The B.C. government is poised to give an effective veto to First Nations over fish farm tenures in their territories, a historic concession that reaches beyond the traditional court-ordered requirement that Indigenous groups be consulted and accommodated on resource decisions on their lands.

Federal government officials spent two days denying the findings of a scientific paper exploring research into the effects of oilsands pollution in the ocean, a week before the Trudeau Liberals gave the green light to the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion to the west coast.

Lost in the heated arguments over Kinder Morgan's proposed Trans Mountain pipeline is this simple fact: more than a quarter of the bitumen flowing through it will end up as pollution spilling into our oceans — one way or the other.

All the bitumen that doesn't spill from pipelines or tankers gets burned, ending up as carbon pollution dumped into our environment. Over one quarter ends up in the oceans, acidifying them for millennia to come.

It's an oil spill the size of Paris. But only now is the world's attention catching up with the vast scale of the disaster in the East China Sea — the largest tanker spill in decades.

The crash itself happened weeks ago when an Iranian tanker called the Sanchi collided with a Chinese freighter on January 6 and burst into flames, later sinking. Thirty-two crew members are presumed dead.

January 18, 2018

Shortly before 4 p.m. on November 26, 2017, a U.S. barge carrying 3.5 million litres of diesel to Alaska broke free from its tugboat, the Jake Shearer, off the rocky shore of British Columbia’s Goose Island. Westerly winds were blowing at 45 knots while rain all but sandblasted the side of the barge, now anchored precariously in rough waters. The Canadian Coast Guard vessel deployed from Prince Rupert, approximately 300 kilometres away, wasn’t expected to reach the stranded barge until 7:30 p.m. at the earliest.

Part one of a series. Provincial lab played key role in denying existence of HSMI in BC.

10 Jan 2018

In 2002, Dr. Ian Keith, a senior DFO veterinarian, began noticing strange heart lesions when he examined Atlantic salmon from B.C.’s growing fish farm industry.

Keith was likely the first to detect signs of Heart and Skeletal Muscle Inflammation. The disease, first found three years earlier in Norwegian farmed salmon, went on to plague the industry there, killing up to 20 per cent of salmon in some outbreaks.

Molina Dawson and Karissa Glendale are vowing to continue their fight against the fish farm industry despite a British Columbia Supreme Court ruling that granted injunctions to two companies against them.

The province’s highest court has granted Marine Harvest Canada and Cermaq Canada injunctions at four different salmon farms north of Vancouver Island.

This means Dawson, Glendale and a number of other First Nation protestors must stay away or face being arrested.

But they say the injunctions won’t stop them.