Peel consultations are over. What’s next?

Header Image: Peter Mather
Written by: Adil Darvesh, Communications Coordinator

It’s taken seven years to get to this point, but we’ve finally reached the end of the consultations on the Peel Watershed Final Recommended Plan. Congratulations to everybody who submitted their comments and participated in this important democratic process! Submissions closed in November, and now many of you may be asking: “What happens next?”.

In the coming weeks, Stantec (the firm responsible for collecting and analyzing the submissions) will release a report highlighting how many submissions were received, and what was said in those submissions. The parties of Na Cho Nyak Dun, Vuntut Gwitchin, Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, Gwich’in Tribal Council, and the Yukon Government will use this document to help them decide whether they want to accept the Final Recommended Plan as written, make minor modifications to the Final Recommended Plan to accommodate the responses from the submissions, or reject the Final Recommended Plan (which Yukon Government has said won’t happen). CPAWS Yukon and the Yukon Conservation Society have asked that the Final Recommended Plan be improved by protecting 80% of the watershed permanently now (rather than leaving 25% of the protected region to be ‘interim protection’, revisited at a later date).

Once the Plan is finalized, it will become the Peel Watershed Land Use Plan, and work will begin on creating an implementation (management) strategy for the Peel.

CPAWS Yukon and YCS hope that the Yukon Government will also extend the current ban on development and the staking of mineral claims in the Peel Watershed, until management plans have been completed.

Stay tuned for updates from CPAWS Yukon and YCS along the way!

For more information on the Peel Watershed visit www.protectpeel.ca