I really can't speak to the science behind the areas to protect that have been identified. DFO, Environment Canada, and a variety of other federal agencies have gone through a process to identify areas are ecologically and biologically significant. Parks Canada has a process of identifying representative ecological areas and whatnot. I am ill-equipped to speak to that.
As for protecting areas that are under threat as opposed to those that are not, and you referenced the Manitoba coastline, we found in our work there's a very large population of belugas that, as you may know, spend their summers in the estuaries of the Churchill, Seal, and.... The other river escapes me now. I should be ashamed of myself. My work colleague is going to kill me.
Anyway, we've been advocating that there need to be protective measures introduced in that area. It could be a marine protected area or a national marine conservation area or whatever, but some form of marine protection needs to be afforded to that population in their summer range, and that is supported by adjacent Inuit communities.
That is not advocating to support protection for a population that appears to be under imminent threat but to protect a population that is abundant. There's probably a reason that nature has some populations that are abundant; it's because they need to be abundant in order to survive. The northern cod population off Newfoundland was huge. It collapsed for a variety of reasons, and one in particular. It's been very slow to rebuild. It probably needed to be big in order to be resilient, so we advocate that in some areas you don't protect an area just because it is affording refuge for the last of a species: you need to protect areas because they afford a refuge for this huge amount of a species.