Okay. Thank you.
In looking at the government's “Canada's National Strategy to Ensure the Future of Atlantic Salmon, 2024-2036”, I picked up on a line that said “it will not be possible to invest everywhere”. To me, that sounds like a government giving up on salmon.
I come from B.C., from the interior, and there were no salmon in the B.C. portion of the Okanagan system for over 50 years. Work with the first nations there, the Okanagan Nation Alliance, across the Canada-U.S. border, established a hatchery there, and now there are salmon returning on their own all the way up into Okanagan Lake, hundreds of kilometres up the river, where there hadn't been salmon for 50 years.
How important is it to the salmon population and to your nation that this genetic stock remain viable in some way, so when other factors are impacting the population, that stock can be there to rebuild what was there?