Posted on Facebook, April 26, 2025, by R. S. Hooton

Posted on Facebook, April 26, 2025, by R. S. Hooton

Over the past year I have authored several social media pieces concerning a serious misappropriation of Canadian taxpayer dollars through a fund known as the BC Salmon Restoration and Innovation Fund (BCSRIF). My focus has been the the project advanced by an American organization (the Duvall, Washington based Wild Fish Conservancy) that involved an initial allocation of $2.27M for construction of a “pound trap” patterned after its project on the Columbia River. That project amounts to an ongoing demonstration (now 8 or 9 years) that it is possible to capture salmon and steelhead and release them alive and healthy. Somehow the WFC convinced the adjudicators of the BCSRIF they could develop a similar operation on the lower Skeena River and demonstrate its efficacy in terms of replacing indiscriminate mixed stock harvesting practices (i.e. gill nets) long standard in the Skeena approaches. Any notion that the proposed operation could begin to address harvest of a single, dominant, enhanced sockeye salmon stock (Babine spawning channel production) while eliminating (or even reducing) pressure on numerous impoverished wild salmon and steelhead stocks is pure deception.

Those unfamiliar with the WFC’s Columbia River pound trap project are invited to check the following link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLaNNgbeS34&list=PLEIL8GB2O2FSNBKFUS7UA8CbPGRCBpOHX&index=5

This was one of many presentations at a selective fisheries forum sponsored by the BC Wildlife Federation in March of 2019. Fast forward another six years. Columbia River fisheries management is unaltered in response to anything the WFC has done before or since. Is that a model to be duplicated on the Skeena courtesy Canadian taxpayers?

Apart from the unanswerable fish related questions inherent in the WFC’s Skeena undertakings, it somehow escaped the BCSRIF adjudicators there were insurmountable physical obstacles to duplicating the Columbia experience on the Skeena. The former is a very manageable flow-controlled system. The latter is a highly volatile natural flow regime that does not lend itself to a trap operation that could begin to replace practices and procedures that have been in place for more than six decades. The social implications of eliminating the substantial numbers of First Nations commercial fishers with a single trap constitute another major red flag that shows no evidence of ever being considered.

The WFC project was never referred to either the federal (Department of Fisheries and Oceans) or the provincial (now the Ministry of Water Land and Resource Stewardship) fisheries management authorities before or since its inception. The permit to install and operate the required works still hasn’t been issued by the appropriate federal authority (Transport Canada).

All of the above has been the root of numerous personal inquiries to the principals involved, namely the administrator of the BCSRIF program (Shane Petersen, a DFO employee) and the reigning authorities within the WFC (Executive Director Emma Helverson and Special Projects Director Kurt Beardslee). Deafening silence prevailed. Before abandoning my efforts entirely, I thought it worth one last attempt, so I sent the following message to Mr. Petersen on March 27, 2025 (please forgive the duplication of some of the above):

I’ve been trying to stay abreast of developments with respect to the BCSRIF allocations to the Wild Fish Conservancy. I hope you appreciate how difficult that is for a taxpaying member of the Canadian public. Items I would appreciate your response to are outlined below. 

1. How much of the announced $2.21M that was granted to the WFC as the project lead for the pound trap that was supposed to have been installed and operational in 2024 was spent? Are budget expenditures ever audited and, if so, by whom? If not, why not?
2. Presumably there is an obligation for the project lead to provide a report to BCSRIF for every project every year. Can you please share with me the report for 2024?
3. I note that neither federal nor provincial fisheries management agencies were ever involved in any aspect of the 2024 undertakings. Whatever objectives may have been identified by the WFC were never shared with either of the two governments. How is it that BCSRIF would allocate such a large sum on the basis of no review or involvement by the professionals whose mandate is to manage publicly owned fisheries resources?
4. The permits required to install the works initially intended for the pound trap site(s) were never even applied for in 2024. For 2025 I see (Mar 22) there is a very different fish capturing apparatus now proposed for installation. However, once again, no permit has been issued. In fact, an application is under review as we speak. The closing date for public comment to Transport Canada adjudicators is April 26. How can any expenditures be authorized when it is still uncertain what comments might be forthcoming and how TC may view and incorporate them?
5. Attached to the Mar 22 material describing WFC’s intent for 2025/26 I see a number of objectives, none of which can be considered deliverable according to the loosely described methods involved. For example, somehow the WFC’s trap is going to calibrate DFO’s 65 yr test fishery data base. I reminded proponents several years ago it would take 5-10 years of highly successful operation of a trap before there was any legitimate data to compare. DFO’s test fishery is conducted by drift netting which can be conducted during all but the most extreme river flows. A fixed station trap would be inoperable for extended periods of high water when the DFO net was fully operational. 
6. I see WFC is proposing to radio tag 600 fish and monitor their health and survival for months afterward. Does BCSRIF have the slightest concept of what that would entail, other than inordinate expenditures for tid bits of anecdotal observations that would do nothing to improve management? Does BCSRIF understand the 200 steelhead it proposes to involve in a radio telemetry undertaking will not spawn until well after the 2025/26 funding allocation is supposed to expire?
7. WFC has never acknowledged (if it even understands) that the primary motivation for DFO’s ongoing restraint of the commercial gill net fishery (which is comprised of a majority of First Nations fishers opposed to being replaced by any trap) is the conservation status of wild Skeena sockeye whose status is seriously depressed due to decades of mixed stock fishing for enhanced sockeye originating from spawning channels on Babine Lake. Those wild stocks include Kitwanga, Morice and all the once prolific stocks originating from Babine Lake tributaries. There are numerous other less well-known wild stocks that could also be included. How is it that a trap at the mouth of the Skeena, even if successful beyond the wildest imaginings of its proponents, is going to facilitate separating enhanced sockeye from wild sockeye? After the fact DNA analyses will add substantially to costs but not to data applicable to management measures, other than outright closures to all fishing.
8. The Transport Canada application now under consideration notes:  “The Province has decided to go forward with a 2-year license of occupation instead of a longer-term lease. It’s possible that after the two years an application for the permanent fish trap may emerge.” This fits with the perception many of us non-participants share that the WFC is doing everything possible to create a project that will last for many years, presumably with more financial support expected from Canadian taxpayers. One only has to glance at the objectives WFC describes in the information it sent to TC to appreciate how it is positioning itself for a long-term undertaking. Does BCSRIF understand that the Columbia pound trap that has been at the root of WFC’s sales pitch has been around for 8 or 9 years and has yet to replace any gill nets in the Columbia? Does BSSRIF appreciate the major physical differences between the lake like environment WFC operates in on the Columbia and the dynamic free flowing Skeena? Did BCSRIF ever look at the Skeena hydrograph for 2024 to appreciate that it might be throwing good money after bad by sanctioning/financing WFC’s intended 2025 project?
9. Does BCSRIF have any concerns with respect to providing millions of Canadian taxpayer dollars to an American organization that apparently bears no responsibility for providing any report on how it spent our money? Does this not seem unacceptable under normal circumstances, let alone given the unprecedented trade war circumstances now in the forefront? 

I could go on at length with observations and questions surrounding other BCSRIF supported projects Shane. Not the least of those is the Campbell River pound trap that was supposed to see $1.1M funnelled through the BCSRIF last fiscal. I’ll save that for another day. For now, I’d be satisfied with timely information on the items listed above.

Thank you.

There are countless fisheries resource issues in BC that command attention by taxpayer funded professionals paid to manage publicly owned fisheries resources. We should not be lining the pockets of an opportunistic foreign organization as some form of surrogate. Needless to say, the issues surrounding tariffs and President Trump’s stated intent to destroy the Canadian economy and annex us as the 51^st state have poisoned relationships between our respective countries. If it wasn’t highly objectionable that Canadians were sending millions of our tax dollars to an American organization, for indefensible undertakings, before President Trump arrived, consider what that looks like today. At the very least, all WFC’s BC based activities should be subject to an immediate freeze on all Canadian government contributions and a thorough, independent audit.