Ottawa dragging its feet on protecting endangered caribou: B.C. conservation groups

This photo provided by the British Columbia Forest Service shows part of the Southern Selkirk caribou herd moving north through the Selkirk Mountains near the Canada-U.S. border in November 2005. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO, AP, British Columbia Forest Service, Garry Beaudry

Conservation groups in British Columbia say the federal government has dragged its feet for 10 years on fulfilling its duty to complete critical habitat mapping for endangered caribou herds, and without urgent action, the animals will disappear.

A letter sent to Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault by Ecojustice on behalf of the Wilderness Committee, Wildsight and Stand.earth says three populations of southern mountain caribou are in steep decline as logging and other industrial development cuts through their habitat.

Southern mountain caribou are currently classified as threatened under Canada’s Species at Risk Act, and a statement issued by the federal government in 2020 said they numbered roughly 3,100, a reduction of 53 per cent over about six years.

Ottawa released a recovery strategy and partial habitat mapping for the caribou 2014, but the conservation groups say the mapping has not been finalized, a requirement under the legislation and a key step toward stopping the decline.

The letter from Ecojustice lawyer Sean Nixon says the last update from Environment Canada indicated a proposed recovery strategy with critical habitat mapping would be released sometime in 2026, though its timeline may shift.

Eddie Petryshen, a conservation specialist with Wildsight based in B.C.‘s East Kootenay region, says successive federal governments and environment ministers have “kicked the can further down the road,” and that trend continues today.

“It’s just been this constant, decade-long plan to make a plan while caribou are disappearing and their habitat is being decimated and logged.”

Petryshen says eight of 18 herds in the southern group have been extirpated, a term for local extinction, over the last two decades.

“We know what’s causing that extirpation,” he says.

Southern mountain caribou depend on old-growth forests to survive, and Petryshen says an analysis by the Wilderness Committee found more than 190,000 hectares of the southern group’s critical habitat were logged between 2007 and 2023.

That analysis used Ottawa’s partial habitat identification from 2014, he says, while they used mapping from the provincial government in 2019 to find more than 310,000 hectares of critical habitat were logged during the same time period.

The Ecojustice letter dated Jan. 22 says Ottawa’s ongoing delays and inaction “amount to a tacit endorsement of the extermination of a species.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 22, 2025.

Brenna Owen, The Canadian Press