A muddled mess of plans that were never implemented, unclear accountability, lack of organized monitoring and spotty oversight has been at the root of the provincial government’s management of grizzly bear populations for more than two decades, Auditor General Carol Bellringer found in a highly critical report released Tuesday.

The report confirms many of the concerns frequently raised by conservation groups.  A lack of firm population numbers. Resource extraction in grizzly bear habitat. Lax regulation of the grizzly bear trophy hunt.

“This is a scathing indictment of the poor management of grizzly bears by successive B.C. governments, going back decades,” said Faisal Moola, director of the David Suzuki Foundation, which requested an audit in 2014 along with University of Victoria’s Environmental Law Centre.

To understand where things went wrong, we’ve got to rewind to 1995 when the government committed to a “Grizzly Bear Conservation Strategy” with a goal to maintain healthy grizzly bear populations and the ecosystems they depend on.

But the Environment Ministry and Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resources never clarified responsibilities and priorities in terms of actually implementing the strategy.

“Currently, there is no organized inventory and limited monitoring of grizzly bears. We found that one of the reasons this work is not being carried out is that there is no dedicated ministry funding,” says the report.

B.C. Bungled #Grizzly Bear Management: Auditor General https://t.co/xWX6BNcHCD #bcpoli #wildlife @BCAuditorGen @DavidSuzukiFDN @faisal_moola pic.twitter.com/xUe0hEZWF1

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) October 24, 2017

In other cases, government created plans, such as the strategy for recovering the endangered North Cascades grizzly population, but plans were never implemented.

“In many cases they have not developed policies and procedures necessary to ensure the survival of grizzly bear populations and, when they have had plans, they have failed to effectively implement them,” Moola said.

Government figures estimate there are now 15,000 grizzly bears in B.C. — one of the last areas in North America where grizzly bears live in their natural habitat. But that figure is questioned by some scientists — and nine of the province’s grizzly bear populations are on the verge of elimination.

A century ago, 35,000 grizzly bears lived in B.C., while other populations flourished from Alaska to Mexico to Manitoba, according to the Suzuki Foundation.

Some populations of bears have increased, Bellringer noted, but that is not the result of management strategies.

Habitat Destruction Key Threat to Grizzly Bears

Despite the public controversy that has raged around the grizzly bear trophy hunt, with 250 to 300 bears killed every year, the greatest threat is not hunting, but human activities that degrade grizzly bear habitat, Bellringer wrote.

“For example, there are 600,000 kilometres of resource roads with, on the order of 10,000 kilometres more added each year. This expansion allows greater human access into wilderness areas, which results in illegal killing of grizzly bears and greater human-bear conflicts,” she wrote.

Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations Minister Doug Donaldson and Environment Minister George Heyman said the government is accepting all 10 recommendations in the report and will develop a grizzly bear management plan with clear objectives, roles, responsibilities and accountabilities.

The recommendations include improvements in monitoring populations and threats, developing an adequately funded inventory of bears, increased transparency, ensuring the Conservation Officer Service has enough resources to respond to grizzly/human conflicts, developing clear policies and procedures for bear viewing, mitigating the effect of industry on bear habitat, adjusting tools needed to conserve habitat and reviewing wildlife management in B.C.

Some Areas Need to be 'Off Limits' To Industry to Protect Habitat

Moola is pleased the government has accepted the recommendations, but says more is needed.

“They have gone, far, far further than the previous government, but we definitely need to ensure that there is tangible action and that will mean there have to be some areas of the province that are put off limits to any industrial development whatsoever — off limits to any resource roads, mining, forestry, oil and gas development so the remaining habitat of grizzly bears is not further eviscerated,” he said.

Heyman said at a news conference that environmental assessments will be tightened to include habitat concerns and there will be public consultations on a new species at risk act for the province.

“Part of the purpose of a species at risk act is to identify areas where species are at risk of being extirpated or threatened and to take action to prevent it happening in the first place. That can come with a whole range of conditions that will work in concert with the environmental assessment,” he said.

After a decade of decreases in boots on the ground, the government will be adding new conservation officers next year and there will be a close look at the professional reliance model, which often sees industries policing themselves, Heyman said.

Donaldson added that new guidelines are being given to statutory decision makers to consider wildlife values.

Trophy Hunting Controversy Continues

However, Heyman and Donaldson skirted around questions about the newly revamped grizzly hunt.

Under the new rules, no grizzly hunting will be allowed in the Great Bear Rainforest and trophy hunting will be banned through the rest of the province, but a meat hunt will be allowed to continue, something that critics say will open a loophole that will allow the hunt to continue.

Guide outfitters in B.C. are continuing to advertise grizzly hunting to overseas hunters, but have eliminated the word trophy.

Trish Boyum, speaking for the Facebook group Stop The Grizzly Killing, said it is now up to all British Columbians to tell the government, before the Nov. 2 deadline, that a meat hunt is not acceptable.

Since the Auditor General’s report says there is not an adequate management framework in place, it is difficult to know how a meat hunt would be policed, Boyum said.

“How can the public now be expected to trust that the Conservation Officer Service will be able to police the government’s new proposed strategies?” she said.

The report does not take into account the ethics around killing grizzlies for the thrill of the kill, Boyum said.

“If a new grizzly bear management strategy is to succeed, it will require the backing of the majority of British Columbians . . . and British Columbians want a total ban on grizzly hunting across all of B.C.”

Green Party spokesman Adam Olsen agreed it is disturbing that the province has failed to properly manage the grizzly population and wants to see a moratorium on hunting “while we take the time to review our wildlife management practices and plan for a landscape altered by climate change.”

Image: Nathan Rupert via Flickr

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

The B.C. government announced on Monday it will end grizzly bear trophy hunting throughout the province and stop all hunting of grizzles in the Great Bear Rainforest.

“By bringing trophy hunting of grizzlies to an end, we’re delivering on our commitment to British Columbians,” Doug Donaldson, Minister of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development, said. “This action is supported by the vast majority of people across our province."

A public opinion poll conducted by Insights West in February found strong opposition to trophy hunting across Canada (80 per cent), including 90 per cent of British Columbians.

The ban will take effect Nov. 30th — after this year’s hunt.

Hunting for meat will be allowed to continue outside of the Great Bear Rainforest. Historically, environmentalists have critiqued exceptions for food hunting, saying it leaves the door open for trophy hunting.

"We’re pretty dubious about the whole notion of classifying any killing of grizzlies as a food hunt," said Chris Genovali, executive director of Raincoast Conservation Foundation, a group that has campagined against the trophy hunt.

"If the food hunt policy is going to have any chance of having an effect, at the very least you’d have to force the hunters to surrender the trophy parts to provincial authorities in an attempt to de-incentivize why people go out and kill these animals."

While reserving judgment on the trophy hunting ban until further details are released, Raincoast Conservation Foundation called the complete end of grizzly bear hunting in the Great Bear Rainforest "a solid step forward for wildlife management in British Columbia."

BREAKING: B.C. to End Grizzly Bear Trophy Hunting https://t.co/mbFXaZhziM #bcpoli #grizzlies #wildlife #explorebc pic.twitter.com/jQ9Yi4YUsR

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) August 14, 2017

According to B.C. government statistics, about 300 grizzlies are killed each year by trophy hunters. Eighty-seven per cent of known, human-caused grizzly bear deaths in B.C. are attributable to trophy hunters, who have killed 12,026 grizzly bears since the government began keeping records in 1975.

Foreign hunters account for about 30 per cent of all trophy kills in B.C. in any given year and they can pay upwards of $30,000 for the proper permits and the assistance of a guide outfitter. Former premier Christy Clark supported the grizzly trophy hunt and the BC Liberals received nearly $60,000 in donations from guide outfitter associations since 2005.

Earlier this year, Safari Club International put its name behind a $60,000 fundraising effort for the Guide Outfitters Association of BC. In a post on Facebook, the Canadian chapter for Safari Club International wrote: “NDP have vowed to end the Grizzly hunt in BC if elected. SCI chapters from CANADA and the USA banded together donating $60000.00.”

Until now trophy hunting has even been allowed within some of B.C.’s provincial parks and protected areas. A 2012 report [PDF] by Stanford University in conjunction with the Center for Responsible Travel found that bear viewing groups in the Great Bear Rainforest generated “more than 12 times more in visitor spending than bear hunting.”

The government will consult with First Nations and stakeholder groups to determine next steps and mechanisms as B.C. moves toward ending the trophy hunt, according to a press release.

In late 2016, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) assessed the world’s brown bear populations, and identified eleven around the world as critically endangered. Three of those are in Canada — all in southwest B.C.

The Coast to Cascades grizzly bear initiative warned on Monday that without stronger management of the species and their habitat — beyond hunting — grizzlies are still in grave danger.

“Many British Columbians are not aware that for years there has been no legal hunt for the most at-risk populations of grizzly bears in B.C., yet some of these populations continue to decline to perilous levels,” said Johnny Mikes, field director for Coast to Cascades. “Even though the province will end the B.C. grizzly bear trophy hunt in its entirety, it is only improved management focused on habitat and non-hunting threats that will benefit the bears in these depressed and declining populations.” 

The B.C. auditor general's office is expected to release a report on the effectiveness of grizzly bear management in B.C. sometime this fall.

Image source: Dogwood

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Unmistakable grizzly bear prints in the soft sand of English Bay were enough to stop some dog walkers in their tracks Tuesday.

But, it was sculptor George Rammell, art instructor at Capilano University, marching down the beach, making prints with casts of bear paws strapped to his feet.

“There aren’t going to be bears out there if we keep on the way we are going,” Rammell, one of a growing number of British Columbians committed to stopping the province’s grizzly bear trophy hunt, said.

“Imagine if B.C. was a grizzly bear sanctuary, what a message it would send to the world,” Rammell said at the launch of Justice for B.C. Grizzlies, a newly formed group that wants supporters to actively lobby sitting politicians and candidates in the upcoming provincial election and then vote for those who support scrapping the hunt.

The Liberal government, which has received generous financial support from the Guide Outfitters Association of B.C, insists that the hunt, which kills about 300 bears a year, is sustainable as there are more than 15,000 grizzly bears in the province.

But that number is based on models, not a count of bears, and is questioned by some scientists who believe numbers are much lower. A recent study, analyzing 35 years of grizzly mortality data, also found kill limits are regularly exceeded.

Shortly before the 2001 election, the NDP put a moratorium on grizzly trophy hunting  — which was immediately scrapped by the incoming BC Liberal government — but, so far, New Democrats have not committed to stopping the hunt and environment critic George Heyman said caucus discussions are continuing.

However, among the general public there is little ambivalence, with polls showing more than 90 per cent of British Columbians oppose the hunt. In addition, studies in the Great Bear Rainforest show bear viewing generates 12 times the revenue of bear-hunting.

“I don’t understand why this government is so determined to keep on with the hunt,” said Valerie Murray, a founder of Justice for B.C. Grizzlies, speaking at Tuesday’s launch.

The hunt is irresponsible and short-sighted, said group founder Barbara Murray, who pointed out that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will be visiting the Great Bear Rainforest for the environmental values — which do not fit comfortably with the violence of the trophy hunt.

“We need to (stop) this for our own humanity and self-respect,” she said.

Other newly-formed groups opposing the hunt include the non-profit Grizzly Bear Foundation, initiated by philanthropist and developer Michael Audain, who kickstarted the effort with a $500,000 grant from the Audain Foundation.

The Foundation will hold public meetings around B.C. from Sept. 27 to Oct. 20 and will hand a report to the provincial government by next February.

#Grizzly Bear Advocates Determined to Make #TrophyHunt a Top #BCelxn2017 Issue #bcpoli @bcliberals @BCLiberalCaucus https://t.co/m9U6EtR6af

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) September 14, 2016

“The purpose will be to promote the welfare of grizzly bears of B.C. through education, research and conservation activities,” Audain said at the group’s launch.

“How can we share the province in a harmonious way that facilitates a healthy bear population as well as in a manner that does not provide problems for the human population.”

The government will also be receiving a report this spring from Auditor General Carol Bellringer, who has been asked to look into whether the province is properly managing bear populations.

The Grizzly Bear Foundation will look at threats such as habitat loss, climate change, urbanization and food supply as well as hunting. Rammell said looking at a range of threats is good, but halting the hunt will produce immediate results.

“Stop the hunt and it puts 300 extra bears in the woods every year. Populations can’t handle the hunt,” he said.

LUSH Fresh Handmade Cosmetics will also be lending its clout to the campaign this fall.

“We have 240 stores in North America and all those stores will be talking about trophy hunting,” said Carleen Pickard, LUSH ethical campaigns specialist, in an interview.

“We are joining the other organizations to talk about this cruel and outdated trophy hunt. . . .We want people coming into our stores to put pressure on their elected individuals,” she said.

The LUSH campaign is likely to include a documentary with internationally renowned bear expert Charlie Russell, who has spent his life studying and living with grizzly bears in Canada, Alaska and Russia.

Speaking at the launch of Justice for B.C. Grizzlies, Russell said human attitudes towards bears have to change.

Bears should not be portrayed as aggressive killers, but as intelligent animals who want to get along with humans if they are not threatened, he said, pointing out that, during one of his studies, female bears would bring their cubs to him for babysitting.

“What I saw was a peace-loving animal that wanted to get along with us, but we don’t allow it,” he said in an interview.

British Columbians need to ask themselves how civilized they are, Russell said.

“We are supposed to be the top species in world and we are not civilized if we kill for just sport,” he said.

Image: Nathan Rupert via Flickr

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

By Chris Wood. This article originally appeared on The Tyee. 

The sound of water is loud in a land muffled by snow. No human sound penetrates this broad valley between tapering extensions of the Rocky Mountains, 100 kilometres southwest of Grand Prairie, Alberta. A stray beam from the low winter sun washes the landscape in pink. A young doe caribou makes her way to the water. She's thin, ribs visible beneath her winter coat. At the water's edge she lowers her head to drink.

Suddenly grey shapes burst from the shadows. The swiftest comes racing over her own hoof-trail, leaps and sinks sharp teeth deep into her haunch, lacerating ligament. Within minutes, the doe's struggle is over. The wolves settle in to eat.

For Alberta's foothills caribou, death row is a fraying triangle of pine, spruce and aspenforest and meadows, stretched along the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains and running roughly from Banff, west of Calgary, some 630 kilometres north and west over the provincial border into British Columbia. A broad thumb of forest thrusts east toward Slave Lake.

A second area with a similar ecological community, not quite as large, straddles the provincial borders north of Fort St. John, B.C. Anchored on Alberta's Chinchaga Wildland Park it holds the headwaters of the Hay River. The two areas are isolated from each other by the trans-border Peace River and its development corridor of gas fields, forest mills and a soon-to-be-built third hydroelectric dam and reservoir on the river.

An expanse of 120,000 square kilometres, the size of Nicaragua or North Korea, might seem roomy enough to provide security for wildlife. But only about five per cent of that area enjoys some form of protection, the biggest chunks in Banff and Jasper National Parks. Outside those areas' boundaries, Alberta's foothills are open for ranching, forestry and mineral extraction.

Two ranges of the Alberta foothills forest. Source: The Encyclopedia of Earth.

When you're an animal like the foothills caribou, larger than a full-grown lama with an extended family that can run into hundreds of individuals, you need your space. More than that, you need a certain kind of space: a large-scale mosaic of thick forests, more open woodland and meadows. The same is true for scores of other creatures that became adapted to the particular mix of landforms and weather and other plants and animals, as well as its regular disturbance by forest fires and seasonal river floods, that emerged here over thousands of their generations before European settlers arrived.

Threatened 'refugees'

The caribou is not the only species making a last stand in the shifting scraps of shelter the Alberta foothills forest still offers.

It's also one of the last havens east of the Rockies for the Grizzly Bear. Not, as most people think, originally a forest-dweller, Grizzlies were the uber-predators of the open prairies before those were surveyed off into square-mile sections for farming.

Forced into the foothills, Grizzlies "are refugees" there, says Matt Wheatley, a wildlife ecologist who worked for the province on protected areas before joining the faculty of the University of Alberta.

Grizzlies, powerful and adaptable, are ranked as a species of relatively low "special concern" by the federal government. While they are failing to survive in the forest's southern portion, their numbers are reported to be stable in the northern part.

Bull trout spend January in dark, deep pools of the foothills, waiting for the ice over them to melt and the cycle of spawning to begin again. But they too are ranked as "threatened," mostly by the side effects of forest clearing.

Caribou, though, are the most critically vulnerable, assessed in the highest risk category of imminently endangered by "extinction or extirpation throughout all or a significant portion" of their former home. Many of the herds recorded in historic population surveys "are not really extant any more," says Wheatley's University of Alberta colleague, biologist Cindy Paszkowski.

Other species at risk have found refuge in the foothills' natural forest mosaic of jack and lodgepole pine, black and white spruce and aspen, regularly opened by fire into meadow clearings. Long-toed Salamanders and Columbian Spotted Frogs, American Badgers and Pygmy Owls, Wolverines and Cougars also shelter in this ecological transition zone between the drier prairie, and the higher altitude montane, more arid and a lot colder.

A century of occupation

If this "just right" quality allows the foothills forest to shelter refugee species from other vanished landscapes, it also helps explains why so little of it remains intact after a century and a half of post-Indigenous human occupation.

Many species at risk once found refuge in the foothills' natural forest mosaic of jack and lodgepole pine, black and white spruce and aspen. Photo via Shutterstock.

It was the value of forest timber that attracted the first settlers from the increasingly crowded Utah and Montana territories to what is now Alberta in the late 19th century. Flush with new technology and the era's enthusiasm for exploiting "undeveloped" resources, they launched a century of full-throttle extraction that has altered virtually every centimetre of the former landscape.

Changes in land cover, forest mix, and the regularity of fire and flood, have altered the ecosystem which once allowed the Caribou, Bull trout and others species to thrive, to the point that what remains is "not the real deal any more," Paszkowski says.

It is, for one thing, generally a much younger forest. Over the decades loggers removed most of the trees more than 70 or 80 years old, whose trunks supported rich crusts of lichen that caribou could rely on for winter forage.

Loggers, and later farmers, also sent plumes of disturbed soil down creeks newly exposed to the sun, clogging the fine grains of clean gravel that Bull trout need for nest-building and warming the water in many sections beyond the cold-water species' tolerance.

In the last half-century, as forestry activity continued to chase the region's larger mammals from one refuge block of older growth to another, a new threat arrived. The explosive growth of oil and gas exploration sent seismic crews to virtually every corner of the foothills, cutting metres-wide, clear-cut corridors through hill and dale.

"Caribou have adapted for thousands of years to live in old, dense forest," Wheatley observes. "This kept them away from the most efficient predator in the system, which is wolves. Until you start exploring the forest for oil and gas, and you create trails [that] made it easier for wolves to encounter caribou."

Some foothills herds, Wheatley believes, have been losing members to wolves and other stressors at the rate of five to 10 per cent a year. At that rate, "your population is gone in 10 years," he says.

Seismic lines and road networks have also allowed humans on ATVs or snowmobiles year-round access deep into what remains of the heavily altered ecosystems. And as Paszkowski notes, "any human activity is probably not good for caribou, nor for grizzly bears."

The Albertan foothills are one of the last havens east of the Rockies for the Grizzly Bear. Photo via Shutterstock.

The bears are the object of illegal trophy hunting, but a more lethal factor may be road kills and freight trains — especially those carrying grain. Attracted by fallen grain alongside tracks, even the world's most powerful bear meets its match in a diesel locomotive.

Nowhere left to go

Overarching all of these threats to the foothill refugees, ecologists say, is an even less obvious factor: fire — or rather, the way European settlers in the last century and a quarter have altered its rhythm.

Once relatively frequent, relatively small fires cycled through older stands of foothills forest. Caribou and many other animals could avoid their conflagration, returning later to the newly refreshed open meadows and young forests the fires left behind. Scorched trees that fell into creeks created shelter for Bull trout spawning beds.

But viewing forest fires as destructive to timber value and threatening to settlements, provincial governments have invested heavily for decades in their suppression.

Now, the former natural cycle has been irrecoverably disrupted. The mosaic of open meadow, parkland and denser forest is out of balance. Remaining forested areas are unnaturally old, and dense with unburned fuel. When fires do ignite, they burn more deeply, far wider and for longer.

Outside of protected areas, forest managers are experimenting with re-introducing smaller fires through controlled burns. But those are risky, and despite their name may run out of control, threatening the very last sanctuary for fugitive wildlife.

The foothills' few protected areas, Wheatley worries, "are too small for both fire and the animals. We've run out of natural capital to play with if we want to put fire back into the landscape."

The caribou, like the Prairie grizzlies and the Bull trout beneath the winter ice, have nowhere left to go.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.