The Salmon People

The Salmon People podcast tells the story of a 40-year fight for wild salmon. It began with a fishing outfitter seeing smolts – young fish – covered in sea lice as he took tourists out to fish. He took his concerns to biologist Alex Morton. She was interested because the whales she was studying had stopped returning to the B.C. coast in the spring. She wondered if the sea lice were killing the smolts preventing them from going out to the ocean and returning as adult fish – fish the whales loved to eat?

One person has a question, a second person decides to try and answer it. And the years rolled by as Alex Morton worked with other scientists, environmentalists, nature guardians and First Nations to convince government that an industry controlled by multi-national companies based in Norway was contributing to the decline of the wild salmon.

Now with a 2029 deadline for all ocean-based fish farms to close, the industry is still lobbying to stay. They say they have a new design of farm that provides a better separation from the wild salmon and protect their fish from sea lice.

Scientist Stan Proboszcz of Watershed Watch says one of the companies, Cermaq is testing the new configuration. He says the fish are grown in a big plastic bag, which still sits in the water. 

“They have kind of switched their branding of that technology to closed containment. The reason for that rebranding in this federal transition that is the one thing that would be allowed is closed containment,” Proboszcz said.

“And if this is closed containment and this is the solution, I'm going to suggest that it's a terrible solution. It doesn’t work. It does not work at all,”

Dan Lewis of Clayoquot Action keeps watch on the fish farms on the west side of the island and says the new design doesn’t fix a major problem – enormous amounts of fish feces released from the farms into the ocean.  He says a video recorded by biologists from Fisheries and Oceans Canada, that was released after an ATIP request, showed a shocking amount of feces below the fish farm.

“And they found a trench and they followed it and it appeared to be full of feces from the farm. And I'm sure that's not how it's supposed to function.” Lewis said.