Endangered orcas remain at risk even after Ottawa drops proposed legal change

During the Trans Mountain proposal period, the government’s own review found that added tanker traffic could harm endangered Southern Resident killer whales in the waters where they feed — so it promised to make a plan to reduce the harm, including goals for cutting underwater noise over the short, medium and long term, said Hussein Alidina, WWF-Canada’s lead specialist for marine conservation.

Since the expanded pipeline began operating in May 2024, Ottawa has continued voluntary ship slowdowns and route changes in place and increased the distance vessels must keep from the whales from 400 to 1,000 metres, but Alidina said the measures have not delivered the broader reductions promised when the project was approved.

“No plan is really in place. All we’ve seen is assessment after assessment that kind of depicts what’s happening and lots of monitoring, but no real tangible plans to have target-based reductions of noise,” he said.

That record is now part of the debate over a proposed West Coast oil pipeline from Alberta to a marine terminal at Roberts Bank in Metro Vancouver, near critical habitat for the whales.

The government has dropped a proposal that would have let cabinet approve projects that threatened an endangered species’ survival or recovery but environmental lawyers say other laws could still let cabinet bypass that protection and allow the pipeline to move forward.

Under the Species at Risk Act, the fisheries minister cannot authorize an activity that would jeopardize an endangered species’ survival or recovery, said Anna Johnston, a staff lawyer at West Coast Environmental Law. But if cabinet lists the pipeline under the Building Canada Act, that approval could be granted in advance as part of one federal decision, leaving a minister to set the conditions the company must meet.

“Cabinet wants to use the Building Canada Act to do an end run around that last line of defence,” Johnston said.

The government is expected to decide by Oct. 1 whether it plans to list the pipeline under the Building Canada Act.

Earlier this month, the federal government put the Canada Energy Regulator in charge of reviewing pipelines that cross provincial or international borders. Before that, the regulator and the federal impact-assessment agency reviewed them together. Environmental groups say removing the second layer of review could limit scrutiny of fossil-fuel projects and lead to fewer opportunities for the public and Indigenous communities to take part.

A small population under pressure

The Southern Resident killer whale has been listed as endangered under Species at Risk Act since 2003.

Alidina said progress under the act has been slow. It took the federal government five to six years to develop a recovery strategy for the whales and another 10 years to produce an action plan. In 2017 and 2018, conservation groups sought emergency protections, but the request was denied and the government introduced less extensive measures instead.

“There are some benefits to those measures, but they are not enough in themselves to reverse the decline of southern residents,” Alidina said. “We haven’t done really well in recovering the species.”

In some parts of the Salish Sea, noise from boats and ships makes up 40 to 80 per cent of what is heard underwater, Alidina said. The whales use sound to communicate, navigate and find salmon, so the noise can make it harder for them to hunt and travel.

Chinook salmon, the whales’ main food, have also become smaller, said Misty MacDuffee, a conservation biologist and director of the wild salmon program at the Raincoast Conservation Foundation. The whales now spend more energy catching fish while getting fewer calories from each one.

The latest finalized count found 74 whales in July 2025, while a provisional 2026 count put the population at 76. MacDuffee said the number changes as whales are born and die and the small increase does not mean the population is recovering.

“All of the analysis suggests that unless we reduce the threat to these whales ... this population can’t recover under those conditions,” MacDuffee said.

A Fisheries and Oceans Canada-led study published in 2021 projected that, with no management action, the whales faced a 26 per cent chance of extinction, with the population disappearing by the end of the century.

MacDuffee said the proposed terminal would bring some of the largest oil tankers through the Salish Sea, already crowded with ships, ports and coastal development. The added traffic would increase pressure on waters the whales use to feed and travel, even if no oil were spilled.

“The noise they generate is consequence enough,” she said.

MacDuffee said salmon restoration and noise reduction are connected to the whales’ survival. Restoration work in the Fraser River estuary is reopening historic habitat for young salmon, while Indigenous-led teams monitor underwater noise and work to reduce its impact on whale habitat.

“All roads to their survival are through salmon,” she said. “We need to quiet the ocean and we need to improve the quality and the abundance of their prey.” Sonal Gupta / Local Journalism Initiative / Canada's National Observer.

Copyright 2026, Canada's National Observer. All rights reserved.

Sonal Gupta, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Canada's National Observer.