CKNW Editorial
for June 16, 1999

We have only the press releases of David Anderson to go on – and with all due respect to the honourable minister, one tends to be a tad wary of political press releases – so it’s hard to judge the new Salmon treaty.

It is possible, however, to comment upon what we do know.

The history of salmon administration in this province would be impossible for any but a maso-sadistic computer nerd to compile for it amounts to a massive involvement, over the years, of everyone who has ever dunked a herring strip in the chuck or cast a net. For the hallmark of the history of this complicated issue has been the number of organizations involved over the years – even I had a hand in setting one up, the Save our Fish Foundation.

But that is a private effort – one couldn’t possibly count the number of organizations, advisory councils and so on that have been set up, mostly by the federal government, over the years. Add to that the interest groups representing natives, net fishermen, trollers, sports fishermen salmon and sports fishermen steelhead and the mind is truly boggled. In fact it was, in part, a game the feds played to keep their adversaries arguing amongst themselves. We even have a sportsfishing ombudsman – a federal employee.

Over the years the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans could be sure that no matter how potentially explosive the issue, all they had to do was throw it into the bubbling cauldron of fisheries organizations to be sure that the public would become too bewildered by the barrage of one-liners and slogans to care much about the issue itself.

These groups – or at least the favoured ones – were elevated in recent times to the appellation “stakeholder”, as if this is a giant poker game we were all in - which, thinking on it, it probably is.

When David Anderson became the minister designated to get a treaty at all costs, he honoured many of the stakeholders with his divine presence, from time to time, leaving them with the impression that there would be no deal without their prior consultation. In fact Mr Anderson, after a slow start, even got a commission of his own going chaired by the eminent John Fraser.

This history of stakeholder involvement was not, however, Mr Anderson’s personal creation. In fact, judging by Mr Anderson’s unwillingness to suffer anyone, much less fools, gladly, I doubt that he would, on his own, have seen any stakeholder groups created much less listened to.

The fact is, however, David Anderson inherited a situation where every conceivable type of fishing by every conceivable sort of person from every conceivable corner of the province was represented by at least one “stakeholder” organization which felt itself raised over the years to a level of considerable importance. And in recent years, the provincial government has increased its involvement and has demanded, and usually got, a seat at the table.

Now comes the problem. David Anderson presents us with a new Salmon Treaty for 10 years, 12 in the case of the Fraser, without any of these stakeholders having been present at let alone participants in the negotiations. Now one must sympathize with Mr Anderson’s position that there were far too many cooks for the broth he was brewing but Canadian stakeholders looked at the negotiations and saw their counterparts at the table on the American side. It’s very true that under the American constitution the states and natives had a right to be there while under the Canadian constitution that’s not so but, as they say, the optics were terrible. It looks to all the world as if Alaska, Washington, Oregon and American Indians were on one side, Mr Anderson on the other, leaving the logical inference that we were overwhelmed and got slaughtered.

This may not be the case. We may, in the fullness of time, see that Mr Anderson got us a very good deal. In the meantime, however, as we go into the crucial first year of the treaty the so-called Canadian stakeholders feel that they are faced with a diktat into which they had no direct input. Many of them are therefore likely to be uncooperative.

Bearing in mind that cooperation of the stakeholders is essential, especially since the Department of Fisheries and Oceans is too underfunded to properly police the treaty, we could be in for a very rough year indeed on the fishing grounds.

For the bottom line is this – the price you pay for lack of consultation is lack of cooperation. And that’s bad news for our salmon.