The biodiversity crisis in Canada: failures and challenges of federal and sub-national strategic and legal frameworks

The ground-breaking Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) global assessment of the condition of biodiversity—the variety of life on earth at all levels, from genes to ecosystems—was delivered to the public in IPBES (2019) with a call for transformative change. It marked the first report issued by this independent intergovernmental panel of experts as an analogue to the five by the International Panel on Climate Change since 1988. Overall, 150 scientists distilled an enormous number of studies (∼15,000) into an integrated global synthesis that was subject to extensive peer review during the IPBES first work programme, from 2014 to 2018. According to the IPBES assessment, the overall trends as they relate to the health and functioning of species and ecosystems and the Earth’s support systems are overwhelmingly negative and permeate the world everywhere. These deteriorating trends have been accelerating and intensifying since about the 1970s, at a remarkable pace and rate of change relative to the last 10 million years and are projected to continue or worsen into the future under business-as-usual scenarios.

As the world’s second largest country, Canada encompasses about 10 million km² of terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems with almost 9% of the world’s total forest area and 25% of the world’s wetlands (NWWG 1997). From a marine perspective, Canada is responsible for the care of more than 243,000 km of Arctic, Atlantic, and Pacific coastlines and marine ecosystems that encompass more than 56,000 km². Although not included among the 17 “megadiverse” countries of the world, Canada is home to an estimated 80,000 species (CESCC 2016), over 300 of which occur nowhere else in the world (Enns et al. 2020). Even while containing the second highest remaining area of intact ecosystems in the world (Watson et al. 2018), many of the global trends highlighted in the IPBES report are mirrored in Canada.

Of 30,000 species in Canada for which there is sufficient information, 20% are imperilled to some degree (CESCC 2016). From 1970 to 2014, about half of 903 monitored wildlife species in Canada declined in abundance (WWF 2018), many of which belong to species groups highlighted in the IPBES global assessment, i.e., amphibians and reptiles (CESCC 2016), birds (NABCIC 2019), and freshwater fish (Chu et al. 2015). Certain ecosystems, such as wetlands and grasslands, have experienced particularly significant and continuing loss in Canada (FPTGC 2010). The drivers of biodiversity loss and degradation—land conversion, overfishing, climate change, pollution, and invasive alien species (Woo-Durand et al. 2020; WWF 2020)—mirror those reported by IPBES (2019) for the rest of the world.

In spite of Canada’s ecological and economic wealth and a stable democratic system, several issues related to the governance of biodiversity in Canada prevent the effective mitigation of the negative impacts of anthropogenic change on the distribution and abundance of species and the erosion of ecosystem services and ecological functions. Biodiversity is formally protected and managed through a bewildering array of policy instruments administered by different levels (federal, provincial, and territorial) or scales of government. While we acknowledge that governance includes other actors, such as Indigenous communities, landowners, industry, and civil society organizations, our focus is to provide a clear snapshot of the extent to which Canada’s national and subnational governments are taking responsibility from the standpoint of legislated commitments—a key starting point for assessing how Canada is prioritizing biodiversity.

To examine Canada’s broad approach to implementing the CBD objectives, we first compiled jurisdictional biodiversity strategies, plans, or policies that have been developed to meet Canada’s CBD obligations, all of which sit outside legislation (i.e., are nonbinding). We conducted this independently for the federal government, the 10 provinces, and three territories. We searched each government website for evidence of a strategic approach to conserving biodiversity. We looked for content that was reflective of the Canadian Biodiversity Strategy goals and targets, and in turn those of the Aichi Targets, and evidence of approach, e.g., whole-of-government, ministry or department-led. We examined jurisdictional strategic documents that were either wholly or partly devoted to biodiversity (or nature) conservation.

To examine domestic statutes for the implementation of the NBSAP (Canadian Biodiversity Strategy) and the delivery of Aichi Targets, we did a manual search for all legislation relevant to biodiversity and major threats to biodiversity from the federal, provincial, and territorial governments of Canada. The key threats to biodiversity—habitat loss/degradation, overexploitation, invasive species, climate change, and pollution—were those identified by the IPBES (2019) assessment as well as similar literature in Canada (Currie and Marconi 2020, Woo-Durand et al. 2020; McCune et al. 2013). We collected these data in two phases: first, through a broad search of government websites for relevant laws and, second, a more systematic search of each law as accessed through the Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII: canlii.org/en/). We inspected each statute for a stated purpose or set of objectives and included them in further analysis if some element of biodiversity or threat to biodiversity was central or included in some fashion. We were aided in our search by legal reviews that have been conducted by federal departments (e.g., ECCC 2019b) and natural resource law reviews (e.g., Hughes et al. 2016). We also consulted occasional reviews and evaluations of NBSAPs by the CBD Secretariat and the published literature to gain perspective on Canada’s progress on the implementation of CBD objectives relative to the other 195 parties to the Convention. For each statute, we gathered the same set of information and summarised these within and across jurisdiction according to stated purpose, type of statute and implementing agency (Supplementary Material 1).

We categorized each statute within each jurisdiction into one of five categories:

For laws governing resource extraction (e.g., forestry, mining, oil and gas, coal, water management) and other development (e.g., land planning, agriculture and farm laws), we analyzed each individually for provisions aimed at the protection and management of biodiversity using keywords that represented biodiversity or its constituent elements, or key threats, e.g., biodiversity, fish, wildlife, species, habitat*, ecosystem*, forest*, environment*, pollution, climate change, emissions, invasive species, pest*, exploitation, sustain[able]. We removed from consideration those statutes for which the exclusive purpose was economic development and either contained no mention of biodiversity and related terms or deferred to other pieces of legislation, especially impact assessment. Although we included many land-use planning laws, we did not include statutes used to convey land to the public for nonconservation purposes, e.g., community, industrial, and business use. We also did not include laws that concerned domestic, farm, or display of animals. Left completely out of this analysis were the many laws that exist in each jurisdiction that may have profound (and exacerbating) if inadvertent impacts on biodiversity, such as corporate, tax, property, trade, etc. laws.

With the Government of Canada as a Party to the CBD, our focus here is on settler governments as the implementation agents. Although Indigenous legal orders governed long before settlers arrived and continue as such, we have not provided any data about the scope or breadth of such legal orders that benefit biodiversity created by Indigenous governments, and we know of no existing data set or systematic review that contains such information. From a methodological standpoint it is necessary to note that we have purposefully excluded from this analysis legislation implementing the 25 modern treaties in a number of Canadian jurisdictions that have been signed with Indigenous Peoples since 1975 (Government of Canada n.d.), although we discuss this later.

Resolving the biodiversity crisis will require transformative change that takes a long-term perspective and confronts and addresses the root causes of biodiversity loss—“namely a fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic, and social factors, making sustainability the norm rather than the altruistic exception” (Diaz et al. 2019, p. 7). Our focus in this paper has been on governance instruments and approaches, only one of several fundamental components of sustainable pathways (Chan et al. 2020). Transitioning to scale-appropriate planning and integrated decision-making that can address the pressures and causes of biodiversity loss in Canada will require a shift in governance systems to those that are coordinated, integrated, pre-emptive, adaptive, and precautionary (Chan et al. 2020). It will not only require reform of some existing policies (particularly those that are harmful to biodiversity), but also consideration of species and ecosystem services to be mainstreamed into economic and development decision-making. Yet the fragmented nature of governance of biodiversity that persists across and within Canadian jurisdictions today, with multiple agencies and departments in each jurisdiction responsible for various facets of biodiversity, present formidable challenges.

Habitat loss and degradation as the primary cause of terrestrial species loss (Woo-Durand et al. 2020) points to the imperative of area-based conservation as a major cornerstone of action. This is one arena where Canada has made significant progress in the past few years, centred on its intention to meet its Aichi Target 11 for land and marine protection within its borders and commitment to further, post-2020 increases (ECCC 2020). However, Article 8 of the CBD makes clear that there are many additional needs apart from in situ protection of biodiversity, including (but not limited to) sustainable development in unprotected areas. Achieving this will require recognition of biodiversity needs and integration across all sectors, such that the safeguarding of species and ecosystems does not remain a boutique issue for environmental agencies to address on their own (Sarkki et al. 2015). Accordingly, our examination of Canada’s biodiversity-related laws provides support to calls for a concerted evolution of regulatory regimes towards truly integrated approaches to terrestrial and marine planning and management of development activities that foster cross-sectoral approaches and coordinated planning at appropriately large scales and long-term timeframes, with the aim of creating strong links among landscape- or regional-level plans and targets and project-level decisions (NAP 2018; CCA 2019).

Moving away from the attractive but unrealistic notion that use of lands and resources by many entities can be achieved for the maximum benefit of humans (“multi-use”), trade-offs between various interests, and uneven power relations among actors would have to reconciled (Hughes 2016b; CCA 2019). Successful implementation across the board will require a rethinking of natural resource decision-making in Canada, including actual implementation of sustainable development as originally conceived (Hughes 2016b)–or, perhaps more importantly, Canada’s self-identity as a resource-intensive economy driven by short-term economic priorities (Boyd 2003, 2015).

Serious attention to the implementation of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change led to a series of new federal, provincial, and territorial laws (Table 3; Supplementary Material 1). The obvious question is: should this also happen with biodiversity? Species at risk legislation in Canadian jurisdictions to date provides a cautionary tale for law reform. The laws are politically contentious and often weakly implemented (Ecojustice 2012; Olive 2014). The latest example is the weakening of the Endangered Species Act (2008) in Ontario, where amendments to the Act in 2019 introduced major delays and reductions to protections (Bergman et al. 2020). Unless the government is willing to put finances behind strong laws and treat imperiled species as primary considerations in decision-making, the experience to date suggests entrenchment of business-as-usual approaches. Westwood et al. (2019) call for new species at risk legislation in British Columbia, but absent a whole-of-government commitment to adopt a fundamentally different approach along with adequate funding, a new law—layered upon existing laws—may not make a needed difference, particularly if administered by an environment ministry that is dwarfed in power by other natural resource agencies.

While it is beyond the scope of this exercise to evaluate the extent to which failures of ambition have been undermined by the design of the each of the 201 laws we examined, we can be certain that attention must be paid to the reform of existing laws in all jurisdictions and the potential creation of new statutes to fill gaps. We caution, however, that transformation of Canada’s approach to biodiversity conservation will require more than the mere enactment of new laws. Instead, it will require innovative styles of governance and an altogether different mindset from conventional approaches to resource management and land use decisions (Sinclair et al. 2017; CCA 2019).

Governing resource extraction involves a constant tug-of-war between business interests concerned about unnecessary regulatory barriers and those who would like to see strong environmental safeguards. This polarization reminds us that strong biodiversity laws and policies can easily be torn down. As already mentioned, Ontario’s More Homes, More Choices Act (2019) made major changes to its Endangered Species Act (Bergman et al. 2020) to provide “efficiencies” for development interests. Perhaps more blatantly, Alberta’s 2019 “Cut Red Tape” initiatives include panels of businesses and industry representatives making regulatory recommendations to the province about oil and gas, agriculture, forestry, and other environmentally harmful sectors (see Government of Alberta n.d.). More recently, under its COVID-19 economic recovery plan, Alberta’s government also rescinded its 1976 Coal Development Policy, thereby removing protections in the Rocky Mountains to allow for open-pit coal mining in environmentally sensitive lands (Fletcher et al. 2020).

Notwithstanding promising (and recent) expressions of ambition and collaboration for meeting biodiversity targets (e.g., Conservation2020 n.d.; ECCC 2020), the governance system in Canada today that is available to address the biodiversity crisis at a national scale relies on diplomacy among 14 jurisdictions, with the federal government “historically restrained in exercising authority in the environmental field” (MacKay 2004 p. 30). Although much is made of the limits to federal jurisdiction relative to the provinces on biodiversity-related matters, cooperative federalism (which has been institutionalized to a certain extent through cooperative agreements and Interministerial Councils (Campbell and Thomas 2002)), tends to serve as a pathway to lowest-common denominator protections (MacKay 2004). It follows that along with a high degree of interest and commitment, a federal government must be willing to skillfully use some of its available power to play an effective leadership role (Macdonald 2020). For example, the federal government regularly deploys fiscal levers to stimulate action on policy priorities in lieu of exerting jurisdictional authority, (e.g., in areas like health, education, and infrastructure). The recently initiated Pathway to Canada Target 1 process (ECCC 2019a) represents a promising example of how this can be applied to biodiversity conservation, whereby a relatively small amount of federal money (>$200 million) and coordinated ambition has incentivised some provinces and territories and many Indigenous governments to make commitments to initiate or complete protected area projects. Along with meaningful levels of financial investment, the notion brought forward by NAP (2018) of a “new nature conservation architecture,” consisting of a new federal Nature Conservation Department and associated federal law, merits thoughtful consideration as a means to enable delivery of the complete set of nature and sustainability goals and targets in a coordinated and integrated fashion.

Although Indigenous individuals and communities in Canada are not formally responsible for implementing the country’s international commitments to biodiversity, consideration for the resurgent role of Indigenous-led conservation is nevertheless essential for confronting the crisis. Most opportunities for future conservation gains in Canada lie within Indigenous territories, where increasing recognition of Indigenous jurisdiction means that both natural resource development and conservation initiatives are less and less likely to succeed without Indigenous consent, in accordance with Article 19 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP; Artelle et al. 2019). In their recent landmark report, the Indigenous Circle of Experts (2018) put forward a case for how Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs) represent a long-term commitment to conservation, while elevating Indigenous rights and responsibilities and supporting meaningful reconciliation and implementation of the principles of UNDRIP (Artelle et al. 2019). There is room for substantial growth for this model of governance, particularly in as-yet ecologically intact northern regions where there are opportunities at appropriate scales for complete ecosystem conservation and where Indigenous communities are already demonstrating leadership, supported in part by federal government expenditures (Zurba et al. 2019; Artelle et al. 2019). Particularly in areas covered by modern land claim agreements since 1971, as well as in the territories, there have been and will be opportunities to create new pathways for integrated planning and decision-making around and protected areas and development. The government of the Northwest Territories provides an example of this kind of opportunity in its recent efforts to develop post-devolution legislation (Environmental Rights Act, 2019 and Protected Areas Act, 2019) and strategies (Table 1; Supplemental Materials 1) that reflect integrated management of largely intact northern landscapes in the context of co-governance realities. Similarly, species conservation will benefit from an increasing recognition of how management approaches grounded in traditional Indigenous systems that are multi-generational in scope as alternatives to contemporary resource management that emphasize extraction for short-term profits (Atlas et al. 2020).

The world’s nations have been pledging to cooperate on global environmental issues ever since the Stockholm Declaration in 1972 that emerged from the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. This, and a number of subsequent Multilateral Environmental Agreements ratified by most countries of the world, have created a collective societal imperative towards the achievement of a common set of goals for nature and sustainability (Chan et al. 2020). Alongside these regular discussions over the decades, evidence has been accumulating regarding both the urgency of the problem facing biodiversity and nature’s critical supportive role for humanity. The sustainable future of biodiversity as a crisis receives less attention than climate change (e.g., Legagneux et al. 2018), but the condition of the world’s lands and oceans as functional carbon sinks will be critical for combating the climate crisis (Le Quéré et al. 2018). Moreover, the IPBES (2019) assessment and the COVID-19 pandemic have placed biodiversity, and human connections to wildlife, on the public agenda worldwide. Indeed, the pandemic has not only exposed once again the links between zoonotic disease risk and environmental degradation (Everard et al. 2020), but the enormous economic consequences of failing to invest in preventative actions (Dobson et al. 2020) and the essential role of natural areas and green spaces for human wellbeing (WHO 2020).

As a wealthy and stable democracy, Canada has both a responsibility and an important opportunity to be a global leader in conserving biological diversity, yet the pathway it has developed thus far is clearly inadequate for achieving that status. Patterns of biodiversity loss within Canada along with its strategic planning and governance framework suggest that, similar to the rest of the world (Diaz et al. 2019), transformative change is needed. Based on our research, we suggest that statutory reforms, while critical, will not succeed unless accompanied by: (i) a whole-of-government approach to sustainability (ENVI 2016), characterised by a mainstreaming of biodiversity considerations into economic development decision-making; (ii) confronting the cultural ethos of prioritizing the “development” aspect of sustainable development, shifting from a short-term profit maximization motive to one with explicit consideration of future generations; (iii) innovative governance, including embracing Indigenous-led conservation and management systems; and (iv) bold federal leadership and coordination that overcomes jurisdictional fragmentation, along with financial resources enabled by a deliberate shift from harmful subsidies. Collectively, Canada’s 10 million km² of terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems and its three marine coasts (the longest in the world), are too precious a global asset to accept anything short of such transformation.

We are indebted to H. Benevides, A. Johnston, A. Kwasniak, S. Lieberman, M. von Mirbach, S. Nixon, D. Poulton, D. Reid, K. Richardson, A. Woodley, and an anonymous reviewer for their insightful comments on various versions of this manuscript.