This article examines fishery management along and across the Canadian-US border through the comparison of collaborative transboundary networks in four regions: the Salish Sea, the Great Lakes, the Gulf of Maine, and the northern region including the Gulf of Alaska and the Hecate Strait. Transnational fishery management is an inter-organizational and multi-jurisdictional enterprise constituted by shared understandings of a suite of tasks and by communications among the participants. We use survey data to summarize the inter-organizational scale and participation in the networks, the centrality of different organization types, the factors that contribute to network formation, other ideational network traits like inter-organizational trust and risk perception, the activities that actors engage in to facilitate transboundary collaboration, and the influence of binational organizations. We show that the networks managing marine fisheries exhibit binodal organizational clustering along national boundaries, but the freshwater Great Lakes fishery has a more transnational multi-nodal network. These fishery binational management networks are brought together by regulatory dependencies and shared ideas about who should be involved, despite perceived risks between Canadian and US government agencies and a lack of trust in the political system to ensure fairness. When present, binational fishery commissions can facilitate collaboration by framing issues on an ecosystem scale and exercising their convening power.
This note describes my experience teaching a new first-year course called "Neighbours to the North" about the Canadian-American environmental relationship since the late eighteenth century. We visited 12 places and moments in time where Americans occupied and altered Canadian (or what would become Canadian) lands and waters, from Loyalists landing at the Wolastoq to the Greenpeace sailing from Vancouver. How have different American actors and interests shaped Canadian locales and landscapes? How does the lens of environmental history expand our understanding of national origins and national agendas, as well as the shape of today's environmental dilemmas? The note explores the themes that emerged most prominently, some of the more effective sources, and how students responded.
This article argues that the friction between the need for exports and the desire for local use in the early natural gas industry in southwestern Ontario laid the conceptual, political, regulatory, and material foundation for the much larger post-World War Two natural gas industry that took hold in Canada's western provinces. It draws on an extensive review of newspapers serving readers on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border from the late 1880s to 1910, as well as on related Canadian and Ontario government documents and reports. In particular, it provides an account of how two natural gas companies linked to the entrepreneur Eugene Coste worked with subsidiaries of the American monopoly, Standard Oil, to provide fast-growing communities in the American Midwest with cheap Ontario gas while the Canadian communities their pipelines traveled through clamored for service.
Nuclear energy expansion represents a rare area of energy, environmental, and climate policy with growing cross-partisan support in the United States and Canada in recent years. This reflects its capacity to combine non-carbon electricity addressing climate and air quality concerns with baseload power offering supply reliability. High-level nuclear waste remains an enduring challenge, however, as neither nation has established a permanent geological repository to provide secure management for tens of thousands of years. The United States has struggled for decades to address nuclear waste, including sustained intergovernmental battles over facilities proposed in three western states. In contrast, Canada has maintained a deliberative process that has made considerable progress in recent years in securing an Ontario host site through voluntary mechanisms, comparable to model cases from other nations. This suggests substantial policy divergence between the nations, one which might prepare Canada better than the United States for future nuclear energy expansion and export.
The export of Canadian raw materials to the United States has historically been a central and contentious issue in diplomatic relations between the two countries. During the first half of the twentieth century, many American firms relied on Canadian pulpwood, even though a number of restrictions ostensibly limited its export. The experience of the West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company provides an object lesson in how this was accomplished. Although it operated across eastern Canada, it was particularly effective in obtaining pulpwood from Nova Scotia during the interwar years. Ultimately, it procured an enormous volume of high-quality and relatively cheap timber in Canada by pursuing various strategies, the most important of which was engaging very well-connected and high-placed local officials and deferring to their insight into domestic affairs.
During the period 1953-1968, Canadian and American officials planned the full development of the international St. John River, including large, publicly operated dams in northern Maine linked with tidal power and smaller hydro operations downriver at Mactaquac, New Brunswick. In doing so, planners conceptualized the river as a cross-border power source linked by a regional power grid. This article examines the concurrent controversies over dams in both jurisdictions and why, in the end, only Mactaquac was built. Opposition was most effective in Maine because of lobbying by federal agencies, local and national wilderness organizations, private paper companies, and, most importantly, private power companies. In contrast, New Brunswick's electrical sector was dominated by a single public power utility that enjoyed great leeway in pursuing development. Moreover, while Mactaquac's opponents emphasized environmental and aesthetic concerns similar to their Maine counterparts, they did not have the same national or corporate support.
Since 1909, the International Joint Commission has administered the Boundary Waters Treaty between Canada and the United States. Successful cooperation was not guaranteed, however. This article examines how efforts to establish a commission for international waters rose and fell between 1894 and 1900. Initial concerns centered on shared rivers in Montana and Alberta. Although Canada raised the prospect of an international commission in 1896 it did not materialize. However, the idea was resuscitated in 1900 through correspondence by irrigation experts from the United States and Canada: Elwood Mead and John Dennis, respectively. These individuals had leading roles in their respective countries and were also part of larger circuits of knowledge exchange. Efforts to expand those exchanges to international waters, however, created a small diplomatic controversy. Setting these episodes in the broader context of international knowledge exchange, I consider what they reveal about how international waters figured in efforts to advance settler societies.
