With only a handful of spotted owls left in B.C.’s wild, a national conservation group is demanding that federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna step in and produce a long-overdue habitat action plan to help save the iconic species from Canadian extinction.

In a letter sent to McKenna on Wednesday, the environmental law charity Ecojustice, acting for the Wilderness Committee, called on the minister to take action following decades of “mismanagement” by the B.C. government, which has prioritized logging in the owl’s habitat over legally required protections, according to an expert report.

“We’re saying ‘enough is enough,’” Ecojustice lawyer Kegan Pepper-Smith told The Narwhal. “This is about ensuring another step towards adequate protection for the owl.”

The demand letter comes as biologists at an experimental Lower Mainland breeding facility for the northern spotted owl tend three newly hatched chicks, in the hopes of adding to a captive population they hope will one day be robust enough to allow for the release of individuals into the wild. The successes and challenges faced by the breeding centre, the only one of its kind in the world, were documented last year in a feature published by The Narwhal.

The letter to McKenna follows the release of an ominous UN report on biodiversity that found nearly one million plant and animal species around the world face extinction due to human activity.

The report — compiled over three years by 145 expert authors from more than 50 countries — concluded that nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history, with grave impacts for people everywhere.

Spotted owls are now functionally extinct in Canada’s wild, where an estimated 1,000 of the raptors once lived in southwestern B.C.’s old-growth forests of Douglas fir, western hemlock and western red cedar. For 12 years, the B.C. government has steadfastly avoided identification of the owl’s critical habitat, required by the recovery strategy. Photo: Jared Hobbs

“The health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever,” said Sir Robert Watson, chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) that put together the report.

“We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide.”

Among other notable findings, the report concluded that the current rate of extinction is double to hundreds of times higher than the average over the past 10 million years. That rate is accelerating, with many at-risk species facing extinction within decades.

Scientists say we are in the midst of the planet’s Sixth Great Extinction. Close to 700 vertebrate species have already been driven to extinction by human actions since the 16th century, according to the UN report, released on Monday.

The primary threat to the spotted owl is the loss and fragmentation of its habitat —  mainly comprised of old-growth forests of Douglas fir, western hemlock and western red cedar — in southwestern B.C., the only place it is found in Canada.

Commercial logging, regulated and approved by the B.C. government, is the principal cause of habitat destruction and fragmentation for the raptor, which feeds on flying squirrels. Spotted owl populations in the province have plummeted from an estimated 500 pairs historically to only a few individuals in the wild at last count.

“The unfortunate reality is their old-growth habitat has overlapped with the epicentre of human settlement and old-growth harvesting throughout B.C.,” said Pepper-Smith. “As the forests have gone so have the owls.”

The spotted owl has been listed as endangered under the federal Species at Risk Act (SARA) since 2003, requiring Ottawa to take action.  

A 2006 federal recovery strategy for the spotted owl committed to producing an action plan within a year that would fully identify the raptor’s critical habitat and activities likely to cause destruction to it.

But documents made public through a subsequent court case reveal that the B.C. government told the federal government it would produce that habitat action plan, Pepper-Smith said.

“And here we are 12 years later. We know now that was never completed. There was no critical habitat identified for the owl. And, in fact, the B.C. government has maintained much the same approach as they did in the 1990s and throughout the 2000s — piecemeal, inadequate protection throughout the spotted owl’s range.”

Pepper-Smith said the demand letter had not been sent earlier because both organizations have been working on other pressing issues.  

“The unfortunate reality is that we both, as non-governmental organizations, have limited resources.”

In an emailed statement, the federal environment ministry pointed out that the spotted owl is a provincially managed species and said the B.C. government committed in 2006 to developing and implementing a spotted owl recovery plan.

“The government of Canada will work with the government of B.C. to determine the next steps in the protection and recovery of the spotted owl based on the best available information,” the ministry said.

B.C. has the greatest number of species at risk of extinction in all of Canada, yet is one of the few provinces without a stand-alone law to protect endangered species.

The provincial government promised to introduce a law to protect B.C.’s 1,807 species at-risk, and instructions to enact endangered species legislation were included in Premier John Horgan’s

2017 mandate letter to B.C. Environment Minister George Heyman.

But following a recent backlash about draft agreements to protect B.C.’s imperilled southern mountain caribou herds — based in part on fears that habitat protection will lead to job losses, particularly in the forest industry — the government is backpedalling on its pledge, leaving scientists gravely concerned.

In response to the Ecojustice letter, the B.C. government said it has allocated $400,000 in annual funding over the past five years “to help this important species recover.”

The funds have supported the captive breeding program, field research and inventories, and new technologies for monitoring and conducting habitat assessments, according to an emailed statement from the ministry of forests, lands and natural resource operations.

The ministry said 303,850 hectares of forests are protected within provincial and regional parks, Greater Vancouver watersheds and wildlife habitat areas. About 66 per cent of that land consists of old and mature forests, which the government described as “preferred by the spotted owl.”

Charlotte Dawe, conservation and policy campaigner with the Wilderness Committee, stands in the Karen Creek clearcut. The Karen Creek watershed is located just east of Hope, B.C., and just off the Coquihalla Highway, within a Wildlife Habitat Area designated by the B.C. government to preserve spotted owl forest habitat. Photo: Wilderness Committee

The expert report, written by B.C.’s leading spotted owl biologist, Jared Hobbs, found that spotted owl recovery in B.C. is still technically and biologically feasible. It noted, however, that the province “will face several significant logistical, societal and economic challenges.”

Hobbs, a scientific advisor for the B.C.’s spotted owl recovery team from 2002 to 2006, found that recovery actions need to be implemented more “conservatively” with regard to timber harvest in spotted owl habitat and with “strict adherence to scientific principle.”

They also need to be implemented “without delay for improved habitat protection” if the province is committed to successfully recovering spotted owls in B.C., his report said.  

Joe Foy, co-executive director of the Wilderness Committee, pointed out that the U.S. has allocated four million hectares for spotted owl protection.

Canadian protection efforts have been “dismal” by comparison, Foy said, noting that only 218,350 total hectares of suitable habitat has been protected and the B.C. government continues to allow logging in old-growth forests suitable for spotted owls.

“This despicable state of affairs must stop now,” Foy said.

The UN report found that human actions have significantly altered three-quarters of the land-based environment and about two-thirds of the marine environment, with grim consequences for all life on earth.

Nature managed by Indigenous peoples and local communities is under increasing pressure but declining less rapidly than elsewhere, the report discovered.

The authors found that the global response to the biodiversity crisis is insufficient and that “transformative changes” are needed to restore and protect nature. However, they said it is not too late to make a difference if opposition from vested interests can be overcome for the greater public good.

The Wilderness Committee requested that McKenna let it know by June 30 of steps taken to produce a habitat action plan and that the plan be developed by the end of this year.

“Obviously we’d like her to see the urgency of this matter and react quicker than that,” Pepper-Smith said. “But we understand that there are other species out there who require action.”

He said it would be “completely unacceptable” for McKenna’s ministry to defer to the B.C. government once again.

“The evidence is in the forests with how few owls remain out there.”

Update Thursday, May 9 2019 at 4:08pm pst: This article was updated to include comment from Environment and Climate Change Canada that was not submitted before publication time.

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A forestry industry lobby group is working to undermine Canada’s plans to protect endangered caribou, according to several experts.

The campaign, ‘Caribou Facts,’ launched by the Forest Products Association of Canada (FPAC), is designed to cast doubt on the science of caribou conservation.

Several caribou populations in Canada are listed as threatened or endangered under the Species At Risk Act, which means provincial and federal governments are legally required to protect habitat and develop recovery plans to avoid localized extinction.

Scientists have pinpointed habitat fragmentation, caused by things like oil and gas activity, seismic lines, forestry and hydroelectric development, as the leading cause of caribou declines.

“We know more about caribou than almost any other species in Canada,” says Mark Hebblewhite, associate professor of ungulate habitat biology at the University of Montana.

John Bergenske, conservation director for Kootenay conservation group Wildsight, said the forestry industry is trying to shift emphasis away from habitat.

“But it all boils down to habitat,” Bergenske said. “There’s not a single scientific paper that won’t go back to that when you’re talking about caribou.”

Industry Campaign ‘Misrepresents’ Caribou Declines, Creates Doubt

The Caribou Facts website raises questions about the cause of caribou declines in Canada, sowing doubt that recovery plans are “based on sound science.”

Canadians are encouraged to sign a petition targeted to MPs with suggested text that reads, “I’m afraid that the wrong approach will do nothing for caribou and will kill thousands of Canadian jobs.”

Hebblewhite said the website “misrepresents” the causes of caribou decline, which are well known to the scientific community.

Screenshot/CaribouFacts website

“They are trying to create a sense of uncertainty,” he said. “Just like the anti-climate science lobbyists do: they want to say it’s too uncertain, we can’t do anything.”

“That’s complete bullshit,” Hebblewhite told DeSmog Canada. “It is disingenuous to anyone with half a brain.”

The forestry industry has tried to move the government’s focus away from the issue of caribou recovery to that of job losses, Bergenske said.

“It is a really unfortunate ploy.”

The Forest Products Association of Canada told DeSmog Canada a spokesperson could not be made available to comment on this story.

ICYMI: Oilsands Companies Scramble to Reclaim Seismic Lines in Endangered Caribou Habitat

Carolyn Campbell, conservation expert with the Alberta Wilderness Association, said the Caribou Facts campaign represents a “big step back” for the industry group when it comes to caribou recovery.

The Caribou Facts website seems to undermine the Forest Product Association’s own commitment in 2012 to the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement and their own methodology for how to move forward together on caribou recovery, Campbell told DeSmog Canada.

“At that time they recognized loss of habitat as the key driver of caribou loss.”

According to provincial estimates, caribou in Alberta are disappearing at a rate of about eight per cent per year due to habitat loss from energy and forestry development, which in turn increases the reach of predators like wolves into caribou habitat. A total of 96 per cent of the critically endangered Littly Smoky caribou range is within 500 metres of human development.*

ICYMI: Wolves Scapegoated While Alberta Government Sells Off Endangered Caribou Habitat

ICYMI: Alberta to Sell More Oil and Gas Leases in Endangered Caribou Habitat

Campbell said the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement resulted in deferred logging in caribou ranges, although she adds, some recent studies of mapping show those deferrals weren’t always honoured.

Critical caribou habitat in British Columbia has also suffered continued industrial incursion.

As DeSmog Canada reported in April, the B.C. government granted permits to Canfor, a member of the Forest Products Association of Canada, to log in critical mountain caribou habitat.

The permits were granted to Canfor despite the provincial government’s knowledge mountain caribou are at risk of extinction and the company’s own commitment to avoid logging in critical habitat for species at risk.

Canfor engaged in clear-cut logging near Wells Gray Provincial Park while locals appealed to Environment Minister Catherine McKenna for an emergency stop-work order and an enforcement of federal Species At Risk laws.

Campaign Targets Minister at Critical Time

Species at risk are listed by the federal government on the recommendation of the non-governmental Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC). Once listed those species are then subject to a recovery goal that identifies critical habitat. In 2012 the federal government laid out a goal of 65 per cent undisturbed habitat in caribou ranges — a target provinces must now work into provincial recovery plans.

Those plans were due on Oct. 5 — but the vast majority of provinces failed to meet the deadline, prompting First Nations, environmental organizations and corporations to call on minister McKenna to intervene at the federal level.

The September roll-out of the ‘Caribou Facts’ campaign was timed to influence the minister, Hebblewhite said.

ICYMI: Will Alberta’s Last-Ditch Effort to Save the Caribou Be Enough?

“In the U.S. the Endangered Species Act includes an analysis of the socio-economic impacts of the Act. So that’s where industry meddling occurs, that’s where you’ll see industry lobbying,” he said.

But when Canada drafted the Species At Risk Act, it was designed to focus on biology, rather than economics.

“At no time during these phases are socio-economic influences considered. It’s meant to be a scientific analysis.”

Once recovery plans are developed, provinces are able to move into the action planning phase, which is where Canada is now with incoming range plans, Hebblewhite said.

Minister McKenna will take until April 2018 to evaluate provincial and territorial plans.

“The minister now has the right to consider socio-economic concerns,” Hebblewhite said. “So that is why we’re seeing this industry campaign now. The minister is the main audience here.”

*This article was updated to specifiy 96 per cent of the Little Smoky caribou range is within 500 metres of human disturbance, rather than all caribou habitat.

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 is granting logging permits in critical caribou habitat, despite evidence that B.C.’s Southern Mountain Caribou are being driven to extinction by habitat loss — a move that has driven citizens to call on the federal government to enforce the Species At Risk Act.

Among the hardest hit regions in the province is the area in and around Wells Gray Park, the scenic home to Helmcken Falls, two hours north of Kamloops.

There, people like Trevor Goward, a longtime local resident, naturalist and professional lichenologist, are sounding the alarm over the province’s failure to protect caribou.

Goward, along with a group of local citizens, is currently preparing to file with the federal government for an emergency stop to a fresh round of clearcuts in the Upper Clearwater Valley, which lies just outside of the southern boundaries of Wells Gray Park.

Canfor has obtained permits to log blocks W101 and W102 on the west side of the Clearwater River, and block T121 on the east side — all designated critical habitat for caribou. The company is sitting on nine more blocks on the east side, covering hundreds of hectares, and has indicated imminent plans to file for a number of additional permits there.

Canfor and its subsidiaries have donated a total of $884,366.08 to the BC Liberals since 2005, according to data released by Elections BC and the BC Liberals. The Council of Forest Industries, of which Canfor is a member, has donated an additional $54,815.00.

Canfor did not respond to a request for comment.

Image: Trevor Goward and Jason Hollinger

In filing their petition, Goward and his group are essentially going over the head of the province, which has jurisdiction over logging and caribou management, but not over endangered species. That constitutional responsibility for endangered species falls to the federal government, under the Species at Risk Act (SARA).

The Southern Mountain Caribou were listed as “threatened” when SARA was created in 2002. Then in 2014, they were designated as “endangered” by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada.

“The province of B.C. has utterly failed to prevent logging in areas outside the Wells Gray Park where logging boosts deer and moose populations and artificially increases the number of wolves that then prey on caribou,” explains Bill Andrews, lawyer for Goward’s petition group.

A major point of divergence between the province and federal government’s approach to endangered Southern Mountain Caribou is in the treatment of “matrix habitat” — areas where caribou may not necessarily roam, but, because they are adjacent to other critical habitat, are nevertheless important to the caribou’s survival.

When matrix areas are clearcut, they attract and sustain predators, including wolves which can travel up to 100 kilometres per day — yet the B.C. government does not prevent logging in these areas, restricting industry only in those it narrowly defines as “core habitat.”

The new Canfor cutblocks fall directly within what is considered Type 2 Matrix habitat by the Species At Risk Act, meaning it should be kept relatively free of predators

“The federal government has constitutional authority to step in and protect the critical habitat of an endangered species where the province is unwilling to do so,” Andrews says.

“My clients are petitioning federal minister of environment Catherine McKenna to do just that.”

#BCLiberals Grant Major Political Donor Permission to Log #Endangered Caribou Habitat https://t.co/wazlcuTtnm #Canfor #bcpoli #bcelxn17

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) April 3, 2017

Caribou’s True Culprit: Habitat Destruction

While the province of B.C. has placed much of the blame for disappearing caribou on wolves, a closer look reveals the real culprit: decades of habitat loss from various forms of industry and, most notably, landmark changes to B.C.’s logging regulations under the 16-year tenure of the B.C. Liberal government.

Goward has produced a graph that lays key policy and legislative changes over declining caribou populations, revealing a stark parallel.

In 2004, the B.C. Liberals switched to the Forest and Range Practices Act, which essentially deregulated the forestry sector and put logging companies in charge of policing their own operations. As a 2011 B.C. Government and Service Employees’ Union report, “B.C. Forests in Crisis,” put it:

“Under FRPA, industry was given control over its operations, and entrusted to achieve on-the-ground results with less government supervision. Industry was allowed to define its own ‘results,’ as long as the results were consistent with general government objectives, and forest professionals would be relied upon to ensure sustainable practices (called “professional reliance”)…These policy changes significantly reduced the role of government in the forest industry. Direct government involvement in on-the-ground forest management was seriously limited, and key levers to influence industry activities were removed.”

These regulatory changes ushered in a series of devastating clearcuts throughout the Wells Gray region and all around the province.

Image: Trevor Goward and Jason Hollinger

In February, the B.C. government issued an election-time announcement, committing $27 million toward caribou recovery efforts. But the announcement downplayed a dramatic reduction in caribou numbers and plans to expand the province’s controversial wolf cull program to new caribou regions.

“It’s a policy to influence politics,” Chris Darimont, Hakai-Raincoast professor at the University of Victoria, says. “The province needs to be recognized for ‘doing something’. And despite the controversy about wolf control now, it’s easier politically than halting industry where endangered caribou roam.”

Christy Clark’s Caribou Numbers Game

In its February announcement, the B.C. government released population figures for the total of B.C.’s woodland population herds — numbers that mask precipitous declines in specific herds.

“Today there are some 19,000 caribou in the province, compared to between 30,000 and 40,000 at the turn of the last century,” the press release states. Yet only around 1,300 Southern Mountain Caribou remain across the province and many herds — including the Northern Woodland Caribou in the Peace region — are now endangered or even extirpated (locally extinct).

All of B.C.’s caribou are of the woodland variety, but there are different subpopulations within that.

South of Prince George roams a unique variety known as mountain or “deep snow” caribou. What makes the Southern Mountain Caribou special is their wintertime vertical migration into the high country. Their saucer-like hooves enable them to walk on top of 3-meter deep snow into alpine and sub-alpine habitat, where they evade predators like wolves and cougars and feed on black hair lichens which hang in abundance from the branches of spruce and fir.

It is the Southern Mountain Caribou that has experts worried the animal is being ignored by the B.C. Government.

The South Columbia herd around Mount Revelstoke, for example, has fallen from 120 animals in 1994 to just four in the 2016 census.

The Monsahee herd was recently classified as extirpated — meaning locally extinct — with just one very lonely animal noted in the census.

The province’s recent announcement acknowledges the need for habitat protection but much of the program’s focus is on “predator management” — which is more or less a lovely euphemism for killing wolves — and a maternal penning program, the effectiveness of which has been questioned.

Helicopter wolf kill programs have been taking place since 2015 in the South Peace and Southern Selkirks, but this year the province has added a new one in the North Columbia, near Revelstoke.

In 2016, 163 wolves were killed by the government’s program, a doubling from the previous year.

With the addition of a third kill program in 2017, the number is expected to grow again.

Although a portion of the $27 million is specifically set aside to support wolf culls in the Southern Mountain Caribou region, the announcement emphasized recovery work for the healthier woodland caribou north of the Peace Valley and in less industrialized portions of northwest B.C. — herds that still matter to hunters, an important voter constituency for the B.C. Liberals.

A 2017 protection study from the joint Canada-British Columbia Southern Mountain Caribou (Central Group) in B.C., found more than a quarter of the $12.5 million spent on caribou recovery between 2006 and 2016 went to predator-related initiatives — half of which was spent specifically on killing wolves.

Only $168,000, or about 1.3 per cent of the total, was spent on habitat management.

The Ministry of Forest, Lands and Natural Resource Operations (FLNRO) declined to provide details on how this new $27 million will be allocated, stating simply, “since the funding has just been announced, a detailed breakdown of how the funds will be spent is not yet available.”

Caribou in the Timber Sacrifice Zone

The province began the Mountain Caribou Recovery Implementation Program in 2008 — the goal of which was to return mountain caribou from the Prince George and the Omineca Mountains south to the Washington border to 1995 census levels by 2028.

Nearly halfway into that timeframe, the program has been a dismal failure.

Most notably, the province has resisted protecting caribou habitat in areas rich in timber resources.

Just 0.65 per cent of B.C.’s Timber Harvesting Land Base has been set aside for ungulate winter range — and of this amount, very little is prime habitat for caribou.

Those lands that are protected from logging are often impacted by heavy-duty snowmobiling, which carves a path for predators to access caribou in alpine habitat.

Forestry clearcuts and recreational activities create a cascading effect by stripping the landscape of old-growth and mature forests. What grows in their place is a mixture of brush and young deciduous shrubs and trees like willow, alder, and poplar — known as early seral forest.

Seral forest makes for poor caribou habitat but attracts and sustains lots of deer, moose and elk, which in turn attract predators such as wolves and cougars. Caribou often end up killed as “by-catch.”

The de facto response from the province has been to emphasize removing these predators rather than protecting caribou habitat from industry — the fundamental method of caribou recovery consistently recommended by the scientific community.

B.C. Liberals Walked Away from Local Use Plan

For Goward, however, the problem is much bigger than concerns over logging and its impact on Wells Gray’s mountain caribou.

“What we’re looking at here,” he says, “ is a breakdown of participatory democracy — a situation where the B.C. government called for, supported and signed into effect a land-use agreement with local residents — only to walk away from it a few years later.”

Goward belongs to the Upper Clearwater Referral Group, which grew out of a relatively collaborative land use visioning process with the NDP government in the mid-to-late nineties.

Recognizing local concerns over clearcuts, the government engaged with citizens to develop a local use plan under the Kamloops Land and Resource Management Plan (LRMP). The resulting agreement, called the “Guiding Principles,” was intended to achieve a lasting balance between industry and other user groups in the Upper Clearwater Valley.

In 2000, a year after the B.C. government signed onto the Guiding Principles, it convened the Referral Group, which it mandated to act as a watchdog committee to ensure the Guiding Principles agreement was respected by all parties.

While the B.C. Liberal Government of the 2000s maintained some contact with the group, it has steadily backed away from those earlier commitments and now, in 2016, has abandoned them entirely.

This left locals like Goward feeling frustrated and without a voice as new clearcuts loom over the valley.

Logging near the south end of Wells Gray Park since 1984. Image: Damien Gillis via Google Maps

Problem Widespread in B.C.

This problem is far from isolated to the Wells Gray region. It’s a pattern visible all across southern B.C.

In the Selkirk Mountains, caribou face an uphill battle too.

Like Goward, naturalists there see it as a problem of habitat destruction and are seeking to stem the decline by creating a new provincial park that would connect to other exiting ones and preserve some of the last truly intact sections of old-growth caribou habitat from clearcuts. (This is the subject of a new short documentary I directed called Primeval: Enter the Incomappleux.)

Craig Pettitt, a charter director of Valhalla Wilderness Society, based in New Denver told DeSmog Canada caribou can be pushed over the recovery threshold.

“Once these mountain caribou are wiped out, we can’t simply import woodland caribou from further north to repopulate the region,” explains Pettitt.

Previous attempts to transplant northern woodland caribou into southern mountain herds have proved an utter failure.

The issue also goes beyond any individual cut block or road to a bigger picture of repeated habitat destruction by many activities over a prolonged period.

This notion was underscored by an important 2015 paper published in the journal Biological Conservation, titled “Witnessing Extinction: Cumulative impacts across landscapes and the future loss of an evolutionarily significant unit of woodland caribou in Canada.”

“Currently, we are observing the decline, extirpation, and perhaps extinction of several evolutionarily significant units of woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou), an iconic and cultural keystone species,” the authors note, drawing on 11 years worth of data and observations on declining caribou populations.

“The cumulative impacts of multiple anthropogenic activities are now recognized as one of the most pressing problems facing the conservation and management of wildlife across North America and beyond.”

The authors look at habitat destruction through the lens of cumulative impacts — the piling on of various layers of industrial development on the natural landscape — or, as Goward’s group refers to it in a new website dedicated to raising these issues, death by a thousand (clear)cuts.

A similar situation has unfolded in B.C.’s Peace region where decades of road building, logging, mining, dams, power lines, conventional gas and fracking have heavily industrialized two thirds of the landscape, leaving little contiguous habitat for species like caribou.

While cumulative impacts are an important legal consideration in decisions on resource projects in the U.S., in Canada, they aren’t given much weight in environmental reviews, as the Joint Review Panel into Site C Dam sharply pointed out in its final report, noting “the Panel recommends that the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency undertake, on an urgent basis, an update of its guidance on cumulative effects assessment…”

Mountain Caribou. Photo: David Moskowitz/Mountain Caribou Initiative

As conservation biologist and wolf expert Paul Paquet puts it, “A long history of shortsighted and misguided accommodation of the forest industry has conspired to deprive mountain caribou of their life requisites and placed their survival in jeopardy. Their future now depends on our repairing the environmentally destructive mistakes of the past while stopping those of the present.”

It also depends on British Columbians demanding their government put the survival of an iconic species ahead of the interests of deep-pocketed donors.

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.

Over the last decade Canada has fallen from its position as a leader in ocean protection and become a laggard that has failed to keep up with international commitments, say some of Canada’s top marine scientists.

Lack of support for conservation has changed Canada from a country with innovative conservation policies to one where marine species on the brink of extinction are not afforded protection until too late because of delays and inappropriate legislation, said scholars and scientists who gathered in Victoria recently for the Royal Society of Canada annual general meeting.

But, with a new government, there is refreshed hope in the scientific community and a chance to reverse direction.

Some of the country’s top academic minds looked at challenges facing Canada’s three oceans and possible ways to mitigate warming oceans, acidification, disappearing species, microplastics and watered down environmental protection legislation.

“What can we do?” asked Isabelle Cote, marine ecology professor at Simon Fraser University.

Part of the answer came on October 19 — election day — she said.

“We know that red tides are usually very bad in the marine environment, but this one was very good.”

It was a theme echoed by several speakers who are encouraged by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s mandate letter to Hunter Tootoo, his new Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard.

The mandate includes increasing marine and coastal protected areas to five per cent by 2017 and 10 per cent by 2020, acting on recommendations of the Cohen Commission on restoring sockeye salmon stocks in the Fraser River, reviewing the previous government’s changes to the Fisheries and Navigable Waters Protection Acts and using scientific evidence, the precautionary principle and taking into account climate change when making decisions affecting fish stocks and ecosystem management.

“Our new government has set out a refreshing new ocean agenda, including areas many of us have been fighting for over the last decade,” said Julia Baum, assistant professor in the University of Victoria’s biology department.

One of the disturbing trends over the Harper years has been what is seen as political tampering in appointments to boards that make vital decisions on endangered species, such as Committee of the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC), a group of experts that assesses which species are in need of protection, Baum said.

Marine species are almost always denied protection, often because of conflicts with commercial fishing, said several speakers.

“We sit and let the species wait and do nothing. We know this is a really dangerous strategy,” Baum said.

“Almost 60 per cent of marine fish that have been assessed by COSEWIC as being at risk are sitting with no decision for many years. Those that are at greatest risk wait longest and are typically denied listing,” she said.

Recovery strategies, under the Species At Risk Act, are often three years late and action plans are almost never completed, she added.

Jeffrey Hutchings of Dalhousie University, who chaired the Royal Society’s pivotal expert panel 2012 report “Sustaining Canadian Marine Biodiversity,” believes the change in government will mean a greater willingness to discuss the report’s recommendations.

Those include making ocean stewardship and biodiversity conservation a top government priority, resolving conflicts of interest in legislation, more research into sustaining marine biodiversity and reducing the discretionary power of the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans in fisheries management decisions.

As Trudeau decides on his priorities, Hutchings would like him to consider splitting the ministry into two parts — the department of fisheries and the department of oceans — to resolve the conflict where the ministry is seen as acting as an agent for fisheries, not for conservation.

If it was split, the fisheries department, under the Fisheries Act, could take care of the economic development side, such as fishing and aquaculture — preferably with much-needed national aquaculture legislation — and the department of oceans, under the Oceans Act, could look after conservation, protection and habitat protection, Hutchings suggested in an interview.

Government should also look at the huge discretionary powers of the Fisheries and Oceans Minister, which add to conservation uncertainties, Hutchings said.

In Canada when it is scientifically determined that a fish population is being overfished, there is no requirement for the minister to take action.

“What has inevitably happened is the minister continues (to allow) fishing on the stock and it declines further and further,” Hutchings said.

In contrast, in the U.S. when it is scientifically determined a stock is in trouble, the department must take specific actions to rebuild the stock, usually by dramatically cutting catches, he said.

David VanderZwaag, Ocean Law and Governance Canada Research Chair at Dalhousie University, believes modernizing the Fisheries Act should be high on the agenda.

“It’s a no brainer,” he said.

“I call it a ghost ship. You see the mast in the fog, but everything is underneath. It’s all at the minister’s discretion.”

The department has attempted to paper over the legislative vacuum with multiple policies, but clarity is needed, he said.

In a similar vein, the Environmental Assessment Act is a roulette system, VanderZwaag said.

“You throw the dice to see what may be covered.”

National aquaculture legislation must be developed and the new government should look at laws and policies around future ocean renewable energy projects, such as wave power, VanderZwaag said.

“The federal government is not really prepared to deal with offshore renewable energy,” he said.

Photo: Dan Cox via Flickr

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Official recognition that a Canadian species is in trouble is no guarantee that the slide towards extinction can be slowed or halted, a new study has found.

A paper by Raincoast Conservation Foundation scientist Caroline Fox and co-authors from the University of Victoria, published Monday by the scientific journal PLOS ONE, looks at species assessed by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) and concludes that, instead of recovering, many have become more endangered.

“Using the COSEWIC assessments, obviously we are not doing as well as we would like,” Fox said in an interview.

The study, Trends in Extinction Risk for Imperiled Species in Canada, aimed to assess the effectiveness of Canada’s biodiversity conservation and the report card is not good. 

Fox and her colleagues looked at 369 species and found that 115 had become more endangered, 202 were unchanged and 52 improved in status. Only 20, amounting to 5.4 per cent, improved to the extent that they were no longer at risk of extinction.

Species at risk of extinction or extirpation are initially reviewed by COSEWIC, an independent scientific panel that makes recommendations to government, and some species are then listed under the Species at Risk Act (SARA). Once a species is listed under the Species at Risk Act it has legal protection and, for most species, critical habitat is supposed to be identified and protected.

However, the study found that, in most cases, critical habitat was not fully identified. Of the 221 cases studied that required critical habitat protection, only 56 met the requirements.

“We suggest that the Canadian government should formally identify and protect critical habitat, as is required by existing legislation,” says the study.

“In addition, our finding that at-risk species in Canada rarely recover leads us to recommend that every effort be made to actively prevent species from becoming at-risk in the first place.”

Species at risk are protected by patchwork layers of legislation and the Species at Risk Act is the last resort, Fox said.

The study notes that recent weakening of federal laws that protect habitat, such as changes to the Fisheries Act, may result in more species heading for trouble.

“Future legislation should be underpinned by a strong mandate to conserve habitat and we recommend that any legislative changes that may reduce habitat protection (e.g. the Fisheries Act) should be reconsidered,” the report says.

Photo: Gregory Slobirdr Smith via Flickr

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This week the federal government was legally obligated to establish protected habitat for threatened North Pacific humpback whales. Instead the Harper government suddenly moved to take the humpback off the “threatened species” list. That would eliminate the legal requirement under Canada’s Species At Risk Act for protecting habitat along the British Columbia coast.

The government based the downgrade on a recommendation made by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC), the independent scientific body that designates which wildlife species are in trouble, in 2011.

Critics have noted the decision eliminates a major obstacle to both the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline and the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline expansion. After the conditional approval of the Northern Gateway pipeline by the National Energy Board's joint review panel, the University of Victoria Environmental Law Centre launched a legal complaint on behalf of B.C. Nature requesting the government's recovery strategy for humpback whales be taken into consideration.

A federal recovery strategy for humpback whales on the B.C. coast released in October cited potential increased oil tanker traffic as a danger to dwindling populations. The recovery strategy, released after a five-year delay, also noted the danger toxic spills posed to critical habitat.

If built, the two pipeline projects would increase oil tanker traffic from eight to 28 per month, increasing the risks of collisions with whales, potential spills in vital habitat and excessive noise.

The good news is that the North Pacific humpbacks are recovering after nearly being wiped out by whale hunting, Marty Leonard, chair of COSEWIC, told DeSmog Canada.

The whales were listed as a species of “special concern” back in 2011, Leonard said. “Their numbers are increasing which is good to see. But they still face threats.”

Those threats include oil spills, collisions with ships, entanglement in fishing gear and overfishing of their food sources.

The Pacific Ocean is the largest feature on the planet — bigger than all land areas combined. After 250 years of whaling, an estimated 1,400 humpbacks remained in the North Pacific. They’re among the largest marine mammals reaching 14 metres in length and weighing up to 40 tonnes. Hunting was banned in 1965 and today there are about 20,000 in the entire region. Perhaps 3,000 are found seasonally in B.C. waters.

The Species At Risk Act took affect in 2003, prior to which Canada had little endangered species protection.

In 2005, COSEWIC listed North Pacific humpbacks as a “threatened” species. COSEWIC defines “threatened” as a species likely to become endangered if nothing is done. “Endangered” means about to go extinct. The government’s move will demote the status of humpbacks to “species of special concern.”

The federal government is required to produce an official “recovery strategy” for all species on the endangered and threatened lists, including legal protection of essential habitat.

Despite its legal obligation, the Harper government has persistently failed to do so for humpbacks and another 170 species.

In September 2012, Ecojustice lawyers filed a lawsuit in response to the Harper government’s delay on behalf of five environmental groups, the David Suzuki Foundation, Greenpeace Canada, Sierra Club BC, Wilderness Committee and Wildsight.

In February 2014, the Federal Court ruled the Harper government was breaking the law and was very critical of the government’s delay.

“We took the federal government to court and won,” said Caitlyn Vernon of the Sierra Club BC. 

“There is clearly an enormous systemic problem within the relevant Ministries,” Justice Anne L. Mactavish wrote in her judgment.

Justice Mactavish also noted that when it comes to protecting species, delay can lead to extinction.

The lawsuit prompted the Federal government to develop a recovery strategy for North Pacific humpbacks in September 2013, eight years after being listed as threatened.

The recovery strategy required legal protection of designated feeding grounds to be in place by this week, Vernon told DeSmog.

But rather than implement such protections, the government moved to downgrade the status of the whales to eliminate the need for legal protection of habitat.

“It’s good news humpback numbers are increasing, but their recovery is fragile. The science is clear that increased tanker traffic from the proposed pipelines will affect that recovery,” said Vernon.

“One oil spill and they’re back on the endangered species list.”

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A new court ruling means that the dozens of animal species that are at risk of extinction across Canada may finally receive the support they need.

A federal court judge found that the Canadian government has been breaking the law in not following through on its obligations under the Species at Risk Act (SARA). The act, established in 2003, obliges the government to develop and implement recovery strategies for animal species in Canada at risk of extinction.

In her ruling, federal court Justice Anne L. Mactavish found that “there is clearly an enormous systemic problem within the relevant Ministries, given the respondents' acknowledgement that there remain some 167 species at risk for which recovery strategies have not yet been developed.”

The request for judicial review was brought by the Wilderness Committee, the David Suzuki Foundation, Greenpeace Canada, the Sierra Club Of British Columbia, and Wildsight, who were represented by Ecojustice, against the Minister of the Environment and the Minister of Oceans and Fisheries, who are tasked with ensuring that SARA is implemented. And while there is a backlog of over 160 species, the case focused on four in particular: the Nechako White Sturgeon, the Pacific Humpback Whale, the Marbled Murrelet and the Southern Mountain Caribou.

Each were listed as a threatened species over five years ago, and have been waiting for a recovery strategy since. Even more important, each live in habitats that are directly impacted by Enbridge's proposed Northern Gateway pipeline, either by its route or by increased tanker traffic. The pipeline recently received approval from the National Energy Board. This made the need for recovery strategies even more pressing, but also meant that important information on the pipeline's impact on these species was missing from the hearings.

The immense backlog in establishing recovery strategies raised concerns that the government didn't take the SARA seriously enough to act on it. “One of our worries was that there seems to be a lack of political will to implement the law,” Sean Nixon, an Ecojustice staff lawyer who worked on the case, told DeSmog Canada. But the ruling gives hope that the backlog will soon be taken seriously.

“Because the language was so strong in the court decision and because the judge also had an expression of judicial disapproval in how the government was acting in regards to the recovery strategy, we're hoping that the federal government will take this seriously,” said Gwen Barlee, policy director at Wilderness Committee, when reached by DeSmog.

And it has already had an impact, at least on these four cases. After the request for judicial review was filed in 2012, the recovery strategy for the Pacific Humpback Whale was finalized, and draft strategies for the other three species in question have been posted for public comment. Once the 60 day window for public comment closes, the government should issue a final recovery strategy relatively quickly. The court will be following the process to ensure that the government follows through.

Repeat offender

This isn't the first time that the government has been taken to court over recovery strategies. Nixon says that Ecojustice has already brought at least six similar cases forward. While they have had success each time, it has become frustrating to both him and to environmental organizations to have to fight for the protection of each animal listed as at risk. Judicial supervision is about all that can be expected, since like much legislation, there are no clear penalties for when the government ignores what it is mandated to do.

“The question is what will happen if the government keeps violating the statute? The answer, sadly, is probably just public interest groups taking them back to court,” he said. Like most legislation mandating parliament, there are no clear penalties if the government takes no action. It speaks to how our parliamentary democracy is meant to function, though, says Nixon: the judicial branch of the government telling the executive branch that it is violating what the legislative branch (Parliament) has implemented as law.

“The fact is that you bring them to court, and [if| their actions are found to be unlawful, that generally, in a democracy, is enough for the federal government to respond and to remedy their unlawful behaviour," he explained.

“Environment Canada is reviewing the Court’s decision to determine next steps. Our government is committed to the protection and conservation of species at risk,” wrote Danny Kingsberry, a Media Relations officer with Environment Canada, when asked for comment by DeSmog. He emphasized that the government invested $50 million in implementing the species at risk act and has finalized 85 recovery strategies in the past three years. In court, though, the government did not dispute that they have gone against the provisions of the legislation, which state that a proposed recovery strategy must be posted within one year of a species being listed as “at risk.”

Canaries in the coal mine

While legislation like SARA are essential for conservation efforts, Barlee also emphasized the importance of the links between habitat protection and the growing impacts of climate change. While these four species are linked directly to the Northern Gateway pipeline, others of the 167 that are at risk are also directly in the route of and being impacted by the fossil fuel industry. By studying the habitats and ecosystems that keep animal species strong, we're not simply protecting biodiversity, but also maintaining vigilance over our own ecosystems and quality of life.

“[These] species are telling us something: they really are the canary in the coal mine, and they are telling us when their numbers are declining that the habitat that they've relied upon for millennia is no longer healthy enough to support them," Barlee said. “They're saying that their habitat has been so badly managed that they can no longer survive, and that's eventually going to have repercussions for humans living on Earth.” 

Image Credit: mikebaird via Flickr

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