Salmon: The Decline of the British Columbia Fishery

John Van West is a policy analyst with the Ontario Native Affairs
Secretariat.

Meggs is a Vancouver-based investigative journalist whose reports on
environmental, aboriginal, and fisheries issues have won several awards.
The destruction of British Columbia’s salmon fisheries, Meggs argues,
was orchestrated not by the fishermen per se, but by the canneries. The
federal government, he states, supported the cannery operators’
assault on the fisheries in their obsession with quick profits. The
government was also party to the litany of human-rights violations
inflicted by these operators on Japanese and Chinese fishermen and
shoreworkers, among others, through the enactment of racist legislation
and policies that served to facilitate the development of the processing
sector.

As the industry developed, aboriginal fishing rights, never ceded by
treaty, were given only superficial consideration in some areas and
ignored in others. This was the case at the headwaters of the Babine
River, where federal fishery officers, acting in the interests of Skeena
canners, deemed illegal and destroyed the fish traps of the Babine
Indians. The elimination of these instruments of production in 1905
disintegrated the self-sustaining fisheries-dependent economies of
Native communities throughout the region. In 1910, at his retirement
dinner, the fishery officer responsible for the removal of the traps was
given a gold cane and $630 by the canneries in appreciation.

Fishermen and shoreworkers were divided by culture and region—and,
for the fishermen, by gear type. Yet these divisions did not prevent
them from coalescing into what became the very powerful United Fishermen
and Allied Workers Union. Through its militancy, the UFAWU has been
successful in keeping the canneries in check. Tragically, in recent
years, its strength has been diminished by free trade, which permits the
canneries to export capital and labor with impunity.

On a critical note, Meggs writes in support of labor, and thus he could
be faulted by those on the right for not providing a more balanced
account of the industry. Furthermore, his book contains not a single map
identifying place names, geographical features, and the location of
aboriginal groups—an oversight that detracts from the strength of the
story line. Finally, footnote citations are not provided (although there
is a bibliography). This omission diminishes the academic value of what
is an otherwise exceptionally well-written book.