Independent Caribou Commission | Memoirs copied and “bad faith”

A dozen municipalities and regional county municipalities (RCMs) of Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean submitted the same brief, word for word, to the Independent Commission on Woodland and Mountain Caribou, a document that also conveys falsehoods. on the situation of the species, note experts.

Jean-Thomas Léveillé
The Press

The briefs of the cities of Roberval and Dolbeau-Mistassini, but also of smaller municipalities such as Girardville or Saint-Henri-de-Taillon, are themselves a transcription of passages from the brief submitted by the Alliance forêt boréale (AFB).

This non-profit organization, made up of elected officials from Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean and the Côte-Nord, defends the “right to harvest and create wealth by developing the boreal forest” and questions caribou decline.

“We deplore that the Government of Quebec wishes to develop a protection strategy for woodland caribou without really knowing the state of woodland caribou populations across the entire range,” write the AFB and the municipalities that have taken up his memoir on their behalf.

“That’s a bit of nonsense! exclaims Daniel Fortin, full professor in the biology department at Université Laval, woodland caribou specialist and co-author of the joint memoir of the Center d’études de la forêt, the Center d’études nordiques and the Center de la science of Québec’s biodiversity, signed by some sixty researchers from a dozen educational establishments in Québec.

He criticizes the Boreal Forest Alliance and the municipalities that have taken up passages from his brief for making cherry pickingpicking up data, to retain only those that support their theories.

The famous literature review¹ on the caribou, made public last February by the Minister of Forests, Wildlife and Parks, Pierre Dufour, “shows that almost all populations are in decline, but that, they don’t talk about it” , he illustrates.

“It’s bad faith! “, he launches.

Wait… again

The municipalities conclude their brief by demanding that caribou protection “have positive impacts on forest workers and communities” and call for the renewal of the recovery plan currently in force, decried by specialists, who consider it clearly insufficient.

“Asking for delays and delays, which they still do, is deplorable,” indignant Daniel Fortin, who disagrees with the AFB, which claims that we do not know enough about the effect climate change will have on caribou to take action.

The memoir co-signed by Daniel Fortin calls instead for rapid and enhanced action, and rejects the two protection scenarios developed by Quebec within the framework of the commission, which he severely stings.

“We consider these two scenarios to be too unambitious, well anchored in the unsustainable economic model that has led to the decline of the woodland caribou, when we should favor a sustainable management perspective based on ecosystem bases and supported by evidence. and the most rigorous scientific evidence”, one can read there.

“current” strategy

Sending the same document by different people or organizations is “a common tactic”, observes Scott McKay, former member of the National Assembly and former city councilor for the City of Montreal, who is additional commissioner at the Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement (BAPE).

“In my opinion, it doesn’t have much impact, because it doesn’t show great credibility. [et] a very high level of commitment,” he says.

This strategy “can show a certain form of representativeness”, but does not necessarily have more weight, since “the commissioners have the duty to report all the comments”, estimates Stéphanie Yates, professor in the department of social and public communication from the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM), specialist in lobbying and public participation issues.

The former vice-president of the BAPE and retired environmental journalist Louis-Gilles Francœur also believes that the value of the arguments counts more than the number of briefs, but underlines that the multiplication of identical briefs “indicates something, a trend”.

The commission he chaired in 2015 on “the challenges of the uranium industry in Quebec” had also received from 482 different people the same brief consisting of five texts prepared by the coalition For a Quebec without uranium.

“You consider it a social fact [et] social facts are part of the environmental analysis,” explains Mr. Francœur.

The Independent Commission on Woodland and Mountain Caribou says that the commissioners “are more focused on content than on quantity”, but that “the repetition of briefs can demonstrate that municipalities and citizens have several concerns about caribou conservation”. , said its president, Nancy Gélinas, in a written statement sent to The Press.