Yes. Trying to understand what DFO was doing in terms of salmon farms was a very frustrating, long experience until I started accessing their actual emails and could understand what was going on.
There are long chains of emails where DFO biologists are trying to figure out what happened when there were die-offs on salmon farms. This has particularly been happening in Clayoquot Sound and also in Nootka Sound, the west coast farms. What the industry wants it to be is that they died of a plankton bloom, but when you go back through the conversation, there's evidence, for example, of novel pathogens. There's alarm in scientists. There are scientists saying they want to access that farm and test those fish, but those conversations are cut off. The final report is that the fish died of a natural plankton bloom.
At the moment, DFO is prohibited from attending a farm during a mortality event. The industry says that's to stop the spread of disease, but their own staff are coming and going on these farms. DFO has to be on those farms. This cannot be through a group that is tasked to promote aquaculture. That has to be taken right out of the equation.
In my view, the way the aquaculture management division has handled salmon farms has not only destroyed our wild salmon runs; it has also destroyed the aquaculture industry. If the regulations had been built to protect wild salmon from day one, we would probably have the leading land-based aquaculture industry right now. We would also have our wild salmon stocks.