Federal environment minister pledges $7.5 million to protect habitat

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Steven Guilbeault, the federal minister of environment and climate change, was in Montreal on Monday to announce up to $7.5 million of new funding for projects to protect the habitat of species at risk across the country, including $1.5 million for 12 projects in Quebec.

“Nature is at the heart of our way of life and our main ally in the fight against climate change,” he told reporters at a news conference in La Fontaine Park. “Investing in nature also means investing in the fight against climate change because they are two sides of the same coin.”

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He noted that at COP 15, the international conference on biodiversity held in Montreal in December 2022, Canada and other countries committed to preserving at least 30 per cent of their waterways and lands by 2030. “We showed the world the important role Canada can play in reversing the current situation and restoring biodiversity on a global scale, and time is of the essence,” he said.

In recent months, he said, the federal government has announced new conservation projects representing more than a million square kilometres; “four times the size of Great Britain.” He claimed the Liberal government has undertaken “the largest conservation campaign in Canada’s history,” investing more than $5 billion in an effort to stop and reverse the loss of biodiversity and protect undeveloped lands and waters.

Among the 12 projects in Quebec that will receive funding over the next five years from the Habitat Stewardship Program for Species at Risk are: CIME, an ecological organization in Haut Richelieu that works to protect habitat on Mont St-Grégoire; the St. Lawrence Valley Natural History Society that works to reduce road kill of certain species in the Shawinigan River watershed, and Nature-Action Quebec Inc., which is working to expand protected habitat of endangered species and control invasive species in the Montérégie region.

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The Habitat Stewardship Program was established in 2000, and through it the federal government has invested more than $226 million in 3,800 programs since its inception.

No new monies were announced for projects on the Island of Montreal, but Guilbeault said the federal government is supporting Montreal in its efforts to create a large nature park in the west part of the island — the Parc de l’Ouest — and a green corridor in the east.

“We are not forgetting Montreal. You can count on me,” he said.

But environmental groups have been calling on the federal government to announce concrete action to protect the monarch butterfly and other at-risk and endangered species that rely on fields, forests and wetlands in 155 hectares of land owned by the transport ministry north of Trudeau International Airport, adjacent to the Montreal Technoparc lands.

These lands are zoned industrial, and as recently as the summer of 2022, ADM authorized destruction of milkweed plants — crucial to the monarch’s survival — in preparation for development of those lands.

Asked about the issue, Guilbeault said “they won’t be able to do that moving forward.”

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“We have signalled that in the coming months, the monarch butterfly will be included on Canada’s Endangered Species list, which means I have a legal obligation as minister of environment and climate change to protect their habitat on all federal lands.”

Once the listing is official, a spokesperson for the environment ministry explained, the government must develop a recovery strategy that identifies critical habitat of the monarch, and then the minister has six months to legally protect any unprotected critical habitat on federal lands.

The process takes time, but according to scientists, the monarch butterfly may be short on that commodity. Recent data released by the World Wildlife Fund indicated a drastic decline in monarchs over just one year.

Guilbeault said he has no power to act more quickly to stop development on lands owned by Transport Canada.

“There are no levers that I have specifically, other than where we find habitat for the monarch under what’s happening under the Species at Risk Act where the monarch will be listed soon.”

“We have to follow due process. A minister can’t wake up in the morning and say, ‘Oh I’m going to list the monarch butterfly.’ We have advisory committees of scientists. … Are there ways we can try and accelerate this? Maybe and certainly the commissioner to the environment said we need to do a better job and we are looking at ways of doing that. But there has to be a process, otherwise if it’s all arbitrary, what if the people who come next decide they aren’t interested?”

He noted that when the Liberals came into power federally in 2015, Canada was protecting less than one per cent of its coastline and oceans. “We are at almost 16 per cent now. We were less than 10 per cent for terrestrial protection. We are at 16 per cent and we will likely be around 20 per cent by the end of 2024. We are making huge strides, but we need to continue.”

mlalonde@postmedia.com

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