Fisheries Committee on April 14th, 2010

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

I call this meeting to order.

Before we begin with our guest this afternoon, we have a housekeeping item to deal with. In your packages you will find a couple of budgets required to cover witnesses' expenses. There are two budgets, one for $7,700 and the other for $5,700.

Is it the pleasure of the committee to adopt proposed budget one, in the amount of $7,700?

(Motion agreed to)

Likewise, is it the pleasure of the committee to adopt the second budget, in the amount of $5,700, for expenses pertaining to the video conference and briefings that we have received and will receive?

(Motion agreed to)

Thank you very much for your cooperation on those housekeeping items.

Dr. Sheppard is with us today.

We thank you very much for taking the time out of your schedule, Dr. Sheppard, to come and appear before the committee and provide us with a briefing, an update, in your capacity.

We generally allow about 10 minutes for our witnesses to make an opening presentation and then we move into questions from our committee members. The members are aware of the time frames allotted, and these are for questions and answers.

At this time, Dr. Sheppard, I would ask you if you have any opening comments.

[Dr. Mark Sheppard, Veterinarian, Aquatic Animal Health, Ministry of Agriculture and Lands, Government of British Columbia]

Thank you very much.

First I'd like to thank you very much for the invitation and the opportunity to come to speak with you in person and address any questions the committee has about the management of fish health in British Columbia. I trust the committee has received a small package or brief, including some graphs, that I anticipated might cover the usual topics of interest in B.C. aquaculture. I'm happy to speak to those notes if they require further clarification.

To begin, I should introduce my credentials and experience. I have a bachelor of science degree. Subsequent to that, I earned a doctorate of veterinary medicine from the Canadian Western College of Veterinary Medicine. I have 20 years of veterinary experience in finfish aquaculture management, both in Canada and abroad. I have provided veterinary services as an animal health consultant to aquaculture farms and the federal fish enhancement facilities.

I joined the province just three years ago and currently manage the operations of the British Columbia provincial fish health program within the animal health branch of the B.C. Ministry of Agriculture and Lands. I provide advice on the management and health and diseases of economic and regulatory significance to the aquaculture sector and to senior ministry executive for strategic planning. I interact regularly with federal and provincial agencies, industry, first nations, and the public.

Now that I've told you what I am, I should probably balance that by telling you what I am not. I am not a policy-maker, I am not a sea lice researcher, and I am not a wild fisheries biologist, so please understand that I will do my best to answer your questions, but I may restrict my comments to aquaculture and my area of expertise, hopefully using sound and scientific objectivity, rather than delving into the world of speculation and innuendo, which is often what we are exposed to in the media and the Internet lately.

I would like to introduce ten or so key points at the outset, if I may.

British Columbia's salmon aquaculture industry is monitored through very frequent inspections by the Ministry of Agriculture and Lands and the Ministry of Environment. My staff alone audits and monitors the industry farms approximately 150 times each year. In other words, the fish health staff are on the salmon farms, on average, more than 12 times per month.

When considering infectious agents or disease agents on those salmon farms, on average the survival of the farmed salmon exceeds 97%. Any other losses beyond that are due to environmental and predation issues, so overall the farmed fish are very healthy populations.

As a measure of accountability and transparency, the industry-specific results are regularly made public online and are included in the annual fish health and compliance inspection reports. Farms' sea lice values are posted either by the farms directly onto the web or on a monthly basis through the provincial government website.

Contrary to what you hear or see in the media, sea lice in British Columbia are not a growing problem. The management of lice in British Columbia is very much under control. In general, lice abundance on both farmed and wild fry has actually declined for five consecutive years.

The province takes this issue and the public's concern very seriously and follows a comprehensive sea lice management strategy. That strategy is part of the larger fish health program, which takes a proactive approach to fish health management at the farms.

Speaking directly to the issue of sea lice in British Columbia, I'll make a few points.

Lice abundance on farmed salmon in British Columbia is low compared with lice abundance experienced in other countries and regions. We're talking ones and tens of lice per fish as opposed up to hundreds of lice per fish in other regions.

Some research from 2007 and 2008 that I consider to be cornerstone genetic research shows that the Pacific Ocean louse is genetically different from the Atlantic Ocean louse, the problem in Europe and in eastern Canada. This largely explains why in British Columbia we have not seen the lice-related damage that the other aquaculture regions experience.

That genetic difference, by the way, between the Pacific Ocean louse and the Atlantic Ocean louse is basically equivalent to comparing a human to a chimpanzee, and largely explains why we do not see the lesions and the disease problems.

Sea lice, as you know, are naturally occurring parasites, as common as fleas on a dog. We are not going to get rid of them from our ecosystem. The changes and the ups and downs in lice abundance patterns are common, and are readily explained by environmental and farming events. Fresh and new populations of lice come to B.C. from wild fish as they return to the B.C. coastline at the end of each summer. There is insufficient evidence to substantiate the claim that lice in British Columbia are resistant to the one drug we use.

In closing--I'm sure you have many questions--British Columbians want the risk to wild fish minimized, and so does the provincial government. That is why the animal health branch has monitored and analyzed routinely, and reported the status of lice and disease on B.C. salmon farms, for the past seven or eight years. From that, we can claim that the ecosystem as it relates to salmon aquaculture remains healthy and sustainable.

Mr. Weston, that ends what I would like to present today. I would be very happy to entertain questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you very much, Dr. Sheppard.

Mr. Andrews.

[Scott Andrews, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Just to start out, I'd like to go back to one of the first points you made, and maybe get you to provide a little bit more detail to the committee, regarding the access you had to the aquaculture farms. You made the statement that you were there 12 times per month.

Have you had access to all the aquaculture farms? As well, what kind of access have you been given in order to do some of your research?

[Dr. Mark Sheppard]

Thank you. That's a very good question.

The fish health program is largely based on a database system that has an algorithm. At the beginning of each quarter of the year, we put in the farms that are currently active with growing fish in that quarter. The computer will randomly choose which sites we are going to go audit and visit, not only for health visits but also for sea lice monitoring and audits.

Our staff, once that's chosen, will communicate with each of the farms, and over the next three-month period will go and visit those particular sites. They will coordinate it with the carcass collection days, whether that be coordinating with a third-party diving company, or sometimes the carcasses are brought up by a pump.

So we go out and we attend the carcass collections, collect the samples from the selected group of dead fish, and bring them back, where they are analyzed very thoroughly in the laboratory in the Animal Health Centre in Abbotsford.

[Scott Andrews, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

Are the aquaculture farms giving you full cooperation and full access to all aspects of the farm? Is there a need to improve that, or is it sufficient?

[Dr. Mark Sheppard]

We have absolutely full access to the information once we arrive on site. As I said, each farming company has a fish health management plan where they have to meet certain requirements in terms of monitoring their carcasses, monitoring their fish, everything to do with husbandry. They have to record all that. We do have access to all of that information on site.

If I can break this down for you, Mr. Andrews, the fish health program is composed of three basic components. One is the fish health management plan that the farmers must follow and must abide by, which does speak mostly to monitoring, recording, and reporting their own information, and making that available to government officials.

The second component is what I was talking about earlier, which is the fish health audit and surveillance program, where we will coordinate our visits to go and actually collect dead fish of diagnostic quality and have those submitted and screened for pathogens of concern to Canada and internationally, not to mention the endemic infectious agents that are just in the ocean in B.C.

The third component is to coordinate visits to actually go and conduct sea lice counts at the farm, shoulder to shoulder with the farmer. By that I mean they will count half of the fish and we will count the other half of the fish that are collected. In other words, they count 30, we count 30, 10 from each pen, so that we can make a comparison and feel confident that what they're looking at and what they're reporting is the same thing that we're seeing and what we record.

[Scott Andrews, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

Do you agree with the statement that's made that aquaculture has been one of the possible causes of the decline in sockeye salmon?

[Dr. Mark Sheppard]

As I said, to reiterate, I'm not a fisheries biologist. I would suggest that question might be better answered by a DFO scientist.

However, not to dismiss the question, I'll say that from an aquaculture perspective, as I said, with the infectious rate in farmed salmon and the survivor rate being over 97%, I do not foresee that the aquaculture industry has an effect on the Fraser River sockeye.

[Scott Andrews, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

Speaking about scientists, do you think government agencies have enough scientists? Are we doing enough science in this matter? Could we do more? Is it at the suffice level now, or should we look at possibly expanding it or suggesting it be expanded?

[Dr. Mark Sheppard]

Personally, I feel the industry is very highly monitored, not only by the provincial government and the Ministry of Environment but also within the industry itself. They have their own veterinarians. They have a much more detailed database than the province does. The veterinarians working in that industry see things on a daily basis. They have their fingers on the pulse.

Of course, there has been a tremendous number of questions and improvements over the last 25 years, and a lot of that has been due to ongoing projects and questions, and then supporting that through applicable research. An awful lot is being done already. Of course, the focus lately has been on sea lice activity and trying to find the answers to that. But we feel we've got a fairly good finger on the pulse in terms of what's happening health-wise at the farms.

[Scott Andrews, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

I have a question here that one of our analysts put together. We heard evidence that tolerance to Slice, an antiparasitic drug used to treat sea lice infection, was not a problem in British Columbia. Can you confirm that this is the case, and how do you test for this type of drug tolerance? Are you familiar with that?

[Dr. Mark Sheppard]

Yes, and again, I'll reiterate that there is no evidence to substantiate the allegation that there is drug resistance to Slice by lice in British Columbia. To make such a claim, in my opinion, is misleading and quite frankly irresponsible.

It's a complex issue, drug resistance and the development of it, and there are a myriad of other factors that need to be considered before putting it on the list. Now, it is on the list; it would be on the very bottom of the list as a likelihood as to how one would explain why a Slice treatment did not work.

If people are interested in that line of questioning, perhaps I should start at the beginning and explain what is really happening as opposed to the allegations that are out there. Is that acceptable?

[Scott Andrews, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

Go ahead.

[Dr. Mark Sheppard]

Maybe I should begin with a normal Slice treatment in British Columbia.

Again, British Columbia is in a very unique situation. The lice are very much under control. Slice is only used approximately one time each year. So its infrequent use, first of all, is not conducive to the development of resistance. It's a very effective drug normally.

What happens is that new batches of naive lice come back on the wild salmon, and they seem to be readily transferred into the farming system, usually beginning sometime in August or September. Normally at the farm site a veterinarian will continue to monitor that situation, and will finally write a prescription to medicate that population of farm fish--sometimes in November, sometimes December, sometimes January. In the winter months, that's when the lice numbers have accumulated, compared to the rest of the year.

Within a month or so after that treatment, the lice numbers normally drop to next to nothing. Without any further challenge of lice...which is the normal case in British Columbia, because as I said, the resident availability of lice usually doesn't begin again until September. So after that Slice treatment, the farmers in British Columbia normally have the opportunity to have effectively a louse-free or very low louse count, often below one per fish, for anywhere from three to six months, until again they're challenged with lice when the next batch of Pacific salmon comes through in late August or in September.

If I can take you back to June 2009, a different scenario was set up in one particular area of British Columbia. It was a very dry year with very little rain. In June, July, August, what happens on the west coast, the outside coast of Vancouver Island, is that the farms often suffer from what's called a “low-dissolved” oxygen....

Is that phone for me?

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Carry on.

[Dr. Mark Sheppard]

Carry on? Okay.

So it's a low-dissolved oxygen situation. Again, it's a natural situation that happens every year. It's my understanding that in the Pacific northwest there is a low-oxygen dead zone, if you will, of dead water, which comes to shore sometimes. So in that period of time, fish can be killed or...but certainly they can't be fed very well, because that will kill them.

In addition to that, when you have a lot of sun and sometimes a little bit of rain, harmful algae blooms will develop. Again, that can either kill your fish, or, as they certainly can't be fed, the farmers leave them down in the bottom; they don't want to entice them up to the top. In that period of time of June, July, August, September, some farms literally cannot feed their fish very much. Instead of feeding them the normal 30 or 31 times a month, they may only get 7, 10, or 15 days of feeding in.

So those are some of the environmental factors. What's happened now is that you have a group of animals who haven't really had access to feed very much and as a result they haven't grown. That would explain why we have undersized fish now, and it can wreak havoc with someone's harvesting and marketing schedules. That was the case here, where you had a group of fish that had just been sort of maintained for several months.

In addition, if you start looking at population dynamics, a pecking order will develop, just as it will among a group of chickens, for example. You will have aggressive fish that will get the feed, and they'll grow a little bit, but because there's a bimodal population, you will also have another group of fish that just isn't doing well. These fish go by a number of different names--poor doers, slinks, or just basically subordinate fish that are marginalized in the population in every pen.

So by the end of October, hasn't been raining, so the salinity of the ocean will have been increasing. The salt content, as far as I can tell, was at a record high in that area. Lice really like high salt content. So you have waves of Pacific salmon coming in with their lice; you have fish that aren't feeding; you have perfect salinity conditions; and you have lice getting into the farms and multiplying there. By the end of October, it looked like the fish were going to start feeding again. So the veterinarian—and I applaud him for his very diligent activity and judicial use of the product—set up a seven-day medication period for the fish. The medication was fed for seven days at the end of October. Cameras were used, as they are in every pen, to make sure that little or no medication fell through. Sure enough, the entire amount of medication, 100%, was consumed by the fish that were eating, and that's the key. Again, you can imagine that you have a prescription of Slice eaten by 80%, for argument's sake, of the fish, and that Slice worked very well to reduce the numbers of lice to next to nothing on those robust fish that had access to the feed. You also have another 20% of the fish that were marginalized and didn't have access to that medicated feed. The lice would remain on those fish not exposed to Slice.

So what happened was that shortly after the Slice medication was given, the concentration of that product in the mucous and the skin started to decline over a number of weeks. As it declined, you can imagine that the lice from the subordinate fish were now looking to move back over onto the robust fish. The same thing happens with the lice from the ecology, the other waves of Pacific salmon coming through that area, or with the resident lice on small fish, like sticklebacks, for example. So there are a number of sources of Slice-free lice that are now moving back onto those fish that had been medicated in the last month or two.

That's where you see an increase. You have likely seen some of the graphs. There was an increase in lice, and instead of seeing a nice flat line after that, you see an increase again. That would be the explanation for that: they are not Slice-resistant. Credible and objective scientists have looked at all of these factors.

We went out to visit the site. I went out personally at the end of January to assess the situation and the farm was following all of its requirements, exceeding all of their requirements. I applaud the veterinarian for doing what he did, because at that point there was tremendous pressure to keep throwing drugs at those fish in order to control that situation. But they realized that it's just not going to work when we only have one in-feed product. How can one in-feed product be effective when you have animals that aren't eating it?

That's why the decision was made, the multi-million dollar decision was made, to start to harvest undersized, under-marketed fish to get them out of the system. Quite frankly, it's sort of what everybody would like to have done, but it certainly didn't come across as being praised.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you very much, Dr. Sheppard.

Monsieur Lévesque.

[Yvon Lévesque, Bloc, Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou, QC]

Good afternoon, Mr. Sheppard. Until now, I was under the impression, further to the testimony presented to this committee, that the lice came from farmed fish. You are saying that the lice can in fact be traced back to Pacific fish. Did I also understand you to say that the lice problem is less prevalent among Pacific fish than among Atlantic fish?

[Dr. Mark Sheppard]

Thank you for your question. I apologize, I do not speak French well enough to answer in French, but may I repeat your question in English to confirm that I have the gist of it?

Yes, I've given you an opposing opinion about where the lice come from. Others have said the lice come from the farmed fish. I'm saying the lice come from the wild fish.

The last part of the question is that you said I said fewer lice were on the Pacific fish compared to the Atlantic fish, the farmed fish. Is that your question?

So that's true. If we backtrack, we know that the lice do come from the wild. The Atlantic salmon that are grown in the cages come from the hatcheries, and they're completely lice-free. They do not start to acquire lice until they get into the marine cages. Small Atlantic salmon can acquire lice, but they generally have many fewer lice than the larger fish. As they get older, they start to accumulate things in the next season. So the lice do come from the wild fish.

In the package that I delivered earlier, you will notice that there's a typical pattern of where lice increase in the farm cages at the same time that the Pacific salmon are coming back. I think it's well understood that those lice are coming from the Pacific salmon that are returning to the coastline.

In terms of there being fewer lice on the Pacific fish than the Atlantic fish, no, I said that in the last five years, in measuring both the farmed fish--in the out-migration period of the small Pacific fry from March until June--there was a decline in both populations, the farmed fish as well as the presence of lice on the wild fry in that same period for the last five years.

Does that answer your question?

[Yvon Lévesque, Bloc, Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou, QC]

I have a clearer understanding of the issue.

You referred to the documents that you delivered earlier, but I do not know if they has been circulated. Mr. Chair, I have not seen the charts to which Mr. Sheppard is referring.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

The documents were distributed. The charts were not, because they were not translated.

[Yvon Lévesque, Bloc, Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou, QC]

That explains why.

[Dr. Mark Sheppard]

My apologies for that. I can make some of these charts available. I can leave them with you, if members are interested to look at them. They're largely just bar charts and line charts that do show the history of louse counts at the farms. There are no wild fish on them. These are farm counts from the farmers themselves versus what we audit at the farms. There's a number of reports on lice from the DFO scientists who have been monitoring the wild fry for those same periods; for five years, I guess, since 2005 likely.

[Yvon Lévesque, Bloc, Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou, QC]

Mr. Sheppard, we know Judge Hinkson decided that aquaculture, often called fish farming, was basically a fishery, not fish farming. Where you surprised by this decision?