A B.C. Supreme Court justice will lead a judicial inquiry into the collapse of the Fraser River salmon stocks, Prime Minster Stephen Harper announced Thursday.

Justice Bruce Cohen, former chairman of the province's electoral boundary commission, was named on Friday as the inquiry's head. Cohen will have access to all of the documents on the issue from the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans, as well as being able to summon witnesses to testify under oath.

Harper announced the inquiry in Parliament in response to a question from John Weston, MP for West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast-Sea to Sky Country.

"If we're going to get to the bottom of this, this is the most direct way," Weston said later that day. "I think everyone on the West Coast shares this concern and now we have a substantial inquiry."

Fisheries officials expected 10.6 million sockeye salmon to return to the Fraser to breed this year.

Less than a tenth of them actually appeared, a catastrophic drop that stunned scientists and led to the fishery being closed for the third straight year.

There is, so far, no agreement on what caused nine million fish to vanish.

Climate change, predators, overfishing, changing ocean temperatures and the impact of coastal fish farms have all been put forward as possible reasons. Several opposition MPs have called on Harper to convene an inquiry.

"This is no longer a fire drill," said Alexandra Morton, a biologist with the Raincoast Research Society.

"We've been hearing that the salmon numbers are going down, but British Columbia has so many salmon that this was able to go on for quite some time before we reach bottom. Well, we are just before there right now.

"This inquiry is exactly what we need if we want to have any wild fish in this country at all," she said.

"If we had this judicial inquiry process for the cod before they went down, we would still have them."

Atlantic cod stocks collapsed in the late '90s, costing the East Coast tens of thousands of jobs and leading to a federal bailout of the fishing industry. Although he resisted calls for a public inquiry, then Fisheries Minister David Anderson later admitted his department had mismanaged the cod stock.

This is not the first inquiry into the West Coast salmon population.

In 1998, former Newfoundland Premier Brian Peckford released a controversial report commissioned by the provincial government, which accused Ottawa of being overly restrictive of salmon fishing. The federal fisheries department refused to participate in Peckford's inquiry and dismissed his conclusions.

But Weston is optimistic that Cohen will "get results."

"There is more than one way to skin a cat, and I think it is important that the inquiry is independent of DFO," he said.

© North Shore News 2009