Salmon Wars documentary on Eastlink Sunday

Timothy Gillespie — Tue, 05 Jan 2016 20:48:54 +0000

SALMON WARS - A Video Documentary Sunday, January 10 @ 9:00pm on Eastlink

Three years ago, in exchange for a $25 million grant and loan package from the Nova Scotia government, Cooke Aquaculture CEO Glenn Cooke told a packed house at the Shelburne Harbour Yacht Club that no later than December 31, 2015, Cooke would have completed a salmon processing plant in Shelburne, bringing with it 350 full-time, well-paying jobs.

Here, on January 5, 2016 we have no plant, no jobs and a grossly polluted harbour.

Cooke took the money and ran, investing in salmon and other fishing operations in Spain, Chile and the USA.

Silver Donald Cameron's Salmon Wars documentary tells some of the story about how Cooke Aquaculture and the Nova Scotia government have colluded to strong arm local communities and put massive, industrial feed-lot salmon pens in pristine harbours throughout the province; like they have in New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Chile.

Cooke's operations foul the bottoms of harbours where they sit and the fish farms are continually wracked with infectious salmon diseases, winter-time "super-chill" die-offs and sea lice infestations.

Salmon Wars tells some of the story
In 2010, strongly encouraged by Nova Scotia's NDP government, international salmon-farming corporations moved to establish massive new salmon feedlots in three pristine bays and harbours, and to expand existing feedlots in other inlets. Galvanized by the threat to wildlife habitat, tourism, salmon runs and the all-important lobster fishery, Nova Scotia's coastal communities furiously opposed the plan, to no avail.

Silver Donald Cameron, then a columnist for the province's leading newspaper, wrote a column (which you can read below) denouncing the expansion -- and got a call from a worried salmon conservationist who wanted to know how opponents of the feedlots could most powerfully publicize the issue.

Cameron was also the host and executive producer of the environmental web site The Green Interview, which provides video interviews with the world's leading environmentalists. With his colleague Chris Beckett, he had the capacity to produce a video documentary for non-traditional distribution via cable, the web, village meetings and the like. He wrote a proposal (see below) and the conservation community set out to raise the production costs.

And the Salmon Wars project was born. The film is was launched on June 13, 2012. For more details, click here.

"An impressive piece of work that brings the issue in all its dimensions into the light of day, where it belongs."

-- Ralph Surette, journalist

See Salmon Wars web here.

See Eastlink promo here

See Silver Donald Cameron on TedTalks:

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