Sustainable Aquaculture — Issue No. 34 — Friday, February 16, 2007 (HTML)

2006 Legislative Session: Third Session, 38th Parliament
SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON SUSTAINABLE AQUACULTURE
MINUTES AND HANSARD

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON
SUSTAINABLE AQUACULTURE



CONTENTS

		Page

Election of Chair and Deputy Chair		1045

Election of Subcommittee on Agenda and Procedure		1045

Presentations		1045
	R. MacDonald
	E. Wickham
	S. Cox
	C. Acheson
	T. Joys

Chair:	* Robin Austin (Skeena NDP)
Deputy Chair:	* Ron Cantelon (Nanaimo-Parksville L)
Members:	* Al Horning (Kelowna–Lake Country L) * Daniel Jarvis (North Vancouver–Seymour L) John Yap (Richmond-Steveston L) * Gary Coons (North Coast NDP) * Scott Fraser (Alberni-Qualicum NDP) * Gregor Robertson (Vancouver-Fairview NDP) * Shane Simpson (Vancouver-Hastings NDP) * Claire Trevena (North Island NDP) * denotes member present


Witnesses:	Chris Acheson (President, Canadian Sablefish Association) Mark Baggio (Canadian Sablefish Association) Leslie Budden (Canadian Sablefish Association) Sean Cox (Canadian Sablefish Association) Tim Joys (Canadian Sablefish Association) Ron MacDonald (Canadian Sablefish Association) Eric Wickham (Canadian Sablefish Association)

C. James (Clerk Assistant and Clerk of Committees): This being the first meeting of the Special Committee on Sustainable Aquaculture for the third session of the 38th Parliament, and there not being a Chairperson, I call for nominations for the Chair.

C. James (Clerk of Committees): Any further nominations? I see no further nominations. I presume you'll accept the nomination. I'll put the question.

R. Austin (Chair): Thank you very much. I would now like to ask for nominations for Deputy Chair.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): Well, it wasn't quite as enthusiastic as yours, but nevertheless.

S. Fraser: I would move that Claire Trevena be nominated for subcommittee and also Robin Austin and also the co-Chair, Ron Cantelon.

R. Austin (Chair): We are here this morning to hear a briefing from members of the Canadian Sablefish Association. I would like to note that today's meeting of the committee is a public meeting which is being recorded and transcribed by Hansard Services. A copy of today's transcript, along with the minutes of this meeting, will be printed and will be made available on the committee's website at www.leg.bc.ca/cmt/aquaculture. As well, an audio recording of today's meeting will be archived on this website.

Before we start, I would ask committee members to introduce themselves, starting on my far right.

R. Austin (Chair): Thank you very much. I would like to ask the witnesses to briefly state their names for the record before beginning the presentation.

R. MacDonald: First of all, I want, as a former parliamentarian, to congratulate those that were just elected. I always knew, when I chaired the House of Commons fisheries committee for two and a half years, that if I was ever successful, it was because I had a Clerk that always anticipated my every move and my every word. I notice that you probably have the same reliance on your Clerk, because they're clairvoyant and

had already presupposed who would be the Chair and the Deputy Chair and the Clerk Assistant and all of those things. So to the Clerk, Craig James, thanks for keeping these guys honest and moving forward.

S. Fraser: The name is pronounced Claire Trevena, not clairvoyant. [Laughter.]

R. MacDonald: Is that right? There we go. I'm from Cape Breton. I'm lucky if I can speak English — right?

First of all, I would like to thank the committee for allowing us to come here again. I think it's our third time. I'm the new guy on the block with the Sablefish Association. I've been here for probably six weeks. It seems already like two years.

These are a really good group of men and women to work for. I say that because it's been ten years since I worked in the fishery. The last time that I had anything to do with the fisheries is when I was a Member of Parliament with Mr. Horning over here a long time ago. I did it with a bit of trepidation, because having dealt with east coast fisheries organizations and having been chair of the Fisheries and Oceans committee when we had to shut down the east coast fishery — the ground fishery — and all of the travesty that happened as a result of that, I was a little reluctant to once again work with fisheries.

I want to tell you what I found out in December when I looked at this organization. It was pretty incredible. This is probably the most sustainable fishery on both coasts of Canada. It has been that way for well over 15, 16, 20 years. It's been fished for a long time. But the history of responsibility of this group of 47 vessel owners is pretty amazing. One of the things that they did in 2002 was go into the department after the science indicated what the TAC should be. They went in and asked for — they actually insisted that there be — a cut of…. How much was it, Eric? Probably…?

R. MacDonald: Forty and 50 percent of the TAC in mid-season, because their concern about the stock was much higher than their concern about their economic return from the fishery for that year. Indeed, in 2006, last year, they went back in at the beginning of the season and said: "We know that you're telling us it should be 4,500 tonnes. We've looked at this. We've talked amongst ourselves. We're concerned about the stock." They voluntarily took a cut down to 3,900 at a cost of several million dollars to what they would otherwise have made.

They've also invested heavily in science and science programs so that they understand the stock. They understand that there is an interaction between the inlets and where they fish. They understand that there is an interaction between where the juveniles are and the migration patterns and that it isn't just a Canadian fishery. This is a fishery between Canada and the U.S., and it's one biomass. So what happens in Alaska or what happens in the lower 49 has an impact on our ability to fish, and what happens here has an ability on the Alaskan and the lower 49 states' ability to have a healthy stock that they can sustainably pursue.

I think one of the other big things that we have to remember, and I'm sure the committee's aware of it, is that we now have an integrated fishery on the west coast of British Columbia. What that means is that we have to be accountable and responsible for what we catch. So when we go out, we have to estimate what's our bycatch of various other species, and we have to work with those other associations and with the federal government — DFO — to make sure that every fish we catch is accounted for, and we are responsible for it.

What that means is that when we look at the health of various fish stocks, we recognize that they are now all integrated. If we do something that damages this stock, it has an impact not just on our fishery, but on the entire ground fishery across coastal B.C. In other words, our $30 million to $40 million industry now has an impact on an industry — the groundfish industry, the landings — of over $300 million. So there's a recognition inside the fisheries on the west coast that this biosystem is all interconnected and linked, and indeed, that the health of one species has an impact on our ability to go out and fish all of the other species to our TACs.

This is a first. This is what we've been doing over the last number of years, and it's starting to work. There have been some hiccups, and there have been some adjustments, but we've recognized what fishermen have recognized for years — that fish don't just hang out with their own. If you're going to go out and catch a sablefish, you're just as likely to catch some rockfish or you're just as likely to catch some halibut.

The new integrated management plans of the fisheries on the west coast are a first, and they're working. One of the reasons that it's been done is because DFO — and, I think, all of the fisheries — have taken the precautionary principle. We recognize that what we do has an impact on other areas, and we have to understand as best we can what those impacts are, and we have to try to mitigate the highest risks. Where the risks are high, we have to take some other actions.

When our association — and it was Eric and, I think, Leslie and maybe Chris — first appeared, we had given a considerable briefing to the committee. I think it was back in July or August. Then the committee allowed us to come back and offer some other information.

In the province of British Columbia the government follows the precautionary principle, and it's the right way to go. The government has just come out with its Speech from the Throne, and it has stated that its number one priority is the environment. We're really glad to hear that, because we make our living in an environment that…. If we do not treat it in a sustainable fashion, if we don't use the precautionary principle, we will not be able to make a living on the ocean.

We're very pleased to see that the government has seen what the public is now saying, and that is that

sustainability issues are at the top of the political agenda. When Al and I were in parliament, that wasn't the case. These issues were talked about, but they were never at the top of the agenda. They're now at the top of the agenda — issues like sustainability, biodiversity, comanagement of resources, issues like making sure that what we do today…. In the absence of good knowledge about outcomes, we probably shouldn't make those decisions.

We need to make sure that the decisions we make do not have irreversible impacts on species. Indeed, in British Columbia — and I used to run the forest sector here when I was the president of COFI — we have strong laws and rules dealing with the environment. Indeed, you can look along coastal B.C., and there are probably millions of hectares of land that we used to think were available, or should be available, for us for coastal logging, commercial logging. But because of some species concerns, they have been taken out of the equation. You know, maybe sometimes the forest industry didn't like it, but it was the right thing to do. It was the right policy decision to make.

The other thing that I note is the endangered species act in B.C., or the Species at Risk Act in the federal legislation, clearly puts a high priority on preservation of species. There is lots of money there to go out and do stock assessments or to do herd assessments, or whatever it is, so that we make better public decisions; that we ensure that biodiversity is at the top of our priority scale; and, indeed, that we do more than talk about it — that we actually have plans put in place.

When I read the submissions that we made in the past — and I certainly concurred with our conclusions on it — it seems to me that there was a stunning lack of science and data dealing with some issues around aquaculture to make an informed decision about going forward. One of the things that was clear…. I'm going to quote here, and I think it was from a DFO aquaculture risk assessment that was tabled with this committee on November 2, 2004. It was done by the Centre for Coastal Health, and it was on page 51.

I think we've given this, so it will be appended. "We were unable to find evidence, apart from anecdotal reports, that there are specific areas of preference for juvenile sablefish on the B.C. coast. R. Kronlund suggested that there are no discrete sablefish nursery areas, rather that varying parts of the inshore areas are used as stock size changes. We cannot, therefore, specify locations where juveniles would be at highest risk for wild-farm interactions."

As a result of that, we have been working with our scientist Sean Cox and his group out at UBC. They presented us with some information only about maybe six weeks ago, which we thought would be valuable to this committee when they're doing their deliberations. Hence, we've asked to come back here today to make this additional submission.

Clearly, I want to state what our recommendations would be. They're consistent with what we've done in the past. We're not opposed to sablefish farming on the face of it. What we do believe, however, is that before any decision is made to allow, or to continue to allow, sablefish farming, we need to ensure that we have done a gap analysis of the science, which we need to know, following the precautionary principle.

Once we do that gap analysis, that we identify a protocol for collecting that data, which is clear from political or industry interference, and once that is done and the data is collected and examined, that no decision can be made to allow sablefish farming because of the inherent risks that could happen to the wild stocks.

I just mentioned the integrated fishery. That's really important. If a decision is made to allow the status quo…. Right now they're licensed. If the decision is made to allow those licences to continue and there's a transference of parasites or disease to the wild stock, you're not just looking at a potentially devastating impact on one stock — sablefish; you're looking at a potentially devastating impact on the entire commercial B.C. ground fishery, which is worth over $350 million.

R. MacDonald: And Alaska as well. Halibut and most of our groundfish don't know where our borders are. They go across borders.

With that being said and done, if it's okay with the committee, I'm going to ask Eric, who has done three years of solid work on this, to just remind the committee of some of the points that we made in our last presentation. Then I'll go over to Sean, and I'll ask Sean to present the data — the reason that we're here today. Then I'm going to ask Chris, who is one of two fishermen at the table, to just talk to you about some of the issues around biodiversity and around sustainability that he sees as a fisherman. Then we'll conclude. Hopefully, that will take no more than half an hour all told, and we're here for questions.

But mostly I want to tell the committee that we're really glad that they're studying this and that they've given us three opportunities to come and participate.

E. Wickham: I'll try to be brief. I saw that when the salmon farmers presented, they went around and talked about how they were just sort of good, grass-roots people. I realize that they've been schooled by one of the biggest PR firms in the world — one of the most successful ones, actually. So what I did was write a book for you guys about it. We'll send the book to you instead. So we won't go through that — about us being good, salt of the earth. You can assume we all are good, salt of the earth, though.

Then I'll back up a bit. We jump ahead, and we assume everybody in the world knows what a sablefish is and what it does and where it goes. It's about the size of a salmon, the shape of a salmon. It lives its adult life out on the continental shelf around 800 to 1,000 metres deep — one of the deepest water fish of all. It's probably spread very, very thinly, from what we find, all the way to Hawaii — down around a thousand fathoms deep. There's the odd one scattered through that area.

So it's the deepest water of all fish. It spends its juvenile years in our inlets. That's what a sablefish is.

What this fishery is…. Ron said it's an old fishery, but it's a new fishery in the sense that it was started 30 years ago by some of us. Everybody was a salmon fisher. Everybody made money. Some of us guys went out in the winter and tried to get another fishery going, because we were a little hard up. The guys that started it are still in our fishery — the same guys. We brought in Japanese technicians to make sure we processed the fish.

When I say "we" — there was no DFO assistance in this. Guys brought in the technicians to make sure we processed the fish the way the Japanese wanted it and went through the thing of building a market in Japan and getting a fishery going. It took several years. I had crews that would have quit me — except they needed the salmon job — because they would have made more on UIC than going sablefish fishing.

We built a fishery. We were a small and tight enough group that we built it into what we call a model fishery. We've been called a model fishery around the world. They based the model of our fishery…. Iceland has copied off us, New Zealand has copied off us, Australia, now the United States. Just about everybody in the world now is going to the model that we created. We created it because we saw that you can't allow DFO Ottawa to run a fishery. We basically went to them and said: "Look. We'll run the fishery. What's the deal?" They said: "Sure. Just give us a bunch of money. Pay the shop." That was the bottom-line deal. We did it in conjunction with DFO locally.

We built a fishery that got quoted by the last fishery minister in parliament as the model fishery we want to base all the Canadian fisheries on. So we built a good fishery.

We're lucky we fish in a way where there's not too much bycatch because of where they are so deep. But we fish in a really clean method with traps. We catch the best-tasting fish in the world. If you doubt that, go down to C Restaurant, which is probably the best in Vancouver, down the end of the street here. It's his specialty, as it's the specialty of Nobu, the best-known chef in the world. It's his specialty in his restaurant in London, Las Vegas and L.A.

It's a unique species that's really nice tasting, really high in omega 3, healthy. Here's something that tastes good and is healthy. It's a winner. We don't have enough of it to sell it to everybody in the world, like salmon. If every Canadian ate Z|n of a pound of sablefish, that would do it. That would take our quota. So we sell it into the high-class restaurants as an elite food. It's very expensive, and it creates a lot of wealth. All of it, just about, goes outside of Canada because the Asians want it so much. It goes to mostly Japan, Hong Kong and that. So we bring in about $30 million of revenue to B.C. every year.

All our licence holders, all our crew — all these people are residents of B.C. Not one licence is owned by a big foreign corporation, so the money comes into B.C. and gets spent in B.C. It's not going to run the B.C. economy. We've got a nice little thing that'll go for, like Hitler said, a thousand years — right? — if we look after it.

When I retired from fishing, the guys hired me to manage the association, and my job was basically that: to look after the fishery. That meant looking after the stock. First thing to do when you look after a fishery is look after the stock. Then you start looking after markets and all the other stuff.

When sablefish farming came on the horizon, we started looking at it. We did things like…. We hired the head of the economics of fisheries in UBC to take a look at the economics of it. He basically told us that there's no net gain. You've got that report. There's no net gain on it economically. You'll see a short net gain for the first few farmers, and then they'll crash the market as it becomes a volume market. Then they'll move to Chile when the competition gets bigger.

We've seen that on salmon before. We developed the technology in Canada on how to farm salmon, and it went worldwide everywhere else. That's the process that the study indicated would probably happen over a period of years. So there's no net gain for B.C. economically. We've seen that.

I personally looked at farming sablefish 20 years ago. I had some oil people that really wanted to put money into fish farming. They wanted to get into a niche other than salmon, and we went and talked to the scientists. We looked at it. We decided, first off, the science wasn't complete on how to do it, and second, the whole thing about doing it in the environment was just too wide open, so we dropped the idea.

Then when I started looking at it four years ago for the association, we found the same thing. We were risking the hell out of the wild stock by doing it, from the information that's coming from the salmon industry. We didn't know that 15, 20 years ago. Now we know it. There are lots and lots of things. So we've taken the position since then….

Our guys have had at least two long, hard meetings where we talked about us investing in sablefish farming — going into it. Both times we have come to the conclusion that yes, we want to do it, but we want to do it only when we find it's safe. We don't want to risk our wild stock to do it. So we're not going to do it the way that salmon farmers want to do it now and the way that government is saying: "Well, let's just go ahead and do it and see what happens."

The Governor of Alaska wrote to our Premier and said: "That's not the way to do it, because 'see what happens' may mean that you've destroyed the stock, that you've done something to destroy it and it's too late to stop it. You've got to do your research first."

That's kind of where we sit. We say that when the research is done and it's very, very clear that there's a method to do it without risking the wild stock, we'll probably get involved. I speculate that for sure it's going to have to be closed containment. You'll hear that closed containment needs a lot of technology to be worked out and that it's new science and all that.

In your last presentation you got this picture of Spain as a closed-containment turbot farm. They take about two years to get them to market — about what it takes for sablefish. They sell for exactly the same price as sablefish wholesale — about five bucks a pound. The economics are there for sablefish; the technology is there for sablefish. You do it on land.

Since this came out, the company in Spain has announced that it's going into a production way, way bigger than this one, in Portugal. I think it was…. I won't quote the numbers, but it was in the high, high tens of millions of dollars. They're doing so well at it that they've built another turbot farm.

I would think that the technology to farm closed containment on land…. It exists; it's there. If they can sell a fish for $5 a pound and make money at it and spend hundreds of millions investing in it, I would think it could be done here too. That's kind of where we sit. That's the evidence to us that, well, we should go.

Then you'll hear from Sean why you shouldn't do it in the wild. There are just too many dangers. You've got a nice little healthy fishery that you can be proud of. The last throne speech a year ago said that we want the best-managed fishery in the world, bar none. You've got it, you know. That's why I want to jump to tell the Premier: "You've got it. We are. They copy fisheries all over the world from us. You've got it, but you're risking destroying it with what you're doing."

That's where I stand. I've been involved in this fishery since it started 30 years ago, and I'd like to see people involved in it for another 300 years. It's never going to create $10 billion or anything, but it can create 30, 40, 50 million bucks a year for B.C. forever.

R. MacDonald: Mr. Chairman, one of our members has just come in. I just want to introduce him: Tim Joys.

C. Acheson: I think you just got off the boat. You just came in from fishing yesterday.

S. Cox: Well, I don't intend to overwhelm you with a lot of scientific information. We've provided a couple of handouts for you. I just want to draw a couple of points from those. As a scientific adviser to the Sablefish Association, one of the things that I try to do is inform the industry where possible risks are and possible ways to manage those kinds of risks.

S. Cox: I'm a fisheries scientist, yes — oceanography, biology and resource management.

In trying to inform the industry about risks, one of the things I try to do is use a set of guidelines that are generally provided in the precautionary approach, in the precautionary principle. The reason we use those is because those are the working guidelines that are used in all sorts of environmental legislation, so we feel pretty good about using those as a place to start. There are two of them that I can see are potential sources of uncertainty here. One of them — and I'll just quote this right from the precautionary approach — is: "We should give priority to maintenance of long-term productive capacity of a resource, not just short-term economic or social needs."

In terms of productive capacity of the sablefish resource, one of the pieces of information I brought is this handout that you hopefully have. On the first page — I'm not going to go over all of this — look down to where it says "Part 1: CPUE – an index of fish abundance." The top left series of plots there is labelled "(1) Trends in CPUE." There are four boxes there. Those boxes show trends in sablefish abundance in four different inlets that range from the northernmost in Portland Inlet to the southernmost in Dean-Burke Channel.

In 1995 the Sablefish Association voluntarily closed these inlets to commercial fishing, so there's no fishing allowed in those inlets. It was a voluntary closure that they instituted themselves. At the same time, even though they don't fish there, there have been ongoing surveys every year. At the cost of several hundred thousand dollars a year, they monitor these populations to see what the status of that resource is. As you can see in those four plots, just about all of them — at least three out of the four — have been growing ever since this closure was put into effect.

C. Acheson: Could I interrupt? One thing that I'd like to point out is that the reason why the Canadian sablefish fishermen closed the inlets was because we believe anecdotally that they were harbouring our juvenile population of the fishery. The inlets were full of fish, and we wanted to remove the commercial impact off of the nursery grounds.

S. Cox: It wasn't known at the time whether that was actually true or not. It was something, as Chris mentioned, that they thought was a nursery ground.

What you see there is that these stocks are growing. They've been growing almost continuously ever since that closure. If we look inside those inlets, those fish range in age from one to 12 years, where the age of sablefish that are caught in the offshore fishery ranges from about four to 80 years. That bit of evidence certainly points to these inlets being an important rearing ground and nursery area for the offshore fishery.

To tie that in with the offshore fishery, if you flip over to the second page, this is the second study that

we've done trying to actually quantify how important those inlets are for the offshore fishery. Since 1994, on average, we've tagged between 8,900 and 20,000 fish in these inlets. The survey goes out and tags fish, and then we record where these fish are actually recovered.

What you see on the right — those maps show for each inlet where those fish go in terms of where they're recaptured, and in what percentages. For example, if you look at the one on the top left, of fish that are tagged and released from Portland Inlet, 70 percent of those fish make it to the offshore fishery and are caught off the Queen Charlotte Islands, and so on down the coast.

Of the fish down in the southern inlets — for example, in the lower right, Dean-Burke Channel — 43 percent make it out to Queen Charlotte Sound and basically spread themselves all over the coast. So we have a situation here where the inlets are the productive capacity of the offshore resource as well as the inlets. Those fish move not only to support the B.C. commercial fishery but also to Alaska. We get a lot of tagged returns from Alaska, a lot from the U.S. In fact, some of them are even caught off California. So these fish are highly migratory when they leave these inlets. That's one of my main points about protecting the productive capacity of the resource.

The second one, which is perhaps a bit more…. It's not more important, but it's a critical thing. The precautionary approach says that we should avoid irreversible changes in the environment. As I mentioned, these fish that live in these inlets range between two and 12 years, so they're spending between two and 12 years in these inlets.

We know — and it's pretty well documented in the scientific literature now — the issues around sea lice at least in the Broughton Archipelago. Juvenile salmon move through net-pen farming areas in a couple of weeks. Pink salmon that migrate out — it just takes them a few weeks to move through that area. They're being infected by sea lice and probably dying before they actually make it to the offshore areas where they spread out in the open ocean.

Sablefish not only are resident in inlets, but when they actually leave the inlets, they range in size from 40 centimetres to 60 centimetres. So these are fairly large, robust fish. One of the risks that I see is that if these fish are infected with certain viruses and diseases, the chances are they are going to survive to make it to the offshore. As you can see from where these fish go, they're going to distribute themselves throughout the entire coast of B.C., Alaska and all the way down to California. That's a potentially very large risk of introducing viruses and diseases to places where they don't belong.

One of the reasons — and this, again, is in the scientific literature — is that the farm creates a place where you can actually amplify sea lice presence, because sea lice are common in wild fish. So one of the other issues — in salmon farming, anyway — is the infectious hematopoietic necrosis virus, IHN, that's common in wild fish. But wild fish have survived for tens of thousands of years with that virus. What happens when you farm them in close proximity to each other is that you actually amplify the prevalence of that disease.

We don't know what diseases sablefish have that are like that. You know, there may be low-level viruses and things that are fine in a natural population. But when you confine them, what diseases are going to be amplified? We don't know. We didn't expect that sea lice problem. That came out of nowhere. So we have no idea what the issue will be with sablefish.

I do want to emphasize the fact that if you were to amplify these diseases in a resident sablefish population in inlets that eventually move to the offshore…. Can you just imagine what could possibly happen to the entire Pacific coast sablefish stocks? It's a potentially very large issue.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): I just want to ask: are you referring to the effect that potentially might happen of farming sablefish, or are you talking about…?

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): Okay, because I'm getting confused here. I thought you were talking about the effects that salmon farming would have on sablefish.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): All right. Good. Thank you. I just want to know what we're talking about.

S. Cox: The other main issue that I have, having to do with irreversible changes, is that…. I use salmon as an example because that's the only thing we have experience with in fish farming — just trying to draw a parallel to what could possibly happen with sablefish.

Farms are generally nearshore. They're done nearshore, and they're close to the surface. Sablefish, as Eric mentioned, are a deep water species. They live thousands of feet below the surface. One of the things you would do in farming them is bring a deep-water fish to the surface, move them nearshore and confine them. The potential to introduce diseases that are not common in nearshore ecosystems…. We have no idea what that would do.

This is an example. We're now seeing diseases that used to be known only in salmon, like IHN, showing up in herring because they've now jumped species that way.

In a way, bringing sablefish to nearshore ecosystems where they don't belong is like an exotic species. It's like bringing in a whole new species to an area where they really don't belong. Again, confining them in small places runs the risk of amplifying these effects.

One last point having to do with genetic impacts. I'm not a geneticist, but I have followed the literature through my involvement in salmon and steelhead fisheries science. In steelhead, we've had a lot of cases where steelhead populations have declined for various reasons. One of the initial responses to that is to start

stocking hatchery steelhead to try to get these populations to recover. The scientific literature on the introduction of hatchery fish to recover wild stocks has been nothing but negative.

There's been an enormous amount of studies looking at the increasing population extinction risk as you introduce more and more hatchery fish. The chances of having fish escape from farms and interact with wild sablefish moving throughout the coast…. It just presents an enormous risk, in my opinion.

C. Acheson: I'd like to comment a bit about that. One thing is that we've got a lot of information from Scotland. One of the things that happened in Scotland was that they were losing their Atlantic salmon runs out of their river. They have quite a tourist industry on it. They didn't realize that their fish were being liced out.

What they were doing was buying fish from the farms, moving them into the creeks and letting them go to stock the fish. Then they could keep their tourist trade up, and the sport fishermen were catching the fish. What happened was that those fish interbred with the wild stock. It's put them all on a vortex of extinction because when the farm fish interbreed with the wild-stock fish, they lose their ability to survive and go through their natural life cycle at sea. They've got curves for this, and at some point they reach a vortex of extinction.

This is the problem that Scotland is facing in pretty much all their tourist rivers. They're actually trying to switch from salmon fishing — fly-fishing, which is quite a tradition in Scotland — to bicycling now.

S. Cox: The point Chris just made is actually documented in a Proceedings of the Royal Society of London research article, which is one of the top scientific journals in the field. It's called "Fitness reduction and potential extinction of wild populations of Atlantic salmon as a result of interactions with escaped farm salmon."

R. MacDonald: Mr. Chairman, perhaps we can ask Chris Acheson to make some comments as well.

C. Acheson: I'm a fisherman. I've lived on this coast all my life. My granddad never lived out here, though. I used to have a granddad…. He wasn't my granddad, but he'd take me out fishing with the kids….

C. Acheson: I always thought he was my granddad, but he wasn't. Anyway, ever since I was knee-high to nowhere, we were out on the water in the gulf and catching fish. When I was young, the gulf was really a lively place. There were always blueback. They were catching juvenile salmon. It was a great place to live.

Anyway, I became a commercial fisherman and then went and got involved in the Sablefish Association with the early sablefish fishermen. One of our first advisers, Ray Hilborn, would help us do the stock assessments.

Then aquaculture came on the scene. We were always kind of a little bit leery of it. When I talked to Ray about it one time, he said: "You don't have to be a genius to understand this. You're never going to have two populations living in the same pond."

You'll never have a population that's doctored by man — incubated, vaccinated, fed high-protein foods and antibiotics against disease…. You'll never have that population coexist with a population that doesn't get any of that type of attention. It won't be inoculated against disease. It'll just be on its own. It's going to catch the cold and perish — the wild fish. As long as you keep doctoring your penned stock, amplifying diseases that become more drug-resistant and tougher and passing those diseases out into the wild stock, you're going to keep depleting the wild stock over time, and you'll lose them.

There is just no way of stopping that risk or the inevitable end of losing your wild stock. In my mind, you've got to remove this open-cage farming out of the water. You've got to put an end to it. It should be up on land where you can control it.

Agriculture has caused quite a bit of irreversible damage on land. Most farm species have passed off disease into the wild animals. Sheep passed off lungworm into bighorn sheep. Irreversible. Cattle passed off tuberculosis into the buffalo. Irreversible. They're actually now talking about killing the last wild buffalo herd in British Columbia and replacing them with supplements that they've moved up into the Yukon to get rid of the tuberculosis. It's actually the cattlemen that want this done, because the tuberculosis is getting back into the cattle.

A great example would be elk and deer farming. We haven't allowed it in British Columbia because in British Columbia it's illegal to farm indigenous species. You're not allowed to farm mule deer. You're not allowed to farm elk or blacktail deer. They're protected against farming.

They didn't do that back east. Immediately, you got chronic wasting disease into the deer and elk. Now the chronic wasting disease has moved out into the wild population. There's no way to control it, so the farm industry is shut down. They're having to exterminate their animals. But you're never going to remove the chronic wasting disease from the population, meaning that you're never going to be able to start back up on the deer and the elk again.

So because you didn't take the proper approach at the start of the industry, you've ruined the potential for another industry. This is where the precautionary principle is supposed to protect us. We're supposed to move forward and protect our wild species from these types of risks. It's just a matter of time until this happens in the sablefish industry if you allow open-cage farming. There will be a disease.

They're having trouble with a disease in Norway in the Atlantic cod farming. Have you been advised of the diseases coming out of the Atlantic cod? We were at a provincial seminar on sablefish, and there were some

presentations done on some of the diseases that are coming out. They're the same thing. They're stress-related viruses that come from dense populations. They are highly contagious and will totally inflict the wild fish.

The problem about allowing something to get started…. If you allow open-cage sablefish farming to get started, then there's no incentive for closed containment. British Columbia is going to have to move toward closed containment or on-land farming.

My generation and my kids' generation are putting the environment first. We want to see things done properly. We want sustainability, and we don't want to trade off environmental issues for short-term gain anymore. I think it's clearly a political movement with people today.

Global warming is a huge issue that people don't even know how to deal with, but it's the number-one political issue right now. It's environmental again. We should protect our environment in the future from short-term gains.

I did a health study last year. We went out and started collecting samples, because one of the things that was never done for salmon farming was that nobody went in and looked at the health of the fish before they started farming. So now when Alexandra Morton complains that the fish are full of lice, it's easy to say: "Well, we don't know. Maybe they were full of lice before too." You can just deny the information. So we went out and started collecting samples and tried to get some lice counts and some diseases and stuff off of the fish.

We started up north. There are lots of fish up north. The inlets are full of fish. There are mammals. There are lots of codfish and different types of sharks. It's just full of fish. Samples were easy to catch, and it went really smoothly until we got into the Broughton Archipelago. Then right from the top of Vancouver Island down to the bottom of Jervis Inlet, we couldn't get our samples anymore. There are no fish left in the gulf. You guys have got to open your eyes, because there are no fish in the gulf.

We finally got into Jervis Inlet, where I started fishing 35 years ago — sablefish fishing. There are no sablefish left there. We couldn't get our 50-fish sample. It took us two days to catch 50 fish in that inlet, whereas there are records of people commercially fishing there for years. There are no rockfish left. There are no salmon. It's changed.

At the time we were in Jervis Inlet there was a huge algae bloom going on, which was coming right out of the farms. It has changed. It has changed the environment of the lower gulf here and Johnstone Strait. All you need to do is get away from here and into any of the inlets up north, and you'll see them come right back to life. It may be anecdotal, but something has gone on in the lower gulf here and the inside inlets on Vancouver Island that has changed the ecology.

The lack of fish is incredible. We have a huge number of inlet rivers that should all be supporting strong chum salmon runs and coho runs, and all of that fish is gone. There is nobody answering those questions. It seems obvious that as soon as you get around the farms, all the wild fish populations drop off like crazy. As soon as you get away from them, everything gets back to normal. These are anecdotal observations, but sometimes you don't have to be a genius or a scientist or an engineer to know that something is not right.

You can have all the engineers in the world build a bridge, but if it falls down, that bridge is no good. Right now you've got a huge number of PhDs, scientists, all saying that the way to protect the future world food supply is by farming it, but they're not right when it comes to the ocean.

The ocean is too liquid. Everything in the ocean is migratory, and you can't pen it all up and stop it. You can't stop that movement. It's like trying to stop a little piece of a clock from working. You're going to stop the whole clock.

We've got to get our heads wrapped around this, and we've got to manage the ocean as an ecosystem and stop putting these big interfering blocks in.

E. Wickham: Can I butt in for a second? I just want to clarify who Ray Hilborn is. Ray Hilborn is a world-class fishery scientist, a Canadian who's a professor at the University of Washington and who worked for us for several years on it, because we have hired scientists to do stock assessment stuff for us.

Then I want to reiterate the key thing that Chris said. No indigenous species is allowed to be farmed in British Columbia on land for reasons of protecting the wild resource. Why the hell would we allow it in the ocean if we've never allowed it on land? This proved to be correct, on land, to do this, from the example where they did allow it on land in other provinces and it has devastated wild stocks.

C. Acheson: I'm really concerned. I mean, I believe that we could grow fish on land and produce a product that everybody would be proud to buy and take home and eat. Having this big controversy about whether it's wild or farmed doesn't help us in selling our fish. People are confused. It's hurting everybody. But British Columbia will move forward into an environmentally correct form of fish farming.

To try to prolong open-cage farming under the confidence that the scientists are going to mitigate the problems of interaction is wrong. It won't work. You'll never mitigate the problems of interaction.

Right now you don't even have a pen that can stop a baby sablefish from getting inside a salmon pen. What's happening right now is that the salmon farms are supplying food into the water. The baby sablefish go and swim into the pens when they're small enough to swim through the web, and then they stay in there. They get fat, and then they can't get out, and they stay in there for their whole lives.

Then the farm is supposed to return them to the water when they grade their fish. Whether that happens or not is questionable. It probably shouldn't.

That's probably the last sablefish that should be thrown back into the water — one that has been in a farm for a year or 18 months.

It's a slow-growing fish. It's probably not going to be really highly suitable for farming. It's the risk of what you're going to do to the west coast fishing industry.…

R. MacDonald: Mr. Chairman, I know we're watching our clock here, but Tim Joys is here, and he wants to make some comments. Then maybe I could just wrap up.

T. Joys: I'll be very brief. Basically, some of my history as a fisherman…. I was born in North Vancouver, joined the navy and ended up on the east coast, so I happened to be on the east coast to watch some of the collapse of the fishing stocks over there. I've sort of come to the conclusion in my life that there are low-impact types of fisheries in aquaculture and there are high-impact fisheries in aquaculture.

I pride myself in being in a low-impact type of fishery. I use traps. I'm not dragging all over the bottom tearing up coral. I'm not doing this. I'd like to see more or less the same kind of analogy used in the aquaculture section.

When fish farming first started to develop in B.C., I was all for it. I thought: oh, this is great; this sounds really good. But because I was in the diving industry, I happen to have dived underneath fish farms, both on the Atlantic coast and on this coast, and there is definitely an environmental impact. I'd just like to be able to see them get into a low-impact type of thing. If this means putting it on land or closed containment, then I'd feel a lot more comfortable.

R. MacDonald: Well, Mr. Chairman, if I could kind of conclude. I think what you've heard today is that we're blessed on the west coast, and that we've got one of the best and most sustainable fisheries anywhere. It's become a model on how we manage the sablefish fishery not just in Canada but around the world.

We've also heard today that the sablefish fishery doesn't sit on its own. If something is done and has an impact on the sablefish fishery, it will have an impact on the entire ground fishery in B.C. Indeed, it goes across borders. It goes into Alaska; it goes down to the lower 49. We've had letters of concern from no less than the House of Commons Committee on Fisheries and Oceans — of which I was proud to have served as chairman at one point in time — cautioning this committee on moving forward and allowing for the farming of sablefish.

Now, why did they say that? They said that because the science is not there that would allow, at this point in time, for that decision to be made and still adhere to the precautionary principle. We've had the former Governor of Alaska make it very clear. They're concerned about sustainability. They understand that this biomass does not just belong to Canada. It's an international biomass. Some of the guys that are born up there, we catch down here. Some of the guys that are in the inlets down there, they catch up there.

There's an international treaty about how we manage these things. There is a law of the sea. There is a treaty at the U.N. on highly migratory transboundary stocks. This committee needs to be aware of and needs to understand that the decisions they make can have an impact because those treaties — which are nation to nation through the United Nations — put out a protocol about these types of decisions that are made in one jurisdiction and that impact another country's ability to have a sustainable fishery.

We've also heard that this province subscribes to the precautionary principle. We've heard recently, in the last couple of days, that this province has adopted a green agenda. I'm very pleased that they've done that, in practice.

We have heard today that there's some difference in treatment. I wasn't aware of this until yesterday, and I think it's pretty compelling. You know, as somebody that sat on the other side of this table for a long time, a lot of times you get a lot of information. It's science, and it's this guy's interpretation and that guy's….

Sometimes there's just something that falls out, which sort of ties it all together. For me — yesterday, on this issue — it's what Chris just said. What Chris said is that in the province of British Columbia for a long period of time, we have not allowed for the farming of wild land species. We've done it, not because there's been a tremendous amount of science. We've been doing this for a long time because even before the science, there was high anecdotal information that said that if you do that, you can have unwanted consequences that can devastate a wild stock.

To go back to what our scientist Sean Cox said, and the precautionary principle. What it says is that you should not do anything that is irrevocable. We've seen that it's happened to land animals…. So the question that I would ask, as a former politician or a politician in recovery, is…. I think you've got the right policy on the land. Why would you not adopt the same policy when you're dealing with marine species? I don't quite understand it. You know, back home, down east, we would say: if it's sauce for the goose, it's sauce for the gander. If it's the right thing to do for indigenous, wild land species, then — damn it — I think it's the right thing to do for indigenous, wild marine species.

So you've got a choice here. You've got to make some recommendations, and governments will do something. I understand the pressures that are on government and the committee. I understand salmon farming. We started it down east with Atlantic salmon, and somebody out here said that we could do it out west. Nobody at the time — and I can remember back then because we did a study as the House of Commons committee on aquaculture — quite understood all of the risks involved. We now know all of the risks involved.

So a decision can be made here today to just say: "Status quo. We can't comment." That decision to not

make a decision can be a decision that could lead to the 23rd aquatic groundfish species in the waters of B.C. potentially being listed, at some point in time, on the SARA list. We have 22 species of groundfish that are now listed and being examined under the Species at Risk Act, through COSEWIC federally.

A decision to not make a decision today could add one more species, the species that is the model for the world — the most sustainable fishery and stock on both coasts of Canada.

What we have asked you to do today is look at this. We have said that as an industry we are not carte blanche against farming. We have said that we follow the precautionary principle. We're glad that there is a green agenda in British Columbia.

We have said that until the science allows us to understand what decisions we can make to mitigate risks to the wild stocks, you cannot allow for the licensing of these fish farms for sablefish. So the recommendation we make today is to establish a peer review group of independent science, and they could do a gap analysis.

The first thing is: what is the information that is missing for us to be able to make a reasoned decision? Second is to establish a protocol and to collect that data in a way that does not in any way, to Eric's point, damage or have the potential to damage irrevocably the wild stocks. Third, until that information is available, we are asking today very clearly for this committee to make a recommendation to suspend any renewal of licences for these fish farms for sablefish and not to issue any new licences until those protocols are established, until the data comes in and until a decision can be made respecting the precautionary principle.

R. Austin (Chair): Thank you, Ron. I am now going to open the floor for members to ask questions.

S. Fraser: Something Chris said. You're talking about how you don't have to be a genius. I've known geniuses that you have to show how to work the chip dip. You don't always have the common sense there.

I appreciate the expertise we get from science and the rest of you here, but the commercial fishermen are out there all the time. I think that is overlooked often by politicians and by decision-makers, so I really appreciate having you all here giving us that information.

Ron, you started out by saying that in a marine environment it's very hard to separate out species. Everyone has alluded to that. It's a fluid environment, which makes a lot more potential for interaction, which we know happens. We've heard that from prawn fishermen — again, anecdotal.

Nonetheless, they're claiming that they have seen a loss or a reduction in their fishery. They have equated it anecdotally with the potential use of SLICE. Larval sea lice and prawns are very similar biological critters. I don't know if we have seen any science on that, but we've heard that, and I don't think it can be ignored.

S. Fraser: Ron touched on this earlier. I understand your position and the recommendations for sable farming, but a lot of the discussion has been around salmon farms and the potential impact. You've all alluded that it's hard to separate these things out.

Is that an issue too? It was part of the presentations here, but is it part of your recommendations? Are you making any comment on salmon farming in the recommendations? I'm confused, as I guess maybe Ron is.

E. Wickham: Nobody had been doing any research on sablefish, so we did. I mentioned an economic study. We also hired LGL, an environmental firm, to do research on all the stuff about sablefish parasites and diseases.

It turns out that sablefish in the wild…. There are 20 different parasites and diseases they can have. A few of those were transferable to other fish, including salmon. So that kind of answers the question. We're concerned.

There are talks of two new salmon farm applications on the central coast. That's the area Chris is talking about that is rich with fish. Those two salmon farms have also said that they want to farm sablefish.

We are adamantly against them farming sablefish. Farming salmon, in my mind, is also a risk. It's also a risk, because there are transfers. We don't know what goes on. We know there are no sablefish left where they farm salmon — no wild ones. Jervis Inlet is the only long-operating sablefish farm in British Columbia. It's been there ten or 12 years. It's a very small mom-and-pop operation. But there are no sablefish left in Jervis. There used to be a fairly successful wild fishery.

Yeah, we're very concerned about salmon farming. We're concerned about it too. The research has got to be done. It's got to be done. I'll let it go at that.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): If I may interrupt here, we've got three people on the speakers list, and we're 15 minutes over. If you could keep your preamble short and your questions short, we do want to get to the next group. I don't want to cut off debate, but I'm cutting off debate.

C. Acheson: I'd like to comment on that question. I think our concern is very much for the whole ecosystem. If we're getting transfer of disease into the herring and the herring populations are depleting, we're going to lose the bottom end of the food chain that our higher predator fish need. If that's a consequence of salmon farming, then it's having a consequence on all our fisheries.

E. Wickham: Briefly, I fished herring when the quota was 300,000 tonnes, almost 40-some years ago. That was overfishing. The scientists told us when we crashed it that we should have stayed at no higher than 180,000 tonnes. We crashed it, and it came back, so we've stayed at around 180,000 tonnes.

The stock of the herring catch this year will be less than 10,000 tonnes. Nobody knows why. I'm not blaming it on salmon. I don't know why. But yeah, there's some stuff going on that's pretty severe out there that nobody's talking about.

G. Coons: Very quickly — I realize the time. Throughout your presentation you really accent the precautionary principle. Do you believe that DFO, in their aquaculture division, is applying the precautionary principle as far as environmental assessments in British Columbia?

S. Cox: They are. There have been several policy documents that are trying to make the precautionary approach the active way to manage aquaculture. They're trying to develop guidelines for siting farms and for moving farms — how to measure the impacts. They're particularly interested in the benthic communities, the sea floor — what happens on the sea floor with invertebrates and those sorts of things.

They're also trying to look at…. They call them near-field and far-field effects. This is one of the things that the precautionary approach would tell you to do: not just to focus on what you can observe directly and easily but also to think about moving things long distances. Far-field effects are chemicals, elements, pollutants that are more buoyant than fish food and fish feces, which sink to the bottom. There are other things that drift on ocean currents and things like that.

It's a terribly underfunded thing, especially on the west coast, but they are trying to move that way. There have been several fairly large meetings within the last few months, actually, trying to develop these kinds of guidelines.

G. Coons: But as far as our current aquaculture situation, do you believe that this should have been done prior to allowing sites?

C. Trevena: A couple of questions. One is: sablefish is a deep-water species, so even if you were looking at farming sablefish, would you not have to have it in extremely deep water to be farming it?

E. Wickham: Well, it would make sense, because like Sean said before, they don't know. The fish farmers say: "No, no. We could farm at the surface. It's fine." But they are running into problems. They've got a high level of fish being blinded. Sablefish aren't used to the light, for one thing. They're running into problems. It would make sense to me, but they're saying no.

What they're doing is what Sean said. You're introducing a foreign species into the surface then, and it may damage something else. You really don't know what you're doing. You don't know.

R. MacDonald: I think that's one of the things, when we talk about: does the government or does a regulatory body have the scientific information required to make a decision to move forward? I would tell you that in the stuff that I see, it's not there. We don't know. So there are more questions than answers here. If there are more questions than answers, that tells me that you don't make a decision to allow.

C. Trevena: And a separate question. You showed the pictures of Stolt Sea Farm's turbot farms in Spain and Portugal, and we used to go to war over turbot.

R. MacDonald: Yes, we did. I was right in the middle of that. Greenland halibut.

C. Trevena: I was working as a reporter at the time, so I remember it very clearly.

You quote about on land as being a possible way of doing aquaculture, but sablefish is obviously a high-end fish, and you're going to get a lot higher returns for farming sablefish.

This might be an unfair question for you: do you think that could work equally well for the salmon? I mean, for the salmon you're getting $1.50 a pound, and for sablefish you're getting five bucks a pound.

R. MacDonald: I don't know, because we don't know what the quality of the fish would be. There's not enough research on it, I guess. We don't know if it's going to be the same flavour or the same texture. Typically, we look at the salmon. They kind of look a little different than wild Atlantic salmon, and because of closed containment and because they're fed high protein, they are basically a different-fleshed fish. They don't necessarily taste the same, so we don't know on that.

I think that before we get into sort of the economics…. I don't know what the economics might be on the plus side. What I do know about is the economics on the downside if we infect the species with a disease, with an ailment, with a parasite that could catastrophically collapse the species.

Our scientists talked about how the penned environment sort of amplifies disease and parasitic inflictions and all that. Integrated fisheries amplify the economic impact on British Columbia and Canada if a commercial stock collapses. If our stock is infected because of a decision that's made on penned sablefish and a disease…. If it becomes resistant to antibiotics and it hits the wild stock and we have a significant decline of that stock, it will affect every other ground fishery.

The integrated fisheries policy says that if we're out fishing sablefish…. We know now that it is the policy of government to protect certain species of rockfish, so our bycatch of rockfish that's allowed is very small.

If we exhaust the bycatch or the catch available and we still have 50 percent of our quota to catch, our fishery shuts down. Anything that might endanger that whole complicated integrated fisheries doesn't just have an impact on our values; it has an impact on values of the entire ground fishery. So we know what could happen on the downside. We don't know the upside.

A. Horning: Just a quick question here to do with sablefish farming. Are you doing any experimental on that now, or do you have anything going to see if it's going to work? If so, where? And if not, how come?

E. Wickham: The answer to that…. Like I said, our members looked at it two or three times, and we decided there were too many unanswered questions. It was too dangerous, and the experiment — we didn't have the funding to do the kind of level….

We're looking after our wild fishery. Our guys, 48 guys, kick up $2 million cash every year to look after our wild fishery. We hire the science. We give DFO a whole bunch of money for enforcement. We look after our stock. We didn't have the bucks to go….

You can see the questions that haven't been answered are going to take a few years and a lot of time and a lot of money. The funding that's gone for aquaculture has not come to us. We had talked to government about it. It's gone to the salmon-farming industry. That's where all the government funding goes.

I believe government should make sure it's safe before it allows anybody to do it, including us. We're just not big enough and strong enough to go ahead and research everything that has to be done on this. In fact, the research should be done before anything happens in the ocean.

While I've got the mike, can I make a quick comment about your question about economics? I've been a fisherman since I was eight years old, until I was 55, so those are my credentials for economics. I don't believe the salmon-farming industry will survive in British Columbia unless it goes on land because of market reasons — period. They can't compete against Chile for a cheap product for mass consumption, but they can sell an elite product into the American market that's environmentally sound. That's my belief.

S. Cox: Can I add to that? The type of experiments that you would need to do…. You could do some very small closed-containment experiments to see if disease is transferred between farmed and wild fish, but when you get into an open environmental system, it takes years and years and years to actually see, sometimes, an effect. And sometimes when that effect occurs, it's too late.

The point I was trying to make about salmon farming is that they could have done a ten-year-long experiment on farmed-salmon interactions with wild salmon, but they wouldn't have come across the sea lice outbreaks that they've had in the Broughton right now. Some things you just don't learn from an experiment. You only find out when you've actually had a system in place for dozens of years.

C. Acheson: I'd like to comment too. There are two hatcheries now that advertise the ability to produce millions of sablefish smolts for farm grow-out in British Columbia. By not dealing with the issue immediately and if you allow open-cage farming to start up, it'll create an unfair advantage for people that want to move more environmentally enclosed containment systems on land.

You'll never have the two operating together. You can't have open-cage and closed containment operating. It'll be an unfair economic advantage. If you just have closed containment, then that'll be the price of the fish and that'll be their market. The world needs more fish to eat, and they will have markets to sell their fish. But it needs to be done properly from the start.

D. Jarvis: Very quickly, I'm going to ask a couple of questions. I noticed in your report here the comparisons between northern, central and southern sites. You say there's no difference in the pathogen of sablefish in the southern compared to the northern. It's here. "Sites with and without fish farms — no difference in the pathogen levels" from the northern and the central. Do you not think that the loss of sablefish in that area, then, is ostensibly from other predation? I'm a civilian fisher out there every summer with the grandchildren, and all I see is seals. They're eating cod. They're probably eating sablefish too. They're scraping the ground. Every rock has got five or ten seals on it in the south.

S. Cox: You're able to fish ling cod now in some places in Georgia Strait — right?

D. Jarvis: They're not around. They get eaten by the salmon. I'll give you an example. I had one on last year, a great big one, and I had 50 seals within sight, all diving off of rocks and swimming around after it.

S. Cox: I agree that there are more seals around. What I'm trying to say is that there was a fairly detailed scientific assessment of ling cod that showed that seals were not the problem in the ling cod population status right now, which is low. It happened a long time ago. There are a lot of seals now, but seals are not the problem there.

For sablefish, I think it's even more clear that seals are not the problem, because seals don't go several thousand feet to the bottom of these inlets. They may feed on juveniles while they're at the surface in the first year. But it's probably not the seals.

In terms of having no difference in parasite levels between the north and south inlets, there could be many reasons for that. As a scientist, when you see a result like that, you don't just say: "Oh well, there's no effect." Again, if we go to the precautionary approach, there are certain things you do to make sure that you're not claiming no effect in the wrong case.

It could be, for example, that fish which get a disease die. They won't be caught; they won't be sampled. All you're actually sampling are healthy fish. That's one of the issues. What we did in the study that you have there was a first try at actually going and measuring these things. That's one of the issues we have identified is going to be a problem. How do you catch a sick fish? It's a very basic problem in measurement that we try to deal with.

D. Jarvis: The last…. It's not a question. It's a statement, more or less. If we get rid of farming, my gut feeling is that with the onshore containment of any fish farm, we will lose that market for British Columbia completely. Our market for fish farms is not British Columbia. It is the United States and other sources that are offshore. Why would they want to put a fish farm up at the top end of Vancouver Island when they could bring it down closer to…?

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): Mr. Chair, we're late. My frustration is that we're going way off topic here from the sablefish. Mr. MacDonald, as a former politician, you speak quite well but sometimes at length. I'm wondering if we can't just carry on.

R. Austin (Chair): We only have one more person to ask a question, anyway, so….

R. MacDonald: Very quickly. I think, Dan, there are two issues here. One of the issues is the economics. I'm not sure of the mandate of the committee, but if you're looking at socioeconomic and environmental, the precautionary principle tells you that the environmental is the trump card. That's what it tells you.

The economic questions around the fishery are real, and they're ones that need to be examined. If you say that in order to maintain the economic impact of a fishery we have got to things that do irreparable environmental harm, then you've got to say that the economic value cannot trump the environmental requirement.

G. Robertson: Thanks very much for your presentation, and I'll be coming here. A question about the current state of the sablefish aquaculture industry. I'm just curious if the association is aware of current expansion plans — has voiced your concerns related to that — and if you have knowledge of what's going on, which is work that you recommend the committee to pursue.

R. MacDonald: What we're recommending to the committee is that in the absence of science that would allow you to proceed…. We're asking two things.

All you have to do is apply. If you've got a salmon-farming licence, you just apply. You check off a couple of boxes, and you can get an authorization to farm sablefish. We understand there are two farms that are currently farming it, but the other 40-some licences tomorrow could start it. I'm going to tell you that we're pretty nervous about this.

In the absence of science that would tell you that you should move forward, we're asking two things: one is that the current licences that are there not be renewed and that there be a suspension on any further licensing until the science can do a gap analysis — that the science be done, and then make a decision.

You've got a bit of an issue there, Gregor, and I understand that you've got two operators that are currently out there that have invested dollars. What I would suggest to you…. You know, it's the old adage. There was a commercial on TV. You pay me now, or you pay me later. If this turns out to be a disaster in ten years time, you're not only going to lose the value of the wild fishery; you're going to have to do something with all those people that have invested in those other 40 licences.

I think that a suspension is required right now, and everybody should step back and allow the science and encourage the science and even, if necessary, find a way to fund the science to get this done so that we can make better environmental and economic decisions.

E. Wickham: I want to add to that. The two operators there are very small operators. It would make sense to government if the government compensated those two guys and took them out. It wouldn't be a significant amount of money, and it would be a fair process, I think.

G. Robertson: Is the association aware of other salmon farms that are on the verge or…?

C. Acheson: Yes. I believe that one of the major farms is doing a study in Kyuquot Sound. We don't have exact numbers, but I think they've been moving about 30,000 fish a year out to that farmsite, so they must have quite a substantial number of fish out there now.

G. Robertson: That's one of the two. But as far as you know right now, there are only two that have sablefish in the aquaculture industry.

C. Acheson: And we're allowing export down to the United States, but they're grown on land, I believe.

It's sort of an industry that's poised to explode, and now is the time to deal with it. I think that by using the closed-containment examples, they would then produce a product that's new to the world and will be environmentally responsible and recover the environmental costs of just exactly what it costs to grow the fish.

The public shouldn't be funding the farms by the usage of the environment. It's a public…. We're supposed to be taking a stewardship over the environment, and if allowing the open-caged farms is degrading the environment, that's irresponsible.

E. Wickham: Can I add to that? If you look at a vision of the future where we have closed-containment sablefish farming on land in British Columbia in a big way, like the turbot farming in Spain and the massive ones they're just building now in Portugal…. If we had that, plus the wild fishery we've got now that's on every one of the environmental websites as one of the most sustainable fisheries in the world…. Even Suzuki has got a special couple of paragraphs about it. The Monterey Aquarium puts us down as one of the best.

If we had those two things in British Columbia, boy, we could sell sablefish as one of the cleanest-, nicest-, healthiest-tasting products in the world. We could work together. We could have…

We could have a nice, big, healthy interest. We could work with the sablefish farmers and the wild guys to be able to sell the same product in a big way. That's where we'd go.

The other alternative. What you're going to have is what you have in salmon farming right now — two sides fighting each other, destroying each other's market because of the fight, destroying each other's environment. The salmon farmers are saying that we have to hire people out of Mexico now — try to get people out of Mexico — because they can't afford to pay Canadians. That's in the latest Northern Aquaculture magazine. That's what they're doing.

Tell me what the economic benefit of salmon farming is if it's owned by big foreign companies? There is no profit made, they always tell us, so I assume they're not paying any B.C. taxes, and we're not creating any B.C. jobs. Nobody in B.C. wants to work on them, so we're going to hire people out of Mexico. That's one scenario if we continue where we're going.

There is a scallop operation in British Columbia that has raised a whole bunch of money on the Nevada exchange to farm sablefish in massive numbers. I'm talking three or four million juveniles, more than our wild stock. If you leave the situation where it is, there are 48 operations that have got licences to do it. You've got a guy that has got a bunch of promotion money, and he says he's going to do it. It's a very, very dangerous situation that you can nip in the bud right now.

R. Austin (Chair): On behalf of the committee, I'd like to thank all of you for coming and making your presentation today.

C. Acheson: On behalf of the Canadian Sablefish Association, I thank you for hearing us again.

R. Austin (Chair): I'd like a motion to move in camera before we get a presentation from MMK. Thank you very much.

R. Austin (Chair): I'd just like to remind members about the briefing on Monday. It's in the Douglas Fir Committee Room at the Leg. At 10 a.m. we're going to have briefings with the Ministry of Agriculture and Lands and DFO with regard to geoducks. We're also going to be hearing witnesses from the Underwater Harvesters Association, again on geoducks, and taking care of any other business that day.

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Committee Staff:	Brant Felker (Committee Research Analyst)

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS (Hansard)

SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON SUSTAINABLE AQUACULTURE

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON
SUSTAINABLE AQUACULTURE