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[chris gadsden]

If chinooks are in trouble I certainly do not mind not fishing for them but what bothers me I am not sure FOC is doing all than can in stock assessment and with futher cutback in their budget I do not think it will get any better. I also believe a lot more can be done to improve habitat instead of replacing and changing the Fisheries act.

Maybe some that are retired from FOC or still working will disagree what I say about stock assessment. I know you are out there reading this but to be able to speak out is another thing.

This topic should provoke some interesting dialogue.

 http://blogs.theprovince.com/2012/04/27/martin-paish-its-time-to-insist-that-dfo-listen-to-anglers/

[shuswapsteve]

First, of all these types of allocation decisions are made by resource management - not stock assessment.

Second, I believe that recreational anglers need to do a little listening themselves.  DNA analysis has shown that 50% of the recreational sector catch is from those weaker stocks.  It also shows that the First Nation catch of those weaker stocks is more, but First Nations have the next level of priority after conservation.  The courts of this country have stated that First Nations food and ceremonial fishery has the highest priority over the recreational and commercial sectors.  However, this doesn't mean that FN are not going to feel some pain also in this.

Third, the recent court ruling has stated that Federal Government is LEGALLY bound to protect Killer Whale habitat.  This means making sure there are enough Chinook for the Killer Whales also.  I realize there were a bunch of anglers jumping up and down and doing carwheels when they saw the feds take one in the jaw on this ruling; however, little did they realize that this ultimately affects them.

The recreational sector is very valuable when you consider the economic benefit of a sport-caught fish, but anglers need to realize that the 5 sub 2 Chinook are not doing well these days. 

[Dave]

All user groups have to unite on this – for these interior chinook stocks to have a hope is that all but the orcas stop harvesting them.  Interior FN  have been advocating this for over a decade; lower Fraser bands not so much.  Time to start really talking boys because it is going to come down to you if these fish are to survive.
Sure, improving habitat is good and a bigger budget for stock assessment would be great but spawning fish are what's needed, and soon.

[chris gadsden]

First, of all these types of allocation decisions are made by resource management - not stock assessment.

Second, I believe that recreational anglers need to do a little listening themselves.  DNA analysis has shown that 50% of the recreational sector catch is from those weaker stocks.  It also shows that the First Nation catch of those weaker stocks is more, but First Nations have the next level of priority after conservation.  The courts of this country have stated that First Nations food and ceremonial fishery has the highest priority over the recreational and commercial sectors.  However, this doesn't mean that FN are not going to feel some pain also in this.

Third, the recent court ruling has stated that Federal Government is LEGALLY bound to protect Killer Whale habitat.  This means making sure there are enough Chinook for the Killer Whales also.  I realize there were a bunch of anglers jumping up and down and doing carwheels when they saw the feds take one in the jaw on this ruling; however, little did they realize that this ultimately affects them.

The recreational sector is very valuable when you consider the economic benefit of a sport-caught fish, but anglers need to realize that the 5 sub 2 Chinook are not doing well these days. 

Coast-wide, Fisheries and Oceans Canada and its partners expend considerable effort to determine salmon escapements (the number of salmon that reach the spawning grounds after "escaping" the fisheries). Most escapement enumeration programs fall under the responsibility of the Stock Assessment Division of Fisheries and Oceans Canada. Work is done with a range of partners, including First Nations and local community organizations. Techniques used include counting fences, visual surveys and mark-recapture programs. Annual estimates of the on-the-grounds escapement are compiled for many stocks by Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

[shuswapsteve]

Coast-wide, Fisheries and Oceans Canada and its partners expend considerable effort to determine salmon escapements (the number of salmon that reach the spawning grounds after "escaping" the fisheries). Most escapement enumeration programs fall under the responsibility of the Stock Assessment Division of Fisheries and Oceans Canada. Work is done with a range of partners, including First Nations and local community organizations. Techniques used include counting fences, visual surveys and mark-recapture programs. Annual estimates of the on-the-grounds escapement are compiled for many stocks by Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

Ok....but what you are describing are stock assessment activities; however, it is not stock assessment that determines who catches what, how much and for how long.  The Resource Management Division of DFO are the ones determine allocation.  They deal directly with stakeholders.  Stock Assessment provides advice on the status and health of stocks to Resource Management.  This involves those enumeration techniques which you have outlined.  I am sure there would be many that would agree with you that more money in the budgets of stock assessment would be good thing, but as Dave said....spawning fish is what is needed and soon.

[KP]

Resource Management?? Stock Assessment??  Give me a break.  Anyone who is aware of what went down when the decision was made to not list Cultus sockey under SARA knows who is really driving the bus.  Big money is running the show and all us little minions need to learn to get in line and take whatever comes down.  If you can't see that then you need to pay attention.  The political side of DFO isn't listening to the little guy.  And it doesn'y give a rats butt what its own people even have to say.  We've seen it all before.  Remember the east coast cod.  The assessment community back there said there was a problem a decade before the actual collapse but the political wing said we can't do what was recommended because of the impact it would have.  Now the youngsters learn in text books what Cabot experienced when he first sailed there and we act like we don't have a clue what went wrong.  Believe me we know but when you battle the political wing you will never win because we still think we have a say.  The latest is the posturing over the two pipelines.  They are a done deal.  Unfortunatly everyone is saying what we shouldn't do  and no one is showing anyone what will work and make most people satisfied.  This gives big money all the imputus to continue with the plan as they see it.

[chris gadsden]

Good to have KP wade into these discussion.

Further to what KP says and why many of us are so suspicious on a number of environmental issues including fish farms of course.


Muzzling scientists fetters innovation
  By Stephen Hume, Vancouver Sun April 30, 2012   Many years ago, I attended a gathering of top media executives at the American Press Institute.

We senior management suits had been dispatched to glean wisdom from various gurus about the future of newspapers.

The speaker's name is lost to me in the mossy recesses of time, but the gist of what he said returned to mind the other day after reading two stories.

The first was an op-ed piece by Anne Golden, CEO of the Conference Board of Canada.

It was headlined "We need to unleash our entrepreneurial genes" and observed that although the federal government's last bud-get highlighted innovation as a driver of economic growth and Canada has an excellent public policy framework for encouraging innovation, performance is consistently poor.

Both the entrepreneurial gene and the genetic code for competitive leadership seems suppressed, Golden argued.

The second was a story by Post-media colleague Margaret Munro.

Her story was about how the federal government had dispatched media minders to an international polar conference in Montreal to monitor, to record and presumably to report what Environment Canada scientists said to reporters.

When did Montreal morph into Cold War Moscow? Government minders for scientists certainly seem more in keeping with Soviet Union-style surveillance than a democracy which cites freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression as a fundamental constitutional right.

This troubling trend has been underway for some time. The government calls it "established practice." However, our federal Politburo's "minding" of scientific discourse has now drawn concerned attention from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Canadian science writers' associations in both English and French, and the Writer's Union of Canada.

Nature, one of the world's leading scientific journals, has called upon Canada to "set its scientists free."

Perhaps more troubling, the Canadian arm of PEN International, the global organization of writers dedicated to defending freedom of expression in repressive places like China, Uzbekistan and Iran, has now voiced concerns that "the federal government's restrictions on media access to publicly funded scientists have become a serious infringement on the right to freedom of expression."

All this brings me back to the address at that long ago API session.

The speaker said that he'd just arrived on a plane carrying blue-jeaned staff from a major Silicon Valley company to a computer industry conference.

He couldn't hear himself think for the passionate arguments, enthusiastic exchanges of information, loud disagreements and agreements and eureka moments all emerging from the roar of conversation, he told us. Then he'd arrived at our API conference reception and felt like he'd come to a funeral, all polite murmurs and careful conversational platitudes from intensely controlled people sipping soda water dressed up with a slice of lemon to look like a gin and tonic.

"That's your problem as an industry," he began.

I took that insight away and mulled it over. He was right. The best newsrooms in which I've worked have always been like that flight he described. The best bosses have been those who never hesitated to hire square pegs or to tolerate eccentrics and who encouraged the friction of off-the-wall ideas and the ferment of disagreement they generate.

They didn't want obsequious minions around them; they wanted people speaking their minds even when what they said was disagreeable.

So when the Conference Board's CEO tells us we need to liberate our innovation genes, I can suggest one way to guarantee that goal won't be achieved.

Create an Orwellian culture in which senior scientists can't be trusted to discuss what they've discovered without some political commissar making sure that they are uttering only the "approved" version.

"We cannot expect Canadian scientists to work productively for the greater good at home, or exert Canadian influence abroad, if their work is routinely subordinated to the demands of political messaging," warns PEN Canada's Philip Slayton.

Indeed. Stifle disagreement, sup-press dissent, insist on a political culture of subservient 'yes' men and women in which every comment must first be run through the Politburo's massage parlour and the first victim will be the culture of innovation.

Innovation requires letting ideas out of the corral. Fetter expression and you chain ideas. This means your entrepreneurial genes can't be unleashed.


Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Muzzling+scientists+fetters+innovation/6542139/story.html#ixzz1tcy17E2z

[skaha]

--The only tool I have seen used on a consistant basis, (Fed or Provincial) whenever there is an issue is to shut down the so called Recreational fishery.