Cermaq Canada’s withdrawal on 9 April from all expansion plans in Nova Scotia were due to temperature readings, Cermaq Sustainable Development Director Linda Sams told the Guysborough Journal.
Cermaq announced its expansion plans in April 2019, planning farms with 3,500 metric tons of production at each site, with a total of 20,000 metric tons of salmon total to be produced. However, the company announced it was withdrawing from those plans on 9 April, citing an inadequate number of viable farm cites.
The inadequacy, Sams told the Journal, was due to temperature.
“For us, it was just the temperature profiles,” she said. “We knew it would be close and that there could be potential there. Unfortunately, because of climate change, it’s likely, maybe, in the next five to 10 years there might be changes and it might be more hospitable, but right now we just couldn’t find the number of sites for the amount of investment we wanted to do in the province.”
Cermaq Canada Managing Director David Kiemele said it was looking for 15 to 20 viable sites in the region, and that it was unable to locate enough to make the level of investment that the company wanted.
“We acknowledge there were many people interested in our potential investment as this kind of economic diversification can be very important to rural coastal communities,” Kiemele said in the announcement. “Aquaculture, such as salmon farming, will have an increasingly important role to play in responding to climate change and contributing to North American food security.”
Sams also reiterated that despite Cermaq’s decision, the Nova Scotia region is still a viable location for aquaculture.
“One of things that I think is very important that I stress is that marine farming is still very viable in Nova Scotia. I think there is a bright future for aquaculture and marine farming and fish farming. It just was not at the scale we needed to justify that sort of investment,” she told the Journal. “The one thing that I learned in these small communities, I think there is a desperate need for diversification in economies … In the COVID-19 crisis, we are seeing that those primary industries have an amazingly important role in these small community economies.”
