Sorry CFM but I can't buy into these blanket "take the non-treaty commercial fishers out completely" ideas as remotely feasible. That idea will be popular on forums like this, however in the real world? I think not. I view this effort to be just like the Ban Initiative; the Recs promoting legislation, faening conservation, while in reality it's just the Recs trying to get a bigger piece of the non-treaty harvest pie, or in this case, the whole pie in one bite. Makes for good non-fiction.

I think our efforts would be better spent trying to find ways to make the non-treaty commercials fish more responsibly. Sorry if you've heard this before, but I believe forcing the non-treaty commercial fishers into more selective fisheries would serve salmon and the Recs better. One idea would be to invoke mandatory maximium by-catch mortality rates for the commercials, somewhere in the range of 10% or whatever a high end hooking mortality rate might be. Make the commercials fish as selectively as the Recs are now. There are lots of ideas. It wouldn't take much to knock out non-selective methods like all the gill nets and the draggers while making the seiners and reef netters comply.

I know what I propose will take longer than the ten years you think we have left, however I don't think that the "knock them all out with one punch" is possible even if you dress it up as a conservation effort.

Beezer