Report: Made in BC Wild Salmon Strategy - Wild Salmon Advisory Council

The report we have been waiting for about bringing back wild BC salmon, brought to us by us, meaning a made in BC Wild Salmon Strategy is now out: https://engage.gov.bc.ca/app/uploads/sites/426/2019/03/Wild-Salmon-Advisory-Council-Report.pdf.

It has about 25 pages of text, is cut-to-the-chase stuff and you should read it. If the plan works out as described, we should be able to bring back wild BC salmon that DFO has, shamelessly, managed into extinction for 50 years.

I put some thoughts together based on parts of the report and sent it in to them. I agree with much of it, and think, that of the two criticisms I have read so far that the issue of hatcheries and genetics that the ENGOs are worried about, will be satisfactorily taken care of. The issue of not asking enough questions from the BC interior is fair, and the plan contains action to reach out to all areas of the province.

Here is what I sent in to the WSAC:

Hi Doug/Martin/Allison

I am reading the new report and am in agreement with most of it. I have a few comments/questions for WSAC:

P6: “It must also be noted that investment in scientific study and data quality and quantity with respect to wild salmon management has been significantly reduced over the past several years.”

1. Doesn’t this mean that the Integrated Fishing Management Plans for north and south BC have no factual basis?
2. I caught that you got the PSF to do a stock assessment – can you give me a link to it? Note that my overall figure from assessing DFO reports is, in an average year, 73 Million in-ocean, pre-fisheries; 38M escapement.

P8: Reference 10 - Estimate of salt sport revenue: $1B. We all use this, but I looked at fresh/salt angling and came up with $2.52B, and if Strait of Georgia coho are brought back, an additional $200M – Pacific Salmon Foundation mid-point figure. My figure is public, published by the PSF.

P12: Habitat Protection – Re laws and enforcement, don’t expect much from DFO as it has chronically underfunded this. Read Randy Nelson’s, Poachers, Polluters and Politics. He was a director of Conservation & Protection.

P12: Habitat Restoration – Yes to this. But I don’t agree to employment ops until leveraged restoration has been done. Yes, to in-stream options like spawning channels; Big Q and Taylor are terrific examples of this work, and can serve as models. The San Juan – above the Harris confluence – that blew five years ago, is an example of a river looking for a good, large spawning channel project. Any river with old channels or a flat, bottom section has this potential – high water table, willow to alder coverage.

P13: Salmon Enhancement – No to Alaska’s ‘ocean ranching’ and no to other States’ ‘springer’ approach, both of which degrade wild genetics. But, epigenetics should be used here to make ‘wild’ hatchery fry. And sterilized, fin clipped fry make for non-reproducing stock, and terminal mop-up fisheries. Yes to sterilized, clipped netpen chinook for Southern Resident Killer Whales.

P 14: Data, Research and Science – After I crunch the new BC Stats/AG report on the fishing sectors, I will turn my attention to climate change research and make suggestions to deal with the issues. I will have many novel approaches.

P15: Governance – Yes to the first sentence.

P16: Fishing – Yes to terminating the herring roe fishery.

P16: Fish Farms – BC is behind the rest of the world in putting fish farms on land. The new US plants, Atlantic Sapphire, Whole Oceans, Nordic Aquafarms and Aquabanq, aiming at 218,000mt may well put the in-ocean BC industry out of business. Globally, Pure Salmon is aiming at 260,000mt. BC is less than 100,000mt. Here is a post of on-land good news, almost 100 articles in the last 3 months: http://fishfarmnews.blogspot.com/2018/11/links-to-on-land-closed-containment.html. When you need info, ask me for it.

Note that fish farm sewage is a big cost to BC: $10.4B, my estimate makes the revenue of $777M only 7.5% of the cost.

P16: Climate Change – As above, I am working on solutions to the problem.

P18: Reference 14 - Support for the AG finfish committee on fish farms. I strongly oppose this.

P19: Strategy 1.1: Immediately: Provide support to 'provincial organizations' that are working to protect habitats.

I assume you will use the Pacific Salmon Foundation. As they leverage money 4 to 7 times, that means if BC puts in $15M each year for ten years, the cumulative effect is $600- to $1,050-million.

Without expecting DFO to do much, the simplest thing is to ask for the same amount of funding to the PSF, a drop in their $2.4B budget bucket, and they can claim to be helping out. That would make a cumulative total of $1,200- to $2,100-million in ten years.

P20: Strategy 1.3: Monitoring and enforcement. Make sure that BC does it and you don’t give any responsibility to DFO as they have done poorly and are not to be trusted. See P12 above.

P21: Strategy 1.4: Yes to both immediate tasks, and: do some restoration projects ASAP, prepare news releases and get them in the press, so the public sees the result of the WSAC process immediately.

P21: Immediate to Mid-term – invasive species. John Volpe’s science suggests that annually 153,000 Atlantics escape and are in 97% of swum Van Isle rivers. Please add getting Atlantics and progeny out of Island rivers – a good project for our indigenous brothers. I have several links to his work: https://fishfarmnews.blogspot.com/2017/12/atlantic-salmon-in-bc-rivers-bad-news.html.

P21: Mid-term: As DFO has been managing wild salmon into extinction for 50 years, I would not count on the Feds doing much. I would first get the cash for habitat restoration, and then talk about joint actions.

P22: Strategy 1.5: I would put out a news release on the selective nature of WSAC salmon enhancement plans which would ameliorate ENGO concerns.

P25: Yes to BC branding.

P25: Strategy 2.6.: Yes to better stats from BC Stats, but a separate report would be better for the ‘fishing sectors’. As noted, my estimate of salt/fresh sport revenue far exceeds what we currently use. Remember that DFO uses its stats to add more fish farms in BC. It’s revenue is only 7.4% of the sewage cost, but DFO doesn’t calculate sewage cost.

P25: Goal 3: Immediately: Yes to an on going structure within government for the Made in BC Wild Salmon Plan. The unit gets things done, and lobbies on behalf of salmon.

P26: Mid-term – Yes to an annual progress review of concrete action.

What comes next for WSAC?

DC Reid

 Allison, FYI, these are the federal Estimates: https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/tbs-sct/documents/planned-government-spending/main-estimates/2018-19/me-bpd-eng.pdf.

DFO, Salmon and Killer Whales - Take Two, Updated July 5, 2018

The Sport Fishing Institute sent around a note – link at bottom – this past week asking for sport fishers to send a letter to DFO on the closing of sport fishing to put more chinook in the tummies of Southern Resident Killer whales. So, I wrote a letter to Dominic LeBlanc and also put it on one of my sites: http://fishfarmnews.blogspot.com/2018/05/dfo-salmon-and-killer-whales.html. Please write your own.

It is a cut to the chase piece that notes the problem is long term intransigence by DFO for both salmon habitat restoration and protecting killer whales. It is below. Immediately below is my second note to LeBlanc:

Hi Dominic (Letter also sent to Justin Trudeau, Andrew Weaver, Elizabeth May, Adam Olsen, Martin Paish, Chris Bos, Rebecca Reid, Sport Fishing Institute).

I sent a letter to you this past week noting that the chinook/killer whale problem is not going to be solved by closing sport fishing in selected areas. I have written on fisheries policy for 25 years, and the answer is: significantly increasing habitat restoration funding and netpens for chinook.

In the past four days, since posting the letter to my Fish Farm News and Science site, it has had an unprecedented response: 8,500 pageviews so far, virtually all from Canada. I used to write letters for ministers in the BC government, and know lists of issues are kept, and preparing responses is a meticulous, time consuming and costly activity. 

If 8,500 complaints had been received, it would have shut down the branch preparing responses for months. That is how big a response BC has to your ill-conceived plan that will solve nothing, other than make British Columbians angry. My plan will solve the problem. Please read it again.

After buying the Kinder Morgan pipeline with BC taxpayer money, you need a significant win in BC or you will be shut out in the next election. You will recall that BC was the balance of power in the last election.

DC Reid

Here is the first letter:

Hi Dominic et al

I want to tell you that it is greatly disappointing that after 40 years of DFO managing BC salmon into extinction, here we are today, with you eliminating recreational fishing in areas of the Salish Sea/Juan de Fuca Strait for killer whale food, when the real solution is for DFO to have been doing freshwater habitat restoration and hatchery epigenetics work at a rate that would have seen salmon stocks stay at the same level as in the 1960s.

What you are doing now is with almost extinction levels of Fraser chinook, feeding almost extinct killer whales that DFO has not been doing enough for over the decades, and finally, when it won’t save the whales, eliminating a sport fishery, and they will likely become extinct, anyway. Note that from the east all we hear from DFO is how 500 right whales are on the brink. Note that 76 BC orcas are only 15.2% of your eastern right whales.

Note the attached shot of a 1960’s morning’s sport catch from the Nahmint River, a small drainage in the Alberni Inlet. Where are the Nahmint and dozens of other chinook runs today, DFO?

Two things are required immediately: far greater money spent on freshwater habitat restoration, and netpens of chinook.

Freshwater Habitat Restoration

I think $100 million needs to be invested each year for the next 10 years to catch up. If you look at what $1.5 million did to the Clay Bank on the Cowichan River, it shows that money doesn’t go very far. I suggest you give the money to the Pacific Salmon Foundation because it leverages money 4 to 7 times, and the public, particularly students and sport fishers do most projects.

I spent more than a week’s time figuring out from DFO’s patchwork of data/reports (because DFO doesn’t have a final number) that there were, before escapement, 73 million salmon in the ocean. In perspective, this is 99.8% of all the salmon in Canada. Your eastern Atlantic salmon are a measly .2-to .4-million, or .2%.

In my estimation, there are four major problems that have lead to the downward spiral of wild BC salmon: lack of freshwater habitat restoration, DFO, in-ocean fish farms and climate change. We can change every major problem except climate change. 

Netpens

I recommend an immediate establishment of a dozen netpens of 2 million chinook fry each. Use Robertson Creek and the Nitinat hatcheries for Juan de Fuca Strait, and Cowichan – a river that has had a large turnaround in the past few years – for Strait of Georgia. That means 24 million fry each year for the next ten years. The point is that it has to be done quickly to save the killer whales, and though it is 4 years to adults, if we wait, it is those years plus 4 years to adults. 

Pay attention to the issue of triploiding for netpens and epigenetics for an increased Salmon Enhancement Program in the specific rivers. And pay attention to the work done by the South Vancouver Island Anglers Coalition, Sooke netpen operation using Nitinat stock, now releasing its second crop. Funding comes from members, mostly anglers. And a seal cull would help.

Finally, after buying out Kinder Morgan, you liberals are in deep trouble in BC, on two major issues. You need to do something major quickly, and a recent poll shows that BC holds salmon as dear as Quebec does French.

Thanks

DC Reid

See: https://www.sportfishingbc.com/forum/index.php?threads/important-note-from-sfi-bc-sviac-re-fishing-regs.70431/.


Also, get your say in on the 'critical habitat' proposal by July 11:  http://www.pac.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/forms/sara-lep/killerwhales-epaulards/workbook-cahier-eng.aspx.