Sustainable Aquaculture — Issue No. 36 — Friday, March 2, 2007 (HTML)

2007 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

Presentations		1077
	S. Nakai
	T. DeJager
	B. Pennell
	D. Tillapaugh
	P. Barnes

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:

Dr. Penny Barnes (Centre for Shellfish Research, Malaspina University College)
Dr. Tim DeJager (British Columbia Aquaculture Research and Development Committee)
Sam Nakai (British Columbia Aquaculture Research and Development Committee)
Dr. Bill Pennell (British Columbia Aquaculture Research and Development Committee)
Don Tillapaugh (Centre for Shellfish Research, Malaspina University College)

R. Austin (Chair): Good morning. My name is Robin Austin, and I'm Chair of the Special Committee on Sustainable Aquaculture. We are here in Nanaimo this morning to hear briefings from members of the British Columbia Aquaculture Research and Development Committee as well as a presentation on new research coming out of Malaspina University College's Centre for Shellfish Research.

I would like to thank the BCARDC for their patience in being able to come back and make a presentation. We did, of course, leave you hanging in Vancouver, and I apologize again for that, so I thank you for your diligence and your patience.

I'd like to note that today's meeting of the committee is a public meeting, which will be 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 committees website at www.leg.bc.ca/cmt/aquaculture. As well, an audio recording of today's meeting will be archived on this website.

I want to note that we are missing a couple of members today, but they will have an opportunity to read the transcripts at their leisure and make sure that they are filled in with what you present today.

Before we start, I'd just like to ask each committee member to introduce themselves, starting on my far right.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): Ron Cantelon, MLA for Nanaimo-Parksville. Welcome to Nanaimo.

S. Fraser: Scott Fraser, MLA for Alberni-Qualicum. Thanks for coming again. Good to see you again too.

R. Austin (Chair): I'd now like to invite members of BCARDC to proceed with their briefing.

S. Nakai: Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, committee members, and good morning. I'd just like to thank you for the opportunity for us to present. My name is Sam Nakai. I'm director of programs at the B.C. Innovation Council. I'd like to introduce Dr. Tim DeJager. He is a longtime member of BCARDC and has recently joined us as BCARDC's program manager.

His background. He has a PhD in history and philosophy of science and technology, specializing in the history of biomedical sciences, post-doctoral research fellow with the University of Manchester specializing in agricultural sciences issues. He has a post-degree diploma in the management of aquaculture systems from UBC.

He's a past shellfish farm manager and director and has been an instructor at Malaspina University College in their aquaculture extension program and, since 2002, has been a consultant dealing in areas such as first nations shellfish aquaculture development, a shellfish training program, research, and innovation program development and management.

As I said, he has been involved in BCARDC since its inception and also serves on ACRDP, the AquaNet research management committee and the Aquaculture Association of Canada.

Dr. Bill Pennell is also a longtime member of BCARDC since its inception and has a PhD in biological oceanography from McGill. For three years he was with the 'Namgis First Nations group in aquaculture and fisheries development. For 25 years he has been with the fisheries and aquaculture program at Malaspina University College. He has retired from teaching, but that hasn't stopped him from continuing on as a research associate at Malaspina, and he' currently director of the Institute for Coastal Research at the university college.

I'd like to start off with just a quick overview of what we'd like to present. Basically, I'll start with some of the gaps and needs in the B.C. aquaculture research sector at the beginning of the decade, go into describing a little bit about what BCARDC is and does and the aquaculture and environment research fund, then look at the process as to how we have undertaken research and selected projects and the review process of those projects.

Then I'll hand the presentation to Tim, who will be talking about the aqua e-fund projects themselves and communication initiatives. Dr. Bennett will then be finishing off with some comments about capacity-building and moving forward in the sector.

The gaps. At the beginning of the decade, there was no strategic framework or research coordination happening in B.C. Also, in order to achieve some of the sustainable development goals of aquaculture in B.C. and spur innovation, it was recognized that a significant amount of research effort would be needed. That was cited in the Salmon Aquaculture Review in 1997.

Some of the issues were limited, and declining capacity of aquaculture research in B.C….. Some of those examples would be, for example, DFO at the time. Some of their key researchers were retiring and weren't being replaced. Some of the universities and colleges were doing individual research projects throughout their different departments and faculties, but there was really no coordination going on there either. SFU had a masters in aquaculture program, but that was being wound down. That left the undergrad program at Malaspina University College as the only formal technical training opportunity.

There was a need for a responsive mechanism to address these issues and concerns. What was created in

2001 was the B.C. Aquaculture Research and Development Committee. Its mission is to encourage independent research and to foster a fully sustainable aquaculture industry in B.C. in conjunction with the stewardship of aquatic resources. What that basically means is that the basis of BCARDC is not to question whether an aquaculture industry should exist in B.C. But if it does exist, what research is needed in order to develop that in an environmentally sustainable manner?

BCARDC operates autonomously with administrative support from the B.C. Innovation Council and with financial support from the government of British Columbia. Its mandate is to prioritize research and development needs in B.C.; to provide strategic direction and advice on aquaculture-related R-and-D expenditure to government and other agencies; to fund and manage research programs; to facilitate coordination, collaboration and networking amongst people and organizations involved in R and D, and communications and extension services related to aquaculture in B.C.; and to reliably communicate that research information on aquaculture activities and their sustainable management.

The membership of BCARDC includes members from academia; first nations; the industry, both from the finfish side and the shellfish; representatives from the Ministry of Agriculture and Lands and the Ministry of Environment from the provincial government side; representatives from DFO and Western Economic Diversification Canada, which make up the federal government side; the B.C. Innovation Council; and the commercial fisheries. We have program managers Dr. Tim DeJager and Ruth Salmon, who manage the committee and provide background support, and myself, with the B.C. Innovation Council providing secretariat support.

Out of that came the aquaculture and environment research fund. This is $3.75 million that was provided by the province of British Columbia for the purpose of supporting research on the environmental aspects of finfish and shellfish aquaculture that have been identified to be of concern to British Columbians.

The Salmon Aquaculture Review provided five primary issues that were in related areas in which to conduct research where knowledge gaps existed. The aquaculture and environment research fund was created to look at some of those priority areas and research gaps.

With the formation of BCARDC and the establishment of the aqua e-fund, it was now possible to take concrete action to address gaps and needs in specific areas where further research was needed. Once these issues were prioritized, it was necessary to establish a sound research strategy and a framework for addressing them.

The process implemented was to look at prioritizing the research issues, determining the state-of-knowledge and developing a strategy to address those needs. The mechanism that was developed was these scientific workshops with international participation from experts.

What these workshops did was invite scientists and other experts from all over the world basically to determine how to tackle certain priority areas of research. BCARDC recognizes that as critical to conducting sound science, such preresearch activity allows experts to synthesize the current state-of-knowledge on an issue, identify with a fair degree of precision where knowledge gaps exist and generally give some indication of how the knowledge might effectively be gained through investigation. It's important that this exercise be done well and that it include a sufficiently broad and diverse range of expertise — united, of course, in the desire to seek solutions.

Those are examples of some of the scientific workshops that have been conducted over the years. The result of those workshops is the development of White Papers that analyze the workshop contributions and basically bring all the state-of-knowledge together on a certain research topic, identify the research gaps and make recommendations as to how to move forward in filling those gaps. From that, we issue RFPs — requests for proposals — that then fund projects.

I thought that at this point I could get into how projects are selected and how the review process is conducted. First is that when a research area is identified, then those scientific workshops would be conducted and the White Papers would be developed. Then from that, a request for proposals would be issued.

There's a mechanism to bypass the workshop in instances where there might be some urgent research that needs to be done on a certain research area. That might be just to provide some basic information, so the workshop may be delayed in order to get that research completed.

In other cases, other organizations may have already done a workshop and established research priorities. It's not in the interests of BCARDC to duplicate that activity, so there's a mechanism to bypass the workshop and go directly to a request-for-proposal process.

Once we receive the proposals, they go through a scientific review panel. What that basically does is bring together a number of experts from all over the world, who would be experts in that particular field and would review the proposals on scientific merit.

As someone that organizes these review panels, I can say that it's not an easy task. The research community in B.C. is very small, so we have had to go to jurisdictions outside — whether it's eastern Canada or into the States or even into the U.K. and Norway — in order to get independent reviewers free from conflict of interest.

Once the proposals have gone through a scientific review, they go to an aqua e-fund subcommittee. The subcommittee is a group that oversees and guides this whole process for a certain research area. Once they receive the proposals, they look at them and determine which ones address the most pressing need, based on the available dollars for that certain research area.

There is an opportunity for the subcommittee to, for example, go back to the proponent to redefine the project if they see that there might be a better fit with the research that needs to be done. Or if the research needs to be tweaked a little bit, there's a mechanism for feedback to the proponent. Then, if necessary, it would go through the scientific review process again.

The next step is that it would go to the BCARDC committee for overall review. When the projects have been recommended, they will be passed on to the B.C. Innovation Council where the proponents would be notified and letters of agreement would be signed. The council is a legal entity. The committee is not, so the committee is not able to sign research contracts. The B.C. Innovation Council does that on behalf of the committee.

Once the projects begin, there's a process of reviewing progress reports and final reports as they come in. That goes through a technical review and administrative process. Once the projects are completed, then they are passed on in terms of the communication aspects of reporting out the results. Dr. DeJager will touch on that in terms of some of the initiatives that we're working on.

The whole point is really to get this research happening and increase the research capacity in British Columbia. As I said before, capacity was limited. One of the benefits of doing research projects is that it gets the researchers engaged in the sector. It gets the researchers talking to each other, networking and collaborating. That's one of the positive benefits.

The key process points here. Our process is open. All the research proposals are available to all researchers in B.C. In some cases if the capacity isn't in B.C., we may fund a project outside of B.C., but we then require that the proponents would work with a B.C. partner so that the knowledge transfer happens into B.C. It's science-based, based on good science, as it goes through the independent scientific review panel.

Projects are accountable, in that they require technical and financial progress and final reports, and are communicative, in that along the way we may have certain workshops that allow the researchers to share information on their progress. They may have meetings and presentations that would allow them to disseminate their research, and we also encourage them to go out and participate in conferences and those types of events.

Reports are available through BCIC. We also have been working on a new initiative involving summaries of the research projects that are more user-friendly than technical reports. Dr. DeJager will touch on that also.

At this point I'd like to pass on the presentation to Dr. DeJager. He'll talk about some more specifics about the projects that we're working on.

T. DeJager: I'd like to thank the committee for the opportunity to present, and I will follow up from Sam's excellent introduction to BCARDC.

I want to talk very briefly about the scope of the projects that BCARDC has funded, not for the purpose of going into great detail in those projects — you'll have heard from many of the experts already who have worked on those projects — but because I want to give an idea of the nature of the initiatives we've undertaken and how they've related to the key knowledge gaps and, furthermore, to get a picture of how these projects have been undertaken in a collaborative manner.

Over the lifespan of the aqua e-fund so far, it has undertaken investigations in five key areas: benthic impacts of finfish aquaculture, three projects; fish disease interactions — those are farmed and wild interactions — using IHN as the disease of focus, five projects; fish processing waste or what's called blood-water management, one project; fish parasite interactions, the sea lice project — we've done ten projects in that field; and a shellfish particulate cycling and ecological interactions project, which Dr. Barnes will discuss following our presentation.

I'll go through each of those areas very quickly and simply identify the research importance of the project and quickly identify the research projects and the principal investigators. The benthic impacts of finfish aquaculture is targeted towards the development of improved monitoring and management tools to assess potential biological impacts — and it's important that we address that — of aquaculture operations in a variety of marine environments. We've looked at projects in soft bottom as well as hard substrate.

The hard-substrate monitoring project is continuing with DFO and the province. It's a critical area where it's important to identify where the biological impacts might occur and how to monitor them and establish the parameters.

The benthic impacts of finfish aquaculture key outcomes. We've developed improved monitoring techniques for both hard and soft environments, substrate classification, appropriate biological indicators and standardized processes and protocols.

The fish disease interactions' key importance is the area of how viral disease, in this case, infects farmed fish and how it moves in the environment between host and populations, and the development of effective treatment and disease prevention. Dr. Garth Traxler has been involved as the principal investigator in two of these projects, early detection and genetic factors.

As Sam mentioned, certainly in this case, this is an example of limited capacity in B.C. A project at UPEI at the Atlantic Veterinary College — Dr. Larry Hammell collaborated with us on projects as well. An interesting project by Dr. Curtis Suttle at UBC on reservoirs, persistence and transmission of the virus. He's an ocean virus hunter.

Key outcomes. Again, techniques for early detection of IHN, identification of resistance in wild salmon, site-based research enabling farms to mobilize in an event of IHN occurrence, and vaccine development.

Sea lice. Again, I'm not going to go into detail. There is plenty of detail already that you've heard on this topic. The key areas in general are the transmission dynamics of sea lice between farmed and wild salmon, requiring monitoring and field investigations, and the effect of sea lice on wild and farmed salmon, requiring laboratory and field investigations.

As I mentioned, there are ten projects in this area — Dr. Beamish, Dr. Trudel, Dr. Mazumder. Baseline monitoring in areas where there are no fish farms — the North Coast baseline survey done by Teresa Ryan

and the Tsimshian Tribal Council; Dr. McKinley at UBC, on the impact of sea lice on native stock using a risk-factor model; and another interesting monitoring project on the west coast with the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council.

I think it's important to point out, particularly in projects like this where we've really encouraged a collaborative process with these projects and an engagement with communities, that community members have been involved in these monitoring projects.

Additional ones are by Dr. Inigo Novales Flamarique, Dr. Richard Beamish, Simon Jones and a second one by Dr. Scott McKinley.

The key outcomes. Again, this is just very, very high-level. The research is not over there; it's ongoing. There are persistent knowledge gaps that are being addressed, but the work we have done has advanced the understanding of the basic sea lice biology; the species; the life cycle; alternate hosts; the ecology of sea lice; how sea lice infestation affects the growth, health, susceptibility to pathogens and mortality of salmon species; and shed light on transmission dynamics.

Further, it will enable development of ecosystem-based risk assessments, management strategies, and treatment and prevention. Lastly, our projects and the work we've done has been the foundation for assisting the Pacific Salmon Forum in moving forward with this whole research area. We've worked closely with the Pacific Salmon Forum to help our projects move into the new projects undertaken here.

Quickly, on bloodwater or fish-processing wastes, it is very important to deal with the potential risk of pathogens in fish waste and the impact on the environment, and how that should be treated in order to inactivate those pathogens, in addition to treating the organic loading component. We have done a project on that which is leading to new technological developments for more effective and lower-cost options.

Finally, the shellfish and environment research area is regarding the fate of particulate material from shellfish in associated organism communities on farms and how shellfish farms may affect biodiversity. Dr. Barnes will be speaking in detail on that project, so I'll just quickly move along on this one.

That's the scope of the projects. The next stage, integral to knowledge generation done through the project, is knowledge transfer. It's very important. BCARDC has recognized that knowledge transfer must be done integrally with projects. It's not a process of doing the research and then the communication happening at the end by some magical means. What we've done is to develop…. Of course, at a certain stage, once project outcomes are evident, we begin developing what we call learning leaflets and technical profiles. For the committee, I have some samples of our learning leaflets and technical profiles. I'll just hand these down.

The learning leaflets are intended for a non-technical audience. We wanted to get a little bit away from what we might call fact sheets and really, with this process, to try to engage communities and people who are interested in the issue to be able to engage with the issue in a learning process and also to make it clear that the science underlying this is dynamic. It's rarely finished, and there are ongoing aspects.

The technical profiles are meant to be more science-oriented documents that essentially summarize the key technical results of the projects, intended for other science members or researchers and government people.

A second area where BCARDC has been instrumental is in creating what was, two years ago, the first overview of aquaculture research in Canada. This, the latest edition — you all have copies — has just been published a month ago. The idea is that probably every two years we would pull together…. Essentially, it's a glimpse of the state of knowledge and of who is doing what research in aquaculture in Canada. This is an important tool not just for knowledge transfer but also for bringing people together and collaborating on future initiatives.

Thirdly, BCARDC has been key in a new initiative underway presently to develop an on-line, web-based knowledge exchange platform called AquaPort. Its goal is to create an open, publicly accessible and credible source of knowledge and knowledge-sharing using advanced web technology and to bring information and issues to the fore rapidly. This project is being funded by AquaNet at the moment and will be launched this summer — summer 2007. I think you have a one-page brief on this project as well.

All of these knowledge exchange initiatives are based on key principles of knowledge exchange and innovation. We believe that knowledge is based on four key areas. Generating new knowledge is the research and discovery component. Communicating knowledge — that is, the publications, presentations, forums. Thirdly, transforming knowledge. This is an area that I think has been underrepresented and underresourced, and that is translating knowledge. That's what our learning leaflets and our technical profiles do — transform knowledge from high science to users who can implement it in decision-making, in environmental management from the farm level, and so on. So it goes right down to using knowledge, and all of those four components must be integral to any initiative.

I like to occasionally just use the Conference Board of Canada's definition of innovation, because it fits quite well: "A process through which economic or social value is extracted from knowledge through the creation, diffusion and transformation of ideas…."

B. Pennell: Thank you very much. I'll conclude this discussion with a few comments on capacity-building, where we've come from and where we all think we should perhaps be going.

First of all, one of those things that BCARDC has done — which I think was quite pioneering, but I'm not sure we realized at the time — is to create collaboration among different researchers and different research institutions. In the old days of the B.C. Science Council research panels, we would look at a report, and it would

get funded or not. It would come from unsolicited reports in a subject area, come from a proponent — judge it on its merits, and off it would go.

What we started to do early on in the BCARDC process was to look at a way of integrating research projects, bringing proponents together and saying: "Well, you can do this, and you can do that. Instead of two separate proposals, why don't you combine them?" A lot of iterative feedback going back to proponents. This has now become quite commonplace. As Tim was saying earlier, it's almost a new paradigm on how to conduct research funding and research organization.

It's led to a much more effective approach to research. It wasn't easy. We stumbled a lot in getting to this. It has also resulted in enormous leverage. I think that BCARDC projects overall have almost a one-to-one leveraging of funding — 91 percent. That's a side benefit of this highly organized, collaborating approach.

These are some of the groups that we've collaborated with. We started off in the early BCARDC years with what I would call almost a crisis situation. Aquaculture was growing quite rapidly in B.C. There were all kinds of concerns, both from the industry side and from the public and community side. Research capacity was declining, as I'm sure you've heard many times, through retirements, positions not being funded or refilled and through various cutbacks. Aquaculture was not really on the radar of most researchers in the university systems and in the government research laboratories.

Since then there's been a lot of progress, and I'll just go over a few examples of this — not following the PowerPoint terribly closely. DFO had reduced its aquaculture research capacity to not zero but a very, very low level — many through retirements, a large wave of retirements not being replaced. That's starting to turn around now. They've hired a researcher, Dr. Chris Pearce, in shellfish research. There are several other new people, new technical support, and there's a feeling of optimism that DFO research capacity in this area is on the upswing.

There's a new national aquatic animal health program in Ottawa, which will affect all the provinces, all industries, conducted by CFIA. That's been in the planning stages for a long time, but it's now being put into operation.

A number of universities now have definite aquaculture programs or researchers in the universities have turned their attention to aquaculture. This includes hiring of new people as well — Canada research chairs and so forth. UBC has taken over…. I think you've probably been through the West Vancouver laboratory. Is that correct?

B. Pennell: The West Vancouver laboratory was a DFO laboratory about to be shut down. It opened in 1987. In the late 1990s UBC suggested that they essentially take it over, have a partnership, so it's now the centre for environmental aquaculture studies. Scott McKinley and other people are there. It's a partnership with DFO. So that laboratory has been revitalized and aimed at aquaculture. That's a very good increase in capacity.

The Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre has had a major infrastructure uplift, and a lot of that infrastructure will be useful for aquaculture. That's also the home of the abalone project. I wasn't sure if you'd been out there to see the abalone — a very fascinating study to produce abalone, which is actually a listed species.

UVic is getting involved in aquaculture, especially with the SEA-Lab project — intregrated multitrophic aquaculture on the west coast. We'll talk about that a little bit later. That's quite a forward-thinking venture and, I think, of great significance.

At Malaspina, where I work, we have a Centre for Shellfish Research and a number of new research centres — that's the first of our new research centres. Don Tillapaugh and Penny Barnes are here, and they will be talking about that. We have a new field research laboratory in Deep Bay just going into construction now.

The Centre for Coastal Health is an interdisciplinary centre, including a lot of veterinarians, looking at interactions between human and animal health.

Institute for Coastal Research, which is one of my projects, is a multidisciplinary department looking at coastal resource management from all different disciplines. We have one Canada Research Chair there as well, and a sturgeon research centre is about to be built.

Overall, it's a good-news story. There is a lot of new capacity, although a lot of it is in the very early stages, very embryonic. I think it's going to need a lot of support if it actually matures and can do what has to be done.

Long-term strategy. We've chosen to look at the overall health of aquaculture populations, finfish and shellfish. If animals are healthy, then many of the environmental concerns — interactions with wild stocks — are reduced or eliminated. So the development of vaccines, as Tim has talked about, and better nutrition, husbandry, management…. There's always room for more improvement. That reduces a lot of public concern over aquaculture. As Tim has already mentioned, another area is improving the management of aquaculture waste.

Now, one of the really important things we've done towards the very end of the last few years — actually, the last year — is to set up a series of research chairs funded in four different new aquaculture research centres. Dr. Steve Cross out of the University of Victoria is working on the SEA-Lab project. This is the project you've probably heard about where you integrate seaweed, fish, shellfish and so forth, trying to reduce the overall footprint and increase the efficiency of a site. That's very exciting.

Dr. Shannon Balfry is working in the area of health and nutrition of mainly fish at the West Vancouver lab. Dr. Val Funk is up at the CAHS centre — Centre for Aquatic Health — in Campbell River. I know you did go there. She's working in vaccine development and other applications.

Dr. Yomi Alabi has just recently been at the Centre for Shellfish Research. He's left us to go to the private sector. He's a microbiologist and also a larval-rearing specialist. We're replacing him probably this coming week. That position is ongoing.

These four positions represent an approach of BCARDC to try to look long-term strategically into the future and develop capacity, as opposed to just simply doing more projects, although those have been very fruitful.

This is a miraculous slide that Sam put together, and I hope I can operate it properly. Under the leadership of Don Tillapaugh, and I think he'll be talking about this…. The four centres at which we've supported a few funding research chairs have all got together, plus AquaPort, and formed a network. I think this is extremely significant because better use of research materials, research skills, personnel, infrastructure in a collaborative way allows you to target problem subjects effectively.

We have the West Vancouver laboratory. That's one of them, with Shannon Balfry. Centre for Shellfish Research — Yomi's position. CAHS in Campbell River — Val Funk. Pacific SEA-Lab — Steve Cross. Those are the four new centres where we've put strategic, long-term capacity-building funding.

AquaPort — we have different ways of expressing this — is the interstitial connective tissue of the four. Communications is a challenge. Communications is the basis of how you collaborate, and AquaPort is a communications vehicle.

Then, of course, this won't be isolated. We'll be working with other institutions — national, international, government, community, industry and other interested groups. It is already branching out. Each of the individual centres has their own connections, and when we combine them, they'll be quite formidable.

Now, a few final comments. As I've already said, when BCARDC came into being, there was what I think was really a crisis situation in terms of capacity to address the questions. The questions were coming in ever more forcefully and more rapidly. Aquaculture was becoming controversial in some areas; in other areas it wasn't developing. We just didn't have the capacity to address the issues. Even if we had the money on the table — and we had some — the capacity wasn't there. Since then, the capacity has built up. There's a long way to go before we can really step forward and address aquaculture issues from all the different sides or aspects of aquaculture in the way that this is done in other countries, particularly Europe.

One of the important features of aquaculture, as I'm sure you've heard many times, is that it's a global phenomenon. Right now the value of all the seafood and freshwater fish production is about 50 percent, in terms of dollar value — 50 percent that's coming from aquaculture worldwide. The amount of aquaculture being produced relative to wild fish catch is increasing geometrically in a very steady fashion. So it's happening. It's not going to go away. It's very controversial in B.C., particularly finfish farming, but aquaculture in general is here.

I think this is seen very clearly in some of the major world wildlife foundations. There's one prominent example. They're no longer trying to put a stop to aquaculture or to hold it back, but rather, they're trying to guide it into sustainable pathways. If you look at their website, it's very, very interesting. They're suggesting very rational — not draconian, but also very forceful — pathways that aquaculture should be looking to for development. This will be green technology, sustainable — in all the difference senses of that word, including socially sustainable.

In reflecting about the BCARDC years, it seems to me that where we have been going fits exactly with where a number of these large foundations and international opinion are heading as well. It's the same direction. We're looking at research into providing better technology, better management and more sustainability, and that fits perfectly. The aqua e-fund was really made for that purpose.

The fact that we've funded these four research chairs is very, very pivotal, very important. The fact that the four new research centres for aquaculture research have combined, under Don's leadership, into a network is another really interesting and important step forward. It's a small step, but it's big in terms of the approach. I think it's really important.

So we've set the foundations — in terms of process; how you go about defining research needs and creating collaboration and communication among researchers and institutions — we've started to develop capacity, and things are looking, I think, guardedly hopeful. But there's not a lot of funding around, and we have a long way to go — many things to be addressed. I think we need to foster and encourage these centres and their network.

Also, just as an aside, I think there needs to be more research done in the social sciences. How do communities best assess their choices in the development of any industry, including aquaculture? How do industries benefit communities? And how do they not, sometimes, benefit communities? That's a growing area, one which BCARDC hasn't really addressed, although we've been discussing it.

R. Austin (Chair): Thank you, Dr. Pennell. I'm going to open the floor for members' questions. I'll start with John over there.

J. Yap: Thank you, Dr. DeJager, Dr. Pennell and Sam for your presentations. I've got a few questions. We'll start with your last point on funding.

Dr. Pennell, you said it's a challenge — that more funding is needed. Earlier the figure of $3.75 million was mentioned, which I assume was the funding that was provided at the very beginning by the government. It was also mentioned that it was good leveraging of funding. It sounds like a very impressive amount of research being done with $3.75 million. Presumably you did get some leverage funding along the way. Could you tell us about those sources of funding — how that has worked out for you?

B. Pennell: Another funding agency was the B.C. Pacific Salmon Forum, and they have turned their

attention mainly to the sea lice issue. I'm not sure how much money they had; I think it was $4 million. DFO has a base budget, and when an aquaculture issue comes up, they can direct some of their moneys to aquaculture topics. The province has some money in MAL, MOE, and then there are other sources. NSERC is a traditional research funding source, and SSHRC, as well, in the university system, so there are these different areas. The message I was conveying is if you put them together, you can make the whole greater than the sum of the parts, but it's still a limited base of funding.

When you look at other countries, European countries where aquaculture research has been developed, including sustainability research, they have far, far more funding to devote to that. Norway would be one example; Denmark would be another very good example. What I meant to say is that we've made excellent use of what was available. It sounds like a lot — like you say, $4 million here and $3.7 million there. It's really not, when you realize that it's spread over a number of years, when you put it in the context of other expenditures here and in other countries.

I think the kind of funding that we need to consider now is funding towards capacity-building. Don Tillapaugh will talk about this, I believe, but I've used the four embryonic research centres — some are further along than others — as areas that really could use support, where the effectiveness of the money spent will be extremely high.

J. Yap: Presumably the institutions that are involved — Malaspina, UBC, UVic — are also providing funding through their centres.

B. Pennell: They are. UBC, of course, has more capacity to fund their research centres, and their research chairs have the ability to get large NSERC grants as well. So UBC is quite…. I don't think they would say they are well-endowed — everybody is struggling for funding — but they are doing quite well.

Malaspina supports the research centres by fundraising. We've had to raise 20 percent of all our CFI-BCKDF projects, and then they pay the operating expenses for the buildings and infrastructure. But we have to go out and find the funding to maintain operations and staff. It's not on a base budget from Malaspina, as one example.

I think the same is true for the other centres as well — and new centres, of course. For example, the Pacific SEA-Lab, the UVic multitrophic venture on the west coast, is very new, and it doesn't have a lot of base funding.

J. Yap: What about industry? Are they also contributing to the funding of some of the research?

B. Pennell: Yeah, they do. The finfish industry is better able to do that than the shellfish industry.

J. Yap: So if you had to paint a picture of the funding that is presently provided to aquaculture research, how would that look, between different levels of government, industry, foundations, academia?

B. Pennell: It looks a lot better now than it did six or seven years ago, although some sources of funding that were available then aren't available now. There's been a decline in some areas, yet capacity has been growing. I would say that, overall, it's pretty thin on the ground.

J. Yap: You made reference to a comparison to the European picture. Were you suggesting, as a proportion or a percentage of the funding that's happening over there, that the commitment to research is higher than here?

B. Pennell: I'm sure it's at least an order of magnitude, and probably more.

J. Yap: Okay. Moving from funding, early in the presentation there was a nice flow chart of the process, and you had the step called "technical and admin review" after the research is done. Is that done by the same people who do the scientific review, or is it a different group?

S. Nakai: Yeah, it depends on the project. The scientific reviewers are available for external reviews, but the technical reviews are conducted by people that we've contracted as research coordinators, who have an expertise in the specific field. So they are able to look at the research to see the scientific rigour of the project, and if needed, they can then go back to the scientific review panel, who can also take a look at the projects.

J. Yap: Now, it was mentioned…. You had that beautiful chart with the report, pulling all the different bodies together in collaboration. Wonderful. I didn't see in there any linkages to international networks of research. What level of collaboration is there with, say, European scientists?

B. Pennell: I'll let Sam comment on that, but there are certainly strong international links developing. In the Centre for Shellfish Research, for example, we have delegations coming through from China, from Europe, from other countries. These will result in possibilities of investment in B.C. and also collaborative research. We've also had collaborations through the West Van lab with Norwegian scientists. Maybe Sam would want to elaborate.

S. Nakai: Yeah. In that sort of circular chart, at the top and the bottom there was reference to national and international collaborators coming in. So the networks are there. It may not necessarily be a direct link, but each node within that collaborative network would

J. Yap: You listed some of the projects that you've worked on — IHN, sea lice. Has there been any research on the question of closed-containment systems, where finfish aquaculture happens in a sequestered environment?

B. Pennell: BCARDC, so far as I'm aware, has not been involved directly in that. There have been a number of studies over the last decade on that topic, because it's become an issue. I understand that Marine Harvest and CAAR are looking at a further economic study involving benefits of scale, but BCARDC has not been involved with that directly.

S. Fraser: Thanks for the presentation. I'll be fairly quick. There are issues that come out, and I think you've mentioned the social science issues that may or may not need to be dealt with. I'm just wondering how they can be dealt with through the BCARDC. Do we have a mechanism for addressing a mandate that comes forward, when an application comes forward, if it's controversial in a social setting, community-wise, to try to determine if those concerns that are brought forward by the public are valid or if there are ways of mitigating those concerns?

There are applications that are going forward. Certainly with finfish, but also with shellfish, applications there are questions about compatibility. They are coming, obviously, while the application's being considered by government. There are a lot of questions being brought forward. Do you have a role there, and if so, how would that be kicked in?

B. Pennell: I'll refer to that question in a minute. In terms of policy, I think we could have a role there. There's a distinction between conflict resolution and social sciences research. Social sciences research, or so sociologists tell me, goes into a community, possibly works with a community as opposed to analyzing it from the outside; determines what the community felt their problems were; and does economic analyses as to where the benefits flowed from a certain activity — who got the benefits and so forth. It's a very complex area involving policy, political scientists, economists, sociologists and others. Then, when all that information has emerged from research, those become the tools for conflict resolution, which is another stage.

I don't think BCARDC…. Personally, I don't think BCIC would be getting involved in conflict resolution, but rather, in setting the underpinnings for understanding where the conflict is coming from and how somebody might resolve it.

T. DeJager: I'll just add an element to that. I suppose in some ways it's not just the social science per se. From our perspective as a program and committee that funds research, one of our goals….

It has become more apparent recently over the last few years, and it probably has something to do with the paradigm shift that we've talked about, in how science is done, and that is by a process of not so much just doing it from the outside of communities but involving or engaging the communities in the process of the science itself so that there's a learning process and an involvement right from the start, whether that's social science or ecological science or other kinds of projects.

So that's an important element, as well, and it would bring in the element of the engagement and knowledge transfer. Knowledge exchange, I would say, is a really critical component that we need to look at more, as well, so that we validate local knowledge or community knowledge incorporated into the research. This is sort of new ground for both the social side and the natural science side as well.

S. Fraser: Okay. I mean, along with that, I know Don's and Brian's work around the centre in Deep Bay. It's placing a centre in a community that's largely proximal to shellfish aquaculture, which is probably in the right direction.

How about gaps? If you know there are gaps…. There was a recent announcement of a letting of a tenure for geoduck aquaculture, and we've met with the proponents for that industry and with the government scientists and bureaucrats. It was quite clear that there were some significant gaps or complete lack of science data that was relevant to actual geoduck aquaculture. There was some work done in the '70s on harvesting. There was some ongoing work that wasn't completed, and it was altered to try to fit into a time span that wasn't…. There were gaps.

Is there anything that could make you kick into action when you see those things, when they're coming forward as controversial and the gaps are quite clear? Can you just fire up, or does somebody have to fire you up? How does that work?

S. Nakai: That's a good question, actually. The scientific review process is in place to, I guess, identify what those gaps are. There are just so many gaps, though. I think that we need to be able to prioritize what those are and how to address them.

The funding for the aqua e-fund is…. Out of $3.75 million we've committed about $3.5 million to that. Funding is also an issue. I don't know what to say about that. It's a difficult question to answer.

B. Pennell: It's a question of money and capacity. Going back maybe to the social sciences, the community issues…. Sometimes things are framed as environmental problems, and there will be a gap.

There may be another group of issues that aren't really environmental. There's no fisheries act to act as a focus, for example. They may be driving the concerns which have been expressed as environmental. It's very

hard to decide what's a really high-profile environmental issue and what's something which really has a different origin and, also, may have been emphasized in the popular media.

You have to respond to what the citizens feel is important, but also look at what the science says that might be important and look at the social sciences. It's not easy to do. Fundamentally, it's capacity and money to address these things.

Following up on John's question, he asked a question about the funding. What percentage of your funding does come from industry?

S. Nakai: I have some figures here. Out of the projects that we've funded, not including those innovation awards, the projects that Tim listed, there's been about $58,000 from industry coming in.

I don't know if that's a clear picture of industry involvement, because they do provide other information and in-kind contributions that are needed and valuable for the research to occur. So when we look at industry contribution or any type of contribution, I think it's good to sort of balance that out in terms of some of the non-financial contributions that are made too.

S. Simpson: What would those non-financial contributions look like? What would that be — access?

S. Simpson: The review panel that makes the decisions — I think that John also referenced this. Now, there's the scientific review that's done where you access outside scientists who sit on a review panel that looks at the merits around projects you've decided to go forward with. I believe you said it then goes to the e-fund committee?

S. Simpson: And after the scientific review, that committee then vets and looks at where funding goes. Is that accurate?

S. Nakai: Right. Yeah, the scientific review panel looks at the scientific merit of the project. The aqua e-fund subcommittee receives the comments from the scientific review panel and looks at it as a whole, in terms of the projects that get presented, how that is best able to be collaborated together.

Bill was saying about when you have two separate projects that are proposed and both have very good scientific merit, there are opportunities to combine them, for instance, or there are opportunities to bring in other researchers into the project. It's not really a scientific review that they do. They just look at opportunities of how to make the project better and just how to get more value out of the projects that we get funded.

S. Simpson: When I look at the projects that are listed in your overheads…. I do notice that in the R-and-D review you list a number of projects in sea lice, for example. There are three or four projects there, I believe, that would have been conducted by those scientists and academics who would be deemed to be not particularly favourable to finfish aquaculture — people like Craig Orr or Marty Krkošek, Alexandra Morton — and I notice that you list some of those projects in the review.

Have any of those scientists or those projects been funded by your program? I didn't see them on the list in here. It looks like mostly DFO and some UVic and UBC. Those people who clearly are somewhat more critical of the industry in terms of sea lice and some other related issues…. Have they been funded?

S. Nakai: I'm not sure. I guess with the list of projects that Tim had listed…. There's always, I guess, a balance or a split between researchers who are favourable to aquaculture and those who aren't. We try to stick to the science in terms of scientific review and the rigour of the science. We don't really make a distinction on that.

S. Simpson: I guess my question to you, because it seems to me that from what I've seen…. Certainly, it's not exclusive, by any means, but the preponderance of peer-reviewed science tends to fall on the side of the agenda — around the sea lice issue, for example — that has been more critical.

It's not exclusive, by any means. I know that Dr. Beamish has been peer-reviewed — and others, I'm sure. But certainly, the preponderance of what we've seen…. Presumably, that's pretty credible science if it's peer-reviewed science in significant and important publications.

The question I have is: where do the decisions get made about what science you do? Part of the question for this, quite honestly, is that when I look at the committee, which presumably includes significant membership from the industry on the e-fund committee, I'm wondering where those decisions get made.

B. Pennell: When the proposals go out, they go out for peer review, and the peer reviews come back. In terms of the process, we're pretty much bound by that. The only intervention made by the committee is to say that if two projects overlap or are doing the same thing twice, we'll try to combine them. There have been no choices made by the committee above and beyond what the external reviewers have said about whether this project or that project has merit.

S. Simpson: Can we get a list of those external reviewers, or is that confidential?

S. Nakai: The reviewers are confidential. They do this on a volunteer basis.

S. Simpson: I understand that the peer-reviewed process is confidential, usually. Is that a peer-reviewed process, or is it a review of process? I'm not….

S. Simpson: Right. Not on the science. Not on the research, but on the applications.

S. Simpson: I guess the question I raise here is where the investment of BCARDC research dollars is for those organizations or credible scientists who have raised serious questions about the industry. Maybe I just missed it here, but I don't see it, so that's a point that I want to make.

Another question I wanted to raise. You talked about…. I believe it was Sam who made the question about trying to stay independent in terms of the work and being very careful about where there are conflicts and being sure to not want to get engaged where there are potential conflicts — for whoever it may be. There are certainly those on both sides. How do you do that?

S. Nakai: The B.C. Innovation Council itself has a strict set of guidelines in terms of conflict. Basically, what it comes down to is that if a person will benefit financially from, for example, another person being voted an award, then they have to step back from the process.

Like I said, with the scientific review process, it has been difficult to get reviewers that are independent in B.C., because most know each other and most are working together on projects. We've made a concerted effort to try to keep the independence there and make sure that the scientific reviews are done with the highest quality, so we've had to go outside and work through that process.

B. Pennell: One comment. This is a very difficult area when you find that scientific researchers — researchers who have good reputations, tenured professors and so forth — end up so diametrically opposed on an issue that their research is framed very differently.

I talked about how successful we were at getting collaboration, but there are some areas where you cannot get scientists to collaborate with each other because they've gone to separate camps. It's a sociological phenomenon, I suppose. It's very difficult.

I think that probably if someone did an analysis of sea lice research ten years from now, they'd conclude that a lot of money was misspent with good intentions because of this enormous division that goes from the community level right up to the top of the scientific structure. I've tried to deal with it on a number of occasions. It's very difficult.

S. Simpson: From what little I've learned sitting on this committee, I would agree with that. It's very challenging. A large number of people end up landing on one side or the other of this — very credible people who do good work. They've fallen in one place or another, presumably based on the work they've done previously that's drawn some conclusions for them. Then they've continued down that path. So I agree that that's a problem.

The question of conflict for the council is: what is the traditional…? It's a question of: is there some money in this for you? It's a financial interest. That's where you draw that, largely.

S. Nakai: Part of it is the financial. Part of it is also…. I guess in any type of personal gain — whether it's financial or something else, in terms of maybe an opportunity to collaborate or something like that…. It's more of a personal gain issue, and sometimes the financial, I guess, becomes a bit more prominent.

S. Simpson: One last question that kind of relates to that. That being the case, and I think it obviously makes eminent sense that it's the approach to take…. When we go back and look at the membership of BCARDC and the e-fund committee, a significant portion of the membership of that committee comes from the industry, who quite rightly have a financial interest in the results of this research.

I don't begrudge them that; they work hard. I have no problem with that. How do you deal with that situation, when a number of the people who are making those decisions about where the money goes have a clear interest?

S. Nakai: The strength of the committee is when you do have different representation in various areas, whether it's industry, academia, the provincial government, the federal government. So it's not just one group making the decision. That's how you make the distinction.

S. Simpson: I won't ask you where the other people are in here who have the contrary view to you. I'm sure I see them on the list.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): I'll just follow up, I think, on Shane's line of questioning. I think one of the things we're trying to determine is a level of objectivity in evaluating some of the material that's been presented to us, because it's been presented to us very passionately in many cases and very polarized points of view. I think that what Shane is trying to say is: where do we get the objectivity and have we reached it?

It would seem to me that we might have to go far removed, maybe as far as the moon, before we get people who aren't removed. But we can't go that far. I don't think there are too many marine biologists there. So we'll have to try to sort out the best that we have.

I'd just like to — whoever wants to answer the question — go through the process about deciding on projects. So the committee would look at identifying

gaps, and then put out an RFP for proposals to address those gaps. Am I correct on that? Maybe you could comment on that if you want.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): All right. Then when they come out, when the RFPs come back, they're peer-reviewed. Could you tell me what that peer-reviewed process involves? What do they do — look at the methodology? What were the criteria to guide us?

S. Nakai: There are a certain number of criteria. They look at scientific merit, they look at the research team, they look at the methodology of the science — their workplan. How realistic is the science in terms of completing it within what the proponent says they would be able to complete it — by what time. There's the cost-efficiency of the research that they look at. I think that's about it.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): Would it go out to several scientists to review? And would they work independently, or would they compare notes? How does that process work?

S. Nakai: Depending on how many applications we receive, we'll try to secure up to five or six scientific reviewers. They will look at the proposals independently and produce sort of a scoring sheet. Then we would convene a teleconference so that the reviewers could then discuss amongst themselves as to which projects would be ranked in terms of their scientific merit.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): Go sideways a bit here. We've talked a lot in this conference about the committee, the value of peer-review. Peer-review elevates the quality of the scientific study — I'm talking about scientific studies, generally — but I gather doesn't necessarily make it an immutable law of science. Maybe you could comment to me on just what is the nature of peer-review. Does it endorse and validate the study? What does peer-review do?

B. Pennell: I think it's the process of due diligence, of quality control, and it does elevate the work to an extent. It's like democracy: it's the best process we have, maybe, but it's not perfect. There's a huge debate internationally in scientific circles about how to improve the peer-review process.

An example came my way not too long ago. A series of papers on finfish environmental aquaculture issues were submitted to a journal. The external peer-reviewers came back with such contrasting viewpoints that the editor finally threw up his hands and published all of them. The peer-review…. Science is always controversial. There's always internal debate and disagreement. That's what makes it work.

Peer-review does not canonize results. It has to be done. It's one major step in saying whether something is valid or not — if it's done properly or not — but it's always just the beginning of the debate.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): So the scientists — I'm going to go toward sea lice now — don't seem to agree. The peer-reviewers don't seem to agree. How would you guide us in trying to evaluate all of this?

B. Pennell: Sea lice is a fascinating topic. In the end we'll probably know something about sea lice. I'm not absolutely sure that we will know the answers that people set out to find out.

It's an example of a problem that can be very intractable to science over a short time. There is so much environmental variation and so many different aspects that a lot of money could be spent and still not get to a definitive answer. I know there are people who feel that we have the definitive answer right now and that we've had it for a while. Other people don't think we have anywhere near that answer. I kind of fall into that camp.

On the other hand, management practices may come about — may be evolved, maybe already have been evolved — which will mitigate the problem even though they don't fully understand the dynamics of it.

I can't really answer your question. It's not really an easy pathway. When that topic came up, it became apparent that it was immediately a political topic in addition to a scientific topic. It became obvious to many people that it was not going to be a simple process. Because the scientists were, and are, so divided, it was hard to come up with an integrated, logical approach that would go year by year to hone in on the solution to the problem in a pragmatic way.

If you have a new human disease, perhaps another SARS, there'd be a highly orchestrated research response to that. There would be debate, discussion and competition for funding. There would be a highly orchestrated response to get the vaccine, or whatever, as soon as possible. I think we've seen that. In sea lice, it's a very small topic in the world picture but a very complicated project scientifically. We haven't seen that approach. It hasn't been possible to create that approach.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): Perhaps to Dr. DeJager: we've seen your group has started with ten studies on sea lice. I gather from your comments that this has resulted in the Pacific Salmon Forum following up. The Chair and I were at a forum a year ago last November where they started another series of studies which we'll hear about.

From your perspective, Dr. DeJager, where are we with it? I'd like some more overview and comments from 50,000 feet or whatever. Go as deep as you want on the subject, and I'll try not to encourage Scott Fraser to indulge in his usual efforts. Where are we? And I'll

ask the final question: do we need to stop the world here and put a moratorium on and hold everything? Is the situation at that extent — that we need to put the brakes on until we know better? Or are we on the way to sustainable management?

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): I know. You think you're on the spot. Well, so are we.

T. DeJager: I want to just start my response with the following comments that Bill has made. And that is: I think it's important, first of all, not so much to think of the results but the process, and ensure…. The process does actually work. I mean, science is pretty effective, and it does provide answers, as Bill suggested. There is a way, but the process must be respected. And the process is one in which science is open. There must be an element of trust, and principles must be followed.

Once those principles are chucked out the window, then it breaks down. I think we may be in a situation where we've lost some of the principles of doing science — collaboratively, constructively. That's unfortunate because I think that hijacks the process, and it hijacks where we're going — the ability to get answers, as well.

I think we need to look carefully at the process to make sure that…. When the salmon forum started, we were working at transitioning our work into their work. There was an idea that went through some work with Dr. Tony Farrell to develop the standards, guidelines and protocol sorts of issues. Before we get too bogged down in details, let's work out the principles of the process. Whether or not that was fully successful, that was a step in the right direction to ensure that the science process is followed.

The science process historically will take us forward, and I think we need to — I'm not sure, but I want to say — step into the final answer or not, but we need to move forward, and move forward with science being there to guide and assist and help make decisions. So other than that — that's a 50,000-foot answer. But the principles of the process are critical, and I think we may have lost sight of some of those in this particular area.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): Thank you. You get kudos for ducking the question. We won't be able to do that.

I would like to ask then, from 50,000 feet or wherever — we may be a little higher — where would you describe the state of science with respect to sea lice? It certainly seems that's the key issue that we're dealing with. Are we much further ahead, a little further ahead — whatever frame of reference you wish to describe it in?

T. DeJager: I'll do a little bit of a duck again. First of all, one can investigate endlessly. The problems, as Bill has alluded to…. Once we engage in the complexity of eco-system research in this area, there's an endless amount of research, and knowledge gaps will always be apparent.

But, again, we need to go back to the process but say, essentially, is there evidence that there is harm here? What is the nature of the evidence, and we need to sort of put the evidence into the process. I think we've accomplished a fairly substantial amount of research and knowledge base. Probably by now we have enough of a knowledge base to make our collective decision on.

Again, I'm not going to preclude an answer to say yes or no or it can move ahead or it should be stopped or some such thing. It's a matter of, "How significant is this risk of sea lice to the wild stocks?" and making a joint, collective, open, transparent process where we sort of bring together what we know and where we need to go ahead.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): You didn't open your door, but you had your hand on the handle, and I thank you for that. Then that begs the question, because we thought we had attempted to do that, but it didn't work out that way. We had a complete dichotomy of opinion when we tried to bring that together.

What kind of process would you see that could bring us to that decision, to that collective, scientific, unbiased, objective-as-we-can point which we as this committee…? We will be called upon to do that very shortly: to advise the Legislature on where this goes next. What's the process? You're good at process.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): Told you. It doesn't get easier for us, Dr. DeJager, if that's any consolation.

T. DeJager: Again, other than I think we need to reassert the principles…. That is, that everybody who is involved from a research point of view has knowledge to contribute, it's valuable, and it needs to be put into the correct perspective. I think there, somehow, we have to accomplish the shedding of, I guess, a kind of an agenda in order to commit, I would say, with the scientists collectively, to shed the agenda and commit to finding the direction and solution.

Now, I mean, you don't have the luxury of a lot of time and another convening of great scientific processes. You have to wade through quite a mass of material.

I'm not sure. It's complex. Perhaps with some assistive techniques in mapping where the knowledge is, for example, we might learn from people that have been involved in biotechnology debates and the social issues around….

Maybe we should look at if there's a technique that has worked in that area that we can use to help separate the wheat from the chaff — if you will.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): What you're suggesting is: look at how other jurisdictions of science have approached

T. DeJager: That's one suggestion that we have been, as part of the AquaPort project where…. Obviously, this is going to be something that project will be concerned about: how do you portray and engage with complex, conflicted issues in a meaningful way which doesn't distort the knowledge. So this is not a small challenge for a project like this. We're looking around the world for people and ways to help make that happen.

B. Pennell: I've nothing to lose. I think I detect a little bit of a shift — I'm not sure — in the way people are speaking about the issue to each other and amongst themselves — that's within DFO, Simon Fraser and other groups. I think there's a feeling that if the farms are correctly managed — right now it's using SLICE; soon it may be a vaccine for sea lice….

We may not know what their contribution is. We don't know at all whether the sea lice actually have an effect on the populations of pink salmon or not. That has eluded all studies. But if there is an effect, what is the farm contribution? I think there's a growing acceptance that if the farms are properly managed, scrutinized, treated — right now what we have is SLICE — and harvesting dates and so forth, the effects of the farms will be minimized.

But I don't believe you're going to find a final, definitive answer for a long time.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): Well, thank you very much. Chair, I have one last question, and that's regarding funding.

We're aware that there is considerable foundation funding for various groups. Certainly, CAAR is receiving, from various American sources, large funding. Is there other foundation funding? Suzuki or other foundation funding that contributes to your committee and research, Sam?

S. Fraser: I won't be at the 10,000-foot level. Your example of the peer review by attrition is like: "Oh thanks, Dr. Pennell." It scared me. I think at ground level.

You mentioned SLICE. We've had prawn fishermen in with concerns about potential impacts of SLICE on their fishery. They're the smaller players. We've had B.C. Council of Professional Fish Harvesters in here too — the smaller operators.

You've got, in your membership, commercial fisheries represented by Christina Burridge. Who does she represent?

S. Fraser: Okay. And they would be, in your opinion, representing the smaller players?

S. Fraser: Okay. Then the first nations membership. You've got Teresa Ryan and Richard Harry. I notice that Teresa is Tsimshian, but are they first nations members, or are they representing first nations? Do they have a role with the Leadership Council, Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, Assembly of First Nations or summit? Or are they first nations members? Do they represent somebody, officially?

S. Nakai: They don't necessarily represent the first nations as a whole, but they bring in input of the first nations. Does that answer your question?

S. Fraser: I know she's with the Tsimshian Tribal Council, but I don't know that she represents them either. I'm just curious.

S. Nakai: No, I don't believe that she does, but she does bring in input in terms of first nations perspective.

The clarification, Dr. Pennell. When we talked about peer-reviewed science, I think you made a very good point when you said that because something is peer reviewed doesn't make it the be-all and the end-all; it means it has gone through a process of due diligence that's an accepted process in the scientific community. That's accurate, I think, certainly from everything that we've heard.

The clarification is: are you saying here that it's not perfect, but it is one of the things that we should look for in terms of at least a screen when we're looking at science?

B. Pennell: It's the first major screening step. If something has been through the peer-reviewed process, it doesn't mean it's true or final. It will be debated onward.

I think the peer-reviewed process, actually, is a continuum. It becomes quite intricate. Researchers will evaluate each other in terms of how many times their

paper has been cited by other researchers — not just that they got it published. And then they'll refine that rating system — this is for promotions, for example — to the prestige of the journals that publish the paper and how long it is cited.

That goes on. The papers will be debated in the future, and it may be that a paper that was peer reviewed and published as well could well be considered a false lead or imperfect later on, a year or two or three later, as more research is known and as the debate unfolds.

It is that one screen to get it into print. That's way above something I may read in my newspaper. But it's an ongoing process, and it's not perfect.

S. Simpson: So when we deal with literally thousands of documents that are sitting in the boxes in our offices, that is an important screen when we have to kind of work our way through?

B. Pennell: It's an important screen, but there are also technical reports put out by the province, DFO and so forth, and they've been through an internal peer-review process, usually. They're extremely important, but they're somewhat separate — sometimes called grey literature. You have to use it, being forewarned that it's not a final statement.

Dr. DeJager, you talked about — this is my question — how we haven't got the definitive answer on the sea lice question that Ron asked about. There are a number of views, and they're all over the map. One of the things that we hear more about — not just in terms of this issue, and we've now seen that the courts have acknowledged it — is the question of the precautionary principle and the adoption of the precautionary principle.

My question to you is: when we are weighing what some might say are uncertain results, or certainly conflicting results, how important do you think it is for us to use the precautionary principle, maybe not as the only measurement, but as one of the things we measure in our decision-making?

T. DeJager: Yeah, the precautionary principle is recognized as an important principle to incorporate into decision-making. There's also a lot of rhetoric around the precautionary principle sometimes, and it's actually, I think, a very difficult principle to implement in a consistent way or in a way that's clear, because it's applied in different ways.

I think, also, there's scientific knowledge that precedes, for example, the application of the precautionary principle. So there may need to be enough scientific evidence of harm, if you will, in order to bring the precautionary principle into the picture, saying it's now necessary to consider the precautionary principle in this context.

For example, I did look a little bit into the…. Canada has a discussion paper. The Canadian government put together a discussion paper on the precautionary principle a few years ago, and there are some very good measures in that paper that can probably help the committee in how to implement or how to utilize the precautionary principle.

One of the principles there is that sound scientific information and its evaluation must be the basis for applying the precautionary approach, particularly with regard to the decision to act or not to act and measures taken once a decision is made. I think sometimes certain scientific knowledge follows the precautionary principle, but certain scientific knowledge precedes it as well. Again, not an easy application, but again, it's valid and important to consider.

S. Simpson: Just one follow-up on that. As somebody who has looked at these issues an awful lot and seen a lot of science on both sides of this question, as a scientist and somebody knowledgable in this, is this an area in your mind — and I'm not asking you to, say, invoke the precautionary principle or not — where that is a principle that we should consider in our deliberations because there isn't a definitive answer here?

T. DeJager: Yeah, I think it's part of the picture, for sure. I think it's a part of the consideration. But again, I would say we need to be careful about how we interpret it and how we apply it.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): Thank you, Dr. DeJager. Did you ever play shortstop, may I ask? You seem to be taking a lot of hot grounders here today.

Further on the precautionary principle, one element that I recall is that you apply it when there's a risk of — to me, it's the key phrase — irreversible damage. That is when you apply it. As non-scientific people, I guess, how do you guide us to know when damage is irreversible? If you place something like a fish pen in the water but you remove it later on, the effects dissipate. So it could be said that over time there would be no permanent damage. Perhaps, perhaps not, but certainly less so than a copper mine, for example, where you're making a large hole in the ground and there's no question that you're going to have some long-term effects.

How can you guide us as non-scientists in trying to apply that principle? How do we know when it's irreversible and not?

T. DeJager: Again, it's not an easy or simple question. I think that one needs to look at evidence. Going back to the principle, I think that there must be some evidence of serious…. It says: "…threats of serious or irreversible damage." That's the phrase at Rio. That's the key to it. But there must be evidence to support that that in fact would…. It's a little bit of a circle, but I think that has to be there. So we need to ask, in this case: what is the evidence that it's…? It's evidence plus

I notice you have "a single port in a sea of information." Well, that's certainly where we are. We were hoping for, if not a compass, at least a couple of oars.

R. Austin (Chair): On behalf of the committee, I'd like to thank the three of you for coming here and making a presentation. It was a very interesting presentation and, I think, a very interesting dialogue from the members back and forth.

I think that what we'll do is recess for a five-minute comfort break before the next witnesses come forward.

R. Austin (Chair): I'd now like to invite a presentation from Malaspina University College Centre for Shellfish Research. The two witnesses up today are Dr. Penny Barnes and Don Tillapaugh. I'll open the floor to both of you for your presentation.

D. Tillapaugh: Thanks a lot, Mr. Chair. First of all, I'd like to thank you on behalf of Penny and myself for the opportunity to present to you today. We worked through the Clerk and thought that it would be important for us to speak after the BCARDC committee presented because they funded the work that Dr. Barnes is going to be talking about. We thought this would be a good illustration of capacity-building and how taxpayers' moneys are spent wisely on science in action.

When you were at Malaspina, back in the summer when you were just getting started, I didn't anticipate that shellfish aquaculture issues were going to be on the committee's agenda. When we spoke to you at that point in time, I spoke on behalf of Malaspina and explained their role in education in the aquaculture business. However, since the issue of shellfish aquaculture has been presented to the committee, I thought it was our duty — in fact, our obligation — to get in front of you and present the results of Dr. Barnes's research, so that you had that knowledge for your decision-making.

In that regard, John asked, on the AquaPort — in the fancy diagram that Tim, Sam and Bill had on the network — where the international connections are. I dragged Dr. Barnes back from the World Agricultural Society meeting that she was presenting at yesterday in San Antonio, Texas. She arrived back this morning on the plane with John so that she could be here to present today. That's an example of how our connections are made and the knowledge gets discussed.

Our presentation today is that I'm going give you a few introductory slides. Then I'm going to pass the floor over to Dr. Barnes. I'm going to make some additional comments, and then we'll have some questions and answers. With that, maybe I'll just move up to the PowerPoint.

First of all, a little background on me. I'm a graduate of the University of Victoria — many decades ago. I've spent time in the provincial government as a marine biologist, aquaculture specialist and environmental impact biologist. I went to work in the industry. I've worked for North Island College, and I've been at Malaspina for the last five years as the director of the Centre for Shellfish Research.

Dr. Barnes is a graduate of UVic as well. She did her bachelor and master of science degree at UVic. She did her PhD at the University of Plymouth in England and did a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard, and we recruited her from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. So she's obviously highly qualified.

Just where we left off, the last time we met. Malaspina University College has a 25-year history and an international reputation in aquaculture training. Aquaculture research is our emerging strength. The point I made to you at that time, last summer, is that the B.C. aquaculture industry is populated with highly educated Malaspina graduates. One of the other key themes at Malaspina is…. First nations education and training is a large part of what the institution does.

Now, about the Centre for Shellfish Research. What I didn't tell you about in detail last summer, which I will tell you about in overview right now, is that we were established by Malaspina in 2001. Our role is to facilitate the research and training needs of the shellfish aquaculture industry. We act as a catalyst. We can't do it all, but we develop win-win partnerships with a whole variety of institutions and people.

We're designed to serve the entire B.C. coast, and since 2001 we've launched five critical programs. They are, from the left, ecological interactions, about which Dr. Barnes will speak to you today; shellfish health and husbandry; social and economic and policy studies; communications program; and we have a comprehensive training program as well.

Why ecological interactions? Well, we have to figure out the environmental sustainability of the shellfish aquaculture industry. It's critical. That knowledge will help to inform sound, science-based public policy development.

Health and husbandry is fundamental to the profitability of the industry. It will improve global competitiveness and provide opportunities for diversification.

Social and economic policy investigations will help to generate a social licence or social acceptability for aquaculture and better governance.

Training is obviously very important for productivity at the farmsites, and also, highly trained workers help to improve the sustainability of operations. They're not making mistakes. They're doing things properly.

Communications. Obviously, if you're creating knowledge, you have to put it in the hands of people who can put it to work. So communications is important for knowledge mobilization.

The Centre for Shellfish Research extends the reach of Malaspina in terms of producing the next generation of the industry of the future. Here are some examples

of people who have worked with us, particularly with Dr. Barnes, over the last four years.

This is now Dr. Daphne Munroe. She just finished her PhD, and she's gone on to do a post-doctoral research program. She's a new-generation shellfish scientist.

This is Debbie Paltzat. She did her master's degree with Penny on polyculture of oysters and sea cucumbers, a new area of research. She worked for first nations for a while — I'm sorry you can't see this — and now she works for the Ministry of Agriculture and Lands. She's part of the management of the industry.

Anne Bonvegna is a BSc graduate of fisheries and aquaculture. She's worked in the industry, and she's working temporarily now in academia at Malaspina.

Amanda Berens, pictured here next to our new president, Dr. Ralph Nilson, is working on a project with us and the industry at Malaspina at the Centre for Shellfish Research right now.

Soleil Switzer is one of three individuals that Penny still supervises who are doing graduate programs at Malaspina. We're creating and populating the next generation of highly qualified personnel to help move the industry forward.

I gave you Penny's CV, a very short-form CV. It's several pages long. We recruited Penny from the Smithsonian in 2003. The project she's going to talk to you today about is shellfish particulate matter production and cycling. It is the first and the only study of its kind in B.C. You need to understand that. That's the reason we got in front of you today, because you have received presentations from other individuals and other data that's nothing like what you're going to hear today. You need to have the straight goods from the horse's mouth.

This project cost about $580,000 in total, just to do this one project. It's very comprehensive, and there are over 5,000 examples that Penny's team has kept, sampled, processed, analyzed, tabulated and then processed. I'm going to pass the floor over to Penny right now, if you'll just bear with us for a transition, and she'll speak to that.

P. Barnes: The goal of my presentation today is to provide you with a brief introduction to the research projects on ecologically sustainable shellfish aquaculture that either are being or have been worked on, conducted at the CSR, and to present the results of one of these projects in a little more detail.

In 2003 the Centre for Shellfish Research initiated the ecological interactions research program. The CSR was still a very young institution at this time, but they recognized the importance of this field of study to B.C., and they made this program an early priority. In this same year, as Don mentioned, I was recruited to come and head that program, and then in 2004 the research potential of this program was strengthened significantly when I was awarded an NSERC Canada Research Chair. This at least gave some financial stability in terms of salary to the program.

Now, ecological concerns regarding bivalve aquaculture usually relate to the effects of that culture on environmental carrying capacity. Environmental carrying capacity is usually interpreted as the ability of an ecosystem to accommodate a particular activity without decreasing the productivity or the functionality, if you will, of that ecosystem.

Examples of specific concerns in this regard are sufficient food: are the food resources — and we're usually talking about phytoplankton, in this case — sufficient to support a farm of a specific size and nature as well as those naturally occurring or non-cultured organisms that are found in that ecosystem? My program at the CSR has conducted research in this area with Dr. Bill Heath from the B.C. Ministry of Agriculture and Lands.

Other significant concerns relate to benthic or sea floor interactions. Are potential environmental impacts of bivalve aquaculture on the sea floor within the environmental carrying capacity of the ecosystem? The same can be said for biodiversity, whether we're talking about biodiversity on the oyster strings themselves or on the sea floor. Are there changes to biodiversity and are those changes within the carrying capacity of the ecosystem?

Today I'm going to talk about these latter two subjects and the project we've done on this. First of all, how might bivalve culture interact with the benthos? I'm just going to spend the next few minutes giving you a little bit of background on this because I think then you'll see how our research fits into the context.

Cultured bivalves, as I think we all know, feed on naturally occurring phytoplankton, so there's no addition of organic material as feed to the ecosystem. We also know that bivalves package the phytoplankton or the fine suspended material into larger feces and pseudo-feces. If you don't know that term, that means material the bivalves take in and then reject. They clap it out with a little bit of mucus. These larger feces and pseudo-feces sink through the water column towards the sea floor, and they still contain organic material.

We call these biodeposits, by the way. As a result, these biodeposits or biodeposit production by high-density bivalve culture might increase organic input into the sediments. Potential benthic impacts of increased organic input from a variety of both anthropogenic and natural sources have been incredibly well-documented in the literature for the last few decades.

Basically, what you may expect to see is an increased aerobic microbial activity. The bacteria break down the organic material. They suck back the oxygen, and that leads to lower oxygen levels in the sediment or even, in some cases, anoxic conditions where there is no oxygen.

When the oxygen disappears, the anaerobic bacteria take over. One of the by-products of their activity is the production of sulphide. If you think of hydrogen sulphide, rotten-egg gas, that's one of the types of sulphides we're talking about. Sulphide is toxic to most aerobic organisms, so you can see that these environmental changes can lead to changes in benthic-phenol communities. Typically what we expect to see is a decrease in species diversity in benthic areas that are impacted and sometimes survival of a small number of species that are tolerant of those adverse conditions and then become dominant.

Before I go on, I want to stress here that this response is well-documented, but it is not always the case. It

doesn't always occur. The response of sediments to organic loading depends on the levels of organic input, the characteristics of the water column, the current regime, the sediment biogeochemistry and a number of other factors. So it's not necessarily predictable.

It's no surprise, therefore, that while increased production of biodeposits has been well-documented in the literature for a variety of shellfish culture types, the biodeposition rates — the rate at which that material reaches the sea floor — and the benthic impact of those biodeposits are documented as highly variable, and — I want to stress this — they are site-specific.

In fact, factors that affect biodeposition and benthic impact are the culture's species; the particular animal in question; the size of the farm, obviously; the culture method — whether it's deep-water suspended oyster raft culture, which I'm talking about today, or other methods; and, very important, the site characteristics — the depth of the site, the current patterns, how productive the site is.

The influence of these factors, shown on the screen, can make it very difficult to compare two or more environmental impact studies on shellfish aquaculture. And it's very important to be aware when you're comparing, for example, intertidal shellfish culture with subtidal shellfish culture or even two different methods of intertidal shellfish culture that you may be comparing apples with oranges. It's very difficult, if not impossible, to make some of those comparisons.

The other thing that I should point out is that some of these factors shown on the screen here — for example, primary productivity, water-column characteristics — do vary seasonally. That seasonal variation is going to be reflected in the biodeposition rate and potentially the benthic impacts.

I've put this slide on just because it's so nice and colourful. It does show you some interesting stuff. This is on water-column characteristics at one of our study sites. Basically, depth from the water surface down to 20 metres is shown on the vertical axis. This picture here is temperature; salinity; chlorophyll, which we equate to primary productivity or phytoplankton availability; and dissolved oxygen. Across the horizontal axis are our sampling dates. These are across the seasons; here's the winter.

For example, let's look at salinity. If you look as you go down the water column from the water surface, you can see the colours change. The colours, obviously, represent different levels. In this case, what you're seeing is a lower salinity accumulation on the surface in the winter because of increased rainfall.

If we look at chlorophyll — which is quite important, because that's productivity, food availability — you can see that in the wintertime it's fairly well mixed through the water column, but as we move on seasonally it changes quite a bit. In the spring, as we might have predicted, we have higher levels of chlorophyll and some patches of very high productivity. So not only do these factors change throughout the water column, they also change seasonally.

Now, our research project that I'm talking about today was designed to meet three major research objectives in order to address the question of the effect of biodeposits from deep-water suspended Pacific oyster farms on the benthic environment. To answer that question, we designed three research objectives.

Obviously, we wanted to measure biodeposition at the sea floor per unit time at these oyster farms in B.C. and to compare with deposition rates at stations in close proximity to the farms — so we could get an idea of the range of influence, if there was one, of the farm — and then also at reference stations. We wanted to investigate the effects of this deposition on the sediment's physical and geochemical parameters as well as on the benthic communities. Of course, we wanted to measure water currents and other water column variables, which may affect deposition rates at these sites.

Our study was based at two oyster farmsites in B.C., one on Quadra Island and one on Cortes Island in Gorge Harbour. These were chosen because they had very different water depths and different current patterns, so it was a nice contrast to look at how those factors may affect biodeposition and impact. Now, in the interest of available time today, I'm going to present the data from one of those sites only, and that's Village Bay on Quadra Island. I think, even looking at this large-scale chart, you can see Village Bay here has a very wide mouth. It's open to the southeast to this body of water, which is the Strait of Georgia.

This is a picture of our study site. You can see the rafts, which are suspended, and the oyster strings are hung down from those rafts. They penetrate about six to seven metres down into the water column. I've put a little inset photo here that shows you a little more clearly so you can see what they look like. The fieldwork portion of this study ran from July '03 to August '04, and we sampled every three months to accommodate seasonal variation. The oysters were about one year old when we started this study, and the average oyster density at this site was 183 oysters per cubic metre.

Now, this map of Village Bay shows you our sampling design. The farm is located here in the southwest corner of the bay. Ignore the light blue shading; that's actually the farm tenure, and it's much, much larger than the actual farm itself. The farm itself occupies only a small portion of that shaded area.

Basically, we set up a transect that ran through the centre of the farm and parallel to the dominant current directions. On each end of the transect we had a reference station that was at least half a kilometre from the boundary of the active farm. We had two stations that were 50 metres either side of that farm boundary and two stations that were 20 metres either side of the farm boundary.

Station 3, which we called the raft station, was located under the central raft in the farm. I've put blue asterisks beside the reference stations and red beside the raft site. I'll follow this pattern on all the graphs so that you can track this easily.

Now, you don't have to read all of this. I put this table on only to illustrate for you how comprehensive

this study was. This table lists and enumerates the field samples that were taken and processed during this study — you notice that the last column there is sample number — and the field data that were collected. Today I'm going to present data from three key variables only — that is, organic carbon deposition rate, sulphide levels in the sediment, and we'll talk about the benthic invertebrate communities.

The first of these key variables that we're going to look at is total organic carbon deposition. Deposition rates in this study were measured using sediment traps. The sediment trap array shown here…. One was deployed at a depth equivalent to one metre below the maximum depth of the oyster strings to get an idea of what is falling at that depth. The other one was deployed two metres above the sediment surface to get an idea of how much actually reached the benthos.

This slide I'm showing you has a series of five graphs. Each graph represents a different sampling date. On the x-axis of this graph is the transect. Basically, you're going from reference station 1, through the centre of the farm to the raft station, on to reference station 2. Obviously, the stations, in reality, weren't equidistant, even though I've shown them this way on the graph.

On the y-axis is the variable of interest, which in this case is total organic carbon deposition shown as grams carbon per metre squared per day.

You can see that I've added the blue asterisks for the reference station and the red for the raft station. One thing to note immediately is that the different coloured lines are the deep and shallow traps. There is no noticeable difference in deposition rates between the deep traps and the shallow traps.

The other thing to notice is that all of the stations, except the raft station, have consistently low carbon deposition rates. They are consistent across time. Most of these rates were less than half a gram carbon per metre squared per day. Statistically, when we analyzed these data, the organic carbon deposition rate at the raft station was significantly higher than the rates at all of the other stations on all dates, except for January 2004, when you really could not pick up a farm signal at all for organic carbon deposition.

At the raft station the carbon deposition rates ranged from 0.4 grams carbon in January. The highest rate that we recorded was 2.5 grams carbon per metre squared per day in the summer of '04. The other interesting thing that I hope these graphs show you by their repetition is how quickly this deposition signal drops off. This is a very discrete peak so that even when we're only 20 metres beyond the boundary of the farm, those carbon deposition rates are back to the background levels.

I should also point out that the data you see here — the deposition rate data — tells us, with the shallow trap, the rate at which carbon is released from the raft, or at that depth at the other stations, and it tells you the rate at which carbon reaches the deep trap. It does not tell you the fate of that material. It does not tell you what happens to it, and it does not really tell you anything about the impact at that site.

To know more about the impact at the site, one has to look at other variables. One of the variables that's often quoted in the literature is sediment sulphide levels, because they are indicative of impact from high organic loading.

This series of graphs has basically the same format as the other one I showed you, except that on the vertical axis these are sulphide levels in the sediment in micromolar. All of these stations, all of these values — except there was an errant reading over here at one of the reference stations — are less than 800 micromolar sulphide. That puts them within the range of what we call background levels for B.C. coastal sediments, based on a big database that is available through the B.C. MOE, the Ministry of Environment, and also from the literature.

However, statistically, sulphide levels at the raft station were significantly higher than at the reference stations in July 2003, but only July 2003. So when you looked at all of these other dates that we went out, you cannot pick up a farm signal, based on sediment sulphide levels.

Now, the previous graph clearly showed you that there is increased carbon deposition below the rafts. So the question, then, becomes: what's happening to that carbon that we know is being deposited below the raft? The answer to this is that there are several hypotheses, and I'll give you just a couple of them.

One of the hypotheses is that the other stations in Village Bay are subject to input of organic material, leading to sulphide accumulation comparable to the raft site. This is not unusual for coastal sediments in B.C. Organic input can come from a variety of sources. You can get it from terrigenous runoff after a rainfall. You can get it from plankton blooms. These are sporadic sources of organic input, and it's quite likely that you would not be able to document these during the period of time that you're deploying a sediment trap. They may have happened, but you weren't able to actually document them.

I want to point out here that I don't think that is what is happening with these stations in these high sulphide levels. These stations are located in the vicinity of an old log dump. We find this quite often in B.C., that the same sites that were good for log dumps are also good sites for this sort of activity. In our grabs and also in our underwater video tows we have seen isolated pockets of fine wood fibre, heterogeneously spread, but they're there. I think that that's what's going on there. We've got some sporadic organic content.

The second hypothesis and my last hypothesis for today, anyway, is that sulphide may be being produced at the raft stations from that carbon that's being deposited there. It may be being broken down, but the sulphide never accumulates. There's a reason for this. If you remember Village Bay, it was really open to the Strait of Georgia. The site where the farm is, is fairly shallow.

As we look at our water column data, the water column is really well mixed at that site. We get fairly consistent readings all the way to the sea floor, and that means that it's oxygenated. In fact, we've got data showing that it's oxygenated to the sea floor. When you have oxygen present, sulphide spontaneously

disappears. It's oxidized. So it's quite possible that at this station they're breaking down the carbon, but it's just never reaching anoxic conditions. So sulphide is ephemeral.

Okay. Now I'm going to switch gears and talk about the animals. The third key variable, and the last one I'm going to talk about, that's used to determine the impact of organic input on sediments is benthic invertebrate community data. All data that I'm going to present today on this topic is based on samples from benthic grabs. These many, many replicates are washed through a one-millimetre screen, the animals are preserved, they're identified taxonomically, and then they're sent out to specialists for taxonomic verification.

This table…. What I would like you to look at first is the first column, which basically, again, is the transect. So you're running from reference station 1 through the centre of the farm — there's the raft station — down to reference station 2. If we look at these first two columns of data, which are the number of different species we found at that site and the average abundance of organisms that we found at that site, then you can see that there's no indication at all of impoverishment in either the number of different species or the abundance of organisms in relation to the oyster farm site.

In fact, station 3, or the raft station, has the third-highest species diversity of all of the seven stations on the transect, and it has the second-highest abundance numbers. Okay? So we want more information than this. What we want to know is: how evenly distributed are all those organisms in those species? Remember that sometimes when you have organic impact, you can get dominance by a small number of species, and that's indicative of organic impact.

What we do is we calculate diversity indices. In this case I did a number of these, but I'm representing the Swartz's dominance index. What this does is that you count the number of species that account for 75 percent of the abundance. That gives you an idea that the smaller the Swartz's dominance index, obviously the more dominant are a small number of species. The larger the Swartz's dominance index, the more evenly distributed that abundance is.

If you look at these numbers for the raft station here, you see that the SDI is 19.5, which puts it smack in the middle of the evenness distribution. At none of the Village Bay stations are we seeing any evidence of impact in terms of the invertebrate community structure from organic impact.

Now, I'm going to go one step further and say: okay, well, these are numbers, but what about the actual animals that are present there? If you go under the raft at an oyster farm, do you find the same animals that you find at the other stations, or is it a very different community — for whatever reason? To help illustrate that point, I've included these last six columns of different major groups of organisms.

If we look at the bivalves and the segmented worms here, the first thing that we see is that there are some general similarities. Almost all of those Village Bay stations are dominated in terms of abundance — this is abundance numbers, okay? — by the bivalves and the segmented worms. That's common there. But if you were to look at species here — break this down to the lower level of taxonomy — and say, "Okay. Yeah, same groups, but are these of the same species?" the answer is no. The species that are dominant — the dominant bivalves and the dominant polychaetes — at the raft station are different species than are found at the other stations, and there's a reason for this that I'll talk about in a sec.

We get additional information on that community structure by looking at these four big groups. Here we don't even need to think about species, because it's pretty clear what's going on at that higher group level. If we look at snails, 144 average snails at that group — way, way more abundant and, I can tell you, much, much more diverse in terms of number of species than at any of the other stations. If we look at ribbon worms, sponges, hydrozoa, it's the same story — to a lesser extent, but certainly, those groups are much more represented at the raft station than they are at the other stations.

Let's take a look at the organisms in those four last columns. Ribbon worms — which, by the way, get quite large, up to a metre — are carnivorous. They're predators. They hang out wherever there's lots of prey. So if you get an abundance of these, you know there are lots of prey organisms in the area.

The other groups that we found an abundance of on the raft benthos were snails, sponges and hydrozoa. Unfortunately, that doesn't have a common name. All of the hydrozoa and 50 percent of the different snail species were also found on the raft in the fouling community that lives on the raft structure on the oyster shells. One could say that those may have fallen off from the raft and are making a go of it on the bottom. But all of the sponge species and the other half of those snail species were not found in the fouling community on the raft.

What we can say from that is that those species potentially colonize the benthic environment where shell falloff from the rafts is providing hard substrate. That's the key here. These three groups — not the nemerteans — are characteristic of hard substrates. They're found in hard substrates. The dominant species of bivalves and segmented worms that we found are characteristic of hard substrates. We're getting a very diverse, abundant fauna, but it's more characteristic of a hard substrate than it is of a soft substrate.

Not all benthic organisms can be captured in a benthic grab. They're either too large or they're mobile, they see it coming, and they get out of the way. Or they don't see it coming, but they feel it coming. In order to get a handle on what those large, mobile macrofauna are doing, we use underwater video cameras, either ROV or towed video — different types of techniques.

I'm just presenting a tiny little bit of these data today. What I've done is summarize the April '04 just for the raft site and for the reference station that in fact had the highest abundance and diversity at Village Bay. Each one of these colours represents a big group, and the groups are up here, and each line here has the species name.

Each one of these lines is a different species; each colour is a group. You can see that they're kind of broken

up into these rectangles. Each one of those rectangles represents 60 seconds of video footage, with no overlaps. These data are presence/absence data: did we see that species or did we not see that species in that 30-second video clip? They're not representative of relative abundance, but if you look at these two columns, the information that you gain allows you to compare diversity of species with diversity of species. The species diversity was higher at the raft station than it was at the reference station.

It also allows you to compare what we call frequency of occurrence. The frequency of occurrence was higher at the raft station than it was at the reference station. I want to reassure you that we've done all kinds of statistical analyses on these, but I think there's really no need to present that here, because this is quite an illustrative diagram.

In summary, then, today we've looked at total organic carbon deposition rates and seen that they are significantly higher at the raft station than at reference stations on all of the sampling dates except the winter one. We've looked at sediment sulphides and seen that with the exception of the one date, they were not significantly higher at the raft station than at the reference stations. We could not pick out a farm signal.

We've looked at invertebrate faunal communities and seen no indication of faunal impoverishment at the raft site. We've looked at the composition of that community, using very robust statistical analyses, and we found a hard substrate fauna present and differences in species of the dominant groups. We've looked at the large macroinvertebrates that live on the sediment surface and found higher diversity and frequency of occurrence at the raft station than at the reference stations.

I'm going to end my presentation with something different, and that's a short underwater video clip that illustrates the remarkable diversity that's actually found on those strings, on the oyster lines that are hanging down into the water.

In addition to studying the benthic environment, we at the CSR have an active study on the biodiversity associated with these culture facilities. You saw a slide…. One of my graduate students, Soleil Switzer, is working on this for her master's degree.

Don and I were talking this morning about when he first took me out in a boat to this site to look at this. I was just amazed at the diversity. I had spent the previous 20 years working in the tropics. I looked down at this, and I said that this is just like mangrove groups. Every inch is covered with some form of organism. The similarity was amazing, very pretty.

I want to end with acknowledgments for funding. Obviously, the B.C. Aquaculture Research and Development Committee funded this study, as did a fellowship from the Advanced Systems Institute, NSERC through my Canada Research Chair, and a long, long list of individuals that have helped support this study in one way or another.

D. Tillapaugh: Just a few slides to wrap up from what Penny said. To review, any ecological study, especially one of benthic deposition and benthic impact, has a huge number of factors that have to be taken into consideration. Penny reviewed those — this is another review slide — and she dissected them and produced a variety of data that demonstrate the results of her oyster investigation at her Village Bay site. She's got another site, Gorge Harbour, where she's done the same thing.

Without reviewing all of the factors, the bottom bullet…. Penny emphasizes, and I'd like to re-emphasize that when comparing the results of these environmental studies on shellfish aquaculture, it's important to remember to compare apples with apples. We can't compare the results between two sites and expect them to be the same. You have to have apples and apples. You received some presentations before. I think you should consider those oranges, because this is the first and only study of its kind in B.C. Anything you've heard before is an orange. It's not an apple.

I'd like to just transition a little bit to talk about aquaculture in general. It's been characterized as the blue revolution, where agriculture was the green revolution. It's 2,000 years old. It's not that old in B.C. Shellfish culture started in about 1930 — something along those lines. This is a new seafood production paradigm, because capture fisheries are at or beyond their sustainable limit, and many of them are in decline. So it's the way we're going to produce seafood for the future.

Aquaculture in B.C. hasn't become — obviously, as you know better than anybody — part of the social fabric. However, what has become part of the social fabric over the years…. You have 100 years of logging, and logbooms and log-storage areas are part of what we accept. I haven't heard too much in the media lately about those. Conversely, or in comparison, this is an acceptable coastal marine use in Spain. That's not the Lions Gate Bridge; that's Galicia, Spain, and you can see all those oyster rafts that are there.

This is the environmental impact of a marine log-handling area, and it's alienated from its productive base for 100 years or more. Dr. Barnes started her research career looking at benthic infauna in impacted areas from logbooms.

This is an underwater shot of mussel stocks in Galicia, Spain. If you were to take aquaculture activities out of the water column, any impacts they may have had are ephemeral or transitory. They would go back to their natural state within a period of months to — in the worst case, salmon farms in the early '80s — five years, and you couldn't even recognize that it had ever been there.

You take logbooms out or you finish with a marine log-storage area, and you can smell the sulphide for decades. I just want to make that comparison.

One of the species that has attracted some controversy with the media attention lately has been scallop culture. I thought we might get a question on that today, so I took the liberty of preparing a bit of discussion around that.

Scallop culture — can we compare it with oyster culture? Well, I've just told you you've got to be careful

of apples and oranges, and apples and apples. We haven't investigated scallop culture, so I'll state that up front, but can we inform or offer some results of our oyster research to inform the discussion? I say yes — carefully, and with all the caveats that I just reviewed from Penny's work. How are we going to do that? The approach I will use is to work from what we know, so let me just lead you through this briefly.

Oyster raft culture is pictured on the left there. That's Penny's study site on the left, and you can see that the rafts are fairly concentrated. This is an aerial view of scallop long-lines. You can't see them, but you can see these boats right here, here and here, and there's line there, line there and line there. There's 20 to 30 metres between each line, and there's just a single line of scallops.

This is the raft on the left, and that's what Penny has been studying: the deposition from that kind of concentration of animals under this raft. There's a horizontal longline here. This is scallops on the right. These are the downlines on which there are ear-hung scallops. You can see the relative density on the right versus on the left. So that's the culture situation.

How much fecal matter or biodeposits are they producing? Well, we went back to the literature — what we know — and Dr. Barnes has found that a ten-centimetre oyster will produce 33.5 milligrams dry weight of carbon per day. A ten-centimetre scallop, from sources that we got out of the literature, will produce 35.3 units per day, so they're relatively the same.

All else being equal, if oysters and scallops have the same or comparable feces production rates and if their rearing densities were the same — that is to say, the same number of animals in a cubic volume of water…. If they are identical and they're reared in the same location, then we'd expect similar benthic deposition rates. And Penny has already showed you, demonstrated, that at her site the benthic impact of oyster farming is ecologically sustainable. So we would expect that scallops would be the same. However, are the rearing densities the same with scallops and oysters? Well, they're not. The answer is no.

The aerial views would show you that the scallop culture is far more extensive — i.e., far less intensive — than oyster culture. If this is an oyster raft drawn in a cube, the oyster raft is seven metres wide, seven metres long and seven metres deep. That's the volume of the water: 343 cubic metres of water that surrounds a raft.

This raft is in Village Bay. There are 47,000 animals that live in these 343 cubic metres of water. So the density is 183 animals per metre cubed, as Penny has already shown you.

In her Gorge Harbour site, a little different culture density — 41,000 animals; 157 per cubic metre. Now, if you take the same volume of water and you put that one scallop longline through it, there are only 6,576 animals in the same volume of water, or 19 animals per metre cubed.

What does that mean? It means scallop-rearing density on longlines is approximately nine times less dense than oyster culture. Dr. Barnes has already indicated that oyster culture has acceptable benthic impacts. So we would expect that the scallop longline culture would have much fewer benthic impacts than an already acceptable oyster culture activity. I just wanted to put that in perspective for you. I thought it might help you.

Bill Pennell mentioned something about the little initiative I'm trying to lead about research centres and research capacity. The work that Penny has been able to do over the last three years has been instrumental in allowing us to have, today, information to present to you, the committee, so that you can assess the information you have on whether shellfish or oyster culture — or even scallop culture, for that matter now — are sustainable activities. That was important.

We had developed the research capacity, and it was vital to address key issues. In fact, we anticipated that this question would be asked — that the public would want to have that question answered — in 2003 when we started this. It's early 2007, and we've just got the answers. It's a long process. It's been worth the wait, I hope. That's really important, to build that capacity.

Research results can help to frame or provide context regarding new issues. The scallop. Dissection of that issue was an example of how I can take what we know and, with certain caveats, say, "Okay, is it an issue or is it not an issue? Is it a big issue or is it a small issue?" — that kind of thing. It gives some context.

Research knowledge can help to shape the future. We can now use that knowledge to shape public policy. Are densities appropriate for oyster culture or for scallop culture? Can we farm them more densely and make better use of our capital? And we can increase productivity. Finally, if we've got knowledge to say that these activities are environmentally sustainable, then we should be able to get a social licence to undertake those activities based on their environmental record.

We're the Centre for Shellfish Research, started in 2001. It's 2007. We're five years old, and we have developed the capacity to do a number of things over those five years. There's a lot of conversation about, "How much money does it take?" and where we'll spend it.

Malaspina keeps the lights and heat on and provides us with some support in that regard, in terms of services. But all of the other programming and infrastructure that we've assembled has been done on soft funding.

We're just one of a number of centres. Because of that, we have had to develop collaborative partnerships within industry and government and academia. We all work together.

We have bridged out to the aquaculture industry — what are their issues? How can we help? — and to coastal communities and to first nations: "Could you become involved in this?" We involve environmental non-government organizations in our stakeholder consultations. Are we addressing the issues that are of concern to them as well?

Through this process we provide better value for taxpayers' dollars to do research. Research centres — not the Department of Fisheries and Oceans or individual scientists in academic institutions — which need these collaborations to thrive, are the new paradigm for research in the future.

Aquaculture: the blue revolution. Agriculture: the green revolution. Sustainable aquaculture: the green-blue revolution. We can, through sustainable aquaculture, green the planet. There is a lot of talk recently about climate change. Penny and I were talking about this driving down today, how it's taken a long time to come up with a definitive study that says: "Actually, we should pay attention to climate change."

We've got a lot of information coming now that says we can do aquaculture sustainably. So we can green the planet through aquaculture. We can feed the planet. There is a 50 to 80 million metric ton shortfall in seafood. That's a $50 billion food opportunity per year, and it's got to come from aquaculture, because fisheries are at their limit.

One thing that's never mentioned but that I think needs more attention is that seafood produces healthier citizens. Omega-3 fatty acids, high cholesterol. They are health benefits to individuals. They will improve people's quality of life, keep more people alive, and they'll save us billions of dollars in health care in the future. That's sort of getting beyond where we're going, but I think it's something you need to consider, because it's all about budgets.

What I propose to do is, because we're the Centre for Shellfish Research…. There are other centres in exactly the same situation; we're focused on different areas. The Centre for Aquatic Health Sciences in Campbell River — in the winter you had two presentations from their scientists, Dr. Valerie Funk and Dr. Sonja Saksida. I remember listening in and, after their presentations, Ron Cantelon said: "Well, we can dispel that myth."

They provided, like Dr. Barnes, hard scientific data on specific issues that they'd been researching, and they clarified the issue for you. That's the value of centres. Dr. Barnes has done it for shellfish — one aspect. The two doctors from the Centre for Aquatic Health Sciences have done it. Dr. McKinley and his group are doing it at the Centre for Aquaculture and Environmental Research at UBC-DFO.

The Pacific SEA-Lab. Bill mentioned AquaPort. Together they form an integrative, cohesive and strategic research network that supports the green-blue revolution. That's the end of my talk. Thanks for listening.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): Thank you very much, Don and Dr. Barnes, and thank you for coming so far from what must have been quite an interesting conference in San Antonio on sea lice and shellfish. I looked at some of the studies that were done — quite a few on shellfish.

A couple of questions. You were discussing the benthic material. There is a buildup of carbon now. When it turns to sulphide, you know it's anaerobic and that's not a good thing, but are there any long-term consequences of carbon buildup?

P. Barnes: I actually didn't say that there was a buildup of carbon. I didn't show the slide of the data that we have for percent of total organic material in the sediments. In fact, there isn't a signal at the farm for total organic carbon buildup. It's quite the opposite. It's impossible to pick out the farm signal for total organic carbon buildup.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): So there isn't. What about oxygen levels? Can you make any comment?

P. Barnes: We didn't measure oxygen levels in the sediments. However, we measured sulphide levels. Since the two are mutually exclusive, then that does…. We also measured oxidation reduction potentials. In Village Bay the sediments tend to have positive redox values, so that's indicative of oxygen being present.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): Right. So if you have sulphide, then you don't have it?

P. Barnes: But it's sporadic, and they can be very heterogeneous. So you can have an organism that's died over here and the sulphide levels are very high, and right next to it, a few centimetres over, you can have oxygenated sediments. That's something that is intrinsic in understanding sulphide and oxygen sediment data.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): We certainly seem to have an increased biodiversity underneath the raft.

P. Barnes: You could argue that it's a good thing. It does appear to enhance, I always say, localized diversity. In order to put that data into context so that you could come out and say definitively, "Do these rafts increase regional biodiversity?" you would need a very comprehensive study of the ecosystem that those farms are housed in. We don't have that data in B.C. That's a large undertaking.

Unless we can record the biodiversity of our coastal ecosystems, how can we put it into context? However, I can tell you that at the Village Bay site there are some sites with hard substrate that we've looked at, and the organisms are comparable — the type of organisms that we find there. But still, the diversity and abundance is higher at the raft.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): Does it affect the naturally occurring species in that area, genetically speaking? I mean, are we now…? I guess the concern is: are we introducing new species to the area that are falling off the raft? Are we changing the nature of the genetic coding of the organisms that are there?

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): Not necessarily, but are we importing different species into that area?

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): One thing you didn't comment on in the study was the feed. It has come up that these rafts basically act as a filter for all the phytoplankton that don't come out the other side of the raft. This is presumed to affect downstream nutrition. Can you comment on that?

P. Barnes: I haven't answered that question directly, but there have been a lot of studies in the past, even some at Gorge Harbour, that have addressed that question. I currently have a PhD student at Dalhousie who's looking at optical sensors deployed on either side of the raft as a way of gauging the productivity that goes into that raft, how much is slurped out by the animals and what comes out the other side. To my knowledge, studies to date have not shown this to be an issue in British Columbia at the densities we're working with right now.

Just a comment there, almost a throwaway that you had put to us, Don. It comes to an issue we raised earlier about the precautionary principle and the fact that a key element of that is long-term irreversible damage. You commented that with a raft, if fish farming were removed, no evidence that it was ever there would be there within five years, or something like that. Maybe you could expand your comment.

D. Tillapaugh: In the early days of salmon farming, salmon farms were located in enclosed bays and poorly circulated areas, shallow areas. There was a study done by UVic. They studied farms that had been removed. They followed the remediation course, or how it changed over time after the farm had been removed. In the worst-case scenario, it was five years that they were able to detect the signal from the farm. After that it was back to normal.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): That certainly wouldn't be the case with log booms. We wouldn't….

D. Tillapaugh: Can I just add one thing? Ron was mentioning the hard substrate issue, and Penny indicated that more research would be done. In order to put it into context, I would just add that if a proponent wants to make a change in the marine foreshore and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans came in to do an assessment and thought there was going to be an impact on fish habitat, they would issue a prescription. Part of that prescription has been, and continues to be, the deposit of raw boulders and rocks onto soft bottoms to create hard substrate habitat for animals.

In essence, there's a policy already in existence from the federal government that creates hard substrate. They've already decided that's a good thing. We can elaborate the reasons later. Shell falloff from rafts is exactly the same thing. In fact, we're creating habitat that Fisheries and Oceans would like to see created.

P. Barnes: The rafts themselves are a three-dimensional hard substrate, almost an artificial reef type of structure.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): A couple of quick ones, Chair, if I may. One was that I saw a lot of fish swimming through this. It's quite an interesting video. We've heard concerns that this interferes with fish culture and the natural fish in the areas. Do you have any studies or anecdotal evidence? There seem to be a lot of fish swimming around there. Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

D. Tillapaugh: It's a delicatessen for fish. The video quite clearly showed all those prey organisms that are inhabiting — you know, biofouling — the hard shells of the oysters and their prey. The fish are swimming there for two reasons, I guess. One, they're eating what's available to eat, and two, protection. They're hiding.

P. Barnes: The lines hang down, and they form vertical disruption. Most predators just have vision…. They're vertically disrupted, so it makes great camouflage for them.

D. Tillapaugh: Coming back to DFO, what DFO does in streams to increase habitat and to grow more baby salmon is to put in root wads, with the bottoms of trees. They take them, put them in the stream, bury them and create all kinds of complex habitat for little fish to hide in. The raft structures are the same thing.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): Last question: is it better in bays or in open sounds for the oyster rafts, and so forth?

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): As opposed to tidal movement that is very key for salmon farms. It's not so critical….

P. Barnes: No. These are suspended in the top six to seven metres. They're far from the bottom in the sites. This is a subtidal form of culture. It's not related to shallow water.

S. Simpson: One question. The Gorge Harbour, the other site — did you find anything there that was significantly different than at Village Bay?

P. Barnes: In the general themes or trends that I've presented today, no, not really. I didn't present that site, because it's a much more complex site. It's deeper. It has very complex current patterns. It has gyres that cause deposition of organic material from other sources — natural sources — far away from the farm.

Basically, the trends are the same, but Gorge Harbour overall is a more depositional environment. The whole harbour is collecting organic material from runoff. Our reference stations consistently had higher sulphide levels than anywhere near the raft because of organic materials depositing. It's a little more complex to interpret, but in answer to your question: yes, the general trends are the same.

S. Fraser: Several comments. Thanks for taking us through Swartz's dominance index.

S. Fraser: A very Coles Notes version. It was good, though; it was understandable. That's a credit to you, so thank you for that.

Just a couple of things on what Ron was saying around the carrying capacity. I know in Lemmens Inlet in Clayoquot Sound, Meares Island, there was carrying capacity work done there by AquaMetrics. Capacity wasn't an issue with the nutrients, with arguably a fairly low density of farms there compared to other areas. The size of the site that you studied, Village Bay: how large was that, Dr. Barnes — the tenure itself, or the actual footprint of the farm? Was it five, ten hectares or something?

D. Tillapaugh: I can't tell you in hectares, but there were 24 rafts, three rows of eight. Then inshore of that, there were about three long lines, which were probably about 300 feet long with a string culture — so a couple of acres, if that.

S. Fraser: In comparison with…. You're mentioning scallops and scallop farms. There is an issue around a scallop farm proposal that's going forward. There are a lot of issues that have been brought forward, the benthic issue being one. So this is very helpful information for the committee. I've dived on sites. There is a multitude. It's like an artificial reef.

The fisheries issues that Ron raised with me were not around whether or not the fish would grow or were going to be impacted. It was if we were going to be able to access them. If you're looking at a tenure site that's 100, 200 or 300 hectares, that's different. There are a number of issues around that besides just the straight biological….

I guess you look at those straight biological issues as research. You don't look at some of those larger issues that are raised as concerns from the public, whether they're valid or not. I'm not making comment. There are all sorts of them: access to fisheries, access through boats.

D. Tillapaugh: That's a good question, Scott. We have the ecological interactions research program, just biological research. Health and husbandry — we'd look at production-related stuff. The social and economic portfolio — we would work with other professors and scientists, much the same as Bill Pennell described, to look at what the social issues are, but there's nothing to do with conflict resolution.

Typically, we wouldn't get into that arena. What are the facts? We're trying to find the facts.

P. Barnes: I wouldn't be involved in that. I just do the research and generate the information.

S. Fraser: I appreciate that. Lastly, just to Don, we've got a deep-bay site that you're looking at developing for research. I've had the pleasure of Brian and you taking me on a tour of it. Are you getting any help? Are you getting sufficient funding to deal with that? Is government coming forward with any help provincially?

D. Tillapaugh: That's a good question, Scott. We were able to fund the development of the research portion of the field station research site with the Canada Foundation for Innovation grant of $900,000, with matching funds from the B.C. knowledge development fund out of Advanced Ed for $900,000. The seven acres of land was donated to us from a private donation. That created over $2 million for us to build a small facility on the upland and to develop some demonstration farm facilities floating on the water and on the beach.

However, while I've got this opportunity, we've expanded our vision beyond just research to try and build a facility that would facilitate more training for first nations, more public engagement with regards to bringing Elderhostel in or kindergarten-to-grade-12 people. It's to engage the public in what it is to walk on a beach, to be involved in how shellfish aquaculture fits into the beach — the social and the ecological frameworks — and to try and engage the public and educate them that way. For that measure, and to facilitate that part of the vision, we are presently trying to raise another $3.8 million.

It's interesting you asked Brian Kingzett, who is the field station manager and is sitting in the audience behind me in the white shirt. He's about to go over to Vancouver next week to work. We're working with Ecotrust Canada on that, to be quite honest. They're helping us to develop our fundraising package. We're presently going to be going to the foundations and other philanthropic organizations to see if we can raise non-government funds for that. We've got the government funds. Now we're going to try and go somewhere else.

Having said that, to make a clear point about the B.C. Aquaculture Research and Development Committee, they had $3.7 million starting in 2002 or 2003. They don't have any more money for research.

In the five years I've been running the Centre for Shellfish Research, the number of sources for research funds to do projects such as Dr. Barnes does has gone from about five down to one or two. Now, we've got some capacity but no gas, so to speak. Before we didn't have the car and had some gas. So we need to have a balance between the car, the gas capacity and the funding.

R. Austin (Chair): Thank you very much. Seeing no further questions, I'd like to thank both of you for the presentation. It was fascinating. Even the science was presented in a way that even MLAs, I think, understood quite clearly.

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Committee Staff:	Kathryn Butler (Committee Researcher)

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS (Hansard)

SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON SUSTAINABLE AQUACULTURE

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON
SUSTAINABLE AQUACULTURE