TPCI's Application
September 4, 2020
TPCI’s applications for marine leases in Antigonish Harbour were posted on the NS Dept of Fisheries and Aquaculture website.
Read our in-depth analysis of the application here.
FOAH has prepared a thorough review of TPCI’s applications. Here is a brief summary:
The TPCI plan calls for placing 23,000 oyster floats, 500 spat collectors, untold numbers of buoys, 440 anchors to be drilled into the harbour floor and over 52 km of ropes holding it all together. The plan calls for 10 year leases over 90 acres (approx. 230 hockey rinks) in the outer portion of Antigonish Harbour. Leases are almost always renewed by the Dept of Fisheries and Aquaculture. The map with water depths is on page 13 of the attachment.
Concerns about safety of navigation remain due to lease proximity to the channel, the potential for broken ropes, scattered debris and environmental damage from farming in very shallow water (less than a meter in depth in some places) with ice cover in winter. The largest lease also infringes over 5 hectares into a registered navigational route.
Our concerns about the environment remain from eelgrass threatened by shallow lease areas, to a complete lack of baseline information on the harbour against which to measure adverse impacts. The application uses only anecdotal comments to dismiss concerns over birds and fish which live in and/or migrate through and immediately next to the proposed lease areas.
Our frustration remains over the proposed leasing of approximately 10% of the waters in the outer harbour which have been communal resources since the beginning of time.
We remain skeptical the plan will even work. TPCI’s principals have only modest experience yet plan to use many new processes, several pieces of new, proprietary technology and to introduce these new techniques and technologies at the same time.
TPCI used flawed public engagement tactics and overstated support for its proposal from the community (stating repeatedly that 87% are in favour of their plan). Key stakeholders, including lobster fisherman who keep their boats in the harbour and the First Nations representatives are “assumed to have no objections”. We know this is not the case for the lobster fisherman who share many of our concerns and we know that the First Nations leaders have been busy with other pressing issues.