Editor:
On Monday the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency Review Panel made recommendations which, if accepted by the federal government, would permit the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority to fill in 177 additional hectares of highly productive mudflat and marshlands for another container port at Roberts Bank in the middle of the highly productive Fraser River estuary.
Fraser Voices is disappointed by this review panel’s recommendations which suggest all environmental damages can be mitigated, monitored or offset. Conducted under the outdated 2012 rules of the environmentally callous Harper government, this long, drawn out and bureaucratic assessment seemed designed to minimize concerns of local communities and agencies opposed to it.
The panel begins its summary of recommendations by first extolling the economic and industrial benefits of the project before outlining numerous substantial negative environmental effects. Nonetheless, none of the environmental damage is considered sufficient to recommend denying the port’s expansion.
The damages are seen as technical challenges which can be overcome without proof this is actually feasible. Of interest is that as presenters we were not to comment on, nor ask about either the economic case for the expansion nor the rational for its location on Roberts Bank.
Many recommendations determine that the loss of Roberts Bank habitats and its biota can be simply “offset” to other places in the estuary, primarily Sturgeon Banks. This means obliterating long established, thriving marshes and mudflats at Sturgeon Banks and replacing them with some man-made versions of themselves. Somehow, the review panel imagines Sturgeon Banks will magically host more crab so the displaced Roberts Bank fishery can simply move north.
Many of the recommendations are disjointed and minimize the damage, seemingly doubting the data and predictions of experts questioning the ports expansion. While the proponent will have to undertake some recommendations to monitor, correct or resolve some issues during and after construction, other governmental agencies are to be involved and will need to foot the bill from depleted reserves and diminished personnel.
The Fraser estuary has lost over 80 per cent of its wetlands and most of its scrublands since the advent of European settlers. During the past decade alone it has seen development pressure for a coal port, jet fuel terminal and storage facility, doubling of the Tilbury cement plant and the Fortis LNG facility on Tilbury Island, T2 and YVR plans to build a fourth runway onto the marshes and mudflats of Sturgeon Banks. Some of these projects are underway now.
If the Liberal cabinet accepts the T2 environmental assessment report and allows this expansion, is there nothing it will reject? What shoreline or estuary from here to the open ocean will be safe from the unassailable “Gateway to the Pacific” project?
Optimistically we can hope the federal government will do the right thing and reject T2. It is based on shallow, weak economics and in this site will do irreparable damage to the flora, fauna and microorganisms who live there, and the salmon, sturgeon, orca and thousands of migratory shorebirds passing through the region. The mitigation measures recommended are high risk and many simply will not work.
The Fraser estuary is struggling to survive as an ecosystem, as a place we all love and enjoy. We urge our Trudeau government to relate to the many negative impacts to the environment as identified by the panel and reject the proposal for Roberts Bank port expansion.
Otto E. Langer
Chair Fraser Voices
This article by Otto E. Langer originally appeared in the Delta Optimist on April 7, 2020.
