Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
It's a pleasure to be here today with the committee.
My name is Dr. Brian Riddell. I got a Ph.D. from McGill University and immediately came to God's country on the west coast, where I have worked on salmon restoration, salmon conservation, and fisheries management and science for 42 years now.
I am speaking today as an individual, but I should declare that I am still employed by the Pacific Salmon Foundation as their science advisor.
I do have a presentation that I have provided to the committee, but I expect you have not seen it yet. You will see that in the future. I am only going to speak to the highlights of that today.
The Pacific Salmon Foundation did speak to the committee last July 2020. I do want to support that presentation, as there are lots of useful comments in there. The individual was Jason Hwang. I think you really need to look at his key points for federal action as a reminder of what was said at that time.
A fundamental point for me is that it's fine to talk about the state of salmon today, but we really have to think about how we act for the future. An important point he made is that we really need to be thinking about our community's welfare 20 years out for salmon. It's not a short-term turnaround of an investment here.
The summary point I want to make for you today is that summarizing the state of salmon is not simple. There are over 9,000 populations of salmon. Mr. Hauknes made an extremely important point that the quality of our data is simply not sufficient. Whether it's catch, escapement or biological sampling, we are short on what we need.
Sadly, the state of salmon today is even poorer than what you heard last summer in the presentation. The particular point, as an example, is the return. The gold standard for salmon on the west coast is likely the Fraser sockeye salmon. You may not be aware that the return of Fraser sockeye salmon in 2020 was the poorest ever recorded. In 2009, the Cohen commission was caused because of the returns of Fraser sockeye salmon. Our return in 2020 was less than one-fifth of the return in 2009. You can't get much worse than that.
We have a very serious issue and it is on the minds of many people on this coast, as you've just heard.
I think the Fraser sockeye also exemplifies the difficulty of understanding the causes of the state of salmon. Fraser sockeye salmon rear in the streams and lakes of the Fraser drainage. They go through a highly disrupted estuary in the city of Vancouver and peripheral areas. They then spend two to three months in the Strait of Georgia, which is what we call the “near shore”. They go past the Discovery Islands, which are obviously in the media frequently because of the state of the open net-pen salmon farms and their transition. Then they go out to sea for two years and return.
The abundance we see on the return is the cumulative effect of all those factors. All of these factors interact, so we have a huge job when we talk about restoring the state of Pacific salmon and returning the abundance.
In the presentation, I provided you with a life-cycle diagram. You will all be familiar with the life cycle of salmon by now, but I think the main point I want to make here is that all their various habitats can interact to compound problems or they can compensate for problems. They all act independently. There's almost never a single factor that causes a change in the state of salmon, so we do need to have the monitoring systems in place so we can understand the good and the bad together.
Unfortunately, the state today is generally bad. I use the term “bad” to emphasize the point. There are variations between salmon populations, but generally it has never been really poor overall.
The challenge for us is what to do moving forward. What we're looking for now is strong leadership in acting to conserve these invaluable fish for British Columbia. It's not just for our indigenous peoples and their cultures, but for our social well-being and economy in British Columbia and for the B.C. ecosystems. The Pacific salmon returns affect many different industries. We need a commitment of resources in order to act on this, and we need a persistent effort. This will not happen overnight. I provide in my summary five actions, basically, to help guide us.
Ironically, we have a very strong policy statement that is the management framework to go forward. In 2005, we had the “Policy for Conservation of Wild Pacific Salmon”. It's a federal policy. It has not been implemented fully.
In that policy, there is a guideline that you have to protect the diversity and distribution of salmon first. We do not know how extremely the environment will change or what habitat changes will occur. You can only plan by managing the diversity of the salmon to protect future production.