As her day to testify at the Cohen Commission arrived, Alex Morton was full of adrenaline. She could tell people what she had been seeing with the salmon for the past two decades. And she would reveal what she had found in the 500,000 pages of government documents submitted to the inquiry.
The salmon had been returning to the Fraser River for hundreds of years. In 2009, they didn’t. Or barely did. Nine million sockeye salmon were missing. Stephen Harper, prime minister at the time, was not a man known for promoting science, but the catastrophic loss forced him to call an inquiry. For the first time, there would be money, time and people testifying under oath
iPolitics By Tony Allard. Published on Apr 16, 2021 3:53pm The minister must surely have known that previous ministers had relied on DFO bureaucrats for decisions, only to have the courts find those decisions inconsistent, contradictory, and, in any event, fail in light of the evidence.
In doing so, she departed from her department’s advice, a move critics called unreasonable.
When faced with the decision to respond to the Cohen commission’s recommendation to phase out fish farms from the Discovery Islands unless she could
confidently say they posed less than a minimal risk to wild salmon the minister didn’t rely on bureaucrats in the department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO). Instead, she met with Indigenous people and heard their criticisms of the DFO’s science.
New laws are on the horizon for Canada’s aquaculture industry, but environmentalists are wary the proposed legislation might not be enough to protect the country’s oceans.
Canada’s $1.2-billion aquaculture industry is now regulated under a patchwork of federal and provincial laws and regulations. Confusion over that regulatory maze has fuelled a years-long effort by Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) to develop aquaculture-specific legislation. The new laws would update rules on everything from licensing to the industry’s environmental impact.
“We have concerns around the act that (with) the direction it is going, it may actually exempt or replace or undermine some of the other legislative protections around wild fish biodiversity,” said Stan Proboszcz, science and campaign adviser for the Watershed Watch Salmon Society.
by Martin Dunphy on December 18th, 2020 at 6:30 PM 1 of 3 2 of 3
Fish farms in B.C. s Discovery Islands area will be emptied of all fish by June 30, 2022, the federal minister of fisheries and oceans has announced .
Bernadette Jordan said in a December 17 news release that the decision to phase out the 19 aquaculture facilities, some of the oldest on the B.C. coast, was made after extensive consultation with stakeholders. Today’s decision was not easy. I am committed to working with all involved parties; the First Nations, industry and the Province of British Columbia, over the next 18 months to ensure a fair and orderly transition process that phases out salmon farming in the Discovery Island, Jordan said in the bulletin.