On Thursday, December 19, 2024 at 04:14:00 p.m. AST, John Bagnall
Hi Marc. Thank you for your offer to meet on January 6, 2025.
Our group, Save Miramichi Salmon Inc., was somewhat encouraged by the response of RDG, Celine Gaudet, to our demand letter from Ian Knapp. That said, we are going ahead with our legal action on this issue, but we can pause or withdraw it when we are comfortable that DFO will discuss the issue in good faith and pledge to rapidly implement the actions that are required to reverse the current population trends of Miramichi salmon. We want to have confidence that your proposed response will not be just a delaying tactic. What we want in particular is for you to agree with the first bullet on page 4 of the demand letter.
As you can appreciate Marc, this is a crisis, and resolution requires that foot-dragging end immediately. One aspect that is critical to us is the following statement in Research Document 2022/030, that being:
“It is not clear from these time series of data, that reducing Striped Bass spawner abundances to the level of the early 2000s, i.e., less than 100 thousand spawners, would improve the acoustic tagged smolt survival estimates, the population level relative survival rates….”
We think this uncertainty has now been definitively resolved, and that reducing the bass population would increase tagged, and by extension untagged smolt survival rates through each estuarial bay, and ultimately benefit adult returns. It seems to us that the Res. Doc. 2022/30 statement above has been used by DFO to authorize the management of bass and salmon in separate silos. Admitting that bass are having an effect on the Miramichi salmon population such that it has been “depleted to a point of serious harm” would trigger the implementation of the 2019 policy to support rebuilding plans under the precautionary approach framework for stocks that are in the critical zone. Everything follows from there.
Anyways, we hope to discuss these issues on the 6th.
Merry Christmas Marc and Happy Holidays.
John