Fun with Fish Farms

The British Columbia Supreme Court struck down British Columbia's fish farm regulatory regime yesterday holding that laws that manage things that are swimming in the oceans, have gills, have fins and defecate into the ocean amount to laws managing fisheries (even if the fish are in a large pen). The little difficulty that this posed for the Court is that the power to pass laws that are designed to manage fisheries is given exclusively to the Federal Parliament and not the British Columbia legislature. Now it is true that a group of bureaucrats in Ottawa signed an agreement with a group of bureaucrats in Victoria essentially giving Victoria a free hand to manage the fisheries, but the judge found this less than helpful since he had problems finding the part of our constuitution that allowed bureaucrats to make laws without dealing with those nasty little details like Parliament or (at least) cabinet. Well this should lead to lots of interesting head scratching over the next few weeks.