There are moments in history and in the lives of people where threat creep towards them without cause for alarm, like the long sweep of a tsunami far out to sea and then suddenly makes landfall. History is full of them, human lives are ended by them. British Columbia, a nasty groundswell fundamental to your right to food security is approaching faster than a galloping horse to make landfall and history in the BC Parliament in the coming days. Please wake up.
In the coming few days, the Liberal government of BC intends to pass Bill 37, which makes sickness in farm animals a secret. When I read the BC farm salmon disease records released by Justice Cohen, my colleagues and I began testing for salmon influenza and heart viruses and found them. The federal and provincial governments and the salmon farming industry stubbornly, and without stated rational reason, refuse to even investigate these reports from top laboratories that these viruses are in farm salmon being sold in Vancouver and Victoria markets.
Provincial Minister of Agriculture, Don McRae, stood in the BC Parliament on the afternoon of March 27 to state that Asian and US legislators wanted to close their doors to BC farm salmon following positive tests for salmon flu virus. What were they told to reverse this decision?
I now have over 600 samples of farm salmon, wild salmon, Oolichans and steelhead in labs and if Minister McRae’s Bill 37 passes I won’t be able to tell you what is in those fish without facing punishment of 2 years in prison. First Nation friends liken the arrival of these European salmon and heart viruses to the small pox infested blankets given to them to control them. Officials with the government of Canada and the Province of BC called viral contamination via Atlantic salmon eggs “guaranteed,” but they were silenced by threat of international trade sanctions. And so the eggs poured in, the viruses came with them. All the players knew. And now those of us who have found these viruses will be silenced in the name of keeping open trade borders. Is the premise on which these borders remain open honest?
Wild salmon are the bloodstream of this coast. As this law no one can quite believe approaches we receive news of new viral epidemics in the industrial salmon weekly. Without people willing to ground-truth this industry by tracking their viruses, what do you think it going to happen to these reports?
Today a lawyer went into the BC Parliament, to witness landfall by this tsunami whose undertow will tear democracy and free speech from our very bodies. I want to look the men and women who would do this to us, to our children and to the earth, in the eye as they make sickness in our food secret.
Industrial salmon taking us where?
Alexandra Morton
