Article by Dahr Jamail in globalresearch.ca. “These most recent, and most blatant of the BP/US Government propaganda gems are easily undermined by countless facts.” Read article
Article by Robyn Smith in The Tyee. “Vancouver Canucks defenceman Willie Mitchell is the latest star to voice support for the protection of British Columbia’s wild salmon and the move towards closed containment farming, joining William Shatner in a growing cast of celebrity salmon defenders.” Read article
Letter to the editor by Chris Genovali of the Raincoast Consaervation Society in the Times Colonist.
“the B.C. fish farm industry relies on the application of the agricultural drug Slice to address chronic sea lice outbreaks.
“Emamectin benzoate is the active ingredient in Slice, which is administered in feed. The use of Slice is a concern to scientists like David Carpenter, professor at the environmental health and toxicology division at the University of Albany in New York. Carpenter has said that ’emamectin is one of a class of drugs known to block a major inhibitory neural transmitter in the brain. Animal studies have demonstrated exposure to this chemical during development causes changes in behaviour and growth as well as pathological changes in the brain.'”
July 28, 2010
Ed Porter, Team Leader, Regulatory Operations
Fisheries and Oceans Canada
PAR-RPA AT dfo-mpo.gc.ca
Dear Mr. Ed Porter:
I am responding to the 60-day public comment opportunity on the proposed Federal Pacific Aquaculture Regulations
http://www.gazette.gc.ca/cg-gc/about-sujet-eng.html
(left column “Part I Notices and Proposed Regulations” Vol. 144, No. 28, page 1933).
When BC Supreme Court ruled that the federal government must take over regulation of salmon feedlots, the intent was to bring the industry into compliance with the Constitution of Canada. But what Stephen Harper’s Conservatives are trying to do instead is remove safeguards established by previous governments and open the door to privatizing the ocean, which is prohibited by the Canadian Constitution.
With his document Harper not only licences massive ecological damage, he depreciates the market value of BC feedlot salmon. No reputable retailer can afford to be seen with a seafood product raised under a licence to “harm, alter, disrupt and destroy” the ocean. The federal licences will be issued without consultation with First Nations.
“Increasingly stringent international standards are driving seafood importing nations to require Canada to certify health (disease) status, not just food safety, of live aquatic animals and their products. ? Canada cannot meet these standards, and is facing increasing challenges to export market access. Canada is already subject to a lesser market access than the United States, Europe …” http://www.gazette.gc.ca/rp-pr/p1/2009/2009-12-19/html/reg1-eng.html
Canadian pathologists warn against holding millions of diseased salmon in pens (Traxler et al. 1993) and the graph below demonstrates the reason. There is a strong correlation between salmon feedlot epidemics and the declining Fraser sockeye. This must be examined, but the provincial government is stonewalling release of salmon feedlot disease records and Harper is stepping in to help.
These draft regulations ignore the International (OIE) and the Canadian Food and Health Inspection Agency standards by exempting salmon feedlots from full disease reporting. Harper is not only offering Norwegian companies the right to leave infected salmon in the water, he is protecting them from liability. If government and the industry are willing to throw away premium market value for disease secrecy we are warned this is a dangerous and strong priority.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper is also offering these Norwegian companies blanket authorization for “Harmful Alteration, Disruption or Destruction” of fish habitat (Section 35(1) Fisheries Act). This ignores the value of the oceans to communities across British Columbia. Oddly, these rules will not apply to eastern Canada, where the Minister of Fisheries resides.
Harper is going to legalize destruction of wild fish that become trapped in the pens, attracted by the bright lights and food in the water. There are no surplus wild fish and so this by-catch will compete with fishing quotas. Many feedlots are in rock cod conservation areas where fishermen are not allowed, but the feedlots will continue trapping unknown amounts. This is bad management and will affect herring, sable fish, salmon, lingcod and other important wild fish.
The federal Conservatives are proposing salmon feedlot licences be granted and amended without environmental assessment. This violates strong public demand for healthy coastal waters, but neatly resolves the irreconcilable issue of dumping over a ton/day/site of industrial waste into salmon habitat. These are the only feedlots that never have to shovel manure and chemical waste as it flows conveniently into public waters.
It is dangerous to humanity, (risking food security, drug resistance, disease mutation) to allow feedlots to contaminate natural environments with disease. Feedlots remove all the natural disease control mechanisms and thus allow viruses to mutate, multiply and jump to new species.
Because Mr. Harper is proposing to remove standards designed to protect the ocean from Norwegian feedlots, retailers like COSTCO will have to decide if their mission statements honor government or their customers. Promising to “Exceed ecological standards required in every community where we do business,” is meaningless if there are no ecological standards.
Salmon feedlots are an “ecology of bad ideas,” struggling to control disease with drugs, corrupting the foodchain by using warm-blooded animal products, plants and fish from the southern hemisphere as feed, displacing local businesses, turning a public resource into a corporate commodity with no public access, dyeing their fish pink to resemble salmon. If jobs were the goal, the federal Conservatives and BC Liberals would be working with the BC companies developing sustainable land-based aquaculture to create a viable, world-class product. Instead Mr. Harper is proposing to change the laws of Canada to allow unchecked pollution by a 92% Norwegian-owned industry associated wild salmon declines worldwide. Wild salmon are thriving everywhere this industry does not exist (Alaska, Iceland, western Pacific, areas of BC).
These proposed regulations are a signpost. If this was about fish, attention would have been paid to the market value of the product. Instead it risks one of the last naturally producing salmon regions in the world for a depreciating commodity. What these draft regulations do is clear away legislation established to protect Canadians and our coast from industrialization and privatization.
Ed Porter, the proposed Federal Pacific Aquaculture Regulations do not protect the interests of Canadians or the world and must not be adopted.
Sincerely,
Alexandra Morton
The Fraser sockeye decline began at the same time government failed to cull millions of IHN virus infected feedlot salmon on the Fraser River migration routes. Government ignored federal scientists who state infected Atlantic salmon should not be permitted in pens (Traxler et al 1993). The federal government also ignored warnings from their scientists that would have saved the North Atlantic cod. When the cod went extinct the Hibernia Oil wells appeared on the Grand Banks – the most generous food-producing area humanity will ever have was exchanged for oil.
Article by Ethan Baron in The Province about the Wikileaks documents on Afghanistan and responses from former BC Premier Ujjal Dosanjh and Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon. Read article
Article by Stephen Hume in the Vancouver Sun. “In moral terms, how does extracting cash from gambling addicts differ from selling crystal meth to drug addicts on grounds that if you don’t, somebody else will?”
Read article
What has a newspaper chain like Canwest got to do with an environmental website and its quest to save our environment?
A very great deal.
Undoubtedly newspapers have lost much of their onetime influence. Certainly when I was growing up, although our parents would admonish, “don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers”, the three papers in Vancouver, the News-Herald in the morning and the Sun and Province in the afternoon were very powerful influences on public opinion. For solid factual news coverage one listened to the CBC but the issues of the day in British Columbia were fashioned and debated in the print press.
Television, in my case in the early 50s, began to take over the coverage of public affairs. Starting with the brilliant Edward R. Murrow and continuing perhaps until the development of Fox, TV gave the hard edge to stories. Shows like 60 Minutes exposed what needed to be exposed.
Now the Internet so threatens TV and the newspapers that advertising revenue has sunk calamitously and even the mighty, like the New York Times, which exposed the disinformation by which the US government kept the war in Vietnam going, and the Washington Post, which exposed Watergate and drove Richard Nixon from power, are in serious financial difficulties.
Vancouver and, by extension British Columbia, has always marched to its own drummer. Until the last decade or so, opinion was driven by hard-hitting columnists and political talk show hosts. Names like Jack Webster, Marjorie Nichols, Pat Burns, Gary Bannerman and dare I add Rafe Mair, in radio and Allan Fotheringham, Jack Wasserman, Denny Boyd, Vaughn Palmer, Les Leyne, Jim Hume, and his two talented sons Mark and Stephen in print, and others consistently held all governments, municipal, provincial, and federal, accountable to the public. As they say, held their feet to the fire. There was a strong feeling of a journalistic obligation to question whatever the government alleged to be true.
Television played an important role as well, especially BCTV, and there are several names that come to mind, but theirs was not so much led by an individual as by the news department – led by the likes of Cameron Bell and the late Keith Bradbury. As a cabinet minister in the Bill Bennett government in the mid seventies I well remember the bashing we took, night after night, from BCTV over scandals real or imagined.
A clear distinction must be made here between columnists who write interesting analyses of the goings on of the times and those who, like a dog with a bone, pursue governments they see as practicing bad unto evil policies and being economical with the truth. Those who used to do the latter have been forced to do the former in order to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table.
That tradition of “show me” journalism and the will to see government bullshit exposed have all but left us.
Talk radio is a bad joke and television is little better. The guns of the print journalists have been retired or spiked.
The purchase of Canwest in separate lumps, Global-BCTV to Shaw Cable and the newspapers to a conglomerate of investment bankers and former employees led by Paul Godfrey holds out some promise for change.
Mr. Godfrey, with a minimum of subtlety, has criticized what’s happened in the past and promised changes for the future and here’s where the environment comes in – for unless the Canwest papers are going back to holding governments’ feet to the fire, what meaningful changes can Mr. Godfrey be talking about.
The environmental issues which have emerged as important in the last decade in BC are the fish farms and private power and both issues have been largely ignored by the media. In days of yore, Fotheringham and Nichols in the papers, Jack Webster and Gary Bannerman on radio, and Cameron Bell and Keith Bradbury at BCTV would have been all over the government on both of these issues. Moreover – and here’s the critical point – the Campbell government would never have got away with rank and demonstrable deceit on these two issues had Canwest, TV and print, and talk radio not badly let the public down – badly.
Hundreds of thousands, indeed millions of wild salmon would have been saved. Our rivers and the ecologies they support would be free of private dams on our rivers, roads and transmission lines scarring the countryside forever more. BC Hydro would be free of billions of dollars debt incurred paying for power they don’t need to the profit of the shareholders of General Electric.
This is the legacy of Canwest to the people of British Columbia. Mr. Godfrey can’t undo this but he can direct his papers to a return to the sort of journalism that prevented this sort of governmental abuse in the past.
We have reason, I think, for cautious – very cautious – optimism.
Damien Gillis discusses the dire threats to Clayoquot Sound and other stories The Common Sense Canadian is following with CJSF’s Stuart Richardson. 17 minutes.