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PNCIMA project asks locals for regulatory ideas

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North Coast residents and politicians gathered at the Crest Hotel in Prince Rupert last Wednesday to make suggestions for plan to establish a Pacific North Coast Integrated Management Area (PNCIMA).

“Essentially, what we’re embarking on is a collaborative planning process with the intention to develop an integrated management plan for this area. And the goals of that plan in broad terms are to ensure sustainable human use and to conserve ecological diversity of this area. And we want to do this plan by bringing all the various interested parties who have some sort of roll to play or something to contribute to the process,” says PNCIMA Coordinator, Neil Davis.

PNCIMA will basically be one large plan that will govern many different marine issues that otherwise would be divided up between the jurisdictions of multiple federal departments. For instance, fisheries management and shipping safety rules will be both be part of the same plan with one having to take the other into account when making decisions.

The PINCIMA planning process has been underway for almost two years and this is not the first public meeting on the subject that has taken place in Prince Rupert. The public servants overseeing the planning process want to build the plan around a concept called “ecosystem-based management,” which is a regulatory framework where environment protection must respect the cultural, social and economic needs of the area. The last meeting in Prince Rupert was spent deciding what the general principles of this framework would be.

At last week’s meeting, people were now being asked for ideas for regulations and organizations to integrate into the plan that would fall in line with the framework, and there was no shortage of ideas.

When it came to integrating economic strategies on top the PNCIMA plan, people suggested that environmental protection should help promote eco-tourism in the area. Another suggestion was that continued port expansion in Prince Rupert be made an ongoing priority, that commercial fishing vessels check to make sure they were not importing invasive species into the area, and shellfish aquaculture should be promoted.

Suggestions for how the plan should deal with the fisheries often centered around the creation of new monitoring mechanism and commissioning scientific research into fish stocks in order to improve the sustainability of the fisheries along the North Coast.

Oil Tankers and the Enbridge Pipeline was brought up when the topic turned to shipping guidelines for the North Coast. Some people said that PNCIMA rules should completely ban the tankers from the area. Another suggestion was to limit the amount of shipping of raw materials from the area to encourage value-added manufacturing operations in the region instead of shipping materials elsewhere to be processed.