The permanent solution to preventing lice from becoming resistant to drugs and therefore killing our wild salmon is to put a complete barrier between the wild and farmed fish. That's the only thing that needs to happen here on all of the issues of waste and disease and impact. We just need a solid barrier; just separate the two.
The salmon farms have been extraordinarily resistant in providing information, which I find appalling because they are operating in public waters and the public should know. My community is never told when they are applying drugs. There are all kinds of warnings on these drug bags about handling, and yet people are eating food—clams for first nations, prawns and crabs in commercial fisheries and sport fisheries.
You should talk to Dr. Larry Dill from Simon Fraser University. He was heading up the BC Pacific Salmon Forum, a big study that went on in British Columbia with John Fraser. He quit because of the salmon farms' completely uncooperative nature. They do release a little sea lice information now, but to do scientific tests you have to have individual farms and dates, and the way they clump things makes it impossible for scientists to use the data in their models.
I hope you will look at salmon aquaculture or at what is happening with our Pacific salmon on the west coast. People feel it is the same treatment the east coast got with their cod, when you lost an enormous industry with hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of jobs.
My advice would be to go to the senior scientists in this province who have dealt with this and to retired government employees who have dealt with it. People have sent me memos written for the last 20 years. The provincial Ministry of Environment fought hard to keep Atlantic salmon farming out. They did not want Atlantic salmon in this province. Even Pat Chamut, as director general of Fisheries and Oceans for the Pacific region, tried to prevent egg imports, and gradually you can see how he was eroded and in the end allowed a lot of eggs to come in. I would go back into history a little bit and look at it.
In terms of the four reviews and the recommendations, I see the same thing in salmon farming, where there are all these recommendations made, lots of money spent studying, and very little done, but I would argue that those reviews did not include salmon aquaculture or the disease epidemics that were occurring there, and if these are indeed our problem, none of the recommendations that were taken will fix the problem. For example, reducing the commercial fishery has been tried. There was no commercial fishery last year, and it has been very low for years now. If commercial fishing were the problem, its reduction should be allowing the salmon to return.