“Salmon Secrets” Is a Deep Dive Into the Deceiving Depths of Anti-Fish Farm Activism in B.C.

With fishy facts, fear-based edits, and a cast of debunked anti-aquaculture activists, Salmon Secrets is a ‘shockumentary’ that gasps for credibility as it drowns in its own misinformation.

By Fabian Dawson
SeaWestNews

If you like your science cherry-picked, your facts filleted beyond recognition, and your villains Norwegian, then Salmon Secrets is the perfect catch of the day.

Billed as a bold exposé of salmon farming in British Columbia’s Clayoquot Sound, complete with breathy narration, shaky underwater footage, and sentimental storytelling, Salmon Secrets positions itself as an ecological thriller.

But it’s less Blue Planet and more The Blair Fish Project.

Let’s get one thing straight: the passion in this film is real. The science? Not so much. And the film delivers its message with all the subtlety of a sea lion in a supermarket.

“Millions of salmon used to jump here!” cries one narrator early on, as the camera pans across a quiet inlet. That’s a powerful image until you realize it’s nostalgia weaponized. Salmon populations in Clayoquot Sound, like elsewhere, have indeed fluctuated over the years and before the advent of salmon farms on Canada’s west coast.

Just ask the First Nations, whose ancient tongues support the voluminous scientific conclusions that salmon runs vary not only year to year, but also on decades-long time cycles.

But this ‘shockumentary’ draws a straight line between salmon farming and wild stock declines, sidestepping research pointing to climate shifts, habitat loss, and changing ocean conditions. It’s a narrative sleight of hand, emotionally effective but scientifically hollow.

One of the most recent glaring examples of this, pushed by the same discredited activists featured in Salmon Secrets, is the false claim that recent record pink salmon returns in British Columbia are a direct result of salmon farm closures. This falsehood, parroted in mainstream media before being retracted, ignores global scientific data showing pink salmon populations are booming worldwide, including in regions with active salmon farms.

None of this peer-reviewed research, traditional Indigenous knowledge, government reports and findings by conservation groups that have studied wild salmon populations make it into the script. They’re left on the cutting room floor, right next to the science.

At the heart of the film lies a familiar antagonist: the salmon farm. Enter Cermaq, draped in corporate shadow, with sinister outflow pipes “spewing fat, flesh, and feces” into the deep. It’s a compelling image until you remember that those same pipes are subject to stringent government regulations, pressure-tested filtration, and routine environmental monitoring by First Nations stewards.

Earlier this year, the same folks behind Salmon Secrets flooded their social media channels with a video series called the“Sh*t Tapes” portraying “damning footage” from a Cermaq experimental salmon farm near Tofino. 

Despite the manufactured online outrage, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) didn’t issue a single compliance infraction. Why? Because no regulation was breached.

And those “terrifying vibrations” heard by divers at the same Cermaq farm in Salmon Secrets? That’s called a pump. Welcome to aquaculture.

The film also repeatedly leans on old tropes, like sea lice “killing every baby salmon in sight.”  Yet credible scientific findings, including a new, peer-reviewed eight-year study published in the Journal of Fish Diseases, gets no mention.

This study tracked sea lice levels on juvenile wild salmon in the Discovery Islands from 2017 through 2024, that is before, during, and after the full removal of salmon farms from the region. The results are unambiguous: sea lice levels in 2024 were among the highest recorded over the entire study period, even though no salmon farms were operating in the area.

Then there’s the Piscine Reovirus (PRV) which has been dramatized as an imported biological weapon from Norway. In reality, this Reovirus has been in Pacific waters since the 1970s and has shown no meaningful impact on wild salmon health. But hey, why let science spoil a good villain?

One of the documentary’s more bizarre turns features sea lions as helpless victims, trapped for weeks in fish farms like aquatic soap stars awaiting rescue. The truth?

Publicly available data show that marine mammal interactions with salmon farms in B.C. have remained consistently low over the past decade, despite the population of sea lions growing by between 30 to 40 percent. Since 2016, no more than 10 marine mammal interactions have been recorded in any given year, with just two reported so far in 2025, according to government records.

This trend reflects the success of the sector-wide “no-kill” marine mammal management policy adopted in 2012, supported by significant investments in exclusion technology and staff training.

Perhaps the most glaring absence in Salmon Secrets is balance. There’s no mention of the thousands of jobs in salmon aquaculture, the science-based oversight by DFO and First Nation partners, or the environmental advancements in aquaculture technology that has made fish farmers   the most sustainable protein producers on the planet.

Instead, we get a bizarre subplot in this underwater melodrama about herring turning into salmon chow pellet junkies, one mouthful away from forming a marine addiction support group.

Salmon Secrets isn’t a documentary. It’s a campaign ad designed to get donations for the anti-fish farming activist groups behind its production. Its emotionally manipulative, scientifically selective, ethically slippery and sinks under the weight of its own misinformation.

Main image is a still from Salmon Secrets – vimff.org