Okay. Well, I'll state for the record here that the people of Churchill are extremely concerned about these marine mammal regulations. The population of belugas there is 55,000 and increasing, and the federal government is imposing a great hardship on these communities. I will be dealing with this over the next few months.
I'm also disappointed in your report that you conflate marine mammals. You just talk of them in general. Obviously, you're talking mostly about cetaceans, but marine mammals include cetaceans and seals. I think it's misleading when you use the words “marine mammals” and you do not divide them into the marine mammals that they actually are—cetaceans and seals—because the situations for cetaceans and seals are completely different. Your audit does not make that.... You use the words “marine mammals” interchangeably.
Also, you talk about the depletion of marine mammal food resources. This committee, on numerous occasions, has talked about overabundant seal populations. In terms of your report here you completely.... I actually wish—and again this is not your fault—that this report had been an audit of protecting and managing marine mammal resources, not just protecting, because we have incredibly overabundant seals in many areas.
You talk about the depletion of marine mammal food resources. I'm looking at a study here by Dr. Olesiuk of a creek near the Puntledge River on Vancouver Island. He concluded that three dozen seals killed 10,000 adult chum salmon. That's 36 seals killing 10,000 fish in the fall spawning run. The number of harbour seals on the west coast has gone from 10,000 in the 1970s to 105,000 now. It shocks me that nobody talks about the overabundance of seals as actually the main threat to the food resources of cetaceans.
Would you provide a comment on that? Why did you omit the effect of an overabundance of seals on the food resources of cetaceans?