Under protection

So, you have a little plot of land behind your house.

You put a fence around it, make sure all of your neighbours know where the boundaries are, and make a big public deal about setting the land aside for reasons like biodiversity, the protection of rare species and the need for nursery areas for small land mammals. You call it an environmentally protected area, and issue some hearty self-congratulations on your environmental stewardship.

Then, just like anywhere else on your property, you allow a logging company to come in and cut down all the trees. You allow someone else to store their trash there. Maybe you get a company to bulldoze it flat so you can park your car there.

In essence, you pretty much use it for the same purposes you would use any other piece of land.

Not much of an environmentally protected area, is it?

Welcome to the weird world of marine protected areas (MPAs).

Until last week, the federal government had a variety of marine protected areas in Canada’s oceans. But all of them had provisions that could have allowed oil and gas exploration, maritime dumping, bottom trawling and mining to take place.

In other words, like your little plot of land, they were protected areas in name only.

That changed when the federal government announced just over a week ago that those sorts of activities would be banned under the Oceans Act. The move comes after a series of consultations by a federal working group looking into MPAs.

The move takes some of the uncertainty out of what would and wouldn’t be allowed in the areas —and puts an end to the idea that, if your project will create jobs and money, MPAs are transitory things.

“All industries will know what’s in and what’s out, instead of what happens right now when you have ongoing ad nauseam conversations about what’s in and what’s out. It provides a lot of clarity,” Susanna Fuller, a senior project manager with Oceans North, told SaltWire Network.

The changes were announced just as a new MPA covering 11,000 square kilometres was announced in the Laurentian Channel, between Nova Scotia and Newfoundland.

Not everybody is pleased; the premiers of both Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador have expressed concerns about MPAs removing areas of the ocean from economic exploitation.

But really, that’s exactly what a protected area is supposed to be.

If you’re going to have Marine Protected Areas, and if those areas have any intrinsic value, they have to be, well, protected.

The next step? Maybe defining clearly and consistently what is and is not allowed in another kind of protected area: marine refuges.

There are more marine refuges than MPAs right now, but other than fishing, they can still allow things like oil and gas work on a case-by-case basis.

Is it really a refuge if there’s seismic work and drilling going on?

“Is it really a refuge if there’s seismic work and drilling going on?”