Thank you very much. I appreciate the chance to be called to give further information to the committee at this time.
I represent an organization called the T. Buck Suzuki Environmental Foundation. We've been in existence for more than 20 years. As an environmental group, we're based very much on people who work in the commercial fishing industry on fish boats or in fish plants. Our stated mandate is to work to protect wild salmon and other fisheries in the Province of British Columbia.
We're also active in a coalition of four organizations that have banded together and been working for 10 years on looking at impacts from open-net salmon farms. It's called the Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform. We're not about closing down open-net farms; we're about finding solutions to the environmental problems.
We have always said that closed containment is the way to eliminate those environmental impacts specifically. The things that closed containment are able to do and are proven to have done.... The two top issues for the environmental community in British Columbia are the impact from sea lice and the impact from diseases that are generated and amplified on open-net salmon farms that are on salmon migration routes and can transfer to wild juvenile salmon. Those impacts have been well documented in scientific studies showing that the more sea lice you have on fish farms, the more you have on juvenile migration routes with wild juvenile salmon. We believe the same to be true as far as disease is concerned.
If you move salmon farms onto land in closed containment, you virtually eliminate that possibility of sea lice transfer and disease transfer. As a matter of fact, the proponents of closed containment technologies believe that you can operate a farm with no disease whatsoever and even without the use of antibiotics.
As Andy Wright mentioned, the waste from open-net fish farms floats to the bottom and can cause smothering of the ocean floor. That's eliminated entirely by having closed containment, where the water is circulated, filtered, and treated, and all solid waste is removed and can be used as a resource, as fertilizer. It can be used for a lot of different products.
There have been increasing incidents of marine mammals being killed by open-net salmon farm operators. There were 141 California sea lions shot just in the first three months of this year, according to Department of Fisheries and Oceans statistics. That, of course, is not a problem at all with closed containment. You're removing those fish—the target—from the open environment and that problem is virtually eliminated.
With those impacts being zero with closed containment, there still remain a few issues. I want to touch on three that have been brought up to the committee by the salmon farming industry in British Columbia.
The first is that it would take a huge footprint of land to move fish farms from open nets to closed containment. The second is that there's a huge water use. Thirdly, rural jobs where there are currently open-net fish farms would be lost, presumably to urban centres. All three, we believe, are incorrect statements. I'll go through them one by one.
First of all, as far as the huge land footprint is concerned, the spokesperson for the Canadian Aquaculture Industry Alliance, Ruth Salmon, spoke to you on November 1 and said that she believed that in New Brunswick, for example, it would take the equivalent of 18,000 football fields to house closed containment, as opposed to the current net-pen operations. That number is out by more than 200 times. It's actually 200 times less than that.
The amount of land required to move to closed containment actually is about identical to the amount of ocean being used by open-net pens right now. The structure of a net pen.... I'm sure you've seen it visually in some demonstrations. A building needed for closed containment to produce about the same amount of fish needs about the same space.
There's a bit of space around it, about equal to the amount of anchoring for a fish farm in the ocean. There would really be no different footprint on land than on ocean. The difference is simply that it's on private property, on land, and we have more than enough land in British Columbia. To house the same production on land would take about 140 hectares.
If you put that into perspective, agriculture is a huge economic boon in British Columbia, and there are four million hectares in our agriculture land reserve. This would be .001% of that required to have a viable and new economy through closed containment in British Columbia. Also, to put it in perspective, it's about the same space as the largest blueberry farm in the Fraser Valley in British Columbia--one farm.
With respect to water use, it takes a fair bit of water to run the system and to have multiple tanks in a commercial-scale facility, but this is not much different than the water needed for a major food-processing plant or a major fish-processing plant. We have a lot of water in British Columbia. The biggest uses of water are hydroelectricity and agriculture irrigation. This would be a small fraction of those uses. It's a matter of the source and the sustainability of that source.
Finally, I want to touch on the issue of rural communities and jobs moving from where open nets currently are. As a matter of fact, all of the proposals for closed containment operations are in rural communities. They're in the communities on our coast. Good possibilities would be Port Hardy, Campbell River, and even further up in northern Vancouver Island. It helps to be near a fish-processing plant. It's suited to rural communities and it's particularly good for first nations communities.
We believe that the current jobs in open-net operations could be immediately transferred to land-based closed containment. There would be two added bonuses.
First, there are more jobs created through closed containment. It takes more people to run a closed containment operation. This was verified in a Department of Fisheries and Oceans study which found that at least 50% more people are needed to run a closed containment farm. That's a boon for local rural economies.
Second, it's often forgotten that open-net fish farms aren't actually in communities. They're often an hour or so away by boat, in remote locations where somebody goes for a week or more, away from his family and away from his community. If closed containment were in the local community, they would be able to drive to work, just like for a regular job. This, we believe, would be a significant boost for rural economies and first nations in British Columbia and elsewhere in Canada.
Thank you.