Thank you, sir. Thank you again to the committee for inviting me to speak. I did back in 2020 as well.
As I said, my name is Greg Witzky. I'm the executive director of the Fraser Salmon Management Council. We're a mandated assembly of 76 first nations in B.C. who work along with DFO to try to create and support nation-to-nation government structures for management, governance and conservation of all Fraser salmon.
I also worked closely as the project director when the Big Bar landslide occurred back in 2019. Funding from the government helped us do that. It was a success. Additionally, I'm a mid-Fraser indigenous delegate on the international Pacific Salmon Commission's Fraser River panel.
Today, I'm going to go over some key priorities with you and then offer a few proposed solutions to address those priorities.
Most of the illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing that gravely concerns the indigenous peoples in B.C. occurs in the marine and the approach to mixed-stock salmon recreational fisheries—or “rec” for short.
DFO enforcement monitoring of the rec fishery does not effectively cover the vast open waters where over 300,000 of these rec fishers are free to roam as they see fit. There are many anecdotal reports of sport fishers never even seeing a single fisheries officer or a dockside observer during the entire season, which can be open for 12 months in many cases and in many areas.
Krill surveys along with the iREC electronic surveys are utilized by DFO as a primary catch-monitoring program. The program relies on the rec fishers to report their catch voluntarily and accurately. However, human nature shows us how voluntary reporting behaviour does not work out as planned.
Fishing for the larger-bodied salmon, along with the broader introduction of mark-selective fisheries in recent years, has meant that many small salmon or unmarked fish are disregarded, resulting in massive amounts of unreported mortalities. There are currently no regulations in place that limit the amount of chinook that the rec fishers are allowed to catch and release. In recent years, that amount has significantly increased, yet DFO insists upon giving increased access to rec fishers without having the appropriate technical data and monitoring activities needed to support those openings.
It begs the question: Why would high-level DFO decision-makers support this knowing that most Pacific salmon stocks have been steadily declining over the past 25 years?
We work closely and collaboratively with DFO, but our voice is getting lost when it gets to the federal level in Ottawa. Hopefully my opinion will be viewed as an important step forward to help us cease these unreported and unregulated fisheries.
I do have some solutions to propose. Considering the enormous area of B.C.'s Pacific coast and the inability of DFO to effectively manage and monitor the fisheries, additional time and area closures are needed to conserve and protect endangered salmon populations from becoming extirpated. There should be outright closures, meaning no fishing for salmon in a lot of areas.
Currently DFO has allowed most areas to remain open to fishing for salmon. However, rec fishers are not allowed to keep the salmon. The salmon are still harmed when they're released.
Rec fishing activity in the main migration corridors of stocks is subject to conservation research. It should be reduced and allowed only in certain coastal areas where the local wild stocks are strong or there are some small hatcheries that can support it. There must be adequate stock assessment programs within the main migration corridors to ensure that any targeted harvest of these stocks is sustainable. Currently on the south coast inlet fjords populations, the data is limited, so we really have no idea what the populations status is and whether it can sustain any amount of targeted harvesting.
Doing this will allow for easier monitoring by fisheries officers. If everybody is more or less crowded together in an inlet, it will give cost reductions for the rec fishery monitoring if DFO can be in a place where the fishers are not spread along a vast expanse of ocean front.
I would say the length of time the rec fisheries are open must be reduced. For example, in Washington State chinook rec fishers are limited to two or three days opening at a time during the whole season. They're not open without adequate enforcement either. The catch monitoring and test fishery data programs need to be in place in order to monitor those pockets of fisheries that occur during the whole season.