Thank you very much, Minister Thompson. Member of Parliament Caley, my fellow Caucus members, Chairperson Williams from Squamish Nation, and Councillor Alec Guerin from Musqueam Nation, dear friends, conservation officers, thank you for joining us today.
We are gathered on the shores of the Pacific, shores where Indigenous Peoples, including the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations have lived since time immemorial. They were the first guardians of these waters. They have cared for them for thousands of years.
Water is where life begins, for each of us and for our planet.
Many Indigenous teachings begin with this truth.
The ocean is our First Water.
Life on this planet began in the ocean. Today, the ocean is a lifeforce that produces half of the oxygen we breathe. It feeds billions of people. It helps to steady our climate.
And these waters connect us to the world.
Our food, our trade, our transportation, our way of life all depend on the ocean.
Canada is an ocean nation, with the longest coastline on Earth, touching three oceans, long enough to circle the equator six times.
That’s an enormous strength; one we have drawn upon from our first fisheries to new trade corridors that are poised to transform our economy.
But when something comes first, we should treat it accordingly.
So first and foremost, we must protect our oceans.
Long before Canada had an oceans policy, Indigenous Peoples protected these waters.
Governments are now beginning to catch up.
The Government of Canada has taken major actions to restore our waterways and marine ecosystems.
Over 25 million square metres of aquatic habitat – the equivalent of 20,000 Olympic swimming pools – have been restored.
We’ve removed over 2,500 tonnes of ghost gear, deadly marine pollution that harms turtles, fish, and other marine life.
We’ve recovered more than 1,600 wrecked, hazardous, and abandoned vessels from the water.
And now we’re going further.
In March, Canada’s government launched A Force of Nature – a $3.8 billion strategy to protect and restore critical habitats, harmonise our growth strategies with our conservation, and mobilise new capital for nature.
At its core is our plan to protect 30% of our lands and 30% of our waters by the end of this decade.
A decade ago, Canada protected barely 1% of our waters. In the intervening years, there’s been steady progress.
In the past six months, we’ve added two more per cent in marine protected areas with two new ones in the Arctic, Qikiqtait and Sarvarjuaq in Nunavut and the Miayaltwa Ha’lidzogm hoon marine conservation area on British Columbia’s central coast.
Today, in total with those extra areas, we’re protecting more than 17% of our oceans – that’s over a million square kilometres. That’s more than 50 times the size of Lake Ontario.
Indigenous partners are helping shape these decisions.
Indigenous knowledge, as we know, has stewarded these waters for thousands of years. And that knowledge will help us to ensure that they remain safe, sustainable, and healthy for future generations – and for all the life that lives in them.
To that end, we can announce today we will expand the Reconciliation Framework Agreement in the Northern Shelf Bioregion. That’s the region that stretches from the top of Vancouver Island to the Alaskan border.
This new $185 million investment will support a five-year agreement with the Province of British Columbia and 18 First Nations to strengthen collaborative governance, conservation, and emergency preparedness.
And where the Fraser River meets the Salish Sea, we’re investing in Indigenous-led stewardship and the restoration of the Lower Fraser River Estuary.
More broadly, we will continue to identify additional marine protected areas over the coming three years to conserve that additional 13% of Canada’s marine heritage to which we committed.
Ocean conservation must go hand in hand with our ambitious agenda to build Canada strong.
Canadians know that we need to diversify our trade with reliable partners. But we can’t trade more without greater port capacity.
That’s why the Government of Canada is investing $10 billion to help transform the Port of Vancouver and the Roberts Bank Terminal 2, and why we’re currently determining whether this project will be in the national interest.
It’s also why we’re expanding the Port of Prince Rupert and the Port of Stewart. And it’s why we’re replacing the George Massey Tunnel, cutting travel times for commuters and speeding up our exports.
Collectively, these measures will unlock over $100 billion in new trade capacity. They will support hundreds, hundreds of thousands of new jobs in B.C. and across Canada.
But they will also mean more ships on the water and more pressure on the habitats that we are all working to protect.
And that means we must further strengthen our conservation efforts. Through fast, effective response plans. And by changing how we build, how we travel, and how we operate on the water to minimise impact.
To these ends, my colleagues and I are proud to announce a historic investment of $1.2 billion to keep our waters safe, to protect marine life, and to strengthen front-line conservation enforcement.
Canada is already a leader in ocean conservation, so we’re starting from a position of strength.
For the past decade, Canada’s robust Oceans Protection Plan has made considerable progress. But those growing trade volumes and intensifying climate mean we must now redouble our efforts.
So, we’re expanding the Coast Guard’s capacity to monitor marine traffic, we’re upgrading search and rescue stations, and we’re extending the very high frequency radio and radar network.
We’re improving seabed mapping as well as fisheries conservation and protection through new digital and autonomous tools.
And we’re developing a new national nearshore ocean forecasting system to better predict weather and currents – both to prevent marine incidents and to respond more rapidly when those incidents occur.
Now, as you know, we’re in the final stages of deciding whether one of Canada’s biggest infrastructure projects – a proposed new bitumen pipeline to the West Coast – could be a project of national interest. This project would diversify our economy, create almost 150,000 new jobs right across Canada, and make us much less dependent on the United States.
But we know it’s not just what we build, it’s how we build. And our government is taking a ‘protect while we build’ approach to new investments. We’ve made it clear that the pipeline should avoid highly sensitive areas. The proposed route would follow a similar southern corridor to the existing Transmountain pipeline, and the North Coast oil tanker ban will remain.
Given our increased trade requirements, more ships will enter the port of Vancouver. So we must scale up our systems to protect marine life in the event that something goes wrong. We’re investing in a national marine-mammal oil spill response plan and working with local partners to respond more quickly and effectively right across Canada.
And every project we advance must fully assess its potential impact on the environment and have a plan to mitigate it. For example, the extensive conditions for any Roberts Bank Terminal 2 expansion will include detailed measures to protect the habitats of killer whales. We’re establishing noise thresholds and implementing marine protection procedures.
To put it simply, if a killer whale gets too close to the site, work must stop.
These measures, and others like them, are the product of years of detailed analysis and consultations. They’ll add significantly to the cost of the project, but it will be worth it to protect our First Waters.
We can do it. We can create jobs and diversify our economy. And we can do it safely and responsibly, while protecting our oceans and the marine life that depends on them.
After all, one of the great benefits of sovereignty is being able to choose how we live.
Canadians choose to live in harmony with the environment, to preserve our exceptional natural heritage, to foster growth that benefits everyone, to move forward inclusively with Indigenous Peoples, and to look after one another.
You know, whales in Canada’s coastal waters live by sound. It’s how they find food or their family. It’s how they traverse these great seas. That means that a loud ship can be disorientating, deafening, and dangerous.
So, we’re investing an additional $100 million to build a national long-term capacity to monitor, assess, and mitigate underwater noise across Canada’s oceans.
That means we’ll work with companies and individual owner-operators to reduce noise with proven technologies, such as low-noise propellers, electric and hybrid motors, and hull improvements to make vessels more hydrodynamic.
In the Arctic, we will monitor underwater noise and marine mammals, understand baseline noise levels, assess the impact of increasing ship traffic, and address mitigation issues.
And that $100 million commitment builds on the $258 million we announced earlier this year to protect Southern Resident killer whales, North Atlantic right whales, and St. Lawrence Estuary belugas.
And it builds on the vital work in the Salish Sea to protect whales by reducing underwater noise, improving real-time whale detection, and responding faster to marine mammal incidents.
Our ocean protection approach has to be comprehensive, and that means replenishing the food source on which whales depend. Our Pacific Salmon Strategy is a $412 million plan to protect the lifeblood of the West Coast ecosystem – and I want to pay tribute to my colleagues who helped design and make that a reality. To restore habitats, rebuild wild salmon stocks, and transform fisheries in partnership with Indigenous Peoples and coastal communities.
Let me be clear about what all this will mean for the unique ocean ecosystem around Vancouver.
We’re setting a clear objective: to keep ocean noise at 2023 levels even as vessel traffic increases. We’ll do that through the combination of rigorous conditions around construction and investments in noise reduction.
For the whales we’re protecting, we will plan according to their patterns, not ours.
And to maximise the effectiveness of these initiatives, we’ll need more effective monitoring and better enforcement.
And that’s why we’re also investing more than $90 million to increase front-line capacity and modernise fisheries enforcement. We’ll equip fisheries officers with digital surveillance tools, including drones, and we’ll invest in recruitment, training, and retention of skilled officers.
We’ll have more eyes on the water – above and below the surface.
Today’s announced investment will improve how we protect our oceans.
But as we know, we can’t protect what we can’t see. And we can’t manage what we don’t understand.
The fact is, the Arctic is warming four times faster than the global average. We don’t always have the full picture, but we must act now.
That’s why, last week at the United Nations General Assembly, I joined the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, in launching the OceanEye International Alliance for the Global Ocean Observing System.
Thanks to Canada’s $82 million investment, we will be installing moored observation devices in the Arctic. The devices will transmit data in real time year-round.
Underwater gliders. Sensors that will monitor the ocean currents affecting the weather, ice movement, and fisheries along our Atlantic coast.
Through the Global Ocean Observing System, we’ll share these data with a network of countries across the globe.
Last week, through our partnership with the European Union, we gathered 29 other countries and secured $340 million for this vital work.
The action we’re taking today will advance Canada’s position as a global leader in ocean protection. Getting ocean protection right is the prerequisite for sustainable growth.
With today’s measures, our government is now investing more than $3 billion in ocean conservation.
In the coming months, we’ll release the other two pillars of Canada’s ocean strategy: namely, our plans to secure our waters, and secondly, to build our ocean economy.
And all this work will accelerate as we prepare to welcome the world for the 12th Our Ocean Conference in May 2027, convening governments, Indigenous leaders, scientists, and coastal communities to turn ambition into concrete action for ocean protection and sustainable use.
Let me end at our beginning: First Water.
The waves, the waters behind me sustain life and are a gateway for the exchange of trade, people, and ideas.
They’ve shaped the Canada we know today – and how we treat them will shape our future.
Canada is building big again. We’re doing so to strengthen our shared prosperity, to reinforce our sovereignty, and to carry us further than ever before.
But the further we reach, the greater is our responsibility to protect what sustains us. We inherited these oceans, and it’s our obligation to pass them on better than we found them.
And so we will. Canada is an ocean nation that will protect our First Waters.
Thank you very much.