Salmon's bittersweet return
Ian Smith, Postmedia News
B.C.'s fishery has been so devastated by low returns and accompanying moratoria that even record years are bittersweet.
Kevin Libin, National Post · Saturday, Aug. 28, 2010
The Fraser River is brimming with sockeye as it hasn't in a century. Estimates are that 30 million salmon are scrambling their way to the place from whence they once came, the largest return since 1913. B.C.'s fishermen might be delighted, you would expect. Many are not.
The fishing is good. In a 32-hour frenzy near Vancouver this week, nets bulged with fat sockeye. But the industry is scarcely equipped to handle it anymore: There were shortages of ice, totes and freezer space while processing plants turned away boatloads of salmon for lack of processing capacity and available workers.
Prices are swooning. B.C.'s fishery has been so devastated by low returns and accompanying moratoria in the past decade that even record years are bittersweet. And the blame, say many, lies not with global warming, sea lice or any other oft-suspected abstruse scientific phenomena. Rather, it is mismanagement by, and conflicting political interests -- clashing agendas involving First Nations policies, environmentalists and industry -- within none other than the same Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) that oversaw the disastrous collapse of the East Coast's northern cod fisheries.
"We have fought them tooth and nail. We have fought them politically, we have fought them in the courts, and we have lost every single battle," says Phil Eidsvik, a Vancouver-area fisherman and executive director of the B.C. Fisheries Survival Coalition.
"DFO got their way on everything in the past 20 years and what did we get? We have a fishery that's closed three out of four years."
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