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Fisheries committee Thank you. Good afternoon. I would like to thank the committee for this opportunity to present on the important issue of fish habitat protection. My name is Margot Venton. I am a Staff Lawyer with Ecojustice Canada and also the Director of our Marine Program. Ecojustice is a n
November 28th, 2016Committee meeting
Margot Venton
Fisheries committee That's okay. I was done. That was the end.
November 28th, 2016Committee meeting
Margot Venton
Fisheries committee Thank you for that question. To clarify my earlier statements, we were very clear that we don't propose reverting to the HADD prohibition. We would propose reverting to “harmful alteration, disruption, and destruction of fish habitat” as the primary definition for what constitut
November 28th, 2016Committee meeting
Margot Venton
Fisheries committee Sure. I think there are many places in the Fisheries Act where you could specifically insert consideration of cumulative effects. There's the idea that I believe we just heard about: the notion of the guiding principles. For example, you could specifically insert into the discr
November 28th, 2016Committee meeting
Margot Venton
Fisheries committee That would be a really.... Let me just say that all of our money comes from individual or group donors. We don't receive any government money, and we don't take any direct corporate sponsorships. As I mentioned in my introduction—maybe it was only in my written notes—we do have a
November 28th, 2016Committee meeting
Margot Venton
Fisheries committee Those are just our individual donors. We're also supported by foundations. Generally, those are our two large sources of support.
November 28th, 2016Committee meeting
Margot Venton
Fisheries committee As I said, I've been in a number of legal cases that have involved the interpretation, application, and enforcement of the Fisheries Act. Some of those have been against DFO for, in our opinion—and, in some cases, the court's opinion—the failure to properly implement the act.
November 28th, 2016Committee meeting
Margot Venton
Fisheries committee If that's the way one wants to interpret the provision, I think we would be on the same page. We would agree that there probably is, from a biological perspective perhaps, no fish species out there that isn't involved in the ecological web of life that keeps the commercial fisher
November 28th, 2016Committee meeting
Margot Venton
Fisheries committee From a clarity perspective, I think it would just be better to revert to that position, for that reason.
November 28th, 2016Committee meeting
Margot Venton
Fisheries committee Absolutely. It's a recommendation for two separate provisions. This approach actually exists in some other legislation in Canada. There are parallel provisions, or similar provisions, in the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. Essentially, the request for investigation simply
November 28th, 2016Committee meeting
Margot Venton
Fisheries committee Well—
November 28th, 2016Committee meeting
Margot Venton
Fisheries committee It would certainly help the situation. Unquestionably, I think that you need to properly staff and to equip the people enforcing the act to go out on the water and do that. Canada is such an enormous country that I question whether you could ever really get total enforcement in a
November 28th, 2016Committee meeting
Margot Venton
Fisheries committee Yes. It's the idea that if you have a lake, for example, a single decision to develop something or do something on that lake may itself not have an impact, but if you do the same thing 20 or 30 times where there are 30 or 40 different activities, that can create an impact, even t
November 28th, 2016Committee meeting
Margot Venton
Fisheries committee I think this is one of the reasons why it's extremely important, as we said in our recommendations, for DFO to evaluate and assess what those watersheds can handle and where those tipping points are. I also think it's really tricky for us in North America in general, where we've
November 28th, 2016Committee meeting
Margot Venton
Fisheries committee It depends on your perspective on the tipping point.
November 28th, 2016Committee meeting
Margot Venton