Shell shocked
Privatization threatens Nova Scotia clams
BY Wanda Waterman St. Louis
Illustration by Swizzle: Rob Elliot
For thousands of years First Nations peoples have dug clams from Nova Scotia’s Bay of Fundy shores, but the sustainability of the already troubled industry is now being further threatened by privatization.
Last year, the provincial Department of Fisheries and Aquaculture and the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) signed a joint agreement allowing companies to become eligible for 10-year leases on closed beaches—a deal opponents claim is based on questionable legal grounds.
“According to a 1997 Supreme Court of Canada ruling, the fishery is a common property resource and should not be privatized,” says Peter Stoffer, member of Parliament for Sackville-Eastern Shore and federal NDP fisheries and oceans critic. “By granting these 10-year leases, DFO may not be honouring this decision.”
Whether it’s legal or not, however, one company, Innovative Fishery Products (IFP), has already been granted a lease on a prime stretch of closed beach at the head of St. Mary’s Bay, and it’s seeking leases on other closed beaches in the area. IFP is the only company with an operating depuration plant for cleaning clams harvested from closed beaches, making it the only company eligible for the lease.
While independent clammers can’t sell clams taken from closed beaches (beaches contaminated from sewage runoff and other pollutants), they want access to them to extract undersized, overcrowded clams and move them to open ones. This process, known as “relaying,” cleans the contaminated clams and can restock open beaches. One study shows that clams relayed from closed beaches to open beaches can become safe for consumption in as little as six weeks.
Relaying from closed beaches hasn’t yet been legalized, but as the number of closed beaches increases with pollution, many local clammers have been lobbying the government to allow it, and they’re seeing the lease deal as a major setback to their efforts. But it’s the length of the lease that local clammers find most alarming. “What would happen if a beach were to become uncontaminated while a private landowner owns the lease or licence to it?” asks Chief Frank Meuse of Bear River First Nation. “How would they release that land back to the public?”
