Park board fast-tracks ban on aquarium whales
A ban on whales and other cetaceans at the Vancouver Aquarium will be in place as early as May 15, when the Vancouver park board will meet to review a new draft bylaw, board chairman Michael Wiebe said Friday.
The board voted unanimously Thursday night to prepare a bylaw banning cetacean captivity in city parks, including Stanley Park where the Vancouver Aquarium is the board’s most high-profile tenant.
“It’s going to happen as soon as possible,” Wiebe said of the ban. “It’s not that this was a big debate around the table. This is something that the commissioners had come around to. ... This has been a long time coming.”
The issue of cetaceans came to a head last fall with the deaths of the last two belugas at the aquarium. The aquarium has five more belu- gas on loan to U.S. facilities.
In 2006, an earlier park board approved the expansion of the aquarium, including new buildings and larger whale tanks. To date, the aquarium has spent more than $45 million of the planned $100-million budget.
Last month, the aquarium announced a new plan. It would proceed in fall of this year with the expansion, including a bigger beluga tank, bringing back the five belugas in 2019 when the new tanks were finished, but phasing out captive whales by 2029.
Wiebe acknowledged that Thursday’s vote will mean a change to those plans, with a focus on new tanks that could accommodate other animals.
“Obviously, with the passing of the two belugas, and the fact that the expansion has not started yet, we had a critical time to make a decision, and the board made that decision,” he said.
The aquarium still has three smaller cetaceans in Vancouver — a dolphin, a porpoise and a false killer whale. Wiebe said the bylaw will be written to allow those animals to stay.
Aquarium CEO John Nightingale released a written statement Friday expressing disappointment with the board’s decision, but Wiebe said he hoped the board could work even more closely with the aquarium in the future.
Wiebe pointed to such facilities as the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California as examples of successful aquariums that don’t display cetaceans.
“This is something that’s becoming ‘ best practice’ worldwide,” he said, adding that Vancouver’s aquarium had already planned to phase out cetacean captivity by 2029.
“They were going to convert over to maybe having arctic seals and other animals. They already have a plan B,” he said. “We just felt as a board that it should be done sooner.”
Wiebe praised the aquarium’s vigorous volunteer program, and said he hoped the aquarium could partner with the park board to reclaim city creeks and bring wildlife back to False Creek.
But in his statement, the aquarium’s Nightingale said Thursday night’s vote puts the expansion plan “in jeopardy,” and threatens the aquarium’s off-site marine mammal rescue centre.
A 2014 vote by the park board to enact a cetacean-breeding ban at the aquarium resulted in the aquarium seeking a judicial review of whether the board had the power to dictate how it handles its animals. The aquarium ultimately ended its breeding program voluntarily, and the court review was abandoned.
There was no word Friday from the aquarium on whether there would be a court challenge to this latest action.
The aquarium, a private nonprofit organization, logged a record 1.2 million visitors last year. It had revenues of more than $37 million in 2015.