Whatever Happens to Wild Salmon in BC, Let’s Blame the Salmon Farmers

British Columbia wild salmon-runs rise and fall for complex reasons. But for anti-fish farming activists, every boom and bust somehow leads back to the same target.

Analysis
By Fabian Dawson
SeaWestNews

British Columbia’s salmon runs are famously hard to forecast. What has proven far easier to predict is what anti-salmon farming activists will say about them. And almost every time in recent years, the numbers have gone on to contradict them.

This year is no exception. Only this time, instead of a surprise boom being wrongly credited to farm closures, it’s a surprise bust arriving right after activists staked their credibility on the opposite outcome.

2026 is the “dominant year” in the Fraser sockeye’s four-year cycle, the year fisheries watchers traditionally expect the biggest numbers. Recently, anti-fish farming activists Alexandra Morton and Bob Chamberlin pointed to early test-fishery results and argued the coming dominant run would be enormous, and that removing salmon farms was the reason why.

Watershed Watch Salmon Society’s Greg Taylor struck a similar note on July 9, telling followers he was “bullish on Fraser sockeye” and pointing to favourable ocean conditions and a route to sea for out-migrating smolts that passed fewer active salmon farms.

Activist financier Tony Allard also claimed restored abundance in many local salmon populations.

But by August 7, the activists’ claims told a different story. The Early Summer run had been downgraded from an expected 1.16 million fish to just 200,000, and test fishing for the Summer run, which the activist groups said will support large fisheries this year, was described as very poor.

By mid-August, the forecast had worsened. The Pacific Salmon Commission had cut the Summer run from a preseason estimate of 4.3 million to 2.2 million and the Late run from 2.21 million to 1.6 million. The overall adopted Fraser sockeye run stood at about 4.1 million, barely half the preseason forecast of 7.74 million.

The numbers recalled the 2009 collapse, when just 1.59 million sockeye returned, triggering the Cohen Commission of Inquiry. After an exhaustive investigation, the commission could not identify salmon farms, or any other single factor, as the cause of the collapse.

Subsequent government risk assessments have concluded that salmon farms pose no more than a minimal risk to Fraser River sockeye abundance and diversity.

To the north, the Skeena Rivertells a similar story despite having no salmon farms in its watershed. Fishery managers opened commercial fishing there in July after a strong start, but the sockeye that were supposed to show up simply didn’t. Pink salmon runs on the central and north coast, including the Nass River, were weak too.

None of this fits the narrative activists advanced in July. And once the numbers turned, and like they have always done, the activists just move onto the next spurious claim to further their attack on B.C.’s salmon farming sector.

Here’s a look at how anti-fish farming activists in B.C. have cherry-picked salmon numbers to advance claims that repeatedly fall apart when tested against the broader record.

• 2025 — the Fraser sockeye “surge.” Fraser sockeye came back strong, and activists were quick to claim victory, insisting the removal of salmon farms had triggered the rebound. They were wrong. Pacific Salmon Commission data shows average sockeye returns from 1990–2023 running higher than the preceding four decades, and the largest Fraser sockeye return in living memory, 28.2 million fish, arrived in 2010 while salmon farms were operating. Sockeye runs rise and fall with ocean conditions whether farms are present or not, and a single strong season, selected from of a 70-year record, proves nothing about salmon farms one way or the other.
• 2023 — the pink salmon boom. Pink salmon surged that year across the North Pacific, part of a broad regional pattern documented by the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission. Activists nonetheless credited BC’s local farm closures. CTV News Vancouver later removed the segment from its website after the claims were challenged as inaccurate. Another walked back on her claims. Fish pathologist Dr. Gary Marty, who has co-authored dozens of peer-reviewed papers on fish health said at that time that ‘it was frustrating to see the imagination of activists getting more press than the evidence.’
• 2022 — the Ahta River claim. Chamberlin pointed to a roughly tenfold increase in Ahta River pink salmon following the 2020 Broughton farm closures, calling it “compelling evidence” of a farms-to-wild-salmon link. Morton has repeated the similar “tenfold” claim about the Ahta in subsequent appearances. They have been both wrong. Four years on, no sustained rebound on the Ahta has been documented anywhere close to the one conjured up by activists.
• Sea lice haven’t budged either. Salmon farms in the Discovery Islands were removed in 2022, and B.C. farmed salmon production has fallen by more than 40 per cent from its 2015 peak, with the latest official production figure at about 54,000 tonnes in 2024. If farms were driving sea lice loads on wild juvenile salmon, that reduction should show up in the data. Multiple years of sampling in the Broughton Archipelago and Discovery Islands, published in peer-reviewed journals, have found sea lice levels on wild salmon essentially unchanged and in some cases even increased since the farms were pulled from those areas. Further supporting these recent findings, the Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat’s (CSAS) 2022 Science Response showed no meaningful link between sea lice on salmon farms and sea lice on wild juvenile salmon in B.C.

Salmon returns are genuinely volatile, driven by ocean temperature, food supply, predator numbers, freshwater flow and a cycle of dominant and sub-dominant year classes that scientists still don’t fully understand.

That volatility makes it easy to pluck one season out of decades of data and use it to support whatever claim activists are making about salmon farm closures.

Their verdict, however, never changes. A poor return is blamed on salmon farms and a strong one is claimed as proof that closing them worked.

Either way, the accusation always comes first and the evidence is made to fit.

Main Image (Top left clockwise) shows Greg Taylor, Bob Chamberlin, Tony Allard and Alexandra Morton.