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.