John Nightingale and Scott Vaughan, in their op-ed on marine protected areas in the Times Colonist on Feb. 10, called for increased numbers of such areas, protecting habitat and breeding grounds and eliminating fisheries.
Answer: There is much to be said for MPAs, but most people who call for them aren’t aware of what the current situation is. In the ’70s to ’80s, commercial bottom fishing “serially depleted” rockfish stocks from Juan de Fuca through Georgia Strait and out Johnstone Strait and then moved on. These 37 species are slow to reach sexual maturity, and the Sport Fish Advisory Board began asking DFO to set aside Rockfish Conservation Areas for the same purpose as MPAs.
The SFAB asked for RCAs for 13 years until the DFO committed to doing something. The 20 individual boards started drawing up RCAs to set aside 30 per cent of such habitat. The reason sport people know these spots is they are on the water all the time. Our local SFAB drew up RCAs from roughly Border Bank to past Sooke. To give just one example, I have fly fished for lingcod off Trial Island, and so I drew the closed area that, along with all the rest, were signed off with DFO as closed zones and so now operate. So there are loads of RCAs along the coast already.
As for protecting habitat and breeding grounds, when we talk about salmon, we are talking about protecting riverine areas a kilometre to 1,500 kilometres from the ocean. Salmon breed in freshwater far removed from the ocean, so there is no protection if freshwater habitat is not part of the bargain. A salmon run that cannot spawn, is extinct in the snap of a finger. Evidence of this is declining salmon numbers, even though there are dozens of saltwater RCAs.
DFO needs to change its mind set of only ratcheting down saltwater fishing, particularly as four of the five species are only here two months of the year as they pass through. Chinook are available 12 months of the year, and rivers like the Cowichan need drastically increased enhancement and spawning habitat work to increase their numbers. And DFO ignores things like gravel extraction in the lower Fraser that killed three million pink salmon.
The Cowichan is about 3,500 chinook when it should be 12- to 15-thousand with a high of 25. Admittedly, there is some excellent restoration work: the back channelling of the Taylor is nothing short of genius, but take a walk down the Harris to the San Juan and weep — see a kilometre wide logging-damage gravel pit. This should be eliminated by cabling logs to shoot the gravel and silt out the river mouth.
It makes no sense to allow salmon to die on spawning beds with no water, high temp water because trees have been removed, and lack of meaningful enhancement across our province. The MPA suggestion simply allows DFO to keep on doing what it has always been doing: working salmon numbers down to nothing, and then all the orca’s die when the salmon are extinct. The pitiful number of 6,000 wild Chinook spawners from the San Juan to Quatsino Sound should be seen as a national calamity. Freshwater habitat must be part of the equation or MPAs/RCAs will never achieve anything other than salmon numbers spiralling to zero.
