Hypocrisy and Falsehoods Celebrated as Truth After Court Rules on Salmon Farms

The judicial decision on salmon aquaculture in B.C.’s Discovery Islands is being laundered into claims of scientific validation, ecological success, and Indigenous consensus, even though the court ruled on none of it.

Commentary
By Fabian Dawson
SeaWestNews

In the hours after the Federal Court of Appeal upheld a minister’s discretionary decision not to renew salmon farm licences in British Columbia’s Discovery Islands, anti-fish farming activist groups and their allies rushed to declare a sweeping ecological victory.

What followed was a cascade of statements recasting the ruling as scientific vindication for long-held ideological positions, evidence that ocean farm closures have produced wild salmon rebounds, and proof that Indigenous rights now mandate a ban on ocean salmon farming in British Columbia.

This laundered narrative is weak at best and false at worst, but the ruling has nonetheless been weaponized for political messaging and fundraising.

Even the most cursory examination of their victory chants exposes how detached many of these activists and their allies are from the realities of salmon farming, as they parrot recycled talking points and second-hand misinformation.

Indigenous Rights

One of the loudest claims following the court ruling was that it affirmed Indigenous rights and title in accordance with the principles of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).

That framing collapses the moment it is examined beyond salmon farming, revealing the hypocrisy advanced by groups such as the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs and the First Nations Wild Salmon Alliance.

Across British Columbia’s coast, salmon farming operates entirely through agreements with First Nations that assert title, exercise jurisdiction, and embed aquaculture into Indigenous-led economic strategies. These arrangements include guardian oversight, site monitoring, revenue sharing, employment, and direct decision-making authority exercised by the Nations themselves. This is Indigenous self-determination in practice.

But for the vocal group of First Nations leaders opposed to salmon farming, this exercise of self-determination is dismissed as illegitimate because it conflicts with their agenda.

This group now celebrating the Discovery Islands ruling have supported or remained conspicuously silent on major industrial projects with well-documented impacts on salmon habitat.

Pipelines, LNG terminals, port expansions, logging and mining operations have all moved forward  in their traditional territories under the banner of reconciliation and Indigenous consent. In those cases, Indigenous governments are trusted to assess risk, impose conditions, and protect their lands and waters.

That trust evaporates when First Nations choose industries that fall outside an activist-approved narrative, like salmon farming. Consent is no longer treated as authoritative. Self-determination is reframed as error. And rights and title are selectively reinterpreted rather than respected.

When you cut through this hypocritical noise, it becomes clear that the ruling is being weaponized to manufacture a façade of unanimous opposition to ocean salmon farming.

It is also being used to provide cover for Indigenous voices to assume a colonial posture and dictate what is deemed acceptable in the traditional territories of salmon farming First Nations.

“Settled Science”

Another celebratory claim, delivered with confidence born of repetition rather than proof, is that the ruling somehow validated decades of scientific evidence alleging that open-net pen salmon farms harm wild salmon.

That ‘confidence’ rests on assumptions the court never examined, yet which activist groups and their allies continue to present as settled fact.

The court made no findings on biology, disease transmission, sea lice dynamics, or population-level impacts. It did not evaluate ecological outcomes or adjudicate scientific disputes. It issued a narrow administrative ruling not an environmental judgment on cause and effect.

That distinction is exactly what the post-ruling celebrations have worked to blur. The science now being advertised as “settled” remains deeply contested. There is no scientific consensus that salmon farms endanger wild salmon.

To date, the preponderance of peer-reviewed evidence points the other way, showing that   ocean salmon aquaculture has, at most, a minimal impact on wild stocks.

This ruling never settled the science, no matter how aggressively that claim has been amplified across activist echo chambers. What it settled was that a minister has the discretion to invoke the precautionary principle without an obligation to prove results.

Converting that discretion into scientific certainty is not interpretation. It is a deliberate misrepresentation of what the court actually said.

Wild salmon rebound claims

Perhaps the most prominent false celebratory claim repeated after the ruling was that wild salmon are already rebounding because ocean salmon farms were removed from the Discovery Islands.

It is an appealing narrative, but one neither supported by the evidence nor weighed by the court.

The claim that salmon farm closures caused the 2025 rebound fails under even basic scrutiny. Mid-year analyses showed pink salmon surging across the entire North Pacific, including in regions where ocean salmon farms remain fully operational. Major increases were recorded in Alaska and Russia, with expanding runs reported as far away as Norway, the United Kingdom, and Newfoundland. A rebound occurring simultaneously across multiple oceans is not the signature of a localized policy change on B.C.’s coast.

Sockeye data cut the same way. August 2025 analyses linked improved Fraser River returns to favourable ocean conditions and large-scale climate cycles, not to changes in aquaculture activity near Vancouver Island. Historical records further dismantle the closure narrative as some of the largest Fraser River salmon runs ever recorded occurred during periods when salmon farming was fully active in the Discovery Islands.

None of this complexity was examined by the court. No post-closure return data was tested. No pathway linking farm removals to stock recovery was evaluated. No population-level conclusion was reached.

Yet the post-ruling celebrations rushed to convert short-term return figures into proof that farm removal “worked”. That leap asks the public to believe a single management decision in B.C. rewrote the rules of marine ecology.

In this context, what is being  celebrated as proof was never proven at all.

Weaponizing the precautionary principle

The precautionary principle featured prominently in post-ruling statements by activist groups, often frame it as a legal and moral imperative that demanded salmon farm closures.

The court did not say that.

What it confirmed was that the Minister was entitled to apply a low tolerance for perceived risk. That is a permissive standard, not a mandatory one. Precaution allows decision-makers to act amid uncertainty. It does not declare that uncertainty itself is proof of harm.

Used properly, precaution is a tool. Used as activists now deploy it, precaution becomes a shortcut, allowing desired policy outcomes to be declared inevitable without resolving the underlying evidence.

Ironically, this approach undermines the very concept of evidence-based decision-making that activists claim to defend and are now celebrating.

When stripped of its slogans, the post-ruling celebration collapses into something far less noble.

What is being sold to the public as clarity is confusion by design. What is being marketed as proof was never proven. And what is being invoked as Indigenous authority is, in practice, a selective elevation of voices that align with an activist agenda while silencing those that do not.

That is the hypocrisy, built on falsehoods, at the heart of this celebration.

(Main file image shows a salmon farm in British Columbia)