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Vaughn Palmer: Reopening Columbia River to Salmon Could Come at a High Cost to B.C. Taxpayers
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(The Vancouver Sun By Vaughn Palmer) -- On a recent trip through Washington state, I took a tour of the Chief Joseph Dam, having been told I would gain a unique insight into one of the complexities that would arise from reopening the Columbia River Treaty. Sure enough. On a given day, one can see Native Americans casting their fishing lines into the turbulent waters below the powerhouse and dam, both named for the great leader of the Nez Perce who ended his years in exile on the adjacent Colville Indian Reservation.

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The site in north-central Washington south of the Okanagan is doubly symbolic for Native Americans living along the river, because as my tour guide a fisheries biologist explained, Chief Joseph is the end of the line for salmon on the Columbia River. The dam has no fish ladders nor other means of passage in either direction for salmon or other migratory fish. Hence the catch from the dam consists of fish that took a wrong turn from one of the still active streams in the Columbia (the Okanogan River is nearby) or that are simply lost. Nor is the Chief Joseph Dam to blame, as my guide explained. When they began building the dam in 1949, there was no point providing fish passage because the river was already blocked by a doubly formidable structure several dozen kilometres upstream the 168-metre-high Grand Coulee Dam, completed in 1942. No fish passage there either, for reasons spelled out by Washington state writer William Dietrich in Northwest Passage, his fine book on the Columbia River that devotes an entire chapter (the biggest thing on earth) to the Grand Coulee project. Biologists doubted a salmon could surmount a fish ladder (that) high or that young salmon could migrate downstream through a 150-mile long reservoir and past the dam, wrote Dietrich. The salmon runs represented a catch of about 30,000 adult fish, worth, at that time, about $300,000, which seemed insignificant to everyone but the natives

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http://whatsupic.com/news-politics-canada/3349-vaughn-palmer-reopening-columbia-river-to-salmon-could-come-at-a 2/3
upstream. The affected natives included many living in Canada, for the Grand Coulee put paid to salmon runs that had been part of their traditional lifestyle as well. But the chronology also means that by the time Canada and the United States implemented the Columbia River Treaty in 1964, the salmon runs on the upper river had been a dead letter for two decades. Still, with the treaty subject to reopening at its 50th anniversary next year, governments on both sides of the border are being pressured to seize the opportunity to rectify the historic wrong to the salmon. The issue of restoring salmon to the Canadian Columbia River system was raised at almost every community workshop, said the latest report on public consultations released last week by the B.C. governments Columbia River Treaty Review. Many who attended community consultation workshops thought recommendations for the future of the treaty should include salmon restoration and that these recommendations should apply to both sides of the border as the feasibility of returning salmon to the upper reaches of the Columbia River would require a joint Canada-U.S. investigation into habitat and fish passage all along the river. That notion is echoed in recent recommendations on reopening the treaty from Bonneville Power and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, two American government entities that are conducting a review on the U.S. side. The United States should pursue a joint program with Canada, with shared costs, to investigate and, if warranted, implement restored fish passage and reintroduction of anadromous fish -- the fancy word for salmon and other species that migrate from the sea to fresh water to spawn -- on the main stem Columbia to Canadian spawning grounds. The key consideration in that paragraph is if warranted. Bonneville Power reports spending more than $750 million a year mitigating impacts on fish and wildlife, and thats without any measures to rectify the total blockages at Chief Joseph and Grand Coulee. Dietrich estimated the all-in cost (including the foregone value of hydroelectric power in order to maintain optimum water levels) of mitigation measures at $50 to $200 per fish and that was circa 1995. A friend of mine who worked for Bonneville once joked that it would be cheaper for the giant public utility to transport each individual fish from the mouth of the river to the spawning grounds by taxi. Note, too, that the $750 million that Bonneville is spending every year is equal to the cash value of Canadian share of benefits under the treaty for the past five years combined. (The money comes to B.C. as the province that manages the treaty and endured the impact of the dams and flooding). The B.C. review expresses the hope, voiced in the consultations, that each country should be responsible for their own costs to restore habitat and passage, particularly for dams that predate the life of the treaty. But the Americans are talking shared costs while

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maintaining that Canada is already collecting too much in cash benefits from its entitlement under the treaty. On that basis, it is hard to see where the money would come from to restore the fishery on either side of the border, other than at the expense of B.C. taxpayers.

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