Experts await details on feds’ new strategy for B.C. salmon

As a teenager, Murray Ned was accustomed to fishing for salmon three days a week all year round on the Fraser River in southwestern British Columbia.

As a teenager, Murray Ned was accustomed to fishing for salmon three days a week all year round on the Fraser River in southwestern British Columbia.

Three decades later, the longtime Sumas First Nation councillor and member of the joint U.S.-Canadian Pacific Salmon Commission said he expects salmon fisheries on the river will have opened for a total 25 days or less for the entire year.

Salmon are in crisis, he said, while Indigenous, commercial and recreational fishers await details on the federal government’s latest plan to recover plummeting stocks.

“We’re literally losing our food security, but also our cultural security and integrity and connection to the Fraser River and the salmon species that go along with it,” Ned, who’s also the executive director of the Lower Fraser Fisheries Alliance.

“The ability to transfer knowledge to youth from elders … we’re losing that every day that we’re not able to be on the river.”

Complete data on salmon that returned to their spawning streams this year is not yet available, but Fisheries and Oceans has said many stocks are declining to “historic lows” due to the impacts of climate change, habitat loss and other threats.

In the last budget, Ottawa pledged close to $650 million over five years for the Pacific Salmon Strategy Initiative unveiled in June, but few details have been released about how the money would be spent on salmon recovery plans.

Ned said he sees the salmon strategy initiative as “a black hole right now.”