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Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Canada's salmon fishery target of two lawsuits
Canadian fishing is severely cutting into salmon recovery efforts in the Pacific Northwest, according to two new federal lawsuits.
One lawsuit seeks to bar the import from Canada of any salmon protected by the Endangered Species Act; the other would force the U.S. government to reconsider a biological opinion it wrote supporting the 1999 Pacific Salmon Treaty with Canada.
Both lawsuits were filed Monday in U.S. District Court by the Salmon Spawning and Recovery Alliance, a collection of environmental and recreational groups from Washington and Oregon, as well as the Snohomish County Public Utility District. The lawsuits name the Commerce Department, the National Marine Fisheries Service, the State Department, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Interior Department and the Fish and Wildlife Service as defendants.
The lawsuits say that chinook salmon from Puget Sound rivers migrate north to Canadian and Alaskan waters, then return to spawn in their native rivers. About 88 percent of the chinook salmon caught in the commercial troll fishery off the west coast of Canada's Vancouver Island are of U.S. origin, the lawsuits said, citing data from the Pacific Salmon Commission, which implements the treaty.
Many of those fish are exported to the United States -- despite Endangered Species Act rules forbidding the import or export of protected species, the lawsuits said.
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