Fraser sockeye being hung out to dry by politicians
By CRAIG ORR AND STAN PROBOSZCZ, Vancouver Sun December 27, 2011 Comment 0 •Story•Photos ( 1 )
Salmon must swim a gauntlet of indifference and lax protection measures.With all respect to a certain cinematic frog, it’s tough being a Fraser River sockeye, judging by masses of evidence and testimony tendered over the past two years at the Cohen Commission Inquiry into the Decline of Fraser River Sockeye. There’s little doubt: Sockeye face a tough existence, and unless things change, their future — and ours — will be far less rich. Sockeye are plagued by a lack of food, lax pollution standards, ineffective habitat protection efforts, archaic water laws, harmful hydro impacts, unjustified riverbed mining, a “modernized” Fisheries Act, illegal fishing, subpar catch monitoring, and debilitating climate change. Unlucky Oncorhynchus nerka must also swim a gauntlet of non-selective nets, predators, toxic algae blooms, and pathogen-bearing fish farms — all for an increasingly slim chance to spawn and die.
If these stresses weren’t troubling enough, the federal review of Fraser sockeye woes recently reopened to testimony about positive tests for the infectious salmon anemia virus (ISAv) in wild and farmed salmon. Indeed, despite vigorous government assurances to the contrary, compelling evidence suggests this virus has been here for some time. Governments’ reaction to the news — and to leaks that they had known of a possible virus for nearly a decade — prompts one to fear that wild salmon ranked disturbingly low on their list of priorities.
Reaction to reports of a virus associated with salmon farms predictably meant strident denial among Canada’s regulators, followed by something more insidious. Governments seemed less inclined to act on disease and public concerns, and more intent on firing back at the scientists who reported ISAv positives. Judge Bruce Cohen was told scientists felt “intimidated,” “attacked,” and “alienated.” Samples were seized, methods publicly questioned, labs audited. Fisheries ministers unleashed media releases chastising highly accredited academics for “reckless behaviour” and “unsound science.” Directives streamed forth from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency considering banning labs from further testing of samples collected by mere private citizens. That’s government’s job, claimed CFIA, though no government testing will happen until a disease surveillance plan is initiated, hopefully sometime in 2012. And heaven (and government) forbid anyone reporting “presumptive positives;” we must consider the international trade implications — and less so the risk to salmon.
At the core of the Cohen inquiry is the integrity of government in protecting both wild salmon and the public interest. Enough evidence was tabled to portray a Department of Fisheries and Oceans caught unfairly between conflicting mandates of simultaneously promoting industrial interests, and protecting wild salmon. Indeed, sockeye-coloured flags were raised when Cohen learned government offers up big bucks to aquaculture advocacy groups, while simultaneously Scrooging fisheries management, enforcement, and good science (like the DFO’s own fisheries scientist Kristi Miller’s). And epitaphs seem more appropriate for Canada’s progressive Wild Salmon Policy, left to fend for itself with political indifference and a lump of coal.
For keen observers of DFO and government in general, none of this surprises. The myriad details revealed in the inquiry are new though, and they paint what may be the master rendering of the current dysfunctional landscape. Like elsewhere, our governments are seemingly “captured” by industrial interests. According to British Columbia’s own Buzz Holling, the guru of adaptive management, both sockeye and those responsible for sockeye have consequently lost resilience and become “accidents waiting to happen.” In human systems, the debilitating situation is manifested by narrow interests, attempts to tightly control messaging and messengers, and a near singular drive for cost and organizational efficiency. Though the actors may change, Holling’s work suggests sockeye fit a remarkably robust pattern that he ominously calls “resource management pathology.”
Fraser River sockeye are, simply put, our own home-brewed case of resource management pathology. For those who value wild salmon and the democratic process, the current regime is in need of a major overhaul. The crisis with sockeye, and in public confidence in government, has opened up a rare opportunity for reform. The inquiry itself, especially the report due in June, can help lay a much-needed blueprint for positive change.
But it will mean government embracing, not ignoring, the outcome. More transparency. Resolving conflicting mandates. Depoliticizing science. Less kowtowing to industrial interests. More fisheries management and independent science capacity. Favouring long-term planning over narrow short-term interests. Promoting land-based farming. Less robbing of the future. Honouring the wild salmon policy.
Such a reform would stand apart as a lasting legacy, and serve as a welcome relief for Canadians forced for too long to bear witness to the constant fumbling of the political football that sockeye have come to represent.
Craig Orr is executive director and Stan Proboszcz fisheries biologist with the Watershed Watch Salmon Society, one of the member groups of the Conservation Coalition represented at the Cohn inquiry by Ecojustice.
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