Fisheries committee  Well, being specific differs with every single estuary you turn to—

Fisheries committee  Well, we're doing a lot, as you hopefully have heard. As for where we can do more, there's an unlimited amount of work we could do in habitat, and we really do have to scale that over time because there are certain capacities. One of the big areas that I think we're finding in terms of restoration of production is in the estuaries.

Fisheries committee  —but I'll tell you exactly what we're doing. One of our main focuses on this sort of thing is the Cowichan estuary. What commonly happens in estuaries is that to get to deeper water we build causeways, or a port, or a mill or something. You can't fracture estuaries and maintain their productivity, because it's all about the connection of the flow from the fresh to the salt, the flats that contain the eelgrass, and then into the deeper water with the kelp.

Fisheries committee  I think the Pacific Salmon Foundation is mostly focused on supporting the school programs. Other educators that go into schools, such as the Stream of Dreams Society I just described, are working right across North America. I think they're only about 12 years old and yet have won 12 national awards for education.

Fisheries committee  Absolutely, it's a very wide range. In the beginning, the logo of the salmon foundation rather captures it: bring them back, stream by stream. These were very much local community organizations that had salmon in local streams. These streams required habitat restoration. You have to get rid of the shopping carts and the tires and whatever is there, so they would go in and do these stream clean-ups.

Fisheries committee  It's $8 million from other donations—from foundations, private individuals, and corporations.

Fisheries committee  I think we were fortunate to have an extremely strong initial board. George Hungerford was asked by Minister Tom Siddon at the time to chair it and to find other board members. We had the Honourable John Fraser become an early board member and John Woodward with the Woodward family name in B.C.

Fisheries committee  Yes it is.

Fisheries committee  I agree. Most of our education funds are not stamp funds. I think the percentage of stamp funds shown in the text of my remarks is 23% for education, outreach, and training. The education amount is probably in the range of 10% to 15%. It always differs between the years.

Fisheries committee  Probably something like $100,000 or less each year. What we do with it is that we have a program in B.C. called incubators in the classroom. There's a core curriculum in the education program about Pacific salmon and the ecosystems in B.C. Fundamentally we support them. There's one program that we support that you may have seen out here, and it's very common in B.C.

Fisheries committee  That's the yin and the yang. It really depends on whom you talk to. The only time the PSF has ever really depended on government money was for a major five-year program called the Fraser salmon watershed initiative. It followed from the federal government's green plan in the 1990s.

Fisheries committee  Well, we have opportunities to respond but some of the new regulations, in our opinion, are limiting our opportunities. I'll just give you one example that we're still talking to Fisheries about, and this is the 10% in cash compensation. We have locations where, if there's development, there's not a lot of habitat around that you need to fix.

Fisheries committee  Well, let me say that the source of those volunteers really does come back to a government program called the salmon enhancement program that was initiated in 1977. The Pacific Salmon Foundation was established in 1987 and it really got going in about 1989. We were able to really build off the community program within the salmon enhancement program.

Fisheries committee  Maybe just two quick points. First, I'd like to emphatically support what Al just said about prevention. We talk very glibly about restoration, but really, effective restoration is costly and not high probability. We always tend to lose something. We have to be very much aware of that.

Fisheries committee  Well, that requirement is still in the new Fisheries Act. So I don't think there is any fundamental change there. No, I'm sorry, I would say that the fundamental change is that the onus is on the developer and then reviewed by the department. But the requirement for offsetting still exists.