By Gloria Dickie 
HAKAI MAGAZINE

​In 2013, a mass of unusually warm water appeared in the Gulf of Alaska. Over the next three years, the Blob, as it became known, spread more than 3,200 kilometers, reaching down to Mexico. This freak marine heatwave, combined with a strong El Niño, drastically affected the Pacific Ocean ecosystem killing thousands of animals and changing the distribution of species along the coast.

It’s been three years since the Blob dissipated, and researchers are taking stock of its long-term impacts on fish and other wildlife.

Last month, Laurie Weitkamp, a fisheries biologist with the Northwest Fisheries Science Center, and her colleagues released a report detailing how the Blob affected species found in the northern California Current ecosystem, which runs from the Canadian border to southern Oregon. The report shows that the mass of warm water helped some and hurt others. Between 2013 and 2017, for instance, the populations of animals accustomed to warm water, such as mackerel, squid, hake, and rockfish, ballooned. Many jellyfish species also had a strong showing.

One of the strongest effects of the Blob was the explosion of California market squid along the Oregon coast. In 2018, fishers in Oregon landed more than three million kilograms of market squid, shattering the previous record of a mere 1.2 million kilograms in 2016. Meanwhile, fewer squid swam in the waters off California, their usual stronghold.

Troy Buell, the fisheries management program leader at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, says the boom was likely the result of more squid being born in Oregon waters rather than animals moving up from the Golden State. Squid fishers, however, did migrate north to cash in.

But other species have struggled in the wake of the Blob. “When fish hatch out of their eggs, they absorb their yolk sac and have to start feeding,” says Weitkamp. But if their food isn’t there, “they’re screwed.” For many young fish, their favorite food was wiped out by the heat or shifted elsewhere.

As a result, there is now a void in the populations of some species that were in their larval stages when the Blob hit its crescendo. Species that should be along the Pacific coast or returning to inland waterways simply aren’t. And that’s taking a toll on the ecosystem and on commercial fisheries.

Chinook salmon, for example, are often harvested when they are around three or four years old, meaning that the salmon that went out to sea in 2015 should have returned home this year. As a result of the Blob, says Weitkamp, the Columbia River has “the lowest spring return ever of chinook this year.” In response, Washington State has suspended summer chinook fishing.

This July, British Columbia, also suffering low returns of sockeye salmon due to the Blob, closed the recreational sockeye fishery on the Skeena River. The return of sockeye and pink salmon to the Fraser River this year is also uncertain.

Alaska, meanwhile, is a story of contrasts. Pacific cod crashed around 2017, and the shrimping industry has struggled, too. But in 2018, Bristol Bay, in southwest Alaska, saw the highest return of sockeye salmon ever recorded. “It’s so strange,” says Weitkamp. “It’s so unpredictable.”

There have been less obvious consequences of the Blob, too. Scientists believe that the availability of prey for humpback whales has changed around California. “There’s now a lack of krill, so the whales are feeding on anchovies closer to shore, which is also where there is more overlap with crab gear,” says Buell. This change in feeding habits may be contributing to a recent spike in whale entanglements.
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It’s unclear how long the consequences of the Blob might last or when the next Blob might hit.

By Gabriel Friedman
FINANCIAL POST

The Senate on Thursday night passed controversial legislation that overhauls the environmental review process, a bill that is likely to draw court challenges and remain a topic of discussion as campaigning for the upcoming federal election heats up.

“I must say that I’m fairly comfortable supporting Bill C-69 as it stands today, especially because it may be one of the major issues in the next election campaign,” said Eric Forest, an independent senator from Quebec.

Though it was staunchly opposed in the energy sector, the bill drew support from mining trade organizations.
C-69, which passed 57 to 37, has a broad range of consequences and was designed to ensure that companies moving forward on major construction projects have a “social licence.”

To that end, it creates new requirements for public consultation including on climate change, gender and other issues. But it also has broader consequences, including the creation of a national Impact Assessment Agency that will oversee project evaluations.

The legislation grew out of a Liberal campaign promise in 2015 to overhaul the environmental review process; and earlier this month, Senator Grant Mitchell, formerly leader of Alberta’s Liberal Party and now sitting as an independent, said that C-69, which he sponsored, replaces an environmental review process that had stopped working.

“It had failed to get critical projects built,” Mitchell told the Senate on June 17. “It did not have the trust of Indigenous peoples nor the public at large and, as a result, had been mired in litigation that had so unsettled investors it had to be fixed.”

He added that the House of Commons had accepted 62 amendments from the Senate outright and 37 with some modifications, which is an “historic record” and the greatest number since it started being tracked in the 1940s.

The centre of opposition to the bill has been the oil and gas industry in Alberta, where Premier Jason Kenney said on Friday he would file a court challenge to the law, calling it a violation of provinces’ constitutional right to control the development of natural resources.

“It inserts massive new uncertainty into the federal environmental approval process for major projects, leading energy industry groups to say that no future pipeline will ever be proposed under this regime,” Kenney said in a statement.

Chris Bloomer, president and chief executive of the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, said that his organization had put forward a package of amendments it felt were necessary to make the bill palatable.
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The Liberals rejected most of his organization’s suggested amendments, leaving him feeling like their concerns had been “glossed over,”  said Bloomer.

Unlike the Liberals, he argued that the old environmental review process — the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act of 2012 — has been working.

“There were things about the CEAA 2012 legislation that needed to be fixed,” said Bloomer, “but fundamentally these were renovations, not burning down the house.”

Still, he said it is difficult to point to specific problems with C-69, and instead said that the legislation has too many vague clauses and elements. That will end up injecting uncertainty into the environmental review process, which will deter investment in pipeline projects in Canada, said Bloomer.

In a prediction, he said, “It’s highly unlikely that you’re going to see, beyond what we see on the table now, major new projects put forward.”

But there was even stronger opposition from a group called Suits and Boots, founded and led by Rick Peterson, a former leadership candidate for the Conservative Party of Canada, who led a campaign to kill the bill outright.
Peterson acknowledged that the bill did contain some good provisions, but said it also had “some real killers.”

“To me, the biggest risk is the litigation risk — going to court all the time,” he said.

In some ways, that concern echoes Liberals’ stated reason for overhauling the environment legislation, with Mitchell saying that projects had been “mired in litigation.”

Most notably, that included the Trans Mountain Pipeline, which faced 18 court challenges.

Anna Johnston, a lawyer with West Coast Environmental Law, who was appointed to sit on an advisory committee to assist with the process, said the new bill is an improvement in many ways.

As an example, she said it introduces a new planning phase so that companies must consult the public early on, designed to ensure that all project impacts that need to be studied are identified at the outset.

She also said it requires companies to assess their impact on gender: For instance, when a mining company, which has a largely male workforce, sets up in a remote area, it evaluate its potential impact on women in the nearby community.

“Unlike what a lot of opponents would have you believe, it’s not earth shattering, it’s not a whole new approach,” said Johnston.

The bill sets out which projects are subject to the federal environmental review, and Johnston said many projects are not covered, and predicted only a handful of projects per year would be covered.
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“Bill C-69 — it’s a compromise, it’s not a perfect bill,” said Johnston.