Hello to the honourable committee members who are here today. I would like to thank you for hosting this meeting. I'm not going to try to rehash a lot of what is being talked about here, but there are a lot of good points coming from the other witnesses who are speaking today.
To start, I suppose I'll highlight the principles of evolution and natural selection. You know of Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace, the essential people for the idea of a movement to understand the natural world. Both worked alone, separate from one another, in evaluating species and documenting them wherever they explored across the world. These naturalists explored these unknown places of our planet, assessing and compiling data on ecosystems and a wide range of different species in their own distinct ecosystems.
It's no surprise that today, humanity has completely removed any barriers for species to travel across the globe. Over thousands of years we've been travelling and trading, with the 20th century proving to be the pinnacle of global trade, thanks to globalization.
Now, I said I wouldn't try to rehash a lot of what's been highlighted here today, but one of the most important aspects to keep in mind here for invasive species is their incredible ability to survive, even thrive from a single egg to larvals, from two or three. This kind of invasion would be more or less a comparison to a spark in a forest fire, or a single match in a forest fire, and see the impacts of that not only short term but long term. Some of these impacts are not possible to come to terms with and solve, more or less.
Successful aquatic invaders have been moulded by evolution over time. They're very skilled opportunists. They have patience and timing to germinate from their dormant extended periods of time, given their environments in which they're found. Being transported across the oceans, for instance, in bottoms of ships' hulls, with vastly different environments, vastly different temperatures and food supplies, these species that survive these journeys most certainly show us the resilience and the tenacity for them to thrive in other environments. They are most certainly a danger to native species and native ecosystems wherever they find themselves. It's global climate change, the ocean acidity levels, temperature fluctuations. Invasive species are essentially a biological pollution, in whatever ecosystem they find them, to native species and to ecosystems as a whole.
The solutions to deal with this are quite often the preventive measures. We need to assess this early on. Then we need to have a very rapid response if we find invasive species. They have the potential to cause irreversible harm and destroy and eradicate entire environments, whether we are talking about marine environments or freshwater environments. You can look at kelp in different places, or seagrass, and the impacts they have of out-competing the native species, and on a larger scale, the economic impacts. This will have a long-term impact for industry across the country. There are millions and billions of dollars in damages that can be prevented here if the right amount of money and resources are allocated, and there is a vision and foresight to ensure that our coastline....
I completely understand we have quite a large coastline in this country and the largest in the world. But to have the lion's share of money allocated toward two specific species in this country.... Ontario gets the lion's share of all of this money. There's no doubt there. It's going to sea lamprey and Asian carp in the Great Lakes, and for the Great Lakes Commission. It is an important matter, no doubt. The Great Lakes are very important to both Canada and the United States. However, the funding allocated to the rest of the country is almost nothing.
For instance, you can look at five or six species found in Newfoundland and Labrador. Now the European green crab would probably be the top one, and this is probably the most talked about, especially in the commercial fishery. Then you have the oyster thief, which is found just about everywhere across the province. It showed up in Atlantic Canada around the early 1990s, and then 20 years later it stretched for more than 445 kilometres of coastline. Then you have the vase tunicate, the violet tunicate and the coffin box. For most of these species that I'm talking about, it was roughly in 2009, 2011 and 2012 that there was something last done, as far as I'm concerned, with respect to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Even besides that, it was about 10 years that the provincial government addressed aquatic invasive species here in the province, or invasive species in general.
It's a very big concern for us here in the province, and it should be a concern for every province and territory in the country. There's the damage to natural habitats and the long-term impact that this is having is that it's displacing native species. It's pushing them out. It's making them compete for the resources.
Every time I or someone from my organization gets the chance to sit down with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, funding increases are always a key aspect. We want to see more science done. We want to see, most importantly, assessments done in key areas of the province. I can think of 174 scheduled salmon rivers in this province that I would very much like to see some evaluation done on, the estuaries in particular, looking at the health of those systems, and having an ecosystem-based approach. It's crucial for us not to ignore these issues.
I think that today we're left with a long list of failures from all previous governments on the federal scale. I would hope that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in Ottawa realizes that we could be, or we should be the leaders in wildlife conservation environmental management for the world. We have the second-biggest country in the world. We have 35 million to 36 million people. We could be the stewards of this vast resource that we have.
Quite frankly, I don't see anything coming from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans to help out, to add additional funds, to add enforcement, or to add research. Here in the province, for instance, we're afraid that our wild Atlantic salmon stocks are going to be put at risk and that we might lose them in the future. This is the last stronghold for wild Atlantic salmon in North America. If their habitats, if their ecosystems are put in jeopardy from aquatic invasive species, then we could lose them. Not only that, we could lose a wide range of other biodiversities in this province and across the country.
Biodiversity is one of the most important things that we can keep in mind globally. Habitat loss is number one on the list of things that threaten and put at risk the health of our ecosystems. Aquatic invasive species are quite close to that, depending on where they're found and depending on what they can do over time.
Thank you.