A pod of beluga whales swims in Darnley Bay in the Beaufort Sea. A Marine Protected Area has been designated for parts of the bay, offshore from Paulatuk, N.W.T. Laura Morse/THE CANADIAN PRESS

The oceans that surround Canada on three coasts are under considerable pressure from a range of human-driven stressors. But measures in place to protect and de-stress them are a weak patchwork.

The consensus is that by prohibiting some of the main culprits, such as commercial fishing and oil drilling, within their boundaries, designated marine protected areas (MPAs) go a long way to relieving the stress seas are under.

“But right now our MPA laws are like baby Aspirin,” says Linda Nowlan, who heads the marine program at West Coast Environmental Law.

“What we need is a heavy duty Advil.”

That was her message to the National Advisory Panel on Marine Protected Area Standards Friday during the first of three days of consultations in Ottawa.

She said Fisheries Minister Dominic LeBlanc has stood in the House of Commons and spoken about enshrining a “floor of basic protections” in MPA law.

“As you can imagine, lawyers like standards,” Nowlan said. “The best are the kind that are set in law — not guidelines. We currently do not have that floor of standards. We have inconsistencies between Canada’s three main MPA laws — quite significant inconsistencies.”

The same is true of governance standards, which she said are also weak, and “in many cases, non-existent and discretionary.”

Right now in Canada, each MPA has its own regulations about what is permitted within its boundaries. There are no standard prohibitions on extraction activities, including seabed mining and seismic testing.

On the East Coast, for instance, oil and gas exploration is not prohibited within the proposed MPA in the Laurentian Channel.

Of all the legislation in Canada that MPAs fall under, the flagship Oceans Act has no outright prohibition on extractive activities, the Canada Wildlife Act doesn’t address it head on and the Canada National Parks Act only says that permitted activities must not threaten the ecological activity of the protected area.

Nowlan noted that even when there are prohibitions in place, there are lists of exemptions to them.

While all have a role in managing MPAs, only the Canada National Marine Conservation Areas Act has an expressed prohibition on oil and mineral exploration and exploitation.

“That’s a basic floor of protection that should be in all of Canada’s marine protected area laws,” Nowlan said.

“Most people take it for granted that you wouldn’t have oil and gas in an MPA. (But) I’ve heard our prime minister express surprise that it would take place.”

She noted it’s the norm in other jurisdictions. Mexico has banned oil and gas exploration in all MPAs, while Belize banned all oil and gas activity from its waters in 2017. In the United States, many national marine sanctuaries also ban oil and gas extraction.

Then there’s commercial fishing. In Hawaii, the U.S.’s largest protected area prohibits it outright, although subsistence fishing is allowed. Palau and the Cook Islands also have complete no-take zones in their protected areas.

“In Canada we really don’t have too many (no-take areas),” Nowlan said. “The ocean is viewed as this limitless source of supplies for humans. We want to have healthy seafood. We want to protect our fish. One of the ways to do that is to have no-take zones in MPAs.”

She said part of the problem is the different mentality that exists when it comes to how things are done in the ocean.

“In the water, we seem to assume that certain activities will go on and on. When we create a park on land, we assume the opposite: there won’t be oil and gas, there won’t be mining and there won’t be cutting.”

Anna Metaxas, an oceanographer from Dalhousie University, said no-take zones are critical for Canada’s MPAs.

“There is strong scientific evidence that full protection works much, much, much better than partial protection in achieving conservation goals,” she said. “Which means that our MPAs have to have a chunk of space where no body goes in there and takes anything.”

When asked by a panel member about claims from the oil and gas industry at previous hearings that there is no environmental impact from drilling, she quipped, “The Deepwater Horizon was also supposed to be extremely safe.”

“There’s so much ocean out there, why do we need to be in that 10 per cent? Why take the risk? I don’t see why. There’s a lot of ocean they can extract all they want from.”

The 10 per cent is the amount of ocean Canada has committed to protecting by 2020 as part of the Convention on Biological Diversity. Last year it met the goal of five per cent protected by 2017.

Paul Crowley, WWF Canada’s vice-president, Arctic, said when drafting standards and deciding what is to be permitted and prohibited, what should be top of mind is the ultimate goal of the MPA, which is conservation and protecting biodiversity

“The most effective MPAs are those off limits to extractive and industrial activities,” he said.

Tasked with creating standards, the panel is drawing on guidelines created by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature as a baseline.

Crowley said the IUCN clearly states that oil exploration, seabed mining and industrial fishing “are not compatible with conservation.”

“As a minimum standard we agree that these activities should be excluded from all zones of MPA.”

He said the evidence shows that’s what works, and referred to a study of 982 sites in 87 MPAs in 40 countries which showed that conservation benefits increased exponentially when no-take MPAs were well-enforced, in place for more than 10 years and larger than 100 sq. km.

To that end, Metaxas called for investment to be able to capture baseline data to gauge levels of biodiversity and monitor MPAs to determine if they’re meeting the conservation goals they were created for. She noted DFO is already stretched to the hilt, so support is needed, particularly given that monitoring an MPA can cost $20,000 to $40,000 a day on a department ship.

“Unless you know what was there before you started, how do you know if you’re doing okay? Are things increasing? Decreasing?”

As for standards and what should be permitted, Bruce Chapman of the Groundfish Enterprise Allocation Council doesn’t think things need to be completely black and white. For instance, he said if the purpose of an MPA is to protect corals and sponges, certain fishing activities that don’t involve bottom trawling wouldn’t pose a risk to that — so a complete no-take zone would be unnecessary.

“We are strong supporters of marine conservation. This can require area closures that we support. But any expectation that area closures will rebuild fish stocks in open shelf closed areas is without merit,” he said, noting permanent spatial closures is not the ideal tool to protect stocks.

He also said the IUCN guidelines are generic and rigid.

“We don’t think they should be used to dictate how we should go about designing our system in Canada. I think we would look at deep sea standards differently than we would open shelf areas.”

Paul Lansbergen, president of the Fisheries Council of Canada also called for a flexible conservation approach based on each situation.

“We need to select the right tool for the job,” he said. “If we cast the net wider than necessary we are potentially forgoing economic activity that could benefit our coastal communities. It has to be recognized that MPAs have a profound effect on commercial fisheries. We can’t always just fish elsewhere.”

The panel is expected to make recommendations in a final report by mid-September.

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