Thank you.
Good morning, Mr. Chairman and members of the standing committee.
I have lived in Victoria, B.C., for the past 22 years, with closeness to the ocean and excellent angling opportunities being significant factors in my motivation to live there.
I am the Victoria committee chair for the sport fishing advisory board and have held positions at all levels in the process during my 19 years of involvement. I am also the past-president of the Victoria Fish and Game Protective Association and served as fisheries committee chair for the B.C. Wildlife Federation. In addition, I am currently a director of the Public Fishery Alliance. Today I appear before you as the president of South Vancouver Island Anglers Coalition.
I bring forward two significant concerns.
The first is the lack of sufficient support for the strategic salmon enhancement in the Pacific region. For the past six years, the South Vancouver Island Anglers Coalition has served as the administrator and coordinating organization for an important and successful citizen-driven, volunteer-operated and community-based chinook enhancement initiative in Sooke, B.C.
Since its inception, the program has raised and released 3.5 million healthy chinook smolts into the Sooke Basin—all with private money. The purpose of the project is to increase the abundance of returning large adult chinook salmon to provide additional preferred prey for the endangered southern resident killer whales at key pre-winter feeding time. Added benefits include increased natural spawners in the Sooke River; first nations' food, social and ceremonial chinook harvest opportunities; as well as great angling for chinook between July and early September in the Juan de Fuca Strait each year. The Sooke chinook enhancement initiative is eminently scalable and can easily be successful in other locations.
This is especially disappointing as historic pen programs were operated at the same sites. Additionally, several first nations and local stakeholders were strongly supportive and wish to collaborate on these potential programs being restarted. In essence, the department has not allowed other projects like Sooke to continue.
Strategic enhancement and habitat restoration are good examples of how to give endangered stocks a chance. By introducing mark-selective fisheries, the public fishery can survive while endangered stocks recover. Micromanaging the public salmon fishery alone is basically optics and does not constitute a recovery plan. The salmon enhancement program in B.C. is held in high esteem by Canadians and has served its purpose very well over the past 40 years. It is well past time that SEP be given sufficient funds to update and improve to a world-class operation again.
DFO funding should also be provided for volunteer groups and associations that seek to enhance salmon populations where fisheries will benefit all Canadians, such as the Sooke chinook enhancement initiative. To address the crippling challenges posed by the declining Fraser stream-type chinook salmon, a new hatchery should be built on the upper Fraser, too.
The government has also bought and paid for two highly specialized automated mobile fish marking systems. As Canadian taxpayers' money supports the department's hatchery system in B.C., it would make far more sense that all hatchery fish be marked to afford fishing opportunity for Canadians who pay for them.
The second concern I bring to you today is the lack of access to viable chinook salmon harvest opportunities. Chinook salmon are, without doubt, the most important species to saltwater anglers in B.C. The vast majority fish in the ocean to catch salmon and take it home for the family table. Therefore, catch-and-release angling for chinook simply does not work.
This year, there is a significant abundance of chinook salmon in the waters around south Vancouver Island—perhaps the most seen by anglers in decades. Currently there are plentiful hatchery-marked chinook, mostly of U.S. origin, available, but anglers cannot keep any at all as they can only practice catch and release at this time.
Earlier this year, DFO fisheries managers would not entertain chinook fishing proposals from April and May. Also, two extremely low-risk, SFAB-supported chinook retention proposals were turned down by the minister.
Since April 2019, when Fisheries Minister Wilkinson implemented non-retention chinook salmon regulations for four key months of the year, participation in the fishery has collapsed. While on the face of it this helps struggling Fraser chinook stocks, this also harms many fisheries support businesses. Excessive fishing restrictions used as a lone recovery strategy have rarely ever worked.
Regrettably, the chinook regulation regime in 2019 closed an existing well-managed hybrid mark-selective fishery originally implemented in 2008, which ironically still meets and exceeds the baseline criteria for a DFO-approved mark-selective fishery to proceed, but there is not one.
The avid anglers program, which is the epitome of good science, is all but not working around south Vancouver Island because these anglers, not being able to keep a fish, are not going fishing.