Editor's note: The Chief's weekly editorial represents the opinion of the newspaper.
The powers that be at Fisheries and Oceans Canada — better known as the DFO — do not seem to have the well being of our wild salmon, rockfish, Howe Sound or the Squamish and Lillooet watersheds at heart.
Those who work on the ground for the DFO in Squamish are good and talented folk who are invaluable to our local conservation groups and to the health of our fish stocks, rivers, creeks and streams. It is their bosses or their bosses’ bosses who have shown a shocking disregard for our region.
For months, our newsroom has been told by local sources we trust that the DFO office in Squamish will close and staff will be relocated to an office in Steveston as of next spring.
We have asked repeatedly but have officially been told by DFO some version of “nothing has been decided.”
Finally, this week they acknowledged the office is being relocated, but were not clear that it is to Steveston, as our sources were told, even though last week DFO staff themsleves said at a local workshop — three present confirmed what they heard to The Chief — that the relocation is a done deal.
What gives? Why is the DFO not giving the media and thus the public, the full story?
The hundreds of pages of Access to Information records obtained by The Chief that document the lead-up to the cancellation of the Salmonid Enhancement Program, and Resource Restoration Unit last year show a similar disregard for our community.
The documents chronicle those at the highest level in the western region of the DFO discussing ad nauseam how to spin the cancellation of these vital programs so to minimize alarm. There is very little discussion in those hundreds of pages of what the programs mean for habitat and its restoration.
This is the same disregard shown during the Stephen Harper years that many conservationists who have talked off the record to The Chief say they thought came to an end with the dawn of the federal Liberal government.
So what of our federal representative, MP Pamela Goldsmith-Jones? Those concerned about the situation locally tell us that she has been receptive and engaged on the topic of the DFO office and some credit her with the reversal of the salmonid program cuts in June 2017.
But when in Squamish in July in 2017, she framed the cuts as unintentional.
“Most of us may have been involved a couple weeks ago in the threat to the Salmonid Enhancement Program, which was certainly unintentional on the part of the minister of fisheries,” said Goldsmith-Jones at the 2017 meeting in Squamish.
The internal documents show it was anything but unintentional.
Either Goldsmith-Jones is avoiding the ugly truths about the DFO in our region or she is not in the loop enough to know what is going on.
The Liberals won handily in this riding and anecdotally, many corridor voters told us the promises of protection of fish and other marine life swayed them.
So far, what those voters got in return smells as fishy as the previous government.
