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Salmon Confidential is a new film on the government cover up of what is killing BC’s wild salmon. When biologist Alexandra Morton discovers BC’s wild salmon are testing positive for dangerous European salmon viruses associated with salmon farming worldwide, a chain of events is set off by government to suppress the findings. Tracking viruses, Morton moves from courtrooms, into British Columbia’s most remote rivers, Vancouver grocery stores and sushi restaurants. The film documents Morton’s journey as she attempts to overcome government and industry roadblocks thrown in her path and works to bring critical information to the public in time to save BC’s wild salmon.
The film provides surprising insight into the inner workings of government agencies, as well as rare footage of the bureaucrats tasked with managing our fish and the safety of our food supply.
http://www.salmonconfidential.ca/
<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/61301410?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0&color=ffffff" width="400" height="300" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe>
What you can do:
http://www.salmonconfidential.ca/what-you-can-do/
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This is truly outrageous : the government and agencies such as the DFO and CFIA are robbing British Columbians, Canadians and not to mention, the entire ecosystem that depends on wild salmon for its very lives, of a natural resource that belongs to them, to us. While they are supposed to be acting based on our best interests, they are also being required to boost and promote the very industry that threatens these natural resource - and in some cases, public health.
There are so many ways our system, our government have shown us it is broken, this is one of the most reprehensible cases IMO. Both DFO and CFIA, whose mandates require them to act with our interests in mind, are evidently also made to prioritize business, markets and trade over health and wildlife. It's so blatant and self serving, its disgusting. I cannot interpret it as anything but absolute contempt and disregard for the public. There are quite a few separate but related issues brought up in the documentary: our food supply, food safety, government transparency and accountability, democracy, government priorities and allegiance, wildlife and ecosystem protection and management, muzzling of scientists - to name only a few.
Anyway, recently a movie documenting all of this and making it much easier than having to pore through all the blog entries, has been posted online. I just finished watching it and it's unbelievable. People really need to watch it and become informed about this. So I'm posting it here and I urge you to watch it and please share it. This is crazy. Seriously. Watch. It.
This woman, Alexandra Morton, is amazing and we truly owe a lot to her, for her effortless, passionate, unrelenting battle for more than a decade. She is doing what the BC and Canadian governments should be doing for us. I am really in awe of her. She's done all the leg work, the hard part and all she needs now is for everyone to get behind her and demand that our government do what's best for people, for wild salmon and for the future of BC. They need to be told whose interests they are expected to look after, which are not foreign owned corporations, big business or industry. This seems to be the new standard for everything these days but it has to stop. Government don't serve corporations and profits do not come before people, wildlife and our environment. At this point, if we do not stop them they will easily sell off and destroy everything that can be sold to the highest bidder.
Enough.
This is her blog for anyone interested in reading about it in more details. It's really interesting and it's loaded with info. There is also a link to a petition:
http://alexandramorton.typepad.com/
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/0fDaDumu9vM" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/1BcRBwCh6BA?list=UUOXDWN7hPgfBtI_Y4oUE6_g" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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Just an aside..
DFO (Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada) is the very same agency that was directly responsible for dropping the ball and sitting by, doing nothing as cod stocks completely collapsed on the east coast. That was disastrous and still has not recovered - and won't for quite some time, if ever. It was also on their watch that herring was completely overfished and mismanaged. They do not deserve to be trusted and allowed to do nothing again as wild salmon becomes the next victim - taking with it an entire ecosystem that depends on the flagship species in BC.
CFIA (Canadian Food Inspection Agency) is the agency responsible for the safety of our food supply and they have been under fire already more than once in recent years. For example, after the listerosis outbreak that killed 22 people in, they not only admitted to having insufficient numbers of inspectors, in fact not even knowing how many they had. As a result of a report after that crisis (and also from a report by the WSPA, through an FOI request for which only a portion of the documents were provided by the CFIA), it was found that in many cases, the shortage of inspectors meant that administrative staff without appropriate experience as inspectors were put in charge of those duties and sent to processing plants. Inspectors were assigned too many plants that also required them to spend time travelling to and from in order to perform their duties. This resulted in them not being physically present at times they were expected to be overlooking operations and often lead to them coming in after the fact and having only a short time to spend before they needed to move on to the next location. Many other issues concerning the CFIA were cited in the report, most of which have remained unaddressed to this day.
CFIA inspectors remain understaffed. In addition, budget cuts by the Conservative government of Canada have resulted in a reversal and an overall relaxing of laws, essentially handing over responsibility to the plants to monitor and 'investigate' themselves! This obviously puts our health at risk. More recently, during another outbreak that was traced back to XL Foods, which was in such bad shape and found to be guilty of numerous infractions. Hygiene and safety were compromised and several of the plants own employees came forward to blow the whistle, if I remember correctly. CFIA dropped the ball there too.
If that's not reassuring, consider the memo that was discovered:
Yum yum.
Clearly, the health of Canadian consumers is not very high on the CFIA's list of priorities.
Salmon Confidential is a new film on the government cover up of what is killing BC’s wild salmon. When biologist Alexandra Morton discovers BC’s wild salmon are testing positive for dangerous European salmon viruses associated with salmon farming worldwide, a chain of events is set off by government to suppress the findings. Tracking viruses, Morton moves from courtrooms, into British Columbia’s most remote rivers, Vancouver grocery stores and sushi restaurants. The film documents Morton’s journey as she attempts to overcome government and industry roadblocks thrown in her path and works to bring critical information to the public in time to save BC’s wild salmon.
The film provides surprising insight into the inner workings of government agencies, as well as rare footage of the bureaucrats tasked with managing our fish and the safety of our food supply.
http://www.salmonconfidential.ca/
<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/61301410?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0&color=ffffff" width="400" height="300" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe>
What you can do:
http://www.salmonconfidential.ca/what-you-can-do/
---------
This is truly outrageous : the government and agencies such as the DFO and CFIA are robbing British Columbians, Canadians and not to mention, the entire ecosystem that depends on wild salmon for its very lives, of a natural resource that belongs to them, to us. While they are supposed to be acting based on our best interests, they are also being required to boost and promote the very industry that threatens these natural resource - and in some cases, public health.
There are so many ways our system, our government have shown us it is broken, this is one of the most reprehensible cases IMO. Both DFO and CFIA, whose mandates require them to act with our interests in mind, are evidently also made to prioritize business, markets and trade over health and wildlife. It's so blatant and self serving, its disgusting. I cannot interpret it as anything but absolute contempt and disregard for the public. There are quite a few separate but related issues brought up in the documentary: our food supply, food safety, government transparency and accountability, democracy, government priorities and allegiance, wildlife and ecosystem protection and management, muzzling of scientists - to name only a few.
Anyway, recently a movie documenting all of this and making it much easier than having to pore through all the blog entries, has been posted online. I just finished watching it and it's unbelievable. People really need to watch it and become informed about this. So I'm posting it here and I urge you to watch it and please share it. This is crazy. Seriously. Watch. It.
This woman, Alexandra Morton, is amazing and we truly owe a lot to her, for her effortless, passionate, unrelenting battle for more than a decade. She is doing what the BC and Canadian governments should be doing for us. I am really in awe of her. She's done all the leg work, the hard part and all she needs now is for everyone to get behind her and demand that our government do what's best for people, for wild salmon and for the future of BC. They need to be told whose interests they are expected to look after, which are not foreign owned corporations, big business or industry. This seems to be the new standard for everything these days but it has to stop. Government don't serve corporations and profits do not come before people, wildlife and our environment. At this point, if we do not stop them they will easily sell off and destroy everything that can be sold to the highest bidder.
Enough.
This is her blog for anyone interested in reading about it in more details. It's really interesting and it's loaded with info. There is also a link to a petition:
http://alexandramorton.typepad.com/
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/0fDaDumu9vM" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/1BcRBwCh6BA?list=UUOXDWN7hPgfBtI_Y4oUE6_g" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
---------
Just an aside..
DFO (Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada) is the very same agency that was directly responsible for dropping the ball and sitting by, doing nothing as cod stocks completely collapsed on the east coast. That was disastrous and still has not recovered - and won't for quite some time, if ever. It was also on their watch that herring was completely overfished and mismanaged. They do not deserve to be trusted and allowed to do nothing again as wild salmon becomes the next victim - taking with it an entire ecosystem that depends on the flagship species in BC.
CFIA (Canadian Food Inspection Agency) is the agency responsible for the safety of our food supply and they have been under fire already more than once in recent years. For example, after the listerosis outbreak that killed 22 people in, they not only admitted to having insufficient numbers of inspectors, in fact not even knowing how many they had. As a result of a report after that crisis (and also from a report by the WSPA, through an FOI request for which only a portion of the documents were provided by the CFIA), it was found that in many cases, the shortage of inspectors meant that administrative staff without appropriate experience as inspectors were put in charge of those duties and sent to processing plants. Inspectors were assigned too many plants that also required them to spend time travelling to and from in order to perform their duties. This resulted in them not being physically present at times they were expected to be overlooking operations and often lead to them coming in after the fact and having only a short time to spend before they needed to move on to the next location. Many other issues concerning the CFIA were cited in the report, most of which have remained unaddressed to this day.
CFIA inspectors remain understaffed. In addition, budget cuts by the Conservative government of Canada have resulted in a reversal and an overall relaxing of laws, essentially handing over responsibility to the plants to monitor and 'investigate' themselves! This obviously puts our health at risk. More recently, during another outbreak that was traced back to XL Foods, which was in such bad shape and found to be guilty of numerous infractions. Hygiene and safety were compromised and several of the plants own employees came forward to blow the whistle, if I remember correctly. CFIA dropped the ball there too.
If that's not reassuring, consider the memo that was discovered:
Yum yum.
Clearly, the health of Canadian consumers is not very high on the CFIA's list of priorities.
