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Outfitters brace for GNWT axe

Andrew Livingstone
Northern News Services
Published Wednesday, July 22, 2009

SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - Caribou outfitters are worried a meeting tomorrow with the GNWT will result in the end of their industry.

John Andre, an outfitter from Montana, said he is quite sure they will be told the upcoming hunting season this fall will be their last.

"That's the impression we get," Andre said. "It's pretty clear this is an agenda and it has nothing to do with the science. It's a political agenda to put the outfitters out of business."

A report completed by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources in June states that the Bathurst caribou herd is still in steep decline. Specific numbers have yet to be provided and final counts for the widely harvested herd won't be available until September.

Taking the same position as Andre, Yellowknife-based outfitter Boyd Warner, operator of Bathurst Inlet Developments, said he hopes the GNWT supplies evidence that supports the claims it has been making about a drastic decline in the herd.

"They did a survey they are happy with but we still have some questions we want answered," Warner told Yellowknifer on Tuesday.

Michael Miltenberger, minister of Environment, wouldn't comment on whether the outfitters will be told they can't hunt anymore, but did say if the territorial government adopts more stringent hunting regulations, the sport hunters will be the first to feel the changes.

"We also know the way our priorities work that if there are restrictions or any kind of belt tightening to be done, we start at the top with the sports hunters. That has not changed," Miltenberger said.

Miltenberger said history shows that caribou populations expand and decline in cycles, and the current decline has yet to bottom out.

A 2006 photographic count of the herd showed a total of 128,000 animals. The count, however, had a margin of error of 27,300. According to Andre, a late spring is the reason the herd seems smaller than it was in 2006 and a small number of collared caribou as a sample is not sufficient.

A review conducted by the Alberta Research Council last year on barren-ground caribou management in the NWT was critical of how counts were done and said collar use should be increased severalfold within the herd, one of nine recommendations made by the council.

"The sample sizes of collars currently employed by ENR are inadequate to provide empirical evidence strong enough to support many assumptions key to ENR's caribou management policies," the report reads.

"They say clearly that these guys don't have enough to support this crashing caribou theory, it's ludicrous," Andre said.

Miltenberger said the GNWT has agreed to accept the recommendations in the Alberta Research Council review, but is still working on putting them in place.

"There is some concern about using collars within the aboriginal communities, but we are working with the aboriginal governments to get the largest representative sample as we can afford," he said.

Miltenberger said the GNWT will meet with others this winter once all the data are ready.

"There won't be any surprises," he said. "The outfitters know and have known where the numbers are and all the indicators are that the trends are not improving."