With regard to marine protected areas, an important interim step is the closures that Anna mentioned. That's a fairly quick way the government can act to ensure that the integrity of a particular site is maintained while the more lengthy process of marine protected area establishment occurs. That's a band-aid solution; it's not a fix to the problem.
Another thing the government could do is to do multiple sites at the same time. It takes almost as long to do one site as it would take to do five or six sites as a single patch. I think that's the direction that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans is going in designing an MPA network plan as a whole.
I don't know any specifics on implementation, but one clear thing that the government could do would be to designate multiple sites at the same time.