Yes Bones it's a LOL for you but the rest of us are not laughing. Seems that this issue is being taken more seriously than our friends of fish farms are willing to admit.
https://www.leg.bc.ca/documents-dat...parliament/2nd-session/20171129pm-House-Blues
MONITORING OF
FISH PROCESSING PLANTS AND
PROTECTION OF WILD SALMON
S. Furstenau: Speaking of charades, under the previous government, despite population growth and increased resource activity, our environmental protection in this province —
monitoring and enforcement capacity — was crippled by budget and staff cuts. They found fewer infractions because they weren't looking. Earlier this session, we spoke about illegal dams being built in B.C. without government permitting or oversight, a case where a citizen spoke up to identify problems that the government wouldn't.
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This week another concerned British Columbian, Tavish Campbell, has stepped forward — this time with videos of blood pouring out of underwater pipes. The blood, he has told us, is coming from farmed salmon and is contaminated with piscine reovirus, a potential risk to our wild salmon stocks.
While I appreciate the Minister of Environment's immediate response to the videos, we need a government that works to proactively protect our environment, not one that waits for the public to prove that we've got a problem.
My question is to the Minister of Environment. Mr. Campbell dove at two out of the 109 fish processing plants in B.C. Is the minister going to expand his review to cover every plant that releases effluent into wild salmon habitat to ensure it's not contaminated, or will Mr. Campbell need to keep testing the bloodwater?
Hon. G. Heyman: Thank you to the member for the question. I also want to thank Tavish Campbell for bringing this issue to the attention of the government and the public of B.C. and Canada. It is important. To view that video is visceral, and
I had the same reaction that British Columbians and Canadians did: what is going on here?
So I looked into it, and I found out that under the previous government, the last inspection of this fish processing plant was in 2013. And despite the fact that the plant was out of compliance at that inspection, no further inspection took place.
No further inspection took place. So I dug a little further. We have over 7,000 permits to inspect and a handful of inspectors to do it. Notwithstanding that, I've asked inspectors to go to the Brown's Bay processing plant. I've asked them to inspect what's going on there. We will review the samples that were taken by Mr. Campbell, and if we need greater certainty, we will take additional simples.
The permits for Brown's Bay are being reviewed. They are three decades old. The conditions on them are three decades old.
We will be reviewing the conditions to ensure they meet the expectations of British Columbians that nothing — nothing — goes into our ocean that has contaminants or pathogens, that it's clean, and that we protect wild salmon in British Columbia. We will apply those conditions to all the permits for fish processing plants in British Columbia, because we're here to protect wild salmon, the 10,000 jobs that depend on them, and the Indigenous people who depend on them for food.