Calum Bonnington is a Registered Professional Biologist who leads the team that will look after watercourse crossings for the Trans Mountain Expansion Project. This work began three years ago, and it will continue during construction should the Project be approved, and afterwards to ensure aquatic environments have been restored.

You’re the fisheries lead for Trans Mountain Expansion Project. How do you describe what you do?

My role is to co-ordinate the BC and Alberta components of the Project. Because we have a Project that’s spanning two provinces, and there are differences in the fisheries information in each, my job is to co-ordinate a cohesive approach to fish and fish habitat for the Project in general.

How did you get started as a fisheries biologist?

I started off as a marine biologist in New Zealand, which is where I did most of my marine research and education. I came to Canada and converted over to freshwater biology and that’s what I’ve been doing for the last 12 years.

How many locations have you and your fisheries crews visited in BC and Alberta?

We’ve identified more than 1,000 potential watercourses and we’ve gone out and investigated every single one of them with the exception of a few we just didn’t have access to. Out of those potential watercourses. we have roughly 446 that are defined watercourses in BC and another 90 that are defined watercourses in Alberta. How many will develop into a crossing? It’s roughly that 500 or so defined watercourses.

What’s the most interesting aspect of your work?

It’s incredibly rewarding when you have a hands-on interaction with the environment and ensuring all elements are addressed when working with industry. The aquatic environment is such a neat place. It’s teeming with life. It’s the lifeblood of our landscape, really — it’s like the arterial veins in a body.

You’ve travelled to a lot of places along the route for the Trans Mountain Expansion Project. Are there any that really stick out in your mind?

No one has walked it in a straight line yet, but we’ve hit every mapped watercourse or potential watercourse along the route (with the exception of a few we have not had access to). I’ve looked at key areas, personally, so I have perhaps seen less than some of the crews that have been out there doing a lot of the fieldwork. I particularly enjoyed some of the sights deep in the BC Interior. Closer to the coast you’ve got watercourses falling through some old growth timber at Bridal Veil Falls Provincial Park. That’s pretty neat stuff.

Can you talk about the time and effort devoted to aquatic research before any construction takes place along the proposed route?

A lot of time and a lot of care goes into any project of this scale before you even get close to construction. Sometimes I don’t think people realize quite what has gone on to prepare an environmental application. Focusing on the environment, for example — collecting all the environmental data that’s needed to support an application like this is a colossal amount of work.

If the expansion is approved, what kind of work would you be performing during the construction stage?

The majority of trenched crossings through fish-bearing watercourses will require some kind of isolation (such as a short-term rerouting of a portion of the stream in order to shift water away from the construction area).

One of the key things we do as fisheries biologists when isolations are installed is moving fish out of that isolated area. We salvage fish and release them upstream. We also monitor water quality during construction. Quite often our experts, our professionally qualified folks, will help direct the reassembly or rebuilding of a watercourse following that construction. Essentially we put it back to how it looked before we started.

Even after construction is completed, our work continues. There is a period of time that monitoring is ongoing.