This session was developed to ensure that the non-agency/public initiatives and perspectives on watershed ecosystem health and fisheries initiatives in the Okanagan Basin are coordinated with, and presented alongside, science and government efforts. This session follows similar community-oriented discussions at both the “Okanagan Session” of the April 2002 AFS “Towards Watershed-Based Management in the Columbia Basin” conference, as well as the November 2002 Upper Columbia Group Salmon Summit in Lake Chelan.

The objective of the session was to bring participants up to speed on the aquatic ecosystem initiatives done by non-agency groups in the last year, and discuss how to fund and coordinate community initiatives and communication on both sides of the Canada / US border in the Okanagan watershed.

The major outcomes from the session include:

There were several themes that emerged as either challenges or steps forward in progress over the last ten or fifteen years. Some challenges are in information management. In some cases there are efficiencies in information, in others a lack of data, in other cases there is more data then we can effectively manage and mobilize in a way that we can share, integrate and utilize it. The standard today is a protocol for collection of information, standardization, and collection of managing data.

Managing across databases architecture is another challenge. We have made technological advances over time but we still have the issue of meeting and sharing information in a way that is comprehensive.

The third challenge is kind of a derivation the first two and that is we lack the ability to have a clearinghouse for integration. We have too many clearing houses and so we defeat our purpose. There are many clearing houses on data for the Okanagan which is heartening and daunting when you look at applying the data to sub-basin or recovery process. There is still some progress to be made, but some of the positives steps are technological advances, such as use of GIS, standardization of protocols, meta data, data dictionary, and web page access. All these things are beginning to allow us to have more access to information and manage it so there is some progress.

Public involvement in processes is a great bi-product of making this information available. Running information through several filters of economics, public acceptance, and public enforceability is also possible. It helps users understand what is feasible and what’s implementable, when they come up with scenarios through ecosystem management recovery plans.

The public becomes a very important partner in efforts and managers need them as partners. The first step is the public having access to that information and awareness of the information we have in the area.

In conclusion, managers still recognize that better integration is necessary and working together can lead to more information or access to more information in a way that can be incorporated into plans producing better strategies and more creditable products in the end.

I guess I am heartened by the progress made in identifying problems in the fish study undertaken and the progress made in looking at re-introducing sockeye salmon further up the Okanagan. It it is getting close to furthering the Okanagan population and it appears there is no time to waste there judging from the presentations by Margo and Paul. It that appears that Lake Osoyoos is insufficient to maintain that population and getting sockeye up into Skaha Lake will be very critical.

Tom Cooney with NOAA wasn’t able to attend the conference. He just finished a statistical review of salmon and steelhead in the Columbian Basin. Their work shows that in the last five years we had quite an upswing in the population, in his opinion due to the ocean conditions.

Paul Wagner’s presentation outlined that a great deal of progress has been made on fish passage through dams and that’s heartening as well. The resiliency of these stocks is amazing, I’ve been in the business for thirty years and it is surprising how quickly these stocks can rebuild if passage and habitat and the ocean conditions improve.

The message from Bill Tweit’s presentation was that the management agencies are doing better in harvest management. In my opinion they are quite not there yet, but we are keeping weak stocks and we are keeping impacts to minimal levels on the weakest stocks. I believe that your interest of the upper basin here in the next year or so will be around re-negotiating all of the harvest management agreements in lower Columbia and you need to watch that very closely because those negotiations are always difficult and in the past the weak stocks, upper basin interests were compromised by the deal that happened down there so I think its in everyone’s interest to keep an eye on that.

In a few years when we come back here again I hope it’s not all kokanee, sockeye presentations I hope its chinook, steelhead and coho. We need to broaden our views here, I guess one, on bit of advice on making a strategy for getting this moving forward is you have your interests up here but you need to look at overlapping those interests with those people with money and of course the United States that could be the Bonnieville Power Administration 130-140 Million dollars a year US going into salmon and steelhead recovery, primarily now driven by endangered species act. To the extent you can overlap your habitat needs and your study requirements with satisfying their needs which would include recovering Upper Columbia Steelhead and Upper Columbia Spring Chinook and we could be successful to get more of that money in the Okanagan Basin.

I was surprised by the amount of interest put into all the effort going on into exotic habitat problems. All the things that will never allow the Okanagan to be pristine again and I looked at this and I compared it to the subbasins within the lower Columbia and your problems up here are no different than those in the subbasins down below and yet they have overcome a lot of those through good planning and good studies and lots of Bonneville money. I think that strategy will work here as well, so don’t let those problems overcome the need just to move on. I think that the Okanagan Basin has somewhat ignored from the powers down in the Portland area where fish management in the Columbia Lower Basin primarily is in the centers and I think that is going to change in the near future. I think the focus guarantee now from NOAA fisheries and from the Bonnieville Power Administration people with the money and people with the authority will now have to start to focus on the Columbia Cascade Province including the Okanagan Basin and so hopefully in the next few years we will be more focused and that brings in the money and the money causes these habitats to be restored.

I guess the last piece of advice, and I apologize for the wording of this folks, one lesson when I worked at Bonneville Power a couple of years ago and that was “the best answer a day late ain’t worth shit” and be careful about not studying too long and not taking the action. We have a resurgence in ocean environment right now we have to take advantage of that increase survival rate and productivity to try and re-introduce stocks up here. Take advantage of what we have now.

One of the first things I’ll say is that what Keith, Steve and Eike have as themes really run through all of the sessions. I think there are certain themes that keep popping up and those themes are things like long term and consistent, public involvement, but one term I haven’t heard is planning and that came up with the habitat session. One of the things we started off in habitat session is learning that habitat is measured in isolation that we have discrete units of measure, but we can’t treat those habitat units in isolation, we have to relate them back to the landscape level and we have to be able use them in ecosystem level and also include things like land use and wildlife value’s in what we are planning as an entire ecosystem.

I think another thing to keep in mind is that the ecosystem conference is a snapshot of things that are happening and we may or may not be able to fit everything in. There were a lot of presenters available and we had limited time to slot them in. So we had to pick some that we felt were appropriate, that doesn’t mean that we covered every thing. The discussion around planning kind of went this way, planning has to be done but God it is boring cause it’s terrible stuff but you got to have a long term plan but you also have to be able to take care of the opportunistic things that come up during the time that you are doing a long term plan and those are the project things that keep people interested in what is going on. So you need to have the public involved. You need to have those projects that show a level of success for the public and the politicians too, because they are a “four year cycle spawner” so you need to be able to have things to keep their interest involved too. But we need to have a long term plan because that is the only ways were going to find a true ecosystem plan.

Some of the habitat measurement techniques that we talked about have to be user friendly; that is they have to be able to be used by as wide an audience as we are aiming it at. They have to be permanent and they have to be time and season sensitive. Things that go on at different times and different seasons, need to be put in the plan and we need to look at what is going on within certain life history and habitat issues.

So again, the terms that kept popping up are long term, opportunistic, collaborative, dynamic and permanent. We’re sitting in this room today and we’ve had three ecosystem conferences, two in Okanagan and one in Spokane and were sitting at a point right now where we’ve developed a little more synergy each time we go along and I think we have some really interesting collaboration that is coming together and from my perspective that is the only way we are going to build an ecosystem plan that unifies resource management in a true ecosystem realm.

There are two recurring theme’s I want to focus on very quickly. The first one is water, now I know this is the habitat session, but water is habitat, it supports habitat. When you look at the habitat session, fish session, water session I think the problem with water quality and quantity stand out as a big issue that it is the biggest single issue researchers deal with from a provincial perspective whether in Okanagan or not it is just a huge issue. Obviously and unfortunately there simply isn’t enough water for the fish for all of our system because all of the systems have been overallocated and I am sure I can speak for south of the border as well, we’re in the same situation also. This has severe impacts on water quality and habitat and I think were stepping into a really severe situation in 2003 and I’m actually very worried where were going this year in regards to water quantity and the issues surrounding the problems other developing out there. In June we had virtually no precipitation and our high precipitation amount this year was low and there were low snow caps and so we’re off to a scary start this year.

So the trend is continuing and the biggest challenge here is changing mind sets because water users and communities at large just do not think there should be reserved water. Even our legislation does not have any protection does not recognize water or fish as users of water. So there are some real problems there and some issues we have to deal with in our water users and community. Everyone out there is a water user and we need to understand that there are ways to address issues with fish flow deficit from fish perspective: conservation, better education and awareness and working with our partner users and in terms fish management in the system. There is a whole line of people in the community who need to be involved trying to turn things around in the water perspective it all starts at the top end in terms of regulators like Land and Water in BC the provincial regulator.

We have already allocated our water, unfortunately most of the systems in the Okanagan north of the border are fully recorded. They fully recorded it a long time ago, but they continue to issue licenses on it, and on top of that, there is no protection of ground water. When you have water withdrawls going in beside systems that are over allocated or not quite over allocated you are essentially taking away water from one site and it doesn’t make any sense. So Land and Water BC and the Ministry of Water Land and Air Protection and along with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, can do a better job to protect the resource. We talked about the collaborative approach of with working with the users. The days of going in and throwing a hammer down on the larger water usage and saying this is a violation of the Fisheries Act or whatever legislation and this doesn’t fit with our government provincially and even federally. They are taking a different approach needed take a collaborative approach and trying to come to some working arrangement worldwide where you can meet the needs of the fish and meet the needs of people.

We need the local governments to find, in terms of official community plans, how development occurs and recognize, simply that there is not enough water to meet the huge demand. We have to have to think about some different ways to supply water. Again the users themselves, they need that collaborative approach and to try to work out water use plans for these different watersheds, and finally you need the support in the community to understand water conservation is an important issue and how much you’re using to brush your teeth.

One other perspective that is really important in watershed planning is that water comes first when restoration planning. Far too often you see restoration plans developed without even thinking whether they have enough water in the system. We don’t have sufficient water supply water, or water of sufficient quality. The second and third thing is urbanization and so many presentations about population growth and expediential growth occurring. This valley just can’t support that kind of growth and the kind of impact that is going to have on our resources. So it comes back to what they talked about with planning processes that we have to do a better job of recognizing the needs of maintaining the natural environment. It’s just an approach in trying to build in the needs of fish and wildlife as well as the needs of people.

I’m going to summarize the presenters and talk of some of the opportunities and potential we see. I would like to thank the Okanagan Nation for hosting this. For the last seven years they have been raising their objectives and their profile in a very positive way. I would also like to thank the Okanagan Basin Technical Working Group which has the collaboration of all three parties.

The session worked through from broader scale issues such as the endangered species act and SARA, then through to watershed planning. There is a lot of commonality in the ways the processes are happening now, but it was also quite clear that it hasn’t always happened that way. A number of people mentioned the fact that many of the agencies carried their mandates and issues alone through the 70’s and 80’s and didn’t make a lot of progress. What we are hearing is a change in approach and it is best if we work together, where people are being brought together with the best science getting together all levels of government and stakeholders, first nations and communities and having an inclusive ecosystem approach. It is something that is key for us to build on, it is the kind of process that we want to move forward with. We also delved into some of the differences in processes as well.

Under the Endangered Species Act recovery also includes sustainable fisheries and the tribal rights and they work off a system of significant evolutionary units. In Canada the key that was discussed with the Species at Risk Act (SARA) is that there is a process to deal with extirpated stocks that doesn’t exist in the process in the US. We can build on the strength of the legislation and learn how to best use the legislation to reach the common goals. We gained a perspective as well that the legislation was just passed in June. It has key elements built into it for the First Nation’s role and we need to make sure that it is coming off on a number of those facets but in a way that ties easily into the legislation.

Mart Gross gave us a presentation on how the listing process works in Canada for those that haven’t seen it before. To get involvement in an inclusive process has strong challenges in it and one of those is how to make best use of it and how Canada works on designated units instead of the evolutionary submitting units and this was done for a reason.

In BC, Ted Down gave a presentation about how they are taking SARA forward through biodiversity planning and a key is to not wait until we have listed all the species before we learn how to use this legislation for what we want. We need do the planning and use the legislation to make the changes we need to be able to use it for planning. Really we use the SARA legislation only if you wait too long with your life support system. On the Canadian side we can’t wait for the species to disappear, things like SARA didn’t come with a lot of new legislation. It will be using a lot of existing legislation.

I think that the key places where changes are being made are at the watershed, subbasin planning level. When you go through processes this is the place where you can make the most changes where we can benefit the most. On the Canadian side we have the process started on the Watershed Based Fish Sustainability Planning, although we don’t have a full-blown model. We have seen an example of it in the Salmon River Roundtable. We are just starting on the Okanagan Basin, there is already a huge amount of work on the American side. So in places, we need to think about how to connect our work on both sides. It is somewhat disheartening when one side is not working at the same rate as the other. There is money on the US side. Making the links and making sure that we are aware of each other’s processes including the utility districts and the BPA, helps plan how we link. One thing that is of concern with me in regards to the states side is the fast time lines the US Subbasin Planning process is sooner, but we want to link into it. This conference is about making a connection and we are building on the Spokane Conference. We are starting to get a further understanding and discussion going on. We knew that there were other groups with some commonalities in work.

There are potentially some opportunities for codification like with the Migratory Birds Convention, Pacific Salmon Treaty and whether we can build on the Okanagan Basin Technical Working Group, there are some opportunities with the treaty there are some funding sources. On the fish side of things it is important. The Washington BC Environmental Cooperation Council is also there. You need to have buy in at the local level with the communities and subbasins and watersheds. Water and fish is not going to make it.

As Barry pointed out there are some commonalities and plain processes in between the United States and Canada and I also would like to point out the commonality that is in the Okanagan Nation. I think this is a significant step for increased collaboration for the Okanagan Basin recovery. I think there’s a lot a of opportunities that we did see in the planning processes that can increase our level of collaboration particularly in the sub-basin planning currently underway of the Okanagan United States area. Barry mentioned a very quick time frame of May 2004 product there and I think it would be everyone’s best interest to increase our level of co-ordination across the bordered area.

There are also some little first step kind of things we could do. I think certainly the Bilateral Okanagan Basin Technical Working Group is a very appropriate vehicle for increased communication and co-ordination strategy development for the Okanagan Basin. I think that what you are developing there is very good tool that takes the crawl, walk, run, type of approach. Where we complicate, certainly after crawling level, is with information sharing. We are well on our way to a far better understanding of how your processes work, how American processes work and how Canadian processes work and state processes work and just a better understanding of how they work.

These processes will lead to strategy development and then most will have goals and we can have some terms of reference developed in the long term through the Okanagan Basin Technical Working Group. Then we can hand formal mechanisms that come up and address the significant policy issues that we have through extirpated stocks, use of water, water quality and things like that. We need to have some kind of contact and over the long term BOBTWG is the right approach. The BC Washington Environmental Cooperation Council is another avenue we can use.

Some of the recommendations are a common sense approach and common currency in our language and terms so that we know we are on a common page. Standardization of protocol is also needed. I think that there are information management systems that we share in the Okanagan basin, there are great opportunities for web portals that we can all use and we can all access and that will certainly increase our capabilities to work together.

There was a closing thought that I think certainly has been our experience in the United States, a lot of times the agencies get yanked around a lot by the Endangered Species Act. This turns us into a crisis management mode where we deal with issues on a “react to” basis because of the agencies, because of the issues that are developed, or because of management protection for a single species or a single ESU that often times contradicts or is a detriment to the ecosystem approach. I certainly hope, and it looks from Paul Kluckner’s presentation, that SARA would have taken care to avoid much of this. I certainly hope that does happen in the Okanagan Basin because you are not in crisis mode yet and you need to correct things now so that it doesn’t get to that point.

We’re dealing with initiatives that are very complex in nature as we have all heard over the last few days. Ecosystem restoration and all of the elements that are required to make that work and function well really take cooperation from a number of agencies at both the governmental level and non-government level. I found that one of the ways to make these types of working groups that are multi sectoral or multifaceted in nature effective, is to have a really good set of guide lines and principles your going to operate under. Without those kind of guidelines there is the danger of randomly going off in different directions. You need to funnel the objectives together, in a framework that will allow very effective efficient operation of these working groups.

For the past three years now our group has been actively involved in developing in terms of reference and operating guidelines with respect to our operation as a technical working group. Realizing we have different agencies and in some ways different band aids involved here, thus it is a bit of a challenge sometimes, but we have done it. It may seem like a small feat to some of you that don’t understand the intricacy of these kind of activities but I can assure you it does take energy to do it, but where there is a will there is a way and we have found a way so for all of you who are interested you have seen our terms of reference look like and the contents of them there are copies I believe available at our registration table.

That being said there are some key players within our agencies that were instrumental in our achieving those objectives who I would like to introduce: Barry Rosenberger (DFO), Ted Down (MWLAP) and Byron Louis (ONA).

We’re very pleased to get to this point, bringing the three parties together was an issue in 1996 when we had a single one page term of reference that you boxed and underlined with font words. That still gave us momentum and drive with the clarification to carry on for the three parties and it has shown what we could do working together with the cooperation and the dedication of the people that came to the table. I think the process has produced this last version which is much more than a single page and a lot more meaningful than where we were going and continue on going. From a DFO point of view we’re very pleased that the province and the Okanagan First Nations have signed off this arrangement and we have momentum. We have also agreed to start meeting at a policy level tomorrow for the first time to try to work through some of the areas that have been issues that the technical group is not mandated for. I think it’s been a good growth process. We will take small steps and build under that and we will move in the right direction.

On behalf of ONA, I would like to thank DFO and the province for sitting out there since 1997. It wasn’t always easy, but in the end it worked out rather nicely. You look across Canada and other places and a lot of other issues on resources don’t come out with that kind of ending where all three levels governments are willing to work and I think we can just look on the East Coast and where things fell off the rails, over resources. In the words of Chief Steward Phillip last night who basically commended what’s happening in the Okanagan, and the real effort to make it work. It is one of the few areas that I have seen right across this country and its right here in this region and it has taken a lot of effort, commitment, faith and in our history is over last 30-40 years this is probably good for it. Lately it was a miracle we opened them up and you opened up your priorities on behalf of our people we are very happy with the outcome and actually have a technical organization that strictly deals with science and did science with also traditional knowledge. I think we are going to succeed in rebuilding the system but it won’t be pristine but it’s going to be pretty darn close.