Fisheries committee  Canada is basically ignoring the problem, whereas Washington state really grabbed it by the horns. They passed legislation to pull the industry out of the ocean to stop Atlantic salmon farming and, most importantly, to stop the spread of this piscine orthoreovirus, a blood virus

Fisheries committee  Salmon stocks are fluctuating wildly. Some are crashing and some are suddenly big, and we have no idea why. People are counting salmon in a different way up and down the coast. There's no unified system. Unless there is a detailed plan.... For example, what the director should do

Fisheries committee  Appoint a regional director of Pacific wild salmon, because there is nobody in DFO whose entire focus is what is going on with these fish. Also, you will be talking to Dr. Kristi Miller-Saunders, so pick up that science and use it, because that is phenomenal. That is the most p

Fisheries committee  It's not that fish farms are my interest. It's that I lived in a territory that the fish farms moved into and then I studied the impact of that. I think hatcheries are a serious problem. I think disease testing should be upped in those hatcheries. As for the pinnipeds, removing

Fisheries committee  Thank you. The Canadian public spent $23 million on the Cohen commission, and I think Justice Bruce Cohen did a fine job of looking at what we know about wild salmon and what needs to be done. He said that if we want the Fraser River sockeye—the commission was just on the Frase

Fisheries committee  It's both. We have a massive herring die-off going on right now in the Queen Charlotte Strait. I know DFO is not researching it, but I'm trying to take samples. We also have the industry catching a large number of them. Again, if we use the genomic science, we could find out exac

Fisheries committee  I know that in 2013, 5% of the fish in the Skeena and the Lower Nass were infected with this piscine reovirus. However, if we want to answer that question, we need a director of wild salmon. We need somebody to pick up the genomic profiling tools. If you were to sample all the fi

Fisheries committee  No. We looked for it. The problem is that the industry is based on share price, so they have to grow every single year. They will never be satisfied with five, 10 or 1,000 farms. They always have to have more farms, and through torturous talks with the industry years ago, we real

Fisheries committee  In my experience, the ocean eventually breaks everything, so it would make sense to just get them all onto land and build a secure system. It doesn't necessarily have to be fresh water. They can make salt water. Then they have a much greater ability to collect the waste. It just

Fisheries committee  I'm very concerned. That's why they need to come out of the water. It's these closed recirculating systems that are the future of the industry, and closed means they're not getting out. The 'Namgis First Nation has had field trials for such a system. They built perc holes on th

Fisheries committee  Yes, the Kuterra project. It's the reason we—

Fisheries committee  Yes, people are losing faith in the Canadian federal government on this issue because Trudeau clearly understands there's a problem with salmon farming. He understands people don't want it, so he made the election promise that this industry would be out of our waters by 2025. The

Fisheries committee  I'm not invited by the industry, but I am increasingly invited by first nations to help them navigate this situation. I spend a lot of time doing ATIPs, so I read the emails between government and industry. This has given me a background on what is going on and how to help the na

Fisheries committee  No. In the Broughton Archipelago, the first nations never engaged in a financial arrangement, and they now have the authority to remove the farms. They are doing that. We are going to get a chance to see what happens when you remove these farms—first place anywhere in the world.

Fisheries committee  They are the biggest herring fishery on this coast with no quota and no licence. During the 2017-18 first nations' occupation of the salmon farms in the Broughton Archipelago, GoPro cameras were put down in every farm, and also in Campbell River and on the west coast. There are