Dismal sockeye run sparks downtown rally
People dressed as fish and a new group called the Wild Salmon Circle were joined by broadcaster Rafe Mair at a protest yesterday outside the federal fisheries offices in Vancouver.

"We're in the fight of our lives to save the wild salmon. Every fisheries minister has been a blithering idiot, and the one we have now takes the cake," bellowed Mair, 77, but still in possession of his radio hotliner's voice.

Mair criticized federal fisheries for mismanaging wild Pacific salmon stocks and encouraging fish farms, which he blamed for "disastrous" Fraser River sockeye salmon runs this summer that collapsed from a predicted 13 million to fewer than two million.

Joe Foy of the Wilderness Committee slammed government scientists.

"Federal fisheries has not shown any caution in managing our salmon . . . and these are very, very dangerous times," said Foy, citing the virtual extinction of wild salmon stocks in countries such as Chile and Norway due to disease spread by farmed salmon.

"We need to wipe the salmon farms off our coast now," said Foy.

Despite this year's low returns of sockeye and chum salmon, which sustain grizzlies and other species, the Pacific Salmon Commission noted yesterday that it is expecting a run of 19.5 million pink salmon, more than preseason forecasts and higher than the 12 million pinks that return in an average year.

Biologist Alexandra Morton said she attributes the huge pink salmon run to fish farmers' use of a toxic chemical to kill sea lice that infest open-ocean cages and infect wild salmon.

The chemical wasn't used in time to save the sockeye runs, but was a help later in saving the pinks that swam through the area that included 30 fish farms, Morton said.