Environmental group welcomes Liberal ocean protection plan

Marine conservation activists are welcoming a decision by the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to invest $1.5 billion in an ocean protection strategy to safeguard the Pacific, Atlantic and Arctic oceans and protect Canada’s coastlines.

The five-year funding program aims to protect Canada’s three oceans and coastlines from “the damage that comes from shipping and pollution,” Trudeau said yesterday in Vancouver. It includes creating a marine safety system, restoring marine ecosystems, and spending on oil spill cleanup research and methods.

The announcement is “unequivocally a good investment in our oceans,” said Josh Laughren, executive director of Oceana Canada.

A welcome trend

“We’re certainly quite happy to see it,” said Laughren in a phone interview from Toronto. “Over the past year we’ve had quite a bit of new investment in Canada’s oceans.”

(click to listen to the full interview with Josh Laughren)

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The Liberal government announcement continues a very good trend that saw it hiring 135 scientists at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) and investing in marine scientific research, Laughren said.

• Canada’s oceans get $1.5 billion in marine protection

The announcement is addressing a “genuine gape” in Canada’s marine safety, protection of marine mammals and the country’s ability to respond to pollution incidents, Laughren said.

“On face value what this does is addresses a gap that has been there a long time in our oceans,” Laughren said. “Now, of course the speculation is that, what this sets up for future announcements on development and on pipelines, and I think we need to take those decisions when they come and assess them on their merit.”\

Poor response to oil spill

The announcement came a day after a barge flipped and sank not far from the site on B.C.’s central coast where a tug ran aground last month, spilling more than 100,000 litres of diesel fuel from its tanks.

“Our ability to respond to that was really poor,” Laughren said. “No matter what else, we need to make sure we’ve got better community level response capability.”

First of many steps ahead

The first step in the government’s goal in becoming a world leader in ocean and coastline protection should be restoring some of the capacity to the Coast Guard, to the DFO and local communities, Laughren said.

“We need to make sure that the government delivers on commitments to increase marine conservation areas up to 10 per cent from the current 1 per cent,” Laughren said. “We need to make sure that this money goes where it’s supposed to: in our spill response.”

The government also needs to radically revamp its 100-year-old Fisheries Act to make it a world-leading piece of legislation, and to invest in recovery of Canadian fish stocks, which are still depleted greatly from the overfishing in the 1970s and 80s, Laughren said.

“There is a lot of work to do,” Laughren said. “And we have to make sure that future decisions on development don’t put those at risk as well. This is one welcome step, but still only one step in ensuring that Canada actually gets up to world class in protection of our ocean resources.”