For Canadians, the ocean is a vital source of food security, health and cultural belonging. The ocean economy sustains the livelihoods of coastal communities in the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic, and unlike in many places in the world, we can still eat fish and seafood directly from our coastal waters. As the country with the longest coastline in the world, defending our values, identity and economy requires safeguarding the ocean.
Now that we have a new federal government in Ottawa, what’s on the agenda for ocean and coastal protection?
The Liberal Party’s election platform made several important and meaningful commitments to the ocean, including: protecting 30% of ocean spaces by 2030; developing new marine protected areas; ratifying the High Seas Treaty; launching a Canadian Nature Protection Fund to, among other things, revive coastal waters; and addressing the impacts of significant infrastructure development to the environment and species at risk.
These commitments are a good start, but as the pressures on the ocean continue to intensify, we must go further to protect the ocean from harmful and risky activities like deep sea mining, geoengineering and pollution from commercial shipping.
Below, we lay out our priority law and policy goals for the next four years, to ensure that marine life can thrive, and to sustain our human connections to the ocean through the food we eat, our work and our livelihoods. We will be watching and holding the federal government to account on their ocean commitments.
What do we need to do in the next four years to set ourselves up for long-term success?
1. Safeguard 1/3 of Canada’s ocean within strong, legally-designated marine protected areas.
Marine protected areas are areas of the ocean shielded from destructive human activities so that marine life can recover and thrive. Science has shown that highly-protected ocean areas allow fish and shellfish to live longer and become more fertile, seeding populations beyond the area and restoring abundance to fisheries.
In the last several years, Canada has made significant progress in protecting important areas of the ocean, including in underwater seamounts on the Pacific coast, Tuvaijuittuq or the “last-ice area” in the Arctic, and a submarine bank that is one of the most treasured and productive sites in the Gulf of the St. Lawrence.
However, scientists and policy makers from around the world agree that we must protect one third of the ocean to sustain its health over the long term, and Canada is only halfway there. That’s why we were heartened to see the government’s commitment to protecting 30% of Canada’s lands and waters by 2030 renewed in the 2025 Speech from the Throne.
Canada must protect more of the ocean in the places where human and marine life most rely on it. This includes supporting stewardship and conservation efforts led by Indigenous nations, who have lived longest on the coast and know it best.
The quality of these protections matters too. In 2023, Canada introduced minimum protection standards that ensure that new marine protected areas are closed to the most harmful ocean activities, including bottom trawling, oil and gas, mining and dumping. As industrial activities in the ocean continue to expand, Canada needs to build on this effort to recognize these standards in law, and to ensure that marine protected areas are safeguarded from new and emerging industrial activities as well.
Photo: Paolo Syiaco via Unsplash
2. Make smart decisions about new and expanding ocean industries.
Industrial uses of the ocean are expected to continue to grow, including increased commercial shipping, the development of offshore renewable energy and the emergence of risky ocean activities like deep sea mining and geoengineering. Canada has the opportunity to put smart and sustainable legal frameworks in place to address associated threats like habitat loss, ocean noise and toxic pollution, and secure the health of the ocean for years to come.
Canada should prioritize the following actions:
a) Protect our coastal waters from ship pollution
Loopholes in Canadian laws allow ships to dump sewage, greywater and toxic chemicals into areas that overlap with our food sources. Sewage and greywater can cause shellfish to contract viruses, while chemicals from scrubber washwater are toxic to shellfish and may be passed on to humans who eat them. Canada must protect Canadian waters by closing legal loopholes on sewage and greywater discharges, and by following the lead of other jurisdictions around the world – including California, Belgium, Germany, Denmark and Turkey – and banning scrubber washwater.
b) Develop a sustainable framework for offshore renewable energy
In 2024, Canada enacted two new legal frameworks to enable offshore renewable energy on all three coasts. Renewable energy is essential to the climate transition, but as an industrial ocean activity that is forecasted to grow dramatically, we must manage it effectively. This includes introducing legal safeguards that ensure that renewable energy projects do not happen in marine protected areas.
c) Introduce a legal moratorium on seabed mining in Canada
In 2023, Canada introduced an effective moratorium on seabed mining in Canadian waters, in the absence of adequate scientific knowledge and regulatory oversight. As mining companies exert mounting pressure on countries around the world to begin seabed mining, Canada should secure the long-term health of the ocean by formalizing this moratorium in law.
d) Apply regulatory safeguards on marine geoengineering proposals
Marine geoengineering is an emerging field of technologies that aim to sequester carbon in the ocean. However, at present these technologies have little scientific evidence to support them, and risk causing unforeseen and far-reaching negative consequences to the ocean, climate and food security. Despite this, geoengineering projects are currently moving ahead in Canada with little to no regulatory oversight. Canada must adopt regulatory safeguards to decide if and when these projects should go ahead, including by following the thoughtful and protective frameworks established by the Convention on Biological Diversity and London Convention and Protocol, two international treaties to which Canada is party, which are designed to protect ocean health.
3. Support strong ocean governance structures nationally and internationally.
Finally, Canada must maintain its attention to developing strong, equitable and just ocean governance structures within Canada and internationally. This includes:
a) Ratifying the High Seas Treaty
In 2023, Canada signed the United Nations Agreement on Marine Biological Diversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction, also known as the High Seas Treaty. The Treaty creates the first legal framework to protect and manage biodiversity in the high seas, which cover almost half the planet. It enables the creation of marine protected areas and allows for environmental impact assessments of potentially harmful activities in these vast ocean areas.
However, Canada still has not ratified the treaty. The Liberal Party’s election platform committed to ratification, and the federal government must make good on this promise as soon as possible to show its leadership on protecting the ocean, and to ensure that the treaty enters into force without delay.
b) Supporting Indigenous governance and stewardship of coastal and marine areas
Canada must also continue to build fair and equitable governance structures at home. Coastal Indigenous nations are at the forefront of the impacts to the ocean, experiencing the impacts of fisheries declines, oil spills and climate change on their food security and way of life. Indigenous nations also have deep, long-term knowledge of their territories, as well as the legal systems to make decisions to protect the health of the coast.
Canada must respect and make room for Indigenous legal orders in ocean governance. This means recognizing Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs) and supporting them with appropriate Crown legal designations, where desired. It also means respecting Indigenous authority over their marine territories, and supporting co-governance with Indigenous nations and the braiding together of Indigenous and Western laws and science to make decisions that support the long-term health of the coast. Canada can start by implementing the clear recommendations set out by the Assembly of First Nations in their marine IPCA report.
Conclusion
The next four years will be critical for Canada’s coasts and ocean. As industrial pressures continue to expand, we must ensure that the federal government meets its commitments to building laws and policies that will safeguard the long-term ecological health of the ocean. It is up to all of us to hold them to it.
Top photo: Sofia Neumann via Unsplash