Earlier this month, I joined with leaders representing over 120 First Nations, commercial fishers, tourism operators, business leaders, recreational fishers, scientists, and environmental NGOs at a press conference to send a clear message to Prime Minister Trudeau: we expect him to keep his promise to transition open-net pen salmon farms out of BC waters by 2025. 

It’s a rare thing to get such a diverse spread of often diametrically opposed organizations together in one room, standing up for one cause. It speaks to the issue’s critical importance to the vast majority of British Columbians.

As the co-founder of a Vancouver-based community-supported fishery called Skipper Otto, I represent a network of more than 40 fishing families and 8,000 member home cooks across Canada who depend on wild salmon for our way of life, our living-wage jobs, and our local food system.

Long before open-net pen salmon farms, there were community-based fishers and workers who thrived on wild-capture salmon and the myriad shoreside businesses that supported them. Since salmon farms were brought into our waters, we’ve seen a steady decline in wild salmon numbers. This has happened everywhere in the world where open-net pen salmon farms exist. 

There is ample peer-reviewed research on the parasites, pathogens, and pollutants that are released from open-net pen salmon farms into BC waters—and the subsequent deadly impact on wild Pacific salmon. It was in part due to this clear science that in 2019, the prime minister issued a mandate to transition open-net pen salmon farms out of BC waters by 2025. Since then, the urgency has only increased. 

On behalf of our fishing families and member home cooks, we expect Trudeau to keep his promise to get the salmon farm industry out of our oceans. He has not backed off that promise, and yet, now that the deadline is less than a year away, the minister of fisheries has still not offered a clear transition plan, nor the assurance that the government will adhere to its promise. 

The uncertainty created by this lack of leadership has thrown our food systems and community-based fisheries into chaos. In areas where salmon farms have already been removed, we are seeing strong, healthy returns of wild salmon. This indicates the restorative potential for coast-wide threatened salmon runs when disease-filled salmon feedlots are removed from their migratory path. 

Meanwhile, seafood consumers who want to do the right thing for people and the planet can scarcely find local, wild salmon in a marketplace flooded with farmed options. Many will remember the reports that found one-quarter of fish products in Metro Vancouver are fraudulently labelled. So even when folks try to do the right thing by avoiding farmed salmon, fraud and mislabelling make it difficult to have confidence that they’re buying what they think they are.

That’s why joining a community-supported fishery is one of the most important acts of political activism that consumers can make in this time of uncertainty as we await the full removal of open-pen salmon farms from our waters. It’s a vote with your dollars to support community-based salmon fishers in our coastal and Indigenous communities, so they can persist in their traditional, small-scale, sustainable way of life in the face of the existential threats posed by open-pen salmon farms.

Community-supported fisheries like Skipper Otto enable members to celebrate the value of our beautiful, complex marine ecosystems and the role that humans have played in that ecosystem for more than 15,000 years. Our members buy a share in the catch early in the fishing season, guaranteeing our fishing families a fair market for their catch before they even untie from the docks.

They also get to know each of our fishing families throughout the season with photos, videos, and stories from the fishing grounds. Each and every piece of seafood comes with the face and name of the person who caught it, and the story of when, where, and how it was caught—guaranteeing that members know their dollars are supporting sustainable, good-paying jobs in our coastal and Indigenous fishing communities.

We must each do our part to ensure that wild BC salmon and the people and ecosystems that depend on them will thrive for generations to come. This also includes Trudeau doing his part by keeping his promise to remove one of the biggest threats to the survival of wild salmon in BC waters. We’ve waited long enough, and the salmon won’t survive any more stalling tactics.

Going back on that promise now is an affront to everyday Canadians and their food system, to thousands of workers whose good jobs depend on wild salmon, to British Columbia’s ecosystems, and to the wild salmon themselves.