Hunters largely pass on expanded moose hunt in Manitoba

Opinion

In the ongoing battle over the fate of Manitoba’s moose population, hunters appear to have had the final say.

Government sources confirmed that when the window for purchasing licences and tags for the fall moose hunt closed Wednesday, 100 licences and 50 tags were issued. That is less than a third of the 350 licences and 175 tags the NDP government offered hunters this fall, a decision that sparked a court case and sent angry shockwaves across the hunting community.

On May 1, the NDP government announced it was more than doubling the number of moose licences and tags for fall’s hunting season — from 100 to 350 — based on the results of “aerial surveys.” The Natural Resources department flies over a selection of government hunting areas, tries to spot as many moose as it can, and then builds a mathematical model to estimate the total population.

Why wouldn’t hunters snap up the entire number of licences and tags? In the end, it appears the non-Indigenous hunting community did not share the government’s confidence that 175 bull moose could be safely harvested. And that raises additional questions about the process the province used to expand the hunt.

It appears the province did not quite have all its moose in a row when it increased the number of licences for this year.

Last December, Natural Resources and Indigenous Futures Minister Ian Bushie announced his department was undertaking a significantly enhanced moose surveillance program, involving drones and infrared technology, and covering a greater number of game hunting areas than ever before. The cost of this enhanced survey was pegged at $1.6 million.

However, Bushie confirmed in an interview this most recent data was not fully available to guide his department’s decision to expand the moose hunt. Full data from the 2025 survey is still being analyzed by department officials, he added.

What did Natural Resources use for this year’s estimates? There was some preliminary data for two of the game hunting areas approved for expanded hunting — 9A and 10 — which was provided to affected First Nations. But data for other game hunting areas approved for moose hunting this year has not yet been released, and the department has refused to provide supporting analysis to show these results justified an expanded hunt.

Beyond those preliminary numbers, Bushie confirmed his department was forced to rely on data from what was, at the time, a 14-month-old survey done at the beginning of 2024.

Although he still believes the decision to increase licences and tags was justified, Bushie said his “ultimate goal” was to have his department move faster to analyze and report the results of aerial surveys “in real time.”

“I think when we go back and we look at the justification for the increase in the tags, I think that was really based on the numbers that we had at that time,” Bushie said. “So we made those choices based on those numbers. But fully agree that as we go forward, we need to do better.”

First Nations have had long-standing and well-established concerns that the moose population in Manitoba was in trouble. Those concerns were exacerbated this summer when Manitoba suffered its worst wildfire season in history.

First Nations have a constitutionally guaranteed right to hunt for food on their ancestral lands and argued this year that issuing a greater number of licences to non-Indigenous hunters, at a time when the moose population seems to be declining, undermines those rights.

Although anecdotal, reports of declining moose populations from First Nations are compelling because of one inescapable fact: Indigenous hunters, who rely on moose for both food and cultural ceremonies, are harvesting far fewer animals than in previous years. In fact, at least one First Nation is paying to send its hunters to Saskatchewan.

Inevitably, the increased number of hunting licences and tags has triggered conflict.

Misipawistik Cree Nation, located on the northwestern shores of Lake Winnipeg, filed a lawsuit against the province to stop non-Indigenous hunters from accessing three game hunting areas approved by the province for this fall. Pimicikamak First Nation, located 520 kilometres north of Winnipeg, followed up the lawsuit with a media campaign calling on non-Indigenous hunters to return their licences for this year to help protect the moose population.

When pressed, NDP sources are quick to point out that the previous Progressive Conservative government did not do a good job of managing the moose population surveys. Although it’s easy for any government to criticize the old government, there is some justification to this allegation.

In a recent interview with Premier Wab Kinew, he noted that at least one of the aerial moose surveys in the early 2020s ran into problems with technology and methodology and was largely unusable. The NDP government had hoped to get things back on the right track with its new and improved survey in early 2025, but did not bank on the fact that analysis and modelling would take so long.

Regardless of which party ran the worst moose survey, changes need to be made and quickly. Manitoba’s moose are too important for too many reasons to be victimized by bad wildlife management.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca