Popular Metro Vancouver salmon hatchery is undergoing a $49-million rebuild
One of Metro Vancouver’s most popular salmon hatcheries is getting a $49-million upgrade.
Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) will begin rebuilding the North Vancouver Capilano River Hatchery in Fall 2026, in partnership with the Squamish Nation (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw), the Musqueam Nation (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm), the Tsleil-Waututh Nation (sə̓lílwətaʔɬ), Metro Vancouver, and the District of North Vancouver.
This is a significant hatchery for the DFO, producing about 1.5 million juvenile salmon each year and welcoming thousands of visitors.
Access to the hatchery will be closed or limited during construction, although the surrounding trails will remain open to the public.
DFO staff say the facility is at the end of its life.
“We’ve been putting Band-Aids on the infrastructure over the last 20 years, probably, with hopes of this rebuild coming down the road. And it’s just reached the point where the investment in a new facility is required to keep the program going,” said David Laird, a senior real property and environmental management engineer on the rebuild.
Capilano River Hatchery/Supplied
Laird said they’ve had ongoing roof issues that they’ve patched up to try to keep the building dry, along with various mishaps, including broken pumps and seized valves.
“It’s just old and tired and ready for an upgrade.”
They’re also taking the opportunity make the building climate resilient by removing natural gas, fully electrifying it, using heat pumps, and designing it according to net-zero building standards.
With these efficiencies, Laird said the building should be cheaper to run, and they’ll be able to pivot that money elsewhere.
“We can invest that in the program and salmon conservation and rearing instead of paying electricity bills,” he said.
The DFO will also build a new water supply for the hatchery. With climate change, the river’s water temperatures are projected to increase, and so the DFO is looking at taking water from the deep, cold water of the Cleveland Dam for its operations.
The build
One of the unique challenges of the rebuild is the fact that it’s going to remain a functional hatchery throughout.
To deal with this, the DFO is using a phased approach, focusing on one or two projects at a time so that they can “shuffle the operations around on site,” said Laird.
They’ll start with the demolition and rebuild of the main hatchery office building, which includes lab space, early rearing, and incubation. When it’s complete, they can then move on to the other parts of the hatchery, like its aquaculture and public areas.
The public area, which is free to access, will have many more interpretive and educational elements once finished. It will also showcase the history that the local First Nations have with salmon.
Another factor they have to contend with is that Metro Vancouver has a pump house at the build site that they need unfettered access to. There’s also a large pipe running underneath the hatchery that Laird says supplies a third of the region’s drinking water.
Because of this, they need to coordinate with the region to ensure that the “system is safe and reliable and they can access it at all points.”
With these complications, Laird expects the project to take a bit longer than a regular commercial rebuild might. The demolition and rebuild of the main hatchery could take 18 months to two years, before the DFO moves on to other phases.
He estimates that it won’t be until 2030 that the project rebuild wraps up.
Why is it important?
The existing hatchery building was finished in 1971, in response to the Cleveland Dam’s construction nearly 20 years earlier.
As Vancouver started to grow and build in the 1940s, the city needed a secure water supply, and the Greater Vancouver Water District built a dam in 1954.
In doing so, they blocked the pathway for migrating salmon.
To try and assist the fish, they built a “weir,” said Jeremy Smith, section head for Fraser River enhancement operations from the Salmonid Enhancement Program.
Wirestock Creators/Shutterstock
“Which is sort of like a small micro dam that’s just downstream of the larger dam that would divert returning adult salmon through a fish ladder to a place where those adults could be collected and then put into the watershed.”
“We tried that for about 20 years. It didn’t really work.”
While salmon could swim up the system and spawn, the juveniles had a hard time with the spillway, where the surface water from the reservoir spills over the Cleveland dam.
By the late 1960s, there were only a few hundred fish returning, and so the hatchery was built to try to replenish fish stocks.
How does it work?
Some of the pre-hatchery infrastructure is still in the river, including the weir to divert fish from the river and up the fish ladder into the hatchery. There, the hatchery staff catches the fish, anesthetizes them, sorts them by species and sex, and finally puts them into receiving containers.
In the fall, when salmon turn from bright silver to more colourful shades, technicians harvest salmon eggs and sperm, fertilize the eggs, and put them into incubators.
“It’s pretty esoteric. Not everybody can do it,” said Smith.
For a few months, the eggs are supplied with a constant flow of fresh, cold, oxygenated water. When the salmon hatch, they grow up in the hatchery until they are ready for release in the river.
Fisheries and Oceans Canada/Submitted
They return many of these salmon carcasses to the river, so they can decompose and release essential marine nutrients like carbon, phosphorus, and nitrogen into the surrounding ecosystem.
“And from that point forward, they behave just like a wild salmon,” said Smith.
While there is a lot of variability in salmon returns from one year to the next (Smith calls the ocean “a big black box”), there are between 10 and 20,000 coho adults that return each year.