Pacific Salmon Foundation Study Fuels Fresh Alarm With Shaky Science

A new Pacific Salmon Foundation study shows how disputed findings can be turned into alarming headlines,  fuelling the “scientific uncertainty” activists need to kill British Columbia’s ocean salmon farming sector.

Analysis
By Fabian Dawson
SeaWestNews

There is a simple way to make almost any industry look dangerous.

Start with something that might pose a risk, present it as evidence of a wider threat, emphasize what scientists still don’t know, then argue that because nobody can prove there is zero risk, government must act before it is too late.

That approach became deeply embedded in the Trudeau government’s handling of the B.C. salmon farming file because it also worked politically.

It allowed the former government to harvest activist votes while using “scientific uncertainty” to support policy decisions that went well beyond what its own federal science reviews supported.

The result was the Trudeau-era decision to end conventional ocean salmon farming in B.C. by 2029, despite federal assessments that had concluded ocean salmon farms posed no more than minimal risk to wild stocks.

The policy remains in place as Prime Minister Mark Carney weighs the future of ocean aquaculture on Canada’s West Coast.

With Carney signalling a more pragmatic approach to resource development and economic growth, opponents of salmon farming have fresh reason to keep uncertainty alive and the case for precaution front and centre.

Enter the Pacific Salmon Foundation, which has received millions of dollars in public funding and has aligned itself with the campaign to end conventional open-net salmon farming in B.C. waters.

Its latest study, led by Emiliano Di Cicco, a well-known opponent of the sector, offers a telling example of how limited scientific findings can be stretched into alarming warnings and fed into the political argument for precaution.

The study says Heart and Skeletal Muscle Inflammation, or HSMI, is more widespread on B.C. salmon farms than previously reported and warns that PRV, the virus associated with the condition, can be released into surrounding waters.

The headline on the accompanying PSF media release sounds damning, as intended. The evidence behind it is far less so.

More than 80 per cent of the 749 fish examined were already dead or dying, while the live fish selected for closer examination showed visible lesions, meaning the sample was heavily weighted toward unhealthy fish.

PSF highlighted that nearly seven per cent of the fish examined had HSMI, a figure activists have already begun circulating on social media as if it represents the disease rate across the wider farm population, although it does not.

The study itself acknowledges that its sampling may not reflect the health of the overall population, an important qualification missing from the PSF media release.

The media release also says the findings were verified by three independent pathologists, making the diagnosis sound more settled than it was. The outside pathologists reviewed only part of the material from four farms and disagreed on diagnoses. Two did not even find HSMI on farms where the lead researcher had.

Then comes the leap to wild salmon, with the media release warning that PRV can spread into surrounding waters “where it can infect wild salmon.”

The warning was pushed prominently for media attention even though the study did not test a single wild salmon. It found PRV genetic material in the water, but no evidence that wild fish became infected, developed disease or suffered harm.

The public messaging also gives little sense of earlier federal and peer-reviewed research that found the B.C. strain of PRV posed low risk and is no salmon killer. Instead, this new study is framed as fresh evidence of danger and another reason to invoke the precautionary principle, even though its findings do not support that leap.

SeaWestNews gave PSF an opportunity to explain the gaps between the study and the claims in its media release. It did not respond, allowing   a misleading public narrative built on already disputed research to stand uncorrected.

This is not the first time PSF research aligned with the anti-salmon farming campaign has amplified fears about the sector beyond what the evidence could firmly support.

In 2018, Di Cicco led research linking PRV with jaundice and anemia in Chinook salmon. The study itself acknowledged that the Chinook samples were moribund or recently dead and lacked true disease-negative controls. Later controlled experiments found negligible mortality, no anemia and mostly mild heart inflammation after exposing Pacific salmonids to PRV.

The same broader pattern has appeared in the sea-lice issue. Activists argued for years that removing farms would reduce lice on juvenile wild salmon. Farms were subsequently removed from the Discovery Islands and Broughton Archipelago, yet monitoring has continued to find high levels of lice on wild juvenile salmon in areas where farms were removed.

That brings the debate over salmon farming in B.C. to the larger question of where reasonable precaution ends and economic paralysis begins.

B.C. salmon farmers are no longer simply being asked to meet environmental standards designed to protect wild fish. They are increasingly being expected to prove that nothing bad can ever happen.

Science cannot provide that guarantee, and no industry could survive if it were required to do so.

Forestry cannot eliminate ecological risk. Hydroelectric dams cannot have zero effect on fish. Ports, mines, pipelines, highways, LNG terminals, commercial fisheries and agriculture all carry environmental impacts.

Government’s job is to determine the level of risk, regulate it and decide what is acceptable. Science-based policy weighs the evidence, the uncertainty and the consequences, then sets rules that match the risk instead of demanding absolute certainty.

If scientific uncertainty alone becomes enough to condemn an industry, activists and organizations like the Pacific Salmon Foundation no longer have to demonstrate actual harm.

They only have to manufacture doubt until precaution becomes prohibition.

(Main file image from Pacific Salmon Foundation)