“I’ll be honest; the stocks I saw this year were not the healthiest year I’ve ever seen,” Young said. “We did not catch our entire quota.” Young was not alone. When the season opened on March 3 for boats equipped with purse nets, they collected the silver fish in a length of 48 hours. When Young and hundreds of others using gillnets arrived on March 5, the fish appeared to be extinct. Normally, it only takes days to complete the quota. But when the season finally closed on March 28, the total catch was just over 4,000 tonnes, just over half of what the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) had set for the quota. “It was a different year,” Yang said stoically. Josh Young has been a commercial fisherman for 30 years and works in Pender Harbor, BC (Submitted by Josh Young)
The result seems to have surprised the department as well. The DFO is trying to manage herring stocks using air surveillance, sonar and even divers in the water doing research. It then coordinates the opening of the season with when the herring arrives to give birth. This is because it is the roe that fishermen like Young are looking for. It is very award-winning in the Japanese market. After the roe is removed from the females, the fish are ground for pet food or fish feed. In view of this most recent season, the DFO estimated that there were over 70,000 tonnes of herring in the Georgia Strait. In the past, the total allowable catches were set at 20 percent of the estimate. But as stock estimates in recent years suggest a reduction in numbers, Federal Fisheries Secretary Joyce Murray has reduced the quota to just 10 percent. Commercial fishermen still could not fill it. This frightens environmentalists like Grand Scott. A former commercial fisherman, he believes the empty nets are a clear sign that the Pacific herring is on the verge of collapse. “It’s a disaster,” Scott said from his home on Hornby Island. “Not so much for fishing, but for the whole environment.”

He asks for a moratorium

Herring is a critical livestock fish for larger species such as salmon and whales. Scott has chaired Conservancy Hornby Island, one of many groups calling for a moratorium on any commercial herring fishery for several years. Grant Scott chairs the Conservancy Hornby Island. (Rebecca Benjamin-Carey)
“We were really pushing for a herring recovery program, which is to do science, leave the fish alone for five years, let the stocks rebuild and give the fishermen money to phase out the industry,” Scott said. recognizing people will be hurt by the complete closure of a profitable fishery. But how much it hurts can be a matter of perspective. The most recent data published by the government of BC. show that the value of all herring exports has been declining for years, falling from $ 36.2 million in 2018 to $ 28.6 million in 2020. Most of this comes from roe sales in Japan, although China also buys a lot of herring BC Emmie Page, a Pacific Wild activist, suggests that quitting fishing is a relatively small financial concession to secure the species’ future. “A moratorium that completely reduces this fishing pressure for a few years removes one of the factors that could affect the health of the stock and allows them to recover.” Last December, the federal government appeared to be listening to environmental groups when it closed four of the five areas where commercial herring fishing is allowed off the coast of BC, leaving only the Georgia Strait open. Emmie Page, a Pacific Wild activist, believes it is worthwhile to make financial concessions to secure the future of Pacific herring. (Submitted by Emmie Page)
Industry spokesman Rob Morley was not one to be applauded. “The fact that the minister closed the fishery was, in our view, a bad decision,” said Morley of the Reggae Research and Conservation Society in North Vancouver. “It is not based on stock status or science.”

The industry says there is no cause for concern

Morley says the BC herring industry is not just roe. He says it’s worth about $ 40 million a year, including food and bait sales and value to processors. He also says there is no cause for concern. “You do not determine how many fish there are from how many fish will be caught,” he insisted. The explanation for what happened to herring this year can be buried in research data that DFO says will not be analyzed or made public for months. It is possible that the DFO miscalculated or that the herring largely ran out of spawning and left the area before fishermen like Josh Young arrived with their nets. CBC’s questions to the department about its findings remain unanswered. A spokesman for Secretary Murray issued a statement to the CBC that was similar to previous statements on the health of herring stocks. In it, Murray acknowledges that “stocks are fragile.” Young says he also cares about herring – for the past 30 years, he has helped raise his family. It is difficult to present him as the “greedy fisherman” who “would kill the last of them”. He says a moratorium is premature without science supporting it.