I seem to be the odd person out here, being the scientist who used to be involved in DFO and who went to CSAS meetings all the time.
I'm a retired professor of biology from Acadia University in Wolfville, so I'm also the only person here from the east coast, rather than the west. For 55 years or so, I've been working on Atlantic salmon, sturgeons, lobsters, scallop aquaculture, the impact of tidal turbines on fishes, and freshwater ecology. I've worked for the Canadian wildlife service, the Huntsman marine laboratory, the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans for nine years, and then I was at Acadia University for about 30 years. Through that, I've published about 255 papers, technical briefs and so forth.
I'm hoping I might be able to add a little bit to the context that's coming out of this meeting in terms of sea lice and salmon. That would be Atlantic salmon in the Atlantic Ocean, not the Pacific.
First, I'd just like to talk a little bit about my CSAS experience, seeing as how I was in DFO for nine years and they have approached me on other things. I have quite a background with CSAS.
Basically, my opinion is that the handling of different interpretations of scientific evidence and uncertainty in CSAS was a process that was one of my sore points while I was an employee of DFO, later a research scientist at a university and finally a retired fisheries scientist. I have found that differing opinions on data and conclusions that are contradictory to DFO policy and unsanctioned by CSAS are most often totally unwelcome and usually ignored. I can say that on the power of being in on at least 20 CSAS meetings, maybe, for different species and so forth.
My first one was in 1979 when I was a freshman working at DFO, basically. I participated in a number of meetings on the Canso causeway and what it might have done to the fisheries on the east coast of Nova Scotia—which was clearly a total disaster at the time because a lot of the lobster fishery had collapsed. I came up with some interesting scientific observations—which I thought as a scientist I was supposed to do—but when I brought them before the committee, I was essentially put down. They said, “Oh no, we don't agree with that.” It was stuff that came from other lobster fisheries in other parts of the world on how they recruit and so on.
We had to write the papers to go into the CSAS report and the technical report publication. My paper was directly opposed by the lobster biologists and managers at DFO. I was in a different unit, actually. I wasn't in the management unit. Literally, when I published a paper in a technical report, they put a page at the end of it saying they disavowed having anything to do with it. Anyway, that's my start with CSAS.
The funny thing is that, as time goes by, scientific opinions change. The present DFO lobster group now accepts my original hypothesis as to why the Canso strait and eastern coast lobster fishery collapsed, and they are using it in their management decisions. How about that?
A similar process took place while I was working on the development of tidal power while I was still at DFO. This would be in about 1979, 1980 or 1981. I had a research group that was looking at the Annapolis River in Nova Scotia, which was up for having a test turbine put in. Anyway, when I went into the CSAS meetings on that.... First off, let me say that, as a scientist, I spent about six months researching what hydroelectric turbines do to fish, and it's not a very pretty picture—lots of mortality.
Here they were. They were going to put this big huge turbine in the Annapolis River, and it was going to affect all of the fish populations, as far as I was concerned. I was again completely ignored. I was probably the only one who knew how fish turbines kill fish and so forth at the time, and what happened? Jumping forward to the present, 35 years later, they finally closed the Annapolis turbine down because it was killing all the fish in the Annapolis River. Guess what. Originally I was in the meeting and said, “Don't do it”, but anyway, they don't seem to listen very much.
The final example I want to give you is Atlantic salmon in the Atlantic Ocean. I just finished writing a paper on this entitled “The Decline and Impending Collapse of the Atlantic Salmon Population in the North Atlantic”, and that is what's happening.
Virtually all the big rivers that had over 100,000 Atlantic salmon fish runs are now collapsing in the Atlantic Ocean. I brought this up in 1998 and 2000 to the Minister of Fisheries at the time, and I told him that I thought that IUU fisheries were causing the problem, that Japan, Denmark and probably other nations were out there taking Atlantic salmon in the open ocean before they could come back to the Atlantic rivers.
You don't have this problem so bad in the Pacific ocean because you have a very good organized fisheries group there that does surveillance, so they are keeping the Japanese and the other people, Chinese, in check to a degree and allowing the fish runs to remain quite good. In places like Alaska, you're having more problems than in B.C., and I understand that completely.
What is happening in the Atlantic Ocean is that rivers like the Miramichi River, the River Foyle in Ireland, which had a huge salmon run, and now the Tana River in northern Norway, which also had a 100,000 to 200,000 fish run, have collapsed, and they are all closed to fishing, not only commercial but recreational.
Here in 2000, I was telling the Canadian DFO minister about this, and it was going through a CSAS meeting. I wasn't invited, but in the end, they told me I was foolish and so forth and so on, and they didn't agree with my conclusion.
As an example, in Nova Scotia where I live, there used to be about 100 Atlantic salmon fishing streams. Now only three are open to recreational fisheries and, of course, the commercial fishery was closed in 1984.