With nearly 60 Canadian members of parliament having confirmed their attendance at a Canadian Aquaculture Policy Conference in Ottawa next week, expectations are that a new set of laws will be issued for the country’s aquaculture industry.
Federal Minister of Fisheries, Dominic LeBlanc and Newfoundland’s equivalent, Gerry Byrne, will appear as well as local government representatives and delegates from the country’s big salmon producers. Notable among municipal leaders is Mayor Teresa James of Blacks Harbour, headquarters to Cooke Seafarms.
It was a Grieg NL Seafarms project, however, which revealed how environmental impact assessments can be held up, shelved by overlapping regulators or delayed by a multitude of competing interests and levels of government. The Marystown-, Newfoundland based Grieg NL would have helped by rules that streamline project applications by eliminating duplicate approvals.
Earlier this autumn, Minister LeBlanc promised new aquaculture regulations would be ready by year’s end after a lengthy round of hearings and public meetings. A new report on the genes of B.C. salmon might also have impacted the final writing of the report.
Among the industry heavyweights that’ll be on-hand are Steinsvik Group chief executive, Bjorn Apeland; Cooke Aquaculture SVP Andrew Young and Randy Doctoroff, fresh meat buyer for Costco Wholesale Canada Ltd.
This story was written-through at 13:55 hrs to name Blacks Harbour as Cooke Aquaculture’s headquarters rather than Grieg NL Seafarms’s.
