Yes, certainly. Thanks, Mr. Johns.
Through my work with the local Clayoquot salmon round table, which is, of course, populated by first nations, the province, DFO, the ENGOs, fishermen—both commercial and sport—I understand very well the workings of the local hatcheries. We receive regular reports and updates on their progress and how successful or unsuccessful they've been on gathering brood stock and what their funding situations are like.
We know one thing to be true. When the funding taps are turned off or are completely restricted to a trickle, the number of fish plummet in our local systems because our local systems here, at least the ones that the local community hatcheries have been working on, are highly dependent on the input from those hatcheries. Once the production and the funding are turned off, our numbers of chinook salmon particularly plummet to either close to zero or zero.
Without that funding that we talked about earlier, we don't have salmon returning to our local streams naturally in any meaningful way. We have small returns, but just in my lifetime I've watched those returns go from numbers in the thousands to single digits. Without the hatchery work that is being done by these amazing teams of community hatcheries, we wouldn't have any numbers of fish left in our rivers at all.