At its recent annual general meeting, the Alberta Forest Products Association (AFPA) announced that it wants the federal government to reform Canada’s Species at Risk Act (SARA) to allow for the logging of old growth forests, including critical habitat for at-risk woodland caribou.
Caribou herds need at least 65 percent of their range to be undisturbed to have a shot at survival. Currently, six of Alberta’s caribou ranges have less than 10 percent undisturbed habitat remaining, and some – like the Little Smoky Herd – have less than one percent remaining. Yet Alberta’s forestry industry wants to go into these ranges and cut down even more trees – and they’re using wildfires as cover.
For those who are not familiar with SARA, it’s a piece of federal legislation whose purpose is to prevent wildlife species from becoming extinct or extirpated, and to help in the recovery of extirpated, endangered, or threatened species. Woodland caribou were first listed as threatened under SARA back in 2003, but their decline goes back many decades, with little progress made on their recovery to date.
AFPA’s claim that SARA prohibits forestry is also just plain wrong. Under SARA, Alberta is responsible for implementing caribou ranges plans (also known as sub-regional plans) to meet the 65% undisturbed habitat target. To date, only two out of eleven plans have been completed, and neither of those plans place strict limits on forestry.
For example, the Bistcho Lake sub-regional plan, released back in April 2022, encompasses a large area in the northwest corner of the province and was created to support the conservation and recovery of caribou in the Bistcho range. The sub-regional plan is supposed to describe how woodland caribou, and its critical habitat will be “conserved, managed, and recovered,” but instead it actually permits new disturbances, such as potential new access roads and forestry cut blocks.
In addition, a 2024 Government of Alberta report on caribou recovery states that: “Over the period 2010 to 2023 the percentage of caribou range covered by footprint increased in all ranges, except for the A la Peche and Redrock-Prairie Creek summer ranges.” While that statement doesn’t necessarily mean that the increase in footprint is specifically from forestry, it does demonstrate how little SARA currently does to protect caribou habitat. It’s unclear what prohibitions AFPA is so upset about.
AFPA seems to be simultaneously: A) blaming wildfires on SARA, and B) weaponizing wildfire risk against already struggling caribou populations and their remaining critical habitat. This is yet another example of how corporations (and their lobby groups) will stop at nothing to convert all of Alberta’s natural beauty into shareholder profits, regardless of its impact on wildlife, ecosystems, Indigenous Peoples, and local communities.
Rather than weakening our already ineffective Species at Risk Act to the benefit of corporations, how about we nationalize the forestry industry, plan our forest harvest to meet the needs of ecosystems, and use the revenue to protect nature instead?
Phillip Meintzer is a conservation specialist with Alberta Wilderness Association.
