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As a photographer who enjoys interacting with fish non-consumptively, I’m thrilled fishing was curtailed in Port Hope, Ont., this year. As a biologist, I hate the justification used for implementing the ban — there was no science involved and Port Hope’s fix likely just pushed the problem to other locations that are less publicly visible and will cause more harm.

The Ganaraska River, which runs directly through the town of Port Hope, has the largest migration of wild salmonids on the Canadian side of Lake Ontario. In the fall of 2023, more than 28,000 Chinook salmon passed the town’s dam, according to the Ministry of Natural Resources, and that doesn’t include an estimated couple thousand spawning before the dam or harvested by anglers along the way. 

A catastrophic 1980 flood resulted in the town blasting parts of the river down to bedrock, leaving shallow pools and steps of rock one-to-two feet high along the river. Each step slows down fish, so they congregate in the shallow pools below, often with their backs exposed, making them easy targets for anglers.

Easy targets also increase the chances of illegal behaviour. While some Chinook salmon will chase lures and flies, a fish crowded with hundreds of others or waiting in the shallows to ascend a rock step is unlikely to actively bite. Snagging (hooking in parts of the body other than the mouth) and flossing (running your fishing line through a fish’s open mouth until the hook gets caught) dominate angling methods in these conditions, and they are illegal under Ontario’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Act. 

Most rivers feeding into Lake Ontario have runs of wild salmon. And come fall, when Chinook salmon dominate these systems during their annual spawning migration, anglers descend on these tributaries in force, resulting in illegal fishing, littering and fish carcasses left on riverbanks (often slit open with their eggs harvested for bait). Ontario has too few conservation officers to effectively monitor and enforce fishing activities across all tributaries.

In 2023, while learning about how wild salmonids are managed, I asked the provincial Ministry of Natural Resources’ Lake Ontario Management Unit why there was so little emphasis on protecting wild fish. I was told healthy populations of wild fish in the lake and tributaries suggest current management practices are working, so additional protections weren’t needed. So you can imagine my confusion when the ministry announced in 2024 it was proposing a new seasonal fish sanctuary, and only in Port Hope, to “help protect vulnerable migrating Chinook salmon.”

According to the ministry, the dam — located three kilometres upstream of the river’s mouth — slows down salmon migration in town. They acknowledge the fish are also slowed because of the human-made shallow pool-and-step formations in town — but it has been this way for 40 years. It takes energy for fish to jump over rock ledges and power through three inches of water, hence why they gather in the pools until it rains or instinct drives them forward. The fish continue moving until they reach the pool below the dam, where they must wait because the fishway physically cannot pass enough fish. But this pool was already a permanent sanctuary, closed to fishing year-round. The new rule extends that sanctuary downstream during peak migration.

But with the Ganaraska River experiencing its largest run ever in 2023, why, in 2024, did the ministry change its tune and decide it needs to protect these fish? Chinook salmon in the Ganaraska River are doing fine. But last year’s bumper run spurred an abundance of social media posts, news coverage and public complaints, including an online petition with more than 13,000 signatures, which brought the illegal fishing and problematic behaviour of anglers to the forefront. These issues happen to be very visible in Port Hope, but they occur on all streams. Clearly, the ban was meant to appease people, not protect fish. 

After public comments on the proposed ban closed, the ministry approved it with no changes just one week later — an exceptionally fast review and assessment of the more than 2,000 pages of comments they received. The ban came into force just two days after it was approved — another shocking timeline considering the speed at which government regulations usually change.

It would be one thing if this change only affected Port Hope. But those anglers are now going to fish in neighbouring streams that have smaller wild runs, which are harder for our few conservation officers to patrol, and which may not be able to sustain the additional fishing pressure. This is not a small problem: Port Hope anglers put in more than 24,000 hours of fishing in 2015. Yet there was no proposal to add additional enforcement or monitor the biological effects of this closure on other streams.

Port Hope succeeded in fixing its problem by spreading it everywhere else.

I’m all for science-based changes in regulations when necessary to protect wild fish. But this change is not grounded in science: the biological protection is a false pretense, and this regulation instead implicitly acknowledges that social issues attached to salmon fisheries are more important than the fish themselves. 

During the fall of 2023, I tried to sit streamside in Port Hope to photograph fish. I had fishing lines thrown over me and anglers laugh at me, as though I had no right to be there because I wasn’t fishing. As though the fish belonged to anglers and no one else. 

After the closure on Sept. 1, 2024, I watched families, outdoor clubs, tourists and more all enjoying the river and fish that are, after all, for everyone. I hope the Ministry of Natural Resources will step up and monitor the effects of this ban on other streams to ensure this protection doesn’t come at the expense of wild fish elsewhere.

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