Evidence of meeting #7 for Fisheries and Oceans in the 40th Parliament, 3rd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was farm.
A recording is available from Parliament.
3:35 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Rodney Weston
I'll call this meeting to order. We have with us by teleconference today Ms. Alexandra Morton.
I'd like to thank you for joining us today via teleconference, Ms. Morton.
3:35 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Rodney Weston
My name is Rodney Weston. I'm the chair of the committee.
Before we start, I'll go through just a couple of housekeeping items. If you have some opening remarks, we generally allow about 10 minutes for presentations from our guests. You'll probably hear a beeping noise throughout, Ms. Morton. There will be some time constraints on our members for questions and answers as we proceed throughout the afternoon. If you hear a beep, don't be alarmed. It's a signal that the time has expired for a certain exchange, and we'll move on to the next one shortly.
I generally don't cut our guests off. Perhaps you could finish your thoughts once you hear the beep. The members know the signal, and they're usually pretty good at adhering to it.
Once again, I'd like to say thank you very much for joining us today. I know the members have lots of questions for you and look forward to the discussion that will ensue.
If you don't have any questions, Ms. Morton, please proceed with your opening comments.
3:35 p.m.
As an Individual
I really appreciate this opportunity, and I appreciate you making it so easy for me to appear before all of you.
I just wanted to say a little bit about sea lice. I'm a killer whale researcher, but sea lice are actually very easy to study, and the reason I say that is because they change their body shape every few days for the first month. So when you see a fish, you can see how long it has had each of those lice, and that's how we've been able to study them. We watch the little fish come out of the rivers and we check them at intervals to see how many lice they have. Typically they have no lice, and then they get to the fish farms and they have baby lice. Then, as they go past the farms, the sea lice just mature, and when they get to the next farm, they get more juvenile lice. That's why it has been easy for us to figure out where the lice are getting on the fish.
The reason I and many of my colleagues have such a strong opinion about the sea lice coming from the fish farms is because we've done experiments--not with the fish farmers really coming onside, but we work with them. For example, in an area where there are no farm fish one year, we'll count the number of lice on young fish, and then when they put the farm fish back, we count the lice on the young fish. And the pattern is really clear. If you take the farm fish out, the lice go away. If you drug the farm fish--so you're killing the lice on the farm fish--the lice go away on the wild fish. When you put the farm fish back, the lice come back. If you look at two areas in the same year and one area has no fish farms and the other has lots of fish farms, you find lice where there are farms and no lice where there are no farms.
So we've done a lot of work for 10 years.
There was a little bit of a disturbing comment by Trevor Swerdfager, who said that this work had been seriously debunked. I would like to say they tried to debunk it, but we were allowed to publish our responses in the journal Science, which is arguably one of the two top journals in the world and very hard to get into. They published DFO and they published our response back, so I think it's questionable whether it was debunked at all.
The question about drug resistance in lice...it's inevitable. As soon as you have a monoculture, the parasites increase, because there are no predators and because all the hosts are packed together. So in the wild, sea lice have a very difficult life when they're young. They hatch, and then they have to swim for a period of days before they even have the ability to grab a fish. This means they never get on their mother's fish. That fish is long gone, and they're lucky to find a fish at all. But when you take a salmon farm and you hold the fish stationary, and you crowd them together and you put them in the inshore waters, you're breaking three very fundamental biological natural laws that govern wild salmon. Wild salmon are supposed to move. They're not supposed to be beside the rivers when the young ones come out, and they're not supposed to be crowded together.
What's happening now is the wild fish come in, and for sure, lice are natural and they have lice. They pass them to the farm fish, and then all the wild fish go into the rivers and they die. This really brings down the lice population to nearly zero, but what happens now is that as the wild fish go by the farms, the lice are passing to the farm fish. The wild ones go and die, but the farm fish don't, and they have lights on.... So the fish are crowded and stationary, and as the baby lice hatch, they find fish to attach to and the lice numbers come up. When you've got 600,000 to a million farm salmon in a school, it doesn't take very many lice on them to make billions of larval lice. Lice, like most parasites, reproduce rapidly. They're a very fecund animal.
This means there are many generations of lice, and when you treat them with the drug, you never kill all the lice. If you talk to fish farmers, they all realize you can't kill them all. So the ones that survive are a little bit resistant to the drug and they produce babies. Then, as more drugs are used, of course, the resistance builds.
This is a very serious problem in Norway. The lice are becoming resistant to all the drugs, both in the feed and bath treatments. As for the east coast of Canada, Mr. Swerdfager was debating whether DFO really recognized drug resistance there, but the fish farmers certainly recognize it. They now have three more drugs to use, and the trouble with these further drugs is the one we're using now is in a pellet form and the fish eat it. It does come out through the fish waste. But the other treatments are bath treatments. They drop tarps and they pour the drug in, and it affects the outside of the fish, but then they lift the tarps and this goes into the water.
In the areas where there is salmon farming in British Columbia, we have very viable prawn, crab, shrimp, and other fisheries for animals with a shell, and all these drugs they use on the lice attack animals with a shell.
I also want to point out that sea lice are the easy pathogen to study, but the same dynamic is occurring with bacteria and viruses. They get in and they intensify, as they do in all feedlots, and they challenge wild fish at a higher level than they are designed to take.
That's all I have to say. I'm happy to answer questions.
3:40 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Rodney Weston
Thank you very much, Ms. Morton.
We're going to start with Mr. Byrne.
3:40 p.m.
Liberal
Gerry Byrne Liberal Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Ms. Morton, thanks for appearing before us via teleconference.
We've had some discussions in the past regarding the use of the lights and impact on salmon aquaculture, cage culture, rearing facilities. You made reference in your opening remarks to the use of high-intensity lighting systems as part of farm infrastructure. Could you elaborate a little on your feelings in terms of the consequence to indigenous stocks and the salmon runs?
3:40 p.m.
As an Individual
You bet. First of all, it is an enormous concern for commercial fishermen. Lights were banned from commercial fishing in British Columbia some decades ago because they were known to attract everything. Herring fishermen used them to get herring, but they were also catching octopus and other species of fish.
The lights cause lice to reproduce more rapidly because they think it is summer. They also attract plankton. When I do plankton tows near fish farms with lights, I get far more plankton organisms than I do against the farms with no lights. They also attract fish.
There is a growing concern with the number of wild fish in these pens, and I actually laid a charge against Marine Harvest for having wild pink salmon in the pens. The lights are partly responsible for attracting the fish, so they're a very serious problem. Of course, this is a problem that's easily dealt with because they could just turn the lights off.
3:40 p.m.
Liberal
Gerry Byrne Liberal Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL
So the consequence is that the lights are magnifying or intensifying the outbreak of lice populations. Could you acknowledge whether I am hearing that correctly? And in your opinion, what is the specific impact this outbreak of lice is having on wild salmon populations?
3:40 p.m.
As an Individual
Regarding the lights, you are correct, they cause the lice to reproduce, and they also attract fish to the problem area. So they are a big problem.
When I first discovered the sea lice problem in 2001, they were infecting 99% of the juvenile salmon in the area. Over time, the salmon farming industry has been on the case, and they are now treating their fish with the drug SLICE. However, they are treating their fish every single spring, which is certainly going to make drug resistance happen. But they have to do that to reduce the lice. In the last two years there has been a concerted effort by the fish farmers to treat at the right time, and they have brought the lice down to a level where we were able to get a couple of generations through. We had a look at the pink salmon that were being treated with the drugs last year, and from Campbell River to the area where I live, Broughton, they looked really clean.
What this tells you is that the Norwegian salmon farming industry has become the gatekeeper to our fish. If they clean up their lice problem, we get fish back. Of course, we don't know what their bacterial and viral problems are, but they also have to be considered. It bothers me that industry, and in some cases government, has used last winter's pink salmon returns to argue that wild fish can survive with these salmon farms. That is not the case at all. The salmon farms are the bottleneck that our fish are going through, and as soon as they deal with their lice, we get fish back. The problem is that the drug is a temporary solution.
3:45 p.m.
Liberal
Gerry Byrne Liberal Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL
Would you be able to categorize the opinions expressed by other groups, for example, the Canadian veterinarian association? I know veterinarians are involved in aquaculture, so obviously the veterinarian association would necessarily be involved in the aquaculture industry. Have they expressed any opinion about this whatsoever? We're dealing with a very technical science here, a drug resistance, so what is their opinion, in your mind?
3:45 p.m.
As an Individual
I haven't heard their opinion on sea lice, in general, but I am dealing with Dr. Mark Sheppard in the province. He is a veterinarian in charge of this, and he is saying there is no evidence of drug resistance anywhere in British Columbia. I keep writing him back saying that the graphs on their website, on the Ministry of Agriculture and Lands website, for the area of concern...for a scientist, they're a neon sign warning of drug resistance.
The reason I say that is because they had very high lice levels in this area on the Greig farms. They treated it in October and the lice levels came down to three times the provincial limit, an average of nine per fish, and then they bounced right back up. So I've asked him, “What is your explanation for that behaviour in the lice after the treatment?” They won't answer. They just keep saying, “We're looking into it”, or “It's a concern”, or “We don't see any evidence.” He won't tell me why that happened.
There's actually an audio clip on CBC from Dr. Larry Hammell from the University of P.E.I. He describes what drug resistance looks like in sea lice, and he describes exactly what's on those charts in the Ministry of Agriculture and Lands website.
So quite frankly, they're not answering the question. I don't see how you can look at those graphs and not see drug resistance.
3:45 p.m.
Liberal
Gerry Byrne Liberal Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL
I think we all recognize there are probably a number of different causes or sources of population decline or disappearance in terms of Fraser River sockeye. Would you characterize an explosion in sea lice population in key transit areas as being the critical cause for wild salmon population decline?
3:45 p.m.
As an Individual
I would expand that to a pathogen explosion, because a lot of fish farmers now come to me directly; they talk to me and tell me what goes on in these farms. I, unfortunately, can't do much with that information because they don't want to be revealed. They won't tell me the exact site sometimes. The impression I have very clearly is that there are large bacterial and viral outbreaks on these salmon farms.
There was a paper written by Dr. Sonja Saksida that described a massive outbreak of the virus IHN from 2001 to 2003, which infected 12 million farm salmon. The Fraser sockeye swam through that, and that was the 2005 generation that crashed so badly.
Now, the really key thing about those Fraser sockeye is there's a pattern we should be reading. All of the stocks that have been genetically observed going north past Campbell River and the 60 salmon farms from there to the open ocean are in steep decline. The one stock that is observed genetically going out from the bottom of Vancouver Island--they're called the Harrison--is actually increasing. If you pull back your focus, the Somass River coming out of Alberni Inlet, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, goes by no salmon farms, goes straight into the Pacific Ocean. That run of sockeye came back at more than twice what DFO forecast. As well, from the Columbia River to the south, and the Okanagan River, which feeds into the Columbia, those sockeye go straight into the Pacific Ocean. They're in the same latitude, and they did extremely well. They passed no fish farms.
That pattern, to me, says (a) there was a serious problem in the eastern coast of Vancouver Island, and (b) that's where all the salmon farms are. We absolutely need to know what pathogens were on those farms or we will never answer this question.
There are also processing plants spewing blood water into these areas. Some kids went down and videoed the Walcan one on Quadra Island. They put my plankton net right over the end of the pipe, and like it or not, they bottled it all up and put it in a cooler for me to check. Coming out of that pipe were sea lice hatching. They were actually alive. It's the first time I've actually seen sea lice hatch. So that suggests viruses and bacteria are coming out of that pipe, too.
All of that is so incredibly risky to our Fraser sockeye. The fact that only those stocks that are going through that area are in decline is a huge warning sign. If we really want to protect those fish, we need to pull those farms out right now and just test and see what happens. At the very least, we need to know exactly what was going on in them.
3:50 p.m.
Liberal
Gerry Byrne Liberal Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL
With the shift in certain aspects of jurisdiction from the province to the federal government in December of this year, what specifically would you ask for or anticipate the federal government could do in response to some of your concerns?
3:50 p.m.
As an Individual
First of all, I would say the federal government needs to take over the health of these fish. I understand that is going to remain with the province, and that office, in my estimation, is a big part of the problem we're in today because everything I bring to them never seems to come out the other end to the politicians.
Second, they have been run as provincial farms, so when the province says they're highly regulated, they're talking about what happens inside the leases. But now that it's going to become federal and you are responsible for the fish outside the farms, the measurement of impact of salmon farms has to be taken outside the farms on the wild fish. Where is the waste going? It's not good enough to say it's clean under those farms. A ton of food is coming out of those fish every single day and we know it's going somewhere. So find it. We need to measure the lice numbers on the wild fish. That's the indicator of whether it's okay inside the farms. We need to measure the disease. We need complete transparency on bacteria and viruses.
And please, if there is one thing I could beg you to do, it would be to check every single Atlantic salmon facility in British Columbia for infectious salmon anemia just as soon as you can. Minister Shea has taken an extraordinarily risky position on that. She says there is no strong evidence that this virus comes in the eggs. But the scientists who are studying this out at the University of Bergen are saying that's how it got to Chile. Now certainly these Norwegian companies did not want that virus to go to Chile. Somehow it slipped through the cracks, and I'm not hearing how we're protected. So this scientist, Dr. Are Nylund—it would be great if you guys could communicate with him—said British Columbia is guaranteed to get this virus, and it's the last thing we want with our five species of salmon. He also said we probably already have it.
That would be at the top of my list of requests.
3:50 p.m.
Bloc
Raynald Blais Bloc Gaspésie—Îles-de-la-Madeleine, QC
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Good day, Madam.
Are you relatively optimistic, or pessimistic, about the fact that in the coming months, that is by December 2010, aquaculture in British Columbia will come under federal jurisdiction?
Jurisdictional authority for aquaculture management will be transferred from the provincial to the federal government. How do you see things working out down the road?
3:50 p.m.
As an Individual
Well, I'm optimistic, because now, for once, the people who are responsible for the wild fish will also be responsible for the farm fish. In my experience, I've been like a ping-pong ball. I go to the province and say there's this problem; they say DFO said it was okay. So I go to DFO and DFO says the province is managing it. So it's just been back and forth. Now it's all in one house.
I also feel that we need to clean that house up, because the people of British Columbia are saying they want wild salmon as the top priority. What I see is that every time there is conflict, the farm salmon win. We are told that our concerns are not valid. That's why I did 10 years of sea lice research, because DFO told me to prove it because it was anecdotal. They told me they wanted made-in-B.C. science. So I turned my home into a research station and now we've done over 20 scientific papers on this.
It's time to accept the science and move forward. This era of denial has got to end, because I think British Columbia is just not going to take it any more.
3:50 p.m.
Bloc
Raynald Blais Bloc Gaspésie—Îles-de-la-Madeleine, QC
I don't want to temper your optimism, but the federal government was involved in this industry to some extent in the past. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans was involved. It had the authority to intervene, and it may possibly have done so, but the problem remains.
Do you really think that because of a transfer in jurisdiction, all of the problems will magically disappear and solutions will be found?
3:55 p.m.
As an Individual
I accept that it will not be a magical change. I see enormous work ahead. But we do have the Fisheries Act, which is a powerful toolbox.
Because in 1993 provincially licensed aquaculture was exempted from all the regulations surrounding fishing in Canada, they were protected from using those lakes. They were protected from having wild fish in their pens, from destroying habitat. Somebody put up a shield between this industry and the federal government. Well, I'm hoping that shield will come down.
Honestly, I don't think the Norwegian industry can survive that. I think they will leave. But there's a Canadian industry that is trying to grow here, and I just learned in December that the provincial government would not even meet with these people who are farming salmon and other species on land in fresh water. They have a website called aquaculturebc.com, and they're trying to grow.
For me, the solution is to apply the Fisheries Act full bore on this industry, and if it can't survive, I think the Norwegians, frankly, should go home, because they've just been bullies. Let the Canadian industry grow, and for the people whose jobs are going to be damaged when these Norwegians leave, give them an opportunity to do what they know how to do, which is to grow fish. Work with this Canadian industry. Then you will have an industry that's in the towns. And the money will stay here; it will not go to shareholders. There will be some real salaries instead of the low wages on these farms. You will get your wild salmon, too. This is what will work for these little towns.
The government told me fish farming was good for my town. We have 29 big Norwegian salmon farm sites. Our school is closed now. There are nine people left in my town. It was not good for us. They don't want to hire local people. They're very secretive. All the first nations chiefs and the tourism operators in my area ever said to the industry was to please move over and not go on the major migration routes. But the provincial government allowed them onto the major migration routes, and that's why we're in the mess we are in today.
3:55 p.m.
Bloc
Raynald Blais Bloc Gaspésie—Îles-de-la-Madeleine, QC
In my opinion, your involvement reflects your social awareness. I applaud your efforts, because it is good for all of the different stakeholders to get involved as much as they can in dealing with problems of this nature.
Do you not think that at some point, what we truly need to resolve this issue is not necessarily a government solution, but rather all stakeholders—not only the industry, but the people and the community as well—working together to find a solution? If we rely solely on the government to resolve the problem, then we could ultimately encounter a number of other problems.
3:55 p.m.
As an Individual
I could not agree with you more. You're absolutely right. Let these towns figure out some solutions here, because in terms of the heavy hand of government and these industries that will not respond, we have been trying to work with this industry. The environmental groups of Canada have made an amazing effort where they've tried to negotiate with them, tried to protect these fish and allow the salmon farming industry to continue. But it gets out of control every time.
So you're absolutely right. There are enormous solutions. People have been very patient, but the response I'm getting from people, because they think I can fix this, is now overwhelming. I have never had so many angry people coming to me hoping that somebody will fix this situation.