Farmers have welcomed proposed changes to the federal Fisheries Act as a step toward ending harassment of farmers by fisheries officers when drainage and irrigations ditches become inadvertent fish habitat.
“This has been a real irritant for many farmers,” Keystone Agricultural Producers president Dough Chorney.
“They have found DFO (Department of Fisheries and Oceans) officers telling them when or if they could drain ditches if there were fish, even though the Fisheries Act should be protecting the habitat of commercial fishery areas and not farm ditches.”
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He said the threat of DFO intervention in their water management was “just another level of bureaucracy to deal with, and one that did not make sense. Many producers felt targeting them as fish habitat managers was an unrealistic expectation to put on them.”
Canadian Federation of Agriculture president Ron Bonnett said the change would encourage farmers to work with government to preserve real fish habitat rather than targeting farmers.
However, opposition MPs and environmental critics said it was an attempt by the Conservatives to weaken environmental and fish habitat protection by allowing the fisheries minister to decide what are fish habitats worth protecting.
