"For the first time in 70 years, salmon are swimming up Surrey’s Bon Accord Creek again. The project is being touted as the largest culvert rehabilitation project in North America, and is a collaboration between the City of Surrey’s Salmon Habitat Restoration Program students and fish passage installation company SSA Environmental." Read more here.

Factory fish farm giant Mowi is trying to sue Canadians for lost profits because our federal government closed 11 of its polluting salmon factory sites in the Discovery Islands, British Columbia. 

Mowi Canada West, a subsidiary of the Norwegian fish farm giant, filed the lawsuit quietly in B.C. Supreme Court, while they continued their public relations sympathy campaign, talking endlessly about their contributions to B.C. communities and the economy. That’s rich. It’s clear Mowi doesn’t want Canadians to know the full extent of their greed.

Factory fish farm companies are alleged to have “participated in an unlawful conspiracy to fix, maintain, increase or control the price of farmed Atlantic salmon." Read more in the New Westminster Record.

Factory fish farm giant, Mowi, is suing Canadians for lost profits because their farms were removed from the Discovery Islands, British Columbia. Read more in a National Observer story. You can also urge the federal government to stand-up to Mowi, here.

Canadian taxpayers may be on the hook for tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars while Mowi, the world's largest factory fish farming conglomerate, continues to spread parasites, viruses and bacteria along wild salmon migration routes in British Columbia. 

Thousands of factory farm salmon escaped from a Mowi-owned net-pen in Iceland. The fish have been sighted in at least 32 rivers and threaten the country's native wild salmon. Read more in a Guardian story. 

A new study published in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences examined juvenile pink and chum salmon at sites in the Discovery Islands, British Columbia, over the years 2020-22. The study's findings show a 96% decline in the average number of parasitic sea lice observed on juvenile salmon during this period. This coincides with the removal of salmon farms from the region during this period. Read more about it in a Business in Vancouver story.

“I told you so” feels so lame…

One of the problems of growing old in this business of saving the planet is that you live to see some of your worst predictions come true. The campaign to stop salmon farms from harming wild salmon has been ongoing since the early 90’s and has just hit a new milestone for ‘worst predictions come true’.

In 1996, the Province started the Salmon Aquaculture Review in response to pressure from fishing and environmental groups, First Nations and communities. As legal counsel at Sierra Legal Defence Fund, I represented a group fighting against factory fish farms at the hearings and had the chance to cross-examine all the witnesses.

In case you missed it, in December before the holidays all federal ministers received their marching orders from the Prime Minister in the form of mandate letters. This includes the new Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, British Columbia-based, Joyce Murray. She’s the member of parliament for Vancouver-Quadra. 

Wasn’t that a fun election—not. I think most people want to move on and are hoping the new government (which is a lot like the old government) gets rolling ASAP.

We heard loads of promises over the last year and the old saying rings especially true when it comes from politicians—talk is cheap. Verbal commitments rise to adulthood when they’re put in writing. Prime Minister Trudeau started a useful precedent several years ago when he made his mandate letters to cabinet public documents. Essentially, mandate letters are a Cabinet Minister’s marching orders, straight from the Prime Minister. Public mandate letters allow us to track what promises they’ve kept and broken.

The last federal government made several promises about B.C. wild salmon. They announced an allocation of $647 million towards a broad Pacific Salmon Strategy, to help wild salmon populations in trouble. Great news. It will focus on four areas: conservation and stewardship; enhanced hatchery production; harvest transformation; and integrated management and collaboration.

They also promised to:

            “create a responsible plan to transition from open net-pen salmon farming in coastal British Columbia waters by 2025.”