Sean Godwin was walking down Commercial Drive in Vancouver when he got a text from a colleague.

“It said something like, ‘you won’t believe what just came out,’ ” he said.

Fisheries and Oceans Canada, commonly called DFO, had released a report that found “no statistically significant association” between the level of sea lice that attack juvenile wild salmon and infestations of the parasite at nearby salmon farms. What that implies, the report continues, is that sea lice on wild juvenile Pacific salmon “cannot be explained solely” by sea lice larvae from farms.

The industry association that represents salmon farmers in B.C. sent out a press release lauding the report as “comprehensive.” 

Godwin was baffled.

“It is one of the worst pieces of science I’ve ever seen come out of a government agency,” Godwin, a post-doctoral fellow at Simon Fraser University, told The Narwhal.

He’s not alone in his concern. On January 30, he and 15 other academic scientists wrote to Fisheries and Oceans Minister Joyce Murray to share their “professional dismay at serious scientific failings” in the report.

“This report falls far short of the standards of credible independent peer review and publishable science,” the letter, which was made public Thursday, says.

“There are over 30 peer-reviewed scientific papers from B.C. that link sea lice on wild juvenile salmon with salmon farms, and many more papers internationally,” the scientists note.

The DFO report “in no way overturns the accumulated scientific evidence that salmon farms are one of the primary drivers of sea louse infestations on nearby wild juvenile salmon,” they write.​​

In a statement to The Narwhal Brian Kingzett, the executive director of the BC Salmon Farmers Association, an industry lobby group, said, “so far, our analysis is that it was a comprehensive study.”

“When we have a chance to review scientific criticisms, we will look at them in detail and in an objective manner,” he said. 

Minister Murray’s office and Fisheries and Oceans Canada did not respond to The Narwhal’s questions prior to publication. 

Salmon face ‘death by 1,000 cuts’ — sea lice are one threat that could be controlled

Sea lice are naturally occurring in the ocean and the BC Salmon Farmers Association noted in a statement to The Narwhal that farmed salmon are free from lice when they enter their pens. 

But in the same way that viruses like COVID-19 spread more easily in big crowds of people, once sea lice get in they flourish in farms teeming with fish.

Exposure to lice is a particular concern for the juvenile salmon that migrate past infested farms on their way out into the open ocean. Lice eat away at salmons’ skin, mucus and blood, leaving them with open sores and weakened immune systems. A single louse can cause enough damage to kill a juvenile salmon.

Godwin, who has spent the past decade or so studying the interactions between farmed and wild salmon, said the young wilds infested with more sea lice struggle to compete for food, grow more slowly and are more vulnerable to predators.

“Wild salmon are suffering from death by 1,000 cuts right now,” he said. But sea lice are “definitely a big issue and one of the only ones that is actually kind of manageable.”

“Salmon farmers in B.C. are as concerned as any other coastal resident about wild salmon,” Kingzett said in a statement to The Narwhal. 

Sea lice are a problem that has long plagued the B.C. salmon farming industry. Salmon farmers relied on chemical treatments to control sea lice outbreaks but the pests are becoming increasingly resistant to pesticides. Farms have also used freshwater and pressurized water treatments to control lice and other methods to prevent lice from entering pens. But farms have found it difficult to control sea lice outbreaks and in recent years, salmon farms have been found to be above the legal limit for lice during key migration windows for young salmon. A study Godwin conducted in 2020 found the amount of sea lice is regularly underreported at salmon farming operations.

Kingzett noted that “studies have shown wild salmon become infected with sea lice before even passing salmon farms and transfer sea lice to farmed salmon.”

DFO’s sea lice report’s conclusion is “important in the discussion regarding sea lice and farmed salmon. However, BC Salmon Farmers will continue to reduce any potential risk,” he said.

For years, scientists, many First Nations and conservationists have urged Fisheries and Oceans Canada to remove net-pen salmon farms from coastal waters.

Now, as the federal department is considering how to transition the industry away from open-net pen farms and Fisheries Minister Murray faces a more imminent decision on the future of salmon farming in the Discovery Islands region, the quality of scientific advice she’s getting from her department is a pressing concern.

Some scientists warn the recent sea lice report is just one example of many that illustrate major problems with the way science is done at Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

Scientists raise ire over ‘flaws’ and ‘unsupported conclusion’ in DFO report

In their letter, the scientists point to internal government documents obtained through an access to information request, that indicate the federal scientists only reported select results from their analyses.

Godwin said the documents show the federal scientists ran their analysis “multiple times in multiple different ways,” and excluded results from the report that showed a significant association between the level of sea lice on farms and wild salmon.

Martin Krkosek, a Canada Research Chair in marine epidemiology based at the University of Toronto and another signatory to the letter, noted there’s also a discrepancy between the reported results of the analysis and the conclusions that suggest there’s no problem with sea lice from salmon farms.

“The results in the paper themselves actually reinforced the connection that salmon farms are a primary driver of lice on juvenile salmon,” he said.

Very simply, the federal scientists used models to analyse the relationship between juvenile salmon infected by sea lice and the level of sea lice infestation on nearby farms in four separate regions. 

Their results were very close to a statistical threshold that would signal there is a significant association between the level of lice on farms and the level of lice on wild salmon swimming past, Krkosek explained.

With results so close to the threshold it begs the question is there really no association or is the analysis just too weak to detect it, Krkosek said. “And we think it’s more the case of the latter,” he said.

The academic scientists found that when the department’s reported results for each of the four regions are combined into a meta analysis there is a clear association between the lice infestation on farmed and wild salmon.

The 16 academic scientists are calling for the department to release the entire dataset it relied on so a fulsome, independent analysis can be done.

“Our primary concern is that the science advice that’s going up to the minister isn’t really the best advice,” Krkosek said. 

Kingzett said the data is publicly available through DFO’s website and through smolt monitoring reports salmon farm companies release.

“This report is unique because it looked into the relationship between extremely comprehensive data sets,” he said. One looks at lice and production levels collected by veterinarians and the other, collected by a consulting firm, looks at out-migrating salmon, according to Kingzett’s statement.

Krkosek said the smolt monitoring data could be compiled by combing through individual reports, but said a key piece of missing information is the number of fish at each farm. Without that, the infestation pressure from the farms can’t be calculated, he said.

He added that the scientists also want the exact data sets compiled by DFO to ensure that the results can be reproduced and so external scientists can do further analysis.

Sea lice report latest in string of examples that raise questions about industry bias at DFO 

In their letter, the academic scientists also note the contributors to the report are largely DFO officials involved in aquaculture management or aquaculture regulatory science. 

Numerous concerns have been raised over the years about DFO’s competing mandates to both promote the aquaculture industry and protect and conserve wild salmon. 

“We know that people have strongly suggested that DFO has a potential salmon farming industry bias,” Stan Proboszcz, senior scientist with the non-profit Watershed Watch Salmon Society.

He pointed to the findings of the 2012 Commission of Inquiry into the Decline of Sockeye Salmon in the Fraser River by Justice Bruce Cohen. In it, Cohen wrote that “DFO faces conflicting roles in having to tell the world that Canada’s farmed salmon products do not threaten the sustainability of wild salmon, yet at the same time credibly examining the possibility that such products are not safe.”

The recent sea lice report isn’t the first time DFO’s conclusions about the risk of salmon farms have been questioned, Proboszcz said. “All you have to do is Google suppression of science,” he said.

Kingzett said the industry was not involved in analyzing the data or developing the report.

“The report was developed by leading federal researchers in Canada and international experts, each with decades of research on sea lice biology,” he said. He chalked concerns about the report up to “anti-salmon farming activists who do not agree with the results are trying to claim the process is flawed or compromised by industry.”

To Gideon Mordecai, a viral ecologist at the University of British Columbia and signatory to the letter, the sea lice report is “very reminiscent of the way aquaculture management division has handled other science review processes,” 

Mordecai points for instance to the department’s record of undermining scientific studies that showed a link between piscine orthoreovirus or PRV and disease in wild salmon. Despite this research, including from one of its own scientists, a DFO report concluded that because PRV can be found in healthy fish, it can’t cause disease, he said.

“Now, after the COVID-19 pandemic we all understand that a virus can be in a healthy individual and they’ll not have any symptoms, but in others it can cause severe disease,” Mordecai said.

In May, Mordecai presented his concerns about the lack of independent science at DFO in a written and oral testimony to a parliamentary committee tasked with studying the state of science in the department.

In an interview this week, he said “the idea that policymakers can’t trust the science advice that they’re being given, that’s a worrying thing.”

Godwin agrees. “The minister has these incredibly important decisions to make that will affect the future of ecosystems and people that depend on these iconic fish and she just deserves to be able to trust the science advice that was given to her by her department,” he said.

“She can’t possibly do that right now given a shoddy report like this.”

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Discrepancies between the number of sea lice found on farmed salmon during in-house company checks and the number recorded when counts are audited by Fisheries and Oceans Canada reveal that salmon farming companies are regularly under-reporting the number of lice on their fish, a newly released study has found.

The spread of sea lice from salmon farms to wild fish is linked to shrinking wild salmon runs, so farms are required by Fisheries and Oceans Canada to do regular louse counts. If more than three adult lice are found on individual fish while juvenile wild salmon are migrating through the area, the company is obligated to conduct expensive delousing treatments to protect wild fish.

The study led by Sean Godwin, postdoctoral researcher at Dalhousie University, and published this week in the journal Ecological Application, looks at data from 2011 to 2016. Researchers found the number of lice reported during unsupervised counts was 15 per cent lower for one sea louse species and almost 50 per cent lower for a second species when compared to numbers recorded during pre-arranged audits of the counts by Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

When auditors are looking over the shoulders of industry staff, the company and government counts seem to be in agreement, “but, when auditors aren’t there, which is the vast majority of the time, the industry counts go down,” Godwin told The Narwhal.

Those lower numbers mean that delousing treatments of farm fish — either by feeding fish a chemical parasiticide or bathing the fish in hydrogen peroxide — may be delayed or not done at all, Godwin said.

“These treatments are expensive, so there’s a conflict of interest there. If the farm (counts) were accurate instead of under-reported, the public could be more confident that the farms are complying with the regulations that are supposed to safeguard wild salmon,” he said.

“Right now we can’t have that confidence because the companies that are being forced to do these expensive treatments are also providing the data to decide when these treatments are going to happen.”

Wild juvenile pink salmon from Nootka Sound, B.C., covered in and scarred by parasitic sea lice in 2020. Photo: Tavish Campbell

A wild juvenile sockeye salmon, caught in Johnstone Strait, B.C., during its migration from the Fraser River, infested with parasitic sea lice. Photo: Tavish Campbell

Wild juvenile salmon caught in the Discovery Islands, in B.C., in 2020 being grazed on by immature and adult sea lice. Photo: Tavish Campbell

The B.C. Salmon Farmers Association includes extensive information on its website about measures taken by farms to minimize and treat sea lice.

However, when contacted by The Narwhal, the association would not respond to the study’s findings.

A spokesperson for Fisheries and Oceans Canada said in an e-mailed response to questions from The Narwhal that about 50 per cent of farms are randomly audited for sea lice during the outmigration season and “over 95 per cent have been in compliance.” This year, additional funding was put into targeted audits, which can occur without warning when non-compliance is suspected, and the department is “very confident” in the auditing program, she wrote.

“To date, all deficiency issues have been corrected by companies to the satisfaction of the department without having to proceed or progress to a prosecution,” she wrote.

Godwin’s study suggests that bias would be removed from self-reported numbers if monitoring was conducted by an independent third party.

Alternatively, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) should conduct audits without advance notice after the company has collected data, so there would always be the risk of a subsequent review, the study says.

“If the salmon farming industry is to continue reporting the counts and, if DFO considers it important to protect wild salmon, DFO should impose some explicit and strong incentives for accurate reporting,” Godwin said.

A salmon farm at Sonora Point in the Discovery Islands of B.C. Photo: Tavish Campbell

Fisheries and Oceans Canada said farm sites are selected randomly and given very little warning prior to an audit, but “some site notification is required in order to ensure proper staff and equipment are on site to conduct an effective and in-depth audit. Unannounced spot checks would yield less information and could put staff or fish welfare at risk due to biosecurity protocols.”

Discrepancies in the counts are not surprising, according to Brian Riddell, science advisor with the Pacific Salmon Foundation.

“I don’t say that to be insulting to the entire industry, but there’s something in statistics we call inherent bias. So when people are collecting data and they know there’s a particular consequence, they, quite naturally, will perhaps not be so discriminating,” Riddell said.

The concern is that delousing treatments are not being done when they are needed, which puts wild fish at risk. A major step towards gaining accurate information would be for Fisheries and Oceans Canada to stop notifying companies when they are coming to do an audit, Riddell said.

“Break the chain so there is more of a random check,” he suggested.

An industry employee works on a B.C. salmon farm. Photo: Tavish Campbell

Lawrence Dill, behavioural ecology professor at Simon Fraser University, is also unsurprised by the findings.

“They’ve lied to the public about the risks of virtually every other aspect of their operations over the years,” Dill told The Narwhal.

“I’d favour counts by a well-trained independent third party. It’s vital for the health of wild salmon,” he said.

The Fraser River sockeye run plummeted to record lows this year and most other salmon runs have been poor.

Craig Orr, conservation advisor for Watershed Watch Salmon Society, said self-reporting is always a concern and the consequent delay in treatments means there is a breakdown of precautionary management of the impacts of lice on wild fish.

“They either delay the treatment of lice or don’t treat it at all because they apparently don’t exceed the threshold, when, in many cases shown by this study, they are exceeding the threshold,” Orr said.

Fears that lice are out of control in salmon farms in B.C. is propelling the push to get farms out of the water and on to land or closed containment pens, said Orr and Riddell.

A recent study by biologist Alexandra Morton, using data published by salmon farming companies Mowi, Cermaq and Grieg, found that 37 per cent of salmon farms exceeded sea lice limits this spring.

However, Morton’s preliminary report noted that Fisheries and Oceans Canada granted the industry a 42-day grace period, while juvenile salmon were migrating, during which time the companies were allowed to exceed the number of sea lice thought safe for wild salmon.

“This means that a farm shedding dangerous lice levels into the path of young salmon is protected from consequences, even if they are causing death to millions of wild salmon,” says Morton’s report, which documented sea lice infection rates of 94 per cent in the Discovery Islands, 87 per cent in Nootka Sound, 72 per cent in the Clayoquot Region and a low 34 per cent in the Broughton Archipelago where five fish farms were recently closed.

A recent study found that salmon farms in the Discovery Islands of B.C., like this one at Sonora Point, have a rate of sea lice infection of 94 per cent. Photo: Tavish Campbell

The report, released by the First Nations Leadership Council in June, prompted Indigenous leaders to call for an end to all open-net pen salmon farming.

“We have known for years that open-net pen salmon farming is one of the main contributors to the massive decline in wild salmon stocks in this province,” said B.C. Assembly of First Nations Regional Chief Terry Teegee.

A major obstacle is the dual mandate of Fisheries and Oceans Canada to both protect wild salmon and promote the salmon farming industry, Godwin said.

In 2012 the $37-million Cohen Commission of Inquiry into the Decline of Sockeye Salmon in the Fraser River recommended that the two mandates should be separated because of inherent conflict of interest, but no action has been taken.

Another Cohen Commission recommendation, now being watched closely, is the Sept. 30 deadline for prohibiting net-pen salmon farming in the Discovery Islands unless the Fisheries Minister is satisfied that the farms pose “at most a minimal risk of serious harm to the health of migrating Fraser River sockeye salmon.”

Orr suspects that, despite the federal government’s assertion that they have acted on all the Cohen recommendations, farms will not be moved from the Discovery Islands.

“They’ve been very much promoting the industry for a long time,” he said.

Fisheries and Oceans Canada said in a statement that a formal risk assessment process has been created to look at the transfer of pathogens from farmed Atlantic salmon in the Discovery Islands to Fraser River sockeye. The last of nine assessments is scheduled for mid-September and “the science advice to date has concluded that pathogens from aquaculture farms pose no more than a minimal risk to the abundance and diversity of Fraser River sockeye salmon.”

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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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