Is a fish fight brewing between the US and Canada?

Jordan You’ve probably seen it in a nature documentary, unless you’ve been lucky enough to witness it yourself. It is a majestic sight. Millions of salmon returning to British Columbia Rivers swimming upstream to spawn after completing years-long journeys on the open ocean. But every year, these days at least fewer salmon return. There are many reasons for this decline. It is an incredibly complex ecosystem. And of course, some of those reasons stem from climate change. And in BC right now, there are strict regulations on fishers to try to keep the salmon population healthy. But you will notice that I said in BC there are regulations, because those regulations don’t apply and Alaska. And of course, fish don’t respect borders. And you can probably guess what happens next in this story. But what remains to be seen is what comes of the salmon conflict. If Alaskan fishers are going to scoop salmon headed for BC? What does Canada do? Do we scoop salmon headed for Washington State and retaliation? Do we need diplomatic intervention from our governments? Or can we maybe all get along because both sides surely are mature enough to realize that it doesn’t matter who takes the salmon? If the salmon are all gone? We all lose.

Jordan I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings. This is the big story. Stefan Labbe is a journalist covering climate and environment solutions for glacier media. Hey, Stefan Labbe.

Stefan Labbe Hey, Jordan, thanks for having me.

Jordan Thank you for joining us, I found this story pretty fascinating. And maybe just to lay the groundwork for us. Before we get into what’s happening here. Can you describe the journey that BC salmon make in a normal year? You know, where do they go?

Stefan Labbe Yeah. So, you know, BC is a pretty rugged province, we’re just laced with all sorts of rivers running up and down the coast, pouring out into the Pacific. So every year there, there’s a handful of salmon species that make this grueling journey, they start high in the reaches of these rivers and streams. And in many places, they go down these rivers evading sport fishers, toxic water, landslides, the impacts of logging on the sides of the rivers, city building.

Jordan Right

Stefan Labbe And when they finally get to the Pacific Ocean, they do this kind of incredible loop, we’ll cut deep out into the Pacific Ocean, kind of loop up to the Aleutian chain in Alaska, and then come back down, eventually making landfall either on the Alaskan coast or the BC coast. But this journey, you know, it’s a little bit different for every species of salmon, but say for sockeye, which is one of the most valuable for food and their most valuable in the store as well. It takes four years to make this round trip journey. And it’s not a guarantee something like one out of every two to 4000 fish make it.

Jordan Wow

Stefan Labbe Do we know how many fish there are kind of making these journeys? And I know, you know, there’s a million different in species and variations. But I’m just trying to get a sense of you know, how the salmon stock is doing in BC?

Stefan Labbe Sure. So I mean, you’re right there. It’s it’s a lot of numbers here. So maybe we just take stock, I will stick with that for a minute. So on the Fraser River, which is the most important salmon-bearing River in the country, if you go back to 1980, and you take the average between 1980 and 2014, there was something like just under 10 million Sockeye returns every year. Some years that would go up to something like just under 30 million in a year. Okay. In 2020, that return of sockeye salmon plummeted to an all-time low of something like 293,000 fish.

Jordan Wow.

Stefan Labbe So we’re talking 95 fold decline just in the last several decades. That doesn’t even speak to the, you know, stories that I think a lot of Canadians are familiar with, where you could almost just reach into the water and pull out fish, you know. So we’re talking about a massive decline so big that we can’t even sometimes picture it. You know, unless you live through these decades and seen it, it’s hard to understand what we’ve really lost.

Jordan Before we talk about what we’re doing about this, because that’ll lead us into the critical part of the story, just in general, what happens to the ecosystem when stocks like that dropped by 95%?

Stefan Labbe In these kind of glacier-fed rivers and this goes for the Skeena and Nass rivers these the second and third most important rivers in British Columbia, and the North that kind of stuff. Make through the Great Bear Rainforest. They, they require salmon for this kind of building block of life as salmon when they return, and, you know, they feed bears, but those bears, you know, they feast on the salmon and they discard maybe parts of their carcasses on the forest floor providing this kind of foundation this building block for life and, and then those nutrients they fill the rivers to, and they create this whole kind of chain of life that propagates outward and upward and, and without them, you don’t have this, this really vital source of, of nutrients, At sea.

You know, if we look at a species like Chinook, this is the most important food source and these food source for the Southern Resident killer whales. And this is a group of killer whales, you know, that have declined in recent years, there used to be over 100 Now there’s something like just over 70. And they require these Chinook salmon. And without them, you know, they think they could starve, you know, and so, you know, these salmon, they provide a source of food and a source of life for everything along the coast, all the way up these rivers, it’s, it’s really hard to overstate how important they are.

Jordan So what have we been doing about it either as the Canadian government as the British Columbian government, or just fisheries themselves to help preserve these trucks? Are there restrictions on fishing now?

Stefan Labbe In June, last year, the Canadian government closed something like 60% of the salmon fishing on the BC coast. I hear from sources that effectively this cuts off even more of the fishing than than that. But at the same time, when they announced that they said, they would put something like $647 million towards rebuilding salmon stocks on the west coast of Canada. Now, that sounds like a lot of money. But I’ve talked to fishermen that have put forward recommendations that we need, you know, nearly $50 million a year for decades on end, just to bring this back. So and these are recommendations that have been, you know, they stretch back decades, they’re talking about this in the 90s. And they’ve been working on this for a long time. So so it sounds like a lot of money. And I hear from environmental groups, that is a great start. But we’re just getting off the ground here. And we’re digging ourselves out of a very deep hole. To get back out of that. Sources tell me that we need to start by limiting and changing the way we do logging and this province, when trees are taken off the side of a river, the soil just loosens up and it can pour into the river. And that creates this kind of turbid environment that is really bad for fish, whether you know as they hatch, or as they go back up, you know, it kills them, or prevents them from spawning the next generation.

Another thing is a lot of people are talking about there’s two sides to this conversation, but bringing salmon farms off the ocean and inland so they don’t compete and cause disease in wild salmon populations. So there’s two sides to this, the industry’s got a very different take on that. But there’s a lot of research out there that says that there’s a huge impact. But we’ve got climate change too. And there’s a lot of pressures that are out of our hands, essentially. So there’s a lot of different things here and $647 million, it’s a big pot of money, but this money’s still coming down the pipe and it’s gonna take years to bounce back.

Jordan So there’s a whole lot of stuff that we’re doing, or at least trying to do, and we could probably go back and forth on whether it’s enough and who thinks it’s too little. And who thinks we need to take a different direction. But in the middle of all this, why are BC fishers angry? What’s happening up on the Alaskan coast?

Stefan Labbe So in southeast Alaska, you’ve got a border, but fish don’t respect borders. They swim back and forth between them. I mentioned this big loop that salmon do over the course of their lives. When they come back to the coast. They’ll hit landfall either in BC or Alaska. And in years where the water is particularly warm in the Pacific. They’ll avoid that they don’t like the warm water so they’ll go and they’ll and they’ll smash into the Alaskan coast more likely than the BC coast. So some years you have more fish coming down from Alaska into BC. This last year we have learned from a technical report that came out last week that they caught 800,000 sockeye salmon in this small fishing district or a handful of districts but primarily one district 104. And of these 800,000 fish, this report estimates between 50 and 75% of them were headed to the Skeena River and that number drops slightly for the Nass River. So we’re talking about over a half-million fish that American, Alaskan fishers intercepted on their way home to their BC rivers, at a time when the Canadian government effectively shut down the fisheries and British Columbia. So a lot of fishers are angry, they’re frustrated, why are we taking this on the chin? When just across the border, we can take our boats up there, and we can hear them chattering on the radio talking back and forth.

They’re angry, but they’re not angry at those fishers. Those are people that I mean, the ones I’ve talked to those are people that do the same kind of work they do. They’re angry that these regulations and international treaties that govern who gets what are just not working for everyone, and especially not working for them.

Jordan Do those treaties actively prohibit or regulate this sort of thing? Like, is there anything in there saying like don’t take salmon that are headed back to BC? Or is this all above board, and it’s just a matter of two governments with different approaches to conservation?

Stefan Labbe So the treaties, they stretch back to the 80s, the mid-80s, they’ve been renewed since the 90s. On a 10 year rolling basis. So every 10 years, it gets renegotiated. It’s not up again, for another renegotiation until 2028. So basically, these treaties, what they try to do is they try to, I mean, the kind of Elevator Pitch they give is they’re supposed to govern this agreement. So everyone gets a little bit, right. So we can share this resource between the two countries in a way that’s fair. And that also doesn’t wipe out the resource, the species, the animal, right. But when I talk to fishers, and you know, I’ve been talking to them quite a bit over the last week, the treaty has not worked in their favor. There’s been some success on the Washington DC border, where there’s been a lot of agreements, so people can get a little bit on both sides of the border. But if you go up to Alaska, I hear the word loophole a lot . And this is where we go back to this district, one of four and a couple of other districts around it. These fish have been getting intercepted over decades, and the Canadian government has just not been willing to put that diplomatic pressure on the American government to get what these fissures are missing out on. That’s what they say. The press secretary for DFO told me last week that they’re looking at this most recent report, and they’re actively working on it. Fisher say over that’s just them kicking the can down the road again, if they’re willing to sacrifice fish, and this multi-decadal effort of diplomacy.

Jordan Do Canadian fishers have any options in this situation? And, you know, this is kind of an awkward question. But like if, if fissures in Alaska are taking our fish that stray too far north, can we take Washington State’s fish that stray too far north? Do you know what I’m saying?

Stefan Labbe I do. So it’s important to recognize that Canada’s not innocent in this. You know, some fishes are a bit reluctant to say this because it undermines the idea that we’re the little guy and we’re getting walked all over. Alaskans have a pretty robust system for maintaining their fishery and checks and balances that ensure that laws are followed. Everyone I’ve talked to says that these policy experts in fishing, but on the BC side, we can’t forget that when it comes to our recreational fishery, as one consultant put it, it’s designed to catch American fish. So Greg Taylor, who he’s been in the industry for 40-50 years and now kind of works with First Nations he works with non First Nations fisheries and, and helps them understand what’s going on and in the industry and the environment.

He told me that of the 436,000 Chinook salmon that were caught last year, just under half of them were intercepted by BCS recreational fishery. So we’re already doing that okay, just not in a way that’s really tit for tat we’re not looking at what they’re taking and you know, pushing back by taking this at the same time you know, if we want to narrow the argument to a commercial fishery, you know, another fisherman told me Oh, look, we could be really punishing the Americans by taking these fish that migrate down to Oregon to Washington to California by you know, taking them off our coast and we don’t do that. And so, really depends how you really want to bring this argument forward. But it’s it is important to know that BC is not innocent in this.

Jordan That’s really good to know. And, you know, I think the last thing I want to ask you about is the diplomacy involved in the level of governmental cooperation. You mentioned, it’s going to be years before those treaties are up for discussion again, but I guess, in the big picture, in a world in which the environments and ecosystems can change so rapidly, how do you have like one intertwined ecosystem governed by two different sets of regulations, and without trying to lead the witness, I guess that sounds like a recipe for disaster.

Stefan Labbe It is hard. But last year, we saw, as I mentioned, a lot of fish come from the Alaskan side of the border down into BC and, and because of that warm plume of water, with climate change, we’re going to be seeing that a lot more in the coming years. And that means that more fish are going to be making landfall in Alaska, and are going to be running through the same places where they put their nets in the water today, and creating an effective barrier for the fish that need to make it back to BC rivers to create that next generation. So no matter how much money we put into, you know, the restoration of BC fisheries that’s going to be at some point, a kind of bottleneck, I hear. And so we need, we need to find a way to work with the Americans we obviously have different regulatory systems. And we have worked with the Americans over the years while the Canadian government has pledged you know, over a half a billion dollars to bring back fish and BC for that money to make any impact it’s going to take decades and decades. So how do you align those things with the Americans? It’s hard to say. But a lot of people don’t even see that as the solution sometimes. I mean, I some people I’ve talked to they say we the only thing that’s going to get the Americans to stop fishing in these waters taking BC fish is consumer pressure getting the story out there that you know these fish are taken and they’re not making it back to the rivers they need to to bring the next generation of fish to life.

Jordan And so like a don’t buy Alaskan salmon campaign.

Stefan Labbe Yeah. Is it a don’t buy Alaskan salmon campaign? Others say, you know, do we need to have mechanisms so fishers only fish at the rivers where these salmon come back to should you only be tied to the river where you have a stake in keeping it alive, you know, that there’s a lot of solutions out there and a lot of people are saying look a little more local. Try to to bring awareness to this but we’re there’s really just kind of a deadlock right now. There’s not a lot either side can do. The Americans have an effective veto on what they do in their own waters, and so does Canada.

Jordan What about the individual fishers at the heart of this, these are people who have devoted their lives to this job and supported themselves and their family on it. What’s happening to them right now,

Stefan Labbe There used to be, you know, over 10,000 people employed in this industry. And, you know, I talked to a guy named John Stevens, he, he’s a fourth-generation Fisher going back to over 100 years ago, his family was fishing and he’s been in the industry for 55 years and he used to fish months on end and bring in money to support himself and the last year he got something like three or four days in the water and made $13,000 Wow. He said he’s 71 years old and he doesn’t know how much longer he has and he’s got friends and you know, fellow fishers that have turned it in, they’ve gotten rid of their hunted their fishing licenses, and they’ve decided to move on. They’ve given up they’ve sold them and unfortunately selling them now means taking a big hit because they’ve lost all their value just due to the decline in fish. So there’s a lot of people here on the First Nation side, the Tŝilhqot’in nation came out swinging right after this report. They said you know, we demand a seat at the International Table we demand to be heard, we’ve been closing our stock, our fishing and try to save our stocks, and all of a sudden we find out that the Americans are taking these fish before they can make it back to our territory. And so they’re demanding a seat at the table. They’re not precluding legal action. There’s a lot of people hurting and half million fish might sound like a small number. They say it’s the sockeye were $6 million. But there’s a lot of First Nation communities that depend on these fish to eat and to take them away is a big hit to these people.

Jordan Hope some diplomacy ramps up sooner than later.Thanks, Stefan for this.

Stefan Labbe Yeah, no problem.

Jordan Stefan Labbe of Glacier Media. That was the big story for more from us. You can find it at the big story podcast.ca . You can find us on Twitter @TheBigStoryFPN you can find our email box in which we welcome any kind of feedback you have at the big story podcast all one word@rci.rogers.com [click here!]. We also welcome truly ratings and reviews as long as they’re five stars and say nice things which you can do in any podcast platform that allows it even more than ratings and reviews. We love it. When you tell your friends and take their phone and open whatever app they use and just subscribe them then, they’ll just start getting episodes and they’ll listen and hopefully they’ll love it and will love you for doing it. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow