If Salmon Could Vote

Where are Lib candidates on fishery? Nowhere.

By Rafe Mair
November 27, 2006

TheTyee.ca

All my life the Pacific salmon has held me in awe. When I was a little boy my parents would take me to my grandparents' little cottage at Granthams Landing and we would often go salmon fishing, they with their big cane rods and the Peetz reels, me with my hand line. I wasn't trusted with a rod and to ensure I didn't get a big salmon strike I was equipped with a small Tom Mack spoon for bait and I wasn't allowed to let much line out. Occasionally I would catch an immature salmon, which we wrongly called a grilse, but on one occasion a salmon did strike and tore the line from my hands but not before giving them a bad burn. Far from discouraging me, it made salmon all the more thrilling.

Over my years of youth and early adulthood, there were plenty of fish. I can remember casting strips of herring at coho and chinook salmon at Thrasher Rock, near Nanaimo, and virtually filling the boat. When I lived in Kamloops, my son and I would come down to the coast and fish for chinooks at Pirate Rock on Thormanby Island near Pender Island. There was an abundance of coho and chinooks that beggars description -- plenty for commercial interests, plenty for the sports fishery. Now there is nary a coho to be found in the Georgia Strait.

Why is this? We haven't enough fingers to point at all the culprits, but it boils down to Pogo's aphorism: "We have met the enemy and he is us."

But this must be said. Governments, until recently mostly the Feds, have had the authority over salmon, so what has happened is largely bad planning, bad enforcement and bad allocation of fish to be caught.

Save the sockeye

There are seven varieties of Pacific salmon: the chinook, the coho, the chum, the pinks, the sockeye, the rainbow (steelhead) and cutthroat. Only the first five are important for this dissertation.

I've often said that the Pacific Salmon is the soul of British Columbia; it's what marks us out as British Columbians and it is our trademark around the world -- especially the sockeye. They are anadromous, meaning they spawn in fresh water. Five to 12 pounds at maturity, sockeye are the bright red fish starring in countless documentaries of crystal green rivers brimming with hundreds of thousands of these wonderful fish. Typically four years old, sockeye often travel long distances to reach the spawning grounds. The most important of these are found in the Fraser, Nass and Skeena Rivers, as well as in the Rivers and Smith Inlets.

Sockeye are the preferred eating fish not just for their firmness and taste, but also because of their red flesh. (It should be noted that Atlantic salmon farmers dye their fish red so as to imitate the sockeye.) The most spectacular run is that which turns right at Lytton into the Thompson River and exits in huge numbers into the Adams River. Thousands of tourists make their way to the Adams River to see this remarkable act of nature.

Tragically, we may soon see the end of this and other Fraser River runs of sockeye. The 2006 return of Adams River sockeye shows graphically and tragically why we must change our ways or lose our fish. Fisheries and Oceans Canada has the mandate to determine how many sockeye will return and then make an appropriate allotment to the commercial and sports fishermen. This year they were out by 50 per cent! This means the allotments were based on a guess that was twice as big as what actually happened.

No accountability

Put another way, fishermen harvested twice as many fish than they should have. To make matters worse, many fish having survived the wild died before they could spawn because water levels in their home streams were too low or water temperatures were too high because of an unusually dry summer. (A situation those of us who opposed Alcan lowering the Nechako river further predicted.)

Many causes of this catastrophe are put about by the federal government. El Nino, warmer waters bringing new predators into the sockeye's fascinating odyssey, habitat destruction and abnormally high temperatures in rivers where they spawn or, as in the case of the Nechako, pass through on their way to the spawning grounds. The trouble is that Fisheries and Oceans makes its calculations based on pure guesswork and, I'm reliably told, on outdated guidelines. In this past year, Fisheries and Oceans counted the fish in late August, saw that the number was unnaturally low and assumed that the other half were on their way. They weren't. Moreover, this is scarcely the first time this has happened.

What's truly puzzling is why there has been no political accountability, indeed culpability.

Easy questions for you: in the 2006 election, how many questions on Pacific fisheries or indeed the environment were put to the leaders in the televised debates? Answer? None. Dick all. Two times the square root of S.F.A.

How many times has the current government shown concern for the B.C. fishery, especially the Fraser sockeye runs? Same answer.

Fishery is key issue

OK, there is a competition for the man who may be the next prime minister. Which of the candidates for the Liberal leadership has said a single solitary word about our fishery? You're right again.

And do you think you've seen this movie before? Like in Atlantic Canada where the feds allowed the cod fishery to be so abused that it was shut down and mostly remains so. Unless the Department of Fisheries and Oceans radically addresses the Fraser sockeye ongoing catastrophe, we will reach the stage (if we haven't reached it already) where we must have a total fishing ban.

There's a very tough economic problem here. Fishermen have millions of dollars tied up in boats and equipment. They're not interested in fishing closures, and when they happen, they blame the problems on Indians and sports fishermen. That leads to a very difficult political situation -- politicians fear the backlash of fishermen at the polls more than they care for the salmon. Their attitude reminds me of the story of a baseball manager who, in a long tough game, used his very last pitcher.

"What'll you do for pitchers for the big game tomorrow, Skipper?"

"Tomorrow it might rain" is the reply.

Since 1871, our salmon fishery has been run by the federal government. Most of the ministers couldn't tell a salmon from codfish and, moreover, couldn't have cared less.

The current Liberal leadership convention is carrying on that legacy to perfection. After Dec. 2 there will be one more political leader who doesn't give a fiddler's fart about British Columbia or its unique salmon.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Rafe Mair writes a Monday column for The Tyee. His website is www.rafeonline.com.