When French filmmaker Jérémy Mathieu moved to B.C. five years ago, he says he didn’t really know much about the province or even the country, but with a background in photography and wildlife documentaries for film and TV, he was excited to see the natural landscape.
Mathieu soon began work with Clayoquot Action, a conservation society based in Tofino which is focused on protecting the biocultural diversity of Clayoquot Sound. He also quickly heard about the ways the farmed fish industry was decimating the area’s wild salmon populations, so he decided to take a closer look.
Four years later, the result of his investigations is Salmon Secrets, a 40-minute documentary that launches this week in the Fish Farm Medicine Revival Roadshow, a travelling event that features guest speakers, musical acts and a screening of Mathieu’s film. It arrives in Nanaimo on March 7 at 7 p.m. in the Vancouver Island Conference Centre’s Departure Bay room.
“Honestly, I didn’t know that much about Canada and British Columbia before arriving here. I had that kind of vision of a very green country,” he says.
“You kind of cry twice when you come to Canada, you cry the first time because it’s beautiful — there is way much more wildlife than you can find in Europe. But you cry the second time when you see how the resource extraction industries are powerful, and the damage they’re doing to the environment.”
The film specifically focuses on the fish farming industry in the Clayoquot Sound area — a pristine temperate rainforest off the West Coast of Vancouver Island home to whales, wolves and bears and which is the traditional territory of the Hesquiaht, Ahousaht and Tla-o-qui-aht First Nations.
Combining footage of interviews with biologist Alexandra Morton, Tla’o’qui’aht Elder Joseph Martin, Skookum John of Keltsmaht First Nation, and traditional ‘Na̱mg̱is Chief Ernest Alfred, among others, the film explores a variety of topic including the practice of importing Atlantic salmon eggs from Europe by Norwegian companies.
These eggs have been found to be infected with piscine orthoreovirus, which is highly contagious and strongly associated with the death of Chinook salmon. The crowded conditions of open-net farms also promote the spread of sea lice to wild salmon populations, and Mathieu explores the knock-on effect that the death of these salmon then has on the starving deaths of grey whales and orcas in the area.
Though this is a topic that has been documented for years — perhaps most famously in Morton’s own 2013 documentary Salmon Confidential — the film breaks new ground by zeroing in on the investigation of a new experimental semi-closed containment fish farm operated by Norwegian-owned company Cermaq.
“It’s basically a huge bag that is supposed to protect the interactions between wild salmon and the farmed salmon, and we were very curious about it. So we sent in a team of filmmaker divers to investigate and realized that there is nothing specific that would protect the wild salmon, they were filming the outflow and you still have a lot of water that is pumped out without any filtration,” he says, adding that they collected samples of pellets and feces from the farmed fish.
The reason behind the new farm is not entirely clear, but the team with Clayoquot Action — which funded the film — believes that it might be aimed at growing the farmed fish faster, though the trials have been beset with failures.
“Even if the semi-closed containment system was working perfectly, it’s still an experiment. They’ve never been able to grow a fish to the market size. Basically, you have to put your farmed juveniles in that big bag, and then you have to move them into an open net fish farm, and then the same issues are going to happen with sea lice and [the spread of] viruses,” says Mathieu. “So it doesn’t change that much.”
The film is being released at a critical time because despite the Trudeau government’s commitment to phase out open-net fish farms by 2025, and last year’s ban of 15 fish farms in the Discovery Islands, murky language within documents around the mandated timeline and a lawsuit launched by a Norwegian aquaculture company is causing critics of the farms to be nervous that the government may back away from that promise.
However, Mathieu says there’s reason to hope that salmon may recover from the damage wrought by fish farms, by looking to what happened in the Broughton Archipelago in the last four years, when a series of fish farms were removed through an agreement between the ‘Na̱mg̱is, Kwikwasut’inuxw Haxwa’mis and Mamalilikulla First Nations and the B.C. government.
“As soon as you get rid of those fish farms, you see the wild salmon population bouncing back pretty fast,” says Mathieu. “Some people think that it’s too late, there is not enough wild salmon in the ocean, there is no more fisheries… but that example, that as soon as you remove those fish farms the populations are bouncing back, it is a very hopeful example.”
The Roadshow will also travel to Cowichan on March 6, Nanaimo on March 7, Quadra Island on March 8, and Courtenay on March 9. Tickets are $15.
