Cautious Optimism Over Canada's Big Orca Announcement

Today, Canada announced new measures to protect the Southern Resident orcas, one of the most endangered, and beloved, populations of whales on either side of the border. Together with the orca bills signed on Wednesday by Washington Governor Jay Inslee, they provide some very cautious grounds for hope.

As my colleague Giulia and I have written, the whales’ situation is dire. They don’t have enough food, their habitat is degraded by contaminants and noise, and they have not successfully raised a calf in almost four years. Last summer, the whale known to researchers as J35, and to the public as Tahlequah, floated her dead baby around the Salish Sea for seventeen days in what can only be regarded as a profound expression of grief. It wasn’t clear how Canada would respond. The fate of the whales is tied in many ways to the fate of the Pacific Northwest, and saving them—and, by extension, our coast and rivers—will require significant changes in the ways we go about our business. NRDC and our Canadian partners have petitioned the ministries and litigated for more action over the last year. The government’s announcement is a sign that it has begun taking the challenge seriously.

The measures announced for 2019 are focused on improving the whales’ access to food, both by providing more Chinook salmon and by reducing the noise and disturbance that interferes with foraging. In sum, the government will:

• Establish fishing closures and non-retention policies aimed at reducing total mortality of returning Chinook salmon to 5% (a related measure that was separately announced last month);
• Designate “sanctuaries” in three foraging areas for the Southern Residents, where most human activities are prohibited;
• Restrict salmon fishing in certain other identified Southern Resident foraging areas, to reduce competition with the whales;
• Require boaters to stay 400 meters from the whales, and, through a pending agreement with the region’s whale-watching association, suspend commercial tours on Southern Residents; and
• Extend an existing voluntary slow-down for large commercial ships, designed to reduce noise in Southern Resident foraging areas, from Haro Strait into Boundary Pass.

For me, the most notable improvement may be in whale-watching. I haven’t been shy these last few months in advocating for a suspension of public and commercial whale-watching on the Southern Residents. Restoring the whales’ prey, the big, fatty Chinook salmon that they depend on, is paramount. Until then, we have to end the constant presence of boats around them, which disrupts their ability to hear their own echolocation signals and compromises their foraging. The Pacific Whale Watch Association’s commitment to suspend tours on the Southern Residents, and focus instead on non-endangered orca populations, would be significant if finalized, and reflects a positive move from the operators as well as from the Canadian government.

One year won’t tell the tale. It will soon be necessary to match the short-term measures announced today with long-term action to bring back Chinook, reduce noise pollution, and cease the flow of contaminants—including poorly treated sewage—into the Salish Sea. I’ve come to look at the Southern Residents as a bellwether. If we can’t muster the will to save these whales, this iconic population so close to the heart of the Northwest, it’s hard to know what we can save in the natural world. But if we manage to change our ways enough to recover them, then we’ll have gone some way towards recovering this region and the place we live ourselves.