Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I'm the only francophone in the association. My presentation will be in English, but
if you have questions,
you can ask them in either official language, and it will be my pleasure to answer.
I'd like to note two things that I did not include in my document. They are comments that were made, or were not responded to. The first was about the concept of catch and release.
I'm also president of the Cheticamp River Salmon Association. I believe that may have been the first catch-and-release river in Canada. It's in a national park, and it was established as a catch-and-release river in 1988. I don't know if there were others at that time. In the 28-year history of catch-and-release, there are no known mortalities from catch-and-release on that particular river.
It's in Cape Breton Highlands National Park, and of course it is a cold-water river, more fished in spring and fall, so that may help, and by experienced anglers. I think under good conditions with the average there would be no mortality in catch-and-release, and I think there would be many studies that show from zero to five, I heard, but in this river there were none in 28 years.
The other one, which I'll just note, was on aquaculture in the Bay of Fundy. No one responded to that here at the time. The reason no one responded is that all of the groups here, except Sonja Wood, are in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. There is no aquaculture in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The aquaculture is all in the Bay of Fundy, on the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia, and on the south coast of Newfoundland.
I will not go any further. I do have more comments on that. Hopefully they will come out in the questions.
The Nova Scotia Salmon Association was created in 1963 by prominent members of the N.S. angling community. It's a registered non-profit charitable organization, with 1,100 members or so and 22 directors who come from all parts of the province. It's the leading volunteer organization promoting the wise management and conservation of wild Atlantic salmon stock and trout stock in Nova Scotia with a board of directors representing all parts of Nova Scotia, again. There are about 23 affiliated organizations. The Cheticamp River Salmon Association, of which I am president, is a member of the Nova Scotia Salmon Association. The Nova Scotia Salmon Association in turn is an affiliate of the Atlantic Salmon Federation.
The primary local issues of concern for NSSA are the acid rain impact on Nova Scotia Atlantic coast rivers, in the area we call the southern uplands; open-pen or sea cage aquaculture impact on wild Atlantic salmon, again in the Bay of Fundy and the Atlantic coast; human impact past and present on river and stream fish habitat; and the loss of the inner Bay of Fundy wild salmon from 40,000 a generation ago to a handful today, which you heard very recently. My presentation will just focus on the acid rain mitigation project.
You have a map there. It shows the acid rain impacted areas of Nova Scotia, and this coincides with the geology. There's very poor geology. It's all basically rock in that whole area. How the acid rain works, if you're not too familiar with that, is that when the air currents and the streams from west to east hit the Atlantic coast, they bring in all this acid rain stuff from the industrialized U.S. It then follows up along the Atlantic coast, and basically what you're seeing there is the drift of the air currents hitting that particular area.
The acid rain mitigation project is in West River Sheet Harbour. It is actually a lime doser, and you can see from the picture on the next page that it's the size of a tractor-trailer. It's installed on the West River Sheet Harbour. It's about 30 kilometres upstream and it's dishing out lime on a daily basis and has been doing so for the last 10 years.
In 2005, NSSA initiated an ambitious project to restore one of the rivers damaged by acid rain. The West River was selected for the demonstration project through an extensive review exercise carried out by a committee composed of NSSA, ASF, Trout Nova Scotia, Nova Scotia Power, and both federal and provincial governments. A report was contracted by NSSA and prepared by Dr. Atle Hindar, a leading Norwegian researcher on liming strategies to combat acid rain effects. For the first 10 years of operation, the lime doser was operated solely by volunteers from NSSA.
The cost to 2015, fundraised mostly by NSSA—we have two fundraising events a year, a golf tournament and a dinner—of liming, maintenance, and operation approached $1 million for the first 10 years.
The major objective is as follows.
The West River acid rain mitigation project serves as a demonstration and experimental project. We are concentrating resources within this one watershed in order to find the methods needed for effective acid mitigation.
It may sound relatively simple: you just dump the lime into the water and that will bring the pH high enough. However, what we are finding is that pH is only one of the factors—the main one—but there are some other very important factors. You may have heard of this. The second one is aluminum leaching into the rivers, and that is caused by the lack of buffering soil. The buffering agents are gone from the soil, so aluminum leaching into the rivers from the rains is affecting the gills of the small fish that basically have difficulty in surviving the transition to the ocean. That's another thing that we've found out.
We are also conducting concerted experiments to answer the questions currently limiting liming restoration potential. It can be complicated. The lessons learned on the West River are to be incorporated in a restoration blueprint on how to address the issue of acid rain in the impacted rivers of Nova Scotia and Maine. Northeast Maine does share some of that same geology.
In 2016, we have a new partner, new funding after 10 years. It's been a long time doing this by ourselves. The Province of Nova Scotia, in 2016, granted us $100,000 a year. They gave us $300,000 to hire a scientist to start managing this project. It was kind of “go home or go bust”. Why did it take so long? There was a two-year life cycle that we were trying to accomplish, but because we were doing all this research on a shoestring budget with volunteers, it took a long time.
The province has also helped us. We're now doing some helicopter liming. We started that in that same West River watershed. Again, it's to find out exactly the technique and what we need to do to preserve this one river, so that we can possibly take this knowledge to another area.
DFO also partnered in the building and installation of an adult counting fence. In all these years, we did not have a clue of how many fish were coming back. Finally, with some help from DFO and other partners.... The Atlantic salmon conservation fund was a big player, and I think your program, the recreational fisheries partnership program, was also a player.
Other funders have included the NSLC Adopt a Stream. The Nova Scotia Liquor Corporation provides our Adopt a Stream program $100,000 a year. We will be getting, in a 10-year period, $1 million from them for that specific program. The Atlantic salmon conservation fund, RFPP, and various student projects are how we've been managing this project for 10 years.
Finally, the federal government has become involved, and other than the RFPP.... In fact, last week I signed a substantial grant from ACOA for a second lime doser, which is to be installed on the West River, on the Killag branch. Where we have the original lime doser wasn't where it was supposed to be, but it was the only place where we had access. This Killag branch is the preferred place, and now we have access there. We hope that with these two dosers, we will be able to complete our study within a relatively short number of years.
What is the request from NSSA to the federal government? It is recommended that DFO and other federal agencies, including Environment Canada, get involved directly in NSSA's acid mitigation project, that they invest in infrastructure to facilitate acid rain mitigation, including management and administration. So far, we've seen some funding for some parts, but none of the management administration.
Full-time staff could be hired who would be responsible for the implementation of new projects. Initiatives could be funded that would allow non-profit organizations to contribute to DFO's mandate on fish protection in the face of acid rain.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.