Photo courtesy Natasha Kuperman

In Hazelton, B.C., one organization is undertaking an ambitious project: to regenerate the public forests of Canada’s north. Seed the North, founded in 2020 by infrastructure developer and architect Natasha Kuperman, isn’t the first to tackle reforestation. However, it has set out to do so with a fresh approach that combines clean technology with deeply rooted Indigenous knowledge.

Seed the North’s core mission is to gather seeds with value to the local ecosystem, encase them in a biochar-based coating (a carbon-rich soil enhancer made from agricultural waste), and then use drones to distribute them across thousands of hectares. Kuperman explains that the coating makes seeds drought-resilient and less likely to be eaten by predators. “Those are the two greatest contributors to seed in the wild not having [a] sufficient survival rate,” she says.

Kuperman and her team focus on areas that are overlooked by conventional reforestation strategies, like planting nursery-grown seedlings that are commissioned and paid for by logging organizations. But the more remote and further north an area is, “the more expensive and logistically difficult it is to seed at scale,” Kuperman says. That’s why Seed the North uses drones—they are the lowest carbon impact tool that can efficiently and affordably seed such large swathes of land.

Many of these areas are also home to Indigenous communities, which face the consequences of compromised ecosystems—for example, habitat loss reduces access to traditional food sources. Currently, Seed the North works with, learns from, and employs people from multiple communities of the Tsimshian and Gitxsan, particularly the Kitselas First Nations and the Luutkudziiwus Wilp. These communities’ knowledge about local ecosystems is then incorporated into Seed the North’s work.

Kuperman says that Seed the North is different from other reforestation efforts because it doesn’t just focus on the trees, or even the forests—it is concerned with landscape-level analysis. That means accounting for the full ecology of an area and identifying patterns that can reveal the impacts of past disturbances. Understanding a forest’s past then enables better planning for its future.

The organization’s scientific approach also sets it apart. “Historically,” Kuperman says, “direct seeding—like broadcast seeding from an airplane or helicopter—has largely been a failure.” But she chalks this up to a lack of precision, offering up birch trees as an example.

A birch seed has a 25 percent chance of viability: three out of four seeds have no embryos inside. So, when past direct seeding restoration projects have used birch seed, it’s likely they’ve been planting blanks. But Seed the North’s approach is to rigorously process the seeds and examine them for viability and germination value. The birch seeds are then planted with companion plants like alder that fix nitrogen in the soil, helping birch trees divide.

In the bigger picture, the care that Seed the North takes with its seeds matters because birch trees have high albedo, a quality that measures how much a surface reflects light. Snow and ice also have high albedo, but as winters shorten and the amount of snow declines, that amount of albedo decreases. In the north, albedo is the single greatest source of climate feedback. As reflectivity declines, the surface of the Earth absorbs more solar radiation, therefore increasing temperatures and causing more ice to melt.

“We can’t exclusively focus on tree planting,” Kuperman says, emphasizing that we need to understand these “larger governing forces” in order to make meaningful change.

Looking ahead, Kuperman hopes to continue building a “robust workforce” in Hazelton. In her vision for Seed the North’s future, the organization will also expand into small towns across Northern Canada and work with those communities to collect and process seeds that will help address local disturbances to the landscape, like wildfires or road building. Kuperman hopes there will be “a constant exchange of knowledge” with these communities: Elders will share what they know about the forest, and Seed the North will reciprocate by providing services, training, and funds.

All this community-based ecological restoration work, Kuperman hopes, will “help mitigate this ticking time bomb that’s called climate change.”

British Columbia is facing widespread doctor shortages, and among the province’s limited supply of physicians, strikingly few are trained in addiction medicine.

According to a study released by the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, only 25 B.C. doctors have passed the American Board of Addiction Medicine’s (ABAM) exam, the North American standard for addiction training. Most of them are located in Vancouver. Just three ABAM accredited doctors are located in B.C.’s interior region, and two are in the Fraser region, leaving Vancouver Island and northern B.C. with zero doctors trained to understand and diagnose addiction.

“The goal of having physicians trained is to ensure patients and families have access to addictions treatment,” says Dr. Annabel Mead, who co-authored the study and emphasizes that, so far, B.C. is missing the mark.

With fentanyl and other drug use on the rise in B.C., having doctors who understand substance use and how it can affect other health issues is imperative. This year, between January–July, 433 overdose deaths were reported as a direct result of illicit drug use in B.C. Meanwhile, poor access to treatment further increases chances of liver disease, psychiatric issues, HIV, hepatitis, and other blood infections, adding strain on an over stretched medical system and putting users at risk of premature death. The island and northern regions, which have no ABAM-accredited doctors, show the highest percentage of illicit drug-related deaths.

In an attempt to fill that gap, St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver offers an addiction medicine fellowship to train select doctors how to treat patients experiencing addiction and its side effects. The program has trained 15 doctors and three nurses since 2013. Having recently completed that training, Dr. Nadia Fairbairn says she has seen risk reduction in her own patients who have been diagnosed with substance abuse disorder.

While Mead notes that some unaccredited physicians do provide care for patients with addiction, she adds that relying on such a laissez-faire system is unfair for both doctors and patients. “Prevention, screening, and treatment for substance abuse disorders should be a routine part of general medical care,” she says.

A number of countries, including Australia and the U.S., have declared addictions medicine a subspecialty for doctors. “Until Canada does the same,” says Mead, “there won’t be any Canadian standards for practicing addiction medicine, and ultimately for providing care to patients.”

Kinuseo falls in Tumbler Ridge, B.C.

British Columbia introduced its Instant Towns Act in 1965 during the height of an industrial boom. The policy’s purpose was exactly what the quirky name suggests: to allow the government to instantly grant municipal status to the many informal settlements surrounding its natural resources. The idea was that instant towns could prevent some of the problems of company towns, which had a habit of becoming ghost towns, by empowering local governments to create real communities.

Not everything went as planned. Four decades and a dozen such towns later, many once-vibrant communities were near death as mills and mines shut down or shipped out. The government was, however, right about one thing: towns aren’t so quick to grab the tombstone. Here’s how four post–Instant Towns are embracing their abundant resources, natural and artificial, in hopes of a greener second life.

Hudson’s Hope

Industry: Hydroelectricity
Incorporated: 1965
Population: 1,012
Hudson’s Hope was incorporated in 1965 when it became the second-largest municipality in B.C. Dubbed the “Land of Dinosaurs and Dams,” the town is rich with fossils. There are more than 1,700 dinosaur tracks in the area dating back to the Early Cretaceous Period. They even have their own dinosaur—the Hudsonelpidia—that was named for the town.

Mackenzie

Industry: Pulp and paper
Incorporated: 1966
Population: 5,452 (2006)
Mackenzie is home to the world’s largest tree-crusher. Indeed, in 1968 the 175-tonne behemoth flattened a 1,773-square- kilometre patch of woodland that would become Williston Lake, the province’s largest reservoir. The town has since incorporated the tree-crusher, which sat idle for years, as a central attraction in the town’s push for tourism.

Tumbler Ridge

Industry: Coal
Incorporated: 1981
Population: 2,454
Tumbler Ridge bills itself as the “Waterfall Capital of the North.” Kinuseo Falls is taller than Niagara at nearly 200 feet. The Cascades are 10 waterfalls that are all located within a few kilometres of each other. The community also holds an annual music festival—Grizfest—which this year hosted April Wine, Platinum Blonde, and children’s entertainers Sharon & Bram.

Elkford

Industry: Coal
Incorporated: 1971
Population: 2,463
Elkford may be a coal town, but nature still dominates. Indeed, the town’s website calls it a place where “humanity borrows a bit of space.” Currently, Elkford is repositioning itself as a good getaway for photographers. If would-be tourists are brave, they can try to snap some of the area’s grizzlies, elk, lynx, or wolves. If not, there’s always the Elkford webcam.

Creative Commons photo by Flickr user The-Lane-Team

On October 1st, consumers in B.C. will shoulder a price increase on small appliances. But this modest fee will make a big impact on waste reduction throughout the province.

Tomorrow, The Canadian Electrical Stewardship Association is launching Unplugged, a small appliance recycling program. The motivation: over 2 million small appliances wind up in British Columbia’s landfills annually. Never before seen in Canada, this program will accept over 120 types of small appliances, saving even your electric toothbrush from the landfill.

The program is non-profit, non-governmental, and completely funded by the consumer surcharge. The small hike covers a free drop-off at the 100+ drop-off stations located across the province, as well as all recycling, transportation, and collection costs incurred by the program. Purveyors of the initiative ensure consumers that the recycling fee is not a tax, as the money is not gathered or tracked by the government. But it is on the government’s radar as Environment Minister Terry Lake sings his praises in the business review canada earlier this month.

With all the expected benefits of increased recycling, such as the re-use of aluminum which takes 95% less energy than it does to produce it with raw materials, the program is not without its critics. Although the public will be able to view data such as how much material picked up is actually recycled in Unplugged’s planned annual report, some still worry about a lack of transparency.

This article expresses concern regarding the non-disclosure of processing partners prior to contract completion. These concerns address the export practises of the potential partners as recycling depots can be known to dump electronic waste on developing countries. However, the identities of the partners are scheduled to be posted when the program launches.

With the timely acceptance of such products as bathroom scales (bring on the turkey), beard trimmers (sweet Movember), and gelato makers (no excuse, but have you ever actually used it?), the West is showing up the rest of Canada once again as a recycler’s haven — although this PEI fisherman’s DIY approach to reusing is also a classic and oh-so-poetic.

Interior of one of the Habitat ’76 hangars. Image courtesy Lindsay Brown.

Walk around Vancouver’s Jericho Beach in 2011 and you’ll see some odd architecture: an empty concrete wharf, a welded steel railing that overlooks English Bay, a strange rail embedded beneath the sailing club. These are all that is left of a complex of five gigantic aircraft hangars that was home to an international conference 35 years ago.

Lindsay Brown, a textile designer and board president of Vancouver’s Or Gallery, is working to unearth a forgotten piece of Vancouver’s history: Habitat ’76, a United Nations-sponsored conference that brought together figures like Buckminster Fuller, Margaret Mead, and Mother Teresa, to discuss and explore human living conditions and social justice. She is gathering information towards publishing a book.

An adjunct to the UN Habitat Conference on Human Settlements, the Habitat Forum was infused with a distinctly mid-’70s brand of optimism and utopianism. The five huge seaplane hangars, left over from the 1930s, were converted into theatres, halls and restaurants for the thousands of people who attended. The theatre, styled to look like a First Nations longhouse, had a Bill Reid mural.

Brown, a thirteen-year-old girl at the time, visited the Habitat forum and calls it a life-changing experience. “It had a kind of a carnival atmosphere. It had a less controlled atmosphere than the city generally had. People call it ‘No Fun City’ now. When you’re thirteen, you don’t exactly know what’s going on, but it had that feeling of ideas and experimentation as well as fun. It was so beautiful.”

Exterior of one of the Habitat ’76 hangars. Image courtesy Lindsay Brown.

She was impressed with the ferment of artistic and political ideas and creativity at Habitat, in contrast to the staid conservatism she experienced in the rest of the city. “You did get the sense you were in a global event rather than the sort of parochial Vancouver I’d been used to.”

Years later, Brown never forgot about Habitat. She would Google it now and then, but was often frustrated that little or nothing turned up. Habitat seemed to have been forgotten. In 2009, she decided that if nobody else would write a book about it, she would.

Brown managed to track down Al Clapp, Habitat’s organizer and a prominent broadcaster. ““I said, ‘Hi, I’m a child of Habitat. I want to write about it. Can we talk?’ He said, ‘Sure. I’m in Victoria. Come on over.’” Brown visited Clapp, who loaned her his archive of photos and other material. “That’s when I knew there was a book in it.”

Brown says that, unlike Expo ’86, Habitat ’76 was deliberately buried by Vancouver’s city government. “It’s very hard to keep a history alive when you have absolutely zero public, official recognition of it. I think it was deliberately suppressed.” The aircraft hangars were demolished and the 35th anniversary came and went with little fanfare.

More than just nostalgia, Brown believes that Habitat’s ideals are increasingly relevant today with the renewed focus on urban planning. “One of the interesting things about Habitat is that it thought about those things, what is actually livable at a human level? What should neighbourhoods and cities be like?”

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.

The Claim

Last June, the governmental Canadian General Standards Board released proposed standards for organic salmon farming. The goal: to overcome trade barriers and help develop niche markets. But will that organic sticker really mean organic-quality farmed fish, or is it just covering up some nasty production practices?

The Investigation

Though the standards board is a federal organization, the new rules were largely produced by a business coalition called the Canadian Organic Aquatic Producers Association and have raised concerns among environmentalists. In a letter to the board published last August, a group of more than 40 leading organic, conservation, and food-safety organizations in Canada and the U.S. argued the draft standards would make certification possible with “minimal changes to current, conventional [farming] practices.”

They have a point. When people think of organic, they usually think that means no pesticides and no antibiotics. Under the proposed standards, salmon farms are allowed to use pesticides routinely, instead of as a last resort (as is stipulated in Canada’s current standards for organic farming on land). Fish can also receive antibiotics and still be called organic.

Just as questionable: the proposed regulations would allow up to 30 percent of feed to be non-organic until proper feed is commercially available. Current regulations for livestock only allow non-organic feed for 10 days following a “catastrophic event.” Farms can also continue to use unlimited amounts of wild fish as feed. Canadian farms produced over 100,000 tonnes of salmon in 2009. According to the non-profit SeaWeb, three pounds or more of wild fish are required to produce one pound of salmon. Do the math and the potential drain on wild stocks seems far from sustainable.

Net-cage farming, which allows waste to litter the ocean (but is much cheaper than sustainable alternatives), is also given a pass. “Consumers expect that organic products are produced in a way that does not require antibiotics, pesticides, or other chemicals, and does not harm the environment,” says Shauna MacKinnon, spokesperson for the Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform, created in 2001 to advocate for a sustainable coast. “Organic aquaculture needs to meet these same principles before it can call itself organic.”

The Investigation

The proposed standards are about rationalizing business as usual, not real change. With pesticides, antibiotics, and nets all given the thumbs-up under the proposed standards, the organic label starts to sound like a bad joke—one that could be disastrous for the organic industry as a whole.

Voter recall—known in political science as a citizens’ initiative—is best known for taking place in the basketcase democracy that is California.

In 2003 the “Dump Davis” campaign was launched a year into Gray Davis’ second term in office. Davis, who described the initiative as a “right-wing power grab,” was voted out after an electricity crisis, an ongoing financial crisis, and a public image crisis.

The $66 million recall — the second state-level initiative in US history (most are mayoral) — resulted in a snap election with many candidates including Arianna Huffington, Gary Coleman, and ultimate determinator Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Last year, Illinoisans did some legal fidgeting allowing them to do likewise after facing gubernatorial scumbag Rod Blagojevich. Angry Wisconsinites might follow suit.

Last week, in the run-up to Ontario’s election this October, one Progressive Conservative MPP floated the idea of implementing recall legislation. Although the proposal’s likely just a distraction in a campaign that’s had little substance, the idea has been gaining some traction. One candidate in Toronto’s recent mayoral campaign proposed a similar initiative.

While some commentators have shown interest, others have decried the proposal as an extra apparatus for the Tea Party’s populist toolkit. NDP MPP Peter Kormos dismissed the initiative as being among “interesting things that come from the right.”

Ballot recalls aren’t too popular in Canada. The Albertan government passed the Recall Act in April 1936 but rescinded it 19 months later after public support dropped. A bill to reintroduce the act had its first reading last year.

British Columbia is the only province where voter recall is an option. It was implemented in 1995 by the provincial NDP after a 1991 referendum, but it’s much more stringent than American legislation.

In California, a successful recall petition requires an number of signatories equal to a percentage of those who voted in the last election for the office in question: 12 percent for statewide offices and 20 percent for local senators. Because only half of registered voters actually voted in the 2003 election, only six percent of registered Californians were needed to oust Davis.

Luckily, a voter recall is much harder to stage in BC, where the required levee is 40 percent of all of registered voters — regardless of whether they even voted. Not that an actual recall is necessary. The threat alone can shake things up.

Last summer, anti-HST activists mounted a recall campaign in an attempt to oust Liberal MLAs in ridings with shaky support. What resulted was a premier’s resignation and a related NDP coup, described by one voter as an “internal recall.”

If it is implemented in Ontario, Alberta, or elsewhere, let’s hope voter recall produces better results for democracy than its antithesis.

Finally, we suggest subscribing to our RSS feed to ensure you never miss a new article going online, and following us on Twitter or becoming a fan on Facebook for updates, new articles and tasty links.

The cover story this issue is Elizabeth Wright‘s look at Canada’s broken drug approval process. The way that pharmaceuticals in this country get approved for medical use is needlessly secretive, rushed, and inefficient, many experts say, and its dysfunction puts everyone’s health at risk. And with Big Pharma in the driver’s seat—from the doctor’s office to the federal research labs, it’s increasingly clear that a more accountable, transparent, and independent drug approval process is necessary.

Also in this issue: Brad Badelt reports on the mystery of B.C.’s 2010 salmon run, which saw record-breaking numbers of fish returning to west-coast rivers. The fish-farming industry said it proved that Pacific salmon stocks are perfectly healthy and there’s no need to worry. But was last year’s boom a sign of resurgence—or a last gasp? Plus we bring you a special eight-page photo essay by Ian Willms from the dark heart of the tar sands. In Fort Chipewyan, 300 kilometres downstream from the world’s most environmentally destructive project, residents are living—and dying—amidst a skyrocketing cancer rate and deteriorating ecosystem.

And there’s plenty more: Paul McLaughlin interviews Silicone Diaries playwright-performer Nina Arsenault; Jason Brown explains how Canada is losing the global race for geothermal energy; Ellen Russell asks why we can’t have more muscular banking reforms; Lisa Xing sends a postcard from Jeju Island, South Korea, where the last of the pacific “mermaids” live; Dylan C. Robertson explains how the Canada-European Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement will change our world; Kapil Khatter shows why that “organic farmed fish” you buy may be anything but; Daniel Wilson untangles the right wing’s curious fixation on aboriginal tax exemptions; and Emily Landau sneaks a peek at the next genre-bending project from KENK publisher Pop Sandbox.

PLUS: Christina Palassio on poetry in schools; Navneet Alang on Wikileaks; Jackie Wong on painter Michael Lewis; Flavie Halais on the West Coast’s greenest city; Victoria Salvas on criminalizing HIV-AIDS; Denise Deby on the fight to save Ottawa’s South March Highlands; and reviews of new books by Renee Rodin, Lorna Goodison, David Collier, and David Lester.

This issue also includes debut fiction by Christine Miscione and new poetry by Jim Smith.

Nine months later, you’ll find Nelson busy planning ways to feed his new-found “obsession” with French-Canadian culture. Nelson credits the program for his change of heart. However, he’s not too impressed with Katimavik now. Like many, Nelson’s concern centres on recent “drastic changes” to the program. Starting this year, Katimavik is taking fewer volunteers, working in fewer communities and, for the first time, charging its participants.

Admittedly, Katimavik has been on the brink before. Launched in 1977 by Pierre Trudeau’s government, Katimavik was originally designed to solve Canada’s unity problem. Groups of youth from across Canada were cycled through three different communities, where they worked at non-profit organizations, lived together, and learned about the country’s cultural variety. Katimavik received its first blow in 1986, when Brian Mulroney’s government completely dismantled it. Jean Chrétien restarted it in 1994.

The program now has a three-year funding agreement with the Conservative government. Currently in its first year, the agreement will eventually cut Katimavik’s budget by a quarter, resulting in a yearly $4.7 million yearly shortfall. “Katimavik is certainly not as strong, and it is certainly not as able to create powerful Canadian citizens the way it could,” says Justin Trudeau, the opposition critic for youth, citizenship and immigration, and a former chair of the Katimavik board of directors.

The money isn’t the only thing that’s been cut. In order to balance its budget, the new funding agreement has forced Katimavik to cut back in many ways: it has reduced the number of participants to 1,000, down from 4,000 in the early ’80s; the program length has been cut from nine months to six; and, instead of being free, participants now must pay fees of up to $535, $350 of which is refunded upon successful completion of the program.

Trudeau doesn’t like the new fee structure. “It was something that was supposed to be accessible to all young Canadians,” he says, “regardless of social or economic status, regardless of education.”

Publicly, Katimavik has stated the cuts aren’t all bad, as they now have secure fiscal support, and are encouraged to diversify funding and look for new financial partners. But some former participants, such as Nelson, aren’t buying it: “I think we are seeing the beginning of the end for Katimavik, honestly.” For Trudeau, the changes are just another step away from his father’s vision. “Katimavik continues to fail to live up to it,” he says. “We haven’t had the capacity in this program to respond to the demand, to give opportunities to the tens of thousands of young people who would love to do this program.”