Cohen: you can’t make a dead horse more dead

In the faint chance you maybe hadn’t heard of the Cohen commission, (put together by the prince of darkness himself in 2009 in response to one of the poorest sockeye returns to the Fraser on record and then subsequently ignored for the rest of the conservative party’s mighty reign) here it is:

http://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/432516/publication.html

Since the release of the report in late 2012, the federal government has done little to act on any part of the panels recommendations. But wait!

Justin Trudeau has come to save the day, so now the D.F.O has announced that now they are going to act on all of the recommendations that they had been steadfastly ignoring for the past three and a half-ish years.

Here is a report card for the governments response so far to the 75 recommendations made by the Cohen commission

https://www.watershed-watch.org/issues/salmon-biodiversity/the-fraser-sockeye-inquiry/cohen-report-tracker/

Here is the federal Liberal government’s 2016 statement of intent (and other info) to follow the reports recommendations

http://news.gc.ca/web/article-en.do?mthd=index&crtr.page=1&nid=1109249

The reason I include all these long documents full of words and shit is for 2 reasons:

1. Many fisherman are ignorant as pie about conservation or salmonids in general, and really need to learn how to read and interpret information and then join together as opposed to what they mostly have been doing, which is bickering about long rods versus short rods, or making feeble, racist and incomprehensible rants.
2. I want to feel important.

While I want to believe in the intent of the D.F.O as an entity to save wild pacific salmon like I want to believe in The X-Files or clean Russian athletes, I do believe that the D.F.O has many members who as individuals want to help pacific salmon and somewhere in there some of them will be empowered to do the good work they are there to do as opposed to being bullied for it.

This is the first real acknowledgement I have seen in years by the department that pacific salmonids are not doing all that well.

Breaking News:

Pacific salmonids are not doing very well across much of their range and most stakeholders are only trying to take a bigger cut of a diminishing pie as opposed to acknowledging their own part in that decline. Looking at you and me!

The Cohen recommendations if implemented will have a much broader impact than just Fraser river sockeye salmon.

That to me is significant.

Then again they refused to acknowledge any impact or conflict of interest in their co-management of coastal fish farms and wild salmon, and the recently departed fisheries minister was carrying on a la Rob Ford’s (rest his soul) mayoral cluster fuck in Toronto so take it for what it’s worth.