Trilateral partnership: The Big Bar landslide response in British Columbia

We've collaborated as three governments.

How it should always be, how it was meant to be when everybody's working together for the benefit of one cause.

We've been here for millennia.

We've been fishing these rivers for that long and so salmon has always been a part of our culture.

It's really important that you know, for us passing that down to the younger generations.

You know, the response efforts here has been tremendous.

Everybody's working in an effort to save the salmon and that's really good to see.

Two years ago in 2019, there was a major landslide detected in the Fraser River at Big Bar.

And it blocked the river for all salmon returning.

And it was deemed an emergency incident, so fisheries and the Province got together with First Nations governments, and we formed a tripartite relationship that's still in place today to remedy the situation and get salmon past the slide.

I think we're getting a good relationship with all the three governments.

The majority of this thing is for the fish, just seeing the natural passage of the fish is really good.

Hopefully, we'll get it all as natural passage.

Each of the parties has brought their own individual expertise.

The unique perspective that First Nations brought to the project was really their Traditional Knowledge around salmon, around fishing techniques and the Big Bar landslide site.

It's important to get their perspective to allow us to protect the cultural artifacts that are present in that location.

So, with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, that expertise is the salmon themselves.

You know, with respect to the Province, it's around our expertise in building resource roads in challenging environments.

I think there would have been challenges to one party trying to remediate the slide on its own.

The trilateral partnership and the Joint Executive Steering Committee level has facilitated the process and making decisions on how we were going to protect and save the fish to get by Big Bar slide.

If everybody has a common goal, and everybody has a clear direction of where they're going and what they need to do, it can be done.

This was a huge response.

It continues and it will continue probably for a couple more years until we get a permanent mitigation to natural fish passage.

The other piece is the collaboration that we've seen.

With the two communities, with all Fraser First Nations, and with the provincial and federal governments to have a common goal of long-term successful fish passage.