Salmon Farm Activist
Acquitted of Defamation
My guess is the average sport fisher does not know who Don
Staniford is. And I venture that Staniford doesn’t know the difference between
a bull head and a bull trout, or even how to catch a salmon. But the roughly
300,000 licenced sport fishers in BC owe him their gratitude. That is because
he has been fearless in his opposition to in-ocean fish farms, particularly in
BC, Scotland, Norway and
other countries.
Staniford’s approach to criticizing the industry that has in
recent months had well-reported disease problems in BC, Washington,
Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, is flamboyant in the extreme
and often foolhardy. His approach lies somewhere between Monty Python and Darth
Vader, with the Energizer Bunny supplying manic energy to his 24-hour a day
activism.
Mainstream Canada
sued him for defamation in February 2012. Judge Adair has just released her
findings. I have excised five pages of relevant clauses from her ruling and you
may find it on my blog, www.fishfarmnews.blogspot.com,
which also contains the link to her 71 page ruling – really worth reading in
its entirety. [Note: the excised comments are the next post on this blog].
Mainstream’s reasons are summarized in clause 10: “Mainstream
claims that, in their natural and ordinary meaning, Mr. Staniford’s statements,
in context, meant and were understood to mean that Mainstream’s business and
products kill people, and that Mainstream is knowingly marketing a carcinogenic
product that causes illness, death and harm. Mainstream says that the “sting”
arising from Mr. Staniford’s publications is that farmed salmon – like smoking
– causes cancer, and that the salmon farming industry is as odious and
dishonest as the tobacco industry.”
Pretty damning
stuff. And Judge Adair roasts Staniford’s character: “[his] value judgments…
[are] prejudiced, exaggerated and obstinate [171].” And, [from 174]: “Mr. Staniford’s judgements have no balance because balance
does not exist in Mr. Staniford’s world when it comes to salmon farming. He has
dedicated himself to eradicating it.” She also found that his comments were
defamatory [118], and that they applied to Mainstream [141].
But at the end, Adair excused Staniford of defamation on the
grounds that he believed what he was saying was true. Having read a lot of what
he has written, I ignore his inflammatory approach and follow-up his links to
the science. They are on the money.
My opinion is that, sadly, the top four problems for ten
species of salmonids are: fish farms, DFO, run of river power and Global
Warming. The last we can do little about quickly, but the other three can be addressed
today with policy decisions. The Cohen Commission into Fraser sockeye collapse
reconvened in December 2011 to assess whether fish farm diseases kill wild
salmon. Its report is due by October 30, 2012. I’ll let you know what it says.
Sport fishers should pat Staniford on the back – he has
withstood being sued three times over the past decade by fish farms, though never
successfully – because his bottom line is to stand with wild salmon in BC. In
fairness, I don’t see that fish farms need to be eradicated - they need to be
on land where their density-related disease amplification affects no other fish
or species. I have found more than 8,000 actual on-land farms around the world,
so there is no technological or economic impediment. We need wild salmon and so
do 37 species of our wild animals like bears and eagles.
560 Words
dcreid@islandnet.com
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