Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - A massive beach clean-up is underway in the intertidal zones of the Southern Discovery Islands.

“The volume of debris we are finding is mind blowing. We are focusing on the larger items instead of the tiny little microplastics. We’re trying to get the larger items out before they become the microplastics,” explained Breanne Quesnel. “I know we have some very responsible aquaculture operations in our region, but the amount of aquaculture debris is mind boggling: trays; baskets; nettings and things that have just gotten away at one point - or derelict sites.”

Her company, Quadra Island based Spirit of the West Adventures on Quadra Island, obtained the the contract to clean up between 200 and 400 kilometres of shoreline on Quadra, Maurelle, Read, Cortes and Marina Islands. It is part of the Clean Coast, Clean Waters Initiative, a provincially funded program support coastal communities as they recover from the COVID-19 economic downturn and loss of tourism.

“We have just over a month to get to all those, and so far we are on track,” said Quesnel.

Spirit of the West was working in Granite Bay and Kanish Bay, on the northern end of Quadra, when Cortes Currents caught up to them on October 14th.

“Yesterday we were just focused at the very [southern] tip of Quadra Island, Francisco point around to close to Tsa Kwa Luten Lodge. We have a 28 foot landing craft that we are using as part of this and it was stuffed to the gills. We had to stuff more debris, in order to come back for it,” said Quesnel. “So far we’ve cleaned around Marina, some of the north end of Cortes and south end of Quadra. We’re kind of weather and tide dependant, so it’s picking the best place, the best time.”

She expects to collect 50 tons of debris.

There are 4 crews of 5 in the field, and a support team working behind the scenes.

Most of the debris is destined for marine debris specific facility, in the Lower Mainland.

The Oceans Legacy Foundation established this connection, when it teamed up with Fishing for Plastic for a beach clean-up last Spring.

Kelli Turner, Managing Director at Desolation Sound Ocean Protection and Research Foundation (as well as the new Cortes Bay to Lund water taxi service), was one of the participants.

“Shoreline clean-up is one of our big and true heart loves. We try to support a lot of that stuff with the funds we are able to get from moving people and growing the company,” he said.

Turner said they cleaned the eastern shore of Cortes Island, from the northern tip down to the Twin Islands, as well as “a good chunk of Desolation Sound,” Hernando Island and Savary Island.

“It can be very easy to be overwhelmed by the staggering volumes of debris, not having real control and it getting to the ocean in the first place. A lot of this is docks and industry, as well as consumer goods like plastics,” said Quesnel. “I think we just really need to focus on what kinds of changes we can make on a daily basis and what we can control. Starting at home and thinking with small and then just using our voices, of course, to try and encourage the government and industry to be more proactive so that this debris doesn’t end up in the ocean in the first place.

Photo credit: courtesy Spirit of the West Adventures

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Greenpeace co-founder Rex Weyler advises environmentalists to stay home, international conferences like COP 26 are a waste of time.

“These climate conferences are not addressing the real root problem, which is overshoot of the human species on earth, and they are not doing anything about the one symptom they are addressing, which is climate change,” he said.

There have been 34 climate meetings since 1979, when the first global conference was held in Geneva.

“What I expect from COP 26 is what we’ve seen from the last 25 COP meetings and the dozen climate meetings before that,” said Weyler. “Everything they agree on is full of loopholes for the governments and corporations to get out of their commitments.”

Fifty years ago, when he entered the environmental movement, Weyler believed that people would respond when they heard “the facts of what was going on with species collapse, climate change, toxins in our environment.”

Some have, but the level of response “feels almost insignificant” and society as a whole largely remains oblivious.

Weyler was shocked by the world’s failure to react in 2008, when it was first revealed that the Arctic permafrost is melting. The methane being released is a far deadlier greenhouse gas than CO2 and could trigger runaway global warming.

“It didn’t get a mention anywhere in the popular public media and was successfully ignored by all the governments in the world.”

He doesn’t know what scale of crisis it will take to inspire significant change.

Meanwhile, every year, close to 90 million new humans are brought into a world that doesn’t have the resources to support them.

“We’re not even addressing the problem of human population. We are ignoring that, pretending that is not an issue. We’re not really addressing our consumption habit. We are trying to come up with technological fixes that will allow us to continue with business as usual,” said Weyler.

He cited three examples of population overshoot in nature: among wolves, locusts and algae. While there were massive die offs in each case, a remnant of the species survived.

This is most likely what will happen to humanity, but “people are not going to necessarily remember how to achieve all the technological systems that we have in place now.”

“We’d be a lot better off if we could organize a soft landing at a lower population with a much lower consumption,” said Weyler. “Right now our population is growing at about 1.2% a year … If we could institutionalize women’s rights, so that women had the right to control how many children they had, and if we made contraception available worldwide, that alone would probably reduce our growth rate from 1.2% to maybe minus 1% or 2%.”

If humanity’s population was contracting at the same rate it is now expanding, in 70 years there would be 4 billion people.

Eventually there would be 1 billion, a number that Weyler believes our planet could sustain forever.

Photo credit: Crowd by Michael Kleban via Flickr (CC BY SA, 2.0 License)

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - It has been more than three months since the village of Lytton burned to the ground, displacing nearly 1,300 people, and the Strathcona Regional District (SRD) is reaching out to see if it can help.

This initiative was inspired by a commitment made in the Regional District of Mount Waddington (RDMW), in northern Vancouver Island.

“To help Lytton rebuild, the Electoral Area Directors of the RDMW will contribute one dollar for every person in their representative areas. ln doing so, the Electoral Area Directors of the RDMW wish to challenge all other local governments to make a similar gesture.”

At the Wednesday October 6th SRD Board meeting, Mayors Julie Colborne of Zeballos, Martin Davis of Tahsis and Mark Baker of Sayward all spoke in favour of the SRD making a donation.

Colborne mentioned to the 2018 fire, which damaged 7 buildings above the village and could easily destroyed Zeballos.

Tom Yates, corporate services manager at the SRD, said it would cost the district $44,000 to $45,000, but they would need to figure out how they could set up the donation. (It is not, for example, a grant in aid.)

Director Brenda Leigh suggested that this topic be referred back to the SRD’s Emergency Services Co-ordinator, Shaun Koopman, asking that he draw up a report on how much money has already been given to Lytton and what was needed.

Director Claire Moglove said a report was unnecessary. They city of Campbell River decided to contact Lytton directly to ask what the needs are.

That was the motion that Davis brought forward, Director Kerr seconded, and was carried at the SRD Board meeting.

Image credit: Photo by Adam Wilson on Unsplash

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - The widespread belief at-risk southern resident killer whales are starving due to a lack of chinook salmon has been debunked.

A UBC led study found there are actually more than four times as many salmon in their territory than that of their supposedly better fed kinsmen north of Cortes Island.

This was not what the authors expected to find, when they compared the numbers of Chinook entering the Strait of Juan de Fuca to those just north of Campbell River, in the Johnstone Strait, during the summers of 2018 and 2019.

“Measurements from drone footage has shown the southern resident killer whales are thinner on average than the northern residents — which supports the common belief that the southern residents are experiencing a food shortage,” explained Dr. Andrew Trites, director of the Marine Mammal Research Unit at the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries at UBC, and one of the study’s three authors.

When the southern residents failed to return for four consecutive summers, people assumed that was because there was no Chinook for them.

This is the first study to employ hydro-acoustic technology in an acoustic survey of salmon populations at sea. Up until now, researchers have had to rely on counts of salmon returning to rivers. Fishermen helped point the team to areas where their state-of-the-art fish finders should be deployed. Researchers caught sample fish to validate the accuracy of their equipment.

“There is a food problem, but we are not seeing the problem as being here during the summer time,” concluded Trites. “The reality is killer whales have to eat everyday of the year.”

While BC’s Chinook salmon population is in decline, he suspects the real threat to the southern resident population may occur during the Fall and Winter, when they are south of the border. Prior to the introduction of logging, dams and irrigation, California’s rivers had some of the biggest Chinook runs in the North Pacific Ocean.

“Those runs were destroyed, they used to support four runs of Chinook,” said Trites. “Here we think of Summer and Fall runs, but they also have a winter run that came in around Christmas time and a Spring run as well. Historically their habitat had food throughout it for different times of the year. They haven’t had a proper meal, say in terms of that Christmas dinner, since the 1800s.”

He concluded that if scientists want to find out why southern residents appear to be malnourished, they need to extend their research throughout their entire range - which includes the West Coast of the United States.

Photo credit: A southern resident killer whale seen from a drone swimming past a school of salmon near the mouth of the Fraser River. (photo. K. Holmes, Hakai Institute and University of British Columbia).

De Clarke/Cortes Currents - When Justice Douglas Thompson refused to extend an injunction against old-growth defenders blocking a logging road at Fairy Creek on Vancouver Island, his decision made headlines around the world.

Justice Thompson referred explicitly in his decision to “enforcement […] carried out by police officers rendered anonymous to the protesters, many of those police officers wearing ‘thin blue line’ badges.” The significance of this language may not be clear to every reader; but the judge’s reasoning was important — to more than just the struggle over the fate of the pathetic remnants (one or two percent) of BC’s old-growth forests.

The judge raised crucial and timely questions about the culture and practise of police work.

The “thin blue line” symbol worn by police officers has a long history. Derived from the “thin red line” of Scottish Highlanders who stood their ground in terrifying circumstances during the Crimean War, by 1922 the phrase had been used in the US to describe police officers. By the early 50’s, LAPD police chief Bill Parker used it often as a rhetorical device, conceptualising the police force as “the thin blue line” that stands its ground between a virtuous citizenry and an onslaught of violence and anarchy.

Today the symbol has acquired less heroic meanings. In 2018 a law review article noted that it can mean the code of silence by which police officers cover up for each other’s misconduct. And by 2014 it had become the rallying symbol of “Blue Lives Matter,” a backlash directed against the Black Lives Matter protests.

In the context of intensifying protests against racial bias in policing, and specifically against the murders of Black Americans by their own police forces, the Thin Blue Line quickly became associated with anti-BLM sentiment and hence with American White Supremacist ideology. White Supremacists began to display the symbol on their web sites and in person, at rallies and marches.

RCMP ban on wearing of the symbol by on-duty officers

Police officers are in general not encouraged to modify their uniforms by adding “loyalty symbols” of any other organisation or group. Recognising the inflammatory potential of the Thin Blue Line symbol, RCMP in October 2020 issued a directive banning officers on duty from wearing the symbol. In response, the police union defied orders by providing its members with Thin Blue Line patches to wear.

Individual municipalities such as Victoria and Saanich have felt the need for directives banning the wearing of the controversial emblem. RCMP officers throughout Canada continue, however, to defy the October 2020 ban. Many of the officers arresting (and mistreating) protesters at Fairy Creek were seen by eyewitnesses and in photographs wearing the Thin Blue Line badge.

The editorial continues in the podcast

Photo credit: RCMP E Division headquarters in Surrey, BC by Waferboard via Flickr (CC BY SA, 2.0 License)

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - SRD staff will be meet with the Cortes Island Fire Fighting Association Board (CIFFA) and Regional Director Noba Anderson to discuss plans for a Superior Tanker Shuttle Service on Cortes Island.

If this program goes forward, a series of water tanks will be deployed across the island to be used in the same manner as fire hydrants in urban areas.

Firefighters in neighbouring communities like Salt Spring Island (2011), Powell River (2017) and Hornby Island (2018), found the Superior Tanker Shuttle Service enables them to deliver water suppression at the exact same standard as urban fire departments.

SRD staff has prepared a detailed report for Cortes which, according to Anderson, has a lot of useful information but also proposes things the Cortes Fire department is already doing.

At their September 8th meeting, the Electoral Areas Services Committee passed an unanimous recommendation that SRD staff meet with Anderson and the fire department.

However staff were not supportive when Anderson raised this topic at the October 6th meeting of the full board.

According to Tom Yates, corporate services manager at the SRD, staff has been meeting with the Cortes Fire Department since the beginning.

Chief Administrative officer David Leitch added that he did not understand what Anderson expected to get out of such a meeting.

“At this point, I can’t take further action on this report because so much of it is already either being implemented, or is planned to be implemented, or is not appealing to CIFFA,” said Anderson. “It seems much more effective to have all those parties at the table to discuss who might do what? And who is already doing what?”

Anderson would like to have this resolved before submitting Cortes Island figures to the next annual budget.

The SRD Board passed a resolution that the staff “report be referred to the Cortes Island Fire Fighting Association Board for a joint discussion between them, SRD staff and the Director for the area.”

Figure 4.2 Water Storage Tank at Cortes Island School - courtesy Superior Tanker Shutter Service Feasibility study (SRD)

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - The outlook for rural ambulance services within the Strathcona Regional District (SRD) has greatly improved several directors agreed. Others require more information.

BC Emergency Health Services (BCEHS) had intended to introduce a pay scale whereby BC’s rural paramedics would receive $2 an hour unless they were responding to an emergency. This would have led to a mass loss of personal, as paramedics sought other jobs to support their families.

In response to the outcry, on August 6th BCEHS introduced a staffing model designed to ensure that communities like Cortes Island, Sayward, Tahsis and Zeballos have four scheduled on-call (SOC) paramedics. They work 8 hour shifts, then are on stand-by for the next 16 hours, in 3 day rotations.

The topic came up when Cortes Island’s Regional Director Noba Anderson gave a verbal report regarding the SRD’s recent meeting with MLA Michele Babchuk, representatives from Island Health (VIHA), BCEHS and the Ministry of Health at the Wed October 6th SRD Board meeting.

All of the SRD directors were invited, but only Anderson and SRD Chair Brad Unger attended.

Consequently, the meeting focused on Cortes Island.

The ambulance attendants Anderson spoke with were concerned with the overall culture of BCEHS and did not feel free to speak about these issues in pubic. Some were almost moved to tears when their Regional Director listened to them. Anderson said the newstaffing model is “way better.”

She told the other Directors, “I’m satisfied for the time being, but I’m aware that some of you weren’t involved.”

Mayors Julie Colborne of Zeballos and Martin Davis of Tahsis said the new plan was working in their communities too.

If there was a follow-up meeting, Colborne would tell BCEHS, ”Communication could have been done much more effectively and probably would have cost much less money for them and us, in the long run, if there had been consultation.”

Mayor Mark Baker of Sayward said he did not believe he had been invited to the meeting and he wanted to be included in the next one.

Regional Directors Jim Abram and Gerald Whalley also claimed to have not been informed of the meeting.

While wanted to attend the next meeting, Abram said he would not have anything to say until Quadra Island’s paramedics spoke with him.

These comments prompted SRD Chair Brad Unger to point out that out that the invitation had been sent out to every Director and it was part of their job to check their emails.

Top photo credit: Looking out at the ambulance by Shawn via Flickr (CC BY SA, 2.0 License)

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Current - As November 1st, a new Water Taxi & Cargo Deliveries service will be connecting Lund to the government wharf at Cortes Bay, on Mondays and Fridays.

“It will be a 25 minute boat ride across to Cortes Bay and we’re going to and from Cortes Bay twice a day. We’re offering 12 spots on a water taxi, with the option to bring cargo as well,” explained Kelli Turner, who owns the Finn Bay Group (soon to be renamed Access Point Marine Transportation). “That rate will include 85 pounds of cargo per each person.”

Should you wish to transport more cargo, the rate is $0.30 a pound.

09:15 Finn Bay to Cortes Bay 

09:45 Cortes Bay to Finn Bay 

 

4:15 Finn Bay to Cortes Bay 

4:45 Cortes Bay to Finn Bay

Tickets are $35 for adults; $30 for children and seniors.

“We’re going to be giving a soft start to get it rolling throughout the winter on Mondays and Fridays and then go into six return trips a day starting in June,” said Turner.

The Finn Bay Group also plans to operate tours of Desolation Sound, in their new 40 person water taxi, during the summer of 2022.

Turner launched his company as “U Call We Haul Marine Services,” in North Vancouver, during in 2010.

He relocated to Finn Bay, just outside Lund, two years ago. Since then, the Finn Bay Group has been serving an area that stretches from Cortes Island south to Powell River and up Desolation Sound. Turner also mentioned trips to Campbell River.

The trips to Cortes Island were charter runs, in which the water taxi was rented out for $300 per hour. Some of his regular customers were from the Klahoose First Nation in Squirrel Cove. The water taxi services contractors working on Hernando Island. There has been a lot of passengers, contractors and supplies coming out of Gorge Harbour. During the past three months, the water taxi made 52 runs between Cortes Island and Lund. It carried anywhere from 2 to 12 passengers on a trip.

“We’ve also had the opportunity to get into Cortes Bay to drop off a lot of day trippers, as well as people looking to do biking programs throughout Quadra, Cortes and of course Campbell River,” said Turner. “We’ve had a lot of interest from customers and businesses on Cortes to open up that hub to the Sunshine Coast.”

The Finn Bay Group’s decision to offer regular passenger service to Cortes arose out of their success with a similar service to and from Savary Island.

On Fridays, Turner also offers a shopping service in Powell River.

“Everyone calls in and preorders in the stores and then we bring it out and deliver,” he explained. “A big hub for us is all the online shopping. We have everything from furniture to golf carts, ladders and equipment coming here with customers names on it.”

They have a large walk-in-fridge and almost as large walk-in-freezer, at Finn Bay, which holds food destined for restaurants, resorts and other customers within their service area.

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - UBC marine ecologist Dr. Chris Harley initially told the media that more than a billion mussels, clams, sea stars and other invertebrates may have cooked to death in the area between Campbell River and Washington state. That was a ‘back of the envelope’ estimate, based on his observations among the Lower Mainland’s mussel population and some preliminary reports. Harley has done a great deal more research since then. He now guesstimates that, conservatively speaking, the number of marine fatalities during last June’s heat wave is closer to 10 billion.

In the attached podcast, he describes the new temperature records being set throughout British Columbia.

“Unfortunately for marine life, those really hot days coincided with very low tides. So things that aren’t normally out of the water for very long, were left high and dry during extreme hot weather,” explained Harley. “That combination resulted in dead sea stars, and dead clams, and dead mussels, and dead barnacles - the list just goes on and on.”

While it is easy to spot dead mussels because their shells open, this isn’t as easy with some other species. Harley says that for the first few weeks, there is very little to distinguish between live and dead barnacles.

As the geographic extent of the disaster, numbers of species involved, and numbers of individual animals became clear - Harley gave up on the attempt to make an exact count.

In the Campbell River -Discovery Islands area

While there is not much information about the marine impacts, Harley said “the north end of the Straight of Georgia is one of the places that got the hottest for coastal communities.”

Visiting the area south of Comox, on Vancouver Island, Harley said, “There were certainly still a lot of dead barnacles in evidence as of a few weeks ago.”

There were die-offs on Quadra and Calvert Island, as well as Desolation Sound.

A number of reports came from Cortes Island, and on July 10th Cortes Currents emailed Harley a series of photos of dead mussels at Smelt Bay. There appeared to be thousands.

Snails were attached to some of the shells.

Harley responded, “Yes, you do have some snails in your photo. Those guys are apparently pretty tough - I've seen them on other beaches where other species didn't make it through the heat wave. One of them in the upper-middle part of the second photo has glued itself on edge to a mussel shell with a little blob of mucus. They do that so that as little as possible touches a hot surface, which keeps them cooler.”

He suggested returning to the site to do a series of plots and put a metre stick in the images to indicate the scale.

Most of the dead mussels had washed away by the time Cortes Currents returned to take 10 ‘plots’ on July 14th, but there were also what appeared to be thousands of dead sand dollars.

‘Wow!’ emailed Harley, looking through the subsequent images from 20 sand dollar plots.

Local biologist Deb Cowper reported that some sand dollars survived in the more sheltered waters of Mansons Lagoon, but Smelt Bay is more exposed. There do not appear to be any survivors in the images taken by Cortes Currents.

Most of the sand dollars were white, which Harley suggested meant they are ‘recently dead.” There were also some, ‘greenish ones have been dead long enough to acquire some algal growth.’

Image credit: Dr. Chris Harley at Kits Beach, with downtown Vancouver in the background. Photo by Chris Harley

Manda Aufochs Gillespie/ Folk U - On October 1st Howie Roman celebrated his 50th anniversary of coming to Cortes Island. This led to an unexpected interview on Folk U, in which Howie talks about: the New York he remembers; why he wasn't a draft dodger; coming to Cortes in 1971; when the power lines were only on the main road; growing your own food; the stores; how the floorboards bounced at a dance at Gorge Hall; the importance of radio in the 1970s-90s.