Like anything else, any other business decision we make in life, any political decision we make in life, you have to show me that it's working, and if they can show me that it's working, I'm not going to resist it. I don't take a Luddite approach to anything. If there's a way of improving it, and we can improve employment and we can improve the product or produce more product, there's no way we should tell people they can't build it near a processing plant or near one of the major centres farther south.
I don't believe the economy would allow all of it to function, say, on the borders of Vancouver. The climate, the availability of water, and the availability of areas in which to disperse the water from the fish farms would be limited.
Our area has very little other activity in it that would inhibit having a neighbourhood turn into a fish farming area, and if it's on land, great; it will employ people as well in the processing, transportation, and other activities. But until such time as we can understand what the economics are—the real economics, not the economics of the force-fed, foreign money coming in and interfering with the normal transition of an industry on land or off land.... I believe until we see that proven in hard numbers, it's very hard to make that kind of a decision. I don't believe we should be putting fish farms or any other activity so far away that they can't be done economically. Whatever we do in the long run has to be economical, and has to be justified to the investors and to the people in terms of their interest in the continuity of the industry.