The Conservative government’s announcement of $10 million over two years to fish or conservation groups has a local society wondering how or if it’ll get any of it, and an NDP MP suspicious.
“They’re trying to appear that they’re doing something,” said Fin Donnelly, MP for New Westminster-Coquitlam.
“The Conservative government should be focused on preventing habitat damage. Instead, they have gutted the Fisheries Act, specifically habitat protection,” and asking volunteers to repair the damage.
The federal government has yet to show any sign of following last year’s Cohen Commission inquiry into missing Fraser River sockeye salmon, he added.
In his 2012 report, The Uncertain Future of Fraser River Sockeye, Justice Bruce Cohen warned that further cuts to Fisheries and Oceans Canada threaten B.C.’s sockeye. His key finding was that more research was needed.
Cohen said changes the Conservatives made in 2012 to the Fisheries Act that removed habitat protection were “troubling.”
The report found no single cause to the declining sockeye stocks, which plunged in 2009, triggering the formation of the report.
“There hasn’t been one single public announcement on one of those recommendations,” Donnelly said.
Fisheries parliamentary secretary and local MP Randy Kamp announced the Recreational Fisheries Conservation Partnerships Program last week.
The program allots $10 million over two years to local groups that take on fisheries restoration projects.
“Local people, on the ground can protect and conserve fisheries and habitat better and more efficiently than any government,” Kamp said. “These are people who know what needs to be done and who have the will and drive to do it.”
Donnelly said the government is cutting millions from enforcement and removed habitat protection from the Fisheries Act. Now it’s asking volunteer groups to pitch in and fix the damage caused to the environment.
The habitat protection office is “crippled to the bone,” he added.
Donnelly said it’s good to find efficiencies in government, but that the government has already cut $100 million from the department in the past six years and has plans to do more.
“When you’re cutting that deep, you’re cutting into services.” Habitat protection offices no longer can do their job, staff morale is low as they try not to speak out.
“They’re really struggling.”
He said over the next three years, Fisheries and Oceans Canada will take even more cuts making it one of the most hardest hit ministries, because the government sees the Fisheries Act as an impediment to getting oil tankers off B.C.’s coast.
Pacific Salmon Foundation CEO Brian Riddell “commended” the government for the program.
“Our community partners have now undertaken over 2,000 projects and demonstrated a highly successful business plan where every dollar from the foundation is leveraged several times.
“Their success in these partnerships enabled us to return 100 per cent of the Recreational Conservation stamp to B.C. in the 2013 federal budget and now provides a model for the new federal funds.”
The foundation’s mission is to restore salmon runs, “stream by stream through the strategic use of resources where local communities are mobilized.”
Four million will be allocated in the first year and $6 million in the second.
There’s a long shot that the money could help the Alouette River Management Society with its major project of the decade.
“We’re reviewing that to see if it will fit for the fish ladder,” said society president Geoff Clayton.
ARMS is trying to make case to have a fishway built beside the Alouette dam so that salmon and trout can reach their historical spawning grounds in Alouette Lake.
The fishway would be only about 12 metres and ring in at about $3 million.
Clayton said his group would have only three weeks to prepare an application.
Clayton would like to form partnerships with possibly the Pacific Salmon Foundation.
But staff at Fisheries don’t seem to be aware of the criteria for awarding the money.
Kamp’s constituency assistant Blair Kesteven though said the short time period was because the money was just freed when the 2013 budget was approved.
“There will be a longer time period for the second period.”
The emphasis is on local improvements but doesn’t have to be matching, but only half can be government money.