Hampton fears Ottawa will cave in ‘fish war’

As rumours abound concerning the possible end to the so-called “fish war” between the province and Minnesota, Ontario NDP leader Howard Hampton is concerned Ottawa may sell out to the U.S. in order to solve the dispute.
“I’m very much afraid the federal government just doesn’t care about this issue,” Hampton charged yesterday afternoon from Toronto. “They’d sell us down the [river] in a minute.
“My fear in this is that the Harris government and federal Liberals will cave in on this in a second,” he stressed.
At issue is new Ontario regulations for Lake of the Woods and Rainy River that prohibit non-resident anglers who fish for walleye and sauger from keeping fish unless they stay overnight at a Canadian resort.
A column in last Thursday’s edition of the Globe and Mail said Ontario is proposing to eliminate its regulation if Minnesota would agree to stricter catch limits in return.
But Hampton said Minnesota previously refused to follow through on an agreement reached by a joint Ontario-Minnesota task force which was supposed to ensure stricter catch limits on the American side.
He said Ontario had no choice but to go with catch-and-release as a result.
“Minnesota would not accept any proposal except one that would allow them to take as many fish as they want,” said Hampton, who was Natural Resources minister from 1993-95 under the former NDP government.
“That’s been the history on this for 10 years.”
Hampton said the U.S. continually has tried to take away the fact that Ontario sees the issue as a conservation one.
“Minnesota is trying to change what is essentially a fish conservation issue–a conservation of fishing stocks–into one about tourism and trade,” he argued.
“They know they can’t win the fishing conservation issue because their record is abysmal,” he charged.
Area camp operators agreed.
“We have to get the story to the U.S. ‘P.R.’ that they will never have an opportunity to come up here [to fish] like they used to,” Camp Narrows owner Tom Pearson, the Rainy Lake rep on the Conservation Coalition for Ontario’s Resources based in Fort Frances, said last Friday.
“It’s a battle and it will affect 20,000 U.S. tourists a week that fish in Ontario because a handful of resorts that wish to exploit Ontario’s resources,” he stressed.
The Globe and Mail column suggested Premier Mike Harris and Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura could announce the end of the “fish war” at a meeting in Cleveland later this month.