Final Report of the National Advisory Panel on Marine Protected Area Standards

Submitted to the Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard

September 26, 2018

Rémi Bujold and Mary Simon,
Panel Co-Chairs

David Anderson
Darcy Dobell
Tom Hayes
Marc Léger
Maureen Thomas

Table of Contents

• Complete Text
• Letter to Minister
• Summary of recommendations
• Introduction
• Principles
• Panel’s process
• What we heard
• Effectiveness of marine protected areas
• Recommendations
  1. Collaborative planning and design
  2. Crown-Indigenous relations
  3. Protection standards
  4. Marine spatial planning
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1: List of intervenors and written submissions
• Appendix 2: Terms of reference for the National Advisory Panel on MPA Standards
• Appendix 3: Panel members
• Appendix 4: Glossary and acronyms

Panel’s process

Canada’s oceans are central to the livelihood of coastal people and long-term ocean health has important implications for the future of the planet. In support of our mandate, we were invited to gather perspectives on marine conservation across Canada. In every community we visited, we made an effort to hear from the people affected by the federal government’s decisions on marine conservation. Over the course of 6 months, we travelled to Vancouver, Moncton, St. John’s, Inuvik, Iqaluit and Mont-Joli to hear directly from intervenors and see the coastal places that are so important to them. We also held meetings in Ottawa where we learned from international and domestic experts in marine conservation and welcomed presentations from still more intervenors. We invited written submissions from the Canadian public and received a wide range of thoughtful responses, including videos and even poetry. In total, we heard from about 125 individuals, groups, or governments who spoke to us in person or sent in written submissions. On August 15, 2018, we provided the Minister with an Interim Report summarizing what we had heard and presenting the key themes and principles that now guide our recommendations.

In deliberating as a Panel, we worked to be as neutral as possible and we sought consensus. For us, neutrality meant that we should design standards to allow the best operation, management, and reporting for an MPA without regard to how that standard might affect economic, political, or social behaviour^{Footnote 4}. We defined consensus as an agreement that all Panel members could live with. Panelists might not support every aspect, but on balance, decisions we made based on consensus satisfied the major concerns of everyone to the extent that all members could support them.