The Chief’s article “Fishing Closure Too Restrictive” was an excellent piece, particularly the comments by Dave Brown and the section on the positions of the various federal candidates.
I was involved in a sport-fishing business for over 40 years. During that time I also sat on numerous federal, international and provincial fishing advisory boards.
The solution for sustaining recreational fisheries and conserving and rebuilding critical chinook and coho stocks is available if Minister of Fisheries Jonathan Wilkinson has the courage to grasp it.
Unfortunately, he has chosen to follow the traditional DFO prescription consisting of massive fishing cuts, followed by limited on-the-ground recovery plans.
The history of the west coast salmon fishery shows that this strategy has failed time and time again because Fisheries has not kept its end of the bargain by adequately investing in restoration and enhancement initiatives, and enforcing laws that prevent habitat destruction.
Look no further than the failed recovery of Interior Fraser River coho salmon after 20 years of no directed coho fisheries and just three to five total exploitation rates on these stocks.
Fisheries reductions are a legitimate conservation tool, but the technology exists to have both fisheries and conservation by moving towards a mark selective fishery. This means that anglers can keep hatchery-produced fish, identified by a missing adipose fin, but are required to release any chinook or coho, which still has the adipose fin attached.
The logic is elegantly simple.
Keep hatchery fish that are generally reared for that purpose and release the wild ones.
The U.S. is going full steam ahead on this program. That program really benefits Canadian anglers because U.S. hatchery fish already make up a large proportion of the salmon that are available in important southern B.C. fisheries.
Unfortunately, Wilkinson’s response in Thuncher’s article to this question is not encouraging.
He claims that having more marked fish will create much more fishing effort and will result in more wild fish being killed. This is backwards.
No one is advocating producing millions more hatchery fish, just mark those that are already being produced; and the higher the percentage of marked fish in an area the less likely anglers are to encounter wild salmon. His understanding of how this works begs the question. Who is he taking his advice from? It’s time to try a new strategy because the prescriptions for recovery used in the past have failed.
Thomas Davis
Victoria
