The Daily Press is the city of Timmins broadsheet newspaper.
City council has been forced from hibernation on the issue of black bear management. The latest budget-cutting effort from Queen’s Park has eliminated the practice of trapping and relocating nuisance bears from the Ministry of Natural Resources’ Bear Wise program.
Instead, the provincial government has passed the bear buck to police. At council Monday night, Police Chief John Gauthier said in the first week of June alone Timmins Police Service received 21 complaints about nuisance bears. In May, they received 62 bear calls calls.
While the track record of trapping and relocating the bruins is spotty at best — many times bears find their way back to where they were caught — it is definitely a better solution than handing off the responsibility to police.
The situation is becoming, well, unbearable. On Sunday night, TPS officers were forced to shoot a large bear that wouldn’t leave the clubhouse area at Hollinger Golf Club.
“I would think we have more bears running at large than dogs,” Gauthier said.
Police officers are not trained in wildlife management, nor should they be.
Every nuisance bear call police are required to respond to means less time officers are available for other duties.
It is unacceptable that the responsibility for answering bear calls has been dumped on police, without so much as a thought for the impact it has on the department’s servicing and wildlife management.
When police receive a bear call somewhere within the Greater Toronto Area this year — and it is bound to happen — you can bet the farm that MNR staff will be called in to trap and relocate the animal.
We have seen this in past years, via Toronto area news broadcasts. A bear wanders into an Aurora neighbourhood. Police, firefighters and MNR are called to the scene. Everyone walks away smiling when the cute critter is trapped and chauffeured to a new home.
If they treated southern communities like the North, the same broadcasts would show a York Regional Police officer emptying a shotgun into the beast. Everyone would be horrified. Animal rights groups would be up in arms.
But we already know from a Queen’s Park perspective that Northerners don’t deserve or require the same service and attention as Southern Ontario residents.
While it is admirable that city council is lobbying for either the MNR to take back nuisance bear management or the restoration of the spring bear hunt, we’re just shouting into the wind.