Thank you.
I've also taken part in the Fraser Salmon Management Council meetings, and my community is the delegated representative at the Fraser Salmon Management Council meetings. As Darren mentioned, whether or not the Fraser Salmon Management Council is the delegated authority, there's been a lot of commitment from the 190 first nations that rely on the Fraser River salmon. At this point, over a third of them have signed on to the Fraser Salmon Management Council. To have that number of signatories to that agreement is a huge success. That shows the commitment we have for the B.C. first nations to look to recover the Pacific salmon stocks. It's not an easy task to get that many first nations on board. It shows that first nations are fully committed. I'm sure we'll have more come on board over the next little while.
This conversation we're having really goes back to the Crown's mandate, the nice gestures, the nice words we've been hearing over the past four years from Prime Minister Trudeau around recognition and reconciliation, supporting UNDRIP. You know what? When we speak about implementing UNDRIP, we think about passing on some of that responsibility the Crown and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans have held so dear to their hearts for so long.
If you want to implement the United Nations declaration, or you want to look to implement some of the court decisions, we have an opportunity with the Fraser Salmon Collaborative Management Agreement. Those are the fundamental steps that need to happen for us to be able to properly resource the traditional knowledge, title and rights discussion. Some of the responsibility needs to be passed on to the first nation.
That's probably being debated somewhere in Ottawa at this time as to how to do that. But that's what we want. We want responsibility with regard to fisheries within the Fraser River watershed. I think those discussions are coming, and we need to take them seriously. When I look at that Fraser Salmon Collaborative Management Agreement, it is a step towards first nations taking on more responsibility for salmon, and it's a long time coming.
We can look to tools such as that agreement to improve our place with regard to the management of the salmon stock, which means so much to our identity, a symbol of the people.