More alewife, blueback herring returning to St. Croix River after dam removal, group says
CBC
Conservationists are reporting that more alewife and blueback herring are returning to the St. Croix River after the removal of a hydroelectric dam two years ago.
The St. Croix River, also known as the Skutik, flows along the southwest New Brunswick town of St. Stephen, and was once home to the Milltown Dam.
The dam was removed with the help of efforts led by conservationists.
“It feels alive again. It feels like its own entity again and it's really beautiful,” said Alexa Meyer of the Passamaquoddy Recognition Group, an Indigenous-led group representing the interests of the Peskotomuhkati Nation.
Meyer said she believes there are more than one million fish in the river, up from about 800,000 since the last time the population was recorded.
“But really the amount of fish that should be in the river are estimated between 50 to 100 million,” she said.
“Milltown Dam stood for 140-ish years but before that [the river] was really the heart of the Peskotomuhkati Nation.”
She said this is where families would come together to fish.
“For the nation, it is so special to see that dam reopened.”
Matt Abbott of the Conservation Council of New Brunswick has been holding discussions at the river, where people can share its history and talk about their personal connection to it.
“We realized that the damage to the fish and damage to the river also caused cultural and social damage,” Abbott said of the dam's impact.
“As the fish were kept out of the river, as the river's quality declined, people's sense of connection to the river also declined,” he said.
Peter Brown, a St. Stephen resident who attended a storytelling session on Saturday, shared his memories of paddling on the river in the summer.
Brown said he was always keen to know what the river would look like without the dam.
Two Ontario residents are urging the province to review and improve what they say is a "broken" system that's supposed to limit air pollution from big industries.
Politicians, prospectors and mining executives from across northern Ontario are in Toronto this week for the world's largest mining conference.
The City of Toronto is making drivers aware of an intersection closure in downtown Toronto beginning Monday.
A period of bitterly cold wind chills is expected overnight into Monday morning across Waterloo Region and Guelph.
Canada's seemingly breakneck effort to replace its aging submarine fleet hits an important milestone on Monday with the deadline for both the South Korean and German shipyards to submit their formal proposals in the more than $20-billion program.
Cheers rang through Springbank Park in London, Ont., on Sunday afternoon as dozens of local Iranians danced, chanted and waved flags to mark the death of Iran’s supreme leader, who was killed in a major strike.
Shayan Morshedi stayed awake, waiting for news from home, as the United States and Israel launched attacks on Iran on Saturday.
It’s been 31 years since Ziba Mashkori left her home country of Iran, and for the first time in a while, she says, she's hopeful about the future of the country.
Conservationists are reporting that more alewife and blueback herring are returning to the St. Croix River after the removal of a hydroelectric dam two years ago.
Youth in Montreal's east end are more susceptible to social isolation, financial precarity and issues accessing higher education because of a lack of public transit services in the area, a recent report suggests.
Some Iranians living in Winnipeg continued celebrating throughout the weekend after Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in a joint attack launched by the U.S. and Israel.
The Regina Fire department and police say they found a man dead inside a Regina home while responding to an early morning house fire.
A snowmobiler has died in B.C.’s Interior after an avalanche in the Kootenay Pass area on Saturday, RCMP says, as forecasters warn hazardous conditions persist across the province.