Gjoa Haven hunters want polar bear study studied

MIRIAM HILL

Louie Kamookak, the chair of Gjoa Haven’s Hunters and Trappers Association, wants an independent review of the department of sustainable development’s McClintock Channel polar bear study.

Kamookak said the HTA met with representatives from Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board and DSD on Jan. 30 and 31 and asked to see the full report of the study, which estimates numbers of bears in the area.

It’s part of a study to find acceptable harvest rates for bears all over the territory.

During the 2000-01 hunting season, the NWMB stated 12 bears could be taken from the McClintock Channel area. Gjoa Haven, Cambridge Bay and Taloyoak shared the quota equally among themselves. In 2001-02, there was a moratorium put in place and no bears were harvested from the area.

Kamookak was told the study was still in draft form, which confused him.

“It’s confusing us, because it doesn’t really make sense if a moratorium was put in place and the study it was based on was still in the draft stage,” he explained. He wants an outside body to check that the study was done properly.

But finding a third party to review the study could prove harder than Kamookak expected.

“It was like we hit a wall when we asked NTI, who is supposed to be our representative in this. What we got from the people that were here is that they don’t have the resources to do a review on the study,” he said.

Kamookak said if the draft report is good enough to base a moratorium on, he wants to know why a copy can’t be released to his HTA.

DSD polar bear biologist Mitch Taylor said he understands Kamookak’s concerns, but for a scientific report to have any merit, it must be put into a standard form accepted by scientists around the world and submitted to a journal where others can scrutinize it.

“If there are mistakes or issues, or things that we did wrong, then it comes back to us for corrections,” he said.

This is what he explained to Kamookak, he said.

“What Louie would say is, ‘How do we know Mitch Taylor did it right then if other scientists haven’t viewed it?'” Taylor said.

It takes about a year for a final draft of a study to go through the full process, he said. In the meantime the study is reviewed by the polar bear technical committee.

“We have other specialists who we work with, colleagues and collaborators,” Taylor said, citing a biometrician at the marine mammal lab in Seattle, who is a world leader in this work.

“This is not just my analysis, this is our analysis,” Taylor said. “So I’m responsible for it, but when you have people of that calibre working on it and reviewing it in a shorter time frame, we don’t have to wait until the study can be written up and reviewed and published and all that, we can move on this information right away.”

While he said DSD would like to see a 15-year moratorium on polar bear harvesting in the channel for conservation reasons, there is still room for a harvest and it just means that the population will take longer to recover.

It’s the NWMB that makes the final decision on quotas, not DSD, he said.

“We’re doing our consultation. We’re not making any unilateral decisions,” Taylor said. At the meeting in Taloyoak, the community agreed to a moratorium on harvesting in McClintock Channel, he said.

Representatives from the NWMB, NTI and DSD will be on the road doing more community consultations in the Kivalliq this week.