Bruce McKay
Key Player
Founding director, Greenpeace Montreal; former science advisor, Greenpeace InternationalPrior to joining SeaWeb, Bruce McKay was a science advisor and media spokesman for Greenpeace International, where he founded and ran Greenpeace’s Montreal office. No stranger to the art of the health scare, McKay once incited province-wide panic by telling Canadian newsweekly Maclean’s that Montrealers were “ingesting small amounts of a wide range of contaminants every time they drink tap water from the St. Lawrence [Seaway].” He later claimed that he was trying to draw attention to a handful of dolphins that died of unknown causes in coastal waters. McKay was often the go-to guy when Greenpeace wanted to cook up a North American scare over seafood, frequently raising the specter of toxic shellfish and PCB-infected marine mammals (both of which remain in the “rumor” category).
What probably brought SeaWeb to his door, however, was a 1994 New York Times article in which McKay tried to make the case that well-intentional environmental fishing bans would actually make fishermen wealthier in the long run. Just as he managed to ignore the thousands of fisherman who were put out of business by Greenpeace’s unnecessary fishery-control lobbying in the 1980s and 1990s, SeaWeb tends to ignore the human consequences of its actions.