Government is right to investigate fish lab

Sea lice, protests, 60 Minutes, the Cohen Commission — the B.C. salmon-farming industry has weathered them all, but mention “piscine reovirus” and everyone runs for cover.

Eighty per cent of B.C. farm salmon are infected. If this disease agent is prohibited from entering Canadian waters, as per federal regulation, marine salmon farms don’t have enough uninfected fish to operate legally in B.C.

The B.C. farm-fish health lab (now under investigation) claims the virus is harmless, which would make this a legal non-issue, but this claim crumbled when a second government lab got access to the farms and discovered the same heart disease as in Norway.

When Federal Court ordered Minister of Fisheries Dominic LeBlanc to test farmed salmon for PRV, he refused to comply. He has been sued a second time and DFO is trying to change the law and abdicate responsibility for piscine reovirus to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, which protects trade, not wild fish.

The industry ignored all the signs placed on fish farms by the First Nations, but when “Got Piscine Reovirus?” was put up, the staff appeared, with knives drawn, slashed the ropes and spirited the banner away.

The effort to ignore PRV in tens of millions of Atlantic farm salmon is being revealed and might go down in history as the most damaging industrial spill in the history of Canada, because viruses go viral.

I applaud the B.C. government’s move to investigate the lab responsible for the fish farm’s clean bill of health.