Budget cuts have left the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada struggling to do its job even as the number of species at risk of extinction in the country steadily climbs.
The Tyee has learned that the committee of scientists is so strapped for funding that it was forced to cancel its biannual meeting last month to assess species as threatened or endangered — the first step for struggling wildlife to get help.
Dozens of imperilled species that the committee planned to examine in May — including pale evening primrose, a fragrant B.C. wildflower that feeds bees and butterflies — will now remain in a growing backlog of more than 1,000 at-risk species waiting for an assessment.
That backlog also includes more than 50 bird species that might become extinct or endangered before scientists can assess them, wildlife committee chair David Lee told a Senate committee in February.
Species can receive legal protection and a recovery plan only once they’ve been assessed and the federal cabinet approves.
The wildlife committee’s funding constraints have caught the attention of the Standing Senate Committee on Energy, the Environment and Natural Resources.
On May 25, the Senate committee wrote to federal Minister of the Environment, Climate Change and Nature Julie Dabrusin, expressing “serious concerns” about the “insufficient resources” the government has allocated for wildlife assessments, which are mandated by the Species at Risk Act.
Resources are ‘completely inadequate’
The letter follows testimony to the Senate committee from Jerry DeMarco, Canada’s commissioner of the environment and sustainable development, who told senators that resources for assessing species at risk of extinction don’t fit the scale of the problem.
“It is like providing a fire department with garden hoses for three-alarm fires; it is just completely inadequate,” DeMarco testified in late March.
He said it is “disappointing” that Canada would pass the Species at Risk Act and then fail to put in the necessary resources for the “crucial first step” in listing species under the act.
“It is cheaper in the long run to protect them and identify them before they get too endangered or their populations diminish,” he said.
The Senate committee was looking into a 2024 report from Canada’s auditor general that found the government is not meeting its obligations to provide adequate support to the endangered wildlife committee.
The report noted that at current rates it would take the wildlife committee more than a century to assess all the species on its list.
Testifying before the Senate committee in February, Lee, the chair of the endangered wildlife committee, told senators that the committee’s budget was cut from $1.8 million in 2023-24 to $1.6 million the following year, despite inflationary pressures.
The 50 members and more than 125 species specialist subcommittee experts associated with the wildlife committee are compensated for time for meetings and reviewing documents, but “almost all of us provide voluntary time,” Lee said. That in-kind support is estimated at between $10 million and $12 million annually, Lee added.
Lee said the committee has taken measures to reduce costs over the past three years, but those efforts remain insufficient to address the challenges highlighted in the auditor general’s report.
Doubling the budget would allow a 33 per cent increase in assessments each year, Lee said.
‘Only one species takes part in elections’
Endangered wildlife committee member Christina Davy, who also testified to the Senate committee, told The Tyee that while many meetings can be held virtually, the assessment meetings — which normally take a week — can’t be held online. Davy is a research scientist and associate professor in the biology department at Carleton University.
The committee did shift to online meetings in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, “but the speed of that work and the quality of the discussions was really affected,” Davy said.
“When the funding gets cut at the same time as travel costs are increasing, we’re no longer able to meet because there simply isn’t enough funding to get everybody into one place at the same time,” Davy added.
She also said several species subcommittees, which make recommendations to the broader committee, were unable to meet last year due to funding constraints.
Even though Canada is home to more than 5,000 wild species at some risk of extinction, Davy said some groups of species don’t receive assessments because there are no subcommittees to review them.
There’s no subcommittee for marine arthropods, for example, so crabs and lobsters aren’t assessed. There’s also no subcommittee to assess sea stars, which are known to be at risk of extinction due to sea star wasting disease . Nor is there a subcommittee for fungi, so they don’t get assessed either.
“There are lots of species that we are responsible for already that we can’t get to, but then there’s also t…
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