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.