From Nunatsiaq Online.ca 

October 14, 2014

Governments, aboriginal groups strike deal on south Hudson Bay polar bears

Annual harvest set at 45 bears, 15 fewer than in recent years

NUNATSIAQ NEWS

Governments, Inuit organizations and hunters in both Nunavut and Nunavik say they have reached a new agreement on how to manage the Southern Hudson Bay polar bear subpopulation. But they don' say what the new quota is. (FILE PHOTO)

After years of postponed meetings and debates, governments, Aboriginal organizations and hunters in Nunavut, Nunavik and Cree regions within Ontario and Quebec have reached a new agreement on how to manage the controversial southern Hudson Bay polar bear subpopulation.

Under the new agreement, Inuit hunters will be taking fewer polar bears that in past years; the annual harvest of that subpopulation has been set at 45, said an Oct. 10 Environment Canada news release.

But the federal agency still has not revealed how that quota is divided up between the different user groups.

Since 2011, in the absence of a quota system, a combined voluntary quota for the Southern Hudson Bay polar bear population of 60 has been used.

Twenty-six of those are allocated to Nunavik; 25 to Nunavut - for Sanikiluaq -and the remainder go to Cree communities in Ontario and Quebec.

The southern Hudson Bay's polar bear subpopulation is among the most complex in Canada as it involves a territory, two provinces, two Inuit land claim areas, and Cree hunting rights under Treaty 9.

While Nunavik's Inuit birthright organization, Makivik Corp., signed off on the voluntary quota in 2011, Nunavik hunters said the decision was unfair, because the region has never before had strict regulations put on its polar bear hunt.

"[The voluntary quota] was supposed to be there for a year, but it's carried over," Adamie Delisle Alaku, Makivik's vice-president of resource development, said earlier this year. "There needs to be a better system."

Delisle Alaku's comments came this past February, shortly after officials from Nunavut, Quebec and Ontario came together in Inukjuak for the first set of public hearings focused on that sub-population.

Although the federal environment department first requested that the different jurisdictions come up with a new quota for the sub-population in 2011, that meeting continued to be delayed while groups awaited the results of aerial surveys carried out in 2011 and 2012.

The surveys pegged the southern Hudson Bay polar bear population at 951 animals, suggesting the population hasn't changed since the mid-1980s and is generally in good health.

But previous surveys had shown the population in decline and had caused concern for both scientists and regulators alike.

Environment Canada said the new agreement takes effect November 2014 and continues until November 2016.

The agreement is applicable to the take of polar bears in accordance with the respective hunting seasons in each jurisdiction, the release said.

Following the agreement's end in 2016, user groups will meet again to review it.