The Premier of B.C. says when people put their heads together and focus on the end result, good things will happen.

John Horgan was speaking at the UBCM Convention where he said a good example of that right now is the Big Bar landslide site, northwest of Kamloops.

“The slide at Big Bar was preventing our sockeye runs putting that at risk,” he told the crowd gathered. “So we assembled a team at Lillooet, federal representatives, provincial representatives, Indigenous people and we worked as hard as we could to resolve a natural disaster that had a profound impact on salmon, which would have then had a profound impact on people.”

Horgan says at the end of the day, all of the work has proven to be successful as about a quarter million salmon have made it past the slide in the past few months.

“We literally put them in helicopters to lift them over the impasse,” Horgan added. “At the end of the day, the waters receded and hundreds of thousands of salmon made it to their destination.”

“Now I’m not going to try and pretend that there was a positive outcome for those salmon because that’s not what spawning is all about. But the good news is their kids are getting a fresh start in life.”

He went on to say there is still lots of work to be done at the Big Bar landslide, but he says by coming together, people were able to help prevent what could have been a bigger catastrophe.

“If you’re depending on salmon to arrive, you don’t care who is responsible, you just want to make sure it gets done,” Horgan noted. “And what we were able to accomplish, orders of government, local people, Indigenous communities was quite extraordinary.”