Time to finally protect caribou habitat
Help protect caribou in Ontario. Demand federal intervention!
The Ontario government can’t be trusted with preserving threatened boreal caribou. With only about 5,000 left in Ontario, caribou need your support in calling for federal intervention.
In April 2022, the federal and Ontario governments signed a boreal caribou conservation agreement. Yet Ontario continues to undermine habitat protection and restoration by:
- disregarding the need for cumulative effects planning in caribou zones, as habitat fragmentation from industrial resource-extraction activities drives population decline.
- exempting the forest industry from the prohibition against habitat destruction in the Endangered Species Act, essentially removing any regulatory requirement for the industry to prioritize recovery.
- aiming to almost double industrial logging in the province by 2030, as per Ontario’s Forest Sector Strategy.
Despite federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault’s recommendation to cabinet in March 2023 to intervene to protect habitat in the province, the potential of federal action has been postponed until April 2024. The public’s trust in Ontario’s ability to safeguard boreal caribou, and in the federal government to show leadership, has diminished. To ensure the species’ survival, federal intervention must be the next step.