Feb. 20, 2012
Dear Justice Adair
I don’t know if the legal system allows you to hear me, but there are things that need to be said in the name of truth. To win their defamation case Mainstream brought forward evidence regarding Don Staniford, but some of it was not accurate.
You were told Don Staniford threw mud at the Mainstream office in Campbell River. I was there, that never happened. A small group of us asked Mainstream to look at waste collected from the seafloor near salmon farms in Broughton. They refused, locked the door and took pictures from their upstairs windows. Here I am asking them to come down.
I then pressed it against their logo in a symbolic gesture to communicate that we don’t want this on the sea floor anymore than they want it on their window. While they could clean it with a short blast of a hose, we are stuck with it indefinitely on the seafloor. No one threw any of the farm waste and Mainstream should know this because they were photographing us.
Staniford told the court 5,000-7,000 people gathered in Victoria for the GET OUT migration (referring to salmon feedlots get out of the ocean). The Mainstream lawyer told you the Vancouver Sun reported only about 1,000 people. Mainstream used this to paint Staniford as a liar. While the lawyer quoted the Vancouver Sun correctly, he should have known that number was highly controversial. I spoke to the security guards present and based on the area of the grounds covered, they estimated 5,000-7,000 people. Please look at this slide show– I think it is dangerous when society makes people disappear by rewriting history.
And finally, when the Mainstream lawyers told you salmon farms are good for small communities, you should know Echo Bay was a lovely little community. We believed when we were told salmon farms would be good for us. But they weren’t. There are 27 Norwegian-owned salmon farms now and only 8 people left in Echo Bay. We have toxic algae blooms, there have been viral and bacterial epidemics, sea lice epidemics, young herring and salmon are lured into the pens. We don’t have wild salmon, almost no one fishes there anymore and the fish don’t come back.
We have the highest salmon farm density in BC, salmon farming is not good for Echo Bay
Alexandra Morton
