DFO doesn't fund culling
Colleen Dane / Campbell River Courier-Islander, February 14, 2014
Re: DFO needs funding, not fish farms. We agree with Mr. Macdonald of the Campbell River Guides Association that providing sufficient funding and resources to Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) is important to ensuring the appropriate regulation and protection of our oceans. We would also like to clarify how compensation works for Canadian food producers.
Aquaculture food producers - both finfish and shellfish - have the same access to funding as agriculture food producers. This includes money for research and development, disaster coverage, and compensation if our stocks are ordered destroyed. Compensation takes place through the Canadian Food Inspection
Agency (CFIA) and is not related to the funding for DFO. This is the same procedure for beef, pork or chicken producers should their stocks be ordered destroyed, and even vegetable farmers can be eligible for compensation if they receive a destruction order. No farmers in aquaculture or agriculture want to see their stock culled. BC Salmon Farmers spend years caring for their fish. Disease outbreaks are rare, thanks to the dedication of our fish health professionals, and we are proud to produce healthy, nutritious fish that are helping to meet the growing global demand for seafood.
Colleen Dane, Communication Manager, BC Salmon Farmers Association
The BCSFA letter was in response to the following:
DFO needs funding, not fish farms
Harry MacDonald / Campbell River Courier-Islander, February 5, 2014
(An open letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper published here by request.) The Campbell River Guides Association was formed in 1968 and since then has been an advocate for the recreational fishery in the north-centre Vancouver Island area and the fisheries resource upon which it depends.
Our association has been increasingly concerned in recent years at the steady reduction in the financial resources allocated by your government to Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) and the increasing inability of this department to undertake its core responsibilities. Sock assessment, habitat protection, enforcement, enhancement and research are now not conducted at anything like the level that is necessary to properly sustain both the resource and the fisheries for which Canada is known. Departmental staff always have too much to do and not enough resources to enable them to properly undertake that which is expected of them by Canadians.
It is against that background that our association's membership is outraged to learn that in the past year and a half your government has paid $46 million in compensation to aquaculture companies in Atlantic Canada which have been ordered by a federal agency to destroy farmed salmon.
Your choice to compensate private aquaculture companies with tens of millions of taxpayers dollars against the consequences of unwise decisions related to site location and stocking densities while at the same time constantly reducing funding to the department tasked with managing the wild fishery resource and the many fisheries it can sustain is not one that the Canadian public can support. These spending priorities need to be reversed immediately, with compensation for disease outbreaks on salmon farms ended and funding adequate to allow DFO to do its job properly being restored quickly.
Harry Macdonald,
President, Campbell River Guides Association
