Herring roe fishery stays closed for a fourth year
Spawn measurements improved on the north coast; Strait of Georgia stocks did not.
The roe herring fishery will stay closed for a fourth consecutive season, the department confirmed this week, extending a pause that began as an emergency and is settling into policy.
The survey numbers explain the split decision the industry had hoped for and did not get. Spawn indices on the north coast improved for the second straight year — enough that a limited opening was modelled — while the Strait of Georgia stocks, the fishery's historical centre, stayed flat at levels the department's own framework classes as critical.
The closure's defenders point at everything that eats herring: the salmon the coast is spending fortunes to recover, the whales the whale-watching economy runs on, the seabird colonies whose failures track the herring cycles almost exactly. A forage fish left in the water, the argument runs, is not unharvested; it is working.
The seine fleet's counterargument is generational: licences held forty years, crews that have re-rigged for other fisheries three times, and a processing capacity that will not survive a decade of idleness to greet any recovery. Both arguments are correct, which is why the file produces closures one year at a time rather than a decision.
