Pacific Fisheries Resource
Conservation Council (PFRCC) met in Prince George, B.C., and elsewhere on the Fraser River,
fall 2007
“The Pacific Fisheries Resource Conservation Council (PFRCC)
is an independent body that reports annually on the status of B.C. salmon
stocks,” Dr. Paul LeBlond explained. It functions within a mandate that
includes provision of strategic advice on topics like conservation, habitat, protection,
and improvement of salmon stocks.
Dr. LeBlond is the chair of the PFRCC, a professor emeritus
of Oceanography and Physics at the University of British Columbia. The PFRCC
held meetings through the autumn ‘07 along the Fraser River, stopping at Prince
George, Williams Lake, and Quesnel seeking public input for the council’s
information base, and the organization found a large reception in Prince George
and heard the expression of a lot of concerns about missing fish from the
Fraser River system, and lots of questions about the direction for management
of an apparently dwindling fisheries resource.
“This organization was established by then-Minister of the Environment
Liberal Hon. David Anderson,” LeBlond said. The council is about 10 years old
now and works cooperatively between the federal and provincial governments to
seek and acquire public input, “We work toward long-term development of the
resources in Pacific fisheries, especially regarding the preservation of
salmon.” He said the PFRCC works at the gradual pace of governments everywhere
to move regulations and legislation into place that benefits fish and their
habitat.
An example of current PFRCC ‘actionable items’, the chairperson
said, includes water. Water a huge issue in central B.C., and LeBlond said
presently the PFRCC is creating as much information and dialogue as possible
about the use of water resources with a particular goal to rejuvenate the BC
Water Act of the late 1800s. “This is antiquated legislation that requires
drafting to deal with issues surrounding ground water.”
Furthermore the council is working with the federal
Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) regarding the general conduct of
fisheries on the Pacific coast and in river systems that feed into the Pacific
Ocean, and the manner with which ‘allocations’ of fish are carried out toward
various commercial and cultural interests. The meeting in Prince George, for
instance, heard a lot of public input from sports fishers and guides. For a
host of reports and informative articles visit www.fish.bc.ca
Further
dialogue autumn ’07 on failing Fraser River salmon fisheries
Fraser
River Salmon 
Table Society met to devise strategies to prevent low salmon
returns
PHOTO CREDITS: Malcolm
McColl
“The Fraser River Salmon Table
Society is working toward consensus,” said Richard McGuigan, PhD, co-chair of
the salmon table along with Marcel Shepert, Pacific Salmon Treaty during a
meeting Sep 18 07 in Prince George, B.C., , at the Prince George Native
Friendship Centre.
“Cooperative Decision Management
is the way to achieve consensus,” for the fledgling table society, Dr. McGuigan
said. Interest-based negotiations are conducted through three stages within
this emerging method and everybody abides by a final consensus.
Cooperative Decision Management
allows no veto to any party, and is not co-management, which, “has a negative
reputation and gives regulators a lot of power,” said co-chair McGuigan.
The salmon table process must
respect the ability of First Nations to represent their constituencies, said
Doug Kelly, Sto:lo Tribal Council, “especially regarding the inter-tribal
treaty process.” The table is an open forum as long as Aboriginal rights and
title are respected.
David Moore worked on table
planning, “One goal of the salmon table is to create transparency in marketing,
ultimately to resolve problems like selling caviar for as low as 11 cents per
pound and finding out it fetches $15 a pound in the US food market.”
Market transparency is the goal
of a Siska First Nation demonstration project, to, “catch, process, and sell
their fish harvested from a fish wheel,” with approval of CFIA, BC Food Safety
Act, and BC Centre for Disease Control. Salmon is a commodity from the wild
realm, and salmon is still largely misunderstood in terms of behaviour and even
physiology. Moore explained, “We have learned colour of the flesh is not
determined by how far up the river the fish has gone,” a previous assumption,
“rather, maturity is the determinant in quality and colour of the flesh.”
This is interesting because the
old view was the farther up the river salmon were caught the less red and more
dark the flesh would be (and dark is inedible). Now upstream fishers can join
the mainstream market. “The key is flexibility in marketing,” said Moore to the
table society meeting. He said, “Micro-processing can be done profitably
without over-capitalization.” A regulatory boondoggle may exist, however, in
the changing provincial management of food health as it moves to Regional
Health Authorities in B.C..
The provincial government says on
the internet, “This structure, introduced in December 2001, modernized a
complicated, confusing and expensive health care system by merging the previous
52 health authorities into a streamlined governance and management model.”
Today, said Moore, “These regional health authorities are charged with
supplying permits required for the catching processing and selling of fish.”
The commercialization of fresh-caught
salmon may be advanced through a new process, noted Moore, including a specific
container for storing a fish, a wax-coated card-board that preserves ice and
fish together for the few hours required to get a fish into a larder. The
problem is, nevertheless, a lack of fish to market.
Teresa Ryan works in Vancouver as
a fish biologist on the Pacific Salmon Commission and a scientist representing
coastal First Nations. They were all asking the same question: where have all
the fish gone? A report in the Prince George Free Press said low salmon returns
found along the Fraser River this year show nets producing a tenth the expected
catch.
One-tenth of the expected catch means
as a result that people were not going fishing. Obviously this is a major
concern in Canada’s North West Pacific where the First Nations are losing of a
way of life. Traditional salmon harvests unite communities but this year nobody
goes to the river. These people are facing a disappearing diet, a staple food
for the poor, and a lack of cultural control over problems associated with the
loss.
This is a major concern in the Pacific North West, and the
First Nations have stated that they that they are extremely worried about a
disappearing way of life. The Carrier Sekani Tribal Council membership faces
these dire prospects.
Conservation of fish
cannot be achieved at the far end of the stream like this, say the Lheidli
Tenneh members of Carrier Sekani, and while reports went into detail as the
autumn ensued (www.fish.bc.ca) including meetings of the PFRCC and the
fledgling table society, Teresa Ryan noted the issue is affecting every salmon
bearing river in the Pacific North West on both sides of the international
border.
To the south,
the U.S. members of the Pacific Salmon Commission “officially closed on the
2007 spring and summer salmon season” on the Columbia and Snake Rivers in
mid-August, and, “the bottom line was even worse than fisheries managers
predicted.”
The Americans
reported that returns of spring and summer chinook to the Columbia-Snake basin
fell far below the level needed for recovery for the eighth consecutive year.
The report said, “For fishermen and northwest communities it was another year
of reduced seasons and economic insecurity and puts an exclamation point on the
continuing failure of federal salmon recovery efforts.”
Recreational, commercial, and tribal fishermen in the U.S. all experienced cutbacks and closures in 2007 which gutted fishing seasons to just half of what they were last year. Those who fish Washington’s waters, in particular, faced quotas as low as they’ve been since 1994," and this sector of the economy is profoundly threatened. These are the numbers they reported: “Fewer than 67,000 adult spring Chinook crossed Bonneville Dam this year, the first of eight dams salmon must navigate during their upstream migration to Idaho through the Columbia-Snake river system. That’s 30% below last year’s number (itself a dismal year), significantly below the 10-year average, and only a fraction of the 400,000-plus fish needed for sustained recovery.”
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