Canadian cabinet ministers have rejected a plea by the country’s environment minister to save an endangered owl, casting doubt on the species’ survival in the coming years.
The Wilderness Committee environmental advocacy group announced on Wednesday that federal ministers had rejected a request for an emergency order to protect the northern spotted owl – a request submitted by environment minister Steven Guilbeault.
The Wilderness Committee has for years lobbied the federal government to intervene in the destruction of spotted owl habitat.
In February 2023, Guilbeault said the spotted owl was facing “imminent threats to its survival” and told environmental groups he would recommend an emergency order to block further destruction of its habitat in British Columbia.
Guilbeault concluded that logging must stop in an area of the Spô’zêm Nation territory, including the Spuzzum and Utzlius watersheds, as well as a further 2,500 hectares (6,200 acres) of forest habitat that are at risk of logging.
In order for the emergency order to go into effect, the federal cabinet must accept Guilbeault’s recommendation, after it consults affected First Nations.
After an eight-month delay, however, other cabinet members of the governing Liberal party, which have touted their commitments to biodiversity protection, have rejected the order.
Before industrial logging in south-west British Columbia, there were nearly 1,000 spotted owls in the old-growth forests. Now, only one wild-born owl remains. Two captive-bred owls released last fall were found dead in May. Two more captive-bred owls were released into the wild earlier this year.
Biologists have told the Guardian the species could recover with adequate protections to key habitat areas, all of which are old-growth forests.
The Wilderness Committee, represented by environmental law charity Ecojustice, will be in court on 18 October to determine if Guilbeault’s eight-month delay in recommending this emergency order to cabinet adheres to requirements under the federal Species at Risk Act.
“The minister has been required by law since January to recommend an emergency order,” Ecojustice lawyer Andhra Azevedo said in a statement. “Instead, the minister spent months ‘engaging’ with [British Columbia], while [British Columbia] made no new commitments to protect habitat and instead continued to approve logging. To state the obvious, we have emergency orders under the Species at Risk Act to respond to emergencies – what we’ve seen by the minister and now cabinet is nowhere close to an emergency response.”
