Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Good afternoon to the standing committee.

My name is Darren Haskell. I'm the natural resources and fisheries manager for Tl'azt'en Nation, which is located in the headwaters of the Early Stuart sockeye. I'm also the president of the Fraser Salmon Management Council, which currently has 76 member nations from along the Fraser and the approach areas.

First off, I'd like to thank the standing committee for inviting me to speak again on the state of the salmon. I spoke previously in the summer of 2020. This important topic today is that budget announcement. The announcement of the injection of funds into the preservation of wild salmon really came as a breath of fresh air to a lot of folks out here. Some important habitat-related projects began with the BCSRIF, the British Columbia Salmon Restoration and Innovation Fund, but the injection of funds will ensure that these projects can continue and that new ones can begin, helping our salmon for at least the next five years and hopefully for many more.

As you've already heard, many of the stocks have been in steep decline over the past years. Many different factors have been contributing to these declines. Understanding climate change and the impacts on wild salmon is something that could help us react in a proper manner to these changes. For example, right now we already know that the freshet timing has changed on the Fraser River. It occurs almost a full week earlier, and the impacts on fish passage in the Fraser during this time is really great. We know the ocean has been warming up, reducing nutrients that migrating wild salmon depend on for food during the long migration around the Pacific. Understanding the cumulative effects on wild salmon is also very important. The work that Dr. Kristi Miller-Saunders' group is engaging in with the FIT-CHIP for understanding cumulative effects on salmon has been needed for a long time.

I'll give you an example of cumulative effects building up on these salmon. The Early Stuart is a Fraser salmon stock that has a 1,400-kilometre journey right from the mouth of the Fraser to the spawning grounds in the Stuart-Takla watershed. Along the way they need to pass through effluent from industry that's flowing throughout the Fraser and make their way through mixed stock fisheries and the different changes in water temperature along the Fraser, and if that's not enough, they have to go through Hells Gate, where in certain years the velocity going through there really causes a barrier to their migration. Then after that we have now had the Big Bar landslide for the last two years, which has been a huge detriment on anything that spawns above Big Bar.

We, as Upper Fraser first nations, have had water quality monitoring stations throughout our watershed so we can keep track of what's happening in our backyard, but water quality is only a small part of the studies that need to be done to understand the environmental effects on wild salmon. The announcement of hatcheries being looked at a lot more closely is.... The word “hatcheries” used to be a bad word among first nations. If we were pushing towards hatcheries, it really meant we were already past the point of no return in terms of naturally bringing back the stocks to their previous numbers. I feel that we are at that point already. Big Bar is one of the biggest reasons for this. The amount of disruption that happened due to Big Bar has been felt by a lot of first nations both above and below the slide site. Instead of getting ready to fish for our families, we have to wait and see what shows up on the fishing grounds in order to ensure that the stocks can survive for that year.

Our elders have been concerned for years about the health of our salmon, and it's now becoming a reality. Some first nations are fortunate enough to have salmon brought into their communities from neighbouring first nations, but this may not be the case every year, as other stocks are starting to dwindle as well.

I just wanted to share some really hard numbers with you from this past year, similar to what I did last year. In the Early Stuart 2020 return, there were 30 sockeye in total that returned to the spawning grounds. That's 0.02% of the in-season expectation of 16,000. In 2019, we had 89 sockeye, so this is two years in a row when we've had below 100 spawners for that run. The early summer aggregate was about 51% of the 2016 brood year this year, similar to last year, when it was 33% of the 2015 brood year. It's the first time since 1992 that the early summer aggregate has reached below 100,000 spawners.

The summer run aggregate is 81% of the 2016 brood year, and the Chilko 2020 return within that summer run is 55,000, which is 36%. The Late Stuart 2020 return is 4,763, and it's the third straight year of decline on this cycle.

I really wanted to share those numbers because it shows in black and white what kind of devastation all of these declines are causing.

Right now I want to recommend that all fisheries along the Fraser be curtailed for a few years to allow for the recovery of a lot of these stocks.

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