Thank you very much for having me here today.
I'm the executive director at Watershed Watch Salmon Society. We're a charity that's been advocating for the conservation of B.C.'s wild salmon for over 25 years. I've been with the society since 2008. Much of my work here is focused on improving the sustainability of Pacific salmon fisheries.
I have sat on many multi-stakeholder fishery management committees. I have a master’s degree in biology and I spent years working as a fisheries observer with experience in all modes of commercial and recreational salmon fishing. I also grew up in northwest B.C. where my father worked as a fishing guide, so I have an intimate understanding of how important salmon are for maintaining livelihoods in our communities.
Wild Pacific salmon and steelhead populations in B.C. have progressively declined over the past several decades. In many cases, overfishing has been a factor, both inside and outside our borders.
After the young salmon and steelhead hatch in our rivers, they migrate out to the Pacific Ocean where they feed and grow for at least one year. Many of these fish follow a clockwise arc around the Gulf of Alaska before they head south along the Alaska panhandle, where they are then intercepted in large numbers by Alaskan commercial fisheries.
There is still some overfishing happening in B.C., but many of our fisheries have been severely curtailed to help conserve our stocks in recent years. Our average annual harvest from 1924 to 1994 was 24 million fish. The average in recent years is around two and a half million.
That order of magnitude decline was a major impetus for the Pacific salmon strategy initiative, which is providing a surge of $647 million of federal funding over five years to address these declines.
However, just as we've shut down our fisheries and spent all of this public money on recovery, Alaskan fleets just across the border have not scaled back. We partnered with SkeenaWild Conservation Trust a couple of years ago to commission a comprehensive technical report on the impacts of Alaskan fisheries on B.C. salmon. The report confirmed that the Alaskan share of the catch has grown substantially in the past decade and that Alaska is now the biggest killer of many B.C. salmon populations.
In recent years, Alaskans have taken half of the entire returning adult run, in some salmon and steelhead populations, from northern B.C. rivers like the Skeena and the Nass.
Last year, two Alaskan fishing districts along the B.C. border harvested more salmon than all of the fisheries in B.C., Washington, Oregon and California combined. They are also taking 30% to 75% of the catch of salmon populations from as far south as Vancouver Island and from throughout the Fraser watershed. Over 90% of chinook salmon caught in the southeast Alaska troll fishery originate in rivers in B.C., Washington or Oregon.
A U.S. federal court recently ruled that this fishery in particular is preventing the recovery of endangered southern resident killer whales, which rely on the chinook salmon as their primary food source. Those whales move between Canada and the U.S. and we've scaled back our chinook fisheries to help them recover.
We'd like to see Alaska move its fleet out of the areas on the outer coast where most of the B.C.-bound salmon are migrating.
We'd like to see them implement basic management measures that are standard practice in B.C. and other jurisdictions. Those include collecting and sharing genetic information on their catch to determine the rivers of origin; requiring the live release of non-target species; reporting their discard numbers; and using cameras or observers on vessels to verify their catch numbers. These are all things we do in B.C. that they're not doing in Alaska.
The Pacific Salmon Treaty is supposed to address these matters, but it's not. We need the Alaskans to work with Canada to fix those shortcomings.
We need Canada to put more pressure on the Alaskans, both inside and outside the treaty process. Canada could also offer up compensation to shut down these fisheries, similar to how the U.S. compensated Canada for shutting down the west coast Vancouver Island troll fishery in 2008 to reduce impacts on fish that are migrating back to rivers in Washington and Oregon.
I know that the study was initiated around Yukon stocks, but these transboundary management issues are very severe for British Columbia as well. That's why I'm focusing on that today.
These are solvable problems and the solutions could put millions more fish back into B.C. rivers annually.
Thank you for your attention, and I look forward to answering any questions you may have.