Thank you very much for the question.
You're right, you hear about our problems and our concerns on the east coast in certain species. The west coast has its own problems--salmon in particular. When you talk about the fishery, the icon out there is the sockeye. Even though some of the fisheries are doing relatively well, an exercise we went through about a year and a half ago, shortly after I came in and took a lot of flak for it originally--the groundfish integration plan--has worked out extremely well. It's been lauded by practically everyone involved.
We did a lot of work to minimize the costs that would be involved in bringing in such a plan, etc. It's enabled a lot of fishermen to continue to fish and catch species they depend on while sharing bycatch with other fishermen, etc. It's a total integration of the groundfish operation and it's been very successful. In some species they are doing very well.
When it comes to salmon, we have major problems. You never know, of course, until you get the returns, but the predictions this year, certainly on sockeye, are rather dim. In the way we look at sharing any fish, it doesn't matter if it's B.C. or anywhere else, conservation comes first, and it has to come first. If not, we're not going to have a fishery in the future.
In areas where we have first nations, the food, social, and ceremonial fishery comes next. We are very pleased with the input from first nations. Instead of dealing with them from afar, which might have happened for too long in the past, we've brought them around the table. They are heavily involved in decision-making. Last year we saw real leadership even in their food, social, and ceremonial component--not the commercial component, but in how much they caught and spread it to those who had less, etc. Again this year they're making some suggestions, knowing it will be tough and knowing that further up the stream some bands just won't have access to the fish, and they're talking about sharing, etc. That is laudable.
David can add to this, but for some of the species--chum, I believe--later on in the year it looks as if there might be a very good fishery. But again sockeye seems to be key, and even though it's only a small percentage of the total fishery on the west coast, it's like cod off Newfoundland. If you don't have cod, you have nothing, even though we make more money on the fishery than we ever did.
Do you want to add something to that, David?