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Sport Fishing Institute of British Columbia

2011 Election Update: A Message from Rob Alcock

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Over the past six months, the SFI and the other members of the BC Sportfishing Coalition have been pulling out all the stops to put halibut on the political agenda in the 2011 election. It started tentatively at the 2010 Sport Fishing Industry Policy Conference, gathered steam over the Christmas break and culminated in a series of unprecedented town hall meetings up and down Vancouver Island and in the Lower Mainland.

 

The results of this effort are perhaps best summed up by reporter Rod Mickleburg's recent story in the Globe and Mail:

Why would Conservative Party Leader Stephen Harper, on the Saturday of a long Easter weekend, journey all the way from Etobicoke to Campbell River on the northern reaches of Vancouver Island? After all, the Tory incumbent John Duncan is a cabinet minister and winner of five of the past six elections. What's his worry? In a word: Halibut.

Reporter Mark Hume of the Globe and Mail also took note. On April 17th he wrote:

 

While Ms. Morton has been busy trying to get salmon on the election agenda, other fish activists have been urging voters to think about halibut when they go to the polls. The focus of that campaign is an unpopular decision, made earlier this year by federal Conservative Fisheries Minister Gail Shea, which maintained a policy that splits the halibut allocation, giving the commercial sector 88 per cent of the catch, and sports anglers 12 per cent.

 

Nathan Cullen, the NDP incumbent in Skeena-Bulkley Valley, said that he's run into the halibut lobby, and has taken notice. "I think they are the most organized guys in the election. They have great lists ... and I really believe halibut could determine three or four seats," he said. The halibut gang, he said, are focusing on a few ridings where the race is tight, including his.

 

Not surprisingly, Mr. Cullen and Ronna-Rae Leonard, the NDP candidate in Vancouver Island North, recently released a joint statement making it clear they side with sports anglers in the fight over halibut quotas. Given the closeness of some B.C. races, coming down on the side of halibut anglers or embracing Ms. Morton's salmon campaign may mean candidates won't later have to lament the one that got away.

 

All that hard work, all those countless hours of volunteer time and travel, all that planning, writing, phoning and cajoling have paid off. The collective efforts of recreational anglers have managed to make halibut a bona fide election issue in the riding of Vancouver Island North, and may well be the question that decides the political fate of incumbent Conservative MP and Cabinet Minister John Duncan.

 

And everyone in North Island is talking about it.

 

Duncan's chief rival, NDP candidate Ronna-Rae Leonard issued a press release arguing "We are seeing the valuable halibut fishery privatized and Canadian fishermen of all kinds are being shut out. Both commercial and sport fishermen are losing opportunities to access a public resource, in large part due to this Conservative government's policy of neglect."

 

North Island Liberal candidate Mike Holland updated his website to note: [Fisheries Minister Gail] Shea's solution is to get the recreational fishery to lease quota from the commercial sector; a non-starter for the recreational sector. This valuable component of the North Island economy deserves to be treated better. The recreational fishery has put forward at least two proposals, both of which seem fairer than making it lease allocation year after year. One is to establish a "use it or lose it" policy to slowly transfer quota from holders who don't fish (the so-called "slipper skipper') and the other is to remove the quota from the recreational fisher and simply allocate it a set number of fish before establishing the allowable catch for the commercial fishers.

 

And the impact of our collective efforts has caused the issue to spill over into other ridings as well. North Cowichan Conservative candidate John Kourey issued a statement saying: "I believe the challenges which have resulted in this problem of access to this common property resource, namely the public fishery, need to be resolved. I believe there needs to be a fairer and more equitable way to divide up the Total Allowable Catch decided by the IHPC."

 

Esquimalt Juan de Fuca Conservative candidate Troy De Souza said that the three issues he is focused on in this election are local infrastructure, shipbuilding jobs and fairness in our halibut fisheries.

 

Nanaimo-Alberni MP James Lunny called for changes to the halibut allocation months before the election because he did not want to face the wrath of angry anglers at the ballot box.

 

And this underscores the critical point: This is not about electing or defeating Conservatives, Liberals or New Democrats. It's about ensuring that an issue that affects 100,000 recreational halibut anglers receives the attention it deserves.

 

In the final days of the campaign, the SFI will be running advertisements in local newspapers and on Vancouver Island TV asking candidates where they stand on halibut. We hope that this will help ensure that halibut remains in the spotlight, and that whoever is elected on May 2nd will finally understand that government ignores recreational anglers at its peril.

On behalf of the Board of Directors of the SFI, I want to thank you for your continuing support. Together we have shown that we can affect real change for recreational anglers and the sport fishing industry.

 

Sincerely,

 

 

 

Rob Alcock

President

Sport Fishing Institute of British Columbia

The Fish Report is a publication of the Sport Fishing Institute of BC. The Fish Report is distributed every four to six weeks to SFI members via email as a PDF document. If you're going to print the Fish Report and would prefer using black ink only, please remember to select the black-and-white option on your colour printer.

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