North Island MLA Anna Kindy is lauding the economic merits of open-net pen salmon farming in the province's legislature, saying the farms pose minimal risk to wild Pacific salmon.
"As a province, we need to advocate for an industry that, science says, is of minimal risk to wild stock," Kindy told the legislature during a debate on Feb. 20. "I will repeat: minimal risk to wild stock. There's no such thing as no risk (...) It provides billions of dollars to our economy, and good-paying jobs."
A study published in 2024 in Reviews in Aquaculture, which evaluated Norway’s regulatory management of the salmon farming sector, concluded that sea lice infections on salmon farms are not linked to measurable impacts on wild Atlantic salmon.
In the online publication, SalmonBusiness, Emeritus Scientist of Fisheries and Oceans Canada Simon Jones, co-author of the review, called the findings significant as they corresponds with the research and data collected on sea lice in Canada.
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"The highly variable relationship between lice levels on wild salmon and salmon aquaculture in B.C. indicates the need for a greater understanding of all factors affecting the survival of wild salmon," Jones said.
Back in the provincial legislature, Kindy said as an addiction doctor, she had a patient who got a job at a fish farm. "He's sober today, and he bought a home."
"For the Klemtu Nations, in B.C., with their fish farm, their suicide rate and overdose rates plummeted," Kindy continued. "They even bought a smoker and are selling fish to Walmart. We're taking that away from them."
Kindy, who was elected to serve the North Island riding last fall, replacing NDP MLA Michele Babchuk, said it's important to have high environmental standards. But she said the province must allow "an industry, which is renewable and provides us food and jobs, to thrive if they are following the environmental standards."
The 2024 findings published in Reviews in Aquaculture contradict a large body of independent research conducted in B.C., which indicates that salmon farms increase the presence of parasites, bacteria and viruses, potentially transmitting them to wild fish.
In an email to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the end of January, biologist and activist Alexandra Morton, a long-time critic of fish farms in the Discovery Islands, called the federal government's decision to ban fish farms in B.C. a "historic success." The ban on commercial fish farms that use an open-net system in B.C. comes into effect in 2029.
The decision to ban salmon farms is "one of the most measurably successful policies in the history of Canada to restore health and resilience to our environment," Morton wrote in the email sent on Jan. 22.
In addition to the 17 salmon closed farms, Mamalilikulla, Namgis, Kwikwasut’inuxw Haxwa’mis, Gwawaenuk, Kwiakah, Homalco, shíshálh and Nuchatlaht First Nations and Washington State closed another 35 salmon farms, extending a salmon farm-free corridor north to Alert Bay and south through Puget Sound, Morton said.
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Morton said the 2024 salmon returns to the region ballooned across a 500 kilometre swath, ranging from the Broughton Archipelago near Alert Bay through the Discovery Islands into Puget Sound. This region coincides with the locations where most industrial salmon farms have been shut down.
"A river adjacent to the Discovery Islands averaging 6,500 salmon annually, saw a return of 52,000!" Morton wrote. "The Viner River in the Broughton Archipelago saw a 22-fold increase in a single generation! Extraordinary returns ten to twenty times higher than recent generations occurred across the 500 kilometres but did not include the Salmon River where two salmon farms remain."
Morton added that caution is advised in attributing the remarkable 2024 salmon returns to removing salmon farms, but she said a recent report highlights these returns were a "continuum, not a one off."
