Fish Farms out of Discovery, Cohen Recommendation, Deadline September 30, 2020

I sent the following post to the ENGOs in BC to help them in their response to the rapidly approaching September 30 Cohen deadline to get fish farms out of the water. Please feel free to use the two lists in shaping your letter to the Liberal govt about it's promise to meet all of Cohen's recommendations.
Hi Everyone

I pass on two lists regarding on-land fish farms in advance of the Sept 30, 2020 Cohen deadline about getting fish farms out of Discovery Passage. Use them in addressing Trudeau and Jordan.

They should help you with two things: on-land is now mainstream and if the BC industry doesn’t come on-land it will likely be wiped out as 85% of its product goes to the USA, but the on-land movement there is aimed at quadruple the metric tonnes, Atlantic Sapphire, alone, aiming for 160,000 to begin with, and 250,000 in its plans, triple BC.

I started noticing a steady stream of articles/papers/analyses about on-land in the global seafood press about 18 months ago, and started a post to put them together in one place. In that short period, I have found an avalanche of interest, exceeding 500 items. On-land is mainstream, despite what fish farms might say.

This link lists the first 500 articles/papers I have found about on-land: https://fishfarmnews.blogspot.com/2018/11/good-news-post-links-to-on-land-closed.html.

This link lists the 326 on-land fish farms I have found: https://fishfarmnews.blogspot.com/2016/05/152-different-on-land-fish-farm-systems.html. The list starts halfway down the post, so scroll down to it.

And the third thing is low employment: fish farms always say they bring employment to ‘down on their luck, remote’ communities. This post thoroughly addresses that employment has been in decline for decades, and that Norwegian automation suggests that in Canada we could face an additonal 80% cut in jobs, when it is brought here. We don’t need to destroy our wild areas.

This post is dense, so if you are pressed for time, find the Inga Milewski article link on employment and read it. It is the best paper I have ever read on the subject: https://fishfarmnews.blogspot.com/2019/07/fish-farm-problems-on-global-scale-inka.html. The link to the BC Stats Report is in this post, the best stats on the BC ‘fishing sectors.’
DC (Dennis) Reid

Fisheries Act Recommendations - West Coast Environmental Law, Updated Feb 28, 2018

West Coast Environmental Law, a long time, enviro law firm, has, among other things come up with ten recommendations for the Fisheries Act. Do note that there are other statutes that need amendment, too, The Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, for instance.

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

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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.

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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.

Salmon Diversity Important to First Nation Food Supply - WCEL, Watershed Watch

A recent study from BC  shows that diversity of stock sub-components, in other words, genetic gene pools in BC rivers are important to longterm food supply for First Nations:

'A recent study, “Species and population diversity in Pacific salmon fisheries underpin Indigenous food security” published by SFU researchers Holly Nesbitt and Dr. Jonathan Moore, is a fantastic example. It’s good timing for the publication of this new science, too, as the findings will be valuable for the newly started review of the Fisheries Act.'

This is a link to the study summary: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2664.12717/full.

The point in the study is that runs of salmon are composed of stocks within the run and it is the genetic diversity of the many stocks that is important to conserving salmon.

West Coast Environmental Law has done an analysis of the laws governing fish and habitat, that were systematically weakened by the Harper government. For a good read of their work, see:  http://www.wcel.org/resources/environmental-law-alert/catching-science-salmon-biodiversity-and-aboriginal-fisheries-righ?utm_source=LEB.

Here is a key paragraph: 'As WCEL has been warning since 2012, amendments made to the Fisheries Act significantly weakened habitat protection provisions under the Act. As the current federal government works to restore and strengthen habitat protection, potential amendments to the Act could include a focus on protecting habitat for sub-species that may not be currently given high priority, but that are vital for ensuring healthy runs. See our brief Scaling Up the Fisheries Act for other ideas for amendments.'

In other words, habitat protection and restoration are key to maintaining salmon. The other major influences on salmon are: DFO itself, fish farms and climate change.

The WCEL brief has this to say:  'DFO’s Wild Salmon Policy (formally known as “Canada’s Policy for Conservation of Wild Pacific Salmon”) has as its first objective to “[s]afeguard the genetic diversity of wild Pacific salmon.” In addition, the Convention on Biological Diversity, to which Canada is a signatory, has “the conservation of biological diversity” as its core objective. We need to take these legal commitments seriously to stem the alarming loss of biodiversity.'

Maintaining biological diversity is a reason for getting fish farms out of BC water because they indiscriminately affect all runs.

Here is an analysis by Watershed Watch. It is worth reading: https://www.watershed-watch.org/resources/critique-of-federal-update-on-cohen-inquiry-recommendations/?utm_source=Watershed+Watch+Email+List&utm_campaign=28825f0733-Update_on_Minister_LeBlanc_Announcement-8_17_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_405944b1b5-28825f0733-166907249.