Failure to Monitor Ocean Pollution Risks Health of First Nations

A decade ago a group of First Nations communities on Vancouver Island approached Health Canada and asked whether it was safe to eat the foods, like wild salmon, or harbour seals, that make up a traditional diet. Health Canada did not have the answer, but introduced these communities to a Department of Fisheries and Oceans scientist named Peter Ross who made it his mission to find out.

Dr. Ross worked his last day as a government employee in late August, which officially brings his study on the contamination of traditional seafoods to an end. At the sixth annual Vancouver Island Traditional Food Conference, Ross expressed the significance of this: coastal aboriginal peoples will be the first to feel the effects of the DFO’s reduced capacity study ocean pollution in Canada.

An elder named Ipswa Mescacakanis described the cutbacks to DFO and ocean pollution research in particular as a broken trust. "The government of Canada has promised us access to food, to safe food, and culturally appropriate food. We can no longer be sure if the food we eat is safe."

The community Mescacakanis has lived in for 30 years, the Snuneymuxw First Nation, has seen the direct benefits of scientific research. One of the important traditional shellfish gathering places for the Snuneymuxw is in the Nanaimo River estuary, not far from a pulp mill.

The discovery that the use of liquid chlorine to bleach paper contaminated some seafoods near pulp mills led to a ban on this process in 1989, under the Fisheries Act. Levels of dioxins and furans have dropped considerably in seafoods like those harvested by from the Nanaimo River Estuary since this ban was put in place.

Mescacakani says that kind of science is now out of reach for his people. He says many people from his, and other First Nations communities rely on locally foraged food in large part because of economic hardship.

“Non-aboriginals buying their seafood from a grocery store have the benefit of science,” he says. “Industrial seafood operations like the Nanaimo clam deprivation system, for example, happen in areas where pollution is easy to control and monitor. Either that or major seafood harvesting operations occur well offshore in areas not affected by pollution.”

According to Dr. Ross's preliminary research, the average person living in a First Nation's community on Vancouver Island eats 55kg of seafood each year. That's 15 times as much seafood as the "average" Canadian. So Health Canada guidelines about what is safe to eat, says Ross, don't necessarily apply to those people whose diet is so far from the average Canadian.

The First Nations Environmental Contaminants Program which initially helped to fund Ross's work on traditional foods continues to offer $900 thousand annually in grants. However, Ross says that without the backing of a lab he can not continue the work.

"When it comes to testing for PCBs, organochlorine pesticides, dioxins, furans and PBDEs, which is what we're interested in when it comes to seafood, a private lab would charge more than $2000 per sample," says Ross. "You can see that with three oceans plus all the freshwaters in between (and other foods, such as game), $900 thousand is a modest budget."

When asked whether First Nations Communities on Vancouver Island will find some way to continue pollution monitoring without DFO, Mescacakani replied that most First Nations communities can barely get by with the challenges they face day to day.

“I suspect what will happen is that it is only when we are showing severe health concerns, as our northern Cree communities have, that we’ll be able to start putting pressure on the International Community to put pressure back onto the Canadian government, or that we’ll be able to pressure industry to stop producing whatever toxins are causing the harm.”

Photo Credit: Sophie Bragg