SaltWire E-Edition

N.S. wades deeper while B.C. balks

WENDY WATSON SMITH Wendy Watson Smith is chair of the Healthy Bays Network.

Last month, Fisheries and Oceans Minister Joyce Murray reaffirmed the federal government’s commitment to transitioning away from the open-net pen systems by 2025, extending dozens of B.C. fish farming licences for just two years rather than the six-plus years demanded by industry.

Our federal leaders deserve credit for recognizing the “urgent need for sustainable aquaculture technology,” and for sticking to their guns in the face of serious corporate pushback. If they can finish the job, it would mean genuine progress for threatened wild Pacific salmon populations critical to coastal and First Nations communities across B.C.

Meanwhile, in Nova Scotia, where jurisdiction for aquaculture falls to the province, coastal communities are bracing themselves for sea-cage salmon expansions that would quadruple the number of farmed fish produced in our waters.

In the latest industry development, just weeks before the B.C. decision was released, fishers and residents on the Digby Neck found out that a long-dormant fish farm site near Long Beach had been discreetly bought up and restocked by Cooke Aquaculture. The plan was approved by provincial regulators without any meaningful requirement for public consultation.

The Digby Neck, home to some of the most productive inshore lobster fishing in the world, has become ground zero for fish farming expansion in Nova Scotia. The quietly revived Long Beach operation is just a small part of very ambitious industry plans spanning the province.

Cooke is one of two companies, with Norway’s Haugland Gruppen, that would up Nova Scotia’s sea-cage salmon production capacity from 20 million pounds today, to at least 80 million pounds in years to come — half of it in St. Mary’s Bay. That would make us the country’s secondlargest farmed salmon producer. The largest? B.C., where the federal government has been forced to step in and clean up the industry’s incredible mess of sea lice, disease, mortality events, feces and escaped fish.

Premier Tim Houston and Fisheries and Aquaculture Minister Steve Craig have an opportunity to intervene before this industry is allowed to turn Nova Scotia into its next major dump site. In a move noticed by few, the province has backed away from a 2021 campaign promise to consult Nova Scotians regarding a moratorium on new fish farming licences, in favour of an uninspired regulatory review instead. We desperately need them to bring that promised consultation back, before it’s too late.

Coastal communities in Nova Scotia rely on publicly accessible waters and the health of marine ecosystems to support existing livelihoods in the wild fishery and in tourism. Salmon farming is a risk to both.

To assess that risk, we can look across the Bay of Fundy, where some 90 salmon farming leases cover a patchwork of nearly 2,000 hectares of the nearshore. In a 2012 study published by Melanie Wiber with the University of New Brunswick, fishermen report “diseased” and “cancerous” sea urchins, degraded or disappearing scallops, “drifts” of dead shrimp after sea lice treatments, and “contaminated” lobster near longterm salmon aquaculture sites. This in addition to the vast number of escaped fish routinely showing up in New Brunswick rivers, at great risk to the few remaining wild Atlantic salmon populations hanging on for dear life there. Both fishers and coastal residents are sensitive to these threats, and many Nova Scotian communities have long opposed fish farming in local bays. Grassroots community organizing in Guysborough County, St. Margaret’s Bay, and Digby successfully prevented a 40 million-pound Cermaq-canada salmon farming proposal in 2020.

There is no evidence to suggest that community sentiment has changed today. The only difference between Cermaq’s proposals and the proposals on offer now, is that Cermaq promised to leave if they weren’t welcome. Cooke and Haugland Gruppen have made no such assurances, and so the same coastal communities are left to fight, again and again, project after project, with each incoming company, until the province recognizes their interests.

We applaud the federal government’s most recent West Coast decision towards a better, cleaner aquaculture industry with our friends and fellow bay protectors in B.C. Here in Nova Scotia, we are left to wonder: When will our own government get the message, and put a stop to this decades-long effort by industry to force unwanted salmon farms on the coastal communities where we live, work and play?

OPINION

en-ca

2022-07-05T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-07-05T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://saltwire.pressreader.com/article/281642488873110

SaltWire Network