Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, members of the committee, for inviting us here. I'd like to talk to you for a few minutes about the Fraser River and gravel removal situations that are occurring there currently. In major part, I would like to discuss what I feel is DFO's inability to meet its statutory obligations in regard to the Canada Fisheries Act, and specifically section 35 of the Canada Fisheries Act with regard to habitat, and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act.
I'll just give you a brief overview. I've had extensive experience with regard to gravel removal, both on and off the Fraser River, mostly gravel removal in streams for flood protection. I'm a fisheries biologist with 25 years of experience, and I did work on the Fraser River in a variety of different capacities for about ten years, until the committee dealing with gravel removal was disbanded and I was sent elsewhere. Right now I'm a fisheries instructor at the British Columbia Institute of Technology.
What I'd like to do for a few minutes today is to give you an overview of something that happened this winter, to provide you with an example of how I feel the Department of Fisheries and Oceans is not meeting its statutory obligations. It regards a fish kill associated with the gravel removal project in the gravel reach of the Fraser River.
The gravel reach of the Fraser River, as you can see on the first slide, is in the southwestern part of British Columbia. It's 100 to 150 kilometres long, just between Hope and Mission. The Fraser is 1370 kilometres long, from Mount Robson to the Gulf of Georgia. This is a very short section but an extraordinarily productive section. It's very fish-rich. It's the most fish-species-rich freshwater environment in British Columbia, with about 30 species. It has the largest sturgeon population in all of British Columbia. I worked extensively on sturgeon in my capacity as a Ministry of Environment employee up until three years ago. The largest salmon run in British Columbia spawn in the gravel reach. Sometimes there are in excess of ten million fish. At least five listed species at risk are contained in that gravel reach.
This is an aerial photograph of the gravel reach. This is a chunk of river between roughly Laidlaw and Chilliwack, the confluence with the Harrison. It's a very braided section, a very habitat-rich section. You can see the large islands and the large gravel bars between the green lines, which are the diked areas.
There is an idea--and there's an element of truth to it--that there is sedimentation, in other words, aggregation of gravel and sand in this area, causing flood profile difficulties, possibly requiring that sand and gravel be moved out, at least in some locations. There's a lot of equivocal science in regard to that, in terms of how much, when, and where.
This leads us to the agreement the Department of Fisheries and Oceans made with Land and Water B.C. two or three years ago with regard to removing 500,000 cubic metres of gravel for flood protection. I maintain that while gravel may need to come out, what Land and Water B.C. and Department of Fisheries and Oceans have agreed to is simply a gravel grab. It has nothing to do with flood protection. The situation we saw here in March of 2006, which we in effect audited, exemplifies that this and other projects that DFO has authorized do not meet those objectives.
Here, some time in early March, a causeway was put across a large side channel of the Fraser to an island, a bar, where gravel was to be removed. I'd point out that this gravel bar where the removal took place is probably one of the better places to remove gravel for flood protection, in my opinion. A number of other spots, the one immediately upstream, at Popkum, for instance, simply presented an opportunity for the local interests to get gravel. They had nothing to do with flood protection.
DFO's decision to authorize these folks to take gravel out at this particular location, Big Bar, was very egregious because of its implications for habitat. They cut off this large side channel; the large side channel was probably larger in flow than 95% of the streams at this time of year, in all of British Columbia, so it was a very large channel. And as you can see from the yellow line, as the channel was cut off, there was a residual flow through the rip-rap berm. Most of the river was cut off on this side channel, and up to 40 metres in a lineal distance was de-watered. Multiple hectares were de-watered. This slide is the close-up of the causeway where gravel was taken across.
What was most disturbing was that very large spawning beds were dewatered. You could see that these were spawning beds.
Pink salmon, as I indicated earlier, spawn in the main stem of the Fraser River. The bar and spawning beds I'm pointing out were de-watered. Several million fish were killed as a function of this, in our estimation.
I teach at the British Columbia Institute of Technology, and my students went out and did physical surveys. This picture shows the ultimate objective for gravel removal: to take large amounts of gravel out of the river. We had our students out there digging up redds, doing surveys, transects, elevations, and so on. In pretty well every redd we dug into, we found dead fish. As I say, we used biostandards to determine that several million fish were killed.
Just to give you a sense, the DFO manager suggested this was a natural event caused by low water. Well, the before side, the left-hand side of the slide, is the de-watered area. At the end of March the causeway was pulled out. Instantaneously this area was re-watered, and we surveyed it. So we have very good, concrete data to show this.
Here I am showing the surveyed area of the redds. The red line is the outer perimeter of the de-watered redds. What we ended up with was about three-quarters of a hectare. If we add up all the other sites on the island and downstream and upstream, we figure we had a whole hectare of de-watered redds. Some fish were pulled out right at the water's edge, so it wasn't just up at the outer perimeter; mortality occurred right down close to the water.
The upper figure in the slide shows our zero point, when the causeway was in. You can see that the staff gauge, which is basically a stick but was pretty accurate, shows the zero point with the causeway in. With the causeway out, which is shown in the lower picture, the water surface elevation of the side channel went up almost a metre. At the point depicted, it was 0.84 metres.
This figure shows the Water Survey of Canada gauge. The black line is the gauge at Hope and right about where the red line takes off.... The red line shows the elevation of the channel, so rather than de-watering, what it shows is the re-watering of the channel at various intervals of the channel's being re-watered. In effect the elevation was again almost a metre.
Our transit surveys.... You can't see the little numbers, but if you go horizontally from the blue line to the red line, again the re-watering of the channel, using a transit, was about a metre.
DFO said they were going to put some culverts in to allow flow-through in the area I am showing. Directors ordered this, and you can see how absurd the direction was from the area director. The actual installation of those culverts was very messy—a lot of silt went into the river—and the monitor basically pooh-poohed the notion that this would have any impact. The area habitat chief said, “Well, you know, we're really lucky. The fish had probably all emerged, or close to all emerged.” The red line shows, at the beginning of March, the out-migration of pink salmon at Mission—these are data from DFO—and it shows that in the Fraser River watershed, the pink salmon juvenile out-migration had barely started. So again, the area habitat chief was way out to lunch. He either didn't know what he was talking about or was basically making up stories.
To get to the final point, DFO suggested it was an inordinately low-water year. In fact it wasn't a low-water year if you look at the percentiles above and below normal flows. Our green star shows exactly where the flows were during this time period, and it was a very normal year. There was nothing environmentally, in a natural sense, unusual about this. The mortalities were clearly a result of a DFO-authorized incident.
DFO understands how to get gravel out. As I said, I was part of the Fraser gravel committee up until 2003. Here is a picture showing how gravel was taken out from Harrison Bar in 2000 and into a channel. You can do it cleanly and without impact. What I would say is that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans has turned around, and instead of protecting the environment the authorizations have become political; they have become politicized. Executives and the senior managers are making decisions, and the local biologists and engineers are basically being cut out of the decision-making process. What you have is extreme habitat damage as a result.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.