Imbalanced story misleads public
BCSFA, April 29, 2011
This letter was submitted to the Campbell River Courier-Islander on April 28 in response to a story that ran in their issue published the day before. It, unfortunately, did not run in the subsequent edition published today, so we'd like to share it with you here.
Thank-you for reading,
Mary Ellen Walling
Executive Director, BCSFA
Dear Editor
Re; "Cut the Crap Campaign brought to Campbell River, Dan MacLennan, April 27, 2011
For the thousands of local people working hard in BC's salmon farming industry, it was disappointing to see a poorly-attended, misinformed campaign be given platform to parrot its cause without any balance in the pages of the Courier-Islander.
Mr. MacLennan's story about Alexandra Morton's most recent vandalism in the Campbell River area doesn't even try to explain what our highly-regulated and monitored industry does to ensure that waste from our farms is managed and controlled.
If we had been contacted, the BC Salmon Farmers Association - or any of the companies targeted by last week's group of 10 costumed activists - would have explained how possible impacts on the benthic environment is one of the key focuses of our management programs.
Not only is extensive baseline data collected before a site is ever chosen or approved, but threshold levels for that bottom are then set - meaning that farms cannot exceed a regulated level of impact on the benthos. If they reach that threshold, our fish have to be removed immediately. It's a good motivators to make sure we're using high energy sites, that we don't waste feed, and that we control how many fish are on our farms at any given time.
These are all parts of the province's waste management regulation which was implemented in 2004 - and these standards are still in place.
This is an example of critics raising concerns that have in fact been heard by industry, studied by responsible researchers, enforced by regulators and eagerly met and exceeded by farmers.
Any human activity has an impact on the environment - for salmon farming, it is key that we recognize what those potential impacts are and mitigate them. We are doing that to a standard that is exemplary for other salmon-farming jurisdictions and industries around the world. It's time that story got some attention.
Mary Ellen Walling
Executive Director, BC Salmon Farmers Association
Campbell River
Mary Ellen Walling was responding to the following article:
'Cut the Crap' campaign brought to Campbell River
Dan MacLennan, Courier-Islander, Wednesday, April 27, 2011
The federal election campaign has featured no shortage of mud-slinging, but Alexandra Morton brought a less traditional, smellier form to Campbell River Tuesday morning.
The outspoken opponent of open-net fish farming took containers of fish manure to local fish farm headquarters and to the Vancouver Island North campaign office of Conservative candidate John Duncan as part of a "Cut The Crap" campaign.
Morton visited the Marine Harvest and Mainstream offices with the containers, and a crew dressed in hazardous material suits or dressed as skeletons. The campaigners left some of the muck behind.
"This is a crime scene," said Alexandra Morton. "The message to Marine Harvest, Mainstream and Grieg is crystal clear -- cut the crap and stop polluting BC's pristine waters. Please remove your filthy feedlots out of the path of migrating wild salmon."
Next Morton brought the muck to Duncan's office.
"We're here with some waste from under one of the farms...," Morton told Duncan's Campbell River campaign manager Dave McArthur after her cast of characters had entered the office.
"Yes, but you can take that out," McArthur tried. "Don't leave that in here, it smells."
"Yes, but you should just get a whiff," Morton persisted.
"I can smell it from there, so that's close enough," McArthur insisted.
Duncan did not make an appearance.
Outside, Morton dipped one of Duncan's campaign buttons into the muck. She said Duncan was the only Vancouver Island North candidate supporting continued use of open-net fish farms. She said fish farm waste is too much a hidden issue.
"I think that the reason salmon farms are allowed to dump their waste all over our sea floor is because nobody sees it, nobody smells it," she said. "If this was a cattle farm on Vancouver Island, they would not be allowed to have tons of this smelly waste all over the area around that farm. But in the ocean they're getting away with it because nobody sees it, nobody smells it."
"There's a better way to farm fish. We do not need to treat our sea floor like this. Put them in tanks. That waste is extremely rich. It could be used as fertilizer and they're just wasting it and destroying the environment as they do it."
Morton has thrown her support behind the NDP's Ronna-Rae Leonard.
"They are saying that they will move these salmon farms out of our ocean," Morton said. "If Ronna-Rae gets elected, she'll need to be reminded every week that that's what we want."
Later Morton's campaigners were planning to stage flotilla protest and swim around a salmon farm operated by Grieg Seafood in Conville Bay.
"It's a wasteland down under the farms," said Jody Eriksson, who collected the waste samples and filmed under the farms. "We were shocked: piles of fish faeces, rotting feed, bacterial mats and bubbling gases; a bottom smothered by waste.
