B.C. Premier Creates Waves Premier Glen Clark Threatens To Close U.S. Base In Talks Over Fraser River Salmon Runs

Docking his boat, the Sunshine, on a rainy summer afternoon, Gary Rogers wondered when he will get to catch some of the 29 million salmon bound for the Fraser River, and why the United States and Canada can’t agree on how to divide the enormous runs.

Past sacrifices made to conserve salmon would appear to be ready to pay off on both sides of the border. Instead, Rogers hears angry denunciations from British Columbia Premier Glen Clark, and vows that Canada will try to minimize Americans’ catch of Fraser River-bound salmon.

“They just keep throwing tantrums and demanding more,” Rogers reflected Wednesday.

The long-running U.S.-Canada salmon dispute shows no signs of resolution as record salmon runs begin to return to a great, undammed river system shared for more than half a century by fishermen on both sides of the 49th parallel.

Talks broke off last month, as they have each June since 1994, with U.S. and Canadian negotiators failing to agree on catch quotas under the 1985 U.S.-Canada Salmon Treaty. Each country is setting its own limits.

The first sockeye salmon, the so-called early Stuart run, are already in the Fraser on an 850-mile upstream migration to the Stuart River system west of Prince George.

A much larger run is expected to begin in about three weeks, bound for the Quesnel and Horsefly Rivers. Later in the summer will come salmon bound for the Adams River east of Kamploops.

By the end of the season, 18 million sockeye and 11 million pink salmon will have migrated toward the Fraser - a majority of them ending up in fishermens’ nets.

With U.S. waters reaching to within five miles of its mouth, the Fraser River is at the heart of the impasse. U.S. negotiators offered Canada more than 80 percent of the river’s catch. Canada said it wasn’t enough.

Clark has stepped into the impasse, with what has become a kind of three-step political strategy: Make noise. Preach nationalism. And promote confrontation.

The British Columbia premier rarely lets a single news cycle go by.

Last week, he blasted the United States for allowing its fishermen to take salmon from the early Stuart run, the Fraser River system’s first major sockeye salmon run. Early this week, British Columbia accused Alaska fishermen of improperly catching Fraser-bound sockeye.

On Wednesday, Clark was addressing readers of Seattle newspapers with an advertisement calling the early Stuart fishery “a blot on the conservation ethic of your state.”

When not taking on the Americans, Clark has feuded with Canada’s federal government. Ottawa is trying to get the premier to back away from his threat to cancel the lease on a torpedo testing range used by U.S. Navy submarines at Nanoose Bay on Vancouver Island.

“In this business, you don’t make threats you’re not ready to carry out,” Clark told reporters earlier this week.

The lease is due to be canceled Aug. 22. Under Canada’s constitution, however, the federal government has the power to step in and preempt provincial authority.

“I’d be shocked if the federal government chose to do that and side with the United States against the people of British Columbia,” Clark said.

But there are signs that Clark’s confrontation strategy is straining the patience of both federal governments, and losing its credibility.

“Frankly, I haven’t paid much attention to him,” said Jim Pipkin, a veteran U.S. negotiator in the fisheries dispute.

At a briefing Thursday, U.S. State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns was contemptuous toward the premier’s advertisement. He described Clark’s letter as “unhelpful and grossly inaccurate.”

“If Premier Clark perhaps might spend more time working on the treaty than writing open editorials to the people of Washington, then perhaps we might make more progress,” Burns said.

Asked if he took seriously Clark’s threat to close the testing range at Nanoose Bay, Burns replied: “No.”