New Science Committee? Don't Bother, Dominic, Updated Feb 4, 2018

Hi Dominic LeBlanc

You are new to a department that is behind the fish farm industry, but out of date by a decade. In-ocean is dying, on-land is taking over. Right now, Marine Harvest executives are jumping ship to the on-land Atlantic Sapphire plant in Florida at 150,000mt, and Nordic Aquafarm is building a new on-land site at 33,000mt in Maine. These are only two of the 212 on-land systems I have found, but they alone will have a huge impact on the in-ocean industry in Canada: https://fishfarmnews.blogspot.ca/2016/05/152-different-on-land-fish-farm-systems.html. If they aren’t on land, Canadian farms will die because consumers won’t buy in-ocean anymore, and US on-land will be cheaper.

Forget setting up a committee to look over in-ocean fish farm science: https://www.canada.ca/en/fisheries-oceans/news/2018/02/minister_leblancannouncesindependentexpertpanelonaquaculturescie.html. Having looked at it for a very long time, my opinion is that asking for science with respect to in-ocean fish farms is naïve, hubris or a manipulation.

I have read 20,000 pages of fish farm science and nothing has changed. Your attitude expresses the naïve, and DFO’s attitude expresses the hubris. What the industry does is manipulate – they always call for more science because it allows them to stay in the water longer, because they always say the science doesn’t say they are to blame… we need more science. But all around the world, those who have to live with fish farms come to overwhelmingly reject them. Put a fish farm in the Rideau Canal in Ottawa and see how long it takes for you to hate it.

Here are a few cases where science and DFO don’t work:

1. This case, in my opinion, is fraudulent, done by DFO and the CFIA. It involves looking not to find disease in BC’s ocean and letting a contract with BCMAL who they were sure would bring back a negative result. This is fraud and I’ll give you one month to address this one before I take further action: http://fishfarmnews.blogspot.ca/2016/09/canadian-food-inspection-agency.html.

2. During the Cohen Commission, the good scientists, Miller, Kibenge and Nylund, pointed out that your DFO, Gagne lab was not very good. Since then, Miller has been critical of DFO, who, as you know, she works for. Kibenge was knifed in the back by the CFIA going to the OIE to have his accreditation for being the western hemisphere’s scientist for fish farm diseases taken away.

3. DFO recently, and falsely, concluded that wild sockeye could not catch viruses from farmed fish. All that that work did was show that wild sockeye did not get IHN from farmed fish that were vaccinated against IHN. See: https://fishfarmnews.blogspot.ca/2018/01/sockeye-cant-catch-fish-farm-viruses.html. 

          Read the post by Stan Proboszcz where he showed that DFO’s method on the issue was to        refuse to give its own science committee, that you set up and he was on, the very science required to conclude that sockeye did not catch IHN from vaccinated farm fish: https://fishfarmnews.blogspot.ca/2018/01/sockeye-cant-catch-fish-farm-viruses_13.html.  Why should anyone conclude that setting up a committee is going to solve anything, if DFO won’t let its own committee have the science documents?

4. DFO just concluded on the east coast that farmed fish wouldn’t survive, wouldn’t eat, couldn’t spawn and the usual spin, if released from a fish farm. See: https://fishfarmnews.blogspot.ca/2018/01/dfo-asleep-at-switches.html. But it failed to find and include the science by John Volpe, who did the work with DFO in BC, that of the Vancouver Island rivers that his team snorkeled that rivers with multiple species of Pacific salmon had adult Atlantic salmon and up to two generations of progeny in 97% of those rivers. This is shocking.  DFO did not even mention its own science: https://fishfarmnews.blogspot.ca/2017/12/atlantic-salmon-in-bc-rivers-bad-news.html. That is also shocking.

          Note that in this case, the paper by Dounia Hamoutene et al has not been published but has been leaked from DFO so that the public knows what is going on. This is also shocking, but at least it shows that people at DFO think things are so bad they need to leak documents. 

Don’t set up a committee. Do, instead, what BC is going to do and that is take fish farms out of the ocean and set up on land, just like where they are from: Norway, that hasn’t auctioned an in-ocean licence in four years, it is so fed up with in-ocean degradation. And then, let's all move on from this issue and bring back wild Pacific salmon.

Oh and Alaska and California forbid in-ocean fish farms, with Oregon having zero, and Washington phasing them out. Let's join them and move on.

DC (Dennis) Reid