Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

A river runs through it, again

But after $5 million in restoration work is Squamish’s Mamquam Reunion Project protected
1524river
Lady by the Water Biologist Edith Tobe wanders a newly hydrated channel of the Mamquam River. The Mamquam Reunion Project is now in "tweaking" stages

Were Edith Tobe to forage her property and soul in search of commonality with Peter Legere, no doubt she’d come up almost entirely short — almost being the operative adjective.

Tobe’s proverbial best friend, Angel, is a stone-deaf Australian Cattle Dog. Peppy and pert, Angel is probably the last place Tobe would look for a link to Legere. But there it is: The dog is mad for rocks, just loves them, barks like crazy every time she sees one, scoops them up in her tiny jaw and takes them running all over Tobe’s haunts, which include the network of trails skirting the newly hydrated Mamquam River channels.

And Legere? He digs rocks, too. At least, he’d very much like to. Along with a partner, Legere has an investigative permit from the Integrated Land Management Bureau. He’s using it to explore the possibility of setting up a rock quarry off Loggers Lane, right in the environs of the Mamquam Reunion Project, a multi-million dollar restoration effort that Tobe, a biologist and project manager with the Squamish River Watershed Society, was a key part of. Should the quarry become a reality, Tobe worries, the water table could be smashed and all those re-hydrated fingers could once again run dry.

Fret not, says Legere. “If it would have any affect on their operation, I’m thinking that it might enhance their efforts by adding more water to the upper end of the Blind Channel.”

The way Legere sees it, the quarry hole would be dug down “approximately to low tide level,” which would allow it to collect water from the underground flow of the Mamquam.

“We’d end up with more fish habitat,” he says, “which is what Ms. Tobe and her fisheries people have been after all along.”

If arguments unfold on a continuum, and Legere inhabits one end of the debate, Tobe would probably need an investigative permit to see if she could construct a bridge from her spectrum to his.

“I think the bottom line is we don’t know what the impacts are,” she says summarily, “and I’m concerned what the impacts will be.”

The quarry isn’t quite the point. It’s more of an offshoot of the point, which is that after spending $2.5 million in cold cash (a total of $5 million in cash and in-kind contributions), the reunited Mamquam is not fully protected. It’s just flowing under partial guard through the busy battlefield that is development culture in today’s Squamish.

Long before anyone with a hammer could get rich in Squamish, the Mamquam used to flow from Mamquam Lake, way up in Garibaldi Provincial Park, down through the Industrial Park, finally joining Squamish River just north of Howe Sound Secondary, which is across from the Adventure Centre.

During the flood of 1921, the river jumped its banks, gushing in torrents along its present day trajectory. Pacific Great Eastern Railway dyked it off that way to protect infrastructure, in the process creating Blind Channel. As a result, the upper portions of the system were out of tidal reach, and silt and stagnation both began to take their toll on the fish habitat, which, historically, was ideal for coho and chinook.

Over the past three years, Tobe and a team of fish and habitat experts have restored water to the channels in the Mamquam’s historic flowing grounds. Long before its zenith, three successive district councils met the project with open arms. The Pacific Salmon Commission, CN Rail, the Pacific Salmon Foundation and the Ministry of Transportation all came on board at various stages after the project was conceived.

“Suddenly, we had over $300,000,” Tobe remembers. “And that doesn’t even go into the in-kind contributions from the District of Squamish, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and Solterra.”

The latter is the developer behind the massive Eaglewind downtown residential project, which was announced in 2005, just as the first phase of the Mamquam project was getting underway.

While most of the Mamquam project’s benefactors are focused on fish, Tobe’s passions surround habitat. The agendas coincide, however, and a good deal of the project necessarily involves replanting things like aspen and lupin, the last of which is planted seed by seed. The aesthetic is soothing, as is a stroll down the trail network strafing any one of the channels. Add to that the demonstration channel running along the southernmost baseball field off Loggers Lane, with its woody debris and lilting vegetation, and developers like Solterra wind up with a nice sales asset.

“If we hadn’t had this in place in ’05, the chances of having this substantial a fish habitat wouldn’t have been quite what it is now,” says Tobe. “But they’ve been very decent to work with.”

Today, the project is mostly done. There’s a floodgate set up on the Centennial Way dyke. Water from the Mamquam enters the old system from up there. Culverts have been installed underneath Loggers Lane, connecting Loggers Lane Creek to the west side of the system, where rearing ponds have been engineered and another slew of fingers re-watered.

“Now we’re doing what I’m calling tweaking,” says Tobe. “We’ve got some little things to fix up.”

In addition to the 28,000 coho fry released into the system earlier this year, another 23,000 will be deposited in coming months. Meanwhile, Tobe could also use some help naming all the channels, a duty tasked to district school children, though not exclusively. She’ll also be monitoring the waterways, checking up on flow, oxygen and woody debris. In the fall, she’ll set some traps and see what the fish stock is looking like. The end game, from a fisheries perspective, is to make the habitat appealing and accessible to adult fish.

“It takes time,” she adds. “The numbers don’t matter so much. It’s the fact that they’re there.”

But for how long? Development desiccated the habitat before, and, without the proper legal protection, it could do so again. Legere’s gravel pit isn’t the only project taking shape in the area. There’s also a neighbouring site recently rezoned for 185 single-family homes.

As far as Legere’s project is concerned, Tobe has filed her grievances with the Land Management Bureau, which is accepting written submissions until the end of the month.

Meanwhile, Peter Woods, environmental coordinator with the District of Squamish, says staff and council are cognizant of the Mamquam Reunion and don’t want it imperiled.

“We always look at proposals in relation to the aquifers,” he says. “They’re important to the community as a whole. Whenever those are potentially impacted, we don’t take it lightly.

“For any channel that has been restored, and the community has invested in that ecosystem, the environment department of the district is concerned.”

Establishing a protective framework is no easy task. For example, there’s a riparian bylaw in the works at the district level, complete with an open house on Thursday June 12, from 6 to 9 p.m. at the Adventure Centre. The bylaw focuses on freshwater zones. According to Woods, there’s more pressure on legislating freshwater environs, simply because more development takes place along those interfaces.

As it stands, there’s some controversy surrounding that bylaw, as the draft proposal includes a developer’s representative, called a qualified environmental professional, at the decision-making level, where the definition and extent of hardships sustained by an ecosystem will be determined.

However, because the re-hydrated Mamquam channels are saltwater, the bylaw, even though it takes what’s called a watershed approach, is not explicitly concerned with the Reunion project.

“There are certain things that the district can review,” says Woods, “and there are certain things that we immediately defer to Fisheries and Oceans Canada.”

According to Woods, Fisheries and Oceans is reviewing the Mamquam situation. There are protective mechanisms embedded in the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act (CEAA) and the Fisheries Act (FA).

In section 27 of the FA, there are provisions against damaging or obstructing “any fish-way or canal built, constructed or used to enable fish to pass over or around any obstruction” or doing “anything to stop, impede or hinder fish from entering or passing the fish-way or canal or to stop, impede or hinder fish from surmounting any obstacle or leap.”

Among the purposes listed in the CEAA is the encouragement of “responsible authorities to take actions that promote sustainable development and thereby achieve or maintain a healthy environment and a healthy economy.”

Back at the district level, Tobe has issues with the riparian bylaw, mainly because of the inclusion of a qualified environmental professional commissioned by a developer. “It’s not a bad bylaw. It’s a hybrid, and it could be worse, but they have to sell it to the developer.”

As for the Mamquam Reunion? Is it protected?

“As much as it can be,” she says, noting that some developers have taken the project quite seriously, “and that’s a success.”

At the same time, if you talk to Tobe long enough, you’ll hear one of her apprehensive adages: “Some developers work with nature,” she’ll say, “and some work against it.”