Source: The Conversation – Canada
Peekachu, Rain, Osiris, Caspian, Jellybean and Cyprus are dead. They were six of the 30 beluga whales removed from Marineland in Niagara Falls earlier this year. Echo is dead too. She was one of the four dolphins who were also removed around the same time. For all intents and purposes, she was blind.
I think about the rocks and paint that have been found in the belugas’ stomachs through autopsies. I dwell on how a place designed to hold them captive was legitimized for years. Jellybean was born at Marineland 19 years ago and gave birth there, too.
My profession — planning — had a role to play in facilitating their deaths and in allowing suffering during their lives. Planning has many specializations: urban, rural, regional, housing and transportation are a few.
I am a Registered Professional Planner who specialized in environmental planning during graduate school. My work over the past 20 years, though, has often been more about what land can be used for and how it’s used.
Marineland has been around since the 1960s. Its record of bad things happening to animals only grew over time. I can now see how the mistreatment of the whales and dolphins was inevitable.
The orientation of planning
Planning has been a formal occupation in Canada since 1919. It has the legal status of a self-regulating profession now. Planners often work for governments, especially municipalities. Personally, I’ve analyzed land-use plans as a consultant.
In my work for a provincial government, I’ve told other planners what needs to change before a plan or its implementing bylaw can be approved. And as a municipal planner, I’ve made decisions about how humans can use land.
The City of Niagara Falls’ Official Plan describes Marineland as “family entertainment.” No words in this legal planning document speak to the conditions the sea mammals needed to survive, let alone thrive. Yet it’s the document that legitimized Marineland’s existence.
The nails in the coffins
A February 2025 Committee of Adjustment meeting haunts me. Committees of Adjustment are a sub-structure of municipal governments in Ontario. They are allowed under Section 44 of the provincial government’s Planning Act.
Committees of Adjustment make decisions about proposed changes to land that are minor, and that also don’t meet the requirements in municipal planning documents. Since these committees are a planning mechanism, planning staff help them do their work.
The Niagara Falls committee considered eight different applications about Marineland in February 2025. Each was approved. Together, they brought Marineland into compliance with the city’s Official Plan and Zoning Bylaw. Niagara Falls adopted a new Official Plan in August 2026, which is still awaiting approval from the provincial government.
Many wheels need to be set in motion before an actual application to eventually redevelop land materializes. This was one of those wheels.
After the February 2025 meeting, Marineland applied for federal approval to export the whales and dolphins (which was at first denied), then said that it would euthanize them (more than once) and finally received federal approval to export them.
Hierarchies of power and public processes
The planning process can be the only public opportunity to point out something that could, otherwise, go unnoticed. At the February 2025 meeting, people expressed concerns about what would happen to Marineland’s whales and dolphins.
Some attendees asked the committee to defer its decision until there was more information about how the animals on the site would be treated. Marineland’s representative suggested that the approvals they sought were unrelated to animal welfare.
Marineland had asked for variances, easements, new parcel creation and mortgage release to secure operational financing. The municipality’s planners had evaluated the applications as minor, based on how there was no actual development being proposed, how no neighbouring properties would be impacted and how streetscape and character wouldn’t be compromised.
If it sounds like jargon, that’s because it is. Over time, planning has become a profession with its own language and processes. Often, when I’m talking to a non-planner, I’m simply translating.
The planning priorities in the jargon are not unusual either. Mechanisms like Committees of Adjustment have also been called out for reducing greater public participation.
Finding a better way
Peekachu, Rain, Osiris, Caspian, Jellybean, Cyprus and Echo didn’t fit into the planning process. Sweden-based planning theorist Jonathan Metzger calls the effect “radical exclusion.”
As a practitioner who has turned to a PhD, I’m painfully aware that planners think not in terms of life, but land. The Canadian planning profession’s most recent update to its ethical standards doesn’t do animals justice either.
Marineland’s tanks and enclosures may be empty now. Fur farms, factory farms, testing labs and zoos still stand. The path to different futures is not easy. Animals are legally property. So is land. There is urgency, though, and a need for answers that are kinder than the status quo.
In their new book, Animals and The Right to Politics, philosophy scholars Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka imagine a city with two distinct governance systems. In addition to the existing municipal government, they propose a new political entity that takes over land and development decisions. The intention is to create a more stable, peaceful world for animals.
Plausible or not, we must move towards some new normal. Humanity is a hollow word if we don’t. But I don’t see it happening unless non-planners insist that planning work consider every sentient being, not just humans.
Pooja Kumar received the Ontario Graduate Scholarship (2026-2027) to generally support her PhD studies. She is a Member of the Canadian Institute of Planners and the Prince Edward Island Institute of Professional Planners. She became a Registered Professional Planner in 2010, with the Ontario Professional Planners Institute.
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/11/15/was-a-kinder-fate-possible-for-marinelands-animals-how-the-planning-process-failed-them/