Two-thirds of the world’s commercial fish stocks are over-exploited or fished to the edge of commercial extinction. Only 10 per cent of the world’s potential fish supply are in international waters but there is intense competition for these resources. Canada may have fired a machine gun across the bow of the Estai, but when a Russian coast guard vessel opened fire on Japanese fishing vessels near the Kuril islands off the coast of northern Japan in 1997 two fishermen were injured.
The few productive regions in international waters will continue to be the flashpoint for international disputes. Conservation of important straddling fish stocks is a concern all over the world, whether it is hake and squid on Argentina’s Patagonian shelf; orange roughy on the Challenger plateau off New Zealand; tuna in the South Pacific; blue whiting and jack mackerel off the Pacific coasts of Chile and Peru; pollock in the “doughnut hole” in the Bering Sea or in the “peanut hole” in the Sea of Okhotsk; or cod, flounder, and redfish on the Grand Banks outside Canada’s 200-mile limit.
Migrating stocks face the same threat from intense competition. Canada’s “salmon war” with the world’s only superpower promises to end badly for the fish. The Americans are fishing within their own territorial waters, but they are taking fish that were spawned in Canadian rivers, a clear contravention of the 1985 Canada-U.S.A. Pacific Salmon Treaty. The salmon are merely passing through U.S. waters on their way home to spawn.
The salmon has deep cultural significance to both native and non-native inhabitants of British Columbia. A symbol of the beauty and strength of its natural resources, the fish are at the centre of the West Coast ecosystem — food for bears, eagles, and otters, as well as man. Nature has no set rules, times, or areas for the great West Coast salmon runs that occur each year between May and December. But every summer and fall, millions of fish try to make it back to the rivers and lakes where they were born — to spawn, die, and start the great cycle of life again.
Public confrontation with the Americans has rarely ended well for Canadians. The prime minister’s slip in front of an open microphone in Madrid in July 1997 captured the essence of the relationship. Chrétien boasted, “I like to stand up to the Americans. It’s popular. But you have to be very careful because they’re our friends.” It may make Canadians feel good to shake a fist at their southern neighbours once in a while on issues such as soft-wood lumber, magazines, or Cuba, but everyone knows that compromise and accommodation are the watchwords of the relationship. Canada desperately wanted the U.S.A. to sign the 1997 treaty banning land mines, but the Americans pulled out at the last minute, spoiling a high point of Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy’s career.
During a press conference at the UN conference on straddling fish stocks in July 1995, Brian Tobin, who was then Canadian fisheries minister, announced that Canada and the U.S.A. had reached an agreement regarding the mediation of Canada’s dispute with Alaska about salmon quotas. The attempt at mediation later collapsed when former New Zealand ambassador Christopher Beebe’s non-binding report urging a return to the equity principal was rejected by the U.S.A. Beebe resigned in frustration, and the American interceptions of British Columbia fish continued. (According to an article in the Ottawa Citizen, the Beebe report was suppressed by Washington.)
In his opening-day address at the UN conference, Tobin called for public attention to the problem of unequal harvesting of Pacific salmon by Canadian and Alaskan fishermen, even though salmon wasn’t on the conference agenda. (The salmon are not in international waters, and the UN draft treaty applied only to fish in international waters.) Canadian scientists said a proper catch by the Alaskans would be 138,000 chinook a year. The Alaskans planned to catch 230,000, and refused to reduce the catch by the 40 per cent Canada requested. Alaska disputed Canadian evidence that deeper cuts were necessary to protect the stock.
Vice-President Al Gore contacted Alaska’s governor, Tony Knowles, and asked the state to back Canada’s calls for reductions, but Knowles refused. Alaska’s commercial fishing lobby is a powerful political force, and the state’s senior senator, Ted Stevens, chaired the Senate subcommittee on oceans and fisheries. Under the American system, the state has jurisdiction over fishing. Even though the U.S. federal government heads the negotiations over the Pacific Salmon Treaty, each state involved has a right to veto anything it doesn’t agree to. It was a negotiator’s nightmare. Different gear types add to the complexity of the salmon dispute; negotiators disagree about everything from the number of fish to which side has the best scientists.
There are five major species and several hundred sub-stocks of Pacific salmon, ranging from the small pink salmon that lives for two years to the great chinook that can live for seven years and weigh as much as thirty kilograms on a fisherman’s line. Sixty per cent of all salmon are produced in Canadian rivers, 10 per cent in Alaskan waters, and 30 per cent in Washington and Oregon. When the salmon migrate to the open sea, where they grow to commercial size, they don’t carry passports.
When they return, the salmon follow the great sea route that sweeps in from the Aleutian Islands, along the coast of Alaska, down past the Queen Charlotte Islands and Vancouver Island, to the states of Washington and Oregon. Along the way, the salmon branch off to rivers such as the Nass, the Skeena, and the Fraser, finally spawning in hundreds of home streams.
The Pacific Salmon Treaty included a provision intended to divide the catch between each country: “Each party shall conduct its fisheries and salmon enhancement programs so as to: (a) prevent overfishing and provide for optimum production; and (b) provide for each party to receive benefits equivalent to the production of salmon originating in its waters.” According to Canada, the U.S.A. was taking more than their fair share of B.C. salmon — 50 per cent more since the treaty was signed in 1985, while the B.C. harvest of fish from American waters had dropped by 25 per cent. Even the U.S.A. figures showed disparity in favour of the Americans.
Portions of the treaty came up for renewal in 1991, but it lapsed in 1992. Talks about a renewed treaty were soon derailed over the crucial question of defining what each nation’s share should be. According to Canadian figures, the Americans were catching about $60 to $70 million more salmon a year than they were entitled to take. When talks broke down, both sides fished aggressively.
The original treaty was signed only after fifteen years of negotiations. One of the first commissioners later alleged that the treaty was rushed through by the Mulroney government without an effective dispute-settlement mechanism, just so it could be unveiled at the 1985 Shamrock Summit — Mulroney’s first summit with President Ronald Reagan. Disagreements had started the moment the ink was dry, and by 1994 everyone was openly referring to the “salmon wars.” That was the year Brian Tobin had announced Canada would fish sockeye aggressively, without regard for American conservation concerns, because Alaska was overfishing Canadian chinook. It was the fish world’s equivalent of mutually assured destruction. By 1994, Canada had cut its quota for chinook by half to try to preserve the stocks, but the salmon had been overfished for twenty years. As well, streams where the salmon spawned had been poisoned by toxic waste, drained for power, or destroyed by clearcut logging.
A 1995 lawsuit against Alaska by Washington, Oregon, and the Northwest Indian bands was joined by Canada. The suit shut down the Alaska run for chinook early, but the Alaskans still caught 175,000 of the salmon. Alaska had replaced scientists on a chinook study with administrators because the government didn’t like the scientists’ findings. Ironically, the main witness for the successful suit was an Alaskan government scientist.
Canada did not have clean hands, either. In 1994, Tobin had authorized a grab for sockeye from the Fraser River before fishermen from Washington or Oregon could catch them. Everyone got a huge scare that year when the valuable sockeye from the Adams River suddenly went “missing.” The Adams was part of the Fraser River watershed and a major sockeye spawning river in the British Columbia interior. Canadian officials later acknowledged that the stock was only hours away from being wiped out completely. Red-faced officials could not explain why an expected 1.3 million salmon had not returned to their spawning grounds.
Former Tory fisheries minister John Fraser chaired an investigation into disappearance of Fraser River salmon stocks in the summer of 1994 for the Fraser River Sockeye Public Review Board. His report was released on March 7, 1995, just two days before the seizure of the Estai. One of its key recommendations was that the harvesting of salmon must be on a “conservative, risk aversion basis.” But at least 80 per cent of the returning salmon stocks were being taken by the fishery. Fraser’s report concluded that errors made by the DFO had almost eliminated the Adams River run. He told a news conference: “We have lost the Atlantic cod, and the public believes it is a national Canadian scandal. The public wonders if the same thing is happening to the salmon.” Then Fisheries Minister Brian Tobin pledged that past mistakes would not be repeated, saying, “My department can and will do better.”
After the Adams River scare, Tobin planned to shut down the whole Fraser River fishery indefinitely to allow the returning salmon to get upriver to spawn, but intense political pressure persuaded him to agree to a 1995 fishery. Federal scientists suddenly found an extra 700,000 fish. Estimates had originally been for a return of 3.8 million salmon, and this was revised upward to 4.5 million fish. (This was still less than half of the 10.7 million run that had been anticipated earlier in the year.)
DFO salmon co-ordinator Wayne Saito insisted that overfishing had not caused the low numbers. Saito blamed the drop on a combination of warm ocean currents caused by El Nñ, voracious mackerel predation on young fish, and “poor ocean survival” of the 1995 run. But all these natural fluctuations had occurred for centuries, and the fish had always multiplied.
After aboriginal and commercial fishermen caught only 536,000 sockeye, Tobin closed the Fraser River run indefinitely. Just 3.3 million fish had showed up, less than the original low estimate of 3.8 million that had led to the first planned closure. Over seven million sockeye had failed to make the spawning run. Little federal help was offered to the affected fishermen and processors. In 1995, fifteen thousand people relied on the West Coast fishery, with about 40 per cent of them receiving UI for most of the year. Tobin and the DFO had a major credibility problem.
The Fraser River was once the greatest salmon-producing river in the world, and more than half of B.C.’s commercial salmon catch came from the river and its tributaries. In 1994, the wholesale sockeye catch alone had been worth $302 million. In 1995, the landed value of sockeye, chinook, and coho salmon together dropped to just $90 million. For the first time in history, the New Brunswick farm salmon industry was worth more than the B.C. wild salmon fishery. Income for West Coast commercial fishermen dropped by 65 per cent.
There were about 4,400 commercial boats in the B.C. salmon fleet. Everyone knew that number had to be reduced, fifteen years of commissions and inquiries had all said the same thing. But no one could agree on how it should be done. The fishing gear was now so efficient that vessels could take in a few hours what had previously taken days. It was not unusual for a good fisherman with modern equipment to make as much as $55,000 for a few hours’ work. With such intense fishing power even a brief opening could wipe out a stock.
The B.C. fishermen favoured a phased-in, industry-controlled, voluntary licence-buyback scheme, with government sharing the cost with them. They suggested that they would pay royalties on the salmon they caught, rather than a flat landing fee. The royalties would be used to enhance the resource and reduce the fleet with buybacks. For its part, the DFO suggested area licensing to divide the coast into units that could be managed more easily.
On March 29, 1996, the new fisheries minister, Fred Mifflin, announced a plan to revitalize the West Coast salmon fishery. Conservation would be a top priority. The minister claimed that a 50 per cent reduction in the capacity of the commercial fleet was necessary both to protect the resource and to make the fishery viable. The first step would be voluntary licence retirement, and $80 million would be spent to kickstart the program. The coast would be divided into five areas: two for seiners and three for gillnetters and trollers. A licence would allow the holder to fish one area with one type of gear; if he wanted to fish in another area with another gear type, he would have to buy a licence from another holder. To no one’s surprise most fishing-boat owners opposed the plan. Fishermen at the press conference responded with loud jeers. One angry gill-net fisherman confronted the minister, his voice breaking, “I might as well put a match to my boat.… Fishermen are having their guts cut out.”
Mifflin’s announcement came just before what was expected to be the worst salmon fishing season in memory. The numbers of fish returning were anticipated to be so low that much of the fishery would have to be closed. Only 1.5 million salmon were expected to make it back to the Fraser River as it ran through Vancouver. The Fraser fishery was shut down. As many native people relied on salmon as a food source, the DFO allowed a native food fishery, but the commercial industry feared this would be a major conservation risk.
The $80-million buyback program certainly paled when compared to the $1.9-billion TAGS program on the East Coast. Fleet reduction would mean a loss of at least 3,500 jobs. Yet little compensation was offered to the thousands of fishermen and plant workers who would now be out of work. Capital investment had increased dramatically in the fleet and high operating expenses made it impossible for fishermen to survive on low prices. The resource could no longer sustain a way of life that had once been deeply satisfying to the players.
On April 17, 1996, five hundred people marched through downtown Vancouver to protest the way the federal government planned to reduce the salmon fleet. Mifflin had claimed that his plan was industry-driven, the result of Pacific Policy Roundtable discussions with seventy industry representatives. But some fishermen who sat at the roundtable insisted the recommendations they had made were ignored. Others said that the DFO was doing things backward: Before asking fishermen to sell off their licences, the Pacific Salmon Treaty had to be renegotiated with the U.S.A., then allocations had to be set between commercial, aboriginal, and sport fishermen. Only then would the government and everyone else know where they stood.
In May 1996, angry fishermen blockaded a floatplane set to take off for a fishing lodge on the northern tip of the Queen Charlotte Islands. The protesters were furious that sport fishermen were still allowed to catch one chinook each day, even though a commercial ban was in place.
The next month, B.C. premier Glen Clark gave Ottawa an earful at the First Ministers meeting. Despite federal spending of $241 million a year on the DFO’s Pacific Coast operation, the salmon fishery was in shambles. Ottawa had authorized a native fishery of 753,000 fish from the Fraser even though commercial fishing was banned. If native people took their quota it would lead to the lowest escapement levels of sockeye since 1968.
For the 1996 season, Canada wanted the southeast Alaska quota of chinook set at 60,000 fish. Alaska announced the catch would be between 140,000 and 155,000 fish, the lowest limit in years. Canada and the U.S.A. were still at odds over the number of salmon that originated in each other’s rivers. (Scientists are working to identify the different Pacific salmon stocks by their DNA. If they can establish the origin of fish caught at sea then they can also track their migration paths, and manage the harvest of individual stocks better.) Canada continued to insist the Americans were catching about five million more salmon than they were entitled to under the treaty.
While the prized chinook stocks were disappearing at an alarming rate, there were so many pink and chum salmon that they were being ground up and dumped at sea — a tremendous waste of the species. There were no buyers for the fish and prices dropped. The glut was made worse by huge numbers of farm salmon hitting the market just when the wild fish runs peaked. Norway, Chile, and Japan had flooded the international market with farm salmon.
Today over 40 per cent of the world’s salmon is produced by aquaculture, and that number is expected to climb to 50 per cent by the turn of the century. In 1996, B.C. produced 34,000 tonnes of wild salmon and about 25,000 tonnes of farm salmon. Conservationists worry about pollution and about farm fish escaping and mixing with the wild stock, but aquaculturalists claim that with careful husbandry there should be no problems.
At the end of February 1997, representatives of all stakeholders in the salmon fishery sat down together in Vancouver for round two of yet another attempt to renew the Pacific Salmon Treaty. Round one had been in Portland, Oregon, a week earlier. The task was to get British Columbia, Alaska, Oregon, Washington, the federal governments of both Canada and the U.S.A., hundreds of aboriginal groups, and thousands of commercial and sport fishermen to agree on a plan to share five species of salmon, which ranged across international borders. Complicating the problem further was the fact that while some species were endangered, others were so abundant they could not be profitably harvested.
There were four teams made up of commercial fishermen, native leaders, sport fishermen, and fishing industry representatives — thirty-two stakeholders in all, sixteen from each country. Sixty scientists, advisers, negotiators, and lawyers — the same people who had led the negotiations in the past but failed — were there to lend support. The stakeholders would report directly to the top negotiators, Yves Fortier for Canada and Mary Beth West for the U.S.A.
On April 8, 1997, Prime Minister Chrétien was in Washington for talks with President Clinton. The two men reached a number of bilateral agreements during a morning meeting at the White House, but the Pacific salmon fishery, although discussed, was not among them. The stakeholder negotiations continued, and a March 15 deadline was extended to May 9 because there had been some progress, but the talks ultimately failed over the issue of sharing of the resource.
The Canadian election was coming, and on April 16, a deal was announced between B.C. and Ottawa that would give the province more say in managing and conserving salmon stocks. On May 20, talks between the two chief salmon negotiators resumed in Seattle, but the next day Fortier announced he was suspending discussions because he had learned that West did not have authority to make a binding agreement. One former ministerial staffer at Fisheries described the change in ministers from the days of the Turbot War. “In Tobin, we had an energetic guy who could handle a big agenda. In Mifflin, we had a guy who had no energy and couldn’t even handle a small agenda. He was interested in parking problems, not solving them. That’s why Foreign Affairs was able to take back the fish file on sensitive matters like the salmon wars with the Americans.”
Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy announced that Canada would resume negotiations as soon as the U.S.A. was prepared to negotiate in good faith, adding, “We are deeply disappointed that the United States came to these meetings lacking the authority to negotiate.” Meanwhile, the DFO was instructed to enforce regulations requiring foreign vessels to contact Canadian authorities when they passed through Canadian waters. If they did not, they would face arrest.
The talks were suspended just twelve days before the June 2 federal election. The core of the dispute was how much U.S.-bound coho salmon Canadians could catch and how much sockeye bound for the Fraser the Americans could catch. The U.S.A. wanted Canada to cut back on fishing American coho stocks until they recovered, but at the same time it also wanted a greater share of Canadian fish.
Four American fishing boats were seized as they passed through Canadian waters after they failed to hail in as they entered Canadian territory. The judge who handed the captains $300 fines commented, “Someone just turned the heat up under you, gentlemen, and you are the pawns.” Poking the elephant in this way was designed to get attention, and it did. Regulations requiring American boats to report by radio and stow their fishing gear as they crossed the border had been in effect since June 1996, but they had not been enforced. About six hundred American boats a year take a shortcut through Canadian waters in the Inside Passage on their way to Alaskan fishing grounds.
The elephant was not amused by Canada’s antics. U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called off planned future talks on the Pacific Salmon Treaty after the arrests of the American boats; and Alaska Governor Tony Knowles accused Canada of “gunboat diplomacy.”
Although Chrétien had brought the Pacific Salmon Treaty up during his April meeting with President Clinton in Washington, everyone knew it was not a front-burner issue in the American capital. That would soon change. In May, Premier Glen Clark vowed to bar the American navy from access to the weapons-testing site at the Nanoose Bay base north of Nanaimo. The ban would come into effect on August 22. The federal government decried the decision, warning it could spark a damaging trade war or worse. It appeared that Ottawa would rather get tough with B.C. than with the Americans.
Canada has a $30-billion trade surplus with its nearest and dearest trading partner, and in 1996 there was $370 billion in trade between the two countries. Unlike the Estai incident, where other EU members, such as Britain, unofficially supported Canada in taking on the Spanish, no one would support the Canadians against the U.S.A. It appeared to be a losing situation no matter what Canada did.
Clark asked the federal government to bring back a $1,500 transit fee for American boats travelling the Inside Passage between Washington and Alaska, a charge briefly levied by Tobin in 1994. Some thought that the transit fee had brought the Americans back to the negotiating table after Vice-President Al Gore exerted his influence on the American stakeholders.
Chrétien raised the issue of the treaty again with Clinton at the G-8 summit in Denver in June. He was told that a deal was difficult because his negotiators needed the approval of the affected states, aboriginal groups, and fishermen before they could strike an agreement. These different interests had to be reconciled before a deal could be made.
Canadian negotiators kept asking for binding arbitration and wanted the White House to override local and state interests because of its international obligation to Canada. But U.S. states do not have to accept binding arbitration. The real question was would the White House anger the powerful Alaskan fishing lobby and state senators, just to please Canada?
The treaty talks had broken down just days before the start of the 1997 salmon season. Both countries then announced plans to fish more aggressively. The Canadian plan seemed to be to take so many fish that American fishermen would regret that the Pacific Salmon Treaty had not been renegotiated, making a mockery of Canada’s claim that conservation was our highest priority. On June 26, David Anderson, who had been made fisheries minister just two weeks earlier, the first from B.C. since John Fraser, announced a Canadian quota of almost 24 million salmon. The Fraser River quota was set at 12 million because the 1997 run was expected to be the second highest since 1913 — about 18.2 million fish.
There would be no directed commercial fishery for coho because of “conservation concerns,” and certain fishing areas would be closed to protect the coho from being taken as a by-catch. But at the same time as Anderson was saying he would not endanger coho stocks, he was telling B.C. fishermen to maximize their catch of U.S.-bound fish. This could put the salmon at risk of extinction. Both countries set maximum quotas, and as usual it was the fish that suffered. While the U.S.A. was demanding that Canada restrict its coho catch off Vancouver Island, the Americans refused to adopt similar restrictions on the controversial Alaskan fishery.
The salmon war escalated when the Alaskans began targeting Canadian sockeye runs on their way south to spawn. They claimed they were fishing for American pink salmon and getting the sockeye as a by-catch. (Sockeye are worth two dollars per kilo; pink salmon about twelve cents a kilo.) According to the lapsed Pacific Salmon Treaty, the Alaskans were supposed to cap their sockeye fishery at 120,000 fish. Instead they had taken nearly 350,000.
Anderson said the Americans were difficult, stubborn, and “in some respects bullies” during negotiations, but he allowed that “at some point retaliation becomes counterproductive” because the mouse had nothing with which to press the elephant. Other than saying that the U.S.A. had weakened its credibility as a leader in global environmental issues, Canada could do nothing, Anderson claimed.
Nevertheless, Premier Clark continued to push for a tough Canadian stand and took out controversial radio and newspaper ads in Washington State to publish a letter criticizing the Americans for endangering Canadian salmon stocks. A U.S. state department official called Clark’s letter unhelpful and “grossly inaccurate.” Clark wrote to Chrétien, calling for a joint strategy to counter the Alaskan catches of B.C.-bound salmon. The premier said the situation demanded a national response.
Making matters worse, fewer than expected early Stuart Lakes salmon reached their spawning grounds because of high water levels in the Fraser River. These salmon travel 1,100 kilometres up the Fraser to the lakes without stopping to feed, and high water levels exhaust the fish. Tests on dead female salmon showed they had been unable to spawn. Canadian officials had decided not to reopen the Stuart run because the high water levels would kill at least 10 per cent of the fish, estimated to be about 1.4 million. Washington state fishermen had already taken 25,000 more Stuart-bound sockeye than their usual 80,000. While this was happening, Lloyd Axworthy sent a strongly worded diplomatic note to Washington accusing the Alaskans of violating international laws by taking so much Canadian sockeye. He demanded that Alaska stop its salmon fishery immediately.
On the morning of Saturday, July 19, American boats off Juan de Fuca Strait were spotted intercepting salmon bound for the Fraser river — the early Stuart sockeye run. Outraged, B.C. fishermen retaliated by blockading the Alaskan ferry Malaspina in Prince Rupert. Their anger stemmed as much from Ottawa’s limp response to American overfishing, as the overfishing itself. Hundreds of fishing boats surrounded the state ferry, which was carrying over three hundred passengers. Although the Malaspina was prevented from leaving port, the passengers were allowed to disembark. They spent Saturday night in hotels and reboarded Sunday morning. The Alaskan government obtained a ruling from the federal court of Canada in Vancouver ordering the fishing boats not to interfere with Alaskan ferries. The injunction had little effect on the blockade. The ferry operator suspended further service to Prince Rupert, a business that was worth about $12 million a year to the town’s economy.
The fishermen insisted they would not lift the blockade until they talked to Anderson, and Clark’s top salmon adviser, Dennis Brown, told reporters that it was “absolutely absurd that the Americans are able to get a court order faster than our fishermen can get a meeting with their minister.” Onlookers on the wharf demonstrated their support, and a Vancouver radio station ran a contest for the ten best ways to retaliate against the Americans. The next day, Anderson flew back to the West Coast to attempt to cool down the escalating salmon war.
That night some fishermen began to leave the blockade and move their boats offshore from the hotel where Anderson was meeting protest leaders. The minister told them he would seek cabinet approval to protect the fishermen from possible American lawsuits. He said that he had done everything he could to resolve the dispute but that “retaliation has failed us miserably.” U.S. foreign policy had been focused entirely on conflicts in Bosnia and the Middle East, but the blockade soon gained worldwide media attention.
Clark admitted to reporters that he was worried about American retaliation if he shut down U.S. naval testing. But, he said, “There are certain times in a country’s life when you have to stand up and exercise your sovereignty, and this is one of those.” Both Anderson and Defence Minister Art Eggleton tried to get Clark to withdraw his threat to close the torpedo range. Eggleton said that if Canada broke its treaty over Nanoose Bay, other military treaties could be jeopardized. Clark responded by telling reporters that if the U.S.A. accepted arbitration or returned to the table to settle the dispute, he would withdraw the threat to close the base. During the federal election campaign, Clark said, Anderson and other politicians had supported his threat to close the base. Canadian defence workers at the site were upset by Clark’s threat, and the Union of National Defence Employees asked the Supreme Court of British Columbia for an injunction against the closure on August 22. Their writ claimed that the B.C. government had no authority to cancel the lease agreement with the U.S.A. because it was under federal jurisdiction. About ninety jobs were at risk.
Tourist industry representatives let it be known they were unhappy with Clark’s fiery defence in the salmon war. They were alarmed that the blockade of the Malaspina could have serious implications for B.C. tourism. The president of the Council of Tourism Associations sent a letter to Prime Minister Chrétien praising him for his “conciliatory approach” to the U.S.A.
Tourism is worth about $7 billion to British Columbia’s economy. Much of that money is spent by American visitors. A 1997 government report by Arthur May of Memorial University advised Ottawa that a fish caught in B.C.’s recreational salmon fishery was worth much more to the provincial economy than the same fish caught commercially. A chinook caught by a sport fisherman was worth about $670, but the same fish caught by a commercial fisherman was only worth $26.
The commercial salmon fishery catches about 92 per cent of the fish and is worth about $400 million a year to the province. The sport fishery (mainly chinook and coho) takes about 4 per cent of the salmon but is worth about $600 million a year to the provincial economy. British Columbian native people take the other 4 per cent. The sport fishery also generates six times as many jobs as the commercial fishery. Every year as many as 80,000 to 100,000 salmon fishing licences go to non-resident tourists, who pay as much as $1,000 a day to fly into remote fishing camps.
Premier Clark had tacitly supported the blockade, but in the face of pressure from Ottawa and B.C.’s tourist industry, he agreed it was time to end it. Calls went out to the White House, the U.S. State Department, and the U.S. embassy in Ottawa as senior Canadian officials made it clear that there was a difference between “the acts of some individuals and the Government of Canada.” The prime minister’s nephew Raymond Chrétien, Canada’s ambassador to the U.S.A., promised that the injunction ordering the end of the blockade would be enforced if the fishermen persisted. Ambassador Chrétien telephoned Alaska’s powerful Republican senator, Frank Murkowski. After the call, the senator told a press conference that he understood that the fishermen were upset by the unresolved dispute. On July 21, two days after the blockade began, the fishing boats released the Alaskan ferry.
As the Malaspina sailed out of the harbour the following morning, Ottawa was searching for a way to make Clark back down on his threat to close the base. Salmon had suddenly become the top issue on the bilateral agenda. Anderson promised to compensate British Columbia’s salmon fishermen for fish taken by the Alaskans and to protect the protesters from American lawsuits. Both Canada and the U.S.A. agreed to have “talks about talks.” But the tension remained.
A day later, Axworthy and Anderson flew to Washington to meet with senior American officials and senators from the western salmon fishing states. By agreeing to talks about talks, Canada signalled it was giving up its demand that the issue be submitted to binding third-party arbitration. Axworthy publicly accepted the U.S.A.’s position that binding arbitration was “not possible” and expressed his “concern and chagrin” about the blockade during a meeting with Senator Murkowski, but he stopped short of publicly apologizing. Meanwhile, the Senate passed a resolution by a vote of 81 to 19 calling on the president to send the U.S. navy along to protect Alaskan ferries as they passed through Canadian waters.
To lower the temperature of the dispute, it was agreed that two “eminent persons” with direct access to Prime Minister Chrétien and President Clinton would be named as envoys. Ottawa also made it clear that it would not allow Clark to close the military site at Nanoose Bay. When Chrétien spoke on the issue, he said the dispute would be solved more quickly if everyone just calmed down, especially Mr. Clark: “We have to maintain a dialogue. We have to remain on speaking terms with the government of the state that is neighbouring B.C., because they have a lot to say in the solution. We’re using the diplomatic way, and I think this is the best way.”
Retiring University of British Columbia president David Strangway was the Canadian choice for the new dynamic duo. William Ruckelshaus was selected by the Americans. He was the former head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, briefly served as acting director of the FBI, and was now a Seattle businessman. The envoys were to report by the end of 1997 to both the prime minister and the president.
Clark condemned the decision to place the dispute in the hands of the two men, saying that neither of them had the mandate to negotiate nor to recommend a solution. All they could do was identify areas of agreement and disagreement and set the stage for later substantive talks. The premier stood by his threat to cancel the military lease at Nanoose in late August and accused Ottawa of appeasing the Americans: “This may well be the first time — certainly in my memory — that the Canadian government doesn’t stand on the side of Canadians.” Clark was not invited to a scheduled meeting in Seattle that week with Anderson and the governors and state senators from Alaska, Oregon, and Washington. The American governors had refused to meet with the bad boy of B.C.
Threats and blockades had failed. The message was clear — the Americans could do whatever they wanted and Canadian politicians were powerless to stop them. The 1997 fishing season continued. When only half the expected number of American sockeye salmon returned to Bristol Bay off Alaska, Alaskan fishermen simply quadrupled their catch of Canadian sockeye to make up for the shortfall. By the end of July, Alaskan fishermen had intercepted almost 500,000 sockeye, worth about $3.5 million.
The heavy American catch left about 30 per cent fewer fish in the important Nass River run in northern B.C. To protect future runs, DFO officials restricted fishing by British Columbian fishermen along the northern coast, threatening their livelihoods even further. Canadian biologists were concerned that the Alaskans were also overfishing steelhead and coho salmon, which were important to the sport-fishing industry.
While the Americans were taking Canadian fish in record numbers, B.C. fishermen were doing the same thing to their stocks — intercepting U.S.A.-bound salmon off the southern tip of Vancouver Island — with Ottawa’s approval. The American fleet watched and could do nothing. The only difference in the two countries’ rush for spoils was that the Americans took more fish, and the species they took was more valuable. Canada could certainly not claim “the moral high ground,” even though Anderson denied the expanded Canadian fishery was an “aggressive” tactic, calling it instead a “vigorous” fishery that would not put coho stocks at risk.
The coho was near commercial extinction in Washington State, primarily because of the damming of the Columbia River for hydro power. The aim of the Canadian action was to get Washington fishermen to exert pressure on their Alaskan counterparts to stop their overfishing, but all it accomplished was to endanger the stocks further. It also turned Canadians into ecological hypocrites. Anderson was in Washington telling the Americans to think of the fish first: “The world looks to the United States for leadership on environmental issues, and the credibility of the U.S. administration is at risk here.”
Washington and Oregon, and aboriginal Americans are B.C.’s natural allies in the dispute with Alaskan fishermen, but the fisheries are a state jurisdiction. The affected states, stakeholders, and native people all have to agree before the salmon treaty can be renewed. Each state has a de facto veto over quotas, and this plays into Alaska’s hands. Even though Washington, D.C., cannot make Alaska agree to settle the dispute, American solidarity remains. In contrast, in Canada, B.C. and Ottawa are divided and fighting between themselves. Ottawa has been more critical of Glen Clark than of the Americans who are violating the treaty.
Under Mifflin’s plan, salmon fishermen were limited to one area unless they bought another expensive licence at a cost of $80,000 to $120,000. The result was that some fishermen were confined to areas where there were few fish. Some small coastal communities in the north depend entirely on the salmon fishery and they are desperate. Since the restrictions came into effect, average incomes for gill-netters have fallen by a third or more, and trollers and seine-net boats make next to nothing.
As much as half of the 800-boat northern fleet faced bankruptcy during the 1997 season, yet the money promised by Mifflin in January for short-term relief had not arrived. Fish plants were operating at about half capacity partly because, after the ferry blockade, they lost the Alaska salmon that was normally packed in B.C. Many packers could not work long enough to qualify for EI. Prices for B.C. sockeye have dropped by about 75 per cent in the last ten years to $1.20 a pound, so to make a living, commercial fishermen must take more and more fish. The competition for the resource is fierce, and thanks to Alaskan overfishing, commercial fishermen along British Columbia’s north coast earned an average of only $8,000 during the 1997 season.
The so-called “Canada first” fishery opened on the Fraser River sockeye on August 11, 1997. The aim was simple — to catch as many fish as possible before they reached American waters. Conservationists worried that the all-out assault on the sockeye would endanger the fragile coho stock, taken as a by-catch. In a news release they said the DFO had admitted that seine-net boats would kill at least 63,000 coho. One DFO report was rumoured to say that coho stocks were so weak some runs might not survive, even if no coho were caught. No one would know how much damage had been done until the survivors reached their spawning grounds. By the end of August, it was estimated that Canadian commercial fishermen had caught over seven million Fraser River sockeye, while their American cousins had caught only one million, about 13 per cent of the catch. Dennis Brown wryly observed that the Americans should have taken Canada’s offer of 17 per cent of the catch when they had the opportunity.
On August 14, the federal government began legal proceedings to keep the Nanoose Bay weapons range open. Clark immediately announced that he would fight the case, and he accused the federal government of sabotaging B.C.’s attempt to win the salmon war. The premier vehemently denied news reports that he had been looking for a way out of the threatened cancellation without losing face.
On the weekend of August 23, under the cover of darkness, a flotilla of over one hundred British Columbian boats began illegally netting tonnes of salmon on the Fraser River. The fishermen opposed exclusive fishing rights for natives, who fish for food, while they sit idle facing bankruptcy. They refused to allow federal inspectors on board their boats, and drove them back with threats and harassment. Outnumbered, and unable to use larger patrol vessels and helicopters safely in the dark, the DFO officers had to withdraw. Reform MP John Cummins, a former fisherman, took part in the illegal fishing organized by the group calling itself the Fisheries Survival Coalition. Most of the illegal fish was trucked to Seattle and sold to American processors.
At the end of August, the Alaskan government sent out letters stating they intended to arrest the owners of the fishing boats who had blockaded the Malaspina if they didn’t come up with a $3-million bond to cover damages. Individual boat-owners were given until the end of September to post bonds up to $10,000 or risk having their boats seized by the Americans. After initially promising to seek cabinet approval for aid for the fishermen, at the end of October Anderson said he would not help them. Ottawa was committed to enforcing the law.
After four years of bilateral discussions, Ottawa’s diplomacy had failed. The mandarins in the Department of Foreign Affairs had won the battle. Anderson lamely said that Ottawa was seeking international support for its case and that he did not want to “upset the negotiations process” by suing the U.S.A. government for failing to prevent Alaska from overfishing.
On September 8, B.C. launched a lawsuit against the American government and two states for $325 million. The suit claimed that the U.S.A. and the states of Alaska and Washington had violated the Pacific Salmon Treaty by taking too many fish. Two days after the suit was filed in Seattle, Robert Wright resigned from the Pacific Salmon Commission. The veteran Canadian member had been with the commission since 1985. Commenting on why he was resigning, Wright described the DFO as “full of dinosaurs” who were allowing the chinook and coho to be fished to extinction in an attempt to pressure the Americans into a deal. The tactic had failed. Wright had also been an occasional adviser to Premier Clark, but dropped that role because of the province’s “ill-conceived lawsuit” against the U.S.A. He said Clark’s inflammatory political rhetoric and the lawsuit had worsened an already tense situation.
Wright had built a $70-million sports-fishing business that depended on chinook and coho, and many of his customers were Americans. He accused Clark’s advisers, such as Dennis Brown, of being too close to unionized commercial fishermen, and said that the DFO bureaucracy was full of managers who saw the commercial fishermen as the main stakeholders in the salmon industry, but failed to see the importance of fish farming and the sport fishery.
Wright claimed the salmon treaty as it was written was deeply flawed, “doomed from the day of its being signed,” because three states and the native people had to agree before an agreement on quotas could be reached with Canada. In Canada, by comparison, the federal government could make a decision even if industry stakeholders disagreed. So, in effect, Canada had to satisfy the demands of four different groups in the U.S.A. — all with different interests. According to the former commissioner, since neither Strangway nor Ruckelshaus had formal power to agree to a solution, their efforts were doomed to failure as well. Wright went so far as to say that neither the Queen nor the Pope would be able to solve the salmon crisis working with the present treaty.
The salmon dispute had all the marks of a typical Canadian fishery dispute: The federal government was warring with a provincial government over an issue with serious international implications. There were disagreements among the fishermen in different sectors, and between the commercial and sport fishermen. There were even disagreements within the DFO. As if that wasn’t enough, aboriginal fishing rights added more complications, while environmentalists did their usual dance, and every political party scoured the dispute looking for an edge. Lost in the fracas was the overfished salmon, headed to extinction.
President Bill Clinton knew where his interests lay when he sent a letter to Alaskan senators promising that the U.S.A. would retaliate against further incidents such as the blockade of the Alaskan ferry in July 1997. The letter was written about the same time that Chrétien was on the phone to Clinton urging him to help solve the salmon dispute. So much for Canada’s quiet diplomacy. The timing made it clear that the president would press Alaskan politicians for a salmon agreement only when it suited his political needs and his political debts.
On September 24, Senator Pat Carney spoke for a lot of British Columbians when she told Ian Mulgrew of the Vancouver Sun that B.C. should renegotiate its relationship with Canada. Carney said, “The lesson of the salmon wars is that B.C. does not count. That’s a fact. I think we have to rethink what we want from confederation because the current arrangement is not meeting our needs and the fish war proves that.”
The senator said that watching the way the federal government had restructured the fishery on the West Coast, displacing half the fleet and putting as many as seven thousand people out of work, and the way it had handled the fishing dispute with the U.S.A., had changed her from a strong nationalist to a person who believed that B.C. had to rethink its relationship with central Canada. Her office was flooded with calls of support from British Columbians, but her comments set off a media storm in Ottawa and a denunciation from her party leader, Jean Charest. In reaction, Carney said she was tired of the bias shown by “the hysterical central Canadian pig media” and federal politicians. Premier Glen Clark warned that Carney’s position should be seen as a wake-up call to the rest of the country. When Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion asked what salmon had to do with secession, Clark said he showed ignorance of B.C.’s problems: “Salmon has everything to do with national unity because it’s a symbol of Ottawa’s failure to recognize the unique issues that concern British Columbians.” Clark ruled out separation, but said that Carney’s statements were “a sign of how deep the feelings of alienation are in British Columbia and I hope [will] send a message to the federal government that they have to take us seriously.”
In October 1997, B.C.’s fisheries minister, Corky Evans, attended a meeting of federal and provincial fisheries ministers in St. John’s. (Anderson had ignored several previous requests for a meeting, according to Evans.) In a private talk with Anderson, Evans raised the subject of the province’s lawsuit against the U.S.A. for violating the Pacific Salmon Treaty. “I asked him to join our court case,” Evans says. “He asked me to withdraw our court case.” The two men had fundamentally different views: Anderson believed in diplomacy; Evans pointed to four years of failed negotiations. He couldn’t help making a comparison to the arrest of the Estai, when Canada had stood up for East Coast fishermen against the Spanish. That, Anderson said, was different. The Americans were fishing within their own waters.
The special envoys did their best, but when they reported on January 12, 1998, it was to recommend government-to-government negotiations as a means of breaking the impasse. Glen Clark tempered his praise for the “breakthrough” Ottawa claimed by pointing out that the dispute was now right back where it had started four years earlier.
The Americans had continued to insist on stakeholder negotiations, and Ruckelshaus and Strangway made one last attempt to get the parties talking at a meeting in Seattle on December 19. After a twelve-hour standoff in a private room, no one blinked. The envoys also recommended that the U.S.A. and Canada agree on interim quotas to protect the salmon before the start of the fishing season in 1998. Although they suggested that Canada should get more fish, there was little chance of that happening in a congressional election year. And that wasn’t the only reason for questioning the plausibility of what the envoys were recommending, as Clark pointed out: “Do we really believe that commercial salmon fishermen in Seattle will give up fish to us because we will make more salmon available to Washington State’s sports fishery?”
But even Clark admitted that the situation was now less volatile thanks to Ruckelshaus and Strangway. In return for a tourism promotion agreement, under which Canada would pump over $2.7 million into a campaign that would benefit both northern B.C. and Alaska, the state dismissed its $3-million legal claim against B.C. fishermen and their vessels. The fishermen also dropped their counterclaims and agreed to a permanent injunction against further ferry blockades. (The settlement did not affect B.C.’s $325-million lawsuit against Alaska for overfishing, which the province intended to pursue.)
The big shapes, however, remained depressingly unchanged. After delivering a bleak report about Canada’s prospects in the talks, the federal government’s chief negotiator, Yves Fortier, abruptly quit on February 6, 1998. In a letter to David Anderson and Lloyd Axworthy, Fortier wrote, “Ultimately, after many lengthy and frustrating negotiating sessions, Canada’s objectives proved to be unattainable in a negotiating forum in which the U.S. Government considered itself hostage to the demands of various state and tribal jurisdictions.”
Fortier saw no hope of a solution unless Washington put federal pressure on recalcitrant Alaskan fishing interests. His resignation sparked fears among fishermen that Ottawa was preparing to cave in and give more salmon to the Americans. Officials in both Foreign Affairs and the DFO adamantly denied that there had been a change in Canada’s position, but went out of their way to say that the envoys themselves had called for compromise on both sides.
At the very least, it was a reversal of fortune for the DFO. Under the leadership of the fiery Brian Tobin, the department had wrested the salmon file from mandarins at Foreign Affairs, only to see it handed back to Lloyd Axworthy after the appointment of a weaker fisheries minister. According to a senior DFO manager who worked for both men, “Brian Tobin managed to divide American interests, but Fred Mifflin was nowhere to be seen. He’d run off to his riding and hide for days.” Mifflin, the official said, was “looking for ways to park issues, and when Axworthy started flexing muscles over at Foreign Affairs, Freddie saluted.” Axworthy hadn’t wanted “to provoke the Yanks” in a U.S. election year, and as a result, the salmon file was turned into an exercise of “ragging the puck.”
The man who inherited the mess, Fisheries Minister David Anderson, did his best to see the silver lining in the cloud of the failed salmon talks: “You have to remember that the approach taken in the last four years has failed; we’ve not had an agreement in those four years. This is the first time we’ve had a high-ranking American official, who happens to be the special representative of the president of the United States, saying that Canada should receive more fish.”
When asked about Clark’s view that the special envoys had failed to resolve the problem, Anderson bristled. “They were never expected to provide us with an agreement,” he said. “They were only asked to give us the type of process that would lead to an agreement. Whether it’s enough to come to an agreement, time will tell. The alternative is to throw up your hands, walk away, and say, ‘Well, there’ll be no fishing.’ ” Protecting Canadian fishing interests by force, as Tobin had done over the turbot, was not in the play book of David Anderson and the DFO.