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Minnesota fishing town angling to join Canada

Broadcast Date: March 18, 1998

Something's fishy in the tiny Minnesota town of Northwest Angle Inlet and it's not the tasty walleye, the 104 townsfolk say. Their town, physically cut off from the rest of the U.S., is troubled by Canadian rules forcing guests at American fishing lodges to throw their prized catches back into the lake. If they can't beat the Canucks, are they really ready to join 'em? The National reports on the town's half-serious bid to secede from the U.S.

Minnesota fishing town angling to join Canada

• The Northwest Angle is a peninsula of American territory on Lake of the Woods. The Angle is above the 49th parallel which separates the U.S. and Canada. A third of the massive lake is in Minnesota and the rest is in Canada. The lake has some 104,600 kilometres of shoreline and 14,652 islands.
• The lake is a famous sport fishing destination. The best spots to catch walleye — known in Canada as pickerel — are in the deeper waters on the Ontario side of the lake.

• Starting on Jan. 1, 1998, the Ontario government said U.S. fishermen could only keep their walleye if they stayed in an Ontario resort. Anglers staying in resorts on the American side, including the 14 fishing lodges in Northwest Angle Inlet, had to release their fish back into the water.
• Most of the Angle's residents live on creeks leading into a bay called Angle Inlet. But the bulk of the 340 square kilometre peninsula is uninhabited. The land is held in trust by the Red Lake Indian Reservation.

• The 1783 treaty to end the revolutionary war with Britain gave the Northwest Angle to the U.S. The Americans thought the still-undiscovered source of the Mississippi River was somewhere on the Angle and they wanted to control it.
• The mighty river's source was finally found in 1832 at Minnesota's Lake Itasca, about 225 km south of Lake of the Woods.

• Until the 1970s there was no year-round road to the Angle. Before then, winter travelers came on snowmobile and summer travelers had to take a boat from the town of Warroad, Minn. To get there by road now, U.S. travelers have to cross into Canada and drive through Manitoba for about 30 minutes.

• In 2002, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Mark Johnson wrote about the town's honour system border crossing. The one-man U.S. Customs reporting station had been closed down in the 90s and replaced with a tiny video telephone booth on a vacant lot called Jim's Corner.
• When Johnson went, the phone was out of order and a sign said to use the pay phone at Grumpy's restaurant. "The voice on the other end first sounds startled, then asks: How many in your group? What country are you citizens of? And with that, you're legal."

• The Ontario lodging rule meant American fishermen wanting to keep their fish couldn't stay at the Angle's fishing lodges. "When it's your livelihood, it is very big potatoes," Celeste Colson, owner of Jake's Northwest Angle, told the New York Times in November 1999.
• The rule cut the Angle's business in half, Colson said. "We were pretty sure it was basically illegal," she said. "But they were getting away with it."

• Canadian resort owners thought the rules were necessary, the Times said, because U.S. sport fishermen took more than half of the fish caught on the lake each year. While Canada largely froze the development of new lodges in the 1970s, Minnesota kept building more, owners said.
• The town's half-serious secession bid reeled in plenty of publicity, just as they'd hoped.

• The New York Times reported that Minnesota governor Jesse "The Body" Ventura warned, "Canada shouldn't mess with Minnesota." The state's legislature started debating a bill to tax the 20 or so Canadian freight trains that roll daily through the 69 kilometre Minnesota section of the Canadian National railway.
• "I'm not the kind of person that you want mad at you," Ventura told Canadian Ambassador Raymond Chrétien. "You're better off being happy with me."

• The U.S. government used conflict-resolution mechanisms set up by the North American Free Trade Agreement to force Ontario to drop the lodge rules.
• In November 1999, U.S. trade representative Charlene Barshefsky issued a "victory statement," the Times reported. The statement's headline: "U.S. prevails in dispute with Canada over sport fishing and tourism services."

• "We appear to be losing more than we should," Peter S. Bleyer, executive director of the Council of Canadians, told the Times after the ruling. "Every time our government hears any threatening noises from south of the border, they back down."

Minnesota fishing town angling to join Canada

Medium: Television

Program: The National

Broadcast Date: March 18, 1998

Guest(s): Paul Colson, Paul Evans, Collin Peterson

Anchor: Peter Mansbridge
Reporter: Reg Sherren

Duration: 2:55

Last updated:
March 16, 2006