Many years in the making, the U.S. and Canada have just announced their draft agreement for a modernized Columbia River Treaty. You can read a summary of the details here. The language in this summary offers clues that the agreement may provide a resolution to Canada’s long grievances against the lopsided treaty. Those who have read A River Captured, now out in a new edition, know that the US team entered the final 1960 negotiation hoping to secure either Libby, or the High Arrow/Keenleyside dams. They left with both.
The culprit? Not the Americans! It was WAC Bennett, premier of the province of BC at the time. He was an astute businessman, trading the water and landscape like horses.
Since then, the Columbia River’s main stem has become one of the most tightly managed and profitable systems in the world. Breathing life into the system as this agreement proposes, will not come easy. Check out this “staircase” model (reproduced in the new edition of A River Captured). It demonstrates the inequities of Canadian storage vs. US power generation. (Note the “free-flowing” section in Canada. This movement exists only because of local outcry over the final Canadian project, Murphy Dam, proposed in the 1980s. The free-flowing US section passes by the environmentally disastrous Hanford Nuclear Waste Site.
Two items of big news in this agreement:
1) A gradual reduction of the Canadian Entitlement, the 50% share to power enhancements that politicians fought hard for. Seems like a loss, but Canada gains big in return. Phrases like “unilaterally decide” and “domestic flexibility” demonstrate a partial restoration of Canadian control over its upstream flows. Bravo! This may be good for fish, ecosystems and people. I say may be, because the public will need to continue to assert its values and curb the BC government’s tendency to act like a profitable corporation, instead of caretaker for future generations.
2) A proposed international “Indigenous and Tribal Advisory Board” is brand new, and commendable. Indigenous people will have input on management of what the tribes have long referred to as “one river.” There is no legal muscle here. Just a different set of values in the mix. A foot in the door, opening out into a more compassionate home for fish and other voiceless residents of the basin? The general public can be watchful and continue to speak out in support of these values, because they benefit all of us.
One more detailed note from this self-described CRT geek, then a shout out to a brave woman.
The Agreement-in-Principle says that the diminishing Canadian Entitlement “takes into account the decrease expected when the treaty was originally entered into.” That decline was supposed to dovetail with an expected rise in “thermal” sources, i.e., nuclear. Once the darling of future energy supply, nuclear aspiration suffered after Three-Mile-Island and other factors. Instead of falling, the entitlement has skyrocketed in value. This has long been a thorn in the side of American power generators. The agreement may remove that thorn…or place it elsewhere!
Finally, I would like to point out the remarkable fairness embodied in this agreement and give credit to Canada’s tough, smart and unflinching lead negotiator, Kathy Eichenberger. I have watched and listened to this veteran public servant for years now, and have great admiration for her humanity and principles. Thank you Kathy, for your work behind the scenes at the negotiating table. It can’t have been easy for the tail, standing up to the big dog.
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