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VANCOUVER — When Fisheries and Oceans Minister Loyola Hearn met “Mr. Stinky” after a news conference Tuesday at which he announced $42-million in new environmental funding to protect marine ecosystems, he didn't hold his nose or make a face.
Instead Mr. Hearn seemed genuinely impressed with the knee-high stack of delicately interlaced tubes of silica, a type of glass sponge known formally as a Finger Goblet sponge, which has a colourful nickname because of its pungent, rotten seaweed aroma.
“It's kinda neat,” Mr. Hearn said with a smile as he examined the sponge, a tiny fragment of a reef, which was placed on a table at the back of the room by the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society to draw attention to an environmental campaign to establish more marine protected areas off the British Columbia coast.
Mr. Hearn, who moments earlier had more than tripled the federal spending commitment for ocean projects – bringing it to $61.5-million – said six new marine protected areas will be established over the next five years, on all three coasts.
But he declined to be specific about which “special areas” will be set aside in the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic, saying more research is needed first, as DFO develops a plan “to advance the health of Canada's three oceans.”
Mr. Hearn said the government isn't going to designate marine protected areas simply by drawing a circle on a map, but rather will use careful research to decide what needs to be saved and which areas can be left open to resource use.
“It's not something that's being done to stymie development … You do it because you have a reason to do it,” he said of establishing marine protected areas.
“Can we fish in an area that doesn't destroy this?” he asked, referring to the glass sponge, which was taken from one of about a dozen reefs recently identified on the West Coast. “Yes, absolutely.”
But Sabine Jessen, national manager of CPAWS, pressed Mr. Hearn for prompt action on protecting B.C.'s rare glass sponge reefs, which grow up to 25 metres high and are thought to be 9,000 years old, saying some have already been damaged by bottom-trawl fisheries.
She praised the government for putting more money into programs to protect ocean health, but said faster action is needed because Canada ranks 70th in the world when it comes to establishing marine protected areas.
“I think we need to do a lot more than that,” she said of Mr. Hearn's announced spending increases and promise of action.
Canada currently has six marine protected areas. The first, protecting deep ocean hydrothermal vents off Vancouver Island, was established in 2003; the latest, established last March, protects the Musquash Estuary in New Brunswick.
Ms. Jessen said a lot of research has already been done and some special places – such as the Pacific's glass sponge reefs and the Arctic's whale-breeding grounds in Lancaster Sound – should be set aside immediately.
Mr. Hearn said the new funding will advance 22 different initiatives that are designed to protect the health of Canada's oceans.
Among the initiatives are plans to: establish a federal network of marine protected areas; open four new centres of ocean expertise; establish a conservation strategy for coral reefs in Newfoundland and Labrador; improve oil-spill response capacity in the Arctic; develop trans-boundary programs in the Bay of Fundy and Gulf of Maine and protect sea-bird foraging areas around the Scott Islands, some of the most important nesting grounds on the West Coast.
