Thank you.
I too agree with everything that's already been said, so I'm going to carry on from there.
I carry a bit of a different torch, because I'm president of the Miramichi Watershed Management Committee, and we're not a conservation group. We are a group of stakeholders looking to utilize the resources and create as much economics from the Miramichi River as possible. We are not there to pick one species over another, but we definitely want our river to be in equilibrium. We want all of the species that are native to the river in equilibrium.
I would say that we are fortunate in the Miramichi Watershed Management Committee, because we have a memorandum of understanding with DFO and our energy resource development department in the provincial government to co-manage the Miramichi watershed. I would look to our having a bigger voice at that table and getting more done there.
The four species that we look to utilize for economic development are salmon, trout, shad and striped bass. The striped bass is a wonderful fish and wonderful species. We just don't want a kazillion of them and two of something else. I'm not telling you anything you don't already know. You know that the population crashed. It went down as a result of the bycatch—that's my opinion as well—and then there was a wonderful good news story. Wow. It rebounded.
When it rebounded, we, the people on the Miramichi, wanted to go fishing. We wanted to fish for these hundreds of thousands of fish we were seeing in front of our noses. It was a wild time. There were a lot of town hall meetings and we had DFO resources from the gulf region come to these meetings—not the two gentlemen who spoke here; it was before their time—to try to explain the management of the resource to us. We actually had one individual stand up and tell us that perhaps the job of DFO was to see how high they could raise the population of striped bass. In my opinion, that's not managing a species.
You know what happened. As somebody said, they went prospecting. They went on a walkabout. They went to the Strait of Belle Isle and up to Labrador. I don't know how many thousands or hundreds of thousands didn't come back, but they didn't come back. Why did they go there?
I forgot to tell you. I'm not just from the Miramichi. I live on the Miramichi River. It's the last thing I see at night and the first thing I see in the morning, so my eyes have a pretty good idea of what's happening in the river. A smolt wheel catches everything that comes down. We're using them to count baby salmon and get an estimate of the population, but everything else goes into that smolt wheel too. Three years ago it was impossible to put that wheel down at night without standing there and bailing smelt out of it all night long. Sometimes two men were not able to do that, so we would have to stop fishing it. I was saying earlier how many smelt we caught in three wheels last year. We caught a grand total of 15.
The striped bass is not a bad fish. It just has to eat. It's like us, so it has to eat, and it has. It's eaten everything. It's eaten all of our forage fish. We have no smelt left. We have no gaspereau left. It's eaten everything, so people ask how many striped bass we should have in the Miramichi. I'm not a biologist. I don't know, but it would appear to me that 300,000, as Bill pointed out, is 10 times more than the lower reference point. Maybe that would be a good upper reference point. We sure have to get that upper reference point developed, and we have to start managing around it.
That's all I have to say.