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The following transcript is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. Link to Audio and Episode Info Here
Show Transcript Deconstructing Dinner Kootenay Co-op Radio CJLY Nelson, B.C. Canada May 31, 2007 Salmon
Wars: The Battle for the West Coast Salmon Fishery Producer/Host: Jon Steinman Transcript: Carol Elliott Voice
1: For me, the reason we should be deconstructing our
dinner is because our food is inescapably tied into a globalized and
industrialized food system with very few exceptions. Voice
2: Our connection with the rural fifteen per cent of
the population that is growing the food has been disconnected and a lot of the
urban areas don't really know where their food comes from. Jon Steinman: And welcome to Deconstructing Dinner, a
weekly one-hour guide to more educated eating. This program is produced at
Kootenay Co-op Radio in Nelson, British Columbia and is heard on radio stations
around the world and through our weekly Podcast. I'm Jon Steinman. As is
the starting point for much of the content of this program, Canadians and North
Americans as a whole are disconnected from where our food comes from. This is a
recurring remark made here on Deconstructing Dinner, but no where is this
closer to the truth than when looking at how disconnected we have become to the
food that we consume from our oceans, from our lakes, our rivers, our streams.
The visual loss of where our food originates does exist on land:
most dairy cattle, pigs and chickens never see the light of day, nor do we see
them; grain crops are grown as far away from where people live as possible; and
the majority of the foods on our grocery store shelves contain ingredients that
did not even originate anywhere near this country. But in the case of our food
from the sea, only a fraction of the Canadian population lives by the ocean,
and those who do are only exposed to a glistening sheet of water stretching out
to the horizon, oblivious of what lies beneath. When
we think of food from the ocean and think of Canada, it is without doubt our
country's populations of wild salmon that pop into mind. Back in February 2006,
Deconstructing Dinner ran a one-hour feature on the farmed salmon
industry along the coast of British Columbia. We learned of the effects such
industrial aquaculture practices are having on the West Coast stocks of wild
salmon. That broadcast was titled Norway, British Columbia. And
it will be salmon yet again that we will visit with on today's broadcast, but
instead we will learn of the management of Canada's wild salmon
populations and the history of how such an important industry began heading in
the same direction that eventually led to the collapse of the Atlantic cod
fishery. On
the broadcast we will here segments of a presentation by Dennis Brown, author
of the book Salmon Wars: The Battle for the West Coast Salmon Fishery. increase music and fade out Jon Steinman: The featured speaker on today's
Deconstructing Dinner is Dennis Brown. Dennis is a member of a third-generation
fishing family and was born and raised in Vancouver. He was educated at the
University of British Columbia and, in 1980, joined the staff of the United
Fishermen and Allied Workers' Union (the UFAWU), where he worked as the Union's
Fraser Valley organizer dealing primarily with the gillnet and troll fleets. In
1990 he was elected to the post of Business Agent and three years later became
Secretary-Treasurer. In 1996 he was hired as Premier Glen Clark's Special
Advisor on the Pacific Salmon Treaty, and he currently lives in Burnaby,
British Columbia. His
experience within the salmon fishing industry led him to, in 2005,
author the book Salmon Wars: The Battle
for the West Coast Salmon Fishery. The book tackles what is undoubtedly one
of the most confusing and misunderstood segments of our food system, and his
book looks into the history of the West Coast salmon resource, and it exposes
the controversies surrounding the Canada-United States Pacific Salmon Treaty,
and the subsequent Alaska ferry blockade. In September 2005, Dennis spoke at the Vancouver
Public Library where he was recorded by the Necessary Voices Society. He
launched his presentation with a reading of the first chapter of his book
titled "On the Brink of Disaster." The chapter introduces Dennis's father and his
recollection of the events of 1958, when a glut of salmon encouraged the
powerful canning industry to reduce the price paid per pound to fishermen. The
fishermen did not submit to what would essentially be slave wages. Here we
begin to see the similarities between our land-based agricultural system and
that of the open seas, where in one instance farmers in Canada and around the world
are in some of the worst financial positions ever, as the rest of the food
system makes record profits, and where in the case of Canada's fisheries,
fishermen are faced with a very similar scenario. Dennis Brown: Every
story has a beginning and this one starts in 1994, when the West Coast fishing
industry changed forever. That year critics alleged that commercial fishermen
had fished B.C.'s precious salmon stocks to within twelve hours of disaster. And
that year Canadians went to war with the United States of America over Pacific
salmon. But my most vivid memory of that time, however, is
personal. It is of my father, Alan Brown, struggling to loosen a rusty sprocket
from the propeller shaft of his gillnet troller, the Seadeuce. A few days
earlier he had been gillnetting for Fraser River sockeye in Sabine Channel when
the shaft bearings had seized. Now he was desperately trying to fix the damage
so he could get back out fishing. But no matter what he did the sprocket would
not budge. He tried to loosen it by hitting it with a blowtorch and even to weld
a steel bar directly onto the sprocket and lever it with a six ton hydraulic
jack. But that sprocket would not budge. When he was building the boat in his backyard in the
years between 1963 and 1967 he had anticipated engine failure, as all fishermen
do, and created a unique system, a main engine supplemented by an auxiliary
motor, both connected to a single propeller shaft. He designed a heavy
sprocket, over twelve inches in circumference and three inches wide, to fit
onto the shaft. When necessary, the clutch on the main engine could be
disengaged and the more fuel-efficient auxiliary connected to the sprocket
gears by a series of chains would drive the propeller. Now, after many years,
the sprocket had rusted and the shaft could no longer be pulled out for
repairs. That day, August 28th 1994, while he
toiled in the cramped engine room of his boat, I was in Vancouver at a meeting
of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) on behalf of the United Fishermen
and Allied Workers' Union. I was a member of a DFO advisory committee waging an
"aggressive" fishing strategy to force the U.S. to renew the expired annexes of
the Pacific Salmon Treaty. After the meeting I called my father to let him know
the DFO was planning to open the Gulf of Georgia the next day to all commercial
salmon license holders to trawl for sockeye. For decades he had trawled in the
Gulf every year and had commented that it was nice fishing, as if there was
such a thing. But in 1981 the DFO had instituted an area licensing policy that
limited access to only three hundred trollers, and he
had been shut out of the Gulf of Georgia ever since. When my father first began fishing in 1950
commercial fishermen took pride in fishing on a full-time, year round basis,
and he often cursed the moonlighters who came along at the peak of the season
to compete with the bona fide fishermen. In those days anyone could become a
commercial fisherman for all species of fish by simply paying a one dollar license
fee. The lives of bona fide fishermen changed irrevocably when the federal
government began to impose a host of regulations and restrictions to
"modernize" the salmon fishery and make it "efficient" and "rational." Yet, despite this constant meddling, the West Coast
fishery had not become more viable. In fact, ever since the limited-entry
licensing scheme had been introduced in 1969, fishermen had faced a steady
erosion of their fishing privileges. At the same time they had been forced to
fish much harder to get out of debt, which they had incurred because they had
to buy a separate fishing license often worth thousands and thousands of
dollars for virtually every species. Now, for the first time in almost a quarter of a
century, the DFO was about to reverse its habit of restriction, although very
briefly, because the bilateral Pacific Salmon Commission, founded in 1985 to
supervise fisheries in B.C., the Northwestern States and Alaska, had predicted
an enormous build up of late-run sockeye in the Gulf of Georgia over the next
few days. The DFO's decision was
made to satisfy Ottawa's short-term political needs rather than the needs of
the fishermen. But the battalions of experts who try to make commercial fishing
a more economically rational enterprise seldom ever consider it a problem from
the fishermen's point of view. While he worked on his boat that day in 1994, my
father was thinking about the nineteen million salmon forecast to return to the
Fraser River, some of which he would catch the next day if he fixed his
propeller shaft on time. Where would the main schools be concentrated? How
would the tide and the presence of such a large fishing fleet affect their
movement? Each run of Fraser River salmon, which this year
would include the dominant cycle of the famous Adams River run, had its own
unique behaviour. Some runs moved up the river
quickly, others stayed outside the mouth of the river for weeks. Pinks and
other species have two year spawning cycles but sockeye return to spawn in four
and five year cycles, and my father had chased many cycles of Adams River
sockeye during his forty-five year fishing career. He remembered the famous Adams River run of 1958 and
about the canners who had decided to cut the price to the fisherman because
there was such a glut of fish. The UFAWU armed itself with a 90.26 per cent
rejection vote and stood its ground. A strike deadline was set for August 9th
and the canners agreed on August 16th to pay the previous year's
prices, which at that time were twenty-eight cents a pound or better. Then, during the week of August 22nd, the
unexpected happened: millions of sockeye bound for the Fraser River poured
through Johnstone Strait, just north of Campbell
River. In 1958 the forecast for the run had been good but nobody had expected
the bonanza that occurred because of the northern diversion. Despite an
unprecedented fishing effort, millions of Sockeye evaded the commercial fleet
and entered the Gulf of Georgia. Thousands of part-time fishermen joined the
rush for the spoils and the government responded by imposing a series of
license policies that wreaked havoc on the lives of bona fide fishermen, not to
mention the salmon, in the years ahead. By the end of August 1958 the B.C. canneries were
plugged with a massive inventory: 1.8 million cases of canned salmon. So they
were relieved when the DFO imposed a closure throughout most of the month of
September to protect the Adams River sockeye, which normally delay for more
than a month before entering the Fraser. However, before the closure ended, the canners
announced they didn't want to buy any of the millions of surplus sockeye still
milling around in the Gulf of Georgia. James Sinclair, formerly the Federal
Minister of Fisheries and now a spokesman for the Fisheries Association of B.C,
claimed that, "the tail end sockeye are not fit to can" and could only be fed
to "Eskimos and Native Indians." Canners, however, said they would reconsider their
position if the fishermen agreed to cut the price from twenty-eight cents a
pound to seventeen cents a pound. The Union membership refused to accept the
cut and voted to boycott any company paying less than the contract price, which
they had agreed to just in August. In return, the canners called Homer Stevens,
who was the President of the Union at the time, a dictator and imposed a
lockout, and millions of salmon in excess of the spawning goal headed up the
river. But on that day in 1994 my father told me his story
about the 1958 lockout. "That was a tough year," he said. "When the lockout
started, we knew we couldn't fish for the prices the canners wanted. I mean,
how could we? It would have meant working for slave wages. So we swore that we
would never give in, that we would fight until the last man standing, until the
last dog was hung, as we used to say during the war." The hell of it was, though, the canners could afford
to wait it out but a lot of fishermen couldn't. Plenty of guys went broke that
winter. And even though most of the Adams River run was wasted, the company
boys were still driving fancy cars and puffing big cigars. After the canners lockout in 1958 no further fishing
occurred that year. And by mid-October no one was sure how many fish were
headed up the river. The federal Fisheries Department estimated the number to
be as high as four million. Canners claim that more than ten million sockeye
would go to waste and blamed this on the actions of the UFAWU. On October 10th the Union demanded that
the federal Fisheries Minister, Angus MacLean, buy the excess salmon as part of
humanitarian food program. MacLean and the rest of the Ottawa bureaucracy
dodged the issue and the press claimed that the greed of the UFAWU members had
caused the company lockout, which in turn had resulted in an over-escapement on
the spawning grounds. The Union leadership replied on October 24th.
In an editorial in the Fishermen's newspaper, the UFAWU said, "The truth of the
tragic situation is that the Salmon Commission made an error in judging the
number of fish available for spawning - waited too long to clean up the
situation. The canners washed their hands of the responsibility and, in so
doing, broke their signed agreement with the Union. And the federal government
through its Minister of Fisheries refused to help find a solution. In all this
mess, the fishermen and the public were the real victims, and the many
thousands of valuable fish were wasted." On October 30th the International Pacific
Salmon Fisheries Commission met to discuss the large surplus escapement
flooding the spawning grounds, and the Commissioners voted unanimously voted to
install an electric fence at the mouth of the Adams River on Shuswap Lake to ensure the more than 1.7 million prime
quality spawners already in the river were not
disturbed by the massive late arrivals. "This unprecedented action appears
essential if we are to forestall a serious decline in the returning run in
1962," said Canadian Senator Tom Reid, Chairman of the Commission. However, four years later, in the spring of 1962 the
IPSFC announced that "adverse estuarial conditions" in the brood year have
resulted in a poor return for the Adams River. Consequently, in 1962, four
years later when those fish came back, thanks to the lockout, it was a disaster
instead of a record return as in 1958. Eventually the IPSFC was forced to admit
that the "total Adams River escapement in 1962 (the total returned) is not
expected to meet the maximum requirements." But that was 1958 and this was 1994. My father would
either repair the shaft bearings in the next few hours or he would miss the
chance to drop his line for one last time in the Gulf of Georgia. Jon Steinman: And this is Deconstructing Dinner, where
we are listening to Dennis Brown author of the book Salmon Wars: The Battle for the West Coast
Salmon Fishery. In September 2005 Dennis was recorded reading the first
chapter of the book at an event in Vancouver. If you miss any of today's show
it will be archived on our website at cjly.net/deconstructingdinner.
In
this next segment, Dennis Brown continues with the 1994 story of the fish war
with the Americans and how, in that year, the American salmon fishery
over-harvested the Fraser River salmon. The media subsequently reported that
the all-important Adams River salmon run had been destroyed, with so-called
fisheries experts blaming the incident on British Columbia's commercial
fishermen and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. There was no
mention of any American involvement. This event prompted Ottawa in 1996 to cut
the commercial fleet by more than half. As this incident was also on the heels
of the Atlantic cod collapse, the public granted no sympathy for B.C. fishermen
as this was seen by most as an act of greed by the fishermen themselves. Dennis Brown: The
following day more than a thousand trollers were
slated to fish in the Gulf of Georgia at the behest of federal Fisheries
Minister Brian Tobin, who was waging the fish war against the Americans. "Screw it. Let's go home," my father announced. It
was getting dark and the damned sprocket had not budged. I agreed reluctantly.
I had hoped to join him as a deck hand the next day. Instead I attended yet
another meeting at the DFO offices. When I arrived a small group of officials were
already pouring over reams of statistical data. In the chair was Dave Schutz, a quiet-spoken fellow whose job it was to keep to track of all salmon fisheries along the coast. At his
side were Wayne Sato, a Fraser River sockeye specialist, and Bud Graham,
Director of Fisheries Management, and several others. In short order I discovered that the hails from the
troll fishery that morning - August 29th, 1994 - were far below
expectation. Before starting the telephone conference call
with the staff of the Pacific Salmon Commission and the American side of the
Fraser Panel, the Canadian contingent caucus. Given the poor results,
were apprehensive about allowing the Gulf of Georgia troll fishery to continue.
But a Vancouver Island Fisheries manager spoke vociferously over the
speaker-phone against curtailing the net fishery in Johnstone
Strait. "Don't forget, the Gulf of Georgia is a huge bloody area," he cried.
"When those Adams sockeye go deep they are really hard to find, even if there
are over a thousand damned trollers out there." He
also reminded everyone that in 1993 the DFO had underestimated the largest run
of sockeye on that cycle since 1913. So fisheries off
northern Vancouver Island and Johnstone Strait had
been curtailed while millions of surplus sockeye were wasted. When the bilateral conference call began, Jim Woody,
Chief Biologist for the Pacific Salmon Commission, reported a catch of
approximately 111,000 sockeye for the first day of the Canadian troll fishery.
Not a bad catch, but nowhere near what had been expected. The Canadian Fraser Panel concluded that it was best
to close the troll fishery the following day, although the DFO did leave open
the option of fishing again if more sockeye appeared. I agreed with that
decision, but I was also thinking of my old man, staring at that rusty sprocket,
and I was secretly hoping more fish would show up in a day or two. My father, meanwhile, was returning the hydraulic
jack he had rented and learning that the proprietor had mistakenly rented him a
jack with only a fraction of the promised lifting power. My father returned to
his boat with a better jack and gave it one mighty push. The sprocket
screeched, and like some gigantic Jurassic vertebrae it rotated slowly on the
propeller shaft. But unbeknownst to him, however, it was too late.
The fish war of 1994 was already over and his attempt to troll one last time in
the Gulf of Georgia had been foiled. For him an era had ended without ceremony.
But for the West Coast fishery as a whole an era of turmoil had just begun. On August 31st, 1994 the DFO announced
that all Canadian salmon fisheries were closed for the balance of the season
for conservation reasons. At this point DFO managers claimed there were still
enough sockeye left to ensure that optimum escapement targets were met,
assuming that the Americans stopped fishing. However, because of Tobin's
aggressive fishing strategy and the high diversion of the run through Johnstone Strait, the Americans then had poor catches all
season. So now they insisted they would continue to fish until they caught
their rightful share, and the sockeye of the Adams River run, which were still
lying just across the border off Point Roberts, only a few miles from the
river's mouth, were an easy target. U.S. commercial fisheries continued all through the
week ending September 3rd and into the week of September 10th.
Thus, from August 28th onward, the Americans harvested some 736,500
Fraser River sockeye, a catch that made the difference between a reasonable
escapement and a disaster. When the fish finally entered the river at the end
of September, the test fishery revealed that the total 1994 sockeye run was
almost two million less than predicted. This prompted Vancouver Sun reporter Mark Hume to write that the legendary Adams
River sockeye run had been wrecked. A host of so-called fisheries experts, including
John Fraser, claimed that the debacle had been called by "attitudinal anarchy"
of the DFO and a grab-all attitude from B.C.'s commercial fishermen. No mention
was made of the slaughter just across the international boundary line at Point
Roberts. Scores of scientists, independent fisheries experts,
environmentalists, government officials and journalists clamored to have the
commercial fleet slashed. In response, in 1996 Ottawa introduced the Pacific
Salmon fleet restructuring program, generally known as the Mifflin Plan,
followed by the Anderson Plan in 1998. In short order, the fleet was reduced by
more than half. Fishing privileges were concentrated in ever fewer hands, and
coastal communities were thrown into profound turmoil. In another era, the problems facing B.C. fishermen
might have aroused public sympathy, but not now. On the heals of the East Coast
cod collapse, which to many Canadians symbolized the wanton plunder of the
natural environment, the participants were seen as looters, bent on fishing the
last fish. Consequently, saving endangered salmon became a cause célèbre for
the dominant elites and vilification of commercial fishermen an easy substitute
for changing the way society as a whole threatens our salmon resource. Ottawa
claimed that it had acted in the name of conservation but it can be argued that
the subsequent dismantling of the West Coast commercial salmon fishery had more
to do with the interest of powerful fishing companies than the health of the
resource. Reflecting on the plight of commercial fisheries
around the world, as cultural anthropologist James R. McGoodwin
notes, "The major problems in the fisheries today worldwide are not the
biological depletion of fish stocks, economic overcapitalization and so forth.
Rather, they are the deleterious consequences of these very same conditions for
the human participants in the fishery. Many fisheries problems are merely a
small but connected part of the more pervasive problems in the world and
political and economic order." This certainly holds true for the West Coast
fishing industry. Its collapse was caused by government mismanagement but it
was working people, not politicians, who paid the price. And although the
turmoil that ensued was often described as the death rattle of an outmoded
industry, it was in fact symptomatic of a much greater sickness afflicting our
contemporary society. Jon Steinman: And this is Deconstructing Dinner,
produced at Kootenay Co-op Radio in Nelson, British Columbia. That last segment
concluded the reading of Chapter 1 of the book Salmon Wars by author Dennis Brown, the book was released in 2005
by Harbour Publishing. Following
this reading, Dennis fielded a number of questions from the audience, one of
which asked Dennis to describe one particular incident involving B.C. salmon
fishermen at the Cultus Lake salmon run. This
incident suggests one example of why the common argument that wild salmon
stocks were simply overfished is false. The Cultus Lake story further illustrates how our society's
blind pursuit for happiness through outdoor recreation can often be at the
expense of an extremely fragile and well-evolved natural system. Such a pursuit
is also at the expense of a secure food supply, if managed properly. Dennis Brown: I
was a little bit nervous that I would meet somebody tonight, and maybe I will
yet, who will say, "You're a bunch of hooey. You commercial fishermen have been
overfishing the fish and you're to blame." I brought this little chart, which I
made up. I went and did research back to 1948. This is on this year's cycle.
Everybody knows that there is a different cycle of sockeye. And this is sockeye
only, going into the Fraser River. They are in four-year units. This is the famous Horsefly run this year. The
yellow bar is the amount of spawners that go up the
river. They call that the escapement. The blue bar is the return the following
four years that that escapement produced. The red line is what they call the
productivity ratio: the number of adults that returned per number of spawners. And you can see our so-called nefarious commercial fishermen,
who have been "overfishing and fishing the last fish out" over the last fifty
years, managed to build the famous Horsefly run. Incidentally, if I had more
room on this graph I would take it back another forty years. It was down to
(what was it Richard?) about a thousand fish, not from overfishing, from
habitat destruction. I really have to say, because the DFO did not spend the
money, it was out of the fishermen's pockets. It was the only way these runs
were rebuilt. They got it up to twenty-four million in 1993 - fairly recent
history. But, you just heard me read a chapter from my book,
things went haywire in 1994. The politics in the industry changed. All of a sudden
fishermen were the bad guys: "attitudinal anarchy" - you heard the quotes. John
Fraser and all these experts said we need more fish in the spawning grounds. No
more irresponsible overfishing. And so the runs, the escapements, started to go
up. In this run, the Horsefly run is so tiny you
couldn't even put it on this graph. It would be probably less than .001 per
cent of this run. It's a stock of about, in a good year, four or five thousand
fish; in a poor year, two or three hundred fish. It's one tiny lake at the
bottom of the river system. And in the cycle year of 2001, a
record of five-and-a-half million sockeye were put on the spawning
grounds. People like Richard Nomura, who is a Fraser River gillnetter here
tonight, didn't fish, didn't overfish, didn't fish at
all to put those fish up. And low and behold the run is not coming back. Do I know? Do I have a biology degree? No. Do I know
why? But all I can say to you is, when you hear the story about overfishing,
don't buy it. It's not true. Now, let me just go back to the Cultus,
and I hope I'm not jumping around too illogically here. The Cultus
stock has been depressed for decades. The reason why it's depressed is -
everybody knows what Cultus Lake is - it is a
recreational paradise. The Cultus stock is very
unique among sockeye because it doesn't spawn in rivers: it's what is known as
a lake spawner. Some species of sockeye are unique that
way. There are four places in Cultus Lake where the
sockeye have been known to spawn. Two of those spawning grounds are dead; two
are remaining. In one of those two there is a marina built right over the
adjacent spawning bed. And into that lake, every single day of the year, flows
huge amounts of phosphates, huge amounts of chemicals. There is what the scientists term - I learned this big word the other day - eutrophication happening in that fresh water. There are
people discharging their septic tanks there. There are people roaring around in
speedboats. There are people having a wonderful time not even knowing that
those fish are in that lake. In the last thirty years, the recreational boaters
brought in Eurasian milfoil, a famous weed that grows in our freshwater lakes,
and it has taken over the lake. And it happens to grow very well in those
spawning beds where the salmon used to spawn. To add to that problem is a fish called the pikeminnow, which lives in the weeds. And I think everybody
here knows, because you are all from B.C., that sockeye are unique as salmon
because they live a whole year in freshwater, unlike the other species. So
these little baby sockeye that are swimming around for a year, they are being
chased by the pikeminnow and they are getting wiped
out. So let me just backtrack to 1990 - not that long
ago. A group of commercial fisherman, not the government and, so far as I know,
nobody at an environmental foundation or anything like that, went in and they got
some boats and some nets and they had a program to clean up the pikeminnow. I have read, and I can show anybody that's
interested, biologists' reports that showed that when they cleaned up the
predator fish the return, or the survival, in freshwater of the Cultus Lake stock dramatically rose. Now when I say
dramatically, if you only have three hundred and you get six hundred that's a
big increase. But still, it's not big numbers but it's profoundly important. So what has happened this year, or in the last
couple of years? The provincial government is responsible for freshwater
habitat. In my book, if you care to buy it and read it, there are all kinds of
references to budget cuts and habitat programs that have been cut. The provincial
government slashed the milfoil cleanup program for Cultus
Lake and made a thirty thousand dollar budget cut. Thirty thousand dollars a
year is all it costs. They cut the program, and they turn around and say to the
federal government, "You look after the Cultus
stock." Close a multi-million dollar commercial fishery on huge surpluses of
fish, impoverish Coastal communities. But we are going to cut that program. And
by the way, it's all in the aid of the Cultus. So what do the poor fishermen do? They stepped up to
the plate again, the Area E fishermen's group. And they said, "We'll take our
boats and we'll go in there with our labour, and
we'll even put money in." Believe it or not, these bad guys were prepared to
put up ten grand - which may not seem a lot to some people but it is a lot to
unemployed fishermen - if the government would match the money (the two
governments), and go in there and clean up the pikeminnow.
And the government said no. Every day you are treated in the news to the
terrible plight of the Cultus. I want to make it
clear, I'm not standing up here making short shrift out of the plague of the Cultus, and neither is Richard or anybody else. We're
onside. But what I am really angry about is that the government is so
hypocritical and lies to you people about what they are doing and how they
doing such a wonderful job. We are now seeing some of our strongest runs, I
argue, collapsing because they are not being harvested anymore. Large, excess
numbers of spawners are going into the spawning
grounds, just like in 1958, and the lakes cannot feed them. The brood stock,
which goes out the following year - on this run we are seeing some of the smallest
smolts in history. They went out into a marine
environment where there are all kinds of hazards which nobody knows about, but
in that state they were threatened. All I hear these days is, "It's the fishermen. It's
the fishermen." I even heard somebody that I used to have a lot of respect for,
and I better stop here, a very senior member of the environmental community,
calling for those fishermen to be thrown in jail, just the other day. And
that's not good enough. We have got to pull together - fishermen,
environmentalists, the public - and save these fish, and stop blaming the wrong
people. Jon Steinman: And this is Deconstructing Dinner and today's broadcast titled Salmon
Wars: The Battle for the West Coast Salmon Fishery. The show provides a
window into a common food source of Canadians that most of us know very little
about. Much
of the information contained within the book titled Salmon Wars is so shocking that learning how poorly managed our
country's wild salmon has been, both historically and today, can mark an easy
entry into a more encompassing understanding of how poorly managed much of our
country's food supply is. Author
Dennis Brown spent three years working in the Office of the Premier of British
Columbia, where he observed first hand how a resource he understood all too
well was managed by those who knew very little. When we return after this short
musical intermission, Dennis will share his thoughts on the mismanagement of
such an important Canadian resource. Song - "Salmon Song," by Good Dog, from
the album Tunes From the Tides (Indy) You
get a line and I'll get a pole, honey You
get a line and I'll get a pole, babe You
get a line and I'll get a pole We'll
go down to the salmon hole Honey,
baby mine Honey,
baby mine Wake
up little kid Don't
sleep too late, honey Wake
up little kid Don't
sleep too late, babe Wake
up little kid, don't sleep too late There's
salmon in the bay today Honey,
baby mine Yonder
comes a man with fish on his back, honey Yonder
comes a man with a fish on his back, babe Yonder
comes a man with a fish on his back Come
on, let's go, get out of the sack Honey,
baby mine You
get a line and I'll get a pole, honey You
get a line and I'll get a pole, babe You
get a line and I'll get a pole We'll
go down to the salmon hole Honey,
baby mine Honey,
baby mine [instrumental] Jon Steinman: And that was the "Salmon Song" from the
album Tunes From the Tides, a release by the Alaskan
musical duo known as Good Dog. The album features eleven original songs geared
towards children, all of which are inspired by the marine environment. On
today's broadcast of Deconstructing Dinner we are listening to segments from an
event recorded in September 2005 in Vancouver, British Columbia. In that same
year, Burnaby's Dennis Brown released his book Salmon Wars: The Battle for the West Coast
Salmon Fishery. The book explores the management of the province's wild
salmon stocks in both a historical and current context, and in this next
segment from the event, he shares his thoughts following his experience working
for three years as an advisor within the Office of the then Premier Glen Clark.
Dennis Brown: Working in the Premier's Office
as I did, and I mention this in the book, I never ever succumbed to the belief
that I was part of the political process. I was a working class guy who worked
his way up in the union and got that job because of who I represented. But I
never had any illusion that I was really part of the elites that run the
government. And I
will be quite honest with you: it was the shock of a lifetime simply to see
first hand how our society is run by unelected bureaucrats - and the power they
have - and the relative impotence of elected politicians, and the profound way
in which society hurtles along - we think we live in a democracy - and how
little we as people are actually affecting that process. That's
my person feeling. I worked there for over four years, and I was quite
disturbed by the lack of accountability: that isn't just a reflection of the
NDP government, which I was working for, I believe it
runs right across the board. So it was unpleasant for me. Aboriginal
issues are a hugely controversial, painfully controversial issue in the fishing
industry and they are a major problem facing our society. I personally am a
very strong supporter of Aboriginal rights. And I believe very strongly that
our society must settle Aboriginal claims honourably.
But I am not going to berate you with my opinions on it. I will only make this
observation: the antinomies within the fishing industry are particular and
unique around this question. I will
only say this to the extent that it is true: Aboriginal people have harvested
fish since the beginning of human settlement in this continent, and they have a
special relationship with those fish, and they have a very special claim to a
portion of those fish. The way in which our society, and the
elites of our society, have pitted other working class people who depend
on those fish and caused divisions along racial lines is truly an irresponsible
and reprehensible disaster. All
too often, though, I hear people saying, "What's the matter with those
commercial fishermen? Why are they so anti-native?" Or, "Why are they racist?"
I will speak from the bottom of my heart: in the fishermen that I know, I have
yet to meet genuine racists in the fishing industry. What I have met are people
who are under constant threat, constant insecurity in the position in the
investment that they have in the industry. And when I say investment, not just
financial - it is their whole life. And a
very, very poor handling of the Aboriginal question, to this extent: in no
other sector in the Canadian society or economy is, first of all, Aboriginal
First Nation's participation as great as it is in the West Coast fishery - no
where else - and yet, ironically, no where else in society is that particular
industrial sector expected to pay such a hugely disproportionate price in the
settlement, which every single one of us Canadian citizens owe to those people.
And if there is a reason why there is so much friction, it's that simple fact. Every
fisherman that I know has said, "We support Aboriginal rights. We support their
special - what the legal people call suis
generis - rights to have fish for food. But we have difficulty when somebody
comes along and arbitrarily takes a share of a finite resource for whatever
reason, well-intentioned or not, and says, ‘We are settling one social problem
over here but we are going to leave you, the victims, without proper compensation.'"
And I won't bore you tonight, but I could, if I was pressed, talk about the
absolute hypocrisy of the government's so-called compensation. You have got a
recipe for disaster. And
so I say that with the greatest deference to the fact that Aboriginal people
need justice in this society. I have only vocalized my personal view, that
working class commercial fishermen should not pay any greater price than any
other person in Canada. Jon Steinman: As the question and answer period
continued, Dennis Brown was asked about the technological innovations in
fishing salmon and what impact such technology has on wild salmon stocks. He
was also asked how the role of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (the DFO)
has changed. Dennis Brown: There
are no trollers operating on salmon in this province.
There is quite a debate about the methods of trolling, although they even have
done quite a bit to change their technology. But let me just give you an example of the most
efficient type of fishing for salmon on this coast, which is the seine fleet.
Everybody knows from their school books the seiners have a larger boat. They
have usually a crew of five or six. They circle around with a great big net and
they then close the bottom of that net and anything in that circle is caught,
unlike what Richard does with the gillnet, which is snares the fish by the
gills in a smaller boat and a smaller net. Before the Mifflin Plan, when seiners used to go out
fishing - they're pretty big boats. My book describes the whole growth of the
seine fleet, which I believe was overly large because it was corporate
dominated compared to the small fishery, but that's another story. When a
skipper set a seine net in a place like Johnstone
Strait or in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, they set the net, then they'd put out
a skiff, and they'd go and either tie up to the beach or tie up to a boat or a
skiff. They would circle around with a great big, powerful boat and very
quickly close it up; then, with a very strong, powerful hydraulic drum wrap that
net in. What would happen would be at the end of the set a big bag of fish - if
there is any amount of fish - would get hauled up. In latter days they actually
changed the design of the seine boats so that they had tilt sterns that would
go down into the water and lift the bag of fish up and flip it up. Then they
would release that bag, and the deck would flow with fish. And then, while the
skipper ran back to go make another set, his crew would be shovelling
the fish down into the hatch. They would go and make another set fifteen
minutes later. That's how long that would take. Now, when they make a set, they have to stop at the
end of the set. When it's closed, they have to slowly bring the net in. They
have to take what is called a brailer and they have
to dip out any species, like coho or any bi-catch
non-target species, and carefully release them. But the point I am making,
though, is that even though these are grossly over-capitalized vessels, the way
the fisheries are now managed, their technology and their power is greatly
curbed because of all these regulations. As to what are the DFO doing, I have no idea but
I'll make one observation about some of the people I know in the DFO. Twenty
years ago, the cadre of managers in the DFO used to pride themselves on getting
fisheries going, protecting stocks, walking creeks, making sure habitat wasn't
being damaged. Some of them used to live in remote coastal communities and in
remote coastal inlets, like Rivers Inlet and places like that. They used to walk
the streams. Now almost all of the fisheries officers are in urban
areas or centralized communities. Increasingly, more and more of them are bound
to their desks doing paper work. They don't have the fuel to put in their
trucks and their boats. I have gone through Freedom of Information files and
seen all the memos on this. They have witnessed massive cuts, by more than half
of their former enforcement and habitat protection budgets. An increasing
number of the old guard which used to know about how you get fisheries going -
they'd fly by the seat of their pants, some of them - are retiring, and there
is a new cadre of DFO people which tend - and I don't mean to be unfair - to be
inexperienced in managing fisheries and quite reluctant to have fisheries for
fear that something will go wrong. I don't think that is what we need a DFO
for. I make this point and they don't like it, but if we
are going to go down the road we are at now, where there is not going to be any
fishing any more and runs that are harvestable, I don't know why we are paying
people $150,000 dollars a year to sit in offices and stare at computers. We
might as well just say, "Close the Fisheries Department down." Now, that's kind of a demagogic statement but it's
not far off the truth, because unless they are going to actually deliver
fisheries and provide food and provide jobs, I wonder what their role is. They
can't solely be to just save the fish as wild icons. And here's my reason why I
say that: because if that is all we do with these fish, let me warn you, the
fish are doomed. Because when nobody cares about them because their jobs depend
on them, there won't be anybody there cares when the logging damages them, or
the pollution goes into the stream, or when the predators.... so there's
something to be said. Some very, very profoundly influential thinkers that
I mention in this book, like Parzival Copes and others, have tied the whole notion of ecological sustainability
to social community equity. I think we need to swing a little bit of the
hard-line preservationism a little bit more back to
the fact that humans count in the system. Jon Steinman: Dennis Brown's book Salmon Wars is very critical of the management of Canada's West
Coast salmon fishery, and he was presented with one
very important question, and that was, "Are there any examples of management
systems that actually work well?" And here was his response. Dennis Brown: I
wish you wouldn't ask me that, because I have to admit something that I hate,
because if you read this book you'll see that I am not a big fan of Alaska,
because they steal a lot of our fish. But if you want to find a place where the fishery
works as good as you're ever going to find anywhere in the world - you are
going to make me spit it out - it's Alaska. And you know why? Because there are
seven hundred thousand people living in Alaska, and, except for a little bit of
oil up wherever they get it, most of the people in Alaska depend on the
fishery. As much as I hate their right-wing Republican government, or whatever,
those politicians go, "If we don't look after the fishermen we don't have any base."
They have a policy that I think is absolutely
terrific. I mention it in this book: it's called owner-operator policy. The
only people that can have a boat or a license in Alaska are people who actually
fish and people that are actually small-scale harvesters. The other thing they did, which is absolutely
astounding, aside from the fact that they live in a relatively wild state
compared to even B.C. or at least the Lower Mainland, is they built
community-based hatcheries, where they actually said, "We are going to generate
fish here and we are going to let you people get the benefits." Is it perfect? No. I know the David Suzuki
Foundation a few years ago put out a book a few years ago that I eagerly read
called Fisheries That Work. I was
rather disappointed at the end of it because I don't think that there is any
fishery anywhere in the world that works perfectly. But I think that's about as
close, and it's close to what we have in the way of similar types of boats,
people and fish. The only thing is we are luckier than Alaska
because, despite the fact that they have huge runs, they only have a couple of
species of salmon. They have pink salmon and they have chum salmon. Some
sockeye, but nowhere near the numbers we have. And they don't have the chinooks that we have. So we have actually a more diverse
salmon base but we don't get the same kind of returns. And Alaska was very
fiercely possessive of its right to manage the fishery, whereas in our context
the federal government runs the fishery. Some of you will not have been there but I went
there many times: there is a building in Kent Street in the middle of Ottawa,
and there is a thousand people working in that building, and there is not an
ocean for a thousand miles. And you go, "What are all these...?" These aren't
worker bees: these are slick Deputies and Assistant Deputies, and they have all
got assistants, and they are in the upper elite. You really have to wonder how
you can run a fishery back in Ottawa in B.C. - you can't. Jon Steinman: And this is Deconstructing Dinner, where
we are listening to segments from the question and answer period at an event
featuring Dennis Brown, author of the book Salmon
Wars: The Battle for the West Coast Salmon Fishery. In
this next segment, Dennis responds to a question asking how he would
suggest the DFO go about managing wild salmon stocks effectively. Dennis Brown: First thing I would do is I
would end this despicable, penurious right-wing neo-Conservative ideology that
says that everything that governments do has got to be cut down to the bone.
You know the rest of it. That's the first place to start. DFO
was slashed in half during the Tory budget-cutting era. And guess what? They
didn't slash Kent Street, as I just mentioned. They slashed the guys that
walked the Joaquina Lake system. They slashed the
guys that used to go out in the dead of night and catch poachers. They slashed
the people that used to sail out into the mid-Pacific to study temperature
gradients and what was going with the ocean. The guys with the suitcases and
the big shots survived. So the first thing that I would do is restore the DFO's funding. The
next thing I would do, and I mention this at length in this book, is I would
restore the salmon enhancement program, which was one of the finest examples of
- and I am not ashamed of this term - "social engineering" in the history of
this country, because it did two things, for what was approximately only two
hundred million spent over I think it was seven years. It created vast amounts
of fish - hugely productive returns in terms of the amount of money spent. I
think I heard the best cost-benefit analysis was $1.70 for every dollar spent:
if you can find me a mutual fund that returns that I want to know where it is.
The second thing is they took salmon enhancement into little kids' classrooms.
They raised little salmon and most died. But they raised salmon and those
little kids got to know those fish, and they walked down and they released
those fish into the water. And they started bugging their parents saying,
"Don't put paint down the ...." You know the rest of the story. That is what I
call a cultured society's approach to a problem. What
did they do? They've cut salmon enhancement to the bone. The only money that's
left for salmon enhancement now is to run a few of the hatcheries that are left
and keep the pumps turning. So that will be the first thing I would do. The
second thing I would do is re-think the whole notion - and this book is thick
with political economy - about these right-wing ideologists like Peter Pearse, who suggest that the way you develop a fishery is
to let the free market figure out who should fish. I don't think that's right,
because what that's going to get you in the long-run is big corporations, and
they may not even be Jimmy Patterson, who is on his last legs - a Canadian
fishing company - but it may be ... for all I know, the Republic of China could
walk in here, and for small change for them, buy out every single fish in our
Coast. I
say, go down to the thing that the Alaskans do, which is to say the people that
harvest the fish be the first people to get it. It should be the people that
live in the Coastal communities first. You should not be able to do something
that I mention in this book, which is to sit on the beach and rent out a
license - some of them are individuals, many of them
are companies - at luxurious rates, charging the people that do go out and fish
rentier-style charges, and then not turn a wheel. So
that's a fishing licensing policy. Jon Steinman: And that was Dennis Brown, author of the
book Salmon Wars, released in 2005 by
Harbour Publishing. Today's recording is courtesy of
the Vancouver-based Necessary Voices Society, who recorded Dennis speaking at
an event held in September 2005. You
can learn more about the Necessary Voices Society on their website at
necessaryvoices.org, and today's broadcast will also be archived on the
Deconstructing Dinner website at cjly.net/deconstructingdinner,
where more information on today's topic will also be located. In
closing out the show today, I'll leave you with these final words by author
Dennis Brown. Dennis Brown: There is just an alarming loss
of both freshwater and marine environment habitat in this province, and every
one of us is responsible for it. We are all driving cars. We are all living in
cities and suburbs. None of us can get high and mighty here and look down on
the fishermen. We're all part of it. And so if we don't do those things we will
not have salmon in the future. But I will tell you this: I am willing to stake
my name on this - it won't be over-fishing that will finish them off. ending theme And that was this week's edition of
Deconstructing Dinner, produced and recorded at Nelson, British Columbia's
Kootenay Co-op Radio. I've been your host Jon Steinman. I thank my technical
assistant John Ryan. The theme music for Deconstructing Dinner
is courtesy of Nelson-area resident Adham Shaikh. This
radio program is provided free of charge to campus/community radio stations
across the country, and relies on the financial support from you the listener. Support for the program can be donated
through our website at cjly.net/deconstructingdinner
or by dialing 250-352-9600. Till next week.
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