I can understand if you see me as overly pessimistic, a doomsayer perhaps, however... as a biologist, I have sworn a private, internal oath to say it, like I see it. If I think I am looking at extinction trends that are going to wreck havoc on us, I am going to do what I can to let people know.

It is up to you to decide whether to believe me.

Hard truths are the new norm. The climate patterns we relied on are gone. Now we don’t know what to expect. Will this winter drop us off ext spring in a drought state, like last winter? We don't know.

PRV - a virus that tests Canada's resolve to serve the people



I was the first scientist to have the freedom and opportunity to publish on the existence of piscine reovirus in BC farm salmon. I sent renowned filmmaker Twyla Roscovich to Norway, to interview scientists just before I published my first paper on PRV because no one had heard of the virus in BC.

This was before everyone dug trenches, and got in them. PRV was just an emerging virus and the disease it causes, HSMI, is listed as a production threat for Marine Harvest (MOWI) year after year in their Annual Reports.







Marine Harvest Annual report 2016

The leading PRV scientists in Norway spoke freely to the 7-month pregnant filmmaker from Canada. They knew the virus in BC was from Norway, because I had sent samples of BC farm salmon to them. They knew that it was not a good idea to allow PRV to spread and that the virus was causing organ damage in salmon.

Twyla made the film, Asking Norway.

Today, the virus has grown into a legal threat to the existence of open net salmon farming in Canada. Canadian law prohibits DFO from signing transfer permits for fish infected with a disease agent (s.56 FGR) to go into Canadian waters, including salmon farms. PRV is a disease agent, and you can see that MOWI sees it as one of the most damaging infectious agents to their industry. It is only here in Canada that the aquaculture industry refuses to see PRV is a disease agent. When I say “aquaculture industry” I include DFO’s Aquaculture Management Division (AMD) and the Provincial Animal Health Centre with the BC Ministry of Agriculture and I am also including commercial science labs, and the many academic labs receiving funds from the industry.

The scientists who dare publish warnings about PRV are under attack via internal agency audit processes which are hidden from view cloaked in confidentiality. Their jobs, credibility, and careers are threatened. Fortunately the field is widening and some have the support of their employers, but it continues to be very difficult to study aquaculture viruses and keep your funding and reputation intact. This behaviour occurs in Norway and Canada.



In 2010, I was asked to be a participant in the Cohen Commission. All participants were given access to .5 million internal DFO documents. Among them I found the farm salmon health records produced by the Animal Health Centre of BC Ministry of Agriculture. Case 08-3362 provided to Mainstream Canada (now Cermaq) mentioned seeing the organ damage caused by HSMI, the disease caused by PRV. While the report noted HSMI lesions, it brushed off the observation saying the disease had never been found in BC.



Case: 08-3362

This report concerned me. I wondered did this mean a disease widespread in the Atlantic salmon farming industry had made its way to BC and what would the impact of this be on wild salmon that are naive to the virus?

By this time in my career, I had experienced 10 years of DFO’s unreasonable and stubborn refusal to acknowledge that sea lice from salmon farms are killing wild salmon, something well-researched and widely accepted in other countries. I decided to go looking for the virus considered to be the cause of HSMI - PRV No one except the Animal Centre was allowed to test the salmon in the farms and by this time I did not trust DFO or the province. So I began sending samples of BC farm salmon that I purchased from markets with international credentials. Most farm salmon were infected. The genetic sequence of the virus in BC farm salmon was traced to Norway

In 2013, I got a tip that Marine Harvest (MOWI) was going to transfer Atlantic salmon smolts that had tested positive for PRV from their Dalrymple Hatchery into a farm off Port Hardy. I assumed this was not legal… to knowingly spread a problem virus from the Atlantic into Pacific waters.

I pleaded to Marine Harvest not to move the infected fish.

Of course they didn’t listen and I learned that transferring Atlantic salmon infected with a Norwegian virus was in fact "legal. However, in their regulatory haste when someone in DFO wrote this dangerous practice into the fish farm conditions of licences, they contradicted the Federal laws of Canada (section 56, Fishery General Regulations). They left it up to the company to decide if the fish were low risk to wild salmon and this was an unlawful delegation of ministerial powers.



As a biologist with some understanding of the enormous ramifications of releasing viruses, I went to court to change these regulations and I won in 2016, thanks to Ecojustice.

It was considered an important decision for the precautionary principle in resource management. Justice Rennie ruled that DFO must screen for PRV. The Minister and Marine Harvest (MOWI) disagreed and said they would appeal the decision, however, just before the deadline for that appeal all parties got a letter from the Department of Justice. There was new information that all sides might want to review i.e. the results of the now-published Di Cicco et al 2017 – PRV is causing HSMI in BC salmon farms, thus it is a “disease agent.”

Unable to appeal the decision, because DFO's own scientists were on the paper reporting that PRV is causing disease in BC, three successive Ministers of Fisheries simply refused to acknowledge the ruling that they must salmon from PRV - Gail Shea, Hunter Tootoo, Dominic LeBlanc. They were mute and unrelenting on the issue. They showed no understanding of the ramifications of ignoring our courts and the epidemiology of releasing viruses via farm animals into the wild. It was surprising to many, that a Minister could cherry pick among which laws he/she wanted to obey.

Screening for PRV would protect wild salmon and the interests of the public. Not screening for PRV would benefit 3 companies, with head offices in Norway, that were using BC waters to grow cheap farm salmon.

The math was the easy. This was not a good deal for Canadians.

I am guessing that the thought went – if we don’t test for PRV, then we don't know, and so we are not really breaking the law when we sign the transfer permits to move farm salmon infected with PRV into net pens along the coast. But we all know this is not how the law works. If you get stopped for speeding the police doesn't care if you didn't see the speed limit sign.



Two years later, ‘Namgis filed a lawsuit to stop DFO from putting PRV-infected farm salmon in their territory. I had also filed a second lawsuit a few months earlier and these cases were heard together. On February 5, 2019, we won. In the 199-page decision Justice Cecily Strickland ruled that transferring the fish without screening them for piscine orthoreovirus, or PRV, “perpetuates a state of wilful blindness on the part of the (Minister of Fisheries) with respect to the extent of PRV infection in hatcheries and fish farms.” https://www.campbellrivermirror.com/news/alexandra-morton-namgis-first-nation-win-federal-court-ruling/

Download Order and Reasons of Madam Justice Strickland made February 4 2019

Justice Strickland ordered DFO to consult with ‘Namgis and revise their PRV policy within four months.

Astonishingly tone-deaf to the nation’s rising intolerance of disregard of the indigenous governments, DFO did not consult with ‘Namgis! At the last minute they asked for an extension. All parties agreed. The clock was reset and DFO was given another 4 months to consult and come up with a decision based on that consultation. The new due date for DFO's response to the court, was October 3rd - in the middle of the election period. The lawyers for DFO assured us that the decision would be made prior to the election.



I became an expert witness for ‘Namgis along with the virologists on the front-lines of the emerging science on PRV for this consultation with DFO. Dr. Fred Kibenge flew in from UPEI. Dr. Gideon Mordecai came from UBC. Dr. Emiliano Di Cicco came from the Pacific Salmon Foundation, Dr. Rick Routledge – Simon Fraser University and me.

This group presented the unvarnished truth about PRV and what it is doing to salmon and trout globally. Working at breakneck speed an in-depth expert report was produced and provided to DFO prior to the court-mandated decision date. This report is an asset to everyone who wants understand the risk PRV in farm salmon to wild salmon.

Download 2019.09.24 'Namgis Submission_ Accommodations_Rationales_PRV

The primary points are:

PRV is from the Atlantic.

It is harming Pacific salmon

In the high-density fish farm environment it is known to mutate to higher virulence

DFO refuses to believe the work of these exerts and claims there is a harmless, local BC strain of PRV, but they cannot provide the critical evidence - the genetic sequence of this unique-to-BC “strain” of PRV. The word “strain” is ambiguous; no one knows exactly what it means. A better way to talk about the variation in PRV is to refer to “sequence variants.” PRV sequences will vary even within a single fish. However, there is no consistent difference between PRV sampled in BC to sequence variants found in Norway and Iceland. They are all the same virus.

If a family gave birth to three children, one in Norway, one in Iceland and one in Canada, each of the children would be slightly different genetically different from the others. Each child could say they were from Norway, Iceland or Canada, but genetically they would still be the same family.

It is the same with PRV. The virus appears to have been moved from country to country where it replicates and spreads. Eventually, enough genetic drift will occur that BC might have it’s own variation of PRV, but the virus is still too new to this coast. The oldest genetic sequence of PRV in BC is from 2011. Salmon farming began in BC in the mid 1980s. So to prove that PRV existed in BC prior to salmon farming and this is endemic, we would need to see genetic sequences prior to 1980. DFO has samples of fish going back several decades in their freezers, but they have not supported their own claims by finding PRV in those samples.



There is no reason to be surprised that we got PRV from the Atlantic Ocean. 30 million Atlantic salmon eggs came into BC before anyone even knew PRV existed and many are identified as "MOWI" stock, which is ultimately Norwegian. The disease caused by PRV, HSMI, started ripping through the Norwegian salmon farming industry in 1999. No one knew what was causing this wasting-type disease, called HSMI. The fish just refused to move and grew skinny.

While the virus was spreading undetected through the industry in the North Atlantic, the industry was spreading aggressively into other countries, taking their infected stock with them.

Finally in 2010, piscine reovirus was discovered, named and proposed as the causative agent of Heart and Skeletal Muscle, HSMI (Palacios et al 2010).

Given that the disease and the industry were spreading rapidly at the same time - the virus got a ten-year head start on any effort to contain it. Industry and government couldn’t guard against a virus they didn’t know existed. However four years after PRV was discovered as the cause of HSMI, the Norwegian government officially gave up trying to control the disease, it was too widespread and in 2014 they delisted it as reportable. They would just learn to live with it. There were so few wild salmon left in Norway anyway. The Canadian government is trying to follow suit and would also like to ignore PRV, but they keep running afoul of our laws that prohibit DFO from ignoring viruses that cause disease. The industry told the court they were so infected with PRV that they would be “severely impacted” if they were prohibited from transferring PRV-infected fish in marine pens.

And so the opposing forces pressuring DFO are the people trying to protect the last wild salmon vs the 3 salmon farming companies in BC who sound like they will have trouble complying with the law.

In a world where natural salmon are valued, the admission that the Norwegian salmon farming industry cannot comply with our laws because they are so heavily infected with PRV would have triggered swift removal of fish farms from the ocean into tanks on land. However there is no evidence that wild salmon are respected by the government of Canada.

Now that PRV has become a legal issue, every research project into this virus is viewed as a threat by the industry. While scientists who claim the virus is harmless have access to the biosecurity tank facilities where they can run tests on what PRV does to Pacific salmon, the scientists who view the virus as a disease agent are denied access. I had to go to Norway to find a lab to run PRV challenges. That was a mistake.

One third of the fish in the experiments I commissioned mysteriously disappeared. Jumped out of the tanks and walked away? how did this happen? There was no explanation. Then many of the samples taken from the remaining fish were missing the key organ for analysis, the heart. I refused to pay for this work and the lab was fine with that – no argument from them. My impression is that they were happy to abandon this project. Being the lab to prove that PRV from BC is causing disease in salmon would not be good for business as the primary clients are industry-related. To this day, scientific team reporting PRV causes disease have not been given access to a lab to run challenge experiments.

Why would DFO prevent the research on whether or not PRV from BC is causing disease? Why would they favour only the researchers who have co-published with Marine Harvest?

There are so many implications

If the virus is from the Atlantic… that means someone is liable for bringing it here, so denying it came from the Atlantic protects companies



Denying PRV is a disease agent despite all the research to the contrary protects profits for an industry that admits it is infected



If the same PRV genetic sequence is found in a farm hatchery and a collapsing wild salmon stock and someone can show that PRV is killing these fish - these are grounds for suing for damages.

You can see why it's better for some to stop the research before it gets that far.

There are fewer powerful organizations still defending wild salmon. The once powerful Fisherman’s Union went silent when they lost most fishermen to the wild salmon collapses and began to sign up fish farm workers. The Steelhead Society was once a powerful voice in the fight to stop Atlantic salmon from being imported for fear of disease. Now that that has exactly happened they have withered into complete silence. They don’t want to know about the impact of PRV on steelhead, they don't respond. The BC Wildlife Federation, perhaps the biggest wildlife organization in Canada seems silent on the issue of this virus spreading into wild salmon and trout.



Most indigenous governments on the coast have signed arrangements with the industry. I don't know what they think is causing their salmon to vanish, but they are silenced.



Because of the widespread complicit silence on the impact of this industry, the scientists on the front lines are largely unsupported. Worse than that, there are attempts to have our papers "retracted." So far the journals have refused to comply. There are changes of misconduct filed, repeatedly in some cases, which take huge amounts of time to sort out and permanently damage credibility even though every one of them has been dismissed.

The ‘Namgis expert witness panel detailed why the DFO science reporting PRV is not a disease agent is wrong.

The experiments used to say PRV is not a disease agent did not run long enough to record the full damage to the organs of the fish. Immune system measurements were taken too soon and too late and so missed the interval when other researchers report peak response. In some cases, they examined the wrong organs.

Then when these DFO scientists still found “moderate to mild” heart lesions in Fraser River sockeye salmon, they decided those lesions did not impact the fish. What human would volunteer for exposure to a virus that caused moderate heart damage? It is impossible to accept that heart damage is no risk to salmon faced with swimming up the Fraser River through Hells Gate and the slide at Big Bar. I think it is reckless to expose salmon to a virus causing heart lesions.



DFO refused to bring the scientists who say PRV is low risk to Pacific Salmon to the ‘Namgis consultations. There was no opportunity to hear them defend exposing salmon to a virus that causes heart damage. Instead all we got were bureaucrats.

I constantly review DFO internal conversations through the Freedom of Information Act, trying to figure out why they are so adamant about putting wild salmon at such enormous risk. I have read hundreds of emails written over the years, many of them by the bureaucrats who were sitting across the table from us. The way I read their emails, they are involved in the day-to-day control of information about PRV. Papers by DFO scientists on the impact PRV on Pacific salmon were not allowed to be published for years.

Very concerning there is never any one in the room from the government in Canada who is responsible for wild salmon. No one who could act to protect wild salmon.



One of the many problems for DFO is that its own scientists strongly disagree. Dr. Miller’s lab suggests PRV is an exotic virus causing significant and widespread damage to Pacific salmon. However, Dr. Garver’s lab also at the Pacific Biological Station suggests the virus is local and low risk to wild salmon.

DFO is a two-headed regulator. One head says PRV is a disease agent, the other says it is not. However the hand that is signing the transfer permits for the farm salmon industry appears to only listening to the head that claims PRV is not a disease agent. How can Canadians have any confidence in this situation, especially when wild salmon populations are lower than they have been in the history of this country?

All of this started at 2:55pm on August 19, 2008 when Dr. Gary Marty of the Animal Health Centre in Abbotsford wrote up Case: 08-3362 a fish health report to a Mainstream veterinarian:

“This pattern of inflammation has also been described with Heart and Skeletal Muscle Inflammation in Atlantic salmon reared in Europe, but this disease has not been identified in BC salmon.”

There is only one HSMI report in the records provided to the Cohen Inquiry into the collapse of the Fraser River sockeye salmon.

Eight years later, on January 5th 2016, Dr. Marty publish a paper with Dr. Garver and Marine Harvest that states emphatically that the PRV found in BC does not cause HSMI:

“Western North American PRV Fails to Cause HSMI”

However, four months after that, on May 20th, DFO scientist Dr. Miller and Dr. Di Cicco from the Pacific Salmon Foundation reported they had diagnosed HSMI in farmed Atlantic salmon in BC. This is the news that caused DFO and Marine Harvest (MOWI) to drop their appeal against the legal decision I had won.

In an odd twist, I came across emails that Dr. Marty sent the next day May 21 and on the 23, appearing to admit that he found HSMI in 2008 - that would be case 08-3362 that launched my surveillance and discovery of PRV.

Dr. Marty explained that he deserved credit discovering the disease in 2008, even though he had published a paper just 4 months earlier reporting that it did not occur in BC.

He explained that when he saw the characteristic lesions of HSMI he went to the salmon farmers, who said it wasn’t HSMI. Dr. Marty gave the condition a new name, changed how HSMI would be diagnosed in his lab - the lab doing the government health audits of the farm salmon. Indeed the new diagnostic worked perfectly. HSMI was never reported by him again - until Miller and Di Cicco finally got access to a fish farms, and bam there it was, large as life. Dr. Marty wanted credit for the discovery of HSMI in BC.

No one blinked, except the lawyers who recommended that the Minister drop his appeal of my case.

Even though the appeal was dropped in response to this finding - everyone became quietly complicit.

It was too risky for anyone to respond to this, pull up the blinds and let the light in. PRV is disease agent in BC... and thus infected fish have to be prohibited from transfer into farms.



Science co-published by federal and provincial scientists and Marine Harvest stated - no HSMI in BC, and then one of the government scientists broke ranks and wanted credit its discovery 8 years earlier. This information was provided to two ministers how could the same government scientist appear to be saying one thing publicly and a different thing privately. No response. What about PLoS One, the scientific journal that published HSMI is not in BC? Do they know one of the authors appears to want credit for finding it 8 years earlier?

In the fall of 2019, I began walking rivers from Port Hardy to the Fraser River examining dead yellow salmon. Yellow is the colour PRV turns Pacific salmon after their livers to fail.



2019 is the worst year on record for wild salmon returns to BC. Images of starving bears from rivers in the Broughton Archipelago flashed around the world on CNN, the BBC, Daily Telegraph, PEOPLE.com. The southern Resident orca are starving towards extinction and abandoned their summer feeding grounds. While all of BC seems impacted, the rivers near salmon farms are orders of magnitude lower.





Commercial fisheries were closed. Thousands of people were put out of work. Forests have been robbed of the nutrients that allow them to draw-down massive loads of carbon pollution and produce the oxygen we breathe.

On October 3rd DFO sent a letter to inform me they had made their final decision on whether to screen farm salmon for PRV.

DFO will not be screening farm salmon for the virus PRV, a virus linked to heart damage and red blood cell rupture in the last wild salmon.

They went one step further. Even if they know the virus is present they will approve the transfer of infected fish.

Download Final Signed - Morton Letter Oct 3

This is against the spirit of the law in Canada s. 56 (FGR).

Seven years in court, three legal decisions against this, extensive scientific evidence, exposed cover-up, division within DFO, the collapse of BC salmon fisheries, Pacific salmon turning yellow and dying before spawning in the rivers and DFO opted for a state of lawlessness aiding millions of farm salmon in shedding a virus over every run of wild salmon that tries to migrate to sea from rivers in the southern half of BC - that is associated with rupturing their red blood cells.



DFO has ruined the salmon farming industry by never giving them any reason to clean up.

I sat in the rain and wept for hours at the suffering, loss, extinctions and the thing about some humans that drives them to destroy the very things our children need to survive.

Onward....