DOI: 10.5061/dryad.d2547d8c4
title: Canada's common law species at risk legislation scoring rubric and provincial conservation plans for listed species at risk

description: Species across the globe are at risk of disappearing due to a human-driven
 extinction crisis. One of the most important tools for combating
 biodiversity loss is species at risk legislation. Of Canada’s nine common
 law provinces, only five have enacted legislation specifically designated
 to address species at risk protections. The other four have their
 protections included within non-species at-risk laws and regulations. In
 this research, we compared the content and completeness of species at risk
 protections among the provinces. To achieve this, we assessed the language
 of each province’s legislation using statutory interpretation and legal
 analysis and made a rubric to assign numerical scores to each province
 based on the thoroughness of their protections., We also examined how many
 of each province’s listed species at risk had conservation plans, which
 indicates that a government is taking action to protect and conserve
 at-risk species. We find that jurisdictions with designated species at
 risk legislation significantly outscore those without designated
 legislation, indicating that they have more comprehensive and stronger
 protections for species at risk.
description: The legislation that governs species at risk protections was
 collected for each jurisdiction using official government websites as the
 starting point. We used CanLII, an open-access Canadian legal database, to
 search for any legislation in each jurisdiction containing the terms
 “species at risk”, “endangered species”, “threatened species”, or “listed
 species” to find any legislation not included on official websites. We
 also used CanLII to find all regulations made under each statute. Finally,
 we repeated the searches using Westlaw, another legal database, to check
 for any missing data. To compare the legislation, we
 first needed to “score” the contents of the statutes and regulations. We
 made a scoring rubric to assign numerical values to evaluation criteria
 (Hoekstra et al., 2002; Murray et al., 2018). The evaluation criteria for
 this rubric were pulled from existing research, commentary, and
 recommendations for developing species at risk legislation from legal and
 scientific professionals (Hume et al., 2012; Westwood et al.,
 2019)<strong>.</strong> These informed the criteria for the
 rubric. Each criterion was assessed on a six-point
 scale from 0 to 5 for how well it was incorporated into a jurisdiction’s
 legislation (Hill et al., 2019; Pawluk et al., 2019). This gave each
 jurisdiction an unweighted and weighted score for their legislation,
 expressed as a percentage of the total score available. The total score
 was 340 for the unweighted rubric and 775 for the weighted rubric. The
 higher a jurisdiction scored, the more complete the legislation.
 To assess the effectiveness of species at risk protections and
 government willingness to implement protections, we examine the number of
 provincially listed species with a conservation plan. For each province,
 we compared the number of published conservation plans to the total number
 of provincially listed species. We used each jurisdiction’s respective
 database or species at risk list to determine the number of species listed
 at any level of risk. We used BC's colour-coded list rather than the
 appendices of the Designation and Exemption Regulation (B.C. Reg 157/2022)
 as it is updated regularly and the regulation appendices have not been
 amended since 2000.
description: # Canada's common law species at risk legislation scoring rubric and
 provincial conservation plans for listed species at risk
 [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.d2547d8c4](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.d2547d8c4) ## Description of the data and file structure The tables in the dataset include the blank scoring rubric, as well as the filled-in rubrics for each common law province in Canada. The filled-in rubrics include the pieces of legislation used for each province at the top of the section, and the text of relevant provisions (with direction to a specific piece of legislation if there are multiple for that province), and notes or comments on specific provisions. Of most importance is the scoring for each included element from the rubric. The scale reflected both the completeness of the legislation and whether it was discretionary or non-discretionary. A score of 0 meant that the criterion was not included anywhere in the legislation, while a score of 5 meant that it was included in full and was non-discretionary. Scores are assessed from 0 to 5 for each element in the rubric according to the following assessment criteria: * SCORE FOR INCLUDED ELEMENTS: * 0 – not included, 1 – incomplete/nominal and discretionary, 2 – incomplete and non-discretionary or partially discretionary, 3 – vague/uncertain if complete and non-discretionary or partially discretionary, 4 – complete but discretionary, 5 – complete and mandatory Scores are then weighted for the importance of each element included in the rubric by using the following multipliers: * Score Multiplier: x1 – tangential (nice to have), x2 – supporting provision, x3 – core practical/essential provisions Additional considerations for the comparison of legislation were to look at how easy it is to access the legislation. This was done by using the title of each included piece of legislation and assigning it a score from 1 to 5 for how easily searchable the title was for persons interested in finding species at risk-related provisions. The score for searchability used the following criteria: * How searchable is legislation? (1- Bad – no directly relevant terms, 2 – Long title includes terms, but not short title, 3 – OK, title includes related terms like species, wildlife, endangered, 4 – Long title is descriptive, short title includes term, 5 – Good – name is specific and descriptive (species at risk, endangered species, threatened species) This searchability score was averaged across all the pieces of legislation for each province (both statutes and regulations) to avoid discrepancies between provinces with a different number of pieces of legislation, and the average for each province was added to the overall rubric score above. The total possible score for the unweighted rubric was 340, and after using the weighting multiplier, the total possible score was 775.  ### Files and variables * **Legislation_Scoring_Rubric_Data_Set.rtf** * **Legislation_Scoring_AB.csv** * **Legislation_Scoring_SK.csv** * **Legislation_Scoring_MB.csv** * **Legislation_Scoring_ON.csv** * **Legislation_Scoring_NB.csv** * **Legislation_Scoring_NS.csv** * **Legislation_Scoring_PEI.csv** * **Legislation_Scoring_NL.csv** * **Legislation_Scoring_BC.csv** * **Legislation_Scoring_Federal.csv** * **Legislation_Scoring_Template.csv** **Description:**  Missing values within the table are represented by N/A, with the exception of the scoring column, where they are represented with a "0" value.  Excerpts of Canadian federal and provincial legislation are included in Legislation_Scoring_Rubric_Data_Set.rtf in the table (Section # and Additional Section columns) for clarity and informational purposes. Excerpts are incomplete provisions selected for relevance to the topic and were collected in March 2021 and may not be representative of current provisions. Legislation excerpts are not official versions of legislation and should not be relied on for legal purposes.  For versions without excerpts, please use the .csv files. # Species at risk listing numbers and conservation plans data set ## Description of the data and file structure There are three tables in this dataset: the first shows the sources used to find provincial species at risk listing information for Canadian common law provinces, and conservation or action plans for listed species. These listed sources were used to obtain the data for the second and third tables in this data set. The second table shows the number of listed species at risk in each province, separated by severity of risk level (e.g., endangered, threatened, sensitive).   The third table shows how many species at risk in each province have conservation or action plans, separated by the severity of risk level. The table shows the number with plans out of the total in each category in the following format X(of Y), where X is the number of species with a plan, and Y is the total number of species in that category. For example, Ontario has 45 action plans for its 60 species listed as "threatened", represented in the table by 45 (of 60). Information in this data set was current as of February 2023.  **File: Common_law_provincial_species_at_risk_listing_numbers_and_conservation_plans.rtf** - **Species_Listing_Numbers.csv** - **Listed_Species_Conservation_Plan_Numbers.csv** - **Species_Listing_Sources.csv** Conservation plans are a binary, either "yes" and a conservation plan exists, or no there is no conservation plan. The content and name of the conservation plan (whether it's an action plan, recovery plan, management plan, etc.) were not considered a separate variable for this research. Tables are available with descriptive context in the .rtf file. For data analysis, please use the .csv files. ## Access information Other publicly accessible locations of the data: * figshare: [https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.28067219.v1](https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.28067219.v1) Data was derived from the following sources: * We collected the legislation that governs species at risk protections for each jurisdiction using each government's Ministry of Environment or equivalent website as the starting point. We then used CanLII, an open-access Canadian legal database, to search for any legislation in each jurisdiction containing the terms “species at risk”, “endangered species”, “threatened species”, or “listed species” to find any legislation not included on official websites. We also used CanLII to find all regulations made under each statute. Finally, we repeated the searches using Westlaw, another legal database, to check for any missing data.   * Sources for species at risk lists and conservation plans for each province are listed in Table 1 of the common law provincial species at risk listing numbers and conservation plans file.