KJIPUKTUK (Halifax) – Back in February, Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) quietly added a notice to their website, announcing their intent to create regulations under the Fisheries Act just for Alton Gas.

That might sound like good news. The proposed Alton Gas project has been controversial at best, the subject of repeated calls for respect, caution and fair process. Mi’kmaq rights holders never consented to this project and have opposed it alongside local residents and environmentalists since they discovered brine pipeline construction in 2014, seven years after the environmental assessment was approved.

But Water Protectors are sounding the alarm, because if these regulations are allowed to happen, they will be the first proposed under the Fisheries Act’s Section 36 prohibition made for one company. Section 36 forbids the deposit of “deleterious substances” into fish-bearing waters- an important prohibition- and these regulations would effectively exempt Alton Gas. In other words, these regulations would allow the company to harm (and even kill) fish in the Sipekne’katik (Shubenacadie) River.