The Canadian government is proposing sweeping changes to accelerate industrial development and reduce environmental oversight. These proposed legislative, regulatory and policy reforms could significantly diminish the government’s capacity to assess environmental impacts and weaken protections for fish habitats and species at risk.

This sits uneasily alongside Canada’s recent conservation commitments. Earlier this year, Canada’s government committed billions of dollars toward biodiversity protection, species recovery, Indigenous stewardship and climate resilience. This includes the government’s $3.8 billion Strategy to Protect Nature, commitments to protect 30 per cent of lands and waters by 2030, and renewed investments in salmon recovery through the Pacific Salmon Strategy Initiative.

In 2005, Canada adopted one of the world’s most ambitious conservation frameworks for commercially exploited species: the Wild Salmon Policy. The policy promised a conservation-first approach grounded in monitoring, science-based risk assessment and proactive intervention before salmon populations reached crisis levels.

Yet many Pacific salmon populations continue to decline and fisheries are increasingly constrained. There is insufficient data for nearly half of conservation units — distinct groups of spawning populations used to assess status and guide management — to reliably assess extinction risk. Even where sufficient information exists for at-risk populations, governments have repeatedly failed to........

© The Conversation