No fish for you

By Pieta Woolley | pieta@prliving.ca

I love seafood, but I don’t eat it much. At the grocery store, the tantalizing, thick pink fillets of salmon and steelhead threaten bankruptcy. Most seafood is bitingly expensive - much more than industrially-grown chicken, beef, pork, or tofu. May’s beautiful spot prawns are an annual treat; at $20 a pound or more, that’s a wallet-breaking meal for my family. Cheaper grocery store prawns, grown in Asia and imported by container ship, are an environmental disaster, and often host a tangy aftertaste.

I’ve thought about seafood a lot over the years. Somehow, fisheries

have largely evaded the local-food conversation, which tends to centre around small-scale gardening. That’s a bit weird; as we live on the Salish Sea, which has fed dense populations of people for millennia. It continues to feed millions of people... just most of those people, I’ve discovered, do not live in BC.

This article started with a simple question: what percentage of the local commercial catch and farmed seafood is eaten by locals?

I’ve found that’s a near-impossible question to fully answer, due to the way numbers are reported by the federal Department of Fisheries and

Oceans (DFO). However, in trying to answer it, I learned that there’s a big story here for anyone who cares about a local, sustainable future for qathet’s food supply: it’s international, financial, political and very personal.

There’s a lot here, but for the purposes of this short article, I’ll stick to two reasons we’re eating far less seafood than you’d imagine, given our location:

1. Most of us in qathet don’t catch fish - and those of us who do just got their hooks clipped, and

2. Most BC-produced seafood is exported.

For Chris Carlos and his three kids, aged 6, 8 and 11, fishing is grocery shopping - but way more satisfying. The family keeps about 10 chinook salmon a summer. If they bought them from a store, each fish would be worth $60 or more.

“So they’re a treat. We give salmon to friends and family, we put it in the freezer to smoke for Christmas,” said Chris, who runs the popular Facebook group Powell River Fishing Report and organizes Friday night derbies throughout the summer, which attract about 100 anglers per night.

The meaty chinook, or Tyee salmon, he said, is what locals mostly fish for around here. Until last year, Powell Riverites with a salmon tag could retain up to two chinook a day. Last year, that was reduced to one. This year, DFO announced on April 17 that has changed. This summer, local anglers can retain no chinook until July 15. After that, they may retain one per day until August 30, after which two a day may be retained.

“Recreational fishermen are not against conservation. We just want it to be thoughtful,” said Chris, noting that many locals feel DFO is overpenalizing the relatively-small local food fishery in favour of environmental optics. In 2017, for example, BC exported $49.5 million worth of wild chinook – up from $42 million in 2015.

The reasoning for the new regulations and the push-back are far too complicated to delve in to here; they have to do with environmental problems on the Fraser River, the movement of vulnerable and nonvulnerable chinook populations around the Pacific Northwest, and food for resident orcas. Chris questions whether the new regulations will help solve BC’s chinook population problem.

Also, he is baffled as to why advocating for food fishing isn’t front-and-centre in the local food conversation.

“Maybe it’s because we’re just a small population,” said Chris. “How many people really fish around here?”

According to DFO, 3,265 fishing licenses were sold to Powell River residents last year. That’s in a population of 20,000 people, so about 16 percent of locals fish for food – or have at least made a vague plan to do so.

BC-wide, just four per cent of the population gets a tidal fishing license (incidentally, the same number that are vegan.)

Powell River Outdoors owner Sam Sansalone says he is “left with no voice from answering all the questions” from fishers about the DFO changes. As a fishing license vendor, he’s frustrated that he and his staff are doing the work of education on behalf of DFO, especially as his business receives no money from government to sell licenses. The caps on chinook retention will crush small businesses, he said. “Hopefully going forward the users of this resource will have more input,” he said.

When Shane Reid catches pink shrimp on his boat, the Double Odds, he takes them to Vancouver where they get hand-peeled and sold to Lower Mainland restaurants and grocery stores. But Double Odds Fishing Ltd’s other two staples – spot prawns and side-stripe shrimp – he sells directly to Powell Riverites at the wharf, at the docks in Lund and on Savary, and from his Westview home. Around Christmas, he sells up to 120 pounds a day when people are splurging on entertaining. In the summer, he sells up to 50 pounds a day.

This makes him a most unusual fisherman. First, because there are so few commercial boats in Powell River, as it’s an expensive business to get in to. And second, most BC seafood leaves BC. According to the Seafood Producers Association of BC, 80 to 90 per cent of wild-caught seafood is exported. According to the BC Salmon Farmers Association, 72 percent of farmed salmon is exported (see sidebar).

“It would be a lot easier if I just put everything in a tote and brought it to Vancouver [to sell to a processor,]” said Shane. “But I like to keep it local. I know a lot of people are looking to buy local seafood, but they don’t know where to get it.”

Most Powell River grocery stores sell some local fish, including Lois Lake steelhead, spot prawns, and more. Some restaurants sell locallycaught seafood. On May 25 & 26, head to Lund for the annual Shellfish Festival. And the downtown wharf, through the summer, can be fruitful at about 3 pm.

But there are hurdles. As the BC Shellfish Grower’s Association spokesperson Darlene Winterburn explained, all seafood destined for retail must pass through a federallyregistered processing facility; Powell River’s closest, she said, is in Vancouver or on Vancouver Island, “which unfortunately makes it very expensive for locals to be able to purchase local product.”

Darlene did say that the Province’s

Buy BC program is making strides in connecting producers to retailers and restaurants. Additionally, the #BeShellfish for BC Oysters promotion hopes to attract new customers to local oysters; at www.eatbcoysters.ca, Okeover’s Perrault family is featured on a video.

The BC Salmon Marketing Council is also hoping to increase local demand; spokesperson Steven Richards says they’ve recently launched a locator app at www.bcsalmon.ca, which will help British Columbians find local seafood in stores. The “vast bulk” of wild BC seafood is exported, he said.

“Fishermen may choose to sell to a processor as opposed to selling at a dock because it’s easier and assured,” Steven said. “For many, depending on their location, I imagine the market is insufficient and/or irregular.”