There may be no better example of the unique and difficult challenge Erin O’Toole faces as leader of the federal Conservative Party than his recently announced policy on mandatory vaccinations.

Mr. O’Toole is against measures that force Canadians to get vaccinated, regardless of what line of work they may be in. Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau has said federal workers must be vaccinated, as well as anyone who wants to fly or travel by train.

The Conservative Leader says he believes in the power and safety of vaccines, but doesn’t feel people should be forced to take them. Mr. Trudeau doesn’t believe people should be forced to take them either, but nor should the unvaccinated have the right to potentially pass COVID-19 on to others. Thus, the mandate.

A majority of Canadians are fully or partially vaccinated. And most of them, polls suggest, support vaccine mandates or vaccine passports that bestow certain rights and privileges on those who have chosen to get jabbed. In his heart, I think Mr. O’Toole believes this also. He just can’t endorse that policy because it would alienate a faction of his base – the libertarians and vaccine deniers – who think the state has no right imposing restrictive measures on anyone. These are voters Maxime Bernier and his People’s Party of Canada are trying to steal away from the Conservatives.

Welcome to Erin O’Toole’s world – or rather, his nightmare. While his central challenger in this election, Justin Trudeau, can be many things to many people, the Conservative Leader does not have that option. He is bound, in many ways, to a segment of the population resistant to change and who are suspicious of government intrusions of any sort into their lives, regardless of the reason.

This is why Mr. O’Toole can’t talk as forcefully as perhaps he needs to about an issue such as climate change. He has vowed to bring in carbon pricing but cap it at a mere $50 a tonne, which renders it mostly symbolic. (The Liberals will raise their carbon price to $170 a tonne by 2030.) Mr. O’Toole is restrained by conservative supporters in the Prairies, especially Alberta, who view carbon pricing as a useless tax grab and nothing more.

But how can someone who wants to lead this country be hamstrung politically when it comes to the No. 1 issue facing the planet, let alone the country?

Instead, many conservatives in Canada, including Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, prefer to ridicule and demonize those calling for stricter policies to cut emissions. While they are a minority, they are a minority whom Mr. O’Toole feels the need to protect – and pander to.

A ballooning federal debt would seem to be a natural opening for the Tories. However, many of the programs that debt has financed, including those associated with pandemic relief and the $10-a-day child care promise announced in the last budget, are incredibly popular. This has put Mr. O’Toole in the position of saying he’d balance the budget – but not for a decade. That’s about as meaningless a pledge as there is.

Mr. O’Toole is also not helped by the fact that many high-profile right-wing politicians in the country currently are a drag on the Conservative brand. That would include Ontario’s Doug Ford, Manitoba’s Brian Pallister and, perhaps most of all, Mr. Kenney in Alberta. His stock has fallen so far that the Liberals are eyeing the possibility of picking up four seats or more in the province in this election.

Mr. O’Toole has other issues to contend with as well. Some of his party’s ads have been downright appalling and have done nothing more than cast doubt on the Tories’ suitability for power and the leader’s personal judgment. He’s being sabotaged by his own marketing team.

Finally, poll after poll this past year has contained nothing but bad news for the Conservatives. Not only has the party consistently trailed the Liberals, but the numbers make clear that Canadians aren’t particularly enamoured with Mr. O’Toole, either. People find him bland, and lacking charisma.

A survey by Leger in July, for instance, indicated that more Canadians thought NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh would make a better prime minister than Mr. O’Toole. Mr. Singh even held a lead over Mr. O’Toole in the West. Ouch.

In total, this is a lot for any political leader to overcome. Erin O’Toole isn’t just fighting Justin Trudeau and the other federal leaders. In many respects, he’s also battling many in his own party – which is never good at election time.

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2021/08/15/why-this-river-is-about-to-be-poisoned-and-why-its-being-seen-as-good-news.html

There’s an operation underway to save these salmon. It requires poisoning a New Brunswick river

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NAPADOGAN, N.B.— In 2008, a fisherman at New Brunswick’s Miramichi Lake hooked a fish that wasn’t supposed to be there.

That catch set off a chain of events that ultimately led to this: More than a dozen biologists and conservationists tramping through the water across the Miramichi River on a muggy day last week, herding the water’s native salmon into a net.

The humans were there to stage an aquatic rescue mission ahead of a bold intervention that’s meant to set nature’s course right again.

One by one, they retrieved the salmon from their net — along with any other native river species — and transported them to a big, blue tank sitting in a pickup truck. When the tank was full, they drove — an hour over rattling, rutted logging roads — to a point well downstream, where, one by one, they released the fish carefully back into the river.

Then they did it again. And again. And again. When they were done there, they moved to another spot along the river and repeated the whole process.

They were, to a person, in good humour; the sun beating warm on their shoulders, and the river water cool around their feet.

“We won’t get all the fish, but we’ll do our darndest to get as many as we can,” said Nathan Wilber, of the Atlantic Salmon Federation.Several moments later, he was removing salmon one-by-one from the back end of a fyke net and passing them to people who would start them on their journey.

Once their work was done, those gathered knew, the rescue mission would shift to its next stage.

That comes Tuesday, when a poison will be poured into this portion of the river, and almost everything left in the water with gills will die.

The poison — rotenone, it’s called — is a temporary one.

Rotenone is a natural toxin derived from the root of bean plants in South America and the Pacific regions, used for centuries by Indigenous populations to catch fish. While it’s highly toxic to fish, it has low toxicity to birds and mammals.

It deteriorates rapidly with exposure to light, heat and oxygen, and biologists have picked this time of year — with warm water temperatures and low water levels and favourable life-cycle stages — with that in mind.

By the time water flows the 10 kilometres downstream to where the salmon have been released — below a recently erected barrier preventing them from swimming back upstream — the toxin will be impotent, helped along that path by a release of potassium permanganate into the river along the way.

The fish that wasn’t supposed to be there in 2008 was a smallmouth bass, an invasive species. Though they’re not native to the Maritime provinces, they can now be found in more than 100 lakes and rivers in New Brunswick.

“None of the consequences of smallmouth bass introductions will be positive for Atlantic salmon,” reads a 2009 Fisheries and Oceans report on the appearance of the invasive species in the Miramichi.

Conservationists suspect that an initial few fish were released into Miramichi Lake at some point prior to 2008 for sport fishing; their numbers have increased drastically since then.

And that’s a problem because the smallmouth bass, like many invasive species, has the potential to disrupt an entire ecosystem. They can out-compete other fish and can become dominant. They will prey on other fish, including young salmon.

“It’s a very voracious species,” says Devin Ward, a senior biologist for Anqotum Resource Management and a member of the Natoaganeg First Nation, which makes its home along the Miramichi.

“It defends its territory very well. And like all other bass species, they tend to eat everything in the area.”

That’s problematic because what’s in the area is the Atlantic salmon — the pearls of the Miramichi watershed. The New Brunswick river has one of the largest salmon runs on the planet and attracts visitors and fishers from across the world.

But those salmon numbers have been dwindling. In 2020, according to the Miramichi Salmon Association, there were 15,000 small and large Atlantic salmon in the Miramichi River. That’s a worrisome drop from the 75,000 recorded there in 2011, and one that has a significant economic impact on the region.

“If a species like this was to get established in these headwater areas, that’s a new pressure that’s introduced … adding to the million other pressures that salmon are facing,” says Ward. “We fear that this might be the nail in the coffin for the species in the area.”

There’s an economic impact as well. A 2011 Atlantic Salmon Federation report — the most recent comprehensive study of the economic value of the Atlantic salmon — sets that value at $17 million. The salmon also creating 637 jobs, worth another $19.1 million.

In the 13 years since it was spotted in the Miramichi Lake, conservationists’ greatest fears have been realized — the smallmouth has migrated from the lake to the Miramichi River. In the lake, there were few if any salmon, but once the smallmouth invaded the headwaters of the Miramichi, where, to date, there have been no freshwater predators of salmon, the situation became much more dire.

This is why groups of salmon stakeholders with the catchy moniker “Working Group on Smallmouth Bass Eradication in Miramichi Lake” — which includes the North Shore Micmac District Council, the Atlantic Salmon Federation and the Miramichi Salmon Association — began developing an eradication plan for the smallmouth bass menace.

By 2018, despite having pulled some 6,000 bass out of Miramichi Lake, Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) was no closer to controlling the smallmouth population than before. And the feds were adamant about not using toxins to the eradicate the fish. At the time, they seemed more inclined to merely wait and monitor the situation.

In August that year, after having presented DFO with a plan to use rotenone in the lake, the Working Group hosted a followup meeting with federal officials in Moncton.

Neville Crabbe of the Atlantic Salmon Federation remembers well the moment in that meeting when Jim Ward, the general manager of the North Shore Micmac District Council stood up.

“‘Well,’ he said. ‘If you guys won’t do it, then we will.’”

“And then all of a sudden you have a really well-organized Indigenous proponent backed up by a fairly muscular and determined coalition of NGOs that just said, ‘We’ll do it,’” remembers Crabbe.

In May of this year, the Working Group finally got provincial and federal permissions sorted and began to put its massively ambitious, logistically complex plan into action.

It’s a task accomplished by rote in many other places in the country: in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Alberta, British Columbia and across the planet, most notably in Norway, where the government there adopted a 10-year plan to eradicate a parasite infecting wild salmon in the country’s rivers. The parasite was deemed capable of completely wiping out a river’s salmon population over the course of four to six years.

Beginning around 2013, after establishing gene banks for their salmon, the Norwegians dosed entire river systems with rotenone, killing all the wild salmon therein.

To date, of the 50 rivers infected, 32 have been declared parasite-free and have had salmon reintroduced. A further 11 have been treated with rotenone and are awaiting a potential all-clear.

There have been many weeks leading up to it, and many people involved in various facets of the eradication plan, but on treatment day, the Working Group will launch its operation in earnest.

There will be more than 100 people in 46 crews, all dressed in personal protective equipment monitoring on and along the lake and the river.

On Miramichi Lake, boats will traverse the lake, mixing rotenone with lake water and redistributing it. On the river, drip stations over the water will be set up to feed rotenone into the water flow.

After about 15 minutes, the first of the fish affected by the toxin will float to the surface. More will drop to the lake and river beds. Those that float will be gathered eventually up by crews and buried in pits dug for the purpose.

That’s merely for the benefit of homeowners around the lake, however. The scavengers that would gather to feed on the dead fish — eagles, ospreys, kingfishers and bears — would not be harmed by eating them. Although rotenone shows low toxicity for mammals, experts advise against eating the killed fish.

Over the next several days, the water will be monitored closely, assuring that the rotenone is breaking down as anticipated.

For the next five years after that, the North Shore Micmac District Council will monitor the water, the sediment and the various fish species themselves, to make sure that the ecosystem is recovering as projected, with no adverse effects.

Back on the Miramichi, several kilometres downstream from where they were netted, Neville Crabbe and Caleb Koch cradle sleek, speckled salmon in the river’s flow, helping them recover from the stress of being transferred from their earlier home.

The water is ideal for them here; shallow on the bank where they are released, deeper and colder on the far side of the small, fast-moving current that divides the river. Koch and Crabbe move the fish gently in the water, helping them find their fins again.

Upstream, about 100 metres, is the recently erected barricade that prevents them from returning to their soon-to-be inhospitable home.

At some point in the near future, it will be determined that their former haunts are safe for them; crews will come and remove that barricade and they will be able to return to their old stomping … swimming … grounds.

But for now, unaware of the massive, multi-year, multi-organizational effort to keep them safe, they rest temporarily, seemingly content to relax for a moment in trusted, helping hands.

And then, suddenly, a flick of a tail, a flash of silver, a splash of water. And they’re gone.

Leaving only smiles in their wake.

Use of fish-killing pesticide in Miramichi watershed on pause

Wolastoqey grandmothers and mothers refuse to leave Miramichi Lake

 

Lauren Bird· CBC News · Posted: Aug 20, 2021 6:38 PM AT

 

 

Crews remove barrels of rotenone from boats to be taken away. (Shane Fowler)

A plan to eradicate smallmouth bass from Miramichi Lake and part of the southwest Miramichi River has been temporarily suspended.

The project was supposed to begin earlier this week but was delayed after several Wolastoqey grandmothers and mothers took to their canoes and kayaks on the lake so the chemical couldn't be applied.

Barrels of rotenone, a fish-killing pesticide, were lifted from boats and put on trucks Friday morning as boats were taken out of the water and crews began to leave the site.

A working group made up of several agencies, including the Atlantic Salmon Federation, the North Shore Micmac District Council and the New Brunswick Wildlife Federation, planned to use the chemical to kill invasive smallmouth bass, which are threatening the salmon population. 

Brandy Stanovich says she's staying at the lake as long as she needs to. (Shane Fowler )

"It's bittersweet," said Brandy Stanovich, who arrived at the lake on Tuesday morning. "Because you feel so good to have the support and have people come and thank you and protect this place as well, but at the same it shouldn't be happening at all, and there's people that are really fighting to have it happen."

Stanovich said she hiked several hours on Tuesday morning to get past the roadblock set up by peace officers and to the lake.