Evaluating the Conservation Regime for Boreal Caribou in Alberta and Ontario, Canada

Abstract

The protection and recovery of species at risk is critical for remediating Canada’s biodiversity crisis. This thesis examines Canada’s legal and policy-based conservation regime as it applies to boreal caribou in Alberta and Ontario. Listed as threatened for decades, boreal caribou continue to experience population declines and habitat degradation despite their significant cultural importance and well-resourced conservation frameworks.

As these caribou reflect the overall health of Canada’s boreal landscapes, their precarious status raises broader questions about how federal and provincial conservation efforts perform within areas of natural resource development. This study uses a large-scale literature and policy analysis, a novel evaluation framework, and interviews with eNGO, academic, natural resource, and bureaucratic experts to answer the overarching question: Is Canada’s legislative, regulatory, and policy-based biodiversity conservation regime effectively protecting and recovering boreal caribou in Alberta and Ontario?

Findings illustrate how boreal caribou lose out within a complex ecosystem of social, economic, and political priorities. While research and planning for boreal caribou in Alberta and Ontario is relatively robust, tangible outcomes are inhibited by flawed laws and policies which falter upon implementation.

Conservation frameworks remain non-committal to habitat protection and disturbance thresholds, whilst being predicated upon uncertain habitat recovery. In Alberta, these challenges are exacerbated by highly subjective land use management, a reliance on intensive predator reduction programs, and severely fragmented caribou ranges. In Ontario, weakening protections are accelerating incoming declines and fragmentation across relatively intact distributions. Overall, this study diagnoses systemic barriers to effective boreal caribou conservation in the two provinces, identifies opportunities for further research, and contributes to the growing empirical evidence for necessary improvements to species at risk governance in Canada.