On-land Fish Farms – Note to Trudeau and Tootoo

I sent a note to Trudeau and Tootoo asking for them to take fish farms out of the water and set them up on land to protect wild salmon, eliminate environmental damage and end the free release of climate-change sewage.

My list of 123 on-land systems shows that the Norwegian fish farm claim that it is too expensive is disingenuous. As you will see, Norway has gotten fed up with the environmental damage that Marine Harvest, Cermaq and Grieg Seafood cause in their own country and is giving out free licences for on-land farms to move the industry out of the ocean. We should be doing the same in Canada with the same companies.

When I generate a figure, or accept one from a report, I do a lot of work so that I am sure of what I say before I say it. An example is the sewage cost of $10.4 Billion in BC, which equals the entire human sewage put out in BC. I looked at sewage treatment in Victoria, the CRD, Vancouver, GVRD, Calgary, Ottawa, Halifax, Milwaukee, talked with the engineers of the Calgary Bonnybrook plant, read several reports, including one right on subject from Nova Scotia, as well as investigated Scotland, Norway itself, and Chile, the saddest, dirtiest country of them all.

My figure is conservative and the other end of the reasonable spectrum is, surprisingly, triple the $10.4 Billion figure – hard to believe yet true. Do also scan the list of 220 News Bites of global news from the last six months. I think you will be shocked. Also, the BC Stats report I cite, was actually done for and paid by DFO. They have never used one stat from their own report, only had their economists increase the multiplier number for jobs 230% from 1700 to 3900. Sorry DFO, that’s bogus.

Anyway, for a whole slew of reasons the way of the future is on land and you can see the link below to an article that concludes we are on the tipping point from sea to shore.

Here is my Christmas day note. Please consider sending one yourself:

Dear PM Justin Trudeau and DFO Minister Tootoo

I am writing to ask you to get fish farms out of the oceans of this country, particularly in BC where I live, and to eliminate the conflict of interest that DFO has with fish farms; as the Cohen Commission also said: DFO needs to concentrate on saving wild Pacific salmon. This is as big an issue in BC as stopping the Enbridge pipeline.

The government of Norway, where Marine Harvest, Cermaq and Grieg Seafood come from, is so fed up with the environmental damage caused by its own companies that it is giving away free licences for on-land farms - to get the industry out of the ocean. In-ocean farms must pay an auction price of $9- to $12-million per licence. In BC the same companies pay a measly $5,000. That means the licence subsidy for in-ocean BC fish farms is: $1.17- to 1.56-Billion that grants them the use of BC water as a free, open sewer, that Norway will no longer tolerate from the same companies.

We don’t want fish farms in the water either. Where people have to live with fish farms they overwhelmingly reject them. In BC 110,000 people signed a petition to stop expansion and get the industry out of the water: https://www.change.org/p/restore-wild-salmon-ban-salmon-feedlots-in-bc. This number far exceeds any petition against Enbridge that I have seen.

In Nova Scotia the public also rejects in-ocean fish farms, and the new weaker laws governing them: http://thechronicleherald.ca/novascotia/1322086-open-process-sought-in-aquaculture-rules. 

I estimate the sewage cost in BC from in-ocean fish farms to be $10.4 Billion. In Norway, the sewage far exceeds that from the entire human population of 8.1 Million. And fish farms don’t contribute much to the BC economy – nowhere near the damage cost they inflict. They say 6,000 jobs and $800 Million, however, the only believable stats, by BC Stats, says 1700 multiplier jobs and $469 Million, with a tiny contribution to GDP, for all of aquaculture, of only $61.9 Million, less than 10% of the contribution from the rest of the fishing sectors.

I made a point of looking into the actual job numbers and found it is only 795 actual jobs in BC. So for the huge environmental damage we suffer, it is for only a handful of jobs. It makes no economic or environmental sense.

And the problems in the global fish farm and seafood industry are pretty shocking: http://fishfarmnews.blogspot.ca/2015/07/key-document-fish-farm-news-bites.html. This is a list of more than 220 items in the past six months, including that the CEO of Fredriksen, Jo Lunder (item 129), the company that owns Marine Harvest, was sentenced to six months in jail for corruption. There are other jail sentences in Norway. Why are we not dealing with these companies the same way they are in Norway?

The people of BC want our elected officials to do what we want: get fish farms out of our pristine ocean, or they can take their few jobs back to Norway and set up on land in their own country.

In fact, the on-land movement is global. I have found 123 different on-land systems comprising more than 10,000 on-land farms around the globe. Why are fish farms still in BC water? See: http://fishfarmnews.blogspot.ca/2012/01/key-document-34-mostly-on-land-closed.html.

I receive four global fish farm newsletters every day, and it is my opinion that we are on the tipping point globally, moving from oceans to land. Those on-land near large cities first are the way of the future. See: http://fishfarmnews.blogspot.ca/2015/12/key-document-tipping-point-goodbye-in.html.  Let’s get there first, or they can go home to Norway.

Finally, my site is a global portal for fish farm environmental damage links, with more than 150,000 page views from all around the world. It will reach a quarter of a million in little more than a year: www.fishfarmnews.blogspot.com. Not surprisingly, Norway leads the pack, with Sweden and Russia in pursuit.

Have a nice holiday season.

DC Reid