Mr. Speaker, for 21 days ending this past Sunday the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans allowed an unsupervised commercial aboriginal beach seine fishery on the Fraser River that has wreaked havoc. Ken Kristian, a recreational fisherman, wrote:
The stretches located directly below each beach seine site are literally stacked with hundreds upon hundreds of pre-spawn male pink salmon bodies. Only the male pink salmon and of course the odd so-called endangered coho or steel head were being culled and grabbed roughly by their heads, gills or tails and thrown from the bunt of the net, some 10 to 15 feet in the air, back into the very shallow water. The pink female salmon were being harvested simply for their payload of valuable roe.
I witnessed this appalling spectacle as did hundreds of others. Missing from this picture was any sign of DFO enforcement. This fishery combined with a lack of enforcement suggests another species of salmon may soon be on the endangered or extinct list.