I think what you're referring to is that, when there are more fish, there's less conflict. That's not a great insightful statement when you think about it, but when you take it the other way it explains a lot of the animosity and the really tough decisions.
When there's very little and your requirement is conservation first, then you have to put the fish in the spawning grounds when they're below their spawning goals. After that, the law requires you to allocate fish to first nations for FSC. Beyond that, there's an allocation by the department for industrial use. Within industrial use, you have multiple people competing for the same fish.
When fish get very scarce, it's a much more difficult job. That is even part of the sensitivity that Greg referred to in the State of Alaska. Alaska is taking Canadian fish and we are not allowing any fisheries. We're required to because they're our fish and they must go spawning, but we also have other responsibilities for it.
Really, I think one of the things we've been really realizing is that climate change is changing the ocean and the oceans are changing fish in B.C. at a much higher rate than we may have expected. We're seeing it across the board. However, all salmon are not equal. Andrew made a comment about this. The idea that we can do risk assessment on sockeye and then declare that there's no risk to wild salmon is grossly misleading. Wild salmon is five species, plus steelhead and cutthroat. There are many different types of salmon that people don't give credit to.
We need a much more open and honest discussion about this topic, but there is no question in my mind that the future of salmon right now is intricately tied to climate change.