There are many fish in the sea, but none really compares with salmon — an iconic coastal species, woven into the human, ecological and cultural fabric of its place of birth, and dramatic death, here on Canada’s West Coast.

It’s the latter part of the story, the life cycle and migration of this big, silvery fish, that really sets salmon apart from all others.

We love the epic tale of the wild salmon, its struggle to navigate back to its home stream to spawn after a life in the open ocean, and then its return to the earth, literally sharing its body with the land, the eagles and bears, even the rainforest trees that depend on its decaying flesh to supplement the soil.

But people love to eat salmon too, and that, among other realities of the modern world, has brought our favourite fish to the brink. So, what should a responsible diner do? It’s not an easy question to answer, but many people have informed opinions when it comes to salmon.

Champions for sustainable salmon
Salmon is so essential to the psyche of all British Columbians that it’s not surprising that there are many non-profit organizations and volunteers working to champion wild salmon populations and their threatened habitats, along with the fishing families and Indigenous communities that depend on this local resource.

According to a recent survey, British Columbians said wild salmon was their top environmental issue, and it’s top of mind for groups ranging from Ocean Wise and Slow Fish Canada to the T. Buck Suzuki Environmental Foundation, the Watershed Watch Salmon Society and the First Nation Wild Salmon Alliance. Protection and rehabilitation of Pacific salmon populations and their habitats, plus support for small-scale fishers, fishing licensing and quotas, are all part of the work being done by those advocating for wild salmon.

Diving deeper into the topic by following these groups’ websites and publications is a great way to stay on top of this complex topic.

Restauranteur Brooke Fader of Wild Mountain Food & Drink in Sooke was one of the founding members of Slow Fish Canada, a network of fishers, chefs and fish mongers all committed to supporting small scale local fishers and Canadian “seafood sovereignty,” that is, keeping Canadian fish in Canada and available to us all.

“It’s not that complex, I just want people fishing,” Fader says.

At Wild Mountain, chef and co-owner Oliver Kienast celebrates local salmon in season. Maybe it’s a starter bite of house-cured salmon in a cucumber cup, or wild coho roe, served on a house- made bull kelp cracker with sunflower seed and winged kelp spread. After all, salmon is just one of the local specialties on Wild Mountain’s ever-changing, dynamic menu, one that’s all about supporting local farmers and fishers.

“We treat salmon as a delicacy and get it in when we can from local fishers,” Fader says. “There are many different species and all are valuable for different reasons. Salmon deserves more respect.”

Beyond climate change, environmental degradation and habitat loss, one of the big pressures on the B.C. fishing industry relates to who owns and controls fishing licences and quota, the total amount of the total allowable catch (TAC) any boat can bring in.

Though only working fishers can hold licences and quota in Eastern Canada, in B.C., these licences are sold as a commodity, and are now largely owned by speculative investors, processors, and other big corporate interests. That means B.C. fishers must lease expensive licences from owners, often leaving harvesters in a tenuous and unprofitable position.

Small commercial and First Nations fishers in B.C. have been lobbying the federal government for years, asking for changes to the Fisheries Act that would return licensing and quota to active harvesters, and Sonia Strobel is a vocal advocate.

Strobel’s fishing family is behind Skipper Otto, the Community Supported Fishery (CSF) based in Vancouver. It’s a unique ocean-to-table system, similar to a CSA veggie box, that connects consumers directly with fishermen, giving them a guaranteed customer base and fair price for the fish they catch.

It’s helped approximately 45 fishing families stay afloat, but also plunged Strobel into the political, social and cultural side of fishing, working with those in the industry — including fishers, First Nations, scientists and NGOs — to support community- based seafood systems.

“We’re fighting hard to save what’s left of the independent fleet,” says Strobel, who just made a presentation to the standing committee considering changes to the Fisheries Act in Ottawa.

“When you prioritize protecting the way of life of the people who live and work on the water in our fisheries, you’re necessarily supporting the objectives of the act, which is protecting fish and fish habitat, advancing reconciliation with Indigenous peoples and ensuring the long-term sustainability of marine resources,” she told the federal government committee.

“If the vast majority of our licences and quotas are owned by large export-oriented companies or foreign entities, we’ve given up our resource even before we’ve given Canadians the opportunity to nourish themselves with fish,” she said, adding, the current licensing situation amounts to a “modern feudal system” in which fishers fish for licence holders, for a pre-determined fee, and cannot sell their catch locally. After paying for their vessels, gear and crew, some fishers can barely pay themselves.

It’s why much of the wild salmon found in our supermarkets comes from Alaska, and why B.C. wild salmon is disappearing from menus.

“We export around 90 per cent of the seafood we catch,” Strobel says. “About 80 per cent of what we eat in Canada is imported seafood, and we know it comes from fisheries that are not as well managed as ours, fisheries where the water isn’t as clean and where we don’t have labour laws to protect workers. Canadian consumers should be benefitting and nourishing their bodies from the bounty of our oceans.”

Strobel acknowledges that some salmon populations are precarious, but says fishermen are in the best position to help them rebound. She points to the grassroots co-operation among commercial, Indigenous and sports fishers in Port Alberni as an example of how local communities can work together to save salmon for all.

“Real social change can happen when people come together with a shared objective,” she says.

Keeping it wild
It was once the simple mantra of sustainable fisheries experts and chefs to “eat wild, to save wild” salmon, while avoiding the farmed competition. That’s still the case, but it’s complicated.

Those giant net-cage salmon farms — crowded, floating livestock pens in our coastal waters — feed our insatiable demand for cheap, accessible salmon, but do nothing for the clean environment wild salmon need to survive and thrive.

The federal government has promised to remove open-net salmon farms from the most critical B.C. waters — where wild salmon smolts migrate into the open ocean and are most susceptible to the diseases and pathogens around fish farms — but the dead- line was recently pushed from 2025 to 2029. Even as Indigenous leaders, commercial fishers, scientists and NGOs joined together in a rare show of solidarity on this issue, the government reneged. Salmon farms are big business, and the jobs they bring, are now embedded into the economy of some coastal communities, and closing them has become a political nightmare.

So the B.C. salmon farms, along with the risks they pose to wild salmon populations and marine ecosystems, remain. Canada’s production of farmed salmon is dropping, but it remains one of the world’s leading producers of Atlantic salmon (always farmed) and is ubiquitous in supermarkets and on menus, with the vast majority of salmon served in sushi bars and used for smoked salmon coming from fish farms.

And even if those farms aren’t in Canada — farmed salmon comes to us from Chile, Norway and Iceland, too — farmed salmon is problematic on other levels. Not only does cheap farmed salmon depress prices for wild fish, salmon are carnivores and feeding farmed salmon is inefficient. It takes 1.5 pounds of fish food to produce 1 pound of farmed salmon, with much of that food made from smaller fish, scooped up in other parts of the world where poorer human populations depend on it for sustenance.

There’s also the issue of higher levels of PCBs and dioxins, along with pesticides and other chemicals used to fight sea lice and other diseases in farmed fish. Even many who are willing to reap the revenue of farming salmon won’t eat it themselves.

Farmed salmon may be a cheaper choice, but there are many hidden costs, and wild salmon advocates say eating wild salmon, when it’s available, is the smart, sustainable choice to support the fishing communities and the fish.

Buying sustainable salmon
It used to be a fairly solid option to choose seafood that got the green light from certification programs such as Canada’s Ocean Wise or the U.S.-based MSC (Marine Stewardship Council).

But what were once clear waters are increasingly murky, with many suggesting that pay-for-play, green washing and pure politics are getting in the way when it comes to the complex definition of what constitutes sustainable seafood.

Salmon was caught in the crosshairs in 2024 when several B.C. conservation groups and scientists challenged MSC’s “sustainable” certification of Alaskan salmon. Raincoast Conservation Foundation, Watershed Watch Salmon Society and SkeenaWild Conservation Trust launched a formal complaint to MSC in April, claiming that fishers in southeast Alaska’s District 104 intercept millions of salmon before they can reach their home rivers in B.C., Washington and Oregon, impacting local fishers and the coastal environment, and depleting the food source for endangered southern resident killer whales.

While an independent adjudicator, appointed by MSC, dismissed that complaint, the submission was convincing enough to lead Ocean Wise to remove salmon from the southeast Alaska fishery from its eco-certification program.

That puts what’s deemed “sustainable salmon” into a grey area at best, leaving consumers and chefs even more confused about what to serve, even removing B.C. salmon from their menus.

But chef Robert Clark, one of the original founders of the Ocean Wise program, says not serving wild B.C. salmon is the wrong approach and only hastens the demise of the small and Indigenous fishing fleet, those best positioned to fish in a low-impact, sustainable manner.

Clark reminds me that when a specific wild salmon fishery is opened to commercial fishing in B.C., it is absolutely sustainable, as scientists have determined that the salmon population there has returned in sufficient numbers to sustain its population.

Buying wild B.C. salmon helps the local fish, he says, because it keeps the small, independent fishers in business, and ensures that wild fish maintain their value in a world where industrial fishing and cheap farmed fish dominate.

“If you don’t support B.C. salmon, you’re degrading the value,” he says. “Large multi-nationals buy up the fish and all of the money goes offshore.”

The best approach for chefs and consumers is to look for local salmon that’s fresh in season or frozen at sea and to be flexible about the species you buy.

“We don’t depend on one river or one species and, from a hospitality point of view, that’s a bonus,” says Clark, who is now working with Organic Ocean, a Vancouver wholesaler of B.C. salmon and other wild, sustainable seafood.

This season, Organic Ocean offered wild salmon from various B.C. fisheries, including Haida Gwaii chinook and pink salmon, ocean run sockeye and Johnstone Strait wild keta (aka chum) salmon.

Clark also connected with Indigenous fishers to bring Gitanyow Fisheries sockeye salmon, harvested in northwestern B.C., to discerning chefs. It’s fished and handled in a traditional way, the Nass River salmon scooped up in dip nets and fish wheels, then bled in holding pools, producing a very high-quality product and economic value for the community.

Other independent fish stores specializing in salmon caught by smaller harvesters in local B.C. waters include Finest at Sea in Victoria, with its own fishing boats, and Codfathers Seafood in Kelowna, where owner Jon Crofts is a passionate supporter of local fishers.

“You need to buy fish from somebody you trust,” Crofts says of the complicated world of “sustainable” seafood.

“Sustainable is massively overused. I talk about ethical — who is fishing, how they are fishing and why. When it comes from a small-scale fishery, you know it’s sustainable.”

Crofts, who also helped launch Slow Fish Canada, wholesales fish to Okanagan chefs and offers a weekly “fish box” delivery to local consumers, featuring seafood that’s affordable and often underutilized. That might be wild swimming scallops, halibut cheeks, ling cod or salmon, especially less expensive species such as keta (chum) or pink (humpback) salmon.

“The emphasis is on West Coast fish, but it must be Canadian and traceable,” Crofts says. “It’s all about good, clean and fair fish.”

There are also opportunities to buy direct from fishers if you live near a fishing community. Michelle Rose is a small CSF on Vancouver Island while Skipper Otto ships wild-caught fish to thousands of customers across the country.

Serving wild salmon
The beauty of wild salmon is that it comes in five different species, which offers a wide variety of ways to serve it.

While the rare Gitanyow sockeye from Organic Ocean ended up on the menu at upscale Boulevard Kitchen in Vancouver, Crofts sold more than 600 pounds of Keta through his small fish market in Kelowna. Some turned up on the menu at CedarCreek Estate Winery, where chef Neil Taylor features fresh wild salmon throughout the fishing season.

“I’m open to using all of the species,” says Taylor, who cooks on a wood-fired grill at upscale Home Block Restaurant. “All salmon is different — sockeye is very lean, spring is fatty and coho is a balance. Pinks are pale and beautiful, and keta has a decent amount of fat. I love it.”

With a strong run of keta this year and good chinook returns to some rivers, including the Port Alberni inlet, these experts are optimistic about the future of wild B.C. salmon. Strobel says she’s confident that the federal government will finally hear the pleas of B.C. fishers and start the process of returning commercial licences and quotas to those working on the water.

Crofts says chefs and consumers can help if they buy and serve all species of salmon, along with other locally caught fish.

“We have to eat what’s seasonal and what the ocean provides,” he says.

Adds Clark: “I’ve been advocating for salmon for more than 25 years, and I’ve never been more excited about B.C. salmon.”