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.