A May report from Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) is highlighting a glaring lack of progress in caribou recovery efforts across the country.
While every province and territory home to caribou populations are behind in conservation efforts, recent progress reports for Alberta and Ontario point to their governments lagging behind.
“This is a very dire situation for almost all herds in Canada,” says Tara Russell, the program director for the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society in northern Alberta. “There’s a distinct lack of action across the country.”
Boreal caribou have been listed as threatened in the federal Species at Risk Act (SARA) since the act’s implementation in 2003. In 2012, the federal government finalized a recovery strategy for woodland caribou, with an additional action plan in 2018.
Under section 11 of SARA, all provinces and territories with caribou populations were required to sign on to a conservation agreement with the federal government. These agreements are intended to lay out plans for caribou conservation, management, and recovery actions with clear timelines for achieving naturally-sustaining caribou populations.
The federal recovery strategy sets a goal of achieving self-sustaining local populations in all 51 ranges across Canada, with an undisturbed habitat threshold of 65 per cent. But wildlife experts say that this goal feels far away.
“This iconic Canadian species is at risk of going extinct,” says Russell. “We need to flip the balance back in favour of the environment.”
Alberta facing high habitat disruption from industry, unsustainable recovery strategies
In Alberta, the provincial and federal government signed a five-year agreement in 2020 to work towards the self-sustaining status of boreal and southern mountain caribou within 50 to 100 years, and recover 65 per cent of disturbed habitat.
The cumulative impacts of human activity have led to the destruction of caribou habitat, says Phillip Meintzer, a conservation specialist with the Alberta Wilderness Association. The industries that Alberta is known for—oil, logging, and gas—are the major forces behind habitat loss.
According to its conservation agreement, signed in 2020, Alberta agreed to complete its range plans by 2025. Now, Meintzer says the timeline has shifted to 2027.
“It’s not just a two year delay,” says Meintzer. “Slowness of process means that caribou suffer in the interim because there aren’t plans to recover their habitat.”
A key component of Alberta’ s restoration plan lies within seismic lines across the province—wide cutlines that can be up to 10 km wide that were historically used for oil and gas exploration. These clearings run through caribou habitat, and are ideal highways for predators such as wolves.
Alberta has performed wolf culls since 2005 as part of its caribou recovery plan despite evidence that it has not led to increased caribou populations in all herds. Since 2017, four herds have increased in population, six are stable, and two are declining, according to the federal report.
In a statement, the province’s ministry of environment and protected areas said that they are increasing funding by $27 million over the next two years to support caribou recovery and preparing to restore up to 5,000 kilometres of seismic lines in several caribou ranges this year.
“We are making major investments and seeing positive results, but it will take decades for the benefits to be fully realized,” says Ryan Fournier, press secretary for Alberta’s minister of environment and protected areas.
The government has a new proposal to save Jasper’s caribou population
But Russell says that at this stage of the problem, this isn’t enough progress.
“The government should’ve been prioritizing recovery of caribou habitat decades ago,” she says. “Now they’re applying bandaid salutations and twiddling their thumbs on restoration.”
Ontario lacks minimum goal for undisturbed habitat and effective recovery plan
Over in Ontario, the province has faced considerable criticism for its lack of tangible action in caribou recovery.
“The province has had what it needs to implement caribou recovery since 2008,” says Rachel Plotkin, the boreal project manager with the David Suzuki Foundation. Ontario’s first caribou recovery strategy was completed that year.
Despite this, evidence suggests that Ontario is still in its planning phase for much of its conservation strategy.
The May report from the ECCC notes that the province has not set a goal to maintain or achieve an explicit minimum threshold of undisturbed habitat, and lacks comprehensive restoration strategies.
In addition, Ontario’s progress report noted an absence of data including information regarding habitat conditions, genetic information, and population size. As a result, the group was “limited” in their ability to understand the effectiveness of the current conservation framework. They were also unclear as to how the provincial policies work to inform caribou recovery.
“This, combined with the complexity of the regulatory framework, hampered the ability to assess how likely the provincial framework is to achieve self-sustaining caribou populations,” said the progress report.
Since 2022, the province has run caribou conservation stewardship programs, committing millions of dollars to organizations and citizen scientists willing to bring forward plans for recovery. But Plotkin says the government needs to implement “comprehensive, science-based policies.”
“It’s not a matter of how much money they’re putting on the table, but rather what they need to do for caribou to survive,” says Plotkin.
And while the provinces work to further their plans, experts agree that time is running out for caribou.
“Protecting caribou represents an opportunity to protect more than just this one species,” says Russell, pointing to how intertwined caribou are to the health of boreal forests. “If we can do better by caribou, we can do better by the entire forest.”
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