Biodiversity Caribou Conservation planning Natural resource development

WCS Canada comment: Draft Upper Smoky Sub-Regional Plan

Ray, J.

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WCS Canada's response to the Government of Alberta’s draft Upper Smoky Sub-Regional Plan (SRP).

Key points

1. The draft Upper Smoky Sub-Regional Plan fails to provide a credible path to caribou recovery and actively facilitates further habitat loss.
   It omits fundamental components of a range plan—such as disturbance thresholds, critical habitat protection, and caribou-specific restoration—and enables extensive new disturbance within the remaining winter ranges of two already imperiled caribou populations.
   
   
2. There is no functional cumulative effects management framework in the plan, despite Alberta’s commitment to use land-use planning for this purpose.
   The province has repeatedly identified sub-regional planning as a tool to manage the cumulative effects of resource development, yet the draft plan includes no ecological baselines, thresholds, or mechanisms to assess and limit total disturbance across sectors.
   
   
3. Alberta disregarded key input from the West-Central Caribou Task Force and Indigenous Peoples, despite commitments to reflect their perspectives.
   The draft plan omits Task Force recommendations on habitat recovery and coordinated access, and gives minimal weight to Indigenous perspectives, despite repeated and consistent concerns raised about the impacts of unchecked development on rights and land use.
   
   
4. This plan is dramatically inadequate and cannot be salvaged through revision.
   It is fundamentally misaligned with the stated purpose of sub-regional planning and must be re-done from the ground up with a clear mandate to support caribou recovery and responsible land-use decision-making.

Recommended citation

Ray, J. (2025). WCS Canada comment: Draft Upper Smoky Sub-Regional Plan. Wildlife Conservation Society Canada [WCS Canada]. https://wcscanada.org/resources/wcs-canada-comment-draft-upper-smoky-sub-regional-plan/