BROUGHTON ARCHIPELAGO, B.C.—Alex Morton’s boat radio crackles as it picks up a stray transmission.

“You’ve got one coming in … Not the good kind.”

On this afternoon in early March, the marine biologist is speeding toward a fish farm in the Broughton Archipelago, a group of remote islands and sheltered inlets on Vancouver Island’s eastern shore. This is ground zero in a protracted battle over B.C.’s salmon farms.

Morton gazes out at the ocean around her. She’s pretty sure the warning came from a fish farm worker — and she’s pretty sure it’s about her.

The self-described activist has spent decades fighting to expose the risk fish farms pose to the environment. She makes this trip several times a week, dipping a net into the water just outside the pens teeming with farmed salmon, gathering samples of dead tissue.

Here, farmed fish swim in the same water as wild salmon, and Morton believes the farms are breeding grounds for dangerous pathogens that could be killing marine life.

“They are viral factories,” she says.

Morton is testing for the highly contagious Piscine orthoreovirus (PRV) — because the government won’t. Fisheries and Oceans Canada allows farms to transfer salmon from land-based hatcheries to ocean pens without testing for the virus.

Morton and the ’Namgis First Nation, based on a small island off the east coast of Vancouver Island, challenged the federal government’s approach to PRV in court. In February, a federal court judge struck down the government’s no-testing policy, giving Fisheries and Oceans Canada — often called the Department of Fisheries and Oceans or DFO — four months to reconsider its PRV policy.

It now has two months to comply.

Though the science on PRV is still being debated, the judge reinforced the importance of the precautionary principle: when there is uncertainty, policy-makers should err on the side of caution in order to protect the environment.

The stakes are high; even scientists on Canada’s east coast are watching how this plays out. They know what happens when the federal government mismanages wild fish stocks.

In 1992, the Atlantic cod fishery — a key economic driver for the region — was shut down after decades of overfishing. Authorities determined that, since 1962, cod stocks had dropped by about 93 per cent. Some scientists had warned in years prior that wild fish were in trouble, but few predicted such a devastating loss.

Scientists can’t have “perfect knowledge” of the ocean, warned Boris Worm, a research professor in marine biology at Dalhousie University.

“History can repeat itself.”

Some observers worry the department could be making the same mistake with PRV and B.C.’s salmon stocks. Court records and government documents show the DFO has repeatedly downplayed research that the highly contagious virus could threaten B.C.’s wild salmon.

Morton has spent years fighting to get the DFO to recognize the threat.

The 61-year-old didn’t start her career studying salmon; it was B.C.’s iconic orcas that first drew her to the Broughton Archipelago back in the 1970s. However, she came to realize that the biggest threat to the orcas was the loss of their primary food source: salmon. And one of the biggest threat to salmon, she fears, is PRV.

“PRV is the sword that either the industry is going to die on or the wild fish are going to die on,” she said.

Minister of Fisheries and Oceans Jonathan Wilkinson said the department is committed to a renewed approach to the aquaculture industry prioritizing the precautionary principle. His mandate as fisheries minister, after all, is “first and foremost” about conservation.

However, he argued it is too early for the department to commit to testing farmed salmon for PRV. The February court decision did not order the DFO to test for PRV, only to reconsider its policy in light of the virus’ risk to wild salmon.

“We are certainly looking at all of the available science,” he told the Star in a phone interview.

The virus attacks the red blood cells, which carry oxygen throughout a salmon’s body. In Norway, the world’s largest producer of farmed salmon, it’s widely accepted that PRV can cause a sometimes fatal disease in farmed Atlantic salmon.

PRV infection is ubiquitous among farmed salmon in B.C. as well. Last year Morton visited 23 different fish farms; about 70 per cent of the samples came back positive for PRV, she said.

But scientists who study the virus in B.C. are divided on whether it poses a threat to wild fish here. Some say the PRV found off B.C.’s coast is less harmful than the virus in Norwegian waters, potentially due to genetic differences.

The fish farm industry has maintained the virus is naturally occurring in B.C. and is nothing to worry about.

“It’s just not making fish sick,” said Shawn Hall, a spokesperson for the BC Salmon Farmers Association.

Some government scientists agree it doesn’t seem to be a major threat.

“We don’t see the disease or outright disease signs as they see in Norway,” said Kyle Garver, who leads the DFO’s virology research program.

Garver and his colleagues have exposed Atlantic salmon and two species of Pacific salmon to the PRV that’s found in B.C. waters during multiple laboratory trials. None developed any major signs of disease, he said, only mild inflammation.

More recently, a joint UBC and DFO trial found the respiratory systems of Atlantic salmon were unaffected by PRV. Garver said they got the same results from a similar trial with juvenile sockeye, which has not yet been published.

It’s this research the DFO cites to defend its PRV policy.

Two studies have connected the virus with fish diseases in B.C. But court records and government documents previously released under Access to Information laws reveal the DFO has a pattern of downplaying this research.

By law, the department can only allow farms to transfer fish into the ocean if they are free from any “disease or disease agent” that could be harmful to wild fish.

Sitting in his shared office at the DFO’s Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo, Emiliano Di Cicco’s exasperation with the department is clear.

The fish pathologist is employed by the non-profit Pacific Salmon Foundation but works with DFO scientists as part a Strategic Salmon Health Initiative. He moved from Italy to B.C. five years ago to study salmon health.

“I didn’t know how much politics there was involved in what I was about to do,” he said.

Di Cicco and a DFO scientist have published two studies that show PRV in B.C. may cause diseases in salmon.

One study diagnosed Heart and Skeletal Muscle Inflammation (HSMI) — the same problematic disease found in Norway — for the first time at an Atlantic salmon farm in B.C.

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But internal government emails show the DFO welcomed industry input on how and when the study would be announced. The department then tweaked the news release “in an attempt to accommodate concerns” from industry and other government scientists.

It’s unclear exactly what changes industry wanted, but the official release called Di Cicco’s findings a “potential diagnosis” — a qualifier that wasn’t in an early draft of the DFO’s media strategy.

“We didn’t agree with it,” Di Cicco said about the change.

Di Cicco’s other study found PRV is associated with a different disease in farmed Chinook, a Pacific salmon species. When the virus thrives in Chinook, it causes red blood cells to explode and may lead to first anemia and then jaundice.

Neither this study nor the HSMI study were done in controlled laboratory trials, but Di Cicco is confident there is a strong link between PRV and both diseases.

“It walks like a duck, it sounds like a duck, it probably is a duck,” he said.

In reaction to the Chinook research, the DFO ordered a so-called rapid science response, a five-page document that raised numerous issues with Di Cicco’s study and ultimately advised there was no need to change the department’s “scientific perspective” on PRV.

A rapid science response is not considered authoritative, peer-reviewed scientific advice. These documents are intended to help the department keep track of their early discussions about changes in science.

But court records show a senior DFO official sent an internal email reconfirming the department’s policy of not testing for PRV based partially on that advice.

“The whole process obviously is concerning,” Di Cicco said.

Not only did the rapid response ignore a huge part of the study, Di Cicco said, he didn’t know it was taking place and wasn’t given the chance to respond to any of the issues raised.

More recently, Di Cicco said, it was “odd” that he wasn’t invited to participate in a three-day meeting in Vancouver in January, where more than 30 scientists gathered to consider whether PRV poses a risk to Fraser River sockeye. According to the DFO, those scientists concluded PRV poses a minimal risk.

Di Cicco said there are still too many unknowns to make such a definitive statement. What he can say is the outlook for a sick fish in the open ocean is grim.

“When you are a wild fish out there and you have to fight every day to survive, you’re not going to last very long,” he said.

Minister Wilkinson rejected the notion that the DFO is turning a blind eye to the risks of PRV and fish farms more broadly.

He said the department is looking into aquaculture technologies that could help reduce the environmental impact of fish farms and is developing a new set of regulations for the industry. At the same time, the department has made investments to restore salmon habitat and lowered certain fishing quotas.

The minister, though, has repeatedly emphasized the importance of the industry. B.C. is the fourth largest producer of farmed salmon in the world, and the industry provides about 7,000 jobs, according to the BC Salmon Farmers Association.

And as demand grows, these farmed salmon could be a sustainable alternative to wild fish, Wilkinson said. Globally, salmon consumption has tripled since the 1980s, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

“We need to ... address the concerns people have been raising in ways that allow us to progress forward from an economic perspective,” Wilkinson said.

However, in December the B.C. government — which has authority over where fish farms anchor to the sea floor — announced an agreement with First Nations that will see most farms leave the Broughton Archipelago by 2022. By 2023, any remaining farms will require First Nations consent.

The dozens of fish farms outside the archipelago are unaffected.

In the meantime, Broughton-area First Nations have the authority to test for PRV before the farms transfer salmon into ocean pens — yet the department won’t let them use a DFO lab to do it. Wilkinson said it’s not feasible because the work would take too much of the scientists’ time.

’Namgis First Nation Chief Don Svanvik argued that using the DFO’s lab would be the “most efficient and cost-effective” option.

“The reluctance for things just makes one suspicious,” Svanvik said.

Back in early March, Svanvik slowly navigated his flat-bottomed boat out of the small Alert Bay harbour before setting off toward the mouth of the Gwa’ni River (Nimpkish River) on Vancouver Island. He stopped the motor where the river merges with the sea.

In just a few months, members of his community will gather on this spot, fishing net in hand, as the salmon make the journey upriver to spawn. For at least three decades, the ’Namgis voluntarily stopped fishing at the river in an effort to relieve pressure on struggling stocks. That meant Svanvik’s children didn’t have the same opportunity to practice their culture when they were young that he did.

“This is a treasure, and you know we want it to get back to where it was,” he said. Salmon have supported the ’Namgis people since time immemorial.

The fish farms may not be the only threat to these wild fish but they are part of the problem, Svanvik said. And the only way to guarantee they aren’t pushing wild salmon stocks over the edge is to get them out of the water.

“When we lose the opportunities to fish we’re also losing that part of our tradition and our culture,” he said.

“We’re people of the sea; we’re salmon people.”

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