By Brian Lee
Now that Barry Penner has said it, everyone agrees — the province blew it with the dock management plan. Penner’s report offers some vindication for anyone who reacted angrily to the government’s freewheeling experiment with reconciliation at Pender Harbour’s expense. His 28-page report on the DMP is fair and considered and might even be worth the $25,000 budgeted for it. But that will seem cheap compared to the cost of upcoming reviews of the environmental and archaeological toll of Pender Harbour’s docks.
I like consultants’ reports. They stir up lots of fancy data to fold into stories and if done well, give us all a little more understanding of our home. Putting Pender Harbour’s marine health under the microscope might even provide a template for a province-wide dock strategy. Or it could be a political stall by the province, hoping the results provide enough wiggle room to move ahead with the original plan anyway.
Politics aside, issues stirred up by the DMP provide a healthy opportunity for self-examination. Despite the "significant deterioration in the relationship between the Shíshálh Nation and the nonaboriginal community," the DMP has opened a dialogue there that didn’t exist before. Once we put this issue to rest, it’s possible both communities will benefit from a better understanding of each other. Who knows where that might lead?
In the meantime, it’s forced us to take a peak under Pender Harbour’s rug. I paddle a tippy kayak around the harbour a couple times a week and feel like I have a pretty intimate understanding of its health. Like many populated waterways on the Coast, it has suffered from decades of unintended pollution but now seems to be on the rebound.Which means it’s more important than ever to monitor threats to that progress.
Despite moving away from weeping tile septic systems and direct flushing of sewage, fecal coliform counts are still unacceptably high. Derelict boats sit like quiet disasters waiting their turn. And I regularly splash through fuel spills — not from derelicts but from any number of the 700-plus bilges that pump into Pender Harbour. I once smelled a diesel slick 500 metres before reaching it and the residue remained on my hull even after paddling a few more kilometres through clear water.
A 1992 MoE study, "Pender Harbour water quality assessment and objectives," found a huge variability in flushing times for Pender Harbour (the number of days it takes for the tidal exchange to circulates). Depending on tides and amount of freshwater runoff, it takes between 1.7 and 17.1 days to flush out. What influence do trapped contaminants have on herring spawn or the impressive flocks of seabirds that bob around all winter?
Hopefully these kinds of threats will be included in the analytic scope of the upcoming studies. And if we are serious about improving the health of Pender Harbour, let’s keep political influence out of any decisions that come from them.