Here’s a Resource Works interview with Brian Kingzett, executive director of the BC Salmon Farmers Association. It’s been edited for clarity, and to keep it short.
As the new federal fisheries minister, Joanne Thompson, hears pleas to scrap Ottawa’s plan to ban marine net-pen salmon farming in BC waters by 2029, Brian Kingzett made these points in late July:
- “The anxiety is pretty high in the sector, because we’re close to needing a deadline. The minister recognized the urgency and listened to the concerns from sector representatives and First Nation leaders. She toured the Brown’s Bay processing facility, she was curious, and she heard firsthand from employees the importance of the jobs here. I think, given it was an early discussion, it went about as well as it could.”
- “We’re looking at a very binary decision regarding the companies. That will be to either start a new production cycle and commit, which means they have to keep the farms, the employees, the contractors, the feed contracts, and the hatcheries. If the uncertainty continues and the ban is not withdrawn, they will not be able to continue doing business. The sector will have to start making decisions next year if we don’t have a signal of certainty by this fall.”
- “If you think about the production cycle of salmon, it’s about five to six years including brood stock so we are already into the cycle. So, if the sector has to commit to another production cycle. They need to know that they will be able to farm past 2029 — companies were already forced to cull over 10 million fish in hatcheries following the farm closures in the Discovery Islands because they could not transfer them into the marine pens. The companies have already lost significant business, staff and fish during the current period of reduced production and uncertainty. One company did not even stock all their sites last year. They couldn’t afford to. They basically risk-managed it. They stocked the minimum amount of sites to keep the company going.”
- “I think people forget that we’re farmers. We’re dealing with biological production cycles, and in our case, it is a longer-term and very expensive cycle. Even if the farms were to stop now, it would take two years to wind down as we move the fish that are in the water.”
- “Some of these companies are publicly traded with capital that can go to other jurisdictions in the world. We’ve already sent about a billion dollars in capital — of projects that were planned — back to Norway. So we’ve already joined the capital flight out of Canada.”
- “We are experiencing recruitment issues. Highly skilled employees are leaving for other opportunities because of the uncertainty. We’ve seen it. There was an acquisition announced last week of one of the salmon farming companies, which is partly due to all this uncertainty.”
- “If the 2029 ban stay in place, we risk losing $1.17 billion dollars in existing annual economic activity.”
- “If that occurs, there will be massive ripples through the supply chain as they try to decide what they will do. Our sector has developed alongside a lot of dedicated local contractors. The feed sector in chicken and pork, for example, depends a lot on West Coast Reduction, which takes protein from processing waste in the salmon sector and then uses that in feed meals. So they might have to import products for feed in the chicken industry to offset the loss locally. We’re also a major buyer of Canadian canola. So all those feed contracts become significantly impacted.”
- “The decision to ban marine net-pens was politically driven. The sector was told it had to go to land based or fully closed containment in the ocean,We’re more than a year in, and DFO has not defined what closed containment is. knew I believe that those behind the political mandate knew that we did not have the ability to move to closed containment. “The reality is, no one has been able to make land-based work on a commercial scale, even in the best geographical facilities anywhere in the world. Where land-based facilities are operating, they produce a much smaller fish and smaller quantities than the market demands. The only reason we have a salmon-farming sector here in British Columbia, let alone northern Vancouver Island, is because of the oceanography and the geography. When you try and build land based farming that that equation completely flips.
- “We might have the ability on Vancouver Island to maybe do one or two small to medium-sized land-based facilities, but you also need a lot of land, a lot of really flat land, and we just don’t have that on the Island. The biggest land-based facility, which now has over $1 billion US invested in it, is Atlantic Sapphire in Florida. It had the best engineers, the best technology, and flat land. It was doing things with their wastewater that you’d never be able to permit in Canada. And it was on a rail line to get the feed grains. Their stock has now plummeted by more than 99%.
- “If you’re an investor in Norway, you can invest in salmon aquaculture in Chile, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Japan, or Atlantic Canada, where the Premiers are very much on side. This causes frustration for us because we’re looking globally. We know that in Chile, more 70,000 rural people are employed in this sector. And one of their biggest problems in Chile right now is armed gangs pirating truckloads of farm-raised salmon on the highway.”
- “We have probably the best greenfield opportunity in the world if we choose to take advantage of it. We have 59 operating farms now. Norway has well, over 200 producer companies, and 1,220 sites. Investors are looking at Namibia and South Africa,to a salmon farming industry there. Norway’s exports of farmed salmon in 2023 were $17 billion Canadian. And we have more coastline than Norway.”
- “We need a good signal from the federal Government. Then the capital flows back into Canada, which you would think would suit what (Prime Minister Mark) Carney is saying publicly about transforming the Canadian economy. That’s the irony in this whole thing. Everybody else that Prime Minister Carney is asking to invest in the Canadian transformational-style economy is looking for help from the federal government. We’re just looking for permission to move forward with the First Nations in whose territories we farm. This is tailor-made for what Prime Minister Carney is trying to do.”
- “We could be bringing in massive innovation that is already sitting on the shelf in Norway. We just can’t bring it over here because of the federal government (and its impact) on investor confidence. We’ve got to get back in on the innovation cycle within a year or two, and by that time there’s going to be another innovation cycle.”
- “I’m going to be optimistic (about the federal government) because of the science. The problem was a massive anti-salmon farming campaigns that made all sorts of unproven claims that farm-raised salmon were destroying wild salmon. There has now been a phenomenal amount of science that says that is not true. There are actually more salmon in the ocean than there have been for 100 years.”
- We did a biological experiment that has not happened anywhere else in the world, and, ironically, is getting global attention from all the other jurisdictions, because we actually removed salmon farms from some entire geographic areas. We continued to monitor the impacts. What we found was that sea lice levels actually did not change. In fact, we’ve actually seen some of the highest sea lice levels after farms were removed. The anti-salmon farming opposition groups ran on a slogan of ‘no farms, no lice on wild salmon’ shortened ‘no farms, no lice.’ The reality is no farms, still lice. They’re tying themselves in knots trying to explain that.
- We’ve had some excellent research come out, and some excellent papers have analyzed 20 years of disease and pathogen work, and concluded, from an epidemiological point of view, there’s no risk.”
- “You know, we issued an economic report last November that the government has never challenged. Our report said that the removal of our sector was going to create another $9 billion cost to Canadian taxpayers.” And now we’re hearing that BC might have a $18 billion deficit this budget year. We have the highest deficit per capita in Canada, and an absolute record. And then we have this existential crisis with Trump that Prime Minister Carney is trying to deal with, basically across all natural-resource sectors, having to shift our economy.”
- “In the early days of salmon farming, American ENGOs (environmental non-governmental organizations siphoned tens of millions of dollars into British Columbia with the goal to shut down the BC salmon farming sector. Now, some of these organizations see that this sector is the only solution to the global population and protein demand increasing, because every kilogram of protein you take off the land and move into the ocean has almost a tenfold carbon reduction footprint. So if I’m Prime Minister Carney and I’ve got the World Bank and two of the largest Environmental NGOs telling me to invest in salmon farming, maybe that’s going to carry some weight.”
- “The government and Canada need some wins. So we’re out there saying, ‘Hey, if you get rid of us, we lose over a billion dollars in economic activity. But if you let us continue, we can double down that economic activity and be supported by science.’ You know this is a win-win. This is a little example of how natural-resource sectors can grow under First Nations stewardship with First Nations jobs and First Nations oversight. It’s everything that they’ve been asking us to do in the agriculture sector as a whole in Canada. We are leading that.”
- “If we get a positive decision, we’ve shown really effectively that we can reach $2 billion in annual economic activity in the next five or six years. No other sector in agriculture or on this coast can pivot as fast as we can, because we already have the infrastructure in place.
- “Maybe our economic impact is not going to be as big as LNG or or another oil pipeline, but we can add a couple of foundational bricks on the economy right now, and there’s no other sector, that can produce all the economic benefits and jobs, in a sustainable way, that salmon farming can on northern Vancouver Island.
