Alton Gas water protectors Dale Poulette and Rachael Greenland-Smith did an amazing job filing Freedom of Information requests and identifying numerous serious flaws in the Alton Gas approval processes. Now they have compiled all that info into a report. Read a summary and download the report here.
Ken Summers takes a close look at the history of Alton Gas and Indigenous consultations. With so many players, the KMKNO, the Assembly of Mi’kmaq Chiefs, Millbrook First Nation, and Sipekne’katik, it’s complicated and things aren’t always what they seem.
As CBC’s Paul Withers reported yesterday Clearwater Seafood left thousands of lobster traps in the water for longer than the 72 hours allowed by law.
We’re not talking an extra day here because of bad weather. Sometimes baited and unbaited traps would be left on the ocean floor for as long as 98 days at a time, and this environmentally unsound practice has been going on at least since 2014. Breaking the law this way saved the company huge amounts of money. We talked with Shannon Arnold of the Ecology Action Centre to find out more, and what she told us is pretty alarming.
Fisher and activist Darren Porter on the latest developments around the illegal fish kills by the Annapolis tidal generating station. A study by the Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat may offer Nova Scotia Power a way out of the mess of its own creation, he says.
The contentious issue of twinning of the 101 near the Town of Windsor is still alive. Some folks believe it is time to get rid of the causeway and build a bridge, but they have a hard time getting heard at municipal councils, they say.
New contributor Lori Oliver, who grew up in the Digby area, takes a look at the tensions between white and Mi’kmaq lobster fishers in South West Nova Scotia. The issues go deeper than most newspaper reports suggests, she writes, poverty, racism and colonialism are at the root of the current problems.
A letter written by Joanne Light to federal Fisheries minister Dominic Leblanc. She pleads for a radical rethink of the proposed twinned Avon River causeway in Windsor. Endangered salmon cannot enter the Avon River to spawn, and that should be fixed. Leblanc knows what to do, after all, a couple of years ago he helped fix a similar problem in the Peticodiac River, in his own riding.
A group of environmental activists in the Annapolis Valley is calling for a radical rethink of the Avon River causeway in Windsor. Endangered salmon cannot enter the Avon River to spawn and the group has launched a letter writing campaign to call on the federal Department of Fisheries to interfere.
As if we didn’t learn anything from the depletion of the cod stocks, an auditor general report has found that DFO is not adequately managing and monitoring fish stocks. That’s a serious problem, and Nova Scotians should demand action, says the Ecology Action Centre.
Chances are that Justin Trudeau,federal ministers and Stephen McNeil are going to find their inboxes and Facebook and Twitter timelines rather full this week. The group that is trying to stop Alton Gas from dumping brine into the vulnerable Shubenacadie River kicked off a one-week social media blitz to make the politicians aware of the issues.