Thursday, April 13, 2006

Interior Fraser coho salmon abandoned

Cowardly act kills species

By terry glavin

Although it once thrived, the Interior Fraser coho may soon be forced out of the world’s fast-dwindling inventory of living things. Ernest Keeley photo.

Although it once thrived, the Interior Fraser coho may soon be forced out of the world’s fast-dwindling inventory of living things. Ernest Keeley photo.

This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but with decisions. The decision that this column is about is buried deep within a 6,916-word “regulatory impact analysis statement”, a document with the misleading title “Northern Bottlenose Whale (Scotian shelf) and Channel Darter Protected Under the Species at Risk Act”. It appeared quite suddenly on an obscure federal public-registry Web site, at the very end of the business day in Ottawa, on Friday, April 7.

What was hidden in that document was Ottawa’s decision to withhold the protection of the Species at Risk Act (SARA) from a critically endangered species known as the Interior Fraser coho salmon.

Read the full story in the Georgia Straight.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I have been reading accounts of how Federal Fisheries, by its various names over the years, has failed to protect or maintain fish since the 1960s. Why should anyone be shocked, surprised, alarmed, or, most phoney of all, :"saddened" by more of this in 2006.
Federal Fisheries slippery evasion of its apparent duties is legion. They will study ways to make fish fatter while not noticing the 24 pulp mills in BC (fewer now) on whose efffluent millions of fish have choked. They will fool around with hatchery design while igrnoring commercial practices which exhaust the fish stocks. They will bemoan the fate of this or that fish in public meetings, posturing as protectors, while either not showing up to give evidence when it counts, or giving evidence which quite suddenly and surprising fails to support the same accounts of fish in danger they formerly peddled. And they will be discovered, belatedly as being involved and executing bureaucratic steps which reveal the department as concerned with facilitating the destruction of one fish population after another. Writing off fish populations is their true speciality.

Fisheries is a substantial fraud and should be disbanded. It is a true waste of tax money.