Canada is losing a lot of its wildlife. The World Wildlife Fund’s 2017 Living Planet Report Canada found half the monitored mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian and fish species declined from 1970 to 2014. Threatened and endangered species continue to disappear despite federal legislation designed to protect them and help their populations recover. What’s going wrong?
The report puts the blame on habitat loss, farming, forestry, urban and industrial development, climate change, pollution, invasive species and overfishing—all related to human activity.
One reason plant and animal populations continue to suffer
Enter a little-used legal tool: an emergency order under the Species at Risk Act. An emergency order is a flexible, effective tool that can be tailored to a species’ specific needs. It provides measures to address imminent threats to a species. Emergency orders helped stop further declines of western chorus frogs and rebuilt greater sage grouse populations.
West Coast conservation groups, including the David Suzuki Foundation, are calling for an emergency order to protect Canada’s most endangered marine mammal: southern resident orcas, or killer whales. The 76 remaining animals—which can be found in the Salish Sea near Vancouver and around Washington State’s San Juan Islands and B.C.’s Gulf Islands—face threats that imperil their ability to survive. This is the orca’s lowest population in more than three decades, and no surviving calves have been produced since 2015.
The act compels the ministers responsible to recommend an emergency order to cabinet if they believe a species is facing imminent threats to its survival or recovery. Emergency orders can require actions over and above any laws, policies or regulations already in place to recover the species. Although the act requires that southern resident orcas and the habitat they need for recovery be given automatic protection, not enough has been done to prevent their continuing decline. Urgent additional measures are needed to ensure survival and recovery.
The three biggest threats to the whales’ recovery are underwater noise and disturbance, contaminants and a reduction in the whales’ favoured prey, chinook salmon. While all these threats require an immediate response, recent deaths—in particular among calves and mothers or pregnant whales—appear to be driven by food scarcity.
The orcas feed primarily on Fraser River chinook, whose populations and nutritional yield have declined over the past 12 to 15 years. Habitat change, harvest rates and hatchery influences, along with climate change impacts and possibly disease threats from open net-cage salmon farms, all play roles in the chinook’s decline. Recreational and commercial fisheries are competing with the whales for salmon and disrupting the whales when they try to feed.
The emergency order calls for limits to the number of
Research indicates a 24 to 50 percent risk of southern resident orca extinction this century if conditions don’t change. It’s a colossal failure of policy and will that finds Canada’s wildlife in such dire circumstances. The extinction of these
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