U.S. lifts ban on wild game

An enormous sigh of relief echoed across Northern Ontario on Friday when the United States partially lifted its ban on beef imports from Canada.
Although live cattle still cannot be shipped across the border yet, area tourist outfitters have dodged a bullet as the U.S. now will allow hunters to bring back ruminants like deer, moose, and elk from Canada for personal consumption.
But it was a very near miss.
“Probably in another week or so, it would have been a much different outcome,” said Doug Reynolds, executive director of the Northern Ontario Tourist Outfitters (NOTO).
“Some [outfitters] have had guests cancel, but for the most part, we were able to convince them to wait a little,” he added. “We seem to have avoided much of the damage.”
Due to the initial blanket ban, American hunters had been told they would not be allowed to bring home the game they shoot in Canada. But now that the restriction has been lifted, so too have the spirits of those involved in the multi-million-dollar industry.
Reynolds said the fall big-game hunt is probably the most important single revenue generator in the tourism industry, coming as it does at the end of the tourist season when most of the operating costs already have been absorbed.
“Moose [hunting] is an extremely high-priced, high-value activity,” he noted. “It has a tremendous impact on revenue while incurring little additional expense to the operators.”
Each year, roughly 3,000 moose tags are made available to American sportsmen, who pay between $5,000-7,000 (U.S.) to hunt here. That, says Reynolds, amounts to up to $10 million in direct spending.
But the buck doesn’t stop there.
“We calculate that seven dollars circulate for every dollar spent directly,” he added, referring to lodging, gasoline, grocery, and clothing purchases.
“Furthermore, tourism dollars tend to circulate close to where they are spent,” he remarked.
Reynolds said the breakthrough came late last week when rumblings out of Washington, D.C. indicated the U.S. government was ready to move.
“We saw indications last week a breakthrough was imminent and managed to convince people to give us another week,” Reynolds said from his office in North Bay.
“We have been in contact with our members and had them request their guests to lobby their politicians.
“The breakthrough came largely as a result of contacts our organization and others made with American politicians,” Reynolds added.
One of those he credited with lobbying most effectively was Bob Lessard, a NOTO member who operates Sunny Beach Camp near Nestor Falls.
An American citizen with strong ties to Canada, Lessard was a Minnesota state senator for 26 years. He used his personal connections in Washington to force Congress to revisit the ban on wild game imports, which he said was never intended as part of the initial legislation.
“It [the wild game ban] got caught in a glitch,” Lessard explained.
“Somebody in Washington tagged it onto the bill and it was passed as is,” he added, noting it often is difficult to amend bills once they are passed—even if they are flawed.
“Don’t ever confuse common sense with the legislative process,” Lessard quipped. “It will just give you a headache.”
Getting that error fixed proved to be a long, frustrating process that required overcoming a high degree of legislative inertia—something with which Lessard has had years of experience.
So Lessard began making phone calls and as a former chair of the environmental and natural resources committee, he knew exactly whom to call.
“I just know a lot of people down there [in Washington] and did what I could do,” he said. “Once you’re well-known, there’s a lot of people you can call. I just went straight to the Congress.”
Lessard prevailed upon Congressman John Klein and Sen. Colin Peterson, both of whom are members of the Safari Club—a powerful sportsmen’s lobby group—and things began to move.
“The sportsmen’s caucus is a powerful group in Congress,” Lessard noted. “Even legislators who are not sportsmen join it because their constituents like it.”
As a result of the efforts of Lessard and his friends in Congress, the push to remove the ruminant ban went straight to the highest levels of government.
It was at the cabinet level that the outcome ultimately was decided and Lessard was quick to give credit where it was due—the Oval Office.
President George W. Bush, says Lessard, could have stalled the effort had he chosen to, but as an avid sportsman, he expedited it instead.
“Make no mistake about it, this could not have happened without the support of the president,” Lessard stressed.
To show his gratitude, Lessard said he has plans to invite Bush to northern Minnesota next summer during the presidential campaign to sample some of Rainy Lake’s world-class smallmouth bass.
“I know he’s [Bush] fished a lot of bass in Texas, but I don’t think he’s ever tangled with our smallmouth,” Lessard said. “Is he ever in for a surprise.”
(Fort Frances Times)