Safeguards to protect fish habitats welcomed
Conservationists tout move to reverse 2012 changes as a ‘very good step’ forward
Fish habitat protections gutted under the previous government would be restored by legislative changes introduced in Ottawa Tuesday, along with a suite of new “modern safeguards” for Canada’s ocean environments — including tools to address urgent threats like last summer’s North Atlantic right whale die-off.
The proposed amendments to Canada’s Fisheries Act were welcomed by Canada’s conservation community, among others.
“Of course the devil is in the details,” said Susanna Fuller, senior marine co-ordinator at the Ecology Action Centre in Halifax.
The bill tabled Tuesday still has to be debated and passed. But “having been around the Fisheries Act and attempts to modernize it in the past, I feel like this is a very good step.”
In 2012, the Conservative government removed a broad prohibition against harming all fish habitat, restricting the scope of those protections to apply only to commercial, recreational and Indigenous fisheries.
Scientists, conservationists, First Nations, and former Conservative and Liberal fisheries ministers decried the move.
“From an ecological perspective, we’ve known for 40 to 50 years that that doesn’t make sense, because of course the fishery resources are interconnected — it’s a system, with all kinds of species playing different roles,” said Martin Olszynski, a professor at the University of Calgary Faculty of Law who specializes in environmental and natural resources law and policy. “It’s very hard to know whether a given species is important or not.”
The changes created uncertainty and ultimately weakened the protections, Olszynski said. “A lot of people essentially just assumed that the prohibition didn’t matter anymore.”
The Liberal government promised to review the 2012 changes, and in public consultations, conservation groups pressed to restore those protections, often referred to as “HADD,” an acronym for the prohibitions on habitat alteration, damage and destruction.
One amendment will make it easier for the fisheries minister to create targeted, short-term measures to address urgent, unforeseen threats to fish and other marine animals such as whales.
Last summer, amid an unprecedented wave of deaths among the highly endangered North Atlantic right whale population, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans closed a snow crab fishery early in an area where the whales had congregated. The government announced $284.2 million in funding to support the changes, funding that Fisheries Minister Dominic LeBlanc said was “to ensure that we have the tools, the human resources, the scientific capacity to properly enforce these new measures.”