If you go back 20 years and look at the Fraser River sockeye productivity over the last 20 years, you'll see it's about a 45-degree angle downwards to 2009 when there were just over a million spawners that returned to the Fraser. I'm talking about sockeye. Then there was this large return that you talked about in 2010, 30 million fish, and then back to 4 million or 4.5 million this year.
If you talk to the scientists, they will say that's either a presence or lack of disease in the stocks. Of course the Cohen commission hearing has gone into great depths about disease, using the records provided by the salmon farmers themselves in the province of B.C. It was hotly debated, and there's a lot more work being done in that area.
I'll say one thing about the five or six years I've been involved in this issue. When I first got involved, the salmon farmers did not really treat their fish for sea lice. They didn't use the therapeutants they're using now. I think part of it was not only the science but also the public pressure that was brought to bear on the farmers, such that they manage their farms much better today than they did five years ago. The harvest before the out-migration of the smolts is one operating plan that they have. They treat their farm salmon with this lice treatment usually in January or February prior to the out-migration, forcing the lice off their farm fish. That helps the smolt survival rate.
So they've made a number of moves to react, if you like, to the problems that these farms were causing to the smolts. I think that's had a positive impact.