Marineland Beluga Whales: What’s Next for Canada’s Captive Cetaceans

1:00:00 30 Belugas on the edge. Canada says no to export. Marine land says it can't afford to care for them and euthanasia has been threatened. And what happens when the law protects animals but the system fails them? We're gonna talk about updates. This is just gonna be a straight up episode. No fantasy, semantic editing. I want to give you an update because so much has been commented on on different videos and so many little updates and big updates have happened. The good news is so far the Belugas, the 30 Belugas are still alive. We're gonna talk about the options and what is probably going to happen in my opinions on that on this episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Let's start the show.

1:00:44 Hey everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin. And this is the podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean, how you can speak up for the ocean and what you can do to live for a better ocean by taking action. On today's episode, we're gonna be talking about the updates surrounding this Marine Land debacle. So here is what has happened. So Marine Land came out and said, hey, by the way, we're out of money. We haven't been open for the last year. Our parents have died. These are the kids that have taken over Marine Land and the parents owned it for decades and decades and decades and ran this facility in a lot of controversy. There's been a lot of problems with water quality over the last 10 years and even before that, there've been a lot of deaths over the last little bit.

1:01:31 Since 2019, 19 beluga whales have passed away. One orca has passed away and one dolphin has passed away. So a lot of stuff has happened and bad stuff is happening with Marine Land. There's a law that came into place that says, hey, you know what? Government of Canada says, you cannot bring in any new Marine mammals to any kind of Marine theme park. So you have to and you can't really get rid of your other emails without permits and it's all going to be regulated now. And you can't just do anything willy nilly. You can't use them for entertainment and you can't use them for breeding, which was a big moneymaker for the Marine theme parks in the US as well as in Canada, as well as around the world.

1:02:13 If you want more information on that, I highly recommend that you watch the documentary Blackfish. It outlines everything that the theme parks were doing, including Sea World as well as Marine Land. So now, you know, this has been a big, a big problem in the last couple of weeks. Marine Land said, hey, you know what? We're running out of money. We can't take care. We can't feed or take care of these animals anymore. And if we don't get them out, we are going to, they're going to die. We're going to have to euthanize them because we can't feed them, which is kind of BS in my opinion, but we'll talk about that in a minute. So essentially what happens is in 2019, the ending of captivity of whales and dolphins that came into play.

1:02:55 So now they needed like Marine Land needs a permit to ship them out. They had a deal with a Marine theme park in China that, they worked a year, almost a year on that deal. They applied for a permit with the government of Canada, Department of Fisheries and Oceans. The minister came back said, you know what? No, we're not going to allow this to happen. I've seen a lot on captive whales. We don't want to have a law here that says, hey, we're not going to use them for entertainment and breeding and then ship them off to another facility that allows entertainment, the use of whales in entertainment and breeding because that's not what we do. That's just, it is, you know, a bit hypocritical if we start saying, hey, we're not going to do it, but we're going to allow other people to do it.

1:03:36 So what happens to these whales? This first thing when the government denied the first thing, the deny the permit, the first thing that Marine Land did was like, hey, by the way, we're just going to, we're going to have to euthanize them if you don't do this, which the minister just came back said that response was inappropriate because first of all, you can't do that in the law. The next step was to find out how these animals need to be cared for. And this is where the updates have to have, like have to come, you know, and there have been some updates. First of all, the animals, there was a deadline date of when the animals were going to be euthanized. That didn't happen. Of course, it's not going to happen. I think a lot of people were worried about that. Marine Land can't do it by law.

1:04:17 It has to have others come in through this law, this captivity of whales and dolphins act. You have to have the government. The government can actually come in and take over, whether it's the federal or provincial government. They could both. They all have. They both have acts that allows them to take over for animal welfare. So that would be the first step that happens. But at this point, one of the major updates is that Marine Land has some, some type of funny. It's restructured. It says restructured. It's been able to have some short term bridge financing, but the animals are still at risk. This is his short term. It's not going to be, it's not going to be something that is going to happen. Now, a couple of things have come up in terms of where can they go?

1:04:58 All of them have been denied by Marine Land. So the first one was the whale seaside sanctuary in Nova Scotia off the coast of Nova Scotia. A couple of problems with that one. One, there's no facility right now. There's no sanctuary at this point. It's still a theoretical, unfortunately. The nets haven't been put into place because the adjacent owners who have to have unanimous decision, a unanimous agreement that the seaside sanctuary could come in are not unanimous. They don't want to come in because they're worried about a few things. They're worried about tourists that are going to come in because there's going to be an education center around there and they're worried about traffic. These are small towns in Nova Scotia. These are not Halifax. Halifax is the biggest city and it's about 300,000.

1:05:40 The rest, if you've ever been in Nova Scotia, all these little towns maybe have a couple thousand people. Some of them 10,000, some of them 30,000, but not much more than that. A lot of these areas are small. They like their local traffic the way it is. They don't want to increase their traffic. Then there's a couple of other risks. One, they're worried about access to the ocean. There's going to be a net. Will they have access to the ocean? Now, there's also going to be different whales in their area that they're not used to. It's a lot of different things that are going on. They're working with the federal government to make sure that this is going through. The whale seaside sanctuary just put up a new response, a new update in terms of the mayor of Niagara where Marine land is coming in saying, "Hey, we have to figure out a way to find them."

1:06:32 So there are updates going through, but we'll see how that kind of comes through because we're not sure what's going to happen to these whales. That's the first thing. The whale seaside sanctuary, unfortunately, is not ready to go. There's nothing there at this point. They're still locked up in some legalities and some regulations. This is obviously going to take some time. So the short term way of trying to keep these animals and saying them in the wild is not going to happen through the whale seaside sanctuary at any point in time over the next year. This is a long time in the making and the whale seaside sanctuary, the group has been working with the government for a long time and hopefully we will see something in time.

1:07:14 Now the whale seaside sanctuary did apply to take two French or two orcas that were in a French Marine thing park as that was shutting down last year. It got denied because there was no facility that was available. And it seemed like the government of Canada wasn't going to make it easy, not to say that's bad for the government of Canada, but also nothing was going to happen within the next year when those orcas had to be out by law in France. So that was happening as well. So that's the first option of the sanctuary. There was another option in a sanctuary that could happen, although we still haven't found out at this point. There is a sanctuary in Nunavik in the territory of Nunavik, which is northern Canada.

1:08:02 There was a suggestion, the relocation to Hudson Bay or Nunavik, for possible reintegration into natural habitat where a lot of belugas are found. But there hasn't been an official Inuit organization response yet. So there was somebody in Montreal who's part of that nation who said, "Hey, why don't we just put it there?" This is where a lot of them will be able to be there and that could be a place that we can put them there. We haven't heard back from any of the indigenous nations up there who will have pretty much final say as well as the territorial government will have final say of where it goes. Now, of course, there is a potential for the government of Ontario to be involved in this because Hudson's Bay does border along Ontario quite a bit.

1:08:46 So there could be actions there. Now, again, with putting these into a population where you have belugas, you're messing with the genetic makeup of those belugas. Now, this beluga population in Hudson's Bay, as far as I know, correct me if I'm wrong, is not endangered at this point. The one in St. Lawrence is, but the one in Hudson Bay is not endangered. And so, but if you input or add or introduce new beluga genetics into that area, will it have an effect, a negative effect on the gene pool of that population? Or will it make it better? I don't know. That's a study that needs to be done for a long time.

1:09:26 And I don't know if that's going to be possible to send them there and do that. With that said, too, there's a sanctuary up there that could be a possible location for that. But we haven't heard anything back from the people who are involved in that sanctuary. But they said it's not there's one person that came out and said it's not impossible, but it will be challenging. And one of the challenges is the genetics, of course, and how that's going to mix within the population. The other one is the care and the money that goes into feeding these belugas. These belugas were born in captivity. They were not born outside. So they have been fed, hand fed for their entire lives. How they're going to be fed. They're going to have to have someone there to take care of them, to feed them.

1:10:07 And as long as they want it, if they can, if they can figure out how to feed for themselves, they will figure out how to feed themselves and they won't be stopped from doing that. But somebody is going to have to take general care of them. Now, one thing that I missed on the whale seed size sanctuary. Marine land is pushing back on that sanctuary because they're saying that the there's a metal. There's a gold metal mine in the 1930s that was there. And there's still a lot of arsenic and a lot of metals that could pollute the animals. According to the government and according to the marine or the seaside sanctuary project, the organization, they said that all that has been put out in reports and everything has been fine. There hasn't been a problem with the water quality in that area for belugas or any other type of marine animal or cetacean, which is a whale.

1:10:52 So, you know, that is something that, you know, marine land keeps pushing, but the government is aware of that. And they've been working with the marine seaside as whale sanctuary project for that time to be able to put that together. So two sanctuaries available, one probably not available for the next year, at least the Inuit led proposals might be an option. Now, the one thing that's interesting and hasn't really been talked about is that when the whales were being proposed to go to China, the Chinese marine theme park was going to pay them. So when you go to a sanctuary, the seaside sanctuary project is not going to pay for the whales because they think that's that's not right. We shouldn't be paying for whales.

1:11:33 They should just be going back into the wild. And of course, the Inuit led proposals, those probably won't be a situation where the marine lands going to get paid for them. So the real question is like, obviously, marine land has said no to each of those sanctuary projects. Is it because they're not going to get paid for it or do they actually care about the whales themselves? It sounds to me like they just want to get paid for these whales and get out of the business as much as possible and recoup as much as possible. Because they said they are indebted quite a bit already and they just want to get rid of this. Now, I'm sure there are some financial ways to get rid of the debt and say, hey, look, we're trying to get rid of these whales. But I would love to see these animals go to a sanctuary.

1:12:17 But it's still a lot of problems because it hasn't really been done too many times. There is one where a couple of blue guys have been put out into the wild, but they're always into their pools that they have, like indoors, that they have options to go in and out in their note that they want to go into the wild, which, to be honest, is up to them. They have a choice of whether they want to stay in a pool or they want to go out in the wild. If they have that choice and they want to make that choice to go out to the wild, that's up to them. If they want to come in closer, that's up to them as well. At least they have the choice. And so that's a big thing, but it does cost money. And although the marine seasank the whale seaside sanctuary project has been raising money, it hasn't had any money at this point.

1:13:00 It's getting more money as these projects go on and as these get closer and closer, but it's not asking the government for money. So I think a long term solution, like a long term Canadian sanctuary is still years away from being fully, fully operational. So here are the questions now going forward is one. If the marine land is actually out of money, what happens to these animals? The big thing from the law is that the government will arrange for them to be taken over. So the animal, the care for the animals will be taken over, whether it's in marine land itself or it's at a different care facility. That is up. We don't know where that's going to happen at this point. The easy question is the easy answer would be at marine land itself where it's staying close and they would have to be cared for there.

1:13:46 And I don't know who would put the bill for that. If marine land says it's out of money, it's totally out of money. I don't know what would happen. That could be taxpayers money. Do Canadians want taxpayer money to go there? Do they have a choice? The law probably says no and somebody will have to put that bill provincial and Canadians. The province, the premiers already said they don't want to put the bill, but they have to be moved. They just don't know how to move them. Also, in some of the sanctuaries, they can only probably take about eight to 10 of the belugas. They can't take the full 30. So something's going to have to be done at some point. So the other the ethical question here is whales welfare has to come first, but finances and politics should not be an excuse for cruelty. Right. This is the marine land has been taken care of these animals for decades and all of a sudden they're out of money and they're saying, well, we can't take care of them.

1:14:30 They have an ethical responsibility. I said this in my last episode. We have an ethical responsibility to take care of these animals. If you are going to have a marine theme park. Now, they also have dolphins. They had an orca that passed away earlier this or within the last year. Obviously these belugas, they have deer and they also have bears, but they have to look after as well. So yes, yes, it's expensive, but that's the business that they're in. And that's the the ethical questions that they kind of took on an ethical responsibility. So the responsibility should not be outsourced. You should not just be able to like take a take a pen and say, hey, we're going to ship them off to somewhere else, whether the sanctuary government or other animals themselves. Where do we go with this? I'd love to hear your your your opinions on this.

1:15:12 Where do you think these animals should go? I actually think they're going to stay in marine land, unfortunately, until they pass away. Some people think that they should be euthanized just because they can't, you know, it's it's cruel to keep them in that in that tank for the rest of their lives. But, you know, is it better just to put them out into the wild in a sanctuary where they actually have a chance and maybe live free for just a little bit longer or somewhat free for a little bit longer? These animals have been, you know, abused just in terms of the actual case that they've been in, like the the tank that they've been in for their entire lives. They've been fed, they've been taken to like their wild sort of abilities have been taken away from them without, you know, their their say or choice in the matter.

1:15:56 And that's a tough thing to sell. So this is a big thing. But what I want you to all do if you listen to this is really listen to the facts. This is not a government problem. This is not a government's fault for denying the permit for these animals to go to China. They're actually doing a really good thing here. They put in the law because of this. They knew this was going to start to happen. They knew marine land was going to suffer at some point. They've been suffering for years. They haven't been able to take care of these belugas for a long time. And when they've tried to ship some of these belugas off, the belugas have died. So this has been an ongoing issue. The law is there for a reason. It's not the government's fault just because they denied a permit. Obviously, everybody wants these animals to be healthy, to be happy.

1:16:38 Unfortunately, in this situation, I just don't think it's going to happen, whether they're going to be happy, healthy and happy in a tank for the rest of their lives. I don't know. But that this point is like not moving them might be the best way and just trying to provide the best care possible for them. That is the more realistic answer in my opinion. But I'd love to hear your opinions. You know, this is no judgment on anybody. This is no judgment on whether you want this these belugas to go out and at sea and like, you know, good luck to them or if you want them to be cared for or if you want them to stay in captivity. This is a difficult, difficult and complex situation that is one of those things where it's sad to see these belugas.

1:17:19 But it's also something that we, you know, we need to take care of them in the best way possible. And unfortunately, no way is going to be the best way or the ideal way. It's just what's best for these belugas at this point. But to be honest, I'm a little angry at Marine land. I don't think they should have been doing what they've been doing. They've been just disappointing these belugas and orcas and dolphins and other animals that they take care of for the last decade. And it's really sad to see that it's something that should have been done a long time ago.

1:18:13 That's it. If you have an opinion, put them in the comments below. If you're watching this on YouTube, if you're listening to this through your favorite podcast app like Apple, Spotify, Amazon music, whatever that might be. I'd love to hear from you can DM me on Instagram at how to protect the ocean. That's at how to protect the ocean or you can hit me up on our website. Go to speak up for blue dot com forward slash contact and just fill out the form goes right to my personal email. I want to thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the how to protect the ocean podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin from the true North strong and free. Today, we'll talk to you next time and happy conservation.