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Opinion: It beggars belief that a government would ever consider undoing a law as popular as B.C.’s ban on grizzly hunting — 77 per cent of British Columbians want it made permanent.
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It’s been just over a year since David Eby became premier of B.C., long enough for me to conclude that the environment is not one of his priorities.
Until last week’s welcome deal with Ottawa to protect 30 percent of B.C. land by 2030, it’s been pretty much business as usual where the environment is concerned, with the emphasis, typically, on business.
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Barring one mysterious exception: grizzly bears. Months ago, the Environment Ministry began working on what it called a “grizzly bear stewardship framework” whose goal was to improve conservation efforts and fill “knowledge gaps” where grizzlies are concerned. Why grizzlies and why now? Your guess is as good as mine, but at first glance it sounded positive.
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Granted, it’s not as if grizzlies are the only wild creature in B.C. under threat of … well, modernity, but they are a keystone species, meaning if they’re in trouble, a lot of lesser animals are, too.
Central to this effort was a detailed questionnaire that anyone was allowed to answer, but it’s a pretty safe bet that only people with a particular interest in grizzlies — scientists, animal-welfare groups, hunters and guide outfitters — did. As someone who filled in the questionnaire myself, it’s no exaggeration to say that to make sense of it, you had to know your stuff and know it well. A lay person would have been lost.
Which, I have to admit, only added to my suspicions. According to the ministry, its aims were fourfold: 1) to educate the public about grizzlies, 2) invite public feedback on the framework, 3) identify deficiencies in the framework, and 4) gauge what really matters to British Columbians when it comes to grizzlies.
Again, all that sounds good, but just after the deadline for completing the questionnaire passed, news emerged that a six-year study of B.C.’s Elk Valley near the Alberta and Montana borders showed it to have the highest mortality rate for young grizzlies in North America. Road and railway deaths are to blame.
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The study’s leader, UBC scientist Clayton Lamb, explained: “When you dig into it, and kind of understand the population dynamics, you realize that it’s not really working in this area for these bears.”
In other words, if the province was serious about improving grizzly management, wouldn’t Elk Valley be the ideal place to begin?
Apparently not. No action has been taken to address the situation there. Instead all we have is this questionnaire whose very existence poses the most perplexing question of all: What’s it really for? In a letter sent to the government by 55 scientists and conservation groups in mid-October, their guess coincided with mine: a camouflaged return to hunting.
For most of its 137-year history, colonial wildlife management in B.C. has been left in the trigger-happy hands of hunters and those sympathetic to hunting. Since they were deemed to be experts, it followed that they should run the show.
It wasn’t until environmentalists started poking their noses in places they weren’t welcome that things started to change. The wildlife branch office even suffered the indignity of being renamed the ecosystems branch. That must have hurt.
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But not as much as the NDP government’s 2017 ban on the trophy hunting of grizzlies, probably the most public piece of environmental legislation the party has ever enacted.
While it may have infuriated hunters, it delighted voters. According to a September poll done by Research Co., a whopping 84 per cent of British Columbians oppose sport hunting of grizzlies and 77 per cent want the ban made permanent.
So why does this so-called framework leave the door ajar to its return?
It never comes right out and says it would like to bring hunting back, but there are clues. For one, while the questionnaire does refer occasionally to the possibility of renewed hunting in some regions, it never speaks of a permanent ban.
It beggars belief that a government would ever consider undoing a law as popular as B.C.’s ban on grizzly hunting. But that popularity begs a confounding riddle: why isn’t the ban permanent? Seventy-seven per cent of British Columbians almost never agree on anything, but they agree on that.
Nicholas Read is the author of 13 books on animals and nature and a former Vancouver Sun reporter.
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