The federal government's fight to save the West Coast's dwindling salmon stocks is run from a glistening 18-storey office tower in the heart of Vancouver's financial district, where, despite a $250-million budget and the best work of more than 2,000 employees, the battle is being lost.
On the shores of Vancouver Island's Great Central Lake, in a clearing they hacked out of the forest by hand, Bruce Kenny and Carol Schmitt think they know why British Columbia is losing that fight and is having some of its worst salmon returns in history.
And they say they know how to fix it: by adopting a model perfected by the aquaculture industry, which has learned to grow its young fish more slowly during the first year. The approach relies on producing fewer, but healthier, salmon that have a vastly improved chance of surviving in the ocean environment.
“We truly believe the first brick in the wall was wrong when DFO built its hatchery program. We should correct this,” said Mr. Kenny, commenting on the Department of Fisheries and Oceans 32-year-old strategy for bringing back salmon runs.
DFO's Pacific Region has many responsibilities, but the protection of B.C.'s salmon resource is paramount. In recognition of that, DFO launched a special hatchery-based project in 1977, known as the Salmonid Enhancement Program. SEP's goal: to double B.C.'s salmon stocks.
SEP releases more than 400 million juvenile salmon each year, from 23 major and about 300 small hatcheries. It has an annual budget of about $26-million and is supported by 10,000 community volunteers. It has had some tremendous successes (as recently as 1996, SEP helped boost the Skeena River sockeye runs to record levels), but the trend for B.C. has been steadily downward for most of the decade.
Carol Schmitt holds a tray of precious salmon eggs at the Omega Pacific Hatchery in Central Lake near Port Alberni.
The crisis was brought into sharp focus on the Fraser River this fall, when the sockeye run collapsed so completely that on Thursday Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced a judicial inquiry to find out what went wrong.
But the problem is bigger than the Fraser. It is coast-wide and it raises the question: Why has B.C.'s salmon catch fallen from over 30,000 tonnes in 1998 to only 5,000 tonnes last year?
Many blame the ocean, saying shifts in temperature and nutrient levels have resulted in extreme mortality rates.
But according to Mr. Kenny, who with his business partner, Ms. Schmitt, runs a private hatchery, a big part of the problem is that DFO's enhancement program is out of sync with nature.
“Look at it this way,” Ms. Schmitt said as she fussed over trays of salmon eggs at the Omega Pacific Hatchery, near Port Alberni. “When DFO releases its smolts in the spring, 60 per cent will be dead within four months. That's not good.”
Mr. Kenny lives over the Omega hatchery incubation room, where he wakes to the sound of 1,200 gallons a minute of cold mountain water running through tanks that contain tens of thousands of tiny chinook salmon eggs. He and Ms. Schmitt, whose home is next door, live and breathe salmon, and they learned the hard way about the challenges fish face.
“If there's one thing I don't ever want to see again, it's a dead salmon,” Mr. Kenny said.
When he and Ms. Schmitt began their hatchery 30 years ago, growing small salmon for the fish-farming industry then just emerging on the West Coast, they regularly experienced horrific die-offs when smolts were moved from freshwater tanks to ocean pens.
They were working with chinook eggs provided by a DFO facility and were producing fish the same way SEP was. They moved the young fish from fresh to saltwater when they were about eight months old – at a stage known as S-0, for smolts-zero.
But unlike DFO, which loses track of its smolts once they are released, Omega kept all its fish in pens – and they got to see what happened next.
