An association that campaigns for the defense of the boreal forest believes that the Minister of the Environment, Benoit Charette, commits “intellectual fraud” when he boasts of having achieved his objective in terms of protecting the territory.
Action Boréale, of which singer Richard Desjardins is a member, denounces the hypocrisy of the Legault government in a letter published in the Journal, Saturday.
The signatories of the letter consider that Quebec took advantage of COP15, held in Montreal, to “spread its exemplarity in the field of nature preservation”, by respecting its commitment to protect 17% of its territory in 2020.
However, to achieve this, he had to concentrate his efforts in sparsely populated territories in the north of the province, which is nothing less than a “major intellectual fraud”, they say.
By channeling its energy into “the tundra”, the government would have even “violated” the principle which governs the establishment of protected areas, according to the authors of the letter, who deplore that “all of southern Quebec was thus obliterated” .
Shade
“We have to be careful when we talk about intellectual fraud, because the boomerang can quickly come back to us,” said the director general of the Quebec section of the Society for Nature and Parks of Canada, Alain Branchaud, in reaction to the letter from Action Boréale.
Mr. Branchaud agrees that there is an “imbalance” in the proportion of protected areas announced in December 2020, but he recalls that the protection of these territories is completely justified.
“In Nunavik, which represents more than a third of the territory of Quebec, we are at 20% protection of the territory. We wanted to reach 17%, we put a little more in the North, it’s not a total imbalance. As Quebec is committed to protecting 30% of its territory, that means that we still have to make a jump of 10% in Nunavik,” he explains.
Same story on the side of Dominique Gravel, holder of the Canada Research Chair in Integrative Ecology at the University of Sherbrooke, who considers that it is “exaggerated” to speak of “intellectual fraud”.
“It’s not bad to protect in the North. And we are not in overprotection for the North, even if there is a lack of protection in the South”, he underlines.
A start in the South
Action Boréale also deplores in its letter that the government has “denied” and “aborted” 83 protected area projects across the province. The organization calls on the government to “reinstate” them.
Alain Branchaud indicates, however, that since that time, 23 of the 83 sites have been protected. So “things are moving”, according to him. He adds that it is “normal” for it to be more complex in the south of the province because of the “conflicts of use” which are greater.