Spruce City Wildlife Association hatchery

By Cheryl Jahn

Spruce City Wildlife Association

Spruce City Wildlife Association losing out

Mar 17, 2026 | 3:25 PM

PRINCE GEORGE – An unassuming building on River Road rears millions of salmon fry every year. But the folks from the Spruce City Wildlife Association do so using a lot of volunteer hours. Two years ago, though, they got some help from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in the form of a team of two habitat restoration positions.

“Since they’ve been put in place here for the last couple of years, there’s been over $1.5 million worth habitat projects done, in the Nechako and locally here,” explains Dustin Snyder with the Spruce City Wildlife Association. “They were a huge help with doing the Cottonwood Island project. And on top of that, they’ve helped, with some science related projects. They’ve consulted and helped us on enumeration programs in the upper Fraser. They’ve also helped us with some tagging programs.”

But recently, they were told those two positions will be no more as of the end of the month … a sore spot for the association. But according to the Government of Canada it is the end of a program. Period.

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans has issued the following statement in response to an interview.

“In 2021 the Government of Canada launched the Pacific Salmon Strategy Initiative, which provided funding for Pacific salmon initiatives throughout British Columbia and Yukon for a five-year period. As the Pacific Salmon Strategy Initiative reaches its five-year conclusion on March 31, 2026, Fisheries and Oceans Canada is finalizing projects and activities intended to achieve specified Pacific outcomes.”

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“Our stocks up here, especially our Chinook stocks, are threatened and endangered,” says Snyder. “The majority of the closures around the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island, all of those fishing closures usually stem back to the Upper Fraser stocks. So this is a huge economic impact, not just here, but down there as well. And again, to having these folks here has made a world of difference for these stocks.”

Snyder says the work of those two people will now be handled out of Kamloops. And entirely different habitat.

“In the four years of us trying to get somebody up here, to try to get habitat projects going, we were able to get in that four-year-time frame, two one day visits.”

He says, unfortunately, there isn’t really another pot of funding from which the positions is tricky.

“The funding for these projects doesn’t come directly from the Department of Fisheries. We have that one or two people helping with these projects. And then we go out and we find the money. So they were able to contribute not only their time and their expertise, but a few thousand dollars here and there. We went out and found the other $400,000 and $500,000 or $1 million, depending on how big of a scope you want to look at.”

He suggests the federal government clearly doesn’t care about rebuilding the Upper Fraser stocks.