Marine Conservation --
Keeping the Arctic Ocean on the Agenda

 " The Canada Oceans Act must acknowledge that there are limits to
   our management ability: it must mandate integrated, ecosystem-wide
   decision-making based on a precautionary approach. "

Summer fishing: fillets of arctic char.

The recent international dispute between Canada and Spain over turbot fishing has seen Brian Tobin, Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, win much domestic praise for vigorously promoting Canada's offshore fishing interests in negotiations with the Europeans. But Canada's oceans and their resources have captured othet national headlines recently: the collapse of the Atlantic cod stocks and the disappearance of millions of Pacific salmon. There is no doubt that Canada's efforts to manage the commercial fishery in its own waters have failed. By now, all Canadians are aware that, despite the government' s commitment to environmentally sustainable development, something is amiss with our oceans.

New approaches to marine management are urgently needed to deal with marine issues on the east and west coasts and to prevent similar crises in the North. Rather than simply managing the commercial fishery on a species-by-species basis, we must make conservation of both commercial and non-commercial species and their habitats the fundamental tenet of our national and northern marine policies. Fisheries politics must be replaced by ocean conservation.

The task before us is to deeply embed principles of conservation and sustainable development in marine decision-making.

A major initiative by Brian Tobin and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) could go some distance towards this end. In November of last year, DFO released the federal government's "Vision for Ocean Management." This policy renewed a long-standing promise to promulgate a Canada Oceans Act to co-ordinate disparate marine programmes and to focus efforts strongly towards conservation. CARC believes that this legislation should serve as Canada' s Charter for the Oceans-a national vehicle to guarantee environmental conservation and sustainable development of Canada' s oceans and coasts. To do so, it must acknowledge that there are limits to our management ability and, accordingly, must require integrated, ecosystem-wide decision-making based on a precautionary approach. Only adoption of these principles in law will yield behaviour that preserves our marine "capital" so that we may always rely on the "interest" for our prosperity.

The next step will be to ensure that these principles are applied to all three coasts. While, in practice, the Arctic Ocean has been harvested chiefly to meet subsistence needs and thus seems insulated from the crises on the east and west coasts, it remains vulnerable. Long-range transport of toxic pollutants threatens marine mammals on which many Inuit depend. In- credibly, we still lack basic marine research facilities in the North that would help us determine how much can be har- vested without damage to the marine ecosystem. And, many northerners eye Greenland's marine-based economy and foresee commercial development of living marine resources in Arctic Canada. For these reasons, among others, northern Canada must not come a distant third in the competition for legislative attention.

This issue of Northern Perspectives has been produced to underscore the need to address three of Canada's coasts in the policy arena. It begins with an article that provides a brief history of ocean management in the North, an overview of CARC's marine programme, and a review of several issues key to successful management of arctic marine ecosystems. The following article, prepared by Dr. Harold Welch of the Freshwater Institute in Winnipeg, presents, in detail, the problems confronting the northern marine environment and offers a suite of possible solutions to those problems. The final article, by Bruce Gillies of Nunavut Tungavik Incorporated (NTI), offers a review of the Nunavut Final Agreement and its implications for marine management in the North.