Grizzly bear recovery in Alberta a "sham"

Albertans (and Canadians as a whole) should be very concerned about the Alberta government's disengenuos approach to grizzly bear recovery. Like oil-addicted Pinnochios, Alberta politicians and bureaucrats tout their successful efforts to responsibly manage and recover Alberta's beleaguered grizzly bear population when nothing could be further from the truth.

The latest sign of spin was on April 3, when Minister of (un)Sustainable Resource Development Mel Knight told CBC National, “We see success with these programs, and we’re going to continue to operate these programs.”

The programs to which he refers have done nothing to recover Alberta's grizzly bear population. While the government has adopted a recovery plan and drawn up maps of core grizzly bear habitat, little if anything has improved on the ground in the eight years since Alberta's Endangered Species Conservation Committee recommended that the grizzly bear be listed as a threatened species.

In fact, neither of SRD's two webpages devoted to grizzly bear management and recovery even mentions what the government's recent status report calls the single most important aspect of grizzly bear conservation and recovery: limiting road density and motorized access into grizzly bear habitat.

Not surprisingly, things have actually gotten worse over the last eight years. During a recent Google search, I discovered that Knight's Ministry of Sustained Untruths recently approved a Forest Management Plan that ignores its own grizzly recovery plan and puts grizzly bears at greater risk of extirpation. The plan is for the E8 Forest Management Area, which is located just south of Knight's electoral riding, in one of the most productive grizzly bear population units in the province.

Despite the fact that nearly all of the E8 Forest Management Area has been designated core grizzly bear habitat, the forest management plan allows Foothills Forest Products to exceed the road density thresholds for core habitat as stipulated by the grizzly recovery plan. The density of roads that Foothills Forest Products will build over the next 10 years likely will not allow grizzly bears to persist in this area.

The government also brags about its supposed Bear Smart Program, but it is really nothing more than a website and a few pamphlets. The government claims to spend $150,000 a year on its Bear Smart Program, but this insufficient token is nothing compared to the millions of dollars the Alberta government spends every year on other publicly funded education programs.


The only real Bear Smart improvements in Alberta communities (like Canmore) have been because of the commitment and hard work of local citizens, and have very little to do with the efforts of Minister Knight and his SRD minions. This is something that George Hamilton, priority species manager with Alberta Sustainable Resource Development, admitted at a 2008 forestry workshop I attended and wrote about (read Bearly With Us).

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of all is that even if Minister Knight in Shining Spin does decide to list the grizzly bear as a threatened species, the decision will afford no protection whatsoever to our grizzly bears. Unlike any other place on the planet, the Alberta government could still allow hunters to kill threatened grizzly bears. And Knight will almost certainly allow forestry and oil and gas companies to continue to build roads and otherwise destroy the critical habitat on which Alberta's grizzly bear depends.

The good news is that not everyone's a two-faced L*@!. The only honest spokesperson in Alberta's Ministry of Species Extinction appears to be its priority species manager, the aforementioned George Hamilton, who told The Edmonton Journal that, in fact, "the Alberta government has finally decided that it does not want to recover grizzlies."

As for investing enough money into the actual recovery of Alberta's grizzly bears, well, Mel Knight, a senior politician in one of the wealthiest jurisdictions on the planet, told CBC that those nasty conservation groups should foot the bill. Nothing like passing the buck, Mel!

Want more details? Look for The Grizzly Manifesto on store shelves in mid-May.