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Call Galen Weston
1-888-495-5111

Pick up the phone and leave a message for Galen Weston. Tell him you want Loblaw to stop selling Redlist fish and develop a sustainable seafood policy.

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QUIZ
YOUR GROCER

During your next visit to your local supermarket, choose a couple of species of seafood that you are concerned about and ask the person at the seafood counter where the seafood is coming from and how it was caught or farmed.

• Is this salmon wild or farmed?
• What species of tuna is this, and can I be sure it wasn't fished illegally?
• I'm trying to avoid tropical shrimp because of the impact of aquaculture on coastal communities, do you have any alternatives?
• I don't want to buy bottom-trawled fish, can you tell me how this was fished?

Write back to us at seafood@greenpeace.ca to let us know which supermarket you visited and in what city, which seafood you asked about and what the employee responded to your questions.

Greenpeace is urging Loblaw to shoulder its share of the responsibility for the decline of fish stocks by ceasing to sell the most threatened species. Loblaw accounts for nearly a third of the grocery market share in Canada and operates under banners including Atlantic Superstore, Maxi, Provigo and Zehrs.

Why Loblaws and what if you don't shop there?

Loblaw presents itself as a ‘green’ grocer, but Greenpeace surveys indicate that the company is selling 14 of the 15 Redlist species that are most destructively fished or farmed. In its Out of Stock report released last June, Greenpeace identified a "Redlist" of seafood which should be taken off the shelves until stocks recover or fishing and fish farming practices improve.

Redlist species at risk of commercial extinction include Atlantic bluefin tuna, Atlantic cod, sharks, skates and orange roughy. Tropical shrimp is the most consumed species on the list, but harvesting and farming the species is wreaking havoc on ecosystems and threatening coastal communities. Bottom trawling and other destructive fishing methods are raking the ocean floor and fishing at an entirely unsustainable rate.

Our oceans are in peril: global fishing operations take 2.5 times more fish and seafood than is sustainable. Currently, three-quarters of the world’s fisheries are fully exploited or overexploited, and 90 per cent of large, predatory fish such as tuna and cod are gone. Greenpeace is advocating for a global network of marine reserves covering 40 per cent of the oceans.

As the link between the consumer and the producer, supermarkets have a unique role to play in ensuring fish for the future. Greenpeace is asking Loblaw and other retailers to take the pressure off threatened fisheries now by purchasing their seafood only from sustainably managed fisheries. If they don’t, there soon won’t be any fish left to sell.