There are those like Stephen Harper who repeatedly say we must choose between economic development and sustainable development.
And there are those who, concerned about the environment and the latest reports from the International Panel on Climate Change, suggest that economic development and sustainable development should be reconciled. Countries such as Germany are often cited as cases in point. Most environmental organizations fall into this latter reconciliation category.
Sustainability and economic development go hand in hand
That said, the term reconciliation seems totally out of place when one considers that the green sectors are among the fastest growing and highest job creation sectors of our times and that this growth can only get better as nations adopt more aggressive approaches to fully participate in the new economy. Moreover, what especially makes this growth attractive is that the green economy is every bit as diversified, if not more so, as Canada’s traditional natural resource-based economy.
Accordingly, rather than the reconciliation of opposing forces, we should be talking about the green economy as the prime focus of Finance, Economic Development and Treasury ministers, supported by a minister responsible for the green economy. If this “attitude” was to be adopted in Canada, we would be assured of significant progress towards synergistic economic and sustainable development objectives.
Green sectors deliver big job creation, economic development
China is investing $70 billion a year in renewable energy
Meanwhile, China added a whopping 16.1 gigawatts (GW) of new wind capacity just in 2013, bringing total domestic wind capacity to 91.4 GW. (To put this in relative terms, Québec’s current entire electricity production capacity is 43 GW). By 2020, China may reach 200 GW of installed wind capacity along with 500,000 jobs in China’s wind sector.
China also added 12 GW of solar capacity in 2013. Currently, there are 300,000 jobs in China’s solar photovoltaic domain and another 800,000 in Chinese solar heating and cooling.
Of course, there is much more to the green economy than just clean energy. The green economy is also about technologies to reduce waste and therefore improve business profits over the long run. This includes technologies aimed at reducing pollution, toxic by-products, and above all, those technologies which reduce the production of waste at the source, in the manufacturing process.
Then there are the exceptional opportunities pertaining to the transportation sector. Being nearly entirely dependent on fossil fuels, transport must be seriously revamped. The right legislative and fiscal frameworks for the auto sector would spur both innovation and new supply chain products and industries.
What is stopping us from working on these high job creation sustainable development solutions?
Time to stop subsidizing fossil fuels
One of the greatest impediments to migrating away from the traditional economy rests with the fact that we continue subsidizing the problem, big time. Indeed the fossil sectors are the world’s most subsidized.
Particularly telling is the data churned out by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on 2011 fossil fuels direct subsidies, plus the costs of externalities – such as the impacts of climate change on infrastructure and pollution on health. The IMF came up with a global total of $1.9 Trillion/year in subsidies and government costs associated with fossil fuels. Among nations evaluated by the IMF, Canada shamefully ranked 14th in public subsidies for fossils at $26.4B/year.
Consequently, ending these subsidies would not only level the playing field for more equitable competition from clean technologies, but would also free up financial resources to support the shift to a green economy.
And the payoff is green jobs – lots of them. That is, a green shift offers 6 to 8 times more jobs for a given unit of investment when compared with government investments in the fossil fuel economy. To this effect, the BlueGreen Alliance published a report indicating that $1.3 billion in subsidies for the oil and gas sector supports just 2,300 Canadian jobs, while the same amount invested in the green economy would support 18,000 to 20,000 jobs.
Not only does the green economy give a better bang for government bucks, but a green economy is also very unlike a resource-based economy, which concentrates the wealth in the specific geographic areas where the fossil and natural resources are found. This is to say that a green economy spreads the wealth opportunities all over the country and planet.
The production of clean energy, the manufacturing of clean technologies and the maintenance of clean tech systems can occur in most parts of Canada and around the globe.
Finally, with respect to funding to support the transition to a green economy, it is important to note that both Harper and Trudeau support an exceptionally low corporate tax rate of 15%, a policy that has resulted in $575 billion lying dormant in corporate liquidity – a formula for austerity budgets.
In other words, with a higher corporate tax rate, there would be plenty of money around to support a fast-forward catch-up to other nations regarding the green economy as well as improvements in job creation, health, child care, innovation and so on.
Removing the roadblocks
The main obstacles in the way to moving to a diversified, high-growth, high-job creation, green economy are our governments and political leaders – incapable of thinking outside of the box.
To a lesser extent, the US has embarked on a similar path.
Both Trudeau and Harper also seem oblivious to the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) conclusion that, “apart from short-term price booms, the ‘terms of trade’ – the price of resource exports relative to manufactured goods – have been falling for more than a century.” Suffice it to say, neither Harper or Trudeau is prepared for the emerging global green economy – the economy of tomorrow.
Finally, green advocates have got to get out of the paradigm of economic and sustainable development reconciliation and start talking about attractive, green economic development strategies.
By Kevin Begos And Matthew Daly, The Associated Press
PITTSBURGH – The U.S. Department of Energy said Friday that it welcomes the decision by oil and gas industry supplier Baker Hughes to disclose all chemicals in hydraulic fracturing fluid. But Halliburton, a major competitor in the field, isn’t committing to such disclosure.
Deputy Assistant Energy Secretary Paula Gant said that Baker Hughes’ move “is an important step in building public confidence” and the department “hopes others will follow their lead.”
Disclosure loophole allows for secrecy
The oil and gas industry has said the fracking chemicals are disclosed at tens of thousands of wells, but environmental and health groups and government regulators decry a loophole that allows companies to hide chemical “trade secrets.”
Houston-based Halliburton said Friday that it’s studying the move by Baker Hughes, which is also based in that city. Halliburton said it had an interest in protecting “our intellectual property and the substantial investment it represents” and will examine the new Baker Hughes format for its ability to protect such investments.
Baker Hughes ready for 100% disclosure
Baker Hughes said it now believes it’s possible to disclose 100 per cent “of the chemical ingredients we use in hydraulic fracturing fluids without compromising our formulations,” to increase public trust.
Baker Hughes spokeswoman Melanie Kania wrote in an email that it will take “several months” for the new policy to take effect. She said the end result will be a “single list” that provides “all the chemical constituents” for frack fluids, with no trade secrets.
Frack fluids can contaminate groundwater
A boom in drilling has led to tens of thousands of new wells being drilled in recent years using the fracking process. A mix of water, sand and chemicals is forced into deep underground formations to break rock apart and free oil and gas. That’s led to major economic benefits but also fears that the chemicals could spread to water supplies.
The mix of chemicals varies by company and region — and some of the chemicals are toxic and could cause health problems in significant doses — so the lack of full transparency has worried landowners and public health experts.
Many companies voluntarily disclose the contents of their fracking fluids through FracFocus.org, a website partially funded by the oil and gas industry that tracks fracking operations nationwide. But critics say the website has loose reporting standards and allows companies to avoid disclosure by declaring certain chemicals as trade secrets.
Northern Rockies Regional Municipality Mayor Bill Streeper has publicly called out the local Fort Nelson First Nation (FNFN) over its repudiation of government officials at a summit on liquefied natural gas (LNG) it held last week.
[quote]No shale gas development will proceed in FNFN territory until our Nation and our Treaty are respected and our concerns about our land and our waters are addressed.[/quote]
The chief’s decisive actions made headlines across the country, generated a wave of accolades in these pages and other social media, and yielded an uncharacteristically speedy and deferential response from government. Within hours, Environment Minister Mary Polak issued a mea culpa, recanting the proposed regulatory changes. “Our government apologizes for failing to discuss the amendment with First Nations prior to its approval,” stated Polak.
“That is why we will rescind the amendment…until we have undertaken discussions with First Nations.”
Yet Mayor Streeper, who has long ties to the shale gas industry, doesn’t share the government’s contrition and agreement with FNFN’s position. In an open letter castigating his aboriginal neighbours in Fort Nelson, Streeper called the expulsion a “knee-jerk” reaction that constituted “discriminatory exploitation”.
“We’re a one-industry town,” noted Streeper, who apologized to the provincial government on behalf of his community. Underscoring his perceived urgency of developing the industry at all costs, the exasperated mayor stated:
[quote]If LNG fails, this town will fail.
[/quote]
Yet, at no point did Chief Gale reject the industry outright; rather she highlighted her community’s concern with the government’s secretive legislative changes and emphasized that in order for the industry to proceed, it must address a number of key environmental concerns:
[quote]The FNFN is not against development but these projects must be consistent with our values and have respect for the land…First Nation people are the governments of their territories and will make decisions going forward on these projects.[/quote]
Namgis First Nation-grown closed-containment salmon ready for market (Photo: Kuterra.com)
Part 2 of DC Reid’s appeal to Canadian Senator and Olympic hero Nancy Greene Raine, who recently came out in support of a massive increase to open net pen salmon farms on BC’s coast. Read part 1 here.
While Nancy Greene Raine has taken a stance to push in-ocean fish farms, there is a lot of science that she likely does not know. And I doubt she realizes she is taking a stand against wild BC salmon. The bullets from my earlier article are discussed further here, with links for readers to go and read the documents and come to their own conclusions.
Alternate solutions are real and available
Inside Kuterra plant (Kuterra.com)
Just yesterday, the Namgis First Nation announced it has just changed the entire game for fish farming in BC and around the world. What terrific timing – just as DFO was throwing open our pristine ocean for in-ocean fish farms and their huge environmental damage, land-based Atlantics are now on stream and selling for a premium as an environmentally safe product.
Our aboriginal friends are standing up for wild salmon and our environment. This is one fish farm system that I, Nancy Greene Raine and the citizens of BC can support. Well done Chief Bill Cranmer and the Namgis First Nation, Port McNeill, BC.
Cohen Commission highlighted DFO’s conflict of interest
It would be good for Raine and the other senators to get a more balanced look at the issues than what DFO and fish farms present. Nancy, please look at these issues more closely, and then stand on the side of wild BC salmon.
DFO is conflicted in supporting the industry over wild salmon. In his $26 million Judicial Inquiry, Justice Bruce Cohen told them in bold face recommendation 3 of his 1200 page report, Vol 3, Chapter 2 page 12, that DFO had to be stripped of supporting farmed fish and get on with the priority of protecting wild Pacific salmon:
[quote]The Government of Canada should remove from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans’ mandate the promotion of salmon farming as an industry and farmed salmon as a product.[/quote]
This is clear and unequivocal. Nancy Greene Raine and the other senators on the fish committee need to read what Cohen said. His 75 recommendations are in Volume 3, Chapters 2 and 3.
Governments, scientists and testing are in conflict
Staff and resources circulate from the companies to governments and monitoring systems deal with farms as clients rather than being adversarial like police. Fish farms fund lots of research, conflicting scientists. And Cohen evidence showed clearly that fish farms, governments, both provincial and federal, and scientists are in conflict of interest with one another.
For example, Clare Blackman worked for the provincial body that chose fish farm sites, and now works for Marine Harvest. Cohen evidence shows the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) does not want to find ISA and other diseases in farmed salmon. Their Moncton lab was shown not able to find ISA.
Fish farms aren’t about jobs and revenue
The Fish farm industry is fond of stating that it provides $800 million in revenue and 6,000 jobs in BC. This is not true. The only real report, from Stats BC – which ironically has DFO’s name on it though DFO does not say so – shows categorically that fish farms result in few jobs and very low revenue. The report says all BC aquaculture results in a measly $61.9 Million in BC GDP.
This compared with the other parts of the fishing sectors – sport, commercial, processing – contribute 600% more at $605.5 Million, a full 90% of the contribution to GDP.
When you consider that the commercial sector has dropped 1,400 jobs since fish farms set up shop, and wild salmon are down 50%, this strongly suggests that fish farms don’t result in increased employment at all. Wild salmon disappear and fish farms jobs replace those lost in other sectors.
Let me add that the real number of actual jobs in fish farms is far below the econometric analysis, with its multipliers, suggests. I was astonished to sleuth out there are only 795 actual jobs in BC fish farming. That’s all – nowhere near 6,000 – in fact there are only 13.35% of what they claim.
Almost double the employment has been lost from the commercial sector alone. This results in fewer processing jobs, and impacts sport jobs and revenues, too. Let’s assume a marginal 10%: this means 840 jobs from sport’s 8,400 multiplier jobs and 240 from processing’s 2,400, since 50% of the wild salmon died in the presence of fish farms.
And, once fish farms set up lighting and feed machines, employment drops, and herring and wild salmon have been lured into the nets at night, some eaten, and some in the presence of disease and the ever-present lice. These are the public’s fish, and they are the ones we care about. Lights out.
Fish farms a net job loser
The Stats BC report says all of aquaculture (including shellfish and other fin fish) provides only 1,700 jobs. Add the loss in the other sectors together, 840 + 240 + 1,400, and the total realistic loss is 2,480 jobs in the rest of the fishing sector. This strongly suggests that fish farm replace jobs they eliminate rather than adding anything to the province’s job numbers. And do remember this is not the actual number of jobs in fish farming – only 795, less than half. We would have more than 300% more jobs in the other parts of the fishing sector if fish farms were eliminated and DFO took substantial action on the Wild Salmon Policy as Cohen told them to.
Fish farms are not about jobs and revenue. They are a boom bust industry. Most importantly, it is the workers who suffer the job losses – the very people Raine seeks to employ. 13,000 to 26,000 workers lost their jobs in Chile circa 2008 from its ISA outbreak (63 workers were killed working at fish farms, too). And what do you do with a quarter billion dead fish? Here in BC, Marine Harvest let staff go just before Christmas a couple of years ago. The problem? A disease called Kudoa, which turns farmed salmon flesh to mush. Marine Harvest lost $12 million last year to Kudoa – in fact, BC has way more of this parasite than Norway.
Farms want expansion without using the space they already have
Fish farms want to expand by 19,140 metric tonnes (mt) right now but they don’t use what they already have, putting out a max of 83,000, even though they have 280,000 mt authorized. They have never used their current capacity, so why do they want more? This does not make sense, unless these will be sold off as quota on a spot market, as they are in Norway at 10 million crowns, or it improves share prices, sometime in the future.
The people of BC do not support selling off of free quota for big bucks. We want wild salmon. In Chile, it has been noted that fish farms want more sites because they need to move from diseased areas that they create.
On-land fish farms offer solution
A Kuterra employee shows off one of its land-raised fish (Kuterra.com)
The big fish farm companies say land-based closed-containment can’t be done because of the high cost of land, electricity, etc. This is not true – they just want to continue using the ocean as a free, open sewer. On-land recirculating systems use one tenth of the electricity by using a heat pump. They use less land because fish tanks can be stacked one on top of the other. And the fish are protected from all ocean diseases and their own diseases are isolated from other fish, a huge improvement.
With tank covers, the sewage methane can be collected, used to make electricity or heat, and the excess put back into the grid to make money. Water temperature can be set to maximum growth, unlike the ocean that varies all over the place, hardly ideal. Same with optimal photo-period. The sewage can grow hydroponic vegetables for cash. Or be composted and sold for cash.
Recirculating the water saves up to 98% of it. Putting in a current makes the fish line up and thus more fish can be put in the tank, making even more money. In fact, I have a list of 66 different on-land systems comprising more than 8,100 on-land fish farms around the world.
In-ocean fish farms are old-tech dinosaurs compared with on-land systems. See my list. The last major conference on closed containment was held in Shepherdstown, Virginia, in September, 2013. Tides Canada has the more than 50 presentations here. Even Norway, where the BC industry is from, is doing closed-containment studies, for Pete’s sake.
Fish farms dump sewage costs on public, environment
And the senators want to triple the size of the industry? Nobody wants to pay for the current sewage dumped into our ocean, let alone triple the tripled cost of fish farm sewage. I have looked at sewage treatment in North America and Europe, and it’s clear that no one wants to pay a bean for anyone else’s sewage. Why would we pay for fish?
Fish farms produce more sewage than the entire human populations of many countries, Scotland and Norway included. It’s pretty even in BC, too.
Fish farms kill seals, sea lions and other animals
My estimate for sea lions killed by the fish farm industry is 11,469 up to 2011 – at least the ones they count. Greene may not know that many of these sentient creatures drown and realize they are drowning when they are caught in the nets. The rest are humanely dispatched with a bullet through the head – if you think that’s humane.
I keep asking for the autopsy of that whale found dead in a fish farm net last year on Vancouver Island, but DFO keeps telling me it isn’t available. Hmm.
And in Skuna Bay, where Norwegian giant Grieg tries on the “we are sustainable, organic” spin, 65 sea lions were killed and they got a fine for so doing of $100,000. So a sea lion is worth $1,538 to DFO and fish farms. Many would say that should have been the day all fish farms came out of the water. And, get this, they don’t count otters, seagulls, eagles and so on. Watch this seagull die in a fish farm net.
DFO’s own report shows that harbour seals are basically extirpated where there are fish farms. As seals don’t migrate more than 10 km, when the kill stats go down, it means local extinction, not ‘nuisance’ seals moving on and fish farms not killing as many – you cannot kill what you have already killed.
The DFO report said the figures I used are conservative and that killing seals, sea lions, and other pinnipeds must stop. But the killing goes on, in BC and all over the world – Marine Harvest operates in 22 countries. And fish farms want to expand in the ocean in BC?
Fish farm diseases
There are several dozen fungal, microbial and viral diseases. Because the fish are packed together, which stresses them, cortisone is released, which is an immune system depressant. They then pick up any old infection and among the million fish, it gets reproduced so many times that it changes to a virulent strain and the fish die. Then taxpayers pay for them – $5.56 million for dead diseased fish in BC last year – $50 million across Canada, last year. Government paid $135 million of our tax money on the east coast since 1990. We don’t want to pay.
But we do care about wild fish. Here is an example: Dr. Kristi Miller, on the Cohen record, showed that 25% of farmed chinook in Clayoquot Sound had both HSMI and ISA (both are Norwegian diseases that should not be in the North Pacific – DFO let them in on eggs). That is roughly 125,000 per farm. There are 22 farms in Clayoquot Sound, and it is a UN biosphere reserve.
How many wild fish are there? DFO’s number is a pitiful 501 chinook in six streams in 2012 and the Kennedy Lake sockeye run was wiped out in the early nineties and has not come back. Little wonder why. Same outcome for those Owikeno sockeye in Rivers Inlet, where the first two ISA positives for wild sockeye fry came from.
In Chile, ISA resulted in Cermaq reportedly losing $323 million, while Marine Harvest lost 1.4 billion Euros. A quarter of a billion dead salmon. ISA is only one disease. There is also IHN IPN, kudoa, SLV PRV, HSMI. The list goes on.
Cohen on fish diseases
When the two Routledge Owikeno sockeye fry came back with a weak positive, and inconclusive from the Gagnon lab in Moncton; with a positive, with more work needed from Dr. Are Nylund in Norway; and, a positive on the same fry From Dr. Fred Kibenge in PEI, DFO and the CFIA were rocked.
Then, thankfully, someone leaked a DFO report – the Kibenge report – showing ISA in BC waters. DFO saddled Cohen with 500,000 documents but missed its own report on the worst fish farm disease – they considered all results for ISA were false positives – but should have sent the document to Cohen anyway. They did not.
DFO’s scientist Kristi Miller and her viral signature work, showed that ISA was in Fraser sockeye back to 1988 – and recently, some sockeye components died up to 90% on the spawning beds from PRV. Cohen reopened the already closed Commission, strictly on fish farm disease issues, and then out spilled all the evidence on fish farm diseases, particularly, ISA and HSMI, (soon followed by PRV) and then IHN in Clayoquot Sound last year, for which we the taxpayer paid multinational billion dollar corporations $5.56 million for their diseased fish.
Incidentally, Minister Ashfield, changed the Gagnon finding to negative – perhaps on the semantic issue of having a virus does not mean having a disease. In other words he mis-spoke, saying something he knew not to be true. He should have reported his own lab’s words, and DFO ignores, in public, the Miller evidence and the two world class labs of Nylund and Kibenge, finding the same thing.
BC is no place for fish farms
Here is the point: the North Pacific is the worst place in the world to have fish farms. That is because there are 10 species of wild salmonids from California, up through BC, Alaska and all the way down the west north Pacific shore to Korea, perhaps a billion fish. Fish farms should not have been let in the water here as now all those wild fish could be lost. More fish farms means Greene’s support could help result in the biggest manmade fish disaster in history.
In Chile, they use antibiotics by the tonne, literally. During the climax of the ISA crisis in 2007, the industry used 385.6 metric tonnes of antibiotics. In 2010 that fell to 143; and in 2012 it climbed again to 337.9.
To put such use in perspective, that is: 743,380 pounds of antibiotics. Disease follows fish farms. ISA has pretty much been constant in Norway since the industry fish changed a freshwater ISA virus to a virulent saltwater form in the 1980s. If you read global fish farm news, you find that Chile is on the edge of another ISA disaster which they don’t report on much – remember those strict laws, well, they tend not to mention those in the same breath as the reports of ISA come in – but the antibiotic use is the evidence of tonnes of disease.
Global public opposition
There comes a point everywhere in the world when the people realize fish farms kill wild fish, trash the ocean and the people want them out of the water. This has happened in BC, NS, NB, Scotland, Ireland, Norway itself, the Faroe Islands and will, shortly, in the USA, in Maine. In Denmark they have already moved 50% of fish farms onto land. I just received a request for my research from a newspaper in Tasmania, Australia.
We need – and our wild BC salmon and all the species that depend on them – need us to get fish farms out of the water. If they want to set up shop on land and control their problems, that’s fine; if they want to go home that would be better. The Norwegian coast, is like BC, with long fjords, and the genetic damage has ruined the wild Atlantic salmon in rivers. The sewage is so bad it is more than all the people in Norway. Just as it is in Scotland and pretty much in BC.
In fact, the public being against fish farms has become a global movement with citizens reaching out to find each other around the world and become better informed. This is how I found out that in Atlantic Canada taxpayers paid $135 Million to fish farms for their dead diseased fish – including BC, the past year’s payment was over $50 million. No one wants to pay a dime of our tax money on fish farms that kill their fish with disease caused by too high density. They need to be on land. And the bigger the farms, the bigger the problem,
In the first week in April, 2014 Marine Harvest in Norway announced that it was forgoing putting in smolts because it feared a full $4 billion loss with all the fish dying from sea lice. This article was pulled from the internet in less than a week (I know because I query other people who follow global fish farm news and they confirmed this); then CEO Aarskog announced that sea lice were the biggest problem in Norway, and for anybody with a solution to get in touch with him asap. This is right now in 2014, the CEO of Marine Harvest, the same Marine Harvest that operates in BC in 2014, right now.
In Norway, sea lice are resistant to lice chemicals and it lobbied the EU to accept an endosulfan limit in fish that is one hundred times higher than before. And the PCB, dioxin, and PCB-like cancer causing chemicals, level is also a factor of ten above all other meat type products in Europe. See the graph – it is not pretty.
Back in Canada, in Nova Scotia, Cooke Aquaculture was caught using the illegal lice chemical, cypermethrin, for two years. When the news hit – facing a $33 million fine and up to 99 years in jail – Cooke said it wanted to study the case evidence, and within a few months of silence, the NS government gave Cooke $25 million for aid.
After receiving the $25 million, Cooke ultimately paid a $500,000 fine from Kelly Cove farms for using illegal chemicals for two years. This kind of behavior, and money from government, is all too common in fish farming in Canada. Read on.
Cermaq sees big losses in Chile
But first, in Chile, Cermaq lost 15% of its Atlantic salmon crop to lice in 2012-13. And Chile is openly acknowledged as the dirtiest fish farm country in the world – increasingly moving south to operate largely within the pristine Patagonia UN biospheres. In main production areas to the north, the limiting factors are: disease, lice and fish farm pollution. When production hits 650,000 mt, no more fish can be grown because ‘nature’ kills them all.
At its peak level of 650,000 mt that means they lose more than the entire harvest, and largest output ever recorded in BC, to lice. That is how bad sea lice problems are. But the people of BC don’t really care about fish farm fish deaths – we care about wild salmonids, and there are 10 species that can be killed by lice – and other non-salmonids like herring.
Chemical restriction gutted for BC farms
So what is happening in BC? Here, DFO has announced that it will drop from the already environmentally gutted Fisheries Act, S 36 – for releasing deleterious substances into water – to give the fish farms the right to try any chemical they want.
The annual Norwegian cost to treat sea lice is $170 million and world wide over $300 million. Cypermethrin kills lobsters – and that was how it was determined that Cooke had been illegally using it in its Kelly Cove farms – as well as other crustaceans, for example, crab and shrimp. Krill, shrimp-like crustaceans, are the step above plankton in the wild salmon food chain in BC. We don’t want them killed.
Do note that the article shows that cypermethrin causes gene mutation, organ abnormalities and cancers in mammals. The chemical is suspected to be carcinogenic in humans.
The strictest laws in the world?
You will find that governments and fish farms around the world repeatedly use the phrase: ‘fish farms operate under the strictest (or among the strictest) environmental laws in the world’ in the country in question, (when anyone complains about their environmental damage). The claim is not true because, in the past year, fish farms have said this in Chile, Scotland, Norway and Canada. As the laws are different in each country, the claim cannot be true.
And, of course, Chile is acknowledged as the dirtiest fish farm country in the world, euphemistically referred to as having ‘sanitary problems’. Not to mention that it may have laws, but that is a different thing from enforcing the laws. For example, read fish farm news in Chile and you will find, that though its chemical use is high, Chile does not report most cases of ISA.
In Canada, the claim is even more untrue because the laws don’t apply all the way across the country. There are different jurisdictions operative on the west coast and on the east coast, both federal and provincial.
Furthermore, in Canada, the claim is more untrue because the Fisheries Act and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act were both gutted a year ago in a federal omnibus bill (an egregious occurrence in itself). But it is even worse than this.
Minister Shea and the DFO ADMs state in the senate video noted in this article, that S 36 of the Fisheries Act, already gutted a year ago, will be further gutted so that fish farms will be able to use whatever deleterious substances they want – say, SLICE, cypermethrin, endosulfan, hydrogen peroxide – on lice and for other reasons.
Norway want laws to ‘deal with Aboriginals in Canada’
And there has been a call for an Aquaculture Act, presumably to eliminate the provincial laws, further weaken laws against the use of chemicals and permit fish farms to use the ocean as a free open sewer, as they do now around the world. Here’s another Canadian nuance: from time to time you will see the Norwegian CEOs saying in the press that there need to be rules to deal with aboriginals in Canada, meaning they don’t want to have to deal with each individual First Nation. They want them rounded up, I suppose.
Industry wants laws gutted even further
There is another issue: as soon as fish farms claim the laws are the strictest in the world, they then use that as an excuse to argue that the laws are too strict and to keep jobs and revenue in the country in a competitive world, the laws need to be relaxed. Or they will move on, which they do anyway because fish farms are a boom and bust industry. Marine Harvest operates in 22 countries, and disease takes one third to one half of all aquaculture animals, as noted above in the Kibenge presentation.
And as I have said, the enforcement staff in BC are swamped with duties and few in number. I may see one every five years or so in the field. And, of course, laying off scientists means that other duties with respect to fish farms also do not get done.
Advice for Senator Greene Raine
I suggest that someone who knows Nancy Greene Raine sit her down and tell her that it is wrong to stand against wild BC salmon. And her name is going to be badly tarnished by associating herself with fish farms.She should be on the side of these up to 90% of sockeye dying from PRV on some Fraser tributary spawning beds, too diseased to spawn. Ask DFO to stand by wild BC salmon, and eliminate fish farms from our pristine waters. They sure don’t stand by wild BC salmon right now in 2014.
As BC’s First Nations are showing with their on-land, closed-containment operation, there is a better way.
VANCOUVER – British Columbia Environment Ministry staff have warned their minister that the province’s dreamed-of liquefied natural gas industry poses some big challenges with greenhouse gas emissions.
Internal briefing notes prepared for Environment Minister Mary Polak since she took office last year and obtained by The Canadian Press, single out methane emissions for concern.
On top of emissions from combustion and flaring of natural gas, methane and carbon dioxide escape during hydraulic fracturing process, or fracking, the documents said. One July briefing note warned:
[quote]Methane emissions are a particular concern since they have a global warming impact 21 times higher than carbon dioxide. A small increase in the percentage of natural gas that escapes can have a significant impact on overall emissions.[/quote]
At a meeting last November, staff warned Polak that the federal government has updated its formula for calculating greenhouse gas emissions and that alone will increase methane values by 20 per cent. The province will need to follow suit, members of the Climate Action Secretariat told Polak.
Premier Christy Clark says B.C. is poised to develop a trillion-dollar LNG industry.
But emissions remain a hurdle for the provinces, which has legislated targets for reductions. Legislation dictates that emissions are to be reduced by at least a third below 2007 levels by 2020.
Polak has also been told that while B.C. estimates that between 0.3 and three per cent of natural gas extracted is lost as fugitive methane emissions, other North American jurisdictions and scientific literature estimate that rate is between seven and eight per cent.
The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates between four and nine per cent is lost.
However, in B.C. regulations are significantly different, the briefing notes pointed out. Because B.C. gas contains toxic hydrogen sulfide, leaks are more tightly regulated.
The province’s Climate Action Secretariat and Natural Gas Development Ministry are working with the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers to test technology to curb emissions, said the internal documents.
“Though significant, this work does not address concerns about potential fracking-related emissions from geological formations, poor cement casing or produced water storage tanks,” said the briefing prepared last July.
Polak declined a request for an interview. In an emailed statement to The Canadian Press, the ministry said:
[quote]Based on academic research and work in the United States, there is concern that fugitive or unplanned emissions from oil and gas facilities are higher than currently reported in B.C.[/quote]
The federal government has updated its greenhouse gas emissions formula and the province “is examining” when to update its own regulations, it said.
The Climate Action Secretariat is working with the association and industry to find ways to reduce emissions and “ensure emissions levels are properly understood,” it said.
They’ve initiated a joint study of emissions levels and, as a result of updated information, the province has removed an outdated metering requirement, the statement said.
“International greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting and measurement practices are changing as research and the understanding of science evolves,” the ministry said.
B.C. has been underestimating the impact of methane, said Tom Pedersen, executive director of the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions, a collaboration between the University of Victoria, Simon Fraser University, the University of British Columbia and the University of Northern British Columbia.
But provincial officials are very aware of the challenges, he said.
[quote]This is not something that they are trying to sweep under the rug. They are concerned about it and they are trying to put in place appropriate regulations to deal with it.[/quote]
That will require intensive monitoring and enforcement of regulations, he said.
“At the same time, one does have to be realistic about this, there is pushback from industry. They would prefer not to have regulations of course.”
We want fish farms out of our pristine ocean and put on land, or they can go back to Norway. More than 100,000 British Columbians have signed a petition urging Premier Clark to refuse any expansion leases in BC.
I doubt Nancy Greene Raine knew this and probably needs time to gather independent information and think things over. As it is, she is out of step with the entire province. And I doubt she has considered how soiled her name will become if she gets on the fish farm side of this issue rather than standing with wild BC salmon.
Fish farms tied to wild salmon die-off
There are only 50% of wild salmon left in BC since fish farms set up shop here. Does she want to be the name associated with the loss of wild salmon? I wouldn’t think so. This is the science.
In all fairness, I think she, and the other senators on the committee are just innocents and believe what DFO and fish farms tell them about jobs and revenue, rather than looking at the science themselves. See Gail Shea talk to the senators, Feb 25, 2014.
Jobs over science, environment
In the senate video, the three DFO ADMs make the case that the only thing that stands in the way of expanding the fish farm industry, is that the regulations on sea lice drugs need to be rationalized. And the Senators agree there should be nothing in the way of new jobs and revenue.
It also came clear that Swerdfager/Beven/Gillis have little knowledge of BC salmon. They suggest salmon are milling about in the ocean in any old place and when it comes to spawning time, they go to any old river. Only someone in Ottawa could be so out of touch – too bad it is DFO. And they ignore the many problems with fish farms.
Thriving salmon run doesn’t pass by fish farms
For the record, salmon have set out-travel routes, grid like precision in the open ocean where they feed and set return-routes, and they not only come back to the same river, but spawn within 100 yards of where they hatched. And so on with succeeding generations.
That is why, for instance, that the Harrison component of the 100 subcomponent Fraser sockeye run is coming back in record numbers. Historically they returned at about 38,000, but now are nearing 400,000. This is because, unlike other Fraser sub-components, they migrate out to sea through Juan de Fuca Strait where there are no fish farms, rather than Johnstone where there are. They don’t get killed by fish farm diseases, or lice and ocean survival has been good.
I took the bait too…until I read the science
Now, back to Swerdfager et al. They suggest the only wrinkle is that lice chemical thing, and the senators agreed – it’s about jobs after all. But the ADMs didn’t let on that the Harper Government has already gutted the Fisheries Act and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act and let go 200 scientists, many in BC. And they didn’t say what a huge problem that sea lice really are. The most recent example of many is Norway where lice are so resistant to pesticides, SLICE etc., that chemical use has gone up 80-fold in a decade. That’s how bad lice can be.
To be fair to Nancy Greene, in the beginning, I thought saving wild salmon in the ocean and feeding a hungry world sounded good, too. But then I started finding holes in the arguments. Instead of saving wild salmon, the science shows that fish farms kill them. And fish farm salmon will never feed a hungry world. That is because they cost too much, and can only be sold to first world consumers. In fact, in Chile, the industry destroyed the small fish in the ocean such as anchovies and jack mackerel, to feed their fish.
Farmed salmon gobble up other fish species
The anchovy should have been the protein for the poor mouths of the world, say Chileans, but they were fed to fish farm fish. Today, fish farms say they are moving on to ‘improve’ their feed, but do not acknowledge their role as important contributors to the massive declines – in other words they have no choice but to move on from fish-based feed. Today, boats are scouring the Antarctica, and down the food chain to catch krill for fish feed, if you can believe it. And off Chile the Asian fish farms are still scooping up what wild fish remain and taking them to Asian fish farms, largely prawns – the only industry dirtier than Chile’s fish farms. Read global news on www.thefishsite.com, for a while.
A deceptive industry
I am a citizen of BC and make no money out of this, but I became aghast at the deceptiveness and intransigence of fish farms around the world. I realized how bad fish farm companies were when I read an article on how they neutralized an article by Albany, New York, scientists – Hites et al, in Science, January 9, 2004 – on the cancer causing chemicals in farmed salmon – PCBs, dioxins, POPs and so on.
The article reads like a Hollywood movie, and it came clear to me that every claim fish farms make has to be ground proofed. Read this Spinwatch article. It leaves you feeling you would not have believed corporate citizens could sink so low. See if they don’t remind you of tobacco CEOs.
Farmed salmon and chemicals
And just so that you know, the Hites group has gone on to publish many more articles on chemicals in farmed salmon in the decade since. It’s become world news. In fact, the biggest story out of Norway, where the BC industry is from, in the past year, is doctors and scientists repeatedly warning Norwegians not to eat farmed salmon, particularly women, pregnant women, and children, because of the chemicals in the fish. For a collection of these articles, see here. Cancer causing PCBs, for example, take more than 50 years to be washed from the body.
So farmed fish is full of many kinds of chemicals, the cancer causing ones from feed, then SLICE, endosulfan and a host of other pesticides and antibiotics. The cancer causing chemical problem is currently causing big problems for the Scotland industry – they tried to maintain the fiction they were sustainable and organic. If they said it long enough perhaps people would believe it.
Closed-containment is the answer
The solution to this and most other problems is and has always been taking the farms out of the water and growing the fish on land in closed containers, like the Namgis project on Vancouver Island. I don’t think Raine has much acquaintance with the real problems, so here is a list I will send to her. You might want to contact her too: nancy.raine@sen.parl.gc.ca.
DFO is conflicted with fish farms.
The Cohen Commission told the Harper government to remove the conflict and make DFO get on with saving wild salmon.
Fish farms are not about jobs and revenue. They are a net negative to the economy.
Fish feed has cancer causing, and other chemicals in it.
Diseases kill one third to one half of all aquaculture products around the globe.
Wild salmon decline more than 50% where fish farms are introduced around the world.
Fish farms already have triple the capacity than what they use in BC. They do not need expansions.
On land fish farms solve virtually all problems of in-ocean open-net fish farms.
Fish farm sewage costs are astronomical and no one wants to pay for them.
Fish farms kill seals, sea lions and other animals around the globe.
Cohen Commission reconvened over fish farm diseases, when ISA was demonstrated in wild salmon.
Aquatic animal disease is part and parcel of aquaculture.
Scientists and doctors tell Norwegians not to eat farmed salmon because of the chemicals in them.
Public opposition to in-ocean fish farms is growing around the world.
Sea lice chemical use grows dramatically.
Governments and fish farms like to claim they operate under the strictest laws in the world, which is not true, and then fish farms push for weakening the laws.
Tune in for my next article that discusses these negative impacts of fish farms.
Fracking operations in BC’s Montney Shale (Photo: Damien Gillis)
Despite admitting there is an increasing trend of inactive well sites awaiting reclamation, the BC Oil and Gas Commission has slashed its budget for its orphan site reclamation fund from $4.83 million in 2013 to just $1 million in 2014.
According to the Orphan Well Association, “an orphan is a well, pipeline, facility or associated site which has been investigated and confirmed as not having any legally responsible or financially able party to deal with its abandonment and reclamation.”
Earlier this year, the BC Ministry of Finance announced the 2014 Budget, focused on LNG development. According to the budget, the Liberals plan to spend $29 million over the next three years on LNG development alone. The National Energy Board also approved seven LNG export applications for BC, touted as the basis for a $100 billion Prosperity Fund that will wipe out the province’s debt by 2028.
In order to increase LNG development, the oil and gas industry will have to ramp up drilling, fracking and the number of LNG plants along the coast.
This push to expand LNG resources will create more orphan sites, but the government does not have the funds for reclamation because the Commission has scheduled to cut its cleanup expenditures. According to the BC Oil and Gas Commission’s 2014 Service Plan.
[quote]There is a trend of increasing inactive well sites awaiting reclamation as the industry matures. Delays in the implementation of restoration activities may increase the number of inactive sites and associated liabilities.[/quote]
Gas production in the province
In the northern BC regions of the Liard and Horn River Basins, and Montney shale field, the production from a natural gas well typically declines by 61 to 80-percent in just three years, according to geoscientist, David Hughes’ research. By that point, the well is all but played out, requiring far more drilling to keep up with production demands.
(Photo: Watershed Sentinel)
With the limited lifespan of these wells and the demand the LNG industry will place on fracking in BC, Hughes estimates industry will need to drill a staggering 50,000 new wells by 2040 – twice the total number in the 60 year history of the province’s natural gas industry.
That means the number of wells left behind will sharply increase. For example, the Horn River Basin gas well has a depletion rate of 80-percent in the first three years.
With a budget of $1 million until 2017, the BC Oil and Gas Commission will be unable to keep up with the demand for new sites as industry continues drilling, unable to account for the vast number of well pads reaching orphan stage, leaving more orphan well sites than they are able to responsibly reclaim.
Government and industry are driving a massive experiment in fracking and LNG development without being sure of the consequences for this scale of development.
For instance, in October the BC Ministry of Environment funded the $650,000 Kitimat Airshed Impact Assessment Project to measure the cumulative effects of existing and proposed industrial air emissions in the Kitimat Valley airshed. The SkeenaWild Conservation Trust accessed this research in their November 2013 “Air Advisory” report, concluding, “this research is being carried out under tight timelines and with a limited budget… raises concerns about whether current research can provide a comprehensive understanding of potential impacts on which to base sound decisions.”
The Kitimat airshed blockage from the current Rio Tinto Alcan aluminum smelter plant’s carbon dioxide emissions has demonstrated the link between human health problems and industrial air emissions in the area.
“It’s a new era and it needs to be spoken about differently than any other time you’ve done gas before,” says Eoin Madden, climate campaigner with the Wilderness Committee.
[quote] I had one call from Fort Nelson First Nation which described it as carpet-bombing. It’s taking wilderness and carpet-bombing it like you would have seen back in Vietnam. It’s that destructive.[/quote]
The concern is that shale gas and LNG are a very different animal from the historical conventional industry with which the province is so familiar.
“When folks hear LNG they don’t realize the danger and that we’re talking about a completely different product from what we’ve traditionally had in BC,” says Madden. “It’s the product that forces us to swap our fresh water for gas and it’s the product that forces us to industrialize enormous amounts of wilderness.”
The unknown consequences of orphan sites
Hydrologist, Dr. Gilles Wendling, presented the unknowns about groundwater in the Yukon in January to the Yukon legislative committee.
“We are extremely ignorant about groundwater,” said Wendling.
[quote]We don’t know where our aquifers are. Even shallow aquifers, we don’t know where they are, we don’t know how big they are, we don’t know how deep they are. We don’t know the water table elevation, we don’t even know in which direction the groundwater moves, we don’t know, we haven’t collected the information.[/quote]
The unknown dangers with old well sites come from the toxic water reserves created during hydraulic fracturing. Not all old well sites become orphan wells. The majority of them are injected with fracking fluid flowback that’s been mixed with toxic additives, such as ethylene glycol, methanol, hydrochloric acid, formaldehyde, mercury, uranium, and lead. The toxic flowback is then injected deep underground into old oil wells that haven’t become orphan sites. These types of wells that use this technique of deep oilfield injection are known as disposal wells. Disposal wells are old wells which use the drilling hole to dispose the leftover fluid from hydraulic fracking. These disposal wells are then sealed with concrete to prevent open exposure.
Toxic flowback fluid from hydraulic fracking (Photo: Upstream Pumping Solutions).
But wastewater-injected wells contain structural risks says Wendling. Active wells, disposal wells and orphan wells are all subject to native conditions, such as mini earthquakes, that create micro-fractures in the cement seals and corrosion in the casing of the well hole where leaks can happen a year to a decade as the structural integrity of the well degrades.
Well integrity is how wells are sealed and how a well’s sealing capacity will be modified with time.
“Once a hole is drilled in the ground, this hole is drilled forever,” says Wendling.
[quote]This hole goes through various zones which are under different pressures and which contain different types of fluids like gases, or liquids or a mix of the two. Once you have a hole that reaches through various zones and it’s properly sealed then it doesn’t act as a pathway, but with time and depending on induced anomalies, like mini-earthquakes, that cause fracturation – how is this going to effect the integrity of the well, how is it going to create micro-fractures along the well, how is it going to crack the cement seal along the well after one year, five years, ten years, 100 years, how is this going to change with time?[/quote]
If these disposal wells leak after deep oilfield injection, there is potential for our groundwater sources, that feed lakes and rivers, to become contaminated by these hydraulic fracturing chemicals because they can undergo pressure changes in the injection site that acts like a pathway for the mixing of deep and shallow water systems once the well’s integrity is jeopardized. There is a lot of research being conducted right now to grasp the risks associated with creating and connecting non-native pathways underground through drilling, but there are still a lot of unanswered questions about the dangers of disposal wells and orphan well sites, says Wendling.
Boom and bust economy
Hardy Friedrich, manager of communications for the Oil and Gas Commission in Fort St. John was given the opportunity to comment on the Commission’s plan for orphan well site reclamation but declined to comment in a phone interview.
“We shouldn’t get dragged into conversations about how much money should be spent reclaiming well sites,” says Madden. “Should the BC government spend money on that, or should Encana, or Talisman, or Apache, whoever made the mess? The way we’re thinking about it is endemic of how much ownership over our politics the oil and gas industry has.”
According to Madden, the dependence on the public to clean up after the energy industry reflects a fundamental problem in Canada’s fossil fuel economy.
[quote]The rules should state if you open a gas well, you’re responsible for remediation.[/quote]
However, that is not the case in BC. Taxpayer money is budgeted by the BC Oil and Gas Commission to reclaim orphan well sites so oil companies can move onto the next drilling project, but this allotted budget for environmental remediation is not enough to keep up with the demand for oil and gas.
In June 2013, Natural Resources Canada mandated that pipeline companies have at least $1 billion of cleanup funds available to deal with incidents. If the government of Canada is willing to make the polluter pay in the event of a pipeline spill, why doesn’t the government hold oil companies accountable for reclaiming their old well sites as well?
Alternative forms of energy for a sustainable economy and jobs
“The infrastructure I would advocate for right now is an infrastructure that shifts how we think about energy and how we create energy jobs,” says Madden.
[quote]You’ve got geothermal potential, wind, solar power, different ways you can make energy. The question mark is over whether we should even have an export energy market?[/quote]
With the current plan for LNG development there is not enough money in the budget to responsibly account for the necessary cleanup associated with LNG and shale gas development. Without this in place, the BC government risks running their fresh water supplies into the ground, along with their ability to deal with climate change.
“If you’re responsible on the environment, you’re going to create more jobs, that’s the truth,” says Madden.
According to Madden and other critics of LNG development, the government risks alienating public support for its LNG vision if it passes the buck for industry cleanup to taxpayers.
The Unist’ot’en camp’s Toghestiy (left) and Mel Bazil stand in the path of 3 pipelines (Two Island Films)
UPDATE: Fort Nelson First Nation drums government, industry reps out of LNG conference, outraged over lack of consultation on surprise gutting of environmental reviews for gas plants. Government issues swift apology and cancels changes (more below).
One of the biggest myths pervading BC’s energy dialogue goes something like this: While First Nations stand united against the proposed Enbridge pipeline, they overwhelmingly embrace Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG).
Sure, Premier Christy Clark can tick off a list of aboriginal allies in her effort to build at least five among a dozen terminals proposed for Kitimat and Prince Rupert. Just last week, she announced with great fanfare LNG revenue sharing agreements with two coastal nations – Metlakatla and Lax Kw’alaams.
But a growing group of hereditary leaders, grassroots members and their allies, even some elected governments, are rising up in opposition – from the fracking fields of northeast BC that would supply the industry, to the various proposed pipeline routes across the province, to the coastal communities that would house the hulking terminals.
LNG is designed to achieve higher prices for BC’s gas in Asia, by cooling it to -160 degrees celsius, thus liquefying it so it can be loaded onto tankers bound for China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, and India. But it may be investors who are getting cold feet amid the myriad challenges facing the industry.
Gitxsan Nation hereditary chiefs deliver a cease-and-desist order to TransCanada (Photo: Graeme Pole)
In a little-reported but highly significant development a few weeks ago, a group of Gitxsan hereditary chiefs in the Kispiox Valley, near Hazelton, ordered TransCanada to cease and desist test drilling relating to the pipeline it plans to construct to Prince Rupert on behalf of Malaysian, Japanese and Indian LNG partners.
The issue adds more uncertainty to the province’s nascent LNG industry, on top of the unified opposition of all five clans of the Wet’suwet’en Nation to the south; mounting concerns from Treaty 8 and Fort Nelson First Nation in the heart of northeast BC’s fracking country; and increasing scrutiny of the proposed Woodfibre LNG Plant in Squamish territory, near Vancouver.
A brief survey of the geography and indigenous territorial boundaries of BC, juxtaposed with these respective challenges, reveals a far more perilous landscape for this industry to traverse than the rosy picture being painted in Victoria and on press junkets to Asia.
Whether you’re a BC taxpayer about to commit massive public subsidies to this industry, or a board member or shareholder of a company contemplating investing the tens of billions of dollars required to build LNG infrastructure, it may be useful to know the real odds before laying a bet on BC LNG.
A tale of two nations: Hereditary vs. Elected
Understanding the discrepancy between the official story on First Nations’ support for LNG and the emerging, contrary reality requires some sense of the different – often competing – systems of governance amongst BC’s aboriginal communities.
Broadly speaking, there are two main forms of aboriginal government: elected and hereditary. The former is a product of the Indian Act – elected band councils which govern reserves created by the Crown. The latter is an ancestral system of leadership made up of houses and clans – the specific makeup varying from nation to nation. Hereditary governments may also incorporate democratic elements – i.e. not strictly “hereditary” per our western concept of the term – whereby chiefs’ names are passed on through decisions reached in the feast hall or by presiding chiefs or house groups.
Where these systems still exist, hereditary chiefs may hold jurisdiction over their nations’ often vast, resource-rich traditional territories. The Canadian case law on this subject is relatively new and not well defined, but individual nations often have their own laws or internal protocol agreements on the subject of jurisdiction. Elected band councils, meanwhile, are responsible for the much smaller reserves which many First Nations inhabit today. Jurisdiction remains a contentious legal issue, specific to individual nations. That said, a number of deals involving pipelines and energy terminals have been signed by elected councils, which is sewing conflict in some communities.
Gitxsan: Home of Delgamuukw
In Gitxsan territory – which covers some 53,000 square kilometers surrounding the mighty Skeena River in northwest BC – a rogue chief and head of the nation’s treaty society (another entity which can hold considerable sway in aboriginal communities), Elmer Derrick, stoked a firestorm when he signed an unauthorized deal with Enbridge in 2011. Derrick and his cohorts were promptly evicted from the treaty office and the deal was torn up – by the very hereditary chiefs whose support he had erroneously claimed.
The hereditary system is deeply rooted in Gitxsan culture, as it is with their neighbours to the south, the Wet’suwet’en. These two nations together won the landmark Delgamuukw v. British Columbia case at the Supreme Court of Canada. Some of the same 48 hereditary chiefs who initiated the case in 1984 are still alive today, standing in the path of myriad proposed pipelines.
As this federal government summary of the case explains, Delgamuukw legally entrenched the existence of aboriginal title and rights contained in the country’s constitution:
“Delgamuukw confirmed that common law Aboriginal title, recognized as a common law Aboriginal right prior to 1982, was “constitutionalized … in its full form” by section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 (par. 133)”
The ruling itself noted: “[A]boriginal title confers more than the right to engage in site-specific activities which are aspects of the practices, customs and traditions of distinctive aboriginal cultures…What aboriginal title confers is the right to the land itself.” However, the court stopped short of confirming Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en title, requiring a new case be brought to address that matter specifically.
The ripple effects of this decision continue to be felt today and weigh heavily upon the LNG issue.
Gixtsan chiefs evict TransCanada
BC map of First Nations, highlighting Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en lands
Take a look at the BC Government’s map of First Nations territories. Now, draw a line around the neighbouring Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en nations (pictured to the right). Note how they form a 500 km-long vertical wall, smack in the middle of every major pipeline route proposed across northern BC. Now you have a glimpse of the trouble awaiting these projects, were both nations to block their path.
And that is precisely what’s taking root on the ground right now, though you wouldn’t know it from Christy Clark’s endless stream of LNG photo-ops touting First Nations’ embrace of the industry.
In late March, Gitxsan Hereditary Chief Wa’a (Samson Muldoe) delivered a letter to TransCanada workers conducting test drilling in the Kispiox Valley, related to one of the two major pipelines being eyed to take fracked natural gas from northeast BC to Prince Rupert (see video below).
The letter, signed by a number of high-ranking hereditary chiefs, stated, “As rightful guardians of the territory on which this work is being carried out, this is to instruct TransCanada Pipelines and its contractors and representatives to cease and desist from this work immediately and to remove all their equipment, vehicles and personnel by the end of Tuesday, March 25th, 2014, and to not return thereafter.”
To the point of governance and jurisdiction, the letter continued:
“We assert that the persons representing the Gitxsan Nation, with whom TransCanada Pipelines has been dealing to this point, do not have legitimate right to make decisions with regards to [the territory] where the work mentioned is now taking place – and that TransCanada Pipelines has thus failed to properly consult, as required pursuant to the Delgamuukw Supreme Court of Canada 1997 ruling.”
The chiefs identified impacts on Skeena River salmon from pipelines, LNG terminals and potential fracking in the region as the prime motives for their action.
Petronas’ magic trick
The issue is of particular sensitivity given pipeline owner Petronas/Progress Energy’s attempt to erase the Skeena River and estuary from its project description maps (a story broken by The Common Sense Canadian last year). The uproar over the issue, combined with concern about the impacts of the proposed LNG plant on vital estuary habitat during the worst year on record for Skeena sockeye, forced a significant extension to the initial public comment period on the project.
The eviction order is a wake-up call for TransCanada and it should come as no surprise if Spectra Energy, the proponent of the other major pipeline to Prince Rupert, met with a similar notice from the chiefs.
Wet’suwet’en chiefs ban all pipelines
Meanhwhile, several hundred kilometers to the south, Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs banned all pipelines – including the proposed Enbridge pipeline and two major gas conduits – through their territory last summer.
Hereditary Chief Na’moks, leader of the Tsayu Clan, explained to me on camera last October that the heads of all five Wet’suwet’en clans had voted to ban all pipelines through their 22,000 square kilometer territory – with unmistakable resolve.
Like the Gitxsan chiefs, Na’moks raised fracking – the ultimate source of this gas – as a key concern in reaching their decision:
“When you’re talking about fracking and the dangers that come with it – the waste of water, the poisoning of water, the waste of land…when we allow pipelines, we have to take that responsibility that we’re supporting this industry to continue that. As Wet’suwet’en, we can’t do that.”
LNG means 50,000 new holes in the ground: geoscientist
A fracking drill in BC’s Horn River Basin (Two Island Films)
So these chiefs are right to be concerned about the implications of LNG plans in terms of increased fracking and environmental impacts.
Unist’ot’en Clan holds the line
At the end of a series of forest service roads west of the sawmill town of Houston, BC, lies a solar-powered cabin on the banks of the Morice River. It may soon become ground zero in the battle over BC’s proposed pipelines.
There, members of one of the five Wet’suwet’en clans, the Unist’ot’en, have been strategically occupying their land – directly in the path of two gas pipelines and the Enbridge pipeline – for several years now. Their position is simple: No pipelines will cross their territory, period. They’ve already evicted contractors doing survey work for one of the proposed pipelines, Chevron and Apache’s Pacific Trails project.
I’ve visited the camp on two occasions – this past winter and in its early days in the summer of 2012 – for my forthcoming film Fractured Land. It’s a beehive of activity, with supporters regularly joining the camp for weeks to assist with various chores, the construction of new facilities, and gathering and preparing food.
The Unist’ot’en camp has raised close to $20,000 for bunk house renos
They work to feed themselves in a traditional manner from hunting, trapping and fishing, though one of the camp’s leaders, who goes by the traditional name of Toghestiy, acknowledged to me on a tour of their trapline this winter that with diminished wildlife following years of logging in the region, they are forced to supplement their traditional diet with other food sources.
Though the group runs the risk of being characterized as militant radicals, that would appear, on closer inspection, to be a gross misunderstanding of their motives and philosophy. “We’re not about a fight,” camp regular Mel Bazil explained on our last trip. “I don’t wake up thinking, ‘Is the fight coming on today?’…We’re prepared to protect ourselves, but we’re more prepared to build with people a shared responsibility that we can really believe in – that will not occur from a board room or a government level.”
Many of the camp’s members are are schooled in both western universities and the traditional ways of their people, having left high-ranking jobs in aboriginal governance, social work and other fields to embrace a different way of life, in reaction to serious challenges facing their land and people.
“This planet is in trouble. If we can all agree upon that and not worry about how media and governments are spinning it, we really must all, as a people, take control of ourselves.”
Injunction being sought?
Born into another Wet’suwet’en clan, Toghestiy is married to Freda Huson of the Unist’ot’en, the camp’s frequent spokesperson. The pair were in Vancouver last week for an emergency press conference, after they caught wind of an alleged plan by government and industry officials to obtain an injunction against their camp.
When pressed by the Globe and Mail’s Mark Hume, Chevron representative Gillian Robinson-Riddell denied seeking an injunction. She did, however, seem to acknowledge that the company has yet to secure the social licence it requires from First Nations to commit fully to the project financially:
“We’re working toward a final investment decision but there are a few factors [that have to be confirmed] yet…We are looking for further First Nation support.
Video by Eric Doherty
Camp building broad support
The Unist’ot’en are currently running a crowd funding campaign to further build up their camp. With several weeks to go, they’ve nearly met their goal of $20,000 – evidence of the broad support their cause is attracting. From the looks of it, the group isn’t going anywhere – certainly not without a Herculean effort on behalf of government, industry and law enforcement that could well backfire under public scrutiny.
Canada: The world is watching you
When I asked Ms. Huson what would happen if authorities tried to serve an injunction, she replied:
“Supporters would walk off their jobs and come join us. People from all over have said busloads would come to our camp.” Others as far away as Ontario “would close highways” in sympathy.
“My message is: “Canada, the world is watching you.”
I asked Ms. Huson what she would say to the elected chiefs who have signed LNG deals. “I would ask them, ‘Have you done your homework?'” she replied. “Have you investigated how LNG plants affect the air and water; how you will affect not just your communities, but people upstream and downstream?…And what would your ancestors do?
More First Nations opposition brewing
In northeast BC, First Nations leaders have long worked to balance the natural gas industry’s job benefits to their members with its environmental impacts. But with the shift from conventional gas to riskier fracking, change is in the wind.
Now, as they peer over the horizon at a massive build-up of fracking to feed these proposed LNG terminals, they are increasingly expressing concern for the future. The Fort Nelson First Nation came out swinging in 2012 against 20 proposed long-term water licences for fracking in their territory, forcing the government to pull them off the table – with the exception of one, which is currently being litigated by the band.
In 2013, Chief Sharleen Gale and Lands Manager Lana Lowe co-penned an op-ed in The Globe and Mail, which stopped short of opposing the industry, but raised alarm bells over the implications of LNG for their territory – calling for increased environmental standards and royalty sharing to compensate their community. If anything, their estimate of future impacts was highly conservative, in light geoscientist David Hughes’ figures and the Clark government’s bullish outlook for building LNG plants:
“Should a modest number of LNG plants be built we anticipate at least 3,000 new wells will be drilled and fracked over the next decade. This will remove millions of tonnes of frack sand from our land, and trillions of litres of water from our rivers, unleashing a race for large-scale industrial frack sand mining and freshwater withdrawals…Industry has already proven unable or unwilling to stay within the generous water allocations provided to them for fracking.”
Finally, in a surprise turn of events this week, Fort Nelson First Nation members, led by the strong words of Chief Gale, literally drummed out government and industry representatives from a conference the band was hosting on liquefied natural gas (LNG).
The 3-day conference, titled “Striking the Balance”, was designed to discuss both the economic opportunities and potential environmental impacts of increased fracking in the nation’s territory. But things got off on the wrong foot when the BC Liberal government made a surprise announcement on Tuesday that new sweet gas processing plants would be exempted from environmental assessment.
Chief Gale alluded to the betrayal in her comments from the podium at the event today:
“The word from my elders is you treat people kind. You treat them with respect even when they’re stabbing you in the back…so I respectfully ask government to remove themselves from the room.”
Several dozen government officials promptly arose and left, to the beating of Dene drummers. LNG and shale gas industry representatives were asked to stay behind for a few minutes to hear about the nation’s concerns in greater detail, after which they too were dismissed. (see video here).
The message was received loud and clear by the Liberal government, as Energy Minister Mary Polak issued a swift, statement repealing the planned change to the province’s environmental assessment laws.
“I would like to acknowledge First Nations concerns about amendments to the Reviewable Projects Regulation under the Environmental Assessment Act,” stated Polak. “Our government apologizes for failing to discuss the amendment with First Nations prior to its approval.”
Non-BC First Nations take hard line against fracking
As Common Sense Canadian contributor Kevin Logan asked last year, is Elsipogtog the spark that will light the fire of fracking protest amongst other First Nations in places like BC and Alberta? Fort Nelson Chief Gale and Lands Manager Lowe suggested as much in their Globe editorial at the time:
[quote]Sadly it has taken the images from New Brunswick over the past two weeks to raise the debate around “shale gas” to the national stage. It has taken Elsipogtog people being arrested, and images of burning vehicles to illuminate how raw the tension is between the indigenous peoples, and the federal and provincial governments around unchecked resource extraction…We feel particularly close to our relatives in New Brunswick. We share a connection through our treaties and our concern for the land, water and air and the future generations in the face of shale gas.[/quote]
BC LNG a risky bet
The BC Liberal government is banking on support for LNG from First Nations based on the jobs it is dangling before them – as bloated and unrealistic as these claims clearly are. Now-Minister of Natural Gas Development Rich Coleman told political pundit Vaughn Palmer in 2012, “One of the greatest outcomes for this would be that every First Nation young person coming through in the next ten years can get a trade or a job…in the LNG business.”
BC Premier Christy Clark (Photo: Tina Lovegreen)
But in order for BC LNG’s ship to set sail, it will require hundreds of billions of dollars in private capital – not to mention huge taxpayer subsidies. And there are already myriad signs that this boat won’t float – from the government’s difficulty in developing a long-delayed export tax regime, to the lack of a single major investment commitment from any proponent in the 8 or so years the industry has been brewing.
At some point, investors will be confronted with the fact that, on top of all the other risks associated with this incredibly costly and volatile industry, they face growing opposition from First Nations.
Even in the best of circumstances, LNG is a gamble. Given the odds facing BC’s attempts to build an industry, I’d think long and hard before laying my chips on the table.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The passage on hereditary vs. elected governments has been updated since original publication to better reflect the nuances of this subject.
Gridlock in China forces drivers out of their cars
In railing against everything from bike lanes to transit spending, pundits and politicians often raise the spectre of a “war on cars.” Of course, there is no war on cars – but there should be.
Cars directly kill and hurt more people every year than most diseases, resulting in 1.5 million deaths and 78 million injuries needing medical care, according to the World Bank. Road injury is the eighth leading cause of death worldwide. Pollution from cars also causes acute and chronic health problems that often result in premature death – from heart disease and stroke to respiratory illness and lung cancer.
Emissions from cars double since 1970
Environmental impacts of cars are also well-known and wide-ranging, including climate change, smog and oily run-off from roads, not to mention the green space sacrificed for infrastructure to sell, drive, fuel and park them. Despite fuel-efficiency improvements, emissions from vehicles have more than doubled since 1970, and will increase with rising car demand in countries like China, India and Brazil, according to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.
Time for a recall
Because many people, especially North Americans, can’t conceive of a world without cars for everyone, we overlook major problems caused by our private automobile obsession. We’re rightly outraged when a company like General Motors ignores faulty ignition switches in some of its vehicles, thought to have caused 13 deaths over 13 years. The massive recall that followed was justified and necessary. But as a headline on Treehugger’s website argues, “It’s time for a bigger recall of a seriously defective product: The Car.”
The article continues:
Since we can’t recall every car all at once and redesign the entire country, there are at least things we can do to make it less [quote]bad. Significantly reduce speed limits. Make drivers pay the full cost of infrastructure construction and maintenance through the gas tax. Build the cost of medical care for those millions of injured by cars into the price of gas. Invest in walkable cities and alternative forms of transport.[/quote]
Seattle newsweekly The Stranger, only somewhat tongue-in-cheek, created a 2011 manifesto for a real war on cars. “We demand that car drivers pay their own way, bearing the full cost of the automobile-petroleum-industrial complex that has depleted our environment, strangled our cities, and drawn our nation into foreign wars,” it says.
[quote]Reinstate the progressive motor vehicle excise tax, hike the gas tax, and toll every freeway, bridge, and neighborhood street until the true cost of driving lies as heavy and noxious as our smog-laden air.[/quote]
Drivers need better alternatives
As Treehugger notes, we can’t shift from car-centric societies overnight. And until we find ways to better design our urban areas, many people will continue to rely on cars. After all, in the “developed” world, and increasingly in the developing world, we privilege private automobiles when creating infrastructure, often at the expense of what we need for public transit, walking and cycling.
Car and oil companies bought and dismantled public transit
Some even claim automobile and oil companies bought and dismantled streetcar and urban rail lines from the mid-1930s to the 1950s to sell more cars and oil. Fuel efficiency wasn’t a concern because, before pollution and climate change impacts were known, gas sale profits were a priority. Many factors were involved in the development of car culture, but we now find ourselves in an era when much of our oil is burned to propel mostly single users in inefficient vehicles.
Only 15% of fuel used to power vehicle
Even with today’s improved fuel standards, only about 15 per cent of the energy from each litre of fuel burned is used to move the vehicle, which typically weighs 10 to 20 times more than the passenger(s) it carries. That translates to about a one per cent efficiency to move those passengers.
Although we can’t stop using cars altogether, we can curtail their damage to people and the environment. We can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by cutting back on car use, choosing fuel-efficient vehicles, joining a car pool or sharing program and reducing speed. At the policy level, we need increased investment in public transit and cycling and pedestrian infrastructure, stronger fuel-efficiency standards, reduced speed limits, higher gas taxes and human-centric urban design.
Besides combatting pollution and climate change, reduced dependency on private automobiles will lead to healthier people, fewer deaths and injuries and livable cities with happier citizens. And that’s worth fighting for!
With contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Senior Editor Ian Hanington.
Top corporate leaders gather at the annual Bildergberg conference in 2010
“Freedom” and “democracy” are useful words, but very bankrupt: useful because they serve to advance imperial/corporate agendas, bankrupt because they are empty vessels, perennially co-opted.
When illegal coups are orchestrated to overthrow democratically elected governments in Venezuela, Honduras, Ukraine, or elsewhere, the lies of freedom and democracy are seamlessly attached to the criminal acts.
“Freedom” and “democracy” are still cloaking, tacitly or overtly, mass murder and genocide in Iraq, at this moment.
Hostile takeovers
As long as the masses are fooled, conquest and regime change, not democracy and freedom, are enabled and perpetuated. Illegal coups and wars of aggression are about imperial control, setting up puppet dictators, and the imposition of neoliberal economic business models for the corporate extensions of the invading nations.
Once the vanquished “host” nation is subjugated, its industries are corporatized, and wealth is extracted for the benefit of transnational corporations, corporate elites, and local oligarchs. The vanquished nations face corresponding losses of political and economic self-determination, human rights, democracy, and freedom. De facto corporate proxy regimes may call themselves democratic, or proclaim freedom, but the words are delusional, even if those being enslaved believe otherwise.
Transnational corporate monopolies are the drivers behind the malaise.
Some of the predominant monopolies, all inter-related and mutually reinforcing, are often prefaced with the adjective “Big”. They include:
Finance
Oil
Military-Industrial Complex
Media
Pharmaceuticals
These transnational monopolies metastasize beneath protective umbrellas of secretly negotiated, supranational “free trade” agreements, and they exert disproportionate control over political economies throughout the world. Additionally, their leverage is amplified and perpetuated through a matrix of intersecting trajectories that converge to create seamless, reciprocal unions with each other, and with elected polities.
Crony Capitalism
One strategy used by the resulting “corporatocracy” to increase its political might is the creation of a culture of “crony capitalism.” In this culture, a “revolving door” is created through which personnel from corporations and government come and go, thus creating a mutually empowering relationship, more responsible to each other than to the voting public.
Author Tony Hall reveals the inherent conflict of interest created when a “revolving door” exists between industry-funded regulators and Big Oil. In “Oil Consultant Turned Whisleblower Exposes Fracking Crimes In Alberta”, Hall explains that Gerard Protti, the current head of the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER), is a former executive of EnCana petroleum corporation.
Not only is the industry self-regulated, but the “regulator” himself is a former executive of the industry being regulated. “His conflict of interest,” explains Hall, “is illustrative of a culture of conflict of interest that is transforming the governments of Canada and Alberta into wholly-owned subsidiaries of Texas-based and China-based oil and gas companies.”
According to the article, the Canadian Association Of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), a powerful right-wing “think tank”, would provide “thought leadership” for the media outlet, and that “topics (would) be directed by CAPP and written by Postmedia.” In other words, the petroleum industry’s intent in this instance is to control media messaging related to petroleum related topics, thus creating its own platform/infomercial embedded within media that presents itself as “neutral”. Interestingly, one of the first casualties of the proposed “marriage” was environment reporter Mike De Souza.
The Military-Industrial-Media Complex
Corporate media and the military-industrial complex are also welded together. The Military-Industrial -Media complex profits from keeping countries on a war footing, and is complicit in unfathomable misery throughout the world.
War and war preparations serve as a pretext for vast outlays of money from the public to corporations. Consequently, war-friendly media barely reported the huge protests against the illegal invasion of Iraq, but it did spin stories about Iraq’s imaginary Weapons Of Mass Destruction, and the imperatives of invasion.
Meanwhile, once the Shock and Awe invasion started, Pentagon inspired nomenclature such as “collateral damage” or “surgical strikes” continued to anesthetize the public to the horrors of the invasion. Over one million died as a result of the carnage of the Second Gulf War, and the death rate is still climbing.
The interlocked military-industrial-media complex is created by the myriad of intersecting connections between the industries. Peter Philips and Mike Huff, in “Truth Emergency: Inside The Military Industrial Media Empire” describe some of these connections:
[quote]Only 118 people comprise the membership on the boards of director of the ten big media giants. These 118 individuals in turn sit on the corporate boards of 288 national and international corporations. Four of the top 10 media corporations share board director positions with the major defense contractors including:
William Kennard: New York Times, Carlyle Group
Douglas Warner III, GE (NBC), Bechtel
John Bryson: Disney (ABC), Boeing
Alwyn Lewis: Disney (ABC), Halliburton
Douglas McCorkindale: Gannett, Lockheed-Martin.[/quote]
The Canada-Honduras “Free” Trade Agreement
Financial monopolies, for the most part overseen by the U.S, are also wedded to the destructive, self-reinforcing web of supranationally protected monopolies. Honduras is a case in point.
Since the US-backed coup in 2009, transnational corporations, soon to be further protected beneath the umbrella of the Canada-Honduras Free Trade Agreement, have wreaked havoc on Honduras. Transnational Financing cartels, including the International Monetary Fund, bundle their loans with neoliberal market models, for the profit of foreign investors and Honduran oligarchs. The loans finance cash crops such as African Palm monoculture plantations, and the results are devastating to almost all Hondurans.
The plantations dispossess indigenous small-holder farmers, rob the nation of food sovereignty, and destroy indigenous cultures. Since 2009, oligarchs, in concert with illegal proxy dictatorships, have killed 100 campesinos from the Aguan Valle alone – with impunity.
Harper caves into Big Pharma
Big Pharma , yet another protected monopoly, also creates misery and desperation throughout the world, and its influences are woven into the fabric of lies and omissions perpetuated by the other monopolies.
Michael McBane, in “Harper Caves In To Big Pharma“, argues “(We ) need to take patents out of secret trade agreements and impose conditions that benefit the public interest in exchange for drug monopolies…”
If the suppression of Big Pharma and its ubiquitous messaging were lifted, Canada could also create a National Pharmacare program, which would save Canadians about $10.7 billion per year.
Once freed from the devastating tentacles of the transnational monopolies, Canadians will realize that it’s time to call 911 on the corporatocracy. We might then recapture real democracy and freedom, rather than settle for their bankrupt facsimiles.
