This is The Honourable Gail Shea, Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, Government of Canada, loyal Conservative and Harperite.
She was speaking at the Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo yesterday on the addition of $54 million in research grants to the station’s budget, which really ought to be an expenditure to bring joy to our hearts. In support of the grant, Shea emphasized the need for the country to carry on additional scientific research on fisheries, and that certainly ought to be the case.
Problem number one with her grant is that it is directed solely at the expansion of aquaculture, specifically open-water aquaculture, of both shellfish and fin fish. The government’s program is clearly to support an industry that is largely controlled from beyond Canada’s borders and which, to say it mildly, is not without controversy. This grant will do nothing to lessen that controversy in that there are certain foregone conclusions inherent in the grant, those being that farmed fish are better for the economy than wild fish and that we should be fully invested as a people in net cage open water fish farming.
The first bit of irony lies in Shea’s statements that we need to do more science, this from a minister of a government that shuts down scientific libraries in the interest, on the face of it, of saving a rather paltry pittance in tax dollars. Shea chooses to ignore serious science in the public interest that indicated pretty strongly that fish farming, as it is currently practiced, harms habitat for a wide variety of sea life and threatens stocks of wild fish. The DFO has repeatedly rejected any results from any lab linking fish farming to the propagation of fish-borne viruses sea lice. This, of course, is very convenient for a couple of reasons, one being that it obviates the need for fish farming operations to be moved to dry land, and, secondly and of greater interest to the citizens of Canada, it allows for the degradation at least, and the disappearance at worst, of wild stocks. The degradation/disappearance of wild resources has a couple of benefits for the supporters of the Harper political/economic agenda: it turns the resource into a controlled commodity rather than a part of the biosphere to which all stakeholders have some access, and it removes the need to protect vast areas that have traditionally been protected as part of the salmon spawning régime, removing a significant set of obstacles for resource extraction. The science Shea wishes to pursue is the science of the foregone conclusion, that operates on the principle of perpetuating an ideological goal rather than discovering what all the implications are of the action contemplated.
My own sense is that the reports linked above both demonstrated another part of the tilted equation in that they tend to accept with little question the premise behind Shea’s announcement rather than giving sufficient time, space and credence to a well-documented alternative point of view. This wouldn’t be so much of a problem if so many people weren’t convinced that CVVI and the Nanaimo Daily News, along with the preponderance of the press organs, speak with the force of deep and broad knowledge. They don’t, they are press release channels.
Hence, the following quip from Woody Guthrie:
“I’d rather have the devil running my country than the screwbally bunch we got in most of our offices these days.”
Meanwhile, here’s a little object lesson from Delbert McClinton: