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November/December 2002 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Editor’s Notebook Feature: Bighorn sheep The Inside Story Reverberations À la carte Mosaic

Fish and games
The tension between hunters and anglers and the fish and game officers who manage our wildlife populations is, at the best of times, as taut as piano wire. Nowhere is it more so than in sunny Alberta.

Say you’ve been fishing the same lake for 40 years, and one day, here comes a conservation officer to tell you, "Sorry, no more catch-and-keep in this lake. The fish populations have crashed." The evidence on the end of your own line might be telling you different, so you’d want to believe that the suspension of the fishery was based on sound science, that the conservation officers knew something you didn’t, because observant anglers are often the first to note subtle changes in habitat or population dynamics.

Here’s how Alberta has eroded public confidence in the work of its own conservation officers. Minister of Sustainable Resource Development Mike Cardinal has been slicing jobs out of his department as if he’s filleting fish. Another 80 positions were targeted this spring, which leaves about 400 people in the fish and wildlife division, 10 percent less than there were 20 years ago. At the same time, oil and gas developments, pulp and paper mills, resorts and other projects have been carving ever deeper into what’s left of Alberta’s wilderness.

The fish and wildlife department, once one of the best in the country, has been reorganized so many times in recent years that the shuffling itself seems to have become its principal activity. It was once part of the Department of Lands and Forests, then Recreation, Parks and Wildlife, then Energy and Natural Resources, and so on. Now it is part of the Department of Sustainable Resource Development. This in a province that has been governed by the same political party since the war in Vietnam. It is not as if the Conservatives are trying to roll back NDP or Liberal policies.

But the crowning moment has to be Cardinal’s decision to overrule his own biologists last spring and reopen the fishery on Calling Lake, some 200 kilometres north of Edmonton, which had been closed to catch-and-keep angling. In fact, many of the province’s lake populations of trout and walleye are in a state of collapse. Cardinal said his own "personal knowledge" of the area was as important as any scientific study. And just to make sure all those fish and game officers who work for him got the point, Cardinal took his boss, Premier Ralph Klein, up to the lake for a walleye fishing trip.

Now, with that comment on what the minister and the premier think of the science which is informing wildlife-management decisions, consider what it must be like to work in Alberta as a fish and game officer.

Our cover story by Sid Marty on the bighorn sheep hunt in Alberta explores the province’s new approach to wildlife stewardship. Marty, a native Albertan, has worked as a national-park warden and has been writing about wildlife and environmental issues for 30 years; his first story for us was published in 1985.

This assignment hit a raw nerve for him. "If outrage were whisky, I’d be drunk every day," he says of the Klein government’s cuts to wildlife research and its eagerness to open every corner of the province to industrial development.

Marty tells us that increasingly, wildlife research is funded in Alberta by hunting and fishing charities that are themselves financed by levies on hunting and fishing licences. The more people hunt and fish, the more money may be available to researchers to assess whether existing fish and game populations can sustain the levels of hunting and fishing that support the research, and so on. I get dizzy just thinking about this cat-chasing-its-tail policy.

What Marty asks is, Where’s the public interest in all this? Aren’t wildlife populations part of our common ecological heritage? Why should such fundamental research be dependent on the sale of fishing and hunting licences or — the case in point of Marty’s story — on the auction to trophy-obsessed big-game hunters of Alberta’s official mammal, the bighorn sheep?

Thank you to our readers and the many other Canadians who took the time to vote for the first winners of the Canadian Environment Awards. Visit our website for the names of the winners. On October 15, nomination forms for next year’s awards will be available on our website. Here’s your opportunity to bring national recognition to individuals, groups and enterprises that are making signal contributions in your community to safeguarding the health of our environment.

— Rick Boychuk

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