It should be pointed out that in 2002 the Alberta government took similar action to remove decision-making powers from local authorities. The Klein government instituted a single provincial committee to approve all "agricultural" proposals in Alberta. Prior to 2002, those decisions were made by local governments. The members of this new Provincial Committee are, of course, appointed by Klein's government. Consequently, residents of a community and their local, democratically-elected governments no longer have any control over what industrial farming ventures might arise in their own communities. Consequently, no longer can ordinary citizens expect to be able to influence their local politicians with the threat of re-election if they do something that is not in the best interests of the community. Local authorities simply have nothing to do with such decisions anymore. Democracy is getting fainter and fainter in Canada and the U.S., largely replaced by the power of corporations (the motive being profit/greed, disguised and repackaged for public consumption as "jobs" (i.e. just say the word "jobs" and everybody backs off)). We should not be fooled: jobs at any cost ultimately means no jobs down the line because the greedy corporations and their owners will have stripped our country of its resources and be happily living in the Cayman Islands. I'm no union sympathizer, but at some point, we have to stop this corporate rapist syndrome. Otherwise we'll all be working for and living under the rule of a handful of global conglomerates, the owners of which have no allegiance to any country, much less region or community. We'll all be serfs, and the world will be a vastly more precarious and compromised place. I saw a t-shirt that says it all --"If you aren't outraged, then you haven't been paying attention." We need to pry our eyes away from sugar-coated TV and our minds and wallets away from trinket-bloated malls, and Pay Attention! Use it or lose it (our country and values, I mean.) Signing off -- a 50-something former corporate yuppie/boomer who's seen the light.

British Columbians should welcome recent warnings about contaminant levels in farmed Atlantic salmon. Any news that might reduce the presence of these farms in our priceless coastal environment is good news for our economy in the long run. Industrial salmon farming, as it is carried out in British Columbia, destroys marine habitats. Forget about the contaminants, forget that these farms regularly allow the escape of an exotic species, forget that most of the profits leave British Columbia and that most of the farm jobs are low paying. When a salmon farm is placed in the midst of wild salmon and orca habitat, it destroys a piece of that habitat. The orca becomes an unwelcome predator, as do the eagle, the osprey and the sea lion. 24 hour lights and noise appear in once quiet coves and inlets. Sea lice proliferate in the crowded net pens. Fish feces and uneaten food rains down onto the bottom. As we damage this habitat, so do we threaten our orca poulations. British Columbians should think for a moment about how much a clean coastal environment and healthy orca populations are worth to our economy. How will our tourism operations fare when orca populations decline as more and more habitat is taken over by salmon farms? The marine salmon farming industry, as it is carried out today, is a threat to BC's economic future. Those precious marine habitats and the wealth they represent to all British Columbians and Canadians are being destroyed for a quick buck. We must not allow this to continue. Paul Rideout Ex-Ministry of Environment Employee (Now we don't have a Ministry of Environment) Nanaimo

The fish feed lot enthusiasts always quote the "Norwegian experience" as "proof" the industry is safe. Often they refer to the "Scottish experience". They go no further than that, they don't say WHAT those experiences are... Norway no longer has an unpolluted or disease free river run of Atlantic salmon and Scotland is fighting to keep at least a few clean rivers. Nature magazine carries an article dated 9 January which tells of a study done worldwide which indicates feed lot fish carry up to ten times as much cancer-causing chemicals as wild fish. These components, organochlorides, include a family of industrial bad news called polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB's). PCB's are linked to everything from cancer to birth defects and are known to cause mental retardation. Much of this risk could be avoided by changing the type of food fed to the feedlot fish. Right now the feed is based on processed "trash fish", everything from herring, pilchard, and mackerel to other common but usually not commercially valuable species. Added to the fish meal is stuff from other sources and I use the word "stuff" only after trying to find a better word. Among other words I considered were "crap" and "shit". Both of which wind up in the feed because all offal goes into the vats, including chicken feathers, beaks, feet and legs, cows eyelids and lips...some investigations have suggested even road kill gets tossed into the stew. Were feed lot fish to be fed a diet of VEGETABLE protein there would be much less chance of prion contamination, much less chance of getting variant Kreutzveld-Jacob from salmon and less chance of damage to the unborn children of women who have been told eating Omega-3 fatty acid rich food is good for them. PCB's from pulp mills are known to be dangerous. In Jackfish Bay, in Canada's Great Lakes, fish and frogs have been rendered sterile because of gross abnormalities in their reproductive organs. Often even the most skilled biologist cannot tell male from female and they are virtually all sterile. Even creatures born elsewhere and transplanted to Jackfish Bay begin to alter, to mutate, and are rendered sterile. PCB's are released into the environment by the manufacture of flame retardents, by paints, by pulp mills, and by burning waste products, such as improperly constructed incinerators. There is a material being developed at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana which can identify and destroy chlorinated phenols. Chlorinated phenols are used as wood preservatives , are used in pesticides, and are byproducts of pulp mills. Photocatalytic oxidation burns up organic molecules . Right now the most commonly used catalyst is titanium dioxide but zinc oxide is being studied. It not only destroys organic molecules but can also sense the presence of the compounds in the first place. Zin cOxide absorbs ultraviolet light and re-emits the energy as green light. Just one part per million of chlorinated aromatic olecules, a few drops in fact, will cause the change; the zinc oxide converts the pollutant. Sunlight provides ultraviolet energy and the scientists are working on ways to add zinc oxide to waters known to be polluted and let Old Sol do the rest of the work. All of that is for the future. For the here and now the news is not very good. We know about the sea lice problem, but are not as aware that 21 species of bottom feeding fish are in serious decline on our coast. Factors other than fish feed lots play a part in the dangerous reduction of fish numbers but those factors are linked to fish feed lots by and through the governmental bodies which are supposed to protect the resource and which have failed utterly on both the provincial and federal levels. Have you gone out cod mooching lately? I'm sixtyfive and I still have shreds and fragments of my memory cells. I remember not so many years ago when we'd go out for cod and spend a lot of time removing dogfish from our hooks. Well, they aren't out there in those numbers any more. Dogfish, for generations considered a pest good for nothing but fertlizing the strawberry patch is now a commercially viable product, given a different name it is used for fish and chips, and for those triangles of mystery-fish in the frozen processed food section of your supermarket. Last summer , on a day of fishing , we got one dogfish. I'd like to say we were environmentally wonderful and turned him loose but we brought him home and, yes, fish and chips. It was a smallish one, so it was a male. Only the older, smarter ones become female. Prawns are like that, too. Start off male, become female. Almost magical, certainly miraculous, and our society treats them so cavalierly, so contemptuously. To all those nice people who voted for Campbell and his Liberal-SocialCredit-Reform coalition I say this: wake up, please. ALL levels of protection for resources, wildlife and the most vulnerable of people have been slashed, even obliterated. Social programmes are endangered. And don't whine that you didn't know they'd do this, what in hell did you THINK all the huffin and puffin promises were about, anyway? And our media? Oh such an uproar when Gordon Flip Wilson was involved with Judy Tyabji. HEVVINS, MAUDIE! But nothing said about Gordon Campbells secretary/administrative assistant being pregnant, nothing said about Mrs. Campbells possible divorce, nothing said at all... who was the "unidentified woman" with Gordo on his (hic) trip to Hawaii where he got his picture taken by the police and then was thrown in the drunk tank? not even word one. and too few words about the raping of the entire coast, on land, sea, and in the air. Cleanliness interferes with the profit margin so damn the environment.

I'm sympathetic to the government on this one. The principle of NIMBY applies to fish farms; nobody wants one in their backyard (or foreshore). But fish farming has the potential to be an important part of BC's economy, and can reduce fishing pressure on wild stocks. So long as farms start feeding their fish more healthy vegetable-derived protein rather than fishmeal, I'm not opposed to them. Leave the wild fish for the seals, orcas and sportfishers.

This is in reply to Anne Cameron. Is this a rumour about his Secretary? Is Gordon Campbell involved with someone else, and was this the same person on his drunk tank trip? This seems a story worth investigating. It would certainly make for more ethically responsible and accountable government.

A note from your Tyee editor: Please do not include unsubstantiated rumours in comments, particularly those about personal lives. It lowers the tone and muddies the waters.

I am intrigued to find out what is fed to Salmon at a fish farm? Is this feed safe? Is there a guarantee that Salmon will not be infected with a Transmissible Spongioform Encephalopathy. Are the Neurotoxins, such as SLICE, passed onto humans via the food chain? What about PCB's? My understanding is that they accumulate in in the human body an take a long time to be excreted. Who has the information?

Fish feed lots use commercially produced pellets which contain herring meal as well as rendered "commercially non viable" species like mackerel, sardines, and other fish not usually eaten by humans. The fish feed also contains "animal by-product" from slaughterhouses, which includes everything swept up off the floor, and also includes the brain and neurological tissue of other species; sheep, pigs, cows, lambs...whatever... Because of mad cow disease and variant Kreuzveld-Jacob diseases the brain and spinal cord can no longer be processed into feed destined for farm animals:beef, pork, mutton..but there is no evidence it has been removed from poultry feed or from fish feed. Prions cannot be destroyed at any temperature, they survive freezing, even burying and composting. And PCB levels in feed lot salmon around the world have been found to be ten times as high as is found in wild fish. You might want to check "Nature" magazine, there are a number of articles about feed lot questions. And the Suzuki Foundation has good research material. Then there's Greenpeace and Save Georgia Strait and...the information is out there. Some years ago the Wildwood Ratepayers were involved in an effort to stop the Powell River pulp mill from dumping PCB laden toxic waste in a pit near an elementary school. A man who called himself "Gittens" sent a letter saying a study had been done. He included maps and lists and said a water-flow study had shown that no leachate from this toxic dump would go anywhere near the school. It was a very impressive piece of work, red lines here and topographical measuremenst there and rah rah rah and three bags full. The problem was no study had ever been done! The whole thing was a total damn lie! And I jumped onto my charger and prepared to tilt the windmill, I was sure we "had'em" and could pin their hides to the wall and... there's no law against it. A corporation can tell the most godawful bloody lies and there is nothing you can do about it. They can invent statistics and so what... The evidence is there. I think fish FARMING could work but the current feed lot system is just bad news on all fronts. I'm not too interested in getting into a big fight with the spokespeople of the feedlot industry because they get paid to enter those fights and nobody pays me diddly. My interest is in keeping this coast habitable for my grandchildren. I don't want them living in a toxic stew, I don't want their children walking on beaches which are unsafe because of PCB contamination. We all LIVE here. We could work together and find agreeable solutions but only if the get rich quick b.s. comes to a stop. And the lies have to stop. What is fed to salmon at a fish feedlot? Lips, assholes,eyelids,gums,spinal cords, brains, feathers so the feed sinks more slowly, poop because it's high in nitrogen...cows and other critters which died of disease or injury before they could be slaughtered for human food..road kill...and yes, Transmissable Spongioform Encephalopathy crosses the species barrier into fish. Prions pass from animal to fish to humans. The research is out there.

Mindboggling. PCBs everywhere. Fluorescent lights with PCBs piled up on the floor of the Peace Arch hospital Berkeley Pavillion. No leakage, but still a disaster waiting to happen. No environmental officer anywhere to be seen. Lead, asbestos oh well who cares, for the health of other humans and other species. Campbell is making sure that the province becomes a resources extration centre. Take and take and take. From nature, from the taxpayer, from the middle class that is preoccupied with the next tone of nail polish to be of any use to itself and others. The children growing parentless, the youth bored to death and perhaps mad cow is already obliterating the community memory. Perhaps lack of social responsibility is the first sign of mad cow in the final stages of the disease. Perhaps Campbell is suffering of Transmissable Spongioform brain and heart illness. Otherwise why would he DUI?

All of this has happened because there is no real public participation in politics at any level. The public discourse and public place have been hijacked by the so called "professional activists" and there is no resources available to make possible for people to meet and discuss the issues. Before one could count on the churches (like United Church, Menonites or the Unitarians), to have a space for social activism. Now a days there is activism of the right and of teh left. The "well known" in the social justice circles are the only ones that has access. The right and the left has these "entitlement feeling". This "who are you?" behaviour. Coupled with it there is a balkanization of the community, divided in ethnic groups, that are closed to the outsider. There is a partition even in the most "social justice" inclined group. The society at large is divided not in haves and have nots, but also in ethnic groups as well. There is no sense of co-operation, sharing, caring and "let's take responsibility for our community together" behaviour and action. In this scenario, the government (a shell for the designs of corporations, mafias, academia and moneyed people)will sell our souls without us knowing. We have no knowledge of our constitutions, our charter of right is very weak and lawyers, unions and other naturally inclined organizations towards the welfare of the citizens, are making a lot of noise and very little movement. Poverty pimps every where one looks. We have a virtual reality of structures and mouth pieces that says what you want to hear, but doesn't act on the pratical side of the matter. We needed a general strike bbbbaaaaadddllllyyyy in the beggining of this mofu's madate. Now it is too late. We need to stop the hemorrage of our social net, our paid for institutions (hydro, legal aid, welfare, universities, colleges)are getting to be prepared for the GATS and there is noting we can do about. We don't need a general strike, because it will be a pretending scenario: "Hi can I speak with the premier? Hi! Sir here is the union president of the blah, blah, union. I am setting in motion the "general strike scenario", according to our plans. The media personalities are ready to play their role and the public's reaction is always the same. So we go through the motions and we all keep the show going without anyone loosing a night sleep or money. The noises will come from the right quarters. Everyone is on the same page and the ball will be roling. Even the "radical anarchists are under control". Yah, yah, we promised a some of them jobs and resources to run their organizations. The cops are in the mechanics of the "general strike operation". Once the show is over, we push the resignation phase and all is OK. Nothing changed, besides of more newspaper being sold". Ok. Sir. thank you, my pleasure. I don't want to loose my pension and other benefits. Bye sir!" The whole system is rotten. I heard that PM had probably paid Chretien handsomely in order to ahve him stepping down. Now you look at the situation, how in a democracy, a man that was not elected PM is appointed to the post. Another Bush scenario in Canada. Dictatorial at the provincial and federal level. Stronach bought the opposition. Now she will be crowned. Meanwhile we are talking about one of the various bills that these alcoholic premier has set up to destroy our communites. This is a war against the people. This is a war against the environment. This is a war against future generations. Where are all these "progressive organizations"? They are making sure that their donation base keep bringing the dough from foundations, corporation donors and wealth benefactors. There is no room for honesty left. BC - wants add: Honest people need not apply. Sad, but a fact!

It seems to me that the general public do not understand the real issues behind fish farming. Jonathan Colville's comments illustrate that (if it was that simple, Jonathan, we'd all be in favour of it.) It's not just about what is fed to the Atlantic salmon. It's about the effect on the wild Pacific salmon stocks > the fact that Atlantic salmon that get loose destroy Pacific salmon asn they are not a west coast species; it's about the effect of sea lice on young salmon; it's about the effect on resident orcas whose only food source is Pacific salmon; it's about pollution in the ocean and its shores. It's about a federal government that does very little to protect and improve the west coast's Pacific salmon stocks; it's about the loss of tourism dollars for relevant businesses in those areas. It's about the aboriginal fishers native traditions being lost; (in some areas this has occurred already, prior to the introduction of Atlantic salmon fish farms, due to the effects of logging and resultant pollution.) Obviously, I could go on forever on this topic... FACT: I don't want to eat Atlantic salmonn not only because Pacific salmon is superior, but because it may be the final nail in the coffin of Pacific wild salmon. And I believe that most British Columbians would feel the same if they could be properly informed and convinced of the facts.

i presume this is not the first time this has happened. How outrageous it is!!