WCEL has exhaustive publication links and done lots of work on documents surrounding this subject. If you want to, you could read their material all day. And, of course, for students, this makes pretty sound research for a class environmental report: https://www.wcel.org/publication/top-10-recommendations-renewed-fisheries-act?utm_source=Watershed+Watch+Email+List&utm_campaign=31253acfa3-Salmon_News_Sept1_2017&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_405944b1b5-31253acfa3-166907249&mc_cid=31253acfa3&mc_eid=5777c92bcd.
Here are their top ten recommendations for an Amended Fisheries Act:
A new Act
must:
1.
Restore the Act’s focus on fish
habitat: No habitat, no fish. Bring back the prohibition on harmful alteration,
disruption or destruction of fish habitat (HADD) unless authorized, and turn it
into a modern safeguard by updating and improving it:
a. Include a prohibition on HADD.
b. Include a more complete definition of
HADD, clear threshold for HADD, and factors to be considered in its
authorization.
c. Retain “activities” along with “works
and undertakings” in a revised HADD prohibition.
d. Explicitly restrict or prohibit fishing
practices that harm fish habitat.
2.
Modernize the HADD authorization
process with:
a.
an
explicit requirement to consider cumulative effects to fish and fish habitat when
making authorization decisions;
b. regulations exempting minor
projects and works from the requirement to obtain an authorization if the proponent complies with
specified guidelines and best practices and submits all required information,
such as the project or work’s location, potential effects and cumulative
impacts and their significance, and proposed mitigation measures to the
government for inclusion in a database1;
c. creation of a new publicly
accessible database that requires proponents to record all projects and
works constructed
pursuant the new regulations, and to further record all habitat referrals,
authorizations, charges, warnings prosecutions,
convictions, fines, and other regulatory activities.
3.
Protect fish habitat from
cumulative impacts by:
a.
requiring
the avoidance and mitigation of cumulative impacts relative to legally
established ecosystem-based habitat targets at appropriate geographic scales
(e.g., stream, watershed and seabed levels) using the best available science and
Indigenous law and knowledge;
b. entrenching
the principle of Net Gain in the Act. We support the Canadian Wildlife
Federation’s call for the Act to establish minimum requirements for offsetting
ratios that reflect a net gain for every project to help reduce the cumulative
effects of underperforming and abandoned offset projects;2
4) Restore the other “lost protections” for fish
and fish habitat:
a. Remove
references to Commercial, Recreational and Aboriginal fisheries from the Act to
clarify that the Act applies to all fish, not just ‘fisheries fish.’
b. Restore
the prohibition on killing fish by means other than fishing.
5) Environmental flows are regarded as the ‘master
variable’ for river health, and the Act should clearly protect environmental
flows through these provisions:
a. Define
environmental flow, using the 2007 Brisbane Declaration definition: “Environmental
flows describe the quantity, timing, and quality of water flows required to
sustain freshwater and estuarine ecosystems and the human livelihoods and well-being
that depend on these ecosystems.”
b. Define
conditions of flow alternation that trigger section 20 of the Act on flows and
fish passage, based on science advice from DFO’s Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat
(CSAS).
c. List ‘environmental
flow protection’ as a goal for fish habitat protection in a Purposes or
Preamble section of a renewed Act.
d. Require
the maintenance of environmental flows in listed transboundary rivers of national
significance.
e. Establish
national regulations on flow.
f. Reform
provisions related to orders for the free passage of fish for example by increasing
Ministerial authority to make flow orders under s. 20.
6) Provide for new entrenched requirements for reports
on habitat assessment and monitoring:
a. Require
a systematic assessment of key fish habitats throughout Canada to be presented
to Parliament three to five years after the amended Act comes into force. Should
the report indicate deficiencies, the Act should require DFO to take reasonable
action to correct them, failure of which would be subject to judicial review, and
also require:3
i. a
government response and action plan to address the report’s recommendations, and
ii. follow-up
monitoring of fish habitat for all section 35 authorizations.
7) Make rebuilding depleted fish stocks and
preventing overfishing explicit purposes of the Act in a new Purposes section to
guide decision-makers.
8) Require fish conservation and management
decisions to be based on an expanded list of sustainability Principles as
outlined in WCELA’s two briefs, including the precautionary principle,
sustainable development, and adaptive management. We support the submission from
Professors Olszynski, Stacey, MacLean, Kwasniak, and Gibson, which discusses
the need for detailed legislative provisions
governing the application of adaptive management that could be included in either
the forthcoming new impact assessment legislation that would be made also applicable
to DFO and proponents under the Fisheries Act, or could be replicated in the Fisheries
Act.4
9)Enable delegation of monitoring and enforcement authority
to First Nations, including
the power to enforce Indigenous laws, backed by sufficient funding equivalent
to that provided for DFO’s fisheries officers..
10) Make fisheries authorizations triggers for
environmental assessments by re-establishing s. 32, 35, and 36 authorizations of the Act as
environmental assessment triggers, bearing in mind WCEL’s recommendation that
minor projects would be subject to regulations, not ministerial authorizations.
Linda
Nowlan, Staff Counsel
Mari
Galloway, Law Student
West
Coast Environmental Law
Association
August
28, 2017
********************************************************************************
And do go back to this post of mine about the on-going problems with Canadian environmental laws. and fisheries ones; It is a long document too: http://fishfarmnews.blogspot.ca/2017/04/the-strictest-laws-in-world-wrong.html. It has a litany of complaint for weak laws and poor enforcement. The point being that it doesn't matter what laws you have if you don't enforce them, and you don't have staff that you make enforce them.
*
Updated Feb 28, 2018: here is Ecojustice's take on fisheries act et al changes: https://www.ecojustice.ca/ecojustice-recommendations-helped-contribute-modernized-fisheries-act/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=engagingnetworks&utm_campaign=Impact_2018_02_28&utm_content=2018.02.28+Impact.
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