The Legault government decided to go ahead with the designation of a protected area along the Péribonka River and canceled the imminent logging that would soon befall this territory.
The Minister of the Environment and the Fight against Climate Change, Benoit Charette, and the Minister of Forests, Wildlife and Parks, Pierre Dufour, announced, by press release Tuesday, the intention of the government “to protect this precious territory which is considered by many as a natural jewel and to give access to it to those who want to practice tourist activities”. They seem to have managed to reconcile their competing interests.
The Péribonka River area is one of the 83 projects that had been discarded during the designation, at the end of December last year, of 34 reserves of territory for the purposes of protected areas (RTFAP). These reservations, decreed in extremis, enabled the Legault government to achieve – well, almost – the objective of protecting 17% of natural terrestrial and freshwater environments in Quebec, in order to comply with the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity.
The creation of a recreational tourism park along the Péribonka River is the result of a long mobilization of citizens, including members of the First Nations, and local elected officials. It took them a final push this summer to counter the logging that the Ministry of Forests, Wildlife and Parks (MFFP) had authorized and which were to begin these days. It was planned to harvest 13% of the trees in the territory in the visual corridor of the river.
Several years of preparation and consultation are necessary to succeed in designing a protected area project like that of the Péribonka River in a completed form and ready to receive the seal of the government. This is also the case for the majority of the 82 other projects that were not selected in December. In the list, there are many projects which were the subject of in-depth consultations and which had received the imprimatur from the regional ministerial authorities. Some projects – we are thinking in particular of the protected areas of the Dumoine River and the Black River in the Outaouais – had even been announced by the previous government. The opposition of the “Minister of Forestry”, to use the current term, and his seasoned officials was enough to prevent the projects from materializing.
In the case of the Péribonka River, the victory, which we must salute, is not complete. The area of the protected area, planned to extend over 268 km2, will be revised downwards. Consultations will take place and we can believe that the interests of the industry, defended by Minister Dufour, will still weigh heavily in the balance. In a press briefing on Tuesday, Minister Charette however indicated that the surface area of the area will be substantial and that “it will not be a slice of pie”. The government must also determine what type of protection it will grant to the territory. Thus, the status of protected areas of sustainable use (APUD), allowed by the new law 46 amending the Law on the conservation of natural heritage, adopted last February, authorizes certain commercial activities, but not industrial logging.
The victory is partial because it concerns only one of the 83 areas that the Legault government could have reserved in December. Promising to comply with the international convention, he pledged to protect, by 2030, 17% to 30% of Quebec’s territory. To reach its target of 17%, it created protected areas over vast sparsely populated areas north of 49e parallel, territories which are of no interest to the forest industry. However, to respect the spirit of the UN convention, protected areas must be representative of the biodiversity of the entire national territory.
The 83 protected area projects, which are mainly located further south, would contribute to this representativeness. But it should be remembered that they only total about 1% of Quebec’s territory. Seeing the fuss that the Legault government does before deigning to consider projects that are nevertheless well put together and justified, one can wonder how it intends to achieve this demanding 30% objective. If, for a project to unlock, citizens must mobilize and demonstrate in front of the regional offices of the Ministry of Forestry, as happened in Jonquière this summer, it will take time before grabbing this 1% , while it is 12 times this area that it will be necessary to reserve in the long term. The Legault government must stop its procrastination.
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