ACES first earmarks site of operations:

• Identify all sensitive/valued habitats & FN resource uses within the territory.
• Establish community-based Siting Criteria for Sustainability (SCS) for each aquaculture type.
• Move towards an area-based management plan for aquaculture development using the community CSC, and
• Include in Provincial MOU's for farm siting.

Monitoring requirements will form the basis for ACES area-based evaluations of First Nation site and operational sustainability criteria (SCS, OCS)

ACES second develop reasonable Operational Criteria for Sustainability (OCS) that specifically addresses the key territorial-specific environmental issues of concern to the First Nation community. Territories will be equipped to provide liaison to the Regional Coordination body (AAA) to assist in the environmental management and territorial monitoring of aquaculture operations.

The ACES authors suggest, a Coordination and Certification role should be developed through Regional or National First Nation organizations. This Regional ACES Program entity "would be responsible for training program auditors, assisting First Nation members in developing their Area-Based Sustainability criteria, compiling and assessing Environmental Performance data, and maintaining corporate certification records."

They continued: "This body could also, at the direction or request of specific First Nation territorial members, assume responsibility for program auditing." They point to the need for an umbrella organization that will provide consistency to the program, an "essential. For the Canadian west coast the Aboriginal Aquaculture Association is proposed as the umbrella organization for facilitating First Nation membership participation in the ACES Program," as one example, the template or pilot program.

The integrity of the ACES program rests in the arms-length manner of information analysis (the monitoring of data) and audit results acquired from the Farm-Based Component.

Conditions of certification are issued from these evaluations. National and Regional ACES Program bodies will be arrayed, "to promote the proposed certification program to seafood markets within and outside of Canada. Strong recognition of this certification process, given its premise on environmental sustainability, is considered key to its success," and go a long way to ensuring farms and companies will insist on participating in the program. A sort of critical mass of incentives to participate will be realized. Incentives (and benefits) for co-management of separate areas will create presently non-existent ease of access to new aquaculture developments and opportunities and co-operative partnerships.

WHY ACES?

Jul 11 07 - On the coast of B.C. First Nations are close to a ‘breaking point,’ according to life-long fisherman, Richard Harry, former chief of Homalco First Nation and founder of a modern Homalco community on the Inside Passage. Harry is furthermore the founder of the Aboriginal Aquaculture Association of Canada, because depressed economics of erratic supplies of wild fish turned Canadian commercial fishing into a 'sunset industry.'

A world-wide supply of fish which is clearly distressed and probably destroyed by the failure of management world-wide makes for the permanent loss of fishing as an occupation in Canada, which is driving First Nation coastal leaders like Harry to work overtime to solve a crisis.

At the same time, coastal communities with often 100 percent First Nation populations are looking at a solution to specific claims, and for Aboriginal Rights and Title to be respected in the waters that flow around them. The vision of the former chief contains an opportunity to build beyond normal expectation, which this coastal chief has done in the past.

Harry said the responsibility of the AAA is to the wider coastal economies, which so happens to include an anomalously large First Nation population, where all the nation’s fleet commercial fishers sit idle except for 10 or 15 minutes a year. The reason commercial fishers sit idle for 99 percent of the time is because fewer and fewer fish exist to catch, according to science, as seen in the complete collapse of cod on the east coast. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada manages an unpredictable (at best) supply (of certain less destructible species) on the west coast.

Consider the reports about oceans the world over, including ours, which will be full of nothing but jellyfish by the year 2050. This sad reality is according to best estimates of experts who are closely observed themselves by the editor of the Environment Section of the London Daily Telegraph. Charles Clover wrote, End of the Line: How Overfishing is Changing the World and What We Eat.

He announced last year fish would be gone from the oceans by 2048 if the current fisheries behaviour goes unchecked. Observers have said that while he's being ignored, "That's a shame, because Clover presents a compendium of how precisely we are eating our way through the seas." Fishers like Harry know this, as do his peers at Klemtu, BC, the owners of Kitasoo Seafoods Ltd..

"The fishing industry has undergone significant change over the past decade," SEE EI 2006 REPORT

The village on remote Swindle Island started to recognize a failing fishery 30 years ago. They started warning people, their own, and all the fishers who used their processing facilities (Kitasoo Seafoods Ltd. of today) and then invested deeply into fish farming of their own volition 20 years ago! Today the BC provincial government Committee on Sustainable Aquaculture wants this First Nation stopped in its tracks! The committee wants all fish farms north of Vancouver Island removed from the ocean in five years!

Politically, it must be rarefied air in the Committee for a Sustainable Aquaculture room, for these largely opposition members of the BC government once invited the industry into British Columbia carte blanche in the early 1990s under one condition: feign ignorance of First Nation concerns in the developments. It was implicitly or explicitly decreed to keep First Nations out, and suddenly ill-conceived contraptions of nets floated around the BC coasts without regulation, despoiling the environment everywhere and damaging the relationships with the local communities.

Regulations were formed to control the proliferation and quality of net pen operations, and industry consolidation began to occur. The operations that failed on the environmental end of regulations disappeared, and the larger, better designed operations continued operating within unusual constraints on fallowing and locations. The recent consolidations may reflect the industry’s concern about investing in Canada, leaving the potential for loss to companies that can afford to move along to elsewhere. Not good for BC, and nothing about marine investment and management in Canada seems to go well, neither short nor long term.

Those coastal marine-oriented economies and communities don’t see things the way 'their' politicians do, not even close. The rest of Canada and even British Columbia goes about its business in positive growth, but not Coastal BC. In reality it would be an extraordinary achievement to move these particular communities, largely First Nation, past crisis management and back into the Canadian mainstream of normal growth for economic development of industry, where once they were comfortable and prosperous because it is ridiculous to assume otherwise.

Then came the present situation and a lack of dimension to see to First Nation interests in coastal economic development, which leaves various communities aggravated and isolated in poverty. Communities with 50 percent and higher unemployment would gain unbelievable amounts of prosperity from even 10 percent reductions of unemployment. Communities long accustomed to filling the larders of the world with fish are formerly prosperous in commercial fishing and presently stumped by endemic unemployment. Seasonal layoffs is one thing. Starvation and desperation are another.

Harry and Coastal leaders are meeting through AAA workshops and developing presentations to explain the position to remediate a solution to the disastrous economy so hidden from the rest of Canada,. They met recently, at the end of Jun 07, about which, Harry said,  It was a productive two days of deliberations, where 37 First Nation individuals, organizations, and Bands participated.” In the end the First Nation meeting agreed to an Implementation of the Aboriginal Certification of Environmental Sustainability of Aquaculture (ACES) program. (A concept document describing this program can be found on the AAA web site at Aboriginal Aquaculture)

It begins simply, according to the AAA,  The Provincial government must give serious consideration to the inclusion of the ACES program as part of their new aquaculture management plan for B.C.” The AAA released a set of documents outlining the position of Coastal oriented First Nations who regard their wealth in the giant salmon and seafood culture in existence up until very recently (and persisting despite flotillas intent on eradication).

The AAA said, the provincial government must defend First Nation right to pursue sustainable aquaculture development in B.C.. The AAA added unequivocally their sustained support for the continuation and expansion of sustainable aquaculture development in B.C..  But defend from whom?  Against mostly North American, possibly Californian interests, and somebody with deep pockets who is buying ads in the world’s richest ink to encourage major chain Safeway to stop selling farmed salmon.

The defence is up against somebody with enough influence to publish stange sounding stories in newspapers to put hare-brained ideas into mass-circulation dailies like the Pittsburgh Gazette, Jan 26 ‘06:  . . . helping show that fish are sentient might help convince people to treat them better, a goal shared by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animal's Fish Empathy Project. (Hang on to your fishing rod!) "People just fish for fun. They don't even necessarily eat them."

The provincial government Committee on Sustainable Aquaculture obviously takes an offensive position against the AAA, and follows a business plan, which, since 06:  held a total of 35 meetings, including 21 public hearings, 8 briefings by witnesses, 4 subcommittee meetings, and a science forum. The Committee also visited 15 aquaculture-related sites. By October 31, 2006, the Clerk of Committee’s office received a total of 815 written submissions.”

Themes included, "the importance of aquaculture-related activities to the economy of coastal and isolated communities; the environmental impacts of salmon aquaculture (such as sea lice, fish waste, antifouling paint used on nets, open net pens and closed containment technology); First Nations consultation; and, issues associated with the shellfish aquaculture regulatory regime. In total, the Committee has heard over 100 hours of testimony and received more than 3,000 pages of written submissions from the public."

The committee went, "to meet with people working in the industry who had a first-hand account of day-to-day operations. These visits not only included processing plants and fish farm sites, but also science labs, educational institutes and manufacturing facilities.”

This is what the committee delivered at the beginning of the summer 07:

§  Permanent ban on salmon farms on the North Coast of British Columbia, north of Cape Caution.

§  For existing open-net caged salmon farms on the South Coast of British Columbia a transition to closed containment within 5 years, with a biological barrier separating the farmed salmon from the marine environment

§  Moratorium on any new salmon farms until transition of existing farms to closed containment is complete

§  Fallowing the salmon farms on migratory routes during young wild salmon migration from the rivers to the sea

§  Move away from industry self-policing and have government staff conduct random checks without any notice to salmon farm operators

Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, President of the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs stated a response to the anticpated release the committee report,  The UBCIC fully supports the immediate implementation of the recommendations of the Special Committee on Sustainable Aquaculture.”

The industry response to the committee came from the Canadian Aquaculture Industry Alliance, Ruth Salmon, Executive Director, said,  It is stunning that a committee supposedly dedicated to furthering the sustainability of BC’s aquaculture industry would propose a recommendation that is neither environmentally – nor economically – sustainable.”

 Superficially, closed containment may appear as a viable alternative to current production systems,” says Salmon,  however, in practice this is not yet the case. Closed containment operations in BC and New Brunswick have already proven to be economically impractical.”

CAIA added, closed containment presents an additional burden to the ‘carbon footprint’ because not only were these closed containment systems found to be economically impractical, they also proved to be environmentally unjustifiable. "To ensure fish health, closed systems require that fresh seawater be continually pumped into the fish tanks. To produce BC’s annual salmon aquaculture production in closed systems, the power used to pump the seawater would represent a massive increase in fossil fuel consumption and harmful greenhouse gas emission."

Lonely voices and most are silenced by the pseudo scientists prone to making ‘realistic’ sounding arguments that don’t hold water. Pay a visit to those who recently bought an ad in the New York Times to encourage Safeway to end life as we know it on the west coast.

Whoever is behind the single dimension campaign to wipe out Canada’s largest agricultural crop on the west coast and keep First Nation communities from participating in the 21 century economy must be RICH INDEED, able to make major purchases, in cash, from obviously deep pockets. The line-rates for the New York Times are way beyond the means of average organizations.

And it is hard to make a real assessment of inflammatory scientific dogma now being used to classify Atlantic salmon as a domesticated species. Just because the Atlantic salmon is an adaptable species hardly makes it a domesticated species. If you have ever seen the Canada geese around Wascana Lake in Regina, in the middle of winter, you will know they have adapted, but are far from domesticated.

The arguments about the Atlantic salmon having turned into a domesticated species like any other farm animal are unsupported. By making it a 'domesticated' species some scientists turn escapes from net pens into "invasions of 'exotic' species." It’s not really happening because Atlantic salmon don’t survive in the wild against Pacific salmon.

Atlantic salmon grew on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean and in the British Isles. Who knows? Maybe the Vikings transplanted the Atlantics in their trips around the coastlines. Transplant of the Atlantic was attempted on the west coast in the early 1900s and failed. Now scientists are claiming reports of the Atlantic salmon upstreams on the Pacific coast. Even if the fish is adapting does this again make it domesticated?

If it has been genetically modified by human interaction, so what? Indeed the argument in one study is that the farmed Atlantic salmon are more aggressive than the wild stock, indicative of selective breeding up a wilder animal. They argue that farm animal domestication evolved into some kind of loving entanglement between farmer and fowl. Attributing any long-term endearment to the relationship between farmer and chicken is flatulence. A drive past an industrial grade chicken operation calls for wearing a mask, a gas mask.

Living Oceans is advocacy by summer students, sometimes permanent students, up to their seventh year go-round with the lice. Taxpayers are funding folkies to count lice while First Nations are begging DFO for real science on the impact of the Commercial Fishing fleet currently plundering the North Pacfic.

So, with all that opposition and very little voice in support, one might suggest the Aboriginal Aquaculture Association ACES proposal faces an upstream swim.

As the ACES document is studied it reveals the essence of the proposal: ACES endeavours to integrate First Nations into the following fundamental governmental areas of operation, and add the First Nation components that are missing, components that might ultimately lead to more environmentally sensitive management of the coastal resources, wild and cultivated.

Every farm site in Canada on the west coast goes through the following regulatory obligations:

Corporate and/or Industry Sectors:

§  Best Practices,

§  Environmental Management Systems (e.g., ISO-14000),

§  HACCP,

§  Fish Health Management Plans,

§  Production Management Plans,

§  BCSFA/BCSGA Code of Practices, etc.

§ 
Government Regulations:

§  Fisheries Act,

§  Canadian Environmental Assessment Act (CEAA),

§  Navigable Water Protection Act (NWPA);

§  Canada Shipping Act – Small Vessel Regulations Provincial Government Regulations:

§  BC Fisheries Aquaculture License, Fish Health Standards;

§  Fisheries Act;

§  Feeds Act;

§  Pest Control Act;

§  Aquaculture Regulation;

§  BC Veterinary Medical Association By-Laws & Code of Ethics;

§  Fish Protection Act;

§  Pesticide Control Act;

§  Pharmacist Act;

§  Pharmacists, Pharmacy Operations & Drug Scheduling Act;

§  Veterinarians Act;

§  Waste Management Act (Finfish Aquaculture Waste Control Regulation);

Environmental Management Act.

Meanwhile read a facinating entry into the environmental dialogue from Bill Henderson at Countercurrents.org

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