Fisheries committee  I don't have much to add over what Brandy said. She did an amazing job. I think, with the Whitehorse dam, the key is that although that will take time, the opportunity is immediate. As she said, the licence is being renegotiated now for 2025. That's an immediate opportunity. Again, as she said, it's putting pressure on our partners across the border in the U.S. to limit the illegal and incidental mortality of chinook.

Fisheries committee  Sure. It's a great opportunity to elaborate on that. I'd like to point out that as Brandy said, a lot of monitoring is happening, and first nations have taken amazing leadership on monitoring salmon within their territories. I think one of the issues is that there hasn't been leadership by DFO on centralizing and making data available.

Fisheries committee  They are river-type chinook. As I said, because of their long migrations—these fish migrate over 2,000 kilometres upstream—they do spend time in fresh water rearing as juveniles before making it to the ocean, so they're considered 1+ or river-type chinook. Where they rear is variable, and because of the length of the Yukon River, it's not easy to pinpoint important rearing habitats for these salmon.

Fisheries committee  I believe it's the latter. I don't know whether it is the case in the lower portions of the Yukon, but for Canadian origin salmon, yes, it's rearing 1+ majority.

Fisheries committee  There is a fairly good juvenile chinook sampling program run by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. I'm not intimately familiar with the details of that sampling program, but I know that they have found increased mortality at the juvenile marine stages in recent years as well, so that's certainly being looked at as a contributing factor to these declines.

Fisheries committee  Thank you. My name is Stephanie Peacock. I'm a senior analyst with the Pacific Salmon Foundation. I am based in Whitehorse, Yukon, and I am joining you today from the traditional territories of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation and the Ta’an Kwäch’än Council. The Pacific Salmon Foundation is a non-governmental organization dedicated to the stewardship and conservation of Pacific salmon in B.C. and the Yukon.