“We talk about robbing from future generations, but I have an 18 month old grandson, and it’s really hard to look him in the eyes because we are taking away everything that I love and that he would love. We’re taking away the richness of life. We’re taking away the ability to survive. It really is a form of insanity that we do not act on this.”
“87% of the young salmon leaving parts of this coast… are heavily infected with sea lice.”
“They [First Nations] do not want salmon farms in their territory. They’ve been saying “no” for thirty years and yet one-third of the salmon farming industry in British Columbia is in their territory. And all the waste from these farms is pouring out whether it’s viruses, bacteria, drugs, fish waste.”
“I have to wonder, does he really know that he’s fighting me so that Marine Harvest and Surmac, whose owned by Mitsubishi, can put diseased Atlantic Salmon into the major migration routes of this coast? I just can’t believe that he actually knows that this is going on. Just on the surface, it looks really bad.”
“I was so convinced that if I lined up my words in the right order, remained calm, and gave them [DFO] all the evidence they would say, ‘oh, oh, oh, oh, there’s a better way to do this. Let’s get them off the migration route, let’s put less farms here…’ But no, they never listened to me. That began to concern me.”
“We all had such high hopes, and honestly this Minister is doing worse than Stephen Harper. I mean, we had the worst sockeye return ever in the history of studying sockeye. The DFO did not even blink. They don’t care. They don’t want wild fish. That is my assessment after years, decades of being on this.”
“Canada could become this remarkable leader in land-based aquaculture, which the markets want, and restoring wild fish using genomic profiling. I tell you, every country would come knocking on our door and saying, ‘How did you do that Canada?’”
“Keystone species means that if that species is removed, things start to collapse. It means it’s the key to the lock that opens the door to the whole ecosystem. Some people say to me, ‘ I don’t eat salmon, so I don’t really care.” Well, do you breathe? Because salmon are feeding the trees that make the oxygen that we breathe.”
“You can actually measure the size of the salmon run by looking at the growth rings of the trees.”
“They also feed over 1000 species from bugs, to orca, to eagles and bears, coastal communities. They are essential to First Nations culture and diet.”
“The gains financially, emotionally, spiritually and in every way are so much greater for wild salmon than farmed salmon”
“From the moment the salmon egg leaves the mother’s body, it’s feeding the world around them. There’s not a lot of species that are designed to feed the masses. They can feed all of us and thrive. They are so remarkable and they’re such a gift. They’re so important. They are a bloodstream. I don’t say that lightly. They go out into the open ocean and they are gathering the energy of the sun hitting the ocean. Because the sun hits the ocean and it creates this good plankton bloom which feed little fish, and then the salmon eat those fish. Then they bring that all back home and they defy gravity and they take it up the watershed and they feed the trees. Somehow we have lost that memory, that connection, that understanding. Sometimes the government feels to me like a berserk person on a lawnmower and he’s running over all the power cords and he’s cutting all the lines to our house. We’re not gonna have any hot water. ”
“Honestly, it’s a form of insanity where you cannot see the workings of life. Where you can’t see the gears and all of that is happening. You think you can just break all of that and get away with it. We’re not going to survive with this attitude.”
“People in British Columbia maybe don’t grasp how incredibly fortunate we are that we haven’t taken it completely apart. We’re getting there- we are disassembling it.
“I feel that a place on earth that still make clean air, water and food – whoa a covenant needs to placed on that right now. People in British Columbia maybe don’t grasp how incredibly fortunate we are that we haven’t taken it completely apart…”
“I believe that Justin Trudeau is a good man… I believe that Dominique LeBlanc, our minister of fisheries, is probably a good man. He probably loves his children. They probably both do. And yet what they are both doing to their children, and ours, and us, and the whales, is unforgivable.”
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