Vol. 5, No. 1

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The Bay of Fundy debates future of its disappearing salmon cont'd...

Then in the mid-1980s, the salmon returning to the Gaspereau and dozens of rivers along the Bay of Fundy began a sharp decline. In 1985, the federal government shut down nearly all the commercial salmon fisheries in Atlantic Canada and by the early 1990s, recreational fishing in many rivers in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick had been banned or restricted. Despite the measures, the salmon became ever more elusive.

These days Munro spends much of his time writing about the salmon's nose dive and reminiscing. He still angles for trout and shad, and salmon too, where runs remain steady. But advertising his Wolfville camp as an oasis for salmon fishing is a thing of the past.

"You can't sell what you don't have," he says.

As he sat in a small restaurant in Wolfville recently, Munro listed all the possibilities for salmon's decline: dams, overfishing, pollution, predators at sea, climate change and even synthetic hormones from humans and animals that may have trickled down the food chain. Then he shook his head and took a long sip of coffee. 

"All I know is that we had tremendous fishing 15 years ago, and now there's a certain feeling among the salmon fraternity that there's a problem out there we can't solve. A problem that goes way beyond our control."

But ask Munro if he would like to see the salmon listed as an endangered species and he gets nearly testy. The anglers were the first to put their money and sweat into saving the fish, he says, and if you close down more rivers to fishing, "then the anglers are going to lose interest. And if they walk away from the rivers, there will be no more salmon."

As an epic controversy roils in Maine over the Atlantic salmon's endangered listing, salmon advocates in the Bay of Fundy are also debating whether an endangered listing makes good sense. While salmon anglers like Munro fear a listing might create more apathy than passion, other conservationists say listing the salmon as an endangered species will bring with it more resources desperately needed to fortify a recovery plan. Aquaculture interests, on the other hand, say years of hatchery stocking make the notion of endangered wild salmon a mere flight of fancy. 

"Who knows if there are even any wild salmon left?" questions Nell Halse, the general manager of the New Brunswick Salmon Growers' Association.

But without a doubt, the salmon that once teamed through so many rivers along the Bay of Fundy have disappeared in record numbers. And while there is no shortage of theories, no one knows for certain why.

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