Feds release long-awaited plan to make a plan to make a plan

Sometimes it’s easy to see why people lose faith in the government’s ability to get things done. Nowhere is that more apparent than when it releases a long-awaited plan to address a pressing issue, and the document amounts to a vague plan to gather data to inform a future plan that will, we are told, contain actual, um, plans. 

That’s what happened when the feds dumped their Ocean Noise Strategy — on a Friday in August, one of those days when news crawls off to die. But it’s understandable why they were so eager to avoid making a splash.

Ocean noise gives the government a headache on multiple fronts. Trans Mountain, the pipeline the Liberals bought and then used as a pit to burn cash for several years, has just caused an even greater-than-expected spike in tanker traffic in the critical habitat of Southern Resident killer whales. Those charismatic symbols of the West Coast, a federally protected species, meanwhile, are suffering from an onslaught of noise from the tankers and from other industrial and commercial traffic that disrupts their communication and hunting. The military has been desperate to establish underwater noise limits and mitigation strategies, in part to address its own obligations to species at risk, on all three coasts. All the while, environmental NGOs have been riding the feds for their failure to roll out a strategy they first promised eight years ago. 

But an effective plan to lower ocean noise will most likely mean severe restrictions on traffic and other industrial activity. There isn’t really any other way around it: as with carbon emissions, you can play at the margins with technology (in the case of CO2, you can capture a bit of it; in the case of ocean noise, you can dampen the sound emissions from vessels) but you can’t eliminate it with techno fixes alone. You can ask ships to slow down, as the Port of Vancouver has done for years to great acclaim — but if you’re adding more and more traffic, it more than makes up for the reduction in noise. 

A reduction in shipping traffic is a reduction in stuff. And people don’t want less stuff. They want more stuff. Governments aren’t in the business of telling people they can’t have what they want — that’s why they just approved the expansion of a major shipping port south of Vancouver, which will bring in bigger, noisier ships. 

That brings us back to the new plan to make a plan to make a plan. 

Plans and strategies, of course, are an important part of the work of government: with thousands of people potentially working on their own tiny piece of a very large and challenging puzzle, a strategy is key to bringing those pieces together. Some strategies come together to create real change and truly address the problem at hand — but we don’t need to look far to find another example of a time-buying exercise masquerading as a solution. In 2017, the same Liberal government announced an “action plan” to address the decline in Southern Resident killer whales. That action plan has amounted to “a neglected document gathering dust,” environmental lawyer Dyna Tuytel told Natasha Bulowski this week, while the whales themselves continue to suffer and decline.  

Today, if the government wants to look like it’s doing something on ocean noise while not taking any of the hard steps it will have to take to address the problem itself, it could do worse than announcing a plan in which nine of the 20 “action items” involve some variation on “think really hard about it.” 

As NGOs who worry about ocean noise told Bulowski, gathering more data isn’t going to solve the problem. Fixing the actual problem — not the public relations issue — of ocean noise drowning out the underwater soundscape is going to require tradeoffs that not everyone is going to like. Ships will have to go slower. They will need expensive upgrades. There may have to be fewer of them. All of this will take political will, and none of it will be cheap — but until then, all this talk is only making things louder.