West Coast Salmon vanish - again.

I signed the petition.

British Columbia doesn't need a toxic waste incinerator...

I know Kamloops has hit a bit of a slump but industry like that in such a rich ecological area should be banned...

Thank you for signing Gio...Please let all of your friends know.

This is a beautiful area of the province and the economy is not that bad that we need this. Heck! no one needs this at any price.

City Council basically told the BC govt and the Aboriginal Cogeneration Corp. to stick it! There was standing room only of citizens opposed to this project at council. No one but the govt. official and the pres. of this company was in favour.

City Council did not even know about the project until a concerned citizen brought it to their attention. The BC Libs were trying to ram this through in secret and they still can as they have all the rights to our air!

This company has never taken on such a project before and there is no precedent for this technology in the world. Kamloops will be used as a "guinea pig". Even without toxins, Kamloops airshed cannot support any more particulate matter. We have a wood mill here with a huge stack to take the smoke away yet it can remain stuck in the valley here for days/weeks in the winter during the inversions.

Anyone who has visited or lives or has lived in our fair city should sign this petition...please!

I personally feel that other than the environmental reasons for the problem, another to take a serious look at is the illegal fishing on both sides of the fence (Commercial, private and Native) for the decline IMO.

reply to post by QBSneak000


"Each summer, B.C.-based military aircraft designed for anti-submarine warfare search the North Pacific for a type of fishnet that strip-mines the sea.

From May to October, surveillance planes from Canada, Japan, Russia and the U.S. search that immense body of water for illegal drift nets.

Drift-net boat crews put out the banned nets at dusk and pull them in after dawn, to try to avoid being seen from the eyes in the sky above them.

The nets - some as long as 40 kilometres - are an efficient but indiscriminate way to remove target and non-target fish during those six months, when the North Pacific's frigid waters are warmest and fish populations peak.

Depleted stocks of salmon in North America and Asia aren't the only victims. In the 1980s, before the General Assembly of the United Nations prohibited drift nets, some scientists estimated the webbed curtains of death were killing tens of thousands of marine mammals and perhaps a million birds in the world's oceans each year. "

BC Drift Nets

It's good to see that the international community is doing these patrols...
By the sounds of your post though... the local greedy fishermen and dodgy natives are still using nets and depleting our stocks...

Even though I started this post in doom and gloom. its good to hear soe reassuring words fro the boys in BC who are on the ground and actually see some healthy numbers of salmon.


*edit to add link





[edit on 10-9-2009 by GioTheGreek]

I live live with in walking distance of the Sacramento river. I personally never saw a decline in them and always thought it was a scare tactic. When they are spawning you can literally walk in the shallow areas and reach in a grab them with your hands.

reply to post by calstorm


What would they have to gain from using these scare tactics?

Driving the price of salmon up?

Reducing the amount of licenses given out?

Increasing the market price of salmon?

Having lived in California all my life and having been a forest ecologist who was also an avid fisherman, the study of salmon has been a forte of mine.


The key causes of the decline / collapse of the salmon fisheries are, in order of importance/relevance:

1) Dams.

2) Over-harvesting of timber in the salmon watersheds, causing siltation of the salmon spawning creeks and the smothering of salmon eggs.

3) Overfishing in the oceans of salmon stock from commercial fishermen.

4) Climate change in the oceans.


The California salmon fishery collapsed 20 years ago, not recently. It's my understanding that the larger, dammed rivers in BC are suffering huge declines in the salmon that had been going up the larger rivers, but that the smaller mid-sized to the small rivers still are chock-full of salmon.


And the draw of the still-existing salmon fishery is one key reason why I want to move to BC next year. I finally went to Canada this year and I totally loved it, so I do plan to move there as soon as I can.

Shoppers will only find fresh sockeye salmon in stores for a few more days and should expect shortages and higher prices in the frozen food aisle this winter, fishmongers are predicting.

Sockeye prices to jump

Now there's some concern that this may have impacted the grizzly population.

B.C. to count bears after report their numbers dwindling

The BC govt doesn't think there's a problem but then again, the BC govt doesn't have a problem with fish farms in migration paths either.

You're not doing enough Gail!!!

The Honourable Gail Shea
Minister of Fisheries and Oceans

Egmont (Prince Edward Island)

Gail Shea was first elected to the House of Commons in 2008.

Prior to her election to the House of Commons, Ms. Shea was a member of the Legislative Assembly of Prince Edward Island. She was first elected in April 2000 and was appointed to the provincial cabinet as Minister of Community and Cultural Affairs where she was responsible for the Status of Women, the Worker’s Compensation Board and the Island Waste Management Corporation. From 2002 to 2007, Ms. Shea served as Minister of Transportation and Public Works.

Prior to entering politics, Ms. Shea managed a small family business for 15 years.

Ms. Shea has long been active in her community. She served as vice-president and treasurer of Royal Canadian Legion Branch #6. She has also served as a school trustee and former president of the local Home and School Association. Ms. Shea’s long record of volunteerism includes involvement in her local community festival, sports teams and church. A passionate advocate for seniors, she has also run a tax preparation program for seniors.

Ms. Shea is married to Russell and has five children and seven grandchildren.

What in the hell does this woman know about fisheries and oceans...?

“It's kind of hard to tell what is happening here,” Ms. Shea said in an interview. “Some are higher, some are lower than forecast,” she said. “Some runs are very healthy, so it is hard to point to any one thing as the cause of sockeye not returning.”

Yeah Gail... it is hard to tell, but like others have pointed out, these Atlantic Salmon farms on the west coast need to close asap.

Grand Chief Doug Kelly, co-chair of the First Nations Fisheries Council, said in an interview after the meeting that he told the Minister that the Fraser River sockeye salmon fishery was on the verge of extinction. He urged her to respond to the “crisis” by holding an international summit on salmon to look for answers. The Minister did not respond, Chief Kelly said. “I felt ignored. I'm not sure if she heard me or not,” he said.

What a shame...

And as Duzey posted before me... the bear is in trouble.

More bad news for the bear.

How does it affect the food chain if the mighty bear dies off? Surely it can't be good.

Reports from conservationists, salmon-stream walkers and ecotourism guides all along British Columbia's wild central coast indicate a collapse of salmon runs has triggered widespread death from starvation of black and grizzly bears. Those guides are on the front lines of what they say is an unfolding ecological disaster that is so new that it has not been documented by biologists.

[edit on 12-9-2009 by GioTheGreek]

reply to post by GioTheGreek


Shea is nothing but a pimp for the (mostly) Norwegian fish farms. While we were watching the run collapse, she was in Norway trying to convince them to build more farms here.

The DFO is completely ignoring their mandate to protect the wild stocks and are pretending they are Industry Canada. They are fools, idiots and incompetents. That's me being generous because the only other option is they know exactly what they are doing and just don't care.

The BS letter Shea is sending out to defend her dept (pdf file):

www.adopt-a-fry.org...

She's says all the salmon are down and that's simply not true. The only runs that are down/collapsing are the ones that migrate through the fish farms. So simple a five year old could make the connection yet both federal and provincial govts deny, deny, deny. Morons.