Biologist slams UCP handling of fish and wildlife resources
By Al Beeber - Lethbridge Herald on April 11, 2023.
LETHBRIDGE HERALDabeeber@lethbridgeherald.com Fish and wildlife protections in Alberta have been gutted by the UCP government, says a biologist who spoke Thursday at the Southern Alberta Council on Public Affairs.Lorne Fitch is a retired Fish and Wildlife biologist with the province, a former adjunct professor with the University of Calgary and a regular contributor of opinion pieces to the Lethbridge Herald comment page.
Fitch gave SACPA attendees at the Lethbridge Senior Citizens Organization a scathing talk on the status of protections for fish and wildlife under the present government.
Fitch spoke about the history of fish and wildlife protection in Alberta from the 1930s to 1959 when the Fish and Wildlife department was created from various branches.
He said the Alberta has followed the North American model of conservation where wildlife resources are conserved and held in trust for all citizens.
“This was a legacy from our European ancestors who immigrated here and didn’t want wildlife owned by royalty or by the rich. The Natural Resources Transfer Act of 1939 confirmed responsibility for fish and wildlife resources to the province,” he said.
Provincial management had its roots in the transfer from Ottawa and dedicated departments oversaw that responsibility.
Fish and Wildlife was the agency that inventoried and assessed fish and wildlife populations, he said, and allocated opportunity for hunting and fishing, determined species at risk and their recovery, ran fish hatcheries, provided hunter training and conservation education, enforced rules, engaged in habitat restoration and improvement and most importantly, provided advice on proposed land use to “ensure that populations of fish and wildlife were conserved,” said Fitch.
With the institution of that division, it changed from being “game” management to “wildlife” management to the fullest extent of that definition, he said.
Fitch said people could be fooled into believing those resources are still being managed with the public in mind.
“As hard as you search today, you will not easily find the fragments of the old Fish and Wildlife division. It will not exist under any recognizable name or department,” Fitch said.
Fitch was part of the division ‘before the hemorrhaging began when it was still one of the elite Fish and Wildlife agencies in North America,” he said.
Fitch said fish and wildlife are important for the heritage value, being remaining symbols of “a heritage that each Albertan should carve a place for in our collective psyches.”
The province has legal responsibilities as signatories to provincial and federal conventions on diversity and maintenance and obligations under aboriginal treaties, Fitch said.
“Wildlife are indicators, they are sentinels, they are report cards,” he said. The presence and abundance of native trout, he said as an example, signals a high degree of watershed health, calling it the gold seal of water quality.
“Declines in populations are a distant early warning signal about the intensity, frequency, type and accumulative impact of land use activities,” he said.
Fish and wildlife provide recreation, economic advantages and tourism with about 328,000 licensed anglers and 128,000 hunters in Alberta with both generating $264 million in economic impact in 2008, he said.
Bird identification guides outsell Bibles, he said, which indicates how popular wildlife is.
He said there exists a responsibility and moral obligation to protect resources, which is not about saving the resource such as bull trout, but about saving us.
Fitch said the UCP “has been stealthily engaged in the final gutting of what was the Fish and Wildlife division. Fish and wildlife allocation has been hived off to Forestry, Parks and Tourism under the auspices of a minister who coincidentally is one of the largest guiding and outfitting companies in Alberta. I’m sure this isn’t a conflict of interest,” he said facetiously.
The Minister “has called it a hunting and fishing branch,” which takes it back to the old game branch that existed for a long period of time,” he said.
Fish hatcheries have been sent to Agriculture and Irrigation. Previous Conservative governments transferred enforcement to the Solicitor General’s department, which based on UCP promises to reduce crime, leaves Fish and Wildlife officers being treated more like “county cops, diminishing their roles in fish and wildlife work, including problem wildlife,” Fitch said.
Habitat protection responsibilities related to energy development have been handed to other departments, he said.
Forest companies, especially those with forest management agreements, are expected to concern themselves with habitat protection and maintenance “with no oversight mechanisms,” said Fitch.
“In my experience, self-regulation runs second to self-interest. Much of the fish and wildlife inventory and habitat development function went to non-government” agencies he said, and resource education was privatized under the Alberta Hunter Education Instructors Association.”
The Alberta Professional Outfitters Society, a commercial enterprise of which the Minister of Forestry is a part, said Fitch, was recently given the funding achieved through an annual auction of hunting privileges for two Bighorn sheep, two elk, two moose, two mule deer, two antelope and two turkeys. Those funds used to be dispersed by the Alberta Fish and Game Association through a series of grants to applicants for research and management actions and now “it’s unclear how the Alberta Professional Outfitters Society will handle these funds” and how it will benefit fish and wildlife for the public, he said.
That society has also successfully lobbied to allow successful bidders on those ministerial hunts to hunt year-round for those species, Fitch said.
“This may be legal but it’s hardly ethical.”
He added the outfitters society has also been “intimately involved with mule deer management recommendations, many of which are in conflict with the need to control chronic wasting disease sweeping across the province,” Fitch said.
The disease was “bequeathed to us by the actions of Alberta Agriculture and private interests in an ill-fated attempt at economic diversification. Elk ranching and the importation of infected animals into the province started a tsunami of fatal infections of chronic wasting disease in wild ungulates, especially mule deer that now has spread nearly across the province,” Fitch added, also mentioning wild boars which are now a problem with escaped boars inter-breeding with domestic pigs and “creating a scourge that is very difficult to control.”
“For fish and wildlife to be managed well, there needs to be an adequate and timely inventory of populations, an assessment of what the allocation should be to hunting and fishing interests, ways to monitor population responses to that harvest, robust habitat protection, policy development to ensure bio-diversity is always part of government agendas, responses to the legal and moral requirements for species at risk with necessary recovery actions, provision of additional recreational angling opportunities through fish hatchery operations, a level of enforcement to ensure rules are followed. And keep in mind these functions are not divisible, they hinge upon one another and can only work as a unified whole,” the biologist said.
“The core functions of fish and wildlife management, species management, protection and recovery actions are not standalone items. Each of them work as a unified whole to ensure Albertans have access to the resource through allocations for consumption and non-consumptive uses, that we meet our legal obligations for species protection and that these broad policy objectives are conveyed through government in terms of advice on land and water use decisions.
“Allocation, the consumptive utilization of resources, is not a distinct function independent of managing fish and wildlife resources,” Fitch added.
Amateurs in fish and wildlife management include politicians – even departmental ministers in charge of management, who “overlook, ignore or dismiss the academic training and expertise and decades of experience of biologists,” Fitch said.
“More remarkably they have done this without the use of aerial surveys, electri-fishing, standard survey protocols, habitat evaluations, water quality sampling, radio collaring and tracking, DNA analysis, modelling, statistical analysis and all the other tools of science.” Follow @albeebHerald on Twitter 4
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