| Summary: | The need for thoughtful histories on contemporary Canadian environmental issues has never been more critical than it is regarding the present state of the country’s fisheries. In June 2012, funding for fisheries-related research and protection was significantly curtailed as part of federal government cuts and amendments to the Fisheries Act included in the C-38 omnibus budget bill. These changes, however, are not unprecedented. By placing Canada’s fisheries and marine environments in greater jeopardy than they’ve ever been, the changes fit into a longer pattern of government undermining of the law that go back as far as the 1970s. In response, dozens of environmentalists, researchers and scientists have criticized the cuts as misinformed and dangerous. In a letter to the Globe and Mail soon after bill C-38 was announced, four former Fisheries and Oceans ministers wrote they believe these changes “will inevitably reduce and weaken the habitat-protection provisions” of the Fisheries Act. Canada’s fisheries have been subjects of controversy and sites of tension for over 200 years. On the east coast, small-scale, inshore fisheries (the norm since the seventeenth century) gave way to large-scale, scientifically-managed commercial fisheries. Technological advances, globalizing market structures, and an ever-increasing reliance on experts, created a context in which the Department of Fisheries and Oceans shifted the purpose of fisheries from meeting human needs to meeting maximum sustainable yields and total allowable catches. The result was the collapse of the North Atlantic cod fishery in the early 1990s. On the west coast, the defence of the salmon fishery against hydroelectric development on the Fraser River in the middle of the nineteenth century is one bright spot in a story of over-fishing, habitat loss, and the negative side-effects of commercial-scale aquaculture. The artificial state border between Canada and the United States in the Salish Sea, which did not reflect the migratory lives of pacific salmon, ...
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