There was a sight for sore eyes in late July off the coast of Tofino, when a Dutch-built, Vancouver-registered 30-metre barge, Salar, was towed out of Clayoquot Sound waters, hopefully never to return.

The vessel — looking like something out of Terry Gilliam’s fantasist movie Brazil — was brought to Tofino to battle infestations of sea lice, a persistent by-product of industrial salmon farming that attacks farmed fish and, incidentally, wild juvenile salmon.

That the name, Salar, is derived from the species name for Atlantic salmon, Salmo salar, may seem a rude irony to some on the West Coast where the fabled Oncorhynchus, or wild Pacific salmon, are endangered by the industrialization of salmon rearing not just in Clayoquot Sound, but in the Broughton Archipelago on the east side of Vancouver Island.

Meares Island, immediately to the east of the resort municipality of Tofino, is among the most iconic locations on Canada’s West Coast when it comes to the protection of rare old-growth coastal temperate rainforests.

It was here that the ritual of clear-cut logging was slowed 35 years ago. The Meares Island blockade in 1984 lit a fuse that blew up into a full-scale War in the Woods that dogged successive provincial governments — Socred and NDP and Liberal alike — until much of Clayoquot Sound was “protected,” as were large swaths of Haida Gwaii and, eventually, impressive tracts of the so-called Great Bear Rainforest.

Where there was a War in the Woods, now there’s a War on the Waters.

A view of Clayoquot Sound near Tofino. Photo: Shayd Johnson

To summer tourists who savour the “eco” tourism that has taken the place of some, if not all, logging, the uncut slopes of Meares Island, and a gorgeous necklace of inlets and islets on glittering inshore waters, perfectly disguise an environmental catastrophe that constitutes, literally, a pestilence on our coast.

Parked this summer (one hesitates to use the term “moored”) in sight of the Fourth Street dock in Tofino, the Salar supplemented the onshore processing plant of Cermaq, a Norway-based salmon farming company owned by Mitsubishi that operates in Chile, Norway and Canada.

Farmed fish, packed together in their thousands in pens, like battery chickens, are subject to disease, including outbreaks of a Norwegian strain of piscine orthoreovirus, or PRV — something Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans refused to screen for before a federal court ordered it to do so.

Farmed fish are sitting ducks for sea lice, too. Industry has struggled to contain the sea lice menace.

Last year, Cermaq took to sucking afflicted fish out of their net pens and bathing them in a solution of pesticide designed to dislodge the lice. The fish went back into their pens (and eventually made their way into the mouths of consumers), the chemicals were dispersed into the marine environment and life went on.

But some lice developed an immunity to drugs used to remove them.

This year’s “solution” was to deploy the Salar, or what industry calls a “hydrolicer” that was built to pressure-wash lice to dislodge them rather than use chemicals, making it “100 per cent pollution-free and thus environmentally friendly” according to a soothing review in Fish Farming Expert.

But at least farmed fish get a shake.

Wild smolts — which have no choice other than to migrate past open net pens — pick up lice in such numbers that they cannot survive.

Clayoquot Sound wild smolts covered in sea lice, May 2019. Photo: Tavish Campbell

Regulations require industry keep parasite levels below a certain threshold. During this past spring and early summer three of Cermaq’s farms exceeded sea lice levels in violation of federal rules.

During the early summer wild salmon migration season in Clayoquot Sound, I watched filmmaker and naturalist Tavish Campbell document juvenile salmon covered in sea lice.

Sometimes ten lice clamped to one tiny smolt — fish so young they have yet to develop scales and thus are defenceless against parasitic attacks.

On an excursion for the Cedar Coast Field Station on Vargas Island, Campbell, perhaps best known for his short film Bloodwater, said, “the focus has been on the Broughton, but it’s even worse out here.”

“Clayoquot Sound is close to the point where there’s just not going to be any wild fish any more,” Tavish Campbell told me, looking up for a moment from filming chum salmon smolts he sampled.

Sea lice on a wild salmon smolt recovered in Clayoquot Sound, May 2019. Photo: Tavish Campbell

Bonnie Glambeck, a director of the conservation group, Clayoquot Action, told The Tyee, “At one point during the out-migration, sampling of smolts at the Cedar Coast Field Station found 100 per cent of the juveniles were infected with sea lice.”

Mack Bartlett, research coordinator at the Cedar Coast station, told me the effect of sea lice on wild salmon was devastating. “We have [wild fish] returning in their tens, when there used to be thousands. We could see the disappearance of chinook salmon in Clayoquot Sound if we don’t come up with a solution.”

In an open letter in the Tofino-Ucluelet Westerly News Cermaq’s managing director, David Kiemele, admitted the company was “unable to effectively manage sea lice populations for a variety of reasons” during the critical wild salmon migration period from March to June.

So much for Salar.

Sea lice on a juvenile wild salmon in the Broughton Archipelago. Video: Tavish Campbell

You would think that Fisheries and Oceans Canada would shut down Cermaq’s operations pronto, but instead, the Government of Canada announced it was “moving forward on developing an action plan to address the enforcement of sea lice regulations in coastal waters.”

Which brings a tired laugh of disbelief from Homiskanis Don Svanvik, elected chief of the ‘Namgis First Nation, in Alert Bay.

“One of the biggest issues is that people don’t believe that our government would not be telling us the truth, or would not be doing all they can to help wild salmon. And in fact, they’re not.”

Svanvik’s people have been at the forefront of attempts to get fish farms out of their waters in the Broughton Archipelago, and onto dry land — as with the band-owned Kuterra land-raised salmon enterprise that has shown it can be done.

Open-net pen fish farms, Svanvik told me, “are this staging place for disease and sea lice that were never (previously) in place for the wild salmon returning and going out to sea. The logical place for those is on land, where they cannot impact wild fish.”

“They’ve got to go. Let’s get them out. Let’s not have any risk to our salmon up here.”

The key to getting fish farms out of open waters, Svanvik believes, is “when the population says no, that’s enough. You can’t do this anymore.”

Back in Tofino, in an echo of the Meares Island logging blockade a third of a century ago, signs of the salmon farming’s denouement are evident.

In late June, a new generation of protesters joined with holdovers from the War in the Woods as about 200 protesters took to local waters in the wake of the R/V Martin Sheen, a sailboat operated by the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, which has taken up the fight against salmon farms. A flotilla of small craft motored to and circled Cermaq’s farm on Warne Island.

The R/V Martin Sheen, a research vessel used as part of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s ‘Operation Virus Hunter,’ a campaign to document the impacts of open-net fish farms on the B.C. coast. Photo: Sea Shepherd Conservation Society

Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation member Tsimka Martin, one of the organizers of the flotilla, co-founded a group called the Nuuchahnulth Salmon Alliance that is determined to see fish farms — 27 of them, operated by three companies — evicted from Clayoquot Sound.

“These are cess pools, we need to remove them from our waters,” she says in a video posted on the alliance’s Facebook page.

There have been public marches, a rally outside Cermaq’s plant, boardings of Creative Salmon farm operations, an Indigenous talking circle — all chapters in the textbook endgame for an industry that has worn out whatever welcome it had in the first place.

Because there are jobs involved, of course politicians will have a say.

Unlike Jay Inslee, the governor of Washington State who is clearing fish farms out of the Salish Sea and vows to keep them out, Premier John Horgan has been hesitant to make significant changes.

Indigenous political leaders are meanwhile divided. While some communities benefit economically from the aquaculture industry operating in their traditional waters, others argue the protection of wild salmon should be see as critical to both reconciliation and efforts to free Indigenous nations from their economic dependence on extractive industries.

But time is running out for all — to save salmon from going the way of the East Coast cod.

“The salmon can be a messenger,” Don Svanvik says. “When we start doing things better, they’ll be coming back more. Then we’ll know we’re headed in the right direction.”

And then perhaps the people of Clayoquot Sound — indeed all over Vancouver Island — can get back to fighting the War in the Woods, which, it turns out — a third of a century later — isn’t really over after all …

Bringing back the trees to bring back the salmon

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The federal government has taken action recently to reduce the amount of plastic waste found on land and in oceans, rivers and lakes.

In June, for example, it said it would ban single-use plastics by 2021. “It is tough to explain to your children why dead whales are washing up on our beaches with their stomachs jammed packed with plastic bags,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau commented at the time.

Despite this progress, one of the main plastic polluters — shellfish aquaculture — continues to threaten marine ecosystems.

Coastal British Columbia is rugged and jagged. Its drowned fjords are home to wild salmon and the ecosystems that depend on them. Tucked away between Vancouver and Denman islands is Baynes Sound, a serene inland sea, home to sea mammals, globally important duck and bird populations, and a biological diversity unmatched along our coast.

So unique is this ecosystem that, 20 years ago, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) recommended regions within this area be set aside as protected areas.

Threats to the sound include increased tourism, urbanization and an-as-yet-unregulated seaweed harvest. The greatest threat, however, is an expanding shellfish industry that provides a continual source of plastics to the sound.

Shellfish aquaculture

For the past 14 years, community beach cleanups have measured the plastic in Baynes Sound. An astonishing four to six tonnes of plastic debris, including anti-predator netting, plastics trays, ropes and styrofoam, is collected from the beaches annually. Now polyvinyl chloride (PVC) piping, used for the farming of geoducks is also being washed ashore.

Geoducks are native to the coastal waters of western Canada and the northwest United States. They are the largest burrowing clam in the world and are a delicacy in China, Korea, Japan and the Pacific Northwest. Photo: U.S. Department of Agriculture / Flickr

In 2017, the DFO gave the West Coast shellfish industry a green light to expand its farming practices to include the lucrative geoduck, a luxury protein used in sashimi, to meet the demand from Hong Kong and the rest of China.

Geoducks (pronounced “gooey ducks”) are large salt-water clams, found naturally along the Pacific coast. Sales of farmed geoduck to this select market netted close to $56 million in 2017.

Geoduck Romesco at Taylor’s Shellfish in Seattle, Washington. Photo: T.Tseng / Flickr

Farming them involves placing juvenile geoducks into rows and rows of 18-inch long segments of PVC piping, planted vertically into the intertidal sediments, at a density of one pipe per square foot. Nets are secured with elastic bands over the pipe to protect the immature geoduck.

But the pipes become loose within days, especially after storm events, and the beach becomes littered with the plastic netting, elastics and pipes. Wave action and ultraviolet light from the sun degrade the pipes, creating fragments and then microplastics (items smaller than five millimetres in diametre) that further pollute the marine environment.

Ecosystem and health impacts

PVC is one of the most common plastic polymers in use, and its breakdown can damage ecosystem and human health.

The particles may harm invertebrates, fish, seabirds and other organisms that consume them. The chemicals in the plastic debris, including plasticizers, phthalates, flame retardants and stabilizers, can leach out of particles and have the potential to harm marine organisms. Finally, the pipe fragments can also act as a substrate, providing pathogenic marine organisms and parasites in near-shore environments with a place to grow and multiply.

“Canadians know first-hand the impacts of plastic pollution, and are tired of seeing their beaches, parks, streets and shorelines littered with plastic waste,” Trudeau said in a statement after he announced the single-use plastics ban.“We have a responsibility to work with our partners to reduce plastic pollution, protect the environment and create jobs and grow our economy. We owe it to our kids to keep the environment clean and safe for generations to come.”

So, why the paradox?

The government says it’s intent on protecting at least 10 per cent of our coastal ecosystems and reducing the threat of plastics to our marine environments. Yet the industry, which is managed by our federal government, has been given permission to introduce hazardous plastics into one of B.C.‘s most sensitive ecosystems.

Geoduck planting at the Deep Bay Marine Field Station biological research facility, operated by Vancouver Island University’s Centre for Shellfish Research in Bayes Sound, B.C. Photo: VIUDeepBay / Flickr

The ban on plastic holds consumers accountable. It targets their behaviour and will force change. But this is only part of the problem.

The other part of the problem is the industry practice of discharging dangerous plastics into sensitive ecosystems. Government is regulating a change in consumer behaviour. Why not do the same for industry?

If the government’s goal is to protect these sensitive marine ecosystems, it needs to stop the flow of plastics from industrial sources including the unregulated shellfish industry. The economic gain of farming sashimi for a select market is not worth the environmental cost.

Shelley McKeachie, a founding member, past chair and director of the Association for Denman Island Marine Stewards, co-authored this article.

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As Tavish Campbell dropped his remote camera into the water close to a salmon farm in the Broughton Archipelago, his heart sank.

Earlier in the day, during a dive, he was awestruck by the sight of an ancient, rare and previously undiscovered glass sponge reef in the water off Port Hardy, but now he was staring into the barren ruin of a second glass sponge reef.

“The one was totally alive and vibrant and healthy and the other one was a wasteland, covered in brown sediment,” Campbell told DeSmog Canada.

The live reef was at a depth of about 30 metres, which is unusually shallow for a glass sponge reef and Campbell did not drop a line into the water for fear of damaging the glass sponges.

“It was a little bit eerie doing the first dive, free-falling through the darkness and then my light illuminated this incredible sight — there were vibrant golden sponges, some standing two metres tall like giant vases. Schools of rockfish hovered over the top, there were king crab on top of the sponges and lingcod rested on the big egg masses with the males guarding the eggs. I was pretty gobsmacked,” Campbell said.

“I could hardly believe my eyes. It was like being on another planet. These sponges are ancient. These reefs have thrived there since the Jurassic (era) and were thought to have died off. It was like finding a herd of living dinosaurs.”

The euphoria of seeing the first reef, teeming with life, contrasted violently with the second site where the sponges were clearly dead and appeared to be smothered by waste and salmon feces from the farm, said Campbell, spokesman for Wild First, a coalition of organizations working to have salmon farms move from ocean pens to land-based operations by 2025.

“It was incredibly disheartening. . .One of my first thoughts was, with more than 130 salmon farms on the B.C. coast, what else is being smothered that we have yet to discover,” Campbell said.

“These sponges rely on clean water, free from excessive sedimentation, but unfortunately this is the exact opposite of the conditions under a salmon farm. With close to a million farmed salmon swimming overhead, the steady rain of feces and feed waste is a death sentence for life underneath.”

The fragile sponges, made of silica, were thought to have gone extinct 40-million years ago until living glass sponge reefs, estimated to be 9,000 years old, were discovered in Hecate Strait and Queen Charlotte Sound in 1987. Reefs were then found in Chatham Sound, Howe Sound and the Strait of Georgia

Both of the Broughton Archipelago reefs, about 1.6 kilometres apart, were discovered previously by Jody Eriksson and Campbell’s twin sister Farlyn Campbell, who were doing underwater surveys around open-net salmon farms, and Farlyn then asked her brother to film the area.*

Last year, Campbell filmed the startling “blood water” video showing a stream of blood pouring into the water off Campbell River from farmed salmon processed by the Browns Bay Packing Company. The video sparked an investigation by the province that found the effluent tested positive for the highly contagious piscine reovirus, a virus that can infect wild salmon.

Blood Water: B.C.’s Dirty Salmon Farming Secret from Tavish Campbell on Vimeo.

The dead glass sponge reef was found under Cermaq Canada’s Cecil Island Farm and Cermaq managing director David Kiemele said the company is looking into the claims.

“All of our leases abide by strict environmental regulations about where we can locate farms to ensure we avoid known risks to sensitive marine habitats,” Kiemele said in an emailed statement.

The Cecil Island site has been empty since June 2017 and will remain empty for several more months, Kiemele said.

“The farm is what we refer to as a nursery site where only small fish are grown for short periods of time before being transferred to other farms, so it is not unusual for it to remain fallow for long periods of time,” he said.

Although Kiemele has seen the video, he said there is no way to “clearly understand where this video was shot, at a depth of more than 264 feet,” but that is now being investigated.

Campbell said it was not possible for the remote camera to go directly under the farm, so the video was shot from about six metres outside the perimeter.

Ancient Glass Sponge Reef Smothered By Salmon Farm Waste in B.C. https://t.co/aquTeICDIj #Salmon #Bcpoli

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) April 27, 2018

The Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society has been working to protect glass sponge reefs in B.C. for decades and Ross Jameson, CPAWS-B.C. ocean conservation coordinator said the discovery is a wakeup call and demonstrates the need for the federal and provincial governments to work on protecting B.C.’s glass sponge reefs.

“The discovery of these glass sponge reefs is both incredibly exciting and saddening,” Jameson said.

“To find a new living reef is significant on a global scale. However, seeing the complete destruction of one of those reefs is devastating.”

Last year, the federal government established a 2,410 square kilometre marine conservation area in three sites between Vancouver Island and Haida Gwaii, restricting fishing in about 900 square kilometres.

The plan appears to be successful as there is a 150 metre buffer zone around the reefs to prevent them being damaged by sediment, Jameson said.

The reefs can be damaged by any bottom activity from shrimp fishing and dumping to trawling and more needs to be done by both the federal government and the provincial government, which has responsibility for the seafloor and salmon farm tenures, Jameson said.

Studies are being done on some of the reefs, but CPAWS wants an immediate precautionary approach around the sites so human activities do not destroy them while they are being studied, he said.

“There are about 130 fish farms on the B.C. coastline and we don’t know how many other glass sponge reefs are out there. There’s a good chance that there’s another one under an open net pen farm. We need to put some immediate protection in place,” Jameson said.

“With such limited restrictions on harmful activities along the coast, the discovery could just as easily have been two destroyed reefs,” he said.

Campbell also wants to see both levels of governments offer better protection for the reefs, especially as the province is looking at 22 fish farm tenures coming up for renewal in June.

Glass sponge reefs, which act as a giant ocean filter and essential habitat for marine life, are found only in B.C. and Alaska and, last December, the federal government added the Hecate Strait and Queen Charlotte Sound reefs to Canada’s tentative list for World Heritage Sites.

* Update: April 30, 2018 3:45pm pst. This article previously stated Jody Eriksson and Farlyn Campbell discovered the glass sponge reef earlier spring and has been updated to reflect the fact the reef was discovered prior to this spring.

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Fish farm opponents and proponents alike are waiting with bated breath as a bill to phase out open net pen aquaculture farms in Washington State sits on Governor Jay Inslee’s desk for final approval.

If Governor Inslee signs the bill, it would mean the end of farmed Atlantic salmon reared in open net pens in every jurisdiction on the West Coast of North America — except British Columbia. Alaska practices a controversial form of salmon ranching, but the state, along with California and Oregon, does not allow open net pen fish farm operations.

As pressure mounts on Washington State, where a mere 10 fish farms are in operation, attention has turned to British Columbia where more than 100 fish farms dot the southern and central coasts.

B.C. mulls moving fish farms with expired tenures — but where?

The B.C. government is currently considering whether or not to renew the tenure of 22 operations, 18 of which are clustered in the Broughton Archipelago, a narrow wild salmon migratory route between the mainland and Vancouver Island where local First Nations have historically opposed the aquaculture industry.

A spokesperson from Inslee’s office told DeSmog Canada the Governor has “publicly stated that he supports removing non-native fish from Washington state waters.”

The e-mailed statement read: “As fish don’t respect man-made borders, it would likely have an impact on British Columbia. However, the governor’s office believes that B.C. should do what is best for the province.”

Doug Donaldson, B.C. Minister of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development told DeSmog Canada, “we’re aware of what is happening in Washington state, which does not affect the process we’re following in B.C.”

“We’re committed to wild salmon,” the minister said via an e-mailed statement. “We’re engaged with First Nations on a government to government basis to address concerns that First Nations have with fish farms in their territories.

“What’s happening in Washington State is really exciting for those of us trying to get farms out of the water in B.C. for the last two decades,” said Aaron Hill, executive director and ecologist with Watershed Watch Salmon Society.

“There’s growing evidence that fish farms spread diseases and parasites to wild salmon and the Washington State government has recognized that and they’ve taken real action that we need B.C. to follow suit with.”

Hill said some B.C. politicians have floated moving the fish farm tenures to ocean areas outside the Broughton Archipelago, an idea he said doesn’t represent a true solution.

“Sure, you’d get these fish farms out of these migratory choke points, but they’d still be out there spreading diseases and viruses in someone else’s territory.”

When asked if the B.C. government is considering relocating farmed fish operations from the Broughton Archipelago to alternate locations, the department of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development provided a statement saying, “the province is concerned about protecting wild salmon and the migratory routes that they use and is interested in moving to closed containment where feasible.”

The state of B.C.’s salmon stocks

Pressure escalated in Washington State in August of 2017 after a net at a fish farm, owned and operated by the Canadian company Cooke Aquaculture, failed, releasing over 240,000 farmed Atlantic salmon, considered an invasive species, into the Pacific.

In February the results of a multi-agency investigation into the incident found Cooke Aquaculture failed to adequately maintain its nets, which were burdened 100 tonnes of mussels and debris, causing a ‘reckless disregard’ for the state’s waters and people.

The report was swiftly followed by proposed legislation to phase-out the industry.

State senator, Democrat Kevin Ranker, said Washington’s efforts will be less effective if B.C. doesn’t follow suit.

“The salmon, the orca whale, the ecosystem doesn’t recognize the international boundary,” Ranker told the Canadian Press.

“So what we have to do is manage our transboundary region in a responsible way. And I hope Washington state will pass this legislation and move in this direction and I hope that British Columbia will do the same.”

In B.C., where wild salmon stocks have been in a precipitous decline for several years, critics say not enough has been done to monitor stocks and eliminate threats.

The 2012 Commission of Inquiry into the Decline of Sockeye Salmon in the Fraser River, headed by Justice Bruce Cohen, cost taxpayers more than $37 million and made 75 recommendations designed to save wild salmon runs after the disastrous 2009 sockeye run.

But according to Watershed Watch Salmon Society, very few of those recommendations have been acted on, including the removal of fish farms from the Inside Passage if they’re found to represent even a minimal risk to wild salmon.

“There’s this huge range of threats to our salmon runs and the viruses and parasites from salmon farms are something we can actually do something about. We can actually remove that threat,” Hill said.

“It’s not the only thing. It’s not a silver bullet but it’s an important thing we can do.”

Stan Proboszcz, science and campaign advisor with Watershed Watch, said the need to help wild stocks rebound is becoming more urgent.

“Just look at the recent announcement with regard to Fraser sockeye: 8 of the 24 populations are listed as endangered. Those fish swim directly through the migratory bottleneck that is filled with samlon farms that amplify parasites and diseases.”

“Removing salmon farms from wild salmon migration routes would go a long way.”

Proboszcz pointed to a 2008 bipartisan provincial report that recommended the aquaculture industry be transitioned to closed containment.

“I think the biggest barrier to be quite honest is political leadership — and not just currently but for a long time.”

Farmed Atlantic salmon in a closed containment land-based fish farm, Kuterra, run by the ‘Namgis First Nation in Port McNeill. Photo: Kuterra

Land-based fish farms ‘the answer’: First Nations chief

Don Svanvik, chief counsellor for ‘Namgis First Nation, said it’s clear to him the future of salmon farming in B.C. is land-based.

“It’s the answer,” Svanvik told DeSmog Canada. “The godfather of all of this — Norway — is even moving to land-based farms now.”

“If you look at the history of fish farms in Norway, all the trouble they’ve had with disease and sea lice, it’s no wonder they’re going on land. And all the problems they’ve had there we’re having here now.”

Svanvik said when it comes to land-based fish farming in B.C., his nation has already proven it’s feasible.

Kuterra, an onland closed containment fish farming system, is owned and operated in Port McNeill by the ‘Namgis.

Josephine Mrozewski, spokesperson for Kuterra, said the operation is the primary example in North America of the promise of land-based Atlantic salmon farming.

Started in March 2013, Kuterra began selling land-farmed salmon on the market in April of 2014.

“When we started it was to prove out the viability of the biology, the technology and the business case for doing things this way,” Mrozewski said. “We really have fulfilled our mission.”

Kuterra, which was started with philanthropic funding, is now seeking outside investment to scale up production.

Salmon harvest at Kuterra. Photo courtesy of Kuterra.

The company produces 300 tonnes of farmed salmon each year but estimates it needs to get to 1,200 tonnes to be profitable.

B.C. has a huge advantage when it comes to developing a land-based aquaculture industry, Mrozewski said, because much of the infrastructure and expertise is already in place.

“What is adding urgency is the U.S. is catching up quickly.”

A single Florida facility in development is expected to produce as much land-based salmon as is produced in all of B.C. waters as early as 2020.

A surprising amount of salmon can be produced in on-land facilities, Mrozewski said, estimating all of B.C.’s open net operations could be reproduced in a single facility less than half the size of Stanley Park.

“Our footprint is very small. But it does take a lot of money,” she said, adding costs are declining now that ventures like Kuterra have smoothed the learning curve.

The ‘Namgis have recently appealed to the courts for an injunction to prevent Marine Harvest from restocking its operation near Swanson Island.

All three parties in B.C. have emphasized the importance of protecting wild salmon.

“But we need to see meaningful action soon,” Proboszcz said. “Otherwise we’re just going to keep hearing horror stories in the news.”

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It’s been a nightmarish year for Washington State’s only active Atlantic salmon farming company — Canada’s Cooke Aquaculture Inc.

On Tuesday, a Cooke subsidiary was found responsible for an August 2017 fish farm mishap that released up to 263,000 Atlantic Salmon into Washington’s Puget Sound — in addition to misleading the public and regulators about the cause, and lowballing the number of fish that escaped.

Those were the key findings of an investigation led by Washington’s Department of Ecology, Department of Fish and Wildlife and Department of Natural Resources (DNR) — which started last fall after a net pen near Cypress Island in Puget Sound (about 50 km east of Victoria) broke up on August 19.

“The collapse was not the result of natural causes,” said Hilary Franz, commissioner of public lands at a press conference Tuesday.  “Cooke’s disregard caused this disaster and recklessly put our state’s aquatic ecosystem at risk.”

On the same day this was announced, the state also fined the company $322,000 for violations of Washington state water quality laws associated with the August incident.

The outcome of the investigation is just the latest setback for Cooke and a nascent Atlantic salmon farming industry attempting to gain a foothold in Washington state — currently the only Pacific U.S. state where Atlantic salmon are farmed in ocean net pens.

In December, the Department of Natural Resources terminated Cooke’s lease of aquatic lands at Port Angeles — one of four sites the company has in the state — alleging multiple violations, and prompting the company to launch legal action that is pending. A month later, a coalition of Washington state tribes demanded that legislators outlaw Atlantic salmon farming in Puget Sound altogether.

But by far the most serious risk to Atlantic salmon farming in Washington state is the threat that lawmakers will phase out the industry for good. A case in point: a bill co-sponsored by Washington Senator Kevin Ranker that would prohibit the state from awarding new (or renewing old) farm leases like those run by Cooke continues to advance.

Could the bad news of this investigation be a final nail in the coffin for Atlantic salmon farming in Washington state?

What really happened?

State investigators say that last August, tidal currents at Cypress Island pushed against a heavy build-up of mussels and other organisms on the nets — weighing 110 tons in all — and overwhelming the pen’s mooring system and crushing the pen. Not only did Cooke fail to remove the mussels and clean the pens as they should have, the investigators concluded, they did not take “necessary precautions” after an earlier July incident that saw the Cypress Island net pens shift under the force of strong currents.  

“The results of our investigative report clearly show a significant violation of Washington’s water quality laws,” said Ecology Director Maia Bellon on Tuesday. “Cooke Aquaculture could have prevented this failure.”

“Cooke Aquaculture could have prevented this failure.”https://t.co/sxp7cAAdo4

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) February 2, 2018

Company underestimated escaped fish: state report

Based on Cooke’s reports, it was widely reported that 160,000 fish escaped as a result of the incident.

But state investigators on Tuesday said Cooke “misrepresented” the number of fish it harvested when the pen collapsed, which ultimately low-balled the total number of unaccounted fish.

Of the 305,000 fish in the pen, the company claimed to have extracted 145,000 fish, but the investigators concluded that Cooke could only have removed a maximum of 62,000 fish. The state now says the real number of escaped Atlantics could be as high as 263,000.

The issue of escapes has been high profile because wild Pacific salmon continue to struggle and the prospects of competition and disease transmission from escaped Atlantic salmon could hasten the decline.

Since the escapes, fishermen in Washington and B.C. have caught about 2,000 Atlantic salmon while Washington’s Lummi Nation, which declared a state of emergency after the disaster, has recovered at least 20,000.

A Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife map details the location of Atlantic farmed salmon caught and reported by anglers.

B.C. First Nations and Washington tribes protest

On January 18, Lummi Nation chairman Jeremiah Jay Julius joined 20 other Washington Treaty Tribal leaders in demanding that Washington lawmakers immediately enact legislation to remove Atlantic salmon from Washington waters.

“Too much is at stake — and the risks are too great — to allow Atlantic salmon aquaculture to continue now,” reads the letter.

This tribal activism in Washington mirrors recent protests in B.C.’s Broughton archipelago — where First Nations and environmentalists have raised alarms about sea lice and disease transmission from farmed to wild fish for years. Late last summer, two Broughton-area salmon farms owned by Marine Harvest were occupied by local First Nations demanding provincial and federal governments revoke their permits.

Newly elected Premier John Hogan met with Broughton-area First Nations last October to discuss their concerns, followed by a meeting in late January.

This week, a joint statement by four B.C. ministers and five Broughton-area First Nations confirmed discussions were continuing, but no changes were announced.

Troubled waters ahead for salmon farming in Washington?

On Tuesday, Cooke Aquaculture Pacific lashed out against the state investigation. Vice president of public relations Joel Richardson told DeSmog Canada the company did not overestimate the number of fish recovered and rejects the state’s explanation for the cause of the disaster, despite a concession that the company “fell behind in [net] hygiene.”  (Richardson says the real cause of the mishap is likely a combination factors, and cannot be solely attributed to the buildup of mussels on the nets.)

The report, the company says, is “intended to fuel the push by aquaculture opponents to put Cooke out of business in Washington.” And putting Cooke out of business is now a real possibility.

Commissioner Franz, whose Department of Natural Resources is technically Cooke’s landlord on the seabed where it farms, is now reviewing the report and will make an announcement in the coming week regarding the future of the Cypress Island facility. Asked if evicting the company was an option from this site, a spokesman for the department said “all options are on the table.”

Meanwhile Senator Ranker’s bill cleared another hurdle this week, advancing past a critical finance committee on Monday.

Regardless of what comes next, it’s clear that Cooke has made powerful enemies in Washington state.

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Wild salmon swimming past B.C. fish farms are at high risk of picking up a virus that causes weakness and affects their ability to reach spawning grounds according to new groundbreaking research published this week in the scientific journal PLOS One (Public Library of Science One).

The study found the percentage of wild salmon infected with piscine reovirus (PRV) was much higher in wild salmon exposed to a large cluster of salmon farms along the B.C. coast than in those that were not.

“In my view allowing piscine reovirus to flow from salmon farms into the marine environment will be viewed as an environmental crime of the highest order,” independent biologist and study author, Alexandra Morton, told DeSmog Canada.

ICYMI: Disturbing New Footage Shows Diseased, Deformed Salmon in B.C. Fish Farms

Morton’s concern that enough isn’t being done to protect wild salmon stocks is in line with concerns from some coastal First Nations, which in August occupied two fish farms on the Central Coast over their opposition to open-pen farms.* In early December, environmental group Pacific Wild released footage showing clouds of blood emanating from fish plants on Vancouver Island; subsequent testing revealed that that blood, too, contained the virus and other parasites.

The new study also found infected wild salmon were less likely to make it back to high-elevation spawning grounds.

“This study provides the first evidence that exposure to farmed Atlantic salmon is associated with infection of wild Pacific salmon with PRV, a virus of significant concern to both the aquaculture industry and wild fisheries management and that PRV infection may impair the capacity of wild salmon to complete a challenging spawning migration, with the potential for population-level impacts,” the study concludes.

Alarmingly Low Salmon Stocks in B.C. Stoke Fish Farming Concerns

The findings come at a time of alarmingly low salmon returns in B.C. and, adding weight to the concerns, are recent scientific findings that PRV is linked to heart and skeletal muscular disease (HSMI). Although HSMI has not been found in wild salmon it was found at a fish farm in the Discovery Islands between 2011 and 2013.

HSMI makes the fish lethargic — something that is not necessarily a problem for penned fish, but is usually fatal for wild salmon, which are in danger of being eaten by predators such as eagles, seals or killer whales if they lie around on the surface, independent biologist and study author, Alexandra Morton, told DeSmog Canada.

“And we know the fish don’t even have to get HSMI. PRV lodges itself in the red blood cells and affects the ability to carry oxygen from the gills to the tissues,” Morton said.

If the infection progresses, the salmon’s heart and swimming muscles become damaged leaving the fish very weak.

Salmon farming companies would not give Morton access to their fish, so the team of scientists bought 262 farmed salmon and 35 farmed steelhead from supermarkets. Tests found PRV in 95 per cent of the salmon and 69 per cent of the steelhead.

Farmed salmon tested for study. Photo: Alexandra Morton

Highest Density of Infected Wild Salmon Near Highest Density of Fish Farms

The scientists then looked at wild salmon infection rates and found that the highest percentages of infected fish were in high-density fish farm areas such as the Broughton Archipelago, where 45 per cent of the wild fish were found to have the virus.

Wild fish around the Discovery Islands — where the Cohen Commission concluded that diseases from farmed salmon could have an irrevocable impact on Fraser River sockeye returns — were found to have a 37 per cent infection rate and 40 per cent of returning salmon in the lower Fraser River were infected.

ICYMI: Ban on New Fish Farm Permits Sidelined as Escaped U.S. Farmed Salmon Increase in B.C. Waters

However, as Fraser salmon made it to the upper reaches of the river, the infection rate dropped by about 50 per cent.

“This suggests that salmon infected with PRV are less capable of swimming up through strong rapids in places like Hells Gate and therefore unable to reach their spawning grounds,” said study co-author Rick Routledge, Simon Fraser University professor emeritus.

In contrast, in areas furthest away from salmon farms, such as the Skeena and Nass, the infection rate dropped to five per cent.

This is the first study in the world to compare infection rates in wild fish to infection rates in farmed fish and the difference between the north and south is startling, said Morton, an outspoken opponent of open net pen fish farms.

One oddity found in the study was that in Cultus Lake, where, last year, sockeye were listed as endangered, 76 per cent of the trout were found to be infected.

That will need further study, but the hypothesis is that the trout were infected by salmon that travelled through the Discovery Islands and the virus was then incubated in the lake, Morton said.

“It’s a durable virus, a nasty little thing and it can exist for quite a long time outside the fish. It’s shed in the feces and urine,” Morton said.

A recent, video-gone-viral showing “blood water” being pumped into the ocean near Campbell River from Brown’s Bay Packing Company, a farmed fish processing plant, shocked British Columbians — and effluent samples analyzed by the Atlantic Veterinary College tested positive for PRV.

Morton said her research was completed before the video was taken, but effluent from the processing plant could be contributing to the high PRV rate in the Discovery Islands. The discharges are currently being tested by provincial investigators.

The peer-reviewed study is being strongly criticized by the B.C. Salmon Farmers Association which issued a press release accusing Morton of using weak correlational data to draw strong conclusions.

“This paper is part of a deliberate activist campaign led by Alexandra Morton and can hardly be taken as unbiased research,” said Jeremy Dunn, the association’s executive director.

The release says it is impossible to sample fish in a supermarket and make claims about the exposure of wild salmon to a pathogen.

BCSFA says that PRV commonly affects Atlantic salmon raised in open net pens around the B.C. coast, but say it is rarely associated with any sort of sickness and, although research is continuing, results so far show the virus “has little to no effect on an animal’s fitness.”

The presence of PRV has been linked to HSMI in farmed fish in Norway where the number of HSMI infected salmon farms rose to 181 by 2014. The presence of HSMI in Norway has caused fatalities in farmed fish according to company Marine Harvest.

But that same causal connection has not been proven in B.C. or replicated in laboratory settings, according to the industry association.

Morton said that, after the virus was first identified in Norwegian fish farms in 1999 it moved rapidly through the industry, appearing in the United Kingdom, Ireland and Chile. Most salmon-farming companies operating in B.C. are Norwegian-owned and previous research found the strain of PRV identified in her study originated in Norway, she said.

“This work is a strong indicator that [federal] management of salmon farms is not consistent with law, the precautionary principle or the mandate handed down by the Prime Minister of Canada that [the Department of Fisheries and Oceans] use science to manage fish stocks,” Morton told DeSmog Canada.

Morton and Ecojustice are currently arguing in Federal Court that the government is acting illegally by issuing licences allowing juvenile farmed salmon to be put into ocean pens without testing for the virus as transferring diseased fish into wild fish habitat contravenes the Fisheries Act.

Salmon-farming companies Marine Harvest and Cermaq have joined DFO in contesting the lawsuit and claim their businesses would fail if the court says they cannot put infected fish in the ocean.

* Correction Dec. 15, 2017: Due to an editor's error a previous version of this article stated First Nations occupied B.C. fish farms in October. They in fact began their occupation in August.

Image: B.C. farmed salmon. Photo: Tavish Campbell

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Fish-bearing waters are less protected from pollution after regulations passed by the federal government give Fisheries and Environmental Ministers the ability to grant blanket-authorizations to pollute if the polluting activity is related to fish-farming, research, or falls under other federal or provincial regulations or guidelines, which are not legally binding.

“Deregulating pollution in fish-bearing waters is short-sighted and irresponsible. They represent yet another attempt by the federal government to abdicate its responsibility to Canadians to protect fish and fish habitat,” Jessica Clogg, executive director and senior counsel at the West Coast Environmental Law Association said.

Dumping pollutants, such as drugs, aquatic pesticides and biochemical oxygen-demanding matter, into fish-bearing waters is prohibited in Section 36(3) of the Fisheries Act, except with a permit. The new regulations bypass permits and exempt pollution in a wide-range of circumstances, including aquaculture.

The Harper government quietly made way for a major expansion of fish-farming in British Columbia in January after opening the entire coast, excluding the Discovery Islands region, to aquaculture. Critics say the decision to scale up the fish-farming sector ignores the conclusions of the 2012 Cohen Commission report, the result of a three-year inquiry into the 2009 collapse of the Fraser River sockeye salmon fishery.

The Cohen Commission's final report made 75 recommendations which have yet to be implemented by the federal government. In February conservation groups filed petitions with the auditor general of Canada, requesting the Harper government report back to the public on the fate of the Cohen Commission’s recommendations.

Critics with the Watershed Watch Salmon Society fear the decision to expand fish farming on the B.C. coast is putting wild fish stocks at risk.

“The decision to expand destructive aquaculture practices anywhere along B.C.’s coast is a huge betrayal of the concerns raised in the Cohen inquiry,” Craig Orr with the society said.

The 2012 omnibus budget bills C-38 and C-45 eliminated several pieces of environmental legislation in Canada and revised both the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act and the Fisheries Act. As a result aquaculture projects, among many other kinds of projects, are no longer assessed for environmental impacts by the federal government. 

The Regulatory Impact Analysis Statement that accompanied the federal government’s new pollution regulations states the new rules will bring greater certainty to the industry.

According to the West Coast Environmental Law Association members of the public are concerned the new rules will limit oversight of potentially harmful pollution.

“What we really need is certainty that our rivers, lakes, and oceans are protected," Anna Johnston, staff counsel at the West Coast Environmental Law Association said.

“Requiring permits for pollution ensures that the regulators are aware of the pollution, allows site-specific considerations to be taken into account and allows for adjustments if any unwanted harms happen. What these regulations really enable is the government’s ability to turn a blind eye.”

Image Credit: lipseyhimsley via Flickr

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

British Columbia’s Fraser River was once the most productive sockeye salmon river in the world. In recent history, hundreds of millions of salmon would return to its tributaries, spawning along the thousands of kilometers of rivers and streams that serve as nesting grounds for this keystone species. 

During the early 1990’s scientists began to document a significant drop in the returning salmon to the Fraser River basin. With each passing year the number of returning salmon continued to fall. Over the years the cause of this enigmatic decline has been attributed to several different environmental happenings, but has largely remained elusive.

The new documentary film ‘Salmon Confidential,’ directed by filmmaker Twyla Roscovich and featuring biologist and wild-salmon advocate Alexandra Morton, tells the untold story of the biologists studying BC’s salmon while operating under gag orders imposed by the federal government. As the documentary uncovers, these researchers were prevented from informing the public of a new virus referred to as Salmon Leukemia Virus (SLV) and the proliferation of Infectious Salmon Anemia (ISA) in British Columbia’s wild salmon stocks.

In its current state, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans is mandated with the conflicting task of protecting wild fish stocks while at the same time fostering the development of an aquaculture (farmed-fish) industry. On a stage seemingly set by Kafka himself, numerous independent field researchers who discover the proliferation of (ISA) in British Columbian waters were forced to turn over their samples of ISA infected fish to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) who in turn astonishingly claimed that BC wild salmon tested ‘negative’ for ISA.  When three leading international laboratories released findings of ISA in British Columbian wild fish stocks the CFIA went on the attack and attempted to discredit scientists working at prominent research bodies such as the World Organization for Animal Health. 

Crucial to the story is the fact that international knowledge of contaminated salmon in BC would have a severe effect on the international trade of farmed salmon – a multi-million dollar industry (nearly $500 million in 2010 for salmon alone). Confirmed cases of ISA or SLV in BC fish would mean closed US and Asian borders for BC farmed salmon.

For this reason government and industry have worked overtime to obscure the existence of infectious diseases in British Columbian farmed salmon.

In the meantime, wild salmon stocks exposed to fish farms in the wild, are rapidly declining and suffering from dangerously high pre-spawn mortality rates. Fish migrating inland from the ocean were dying before the had the chance to release their eggs. Alexandra Morton traveled along BC riverbeds to document and study these mysterious deaths – much to the chagrin of government and industry. 

Not satisfied with their ability to solely control the testimony of scientists on the government payroll, in May 2012, British Columbia agricultural minister Don McRae introduced Bill C-37, the Animal Health Act, in an attempt to prohibit the disclosure of an outbreak of disease.  Specifically, section 16 of Bill C-37 states that “a person must refuse…to disclose…information that would reveal that a notifiable or reportable disease is or may be present in a specific place.”

This Act would impose a penalty of 2 years in prison and a $75,000 fine for naming the location where a person found a disease in an animal. Scientists like Morton suddenly found themselves at risk of imprisonment for their work on ISA and SLV.   After a substantial outcry the Bill was quietly withdrawn from consideration.  

In October 2012 the Honourable Bruce Cohen presented the final report of a Commission of Inquiry into the decline of Sockeye salmon in the Fraser River. 

Unable to find a ‘smoking gun,’ Cohen asserted that ‘Further research is crucial to understanding the long-term productivity and sustainability of the Fraser River sockeye salmon.’

The final Cohen Commission report noted several major issues were playing a role in salmon declines – including the conflict of interest at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, climate change and the weakening of species protection in the recent Omnibus Budget Bill C-38. Over 70 recommendations for the recovery of salmon were made throughout the report. These recommendations have yet to be implemented.

But the story doesn’t end with a bleak forecast predicting the end of BC’s wild Salmon stocks. In fact, the story doesn’t really end at all.

The documentary wraps up with Alexandra Morton in the field instructing local individuals on the techniques necessary to properly preserve samples to be sent to labs for inspections and testing for pathogens and viruses.

According to Morton, it is up to citizens to create what she calls the “Department of Wild Salmon.” Monitor of the species needs to be done on the ground and by the people who live in closest contact with the fish, she says.

And the story, for that reason, continues to develop up until this very moment.

There are still multitudes of fish farms populating the coast of British Columbia, packing millions of fish into tiny pens that serve as ideal breeding grounds for the types of pathogens and superbugs that threaten wild fish stocks.

And there are still the champions of ecological sustainability – eco-heroes if you will – volunteers and concerned citizens acting against the government’s wishes by gathering samples and submitting them for testing.

These individuals, who together make up the newly-formed Department of Wild Salmon, are using science to resist a profit-propelled interaction with nature that, if not regulated by organizations that prioritize preservation over short term economic profits, will surely provide BC’s wild salmon a sordid chapter in the book of BC’s history.

—

To watch the documentary, go to the Salmon Confidential website where you can also find a calendar of showings throughout BC.

On April 18th, David Suzuki and Alexandra Morton will attend a screening in Vancouver. Tickets are available online.

In the words of Suzuki: “For years, Alexandra Morton has soldiered on providing evidence of and calling for action on the catastrophic state of wild salmon. Government and industries have thwarted her over and over again. This film clearly documents that governments do not put protection of wild salmon at the top of their priorities and Canadians should be outraged. I am."

Image Credit: Screen shots from Salmon Confidential, available online for free.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.