Fort Chipewyan residents are increasingly afraid to consume the fish pulled from Lake Athabasca.

Canada’s oil sands are the largest and most environmentally destructive industrial project in the world. So far, oil sands development has eliminated 602 square kilometers of Boreal forest and emits 29.5 million tonnes of greenhouse gasses annually. The process involves strip-mining bitumen, a tar-like, sandy earth also known as “tar sands,” then processing it into various petroleum products. This process produces 1.8 billion litres of liquid toxic waste every day, which is stored in man-made “tailings ponds.” These ponds currently hold enough toxic waste to fill 2.2 million Olympic-sized swimming pools.

The First Nations community of Fort Chipewyan is located 300 kilometres downstream from the oil sands. In 2006, Fort Chipewyan’s family physician, Dr. John O’Connor, reported that alarmingly high rates of rare and aggressive cancers were killing local residents. As of 2010, band elders reported that cancer had become the leading cause of death in the community. Fear and grief consume Fort Chipewyan as fishermen are finding tumour-laden fish in Lake Athabasca and residents continue to lose their friends and family to cancer.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers continues to tell Canada and the world that there are no lasting impacts upon human health or the environment from the oil sands. Conflicting statements from CAPP, the Government of Alberta, scientists, environmentalists, non-governmental organizations and First Nations people have led to widespread public confusion over the true effects of the operation. Meanwhile, the people of Fort Chipewyan continue to die. Those who survive are afraid to consume the moose, fish and water that have sustained their families for generations.

Pollution from tailings ponds.

Tailings ponds line both sides of the Athabasca River near the oil sands—their toxic contents held back by man-made sand dikes that are hundreds of feet tall. A 2008 study by Environmental Defence showed that the tailings ponds were leaking 11 million litres of liquid into the surrounding environment every day. The Athabasca River runs past the oil sands, through Lake Athabasca, past several indigenous communities including Fort Chipewyan, and eventually empties into the Arctic Ocean.

Cherie Wanderingspirit worries about her children's health.

The abandoned Holy Angels Residential School in Fort Chipewyan.

Young people in Fort Chipewyan are increasingly disconnected from their traditional culture.

Like many Fort Chipewyan parents, Cherie Wanderingspirit (above) is worried about her children’s health. Today’s younger generations in Fort Chipewyan not only face the threat of cancer, but also live with the social trauma passed down to them by family members who lived at Fort Chipewyan’s Holy Angels Residential School (above) which closed in 1974. The torture and sexual abuse endured by the aboriginal children who attended the school have left lasting wounds upon the social and cultural fabric of Fort Chipewyan. Substance abuse, sexual assault, depression, and suicide are ongoing problems within the community. As a result, young people here are largely disconnected from their traditional First Nations culture. Rather than leaning to hunt, fish and trap, the youth (above) are often more interested in video games and urban fashion.

A willow branch marks the passage from Lake Athabasca into the Athabasca Delta.

Other than working in the oil sands, commercial fishing is one of the last ways to make a living in Fort Chipewyan.

Lake Athabasca fish being smoked.

Fish that can't be sold are thrown to the sled dogs.

A young willow branch (above) stuck into the mud by a boater, marks the deepest passage from Lake Athabasca into the Athabasca Delta. Fort Chipewyan’s band elders are concerned that water being taken from the Athabasca River to process bitumen into oil is contributing to declining water levels. Tar sands processing requires almost four barrels of water for every barrel of crude produced; Alberta Energy projects production will reach 3 million barrels of oil per day by 2018. Aside from employment in the oil sands, commercial fishing is one of Fort Chipewyan’s last viable means of making a living. Over the last five years, more and more fish with golf-ball-sized tumours, double tails, and other abnormalities have been caught in Lake Athabasca by commercial fishermen. In 2010, fishermen in Fort Chipewyan were unable to sell any fish commercially due to growing concerns over contamination from pollution, according to Lionel Lepine, the traditional environmental knowledge coordinator for the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation. Most of the fish caught during 2010 were smoked  or thrown to sled dogs.

Band elder Wilfred Marcel lost his daughter to cancer in 2003. She was 30 years old.

After more than forty years of chiefs and band elders complaining about the effects of pollution from the oil sands and tailings ponds, it took the publicly stated opinion of Dr. John O’Connor and independent environmental assessments by Dr. David Schindler and Dr. Kevin Timoney to finally draw media and public attention to Fort Chipewyan’s health and environmental concerns. The chief and council of Fort Chipewyan have called upon the Canadian government for an independent public health inquiry for over a decade. In that time, hundreds of Fort Chipewyan’s residents have died of unexplained cancers. Band elder Wilfred Marcel (above) lost his daughter Stephanie to cancer in 2003. She was 30 years old.

The cemetery in Fort Chipewyan. Hundreds of residents have died of unexplained cancers.

I moved to downtown Hamilton, Ontario, in 2005. We bought our three-storey Victorian home near Copps Coliseum at a price that would have been unheard of in Toronto. The corner we lived on had been labelled “the most dangerous corner in Hamilton.” But my shaved head and tattoos stood out less here than in the fashionable, gentrified neighborhoods of downtown Toronto.

I noticed that a) there were lots of sex-trade operations near our house— for instance, massage parlours and the Hamilton Strip strip club—and b) there were also two anti-abortion establishments nearby. Our neighbourhood was like many other Canadian neighbourhoods: some people believe sex is for fun and pleasure, whereas others believe sex is specifically for making babies.

That’s why I’m so proud of Big Susie’s. Big Susie’s is (to quote their website) “a working group by and for sex workers in Hamilton and the surrounding area.” Their purpose is to “fight back against the stigma and silence that degrades, devalues and dehumanizes sex workers and their work.”

The organization was born because of an odd and somewhat unfortunate intersection between politics and art. In 2009, a small local art gallery featured a series of photographs the artist had taken from the window of his studio, which was near a notorious alley used by hookers. The photographs were explicit and voyeuristic and—most importantly—were taken without the consent of the subjects. Trendy artists and people from the suburbs who visited the little gallery seemed entertained by a scandalous glimpse of Hamilton’s sexual working-class underbelly. But local sex-trade workers were angry. Weren’t they people too? Did someone have a right to photograph them and make an “artistic statement” about their bodies and their lives, without their permission? The protest against this exhibit led to the birth of Big Susie’s. Is all art political? Definitely, yes. Should artists be challenged when they consistently make work they characterize as apolitical, when in fact it is not? I (not to mention Bertolt Brecht!) would say yes.

As an out gay man and a drag queen, I have always been proud to be promiscuous. It makes me feel safe to have an organization in my town that is sex-positive and defends the rights of women to use their bodies in any way they wish in consenting sexual situations. Some feminists assume all prostitutes are victims, and proceed to speak for them, as if they didn’t have a voice of their own. But, lo and behold, they do.

Catalyst carries on a rich heritage in popular education—one that almost vanished when many great popular-education organizations disappeared (or were disappeared by funders).

I have a soft spot for popular education. Instead of relying on “experts” to tell us what to think, popular education draws on everyone’s expertise to create critical analysis and programs for action.

As far as I know, Catalyst is the only place in English-speaking Canada devoted to using popular education as a vehicle to take the smarts of social justice groups and weave their insight and know-how into vibrant political movements. When you go into a Catalyst Centre teaching event, you learn from others while others learn from you. Everyone’s preconceptions get shaken up. And that shaking up unleashes new possibilities for action.

Take the provincial anti-poverty project that Catalyst assisted with recently. I’ve been to a lot of dry meetings with talking heads discussing poverty. Sometimes a person actually living in poverty will even be invited to say a few words. But Catalyst’s approach is different. It creates a platform to encourage folks living in poverty to understand themselves as a political force. By tapping into our collective expertise, we are poised to build the movements that fight for change. Catalyst generates those glorious political moments when we actually experience the potential that solidarity has to move ourselves and the world.

Another thing I love about Catalyst is that it pays serious attention to activist burn-out. Too many seasoned activists exhaust themselves over divisive tensions amongst social justice movements. To be sustainable for the long haul, social justice activists need to develop better skills to help navigate the tough spots. Catalyst has some great tools that help us transcend difficult interpersonal dynamics and keep activists focused on what strengthens our movements.

Perhaps most importantly, everyone has a lot of fun when Catalyst does its magic. Social justice work should also be about having a good time. Catalyst keeps my eyes on the prize, but I always come out of a Catalyst event with a smile on my face.

You can contact Catalyst to build an event or a curriculum so that your group can go further to build movements around any social justice issue you care about. You can also attend its activist school, hang out with like-minded folks, and get a hand with your own approach to inclusive movement building. Catalyst also has a charitable organization that funnels donations into helping groups that don’t have the resources to commission their own popular education activities.

Detail of "2005 of the Top 3000" (2005) by Olia Mishchenko. Collection of Art Gallery of Ontario, image courtesy Paul Petro Contemporary Art.

“A bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells,” Karl Marx noted. “But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.” Born in Kiev in 1980 and based in Toronto since 1997, artist Olia Mishchenko uses a paraphrase of this passage to situate her work. Bees perform a collective algorithm larger than any individual, while architects are engaged in singular imaginative play, a poesis, that brings forth something new. The tension between the plan and the realized built form—the translation of thought into reality—is a creative crucible, like the battle between paint and canvas, ink and paper, body and field of play.

But whereas Marx falls firmly on the side of the architect and human imagination, and thus allows architects more of the Fountainhead-style self-congratulation that can make them so obnoxious, Mishchenko’s whimsical renderings of collective construction are just as unstable as the buildings being erected in them. Or are they even buildings? In work after work, armies of tiny cartoonish figures—running children, dogs, people on bicycles—enact coordinated but uncanny undertakings, building and playing, laughing and working, leaving behind piles of materials, tools, ramps, walkways, and rickety towers as they venture across sometimes long horizontal vistas of creation. The details offer ambiguous and sometimes disturbing narratives. Who are the children? What are the structures for? What is the social system that calls them forth?

I have one Mishchenko drawing, untitled like all of them from this period, and in it there are no figures at all, just an apparently abandoned minaret fashioned of waterwheels, boxes, and large canisters full of clothing. Is it a dump or a supply centre, a folly or a shrine? And where are the usually busy figures, with their game boards and ladders and rope pulleys, their walking sticks and trunks of hewn wood? The absence is provocative. Mishchenko doesn’t celebrate architecture, she investigates the very idea of shared space, of public meaning, of makers and made. In their lighthearted manner, these joyous political artworks offer fresh sketches of the place where individual identity meets its collective other.

Many First Nations citizens see their tax-exempt status as a function of the treaties and other legal arrangements with the Crown, or as partial compensation for the resources taken from the lands. They believe that imposing an income tax would be not only unfair, but unconstitutional.

Canada’s courts have upheld tax exemptions as a means to preserve the collective rights of First Nations, ensuring that the Crown does not attempt to erode the reserve land base through taxation.

The federal government has made little effort to explain the policy to Canadians, allowing an unhealthy resentment to grow. There has been little counterpoint to the pressure from the right on this issue. Given the public confusion, it seems a worthwhile exercise to actually do the math and see what light it sheds on the matter.

First, it helps to be specific about whom we are talking. Income is only exempt from tax when earned by status Indians working on reserves. The 2006 census identified fewer than 700,000 people who have a North American Indian identity. This number includes about 133,000 who are non-status Indians and slightly more than 565,000 status Indians who might be exempted from paying income tax, if they earned income on-reserve. Bearing in mind that half of Aboriginal people are under 20, more than 40 per cent of status Indians live off-reserve, and Aboriginal people have an unemployment rate more than twice the national average, it is not surprising that the number of people exempted from paying taxes is actually quite small. In fact, the most recent figures tell us that the number of First Nations citizens living on reserves who had employment or self-employment income was only 103,885.

Unfortunately, Statistics Canada has not made average income numbers for on-reserve employment freely available—which would have allowed for a more precise calculation—but we do know that the median income is $13,637. This allows us to estimate the total employment and self-employment income earned on-reserve as somewhere in the neighbourhood of $1.4 billion.

So what is the total of tax revenues lost to Canada as a result of the exemption?

The federal income tax rate for those earning less than $41,544 is 15 percent. Provincial tax rates vary, but adding them into the calculation puts the tax rate somewhere between 20 and 25 percent across the country. The basic personal deduction is $10,382, which would leave just over $4,000 in taxable income from the median, even with no other deductions. On that amount, one would owe between $800 and $1,000. Multiplying that back out against the 103,885 earners, the exemption amounts to between $84 million and $104 million in foregone revenues.

If all of those earning income on-reserve actually qualify for the exemption, the Receiver General is collecting approximately $100 million less in taxes as a result.

It is possible to quibble with the figures here. I have used the most recent census figures from 2006 with the 2010 tax rates and using the median income level rather than the average leads to a lower total. Nonetheless, even the highest mark-ups on all of this data wouldn’t put the lost revenue higher than $120 million.

That number is nothing to sneeze at, of course. But in the context of a 2010 budget of more than $261 billion, it’s also not going to make or break the federal government. Nor does it seem disproportional or unfair, when looked at in context. By way of comparison, there are $1.4 billion in annual subsidies for oil and gas companies, equivalent to the total income earned on-reserve, and $120 million in subsidies for ethanol production, equivalent to the highest estimation of revenues lost to the Canadian government through the income tax exemption.

More to the point, the tax exemption in no way compensates for shortfalls in funding to First Nations. The provinces spend more than 20 percent more on children than the federal government does on First Nations children, whether those kids are in school or under child welfare services care. The disadvantage to First Nations children from these two policies alone amounts to far more than the foregone tax revenues, and there are dozens of other examples.

Taxes pay for public services like roads and water, and First Nations communities are notoriously under-serviced. A 2005 study by the Assembly of First Nations found that, per capita federal funding for First Nations citizens is $7,200. That’s far lower than the amount that the government spends on the population in general. In Ottawa, for instance, the combined per capita spending by all three levels of government totalled $14,900, more than double the amount being spent on-reserve.

Given the amount of energy certain groups have spent decrying this tax exemption, one might have expected them to conduct an analysis of this nature. The fact that they haven’t might suggest that there is another agenda at work in their complaints.

The balance of advantage is clear when the tax exemption is compared to the lack of services on-reserve. To whom is the system unfair when the numbers are so grossly tilted the other way? And why focus on this issue when there is so much else that needs to be done?

Recalling the views of the Supreme Court, if First Nations land can be eroded through tax policy, it is an efficient way to end communal land ownership in Canada. Once that is accomplished, First Nations can be fully assimilated into the mainstream and any resources on or near their lands can be exploited without the inconvenience of consultation or compensation. Complaining about tax policy is only one of many ways in which the right wing in Canada is seeking to achieve that goal.

Institution out of time: A Catholic convent and boarding school circa 1880. Photo courtesy Canadian National Archives.

In Alberta, Ontario, and Saskatchewan, parallel education systems still exist: the secular public school boards, and separate Catholic school boards. It is time to abolish that system. The problem of separate school boards is not their Catholicism; it is their separateness. Public funding elevates one religious tradition above all others, and in secular, multicultural contemporary Canada, that is no longer a viable option.

The propriety of the Catholic school system was up for debate recently when the Halton Catholic District School Board banned gay-straight alliances because, as the chair Alice Anne LeMay said, such student groups are “not within the teachings of the Catholic Church.” An investigation by the gay and lesbian newspaper Xtra! later found that such groups are effectively banned in all 29 of Ontario’s Catholic school boards. Just a year ago, Catholic leaders, including Catholic school board trustees, led the charge against a new sexual education curriculum for all Ontario public schools, and successfully scuppered the new scheme.

These episodes are troubling, but keeping score of who wins which policy scuffle is beside the point. These problems stem from the overarching fact of constitutionally entrenched religious public schools. Separate school boards for Protestants and Catholics are a function of Article 93 of the 1867 Constitution Act, intended at the time to protect minority religious rights. The reasons that a 4th century European institution should have been embedded in our 19th century constitution may have made sense at the time, but that time is long past.

The precedent for ending separate education exists. Quebec secured a constitutional amendment exempting it from Article 93 in 1997, and thereafter reorganized its school boards along linguistic lines, not religious ones. Newfoundland and Labrador merged their school boards into one non-denominational system in 1998.

The United Nations Human Rights Committee has already urged Canada [PDF] to “adopt steps in order to eliminate discrimination on the basis of religion in the funding of schools in Ontario.” Polls find significant public support for the idea, and it would undoubtedly save millions in administrative overheads. But pressure from the UN, public support, or financial incentives are all secondary to the simple truth that creating a singular, secular public school system is the right thing to do.

The problem is political will. No party is willing to touch the issue, especially after Ontario Progressive Conservative leader John Tory’s disastrous 2007 campaign promise to fund all religious schools, for which he was widely ridiculed. Party leaders fear, probably correctly, that proposing a merger of the separate and public school boards would be labelled as anti-Catholic. It is not. It is an acknowledgment that times have changed and state-sponsored religious education of any type or denomination is no longer appropriate.

Syrus Marcus Ware. Production still by Joshua Allen from "Ten," directed by Sarah Sharkey Pearce.

For the last two years, anyone weary of the increasingly commercialized and blissfully apoliticized nature of Pride in Toronto has made a beeline for the back-to-the-future experience that is the Trans March. It’s small, friendly, community-based, unendorsed by any corporate interest. It’s also politicized, giddy, and endearingly disorganized, the way many of us remember Prides of yore. It’s not just nostalgia that draws a bigger crowd each year, though — it’s the sense that trans activism has taken up the social-change banner from a gay movement that dropped it the moment the right to marry became the dominant political cause.

Syrus Marcus Ware, a baby-faced, 35-year-old trans guy, was happily agitating for a trans presence at Pride even before the march got organized. In 2008, he and a buddy “pushed and pushed and convinced” the organizers to start a trans stage (now a regular feature of Pride celebrations), but he’d been kick-starting trans, black, and prison-related causes long before that. Like many trans people, he came out first as gay, became an activist in high school (“I wanted to change attitudes at school and in my family,” he says, “and had a strong belief that the world could, and should, be different”), finally coming out as trans in 2000 after grappling with his feelings for at least a decade. Since then, he’s more than made up for lost time.

He’s an artist (painting, performance, and video) whose work often blurs into activism and whose activism can have the exhilaration of art (a program co-ordinator for youth and young adults at the Art Gallery of Ontario, he’s not wary of blending politics with art appreciation—his take on the recent Maharaja blockbuster show stressed the impact of British imperialism as much as it did the exhibit’s splendour). He’s a host of CIUT 89.5 FM’s Resistance on the Sound Dial. He helped create the publication Primed: The Back Pocket Guide for Transmen and the Men Who Dig Them. He’s involved with Gay/Bi/Queer Transmen Working Group, with a mandate to provide sexual health information to trans guys who have sex with men. He helped develop TransFathers 2B, a pilot course for trans men considering parenting (he recently got pregnant and is in a relationship with another trans guy). He works for prison abolition, both culturally, through the Prison Justice Film Festival, and politically, through the Prisoners’ Justice Action Committee, a group building abolition strategies within the black, indigenous, and trans communities.

If the gay movement opened the door to sexual diversity, the trans movement seems to be kicking it off its hinges, encouraging exploration well beyond gay, straight, and bi, creating a happily dizzy-making world where guys get pregnant, where that bearded dude with the great pecs turns out to have a vagina, where that gorgeous babe intends to keep her penis because she no longer has to comply with cultural expectations of gender. And the rest of us? We get a gender playground, open to all. “There are so many human variations outside the cookie-cutter paradigm of human desire,” says Ware. “We have to stop pathologizing them.” He’s working on it.

'Moral Hazard' (2009) by Michael Lewis. Image courtesy the artist.

The hotel hallway is empty, save for trays of dirty dishes stacked on the muted blue carpet and on a room-service cart along the beige walls. A man in a loose tie bends over the cart, holding a glass of red wine and stooping tentatively over a half-eaten plate of food. He reaches for a chicken drumstick, hazarding a bite from the refuse pile before his colleagues discover his secret indulgence.

The guilty pleasure, intense privacy, and mounting tension of moments like those depicted in his darkly funny 2009 piece “Moral Hazard” underscore Michael Lewis’s large-format paintings. He skewers every office worker’s dream to get away from the grind of daily life in his 2010 piece “Options,” a satirical depiction of a man attempting to escape his office by climbing head first through a ceiling vent. Lewis hasn’t worked in the cubicle farms he documents prolifically in his work, but for the 41-year-old Toronto artist, the feeling of being in a workplace mirrors the experience of living in a society where everyday life is subject to the surveillance, homogeneity, and private crises of business culture.

His paintings aim to capture the experience of living in the past decade: the postmillennial, post-9/11 era where right-wing politics took centre stage in North America.

Many of those works are appearing this spring at the Art Gallery of Mississauga, where Lewis’ paintings form part of a touring group show, Sorting Daemons: Art, Surveillance Regimes and Social Control.

“Something really fell off of reality when George W. Bush came in, for me,” he says. Conservative notions of “the good war” and our cultural obsession with commercial and consumer life are more overt than ever, Lewis says—a troubling context for an increasingly uncritical society.

“It’s quite apparent that this is not freedom that they’re pushing,” he says. “My work has addressed the kind of psychology that will allow for acceptance of these extreme messages.”

Lewis explored the Wall Street financial crisis in Purge, a series he began developing in 2008 during the crash. At the time, the global economic crisis was presented to the public as though it had spontaneously erupted out of the blue, but Lewis’s paintings explore the culture of complacency and denial in big businesses that foreshadowed the collapse. “It seemed to let people off the hook for not really having the foresight, when it was definitely out there,” he says.

Purge is anchored by Lewis’s ironic depiction of office workers literally collapsing in offices and at trade shows. His choice to blot out the eyes of his subjects and almost exclusively paint in the dark, drab tones of traditional office environments lends a sinister quality to his paintings. Their surreal, often embarrassing subject matter explicitly interrogates the nightmarish aspect of office life.

'Options' (2010) by Michael Lewis. Image courtesy the artist.

The stuff of nightmares, perhaps the very dreams of the office workers featured in previous works, was investigated in a January 2011 show, The Deformity Competition, at Toronto’s Meredith Keith Gallery. There, Lewis abandoned straightforward depictions of office life for the more macabre territory of skeletons and corpses.

While Lewis’s paintings deal with the political, financial, and mental fallout of a dark decade, his black humour introduces welcome notes of levity, too. “I know it doesn’t seem exactly funny, people collapsing everywhere,” he says. “Even though it’s a very serious time period and very serious subject matter, I’ve been pushing toward bringing a little humour to it.”

After years of war, financial collapse, and social unravelling, the dark humour of Lewis’s paintings comes as a welcome relief.

Photo by Lisa Xing

The mermaids of Korea’s Jeju Island are a sight to behold, but not in the way you might think. They don’t have long, flowing locks, nor figures reminiscent of magazine models. They don’t sing Disney ballads. The sound they do make is through whistling—their own method of inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide after they surface from the water. Most haenyeo, literally “sea women” in Korean, are grandmothers. They have weathered faces, deep wrinkles, and walk with slow, measured steps. Each morning at dawn, they plunge into the sea to catch clams and other marine life. They dive without much equipment, using only flippers, weighted vests and rubber diving masks. Their method is simple—mark their location in the water with a float, use a weeding hoe for digging up the sea life, and gather their harvest in a net. Some dive as deep as 20 metres, staying under for as long as three minutes without surfacing.

When my friend and I rented mopeds to explore this small island off of Korea’s southern coast, seeing the haenyeo dive was a top priority. After all, the practice helped place local traditions on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage List in 2009. We had read about them in our Lonely Planet guides and heard about them through friends. Devastatingly, we both caught a bad case of food poisoning our second evening there, so waking up at the break of dawn was far from feasible. The majority of the trip was spent nursing ourselves back to health and easing stomach cramps, and we gave up hope of actually seeing the haenyeo ourselves.

On our last day on Jeju, we were determined to see more of the island, ill or not. Not up for anything strenuous, we went to spend the afternoon with a picnic near Sunrise Peak, a popular destination on the island’s east coast. Before we even had a chance to spread the picnic blanket, we spied a small figure in the distance walking toward us with what seemed like a net in one hand. Closer and closer she came—until we realized it was one of the haenyeo, standing before us with that day’s catch, still wearing her rubber diving mask. Without a word, she plopped herself down on the beach and motioned for my friend and me to do the same. Because she spoke no English, and our Korean was broken at best, our communication consisted mostly of hand gestures and chuckles. We sat with her for about 10 minutes as she showed us her catch of the day—squid and other sea life she’d scooped up by hand. She spent every morning in the sea—using practices of eras past, armed with just her two calloused hands and an unflinching strength that seems nearly mystical to modern-day generations.

According to the Korea Tourism Organization, there were about 30,000 haenyeo on Jeju Island in the 1950s. By 2002, the number had dropped to 5,600 divers, more than half of whom were at least 60 years old. When this group of women retire, it seems like the legacy of the haenyeo will also vanish into history books, nearly as mythical as mermaids themselves.

There had been talk that 2010 might be a good year for sockeye salmon, maybe even a great one. But nobody expected what was to come.

It started in early August, when the Pacific Salmon Commission, a government-appointed body of Canadian and U.S. scientists, forecast 10 million sockeye would reach the mouth of B.C.’s Fraser River later in the month. It was seen as a bold prediction at the time, given the near total collapse of the sockeye fishery the previous three years.

Two weeks later, the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans released its first forecast, based on test catches in the area, a whopping 25 million sockeye salmon. It sparked a flurry of headlines—“Fraser River Fishery Braces for Bonanza,” the CBC crowed—and near-chaos along the river when the fishery finally opened on August 25.

“We’ve fished all our lives and we’d never seen anything like it” says Steve Johansen, owner of Organic Ocean, who fished in the Georgia Strait, near the mouth of the Fraser.

“Every day we went out there, and as far as you could see in every direction were sockeye jumping. All day, every day,” said Johansen. “Some days there were so many fish they were actually hitting the sides of our boat.”

When all was said and done, more than 34 million sockeye returned to the Fraser River in 2010, making it the biggest return in nearly a century. It prompted some observers to ask the uncomfortable question: is this iconic fish really on the verge of collapse?

The short answer is yes. The sockeye salmon is in serious trouble, much like the Atlantic cod was two decades before its fateful collapse. The Fraser sockeye, which accounts for roughly half the economic value of all salmon caught in B.C., has been in a downward spiral for decades.

In 2009, the stock appeared to hit rock bottom. After two years of disastrously low numbers, the Pacific Salmon Commission had predicted a modest return of 10 million sockeye—nearly the same number as predicted in 2010—yet only 1.9 million showed up in the Fraser, making it one of the lowest returns on record.

Public outrage over the nine million “missing fish” was heated enough to prompt the federal government to establish the Cohen Commission, a $15 million inquiry headed by B.C. Supreme Court judge Bruce Cohen that’s been under way since last June, tasked with figuring out what went wrong and how best to fix it.

While it’s certainly not the first investigation into the salmon decline—there have been seemingly endless studies and reports done on the sockeye over the last 20 years—the inquiry is by far the most expensive and the highest profile.

The real question, however, is whether the Cohen Commission can actually deliver meaningful change.

“One year certainly does not make a trend,” says Dr. John Reynolds, an aquatic ecologist at Simon Fraser University, referring to the miraculous sockeye return of 2010. “Every generation of fish operates independently from every other year.”

The long-term trend for sockeye salmon has been one of steady decline. In pre-European times, there would often be more than 100 million sockeye fighting their way up the Fraser River. It wasn’t until the Hudson’s Bay Company turned to salt salmon as its primary export after the fur trade dried up that the first commercial fishery was organized. For the sockeye salmon, it’s been downhill ever since.

According to Reynolds, who is a scientific reviewer for the Cohen Commission, the underlying issue for sockeye in recent years is declining productivity. Simply put, the number of fish that come back to a river for each fish that produced them is dropping.

“You could, in theory have a lot of fish coming back to spawn in one year, but if most of their young die, there will be low productivity coming from that generation,” explains Reynolds.

Sockeye productivity has been steadily dropping since the early 1990s—a period over which commercial fishing has also dwindled—and most experts believe it has something to do with conditions in the ocean, where salmon spend the bulk of their lives.

Young sockeye typically spend their first two years rearing in inland lakes and streams before migrating to the sea, where they spend two more years, primarily in the northeast Pacific, near Alaska, before returning to spawn in the streams where they were hatched, guided by natural forces that scientists still don’t understand.

Over the past two decades, the north Pacific has been warmer than usual, a trend most scientists blame on climate change. Warmer ocean temperatures, Reynolds explains, means less food is available for salmon, especially younger fish less able to compete.

The exception in this oceanic warming trend was 2008, which also happened to be the year when the historic 2010 Fraser sockeye return entered the ocean. “When the fish went out to sea in the spring of 2008 it was exceptionally cold in the northeast Pacific,” Reynolds says. “It was a return to the oceanic food webs we would see back in the 1980s.”

Cooler ocean temperatures, along with a natural cycle in sockeye salmon that sees a larger-than-normal return every four years, might explain the historic return last year. “If we were going to get a good year in recent times, 2010 could have been the year,” Reynolds says.

The challenge, according to Reynolds, is the lack of scientific data. Once fish enter the ocean, they might as well swim into a black hole. When fish disappear—like the nine million that went missing in 2009—there’s no evidence of what happened, making it nearly impossible to accurately predict sockeye returns and even harder to ensure their protection.

“It’s like trying to predict the weather two years in advance,” Reynolds says, “but with even less data.”

The elephant in the Cohen Commission courtroom is, of course, fish farming. Fish farms are controversial throughout the world, but nowhere more so than on Canada’s West Coast, and rightly so. No other active fish-farming locale in the world has so much at stake as B.C., where the wild fishery is still relatively abundant and the ecosystem still viable.

In October 2010, anti-fish-farm protesters paddled down the Fraser River from Hell’s Gate to Vancouver en masse, raising awareness along the way. They arrived on the opening day of the inquiry and gathered, 400 strong, outside the federal courthouse in downtown Vancouver where the inquiry is being held, demanding greater scrutiny of fish farms.

At the same time, the B.C. Salmon Farmers Association was running large newspaper ads, showing a picture of a spawning sockeye over a caption reading: “For the last ten years the rule has been that salmon farming is driving wild salmon to extinction … Every rule is allowed a few exceptions, but this one will need 35 million of them.” For the controversial B.C. fish-farming industry, 2010’s exceptional salmon run was an opportunity to try to counter the bad press that has dogged them for years.

Fish farms started out benignly enough, popping up on B.C.’s rugged coastline in the 1970s as small mom-and-pop operations. Since then, however, the industry has quickly grown into the fourth largest in the world, with 128 licensed fish farms operating in B.C. Of those, 92 per cent are Norwegian-owned and the majority of the salmon farmed is Atlantic.

With exponential growth in the industry, so too grew the environmental concerns. Lice and parasites can spread through a crammed fish farm like wildfire, and those same lice and parasites can infect juvenile salmon migrating past the open net pens. Pink salmon appear to be most vulnerable—in 2002 pinks were also considered on the verge of collapse—but sockeye are certainly not immune.

“There have been several papers published recently that suggest that sea lice from open net-pen farms continue to be very difficult to control and very, very problematic to wild juvenile fish,” says Craig Orr, executive director of Vancouver-based Watershed Watch.

“Our attempts to control the lice by regulation have been met with mixed success,” Orr added.

While sea lice are treated on the fish farms, Orr explained, there’s evidence that the lice are becoming more resistant to the chemicals being used. “It’s a lot like antibiotics,” Orr says. A case in point is Norway, the world’s largest aquaculture nation: lice counts tripled last year, despite increased treatment, devastating both farmed and wild salmon populations. Chile, another major producer of farmed fish, is also battling persistent lice problems. The aquaculture industry insists that farms in B.C. have maintained low lice counts over the past several years. “Lice management has been very effective here on the B.C. coast,” says Mary Ellen Walling, executive director of the British Columbia Salmon Farmers Association. “In other jurisdictions, like New Brunswick and Scotland and Norway, they see much higher levels of lice on farmed fish.” According to Walling, a farm is treated if there are more than three lice per fish, based on a sample of 60 fish. She adds that the monitoring of fish health is audited by the provincial government and compiled in annual reports, dating back to the early 2000s.

Anti-fish-farm protesters claimed a victory in early December 2010, when Justice Cohen ordered the B.C. Salmon Farmers Association to submit detailed documents on fish health, disease, stocking, and mortality for 120 farms, dating back 10 years.

Reynolds believes obtaining that data and making it public is a big accomplishment for the commission.

“I’m not saying I think the farms are necessarily the issue,” Reynolds says. “I’m saying that we need to deal with this issue clearly and openly and transparently, so that people can understand whether this is a high priority.”

Lack of data comes up time and time again with respect to sockeye, but in the end it’s what’s done with the data— policy, regulation, and management—that really matters. This brings us to the other elephant in the courtroom: the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

In late 2010, DFO took over the regulation of fish farms from the B.C. provincial government. The transfer of responsibility followed a 2009 B.C. Supreme Court ruling that the federal government, not the province, should regulate fish farms because it has constitutional powers over the ocean. The legal action was launched by biologist Alexandra Morton, a longtime opponent of open-net aquaculture.

Critics, however, argue that DFO has an inherent conflict of interest, since it must now regulate both the wild fishery and the fish farms. Worse yet, they argue that there’s internal bias toward promoting farmed salmon over wild.

“One of the things coming out of the Cohen inquiry loud and clear is the conflict of interest in DFO’s mandate,” says Watershed Watch’s Craig Orr. “On one hand, they have a wild salmon policy that they’re supposed to be promoting and on the other, they have an aquaculture development policy, which is often directly at odds with protecting wild salmon.”

“There are biases in the federal government right now with regard to how science is conducted, especially around the issue of salmon farming impacts,” Orr explains. “No papers have ever been published from DFO on what’s really happening on the fish farms.”

Concern over bias crept into the Cohen Commission inquiry even before the opening day, when Delta-Richmond East MP John Cummins spoke out publicly against the appointment of a former DFO employee, Dr. Brian Riddell, as a scientific adviser to the commission.

“… The clear expectation of a judicial inquiry is that it will be presided over by an unbiased judge and supported by a neutral staff,” said Cummins. The department and its “scientific advice” are the target of the Cohen Inquiry, says Cummins.

Riddell, now president of the Pacific Salmon Foundation, subsequently resigned from the scientific panel, but he has since provided expert testimony on several occasions.

Even if bias were not an issue, most observers agree that DFO doesn’t have the staff or the budget to effectively look after even the wild salmon stock. The department has shrunk over the past decade through a series of federal spending cuts, with most remaining staff in Ottawa offices and few left in the field.

“It’s disconcerting to many of us why we don’t get more serious about protecting wild salmon on this coast,” says Craig Orr. “There’s a real lack of capacity in Canada right now to do the research that’s needed to understand why these [salmon] stocks have declined.” SFU’s John Reynolds agrees, pointing toward DFO’s wild salmon policy—a document published five years ago that has never been fully implemented—as a starting point.

“They’ve had this blueprint for how salmon are to be managed,” says Reynolds. “It’s a very clear document, but DFO has never had the resources to implement it.”

Whether those resources are one of the recommendations that come out of the Cohen Commission when it wraps up in May is anyone’s guess. But make no mistake, expectations are high.

“It’s not a smoke and mirrors show,” says Organic Ocean’s Steven Johansen, who has been a commercial fisherman in B.C. his whole career. “I think Justice Cohen is giving an honest effort and hopefully we get some answers at the end of it.”

SFU’s John Reynolds believes the commission, by virtue of its high profile, will bring some much-needed attention to the sockeye. “I hope it makes people across Canada—and Ottawa in particular—understand just how important this issue is to people on the West Coast.”

The sad fate of the Atlantic cod has cast a long shadow, one that stretches all the way across the country. While the causes of the two species’ declines might be different—the cod was simply over-fished in the end—most people can’t help but draw parallels between the finger-pointing and the mismanagement that has surrounded the sockeye.

The question now is whether Justice Cohen can stop an environmental disaster from happening twice.