Q&A:
Janice Harvey, Conservation Council of New Brunswick

The “eyes and ears of citizens” in the Bay of Fundy

Interview by Lori Valigra

JANICE HARVEY, a Grand Manan Island native, developed her passion for preserving the Bay of Fundy early in life. “My family was a fishing, boat-building and fish-processing family, so I was raised on the Bay of Fundy,” she said. She became involved in environmental issues in the late 1970s while at university, protesting the building of Point Lepreau nuclear power plant. In 1983 she became executive director of the nonprofit environment watchdog group, the Conservation Council of New Brunswick Inc, based in Fredericton. In 1990, she became director of the council's Marine Conservation Program, which among other things focuses on the impacts of tidal barriers and aquaculture.

The Gulf of Maine Times recently interviewed Harvey about the Marine Conservation Program and key issues facing the Bay of Fundy.

Q: What efforts has the Marine Conservation Program been involved in?

A: We're involved in a lot of efforts to network and build alliances throughout the Gulf of Maine area. We did a lot of work on fisheries issues in the 1990s following the collapse of the northern cod. We spearheaded an ecological analysis and published materials to educate the public. And we worked directly with other organizations, including in-shore fishermen's organizations, to try to articulate an alternative model to fisheries management that supports communities and ecosystems. From there, we started to focus on what the ecological foundations are in the Bay of Fundy that support healthy marine life. We were part of a major project with the Conservation Law Foundation and the Island Institute to profile all of the major estuaries from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia and look at what the major stressers were. The Conservation Council did the New Brunswick and Nova Scotia portion. That provided a good baseline of information for identifying priority issues. It was completed in 1998, and a publication came out called “Habitat Lost.”

Q: What did you learn from profiling all the estuaries?

A: There were a lot of local issues, but we wanted to focus on issues that were cross-cutting, that would have an effect over a broader area than just a single bay or estuary. One of the big issues was tidal barriers. We identified the need to understand how widespread barriers to tidal flow are within the whole Bay of Fundy system and to raise awareness about reducing those barriers as much as possible and about how important free-flowing tidal waters are to the healthy function of these systems.

Q: What is the situation with tidal barriers in the Bay of Fundy?

A: The big barrier in New Brunswick and the Bay of Fundy is the Petitcodiac Causeway. We've been involved in that issue since the beginning. It's been a very long, arduous campaign that's been spearheaded by people in the local Moncton area. It now looks like we're close to seeing some action taken on that causeway. We're looking to have either the gates of the causeway permanently opened - there are five gates - or the preferred option from an environmental perspective is to remove a portion of the causeway and replace it with a bridge. A government environmental impact assessment is wrapping up on the best option for restoring fish passage and tidal flow. So hopefully by the end of this year there will be a decision by the federal and provincial governments as to what they're going to do.

There are many causeways on rivers in the Bay of Fundy. Most of them are in the inner bay where the tidal prisms are huge, but there are also causeways further out in the bay and they cause huge ecological disruptions.

Q: Why were causeways built instead of bridges that wouldn't disrupt the tides?

A: I think it was a cheaper alternative than bridges, particularly in these high-tide regimes. And most of the causeways in the upper bay doubled for flood control, because all of that area was diked and the government was looking for ways to avoid having to maintain dikes. While causeways have gates to control flooding, very seldom are the gates operated effectively. For example, in the Petitcodiac there was a management decision, for aesthetic rather than ecological reasons, that there would be no salt water intrusion above the causeway. There would be a freshwater system above it, a head pond, but no incoming tide. So management of these gates was for goals other than maintaining fish passage or good tidal flushing.

Q: What will the upcoming environmental impact assessment report cover?

A: It looks at the impact of opening the barrier. I haven't seen it yet, but I would say marine life has not adapted to the causeway. You don't have fish runs in those rivers anymore, because the fish are avoiding them. The causeway in Petitcodiac was finished in 1968, and by 1970 there were dramatic declines in fish migrations in the river, and it's gone downhill from there. Also, the Petitcodiac strain of Atlantic salmon is extinct, as is the dwarf wedge mussel. There is concern about birds in the lower reaches of the estuary in Shepody Bay. Shorebirds had congregated there in the millions for feeding, but when sedimentation happened on certain mudflats the birds were not coming there in the same numbers.

There has been phenomenal sedimentation just below the Petitcodiac Causeway. The river at the point where the causeway crosses used to be a kilometer wide, but now it's about 100 meters. So the river is just silting up, and that is happening further out now. Through the 1990s there was clear evidence that the sedimentation was moving downward into the estuary. There are shoals now where there weren't before. The river was fundamentally changed physically. That limits colonization and use by species that normally would be there.

Q: What do you think will happen when the tidal waters flow again?

A: Whether or not another population of Atlantic salmon could be established there, I don't know. Our choice is to let nature take its course and see what comes back. There are other locations where there have been dam removals and the recovery has been phenomenal. The Edwards Dam on the Kennebec River in Maine is an excellent example of how quickly species will reestablish once a barrier is removed. What would happen in the Petitcodiac is anybody's guess because it's a different type of system, a very heavily sedimented system. But you've also got the highest tides in the world moving through there, so once it's open you could imagine that there could be pretty quick recovery. So we're very hopeful.

Q: Could you talk a bit about the Fundy Baykeeper program?

A: The Fundy Baykeeper is the eyes and ears of citizens on the water. It is licensed by the Waterkeeper Alliance based in New York and headed by Robert Kennedy Jr. There are about 130 waterkeeper programs now, most in the United States and ten in Canada. The Petitcodiac Riverkeeper was the first, and the Fundy Baykeeper was the fourth program in Canada. We hire a full-time person - David Thompson - as the Fundy Baykeeper to patrol the area between Saint John and the border by boat and on land. There is a phone number people can call to report problems or incidents they believe may violate environmental laws. The primary focus of the Fundy Baykeeper is to make sure laws are enforced that protect the marine environment. The first case where the Fundy Baykeeper intervened was work on a barrier beach within the buffer zone of a salt marsh in Canada. You have to be 30 meters back from any kind of wetland. But heavy equipment was in the area assembling salmon farm cages and scraping the top off the barrier beach, exposing it to erosion. The Baykeeper was successful in getting that activity stopped and is working on many other cases.

Q: What are your biggest issues over the next five to ten years?

A: Besides continuing the Fundy Baykeeper program, which is a high priority, the other big issue is salmon aquaculture. It's a huge industry here in southwestern New Brunswick, and research is indicating some very serious ecological effects in areas of the bay where the farms are most concentrated. We have an ongoing problem of expansion, with the prospect of every little bay and inlet between the Maine border and the city of Saint John holding one or more fish farms. There need to be areas that are fish farm free. But at this point there's no mechanism for insuring there's some balance created. We'll have to rethink some models and paradigms in aquaculture if it's going to become environmentally sustainable.

For more information on the Conservation Council's activities please visit: www.conservationcouncil.ca/.