Tony Allard’s Salmon Farming Sermon Has a $2-Billion Catch

Activist financier wants Ottawa to dismantle a major B.C. aquaculture sector, override coastal First Nations and gamble $2 billion in public money on a land-based salmon farming model with a long record of failure.

Commentary
By Fabian Dawson
SeaWestNews

Psychologists have a term for the gap between what people preach and what their actions support. It is called word-deed inconsistency.

Most of us know it by a blunter phrase: do as I say, not as I do.

That gap runs through Tony Allard’s latest moral missive urging Prime Minister Mark Carney to preserve a Trudeau-era 2029 ban on open-net salmon farming in British Columbia, a policy forged under pressure from the activist network he bankrolls.

Allard, a wealthy influence peddler, invokes science. He appeals to Indigenous rights. He talks about economic opportunity, food security and practical leadership.

Then he champions a policy that runs headlong into all four.

And when you strip away Allard’s rhetoric, his plea begins to look like a thinly veiled attempt to get Carney to put $2 billion in taxpayer money behind a  dubious land-based salmon farming scheme promoted by Allard’s own Wild First activist group.

This plan, being pushed to the Liberal Party’s Pacific Caucus by an Allard ally, rests on big promises, flimsy evidence and fantasy economics. The model being proposed has failed scores of times around the world, including in British Columbia, costing investors billions of dollars.

Even before the scheme gets off the drawing board, the First Nation touted as its pilot partner has yanked its support, while several government studies have already laid bare the folly of its ambitions.

Predictably, there is no sign of Allard risking any of his own fortune on the project he wants taxpayers to fund.

Allard says Carney must face “the world as it is.” Fair enough.

The world as it is, includes a marine aquaculture sector that generates about $1.17 billion in annual economic activity, supports roughly 4,560 full-time jobs and keeps hundreds of B.C. suppliers, contractors and service businesses working.

It includes a model of reconciliation in action, with every farm in B.C. operating in partnership with a First Nation, delivering about $134 million a year in direct economic benefits to Indigenous communities and supporting more than 1,000 Indigenous workers along the coast.

It includes 10 federal science assessments and decades of real world data that have repeatedly concluded B.C. salmon farms pose no more than minimal risk to wild Pacific salmon.

It includes a far more complicated list of pressures on wild salmon: warming oceans, habitat destruction, urban development, historic overfishing, pollution and competition from large-scale salmon enhancement in other countries.

However, Allard prefers a cleaner storyline.

Salmon farms are the problem. Remove them. Put the fish on land. Wild salmon recover.

It is an attractive slogan. It is also a theory that doesn’t hold water.

Salmon farms have been removed from some B.C. migration routes, yet sea lice levels on juvenile wild salmon have not obediently followed the activist script. Wild salmon returns have risen and fallen with and without farms present.

Allard’s words and deeds begin to separate further as the West Vancouver entrepreneur demands science-based action while selecting the science that supports a conclusion he has spent years promoting.

Then there is   land-based salmon farming in B.C.

Allard points to Proximar Seafood in Japan as proof that the industry’s future is on land. One small project in Japan which produced 1,338 tonnes of Atlantic salmon for the premium Asian market in 2025 is hardly a blueprint for replacing roughly 90,000 tonnes of annual B.C. salmon production.

Two B.C. government-commissioned studies have already found land-based salmon farming is neither commercially viable nor capable of replacing ocean production at the scale Ottawa’s policy would require.

Estimates suggest replacing B.C.’s marine production with land-based systems would require between $1.8 billion and $2.2 billion in direct investment and at least a decade to establish a stable industry at scale.

Globally, projected land-based salmon output is expected to reach only about 11,000 tonnes in 2026, roughly 0.3 per cent of farmed finfish production.

Atlantic Sapphire in Florida and Kuterra in B.C., previously paraded by Allard’s anti-salmon farming allies as proof that fish farming belonged on land, have instead left a trail of financial wreckage.

Kuterra, launched with $6 million in federal funding, missed its production targets, failed to attract the capital needed to grow and ultimately abandoned Atlantic salmon. Atlantic Sapphire has burned through hundreds of millions of dollars and been forced into a creditor-led restructuring simply to survive.

Allard points to a group of First Nations assembled by a twice-failed political candidate and lobbyist as proof that Indigenous communities want Carney to proceed with the 2029 ban.

What he leaves out is that none of those Nations hosts a salmon farm, while several are tied to major infrastructure and resource-extraction projects that pose direct risks to wild salmon habitat.

In contrast, salmon-farming First Nations that have studied land-based alternatives, along with operators who have tried them, say the people most convinced the model can work at scale in British Columbia are often those who have never actually done it.

Allard’s version of reconciliation appears to depend on what Indigenous people say when it aligns with his rhetoric. Listen when they oppose salmon farming. Dismiss them when they support it.

Another inconvenient fact is that Allard owns an exclusive fishing lodge in Rivers Inlet where the well-heeled pay thousands of dollars to pursue the same wild salmon he says must be protected.

Allard’s argument asks Canadians to accept fewer jobs, less food production, weaker Indigenous economies and a $2-billion taxpayer wager, all in pursuit of a promise the evidence does not support.

That is not a call for practical leadership.

It is failed ideology repackaged as vision, conceived in a wealthy urban enclave blind to the realities of rural livelihoods, with the invoice going to taxpayers.

Main file image shows Tony Allard of Wild First