New research connects disease to the fish farms and the threat to wild salmon. Some of that research was only possible because First Nations have access to Atlantic salmon on the fish farms in the Discovery Islands. There are now more than two dozen closed salmon farms.Alex Morton reports on the difference that can be seen in wild salmon. Who wins this epic fight?Fisheries and Oceans managers working with the fish farm industry? Or First Nations and a tenacious whale scientist?

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The Fisheries and Oceans minister, following a recommendation from the Cohen Commission, orders fish farms in the Discovery Islands to close. By 2023, they will be gone. The industry — Mowi and Cermaq go to court to challenge the decision. The court rules in their favour. But it isn’t a done deal — it just means the minister has to make some changes before making the order. Meanwhile, First Nations are also moving to get rid of fish farms on their territories.

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The Sea Shepherd research vessel got a rude welcome when it arrived in Victoria, B.C., for its third year of working with Alex Morton. What had been a quick, routine customs event took a menacing turn. Its captain was questioned for six hours, then ordered to stay on board through the weekend until Canada Border Services could hold a hearing. And Alex and the Sea Shepherd were followed by boats with blacked-out windows carrying people with long lens cameras. First Nations made a historic agreement with the B.C. government that gave them the power to say no to fish farms.

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Alex and Hereditary Chief George Quocksister Jr. used GoPro cameras and divers to record what was happening underneath the fish farms. When the footage was shown to First Nations communities, there was shock and sadness, then anger. Fish with holes in their bodies, chunks missing from their faces, barely moving and close to death. A group of young First Nations people felt the pull to defend the wild salmon and they occupied one fish farm, then two, then three. They stayed 270 days before Marine Harvest got an injunction to force them to leave.

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The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society offers to send a research ship to B.C. to help Alex Morton with her studies. At first, she rejects the offer as too provocative. Sea Shepherd is a contentious environmental organization. But Alex needs to get close to the salmon farms, so she changes her mind. Alex planned to visit all the fish farms off the east coast of Vancouver Island and collect water samples to test for diseases coming out of the farms.  And then she got the idea to ask some First Nations people to join her. That was a game-changer.

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As her day to testify at the Cohen Commission arrived, Alex Morton was full of adrenaline. She could tell people what she had been seeing with the salmon for the past two decades. And she would reveal what she had found in the 500,000 pages of government documents submitted to the inquiry. Documents that had only been released to inquiry witnesses, and would go back under lock and key the moment the inquiry was over. It should have been a perfect Hollywood moment — like key scenes from Erin Brockovich, Dark Waters or even The Verdict. And when Alex made key documents public, they revealed how the health of wild salmon had been ignored by Fisheries and Oceans for decades.

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The salmon had been returning to the Fraser River for hundreds of years. In 2009, they didn’t. Or barely did. Nine million sockeye salmon were missing. Stephen Harper, prime minister at the time, was not a man known for promoting science, but the catastrophic loss forced him to call an inquiry. For the first time, there would be money, time and people testifying under oath about events leading to the disappearance of the wild salmon.

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When Alex left the orcas behind to study sea lice, she knew she couldn’t be everywhere, so she started to gather an army of sea lice helpers — citizen scientists from all over northern Vancouver Island willing to collect smolts and count sea lice for her research. Jody Erickson and Farlyn Campbell started as teenagers and were devastated to see baby fish with dozens of sea lice eating through their bodies.

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If you take a boat along the coast of northern British Columbia, you’ll see towering deciduous trees and snow-capped peaks, small islands, big islands and scattered throughout it all … fish farms. Dozens of them. Alexandra Morton remembers their arrival — remembers the Gold Rush when anyone who wanted a fish farm license got one. And she remembers how the government tricked coastal people into pointing out the best wild salmon habitat.

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Chris Bennett runs Blackfish Lodge, 300 kilometres north of Vancouver where Canada’s West Coast crumbles into the Pacific Ocean. His guests are from all over the world. They come to see B.C.’s wildlife, but especially the salmon. Chris was out with a group of tourists when he looked into the water alongside his boat and noticed young salmon — called smolts — acting strangely. He drove down the coast with a few smolts in a bucket to show to Alexandra Morton, a neighbour who studied orcas. It was the first clue in a mystery of disappearing salmon, and Alex, an unlikely detective, stepped up.

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