Dear Sierra club member: (We hope not...:)
Dredges operate too slow to get any fish caught in them. Fish can swim at fifteen miles an hour, as any angler who has trolled knows. The only thing that keeps you from trolling normally at that speed is the fact that the lure rises unacceptably in height. A high volume dredge operates at only a few feet per second. The noise keeps fish away from it as well. On a dredge you do not have to keep throwing fish back into the pond. They do not show up in the feed. The dredge head is buried in holes with the cutter head and suction is not high until you get very near the inlet pipe. A dredge operates very slowly over what to nature and the entire length of the river is a miniscule area. A 1000 yard per day dredge will probably only cover an area of 150 feet wide by 1300 feet long in one season. This .0078 square miles. The Yukon and Pelly rivers have more than 6,000 square miles of available placer area. This represents an area use of one part in one million. It is trivial and the government knows it.
The recent DFO regulations are all about removal of money and power from English Canadian, non-liberal-voting, non-french people, and conservation is not the issue. This has already been signalled by Chretien. He said that "when he was young he thought English Canadians had horns and fangs, that they were the devil." He actually said that recently. He said that because it was the truth as he saw it, albeit in a manner of expression. The thing you have to realize is that people do not necessarily abandon their formative views just because the say they do. If he said he had that view, it is amazing that he could abandon it. He should have had the intelligence to know otherwise even at a tender age.
The DFO are just hired to do a hatchet job, and the government would reject anyone for the job who did not have the necessary non-scientific knee-jerk attitude that is born of a rejection of anything of a necessary process of manufacture or industry. People of this sort have a sort of schizophrenia of oblivious rationalization of origination. They, though exhibiting signs of intelligence in other areas, imagine that their government provided BMW and luxury home were born pristine, without industrial waste of manufacturing side effect on a distant planet of Liberalis Hera-caporum Manufacturis, or possibly built by their communist slave-master friends in China, where conservation and waste do not matter, as they need a leg up, and anyway the stuff they make is not on a Sierra Club 4 colour vegetarian non-polluting-ink (they will have you believe) fact-sheet.
EC<:-}
AI
