From the people of Canada to the people of Norway

"Dear Norway: Help Save Canada's Wild Salmon" - an excellent new short doc from Damien Gillis being shown at the Aqua Nor trade show right now in Norway. Go.

When even John Fredricksen, owner and largest shareholder of Marine Harvest, one of the big three Norwegian companies which control over 92% of BC open-net salmon farms, says :

"I'm concerned about wild salmon. Move salmon farms out of the path of wild salmon"

then you have to wonder what the hell Canada Fisheries and Oceans Minister Gail Shea is doing over there promoting "Canada's sustainable aquaculture" at the trade show.

Featured prominently near the top of the homepage of the Fisheries and Oceans Canada Aquaculture website is an entire page devoted to : Facts About Sea Lice in B.C.

To correct misinformation about sea lice on the West Coast, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) offers the following facts:

Sea lice are naturally occurring, minute parasites that have existed for millions of years.

• No direct cause and effect relationship has been established between sea lice from salmon farms and the abundance of wild populations of pink and chum salmon in the Broughton Archipelago.
• DFO scientists have determined that virtually no mortality due to sea lice occurs in juvenile pink salmon of 0.7 grams or more in weight. The percentage of juvenile pink salmon in the Broughton Archipelago that weighed less than 0.7 grams and had sea lice infections that were equal to or above the lethal threshold has been very low in the area over the past several years. Only 4.5 per cent of juvenile pink salmon were in this category in 2005, and that percentage had declined to zero by 2008.

Zero. Ok, so there's zero problem here, according to the people we employ to protect our salmon - and by extension the grizzly, the bald eagle, the killer whale, First Nations livelihood and culture, and all the crustaceans - crab, shrimp, lobster - affected by fish farm dumping of crustacean-killing pesticide-laced food into open fish tanks to kill the sea lice.

Elsewhere in the world - Norway for instance, and Scotland, Ireland, and Chile - people have already figured this out. Fisheries and Oceans Canada has not.

We are now appealing directly to the king and people of Norway and the shareholders of the fishfarms for help.

Protest : Thursday Aug 20 at noon, Pender and Burrard, in front of the Fisheries & Oceans Canada office in Vancouver

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