Two ministries, one caribou herd, no plan
Recovery money is spent annually and reviewed never.
This week the legislature learned, over four polite minutes, that no minister of the Crown is accountable for caribou recovery. Two of them share the file. Sharing, in government, is the verb that means neither.
The pattern is visible from any distance: money announced annually, spent through programs that each ministry counts toward its own report, on a herd whose numbers are published by whichever office has the less awkward quarter. The pen in the Peace closed this week after eight years of dedicated, competent, measurable work — and its closure memo could not name the decision-maker who might have changed the landscape around it, because there is not one.
None of this is the fault of the biologists, the crews, or even the ministers, who inherited an org chart drawn to diffuse exactly the accountability the file needs. It is the fault of the drawing. A herd is a single thing. It declines as a single thing. It can only be recovered by decisions that trade one ministry's interests against the other's — cutblocks against counts, roads against ranges — and trades need a single signature.
The fix costs nothing and is therefore hard: name one minister, publish one target, audit one result. Any government that finds this unreasonable is telling you, in advance, how the story ends.
