Fishing for answers

Katherine Palmer Gordon
November 2009
Focus Magazine

As many as 11 million sockeye salmon were expected to return to the Fraser River and its tributaries this fall but actual returns may number in the thousands. Critics of DFO say federal fisheries couldn’t manage a home aquarium. DFO says they’re being treated unfairly.

DFO is an agency that couldn’t manage a home aquarium,” says former DFO communications officer Alex Rose. Now a journalist in Vancouver, Rose is not alone in his criticism of his former employer. There is a damning consensus among those involved with BC’s wild salmon fishery that DFO mismanagement is exacerbating the rapid decline of wild salmon numbers in our waters.

DFO has been doing an abysmal job of fisheries management,” says commercial fisheries advocate Phil Eidsvik. Biologist Alexandra Morton, who has devoted the last 15 years to battling both DFO and the provincial government about the negative impacts of fish farms on wild salmon, agrees: “DFO ignores the science, misinforms the public, offers unconfirmed theories and takes no action.” Retired fisheries scientists Gordon Hartman and Casey McAllister add: “DFO’s performance during the past 25 years is lamentable.”

Read the full article in Focus Magazine. Note that article is copyright of Katherine Palmer Gordon and not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without prior written permission.

Read background stories on the collapse of the Fraser River sockeye