B.C.’s most famous fish is on its way to becoming a legend
Grandpa may not have had to walk 30 miles to school, uphill both ways, no matter what he says – but when it comes to gauging the damage that the B.C.’s Pacific salmon fisheries have sustained in the past 50 years, grandpas are one of the best sources we have.
By all reports, the situation was good. Great even. Some rivers and streams had already dried up, but for the most part the salmon industry, aboriginal populations and sport fishermen had few complaints. People used to joke that B.C.’s rivers were half water and half protein.
Those were the days.
Now it appears that B.C.’s salmon stocks are dwindling, even on the verge of collapse. It’s impossible to guess how many salmon runs have been destroyed over the years, or how far pacific salmon populations will be able bounce back with a little coaxing and a lot more control.
According to decade by decade escapement for Rennell Sound, a system of 17 streams, the decline is significant. Starting in 1950, fisheries officers would walk the length of the stream every year, counting the number of fish that had escaped capture to spawn. Because the size of a fish run usually fluctuates on a four or five year cycle, the total number of fish counted is added up at the end of a decade.
Between the decades of 1950 to 59 and 1990 to 99, escape numbers declined 68 per cent for Coho Salmon, 67 per cent for Pink Salmon, and a whopping 92 per cent for Chum.
And that’s just in one watershed.
According the Sierra Club of B.C., sockeye salmon used to move up the Fraser River in waves over 160 million fish strong. The number of sockeye making the trip these days has dwindled to just seven million.
In the last decade alone, sockeye numbers in the Fraser dwindled by a whole 33 per cent. Chinook numbers dropped by 56 per cent in the same timeframe.
The Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) estimated in 1998 that the number of jobs associated with salmon fisheries on the West Coast would drop by 60 per cent, from a season high of 26,000 in 1996 to an all-time low of 10,500 in 2000.
They were almost exactly right – about 16,000 people lost their jobs in that two-year period, and there’s good reason to believe that few of them can ever expect to get them back.
The salmon runs in 1998 and 1999 were the worst the coast had seen since 1900. The Fraser, the Nass, the Skeena and the Thompson River runs didn’t even show up. In May of 2000, the DFO closed the Fraser sockever fishery altogether, with only 3 million fish expected to make the return trip that season – they had originally estimated a limited fishery and three million fish, but were forced to re-evaluate the situation when the fish didn’t show. Rivers up and down the coast also reported lower than normal runs.
While bad years are to be expected in any fishery, the word "collapse," only a whisper a few years short ago, was being used in earnest.
The federal government, having gone through the collapse of the East Coast cod fishing industry less than a decade earlier, knew enough to be realistic. They bought back 1,409 salmon licenses from B.C. fishers, many of whom were still working to pay off their boats. It cost $191 million, a fortune for an industry that was worth $100 million in a good year.
It didn’t help matters that the U.S. salmon fishery did not acknowledge the decline, and continued to intercept the fish that were on their way to Canadian waters, both along the Alaskan panhandle and in the Juan de Fuca Strait separating Washington from Vancouver Island. The situation was referred to as a salmon war in the media, and the disagreement over quantities may have resulted in a situation where both countries, in an effort to carve a larger piece of the pie than the other, took the whole pie.
The federal government may have made this situation even worse by entering into a revised Pacific Salmon Treaty with the U.S. in June of 1999. It put an end to the war, but not to the conflict.
The B.C. fisheries ministry, led by Corky Evans, attempted to appeal the treaty, believing that it was like slapping a Band-Aid on a bleeding artery. While the treaty made sense as a whole, B.C. fisheries were not consulted on the details. For example the treaty did little to stop the Alaskan fleet from intercepting a million or so Canada-bound Coho salmon every year.
The treaty is also based on "abundance management" whereby the season could be opened or closed on the fly based on early catch numbers. The problem is that, due to environmental considerations, the salmon run can be early, late, or arrive in spurts over a two-month period. The numbers are far from accurate, and besides, with American boats intercepting "Canadian" fish, the U.S. fleet will catch at least some of the fish before the fishery departments can agree on what call to make. By the time the fish make Canadian waters, the fishery could be closed.
The treaty did come with more than U.S. $140 million in funding for fisheries enhancement projects in the U.S. and Canada, funded by the American government.
Evans dropped his appeal of the treaty over a year ago, hoping that diplomacy and co-operation would win the day. So far, nothing has changed. Salmon numbers are up in some places, down in others, and down as a whole. Rather than fight over the remaining fish, both the U.S. and Canada are working on programs to bring the fish back.
The decline is being blamed on several problems, all of them man-made: the degradation of salmon habitat through community development and resource extraction; the loss of habitat through hydroelectric development; the effect of global warming on ocean patterns; over-fishing and short-sighted government policies; and jurisidictional disputes with the U.S. whereby our neighbours in Alaska and Washington refused to agree to a joint a moratorium on endangered salmon runs.
In Canada, about half the traditional salmon runs in the province are barren, according to the David Suzuki Foundation. With the exception of Alaska, the majority of salmon runs in U.S. territories are gone. Only 2 per cent of streams and rivers in the U.S. are free flowing, largely due to hydroelectric dams and reservoirs for agriculture and urban populations. The only places that you can find Pacific salmon anymore are those areas that border Canada.
It’s not like we didn’t have warning. The first time people noticed a decline in salmon on the West Coast occurred after the gold rush up the Fraser River in 1938. More than 30,000 miners appeared on the scene, cutting down the forests, panning the streams, and spewing waste into the rivers.
In 1913 and 1914, railroad builders at Hell’s Gate canyon blasted and dumped millions and millions of tons of rock into the river, blocking it in sections and speeding up the river. They also upset the ecosystem, flushing away and burying the gravel that salmon need to spawn.
The numbers never recovered completely, although a fish ladder build in 1938 helped to restore the population somewhat.
Clearcut forestry, which is still a common practice today, led to soil erosion and caused landslides into salmon rivers. Salmon values are becoming more and more important in logging practices, and timber companies are spending millions to repair the damage of the past and to ensure that the same thing doesn’t happen in the future.
Riparian zones are left around riverbeds today, but that is also a relatively new development. Before, loggers would cut right to the river, disturbing the fish and removing the shade that both moderates water temperature and keeps sensitive salmon eggs out of the sunlight.
The riparian zones, and other new forestry methods such as variable retention logging, also soak up rain water and snow melt, which prevents rivers and streams from flowing too fast for the salmon or from washing the nutrients and gravel beds downstream.
Salmon values are also better observed now in mining, urban development and sewage treatment programs, and projects are underway across the province to restore salmon habitat to its former state.
An agreement was also reached on April 4, 2001, between the province and B.C. coastal First Nations which ensures that only environmentally responsible, ecosystem-based logging will be practised on the B.C. coast, from the northern tip of Vancouver Island to the Alaskan border. This will protect the salmon to a large degree, and by doing so, protect the grizzly bear population that relies on the salmon for its survival.
In many ways, 2001 will be a watershed year for salmon in Canada and the U.S. A comprehensive inventory of rivers and salmon is expected by the end of the year, the results of which could determine where and how the US$140 million is to be spent.
It has also been five years since the last good season in 1996, and many of the fish species – sockeye, chinook and chum –spawned that year are due back. A good season would indicate that overfishing and fluke conditions caused the decline, and not the total degradation of fish habitat – overfishing we can fix right away, but restoring habitat to its former glory could take decades.
