It was with no shortage of bemusement that I watched that much-awaited spring ritual in Alberta: The government’s annual announcement of the grizzly bear no-hunt. Grizzly bear hunting was first suspended in 2006, when an increasing amount of scientific evidence indicated Alberta’s grizzly bear population was in deep trouble. Each April since, the Minister of Sustainable Resource Development sends out a press release about whether or not hunters will be able to wander the woods in hopes of shooting one of Alberta’s remaining grizzlies, which the government last June formally listed as threatened. There must be something special about the grizzly bear, for the government doesn’t make similar proclamations about whether we can put some caribou or sage grouse, also formally listed species at risk, in the freezer come hunting season. What gives with the griz?

Like most Albertans, I would have thought it unnecessary to announce that no hunting would be allowed of a legally listed threatened species like the grizzly bear. After all, they are listed as threatened for a reason: small population size and shrinking, biological sensitivity to high mortality rates, an endless number of anthropocentric threats that seem to grow by the year and a good chance that things will only get worse. Why would anyone want to hunt them? And, more to the point, why would we let them?

As far as I am aware, threatened and endangered species are automatically protected from hunting in most other political jurisdictions in the world. A quick survey of federal legislation in both Canada and the United States indicates that intentionally killing species listed as either threatened or endangered under the Species at Risk Act (Canada) or the Endangered Species Act (U.S.) is verboten. In eight of 10 provinces, species at risk are automatically prohibited from direct harm. Only B.C. and Alberta don’t explicitly forbid trophy hunting of imperiled species, though B.C. policy is very clear that hunting grizzlies in population units designated as threatened (of which there are nine) is not allowed until they have been recovered.

Alberta has a similar policy for the grizzly bear, which is the primary reason I thought the “no hunting” announcement seemed redundant. The Alberta government approved a grizzly bear recovery plan in 2008, which I have read more often than any other extant book, short story, essay or report. The plan’s “Appendix A” states quite clearly that hunting may resume only after recovery has been achieved. While there is much to be desired about the recovery plan, the list of criteria that must be satisfied before grizzly bears anywhere in Alberta can be hunted is a long one. There is not room enough here to list them, but suffice to say that it will take years, if not decades, for these criteria to be met — and to do so will require an annual investment of millions of dollars — money the government has so far been unable or unwilling to muster. (The U.S. spends roughly $3 million annually on grizzly bear recovery and management in only the Yellowstone recovery area, which is about one-tenth of the size of Alberta’s recovery area.)

When I queried Sustainable Resource Development spokesman Dave Ealey about what appears to be a very clear policy of “no hunting grizzly bears until they’re recovered,” he told me that, well, government policies (including recovery plans) are only “for guidance.” There is no requirement that these plans be binding or based on the best available science, as is the case in the U.S. Here in Alberta, recovery of threatened species is entirely at the discretion of the minister (in this case Mel Knight) — which is why additional clear-cut logging and road-building can (and will) take place this year in the Castle grizzly bear priority area, without an open and transparent assessment of how this additional new industrial activity will effect grizzly bears in a region that already exceeds thresholds laid out in the grizzly bear recovery plan. And which is why, one of these years, we’ll find that the grizzly bear hunt has been reinstated without having met any meaningful, science-based criteria whatsoever, no doubt because of some fantastical need to “protect public safety.”

When a government regularly ignores its own policies in favour of shoot-from-the-hip discretion, it’s time to be afraid, very afraid. It is the discretionary nature of environmental protection in Alberta that has made it such an abysmal failure. Just ask any woodland caribou or sage grouse. Or David Boyd, one of Canada’s most distinguished experts on environmental law and policy. “Some of the most basic, rudimentary [environmental] laws enacted by other nations are still absent in Canada,” Boyd writes in his environmental policy classic, Unnatural Law. “Canada’s lack of progress in legally protecting species at risk is an international embarrassment.” And Alberta, sad to say, is one of the worst of the bunch.

In the short term, a 10-year moratorium on grizzly bear hunting is the least we need. The only way to really recover grizzly bears and other species at risk in Alberta is to demand that our political representatives enact strong legislation, legislation that makes it mandatory for whatever government is in power — whether it’s the pro-environment Green Party or the pro-industry Tories — to not only list species, but to actually protect them. This goes beyond prohibiting hunting and other forms of killing, and includes the designation and protection of the critical habitat these sensitive species require to survive. Remember that the next time you’re standing at the ballot box.

Jeff Gailus’s The Grizzly Manifesto has been shortlisted for the 2010 Alberta Readers’ Choice Award. His upcoming book about the tarsands, Little Black Lies, will be published later this year.