Vancouver Aquarium’s future could be whale of a civic election issue

The Vancouver Aquarium, a target for animal-rights activists for decades, appears headed up the agenda as the city's municipal election campaign begins ramping up.

More than 130 people turned up to speak at a special weekend meeting of the city's Board of Parks and Recreation (known locally as the park board) over whether the aquarium should be allowed to continue keeping cetaceans – whales, dolphins and porpoises – in captivity.

The crowd was so large the session had to be extended to Monday night to allow everyone who'd signed up time to have their say.

The aquarium, which draws more than a million visitors a year, is located in Stanley Park, which makes the city its landlord.

Park board commissioners, most of whom are not standing for re-election in the Nov. 15 vote, set up the meeting at the behest of a coalition of animal-rights and conservation organizations headed by the group No Whales in Captivity.

No Whales president Anneliese Sorg told Yahoo Canada News that her organization wants the board to tighten a two-decade-old parks bylaw covering the importation of marine mammals to the aquarium, which it hopes would eventually force the closure of its popular cetacean displays.

It also wants the board to place a non-binding referendum question on the upcoming election ballot asking voters whether or not they want an end to the aquarium's captive cetacean program. Sorg said 1996 bylaw barring the import of cetaceans was watered down in the past with several exemptions that have kept the displays alive.

“Vancouverites will have spoken and that will give a clear direction to the [new] park board because six out of seven commissioner are no longer running," Sorg said in an interview Monday.

[ Related: Vancouver Aquarium whales program under review at Park Board meeting ]

Sorg said the issue can't wait because the aquarium is about to begin a $100-million expansion that includes increasing the size of its facilities for whales and dolphins, and its lease agreement will also be up for review soon.

“There’s a few things coming up that if we nip it in the bud right now, then we’re done," she said. "There would be a forced phase-out over time.”

Not surprisingly, the aquarium is puzzled and bitter the park board would facilitate yet another attack on the facility, which has an international reputation for marine mammal research and a world-class rescue and rehabilitation centre.

“Most cities would kill to have an aquarium like this, that does what it does," aquarium president John Nightingale told Yahoo Canada News.

[ Related: Ontario funds tougher enforcement of animal-welfare laws, launches inspections ]

The aquarium has become a political football over the years, Nightingale said.

“We’re not sure what direction we’re going to get kicked in next," he said.

It's not clear what the park board commissioners will do with the information gathered at the meeting. The bylaw covering cetaceans at the aquarium was already scheduled for a review next year.

A staff report prepared for the commissioners ahead of the public session sets out the dilemma:

"While the Vancouver Aquarium provides exceptional care for cetaceans and does not acquire them from the wild except through those that have been injured and cannot be released, the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation recognizes that, increasingly, keeping cetaceans in captivity is becoming an issue of heightened public interest," the report says.

The report recommends the board commission a large-scale scientific study on the welfare of captive cetaceans before going into a discussion about the ethics of holding them.

Nightingale said there's nothing to indicate the aquarium's captive dolphins and beluga whales are unduly stressed from living in with the relative confinement of their enclosures. When it comes to stress-related actions, mating behaviour and metabolic testing, they seem to behave normally.

“There is no evidence the animals are not thriving and are not well off," he said.

Nonsense, said Sorg, who called the aquarium's evidence "self-serving."

“You only have to go to the basic instinct of any animal, including humans, to know that we don’t like to be in jail," she said.

“I think the ethics and the morality of torturing animals in captivity for entertainment and profit is really the issue here.”

Nightingale said activists make the mistake of thinking about animals' lives in human terms. "We don't really know if belugas would be happier swimming 100 kilometres a day in search of food than puttering around their aquarium enclosure," he said.

“Is it cruel?" he asked. "We’re actually convinced it’s not and our animals seem to thrive here. It’s people applying human standards to the animal world.”

This is, as these things usually are, less a cool discussion of the evidence than a passionate battle for hearts and minds.

The aquarium has done its own polling.

“The aquarium enjoys broad-based public support in the mid-eighties," said Nightingale. "When it comes to the flat-out question of keeping cetaceans, it’s in the sixties. Obviously people in the public have questions if it’s good for the animals.”

But Sorg said her years of activism show the anti-captivity camp is growing steadily. Where No Whales once may have attracted a few dozen people to its regular protests outside the aquarium, it now draws 300 to 400, she said.

Her group was instrumental in promoting the 1996 bylaw and deserves credit for pushing the aquarium to eliminate its captive orca display, Sorg said.

Sorg, a former director of the Vancouver Humane Society, was also part of the push to close the century-old Stanley Park Zoo following a 1994 municipal referendum similar to the one being proposed for the aquariam's cetacean program.

Regardless of whether a referendum makes it on this fall's ballot, the aquarium is bound to be a major issue in the park board race that could pull in mayoral and city council candidates, at least if Sorg has her way.

“Regardless of how this goes, this will be brought up in candidate meetings," she said. "That is something we will make sure that our volunteers participate in, especially in park board meetings, to bring up the question.”

[ Related: Downward whale? Yogis protest beluga captivity with stretches and bends ]

Mayor Gregor Robertson went on record in April supporting the phase-out of captive cetaceans at the aquarium, but his Vision Vancouver civic party so far appears not to have taken a position. Park board chairman Aaron Jasper, a Vision party member, did not respond to a request for comment.

Likewise, neither mayoral challenger Kirk Lapointe nor his Non-Partisan Association civic party, have said where they stand.

The aquarium wouldn't take forced abolition of its program lying down. Nightingale said it believes it has legal remedies but would not elaborate.

“We don’t need to go there," he said. "We’ll see what they decide first.”

Nightingale said a move to end the aquarium's cetacean program would be crippling to its work on research and education.

“It would reduce this institution oddly enough from a multi-aspect institution – with research, active conservation work and rescue – to a tourist attraction," he said.

“It would eliminate our ability to engage people in the ways we do. I keep saying the aquarium would survive but it would be a shadow of its former self.”

Sorg challenges that, too. Most research takes place in the wild, she said, noting there are 90 different species of cetaceans but aquariums only keep a handful of types that can perform in shows for visitors.

“It’s the self-serving argument in order to disguise the fact that they make money,"she said. "If they didn’t make money they wouldn’t keep them.”

The whale and dolphin displays are major draws, Nightingale said, adding the aquarium draws 86 per cent of its annual revenue – $30.6 million last year – from gate receipts and merchandise sales.