"Caved under pressure"

That's the charge of environmentalists, who suggest that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, chose to maintain a commercial gillnet fishery on the Skeena River late last summer despite warnings that the stocks were too weak to survive a concentrated fishing program.

Using documents acquired under the federal Access to Information Act, the Watershed Watch and North Coast Steelhead Alliance groups both expressed concerns over political pressure playing too large a role in stock management on the Skeena River.

In particular, they highlighted the efforts of Prince Rupert Mayor Herb Pond last year as evidence of overt political pressure on the federal fisheries department.

In a press release the two groups claimed that "They had management tools to protect endangered salmon and steelhead populations and they chose not to use them."

They are charges that were denied by local DFO officials who claimed, "that decisions in 2006 were made based on stock availability not political pressure."

The resulting media attention from today's press conference should make for a long summer of 2007 for DFO, who will now be aware that there are many eyes on their work, all seemingly pulling in different directions.

The two environmental groups are calling for an independent investigation into last years fishery, to make sure that the same thing doesn't occur again this year.

The Vancouver Sun had a full report on the story on its website on Monday.

DFO didn't protect fish stock, groups claim (12:02 pm)
By Scott Simpson and Larry Pynn
Vancouver Sun
Monday, June 25, 2007

Fisheries and Oceans Canada "caved under pressure" in 2006 to maintain a commercial gillnet fishery on the Skeena River despite warnings that many of the fish caught in the nets were from populations too weak to withstand a major fishing effort, environmental groups said at a press conference this morning.

Documents obtained by the groups under the federal Access to Information Act, and circulated to the media, suggest that fisheries department biologists on the North Coast had significant concerns about their government's decision to keep a commercial sockeye fishery open in summer 2006.

Before the season began, DFO and other groups including the B.C. Ministry of Environment, agreed that the commercial fishing season for Babine River sockeye would end in early August in order to avoid interception of coho, steelhead and other non-target species.

However, the environmental groups groups say the department buckled under to intense political lobbying to keep the fishery open, rather than hold its ground and protect weaker, non-targeted species.

According to the groups, Watershed Watch and North Coast Steelhead Alliance, DFO more than doubled the number of openings last year compared to the 10-year season average.

The gillnets, if strung end to end, would form an unbroken line from Hope to Vancouver, North Coast Steelhead Alliance spokesman Greg Knox said at a press conference.

"This resulted in excessive by-catch of steelhead and weak salmon stocks and contributed to dangerously low returns to many Skeena tributaries," the groups said in a prepared statement.
One e-mail obtained under the Access to Information Act, written by North Coast biologist Steve Cox-Rogers, attributes the protracted opening to successful lobbying by Prince Rupert Mayor Herb Pond.

"Our mayor flew to Vancouver to get DFO to provide more fishing time and so we ended up fishing a few more days," Cox-Rogers wrote to colleague Dana Atagi on October 11, 2006.
In another, Cox-Rogers says he does not believe the department can muster any technical information to demonstrate that it met its commitments to protect steelhead, which are the basis for a multimillion dollar sports fishery encompassing several tributary rivers to the Skeena.

"The real issue for me is that we said we would fish selectively to minimize harvest impacts on non-target species and we caved under pressure," Cox-Rogers wrote to Atagi.

The documents also reveal that gillnet fishermen chose to ignore DFO's recommendations that they gently handle, revive and release the steelhead, coho and other non-targeted species they intercepted during the sockeye fishery.

Instead, Cox-Rogers reported, none of the boats were using the "revival boxes" where non-target fish are kept in order to resuscitate them before release.

"In fact, all of the fishermen I spoke to expressed little desire to participate in reviving steelhead or coho and were just throwing them back dead or alive as they hit the boat."
He also noted that compliance with a recommendation that the gillnetters use weed lines, which keep the nets at depths where steelhead usually do not swim during migration, was "very low to non-existent."

"We think these documents show DFO mangers put politics ahead of science in making critical management decisions," Watershed Watch executive director Craig Orr said in a press release."They had management tools to protect endangered salmon and steelhead populations and they chose not to use them."David Einarson, area chief of resource management for federal fisheries, denied conservation groups' accusations, arguing from Prince Rupert that decisions in 2006 were made based on stock availability not political pressure.

The commercial gillnet fleet received more fishing time because the summer sockeye run, 90 per cent of which is headed to Babine Lake, had increased to three million from an anticipated 1.7 million and because the fish were proportionately younger than expected and boats were having more trouble catching them.

He said the commercial catch reached its target of 32 per cent of the sockeye run, as it did for the steelhead catch at 24 per cent -- a figure set by user groups years ago.

The fleet would have caught more of the weaker stocks in 2006, he said, but the catch did not pose a conservation concern. Steve Cox-Rogers, a stock assessment biologist, suggested in an e-mail obtained under FOI legislation that DFO "caved under pressure" -- which Einarson described as a personal opinion not based on fact.