Fisheries Committee on April 26th, 2021

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

I now call this meeting to order. Welcome to meeting number 26 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans. Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted on October 19, 2020, the committee is meeting for its study on the state of the Pacific salmon.

For those participating virtually, I'd like to outline a few rules to follow. Members and witnesses may speak in the official language of their choice. Interpretation services are available for this meeting. You have the choice at the bottom of your screen of either the floor, English or French. With the latest Zoom version, you may now speak in the language of your choice without the need to select the corresponding language channel. You will also notice that the platform's “raise hand” feature is now in a more easily accessed location on the main toolbar, should you wish to speak or alert the chair.

I would now like to welcome our witnesses. Today we have, from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Kyle Garver, research scientist, Pacific region; John Holmes, division manager, stock assessment and research division; Simon Jones, research scientist, Pacific region; Kristi Miller-Saunders, research scientist, Pacific region; Jay Parsons, director, aquaculture, biotechnology and aquatic animal health science branch; Rebecca Reid, regional director general, Pacific region; and Andrew Thomson, regional director, science, Pacific region.

We will now proceed with opening remarks.

Ms. Reid, you may begin with introductions and then, of course, I believe we're going to hear from at least one other person from the department.

We'll go over to you when you're ready.

[Rebecca Reid, Regional Director General, Pacific Region, Department of Fisheries and Oceans]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Good afternoon, committee members.

Yes, I'm Rebecca Reid. I'm the regional director general for DFO Pacific region. My colleagues and I greatly appreciate the opportunity to appear before the committee on behalf of Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

First of all, we'd like to thank you for your interest in this extremely important issue.

Our aim today is to provide you with as much information as possible to support your deliberations.

We are particularly pleased to have the opportunity to discuss the department's actions to conserve and rebuild Pacific salmon populations.

Over the next 10 minutes, I will introduce you to the witnesses and describe their areas of expertise. I will invite Dr. Kristi Miller-Saunders to provide a more in-depth description of her field of research, and then I will close with some final remarks.

Andrew Thomson, whom many of you have met before, has been recently appointed as the regional director of science. Prior to that, he was regional director of fisheries management for over six years and has held other management positions, including director of aquaculture management.

Dr. Jay Parsons is the director of the aquaculture, biotechnology and aquatic animal health science branch. Dr. Parsons has worked for over 30 years in the field of aquaculture, including both research and aquaculture management.

Dr. John Holmes, division manager, stock assessment and research division, is currently responsible for stock assessment surveys, activities and advice on all marine finfish, invertebrates and Pacific salmon.

Dr. Kyle Garver is a research scientist in the aquatic diagnostics, genomics and technology division. Dr. Garver's research focuses on identifying and characterizing finfish viruses to understand transmission and pathogenic potential.

Dr. Simon Jones is a research scientist with the aquatic diagnostics, genomics and technology division. Dr. Jones' research focuses on diseases in wild and farmed salmonids.

Dr. Kristi Miller-Saunders is section head in salmon genetics. Dr. Millers-Saunders' research focuses on molecular biology, genetics and genomics, ecology and fish health.

At this point, I will turn to Dr. Miller-Saunders to provide some remarks before I offer concluding comments.

Thank you.

[Dr. Kristi Miller-Saunders, Research Scientist, Pacific Region, Department of Fisheries and Oceans]

Thank you very much for the opportunity to come before you.

My name is Dr. Kristi Miller-Saunders. I hold a Ph.D. from Stanford University and have been a research scientist with DFO since 1994. My areas of speciality include molecular biology, genetics and genomics, ecology and fish health. I have worked my entire career on salmon at DFO, and issues surrounding salmon health and salmon declines for the past 20 years, with at least 75 of the 140 publications from my program focused on fish stress and disease.

I co-developed the strategic salmon health initiative with Dr. Brian Riddell in 2012 in response to the clear data gaps on infectious disease discussed in the Cohen inquiry. The SSHI is a large multi-million dollar project that sought to bring clarity to the role of infectious disease as a factor in salmon declines, and to reveal pathogens undermining the survival of salmon in British Columbia.

With a focus on all salmon in B.C.—wild, enhanced and aquaculture—the SSHI assessed over 30,000 salmon for over 50 viruses, bacteria and parasites associated with diseases in salmon worldwide. Technological advances in disease monitoring and diagnostics within the SSHI provided a new foundation for studying complex disease processes in live-sampled fish, including a high throughput molecular infectious agent monitoring system; an innovative approach to the resolution of novel viruses and viral disease, and to visualize viruses in tissue; and a holistic tool called salmon FIT-CHIPS that can resolve specific stressor and disease states in salmon using only a small gill clip.

The funded SSHI program was completed at the end of March 2021. The SSHI has resolved a clearer picture on the role of pathogens on declining survival of our wild B.C. salmon. Key highlights included the discovery of over a dozen previously uncharacterized viruses infecting salmon in aquaculture, hatchery and wild settings. There were no detections of several viruses of regulatory concern, corroborating evidence by the CFIA that these agents were not found in British Columbia

The identification of several agents with higher probabilities of transmission and disease under high water temperatures suggested that disease risks may continue to worsen as the climate warms. Included was the discovery of piscine orthoreovirus in B.C. cultured and wild salmon, the first documented farm-level observation of heart and skeletal muscle inflammation in farmed Atlantic salmon, and a different but related PRV-associated disease in farmed B.C. Chinook salmon.

In juvenile salmon, using infection data spanning a decade and traditional stock assessment modelling approaches, several infectious agents have been resolved that show associations with annual variance in marine survival of Chinook, coho and sockeye salmon.

This represents the most comprehensive analysis of population level impacts of infection on naturally migrating wild salmon. Two of the six agents with consistent associations between species also show connections with farm-mediated transmission, informing the risks to wild salmon posed by open-net farming.

The most notable agents include PRV, or piscine orthoreovirus, associated with annual variances in survival and low weight of Chinook and coho salmon, with highest incidence if infection within 30 kilometres of salmon farms. Phylogenetic studies show that PRV has been repeatedly exchanged between farmed and wild salmon in British Columbia.

The bacterium Tenacibaculum maritimum, responsible for significant mortality on salmon farms, is strongly associated with annual variance in survival and low weight of sockeye, Chinook and coho. For sockeye, the highest incidence of infection is in fish sampled near farms in the Discovery Islands.

The small skin parasite Ichthyophthirius multifiliis that infects salmon in fresh water shows a strong carryover effect on survival and low weight of sockeye, Chinook and coho salmon in the ocean that may indicate years in which poor condition fish are entering the ocean.

A newly discovered Pacific salmon nidovirus, related to mammalian respiratory coronaviruses, infects the respiratory gill tissue of salmon released from some federal hatcheries. We see preliminary associations with survival in Chinook and coho.

A virtual international workshop was held at the end of March to provide expert advice on next steps for the program which will include disease challenge studies and understudied agents if facilities and funding can be sourced.

Our program is now moving to apply salmon FIT-CHIPS to reveal the role of cumulative stressors on salmon survival. This tool can reveal if salmon is undergoing salinity stress, low oxygen stress or thermal stress, and if they are experiencing a viral disease. It can also predict whether salmon is likely to die within 72 hours, and the cumulative level of stress that they carry, which is predictive of lower survival over longer timeframes.

By applying this tool, we can assess the role of climate driven changes on salmon health, and identify environments and years in which salmon are most compromised. Importantly, it is our goal to use this tool to identify the stressors that, if mediated, could increase survival and productivity of our wild salmon. The success of this program has led to a demand for the technology and approach to understand similar issues in salmon worldwide, including Norway, the Netherlands and the U.S.

We're also working closely with many first nations in B.C. and transferring some of the tools to the first indigenous-led genomics laboratory in Canada.

Thank you.

[Rebecca Reid]

Thank you, Kristi.

As you know, DFO's primary mandate is to manage Canada's fisheries and to protect our waters.

Consistent with that mandate, the protection, conservation and restoration of wild Pacific salmon is a key priority.

Pacific salmon are under threat, and the challenges facing them are numerous and multi-faceted. Unforeseen events such as the Big Bar landslide have further heightened the risk facing these populations.

The department has taken significant action, guided by Canada's wild salmon policy and its corresponding implementation plan, as well as the 75 recommendations from the Cohen commission. With respect to marine finfish aquaculture, the department continues to rely on the best available science and a robust regulatory system to manage potential risks to wild fish stocks and ecosystems.

We have made a number of strategic investments, including $142 million, with the province of B.C., for the B.C. salmon restoration innovation fund; $5 million to support the work of the Pacific Salmon Foundation; and, $15 million to implement the Pacific Salmon Treaty's new commitments for stock assessment, coded wire tagging and catch monitoring.

The minister's supplementary letter sets out a commitment “to bring forward a” long-term “Pacific Salmon Strategy and deliver on our commitment to conserve and protect wild Pacific salmon and their habitats and ecosystems”. Budget 2021 identified $647 million over five years to support this work.

Over the coming months, we will be actively supporting the minister in shaping and delivering on this initiative, including close collaboration with our many partners working on the front lines of salmon conservation.

Thank you for your attention. Your questions will be welcome.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you for that.

I'm sure everybody is anxious to get to the questions.

We'll start off with Mr. Arnold, please, for six minutes or less.

[Mel Arnold, Conservative, North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'll start off with Ms. Miller if I could, please.

Ms. Miller, you last appeared before this committee in November of 2016. In that appearance you stated:

In my view, it's difficult to convince a skeptical public that we are doing everything we can to conduct robust, transparent evidence-based risk assessments on aquaculture-wild interactions if we do not maintain independence from industry....

Since 2016, in your view, has DFO's independence from industry changed?

[Dr. Kristi Miller-Saunders]

Well, I am supposed to be sticking to the science, but in short, no.

[Mel Arnold, Conservative, North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

Okay. Thank you.

In March 2020, the Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat released its report on nine populations that COSEWIC has designated as threatened or endangered. The CSAS report stated that “all sources of harm should be reduced to the maximum extent possible” in order to provide the best chance of survival of threatened or endangered wild salmon stocks.

In your view, are viruses from fish farms, such as PRV, a source of harm that should be reduced to the maximum extent possible?

[Dr. Kristi Miller-Saunders]

Viruses are particular concerns because of their capacity for rapid evolution. In farmed salmon, viruses have a constant supply of a new host to infect, so there's no negative fitness consequence and the virus evolves to become more virulent. It is a different situation for wild salmon, where densities are not as high. We do have to worry about having large captured populations of fish and the potential for rapid evolution, which has been demonstrated in many parts of the world, including with PRV in Norway.

In the SSHI, we've amassed strong evidence that PRV is a risk to wild salmon, particularly in Chinook and coho salmon. That risk does need to be managed. I can go into details on what our evidence is, if you are interested.

[Mel Arnold, Conservative, North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

Okay. I'll try to get through some more questions, but if you have further detail to provide to the committee, I would ask you to do that in writing afterwards.

In your view, are sea lice a source of harm that should be reduced to the maximum extent possible?

[Dr. Kristi Miller-Saunders]

Sea lice are not my area. The SSHI didn't look at sea lice, so I can't respond from a place of being an expert in sea lice.

I can say that it does concern me with increasing resistance in the drug SLICE that impacts of treatments like the Hydrolicer, which employs a strong stream of water so that fish are dislodged of sea lice, create a lot of stress on fish. I do know something about stress, and I am concerned that if that kind of tactic to control sea lice were to take place that the stressed fish, the fish that would come out of those kinds of treatments, may be more vulnerable to infection and disease. It's plausible that treatment could actually elevate risk to wild salmon.

[Mel Arnold, Conservative, North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

Thank you.

In your view, are bacteria from fish farms such as Tenacibaculum or mouth rot a source of harm that should be reduced to the maximum extent possible?

[Dr. Kristi Miller-Saunders]

There were two agents in the SSHI that really stood out in terms of risks of transmission from salmon farmers and Tenacibaculum was one of them. Tenacibaculum is also the most consistently impactful agent in our population level models, showing impacts across all three species. It is certainly of concern. There is more work to do on this bacterium in understanding its disease-causing potentially in all of the Pacific salmon species.

We know that in farmed Atlantic salmon, it causes the disease mouth rot and can be quite problematic on farms. In Pacific salmon and other species of fish, it causes a different disease called tenacibaculosis. There have not been a lot of studies done on wild Pacific salmon with that bacterium, but certainly our data do suggest that we need to be very precautionary in our approach with this bacterium.

[Mel Arnold, Conservative, North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

Thank you.

The strategic salmon health initiative was started in 2012, I believe, by the Conservative government following the Cohen commission. I believe that that initiative has stopped due to lack of resources. Could you comment on that, please?

[Dr. Kristi Miller-Saunders]

The program was developed to be run in phases, so it wasn't stopped because of a lack of resources. It simply has run through the course of phase 2b, which was one of the planned phases. The next phase was supposed to be phase 3, where we were basically going to do disease challenge studies on the understudied agents that came out to be the most impactful from phase 2b.

We have to source new funding and facilities to do those research challenges. It's not certain that the Pacific Salmon Foundation or Genome BC will necessarily be involved. So we need to find new partners. It's not necessarily dead; it just means that we have to start over again and make a new program.

[Mel Arnold, Conservative, North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

Thank you.

Really quickly again, were the nine risk assessments used to inform Discovery Island's decision correct in their conclusions that those nine pathogens posed less than minimal risk to wild Pacific salmon?

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Sorry, Mr. Arnold, you've gone over your time. Hopefully, we'll get that answer along the way.

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

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I do appreciate the opportunity to speak with the department.

I have so many questions. I too will [Technical difficulty—Editor]

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

You're muted, Ken.

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

Okay. Not now. It must have flipped back, I think I hit the space bar by accident.

Dr. Miller-Saunders, the pathogens that you've identified—and it seems that there are more ones that haven't commonly been discussed, at least here at this committee.... Now that they're in the population of wild salmon, if we were to lift all of the open-net aquaculture out of the ocean now, would those pathogens still represent a huge ongoing risk to our wild populations?

[Dr. Kristi Miller-Saunders]

First of all, I have to be clear that not all pathogens that are coming out of our program are a risk of transmission from farmed salmon. If we look at the six most impactful agents from our models, two of them show a risk of transmission from salmon farms. So you're not going to remove the risk of all infection, most of which is natural and endemic, by removing salmon farms. However, you may considerably reduce the risks of two of the agents that we find to be most impactful across species.

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

Okay. With the identification of these new pathogens—and here I wouldn't want you to speculate—it would seem, obviously, that something has changed if they didn't exist before, if they're new, if they were introduced or again naturally occurring. I guess the key question here, with the background of all of these pathogens being present in our wild salmon population, is whether we can do anything about that, or are we simply going to have to watch the inevitable decline of our population because these pathogens are present and will keep circulating among our stocks?

[Dr. Kristi Miller-Saunders]

Well, one of the reasons that we expect pathogens may be more impactful today than they were in the past is not only the potential for interactions with cultured fish—and that could be our hatchery fish and aquaculture—but also the shift in the climate. The relationship between pathogens and disease depends upon the susceptibility of the host as well as the environmental conditions that are experienced. When you have salmon that are swimming through areas of very high temperature, that are experiencing low oxygen and experiencing lower food availability, they will be more vulnerable to infections and to becoming diseased. It's not simply cultured fish. It's the combination of environmental change and cultured fish that we should consider when we're looking at disease-causing potential and the potential of disease to undermine the survival of our wild salmon.

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

Are there mediation strategies that can help offset what you've noticed so far, such that we can constructively look at rebuilding salmon stocks?

[Dr. Kristi Miller-Saunders]

In my first outline, I named three agents that are associated with cultured fish. As managers, we're able to deal with the anthropogenic activities that we can control. Obviously one of those is control of cultured fish. We can control how many hatchery fish we release. We can control the health and condition of those releases. We can control where and when farms are occurring and under what regulations.

There's also good evidence that both the freshwater environment and the pathogens that are coming out in salmon from fresh water can be important pathogens in the marine environment. There is mounting evidence in our program that areas of the coast that have more industrial activities may be where salmon are undergoing the highest levels of infection.

I think we need to be focusing not only on what we can control anthropogenically but also on identifying the critical areas along the coast where salmon are most infected and most stressed, and then on remediating the stresses in those habitats.