Canadians ate 4.5 tonnes of unlabelled GM salmon without knowing it this past year

The world’s first shipment of genetically-modified salmon arrived in Montreal last year. After that, it’s impossible to track where it went. Why all the secrecy?

Perched on the coast of Prince Edward Island, in Bay Fortune, a biotechnology company breeds the world’s first genetically modified fish—an Atlantic salmon containing a fish gene that allows it to grow twice as fast as its non-GM cousins. In the past year, without knowing it, Canadians ate 4.5 tonnes of the unlabelled GM fish—the world’s first batches of GM animal sold for human consumption. Where exactly? No one knew, until recently, when Vigilance OGM, a food watchdog in Quebec, obtained import documents via access to information. In a $170-billion global aquaculture industry, Canada in 2016 became the first country to allow human consumption of genetically engineered salmon. Fish-farming companies and consumer groups remained wary, partly because of the controversy around labelling and the secrecy that’s shrouded the fish since research began in Canada in the early 1990s. Since then, taxpayers have forked over $8.2 million in federal grants for the fish’s development, and the Canadian government negotiated a 10 per cent royalty for itself on GM salmon sales.