Fisheries Committee on March 22nd, 2010

[Trevor Swerdfager]

Let's recognize, as I said earlier, that the regulation itself has not passed. If we had something in place that's akin to some of our internal thinking today, if you showed up in British Columbia and you wanted to start a fish farm, you require a provincial lease under the Land Act, you require two permits under the B.C. Fisheries Act, you require a permit under the Farm Practices Protection Act, and you require a permit under the Finfish Aquaculture Waste Control Regulation passed under the Environmental Management Act. So there are five licensing activities, so to speak.

On the federal side of the house, you require a habitat authorization, you require an introduction in transfers licence that's issued under section 56 of the fishery general regulation, and you require a Navigable Waters Protection Act approval, typically, at minimum.

Under the new regime the requirements on the provincial side will go from five to one, because four of the five will simply disappear. On the federal regime, we foresee a permit still being required for the Navigable Waters Protection Act purposes for a new site, and there will be a federal aquaculture licence, and that will be it. Any renewal will no longer require the NWPA permit, so the net effect is that you will go from five provincial decision points or licence activities to one, and four federal ones to two.

[Randy Kamp, Conservative, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge—Mission, BC]

In addition to being more efficient--I think you've made the case that with the federal responsibility it will be more efficient from that side--in the consultations that you're holding, you said they're quite dynamic, probably impassioned at times, from what I've heard. I think British Columbians want to know that it's not just going to be more efficient, but it will also be more effective and it will actually be providing better management, better monitoring and so on of aquaculture operations. I'm assuming that is the direction you think we're going as well, but I just wonder if you can comment on that.

[Trevor Swerdfager]

If I were a provincial bureaucrat instead of a federal one, I think one of the things I would tell this committee is the system that I've been managing for a while is not ideal. I think the province itself has been eager to improve the regulatory regime in British Columbia for quite some time. I think most of the regulatory community, both federally and provincially, views this as a tremendous opportunity to fix quite a number of things. In our view, at least, the new regulation will be, as you say, more efficient in terms of fewer decision points and so on, but I think we will end up with a regime that is far more transparent.

Today, if you were to go on our website and try to find out how many fish farms are active or how many fish are in them or how many therapeutants were applied in the last little while, all that boilerplate information is not available to you. Under the new regime we expect it will be. Reporting requirements are not extensive. They will be. Fine structures are not very stringent in B.C., I guess is the best way to put it. Under the new structure they will be.

There are a series of dimensions of the regulatory regime that, at least in our view, will be substantially improved upon. I say that not just from a regulatory perspective. Certainly from an industry perspective and from the vantage point of the environmental groups we met with, the desire to improve the process is there, and we think we are responding to that. So it's not simply changing the logo on the permit from a rising sun to a maple leaf and saying “Away you go”. We think it will be a substantial improvement.

[Randy Kamp, Conservative, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge—Mission, BC]

That's good to hear. I know that British Columbians certainly want to hear that.

I didn't see it, but somebody told me that they saw an NBC special during the Olympics in which they were talking about salmon aquaculture in British Columbia. They referred to an American operation that was, I think, a land-based closed containment system.

I know that Mr. Donnelly was going to ask this in the next round, but I think I've also heard from our department that there's no closed containment system they know of that's economically viable at this point. Can you clarify that whole issue for me?

[Trevor Swerdfager]

Yes. Closed containment is a deceptively simple term. It implies closed containment, right? But what closed containment can entail is a variety of systems. It can involve the production of fish on land in truly completely sealed off.... You could grow fish in this room with an appropriate tank and all that kind of stuff. Equally, it can involve systems that are in the water and have hard walls instead of an open net. Water still moves in and out of the system. In particular, the bio-matter in the water moves, so lice in particular can still come into a closed containment system and go back out again.

Closed containment is used to produce a variety of finfish at relatively small scales around the world today. It's not new technology in that respect. We're not aware of anywhere in the world that produces salmon at a commercial scale or even close to a commercial scale, both from a technological point of view and from a financial point of view. We're not aware of that being done anywhere today.

The department.... I shouldn't say just “the department”. The federal government has invested significantly in efforts to develop, improve, and support the development of closed containment technology. This has come through a variety of arms of the federal government. So by no means are we anti-closed-containment--far from it. Certainly, if that technology is the future of the industry and were it to evolve, we'd be very supportive of that. But I think that the current state of play is such that closed containment, at least as we see it, is not viable today or in the short-term foreseeable future.

[Randy Kamp, Conservative, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge—Mission, BC]

Let me just ask one last question. This was also on my list and is on Fin's, I think. What has your involvement been so far with the Cohen commission? What role do you think you'll be playing in that?

[Trevor Swerdfager]

My involvement so far has been zero. I don't know what my involvement will be in the future. I know that aquaculture is in the commission's terms of reference, and how it chooses to deal with that is something I'm not aware of. They may call us or they may not.

[Randy Kamp, Conservative, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge—Mission, BC]

Okay. Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Mr. Martin.

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Swerdfager, for being here today. I have a few questions. I may just pose them, and if you can't respond to them in the time, maybe you can let the committee know, if you could.

First, does DFO have evidence to demonstrate that fish farms are not contributing to the decline of sockeye and chinook on B.C.'s west coast, our west coast?

Secondly, you're probably familiar with the new video that's around, by Alexandra Morton, that five-minute clip showing what she demonstrates as evidence of viruses and sea lice coming onto natural fish. My second question is, then, why not at least move the current fish farms away from the egress of smolts as they leave B.C.'s Canadian rivers?

My third question actually has two parts. One is that in British Columbia the forestry practices code that we have now is insufficient to actually address the problem of logging right down to the edge of rivers. It has really devastated a lot of salmon habitat for breeding purposes. Will the Government of Canada work with the Government of British Columbia to change those forestry practices to make the barrier farther away from the edge of rivers? Lastly, will you increase the number of fisheries officers that we have in British Columbia?

Thank you.

[Trevor Swerdfager]

Do you want me to take a crack at that and see how far I get in whatever period of time?

The answer to your first question is difficult to respond to because it's difficult to prove a negative. If I understand you correctly, you're asking whether we have evidence that fish farms have not contributed to the decline of wild salmon populations, and so on. A definitive answer to that will ultimately be very difficult to come to. Our feeling at this point is that fish farms have not contributed to the decline of wild salmon. We have not seen anything that convinces us that fish farms are causing or accelerating that decline.

You can appreciate that from a research design perspective it's difficult to prove a negative, so to speak, but we're certainly not in possession of information that suggests to us that fish farms have had a negative effect on wild salmon populations in British Columbia today in a way that has had a population-level effect. But I should point out, just to be very clear, that individual fish farms definitely do have a site-specific impact. Certainly from our perspective there's no debate around that.

We are also quite aware of the debate around whether sea lice have a population-level....

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Sorry, I just want to add--it's an important point—that when you look at the egress of sockeye down the southern point of Vancouver Island versus those that go north between Vancouver Island and the mainland, there's a very significant difference in population. For those that go through the southern tip of Vancouver Island, where there really aren't any fish farms, the population has gone up. Those that went northwest through the passage of the fish farms showed a massive decline. So that's the backdrop for that question.

[Trevor Swerdfager]

I understand that.

In some of the systems where there are no fish farms declines are negative as well. So to draw a correlation between the presence and absence of fish farms and population trends is not something we've done. There are other factors at play, and part of the reason there's a commission of inquiry under way is to understand better what those factors are.

But to respond to your question very specifically, we don't have information that suggests that the presence of fish farms is causing a decline in the wild salmon populations in British Columbia right now--or anywhere else, I should add. We have looked fairly carefully and are continuing to look carefully at the issue of the interaction between sea lice and wild salmon populations. As the committee probably knows, the theory is that when you put a bunch of fish in a confined space, because sea lice are a naturally occurring parasite, they get on them. You crowd them together, production goes up, and as smolts go by, sea-lice transfer can occur.

When we look at the issues around sea lice and some of the predictions that have been made in models in the papers that are most commonly cited by people who are opposed to aquaculture, some of the predicted outcomes around pink salmon in particular have been 180% wrong. Pink salmon populations are going up in many of the areas where the models presented by some of the opponents of aquaculture suggested we were looking at extinction within four generations. The trends have been precisely the opposite.

We have also tried to kill smolts in experimental conditions by exposing them to very large concentrations of sea lice. We have been successful at killing smolts with extremely high levels of sea lice exposure that you don't see in the wild. We're quite confident that if smolts live to be 26 days or older—I'm talking about wild salmon now—they will reject or deal with lice. So they obviously have a critical period early in their stages. The first four or five of those days are spent inland, so we don't see an awful lot of exposure to a level of lice required to cause severe declines in the wild.

Has it been categorically proven once and for all? No. More research needs to be done in that area.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Mr. Swerdfager, I have to cut you off there. We'll come back in another round.

Mr. Donnelly, do you have any further questions?

Okay, you'll pass.

[Trevor Swerdfager]

I apologize if I'm talking too long.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

You're doing fine.

[Trevor Swerdfager]

The second question, I believe, comes to the business of sea lice resistance. Just as a brief explanation, what will happen with any animal that is regularly exposed to a pesticide--or in a plant case, to an herbicide--is the regular exposure can cause tolerance to build.

We have seen that situation develop elsewhere in the world with respect to a chemical that's called SLICE. SLICE, for those of you who are not aware, is applied to farm fish in feed. It's mixed in with the feed pellets and it's ingested by the animal. It's a neurotoxin, so when a louse attaches to the side of a salmon, it attacks the nervous system of the louse and causes it to essentially become immobilized and fall off. If continuous exposure to SLICE occurs, we have seen lice develop tolerance to that.

We have absolutely no evidence of that whatsoever in British Columbia. We know that this is one of the latest suggestions that has come forward. We have looked into that situation, which has been profiled frequently on the web. But it's not just that.

SLICE is not applied with enough regularity and enough intensity in British Columbia for lice around it to develop resistance, at least as we have seen. We are not aware of any situation anywhere else in the world, and we have asked. I have spent time talking to my counterparts, particularly in Norway, Scotland, Ireland, and Chile, about this issue, and we know that if you.... You would never want something to develop tolerance, but if you were looking for tolerant situations, the level and frequency of exposure would have to be orders of magnitude higher than it is in British Columbia.

So we have not seen tolerance to SLICE develop in B.C. We don't think it's there. We know that there are others who do, and we have tests that are under way as we speak. I wish I could share the information, but it's not finished yet. However, we're not aware of SLICE tolerance building in B.C. right now. We don't think that's an issue there.

Do you want me to just continue with your third one? Relationship to the inquiry, we've covered that a little bit. But certainly one of the items in the terms of reference of the commission of inquiry is to look at the potential impact of aquaculture on salmon populations. At this point, as I mentioned earlier, the regulation process will need to continue in order to respond to the court deadline. So the inquiry will not have any effect on that timeline.

Obviously the government will want to wait to see what the advice and the guidance coming from the commission is and respond to it in due course. I don't know what it will be, so obviously I can't tell you how we would potentially respond as a department, never mind what the broader government response would be.

I can tell you that in terms of going forward with federal management in the industry, we don't foresee any massive policy shifts on December 19, at two in the morning, two hours after we take over, so to speak. The government is not going to proceed in a reckless manner in any kind of way, shape, or form. So I think that we will see a steady and measured approach, and when the results of the inquiry come to the government, insofar as they deal with aquaculture, the government will treat them when we have them.

I have one final quick comment on closed containment, which you asked a question about as well. Part of our take on this is that salmon farmers are in the business to make money. If closed containment is a way to more efficiently produce fish with lower social licence costs, if you will, lower opposition, and a financial return, they'll go there themselves. They don't need the government to tell them that. They will figure out the most cost-effective way to produce their product, to sell it at market, and to make a profit. So if it appears that this is the technology that really does hold the future, I believe that the industry will go there.

To some degree the government is doing what it can to support the exploration of different technologies, to help the industry prove them out, to share some of the risk around some of them. There are things like the sustainable development technology fund and other things.

So by all means the federal government, and I believe the province as well, is committed to fostering the study and development of that technology. If it proves to be the way of the future, then we'll see that's the way it will go. But I think the industry will go there predominantly of its own accord if that's the way that makes the most financial and economic and environmental sense.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you.

Mr. Weston.

[John Weston, Conservative, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Thank you, Chair.

You mentioned the high level of interest in aquaculture. I represent a coastal riding in British Columbia that includes Sechelt and Gibsons and Powell River and Bowen Island and West Vancouver and Squamish. We've had a series of round tables about the fisheries, and clearly the issue that has been the most compelling is the question of aquaculture.

I'd like to direct a few questions on sea lice--directions that have already been anticipated by my colleagues.

Firstly, we've spoken about whether sea lice are affecting wild salmon. Trevor, I would like you to reply to whether there are outbreaks of sea lice in B.C. fish farms, as opposed to whether they're affecting the wild salmon.

Secondly, you mentioned the tests that are under way to see if resistance to SLICE is growing. Could you tell us when those results are likely to be available?

Thirdly, do you anticipate changes in monitoring systems under the new regulations concerning sea lice, and related to that, what systems are in place today?

[Trevor Swerdfager]

With respect to outbreaks on farms as we speak, I think the first thing to keep in mind is that the provincial government has a fish health program in place now that features veterinarians going on site on a regular basis. By regular, I don't mean every nine months; it's quite regular—frequent is a better way to put it, I guess.

Fish farms, if they have three motile live lice on a salmon on farm, are required to treat for lice now. So if you have a situation in which lice numbers are on the rise, the provincial government requires treatment to occur, and the treatment is SLICE. It's applied in feed to keep lice levels down. To my knowledge, we have not had explosions in sea lice populations in any particular farm or group of farms in British Columbia—or elsewhere, for that matter.

Does that answer that part of your question appropriately?

I misspoke if I said that we're doing tests to determine whether resistance is growing in British Columbia. To our knowledge, there is no resistance or tolerance to SLICE, as we speak. So in our view it's not “growing”: it doesn't exist. I'm always very cognizant of the fact that definitive or declarative statements like that may in fact prove to have exceptions, but to our knowledge, we don't know of anywhere it exists at this point.

Because of some of the recent local controversy around this, bio-assays are being done. I can't tell you when those results will be available. I don't mean that as in “it's a secret”: I don't know. It will be shortly, but I don't have a date at which I could say these will be done. The tests are not complicated, but they are time-consuming. You have to take the lice, which are hard to get—they're tiny—and actually running experiments on them to determine their resistance to SLICE is physically just difficult to do. Some of those tests are going to be done over the next little while, and their results will be published in due course. But as I said, I can't tell you the precise date of it.

With respect to monitoring, the monitoring of the industry really follows three tracks today. The majority of it is required by provincial regulation. First, there's an extensive monitoring of the benthic layer below salmon cages. I'm talking primarily about finfish now. Grab samples are done; divers go down and grab samples as well. There is a series of bottom sampling techniques. The key indicator that's looked for is sulphide level loadings of 3,000 micromolar. Essentially you assume, if there is a violation of the benthic layer loading, that a response is required: you should put less fish in the cage. The majority of that work is done by provincial people going on site, taking samples, and so on.

Secondly, companies are required to monitor lice loads on the fish in the farms, and as I mentioned, if they hit a level of three motile lice per fish, that triggers the application of SLICE that's required by provincial policy. A prescription is written by the veterinarian, SLICE is applied, and lice levels typically are contained.

There is a very small number of additional parameters that farmers are required to monitor themselves: they have some effluent concerns and standards they have to meet, and so on.

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans also conducts random habitat assessments and visits to sites, but I wouldn't characterize that as a form of monitoring program in the sense of a regular set of visits and so on.

Under the new regime, our expectation is that we will put more onerous and significant requirements on companies to conduct monitoring activities of their own. We will continue to require sea lice monitoring; we will continue to require benthic layer monitoring. But we also are expecting to require companies to conduct more monitoring of the ambient or natural environment around their farms. To what extent and with what parameters has not been determined yet, but we expect a monitoring program and expect that the companies will be required to report the data to the federal government,

The final point I would make before the last beep is that the paradigm we're moving to is one in which if we have data and information, the public gets it. We may have to withhold data in certain cases from a time point of view, so that we don't create a competitive advantage for farm X versus farm Y, but our information holdings with respect to salmon farming in British Columbia will become public knowledge, and the time lag between when we receive a datum and when it's published will be short. The only reason it will be held is, as I say, to protect competitive advantage for a period of time. It will not be a permanent thing.

The bottom line of all of this—what we are hoping, anyway—is that when the new regime is in place, the amount of monitoring will go up, the timeliness of it will go up, and the information will be shared publicly in a way that typically it is not today.

[John Weston, Conservative, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Mr. Martin.

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Mr. Swerdfager, I have first a plea, basically, that really falls in the realm of the bureaucracy. In British Columbia, water control is managed basically, as you know, by municipal and local authorities. What has happened is that there is a very poor integration between DFO and local authorities on water control. What I would do is basically offer a plea that you could take back to your colleagues to improve this, because what is happening is that water is not being allowed to get through salmon-bearing streams, and the fertilized eggs are drying out and being wiped out. There is an easy win if there is better integration between DFO's water needs and the local authorities.

My question, though, deals with fish viruses. There is one in particular, which is of great concern, that causes renal failure in salmon. In Chile in particular, they have found this virus and are very much concerned. Can you tell the committee, please, what is being done at DFO to prevent that virus from entering into our wild salmon populations?

[Trevor Swerdfager]

Are you talking specifically about ISA in Chile?

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

That is correct.