Mr. Speaker, first, I just want to say I am definitely an ardent supporter of wild salmon. It is a critical issue I have been working on for half my life, a quarter of a century.
I do want to point out that the bill is specific to Canada's west coast, so it is really just focused on British Columbia.
As to the important question about the impacts of transition, yes, there are always impacts when transitioning to a new technology. However, if we look to the world leaders, Norway is the largest open-net salmon farmer in the world. The Norwegians are making a transition to closed containment. What they have recognized is that the costs of keeping the salmon farming industry going, i.e., pesticides and Slice and the toxins that they have to use to combat disease, are getting too high. Therefore, they are seeing the idea of moving to closed containment as the way forward.
I think that Canada can play a significant role by adopting that technology and then, at the same time, not putting the much larger wild salmon economy at risk.
In my speech I spelled out exactly what the problems are with a smaller industry impacting a much larger industry of over $1.1 billion and almost 50,000 employees. We are talking about a small industry. It needs to make the change through adopting a new technology to stay relevant.