IN RESPONSE TO the Cohen Commission’s instructions to DFO to provide all documents that might pertain to the decline of the Fraser River sockeye, over three million pages of internal government documents were filed. These documents were assembled into a database to which each approved participant in the inquiry was given tightly restricted and confidential access. To release a document from this database, the participant’s lawyer had to request that it be made into an exhibit during their allotted time in front of Justice Cohen and Cohen had to accept it into evidence. The lawyers were paid by the commission for their time, but participants, such as me, were not.
As I began combing through the documents, some of them tens of pages long, I borrowed the treadmill again, taped my laptop computer to it and spent nine months staring at the screen. The commission database was painfully slow to search and my internet connectivity was equally slow; the file downloads would grind away interminably.
As a whale researcher in Echo Bay writing letters to government, I only saw DFO’s impenetrable slippery facade. But now I was on the other side of that wall. I began following trails that led deep into the fortress that DFO has become. I saw the responses to many issues I had raised with the Department. For example, when I had reported oily gas bubbles rising to the surface close to Cermaq’s Cecil Island salmon farm in the Broughton in July 2008, a senior aquaculture biologist was sent to investigate. Eventually, she wrote me with these results: “During the three visits we collectively undertook, there were no further bubbles seen, nor any information we could find to explain your observations.”
However, in the Cohen database, I found an email in which she described what she had actually found: “In another sampling location, at the edge of the feed shed, near where the community member [i.e., me] had reported bubbles at the surface, our grab became entangled and we pulled up a mort lift pipe full of dead fish…. We were unable to explain how it got to that location, especially full of fish. The pipes are normally inside the pens and they suck morts up from the bottom of the pens…. It’s possible the pipe was dropped off the system by mistake.” Right, a pipe full of dead fish had been lifted out of the pen, over the walkway, and dropped “by mistake.” What had really happened?
The time I’d spent watching animals closely had sharpened my observational skills. People give up important information in their body language. Government lawyers glance at industry lawyers as interrogation by a judge moves in a direction they are uncomfortable with. Scientists clench their lips and visibly swallow the things they mustn’t say. Federal employees blink compulsively during certain questions. As nervous people attempt to skirt an issue, they define the boundaries of what they are trying to hide like chalk at a crime scene.
The enormous fuss that industry and government kicked up to prevent the provincial farm salmon health records from becoming public was a prominent chalk outline. Even as the industry followed through on its threat to ban government fish inspectors from taking samples of farm salmon after the health records were released to the Fisherman’s Union, I found that the companies continued to send farm salmon samples to the same ministry’s Animal Health Centre for diagnostic work. The industry didn’t trust government, but they trusted this government lab. Was this lab responsible to the companies or government?
One month into reviewing the Cohen documents, I found hundreds of the Animal Health Centre diagnostic reports provided to the companies, many of them done after the government inspectors had been barred from the farms. I printed the neatly typed reports, signed by provincial fish pathologist, Dr. Gary Marty. His reports went back to 2006, when he had been hired. The date, company and submitting industry veterinarians were identified, as well as the health concern of the fish, though usually the farm site in question was not listed. Dr. Marty provided extensive detail in each report on the lesions found in the organ samples submitted to the lab and noted what he thought might have caused the cell damage he observed.
The company veterinarians had asked Dr. Marty about a wide range of symptoms in the farm salmon: cloudy eyes, bloody eyes, blood in the brain, bloat, green livers, open sores, lesions, meningitis, hemorrhages, and scores of other issues. In response, Marty provided detailed descriptions of the abnormalities visible under the microscope. When he described specific cellular damage, he referenced published scientific papers to support his opinions. I looked up those papers, read them and learned about the pathogens that were worrying the salmon farmers in British Columbia.
In addition to these reports to the companies, I found Dr. Marty’s quarterly health audits of the farms from before the industry brought them to an end. This was Cohen file BCP002864, an Excel file with 2,278 lines of entries. I reviewed and graphed these data to find the patterns.
What jumped out at me first were Dr. Marty’s 1,100 reports of the classic lesions associated with ISAV infections in BC farmed salmon. ISAV, or infectious salmon anemia virus, is an internationally reportable virus, meaning the world is trying to prevent it from spreading. Infected countries have to report outbreaks of the virus to the World Organisation for Animal Health, OIE. The virus is a member of the influenza family, and influenza viruses in farm animals are a worry. Think avian and swine flu. Influenza viruses have no “proofreading” gene. The typos in genetic sequences of the virus are not corrected as the virus replicates, which means they mutate easily. This makes them particularly dangerous in feedlots, where the opportunity to mutate is accelerated.
No animal in a feedlot is going to live out its natural lifespan, and so, under those conditions, there is no benefit to a virus to live lightly on its host. It would be a losing strategy for viruses in a farm to bet on a long-term opportunity to replicate and spread. Instead, they adapt to replicate as fast as possible, before the animal or fish is harvested or culled. If the virus kills its host, no problem, it has already spread through the farm population. Higher replication rates equal higher virulence. Crowding animals in the absence of predators is a recipe for plagues.
When the Norwegian salmon farming industry accidentally introduced ISAV to their farms in Chile, the companies ignored the appearance of the virus. They foolishly hoped it would behave differently in Chile than it had Norway, where it was considered one of the top three most dangerous fish viruses. In 2007, one company grew worried about a small, unexplained spike in mortalities in its Chilean farms, and sent samples to the North American ISAV reference lab for the World Organisation for Animal Health at the University of Prince Edward Island. ISAV was not only confirmed, it proved to be a new strain, dubbed HPR7b (the HPR stands for “highly polymorphic region”), and it spread through Chile like fire on gasoline. The salmon farming industry reported they had never seen a virus spread so fast.
Chile doesn’t have any naturally occurring wild salmon to infect, but the ISAV epidemic caused two billion dollars in damage to the Chilean salmon farming industry, which, as in British Columbia, was largely Norwegian-owned. When the government of Chile threatened to sue Norway for contaminating their waters, Norway turned the tables and threatened to sue Chile for laws so lax that they allowed the Norwegian companies to make the mistake of importing ISAV infected stock. This was the volatile situation that Dr. Are Nylund and his associates got caught up in when they traced HPR7b in Chile to the salmon hatchery in Norway and were investigated as a result for “unethical behaviour.” Viruses not only have “fingerprints” in their genetic sequence, but they have molecular clocks that allow scientists to estimate the date of arrival of foreign viruses in a new region.
Two years into the Chilean outbreak, in January 2009, the international salmon farming news service IntraFish wrote: “How long can BC avoid ISA? British Columbia is the only major salmon growing area in the world that hasn’t been impacted by ISA. How long will that last?”
Given this troubling history of ISAV’s unstoppable spread through salmon farms, I didn’t understand why Dr. Marty kept reporting “classic lesions associated with ISAV infections” in BC farm salmon. Why didn’t he resolve whether or not it was ISA and either stop raising the question, or pull the alarm bell to begin the process of eradicating it before it went viral.
In July 2009, the record showed that Marine Harvest suddenly began sending samples to Dr. Marty specifically asking for ISAV testing. They ordered thirty-two tests in one year, up from two such requests total in the previous four years. At the same time, the BC industry abruptly stopped importing Atlantic salmon eggs, something they had told government regulators that they couldn’t possibly do. Then, on April 16, 2010, the three Norwegian companies signed a memorandum of understanding to co-manage viral diseases between themselves, with no government involvement. Had something scared them?
Since Dr. Marty was only a pathologist, his reports were passed up a level to the veterinarian, Dr. Mark Sheppard, the person who had assured me that sea lice in Nootka Sound were not becoming drug-resistant, to make the actual diagnosis. I searched the Cohen database for any records from Dr. Sheppard on ISAV. I found one he had signed, an August 1, 2007, briefing note to the minister of agriculture, labelled “confidential.” It was on the risk to the province from the ISA virus in Atlantic salmon farms. The BC government was keeping an eye on the situation in Chile, perhaps because the same companies were operating in both places. Dr. Sheppard wrote that they had been doing ISAV surveillance but, he told the minister, “there is no importation of live Atlantic salmon or eggs to BC” and so if ISAV showed up in British Columbia the most likely source would be “migrating wild fishes.”
In point of fact, thirty million live Atlantic salmon eggs had been imported into British Columbia from five different countries, and Dr. Sheppard was the man in charge of the health of the fish these eggs produced. Since he was one of only three or four people in the province who had access to Dr. Marty’s records, presumably he was aware that the pathologist was reporting ISA-like lesions in farm salmon every month. I could find no record of whether anyone in government had ever followed up on these alarming reports by sending samples to the ISAV international reference lab. I flagged this document for Greg McDade; he would call Dr. Sheppard as a witness and ask him to explain himself to the commission.
As I continued to search the commission documents, I found the federal Atlantic salmon egg importation certificates. I saw that a signature was required to import the eggs into the province, guaranteeing that the eggs were free of several viruses; ISAV was not on the list. Then I found an internal DFO conversation triggered by an email I’d sent in 2009 asking if the Department was screening imported Atlantic salmon eggs for ISAV. The response I received at the time was confident: “all introductions of eggs into BC are closely tracked by the federal– provincial Introductions and Transfers Committee. As has been communicated to you previously, eggs are screened for all known viral agents prior to shipment to BC.” It was signed by the DFO director of science, Pacific Region, Dr. Laura Richards.
However, internal emails revealed a much less confident DFO. The Ottawa-based director of science, Sharon Ford, wrote, “would it be possible to call the hatchery (in Iceland) [which had already shipped eight million Atlantic salmon eggs to British Columbia] and ask what they did import for the last couple of years? Are there import restrictions?…Is there testing for ISA in the country?”
Andrew Thomson, the regional director of Fisheries Management, wrote: “I have already asked Laura (R.) the specific questions about the presence of ISA in Iceland and how confident we are in the position that ISA does not occur in eggs. No response yet.”
Ed Porter, manager of Aquaculture Policy and Regulatory Initiatives, added, “There is a small possibility that ISAV could be transmitted with reproductive fluids…. However, surface disinfection of eggs, which is routinely carried out…provides assurance that ISAV will not be transmitted.”
Then Thomson asked if Canada was actually requiring egg “surface disinfection.” Porter answered, “Disinfection isn’t a regulatory requirement by FHPR [Fish Health Protection Regulations], but strongly suggested.”
To that, Stephen Stephen, director of Biotechnology, replied, “The I&T [Introductions and Transfer] committees can make this a requirement for import and set any other conditions…. That being said I’m not sure that this is happening in every case.”
None of what Dr. Richards had told me appeared to be true. DFO had no idea how many Atlantic salmon eggs had come into the province, a check for “all known viral agents” was not occurring, and disinfection of the eggs was not even required.
Until the documents were accepted as exhibits in the upcoming commission hearings, I could only discuss these discoveries with my lawyers. However, when my friend and colleague Dr. Rick Routledge, a professor of statistics at Simon Fraser University who I had published several sea louse papers with, lamented that he had done everything he could think of to figure out why Rivers Inlet sockeye on the central coast of British Columbia were declining, I offered a suggestion. “What about testing for ISAV?” I said.
My research prior to 2010 had been focused on the Broughton Archipelago. Now, as part of the Cohen Commission, I needed to mine the commission database in a crash course on what was going on with the Fraser River sockeye salmon. Reading through the document cache, I learned that year after year since the early 1990s, more Fraser River sockeye were dying in the river just before spawning. DFO’s salmon biologists were stumped as to why. Generally when wild fish die, no one finds their bodies, and so there is little evidence to be gathered. But in this case, sockeye salmon were lying dead along the thousands of kilometres of tributaries to the Fraser River. Called pre-spawn mortality, this was nothing new, but what was new was that it previously had been tied to high water temperatures. The warmer the water, the more fish died. Now astronomical numbers of sockeye were dying in water of any temperature.
Between 1995 and 2010, up to 95 percent of the late run Fraser sockeye were dying of pre-spawn mortality. Internal DFO documents reported that 100 percent of the once abundant Cultus Lake sockeye died in 1999, 2000 and 2001. By 2008, the mysterious die-off was described as “system wide,” meaning the entire Fraser River. In 2006, DFO biologist Timber Whitehouse had written to DFO’s Laura Richards and Brian Riddell, to inform them that “pre-spawn mortality for females exceeds 85%.” The scientists knew these populations could not survive this level of mortality, and so the search was on for the cause of death. I read the shared ideas and observations between scientists from DFO and elsewhere.
“Definitely something out of the ordinary,” reported someone named D. Willis about sockeye in the Upper Pitt River that were dying as they were netted in a beach seine (which is designed not to kill fish).
Some of the fish bled profusely when handled; others appeared to have bacterial kidney disease, but lab tests failed to find the bacteria.
“I think it is well worth not overlooking the possibility of a viral agent,” wrote Dr. David Speare to Mike Bradford at the University of Prince Edward Island.
In a DFO memo, Dr. Christine MacWilliams wrote that “despite finding everything but the kitchen sink, there’s no smoking gun.”
“This raises the spectre of a novel pathogen,” concluded David Patterson.
“The mystery deepens,” wrote Dr. Speare.
While the Fraser River sockeye was one of Canada’s most important fisheries, funding from DFO to solve this mystery of mass mortality was stingy. From an internal DFO email thread in May 2009: “A year class of Nadina sockeye have all died prespawning and all we have [to test] are the 11 gill arches and they are virtually useless…. we no longer have the necessary resources to send a field crew out…. Our system to try and solve these problems or at least learn from them appears to be very broken.”
Despite these biologists’ clear sense of urgency, they seemed unable to identify any known environmental factor, parasite, bacteria or virus that was responsible for these millions of dead sockeye salmon. Commercial fisheries were closed and livelihoods threatened; even if an abundance of sockeye was detected approaching the coast in early summer by the DFO test boats, no one knew if any would survive to spawn and produce the next generation. By drastically cutting fishing quotas, DFO managers were successful in getting viable salmon to the spawning grounds, but they died there before spawning. The numbers of Fraser River sockeye kept tumbling like a boulder down a mountainside.
Two months into exploring the commission database, I came across a PowerPoint presentation, dated September 27, 2008, by Dr. Kristi Miller of the Molecular Genetics Lab at DFO’s Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo. It was titled “Epidemic of a novel, cancer-causing viral disease may be associated with wild salmon declines in BC.” The cover photo was of a brain tumour in a sockeye salmon. I hit download.
The document described preliminary data Miller and her lab gathered through a new technique that suggested that an unknown virus was causing tumours in the optic lobes of the Fraser sockeye and killing them. I searched the database for every document with Dr. Miller’s name on it.
In 2007, she had been tasked to join the search for what was killing off the Fraser River sockeye. The documents revealed that Miller was pioneering the ability to “read” the immune system of salmon. By looking at which genes were up-or down-regulated in their expression in the fish, Miller could figure out what the fish were experiencing. Different genes respond to different stressors. Her field of research, called genomic profiling, was new for fish, but quite a bit of work had been done on identifying these patterns in terrestrial animals.
DFO expected that Miller would find that the sockeye died because they were weakened by a lack of food in the open ocean. However, the dying and living fish showed starkly different immune system patterns. Like a road sign on the highway this data revealed which direction the investigation should go. In the fish that died, a unique set of immune system switches had been left on. In terrestrial animals a similar pattern signals that the animal was fighting a retrovirus or leukemia. Why had no one talked about Dr. Miller’s work at the scientific meetings I’d attended on the 2009 collapse of the sockeye? Why was I asked to present on the evidence that pathogens in sockeye were killing them to the Pacific Salmon Commission when this lab’s work had been going on for three years?
Miller had only been able to find two fish viruses in the scientific literature that might produce a leukemia-like immune response, and only one of them occurred in salmon. Called salmon leukemia virus, it had been discovered by DFO scientists in the early 1990s in the same research station in which Miller’s lab was located.
Putting the Cohen documents aside, I downloaded all the papers I could find published by DFO on salmon leukemia virus. The story unfolded. In the 1990s, most fish farmers were trying to grow chinook salmon from eggs robbed from local and distant rivers, such as Robertson Creek and the Yukon River. It was not going well. Marine anemia, as the farmers called it, began killing off entire farms. The industry seemed doomed and the DFO scientist, Dr. Michael Kent, director of the Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo, began researching the cause. He announced his discovery of a retrovirus he called salmon leukemia virus in the journal Cancer Research in 1992, describing how it could be transmitted from farmed chinook to sockeye. Tumour growth in the optic lobe of the salmon brain was one of the features of this disease.
Dr. Kent and others described how the virus travelled with the industry from Sechelt Inlet, where it had first appeared, into the farms in the Discovery Islands and the Broughton Archipelago. As the industry spread, so did the virus, depopulating entire farms. I felt a sickening pull in my gut, realizing that the salmon leukemia outbreak was at its peak when the fish farmers in Echo Bay told us they had been throwing pellets into empty pens after all the fish had died. This was when we lost all the wild chinook that used to overwinter in the archipelago, the winter springs. According to these DFO documents, millions of farm salmon were shedding salmon leukemia virus into the Broughton. People in DFO knew this was happening when I was writing to the Department about the loss of wild salmon and the Department was writing me back to say there was no evidence of such a loss. They had the evidence all along. This was also precisely when the decline of the Fraser River sockeye began.
I turned back to Dr. Miller’s research documents. She reported that there was one run of Fraser River sockeye, the Harrison sockeye that did not carry the leukemia signature in its immune system. Flipping back to a series of graphs among the Cohen Commission documents, I saw that while the other runs of sockeye in the Fraser River were in decline, the number of Harrison sockeye had increased during the same time period.
Turning back to the internet I found a paper by DFO reporting that during the years 1996 to 2007, Harrison River sockeye DNA was never detected on the primary sockeye migration route through the Discovery Islands. It was only found on the other side of Vancouver Island. The paper surmised that Harrison sockeye were migrating in the opposite direction from the rest of the Fraser sockeye, heading around the southern end of Vancouver Island instead, which meant they were not exposed to the salmon farms. Why didn’t everyone working on the sockeye collapse know this? It felt like Miller had been reduced to casting messages in a bottle into the ocean of commission documents.
The Miller lab had drawn up a three-year plan to verify the presence of the virus in Fraser River sockeye, its effect and source. Kent and others working on the salmon leukemia virus in the 1990s had never published its genetic sequence, which made it much harder to trace. Miller had strong circumstantial evidence; the next step was to test the farm salmon to see if their immune systems were exhibiting the same pattern. This is when things started to go badly for Miller.
Dr. Gary Marty, the BC Ministry of Agriculture pathologist who was steadily reporting lesions that he associated with salmon leukemia virus in both the chinook farms that remained in the Discovery Islands and in Atlantic farm salmon, was very critical of Dr. Miller’s hypothesis that the Fraser sockeye might be dying of this virus. To begin with, he wanted to convince the department that the growths Miller was documenting in the sockeye brains were bruising due to “blunt trauma,” not tumours. I wondered why DFO didn’t send the brains to a cancer specialist who could resolve that debate.
Then Miller got her research on the unique immune response in the sockeye accepted for publication in Science. Reporters were eager to speak to her because this was huge—the first scientific evidence as to what was happening to the Fraser River sockeye. I read the emails from reporters all over the world requesting interviews; I saw that Prime Minister Harper’s office decided not to allow Miller to speak to them. As a result, the press got it all wrong. The headlines were all variations of “Fraser River Sockeye Die of Weak Genetics.” As Dr. Craig Stephens, who studied the salmon leukemia virus epidemic in the 1990s, wrote in his PhD thesis, “The evidence supporting the hypothesis that marine anemia is a spreading infectious neoplastic [tumour-causing] disease could have profound regulatory effects on the salmon farming industry.” DFO had chosen to allow “profound” effects on wild salmon returns, instead of the salmon farming industry, and had done nothing to stop the virus from pouring out of the farms.
This was not the end of the story. One year after the 2009 collapse of the Fraser River sockeye, the fish surprised everyone by returning in huge numbers. I first saw them in August 2010, off Lady Ellen Point near Port McNeill, while I was out fishing. Hundreds were visible on the surface at any one time as they rose and dove—“finning,” as the fishermen called it. I went out day after day just to be near them, to see them, to feel their presence. It was adorable to see the diminutive harbour porpoise swimming among them. The fish were too big for the porpoise to eat, so their association was a mystery.
The salmon farmers put out the word that this run was proof that their industry was not damaging the wild salmon. But I remembered the “exceptional survival” of pink salmon in 2003 in the Broughton, the one year when the salmon farms on their migration route was fallowed, and wondered what had really happened.
I went back to the commission documents to see if I could determine what had been going on in the salmon farms when this generation of Fraser sockeye headed out to sea as juveniles in 2008. (Most sockeye spend a year in a lake before heading out to the open ocean, where they live for two years before returning to spawn.) According to file CC1001187, Marine Harvest had removed the last chinook salmon farm, Conville Bay, from the Fraser River sockeye migration route in 2007. This meant that the first Fraser River sockeye to go to sea without exposure to chinook salmon farms that had been shedding a leukemia virus since 1991 were the fish that returned in 2010. Miller’s lab didn’t find the leukemia virus signature in the 2010 Fraser sockeye run. The sockeye stopped dying on the riverbanks.
I pushed my chair away from the kitchen table where I had been working, jumped on my stationary bike and tried to burn up the rage, sadness and sense of helplessness these revelations caused me. Government wouldn’t believe me about sea lice, which you can see with the naked eye; no one was going to believe that DFO had let a virus that causes leukemia in salmon to pour out of salmon farms and just watched the wild salmon go down.
Back at the computer, buried in the reports that Dr. Marty was providing to the salmon farming industry, I also found Case #08-3362, from September 19, 2008, reporting the discovery of the pattern of inflammation described by scientists in Norway as heart and skeletal muscle inflammation (HSMI). I entered the instance in the database I was assembling on these reports. I was so incensed by the other information I was finding, it didn’t mean anything to me at the time. But it would.
While few of the Cohen Commission hearings were well attended, the fish farm hearings, held in August 2011, drew large audiences. Many of the people who’d joined the Get Out Migration and the Paddle for Wild Salmon, and many who wished they had, showed up not only to the hearings, but also to the street demonstrations that took place every day in front of the building where the hearings were being held, on one of downtown Vancouver’s busiest streets. People wore masks made of photos of the federal minister of fisheries’ face and stretched crime-scene tape in front of the building. Huge graphs depicting the sockeye collapse were displayed, and people wore headbands with large papier mâché tumours stuck to them.
On the second day of the fish farm impact hearings, Greg McDade questioned Dr. Michael Kent, the man who had headed the DFO Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo in the 1990s, and had discovered and named the salmon leukemia virus.
Dr. Kent’s research papers had reported that all of the sockeye they experimentally infected with salmon leukemia virus became sick with the disease and one-quarter of them died during the experiment. Kent, who now taught at a university in Oregon, had been hired by the Cohen Commission to write a technical report titled “Infectious diseases and potential impacts on survival of Fraser River sockeye salmon.” In that report, he rated the risk posed by salmon leukemia virus to Fraser River sockeye as “low,” despite his own findings.
McDade asked him, “Have you talked [in your report] about the risk of transfer of farm disease to wild salmon?”
Kent responded, “No.”
“Did you look at the fish farm health database?” McDade asked.
“I scanned them this morning.”
“Did you have [access to] the farm disease database when you wrote your report?”
“No.”
Had Kent reviewed the provincial farm salmon health records, he would have noted that the organ damage considered salmon leukemia’s signature was still being reported in both farmed Atlantic and chinook salmon by Dr. Marty and that rates of this disease had spiked in 2007. That year half of the farmed chinook still being raised in the Discovery Islands had the lesions that DFO scientists reported were caused by salmon leukemia virus. The Fraser River sockeye that swam past those diseased fish farms as juveniles in 2007 were the ones that never returned in 2009, triggering the Cohen Commission’s inquiry into their disappearance.
Under questioning, Dr. Kent revealed that he no longer supported his own published papers describing the existence of the retrovirus in salmon farms that he had named salmon leukemia virus. He testified he now believed that what he had described in the 1990s was a “syndrome” of unknown cause. Dr. Marty agreed with him in his testimony, and so did Dr. Sheppard, who called the occurrence of whatever it was “natural” in chinook.
When McDade asked Dr. Sheppard about his briefing to the minister of agriculture stating that no Atlantic salmon eggs had been imported to British Columbia, Sheppard’s response was that “these briefings are drafted and then go places after me…this one was done in a fairly rushed manner…I would probably tend to word [it] more accurately now.”
McDade asked Dr. Kent, “If ISA virus appeared in salmon farms would you blame the wild fish?”
“Yes,” Kent said.
When Dr. Miller arrived at the inquiry to testify, large men in black suits wearing earpieces flanked her. She came in by a back door, avoiding the crowd out front. On the stand she spoke with astonishing directness for a government scientist. She testified that it appeared that a virus was heavily affecting the Fraser sockeye. “It could be the smoking gun,” said Miller, “but we have work to do.”
Dr. Miller told the commission that it was difficult to get people in DFO to understand the meaning of the genomic signature that she had found in the sockeye. The Conservation Coalition’s lawyer, Tim Leadem, asked Miller why she was not allowed to present her findings at the Simon Fraser University think tank of scientists who had gathered to examine what clues might exist to explain the 2009 sockeye crash. She replied, “The worry was it would automatically be associated with aquaculture.”
“Looking back,” Leadem said, “have you been under pressure?”
She replied, “Oh, very definitely, yes.”
Krista Robertson, the lawyer representing the Musgamagw Dzawada’enuxw from the Broughton, asked Miller about commission document CAN166765, Miller’s request to DFO to analyze the immune systems of farm salmon on the sockeye migration route to learn if they were carrying the same genomic profile as the dying sockeye. If she could establish that a virus in farm fish was the cause, an easy fix was in reach. Instead of grappling with an oceanic change in food, predators or temperature, saving the Fraser River sockeye would simply be a matter of extinguishing a virus in a few dozen salmon farms.
Dr. Miller testified that in response to her request she was denied access to the salmon farms and that her funding to continue working with the Fraser sockeye was cut off. The virus that left its lethal signature in the immune system of the vanishing sockeye would remain a mystery. Since the scientist who discovered salmon leukemia virus in the 1990s never published its genetic sequence, the virus that appeared to have killed millions of Fraser River sockeye could never be matched to the virus infecting the farm salmon, just like a fingerprint match cannot be run unless that person’s fingerprint already exists in the database. This had the makings of a perfect crime.
On September 7, 2011, I was called to testify. In one of the greatest honours of my life, Chiefs Bobby Joseph and Robert Chamberlin escorted me with drummers along Georgia Street and into the hearing room. I had prepared a large binder, with tabs marking the key evidence I’d extracted from the commission database. I wanted to make sure that Justice Bruce Cohen saw the evidence from Dr. Miller’s lab. I’d prepared a sixty-page report I titled “What is happening to the Fraser sockeye?” to enter as evidence; from it, Greg McDade and I could drill down on facts we believed Justice Cohen needed to hear. But as soon as McDade mentioned my report, the lawyers for the federal government and the province sprang to their feet to object. They argued I was there to provide spoken testimony, not written, and that a report prepared by me was “not factual evidence.”
Specifically, Alan Blair, a lawyer for the BC Salmon Farmers Association, pointed to the sentence in my report that would introduce into evidence Dr. Miller’s paper, “Epidemic of a novel, cancer-causing viral disease may be associated with wild salmon decline in BC.”
Greg McDade argued that I had followed Justice Cohen’s instructions to comb through the database and bring forward the information that shed light on why the sockeye were vanishing. Cohen, who used my honorary doctorate as a reason to address me as Dr. Morton, did accept my report into evidence, but not until some weeks after I’d testified. As per the rules of the inquiry, any document that had not yet been accepted as evidence could not be made public. Since my report referred to over one hundred documents, my lawyer and I spent much of my short time on the stand identifying each one and requesting that it be allowed into evidence.
Every time I tried to bring forward documentation of salmon leukemia virus, one or more of the lawyers for the province, Ottawa and industry would say, “Mr. Commissioner, I rise to object again.”
The obfuscating tactics directed at Dr. Miller were now being directed at me, as I tried to bring her work into the daylight. Wild salmon were so important that Canada was spending $27 million on this inquiry, yet the scientific evidence of what had happened to them was being skilfully suppressed. On the stand, I almost broke down into tears of frustration and anger. At the lunch break, as people came forward to pat me on the back, I took my son’s arm and said, “I need to get out of here.” I was not going to cry in public.
Back on the stand after the lunch break, I pulled down an imaginary fencing mask and carried on.
Steven Kelliher, the lawyer for the pro–salmon farm Aboriginal Aquaculture Association, asked me to explain why other scientists had agreed in the end that wild stocks can coexist with fish farms. Why was I the only one who said they couldn’t? I started to explain that because I did not work for government, a university, or a First Nation, I was independent and could…
He cut me off. “You are pure, are you? You’re the only one that isn’t corrupted by business, by government, by a university: is that correct?”
I thought about colleagues who had taken the stand before me and who had caved under questioning from this man when he had attacked them for trying to take salmon farms away from poor Indigenous communities. They hadn’t had the benefit of watching his tactics for several days like I had. He was predictable.
“Perhaps I am.” I stared back at him. Human economic considerations did not change whether wild salmon could survive the disease and the sea lice that poured out of salmon farms.
The next day, the questioning devolved into a personal attack on me. But there was a light moment when Mitch Taylor, a lawyer for the federal government, put an Anissa Reed cartoon up on the commission screen marked exhibit 1839. It depicted Justice Cohen in his robes leaning over his podium to stare at the government employees who were testifying. He was saying, “Let’s take a short break. It appears your pants might be on fire.” I had posted the cartoon on my blog.
Taylor asked, “Now, this, Ms. Morton, deals with the evidence that the veterinarians gave on August 31, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” I replied. “That’s correct.”
“And this is a cartoon of what appears to be the Commissioner speaking to those four witnesses. The words that the Commissioner says, in the cartoon, that is, pants on fire, what does that mean?”
“Well, I’m going to leave that to you. It just…”
He cut me off as the audience started to snort and giggle. “Well, you’re familiar with the saying—”
“The reason…”
He cut me off once more and continued himself. “Liar, liar, pants on fire?”
Several people rushed for the door, exploding in laughter before it had completely closed behind them.
“The reason that I posted this,” I said, “is because Dr. Gary Marty is reporting symptoms of a disease that’s of enormous significance to this Commission, and—”
Taylor cut me off again. “Okay, let me ask you this…”
I needed to finish this. “Yet Dr. Sheppard does not acknowledge that the disease exists.”
Taylor said, “Yeah that’s all fine, we’ve heard that, but let me ask you this: Do you agree with me that that cartoon is disparaging of those witnesses’ evidence? Yes?”
“I felt it was a representation without saying the words.”
“Are you saying they lied?”
“How can you look at the symptoms of a disease, have somebody like Gary Marty report those symptoms—”
“My—my…”
“—as being the clinical signs of marine anaemia, which a DFO scientist thinks the majority of Fraser sockeye are being killed and weakened by, and the vets above him, Peter McKenzie of [the fish farm company] Mainstream, and Dr. Mark Sheppard, simply don’t recognize that that disease exists? That—”
“Ms. Morton—”
“—cannot stand.”
“Ms. Morton…this is not—not an opportunity for you to make a speech.”
“Well, then—”
“And I ask, again—”
I cut him off this time. “—don’t ask me questions.”
Scott Renyard, an independent filmmaker who took it on himself to video the entire Cohen Commission hearings, edited my testimony into the film The Unofficial Trial of Alexandra Morton, which made the rounds at film festivals and is now available on The Green Channel.
It would be another year before Justice Bruce Cohen would finish his report on the 133 days of testimony he’d heard and the 2,147 exhibits entered into evidence, but long before its report came out, the Cohen Commission redirected my life. After everything I learned and witnessed there, on top of the ten years of hearing the government deny the impact of sea lice from salmon farms, I had zero confidence in what DFO, as a department, was saying about viruses. I realized I needed to figure out how to assess the virus situation myself.
But first I needed to go to the Maritimes.