NOT SENT!
I hate form letters, but I do agree with the sentiment, so I sent:
To BC Premier Gordon Campbell and the Honourable Ministers Pat Bell and Loyola Hearn:
There is an e-mail form letter petition circulating entitled "The Future of BC Salmon is in Your Hands", of which I am sure you will receive many thousands, but it does not come close to expressing the frustration, confusion, and anger that we, as anglers, sports men and women, and voters, as either individuals or members of the commercial sectors of the sportfishing industry, are feeling.
The decline of the andramodous fishery is shocking, and despite the vagracies of unknown (and possibly unknowable) occurrences in the ocean, and in spite of, I am sure, the best efforts of Fisheries and Oceans staff to understand them, it behooves you gentlemen to act, as custodians of the public weal, to limit any potentially damaging actions over which we, as a society and yourselves as our representatives, have some control. Most specifically, in this petition, the request is that the siting and operation of 'fish farms' be addressed as it impacts on the passage of smolts to the open ocean.
Despite the 'nay-saying' that has occurred along the lines of 'no studies have shown conclusively that fish farms have a negative impact' I have yet to see anything that suggests that fish farms 'have no impact'.
The onus, in these times of decling salmonoid stocks, should not be on the conservative minded members of society to prove that an enterprise is harmful to a public resource, but should be on the industry, in this case the fish farming industry, to prove that their activity will not infringe on the common weal.
I hope and trust that you will act on behalf of the common good to aide in maintaining and helping to flourish the wondrous natural resouce that the salmon have been in the past and will once again be in the future.
Yours truly