Fisheries committee  Yes, I will speak on behalf of the Restigouche River Watershed Management Council. First of all, I'd like to present our organization. The Restigouche River Watershed Management Council is an interprovincial committee that has a mission to work with different partners to protec

Fisheries committee  Thank you for the question. Our recommendation related to the actual situation of the salmon in the Restigouche watershed area. We have a lot of concerns related to the protection of the salmon and protection by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans officers. As an example, I w

Fisheries committee  Exactement. Yes, exactly. There is a lack of protection from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

Fisheries committee  Concerning predation, there is the increased population of grey seals that we are convinced is having an impact on the fish not coming back to the river. We also see harbour seals now in the Restigouche River. Last year we had a seal as far up as 125 kilometres from the head of t

Fisheries committee  I can speak on behalf of the Restigouche. We have concerns about the peak flows related to forest activities. There are models that exist that we can calculate this. It's called the equivalent cut area calculation, which will demonstrate the percentage impact on the watershed by

Fisheries committee  Maybe I can add something on the recreational protection program. In the Restigouche we had a project last year that allowed us to reduce the silt load from potato farms in the Saint-Quentin area by 120 tonnes per year with all the work that was done, based on LIDAR technology. T

Fisheries committee  If I could something concerning this topic, I was in Quebec City two weeks ago attending the advisory committee chaired by Mr. Greg Roach. There I became aware of why Quebec had not reduced its tag allocation on Quebec licences, which is still seven salmon per licence. We were to

Fisheries committee  Concerning what I was saying about Quebec and the number of tags, I was kind of caught in the middle in representing an interprovincial watershed. We received an announcement from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans for the New Brunswick side of the watershed to implement a fu

Fisheries committee  For the Restigouche, poaching is still an issue on some of the rivers. As an example, the Little Main Restigouche River is hardly reaching spawning escapement, mainly because of poaching in that area. As I said earlier, there are very few protections over this area, and there are

Fisheries committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you for the opportunity to share our concerns about the Restigouche River area. My name is David LeBlanc, and I'm the president and CEO of the Restigouche River Watershed Management Council Inc., founded in 2002. I was born in Matapédia, a village kn

Fisheries committee  I think I can provide a clarification on this subject. Changes have occurred in Quebec this year. Rather than allowing large salmon to be retained from the moment the fishing season begins, people must now wait till mid-season for a count of the river salmon to be done. The resu

Fisheries committee  It's an existing railway, but to ensure the stability and sustainability of that connection, as an example, last year, Canadian National filled up a salmon pool on the Matapedia River to stabilize the railway because it's so close to the river. They did that quickly without prope

Fisheries committee  They put about 3,000 tonnes of rock in the salmon pool.

Fisheries committee  It would have been one of the good salmon pools on the Matapedia River, so you can see that the priority was the railway, not the salmon habitat.

Fisheries committee  Because of the local group complaining about it, with the support from all the salmon organizations, Canadian National had to apply and do some restoration work on another tributary to compensate for that, but that was not the plan at the beginning. They just did that with three