Canada May Cut Funding for Sable Island Station

Northern Sky News, January 2005

For thousands of years, it’s been catching the currents and gales of the North Atlantic as it broods off Nova Scotia’s southeastern coast. It’s also caught hundreds of ships and cost many hundreds of lives as unwitting mariners foundered on its treacherous shoals and shifting sandbars. It has a perfect sobriquet: The Graveyard of the Atlantic. Now Sable Island’s fragile ecosystems may be in serious danger of foundering as well.

The federal government of Canada is considering cutting funding to the only permanently manned facility on the island. It costs about a million dollars a year (Cdn.) to fund the Sable Island Station, which includes a manager and four other full-time staff, who conduct various research projects and monitor weather and ecology changes. They also assist with refueling for search-and-rescue, Coast Guard and petroleum industry vessels. (Natural gas deposits near the island feed the Maritimes & Northeast pipeline, which originates just off Sable Island’s beaches and extends all the way to Dracut, Massachusetts.)

There’s been a continuous human presence on Sable since 1801, when a site to provide assistance to mariners was first established. The Canadian government built aids to navigation, including lighthouses, following the country’s confederation in 1867. More recently the station has housed staffers of Environment Canada’s meteorological service and the Canadian Wildlife Service.

Visits to the island are strictly limited, and visitors are vetted thoroughly by the Canadian Coast Guard as well as the station manager. You can’t just jump on your pleasure boat and zip out to Sable for an afternoon picnic.

A few years back, Environment Canada was reevaluating its presence on a number of properties and determined that it could no longer afford the entire cost of operating the station. In response, the Sable Island Preservation Trust was formed to raise funds for covering the operating expense shortfall. The trust, however, has been far from successful. It has received a lot of press but raised no money at all to go toward the station’s expenses.

One of the island’s permanent residents is self-employed researcher and biologist Zoe Lucas, who has been working on Sable since her first visit there in 1971. Lucas is one of a number of people involved in lobbying the provincial and federal governments to secure funding for the station. The station acts as a central management facility for all kinds of logistics, and without its presence the potential for all kinds of abuses of the island’s ecosystems would increase dramatically. Lucas feels the fragile island’s future will be at stake if the station is not maintained year-round.

As part of her ongoing commitment to protecting Sable Island and its inhabitants, human and otherwise, Lucas operates a fantastic Internet web resource, The Green Horse Society (www.greenhorsesociety.com), the only web site with significant information about the station itself. Says Lucas, “If I can bring people to the web site they’ll have even more support for the situation with the station.”

Once the station’s future has been confirmed and stable funding provided, there may be some opportunity for it to produce some revenue by providing carefully managed ecotourism or additional services for the petroleum projects nearby. But Lucas and the other voices united on Sable’s behalf maintain that there will need to be careful planning and consultation before any sort of additional development projects could begin.

“In a perfect world, the federal government would take responsibility for managing and operating the station, employing the staff,” Lucas says. “They would operate with an advisory board made up of the many stakeholders who have expertise and commitment to the station and the island.”

Lucas is cautiously optimistic that the situation will be resolved in the coming months. “[Federal Minister of Fisheries and Nova Scotia M.P.] Geoff Regan’s office has been quite helpful in looking at the issues and several federal committees are looking at the funding, management options and so on, so there’s a lot more activity now regarding this issue,” she says. “Hopefully within the next couple of months they’ll be making an announcement about their intentions for the station. So the problems are not solved, but they’re definitely being addressed by Ottawa.”