Mr. Hardie, there are people. There's a DFO office that's reasonably well-staffed here.
Specifically, with regard to the response to this flood, my take is that the provincial and federal fisheries organizations were not prepared. They were not resourced to be prepared. They have not prioritized being prepared, and they have struggled to figure out how they can bring the resources they have at their disposal to the table to identify priorities and to work on what they can do to make things better for our fisheries resources.
It's not the fault of DFO or the Province of B.C. per se that the flood happened, but one of the things that was missed, relatively early on, was having a look at what nature handed us, and assessing opportunities to do what we could to reduce the effects, make things better, and try to save some salmon.
As other witnesses, Mr. Ned and Mr. Estrada, have noted, it was non-government entities that went out and did salmon salvage and fish salvage in the flooded fields in the lower Fraser. It was that PSF that was funding works that were identified by DFO restoration biologists as urgent works, but the government organizations did not seem to have the capacity or the ability to find the funds, to undertake those things that saved salmon in real time.