Feds ‘turning their backs’ on salmon
Cuts to Fisheries and Oceans Canada programs will ‘hobble’ habitat enhancement work, B.C. groups say
Fisheries and Oceans Canada is turning its back on wild salmon, say groups that work in B.C. streams and rivers to improve salmon habitat.
Edith Tobe, executive director of the Squamish River Watershed Society, said she learned late last week that the federal department plans to axe several programs intended to support fish in fresh water.
Slated for cuts are the department’s resource restoration unit, education and technical support contracts in its salmon enhancement program and the production of steelhead and cutthroat trout at salmon enhancement hatcheries, according to the department.
The cuts are part of a broader review by the Fisheries Department and one of its operating units, the Canadian Coast Guard, to sniff out programs and services that were not aligned with their “core” mandates.
Several salmon enhancement programs will continue and will receive $27 million in federal funding this year, according to a statement from the department.
“DFO remains committed to the conservation of wild Pacific salmon,” said the statement, stressing its continued ocean-based programs and efforts.
For Tobe, that’s not good enough. She said the fisheries cuts will hurt efforts by First Nations and organizations like the watershed society that are helping to restore salmon stocks through their work in fresh water.
“Salmon can’t live without fresh water,” she said in an interview on Saturday. “If this is the direction that this government is taking, by not investing any further staff and funding into freshwater systems, it basically is saying they’re turning their back on wild salmon.”
For more than two decades, the watershed society has helped build salmon streams, restore habitats, reopen tidal channels, convert previously industrial lands and more. All that work has been done with help from Fisheries Department staff.
“Without having that staff to look at what needs to be done, these projects are all at risk,” Tobe said. “All the work that’s been done since the 1980s to today is at risk throughout the province.”
Tobe said the Fisheries Department has put a halt to all four of the large projects her society has on the go.
News of the cuts caught many people by surprise, including Zo Ann Morten.
Morten is the executive director of the Pacific Streamkeepers Federation, a non-profit that supports community groups involved in freshwater work around the province and in the Yukon. She learned of the cuts shortly after celebrating in Kelowna the 40th anniversary of the salmon enhancement program.
“It’s going to hobble us,” Morten said.
Staff in the axed resource restoration unit help community members make sure the habitat they are restoring will work for fish, she explained. It’s technical work that volunteers can’t do alone.
Meanwhile, the loss of technical support staff in the salmon enhancement program will make it difficult for volunteers to know precisely when their fish are ready to spawn.
“If you take her before her eggs are ready, you don’t get (them). They’re not viable. So basically you’ve stopped production rather than enhance production.”
Also lost in the cuts is a program to incubate salmon in schools — “a way for students to get one of their first introductions to fish and to caring for something,” Morten said.
“Kids that went through that program are now leaders in communities. They’re special assistants to ministers, they’re community advisers, they are people working in the oil and gas fields. They’ve gone through that program and they remember that little egg.”
About 35,000 kids are involved in the program each year, Morten said.
Earlier this week, Roger Girouard, the assistant commissioner for the Coast Guard’s western region, said the search and rescue diving team at the Sea Island Base in Richmond would be discontinued. Fin Donnelly, the federal fisheries and oceans critic, said the decision would “put lives at risk.”
The cut will save the Coast Guard about $500,000 a year, but it will leave the region less prepared to respond to emergencies.
Girouard said his agency will need to “lean on the local agencies” in emergencies that require divers. But no other local, publicly funded dive team is trained for the kind of work the Coast Guard divers did, Donnelly said.