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Let the herring live

By Guest, in Ocean-related reporting, January 30, 2020
West Coast wildlife depends on herring—and there’s a model for bringing them back to the Salish Sea.

THE WILDLIFE IN SPILLER CHANNEL, just north of Bella Bella, is alive and well this fall. Over a thousand bald eagles on their southward migration were feeding on the returns of chum and pink salmon alongside other top predators—black bear, grizzly and wolf. Sea lions, Dall’s porpoise, several humpbacks and northern resident killer whales worked the channel edges.
At the entrance, where the breakers roll in, sea otters have returned, triggering a rebound of kelp forests. Juvenile fish are surviving better in these underwater nurseries. Overwintering sea ducks, like harlequins and surf scoters, fished alongside 500 Western grebes, listed as threatened. Along the channel, small buoys and lines tied to trees mark the traditional non-kill fishery of herring roe of the Heiltsuk First Nation. The foundation for the health and well-being of everyone in Spiller is herring; Spiller Channel is famous for them.

Herring spawn off the south end of Denman Island (Photo courtesy Jake Berman)

Spiller is also famous for the Heiltsuk Nation’s prolonged stand-offs against the commercial “kill” herring fishery (which mostly is used for fish farm feed and pet food). It is an important place—a coastal Standing Rock—where the nation has stood up to pressures that push species and cultures to the brink: overharvesting, overhunting, overfishing and overlogging. Spiller is also close to where the Nathan E. Stewart oil spill occurred in Seaforth Channel in 2016, for which the nation launched their own emergency response.
With their success in stopping the commercial “kill” fishery, the trophy hunts, and commercial logging, along with winning the court case against the Texas Kirby Corporation responsible for the fuel spill, the Heiltsuk have set a course for how to bring life back to the land, the sea and the culture, with herring as the foundation. They have shown the way that abundance can return here too, in the Salish Sea.
All around the Salish Sea there are Spiller Channels waiting to rebound; bays where the open ocean has been calmed by the geography of granite and forests of kelp. People have tended these fish for millennia as they return year after year to spawn on the lush eelgrass meadows. The young fish follow the older fish back to a spawning site (what elders refer to as the scouts) and typically remain loyal to that site.
The Salish Sea had dozens of spawning bays with different spawning windows from Ganges SYOWT, the first place the herring come in spring, according to WSÁNEĆ hereditary chief Eric Pelkey, to the late spawners of Cherry Point near Bellingham. Some herring leave on their migration to the coastal shelf, some never leave, and with this mix of diversity of locations, timing and behaviours, the rest of the coastal community can thrive all the way up the food chain, through chinook to the Southern Resident killer whales and the human communities.
For many elders like Pelkey, whose chieftanship runs from STAUTW (Tsawout) on the Saanich Peninsula to SYOWT (Ganges) on Saltspring Island, the decimation of these herring stocks indicates a fundamental flaw with the fisheries model being used by Fisheries and Oceans (DFO). “It seemed like as soon as there was a sign that herring were starting to come back again and into Ganges Harbour, DFO would open it up commercially and seine boats would come in and just scoop them up. Eventually that just killed off that herring run.” The fight that began with his grandfather, Louie Pelke, has been long and lonely—and repeated by every coastal nation.
In Lekwungen territory, the Gorge was their Spiller Channel until the commercial fisheries of the 1930s wiped them out. Ross Bay, James Bay and Ogden Point lost their herring to the reduction fisheries by 1938; Juan de Fuca in 1940, Hotham Sound and Redonda, pre-1950.
In WSÁNEĆ territory, Saanich Inlet, Coles Bay, Deep Cove, Patricia Bay, Goldstream and Finlayson Arm all lost their herring to the next wave of commercial fisheries of the ’50s and ’60s, and so it continued around the Salish Sea. Howe Sound, 1966; Malaspina Strait, 1975; Jervis Inlet, 1978; Fraser River, Bedwell Harbour, Campbell Bay, Lyall Harbour and Winter Harbour in 1979; Sechelt, Pender Harbour, Cowichan Bay, Ganges and Fulford Harbours, 1983; Powell River, 1988; Boundary Bay, 1992.
Some bays, like Nanoose and Yellowpoint, lost their spawns during the “wild west” herring bonanzas of the ’80s, rebounding temporarily in the ’90s, only to disappear again. These local extinctions usually followed the winter or spring fishery.
In 2011, Simon Fraser University archeologist Dana Lepofsky started the Herring School forum, recording elders from Alaska to Washington who told of seiners coming into their bays at night, taking every last fish and silencing their spring.
Today, the only place that herring have continued to spawn at any scale is Baynes Sound around Hornby and Denman Island. Yet DFO persists in its claim that it has a workable model and a well-managed fisheries maintaining “historic levels.” Few outside of DFO and industry seem to agree with the model, which is based on taking 20 percent of the total weight (biomass) of the fish predicted and comparing it to a baseline catch in 1951 to assess “historic highs.”
Pelke lists its flaws: it treats all the herring in the Salish Sea as one big population; it targets bigger fish; it doesn’t consider the ecosystem or cultural stewardship; it uses 1951 as a baseline which, as he points out, was a low point for herring during the excess of the reduction fisheries.
Even with an announcement this October from federal scientists that the model is predicting a decline of what they call the Strait of Georgia (SOG) population by one third, there is no move to end the winter or spring fisheries.
The WSÁNEĆ Leadership Council (WLC) of Tsartlip, Tseycum and Tsawout First Nations, like the Heiltsuk, are inviting others to join them in calling for changes. The WLC states that, “Herring have been under increased pressure from commercial fishing interests since the 1960s when herring populations reached a critical low. Since then, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) and Coastal First Nations, including the WSÁNEĆ, have been unable to agree on policies that prioritize the health of the herring population over commercial fishing interests.”
Inspired by the Heiltsuk’s successful lobbying efforts to have DFO agree to a moratorium on commercial herring fishery in places like Spiller, the WLC are cohosting an advocacy event this November called HELIT TTE SLON,ET (Let the Herring Live) with 25 local First Nations, and 50 community organizations invited. As the WLC state: “This is the first time in the Strait of Georgia’s history that such a large and diverse group of interests have joined together to oppose the questionable practices of DFO.” Part of the gathering will be hearing elders and independent researchers who have worked together for a decade in research forums providing the evidence to refute DFO’s position. They will also explore case studies like the Heiltsuk for recovery efforts. Another historic first is that all political representatives of Saanich and the Gulf Islands from the Islands Trust up through Adam Olsen MLA and Elizabeth May MP are supporting this initiative.
Co-hosts like Conservancy Hornby Island, which gathered over 96,000 signatures to stop the herring fishery last spring, say DFO didn’t listen to the decades of warnings, including the latest protests when stocks could have been left to recover. Director Grant Scott, an ex-commercial fisherman, states “it took a collapse of Strait of Georgia (SOG) herring to finally show up the flaw in DFO’s modelling. To be precautionary, there should be no commercial herring fishery here until the populations of herring recover throughout the SOG, not just between Parksville and Comox.” Like Scott, co-host Vanessa Minke-Marten, a fisheries scientist with Pacific Wild, is “supporting First Nations to assume their rightful control and place in herring management.” That includes the integration of traditional and Western science for the full ecosystem: fish, sea birds, mammals, and cultures who rely on herring for their survival.
Management models that incorporate spatial population dynamics, it seems, are being used everywhere on the coast but here. When Washington State saw their 21 distinct spawning stocks, like Cherry Point, flicker out, they stopped the herring fisheries in the early 1980s. Lepofsky’s archaeological evidence backed up elder testimonies prompting a call for changes in policy to align with Indigenous inherent and legal rights. The SFU work expanded into the Ocean Modelling Forum (OMF) in 2015 with 20-plus institutions, including a DFO researcher, joining First Nations in inter-disciplinary research. DFO has responded to calls for policy changes from the Heiltsuk, Haida, Nuu-chaal-nulth, and in small closures with the Q’ul-lhanumutsun Aquatic Resources Society (QARS).
With this sizeable body of evidence, researchers Andre Punt and his co-authors are unequivocal that the old model has “consequences throughout the social-ecological system, including loss of trust in management bodies and conflict...” Loss of trust is top-of-mind for co-host Lockhart MacLean of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society: “There is an issue here that DFO is whitewashing harvest rates based on fictional biomass. The 20 percent harvest rate is a joke with these wild predictions. DFO’s lack of precaution is driving the last viable spawn in the Salish Sea to extinction.”
Another research team under Daniel Okomoto recently found that managing stocks the way Pelkey advises, watershed by wateshed, “diversifies community benefits.”
And the benefits need diversifying. The herring industry is controlled by one man, Jimmy Pattison, and all profits flow to his private empire which, according to BC Business, earned $10.6 billion in 2018, padded out by fuel subsidies for his seine boats. Pattison is counting on a reallocation of tonnage from the spring to the winter fishery which is supposed to start November 21.
The social licence doesn’t appear to be on Pattison’s side. Ocean Modelling Forum researchers have identified the variety of factors having impacts on herring, which range from pollution to climate change, but the unique threat, which only exists on the Canadian side of the Salish Sea (and is easily remedied), is the fishery; a fishery that is now proven to cause local extirpations.
The WSÁNEĆ response is CENENITEL, which means “helping one another to restore home.” CENENITEL could look like a comprehensive herring recovery program that supports local nations and communities in recovery efforts to improve water quality and eelgrass, traditional reseeding of bays with herring roe, or assistance to displaced herring fishermen. Spiller Channel is returning, and the Salish Sea has one last chance to do the same.
Briony Penn is an award-winning writer of creative non-fiction books including The Real Thing: The Natural History of Ian McTaggart Cowan, A Year on the Wild Sideand, to be released in the spring, Following the Good River: The Life and Times of Wa'xaid, a biography with Cecil Paul(Rocky Mountain Books).
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The case for ending the herring fishery

By Guest, in Ocean-related reporting, January 30, 2020
The commercial herring roe fishery in the Salish Sea may be the final nail in the coffin of chinook, resident orca and seabirds.
By Stephen Hume (Originally published in the March-April 2019 edition of Focus Magazine)

In June of 1893, a small steam tug thumped past Nanaimo. Abruptly, the sea began to seethe. It was a herring school so vast it took three hours to traverse. The school was 70 kilometres across.
A century earlier, Captain George Vancouver’s log for June 1792 recorded another astonishing sight—whale spouts at every point of the compass. They were humpback whales. Herring provide up to half a humpback’s daily energy requirements.
The herring school reported 125 years ago was only one of many spawning in the Salish Sea. From February to mid-summer, milt turned the water milky. Each female laid up to 134,000 eggs upon eelgrass, kelp fronds and the hemlock and cedar boughs that First Nations have been placing in the water since time immemorial to harvest the sticky masses they called “skoe.”
Herring spawned in Brentwood Bay, Esquimalt Harbour, Long Harbour, Plumper Sound, Kuleet Bay, Baynes Sound, Lambert Channel, Fulford Harbour, Squamish, Semiahoo Bay, Nanaimo Harbour, Sansum Narrows, around Puget Sound and at an unknown number of smaller locations. Even today the occasional remnant of a herring run through Greater Victoria’s Gorge Narrows draws crowds.
First Nations herring camps were everywhere. Herring bones represent the single most abundant species found in excavations of coastal First Nations sites.
Yet we know of that immense herring school witnessed off Nanaimo only because the tugboat crew thought it so remarkable, they told a federal official. And in 1906, he mentioned it in one of those dry reports to Parliament that gather dust.
Today, although fisheries experts doggedly insist that herring in the Salish Sea are sufficient to sustain a roe harvest, some data are worrisome. One survey from 2009 shows 53 percent of major historic herring spawning areas in the Salish Sea now in serious decline.

Seining Pacific herring in the Salish Sea near Parksville

Courtenay-Alberni’s NDP Member of Parliament Gord Johns asked at the end of January for a moratorium on harvesting roe herring. Jonathan Wilkinson, the Liberal fisheries minister from North Vancouver, responded by recommending a commercial harvest quota of 25,760 tonnes from the Salish Sea (with a 30,000 tonne cap).
Of five herring fisheries areas off the BC coast, three are closed and one is restricted to traditional roe-on-kelp harvests. Only the one in the Salish Sea is deemed to have sufficient stock to support a commercial fishery. “As I said, we make our decisions based on science,” Wilkinson said. The uninvited question, however, is this: If science is so good at predicting abundance, why are 80 percent of herring sites now closed?
The chorus of reassurance should not surprise. We’ve fished stocks to collapse before, amid repeated assurances that the fisheries science shows harvests to be sustainable. Tony Pitcher, a scientist at the University of British Columbia specializing in aquatic ecosystems, noted the irony 20 years ago. “The failure of fisheries science, paradoxically one of the most sophisticated mathematical fields within the discipline of applied ecology, is creating both trauma and denial among its practitioners…These failures are chronic and well-documented and are commonly responded to by many of our colleagues in a range of voices that seek to deflect and deny,” he wrote.
In the 1950s, overfishing of Japan’s herring led to a collapse. In the 1960s, the California sardine fishery collapsed. Herring fisheries in Alaska and BC were closed in the 1960s after overfished stocks collapsed. Overfishing destroyed herring stocks off Iceland, Norway and Russia around the same time. In 1972, the overfished Peruvian anchovy fishery collapsed. In 1992, Canada’s Atlantic cod went the way of the herring, sardines and anchovies. Cod stocks that had supported Newfoundland fisheries for 500 years suddenly fell to one percent of what it had been at its maximum biomass.
Fisheries managers frequently blame predictive failures upon oceanic changes they can’t forecast. The North Pacific is often referred to as a “black box” in which mysterious things happen which affect salmon, herring, tuna and other fish. An anthropologist might describe this as magical rationalization—when the emperor of science turns out to wear no clothes, blame unseen, unknowable forces after the fact.
Pitcher had another observation regarding colleagues who blamed environmental changes for fishery collapses: “Remember that these supposedly delicate fishes have survived 100 million years of sweeping and cyclic environmental changes, including a global catastrophe that wiped out the dinosaurs…!”
What fish stocks apparently don’t survive is hubris.
One common factor in these serial fisheries disasters is that regulators were convinced harvests were sustainable—until they suddenly weren’t.
If that doesn’t set alarm bells ringing for British Columbians, perhaps this will. A global survey by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization concludes that 85 percent of all wild fish stocks are now overexploited, depleted, or recovering from severe depletion—and current science suggests recovery, while possible, is far from certain. “Many species have been hunted to fractions of their original populations. More than half of global fisheries are exhausted and a further third are depleted,” the UN agency reported in 2012. It suggests that our next generation may inherit barren oceans. At current rates of harvest, it notes, the world faces collapse of all wild seafood species currently being fished. Think herring. Then think chinook, coho, ling cod, rock fish, halibut, and so on.

THIS SHOULDN’T BE NEWS. Twenty years ago, a team of eminent fisheries scientists at the University of BC offered a similar caution. Daniel Pauly and Johanne Dalsgaard, in a paper published in the prestigious journal Science entitled “Fishing Down the Food Webs,” wrote: “Marine fisheries are in a global crisis, mainly due to open access policies and subsidy-driven over-capitalization…The global crisis is mainly one of economics or of governance.”
They warned that shifts in fish harvests from large predators to smaller fish, especially in the Northern Hemisphere, implies “major changes in the structure of marine food webs.” And, “It is likely that continuation of present trends will lead to wide spread fisheries collapses…”
They argued that instead of focusing on catch—the doctrine of maximum sustained yield—fisheries management must recalibrate for aggressive rebuilding of fish populations within functional food webs left alone inside large “no-take” marine protected areas.
Since 1935, with the full sanction of federal authorities, we’ve done the opposite with herring. Industry extracted six million tons of herring from BC waters, at first for human consumption but then mostly for reduction into fish oil and fertilizer and, for the last 50 years or so, purportedly to sell herring roe in Japan. I say “purportedly” because critics claim most herring caught in the roe fishery—100 percent of the males and about 90 percent of the females—actually wind up as feed for pets and farmed fish.
This creates another ethical conundrum. Critics complain that federal law bans the use of wild fish for non-human consumption. Section 31, sub-section 1 of the federal Fisheries Act prohibits converting wild fish into “fish meal, manure, guano or fertilizer, or for the manufacture or conversion of the fish into oil, fish meal or manure or other fertilizing product.”
Of course, there’s a loophole in sub-section 2. It gives the fisheries minister discretion to exempt any wild fish from the requirements of sub-section 1.

Herring spawn off the south end of Denman Island (Photo courtesy Jake Berman)

Just to put the total herring harvest into big picture-perspective, we’ve now prevented more than 43 billion herring from spawning. That number represents about 2.8 quadrillion—yes, that’s quadrillion—herring by eggs never laid. Of course, not all herring eggs hatch, and not all that do will survive to spawn in adulthood. But herring killed as eggs have zero chance of survival. Their genes are erased from the reproductive pool. They are not even potential forage.
Thus we forego future herring to provide tidbits for Japanese gourmands who destroyed their own herring stocks. Meanwhile, First Nations foragers in BC are denied their own ancient traditions. This raises ethical questions about the sincerity of promises to First Nations.
The Douglas Treaties, which govern half a dozen Coast Salish tribal groups on southern Vancouver Island, are clear. In exchange for access to First Nations lands, those nations are guaranteed the right to hunt, fish and forage “as formerly.” If access to herring and chinook are denied because the resource has been commercially over-exploited by non-First Nations, we abrogate solemn treaty promises. How does that square with the official rhetoric of reconciliation?

AUTHORITIES SAY SALISH SEA HERRING POPULATIONS have returned to historic levels of abundance. Not everyone agrees. Herring activist David Ellis is a former commercial fisherman, biologist, and one-time member of the federal government’s gold-standard Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC).
Ellis says the estimated biomass for today’s so-called “historic” level of abundance is about the equivalent of one season’s catch 50 years ago.
He thinks the roe herring fishery should be stopped. “Yes. And banned forever. You have to look to Japan to see how destructive it is over time. And for First Nations it means cultural genocide as they lose herring eggs which are as key to their culture as salmon are.”
“Massive overharvests in the reduction fishery era are documented. This was a massacre that we are still paying for. The roe herring fishery has knocked out [local] population after population and interviews with First Nations elders best illustrate this.”
Ellis points to an enduring conflict within the management system—our emphasis on science at the expense of traditional knowledge.
On the one hand, he argues, we have 10,000 years of intimate use-based First Nations knowledge regarding the herring resource. On the other, 100 years of “official” knowledge from government experts who presided over the extirpation of baleen whales from the Salish Sea, serial collapses of herring fisheries, endangered species status for eulachon and now for a dozen chinook populations. Fisheries regulators, remember, once identified orcas as threats to industry to be eradicated with .50-calibre machine guns, put a bounty on seals until they were almost exterminated, and oversaw the indiscriminate slaughter of the harmless, plankton-feeding basking shark, now listed by COSEWIC as an endangered species.
The epicentre of surviving Salish Sea herring spawn is now off the East Coast of Vancouver Island. Since early February, seals, sea lions, porpoises and seabirds have been congregating for the feast. The predator species put on a raucous wildlife show. It brings tourists, sparks local festivals and, of course, attracts the ruthlessly efficient commercial harvesters.
Grant Scott, a former commercial fisherman, is now an advocate for herring as president of Conservancy Hornby Island, a local organization which is leading a campaign to close the herring fishery outright. Scott urges thinking about herring as components in an ecological web that’s so important we shouldn’t fish herring stocks at all. (See their online petition.)
Increasingly, environmentalists, First Nations, conservationists like Scott, sports anglers, and tourist-dependant communities that rely on other species for which herring is forage—chinook salmon, southern resident orcas, at least 40 species of sea birds, and, of course, the humans who make a living from whale watching and recreational sports fishing—want the Salish Sea herring fishery closed. Many argue herring’s value as forage far outweighs its value as industrial feedstock.
BC’s tourism sector, much of it associated with outdoor recreation and wildlife viewing, generated $17 billion in 2016 revenue. Tidal sports angling, most of it directed at fishing for chinook which are dependent on herring, generated $3.2 billion. Whale watching of orcas, which rely on chinook, and humpbacks which eat herring, generates about $200 million a year in BC. The roe herring fishery was worth $33 million in 2016. On the jobs front too, the numbers are worth comparing. While commercial fishing employs about 1,100 people, saltwater sports fishing employs 5,000 and tourism on Vancouver Island employs more than 20,000. In fact, tourism in BC contributed five times more to provincial GDP than the entire agriculture and fisheries sectors combined.

SINCE HERRING IS A KEY COMPONENT in the Salish Sea food chain, and since so many species which rely on herring are now either in steep decline or have begun disrupting other parts of the ecological web by switching predation patterns, the case for ending the herring fishery seems reasonable.
Chinook, which prey on herring stocks, are now in such serious trouble that extinction for many Salish Sea populations seems possible. In its latest report, the federal science committee evaluating species at risk lists nine chinook populations as endangered, four as threatened, and one as being of special concern. About half of BC’s 28 chinook populations are now threatened with extirpation.

Chinook salmon
This is not a management crisis, it’s a looming catastrophe. It raises profound ethical dilemmas for politicians setting management policy.
Southern resident orcas, which feed predominantly upon the now- vanishing chinook salmon, are also listed as an endangered population. It has dwindled to 74, a 35-year low, and biologists say two more are expected to starve to death by summer.

Southern resident orca (Photo by MarkMallesonPhotography.com)

It gets worse. A 2012 study of seabirds in the Salish Sea found that almost 40 percent—22 species—showed “significantly declining trends.” One group of seabirds, the forage fish feeders for whom herring are the most important food source, deserve special concern because of the steepness of the population declines, the researchers warned.
The seabirds that deserve most attention (some have lost almost 20 percent of their populations)—the western grebe, the common loon, the horned grebe and the rhinoceros auklet—“feed largely on small, mid-water schooling bait (or forage) fish when in the Salish Sea. Pacific herring and Pacific sand lance (needlefish) are the two most important forage fish prey, particularly now that some species such as eulachon have collapsed.” The report says herring eggs and larvae are the two most important prey types for marine birds in the Salish Sea.
So, is a declining abundance of herring a key in this large-scale unravelling of Salish Sea food chains?
Ellis thinks so.
“I believe that the loss of the local, non-migratory herring leaves the vast Salish Sea pasturage unused by large herring in the summer, and this has contributed very significantly to the decline of the orca and chinook,” he says.
“Orcas need big chinook and chinook need big herring—and lots of both migratory and resident herring so they can use all areas [of the Salish Sea] as herring pastures.”
One recent major study of the Salish Sea food web concludes that not enough chinook now remain to sustain orcas, seals, sea lions, sport fishing, and commercial harvests. Predictably, there’s now a clamour to cull seals and sea lions, although one study of 1,000 samples of seal scat in the San Juan Islands found that 60 percent of seals’ diet was herring. The question arises, why are seals increasing predation on dwindling chinook stocks if herring stocks, which historically provided more than half their diet, are at historic levels of abundance?

SOME OF US ARE OLD ENOUGH to remember the kind of abundance that astonished Captain Vancouver 226 years ago and mesmerized that tugboat crew 125 years ago. That was before our Garden of Eden was laid to waste by greed and ignorance, scientific hubris, over-capitalization, corporate concentration, exoticized public tastes, and colonialist racism that marginalized Indigenous knowledge and Aboriginal fishing rights.
Old-timers would advise anglers to watch for squabbling masses of gulls hovering and plunge diving. That would signal a herring ball, forced up by large chinook and coho feeding from below. Troll your cut herring strip, Lucky Louie plug, wobbly Tom Mack spoon or bucktail fly past that, the lure emulating a stunned or wounded bait fish, and you’d be pretty sure to get a strike.
Herring in the Salish Sea were once so abundant that you didn’t have to buy bait. You took out a herring rake, a long paddle-like implement with teeth set into it like a comb, and simply swept live bait up and into the bottom of your boat.
My father-in-law, who caught his first chinook from a dugout canoe in Cowichan Bay shortly after the First World War, used a herring rake. His is now an artifact in a museum, just as those recollections of the immense herring schools sweeping in and out of the Salish Sea to spawn each spring have been consigned to mostly-forgotten archives.
Stephen Hume spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island. His byline has appeared in most major Canadian newspapers. The author of nine books of poetry, natural history, history and literary essays, he lives on the Saanich Peninsula.

More insights about the Salish Sea herring fishery in this video by Colby Rex O'Neill

Seining Pacific herring in the Salish Sea near Parksville.tif
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Orcapocalypse

By Guest, in Ocean-related reporting, January 30, 2020
The perils faced by killer whales forewarn of an über-threat—the unravelling of the ecosystems upon which humans also depend.
By Stephen Hume (Originally published in the Nov-Dec 2018 edition of Focus Magazine)
EDGED BY POWERFUL RIPTIDES and the foam-laced menace of Boiling Reef, muscular currents that once bedevilled Spanish sailing masters still churn past cliffs fringed with peeling arbutus. Gulls wheel and squabble over bait fish pushed up by predators below. Vigilant eagles perch in ancient Douglas firs that were saplings when the Magna Carta was yet unsigned.
This is the southernmost tip of Saturna Island, easternmost of British Columbia’s scattered Southern Gulf Islands, whose name is taken from the schooner captained by explorer José Maria Narvaez more than 200 years ago.

An orca at sunset in the Salish Sea (Photo by MarkMallesonPhotography.com)

East Point still evokes a primeval atmosphere. Yet at night the habitation glow from 6.2 million city dwellers casts its milky arc over the Salish Sea from Victoria through Seattle to Vancouver. And the throb of oil tankers, bulk cargo carriers, cruise ships and container vessels pulses insistently through the darkness.
Oasis of the pristine that East Point may appear to be, a favoured spot for observing killer whales in the wild, it is nevertheless an illusion cocooned in the reality of the heavily modified, chemically saturated landscapes of a 21st century megalopolis.
So perhaps it’s the ideal place from which to contemplate what some fear is a looming “orcapocalypse,” an existential crisis that threatens regional extirpation for one of the province’s most iconic creatures.
New research suggests a perfect storm of threats now makes the extirpation of 10 out of 19 global killer whale populations an imminent possibility. The 74 that survive from the Salish Sea’s Southern Resident killer whale population are among those at greatest risk.
The three Salish Sea pods of the Southern Residents, J, K, and L, were among the first listed as endangered under a new federal Species at Risk Act in 2003—two years before the US made the same designation. But a damning report from Canada’s Auditor-General this year points to botched, incompetent and laggardly responses by almost every federal department with responsibility for protecting them.
While there has been plenty of high-minded talk, meetings, workshops, action plans and strategic mission statements, bureaucratic inertia was encouraged by the lack of enthusiasm for environmental issues oozing from the decade-long Conservative government of Stephen Harper. It took 14 years for Ottawa to begin to implement mitigation and recovery strategies that on the surface seemed self-evident.
Indeed, in September, six conservation organizations launched a lawsuit asking a federal court to review two federal ministries’ failures to recommend an emergency order to protect the Southern Resident killer whales.
The threats are wide-ranging and complex. Human activity, from industrial pollution to municipal waste water, to disruptions in the food chain to apparently unconnected activities that range from taking a shower to driving the car to the supermarket, are all driving this gathering ecological storm.

EAST POINT REPRESENTS more than symbolism or a vantage point on orca. It was here, 54 years ago, that scientists harpooned the killer whale that was to become the first of its kind to be put on live public display—all done in the name of art.
In hindsight, it seems one of those benighted schemes that reeks of an entitled craziness. Youth might have been turning to the mellow attractions of Flower Power in 1964 while the grown-ups fretted over the movement’s “get high and get out of the rat race” morality. But the grown-ups also thought it a splendid idea to shoot a large, sentient mammal for art’s sake.
Mind you, just three years earlier, under the supervision of the federal government, a .50 calibre machine-gun had been mounted at Seymour Narrows to shred the orcas deemed a threat to commercial and recreational fisheries. The orcas didn’t show, the scheme proved a folly, and a month later the machine-gun was removed.
A subsequent plan was to kill one of the orcas known to congregate off East Point and tow the corpse to Vancouver where an artist could use it as a model. The sculpture would adorn the foyer of the new Vancouver Aquarium. Its skeleton would provide a specimen for the science exhibit.
The scheme went sideways fast. An orca was harpooned off East Point but then impertinently refused to die. The aquarium’s director decided instead that the wounded animal should be dragged to Vancouver Harbour and “studied.”
But Moby Doll, as the wounded killer whale was misnamed in a testament to ignorance—it was male, not female—became such a sensation (it went viral, we’d say today) that it quickly became the first captured killer whale to be put on public display.
Sadly, Moby Doll seemed disoriented and grief-stricken. A few months later he died. Then Seattle Public Aquarium bought a big male orca from a BC fisherman in whose nets he had become entangled. Namu, named for the place his freedom ended, was trained and became the first performing killer whale. Alas, he too died after 11 months.
Nevertheless, the marketing teams saw a promotional gold mine.
A two-decade rush began to kidnap ocean-ranging killer whales from their complex, tightly-knit family groups and put them on display. It reached its zenith in 1970 when the Seattle Public Aquarium’s collectors deployed helicopters and explosives to herd 80 terrified orcas into a small cove on Whidbey Island. Several whales died from the stress. As their bodies washed ashore, public opinion ebbed from unbridled enthusiasm to appalled distaste.
The barbarity of the killer whale gold rush did have one upside. It triggered a world-spanning interest in learning more about these magnificent animals. Knowledge in turn launched an evolution in awareness. And so, over the intervening decades, orcas have evolved in the public imagination from ravening wolves of the sea, to trained circus acts, to highly intelligent, gregarious, family-centric creatures deserving of their freedom and our protection.
Today, Vancouver Aquarium, which started the cycle, is prohibited by municipal law from capturing any cetaceans from the wild for public display. It may obtain them only from other facilities if they are either born in captivity or deemed to be so acclimatized to captivity they would not survive a return to the wild.
The changing sentiments have been reflected in a growing desire by the public to see whales of all kinds in their natural environment rather than as dead specimens in natural history museums, or performing for treats in aquarium tanks that might reasonably be compared to prison cells.
The so-called “killer whale”—it’s really one of the dolphins—is now the key driver for South Vancouver Island’s successful whale- watching industry, itself part of a global business that attracts 13 million watchers a year and generates more than $2 billion in annual economic activity.
In BC, about half of Canada’s million annual whale watchers spend close to $200 million a year just to see orcas, grey and humpback whales in their natural state.
There’s growing concern, though, that the public is loving its beloved marine mammals to death. All whales orient themselves, navigate, locate and identify food sources using highly-evolved echolocation. But marine noise from close-running whale-watching boats, along with that from more than 13,000 large vessel transits a year requiring Canadian pilots, 164,000 annual BC Ferries sailings, and almost 40,000 pleasure craft with engines larger than 10 horsepower accumulates to create a kind of acoustic fog in the water for the Southern Resident killer whales, whose numbers have steadily dwindled downward by almost 25 percent from 98 in 1995 to 74 in late 2018.
One recent study for the Port of Vancouver assessing the effects of marine noise found that the more distant background noise from commercial vessels, combined with the foreground noise from whale-watching boats, resulted in lost foraging time for feeding orcas of up to five-and-a-half hours per day.
The problem is of sufficient magnitude that from July to November this year, large vessels passing through the Salish Sea to and from Vancouver, Seattle, Tacoma, Bremerton, Crofton, Nanaimo and other points were asked to voluntarily reduce speed. Researchers hope to determine whether reduced engine speed means less marine noise and results in greater killer whale feeding success.

PAIR THE REDUCED FEEDING OPPORTUNITY with historic lows in the abundance of chinook salmon which are the killer whales’ primary food source, then add the toxins carried into the sea from industrial source points, and the problem quickly begins to look profound.
Chinook are critical to Southern Resident killer whales because they are available in the Salish Sea all year round, unlike chum, another important food source, which is available only in the late fall.
John Ford, a scientist at Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo who has been studying killer whales for almost 50 years, says observers noticed that population loss and reproductive decline for Southern Resident killer whales tracked chinook abundance. As soon as chinook numbers rose, the killer whales bounced back, too.
Complicating matters however, Ford says, is the fact that while Southern Resident killer whale populations have been in decline, Northern resident killer whales now number 300 and are thriving. So are the transient killer whales that feed on seals and sea lions, and resident populations in southern Alaska.
And it gets even more confusing. Transient killer whales, which feed on seals, carry a much higher load of PCBs and other contaminants, but remain healthy. Possibly it’s because with abundant food sources, they don’t go into nutritional stress. PCBs, banned almost 50 years ago, are maddeningly persistent toxins, but can remain benignly sequestered in killer whales’ blubber. The Southern killer whales, deprived of adequate food, start metabolizing their fat; PCBs stored there emerge and suppress their immune systems, making them more susceptible to disease, parasites, and reproductive failure.

Transient orcas, this one known as “T123A,” made two rare visits to Victoria’s harbour in 2018, creating a false impression of orca abundance.
Yet this is just one factor among the many. There are hydrocarbons from road runoff carried by storm drains so numerous that Metro Vancouver couldn’t provide a cumulative number. There’s leakage from tens of thousands of untallied septic fields throughout the Gulf Islands, the hinterlands of Greater Victoria, and around the Georgia Basin.
It’s a popular pastime among the green-leaning residents of Saanich and the Gulf Islands who elected the only Green candidate to the federal parliament and one of only three Greens in the BC legislature to point an accusatory finger at urban Victoria and Vancouver over sewage effluent. Yet they are a significant part of the problem, too. Almost a million people in BC dispose of household sewage and wastewater through septic fields, which can leak into aquifers and adjacent watercourses, including much of the rural Saanich Peninsula and the Gulf Islands.
This, too, points to one of those amplifying factors in ecosystem disruption. Dispersed residential communities at the fringes of urban areas throughout the province create the dilemma of the urban-rural interface that’s most at risk from the increased frequency and intensity of wildfires caused by global warming.
Flame retardants used in fighting increasingly intense forest fires, particularly those threatening human settlement, are flushed by the province’s great rivers from the distant Interior into the sea. The Fraser River alone, for example, drains 235,671 square kilometres, an area that dwarfs entire European countries. Another 951 smaller watersheds drain into the Salish Sea.
Last summer, during the worst fire season on record—climate science projects much worse to come—the BC Wildfire Service dropped eight million litres of flame retardant in airborne operations. While flame retardant is an essential weapon in the fire suppression arsenal, particularly in that vulnerable urban-rural interface, it’s also bad for the fish that sustain killer whales.
In 2014, a study by the US government’s National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration showed that although the chemicals in current use are far safer than those deployed in the past, widely-used flame retardant remains especially toxic to chinook smolts. The lethal effects linger right until the migrating smolts reach saltwater.
These contaminants, however, pale by comparison to those from urban areas.
Over 1.3 trillion litres of treated sewage effluent flow into the Salish Sea each year from about 100 Canadian and American treatment plant outfalls emptying into Puget Sound and the straits of Georgia and Juan de Fuca. Basic treatment of sewage doesn’t remove all toxic compounds. The discharge contains heavy metals like lead, mercury, chromium and copper, but also includes persistent organochlorines and hydrocarbons. Then there are trace levels of persistent organic pollutants—now banned, but still lingering in the environment—like polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
There are pharmaceuticals that can act as hormone-disrupters which are excreted in human urine. Contaminants like plastic microparticles occur in cosmetics and sunscreens, and can affect marine larvae insect, small aquatic organisms, and juvenile fish. Some sunscreen compounds are now implicated in declines in insect and coral reef larvae. Recent research by Washington State’s Dr James Meador has shown that the survival rate of chinook juveniles smolting in effluent-impacted estuaries is cut in half compared with juveniles emerging from uncontaminated estuaries.
A study by the T. Buck Suzuki Foundation found that untreated stormwater effluent from the Metro Vancouver region is about the same volume annually as treated sewage effluent.
Storm drain contributions, it appears, may double that amount, the report warns. Thousands of storm drains empty into the almost 1,000 watersheds that dump road runoff, ditch effluents and, in some cases, untreated sewage into the Salish Sea. That means the vector for exposing marine organisms to toxic compounds is mind-bogglingly large.
And there is the long-known spike in hydrocarbons that occurs in the first hour after rains wash the accumulated surface film from roads into storm drains and to the sea. That problem is getting worse, not better.
There are 10 million motor vehicles registered in BC and Washington.
The Insurance Corporation of BC’s statistics show motor vehicle registrations have increased at double the rate of population growth over the last five years. Incredibly, the motor vehicle population is growing faster than the number of people. Put in simple arithmetic, the province added 250,000 people to its population over that period, and it added 320,000 motor vehicles, most of which contribute hydrocarbons to the road runoff that affects the Salish Sea.
Most important for killer whales, many of these contaminants migrate up the food chain. If one of the key components threatening orca survival is a declining abundance of the chinook salmon that provide their main food source, the T. Buck Suzuki Foundation report also points directly at chemical contaminants.
“There is evidence,” it says, “that these chemicals can also disrupt the complex hormonal processes as juvenile salmon acclimatize to the saltwater environment. This is bad news for the billions of juvenile salmon that spend months in the shallow waters around Vancouver”—not to mention Puget Sound and near centres like Campbell River, Nanaimo and Victoria.
“Heavy metals and persistent chemicals that stay in the body bio-magnify as they work their way up the food chain,” the report observes. “Larger fish eating large numbers of contaminated smaller fish can end up with thousands or millions of times the level of toxins than the organisms that first absorbed them.”
This poses a double jeopardy for killer whales. Declining abundance of Georgia Basin chinook, coupled with bio-magnification of toxins in their body fat, amplifies the risk.
The chemicals accumulate in the blubber that protects whales from the oceanic cold. But when whales are starving, their bodies consume the energy stored in their fat, and that’s precisely where toxins which damage nervous systems and other organs are not only stored but concentrated over time.
Which, the Pacific Biological Station’s John Ford explains, is one of the apparent reasons for the health of Northern Residents and transients. As long as they can stay fat, they have a chance to thrive.

ON SATURNA, East Point’s 130-year-old lighthouse presides over a stunningly beautiful littoral of tilted sandstone terraces, tide pools, and echoing galleries sculpted by epochs of wind and storm surge. The tawny rock was quarried by homesteader George Taylor more than a century ago. It was used in constructing Victoria’s new legislature buildings, a Neo-Baroque expression of Victorian colonial authority commissioned on lands the Lekwungen people had been forced to vacate.
The choice of this Cretaceous rock for a government building seems ironically appropriate. The structure exudes a faux sense of permanence, evoking the Roman “imperitas” of which the British assumed themselves natural inheritors. But the materials actually offer only evidence of impermanence, a reminder that the present authority will prove as transient as that of Tyrannosaurus Rex, who reigned in the Cretaceous, or the Southern Resident killer whales on their tottering throne.
East Point’s 65-million-year-old sandstone is part of a deposit that sweeps up the east coast of Vancouver Island to the Comox Valley. Paleontologists celebrate the spectacular marine fossils these ancient sediments yield: ammonites, long-necked plesiosaurs, pickup- truck-sized mosasaurs, dolphin-like ichthyosaurs, all now extinct following what’s called the Cretaceous-Paleogene Event, an abrupt extinction of three-quarters of the Earth’s plant and animal species.
Scholars argue over whether the catastrophe was sudden, caused by abrupt climate change, an asteroid impact, volcanic eruptions, or some slowly unfolding evolutionary apocalypse that we don’t yet understand. But what’s not in dispute is that there was a mass extinction. It occurred at the beginning of the rise of mammals and, ultimately, of the recently arrived hominids—that’s us. We, it appears, so successful that anthropologists now call our era the “Anthropocene,” may also be presiding over what writer Elizabeth Kolbert calls the “sixth extinction,” a collapse in species survival unfolding around us with such rapidity and on such an immense and varied scale that it’s difficult for most people to perceive.
Most visitors to East Point come not in search of fossils or evolutionary philosophy but simply hoping for a glimpse of killer whales. The whales have become a central symbol of the province’s self-aggrandizing mythology of tourism branding; a totem for powerful First People’s clans; and inspiration for artists and marine biologists alike. They may no longer be the marquee show-stopper at aquariums from Victoria’s Inner Harbour to San Diego, but they still command attention.
If visitors to East Point are lucky, as I was 20 years ago, they will have a close encounter with a species that’s arguably as intelligent as ours and perhaps even exceeds human intelligence, although how or in what way remains mysterious.
My experience came in the face of a freshening breeze out of the American islands when I heard what sounded like a rifle shot. It was followed by another and then a third. I went to investigate. It wasn’t some ignorant yahoo shooting at sea lions. It was a family of killer whales, tail-slapping. The tide was in flood and a swift, smooth-as-glass current raced past the ledge. Two females patrolled its perimeter while two calves cavorted in the swooshing jet.
They seemed as excited as a couple of human children enjoying a water slide at the neighbourhood pool. They rode down the current, then zipped back to the top and rode down it again.
I stood at the water’s edge mesmerized. Then I noticed a shadow in the luminous depths. Before I could react, the immense, gleaming head of a male orca emerged. It rose the full length of my body out of the water. It stopped at precisely my height, held upright by the sculling of that mighty tail. One enormous eye swivelled, scanned me up and down, and then, seemingly satisfied I represented no threat to the playful youngsters—or maybe just satisfied to have observed me with the same wonderment with which I was observing him—slid back down into the depths as silently as he had come.
I took it as a hint, though, and moved back a respectful distance—well, considerably more than that—and watched until the whole family, moving almost as one, suddenly vanished. I considered then how I’d been granted an astonishing look into a deep, pre-human past.
But now, reflecting through the prisms of the current news, I wonder if it wasn’t really the future I was experiencing. And not through the whales, but through the rocks from which I was watching them. Perhaps the telling moment wasn’t their arrival in my field of view, but their abrupt disappearance.
The killer whales’ ancestors emerged into the evolutionary record not long after the sandstone ledges from which I observed them were laid down as sediments. They have been travelling these waters about a thousand times longer than the entire span in which modern homo sapiens arose.
Orca—the now-common name derives from the scientific name for the species—is generally preferred in these more language-sensitive times to the once-ubiquitous term “killer whale,” yet the earlier term is not inaccurate. It derives from the species’ undisputed place as the alpha predator of BC’s marine environment.
For all its power and dominance, there’s a growing risk that this iconic creature may be about to join the ammonites and Elasmosaurus in extinction. And that suggests we might be on track for an extinction event that includes us, too, because the perils faced by killer whales may be indicative of an über- threat, the unravelling of the ecosystems upon which humans also depend.
he latest report from the Intergovern-mental Panel on Climate Change, a report by 91 scientists from 40 countries who examined more than 6,000 independent research studies, now warns that the rapidity and the massive scale of human-caused climate change is much more dire and immediate than previously thought.
Even scientists seasoned in the bad news of climate change research expressed shock at the gathering portents, which include increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather, more and longer drought, fiercer and more extensive wildfire conflagrations, mass species die-offs, super-storms, abrupt ecosystem shifts, dwindling food security, and growing world hunger as agricultural production degrades.
As atmospheric carbon increases, it turns out, the protein yield in key field crops decreases. To feed growing global populations, we’ll have to produce even more food than initially predicted.
In fact, the evidence is clear. We’re already losing the race as food production falls and population grows. Researcher Leah Samberg, writing in Scientific American, says that after decades of decline, world hunger is once again on the rise. And the United Nations reports that while hunger is most prevalent in regions of armed conflict, these are also the places experiencing increasingly powerful storms, more persistent crop-and-livestock-killing drought, and more frequent flooding caused by intense and unpredictable rainfall events.
Acidification is already affecting the foundations of ocean food chains once thought inexhaustible, from commercially farmed mollusks unable to properly form protective shells, to the fatal bleaching of coral reefs, to collapsing salmon runs, among them the chinook upon which the local orcas depend.
The Salish Sea’s littoral is one of the world’s miracles, a gigantic salmon factory. Even now, after a century of industrial harvest, habitat disruption, and landscape modification, as many as 800 million juvenile salmon may ride the spring freshet to the sea. Up to 20 million salmon can populate the Fraser River estuary on any given day.
But we’ve taken this gift from nature for granted. We’ve behaved as though salmon stocks were limitless. We’ve dammed spawning tributaries, logged headwaters, clogged the river with blasting debris, converted crucial rearing wetlands habitat to agriculture, mined gravel for construction, altered river flows, dumped mine tailings into watersheds, and polluted the river with industrial effluent, farm fertilizer and storm drain runoff.
Those salmon that return run a gauntlet of commercial trollers, seiners and gill netters; a recreational fishery that itself is heavily commercialized; and First Nations’ food and ceremonial harvests. We’ve even managed to alter the evolutionary course of fish like the chinook. For a century we’ve selected the biggest fish, the trophy fish, out of the gene pool. Now chinook salmon are much smaller on average than they were historically, says scientist John Ford. Feeding orcas are paying the price.
All this exacerbates the impact of climate change, which has been speeding snow melts, reducing summer discharges, raising river temperatures, and changing food abundance for salmon in the ocean—and the availability of salmon to other species like killer whales.
It’s not far-fetched to wonder if the plight of our Southern Resident killer whales isn’t a harbinger of what awaits humanity, too.

HERE IN THE SALISH SEA, a small resident orca population now teeters at the brink of what could quickly become a downward spiral into oblivion. Breeding populations aren’t breeding successfully. Baby whales aren’t surviving. Mature whales are more susceptible to disease, and some show signs of malnutrition. Salmon runs, upon which killer whales depend, are collapsing or have already collapsed, most prominent among them chinook salmon.
All of these are key indicators in a larger ecosystem that sustains humans as well. Salmon are a resource for which humans compete with killer whales.
Canada’s federal government recently intervened with closures of commercial and recreational chinook fisheries in an attempt to preserve dwindling food stocks for the declining Southern Resident killer whale population. The State of Washington struck a special task force to grapple with the problem. Some communities, where recreation fishing is big business, predictably objected.
“Community politicians, ocean anglers and chambers of commerce from Sooke to Tofino are objecting to the possibility of closing two ocean zones to sport fishing,” Victoria Times-Colonist writer Richard Watts reported last July. “Such a closure would devastate the small towns that rely on sport fishing to attract tourists.”
And yet, we are where we are in part because of fishing. Despite declining chinook abundance due to habitat loss, disruptions in rearing areas caused by toxic runoff from storm drains, contaminants in sewage effluent, degradation of spawning areas by logging, hydroelectric and flood control dams, gravel removal for construction and urban development—despite all of that, fishing of chinook stocks continued uninterrupted. Since 1975, when the Southern Resident killer whale population stood at close to 100, federal and state authorities in BC and Washington have supervised the harvesting by First Nations, recreational and commercial fisheries of 32 million chinook salmon bound through the Salish Sea to spawn in the rivers and streams of the Salish Sea.
It’s a reminder that the threats to the Southern Resident orcas are complex, long-lasting and far-reaching. In any event, the chinook closures may be too little, too late.
One day, I hope, I’ll be able to return to Saturna’s East Point and again look into the huge eye of a flourishing fellow species. If I can’t, if the orcas have gone to join the other extinct creatures buried in those Cretaceous sediments, what good will our wealth of commerce have proved? If, for all our wealth and power we can’t ensure survival of the ancient, sentient marine species with which we share this corner of the Salish Sea, what certainty is there that we can ensure our own survival?
Stephen Hume has lived in many parts of BC since 1948. He spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island. His byline has appeared in most major Canadian newspapers; he’s written nine books of poetry, natural history, history and literary essays.
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Fish-farm activists complain about intimidation

By Guest, in Ocean-related reporting, January 30, 2020
The battle of the Broughton continues with surveillance on the seas.

AFTER MORE THAN THREE DECADES of running a whale-watching business out of Port McNeill, Bill Mackay knows the importance of understanding what is happening in the water off northern Vancouver Island and he does not take kindly to boats with blacked-out windows or people telling him he’s not allowed to ask about it.
“On the ocean, with limited visibility and a high-speed vessel I want to know who the hell is coming at me. I don’t want to be looking at blacked-out windows,” said Mackay after a group of men on a dock in Port McNeill refused to tell him what they were doing. “One guy stood in my face and puffed his chest right out and hollered at the other fellow that he was not allowed to talk to me,” Mackay said.
“That got me wondering what the heck is going on. There are at least three of these vessels with blacked-out windows. I asked if they were running drugs or doing illegal things, but they wouldn’t answer,” he said.
Part of the answer was revealed when one man opened his jacket, showing a Marine Harvest tee-shirt, but Mackay felt the incident was sufficiently strange that he wrote out a full report for Port McNeill RCMP.
“I know a thug when I see one,” he said. “I know Marine Harvest is paying the bills, but who are these guys on board?” he asked.

Blacked-out windows and GoPro camera employed by the "Coastal Logger" to monitor fish farm opponents.

The ongoing battle over 20 salmon farms in the Broughton Archipelago has taken on a new twist with Marine Harvest Canada leasing vessels and hiring crews to follow independent biologist and wild salmon advocate Alexandra Morton.
First Nations and activists such as Morton are strenuously opposed to salmon farms in the Broughton, claiming the farms are responsible for killing wild salmon runs. Over the last year, Indigenous protesters occupied two farms in the area for 290 days.
Amid growing tensions, BC Supreme Court last month granted Marine Harvest an interim injunction to block activists from boarding its farms or docks and established a buffer zone around the farms. However, an exception was made for Morton, who is allowed to enter the buffer zone to collect samples, provided she is in a boat of no more than 2.6 metres.
Morton, who is currently travelling on the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s research vessel Martin Sheen, is collecting samples of feces and fish tissue close to the fish farms. The samples will later be tested for piscine reovirus (PRV), a pathogen that is central to two lawsuits against Marine Harvest.
The Namgis First Nation is suing Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) and Marine Harvest to stop the transfer of PRV-infected farm fish into their territory. Morton is suing DFO and Marine Harvest for failing to screen farm salmon for PRV before they are transferred into ocean pens. Both cases will be heard together in a case starting September 10.
Morton has studied transfer of PRV to wild fish and links to heart and skeletal muscle inflammation, which can be fatal in wild salmon populations. This spring, Strategic Salmon Health Initiative, in research led by DFO scientist Kristi Miller-Saunders, found PRV causes red blood cells in chinook salmon to rupture. (The research is a joint effort between Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Genome BC and the Pacific Salmon Foundation.)
However, nothing is simple when it comes to salmon farming disputes, and that research has been challenged by a BC Centre for Aquatic Health Sciences study which concluded the virus “acts in a benign fashion in BC.”
Adding to the legal wrangles, the Dzawada’enuxw First Nation has filed a title case against DFO, Cermaq and Marine Harvest—the latter two being Canadian branches of Norwegian companies—for operating in their territory without permission.
Meanwhile, nation-to-nation talks between First Nations and the provincial government are continuing while the Broughton leases are being renewed on a month-to-month basis after expiring June 20.
In addition, throughout BC, new rules requiring all fish farms to have an agreement with First Nations in whose territory they operate, will click into place in four years.
Morton believes Marine Harvest is feeling threatened by the upcoming court cases, in addition to uncertainty about whether licences in the Broughton will be renewed, and that is why she is being followed. The constant shadowing has provoked her to complain to the RCMP that she is being stalked.
“They follow us everywhere. They sat there when we were visiting people along the way, and one of the days I went out in my boat to do the sampling, and I tried to do a little fishing on the way home and they were following me there,” she said. “I turned around and went right up to their boat and they closed all their windows and doors and they took off, so I followed them and I circled them a couple of times asking why they were following me,” she said.

Morton, who has been told that the company has extensive equipment, is concerned that the surveillance will extend to her home and she fears recent computer problems were caused by cyber-hacking. It is difficult to know where the company will draw the line, Morton said. “In my opinion, this stalking behaviour in territories where First Nations are trying to evict them suggests that Marine Harvest is more aggressive than smart,” she said.
“If this was happening on the road and you had a car with blacked-out windows following you, you would definitely call the police,” said Morton, who added that the surveillance will not stop her taking samples.
Adding to the spy-thriller scenario, the company hired to do the surveillance is Safety Net Security, affiliated with Corrado Ventures Incorporated (CVI). Director Peter Corrado was given a Campbell River business licence in June for Black Cube Strategies and Consulting Ltd.
That put up alarm signals for Morton and others, as Black Cube is known internationally as a group of former Israeli intelligence specialists, with offices in Tel Aviv, Paris and London, who, according to their website, “specialise in tailored solutions to complex business and litigation challenges.” (The firm was hired, for example, by Harvey Weinstein, to deter his accusers.)
Corrado, Black Cube and CVI spokesmen did not return calls, but Shawn Hall, spokesman for BC Salmon Farmers Association, said there is absolutely no relationship between the Israeli-based company and the Vancouver Island firm.
Member companies hired a local health and safety firm to ensure the safety of employees on the farms following the lengthy occupation of two Marine Harvest farms by First Nations protesters, he said.
“There were some boardings last year that created an unsafe work environment, and companies want to ensure the health and safety of employees in a peaceful and appropriate manner,” Hall said. Employees felt threatened by the boardings, and companies are now ensuring that comprehensive services are available to support them, he said.
“We are Canadian, so we support the right to peaceful protest for anyone, but our members have a responsibility to protect employees,” Hall said. It’s unclear why Morton would be viewed as so physically threatening to employees of Marine Harvest that she is being surveilled. Hall dismissed claims that blacked-out windows, sunglasses, long camera lenses and men ducking into the cabin when challenged present an image of a covert operation.
Morton’s lawyer Greg McDade said he finds the surveillance concerning, and it appears to show that Marine Harvest is getting desperate. “I think the fact that Marine Harvest is hiring this quite scary security firm is problematic in and of itself. This is a foreign company that wants to do business in BC waters, and then it goes and hires security people to try and deal with a respected biologist who has been doing research for 20 years in these waters,” he said. It is troubling that the company would try and harass Morton, but it is uncertain whether it’s illegal, as no one owns the ocean, and people have the right to go where they wish, McDade said.
“But, this is just not what we do in Canada. It seems completely out of proportion and out of whack to what they are trying to do, so you can only conclude they are trying to scare Alex off, and it won’t happen,” he said. “It just seems very nefarious and un-Canadian. It should be troubling to most Canadians.”
Meanwhile, Bill Mackay has come up with his own way of showing displeasure at the blacked-out boats.
Recently, with a full load of whale watchers on board the Naiad Explorer, Mackay saw the long camera lenses pointing from behind the windows. “So I asked my passengers politely if they would please give them a round of applause, which they did, and then [the men in the boat] all went and hid behind their blacked-out windows,” Mackay said.
“Now, when we encounter them, I ask all my passengers, who come from all over the globe, to get out even bigger lenses, and we point those at them as they go by and they all disappear. I can tell you they don’t want their pictures taken, but we are firing away like crazy,” he said.
Judith Lavoie is an award-winning journalist specializing in the environment, First Nations, and social issues. Twitter @LavoieJudith
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Vancouver's role in the orca-chinook-sewage death spiral

By Guest, in Ocean-related reporting, January 30, 2020
Is Fisheries & Oceans Canada ignoring Washington State research on chemical contamination from sewage treatment plants?

ARE THREE LARGE SEWAGE TREATMENT PLANTS located on the Fraser River estuary contributing to the decline of the Southern Resident Killer Whale population? Between them they discharge 1.1 billion litres of effluent every day of the year into the estuary and nearshore marine waters. The largest, Iona Island, provides only primary treatment and has been permitted by Fisheries and Oceans Canada to continue at that level until 2030.
We now know that the reproductive health of the orca population depends heavily on the availability of Fraser River chinook salmon, but, according to fisheries scientists, chinook runs on the Fraser are now only 25 percent of historic numbers. Recent research in Washington has found a strong link between the survival rate of juvenile chinook salmon and chemical contamination of their natal estuary. Is the survival rate of Fraser River juvenile chinook being similarly impacted by contamination from the Annacis Island, Lulu Island and Iona Island wastewater treatment plants? Currently, these three plants provide treatment for over 1.8 million people, and that population is not declining.

Vancouver’s three largest sewage treatment plants all discharge into critical chinook salmon habitat.

The physical processes involved in this chinook-sewage-orca death spiral have become better understood in recent years thanks to research by Dr James Meador, an environmental toxicologist with the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, and Dr Samuel Wasser, a research professor of conservation biology at the University of Washington.
Since 2013, Meador and his team of researchers have published three studies that considered the impact of chemical contamination on juvenile chinook salmon during the period they reside in their natal estuary.
Meador’s first study found that the survival rate of juvenile chinook that smolted in contaminated estuaries of rivers flowing into Puget Sound was cut in half compared with juveniles coming from a relatively uncontaminated natal estuary. Let me repeat that: Survival rate is cut in half.
In his second study, Meador analyzed the discharge from secondary sewage treatment plants, located upstream from chinook estuaries, for the occurrence of 150 “chemicals of emerging concern,” or CECs. These are chemicals associated with pharmaceutical and personal care products, as well as industrial compounds. Many are known endocrine disruptors, which can affect hormonal balance and result in developmental and reproductive abnormalities.
The researchers also analyzed the tissue of juvenile chinook and resident sculpin in the estuary for the presence of the selected CECs.
That study became widely publicized in 2016 because cocaine and antidepressants—and many other chemicals—were found in both the treatment plants’ discharge and in fish tissue. Indeed, Meador’s team found unexpectedly high levels of certain CECs in the treated effluent.
The study’s findings suggested that chinook juveniles have a significant vulnerability to bioaccumulation of CECs. Many contaminants that were found in juvenile chinook tissue were at concentrations below detection limits in the estuary waters. The scientists also observed higher levels of contaminants in juvenile chinook than in resident sculpin, even though the latter were permanent residents of the estuary.
Meador’s team observed that the contaminants found in chinook tissue, although present in sub-lethal concentrations on a chemical-by-chemical basis, were, in some cases, present at levels that would be expected to cause detrimental physiological effects. The scientists noted the potential for a drug-cocktail effect: “The fact that we observed multiple pharmaceuticals capable of interacting with a variety of molecular targets in our two fish species, leads to the potential for mixture interactions on critical physiological processes. These interactions can be additive, synergistic, or inhibitory.”
Meador noted that these effects could be responsible for the two-fold reduction in survival rate found in his earlier study.
In a third study (click link below to download), released this past April, Meador’s team found that the contaminants were also causing metabolic dysfunction, which “may result in early mortality or an impaired ability to compete for limited resources.” Again, Meador noted that metabolic dysfunction induced by CEC contamination could contribute to the two-fold reduction in the survival rate of these juvenile chinook, compared with chinook migrating from the uncontaminated estuaries, that he had found in his first study.

Adverse metabolic effects in fish exposed to contaminants of emerging concern in the field and laboratory.pdf815.72 kB · 276 downloads

The US EPA has listed Puget Sound chinook as a “threatened” species, and the decline of those runs has been even more profound than the Fraser decline.
Historically, according to Jim Myers of the Northwest Fisheries Science Centre in Seattle, Puget Sound’s chinook runs were about 25 percent greater than the Fraser River’s. But by 2010, Puget Sound chinook returns had collapsed to only six percent of the size of the greatly-reduced Fraser River returns.
Although the link between the abundance of chinook salmon in the Salish Sea and the physical health of the Southern Resident Killer Whale population has been known for some time, Wasser’s seven-year-long study, published in 2017, provided the first confirmation that low availability of chinook is suppressing the population’s birth rate and endangering the health of reproductive female orca.
Wasser’s team collected orca poop and analyzed it for hormone measures of pregnancy occurrence and health. The scientists also looked for chemical indicators of nutritional and disturbance stress in the poop. By making the same measurements over time, they were able to distinguish between nutritional stress caused by low availability of chinook salmon, and disturbance stress caused by the presence of nearby boats.
Wasser’s team correlated periods of nutritional stress with the timing and strength of the two main chinook runs that are keeping the southern orca alive: the Columbia River early spring run and the Fraser River summer and fall runs. They found that—depending on the timing of those runs, and how many fish were in them—the southern resident orca experienced more or less intense famines through the winter months and between the spring and summer runs.
The scientists observed: “Low availability of chinook salmon appears to be an important stressor among these fish-eating whales as well as a significant cause of late pregnancy failure, including unobserved perinatal loss.” The scientists surmised that “release of lipophilic toxicants during fat metabolism in the nutritionally deprived animals may also provide a contributor to these cumulative effects.”
Not only are the orca being periodically starved, but when a starved, pregnant orca begins burning off her fat reserves in response to the lack of food, toxins bioaccumulated in her fat reserves—such as PCBs and PBDEs—begin to have more of an impact on her health, such as a reduced ability to fight infections. This could contribute to the demise of the fetus and increase the risk to the mother’s life.
As a consequence of these conditions, the study noted, “the 31 potentially reproductive females in the Southern Resident Killer Whale population should have had 48 births between 2008–2015. Yet, only 28 births were recorded during that period. The 7 adult females in K pod have not had a birth since 2011, and just two births since 2007. The 24 females in the remaining two pods (J and L) have averaged less than 1 birth per pod since 2011, with no births in 2013, but had 7 births in 2015. One of the two offspring born in 2014 died.”
As of this writing, with the presumed death of “Crewser,” the population has dwindled to 75 whales. As recently as 1996 there were 98 orca in the 3 pods.
Wasser noted, “Results of the Southern Resident Killer Whale study strongly suggest that recovering Fraser River and Columbia River chinook runs should be among the highest priorities for managers aiming to recover this endangered population of killer whales.”
Let’s make the obvious connection between Meador’s and Wasser’s findings.
Meador’s research strongly suggests that the chemical contamination in Puget Sound rivers that’s quickly bioaccumulating in juvenile chinook is coming from sewage treatment plants discharging into their natal estuary. Removing that contamination could double the number of chinook returning to those rivers as adults.
Wasser’s study shows the Southern Resident Killer Whale population’s decline is strongly correlated with the availability of chinook and he recommends, for one thing, that managers of the Fraser River fishery make chinook recovery amongst their highest priorities.
A rational conclusion, based on the two groups of scientists’ extensive research, would be that Fraser River fisheries managers should be determining whether the impacts Meador measured in Washington estuaries are at play in the Fraser estuary. But that’s not happening.
DFO recently published “A science based review of recovery actions for three at-risk whale populations” that listed 98 specific actions. DFO acknowledges that only 2 of the 98 measures are “specifically directed toward recovery of chinook salmon stocks in Canada.” None of those 98 actions include examination, let alone reduction, of the impacts of chemical contaminants on chinook juveniles in the Fraser River estuary.

DFO paper on SRKW recovery efforts.pdf1.36 MB · 552 downloads

DFO has been caught flat-footed on chemical contamination of the Fraser River estuary in the past. The Cohen Commission of Inquiry into the decline of sockeye salmon in the Fraser River produced a technical report in 2011 that stated: “There is a strong possibility that exposure to contaminants of concern, endocrine disrupting chemicals, and/or contaminants of emerging concern has contributed to the decline of sockeye salmon abundance in the Fraser River.” Despite that, the technical report noted, “Due to limitations on the availability of exposure data and/or toxicity thresholds” it could provide only a “qualitative evaluation.”

Cohen Comm report on chemical contaminants re sockeye decline.pdf15.57 MB · 117 downloads

That was in 2011 and the information gap was related to sockeye. With chinook runs on the verge of collapse, you would think that Meador’s published research on chinook estuary contamination, only 200 kilometres away, would have prompted DFO to narrow the gap in their knowledge. We contacted DFO, but as of our press deadline a spokesperson had been unable to confirm whether or not any DFO-affiliated scientist was investigating the impact of the Fraser River estuary wastewater treatment plants, or other sources of chemical contaminants, on the survival rate of juvenile chinook.
The presumption may be that because sewage effluent is being discharged into the Fraser River estuary through outfalls that achieve legally required dilution ratios, no further consideration is required. But the rivers Meador considered in Puget Sound are meeting similar if not higher requirements, and he found chinook survival rate is being cut in half.
Meador has said it’s unlikely these contaminants can be effectively filtered out of the huge volume of wastewater that’s being flushed into Puget Sound. In the case of the Fraser River it seems possible that the three plants could be connected to a super outfall that diverts the discharge away from the estuary and into deeper marine waters. But without any examination of chemical loading of Fraser chinook juveniles being conducted by DFO, there will be no public pressure mounted for such a measure. Mr Floatie ought to find a new costume (Cocaine Man?) and relocate to Vancouver.
Victoria’s deepwater marine outfalls, by the way, are located about 70 kilometres away from the nearest chinook estuary.
While DFO wasn’t certain about what research is being done, it’s more certain about the magnitude of the chinook decline. In its 2018 outlook for the six different populations of chinook in the Fraser Basin, fisheries managers found that only one was at a level considered necessary to maintain a healthy population.
David Broadland is the publisher of Focus.

Related stories:
The orca famine and Puget Sound's poisoned rivers
Washington's phony sewage war with Victoria
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The 100-year fishing war

By Guest, in Ocean-related reporting, January 30, 2020
The recent renewal of fish farm tenures is just the latest in a long saga of denial of First Nations’ fishing rights.
By Briony Penn (First published in the July-August 2018 edition of Focus Magazine)

IN 1930, a group of First Nations fishermen gathered around a fire to wait out a storm on Langara Island. They were sheltered by their rowboats pulled up on the beach as the storm set in. Salmon prices were so low, gas so high, and federal policy so targeted to support commercial companies, the fishermen had abandoned motors and returned to hand-trolling to make ends meet.
Visiting them that night was Haida elder Alfred Adams, Nangittlagada. He had come with an idea that he had picked up in Alaska—he wanted to form a Native Brotherhood (and Sisterhood) for increased recognition of aboriginal rights in hunting, fishing, trapping and timber harvesting in off-reserve traditional lands. And he wanted to meet with Ottawa officials about these matters. The BC Native Brotherhood was founded in 1931.
Another leader of the Brotherhood, Guy Williams (Haisla), who went on to become a senator in 1971-82, wrote, “The men listened long into the night, no one noticing that the fire had gone completely out and the great rollers were still pounding the beaches heavily from the grey cloud wall at the edge of the world…”
Ninety years later, at the edge of the world, the Brother and Sisterhood still fight on against a metaphorical grey cloud wall: that of the corporate fish industry, morphed into its latest permutation of farming Atlantic salmon.

Three Dzawada’enuxw First Nation Hereditary Chiefs, including Willie Moon (r), deliver an eviction notice to workers at a Cermaq/Mitsubishi fish farm in 2016. (Photo by Tamo Campos)

When the NDP government recently announced their decision to continue to allow open net-pen salmon farms until 2022, it was no surprise to the activist descendants of the fishermen on that Langara beach. Dzawada’enuxw First Nation Elected Chief and Traditional Leader Okwilagame (Willie Moon) of Kingcome Inlet stated, “We’ve been fighting fish farms in our territory for over two decades, and that battle does not end with today’s announcement. We will fight it in court through the various legal tools at our disposal…”
Fighting fish farms is just one chapter in a century of fighting for aboriginal fishing rights, a battle where traction has only been gained through the courts. Politically, there has been little progress, federally or provincially. The pattern of pushing on ahead with ever more aquaculture, followed by token slow-downs, usually in the form of moratoriums, is all too familiar. The provincial government has no real jurisdiction for regulating the federal fisheries other than the granting of land tenure permits for the farm itself. It has only ever used slow-down-and-study approaches to fish farms over the last 30 years.
In the 1980s, a Namgis fisherman, Chris Cook, joined the board of the Brotherhood right about the time the fish farms were being brought into his territory around Alert Bay. He was one of the first to warn his community about the impacts of the farms. He had already experienced the devastating social impacts of the 1971 Davis Plan, which implemented a fishing license buy-back program. The commercial fishing fleets were blowing locals out of the water, at the same time that stocks were declining. The buy-back program was the final nail in the coffin for small-scale native fishermen; it favoured those with capital who could improve the efficiency of their boats to meet increased operating standards. Through the buy-back program, the DFO reduced the number of boats; those who couldn’t afford to upgrade had no alternative but to sell. DFO further consolidated the fleet by giving larger boats the ability to obtain rights to fish in other areas.
A token grandfather clause provided a special Native licence, but it only provided a right to fish, not the ability to sell the licence. The Brotherhood had some influence on the Indian Fishermen’s Assistance Program, in which capital was made available to upgrade equipment, but again it favoured existing boat owners who had the down payment necessary to get in on the scheme.
Fishing policy did not change substantially when, in 1996, the federal Mifflin Plan replaced the Davis Plan—and neither did the results. Corky Evans, then Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food for BC, summed up the two world views of fisheries at a standing committee on fish: “If you’re an economist, you would say that the Mifflin Plan to reduce the fleet to increase the viability of the remaining operators was a perfectly rational response to a changing technology and market conditions. If, however, you were a resident of Ahousat, or maybe a lot of the people in this room, you would say that it’s the elimination of half the jobs in your community.”
Atlantic salmon open-net fish farms arrived on the coast in the early 1980s as mom-and-pop operations around Vancouver Island and the Sunshine Coast. There were just 10 farms in 1984, but within a couple of years, the industry had consolidated and grown ten-fold, and started shifting from farming local species of salmon to Atlantics.
In the north, only the tiny remote village of Klemtu brought fish farms in. The village didn’t have much choice: it had lost all its fish boats through the Davis and Mifflin plans. It had a fish processing plant standing empty and few other options to sustain its community.
Cook says Indigenous bands were left with no choice but to turn to aquaculture because of erosion of their fishing opportunities. He speaks about the divide-and-conquer tactics and his people “being used as pawns by the aquaculture industry.”
A moratorium on further expansion of fish farms was put in place in October 1986, after pressure from fishers following a massive bloom of phytoplankton on the Sunshine Coast that killed an estimated 100,000 fish. That same year, a commission led by David Gillespie explored some of the stickier issues of growth.
Again the Brotherhood raised alarms on the impact to their own salmon fishery, the commercial fishery, and the environment. But many fishing families had already lost their fish boats and livelihoods and so were left with no alternative to get any fish. The recommendation of the Gillespie commission was to lift the moratorium but introduce stricter, clearer guidelines. The moratorium was lifted in 1987 by the Socreds.
During the early 1990s, salmon farms became increasingly owned by transnational corporations and more operating processes became automated, resulting in fewer jobs. Farm locations became concentrated off the coasts of the mainland and east Vancouver Island.
In 1995, the NDP instituted a moratorium on the issuance of new salmon farm licences. Production at existing sites, however, was allowed to intensify. During this time, aquaculture companies ramped up their operations, forging an agreement with some Native villages, and increasing tension between neighbouring First Nations who had placed their own moratoriums on the farms.
By 2000, the aquaculture industry accounted for 15 percent of BC’s total agriculture production. In 2001, fish farm expansion once again hit the pressure valve. The federal Auditor General’s Report came out, followed by the Standing Senate Committee, and the David Suzuki Foundation-funded Leggatt Inquiry. Not one of the three inquiries gave green lights to fish farms.
Stuart Leggatt, a retired judge, was given independence to hear and review the evidence. Leggatt gave a definite red light and recommended a permanent moratorium and switch to closed-containment, land-based operations. Cook spoke at its release: “I’m tired of sending letters. I’m tired of talking. I hope my people stand up and start to fight.”
The Standing Senate Committee recommended the precautionary approach, while the Auditor General reported that DFO was “not fully meeting its legislative obligations under the Fisheries Act to protect wild Pacific salmon stocks and habitat from the effects of salmon farming.” It recommended keeping the moratorium while more public review was conducted.
In 2001, a Liberal government was elected provincially. Despite the recommendations of the three bodies, the moratorium on new locations for fish farms was lifted in 2002. The south was now wide open for expansion, while a battle was waged in the northern communities where there were still livelihoods to be made in the wild salmon fishery. By 2008, a total ban was placed on open-net fish farms on the north coast (north of Klemtu).
In 2012, the $37 million Cohen Commission reported on its examination of the decline of sockeye salmon in the Fraser River, making 75 recommendations, most still unmet, though a moratorium on fish farm tenures around the Discovery Islands was put in place by the Province. In 2016, Chief Bob Chamberlin noted to the press, “The part I find disingenuous with freezing [licences] of the farms in Discovery [Passage], is that just up the coast, five or ten miles from there, they’re expanding the industry and creating new farms.”
In 2017, Chris Cook was still fighting in his territory on Vancouver Island for a southern moratorium. His First Nation, the Namgis, led the way in setting up the first closed containment, land-based fish farm. At age 75, Cook told the press: “What happened to us, the coastal First Nations people? My words would be ‘economic assassination.’”
Most recently, on June 20, 2018, BC Minister of Agriculture Lana Popham announced that any fish farm will need approval of local First Nations to operate beyond 2022. Fish farm operators will also have to “satisfy Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) that their operations will not adversely impact wild salmon stocks.”
Is this a true turning point, or just another twist in the tale of fish farms destroying the wild salmon fishery? Does it spell the end of open net-pen salmon farming on BC’s coasts? What happens if the NDP government gets defeated? How much damage has already been done?
While the Union of BC Indian Chiefs views the new plan as “an initial step on the pathway to preserve and safeguard the future of wild salmon,” others are disappointed and wary.
Chief Willie Moon of the Dzawada’enuxw First Nation is leading the legal challenge. The Dzawada’enuxw First Nation is not waiting around for another four years of negotiation with the fish farm operators while fish stocks continue to decline. The Nation’s lawyer, Jack Woodward, said, “What the Dzawada’enuxw require is legal rights now, not political promises four years from now, when there may be a new government in power with no obligation to follow its predecessor’s policy.”
Meanwhile, six Kwakwaka’wakw First Nations, including the Dzawada’enuxw, continue their occupation of a Broughton Archipelago fish farm, which they began on August 24 of last year.
As for the requirement that fish farms show they are not harming wild salmon stocks, many of the Indigenous salmon protectors of the north island have no trust in what they see as a politicized scientific community.
Yet another standing committee has formed, and the prospect seems probable that the struggle over salmon fish farms on BC’s coast will become a 100-year war.
Briony Penn is currently working with Xenaksiala elder Cecil Paul, Wa’xaid on Following the Good River, Stories from the Magic Canoe of Cecil Paul. Rocky Mountain Books, due out in 2019.
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Wild salmon may get relief from open-net fish farms

By Guest, in Ocean-related reporting, January 30, 2020
Science and First Nations are stepping up the pressure to remove fish farms from BC coastal waters.
By Judith Lavoie (First published in the November-December 2017 edition of Focus Magazine)

CHANGES TO THE RULES GOVERNING OPEN-NET SALMON FARMS are in the wind as calls intensify for the federal and provincial governments to step in and stop the game of Russian roulette being played with BC’s wild salmon stocks.
What makes this debate different from preceding decades of polarized arguments is implacable opposition to fish farms from the majority of BC’s First Nations—underlined by the occupation of two farms off north-east Vancouver Island—along with a growing body of evidence showing that wild fish can be harmed by viruses and sea lice spread from captive fish.
Add in dismally low 2017 Fraser River sockeye returns and the much-publicized escape of 300,000 Atlantic salmon from a collapsed Washington State fish farm, and the climate appears ripe for change.

Young wild salmon swim close to open-net fish farm. (Photo by Tavish Campbell)

Perhaps the biggest switch can be seen in the attitude of the provincial government. While the new NDP-led government recognizes the economic benefits provided by a $1.5-billion aquaculture industry, employing 3,000 people, it is juggling those benefits with increasing concerns about that industry’s effect on wild salmon, and the push to move the farms to closed-containment pens on land.
“The BC government is making sounds I have never heard before,” said independent biologist Alexandra Morton, a fierce opponent of open-net salmon farms.
Though the federal government has prime responsibility for fish farms (including their promotion), the Province does have some power—it has responsibility for issuing and renewing the tenure licences of fish farms in BC waters.
At the provincial level, the change from the previous Liberal government was apparent when Premier John Horgan met this fall with First Nations leaders in Alert Bay, followed by his statement that fish farm tenures will be reviewed to ensure wild salmon do not face obstacles on their migratory routes.
Hopes of fish farm opponents are also pinned on an election campaign statement by Claire Trevena, now BC’s Transportation Minister, who told an Alert Bay audience that if the NDP formed government, the party would “make sure that these territories and the North Island are clear of fish farms.”
Also this fall, new BC Agriculture Minister Lana Popham, in a letter to Marine Harvest, criticized the company’s decision to restock farms in the Broughton Archipelago; those licences expire in June but the fish will not be ready for harvest for two years.
“The decision to restock occurs as we are entering sensitive discussions with some of the First Nations in the Broughton Archipelago who remain opposed to open-net pen salmon farming in their territories,” Popham wrote, reminding the company there is no guarantee tenures will be renewed. “The Province retains all of its rights under the current tenure agreements, including potentially the requirement that you return possession of tenured sites at the end of the current terms,” she warned.
All but two tenures in the Broughton Archipelago expire in June, but the company said it must restock, as it has growing animals that need the space. Marine Harvest spokesman Ian Roberts said he hopes discussions happen quickly, as salmon farmers need assurances they can continue to operate.

AT THE HEART OF THE DEBATE around salmon aquaculture is the fear that diseases can spread from farms to wild fish. Although few scientists would claim that salmon farms are single-handedly killing BC’s wild salmon runs, there is incontrovertible evidence that a deadly disease—heart and skeletal muscle inflammation (HSMI)—infected fish on a farm in the Discovery Islands.
More alarmingly, researchers have found that HSMI is caused by piscine reovirus, a virus that affects about 80 percent of farm fish in BC, but which the industry previously claimed was harmless.
In Norway—where major firms operating in BC have headquarters—HSMI is known to kill farmed fish, and Norwegian scientists have now cemented the link between piscine reovirus and HSMI. As well, a study by a team of scientists from Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Pacific Salmon Foundation and Genome BC came up with proof that HSMI is present in BC. “They debunked the myth that piscine reovirus was harmless because they found that HSMI was present in BC,” Morton said in an interview.
Adding fuel to the flames is a recent video, taken by aboriginal leaders, showing sick and deformed fish in the net pens. “The fish were showing classic symptoms of HSMI. They were emaciated and floating with their heads against the net,” Morton said.
John Reynolds, professor of aquatic ecology and conservation at Simon Fraser University, emphasized that it is not possible to pin responsibility for annual fluctuations in salmon runs on fish farms, as there are many issues with ocean survival. “But there’s a lot of evidence that salmon farms are contributing to the problems that wild salmon face,” he said. Even without proof of a major viral outbreak, damage caused by disease transfer may be ticking away in the background, explained Reynolds. “There’s a lot of research which confirms negative effects of salmon farming on the juvenile wild salmon. It is published in many of the world’s top peer-reviewed journals,” he said. “There’s no dispute about that except, perhaps, by people who have something to gain by questioning it. The science on the matter is quite clear,” he added.
All of which makes Chief Bob Chamberlin of the Kwikwasut’inuxw Haxwas’mis First Nation wonder when the federal and provincial governments will take decisive action. “How can they not listen to the clear messages that we do not give any consent to having these farms in our territory” asked Chamberlin, chairman of the First Nations Wild Salmon Alliance.
The salmon farming industry has agreements with some First Nations to operate in their territories, but Chamberlin said that about 90 percent of First Nations communities are demanding an end to open-net fish farming. “There’s the risk of disease and sea lice and the broad infringement of First Nations rights,” he said, reminding government leaders of their support for the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which entitles indigenous people to giving “free, prior and informed consent on any project affecting their lands or territories and other resources.”
If the provincial government is worried about job loss, Chamberlin suggested it put research and development money into developing a viable closed-containment industry. He also predicted more tourism jobs would come to remote communities if wild salmon runs were restored, improving the health of bears and the surrounding ecosystem.
Chamberlin wants to see the federal government genuinely implement all the recommendations from the 2012 Cohen Commission of Inquiry, including the recommendation that the responsibility for promoting salmon farming be removed from the mandate of Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) as it is working at cross purposes with DFO’s duty to protect wild salmon.
That is not going to happen, according to an emailed statement from a DFO spokesman, who wrote that “no further action is required on this recommendation as responsibility for production and export is split between several different departments.”
However, the federal government is drafting a five-year Wild Salmon Policy implementation plan and putting $40 million annually, for five years, into research, science and monitoring of Pacific salmon, which gives ground for optimism that wild salmon are moving up the priority ladder.
After more than three decades of fighting open-net pen salmon farms, opponents know the road to change is unlikely to be smooth, but Morton believes the tide is turning. Look at the occupations of the fish farms, she suggested. “The First Nations are immovable. They are endlessly creative and extremely brave.”
Judith Lavoie is an award-winning journalist specializing in the environment, First Nations, and social issues. Twitter @LavoieJudith.
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The orca famine and Puget Sound's poisoned rivers

By Guest, in Ocean-related reporting, January 30, 2020
Recent scientific studies show how resident orca populations are affected by diminishing chinook runs and—critically—why the chinook are disappearing.
By David Broadland (Originally published in the July-August 2018 edition of Focus Magazine)

RIVERS RUNNING INTO PUGET SOUND have perennially low returns of chinook salmon—currently estimated at just 10 percent of their historic levels—even though many of them are enhanced with hatcheries. Last year, scientific research connected this decline to secondary sewage treatment plants discharging partially-treated effluent into Puget Sound.
Last June, a group of Washington scientists published a study showing the extent to which the decline in the birth rate of the Southern Resident Killer Whale population, listed as “endangered” by both the Canadian and US federal governments, is linked to the precarious state of the Salish Sea’s chinook salmon. Puget Sound chinook, which were given “threatened” status under the US Endangered Species Act in 1999, have become a cross-border issue.
Recovery of both Puget Sound chinook and the Southern Resident Killer Whale population would require investment of many billions of dollars by Washington State in new sewage treatment infrastructure. While taking action to protect both the orca and chinook is required by US federal law, Washington State currently has no plans to make that investment. Is our southern neighbour ignoring its responsibility to be a good environmental steward?

Killer Whales can be long-lived (“Granny,” above, lived past 100), but their birth rate is dependent on chinook salmon, a threatened species in Puget Sound. (Photo: markmallesonphotography.com)

LAST JUNE, A BRILLIANT SEVEN-YEAR-LONG STUDY that correlated the declining birth rate of the Southern Resident Killer Whale population with falling chinook salmon numbers, mercilessly compared what’s happening to the remaining orcas to the mass starvation of the Dutch population at the hands of German Nazis during World War II.
The authors stated: “The Nazis closed off the borders of Holland between October 1944 and May 1945, causing massive starvation over a 5–8 month period, with good food conditions before and after. There was a one-third decline in the expected number of births among confirmed pregnant woman during the under-nutrition period. Conceptions during the hunger period were very low. However, women who conceived during the hunger period had higher rates of abortion, premature and stillbirths, neonatal mortality and malformation. Nutrition had its greatest impact on birth weight and length for mothers experiencing hunger during their second half of gestation, when the fetus is growing most rapidly.”
The inclusion of the word “Nazis” in a peer-reviewed scientific study on the reproductive dynamics of an endangered whale population may strike some as odd, but the Dutch Famine, as the above events are known, was highly unusual: it took place in a well-developed, literate population that kept excellent health records and the vast majority of those affected survived. Thus it was one of the first events in human history for which scientists had accurate, reliable records to help them understand what health impacts occur when a population of mammals is starved.
The orca scientists found that a similar dynamic between food availability and birth rate has been impacting the Southern Resident Killer Whale (SRKW) population, but with one big difference: For the orca, this is not a one-time event. For them, a months-long famine now occurs almost every year.
Dr Samuel Wasser, the study’s lead author, is a research professor of conservation biology at the University of Washington. Wasser’s team gathered evidence from 2008 to 2014. They found that 69 percent of detectable pregnancies in the SRKW population failed during that period. Of those failed pregnancies, the scientists found, “33 percent failed relatively late in gestation or immediately post-partum, when the cost is especially high.” That high cost included an increased risk of mortality for the would-be mother.
The scientists observed: “Low availability of chinook salmon appears to be an important stressor among these fish-eating whales as well as a significant cause of late pregnancy failure, including unobserved perinatal loss.” They added: “However, release of lipophilic toxicants during fat metabolism in the nutritionally deprived animals may also provide a contributor to these cumulative effects.”
In other words, not only are the orca being starved, but when a starved, pregnant orca begins burning off her fat reserves in response to the scarce supply of food, toxins bioaccumulated in her fat reserves—such as PCBs and PBDEs—begin to have more of an impact on her health, such as a reduced ability to fight infections. This could contribute to the demise of the fetus and increase the risk to the mother’s life.
As a consequence of these conditions, the study found “the 31 potentially reproductive females in the SRKW population should have had 48 births between 2008–2015. Yet, only 28 births were recorded during that period. The 7 adult females in K pod have not had a birth since 2011, and just two births since 2007. The 24 females in the remaining two pods (J and L) have averaged less than 1 birth per pod since 2011, with no births in 2013, but had 7 births in 2015. One of the two offspring born in 2014 died.” As of this writing, the population has dwindled to 76 whales. As recently as 1996 there were 98 orca in the 3 pods.
How did the scientists determine that 69 percent of all pregnancies failed? After all, many of the pregnancies terminated early on, and there would have been no visible signs that the females had been pregnant. How does one detect whale pregnancies? Detection dogs.

Tucker, one of Wasser’s orca poop detection dogs (Photo: University of Washington)

Over the seven years of the study, the scientists intermittently followed J, K and L pods through the Salish Sea and used specially-trained dogs stationed at the bow of the research vessel to sniff for orca poop, and then point out its location to the scientists. The poop was collected and later genotyped (associated with a known individual whale) and analyzed for hormone measures of pregnancy occurrence and health. The scientists also looked for chemical indicators of nutritional and disturbance stress in the poop. By making the same measurements over time, they were able to distinguish between nutritional stress caused by low availability of chinook salmon, and disturbance stress caused by the presence of nearby boats.
Fisheries scientists had previously estimated that 70 to 80 percent of the SRKW population’s year-long diet consists of chinook salmon. The whales are thought to prefer chinook over other species of salmon partly because they use echolocation to find their prey. Since adult chinook are physically larger (they can weigh as much as 55 kilograms) than adults of other salmon species, chinook might be easier for orca to find. As well, there are runs of chinook returning to spawn in different river systems in the spring, summer and fall (sockeye, coho and chum return only in the fall). In the past that meant a reliable, almost year-round supply of chinook. And chinook may be preferred by the orca simply because of its higher fat content compared to other salmon. Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) estimates that reliance on chinook rises to 90 percent during July and August as the resident orca target returns to the Fraser River and rivers flowing into Puget Sound.
Although the link between the abundance of chinook salmon in the Salish Sea and the physical health of the southern resident population was known, Wasser’s research provides the first confirmation that low availability of chinook is suppressing the population’s birth rate and endangering the health of reproductive females.
Wasser included comparison over the seven years of the study of the two main chinook runs that are keeping the southern orcas alive: the Columbia River early spring run and the Fraser River summer and fall runs. Depending on the timing of those runs, and how many fish were in them, the southern resident orca experienced more or less intense famines through the winter months and between the spring and summer runs.
Estimating how many more chinook would need to be in the Salish Sea to make up for the southern orcas’ nutritional deficit wasn’t part of Wasser’s research. But in 2010, DFO estimated the nutritional requirement of the southern resident orca population, which then numbered 87, at about “1200 to 1400” chinook per day. Over the five-month period the orca occupy their critical habitat in the Salish Sea each year, that would amount to 180,000 to 210,000 chinook.
Wasser’s research shows the whales weren’t catching enough chinook in 2010 and the deficit is threatening the population. Yet in the Salish Sea in 2010, the total number of chinook caught by commercial and sport fisheries, plus the number of chinook that escaped to spawn, was about 500,000 fish. (These numbers are from the US EPA and the Pacific Salmon Commission.) Of those, 320,000 returned to their natal rivers to spawn. The 180,000 fish taken by commercial and sports fishers were split roughly in half between Canada and the US, even though 94 percent of the spawning fish were headed for the Fraser River in Canada. Only 6 percent were headed for rivers in Puget Sound. Note that the total catch taken by humans is roughly equivalent to the catch required by orca.
The quickest way to end the orca famine would be to end the commercial and sports fisheries for chinook in the Salish Sea, and Canadian scientist David Suzuki called for that action following the release of Wasser’s study. To recover chinook populations, however, will require a deeper understanding of why they are declining. A comparison of the Southern Resident Killer Whale population with their northern cousins helps in that understanding.
Wasser noted the “significantly lower” fecundity rate of SRKW compared to the Northern Resident Killer Whale (NRKW) population. From a 2011 study by Ellis, Tower and Ford, we know that in 1974 there were 120 whales in the NRKW population; by 2011 that had risen to 262. According to Canada’s Species at Risk Registry, the population grew to 290 by 2014. DFO used this number in its 2017 reports.

Above: Both NRKW and SRKW populations feed primarily on chinook, but one population of whales is growing while the other has stagnated since 1974. Data from DFO and The Center for Whale Research.

Over that same period, though, the SRKW population went from 70 to a high of 98 in 1996 and then dropped to the current 76. Although both resident groups experienced a decline in population after 1996-1997 following significant declines in chinook runs, the northern population then recovered and grew steadily while the southern population has languished.
As mentioned above, scientists have determined that both orca populations prey heavily on chinook as they return to spawn. It’s also known that, while their territories overlap, the northern orca rely on chinook returning to spawn in rivers north of the Salish Sea. The relative strength of the northern population compared to the southern, then, suggests the low availability of chinook that’s limiting growth of the southern orca population is a result of something that’s happening to the southern chinook that’s not happening to the northern chinook. What could that be?
The most dangerous period in a chinook salmon’s life, according to fisheries scientists, is its first year. Research scientist Dr James Meador, an environmental toxicologist with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Fisheries) in Seattle, estimates the current first-year survival rate of Pacific Northwest ocean-type juvenile chinook salmon at 0.4 percent. That’s four-tenths of one percent. Another way of stating that is that 99.6 percent of ocean-type chinook salmon die in their first year. That year is spent in their natal river, their natal estuary and marine waters not too far from that estuary. Since this is where almost all of the mortality occurs, it follows that any substantial recovery of chinook numbers would require conditions in these areas to improve. A doubling of the current rate of survival in that first year—so that only 99.2 percent of them die—could double the number of fish that return to spawn. We’ll come back to Meador later.
Wasser and his University of Washington team concluded their paper with this noteworthy comment: “Results of the SRKW study strongly suggest that recovering Fraser River and Columbia River chinook runs should be among the highest priorities for managers aiming to recover this endangered population of killer whales.”
What about Puget Sound, where chinook runs are listed as “threatened”? Historically, according to Jim Myers of the Northwest Fisheries Science Centre in Seattle, the Puget Sound chinook runs were about 25 percent greater than the Fraser River’s. But in 2010, according to the US EPA and Pacific Salmon Commission, Puget Sound returns were only 6 percent of Fraser River returns. The much bigger hole in chinook numbers is in Puget Sound. Shouldn’t international attention be focussed there?
Instead of accepting responsibility for the role it has played in the orca famine, Washington State has shifted public attention away from its lack of action, thereby reducing the chances of the Southern Resident Killer Whales’ survival. Now the situation is getting critical. The EPA recently downgraded the endangered whales’ survival status from “neutral” to “declining.” Time is running out.
Wasser, on sabbatical, was unavailable to explain why the recovery of Puget Sound chinook stocks shouldn’t be a priority in the effort to recover the southern population of killer whales. However, an examination of two scientific studies published by Meador shed light on why Wasser and other fisheries researchers might not regard recovery of the Puget Sound runs as a likely prospect to save the orca.

The decline of the Southern Resident Killer Whales may be linked to the low survival rate of juvenile Chinook salmon in contaminated Puget Sound estuaries. (Photo by Roger Tabor, US Fish and Wildlife Service)

IN 2013, DR JAMES MEADOR published the study “Do chemically contaminated river estuaries in Puget Sound affect the survival rate of hatchery-reared chinook salmon?” Meador was with the Ecotoxicology and Fish Health Program at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle. NFSC is a division of NOAA.
In that study, Meador observed: “Ocean-type chinook salmon that rear naturally or are released from a hatchery migrate in the spring and summer to the estuary as subyearlings (age 0+) and reside there for several weeks as they adjust physiologically to seawater and increase in size and lipid content before moving offshore to marine waters… Conversely, juvenile coho salmon spend their first year in freshwater and migrate to the estuary in the spring or summer as yearlings (age 1+), generally spending only a few days in the local estuary before proceeding to more open waters. This major difference in life history can have a large effect on the degree of toxicant exposure in contaminated estuaries, which can affect fish in several ways, including impaired growth, altered behavior, higher rates of pathogenic infections, and changes to physiological homeostasis, all of which can lead to increased rates of mortality.”
The physiological process of a juvenile salmon acclimatizing to saltwater is known as “smolting.” The juveniles become “smolts.”
Meador examined the records from hatcheries on major rivers flowing into Puget Sound over the 36 years between 1972 and 2008. Some of the rivers had contaminated estuaries while others were considered uncontaminated. He determined the difference in the chinook smolt-to-adult return rate between rivers with contaminated estuaries and those with uncontaminated estuaries. Meador noted that the smolt-to-adult return rate is the “primary metric to assess life-cycle success.”
He did the same analysis for hatchery coho in these rivers. Coho pass quickly through their natal estuaries and so would be far less impacted by contaminants in that estuary. The coho data, Meador clarified, “was used as another line of evidence to test the hypothesis that contaminated estuaries are one of the main factors determining the rate of survival for chinook.” And that’s what he found: Coho survival was not substantially impacted by contamination in their natal estuary.
Meador noted that “Salmonid survival is dependent on a large number of factors, many that co-occur. The analysis presented here is simplistic, but highlights an important relationship between hatchery chinook survival and contaminated estuaries. Because this analysis examined the smolt-to-adult survival rate in fish from a large number of hatcheries and estuaries over several years in one geographical location, many of these factors were likely accounted for and therefore had less of an effect on the overall results.”
As mentioned earlier, mortality in the first year of an ocean-type chinook is high. Meador described this as follows: “Survival for first-year ocean-type chinook in the Pacific Northwest has been estimated at 0.4 percent. Rates of survival over successive years are considerably higher for 2-, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old fish at 60 percent, 70 percent, 80 percent, and 90 percent, respectively. Clearly, first-year survival is important for chinook, and most of the mortality for first-year ocean-type chinook is attributed to predation, poor growth, pathogens, starvation, and toxicants.”
Meador determined whether or not a particular estuary was “contaminated” or “clean” based on existing records of contaminants found in juvenile chinook tissue in that estuary, records of sediment contamination, and whether or not the estuary had been listed as a contaminated site.
He noted that most of the data on contaminants he was able to access had focussed on polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).
The scientists did not make their own measurements of contaminants in the estuaries, nor did they speculate on the possible sources of such contamination. They simply compared the statistical differences in survival rates for chinook smolts between apparently contaminated estuaries and apparently uncontaminated estuaries.
Meador concluded that “when all data were considered…the mean survival for juvenile chinook released from hatcheries into contaminated estuaries was 45 percent lower than for fish outmigrating through uncontaminated estuaries.” In other words, a contaminated natal estuary causes a nearly two-fold reduction in survival compared with uncontaminated estuaries.
Wow. That was quite a discovery: A single factor that doubled the mortality of a threatened species of fish that was known to be the cornerstone of the diet of an endangered species of whale.
Meador’s data was confined to juveniles that came from hatcheries. Does his conclusion apply to river-reared chinook? Meador’s study reported that, except for the Skagit River, Puget Sound rivers are all dominated by hatchery-bred chinook. But, for juveniles whose parents spawned in rivers, the effect of contaminants may be even greater than for hatchery-bred fish. Meador noted that “wild juvenile chinook spend approximately twice as long in the estuary as do hatchery fish, which would likely increase their exposure to harmful chemicals.”
If the incidence of a contaminated natal estuary was limited to one or two of Puget Sound’s smaller rivers, this effect might not be of too great consequence. But that’s not the case. Some of the Sound’s largest river systems have contaminated estuaries. For example, the Snohomish and Puyallup rivers have the second and third largest drainage areas in the Puget Sound Basin, an indication of their potential for rearing chinook. Two forks of the Snohomish—the Skykomish and the Snoqualmie—have, according to Washington fisheries scientists, the potential for up to 84,000 spawners. But over the last four decades these rivers have been averaging only 4,500, a mere 5 percent of this river system’s potential. Meador’s research suggests this and other rivers’ collective capacity to provide nourishment for a healthy Southern Resident orca population is being cut in half, year after year, by the contamination in their estuaries. But what contamination?

The Puyallup River—which once hosted one of the largest chinook salmon runs in Puget Sound—now hosts the Tacoma Central Wastewater Treatment Plant, which is permitted to discharge up to 10,000 kilograms of suspended solids per day into the river’s estuary, habitat critical to juvenile chinook.

IN 2016, MEADOR PUBLISHED “Contaminants of emerging concern in a large temperate estuary” in the scientific journal Environmental Pollution. The CECs targeted in the study included a long list of pharmaceutical and personal care products, hormones, and a number of industrial compounds. Many of these substances, the authors observed, “are potent human and animal medicines.” They considered their targets to be just a “representative subset” of CECs in the environment, not a comprehensive list of what’s actually there. The scientists estimated there are over 4000 CECs leaking out into the ecosphere.
Meador referenced his earlier study, noting that “juvenile chinook salmon migrating through contaminated estuaries in Puget Sound exhibited a two-fold reduction in survival compared to those migrating through uncontaminated estuaries.” His choice of targets suggests that he suspected secondary sewage treatment plants might be the source of the contamination that is causing that two-fold reduction in juvenile chinook survival. He noted that “some CECs are poorly removed by wastewater treatment plant processing or are discharged to surface waters, including streams, estuaries, or open marine waters due to secondary bypass or combined sewer overflows.” Having found no other research by other scientists along this line of investigation, Meador noted that “bioaccumulation and comparative toxicity to aquatic species constitutes the largest data gap in assessing ecological risk” posed by CECs.
Meador’s team targeted 150 contaminants. They focussed on three estuaries, two considered to be contaminated and one uncontaminated. The two contaminated estuaries (Puyallup River and Sinclair Inlet) each had one or more secondary sewage treatment plants discharging treated effluent into the rivers on which they were located. The third, the Nisqually River estuary, which doesn’t have a sewage treatment plant above it, was intended as a reference—an uncontaminated estuary to establish the extent to which the other two were contaminated.
The researchers took water samples from the estuaries and effluent from the treatment plants and analyzed each for the 150 target contaminants. As well, they netted juvenile chinook and Staghorn sculpin from the estuaries and whole-body tissue analyses for contaminants were performed.
Eighty-one of the CEC’s were found in effluent being discharged from the treatment plants; 25 were detected in the estuaries. To the surprise of the researchers, nine (9) of the CECs were detected in the water column of the Nisqually estuary, which they had supposed was uncontaminated. Their data indicated an even more disturbing situation: “Collectively, we detected 42 compounds in whole-body fish. CECs in juvenile chinook salmon were detected at greater frequency and higher concentrations compared to Staghorn sculpin.” Finding more CECs in fish tissue than estuary water meant juvenile chinook were quickly bioaccumulating the CECs. Moreover, the chinook were absorbing a higher dose of toxins in just a few weeks than were the Staghorn sculpin, which spent their entire life in the estuary.
Of the targeted contaminants, 37 were found in chinook. This included, from A to Z: Amitriptyline, Amlodipine, Amphetamine, Azithromycin, Benztropine, Bisphenol A, Caffeine, DEET, Diazepam, Diltiazem, Diltiazem desmethyl… well, you get the picture.
How might multi-contaminant doses lower the survival rate of juvenile chinook? The scientists found “several compounds in water and tissue that have the potential to affect fish growth, behavior, reproduction, immune function, and antibiotic resistance,” all of which could lead to early mortality. But they also noted that even if individual contaminants weren’t at a lethal level in tissue or organs, the cumulative effect of so many different contaminants in the juvenile chinook at the same time could very well be lethal—the drug-cocktail effect that so many humans experience, sometimes with fatal results.
The scientists put this finding in the context of Puget Sound as a whole: “The greater Puget Sound area contains 106 publicly-owned wastewater treatment plants that discharge at an average total flow about 1347 million litres per day (Washington Department of Ecology (2010)). Our study examined two of these with a combined total of 71 million litres per day. The output for these two wastewater treatment plants alone was on the order of kilogram quantities of detected CECs per day into estuarine waters of Puget Sound. Considering the low percentage of commercially available pharmaceutical and personal care products analyzed in this study and the amount of effluent discharged to Puget Sound waters, it is possible that a substantial load of potentially harmful chemicals are introduced into streams and nearshore marine waters daily. If the concentrations from the two studied effluents are representative of that from other wastewater treatment plants in Puget Sound, then it is reasonable to assume that inputs to streams and nearshore waters are substantial and likely on the order of 121 kilograms per day (approximately 44,000 kilograms annually) and even higher if secondary treatment bypass, permitted flows, maximum outputs, unmeasured compounds, septic system contributions, and transboundary contributions are considered.”

Some of Puget Sound’s largest secondary sewage treatment plants. There are 106 publicly-owned sewage treatment plants in the Puget Sound Basin. Many are located on or near to the natal estuaries of threatened chinook salmon runs. All of Puget Sound is considered to be an estuarine ecosystem.

The data the scientists collected contained another ominous finding. The concentrations of the targeted contaminants found in the effluent from the treatment plants were unexpectedly high, by American standards. Meador found that “a large percentage of the chemicals detected in Puget Sound effluents are among the highest concentrations reported in the US, which may be a function of per capita usage of these compounds or the treatment processes used at these wastewater treatment plants.”
One final, noteworthy point: In the estuary that was thought to be uncontaminated—the mouth of the Nisqually—the researchers found 9 of the targeted contaminants in estuary water and 13 in chinook. Meador observed, “Based on our water and fish data, the Nisqually estuary was more contaminated than expected, which highlights the difficulties of establishing suitable non-polluted reference sites for these ubiquitously distributed CECs.”
This observation has an interesting implication with respect to Meador’s earlier study, mentioned above, in which he was comparing the survival rates of juvenile chinook between contaminated estuaries and those considered uncontaminated. The Nisqually estuary was on the “uncontaminated” side of the ledger in that study, but on investigation it was, in reality, merely less contaminated. Would Meador’s finding of double the rate of mortality have risen if he actually had a number of pristine estuaries to compare with those that are contaminated?

IN AN EARLIER STORY (“Washington’s phony sewage war with Victoria,” Focus, May 2016) we reported on the 32.4 million kilograms of suspended solids permitted to be discharged by 77 of Puget Sound’s largest wastewater treatment plants each year. Attached to those solids are many contaminants, including PCBs and PBDEs, not targeted by Meador’s study, but known to have a negative impact on the health of fish and their sources of food.
The additional impact on chinook smolts, after they leave their natal estuaries and migrate through this near-shore chemical soup—dubbed “Poisoned Waters” by the 2005 PBS film of that name—is hinted at by the Puget Sound Basin’s 10-fold decline in chinook returns from historic numbers. As the urbanization of Puget Sound’s shores has spread, and the daily recontamination of marine and estuarine waters has grown, the chinook and the Southern Resident Killer Whales have been pushed closer and closer toward extinction.
This intense urbanization—right beside the critical habitat of both whales and their prey—is not occurring for the Northern Resident Killer Whale population, and that difference may be the deciding factor in the different birth rates of the two populations.
Given the seriousness of the situation and the headlines in the media about drugged fish in Puget Sound, one might have reasonably expected that Washington State’s political leaders would respond to Meador’s findings. After all, what Everett-Seattle-Tacoma residents were flushing down their toilets into Puget Sound by way of sewage treatment plants was doubling the rate of mortality of a fish already listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
They did respond, but apparently only to deflect attention away from Puget Sound’s contamination from sewage plants. To do that they pointed at…Victoria.
Just two days after an embarrassing drugged-chinook story appeared in the Seattle Times, Washington State Representative Jeff Morris boldly announced a proposal to ban Washington State employees from claiming travel expenses for trips made to Victoria until Victoria built a sewage treatment plant just like the ones around Puget Sound.
A week later, Morris sent a letter to Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps claiming that “chemical loading” from Victoria’s marine-based sewage treatment system poses a “long-term risk” to “our shared waters.” Morris’ letter was signed by 36 other Washington legislators whose districts border on Puget Sound.
The legislators’ letter informed Helps: “We recognize the shared risk in short-term loss of tourism activity on both sides of the border from publicity surrounding [Victoria’s lack of secondary sewage treatment]. However, we believe the long-term damage to marine mammals, in particular, but all marine wildlife, does more long-term damage to ecotourism.”

Washington State Representative Jeff Morris

Morris’ idea that extinctions should be prevented because they’re bad for tourism highlights the gap between a politician’s level of understanding of this critical issue and the depth of knowledge that has been created by scientists like Wasser and Meador. If State legislators were drawing up an action plan for the recovery of Puget Sound, they could do worse than to put on their list: “Read some science about contamination.”
The Washington legislators’ proposal to discourage State employees from travelling to Victoria—a move they didn’t follow through on—wasn’t the only action precipitated by Meador’s science.
There was a bureaucratic response as well. The Puget Sound Partnership (PSP), which describes itself as “the State agency leading the region’s collective effort to restore and protect Puget Sound,” undertook two related “actions” after Meador’s study had been published. One of those was “Action 0156,” which directed the University of Washington to conduct an “analysis of impacts…from Victoria, BC sewage.”
Nowhere to be found on PSP’s long list of actions was any analysis of the impacts from the 106 publicly-owned sewage treatment plants around the Sound that are permitted to discharge over 32.4 million kilograms of suspended solids each year.
The PSP also committed to “Action 0048,” which was “Identifying sources of contaminants harmful to juvenile salmon.” PSP reports that after the expenditure of $273,000, the project is “off-schedule.” Contacted by Focus, the Washington State Department of Ecology—the agency responsible for undertaking the analysis—clarified that the study “was not actually funded.”
It appears that little else on the “Action” list for the Sound’s recovery is funded, either. PSP estimated its list of “Actions” for 2016 would cost $130 million, but acknowledged that only $17 million of that had been found.
Washington’s Department of Ecology confirmed that, as of 2016, the State had no plans to upgrade or relocate any of the existing large sewage treatment plants on Puget Sound.
Washington State says it’s commited to the recovery of Puget Sound. That would require the State to act on its scientists’ findings about the ecological impacts of ongoing contamination from its sewage treatment facilities. Unfortunately, the State’s current course doesn’t appear likely to produce anything that the Southern Resident Killer Whales will be able to chew on.
David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.
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Whales of the Salish Sea

By Guest, in Ocean-related reporting, January 30, 2020
Despite all the noise, pollution and overfishing—the orca are still here.
By Briony Penn (First published in the March-April 2017 edition of Focus Magazine)

IT IS A COLD, WINDY MORNING in the new year at Deception Pass, a spectacular narrow channel between Whidbey Island and the mainland at the US end of the Salish Sea. Around 70 people are gathered to mourn the death of 10 members of the Southern Resident Killer Whales (SRKW) in 2016 alone. Amongst the deaths are Granny, J2, believed to be over 100 years old, and nine other members of this endangered orca population—three of them newborns. The Samish people (relatives of Saanich First Nations) are holding the ceremony, sending cedar planks graced with chinook salmon and boughs of cedar out to sea as an offering to the whale families—J, K and L pods.
Samish elder, Rose James, a granny herself, wraps the witnesses in blankets; drummers accompany the singers as they push the fish out on the makeshift boats.

For the Samish, the whales are their family. The stories and songs have been composed from thousands of years of co-habiting these waters.
James thanks S’ila (Granny) for showing herself to people and making them happy. Loons, scoters and buffleheads bob offshore and bald eagles, gulls and some wily crows eye up the salmon. The human witnesses are from all around the Salish Sea: whale scientists, ecotourism operators, members of orca-related non-profits, journalists and people who just love whales.
With the population of resident orca now down to 78 individuals, our little human group mirrors the whales in more ways than just numbers and range of ages. Like us, these orca have complex cultures and diverse languages. They care for their families and are led by matriarchs, long after their reproductive years. They have rituals for sharing territory. They sing, share their food, play, court, nurse their babies and, like us, grieve at loss.
I look around at the faces and reflect on what it would be like if this was all that was left of my community. I imagine the decimation is not unlike what the Samish and other indigenous groups endured through colonization. What would it be like to lose 10 percent of this clan in one year? Losing three of the babies to accumulated toxins in mother’s milk would be devastating. Young adults are dying from accidents with ships and starvation. For the orca, the prime food (80 percent) is chinook salmon, which have been overfished, their spawning rivers dammed and polluted.
One of the Samish speakers notes that when matriarchs like Granny die, a century of knowledge is lost for the families. The genealogical history of Granny carries not only orca and Samish history, but our western environmental history. Moby Doll, the young L-pod male who was captured in 1964, launched international awareness of orca societies, but also led to their popularity in aquariums. Moby Doll was likely Granny’s son. Lolita (Tokitae), who has been incarcerated for 46 years in a Miami aquarium, galvanized an international community around her release. She too is an offspring of Granny. Both were captured within sound range of where we are standing.

Every five minutes, the ceremony is interrupted by fighter jets—flying barely 100 metres above us. They are so loud that everyone immediately puts their hands over their ears. The speakers, singers and drummers stop and wait until the jets have descended to the naval airbase at nearby Oak Harbour, and then resume.
The orca likely have a similar reaction to the noise of ship traffic. In order to catch chinook, orca need to echolocate, but if the equivalent of a fighter jet flies by every five minutes, they have no choice but to go silent and wait out the noise like we do. Earlier, I had asked a local walking her dog how she and her pet coped with this ear-shattering noise. She looked at me suspiciously and said: “It’s the sound of freedom.”
At the ceremony, however, a young woman tells me she left Texas where she was born and raised, the offspring of a petrochemical engineer, to find a culture for whom whale calls were the sound of freedom. And I’m reminded of how whales draw people from all cultures to a greater awareness and connection to the natural world. For those who have been raised to believe humans are separate from the rest of the natural world, often their first inkling that we are all connected comes from these animals. Through the story of the Southern Resident Killer Whales, people see how orca survival is intrinsically linked to their own.

MANY OF THE PEOPLE AT THE CEREMONY have made the pilgrimage there after attending a full-day research workshop hosted by the Orca Network. Howard Garrett, the co-founder of Orca Network, started working for the Centre for Whale Research in 1981. He and his partner Susan Berta have been tireless educators and activists ever since. The workshop raised the question: Is there hope for reversing the orca population decline?
The answer, according to researchers, is yes, but it will require cooperation throughout the watershed in both countries. From the American side, they are working against the ecological clock to get permits to breach four dams on the Lower Snake River and restore key historic chinook spawning grounds. Jim Waddell, retired US Army Corps of Engineers who leads the charge, told me Obama had given the OK but they got stalled at the state level. Now with President Trump, they are back at square one, though no less determined.
On the noise issue, acoustic researchers Val and Scott Veirs have documented the range of acoustical noise of large ships in US waters, measuring the noise-output of 1600 vessels in all. The Veirs team have narrowed down the offenders to specific bulk carriers, tankers and container ships. Since the 1960s, the growth of commercial fishing has resulted in a 10-fold increase in low-frequency noise. Reducing the traffic, both in terms of number and noise frequency is part of the solution.
A traffic reduction or limit in terms of area would also help to reduce ship strikes, which was what killed J-34, Doublestuff, this December.
Canadians have also started their own acoustic research project, ECHO, with Port Metro Vancouver setting up a hydrophone listening station to monitor underwater vessel noise.
At the research workshop, attendees also heard about Raincoast Conservation Foundation’s Population Viability Analysis which ranks the various threats to the Southern Resident Killer Whales, and determines the ability of the population to recover. The analysis shows that by increasing chinook populations and quieting the sea, we can almost eliminate the risk of them going extinct within the next century.
As a result of its analysis, Raincoast has launched a lawsuit challenging the federal government’s approval of Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain Expansion. The judicial review is requested on the basis that legal protections for marine species at risk were not applied. Raincoast wasn’t the only one stating that the Southern Resident Killer Whales would have a high chance of extinction with the project. Kinder Morgan and the National Energy Board came to the same conclusion, with NEB acknowledging there would be “significant adverse effects.”
Despite that, the project was greenlighted by both federal and provincial governments in their determination to expand ports to get bitumen to market.
As for increasing their food supply, according to a 2010 DFO scientists’ study on chinook salmon, the Southern Resident Killer Whales need 67,000-81,000 chinook over the peak summer feeding period. The conclusion was that chinook fisheries management plans should take the orca’s needs into account “in order to ensure adequate chinook availability for the whales in their Critical Habitats.” Not surprisingly, the federal government under Stephen Harper in 2015 ignored its own scientists and drew up an Action Plan for the Southern Residents that would only “investigate” fisheries closures as a “possible” tool in poor chinook return years.
Fishing levels of chinook are pretty high these days, sometimes at 40 percent or more of stock assessments. This is in a population where spawners have declined in rivers by more than 50 percent over the last 15 years. A 2015 study by Lacey et al showed that just a 20 percent increase in chinook consumption would reverse the decline of the Southern Resident Killer Whales and provide a 1.9 percent growth rate of the pods.
But the forces are stacked against that happening. In 2015, the US and Canadian fishing industries caught close to 2 million chinook. About 80 percent of the salmon caught in BC waters is harvested by Jimmy Pattison Group’s Canadian Fishing Company (Canfisco), and there seems little appetite to let a pesky pod of orca get between the corporate fishing industry and its profits. Another division of the Pattison Group, Westshore Terminals, is Canada’s busiest coal-export terminal, catering to those noisy coal bulk carriers at Robert’s Bank. Pattison has been a big supporter of the BC Liberals; in total, Pattison-related corporations have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Liberals over the past decade.

IT WASN'T ALL BAD NEWS at the Orca Network’s research workshop. Veteran whale researcher John Calambokidis brought some good news about the other whale populations of the Salish Sea. Since 1990, researchers have noticed growing numbers of what constitutes a Salish Sea resident grey whale pod, affectionately known as Sounders. With grey whales returning to historic levels and reaching a carrying capacity on the feeding grounds off the outer coast, a group of greys have moved into the Salish Sea where they spend their spring.
Using amazing footage from suction cup video tags, Calambokidis’ research shows that these whales forage on ghost shrimps in the mudflats of the Snohomish Estuary. As their numbers rise, they could well return to the mudflats of the Fraser Estuary. Calambokidis has found these animals equally as sociable and complex as orca. Unfortunately, they are subject to the same threats of oil spills, ship strikes, and habitat destruction from shipping ports that orcas are.
Humpbacks are also returning to their historic numbers with a population that has levelled off after increasing at 7-8 percent a year. Humpbacks are recolonizing the Salish Sea not just seasonally but overwinter, providing frequent sightings on ferries for visitors.
Likewise, fin whales are increasing at 3-5 percent a year and were spotted in the Juan de Fuca Strait last summer for the first time in a century. Fins are the second-largest whales in the world and forage after krill (small crustaceans). Prior to the voluntary arrival of the fins, the only time you would see these whales around here was dead, wrapped around the bow of a ship. The US banned krill fishing in 2009 to provide for marine mammal foraging and the well-being of other species; Canada wouldn’t follow suit.

BACK AT DECEPTION PASS, the ceremony ends with a feast for the humans. We retreat into a little park hut to get out of the cold wind and reduce the jet noise. There we find a welcoming table of bannock, smoked salmon and hot drinks.
The Samish ceremony left me with a lot of hope. The whales are still here, despite everything thrown at them. They are strong, determined, and have kept their language even with a century of suppression. They are reminding us all what the real sound of freedom is.
Briony Penn’s most recent book The Real Thing: The Natural History of Ian McTaggart Cowan won the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize and the inaugural Mack Laing Literary Prize.
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The struggle to protect wild salmon rages on

By Guest, in Ocean-related reporting, January 30, 2020
The latest battles include the Sea Shepherd’s voyage and eviction notices served by First Nations on fish farms.
By Judith Lavoie (First published in the November-December 2016 edition of Focus Magazine)

AS THE FULL EXTENT of this summer’s catastrophic Fraser River sockeye salmon returns unfolded, sending shock waves through fishing, First Nations and scientific communities, the dismal numbers did not surprise independent biologist Alexandra Morton. For more than 25 years she has warned of the dangers of allowing fish farms along salmon migration routes.
For Morton, the collapse added urgency to her virus-hunting voyage from Vancouver to northern Vancouver Island, aboard the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s research vessel “Martin Sheen.”
“I think people will be amazed at how well wild salmon will rebound once they are no longer exposed to the disease that farm salmon release into BC’s salmon migration routes,” said Morton. During the voyage, Morton took samples in the vicinity of fish farms, intent on scientifically proving they are spreading diseases, viruses and sea lice to wild fish.
It was projected that one million fish would return to spawn in the Fraser River this season—less than the 1.4 million 2009 returns that sparked the Cohen Inquiry. By mid-August, the Pacific Salmon Commission noted only 644,800 returns and all salmon fishing on the Lower Fraser was shut down.
Few would claim that the 70-plus active salmon farms which dot the BC coast are the sole cause of BC’s disappearing wild salmon. Climate change, warm water in the Fraser, and ocean survival are all acknowledged factors and the Cohen Inquiry concluded there are multiple stressors.
The low returns, however, are fuelling a growing conviction that all possible measures must be investigated and acted upon quickly. Such measures would include moving all salmon farming onto land as the ‘Namgis First Nation on northern Vancouver Island has done.
Ernie Crey, chief of the Cheam First Nation and fisheries advisor to Sto:Lo Tribal Council, who affectionately calls Morton the “Mother Earth biologist,” suspects the answers are more complicated than salmon farms. “But I don’t think people can dismiss it. It deserves attention…Something has happened out there over the past two decades, resulting in this decline,” he said.
“Some people want to see all the net pens along the coast closed down. I don’t know that that is necessary, but we need to be very cautious and somewhat suspect of what is going on,” said Crey, who is also director of the Fraser River Management Council, representing 84 First Nations in the Fraser River watershed.
The federal government has promised more scientists and more money for research and hopes are high that some answers will come from the study of microbes in Pacific salmon, being conducted by the Strategic Salmon Health Initiative, a partnership between the Pacific Salmon Foundation, Genome BC and Fisheries and Oceans.
Bob Chamberlin, chairman of the First Nations Wild Salmon Alliance, is happy to see the emphasis on science, but also wants quick action on fish farms.
Government should be adhering to the precautionary principle until all the gaps in science are filled, Chamberlin said.
“That means stop expanding fish farms, stop creating new licences, and stop setting the table for the industry. Science needs to be at the table,” he said.
A major concern for Morton is whether piscine reovirus (PRV), a muscle and heart-wasting disease that has raged through European farms and is now common at BC farms, is spreading from farm fish to wild fish and whether there are hotspots around the farms.
PRV has been linked to Heart and Skeletal Muscle Inflammation, a disease found in farms in Norway, Scotland and Chile and which was confirmed by Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s Kristi Miller to be present on a BC farm in Johnstone Strait this past May.
HSMI is not necessarily fatal to farmed Atlantic salmon, but wild Pacific salmon have to be supreme athletes. Muscle weakness combined with lethargy is likely to be a death sentence, Morton said. “The potential threat to wild salmon is enormous. A wild salmon with a weak heart is a dead salmon,” she said.
Coincidentally, while taking samples near the Mitsubishi-owned Cermaq farm where HSMI was confirmed, Morton and crew members witnessed a fish die-off. Photos show totes full of dead fish, but the problem was explained by Cermaq as mortality due to a “low dissolved oxygen event.”
Possible, but not likely, said Morton who tested water outside the farm and found dissolved oxygen levels suitable for salmon. “The behaviour of the Atlantic salmon fits the description of fish suffering from HSMI,” she said.
The combination of Morton—a thorn in the side of fish farmers—and the Sea Shepherd Society, which has been known to take direct action such as ramming Japanese whaling boats, put up alarm signals for fish farmers, although Morton emphasized the voyage would be peaceful.
But Jeremy Dunn, BC Salmon Farmers Association executive director, said the use of cameras and drones has put stress on fish and employees. Salmon farmers are passionate about the health of their fish and their licences could be revoked at any time if they are not living up to licence conditions. Dunn also disputed Morton’s claim that Cermaq mort totes—crates for fish that die before harvest—contained some Pacific salmon. “I have spoken to Cermaq and they are pretty unequivocal that there were no Pacific salmon in their mort totes,” he said. Dunn applauded federal funding of more scientists and the aim of making science-based decisions for all Canadian fisheries. “But it is important to distinguish between advocacy and science,” he said.
When the virus-hunting voyage was first broached by Sea Shepherd’s Paul Watson, Morton—who has fought long and hard to prove the validity of her science—was reluctant to tie herself to such a controversial organization, with a ship that flies the Jolly Roger. After talking to the group, however, she became convinced of the advantages of having a research vehicle at her disposal.
It is not a decision she has regretted.
“I am so grateful to Paul Watson. At first, when he put it up on Facebook, I literally asked him to take it down, but the crew are highly-trained volunteers. They are dedicated and honourable,” Morton said.
The launch also gained high-profile support from celebrities, ranging from actress Pamela Anderson to veteran environmentalist David Suzuki, who took the opportunity of a news conference to make his views on fish farming absolutely clear: “As a scientist, it makes no sense to grow animals in open nets where you use the ocean as a shithouse,” he said.
However, fish-farming foes were dealt a blow in August when Fisheries Minister Dominic LeBlanc said the government would not implement the 2012 Cohen Commission’s recommendation to separate the department’s duty to protect wild salmon from its promotion of aquaculture.
That has some First Nations, including Dzawada’enuxw (Kingcome) councillor and fisheries coordinator Melissa Willie, wondering about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s election promise to build a new relationship with indigenous people.
“There are 27 farms in Musgamagw Dzawada’enuxw territory and we have never given them permission to be there. We just continue to write letters opposing them,” said Willie, who spent time on the Martin Sheen. (The Musgamagw Dzawada’enuxw are an alliance between four tribes: Gwawa’enuxw [Hopetown], Kwickwasut’inuxw [Gilford], Haxwa’mis [Wakeman] and Dzawada’enuxw [Kingcome].)
Damage from the farms is evident not only in declining salmon runs and the number of sea lice, but also in clam beds, Willie said. “All that shit going into the water. I don’t believe it is being flushed out. And the beaches are becoming muck. It’s our whole food chain. We want them totally out of our territory and I just hope someone is listening,” she said.
While some First Nations have accepted fish farms in their territory and did not welcome the Martin Sheen, the ship and its crew were welcomed in Musgamagw Dzawada’enuxw territory, which contains one-third of all farms, and whose leaders have been resisting them for 30 years. Indeed they used the visit as an opportunity to conduct a ceremonial eviction of a farm, with letters and copies of the notice going to the federal and provincial governments. Morton wrote on her blog: “The rudeness with which the salmon farm employees were told to conduct themselves was in stark contrast to the integrity of the people performing ceremony with cedar bows. It was hard to witness…This Nation is on the front lines for all of us and for future generations.”
Hereditary chiefs say notices will be issued to all 27 farms in their territory. The four-tribe alliance is demanding that no more farm fish be transferred into their territories, removal of all salmon within three months, access to all farm fish “so that we know what diseases exist in the farms,” and that the band office be contacted prior to harvest so an observer can be on site.
In a widely-shared video, the leaders emphasized that the fish farmers are trespassing and destroying their way of life.
Last spring, 40 percent of young salmon leaving the territory were killed by sea lice, said band spokesmen. “The salmon farming industry is infringing on our way of life by breaking the natural cycle of life that has sustained First Nations people for time immemorial,” said hereditary Chief Willie Moon. “Our people have spoken. We want salmon farms out of our territory.”
“One of our youth asked if we were prepared to die for this and I said ‘I think we are now,’” said Melissa Willie. “The fight is on.”
Judith Lavoie is an award-winning journalist specializing in the environment, First Nations, and social issues. Twitter @LavoieJudith.
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Trans Mountain: evidence grows that Trudeau should say "No"

By Guest, in Ocean-related reporting, January 30, 2020
On the heels of the NEB’s approval of Kinder Morgan’s pipeline proposal, a raft of research points in the other direction.
By Judith Lavoie (First published in the July-August edition of Focus Magazine)

THERE IS A STRANGE IRONY to the timing of the National Energy Board’s recommendation that the controversial $6.8-billion Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion should get a green light from the federal cabinet.
Almost simultaneously with the May release of the NEB report, which concluded that, subject to 157 conditions, the Trans-Mountain pipeline would be in the national interest, a flurry of reports and scientific studies appeared documenting the risks of continuing to extract and burn fossil fuels. These were followed by a number of court challenges to the NEB recommendation.

The studies gave momentum to the leave-it-in-the-ground movement and added to public discomfort with the prospect of Kinder Morgan tripling the amount of diluted bitumen flowing from the Alberta oil sands to Burnaby. The expansion would also mean 400 tankers a year—a sevenfold increase—carrying dilbit through the sensitive waters of the Strait of Georgia and Strait of Juan de Fuca.
Opponents are emphasizing the project’s climate change implications and questioning how the increase in oil sands output, as the pipeline opens up new Asian markets, can fit with Canada’s commitment at the Paris climate talks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.
“Expanding fossil fuel production flies in the face of what is needed to tackle climate change,” said David Suzuki in an email to supporters. “So why is the government still talking about building fossil fuel infrastructure?”
The NEB report looked only at direct emissions from pipeline construction and operation, and made nine recommendations. For the first time in its history, the board recommended offsets to ensure no net emissions, but it did not look at upstream or downstream emissions or at the overall effect on climate change.
The final pipeline decision will rest with the federal cabinet. Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr has appointed a three-person panel to hear from BC residents, with promises that at least upstream greenhouse gas emissions will be examined in detail. The panel will finish its’ report in November and Carr has promised a government decision no later than December 19, 2016.
In the meantime, scientific evidence of harm—both from the processes used to extract bitumen from the oil sands and from greenhouse gas emissions released later on—continues to mount.
A study, led by Environment and Climate Change Canada scientists, published in the journal Nature in May, found the oil sands pose another big problem, beyond their contributions to greenhouse gas emissions: They are one of the largest sources of “secondary organic aerosol” pollution in North America. The pollution is now “comparable to downwind of megacities such as Mexico City and Paris, and is higher than that observed in Tokyo and New England.” The tiny airborne particles, which result in what we call smog, have been linked to major health problems like respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.
Other studies examined the impacts of climate change on Canada. As carbon dioxide continues to be released into the atmosphere, Canada’s future, according to different scientific papers, includes both increasing droughts and floods. David Schindler, ecology professor at the University of Alberta, in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said the Prairies are likely to see droughts worse than the 1930s. Meanwhile, the Fraser Basin Council warned that climate change is increasing the risk of major floods in the Lower Mainland.
Tim Takaro, Simon Fraser University health sciences professor, finds it difficult to understand why the NEB did not adequately consider climate change.
“Climate change is huge. You can see the evidence happening in Fort McMurray. It affects our health and you can’t ignore that in a project of this scale,” he said. “It is unconscionable to me that we can be discussing this dramatic expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure without considering climate changes and the health impacts,” Takaro said in an interview.
Health problems could come from a spill of diluted bitumen, but the effects of air pollution, temperature increases, flooding and sea level rise must also be considered, said Takaro.
“The International Panel on Climate Change of the UN has very clearly said that, if we [are to] have any chance of getting hold of this tiger and controlling it, we have to stop building super-large fossil fuel infrastructure,” he said.
An examination of what will happen if we don’t take such action came in May from a team of climate scientists, led by University of Victoria PhD student Katarzyna Tokarska. Published in Nature Climate Change, their study warned that if the Earth’s remaining untapped fossil-fuel resources are burned, the average global temperature is likely to rise between 6.4 and 9.5 degrees Celsius by 2300, with Arctic temperatures warming an astounding 14.7 and 19.5 degrees Celsius by that year.
These increases are a far cry from the 2.0 degrees of warming that is accepted as the upward limit to avoid the most serious effects of climate change. Such warming would end life as we know it on planet Earth.
Tokarska applied sophisticated climate models to the current estimate of known fossil fuel reserves, with their conservative associated five trillion tonnes of carbon emissions when burned, to project “considerably more profound climate changes than previously suggested.”
“What we are doing is showing it’s relevant to know what will happen if we don’t take any action to mitigate climate change—if we don’t ever implement the Paris agreement or other such agreements. It’s a worst case scenario if we don’t do anything now,” Tokarska said in an interview.
Climate scientist and MLA Andrew Weaver, a co-author of Tokarska’s paper, said in an interview that if Canada is serious about the Paris agreement, the government should not even consider the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion.
“Signing that agreement says we shouldn’t be building pipelines and we shouldn’t be building new LNG facilities,” said Weaver, who is also leader of the BC Green Party.
“Canada investing in infrastructure to enhance its extraction of a resource, 80 percent of which, globally, has to be left in the ground if we are going to meet our targets, makes no sense,” Weaver added.
Continued reliance on fossil fuels also does not make economic sense, said Weaver. He pointed to Saudi Arabia’s decision to move to an economy that does not rely on oil and Norway’s decision to eliminate fossil fuel vehicles.
“Canada is in a very precarious position. If we double down on the 20th century economy, which is dependent on resource extraction, we are going to be very poorly positioned when other jurisdictions transition away from fossil fuel,” he said.
The economic uncertainty is echoed by a federal government think-tank that, in a draft report obtained by the CBC in May, said the rapid transformation of the world’s energy landscape could jeopardize economies based on fossil fuels.
Policy Horizons Canada, which provides future-looking advice to federal bureaucrats, said in the report that electricity from wind and solar is becoming competitive with electricity generated by fossil fuels and nuclear power.
“The shift to an electricity-dominated global energy mix will be accelerated as decreasing costs combine with increasing government and private sector concerns over climate change, energy security and air pollution, particularly in developing countries where the need for additional energy capacity is greatest,” says the report.
David Hughes, former research director at the Geological Survey of Canada, agrees that the economic case for new pipelines is flawed. In another new study, he noted that the international price of oil is no longer significantly higher than North American prices.
“The idea that exporting more oil sands bitumen to Europe or Asia will boost returns to Alberta simply doesn’t hold water,” Hughes wrote in the study conducted for the Corporate Mapping Project, led by the University of Victoria, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, and Alberta’s Parkland Institute.
“Oil sand bitumen will always sell at a discount due to its lower quality, regardless of whether it’s sold in North America or on international markets,” says the study.
Hughes also eviscerates claims by politicians that it is possible to meet climate commitments while significantly expanding oil and gas production and building new export pipelines.
“Short of an economic collapse, it is difficult to see how Canada can realistically meet its Paris commitments in the 14 years remaining without rethinking its plans for oil and gas development,” he wrote.
Hughes, who also factors in the five liquefied natural gas export terminals envisioned by the provincial government, found that with projected oil sands growth, emissions in other sectors would have to shrink by 55 percent to meet Paris Agreement commitments.
“If Canada is to have any hope of meeting its Paris commitment, the aggressive oil and gas growth ambitions of the Alberta and BC governments will have to be reconsidered and reduced,” he said.
Environment and Climate Change Canada, in a May review, estimated that, if the pipeline expansion is approved, upstream emissions—those associated with the production, processing and transportation of oil—could be between 20 and 26 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year. The NEB previously estimated that the pipeline itself would generate about one million tonnes of greenhouse gases during construction and another 400,000 tonnes annually once in operation.
The government review, however, also noted that the upstream emissions might occur whether or not the Trans Mountain pipeline is built; if oil sands production does not happen in Canada, investments would be made in other jurisdictions and global oil consumption would be materially unchanged in the long-term.
That assumption is being challenged by critics such as Ecojustice lawyer Dyna Tuytel who wrote in her blog that it amounts to a failure to take responsibility for Canadian upstream emissions.
“This means that Environment Canada will not consider the emissions from additional tar sands production itself and, instead, will focus on the difference in emissions intensity of oil production in Canada compared to other hypothetical jurisdictions if Canada were not to produce it here,” she wrote.
Ecojustice, representing the Living Oceans Society and Raincoast Conservation Foundation, is among the groups now challenging the NEB report in the courts.
Lawyers for Ecojustice have filed for a judicial review of the report saying that the board failed to adequately consider the adverse effects of tankers on endangered southern resident killer whales and their habitat.
The Squamish Nation has filed for a judicial review, as well, claiming that the First Nation’s concerns were not adequately taken into consideration and that the NEB process was flawed. And in June the City of Vancouver filed for a judicial review saying the NEB report is “flawed and biased” and ignores scientific evidence about the consequences of a major spill and the effect on greenhouse gas emissions.
Meanwhile, the federal Liberal government has launched a lengthy review of the NEB process and other legislation governing the way major projects are assessed.
Many of the laws, such as the Fisheries Act, Environmental Assessment Act, and the Fisheries and Navigation Protection Act, were changed in 2012 by the former Conservative government in an effort to get industrial and resource projects fast-tracked and approved more quickly.
Expert panels will now review the legislation and issue a report in January. Some of the laws will also be studied by two parliamentary committees. However, the Liberal government has already said that projects already in the process—such as Kinder Morgan—will not be required to go back to square one and instead will face additional regulation through already-announced interim measures, including more consultation with First Nations and more emphasis on the effect projects will have on greenhouse gas emissions.
Despite the continuing controversy, Kinder Morgan is confident that it can meet NEB’s conditions, including controlling emissions. A communications spokesman said in an emailed statement that the company welcomes the NEB’s requirement for a GHG offset plan. Although pipelines account for only about one percent of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions, the industry is ready to do its part, he said. “It is a sign of the times and an appropriate reflection by the NEB, taking into consideration an issue of great public interest and importance,” he said. “We understand climate change is an important global issue requiring action across many industries around the world.”

PROVINCIALLY, KINDER MORGAN’S pipeline faces hurdles into 2017 when it will likely become a provincial election issue.
Before that it will have to face a provincial environmental review following a BC Supreme Court ruling that the province cannot rely solely on the federal process and, so far, the provincial government is not ready to give a go-ahead.
“Our government position has always been clear and consistent. We will only support heavy oil pipelines in BC if our five conditions are met,” said Environment Minister Mary Polak. “We are not there yet.”
Polak noted that some conditions set by the NEB do address BC’s concerns, but there is work yet to do on issues such as marine spill response, First Nations and benefits for BC.
The provincial conditions include a world-class response to spills and for BC to receive its fair share of benefits, but do not mention climate change or emissions. That’s because pipeline greenhouse gas emissions are a federal responsibility, explained BC Ministry of Environment spokesman David Karn. “As the regulator of interprovincial pipelines, it is the federal government’s responsibility to ensure emissions are managed so that federal commitments are achieved,” he said.
The province will rely on information from the NEB environmental assessment, but provincial Environmental Assessment Office staff will meet with aboriginal groups to determine whether Kinder Morgan has adequately consulted First Nations, Karn said.
The provincial cabinet decision is likely to be made after the federal ruling in December and it is not clear what will happen if the two do not dovetail.
Leading towards May 2017’s provincial election, where do the parties stand on the pipeline?
George Heyman, NDP environment critic, says the NDP has consistently opposed the project, partially because of the NEB failure to consider climate change and lack of information on what part the pipeline plays in an overall climate plan.
“This not in British Columbia’s interest,” Heyman said, counting off potential risks to the environment and the economy and accusing the BC Liberals of trying to have-their-cake-and-eat-it-too by taking an ambivalent stance.
During the last provincial election, the NDP loss was partially blamed on then-leader Adrian Dix coming out against the pipeline during the campaign, but Heyman said that there are no concerns that it will deter voters next spring. “One of the reasons we took this position clearly and early is so people know where we stand. We will go forward into an election telling people what we are going to do to create jobs and a healthy economy as well as what clear measures we will take to have a good climate action plan,” he said.
Weaver also believes the issue could still be knocking around during next spring’s provincial election and, as Green Party leader, he wants to see the Province just say “No.”
“I have said very clearly that Kinder Morgan is simply not going to happen on my watch and they should not be wasting people’s time going through a process that is not in the interest of British Columbians or Canadians,” he said.
The government always seems focused on “getting to yes, no matter what the question is,” Weaver said. “But with some projects the answer should be ‘No’—and Kinder Morgan is one of those projects.”
Judith Lavoie is an award-winning journalist specializing in the environment, First Nations, and social issues. Twitter @LavoieJudith.
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Fighting for the Salish Sea

By Guest, in Ocean-related reporting, January 30, 2020
With 18 large port expansion projects around the Salish Sea, how’s an ecosystem to survive the influx of tanker traffic?
By Briony Penn (First published in the May-June 2016 edition of Focus Magazine)

SALTSPRING ISLAND IS SMACK DAB IN THE CENTRE of the Salish Sea. On the clearest spring day, from our highest peaks, I can see the tip of Mount Waddington at the northernmost edge and Mount Rainier at the southernmost edge of the watershed. In between these two monarchs of mountains is a drainage basin of 110,000 square kilometres.
If I could swim among the hundreds of islands and the 18,000 square kilometres of water, I could catch a glimpse of over 100 different species of bird and 200 species of fish, 20 species of marine mammal and 3000 invertebrates—orcas to nudibranchs.
From my viewpoint in the centre of this particular universe, I can also see tankers in every direction. They are the latest big problem affecting the Salish Sea. Not just oil tankers but all tankers—whether they are carrying coal, LNG, grain, televisions or toxic chemicals.
Federal and provincial agencies on both sides of the border have been missing in action during the last decade on the environmental front. So it isn’t surprising that a transboundary grass roots citizen action has coalesced to take the matter to the highest maritime authority—the International Maritime Organization—which at the very least has the ability to bring all the players to the table.
The increase in tanker traffic is an issue that has snuck up on residents—if you can call the approach of a 120,000-tonne Aframax or a 300-metre Capesize bulk carrier vessel “sneaking up.” One can feel the passage of a supertanker as the vibrations of its huge engines travel up the shore and rattle windows. If you’re lucky, they just pass by, but now the likelihood is they’ll park and idle spewing sulphurous exhaust. At times I have counted 15 tankers at anchor off one shore.
Recent protests of citizens’ groups like the Gabriolans Against Freighter Anchorages to proposed parking lots of tankers off their shores, or the Saanich Nations protests around a proposed Malahat First Nation LNG plant, or My Sea to Sky protests against Squamish LNG, are just a few examples of the rising concern and frustrations. And it shows no signs of abating with 18 large port expansion projects proposed in the Salish Sea. A 43 percent increase of large, commercial marine vessel traffic is predicted, growing the current 12,000 tankers a year to closer to 18,000.
And the size of the tankers themselves is also growing. In 2017, the Panama Canal Expansion Project will enable even larger tankers to reach our shores. The cumulative effects are, as usual, the real killer and no agency has been tasked with tackling that problem.
Stephanie Buffum, executive director of Friends of San Juan, who is spearheading the fight from the US side, points to the science that suggests that this ecosystem, especially species at risk like the southern resident killer whales or Chinook salmon populations, “can’t take one more hit” whether it is an oil spill, another decline in food or more noise pollution.
On the Canadian side, one of the supporting groups is Raincoast Conservation Foundation. Chris Genovali of Raincoast states that “what we can safely say is that we need more salmon and less tankers” if the Salish Sea as a functioning ecosystem is going to survive. As an indicator of how serious the situation is, last month the US Northwest Fisheries Commission, which oversees all tribal fishing, recommended wholesale closures of salmon and herring fishing in the Salish Sea to give populations a better chance to recover.
The problem is, of course, that the humans living along the sprawling southern perimeter of the bowl from Tacoma to Squamish and Victoria to Campbell River are at seven million and rising. Besides not dealing with sprawl, we’ve been over fishing, over logging, over dumping toxic chemicals, and now over tankering.
How do the tankers rate as priorities? Is anyone analyzing the potential cumulative impacts of all these proposed terminal expansion projects? These include, annually, 160 more coal tanker transits proposed for Fraser Surrey terminal, 80 more LNG tankers out of Woodfibre in Squamish, and 520 transits of container ships out of new facilities in Delta (Roberts Bank 2).
The 12 expansions in Vancouver alone include more grain tankers from Viterra, the company which handles most of Western Canada’s grain; more animal rendering/oil disposal tankers from West Coast Reduction; more container ships from Centerm; and, if Kinder Morgan’s plans are approved, a tripling of oil tankers out of its Westridge terminal.
On the US side, just from the Puget Sound area, there’s more coal to move from Bellingham (an estimated 974 tankers-worth per year), more petrochemicals to move from the refinery in Anacortes (120), and more containers to move in and out of Seattle and Tacoma (564). Which straw will break the camel’s back?
The desert metaphor isn’t too far-fetched even for the wet West Coast. These port projects are all directed by global corporate tenants. They are the stakeholders in the game. Local governments, First Nations and concerned citizens have been struggling to be heard on an other than piece-meal basis for over a decade.
In 2014, the US Friends of San Juan realized they couldn’t “fight every battle” and started to explore a “premier global tool that a community can adopt to protect a uniquely important marine ecosystem from the threats posed to it by international shipping.”
The international designation, called a Particularly Sensitive Sea Area (PSSA), only regulates large international vessels, nothing small, but that gives it a certain paradoxical nimbleness. The PSSA doesn’t have the ability to cap traffic but is able to influence routing, areas to be avoided, anchorages, traffic separation schemes, inshore traffic zones and prohibition of discharge. It is also a designation that can be nominated by citizens. As Buffum notes “This is truly a grass roots initiative because so many people who are at the centre of the Salish Sea have been dissatisfied with the level of review at the rise of tanker traffic. There hasn’t been enough energy at the federal, state or provincial level so that is why, as citizens, we moved forward to take our concerns to the International Marine Organization.”
US groups, and now Canadian groups like Raincoast and Georgia Strait Alliance, are following the lead of citizens from 17 PSSAs around the world, including the Galapagos, the Canary Islands, Great Barrier Reef, Western European Waters, and Baltic Sea. The first good news is that once designated it could provide the structure to have the conversation with all the agencies and industry that should be at the table. The second good news is that the proof of the concept is in the initial support. The feasibility study was completed by Buffum’s group in 2014, and the region passed all the criteria for a PSSA. Then they drafted the nomination, which passed the legal review. They have got provisional nods for the concept in the US at all levels, including the federal (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—NOAA), state, tribal and industry.
The group is now soliciting feedback and endorsements for the nomination from the Canadian equivalent groups and agencies like DFO, Coast Guard, Ministry of Environment, Port of Vancouver, local governments and ENGOs, which is why Buffum met with local Canadian groups in April to ask them to shop the idea to their agencies like they have down south. She’s looking for endorsements from all sectors. Once the protective measures—such as routes and no-go areas—are pinned down in workshops, the final PSSA nomination will be submitted to the International Marine Organization. It typically takes a year to review and make a decision.
According to Genovali, it is an important piece of the puzzle and the least we should be doing, while still moving quickly ahead with the National Marine Conservation Area and upholding the national recovery plan for southern resident Orca, which has been severely neglected. The UNESCO Man and the Biosphere reserve proposal has also been resurrected by various groups and is getting traction in local governments. First Nations on both sides of the boundary are in conversation about a declaration of sacred waters.
In addition, the Shaw Discovery Centre of the Salish Sea, the Cattle Point Foundation, and, over in Bellingham, the new Institute of the Salish Sea at Western University, are all helping to educate us about the nature and culture of the Salish Sea.
As Buffum notes, the PSSA is just one small but important international designation which she hopes will strengthen the myriad of efforts being made at grass roots levels to save the Salish Sea.
Briony Penn has been living near and writing about the Salish Sea pretty much all of her life. She is the author of the new book, The Real Thing: The Natural History of Ian McTaggart Cowan.
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Cermaq vs the people

By Guest, in Ocean-related reporting, January 30, 2020
The rise and fall of fish farming in Ahousaht territory
by Briony Penn (First published in the Novemver 2015 edition of Focus Magazine)
Qaamina Hunter starts our telephone conversation by telling me I’ve reached the general store in Ahousat village. I apologize that I have called the wrong number (Is there a general store in Ahousat?). Then I hear him laugh. Judging by the children’s voices in the background, it might as well be a general store I’ve reached. Qaamina’s house is certainly some kind of major hub for this First Nation of 2000 people.
Carver, fisherman, wilderness tour guide, youth counsellor, activist, ex-fish farm worker, grandfather, basketball coach and wise guy, Hunter laughs again when I cautiously ask him what his western title is. “Better say carver because that’s the one I’m famous for.” His masks are famous—in more ways than one. They have been all over the media lately. Masks with the tears of swimming salmon on them, strapped to boats of Ahousaht protestors who—for the first time in BC’s conflicted history with fish farming—successfully stopped one. The offending proposed farm was due to go into Ahousaht territory, at a place called Yaakswiis—a real general store of the region, a bay near the salmon-bearing Atleo River where you used to be able to get all the food you needed before the fish farms arrived.
(Careful readers will notice two apparently different spellings of “Ahousat” in this story. Ahousat refers to the village, Ahousaht to the people and their land.)
Qaamina, as one of the elders, provided support to the younger Ahousaht activists led by Lennie John, who camped out on the new floating catwalks and successfully blocked fish farm giant Cermaq’s access to the net pens.
How and why did a carver grandfather turn into an activist? Qaamina describes how from the day the fish farms arrived nearly 20 years ago, he had concerns about them. A fisherman of 45 years, there isn’t too much on the sea that misses his notice. “Our fishing collapsed, it went downhill and that is all we knew. Our people have been suffering.”
Luckily Qaamina could turn to wilderness guiding as an alternate livelihood, something he had done since a boy of 11 taking visitors to the hot springs for 5 cents. “The fortunate thing for me was that I knew tourism was going to be there,” but others in his community, with declining fishing, were drawn to big promises of lots of steady jobs in the industry made by Pacific National Aquaculture (PNA). “So our people said: OK, it is money coming in.” Fish farming was welcomed by the leadership. Yet over the years, the 14 fish farms in the territory have resulted in only about 15 total jobs for local people.
Mainstream purchased PNA in 2000, acquiring farms in Chile and Norway, as well as the 14 farm sites in Clayoquot, all of which are in Ahousaht territory. Then Cermaq, a Norwegian company, purchased Mainstream. And last year, Cermaq became part of the giant Mitsubishi empire.
In the beginning, Qaamina said, “We didn’t know what the impacts were, if any.”
In 2007, he decided to go work on the fish farm “to see what it was like.” He worked for three months when the first disaster struck. In September 2007, a containment net of a pen near Ahousat village was torn and salmon started escaping. The deputy manager of Mainstream told the Globe and Mail at the time that 5000 Atlantic salmon had been pulled out of the water in between that net and the predator net.
Meanwhile, outside the pens, Ahousaht fisherman were pulling up Atlantics in droves with buzz bombs and their own nets, to keep the non-native species from intermingling with the returning Pacific salmon species. “There was a lot more escapees than they said,” says Qaamina. He and other Ahousaht fishermen protested and Qaamina lost his job: “They let me go because they saw my boat out there protesting.”
He says he had seen enough to know that there were other problems. “I noticed the deterioration of our fish, but also the divide it has created, not only bleeding our stocks but bleeding our ties together.”
But the leadership of Ahousaht had signed an agreement with Mainstream/Cermaq in 2002. The protocol was renewed in 2008, 2010 and then extended for another 5 years last January. The most recent iteration identified problem sites, like Dixon Bay west of the Megin River, that needed re-siting away from what were referred to as “Pristine Areas.” Yaakswiis was intended to be a replacement site for the Dixon Bay farm, which was believed to be more vulnerable. But for Qaamina and others, no location is good.
Qaamina’s 87-year-old father Stanley Sam— or Tsahsiits—told his son that these sites are too culturally important to be invaded by farms. He told Qaamina that below one of the farms, “is a cave underwater that our people used to swim down to become what they wanted to become—whether it was a great speaker or a warrior in the village.” They put a farm right on top of it without consulting the elders, Tsahsiits told him.
Qaamina also points out, “People didn’t know the impacts of the fish farms to our territory. They didn’t know about all the sludge and the crap that dumps into the ocean. One of my nephews who worked on a farm says: ‘I can’t speak. There are a lot of things that they tell us not to say.’ So my encouragement was: Just do the right thing.”
According to Qaamina, every family had someone working for Cermaq. One of his own sons worked for Cermaq, as have nephews. His son knew what was going on in the inside and had decided he wanted out; he planned to become an RCMP officer. Unfortunately, a week after he quit the fish farm, he was in a fatal float plane crash. Qaamina took in two of his orphaned grandchildren and started on a project to ease his loss through carving masks for all his grandchildren to celebrate a teaching that his mother, Katie Sam, had provided.
“My mother always told me about the sacred salmon; how they searched for you and you didn’t search for them. And that is the theme for every carving, so I basically put salmon-are-sacred tears on the masks.”
It is these masks that have found their way, lashed to the bow of protest boats, into the media recently. “I thought of my mum when I told her I hated these farms. I just despised them. Not the workers, not the humans beings. I respect human life, but I just couldn’t stand what they were doing in our territory and to me as a fisherman—taking our jobs away.”
The issue came to a head this summer with a decision by Christy Clark to issue two new tenures on the August long weekend despite the recommendations of the Cohen Commission for DFO to review and change the siting criteria and analyze all current licenses to meet the new criteria. DFO did review the sites with some criteria and rejected one at Hebert Inlet (a first for DFO), but Yaakswiis got the green light, perhaps as the sacrificial lamb for re-siting Dixon Bay. Ahousaht warrior Lennie John spearheaded a petition to the hereditary leadership (who had approved the farm’s site), while biologist Alex Morton took a 106,000-signature petition to the legislature. When the catwalks and pens started accumulating on Tofino docks late this summer, they knew a protest would be necessary to protect Yaakswiis.
Qaamina’s role in the blockade was doing what he always does at basketball tournaments, potlatches and functions of the village. “I supported them circling the farm doing silent prayers and I made a statement: that the power that we carry from our ancestors is still alive within us.” Qaamina has coached most of the young people of the village at some time or other, as well as being a parent, foster parent, uncle and of course grandparent. With the general store of the Hunter clan supporting them, the younger warriors were on solid footing.
The blockade continued for 13 days and on September 21 the company agreed to remove the farm. Dan Lewis and Bonny Glambeck of Clayoquot Action were witnesses in Qaamina’s boat and they report that in the final hours of the blockade Qaamina left them to do a stream purification ritual. He explained, “A long time ago, we were all praying people for our salmon. We all went onto the ocean and swam together praying for the fish to come…We have to start by putting everything back to the way it was. The old way.” The Ahousaht fisheries boat arrived at the floats being dismantled and the hereditary and elected chiefs asked Qaamina to join their ceremony.
When asked why he thought the leadership rescinded their approval of the farm, Qaamina said: “I think because of pressures. Even though a Chief can make a final decision and say the way it is going to be, people have more of a voice.”
Qaamina is full of plans to see the return of the salmon “back for our grandchildren.” He wants more information for his people. Tsahsiits wants native names re-established for all the places where the fish farms are because “they all have a story and a meaning and they were given to us by the creator.”
According to Glambeck and Lewis, “the social licence to do fish farms is almost gone. People don’t want an expansion, they don’t want the farms.” Qaamina believes the salmon will come back but “we have to work together to make these things happen. It took nine very strong people to get it overturned with support and supporters. I’m thinking of Lennie John’s words: ‘Imagine what we could do as a nation?’”
Briony Penn PhD is the author of the new book,The Real Thing: The Natural History of Ian McTaggart Cowan, which will be launched on November 18 at the Royal BC Museum, 7pm. (Free but registration required, royalbcmuseum.bc.ca.)
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Morton vs. DFO

By Guest, in Ocean-related reporting, January 30, 2020
You’d think Fisheries and Oceans Canada would be on the side of wild salmon. Think again.
By Katherine Palmer Gordon (First published in the June 2015 edition of Focus Magazine)

May 6, 2015 was a great day for wild salmon,” says Margot Venton, staff lawyer at Vancouver-based environmental legal group Ecojustice. It was a good day for Alexandra Morton, too: The biologist and the wild fish both scored a potentially significant victory in court.
Two years earlier, Ecojustice had commenced legal action on her behalf against Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) and Marine Harvest Canada Inc in the Federal Court of Appeal, contesting the fish farm company’s DFO-issued licence to transfer young salmon smolts from its hatchery into open-water pens in the ocean.
Fisheries regulations clearly state that such licences can only be issued if the fish do not have any diseases or carry any disease agents that may be harmful to the protection and conservation of fish. Instead of requiring that precondition to the issue of the licence to be met, however, DFO had simply put the condition right into Marine Harvest’s licence, giving the company complete discretion to decide for itself whether it was complying with it.
In other words, the fox was put squarely in charge of the henhouse. DFO retained no oversight authority in the licence to make sure in advance that no infected or diseased fish would be transferred. It even permitted Marine Harvest to transfer diseased fish if the company considered the transfer would be “low risk,” despite the fact that the regulations don’t contemplate that.
In early 2013, Morton learned to her dismay that young fish infected with piscine reovirus (PRV) had been transferred by Marine Harvest into one of their open net fish pens in Shelter Bay, near Port Hardy on northern Vancouver Island, regardless of the potential danger to wild fish.
“It was a completely reckless thing to do,” says Morton in frustration. PRV in farmed fish in the marine environment represents a significant potential risk to wild salmon, she explains, as the weight of scientific evidence indicates that PRV is the most likely cause of Heart and Skeletal Muscle Inflammation (HSMI), a severe and usually fatal disease in salmon. “That tells us putting farmed fish carrying this virus in close proximity to healthy wild fish is a bad idea,” she says. “And most farm fish do carry PRV. Making that transfer was playing biological roulette with the lives of wild salmon.”
Morton wasted no time in going to court to seek judicial review of Marine Harvest’s licence. She argued that not only was the transfer of the PRV-infected fish a direct contravention of the regulations, but so was the issue of the licence by DFO in the first place. DFO has a responsibility to protect wild salmon, she told the court. In handing off responsibility for deciding whether a transfer of smolts might be harmful to other fish to a company with little incentive to protect wild salmon, DFO was not meeting that obligation.
Justice Rennie, who presided over the case, agreed unequivocally with Morton. Rennie found that DFO had clearly abrogated its duty to protect wild salmon by handing off decision-making authority to Marine Harvest: “Unlimited discretion cannot be conferred on a sub-delegate,” he stated. “Supervisory control over the delegate should be retained.”
In giving Marine Harvest discretion to transfer infected fish that might pose a risk to wild salmon, in direct contravention of fisheries regulations, DFO had also, in the plainest of terms, broken the law: “It seems almost too clear to state that the Minister cannot create any licence conditions which would in fact sidestep or nullify the [regulations],” wrote Rennie scathingly. “However, that is the effect of…the licence,” he concluded.
In reaching his decision, to Morton’s delight, Justice Rennie took the unusual step of considering and commenting on the scientific evidence presented to him in court. Rennie concluded that Morton was right about that too: “Although there is a healthy debate between respected scientists on the issue, the evidence suggests that PRV is the viral precursor to HSMI and may be harmful to the protection and conservation of fish.”
In light of that evidence, Rennie also castigated DFO for its failure to apply the “precautionary principle” in issuing a licence giving Marine Harvest complete discretion to release potentially diseased fish into the water. The precautionary principle, which has been recognized by the Supreme Court of Canada, proposes that where a risk of serious or irreversible harm exists, a lack of scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing or failing to take reasonable and cost-effective conservation and management measures to address that risk.
In court, DFO argued it had taken all due precautions required. Rennie disagreed in no uncertain terms: “It is not, on the face of the evidence, open to DFO to assert that the licence conditions permitting a transfer of PRV infected smolts reflect the precautionary principle,” he stated. “The Minister is not, based on the evidence, erring on the side of caution.”
Rennie was equally sarcastic about DFO’s clumsy attempts to insist that science experts were on its side: “The Minister cannot make unsupported statements of science. Nor can the Minister point to expert affidavits, drafted many months after the decision and infer that those considerations must necessarily have been taken into account by the Minister in the exercise of his discretion.”
It’s a dramatic decision, putting a clear onus on DFO to do more to protect wild fish. “Justice Rennie sent a clear message confirming that DFO has a duty to protect and conserve wild fish and the marine environment,” confirms Venton. But while it is a significant win on paper, what happens now remains an open question.
The judge gave DFO four months to come up with a different form of licence that does comply with the law. Any new licence will have to either leave total control in DFO’s hands to make the decision as to whether smolts are safe or not, or spell out very clear criteria for the company to follow to ensure that diseased or infected fish are not transferred into the ocean. DFO will remain responsible for ensuring the criteria are followed; the fox will no longer be allowed to control the henhouse.
“The problem for the fish farms, though,” says Morton, “is that as far as I know, they can’t get stock that isn’t carrying the virus. The farms won’t let us test their stock but I am constantly testing farmed fish sold in BC supermarkets, and almost all of them are infected with PRV.” That means it’s critical for fish farms to use infected stock: “They don’t have enough uninfected stock to be profitable.”
This federal government has a proven track record of gutting important environmental laws, so it isn’t out of the question that DFO may therefore simply amend the regulations to allow fish farms to keep using infected stock. Alternatively—as it has to date—it may simply side with the industry’s public stance that there is no disease or virus in their stock, so amendment of the licences or regulations will make no difference to fish farm operations. Business may well carry on as usual. Either way, worries Morton, “DFO would be ignoring the science and putting the whole coast at risk.”
The problem is that there continues to be little opportunity to directly test industry claims that their fish are fine. The public has no access to disease reports, despite the 2010 Cohen Commission’s conclusion that transparency improves industry safety, to everyone’s benefit. Also still lurking in the background is Bill 37, a 2012 proposal by then Agriculture Minister Don McRae that would make it an offence for anyone to disclose the presence of a reportable animal disease—an offence punishable by two years in prison and/or a fine of $75,000. It was condemned as restricting free speech by citizens and journalists and withdrawn at the time but remains a potential threat that could well be brought forward again by a fish farm-friendly Liberal government.
The industry is also hedging its bets by claiming that a strain of PRV has been present in Pacific waters since before the introduction of fish farms. “Even if that’s true, which we don’t know yet for sure, it doesn’t matter,” responds Morton. “PRV is a very robust virus and concentrating it in feedlots allows it to reproduce very fast. Unlike in the wild, there are no predators to keep the diseased fish population under control. So these farms are amplifying the problem.”
Even though Ecojustice’s Venton thinks an appeal of the case is unlikely—the legal point on which it was decided is very clear and would be hard to challenge—Morton’s celebration of her victory is still tempered. “Come December, DFO will be renewing all the aquaculture licences,” she points out. “These are nine-year licences that are locked in. If that happens and DFO allows infected fish to keep being transferred into the ocean, that spells a death sentence for wild salmon on BC’s coast.”
“The real victory,” she concludes bluntly, “will be when these guys pack their bags, get out of the water and go home.”
Katherine Palmer Gordon is a lawyer as well as the author of six books, most recently We Are Born With the Songs Inside Us: Lives and Stories of First Nations People in British Columbia.
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BC's expensive fish farms

By Guest, in Ocean-related reporting, January 30, 2020
The federal government seems intent on propping up corporate fish farming despite the high costs.
By Briony Penn (First published in the March 2015 edition of Focus Magazine)

On the afternoon of February 10, a whale watching boat docked at Port McNeill, packed to the limit with 48 Malcolm Islanders from the small village of Sointula.
They weren’t whale watchers; well, not the usual type. These were shrimp fishermen, fishing lodge operators, First Nations people, residents, members of local organizations, and biologist Alex Morton, who were coming to an open house of Grieg Seafood, the company that is proposing an expansion of two salmon farms in the Broughton Archipelago that would set a precedent of replacing shellfish tenures with finfish. The reason the islanders were delivered by a whale watching boat was because their ferry doesn’t run passengers on Tuesday afternoons; the meeting was scheduled at the time when it only carries dangerous cargo.
Some might argue that the residents were the dangerous cargo. According to Gord Curry of Living Oceans Society, the islanders, determined to have their voices heard, found their own transportation to Port McNeill and delivered their message loud and clear: No more open net salmon farms; closed containment systems are the answer. Locals pointed to the Namgis First Nation down the road that has set up the first land-based closed containment systems in the region and has been delivering farmed salmon for nearly a year with no risk to wild salmon. The open house was intended to be a little tête-à-tête with industry reps, but it quickly changed into a town hall meeting where people voiced their concerns collectively.
The same calls of alarm that were raised at that meeting are echoing around the coast as the industry is poised to expand open-net salmon farming four-fold. With the recommendations of the $26 million Cohen Commission (tasked to find answers to the disappearing Fraser sockeye in 2012) still mostly unimplemented, the increasing volatility of viruses and other pathogens, the declining efficacy of sea lice drugs, the slashing of federal regulations to allow indiscriminate use of new chemicals to fight the lice and the continued muzzling of government scientists, there are reasons to be concerned. On the lower mainland, Stolo First Nation activist Eddy Gardner is gathering steam encouraging groups to boycott Costco, Walmart and other stores with his online Farmed Salmon Boycott kit with easy instructions for anyone to get started to stage your own boycott. The Change.org petition to ban salmon feedlots is at 106,000 and rising.
Back in Port McNeill, Curry pointed out the obvious to officials, given that one of the strongest recommendations of the Cohen Commission was to put a moratorium on salmon farm expansion in the Discovery Islands—south of the Broughton—to assist the Fraser sockeye migration: “It isn’t a stretch of logic that what’s good for Fraser salmon is good for Knight Inlet salmon.” And that is what’s at stake with the Grieg applications: a safe migratory route for the Knight Inlet salmon, as well as the loss of productive shrimping grounds. Fishermen of Sointula who rely on that productivity stand to lose their livelihoods with no compensation.
Meanwhile, over on the west side of Vancouver Island, Clayoquot Sound fish farm watchers, like Clayoquot Action’s Bonny Glambeck, continue to tussle with the planned expansion of two new Atlantic salmon feedlots in Millar Channel and Herbert Inlet. There are currently 21 fish farm sites in the Clayoquot Sound UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, and Cermaq, a big player in the Sound, wants to add another farm to Millar Channel, which already suffered major die-offs from infectious hematopoietic necrosis virus (IHNV) in 2012, and from an algal bloom in 2014.
Herbert Inlet is at the gateway to the Moyeha River, one of the last intact watersheds on Vancouver Island, through which spawning fish enter and smolts leave. According to Glambeck, the issue is simple: “Salmon populations are crashing in these otherwise pristine watersheds—coincidentally where all the fish farms are. So why wouldn’t we be implementing everything we learned from the Cohen Commission before we start expanding this industry? The recommendation of Cohen was not to have farms on migration routes and Herbert Inlet, for one, is on a migration route.” One of Cohen’s recommendations was for DFO to review and change the siting criteria and analyze all current licenses to meet the new criteria. According to the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), it is now poised to release its new licencing regulations and will be open for business. DFO will now be evaluating new marine finfish aquaculture applications (other than the Discovery Islands area and the north coast where the provincial 2008 moratorium is in place) “through the lens of environmental sustainability and engagement with First Nations and other stakeholders.”
The industry stakeholders’ lens is consistent with how salmon farms have been viewed since they first appeared on the coast in the ’70s, when they were “mom and pop” operations and the rationale of feeding the world with farmed salmon seemed viable. As Grieg writes in a letter this February to the Campbell River Mirror “wild stocks cannot keep up with growing global demand… and farming fish, like we farm other food, is the only way to meet this urgent need.”
There is, however, much more than altruism behind the drive for expansion. The industry’s European farms have been hit by escalating problems due to disease, sea lice and storm-caused escapees. Last autumn, the Norwegian government sold out its shares in Cermaq (a dominant player in BC’s industry) to Mitsubishi, ostensibly to privatize the state asset. But that move might also have reflected a desire by Norway’s government to shed a troubled and troublesome industry—getting out before the storm, so to speak. On January 10 this year, a hurricane force wind hit the Norwegian coast and caused the escape of over 60,000 farmed Pacific coast steelhead. Norwegians were outraged, not only because the fish were found to be suffering from what industry calls PD (or pancreas disease that has plagued Norwegian and Irish farms), but they, like British Columbians, fear these introduced species are putting their native wild salmon stocks at further risk. There are less than a half million wild Atlantic salmon left in Norway. Meanwhile, farmed Atlantic salmon are threatening Pacific species. The irony, however, might be lost only on Canada’s federal minister of Fisheries and Oceans Gail Shea.
In an effort to expand the social licence for fish farming, DFO set up the Aquaculture Management Advisory Committee (AMAC). Craig Orr, long-time advocate with Watershed Watch, was invited to serve on the committee but quickly dropped out, claiming it was “a sham.” He stated, “We came to an early meeting but disagreed with their terms of reference. In particular, that there wasn’t a broad enough science input into AMAC. DFO said that their own scientists would be the only representation. The Cohen Commission specifically identified that DFO’s science mandate was too narrow and conflicted in terms of them wanting to expand the industry and that is exactly what they are doing now. We cannot sit at a committee that ignores the Cohen recommendations and dismisses our research with academics. In the meantime they are expanding farms and they don’t have their advisory committee together.”
DFO refutes these allegations. It claims the federal government respects the 2008 moratorium in the north and that it takes a “science-based approach to the management of aquaculture in British Columbia, including consideration of both DFO and non-DFO research.” DFO also states it has “not dismissed any of the Cohen recommendations, particularly those related to the consideration of peer-reviewed research.” It evaluates the research through the Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat, which it claims includes “non-DFO science.”
One can understand the frustration of people like Orr and Glambeck. Glambeck also turned down a seat on the advisory committee which hosts seven industry reps, two industry associations, two local government reps, seven First Nations and, ostensibly, three environmental non-governmental organizations’ (ENGOs) representatives. No ENGOs have accepted the invitation. Why? The advisory committee is tightly controlled, as are the questions that come before it for review.
One of the independent scientists whose questions and research have been rejected by the Science Advisory Secretariat is Morton, who has published extensively in highly-regarded peer-reviewed journals like Science and posts monthly updates on her work with viruses and sea lice. She has been continuously testing for one of the most dangerous viruses, Infectious Salmon Anemia, a strain of which hit Chilean fish farms with devastating results in 2007-2009. The Cohen Commission revealed evidence of strains of ISA in farms from Clayoquot Sound (reported by a DFO lab). As Morton attests, “We have learned from the Cohen Commission that several government labs have produced positive tests for the ISA virus in BC. We haven’t heard from those labs again. They are silent but we have the exhibits [from the Cohen Commission]. Last fall the Canada Food Inspection Agency made a big announcement that they couldn’t find ISA virus on the coast. I’ve asked them to detail their methods but they won’t provide them. I continue to do work with the eastern lab [that tested positive results for ISA in supermarket-bought fish] and I hope to publish the results. The thing about viruses is that they won’t remain silent. The ISA virus pattern is that it gets to a new place, kicks around harmlessly for 8 to 10 years and then—boom—there is a mutation that takes off. Chile couldn’t believe how quickly their ISA virus variant HPR7b spread.”
In order to bring attention to the severity of the problem, Morton launched a new lawsuit with Ecojustice last December based on a 2007 confidential memo in which the provincial vet in charge of farmed salmon told the minister that BC is at low risk from ISA because BC doesn’t import live salmon eggs. He wrote that memo at the time when his colleagues in DFO were filing reports on the importation of 28 million live Atlantic salmon eggs into BC. As Morton recounts, “I asked the College of Veterinarians to investigate twice and they refused, so I went to Ecojustice. The reason I have done it is because vets and biologists are under so much pressure from these companies. That is why you need colleges that will come down strongly if members do things like this—then vets can simply say: ‘I have to adhere to these standards.’ It isn’t punishment then, it is back-up. This is Canada—it’s a tough place to be a scientist right now.”
Morton’s early research focused on the sea lice issue. As she notes “The salmon fish farm industry is in a drug war with sea lice that they are losing around the world. There is a myth in BC that says sea lice are not a problem here, but it is not true. They are currently using drugs to suppress them. The sea lice are still there but at lower levels, because for the moment the drugs are working and that has saved wild stocks of salmon, specifically the mainland Area 12 pinks where I live. But a life on drugs never works. Companies are certainly looking for new drugs. There’s a guy going to jail for supplying illegal drugs to the fish farm industry on the east coast that killed a vast number of lobster. The prawn and shrimp fishermen are not happy because the drug SLICE does impact anything trying to make a shell [like lice].” Currently the government is giving the industry permits to use hydrogen peroxide baths for farmed salmon, but these are released directly into wild salmon habitat.
Grieg Seafood’s 2013 annual report outlines its efforts, both chemical and biological, to control lice. The report indicates a rising trend in the use of oral medicine and hydrogen peroxide. There is also an increased use of antibiotics for infections like mouth rot in BC. Reading these documents as a shareholder, one wouldn’t have confidence that chemical solutions are either long term or profitable. Such concerns haven’t stopped the federal government from gutting Section 36 of the federal Fisheries Act, which stopped companies from “putting deleterious chemicals into the ocean frequented by fish.”
In response to diseased fish invading Norwegian sportfishing waters and apparently intractable sea lice drug problems, the Norwegian parliament is tightening up their regulations related to water. Unfortunately, that sends Norwegian companies to the wild frontier of BC where licenses and rents are virtually free, regulatory oversight is minimal, government compensation is provided in case of die-offs from disease, and the Canadian government is accommodating industry expansion.
According to Glambeck, the federal government seems to be more than happy to subsidize this beleaguered industry. “We are treating the fish farm industry like Alberta is treating the companies in the tar sands, by giving the resources away, or polluting our oceans for nothing.”
In Norway, salmon farm licenses cost $1.69 million dollars each. With 1400 of them, substantial revenues are generated. Compare that to DFO’s proposed flat fee of $100 per license which will come into effect in 2015 for 115 federally-listed aquaculture licences.
BC takes $2.50 per tonne of produced farmed fish. With 787,000 tonnes produced annually, that means about $2 million is coming in—not much considering it costs $6.3 million to run the BC Aquaculture Regulatory Program, $54 million to run the Sustainable Aquaculture Program, and $6.5 million is spent on regulatory research. The Province, under the new federal/provincial harmonized Aquaculture Application, now just handles the renting of Crown seabed under a farm, a role which the Stolo’s Eddy Gardner refers to as the “slum landlord of the coast.” He has a point: Industry rents farms at a little over $700 per hectare per year. With a total of 4575 hectares, that brings BC another $3.3 million in annual rent.
The BC Salmon Farmer’s Association argues that their industry “provides 6000 direct and indirect jobs while contributing over $800 million annually to the provincial economy.” It is hard to know where those numbers come from. In their recent Fisheries and Aquaculture Sector report, BC Statistics counts only 1700 people as employees of either finfish or shellfish farms (at least 20 percent are in shellfish). The report notes both forms of aquaculture contribute a total of $61.9 million to the GDP (from $496 million in direct sales of farmed fish and shellfish).
According to the government report, the multiplier for the aquaculture sector is 7.83 jobs per $1 million of direct sales of salmon sold, which at $496 million means there are, at most, an additional 3883 jobs. But the numbers seem high. The award-winning environmental reporter D.C. Reid, in his Fish Farm News and Science, claims he could only find 795 actual employees of all fish farms in BC.
Regardless of which set of data one uses, aquaculture doesn’t come close to the economic benefits of even sport fishing. This sector contributes $325.7 million to GDP, $936 million in gross revenue with 8400 direct jobs, according to BC Stats. The government uses an 11.36 multiplier effect in the sports fishing sector, for 10,633 additional jobs. This is an industry that is detrimentally impacted by fish farming. If you add the data for the commercial capture fishery, which still generates $102 million to the GDP and 1200 direct jobs, plus the subsistence fishery for First Nations, aquaculture—which threatens all three—is blown out of the water in terms of jobs generation.
One figure the BC Salmon Farmer’s Association doesn’t like to talk about is the number of taxpayer dollars its members get from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency for their diseased fish. Last year, after weathering an injunction against releasing compensation figures, D.C. Reid reported payments of $2.64 million to Cermaq Mainstream for 959,498 diseased salmon at its IHN-infected Clayoquot Sound farms and $201,000 for infected equipment and supplies. Grieg Seafood’s open-net operation in Sechelt received $1.61 million for 312,032 IHN-diseased fish and $152,000 for infected equipment and supplies. Adding BC figures to those in Atlantic Canada, Reid said, “Here’s the bottom line: In little more than a year, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency paid fish farms almost $50 million taxpayer dollars for diseased slaughtered fish across Canada.”
There are other administrative and legal costs associated with fish farms. When you do the back-of-the-envelope addition of basic costs to Treasury—running departments, holding inquiries, and compensation for diseased fish, the costs easily outstrip the benefits.
Compare this to sport fishing and the economic justification for endangering wild salmon is even more baffling. Why is the federal government catering to three foreign companies who employ few people, bring relatively few dollars into the economy, and cause high administrative and legal costs—let alone the incalculable ecological damage of devastated wild stocks that create far more jobs and economic benefit?
If Canadians are not benefitting, who is? The shareholders of Marine Harvest, who are mostly European and American banks.
So is there any good news on the horizon? When Marine Harvest failed to honour their agreement with ENGOs to do a full-fledged land-based closed-containment pilot project, the Namgis First Nation set up their own and the first harvest took place last April. (See Focus, July, 2014). Other First Nations are exploring Namgis’ lead.
Meanwhile, Watershed Watch is giving advice to other First Nations who are working with their lawyers to get area-based management plans that scientifically evaluate impacts of extending aquaculture in their territory. As Orr says: “The juggling of balls goes on.”
Back in Sointula, Morton is “heartened to see more and more scientists ending up speaking out. It wasn’t our original role, but if you are the person who is on the ground with your hands on these fish and see the effects that the viruses and sea lice have on them, if you don’t stand up then who will?”
Briony Penn PhD has been reporting on the environment since her first article in The Islander in 1975 on Garry oak meadows and has been a columnist in Victoria publications since 1993. She has just completed a biography of Ian McTaggart Cowan.
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Kinder Morgan's fairy tale

By Guest, in Ocean-related reporting, January 30, 2020
The Houston-based pipeline company says it’s a good corporate citizen but its record in Canada doesn’t support that claim.
by Judith Lavoie (This story was first published in Focus Magazine in January, 2015.)

THE COMPLEXITIES OF CORPORATE TAX LAW rarely make compelling reading, but Robyn Allan believes British Columbians will be fascinated and outraged if they take a close look at her analysis of how Kinder Morgan is sucking money out of Canada and paying minimal taxes.
Allan is a thorn in the corporate paw of Kinder Morgan, which wants to twin the Trans Mountain pipeline and triple the flow of bitumen from Alberta’s oil sands to Burnaby. While opposition to the planned pipeline has been strong, what sets Allan apart is a background that makes it tough for critics to discount her in-depth financial investigations.
The independent economist is a former president and CEO of the Insurance Corporation of BC and her many private and public sector executive positions have included a stint as senior economist for BC Central Credit Union and financial vice-president of Parklane Ventures Ltd.
The path tracing how Kinder Morgan avoids paying Canadian taxes is labyrinthine, but the nub is that Houston-based Kinder Morgan was set up in the US as a Master Limited Partnership, an entity that does not exist in Canada.
“It’s a different kind of company…it’s traded publicly on the stock exchange and you could buy a unit and then have the right to receive income from its activities, including the Trans Mountain pipeline,” Allan said in an interview.
Instead of creating net income, a Master Limited Partnership creates cash flow, which is distributed to unit holders and, as a bonus, avoids most US taxes because it derives its income from the development and transportation of minerals or natural resources.
Kinder Morgan consolidated its tax position in August by restructuring, something that the company announced to investor analysts in Houston would “realize over 20 billion dollars in cash tax savings over the next 14 years.”
Allan believes Kinder Morgan’s corporate culture of minimizing taxes spills over into the company’s Canadian dealings and she discovered from poring over documents that, despite the company’s profits and sizeable Canadian interests, Trans Mountain has paid an average of only $1.5 million annually over the last five years in federal and provincial taxes and received Canadian tax refunds in 2009 and 2011.
For example, Trans Mountain generated $167 million in distributable cash flow in 2013, but received a Canadian tax refund of $4.2 million, Kinder Morgan Canada president Ian Anderson told analysts in Houston.
Allan points out that represents a siphoning off of resources from the Canadian economy to be given to US shareholders. “And that flies in the face of the fairy tale they want to tell us about how much they contribute to the economy,” she says. “They suck money out, which is why I asked Revenue Canada for an audit. I have serious concerns that this tax planning they are engaged in may not be appropriate under the law or in the spirit of the law…I have a feeling they are making decisions on avoiding taxes,”
Calls from Focus to Trans Mountain were referred to Kinder Morgan Canada external relations, but there was no response before our deadline.
Meanwhile, Allan has not heard whether Canada Revenue Agency will agree to conduct an audit and CRA spokeswoman Colette Turgeon said in an emailed response to Focus’ questions that confidentiality provisions of the Income Tax Act prevent the CRA from confirming if an audit is planned or ongoing. Turcotte noted that individual cases relating to Master Limited partnerships cannot be discussed, but Canadian legislation has a basic requirement of a 25 percent withholding tax on certain payments to non-residents. “A tax treaty may reduce the amount, but not to zero.”
The oil and gas sector is considered one of Canada’s significant industry sectors, Turgeon wrote. “To effectively manage the tax-related risks of the sector, the CRA has established an Oil and Gas Industry Coordinating Office, where industry specialists provide technical advice to oil and gas specialized auditors.”
Corporations can claim federal and provincial tax credits if they meet the criteria, which helps make Canada an increasingly attractive place to do business, Turgeon said. “Corporate tax credits are part of this system.”
Kinder Morgan, with an enterprise value of more than $100 billion, has a history linked to Enron Corp, best known for its massive accounting fraud and subsequent bankruptcy. Founder and CEO Richard Kinder is a former Enron president, who left in 1996 after he was passed over for the position of CEO—a job handed to Jeffrey Skilling, who is now serving a 24-year prison sentence after being convicted in 2006 of multiple federal felony charges related to Enron’s financial collapse.
Kinder Morgan was formed in 1997 when Kinder and William Morgan acquired Enron Liquids Pipeline for $40 million. The company, relying heavily on Master Limited Partnerships, grew rapidly and, through numerous partnerships and subsidiaries, now owns or operates 180 terminals and about 83,000 kilometres of pipelines, including more than 4000 kilometres in Canada.
Kinder takes a salary of only $1 a year, but, according to financial journals, collected $380 million in dividends from his companies in 2013.
Allan believes it is common for energy companies that want to build pipelines or terminals to overestimate the amount of taxes they will be contributing to the local economy, but she is convinced Kinder Morgan is taking the exaggeration to levels that amount to misinforming Canadians.
“Here’s what concerns me most, as an intervener at the [National Energy Board] hearings, that they say they are great contributors to the fiscal purse when the exact opposite is true. It’s most troubling,” she said. “It doesn’t make sense to me whatsoever that a company that pays that kind of benefits to US shareholders can have such a minimal [tax] obligation in Canada.”
The Province failed to ask economic questions at the hearings and the lack of information was exacerbated by the National Energy Board, which, operating under new rules, refused to order Kinder Morgan to answer Allan’s economic questions.
“Kinder Morgan said they were irrelevant and the board said it agreed with Kinder Morgan. I was shocked,” said Allan, who then went to other sources to obtain information about the company’s finances and tax plans.
“It shows the absurdity of the National Energy Board process. The public thinks the NEB is looking at something and they’re not,” said Allan. She believes policy changes brought in by the Harper government, including time restrictions, mean the NEB process favours companies rather than a fair and balanced review.
Allan worries that, especially with the backdrop of arrests of pipeline opponents on Burnaby Mountain, once people discover they are being given misleading information about financial benefits, they will start to distrust the system and that could undermine civil society.
One of those who believe the public trust has already been undermined is Nathalie Chambers of Madrona Farm in Saanich, whose activism is usually centred on protecting farmland and the Agricultural Land Reserve.
Chambers, who was among those demonstrating on Burnaby Mountain, said she has come to believe that energy and farmland issues are linked. “Everywhere I turn, big oil is coming up. The ALR is being dismantled because the regulations are getting in the way of oil and gas development,” she explained.
Chambers feels that with 2015 being a federal election year it is extraordinarily important that Canadians educate themselves about how the Harper government is supporting tar sands development and the major energy companies while muzzling scientists.
“We need political reform. We need to be able to trust the science and we need to be able to finance [opposition]. We are up against the deepest, deepest pockets,”said Chambers.
Adding to public suspicion of Kinder Morgan is the company’s history of accidents and critics have accused the company of focusing on increasing dividends for shareholders rather than spending resources on pipeline maintenance.
Burnaby Mayor Derrick Corrigan, an implacable opponent of the pipeline twinning, told Vancouver council last year that the company’s reaction to a 2007 spill that damaged 50 houses and dumped 250,000 litres of crude oil into Burrard Inlet convinced him that Kinder Morgan is not a good partner. “They underestimate risks, they constantly trivialize risks, they continually talk about the remoteness of odds in those risks and then they work to limit their own liability,” Corrigan told council. “If you look at research on them, Kinder Morgan has a history of pipeline accidents all over North America.”
In addition to the 2007 pipeline rupture, Kinder Morgan has seen several smaller spills in BC. In June 2013 a small spill near Kingsvale forced a shutdown of the Trans Mountain pipeline; a 2012 spill at the Sumas terminal in Abbotsford infuriated residents, although the company said the 110,000 litre spill was completely contained; and in 2009 crude oil spilled from a tank at Kinder Morgan’s Burnaby Mountain terminal.
For those who oppose the Trans-Mountain twinning, a temporary respite may come with dropping oil prices, which is forcing energy companies to look carefully at expensive capital projects.
But Allan wants Canadians to take a more philosophical view and question why they have to expend energy fighting the company.
“It’s bad economic strategy, so we should not have to waste time and effort asking about what it will do to the environment. The pipeline expansion will not bring financial or economic benefits to Canada,” she said emphatically.
Judith Lavoie has won four Webster awards and has been nominated for a National Newspaper Award and a Michener Award. Twitter @LavoieJudith.
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The truth about Dilbit

By Guest, in Ocean-related reporting, January 30, 2020
There’s little evidence to support the Joint Review Panel’s critical conclusion that diluted bitumen is “unlikely to sink.”
By Katherine Palmer Gordon (First published in the July/August 2014 edition of Focus Magazine)

Whether diluted bitumen will float on the surface or sink in the ocean, says chemical scientist Thomas King wryly, “is a simple question, but it trails a raft of complex issues.”
King, based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, is leading Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s research into the behaviour of diluted bitumen under various environmental conditions. “The trouble is,” he says, “that we have very limited information about dilbit’s properties in water. Very little research has been done so far.”
Yet, despite the lack of research, the National Energy Board’s Joint Review Panel (JRP) recommended approval of Enbridge’s Northern Gateway Pipeline project (subject to 209 conditions). And on June 17, the federal government did just that.
The Northern Gateway Pipeline, if completed, will carry 525,000 barrels of diluted bitumen (“dilbit”) daily from Alberta’s oil sands to Kitimat for export to Asia. Kinder Morgan Canada’s expanded Trans Mountain Pipeline is intended to carry another 890,000 barrels of dilbit daily to the Port of Vancouver, also for export. Together, according to Transport Canada, that represents an additional 600 oil-laden tankers a year traversing British Columbia’s coastal waters.
The ability to recover dilbit spilled by an errant tanker in these turbulent, rock-strewn waters hangs on the response to that so-called simple question: Does it sink or does it float?
The JRP seemed to think it had a simple answer, stating in its report: “The evidence does not indicate that dilbit is prone to sink in the marine environment.” Unfortunately, it would seem that the evidence is nowhere near that clear. If anything, the indications to date suggest that dilbit is prone to sink in the ocean.
Either way, two things are clear. We’re a long way yet from getting the information needed to answer the question definitively. And, until we have it, Canada’s ability to respond effectively to any dilbit spill will remain severely impoverished.
Canada has experience dealing with surface spills of conventional light oil and has developed techniques to deal with such spills, says King. But those techniques aren’t foolproof by any means. And when dilbit is spilled, he points out: “Standard recovery approaches can’t be used anyway.” Submerged dilbit is much harder to locate and remove. It may be completely irrecoverable in deep water.
There is one thing we do know for certain, he adds: “Damage to marine habitat and its living resources [from sinking bitumen] is expected to be much greater.”

The great sink/float debate
Conventional light oil typically floats on the surface of water—hence the oily sheen commonly seen around docks, for example. Undiluted bitumen, a form of a heavy, viscous crude oil, is considerably denser (which is why it is sometimes referred to as “heavy oil”). Bitumen deposits are often referred to as “tar sands” because of the thick, sticky texture of the oil.
Undiluted bitumen is too thick to transport by pipe. Various types of condensate or light synthetic crude oil are therefore used as diluents. The end product is referred to by the generic term “dilbit” or “synbit,” but there may be dozens of different varieties. No-one knows for sure how many currently exist, however, because the development of new chemical combinations is not only industrial proprietary property, but constantly changing as new research is undertaken.
Oil companies, including Enbridge, have typically taken the stance that dilbit floats and therefore doesn’t pose a greater risk to the environment than conventional oil.
Alberta-based Crude Quality Inc, for example, reported in 2011 to American authorities in relation to the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline that “under standard conditions,” dilbit will float on water. A 2012 report by Ottawa-based SL Ross Environmental Research Ltd drew a similar conclusion. A year later Dr Alan Maki, a witness for Enbridge at National Energy Board hearings on the Northern Gateway project, told the NEB even more strongly: “It is an immutable fact of physics that [dilbit] will float. It simply cannot sink in water.”
Independent scientists believe exactly the opposite, however. Dr Merv Fingas, an Edmonton-based environmental physicist, former head of Environment Canada’s oil spill R&D unit and the author of seven books about oil spills, told the Globe and Mail that Maki’s claim was simply “not true.” Fingas added: “Every time we did get a sample of any kind of bitumen in the lab and analyzed it, it always sank.”
Last year American environmental chemist Dr Jeffrey Short, who assessed the impacts of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill for the Alaska and US governments, looked into the susceptibility of dilbit to sinking on behalf of Kitkatla’s Gitxaala Nation. Short reviewed previous studies and then assessed that data against the typical rough, windy weather and cold temperature conditions in the Douglas Channel and Hecate Strait.
He concluded that those previous studies had failed to take into account these typical conditions. The studies were therefore unreliable at best, and completely invalid in some cases. He also pointed out that testing has taken place on only two dilbit products to date. There are many varieties of dilbit being produced, so to conclude that all dilbit floats based on those tests, stated Short, simply doesn’t add up. In fact, he posited the opposite: “Because…only a very few bitumen products have been evaluated experimentally, it is plausible that other products that might be shipped through the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline might be even more susceptible to sinking.”
Short also told The Tyee that he was “mystified” by the lack of available scientific information about dilbit given its importance in analyzing the environmental impact of the Northern Gateway proposal. “On a project of this significance,” he commented to writer Andrew Nikiforuk, “Canadians should go into it with their eyes open and not base your public policy on fantasies.”
Unfortunately, it seems independent Canadian experts able to speak knowledgeably about dilbit’s buoyancy are thin on the ground on the west coast. The University of Victoria, Simon Fraser University, and the University of British Columbia all failed to identify anyone on faculty with this kind of expertise. The provincial Ministry of Environment admitted that there is also no one within the BC government who can speak to the science.
Even Merv Fingas, who was so outspoken on the topic just last year, can apparently no longer speak about the issue. Fingas refused an interview request, writing: “Due to commitments on a particular study I am unable to do that.”

Unprepared for 600 tankers
On November 30 last year, the government released a multi-departmental report confirming what King is saying: “The potential range of behaviour, fate and treatment options for a possible marine spill of diluted bitumen products is not well understood. There is little information on the spill behaviour, fate, impacts and remediation options for diluted bitumen spills.” It did, however, note: “When fine sediments were suspended in the saltwater, high-energy wave action mixed the sediments with the diluted bitumen, causing the mixture to sink or be dispersed as floating tarballs.”
About the same time, Transport Canada released two reports reviewing Canada’s ship-source oil spill and response regime and assessing the risk of spills in Canadian waters south of the 60th Parallel. It made this disturbing admission: “Advances in research and development of response techniques are not captured in the Canadian [response] regime and there has also been a gradual weakening of the regime in other respects. Over time, knowledge and skills sets within Government have eroded…The Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development also identified a number of gaps, largely the result of insufficient data and information collection and analysis.”
In other words, despite the push to export oil, the government isn’t even close to being prepared for a conventional oil spill at sea, let alone a dilbit disaster. The reports contain further bad news for west coasters: One of the areas of highest probable risk right now for a crude oil spill over 10,000 tonnes is the area around the southern tip of Vancouver Island. “In the Strait of Juan de Fuca,” notes one report in unequivocal terms, “Canada should be prepared for a spill of crude oil.”
What happens when 600 additional oil-laden tankers a year start navigating British Columbia’s wild waters? It would seem neither Transport Canada—nor any other arm of the federal government—has any idea.
Only recently, as the result of heavy public pressure, is the issue being taken seriously by the feds. The November 30 report also announced the launch of the coordinated scientific research initiative in which Tom King is participating. In collaboration with DFO, Environment Canada and Natural Resources Canada have begun investigating what may happen in the event of a dilbit spill in Douglas Channel or Hecate Strait. The primary goal of the research initiative is to “improve the preparedness and response for marine spills” of dilbit so that responders can “make informed decisions on the appropriate oil spill response options and strategies.”
King’s team is looking not only into whether, how quickly and how far dilbit sinks in water, but also how the heavy oil behaves in different weather conditions; the impacts of salinity, rainfall, wind, sunlight, water temperature and sedimentation; and the environmental impacts of bitumen in different situations. They are also reviewing the effectiveness under water of existing conventional oil recovery techniques and chemical dispersants—all issues that must be understood before effective dilbit recovery methods can be developed.
The first phase of the research work isn’t expected to be completed before March 2016. Funding has been provided to continue development of ocean and dilbit behaviour models through to the end of 2018. It’s uncertain whether this is sufficient time for the work to be completed, however. In the meantime, the environmental impacts of a major bitumen spill are still only being guessed at.
We do know that three years after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, tar balls—sticky, solid pieces of oil that form when water combines with spilled oil and which can travel hundreds of kilometres—could still be found in the coastal marshes of Louisiana. In 2013, it was estimated that approximately 680 million litres of dilbit remained in Michigan’s Kalamazoo River after an Enbridge pipeline burst in 2010, spilling more than three times that amount into the Kalamazoo. Portions of the river still remain closed.

The JRP’s conclusions
Notwithstanding the scientific uncertainty, the JRP was dismissive of evidence suggesting that dilbit will sink, stating: “Although there is some uncertainty regarding the behavior of dilbit spilled in water, the Panel finds that…dilbit is unlikely to sink due to natural weathering processes alone, within the time frame in which initial, on-water response may occur, or in the absence of sediment or other particulate matter interactions. The Panel finds that a dilbit spill is not likely to sink as a continuous layer that coats the seabed or riverbed.”
The JRP also stated—in contradiction to the concerns expressed by Transport Canada about the negative impact of a lack of scientific information on response capability—“In the Panel's view, the weight of evidence indicates that disagreement among experts on the fate and behaviour of spilled oil is related to specific details that may not be significant from a spill response perspective.”
That’s despite the fact that the JRP also admitted it didn’t have enough information: “Additional research is required to answer outstanding questions related to the detailed behaviour and fate of dilbit. All parties with technical expertise on the topic were in agreement with this. The Panel finds that research on the behaviour and cleanup of heavy oils is required to inform detailed spill response planning and heavy oil spill response in marine and freshwater environments.”
Condition 167 of the JRP’s approval requires Enbridge to file much more detailed information on spill modelling and response with the National Energy Board at least three years prior to commencing operations. How that might change the JRP’s conclusions remains unclear.

Federal scientists’ investigations
Environment Canada, the lead federal agency investigating potential environmental impacts of spilled dilbit, could not “accommodate” a request to interview one of their scientists. Communications staff, however, confirmed: “In certain environmental conditions, dilbit can sink in saltwater environments. In general, how combinations of factors might cause oil to sink is not well known currently. Further research is needed.”
DFO did permit Tom King and another of its senior scientists, Sidney-based Dr Charles Hannah, to speak about the latest state of the science on this subject. In Halifax, Tom King has been conducting experiments in flume tanks with two variations of dilbit. “There are several things that are important to understand,” he explains. “Dilbit will float at first, because it is less dense than water. However, lighter diluent material will start to evaporate. You can smell it—it’s the kind of smell you get at a gas station.” Some of the oil will start to dissolve. What remains will be subject to “weathering”—the effects of rain, temperature, sunlight, turbulence, wind, and microbes in the water.
“Our tests, which mimic what will happen in a real world environment, indicate that by the sixth day of natural weathering, bitumen will sink.” Other factors may cause it to sink more rapidly. “If it spills in freshwater, bitumen will sink faster because freshwater is less dense than brackish (partly salty) or ocean water. In the Kalamazoo River, parts of the oil sank within four days.”
Heavy seas will also make bitumen sink faster. So will the presence of sediment in the water. Many sediment-laden glacial rivers empty into Douglas Channel: “We’re looking at that right now and the impact when bitumen combines with sediment suspended in water,” says King.
Where the spill occurs is also critical. In deep water, the oil won’t necessarily sink to the bottom but may instead hit a point of neutral buoyancy where it will remain suspended. In shallower waters, oil will likely coat the ocean floor or riverbed. As we’ve learned from the Kalamazoo River experience, it may be just as difficult to remove in that situation as if it were floating freely in sub-marine waters.
The next step, King continues, is to use the data being generated by his lab to develop ocean models predicting what will happen in a range of different circumstances. That’s where Charles Hannah comes in.
“What we’re doing here at DFO in Sidney,” says Hannah, “is collecting ocean observations on the north coast and building an ocean circulation model that factors in what happens to water movement based on wind, tides, current, weather conditions and so on. That will inform the development by Environment Canada of different oil spill scenarios and remediation methods to deal with different situations. ”
In Hecate Strait and the Douglas Channel, says Hannah, ocean conditions vary widely from location to season. “At Kitimat, for example, when the rivers are in full flood there is more freshwater entering the Channel. So at some times of year bitumen might sink faster, or have different neutral buoyancy zones.”
The problem for the modellers is the same as the one King and other researchers face: a lack of information. Asked what other factors he is taking into account in developing ocean models specific to the north coast, for example, Hannah replied: “We just don’t know yet.”
He cites Kitimat again as an example. “It’s the rainfall capital of the world, but what weathering impact does rain have on bitumen? The knowledge may be out there but we don't have it yet. We do know a lot about wave impacts, but the wave environment varies enormously in that area. We need to start to study that too, and its importance. ”

Sailing into dangerous waters
Will dilbit-laden tankers be plying Hecate Strait—one of the most dangerous bodies of water in the world (waves can reach 26 metres)—or indeed Juan de Fuca Strait, already identified as high risk for an oil spill—before all these questions have been answered?
Asked to confirm whether current spill response capacity still remains insufficient, Transport Canada replied instead: “As part of new measures for our World Class Tanker Safety System announced on May 13, 2014, the federal government will be implementing Area Response Planning starting in four local areas. Under Area Response Planning, response plans will be tailored to reflect local conditions such as geography, environmental sensitivities, and vessel traffic.”
It also admitted again that it doesn’t yet have the information it needs: “As well, the Government will be undertaking additional research and development on the behaviour of petroleum products and a range of response measures to quickly and effectively respond to and clean up a marine oil spill, should one occur.” Translation: No, as things stand, we aren’t ready for a spill.
Bitumen certainly doesn’t sink if it isn’t permitted to spill in the ocean in the first place, but there appears to be no appetite on the part of the federal government to consider whether dilbit-laden tankers should be allowed in those tempestuous waters in the first place, given the associated risks. Nor, given its acceptance of the JRP’s recommendation to approve the Northern Gateway project, does it seem concerned about the discrepancies between the JRP’s conclusions and the views of several of its own departments.
That may change as a plethora of lawsuits challenging the JRP’s findings starts hitting the courts. Joining several other environment groups and dozens of First Nations in attacking the decision, the BC Federation of Naturalists launched its suit within hours of the federal government’s decision. The view expressed by President Kees Visser is typical of the opposition being expressed: “We cannot stand by and allow Cabinet to approve this ill-conceived project on the basis of a JRP report that is so flawed and incomplete.”
Even if unsuccessful, the litigation may tie up the process long enough for the vital missing research to be completed and for response capability to be improved.
Whether that will be enough is another outstanding question. In the meantime, British Columbians will have to hope that question will only ever have to be answered in theory.
Katherine Palmer Gordon is the author of six books of non-fiction, including several BC Bestsellers and a Haig-Brown prize-winner.
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Cohen ignored

By Guest, in Ocean-related reporting, January 30, 2020
Justice Bruce Cohen demanded urgent government action to save wild salmon. Instead, the situation has deteriorated.
By Katherine Palmer Gordon (First published in the December 2013 edition of Focus Magazine)
On October 31 last year, there was cheering in the streets when the Cohen Commission released its final report. Commissioner Bruce Cohen, who had been tasked with investigating the rapidly declining Fraser River sockeye salmon run, made no less than 75 recommendations for immediate action to save the wild fish, including taking strong measures against the impacts of net-pen Atlantic salmon farms. He also set deadlines for compliance that he expected the federal government to meet.
Wild salmon advocates were overjoyed; the tide seemed to have turned in their favour at long last. Craig Orr, executive director of Vancouver-based Watershed Watch, was highly optimistic about the Cohen report, telling Focus in last December’s issue that this time, things would be different: “It’s a very powerful report,” Orr exclaimed enthusiastically. “It captures information that might never have seen the light of day otherwise. That’s permanently on the record now.”
A year later, however, Orr’s enthusiasm has faded into frustration: “It’s still a very important report,” he insists, “but the lack of commitment by government to it is infuriating. I don’t know if the message isn’t getting through to government, or they are just ignoring it. There has been no meaningful action taken to implement any of the recommendations in the report—none.”
Apart from his recommendations, Cohen also skewered Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) in his report for mismanagement, conflicts of interest, and failure to carry out its mandate to protect wild fish and their habitat. But there is nothing to indicate that DFO’s leadership took that as a clarion call to take corrective action. If anything, what DFO has been doing suggests the opposite.
Immediately after its release the report vanished into DFO’s internal system, and hasn’t been seen since. In the meantime, 14 of Cohen’s recommendations with deadlines attached to them have passed, including the publication by March 2013 of an implementation plan for DFO’s 2005 Wild Salmon Policy. Cohen applauded the policy, stating that it contains vital steps for protecting the wild fish. But he also questioned why it hadn’t been implemented seven years later. Thirteen months later, there is still no sign of one. “How long does it take to draw up an implementation plan?” wonders Orr.
Another March deadline called for the development of revised criteria for siting of fish farms so as to protect wild salmon on important migratory routes. Any farms not meeting the new criteria were to be shut down immediately. That too hasn’t happened: “I’m not aware that any such criteria have even been considered. These deadlines appear to be completely meaningless to government,” concludes Orr.
DFO Minister Gail Shea refused all media interviews on the report’s first anniversary on October 31, issuing a short written statement instead: “Our Government has long recognized the importance of protecting sockeye salmon in the Fraser River…we are responding to Justice Cohen’s recommendations not by producing another written document but by taking concrete actions that make a real difference.”
But a difference to whom? Cohen strongly criticized the conflict of interest between DFO’s duty to protect wild fish and its mandate to promote fish farming, and recommended separating the two. That hasn’t been done either, and it looks like it won’t, if Shea’s statement is anything to go by. Indeed, the contents of the statement illustrate perfectly why Cohen was critical of the conflict, in terms that would be laughable if they didn’t so blatantly favour farmed fish at the expense of wild salmon.
Shea hasextended a moratorium on aquaculture development in the Discovery Islands, an area in which migrating wild salmon are particularly vulnerable to diseases transmitted from farmed fish. But she also omitted to mention that seven existing net-pen operations in that area are free to continue their activities unabated.
She also proudly announced a $57.5 million commitment—not to wild salmon environmental protection, but to the aquaculture industry, to “help bolster environmental protection” in that sector. By contrast recreational fisheries received a paltry $1.8 million for wild fish conservation, and the Pacific Salmon Foundation just $1 million a year.
Shea did assert that the government invests more than $65 million annually in Pacific salmon, of which about $20 million is directly related to Fraser River sockeye. But let’s just have a quick look at those figures in context. How much money is actually being spent on the fish remains far from clear, and she didn’t elaborate. The 2013 federal government budget isn’t precise enough to identify whether the sums quoted are accurate, nor on what that money is spent: It’s quite likely that a large portion of it is going to bureaucratic salaries and other DFO overhead.
The budget does however list DFO’s strategic priorities, in this order: “economically prosperous” maritime sectors and fisheries take precedence over “sustainable aquatic ecosystems.” It’s a priority that’s reflected in the dollar figures as well. DFO’s total budget for 2013/2014 is $1.67 billion. Boosting economics gets $421.5 million; sustainable ecosystems, a little more than half of that at just $238.7 million.
The report card on the provincial government reads slightly better, at least in terms of habitat management. Tagged in eight of Cohen’s recommendations, BC accepted them in principle five months later.
Urged to complete a review of the provincial Water Actwith the goal of regulating issues that affect Fraser River sockeye, it released the proposed new legislation in October 2013 and plans to enact the modernized legislation (to be renamed the Water Sustainability Act) in 2014. If passed, development decisions and groundwater use will be constrained in future by potential impacts on stream health and water quality. The provincial government has also been putting pressure on local governments to complete and enforce riparian protection regulation within their boundaries, as recommended by Cohen.
So far, so good. However, things fall down again when it comes to the fish farm industry. While it committed in March this year not to issue any new tenure agreements for net-pen fish farms in the Discovery Islands, at the same time the government stated it remained fully committed to a “sustainable” aquaculture industry. They took that position into the May election (as did the BCNDP) and neither party has changed its position since.
In the meantime, veteran wild fish campaigner Alexandra Morton has continued her battle against fish farms and associated diseases killing our wild fish. A 2013 online documentary called Salmon Confidential by independent producer Twyla Roscovich (reviewed in the May issue of Focus) made it damningly clear not only that deadly diseases are invading our waters, but that DFO, in collusion with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), is conspiring to hide that fact from consumers.
Despite large numbers of BC fish (both wild and farmed) testing positive for a variety of diseases, CFIA continues to deny that is the case. In fact—apparently determined to undermine the credibility of Morton’s results at any cost—CFIA went as far as orchestrating the removal in July this year of international credentials from the Prince Edward Island laboratory that Morton had been using to test her samples.
Laboratory director Dr Fred Kibenge had reported positive results for infectious salmon anemia virus in several of Morton’s samples, and told the Cohen Commission so. The CFIA immediately leapt into action, pushing for audits of his work. “What they are doing is essentially punishing me for having testified,” Kibenge told theGlobe and Mailnewspaper. “They’re trying to suppress my findings.”
They haven’t succeeded; at least, not yet. Morton continues to publicize her work, and in July a report co-authored by Morton with Kibenge and others was published in Virology Journal, a peer-reviewed scientific journal published in London, England. The report proves that piscine reovirus is present in BC waters, and that it came from Norway, the source of most of the Atlantic salmon produced in local fish farms.
We are also faced with some other hard facts. The 2013 Fraser River run was as disastrous as ever. Rising water temperatures, almost certainly attributable to the accumulated impacts of climate change, saw 70 percent of the fish dying before reaching the spawning grounds. Fishing for all salmon species in the river was banned completely in mid-August in a desperate attempt to allow the few fish coming upriver to spawn. The same thing happened on the Skeena River.
So what now? “We’ve polled British Columbians,” says Orr, “and the overwhelming response is strong support for protecting wild salmon, but it’s hard for people to figure out how to translate that into hard action.”
Morton regularly begs for donations to help support paying the enormous laboratory bills that she faces. She doesn’t receive anywhere close enough to cover them. Orr says Watershed Watch has circulated a petition demanding action on the Cohen report, but by mid-November it had only attracted a few hundred signatures. Orr postulates, “People feel disenfranchised, and powerless against our government. They feel government simply ignores them, so they don’t even try anymore.”
We’ll have only ourselves to blame if a generation from now the Cohen Commission report lies forgotten in a dusty archive and there are no wild salmon left in BC for us to try and save.
Katherine Palmer Gordon is the author of six books of non-fiction, including several BC Bestsellers and a Haig-Brown prize-winner. Her most recent book, We Are Born with the Songs Inside Us: Lives and Stories of First Nations People in British Columbia, has just been released by Harbour Publishing.
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Rolling the dice on the Salish Sea

By Guest, in Ocean-related reporting, January 30, 2020
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Fighting for the Salish Sea

By Guest, in Ocean-related reporting, January 30, 2020
With 18 large port expansion projects around the Salish Sea, how’s an ecosystem to survive the influx of tanker traffic?
By Briony Penn (This story was first published in the May-June 2016 edition of Focus Magazine)

SALTSPRING ISLAND IS SMACK DAB IN THE CENTRE of the Salish Sea. On the clearest spring day, from our highest peaks, I can see the tip of Mount Waddington at the northernmost edge and Mount Rainier at the southernmost edge of the watershed. In between these two monarchs of mountains is a drainage basin of 110,000 square kilometres.
If I could swim among the hundreds of islands and the 18,000 square kilometres of water, I could catch a glimpse of over 100 different species of bird and 200 species of fish, 20 species of marine mammal and 3000 invertebrates—orcas to nudibranchs.
From my viewpoint in the centre of this particular universe, I can also see tankers in every direction. They are the latest big problem affecting the Salish Sea. Not just oil tankers but all tankers—whether they are carrying coal, LNG, grain, televisions or toxic chemicals.
Federal and provincial agencies on both sides of the border have been missing in action during the last decade on the environmental front. So it isn’t surprising that a transboundary grass roots citizen action has coalesced to take the matter to the highest maritime authority—the International Maritime Organization—which at the very least has the ability to bring all the players to the table.
The increase in tanker traffic is an issue that has snuck up on residents—if you can call the approach of a 120,000-tonne Aframax or a 300-metre Capesize bulk carrier vessel “sneaking up.” One can feel the passage of a supertanker as the vibrations of its huge engines travel up the shore and rattle windows. If you’re lucky, they just pass by, but now the likelihood is they’ll park and idle spewing sulphurous exhaust. At times I have counted 15 tankers at anchor off one shore.
Recent protests of citizens’ groups like the Gabriolans Against Freighter Anchorages to proposed parking lots of tankers off their shores, or the Saanich Nations protests around a proposed Malahat First Nation LNG plant, or My Sea to Sky protests against Squamish LNG, are just a few examples of the rising concern and frustrations. And it shows no signs of abating with 18 large port expansion projects proposed in the Salish Sea. A 43 percent increase of large, commercial marine vessel traffic is predicted, growing the current 12,000 tankers a year to closer to 18,000.
And the size of the tankers themselves is also growing. In 2017, the Panama Canal Expansion Project will enable even larger tankers to reach our shores. The cumulative effects are, as usual, the real killer and no agency has been tasked with tackling that problem.
Stephanie Buffum, executive director of Friends of San Juan, who is spearheading the fight from the US side, points to the science that suggests that this ecosystem, especially species at risk like the southern resident killer whales or Chinook salmon populations, “can’t take one more hit” whether it is an oil spill, another decline in food or more noise pollution.
On the Canadian side, one of the supporting groups is Raincoast Conservation Foundation. Chris Genovali of Raincoast states that “what we can safely say is that we need more salmon and less tankers” if the Salish Sea as a functioning ecosystem is going to survive. As an indicator of how serious the situation is, last month the US Northwest Fisheries Commission, which oversees all tribal fishing, recommended wholesale closures of salmon and herring fishing in the Salish Sea to give populations a better chance to recover.
The problem is, of course, that the humans living along the sprawling southern perimeter of the bowl from Tacoma to Squamish and Victoria to Campbell River are at seven million and rising. Besides not dealing with sprawl, we’ve been over fishing, over logging, over dumping toxic chemicals, and now over tankering.
How do the tankers rate as priorities? Is anyone analyzing the potential cumulative impacts of all these proposed terminal expansion projects? These include, annually, 160 more coal tanker transits proposed for Fraser Surrey terminal, 80 more LNG tankers out of Woodfibre in Squamish, and 520 transits of container ships out of new facilities in Delta (Roberts Bank 2).
The 12 expansions in Vancouver alone include more grain tankers from Viterra, the company which handles most of Western Canada’s grain; more animal rendering/oil disposal tankers from West Coast Reduction; more container ships from Centerm; and, if Kinder Morgan’s plans are approved, a tripling of oil tankers out of its Westridge terminal.
On the US side, just from the Puget Sound area, there’s more coal to move from Bellingham (an estimated 974 tankers-worth per year), more petrochemicals to move from the refinery in Anacortes (120), and more containers to move in and out of Seattle and Tacoma (564). Which straw will break the camel’s back?
The desert metaphor isn’t too far-fetched even for the wet West Coast. These port projects are all directed by global corporate tenants. They are the stakeholders in the game. Local governments, First Nations and concerned citizens have been struggling to be heard on an other than piece-meal basis for over a decade.
In 2014, the US Friends of San Juan realized they couldn’t “fight every battle” and started to explore a “premier global tool that a community can adopt to protect a uniquely important marine ecosystem from the threats posed to it by international shipping.”
The international designation, called a Particularly Sensitive Sea Area (PSSA), only regulates large international vessels, nothing small, but that gives it a certain paradoxical nimbleness. The PSSA doesn’t have the ability to cap traffic but is able to influence routing, areas to be avoided, anchorages, traffic separation schemes, inshore traffic zones and prohibition of discharge. It is also a designation that can be nominated by citizens. As Buffum notes “This is truly a grass roots initiative because so many people who are at the centre of the Salish Sea have been dissatisfied with the level of review at the rise of tanker traffic. There hasn’t been enough energy at the federal, state or provincial level so that is why, as citizens, we moved forward to take our concerns to the International Marine Organization.”
US groups, and now Canadian groups like Raincoast and Georgia Strait Alliance, are following the lead of citizens from 17 PSSAs around the world, including the Galapagos, the Canary Islands, Great Barrier Reef, Western European Waters, and Baltic Sea. The first good news is that once designated it could provide the structure to have the conversation with all the agencies and industry that should be at the table. The second good news is that the proof of the concept is in the initial support. The feasibility study was completed by Buffum’s group in 2014, and the region passed all the criteria for a PSSA. Then they drafted the nomination, which passed the legal review. They have got provisional nods for the concept in the US at all levels, including the federal (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—NOAA), state, tribal and industry.
The group is now soliciting feedback and endorsements for the nomination from the Canadian equivalent groups and agencies like DFO, Coast Guard, Ministry of Environment, Port of Vancouver, local governments and ENGOs, which is why Buffum met with local Canadian groups in April to ask them to shop the idea to their agencies like they have down south. She’s looking for endorsements from all sectors. Once the protective measures—such as routes and no-go areas—are pinned down in workshops, the final PSSA nomination will be submitted to the International Marine Organization. It typically takes a year to review and make a decision.
According to Genovali, it is an important piece of the puzzle and the least we should be doing, while still moving quickly ahead with the National Marine Conservation Area and upholding the national recovery plan for southern resident Orca, which has been severely neglected. The UNESCO Man and the Biosphere reserve proposal has also been resurrected by various groups and is getting traction in local governments. First Nations on both sides of the boundary are in conversation about a declaration of sacred waters.
In addition, the Shaw Discovery Centre of the Salish Sea, the Cattle Point Foundation, and, over in Bellingham, the new Institute of the Salish Sea at Western University, are all helping to educate us about the nature and culture of the Salish Sea.
As Buffum notes, the PSSA is just one small but important international designation which she hopes will strengthen the myriad of efforts being made at grass roots levels to save the Salish Sea.
Briony Penn has been living near and writing about the Salish Sea pretty much all of her life. She is the author of the new book, The Real Thing: The Natural History of Ian McTaggart Cowan.
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Kinder Morgan's fairy tale

By Guest, in Ocean-related reporting, January 30, 2020
The Houston-based pipeline company says it’s a good corporate citizen but its record in Canada doesn’t support that claim.

by Judith Lavoie (This story was first published in Focus Magazine in January, 2015.)

THE COMPLEXITIES OF CORPORATE TAX LAW rarely make compelling reading, but Robyn Allan believes British Columbians will be fascinated and outraged if they take a close look at her analysis of how Kinder Morgan is sucking money out of Canada and paying minimal taxes.
Allan is a thorn in the corporate paw of Kinder Morgan, which wants to twin the Trans Mountain pipeline and triple the flow of bitumen from Alberta’s oil sands to Burnaby. While opposition to the planned pipeline has been strong, what sets Allan apart is a background that makes it tough for critics to discount her in-depth financial investigations.
The independent economist is a former president and CEO of the Insurance Corporation of BC and her many private and public sector executive positions have included a stint as senior economist for BC Central Credit Union and financial vice-president of Parklane Ventures Ltd.
The path tracing how Kinder Morgan avoids paying Canadian taxes is labyrinthine, but the nub is that Houston-based Kinder Morgan was set up in the US as a Master Limited Partnership, an entity that does not exist in Canada.
“It’s a different kind of company…it’s traded publicly on the stock exchange and you could buy a unit and then have the right to receive income from its activities, including the Trans Mountain pipeline,” Allan said in an interview.
Instead of creating net income, a Master Limited Partnership creates cash flow, which is distributed to unit holders and, as a bonus, avoids most US taxes because it derives its income from the development and transportation of minerals or natural resources.
Kinder Morgan consolidated its tax position in August by restructuring, something that the company announced to investor analysts in Houston would “realize over 20 billion dollars in cash tax savings over the next 14 years.”
Allan believes Kinder Morgan’s corporate culture of minimizing taxes spills over into the company’s Canadian dealings and she discovered from poring over documents that, despite the company’s profits and sizeable Canadian interests, Trans Mountain has paid an average of only $1.5 million annually over the last five years in federal and provincial taxes and received Canadian tax refunds in 2009 and 2011.
For example, Trans Mountain generated $167 million in distributable cash flow in 2013, but received a Canadian tax refund of $4.2 million, Kinder Morgan Canada president Ian Anderson told analysts in Houston.
Allan points out that represents a siphoning off of resources from the Canadian economy to be given to US shareholders. “And that flies in the face of the fairy tale they want to tell us about how much they contribute to the economy,” she says. “They suck money out, which is why I asked Revenue Canada for an audit. I have serious concerns that this tax planning they are engaged in may not be appropriate under the law or in the spirit of the law…I have a feeling they are making decisions on avoiding taxes,”
Calls from Focus to Trans Mountain were referred to Kinder Morgan Canada external relations, but there was no response before our deadline.
Meanwhile, Allan has not heard whether Canada Revenue Agency will agree to conduct an audit and CRA spokeswoman Colette Turgeon said in an emailed response to Focus’ questions that confidentiality provisions of the Income Tax Act prevent the CRA from confirming if an audit is planned or ongoing. Turcotte noted that individual cases relating to Master Limited partnerships cannot be discussed, but Canadian legislation has a basic requirement of a 25 percent withholding tax on certain payments to non-residents. “A tax treaty may reduce the amount, but not to zero.”
The oil and gas sector is considered one of Canada’s significant industry sectors, Turgeon wrote. “To effectively manage the tax-related risks of the sector, the CRA has established an Oil and Gas Industry Coordinating Office, where industry specialists provide technical advice to oil and gas specialized auditors.”
Corporations can claim federal and provincial tax credits if they meet the criteria, which helps make Canada an increasingly attractive place to do business, Turgeon said. “Corporate tax credits are part of this system.”
Kinder Morgan, with an enterprise value of more than $100 billion, has a history linked to Enron Corp, best known for its massive accounting fraud and subsequent bankruptcy. Founder and CEO Richard Kinder is a former Enron president, who left in 1996 after he was passed over for the position of CEO—a job handed to Jeffrey Skilling, who is now serving a 24-year prison sentence after being convicted in 2006 of multiple federal felony charges related to Enron’s financial collapse.
Kinder Morgan was formed in 1997 when Kinder and William Morgan acquired Enron Liquids Pipeline for $40 million. The company, relying heavily on Master Limited Partnerships, grew rapidly and, through numerous partnerships and subsidiaries, now owns or operates 180 terminals and about 83,000 kilometres of pipelines, including more than 4000 kilometres in Canada.
Kinder takes a salary of only $1 a year, but, according to financial journals, collected $380 million in dividends from his companies in 2013.
Allan believes it is common for energy companies that want to build pipelines or terminals to overestimate the amount of taxes they will be contributing to the local economy, but she is convinced Kinder Morgan is taking the exaggeration to levels that amount to misinforming Canadians.
“Here’s what concerns me most, as an intervener at the [National Energy Board] hearings, that they say they are great contributors to the fiscal purse when the exact opposite is true. It’s most troubling,” she said. “It doesn’t make sense to me whatsoever that a company that pays that kind of benefits to US shareholders can have such a minimal [tax] obligation in Canada.”
The Province failed to ask economic questions at the hearings and the lack of information was exacerbated by the National Energy Board, which, operating under new rules, refused to order Kinder Morgan to answer Allan’s economic questions.
“Kinder Morgan said they were irrelevant and the board said it agreed with Kinder Morgan. I was shocked,” said Allan, who then went to other sources to obtain information about the company’s finances and tax plans.
“It shows the absurdity of the National Energy Board process. The public thinks the NEB is looking at something and they’re not,” said Allan. She believes policy changes brought in by the Harper government, including time restrictions, mean the NEB process favours companies rather than a fair and balanced review.
Allan worries that, especially with the backdrop of arrests of pipeline opponents on Burnaby Mountain, once people discover they are being given misleading information about financial benefits, they will start to distrust the system and that could undermine civil society.
One of those who believe the public trust has already been undermined is Nathalie Chambers of Madrona Farm in Saanich, whose activism is usually centred on protecting farmland and the Agricultural Land Reserve.
Chambers, who was among those demonstrating on Burnaby Mountain, said she has come to believe that energy and farmland issues are linked. “Everywhere I turn, big oil is coming up. The ALR is being dismantled because the regulations are getting in the way of oil and gas development,” she explained.
Chambers feels that with 2015 being a federal election year it is extraordinarily important that Canadians educate themselves about how the Harper government is supporting tar sands development and the major energy companies while muzzling scientists.
“We need political reform. We need to be able to trust the science and we need to be able to finance [opposition]. We are up against the deepest, deepest pockets,”said Chambers.
Adding to public suspicion of Kinder Morgan is the company’s history of accidents and critics have accused the company of focusing on increasing dividends for shareholders rather than spending resources on pipeline maintenance.
Burnaby Mayor Derrick Corrigan, an implacable opponent of the pipeline twinning, told Vancouver council last year that the company’s reaction to a 2007 spill that damaged 50 houses and dumped 250,000 litres of crude oil into Burrard Inlet convinced him that Kinder Morgan is not a good partner. “They underestimate risks, they constantly trivialize risks, they continually talk about the remoteness of odds in those risks and then they work to limit their own liability,” Corrigan told council. “If you look at research on them, Kinder Morgan has a history of pipeline accidents all over North America.”
In addition to the 2007 pipeline rupture, Kinder Morgan has seen several smaller spills in BC. In June 2013 a small spill near Kingsvale forced a shutdown of the Trans Mountain pipeline; a 2012 spill at the Sumas terminal in Abbotsford infuriated residents, although the company said the 110,000 litre spill was completely contained; and in 2009 crude oil spilled from a tank at Kinder Morgan’s Burnaby Mountain terminal.
For those who oppose the Trans-Mountain twinning, a temporary respite may come with dropping oil prices, which is forcing energy companies to look carefully at expensive capital projects.
But Allan wants Canadians to take a more philosophical view and question why they have to expend energy fighting the company.
“It’s bad economic strategy, so we should not have to waste time and effort asking about what it will do to the environment. The pipeline expansion will not bring financial or economic benefits to Canada,” she said emphatically.
Judith Lavoie has won four Webster awards and has been nominated for a National Newspaper Award and a Michener Award. Twitter @LavoieJudith.
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A "novel" virus

By Guest, in Ocean-related reporting, January 30, 2020
The latest deadly threat to BC’s wild salmon
by Ray Grigg (First published in the September 2013 edition of Focus Magazine)

If the research recommendations of the Cohen Commission Report are to be implemented, then the study of pathogens emanating from net-pen salmon farms would be a useful place to begin. Indeed, Justice Cohen is quite explicit that rigorous testing be undertaken on “the hypothesis that diseases are transmitted from farmed salmon” to wild species.
This is a fertile area for study. For example, Justice Cohen learned during a special reconvening of his Commission in December 2011, that infectious salmon anemia (ISAv), is a lethal viral infection in wild salmon linked to the arrival of salmon farms to BC’s West Coast. Had he chosen to reconvene again four months later at the urging of Alexandra Morton, he would also have learned of another debilitating affliction likely brought to the West Coast by the salmon farming industry. A piscine reovirus (PRV), known to cause heart and skeletal muscle inflammation (HSMI), can so weaken wild salmon that they may be unable to swim the oceans or migrate to their spawning grounds. Although Justice Cohen didn’t receive evidence on PRV-HSMI, he already knew enough from his hearings to warn that “devastating disease could sweep through wild [salmon] populations…”
Just as Justice Cohen anticipated in his Report, the presence of PRV-HSMI in BC’s wild salmon was not revealed by the provincial government or the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), the two agencies that are supposed to be monitoring the condition of marine health. Once again disclosure of PRV-HSMI came from Morton.
The credibility of her April 2012, findings were supported by Professor Rick Routledge, a Simon Fraser University fish population statistician, whose research team found the piscine reovirus in 13 of 15 Cultus Lake cutthroat trout, a salmonid species. Such a virus might explain the mysterious collapse of Cultus Lake salmon runs.
Morton also discovered PRV-HSMI when she purchased 45 BC-grown farmed Atlantic salmon from supermarkets in Vancouver and Victoria during February 2012, and sent samples to PEI’s Atlantic Veterinary Lab for testing. Of the 45 samples, 44 tested positive for the piscine reovirus known to cause HSMI. The sequenced profile of the virus indicated it was 99 percent identical to the one found in Norwegian farmed salmon. If this reovirus is in BC farmed salmon in such high proportions, it is almost certainly in the wild salmon that swim past the farms on their migration routes, providing the most likely explanation for how the virus got to Cultus Lake cutthroat.
The implications for all salmonids are significant. As Morton explains, “The obvious potential that piscine reovirus is killing Fraser sockeye by weakening their hearts, rendering them less capable of fighting their way through white water rapids like Hell’s Gate, was never raised at the [Cohen Commission] Inquiry, despite the Province of BC apparently knowing it was common in salmon farms.”
As Morton contends, this information about PRV-HSMI is vital if we are to explain why “over 90 percent of the Fraser sockeye die as they are swimming upstream.”
If we are to understand how piscine reovirus has been able to infect salmon, we need to understand the genetic ingenuity of viruses.
Many of our common human diseases, for example, have come to us from farmed animals through the “horizontal transfer” of novel genetic material that occurs in the microbial world of bacteria and viruses. Thanks to globalization and industrial agriculture, at least 30 new diseases have occurred since 1970, the most obvious being the variants of swine and bird flu.
The crowded conditions in poultry or salmon farms provide the perfect combination of density and stress that allows viruses to exchange genetic material with each other. The result can increase their virulence, allow them to infect a new species, or even create an entirely novel version of themselves—in taxonomy, a new genus.
Which brings us to salmon and viruses.
In 1999, fish in a salmon farm in Norway began to exhibit strange symptoms. Pathologists found they were infected with a new disease later identified as heart and skeletal muscle inflammation (HSMI). Symptoms included a pale and soft heart muscle, yellowish liver, swollen spleen and other swellings. Infection rates in pens were as high as 20 percent, with morbidity close to 100 percent.
HSMI was extremely infectious, soon spreading to 417 other salmon farms in Norway, then to facilities in the United Kingdom. Indeed, HSMI was discovered to be so infectious that it threatened wild fish that came in contact with the farms or with infected fish that escaped from them. According to Brandon Keim, writing in Wired Science in 2010, “Infected fish are physically stunted and their muscles are so weakened that they have trouble swimming or even pumping blood.”
Scientists Gustavo Palacios, W. Ian Lipkin, et al, writing in the journal PLOS One, cite evidence “that HSMI is associated with infection with piscine reovirus,” presumably the way AIDS is associated with HIV—one is a full-blown version of the other. The article claims that “PRV is a novel reovirus identified by unbiased high throughput DNA sequencing,” that “PRV is the causative agent for HSMI,” and that “measures must be taken to control PRV not only because it threatens domestic salmon production but also due to the potential for transmission to wild salmon populations.”
The clue to the origin and virulence of the PRV/HSMI virus and disease comes from the PLOS One article and the word “novel”.
Two general kinds of the family of “Reoviridae” virus occur in the fauna community. One is an orthoreovirus, which includes both a mammalian and an avian strain. The other is an aquareovirus which is exclusive to aquatic animals. An analysis of the genetic material of the piscine reovirus identifies it as distinctly different from the two general groups, but situates it exactly between them, embodying half the attributes of the avian orthoreovirus and half the attributes of the aquareovirus.
In other words, PRV is a new genus, designated GU994015 PRV, that has combined the traits of a bird virus and an aquatic virus—the first such amalgamation that has occurred since the divergence of the virus about 50 million years ago (Journal of General Virology, Aug 2002, and PubMed, May, 2013). This probably explains why it is so infectious.
But how did it become so “novel”?
Well, strange things can happen when salmon eat chickens. The salmon farming industry has routinely been adding chicken wastes to its salmon feed. Such a diet is unprecedented and bizarre in nature, a violation of the biological order that has occurred over millions of years of evolutionary history. Feeding chickens to salmon creates the perfect conditions for viruses to transfer genetic material horizontally from species to species. This might explain how the aquareovirus was able to exchange useful DNA with the avian orthoreovirus to develop a new virulent version of itself to infect fish, manifesting as the novel piscine reovirus and then with the clinical symptoms of HSMI.
When Dr Kristy Miller was giving evidence at the reconvened hearings of the Cohen Commission in December 2011, she did mention that preliminary indications—made independently by her in defiance of DFO instructions to cease investigations—identified piscine reovirus in Chinook salmon in a farm in Clayoquot Sound and in some Fraser River sockeye. Since the focus at the time was on infectious salmon anaemia (ISAv), the evidence of PRV-HSMI seemed to pass as merely incidental information.
But it wasn’t incidental information. It was and is extremely relevant, even though the presence of PRV doesn’t technically mean the clinical symptoms of HSMI are present. Reports from the provincial veterinarian pathologist lab as early as 2008 showed “congestion and hemorrhage in the stratum compactum of the heart” in farmed salmon, symptoms consistent with PRV-HSMI. And both the pathologist and the industry were aware of 75 percent infection rates of PRV in farmed salmon in 2010. Presumably this information was not conveyed to the Cohen Commission because the pathologist and industry did not think the link between PRV and HSMI was relevant, so did not consider the reovirus to be a health concern to wild salmon.
However, as Morton has pointed out in her website (and the recent film, Salmon Confidential), this opinion is contradicted by a joint scientific publication by the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University and by Norwegian government scientists who warn, “It is urgent that measures be taken to control PRV not only because it threatens domestic salmon production but also due to potential for transmission to wild salmon populations.”
Justice Cohen seemed to view such warnings as real and justified, and “that salmon farms along the sockeye migration route have the potential to introduce exotic diseases and to exacerbate endemic diseases…I therefore conclude that the potential harm posed to Fraser River sockeye salmon from salmon farms is serious or irreversible”—a damning finding considering that, in his terminology, “Fraser River sockeye” usually means “all wild salmon.”

Ray Grigg has been writing a weekly environmental newspaper column, Shades of Green, for over ten years, and is the author of seven books on Eastern philosophy. He lives on Quadra Island, BC.
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Fishing for Answers

By Guest, in Ocean-related reporting, January 30, 2020
As many as 11 million sockeye salmon were expected to return to the Fraser River and its tributaries this fall but actual returns may number in the thousands. Critics of DFO say federal fisheries couldn't manage a home aquarium. DFO says they're being treated unfairly.

By Katherine Gordon (This story was originally published in the November 2009 edition of Focus Magazine)

“Wild salmon stocks in crisis” is a depressingly familiar headline in BC coastal communities. This year was no exception, with millions of sockeye vanishing from anticipated Fraser River runs. The federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) could take action to help protect our iconic west coast fish from extinction. But DFO appears instead to be a discouraging part of the problem.
“DFO is an agency that couldn’t manage a home aquarium,” says former DFO communications officer Alex Rose.
Now a journalist in Vancouver, Rose is not alone in his criticism of his former employer. There is a damning consensus among those involved with BC’s wild salmon fishery that DFO mismanagement is exacerbating the rapid decline of wild salmon numbers in our waters.
“DFO has been doing an abysmal job of fisheries management,” says commercial fisheries advocate Phil Eidsvik. Biologist Alexandra Morton, who has devoted the last 15 years to battling both DFO and the provincial government about the negative impacts of fish farms on wild salmon, agrees: “DFO ignores the science, misinforms the public, offers unconfirmed theories and takes no action.” Retired fisheries scientists Gordon Hartman and Casey McAllister add: “DFO’s performance during the past 25 years is lamentable.”
After seeing bear numbers drop drastically on the central coast this year, eco-tour guide Fred Seiler observed: “This should be a huge red flag for DFO, but they continue to manage BC’s salmon fishery in a total state of denial.” “They are in complete denial,” concurs Sto:lo Nation’s Doug Kelly, co-chair of the First Nations Fisheries Council. “This is a department,” concludes Eidsvik bluntly, “with no friends left in Canada.”
In August this year, DFO broke the shattering news that it was closing the Fraser River sockeye fishery for the third year running. Returns of the wild fish were drastically lower than originally estimated. At first DFO predicted returns of over ten million; then after sampling the runs at sea, lowered that to a mere 1.37 million. By September, it was devastatingly clear that the numbers of Fraser River sockeye reaching their spawning grounds could be counted in the mere thousands. When asked what had gone wrong, however, DFO simply shrugged its bureaucratic and political shoulders, saying it had insufficient scientific data to know.
Among the theories espoused in the immediate aftermath of the news were “poor ocean conditions” having a detrimental effect on the fish during the marine phase of their life cycle. But very little is known about salmon in the ocean phase of their life cycle. It’s also difficult to reconcile poor ocean conditions with the fact that pink salmon returns and other sockeye runs were much more abundant in 2009 than in recent years.
A more likely cause, say people like Alex Rose, is BC’s history of overfishing of salmon stocks to the point of terminal decline. In 1996 journalist Terry Glavin recorded a litany of vanished and drastically reduced BC fisheries in his book Dead Reckoning: Confronting the Crisis in Pacific Fisheries. The salmon fisheries, said Glavin, had already become remnants of their former glory thanks to rampant overfishing: they were even then “mere zoo populations compared to their preindustrial abundance.”
By 2005 American scientist Xanthippe Augerot had established that more than 60 BC salmon stocks have already become extinct. Thirty percent of remaining sockeye, 36 percent of chinook and 30 percent of coho and steelhead stocks face extinction. These are numbers, says Rose, which are directly correlated to decades of DFO prioritizing harvesting opportunities for the commercial fishery over conservation.
The third theory regarding the demise of the missing fish, one championed by biologist Alexandra Morton and like-minded scientists, is that the gauntlet of fish farms that Fraser River sockeye have to run is a significant factor. But—despite its admission that it doesn’t know what happened to the fish—DFO has been quick to exonerate fish farms. On August 15, DFO’s Pacific region director Paul Sprout went into print unequivocally stating: “Sea lice from fish farms are not the explanation.” DFO regional director Barry Rosenberger was less sure: “Fish farms may be having an impact to some degree,” he admitted—but he still insisted: “They can’t explain all the problems in the Fraser.”
If so, what can? The answer is easy, say many commentators: DFO’s management of the wild salmon fishery.

What’s wrong with DFO?
Money, politics and conflicts of interest: these are DFO’s main failings. The agency is woefully underfunded, both in terms of research capability and conservation policy implementation. Continued lobbying to Ottawa to provide more research dollars has fallen on deaf ears to date. Cuts to enforcement budgets over the last two decades have also seen DFO’s ability to prosecute environmental violations greatly reduced. John Werring, a fish biologist with the David Suzuki Foundation, says: “They’ve reduced enforcement capability so greatly that there are now just seven inspectors for the entire Pacific Region, to respond to everything from illegal fishing to habitat destruction. This is a situation doomed to fail.”
Secondly, although conservation principles have been added to the Fisheries Act in recent years, DFO’s primary function remains the management of harvesting of salmon, not protection. Accordingly, political pandering to commercial fishing interests—indeed, any business interest affecting salmon or their habitat—almost always overrides science.
In his 2007 book analyzing the collapse of the east coast cod fishery, Who Killed the Grand Banks, Alex Rose castigates DFO for its blatant support for overfishing of threatened stocks, citing page after page of damning evidence of DFO’s imperative to serve business rather than conservation. “Every new employee soon learned that, as an agency, we existed to support the commercial fishing industry. Period,” writes Rose.
Rose devotes two chapters in his book to the BC salmon fishery, writing despairingly that DFO is managing west coast salmon into extinction the same way the department oversaw the disappearance of east coast cod: “It breaks my heart to say it, but there are just too many striking similarities between Atlantic cod and Pacific salmon. I believe we’re at the tipping point.”
In those chapters, Rose documents a litany of poor management decisions in BC from the 1970s onwards, all aimed at support for industry, and all of which have had disastrous consequences for Pacific salmon. Some of those decisions were simply inept. DFO dumped fertilizer into the Babine Lake system, for example, to enhance population growth in the local sockeye stocks. The experiment was successful for sockeye, but has resulted in the decimation of several other threatened species in the bycatch of eager fishermen netting the now abundant Babine Lake sockeye run.
Rose describes other decisions of DFO as outright criminal. In 2006, BC Institute of Technology students discovered millions of juvenile salmon had died as a result of a DFO-supported gravel-mining operation on the lower Fraser River. Gravel extraction is big business on the Fraser, but highly risky to young fish which depend on gravel beds for survival. “[DFO officials] would have had to be blind in order to not to know the risk of gravel removal was more than trivial,” BCIT fisheries biologist Marvin Rosenau told Rose.
Indeed, frontline DFO staff did know of the risks. But according to Rose, when they protested the approval of the gravel operation, they were overruled by senior executives in Ottawa. The same frontline staff told the BCIT researchers that DFO could and should be charged under the Criminal Code for failure to meet its statutory responsibilities. No prosecution ensued, however.
The same year, documents obtained by Watershed Watch Salmon Society under the Freedom of Information Act revealed that DFO managers on the Skeena River had bowed to political pressure from commercial fishing groups and turned a deliberate blind eye to illegal overfishing of endangered stocks on the river. According to Watershed Watch, DFO’s management plan required commercial openings to end on August 6, 2006. But after intensive political lobbying, fishing continued for another month. An internal memo from DFO biologist Steve Cox-Rogers confesses: “We said we would fish selectively to minimize harvest impacts [but] we caved under pressure.”
These are just some of the known examples of DFO management decisions with negative impacts on salmon. Ultimately, says Rose, “While there are some good and honourable people within DFO, as a former employee I have to say the organization is intellectually bankrupt. Politics always takes priority over policy and the fish. This is all about greed, because fish equals money and no-one wants to admit that we’re [annihilating] our wild salmon resource.”
DFO does have a solid basis on which it could—and indeed, should—be taking mitigative action to protect wild salmon. Under the 1995 United Nations Agreement on Straddling and Highly Migratory Fish Stocks, to which Canada is a signatory, DFO is required to apply the “precautionary approach” to its management of the wild fish. When scientific information is “uncertain, unreliable or inadequate” the precautionary approach prohibits DFO from using the absence of adequate scientific information “as a reason to postpone or fail to take action to avoid serious harm” to a fishery.
But despite this unequivocal international obligation, and its public admission that a lack of scientific knowledge is behind the uncertainty over the missing fish, DFO has yet to either constrain harvesting on a long term basis or impose significant controls on industrial operations that affect the fish, such as run-of-river power or fish farms. Instead, it just keeps repeating that it needs more information. Indeed, by time of publication, DFO was denying there was even a problem. On October 14, DFO’s Barry Rosenberger told the New Westminster Record there had been no salmon collapse in the Fraser: “The management objective for the year was to put the majority of those fish into the system to spawn, and we’ve met that objective,” he insisted.
The same day, Stephen Hume reported in the Vancouver Sun that by the end of September fewer than 8,500 fish had been counted in the spawning grounds for the Quesnel Lake system, the Shuswap, the Nechako and the Horsefly River combined. The forecast numbers for the Nechako alone had been 374,000. It is difficult to understand how these actual returns meet management objectives of any kind; unless those objectives are, as Rose surmises, to oversee the complete demise of the fishery.

Conflict and priorities: DFO and fish farms
DFO’s critics say the department also has two functions that are directly at odds with each other: management of wild salmon and promotion of aquaculture.
Atlantic salmon farms on BC’s coast were a long-standing thorn in the side of wild fish advocates well before a court decision in February transferred responsibility for the farms from the province to DFO. The list of concerns is well-known. They include high levels of sea lice in and around open net pens killing migrating juvenile wild salmon, degradation of the sea bed with accumulated faeces, and escapement of the exotic species into wild salmon spawning streams. Unfortunately, at this point, DFO seems even less likely than the province to address these concerns.
Retired Nanaimo fisheries scientists Gordon Hartman and Casey McAllister have 85 years of combined experience in biology and oceanography between them, most of it at DFO. In August, the two men wrote to federal Fisheries Minister Gail Shea skewering their former employer for “playing handmaiden to the aquaculture industry.” While numerous independent and credible scientific studies clearly show that a risk of serious or irreversible harm exists from the open-net salmon farming industry, they stated, DFO’s own research is weak at best and is prone to political and corporate influence.
In direct contravention of its obligation to apply the precautionary approach to wild salmon management, DFO is using the excuse of a lack of solid information to avoid taking any action against salmon farms. If anything, it is doing the opposite: “The department behaves more like an aquaculture promotion organization than a responsibly involved fisheries research and management agency,” Hartman and McAllister accused Shea.
Certainly, if Minister Shea’s behaviour is any indication, they are correct. Shea refused to meet promptly with groups from the fisheries sector or environmental organizations to discuss the missing salmon crisis. Instead, she travelled to Norway to market BC’s salmon farms in accordance with the federal government’s announcement in 2008 of a $70 million plan to double aquaculture production in Canada over the next decade. Although she convened a meeting in Ottawa two months later to discuss the issue, it was by invitation only. Chief Bob Chamberlin, chairman of the First Nations Leadership Council’s aquaculture working group, was barred from entry. Others who attended, like Doug Kelly of the Sto:lo Nation, found it a waste of time: “The meeting achieved very little,” he stated afterwards.
At a bureaucratic level, as we already know, DFO officials have ruled out fish farms as a potential threat to wild salmon. The agency’s website also contains a lengthy dismissal of sea lice as a problem, discounting studies that indicate the opposite is true. It’s a position that aggravates wild salmon advocates almost beyond endurance. “Fish farms may well not be the only cause of wild salmon mortality,” says Watershed Watch Executive Director Craig Orr. “I don’t think anyone disagrees salmon are also vulnerable to habitat loss, environmental degradation and global warming. But that doesn’t mean DFO shouldn’t be investigating to what extent they are to blame. For DFO to say that fish farms aren’t responsible is simply ludicrous,” exclaims Orr in frustration.
To be fair, DFO’s responsibility for the promotion of salmon aquaculture puts it in an irreconcilable conflict of interest in trying to protect wild salmon. “It’s causing no end of trouble for DFO,” agrees Orr. “It’s very hard to protect wild fish when you’re not allowed to close down fish farms.”
As an example of the conflict in practice, consider the issue of underwater lighting on fish farms. According to the BC Salmon Farmers’ Association, lights are commonly used at night on fish farms to regulate the salmon’s growth rate and prevent early maturing of the fish. But the lights also attract young wild salmon into the pens, exposing them to disease, sea lice and predation from the farmed fish. Under clause 8 of the Pacific Fishery Regulations, using lights in any manner to attract fish is prohibited. But requiring the lights to be turned off would interfere with the business operations of fish farms. Unsurprisingly, therefore, no charges have yet been laid by DFO against a fish farm for the use of underwater lights.
The battle against fish farms has instead been left to people like Alexandra Morton. When Minister Shea publicly exonerated fish farms on the basis that there had been a “coastwide decline” across all salmon species, Morton quickly corrected the statement, noting that the collapse had in fact centred only on stocks running the gauntlet of coastal fish farms. She also contradicted statements by DFO officials that the sea lice being found on the Fraser sockeye are not the same as those prevalent on fish farms. “I found that over 90 percent of the fish I looked at had the same species on them,” says Morton. “It boggles my mind why DFO would deny it, but I think they would throw themselves in front of a speeding train to defend the aquaculture industry.” Like Rose, Morton is unafraid to characterize the failure to protect wild salmon for future generations as “a crime against humanity.”
Morton is adamant that fish farms have to take responsibility for the missing sockeye. “People say, it can’t all be fish farms to blame. But I think it is, because if you can’t get past the fish farms safely, then nothing else matters.” Apart from sea lice, Morton says disease is also an enormous issue. “Epidemics don’t occur in the wild, because the fish have evolved in a way that breaks the cycle of disease naturally and predators deal with sick or weak salmon.” But, says Morton, fish farms are breaking the laws of nature. Predators can’t get at penned up animals with diseases, and the use of drugs also carries dangers. Again, says Morton, DFO has done very little to examine the impacts on wild fish of disease in fish farms, or of the drugs used to combat them.
According to Dr Sergio Paone in a report for the Suzuki Foundation on the use of drugs on fish farms, antibiotics, pesticides and fungicides are all in active use. Many of them have extremely negative effects on the surrounding marine environment. Antibiotics like oxytetracycline are poorly absorbed by salmon. When they are excreted by the fish, they persist in the environment, leading to an increase in antibiotic-resistant bacteria. “The fish also quickly get resistant to the drugs,” adds Morton, “so you have to use more and more.”
Morton also says: “These are known neurotoxins being emptied into the ocean, with no public warnings being issued. We don’t know yet the full impact of these drugs, but we know some of them impact shell-formation on crustaceans, for example.” Paone points out that pesticides used in the treatment of sea lice such as ivermectin, azanethipos and cypermethrin, have the ability to disrupt neurological processes and can be highly toxic to a wide variety of marine species, including shrimp, lobster and a class of marine worms that are “a crucial part of many marine food chains.”
Another pesticide called SLICE has been touted as being very effective in sea lice management, and is in active use on BC’s fish farms. But according to the Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform (CAAR), SLICE contains emamectin benzoate, a chemical banned by the US Food and Drug Administration for use on fish. CARR points out that the warning label for Proclaim, an agricultural pesticide containing emamectin benzoate, states clearly: “This pesticide is toxic to fish, birds, mammals, and aquatic invertebrates. Do not apply directly to water, to areas where surface water is present, or to intertidal areas below the mean high water mark.”
Morton says all of the concerns Paone has identified with other pesticides need to be considered in relation to the use of SLICE. Even DFO admits on its website that SLICE is an unknown entity, stating clearly that a review of the drug by Environment Canada notes: “a limited knowledge base for assessment of the environmental effects, particularly for sub-lethal effects and for species of interest in British Columbia. Clearly, more research is required to address ecological toxicity issues in the BC environment.”
Despite that, says Morton, DFO is failing to apply a precautionary approach to the use of such drugs. Rather, the agency is encouraging it.
Opponents of Morton cling to evidence that in the last five years, better fish farm practices in the Broughton Archipelago, including intensive use of pesticides like SLICE during migration periods, have resulted in reductions of sea lice on wild fish in that area from more than 70 percent in 2004 to a three to eight percent incidence rate. The latter figure was established by scientists working for the BC Pacific Salmon Forum (PSF), a now-defunct provincially-funded research group, as being the likely proportion of wild salmon on which sea lice would naturally occur prior to the establishment of fish farms in the 1980s. According to the PSF, that is the acceptable “baseline” or natural sea lice incidence rate that can now again be expected on wild fish in the Broughton area.
But salmon conservation biologist John Werring and his colleague at the David Suzuki Foundation, biologist Jeffery Young , are both dismissive of that baseline as applied to Fraser River salmon. “The red flag goes up whenever I hear the expression ‘baseline data’ used,” says Young. “When it comes to these fish, the world has changed considerably since the 1980s. Even if it is true that levels are the same as they were before, the situation is different now. Juvenile salmon are much more vulnerable in 2009 thanks to environmental degradation and climate change.”
Werring adds: “It’s an incredibly myopic view to suggest data from the Broughton applies anywhere else. That’s only one area of the ocean, and we know nothing about what is happening in other areas.” Werring says it’s also a very selective way at looking at the available research, pointing to the Johnstone Strait migratory route between Campbell River and Alert Bay as an example. “There are 36 farms along that very narrow passage. Preliminary research by Alex Morton and the Raincoast Conservation Foundation has found that all the juveniles—sockeye, pink and chum—going through the passage are infested with sea lice.” Meanwhile, says Werring, DFO senior officials continue to state that there is no evidence fish farms are impacting juvenile salmon. “They haven’t got a scientific leg to stand on,” he says.
Morton also says that the way in which SLICE is being applied is problematic for sockeye. For the last two years, SLICE has been actively applied by fish farms in the Broughton in February and March, in anticipation of spring migration activity. “But the life of the drug is short, only six to eight weeks. It’s acting during April and May, when pinks are migrating, but it doesn’t work long enough to protect the young sockeye, which go past in June and July.”
Morton examined both pinks and sockeye over the course of 2007 and 2008. The juvenile pinks were relatively lice-free; the sockeye heavily infested. Based on her findings, this March Morton accurately predicted the collapse of the Fraser sockeye.
She also notes another damning fact. Harrison Lake sockeye, which are known to migrate south rather than north, like the Fraser River species, returned this year at twice the numbers expected by DFO. There are no fish farms on the southern migration route.
Given such compelling facts, and the evidence of the negative impacts of disease and drug use, Morton, Werring and many of their colleagues say that closing the farmed fishery along the Fraser River migration route is a logical precautionary action to take, but DFO refuses to do so.
More knowledge is required to find a definitive answer to why the fish went missing, says DFO’s Barry Rosenberger, but that doesn’t mean taking the precaution of limiting fish farm activity in the meantime. “The precautionary approach requires a balancing act. If there is an impact from fish farms, we have to address it. But we have to see if there is a negative impact first.”
Jeffery Young is extremely frustrated by that response: “It shouldn’t be up to organizations like ours to prove fish farm practices aren’t safe,” says Young. “The onus should be on them to prove they are. As long as DFO keeps on saying it’s OK to be doing business as usual while research is ongoing, there’s no incentive to find the solution.”

In its own defence
When asked whether DFO could do better, DFO regional director Barry Rosenberger at first avoids answering. Instead, he goes on the attack: “The loudest voices of criticism aren’t necessarily trying to find solutions. They’d rather be in the media than help out.” He is frustrated that journalists consistently and wrongly characterize the missing fish as being in the realm of ten million when the truth was closer to 4.5 million. He gets upset that the media play up the drama of hungry bears on the north and central coast, linking that to low fish returns, when his team have counted more bears on the Fraser River this year than they’ve seen in years. Rosenberger also complains that DFO takes much of the criticism unfairly, when it is the province that is responsible for freshwater habitat and environmental management.
Fair enough. But in the meantime, when the question on improving DFO’s own management is repeated, Rosenberger insists: “In 2009, we responded well to the situation. We have a good in-river management system with good checks and balances, a pretty good set of tools to use, and we used them.” In other words, DFO temporarily closed the Fraser River sockeye fishery to everything but a very limited First Nations catch.
Rosenberger says that the key issue as a manager of salmon is to recognize a problem early and act immediately on it, which DFO did by closing the fishery last August. But such closures are a band-aid rather than a cure. In the meantime, DFO is doing nothing of significance to prevent the low returns in the first place.

The provincial government
The provincial government is doing little to help. Admittedly, it does not have jurisdiction over saltwater fisheries. Nonetheless there is a general consensus that the province does have a pivotal role to play in habitat protection. It could and should be doing more to protect freshwater habitat, for example, from industrial development such as run-of-river power projects, and it should be placing much stricter controls on the use of fresh water generally.
In October 2004, provincial Auditor-General Wayne Strelioff expressed strong criticism of the provincial government for its lack of a “clear vision and an overarching strategy for wild salmon sustainability.” The province agreed that it was a priority to work with the federal government on the issue and commissioned research from the BC Pacific Salmon Forum, a collection of knowledgeable individuals from different fisheries sectors. The Forum released its report in January 2009. One compelling statement stands out: “The current governance of both wild and farmed salmon is simply not adequate to address threats against them and requires transformative change immediately to ensure that wild salmon have a vibrant future in BC.”
Soon afterwards, the province lost control of fish farm management but did nothing to appeal the court decision. Provincial communications officials advise that the government intends to keep lobbying its federal counterparts to support the Forum’s recommendations, which included a shift to more holistic ecosystem-based management of all fisheries and finding definitive answers to the fish farm controversy. Environment Minister Barry Penner also wrote to Gail Shea in August, advocating for a review of the Fraser River fishery.
But Jon O’Riordan, a former provincial deputy minister who was the director of research for the Forum, is less than optimistic DFO will rise to the challenge. “BC had the capacity and interest to deal with the Forum’s recommendations, but I’m not clear whether DFO will assume the same level of commitment. If they don’t, they’re going to be much less capable of managing fish farms than the province.”
That’s a scary thought. It’s one echoed by John Werring: “I’m not optimistic that DFO will do anything, especially given their public statements that they don’t think fish farms are a problem.”

So long and thanks for all the fish
Former DFO scientists Hartman and McAllister concluded their August 31 letter to Gail Shea by telling her: “Your government should protect wild salmon as well as possible for as long as possible. This can be done. However, it requires a more sincere concern for wild fish than is evident to date on the part of DFO.”
The action necessary, says Alexandra Morton, is straightforward: apply the precautionary principle, close the farmed fishery on the Fraser River migratory route, enforce the Fisheries Act against fish farms in violation of its provisions, depoliticize DFO scientists, and invest in open, credible and transparent scientific research to support protection of the wild fish. “If you won’t take these steps,” she wrote forcefully in September, “please resign along with your Pacific Region senior staff and make way for people who will honour DFO’s contract with the public of Canada, present and future generations, to protect our salmon.”
“We ask,” Hartman and McAllister also begged Shea, “that your department begin to honour, fully, its responsibility for wild salmon protection in a manner that is above politics and short-term gain.”
For the sake of the fish, we can all only hope that before it is too late, DFO will finally listen.
Katherine Gordon is an author and freelance writer based on Gabriola Island. Her most recent book is The Garden that You Are (Sono Nis).
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Fishy Business

By Guest, in Ocean-related reporting, January 29, 2020
Farming salmon in open-net pens
By Katherine Gordon
(This story was first published in the September 2008 edition of Focus Magazine)

“Open-net cage fish farming industries,” says the David Suzuki Foundation, “are using publicly owned coastal waters to support what are essentially intensive private feedlot operations that dump drug-laced sewage into the ocean.”
Opponents of open-net salmon farming argue that the nets contribute directly to massive environmental degradation of wild fish habitat through fouling of the seabed with concentrated fish faeces and uneaten food, the spread of sea lice and disease to wild salmon, and frequent escapes of Atlantic salmon into Pacific waters. They criticize both senior levels of government for failing to take action to halt the practice or require fish farmers to clean up their act.
The salmon farming industry points to extensive efforts to comply with what director Mary Ellen Walling of the BC Salmon Farmers Association describes as the “chafing burden of the most stringently regulated environment in the world.” Walling is also adamant that there is nothing wrong with the open-net system: “We are managing environmental issues well and effectively,” she says.
Independent marine biologist and researcher Alexandra Morton, famous for her uncompromising stance on open-net fish-farming, snorts in derision. “These are the only farmers in the world that don’t have to shovel their own manure,” she says witheringly.
Industry dismisses “closed-containment” farms—something also advocated over a year ago by the province’s Special Committee on Sustainable Aquaculture—as too expensive and unnecessary. But Morton and many others believe that it’s past time that BC salmon farmers are forced to make the change to closed-containment technology. They argue the ecological cost of not embracing the new technology is already too high.
The public seems to agree. It would be a daring restaurant in Victoria that boasted the salmon on its menu was farmed rather than wild.
But the province, despite it’s own committee’s report and other compelling evidence, argues there is no scientific proof that open net fish farms cause environmental damage and so is highly reluctant to compel the industry to adapt closed-containment technology. In the meantime, the exotic fish just keep escaping.

The ones that got away
Frederick Arm is a mile-wide by five-mile deep fiord that cuts into BC’s rugged coastline just south of Bute Inlet, about 30 miles northeast of Campbell River. As the strong summer tide of July 1 2008 flowed out of the Arm, swirling currents shifted a net-pen anchor at the Marine Harvest salmon farm. The anchor slipped into an underwater crevice and pulled down, below the water’s surface, the only barrier between 30,000 Atlantic salmon in the pen and the open waters of Frederick Arm.
Within minutes the pen had emptied of its half a million dollars’ worth of uniformly four-kilogram inhabitants. Within hours surprised anglers fishing for wild Pacific salmon in Yuculta Rapids, a few miles to the northwest, began pulling in an unexpected catch: four-kilogram Atlantic salmon.
Despite that and Marine Harvest’s attempts to recover as many escaped fish as they could, 99 percent of the fish got away.
Fish farms are required by law to report escapes. Between 1987 and 2006, more than 1.4 million farmed salmon have been reported as escaped into BC waters. But a study done in 2000 suggests the industry may be underreporting these escapes. A survey of commercial fishermen over a 17-day period found they had caught 10,826 Atlantic salmon—40 percent more than had been reported to have escaped.
Nobody is certain about what might be happening to all those escaped farmed salmon. Atlantics have been found in more than 80 rivers in coastal BC, the spawning grounds of wild Pacific salmon—something the industry once claimed could never happen—and some fisheries biologists are fearful the aggressive Atlantics will eventually adapt to this coast and outcompete the native species. As Alexandra Morton has put it, “There’s only one species of salmon in the Atlantic, whereas there’s five in the Pacific, so that tells you they don’t really play well with others.”

Problems abound
The issue of Atlantic salmon escaping from BC fish farms is only one of several serious problems plaguing the industry.
Research by Morton has linked fish farms in the Broughton Archipelago off Port McNeill to sea lice infestations on juvenile wild pink salmon in the archipelago’s waters, which she and others say are decimating the area’s pink salmon runs. Studies from the United States indicate that the rate of infection of wild salmon with sea lice is four times higher than it was before the introduction of fish farms into west coast waters, and that the parasite may be responsible for killing as many as 95 percent of juvenile wild pink and chum salmon.
There are also fears that farmed salmon will spread infectious diseases to wild salmon, as has happened on other coasts.
As well, BC's coastal salmon farms produce, in total, as much raw sewage as a city of 500,000 humans, and there is evidence that the immense amount of fish faeces the farms produce can trigger phytoplankton blooms that can clog the gills of and suffocate both farmed and wild species of fish.
Recent research from Scotland also demonstrates major damage to seabed flora and fauna in that country directly caused by open-net waste dumping.
It is also plain that open-nets pose considerable risk to marine predators looking for a free lunch. Between 1989 and 2000, according to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), 6,243 seals and sea lions were killed by salmon farmers in BC waters. In the four months between January and April 2007 alone at least 110 sea lions drowned in nets.

A special committee is born—and ignored
If such problems have diminished the average British Columbian’s appetite for farmed salmon, the industry has nevertheless grown steadily since its inception in 1987. According to the BC Salmon Farmers Association, farmed salmon is the province’s largest agricultural export. In 2005, salmon farming, including both aquaculture production and processing , contributed $134 million to the provincial GDP and provided 1500 full-time equivalent jobs. Walling says the industry could double its production and still not satisfy the demand from the United States alone.
But like the forest industry, while salmon farming brings economic benefits to the province, it also is widely seen as doing unacceptable harm to the environment. As concern for the wild salmon fishery rose during the early 2000s, the provincial Liberal government increasingly came under withering criticism for allowing open-net salmon farming to grow so quickly.
What’s a premier to do? Create a committee. Charge it with filing a report.
Premier Gordon Campbell appointed the Special Committee on Sustainable Aquaculture in 2005 “to examine, inquire into and make recommendations with respect to Sustainable Aquaculture in British Columbia,” with particular reference to the environmental and economic impacts of the aquaculture industry, and sustainable options.
In May 2007, the special committee filed its final report. Besides calling for a moratorium on siting fish farms north of Vancouver Island, the committee called for the industry to move towards closed-containment within five years. Both of these recommendations were condemned by the BC Salmon Farmers Association, and the provincial government has not acted upon them.
Media reports about the committee’s recommendations invariably included a description of the committee—as if it somehow explained its findings—as being “New Democrat-dominated.” A majority of the MLAs on the committee were from the NDP, perhaps a reflection of the fact that most coastal communities that have salmon farms operating nearby happen to be represented by NDP MLA’s. At the time the special committee was created, political pundits suggested that appointing a preponderance of NDP members to the committee was a brilliant move on Premier Campbell’s part since it would put the NDP in the middle of a difficult no-win situation.
The media after-burn concentrated on the perception that politics had somehow predetermined the special committee’s recommendations and there was little indepth discussion of the potential benefits and problems of moving the industry to closed-containment. The committee’s recommendations had more or less disappeared from public memory by July, when those 30,000 Atlantic salmon made their dash for freedom.

Why not closed containment?
Closed-containment systems have the obvious advantage of providing a physical barrier, separating the farmed fish from the marine environment so as to prevent escapes and interaction with other marine life and reducing the risk of spreading disease and parasites. Water is typically pumped in and oxygenated, then either recirculated or released back into the ocean once solid wastes have been removed. Wastes can be recycled—fish compost is in high demand as fertilizer, for example.
The land-based variety of closed containers are 100 percent isolated from the marine environment, which deals with all of the environmental criticisms levelled at open-nets, though may create others—high energy consumption in powering pumps, for example, with corresponding greenhouse gas emissions. Containers that float in the ocean, on the other hand, can use natural water flow to some extent, and use less power than land-based tanks. However, the spread of disease and parasites is less easy to control.
So why is the province not moving on the special committee’s recommendation to convert to such technology? Why is it not taking a more precautionary approach to the fragility of the wild salmon fishery?
Stan Hagen, Minister of Agriculture and Lands, says the science on environmental damage is unproven. He’s now awaiting a report (due out in a few months) from the Pacific Salmon Foundation analysing the available scientific data.
In the meantime, the government isn’t about to force the technology on industry. While Director Mary Ellen Walling says that members of the BC Salmon Farmers’ Association are willing to look at such new technology, they still need convincing that it will be worth the expense. She used stronger terms in the Times Colonist in July, saying: “The additional costs of closed-containment would make salmon farming financially unworkable. [It] would render the industry absolutely uncompetitive.”
Jay Ritchlin, director of marine and freshwater conservation at the David Suzuki Foundation, takes issue with the “no proven environmental damage” argument of the government and industry: “Any lingering debate over whether open-nets are damaging wildlife is simply disingenuous.” He also believes the government’s refusal to accept the existing scientific weight of evidence against open-nets is highly problematic, because it removes any impetus for industry to improve its record.

How effective is closed-containment?
In January 2008, DFO’s Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat released an analysis of closed-containment technology. While the report includes some important admissions around concerns for infectious diseases caused by sea lice and non-infectious diseases caused by plankton blooms and low dissolved oxygen, it also found that attempts to produce adult Atlantic salmon in the 40 closed-containment systems they studied world-wide all failed. Among the stated reasons for failure were mechanical breakdown, poor fish performance, management failure, declines in market price and inadequate financing.
None of those are reason enough to dismiss the technology in its own right. Such failures occur in any industry, including open-net farming, and DFO’s Secretariat admitted that more information was necessary to determine the real causes of the failures.
The Secretariat’s report also noted some environmental criticisms of closed containment systems, including that fish are held in closed pens at a density around double that of net pens. Like chickens in a battery, they are more prone to disease in the tanks than in open-nets. Moreover, fish apparently get stressed in rigid floating tanks by “resonance” caused by vigourous wave activity. The report also picked up on the carbon footprint of land-based pens and their high energy usage.
But Ritchlin is critical of the DFO report: “It seems they only looked at what didn’t work and not what is working. Their focus is too narrow.” He says there are answers to every criticism raised in the report.
He lobs the “unproven science” argument back at claims of high energy usage, for example, saying there simply isn’t enough data to make that claim with certainty. “You also have to weigh energy use against damage to wildlife,” he notes. “Any carbon footprint of closed tanks can be mitigated with alternative greener energy sources.” By comparison, he points out, many open-net farms are in remote locations and make heavy use of diesel generators and boats.
The Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform, an association of eight environmental and First Nations groups, backs Ritchlin up: “When the full lifecycle of closed tank production is considered, it is in fact possible that closed tanks will offer improvements in energy performance over current salmon farming systems.” They also claim countries as diverse as Iceland, Morocco, the Netherlands and China use closed containment fish-farming successfully.
Canadian-owned company AgriMarine Industries Inc. at Campbell River is one of the only local companies to test out closed containment. Between 2001 and 2005 AgriMarine trialled a land-based system of concrete tanks at Cedar, near Nanaimo, successfully raising environmentally friendly “eco-salmon” for the local market.
The Ministry of Agriculture and Lands assisted with funding, and reported the project “might be considered an improvement over that of marine net-pens, largely due to the inability of fish to interact with wild species.” It also concluded there was no difference in stress levels between the fish at Cedar and those in open-net enclosures. Concerns about the potential for disease outbreaks were unfounded, said the ministry, which also concluded that it would be possible to retail the fish at profitable levels.
But there are still some kinks to work out. AgriMarine decided in 2005 that the land-based containers it was using were too unwieldy to work with and that power costs running up to $12,000 a month were simply too high (an indication that criticisms of exorbitant energy use, at least vis-à-vis land-based tanks, may be justified). The steep cost of waterfront land needed to site the tanks was another factor reducing the economic viability of that system.
But far from abandoning solid barrier technology, the company is pouring millions of dollars more into a new system of flow-through floating fibreglass tanks secured to pilings, which they plan to install at Middle Bay, near Campbell River. Energy consumption is expected to be far lower for the new system. Sustainable Development Technology Canada is putting $2.36 million of federal funding into the $8 million project, as is the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in San Francisco. The Coast Sustainability Trust is providing $200,000.
Like Jay Ritchlin, AgriMarine director of operations Rob Walker begs to differ with most of the environmental criticisms levelled at closed containment. “I think solid wall containment like this makes so much sense,” he says. “Our system deals 100 percent with escapes and with predator interaction. That’s really big.”
On transference of sea lice and pathogens, Walker admits that’s difficult to stop in a flow-through system. “Having said that, we also understand that sea lice are typically found in upper sea levels. So properly sited, the pens could pull up water from depth to avoid the areas where sea lice thrive,” says Walker. “Mechanical filters could also be used to remove sea lice. Pathogens in the water could be removed through an ultraviolet system.” Walker notes regretfully that’s all very expensive technology. “So right now we’re just focussing on the barrier technology to make that work, then we’ll look at the filters and other add-ons.”
Walker thinks the fish are going to be better off than those in open-nets. “We have freshwater coming in that’s supplemented with oxygen and a system that is constantly cleaning out faeces, so the water quality is very high. You don’t have that kind of control with an open-net.” AgriMarine plans to compost the recycled waste, which could be used for everything from algae feed stock to salt marsh enhancement.

The economic argument
An assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of Victoria, John Volpe is quite certain about the real reason the industry is resisting the science of closed-containment: cheap salmon. To keep prices competitive, costs are simply being offloaded to the environment.
A proponent of closed cages to mitigate sea lice transference and escapes, Volpe wants the public to pay more for BC farmed salmon and thereby help farmers make the switch. Mary Ellen Walling thinks that’s unrealistic: “We simply can’t charge a premium here and keep competing.”
But fish farmers elsewhere in the world are doing just that. While Minister Hagen has said he was not aware of any closed-containment systems anywhere which have worked, they are in fact being widely used commercially to grow other species such as tilapia and catfish. The DFO’s report noted that closed-containment systems have been successfully used in the commercial production of salmon when grown along with other higher value species that help defray the cost of the system. In the Netherlands, the government has gone as far as requiring commercial operators to use them, and a number of European Union governments have adopted policies providing subsidies and tax breaks to operators developing and implementing the technology.
Norwegian companies have been using closed-containment to grow Atlantic salmon for two decades. Idar Schei, director of Norwegian mega-company Aqua Optima, told the Georgia Strait in 2006: “Investment costs are higher but with the risk of sea lice, fish escapes, storms and algae blooms, the operating costs should not be much higher for closed tanks.”
With continuing declining wild stocks and rapidly rising prices for salmon as demand outstrips supply, the future for fish farmers seems promising—even with the extra costs of closed containment technology. The industry seems well-positioned to move towards the adoption of improved (if pricey) technology that will help protect BC’s fragile and valued marine environment—and which may save it money in the long run on expensive environmental assessments and cleanup requirements.
“There does need to be more certainty over the cost-benefit ratio of the environmental performance of this technology,” admits Suzuki Foundation’s Jay Ritchlin. “But we do know some things for sure. We know that the solid waste collection component works and that’s helping stop the transfer of disease and the smothering of the ocean floor. We know they stop escapes.” Those, says Ritchlin, are simply the minimum requirements for a safe industry. “Once you’ve got that, you just keep getting better.”
“People are looking for a be-all-and-end-all solution to all the problems,” says AgriMarine’s Rob Walker. “My response to that is, let’s just get these tanks in the water. This is a huge first step.”

Katherine Gordon is an award-winning author and freelance writer. Her best-selling fourth book, The Garden That You Are (Sono Nis Press, 2007) explores the culture of gardeners, the importance of growing food, and what connects each of us to our place on the Earth.
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