Folks,
A number of years ago I wrote the SRD Minister and asked if the poachers names/location/activity/where happened/$'s fined etc could be published to a web site that is updated regularly.
A kinda "Whose Stealing your Wildlife" site.
I'd thought that there might be a number of positives arise from such a site and these might include:
1] taxpayer seeing returns for enforcement $
2] Shame factor - if any
3] Per group Pressure - if any
4] Areas where enforcement is done
5] Type of tickets - warning and or court
And on and on.
Minister wrote back and told me that they just couldn't do such a thing. Why would anybody be "shamed" for wildlife/fishery tickets.
Curiously other jurisdictions in do this type of thing all the time. Works there.
I suspect that the web site may poke up what most of us think. There is about "0" enforcement out there. Would be a sorrowful experience to have month after month w/o any updates as no new court cases exist.
And the enforcement is going to get worse. Used to be a group called StreamWatch who patrolled the eastern Slopes west of Rocky and in the SW portion of Alberta. The StreamWater group did nearly all the enforcement that happened in the summer. But the group finally folded due to Govt issues. Streamwatch was originally privately funded with officers coming from the enforcement program @ Lethbridge College. Streamwatch was formed because the founders realized that the Govt wasn't doing it's job. After watching AF&G 40 years of resultions telling Govt that they had to do something about enforcement, there had to be another way to get people on the ground.
Streamwatch was a great program finally killed by the bureaucrats.
catch ya'
Don
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