BC Shellfish Growers respond to VIU research I've seen the VIU press release, and to my point I've cut and pasted the response from the BC Shellfish Growers Association to that so called research contract. This response is listed on page 8 of Tidelines, the Spring 2012 edition. It's entitled "Raven Coal Mine update". :
In late April, Compliance Energy Corporation announced that their engineering consultant, AMEC, had awarded a contract to Vancouver Island University’s Centre for Shellfish Research to conduct a part of the field work of the marine environmental study in Baynes Sound. It was stated in their announcement that “The field sampling program was designed by AMEC with input from a representative from the BC Shellfish Growers Assocxiation”. To be clear, the BCSGA had one face to face meeting meeting with AMEC and Compliance Coal in May 2011 to outline our concerns for the project and then participated in a multi-stakeholder conference call that same month. Furthermore, upon reflection, it is our view that this contract was not actually tendered but simply awarded to CSR as a public way to placate marine conservation interests while at he same time insinuating that the BC Shellfish Industry was in any way a part of the process. Unfortunately this is not the case. CSR’s role will be to deploy and retrieve oysters in Baynes Sound period. All the testing and result accumulation will be done by AMEC. Thus, the baseline monitoring that shellfish farmers have been requesting for years is being conducted by AMEC and, in our opinion, neither necessarily transparent nor trustworthy. Data accruing from this work or interpretation thereof is open to at least, the perception of bias. According to our comrades at Coal Watch “It stretches credibility too far to ignore that he who pays the piper calls the tune.”
By using CSR to deploy and retrieve, AMEC and Compliance are able to give the impression that the shellfish industry is being well represented when indeed the BCSGA was consulted very little, did not participate in the project design, nor were our preferred researchers given a chance to bid on the contract. Rest assured, we continue to be vigilent in our monitoring of the situation and have also set up a page on our website for people to voice their opinion on this development at
https://bcsga.ca/noraven