Your Promise to Move Fish Farms onto Land - Jobs and Revenues Low in Fish Farming, Updated Sept 16, 2017

John/Andrew/Lana

You all promised to get fish farms out of the water when campaigning for office. Well, we voted you in, and now we want fish farms taken out of the ocean. You can achieve this by pulling licences, which takes effect in 60 days.

I have read Lana starting to waffle in the press about getting the stakeholders together. This is not what British Columbians voted for. We voted for taking them out of the ocean.

Fish farms do not result in jobs and revenue for the jurisdiction in which they use the ocean as a free, open sewer. In fact, they are low in jobs, low in wages to GDP, and revenue goes out of the country.

See: https://fishfarmnews.blogspot.ca/2017/09/fish-farms-are-small-in-bc-jobs-and.html. And look at how low the jobs and revenue are: only 820 actual jobs and contribution to GDP an insignificant $61.9M for all of aquaculture.

There are only about 10% of the jobs that DFO and fish farms claim. And, at $10.4 Billion, the sewage cost is extraordinary, and revenue goes out of the country, back to their home country of Norway. Even Norway is so fed up with their environmental damage it stopped granting saltwater licences three years ago and now gives out on-land licences for free, a saving of $9- to $12-million. If Marine Harvest, Cermaq and Grieg Seafood don’t want to come out of the water here, send them back to Norway where they will have to set up on land.

See the sewage calculation: http://fishfarmnews.blogspot.ca/2017/02/fish-farm-sewage-huge-cost-to-bc.html.

Note that BC Stats is your own government people, doing a great job. When I worked in Finance, Treasury Board Staff, we felt they were better than Stats Can, because of the effort they put into being accurate. Look at the caveat section of the report in my post: http://www.bcstats.gov.bc.ca/StatisticsBySubject/BusinessIndustry/FisheriesAquacultureHuntingTrapping.aspx.

One final thing, my post on the 192 on-land fish farms systems around the world, comprising almost 20,000 actual on-land farms, shows that the new Atlantic Sapphire farm being set up in Florida on land, will be larger than the entire BC industry and sell into the USA, a more sustainable product, at a cheaper price, ruining BC industry sales, unless they, too, are on land.

See: http://fishfarmnews.blogspot.ca/2016/05/152-different-on-land-fish-farm-systems.html.

Please let British Columbians know when you plan to pull fish farms, that make no economic or environmental sense in the ocean, out of the water.

Everywhere in the world where fish farms are set up the public comes to overwhelmingly reject them. See: http://fishfarmnews.blogspot.ca/2017/05/global-citizens-call-for-on-land-fish.html.

DC Reid

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Here is Les Leyne, writing in the Times Colonist newspaper, also pointing out that you campaigned on getting fish farms out of the water:

"[Andrew Weaver] still has to delineate differences with the government [NDP + Green] to preserve a Green identity. "I'm sure they thought I was going to offer a softball," he said during his first question.

Instead, it was a dig at Transportation Minister Claire Trevana. She promised that the NDP would clear the entire north island of fish farms. Weaver said the promise was made specifically in Alert Bay to convince First Nations people not to vote for the Greens.

So when will the salmon pens be closed?

Agriculture Minister Lana Popham said: "We're figuring out where we go next," and no tenures are being granted or renewed [this has been the case for several years anyway, because fish farms are so overwhelmingly rejected in BC]."

So, John Horgan, when will you pull the licences and get the industry out of the water? After all their own country thinks its dumb to destroy their own ocean and is giving out free licences to set up on land in Norway  Let Marine Harvest, Cermaq, Grieg Seafood go home and set up on land, if they don't like it here.

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Finally, Sooke, BC has just passed a resolution to prohibit in-ocean fish farms. And in Chile, Tortel, has also blocked in-ocean fish farms in its waters. See items 99 and 102 in my BAD NEWS BITES post, started in Sept 2017 (there are five previous ones, totaling more than 2,000 bad news stories in fish farming/seafood industry): https://fishfarmnews.blogspot.ca/2017/08/bad-news-bites-salmonseafood-industry.html.