If your metric is anglers per lake,,, well,,,, Alberta certainly can claim the title of worst fishing in Canada!!!
Or if it the number of fish you can legally keep in a days worth of fishing,,, Alberta lags well behind the pack there as well.
Add to that a number of our lakes are quite shallow prone to both winterkill and summer kills that limit fish populations.
And the life of a trout in many of our foothill and mountain freestone stream is a precarious existence given things like anchor ice and stream bed scouring during ice break up and spring runoff (particularly so in the drainages from the Red Deer River north).
All that said,,, Not all of Alberta's fisheries are doom and gloom. Many fisheries do support long term survival, and for a number of reasons (natural and man induced) can be quite productive fisheries.
So Alberta does offer a number of fair to excellent fishing opportunities with average to above average catch rates and in a few special cases above average sizes as well... All this,,, in spite of,,, or because of,,, Alberta fairly strict angling regulations.
My username being Pikebreath, it should be obvious what my favorite species is to fish for in Alberta. I do lament the number of fisheries we have where the pike seem to max out in size in the 60 - 65 cm zone. However in each of the last 15 years, I have caught pike over 40" annually, and in the last 7-8 years I have been catching anywhere from 6- 20 pike annually over 40" from Alberta waters (all at drive to lakes btw)
Really hard to call that the worst fishing in Canada!!!
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