Fisheries Committee on Nov. 15th, 2010

[Catherine Stewart]

I'd like to take a stab at that, because I think that's exactly what CAAR has been working on for the last four or five years, meeting with Marine Harvest to try to hear each other. When you say I would disagree with Sonja, I don't disagree with Sonja. I believe that the industry is doing its best to manage the health of the fish on their farms. That's not my concern. My concern is the impact of their fish and their practices on the marine ecosystem and on wild fish and the way that global evidence tells us that wherever you locate open-net cage farms, you do have an effect on wild salmon and wild sea trout. Studies done by Ransom Myers and Jennifer Ford out of Dalhousie looked at that issue globally, and said wherever there are farms, there are impacts.

So the question then becomes how can we acknowledge the efforts the industry is making, how can they acknowledge the validity of the concerns on the other side, and then how can we work toward solutions? It's very difficult to achieve solutions to a problem if you can't admit you have a problem. I think that's part of the rut we're stuck in here: science is telling us there is a problem and the industry, to my mind, is very entrenched in claiming there isn't.

I think part of the problem with management as well is that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans has a conflicted mandate. On the one hand, representatives of the aquaculture management branch are flying around and talking to retailers, the same retailers we're talking to, and telling them it's the best-managed salmon farming industry in the world, with the toughest regulations, and it's eminently sustainable. They are promoting the growth of the industry and promoting the product at the same time that now they're supposed to be regulating and managing the industry and its impact on wild fish, which is their primary constitutional mandate, the protection of the wild fish.

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

Brendan, can we hear from you before we're done?

[The Vice-Chair, Bloc, Raynald Blais]

Please be brief.

[Brendan Connors]

I completely agree with what she said. I would point out that I also don't disagree with the statement you made on behalf of what Sonja said earlier. Nobody is arguing that they're not doing their best job on the farms, but one has to just simply take an evidence-based approach and ask, given evidence.... I'm not saying that all the evidence is there. You make informed decisions based on that. Then you can spin out of control very quickly when vested interests argue on either side. That's exactly what results in what you alluded to, to start with.

[The Vice-Chair, Bloc, Raynald Blais]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Sewid, may I ask you also to reply briefly, please. You have 30 seconds.

[Tom Sewid]

Give us aboriginal revenue and equities sharing with the expansion of farms, and then if you give us the rights to ocean ramps and traditional rivers, if our ocean rivers are being ramped and the farms are going to hurt the wild fish, we're going to do something about it and work with both sides of all tables. Give us some land claims. Just speed it up.

[The Vice-Chair, Bloc, Raynald Blais]

Thank you very much.

Rodger, you have the floor.

[Rodger Cuzner, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

Thanks, Mr. Chair.

I'll throw this out to Michelle, because she made the point a couple of times in her comments with regard to the science, but if anybody else wants to jump in on it, no problem.

Obviously there's frustration around the science as it pertains to the farms. Is it a lack of science, is it a lack of protocols, does it fall down because of lack of legislation and regulation around the science? Whether it was implied or not, I got a sense that maybe you're saying the farms aren't really forthcoming. Maybe they have information and they simply don't share that information. Is the science being done that has to be done? I guess I want to know, where does your frustration lie with the science?

[Michelle Young]

There's a lot of science on pink and chum salmon that's available from both sides, if you want to consider this a debate. There are lots of gaps in knowledge when it comes to other species of salmon, especially sockeye. We don't know what happened to those sockeye or what percentage of a role fish farming may have played in the 2009 collapse. What I'd like to see is that the data from the farms, on a farm-by-farm basis, is available in a very speedy manner so that researchers like Mr. Connors can have that data to do the research they want and to ask the questions they want to ask.

[Rodger Cuzner, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

Do you think the protocols that are there are adequate?

[Catherine Stewart]

We don't know because we don't get to see the information.

[Rodger Cuzner, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

Is that your sense as well, Brendan?

[Brendan Connors]

I can't speak to the protocols, but I can speak to the absolute necessity of full disclosure. I can understand and respect proprietary information and the need to be sensitive to that. I'm certainly not very familiar with that. Purely from a scientific perspective, you need full disclosure of all available information to make informed decisions. There's enough of a knowledge gap as is. If we want to move forward and make informed decisions, we need full disclosure of all the available data that is there.

[Catherine Stewart]

May I add a very brief comment to that?

I have two examples. One of our coalition members filed an access to information request in 2004, I believe, or 2005, for data about disease and lice levels on farms, and the industry fought it for five years. They fought tooth and nail against the release of that information.

Another example is that a scientist, Dr. John Volpe out of the University of Victoria, wanted to do a study on the impacts of Slice, the lice treatment, on prawns adjacent to the farms. He asked the farms if they would simply notify him when they were going to treat, so that his researchers could take samples in the field to further our scientific understanding. They refused. They would not give him that information. He was forced to take his team out into the field and do random sampling based on rumours about what the lice levels might be, or when treatment might be taking place.

[Rodger Cuzner, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

Okay. I'm going to try to get two more questions in.

It was mentioned today about the fish fry, when they're passing the farms they tend to stop and meander. It was suggested that maybe it was at nighttime and it happened because of the lights. Would you like to share your opinion on that?

So we can get it in, I'd like your comments, Tom, because I think there was some excitement and anticipation around the aboriginal guardian program. It hasn't happened, so perhaps you could finish with that.

I'll throw the other one out about the lights, then I'll finish.

[Brendan Connors]

I was involved in some work with an undergraduate from Simon Fraser University that looked at the influence of continuous illumination at night, the distribution and abundance of juvenile salmon, as well as all other critters in the water. Not surprisingly, given mountains of scientific work throughout the years, light attracts a lot of marine organisms. This is an area that is ripe for further exploration. One doesn't want to go out willy-nilly and say that it's having an impact or it isn't, but it's an area that certainly needs to be investigated.

[Rodger Cuzner, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

Thank you.

Ms. Stewart.

[Catherine Stewart]

Sure, there is evidence of predation of farm fish on wild stocks, on herring, on juvenile salmon that are attracted to the pens, whether for the feed pellets or the activity, or the lights, and it definitely requires further assessment.

[Tom Sewid]

As a fisherman, take a seine boat back in the sixties, put a generator on board and a bunch of Christmas lights that are clear, let it sit there for an hour after dark, go set your seine around it, the second boat, and you'll catch nothing but herring and small salmon. That was during the reduction in herring seasons back in the sixties and seventies. We never had any herring fisheries in the early seventies, and then all of a sudden roe herring started in the late seventies, and it's still operating right now.

Turn the lights off. When I leave here, I'll be condemned and praised by the fish farm industry, but turn those lights off.

[The Vice-Chair, Bloc, Raynald Blais]

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Rodger. In any case, I expect we will have an opportunity to go and have a nice little drink of water or something else together, and pursue this discussion a little further.

Mr. Donnelly, you have the floor.

[Fin Donnelly, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

Thanks, Mr. Chair.

I just have one question. Ms. Stewart, you mentioned about the pilot project with CAAR, and I wanted to just give you an opportunity to elaborate a little bit more about the trials and tribulations and where that's at, and what the positives have been coming from that.

[Catherine Stewart]

Thanks very much.

We have been working with Marine Harvest for several years. We set out five science priorities to do collaborative work on to try to resolve some of the science conflict. And it has been challenging, but we are getting there and we hope that some of the analysis that will come out of the monitoring program and the data-sharing agreements that have now been signed by all parties will help to contribute to everyone's depth of knowledge on this.

The other big piece of it was the closed-containment pilot. Marine Harvest Canada has put in their budget for next year a request for $4 million to $6 million approval from their head office in Oslo to construct a closed-containment pilot. They have hired an engineering company, and they are actively seeking appropriate sites right now on Vancouver Island, particularly the north island. We are working with them on how the analysis will be undertaken, and we've also embarked on a joint benefit-cost analysis of closed containment.

There are a lot of issues out there, but the economics is a big one. One of the things we're looking at is the externalized costs. If you're going to say that closed containment is prohibitive cost-wise for the industry, you have to look at where they're getting a free ride. Currently they don't have to pay anything for waste disposal because it goes into the ocean and the cost is borne by our children, our ocean ecosystem, the health of our wild populations. So we want to see if we can place a value on those externalized costs to get a fairer comparison.

The Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat, the CSAS study, did conclude that closed containment would be economically viable, but that there would be a lower profit margin for the industry. We believe that this is definitely worth the government's consideration, given the impacts the industry is having on other sectors of the economy, including people like Mr. Sewid, who's talked about the importance of wild salmon for grizzly viewing and orca whale watching and the integral role they play in the health of our ecosystem. We believe that if the federal government could make a significant commitment to invest in closed containment in British Columbia and get pilot projects off the ground, and there are several of them on the books and in the works, this in turn will trigger an investment from the philanthropic community.

I was very successful in raising several million dollars from philanthropic foundations who are interested in fostering closed-containment development, but it requires an investment from the federal government as well. Marine Harvest has been very clear with us that if there were a federal government commitment, and that in turn leveraged the philanthropic investment, that would definitely make things much more likely to go through in terms of Oslo investing in the pilot project here. The international corporation is definitely interested in this. We have met with their sustainability committee, which includes representatives from their operations in Norway and Chile and Canada, everywhere that they're operating, and they are looking quite strongly at the potential of expansion and the potential of investment. So we hope that the government support will be the missing piece that will really trigger a very strong movement forward in that direction.

And honestly, we're open to however that investment comes. It could come through a budget allocation to the AMAP program, to existing federal infrastructure, so the pieces are in place to manage the investment. It could be a direct grant to the aquaculture innovation fund at Tides. We'd just like to see our government make the commitment to say this is the way forward, and this is the way we can start to resolve some of the problems and allow the industry to grow and secure marketplace in a more sustainable way.

[The Vice-Chair, Bloc, Raynald Blais]

Thank you very much, Fin.

Mr. Cannan, you have the floor.

[Ron Cannan, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Mr. Chair, I'd like to pick up where Catherine left off. It's something we've talked about and heard from other organizations. We had a chance. The economics is a big thing, and we understand that somebody has to lead the way. If we can do so with a collaborative model such as you suggested, I think that's a great initiative and a goal.

I spent nine years in local government and on regional boards. I know the LRMP process. Getting everybody in the room takes time, but through consultation and collaboration you can come up with some innovative solutions.

You mentioned a significant investment. Have you, in your discussions with your philanthropic partners, come up with a dollar value that would be required to make this initiative a reality?

[Catherine Stewart]

We have been asking for $5 million to $10 million from the federal government. We were asking that from the provincial government. We have successfully raised $5 million, which has been sitting on the books for some time, from the philanthropic community.

At this point, I would hesitate to say that the entire $5 million will be available for British Columbia. Certainly the market demand for closed-containment salmon is rising. Overwaitea Food Group has told us quite frankly that they would sell whatever they can get their hands on. Everyone is looking to the U.S. now, because if Canada is not prepared to move, there's every likelihood that U.S. entrepreneurs will.

I think an investment in the upcoming budget of $5 million or more would certainly help to start moving this forward and set us on the path of being the innovator. We already have the fish husbandry expertise, we have the land, we have the water, we have the potential for green power sources. We have the marketplace secured, if we can provide the product that the marketplace wants. But I think that if we don't act to start steering the boat, then we're going to be waving at it from the dock as it leaves.