Remove the Three Key Fish Farms by May 15

Salmon Talks Lillooet has decided to take action to get coastal fish farms out of the way of Fraser salmon smolts. Three farms full of adult Atlantic salmon must be harvested and emptied before mid-May, when the Fraser smolts will be reaching the narrows near Quadra Island in the Georgia Strait. The salmon crash that we are experiencing calls for emergency protective and precautionary measures, and we will be visiting our local DFO office on Tuesday, April 6, at 10 a.m., to request that the three fish farms be harvested and emptied immediately. 

We invite others to consider similar rallies at their local DFO offices, or at the sites where the smolts in their waters come to enter the Fraser on their journey to the sea. We invite our friends nearby to join us here in Lillooet.




The juvenile salmon that were born two years ago will, very soon, leave the streams and lakes in the Fraser watershed and head for the Arctic Ocean. They will have to get past many open-net-cage fish farms in the Georgia Strait and Broughton Archipelago. The first of the Fraser River smolts will reach the Georgia Strait by May. 

We know that these farms, located in the Georgia and Johnstone Straits, are hazardous to the smolts - because the adult Atlantic salmon eat the smolts; because the sea lice that infest the farms attach themselves - fatally - to the smolts; and because there is no way around them! The farms are located in precisely the ideal feeding grounds for the smolts - where rivers flow in and where fast waters stir up the ocean to make the algae and smolt-food accessible. 

In the Georgia Strait Narrows, at Quadra Island, there are three farms full of adult fish. This is a bottleneck for the smolts on their migration. If those farms were emptied before the smolts got there, their chances survival would be improved. This is called "the precautionary approach," and has been recommended by scientists and politicians around the globe, most recently here at SFU's Salmon Think Tank, last December. 

Members of Salmon Talks Lillooet, are going to go the DFO office in Lillooet on April 6 , at 10 am, to find out who can order this emergency evacuation of the three key farms: Venture Point, Sonora and Cyrus Rocks - owned by Norwegian companies Mainstream and Marine Harvest. We are going to request that our local DFO personnel forward our demand for an emergency response to the appropriate person. No matter the work of the Cohen Commission, no matter the confusion of authority between the province and the federal government, we wish to find out where the buck stops in such an emergency.  

Since all the science in the world is being denied by the Government; since commissioned recommendations in BC and Canada to move fish farms to closed containment are not being implemented; since even letters from politicians from other countries urging Canada to avoid the fate they have already experienced - allowing salmon farms in migration corridors to decimate wild stocks - are not being heard, it is time for people to make it clear to government what action is required.  

We urge you to express any similar beliefs in action, particularly during the week of April 6, with us, and in solidarity with the Get Out Migration planned by the much-celebrated and honoured biologist Alexandra Morton. From April 22 to May 9. Alexandra will be marching to Victoria to focus and align public attention to the issue of removing open-net-cage salmon farms from wild salmon migration corridors. Please join her if you can. Visit www.salmonaresacred.org for more info.

Salmon Talks Lillooet is a collective of St'at'imc and non-Native people, Elders and Youth, professional technicians, biologists and regular community members, male and female. We work together for restoration and protection of wild salmon of all species. We are on the point of declaring Lillooet a farmed-salmon-free-zone.  

For more information, helpful pamphlets, or more contacts about the salmon crash, please get in touch!  

Sincerely,
Kerry Coast
250-256-2435
salmontalks@gmail.com