Good afternoon, and thank you for the opportunity to appear before the committee today. My name is Rachel Plotkin. I'm the boreal program manager for the David Suzuki Foundation. I've been working to protect at-risk species for over 20 years, with a focus on boreal caribou for almost 20 years.
I actually spent a lot of time here on Parliament Hill when the Species at Risk Act, SARA, was being developed, and I appeared before the environment committee for the five-year review of the act—I'm not sure whether the chair remembers me. When the SARA was being drafted and debated, I witnessed a sincere belief across parties that it was an important tool in the tool box to protect biodiversity. A significant amount of time was spent debating the emergency order, but there was recognition that, while provinces make the majority of decisions about lands and wildlife under normal circumstances, the extirpation of a species is an issue of national importance. I was also part of the petition to invoke the emergency order for sage grouse in Alberta and Saskatchewan in 2011, an emergency habitat protection order that was ultimately passed by a Conservative government, even though there were economic impacts, and which resulted in pivoting the sage grouse towards recovery.
I have to say that working to protect boreal caribou and their habitat for the last 20 years has been pretty depressing. As the federal recovery strategy progress assessments illustrate, caribou habitat has continued to be degraded year after year, and caribou populations have continued to decline.
I listened to the other committee hearings and frequently heard the word “balance” mentioned as a framework for solutions. Since you guys like metaphors, this is my analogy of how “balance” can be problematic. Imagine it's the year 2000. You have 100 hectares of caribou habitat, and there's also industrial pressure, so the government of the day says, “Okay, we're going to balance these interests. We'll give 50 hectares to caribou and 50 to industry.” Then, five years later, there's another government and there are still industrial pressures. There are 50 hectares of caribou habitat. The government of the day says, “Okay, let's balance this,” so then there are 25 hectares for caribou and 25 for industry. That continues to play out, and that's why we end up where we are now, that the Charlevoix herd has less than 17% of its habitat that's undisturbed, and the province continues to approve industrial resource extraction in their range. We know that caribou need a minimum of 65% of their habitat to be undisturbed in order for them to have a 60% probability of persistence.
Many are positioning the protection order as a jobs vs. caribou narrative. If the emergency order is implemented, it will affect some jobs, at least in the short term, but really, this conversation is about unsustainable forest management and how to better manage forests in Quebec for both wildlife and people's livelihoods. As was mentioned by others in this hearing, in the long term these two things go hand in hand. If forests are to be relied upon to provide employment security and not be subject to boom-and-bust cycles, they must be managed sustainably.
At heart, the fact that logging is driving caribou towards extinction in Quebec is glaring evidence that logging, at present, is not sustainable. Forest mismanagement is not unique to Quebec. In B.C. the forestry industry is running out of trees to log because the bigger, older trees near mills have already been logged, and replanted trees haven't matured to take their place. The push to keep mills open in the short term has resulted in serious long-term impacts. Studies show that logging in Quebec is also significantly diminishing the natural levels of old-growth forests. At present, caribou aren't even really taken into consideration in forest management planning.
As it happens, the drive for change to the status quo is shared beyond conservation organizations. Listen to these quotes from a press release put out by forest industry unions in Quebec last week, which joined forces to denounce the Quebec government's inaction. They state that Quebec's “inaction and attitude are exacerbating the situation and turning workers into an instrument of political discord”, and they implore the Quebec government “to take the issue seriously and implement an organized, smart plan, to protect woodland caribou, ensure a sustainable future for the forestry industry and adequately support the workers who make it prosper”. In plain words, only forests managed for ecological resilience can provide resilience to forest-dependent workers.
Healthy forests also support indigenous people. Indigenous rights, cultures and ways of life are at stake if caribou become extirpated. I want to share a message from my Innu colleague Melissa Mollen-Dupuis, from Ekuanitshit. She wonders where all the jobs are going to be when they cut down the forest. These arguments have always been used, she says. Jobs were used to justify putting indigenous people in reservations and caribou in enclosures. She also says that one thing is certain: In their lifetime, her kids will never know the taste of caribou or the smell of smoked leather.
I echo my colleagues who already came before you and articulated that band-aid solutions—like killing wolves, which co-evolved with caribou for thousands of years, or putting caribou in fences that essentially turn them into zoo animals—are not real solutions to the current biodiversity crisis and fly in the face of the global biodiversity framework agreed to in Montreal in 2022.
The good news on this depressing file is that you've heard from all sectors and first nations that a reset for forest management is necessary, and there are solutions at hand. If there's—
