Reasonable people will see the light
By Mary Ellen Walling, Courier-Islander June 6, 2012
Members of the BC Salmon Farmers Association share extensive amounts of information regularly: hot topic and press releases on the website, responding to Facebook and Twitter questions, developing the BC Salmon Facts forum to create transparency around answers to questions people raise, proactively releasing information regarding fish health and environmental monitoring, answering calls and emails and letters from the general public, hosting public farm tours, meeting interest groups and presenting on our operations, hosting booths at public events, providing comments to the media, presenting at local government council meetings, sharing newsletters online, mailing out annual updates to all operating areas and more.
Regardless of all that proactive work, there are anti-salmon farm campaigners who will argue that our farmers are secretive, and who will lie to support their assertions. We, however, will continue this work, with the belief that reasonable, critical thinkers will see the effort and appreciate it.
Mary Ellen Walling Executive Director BC Salmon Farmers Association
Mary Ellen Walling letter was in response to the following:
Trying to get answers
Elena Edwards, Courier-Islander, Wednesday, May 30, 2012
In Mary Ellen Walling's response to "The actual truth" she states that Ms. Koch never contacted the BC Salmon Farmers directly for answers. I cannot speak for Koch's attempts to contact Ms. Walling or getting answers from the BCSFA, but when I tried I never received one response to my phone messages. The one time I did get someone on the phone the fellow was very suspicious of every question asked, wanting to know who I was "with". He could/ would not answer any of my questions, not even as to the safety of the salmon farm structures in the event of a tsunami. (Could happen.)
My limited experience in attempting communication with the BCSFA is that they refuse to answer questions they have not been trained to answer and quickly kill communication by deferring to the BC Salmon "Facts" website.
While the salmon farm PR people are praising the swiftness of their response to the deadly IHN outbreak, they are negligent or oblivious to the dangers of what such an outbreak is capable of. Suppose for a moment that rather than IHN, which the BCSFA excuses as being "harmless" to wild salmon, that this outbreak were the highly lethal and contagious ISAv?
Or piscine reovirus? HSMI? Why should we believe that the BCSFA will be transparent about that when they've denied fish samples to any scientist who does not work for salmon farmers and when the CFIA considers this all to be a "PR war"?
Elena Edwards Quadra Island
