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.