On disengagement

Michael Ignatieff plays to his B.C. audience by mentioning the disastrous drop in wild salmon stocks:

We’ve just seen an entire Fraser River sockeye run evaporate. Millions of salmon just didn’t show up.

Ask upstream communities about the consequences. Ask Aboriginal communities. Ask fishers. Experts are already talking about a connection with climate change.

We need an urgent, independent public inquiry, using the best ocean and climate scientists to figure out what happened, and how we can to keep it from happening again.

Of course, it's certainly worth mentioning the vast array of potential impacts of climate change. But Ignatieff seems to have rather glaringly omitted a far more important explanation:

Morton's new research has begun to reveal that the lice and disease problem is huge in B.C. Her research indicates that sockeye smolts migrating up Johnstone Strait from the Fraser River have been infected with lethal numbers of infected lice as they swim through the Campbell River area. Little wonder this year's run of Fraser sockeye was one of the poorest on record -- and the problem will continue unless we do something.
...
Morton has now found lethal levels of fish farm sea lice in chinook smolts from the Megin River that flows into Clayoquot Sound, meaning all the United Nations World Heritage 650,000-acre Site salt-waters are a gauntlet of sea-lice death for all species of salmon migrating through the narrow fjords near Tofino.

Morton and others have discovered viral outbreaks from now antibiotic resistant infected lice from the Johnstone Strait all the way up to Bella Bella on the mid-coast.
...
From 2001 to 2003, 12,000,000 farmed Atlantic salmon died in B.C. from the infectious haematopoietic necrosis epidemic. The first problem was more than 15 years ago in B.C. Even Canada's highly regarded -- and DFO's own scientist -- Dick Beamish, has published research showing that when Atlantic salmon are removed wild salmon smolts thrive.

See also Rafe Mair, passim - but particularly his advice that Ignatieff take on the harmful effects of fish farming directly.

So why is it that Ignatieff doesn't apparently see fit to mention sea lice and other issues related to fish farming as factors in the loss of salmon? There are two obvious explanations, but it's hard to see either reflecting well on Ignatieff or his party.

On the one hand, it could be that Ignatieff is planning to label anything even remotely environmental as a matter of climate change in order to justify building a campaign on the Libs' "green energy" theme. But it's no more honest for Ignatieff to try to ram every environmental issue into a climate change-shaped hole than it is for the Cons to deliberately confuse other types of pollution with reducing greenhouse gases.

On the other hand, it could be that the decision not to even mention one of the more glaring recent examples of corporate intrusion on the Canadian environment is based on a desire to avoid stepping on any toes in the fish-farming industry. But again, it's hard to see how the Libs can expect to be trusted if they're trying to patronize British Columbia by paying lip service to the decline in salmon stocks while ultimately planning to put corporate interests first.

Either way, though, Ignatieff's wilful omission looks to speak volumes as to whether he can be trusted to take environmental issues seriously. And neither the cause of combatting climate change nor the broader environmental movement figures to be better off if the Libs continue to distort the facts to support their policy plans rather than actually recognizing the problems which need to be solved.