When a Picture Fakes a Thousand Words

From salmon farming to the energy sector, the activist playbook leans on deception to turn fiction into funding.

By Fabian Dawson
SeaWestNews

If someone in the resource sector uses a misleading image to illustrate their industry, they face investigations, regulatory crackdowns, and public outrage. But when an activist group does it, it’s called “raising awareness” and the donations keep rolling in.

That double standard has long given many eco-ideological outfits a free pass to distort facts, stage images, and spin science, all while demanding transparency from the very sectors they smear.

This licence to shill, however, is finally facing long-overdue scrutiny.

A group of British Columbia residents has this week filed a formal complaint with Canada’s Competition Bureau, targeting the David Suzuki Foundation for repeatedly using a 20-year-old photo of a gas field in Wyoming to falsely represent modern natural gas development in B.C.

The image, which shows a dense, industrial landscape, has been shared across the Foundation’s platforms to paint a bleak and inaccurate picture of what’s happening in Canada, states the complaint. It’s an image designed to shock, to conjure dystopian visions of environmental destruction, even though the truth on the ground is far different, the complainants assert.

In B.C., modern horizontal drilling practices allow multiple wells to operate from a single site, minimizing surface impact. The terrain remains green, dotted with farmland and forest.

But for years, the Wyoming image has appeared on social media posts, websites, and donation campaigns tied to the Foundation, driving outrage and raising millions in contributions, said Deena Del Giusto, one of the complainants.

“This is about fairness and truth. The people of Northeast B.C. deserve honest debate, not scare tactics and misleading imagery used to raise millions in donations,” said Del Giusto, a resident of Fort St. John, where the oil and gas sectors are major economic drivers.

“We’re asking the Competition Bureau to hold the David Suzuki Foundation to the same standard businesses face: tell the truth.”

That call for truth echoes loudly across British Columbia’s coastlines, where salmon farmers have long been the target of similar campaigns. And at the centre of it all is one very tired, very overworked baby fish.

This little fish has done more media rounds than a Fisheries minister in damage control, swimming its way through headlines, hashtags, and hysteria without so much as a scale out of place.

Nicknamed the “magic fish,” this smolt debuted in 2020 as a pink salmon from Nootka Sound. Then it became a chum salmon. Later, it appeared in the Discovery Islands—some 700 kilometres away—still looking exactly the same. Same lice. Same pose. Same lighting. Either it hitched a ride with Aquaman, or someone just reused the image.

This fish has been everything: evidence of disaster, proof of recovery, and visual fuel for any message an activist needed that day. It became the Swiss Army knife of anti-salmon farming propaganda, recycled in media stories, fundraising drives, and protest campaigns.

The problem? Real science says otherwise.

Long-term monitoring by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, independent experts, salmon farmers and their First Nations partners show most wild smolts have little to no sea lice. In fact, sea lice levels remained low even after farms were removed. Peer-reviewed studies, court rulings, and government scientists have also repeatedly confirmed that salmon farms pose minimal risk to wild stocks. But that never stopped activists from pushing myths about the sector, again and again.

The deception about salmon farming in B.C. doesn’t end online. False billboard campaigns and radio ads alluding to “extinction claims” have flooded the public sphere, despite being debunked by federal scientists.

As Dr. Ken Coates of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute put it, “The environmental NGO sector is the most unregulated industry in the country. It’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and nobody in Ottawa is scrutinising them or their claims very much.”

That needs to change.

The Suzuki Foundation complaint offers a starting point. If the Competition Bureau determines that misleading imagery used in environmental fundraising qualifies as deceptive conduct, it should apply the same scrutiny to groups targeting aquaculture and other resource sectors.

Because if an activist group builds its influence by misrepresenting the truth, it’s no different than a company making false green claims about a product.

Both are forms of greenwashing. Both erode public trust. And both should be held to the same legal standard.

(Main image shows a page from the David Suzuki Foundation website)