Global experts dismantle Ottawa’s case for banning BC salmon farms

A sweeping international review warns that Canada’s move to ban ocean salmon farms in British Columbia casts aside decades of science, threatens the stability of coastal communities, and does almost nothing to revive declining wild salmon populations.

By Fabian Dawson
SeaWestNews

A major group of international aquaculture experts says Canada’s plan to ban ocean salmon farming in British Columbia is based on outdated assumptions, sidelines decades of scientific progress, and offers little benefit to struggling wild salmon runs.

Their new paper, published in Reviews in Aquaculture, makes direct references to BC, framing it as one of the clearest examples of politics overtaking evidence in aquaculture policy. The authors,  who are leading researchers from the United States, Australia, Sweden and major global universities argue that governance failures, not farm-level science, have driven Ottawa’s push to close BC salmon farms by 2029.

They note that Canada is dismantling a food-production system that has steadily reduced its environmental footprint, even as the country continues to import the same product from regions with weaker rules and far higher emissions.

The paper, No Free Lunch: Sustainable Aquaculture Requires Recognizing Past Science, Improvements, and Comparative Assessment, arrives as BC enters a critical stage in Ottawa’s transition plan for the sector. It strengthens growing concerns that federal decision-making has leaned more on activist messaging than on balanced scientific assessment.

The study also underscores the contradiction in Prime Minister Mark Carney’s nation-building agenda, which emphasizes Indigenous-led economic renewal. BC’s salmon-farming sector supports 4,560 full-time jobs, within formal partnerships with Rights Holder First Nations, yet the transition plan would eliminate them.

“Carney has built his agenda on Indigenous-led evidence-based nation building. Well, the evidence is now overwhelming that closing salmon farms doesn’t help wild salmon and actually harms coastal communities. Ignoring that is becoming impossible,” said an industry observer.

The international researchers call out BC directly, pointing out that decades of scientific work show minimal or neutral effects from pathogens and sea lice on wild salmon.

But instead of clarifying these findings, public debate has amplified activist claims that exaggerate risk. That cycle, the authors write, helped set the stage for political intervention and Canada’s decision to remove marine Atlantic salmon aquaculture from the Pacific.

A central message of the paper is that there is no such thing as zero-impact food production. Removing BC’s tightly regulated farmed salmon does not erase environmental footprints, it shifts them overseas.

That reality is already visible in Canada’s food supply system. A recent economic study funded by Dalhousie University’s Agri-Food Analytics Lab found that Ottawa’s closures have pushed Canada toward higher-emission imports and rising retail prices. The report says salmon could top CAD $30 per kilogram by 2026. Canada imported about 20,000 more tonnes of salmon in 2021–2022 than in pre-closure years, generating an extra 9.9 million tonnes of CO₂, which is equivalent to putting over 2.1 million cars on the road.

The authors of No Free Lunch also note that aquaculture feeds have improved dramatically, forage-fish use has decreased, and by-products now make up a major share of salmon diets. Combined with regulation that is “more stringent than any other food-production sector in North America, by orders of magnitude,” they argue that shutting farms in BC removes one of the region’s most tightly overseen sources of protein.

The authors stress that policymakers cannot single out aquaculture for elimination while ignoring the much larger environmental footprints of imported seafood, terrestrial agriculture, and unmanaged fisheries. “Who benefits from aquaculture should be central,” they write, emphasising that coastal and Indigenous communities must be decision-makers, not casualties.

For BC, these findings add to a growing body of peer-reviewed science that contradicts activist claims and undermines Ottawa’s justification for the phase-out.

Last July, six senior fish-health experts, who analysed more than 20 years of scientific data concluded that marine net pen salmon farms in B.C. have no more than minimal impact on wild salmon populations, concurring with federal government scientists.

The peer-reviewed landmark paper, published in Aquaculture, Fish and Fisheries, said two decades of monitoring showed “no evidence that pathogens from farms are having more than minimal impact on wild stocks.”

A second long-term analysis, published in Diseases of Aquatic Organisms tracked nearly 3,000 juvenile salmon over nine years in the Broughton Archipelago. It found that sea-lice levels in young wild salmon often increased after farms were removed. As the researchers noted:  “The belief that sea lice disappear when farms are removed is not supported by the evidence.”

Taken together, the latest science makes it clear that Canada’s plan to remove salmon farming from BC does not align with the evidence, does not reflect global best practices, and does not account for the real economic impacts on coastal and Indigenous communities.

Several court rulings in both the US and Canada have already reinforced what the science shows, dismissing anti-fish farm activists’ claims as untested hearsay and improper opinion presented as factual evidence.

(Main image shows PM Mark Carney making an announcement in Terrace, B.C., last week about the next batch of major nation building projects)