Salmon stocks not threatened

Protests against Aboriginal fisheries unfounded

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Ottawa's Aboriginal Fisheries Strategy has not decimated West Coast salmon stocks as some non-Native commercial fishermen had predicted, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans reported.

This year's run of cheam and sockeye salmon were the largest since 1913, when a rock slide in the Fraser valley almost wiped out several species of Pacific salmon, said DFO director of Aboriginal fisheries Paul Kariya.

"The facts speak for themselves. There were more spawners on the spawning grounds last year for all the runs of sockeye salmon than had been on those spawning grounds in the last 70 years."

Increased river patrols by Native fisheries officers and adherence to the international Pacific salmon agreement, which limits at-sea catches of Fraser River salmon, helped preserve current levels of stock, he said.

The Fisheries Survival Coalition, a group composed primarily of non-Native commercial fishermen, has been at odds with the DFO over the Aboriginal fishery since the season opened in June.

The coalition is concerned that the creation of a separate Aboriginal fishery, in combination with the already-existing Native commercial fishery, unfairly limits the quotas for non-Natives, said spokesman Phil Eidsvik.

"What we're saying is that if you're going to fish and sell your fish for money, you should have no priority to another commercial fishery. And the DFO gave it a priority."

This was the second year that Ottawa's Aboriginal fishing strategy, which permits Natives without commercial licenses to sell some of the so-called "right-based" food fish, fish ordinarily caught for social and ceremonial use.

The term "right-based" relates to the Supreme Court of Canada's1990 decision on the Sparrow case, which confirmed Aboriginals' rights to fish, at least for food, ceremonial and social reasons, whether they signed treaties or not.

The size of this year's run was the result of the DFO's enforcement policies, which delayed and then kept the commercial fisheries from the stocks, Eidsvik said. The size of the run this year did not make up for any delays caused to commercial fishermen.

Thirty-five per cent of the commercial fishery is already Aboriginal, Eidsvik said, so that Aboriginal Fisheries Strategy further skews catch quotas in favor of Natives.

Eidsvik could not estimate the financial impact of the strategy for 1993 but he did say it was "far in excess" of last year.

"It's in the tens-of-millions of dollars."

Better co-operation between non-Native catch monitors and the Aboriginal fisheries guardians, who had the authority to take nets from the water, also kept this year's runs from being over-fished, said Kariya.

"It was a good year in terms of run size."

Prices this year were, however, "terrible," he said, due in part to a decision by four major processors to stop buying sockeye and pink salmon and an increase in the total number of salmon on the market.