VIVIAN MOREAU
Special to the Globe and Mail

WHISTLER -- In response to growing concern from scientists, environmentalists, anglers and aboriginals, B.C.'s Ministry of Environment has hired an independent consultant to review provincial biologists' steelhead recovery plans for the Cheakamus River.

"The B.C. government wants to ensure that it can arrive at the best possible decision based on sound science for the rehabilitation and long-term health of the Cheakamus River with steelhead," Don McDonald, a ministry spokesman, wrote in an e-mail.

The e-mail followed a Friday event at the University of British Columbia, during which fisheries scientists spoke out against the province's habitat-only enhancement plan for the Cheakamus River. The river lost an estimated 500,000 fish after a Canadian National Railway derailment and caustic soda spill last summer.

"What we're trying to do is get the Cheakamus back to where it was as quickly as possible," said Josh Korman, a UBC PhD candidate who worked on the river for 10 years.

Three other UBC faculty joined Mr. Korman in criticizing ministry biologists' hands-off approach to enhancing steelhead, the prize angling fish that suffered a 90-per-cent juvenile loss that they say could take 50 years to recover.

Ministry of Environment biologists, who have jurisdiction over steelhead populations, have been firm in their contention that habitat-only enhancement -- adding nutrients and woody-debris structures that steelhead favour -- and not hatchery fish culture, is the best method to boost steelhead recovery.

The UBC scientists disagreed.

"There's no scientific data that says that increasing habitat, improving habitat conditions, will do any good at all when the density of fish is already very low," said Prof. Carl Walters, a fisheries assessment expert.

The scientists, along with anglers, environmentalists, fishing guides and aboriginals, are advocating for a two-year hatchery program that would take advantage of a healthy returning spring run of steelhead that were out to sea last summer and unaffected by the river spill.

The federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans, which cultivates and releases salmon fry and smolts from its Tenderfoot Creek hatchery near the Cheakamus River, had offered the province use of its facility for a short-term steelhead hatchery project fully funded by CN, but the offer has not been accepted.

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