The Fisher Queen (25 page)

As the Industrial Revolution erupted in England, the BC fish-canning industry was launched in 1871 by Alexander Ewen to feed the masses of hungry factory workers. Thirty thousand one-pound tin cans were hand-soldered and hand-filled with 2,000 sockeye in 300 cases. Nine years later, 42,000 cases were shipped; just one year later, over 120,000 cases. Sockeye were prized over other salmon species, even the magnificent spring salmon, because of their superior quality for canning. Pulling in up to a thousand fish at a time, the fishers tossed everything but sockeye, considering the other fish garbage and not worth hauling, and left a trail of dead salmon behind them as they rowed to shore.

Canneries admitted to discarding up to 3,000 fish plus guts and offal into the tidal waters at the mouth of the Fraser River every day, which many people saw as the cause of typhus epidemics that raged through the fledgling city of Vancouver and outlying villages.

By 1900 there were more than 1,000 canneries on the BC coast, employing mostly Native and Chinese workers. By 1913 cannery-employed multi-national fishers (Scandinavians, Greeks, Italians, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Chileans and Hawaiians) used hand-pulled linen nets or handlines from 20-foot rowing skiffs. Each dawn they went out and pulled in the massive catches that sent 2.3 million cases of salmon around the world in 1900. A fisher earned $2.25 for a 12-hour shift and a rower earned $1.00; a crude tent slung across the bow and a cut-down oilcan stove was their only comfort.

But early one August morning in 1913, a catastrophic event in the Fraser Canyon destroyed 75 percent of the sockeye run and decimated the industry for the next 80 years. Some say forever. As Canadian Northern Railway crews blasted tunnels through the canyon, a rockslide sent 76,000 cubic metres of debris into the Fraser River at Hells Gate and narrowed the river into a destructive torrent. Millions of sockeye were wiped out in one of the biggest environmental disasters in BC history. Only by the heroic efforts of First Nations people with dip nets and baskets carrying live fish upstream over the slippery rocks and of federal fisheries officers frantically dredging and building wooden box flumes were a few thousand sockeye saved. The Fraser did not bear salmon again until the Hells Gate Fishways opened in 1945.

In 1917 Canada and the United States formed the International Pacific Fisheries Commission to improve salmon runs to spawning beds—in some cases, hundreds of miles inland. Over the years, this joint commission has built fishways—artificial channel systems of low steps (or ladders) that help salmon through the difficult sections of the Fraser River system—at Yale, Hells Gate and Bridge River Rapids. In 1941 only 1,100 fish reached the spawning beds in the BC Interior Quesnel Lake system; by 1973 the number had increased to over 250,000 fish, and in 1981 to over 800,000. But 30 years of significant scientific planning and several years of construction still have not completely repaired the damage done a century ago.

By the early 1920s, gasoline-powered trollers with multiple lines from V-shaped trolling poles began to appear, and in the 1930s, holds were filled with ice to allow for trips of several days farther offshore. By the 1960s, freezing systems extended trips even further. By the 1980s the BC troll fleet consisted of 1,600 freezer, ice and day boats. However, by the year 2000, the fleet was downsized to 544 boats as part of a government buyback and licensing scheme.

When the first reports of salmon-stock depletion on the BC coast filtered back to Ottawa in the 1880s, federal fisheries responded to environmental and resource concerns. They made fishing licences mandatory in 1894, and made trap nets and purse seines illegal. That decision was rescinded a few years later under pressure from fishers in competition with lower-cost American producers. Native weirs had already been banned and land claims pushed to the back burner, leaving many First Nations disgruntled. Canneries were lobbying for more power. Fishers and cannery workers were striking and forming unions. Dissension among fishers grew as various factions of net fishers and hook fishers saw each other as market competitors.

The stage was set for decades of escalating tensions and conflict, as user groups demanded their voices be heard and their share be given. Commercial sport fishing, fish farming, international fishing rights, industrial pollutants, habitat destruction and environmental and climatic change have turned the industry into a many-headed Hydra. Each user group loudly defends itself while blaming others for dwindling stocks, accusing each other of greed and mismanagement. What makes management even more complex is that salmon are migratory, moving through Canadian, American, Russian and Japanese waters. In response, the 1985 Canada–United States Pacific Salmon Treaty and the 1992 North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission
treaty signed by Japan, Canada, Russia and
the United States were created to manage collective research and eliminate destructive practices like high-seas drift nets and trafficking of illegally caught salmon.

The Canadian government, through its Department of Fisheries and Oceans, now known as Fisheries and Oceans Canada, has answered these challenges primarily through licensing and regulations, environmental measures and salmon-enhancement programs. Regulations regarding season length, timed openings, gear and area restrictions, quotas, non-retention and allocation limits extend to all gear types (hook, net and drag).

Unfortunately, each group often feels it is being unfairly burdened with regulations and therefore lobbies for leniency, as trollers did after being restricted to a four- to six-week annual season and increasingly reduced fishing areas.

Beginning as a school project in North Vancouver, the extensive federally funded Salmon Enhancement Program was launched in the late 1970s to support recreational and commercial fisheries and to rebuild depressed stocks. Despite 19 BC hatcheries producing and releasing an average of 485 million salmon fry and smolts, only a small fraction of them, about one percent, returned to spawn. Whether the high mortality rates are from industrial pollutants, disturbed spawning grounds, rising ocean temperatures, unreported over-fishing, diseases and parasites from farmed fish or a combination of all of these is still unclear.

The rise of the commercial sport fishery, which is seen by other user groups as the sexy fishery and the darling of the regulators, is a relatively modern phenomenon. Not to be confused with the personal recreational sport, where folks catch a fish or two for their own table, these major commercial ventures range from exclusive lodges to small charter boat operators who cater to a largely well-heeled crowd seeking adventure holidays.

It was completely unregulated until 1951, when a daily limit came into effect, and personal sport fishing licences came 30 years later. In an industry still largely unregulated and run by volunteers, sport fishermen are now required to purchase an annual licence and adhere to catch limits. Boat totals are reported by the honour system, though many people believe that commercial sports operations should be as closely regulated as commercial fisheries.

Some sources say sport fishers take only three percent of the annual take, but others, especially commercial fishers, say that number is grossly inaccurate, and stories of illegally caught, canned, frozen and sold fish run rampant. Sport fishers are also not required to adhere to any closures or other restrictions, giving them priority access to springs and coho and protecting the fishery from changes in abundance.

Seen as a key element in BC's recreational and commercial well-being, commercial sports operations are significantly tied to the tourist industry. In the 1960s sport fishers began to organize to protect their interests and created the Fishing Advisory Board, which now represents the interests of several hundred thousand anglers and business owners.

By far the most controversial and volatile issue on the BC coast is fish farming. The answer to world hunger to some people, environmental holocaust to others, fish farming has generated immense reactions from all sides.

Fish farms began appearing in the late 1970s; in 2012 there are 130 operations in BC. Located in protected inlets and bays, the farms provide millions of pounds of salmon to a growing middle class around the world that appreciates salmon's health benefits and delicious taste. Unaffected by weather and seas, migration cycles and predators, grown-to-order fish are available throughout the year.

After a moratorium on new fish farms from 1985 to 2002 in order to study their environmental impacts, fish farming has become the province's largest agricultural export, outstripping any other industry and projected to contribute a billion dollars to the province's GDP by 2020. Fish farmers insist this is the only way to take the pressure off the wild stocks and create a viable mass-produced food product.

With commercial fishing, sport fishing and salmon farming each bringing in approximately $300 to $350 million per year in the early 2000s, anti–fish farm protesters argue that employment figures are significantly higher for sport and commercial fishing, at nearly 4,000 jobs compared to approximately 1,500 jobs for fish farming, and without the attendant environmental risk. And that does not include nature-based tourism, of which salmon is a part, coming in at nearly $7 billion and over 120,000 jobs.

At the same time, other marine-related sectors and environmental agencies have voiced significant concern over such issues as contamination of wild stock as they swim by the farm cages, contamination of waters by concentrated fecal matter and uneaten food, use of other fish in the feed pellets, and escape of farmed Atlantic salmon into wild Pacific stock. The greatest concern is the impact on young smolts and fry that are too fragile to survive sea lice and disease.

And so the argument rages on.

Annual catches and fishers' incomes have roller coastered for the last 100 years. Following the devastating aftermath of the Hells Gate rockslide, annual catches slowly increased to a high point of 93,210 tons in 1936. A gradual decline followed, then numbers began to reverse again in the late 1970s, with annual salmon catches reaching historic high levels of 107,500 tons in 1985. From that peak, catches fell rapidly to a historic low of 17,000 tons in 1999, totals that bumped up only marginally in the early 2000s.

Since the late 1990s, severe restrictions have almost eliminated commercial coho fishing and seriously reduced spring salmon harvests to less than two percent of total catch. Restrictions have been based on an extraordinary decline in what used to be considered junk fish only a hundred years before, with the burden falling on commercial fishers. Numerous sources claim the extraordinary decline is due to increasingly unfavourable ocean conditions—mostly to do with rising temperatures and acid levels—resulting in far fewer salmon returning to spawn.

But humans are a resourceful species, hard-wired for ingenuity and survival. From this marine crisis comes new awareness and innovative approaches. Often in partnership, fishers, government and ecologists are searching for solutions, from bar-coding to Frankenfish.

Concerned with mounting ecological issues and dramatically decreasing catches, a group of commercial ling cod and salmon troller fishers on Vancouver Island approached Ecotrust Canada to collaborate on a tracking system that would encourage sustainable fishing practices. In May 2010, Thisfish, the world's first consumer-focused seafood tracking system, was launched, bringing fishers, organizations, businesses and consumers together in an open communication system through bar codes and the Internet.

Designed to help consumers and businesses make more informed choices in support of sustainable fishing practices and quality seafood, Thisfish now includes several other BC fish and seafood species and the Atlantic lobster fishery, and there are plans for expansion to shellfish.

When the fish or seafood is caught, it's tagged and given a Thisfish.info code that is uploaded to a website where the fisher enters information about catch-date, gear-type, location and even the crew. Consumers don't just ensure the freshness of their dinner, they also have an opportunity to connect with the fishers, person-to-person.

Thisfish is also partnering with conservation groups who act as watchdogs for bad fishing practices. Similar to Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch program that has a smartphone app to rate the ocean-friendliness of seafoods as Best Choice, Good Alternative or Avoid, Thisfish publishes the eco-ratings of Seafood Watch, the Marine Stewardship Council, SeaChoice and Ocean Wise, and links to government websites.

Currently almost 300 fishing vessels are tracking their catch at Thisfish.info and codes for over five million pounds of seafood have been uploaded. As of April 2012, 130 fishing vessels in the salmon, halibut, ling cod, sablefish, sockeye and prawn fisheries in BC have participated, with more than 125 Atlantic lobster vessels and nearly 150,000 lobsters traced. Coded products have been distributed to 540 cities in 23 countries around the world.

Studies in Canada and the United States also claim that commercial salmon-trolling practices have the lowest impacts on salmon stocks and the marine environment. Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch has also identified trolling as an environmentally responsible fishing method. Non-targeted fish are quickly and easily removed from the barbless hooks. Selective gear also increases survival rate. The slow pace and personal handling of fish ensure the highest-quality salmon for the marketplace.

The Vancouver Aquarium Ocean Wise seafood conservation program educates and supports consumers to make sustainable, ocean-friendly buying decisions. From suppliers to markets to restaurants to educational institutions, Ocean Wise currently has over 450 members and partners in almost 3,000 locations. Over 90 fish and seafood types are identified on its website oceanwise.ca and rated for sustainability. Overfishing is cited as the greatest threat to marine ecology, with harvests doubling from the 1970s to approximately 130 million tonnes every year. Consumers are urged to purchase only seafood bearing the Ocean Wise logo, whether from menus or through distributors.