Thank you, Mr. Johns, for the question and for your good work representing the west coast of Canada.
The issue is paramount. We need to act now. The federal government needs to take action. As I mentioned in my presentation, there must be bold action now. If we don't act and the federal government does not act now, we will be on the brink of losing our west coast wild salmon and our way of life. The kinds of investments we need have to reflect that. If we're talking dollars, one thing we talked about was an immediate investment of $500 million for just the Fraser watershed alone, over the next 10 years, so $50 million a year. Even that is a modest investment.
You mentioned the B.C. salmon restoration and innovation fund. That is a good start, with $142 million over five years, but it is not sufficient. You just mentioned the need in all the different communities. These are first nations and other communities that want to restore their watersheds, but they have not been able to do that. The funds need to be increased.
An opportunity presents itself currently with COVID to get people working again. We have had economic devastation globally and in Canada, particularly on the west coast. This offers us an opportunity to partner with the provincial government and focus on watershed CPR and watershed security to secure our watersheds and make an investment and a move, with bold leadership, to signal to Canadians that this is a serious issue and we are taking it seriously. It's similar to Big Bar. We need that kind of investment to move forward.
To give an example, Dr. Tara Martin of UBC is doing work that will show we will need to invest at least $350 million in the Fraser estuary alone to prevent many species from being extinct over the next number of years. That's just the estuary. If we include the Fraser Valley, which is another significant part of salmon habitat of the lower Fraser, you could easily get to $500 million over the next five to 10 years in just the lower Fraser, not to mention the areas that Mr. Snyder has talked about in the upper Fraser and many of the regions there and the ocean conditions that Dr. Morton has talked about. We have an opportunity right now to work with partners, invest in watershed CPR and address these critical threats.
Mr. Johns, I'll conclude by saying that you could encourage the members of this committee to take bold action in their recommendations to government and really work together, for the sake of wild Pacific salmon, to encourage the government to do the right thing. We have studied this to death over the last 30 years. It is time to take action before we lose our west coast wild salmon and way of life.