Unions Question Morton's Proof
by Quentin Dodd, The Island Word, May 2010
The “insanity”, as senior union official Gary Kobayashi puts it, has now gone too far and is threatening some of his members’ jobs and livelihoods.
Kobayashi made the comments after anti-fish farm activist Alexandra Morton’s Get Out Migration trek from Sointula to Victoria recently passed through Campbell River and Courtenay/Comox, gathering hundreds of people to rallies in both centres.
Buoyed by that and by the growing number of signatures she and her supporters have been collecting on a petition against commerce with the salmon-farming industry, Morton added to her message to the crowds along the way: hopefully the salmon-farming will now be forced to admit defeat and “get out” of the province, to go back where they came from -- they are, after all, Norwegian companies and we’ve shown what damage they do with the sea lice from their net-pen operations.
Kobayashi, who is business agent of Local 1-1937 of the Steelworkers Union, resupported a open letter to public and the media from Local president Darrel Wong, taking exception to that on several different levels and saying that union members’ jobs are being directly threatened by the anti-farm campaigns of Morton and her support organizations.
The two officials said the Local will stand up for its affected members at an industry processing plant in Port Hardy, as necessary.
The duo said Morton and her supporters had not provided any convicting proof of the extent of damage to wild salmon stocks on the coast from sea lice from the net-pen farms.
And they expressed strong objection to statements and comments from Morton and numbers of her supporters, especially some of B.C.’s NDP MLAs and MPs, sometimes on their websites, prejudging the Bruce Cohen federal judicial inquiry into the cause of the sudden plummet of sockeye salmon runs on the Fraser and pointing an accusing finger at the industry as the cause of the expected millions of fish vanishing.
In the case of Island MLA Lana Popham, said Kobayashi, he notes that an item on her website calling for support for Morton’s Get Out campaign echoed the activist’s now admitted message that the so-called “Norwegian” salmon-farm companies - so called because they have headquarters in Norway - should just “gracefully” get out of the province.
Kobayashi stopped short of calling that and Popham’s remarks on her website racist, but he noted that Popham’s website message also said it should be left to “Canadians” to resolve the situation in the industry.
It was also noted that in the hike to Victoria, one of Morton’s highest-profile supporters, one-time convicted libeller of the industry Don Staniford, was regularly displaying a defaced Norwegian national flag marked with large black depictions of sea lice and the words “NORWAY Open-Net Pen Farms OUT!”
In CR and in Courtenay, Morton told her public audiences that she felt this is a battle they can win - though she also said in interview in Courtenay that she continued to be concerned about the ongoing level of apathy about her message among the general public.
Also in CR, some of her supporters were directly confrontational with one or two observers who had different perspectives, and led by Staniford, some attempted to return to Marine Harvest Canada’s local offices some 25 Atlantic salmon which they said had escaped from a company site some months before.
One outfitted protester lobbed several fish from the roof of a van on to the company’s upstairs balcony.
Morton’s comments in the city’s Spirit Square were not aided - or were aided, depending on your perspective - by a blasting statement from another supporter falsely claiming that the salmon produced by the net-pen operations are so unnatural and so disgusting that wildlife such as orcas, bears, sealions and sealions won’t eat them.
In the Comox Valley, Wong’s letter openly accused federal and provincial NDP politicians of prejudice against the industry, stating that Popham’s endorsement of Morton’s Get Out program was “based on bias and politics, not on science”.
“It’s apparent,” said Wong, “that workers and the communities that depend on salmon aquaculture are often times overlooked in the interests of political expediency or personal bias.”
Wong, whose union has supported both the NDP and the environmental movement in that past, added that it’s simply irresponsible for any elected official to assume that fish farms are the cause of the decline of the Fraser sockeye; that the union and its members strongly support protection of wild salmon and a sustainable salmon aquaculture industry, and believe “there is no reason why both wild salmon and farmed salmon cannot co-exist.”
His comments came shortly after a Department of Fisheries and Oceans study showed that the Canadian aquaculture industry generates revenue of $2.1million a year and creates some $14,500 jobs.
Some of 180-200 of those are at the unionized processing plant in Port Hardy, Kobayashi said.
The study showed that almost half of that national aquaculture revenue comes from British Columbia, where salmon-farming is by far the largest and most lucrative sector of the industry.
