Tomorrow we will celebrate Canada’s 142nd birthday and congratulate ourselves on living in a country that is one of the best, if not the best, in the world.

Canada isn’t without problems. As it gets older it seems to get more of them (i.e. the mud that is attaching itself to our once proud Royal Canadian Mounted Police) but we continue to weather our woes, including the current recession, without too much complaining.

Tomorrow is the day to wave our flag. It wouldn’t do to be too ostentatious, but what about a bit of quiet and tasteful rah-rahing.

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Why is the Canadian media so fascinated by the death of Michael Jackson? He was a celebrity, not a hero. The media frenzy over his death overshadowed other news. Like the report from the United Nations saying B.C. is a world leader in the export of party drugs such as Ecstasy and methamphetamine “uppers.”

Another report said the economic hard times are hitting B.C. as hard as or harder than other provinces.

I guess we’d rather hear about Michael.

One item that didn’t even rate the back pages was the decision by the Strathcona Regional District rural directors to open the door for a huge fish farm to be located where one third of all Canada’s Pacific juvenile salmon pass through Johnstone Strait on their voyage back to the Fraser River and eastern Vancouver.

Why is this of interest to the Cariboo?

Well, native salmon stock is in decline, and it is well documented that fish farms are detrimental to them. While the well-being of salmon may not directly affect our pockets books here, they play a huge role in the ecosystem that keeps us and our environment alive and healthy.

Besides, wild salmon are valuable and tasty to eat.

The fate of salmon is close to my heart because I was raised in a coastal community that depended on them. Our world revolved around them. It was the fleet of seine boats coming in on the tide on a Friday, the trollers and the gillnetters who came in every night. It was the old men from Poverty Point (now the posh April Point resort) out in their row boats, bucking the tide, towing stout fishing lines.

It was the American movie stars with their expensive gear seeking tyees. (The row boat fishermen caught their share of big ones too).It was my mother asking Dad if he would go out and catch a salmon for supper. He would and did. It was the rows of jars of “canned” salmon on shelves in our cellar. It was watching the hordes of salmon spawning in Bear River one year when my dad was the fish warden there.

They were so thick you could have walked across them. It was the shock of fishing at Campbell River a few years back and catching a couple of measly salmon and seeing no one at the resort doing much better.

The latest in the salmon saga is that after 21 years of “trying to bring reason” to the BC fish farming industry, Alexandra Morton is turning the fight over to British Columbians.

“My community  has been lost, ” she wrote last week. “The science is done. The courts ruled the way it has been  regulated is unconstitutional. The people of the B.C. coast are aware of the  issue now. Wild salmon are failing and sea lice, diseases and massive schools of salmon predators parked in pens every few kilometres along their migration routes are clearly not helping. Anyone who looks can see that.

And yet every level of government from federal to regional favours farm salmon over wild salmon. Since this is a democracy I have to assume at this point that B.C has made its choice.

“There are many places on this coast that government could play with this risky business, so when I see one of the biggest farm applications ever being handed B.C.’s primary wild salmon artery by the most local, on the ground level of government, I have to think “this  is OK with B.C. This is what B.C. wants.

“No matter how thin the veneer of democracy, you did vote for them, you had the choice and you picked the people who are giving our coast to the Norwegian farmers.”

The latter see wild salmon as competition, she says.

Morton made one comment that relates to all environmental/conservation issues.

“Humanity is drunk on trinkets and coins and can no longer focus on or interpret the sheer power, generosity and our dependence on the living world that gave birth to us. Is this a fatal code embedded in our DNA to limit us, an auto kill switch, to allow the rest of life on earth a chance against us? Nature does have nasty ways of dealing with out of control species, and we must be top of her list right now.”

Ms. Morton says if British Columbians take a stand in favour of wild salmon and take the fight to Parliament Hill, she will be there. Until then, she says, it’s up to us.  

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For the record. When Ramsey Hart from Mining Watch Canada was here earlier this year, he did not meet with the Cariboo Chilcotin Conservation Society. He met with the Council of Canadians at their request. Different bunch. I expect he would have met with others had he been asked.

Where the CCCS came in is that as chair of that group, I spread the word to the local conservation/environmental community about a May 21 meeting with Roderick Bell-Irving, manager of environmental projects for Taseko.