Fisheries committee  There is the feeding curve. I am showing you a typical curve from the industry. I don't have them.

Fisheries committee  Basically, in a few words, you cannot compare a site that is in year one production, with little fish eating very little, so sulphide numbers are low, to second-year production where you have much bigger fish eating much more, and your sulphide number will be much higher, irrespective if you have IMTA or not.

Fisheries committee  Because I know at the time when we moved to the island, it was a question of rotation in the bay management system—so year one, year two, fallowing, then year one, year two. I know that when we moved to the island, the sites were in year two fish, the big fish, and we moved to a few sites by putting a few rafts, so we don't expect that suddenly overnight the sulphides will disappear.

Fisheries committee  That's why there is this year of fallowing, the fallowing periods. That's why the Bay of Fundy is rotating. We have bay management one, where you have fish in year one--that's also for disease control--and then bay management number two, and then the fallowing period when the site can recover.

Fisheries committee  The data of what?

Fisheries committee  I also mentioned before that IMTA as such was not able to legally operate until we modified the Canadian shellfish sanitation program. There was a little paragraph, twelve lines, that was saying you cannot cultivate two species closer than 125 metres. It took us four years, and we have also eight or nine years of data that say that these 125 metres don't mean anything, if you have the right monitoring and everything.

Fisheries committee  Yes. We have to be sure.... There are some discussions about the Fisheries Act. The Fisheries Act is an old document from 1868 that has been amended a few times, and it still needs a lot of updating. Then there is discussion of do we need an aquaculture act? Even if an aquaculture act is developed in the future, we have to be very careful that with aquaculture we don't take the same approach as with fisheries, which is a mono-specific approach: we want to manage one species in isolation, and another species in isolation.

Fisheries committee  It's very interesting. We have always invited Ms. Inka Milewski of the Conservation Council of New Brunswick to come to our workshops. She decided not to come, and instead she preferred to cross swords, I would say, through the media, or maybe through your committee. It's too bad.

Fisheries committee  I just did, but I can repeat.

Fisheries committee  For the benthic, for the organics, there are two things. We started to work with shellfish. That was the suspension organic particles. The shellfish are good with small particles, but when you have bigger particles that settle faster to the bottom, that's where.... That's what we are working on now, looking at the fourth component, which is whether we can develop the aquaculture of sea cucumber, sea urchins, sea worms, because they will directly impact the bottom.

Fisheries committee  No. It depends on whether you're talking locally or worldwide. Worldwide, the capture fisheries increased; now they have plateaued, and some have declined. We have an increasing human population that wants more and more seafood as a source of protein. What do we do? We have something that has reached a plateau, and we have a population that wants that, so where does the difference come from?

Fisheries committee  In New Brunswick, for example, at the present time we have 96 sites. I don't think that all 96 sites will become IMTA sites, especially since some of these 96 also are disappearing as salmon sites because they do not have enough currents and all those things. So not all of them are okay for salmon; not all of them are okay for IMTA.

Fisheries committee  First, I would say that in Canada we have a very distorted vision of aquaculture. We think it is only fish aquaculture. I always repeat that, worldwide, the largest crop produced in aquaculture—46%—is seaweed, mostly in Asia, which is why we in the western world don't know about that.

Fisheries committee  At the beginning we spent a lot of time monitoring the mussels and the seaweed biomass to be sure that it was okay. With CFIA we monitor heavy metal, arsenic, pesticides, PCBs, and all these things. We did that and that's okay. We can calculate how much nitrogen, phosphorous, and carbon is sequestered in shellfish and how much is sequestered in seaweed, so we have the calculation.

Fisheries committee  Yes. We are not talking so much in terms of theories: we have gone from experimental to early commercialization. That's where we are now, and we hope, over the next few years, to go to more food-scale commercial. At the present time we have eight sites that are producing IMTA products.