Federal Fisheries Minister Diane Lebouthillier has announced, in a surprise decision, that aquaculture farms along the B.C. coast will be allowed to renew their licences for another five years.
Surprising, because Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had earlier said his government was committed to ending those licences. They were supposed to expire next year.
On balance, this looks the better of two difficult choices. Certainly serious concerns have been raised about sea-based net pen salmon farms.
There have been incidents of sea lice escaping from some pens and infecting wild salmon. And in 2022 more than 800,000 wild fish were killed in salmon pens, many of them herring.
There have also been allegations that farmed salmon spread disease in the surrounding waters, though the science here is not fully established.
On the other hand, the cost of moving to land-based farms would be significant.
A study conducted for the B.C. government in 2022 found that to replace sea-based production with land-based farms of a medium size would cost around $1.8 billion to build, and take at least 10 years to come into production.
By 2029, when the current licences are set to expire, that cost estimate is sure to have risen.
As well, there have been serious setbacks at land-based farms. A Florida farm suffered near-wipe out mortalities in 2020, while in 2023 an equipment failure at a farm in Nova Scotia killed 100,000 salmon, in effect the plant’s entire harvest for that year.
One result of these difficulties is that there are no plants, worldwide, that produce more than 3,000 tonnes per year. That falls well short of demand.
There are also wider economic and employment issues. Many of the 79 sea-based farms in B.C. are owned by First Nations. An estimated 500 jobs would disappear if those farms were closed.
More broadly, the B.C. Salmon Farmers Association says that $1.2 billion would be lost to the province’s economy.
Most of that impact would fall on isolated coastal communities where replacement jobs will be hard to find, and where topographies are often unsuitable for land-based farms.
Inevitably, the social disruption would be profound and far-reaching.
It may be tempting to see in Lebouthillier’s announcement a concern for the political impact of early closures, coming perhaps in the midst of a federal election. With the Liberals trailing in the polls, she might have thought it better to postpone a controversial decision.
But more practically, the economic argument seems compelling. For years, along with Norway and Sweden, Canada has been one of the top salmon producing nations.
The global market for fresh or chilled salmon has grown by 23 per cent over the past five years.
However, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, Canada’s place in that market would be threatened by sea farm closings.
With our economy still stuttering along in the wake of the COVID outbreak, giving up one of our few dominant positions in the world marketplace would be difficult medicine to swallow.
It might yet be that the science around the threat to wild salmon posed by sea-farms will develop in such a way that the argument against the latter becomes unanswerable.
If that happens, some difficult choices will have to be faced.
Even then, though, whatever decision is taken would be better made by the B.C. government, than a distant ministry in Ottawa.
For the closer to home that decision is taken, the clearer will be the practical implications.
Lebouthillier has already punted once. She would be well advised to take a back seat and let local voices prevail.
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