The emergence of integrated coastal and ocean management in Canada's Oceans Act: Challenges of integrating fragmented resource sectors in Georges Bank, Nova Scotia and Hecate Strait, British Columbia

For a good part of the last fifty years, Canadian oceans governance has consisted of single-sectoral and multi-jurisdictional regulation of oceans uses. This fragmented governance regime has proven ill-equipped to address multisectoral resource use conflicts, which necessitate the integration of various interdependent sea use relationships.;As early as the 1970s, international fora and documents began developing the notion of integrated coastal and ocean management [hereinafter ICOM] as an approach to international and national oceans governance in order to address sea use conflicts. Canada's adoption of ICOM as a national approach was a slow process. It was only in 1996, with the enactment of the Oceans Act, that the federal government legislated a national integrated oceans governance structure. As the Oceans Act still has not been fully implemented, ICOM remains a nascent concept in Canadian law and policy.;The purpose of this thesis is two-fold. First, on a theoretical level, it proposes that the ICOM framework under the Oceans Act may be used to undertake multisectoral sea use decision-making in an integrated manner. Secondly, on a practical level, it examines how this ICOM process may be commenced and eventually applied to two areas of acute sea use conflict: Georges Bank off Nova Scotia on the east coast and Hecate Strait off British Columbia on the west coast. It is submitted that although the ICOM process is a difficult one to undertake nationally, the inherent flexibility of such a regime allows it to overcome the jurisdictional complexities of oceans governance on any Canadian coast.