That's a really important thing to be aware of. During the first round of National Energy Board hearings, the board was presented with evidence produced by a collection of conservation biologists. It's an analysis called a population viability assessment, and it looked at the trajectory for population growth with different scenarios of increasing threat.
It found two really important things. First of all, it found that if the project went forward with the increased pressure from the shipping noise, which exacerbates the existing and apparently worsening situation with chinook scarcity, the population decline increased significantly. So we push the whales further toward extinction more quickly.
The other hopeful thing it showed us, however, was that if we can keep threats at bay and increase chinook, then we can actually push the population toward recovery, so that we aren't, although it seems dire, dealing with a population that can't [Technical difficulty—Editor]. In order to do that, we say we have to deal with existing threats. We have to take these urgent, quick actions to reduce the stress on the population right now. Before we consider any significant expansion of shipping traffic, we have to really understand that safe threshold, and we have to really understand what a biologically relevant amount of ocean noise is for this species, which is something we don't understand now.
We can't proceed, I say, with that project, based on the science, until we figure those pieces out and ask if it is even possible to mitigate noise, given the existing noisiness and busyness of the Salish Sea.