Conservative Party of Canada anyone on? HAHA this Robert Sopuck guy gets my vote
Mr. Robert Sopuck (Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, CPC):
Thanks.
My main concern is the seal issue. I think what I'm seeing here is kind of an orgy of political correctness and an unwillingness to.... That's not just to our visitors and guests; it's fairly ubiquitous.
It seems to me that's the elephant in the room, and I didn't mean the elephant seal in the room. I'm going to quote a study that was done in British Columbia by Peter Olesiuk.
He talked about the Puntledge River on Vancouver Island, where three dozen seals—that's 36 seals—killed 10,000 adult chum salmon in the fall spawning run. He was quoted as saying, “They take 60 to 70 chum fry per minute, per seal.”
Twenty or 25 years ago, the harbour seal population off the west coast was some 10,000 individuals when there was an active cull going on. Now it's at 105,000. As a biologist myself, I know we always want to say we need more data and we need more information, but at some point, given how critical the status of the chinook salmon is in some of the salmon runs and given some of the southern killer whale populations, this at least needs to be tried. I'm a big fan of adaptive management. You try something, and if it doesn't work, chances are the situation will revert to the original condition.
The seals have exploded both on the east coast and the west coast to levels we've never seen before. It's not just a coincidence that the Atlantic salmon haven't recovered and the cod haven't recovered, and now we're seeing these issues on the west coast.
Mr. Bain, I'd like you to comment on the seal issue and why we're not tackling it head-on.
Mr. David Bain:
There are two aspects to the seal issue. The kinds of seals you're talking about are targeting specific runs and taking a high proportion. That's actually a small percentage of the seal population. If you addressed those seals, you would protect those runs, but it would not make a huge difference to overall abundance. A lot of the other seals are eating different things, including predatory fish that eat salmon. It's unclear how those seals do. We could go back to culling and knock the seal population back down, but then we'd be back here talking about the endangered transient population.
If we want to get an ecosystem back in balance, I would recommend harassment of seals that are taking advantage of artificial conditions such as the one you just cited, and allow the transients to increase in number and reduce the pen-fed population in the long term.
Mr. Robert Sopuck:
I like the use of your term “balance”. When one talks about predator control in any situation, basically it's humans intervening to restore a balance. For example—and I'm going to use a totally different example—in prairie Canada, the landscape has changed so much that waterfowl nesting success is down dramatically, but it has been shown conclusively that removal of nest predators increases nest success from 10% to 80%. We have the issue of the Yellowstone wolves. They were removed, and the elk exploded. As Mr. Hardie pointed out, the reintroduction of the wolves was a good thing. We have study after study that shows how working to restore the balance can work in many situations.
Having said that, one thing I'm not hearing—and I'm sorry I wasn't here for the first part—is what human beings actually want. I think there is such a desire among humans on the west coast for chinook salmon, and all the salmon species, that we should take into account what people actually want in terms of the ecosystem out there.
In the same article I'm looking at, in Scotland, for example, they took three seals out of one river and fishing success went from 1% to 17%.
We have these data points that I think are painting a fairly compelling picture that we need to do something out there, and some active seal management is probably the right thing to do. I don't mean harass them; I mean remove them—not all of them, but reduce them to a number that at least gives salmon a chance.
Could you comment on that, Mr. Bain?