Fisheries committee  I'm saying that the best performance—

Fisheries committee  It was a decision of the government to reduce the program, and for that particular element of the program, $2 million came out from the actual research component of the program, and the other million is a result of reductions in science capacity to undertake that research within the department.

Fisheries committee  The program that was affected in the recent budget changes, as I mentioned earlier, is the aquaculture collaborative research and development program, or ACRDP, a program within the science sector. It's one of two main programs we have. This program was first initiated in 2000 as part of the program for sustainable aquaculture.

Fisheries committee  I'm not sure if we've actually seen the direct data ourselves so much as the reports we've received from colleagues in other countries. But we could certainly look into what other type of information might be available to us or not.

Fisheries committee  We can certainly look into that and see what information is available. Having said that, certainly, as the committee is aware, salmon is a commodity. It's a product that's marketed internationally. The prices are international prices. Certainly the price drivers would be comparable for any country wanting to investigate a closed containment type of system.

Fisheries committee  As Guy has pointed out, there are not only questions around the economic viability, there are also still a number of technical issues that need to be explored for the full life-cycle production. For example, as Alistair Struthers mentioned earlier, the assumption is that we grow fish at a much higher density.

Fisheries committee  Well, I would have—

Fisheries committee  No, no—

Fisheries committee  No, it would be more so with the provincial governments.

Fisheries committee  The short answer is that it depends on the environment you're in. It also depends on the amount of organic matter that has accumulated underneath the nets. But certainly the farm benthic environments can recover in anywhere from months to years, depending on the amount of material, as I say.

Fisheries committee  Again, I'll start off, and certainly others may jump in if they want to. That's a hard question to answer definitively. As far as I'm aware, there haven't been extensive studies that have looked at this, but the information I'm aware of certainly suggests that there are quite high mortalities in escaped salmon after they've escaped and/or moved out of the areas, depending on the time of year.

Fisheries committee  Yes: it would be very much tied to the availability of funding, and often tied to what we would call “B-based” funding, or funding that would be coming in for a very specific purpose for a very specific period of time. That would be one of the options we'd have in order to be able to engage people on those types of projects.

Fisheries committee  We'd have to get back to you with specific information in terms of monitoring in general and how long we've known about sea lice. I mean, sea lice are naturally occurring organisms that we know have been around for literally thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years. We're certainly well aware of its occurrence in the environment, and for many years have noted that it occurs on a number of marine organisms on both the east coast and the west.

Fisheries committee  I'm not familiar with the exact response that you received. In the recent announced reductions for the department, there were some cuts to one of our main aquaculture science programs, the aquaculture collaborative research and development program, or ACRDP. The funding level for that program was cut in half, just approximately 50%, and ten full-time equivalent positions were lost across the country in that program.

Fisheries committee  Okay.