Editor, The Record;
In "More about fish farming" (May 7), incumbent New Westminster MLA Joyce Murray accuses the Record of misleading the reader. Actually, Murray's article provides ample reinforcement for those who have no confidence in Murray's former Water, Land, and Air Protection portfolio.
She refers to "confusing and inconclusive research on this issue". There's nothing at all confusing or inconclusive about the study published in the March 30 edition of Proceedings of the Royal Society B. This was a peer-reviewed study, and it concluded that sea lice production from the farm they studied was four orders of magnitude higher than natural, and that infection of wild juvenile salmon was 73 times higher than ambient levels near the farm and exceeded ambient levels for 30 kilometers of the wild migration route.
As for Murray's claim that her government "put in place one of the most comprehensive aquaculture regulatory regimes in the world", the real story is that Norway and Scotland do not allow open-net cage salmon farms to be located near wild salmon migration routes. And next door Alaska has an even stricter regulatory regime; they don't allow salmon farms at all. Instead, they have taken steps to protect and enhance their wild salmon fishery, and that's what we should be doing here.
Robert Broughton
Green Party Candidate
New Westminster
