There are a couple of things. The reason I answered yes so quickly is that it's clear we need further investigation into this issue. That's just indisputable. When I say “we”, it's not just the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, it's the ocean science community more broadly.
We know quite clearly that changing ocean conditions are significant. We know they are widespread, and we suspect strongly that they're affecting biological productivity of the oceans. Can we prove that categorically in a sort of linear relationship? Not yet.
A big part of our energy around the physical oceanography, chemical oceanography side of things, is trying to understand more effectively what changes are occurring in pH, temperature, salinity, currents, tides, those sorts of things. We know they're changing. We need to monitor them over a period of time.
Our investments are, and will continue to be, very much focused on understanding those trends, then figuring out how we link that back to an issue like Atlantic salmon.
One school of thought is that a major source of challenge for Atlantic salmon is that when these animals do go to sea, there are factors at play there that are causing them to either simply die and not return at all, or return in a poorer state of health, a poorer level of fitness, and so on. Can we prove that? No, we can't.
A big part of our focus, though, in our ongoing research is going to be to target that. While some people might see fish biology as the prime source of science priority, a big part of our emphasis is going to be on understanding the systems the fish swim in to try to figure out how that is affecting them, and tracing that back to population.