Being caught up in the tariff spat between the US and Canada is a little-known treaty that shapes the lives of millions of Americans and Canadians.
The 60-year-old treaty controls waters that run down the snake-snake-snake-snake-snake-snake-driven Columbia River from British Columbia to Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon, providing the largest source of hydropower in the United States. However, some of the treaty expired in the US presidential election.
Negotiators were still a few weeks away from filling out details of the treaty's renewal version when President Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s term ended. After that, 10 years of talks crashed over President Trump's hostility towards Canada. He called Canada the “51st province,” slapped tariffs on Canadian exports and stuck to tapping that water as a “very big faucet.”
In a controversial February call with then-Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Trump included the treaty in the way Canada said it had used the United States. The implications were clear. The treaty could be a tip for negotiations in broader negotiations to reshape the relationship between the two counties.
During a meeting at the White House last week, Prime Minister Mark Carney and Trump declined the heat. But the Trump administration feels like negotiations at the edge of the knife, even treaties that benefit both sides. Trump's volatile trade policy has cast uncertainty on the future of the Pacific Northwest, creating new concerns about everything from electricity to flood control.
Powered by the Internet and artificial intelligence, data centers make full use of the Columbia River power. The Twilight Soccer Game is open to Riverfront Parks, funded by a local dam. Irrigation from the reservoir supplies water to the winding acres of the Pink Women and Gala Apple Garden. The coordinated dams keep flooding in places like Portland, Oregon.
Trump has touched on the raw nerves among Canadians. Canadians have long been worried that the US sees its resources, especially water, to plunder. “They want our land. They want our resources, they want our water, they want our country,” Carney repeated over and over as he succeeded as Prime Minister.
“Canadians feel that kind of sense of betrayal,” Jay Inslee, who was recently governor of Washington, said in an interview. The treaty connects a complex web of cultural and economic interests. “It's not easy to negotiate that,” Inslee said.
A British Columbia spokesman said there has been no “movement at all” since the US State Department suspends negotiations as part of a broad review of the country's international commitments. State Energy Minister Adrian Dix told almost 600 people at virtual city hall in March, “it sounds like a strange e-song representation of what's going on,” but “it sounds like a strange e-song representation of what's going on.”
Dix said local residents pulled him aside at the Save-on-Food market to ask if Canada should withdraw from the treaty entirely. “For the people in the Columbia Basin, this is an internal organ,” he said. “This is part of their lives, their history and their soul.”
If the agreement explodes, the US expects it will be “more difficult to control and predict” hydroelectric production, increasing uncertainty to prevent flooding in the Pacific Northwest, according to a nonpartisan congressional report. New estimates from the Interstate Electricity Council show that the region's electricity needs could double over the next 20 years.
The State Department declined to comment.
The roots of the treaty are dated on the anniversary of 1948. After the rains of the Great Spring, the 15-foot wall of Vanport, Oregon, just outside of Portland, which housed thousands of shipyard workers during World War II, was wiped out. The devastation left 18,000 people homeless and began negotiations with Canada on how to better manage the Columbia River.
On one of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's inauguration days, he signed the Treaty of Columbia River. The Columbia River Treaty was traded between two priorities. Canada agreed to build several dams that bear the brunt of US flood control, and the US agreed to give Canada half of the additional electricity produced in the river by jointly managing flows across the US dam.
The original agreement came into effect in the fall of 1964, and some provisions expired 60 years later.
Debate about renewing the treaty before it expires in 2024 began during the first Trump administration. Biden temporarily suspended them and then resumed. In March 2023, the entire congressional delegation from the Pacific Northwest urged the transaction to be completed. After a slow start, the US and Canada released a rough outline of the agreement last summer.
The electricity produced under the original treaty was far more valuable than initially expected, with half of Canada at around $300 million a year. It was more than necessary, so Canada sold a great deal of power to the United States to the frustration of US utilities.
The updated plan cut Canada's take by about half over time. This will allow the US to maintain more power, just as energy demand has grown for the first time in decades.
Cheap and clean hydroelectric power on the river has been a major draw for high-tech companies that have been trying to build data centers for the past 20 years.
“The country, as a whole, needs to understand how important the Pacific Northwest is to its emerging photography,” said David Kennedy, who studies Stanford's local history.
In return, under the renewed treaty, Canada has reduced the amount of water that must be guaranteed to be stored for flood control, giving it the flexibility to prioritize communities and ecosystems around the reservoir. The original treaty caused dramatic fluctuations in water height, exposing miles of dirt when the water was pulled down due to snow enforcement.
“Every year, this dry bottom causes severe dust problems,” one resident near Valemount, British Columbia, told Dix in the town hall.
This new plan has created a more stable height for the reservoir, allowing Canada to restore coastal ecosystems and create better recreation.
The negotiations involved in indigenous tribes, but even if fishing grounds and towns were destroyed by dams, they were not spoken in the first treaty.
Jay Johnson, Canadian negotiator for Syilx Okanagan Nation, said at the virtual city hall that tribes on both sides of the border found common ground as they restored salmon migration. The updated plan created a provision for excess water in dry years. He called it “essential to salmon's survival, especially in the context of climate change.”
In the fall, when some provisions of the original treaty expired, the state signed a three-year interim agreement, but parts still require additional parliamentary budgets. Both sides must give ten years of notice before leaving the treaty.
“It benefits both sides of the border and you have a lot of problems because there is no treaty,” Jonathan Wilkinson, Canadian Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, said in an interview.
No one knows what will happen next. Some of those who worked on the deal were still in place, but Trump has not yet appointed a deputy secretary for the Western Hemisphere affairs. The situation is even more volatile as Trump attempts to reduce the workforce at major federal agencies involved in treaty consultations, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Federal Power Administration.
With negotiations in the air, those close to consultations in the region hope that the renewed treaty will still be resolved.
Barbara Kossense, a law professor at the University of Idaho, said the Trump administration may not care about salmon habitats or indigenous involvement, but Canada did. Water can flow downstream, but salmon swim upstream, so the US can take advantage of it by maintaining environmental provisions, Kosens said.
And supporters point to years of bipartisan support from Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington, a ranking Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee, and Jim Lisch of Idaho, Republican chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs.
“On this, there will be zero daytime between Republicans and Democrats,” said Scott Sims, chief executive of the Public Power Council, representing consumer-owned utilities in the area.
The interests are not hypothetical. In 1996, after heavy snow, a storm of the so-called Pineapple Express dumped warm rain into the Portland area and unleashed water torrents. The Army Corps of Engineers worked for several days, operating more than 60 dams in the Columbia River System with Canadian partners to keep water at bay.
A small river flowing through Colombia was still flooded, killing eight people. Downtown Portland was barely spared due to the makeshift embankments made from prewood and punching bags.
Ivan Penn contributed to the report from Houston and Toronto's Matina Stevis Gridneff.
