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Winners and Losers in Canada

The Banff Springs snail can be proud of one thing: It is the only species in Canada for which the federal Species at Risk Act has been fully implemented. The small mollusk, which lives in five hot springs in Alberta's Banff National Park, was listed as endangered in 2003; four years later, a recovery and action plan was put in place to protect it.

Other endangered species have not been so lucky. The Canadian government passed the Species at Risk Act in December 2002, with the aim of offering legal protection for a wide variety of endangered or threatened species and a framework for their recovery. Legal listing involves a two-step process. First, the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada — or COSEWIC — an independent scientific advisory body, assesses the status of species and designates them as extirpated, endangered, threatened, of special concern, or not at risk.

How the law works

Once it receives the committee's assessment, the federal government may accept the recommendation and add the species to the legal list, decide not to add it to the list, or refer the assessment back to the committee for further consideration.

If a species is not listed, the rationale must be published in the Canada Gazette, the official government publication. This requirement is meant to provide transparency when a listing decision differs from scientific recommendations. If a listing is denied or referred back to the committee, the species is entitled to no federally legislated protection under the Species at Risk Act, known as SARA. Three different federal agencies — Environment Canada, Parks Canada, and Fisheries and Oceans Canada — are responsible for implementing the law.

When SARA took effect in 2003, all 233 species previously assessed as imperiled were automatically listed. Since then, it has been up to the government to decide whether to list each species individually. According to Jeffrey Hutchings, past chair of COSEWIC and a biology professor at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, 469 wildlife species had been legally listed by July of this year. Overall, the chances of listing are fairly good for most species; 85 percent of them have made the list since 2003.

Politics steps in

But not all species are created equal. The chances of protection are far lower for, say, commercially harvested marine (saltwater) fish or for any species whose habitat happens to be in Nunavut — Canada's northernmost territory. Hutchings notes that only 15 percent of marine fish species and 18 percent of Nunavut species have been listed. Only one marine fish, the basking shark, has been listed as endangered; the other marine fish species get a "special concern" designation, which does not trigger a recovery strategy.

"The reason species are not listed has nothing to do with the best available information but everything to do with the perceived socioeconomic or political consequences associated with those listing decisions," Hutchings says.

Scott Findlay is an associate professor in the biology department of the University of Ottawa and coauthor of a paper on species listing under the Canadian law, published in Conservation Biology in 2009. The paper concluded that species that were denied listing tended to be those that were either harvested by commercial interests or were used for food by those who trapped or caught them. In half the cases studied, the decision not to list a species was made on the grounds of anticipated negative socioeconomic impacts.

The agencies responsible for listing follow different procedures and often have different criteria. Fisheries and Oceans Canada undertakes a cost-benefit analysis to support its listing decisions for aquatic species, while Environment Canada — the Canadian equivalent of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency — does not. "If you have an institution that is looking at the potential socioeconomic consequences of listing," it is likely to list fewer species than institutions with different goals, Findlay says. In short, it shouldn't matter, but it does.

Findlay and others feel that, in some cases, the socioeconomic analysis undertaken to support listing is incomplete and considers only short-term costs and benefits. "These analyses tend to concentrate unduly on the costs of conservation because they are easier to estimate" than the long-term benefits, which might be greater, he says. "If you are only looking at shorter term benefits, you tend to underestimate the true value of conservation."

Findlay believes that listing decisions should be made solely on the basis of biological information and that socioeconomic impact assessments should be undertaken later, when protection actions required to recover a species are better known. A case in point is the porbeagle shark. In 2006, the Canadian government decided not to list this species even though its numbers had dropped by nearly 90 percent since 1961. The reason given was that the listing might have led to the loss of eight jobs and a two percent reduction of income in a single community. "The nonlisting of the porbeagle shark signaled to Canadians how minimal the socioeconomic values need to be to prevent a listing for marine fish," says Hutchings, who has coauthored a paper on biases in legal listing.

Murray Rudd, a former senior economist for Fisheries and Oceans Canada and author of the government's economic analysis of the porbeagle shark decision, has a different view. "It is clear that the potential benefits of conserving the porbeagle outweighed the cost," he says. There have also been claims of bias concerning the refusal to list species found in far northern Nunavut after consultations with regional government officials. For example, the Peary caribou, found only in Canada's Arctic, has experienced an 83 percent decline, and COSEWIC concluded in a 2004 assessment that it was endangered — primarily because of climate change. Yet as a result of the required consultation process, this species is not yet listed.

Such biases are worrisome to Susan Pinkus, a staff scientist with Ecojustice, a nonprofit environmental group that has challenged the federal government in court for failing to comply with SARA. "We are seeing those two very important ecosystems, the north and the marine ecosystem, not get protection," she says. "The potential effect is that those ecosystems will degrade at a much greater degree."

More problems

SARA's deficiencies do not stop at the listing stage. The responsible government minister is required to prepare a recovery strategy for every endangered, threatened, or extirpated species. This document reviews the species' conservation status and the threats it faces, and identifies "critical habitat," the habitat necessary for a species to survive or recover. Habitat loss is the primary cause of decline for species at risk in Canada.

As of August, recovery plans had been completed for 40 percent of the listed species. In a recent report to the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development, Scott Findlay noted that critical habitat had been identified for only 19 percent of the 99 species for which final recovery strategies had been published.

Species found in protected areas — national parks, for instance — are likely to fare better. "The reason the Banff  Springs snail has the degree of protection it has under SARA is because it was easy," Pinkus says. "The impact of doing protection was very small." In cases where there is a likelihood of conflict with humans, the identification and protection of critical habitat often becomes an uphill battle. 

Meanwhile, all endangered and threatened species are at risk. In September 2008, a coalition of nine environmental groups represented by Ecojustice filed suit against the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, charging that it had failed to protect critical habitat for killer whales, or orcas. The "southern resident" orcas are listed as endangered, with about 89 survivors. About 250 "threatened" northern resident orcas survive. The case was heard in federal court this June. If the plaintiffs are successful, we could be assured of stronger legal protection for all of Canada's endangered species.

Ultimately, the effectiveness of the Species at Risk Act will be measured on the ground. Although the law's protection applies only to species under federal jurisdiction, it does include a safety net clause (as yet never used) that allows the federal government to extend its influence. Of the 10 Canadian provinces, Ontario, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick have the most comprehensive laws, while British Columbia and Alberta have no specific legislation. The others are somewhere in between.

The federal law is currently undergoing a parliamentary review of its effectiveness. "It is an uphill battle to try to make SARA meaningful so that there is actually some attempt to address the threats that put the species into trouble in the first place," Pinkus says.

Isabelle Groc, Planning Magazine

View original story: http://www.planning.org/planning/2010/oct/index.htm