Go and read their take.
Then read my comments to Harper, DFO et al, NDP, Greens, News Media:
Hi Stephen Harper et al
The people of BC do not want fish farms in our ocean anymore, so we do not
want your Aquaculture Act that would give them the opportunity to dump
everything they have into our pristine waters. More than 100,000 people have
signed a petition against fish farms in BC: http://www.change.org/p/restore-wild-salmon-ban-salmon-feedlots-in-bc.
The only people who want the old-tech, dinosaur fish farms in the waters of
BC are a few federal and provincial employees and fish farms themselves. Fish
farms only want to be in the water to use it as a free, open sewer. My estimate
of the sewage damage in BC is $10.4 Billion that fish farms get away with but
the cost comes to taxpayers. You will find the formula I used and a summary of
20,000 pages of fish farm environmental damage science on my site: www.fishfarmnews.blogspot.com.
You will find the links to the science that shows that fish farms put out more
sewage than the entire human populations of many countries they operate in. This
includes Scotland, and Norway itself. Norway is so polluted they had to dredge
several kilometres of one inlet of fish farm sewage and put it on land.
Of the 85,000 page views I have had in the three years that I have been
posting, the most popular by far is the one on the 69 on-land fish farm systems
I have found around the globe – comprising more than 8,000 actual on-land farms.
People do not want fish farms in the ocean anymore. Marine Harvest, Cermaq and
Grieg Seafood follow my blog daily - they are followers who won’t use their own
names – as 12,000 of the views are from Norway alone; that is 1 in 7. And look
at the Nancy Greene Raine posts for the deficiencies in the current laws.
Fish farms like to say they operate under the strictest laws in the world –
here and every other country they operate in, recently, Chile, Scotland and
Norway. Norway is so polluted that the big story in the past year has been
scientists and doctors warning Norwegians not to eat farmed fish because of the
POPs, PCBs, dioxins and other organic chemicals that cause, among other things,
cancer. But once fish farms say they operate under the strictest laws, they
lobby behind the scenes for getting rid of them. Your Aquaculture Act is an
example of this. Other of your examples include the omnibus ‘budget’ bill of
2013 that gutted S-35 and -36 of the Fisheries Act, and the Canadian
Environmental Assessment Act, 2012. Among other things you fired 200 scientists,
including those at the ocean sciences facility in Victoria. In addition, you
will find a post on my site that the Royal Society of Canada scientists levelled
a stinging indictment at you for your poor treatment of our three ocean coasts.
I have just finished a book by a federal DFO enforcement officer, Randy Nelson,
who points out that enforcement funding is always a race to the bottom because
of the Ottawa view of west coast enforcement.
What your Aquaculture Act does is create a race to the bottom of all the
countries that produce farmed salmon because fish farms then deal with those
countries and tell them they will have to take their jobs and revenue elsewhere.
And, the BC industry’s only market, 85% of it, goes to the USA, but the parent
companies of the BC industry have just had a 26% tariff lifted in the USA so
Norway is now selling into the only market for BC farmed salmon – and the
Norwegian fish farm industry is ten times the size of its BC operations. They
will be putting their own Canadian operations out of business, because they are
also setting up shop in the USA right now. At the same time, Chile’s production
has peaked since their 2008 crash due to ISA virus and most of it goes to the
States. The BC industry is in peril from its own parent companies – right now.
This has nothing to do with law, only economics.
You haven’t responded to the Cohen Commission that told you to eliminate
DFO’s conflict with supporting fish farms and get on with saving wild salmon.
The Williams review of the mid-90s and the 1982 Pearse Commission also made
environmental recommendations to DFO. Unheeded.
Harper et al, you are forcing BC away from the rest of Canada. At the same
time your fish farms are destroying our ocean and you want to make the weak laws
even weaker, you are backing the Enbridge Pipeline and the Kinder Morgan
Pipeline. There is the shipping of USA coal through BC and the Site C dam is
current, along with LNG fracking and Mt Polly tailings pond break. The last three are provincial issues, but all of
these are happening at the same time and your conservative government is taking
the hit in BC. You undoubtedly know that your current majority is slim and
balance of power is in BC.
Just so that you know, fish farms are not about jobs and revenue. They and
DFO like to claim that employment is 6,000 and revenue is $800 million. These
figures are not true. The BC Stats report shows that fish farming is stagnant
and all of aquaculture contributes only $61.9 Million to GPP, while sport
fishing, processing, and commercial contribute 90%, more than $600 million.
These figures were paid for by DFO and its name is on the document, but because
it didn’t like the figures, it took the 1,700 multiplier job figure for fish
farms and inflated it 250% to 3,900 recently. This is simply not true. The
actual employment is only 795 jobs. That is all there really are. You can find
on the Marine Harvest site, for example, that it only has 6,000 staff world
wide. As it operates in 22 countries, this means about 270 staff per country. As
I have said, the real employment figure in BC is a small 795 jobs, that is
all.
BC does not want fish farms anymore; they cause too much damage and the net
economic effect is negative. Fish farms jobs don’t add anything, they just
replace existing jobs. The commercial sector has lost the same number of jobs
that BC stats says are the fish farm multiplier numbers of 1,700. Also on my
site you will find the science that shows that fish farms result in a 50%
decline in wild salmon numbers around the world. This includes BC and the
indicator stream used on Vancouver Island, Black Creek, is in John Duncan’s
riding.
DC (Dennis) Reid
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