Resource use conflict is nothing new for fish farmers trying to establish new production sites anywhere. Attempts to increase the fledgling production of fresh water species like rainbow trout in Ontario lakes have local cottage owners up in arms, as this report from The Toronto Star explains;Aiming to reclaim Canada’s place as a big player in the booming international fish industry, the federal government plans to expand fish farming in the Great Lakes. The contentious proposal – still in its consultation phase – is pitting Ontario fish farmers against Georgian Bay cottagers. Both groups claim they are protecting the environment. “These farm operations are allowed to run in public water with no nutrient capture and treatment requirements. Their attitude is, the solution to pollution is dilution,” says Bob Duncanson, executive director of the Georgian Bay Association, a group that includes 4,200 cottages on Lake Huron, where most of the fish farms now operate. “When does it stop? You may be a small operation, but open it up, we could get larger operations in there.”Rather than polluting the water, say fish farmers, the fish manure is enhancing the lake’s productivity, replacing nutrients that otherwise would have come from the rotting leaves of logged shoreline forests and the depleted wild fish stock. “We are a counter-balance,” says Gord Cole, partner of Aqua-Cage Fisheries, one of seven commercial aquaculture farms in Ontario. He cites his own farm in Parry Sound as an example: 15 years ago, the wild rainbow trout had all but disappeared, with only 200 left. Today, there are up to 30,000 – largely because of the food web created by his fish farm, he says. “Fish farms always benefit wildlife.”A hotly disputed industry in British Columbia, aquaculture has remained a modest venture in Ontario, mostly because of stringent licensing requirements. The farmers, concentrated in northern Lake Huron, raise rainbow trout in fish pens floating in the lake, producing roughly 4,000 tonnes annually – worth about $18 million. That represents only 3 per cent of aquaculture production in Canada, which itself has barely a toehold in the international industry that is bounding by more than 9 per cent annually. More than half of the fish consumed worldwide now come from fish farms. In 2006, Canada’s stake was less than 0.3 per cent of that, something that Fisheries and Oceans Canada hopes to amend. “Canadian aquaculture still has considerably untapped potential,” says the government proposal.The proposal calls for an 8 per cent increase in the Canadian industry by 2014, much of it in freshwater farms. But recent consultations have shown that’s too modest, says Trevor Swerdfager, director general of the aquaculture management directorate. While a public relations battle has raged over the fish farming industry in British Columbia, which environmentalists accuse of spreading sea lice, polluting water and threatening wild salmon, little of that controversy has ensued in Ontario. However, in his 2000-01 report, Ontario environment commissioner Gord Miller raised red flags about the local industry, pointing specifically to one farm where bacterial growth around fish cages sucked up all the oxygen in the area, forcing wild fish to flee.A 2001 government study of farming in a lake near Winnipeg showed a different result. Scientists found phosphorous in the water had increased only by 10 to 15 per cent over two years, and no great change in water quality had occurred.
