(April 02, 2024) This op-ed appeared in the Hill Times. Long before settlers arrived on Atlantic and Pacific shores, Indigenous people stewarded wildlife for diversity and abundance. “Abundance” isn’t recognized as a recovery target under any current legislation; rather, most efforts to protect at-risk species consist of attempts to stop declines and maintain the status quo. In Montreal in 2022, Canada committed to halt and reverse nature loss by 2030. The federal government is developing...

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(March 01, 2024) This op-ed appeared in the Hill Times. Songbirds from South America travel thousands of kilometres to nest in Canada’s boreal forests. Caribou herds traverse vast tundra distances to find safe areas to calve and then travel back with their young in tow. Whales transit from one ocean to another to reach feeding grounds. Bats make long and perilous journeys to southern forests in the United States to avoid our cold winters.  But where was Canada when it came to discussing the fat...

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(February 05, 2024) In this rundown of upcoming initiatives, we look ahead at some of the big public policy decisions expected in 2024 and explain what outcomes we will be pressing for from each.  From the federal government’s efforts to draft a new National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan that can be a cornerstone for efforts to reverse the current decline of biodiversity across Canada to provincial efforts like the commitment by the British Columbia government, in collaboration with First Na...

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(February 05, 2024) See also: Public Policy Developments WCS Canada is watching in 2024  Releasing a wolverine from a live trap can really get your heart pounding. Providing comments on a government policy, a lot less so.  But helping make government policies better for nature is a big and important part of the work we do here at WCS Canada. That’s because these official laws, policies and regulations (and their implementation) matter – a lot.  The right policy can make a major...

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(January 30, 2024) By Dan Kraus, Director of National Conservation Canada officially has less biodiversity than one year ago.  Without much fanfare, the meter that measures the number of extinct wild species in Canada ticked down. Twice.   You’ve probably never heard of the Enos Lake Stickleback pairs. Over the last few thousand years they evolved in an isolated lake on Vancouver Island north of Nanaimo BC. They were an example of evolution in action and were becoming two di...

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(January 05, 2024) This article was published in the National Observer. We have literally been watching global temperatures climb to new heights this fall in chart after chart of global temperature trends.  It’s an easy way for us to grasp just how fast climate change is moving, but it also makes me wish we could present an equally clear and simple picture of biodiversity trends.  Looking back over the past few years in biodiversity, there is one measure that stands out: the decline and extin...

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(December 21, 2023) By Justina Ray, WCS Canada President and Senior Scientist Earlier this month in Dubai at the COP28 climate talks, the world’s countries finally agreed that addressing the climate crisis will require a “transition away” from fossil fuels. Many different interests have jumped on this declaration to call for countries to act quickly on the spirit rather than the somewhat vague language of the commitment.  A similar scene played out last December in Montreal for the ...

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(December 19, 2023) By Brad Cundiff, Green Living Communications Apple had just unveiled its first iPhone when Elizabeth (Biz) Agnew heard about a conservation organization just getting its feet on the ground in Canada. Biz had never heard of Wildlife Conservation Society Canada and had never met its co-founder, Justina Ray.  But it didn’t take Justina long to convince Biz that working for WCS Canada was going to be the opportunity of a lifetime. With fewer than half a dozen staff and a ...

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(November 15, 2023) by Brad Cundiff, Communications Consultant, Wildlife Conservation Society Canada The Arctic Team scouting sites to test the Ocean Glider. Photo by WCS Canada. You may have taken a few spins around the lake tubing or waterskiing this summer.  Our Western Arctic team, on the other hand, took to a lake near Whitehorse, Yukon to track the performance of a new listening device – a “glider” that can roam beneath the water’s surface picking up sounds ...

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(November 06, 2023) by Dan Kraus, Director of National Conservation, Wildlife Conservation Society Canada A Northern Spotted Owl. Photo by mayoung01 via iNaturalist. Humans have been causing the loss of wildlife for about as long as there have been humans. From the extinctions of mega-fauna in North America and Australia as people colonized the Earth, to the imminent loss of Spotted Owls in Canada, the cumulative impacts of humanity have resulted in an impoverished natural world.  ...

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