As we take a moment to celebrate this Canada Day, it’s easy to see why we are so fortunate if we happen to live here.  Our circumstances aren’t perfect – far from it – but we’ve achieved much, and I have every reason to believe that we can keep things moving in a positive direction.  When it comes to whales and dolphins living off our coasts, we in this country have every opportunity to make these waters a haven for them.  

There are issues we must address which are pressing and urgent.  Also one big structural problem that will take us years to unravel to get to eventual resolution.  Then there are the universal threats to cetaceans that we are every bit a part of, along with all other nations in the world.  We’ll get to some of that in a moment.

Big picture – our country has been undergoing a reckoning of sorts over the last handful of years.  We’ve learned that coming to terms with our history, including our colonialist past, is a road we necessarily must travel.  There are times when a good, hard, honest look in the mirror is called for.  It gives us a chance to reconcile our mistakes, and to form a vision of something better.  Something worth fighting for, and which we can all look forward to.   Our fate is in our own hands.  As Canadians, we’ll decide for ourselves what we want that to look like.

So how is Canada doing in its treatment of nonhuman species, generally speaking?  The Animal Protection Index, a useful, honest assessment courtesy of World Animal Protection, is a ranking of a number of countries according to their “legislation and policy commitments to protecting animals”.  Countries are scored from A (best) to G (needing the most improvement).  In time this will hopefully become a comprehensive list, but with just over 50 scored to date, we get a good sense of where we stand.  It may surprise Canadians that we are not among those countries who do the best.  Those are (in no order except alphabetically):  Austria, Denmark, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.  Doing the worst are: Algeria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Morocco, Myanmar, and Vietnam.

Canada rates a D.  That may come as a surprise to many of us, but should it?  

Here are some things we can and should be criticized for, and believe me, this is just a sampling:

1. Abysmal livestock transport laws that have fallen behind standards in the U.S. and E.U.  Add to that the recent proliferation of Ag Gag laws intended to punish whistleblowers who try to bring to light abuse on our farms and  throughout our meat supply chains.
2. A horrifically cruel seal hunt (which provides little to no economic benefit – not that it would be a justification).  It continues to be subsidized by Canadian tax payers, thus keeping alive an industry that otherwise would have probably ended by now.
3. We allow 40+ beluga whales and bottlenose dolphins to languish in deteriorating conditions in Canada’s last legal marine park permitted to hold cetaceans.  Kiska, another captive in that awful place, has been living in complete isolation from others of her kind for more than a decade.  She has many advocating on her behalf but, so far,  authorities just stand by and watch as her mental health deteriorates.

I could go on, but I think you see my point.  We’ve got a great deal of work to do right here at home.  For organizations like ours, who will continue to speak out on behalf of cetaceans worldwide, it’s important that we acknowledge where our own country is falling short, and to continue to work to address those failings.  When we at CCA write or speak about human actions harmful to cetaceans well outside our borders, it’s important that we critique Canada’s own far-from-flawless record in as balanced and fair a way as we can.  

Now to Canada’s whales and dolphins specifically.  Here is a good sampling of the issues that remain to be addressed.  Our hope is that within a decade or two Canadians will have reached resolution on most or all of them.  Organizations like ours will continue to do our daily work with that very goal in mind.

The plight of the Southern Resident Orcas places urgent and immediate demands on us.  Too few of the salmon they depend on is the essential problem we need to fix, but we also need to think long and hard about how much tanker and container-ship traffic we intend to run through their primary habitat.  Also, despite my being a big fan of whale-watching, I have to agree with Washington State’s decision to temporarily restrict access to the whales in order to let them feed undisturbed.  Some marine mammal experts have recommended this as well, and Canada should implement a similar policy.

At the opposite end of the country, many of our St. Lawrence belugas technically qualify as toxic waste.  Under Canadian law, a PCB level of 500 parts per million (ppm) will get you there, and some of these animals have been measured as high as 800 ppm.  Persistent chemicals that don’t break down easily accumulate in the sediment at the bottom of the river and along the shorelines where the belugas feed.  These in turn accumulate in the whale’s blubber.  Most of the world’s 70,000 beluga whales live in more northerly regions, but this population has found the cold water temperatures of the St Lawrence to their liking for the last 10,000 years.   Now, our chemical pollutants seriously threaten their continued existence.

Whales migrating along our coasts, such as the critically endangered North Atlantic right whales, need much better protections against boat collisions and  entanglement in ghost gear.  A bit over a year ago, when observers recognized that 12 of 17 deaths had occurred in Canadian waters, it prompted a group of Democratic senators to request a review of Canada’s conservation standards.  To be fair, this drew a cool reaction from American scientists working on the whales’ behalf, who didn’t see this adversarial approach as particularly helpful.  Nevertheless, there’s little doubt that we could be doing more.

The fact that Canada is one of only a couple of dozen nations who’ve signed on to the Global Ghost Gear Initiative (GGGI) is very much to our credit.

Next, we seriously need to do much better job with seafood labeling laws.  What we choose to consume that comes out of the sea can and does contribute to the deaths of tens of thousands of dolphins a year.  An irresponsible fishing industry simply designates them as ‘bycatch’ (essentially meaning the pointless death of non-target species).  This is a callous and offensive position for them to take.  It’s imperative that we require much higher levels of accountability. 

Then there is our toughest problem:  the slaughter of thousands of belugas, narwhales and others in Canada’s north.  While we spend a great deal of time attacking the drive hunts in places like the Faroe Islands and Taiji, Canada continues to be among the countries where the most cetaceans are killed every year. 

We’ve written about this in a previous blog (see June 5^th, 2021), and will do so again many times, but the essential problem is that this has to do with aboriginal subsistence hunting.  A commercial hunt is much easier to attack for its cruelty-for-profit, and raising public sentiment against it is relatively less challenging.  This issue, by contrast, will require Canada to address a very complex food scarcity issue in  our northern regions.  We’re also talking about indigenous rights within the entire context of our country’s ongoing reconciliation with its colonialist past. All of this makes resolution of this issue a daunting prospect.  All I know is that, given what we’ve learned about cetaceans’ cognitive capabilities, continuing to serve them up as dinner is not morally defensible long-term plan. 

Finally, I’d like to end on this – Canada’s last remaining captive cetaceans, living in deplorable conditions at Marineland, Niagara Falls.  Grandfathered under the legislation which ended the practice in 2019, these unfortunate few will be the last in this country.  But every day that they continue to languish in concrete tanks is another day that this grave injustice persists.  Kiska, dubbed the ‘world’s loneliest orca’, has not been in the company of another of her kind for over a decade.  Kindness, compassion – and justice – require that she, the dolphins and belugas still held at Marineland be moved to a sanctuary at the first opportunity.

Her suffering is so obvious, so visceral, it suggests that if we can’t even get this one right, it’s hard to be credible on any other issue.  Kiska, unlike the thousands who die via subsistence hunting or entanglement in discarded fishing nets, is just one individual.  But she is perhaps our most urgent cetacean-welfare priority.  

So that’s where we’re going, with our mission and with our vision.  Canada can be a safe haven for whales and dolphins.  Swimming safe and free in our waters.  With the legal standing that will eventually come about when we pass the Jane Goodall Bill.  Perhaps even with personhood rights one day.  It’s what we at CCA are working for, not just here in Canada, but everywhere.  We hope you share that vision. And wherever you happen to be in the world, Happy Canada Day!

For The Orca’s Voice, 

Anna, and the Canadian Cetacean Alliance team