Canada: While the regular critics of the salmon farming industry in the province are still singing the same old tune, B.C. salmon return is once again one of the largest seen in this region.
Even the BBC this week featured an article about this year’s big run of pink salmon- not long ago being predicted to go extinct in certain areas of B.C. due to infection of sea lice spread from salmon farms. Aboriginal and commercial fishers have nicknamed pink salmon the “lousy salmon” long before salmon farming started in B.C.- due to the species’ documented tendency to harbour large numbers of naturally occurring sea lice. States the BBC:
An estimated 26 million pink salmon have crowded British Columbia's waterways, nearly three times more fish than expected, officials have reported. Roughly 17 million of the fish, which have a two-year life cycle, returned from the ocean in 2011. This month's salmon run is one of the largest ever seen in north-west British Columbia, officials have said. Researchers were uncertain what caused the increase but said the pink salmon's survival conditions must have improved.
Officials had anticipated only nine million fish. "It is a really good return this year, and we're quite pleased to see it," Les Jantz, area director for the British Columbia Interior, told the BBC. "It is a bit of a surprise... Hopefully it will be a sign of improved ocean conditions in the future." Mr Jantz said large pink salmon returns had been reported in the US state of Alaska, which could foreshadow significant sockeye salmon returns after a low season.
Meanwhile, a former Canadian Minister of Fisheries who publicly stated during a meeting in Chilliwack years ago that “if it was up to me- there would be no salmon farms in B.C.”, and who co-chaired a B.C. Pacific Salmon Forum that extensively studied the alleged impact of sea lice from salmon farms only to conclude that there was no evidence of wild salmon populations being negatively impacted by sea lice from salmon farms, is part of a group of conservation proponents which has complained to the Canadian government that not enough action has been taken by the current Department of Fisheries to distance itself from “the promotion of salmon farming”.
This follows a CAD$26 million (~€19 million) inquiry into the disappointing return of sockeye salmon to the Fraser River in 2009 (which was followed in 2010 by a hundred-year record return). According to an article by Peter O’Neil in today’s Vancouver Sun newspaper, a group that includes former Conservative Party Fisheries Minister John Fraser suggested- among else- that “the government still needs to respond to several key issues raised by (B.C. Supreme Court Justice) Cohen: The report encouraged Ottawa to remove the promotion of salmon farming from its mandate due to concerns about a conflict of interest in its role in protecting wild fish stocks. Migrating sockeye are vulnerable especially while "on their out-migration route in the Discovery Islands area where there are over 20 farms in relatively tight channels". Therefore, according to Cohen's recommendations, there should be a peer-reviewed re-evaluation of the risk of farms and if the risk is more than a minimal risk of serious harm to Fraser River sockeye, the farms in the Discovery Islands need to be removed."
When the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans for years was the main marketing promoter of wild-caught salmon from B.C. as well as the regulator of the commercial fishery for the same fish, there was no such complaining of a dual mandate, and the final report of former Minister Fraser’s own Pacific Salmon Forum provided no justification for such a “peer-reviewed re-evaluation of the risk of farms”.
