Oversight

Government proposes reduced shellfish aquaculture oversight

The Houston Government wants to allow Nova Scotia Department of Fisheries Aquaculture (NSDFA) officials to issue shellfish aquaculture licenses and leases without review by a neutral, arm’s length entity.  The changes will make a bad system even worse.

Although the Aquaculture Review Board (ARB) proved itself biased, sloppy and incompetent as detailed in this link, multi-year delays in granting aquaculture licenses and leases are the consequence of NSDFA mismanagement, not the ARB.  

Under oath its officials testified they did not verify critical data submitted in lease applications, dismissed Canada Wildlife Services calls for buffer zones to protect piping plovers, demonstrated inability and/or lack of interest in evaluating applicants’ financial forecasts along with many other failings.  It appears NSDFA will always favor the applicant over the environment or community.

Shellfish aquaculture can offer economic benefits without harming the environment.  One obvious way to do this is for NSDFA to actually perform legitimate environmental and infrastructure evaluations and conduct neutral community meetings to determine optimal Aquaculture Development Areas (ADAs). Applications for leases within the ADAs can be approved in a fraction of the time required by the current process.  Although NSDFA agrees the ADA process is the best course, it has created only one ADA (in Argyle, NS) in the past 10 years.  Instead NSDFA focuses on approving ad hoc requests for new sites, often in ill-suited locations like Antigonish Harbour.

If these examples of incompetence and indifference or the prospect of additional government funding of TPCI bother you, please express your concerns to government and opposition leaders about this short sighted plan.  Contact info for these leaders can be found at by clicking here