Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Sometime in the next three weeks, Canada’s Minister of Fisheries, Joyce Murray, will decide whether the licenses for 79 fish farms will be renewed. “I heard a rumour that the minister laid out her options or her ideas to cabinet and cabinet has the plans right now. They're figuring out what to do. We can expect that an announcement quite shortly on the plan around the transition of farms out of British Columbia and also the licensing decision,” said Stan Proboszcz, senior scientist with the Watershed Watch Salmon Society.According to the BC Salmon Farmers Association, based in Campbell River, the province will lose more than 4,700 jobs and $1.2 billion in economic activity if the salmon farm licenses are not reissued.The elected chiefs of the We Wai Kai and Wei Wai Kum are among a small group of First Nations leaders supporting this industry, but Hereditary Chief Arnold Chickite of the We Wai Kai Nation campaigns against fish farms. The Klahoose, Homalco, Tla’amin and K’omok are among the 102 B.C. First Nations that signed a joint letter calling for open-net pen fish farms to be transitioned onto land. Bob Chamberlain, Chair of the First Nation’s Wild Salmon Alliance issued a press release stating, “We are deeply concerned that wild salmon runs in B.C. have suffered from the impacts of fragmented management decisions at both the federal and provincial levels, decisions that have contributed to the precarious extinction-level state of wild salmon and which must now be corrected if we are to see wild salmon runs successfully rebound.”A growing number of scientists agree with them.