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The Ontario government gave $700,000 of caribou conservation funding to a forestry industry group that is pushing back on whether habitat loss is a major cause of caribou decline.
The funding comes from the province’s Caribou Conservation Stewardship Program, which it committed to as part of a back-and-forth between Ontario and the federal government over how the threatened species is managed.
The Forest Products Association of Canada, a lobby group representing companies that produce wood, pulp and paper, received the funding to partner with Lakehead University on a DNA study to estimate the caribou population in the Churchill Range. The association has long been involved with caribou research. For years, it has also publicized its disagreement with the federal government’s approach to conserving caribou.
Environment and Climate Change Canada’s caribou strategy focuses on the idea — backed by a wealth of evidence — that the main cause of caribou decline is the loss of their habitat, which logging can contribute to. The association has pushed back strongly against this approach, arguing the science isn’t so certain and the government’s plans fail to account for other factors like climate change and predators.
Association spokesperson Kerry Patterson-Baker said it is involved in caribou research, also putting up its own money, because accurate population estimates are needed if forests in Canada are going to be managed effectively.
“The forest sector in Canada has — for many decades — invested time and research dollars into improving our collective understanding around woodland caribou recovery,” Patterson-Baker said in an email. “This important work continues and is in addition to monitoring and managing habitat for many other species of plants and animals that call Canada’s forests home.”
Rachel Plotkin of the David Suzuki Foundation, whose role at the charity often focuses on caribou conservation, said there’s no uncertainty in the science: caribou cannot survive if too much of their habitat is destroyed.
“There’s always more research that can be done on it, but we know what caribou need to survive and recover,” she said.
Ontario’s decision to give conservation money to an industry group that disagrees with that raises questions, Plotkin added.
“I think the priority of most industry groups is profit, and that caribou conservation is second,” she said.
Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment didn’t answer questions about how it decided to distribute caribou conservation funding.
Ontario launched its caribou conservation funding in 2023, and has since touted it as the main way it’s fulfilling a caribou conservation agreement with the federal government — and preventing federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault from following through on threats to step in if the province doesn’t do a better job of managing the threatened species.
Caribou, which are also known as reindeer in Europe, are vital to many Indigenous communities and iconic in Canadian culture. They have also been on the decline for decades, a process that has accelerated in recent years across the country. The shy creatures are more sensitive to human development than moose and deer, and much of their habitat has been whittled away. In Ontario, for example, they used to live as far south as modern-day Algonquin Provincial Park, but are now hanging on in about half of their former range.
Though caribou have long been protected under both Ontario and federal law, they tend to live in areas where logging and mining are major industries — and where governments are often reluctant to impose conservation-related rules.
For example, Ontario’s Endangered Species Act, which the current Progressive Conservative government has weakened over the past six years, exempts forestry companies. Since 2009, the first full year that act was in force, the province’s Environment Ministry has never denied a permit to harm an at-risk species.
The province has emphasized the need for balance between caribou conservation and economic concerns. Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives aim to double logging output by 2030 and drive a mining boom — including in an area just inland from James Bay known as the Ring of Fire, home to First Nations and caribou herds.
A July 2022 memo, prepared for Ontario Mining Minister George Pirie by senior bureaucrats, shows how economic concerns have been in the background of federal-provincial negotiations over caribou conservation. Staff prepared the note, obtained by The Narwhal through freedom of information legislation, ahead of a prospective meeting between Pirie and Guilbeault.
“The area of northern Ontario where boreal caribou occur is a key economic driver for the province, generating enormous resource wealth in the forestry and mining sectors as well as the businesses, municipalities and Indigenous communities that depend on it,” the memo suggested Pirie tell the federal environment minister. A note in the margin of the document suggested Pirie could also save the caribou conversation for another day.
It’s not clear if or when that meeting actually happened or what was said. Pirie’s office didn’t answer questions about the document.
Environment and Climate Change Canada spokesperson Amelie Desmarias didn’t answer specific questions about the briefing note but said, “Minister Guilbeault has spoken to his counterparts in Ontario about caribou recovery on several occasions.”
Plotkin said she’s not convinced either level of government is moving quickly enough or taking the right steps. The provincial conservation funding is a “slapshot dispersing of money,” and Ontario is failing to make changes that would actually halt the loss of caribou habitat, she said. The federal government, for its part, seems “torn,” she added.
Brian McLaren, an associate professor of wildlife biology at Lakehead University, previously told The Narwhal caribou reproduce slowly, so it’s too soon to know if any of the initiatives underway in Ontario now are translating into better outcomes for caribou. (McLaren has used the provincial caribou conservation funding, but isn’t involved with Forest Products Association of Canada’s fecal DNA study with Lakehead.)
“I think that the expectation that we’re going to have a lot of recovery everywhere in Ontario in three years is not really grounded in reality,” McLaren added.
In distributing the caribou conservation funding, the Ontario government has emphasized the need for balance between “protecting and recovering the species with the social and economic realities of Ontarians and industries in the north.” Some amount of money — the Ontario government hasn’t disclosed how much — has gone to First Nations. Universities, environmental organizations and companies working on caribou conservation have also received funding, according to a list published by the province.
The fund is open to businesses and industry groups as well. Among the recipients are two consulting companies developing tools and models to assist with caribou conservation, and another company that wants to reintroduce caribou to a forest it uses for carbon credits. The National Council for Air and Stream Improvement, which was created by pulp and paper companies to assist the industry with environmental issues, received funding for a project to map caribou habitats and food sources. The Forest Products Association of Canada is also on the list.
The association has long pushed back on the federal government’s focus on habitat loss as the main factor causing the decline of caribou in Canada.
This link was just reaffirmed in a federal scientific assessment, released earlier this year and assembled by a panel of more than a dozen federal and provincial scientists, academics, conservationists and forestry industry representatives. There is “strong evidence” confirming the relationship between caribou decline and habitat loss, the panel found.
To prevent too much caribou habitat from being destroyed, the federal government established a limit in 2012, pointing to years of research. Now, a minimum of 65 per cent of caribou ranges are supposed to be left undisturbed, a number federal experts have arrived at using data and modelling.
The threshold was a big step, but it’s also imperfect. Some people think the threshold should be higher. Others think it should be lower. Provinces haven’t always abided by it, even though they’re supposed to, and some ranges already had too much disturbance when the threshold was created. In Ontario, four of nine caribou ranges defined by the province don’t have enough undisturbed habitat left, and a fifth one is right at the 65 per cent threshold, according to data that accounts for both human activity and wildfires. Caribou in eight of those nine ranges were declining as of 2012, the most recent year for which population data is available.
The threshold also doesn’t guarantee caribou will be able to survive without human intervention: the federal government says the 65 per cent figure gives herds a 60 per cent chance of being able to sustain themselves.
Attawapiskat First Nation, located near the Ring of Fire, has said those odds aren’t good enough. “We have been forced to stand by as the survival of atik (the woodland caribou), a species at the core of [our] entire way of life, is basically left by Ontario to a coin toss,” Attawapiskat Chief Sylvia Koostachin-Metatawabin wrote in an early August letter to Ontario Environment Minister Andrea Khanjin, which was shared with media outlets and copied to Guilbeault.
The Forest Products Association of Canada, meanwhile, argues the 65 per cent threshold places too much focus on the role of habitat disturbance in caribou decline. It says the federal government’s view is based on old data, and ignores herds that are winking out despite low levels of human activity in their habitat. The association also points to data showing some herds in highly disturbed areas of Ontario and Alberta are rebounding, and argues governments aren’t accounting for other factors in caribou decline, like climate change and predators.
The association’s president and CEO, Derek Nighbor, argued in 2017 that governments were poised to block off tracts of forest and put jobs at risk without helping caribou in the long run. “If we continue down this road, it is not clear that caribou populations will rebound,” Nighbor wrote in an opinion piece for the Province, a newspaper in British Columbia. “We do however know that the livelihoods of tens of thousands of rural and northern Canadians will be impacted.”
Nighbor made a similar argument in a presentation last year for an industry group meeting in New Brunswick. In slides posted online, he said the federal government’s focus on habitat loss ignores populations of caribou that are faring well in highly disturbed landscapes, or dying off in relatively pristine areas.
The next slide, titled “Forestry as a Solution,” lists a few of the association’s research projects, including its caribou fecal DNA project in Ontario, which it says received $700,000 in provincial funding. Another slide asserts a DNA study roughly tripled a previous minimum population estimate for caribou in the Brightsand Range of northwestern Ontario. That study hasn’t been publicly released, but its existence is noted in a federal progress report on caribou, which says the association and three forestry companies were involved.
When The Narwhal reached out to the Forest Products Association of Canada to ask for data that backs up its view on the causes of caribou decline, spokesperson Patterson-Baker offered two scientific papers as examples, which she said “conclude that climate change is having the greatest impact on predator-prey dynamics in Alberta.” Both papers are focused on white-tailed deer, with one aimed at Alberta and the other looking at parts of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Both conclude milder winters fuelled by climate change are playing a large role in causing deer to move north in the areas they studied, with ripple effects for caribou. For example, more deer tend to provide ample food for wolves, attracting more of them and allowing them to bolster their own population, which can mean more predators hunting caribou too. And other research has shown wolves can also use clearings like roads and hydro corridors to hunt caribou more efficiently.
Climate change and habitat loss can both have negative impacts on caribou, but neither paper argues climate change is the main reason caribou are dying out.
One of the papers, which was published this spring in the journal Global Change Biology, notes the additional problems posed by deer means restoring habitat alone may not be enough in some places to help caribou survive without human intervention. Controlling populations of deer or wolves might also be needed. Still, it points back to the federal caribou recovery strategy and an abundance of research indicating habitat alteration has been a major cause of caribou declines.
Melanie Dickie, the lead author of that study and a senior caribou ecologist at the Biodiversity Pathway’s Wildlife Science Centre, which is affiliated with several universities in western Canada, said the paper “absolutely does not suggest that climate change is a bigger threat to caribou than habitat loss” and “does not negate the impact of habitat alteration.”
“The main takeaway of the paper is that when developing on-the-ground management plans or restoration plans, it’s important to consider how climate may also be impacting the system and plan/design accordingly,” Dickie said in an email.
Patterson-Baker said she wasn’t able to respond by deadline to follow-up questions about Dickie’s explanation of the study.
In an emailed statement, Lakehead University confirmed it is partnering with the Forest Products Association of Canada and Ontario’s Environment Ministry on the study, and said academic freedom is fundamental to its role.
“While [the Forest Products Association of Canada] did help to set the objectives of the project, these objectives are aligned with provincial policy aimed at improving population monitoring for woodland caribou and previous DNA studies conducted within the province,” the university said. “Neither [the association] nor the [Environment Ministry] will participate in the genetic data analysis or writing of the research reports.”
Lakehead also said its researchers will submit their findings to peer-reviewed journals and publish their results so that it is “freely and openly available to the scientific community and decision-makers for replication.”
“This external oversight helps ensure the integrity, transparency and accountability of their work,” the statement said.
More and better data on caribou populations can help with conservation efforts in the future, as long as that information is used responsibly.
McLaren said the Forest Products Association of Canada’s interest in caribou research seems genuine, and that having industry involved in caribou conservation can help move the needle in the right direction. For example, through benefit agreements that include funding for caribou recovery and monitoring.
“What I’m seeing in the last couple of years is more earnest partner engagement in recovery than I have seen in past years,” McLaren said.
Environment and Climate Change Canada spokesperson Amelie Desmarais said the federal government is monitoring how Ontario spends its caribou conservation funding. “Everyone in Canada is invited to join in supporting and implementing boreal caribou conservation,” Desmarais said in an email.
“The Government of Canada believes that collaborative actions are the best approach to achieving positive outcomes for boreal caribou recovery at this time.”
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