Thank you very much for having me here.
I am the executive director of the Watershed Watch Salmon Society. We're a small salmon conservation charity. We've been identifying problems and engaging in solutions in wild salmon management for about 22 years.
I have been here for about a dozen years. I have a graduate degree in biology, focused on salmon. I worked for several seasons as a fisheries observer and technician in various commercial and recreational fisheries. I was born and raised in northern B.C. My father worked as both a commercial fisherman and a recreational fishing guide. I love to fish and I love to bring salmon home for my family. My organization and I also strongly support indigenous fishing rights.
Our job is to represent the public interest in wild salmon conservation in B.C., which is the dominant component of the public interest. I didn't realize that when I started working as a conservation advocate. I had an idea that only a minority of the general population really shared our values around conserving wild salmon and their habitat. However, we commissioned a public opinion poll in the run-up to the 2011 federal election, and the results floored me. For example, only 8% of British Columbians agreed that “the government should be allowed to let small, endangered salmon runs go extinct”. Other questions in that poll showed, as have other polls since, strong public support for wild salmon conservation and restoration.
We badly need this right now. It's very grim out there, as the other witnesses have described. In the past, when one set of salmon runs came back in small numbers, usually another would come back strong, but in the past decade there have been fewer and fewer bright spots. In most rivers across our province, healthy salmon runs are now in the minority. In many rivers everything is depleted.
We know the problems. You've heard many of them already this morning: viruses and parasites from salmon farms; overfishing; the harmful effects of salmon hatcheries; habitat destruction and pollution; and of course climate change, which is upending water flow and temperature patterns and degrading the salmon's food sources. All of these problems have been exacerbated by the chronic management dysfunction that Mr. Zeman spoke to and that has been described, along with remedies, in a long series of public inquiries and official policy papers spanning the past several decades.
The solutions are there. I will just touch on a few places where you might want to start.
First, the government could implement the broad recommendations of the Cohen inquiry. It cost taxpayers around $35 million. Contrary to the spin, most of Justice Cohen's 75 recommendations have not been implemented. They could start with the recommendation to remove salmon farms from the Discovery Islands by 2020, which is this year. We also need quicker, stronger action on this government's mandate letter commitment to transition the salmon farming industry to closed containment so that the viruses and parasites won't be harming wild salmon. We need to build on the successful model created by first nations and the provincial government recently in the Broughton Archipelago.