BC Salmon farming companies applied to put in a new fish farm between the Discovery Islands and Broughton Archipelago and expand their existing facilities at 11 other locations around Vancouver Island. 

Two of the expansions, at Dixon Bay and Plover Point in Clayoquot Sound, have already been granted. 

“We had a promise from federal government whereby they said in mandate letters to the minister of fisheries,  they were going to transition the open net salmon farming industry out of BC by 2025,” explained Stan Proboszcz, Science Advisor of the Watershed Watch Salmon Society.

The day this program originally aired, Cortes Currents received word that the new Federal Fisheries Minister, Joyce Murray, informed the National Observer she is absolutely committed to phasing out open-net pen salmon farms in British Columbia by 2025.

The BC Salmon Farmers Association emailed, “All changes to existing farms or for proposed new farms is in concert with First Nations and we respect and support their rights to self-determination and governance of their territories. While we understand concerns around increased salmon capacity, not all of the amendments are concerned with increased capacity or replacement capacity, however any increased capacity will be within licensing regulations and will not impact the health of the fish.”

Proboszcz outlined the 12 proposed expansions:

• A new salmon farm called ‘Ga-Guump’ between the Broughton Archipelago and Discovery Islands
• 4 sites want to increase production
• 4 sites want to install more pens 
• 2 sites in the Clio Channel want the “maximum allowable production cap” in their area removed
• another site wants to increase their tenure size.

Karen Wristen, Executive Director of the Living Oceans Society and lead author of Lousy Choices: Drug Resistant Sea Lice in Clayoquot Sound, said, “When you put more fish into a pen or into an area, or more pens in the area, either way you increase exponentially the potential for sea lice to get out of control. That’s because the little critters reproduce exponentially. So more fish; more sea lice hosts; more reproduction. We’ve already seen, even at the levels of the farms are at now, that farmers are having a great deal of trouble controlling this pest.”

Asked about the firmness of her evidence, Wristen responded, “We know that for Sockeye, at least, probably only two sea lice on an immature Sockeye would be enough to kill it. We’ve seen them with ten, so that’s pretty black and white.”

She conceded the evidences pertaining to viruses and pathogens spreading from farms to wild fish populations are less conclusive.

“It hasn’t been proven that diseases from the farms have actually killed a single fish, to my knowledge,” said Wristen, adding “because it’s very difficult to prove the death of a wild fish in the sea.”

Mack Bartlett is the Director of Research at the Cedar Coast Field Station, and also the lead author of ‘Juvenile Salmon and Sea Lice Monitoring in Clayoquot Sound 2018.  

“This year was the first year that farms in the region failed to keep sea lice abundance below this management threshold [3 lice per salmon] during the wild salmon out migration,” it says in the report. “We found the mean abundance of sea lice, at all life stages, on wild juvenile salmon throughout our assessment was 8.04.”

A quarter of the fish surveyed had ten or more sea lice.

Bartlett said, that viewed as a whole, the farms have kept below the 3 lice threshold since then, “but then when you look at individual farms, we’ve had many instances of them going over.”

He claims there is no biological basis for the three lice limit, which descends from an era when there were thought to be a thousand wild salmon for every one in a net pen.

“Here in Clayoquot sound, we have numbers much lower. We have millions of farmed fish and we have thousands of wild fish,” said Bartlett.

In Norway, where the wild fish population is also sparse, the threshold varies according to the location. 

“So in some areas they’re down to a 0.2 or 0.5 lice, then I think some areas is 1½ lice per fish, or maybe even 3.” 

He added that the Ahousaht First Nation recently imposed a 1½ lice per fish threshold on the fish farms operating within their territory. 

Both of the approved fish farm expansions are in Bartlett’s area:

“So here two farm expansions and two biomass expansions are proposed,” he said. “For myself, I would be most concerned about the additional biomass that they’re considering adding. Both of those farms are in proximity to the Moyeha River, which we consider the wild untouched indicator river for Clayoquot Sound. It’s never been logged. There’s no mining over there and yet still the salmon numbers from that river are near historic lows. For Chinook, we’re talking in the tens when there used to be thousands and those farm sites in 2018 had some of the highest sea lice levels in BC.”

The promises that Proboszcz and his colleagues depend on are found in two letters: a 2019 mandate letter from Prime Minister Trudeau instructed his new Minister of Fisheries (Bernadette Jordan) to develop a plan to transition from open net salmon farming by 2025 and a press release in which she reiterated this goal. 

Prior to the last election, the federal government engaged in a public consultation about fish farms and published the findings.

“Beyond that, there has been no roadmap, no plan, no interim steps laid out to remove farms by 2025,” said Proboszcz.

He wonders why the industry is willing to invest more money into new equipment.

“We just want some clarity and transparency from our government on where we are going with salmon farms in BC,” said Proboszcz.

Bartlett is troubled by some remarks made at a roundtable meeting of local stakeholders (industry, DFO, non-profits and First Nations). A DFO staff member said they do not know what transitioning away from open net salmon farms means. It does not necessarily mean taking pens out of the ocean and, in some areas, may even mean adding more farms.

 “So I’m concerned that even with the political will to change there might not be the will from within certain factions within DFO,” he said.

Wristen is more confident that change is coming, “I take it to be deadly serious and I think the salmon farming industry does too. They’ve seen the closures beginning to happen. They’re fighting back against them pretty hard, but there was no way that promise ever ought to have been made, if it wasn’t deadly serious.”

Top photo credit: Examining a lice infested salmon smolt – Photo by Mack Bartlett, Cedar Coast Field Station

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