Photo Courtesy of Kelsey Savage & John Woods, Real Talk

On paper, Alison Klein is a serious academic with a master’s in interdisciplinary studies focused on adult education and disability. Meet her at one of the Real Talk’s free public events (affectionately known as “pizza parties”), and she’ll be the first to greet you as a peer facilitator and make a joke—sometimes with anatomically correct models at the ready.

“I go, ‘Look, a present’, and then just walk away,” says Klein with a smile. “I have kind of a funny side.”

Founded and managed by sexual health educator John Woods, Real Talk is an initiative based in Metro Vancouver that supports people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). Woods has worked in community living spaces, schools, and sexual health organizations since the early ’90s, both in Canada and in London, UK. He saw the urgent need for sex education tailored to the IDD community, and a slew of intersectional barriers rooted in eugenics. Now, in between pizza parties and Q&As, Real Talk works with the community living sector to support providers and those with cognitive disabilities.

“Step five is getting the public to acknowledge and affirm that folks with intellectual disabilities could be LGBTQ,” explains Kelsey Savage, Real Talk’s project developer. “Step zero is the general population believing that folks with intellectual disabilities have a sexuality at all.”

Since its founding in 2017, Real Talk has grown to include both certified sexual health educators and peer facilitators with lived experience, ensuring its initiatives are driven by community needs. While the disability rights rallying cry “nothing about us without us” has existed for decades, Real Talk remains one of the few accessible sex-positive resources that centre self-advocacy. It provides an extensive library of YouTube videos addressing common questions around sexuality and disability. Savage also oversees Connecting Queer Communities (CQC), a social group for 2SLGBTQIA+ folks with cognitive disabilities to connect across the Lower Mainland both in person and online. People often attend both Real Talk and CQC events, and several have joined Klein as peer facilitators themselves. As facilitators, honouring education and community could mean helping someone explain orgasms to their partner one day, and being with someone’s deepest traumas the next.

“It’s happened a number of times at our events, where people have discovered they’ve been taking birth control and it’s been called a vitamin, or they’ve had an IUD and they didn’t consent to it,” says Savage. “There’s already a lot in the room before you step into it.”

As Real Talk works across communities to expand its outreach, what’s needed to ensure the future of good sexual health education is clear: government-sponsored education and publicly funded accommodations and support so people with cognitive disabilities have an equitable pathway to become sexual health educators. “I want to ideally work myself out of a job,” teases Savage.

“Earlier, I was mostly around staff and disconnected from my community,” Klein says. “I hope Real Talk is a starting point, and that sex education can be taught in schools to kids from all different backgrounds, so they all have a frame of reference [for] each other.”

University of British Columbia’s sexual assault policy. Screenshot taken from UBC.ca.

In April 2016, British Columbia passed a bill mandating all public post-secondary institutions establish policies for handling reports of sexual violence on campus. B.C. schools instituted formal procedures in May 2017, becoming the second province, after Ontario, to do so. This change follows a long pattern of dissatisfaction with how B.C. universities handle sexual assault claims.

The University of British Columbia was criticized for its treatment of sexual misconduct allegations that arose last November against Steven Galloway, the now-fired chair of the school’s creative writing program.

Two of the complainants, Chelsea Rooney and Sierra Skye Gemma, say the school did not adequately protect their identities or confidential testimonies, and that the investigation took a serious toll on their mental health. This, they say, gravely damaged their futures in the literary community.

Meanwhile, UBC graduate students Caitlin Cunningham and Glynnis Kirchmeier say it took the school more than 18 months to act on their sexual assault and harassment complaints about now-expelled Dmitry Mordvinov. The women say the delay put other students in danger, with six reports against Mordvinov accumulating in the process. Cunningham says she has “been more traumatized by the process of reporting than… by the incident of assault.” The pattern prompted Kirchmeier to file a human rights complaint in 2016 on behalf of anyone who has reported sexual misconduct to a west-coast university.

The cases led UBC to establish a new sexual violence policy, including hiring directors of investigations to review sexual assault reports and refer them to external investigators. But complaints of university inaction regarding campus sexual violence extend across the province. At Simon Fraser University, students say campus security ignored multiple reports of sexual harassment on campus in weeks prior to an assault in February. And at the University of Victoria, the school wrote one student a letter suggesting she not discuss the findings of the investigation into her November 2015 assault.

The efficacy of B.C. schools’ new policies will show with time. But there is still much work to be done—to create campuses where survivors are believed and protected, where their voices are not silenced, where they are not re-victimized in the process of reporting.

“The various activities and initiatives undertaken by MCFD during the past decade have created only an illusion of action and progress,” Turpel-Lafond wrote. “There has been no concrete resulting change in the aboriginal child welfare service-delivery system or demonstrable improvements in outcomes for aboriginal children, youth and their families.” She says she understands the money was given to the agencies with sound intent, but adds that many of the child and family reps have no clear spending strategy and no understanding of their roles in the community.

The report concluded with recommendations for the government: develop a comprehensive plan to transfer control of child and welfare services to aboriginal organizations; suspend “open-ended initiatives” that don’t benefit aboriginal self-governance; and create ways to close the gap of education and health between aboriginal and non aboriginal youth—on or off reserve

The deadline for these government drafts were February, March, and April. As of today, nothing has been submitted.

The only change came in January—when the provincial government “cut funding to 18 indigenous-run projects” two months after Turpel-Lafond’s report. It has not yet addressed what may be the next steps (or any steps) to help aboriginal kids in foster care, who made up more than half —almost 4,500 of 8,106 —of B.C.’s kids in the system.

“The ministry has been overly focused on transferring the responsibility to provide services instead of ensuring aboriginal children and youth are getting the help they desperately need,” Turpel-Lafond told CBC. Which sums up her opinion of throwing money around without knowledge of the outcome.

Ministry officials have said they generally appreciated the report, but also criticized it for being one-sided. Much of the $66 million, says the government, helped give aboriginal peoples a public voice.

“I don’t want it to be misinterpreted that government spent $66 million to have these discussions around governance and jurisdictional issues without receiving some benefit,” Minister Stephanie Cadieux told the Tyee. “There are better working relationships with indigenous communities. First Nations, in many cases, have increased capacity to provide culturally relevant care for their own children, including child protection mediation.”

The child and youth watch dog is aware that her report’s guidelines are complex. Since November, Turpel-Lafond has seen more money donated to indigenous agencies that were “crippled by underfunding”. Yet, these organizations need government coordination along with the money allotted them.  As the report states, “the ministry needs to re-focus, and dedicate the time and effort required.”

The lesson here is to start fresh, start planning, but start.

Kinuseo falls in Tumbler Ridge, B.C.

British Columbia introduced its Instant Towns Act in 1965 during the height of an industrial boom. The policy’s purpose was exactly what the quirky name suggests: to allow the government to instantly grant municipal status to the many informal settlements surrounding its natural resources. The idea was that instant towns could prevent some of the problems of company towns, which had a habit of becoming ghost towns, by empowering local governments to create real communities.

Not everything went as planned. Four decades and a dozen such towns later, many once-vibrant communities were near death as mills and mines shut down or shipped out. The government was, however, right about one thing: towns aren’t so quick to grab the tombstone. Here’s how four post–Instant Towns are embracing their abundant resources, natural and artificial, in hopes of a greener second life.

Hudson’s Hope

Industry: Hydroelectricity
Incorporated: 1965
Population: 1,012
Hudson’s Hope was incorporated in 1965 when it became the second-largest municipality in B.C. Dubbed the “Land of Dinosaurs and Dams,” the town is rich with fossils. There are more than 1,700 dinosaur tracks in the area dating back to the Early Cretaceous Period. They even have their own dinosaur—the Hudsonelpidia—that was named for the town.

Mackenzie

Industry: Pulp and paper
Incorporated: 1966
Population: 5,452 (2006)
Mackenzie is home to the world’s largest tree-crusher. Indeed, in 1968 the 175-tonne behemoth flattened a 1,773-square- kilometre patch of woodland that would become Williston Lake, the province’s largest reservoir. The town has since incorporated the tree-crusher, which sat idle for years, as a central attraction in the town’s push for tourism.

Tumbler Ridge

Industry: Coal
Incorporated: 1981
Population: 2,454
Tumbler Ridge bills itself as the “Waterfall Capital of the North.” Kinuseo Falls is taller than Niagara at nearly 200 feet. The Cascades are 10 waterfalls that are all located within a few kilometres of each other. The community also holds an annual music festival—Grizfest—which this year hosted April Wine, Platinum Blonde, and children’s entertainers Sharon & Bram.

Elkford

Industry: Coal
Incorporated: 1971
Population: 2,463
Elkford may be a coal town, but nature still dominates. Indeed, the town’s website calls it a place where “humanity borrows a bit of space.” Currently, Elkford is repositioning itself as a good getaway for photographers. If would-be tourists are brave, they can try to snap some of the area’s grizzlies, elk, lynx, or wolves. If not, there’s always the Elkford webcam.

Creative Commons photo by Flickr user The-Lane-Team

On October 1st, consumers in B.C. will shoulder a price increase on small appliances. But this modest fee will make a big impact on waste reduction throughout the province.

Tomorrow, The Canadian Electrical Stewardship Association is launching Unplugged, a small appliance recycling program. The motivation: over 2 million small appliances wind up in British Columbia’s landfills annually. Never before seen in Canada, this program will accept over 120 types of small appliances, saving even your electric toothbrush from the landfill.

The program is non-profit, non-governmental, and completely funded by the consumer surcharge. The small hike covers a free drop-off at the 100+ drop-off stations located across the province, as well as all recycling, transportation, and collection costs incurred by the program. Purveyors of the initiative ensure consumers that the recycling fee is not a tax, as the money is not gathered or tracked by the government. But it is on the government’s radar as Environment Minister Terry Lake sings his praises in the business review canada earlier this month.

With all the expected benefits of increased recycling, such as the re-use of aluminum which takes 95% less energy than it does to produce it with raw materials, the program is not without its critics. Although the public will be able to view data such as how much material picked up is actually recycled in Unplugged’s planned annual report, some still worry about a lack of transparency.

This article expresses concern regarding the non-disclosure of processing partners prior to contract completion. These concerns address the export practises of the potential partners as recycling depots can be known to dump electronic waste on developing countries. However, the identities of the partners are scheduled to be posted when the program launches.

With the timely acceptance of such products as bathroom scales (bring on the turkey), beard trimmers (sweet Movember), and gelato makers (no excuse, but have you ever actually used it?), the West is showing up the rest of Canada once again as a recycler’s haven — although this PEI fisherman’s DIY approach to reusing is also a classic and oh-so-poetic.

Canada is a nation of wild, legendary rivers. The Mackenzie, the Fraser, the Churchill, and dozens more all empty into our national identity. They flow through our landscape, history, and imagination. They are vital to any history textbook, Group of Seven exhibit, or gift-shop postcard rack.

Canada is also a nation of river-tamers. We revere our waterways—but we also dam them. Trudeau canoed the epic Nahanni and two years later presided over the opening of the mammoth Churchill Falls hydroelectric dam in Labrador. We are, as the Canadian Hydropower Association says, a “hydro superpower.” Almost 60 percent of our electricity supply comes from dams—compared to just 16 percent globally—and only China squeezes more electricity out of its rivers than we do.

The heyday of big dam construction in Canada began around the late 1950s. What followed was an exhibition of progress in the raw. Surveyors and bulldozers headed to the frontier. Mighty men tamed mighty rivers. Engineering prowess replaced natural grandeur.

As rock was blasted and cement poured, legacies were forged, both geographical and political. In Manitoba, the two largest rivers and three of the five largest lakes were dramatically re-engineered. In Quebec, 571 dams and control structures have altered the flow of 74 rivers.

The construction phase lasted through the ’80s, then slowed, even though the country’s hydro potential had only been half tapped. Now, after two decades of limited construction—with the exception of Hydro-Québec, which kept on building—the dam-builders are rumbling to life again.

In the next 10 to 15 years, Canadian utilities will spend $55 to $70 billion on new hydroelectric projects. This would add 14,500 megawatts to Canada’s existing 71,000 megawatts of hydroelectric capacity. Most new projects are in Quebec (4,570 MW), B.C. (3,341 MW), Labrador (3,074 MW), and Manitoba (2,380 MW). The largest of these, Labrador’s 2,250 MW Gull Island project, will produce as much power as 750 train locomotives.

The extent and cost of construction will vary over time, but one thing is certain: the push for more hydro is on.

Most of these projects are driven in large part by the prospect of exporting power to the U.S. American interest in hydropower is linked, in part, to its low cost and its low greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In this context, the push for more hydro is also a push by the industry to position its product as an answer to climate change.

Jacob Irving heads the Canadian Hydropower Association, which represents the interests of the hydro industry. He says hydropower is “a very strong climate change solution,” because it can displace the use of coal and natural gas to generate electricity. The argument is simple and compelling: use more hydropower, use less fossil fuel. The industry especially touts exports of hydro to the U.S., where 600 coal-fired plants produce 45 percent of the nation’s electricity, with another 24 percent fuelled by natural gas. The CHA says hydro exports already reduce continental emissions by half a million tons a year. They want that number to grow.

Given the dire climate prognosis—emissions in Canada, the U.S., and everywhere else are well above levels in 1990, the year used as a benchmark in the Kyoto Accord—the urgency of reducing fossil-fuel consumption is great. Perhaps Canada’s wild rivers, if harnessed, can be our gift to a warming world. Maybe a concrete edifice nestled in a river valley is just as quintessentially Canadian as a lone paddler on a pristine river.

This presents a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too scenario for Canadian utilities. They can build more dams—obviously still a cornerstone of the corporate culture—cash in on lucrative exports, and enjoy eco-hero status. But is damming more of our rivers an optimal strategy for addressing climate change?

Despite the virtues of hydro power, dams can only reduce emissions indirectly. Their climate value hinges in part on the extent to which they substitute for fossilfuel-fired generation, as opposed to displacing nuclear, wind, or other sources. Though displacement is hard to prove, Irving reasons that “were we not to be sending that electricity down to the United States, the next most logical source of generation to meet their load requirements would generally be natural gas and/or coal.” The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) actually predicts that over the next 25 years, 11 percent of new generation in the U.S. will be coal-fired and 60 percent natural gas (which is roughly half as bad as coal in terms of emissions).

In Canada, most new hydro projects are located in provinces with minimal fossil-fuel-fired generation, so limited displacement will happen here. Exceptions are Ontario, Labrador (where 102 MW will be displaced), Nova Scotia (which will import from Labrador), and possibly Saskatchewan, which could use hydro from Manitoba.

While the fossil-fuel displacement argument has obvious merit, it also has weaknesses. Utilities can argue that hydro exports help save the planet, but critics can say these exports just keep the most wasteful society on earth air-conditioned and recharged. They can say that hydro exports just feed an addiction with more and more cheap power, every kilowatt of which reduces the imperative to curb consumption. The basic argument is that reducing demand must be the obvious and dominant priority in energy policy, rather than endlessly ramping up supply.

Government agencies predict electricity demand in Canada will grow almost 10 percent between now and 2020, and in the U.S. by approximately 30 percent between now and 2035. Ralph Torrie says we can and must go in the opposite direction. “We could double the efficiency with which we use fuel and electricity in Canada,” he says. If you want to see how it’s done, he adds, “just take a vacation to Europe.” Torrie, whose energy expertise is internationally recognized, serves as managing director of the Vancouver-based Trottier Energy Futures Project. In contrast to Irving, who accepts that demand for electricity will grow, Torrie advocates a “new way of thinking about the energy future.”

“There is no demand for electricity,” he says. “Nobody wants a kilowatt hour in their living room.” We want the services that electricity can provide, and we must “focus on how we can best meet the underlying needs for amenity with less rather than more fuel and electricity.” That, he says, is the only hope for “anything we might call a sustainable energy future.”

“We waste half the hydro we produce,” says John Bennett, who heads the Sierra Club of Canada. The solution to climate change is “to use less energy,” he says. “That’s where the major investment should be.”

Torrie says large hydro is environmentally preferable to many forms of energy supply, but still, reducing demand can achieve the same thing at a lower cost, and without the decade-long turnaround time for planning and construction. He views conservation as a resource. “There’s almost always a kilowatt of electricity that can be saved for a smaller cost than building the ability to generate a new kilowatt.” Plus, the resource gets bigger with every new innovation in efficiency. As Torrie puts it, “The size of the resource goes up every time somebody has a bright idea.”

Cutting electricity demand by half would include a range of technologies, including LED lighting, sensor-driven smart controls that reduce daytime lighting in buildings, and continued improvements to virtually every device that uses electricity.

But even if we as a continent cut our energy use by half, we still need some energy—and should not a maximum amount of that come from low-emission hydro? Can’t conservation and new hydro be dual priorities?

According to energy consultant Phillipe Dunsky, total spending on efficiency and conservation programs in Canada is only about $1 billion per year. Despite that, Jacob Irving says, “energy conservation has to be forefront of all decisions.” Then he adds a caveat: “There’s a lot of analysis that says energy consumption will grow, and so we need to be ready for that.” Whether demand shrinks or expands, the simple prohydro argument—more hydro equals less fossil fuel— still stands.

But for Tony Maas, who works for the Canadian branch of the World Wildlife Fund, it’s not that simple. He says new hydro projects must be part of an overarching plan for “net reduction in GHG emissions.” He cites Ontario’s Green Energy Act as an example of a plan that commits to overall GHG reduction.

But, as John Bennett points out, “we don’t have a North American plan to reduce emissions,” so new hydro projects “can’t be part of that plan.” The EIA predicts that without policy change, coal use as well as GHG emissions from electricity generation, will continue to increase over the next 25 years. Bennett says building more dams to meet increasing demand is like doubling the fuel efficiency of cars so that people can drive twice as much.

In a release this April, Hydro-Québec, Canada’s largest generator and exporter of hydropower, said, “The major environmental challenge facing North America is to replace coal to generate power and oil used in transportation.” While climate change may be the “major” environmental challenge of the day, it is not the only one. Just because hydro dams do not have highly visible carbon-spewing smoke stacks does not necessarily make them environmentally friendly. Behind the question of whether dams are a climate solution lies a more fundamental question: is hydro actually clean, as utilities and governments regularly assert?

Jacob Irving says, “When people refer to [hydro] as clean, it’s in the context of air emissions.” But rarely is this specified. The categorical use of the term by utilities, without caveat or qualification, is misleading. Tony Maas says he gets “nervous” when hydro is called clean because “it almost implies there are no impacts.” But dams harm the environment. A dam is not an environmental improvement or solution for a watershed.

One of the main impacts is the disruption of the natural “flow regime” in a waterway. Maas says the natural fluctuations in water levels are the “master variable in organizing a river ecosystem,” giving key “cues” to other species. Thus, a WWF report says, “Dams destroy the ecology of river systems by changing the volume, quality, and timing of water flows downstream.” The evidence of this is visible in dammed Canadian rivers, as it is in the hundreds of millions of dollars paid to mitigate and compensate for damages caused by dams. Manitoba Hydro alone has spent over $700 million to address damages from its “clean” hydro projects.

The WWF takes a more nuanced approach. It says some hydro projects can be built without unacceptable harm, but its 2011 global energy plan still “severely restrict[s] future growth of hydro power to reflect the need for an evolution that respects existing ecosystems and human rights.”

Similarly, a 2011 report about Canada’s boreal forests by the Pew Environment Group considers both pros and cons of hydro. In a section about hydro called “How Green Is It?”, the report says:

Although [hydro dams] are comparatively low carbon emitters in comparison to many conventional energy sources, hydropower projects have resulted in significant impacts to wildlife habitat, ecological processes and aboriginal communities.

In a later section, the report states:

While it is clear that allowing our societies to be powered by carbon fuels is not sustainable, this does not mean that alternative or renewable energy sources can simply be viewed as having no cost whatsoever.

The report, entitled “A Forest of Blue,” does not offer a simple verdict. Rather, it says, “We must understand as many of the implications and complexities of the issues as possible.” The candour and openness to complexity demonstrated in the report are exactly what is needed in the assessment of any climate-change strategy.

In keeping with the Pew report’s frank and thorough nature, it also discusses the role Aboriginal peoples play in hydro development. This is an essential part of any discussion of hydropower in Canada since virtually all hydro projects occupy lands to which First Nations have rights. In the past, Aboriginal people vehemently (and mostly unsuccessfully) opposed major dams. That has changed: in some cases Aboriginal opposition has succeeded. The $5 billion, 1,250 MW Slave River project in Alberta has been “deferred” after project proponents were unable to reach a deal with Smith’s Landing First Nation last year.

The proposed Site C Dam, a 1,100 MW, $7.9 billion project planned for the Peace River in B.C., faces resolute opposition from four First Nations in the area. But the outcome of that David-and-Goliath battle will not be know for some time.

Elsewhere, opposition has given way to participation—David and Goliath have become allies. Most recently, members of the Innu Nation in Labrador voted in June to allow the massive Lower Churchill River projects—Muskrat Falls (824 MW) and Gull Island (2,250 MW)—to proceed. In exchange, the 2,800 Innu receive $5 million per year to assist with their process costs during and prior to construction, up to $400 million in contracts during construction, and share of project profits thereafter (5 percent of “After Debt Net Cashflow”).

The broad Tshash Petapen (New Dawn) Agreement, in which these provisions are contained, also includes an agreement in principle on land claims and $2 million a year as compensation for damages related to the existing Upper Churchill Falls dam.

Meanwhile, the Inuit (distinct from the Innu), who are concerned about downstream impacts in their territory, say they have been largely left out of the process.

In Quebec, the James Bay Cree receive over $100 million a year in hydro, forestry, and mining royalties as a result of the 2002 Peace of the Braves agreement. In it they consented to the Eastmain-1-A/Sarcelle/Rupert Project (918 MW) while securing the permanent abandonment of the Nottaway-Broadback-Rupert project, which would have flooded 6,000 square kilometres.

First Nations near proposed dam sites in Manitoba have been offered lump-sum compensation packages, along with the opportunity to invest in projects. For instance, the Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation, with its 4,500 members, will be entitled to a third of the profits of the nearly completed Wuskwatim Dam if they can come up with a third of the $1.3 billion cost of the dam. They also benefit from $60 million of employment training.

In June, four other First Nations joined Manitoba Hydro in announcing the start of construction on the 695 MW, $5.6 billion Keeyask dam. Like Nisichawayasihk, they will be offered the chance to invest in the dam, as well as employment opportunities.

What’s clear in all these cases is that Canadian utilities cannot ignore Aboriginal demands. “We can stop development,” says Ovide Mercredi, former National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations and the recently retired Chief of the Misipawistik Cree Nation in northern Manitoba. His community sits right next to the 479 MW Grand Rapids Dam, which floods 115,700 hectares. In reference to the water flowing through that dam, Mercredi’s message to the province is simple: “That’s not your water, it belongs to our people and we want a share of that money.” The dam’s 50-year provincial licence expires in 2015 and Mercredi wants licence renewal to be contingent on public acknowledgement of the harm, increased mitigation of damages, and a revenue-sharing agreement. In part, the message is that if utilities do not deal with Aboriginal concerns now, they will have to later.

Whether First Nations are defiant or eager for new dams to power their economic future, the broader environmental questions remain. While Aboriginal influence has led to a reduction in the size of dams and increased environmental mitigation, and First Nations consent improves the general ethical perception of a project, there is still no tidy way to pour thousands of tons of cement into a river.

No matter who is involved, the merit of the case for hydro as a climate solution can be tested by the assumptions it rests on. These assumptions are that hydro is clean; that demand for electricity will grow; and that the primary alternative to more hydro is fossil-fuel generation. Are these solutions part of the solution or the problem?

Ultimately, the solution to climate change, as well as to watershed health, may never be found unless we move past these assumptions and replace them with better, more accurate premises.

First, dams are not green or clean in themselves. To disrupt the flow of a river and blaze a transmission corridor through kilometres of forest is, in itself, bad for the biosphere. To solve one environmental problem (global warming) with another (pouring hundreds of thousands of tonnes of cement in a free-flowing river) is counterintuitive. That said, desperate circumstances may require desperate measures.

Second, energy demand can and must be substantially reduced. The logical outcome of letting demand increase indefinitely and meeting that demand with ever more hydro and other renewables is to have every river dammed, the landscape saturated with wind and solar farms, and consumption still increasing. The ultimate, unavoidable solution is to use less energy. This must be the dominant priority.

Finally, dams do not reduce GHG emissions per se. They increase energy supply. Apart from a demonstrated continental commitment to dramatically reduce emissions (and energy demand), the case for hydro as a climate solution is, for the industry, a rather convenient truth. Hydropower can’t be part of the climate-change solution if there is no solution.

Climate change is one of humanity’s greatest challenges, and to address it we may need to conjure greater creativity than just reviving electricity generation megaprojects conceived of decades ago. Dan McDermott of the Sierra Club’s Ontario Chapters says, “The age of big dams is over.” According to him, hydro proponents “have their heads turned backwards attempting to mortgage the future to maintain the past.”

The large hydro projects currently in the works were envisioned before global warming concerned anyone, in an era summed up by former Manitoba premier Duff Roblin when he rose in the legislature in 1966 and prophesied a grandiose future for hydropower, saying, “We can have our cake, we can eat it and we can make a bigger cake, and sell part of that.”

Though hydro prospects are framed differently now, dam proponents still appear to share Roblin’s belief in limitless, consequence-free development. Now the question of whether taming more of our iconic rivers will help the climate becomes a question of whether Roblin was right.

There had been talk that 2010 might be a good year for sockeye salmon, maybe even a great one. But nobody expected what was to come.

It started in early August, when the Pacific Salmon Commission, a government-appointed body of Canadian and U.S. scientists, forecast 10 million sockeye would reach the mouth of B.C.’s Fraser River later in the month. It was seen as a bold prediction at the time, given the near total collapse of the sockeye fishery the previous three years.

Two weeks later, the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans released its first forecast, based on test catches in the area, a whopping 25 million sockeye salmon. It sparked a flurry of headlines—“Fraser River Fishery Braces for Bonanza,” the CBC crowed—and near-chaos along the river when the fishery finally opened on August 25.

“We’ve fished all our lives and we’d never seen anything like it” says Steve Johansen, owner of Organic Ocean, who fished in the Georgia Strait, near the mouth of the Fraser.

“Every day we went out there, and as far as you could see in every direction were sockeye jumping. All day, every day,” said Johansen. “Some days there were so many fish they were actually hitting the sides of our boat.”

When all was said and done, more than 34 million sockeye returned to the Fraser River in 2010, making it the biggest return in nearly a century. It prompted some observers to ask the uncomfortable question: is this iconic fish really on the verge of collapse?

The short answer is yes. The sockeye salmon is in serious trouble, much like the Atlantic cod was two decades before its fateful collapse. The Fraser sockeye, which accounts for roughly half the economic value of all salmon caught in B.C., has been in a downward spiral for decades.

In 2009, the stock appeared to hit rock bottom. After two years of disastrously low numbers, the Pacific Salmon Commission had predicted a modest return of 10 million sockeye—nearly the same number as predicted in 2010—yet only 1.9 million showed up in the Fraser, making it one of the lowest returns on record.

Public outrage over the nine million “missing fish” was heated enough to prompt the federal government to establish the Cohen Commission, a $15 million inquiry headed by B.C. Supreme Court judge Bruce Cohen that’s been under way since last June, tasked with figuring out what went wrong and how best to fix it.

While it’s certainly not the first investigation into the salmon decline—there have been seemingly endless studies and reports done on the sockeye over the last 20 years—the inquiry is by far the most expensive and the highest profile.

The real question, however, is whether the Cohen Commission can actually deliver meaningful change.

“One year certainly does not make a trend,” says Dr. John Reynolds, an aquatic ecologist at Simon Fraser University, referring to the miraculous sockeye return of 2010. “Every generation of fish operates independently from every other year.”

The long-term trend for sockeye salmon has been one of steady decline. In pre-European times, there would often be more than 100 million sockeye fighting their way up the Fraser River. It wasn’t until the Hudson’s Bay Company turned to salt salmon as its primary export after the fur trade dried up that the first commercial fishery was organized. For the sockeye salmon, it’s been downhill ever since.

According to Reynolds, who is a scientific reviewer for the Cohen Commission, the underlying issue for sockeye in recent years is declining productivity. Simply put, the number of fish that come back to a river for each fish that produced them is dropping.

“You could, in theory have a lot of fish coming back to spawn in one year, but if most of their young die, there will be low productivity coming from that generation,” explains Reynolds.

Sockeye productivity has been steadily dropping since the early 1990s—a period over which commercial fishing has also dwindled—and most experts believe it has something to do with conditions in the ocean, where salmon spend the bulk of their lives.

Young sockeye typically spend their first two years rearing in inland lakes and streams before migrating to the sea, where they spend two more years, primarily in the northeast Pacific, near Alaska, before returning to spawn in the streams where they were hatched, guided by natural forces that scientists still don’t understand.

Over the past two decades, the north Pacific has been warmer than usual, a trend most scientists blame on climate change. Warmer ocean temperatures, Reynolds explains, means less food is available for salmon, especially younger fish less able to compete.

The exception in this oceanic warming trend was 2008, which also happened to be the year when the historic 2010 Fraser sockeye return entered the ocean. “When the fish went out to sea in the spring of 2008 it was exceptionally cold in the northeast Pacific,” Reynolds says. “It was a return to the oceanic food webs we would see back in the 1980s.”

Cooler ocean temperatures, along with a natural cycle in sockeye salmon that sees a larger-than-normal return every four years, might explain the historic return last year. “If we were going to get a good year in recent times, 2010 could have been the year,” Reynolds says.

The challenge, according to Reynolds, is the lack of scientific data. Once fish enter the ocean, they might as well swim into a black hole. When fish disappear—like the nine million that went missing in 2009—there’s no evidence of what happened, making it nearly impossible to accurately predict sockeye returns and even harder to ensure their protection.

“It’s like trying to predict the weather two years in advance,” Reynolds says, “but with even less data.”

The elephant in the Cohen Commission courtroom is, of course, fish farming. Fish farms are controversial throughout the world, but nowhere more so than on Canada’s West Coast, and rightly so. No other active fish-farming locale in the world has so much at stake as B.C., where the wild fishery is still relatively abundant and the ecosystem still viable.

In October 2010, anti-fish-farm protesters paddled down the Fraser River from Hell’s Gate to Vancouver en masse, raising awareness along the way. They arrived on the opening day of the inquiry and gathered, 400 strong, outside the federal courthouse in downtown Vancouver where the inquiry is being held, demanding greater scrutiny of fish farms.

At the same time, the B.C. Salmon Farmers Association was running large newspaper ads, showing a picture of a spawning sockeye over a caption reading: “For the last ten years the rule has been that salmon farming is driving wild salmon to extinction … Every rule is allowed a few exceptions, but this one will need 35 million of them.” For the controversial B.C. fish-farming industry, 2010’s exceptional salmon run was an opportunity to try to counter the bad press that has dogged them for years.

Fish farms started out benignly enough, popping up on B.C.’s rugged coastline in the 1970s as small mom-and-pop operations. Since then, however, the industry has quickly grown into the fourth largest in the world, with 128 licensed fish farms operating in B.C. Of those, 92 per cent are Norwegian-owned and the majority of the salmon farmed is Atlantic.

With exponential growth in the industry, so too grew the environmental concerns. Lice and parasites can spread through a crammed fish farm like wildfire, and those same lice and parasites can infect juvenile salmon migrating past the open net pens. Pink salmon appear to be most vulnerable—in 2002 pinks were also considered on the verge of collapse—but sockeye are certainly not immune.

“There have been several papers published recently that suggest that sea lice from open net-pen farms continue to be very difficult to control and very, very problematic to wild juvenile fish,” says Craig Orr, executive director of Vancouver-based Watershed Watch.

“Our attempts to control the lice by regulation have been met with mixed success,” Orr added.

While sea lice are treated on the fish farms, Orr explained, there’s evidence that the lice are becoming more resistant to the chemicals being used. “It’s a lot like antibiotics,” Orr says. A case in point is Norway, the world’s largest aquaculture nation: lice counts tripled last year, despite increased treatment, devastating both farmed and wild salmon populations. Chile, another major producer of farmed fish, is also battling persistent lice problems. The aquaculture industry insists that farms in B.C. have maintained low lice counts over the past several years. “Lice management has been very effective here on the B.C. coast,” says Mary Ellen Walling, executive director of the British Columbia Salmon Farmers Association. “In other jurisdictions, like New Brunswick and Scotland and Norway, they see much higher levels of lice on farmed fish.” According to Walling, a farm is treated if there are more than three lice per fish, based on a sample of 60 fish. She adds that the monitoring of fish health is audited by the provincial government and compiled in annual reports, dating back to the early 2000s.

Anti-fish-farm protesters claimed a victory in early December 2010, when Justice Cohen ordered the B.C. Salmon Farmers Association to submit detailed documents on fish health, disease, stocking, and mortality for 120 farms, dating back 10 years.

Reynolds believes obtaining that data and making it public is a big accomplishment for the commission.

“I’m not saying I think the farms are necessarily the issue,” Reynolds says. “I’m saying that we need to deal with this issue clearly and openly and transparently, so that people can understand whether this is a high priority.”

Lack of data comes up time and time again with respect to sockeye, but in the end it’s what’s done with the data— policy, regulation, and management—that really matters. This brings us to the other elephant in the courtroom: the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

In late 2010, DFO took over the regulation of fish farms from the B.C. provincial government. The transfer of responsibility followed a 2009 B.C. Supreme Court ruling that the federal government, not the province, should regulate fish farms because it has constitutional powers over the ocean. The legal action was launched by biologist Alexandra Morton, a longtime opponent of open-net aquaculture.

Critics, however, argue that DFO has an inherent conflict of interest, since it must now regulate both the wild fishery and the fish farms. Worse yet, they argue that there’s internal bias toward promoting farmed salmon over wild.

“One of the things coming out of the Cohen inquiry loud and clear is the conflict of interest in DFO’s mandate,” says Watershed Watch’s Craig Orr. “On one hand, they have a wild salmon policy that they’re supposed to be promoting and on the other, they have an aquaculture development policy, which is often directly at odds with protecting wild salmon.”

“There are biases in the federal government right now with regard to how science is conducted, especially around the issue of salmon farming impacts,” Orr explains. “No papers have ever been published from DFO on what’s really happening on the fish farms.”

Concern over bias crept into the Cohen Commission inquiry even before the opening day, when Delta-Richmond East MP John Cummins spoke out publicly against the appointment of a former DFO employee, Dr. Brian Riddell, as a scientific adviser to the commission.

“… The clear expectation of a judicial inquiry is that it will be presided over by an unbiased judge and supported by a neutral staff,” said Cummins. The department and its “scientific advice” are the target of the Cohen Inquiry, says Cummins.

Riddell, now president of the Pacific Salmon Foundation, subsequently resigned from the scientific panel, but he has since provided expert testimony on several occasions.

Even if bias were not an issue, most observers agree that DFO doesn’t have the staff or the budget to effectively look after even the wild salmon stock. The department has shrunk over the past decade through a series of federal spending cuts, with most remaining staff in Ottawa offices and few left in the field.

“It’s disconcerting to many of us why we don’t get more serious about protecting wild salmon on this coast,” says Craig Orr. “There’s a real lack of capacity in Canada right now to do the research that’s needed to understand why these [salmon] stocks have declined.” SFU’s John Reynolds agrees, pointing toward DFO’s wild salmon policy—a document published five years ago that has never been fully implemented—as a starting point.

“They’ve had this blueprint for how salmon are to be managed,” says Reynolds. “It’s a very clear document, but DFO has never had the resources to implement it.”

Whether those resources are one of the recommendations that come out of the Cohen Commission when it wraps up in May is anyone’s guess. But make no mistake, expectations are high.

“It’s not a smoke and mirrors show,” says Organic Ocean’s Steven Johansen, who has been a commercial fisherman in B.C. his whole career. “I think Justice Cohen is giving an honest effort and hopefully we get some answers at the end of it.”

SFU’s John Reynolds believes the commission, by virtue of its high profile, will bring some much-needed attention to the sockeye. “I hope it makes people across Canada—and Ottawa in particular—understand just how important this issue is to people on the West Coast.”

The sad fate of the Atlantic cod has cast a long shadow, one that stretches all the way across the country. While the causes of the two species’ declines might be different—the cod was simply over-fished in the end—most people can’t help but draw parallels between the finger-pointing and the mismanagement that has surrounded the sockeye.

The question now is whether Justice Cohen can stop an environmental disaster from happening twice.

The Claim

Last June, the governmental Canadian General Standards Board released proposed standards for organic salmon farming. The goal: to overcome trade barriers and help develop niche markets. But will that organic sticker really mean organic-quality farmed fish, or is it just covering up some nasty production practices?

The Investigation

Though the standards board is a federal organization, the new rules were largely produced by a business coalition called the Canadian Organic Aquatic Producers Association and have raised concerns among environmentalists. In a letter to the board published last August, a group of more than 40 leading organic, conservation, and food-safety organizations in Canada and the U.S. argued the draft standards would make certification possible with “minimal changes to current, conventional [farming] practices.”

They have a point. When people think of organic, they usually think that means no pesticides and no antibiotics. Under the proposed standards, salmon farms are allowed to use pesticides routinely, instead of as a last resort (as is stipulated in Canada’s current standards for organic farming on land). Fish can also receive antibiotics and still be called organic.

Just as questionable: the proposed regulations would allow up to 30 percent of feed to be non-organic until proper feed is commercially available. Current regulations for livestock only allow non-organic feed for 10 days following a “catastrophic event.” Farms can also continue to use unlimited amounts of wild fish as feed. Canadian farms produced over 100,000 tonnes of salmon in 2009. According to the non-profit SeaWeb, three pounds or more of wild fish are required to produce one pound of salmon. Do the math and the potential drain on wild stocks seems far from sustainable.

Net-cage farming, which allows waste to litter the ocean (but is much cheaper than sustainable alternatives), is also given a pass. “Consumers expect that organic products are produced in a way that does not require antibiotics, pesticides, or other chemicals, and does not harm the environment,” says Shauna MacKinnon, spokesperson for the Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform, created in 2001 to advocate for a sustainable coast. “Organic aquaculture needs to meet these same principles before it can call itself organic.”

The Investigation

The proposed standards are about rationalizing business as usual, not real change. With pesticides, antibiotics, and nets all given the thumbs-up under the proposed standards, the organic label starts to sound like a bad joke—one that could be disastrous for the organic industry as a whole.

Public anxiety about allowing offshore drilling has been around for a long time, rising to panic levels during accidents and spills, and for good reason. The continuing environmental disaster off the Gulf coast was the result of poor regulation and should prompt Canadians to question our own regulatory regime for offshore exploration. More specifically, we need to address our inability to manage risks that accompany technological advances and ensure that knowledge about our country’s resource potential is used in the public interest.

Offshore drilling started in the Gulf of Mexico over 60 years ago. In fact, the recent Louisiana spill is remarkably similar to the blowout at Mexico’s offshore IXTOC 1 well in 1979. That accident was caused by failures aboard a Canadian-built oil rig, which, like the recent BP accident, also burned and sank, releasing half a billion litres of oil into the ocean—10 times the size of the Exxon Valdez spill.

A decade before, that same rig had been used to drill the last hole in Shell Canada’s program off the coast of British Columbia. At that time, the infamous Santa Barbara, California, spill was alerting Canadians to the hazards of offshore drilling, but it hardly mattered, because Shell ended its program as planned, in August 1969.

Oil engineers have had 40 years to learn about preventing offshore blowouts. Rather than question their expertise, a better response would be to ask why government monitors seem unable to anticipate and prevent such events. Disasters caused by new technology occur when a small number of engineers monopolize technical knowledge and fail to protect the public. A prescient 1976 study by the British Council for Science and Society entitled “Superstar Technologies” analyzed this problem.

Frailties of intellect may lead engineers to believe their skills are sufficient for the job; or to work within isolated silos of expertise, ignorant of the skills of others. Frailties of conscience may make them yield to boredom, neglect routine safety measures, or let them be bullied out of more cautious or dissenting opinions. The higher the risk, the greater the need for monitoring, but explicit federal policy cripples its capacity to apply the critical scrutiny necessary to protect our environment.

With the notable exception of Health Canada, federal departments do not recognize provincial licensing for professionals. Self-regulation is the public’s first line of defence. Federal engineers and geoscientists are accountable only to their minister, and not to their peers. Secondly, federal regulators must be attentive to political direction filtering down to their level. If a regulator wanted redundancy in an aspect of blowout prevention and the company engineer replied, “We can’t afford that,” the regulator would be risking his or her chances for promotion by withholding approval. Corporations complain to the political level if their desires are thwarted, and the embattled public servant always hears about it, inevitably acquiescing.

Current drilling of Chevron’s deep well Lona 0-55, off Canada’s East Coast, has made everyone very nervous. The regulators said they balanced this project’s higher risk with more operational requirements and monitoring, but we can’t assess the truth of this statement. Long-standing rules for petroleum rights allow companies to withhold release of their offshore seismic and drilling results for five to 10 years. Arguably, the unexplored Orphan basin off our East Coast needed drilling to define its geology, but Chevron gains the knowledge, not the public. That’s still a problem on our West Coast.

Canada first issued offshore permits for the West Coast in 1961. Shell was the sole bidder, and two years later, the company started a six-year exploration program. After the 1968 discovery of oil on Alaska’s North Slope, everyone saw tankers carrying Alaskan oil to the Lower 48 as a pollution threat. The federal Liberal cabinet then attempted to ban tanker traffic to help its advocacy of a new pipeline for Alaska oil across the continent. By then, the government knew Shell had not found oil.

Preventing oil spills was the government’s rationale when it started the “moratorium” on offshore exploration in 1971. This action exempted Shell from obligations like annual permit fees or releasing geological information. Promises to cancel the permits were not kept, so even today the company pays nothing for its rights, which remain preserved like fossils in bureaucratic amber.

It’s unlikely there is oil off Canada’s West Coast. The moratorium lets Shell sit on what it knows, but it published some hints in 1971. Most of Canada’s oil originated in shallow seas of the Cretaceous era, but rocks of that origin are notably absent on the western continental shelf. Overlying, younger rocks were found to be “tight,” meaning they have poor ability to store any oil or gas squeezed up from older rocks. More ominously, Shell reported drilling into “hard geopressures,” where the rock has higher fluid pressures than the weight of overlying rock would predict. Such conditions make blowouts even more likely.

One might wonder what additional requirements regulators assigned to Chevron’s Lona 0-55, to be equipped to handle “hard geopressures.” If the public has only limited and long-delayed access to facts like these, to understand the geological realities, it cannot properly assess the diligence of the monitors.

Technology seems always one step ahead of our evolving capacity to protect the environment. We should insist that the regulation of offshore development include true independence of the monitoring agency, critical scrutiny by licensed professionals, and complete disclosure, to ensure that the interface between rocks and dollars is managed in the public interest.

Desiré Munyaneza

Quebec Superior Court judge André Denis made history on May 22, 2009, when he convicted Desiré Munyaneza of seven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Munyaneza, he said, had “intentionally killed dozens” during the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and “raped several women and pillaged homes and businesses.” For the first time ever, a Canadian court tried and found guilty a citizen of another country for crimes committed outside of Canada. It was an important test of Canada’s Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act of 2000, which grants Canadian courts greater authority to try and punish war criminals residing in Canada, regardless of their nationality. The law itself and Justice Denis’s judgment sends a powerful message: if you commit monstrous crimes anywhere in the world, you will not be able to evade justice in the nooks and crannies of technicality and jurisdiction. Canadian justice is coming for you.

Just a day earlier, another Canadian court sent out a much different message. On May 21, 2009, the Supreme Court of Canada declined to consider whether or not suspected Taliban fighters in the custody of the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan are entitled to the rights and protections of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Amnesty International and the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association had asked the Supreme Court to judge whether the Canadian military had the right to hand Afghan terror suspects over to the indigenous government, where reliable reports were saying they were suffering torture and abuse. Amnesty and the BCCLA posed two questions to the court: “Does the charter apply … to the detention of non-Canadians by the Canadian forces…?” and, if not, would it apply if “the transfer of the detainees in question would expose them to a substantial risk of torture?” To which the Supremes said, merely: “Questions answered in the negative.”

So: which is it?

Is Canadian law so universal—so undeniably and cosmically just—that it applies to everyone, no matter their location or nationality, as in Munyaneza’s case? Or do our laws stop sharply at our borders, with no obligation to extend our protections to non-citizens in the custody of our government, as in the case of the Afghan prisoners? It’s one or the other—it can’t be both.

Canada’s lawmakers apparently want to keep the credit and deflect the blame. Canada is trying to make up for lost time on the war-crimes front—having earned a deserved reputation as a safe haven for Nazi war criminals in the late 20th century—and wants to strut its new tough-on-crime credentials to the international community. This is why Munyaneza was not deported back to Rwanda or the International Criminal Court, both of which have their own systems for prosecuting exactly these cases. We’re quite happy to take the convenient and comfortable position of condemning a well-known genocidaire and throwing him in our prison, a trophy we’ve awarded ourselves. But when it comes to the politically awkward prospect of extending our justice to alleged terrorists and insurgents in Afghanistan, well, suddenly it’s complicated. Not good enough. Human rights are human rights—no exceptions. If our prosecutions are global, then so are our protections, and the Afghan detainees must receive those benefits. Will Canadian justice come for them, too?