The quest to protect Hudson Bay’s unique coastline, one of Canada’s last, best wild places

Sam Hunter was not prepared for what he saw one morning this past July when he stepped out of his cabin near the shore of Hudson Bay.

It was a living tide of caribou – more than 3,000 large animals moving, grunting, foraging and otherwise fully occupying the landscape.

“There were so many. … They were so loud,” said Mr. Hunter, who lives in Peawanuck on northern Ontario’s Winisk River and has worked as a guide in the area for years. “It’s something that I haven’t seen since I was about 10 years old.”

The timing could not have been better.

Mr. Hunter, who is a member of the Weenusk First Nation, had brought with him a team from the Wildlands League, a Toronto-based conservation group. They were there to record the vibrant ecosystem at the province’s northern rim, part of an effort to designate a vast new national marine conservation area there. Everyone grabbed their cameras and began recording the spectacle.

Anna Baggio, conservation director for the Wildlands League, said the unexpected “caribou-palooza” reminded her of a giant family party, with relatives from far and wide gathering for the big meet-up. But the experience also left her with another, more potent thought.

“This still happens,” she said. “We still have this in our province.”

It is this idea that resonates beyond the magic of a wilderness encounter. In many parts of Canada, the natural environment is compromised by a multitude of factors that put species and ecosystems at risk. These are places that conservation biologists say require protection to recover what is being lost.

But elsewhere the wilderness remains robust – sometimes dramatically so. It is these locations that may offer the best chances to address the growing biodiversity crisis. And it is why the shores of Hudson Bay have increasingly become a focus for the Wildlands League and other groups concerned with saving Canada’s last, best wild places.

The biologist and author E. O. Wilson, who died last year, famously proposed that humans need to set aside half of the planet for nature in order to avert a mass extinction event and place life on a safe footing. His basis for the idea is a well-established mathematical relationship between the number of species in a habitat and the habitat’s size.

MAN.

ONTARIO

QUE.

Detail

Ottawa

Toronto

U.S.

Proposed Mushkegowuk National Marine Conservation Area

Fort Severn

Peawanuck

Polar Bear Provincial Park

Attawapiskat

Kashechewan

Fort Albany

ONTARIO

Moosonee

Moose

Factory

Legend

Taykwa

Tagamou

Provincial parks

Indigenous

communities

Missanabie Cree

Chapleau Cree

MURAT YÜKSELIR / THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCES:

OPEN DATA ONTARIO; MUSHKEGOWUK MARINE

CONSERVATION

MAN.

QUE.

ONTARIO

Detail

Ottawa

Toronto

U.S.

Proposed Mushkegowuk National Marine Conservation Area

Fort Severn

Peawanuck

Polar Bear Provincial Park

Attawapiskat

Kashechewan

Fort Albany

ONTARIO

Moosonee

Moose

Factory

Taykwa

Tagamou

Legend

Provincial parks

Missanabie Cree

Indigenous

communities

Chapleau Cree

MURAT YÜKSELIR / THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCES: OPEN

DATA ONTARIO; MUSHKEGOWUK MARINE CONSERVATION

Proposed Mushkegowuk National Marine Conservation Area

MANITOBA

Fort Severn

Polar Bear Provincial Park

Peawanuck

Attawapiskat

QUEBEC

Kashechewan

Fort Albany

Moosonee

Moose Factory

ONTARIO

Taykwa Tagamou

Missanabie Cree

Chapleau Cree

Ottawa

U.S.

Toronto

Legend

Provincial parks

Indigenous communities

MURAT YÜKSELIR / THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCES: OPEN DATA ONTARIO; MUSHKEGOWUK MARINE CONSERVATION

Canada has aimed for nearer-term goals: preserving 25 per cent of its land and ocean waters for wildlife by 2025 and 30 per cent by 2030. This would more than double the combined size of all the parks and protected waters that the country has created to date.

The commitments were made in advance of United Nations biodiversity talks set to take place in Montreal this December. As host of the meeting and a member of the “high ambition coalition” of countries who support the so-called 30 by ‘30 goal, Canada now faces the challenge of identifying the territory it wishes to protect by the end of the decade.

Achieving this at the required scale means setting aside places that are both geographically large and biologically significant – places like the coastline that stretches for hundreds of kilometres in both directions from Mr. Hunter’s cabin.

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Last year, Parks Canada and the Mushkegowuk Council, which represents eight First Nations in Northern Ontario, signed a memorandum of understanding to jointly the assess the idea of establishing a national marine conservation area in the region. While the boundary of the proposed conservation area has yet to be established, the feasibility study encompasses the province’s entire coastline from Manitoba to the southern end of James Bay, along with more than 90,000 square kilometres of open water.

Parallel efforts in Manitoba and Quebec could extend the protected area still further. A key feature of the effort is partnership with the Indigenous communities who inhabit and depend on those natural spaces today.

Vern Cheechoo, the lands and resources director for the Mushkegowuk Council, said the communities have long understood the importance of maintaining the region in its natural state. “We’ve been trying to say that publicly, nationally, globally,” he said.

He added that the best outcome from the assessment would be “the full protection of James and Hudson Bay with the communities involved in the management of the area.” Ideally, he said, those communities would also benefit economically from that involvement.

But success will also depend on co-ordination between the federal government, which has jurisdiction over the ocean, and the provinces, which control what happens on land.

Nature sees no such borders. The coastlands are a seamless meeting place of land and sea, fresh and salt water, and Arctic and boreal ecosystems. They are populated not only by caribou but polar bears, beluga whales, walrus, seals and migratory birds numbering in the billions.

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Ms. Baggio, who is working with the Mushkegowuk Council on the feasibility assessment of the proposed conservation area, said that a more holistic approach to conservation is in keeping with how Indigenous communities in the region view their coastal environment.

“For them, there was never a distinction between the land and the sea,” she said.

The approach has a practical dimension, because the coastline is migrating northward at a steady pace as the bedrock beneath the shore gradually rebounds from the weight of massive glaciers that blanketed the region during the Ice Age. While many coastal regions around the world are experiencing rising seas because of climate change, Hudson Bay is witnessing the emergence of new land.

Biologists say the scientific case for protecting habitat across the region is strong. Earlier this week, policy makers and environmental advocates gathered in Ottawa for the launch of a national registry of key biodiversity areas (KBAs) – areas of high importance for the persistence of species and ecosystems. The initiative, launched by a coalition of conservation groups, is meant to provide a consistent and scientifically rigorous approach to determining which areas are most important to protect.

Open this photo in gallery:

Open this photo in gallery:

Currently, two such areas already fall within the proposed Mushkegowuk national marine conservation area. They were designated KBAs because of their importance to birds and polar bears. Seven more areas in the region are being assessed to see if they meet the KBA criteria.

“It’s a really standout region,” Peter Soroye, KBA assessment and outreach co-ordinator with the Wildlife Conservation Society Canada, said of Ontario’s Hudson Bay coast. “It’s one of those prime areas that we’re looking towards because it’s still relatively intact and unique in Canada.”

Previous investigations have revealed that inland regions adjacent to the Hudson Bay coastline are rich in soil carbon, mainly in the form of peat. From a climate perspective, preserving such areas is considered a high priority, because doing so would prevent the release of that carbon, which would exacerbate global warming.

Currently, a portion of Ontario’s share of the Hudson Bay lowlands is well protected within the boundaries of Polar Bear Provincial Park. But large areas to the west and south of the park have little or no protection, according to a report issued last month by World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Canada.

Meanwhile, work on the potential national marine conservation area continues. This week a Parks Canada team was in the field in connection with the project. The results of the feasibility study are expected in 2024.

For his part, Mr. Hunter said he hopes the growing importance of the region to Canada’s conservation and climate goals will benefit both nature and people.

“Our community is starting to play a big role, being a part of the teams that come up and being able to say what we want and where we should go from here,” he said. “Safe drinking water, clean fish to eat – those are the things we need to bring to the table.”