Fisheries and Oceans Canada has launched measures to try and protect endangered orcas on the West Coast from rising risk of oil spills, indicate federal documents obtained by Canada’s National Observer through access-to-information legislation.

The fisheries department (DFO) has invested in vessels and acoustic gear, drafted an operating procedure for fishery officers, maintains community equipment caches and conducts training exercises led by a marine mammal response team that includes the use of underwater speakers to deter whales from entering a spill zone, the documents show.

The information surfaced after prompts from environmental groups unable to find public information about the federal government’s plans to protect southern resident killer whales from potentially “catastrophic” oil spills in their critical habitat. Tanker traffic in the Salish Sea surged after the expanded Trans Mountain (TMX) pipeline came online in May.

The legal charity Ecojustice filed a petition to the ministries of Environment and Climate Change Canada and Fisheries and Oceans Canada to see the status of promised measures to protect the estimated 72 remaining whales if crude oil shipped by supertankers pollutes their critical habitat in the Salish Sea.

Of concern were key measures promised by the government, like developing a spill response plan to minimize impacts to the whales and ensuring the Canadian Coast Guard made protecting whales and their habitat a “high priority” when responding to an oil spill.

The federal government also committed to evaluate the existing levels of fossil fuel pollution in the orcas’ key habitat as a scientific baseline for assessing the scale of environmental damage if an oil spill occurs.

The federal response to the petition, obtained by Canada’s National Observer, shows some progress has been made around key measures, but aspects are still incomplete, said Margot Venton, nature program director with Ecojustice.

However, no measure is going to eliminate the devastating impacts of a significant oil spill on the orcas, already on the edge of extinction, Venton stressed.

“It’s such a precariously small (whale) population, oil is such a huge impact, and the Salish Sea is such a difficult place to clean up in an oil spill because of the nature of the environment,” she said.

Citing plummeting orca populations after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaskan waters more than 20 years ago, Venton also noted the federal recovery plan for the species states an oil spill would be “potentially catastrophic” — posing not only an immediate acute risk to the southern residents but could also render important areas “uninhabitable” for extended periods of time.

Oil tanker traffic departing TMX’s Westridge Marine Terminal in Burnaby reportedly rose tenfold in the two months immediately after the pipeline’s taps opened. The pipeline expansion nearly triples the amount of oil that flows from Alberta to the B.C. coast.

Trans Mountain says its marine terminal can handle 37 Aframax class tankers per month, with each ship capable of carrying up to 600,000 barrels of oil. When the pipeline is fully operational, tanker traffic from the TMX terminal is expected to rise to 34 vessels each month.

In 2023, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) developed an internal Pacific Marine Mammal Spill Response Plan that includes deterrence methods, training, drills and equipment to mitigate the risks to southern residents, federal documents show.

DFO has established a marine mammal response team that takes the lead on protecting species like southern resident whales as part of an integrated operation led by the Coast Guard.

In addition, upwards of $4.5 million in funding and training has been provided to the Marine Mammal Response Network, led by DFO and which includes Indigenous communities, regional governments and whale conservation groups that support marine mammal response incidents when they occur.

Venton noted the measures outlined by the federal government cannot eliminate the threats an oil spill would pose to the southern residents.

“These measures [involve] scaring whales away, or using booms to contain spills which are temporary things,” she said.

“But there’s still importance in doing these things, because it does reduce the potential impact, or create the possibility that, at least in some limited circumstances, it wouldn’t be as terrible as it could be.”

Additionally, oil spill plans address a potential future threat, but the whales, which lost two members of their population this year, are already under stress from the noise and physical disturbance from increased shipping right now, Venton noted.

It’s a significant concern that the federal government has not created a monitoring system for ocean noise or established a maximum threshold to protect the whales, she said.

The federal government released a long awaited plan to tackle ocean noise in August but it was criticized by conservation groups as being inadequate to protect whales like the resident orcas from ever-increasing shipping traffic.

Noise from vessels, whether large tankers or small recreational boats, hinder orcas’ ability to communicate with one another, hunt for salmon and reproduce or care for their offspring.

In June, to address the immediate threats to the whales, Ecojustice formally asked ministers Guilbeault and Lebouthillier to consider recommendations and issue an emergency order to save the endangered orcas and their food sources.

An emergency order is an effective way to tackle the rising underwater noise, threat of vessel strikes and risks to critical habitat and food sources that shipping traffic poses to the whales, she noted.

The federal government has yet to decide on the emergency order despite the need for speedy action, Venton said.

There’s an obligation to respond to an emergency petition, and Venton hopes it won’t be necessary to go to court as other environmental groups did to get the government to issue an emergency order for B.C.’s last wild spotted owl.

“Our feeling is that they need to respond in a timely fashion, and that’s very soon, if not a while ago.”

With files from John Woodside & Natasha Bulowski / Canada’s National Observer

Rochelle Baker / Local Journalism Initiative / Canada’s National Observer

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