“You could go anywhere and dip up a bucketful of fry with a little dip net,” he says with a laugh. “Dippin’ blind you’d get a bucketful and DFO couldn’t find anything.”

When you see the babies dying all along the beach by the millions with lice all over them, it’s pretty well written there what’s happening when they’re dying like that.”

When asked how the scientists could get it so wrong, Proctor shakes his head. “Well, I don’t know… They’re not giving us the truth that’s what I think. I think they know but they don’t want to rock the boat.”

Geophysicist Neil Frazer was more forthcoming: “I’m a scientist and I don’t buy what they’re saying. I think it’s wrong, I think it’s unscientific. I think it’s untrue.”

Frazer believes the DFO is at the beck of the salmon-farming industry: “I think the word came down from someplace. There will be salmon aquaculture and you guys are gonna make it happen quickly.”

“Disclosure” managed to come into possession of some government documents that show the DFO study was worryingly inept. Noakes consequently found himself on the very embarrassing end of an interview.

I find myself wondering why [the] Provincial government is working so hard to downplay the Broughton Archipelago pink crash. The most senior government fishery biologists in B.C. have given us their analysis of this situation and there is no reason any should doubt their conclusions.  These DFO scientists with the [Pacific Fisheries Resource Conservation Council], are tasked to examine every fishery decline, and they report the Broughton crash was the biggest in recorded history and was caused by something in the nearshore marine environment.  They did not pull this out of hat. …

If I had not done my sea lice research we would be at a loss as to what happened.  As it stands we can not know for certain it was sea lice, and if this were the first time salmon farms, sea lice and collapse had converged in time and space I would be more sceptical.  However, everywhere there are salmon farms and wild salmon, the wild salmon are eaten to death by sea lice.  Don't believe me?  Type “sea lice” on “Google” and see what comes up.

Science and Logic

The BCSFA quotes a New York Times article which attributes the following assertion to Dr. Michael Gallo of the Cancer Institute at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School: “PCB's have not been proved to cause cancer in people, and industry workers who were exposed to higher levels did not have a higher cancer rate.”

This is an extremely odd statement to attribute to a scientist. It was not a direct quotation. Scientists know better than to speak of something as being “proved.” In science one tests a certain subset of possibilities. As articulated by the philosopher Karl Popper, science looks to test the null hypothesis -- the hypothesis that states that there is no difference between or among the variables being investigated. Any finding that there is a statistically significant difference can only be stated as a probability and not as proof.

Besides it would be ethically impossible to carry out anything approaching a definitive study on this question. Researchers cannot conduct an experiment to investigate the effects of consuming PCBs-contaminated food for a causal link to contraction of cancer in humans. Scientists are only able to do post hoc analysis of the data and can then attempt to draw a correlation between the level of PCBs and carcinogenicity in humans.

Referring to the level of PCBs in farmed versus wild salmon, Gallo says, "PCBs are in all salmon. The difference between 5 ppb [parts per billion] and 30 ppb is meaningless. If you use the EPA’s mathematical model...there is no difference." Extremely tiny trace amounts of a substance are under consideration, but the fact that such miniscule amounts can be deleterious is greater cause for concern.

Dr. Mark E. Hahn, a toxicologist at the famous Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution says, "No one is really sure how important these interactions are in the real world." Hahn asks what one should substitute in place of salmon. "What else are you going to eat?"

In these days of mad cow disease and toxic tuna the question has some relevance but it distracts the public from a distinction borne out by the Science salmon study. The authors of the article made that it abundantly plain: to reduce one’s consumption of toxins it is better to eat wild salmon than farmed salmon.

The industry would much rather engage in subtle subterfuge by presenting the study as an attack on salmon consumption in general. The study wasn’t an attack. The methodology is seemingly sound but the conclusions are challenged.

The salmon farmers maintain that their salmon are safe.

There are clearly two choices regarding eating salmon:

1) the consumer can eat farmed salmon reared in the equivalent of a giant flushed toilet, fed  hormones, pesticides, hormones, dyes, and toxic feed at a reduced price or

2) pay a little bit more for wild salmon which has derived most of its sustenance naturally.

Trusting the Salmon-Farming Industry

The BCSFA will bemoan the portrayal of their farmed salmon but the fact is that the farmed fish are more contaminated than their wild brethren. The aquaculture industry can spin and cite various other figures and evade the crux of the matter.

Why should the consumer trust the salmon-farming industry? Why would the consumer trust an industry that solicited the shady spin services of beltway insiders Hill and Knowlton? The legitimacy of Hill and Knowlton in political circles should be nil after the debacle of having coached Nayirah, the teenage daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US, to pose as a hospital volunteer who had witnessed Iraqi soldiers removing infants from incubators -- a role she tearfully and mendaciously played before a gullible US Congress. Hill and Knowlton is the force behind this murderous deception. Nayirah’s testimony was a fillip to attacking Iraq -- an attack that saw hundreds of thousands killed through military violence and UN sanctions. Hill and Knowlton pocketed $10.8 million in blood money for this fraud.

The BC salmon-farming industry is in large part dominated by foreign transnational corporations. Its raison d’être is the pursuit of profit; it is not to grow the economy, or produce jobs, or care for the environment. The industry makes lofty claims about employment and economic activity generated. To accomplish this entailed harming another longstanding industry in BC: commercial fishing.

A Stanford University study “determined that worldwide production of farmed salmon has increased fivefold since the late 1980s. Over that time, commercial fishing operations have seen their market share plummet to less than 40 percent.”

The same study also found that because of the economic competition salmon farming has increased commercial pressures on the wild salmon stock.

Many natives see their traditional salmon-based food culture threatened.

In BC the neoliberal government is clearing the way for an expansion of the salmon-farming industry. The obvious winners are the salmon-farming industry elites with the losers being the commercial fishers and average BCers. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) reports that the government priorities are entrusted in an environmentally destructive industry whose expansion will have a negligible effect on the economy and job creation.

The peer-reviewed study, Fishy Business: The Economics of Salmon Farming in BC, shows that wild marine fisheries create seven times more jobs and wages, compared to industrial salmon aquaculture in BC. And wild fisheries are worth more than four times as much in terms of provincial GDP, and more than three times as much in terms of BC's exports.

"Fish farm expansion is being dangled before coastal communities as a panacea for jobs and economic stability. But this is a false promise," says study author and CCPA resource policy analyst Dale Marshall. "The fact is, running a fish farm takes very few people. And the record in BC, and major fish farm jurisdictions like Norway and Scotland, is that over time, fish farm operations require fewer and fewer workers." …

The study also warns that the economic risks posed by industrial salmon aquaculture to BC's lucrative and diverse coastal wild fisheries could be tremendous.

"We're basically playing Russian Roulette with our coastal-dependent economies - without knowing how many bullets are in the chamber," says Marshall. "The scientific community has already shown that there are risks to other marine industries, such as wild salmon fisheries, tourism and sport fishing," he adds.

"The fact is, wild fisheries are not only our most important economic drivers, they're critical to us culturally. That's why our tribe has adopted a strict no fish farm policy. It's just not worth the risk," says Chief Charlie Williams. Williams is the Hereditary Chief of Gwawaenuk and President of the Kwakiutl Territorial Fisheries Commission in Alert Bay.  

The supportive sources cited by the salmon-farming industry have been demonstrated to be questionable; the PR flaks are downright murderous; traditional and indigenous industry have been and are being adversely affected; the environment and ecosystem have been infiltrated and disrupted. Logically why would anyone, who is not directly or indirectly employed by the industry, support salmon farming?

Billy Proctor sees the logic but concludes there is another powerful force at play.

“Big money talks. Simple as that.”

The historical lesson of human plunder leading to the extinction of the great auk is seemingly unlearned. If big money has its way, wild salmon may well go the way of its cousin the Atlantic cod.