Strait of Georgia National Marine Conservation Area
The first round of public meetings of a feasibility study into the creation of a National Marine Conservation Area for the Strait of Georgia will be held this winter and early spring. Meetings are scheduled for the southern Gulf Islands, Victoria, southern Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland.
Parks Canada will convene these sessions to engage as wide a selection of the public as possible to give input to the idea of establishing protected zones within a large multiple-use marine area with environmental and biodiversity protection as key objectives.
NMCAs are a new form of protection established by the federal NMCA Act, passed in 2002. Parks Canada intends to create one NMCA in each of the 29 marine ecoregions that make up Canada’s three oceans.
The feasibility study for the southern Strait of Georgia is expected to be a three-year exercise, exploring how to zone some of Canada’s most heavily used marine areas for different levels of protection. Prohibitions for species at risk, such as the Southern Resident killer whales, and for special habitats, such as Saanich Inlet’s glass sponges, are examples of what will be discussed.
The study area is still in debate, but includes the waters roughly enclosing Ten Mile Point and the eastern shore of the Saanich Peninsula, Saanich Inlet and Sansum Narrows, Porlier Pass, the eastern contours of Galiano, Mayne and Saturna Islands to the international border in Boundary Pass and Haro Strait.
Orca Pass is the name given to a related initiative by marine conservation groups to characterize and protect a portion of the shared transboundary waters at the heart of the Salish Sea, the combined waters of Georgia Strait and Puget Sound. This is an incredibly rich but increasingly heavily impacted inland sea which desperately needs protection for its fish, birds, marine mammals and habitats.
To learn more about the NMCA and Orca Pass, visit these web sites:
http://www.pc.gc.ca/progs/amnc-nmca/plan/pac6_e.asp
http://www.cpawsbc.org/marine/sites/ssg.php
http://www.georgiastrait.org/orcapass.php
