FRASER RIVER
Channelization: shippers' dream
COMMERCIAL shipping interests are continuing to promote controversial plans to deepen and widen the shipping channel in the lower Fraser River.
And reports on the alleged benefits of channelization are being circulated despite referral of the proposed scheme to an impact study that is supposed to be assessing its potential economic, social and environmental effects before a decision is made as to whether it should proceed.
The impact study is being undertaken for the federal public works department by Beak Consultants of Vancouver and is expected to take another seven months to complete.
But already, according to daily press reports, the Fraser River Harbor Commission is gearing up for what it anticipates will be a big expansion in seaborne traffic following approval of the channelization scheme
Proponents of the plan now are emphasizing that the lower Fraser will not attract an increasing volume of overseas shipping until the existing channel is widened and deepened. If this does not take place, it's suggested, economic stagnation and even higher unemployment will result.
UFAWU members, already concerned over the scheme's implications for the fishing industry, say this is a spurious line of reasoning.
"Shipping that doesn't use New Westminster or other river wharves isn't going to disappear into thin air," business agent Bill Procopation says.
"Ships that don't berth on the river will dock at Vancouver or elsewhere in the lower mainland area. In either case, they'll be serviced by essentially the same labor force.
"It's significant," Procopation says, "that pressure for industrialization along the lower Fraser doesn't originate with, the
workers for whom this concern about jobs is expressed.
"It comes from the same groups pushing channelization: shipping interests, industrial developers, the harbor commission and certain people in the public works department."
According to the department, channelization is intended to provide a two-lane shipping channel with a width of 650 feet compared to the present 300 feet. Affording navigable depths for vessels drawing 37 to 40 feet, the enlarged channel would be a self-scouring waterway created by a system of training walls and other structures.
Fishermen view the scheme as one more in a series of developments that tamper with the river's characteristics and have a cumulative effect on the environment of the estuary.
Changes in flow conditions, they fear, will result in salmon fingerlings being flushed out to sea prematurely. Some of the last remaining estuarial marshland areas may be lost and the salinity balance essential to the well-being of migrant fish altered with potentially disastrous consequences.
In addition, some traditional gillnetters' drifts on the river stand to be eliminated.
"There's absolutely no reason why the fisheries resource should be put in jeopardy to satisfy shipping interests and industrial developers," Procopation declares.
"By any yardstick, the renewable salmon resource is the Fraser's most valuable asset. Given some care, the salmon will be there for future generations, and in much greater numbers than at present if enhancement programs are carried through.
"Alongside this resource, which pumps over $100 million annually into the provincial economy, the interests of foreign shipowners and their local supporters are insignificant."
USSR salmon take rises
ONE of the more remarkable fish production figures for 1977 is that of Pacific salmon in the Soviet Union, reports Fishing News International. This was just under 140,000 metric tons and represented an increase of 100 per cent over the 1976 haul of 69,700 tons, and 70 per cent above the 1975 catch of 82,900 tons.
The real comparison should be with 1975 because Asian pink salmon runs are much larger in odd-numbered years.
Using this comparison, it does seem that some interesting
developments have been taking place in Soviet salmon fishing.
The first, of course, is the drastic reduction in the Japanese high seas salmon quota and the effect on Soviet fishing of the new 200-mile limit. For the first time since the mid-fifties, the Soviet catch exceeded Japan's high seas salmon haul.
Another factor is the improvement in overall salmon production through hatcheries. The USSR is a strong protagonist of salmon enhancement and it does seem to be reaping the benefit of stock improvement programs.
"No need to panic, folks! We're merely stopping to take on ice!"
FISH and SHIPS
"Y¥/E built the great rail-" road. We fly one of the world's great airlines. We own and operate the great hotels. And we sail the great oceans. Canadian Pacific. It's a great story — still being told."
That's how Canadian Pacific — "an enterprise with assets of more than $6 billion" — advertises itself.
One of the facts this national institution doesn't mention in relating its "great story" is that it has a longstanding policy of denying employment to Canadian workers by "sailing the great oceans" with ships flying runaway flags and manned by foreign crews — a familiar story to UFAWU members who recall, among other things, the $12 million swindle involving a fleet of taxpayer-subsidized tuna seiners a few years ago.
That's why it's heartening to learn that trade unionists in Finland recently refused to work cargo on the Fort Hamilton in protest against the Canadian corporation's flagrant use of flags of convenience and low wage crews.
CBRT Seamen's Local president Tom McGrath tells us the Canadian-owned merchant vessel has been tied up in a Finnish port for some three weeks with Finnish labor organizations demanding that Canadian Pacific
Who makes meat profits?
MEMBERS of the UFAWU, who have seen their own organization harassed by combines legislation nominally intended to curb the powers of monopoly, will be interested to see how the federal government responds to a Canadian Labor Congress demand for a combines probe into the activities of major meatpacking firms.
CLC president Dennis McDer-mott last week called on federal consumer affairs minister Warren Allmand to use the Combines Investigation Act to examine "alleged collusion between Swift's, Canada Packers and other large meatpacking companies."
About 4,000 members of the Canadian Food and Allied Workers Union were locked out by Canada Packers recently after Swift's failed to reach an agreement with its 2,000 employees who are currently on strike for a new collective agreement.
"Canada Packers pretends it had no choice but to throw its employees on the street once the Swift workers were on strike," McDermott said, "but that is absolute nonsense.
"The policy of signing a collective agreement with one company, which will then be accepted in substance by others in the same field, has been
IBeTCfherman
138 East Cordova Street, Vancouver, B.C. V6A 1K9 Phone 683-9655
25 CENTS A COPY $8 A YEAR $10 FOREIGN
Editor HAL GRIFFIN Assistant Editors MIKE JAMES and GEOFF MEGGS
Second class mail registration number 1576 ISSN 0015-2986
Published by the Fisherman Publishing Society every other Friday Deadline: Wednesday prior to publication.
4/THE FISHERMAN — JULY 12, 1978
followed in the meatpacking industry for 30 years. . .
"To make things worse, there are indications that Swift's and Canada Packers have requested other meat packing companies to blacklist their employees and that Schneiders and Burns now refuse to hire locked-out experienced workers even though they have jobs available."
McDermott said it was probable that a combines investigation would reveal that "the purpose of these manipulations (is) to artificially increase profits by creating a shortage of meat at a time of high unemployment and rising food prices."
Meat prices have soared in recent months while wages in jthe industry remained static, McDermott pointed out, and labor costs presently constitute "less than two percent of the retail price of meat."
If a trade union were to display the same attitude as the meatpacking firms, "editorialists all over the country would be screaming their heads off about labor's irresponsibility (but we) have yet to see a single editorial condemning the meat packers," McDermott added.
either sign a standard International Transportworkers Federation agreement covering the ship or enter, into bargaining with marine unions in Canada.
Built and operated — like 30 or more other Canadian Pacific merchant ships — with capital produced by the labor of Canadian workers, the struck vessel is registered in the tax evaders' and shipowners' refuge of Bermuda, and is manned by British officers and Phillipine crewmen, the latter earning about $300 a month.
How's that for multinational-ism, Canadian Pacific style? * * *
When the North Island Gazette
reported recently that veteran UFAWU member Charlie Peterson had been dubbed the Sointula Cod Killer by fellow patients at Nanaimo Rehabilitation Centre, curiosity drove us to phone the irrepressible 78-year-old to find out what it was all about.
The three-week visit to Nanaimo had been proposed by doctors to ease the aches and pains of arthritis, Charlie informed us, and when he returned home he "never felt better in his life."
Where the Cod Killer nickname came from, though, he was unsure. "The only cod I ever caught was one afternoon off the Hardy Bay airport," he mused. "That was when we took 1500 pounds of ling cod on that packer the W5."
He and his crew-mates landed a 155-pound halibut during the same 1970 outing, Charlie says, but they had quite a struggle getting it aboard. Nonetheless, his fish stories so enthralled his friends in Nanaimo that they presented him with a plasticene ling cod as a token of their esteem on his 78th birthday.
It left him with a warm feeling. "It was the nicest place. We were like one big family."
A fisherman since 1916, Peterson moved to Sointula in 1922. And, like any veteran fisherman, he has his stories of memorable catches. In July, 1923 he took 1,750 sockeye in Rivers Inlet, and the following July he took 2,750 — not bad for a rowboat man.
The year of the Rivers Inlet strike, 1936, was also the year that Charlie became an active unionist and, despite his years, he has remained one ever since.
Wherever there's a fishing family, there's a founder. And Charlie 'is by way of being a founder, for his son Raymond is on the Western Mist and his grandson Chris has the Island Rogue.
* * *
The British Columbia fishing industry will be well represented at the World Youth Festival in Havana, Cuba, at month's end.
Among those going are three
shoreworkers — Pat Douglas of
Tofino, sponsored by the UFAWU; Angela Husvik of Ladner, sponsored by the UFAWU Women's Auxiliaries, and Sue Jorgensen of Vancouver.
Other delegates include Dian Mcintosh, president of the UFAWU Women's Auxiliaries, and Sue Radosevic, wife of UFAWU Vancouver waterfront organizer John Radosevic.
The fishing industry also will be well represented in the popular folk song group, Bargain at Half the Price, directed by talented young Steve Gidora, which has been invited to perform at the festival.
Two members of the group are shoreworker Kim Zander of Ladner and Charlotte Diamond, wife of Steveston Fishermen's Local secretary Harry Diamond.
* * *
We have two letters of thanks to the United Fishermen's Welfare Fund, one from Mrs. Annie Jensen of Ganges acknowledging benefits int he death of her husband, Eric Jensen, and another from Mrs. Sylka Olkovick, in the death of her husband, Harry Olkovick.
"Harry was a longstanding member of the UFAWU and believed in its policies for the rights of fishermen and shoreworkers alike," she says in a letter to UFAWU welfare director Bert Ogden.
"Even though he owned his own boat in the last few years, he never joined the B.C. Fishing Vessel Owners Association as his loyalty was with the United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union and the B.C. Fishermen's Independent Co-op Association, of which he was a member of the board of directors until his untimely death.
"On behalf of myself and my family, I thank you again for your financial support and your kind expression of sympathy."
* * *
For a small paper we -cover a lot of territory. Recently we had a call from one of our advertisers who wanted to know if we had any subscribers in Egypt. Why, we asked him.
Well, he had received an inquiry from a man or a company — he wasn't quite sure because the letterhead was in Arabic, although the letter itself was in English— who had seen his advertisement in The Fisherman and was interested in acquiring exclusive rights in Egypt.
Yes, we told him, we do have one or two papers going to Egypt and we* referred him to the federal department of industry, trade and commerce for the information he wanted.
For a small paper, we do get around.