Mother Nature needs more champions like Bill Otway
By Judie Steeves - Kelowna Capital News
Published: October 21, 2010 6:00 PM
It was the plight of spawning salmon that led to the past-president of the Port Coquitlam Hunting and Fishing Club picking up the phone to call a newspaper reporter one fall day in 1971.
Pollution of his favourite fishing river had to be stopped, he said bluntly.
He was very persistent about his concerns, very passionate about his love of the outdoors and he pulled no punches in describing what had caused the deterioration in the condition of the Coquitlam River.
Gravel operators were destroying it, he told me.
It was just one of Bill Otway’s great causes during his lifetime; crusades against the wrongs he saw being perpetuated against B.C.’s natural resources, whether by corporations or governments.
Come to think of it, I seldom remember him raging against anything his own size.
He was feisty and he was always facing down a giant—most recently the federal government for its mismanagement of salmon stocks on the West Coast.
He died fighting. Sunday, he lost his battle with cancer and died in his recently-adopted hometown of Merritt.
Bill Otway was a fighter, and it seemed we always met when he had the gloved hands raised, beginning in the early 1970s when he took on the big companies that mined gravel from the Coquitlam River.
They would wash their gravel in the river’s clear flows, then release tonnes of silt downstream to clog the spawning gravel and smother the eggs of the salmon who had fought their way back upstream to lay their eggs before completing their cycle of life, and dying.
At the time, I was a young reporter at the daily Columbian Newspaper, and I was more than willing to listen and ask questions, to investigate and insist on answers.
What I learned, and then saw for myself, convinced me to write repeatedly about the travesty that had turned the clear and productive waters of that now-urban river into a silt-choked lethal remnant of its former self.
For years, we rattled cages and howled at the authorities, each in our own way, until the federal environment ministry got involved and the companies were finally charged.
Unfortunately, a guilty verdict resulted in a simple slap on the wrist and I don’t know if the situation has changed much today, more than 35 years later.
That didn’t stop Bill, though as he carried on his battle against that and many other wrongs against this province’s beautiful but vulnerable wild natural resources, aided for 50 years by fellow members of the B.C. Wildlife Federation.
He served as executive-director of the BCWF through the terms of four presidents and in 1980 was presented with the Canadian Wildlife Federation’s Sportsman of the Year Award for his dedication.
In the years since he has been deeply involved in the BCWF Saltwater Fisheries and Native Affairs committees and was also involved in fighting the federal government’s gun control legislation.
He even worked for the federal government as Western Sport Fishing Ombudsman.
Despite his battle with cancer, Bill persevered in a pet project, publication in 2008 of his book of tales, called Fish Cops and Game Wardens, chronicling the evolution of what are now called conservation officers in B.C.
I’ll miss Bill, with his tall tales and his well-honed sense of humour, but even more important, B.C.’s fish and wildlife and their habitat will miss him.
More of us will be needed to step in and try to fill the shoes he’s left vacant.
He didn’t want a funeral, but a gathering to celebrate his life will be held back in Coquitlam Nov. 14, 1 to 4 p.m., at the Executive Plaza Hotel on North Road.
No flowers, but donations to the BCWF in his name would be appreciated.
Judie Steeves writes about outdoors issues for the Capital News.
jsteeves@kelownacapnews.com
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