The Wolastoqey Nation in New Brunswick and Atlantic salmon scientists and conservationists are criticizing the federal decision to close the Mactaquac Biodiversity Facility, which is mainly made up of a hatchery in French Village, below the Mactaquac Dam on the St. John River.
It’s one of two such facilities in the region being shut down by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans — the other being in Coldbrook, N.S. — as the Carney government pursues spending cuts.
The department also announced the Atlantic salmon live gene bank program, worked on by staff at those facilities, would be discontinued and related salmon-stocking activities will cease.
In a statement to CBC News, the Wolastoqey group that provides advice and support to six Wolastoqey communities said it “is deeply concerned by the unilateral decision” to shut down the biodiversity operation on the river, which is also known as Wolastoq.
“It is unacceptable that we were not consulted or involved in discussions about the future of the facility,” the statement said.
“It directly impacts the Wolastoqiyik and our Aboriginal and Treaty rights, and affects both the river and a critical species — salmon.”
Multiple programs are running at the Mactaquac biodiversity facility, said Tommi Linnansaari, a biology professor at the University of New Brunswick and a fellow at the Canadian Rivers Institute.
Staff from the Mactaquac operation collect wild brood stock that are coming back from the ocean, fertilize the eggs with the milt in captivity and release baby salmon, or fry, in various places upstream, he said.
They also collect juvenile salmon or smolt born in the wild in the Tobique River when they’re on their way to the ocean, grow them for a few years in tanks and release them back into the Tobique.
“If it wasn’t for the smolt-to-adult releases that have been undertaken by DFO, salmon would have been long gone in the Tobique River, and if they shut down the program now it will mean the deaths of salmon upstream of Mactaquac,” Linnansaari said.
These outer Bay of Fundy salmon populations have been the main focus of the Mactaquac facility, he said.
But over the years, Mactaquac staff additionally took on other work supporting DFO recovery programs for salmon that spawn in rivers of the inner Bay of Fundy.
They sampled brood stock from rivers, such as the Big Salmon, to make sure breeding fish aren’t too closely related. This was part of the gene bank program that’s being discontinued.
Staff from the hatchery also operate the fish lift at the dam, Linnansaari noted.
It’s used for helping other fish besides salmon get past the dam, including river herring, which migrate up river in large numbers in the spring, he said.
The hatchery closure will further devastate salmon populations in the St. John River, which have dropped from an estimated population in excess of 100,000 before industrialization to just a couple of hundred returning fish per year, said David Roth, New Brunswick program director for the Atlantic Salmon Federation.
“These operations are kind of the life thread that keeps the populations alive at the moment,” said Roth, whose job involves working in Atlantic salmon rivers across the province, looking after the species, its habitat and doing research.
Closing the hatchery and ending stocking programs would be “catastrophic,” he said.
The Wolastoqey Nation’s technical and legal experts are reviewing the potential impact of the decision, such as the loss of employment and training opportunities and the harm to salmon conservation efforts.
In comments directed at federal Fisheries Minister Joanne Thompson, the group said her department and the utility now called N.B. Power signed an agreement in 1968 that established the Mactaquac Biodiversity Facility and their commitment to operate that facility “during the life of the Mactaquac Project.”
The agreement was a memorandum of understanding that acknowledged there was a need to mitigate the ecological effects of the Mactaquac Dam, Linnansaari said.
Such infrastructure comes with obligations under fisheries legislation to maintain fish passage, he said
N.B. Power did not make anyone available for an interview with CBC News, but the utility provided a brief statement acknowledging “there are changes coming to the Mactaquac Biodiversity Facility.”
“We will continue to work collaboratively with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans during this transition,” it said in an email.
N.B. Power’s understanding is that the fish lift will continue to operate this year.
The federal fisheries department did not make anyone available for an interview either and did not answer questions about why the Mactaquac hatchery is closing, how many people work there, what obligations DFO may have under the agreement with N.B. Power and what impact it anticipates on salmon populations.
A media relations officer for the department provided a written statement that said it would “refocus efforts to continue meeting … obligations under the Species at Risk Act through ongoing work with partners and activities identified in the National Atlantic Salmon Strategy.”
The hatchery is probably fairly expensive to operate, Linnansaari said, and may have been targeted as “low-hanging” fruit for cost cutting.
Given that it has operated for decades and salmon are still very much in trouble, it’s fair to say it hasn’t been effective, he said.
But he doesn’t see that as an excuse to shut it down.
He’s hopeful that instead DFO will revamp its recovery programs or provide funding to someone else who may be able to do better.
For example, he said, you can’t expect fish to survive and produce well in nature if you feed them “the absolute cheapest food available,” as is required by federal rules.
Much has been learned there over the years about the best way to raise fish, but the current infrastructure at the Mactaquac facility is “totally outdated,” Roth agreed.
“There’s very good reason to believe that with improvements in the facility you can actually boost the populations that these programs serve,” he said.
Roth hopes that there will be no interruption in hatchery operations.
If it shuts down for even one year, he said, nearly 60 years and millions of dollars worth of work would be laid to waste.
“These decades of work to keep that genetic strain, that population alive, you can’t just bring it back if you stop it,” he said, citing what happened to the Rhine River, near where he grew up in Switzerland, and in many other former salmon rivers across the globe.
Subsequent restocking efforts there since salmon went extinct in the mid-20th century have proven futile, he said.
