U.S., Canada Salmon Talks Resume Without Progress Officials Hope To Develop Treaty Next Week

WASHINGTON Canadian and U.S. officials made little progress toward a new Pacific salmon treaty Thursday but will meet again next week in Toronto to try to find a way to divide the catch and protect threatened fish species.

Deputy U.S. Commerce Undersecretary Doug Hall met for about 3 hours here with Canadian deputy fisheries minister Bill Rowat. Hall is the deputy commerce undersecretary for oceans and atmosphere.

“They issued no statement after the meeting except to say that they would meet again” next week, said Brian Gorman, a spokesman for the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Marine Fisheries Service.

“As far as I know there’s been no announcement of even an agenda. Participants are being fairly closed mouthed on both sides,” he said.

Terry Colli, a spokesman for the Canadian Embassy here, said “both sides flushed out the issues of concern to them.” He said the next meeting would be next Thursday in Toronto but no other details were available.

The long-running dispute centers on Canadian demands for a larger share of the catch of Pacific salmon, which spawn in both the United States and Canada.

Thursday’s talks were scheduled after Vice President Al Gore assured Canadian Fisheries Minister Brian Tobin the United States is committed to conservation and equity in the salmon catch.

David Colson, deputy U.S. assistant secretary of state for oceans and fisheries, had said earlier that Thursday’s meeting would be a “framework discussion, a process discussion about how we are going to move into a more complex negotiation.”

Colson, the chief U.S. negotiator for the treaty, said one of the biggest differences between the two countries is the value they place on recreational fishing.

“The Canadians are asserting that we ought to be looking at this in terms of simply absolute numbers of fish,” Colson said during a briefing Wednesday at the State Department.

“We don’t look at it that way. We talk about basically the benefits associated with the fisheries,” he said.

Tobin announced Saturday he would lift an $1,100 fee on U.S. fishing boats that travel through British Columbia’s Inside Passage to and from fishing grounds off Alaska. Canada imposed the tariff last month after declaring an impasse in negotiations.

About 300 boats paid the transit fee before it was lifted.

Canada says the United States has increased its interceptions of Canada-spawned salmon by half since 1985 while the Canadian interceptions have dropped 40 percent. The imbalance is worth $50 million a year, Canada says.

Colson said the treaty talks are very complicated because they involve individual states and American Indian tribes as well as two federal governments.

“When you start putting in the tribal perspectives on these fish, the ceremonial and subsistence values, the recreational values of these fish, it’s one of the issues that really is a source of difference between us and the Canadians right now. They tend to value the fish simply by what a fisherman gets for them off of a commercial fishing boat,” Colson said.

“Anybody that’s caught a 50-pound chinook salmon out in a sports fishery knows that it’s a very different fish than a 2-pound pink salmon that goes into can.

“The U.S.-Canada relationship here is not just counting up the number of fish, it’s counting up the kinds of fish and what kinds of fisheries those fish would be going into.

And that’s been sort of the nature of the debate that has led us to the impasse that we had and which led to Canada’s imposition of this fee, which they have now removed.”

Canada must recognize the toll dwindling salmon runs already are taking on the Pacific Northwest, Colson said.

“We’re going to be jerking the United States’ economy around because of a fish called the Snake River fall chinook that comes out of Idaho and is now on the U.S. endangered species list, and we’ve got a lot of concerns about how Canada is catching those fish in their fisheries,” he said.