Live Lightly in May - Make Every Day Earth Day!

Photo: tkeneipp

Today marks the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day. Why not celebrate by making these small changes every day for the month of May:

• Watch less TV
• Buy fewer things
• Eat more vegetables, grains, and fruits while eating less meat
• Take the stairs instead of the elevator
• Ride the bus or your bike to work or school
• Use less water in and around your home

Tells us about your act of green in the comments – and ask your friends and family what they’re doing!

Earth Day is also the first day of advanced voting for the federal election. As you go to the polls, choose the party that will protect and conserve nature on behalf of all Canadians. Not sure who to vote for? We’ve put together 7 Questions for your candidates and a list of 4 things the government must do to effectively protect nature.

Advanced voting takes place on Friday, April 22, Saturday, April 23 and Monday, April 25. Find your local advance polling stations here.

Tell Canada’s leaders where you stand – vote for nature in 2011!

Vote for Nature, part 5: Lead Canadian Conservation

Volunteers from the Canadian IBA Network raise awareness about shoreline habitat.

Conserving wildlife, wild spaces, and the environment is a big job. Fortunately there are many people helping. Aboriginal, provincial, and territorial governments, nonprofit organizations, local clubs, landowners, businesses, industries, and others are doing their part. For example, Nature Canada is part of the global BirdLife International network that implements the Important Bird Areas (IBA) program. There are over 600 IBAs in Canada in need of various kinds of stewardship. There are countless other programs that tackle individual conservation issues. What Canada needs is an ambitious national plan to support and coordinate these efforts. The federal government has its specific areas of responsibility but it also has another role as our national government. We turn to our federal government to lead and coordinate action across Canada to conserve and protect what we hold dear.

By working together we can be much more effective, here at home and beyond our borders. Consider for a moment that ninety percent of our birds migrate out of Canada every fall. We can’t conserve “our” birds unless we look beyond our borders to the places they go through and go to. These places are uniquely linked along “flyways”, the great migratory routes that birds follow up and down our continents. We need to collaborate with partners in the United States and throughout Latin America. We need a conservation plan for Canada that recognizes our international obligations.

Imagine what we could achieve if we were all working together to protect nature, for wildlife, for us to enjoy, and for future generations. The federal government can help make this happen by leading the development of an ambitious national conservation plan.

Ask your candidates:

What will you do to show national leadership and give Canada an ambitious vision and a plan to protect nature for all?


For more about the federal election visit our Vote for Nature page.

Vote for Nature, part 4: Prevent Environmental Disasters

We all know how horrible environmental disasters can be. Massive oil spills, mining waste accidents, ducks dying in oil sands tailings ponds, and the mounting impacts of climate change are just a few examples. These incidents can have enormous personal and economic consequences as well, closing fisheries, damaging human health, and sometimes costing lives.

This is why the federal government has legal powers to protect Canadians by preventing these kinds of environmental disasters before they ever happen. Environmental Assessments are supposed to study the potential environmental harm of proposed projects and find less risky alternatives. The Fisheries Act is supposed to prevent activities that harm freshwater and marine fish habitat. Canada should be doing its fair share to combat climate change by acting decisively at home, negotiating constructively on the international stage and helping the most vulnerable to adapt.

Instead the recommendations from too many Environmental Assessments have been ignored, and even the law itself has been weakened. Canadian lakes are handed over to private mining companies to use as dumps for mining waste. Instead of acting at home and abroad to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, our government continues to subsidize oil and gas companies, with pipeline megaprojects now looking for handouts too.

It’s time for the federal government to stand for good planning, and live up to its responsibility to prevent environmental disasters so current and future generations of Canadians can continue to benefit from Canada’s natural wealth. This means strengthening the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, and closing the loophole in the Fisheries Act that lets mines dump waste in our lakes. It means supporting the development of renewable energy, and advocating a global treaty that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions enough to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Ask your candidates:

How will you do a better job of using federal regulations and environmental assessments to prevent environmental disasters?

What will you do to end dirty subsidies?

What is your party’s plan to really move Canada to a green economy powered by renewable energy?


For more about the federal election visit our Vote for Nature page.

Vote for Nature, part 3: Preserve Natural Areas

Suffield National Wildlife Area. Photo: ateucher

The federal government is accountable to Canadians for permanently protecting natural areas, using a number of different legal tools known collectively as “protected areas”. Parks Canada establishes and manages a system of National Parks and National Marine Conservation Areas to permanently protect representative examples of each of Canada’s natural regions. Environment Canada manages National Wildlife Areas, Migratory Bird Sanctuaries, and Marine Wildlife Areas to protect important wildlife habitat across the country. The department of Fisheries and Oceans is responsible for Marine Protected Areas which protect significant marine ecosystems and important habitats for marine wildlife and species at risk. But there are problems.

We are still losing too much of Canada’s unique wild lands, waters, and oceans to our growing human footprint on the environment. Our National Parks system only covers 33 of Canada’s 68 terrestrial and marine natural regions. The job is only half done and as time goes on it is getting harder to establish parks in the remaining regions. Parks Canada does not have the resources needed to act fast enough to establish new parks while the best opportunities still exist. For example the March 2011 federal budget only provided 2% of the funding needed to meet the federal government’s commitment to establish new National Parks, according to the Green Budget Coalition.

Of course it is not enough to create protected areas on paper. Laws have to be enforced on the ground and on water. Several reviews have concluded that Canada’s protected areas are losing species and suffering environmental damage because of insufficient protection in practice. In fact oil and gas drilling has even been allowed in some National Wildlife Areas and other protected areas. This is obviously wrong. We also need these agencies to work together, and we need these protected areas to be linked together across the landscape.

Our federal government must provide enough money to the agencies we are all counting on to preserve natural areas for us and future generations. This includes $50 million per year for Parks Canada. The federal government must simply say no to oil and gas development in National Wildlife Areas and other protected areas.

Ask your candidates:

What will you do to protect more lands, waters, and oceans for nature and future generations?

How will you make sure nature is really protected in all federal parks and protected areas?


For more about the federal election visit Vote for Nature.

Vote for Nature, Part 2: Protect Wildlife

The federal government is accountable to Canadians for protecting and recovering endangered species and other threatened wildlife through the federal Species at Risk Act. The federal government also has the legal responsibility to protect migratory birds in Canada. The Migratory Birds Convention Act is the law that implements our international agreement with the United States to conserve waterfowl and other migratory birds that fly across our borders.

Many of our bird populations are declining rapidly. Shorebird species and those that depend on Canada’s native grasslands are particularly vulnerable. Unfortunately Canada is not doing enough domestically and internationally to protect our loved and invaluable bird populations. We are not even fully enforcing our own laws to protect wildlife, according to several Canadian and international investigations. For example the Commission on Environmental Cooperation found that Canada was failing to enforce the Migratory Birds Convention Act by allowing logging operations that routinely destroy the nests of migratory birds. There is a similar lack of government regulation of a wide range of industrial activities that harm migratory birds.

Canada’s list of endangered, threatened and special concern species gets longer every year, never shorter. Species that get re-evaluated are typically doing worse rather than better. Time is ticking for these species, yet internal reviews by Environment Canada found a failure to meet the legal requirements and deadlines of the Species at Risk Act. A number of court rulings have also found the federal government not complying with this law, particularly with the requirement to identify critical habitat.

We need the federal government to live up to its responsibilities to protect wildlife. It must do a better job of enforcing the Species at Risk act by identifying critical habitat as required by the law and meeting deadlines. It must uphold the Migratory Birds Convention Act and change industrial activities that harm birds and their nests.

Ask your candidates:

What will you do to make sure Canada does a better job of enforcing our laws to protect wildlife like caribou, whales, and migratory birds?

For more about the federal election visit our Vote for Nature page.

All Eyes Are On Nature!

Cast Your Vote for Nature on May 2, 2011!

Canadians expect their government to protect nature. We live in a time when the planet's health is in peril, a time when strong leadership and decisive action are required to address the urgent threats of climate change, habitat loss, and species extinctions.

To effectively protect nature for future generations, the Government of Canada has to do four things:

1. Protect Wildlife
2. Preserve Natural Areas
3. Prevent Environmental Disasters
4. Lead Canadian Conservation

Visit Vote for Nature 2011 to find out more about what the government should do on these four issues. We've also put together a list of 7 Questions for Your Candidates.

Tell Canada’s leaders where you stand – vote for nature in 2011!


Music for All Eyes Are On Nature is courtesy of Pitx.

Vote for Nature, Part 1: The "Federal Environment"

Candidates make a lot of statements and promises during elections. But what power do politicians really have to protect nature on our behalf? Funny you should ask - today I start a blog series on this very question!

Under the Canadian constitution, the provincial, territorial, and federal governments each have specific areas of responsibility. This means that the candidates asking for your vote will be accountable to you for protecting nature in specific ways.

The federal government has legal responsibility for specific areas of nature conservation based on existing laws and constitutional authority. So what part of the environment is federal jurisdiction? Simply put, the government of Canada has a duty to do four things for us:

1. Protect Wildlife
2. Preserve Natural Areas
3. Prevent Environmental Disasters
4. Lead Canadian Conservation

I will look at each of these in more detail in a series of blog posts. Please let me know what you think.