French filmmaker Jérémy Mathieu’s award winning documentary ‘Salmon Secrets,’ will be coming to Gorge Hall at 1 PM on Sunday, January 12.
This 40 minute film was produced by Clayoquot Action, whose co-founders Bonny Glambeck and Dan Lewis will be speaking at the screening.
Mike Moore, President of the Friends of Cortes Island (FOCI), stated, “The film is hosted by FOCI and our streamkeepers who have just done an incredible job working with the highways department to put in new culverts so that the fish can go up beyond Whaletown Road and the Squirrel Cove Road. They’ve done a lot of work on salmon enhancement projects, but without ocean survival all of those efforts are in vain.”
“One thing that we can do to improve ocean survival of the salmon is to remove the salmon farms that are in their way. We can’t affect ocean nutrient levels and upwelling currents and plankton, which all feed the salmon when they’re out in the North Pacific, but we can keep the salmon farms from transmitting diseases and lice to the wild salmon.”
The trailer starts with Joe Martin, of the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation, speaking a Nuu-chah-nulth word I cannot pronounce or spell.
He said, “ It means that everything is connected. The mountains to the ocean and they’re actually connected by salmon. All the Nuu-chah-nulth have survived with that. You don’t see that anymore.”
As the aerial view of a fish farm came into view, Dan Lewis explained, “The companies are Norwegian. They imported the eggs from the Atlantic Ocean from Europe and those eggs brought with them Piscine Orthoreovirus and the fish here had no defence against it.”
Independent biologist Alexandra Morton is depicted staring into a microscope, “I have been looking closely at hundreds of juvenile pink and chum salmon every single year. By the time the juvenile salmon made it to the open ocean they passed four or five salmon farms and they were just dying, hundreds of thousands of them.”
John K Forde, from the Marine Mammal Research Unit, added, “Right now the gray whales are having a catastrophic die off. In the spring, we’re getting gray whales washing up on shore that are starving to death. If they don’t have their food because it’s been poisoned by Cermaq, then we won’t have any whales through the summer months in this area. This is going to be devastating.”
Morton added, “Orcas have culture, and to maintain their culture, they need to gather. For resident orca to gather, there have to be a lot of salmon. That’s how they maintain not only their health, but their culture. In recent years, it’s been really sad to see them come in. Sometimes they pace up and down, one little family, and then they leave.”
You’ve just been reading a transcript from the trailer for ‘Salmon Secrets.’
Dan Lewis was skiing at Mount Washington when Cortes Currents contacted him.
He stated, “With this whole fish farm transition, we knew that there would be a compromise. When we looked at the war in the woods, and we were saying, stop clear cutting old growth. What they said was, well, why don’t we try variable retention in old growth? We knew there would be some kind of half assed compromise like that being proposed.”
“When Cermaq brought a semi closed containment system to Clayoquot Sound in 2020, we knew right away that’s what they’re going to be pushing for.”
“So we’ve been focusing a lot of effort on that. Our goal is to make sure that there’s nothing in the water at the end of this transition. Fish farms in the water, it doesn’t matter what kind, they’re not going to work.”
“We have an amazing videographer on our team, Jérémy Mathieu. He comes on our Clayoquot Action missions where we monitor the fish farms, and he’s collected quite a bit of footage.”
“Back in 2021 early days of COVID , we invited some underwater cinematographers to dive down to the bottom of the semi closed pens. We wanted to see what was coming out the bottom.”
“These guys go all over the world doing dives and filming. One of them obtained a red camera to do the filming. So it’s cinema quality. Like the footage shown on a full theatre screen. It’s that high resolution.”
“What they found at the bottom was just poop, fat and feces, all that stuff falling out the bottom. There’s a hole that’s about two meters in diameter. And there’s so much stuff coming out that they could barely swim in place to actually film it.”
“So we decided to make a movie, and then Jeremy wanted to really include the story of the comeback that’s happening, all the pink salmon returning on the east coast of the island. So in 2022, he was up in the Broughton interviewing Chief Ernest Alfred and Alexander Morton.”
“He wanted to include that component, the story of hope, because with 40 percent of the fish farms removed, we’re seeing tremendous returns of salmon on the east coast of the island.”
There was an abundant Chum run on Cortes Island in the fall of 2024.
Mike Moore: “We’ve just had fantastic fish runs of returning salmon, better than we’ve seen for decades, I heard reports of boat skippers up in Toba Inlet saying they’ve never seen anything like it, just the sheer number of salmon jumping everywhere.”
In a recent interview, Cortes Streamkeeper Cec Robinson suggested, “This happened from Alaska down through to Washington, so that’s more than our fish farms. There’s obviously a bigger factor at play and I suspect they’re still analyzing in the office somewhere.”
Dan Lewis: “It’s a little early to draw a causal link. I’m not a scientist, so it’s easier for me to go, well, what else could it be? I’m aware that it could be something else, but I think it’s highly unlikely that it’s anything but the removal of these fish farms. I’m pretty confident when you pull the fish farms out, the fish come back. That’s really a big important message of the movie.”
“The quality of the wildlife footage is amazing and the fish farm footage is amazing. Before Jérémy came along, there was nobody but Tavish Campell collecting this kind of footage, but now we’ve got a huge bank of it as well.”
Cortes Currents: Have you been showing in a lot of communities?
Dan Lewis: “This spring we organized a ‘fish farm medicine revival roadshow.’ We went from Victoria all the way up to Campbell River, in five different communities. It also played at the Vancouver International Mountain Film Fest, the Salt Spring Film Fest and it’s on the festival circuit, so it’s going all over the world and winning awards everywhere it goes. I just won another award this week.
Joe Martin, of the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation
Cortes Currents: What did it win?
Dan Lewis: “It was the best activist film at the Big Blue Film Fest.”.
Cortes Currents: How did it happen that you’re coming to Cortes?
Dan Lewis: “Well, so we’re really good friends with Chris and Cec Robinson. I’ve known them for 40 years. So, we’re coming up partly to see them and then we had also wanted to come to Cortes in the spring and we just couldn’t fit it into our schedule. Now we have the time and we’re halfway there on Mount Washington, so we might as well just come right up.”
Cortes Currents: Is there anything else you’d like to say?
Dan Lewis: “Sure living in the Discovery Islands, it’s obvious the battle is over, but really it’s not over until all the farms are out of BC waters. We’re really looking for that solidarity coast wide. Let’s stick with this till we get them all out.”
Mike Moore: “ Most of the fish farms have been removed from the Broughton Archipelago and from the Discovery Islands, but they’ve simply just moved to other places on the BC coast. The federal government has committed to getting open net farms out of the ocean, first of all, by 2025. They’ve just extended that to 2029 as the companies develop new technologies to keep their farms in the ocean.”
“If the federal government decides that semi closed containment farms are the way to go, we will see those back in the Discovery Islands and the Broughton Archipelago. So, we really need to stay vigilant and informed. The subject of fish farms in our area has not gone away.”
In the Salmon Secrets’ trailer, filmmaker Jérémy Mathieu said, “I know how the ocean sounds, but I’ve never heard a vibration or a sound like this before.”
Skookum John (Keltsmaht First Nation), added, “Our ancestors never needed huge corporations to feed our people because we live off salmon, deer, you name it. That’s wealth.”
Chief Ernest Alfred, traditional and elected leader of the ‘Na̱mg̱is First Nation, concluded, “As soon as we start taking over those territories, and start regulating some of the industry here, we’re going to see a little more balance restored. I truly believe that. We just want to be self sufficient, we want to be able to put our young people to work, we want to be on our territory. We want to go home, we want to go to our lands.”
Links of Interest
- Clayoquot Action website
- Upcoming screenings of Salmon Secrets
- Articles about, or mentioning, Clayoquot Action
- Articles about, or mentioning, fish farms in the Discovery Islands
- Articles about, or mentioning, fish farms in the Broughton Archipelago
- Articles about PRV-1 in salmon
- Articles about Sea Lice in Salmon
All photos courtesy Clayoquot Action,