B.C.'s Salmon Farmers Given a Free Ride by Our Provincial 'Regulators'

Catherine Stewart, Special to The Province

In a recent opinion piece defending salmon farming, Ruth Salmon of the Canadian Aquaculture Industry Association rightly stated that the B.C. fish farming industry faces a plethora of regulations and requirements.

We have speeding laws too, but imagine if our traffic laws were enforced the same way that salmon farmers are regulated.Every driver would voluntarily report their violations to the police: "Dear Officer, yesterday I went 60 past an elementary school. Please send the ticket to . . ."

Regulations are meaningless if they are not enforced. By and large, the salmon farming industry in B.C. reports to its association who provide cumulative data to governments. Data such as the number of escaped Atlantic salmon, how many sea lions were shot or drowned in net cages or the regional total of antibiotics pumped into the fish.

When the industry data does arrive in provincial offices the bureaucrats don't question the numbers.

One example is that salmon farms are required to report their usage of Slice™, a neurotoxic pesticide added to feed to treat the constant sea lice outbreaks on the farms. Living Oceans Society recently asked the B.C.

Ministry of Environment for the amount of Slice™ used in 2007 by the three big Norwegian aquaculture corporations that own 92 per cent of B.C.'s salmon farms.

The list was short and according to the province's spreadsheet, one company, Mainstream, used 562,732 kilograms on just eight farms -- an unbelievably high amount.

We contacted the company who resolved the error and provided the correct figures. But the stated use of over half a million kilos of this chemical should have set off alarm bells in an agency charged with enforcing regulations.

It didn't.

And it gets worse.

Oslo-based Marine Harvest, the world's largest salmon farmer, is the only company to voluntarily post the dates of Slice™ treatments on its Canadian web site.

The list provided by the province named seven MH farms that used Slice in 2007. A quick scan of the company's web site showed Slice™ treatments at an additional six B.C. farm sites that year.

In a follow-up phone call, Marine Harvest confirmed an additional eight sites had used Slice™ in 2007.

We asked, but our government clearly isn't asking. It just accepts the voluntary company reports and then publishes regular reports proclaiming overwhelming compliance with "the toughest regulations in the world."

Slice is just the iceberg tip of regulatory failure in B.C.

Returns of wild salmon to the Broughton Archipelago are at an all-time low and grizzly bears in the Glendale River are starving.

Clam beaches down-current from farms are covered in rotting black sludge.

Rockfish near salmon farms have higher levels of mercury contamination. Sea lions and seals are drowned and shot and medicated feed and feces smother the ocean floor beneath the farms.

Ms. Salmon, the fish farming industry and our "regulators" keep repeating the refrain, "all is well." It isn't.

Our governments are failing to protect our salmon, our oceans and our future from open net-cage salmon farms. That is a fact.