Not on My Watch by Alexandra Morton

Author:Alexandra Morton [Morton, Alexandra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2021-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

Take government and industry to court to stop them from breaking the law

Convince politicians they might not get re-elected if they keep issuing the licences the industry requires to operate

Today, I would add a fourth: peaceful, unrelenting activism. Do science, legal action, education, activism—then repeat, as often as you have to. None of these courses of action are easy. They all require money and endurance.

* * *

—

Anissa and I took the ninety-minute ferry ride into the Bay of Fundy to the island of Grand Manan on the border between Canada and the United States. A fish farmer on board recognized me, and came over to say, “You know fishermen could get a job on the farms, but they’re lazy and don’t want to work all year.” What was I to say to that?

At the dock on Grand Manan, a fisherman, Allan Green, met us and offered to show us around the island he loved. Allan had fished since he was a child and had bought his own boat when he was seventeen. “When I was a boy all you had to do was get up in the morning to get a job,” Allan said.

He was one of the few people we encountered who was not afraid to put his name to his comments about the impact of salmon farming. He had worked for the industry and knew a lot about how it got started in Grand Manan. He said a Norwegian corporation called Stolt had arrived on the island in the mid-1990s and had begun buying up the family salmon farms that were failing to make money. (Stolt did the same thing in BC and later sold its interests to Marine Harvest, which changed its name to Mowi in 2019.)

Allan said the rumours about disease outbreaks caused by the ISA virus and by bacterial kidney disease (BKD) were present from the start. ISA virus is an Atlantic salmon virus; no one was sure if it came from the farms or came from the wild salmon, but it multiplied in the farms. No one was studying the impact of this influenza virus on wild salmon exposed to the farms. When Stolt abandoned Grand Manan, Cooke Aquaculture took over.

We stopped to chat with a small group of fishermen working on their gear by the docks. As I stared out at a salmon farm anchored just offshore, one of them said, “This was prime lobster ground, but lobster don’t come here anymore.”

A fisherman painting his trap floats brilliant orange added, “Two weeks into the season about five years ago the lobster were exceptionally high. I was getting twelve counters [legal-sized lobsters] to a trap and a lot of bobs [immature lobster that are thrown back].” It takes seven years for a lobster to grow into a counter.

“Well, a fish farm wellboat showed up on that farm there,” he said, pointing to where I was looking, just beyond the harbour. “They was treating the farm for lice. Next day when I pulled my traps, half the lobster were curled up, stiff, their tails and claws tucked in tight.

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