Treaty could bring salmon back to Columbia River

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Two thousand kilometres from the Pacific Ocean as the water flows, the Columbia River emerges from the lake in eastern British Columbia whose name it shares and begins its meandering arc across the Pacific Northwest.

The Columbia River basin is one of the continent’s great watersheds, draining an area the size of Alberta and propelling turbines that generate half of the power in B.C. and 40 per cent of hydroelectricity in the U.S. Nearly 500 dams tame the basin’s waters, holding them back for irrigation, navigation and protection against a repeat of the devastating floods that wiped an entire Oregon city from the map in 1948.

But many of those dams have also been impenetrable barriers to salmon, starving the Columbia’s upper reaches of the fish that once sustained Indigenous communities there.

Now, nearly 60 years after the U.S. and Canada agreed to jointly manage the river’s waters, negotiations toward a modernized Columbia River Treaty hold the promise of one day bringing back salmon. It’s part of a broader effort to redress historical wrongs that, on Thursday, included a B.C. agreement to share Columbia River electricity revenues with three First Nations.

“To see the wildlife benefit from it and to have Indigenous nations’ ceremony and culture revitalized as a result of the restoration of salmon – it has huge potential,” said Bill Green, founding director of the Canadian Columbia River Inter-tribal Fisheries Commission, who is part of the Canadian delegation at the treaty talks.

“The Indigenous nations want to see them restored to the headwaters.”

Doing so will require decades of work and immense funds – and disagreements over how to value contributions from both Canada and the U.S. have so far kept negotiators from concluding talks. Negotiations between the two countries have already spanned a half-decade and 17 rounds of talks.

The U.S. side previously hoped for an agreement in principle this month. It now says summer is a more likely timeline.

For years, the Columbia River waters were managed to generate power and reduce flood risks. Adding salmon to the list of objectives has brought new complications.

Juvenile salmon need flowing water to reach the ocean. Returning salmon, meanwhile, can be hurt by low water levels and warm temperatures. Releasing water can help but it can also work against flood control priorities and diminish hydroelectric output.

In other words, if salmon are to be returned to the Columbia – as groups in the U.S. have begun to do, and groups in Canada hope to do – it will almost certainly come at a cost. “If there is a political will and some financial resources set up, then it certainly gives salmon a better chance,” said Nathan Matthew, a Secwépemc Nation representative in the treaty negotiations.

Technology to allow salmon to co-exist with dams is not cheap. Floating surface collectors that gather juvenile salmon and pipe them past a dam can cost $20- to $50-million, “and you need several at every dam, if that’s the technology that’s chosen,” said Mr. Green. Ladders to help salmon navigate upstream past major dams “will be hundreds of millions of dollars,” he said.

He believes some percentage of the revenue generated by the river should go toward salmon restoration. It’s one of the reasons why “Canada needs to get as full value as possible” from a Columbia deal, he said.

On Thursday, B.C. First Nations gained a direct interest in that value. The Ktunaxa, Secwépemc and Syilx Okanagan Nations signed four-year interim agreements to each receive 5 per cent of the $100- to $200-million B.C. earns annually through an entitlement to half of downstream power generated from the Columbia. It is the first such revenue-sharing agreement on the Columbia, whose dams altered the natural and cultural landscape with little input from Indigenous groups.

The U.S., however, entered current treaty negotiations seeking to slash those payments. A U.S. State Department official said in an interview that the U.S. also wants an equitable sharing of benefits, which includes ensuring it gets what it pays for in flood protection from Canada.

Canada, meanwhile, wants richer compensation. When the current treaty was signed, the United States paid US$64-million to B.C. for 60 years of flood risk management, money that helped build new dams.

The current arrangement “has kept Portland and other communities all along the lower portion of the Columbia safe,” said Kathy Eichenberger, British Columbia’s lead treaty negotiator. “And I think many people feel that it’s been taken for granted.” The US$64-million payment, “in hindsight today, it doesn’t seem like a large amount.”

A major inundation of Portland, Ore., could easily bring damages in the billions of dollars, said Bill Bennett, B.C.’s former minister of energy and mines.

Many hundreds of that city’s homes lie in areas prone to flooding. Some of its most critical infrastructure, including Portland International Airport, is built behind protective levees, some nearly a century old. If the wrong one is breached, “we lose that airport,” said Chris Voss, director of the emergency management with Multnomah County, which encompasses Portland and Vanport, the city wiped out by floods in 1948.

A failure to settle a new agreement by Sept. 16, 2024, would end Canada’s obligation to participate in preplanned flood-risk management with the U.S., making the system less able to forestall disaster. It would require the U.S. to empty its own reservoirs before calling on water from Canada and would almost certainly prove disruptive to salmon.

Negotiators are meeting every two weeks to preclude that possibility.

But history has shown that the government and power authorities that manage the Columbia “will prioritize flood risk and power over fish every day of the week,” said Greg Haller, executive director of Pacific Rivers, a Portland-based environment group.

Environmental groups calculated that five to nine million acre-feet a year of Columbia River water were needed to support salmon. In recent years, river authorities have released at most 1.5 million acre-feet for fish. (One acre-foot is nearly enough water to cover an NFL field a foot deep.)

Mr. Haller, who was part of a collaborative Columbia modelling working group disbanded several years ago, doubts a new treaty agreement will bring back salmon to the Columbia in Canada. It’s more likely “to be about the water coming over [from Canada] and how much the U.S. is going to pay for it.”

Negotiators, however, say their focus extends beyond floods and electricity – even if a specific agreement on salmon could be reached outside the treaty.

“One thing that the treaty did is placed a spotlight on the salmon reintroduction issue,” Ms. Eichenberger, the head B.C. negotiator, said. “Where it sits at the end of the day is still under discussion. But there is a commitment to working together on that.”