Prince Rupert Council to provide letter of Support on UFAWU call for action on fishery escapement issue

Councillor Barry Cunningham spoke with strong support towards a 
request for a letter from City Council in support of a UFAWU concern 
on the issue of fish escapement plans

City Council members stepped into always churning waters of fishery issues on the North Coast at their Monday evening Council Session, approving a request to provide a letter of support towards a concern. on escapement issues from UFAWU-Unifor.

The item was a late addition to the Agenda on Monday, so there's no text in the Agenda package to go with the request, leaving it to Mayor Herb Pond to outline the scope of the request for support.

"It was a specific request, the issue has died down just a little bit, this letter isn't the best part of what I could have put in front of you ... it came from UFAWU, particularly concerned on there are discussions around reducing, rather  increasing salmon escapement up river by as much as 600,000 fish, which would have a very damaging effect on local fisheries. 

So there's a specific request that we write to several of the parties, I'll just read you if you don't mind just very quickly what the request is."

"That we write to, Northern Panel Co-chairs, Canadian commissioners asking them to abide by the science advice to hold a Skeena Management Strategy evaluation and follow the Wild Salmon policy. Which requires DFO to consider impacts on all users"

Councillor Barry Cunningham carried the conversation from that point,  sharing a range of observations of the North Coast fishery and DFO's management of it.

"You know this is damaging to the Commercial Gill-net and Seine fishery, you know this escapement goes up gets into Interior fishing, it then becomes a commercial fishery for people in the Interior with a degraded product because the salmon has gone upstream.

It's not as good a product as you're going to get as it is at the mouth of the river and it's damaging to the economy of this town in so many ways.

Our fishery has been beat up  to the point where it's on its last legs and anything we can do to encourage DFO to wake up and start looking at the fact that they're not managing, but mismanaging the fishery then we should be involved in it.

And I strongly recommend we send this letter"

That served as the only comment from the Council members, who then voted in favour to provide the letter as requested.

You can review the introduction of the correspondence and the discussion around it from the City's Video Archive starting at the 16 minute mark

More notes related to the February 6th Council session can be explored from our Council Session Archive page here.

Items of interest on the North Coast Fishery and Fishing industry can be reviewed from our archive page.