Sustainable Aquaculture — Issue No. 13 — Tuesday, June 20, 2006 (HTML)

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

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON
SUSTAINABLE AQUACULTURE



CONTENTS

		Page

Economic Study Contract		275

Deferral of Finfish Aquaculture Application Decisions		275

Presentations		277
	C. Barnes
	A. Gottesfeld
	C. Nyce
	G. Bennett
	A. Williams
	M. Dalen
	B. Hill
	E. Hamer
	B. Zeerip
	R. Miller
	G. Hayes
	G. Knox
	F. Seiler
	R. Dozzi
	G. Clark
	S. Spalding
	B. Mounce

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

Witnesses:

Chris Barnes (Gitxsan Watershed Authorities)
Chief Glenn Bennett (Skeena Native Development Society)
George Clark
Mary Dalen
Randy Dozzi
Dr. Allen Gottesfeld (Gitxsan Watershed Authorities)
Edmon Hamer
George Hayes
Bruce Hill
Greg Knox (Skeena Angling Guides Association)
Ric Miller
Bill Mounce
Clarence Nyce (CEO, Skeena Native Development Society)
Fred Seiler (Silvertip Eco Tours Ltd.)
Sue Spalding
Andrew Williams (Friends of Wild Salmon)
Brad Zeerip (Z-Boat Lodge River Guides Ltd.)

R. Austin (Chair): Good afternoon. I would like to call this meeting to order.

The first point of business is with regards to the proposals that came in to our RFP in terms of the economic analysis of the salmon farming industry. We have come to a decision on that?

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): I'd like to move that we engage MMK Consulting and Golder Associates to do the economic study for us. Their bid came in at $105,000, which is within the scope of the budget we outlined.

S. Simpson: I'd like to move the following motion: that the Special Committee on Sustainable Aquaculture call on the government of British Columbia to table and defer all decisions on new finfish aquaculture applications, including those currently before the statutory decision-maker, until the committee has submitted its final report to the Legislative Assembly.

R. Austin (Chair): The motion is now under discussion. Any speakers to the discussion?

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): I feel that the motion is out of order and inappropriate, inasmuch as the Legislature considered the issue of a moratorium and decided not to include it in our terms of reference. We knew that coming in. I think it's inappropriate to change the intent and direction of our committee. We knew what the rules were, and I think this would be disruptive.

S. Simpson: I respect the view of the member, but I don't agree. I believe this motion is totally appropriate. The committee was appointed by the Legislature. The motion acknowledges that this committee has no authority at all over decisions around fish farms — new applications. It has no jurisdiction over those.

What we do know, Mr. Chair, is that we have continually heard that the work of this committee will potentially be compromised if we continue to see new applications approved. We saw an application approved at Bennett Point. We know there are two other applications in front of the statutory decision-maker. We have heard that there may be further applications. The Ministry of Agriculture and Lands has told us that there are a dozen of those applications in process right now.

I believe that if we're going to do our work, we should provide this advice to government. Government has, obviously, every right. It's their prerogative to choose to respect our wishes or to ignore them. Should this motion pass, that's their prerogative. I accept and respect that, but we as a committee should be giving the advice that we need to give to government. In order for us to be able to do the best job possible, I believe that the continuing of these applications will create a problem.

I'll speak in favour of the motion. I know that it's certainly come to my attention from members of the public that our ability to do our job, our credibility as a legislative committee, would be somewhat hamstrung if there were to be a flurry of tenures let while we're doing our deliberations, so I'm speaking in favour of the motion.

R. Austin (Chair): Any other speakers to the motion? Okay. Seeing none, I'll put the question on the motion.

S. Simpson: Just a quick point of information. I would ask, then, that we'll supply this — that the Chair relay this message in a letter or a correspondence from the Chair to the appropriate minister.

Good afternoon. My name is Robin Austin. I'm the Chair of the Special Committee on Sustainable Aquaculture. I would like at this time to recognize that we are here on traditional territory of the Kitsumkalum people, where we have enjoyed a most wonderful lunch in the last hour. I would like to acknowledge, on behalf of all members of the committee, how much we enjoyed the lunch that was presented to us, and I would like to thank all the students of the 'Na aksa Gila Kyew Learning Centre who put that on for us.

I would like to take this opportunity to welcome you to the Aquaculture Committee's public hearing here in Terrace. It is a real pleasure for us to be in your community and to hear directly from you about this important topic.

For your information, today's meeting is a public meeting which will be recorded and transcribed by Hansard Services. A copy of this transcript, along with the minutes of this meeting, will be printed and made available on the committees website at www.leg.bc.ca\cmt\aquaculture.

In addition to the meeting transcript, a live audio webcast of this meeting is also produced and available on the committees website to enable interested listeners to hear the proceedings as they occur. An archived copy of the audio broadcast will also be retained on the committees website.

Let me also, for the benefit of the presenters, read out the mandate that this committee has. The Special Committee on Sustainable Aquaculture was reissued the following terms of reference by the Legislative Assembly on February 20, 2006: that the committee be empowered to examine, inquire into and make recommendations with respect to sustainable aquaculture in British Columbia and in particular, without limiting the generality of the foregoing, to consider the economic and environmental impacts of the aquaculture industry in B.C.; the economic impact of aquaculture on B.C.'s coastal and isolated communities; sustainable options for aquaculture in B.C. that balance economic goals with environmental imperatives, focusing on the interaction between aquaculture, wild fish and the marine environment; and B.C.'s regulatory regime as it compares to other jurisdictions. The committee is to report to the House no later than May 31, 2007.

Today we have a number of people working with us. Adam Wang and Wendy Collisson are here from Hansard Services. They record what is said during the hearing, and then Hansard produces a transcript of what people say, which as I've mentioned, is posted on the Internet.

We also have staff here from the Office of the Clerk of Committees. To my left we have Kate Ryan-Lloyd, our Committee Clerk, and our researcher Brant Felker is at the information table at the front of the room.

I would now like to invite members of the committee to introduce themselves, starting on my right.

I would now like to encourage presenters to throw as much light as they can on the mandate of this committee to help us in our work.

We are running a few minutes ahead of time, which is a nice change from what's been going on the last time. I do see at least one early presenter here, so I'm going to ask, first of all, if Chris Barnes is here. I don't think so, but I do see Dr. Allen Gottesfeld. I'm wondering if Dr. Gottesfeld would be willing to come and present 20 minutes early.

Thank you. Please come up to the witness table, Allen. Do you have a PowerPoint, Allen?

R. Austin (Chair): Okay. We'll just take a few minutes, then, to set that up. We'll recess for ten minutes while that's set up.

R. Austin (Chair): Good afternoon. I'd like to bring the meeting back to order.

The first presentation is a joint presentation by Dr. Allen Gottesfeld and Chris Barnes, who are with the Gitxsan Watershed Authorities. The floor is yours.

C. Barnes: First of all, I'd like to thank you all for coming and listening to our concerns — hoping to get some good decisions made today or in the next few days, next few months.

The Gitxsan have been following this issue for the last four years or so. I think in May '02 we started to follow the issues, seeing that the farms were moving further north from the south archipelago and those initiatives down there. Our chiefs have been really upset about that and got us to follow the problem and scientifically try to figure out what we can do to help not the fish farms directly but the natives within our territories.

The Gitxsan have 10,000 natives in our territory. They have a big problem with some of the concerns, especially with the pink and sockeye smolts migrating into the estuary and that, and 80 percent or 90 percent of them — I can't remember the number off the top of my head — are going through Strouts Point and Anger Anchorage on the way out. Then they come back that way, obviously. They go out on the high water. It mostly goes by the flow of the water, but 80 or 90 percent of the water flows out through Ogden Channel. That's one of our biggest concerns.

The other big problem is IHN, which is infectious hematopoeitic necrosis, which attacks the liver of sockeye. That's another problem we have, on top of sea lice. So we're really concerned, because the Gitxsan depend on the sockeye stocks, for sure, in terms of survival.

The only message that I got from my hereditary chiefs, not a band council, was that they will not allow it and that they'll do any actions that they have to, to stop it. There are 10,000 of us. It's a big part of the north. Given the fact that the economics has gone downhill for a long time, you know, most of the protein they get is from the salmon.

I guess I'll leave it at that. I mean, that's the bottom line. It's that they will fight it. They will go to court. They do want to meet with the federal and provincial governments at a high level. We're meeting with the province right now as the Gitxsan Nation, but we're at a low bureaucracy level and not getting too much feedback, so we're going to step up the process, given our last AGM.

I would expect that they may decide to go to court action or go to a higher level of consultation, which we haven't had, especially from the federal government. We haven't had any consultation. We've had a bit of movement from the provincial side, but as I say, at a low bureaucracy level, where they more or less are just taking notes and going back and not doing very much.

Other than that, I don't have too much to say. I just wanted to deliver that message: that it'll be really hard in the next few years if we aren't accommodated and aren't consulted with in a reasonable fashion. That's all I have to say for now.

A. Gottesfeld: I'm Allen Gottesfeld. I've long been a resident of Skeena, about 30 years. A scientist. I work with salmon in rivers, and the river process and salmon. Now, I wanted to talk about the science of sea lice. At this part of the presentation I didn't want to talk about the science. I'm going to talk about best science and the concept of best science. Real science gets published in scientific journals, peer-reviewed. This business of looking at impacts of net-pen salmon aquacultures is now three or four years old and has four years' history on the B.C. coast.

I guess four years ago we didn't know anything about it, although there was experience in Europe and in eastern North America and in Chile, which led some people to expect there to be problems with sea lice in salmon aquaculture. It turned up in 2002. A chunk of money went into doing research on it — the pink salmon action plan in 2003 and 2004. A couple of million dollars went to research.

Some peer-reviewed publications have come out for…. I wanted to review that for you. I've made an attempt for the presentation to quote all of the peer-reviewed scientific publications. I mean, this is the real stuff, and the other stuff is propaganda — great literature. This is the science.

The first paper that came out in 2004 was from Alexandra Morton and her colleagues, talking about sea lice infection rates on pink and chum salmon in the Broughton. Two things that came out of this…. This paper is in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, and that's a respectable journal in the world — right up there in the top ten.

The first thing this Morton paper says is that there are nine times more lice near salmon farms than distant from them in the Broughton. Then it went on to look at the Broughton compared to other parts of B.C. remote from salmon farms. They found there was a hundred- to a thousand-fold difference between sea lice occurrences. We know now there are more sea lice around salmon farms in the Broughton than elsewhere.

The next is another paper of Alexandra Morton and Rick Routledge in the next year, 2005. The question is: what happens to those little pink salmon and little chum salmon that get sea lice on them? The 2005 paper about mortality rates showed that they die. It's a really simple experiment that was run.

This was published in the Alaska Fishery Research Bulletin, and that's not in the top ten in the world for publications for where you put your science. How come they put it in there? Well, this wasn't rigorous lab science. They caught these little fish which had lice on them or didn't have lice on them and held them in barrels with the ends cut out, little cages hanging off their floats, and counted how many died. Nearly all of the little pinks and chums that had sea lice mature on them….

The sea lice get to the stage where they're throwing them around and eating holes in them. They died — 98 percent in one experiment and 88 percent in another. Less in the third, but in the third one they were really immature stages. A few of them got to the mature stages, and those that got to be mature lice — not the fish…. Only one fish survived with a motile louse on it. It was indicative of problems.

The third paper, another paper of Alexandra Morton, is from 2005. It's looking at the effectiveness of that fallowing program in the pink salmon action plan of 2003. They found that there was a tenfold decrease in the number of sea lice on pink salmon swimming past the salmon farms than swimming down the channel where the salmon farms were fallow. The next year, when fallowing was abandoned, the rates went back up to the same level they were in year one. Sounds like pretty good news. Fallowing that was proposed in 2003 as a response to the pink salmon problems. It works.

Now, this paper is not published. It's from Craig Orr. He assures me that this is accepted for publication in the North American Journal of Fisheries Management. I'm violating my rule a little bit — of only talking about stuff that's actually published. I meant to check the journal this morning and see if it's out yet, but I think sometime in the next few weeks we'll see this one appear.

When the province decided to go for the pink salmon action plan in 2003, they held a conference in Vancouver — January or early February. That had scientists from around the world to talk about the problems. It meant, of course, that they brought in lots of Norwegian experts. One of them was this guy, Peter Andreas Heuch, who talked about his model for estimating the efficacy of sea lice control efforts that were being made in Norway. The model was to count the number of sea lice there are in a number of farmed salmon, multiply it by the number of eggs they produce per week, and then you might have some idea of what the infection pressure is.

Craig Orr has just done this for B.C., and he's got impressive numbers. He's done this with the data provided by Stolt, by the fish farmers — finally some cooperation. We got two years of data with the number of farmed fish and the number of lice on the fish. Craig's got two billion to ten billion eggs produced per two-week interval — a lot of salmon lice eggs.

He compares this, and he goes on to model this against the background infection pressure and comes out with the suggestion that the vast majority of the sea lice infection in the Broughton comes from lice from farmed salmon, particularly in the springtime when there aren't many natural sources, before the annual fish come back. But that's when the little pinks are coming by, getting the lice and dying.

Marty Krkošek and his colleagues wrote a paper on: how do you think about that? You know, biological models tell you how to think about these situations, and this went to the Royal Society of London, the biology branch — the most prestigious place in the world to publish. But this guy, Krkošek…. He's hot. He's a really astonishing, brilliant guy and picked up by the world — maybe not popular in B.C., but he is in the world. A prophet in his own land, I think.

This is a big one on how to think about it. The features are that he assumes a point source, that you want to model sea lice with salmon that come from one spot — the farm — and in a background that's widespread, which is generalized all around. The water moving past the farm has a net movement of so many metres or kilometres per day so that as you move down Knight channel, they get to be older and older. The sea lice grow up. The fish get bigger. Sea lice get into their second generation and start reproducing with one another.

I don't know if that's useful. It's modelled. But what's significant about it is that he then went out and spent months out there catching little fish to see what the occurrence of lice was on them. And they agreed; the observations out in the world agree with the model extraordinarily well. That's what's wonderful about this paper and why it's in the Royal Society of London.

Ken Brooks wrote a paper a few months later attacking Krkošek's model, and he used numbers on the current velocity measured in the midchannel from seven or nine sites that the Institute of Ocean Sciences was running — and water temperature measurements. They use this then to model the movement of water. Brooks took the rates of movement from the paper and said, "Well, water is moving much faster than Krkošek says it is, so I don't believe him."

The salinity measurements in the water…. Salinity is too low to grow lice, based on an earlier paper by Stewart Johnson. But Johnson wasn't looking into that kind of problem. The percentage of survival in his experiments I don't think is very reliable. That's what Stewart Johnson told me. The way science works….

This one went to reviews in fishery science. Marty Krkošek was upset to read the news, and I asked him: "Why don't you write a paper in reply?" They said: "Sure, but it has to be peer-reviewed; it's got to be real." Krkošek did. They took it, and then Brooks got Dario Stucchi to help him write a reply to the modelling of Krkošek. So there's a little back-and-forth there, and you could read it and make up your mind on it.

The way I would sort this stuff out, I think, is…. Brooks's argument — that by models it shouldn't really work the way Krkošek said it does — isn't as strong an argument as Krkošek saying: "Here's the model. I went out and looked, and that's the way it is." That's a much stronger argument to me.

One more paper out there. Now we're getting into the little corners of the argument. Alexandra Morton and Rick Routledge wrote a paper that came out in last few months on Fulton's condition factor. This is peculiar in that it's nowhere in the published literature. Fulton's factor really was that some DFO scientist said: "True, there are a lot of lice on those wild pink salmon, but it doesn't do them any harm. They grow just as fast. We measure them with Fulton's condition factor." That wasn't ever peer-reviewed. I don't think they could have gotten that through — whether they've tried and failed, I don't know — because it was a silly argument. But here's the paper that says, "Here's the fallacy; you can't do it that way," and that one went to the North American Journal of Fisheries Management, which is up there in the top five in the world.

Dick Beamish of the DFO put a paper out last year in fisheries research. He was looking at lice and returning adult salmon, and finding lots on there. When the adults come back late in the summer, they've got lots of lice up there. I'm involved in a project like that. We're running one on the coast right now in conjunction with Beamish. We're collaborating on it.

The last one. The data finally came out on this modelling of current moving from the Institute of Ocean Sciences. I got to see it a week ago, preparing for today. I couldn't wait to see it. You heard all these rumours that Krkošek's model is no good and that the IOS data doesn't support it. Well, what's it say? That's all it says, and there's the quote: "Consequently, these surface flows can be expected to have important implications for the potential interactions, such as transfer of sea lice and viruses between farmed and wild salmon." Krkošek, Morton, 2005. Looks to me like Foreman is satisfied with those conclusions — at least, didn't pick a fight on it.

That's it. That's everything in the best science — the whole stuff. I'd say the conclusions are pretty simple. Salmon farms are a source of sea lice. That's the first paper of Morton's. Also, the modelling of Craig Orr. I tried this morning to think about how it could not be so. As long as there are holes in the net, it must be so. The eggs are being produced on one side of the net, and they're showing up on the other side of the net. They're moving through.

Infestation of wild salmon with sea lice is hard on your salmon farms. That's the first paper. Salmon louse infestation kills juvenile pinks and chum salmon — yeah, maybe not all the time but 98 percent of the time.

Most of the salmon lice in the Broughton come from salmon farms apparently. The implication in Krkošek's paper is that salmon farms are 70 times more important in a unit area than the background infection pressure. The suggested number from Orr's paper — oh, it's in the ten- , 20- , 50-times kind of range.

When you look at sea lice in the Broughton, the problem that has to be dealt with is: are we talking about only 97 percent of the lice coming from farms, or is it 99.5 percent or 99.8 percent? That's the range of the papers in here. Those are the implications.

The effect of salmon farms in raising sea lice infestation levels extends 30 to 70 kilometres downflow to the sea. Marty's paper says 30 to 40. Ken Brooks's paper opposed Krkošek's conclusions. He said: "No, no. They go much further." That would mean that if Brooks is right, then the problem is going to be in the Queen Charlotte Strait and the Johnstone Strait, and it's going to hit all of the Fraser fish, which is not good news. We don't have some solutions for how to deal with it.

Salmon louse problems can be alleviated by fallowing farms. The data that's out in that paper of Craig Orr's shows remarkable and strong declines of sea lice egg production and infection pressure after treatment with SLICE.

As for fallowing, that's in Alexandra's paper, with a tenfold decline of pressure with fallowing — that didn't cost a lot of money. I think the science question is settled. We've got a problem. We've got a problem with sea lice in B.C., just like the one that turned up in Norway, just like the one in Scotland, just like the one on the east coast of North America. Well, no surprise. It's the same species of louse and the same species of salmon. It should be the same. What are we going to do about it?

Well, there is some small stuff to do yet in figuring out how sea lice work in wild populations. What to do about it? Here's the fine print that wrote it up. There are two proven techniques for dealing with sea lice in B.C. that are published. We should be embarrassed that they weren't published by the government scientists.

A third technique for dealing with them is coastal zoning. That's the way it's being dealt with in Norway. That's the way it's being dealt with in Ireland, which is to say that if you've got parts of the coast that don't have salmon farms but have really important wild stocks, don't put salmon farms there. That's something relevant for the north coast of B.C.

Avoiding the principal travel corridors is effective and prudent action. I thought, you know, you want it so that if you have a problem between salmon farms and wild fish, the price you pay for bringing into this isn't very high. It'll affect some local stocks, and you'll get over it. You don't want it to have a catastrophic effect. You don't want to have it wipe out the Skeena. You don't want to have it wipe out the Skeena sockeye, which is the most valuable stock, or wipe out the Fraser stocks. So you want to put your net-pen salmon aquaculture out of the way.

We need to spend more money on monitoring diseases in wild fish. The discussions about how serious sea lice and diseases are in wild salmon are much impeded from lack of data on wild fish. I'll give you some upsetting descriptions for it.

Well, I'll tell you that there's very little data on what's out there. So you don't know where you're starting from. If disease turns up in this population, they don't know…. Did that come from the salmon farm, or has it always been there? Is it new? Is it widespread? We need to spend more money on that, if you can come to answers on that.

The government has to quit denying that it has a problem. The science is settled. It's time now to deal with the political level and not deny that there's a problem with sea lice. Denying it discredits the government's scientific institutions. It's embarrassing to think about the kind of things that might be said for political reasons.

It would be better to quit denying that there are problems with salmon aquaculture. I would feel better. If we were in a situation where the problems are acknowledged and addressed and solved, I would feel much more secure about the future. What's going to happen if we expand salmon aquaculture? We have to have an adaptive system that works.

R. Austin (Chair): Thank you, Allen. I'd like to ask members if they have some questions now. I'll start with Scott.

You know, we've looked over some of the information from, say, the Auditor General, 2004-2005, that said there were a lot of gaps in the science, not specifically around sea lice but around salmon aquaculture. We've certainly seen that, when we get…. There's more than one side on these issues. You've helped to clarify, certainly from your opinion, what the science says, and I grant you that.

You know we get a different perspective when we have, say, industry components coming forward to us who might suggest that there's no problem with sea lice. It's not an issue. How would you respond to that?

A. Gottesfeld: Well, I tried to be an honest broker coming before you. Those are all the papers that are published. That's the science. If you were going to take the high ground and say, "We go with the best science," that's what you've got.

What do we say about…? Oh heavens, we've seen bad examples in the past, like the tobacco industry and so on, denying the science. Global warming in the U.S. — denying the science until things get really bad and can't be denied. I think we could do better here.

The first thing I did when I started looking into salmon aquaculture was in 2002. I went to Norway. I went to see Tore Håstein, who was the grand old man of fish health in Norway. He's the guy who wrote up the first paper on sea lice in salmon aquaculture. He had just retired the year before, and I caught him in his office in Oslo and talked to him.

I talked to him about disease problems and so on. I got around and I said…. He said: "All diseases aren't a big problem with getting into wild fish from salmon farms." I said: "What about sea lice?" "Oh. Well, that's different. Sea lice certainly go from salmon farms to wild fish, but you don't have that in B.C," he said to me. I said: "Well, the first reports have just come out in the past month. We do have it, but the government's in denial in B.C." Then he said: "Oh yes, that happened here too. It took five years for the government to acknowledge it and deal with it." We're at four years now.

S. Simpson: Thank you very much. I appreciated your presentation. I have a couple of questions for you in regard to the science.

As Scott said, we have, of course, continued to hear from industry officials that sea lice are very minimal. There's very little of it that we're seeing. Second, there's very little evidence that it in fact has an effect on wild juvenile salmon. I will tell you that they've produced no evidence to that effect, but they've taken that position.

What I'd ask is: in addition to this and the peer-reviewed science that you've presented for us today, is there any stuff on the other side — peer-reviewed science — that supports that position? Would we find anything if we went looking for it?

S. Simpson: And that it's okay — that lice don't have a significant impact on wild salmon and juveniles.

A. Gottesfeld: For not having a significant impact, there's no relevant literature. Indeed, what exists and what I showed you could be better. As I told you, this thing went to an Alaskan fisheries journal.

You need a good laboratory to do it. The shame is that the DFO, which has the laboratory facilities to do those experiments and answer it, hasn't done it. We could know the answer.

S. Simpson: I appreciate that. When we went and visited with the DFO people, some of their scientists were less than enamoured with that particular piece of research. I think it's interesting.

I have a second question that relates to that, though. We're being told by industry folks that there's very little sea lice impact now. Can you tell us: to the best of your knowledge, what effective monitoring is going on — by government or by others or through stewardship — to actually show us what is happening with sea lice in the Broughton and elsewhere?

A. Gottesfeld: The only place I think this year that there's effective louse monitoring levels going on is in the Broughton. The DFO has gone through a million dollars or so doing it, and some environmental organizations have done it. Alexandra has numbers like that.

You know, those numbers agree. The numbers that both groups came up with are real close.

A. Gottesfeld: Yes, but DFO hasn't published the stuff. The observations make sense to me. It isn't: how could you guys be in the same world and come up with that? They come up with the same answers.

Where else do we have monitoring? We've done monitoring for two or three years now on the north coast — without salmon farms. I could talk about that. I don't think you'd give me the time, but I'm ready to go. We did two or three years up here. The short version is that we looked at a natural situation, and sea lice levels under a natural situation are basically 1/100 of that in the Broughton — 50 to 400 times difference in the occurrence levels.

Now, that's higher than in Alexandra's paper — a little bit higher up here than in there. It's really different, and there's a different geographic pattern. There are essentially no Lep. salmonis infestations in the inshore waters on this coast. They pick them up on the outer coast, where the fish leaving interact with returning adult salmon. There's a different geographic pattern. That's one which means that the lice that get onto young salmon that are leaving aren't when they're this big and it kills them, but when they're this big and they can handle it.

S. Simpson: I have one question for Chris. Yesterday we were in Prince Rupert and Kitkatla. We met

with the Kitkatla band there. As you know, they're moving ahead in discussions with Pan Fish on anywhere up to ten pens — ten fish farms. They're in that discussion. They're telling us that this is in their traditional territories and that we should not be interfering in matters within their traditional territories. That's the position being taken, and I'm asking for your view.

C. Barnes: Well, that's true. It is in their territory that they're putting up the fish farms. At the same time, they have to be cognizant of the migration patterns of the smolts. If they really want to be diligent, do it properly and do not be in denial, as Al said.

With the Kitkatla bunch saying there's only a 5-percent escapement going through their territories, and the rest is going up through the north passage, it's sort of wrong. They should look at the science and that.

The other thing I was contemplating saying is that the sports sector is really going to suffer lots if we wipe out the sockeye stocks and the pinks, because we'll be attacking the coho and the chinook later. If the province thinks they're going to make money off the dividends from these fish farms, they're wrong, because we'll attack the sports fish sector and get the salmon from there, because we have to have our salmon. That's our livelihood, the way we survive. That's a big thing you should think about. What happens if you do wipe out those stocks?

G. Coons: Just a couple of concerns. It's interesting when you bring out your ten peer-reviewed science articles. Yesterday in Prince Rupert we got references on potential fish farm impacts and got 702 references that I don't think we have time to go through. This really highlights what you put together, really highlights the peer-reviewed science, I think.

I just had a question. As far as Fulton's condition factor that DFO uses…. We had Anthony Farrell from UBC in front of us, and he also indicated that that is not the way DFO should be testing. I'm just wondering: in your opinion, why is there such a slant of Fisheries and Oceans Canada in their observations of sea lice?

I'm looking at a fact sheet from Fisheries and Oceans that was in our legislative package, Sea Lice Fast Facts, and they indicate that there is no evidence to support the notion that juvenile salmon travel through migration corridors in the Broughton. This does not support allegations that emptying certain salmon farms along a certain pathway will reduce sea lice infections to young salmon.

I'm just wondering: in your opinion, why is there such a problem with Fisheries and Oceans Canada or DFO in coming to terms with there being a sea lice problem?

A. Gottesfeld: Careerism. Some people built their career on promoting salmon aquaculture and have gotten swallowed up by the chase.

I think there is a place for salmon aquaculture, but you've got to do it right. Denying that you have problems is not a good sign. It's not going to help us out.

As for what the scientific evidence is, write it up. See if you can get it published. See if it will get through peer review. That's the test.

G. Coons: Thank you. One last question. As far the papers that showed the effects of salmon farms in raising sea lice infestation levels that extend 30 kilometres to 70 kilometres…. We got a map yesterday of where Strouts Point, Petrel Point and Anger Anchorage are located from the mouth of the Skeena, and we're looking at 36 kilometres, 70 kilometres and, say, 72 kilometres away. In your opinion, is there a concern with out-migration of smolts from the Skeena watershed?

A. Gottesfeld: The distance from the Skeena, even, is a problem that's hard. I can just quickly put up a photograph which shows that, really, the flow of the Skeena, particularly late in the season, is right out down Ogden Channel.

This is a satellite photo — this is Google Earth — down the Skeena, Telegraph Passage and Ogden Channel. You see by the colour of the water the glacial flour in it? Late in the season most of the Skeena flow is there. I'd say: "That's the Skeena." The concept of, "Oh, where's the mouth?" isn't quite it. That's the Skeena estuary, and the waters in Ogden Channel, for part of the summer, are mostly fresh, or more fresh than salt. That's the Skeena estuary that we're on. It's not like it's distant from the Skeena. It's the past.

Kitkatla is there. It's the entrance to the Skeena. That makes it the best fishing place on the north coast. That's why it's there. Looking at it from up the coast, you see you look right up Ogden Channel and into the Skeena.

Early in the flood tide, the waters are split. Much of the Skeena flows through Chatham Sound. For pink salmon, half or more of the pink salmon juveniles are in Chatham Sound. Late in the season when the coho and sockeye come out, they're down Ogden Channel. From the work we've done in the last two years, I'd say that 95 percent of the Skeena sockeye juveniles go down Ogden Channel. If you wanted to catch little sockeyes this big in June, go to Strouts Point. Any haul with your net will pick them up there. It's a bad place.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): Thank you, Dr. Gottesfeld, for trying to be our guide, I guess, through this interesting field of scientific endeavour. Let me clarify — as our guide, I guess you always want to know who your guide is. Are you a fisheries scientist yourself?

A. Gottesfeld: I guess. I'll explain. I was last a professor at UNBC, where I was teaching watershed management, teaching it from the physical end and from the geography end. This past six years I've been doing more fisheries, but for the past 15 years I've been working the margin.

Right now, this week, I'm writing a paper for the American Fisheries Society, which they invited me to write. I think when that comes out, I'll be a fisheries scientist, but it's anybody's call.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): I'll take a yes for now, then we'll see how your credentials develop.

In any case, you mentioned there are many, many papers, and you've done a summary. You're saying to me that this is all the papers that are done on fish lice. Is that your contention?

A. Gottesfeld: No, those are all the papers on the Broughton. These are the ones that came out of our controversy on the Broughton. They moved this from the Broughton being a place that no one in the world had ever of to being one of the best-known places for sea lice and salmon studies. These are the papers. That's what's come out of spending a couple million dollars on the pink salmon action plan.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): We've got the same package — Gary and I — from the Fisheries research. I guess your comment on there was…. I don't know if you believe them because you commented — to get a response to Gary's question — that careerism is blinding their ability. I wonder if you could expand on what you mean by "careerism" with respect to DFO scientists.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): I'm referring to your comment about DFO Fisheries research. Gary asked: "What's wrong with them?" You said: "It's careerism." What do you mean by that?

A. Gottesfeld: The DFO guys in Rupert who know about the habitat up here and where the critical habitat is were told to keep their mouths shut and just keep out of it. When I go to Rupert, the DFO office people come and clap me on the back — the biologists. The same thing in the DFO headquarters in Nanaimo. I'm saying the things that they've been told not to say — bad for your career.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): Okay. Now one of the studies you have is from Mr. Beamish, who was one of the ones you mentioned up here, of course, and is one of these Nanaimo scientists, who also happens to be an Order of Canada and who happens to be the man who invented acid rain and who has spent his life on science. You did mention one of his points, but one of the other points is the incidence of open wounds on juvenile salmon collected in the Broughton.

This is his study of 2003. During trials in the summer and fall of 2003 and 2005, the incidence of open wounds has been zero. He says: "If mortality is occurring during this period due to sea lice infections, we would expect to see some fish doing poorly and some evidence of wounds or lesions."

A. Gottesfeld: I have a lot of respect for Dick Beamish. We're collaborating on a project now, though we have really different assessments of the overall story.

There's that paper of Morton and Routledge, 2005, which talks about…. One of them is just one of Fulton's condition factor. They say, "Well, indeed, the fish keep on growing, whether they have lice on them or not," and then they croak. In that last day or two before they die, they swim off on their own. They have very peculiar behaviour — you know, flapping around on the surface of the water — and probably don't survive in the wild.

It could well be that you could do a lot of collections out there, and you're collecting the healthy fish. You're not collecting the ones that went off to die. When they're really small, it doesn't take long from when they get a hole in them to when they die. That would be a way to believe both things.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): It is certainly perplexing, and as you point out, there are different assessments by different scientists. Dr. Beamish, whom you're working with, currently has a 2006 study that says: "The exceptional marine survival of pink salmon that entered the marine environment in 2003 suggests that farmed Atlantic and Pacific salmon can coexist successfully in a marine ecosystem." That's a paper that came out and was accepted by the ICES Journal of Marine Science in April 2006.

We could carry on this discussion, but I know the panel here will have the opportunity to discuss….

We will have the opportunity to discuss this with the scientists themselves. I look forward to that opportunity. I'm sure it'll be very interesting, and diverse assessments will be well heard.

J. Yap: Ron asked about the study by Dr. Beamish. In our travels we have had presentations from a number of scientists, and now we're getting a presentation from you, a scientist. I'd like your thoughts on why it is that there is no agreement, if that's the right word, on the interpretation of the data.

What I mean by that is we had a scientist from UBC who is very knowledgable of the research that's been done, and I asked him a question on the record for his opinion. He basically — not to quote him directly, but it's in the public record — suggested that more study needs to be done to prove there is a link between salmon farms and sea lice occurrence in wild salmon, part of the difficulty being that sea lice occur naturally in wild salmon. I think that's a given.

What would you say to this dilemma? We have some scientists who say that there's a link, and there are other scientists who say there is no link and more studying needs to be done.

A. Gottesfeld: I think if you put the scientists in this room who are working with sea lice in B.C. or in the world, that it would be a very unequal split. As I was thinking about who was this person you were talking about…. I'd say in B.C. it's about 18 to two; 18 believe there's a link between sea lice and farmed salmon and negative effects on wild fish. That is by far the majority opinion.

I thought it would be useful to present the peer-reviewed literature. That's the stuff, and the rest is opinion.

J. Yap: We talked about DFO and the scientists working at DFO. We understand — we spent time at the research centre — that there are major studies underway. Are you familiar with the work that they are presently doing? Is that what you're involved with, with Dr. Beamish?

J. Yap: The work that's going on currently, as we speak, at the DFO on sea lice.

A. Gottesfeld: No, in the sense that there hasn't been a meeting this summer about: what are you doing this year? I knew what was happening up till the middle of last summer, and informal contacts and so on, but I don't really know what's going on this month.

J. Yap: But just to round out our discussion here, this panel met with DFO scientists, a number of them, including Dr. Beamish, and we talked about this dilemma of interpreting data. The point I made earlier with regard to the studies that have been done by different researchers and the concept of studies that have been published in journals or peer-reviewed studies…. You referred to a number of studies in your presentation. You mentioned that this is the comprehensive list of Broughton-related studies. Is that correct?

A. Gottesfeld: And there is no paper there that says there's no effect on wild salmon. There's no paper that says sea lice are not transmitted from penned salmon in nets to wild salmon. There's no paper that says it has no effect. These are the rumours that go around or the red herrings that go around.

I'm alarmed at this little indirection we just had to see — that you've had DFO scientists get up and say there's no problem. This is a shocker. This is shocking and certainly not what you hear from the professors in B.C., at SFU or UNBC and so on. This is not what would come out at a scientific meeting.

There was an international meeting a year ago in Alaska, the Northeast Pacific Pink and Chum Salmon Workshop. A session was set up to hash this stuff out with Bill Heard, the grand old man of pink salmon studies. The DFO guys didn't show up.

C. Trevena: Thank you for providing the various peer-reviewed materials. I think it's going to be very helpful for us to go through it.

Much of our debate around here is on how much do we know and whether there are gaps and how we can fill the gaps. My colleague Gary Coons from North Coast has been quoting quite a lot from a book that we were presented by Positive Aquaculture Awareness, which I will also quote:

I think we must all agree that there is more study that we need to do or need to find out about.

Am I right in my understanding of what you're saying: that the issue of the lice on returning salmon isn't such a big one? It's the smolts going out. We're not talking about the fact that we have some lice on the adult salmon coming back that is something we need to be concerned about. It's the smolts going out that are the main concern.

A. Gottesfeld: Yeah, it's clear that the sea lice are natural. They didn't need salmon farms to make a living, and in the natural world they work…. Mostly their life cycle was in the ocean. They reproduce successfully somehow out there in the ocean, which is to say that pink salmon leaving the B.C. coast or leaving the Alaska coast have modest levels of lice on them, a few sea lice on them, and they come back with 20, 30, 50 lice on them. They got them out there.

I think we have a problem we're concerned with about the safety of net-pen aquaculture for salmon,

because sea lice have a new host now in a new environment — in short, in a place where wild salmon are unaccustomed to running into them. On the north coast here the juvenile salmon basically don't run into Lep. salmonis until they're ready to leave and are a couple of months old. I mean, the occurrence levels are two per thousand.

We've changed the ecology. We've changed the natural environment of the sea lice, and it's having negative effects — just the same kinds of problems as in Europe. This isn't the first observation of that, but I think it's more serious on this coast than it is in Europe, because the little salmon that are encountering these parasites are smaller than they are in Europe and more susceptible to damage.

C. Trevena: You mentioned the issue of fallowing as one way to counteract sea lice. Do you think that is enough? If farm companies were made to fallow certain sites at certain times, in certain periods, that would be enough to counteract the issue of sea lice?

A. Gottesfeld: No. It's a powerful tool but not that one alone. You'd be talking about integrated pest management of a variety of techniques. The piece I'd emphasize is zoning — putting your farms in the right kinds of places to start with.

The work we've done on the north coast here shows that under natural conditions, sea lice are not at all uniformly distributed, and there are travel corridors that the wild salmon travel along. You know, you could get yourself out of the corridors where there is likely to be lots of contact. You can use biocides to knock down the fish in the spring, when migration happens. That's successful. You can use fallowing — getting out of the way — if necessary.

But of course, it would be better not to put a farm there to start with. There's a lot of coast. I think we could do well with siting, if we started looking at it that way.

C. Trevena: You've cited Norway quite a lot, and we know that Norway has certain areas that are fish-farm-free and has encountered many of the problems we're now encountering. Are they working now on an integrated management system?

A. Gottesfeld: I don't know, but they certainly are in Scotland — area management systems, they call them — and on the east coast of New Brunswick. It's in the wind in B.C. too.

Diseases are a big problem in salmon aquaculture. They're not just distributed from one fish farm to wild fish that are swimming by. They're distributed from one fish farm to the next fish farm two miles away. If you're going to keep diseases under control, you have to do some kind of area planning and have actions on all the farms happening at the same time and have a higher level of management.

D. Jarvis: Doctor, to follow up on some of the questions Ms. Trevena asked you, I was wondering if I could be somewhat of a devil's advocate and ask you some questions. I'm not trying to insult you or anything like that, actually.

I've lived on the coast for over 70 years, although I don't look it, I don't think. That was supposed to be a joke, ladies and gentlemen.

Anyway, I've done a lot of fishing on the coast. I've fished salmon at the different stages, and I've picked salmon up that have no sea lice on them. Some have many, many sea lice on them. When I was younger, we just stripped them off.

I'm quite surprised at the way this whole argument — and I'm hearing both sides…. The whole central thing is on sea lice themselves, whereas with our salmon in British Columbia, it always has been a very cyclical type of occupation for being a fisherman. There's never any mention whatsoever — I shouldn't say none whatsoever, but very little of it — of other predation on the fish.

We have foreign fishing. A lot of it's illegal. Remember the Russians who had nets off Cape St. James? That size of a camera, size of millimetres…. The Asian countries — it's well known that they're taking a lot of fish. We have foreign fish themselves from the south. As our climate gets warmer, they come up and are predators of our small fish — the smolts going out. We have salmon sharks.

What I'm trying to do is to get down to the point. When lice breed, their eggs are ostensibly, as you'd probably know, like frogs' eggs in their gelatin form. They float below the water, and they float away.

It seems to me I'm hearing all the time that all these eggs and all these lice are just centring around salmon farms. I find that rather difficult to accept — waiting for the fish to swim by and jump on them when you know that they float and they take — what? — a week or so or over a week to hatch. So where can they be? And once they go out above the archipelago — the Broughton, anyway — they're pretty well going out to open sea.

I just find it rather difficult that all of a sudden in this we have the Broughton Archipelago…. Sea lice are there, waiting for the salmon to come out — either to come or go, one or the other — and they're causing all this devastation and the loss of salmon. Why do we always centre on the lice themselves when we know there is considerably more predation elsewhere?

A. Gottesfeld: It's hard being a louse. It's a hard life. I mean, how do you ever find a fish and have a good meal? Even worse is you see from the collections we've done on these wild fish…. I'd say levels are low. Two to 20 percent of the salmon have a louse on them

— generally one. There are males and females. Lice have a hard life, a hard time getting together and reproducing. But they must do it, and they do it by making millions of eggs. The environment they're getting together in, in nearshore waters is pretty easy.

This summer we've been trying to figure out about that connection between wild returning adults and the juveniles. How does that transmission occur? We've been going out and hauling plankton nets to try to catch the early free-swimming larval stages. The eggs only last a day or two, but then they're nauplii for a few days, or four or five days. We caught some. The place we caught them? Places where winds blow and up on the rocky beach. Onshore winds and you get this little scummy stuff piling up inside the kelp zone.

The larval sea lice go up to the surface, and I think then they get blown ashore. Not by coincidence, the pink salmon are living right next to the beach in that water that's a foot or two or three or four feet deep. Those first weeks the pink salmon are right there on the beach. We've been sampling the little scum getting blown ashore and finding juvenile lice in it. So they've got tricks.

As for the predation and who eats those little fish when they leave, the wondrous thing to me — I've thought about that too — is that biologists are saying that more important than who's eating them is how much food the little fish have. How fast they grow is the really important piece of it rather than the predation level. Maybe part of it is that nobody's going out there and sampling the predators adequately to get a handle on that end of it, but then there's not a lot of work being done on the food stuff either.

The prevailing wisdom this year is that the critical time for pink salmon, chum salmon and sockeye, too, is those first couple of weeks as they go to sea. This early marine stage determines how many fish come back — next year's crop. It makes what you get to harvest a year or two or three or four years later. For heaven's sake, why would you put salmon farms in that place, in that critical habitat?

D. Jarvis: Doctor, last night in Prince Rupert they were talking about the 2005 return that was so devastating, so small, compared to the amount of the fry that went out at the start, which were a record number. This is what one of the people was saying — that there are no salmon farms in the area. So why would that be?

A. Gottesfeld: Well, like I say, biologists all look at each other and say, "Bad early marine survival" — the critical first weeks on the coast. This is ocean circulation pattern changes, climate changes.

D. Jarvis: But the correlation between what went on, on the Skeena, where there are no farms versus what people keep saying — that this happened south of that, where there are farms.

A. Gottesfeld: There's no doubt that fewer fish came back than were expected last year, fewer than the parental generation. No doubt about it, they didn't do very well in the ocean there in 2003.

There are ten papers here you mentioned. Are all the people on there fish biologists?

Just segueing from the discussion around siting, and there's no doubt that there are many challenges for young salmon going out to sea. Your work, and the work we see here in terms of peer-reviewed studies that put sea lice and young salmon at odds…. Given all of your background with this, what are your specific recommendations around siting? Maybe, to put it into a couple of specific cases, your recommendations around siting on the north coast, where there are no farms, versus on the south coast. And where there are farms right now, what changes would you be recommending?

A. Gottesfeld: Well, for starts you shouldn't put salmon farms on the Skeena and Nass estuaries. By definition, that's where the action is. That's where the fish are. Of course, those are the most productive habitats, and you don't need productive habitats for a salmon farm, because you feed them. So move away from the estuaries.

You'd want to move off of important travel corridors so that if you're dealing with impacts, you're talking about local stocks. I have a pretty favourable impression of the operation in Klemtu down the coast. That's an example of where the places they have their farms have local impacts. At least if they end up wiping the fish out, that way it's their own fish — one way to look at it. And the arrangements there in Klemtu have really maximized the number of jobs that came out of it. I'm strongly aware of the social impacts of that on that village. I think it was done well there.

If I could give it a negative spin, that's also the place…. That's the first salmon farm on the north coast. They had an IHN outbreak there, the disease that threatens to wipe out the sockeye, the fish that native people are dependent on in the Skeena. The one important species that's supposed to be eaten is sockeye, and they're threatened by IHN. That first complex on the north coast had an IHN outbreak that was brought under control in a year and a half. They've cleaned out some farms and done what they had to do.

Nobody ever went and looked at the wild sockeye populations to see if that disease spread. Nobody ever looked. That upsets me; that disturbs me. Then you could have people commenting: "Oh, there's no problem with the spread of disease to wild fish." We don't look.

Generally, I think the Klemtu example is a good one. Kitkatla is a bad one. Kitkatla is right on the highway. It's hard to put it there without having big impacts up- and downstream.

G. Robertson: The siting in the Broughton or in Clayoquot Sound…. Is your suggestion that fallowing farms are effective enough or that there should be no farms located in migration routes at all?

A. Gottesfeld: It's a much harder world once you've got the farms there. There hasn't been a lot of success in moving farms, which was promised in 2002.

There are problems in the Broughton. I've seen parallels between the Skeena estuary and the Broughton, which you can think of as the Klinaklini estuary, the real distal end of the Fraser estuary stuff.

I had a conversation with Garth Traxler, DFO's IHN specialist, the Canadian expert on this thing, who's unfortunately about to retire. It was about the Strouts Point site. I said that if you wanted a site, you couldn't pick a worse site for putting your salmon farm if you're worried about transmission of IHN from wild fish to the farm and from the farm back to wild fish.

He thought it over for a minute, and he said: "I can think of a worse site — Johnstone Strait, where they've already had transmission of IHN from wild fish to farmed fish." The point would be that at Broughton we've had serious sea lice problems and IHN-produced problems and transfer from wild fish to farm fish or farm fish to wild fish. But Clayoquot Sound has not. Clayoquot Sound is quite out of the way and doesn't have major salmon stocks there. I mean, I don't know that place well, but I think not, and that might well be the example.

R. Austin (Chair): I'd like to thank you both for your presentations. Thanks a lot.

As I mentioned at the beginning of these proceedings, we are very fortunate to be here in Kitsumkalum territory. I would like to acknowledge Steve Roberts here, the chief councillor of the Kitsumkalum band. Thank you very much for coming and watching these proceedings.

C. Nyce: First of all, I'd like to introduce Chief Glenn Bennett, who is the elected chief of the Kitselas people, local Tsimshian people resident on the Skeena River. He's also a director with the company that I'm CEO of, the Skeena Native Development Society.

I'd also like to introduce Geri Budden, who is the manager of my business development department. She's here for my general support. That's how we do it amongst my people. We get our support from our women.

My name is Khum-iam. My English name is Clarence Nyce. I was born into the Haisla First Nation, Kitimat. My grandmother is Tsimshian from the people of [first nations language spoken], now referred to as Kitselas. I'm chief executive officer of the Skeena Native Development Society and pleased to be here.

I want to, first of all, thank you for your valuable time, both personally and professionally, to hear the general public's viewpoints and interests on this critical subject. I'd also like to thank those with the foresight for making this process take place. Thank you very much.

I have a short presentation to give you, so I'll jump right into it. What I'll do is give you the background to the rationale for me standing in front of you and try to tie it up very quickly. I realize I have some time constraints.

In terms of the company background, Skeena Native Development provides resources, to first nations people primarily, to train for the changing job market and to assist individual entrepreneurs start businesses. That's essentially, in a nutshell, what we do.

We're the second largest of our type in Canada. We service an area of approximately 25 percent of the province — about 270,000 square kilometres — and we're the largest, certainly, in western Canada.

We're federally funded. We also partner with various corporations and other foundations to assist with our mandate. We service about 25 first nations villages in this area and about nine nations within that service area. We have a population base of approximately 29,000 people. In the last 14 years — just to kind of give you the magnitude of the type of capital flow that comes through the corporation — we've resourced about $98 million into the economy in the last 14 years.

That's just a pictorial reference on the service area that we cover. I apologize for the small lettering, but you have it in front of you. All of our communities are located either in the coastal region or on a tributary system that hosts major salmon runs.

Before I continue, I want to thank Dr. Gottesfeld for handling the scientific end — just to make sure I've communicated that that's not the direction I'm coming from — so no questions with a scientific perspective. Thank you very much.

In 2003, our last labour market census, the workforce population was about 5,300 — that is, individuals between 15 and 65. Our cumulative unemployment rate amongst 25 villages is about 54 percent. Fourteen years ago it was 72 percent, just to give you an idea.

In 2003, 13 percent of our unemployed population worked in the commercial fisheries sector, whether that's onshore cannery work or offshore of one sort. Twelve years ago this job sector stood at 23 percent, and forestry was at 24 percent — to give you an idea of the market swings over the last few years.

In the last 20 years we witnessed a dramatic decrease, of course, in wild stocks. As a matter of fact, we

saw this. Somewhat coincidentally, we also saw aquaculture starting to emerge as new alternative fisheries. It became something that we've all heard more and more in the last 20 years. Since then, all sorts of evaluations and considerations and research have continued in one way or another. Not to be outdone, we did our own research about three or four years ago.

This subject formally reached my board of directors. My board of directors comprises leaders from different tribal groups across this entire area, whether they are elected chiefs or head administrators and whatnot. We were presented with an application from Kitkatla, as a matter of fact.

The question was: do we or don't we fund? We became quite aware that we didn't have the technical wherewithal, really. We all had our opinions, one way or another, but we didn't have the technical wherewithal to address this sort of application.

This was an extraordinary application, in that my staff typically would routinely handle requests of this nature administratively. Because of the extraordinary nature of this and the sensitivity of it, I chose and made the extraordinary step to pass it up to the board of directors, which we did. We quickly made the decision that we needed to do a study, so we hired a biologist, someone that we felt had the qualifications to give us advice. We outlined the terms of reference for the study — really quite simple. What economic considerations should we make, what technical considerations should we make, and what is the cultural or social match to this? I'll get into that in a second.

When that was done, the board of directors passed a policy on March 10, 2004. It was widely publicized — newspapers, website, letters, bulletins, what have you — and it just so happened that when we got word of this commission, we felt that our policy fit within the terms of this particular commission. That's in large part why I'm standing beside you. It's not because I don't have anything else to do. It's because we felt we had something to say on this subject.

Aquaculture — general term. Obviously, open-net salmon farming is one portion of the concept of aquaculture. You know better than I do. So our policy was defined as being very critical of the current business practice of open-net salmon farming. That seemed kind of a conundrum for us. How could we support business development and employment generation when in fact we were saying something against open-net salmon farming? We'll get to that.

Sustainability. This is a really important point of the results of our study. We encourage other salmon enhancement business concepts such as ocean ranching, onshore salmon farming and other bivalve-type farming initiatives. We had no problem with that. It was just this little niche in the business market called open-net salmon farming that we had a serious problem with.

What about the balance between the environment and the economy? This is where I get back to the social or cultural match. We express considerable concern over the long-term impact on wild stock and the negative impact on those currently employed in the commercial fisheries. At the same time we recognize that there was a declining participation in the commercial fisheries. We recognize that, so I'm not standing here in front of you like a prima donna suggesting that we didn't know that. We knew this at the same time, and I just thought that I'd put that in as a caveat.

Economic impact. Our study notes limited employment and wealth creation opportunities, but there's a caveat to that as well. Just this past June, this month, I presented it back to the board because we received another application for salmon farming. I said to the board: "Do we stand on the original study that we completed three years ago, or do we take a different direction?"

After discussion the board of directors said: "Yes, we are going to stand and reaffirm our current policy on open-net salmon farming. However, please stress that bivalve ocean ranching and onshore salmon farming…. That's fine. We'll encourage that."

Another point that the board asked me to pass on was that the scientific evidence, in our opinion…. I obviously realize that there are two opinions at the table, but in terms of our opinion, there is overwhelming evidence that open-net salmon farming negatively affects wild stock.

Here's our conclusion. Wild salmon is an essential food source as well as an important source of cultural identity for us. There's no question about that. It doesn't matter whether you lean to the left or to the right. That's a fact for us. Akin to the prairie nations, where a loss of their buffalo or bison destroyed cultural identity, loss of wild salmon in our waters, in our opinion, will have a severe impact on our culture and on the long-term sustainabilities of our economies.

We are strong supporters of business development. I want to conclude this way and say this to you. I think Austin knows this very well. In fact, in terms of business development we tend to lean on the right side of the political spectrum, because we very much believe in business development, especially small business, that's not encumbered by the machinations of politics, whether you're on the left or the right.

We need to build up our economies, and we'll do whatever we need to, to do that. Of the $98 million, for example, that I referred to, approximately 60 percent of that money has gone directly into apprenticeship trades or business development, just to give you an idea of that.

However, while our company is a big supporter and advocate of business development, there is an element in the equation of this subject that business must meet. We refer to it as the social-cultural sensitivity match. In the case of the open-net salmon farming business, we feel that there is no social or cultural match due to the dire negative impact on the ocean environment and the wild stock.

Losing wild salmon, to our people, is the fundamental basis of our social, cultural and commercial survival. I reiterate that we believe that there is no cultural or social match. In fact, this business is not even, in our opinion, about being socially responsible. When it comes to the open-net salmon farming business, it's socially irresponsible.

It's not acceptable to discuss the broader economic benefits of aquaculture while shuffling the business practice of the open-net salmon farming into the stack with all its faults. I think that we're obligated — and I applaud this commission — to look at that very specifically in terms of what that possibly could mean to us.

We know that it's a very highly profitable business. We know this. However, we've found, through our study, that this business practice leaves little residual value remaining in the area. This is because it creates very few jobs and almost zero in side spinoff value to downstream local businesses. We also know that. The profit goes almost entirely and exclusively to either foreign interests or large corporations while exhausting a resource commodity in our own back yard. We know that as well.

While we're in the game of wealth creation, that's one of the splits that we have to move away from in terms of this particular business sector. This is one of those elements in the argument where we say: "Look, it's creating wealth, but for whom, and where is it going?" Our study found that the majority of the wealth doesn't stay locally.

We obviously recognize that the consumer market demands a fish product year-round and that commercial fishing of wild stock cannot possibly fill the demand for fresh salmon year-round. We know this. Again, this is one of those comments that have to be said, regardless of where you lean on this particular thing.

However, we also recognize that the consumer market is driving the demand for a fresh product, regardless if the product is substandard and regardless of the environmental damage. So we must all ask ourselves a question: the question of what price we are willing to pay to support this business practice.

That's my presentation — straightforward. Thank you very much for your time, and again, thank you for taking time out of your lives to come here.

R. Austin (Chair): Thank you, Clarence. Chief Bennett, do you have any comments to add to Clarence's presentation?

G. Bennett: My name is Glenn Bennett, and I'm the elected chief councillor for the community of Kitselas. My community has resided on the Skeena River for the last 10,000 years, and that has been well proven. It has been studied.

When it comes to the resources, our people today still rely heavily on those resources that we use to feed our people and our families throughout the year. We are now heading into the salmon season. Our people are now just starting to harvest spring salmon.

I come from a background of commercial fishermen. My father is a commercial fisherman. He is 67, and I think he will continue to fish commercially until he is no longer here. He just has that passion for fishing for food. He is probably the only commercial fisherman within my community. He has had the opportunity, and he accepts that he is the commercial fisherman for his livelihood.

He shares that with our people. He provides them with food fish. Right now he has just recently harvested a little over 2,000 pounds of halibut. He has given that freely back to the people of Kitselas. It is something that we value. We cannot survive without it.

This type of industry, I think, will damage the environment if it is permitted to expand within our region, especially on the Skeena River. Our people and our territory extend down to the mouth of the Skeena River. It covers a vast area. I can assure you that the Kitselas Band Council and the people of Kitselas will have very serious concerns with regards to this industry if it is permitted to expand within the north coast. It will damage the environment.

We fully support the position of the Skeena Native Development Society. Thank you.

R. Austin (Chair): Thank you. Gerri, do you have anything to add, or are you here to answer questions when they get to be difficult questions?

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): Thank you very much for a very clear presentation, Clarence. I wish a lot of the stuff we got in the Legislature was that clear and concise.

We're doing a study ourselves. MMK Consulting, through Golder Associates, is doing a study of the economic impacts of fish farming. My question to you is: would you make your study available? If so, we would appreciate getting who your study was done by so that they can incorporate it as part of their broader study.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): Maybe you could let Hansard know, and then they'll make sure that MMK calls you when they do their report. Thank you.

S. Fraser: Thank you very much, Clarence. This was a great presentation. And thank you again, Chief Bennett and Gerri.

C. Nyce: Nine different tribal groupings. Within the nine tribal groupings are 25 villages.

S. Fraser: Can I ask how you reconciled…? Obviously, they've diverted from the position that the society has taken on this particular issue. I don't want to get touchy here, but can I just ask how that is playing out?

C. Nyce: They applied for resources. We denied them. We have a legislated right to do that, and we did.

Obviously, the story is not over on this. There is more discussion to be had just around the corner. My board of directors is prepared to take that public stand as clearly as we need to with this issue with Kitkatla.

We recognize that Kitkatla has every right to make decisions for itself from a business perspective. We recognize that. However, when it means the possibility of affecting its neighbours negatively, we feel that there has to be a responsibility associated with the decision that is made which could possibly affect the wild salmon stocks.

The employment issue. Obviously, the work you've done here has covered a lot of ground, including whether or not there are cost-benefit analyses and benefit from the employment, if that's sufficient from open-net salmon farming. You found that there were not sufficient returns there for employment. Is that accurate?

C. Nyce: I don't know how many at the table are businessmen. I certainly am. When you develop a business plan and develop your market analysis in terms of the return, it makes best sense, in our opinion, when a return is over 30 percent, for example.

Our job is not to retrain our people to move from the welfare poor and transition over into the working poor. That's not our job. Our job, philosophically, is to bring our people from the welfare poor to at least middle class in Canada, which is $30,000 to $35,000 minimally — not $26,000, which is the national poverty line.

With this sort of investment, which is very significant in open-net salmon farming, we found — and it's our opinion — that the return from the open-net salmon farming business practice didn't warrant that sort of good business sense when in the end all you were left with were two to a half-dozen jobs per farm. It just didn't make sense for us in terms of a business investment.

One of the slides that you didn't see up there was with regards to the number of business plans we do every year. We do, on average, about two dozen business plans every year, and out of the two dozen, maybe three fly. The rest are simply hobbies. We categorize open-net salmon farming as a hobby supported by corporations. Track where the profit goes to. It certainly doesn't stay in Kitkatla — I can guarantee you that — beyond a few jobs.

C. Trevena: Thank you very much for your presentation. Just to follow up from what Scott was asking, if Kitkatla does decide to continue with its negotiations and bring in a fish farm, is there anything that you as a corporation could do, or would it just go ahead?

C. Nyce: Well, obviously, we don't have political leverage, as a band council has. Band councils are legislated federally, blah, blah, blah. What we will do — in fact, we've started a process now — is actively market against salmon farming using the media, starting within the next week or two. That was one of the decisions that the board made this past month.

If any applications come to us for open-net salmon farming on [first nations language spoken], we'll respond in two ways. No, we're not going to support open-net salmon farming. However, if you want to do ocean ranching or bivalve ranching or onshore farming, we'll gladly walk down that road with you and study it and support it, which we have — other businesses. That will be our response, I think.

Beyond that, I have to rely on the good sense of politicians such as the gentleman, my second cousin, sitting beside me or you folks at that table.

C. Trevena: You mentioned in your presentation that you'd said no to one and had said that you'd received a second application. You also said no to that. I wondered where that was from. Was that also Kitkatla?

C. Nyce: No, it's not. In fact, it was from outside our service area. So it was kind of easy to say no, but at the same time, we slipped a package into the "no" that said: "This is the reason why."

C. Nyce: It was down the coast a bit. It was in the central area of the province — Bella Bella.

Following up a bit on the earlier answer to Claire, in your policy you do talk about support for other salmon enhancement strategies, like ocean ranching, bivalve and that. Could you tell us a little bit more about the looking you've done at that and what the thinking is for your corporation around trying to have some of those initiatives get off the ground? Or what is happening around that? We've been hearing more about ocean ranching in the last few days, and it's certainly catching my attention as something that we need to look at closely.

C. Nyce: Let me take a minute and talk about the fish hatchery in Kitimat, if I may. As you may or may not know, there are discussions between the first nations down there and DFO with regards to, minimally, comanagement of the fish hatcheries, with the idea of expanding, perhaps, to ocean ranching.

I'm not even going to pretend to understand the scientific cycle in terms of when that takes place and how it takes place, but we're talking about a multi-million-dollar arrangement that is being looked at. It takes, for example, spring salmon — chinook — and, after or while they're released, puts them into an ocean-ranching type of environment and having that marketed in a certain way.

I know that they're doing a business plan. We haven't been approached yet to participate in the development of that business plan, but that's just one example.

R. Austin (Chair): Thank you very much to all of you for your presentations.

R. Austin (Chair): I would now like to call Taylor Bachrach to come and make a presentation.

Okay. As Taylor is not here, we are going to ask Andrew Williams to come forward and make a presentation, please.

A. Williams: My name's Andrew Williams. I am chairman of Friends of Wild Salmon. This is a coalition of member groups and individuals stretching from the coast, Lax Kw'alaams, Prince Rupert and to the upper Skeena. Thank you for allowing me this opportunity to address you.

I have been paying close attention to the hearings that have gone before this one, and I'd like to take a moment just to address some of the things you've heard from the proponents of the aquaculture industry in those hearings. Industry spokespersons have portrayed themselves as having first nations support for fish farms, for it's been a careful strategy to build partnerships with coastal villages that are suffering high unemployment, as you heard yesterday, because of the demise of traditional commercial fishing.

It is easy for us to sympathize with those first nations that succumb to these offers, but it was made perfectly clear to you yesterday and today that in the north first nations are firm in their opposition to fish farms. Even in Kitkatla, it was explained in a very emotional presentation, the majority of people don't support them. Further, first nations have declared their territory fish-farm-free, taking a declaration to Norway and even to the King of Norway, as you heard yesterday.

The companies and their employees also suggest that fish farms provide needed jobs to these coastal towns. The big issue, of course, is: how many and at what cost?

As a recent IBM study shows, wild salmon bring in at least $100 million a year to the Skeena region, with a multiplying factor of perhaps two and half or three times. Our concern is that fish farms will destroy our economy and our way of life here, as they have clearly done elsewhere.

Worldwide the number of people working in salmon farming is declining as the industry consolidates and automates its operations.

I heard the economic development officer from Kitkatla talk about their right to operate a legitimate business, an argument that parallels Pat Bell's comment that foreign investors have a right to a reasonable return on their investment. I ask you: if wild salmon no longer return to the Skeena and Nass rivers, who will compensate the first nations who lose their food source, and the angling guides, ecotourism operators and others in the hospitality industries who lose their jobs?

We're sometimes told that fish farms are only a coastal issue and that upriver people have no right to comment on it. Let me remind everyone whose knowledge of biology is faulty: wild salmon are born, spawn and die in fresh water. This is as much our right to comment on as anybody on the coast.

A poll carried out by Impacts last year for Friends of Wild Salmon shows that 70 percent of Skeena residents are very concerned about plans to move fish farms to northern coastal waters, and the more they know about fish farms, the more they oppose them. Northern residents — whether aboriginal, non-native, Liberal or NDP — are amazingly united in their opposition to fish farms. Never has there been an issue that people feel so strongly about.

The federal and provincial governments and aquaculture industry in Canada continue to deny the scientific evidence supporting the legitimacy of our concerns, but elsewhere, there's no debate. There's no need for any more science. There's widespread acceptance of the peer-reviewed scientific evidence linking fish farms to the decline of wild fish stocks in Norway, Scotland, Ireland and elsewhere in Canada. All you have to do is read it.

Critics of floating feedlots are not stupid or misinformed or misguided. We can read. We have the Internet. We know what damage salmon aquaculture has done elsewhere, and we're not going to let it happen here to the two remaining significant wild salmon rivers in British Columbia, the Skeena and the Nass.

I personally became concerned in the late '90s about the dangers posed to wild fish in the marine environment by salmon farming as I read about the problems they had caused in Norway, Scotland, Ireland and elsewhere. For instance, Norway had to repeatedly and continues to sterilize with rotenone 27 of its best Atlantic salmon rivers since 1987 in failed attempts to eradicate the parasite Gyrodactylus salaris, imported with farmed salmon smolts from Sweden.

A new and equally frightening scenario is that a brown trout–salmon hybrid, which is resistant to this parasite, has emerged and now constitutes over a third of the wild fish populations in these rivers.

Yesterday I received an e-mail from Bruce Sanderson of the Salmon Farm Protest Group in Scotland, and he said: "Salmon and sea trout fishing in the West Highlands and the islands of Scotland has been virtually destroyed by the impacts of disease and pol-

He mentions also that the fish farm industry in Scotland has lost 2,500 jobs since 2004, and in many rivers a quarter or more of the salmon caught by anglers are, in fact, escaped fish farm fish.

In Ireland, Dr. Paddy Gargan, fisheries board, Dublin — you can look it up on the Internet — concluded that a similar collapse of wild sea trout in the late '90s in 53 river systems in Ireland was linked to nearby fish farms. He found a precise correlation between the levels of sea lice on wild fish and those on farmed fish.

In New Brunswick millions of farmed salmon had to be slaughtered in 1999 due to an outbreak of infectious salmon anemia, ISA, which was found to have already spread to wild fish. The federal government willingly spent $23 million of our tax dollars compensating New Brunswick fish farm companies. Although some rivers have continued to have strong returns, overall, Atlantic salmon numbers are down to a third of their historic levels.

As you know, when Alexandra Morton discovered pink salmon fry in the Broughton Archipelago were infected with sea lice, she predicted the collapse of salmon runs in nearby rivers. The following years' runs were the worst on record, and I've just received figures that show last year's returns have not recovered. The only one that is reasonable is Glendale, which is an enhanced river, and guess where Bennett Point is?

Marty Krkošek's research showed exactly the same link between fish farms and sea lice infestations as did Dr. Paddy Gargan's. How many times do we have to do the same research?

When the provincial government of B.C. lifted the moratorium on new fish farm licences and several sites were approved for the northern coast, I called a group of residents together in January of last year to see what we could do to stop this scourge moving north. The group grew, and in early May we held a wild salmon summit in this very hall. I have a sense of déjà vu being here.

It was attended by 400 people, probably the largest environmental gathering in the north, who listened to scientists such as Dr. Allen Gottesfeld and others discuss their research, their experience and their concerns. We heard from Don Staniford who had worked in Scotland. We had Marty Krkošek come as well. We heard first nations from the Island who were suffering from the effects of the Broughton peninsula.

The Friends of Wild Salmon made it a political question in the provincial election immediately following our summit. Longtime liberals in this area voted NDP for the first time in their lives to stop fish farms, with the result that two of the MLAs on this committee were elected.

In the following federal election, politicians had clearly heard the message, as every candidate, from Conservative to Green Party, made a point of saying they were opposed to fish farms. In November 2005 we took over 4,000 declarations requesting a moratorium on fish farms in the north and delivered them to the Legislature. Since that time we have had over a thousand more signed. Many of these declarations are signed from people all around the world, people who come here because they know what a special place this is.

Now, a year and a half later, it's clear that opposition to fish farms in the north continues to grow. Every day there are more and more people onside. This is not an issue that will go away. Friends of Wild Salmon will not go away. There's only one solution to this issue. Fish farms must be permanently banned from northern rivers.

The Norwegians, as you so well know, have set aside 23 wild salmon rivers. From what I read, their intention is that all of those will be fish-farm-free. We too intend to have the north fish-farm-free. Thank you.

Any questions from members? I think you've made a statement and there are no questions, so thank you very much, Andrew.

R. Austin (Chair): I would like to call Mary Dalen to the witness table, if Mary is here.

M. Dalen: I'll just read my brief. I was told I was given ten minutes to read it. I thank the Special Committee on Sustainable Aquaculture for giving me this time to present this submission on the proposed salmon farms to be located directly in the migratory paths of the wild salmon runs.

I am Mary Dalen. I was born and raised in Cedarvale, B.C. — Skeena River — and I am Gitxsan. For many years I have voiced my concerns on our salmon resources to both governments in Canada, federally and provincially, to the local Department of Fisheries and Oceans and conservation officers.

Today there is widespread concern among the citizens of British Columbia with government plans to expand and locate open-caged fish farms near the mouth of the Skeena River. To me, this has hit home. For this reason, we have come out in full force to voice our opinion on the issue and to fight for the Skeena River wild salmon. It is not okay with me and those around me that we lose the precious Pacific wild

salmon. The fish spawn along the Skeena River, where there are fish-spawning creeks and lakes in the mountains.

Although I have signed declarations and volunteered my time with Friends of Wild Salmon, I've written letters to both governments and have received replies from the former Minister of Fisheries for Canada and Minister of Agriculture and Lands, I am here as an individual. I have publicly urged all those who use fresh salmon as food supply to continue their support to save the wild salmon.

Open-cage fish farms are an unacceptable risk to the Skeena River wild salmon. We do not need any of these farms established in northern British Columbian waters. A significant threat to northern ecosystems is the introduction of alien species. The farms being proposed for the mouth of the Skeena River will have Atlantic salmon. Farm salmon spread deadly diseases in wild salmon and other seafoods. There has been Atlantic salmon caught by some people along the Skeena River while food fishing, so there are already several incidents of this fish found in our streams. It cannot be eaten.

You have heard what scientists have said and are still saying of what is happening to the Pacific wild salmon of the Broughton Archipelago. The science for that area is done. Are governments listening to their concerns and putting a stop to this expansion of fish farms in those areas? The Skeena River is a whole different situation, and the people here who depend on the Skeena River will not allow industries to destroy our food sources.

I have said to this Minister of Agriculture and Lands, and I will say it again to this committee, that the Skeena River wild salmon is our food source. The salmon of all species are world renowned, and I fail to understand the government's decision to allow more fish farms while studies show how extremely harmful these farms are to wild salmon.

The use of pesticides, fungicides, antibiotics and other chemicals to treat sea lice diseases and a host of other problems caused by fish farms compounds the danger that face the young wild salmon.

The ministry may be aware that escaped farmed Atlantic salmon threaten the biological integrity of precious wild salmon stocks. I strongly believe the question of economic benefits of finfish farms to our communities do not warrant risking the valuable and irreplaceable wild salmon populations and, therefore, cannot be justified by our lawmakers and public officials.

A letter to me dated May 31, 2005, from the former Minister of Fisheries and Oceans states: "Fisheries and Oceans Canada recognizes the value of the wild salmon resource to Canadians and British Columbia, and that Pacific salmon provide nourishment for complex natural webs of interconnected species, food and cultural identity for first nations, and economic benefit and enjoyment for other communities, businesses and people."

I ask what the commercial fishermen's views are on the situation we find ourselves in. They fish for wild salmon and other seafoods. Do they have any concerns on open-net-cage fish farms? The Minister of Fisheries and Oceans' closing remarks to me: "It seems governments cannot ask industries to spend millions of dollars on fallowing certain areas or using chemical treatment unless we, who are concerned with these issues that will endanger the wild salmon stocks, have substantiated proof that there is a problem or there will be problems."

Hopefully, the Special Committee on Sustainable Aquaculture will find answers for the dedicated individuals who continue to challenge governments, industries and regulators to recall some of their decisions, and to continue searching for sustainable answers.

It is far too late to be asking for a moratorium at this stage. The citizens who are very concerned along the Skeena River, in this watershed, urge your government to ban further expansion of fish farms and those existing fish farms. There may be a potential infringement on the aboriginal interests and rights to the fish resources and other seafoods. The fish from the Skeena River is our main food source, and I ask to what extent the impact of fish farms will have on our food sources. The situation is equally important to the bear habitat, birds and, as mentioned before, the ecosystems. The Gitxsan people live along the Skeena River.

Do members have any questions of Mary? Seeing none, I will thank you very much for coming here and making your presentation.

R. Austin (Chair): Moving right along, I would like to call Bruce Hill up to the witness table.

B. Hill: Thank you for the opportunity to make a presentation today about fish farming in the Skeena.

I want to start a little bit by giving some background about myself and the work that I've done around fisheries and salmon issues on the Skeena. I've worked for about 15 years on fisheries and salmon conservations on the Skeena, almost entirely as a volunteer. I was president of the Steelhead Society of British Columbia for almost two years. I was the founding chair of the wild steelhead campaign. I was the founding executive director of the Na Na Kila Institute, which is an environmental organization in Kitimat village.

I worked as a fisheries researcher, a fisheries technician and a guide-outfitter. I have 25 years as a millwright and a sawmill owner-operator in the forest industry, and I was a commercial fisherman. I owned two trollers.

I've witnessed government after government, both federal and provincial, and all of the political parties mishandle this issue in this file ever since it's hit in this province. It's really well past time for government to simply listen to the majority of British Columbians and not special interest groups, of which I think the major ones are the international companies that are asking to come in and use our marine environment for their pri-

vate property — profit. And it's well past time to simply do the right thing and put this thing to bed.

I think that you saw, and you have seen in your travels on the road, that this issue is incredibly divisive in our communities. It's tearing them apart. Government hasn't shown leadership on this issue from day one, and it's time that they did.

I would repeat, and I'll repeat, again, the question that Gerald Amos asked of you yesterday. What part of "no" is it that you don't understand?

The science on this issue really is clear and irrefutable. One of the gentlemen up here asked about Mr. Gottesfeld's sort of bona fides. My son is a salmon scientist. He's studying to be a salmon ecologist, just finishing his master's degree at the University of Montana at the Flathead Lake Biological Station. He's studying under a scientist, Dr. Jack Stanford, who's one of the most published and highly respected salmon ecologists in the world. I asked the same question of Jack Stanford about Allen. His opinion was that Dr. Gottesfeld is not only a competent fisheries biologist and scientist; he's one of the most gifted and intuitive scientists that he's ever met in his life. I hope that helps clarify that issue for you.

Jack Stanford — if you want to go through the literature, you'll find 40 or 50 or 60 peer-reviewed papers that he's written on salmon. By the way, his specialty is understanding how rivers work. His opinion is that you would have to be absolutely insane to even consider siting salmon farms outside of the Skeena River, and he studies rivers all over the world.

I've been in this business a long time. There's been a lot of arguing about fisheries conservation. I've seen this issue of science come up time and time again. We call it the salmon wars. We call it the science wars, the data wars.

It's no different than 30 and 40 years ago when the United States Senate was hearing testimony about whether tobacco and smoking were bad for people. There were scientists that came down and testified that there's no proof that tobacco or smoking tobacco is going to hurt you. It happens in every field.

It happens in every issue, about every resource issue. There are always going to be a few scientists that will come forward and say: "I have a different opinion." But I would ask you this. It's 18 to two, according to Mr. Gottesfeld. Is it the 18 that have it right, or is it the two? I think that's the question that you have to ask yourself about science. What is the overwhelming preponderance of scientific opinion?

Again, I ask you: what part of it don't you understand? In every single jurisdiction around the world where salmon farming has occurred, wild salmon have suffered, and they've suffered dramatically. In cases like Chile, where there were no indigenous salmon, the indigenous species suffered. What part of that can't we understand? What part of the precautionary principle don't we understand?

We're northerners up here. Salmon is who we are. It's part of the very fabric of the society up here, and for first nations, I can't even begin to comprehend how important salmon are to them. How could you even consider putting that at risk if there was just the faintest doubt that it was a risky thing to do? How much more do those people have to suffer? How much more damage do we have to do to their communities? Why would we do something like that? I just can't understand it.

I do, though, understand that you have a conundrum. I think it's very important that we break this into two different issues — that is, the salmon farming that's happening down south, and then the north coast. You do have a problem. There are a lot of people out there working in the salmon farming industry down there.

I think it would be irresponsible to just outright go out there and shut that industry down. I think Dr. Gottesfeld has had some suggestions, which you might want to consider in your recommendations, about how to make that a better industry down there. Hopefully, we can eventually replace it with something better for those communities, but up here that's not the question.

Up here there is nobody working in the salmon farming industry. This brings up the other issue. You can't go in and start up new industries without impacting existing industries. That's a simple business principle. When you go in and start a mine on a mountain where there might be a ski resort, you're going to probably affect the ski resort.

The fact of the matter is that there's a whole side effect to salmon farming that hasn't been examined that needs to be. It's that it already has had a dramatic negative effect on our communities. There's a glut of salmon on the world market, and salmon farming has had a dramatic impact on our communities already. They have depressed the price of salmon worldwide. The studies are clear.

In 1990 large red spring salmon were selling in Prince Rupert for $9.90 a pound. Sockeye were selling at close to $5 a pound. Pinks were close to $1 a pound. Twenty-five years ago B.C. supplied 12 percent of the wild salmon in the world. They supply less than 4 percent now, and 60 percent of the world's supply of fresh salmon is farmed salmon.

The salmon industry is devastated in British Columbia. There's no doubt about that. I can cite you facts and figures for hours about how poorly it's doing. One of the reasons it's doing poorly is because governments all around the world, not just B.C., have allowed this industry to proceed without understanding the impacts it would have on existing industries and on people that were making good, honest, honourable livings fishing for wild salmon. The fact of the matter is that the B.C. salmon industry is one of the most mismanaged fisheries in the world. It has been for a long time, and we've really messed it up.

We've seen that the science is being used by proponents to…. They found people that will cast doubt on the overwhelming preponderance of science, but that doesn't mean that they're right. I think that your responsibility is simply to report the facts. The facts are

clear, and they're not in question. The overwhelming preponderance of scientific evidence in practical experience, in historical experience, is that these two activities — wild salmon and farmed salmon — don't really work together very well at all.

Another thing is that there has been a huge focus on lice. That's just one issue. Isn't it convenient that we can find a few people — consultants, mostly, for the industry — who will dispute the science? It seems to me that you have to consider the source — whether you want to consider independent academics in universities or you want to consider consultants paid for by the salmon farming industry.

I'm not saying that they're wrong, and I'm not saying that the people who are proponents of it are bad people. I think they're simply businessmen that want to make a profit, and that's okay. I support that. I think profit's a good thing.

I think the overwhelming question is whether government is going to listen to the people in this region or not, or whether they are going to listen to Pan Fish. The polling has been absolutely clear that B.C. residents overwhelmingly oppose fish farms. I just don't know what more people could do to prove to government that this region doesn't want it.

I think it would be incredibly heartening if this panel would simply ignore the time lines they've been assigned and put in an interim report to the Premier and cabinet, which is the body that has to make this decision. It's ultimately their responsibility. It's not Robin Austin's responsibility, and it's not your responsibility. It's the responsibility of the Premier and the Legislature of this province to make the right decision for the people. The people have been very clear: no.

In all of my time working on conservation issues in the north, I have never seen an issue, one single issue, that has unified the people of this region as this one has. Nothing even comes close to it — not issues around health care or hospitals or anything. Right or left, white or brown, the answer remains the same: no. The people who I'm talking to, and I've talked to most of them on this watershed, feel extremely strongly about this.

The first nations people. Again, I don't speak for them, but I do know that I personally have doubts about whether they can survive as distinct indigenous people and cultures up here absent of healthy salmon runs. There's a lot of scientific evidence out there, social evidence, that they can't, that they would lose their language, lose their identity over time if they lose their salmon. It's how I've made a good part of my living, and I don't want to see them gone.

Anyway, there are multiple opportunities on the part of people who oppose salmon farms to escalate the pressure on you. This is just the beginning. I don't think that our communities need to be torn apart any further, and I don't think that we have to debate endlessly about science and everything else. Again, the answer is no. It's clear. It's overwhelming. There has never been an issue in this province that has brought people together like this.

I guess, in the end, you have a choice. You can either be leaders, or you can be led. That's it.

S. Simpson: Thank you very much, Bruce. I appreciate the comments. As you probably know, we'll be making an interim report in the fall and then a final report in May. But you should know that the committee did make the decision today — we passed a motion today — to call on the government to refrain from approving any further fish farms in British Columbia until we file our final report in May.

We've said we will file a report with recommendations, but in that interim period there should be no approvals until we've made the report public, given it to the Legislature, and then the debate will be settled there. That motion was passed by this committee today, and the Chair will relay that message to the government.

B. Hill: In that case, you have my heartfelt thanks and appreciation. That's leadership, and I appreciate it.

G. Robertson: Thank you, Bruce, for your presentation. A question in terms of the viability of the wild fishery and your background as a troller. The connection between salmon aquaculture and depressed prices available to people making their living from wild salmon….

Where I live in Vancouver, I've heard quite a bit of feedback related to the restaurant industry and to the food industry generally around the preference in that urban market for wild fish specifically. Yet the premium for wild fish doesn't seem to make it to the fisher. There seems to be a gap here between people's desire in the marketplace to buy wild fish and a lack of support getting to the fishermen and translating it into the packing houses, as well, with higher wages.

I'm interested in your feedback on whether you sense there is confusion right now about what goes out into the marketplace — what's wild, what's farmed, how it's labelled — and whether that confusion is part of the reason there isn't more of a premium that flows back to the communities, the economies, that rely on wild fish.

B. Hill: I've actually been working on several projects around just that. I think one of the problems, especially on the north coast, is that we haven't really figured out how to build a successful wild salmon economy in 2006. I think a lot of it has to do with the historical structure of the fishery and the marketing infrastructure that we have.

One of the reasons wild salmon fishermen don't get good prices for their fish is because they don't keep control of the product long enough. It's the nature of the wild salmon fishery that the fish come in, in a very

short period of time in the summer, and you have to get rid of it. There is entirely inadequate freezing capacity on the north coast. That's the major structural impediment to adding value to wild salmon on the north coast.

If the government really wanted to build an economy around salmon in the north, they would be investing in and helping northern communities and first nations get past these historical structural impediments in the wild salmon fishery and adding value to wild salmon. There's a tremendous opportunity. I'm sure you know, in the business you're in, that some communities have been enormously successful in marketing wild salmon. Copper River reds in the United States coming out of Alaska are a prime example.

I don't know if any of you have ever had a coho salmon — like a nice, fresh ocean-caught coho salmon. It's a phenomenal fish. Two years ago the top price paid for a coho salmon in Alaska was paid in Juneau and was 30 cents a pound — a wild coho salmon. The reason for that is because we don't have the infrastructure in place to preserve these fish and to market them correctly. We especially don't have it on the north coast.

Even if you have an ESSR fishery of a first nation that's harvesting 100,000 sockeye on the Skeena — a tremendously valuable fish — they're going to get 90 cents a pound, a dollar a pound for them and everything else, because they can't keep hold of them. If they retained that fish in their communities, if they had freezing capacity, they could turn that into a product that's worth $25 a pound in the European market.

I'm working with one of the top fish processors in Europe. By the way, he processes both farmed and wild salmon. When he was here at the salmon forum last year…. He buys three and a half million pounds of farmed salmon out of Norway every year, and he buys one and a half million pounds of wild salmon out of Alaska. He said: "Bruce, if you allow salmon farms on the Skeena, your wild salmon will go."

He's not a conservationist. He doesn't really give a crap one way or the other whether the Skeena's got salmon in it or not. It was just a statement of fact from a businessman who's seen this all around the world. He owned a salmon farm in Chile. He said, "If you let them come on the north coast, you're going to lose your wild salmon. I'll be here to buy your farmed salmon" — a statement of fact.

Anyway, there are lots of things the government could do to build a wild salmon economy. If you've got to sell the fish to Ocean Fisheries or Jimmy Pattison, and you've got to get rid of it right now because it's going to rot, you're not going to be able to add value to it.

This is a stretch from our topic, but you've touched on something — individual transferable quotas being proposed by the federal government as far as having control of the wild salmon as a public resource. I've certainly heard from first nations and from others, from trollers, that this is a problem as far as control of the industry. Do you agree with that?

B. Hill: I actually did a lot of research on that when I was a fisheries researcher. There's a bad history of individual transferable quotas. They have the same impact on small-boat fishermen as Wal-Marts have on small businesses and communities, but it doesn't have to be that way. It's sort of the ancillary legislation that you would have to attach to ITQs that would determine whether or not they're successful.

There's an example. There have been huge safety benefits in British Columbia and in Alaska when they went to individual transferable quotas. The prices increased tremendously because they could put the product into the market according to market forces. That added value. A lot fewer halibut fishermen got killed going out in derby fisheries.

The problem is that non-fishermen were able to accrue quota and not fish the quota and everything else. Yet people who had money kept getting more and more money, and the people who couldn't quite make it, didn't. It kills the small-boat fishery.

If you had concomitant legislation that said there was a cap on the quota you could own and that you had to fish the quota yourself — physically be on the boat and catch the halibut — I don't think they would be quite as bad as they have been in almost every other jurisdiction where they've been implemented. Without that concomitant legislation it's a disaster for communities.

R. Austin (Chair): Seeing no other questions, I'd like to thank you for your presentation, Bruce.

E. Hamer: I don't have a heck of lot to say, but what I disagree with is giving these licences to these foreign companies. Once you give those licences to those foreign companies, they own the fishery, and they can do whatever they want.

Another thing: living conditions on those floats. What do they do with their waste and the waste off those fish farms and the chemicals they put in the water to keep the fish from getting sick? I had a grandson working on a fish farm, and he said there were dead fish on the bottom of the farm. What do they do to take them out? I don't think they took them out.

How do they clean these fish farms? They say they should put them on the streams so that the streams will wash away the debris, but you're putting this chemical in the water. Where does it go? Your salmon bed gets contaminated, and it kills the other fish. On the west coast we have international draggers. They're fishing outside the limits. They're dragging up all the bottom, and you've got nothing left.

I've been on the halibut boats up in the Bering Sea. I took two trips up to the bay in 1949, and I fished for six years in the commercial fishery. As far as I'm con-

I lived on Ferry Island when I was a kid. You could sit in the house and watch those fish swimming all the way up for hours and hours in the summertime, months on end. What have you got now? Do you ever see a fish sitting in that river? I don't see them.

Other than that, I haven't a heck of a lot to say. I don't agree with giving the country away to some…. Once those companies get hold of those licences, you're not going to have them. They used to have big canneries up here, and the people used to go down for the whole summer and work — scads of people. Then they brought in these packers, and they packed all the fish down south. Eventually there were no more packers. Where do the fish go? You don't get any benefit out of them. They give you whatever price they want, and the wild salmon….

I've been talking to my daughter, and she said that the farm fish is not as good as the wild fish. I raise beef. I've got people that can't eat the meat in the stores, but they can eat my meat because I don't feed them chemicals. That's all I've got to say.

R. Austin (Chair): We've gotten a little bit ahead of time. We'll take a five-minute recess so that we can have a refreshment break, and we'll wait for Brad to come in.

R. Austin (Chair): I'd like to call the meeting back to order, and I'd like to call up Brad Zeerip to the witness table to make his presentation.

B. Zeerip: Hello. I'd like to thank all you folks for coming up here and spending your time to listen to what we have to say. I commend you for your recommendation that you're going to pass on — no more fish farm licences being issued until you're done. I think that's a commonsensical recommendation. I don't know why it didn't start that way, or why the government wouldn't just propose that itself.

I'm a fishing guide; I'm a lodge owner. I make my living from wild salmon, so that's my vested interest in this proceeding. I'm also a third-generation tourism operator. As such, I've had 40 years in the tourism industry. I'm on about my 21st or 22nd year of guiding for wild salmon and steelhead.

My wife and I have purchased a lodge on the banks of the Skeena River, so the salmon are very important to us. It's central to our living. We actually moved to the Skeena River, and we did that because it's undammed and because it's fish-farm-free and because the Skeena River has some of the greatest wild salmon and steelhead left remaining on earth — biggest salmon, biggest steelhead, biggest coho.

I just want to further the message: we don't want fish farms here. There's nobody in this community who wants fish farms. It defies logic to even have the government considering it.

To me, it seems corrupt. Not you people here, but the thought that the government as a whole is even considering this. When you look at the big picture and all the scientific evidence…. I'm not a scientist, but if you were to look to the precautionary principle at all and if you realize the value of the resource in the Nass and the Skeena watershed here and how untainted it is so far, the thought of putting fish farms here is just unimaginable to me. So I just say no to fish farms.

R. Austin (Chair): Okay. That's what this is about: coming here and expressing your opinion. Ron has a question.

B. Zeerip: It's been good. There's been high water here for a while. There've been some good king salmon coming, and fishing's been very good. There's ebb and flow; it's not constant. But so far we're making a good living off it, keeping people happy. Please keep the fish farms out of our neighbourhood.

G. Coons: Thank you, Brad, for coming in today. I was just wondering about your fellow fish guides or lodge operators or other people in your business — how they feel about this.

B. Zeerip: It's unanimous. We do not want fish farms. There's actually another fellow, Greg Knox, who's going to give a presentation for our SAGA, Skeena Angling Guides Association. We're unanimous. We do not want fish farms in the community at all. It'd be bad for business, bad PR on the world market.

I mean, we have people come from all over the world — Ireland, Scotland — and they've all told stories just like the scientists are saying: "We had great fishing, and now the fish farms have come." On the side of Ireland where they have fish farms there are no wild sea trout left. On the other side there still are.

G. Coons: As far as your industry or business, rounding off a number, how many would be involved in the Terrace region?

S. Simpson: With your industry, how good is it? I mean, what's the living like in terms of the money you

can make, in terms of the ability to kind of have a profitable or thriving industry? When we look past commercial fisheries and that and begin to look at the sports opportunities and what you offer…. How lucrative or how successful is that industry in terms of creating jobs and stuff? Do you know?

B. Zeerip: This is my 21st year as a guide. That's my sole income, has been for 21 years. Initially I was just a guide, not a lodge operator. Now my wife and I have sold everything we ever had. We've got our whole life invested in buying a lodge, and we're making a living. There are a lot of expenses, but it's a way of life.

I'd say it's a darn good living. It's not a way to get rich by city standards, but it beats the alternative. It's the only thing I'd ever want to do.

S. Simpson: That's great. You have a lodge, so how many people might you employ when you're working, in the high season?

B. Zeerip: Right now we employ about five people, with part-timers. We're just a small lodge. We cater from the single angler up to a group of eight, at the most.

S. Simpson: The last comment would be — just to be clear — about the motion that we passed, around asking the government to refrain. That decision is not our decision to make. It's the government's to make. We are making that ask of the government — that they not approve any. But it is the government's choice whether they do or don't do that. I'll just let people know that.

B. Zeerip: I understand that, but I would say to every member of the panel that my challenge to you is: don't allow yourselves to just be pawns. If you're just up here wasting all our time and you have no real power, if your voices aren't going to be heard, there's something wrong with this whole process in the first place. You're just another layer of bureaucracy, another layer of b.s.

What you've got to do is hear what we're saying in this valley. We don't want these fish farms. Err on the side of caution. Say no to the government. If they don't hear you the first time, tell them again. Stand up on your chair. Do whatever it takes to do the right thing morally, and help us up here.

One of the suggestions we get is the concept of ocean ranching as they do in Alaska. I don't know a lot about it, but what I've been told is that in Alaska they plunk a ton of fish in the river. Then they set the seiners up, and they come back and catch them. I don't know if you have any knowledge or discussions….

B. Zeerip: I'm very glad. I was in Prince Rupert listening to all this stuff. I've got pages of notes. I'm a terrible public speaker. That's one of the things I wanted to have a rebuttal to.

Ocean ranching, particularly when it comes to the Nass and the Skeena drainage, is a really bad idea. As they said in Norway, they had problems there. They were raising indigenous fish — Atlantic salmon where there were native Atlantic salmon. They ruined the genetics of the wild stock.

The beauty of the fish that we're fishing for here is that they are some of the largest salmon steelhead on earth, virtually. The Kalum River that runs in right here next to the hall has the biggest salmon in the world. The only other place that you could make an argument that might be the same would be the Kenai River in Alaska. They are very special genetically.

Trout Unlimited, which is a freshwater resource organization from the States, had a cover issue about: are there truly any wild salmon left in all of Alaska? They've put so many hatchery fish in. That is a bad thing for genetics. That is a put-and-take thing. That is not good for our drainage.

I am as opposed to the ocean ranching as I am to the fish farms. It is man messing with nature where he shouldn't be. It is man playing God. The best thing to do is protect our headwaters, our small tributary streams. Enhance the natural fish. Protect them — everything from correct logging practices right on through. None of this b.s., playing God, putting — what did they put in Australia? — rabbits in Australia.

It doesn't matter what your example is. It just doesn't work to try to enhance or bolster these or put extra-large numbers of fish out there. Then you go into the whole biomass and the whole feed cycle. They're competing in genetics. Thank you very much. It's a nice idea. It sounds good at the start, but I don't think so.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): The last thing I think we want to do is jump from one controversy to another, but we'll see what develops.

J. Yap: We hear a lot about the economic opportunities that might be provided by aquaculture, particularly for first nations people who by and large are seeking more economic opportunities. I'm interested in your opinion, being in the business that you're in. Do you foresee that what you do as a guide, as a lodge operator in the ecotourism business, as providing some of those opportunities for folks in these communities?

B. Zeerip: Absolutely. The jobs that they are being offered by those fish farms are nothing more than the lowest rung on the ladder in a huge corporation — completely expendable, transient, poor jobs.

We had a break yesterday in Prince Rupert, and we went over to a restaurant. We had our stickers on our packs. Somebody started talking about it. A guy said: "I used to work on a fish farm. That was a great job." I'm an anti–fish farm person, so I thought: what are you talking about? So I went up to him and said: "How do

you mean?" He said: "It was fun." I said: "Oh, great. What did you like about it?"

He said: "I was outside, I had a lot of fun with my friends, and there was nobody supervising us."

I said: "Was it a good job — I mean, like a career? How was the pay?" He said: "It was lousy."

He said, thinking back on it: "You start asking these people what they do with the dead fish. What do they do when these kids are out there, and they spill these chemicals?" This is just a kid I met. It's anecdotal evidence, and I realize it doesn't mean a hill of beans to you guys. So it's not a good job. The kid said it was a fun job, but it's not a career.

I am a third-generation tourism operator. My grandfather started a small resort, and my uncle is still working at it. I was trained by them. It's a very satisfying thing. It's a thing where you get to cater to people and meet people from all over the world. You're your own self-employed person. It's very rewarding, and it's a great thing.

I know from my experience in the Nisga'a territory up here — I've been working with people up there — that there's a hunger for that cultural experience that is far greater than I think any of the first nations people could even realize. It would provide a far greater and more long-term and more economical or environmentally friendly — just much, much better — way to go than the few bottom-of-the-ladder jobs from some corporation that's just going to dump all this waste in your ocean.

J. Yap: Are you familiar with the growth potential for the kinds of opportunities you're referring to? I'm just wondering: what are the numbers? You have an operation here. What are the growth prospects for the type of work you do?

B. Zeerip: It's not easy. The whole marketing thing is very difficult. It's not that you just hang your shingle, and you're automatically successful. But through community projects — like this fellow from Skeena watershed — and with help like that….

I'd be willing to help first nations communities. Actually, I'm enthusiastic about that. It's a lot of work, but there's huge potential — just huge potential. It's a world economy. There's tons of money out there. There are a lot of people who want to fish for wild salmon and steelhead. We've been taking people up and giving them sort of a cultural experience with the Nisga'a up there, and people absolutely love that. There's probably more demand for that than what I'm doing personally. It's a matter of marketing it and getting your name out there and having a good product, where you actually have some quality equipment, and being people people. You have to be service-oriented. It doesn't just automatically happen, but with work, yeah, there's huge growth potential.

B. Zeerip: I don't know exactly. We have about 30 guides in our guides association. Most of those are either independent guides or lodge owners.

I wish I had numbers. Greg Knox was supposed to come. In our community here, there are probably two dozen lodges or so — something like that.

B. Zeerip: The number is growing — absolutely. Right now we're providing a full-time living for my wife and me, and this year I'm paying a fellow a full-time salary. He's actually from the Kitsumkalum band here. We have kitchen help and a number of part-time guides that help us. We're probably at four full-time jobs right now, and we're still growing — for sure. I don't want to ever be a huge business, but I see maybe six full-time employees out of just one small cottage business. I'm one of at least a dozen around Terrace that are like that.

R. Miller: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'm from the Kitsumkalum tribe. I know you've probably already been welcomed here, but since I am a band member, I'd like to reiterate that welcome. So welcome to this, our wonderful territory.

I'm happy that this exercise is taking place, and I look forward to the output at the end of these deliberations. Like the previous speaker, I do have concerns regarding where your recommendations may end up. Will they end up on the shelf gathering dust at the end of this very important round of information-gathering that you're doing?

Before I go any further, I have my colleague George Hayes with me. He and I have been working with UBC on what we consider to be alternatives to open-net cages, which I'll get into later on. I just thought that I should introduce him now.

My name is Ric Miller. I'm Tsimshian from here, as I said. I have a long working history with both the provincial and federal governments, with the private sector and with indigenous organizations on the northwest coast. I've been the executive director of the Tsimshian Tribal Council for about five years. After that I

was the executive director for the Kermode Friendship Centre here in Terrace. So I do have a good feel for the environment in which not only the first nations live but in which all of our citizens in the northwest live.

I have 20 years of military service and honourably retired at the rank of captain with the Canadian Forces decoration. I have my bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from the University of Saskatchewan, and I'm currently registered as a professional engineer with the province of British Columbia. I have to state all that to make my case later.

Although I'm a band member of Kitsumkalum, I'm also a hereditary chief with traditional territories on the Kitselas side of the river, close to Terrace. So I have a real concern with what is happening to the entrance to the Skeena River system, since it will directly affect my people in this area. It's something that's more than near and dear to our hearts. We live and die by what's happening on the Skeena River.

The reason for entering this fray. As a Tsimshian, as I said, I'm interested in an appropriate resolution of this fish farm issue for both environmental purposes and for our Tsimshian Nation unity. Once again we Tsimshian are crossing swords in the newspapers and at public gatherings.

Our nation is already in a lamentable state of disarray as a direct result of some of us being manipulated into a land claims agreement about 11 years ago. The Tsimshian land claims negotiators are self-appointed, do not consult with the masses and, not realizing or perhaps not caring, have put us on the slippery slopes to hell as a nation. They insist on blindly traversing this land claims path, which is rife with land mines for us. Believe me, I'm not digressing. I need to emphasize this to emphasize the plight and disarray of our nation at this juncture in time.

This current issue of fish farms is exacerbating our plight to a mighty degree. We need to nip this issue in the bud sooner rather than later. We have within the Tsimshian Nation…. As you know, one of our communities is being courted by a multinational company to, in my estimation, use some of those people — very few, a minority in that community — as simply pawns. The multinationals are not stupid. They know where there's the greatest chance of achieving success by implementing these open-net cages on the northwest coast.

Like most of my brothers and sisters and most of you, I am inherently concerned about the fragile ecosystem of our planet and, more specifically, here in northwest B.C. One only has to reflect on the abundance of salmon that used to grace our shores, and that was only in the recent past. Today, for a proliferation of reasons, the bulk of our salmon are under severe stress, primarily from activities directly related to mankind. I don't confine that to salmon.

Years ago we had really big oolichan runs on the Skeena River. For the last few years — ten years — they've diminished to almost nothing. So it's not only salmon we're concerned about; it's the other species related to the Skeena River watershed.

In the past I've articulated my concern publicly about open-net fish cages, and to date I see no compelling evidence to change my mind. However, I must hasten to add that my primary purpose here today is not to address the alleged pitfalls of this system. Many speakers before me already have and have done so very eloquently, and I agree with what they had to say.

Options to date are either floating open-net cages in the ocean or closed containment systems on land. It seems to be a binary situation that we're looking at.

What George and I and our colleagues at the University of British Columbia are here to offer is an alternative. I will be getting into that shortly. This alternative will perhaps move us beyond this polarized rhetoric that we're witnessing here today — and in Rupert and wherever else you might have been.

At the same time, we could be developing a system which will dramatically reduce adverse stresses on the environment. Hopefully, we will be able to move beyond this inflamed rhetoric and once again inject a flow of soul and a rush of logic into our economic development in northwest B.C.

I've done some research on the economic estimates for B.C. salmon farms here in the northwest. If one were to delve into the estimates of the past, we would find key impacts cited as follows. A production potential of 40,000 tonnes of farmed salmon annually on the north coast, combined in an area of only 1.4 square kilometres. That's a lot of salmon — 40,000 tonnes. Annual sales of $300 million. Annual expenditures of $220 million on supplies and services, with 90 percent of these purchased from local communities.

Joint venture technologies, transfer and other partnership agreements with coastal indigenous people were some of the benefits that were touted in this exercise. Investment capital in the order of $300 million, with exports generating over $200 million in foreign exchange income. Generation of approximately 5,000 person-years of employment and $144 million in wages, including employment of coastal community residents, natives and dislocated commercial fishermen.

I've only addressed the salmon here, but bear in mind that finfish — including black cod, cod, sablefish, halibut and flatfish — are successfully farmed in other countries. And of course, shellfish aquaculture is already proven in the lower reaches of British Columbia.

By the way, shellfish farming is relatively benign to the environment and the ecosystem. I wonder why that is not promoted more for the northwest coast. I understand that there's another speaker getting up to talk strictly about shellfish, so I'll leave the benefits of it to him to extol on.

With the potential economic impacts which I have just listed, it's no wonder the B.C. government is keen on clearing the way for fish farms on the northwest coast. Perhaps it is one of the reasons this committee may be in danger of being disembowelled — because of the bottom line that these major multinationals will accrue from the fish farms located here on the northwest coast. I'm hoping that will not be the case.

Of course, from the company's point of view, notwithstanding that fish farms were attempted years ago, this is virgin territory ripe for the exploitation. However, this exploitation need not, and definitely should not, take place with disregard for the environment as well as for the people who are living here. Companies cannot continue to be allowed to take the path of least resistance. They must become good corporate citizens and develop long-term sustainable endeavours.

In the past open-net cages have proven to be a quick and dirty solution around the world. From the company's point of view, closed containment onshore is just not economically feasible. They may have an argument there.

Realizing that the bottom line is a real driver for them and the environment is the bottom line for the rest of us, I feel I have an adequate grasp of the issues on both sides of the fence. As long as we only consider these two methods, we could never come to an agreement on action. I propose that we extricate ourselves from this morass by considering a responsible alternative, bearing in mind that this alternative may only resolve the ecosystem pollution dilemma in the area it is used.

Problems associated with generating enough fish feed, chemical use, etc…. I'll leave that to the biologists, because it's something I'm not qualified to speak on — the destruction of the food chain to feed hundreds of thousands of tonnes of farm fish on a yearly basis.

One of the reasons why I'm keen on the concept that we've come up with is that in our communities, we continually suffer approximately 80-percent unemployment year-round. Once again, we first nations have been left sitting on the beach as activity takes place all around us. We did not fare well with the logging. We did not fare well with mining. Our wild stocks are down. The charter fishermen are out there, and once again, I'd say there'd be a gross estimate of a maximum of 10 percent first nations in charter. We're just sitting here watching as everything else takes place around us.

This alternative, I'm hoping, will allow us to finally get a grip on and become masters of our own destiny. We need to look outside the box. That's why George and I are here to talk about the hybrid transition that I'm about to tell you about.

Before I go any further, I'd like to point out to the panel that all the high rhetoric to date has been provided by concerned citizens, indigenous people in B.C., proponents and opponents of open-net-cage fish farming, as well as the research and data that's been provided by marine biologists and environmentalists. As an engineer, I'm in no position to argue with the biologists on either side of the debate, although empirically, evidence points to the deleterious effects of fish farms around the world. So I'll leave that anecdotal stuff alone.

I would like to remind everyone that professional engineers throughout history have built the infrastructures of society. When problems have arisen, which befuddled the minds of people who are not engineers, we would come along and create a solution for them. To date we have been left out of the equation of fish-farming aquaculture in British Columbia. So we are here to let you know that we would like to insert ourselves into the equation, along with our colleagues at the University of British Columbia and the seven graduate students that our colleague has working for him.

What we're proposing is a classic Canadian solution. It's a compromise — neither a closed-contained farm on land nor an open-cage fish farm in the water. It's a closed-contained floating system, and that has many advantages which we've yet to explore. But there are a few, which I will tell you about.

The University of British Columbia has been working on this project under the direction of Jon Mikkelsen, who's the head of mechanical engineering at UBC. I worked with him in 1998 to build a fish trap when I was employed with the Tsimshian Tribal Council. I worked with him again a few years later when we hosted a multinational oil and gas conference in Vancouver, and George has been working with him on a number of other projects as well.

As I said, he has seven graduate students working for him, and George Hayes and I round out the team as senior advisers from the north coast. Ad hoc discussions and planning have been going on for a number of years. It was only recently that the process had moved to the stage where we have the ear of the provincial government.

Basically, the project is designed to be eco-sensitive and self-contained from the energy point of view. It will be a completely enclosed, floating system in the ocean housing the salmon. As a direct result of being immersed in the ocean, the ambient temperature of the system will be maintained at ocean temperature, and the energy required to maintain the system will be derived from ocean currents and wave action. This energy will be used to maintain water circulation and the filtering system of both input and output, and it will be used to condition the feces and other contaminants of the system for discharge at a predetermined location on land.

We envision that enough residual energy should be designed into the system to fulfil energy requirements of local communities as well. Theoretically, the water discharge will be as clean, or cleaner, than the water pumped into the system. That's all because of the filtering system that will be designed into it.

The problem with sea lice will be almost nonexistent. If somehow sea lice did get into the cage, action would be taken to deal with them within the cage. They will not contaminate the surrounding area. The bulk of the sea lice, by the way, do not originate within the fish farm. They're already in the ocean. The problem with open-net cages is that a high concentration of salmon provides a natural breeding ground for sea lice to proliferate. They are then free to roam the ocean and latch onto wild stock. Because our system is enclosed,

this obviates the problem, and it should be a non-issue. I say it should be because we're in the conceptual stage here. This system will resolve local ecosystem problems, but why isn't it already there?

(1) A profitable system — open-net-cage fish farming — is already in place. Therefore, there's no incentive for companies to change their modus operandi.

(2) Scientists from both sides of the debate seem to be at an impasse. There's no clear knockout punch on either side of who's right and who's wrong. Government recognizes this, and with no strong, sustained and cohesive opposition against these types of fish farms, government will continue with open-net fish cages in its efforts for continued economic prosperity. One only has to review the statistics, which I reported above, to see why.

Currently the will to fund an unproven system, either by government or industry, is hardly visible. Our little group is in a catch-22 situation. Without funding we cannot commit people or resources to promote or design the prototype, and without promotion, we of course will continue to lack resources. So we're at an impasse here. Up until now a viable alternative has not been proposed.

(1) Based on the potential of this proposed system, we recommend that this committee assist us in lobbying both the federal and provincial governments and industry to step up to the plate and fund all the activities necessary leading up to the completion of the prototype.

(2) We strongly recommend a moratorium on additional open-net fish farms be established until a prototype is concluded.

(3) Time is of the essence, and a vigorous and sustained lobbying effort on your part and our part will have to be conducted to move this off the starting block.

The advantage of the hybrid fish cage is that this system, once appropriately implemented, could put B.C. in the forefront of salmon farming, not only in the activity itself but also in the manufacture of floating, closed, contained systems.

Little if any pollution would result around the immediate area of the enclosed system, and there's a high probability of it being copied across the world. Because it will not pollute the immediate environment, it will have a much higher probability of being accepted by most of the citizens of this province. We are all very concerned about the pollution from the open-net fish farms in our area.

Because of its design and portability, it could be located close to communities and provide jobs and become a real, sustained economic generator for communities employing it.

The synergies created by this system could spawn many other businesses. As an example, if we had these systems here on the coast, we could ship the fresh salmon out of our newly built international airport of Prince Rupert, which would be built because of its close proximity to our Asian customers. It will provide enough energy to be self-sustaining and possibly enough energy to power the bulk of the small communities that employ it.

For the Tsimshian Nation, this would be one area of agreement and, perhaps, a step towards reuniting. For all the people in the northwest coast, this could be an area of additional pollution-free income.

Really, many other visions come to mind, but we need to take step one first. Additional benefits of this leading-edge technology are yet to be discovered.

In conclusion, this research and development is an area which can no longer be ignored. It must be conducted post-haste. We cannot afford to have any more open-net cages polluting our oceans when a near pollution-free alternative could be available, which would be economically competitive with open-net fish farms.

Thank you for your indulgence. George and I will entertain any questions you might have.

C. Trevena: Thank you very much for your presentation. I have a couple of questions.

You mentioned, earlier on, the use of wave power and tidal power. Are you looking in your design of this that the in-water closed containment would be powered through tidal power?

G. Hayes: Right now we've got seven graduate students with a private partnership, Blue Energy. They've just received a €4 million grant to refine some of the equipment for…. This is wave energy. It is an area of enormous opportunity for British Columbia and also for applications such as this.

We've been looking at this for quite some time. We've just had a group representing 14 nations in Vancouver for a two-day workshop on what is going on. For instance, Portugal has wind and waves, but they haven't got any coal, gas and all that sort of thing. So we're pushing that file down the road rather quickly.

There's a pilot project at Pearson College on tidal energy. In my own background, I was the director of engineering…when we built the Annapolis Royal tidal power. Many of the sites — Kitkatla, the Charlottes — have tremendous tidal flows that can be harnessed. It's a question of sizing and so on.

This is an engineering challenge. The city of Rome had to build aqueducts, sewers, whatever. These are engineering challenges. We think that we have that range of disciplines in the engineering faculties — particularly at UBC, but we work very closely with some of the others as well.

C. Trevena: So you'd be looking at bringing together the evolving science, experimentation and work on tidal power and linking that into the work that you're doing on in-water closed containment.

G. Hayes: It would supply the energy that is now supplied by diesels. Secondly, the pens could be located closer to the community. People could be home at night. This is important. These are costs that will

offset capital costs and bring an industry to the people in those communities, wherever they may be.

Some of the technologies…. I spent a number of years in the pulp and paper industry, for instance. Cleaning out solids, feces, whatever it might be, is a pretty straightforward, uncomplicated process. There are other elements. The University of New Brunswick did some excellent work on the use of kelp, seaweed and so on, or the removal of dissolved materials. We've done five test sites growing kelp from spores too.

C. Trevena: Mr. Miller was talking that this is conceptual. How far along in the conception are you?

G. Hayes: I hope that within the next few weeks we are going to make a proposal to the ministry. We did make a presentation about a month ago to design a business plan, to detail the engineering. We're not going to say that this is it. An engineering process, as far as I'm concerned, is an ongoing one. We've come a long way from a Model T to a B hybrid.

C. Trevena: If I might have the indulgence of one last question. We know that there is work already going on with other in-water closed containment in Campbell River. There's Agrimarine. Are you working with them, looking at their designs?

G. Hayes: We'd love to. We are not going to ignore any technologies, so we will sit down with them and incorporate, in any way possible, all ideas.

G. Coons: Thank you, George and Ric. It's really nice to, sort of, get the expression across of seeing a Canadian, made-in-the-north solution. As Claire was just mentioning, there are other initiatives, and I'm really optimistic about getting some tidal current or wave type of technology going. I'm just wondering how long has this been in the works?

G. Hayes: We've been toying around with this, as Ric has mentioned. I've been working with people like Jon Mikkelsen and others at UBC for ten years. We saw this debate. I was co-chair of the task force on the transportation issues of the northwest a number of years ago. We sat down with the salmon farmers at the time to look at what they saw. The issue and the challenge has not left me, other than that I've gained more and more experience. As you retire, you have more time.

G. Coons: Just a couple of more questions. I was just wondering. Ric, you did some research into the potential on the north coast for farming activities and had some facts and figures and numbers. It would be really interesting, I think, to me and our committee if we could have access to that.

R. Miller: I have a copy of the paper that we just presented, and we'll leave it with you. Unfortunately, we weren't able to run off 14 or 100 copies, or whatever you wanted. But we will leave you a copy.

I just want to clarify. I said this was at the conceptual stage, and in a sense, it is. We've been cogitating and ruminating on it for quite a while now. We are now at the stage where we're talking with the ministry here in British Columbia. We're at the stage where we're generating a business plan for this before we can move any further. So it's not as though we just pull this out and walk through the door. I was a bit careless with that word "conception."

G. Coons: Thank you, Ric. One last comment. As far as our committee's work…. We're coming to Vancouver, and I'm just wondering if it'd be worthwhile, at a site visit, to come and see it.

G. Hayes: By November, which I noticed on the schedule, we hopefully will have the business plan for you.

G. Coons: I'm sure you'll work with our Clerk to finalize that. Thank you very much.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): Well, thank you. It certainly is good to hear positive solutions that are being put forward. Now, just to clarify, your focus is on the tidal energy aspect. Is that your area of focus?

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): You want to marry that with tank technology. You're at the business plan stage. I guess the question we have is: knowing that engineering is always an evolving thing, how long do you think it might take before you have a working model that we can say to industry that this works. Can you say?

G. Hayes: I'm going to stick my neck out, but if we had the resources…. I had 18 months to build a manufacturing facility in Montreal to manufacture this tidal power turbine that's at Annapolis, and we delivered it on time. I also was involved with another project, which was building of a drill

I also was involved with another project, which was the building of a drill rig for the Beaufort Sea for Gulf

Canada, and we had roughly about that same time frame. I think that if we put the resources in…. One only has to look at how quickly they built the Alaska Highway.

R. Miller: It all centres on the magnitude of resources that are available. If we're operating on a shoestring, it could take 50 years. But if the appropriate resources were allocated to this — George and Jon and I were talking about it — we're looking at three to five years.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): Three to five years. Just so you know, you're singing to the wrong choir here, because as you know, we're not a grant-funding…. But I appreciate that you have talked to the Ministry of Agriculture and, I'm sure, other funding sources, such as Western Economic Diversification, to secure funding.

R. Miller: I'd just like to sum up by saying that we first nations on the north coast here do suffer from a severe unemployment problem. I heard a little earlier that these jobs with these fish farms are low-end jobs. Well, that's true. However, they are jobs, and when you don't have a job, 12 or 15 bucks an hour looks like a lot of money to you.

In addition to that, because of the potential portability of these systems, they can be co-located within most of our coastal villages. I keep saying that we have been left sitting on the beach far too many times, and it's happening again.

R. Austin (Chair): I'd like to call Greg Knox up next to the witness table, if Greg is here.

G. Knox: Hi, I'm Greg Knox, and I am representing the Skeena Angling Guides Association. We are a group of 32 licensed angling guides from throughout the Skeena region. We employ several hundred people and bring over $10 million into the economy annually.

Just to state our position first off. We are well educated on the facts of fish farming. We have done this out of self-interest, because our businesses depend on wild salmon. Basically, in Skeena Angling Guides Association, all of our members are totally opposed to any fish farms on the north coast — not only the Skeena River estuary or the Skeena approach waters but all of the waters on the entire north coast — because we make our living off of many of the watersheds, such as the Nass, the Stikine, the Douglas Channel rivers, the Queen Charlotte rivers. We are extremely concerned that if they are brought to another section of the coast, they will damage our salmon stocks elsewhere.

The reason for our total opposition is based purely on the science. We are 100-percent convinced, and the science has done this for us. Every study that was done that we know of points to fish farms directly impacting wild salmon throughout the world: Norway, Scotland, Ireland. We have many clients who are from those regions of the world who have informed us of what has happened in their countries, and it is very frightening for us.

We feel there is no possible way that your panel or the B.C. Liberal Party can ignore this science and allow fish farms on the north coast — let alone the rest of the province, where they already are.

There are two consequences we see from fish farm expansion onto the north coast. The short-term one is that many of our clients have already informed us they will no longer come to spend their money and fish our waters if any fish farms are put on the north coast, because they are from parts of the world where they've seen their wild salmon populations devastated by fish farming.

Secondly, our members have millions of dollars invested in rod-day tenures throughout the region. The day that a fish farm is opened anywhere on the north coast, the rod-day tenure value immediately drops. You can understand that we have spent a lifetime investing in this, and to see an immediate drop in the value of our investment would be devastating to our businesses.

Some long-term consequences we can see are that you will kill the best salmon and steelhead fishery in the world. We have world-record chinook. We have world-record steelhead. We have world-record coho salmon. There's nowhere else in the world where you can replace that. This is the only place in the world, and that is why our businesses thrive here. It's because of this fishery.

If this wild salmon and steelhead fishery is decimated by fish farming, it will cost the local economy over $100 million a year. That is money that is desperately needed. As you are probably well aware, our forestry industry is on the decline, and this is one of the few industries in our particular area that is actually growing and that has a high employment rate. It is money brought in from elsewhere and spent in our communities.

These businesses are locally owned and operated. They are not investment from elsewhere, and the money stays in our communities and is circulated in our communities, which is very important to us.

Just a few things for the government to consider. This fish-farming industry and expansion on the north coast is really costing them a lot of votes, so if they're serious about electing people in our area, well, they better not allow fish farms, because I can tell you that people are going to be furious. The wild salmon of our area are the lifeblood, the soul, of our coast. If they are allowed here, they will tear apart our soul, and you will see a lot of angry people.

Also, the government should be prepared to face legal action, because we are prepared as businesses to take legal action against the government if we face any decline in business due to fish farms and loss of value in our rod-day tenures. We are very serious about this,

and I hope you guys understand that. This is more than just business. This is why people live here. It's because we have wild salmon and steelhead, which feed the rest of the wildlife and give us something to be proud of — an identity.

That is basically all I have to say. I have one question, and that is: is the government prepared to compensate our businesses if you allow fish farms on this coast and they affect our businesses by either reducing the value in our rod days or affecting the wild salmon and steelhead stocks?

R. Austin (Chair): Before I take members' questions, that's a question that you should actually pose to a minister in the government and not to anybody on this committee, unless Ron….

R. Austin (Chair): …speak on behalf of the government in any way. We're a committee that reports back to the Legislature — just to let you know. But you're perfectly willing or able to pose that question in writing to a minister.

S. Fraser: Thanks, Greg, for your comments. Just to be clear: you're not in favour of fish farms on the north coast. I don't mean to make light….

A question. You mentioned a term I'm not familiar with: rod-day tenure. Could you explain that?

G. Knox: Yeah. Many of our rivers and streams on the north coast and inland are tenured. It's like, say, if you have a heli-skiing tenure, then you are allowed so many days to use a certain river. They're worth a value, because they're limited. There were only so many given out in and around 1990.

Those rod days now have quite a high value, and people, in order to get into an angling business, have to invest, in most cases, in the rod-day tenure. Some people will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on rod days just to become a licensed angling guide and operate a viable business in our area.

S. Fraser: For my clarification, you apply for this through the ministry? Through Lands, I guess?

G. Knox: No, you buy them off existing fishing guides. That's the only way you can get them. You purchase them.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): I have a question for you that I asked the other guiding enterprise. It has been suggested today in one proposal, and we've heard it in another place: ocean ranching. I wonder if you know about it or have an opinion on it.

G. Knox: I know a little bit about it. It's where you raise huge amounts of salmon in a hatchery type of setting so that you get massive returns back to that river. You actually harvest those fish. At least that's my understanding of it.

The problem with that is: depending on the interception, when you have salmon going out to the ocean and then returning, they don't return all as one blob. They don't have all the hatchery fish returning in one segment. They're mixed with wild fish, and if you harvest a whole lot, because your harvesting goes way up — your harvest rate — you're intercepting, way more, the wild fish.

You 're putting that much more fishing pressure on those fish, because you have larger populations now returning to the river. That's what happened with our Skeena sockeye. In the fishery on the mouth of the Skeena, because of the Fulton spawning beds, they have massive amounts of sockeye returning, and they intercept a lot of our wild steelhead and salmon. We've had declines directly due to that, so there are concerns there, definitely.

G. Coons: Thank you, Greg, for presenting. It's interesting. I didn't know about rod days.

G. Knox: There are 32 angling guides in our association. There are approximately 100 in the general region.

G. Knox: No, a licensed angling guide can have as many assistant angling guides as you want. Our association, say, has 32 members. We have over 100 assistant angling guides, and in the region there are probably 400 or more assistant angling guides employed by those approximately 100 licensed angling guides.

G. Coons: I'm not trying to delve into your own business, but how many rod days would be sufficient in somebody's tenure? How many rod days?

G. Knox: It depends on how large their operation is. Some people are one or two people doing the operation, doing the actual guiding, whereas other people might have 15 people guiding for them. Some people might have 50 or 100 rod days, supplemented with

other non-classified rivers where you don't need tenure, whereas other people might have over a thousand rod days.

J. Yap: Thanks, Greg, for your presentation. The previous presenter talked about finding economic opportunities for first nations people where the unemployment rate is too high. It's in the 80s in some communities. What would you say to those first nations communities that are looking for economic opportunities and jobs and see aquaculture as perhaps providing that opportunity?

You spoke eloquently about your association wanting to protect its right to a livelihood, and wild salmon is important to your people. What would you say to these folks?

G. Knox: I have a fairly good understanding of the local first nations. The majority of them make their living off of the ocean, and a lot of them are commercial fishermen and, also, in ecotourism and sport fishing.

If they want to put those other jobs at risk for salmon farming jobs, then I guess that's kind of a foolish thing. We already have viable industries that are working, and to put them at risk for salmon farming jobs seems a little bit ludicrous to me. You know, you don't just simply trade one job for another. You try to make new economic opportunities that don't affect the other industries that are already viably operating in the area.

J. Yap: I think I understand what you're saying, but the fact is that the wild fishery is not what it used to be. We all have heard stories of how 30, 40 years ago the ocean was teeming with fish, and today for different reasons, many reasons, the number of commercial fishers who are able to generate a living has declined dramatically. It's kind of: yes, there's a wild fishery, but in some areas the fish are just not there.

G. Knox: Right. But I think you're wrong in that assumption, because on the north coast here we have very strong populations of wild salmon. There is still a viable commercial fishery. The reason why jobs have gone down is not because there are fewer fish. It's due to programs like the Mifflin plan. In the 1990s they concentrated licences into fewer hands. Instead of the small guys being able to fish, now you have bigger, more efficient boats taking more fish, with fewer people employed.

We have to look not at the number of salmon but at how we harvest them and how we process them and so forth. We can't just say: "Well, why don't we just have one giant boat go out there and take them all and employ 20 people?" We want to create employment and decent jobs. We don't want to just make some guy rich, sitting in an office building in Vancouver.

J. Yap: I don't know if that's what's happening, but I appreciate your opinion.

Going back to a comment you made early in your presentation, you said that your association kind of looked at aquaculture and got information. You referred, I think, to studies that were done in Norway and Scotland with regard to how these studies showed there was a direct link to a decline in the wild fishery when aquaculture went into those areas. I'm wondering, just for the benefit of our panel, if you have those references. We would like to take a look at them.

G. Knox: Yeah. I could get them to you. I don't have them with me. I can do that.

G. Knox: It's not coming only from studies. It's coming from actual people who fished there and no longer fish there. They can no longer fish for wild salmon because they don't exist. They've had to poison rivers, because Atlantic farm escapees have taken over the rivers, spread disease in the rivers and killed the wild salmon population. They had to go in there and actually kill the river off, take all the fish out of that river and restock them again. Those are facts.

J. Yap: Right. You referred to those scientific studies. So if we could have the benefit of those, that'll be helpful to us.

R. Austin (Chair): I'd like to call up Fred Seiler to make his presentation.

F. Seiler: Evening. It's good of you guys to come up here and see this great part of our country, especially all the guys from down south. Robin, you're from here. Obviously, you see this place every day.

I run a company called Silvertip Eco Tours Ltd. I started in 1990 and kind of went full-time in 1997. I took on a partner and built the business up basically from scratch. We employ first nations people. We also employ local people. Right now our company is growing, roughly, about 1,000 percent a year, in leaps and bounds.

I think tourism is an industry that's not looked at very well in this area, in the sense that they think the tourism dollar is something that can't make mortgage payments. It's really hard, when you're born here, to see logging when logging's gone downhill. I kind of wanted to get out of the apple crate before the apples got all rotten, because you could see that it was a downhill slide.

Tourism is a really good, growing thing. In 1997 I got the company tenured by — at that time it was —

B.C. Land and Water Inc. We were the first tenured operator in the north to do grizzly bear trips. It was quite a conundrum, because there were no commercial guidelines for any of this stuff. I worked with a guy named Tony Hamilton in addressing guidelines.

Since then, the company has grown substantially. We also do fish guiding. In our industry, because we're so far north and are also kind of hidden, we are the jewel of British Columbia. This section is the jewel, and it's the last remaining jewel that's up here. The reason is because the bottom part of the province is inundated with people. There are people everywhere. Here you can still go five minutes from your house and there's a grizzly bear, and that's a pretty cool thing to do.

At the same time, since tourism is growing, we've got cruise ships coming to the Pacific coast now, stopping in Prince Rupert. Last year our little company did roughly 850 passengers off the cruise ship industry, and we're only one part of the company. There's a whole bunch of other industries, and we're all related to salmon. It's all related. Everything comes back to salmon.

In the Broughton Archipelago, where they've had problems with the fish farms — and it's identified, obviously — the Morton study has said that there is pink salmon that have more sea lice on them. Obviously, if nobody wants to listen and everyone wants to turn a blind eye, then we can think it's something else.

Our biggest concerns are…. We do a lot of grizzly bear viewing, and our grizzly bear viewing, if you look at Knight Inlet, grosses roughly a couple of million a year. All the way through Port Hardy, all the way through, everything is advertised as grizzly bear, grizzly bear, grizzly bear. We don't even have a chance up here, because it's hard for us to get people to come up here for tourism anyway. We're fighting Vancouver all the time. Vancouver, Vancouver, Vancouver. They've got to get an extra plane to come up here.

What's going to happen? If we wind up losing those pink salmon through some of our systems — like what happened in Rivers Inlet, where we don't know what happened to the sockeye run, but they had to dispatch 11 grizzly bears from Owikeno Lake because they lost the sockeye run — and if we have that here where we lose our runs, what is going to happen to our bear viewing and our commercial company we've got going? It's not so much about our company, but what's going to happen to the bears and all these other rich ecosystems we have? We have all this nitrogen that feeds this part of these systems that are here.

You guys are great, and it's great to have you as a committee here. Honestly, you guys should be able to make decisions. It should be an easy decision. It shouldn't be too hard, because you guys are looking at the future of our children, which is really an important part of who we are.

In 1999 I took a guy named Sir David Nells Cane out. This guy was 78 years old. He started the fish farms in Scotland. We went to a place called Indian River, or the Canoona. He looked at this beautiful run of coho that was splashing about, and he said: "Fred, when I put those fish farms in Scotland, we didn't think there was ever going to be a problem."

He doesn't have any of his resident brown trout or any of his resident fish that he had when he was a kid growing up there. He said: "The one thing that you guys have over us is that you guys have bears. We don't have bears." They didn't have to worry about losing a whole bunch of things inside their ecosystem. The wolves, the grizzly bears, the black bears — everything is thriving off of these ecosystems.

You guys are at a chance where if we have…. The amount of salmon fry that migrate out of the Skeena systems and out of the Douglas Channel systems, we don't really have a good shoe on where exactly they go. We know little bits, but we don't have all the true information. If we have a chance at losing these stocks, especially with the global changes we've got coming at the same time now — we've got a lot of different things that are coming upon us — I don't know if our ecosystems can actually sustain that much impact.

There was a guy named Jan Heggenes, and he is the leading scientist in Norway. I happened to do some electrofishing with this guy for steelhead. This guy is one of the DNA geniuses from Norway. He said that in Norway they don't allow any fish farms near any of the main river systems. They don't go near any of the river systems. They're out in the middle of nowhere. They're not out in front of the rivers. I can understand why the fish farms want them there. They want that water flush. They really want to get that changeover.

For our company, you know, to say that I don't know who I'm going to sue…. I'm going to have to sue somebody when my company goes downhill because it's what everybody else does — right? I think there's a whole bunch of environmental outfits that will back you 100 percent to be able to sue somebody. I think it's a really good thing. Obviously, it's a win situation, because if you guys make the wrong decision, I mean, it's a wrong decision, but it should be a pretty simple base decision.

Our environment right now is really rich. We don't have a problem with salmon up here. We don't have one problem. If we took the money that we're going to invest in fish farms and everything like that and put it into stream enhancement, making sure that our logging practices were done properly and that everything else was done properly, we could have sustainable salmon probably for a long, long time. And it would keep going.

It's a real conundrum, because these fish farms may employ a couple of people, but tourism is actually growing here, big time. For the future it can be sustainable, and it will be a continual cycle. I really think it's an easy situation for you guys, even with the science that is in. I haven't seen positive science for fish farms yet. Everything I've read is always negative.

To wrap it up, a future for our children — this is a really important part. We've lost our logging, and it's going to be a long time before we can actually start going again, and that's if the pine beetle doesn't come

With that, if we lose our salmon…. Everybody who works in the north is related to salmon, no matter what. You don't think you are. Everybody that lives up here is related to salmon — every company, whether it's a fishing guide, a tourism guide…. It's really important that you guys understand that the decision you are making has to be a viable one, as a committee.

R. Austin (Chair): Do any members have any questions of Fred? No? Your presentation spoke for itself. Oh, one second.

S. Simpson: A very quick question. Could you tell us a little bit more about the business you have and the number of people you employ?

F. Seiler: When we first started, it was just me, because it was really hard to make a living. Trying to get people from around the world to come was a really tough call. You had to put a lot of money into marketing, and you had to work on it like crazy to get it to go. I took on a full-time partner. Currently we have five employees — two first nations. By next week we could have nine employees, because we're just growing by leaps and bounds. It's just phenomenal.

Again, it's seasonality. It's only a six-month window. But if you're a fair employer, which is what we try to be, the person that works for six months can make what we used to make logging. When we used to work logging, we only worked six months up here. We never worked all year-round.

That was part of the problem. Now it's all year-round. We go, go, go, and there's nothing left. If we were a little bit smarter when we were younger, we would have a lot of forests. When they logged the Kitimat Valley, they logged it in 50 years instead of logging it over 150 years. That was part of our problem.

We have one more witness on our preregistered list. He would definitely like to speak last. We've had a couple of people who have come here, and we have a little bit of time — not 20 minutes, just a few minutes each.

I'm going to allow those people who have asked to speak for a few minutes to please come forward to do so. I'm going to ask Randy Dozzi, who thought that he was registered. Apparently, there had been a miscommunication, so would Randy Dozzi like to come forward and make a presentation?

R. Dozzi: I'm Randy Dozzi, and I'm the owner of a bed-and-breakfast in town. I've lived up in this area for quite a while. My little presentation goes back to 1989, when I graduated in the aquaculture technician program out of Prince Rupert. At the end of that year, what I personally took from the program and the practicums I was on was that open-net-pen salmon farming is, at best, extremely harmful to the environment and, to me, did not appear to be sustainable, as the amount of baitfish that are killed around the world to make this feed and whatnot, actually…. You end up killing more than you're actually growing.

Back then, I and a few other people began to collect studies on salmon farms, and all of the information we collected was from various provincial government ministries and the DFO. They were their commissioned studies. What we did with this information is we just organized it. It was obvious, you know, all the different ministries and people involved had never got together to put all this together. So we did that for them.

The results of sending all this information back as a sort of comprehensive package…. We ended up being blacklisted. It was because what all these studies basically showed were the fears that I had or that I'd learned from the aquaculture program. I think that back in '89 and '90, if all of that information was made public, we wouldn't be having this discussion today.

One report in particular, though, that's always stood out from the others to me, which I've never heard discussed publicly, was about the numbers of wild salmon smolt in the stomachs of farmed fish. Part of the problem there is that we've got these million of adult salmon in areas that, you know, at that stage in their life they're not endemic to. The farms, obviously, were attracting migrating smolts who could swim into the nets, because the net has to be a certain size to allow enough flushing, oxygen and all of those things.

To me now, it's been almost 20 years of Atlantic salmon chowing down on our wild smolts, and I personally believe that's been part of the problem with some of the fish stocks collapsing in areas, especially Vancouver Island and whatnot — my personal opinion.

Outside of that, I've always failed to understand why every other business and industry in this province is subject to environmental regulations concerning dumping raw sewage, chemicals, antibiotics, whatever, into our system, yet salmon farms have always seemed to be exempt from that. I don't think a moratorium is the issue. I think the issue is just to totally ban open-net pens off our coast.

S. Fraser: A question. You said you were blacklisted. Could you elaborate on that? What does that mean?

R. Dozzi: Basically, all of the government reports we read through and compiled and sent back were extremely damaging evidence to open-net pens. So at that point the different ministers that we were getting

information from — everybody then at that point had to be okayed from the head of that ministry — just got stopped. But at that point we'd already filled four filing drawers. It was more than enough information, too. But yeah, the info stopped coming. The Freedom of Information Act became the next issue, and we just didn't want to deal with that.

R. Dozzi: I'm not sure if it's all still available. Our main person, whose name was Mr. Louis Schellinger, unfortunately passed away just recently. I'm not sure what's happened to all of his files.

S. Fraser: Okay. Well, for instance, you raised an issue that I'd never even heard mentioned before — wild smolt being predated by….

R. Dozzi: Yes. That particular document was actually supposed to be just an internal one, but the gentleman did feel it was important enough to let us know, and he did send us a copy of it. It's always been a real hurdle whenever I've spoken to any people over the years from government or from DFO — that it's not to be discussed.

G. Clark: I'll only take a couple of minutes of your time. I know you've been locked in here all day, so you're probably not aware that England drew with Sweden 2-2, and that means they topped their pool and everything's right with the world.

On an only slightly more important topic…. My name is George Clark. I've lived in this area for 31 years. I own three travel agencies: one in Terrace, one in Kitimat and one in Prince Rupert. This is the first time I've ever appeared before a panel. I hope I don't like it too much and I start writing letters to newspapers, which is something I've never done either.

I feel quite strongly about this point, and I want to bring a point to you that Mr. Yap brought up. That's the economic development to, particularly, first nations. Over the past five to ten years the travel industry lost a lot of its traditional income streams, and it became quite a stressful industry to be involved in.

We looked at new income streams that we can develop. One is what we call inbound tourism, which is providing services for tourists coming to this area. We cut our teeth on providing excursions for the cruise ships that came into Prince Rupert starting four years ago. Now we offer a selection of eco-based shore excursions. When a cruise ship comes in, we employ between 20, 25 and sometimes up to even 30 people, many first nations. Two of our most popular excursions are on rivers, on the Skeena and the Exchamsiks. We work with Fred Seiler, who runs a very professional tourism operation.

They're both first nations cultural experiences, as well, and we serve wild salmon. It's interesting. Most of the tourists who come say, "This doesn't taste like salmon," and we point out that yes, this tastes like salmon, and what they've been eating doesn't taste like salmon.

Last year we put about $350,000 into the economy just on the short-excursion business. That was when two ships were coming in every ten days, so not that many. I'd hate to see as many ships calling in Prince Rupert as are calling in some of the ports. Maybe to have two or three a week would be very nice. Next year, I understand, it's possible there could be two a week. You can extrapolate that that might be putting $600,000 to $800,000 into the economy.

Many of our employees are first nations. Another major tour operator in Prince Rupert is the Metlakatla Development Corp., which employs first nations guides almost exclusively. The benefit to tourism based on the Skeena is in the tens of millions.

I can't give you an accurate figure because — a great shame — an impact study has never been done. It's something that should be done as a priority. There's enormous revenue that goes to the provincial government in the form of taxes, of course, but also licences. You may find it an interesting piece of information if you can find out exactly what that revenue is.

Recently I brought ten Chinese tour operators, owners in the lower mainland who own companies that bring Chinese tourists and also provide services to lower mainland Chinese, up to this area to see if there was the possibility of tours here. They primarily do tours to Banff and Jasper, which really is rapidly becoming one of the best places in the world to view tour buses.

As an aside, I spoke with Tourism B.C. about this idea, and they pooh-poohed it and said it would never work because Chinese tourists are only interested in Whistler, Banff and Jasper — so two destinations that aren't even in B.C. I went ahead and did it. I brought these people, and I took them through the Nass Valley, and they went by launch down to Prince Rupert and along the Skeena Valley.

I'm just going to read to you two paragraphs of one letter I got back. The lady doesn't write perfect English, but you can get the point.

Unfortunately, it isn't going to happen like that because we couldn't even get that many air seats up here.

One of the problems in the Nass Valley is that there's a lack of accommodation. Next month one of these operators is bringing a Chinese contact that has expressed a willingness to invest in, maybe, accommodation infrastructure in the Nass. I think that eco-based tourism is an existing industry, a strong industry, but it has enormous potential when you look at the size of the Chinese market. I mean, you just have to look at the numbers involved. Their middle class is much greater than the population of Canada.

I think it is a tremendously important industry, already putting tens of millions of dollars into our economy, and it has the potential to grow.

To bring a new industry to this area that employs nobody right now, a new industry that could threaten the salmon on the Skeena and other rivers…. And tourism is really based on the salmon. It's based on their viewing. It's based on the salmon fishing. It's based on the eagles. Without the salmon, that's all gone. There'll still be water in the river, but it'll no longer be the Skeena. It'll no longer be a wild river.

To bring an industry in that could threaten a much larger industry that already exists is not economic progress. It's economic change, but it's not economic progress. It's economic regression.

I was in Campbell River two weeks ago staying with somebody. They like to fish, but they're coming up here to fish, because the fishing in Campbell River is only a shadow of what it used to be. Their tourism industry is in decline based on the salmon fishing there. Ours isn't. We are becoming a much more important tourism destination because our rivers are still pristine, and the Skeena is the longest undamned river in the world and one of the most pristine.

I'd just like to say that you have an awesome responsibility, and you have an awesome opportunity. You have an opportunity to recommend to the government that the government should take this opportunity it has to at least protect one of the great wild rivers in British Columbia — protect it for future generations and protect it for visitors that would want to come here from around the world. Is it too much to ask that you leave us with one wild river? That's all we want. Just leave us one.

Thank you, George. Coming from Prince Rupert and being…. My daughters both work for the boat-based tourism industry, for the last five or six years, being involved in the whale-watching and the grizzly bear tour. I personally understand that it is the most pristine area left in the world. I thank you for your comments on this.

S. Spalding: Thank you for the opportunity for me to be able to share a story with you. There was a miscommunication. I originally thought I was on the presentation list. I felt it was very important that a Kitsumkalum community member be here and provide a presentation to you, the committee. So I assumed that I was put on, and I got a list that said I was on, but unfortunately there was some sort of miscommunication between whoever was organizing me to be on with your group. All is forgiven.

I won't take up too much of your time, and I'll talk fast. One reason: I'm hungry. The other is that the coffee is hitting, and I'm getting shaky. The other is that I'm nervous, so bear with me.

I am a member of the Kitsumkalum community. Actually, I would just like the people from this community to rise and say hello. These are the people of Kitsumkalum community, and we'd like to welcome you to the traditional territories. [Sm'algyax spoken.] I come from the community of Kitsumkalum.

I wanted to share a story with you because I was told by some elders within my community to always speak from your heart. This is what I choose to do. I am a mother. I am an educator. I work within the public education system. I work hard for social justice and for some common understanding of who we are as aboriginal people within this province and within this country.

I am a member of the Save Our Wild Salmon group. When they arranged for their summit last year I was there, and I spoke as well, but I had notes then. I choose not to have notes today because I feel that a part of our history is our oral history. Our oral history is telling stories, and what I know about telling stories is how you anchor it within your memory. How I want you to anchor it in your memory is not necessarily participating in what we call a feast system, but in a system such as this. Luckily for you, you have the Hansard system to help you anchor it in your memory.

As long as I can remember, growing up within this community of Kitsumkalum with my family, we were

raised on our traditional foods, and our traditional foods came from the ocean and from the Skeena River. I grew up with our traditional foods on the table to a point where it was just natural. It's part of who I am. We had seaweed and cockles and mussels and shrimp and halibut — all the fish, all the abundance that our people get. But what is important to me is what I saw through the seasons. What I saw through the seasons was with my grandma, who we call [Sm'algyax spoken].

My grandma taught me and my family and many of our community members about processing fish. Along with that experience — and I'm very fortunate, and I find it a very enriching experience — was the opportunity to hear the stories that she had about fish and what it means to our people. She taught my dad really well. He was a fisherman. He net fished, and he provided an abundance of fish, like many of our people still do, to our families and our community members, including our elders. He was taught how to net fish, how to process fish, but he only took it to a point.

We had different roles to follow, and our roles were to…. Well, he handed it over and then we had to clean it, as women, and process it and smoke it and jar it and do what we needed to do to share it amongst our family. I was lucky to be able to experience, just behind here, my grandma's [Sm'algyax spoken] smokehouse and have that opportunity to sit there and watch how she filleted the salmon and hung it on the smoke racks in our smokehouses. If a piece dropped in the fire, she said: "Well, one of our ancestors" — it could have been my grandpa; it could have been my uncle; it could have been somebody from our community who just recently passed — "is hungry, so we've got to feed the spirits." So that's what we do.

To the point where she shared stories about when we caught our first salmon…. It is important that we show the respect for it. How we clean it, how we return some of it back to the earth, and how we have a ceremony — all of that was a part of that learning process for me growing up in this community.

She also talked about how our food sustains us through our lifetime, and how that is valuable to us as aboriginals, as Tsimshian people, as the people in this community.

Fortunately my father, before he passed away, taught the skill of net fishing to my husband, who now brings fish to my family and extended family. We don't look after just our own immediate family, we look after our extended family and those members of the community and those members of our extended family who are not necessarily Kitsumkalum.

My husband's Tahltan. From his learning the skill of net fishing, we bring that to his area of Telegraph Creek, where his family goes to their places to process salmon. They have their issues on their river, which they need to be protected as well.

I tell you this story because I cannot alienate the salmon from who I am. It is me. It's part of who I am as Tsimshian. It's part of my people. It's part of what sustains us. When we're talking about sustainability and what it means to us as aboriginal people, we need to be part of those discussions. Unfortunately, Dr. Allen Gottesfeld isn't here, but I'm sure he's quite well-trained by the…. I notice he works for the Gitxsan people, so he must be trained in some indigenous knowledge, hopefully. I feel it's necessary.

I worked in the Yukon Territory for a number of years, and I really liked how they balanced indigenous knowledge with conservation and the conservation of the caribou in the Carcross-Tagish area. I believe that's important, especially when you do live in a corner of our world where we say we are Tsimshian, and this is the territory of our people — that our people are brought to the table and are part of the discussions at an equal level. I feel aboriginal knowledge is just as important as scientific knowledge, because we have the stories and we have those places. We have the history that goes along with it and what it means.

I know that as a community we are grappling with the changes that are occurring around us — at our meeting table, as chief in council — because we know change is coming, and it's coming swiftly. The one thing that we're not ready to sacrifice is the salmon and what it means to our people.

Like somebody said before me, we are preparing now to process salmon — the spring salmon, the sockeye salmon, the coho salmon that everybody knows. We're getting ready, and we have to do it. It's just part of who we are. I want to see that continue.

I oppose open-net fish farms because of the environmental impacts. I know that for future generations, I don't want to see that. I want to see other alternatives. You've been presented with other alternatives. Whether they'll fly or not, as time goes by, we'll see.

Importantly, we're here as Tsimshian and we want to coexist as a people with British Columbians, with Canadians, with our anglers, with our guides, with the people who share this resource. We want to coexist. It's not an issue that we want to be confrontational about. We want to coexist, and we want to be a part of the decisions that affect who we are. I thank you for listening.

R. Austin (Chair): Our final witness this evening is Bill Mounce, if Bill would like to come to the witness table.

B. Mounce: I'd like to thank you for this opportunity, and the people of Kitsumkalum. I'm William Robert Mounce of Humpback Bay and Porcher Island. That's 15 miles south of Prince Rupert, at the mouth of the Skeena. That puts me dead centre in the Tsimshian territories. I believe I have four or five overlapping land claims, so we're right centre.

I'm a marginalized commercial fisherman of 30 years, a developer of the first and current shellfish farm on the north coast and an occasional instructor at the Northwest Community College in either of those previous subjects.

Your mandate seems to stress sustainable aquaculture. Shellfish has to fit any definition of that better than any other form of aquaculture in B.C. — maybe excepting Louis Druehl's marine plants in Bamfield.

I'll try to confine my presentation to my area of expertise, which is north coast shellfish, although I am quite well versed in most of the marine and science issues on the north coast here. I do my best to keep myself very well-informed.

Shellfish potential on the north coast. We have incredible existing infrastructure, an artifact of our commercial fishing industry. We have a centralized processing capacity throughout the Prince Rupert area. It's a transportation hub — road connections 24 hours to either Vancouver or Edmonton. We're soon to have container access to the entire Pacific Rim and, by reverse, weekly rail access to anywhere in North America. We may even get some frequent upgrades in our air traffic, as well as our growing port. Through the fishing industry, we have great packing capacity.

One of our great things that we have on the north coast is pristine water quality. There are not too many places in the world that have the same water quality that exists on the north coast of B.C. We have locally in Prince Rupert an internally recognized program to monitor our biotoxins for our potential shellfish industry. We have a very substantial fleet of work boats, skiffs, punts, gill-netters all scattered around the various villages on our coast.

Our greatest asset is that we have an underemployed, skilled marine workforce. Scratch any group of oyster farmers or shellfish farmers on the south coast, and it won't take you too long to find an ex–commercial fisherman. Commercial fishermen, which we have no shortage of in our villages here, already have the skills that are needed for the shellfish industry. They just don't know it yet.

We have proven commercial shellfish species up here. Our Pacific oysters, due to the colder waters that we have up here…. As you may have heard, they don't spawn. That's a good thing. It means they don't get milky in the summer, and they're not slinked out in the fall. We can produce an oyster here at certain times of the year that nowhere can compete with. Ours are at their very best when the rest of the coast's are at their very worst — a unique marketing opportunity.

Japanese scallops have proven themselves. They're a very finicky animal to grow down south. They're literally bulletproof up here. You really have to go out of your way to kill something which on the south coast they have a real tough time keeping alive.

We have a number of other species which have huge potential. They may be a huge opportunity for industries all on their own, but we haven't even assessed them yet. The basic investigation of species hasn't been done yet on the north coast — an incredible deficit.

Two north coast shellfish leases were licensed just prior to the lifting of the south coast shellfish moratorium. Hopefully, you're a little bit familiar with that bit of history — mine at Humpback Bay and Rick Lozon's over in Queen Charlotte City. There were several pilot projects investigating shellfish that were operating in various local villages.

Around that time, shortly thereafter and even ongoing, there have been many studies — everything from marketing studies along the corridor here to a major biophysical capacity survey. Quite a few projects have been carried out, funded by various levels of government. They represent expenditures, I'm sure, of several million dollars.

With the lifting of the moratorium, it was under a new and improved shellfish licensing system. Basically, today here we are.

As I sit here and speak to you some six or seven years later, there are two licensed shellfish farms on the north coast — mine and Rick Lozon's — and there are several pilot projects operating in various local villages. Seven years. Here we still are.

What I find more serious than that is that despite all the expenditures, it's my perception that the individuals in the villages are not much better informed or trained in shellfish culture. I believe it's obvious that the shellfish industry on the north coast is not developing on its own. Why?

As committee members here, you're in a unique position to influence the future of the north coast in a positive manner. It looks like we've sort of dealt with one issue here as far as your recommendations. Everybody has told you what you shouldn't be doing. I'll tell you what you should be doing.

The current shellfish aquaculture licensing policy for the north here is: protecting the potential of shellfish sites for future use for first nations people. However, when you couple this with the shellfish MOUs that are being offered at present, I think it's serving more to handicap first nations shellfish development than anything.

On the south coast portions of the shellfish industry cringe at the mention of first nations concerns. Here in the north we have a unique opportunity for first nations to actually be the industry. It can be done right here. The opportunity is there. Everything is wide open.

I urge this committee to make their major finding concerning the north coast of B.C. be that MAFF be tasked to fast-track first nations shellfish development in the north coast. It is something that you can do. It's something that will have very positive, long-lasting effects. This is a win-win-win possibility. You can do it.

One of the key things that have to be done is: a five-year plan has to be developed. MAFF should take the leadership role. It has the people who can put this together. Obviously, it's going to take some work, but a lot of the stuff can be done in a hurry. If your interim report were to identify the direction that this is going, MAFF could be well prepared to start next year. It's a possibility.

There are lots of things that have been…. There are no bad people that are to blame for the situation that

we're in today. The shellfishing industry should have been launched six, seven years ago. There is no excuse for it sitting totally stagnated. There aren't any bad people that are forcing that to happen, but there has been a lot of inattention, I think.

We have most of the resources in place. The north coast has a few needs. I mentioned the basic science. We have the Centre for Shellfish Research in Nanaimo — good people, good facility. One of the projects that they're currently working on is cockles — very important. One of the groups that endorsed that cockle project was several of the first nations groups up here. They identified that this is a species that needs attention.

When the project actually got developed and what's being implemented today…. Due to cost-cutting or whatever, they started chopping arms off the project. The first cut: the north coast. Cockles are the one species that has got astronomical potential up here. Cockles are the one thing that needs to be proven in a commercial situation.

It needs to be proven up here. It does not need to be proven to help out geoduckers in the middle of the Gulf of Georgia. It needs to be done for the natives up here. The Alaskans are working on it. Why the heck aren't we? There's no excuse for that.

Not to be critical of the CSR, but they have been using basically all the funds for science in shellfish for British Columbia. They haven't been delivering anything to the north yet. I think it's time that they were tasked to actually deliver something to the north.

I don't think that is an unreasonable request, especially to you people from the north here. I really think you should address that.

Malaspina College, right next door and closely associated, has also been absorbing a lot of funds to produce first nations shellfish courses. To date, the introduction course has been delivered once in Prince Rupert. They had those programs in the package over three years ago when they first came up here. We have been fighting to get them. Last year we got them. We delivered the one introductory course once. We need that course and similar courses run in all the villages. There is a severe deficit of knowledge of shellfish culture in the villages. That needs to be remedied. MAFF needs to get working on their five-year plan and identify all these needs.

There has been no overall development plan for the north, and it needs to be looked at. There is a reason the shellfish industry has not grown up here and hasn't looked after itself. That is because it needs some guidance.

Some 20 years ago MAFF used to run around the southern coast — Vancouver Island and the lower mainland — doing remote-setting workshops. They are no longer in that business, but they were 20 years ago. That is the state we're at right now. We need remote setting workshops. It would be nice if they were happening right now. They could be put off till next year, but it's a real shame, because by not remote-setting this year, for all summer, we are missing a unique opportunity — the Olympics coming up.

We could be producing a triple-A-class Asian market, and we could be showcasing our product at the Olympics. But because we're asleep at the switch right now, we're going to miss it. It's not like we're going to have the Olympics here every couple of years. These opportunities are phenomenal. If you're not ready for them, you miss the boat.

The south coast shellfish industry is coming up against quite a few limitations: space, urban sprawl, NIMBYs — not in my back yard. And we've got deteriorating water quality. These are the things that are currently driving the shellfish industry in B.C. None of these things apply to northern B.C. at all. We've got a blank map. The major constraints that are governing the development of the B.C. shellfish industry do not apply to this half of the coast.

Northern B.C. needs a separate shellfish development plan from the rest of British Columbia. The industry should not be lumped together with what is taking place and has taken place in the south coast. There are a lot of very good lessons that could be taken from the south coast, but the north coast is a unique situation. It has different species, different seasons, different products, and it is going to be done by different people in a different way.

Anyway, I guess my big question to you guys is: how can you not totally support an environmentally friendly, socially acceptable, labour-intensive new industry in an area of high, chronic unemployment? There are other fish in the sea, and first nations shellfish industry is a win-win scenario.

R. Cantelon (Deputy Chair): You may be, Bill, but we're not. Hope you're not disappointed.

We did visit the shellfish centre at Malaspina College. I think it was an eye-opener for us. I'm disappointed to hear that those benefits aren't being spent in the north. We'll see what we can do in trying to push that along, because certainly, it does represent great opportunities for first nations here. I appreciate your initiatives in trying to get it going. Thanks for raising it to our attention again.

S. Fraser: It is an issue near and dear to me, Bill. I've worked with B.C. shellfish growers, and I work with the Nuu-chah-nulth on the west coast dealing with oyster farms. The north coast is a perfect location for those initiatives because of the clean water and the high nutrient levels and everything, as you well know.

The regulatory regime is daunting in B.C. for shellfish, so that's a problem. I have some contacts I can give you — probably better right after the meeting. I'll try to deal with that with you.

I'm biased, because I support the industry in a lot of ways. It's great, and it doesn't have a lot of that stigma

of other portions of aquaculture. You know, there's no feed, and the oysters and cockles and that aren't big on escaping. You don't see them trying to pull away and run up the rivers sort of thing. They're pretty safe that way.

B. Mounce: The current licensing and attitudes of MAFF are not conducive to the development of a shellfish culture industry up here amongst first nations. I think that does have to be recognized.

It's almost as if the province is spending more energy in posturing itself for future land claims than they are in encouraging first nations to fast-track and get involved in shellfish culture. A fully engaged native population in shellfish will only enhance everybody's position as far as land claims. It will simplify it. It will not complicate it.

S. Fraser: I have some experience with that, so I'd be happy to…. I'll give you some contact information, and we should get together.

On behalf of the committee I'd like to thank all those who came here and took the time and trouble to come and make presentations. It was very interesting. Thank you for sharing your knowledge. For those of you who came to witness this, I thank you for coming and taking the time to do that. Now I would like a motion to adjourn these hearings.

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	Yeas (5)	Nays (4)
	G. Coons, MLA	R. Cantelon, MLA
	C. Trevena, MLA	J. Yap, MLA
	G. Robertson, MLA	D. Jarvis, MLA
	S. Simpson, MLA	G. Hogg, MLA
	S. Fraser, MLA

7)	Z-Boat Lodge River Guides	Brad Zeerip
8)	Ric Miller George Hayes
9)	Skeena Angling Guides Association	Greg Knox
10)	Silvertip Eco Tours Limited	Fred Seiler
11)	Randy Dozzi
12)	George Clark
13)	Sue Spalding
14)	Bill Mounce

1)	Gitxsan Watershed Authorities	Chris Barnes Dr. Allen Gottesfeld
2)	Skeena Native Development Society	Clarence Nyce Chief Glenn Bennett
3)	Friends of Wild Salmon	Andrew Williams
4)	Mary G. Dalen
5)	Bruce Hill
6)	Edmon Hamer


	YEAS — 5

S. Simpson	Coons	Fraser
Trevena		Robertson

	NAYS — 4

Jarvis	Cantelon	Hogg
	Yap

Committee Staff:	Brant Felker (Committee Research Analyst)

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS (Hansard)

SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON SUSTAINABLE AQUACULTURE

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON
SUSTAINABLE AQUACULTURE