The sport-fishing industry, and it is an industry, has a very powerful lobby. A lot of people buy sport licences. Politicians respond to a lot of voters. The actual lobby itself is made up extensively of businessmen. There are lodges and there are very large charter vessels that make a great living catching basically the same fish we're after.
As recently as the last five years, this growth has been phenomenal in British Columbia. For instance, five or six years ago, on the north coast, there was a very low catch of chinook salmon, one of our key fisheries as a troller. Last year they took 80,000 pieces--80,000 spring salmon. This year we're assigned 156,000 spring salmon; they're assigned 75,000. On the coho side of the business, they're up to over 100,000 fish a year, a tremendous amount of fish.
They have what's called priority access. A number of years ago, Canada deemed that this fishery was more valuable than ours, so they gave them priority access in years of low abundance so they could run their businesses. Well, that's turned into priority access all the time. The bomb we had dropped on us a week or so ago by Fisheries and Oceans Canada....
By the way folks, if the west coast of Vancouver Island chinook catch goes over 10%, you won't get fish next year. What's going on here is that in the Queen Charlotte Islands we fish chinook, and there are some very healthy runs there. But the west coast of Vancouver Island chinook are endangered. In order to protect them, we're being held to a 6% harvest this year. In other words, 100% of our harvest is looked at, and if it's over 6% of west coast Vancouver Island spring salmon, we're in trouble.
Right now, as we speak, there's a boat out there test fishing. And every two weeks a boat goes out there test fishing, and we're paying for that ourselves, the fishermen. We do DNA testing on that fish, and it establishes the percentage of west coast fish in there. If it's over 6%, we don't go fishing. If it's under 6%, we go out fishing. If it goes over 6% when we're out there, we're moved out of those waters or we're shut down. At the same time, the commercial lodges down the coast are left to fish. In fact, the mobile mother ships can move into those areas with their sport fishermen and fish and catch the very stock we're concerned about.
That would be fine if they had their own level they had to manage to, but what happens is that all of it is put into a pot, and at the end of the year it's looked at, and if it's over 10%, we don't fish the following year, but the sport fishermen do.
What we're saying here, and what we're requesting, is that everybody be put on a level playing field. Give them a piece of the pie, but hold them accountable also to the level of endangered fish.