Thank you for the opportunity to be here today.
My name is Chris Miller. I'm the national conservation biologist with the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, based in Halifax.
I've worked on protected area issues in Nova Scotia for about 20 years. This work has included a lot of collaboration with the provincial government, but it has also involved working closely with local communities as well as forest companies that have expressed an interest in protected areas.
Over that time, I’ve seen Nova Scotia make big strides in expanding its system of protected areas. The province has risen from near the bottom of the pack for total percentage of land allocated for protected areas to its current position as third in Canada, behind only British Columbia and Alberta.
If you look at Atlantic Canada as a whole, generally this part of the country lags behind in the creation of new protected areas. At the moment, jurisdictions with the lowest percentages of protected areas in Canada are Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland and Labrador.
There are reasons for that. In the Maritimes, there is much less public land than elsewhere in Canada, so establishing large tracts of public lands as protected wilderness can be more challenging. It often requires significant investments by the provincial governments to acquire private lands for conservation. The Maritimes also lacks that vast northern area that every other jurisdiction in Canada has. This makes it difficult to achieve protected area targets using a few very large protected areas. Instead, lots of smaller sites need to be established, which can require a considerably longer time to do the necessary analysis and consultations.
Despite that, Nova Scotia has managed to outperform a number of other provinces that don’t have such obstacles, such as Ontario, Quebec, and Manitoba. I’d like to explore some of the reasons for that, but first it should be noted that Newfoundland and Labrador is a bit of an exception in this regard. It does have a lot of public land and it does have a vast northern region that can support very large protected areas, yet it still has a very poor track record.
The reasons for that are harder to explain, but I remain optimistic. The provincial government in Newfoundland and Labrador has taken a number of important steps in the past few years to improve their performance on protected areas. They formalized the completion of the Mealy Mountains National Park Reserve in Labrador, which increased the total amount of protected areas in the province by nearly 50%. This is also now the largest protected area in eastern North America. The provincial government has also indicated that it will finally establish the natural areas systems plan, which is a long-stalled system of protected areas that was created in the 1990’s but was never formally designated. We are still waiting to see the details on that.
In Nova Scotia, the provincial government has committed to establishing about 200 new protected areas, totalling a quarter of a million hectares. It has also invested several hundred million dollars to acquire ecologically significant lands for conservation through direct land purchases and also by setting up a conservation fund to support land trusts.
These are big numbers for a small province. I was part of the small team of experts who selected those protected areas, working directly with provincial government staff, so I can attest to their conservation significance. They are good sites that are important for conservation. They are not the easy sites of low conservation value.
There are many reasons for the success in Nova Scotia. First of all, protected area targets and timelines were enshrined in a piece of provincial legislation called the Environmental Goals and Sustainable Prosperity Act. This legislation requires annual reporting on progress toward environmental goals, so it's very helpful in ensuring that the government remains on track to achieve its protected area targets.
The Nova Scotia government was also open to collaboration with stakeholders early on. In our case, several environmental groups reached out to the forest industry and worked together to develop a jointly supported protected area proposal. This process was called the Colin Stewart Forest Forum and was a made-in-Nova Scotia solution to our poor performance on protected areas. The provincial government agreed early on to embed our joint ENGO and industry process within the formal provincial government process to create new protected areas.
The Nova Scotia government also agreed to do systematic conservation planning rather than take a piecemeal approach. Designating protected areas one at a time is a recipe for slow implementation and missed targets. Instead, Nova Scotia selected 200 protected areas all at once, as a system, and is now proceeding to designate these areas in batches.
I think it's also important to note that there is deep public support for conservation in Nova Scotia that transcends the political spectrum. The initial protected area targets and timelines were set by the Progressive Conservatives in 2007. The final plan was developed and approved by the NDP in 2013, and the current Liberal government is now proceeding with implementation and officially creating the new protected areas.
I hope that the review being undertaken by this committee will take a close look at some of the successes in Nova Scotia and learn from our work. This is the biggest contribution that Nova Scotia can make toward the national 17% protected areas target. Full implementation of the Nova Scotia protected areas plan will not move the national protected area levels very much—we are a small province—but despite the obstacles in our way toward creating new protected areas, Nova Scotia has found a path toward meaningful contributions and has done a lot of heavy lifting to show how this can be done.
What specific help is needed from the federal government right now for protected areas in Nova Scotia?
The first is about marine protected areas. Please be ambitious with marine conservation and support the marine protected areas planning that's under way by DFO. Ensure that the minimum 10% targets are achieved and surpassed in the marine areas on the east coast. This is the single most important thing that the federal government can do in Atlantic Canada to help achieve the national protected areas targets.
Second, in 2013 the federal government protected Sable Island as a national park reserve but unfortunately failed to close a loophole that allows oil and gas exploration to occur inside the national park boundary. Please close that loophole. No oil and gas exploration should be occurring here. Nova Scotians care deeply about Sable Island.
Third, there is a very special place near Halifax called the Birch Cove Lakes. This near-urban wilderness area is very important to Haligonians. The provincial government has protected the public lands in this area, and the municipal government has declared that it wants this wilderness to become a regional park. Unfortunately, the city has failed to acquire the necessary private lands to make the park a reality, with developers owning a key piece of the future park. The federal government should help the city acquire those lands. This is a critical piece of green infrastructure for Halifax and would be compatible with the federal legislation that created Rouge National Urban Park near Toronto and the protection of Gatineau Park near Ottawa.
With that, I'll end my remarks. I would be happy to take questions.
Thank you.