Your numbers are not quite correct at this time. Among the pinnipeds on the coast—and we're talking basically of the seals, including some of the larger fur seals moving down the coast—the harbour seal population through B.C. has been pretty stable for about 20 years, but it grew at the rate you're talking about when hunting was finished in the early 1970s. For approximately 20 to 30 years now, there's no question in people's minds that the role of pinnipeds has increased as a controlling factor.
Do we think it could prevent recovery of salmon? No, we do not. It would potentially be a mortality factor that we would maybe have to remove from an opportunity to fish, for example. One of the things that people struggle with is that you can only kill so many fish to sustain a population. You can kill it by a seal or you can kill it by a fisher, or you can kill it by industrial development. The bottom line is that it's all mortality and has to be accounted through accurate stock assessment and then management.
But it does not have to be the limiting factor to recovery.