Prisoners of Their Histories: Canada-U.S. Conflicts in the Pacific Salmon Fishery

Abstract

Historians may record more fishery conflicts during one year in the nineties than during the entire nineteenth century. --Lester Brown, State of the World 1996 During the past three years, increasing alarm has been expressed within sectors of the fishing industry in both Canada and the United States concerning the numerical decline of salmon entering the rivers of the Pacific Northwest. Concurrently, conflicts and confrontations between the various groups involved in the salmon fishery have increased in number and intensity. This paper will examine the negotiation process leading up to the Canada-U.S. Pacific Salmon Treaty of 1985--and the realities which created the need for such a treaty--as well as assess the success of the Treaty within the contexts of the strife now dominating the international salmon fishery. Strife is not specific to the Pacific Northwest, but pervades almost all of the world's fisheries. Currently, every ocean fishery is being fished at or beyond capacity. Of the world's fifteen leading ocean fisheries, thirteen of them are in decline. (1) The Pacific salmon fishery provides an evocative case study of the causes of this decline in the world's fisheries, as well as a reflection of the strife which dominates the relationship between participants in the aftermath of ecological collapse. The escalating disagreements between Canada and the United States in the Pacific salmon fisheries need to be understood in terms of the difficulties confronting conservation initiatives which, in fact, must deal not only with the difficulties of looming ecological collapse but also with the collapse of good will and trust in the political and economic contexts. Any legal agreement which is struck is confronted immediately with a divisive and hostile group of stakeholders who feel their interests are threatened. Conservation is caught between vulnerable natural processes, on the one hand, and intransigent economic interests on the other. In sequential terms, what becomes clear in the analysis of the relationship between conservation and development in the case of the Pacific salmon fishery is that conservation is all but ignored in the period preceding the threats of ecological collapse, so conservation initiatives created in the period of looming ecological collapse--such as the Canada-U.S. Pacific Salmon Treaty of 1985--are insufficient because the standard legal process is superseded by increasing uncertainty in the larger political and economic context. Carl Walters has described the situation in the Canadian Pacific salmon fishery in this way: Our historical management approach has produced... an institutional quagmire, with grossly overcapitalized and bitterly competitive fishing fleets, an allocation system among fishermen that is dominated more by threat of civil disobedience than by reasoned analysis of where rights and privileges ought to lie, and a publicly costly and burdensome apparatus for both biological management and economic support of fishermen.... When (not if) nature deals us a bad hand, through processes such as the decreasing carrying capacity due to climate change, this quagmire will quickly trap any political decision maker who attempts to act wisely on behalf of long term sustainability. (2) These historical realities, combined with the degradation of salmon habitat resulting from activities outside of the fishery, inform the seeming intractability of the current crisis in Canada-U.S relations in salmon fishery management. This predicament also highlights some of the difficulties which confront the relationship between private and public spheres in modern society. Environmental policymaking generally rests on the assumption that publicly funded bodies operating in the context of the rule of law and equity oversee private individuals and corporations engaged in the competitive production of goods and services. In practice, the line between private and public concerns appears at times to be a porous membrane through which the edicts of economic interests pass, thereby rendering the public sphere as a struggle for resources carried on by other means. …