Yes, DFO is a bit schizophrenic at this point. I would say the guys on the ground are seeing evidence, but that information never seems to get to the top. So the fact that DFO has no evidence is irrelevant, in my mind.
First of all, they don't know what diseases are on these farms. Second, they had a front seat on the sea lice epidemics of the Broughton. There was enormous evidence that it was the fish farms, because in 2003 they took all the farms off the migration route, and the number of pink salmon that survived and came back from that generation was greater than ever recorded in the history of studying pink salmon.
That's a paper, actually, by Dr. Dick Beamish. What Beamish took from that study was that fish farms and wild salmon can survive together. That was a very flawed jump in reasoning because what had happened that year in fact was that the fish farms had been removed.
There's a lot of evidence that the farms are affecting the wild salmon. There are a tremendous number of holes in our knowledge about what is going on in these farms for viruses and bacteria.
I don't know which farm was going to be charged. I certainly hope it was the Esperanza site in the Nootka Sound area because they had over 40 lice per fish average; they treated it with a drug and got it down to nine, which is still over the provincial limit, and they immediately started killing their fish. So they got most of them out in time, but I have a crew out there right now, and we're finding that lineage of drug resistant lice on small fish.
Mr. Swerdfager says it's very difficult to test for resistance to sea lice. That's not true. It's actually extremely simple. I don't have the budget or capacity to do it myself. I tried but was unable to do that.
In terms of what is happening globally, let me just say that when I first found sea lice on salmon in 2001, I wrote to scientists in Norway and they taught me how to study them. I wrote them and said we had sea lice all over our young salmon. The first thing the guy asked when he wrote back was, do you have fish farms? So it's very well recognized over there.
I would also point you to a recent release by the United Kingdom's Salmon and Trout Association. One of their patrons is Prince Charles. They have a great condemnation of fish farms; they say they are responsible for destroying wild salmon and trout stocks.
It's interesting, because the relationship between salmon farms and governments everywhere has been extremely tight. Some people are calling it collusion. It seems to be the way they operate. But if you talk to the scientists and the fishery people, like the fishermen or in Europe where they own fisheries, they're all seeing a very strong link: as soon as you put these farms in, you've got a decline in the wild fish; as soon as you take them out, it's coming back.
It's such a simple biological reason. Salmon farms break natural laws that wild salmon have to obey. They have to move; they have to have the predators getting the sick fish. It cannot be crowded near the rivers. I mean, imagine this. All these salmon come home every fall and they die. Why would nature kill a fish that went all the way out into the open Pacific and then made its way all the back to its spawning grounds? This is a successful animal. Nature should preserve that fish and send it out again. But instead, it's dead. And the reason is to break the cycle of disease. So you can't just go along now and break these laws and expect there not to be a problem. We have the problem. We just need to follow the natural laws of the salmon.