Fisheries committee  It's by doing science, by doing research. First nations are out on the water all the time. They are in the forests and the trees and looking at salmon's ecosystems. We want to be part of that. There's an excellent opportunity for first nations to be working with DFO, as well as

Fisheries committee  We're moving that way slowly and reluctantly, but we're finally getting to the point where first nations are at the table with DFO making the decisions nation to nation and government to government. We have a long way to go, and considering how incredibly important salmon are to

Fisheries committee  It just makes everything so much more difficult, because we know they are the most important player overall in terms of what happens with salmon on the coast, yet they're not there. We're always having to make decisions with the idea that we still have to run it by the department

Fisheries committee  Thank you. I'm mindful of time here. Just speaking for Nuu-chah-nulth, I can say that a limited amount of money from that restoration fund went to Nuu-chah-nulth projects. We put in a lot of proposals. We did get funding for one that is quite important. We're looking at herrin

Fisheries committee  No. There's opportunity for science to be better used in the management process, absolutely. We still struggle to get access to all the information that we need to make good decisions. The tables we work at with DFO and others are still lacking data. There's scientific research

Fisheries committee  Larry, do you want to start with that one?

Fisheries committee  First nations need to be decision-makers at the table with DFO. It's that simple. We don't need to be consulted and we don't need to be engaged; we need to be decision-makers as a level of government, as right holders, in deciding how the money can best be put to work.

Fisheries committee  No. There's a great deal of work that could still be done to create jobs in this context. This kind of economy that we need to transition to with respect to salmon involves a lot more looking after the salmon as opposed to thinking about how many of them we can get out of the oc

Fisheries committee  Sure. Thank you. Mr. Chair, right now DFO is not participating in the management board. They provide some limited support for the salmon round tables to operate, and that's great, but they're not actually participating in the process of decision-making, and that's what we need f

Fisheries committee  The funding 20 years ago was far more significant than what there is now. We operate on tens of thousands of dollars to keep things going. The crisis with salmon is a complex set of problems. There's no one single cause. If you want to deal with a complex problem, you don't deal

Fisheries committee  The issue there is on this question of using that money wisely. That money was meant to come to the west coast of Vancouver Island to support the communities that were facing cutbacks in what they were allowed to fish. Very little of that money has actually made it here. We've be

Fisheries committee  I wouldn't say that we've been consulted per se, but we work closely with DFO. I think there's absolutely work that we can get going on right away. We're doing a lot of that work already. This new money will make it possible to expand on that. As I already spoke about, we have an

Fisheries committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you to the committee for the opportunity to present today. My name is Eric Angel. I am the fisheries program manager for the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Our fisheries program is known as “Uu-a-thluk”, which