V. the green interview .com Work/s 8!gqe:t • The Lsues The VVo:kLs Fnest Mnx/s Remarks to the Law Amendments Committee Legislative Assembly of Nova Scotia by Silver Donald Cameron Host and Executive Producer TheGreenlnterview.com April 27, 2015 Good afternoon. Thank you for this opportunity to speak. the green interview .com My name is Silver Donald Cameron, and as many of you will know I’m a self-employed author, broadcaster, internet publisher and ,te Vno s 6.’qqeN:ues filmmaker. ye also been a university dean, I professor and and for Worlds Fhesr M,’nd: 13 years I was a columnist with the Sunday Herald. I’ve been living and working — and voting and sailing and paying taxes — in Nova Scotia full-time since 1971, mostly in rural Nova Scotia. My current venture is called www.TheGreenlnterview.com. It’s a subscription website which also distributes its intellectual products through four US distributors to millions of students, teachers and library patrons all over the world. I am in fact exactly the kind of information- age entrepreneur that governments are always saying they’re eager to encourage. And no wonder. The cultural industries are the fastest, cheapest job-creators in the whole economy. But my remarks today are about net-pen aquaculture. As a spin-off of The Green Interview, my colleagues and I have also produced documentary films. One of these is called Salmon Wars, and some of you are probably familiar with it. It has its own website, www.SaImonWars.com. To be sure you have a chance to view it, I’ve brought a DVD for each of you. You’ll be told by the industry and their apologists that it’s inaccurate and biased. It’s not. It appeared in 2012, and nobody has yet identified a factual error in it. It does have a point of view, and that point of view is that open net-pen aquaculture as now practiced is an unsustainable, destructive industry that could not possibly survive without constant injections of public funds. I’m sure others will give you plenty of detail about the derisory lease charges for open-pen sites, the compensation from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency when the fish predictably die as a result of poor animal husbandry, the $25 million provided by the previous provincial government to Cooke Aquaculture for a processing plant that remains a figment of the corporate imagination. want to But I focus on jobs in rural communities, which is the only possible justification for the expenditure of public funds on this industry. If you go to Salmon Wars.com, you’ll find a series of short videos designed to be circulated through social media. This is a frame from one of those videos: First point: if you have money to spend on job-creation in rural Nova Scotia, net-pen aquaculture is a terrible way to spend it, creating just 6.7 jobs per million dollars spent. By contrast, the lobster industry produces 12.5 jobs, tourism produces 26 jobs, and recreational fishing — which used to be an important industry here — produces 30 jobs. So why would you spend your money on aquaculture? Second, how many jobs are destroyed by salmon pens? Wherever the pens appear, lobsters vanish — and lobster is the mainstay of coastal Nova Scotia. In fact the salmon feedlot industry has repeatedly been convicted of actually poisoning our keystone seafood. Genetic pollution from interbreeding between wild salmon and farmed salmon weakens and sometimes destroys the wild stocks — which are the foundation of the recreational fishery. And no tourist wants to lie on a beach fouled with salmon fat and debris from broken cages, assaulted by the smell of fish feces and the non-stop roar of offshore machinery. I believe that an honest calculation would show that this industry actually costs us jobs. Third, what kinds of jobs does this industry produce, and who gets them? The answer is, a handful of minimum wage jobs that Nova Scotians shun, and that are therefore mostly filled through the Temporary Foreign Worker program. If this is such a great industry for rural Nova Scotia, why is it so vigorously opposed in almost all the communities where it either operates or wants to operate? So, is there any way forward for this industry? There is, and the government knows it — and I’m bewildered that this bill ignores it. You’ll hear a lot more, I’m sure, about the Doelle-Lahey report called A New Regulatory Framework for Low-Impact/High-Value Aquaculture in Nova Scotia. This fine report is a model for regulatory excellence in all our resource industries. It’s been overwhelmingly supported by the communities affected. It provides the government with an ideal opportunity to move forward in harmony with the rural citizens who have to live with this industry every day. By failing to implement it, this government has needlessly set itself up for another long, unpleasant conflict with its own people, on behalf of an industry that is essentially valueless to this province the government to be re-drafted in accordance with the principles I urge you to send this bill back to enunciated by the Doelle-Lahey report, and endorsed by the Nova Scotians most directly affected by this industry. Thank you again for your time this afternoon. If you have questions, I’ll try to answer them. Silver Donald Cameron, CM, ONS, PhD Host and Executive Producer www.TheGreenlnterview.com 24 Armshore Drive Halifax, NS 83N imS (902)446-5577 Mr. Cameron presented this DVD to the Law Amendments Committee. Please click on Watch DVD to view. Limit search to available items 1 result found. Sorted by relevance | date | title . Link to Cameron, Silver Donald, 1937- Author re Title Salmon wars [electronic resource] : aquaculture, wild fish and the future of communities / a film by Silver Donald Cameron and Chris Beckett. Publication [S.l. : s.n., 2012] Info. Connect to View website Watch DVD Location Call No. Status Lib Office Multimedia 333.9565609716 C182 AVAILABLE Details Description 1 DVD-video (74 min) : sd., col. ; 4 1/2 in. Note This film is provided free but on condition that it be shown in public only complete and unaltered. Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index. Note Also available on the Internet. System System requirements: RealPlayer. Details Subject Salmon fisheries -- Nova Scotia Aquaculture -- Nova Scotia Local Subject Aquaculture Added Author Beckett, Chris Ecology Action Centre 1 of 1 28/04/2015 10:39 AM Ecology Action Centre Ecology Action Centre Submission to Law Amendments Committee Re. Bill 95 - An Act to Amend Chapter 25 of the Acts of 1996, the Fisheries and Coastal Resources Act, Respecting Aquaculture April 27, 2015 Bill P5 introduces amendments to the Fisheries and Coastal Resources Act that are supposedly as a result of the Doelle-Lahey Report’s prescription for a new and improved regulatory Regime for Nova Scotia. Unfortunately Bill 95 falls far short of the recommendations in the Doelle-Lahey Report. There are a few provisions in Bill 95 that reflect the advice of the Doelle-Lahey Report but there are many things missing in the bill and some recommendations where the wording of specific amendments has been significantly watered down. This needs to be corrected. Also — there are probably a lot of people who would like to have had the opportunity to speak to this committee about this bill but are not able to due to the super-fast movement of the bill through the legislative process such that they cannot be here today. This fast tracking of the bill appears to be designed to minimize public awareness and the ability of public stakeholders to review the details of the Bill and top come before Law Amendments Committee to speak to it. This is shameftil. For these reasons (I. the bill is flawed and incomplete and 2. people have not been given reasonable opportunity to review or speak to the bill) we recommend that the Bill 95be sent back for improvements and to allow more time for the public to digest and comment on the bill. Failing that — we recommend the following changes to the legislation. In offering these we wish to remind government that the Doelle-Lahey Report provides a detailed and integrated approach to regulating aquaculture and one that was strongly supported by both industry and stakeholder groups from across the province. How changes are made are as important as what changes are made. Stakeholders other than industry have yet to be briefed on the changes or the long-term plan if there is one. One of the recommendations of the Doelle-Lahey Report, to be implemented as early as possible, was the establishment of a Regulatory Advisory Committee made up of various stakeholder representatives. This is critical and yet there nothing in the new legislation to create this important advisory body. The D-L Report emphasizes transparency, inclusiveness, regulatory excellence, protecting the environment and wild species and building of public trust. The Bill as its currently worded breaks that public trust by omitting important pieces of the D-L Report. It can be significantly improved and brought back into compliance with the D-L Report through the following amendments. Breaking the fragile trust or truce between government, industry and communities will have negative consequences not just for the relationship but for government and the long-term health of the industry. Please heed our warning—none of us want to see Salmon Wars 2, the sequel. Please note that the black text is from Bill 95 and the red text are our suggested changes Add to Clause Add to Clause 2(i) “protect the environment” and then utterly blocking them Clauses 2, 3 and 19 deal with defining “veterinary medical records” amendment to another law - from public access — including, and to the point of, making a consequential the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act - to specifically and explicitly block public access.