You Can’t Make This UpStaring us in the face we have the most obvious and critical conservation issue in recorded history facing Interior Fraser Steelhead (IFS). The predictability of that scenario has been as reliable as any that has ever been made for a salmon or steelhead return on the coast of British Columbia. Think Nass, Skeena and Dean for openers. Then throw in the Columbia to the south of us. The pattern was consistent throughout. It that wasn’t evidence enough of what would follow for IFS, I can’t imagine what doubters could point to that might offer the most remote possibility otherwise. And what are the people us lowly taxpayers front the cost of managing fisheries doing to address the unprecedented and undeniable conservation crisis?
On October 22 the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) issued an update on the status of the Fraser chum salmon returns. That would be the stock/species that has become the single biggest problem for IFS in recent years because those (heavily enhanced) chums’ return timing overlaps IFS, especially the Thompson component, completely.
Let’s think about this for a moment. The chum return is so poor that it won’t support any fishing, including economic opportunity fishing by First Nations. Two sentences later, though, we see that blank cheque of food, social and ceremonial fishing is good to go for 10% of the worst run in a decade and one predicted to reach only 60% of its escapement goal BEFORE that additional 10% is removed. If you’re a chum salmon or one of the last remaining IFS co-migrants, what difference does it make for the label on the net that kills you? Ah, but DFO has its IFMP prescriptions to fall back on that are supposed to be the salvation for IFS. That would be those now three year old, carbon copied measures like a rolling window closure for 27 days (exactly one third of the run timing period for IFS) and all those totally ineffective tweaks of gill net use that have been loudly criticized by the First Nations most responsible for the fishing that can’t possibly be anything but a further nail in the IFS coffin. The steelhead escapement estimates of the past three years stand as irrefutable evidence in that respect.
What does it take for all the players to recognize a conservation crisis? The situation facing IFS is not some silly allocation debate, it’s conservation in the extreme. Independent of interest group, everyone says they believe in conservation. DFO’s own policy (not law) they’ve trumpeted for a couple of decades now says conservation first, FSC fisheries second and all the rest a distant third. A new federal Minister of Fisheries will be announced on October 28. We need to inundate that person with demands to walk his agency’s talk.
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Topic: Episode 32: A Beginner’s Guide to Extinction - A Look at BC’s Steelhead Crisis (Read 1358 times)