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I now call this meeting to order. Welcome to meeting number 26 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans. Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted on October 19, 2020, the committee is meeting for its study on the state of the Pacific salmon.
For those participating virtually, I'd like to outline a few rules to follow. Members and witnesses may speak in the official language of their choice. Interpretation services are available for this meeting. You have the choice at the bottom of your screen of either the floor, English or French. With the latest Zoom version, you may now speak in the language of your choice without the need to select the corresponding language channel. You will also notice that the platform's “raise hand” feature is now in a more easily accessed location on the main toolbar, should you wish to speak or alert the chair.
I would now like to welcome our witnesses. Today we have, from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Kyle Garver, research scientist, Pacific region; John Holmes, division manager, stock assessment and research division; Simon Jones, research scientist, Pacific region; Kristi Miller-Saunders, research scientist, Pacific region; Jay Parsons, director, aquaculture, biotechnology and aquatic animal health science branch; Rebecca Reid, regional director general, Pacific region; and Andrew Thomson, regional director, science, Pacific region.
We will now proceed with opening remarks.
Ms. Reid, you may begin with introductions and then, of course, I believe we're going to hear from at least one other person from the department.
We'll go over to you when you're ready.
:
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Good afternoon, committee members.
Yes, I'm Rebecca Reid. I'm the regional director general for DFO Pacific region. My colleagues and I greatly appreciate the opportunity to appear before the committee on behalf of Fisheries and Oceans Canada.
[Translation]
First of all, we'd like to thank you for your interest in this extremely important issue.
[English]
Our aim today is to provide you with as much information as possible to support your deliberations.
[Translation]
We are particularly pleased to have the opportunity to discuss the department's actions to conserve and rebuild Pacific salmon populations.
[English]
Over the next 10 minutes, I will introduce you to the witnesses and describe their areas of expertise. I will invite Dr. Kristi Miller-Saunders to provide a more in-depth description of her field of research, and then I will close with some final remarks.
Andrew Thomson, whom many of you have met before, has been recently appointed as the regional director of science. Prior to that, he was regional director of fisheries management for over six years and has held other management positions, including director of aquaculture management.
Dr. Jay Parsons is the director of the aquaculture, biotechnology and aquatic animal health science branch. Dr. Parsons has worked for over 30 years in the field of aquaculture, including both research and aquaculture management.
Dr. John Holmes, division manager, stock assessment and research division, is currently responsible for stock assessment surveys, activities and advice on all marine finfish, invertebrates and Pacific salmon.
Dr. Kyle Garver is a research scientist in the aquatic diagnostics, genomics and technology division. Dr. Garver's research focuses on identifying and characterizing finfish viruses to understand transmission and pathogenic potential.
Dr. Simon Jones is a research scientist with the aquatic diagnostics, genomics and technology division. Dr. Jones' research focuses on diseases in wild and farmed salmonids.
Dr. Kristi Miller-Saunders is section head in salmon genetics. Dr. Millers-Saunders' research focuses on molecular biology, genetics and genomics, ecology and fish health.
At this point, I will turn to Dr. Miller-Saunders to provide some remarks before I offer concluding comments.
Thank you.
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Thank you very much for the opportunity to come before you.
My name is Dr. Kristi Miller-Saunders. I hold a Ph.D. from Stanford University and have been a research scientist with DFO since 1994. My areas of speciality include molecular biology, genetics and genomics, ecology and fish health. I have worked my entire career on salmon at DFO, and issues surrounding salmon health and salmon declines for the past 20 years, with at least 75 of the 140 publications from my program focused on fish stress and disease.
I co-developed the strategic salmon health initiative with Dr. Brian Riddell in 2012 in response to the clear data gaps on infectious disease discussed in the Cohen inquiry. The SSHI is a large multi-million dollar project that sought to bring clarity to the role of infectious disease as a factor in salmon declines, and to reveal pathogens undermining the survival of salmon in British Columbia.
With a focus on all salmon in B.C.—wild, enhanced and aquaculture—the SSHI assessed over 30,000 salmon for over 50 viruses, bacteria and parasites associated with diseases in salmon worldwide. Technological advances in disease monitoring and diagnostics within the SSHI provided a new foundation for studying complex disease processes in live-sampled fish, including a high throughput molecular infectious agent monitoring system; an innovative approach to the resolution of novel viruses and viral disease, and to visualize viruses in tissue; and a holistic tool called salmon FIT-CHIPS that can resolve specific stressor and disease states in salmon using only a small gill clip.
The funded SSHI program was completed at the end of March 2021. The SSHI has resolved a clearer picture on the role of pathogens on declining survival of our wild B.C. salmon. Key highlights included the discovery of over a dozen previously uncharacterized viruses infecting salmon in aquaculture, hatchery and wild settings. There were no detections of several viruses of regulatory concern, corroborating evidence by the CFIA that these agents were not found in British Columbia
The identification of several agents with higher probabilities of transmission and disease under high water temperatures suggested that disease risks may continue to worsen as the climate warms. Included was the discovery of piscine orthoreovirus in B.C. cultured and wild salmon, the first documented farm-level observation of heart and skeletal muscle inflammation in farmed Atlantic salmon, and a different but related PRV-associated disease in farmed B.C. Chinook salmon.
In juvenile salmon, using infection data spanning a decade and traditional stock assessment modelling approaches, several infectious agents have been resolved that show associations with annual variance in marine survival of Chinook, coho and sockeye salmon.
This represents the most comprehensive analysis of population level impacts of infection on naturally migrating wild salmon. Two of the six agents with consistent associations between species also show connections with farm-mediated transmission, informing the risks to wild salmon posed by open-net farming.
The most notable agents include PRV, or piscine orthoreovirus, associated with annual variances in survival and low weight of Chinook and coho salmon, with highest incidence if infection within 30 kilometres of salmon farms. Phylogenetic studies show that PRV has been repeatedly exchanged between farmed and wild salmon in British Columbia.
The bacterium Tenacibaculum maritimum, responsible for significant mortality on salmon farms, is strongly associated with annual variance in survival and low weight of sockeye, Chinook and coho. For sockeye, the highest incidence of infection is in fish sampled near farms in the Discovery Islands.
The small skin parasite Ichthyophthirius multifiliis that infects salmon in fresh water shows a strong carryover effect on survival and low weight of sockeye, Chinook and coho salmon in the ocean that may indicate years in which poor condition fish are entering the ocean.
A newly discovered Pacific salmon nidovirus, related to mammalian respiratory coronaviruses, infects the respiratory gill tissue of salmon released from some federal hatcheries. We see preliminary associations with survival in Chinook and coho.
A virtual international workshop was held at the end of March to provide expert advice on next steps for the program which will include disease challenge studies and understudied agents if facilities and funding can be sourced.
Our program is now moving to apply salmon FIT-CHIPS to reveal the role of cumulative stressors on salmon survival. This tool can reveal if salmon is undergoing salinity stress, low oxygen stress or thermal stress, and if they are experiencing a viral disease. It can also predict whether salmon is likely to die within 72 hours, and the cumulative level of stress that they carry, which is predictive of lower survival over longer timeframes.
By applying this tool, we can assess the role of climate driven changes on salmon health, and identify environments and years in which salmon are most compromised. Importantly, it is our goal to use this tool to identify the stressors that, if mediated, could increase survival and productivity of our wild salmon. The success of this program has led to a demand for the technology and approach to understand similar issues in salmon worldwide, including Norway, the Netherlands and the U.S.
We're also working closely with many first nations in B.C. and transferring some of the tools to the first indigenous-led genomics laboratory in Canada.
Thank you.
[Translation]
As you know, DFO's primary mandate is to manage Canada's fisheries and to protect our waters.
[English]
Consistent with that mandate, the protection, conservation and restoration of wild Pacific salmon is a key priority.
Pacific salmon are under threat, and the challenges facing them are numerous and multi-faceted. Unforeseen events such as the Big Bar landslide have further heightened the risk facing these populations.
The department has taken significant action, guided by Canada's wild salmon policy and its corresponding implementation plan, as well as the 75 recommendations from the Cohen commission. With respect to marine finfish aquaculture, the department continues to rely on the best available science and a robust regulatory system to manage potential risks to wild fish stocks and ecosystems.
We have made a number of strategic investments, including $142 million, with the province of B.C., for the B.C. salmon restoration innovation fund; $5 million to support the work of the Pacific Salmon Foundation; and, $15 million to implement the Pacific Salmon Treaty's new commitments for stock assessment, coded wire tagging and catch monitoring.
The's supplementary letter sets out a commitment “to bring forward a” long-term “Pacific Salmon Strategy and deliver on our commitment to conserve and protect wild Pacific salmon and their habitats and ecosystems”. Budget 2021 identified $647 million over five years to support this work.
Over the coming months, we will be actively supporting the in shaping and delivering on this initiative, including close collaboration with our many partners working on the front lines of salmon conservation.
[Translation]
Thank you for your attention. Your questions will be welcome.
[English]
Thank you.
I'll start off with a response and speak to you from the perspective of the science branch.
As you know, DFO is a science-based department. The science sector within DFO is responsible for producing science advice that contributes to the department's mandate. When research findings are published, those are certainly considered as part of our adaptive management approach.
More fulsomely, we have a very strong, formal, robust peer-review process that we call the Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat, or CSAS, that we use to provide formal science advice to DFO resource managers. That process involves looking at the breadth of the scientific literature that's available. That is not only the science we do in the department, but all available science. We conduct a synthesis of that information. That information is then peer reviewed through a process where we bring both internal and external experts together to review that information and provide advice. That advice is then communicated to the DFO managers and is also published on our website.
It's a robust, transparent process to formalize the advice and provide it to aquaculture management as part of their decision-making process.
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I would recommend four key strategies. The first would be to focus investments in habitat, conservation and restoration-type activities.
I would recommend strategic enhancement to support stocks of concern, and where possible, to support harvest where appropriate.
There's a need for some significant harvest sector transformations to focus on selective fishing to avoid stocks of concern.
Finally, we need to focus on integration and collaboration to ensure that our governance structures, both within and outside the department, are functioning at their optimal capacity.
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One of the things we need to better understand is where the bottlenecks are and in which areas along the coast and in the rivers climate change is having its greatest effect. We know that, in freshwater systems, when we have premature mortality of returning adult salmon, they are most likely to die in the areas where they're experiencing prolonged periods of high thermal stress.
Sometimes conditions in a system will allow for cooler water to be introduced. That is obviously more common where there are dams, and unfortunately we don't have as many of those here as there are on the Columbia. But we need to do what we can control, which, for one thing, is that if we're going to rely on hatcheries, we need to produce the most robust fish we can. We know that the condition of fish coming out of fresh water is in one part a predictor of how well they are going to perform in the marine environment when they are exposed to different stressors. If we can produce optimally healthy fish that are ready for that transition to salt water and have as few infections as possible, we will increase the probability that those fish will actually survive long enough to either be prey for killer whales, in the case of chinook salmon, or be available for fisheries.
Certainly climate change affects more than just temperature. It affects the prey availability; it affects the predators, etc., so it is a larger issue than that. But in my view, identifying the areas of the coast—and this is something that I do believe our FIT-CHIPs are going to be really strong for—where there are stressor bottlenecks associated with climate change will allow us to determine what mitigative actions we can possibly take along different parts of the coast.
Thank you to all of the witnesses for coming out this afternoon.
The committee has heard repeatedly that out-of-control pinniped populations are decimating juvenile Pacific salmon populations and that this is contributing to ongoing stock declines.
Dr. Carl Walters stated that he had worked with the Pacific Balance Pinniped Society “to develop proposals for commercial and first nations' harvesting of seals and sea lions, aimed at reducing pinniped populations” to salmon stock recoveries. The witness went on to say, and I quote, “Those proposals went into DFO two years ago, and the department has been sitting on them for over two years with one excuse after another for not taking any action.”
What is the status of the proposals submitted to DFO by the Pacific Balance Pinniped Society?
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I'd like to take that question, Mr. Mazier. In my previous capacity, I was the regional director of fisheries management. I was responsible for all fisheries management, including marine mammal management.
The proposals that came in from the Pacific Balance Pinniped Society were assessed under a new and emerging fisheries policy. That policy, the same as is done for every new and emerging fishery, requires quite a significant amount of information to be provided by proponents in order that we can properly assess any potential impacts of the new fishery not just on the target stock but of course the ecosystem impacts and the impacts that the fishery may have elsewhere.
We have been in conversations with the Pacific Balance Pinniped Society and others that have proposed these things to try to get a full picture so that we can assess what the impacts might be of any potential pinniped harvest on not just the pinnipeds, obviously, but also other stocks. As we all know, pinnipeds are a consumer of salmon. They're also a consumer of prey species of salmon and a consumer of fish that prey on salmon. There's a significant amount of ecosystem impacts that you'd have to fully understand and study to make a broad determination as to whether or not a fishery should proceed.
Ms. Reid, I'll turn to you for my next question. In April 2021 a report prepared by BC Salmon Farmers provided an analysis of the economic impact in Surrey, B.C., of the decision by the federal government to close open net-pen salmon farms in the Discovery Islands region. The report indicated that “potentially more than 1,500 people province-wide could lose their jobs in the near term”, and “salmon farming companies will lose almost $200 million in ongoing annual revenue from salmon farming and processing.”
Did the DFO conduct its own socio-economic analysis prior to taking that decision? If so, can you explain what the analysis consisted of and who was consulted?
Ms. Reid, I'll ask you to act as traffic cop here, and direct the questions to whomever is in the best position to answer them.
On an ongoing basis, from time to time, we see announcements of various programs that have to do with habitat restoration, or anything that preserves or basically restores salmon stocks on the west coast.
Does anybody have any idea about how many of these programs exist right now, or have existed within the last couple of years?
My question is for Ms. Reid.
Ms. Reid, if you don't feel comfortable enough to respond, your colleagues can also respond if they wish. I'd love to hear from them, as well.
My question is about first nations. We haven't heard much about the role that first nations should play in salmon conservation.
What role do you think first nations should play in salmon conservation?
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Sure. I really do believe that the FIT-CHIPs will give us the new resolution that we've never had before. Previously, we could go out and measure temperatures, and we could go out and measure environmental conditions, and we could surmise that they might be impactful on salmon. The FIT-CHIPs actually offer an opportunity to look at the salmon themselves and allow the genomic signatures of the salmon to speak for themselves. We can actually tell when the salmon is experiencing thermal stress: not just that they're in a high-temperature area, but whether they're actually feeling the stress of the environment.
The point of the FIT-CHIPs is to better understand the interconnection between different kinds of stressors and diseases. If you can understand whether they're cumulative, which means that they're additive, or they're synergistic, which means that they could be multiplicative so that you have one stressor and you have another stressor and they're 10 times more powerful when they're together, when you have that kind of information, you're able to ask what would happen if you just removed one of those.
We can't remove all of the stressors, but if we can target the stressors that we can mitigate and we can understand how they interplay with each other, we can be better informed as to what strategies we can take to reverse the declines, to actually develop a measure to increase survival substantially.
The other thing they allow us to do is identify the habitats that are most impactful in terms of stress: Where is the stress hot spot occurring? Then we can target our mitigative actions to those areas. I know that we've done a lot of work in freshwater systems, and I cannot emphasize enough that the early marine rearing environment, where many of our stocks spend up to a year, is also critical and that we need to be looking at what we can do there.
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The increased survival of hatchery fish...?
Mr. Gord Johns: Yes.
Dr. Kristi Miller-Saunders: Yes. One of the things that we have done is develop a means to measure different kinds of stress in hatcheries as well. The way that we culture fish is fairly without habitat, essentially, and one of the issues that has come up is that hatchery fish don't behave the same and don't survive the same as a wild fish. If we can find ways of creating hatchery fish that have a very low level of stress and that behave more like a wild fish, we would potentially not only increase their potential for survival but we would decrease the domestication effects of hatcheries.
The FIT-CHIP applications could identify the optimal window of timing when salmon are ready to enter the marine environment so that we can identify the smolt window, and so that when they enter the marine environment they are able to deal with the change in salinity, which is a very stressful period of time.
We can identify whether fish are experiencing a viral disease state in the hatchery, for example, in a way that's non-invasive, that doesn't actually require the death of the fish to sample it. We can identify whether the practices that we use in hatcheries are stressful on the fish. If we start seeing indices of stress in the fish, we can mitigate those different activities to try to find the least stressful way that we can be growing salmon and releasing the healthiest and least-stressed fish.
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Well, our finding is for Tenacibaculum. Mouth rot is the disease caused by Tenacibaculum in farms.
The work we did was after the CSAS process, so they did not have the same level of information available to them when they performed the CSAS process. I do think it is important, and as was said in every CSAS process, as new information arises, new scientific data, they will reconsider the level of risk that they have determined in the CSAS.
I do fully expect that the new data coming out of our program, which not only suggests that there is a population-level risk...and that's something that they weren't able to look at very holistically with empirical data in the CSAS process because they simply didn't have multiple years of data to look at variations of each of those agents with them and at survival. We had that data. We were able to do that. That makes us quite unique in terms of the research programs on our coast. Now that we know there is a potential population-level effect, they need to go back and look at their estimation of less than 1% impact on sockeye salmon.
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I was personally involved only in the PRV CSAS and my colleague Andrew Bateman was involved in the Tenacibaculum, so I can't really speak to what went on in the room with all nine of those.
I can say that in the PRV CSAS, they were very heavily reliant on the challenge studies that have been performed in DFO. They were reluctant to consider one critical flaw that I flagged numerous times in the CSAS, which was those challenge studies used mortality and clinical signs of disease as the end point to be able to declare that PRV causes disease. Nowhere in the world has mortality been demonstrated in a PRV challenge, even in Norway.
Why would we expect that mortality and clinical signs of disease should be present in a challenge in B.C. when it isn't present in Norwegian challenge studies? Challenge studies for PRV generally rely on the incidents of the pathological lesions that occur in the fish. The early studies performed, which a lot of the CSAS were based on, didn't do a lot of pathology in their analysis.
I think there was an error on the side of the uncertainty in that they felt more certain in the results of the challenge studies than they should have.
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Thank you again, Chair.
I must say I've been most impressed with the level of competency we've seen before this committee of the DFO personnel who have appeared from the scientific and research community.
Dr. Miller-Saunders, I'm impressed with your passion for the science that you're doing here and the cause that's at hand. I truly hope that the groups that come together utilize the great resource that has been on display before this committee, namely, within the scientific branch of DFO, on a host of very.... We may not agree; we may not like the message, but it's clear, from the witness I've been listening to here, that you're bringing it forward in a non-biased stance. I think that's extremely important. The decision-makers simply have to listen.
I would like you to comment on the following, because we often hold Norway up as the gold standard on getting it right. You made a comment earlier that we are ahead of Norway. I would like to know where we're ahead of Norway and in which particular areas.
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I think that we need to get away from the idea that simply pumping out more fish from hatcheries is going to reverse the declines. I think that we need to recognize that the marine environment is where the year class strength for many of these populations is determined, which means that the marine environment is where we need to consider taking the most action.
I think that having mark-selective fisheries for hatchery fish would mean that we would have less fishing pressure on our wild fish, so if there are enough fish to be exploited, then the exploited fish are not our wild stocks.
I think that we need to employ the newest technologies that we can to understand the synergistic and cumulative effects of different kinds of stressors and diseases, as well as the role of prey availability and predator impacts, to make decisions that are informed by models to identify the factors that we can modify anthropogenically to turn things around.
I know that there's a lot of concentration on pinnipeds. My lab actually did some of the work on pinnipeds. The molecular work supporting the diet work was done in my lab. There are many scientists within the DFO who have questions about the numbers that have been generated in terms of the impacts on salmon because a lot of the early studies were focusing mostly on pinnipeds that were feeding in estuaries. However, the vast majority of the pinniped population is not feeding in estuaries. If you can extrapolate what you see in terms of the numbers of salmon that are being consumed in estuaries compared to what is being consumed in all of southern B.C., those numbers may not match up.
I think that we need to be careful. I think that there is a potential that we're looking for the one thing that we can control to blame. I am concerned that we may be misguided in that particular decision.
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Tenacibaculum.... Sorry, sorry, sorry.
Tenacibaculum is not going to be an easy one to control because Tenacibaculum is found in marine fish, as well as salmon and farmed fish. It isn't only found in farmed salmon. The issue with farmed salmon is that it may be considerably increased in terms of the abundance of Tenacibaculum released into the water column. Certainly, the early eDNA studies, environmental DNA studies, show that Tenacibaculum is concentrated around farms.
I think that we do need to look again at treatment effects and what we can do in terms of decreasing the loads of that particular bacterium on those farms. As well, our data actually do show that we're seeing Tenacibaculum present in farmed fish before they've moved them out into the ocean. Likely when they are introducing salt water into the hatcheries, they're already introducing that bacterium into their fish.
You know, the easiest way to control... Well, it may not be easy. However, if the water going into a farm and the water exiting a farm was all filtered, you know, like in closed containment systems or systems on land, we wouldn't have any of these problems because sea lice wouldn't infect farmed fish because sea lice would be filtered out of the water column. Therefore, they wouldn't affect our wild fish as well. You could do that with a lot of things like Tenacibaculum. Viruses will be harder, but the fact of the matter is that if farmed fish were less stressed, if they weren't stressed by sea lice and all the treatments and everything associated them, they wouldn't have the same potential to develop disease. Disease wouldn't ensue to the same degree if we controlled what comes in and what goes out of farms.
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That expires all of our time for today's committee meeting.
I want to thank the departmental officials for appearing before the committee today. I agree with that comments by committee members that it's been probably one of the most informative meetings we've had on this subject for quite some time.
Thank you to everybody for playing their part in providing the committee with that valuable information.
I remind everybody that we're back again on Wednesday. A big thank you to the clerks, analysts and our translation people.
I wish everybody a good evening.
The meeting is adjourned.