The salmon farming industry in BC is once again challenging the authority of the Minister of Fisheries to make decisions about whether or not its feedlots should continue to be located in open ocean settings. Their first successful court challenge overturned Minister Bernadette Jordan’s 2020 decision to close down open-net operations. Now, in 2023, Minister Joyce Murray’s similar decision is also being challenged. For perspective, this challenge invites a review of the history of salmon farming in BC’s waters.
When corporate salmon farming arrived in a relatively pristine British Columbia, the marine wilderness was already occupied by many native species. The farms were totally incongruous with this ecology, and immediately found themselves in conflict with the seals, sea lions, orcas, whales, eagles, osprey, mink, otters and kingfishers. The result was carnage to wildlife as the farmers tried to defend their salmon from a traditional food that had always been available to the natural predators.
Acoustic devices scared away most of the orcas and whales, while uncounted numbers of the smaller predators were unceremoniously shot. The salmon farming industry claimed that, “Zero lethal interaction is our goal.” Well, a “goal” is neither consolation to a dead sea lion nor a deterrent to a hungry one accustomed to freely roaming the open oceans. And “lethal interaction” is a euphemism for “kill”, slippery public relations jargon intent on massaging the gruesome into something that seems less brutal. Considering that these corporate salmon farms were camped in the middle of a marine thoroughfare for migrating mammals—and wild fish, too—the obvious way to ensure “zero lethal interaction” would be to get their net-pens out of the ocean onto land-based sites.
But shareholders of corporations don’t like expensive solutions. The more profitable alternative was to tame the West Coast wilderness with enough “lethal interactions” that troublesome marine mammals were eradicated, a tragedy considering that these waters have been their natural swimming, feeding and breeding territory for millennia.
But “lethal interaction” was the chosen course of action, evident from the information released by Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) in early 2011. The Director of Aquaculture for its western office, who had been “monitoring” the kills during the previous six years, offered the comforting assurance that the number of “culls” were down.
“Cull” is an revealing word. Since salmon farms were not mandated to manage the populations of marine mammals, authorization of a “cull” was yet another example of DFO managing the environment to suit corporate interests. Of course, DFO didn’t kill the trespassing sea lions and seals. Neither did the farm employees have to do most of the killing. In a gesture that was supposed to introduce an element of compassion to the slaughter and distance corporations from the blood of outright guilt, the actual shooting was done by “licensed contractors”. Experts apparently make killing less offensive. But guilt cannot be contracted to others.
Not that salmon farmers were without a twinge of guilt. The Executive Director of the BC Salmon Farmers Association confessed at the time that, “We don’t take this lightly,” acknowledging that sea lions are “extremely intelligent”, although they can be “aggressive”—a trait that was supposed to justify the killing and allay the guilt.
And how many seals and sea lions? DFO’s numbers are sobering. Of the 13 years reported, 1997 was the worst year for seals when 550 were killed—500 per year were common at this time. The worst year for sea lions was 2000 when 250 were shot because they were not “intelligent” enough to know that salmon farms are lethal places to visit. For anyone concerned with this bloodshed, the consolation is that those were only the most bloody years. The killing of 180 animals in 2011—plus the four that drowned—were excused by the rise in their populations, a defence that uses plentitude to justify slaughter. Although more marine mammals meant more predation and more “lethal interactions”, more salmon farms did not count. What is a caring corporation to do with a conflict between its financial interests and the perils posed by a marine wilderness?
This slaughter does not even consider the threat to the wild salmon caused by the diseases and parasites contained in the salmon farms and distributed to the wider environment—threats that have been so thoroughly and so frequently documented that they need not be mentioned here. Nor does this critique consider the fundamental absurdity of farming a carnivorous fish like salmon, an inherently inefficient agricultural practice that is only sustained by the industrial pillaging of ocean protein that should be left for other marine species and for the fishers of poor countries.
However, the latest court challenge to the Minister of Fisheries is also worthy of mention because it raises the question of whether the environmental health of British Columbia should be determined by the ambitions of corporations or by the will of the people’s government.
Ray Grigg for Sierra Quadra
Top photo credit: Sea Lions trapped within a fish farm in Clayoquot Sound – Photo by Jérémy Mathieu courtesy Clayoquot Action press release