I've been fishing the…

I've been fishing the Kaministiquia River for some 40 years now. As a young man I spent many hours plying its waters for Walleye, Bass, Rainbow trout but most of my time was spent chasing the very large Chinook Salmon that spawned in the river. The Kam and it's tributaries were literally full of spawning Chinook every fall. Since at that time there was no stocking of these fish on the Canadian side of Lake Superior, one can only assume that these fish were part of a large, healthy naturalized population of Chinook Salmon. Once the stocking program began on the Kam, the decline in the naturalized population was slow at first, but within 15 years the fish were all but gone. In the past 20 years I have caught no Chinooks in the river, and I have only seen one solitary fish. This stocking program was misguided from the start an goes against the MNR's own "no stocking over an existing, healthy population" mandate. 30 years of stocking has virtually wiped out the existing population (for reasons well known to MNR) which is obviously contrary to the original objective of the local salmon club. This stocking program also involves harvesting eggs and milt from fish from other river systems. There is ZERO data on the populations of these other rivers, therefore how does MNR ensure that egg collecting from these systems is not harming those populations? The stocking program on the Kam River needs to stop immediately to allow nature to do what it does best and restore the once healthy Chinook Salmon fishery.