D.C. Reid is an experienced fishing guide in British Columbia, writer, and regular columnist for the Victoria Times Colonist. In a recent column he writes
Both the Vancouver Sun and the Times Colonist have run stories recently regarding the federal government's pulling the plug on fish habitat work by eliminating environmental assessments of new and existing projects that impact habitat. There are some 500 projects in B.C. This will have an impact on our roughly 100 million wild salmon that return each year.
In the recent past many projects have had negative impacts on fish habitat - and that was before the federal government decided not to do environmental assessments, changing both the Environmental Assessment Act and the Fisheries Act (sections 36 and 38). In 2006, for example, gravel removal from the lower Fraser went ahead, killing an estimated three million pink salmon fry.