You've accurately described the season. I just want to step back a bit so that all the members understand how it's managed, and then try to answer your two questions.
First of all, we forecast how many fish are going to come back. That's the first thing we do. Those fish are out in the far north Pacific and then they migrate and come back into Canadian waters, and eventually into the mouth of the Fraser. In the process of coming back, as they enter into Canadian waters, we start to estimate how many fish are there. That process is controlled by the Pacific Salmon Commission, which is an international body that is charged with assessing Fraser River sockeye populations in season and then recommending to the two countries fishing arrangements to meet their allocation requirements. As the fish migrate back into Canadian waters and into the mouth of the Fraser, they're assessed. So in any one week that assessment can say, as Mr. Kamp has indicated, okay, we think there are 10 million; no, we think there are 7 million; no, we think there are 5 million; no it's back up to 8 million; it's back up to 11 million. That happens; it's normal management for Pacific salmon. It's dynamic; it changes from week to week or day to day. So that's the normal background work. This is different from groundfish, where you fix a catch or an allocation and you leave it for a year, or in some cases for years. In Pacific salmon, it's entirely the opposite. It's dynamic; it changes.
What happened this year is the Pacific Salmon Commission thought that of the pre-season estimate of late-timing Fraser, which was 17 million, 8 million of that population was late-timing sockeye, and they thought that population was actually 10 million, or even greater. The reason they thought that is because we had extraordinary catches in one of our commercial fisheries in one week. Extraordinary catches are that we caught, in the space of a day and a bit, three quarters of a million sockeye. In a small fishery, in a constrained time period, we caught a lot of animals. The commission thought that this was indicating that the run was not 8 million, but 10 million, or even more.
To top it off, of course, a number of commercial fishermen thought that the run was way greater than 10 million. I received a lot of calls saying “You need to open a fishery because there are millions and millions of fish that are here.” In any event, afterward, after the fisheries had been completed, the commission re-evaluated how many fish they thought were there and they downgraded the run from 10 million to five million, where it rests today.
The reason the run was overestimated was probably due to a couple of things, one of which I pointed out, which is that you had very high catches, which normally would have indicated a very strong return. But in this case, it may well have been that the way the fish behaved is they were very vulnerable, for some reason or other, and that this gave an indication, but it was a false indication.
What we have to do, in terms of the post-season review, is go back and look at what happened and ask ourselves how it happened and what we can learn from it for next year and for the years that follow. That was the same argument that we did in 2002, when exactly the reverse happened: a lot more fish got onto the spawning grounds than we anticipated. In that case there was an underestimate of the run. This is a continuing challenge in managing Fraser sockeye. You're always adjusting to make allowances for the behaviour of the fish. It's an argument for why you have to build in buffers and why you have to build in provisions to allow for some margin for error.
The final point I wanted to answer is could the reduction in the number of fish that came back this year be related to how many fish spawned in the brood year, which I think was your second question, Mr. Kamp. For the late-timing population, we think the answer is probably no. For the summer population, that might be the case. Both the summers and the lates came back at less than expected, so it may well be that for the summers it's the number of fish that were on the spawning grounds in the brood year, or the number of spawners in 2002; and for the late timing, it's probably related to the ocean conditions, which were very inhospitable for some parts of the Fraser River sockeye when they went out to sea as young fish. We think it's likely a combination of those two things, and we will be looking at that in the post-season review.