#19 Automatic for the species: fixing Canada's Species at Risk Act with Joe Bennett & Audrey Turcotte

Today on the podcast we’re speaking with Joe Bennett and Audrey Turcotte. Joe received his PhD from the Faculty of Forestry at the University of British Columbia in 2012. He held a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Queensland in Australia, and is now an associate professor at Carleton University, where he is the co-director of the geomatics and landscape ecology laboratory. As is evident in our chat, Joe has a diversity of research interests, including the development of prioritization approaches for conservation, invasion ecology, paleoecology and spatial statistics. Audrey is a PhD Candidate at Université de Sherbrooke in Quebec, where she is studying behavioural, physiological and genetic responses of painted turtle populations that have been exposed to human-made barriers and activities. In 2018, Joe and his colleague Steve Cooke, selected Audrey to lead a graduate student project focused on exploring the shortcomings of Canada’s species at risk act, which you’ll hear us refer to as SARA in our conversation. In 2021, this project, which involved a total of 10 authors, was published in the open access journal Facets with the title “Fixing the Canadian Species at Risk Act: identifying major issues and recommendations for increasing accountability and efficiency”. In our conversation, we walk through the main points of their article, focusing on their recommendations for improving the federal legislation. We discuss the possibility of an automatic listing process under SARA for species that have been assessed as at risk by the committee on the status of endangered wildlife in Canada, or COSEWIC, where currently COSEWIC’s recommendations are considered by the federal cabinet alongside other factors, such as the socio-economic implications of applying protections to certain species and their habitats, a dynamic that sometimes ends in COSEWICs recommendations being rejected by the federal minister. Joe and Audrey also discuss their recommendation for improving the transparency and clarity of mandate regarding consultation and equitable recognition of Indigenous rights for those species listings that would impact Indigenous self-determination. We highly recommend exploring Joe and Audrey’s article as it provides a comprehensive and highly accessible description of the federal species at risk act, a critical assessment of its shortcomings, and several solutions that would drastically improve our ability to protect and recover at risk species in Canada.  Audrey & Joe's article: https://www.facetsjournal.com/doi/10.1139/facets-2020-0064