On a sunny August afternoon in 2010, the Clipper Adventurer hit an underwater rock shelf near Kugluktuk, Nunavut, carrying 128 Adventure Canada passengers and 69 crew.

The nearest ship capable of responding to the incident was the coast guard icebreaker CCGS Amundsen, 500 kilometres away in the Beaufort Sea, which arrived on scene the following day.

Adventure Canada was fined nearly half a million dollars in 2017 for environmental damage caused by 13 tanks carrying fuel, water and sludge that breached during the incident.

The fines were levied after the company unsuccessfully sued the Canadian government for $13 million over what they claimed was an unmarked shelf — it wasn’t marked on the ship’s charts, having only been discovered three years prior.

“It’s a part of the world where you do your best, but there are blank spots on the map,” Adventure Canada’s owner, Matthew Swan, told CBC at the time of the accident.

It wasn’t the first, nor the last marine incident in the Canadian North; just two years later, the fuel tanker M/V Nanny ran aground in Chesterfield Inlet, Nunavut. It hit bottom again — in the same inlet — two years later. Then, in 2016, a 67 metre fishing boat was torn open by ice off Baffin Island and had to limp across Davis Strait to Greenland.

Shipping and tourism are ramping up across the region, and more incidents are inevitable. That has local communities looking askance at their meagre response plans and capabilities.

“I think it’s widely accepted and widely known that if there was a major spill in the Arctic, the consequence would be devastating,” Andrew Dumbrille, shipping specialist with the World Wildlife Fund, told DeSmog Canada.

Sea ice, unforgiving weather, remoteness and sparse charts are just a few of the complications that responders would face in the event of a spill — challenges that would be daunting for seasoned responders, and much more so for untrained locals.

Dumbrille and a large group, including members of the Coast Guard and other government agencies, spent five days in Resolute in March, working with locals to develop a spill response plan tailored to that community, so that in the case of an accident, the community could contain the damage before it eviscerated the hunting and fishing many community members depend on.

“If there was a spill, the community doesn’t know what to do,” Dumbrille said. “There isn’t a plan in place, there isn’t training, there isn’t updating of any kind of plan or any way to mobilize the community around an event or a spill. So you hear that a lot. They don’t necessarily know who to call or what to do about it.”

Currently the community has a shipping container with some equipment to deal with a spill, but it’s not regularly tested and people in the community aren’t trained in using it.

It’s one of what the Coast Guard calls “environmental response caches,” of which there are 22 across the Arctic. The nearest Coast Guard base, however, is in Hay River, Northwest Territories, more than 1,500 kilometres up the Mackenzie River from the Arctic Ocean.

In an emailed response to questions from DeSmog Canada, the Coast Guard said that as part of the Oceans Protection Plan it was training and creating jobs for Indigenous communities across the Arctic.

That includes expanding the Coast Guard Auxiliary, made up of volunteers who are on standby to respond to incidents like search-and-rescue, though it is not clear if the auxiliary has a dedicated role in spill response.

The Coast Guard also says it’s working with its American counterparts to develop safer shipping routes through the Arctic, which would try to avoid risk to sensitive areas.

Dumbille says that was a concern raised during community meetings in Resolute: making sure that ship traffic avoids the most at-risk areas, like calving grounds for whales.

“Why don’t we make sure the ships transit away from our most important whale calving areas and migration routes, so that if there is a spill, then it would be far off from those important areas?” Dumbrille says.

The community also emphasized that what they really want is the capacity to respond to an emergency themselves, and to not have to wait for a ship that could be days away. That means proper equipment, regular training and paid responders.

The Clipper Adventurer was part of a much larger growing trend when it comes to ship traffic in the Canadian Arctic.

Between 1984 and 2004, a total of 23 commercial cruise ships transited the Northwest Passage, according to the Arctic Council. But in 2017 alone, Coast Guard numbers show 93 vessels made voyages in the Arctic: 19 passenger ships and 74 cargo ships and tankers.

“It’s not the Panama Canal,” Dumbrille says.

Numbers are still low, but with projects like the Mary River mine, one of the world’s most northernmost mines, adding bulk carriers to the equation (72 voyages in 2017), as well as fishing vessels (142) and tugs (42) now plying the waters of the Arctic, it’s becoming a crowded place.

Worldwide, there were 55 “incidents” in the Arctic in 2014, including one “total loss,” according to a report by insurer Allianz Global. A decade earlier, in 2005, there were three.

Currently, spill response plans are not tailored to each community; they’re developed at a regional scale. Dumbrille says the Resolute plan is still in development, and will act as a template that can be exported and adapted to communities across the Arctic.

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There have been delays, exemptions, backtracking and threats of lawsuits — but the Pan-Canadian Framework is ever so slowly inching the country towards a low-carbon future.

Unfortunately, the same can’t exactly be said about the country’s 292 off-grid communities, most of which are Indigenous. Roughly 86 per cent of off-grid communities are primarily dependent on diesel for generating electricity.

The federal government recently allocated $220 million over six years to help such communities transition to renewables, a marked increase from the $9 million doled out over the past decade. But calculations indicate that it’s not nearly enough to deal with the 450 megawatts of installed diesel in Canada.

“It’s really a drop in the bucket,” said Nicholas Mercer, PhD candidate at the University of Waterloo and expert on off-grid diesel-reliant communities. “Over six years, that works out to less than five megawatts per year, and that’s only if you’re investing in infrastructure.”

Mercer said the current trajectory will only address around six per cent of annual demand, potentially leaving hundreds of communities dependent on diesel. And that’s a hugely concerning possibility for environmental, social and economic reasons.

Nunavut pays $60 million a year in diesel subsidies

The one and only upside to diesel generation is that it has extremely cheap upfront costs.

Mercer said that diesel in an off-grid community costs around $1,500 per installed kilowatt, whereas a solar or wind installation ranges between $7,000 and $8,000. That means that a 100-kilowatt diesel generator comes at about $150,000, compared to $700,000 or $800,000 for the same capacity from renewables.

That can be a significant benefit in a cash-strapped community — but it’s the only one, and it dooms communities to a string of downsides.

Diesel fuel costs a ton of money for communities. While the average Canadian consumer pays between seven and 17 cents per kilowatt-hour, the unsubsidized cost of diesel is about $1.30. As a result, governments have to heavily subsidize communities. A recently published report from the World Wildlife Fund Canada found that the Government of Nunavut pays $60.5 million every year in diesel subsidies.

The Pembina Institute reports that Canada’s off-grid communities collectively consume between 90 million and 120 million litres of diesel on an annual basis. That’s enough diesel to run all of Toronto’s Go Train system for five and a half years.

While related greenhouse emissions aren’t huge — after all, the communities and electricity demands are fairly small — the use of diesel results in a per-capita electricity carbon footprint that’s over double the national average.

There’s also enormous risk of diesel spills. Recent investigative work by Christopher Pollon indicated that 2015 saw 830 diesel spills in five provinces — and those are only the ones we know about. Attawapiskat First Nation in Northern Ontario is still cleaning up a spill of almost 30,000 litres of diesel from 1979. These can lead to a wide range of human health effects, including cancer.

Finally, there are the social impacts. Diesel generators tend to be old and unreliable, leading to frequent power outages; Mercer said that Pikangikum First Nation in Northern Ontario loses about 20 per cent of classroom education time because of outages. Many are also faced with “load restriction,” which occurs when peak demand reaches 75 per cent of generation capacity and severely restricts potential jobs and growth.

“You can’t build new homes and connect them to the grid, you can’t add new businesses to create opportunity for the community, you can’t invest in infrastructure upgrades,” Mercer said. “You can’t do anything that will increase load. This is a major issue in Canada.”

Capacity training key for remote communities

Dave Lovekin, senior analyst for Pembina Institute specializing in renewable policies for remote communities, said the design of the new funding is also important because it specifically carves out money for capacity training, something which had previously only been lumped together with the overall program. This means that communities will be able to receive money specifically for training and education so that local residents can fix, maintain and order spare parts themselves.

Judith Sayers, president of the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council, said that Tla-o-qui-aht First Nations near Tofino serve as a great example of this in action — they built two small-scale hydro projects in partnership with the Barkley Group and are now working on a third on their own.

“They’ve built enough capacity that they have enough confidence to do this one on their own,” she said in an interview. “That’s what we want to see, right?”

As chief of Hupacasath First Nation, Sayers oversaw the construction of the 6.5 megawatt China Creek run-of-river hydro project. Unlike many First Nations which were only accepting royalty agreements, Hupacasath retained a majority ownership stake in the project and sell excess electricity to BC Hydro.

Approval of Site C dampens potential for Indigenous-owned renewables

Experts said that kind of Indigenous participation and ownership of renewable projects is a crucial part of success.

But Mercer noted that both the state and private sector can often view Indigenous communities as “testing grounds” for technologies or the “low-hanging fruit” of greenhouse gas reductions, which can come across as forcing projects on a community and undermining political self-determination.

“Often, communities are bombarded with consultants and companies that come and say ‘hey, have we got the technology solution for you,’” Lovekin added. “Communities are often over capacity and have a tough time getting past the sales pitch and determining which technology will actually work. It’s a valid concern and communities need more support in this regard to lead instead of dealing with consultation fatigue.”

In British Columbia, there’s yet another obstacle. Sayers said that since the provincial NDP government gave the go-ahead to the Site C dam, BC Hydro has quit taking any applications for new renewable projects that would sell power to the grid. So while First Nations can still build projects that help them transition away from diesel and become grid-independent, they’ll lose out on a lot of potential jobs and revenue due to not being able to sell excess electricity.

“There are so many First Nations that want to develop clean energy,” Sayers said. “Because the government has started to build Site C, they no longer need clean energy. It’s a barrier right now to do anything in an economic way. There’s none. There’s no opportunity.”

The BC Utilities Commission’s final report on Site C concluded that a mixture of alternative energy sources such as wind, geothermal and solar could generate the sufficient amounts of electricity at lower rates for residents.

Still need policy support and new funding

As with many of the government’s climate policies, experts are taking a wait-and-see approach.

Lovekin said he’ll be watching to see what other funding announcements come, noting that more money for projects may be available via the Arctic Energy Fund and Canada Infrastructure Bank.

But he suggests that policies are generally missing to support the funding.

“Actual policy to mandate a certain target of renewables or a production incentive is something we’d like to see,” he said. “Right now, what the federal government has announced are programs to support diesel transition, but no specific policy. We’d like to see a combination of both.”

Contrary to what many people might think, there’s really no major technological challenges impeding the ability for remote communities to transition to renewables: solutions are all available and can be tweaked to particular locations. The only issues are lack of upfront capital and community capacity — both of which could be resolved with far more federal investments.

“When you start looking at some of the other countries and their challenges, we should be able to do this with the kind of technology and money we have available in our country,” Sayers said.

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If an ocean valley becomes federally protected but seismic work and offshore drilling is allowed in more than 80 per cent of the territory, is it really federally protected?

That’s the question facing Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans, which is currently working on the final regulations for the 11,619 square kilometre Laurentian Channel Marine Protected Area off the southwest coast of Newfoundland.

The proposed regulations published on June 24 in the Canada Gazette included significant allowances for offshore oil and gas exploration and drilling, as well a reduction by more than one-third in the actual size of the Marine Protected Area (MPA) from the original area plotted out in 2007.

The government admitted the regulations came about after fossil fuel lobbyists “raised concerns with respect to limitations on potential future activities.”

The proposal came as a shock to conservation specialists, who contend industrial activities contradict the protected area’s conservation goals.

“We have felt the federal government has been much more willing to concede to industry interests and concerns as opposed to listening to the scientists who are making the recommendations about the high standards of protection that are needed for the site,” said Sigrid Kuehnemund, marine biologist and lead specialist for oceans with World Wildlife Fund Canada, in an interview with DeSmog Canada.

The window for public comment on the proposed regulations closes July 24. The World Wildlife Fund, LeadNow and the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society are rallying comments before the deadline.

The Laurentian Channel between New Brunswick and Newfoundland is home to a deep-sea canyon that is 1400 km long — more than three times as long and almost twice as wide as the Grand Canyon. Map: NRCan.

If such concessions remain in the enacted regulations they would allow seismic surveying during an eight-month window in the “core protection zone” and full oil and gas activities in the much larger “adaptive management zone.”

Such a decision would also set the tone for Marine Protected Areas to come.

“Because it is so big and well known, the Laurentian Channel MPA is going to set a precedent for the rest of the MPA network in how we meet that 10 per cent commitment,” said Emilie Novaczek, a marine conservation biologist and PhD candidate in geography at Memorial University of Newfoundland, in an interview with DeSmog Canada.

“I think it’s really important we get this one right so the rest of the network can follow suit.”

Only 0.11 Per Cent of Canada’s Ocean Territory Protected

Canada’s oceans are almost entirely unprotected.

A 2016 report by the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society reported that a mere 0.11 per cent of the country’s ocean territory is covered with an implemented “Marine Protected Area,” the oceanic equivalent of a national park. Incredibly, eight out of the 23 — or over one-third of the protected areas in the country — don’t explicitly prohibit oil and gas activity.

Meanwhile, only nine of the MPAs prohibit all forms of fishing.

That’s why it was a very big deal when the federal Liberals pledged to increase Marine Protected Area coverage to five per cent by 2017 and 10 per cent by 2020, in line with targets set by the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity.

In addition, the Liberals promised to “use scientific evidence and the precautionary principle, and take into account climate change, when making decisions affecting fish stocks and ecosystem management.”

The Canadian Environmental Law Association describes the precautionary principle as “the duty to prevent harm, when it is within our power to do so, even when all the evidence is not in.”

In other words, the Liberals promised to not only dramatically increase the quantity but also the quality of ocean territory protections.

Laurentian Channel Home to Whales, Turtles

As it turns out, the politics of creating a Marine Protected Area are very contested.

The Laurentian Channel was announced as an “area of interest” in 2010. There are plenty of good reasons for the designation: the World Wildlife Fund describes the area as a summer feeding area for humpback and minke whales, as well as endangered blue and North Atlantic right whales.

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans notes on its website that the area serves as home for porbeagle shark, smooth skate and corals. It has the highest concentration of sea pens — a soft coral — off Canada’s eastern coast.

Porbeagle shark. © naturepl.com /Doug Perrine / Courtesy World Wildlife Fund Canada

The Laurentian Channel also has the highest concentration of black dogfish in the country’s ocean territory, serving as the shark’s only pupping area in Canada and two species at risk — the Northern wolffish and leatherback sea turtle — are found in the area. To top it all off, the channel serves as feeding area for many migratory whale species including humpback and blue whales.

But there are also potential offshore oil and gas opportunities.

One reason provided by the federal government for not prohibiting exploration and drilling in the Marine Protected Area was because the reservoirs have low potential due to depressed prices and the level of front-end capital investment required.

Husky Oil had an exploration lease within the area, but it expired in 2014. Seismic and other geophysical surveys used to locate oil and gas reserves have also occurred.

However, a vice-president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers recently told the Globe & Mail that “we think that whole area still holds some promise and “it’s a gas-prone area but there are companies that think there’s the presence of oil there as well.”

In an interview with Hakai Magazine, the same vice-president said, “We felt the Laurentian Channel was a very good, balanced MPA.”

Incidentally, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans reported that “costs to the oil and gas industry are anticipated to be negligible” from the implementation of the Marine Protection Area.

One of the subject matters listed by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers in its federal lobbying profile is “National Marine Conservation Areas Act related to workability and practicality of policy and regulations for oil and gas activity within marine protected areas.”

Oil and Gas Activities Can Seriously Harm Coral, Zooplankton, Whales

Perhaps unsurprisingly, such activities could have catastrophic impacts on the local animals and ecosystem.

As noted in the draft regulations, “oil and gas activities can cause permanent harm to coral and sea pens.” The government also suggested that impacts of oil exploration and development on fish, mammals and turtles is “considered reversible” due to the fact they’re mobile and can “move away from noises and other disturbances.”

Rodolphe Devillers, geography professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland, responded in an open letter, calling the claim “embarrassing to say the least” and asking “since when is chasing species away from their core habitats and possibly from the conservation area an acceptable conservation practice?”

Devillers also pointed to a recent journal article in Nature that suggested the 220 to 250 decibel sound waves created by the seismic surveys can kill huge numbers of zooplankton — which serve as food for fish and other marine organisms — over a kilometre away. The use of seismic airguns can also have catastrophic impacts on whales, dolphins, fish and turtles.

The Laurentian Channel is an important foraging area for endangered leatherback turtles. The turtles can weigh up to 900 kilograms. Photo: dchrisoh via Flickr.

Kuehnemund of World Wildlife Fund Canada said that other impacts from oil and gas activity could include the contamination of food webs, dispersion of toxic drilling waste, noise pollution and considerably higher potential for catastrophic oil spills.

Other nearby MPAs including St. Anns Bank and the Gully banned oil and gas exploration and drilling, arguably following the federal government’s guidelines that “only activities that are determined through an ecological risk assessment to be compatible with the conservation objectives of the proposed MPA would be allowed to continue.”

The draft regulations for the Laurentian Channel currently allow for seismic activity throughout the MPA for eight months of the year, even within the core protection zone. Actual drilling activity will be permissible in a vast majority of the area, “so long as they are not likely to destroy marine habitat in the proposed MPA.”

“The basic thing is that this kind of activity doesn’t belong in any kind of protected area, let alone a marine protected area,” said Sabine Jessen, national director of the oceans program at the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, in an interview with DeSmog Canada.

“We don’t allow those kinds of things to happen in our terrestrial protected areas. So why are we allowing that kind of industrial use in a marine protected area?”

Industry Sways Feds to Allow Offshore #Drilling in #LaurentianChannel Marine Protected Area https://t.co/Bcwup59ADn #cdnpoli @WWFCanada

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) July 22, 2017

Federal Governments Admits Industry Influence In Draft Regulations

It appears the oil and gas industry has had a significant amount of influence over the decision to open up ocean territory to exploration and drilling, as well as restricting the boundaries of the actual protected area.

The draft regulation from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans was remarkably transparent on this front, noting that fossil fuel lobbyists “raised concerns with respect to limitations on potential future activities” given the original Zones 1a and 1b were “inaccessible to directional drilling.”

As a result, the federal government made “subsequent modifications” to the boundaries of the core protection zone, while acknowledging concerns from environmentalists and academics that the decision was made “exclusively on possible economic gains in the future.”

But it wasn’t just the core protection zone. The very boundaries of the Marine Protected Area itself were cut down by over 33 per cent. Devillers reported in his public letter that this change led to 43 per cent of the abundance and 48 per cent of the biomass being left outside of the MPA, compared to original plans.

He also noted the Department of Fisheries and Oceans used very outdated information on the area’s sea pen populations; recent research from 2016 indicates there is sea pen habitat throughout much of the Marine Protected Area, including in much of the Adapted Management Zone that would be open to oil and gas activities.

Critics Call on DFO to Close Off Area to Oil and Gas, Review Reduction in Boundaries

It’s not like these facts aren’t known by many other scientists.

Novaczek emphasized there’s been “a lot of excellent work” that’s gone into planning the MPA. The problem that she points to is the actual implementation process: while a lot of research and consultations preceded the drafting of the regulations, scientists didn’t get to review the plan before it was published.

Jessen also notes the process is somewhat stacked against conservationists.

“It’s usually one seat for conservation and then you’ve got this array of industry players who are trying to protect what they’ve been allowed to do for a long time,” she says. “We have to try to negotiate this every single time for every single marine protected area. That’s just unacceptable.”

She recommends that a set of minimum standards for acceptable and unacceptable practices in Marine Protected Areas be created to ensure that such a situation doesn’t keep happening.

Specifically, many critics are calling on the Department of Fisheries and Oceans to close the area to oil and gas activities — like it has already done for commercial fishing — and get rid of the idea to have two-tiered zoning. In addition, some are advocating for a review of how the reduction in boundaries will impact conservation goals.

“We don’t get those rewards unless we make sure we’re protecting the right areas and protecting them fully with well-planned and enforced and well-regulated MPAs,” Novaczek concluded. “There’s lots of people from researchers to fishers who see this allowance for oil and gas activity within the MPA as a significant problem.”

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