Thank you for the invitation. I appreciate it. I got the invitation late yesterday afternoon, so we rather scrambled to put together something. However, we have had discussions previously with Mr. Finnigan, and we thank him for that audience earlier. I look forward to sharing some of these points with the rest of the committee today.
The Miramichi River Environmental Assessment Committee has been active on the Miramichi River since 1998. We have had long-standing activity on the river. We have been observing with a lot of very credible science since that time not only the freshwater system but also the Miramichi estuary, which is a large estuarine system that's very productive, or at least has been in the past.
Something we've noted over that time is that, to no surprise, with the collapse of industry.... We've had base metal mining on Tomogonops and that is pretty much gone from the watershed now. In fact, you could say it has gone. We've had the pulp and paper sector here, which has collapsed within the last 27 years. Let's say we're looking at that time frame. That industry is now gone. We have other major industries that have collapsed as well, all of which have had input in the river and all have been measured in the past. Those impacts are pretty much gone.
On the positive side for the environment, all the collapses of industry are of course positive impacts on the overall environment, because we no longer have the significant impacts resulting. Add to that, we've had two new sewage treatment plants, the major one is having to do with the north side and the south side of Miramichi city. Those came online in this period of time.
That being the case, one would think that all of these things would reduce the impact on our watershed, and it's a large watershed. The Miramichi watershed is 23% of the province. It's a very significant watershed. It's the largest intact watershed within the entire boundary of New Brunswick.
One would think that with those changes you would get a real increase in basic food stocks, the fisheries stocks, and that environmental improvement would be very discernible. In many ways, it is.
However, we have been looking at that over the years, and we do not see what one would expect to see. One has to ask the reason why. One of the things that we had the privilege of hosting in 1996 was “Water, Science, and the Public: The Miramichi Ecosystem”. This was a science workshop, and Dr. Michael Chadwick was the editor of that. He took it out as a Canadian special publication of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences. It is available, of course, as that technical document.
We looked at the state of the environment during that time. We had scientists from all over Atlantic Canada, many from federal agencies, provincial agencies, and also universities and local colleges to present to that. This is a compilation of those papers. We even saw, back then, of course, that there were declines in some fish stocks. We also completed a state of the environment report in 2007. That, again, looked at the current status, reflected upon all the collapse of industries and the economic decline, which one would think would improve the environmental performance, but we didn't see that.
With all of these things compiling, we then had about a 10-year hiatus of science altogether for reasons you probably appreciate. We have not had significant science activity by the federal government, especially, on this watershed, and especially the estuary, for the last decade or so. With that in mind, we wrote a letter to the Honourable Dominic LeBlanc on August 8, 2016, and followed that up with a meeting with Mr. Finnigan. I'll share some of the excerpts and our ask to you from that letter.
We mentioned that there have been 27 years of dramatic improvements in the river's environmental condition, and we noted that despite the changes in water quality, our membership perceives worrisome declines in important fish populations. We talked about the two documents that reflected the kinds of changes that are worrisome, “Water, Science, and the Public: The Miramichi Ecosystem”, and the “State of the Environment Report for the Miramichi Watershed”, 2007.
The most recent report noted disturbing trends in eel, tomcod, shad, smelt, and Atlantic salmon, populations of which the latter two were once the world's largest. With our watershed smelt populations and the importance of that to our watershed, when we see such significant declines....
The cause of these declines is unknown, and we also, as an offset of that, see the decline in the abundance of aquatic shorebirds and predator raptors. Again, on the converse side, we see the increase of striped bass and grey seals. What is the cause of all this? Why are things not improving and, rather, seeming to be going sideways?
There are three requests that we made in this letter. First, we requested the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, of which the honourable Dominic LeBlanc is still, I understand, the minister, to provide a status update of the approved mentioned fish stocks including trends in landings and fishing effort.
For the second ask, we requested support, data, and funding, if possible, for a master's level project that would compare the current and historical states of the Miramichi ecosystem. We would receive technical support from the University of Moncton, the University of New Brunswick, NBBC, the Miramichi Salmon Association, the Atlantic Salmon Federation, and other organizations.
The third ask is to understand that MREAC, the Miramichi River Environmental Assessment Committee, is prepared to support and facilitate this science and would be pleased to meet with you at any time to discuss it further.
With that in mind, we're hoping to rekindle science on the Miramichi watershed. Much of this science can be concentrated in the Miramichi estuary where we see a number of these problems being manifested. That is the essence of that. We as an organization have been around. We have very credible, scientific backgrounds in terms of our membership. The federal and provincial support we've had in the past is now somewhat collapsed as a result of things that have gone on with them in the past 10 years of decline in federal science.
With that, gentlemen and ladies, I rest the case.