Fisheries committee  Well, they're pink salmon, and pink salmon don't have a huge economic value in the province of British Columbia. Pink salmon—Mr. Cummins can probably enlighten us a little bit more—are maybe worth a couple of bucks a fish, as opposed to sockeye.... If this had been a sockeye population that was impacted, you wouldn't have heard the end of it.

Fisheries committee  In terms of actual numbers of pinks, we figure there are probably the redds—the spawning nests—of about 10,000 females, and there would have been another 10,000 males, one for each female. So it was basically the destruction of a population of about 20,000 fish. That is our rough gross estimate.

Fisheries committee  March 15. It was somewhere around the beginning of the third week of March. The causeway was finished, I think, around March 3 or March 4. My students and myself were on the causeway and taking pictures on March 5 and I think the extractions started to take place full bore on March 6.

Fisheries committee  I know that my students and I were out on March 9, and then the Sunday after March 9 I was on-site as well. Then we went back out on March 17, and on March 17 there was no extraction taking place. I believe the causeway was completely removed by March 17, which is why our pictures show the re-watering of the stream on March 17.

Fisheries committee  My guess is it was probably about one-fifth of the total Fraser. The Fraser was running at about 750 cubic metres per second during the initial construction of the causeway across the channel. It was probably well over 100 cubic metres per second, so it was a large flow.

Fisheries committee  Do you see how it's kind of lumpy there?

Fisheries committee  All those little scallops are fish redds, so they're everywhere. Every time a fish digs out gravel, it digs a hole, drops its eggs in, and spreads a bunch of gravel on top of that, and then there's a hump behind that. Hydraulically, the hump forces water through the embryos and the alevins and makes sure that the oxygenated water percolates across the fish.

Fisheries committee  From my perspective as a biologist, I have been immersed in gravel removal for some time. I actually conducted or managed a couple of hydraulic models on the Fraser River to try to determine the difference between aggradation and channel alignment. River elevations go up and down as a function of all sorts of things, such as the amount of water that's going through, whether aggradation is occurring, and the alignment of the river.

Fisheries committee  Absolutely not. The meeting took place on October 30, 2003. There were two managers at the meeting, and she flew over. It was unprecedented for an executive to basically remove a junior-level technical person, which I was, with the Ministry of the Environment at the time. We had this hour-long meeting and she finally said, “Look, there's nothing wrong with your science.

Fisheries committee  That was Nancy Wilkin, the assistant deputy minister. She reassigned me on October 30, 2003.

Fisheries committee  Yes, she's still the assistant deputy minister of the Ministry of Environment.

Fisheries committee  I think you're referring to Dale Paterson.

Fisheries committee  That's right; that was Dale Paterson, the area chief.

Fisheries committee  Yes, he is.

Fisheries committee  From my perspective, I question whether DFO would be so cavalier as to authorize something like this particular development. The media picked it up; if you googled media shortly after some of the news releases went out, it was picked up as far as North Korea and Malaysia. I would suggest that if DFO did it again, they would be utterly foolish.