REGINA – AgPro Grain will have to pay a $10,000 fine and its Lake Diefenbaker fishery manager a $500 fine after being found guilty of illegal fishing.
The company, a Saskatchewan Wheat Pool subsidiary that owns a commercial fishery on Lake Diefenbaker, Sask., is considering an appeal of the conviction and fine, said chief operating officer Les Rankin.
The charges were laid after AgPro opened its cages and tried to entice fish into them in 1994. Rankin said a tear in a net at the commercial fishery allowed up to 70,000 of its fish to escape into the lake, and it was merely attempting to recapture some of them.
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But Saskatchewan fishing laws consider any fish that escapes into a lake to be wild and public property. Attempting to catch such fish is considered poaching.
Some fish other than those raised by AgPro were found by conservation officers in its facility after it tried to recapture the escaped fish. Using a net to catch fish is also illegal unless one has a licence.
Rankin said AgPro has been a victim of fishing regulations that were designed only for sports fishermen, not commercial fisheries. He said Saskatchewan needs better fishery laws, such as those British Columbia has, so that aquaculture businesses can be viable.
He said better regulations would have spelled out how AgPro could have gone about recapturing its fish once they escaped and the company would not be facing a fine.
“The laws, at least as far as the conservation department interprets them, are very inhospitable to anything other than sports fishing out of a rowboat.”
But Merv Swanson, manager of the fisheries branch of the provincial environment department, said regulations on commercial fisheries have to be strict to ensure wild fish populations and the sport fishing industry are protected.
