First Nations' Lawsuit to Protect Wild Salmon

First Nations Chiefs apply to bring a class action suit to protect the wild salmon of BC from fishfarms.

Chief Bob Chamberlin :

"We look forward to stripping away the denial the provincial government chooses to trot out when it comes to the aquaculture industry. We look around the world and we can see the problems this industry represents. We also are very aware of the delay, deny, and distract approach that industry has and which our provincial government has whole-heartedly embraced. ... We will not stop. We will protect the wild salmon and we will protect the environment of our people."
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Lib MP links pie tossing to terrorism

Liberal MP Gerry Byrne says he believes the federal government should investigate whether the pieing of Fisheries Minister Gail Shea by a woman opposed to the seal hunt constitutes an act of terrorism.

I think Gerry should at least get a cupcake for that.

Gerry Byrne hails from Newfoundland Labrador where, according to Fisheries and Oceans Canada:

"Approximately 1% of the total population of Newfoundland and Labrador derive income from sealing."

When last we heard from our FishMin Gail Shea, she was promoting BC's fish farms at a trade show in Norway, where their Minister of Fisheries is "a co-owner of a salmon farming company and former head of the Norwegian salmon farmers association". Over 90% of the open-pen fish farms in BC originate in Norway.

Asked about the connection between fish farming and the collapse of the Skeena and Fraser River salmon fisheries in December, Gail Shea, minister in charge of Fisheries and Oceans, said : "Nobody knows what’s happening in the marine environment."

I'm betting right now you want to replay that vid at least one more time.

We have had 5 pieings of politicians in Canada in the last decade, two of which were misses. Colby Cosh at Macleans says it's all fun and games till someone throws an acid pie, a particularly daft and rather desperate argument which depends on conflating tofu with acid. Or as one commenter over there points out : "it is stupid to say that pie throwing is serious because somebody could throw something WHICH IS NOT A PIE"

UPDATE : From Dammit Janet : Tofu Pie - It's the New Anthrax

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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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Disappearing Fraser River sockeye salmon vs fish farms

Of the eight to ten million wild sockeye salmon predicted by Oceans and Fisheries Canada to return to the Fraser River this year, only about 7% are returning, leading to the closure of all sockeye fishing on the river for the third year in a row.

Fisheries and Oceans Canada scientists are expressing surprise. Alexandra Morton isn't surprised - she's been warning for 20 years that salmon fry passing through lice-infested open net fish farms become infested and up to 80% fail to return. She notes that both the provincial and federal governments have failed to apply existing Fisheries Act regulations to industrial salmon feedlots in B.C. :

The solution is so simple: Apply the laws of Canada contained in the Fisheries Act. If the Norwegians can’t comply they should leave. Give Canadian fish farmers who want to revamp their industry in closed tanks a break in getting set up. Market wild and farmed fish to raise the value of both. And restore wild salmon in a way that has never been tried by adhering to their biology—the natural laws that have caused them to thrive in the first place.

Fisheries and Oceans Canada rejects sea lice infestation as the cause of the collapse, preferring the climate change theory for which they cannot be held responsible. Meanwhile Fisheries Minister Gail Shea is heading a Fisheries and Oceans Canada delegation to an aquaculture conference, Aqua Nor 2009, in Norway later this month. Norwegian-owned companies control more than 90% of British Columbia's salmon farming production.

How can FOC adequately regulate and promote fish farming at the same time?

Morton also advises that new fish farm licences are being quietly granted and existing ones expanded. Map of factory fish farms operating in BC in 2008 here. As she said back in 2007 :

"Some see wild salmon as just too costly to protect - they require a long corridor of protection from the tops of the rivers all the way out to the ocean and this would "force the politicians to say no to all the hands that feed them."
As a result, "big industry [including logging and offshore drilling] fit well with salmon farms."

I guess once the wild salmon are gone, there will be no good reason to halt Campbell's off-shore drilling and private run-of-river projects.

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Gordon Campbell to "axe the tax" ?

When Gordon Campbell won the BC election by 4% of the vote a scant 10 days ago, the headline at DeSmogBlog read : "Carbon Tax Wins : Cheap Politics Loses"

Just prior to the election, David Suzuki appeared on the front page of the G&M warning of dire consequences "If Liberal Leader Gordon Campbell goes down because of [the NDP's] axe the tax campaign".

G&M again : "Environmentalists vow to punish NDP for plan to dismantle B.C.'s carbon tax"
"The David Suzuki Foundation, the Pembina Institute and Forest Ethics jointly stated that "thousands of jobs in the green economy will be lost, and the province will lose its position as an environmental leader if the (first North American carbon) tax is dropped."

From the webpage of Plutonic Power, environmental activist Tzeporah Berman chimed in : "There is no question that environmentalists should be punishing the NDP..."

The environmental movement promptly blew up between "environmental" supporters of Campbell and his useless carbon tax, versus those like Raif Mair and Alex Morton who argued that the rest of Gordo's environmental policies included the privatizing of BC rivers in the run-of-river goldrush, open-cage fish farms, the end of the 35-year oil-tanker moratorium, Enbridge pipelines running across BC from Alberta to Kitimat to deliver tarsands oil to foreign markets, coalbed methane development, offshore oil drilling, and the return of grizzly bear trophy hunting.
Group 2's ideas, you will not be surprised to learn, did not get the same solid rotation afforded Gordo by his endorsers at the G&M and Canwest.

Whatever. The damage was done and Gordo the environmental premier got his 4% win.

So it's a bit much to read in yesterday's Province that with the election under his belt, Gordo is now considering "axing the tax" himself in favour of the US cap-and-trade system :

"Campbell now says he might strangle his own carbon-tax baby in the cradle.
In one of the great under-reported stories of the B.C. election, Campbell revealed the carbon tax will be reviewed in 2012 and might be frozen in place at 7.24 cents per litre of gas and not rise any further.

But wait: Isn't the whole point of a carbon tax to keep jacking it up every year until people stop burning those evil fossil fuels? Even Campbell's own climate-change adviser, economist Mark Jaccard, says the tax must rise to 24 cents a litre and higher over a decade and beyond to be effective.
But Campbell told me that may not be necessary, if cap-and-trade does the same job
anyway.

The irony here is that this is exactly what NDP Leader Carole James was arguing when she promised to scrap the carbon tax in favour of cap-and-trade.
She was vilified for doing it while Campbell was hailed as some kind of visionary."

Suckered again by Liberal "environmentalists".
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BC Election 2009 : Farmed and dangerous

A map of factory fish farms operating in BC in 2008 in the upper part of the Inside Passage, compiled from data at the BC Ministry of Agriculture and Lands by Living Oceans. I hope they will forgive my scribbling on their original map.

Surprising how far up the rivers used by migrating wild salmon they go, isn't it? And 90% of the farmed fish goes straight to US markets.

Local marine biologist Alex Morton, who has been studying this for 20 years, asks : Why are we allowing Norwegian companies to treat Canada's coast like a litter box?

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In February she won a court decision to have control of granting fish farm licences wrested from Gordo and the provincial government and sent back to the Feds so they fall under the Fisheries Act.

All it would take is setting a concrete timeline for the industry's move to closed containment of the farmed salmon so their sea lice don't continue to kill the wild salmon migrating past them.

Has Gordon Campbell, "the environmental premier", signalled any willingness to do this? No. Instead he has filed an appearance with the court, allowing him the option of contesting the court decision - after the election.

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On May 12, vote to save our salmon.
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Fish 'N Flush Farming

Despite a recent scientific paper warning that parasitic sea lice infestations from fish farms could wipe out 99% of wild Pacific pink salmon within 4 salmon generations or 8 years, don't expect to see any radical mobilizing action from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans any time soon.

Not only is fishfarming part of the DFO mandate, the DFO deputy executive director of the Office of Sustainable Aquaculture expects fish farming to overtake industry fishing soon :

"While the salmon farming industry nearly doubled in size between 1997 and 2005, output from the wild commercial sector fell by more than 30%."

"They don’t believe their interests are in conflict."

"Fisheries scientists try to stay neutral"

"They want to avoid polarized debate."

"A transition to a floating closed containment system could possibly be phased in over 10 years."

Trouble is if this latest scientific paper is correct, the pink salmon don't have 10 years.

Last year, marine ecologist John Volpe of the UVic said that sea lice from fish farms kill up to 95 % of wild juvenile salmon that pass by the open net fish farms.

Yet according to independent researcher Alexandra Morton , "some see wild salmon as just too costly to protect - they require a long corridor of protection from the tops of the rivers all the way out to the ocean and this would "force the politicians to say no to all the hands that feed them."

As a result, "big industry [including logging and offshore drilling] fit well with salmon farms," she says "

So there ya go.

Pink salmon routes and fish farms in Broughton archipeligo, BC.

Fish 'n Flush farming

This all seems rather fishy.

CBC : Environmentalist defamed B.C. fish farm company: judge
"A judge has ordered a former B.C. environmental campaigner to pay $15,000 plus costs to a Vancouver Island aquaculture company for maliciously defaming it in 2005.
The B.C. Supreme Court judge said the language Don Staniford used in two press releases he prepared for the group Friends of Clayoquot Sound was inflammatory and his claims were untrue — and he knew it.
Staniford had falsely claimed that the Tofino-based Creative Salmon Company used antibiotics and another chemical, malachite green, on its farmed Chinook salmon."

Not too much background there, CBC. Let's go back to 2005.

Canadian Press, June 2005 : Organic fish farm halts salmon sales after tests find cancer-causing chemical
"The cancer-causing chemical malachite green has been found in a second Vancouver Island salmon farm, an industry spokesman said on Friday.
Creative Salmon, located near the west coast tourism village of Tofino, voluntarily suspended sales of its organically raised Chinook salmon after federal scientists found malachite green in tests it conducted last month, company manager Spencer Evans said.
Health Canada has a zero tolerance level when it comes to malachite green, a cancer-causing chemical once used to kill fungus in fish eggs. It was banned in Canada in 1992.
Evans said he's dumbfounded how malachite green appeared in his company's fish."

At which point, Staniford, working for "Friends of Clayoquot Sound", called Creative Salmon "a liar" and their claims to being organic "a scam".

Back to CP : "Staniford said he doesn't hold much sympathy for Evans when he says his company doesn't use malachite green and doesn't know how the chemical turned up in the fish.
"From a consumer safety point of view, the fact is that B.C. farmed salmon is once again contaminated with a carcinogenic chemical," he said."

And Creative Salmon took him to court for it.

In her decision, the BC Supreme Court judge explained that Staniford knew that the malachite green could have accidentally gotten into the fish farm naturally via polution in the water from smelters, and not necessarily due to being intentionally administered by Creative Salmon.

Lady, we don't really care how the carcinogens got into the goddamn fish.
Staniford shouldn't have called an "organic fish farm" selling carcinogenic fish "a liar".
But "a scam"? What the hell else would you call it?

And yes, a Fish 'n Flush is a real toilet you can buy with an aquarium for a tank.
Pretty "creative", huh?

UPDATE : From Westcoaster:
"Unfortunately, the Staniford court case isn't about the pouring of antibiotics into the pens and oceans of Clayoquot Sound by Creative Salmon, although it should be. The issue is how you talk about that fact.
No matter how you talk about it, however, the fact isn't going away: Creative Salmon is using more than 500 pounds of antibiotics on their farms in the pristine ocean of a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve."