I started working for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in 1969. I was recruited out of the University of Alberta with two degrees in fisheries biology. I was hired to be a fish protection biologist. I soon learned that it was hard to do the job unless we had a law, so some of us pushed for a law to protect fish habitat. In theory, we could protect fish habitat from dams, flows from dams, debris from logging, and things like that, but there was nothing there to really protect habitat. You could destroy a wetland. You could run a tank through a marsh, and there was nothing you could do about that.
We also used the pollution law to protect a lot of habitat. If you did fill in an estuary, we called that a deleterious substance, and we would try to protect the Fisheries Act using water quality law. Over the years I became, in Canada, probably the expert witness who has done more expert witness courses on pollution and the Fisheries Act, with well over 100 cases from Newfoundland to Vancouver Island, and from the Arctic down to the 49th parallel. I've been on a lot of tribunals. I've done a lot of work. I've directed a lot of projects, many of which have been published. I'm still doing some of that work, including a few of the key ones I have right in front of me that have appeared in qualified journals.