Seattle — The United States and Canada said Thursday they agreed to renew a 60-year-old treaty that governs the use of the Columbia River, one of North America’s largest rivers. Officials said the agreement would include provisions for effective flood control, irrigation, hydropower generation and sharing between nations.
The “agreement in principle” reached after six years of negotiations provides a framework for updating the Columbia River Treaty, which calls for the U.S. to keep more power generated from its dams while improving cooperation between the Bonneville Power Company, which sells power from dams in the northwestern U.S., and Canadian power companies to prevent blackouts.
The U.S. will pay Canada for reservoir capacity to hold water during flood season and protect downstream communities, starting at $37.6 million per year and increasing with inflation. And the agreement will give Canada more flexibility in how it uses the water stored in the reservoirs.
“Sixty years later, this treaty must be updated to reflect a changing climate and the evolving needs of the communities that depend on this vital waterway,” President Joe Biden said in a written statement Thursday.
But environmental groups have lamented that the agreement is a missed opportunity to provide more water for migrating salmon and sturgeon, which have been devastated by damming in the Columbia River Basin over the past century. The original treaty, ratified in 1964, was designed to include flood control and hydroelectric power, but conservationists and Native American tribes have long argued that it should be updated to include river health and salmon restoration as a third principle.
“Our community is frustrated and disappointed today,” said Joseph Bogaard of the nonprofit Save Our Wild Salmon. “This treaty should be a tool to address the challenges facing these fish. While there are benefits and certainty for the power sector and flood risk management, salmon are basically being treated as if they were the status quo.”
The Biden administration brokered a $1 billion plan earlier this year to boost salmon runs in the Northwest.
The Columbia River begins in Canada but flows mostly through the United States during its 1,243-mile (2,000.41 km) journey to the Pacific Ocean. It forms most of the border between Washington and Oregon. The river’s tributaries account for 40 percent of U.S. hydroelectric power, irrigate $8 billion worth of agricultural crops and move 42 million tons of commercial cargo annually, officials said Thursday.
The Columbia River Treaty was signed after a 1948 flood inundated the community of Vanport, Oregon, leaving more than 18,000 people homeless.
This act more than doubled the basin’s reservoir storage capacity by building one dam in Montana that flooded Canadian lands and three dams in British Columbia, completed between 1968 and 1973, providing benefits for both flood control and hydroelectric power. The British Columbia dams also flooded tribal lands and retained much of the spring runoff that would otherwise be available for migrating salmon.
The treaty became known as the “Canada Rights,” in which Canada would receive $250 million to $350 million a year in electricity in exchange for storing water in a huge reservoir and using it to generate U.S. hydroelectric power. The treaty ended up being more expensive than the U.S. had anticipated when it signed, and lawmakers in the Pacific Northwest have long complained that it has raised prices for U.S. customers.
Under the agreement announced Thursday, the U.S. will immediately reduce the amount of Columbia Basin hydroelectric power it supplies to Canada by 37 percent, and reduce it by another 50 percent by 2033. That will save the agency about $70 million next year and about $1.2 billion over the next 20 years, BPA Administrator John Hairston said Thursday.
“These new requirements will go a long way toward meeting the region’s growing energy needs and avoiding the construction of unnecessary fossil fuel-based power plants,” Hairston told reporters at a briefing Thursday.
Senators Maria Cantwell of Washington, D.C., and R. Jim Risch of Idaho, who pushed for the treaty update, called the agreement a positive step but said details needed to be worked out. Government negotiators will finalize the details before the treaty goes to the U.S. Senate for ratification.
Native American tribes have long wanted the Columbia River to flow like a natural river, rather than a series of reservoirs of slow-moving water, whose temperatures often get so high that they kill migrating salmon.
U.S. and Canadian officials say the agreement will establish a tribal-led agency that will provide recommendations on how treaty administration can better support ecosystem needs and the cultural values of tribes and indigenous peoples.
Chief Keith Crow of the Silix Okanagan Tribe in British Columbia said in a written statement that the agreement gives him hope that his grandchildren will one day be able to catch salmon in the upper Columbia River.
“We still have a lot of work to do, together with Canada and B.C., to address the past and present impacts on our land, water and people,” Crow said.
Canada has provided up to 1 million acre-feet of water annually to help juvenile salmon migrate to the Pacific Ocean, and would provide up to 500,000 acre-feet more in drought years, depending on negotiations between the countries, said Bogard of Save Our Wild Salmon.
Researchers say Canada needs to release 3 million to 5 million acre-feet of water each year, but the agreement announced Thursday would supplement the current amount, with a minor improvement that would see Canada automatically release an additional 500,000 acre-feet in dry years, he said.
“Salmon have suffered tremendous losses from industrialization of Columbia Basin rivers, in part as a result of this treaty,” Neil Brandt, executive director of Oregon WaterWatch, said in a written statement. “A modernized treaty must deliver better outcomes for salmon.”
