EDITORIAL, The Edmonton Journal, October 28, 1998.

The northern cod disaster on the Grand Banks is there to teach us, if we’re willing to learn. The lesson is simple: Allow excessive fishing by ever increasing numbers of fishermen and eventually a species collapses.

And when it collapses, the fishermen will move on to another species. Then another and another, till there’s no fish left.

Anyone who thinks it can’t happen here is kidding themselves. The Freshwater Marketing Corp., the non profit federal Crown corporation that buys 14 species of fish from 2,550 commercial fishermen in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and the North West Territories, has seen a 44 per cent drop in eight years in the total catches of the three most sought after species – pickerel (walleye), sauger and northern pike.

Here in Alberta, virtually every species of sport fish is now under threat. A veteran Fish and Wildlife officer testified in a local court case this summer that he’s watched while about 80 per cent of walleye fisheries have been exhausted through over fishing. The three Alberta lakes still viable for walleye are now considered vulnerable. The officer said he didn’t know of any depleted fishery that has adequately recovered.

What’s happening is clear. As one lake becomes exhausted, anglers go in search of more remote lakes and fish them until they, too, are exhausted. And if they’re not allowed to catch walleye they switch to northern pike and yellow perch; now those species are also under pressure. In some provinces, like Manitoba, the main problem is a commercial fishery too large for the number of fish. In Alberta the problem is sports fishermen in the hundreds of thousands in a province with a limited number of fishing lakes.

Short term fixes like the restocking of lakes is not an adequate response to this growing problem. We need healthy natural populations of fish in our lakes, and that will only happen with careful regulation.

Happily, the provincial government has been moving toward greater restrictions on the kind and number of fish that may be caught. And more controls are coming, as the situation of various species worsens.

Regulation alone will not avert this growing crisis. The government needs to put more effort into enforcing the rules; that means paying the salaries of enough Fish and Wildlife officers to make the rules a reality. Yet wildlife officials, whatever their numbers, cannot monitor every angler on 1,000 lakes each summer. If the fish are to be saved, those who catch them for money or sport will have to help save them. That means accepting the restrictions that exist and are coming in the future, voluntarily reducing the number of fish they take each year, and reporting infractions that they see.

Canada’s freshwater fish are important to all of us, but they are especially important to those who love the sport of angling. They should be in the forefront of efforts to let these beleaguered species recover.