Madam Speaker, I am feeling a little homesick, being far from my home on Gabriola Island, but when I think about the number of people who will send the word out on Facebook, especially when Margy lets everybody know that there are orca whales at Orlebar Point, I feel a bit better.
Masses of people stand on the shorelines of the Salish Sea and watch as these amazing whales go by so close to the shoreline. Mudge Islanders post videos all the time of orcas going through Dodd Narrows, which has an extremely strong current of nine knots. These animals have the intuition to know when the current has changed, but they are also determined to push through it. It is phenomenal. We are privileged as B.C. coastal people to live so close to these amazing animals.
A constituent of mine, Charles Thirkill, sent me a note on this, saying, “Orcas are the last surviving species of the whales that once roamed the Strait of Georgia. In 1907, a whaling station was set up in Pipers Lagoon. They caught 97 whales in the first year, and by 1911, there were none left, so they packed up the gear and took it to Graham Island Haida Gwaii. Whaling in the area continued till 1967”—the year after I was born—“and spotter planes were used to locate the prey for the boats. The whales were hunted for their oil. Now ain't that ironic-like?”
He finishes by saying, “We are just beginning to see whales return to the Strait, and it would be sad if they were killed by an oil spill or tanker propeller blades.”
They are imperiled indeed. Chinook salmon numbers have dropped to the point that southern resident orcas are starving. They are miscarrying.
The Raincoast Conservation Foundation says, “69 per cent of pregnancies in the last decade have failed, and what should be healthy animals are being lost to malnutrition and other human-caused mortality.”
Do we need to take action on whales? Yes, we do.
Add to this the harm from shipping traffic in the Salish Sea. A few weeks ago, the Gabriolans Against Freighter Anchorages Society, GAFA, hosted a screening of the film Sonic Sea. It was devastating. I had no idea the impact of shipping noise on whales' ability to communicate with each other, to stay together as a pod, to mate, to keep united with their calves, and to be able to echolocate to find the fish they need to eat. Seismic testing for oil and gas and sonar from navy ships are thought to be responsible for some of the mass beachings of whales, an unexplained phenomenon up to this point.
This movie was made by the National Resources Defense Council and can be seen at www.sonicsea.org. I encourage anybody who is in a decision-making position or who is reliant on the sea, as we all are, to watch that movie. It changed my view.
The whales are in trouble already. Misty MacDuffee of the Raincoast Conservation Foundation was quoted in The Guardian in November 2016, saying, “You can visibly actually see the ribs on some of these whales.” They are in trouble.
Add to that a sevenfold increase in oil tanker traffic in the Salish Sea. After the Harper Conservatives gutted and undermined the legislation, the National Energy Board heard evidence that deafening noise from increased tanker traffic in the Salish Sea would place orcas at a high risk of population decline. Increased noise was expected to decrease the ability of killer whales to communicate, to acquire food, and to survive. This would prevent the population from growing and increase its likelihood of extinction.
In its report, the NEB states that the operation of marine vessels related to the pipeline project would likely result in significant adverse effects to the southern resident killer whale and to indigenous cultural uses associated with this marine mammal.
This is another element of the flawed review by the National Energy Board. It made an eleventh-hour decision to arbitrarily truncate the Trans Mountain project at tidewater in Burnaby, the end of the pipeline, inexplicably excluding impacts to killer whales from the environmental assessment. As a result of the Prime Minister having broken his promise to redo the review on the Kinder Morgan pipeline, the Liberal government approved the Kinder Morgan pipeline knowing that the project could wipe out these iconic orcas.
They are not just iconic to us. They are a SARA-listed species. They have been listed as endangered, and the federal law on this is extremely clear. It is the federal government's responsibility to protect the habitat and the animal. Extinctions are not allowed legally to happen under a government's watch, and yet the Liberals approved this pipeline, knowing it was the one impact identified by the National Energy Board as being inevitable and irremediable. That is a quote from the report. Still, the Prime Minister broke his word and approved the pipeline.
The federal government is being taken to court on this. One of the many court cases that remain against the Kinder Morgan pipeline is about the violation of Canada's Species at Risk Act. Ecojustice lawyers, on behalf of the Raincoast Conservation Foundation and Living Oceans Society, contend that the federal government violated the law when it relied on the National Energy Board report. They say the NEB used an overly narrow interpretation of the law to avoid addressing the harm caused to endangered southern resident killer whales and their critical habitat, yet the Liberals bought the pipeline.
The Liberals just keep digging deeper on the violation of their most serious responsibilities to whales and to the Salish Sea. They say they make their decisions based on science and evidence. The science and evidence say that the impacts on orcas are irremediable. They say that all cabinet decisions go through a sustainability screen, yet they say, “The pipeline will be built.” Now the Prime Minister is going to be fighting first nations and science in court as the defendant.
There is another failure of the government to act and protect the southern resident killer whales. They were designated as endangered over a decade ago, yet neither the Conservatives nor the Liberals have produced the recovery strategy required by law. The Georgia Strait Alliance, which is in my riding of Nanaimo—Ladysmith, and many non-governmental organizations have been pleading for an action plan, and so have many constituents in my riding. I have had hundreds, probably 300 emails on exactly this narrow point, that the emergency order the State of Washington has put in place needs to be enacted by our government. Those from Colleen Alexander and Kay Morisset are both examples of very powerful letters calling for an emergency order, and saying again that time is running out on this.
Just a couple of weeks ago, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans curtailed the chinook fishery to spare salmon for the orcas. That is a good move. I really wish it had been done two and a half years ago, as soon as the Liberals took power, because that would have saved some orca calves. I also hear chinook fishermen ask why they are the ones taking the hit. They find it hypocritical that the government has approved and in fact invested in a 50-year-old bitumen pipeline that will threaten the whales in the Salish Sea, yet it is the chinook fishermen who are taking the hit by having to cut back.
I am going to vote yes to Motion No. 154, which we are debating today, because I love whales, and the more study we have the better. The more we can be a voice for these unique and iconic mammals that have no voice in this Parliament, and the more we can talk about them, the better.
Overall, the situation is critical. This is an emergency, and real actions can be taken right now, not a future strategy or study. Action is needed now to prevent extinction. A Hill Times headline just a couple of months ago stated, “Research and technology won't feed starving southern resident orcas”, yet the motion before us is to study, not to act. To me, it feels like too little, too late, given the emergency orcas face.
The government amendment to the member's motion that is before us pushes the timeline further back and specifically says to find a balance between competing claims. I do not accept that. Our responsibility is to protect the species and the habitat. We can take input, of course, from those who would be most affected, but it is not a trade-off we are looking for the government to make. I urge the government and all parliamentarians to please act now to protect the southern resident orca whale.