Thank you for having us today. It was an impromptu decision to come here. We only found out about this meeting. My name is Sonja Wood, and this is my husband Chris Mansky. We're here from Nova Scotia and we represent the group, the Friends of the Avon River. The Avon River is part of the Minas Basin and part of the Bay of Fundy.
The Avon River has been slated as an inner Bay of Fundy recovery river by the government team whose focus is maintaining the wild Atlantic salmon within the Bay of Fundy. Forty-two rivers were selected by the inner Bay of Fundy recovery team. The Avon River is one of them. The Avon River is a huge watershed that has tributaries that are also salmon-producing rivers: the St. Croix, the Cogmagun, the Kennetcook, and the Halfway River.
The problem with the Avon River is that it's the only river in Canada that has zero fish passage. This has been studied and confirmed in a study by Lisa Isaacman in 2002. We know this is a salmon-producing river and it's critical in the reproduction of the salmon. We have no fish passage on this watershed, which is huge in terms of the stress of the wild Atlantic salmon.
Since 2004, I've been the chair of the board of the Friends of the Avon River. We have been asking the federal fisheries office to instigate a comprehensive and thorough EIA study on this watershed. When the causeway was put in, in 1968, it was put in without any assessment on the river or how it would impact any of the species that thrived within this watershed.
We do have a serious concern about the numbers and the population and the decline of the wild Atlantic salmon, but we also have concern about the American eel. The Avon River is critical in the reproduction of the female species of the American eel, which in turn will ensure that the numbers won't decline. With this barrier, these species are not getting past into the critical habitats to continue their life cycles and are basically dying in this muddy channel.
The Avon River disaster, as I stated, began in 1968 when the causeway went in. They've seen rapid erosion along the watershed that has basically destroyed 16 freshwater-saltwater marshes. The muddy plug has migrated up the St. Croix, which is basically a dead river now. There are no salmon getting into that river.
We have the Kennetcook River, which is also being plugged by this dirty mud, silty bed, that has been eroding for almost 50 years along the watershed. This plug has migrated down into the Cogmagun, and into the Halfway River, and is really wreaking havoc along the entire Avon River watershed.
Our biggest concern is that we've never seen any type of an assessment done along this river. Our pleas have gone unheard. We've had multiple governments listen to us, but deny our concerns, turn a blind eye. We have huge industry projects happening within the Minas Basin right now. We have tidal projects going on. Alton Gas is preparing to dump salty brine into the Shubenacadie River. The Avon River has a huge highway twinning project going on, and to my knowledge, they plan to build a six-lane bridge, not for the throughway of any fish passage but simply for traffic.
We don't want this to happen without any type of an EIA at this point. This is why we launched the petition, which was submitted on September 21 to the federal government, requesting that we have this comprehensive study finally done on this watershed in order to come up with a way that we can mitigate this issue.
We worked hand in hand with the inner Bay of Fundy recovery team. We sat in on multiple meetings with the Petitcodiac Riverkeeper. We feel that portions of the model that was set in 2007, on the Petitcodiac River, could be used to speed the project along on the Avon River. There would have to be a little more investigation done on the Avon River because we've never had fish passage, so they would have to have a little more involvement.
Nonetheless, we could move this along by taking the model that was set on the Petitcodiac River. Our recommendation is that we look at this seriously right now before any highway project is implemented, or before any other projects within the Minas Basin are put in place. We hope the government's theory of no net loss might be considered here. If we are going to wreak havoc, then perhaps we could do something to fix this issue.
The Avon River used to be noted as the “Big Salmon River”. The population of salmon that used to migrate up this river was so numerous that when you came to the salt water-freshwater hole, the river was jam-packed with so many salmon you could walk across the river on the backs of the salmon. This is what they used to say. Our count this year saw 20 wild Atlantic salmon within this watershed, and our concern is that they're not getting past the barrage barrier. This is, to us, an illegal barrier, and we believe that it's time to do something. We have these species at risk. We know that it's a priority river for the inner Bay of Fundy recovery team, and it's listed on their rivers of recovery. We're asking that this comprehensive environmental assessment be put in place immediately.
Thank you for your time, and we appreciate being here.