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Arctic Yearbook 2014
With the passage of Canada’s Oceans Act in 1997 and the adoption of Canada’s Oceans Strategy in
2002, a new ocean management paradigm emerged in Canada that attempted to unify and regulate
the divergent and competing uses of the nation’s marine resources. Over the past decade, increased
global attention on socio-ecological system resilience has also prompted shifts in U.S. ocean policy
toward ecosystem-based management (EBM) and the use of integrated ecosystem assessments
(IEA) by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) (Fluharty 2012; Murawski &
Matlock 2006). As the Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat (CSAS) emphasized, the marine
resource “manager’s reality is evolving – it is moving from single stock to multispecies fish
management, from mostly fisheries users to multiple users (fishing, transportation, oil and
aquaculture, ecotourism, recreational boating, dumping, mining, etc.), and lastly moving from
management by activity to Integrated Management” (2001: 35). Described in Canada’s Oceans
Strategy (2002) as “a continuous process through which decisions are made for the sustainable use,
development and protection of areas and resources”, integrated ocean management has been
heralded as a means to overcome fragmented and sector-specific decision-making (36). It marks an
acknowledgement on the