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Safe from SARA
- Jamie Baker -
jbaker@thetelegram.com
On the eve of a federal election, it was announced Monday Atlantic cod will not be listed as an endangered species.
But the timing of the announcement is being called into question, even as Conservatives and Liberals in the province agree that cod not being among the species recommended for Species at Risk Act (SARA) protection is good news.
St. John’s South-Mount Pearl MP Loyola Hearn, who is a member of the Senate Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans, likes the end result, but said he was surprised to learn federal Fisheries Minister Geoff Regan had called up St. John’s radio media to announce the decision 24 hours before an expected election call.
Early announcement
“The minister wasn’t supposed to make an announcement until later — but with an election coming they’re making any announcement that might be in any way helpful,” Hearn told The Telegram.
“Still, not having cod listed was one of the strong recommendations in our standing committee report, so it’s great to see the minister is doing what he has been asked to do. If cod had been listed there are an awful lot of possibilities it could have affected a lot of other species and people’s lives.
“I don’t care who gets credit or who doesn’t — the thing was getting this done, and getting it done to the province’s benefit.”
In early November, The Telegram reported the details of a federal cabinet briefing paper that said listing cod as an endangered species would deprive thousands of fisheries workers of income in the province, speed up out-migration and potentially suck $75 million out of the provincial economy within a year.
“The pressure has been on the minister, and this is what the people in the province want,” Hearn said.
“If those in power don’t want to do a lot of these things, or are just dragging their heels like we’ve seen, there’s nothing like a good dose of embarrassment to get them to act.”
Timing unimportant: Simms
Bonavista-Gander-Grand Falls-Windsor MP Scott Simms, another member of the fisheries standing committee, said it didn’t matter to him when the announcement was made as long cod was excluded from SARA consideration.
“I don’t care if it’s two years or two days before an election — it’s ours, we got it, we worked hard for it and we’re proud of it,” Simms said.
“We based it on science and socioeconomic factors. Basically, if you lose the species it will effectively shut down other species like shrimp, like crab and — even approaching the absurd level — it could affect oil and gas exploration.
“To put cod on the endangered species list would have been absolutely devastating.”
Species being proposed for endangered status include the Scotian Shelf population of the Northern bottlenose whale, the channel darter and Interior Fraser River coho salmon.
While cod was excluded from the current species proposal, the federal government did recommend that six species assessments — including Atlantic cod — be returned to the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) for further consideration.
In a news release, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans said the reasons for returning those species assessments was to “give COSEWIC the opportunity to incorporate aboriginal traditional knowledge where needed, ensure the best available data is incorporated in the assessment and that populations of species are clearly defined.”
The release also heralded the allocation of $1.2 million over the next two years for cod-related projects and new scientific research that would “focus on the impact of bycatch on cod, inshore and offshore migration patterns of northern cod, and the impacts of fishing area closures on reducing bycatch of northern cod.”
During Senate Standing Committee hearings in St. John’s, at least one fisheries expert suggested listing cod as an endangered species could have allowed for extended custodial management of sedentary species beyond 200 miles, and that it would finally put a comprehensive recovery plan — something cod has never had — in place.
Simms disagrees with the idea extended custodial powers for sedentary species under those circumstances would have merited the risk, and noted that a recovery plan will, in fact, now come into being even without the SARA listing.
“In conjunction with this, they also have a cod recovery action plan, which I admit is long overdue, but nonetheless it’s going ahead — the Senate Standing Committee on Fisheries strongly recommended it and I’m very proud of the recommendations they made, which also included a limited commercial fishery on the inshore of the northeast coast and a limited recreational fishery as well,” Simms said.
“As for extended custodial (jurisdiction), some people made the comment that if you list it as endangered it would provide a better reason to combat overfishing — but, in fact, it would have hurt us more than it would have helped that cause.”
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