Canadian wildlife in peril, groups warn

MONTREAL— Canada may be known for its wide-open spaces and wildlife, but the federal and provincial governments need to dramatically increase their efforts if they’re to save the country’s endangered species, conservationists say.

A World Wildlife Fund report last month created alarm with its finding that global wildlife populations dropped 60 per cent over the last 40 years.

And recent data shows the situation in Canada is not a lot better. A WWF report last year found that Canadian mammal populations dropped by 43 per cent, amphibian and reptile populations by 34 per cent and fish populations by 20 per cent over a similar time period.

Some types of birds have lost between 43 and 69 per cent of their populations.

Populations of species listed under the federal Species at Risk Act, or SARA, declined by an average of 28 per cent since the legislation was enacted in 2002.

Margot Venton, a lawyer with the environmental law group Ecojustice, says part of the reason for the declines is that the regulatory framework is full of holes and is often ignored by governments.

Venton notes that some provinces, such as British Columbia, don’t even have their own endangered species legislation.

Meanwhile, others have appeared unwilling to take the steps to list new species or protect habitat.

And while the federal government has the right to intervene if necessary, she says it generally hesitates to step into provincial jurisdiction.

“That’s a real hole, and we need to fill that hole, and we need to fill it quickly, because of all the recent evidence we have about how rapidly the problem is accelerating,” she said in a phone interview.

Last Wednesday, three environmental groups published a petition calling on the federal government to protect boreal caribou in northern Ontario, saying a decade of mismanagement by the province has put the animals increasingly at risk.

But the Ontario case is part of a larger pattern of governments failing to protect Canada’s atrisk populations, according to a conservationist with the David Suzuki Foundation who has studied the animals.

Rachel Plotkin says caribou herds across Canada are in decline, largely due to habitat loss and economic activities such as logging.

She says governments have been reluctant to act. She cited as an example the Quebec government’s decision this year to allow the small Val-d’Or herd to die off because it would be too expensive to save them.

Instead of protecting habitat, she says, governments tend to favour “mitigation measures,” such as building fences or culling predators.

“It’s a failure to set limits for industrial resource extraction,” she said.

Delay is another problem at both the federal and provincial levels, according to James Snider, the vice-president for science, research and innovation at World Wildlife Fund Canada.

He notes that it can take years from the time a species is recommended for protection under SARA to it being added to the list.

And even then, measures such as protecting critical habitat or creating recovery plans don’t necessarily follow, he said.