Southern mountain caribou are disappearing in British Columbia and the federal government has been dragging its feet for more than a decade on protecting the endangered herds, conservation groups say in a letter to the environment minister.
The letter sent to Steven Guilbeault on behalf of the Wilderness Committee, Wildsight and Stand.earth says three populations of the caribou are in particularly steep decline as logging and other industrial development cuts through their habitat in the mountains of eastern B.C., near the Alberta boundary.
Eddie Petryshen, a conservation specialist with Wildsight based in B.C.'s East Kootenay, says successive federal governments and environment ministers have "kicked the can further down the road," and that trend continues today.
"It's just been this constant, decade-long plan to make a plan, while caribou are disappearing and their habitat is being decimated and logged."
A representative for Environment and Climate Change Canada did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the letter and its assertions.
Southern mountain caribou are currently classified as threatened under Canada's Species at Risk Act, and a statement issued by the federal government in 2020 said they numbered roughly 3,100, a reduction of 53 per cent over about six years.
Ottawa released a recovery strategy and partial habitat mapping for the caribou in 2014, but the conservation groups say the mapping has not been finalized, a requirement under the legislation and a key step toward stopping the decline.
The southern mountain caribou, which are three populations collectively known as the southern group, are at greatest risk of disappearing, says the letter sent on behalf of the conservation groups by Ecojustice lawyer Sean Nixon.
Petryshen says eight of 18 herds in the southern group have been extirpated, a term for local extinction, over the last two decades.
"We know what's causing that extirpation," he says.
Southern mountain caribou depend on old-growth forests to survive, and Petryshen says an analysis by the Wilderness Committee found more than 190,000 hectares of the southern group's critical habitat were logged between 2007 and 2023.
That analysis used the federal government's partial habitat identification from 2014, he says, while they used mapping from the B.C. government in 2019 to find more than 310,000 hectares of critical habitat were logged during the same time period.
Nixon's letter says Ottawa's ongoing delays and inaction "amount to a tacit endorsement of the extermination of a species."
It says the Environment Department indicated in 2014 that it would complete full, critical habitat mapping for southern mountain caribou within six months. It missed that target, and in 2020 the department said it intended to finish by summer 2021.
The last update indicated a proposed recovery strategy with critical habitat mapping would be released sometime in 2026, though the department suggested its timeline "may shift," the letter says.
Environment and Climate Change Canada's timelines for the habitat mapping have shifted "so regularly as to render them meaningless," it says.
The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada recommended in 2014 that the southern group be listed as endangered under the Species at Risk Act, while other southern mountain populations remain classified as threatened.
Ottawa did not respond to the recommendation until February 2022, when it referred the population back to the committee for further consideration.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 22, 2025.
Brenna Owen, The Canadian Press