Fishery closures used to hit conservation target
Government ‘playing quantity over quality’
Canada has moved a little closer to meeting its target to protect five per cent of the country’s oceans by the end of 2017, but some are concerned about the methods the government is using to reach that goal.
To coincide with World Oceans Day, Fisheries Minister Dominic LeBlanc announced on Thursday that St. Anns Bank, covering 4,364 square kilometres east of Cape Breton, is officially Canada’s latest marine protected area.
Altogether, Canada is now protecting 1.52 per cent of its oceans — a far cry from the five per cent target it has promised to hit in the next seven months, though LeBlanc said there’s “other good news coming” that will take the country “to five per cent and a bit beyond.”
The new protected area “will help to protect many, many fish, and even turtles,” LeBlanc told a class of sixthgraders at the Museum of Nature in Ottawa during the announcement.
But Fisheries and Oceans Canada made another, more muted announcement this week about a host of other areas that will also count toward the five per cent target, and it’s raising concerns among conservationists.
The government has decided that some fisheries management areas, including some where just a single fishery has been closed, will now count as marine refuges.
Together, the selected areas account for 0.46 per cent of Canada’s oceans — nearly one third of the total area the government has set aside to date.
“I really worry that the government, in trying to reach the numbers, is playing a quantity over quality game,” said Sabine Jessen, national ocean program director with the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society.
For instance, the list of new areas includes fragile glass sponge reefs in B. C.’s Strait of Georgia, where bottom fishing was prohibited in 2015.
But Jessen said there’s nothing preventing people from laying cables or dropping anchors i nto those areas, which means they’re not fully protected.
“Those are things you can’t actually address using a fishing closure.”
In some of the areas in eastern Canada, only lobster fishing or scallop dragging has been banned.
The issue comes down to wording in an international UN commitment to protect 10 per cent of coastal and marine areas by 2020, which Canada agreed to in 2010.
The agreement states that the 10 per cent must be conserved through protected areas or “other effective areabased conservation measures.”
But Jessen said the international community is still working to define what those other measures can be, and Canada is acting on its own.
The Liberals campaigned on a promise to protect five per cent of Canada’s oceans by 2017, before meeting the 2020 target. The looming deadline put pressure on the government to define “other measures” very broadly, Jessen said.
“They don’t have enough marine protected areas in the pipeline that will be finished by (the end of the year), so they decided that coming up with their own definition… would be a way for them to find other areas.”
Canada does have other marine protected areas in the works, including 12,000 square kilometres of the Laurentian Channel in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, which would be the largest in the country.
But concerns have been raised there, too, as the area would remain open to oil and gas activity and shipping.
Jessen said research has shown that protected areas where some activity still occurs look no different from the rest of the ocean. If the government isn’t going to set aside areas that are fully protected, she said, “Why go to all that trouble?”
Still, LeBlanc said it’s not unreasonable to allow certain activities in areas that are otherwise protected.