Two months before the end of the year, the Government of Canada announced it had hit an ambitious environmental target for 2017.

“Five percent of Canadian oceans are now protected!” the Department of Fisheries and Oceans tweeted in October, along with a picture of a pristine coast. On Thursday, DFO boosted that total even higher, announcing it had achieved 7.75 per cent.

Protecting that much ocean would be an incredible leap. At the end of 2016, Canada had set aside less than one per cent. Carving out conservation areas is difficult and slow, yet Ottawa managed to bump its total by nearly seven per cent in just a year.

Or did it? Here’s how Ottawa did the math.

The goal

Canada has pledged to protect at least 10 per cent of its marine and coastal areas by 2020 and 17 per cent of its land. This goal is known as an “Aichi Target,” part of Canada’s commitment to a major international treaty known as the Convention on Biological Diversity.

Justin Trudeau affirmed his party’s dedication to that goal in the 2015 election that made him prime minister. As the Liberal platform noted, under Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, Canada made almost no progress toward the target. Just 0.96 per cent of oceans and 10.5 per cent of lands were protected at the end of 2016, making Canada a major laggard. The U.S., Australia, and Mexico have protected more of their seas, despite Canada having the longest coastline in the world.

The Liberals laid out a new promise: an interim goal of protecting five per cent of the country’s oceans by 2017. In October, the federal government announced it had achieved and even surpassed that, hitting 5.22 per cent. On Thursday, Fisheries Minister Dominic LeBlanc announced seven new “marine refuges” that add another 2.53 per cent.

Conservation NGOs are more circumspect.

“I think they’re close, and I think their intentions (are good),” says Sabine Jessen, national director of the oceans program for the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society. CPAWS is doing its own accounting of that figure. But “until we do the detailed analysis, I don’t think so. Where they’re at right now, I do think there are some questionable things that need improvement.”

Marine protected areas

The government created three new Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) since November 2016: St. Anns Bank, in Nova Scotia; The Hecate Strait and Queen Charlotte Sound Glass Sponge Reefs, in B.C.; and Anguniaqvia niqiqyuam, in Northwest Territories. MPAs are legally protected under the Oceans Act — one of the government’s primary conservation tools.

All three sites are ecologically rich. “We feel that they are very worthy of MPA designation,” says Sigrid Kuehnemund, WWF Canada’s vice-president of oceans. British Columbia’s new MPA, for example, protects the province’s 9,000-year-old reefs of delicate glass sponges, which are found almost nowhere else in the world and support a huge variety of ocean life.

The three MPAs together add up to just 0.16 per cent of the target. And while conservation NGOs celebrated these three new areas, they say that MPAs are a legislative tool that need sharpening. The law doesn’t set out minimum protection standards, so environmental groups find themselves arguing to exclude disruptive activities like drilling and bottom-trawling in each new proposed area.

Initially, the glass sponge reef MPA in B.C. did not exclude bottom-contact trawl fishing from an “adaptive management” zone around the reefs, even though damage from fishing gear and churned-up sediment are significant risks to glass sponges. Protections were strengthened after public and scientists’ feedback. The water column above the reefs is still open to fishing activities. In June, scientists and environmentalists were outraged after discovering that a proposed new MPA in the Laurentian Channel would permit oil and gas exploration and extraction.

The glass sponge reef MPA is “not perfect, but it does do a pretty solid job,” says Kuehnemund. “It often never goes as far as what NGOs or scientists would like, and probably too far for certain industry groups. That is, I guess, the reality of designating sites.”

Even when MPAs result in robust protection for the ecosystem, it takes an average of seven years to create one. LeBlanc introduced an amendment to the Oceans Act in June that would freeze industrial activity at current levels during that long process, so that proposed MPAs can benefit from legal protections earlier in the process. He also committed to creating an advisory panel to provide advice on minimum protection standards within future MPAs.

Tallurutiup Imanga

A full 1.9 per cent of the target is checked off by a massive new protected area in the Arctic waters north of Baffin Island. The Inuit call these seas Tallurutiup Imanga. The English called it Lancaster Sound.

Tallurutiup Imanga would be a National Marine Conservation Area (NMCA) rather than an MPA, a designation with stronger legal protections and a system managed by Parks Canada rather than DFO. It would cover 109,000 square kilometres, nearly 18 times more than Canada’s largest MPA. It is a critical habitat for polar bears, narwhals, and belugas.

The Government of Canada, the Qikiqtani Inuit Association, and the Government of Nunavut announced proposed boundaries for Tallurutiup Imanga earlier this year.

But it won’t become an official NMCA until after an Inuit impact and benefit agreement is established, a legally required negotiation. Again, conservationists are supportive of the proposed NMCA, but have questions about the government’s accounting.

“I don’t think in the NGO community we would say that that’s ready to be counted,” says Jessen, of CPAWS.

She said she doesn’t think the Inuit would say it’s ready, either — the Inuit impact-benefit agreement is an important step that includes management practices.

“It feels to me that that one is incomplete.”

OEABCMs

Another big chunk of the total, 4.78 per cent, comes from a source with an unwieldy acronym: “Other Effective Area-based Conservation Measures,” or OEABCMs. Thursday’s announcement more than doubled the amount of Canada’s protected ocean areas that fall into this category.

OEABCMs are exactly what they sound like: areas that effectively protect biodiversity but don’t fall under normal legal labels. They were initially introduced as a way to recognize Indigenous territory, privately protected lands, and other regions that meet or exceed conservation goals but aren’t formally recognized.

But critics worry that OEABCMs will degrade conservation standards, allowing countries to hit their Aichi Targets artificially, with quantity over quality. And unfortunately, international guidelines for what qualifies as a legitimately protective OEABCM are still pending.

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Canada, eager to hit its interim target by the end of this year, has been an active participant in discussions over what should count. DFO has developed its own guidelines in the meantime.

“With the combination of the desire to be science-based and transparent, we embarked on a very rigorous process in terms of proposing these criteria,” says Jeff MacDonald, DFO’s director general of oceans management.

Canada’s OEABCMs are all fisheries closures. Many of the sites have legitimate conservation value, conservationists say, but some are questionable.

A handful on the east coast are previously shuttered lobster fisheries, ones with stated conservation objectives like “to increase lobster spawning and egg production.” Lobsters are not threatened, and protected areas are supposed to focus on benefits to ecosystems, not single species.

The government calls these areas “marine refuges.”

“I think calling these marine refuges is perhaps overstating what we get in many cases,” says Jessen.

MacDonald disagrees: protecting the productivity of an area, including lobster stocks, is a completely legitimate goal, he says. He noted that of Canada’s more than 1,000 closed fishing areas, only 30 met DFO’s criteria. He believes Canada’s guidelines are pretty close to what is being developed internationally. “We think that the ones we’ve put forward do meet the test.”

Parks

The last chunk of the target, 0.76 per cent, is achieved through “all other” federal and provincial areas — a smorgasbord of seascapes attached to national and provincial parks, migratory bird sanctuaries, and other areas recognized in some official capacity. Again, the conservation value of these sites is mixed, observers say.

In a recent analysis, CPAWS couldn’t find management plans for any marine areas included in national parks — a basic component of any legally protected area. Provinces only have jurisdiction over the seabed in “inland waters” like straits, bays and inlets; anything in the water column is federal jurisdiction. So many protection measures are beyond provinces’ control: they can’t limit fishing practices, for example.

NGOs like WWF Canada are still researching these sites, and hope they will be considered as part of larger MPA networks that are currently being developed. But for the time being, it’s hard to assess how much of them should count toward targets.

“How those areas are protected, from my perspective, is questionable,” says Kuehnemund.

MacDonald says that in many cases the federal governments collaborates with the provinces to manage these areas, but that the point is warranted: “How do you manage it once you’ve established it? (This) is something that Canada is grappling with, but it’s not Canada alone that’s in that circumstance.”

2018 and beyond

In its own online promise-tracker, the government checked off its goal of five per cent by 2017 and says it is “on track” to achieve 10 per cent by 2020. Trudeau has also said that Canada will aim beyond 10 per cent.

“The mandate commitment was very strong. It’s the first time that a government has been so public, transparent and committed to marine conservation,” says MacDonald.

Conservation groups are loath to pooh-pooh the government’s progress: they say there has been more progress on ocean conservation in the last year than in the previous 20-plus years. But even if the public accepts that the five per cent goal was met, hitting 10 per cent and beyond will be much tougher, they say. Many of Canada’s new protected areas have been in the legislative hopper for years or decades.

“It’s a really exciting time in Canada at the moment with the movement to reach the marine conservation targets,” says Kuehnemund. But there is still a lot of work to be done, she adds.

“We need to ensure the momentum continues,” she says, and that for “every site that is to be counted toward the targets, that there is a consideration of the quality of that site, and not just the quantity — a numbers game to reach the percentage target.”