January 4, 2021
Dear Fisheries Minister Bernadette Jordan:
Thank you again for your decision to respect First Nations and remove salmon farms from the Discovery Islands over the next 18 months. I can see from local and international media and social media that this decision is both widely applauded and fiercely attacked. As much of this, good and bad, will be directed at you, it is important that you are warned about the defensive alliance of senior bureaucrats and scientists that surround the salmon farming industry within DFO. Their allegiance to the industry is stronger than their allegiance to your office. “Divided loyalties” Justice Bruce Cohen called it. They are as much a risk to your government as they are to wild salmon.
Your instinct will be to disregard my warning, no minister wants to hear that they cannot trust their staff. I understand. Fortunately, you don’t have to believe me. Canadians are extremely fortunate that a number of scientists, lawyers, environmentalists and First Nation members and chiefs are challenging the misinformation coming from DFO and the Provincial Ministry of Agriculture. In some cases, they have risked their careers to do this. They provide both evidence of the lies, but also the path to reinstating DFO as a leading agency capable of restoring the great fisheries of Canada. Listening to them will benefit your government enormously.
I believe, previous Minister of Fisheries, Jonathan Wilkinson, began this process, but perhaps it was more than he dared see to completion. Wilkinson made a point of talking to people who are on the frontlines of revealing the true impact of salmon farms and now your parliamentary secretary, Terry Beech, and MLA Fin Donnelly are picking up where he left off. You are going to hear things that are simply unbelievable. For example, the aquaculture loyalists within DFO will tell you that the virus PRV in most salmon farms is endemic and low risk, while other scientists, including some of your own, will tell you it arrived from the North Atlantic during the import of 30 million Atlantic salmon eggs and is causing heart damage in sockeye and massive cell rupture in Chinook salmon. Your lawyers and industry lawyers have sat together in courtrooms fighting First Nation and my lawyers to allow this virus to spread uncontrolled through wild salmon. This will be hard to accept.
You won’t hear anything from your aquaculture-allied staff about the bacteria Tenacibaculum, the cause of mouthrot, pouring out of salmon farms, over the gills of wild salmon, despite heavy antibiotic use, in the most critical wild salmon habitat. This is unconscionable given what we know about the virulence that develops in feedlot pathogens and their risk to wildlife and human health.
I was selected to examine the impact of salmon farming on Fraser River sockeye by Justice Bruce Cohen and with my lawyers Greg McDade and Lisa Glowacki sifted through the .5 million DFO documents provided to the Cohen Inquiry. This is where I picked up the thread of unethical abusive pressure applied to anyone in DFO who dares speak the truth about the impact of salmon farms. This is the same scenario that led to the collapse of the North Atlantic cod. DFO told DFO scientist Ransom Myers not tell the public that DFO’s fishing policy was driving one of the largest human food resources to extinction. He told me DFO is a criminal organization. Indeed, managing ocean fisheries to extinction should be viewed as a crime.
In 2019/20, your staff conducted “consultation” with several First Nations regarding new conditions of salmon farm licences. These nations asked me to sit in and I heard your staff tell them that stickleback, not salmon farms, are likely causing sea lice outbreaks on young wild salmon and that wild salmon are resistant to lice infection. I sat at your Fish Health Table over the winter of 2019/2020 to discuss what regulations would best protect wild salmon from farm lice. And I read your September 28, 2020 announcement that salmon farms are low risk to sockeye salmon in the Discovery Islands, as per Cohen recommendation #19. On that website someone in DFO wrote that Atlantic salmon are more susceptible to sea lice than most Pacific salmon. And yet, scientists within your department knew that sockeye are more susceptible to sea lice than Atlantic salmon. One of the scientists involved in this work sat at the Fish Health table and never mentioned this. Your representatives consulting with First Nations in 2019, never mentioned this work. It was not until the Discovery Island consultations that one of your veterinarians slipped this paper into the flood of documents provided to the nations and that is where I found it. However, it was not included in the sea lice presentation by your staff to the First Nation leadership.
This DFO sea lice paper acknowledges the contributions of Marine Harvest (MOWI) and Greig Seafood. This suggests that these companies, also at the Minister’s Fish Health table, knew the impact their rising lice infections were having on the collapsing Fraser River sockeye salmon populations and they said nothing.
After all these meetings, on March 1, 2020, your staff gave Mowi, Grieg and Cermaq permission for unlimited lice infections for 6 weeks every time they exceeded the limits set to protect wild salmon. As a result, these three companies were immune to charges last spring while Canadians lost a significant portion of the Fraser sockeye, Nootka chum and many other runs of wild salmon.
The problem you and your staff are facing is that the DFO policy to promote salmon farms is completely at odds with responsible wild fisheries management. They cannot control their lice, bacteria or viruses in open net pens. I believe this is why those who wrote the Constitution of Canada frowned on private fisheries - which salmon farms are. You can see the outcome of government protection of this private fishery in Norway where they sacrificed their wild salmon for salmon farms. Members of the Norwegian government came to Canada twice to warn us about this industry, Jon Lilletun, Parliamentary Committee on the Environment in 1991, and Georg Fredrik Rieber-Mohn, former attorney general of Norway in 2010.
DFO has become a division of the aquaculture industry, sharing staff, principles and the suppression of damaging information. As Justice Cohen recommended, I believe you will have to create a Regional Director of Wild Salmon to uphold management of wild fisheries. Whoever inhabits this position will have to understand the powerful science in your genomic lab - the key to restoring wild salmon-, be closely connected with First Nation leadership so as to work seamlessly with their fishery departments and have an awareness of the minefield that your department has become for anyone trying to maintain wild salmon.
I would like to offer a pathway through the scandal bubbling to the surface as we lose one of the most important global fish stocks.
Take the genomic science your department is developing to First Nations. Initiate highly coordinated sampling and enumeration of wild salmon as they migrate, and collection of environmental data on each habitat they pass through. Run these samples through your genomic lab run by Dr. Kristi Miller and make the fish and environment data generated open access, inviting the highly skilled fishery modellers in Canadian universities to find the pulse. Why have Canada’s wild salmon runs become unpredictable. Once we learn what the extinction drivers are, First Nations and municipal governments can work in concert with DFO to alleviate what stressors can be removed. The extraordinary power of this science allows us to ask the fish whether each intervention reduced the stress or not by reading their immune systems. In this way, the fish themselves become the ultimate authority. Making the data open access will guard against biased interpretation, i.e. the transparency your department already strives for.
However, none of this will work if you allow the culture of suppression to continue in DFO. I believe your BC Regional Director of Science, and your Science coordinator must be replaced. It is unforgiveable that in the face of extinction of the Fraser sockeye salmon that they did not bring forward the research warning us that the rising lice infections in the farms would have catastrophic impact on the sockeye.
As well, your aquaculture managers spread across BC, Ottawa and eastern Canada, should have zero influence on publication of research, research funding and access to facilities, such as the high-biosecurity tanks required to fully understand the impact of amplified aquaculture pathogens on wild salmon. I have read 10,000s of pages of internal DFO correspondence through the Freedom of Information Act and so I know what is going on. For example, in 2018 your Director of Science lost all the money to enumerate wild salmon and was never able to account for where it went. Thankfully your Regional Director stepped in at the last moment and found funds.
For example, research defining PRV as a disease agent and thus captured under s. 56 of the Fisheries (General) Regulations, sat on a desk in Ottawa for 7 years as the virus spread from salmon farms into wild salmon.
For example, your CSAS process edited out information that would have altered your September 28, 2020 announcement and classified salmon farms as high-risk to wild salmon.
Aquaculture has an important role, but DFO has destroyed its future in BC. If there had been strong regulation to protect wild fish, we would be the leaders in closed containment. Instead, the Canadians pioneering landbased fish farming have suffered under the shadow of three Norwegian operators. These foreign companies are facing charges in several countries across two continents for acting as a “cartel.” Mowi is facing loss of farms in Scotland due to environmental damages, charges by Chilean authorities for over production, as well as a $6 million fine for escapes and the highest cost for sea lice treatments in Norway in its history. This is an industry in chaos as it resists maturing into closed systems. Both the US Hedge Fund and Oslo stock analysists recommend purchase of landbased salmon farmer stocks. While here in BC the three Norwegian companies insist that they can’t evolve, they are determined to use the cheapest, dirtiest form of growing fish. BC is now producing the lowest grade salmon – neither wild, nor landbased.
I think the Canadian Pension Fund should rethink its heavy investment (5th biggest investor) in Mowi as this company is showing no capacity to keep up with the trend to isolate salmon farms from the wild fisheries it is damaging.
Minister Bernadette Jordan you have taken a brave step that no other Minister of Fisheries anywhere in the world has dared take. I see that you are also making strides to recover the North Atlantic cod. I certainly did not expect this when Trudeau appointed you as our Fisheries Minister. I thought you were too far removed from BC to understand the terrible situation here. I was wrong. You will face the wrath of the salmon farming industry, and you deserve all the support we can provide. We have everything we need to restore wild salmon and likely all the herring impacted by this industry and develop a highly successful landbased aquaculture industry. All we have ever needed is the political will.
Respectfully,
Alexandra Morton