Cortes Currents

De Clarke/ Cortes Currents - On Tuesday May 17th, a group of Mosaic (Island Timberlands / TimberWest) employees travelled to Cortes Island to host an "open house" at the Gorge Hall. They set up displays indoors and offered a casual one-on-one discussion period from 10AM to noon; at noon, they made a formal presentation which -- thanks to improving weather -- was held outdoors for better Covid safety.

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - At the May 12 session of the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans, Stan Proboszcz, senior scientist at the Watershed Watch Salmon Society suggested that DFO covered-up some of its own research when it concluded fish farms pose ‘minimal risk’ to wild salmon. They reduced the number of science risk assessments from 10 to 9 because the evidence indicated sea lice harm wild sockeye.

This is the audio recording of his presentation to the committee

Manda Aufochs Gillespie/ Folk U - Rex Weyler cofounder of Greenpeace International, author, journalist, and musician, joins host Manda Aufochs Gillespie this Friday at 1 p.m. on Folk U Radio (89.5FM or CortesRadio.ca) to talk about the ongoing Chevron pollution case in Ecuador, how Chevron launches SLAPP lawsuits against the attorney’s fight for their victims’ rights, and according to a resent report on Chevron’s international crimes, has “created a legacy of genocide, death, torture, forced labor, rape, and violence against women.” We will talk about how powerful corporations get away with crimes by using massive legal budgets to overwhelm their victims and the smaller nations in which they operate. We will also talk about what the victims and their lawyers are doing to fight back against Chevron’s money, public relations hacks, private investigators, and battalions of lawyers.

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - It has been almost a month since 5,000 hatchery raised Chum fry were released back into Basil Creek, in Squirrel Cove. They were the survivors of 20,000 eggs harvested from wild salmon and later placed inside ‘in-stream incubation boxes.’ Most of their siblings perished when the rising creek waters silted up their boxes. This remnant were taken back to the Klahoose hatchery for a month, before being returned to the creek. Someone asked if using hatchery raised fry like these weakens the local gene pool? Cortes Currents passed the question on to Stacey Larsen, DFO’s Community advisor for our area.

She admitted there is a potential risk, depending on a variety of factors such as how large the fish are and how long they are weired in a hatchery.

“In this case, the benefit of the chum salmon program on Cortes is preventing the loss of eggs in the Creek during flood events,” explained Larsen. “The fry are only reared in the hatchery for short periods, so they will still be subject to most of the natural selection factors.”

She added that giving fry even a brief rearing and feeding greatly improves their chances of surviving.

“There are a lot of factors that are contributing to salmon decline. Healthy watersheds with good habitat, good water quality and supply are critical. Enhancement is a tool, but there are other dials that we can adjust. One of the major ones is also harvest,” said Larsen.

“With the stewardship, volunteers, monitoring stocks and habitat we have more information to make decisions as we move forward with enhancement and restoration in Basil Creek. The broodstock returning chum that we were able to use last fall are mostly returns from our very first year of trauma enhancement. The natural returns of that year were quite low. So the returning fish would have been a small component of the fish that were returning to Basil Creek.”

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents -According to BC Hydro, more than half the province’s power outages are caused by falling trees. That number is probably higher on Cortes and Quadra Islands, which are heavily forested. Trees appear to be dropping on the power lines every time there is a storm. There are also large numbers of relatively young trees falling over in the forest, and in people’s yards. Some of them were critically weakened by root rot.

In yesterday’s interview, General Manager Mark Lombard said a significant number of the fir trees that Cortes Forestry General Partnership recently harvested were afflicted by root rot.

So Cortes Currents asked, “how do you recognize root rot?”

Lombard suggested, “Look at the fir trees. In a healthy fir tree, the crown will be green and typically fairly uniform and vibrant. It's very similar to a house plant or any plant that you have in the garden. If you look at a plant that has brown on the leaves or the leaves are curled up, or the plant looks yellowish, you can tell it's not very healthy as opposed to the really healthy plant that's green and flowering. It's the exact same thing with the fir trees, or any of the trees.”

Hemlock are particularly susceptible to mistletoe, and red cedar to drought.

Root rot is one of the principle threats to Douglas Fir.

Some of the victims are immediately recognizable among the wind blown trees in the forest.

“Sometimes you'll see a fir tree that has fallen over and there's just a little nub of a root. There’s hardly any lateral roots that came up and not much soil. That's a sign of root rot,” explained Lombard. “Another kind of root rot can make the tree rot in the stump and just up the first couple of meters of the stem. So sometimes you'll see a fir tree that shattered and broke off. If you look carefully, you'll notice that there's just the outer sapwood ring left, and the heartwood has rotted away. When it falls over the sapwood shatters. You can see the tree broken off, which is unlikely because fir is such a strong tree. Those are some of the signs of root rot, and it's not always easy to see.”

The BC Ministry of Forests handbook ‘Managing Root Disease in British Columbia’ lists a number recommended treatments.

Replant the area with species less susceptible to root rot

‘Stump removal has been shown to reduce root rot disease in the majority of cases where it has been applied.’

Pushover harvesting has been shown to be as effective as stump removal

‘Hardwoods are less susceptible to infection and more tolerant to disease.’ The roots of birch in particular ‘can form a barrier to underground disease movement.’

Biological controls are introduced agents that can displace or prevent colonization by pathogenic fungi and prevent the spread of disease.

Lombard suggested people wanting more information look up Suzanne Simard at UBC, who's doing the Mother Tree Project and Paul Stamets who has been researching fungi for years.

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - This has been the Cortes Community Forest’s most profitable year, but that is not the Cortes Forestry General Partnership’s only objective.

“I always start with what areas do we want to keep,” explained General Manager Mark Lombard.

He used a recent conversation to illustrate how Cortes is taking a different approach than the industry at large.

A well respected logger from Quadra Island asked why the General Partnership was leaving two healthy stands of cedar untouched.

“Why aren't you going to harvest the cedars? Cedar prices are really good,” the fellow said.

“How much of that is there on Quadra Island?” responded Lombard.

“There's none. There's not even one stand like that.”

“And I said, “That's why we're not going into that area.’”

The General Partnership set a goal of cutting only 15-20% of the forest’s mean annual incremental growth (MAI) in their harvest area. If allowed to continue, the part of Cortes Island under their control will eventually be populated by an old growth forest.

Lombard emailed the statistics after our interview.

The Ministry of Forest allocates the cut on a five-year basis and the community forests first year control period ended on March 31 of this year. At that point, the partnership has harvested 15.8% of the forests mean annual increment of 68,000 m3.

There is a year by year breakdown of this figure in the written version of this broadcast

Breaking the cut rate down into individual years:

2017 - 429 m3,

2018 - 1,783 m3,

2019 - 650 m3,

2020 - 1,012 m3

2021 - 2,500 m3

2022 - 4,400 m3

The cut was larger than initially planned for 2022 for a number of reasons, but the primary one is root rot.

“The thing that caught my attention when the first time I went through the forest was, ‘why are so many fir trees down?’ Everywhere you walk there were a lot of 100 -120 year old trees down on the ground,” he explained. “It turns out that there was a really high concentration of Armillaria ostoyae and Phellinus weirii , the root rots that are most prevalent on Cortes.”

“We have a chance to reforest it, and leave a healthy forest for the next generation,” said Lombard.

Log markets are strong right now. The General Partnership received about $900,000 in revenues for the 6,900 cubic metres of timber harvested in 2021 and 2022. This will replenish the partnership’s bank account.

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Campbell River is a hub for Vancouver Island tugboat companies, but Reuben Buerge lives in Heriot Bay on Quadra Island.

“When I first started, I was the deck hand. At that time we were towing log booms up and down the coast. I worked locally here on a really cool boat called the Utah for a winter too. Then, I had a job up in Prince Rupert and it was all rock barges, they were building breakwaters and stuff like that,” he explained.

Now Buerge is a tugboat captain, working for a company in Vancouver.

He would like to stay in the local area, but is only aware of one tug that actually works out of Quadra Island. Of course, there are a number of boats in Campbell River.

“Vancouver’s only a 10 hour tow, or something like that, from Quadra,” he said.

He goes wherever his employers send him, towing anything from wood chips or rock, to a barge full of equipment for a remote camp.

Some days he’ll leave in the morning and return home that night, but there are also longer hauls where he is gone for a week or two at time.

It can get pretty cramped in a tug with a crew of four, but they work in six hour shifts.

“There’s a full kitchen on the boats. We actually eat pretty well. Sometimes I cook, sometimes a deckhand cooks.”

There is also a hefty food budget, so they can eat whatever they want.

Roy L Hales/ COrtes Currents - Some of Canada’s top scientists are being asked to testify before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans, While it is not clear exactly why this is happening, the common theme running through their presentations is the need for DFO to be more based in scientific evidences and less in the needs of industry.

In the third of a series of broadcasts gleaned from these reports, Dr Andrew Bateman from the Pacific Salmon Foundation talks about pitfalls in DFO’s current approach and points to an existing model that could replace it.

This is a transcript of his opening remarks.

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents -The Hereditary Chiefs of the Laichkwiltach, We Wai Kai and K’omok First Nations will be taking a protest flotilla to the Raza Island fish farm on May 14.

“We three Hereditary Chiefs have jurisdiction and have the right to stewardship over the waters and lands of the Laichwiltach Nation, unceded waters and lands of the Discovery Islands,” wrote Hereditary Chief George Quocksister Jr of the Laichkwiltach First Nation on his facebook page.

“Who in there right mind would support this disgusting salmon farm industry when all the hard evidence videos and pictures shows they are not only killing off all five species of wild stock salmon, but all life in the waters.”

Cermaq Canada has maintained a salmon farm at Raza, just off the northern tip of Cortes Island, since 2004.

On December 17, 2020, former Fisheries Minister Bernadette Jordan announced that all fish farms in the Discovery Islands must be free of fish by June 30th, 2022. 

The DFO press release states, “These facilities are some of the oldest sites on the West Coast and are located on the traditional territory of the Homalco, Klahoose, K'ómoks, Kwaikah, Tla'amin, We Wai Kai and Wei Wai Kum First Nations. Consultations with the seven First Nations in the Discovery Islands area provided important guidance to the Minister and heavily informed the decision.”

The Kwaikah, We Wai Kai and Wei Wai Kum are Laick-kwil-tach Nations.

All of the fish farms in the southern Discovery Islands were subsequently decommissioned.

On April 22, 2022, Federal Court Justice Elizabeth Heneghan overturned Jordan’s order stating that it breached the fish farms rights to procedural fairness.

In her decision, Heneghan wrote, "I do not agree with the minister’s position that the applicants had either constructive or actual notice of her decision regarding renewal of the fish farm licences."

"The applicants were not privy to the concerns raised by several First Nations, as described in the summary of consultations. ”

Cermaq Canada promptly reoccupied its Raza Island site.

They emailed Cortes Currents, “We will not be entering smolts in our Raza Island site this Spring and we are awaiting the Federal Government and DFO’s decisions on license reissuance, including the Discovery Islands region.” 

Hereditary Chief George Quocksister Jr and some of his supporters went to Raza Island on May 4. In his Facebook post the following day, Quocksister refers to the “two elected sellout chiefs” of the We Wai Kai and Wei Wai Kum First Nations who support the fish farm industry.

Quocksister, Hereditary Chief, Arnold Chickite of the We Wai Kai Nation and Hereditary Chief Kerry Frank of K’omox Nation will depart from Campbell River at 11 AM on May 14. They will be onboard the MV Marinet and expect to arrive at Raza Island by 2:30. He mentions a rumour that Cermaq is going to restock the farm.

“That would be totally illegal. On the 3 Hereditary Chiefs behalf, we do not want any salmon farms restocked at Discovery Islands, period. We want them all out of the country, period.”

He extended an invitation to the public through Facebook, “See ya all there, thank ya all.”

The Hereditary Chiefs expect to be back in Campbell River by 6:30 PM on May 14.

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - In the second of a series of posts gleaned from the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans, Dr John Reynolds proposes that DFO adopt a prime directive “where management objectives are expressively expressly prohibited from influencing science.”

Dr Reynolds is a professor of Aquatic Ecology and Conservation at Simon Fraser University, the lead or co-author of 183 peer reviewed publications and Chair of the Committee on the status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (better known as COSEWIC).

This was taken from the presentation he made on May 5, 2022: