Fisheries Committee on March 24th, 2021

[Dr. Emiliano Di Cicco]

When you empty a farm because of the removal of the fish, you cannot clean the water around the farm. It takes some time to actually go to the base level of agents, remaining food, drugs and whatever is used during the production cycle. Usually, it takes some months. It depends on the tidal flow and how secluded or not the location is. It usually takes some time to go back to the regional situation before the fish were put in. Again, it's from weeks to—

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

I'm sorry, Doctor. What about the ocean floor? There would be a lot of debris and detritus from the operation down there.

[Dr. Emiliano Di Cicco]

It takes weeks, if not months.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Ms. Wristen, what are your thoughts?

[Karen Wristen]

I can't really add to what Dr. Di Cicco said. It recovers naturally, as far as the ocean floor is concerned. My concern is that the infrastructure is removed.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

The community impacts of closing down the operations in the Discovery Islands have been noted, and we've certainly heard from them. I heard Dr. Di Cicco reference the operations on the west coast of Vancouver Island, where tidal activity, etc., must be quite a bit different from what it would be in the Discovery Islands, one would think.

Does that make a difference in terms of the acceptability of aquaculture operations?

[Dr. Emiliano Di Cicco]

The water flow is definitely different, so the last stage in the life of the fish living in those areas is different. When we talk about the Discovery Islands, we're talking about those islands between Vancouver Island and the mainland. Usually the fish use that area to migrate up north when they are juvenile and come down when they are adult.

What happens on the west coast is slightly different. We have a population of chinook and coho that spend the first year of their life in those sounds, where there are also farms. In that case, they are not exposed during the migration, but they are exposed during the whole first year of life. I don't think either is good.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Dr. Rosenau, when we talk about habitat, is joint care and attention necessary between the province and the federal government when it comes to dealing with habitat in the inland waters?

[Dr. Marvin Rosenau]

I've been advised that the province has pulled out of habitat in the eastern part of the province. As an example, DFO has had to move back as per requirements under the Canadian Constitution. Its fractured forest rules are different. There is a combination of provincial and federal collaboration within the urban environments, the riparian area regulation types of legislation. DFO seemed to pull out, and I don't know if they're coming back. There is a mixture of collaboration and, in some cases, very close connections; in other cases, they're split right apart. It's a bit of a grab bag from my experience.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

We've heard that water temperature can quite often be an issue, certainly out in the deep ocean, but also in the freshwater cycles. We have water temperature; we have the availability of food; we have the stream beds and the lake beds, as well.

Where in your view is most of the damage taking place, or is it evenly distributed across all those aspects of the habitat?

[Dr. Marvin Rosenau]

I would suggest it's not evenly distributed. Concentrations occur in populated areas. There is always a sort of death by a thousand cuts in the Lower Mainland, where every little development, every little shopping centre, every little parking lot that goes up affects habitat. Of course we have large mine proposals in the interior of the province. I would suggest that within areas of community development, lots of non-diffuse impacts are just as serious as a large mine going up. The Mount Polley mine is a good example; it collapsed and things spiralled out of control.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

While I still have time, we've asked this question a number of times—

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Sorry, Mr. Hardie, your time just ran out.

We'll now go on to Madame Gill, for six minutes or less, please.

[Marilène Gill, Bloc, Manicouagan, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

That was passionate testimony. Personally, I lost track of the time. My thanks to all the witnesses for their testimony, Mr. Di Cicco, Mr. Rosenau and Ms. Wristen.

Ms. Wristen, I listened to you with attention and interest. You talked about the many causes of what is happening now to Pacific salmon populations.

Could you give us some more details about what you were saying earlier with respect to the department itself? For example, you mentioned the marked differences between the scientific information that the department could have had at its disposal in order to make recommendations to the Minister. You also talked about Ms. Miller-Saunders, who noticed much the same thing in terms of the differences in the scientific data.

How can we improve this state of affairs within the department itself?

[Karen Wristen]

That's a large question. Let me confine my remarks to what happened with these scientific recommendations.

They were written down, so to speak. The significance of the remarks was obscured by titling them, by prefacing them, with the suggestion they were unpublished and somehow less than the dire warning that Kristi Miller was trying to convey up the chain of command. It's not even clear that this information was placed before the minister before she made her decision, based on the paper record that we see.

Certainly, there's nothing in the record of decision that appeared in the proceedings of the court—to which I'm a party, which is why I know about it—that would suggest that she had the information before making the decision. This has really important ramifications in practice. The companies are in court right now, trying to get an injunction to reverse this decision and allow them to stock the farms in the Discovery Islands, and the judge hearing that case will have no evidence before him of the dire impacts to Fraser River sockeye that could ensue should he decide to restock those farms. It's simply missing from the record, and that is indefensible.

What needs to happen in order to prevent this from happening again is that DFO's mandate to promote the industry must be removed from that department. They cannot both promote aquaculture and adequately protect wild salmon. They can certainly regulate aquaculture. They have the knowledge to do that, but they cannot promote it and reconcile that promotion with the protection of wild salmon. It's been clear that that has not happened in the past, and there's no indication it can happen going forward.

[Marilène Gill, Bloc, Manicouagan, QC]

Thank you, Ms. Wristen.

You anticipated the subject of my next question a little. I will put it to all the witnesses.

It is about farming salmon without adversely affecting wild salmon populations or the environment, and, at the same time, employment and the economy.

Is any reconciliation possible between the economic activity with salmon, and protecting the environment and salmon populations?

[Dr. Emiliano Di Cicco]

When you have a sustainable activity, it means you have a balance between economic factors, social factors and financial factors. Trying to find the balance among these three big areas is not very easy.

Personally I've been struggling to understand what would be a way to address all three factors at the same time. The idea of having a closed containment industry, I think, not necessarily on land but definitely a closed containment industry, might help to maintain a certain economic impact in the region while not having the impact on the environment. That would be my idea.

[Karen Wristen]

I would say there are a number of economic activities that could replace the economic activity of open net-pen salmon farming. Land-based salmon farming is only one of those. There are also opportunities for the farming of things like seaweed and bivalves that do not interfere with the environmental integrity but, in fact, enhance it and provide habitat for other species. There are opportunities for very small-scale, land-based salmon farming development that could be within the confines of a small community or first nations community on the island.

We have lots of alternatives if we think broadly enough about what we're trying to replace here. In terms of reconciling having both farmed salmon and wild salmon in the water, we see no evidence anywhere in the world that this is possible.

[Dr. Marvin Rosenau]

In response to your question, madam, my view—and I discussed this with some of the members of Parliament some years ago—is that in effect the most pragmatic thing is to choose parts of the coast where salmon runs are very minimal, where the large Fraser River stocks aren't migrating through, and just basically say we're going to sacrifice those areas.

The fish farming industry is so large and so economically powerful that you have to come up with a Solomon's way of cutting the baby down the middle to deal with it and move these guys to areas. It may cause some problems with respect to companies being in conflict with each other, but in terms of providing safe passageways.... Take Nootka Sound versus Barkley Sound: Nootka has lots of farms but no fish. Barkley has no farms but lots of fish.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you, Madame Gill.

We'll now go on to Mr. Johns for six minutes or less, please.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses.

Mr. Hardie asked a question, Dr. Di Cicco, about the west coast of Vancouver Island. We've seen plummeting returns, whether it be in Tofino Creek, Atleo River or Tranquille River, all in Tla-o-qui-aht and Ahousaht Nation territory, or in the Kennedy. Do you believe that salmon farms have had an impact on those wild stock returns?

[Dr. Emiliano Di Cicco]

I believe so. We've been trying to do a study directly in that area to assess what the impact was of the agents in that type of population because, as I said, chinook and coho in particular spend a lot of time inside the sound in the first phase of their lives. They are in close contact for a long period of time with the farms that are present in that area, so the impact is definitely prolonged, and that can be detrimental to their survival.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

We've heard about mouth rot, PRV and sea lice. We've had escapes. We've had die-offs.

This is a question for Ms. Wristen.

The Cohen commission's third recommendation was that the Government of Canada “remove from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans' mandate the promotion of salmon farming as an industry and farmed salmon as a product.” Do you believe it can be both the regulator—to protect wild salmon—and the agent?

[Karen Wristen]

No, it simply has not worked out at all for the wild salmon in that regard. The mandate to expand the industry to help it grow has overtaken, at every turn, considerations of the impacts on wild salmon. I mean, I could provide you with a host of examples—very specific examples—of how that's happened.

Mouth rot would be a good one. The government, together with industry, has been studying mouth rot since at least 2009, but in 2019 it couldn't answer the question, “Do wild fish get it?” In 2019 it couldn't answer the question, “How many sea lice are there on migrating Fraser River sockeye?”

It just doesn't look at any of the questions that need to be looked at to protect the wild fish, because if it did, it couldn't promote the salmon farming.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

Given that, do you believe British Columbians can trust the science that the government has? We've had several reports and a recent Canadian science advisory secretariat that said that PRV is endemic in British Columbia and not a concern. This is right there.

Would you agree that PRV is not of concern, like DFO is saying, or is PRV concerning you? What is the failure of DFO to not take PRV seriously?