Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
You probably don't have to set the timer for me. I don't intend to speak at great length.
At this particular meeting, I represent the Powell River Salmon Society, out of Powell River of course. We're a small CEDP hatchery, a community economic development program hatchery, funded under the overall salmon enhancement program. Our function in the community is a little bit different from that of the larger production facilities. Our focus is not just on fish production, although we do produce a fair number of fish. We also work around community education, habitat restoration, and conservation practices and education throughout our community and throughout the streams we work in and with.
We do have paid people. We have three paid staff who work with our salmon program, but the rest of the ten directors and I are volunteers who maintain the society. We provide part-time employment on a seasonal basis as well, so we think we have a fairly good economic penetration in a relatively small community.
On the question of aquaculture, which I believe is what we were asked to come here to discuss today, we don't participate directly in the ongoing debate on aquaculture with regard to the pros and cons. That is not in fact the business we work in. But we are subjected to all of the discussions that have been ongoing for a number of years, and they do raise a lot of questions for us. In general we support the aquaculture industry in our area. We have people, neighbours, who work in the industry. It provides economic drivers, both direct and indirect, in our communities.
We have various kinds of fish farms. We have shellfish farms. We have salmon farms. We have net-pen farms in freshwater lakes as well as in salt water. We don't in fact have any that are in our direct waterfront, but we do have them within our regional area.
Notwithstanding our support in general for aquaculture as an industry and for the jobs and economic drivers it provides, we do have questions, and we do have concerns around aquaculture in a general sense. One of the biggest concerns we have--and it's expressed to me locally--is the ongoing lack of ownership of the industry as it is transitioned from the province to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans federally. It seems, in our opinion at least, that a vacuum of ownership has been created as this transition has gone forward.
We have concerns around the province being in a position to administer licences to farms even after the transition is done, whereas the Department of Fisheries and Oceans will be the group responsible for regulating the farms. We're concerned that we'll get into a situation much like the one we have with fresh-water streams for which permits are issued that far exceed the ability and capacity of the area they're issued for. We see that in water licences all the time.
We have concerns when we as sort of the public sitting on the sidelines listen to the debate around conflicting science reports. As the general public, we sit here and we hear everything from people saying our oceans will be dead in three to four years, and there will be no salmon, to people saying there's no impact at all. So we have these two points of view that we're trying to make sense of. We don't believe either of them to be true, quite frankly. We on the sidelines are not as stupid as we're sometimes made out to be, but we are concerned that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans has not stepped into the debate. They have not stood up and dealt with the questions at hand and provided us some balancing views on the science that's there. We don't really want to be listening to hired guns on either side of the coin.
As a non-profit society that produces fish, we are, of course, concerned that we're putting fish in the same environments where these fish farms exist. If in fact they are having a negative effect, we'd like to know what that is, and we'd like that to be managed, because it's counterproductive to our interests. We're producing fish, and we really want them to survive, at least to return.
I already mentioned the issue of licences. We are concerned about the fact that now we have a split jurisdiction in which licences are issued provincially and regulation and control are federal responsibilities under the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
That's what I came to say.
Thank you.