AN EMAIL DATED May 2, 2006, from Georges Lemieux, the senior trade commissioner with the Canadian embassy in Oslo, to international relations staff ended up in the inbox of Andrew Thomson, DFO’s Director of Aquaculture in British Columbia. In it Lemieux explained that Cermaq’s CEO, Geir Isaksen, was disappointed in Canada. Cermaq wanted to see “more support from government in countering myths and disinformation about the aquaculture industry,” he wrote. Lemieux explained that he had gone back to Isaksen to show him that the Department had responded to Cermaq’s concerns with a web page titled “Myths and realities about salmon farming.” This was a page on a government-funded and -sponsored website that painted my science as a myth.
The Norwegian CEO had replied that while this was a “good start,” he wanted the Canadian government to do more—to “market” his industry to Canadians.
I figured it was time to go to Norway.
Flying into Oslo looked like flying over British Columbia, with the same inlets or fjords and mountainous evergreen forests below me. It was 2009, and I was with a delegation that included First Nation chiefs Robert Chamberlin and Bobby Joseph, a filmmaker and political blogger named Damien Gillis, a BC tourism operator, and scientists and activists from Chile and Scotland. A concerned shareholder had invited us to speak at the annual general meetings for two of the three companies using the province of BC to grow salmon, Marine Harvest and Cermaq.
After two decades of dealing with their industry, I’d expected Norwegians to be oblivious to the subject of protecting the environment, but they were quite the opposite. People were actively conscious of their impact on the environment, riding bikes everywhere. Having lived off-grid since 1981, I loved that the plastic key card that opened my hotel room door had to be inserted into a slot in the wall to make the power come on. Every house in the world should have something like this so people can easily turn off everything that doesn’t need to be on. Living off-grid, you learn not to waste power, never leaving useless lights or clocks running. If I forget to turn these little power-eaters off, my house batteries can lose 15 percent of their charge overnight.
However, when it came to protection of wild salmon, it was clear that Norwegians, as a whole, had made the choice to sacrifice wild fish for farmed. Where British Columbia had 120 salmon farms, there were over 900 in Norway. At the time a single farm salmon in Norway was almost as valuable as a barrel of oil and, later, they became more valuable than oil. Norway referred to salmon farming as its IKEA, as crucial to the country as IKEA was to Sweden.
Shortly after we arrived in the spring of 2009, I met with a group of Norwegian scientists who were researching the impact of salmon farms. This was the first time I had the opportunity to talk with scientists who completely understood the damage I was observing in the Broughton and who knew more than me. I had so many questions for them that when time ran out on the space they had rented for our meeting, we moved next door into a hotel lobby and talked for hours longer. They knew the sea lice were killing off the wild salmon and sea trout; in Norway, industry did not pretend this wasn’t happening. They also suspected that farm-bred viruses were infecting their wild stocks, though this meeting was before they had discovered that piscine orthoreovirus, a virus that I ended up chasing through British Columbia, was multiplying and mutating in hundreds of farms.
These scientists did not want to give up on wild salmon. They longed to have as many wild salmon as we still had left in BC. They described how only the young wild salmon they treated with anti-lice drugs before they left their rivers made it back to spawn. In their view, this confirmed that the sea lice on the farms were responsible for the collapse of wild salmon and sea trout. (Sea trout are related to salmon, but they generally stay in the estuary or fjord near the river where they were born, so they are exposed to salmon farm effluent throughout their lives.)
The Norwegian scientists told me their biggest problem with salmon farms was genetic pollution, something we don’t face in British Columbia, except in the few chinook and steelhead farms on our coast. They described catching every salmon going up some rivers to spawn, tagging it, taking a tiny sample of its fins and putting it in a holding pool. Then they quickly ran tests on these samples to determine if the salmon were wild or had escaped from a farm. Only the wild salmon were allowed to continue upriver to spawn; the farm salmon were killed. These scientists were fighting to preserve the genetic adaptions that allowed salmon to thrive in each river.
The male escapees were aggressive, chased off the wild males and bred with wild females. Their babies were big, voracious feeders, qualities bred for by the industry. In the wild, these large hybrids outcompeted the smaller wild fish for food, reducing the chances of survival of the wild fish. But when salmon with farm genetics left the rivers for the ocean they made poor choices; a large percentage did not make it back to spawn. Since escaped farm fish had starved out the young wild salmon and displaced the wild males, Norway’s rivers were becoming increasingly empty of all salmon. Too late, big money was being spent to screen all the salmon entering Norwegian rivers and eradicate the farm salmon, but there was no getting ahead of the situation when farm salmon kept leaking out of the cages. These men had the wild salmon in Norway on life support. They knew they were losing the battle to save them, but they were not giving up.
The Vosso River held a legendary status in Norway. Before salmon farms, the Vosso salmon were the biggest Atlantic salmon in the world. To save them these scientists were catching them as juveniles before they left the river, putting them in large tubes that allowed water to flow through, and towing these tubes past the fish farms and far enough out to sea that they were safe. They towed them in order to get them by the farms as quickly as possible to prevent lice infestations, while still giving the young Vosso salmon a chance to memorize their way back to the river.
I told the Norwegians that I had tried to do a similar thing in 2008. The Kwikwasut’inuxw First Nation in the Broughton issued me a permit to catch and transfer young pink salmon in Bond Sound, coming from the Ahta River, and basically medevac them past the three farms owned by Marine Harvest (Mowi) and Cermaq to the open waters of Queen Charlotte Strait. I planned to use a fish boat, fill its hold with seawater and pump water from the ocean through the boat as it travelled past the farms to allow the fish to imprint on the route they would have to navigate on their return trip to spawn. But DFO sent an officer in a seaplane to intercept me in Tribune Channel, stopping me before I could go through with the plan.
I also went to meet Dr. Are Nylund at the University of Bergen. The salmon farming industry had gone after him hard, filing damaging ethics violation complaints and charges of fraud, first to the university and then to the national-level government Integrity Committee after Nylund and his co-authors reported that the most lethal known salmon virus, infectious salmon anemia virus or ISAV, had been introduced to Chile in farm salmon from a Norwegian hatchery. Nylund and his colleagues fought these charges. Their science was solid and eventually they were cleared, but the damage had been done to their careers. (Years after I met with Nylund, in June 2017, their experience was made public in an article printed in the Norwegian publication, Harvest, under the title “A Researcher’s Nightmare.”) Nylund had heard about my work and wanted to meet me. He told me to watch out; he was the second Norwegian scientist to do so.
I did not sleep well in Norway so much was coming to light. These companies had the audacity to blame tiny schools of stickleback for the lice problem in British Columbia, when scientists in their home country were towing wild salmon past farms as fast as possible trying to protect them from the farm lice. With impact of the industry so obvious in Norway, why was my government allowing these companies to damage Canadian ecosystems in the same way? Was industry scheming about how to take advantage of British Columbia in the head offices here in Norway or in Canada?
While the provincial government kept telling me they needed made-in-BC data before they would act, all the research they needed on the industry already existed here in Norway. To the scientists in Norway, it was entirely predictable that the industry was causing catastrophic damage to Pacific salmon. As my colleagues and I produced high-quality published science to reveal the dangers, the industry was silencing scientists around us and establishing more farm sites. All they had to do was make the public think that the harm resulting from fish farming was a subject of complex, honest, scientific debate. It wasn’t. They fought peer-reviewed solid science with media lines crafted to seed doubt.
I learned that Norway’s first salmon farmer was Norsk Hydro, a company that built dams on Norway’s rivers. Geoff Meggs of the Fisherman’s Union had once told me that he thought introducing salmon farming to BC was about weaning people off wild salmon so that the mighty Fraser River could be dammed and the power sold to the US. I hadn’t believed him, but I had to reconsider his theory when I learned that a company that dams rivers to make electricity had started this whole industry.
Marine Harvest (now Mowi) was largely owned by a billionaire named John Fredriksen, nicknamed The Wolf for his predatory business practices. This is a Norwegian who became a citizen of Cyprus to avoid paying taxes at home, and whose main gig is tankers. Marine Harvest was just a small part of his empire. When I walked with the opposition delegation into the Marine Harvest AGM in Oslo, I was at last among the people who were profiting from the destruction of the waters I called home. I looked around, fascinated. These were well-dressed Europeans who mingled easily with each other. I was in a thrift-shop dress and I have never gotten the hang of makeup. I felt impossibly out of place.
I was seated next to a woman in a tight leopard-print jumpsuit. On the other side of me was a man wearing powder-blue cowboy boots. When the Chilean labour leader from our delegation told this crowd about the hardship caused by Marine Harvest to the poor coastal people of Chile, the woman in the leopard-print jumpsuit stood up and said, “If you people would just work with us, I think we would find that you love salmon as much as I do. I just love salmon.”
I headed for the podium, suppressing my anxiety by thinking about the young salmon I’d picked the lice from. I kept my remarks brief, telling the shareholders how they were damaging British Columbia and also that they could fix this simply by moving their farms off the wild salmon migration routes of the coast. As I was heading back to my seat, the chairman of the board gave a little laugh and leaned into the microphone to say, “I hate to disappoint you but we are not going anywhere.”
Chief Robert Chamberlin was next. He started his speech in Kwak’wala, then opened a small jewellery box and presented a pair of silver wolf earrings to the CEO of Marine Harvest, Åse Aulie Michelet. She thanked him. She may have thought these were a gift, but true to his culture, Bob was paying her to hear his words. It seemed that neither she nor anyone else in that room did.
On my last night in Norway, Michelet asked to speak to me in private at Marine Harvest’s head office. We sat at a polished table in a room awash in the company’s signature orange colours. She asked if I had enjoyed my time in Norway. I told her that I had been pleased to learn that Norwegian scientists shared my concerns about her industry and that I didn’t think Marine Harvest was being honest about its impact in British Columbia.
She nodded and then got to her point. “What are you talking about when you told our media that none of our boats have licences on them?”
This was certainly not the issue I expected her to raise. Still, I told her that every boat carrying fish in Canada had to display a licence number large enough to be read at a distance, except for the boats moving farm salmon. She nervously pushed a plate of cookies towards me. Her biggest shareholder was a shipping magnate. He knew how to license ships.
“We are operating legally in Canada,” she said.
I said it didn’t look that way.
“What do you want?” she asked, with another gesture for me to take a cookie. Again I ignored the offering.
I have thought about her question a lot. Should I have said “a million dollars” just to see what would have happened? Instead I replied, “I want you to get your farms off wild salmon migration routes.”
That was the end of the meeting.
A year later, Georg Fredrik Rieber-Mohn, the former attorney general of Norway who had been appointed in 1995 to devise a plan to protect Norway’s wild salmon, published an editorial on the eve of the Norway vs. Canada hockey game at the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver. I’d met him in Norway, and in his editorial Rieber-Mohn referred to that meeting, saying that he’d experienced a sense of déjà vu while hearing me describe how Norwegian companies were causing harm to BC wild salmon due to their sea louse outbreaks.
Rieber-Mohn went on to write that sea lice from salmon farms had killed up to 90 percent of some Norwegian wild salmon runs and that his “wild salmon plan” had recommended prohibiting salmon farms in nine fjord systems, a ban that would have protected fifty of Norway’s best salmon rivers. Apparently John Fredriksen, The Wolf, had agreed and had made a passionate plea for adopting the ban in 2007 as he stood on the River Alta, one of Norway’s last great salmon rivers.
But, Rieber-Mohn wrote, intense lobbying by the salmon farming industry watered down the wild salmon plan in what he described as a “heavy defeat” that has led to the near extinction of wild salmon in many rivers in Norway. He ended his editorial with a plea to Canada: “If we don’t seize the opportunity now to move salmon farms out of the way of wild salmon we will all be losers.” This was an incredibly powerful statement by one of Norway’s highest officials made when all eyes were on Norway and Canada in the Olympics. And still Canada and British Columbia opted not to listen.