Alberta
Montreal urban fish farmers say their Arctic char cuts greenhouse gases and waste
MONTREAL — A warehouse basement in an industrial area of Montreal, near the intersection of two highways, feels about as far from a fish habitat as it gets.
But walk through the doors of Opercule’s self-described “urban fish farm,” and the unmistakable smell of fish fills the air.
After donning rubber boots and lab coats, visitors are greeted with the constant hum of the plant’s filtration system. Inside the dimly lit warehouse basement, thousands of sleek, speckled Arctic char swim in a dozen or so round pools, their fins smoothly breaking the surface or sending up alarmed splashes as they scurry away from people who approach the tanks.
The business is the creation of David Dupaul-Chicoine and Nicolas Paquin, who met each other when they were studying aquaculture in college on Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula. What began as an experiment raising fish in Dupaul-Chicoine’s garage has turned into a commercial operation that they expect will soon produce between 25 and 30 tonnes of Arctic char per year.
By raising fish on land and in an urban setting, Dupaul-Chicoine and Paquin say they hope to avoid some of the problems associated with open net fish farms, which are suspected by some conservationists of harming wild stock by spreading disease or parasites, or by escaping and interbreeding with them.
“We’re not trying to prove anything, but we’re trying to do things the way we think they should be done,” Dupaul-Chicoine said. “We’re raising fish to sell them and we’re thinking about every little step in the production. The way we deliver, the way everything is done, we try to do it in a more eco-friendly way.”
The business uses a recirculation system that filters ammonia and carbon dioxide from water, which is then reinjected with oxygen and pumped back to the tanks — vastly reducing water use. Their city setting cuts greenhouse gas emissions, as deliveries to restaurants can be done on electric bicycles. As well, they only kill fish once the animals are ordered, reducing waste. They’ve even replaced Styrofoam delivery containers with insulated cardboard, they say.
Arctic char was chosen because it sells for a good price and the animals stay healthy in close quarters.
The only downside on the environmental front, they say, is that the fish plant uses “a lot” of electricity. Their business model, Dupaul-Chicoine said, probably wouldn’t make sense if it ran on coal; luckily for them, however, Quebec has ample cheap and relatively clean hydropower.
The pair say their biggest challenge was obtaining the necessary permits — a process that took them about two years after they started their business in 2019. Because it takes 15 or 16 months for a fish to grow from an egg to market size, their first sales only came at the start of 2023.
An indoor filtration system like theirs also needs maintenance and a constant stream of electricity. Among their most stressful moments was a two-day power outage during an ice storm earlier this year; they worried that their generator would go down and cause them to lose fish.
“You have to make sure you have backups, and backups of the backups,” Dupaul-Chicoine said.
Grant Vandenberg, an aquaculture specialist at Université Laval’s agriculture and food sciences department, says land-based water-recirculation farms have some advantages over net pen farms — which are enclosed cages that float in natural water sources. Land farms eliminate concerns over environmental interactions between wild and farmed fish, and waste is easier to collect and can even be recycled into fertilizer for plants, he said.
However, land-based farms are more expensive to start and operate, and require more labour, machinery and energy than do net pens, Vandenberg said. “I think it would be very difficult for some to be able to compete economically,” he said, noting that consumers have the option to purchase imported fish produced cheaper in other countries or provinces.
Vandenberg said that despite the controversies, fish farming has an important role to play in preventing overfishing of wild stocks. Improving fish-farming technology, he added, is reducing the industry’s environmental impact.
Just as agriculture has largely replaced hunting when it comes to meat, “we have to stop hunting fish as well, and I think the answer is to produce them,” he said.
Fish farming will also improve food sovereignty, Vandenberg said, noting that Quebec — which doesn’t use open-water net pens — produces only seven per cent of the trout it consumes. He said Paquin and Dupaul-Chicoine’s operation in Montreal presents an interesting model because the plant’s proximity to its market reduces shipping costs and ensures fresher fish.
Dupaul-Chicoine and Paquin said it cost about a million dollars to launch their fish farm, which includes a processing facility, and they admit it wouldn’t have been possible without provincial government grants. However, they said they’re pleased with early sales, noting they recently passed the break-even point in terms of operational profitability.
Both said that, so far, they have no regrets. “Before this I had a career as a mechanical engineer and I decided I wanted a change,” Paquin said. “So for me, it’s fun, even though it’s hard.”
Once they’ve proved to investors and themselves that their business model can be successful, they’re hoping to expand into a bigger facility.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 13, 2023.
Morgan Lowrie, The Canadian Press
From LifeSiteNews
After Alberta’s Danielle Smith put forth legislation to protect kids from being gender ‘transitioned,’ the Canadian media went on a predictable melt down, citing ‘experts’ who blatantly lie to advance the LGBT agenda.
A year after announcing her intention to combat transgender ideology and protect children, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has tabled three pieces of UCP (United Conservative Party) government legislation:
- The Education Amendment Act 2024 will require parental consent for “socially transitioning” children under the age of 16 (changing a child’s name or “preferred pronouns”). The bill also gives parents an “opt-in” option for any sexual or content at school. Smith has emphasized that the Alberta Teaching Profession Commission has the power to discipline teachers if they decide to break the law.
- The Health Statues Amendment Act 2024 will ban the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors, as well as prohibit sex change surgeries on minors.
- The Fairness and Safety in Sport Act will ban trans-identifying men from female sports teams.
Together, these three bills represent the most definitive pushback against gender ideology in Canada by any premier. Smith’s decision to announce her intent to pursue such legislation and then wait has turned out to be politically savvy—it has given the UCP government a good look at the LGBT response, and during that time the U.K.’s Labour government has successfully fought to maintain a similar ban in the courts and publicly rebutted many of the scare tactics used by LGBT activists.
Smith and the UCP are thus walking into this debate with eyes wide open, and are clearly certain that the public is on their side (it is) and that the legislation can survive the court challenges surely coming from LGBT activists. The policies are clearly popular with the UCP party’s base, who handed Smith a staggering 91.5% approval rating in her leadership review at UCP gathering in Red Deer last Saturday.
The party also passed 35 policy resolutions, including several that indicate the UCP’s willingness to go further in fighting transgender ideology, with resolutions that would restrict “exclusively female spaces” like bathrooms and changerooms to females and designating transgender surgeries as “elective cosmetic procedures” not funded by the taxpayer. The motions received near-unanimous support.
The Canadian press, unsurprisingly, is working hard to present policies that the vast majority of Canadians support as an attack on fundamental norms (albeit norms that only surfaced in the last few years and were never presented to voters). Global News ran the headline: “Alberta unveils 3 sweeping bills affecting trans and gender-diverse youth.” It is important to note that the press accepts the premises of transgender ideology as the starting point for their reporting, with heavy usage of nonsensical phrases like “gender-diverse youth,” which implies that there are many genders.
In fact, Global News and other Canadian outlets trotted out talking points that have been definitively rebutted by the U.K.’s Cass Review and multiple medical studies—in fact, even the New York Times has been reporting on the permanent harms of puberty blockers over the past several years. An example from Global News:
Alberta parents of gender-diverse youth like Haley Wray believe the new laws will give kids less choice — especially when it comes to health-care that is not permanent but instead, gives kids time to work through their identity struggles.
‘Hormone blockers are a very valuable tool,’ Wray said, explaining they have a very small window of effectiveness to pause, but not prevent, puberty. ‘It is reversible because nothing changes. And what that does is it allows youth and families to have that that pause, that break to explore further, validate, understand what this means and know that permanent changes aren’t happening.’
Wray believes the proposed legislation will make the province a less safe place for tens of thousands of Alberta kids who aren’t straight. It’s why, Wray says, a growing number of families with transgender children are now grappling with whether Alberta is a place they can stay. ‘I know people who have, and I know people who genuinely feel like there is likely nowhere to go,’ she said.
This is incorrect. Puberty blockers cause permanent damage, and children may be rendered permanently sterile after taking them for a relatively short period of time. Puberty is not something that can be “paused,” and it frequently causes irreversible rather than reversible damage. Smith and her government understand this, which is why they have decided to pass this legislation—not, as nearly every press outlet claimed, to “target trans youth,” but to protect them.
The CBC chimed in with sentences like this one:
Terms like ‘biological female’ and ‘biological male’ can be used to imply that transgender people are still their assigned sex at birth, despite their identity.
To translate: a scientifically accurate and precise statement is now an ideological one, but inherently ideological language invented by the transgender movement over the past decade is, in fact, technically accurate. People can identify as anything they want; it is irrelevant to their biology. The CBC presents pointing this out as some sort of propagandistic attack on vulnerable people.
Fortunately, Smith appears to know what she’s doing here. She’s taken her time to ensure that the legislation she has put forward will pass, and that it is defensible in court. Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe, who has just led the Saskatchewan Party to its fifth straight majority government, is of a similar mind—he’s promised to put forward legislation protecting female spaces as a matter of first priority. It took long enough, but Canada’s conservatives are finally starting to move.
Alberta
Alberta calling for federal election! Premier Smith demands feds scrap dangerous oil and gas production caps
Premier Danielle Smith, Minister of Environment and Protected Areas Rebecca Schulz and Minister of Energy and Minerals Brian Jean issued the following statement on the proposed federal oil and gas production cap:
“This production cap will hurt families, hurt businesses and hurt Canada’s economy. We will defend our province, our country and our Constitutional rights.
“Make no mistake, this cap violates Canada’s constitution. Section 92A clearly gives provinces exclusive jurisdiction over non-renewable natural resource development yet this cap will require a one million barrel a day production cut by 2030.
“The evidence is overwhelming. Three reports from reputable firms have shown that these regulations will sucker-punch Canada’s economy, a million barrels cut every day according to S&P Global, $28 billion a year in lost GDP according to Deloitte, and up to 150,000 lost jobs according to the Conference Board of Canada.
“The losses to GDP mean billions a year will disappear from the economy. Billions that won’t be going towards new schools, hospitals and roads, all for a reckless ideological scheme that will not reduce global emissions.
“Ultimately, this cap will lead Alberta and our country into economic and societal decline. The average Canadian family would be left with up to $419 less for groceries, mortgage payments and utilities every month. Canadian parents and workers will suffer while Justin Trudeau outsources the duty to provide safe, affordable, reliable and responsibly produced oil and gas to dictators and less clean producers around the world. We could be the solution. Instead, Ottawa would rather sacrifice our ability to lead.
“Tweaks won’t work. This cap must be scrapped. Alberta’s government is actively exploring the use of every legal option, including a constitutional challenge and the use of the Alberta Sovereignty within a United Canada Act. We will not stand idly by while the federal government sacrifices our prosperity, our constitution and our quality of life for its extreme agenda.”
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