The PSF
asked me to do an editorial on the value of salmon/fishing to BC and what needs
to be done to bring salmon back. Below is the text that ran in the Salmon
Steward on April 6, 2015. You can get a PDF for the entire document from Elayne
Sun, esun@PSF.CA.
Below the
text is backup for revenue and salmon numbers.
Examining the massive impact B.C. salmon have on Canada’s
economy
BY DC REID
DC Reid is a B.C. poet, novelist and angling writer
British
Columbia’s calendar begins when salmon come back, and resident and
non-residents alike eagerly take to the waters. Salmon are more than just fish
to British Columbians. They compose a socio-economic backbone for aboriginal
and non-aboriginals alike. Even BC vegetation responds. Fifteen percent of
carbon in cedar trees 1000 years old comes from salmon toted into the woods by
bears, wolves and eagles. With almost a million square kilometres, less than a
tenth of the country, British Columbia has 99.8% of the salmon (that’s 42,900%
more than the rest of Canada). In turn, we issue 300,000 freshwater licenses, 300,000
salt-water licences, and 200 First Nations licenses, comprising almost a third
of all Canadian licenses.
Expenditures
on salmon capture and freshwater fishing topped $1.716 Billion in 2014. If we
add the commercial and processing sectors, the value is: $2.52 billion. We need
to protect our fish because, for example, in the Strait of Georgia, there has
been no commercial fishery for more than 20 years, and the sport fleet is a
spectre of what it once was. Fixing the Salish Sea’s Georgia Strait could add $200
million in additional revenue, more than $2.72 billion in total, and that is
only part of our 25,000 km shoreline. Salmon are that important.
Need
for Change
But there
are problems to solve on the way to prosperity. We need to accelerate the use
of land-based fish farms. The Namgis First Nations are proving that
closed-containment land-based aquaculture can be an economically viable option
through their Kuterra farmed salmon brand. Additionally, our science must adapt
to climate change which results in dry hot water in summer and floods in
winter. We need to know the genetics of fish that can stand extremes.
A century’s
logging damage must be addressed along with 77,000 culverts that prevent fish movement
and spawning. Habitat work costs millions. Passing the responsibility to B.C. from
Ottawa could help strengthen support for provincial salmon needs.— Last year
Ottawa’s total B.C. program was $0.9 million, when one clay bank project on the
Cowichan cost at $1.5 million a few years ago. Not enough.
The $25
million Salmon Enhancement Program needs to be taken out of the Conservation
and Protection standard object — where it is whittled down as a freebie for the
West — and placed in its own budget along with the new announcement of $4 million
for salmon enhancement in the east.
A drastic interim
need is widespread netpens for sterilized Chinook to address food needs for imperiled
killer whale populations that now only consist of 78 individuals, with the
residual adding to winter fisheries and adult returnees. There is little
genetic issue with fish that cannot reproduce and there is little competition
for food with wild fish, because there are so few wild Salish Sea Chinook. Ending
the herring roe harvest would improve salmon numbers, too, allowing us to
slowly replace netpens with wild Pacific Chinook in Georgia Strait.
Salmon
Need Habitat and Money
The Pacific
Salmon Foundation has a vital role in bringing back wild Pacific salmon. The
most important role is improving habitat for salmon. Additionally, the
Freshwater Fisheries Society that puts out 8 million freshwater trout, and has
a well-developed marketing program that could be adapted to salt water, too.
In terms of
funding, the $1.8 Million Salmon Conservation Stamp revenue was dedicated to
the Foundation recently. I think the Salmon Conservation Stamp should quadruple
to $24 per licence, making the amount $7.2 million per year. At the same time, the
federal and B.C. governments could make matching contributions making available
$21.6 million for habitat reconstruction. This annual amount would comprise a
sound base given the community groups that the Foundation funds ability to
leverage dollars some seven-times, through donations and in-kind contributions
in for work and equipment used. Let’s bring them back one at a time and let’s
do it in British Columbia.
***
Now, let me
show you how I derived the financial figures and fish number figures.
1. Revenue
The financial numbers were derived from
several reports. We normally say it is a billion for angling, but when I looked
deeper into the reports, and accounted for processing and commercial, updated
for inflation, found separate figures for fresh and salt angling, the figure
came in much higher. Note that my purpose was saying what the total value of
salmon/fishing is to BC, not simply sport revenue.
My estimate should be
conservative, as I made no inflation adjustment for the BCFFSBC figure, and
used $200 M for Salish Sea potential, rather than the high end of $400M or
higher.
2.
3.
Total: $806.4M + $957M + $758.7 =
$2.52Billion.
4. Then
I added the mid-range value from the stats on the Salish Sea derived for the
PSF: $200M
Grand total: $2.52B + $.2B = $2.72 Billion
***
2. Fish Numbers
A.
Atlantic
Salmon
I was simply stunned to find out that
all Atlantic salmon, in six provinces, half the country (and you can add Maine
in, too) was only 170,000 adult salmon
at sea. I think that this alone explains why DFO in Ottawa does not get BC.
See the graph in this document: http://0801.nccdn.net/1_5/039/0bf/290/nasco-background2014v4.pdf.
You will note that the numbers of Atlantics has been below the lowest threshold
for fisheries of 213,000 for more than 20 years.
B.
Wild
BC Salmon
As for wild BC salmon, I looked over
five DFO and PFRCC reports and settled on three for most of the data:
Riddell on northern BC: https://www.psf.ca/sites/default/files/SalmonResources-North_2004_0_Complete.pdf.
QC Sound to Portland Canal.
Marc Labelle, PFRCC Doc, 2009 for
southern BC: Can be found on the PSF site.
There were problems with data and
methods: data holes, differing methods, for ex, aerial survey versus on foot,
flood years, methodological differences, estimated figures, graphs with trends
but no current figure, different models and so on. I spent three full days figuring
out the numbers of fish from all systems in BC.
Where needed, I made assumptions of what
seemed the most reasonable fish figures in comparable years. For escapement in
an average year, meaning in-river after all fisheries, the wild BC salmon
number is 38.62 million salmon. The
number of salmon in the ocean before all fisheries is about twice that size or 72.65 million salmon. To figure out a
mega-year in-ocean number of salmon before fisheries, I scoured the documents for
peak year numbers, for example, in the Fraser, add 15M for extra sockeye, and
20M for pinks, and this came out to 128.05M
wild salmon in BC.
Now, BC’s percent of all Canadian salmon,
in an average year, is: 72.65M / .17M + 72.65M = 99.8% of all the salmon in Canada. The six eastern provinces have
only .2% of all salmon.
Similarly, BC has 72.82M / .17M = 42,835% more salmon than the rest of
Canada.
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