British Columbia’s three major political parties found rare common ground in the last provincial election on the forestry sector’s use of glyphosate. The common and controversial herbicide ingredient is used to kill off plants that might compete with planted trees for water, nutrients and sunlight.

During the 2024 campaign, the BC Greens promised to ban the use of all chemical herbicides in forestry. The BC Conservatives committed to stop all aerial spraying of glyphosate. And the BC NDP, which was re-elected with a slim majority that October, promised to phase out the sector’s use of glyphosate altogether. 

Despite those commitments, chemical herbicides were sprayed across hundreds of hectares of forests in 2025, mostly in the area northeast of Prince George, B.C.

For James Steidle, founder of Stop the Spray B.C., it’s a “disappointment.”Aerial spraying of forests has been most common in the province’s northeast. The areas sprayed last year fall within the Fraser River watershed, he noted. There, companies target species like fireweed, huckleberries and elderberries, he said. “All these really cool plants and berries that they think are out-competing the spruce trees,” he said. “These are things that animals eat.”

People use these areas as well, to harvest berries and other plants, to camp and to hunt, Steidle said. But he warned it’s not easy to access detailed information about planned spraying.

Companies have until June to report spraying activities from 2025 to the province. The data reported as of Jan. 22, 2026, shows Canfor, a Vancouver-based forestry company, was responsible for most of the spraying in the northeast last year. Steidle questions why the company continues to spray herbicides in cutblocks when many other local companies have given up the practice of aerial spraying. The Narwhal reached out to Canfor for comment but did not receive a response ahead of publication. 

For Steidle, a bigger concern is that there are no laws or regulations to prevent spraying.

“The NDP has broken their promise, I’d say,” he told The Narwhal.

When asked by email if the NDP government remained committed to phasing out the use of glyphosate Premier David Eby’s director of communications deferred The Narwhal to a statement we had already received from the Ministry of Forests, which did not answer the question.

Concerns about B.C.’s approach to reforestation is just one of the challenges the forestry sector is grappling with amid major upheavals in the industry, including mill closures, reduced logging levels and ongoing trade pressures.

Chemical herbicides have been used to kill off plants that might compete with tree plantations

Herbicide use in B.C. forests dates back decades. Companies are responsible for managing the sections of forest they’ve logged until the trees they replanted are considered “free growing,” unimpeded by other vegetation. 

To make sure they hit that target, and avoid potential fines from the B.C. government, companies clear away other plants that might compete with planted trees — a process known in the industry as brushing.

Forest professionals use various brushing methods to remove plants that might compete with planted trees, including manually or mechanically cutting back other plants, spraying herbicides, prescribed burning or using livestock to graze on vegetation, according to a statement from B.C.’s Ministry of Forests. Government data indicates companies most commonly cut back competing plants manually. They also use herbicides like glyphosate to kill off aspen and other plants that fall under the broad category of “herbaceous.” This can include plants like huckleberries and wild rose. Companies use backpack tanks to target species on the ground and helicopters to spray from the air.

Glyphosate, which the World Health Organization says is probably carcinogenic to people, is the main component in the common herbicide Roundup. When plants absorb the chemical it prevents them from taking up nutrients, essentially starving them to death. 

In Dec. 2024, The Narwhal reported on the use of glyphosate in B.C. forests. At the time, we incorrectly reported more than 1 million hectares of forest had been sprayed with herbicides since the 1970s. A re-analysis of government data shows companies actually reported spraying more than 430,000 hectares across more than 1 million hectares of cutblocks. In many cases companies reported spraying only a portion of a particular cutblock.

However, the sprayed area available in the government application The Narwhal retrieved the data from only appears to be reported for the initial brushing treatment even if a cutblock was brushed multiple times. 

When asked to confirm if more than 430,000 hectares have been brushed with herbicides, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Forests said its data recounts areas that have been sprayed multiple times and shows 738,000 hectares have been treated with herbicides since 1987. In the same time period, 7.4 million hectares of forests were harvested. 

The spokesperson noted that most chemical herbicide treatments occurred in the 1990s and early 2000s. “The past 20 years have accounted for only a third of the total treated area,” the statement said.

The area forestry companies reported spraying with herbicides each year in B.C. has declined since 1989, when it peaked at about 40,000 hectares, according to a 2019 report by FPInnovations, which describes itself as a private non-profit focused on research and development in the forestry sector. In 2024, companies reported spraying about 340 hectares with herbicides. As of Jan. 22, 2026, companies reported spraying almost 600 hectares in 2025.

At the same time, the practice of brushing itself has declined alongside a “greater desire” to manage forests to strengthen biodiversity and build resilience to wildfire, the forests ministry statement said. 

B.C. government mum on promised phase-out of glyphosate

But past herbicide use can have lasting impacts on forest ecosystems, potentially excluding or restricting the growth of certain trees and plants for years after. And while herbicide use has declined even in northeast B.C., Steidle said the practice still takes a toll. 

“These might be small areas, but they’re important areas that people target for berry picking, for hunting,” he said. 

Late last year, Lheidli T’enneh First Nation announced it was banning glyphosate spraying across its territory, which encompasses Prince George. Lheidli T’enneh Chief Dolleen Logan could not be reached for comment ahead of publication.

In November, Elder and Land Guardian Les Baker told reporters at a press conference announcing the ban that he’d heard concerns from the community about the use of herbicides. 

“They don’t feel safe going and collecting their berries or their food from the bush anymore,” Baker said, according to CBC and the Prince George Citizen.

Forestry companies are generally required to develop and consult the public on pest management plans for their planned use of herbicides but don’t have to publicize exactly where and when they plan to spray — though notices must be posted around the treatment area itself.

According to the Ministry of Forests’ statement, BC Timber Sales, the government agency responsible for managing about 20 per cent of B.C.’s public timber harvest, has not used glyphosate or other herbicides for reforestation since 2022. 

In a statement, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Environment and Parks said glyphosate use in forests has declined significantly and is typically used when other methods haven’t or aren’t expected to successfully remove competing plants. 

The statement noted concerns raised by First Nations are “explored” during pest management plan consultations. It noted “band resolutions such as the [Lheidli T’enneh First Nation’s] position signal a need to continue these discussions and are used to support assessing potential infringement of Indigenous Rights and Title.”

The statement did not answer The Narwhal’s question about whether the ministry would prohibit forestry companies, like Canfor, from using chemical herbicides or if the government remained committed to phasing out the sector’s use of glyphosate.

Steidle ultimately wants to see an end to herbicide use in forests. Until that happens, he’s calling for greater transparency — specifically, he wants the maps companies submit to the province 30 days before spraying to be made public. 

“The government has these maps, and they could release them,” Steidle said.

The Environment Ministry spokesperson said officials are working to improve the ministry’s digital systems to improve transparency in the pest management process. 

Updated on Feb. 13, 2026, at 2:37 p.m. PT: This story has been updated to clarify that the 738,000 hectare figured referenced by the B.C. government referred to areas that had been brushed with herbicides

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In 2014, the federal government promised to finish mapping the critical habitat that imperilled southern mountain caribou need to survive. It said it would be done by the end of that year. 

Today, nine southern mountain caribou herds have been wiped out and Ottawa still hasn’t released completed critical habitat maps.

Tired of waiting, lawyers for three conservation groups — Wildsight, Wilderness Committee and Stand.earth — filed a lawsuit Feb. 9 in Federal Court over what they describe as an “unreasonable” delay in completing critical habitat mapping. The groups are represented by the environmental law charity Ecojustice.

The suit asks the court to declare the delay unlawful — a ruling that could force the federal government to protect not only caribou but other at-risk species as well, according to the applicants.

“It should not have come to this,” Tegan Hansen, a senior forest campaigner with Stand.earth, said in an interview. 

Protecting caribou habitat is crucial to their survival, Hansen said. Although critical habitat maps do not themselves offer protection, they are a necessary first step toward actual habitat conservation, she explained.

That’s “why it’s so egregious that this delay has lasted so long,” she said.

Southern mountain caribou — a population of woodland caribou encompassing three regional subgroups found in southeastern and northcentral B.C. — were listed as threatened under the Species At Risk Act in 2003. In the wake of a previous lawsuit by conservation groups, the federal government released an overdue recovery strategy in 2014 aiming to achieve self-sustaining herds. That same year, the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, which makes recommendations to the federal government, determined the southern and central groups of herds were so imperilled they should be listed as endangered. 

Conservation groups warn Ottawa can’t meet its stated goal of self-sustaining herds without completed critical habitat maps to guide effective protections.

“At this point, extinction is not accidental; it is a political choice, and this lawsuit is our refusal to accept it,” Lucero González, conservation and policy campaigner at Wilderness Committee, one of the conservation groups behind the lawsuit, said in a media statement.  

Federal Minister of the Environment, Climate Change and Nature Julie Dabrusin did not immediately respond to The Narwhal’s request for comment on the lawsuit.

‘Most herds continue to decline’: biologist

Southern mountain caribou are especially vulnerable to habitat loss and have suffered dramatic declines since colonization.

“Overall, most of the herds continue to decline,” biologist Rob Serrouya, co-director of the Wildlife Science Centre at the research organization Biodiversity Pathways, said in an interview. “They’re a long way from being self-sustaining.”

There are some herds that are increasing, he said, but only because of intensive recovery efforts. These include wolf culls, supplemental feeding and maternity pens to help protect pregnant cows and calves from predators until they’re strong enough to have a fighting chance of surviving on their own.

For most of the southern mountain caribou population, logging and associated road building are the main threats to habitat, Serrouya explained. Caribou evolved to rely on old forests, but the shrubs and herbaceous plants that flourish after logging offer more attractive habitat for moose and deer. As those populations grow, they attract wolves and cougars, increasing the risk that struggling caribou herds will encounter predators.

“If we want there to be light at the end of the tunnel, the goal would be to have habitat improving at a faster rate than it’s being degraded,” Serrouya said. Critical habitat mapping is needed to help ensure that happens, he said.

He warned, however, that even if all critical habitat for southern mountain caribou was protected immediately, intensive management would still be needed for some time until all the habitat that is already degraded recovers sufficiently to support caribou. 

The notice of application for judicial review Ecojustice filed on Monday asks the Federal Court to rule the environment minister’s delay in releasing an amended recovery strategy or action plan that fully identifies critical habitat is unlawful or unreasonable.

The recovery strategy released in 2014 only identified a portion of southern mountain caribou critical habitat. In it, the government outlined a schedule of studies it needed to do to complete critical habitat mapping, and set 2014 as the deadline for those studies. According to the application, that served as the minister’s commitment to complete all critical habitat mapping for southern mountain caribou by the end of that year.

“Species aren’t going to survive and recover in the long run unless the federal government identifies the full critical habitat they need,” Sean Nixon, a staff lawyer with Ecojustice, told The Narwhal.

The minister’s duties to monitor and protect at-risk species’ critical habitat aren’t triggered until that habitat is identified in a recovery strategy, the application says. Meaning, any habitat vital to caribou survival and recovery that has not been identified in critical habitat mapping as part of a recovery strategy remains vulnerable to destruction.

“It ends up being a backdoor route to gut the duties and powers in the act,” Nixon said.

The delays in completing critical habitat mapping aren’t unique to southern mountain caribou. In 2025, the federal Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, an environmental watchdog, found critical habitat had only been fully identified in recovery strategies or action plans for 32 per cent of species at risk. And just more than half of the studies needed to finalize that mapping were either late or overdue.

The federal government says it’s prioritizing southern mountain caribou recovery, Nixon noted. “To me, it bodes very poorly for all of Canada’s species at risk if a priority species takes more than two decades just for the federal government to complete initial steps under the act.”

“We don’t want to see these animals disappear,” Hansen said. There’s a moral obligation to prevent extinction, but the federal government also has a legal obligation, she said. The lawsuit is a way to hold Ottawa accountable after cooperative attempts to encourage action failed, according to the notice of application. 

For Hansen, there’s a personal side to this fight. “I grew up in Nelson. I learned how to snowshoe tracking the South Selkirks mountain caribou herd,” she said. “And now that herd is gone.”

“There’s a lot of grief there.”

Updated Feb. 9, 2026, at 4:25 p.m. PT: This story was updated to correct the date of the report from the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development that looked at critical habitat for species at risk. It was published in 2025 not 2023 as previously stated.

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More than 5,000 wild species are at some risk of extinction in Canada, largely because the places they live are disappearing. Yet despite repeated promises, Canada appears to have failed to meet its target of protecting 25 per cent of its forests, grasslands, rivers, lakes, peatlands and oceans by 2025. 

As of December 2024 the country had conserved 13.8 per cent of land and fresh water and 15.5 of ocean areas — falling “well short” of its targets, Akaash Maharaj, policy director at the conservation charity Nature Canada, said in an interview. While the final accounting isn’t in yet, it’s unlikely Canada closed the gap in the intervening year. 

A series of reports from the federal commissioner of the environment and sustainable development late last year also warned Canada was not on track to meet either its 2025 target or its international commitments to conserve 30 per cent of land and waters by 2030 under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

The 30-by-30 target, one of almost two dozen targets in the international agreement designed to work together to stave off catastrophic nature declines, aims to secure the habitats plants and animals need to survive and is largely regarded as the minimum needed to guard against further losses.

Nathalie Provost, Canada’s secretary of state for nature whose role in cabinet is focused on reaching the 30-by-30 target, said missing the 2025 conservation goal was “a disappointment.”

The federal government remains committed to meeting the 30-by-30 target, she said, but Ottawa needs the buy-in of provincial and territorial governments to succeed.

Finding innovative ways to finance nature protection, in line with Prime Minister Mark Carney’s commitment to cut government spending and increase investment, remains a key focus, said Provost.

Steven Guilbeault, the former Liberal environment minister who helped shepherd the global biodiversity treaty into fruition, said he remains optimistic Canada can meet its next milestone.

Not every conservation project in development across the country is reflected in the federal database where efforts are tracked, he said.

Valérie Courtois, director of the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, said there are more than 100 proposals for Indigenous Conserved and Protected Areas which could bring Canada closer to its conservation goals if they had the financial support they need.

But funding for long-term management remains an outstanding issue, she warned, which forces Indigenous governments to weigh large-scale conservation endeavours against other items on their already-stretched budgets. 

It’s a challenge Jerry DeMarco, the commissioner of the environment and sustainable development, a federal environmental watchdog, also underscored in a November report. 

DeMarco noted, for instance, that the federal government typically provided short-term funding of five years or less for Indigenous-led conservation programs, which created an inherent risk funding would not be renewed, affecting long-term outcomes.

Are Canada’s conservation milestones at odds with its critical mineral strategy?

At the same time, Canada is grappling with the economic fallout from U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war and broader geopolitical tensions. In response, federal, provincial and territorial governments are pursuing new critical minerals projects with renewed vigour. 

Critical minerals, including copper, nickel and lithium, are essential components in digital technologies like cellphones and laptops, renewable energy systems such as solar panels and wind turbines and the batteries required for both. They’re also used for satellites, defence applications, including weapons and jet engines and a range of other things.

But Canada’s pursuit of new mining projects has the potential to conflict with its conservation commitments as both require large swaths of land.

In a June report, the International Energy Agency said about 35 per cent of Canada’s mineral resources important for the energy transition overlap with lands that are also important for biodiversity and remain unprotected. 

“The government is absolutely right to put economic development and economic security for Canadians at the top of the political agenda,” Maharaj, with Nature Canada, said, noting there’s a deep economic anxiety felt across the country at the moment.

However, he warned, “The only way to sustainably grow the economy so that it’s generating jobs, not just for today, but a generation hence, is to build an economy that’s based on environmental protection and the strengthening of nature.”

Tara Shea, the vice-president of regulatory and Indigenous affairs at the Mining Association of Canada, said she doesn’t see conservation and expanded mining as mutually exclusive.

The industry association supports ambitious, evidence-based actions to protect biodiversity, she said, pointing to its longstanding sustainable mining initiative, which, among other things, offers guidelines for nature conservation.

But Canada also has commitments to meet the needs of the energy transition and secure critical mineral supply chains for its allies, according to Shea. 

“In Canada, we have the minerals and the opportunity. We also benefit from robust environmental standards,” she said. “It does make sense for us to expand our sector here.”

Guilbeault, who resigned from Carney’s cabinet late last year over the prime minister’s early support of a new pipeline out of Alberta, said mining for critical minerals is necessary to combat the threats posed by climate change.

“We can’t do the transition away from fossil fuels without moving toward a world where electricity becomes the dominant source of energy,” he said. “So we have to do this, but we can do it right.”

Courtois also sees potential for both conservation and new mining, particularly in areas where mining projects can bolster communities and local economies. 

“But we can’t do that blindly, we can’t do that by ignoring the learnings that we’ve had in the last few decades around things like environmental risk,” she said.

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The head of a national network that tracks the spread of wildlife diseases says a persistent funding shortfall is undermining Canada’s ability to detect and respond to emerging threats to biodiversity, agriculture and human health.

Damien Joly is the chief executive officer of the Canadian Wildlife Health Cooperative, a network of Canada’s five veterinary schools and the B.C. government’s Animal Health Centre. The cooperative works with federal, provincial and territorial governments to monitor wildlife diseases across the country.

In an interview with The Narwhal, Joly said the organization is “cash strapped across the board.”

“We do not have the resources we need to effectively monitor these diseases,” he said.

That warning comes as Canada grapples with the spread of highly transmissible diseases, such as chronic wasting disease, a fatal infection that afflicts deer, moose, elk and other cervids. At the same time, avian influenza, which has caused huge die-offs of wild birds and triggered mass culls at hundreds of infected poultry farms across the country, continues to spread. Hundreds of dead wild birds found in southern Manitoba in recent months have been linked to bird flu, as have the deaths of wild birds in Ontario. 

In Atlantic Canada, Joly said the cooperative is scraping together whatever funding it can find to continue monitoring the spread of avian flu, keeping a particular eye out for mutations in the virus.

“We’re seeing massive die-offs in Europe and it’s not going to be long before that particular strain finds its way over the Atlantic into Canada,” Joly said. 

Environment and Climate Change Canada is the cooperative’s primary funder, contributing almost $1.2 million in 2024-25. Funding from other federal agencies and departments, as well as provincial and territorial governments, brought the cooperative’s total budget to $3.5 million for that fiscal year, according to its annual report.

While Joly said the cooperative’s partners in government work hard to secure funding for wildlife disease monitoring, budget shortfalls remain a persistent problem.

“Every region is in a deficit situation,” Joly said. The result is the cooperative is being forced to dip into its rainy-day funds to cover costs.

Now he’s calling for federal, provincial and territorial governments to renew their commitment to implementing the Pan-Canadian Approach to Wildlife Health strategy, which most environment ministers endorsed in 2018 at an intergovernmental conference.

Joly estimates at least $10 million a year is needed to implement that strategy, half for the cooperative and the rest to be shared among provincial and territorial governments to strengthen wildlife disease monitoring and response.

At a minimum, Joly said more streamlined and consistent funding would give the cooperative and its staff more stability. Currently, he said, he’s managing reporting for more than 20 different funding pots for the cooperative’s national office alone.

In a statement to The Narwhal, Keean Nembhard, a press secretary for Julie Dabrusin, minister of environment, climate change and nature, said the federal government remains committed to conservation, addressing key threats to biodiversity and the principles of the Pan-Canadian Approach to Wildlife Health. But, he said, implementing that approach would require coordinated efforts and funding from federal, provincial and territorial governments.

Nembhard said Environment and Climate Change Canada has committed to providing the cooperative almost $360,000 in core funding for another two fiscal years to support monitoring and diagnostics of wildlife pathogens. But that’s only a fraction of the funding the cooperative needs, meaning the organization is still being left to juggle a piecemeal funding model.

Wildlife disease tracking is key to defending against emerging threats 

For three decades, the Canadian Wildlife Health Cooperative has been tracking the causes of death for wild animals assessed by the network’s pathologists. That record gives researchers a clear picture of the pathogens and diseases that spread among wildlife and how deadly they usually are.

Having a baseline is crucial for being able to detect and respond to emerging threats to biodiversity quickly, Joly said. 

Take chronic wasting disease, which was first detected in Canada on a Saskatchewan elk farm in 1996. Since then, the disease has spread through wild populations of deer, elk and other cervids. With cases now being detected in British Columbia, Joly said the risks to caribou are particularly scary.

“This is a species that’s in trouble already,” he said. 

Researchers knew the disease was a looming threat for B.C. long before the first case was detected in the province in 2024, according to Kaylee Byers, an assistant professor in the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia.

As monitoring showed the disease had spread to Alberta and neighbouring regions in the United States, the risk that it would move into B.C. grew.

Knowing where and how a disease is spreading can give governments and researchers a chance to target their response, Byers said. That could mean, for instance, increasing sample collection and testing in high-risk areas or putting in place new protocols for transporting animal parts. 

Byers, who is also the deputy director of the B.C. arm of the Canadian Wildlife Health Cooperative, said wildlife disease monitoring today largely relies on the public to report sick, injured or dead animals. 

“What’s really challenging about that, is it’s not the full picture,” she said, adding that more funding could allow for expanded monitoring.

“Take something like avian influenza,” she said. Wild birds land in plenty of remote wetlands where there’s potential for the virus to spill over into other animal populations. But, if people aren’t frequenting these areas, that spread might not be captured by current monitoring programs, she warned. 

Wildlife diseases can threaten human health, livestock and international trade

Understanding the pathogens and diseases spreading among wildlife is important for people as well. These diseases can threaten the wildlife populations hunters rely on for food. They can pass to and spread rapidly among livestock, putting animal welfare in jeopardy and farmers’ livelihoods at risk. And they can threaten our own human health.

Many of the diseases that affect people today are zoonotic, meaning they’re caused by germs that can spread between animals and people. 

Scientists have worried for years about the potential for bird flu to cause a human pandemic. While it has wreaked havoc around the world in recent years, it hasn’t caused widespread disease in people so far. There have been dozens of human cases in the U.S. since 2024, mostly among workers exposed to the virus at infected poultry and dairy operations. In Canada, a teenager was infected with a severe case of the virus in late 2024. Advanced testing showed the closest match for the virus she contracted was found in wild birds in the Fraser Valley. The teen spent almost two months in hospital before she was released. 

Though human cases remain rare, bird flu has taken a significant toll on poultry farmers across the country. Since 2021, there have been outbreaks at 591 poultry farms in Canada. Millions of farmed birds have been culled as a result.

As a member of the World Organisation for Animal Health, Canada is obligated to monitor and report on certain diseases, including avian flu, that spread not just among livestock but also wildlife.

“Identifying disease risks in wildlife early ensures timely intervention strategies, reduces the risk of disease spread to other animals or people (so-called spillovers) and reduces the impacts on wildlife themselves and on biodiversity and ecosystems,” Claire Cayol, the organization’s project manager for wildlife health information systems, said in a statement to The Narwhal.

Founded in 1924, the international organization sets standards related to animal health, including for surveillance of certain wildlife diseases, that allow for global trade of animals and animal products.

What that means, Joly said, is the work the Canadian Wildlife Health Cooperative does is also vital to Canada’s ability to trade beef, poultry and other food products. 

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Alberta government scientists have produced several studies about pollution from coal mining in the Rockies in recent years, raising questions from a B.C. conservation group about a lack of similar research from the B.C. government.

“The best research is coming out of Alberta,” Simon Wiebe, the mining impacts and policy lead for Kootenay-based conservation group Wildsight, said in an interview. “B.C. is lagging way behind.”

Research from aquatic scientist Colin Cooke, who works for Alberta Environment and Protected Areas, and his co-authors found historic coal mines in the Crowsnest Pass continue to pollute nearby waterways decades after closing, as well as concerning selenium concentrations in fish from Crowsnest Lake. He found snowpacks have been contaminated by windblown pollution from coal mines in southeast B.C. And more recently, he found selenium contamination downstream of three coal mines in the McLeod River watershed exceeded guidelines even after the mines had been partially, and in at least one case almost entirely reclaimed.

“This is a warning bell,” Wiebe said of the McLeod River watershed study. “It should be extremely concerning for everybody who has any interest in making the world a decent place for future generations,” he said.

It also raised questions for him, such as, “What’s going on in B.C.? Why aren’t we doing our own research?”

Coal mining is big business in B.C., employing thousands of people and contributing tens of millions in dollars to government coffers at all levels. But there are also long-standing concerns about environmental impacts from coal mining, including extensive water contamination — now the subject of an international inquiry.

In response to questions from The Narwhal, a spokesperson for B.C.’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy said, “The Elk River watershed is one of the most intensively monitored and studied watersheds in British Columbia, with detailed programs to detect and assess impacts from coal mining and other development.” 

But that isn’t leading to peer-reviewed studies from government scientists. The spokesperson confirmed: “We do not produce publications for peer-reviewed journals.”

That’s a concern for Wiebe, who said independent, peer-reviewed studies like those produced by Cooke and his colleagues are “the gold standard, as they have no financial incentive to keep the status quo.” 

“All the independent research points to the same conclusion: coal mining produces huge environmental debts that will last for generations,” he said.

In the Elk Valley, leftover waste rock piles up as mountain tops are stripped to extract coal, and when those piles of rock are exposed to rain and snowmelt, naturally occurring contaminants like selenium leach into the water far more quickly than they would had no mining occurred. 

“When you take down a mountain, you end up really accelerating the natural weather processes of that rock,” Wiebe explained. “It causes a big problem.”

While all living things need selenium to live, too much of it can be toxic. For fish, its effect on reproduction is one of its most insidious threats. It can lead to deformities — curved spines, misshapen skulls, abnormal gills — and, in a worst-case scenario, reproductive collapse.

B.C. offers a ‘version of transparency’ but it’s ‘still not that useful’: scientist 

The spokesperson for B.C.’s Environment Ministry pointed The Narwhal to multiple sources of monitoring data and company monitoring reports and noted the Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship is studying high elevation grasslands, including impacts from coal mining, which will lead to future publications.

The statement noted surface water is monitored at roughly 130 sites and that data is publicly available, as is water quality compliance and trend information. Groundwater is also monitored in more than 130 wells and there are extensive biological and aquatic effects monitoring programs underway, the spokesperson said.

Elk Valley Resources, which owns the four steel-making coal mines in southeast B.C., is required by the province to run more than 25 studies and monitoring programs in the Elk Valley, the statement added. And required reports on water quality, aquatic effects and fish population monitoring reports are available on the Elk Valley Resources website.

The spokesperson noted these reports must be completed by qualified professionals, and designs and drafts are reviewed by an environmental monitoring committee composed of scientists and technical experts from the B.C. government, Ktunaxa Nation Council and an independent scientist.

Bill Donahue, a freshwater scientist and a former head of environmental monitoring for the Alberta government, said B.C. has “a version of transparency and data availability that isn’t available in a lot of other provinces, but it’s still not that useful.”

It doesn’t appear, for example, that you can batch download selenium data for a period of time across an entire region all at once, he noted. 

He also raised concerns about the conflict of interest when industry is responsible for doing environmental monitoring and reporting. And while companies may be required to retain “qualified professionals,” he said the quality of work to meet regulatory standards is typically lower than what’s required for peer-reviewed scientific studies.

There’s also more transparency in peer-reviewed studies, he said. For one thing, it’s clear who did the work. Studies published in reputable journals are also reviewed by other independent scientists with relevant expertise who are not involved in the research, he noted.

The monitoring reports available from Elk Valley Resources, some of which are hundreds or thousands of pages long, are also not easily comprehensible to the public, he added. 

Donahue noted the abstract, introduction and conclusions of scientific studies typically offer a big-picture takeaway. “You don’t tend to see that in these big regulatory reports,” he said. 

Wiebe credited B.C. with working to hold Elk Valley Resources and the mines’ previous owner Teck Resources accountable for water pollution with some measure of success, but said, “it is clear much more needs to be done.”

Meanwhile, scientific research is being produced in neighbouring Alberta, but there are concerns the government is muzzling scientists and stalling the release of studies. Internal emails and records obtained by The Narwhal through a freedom of information request show senior government officials delayed the submission of Cooke’s McLeod River watershed study for four months after it was complete and seemingly prevented him from participating in at least two media interviews or speaking about his research to a community group. In a statement to The Narwhal, Ryan Fournier, press secretary to Environment and Protected Areas Minister Rebecca Schulz, said the Alberta government takes the issue very seriously, noting internal reviews before publication “are standard practice and necessary.”

In a previous interview, Donahue, a co-author on the McLeod River study, raised concerns Alberta had viewed monitoring as a box-checking exercise. 

“The only thing that’s really of use publicly is an expert analysis of monitoring data and then an interpretation in a way that is comprehensible to the public,” he said.

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Senior Alberta government officials stalled the submission of a coal mine pollution study to a scientific journal and prevented the lead researcher from speaking publicly about his work, according to records The Narwhal obtained through a freedom of information request.

Emails included among more than 600 pages of documents show officials delayed government scientist Colin Cooke from submitting a study about selenium pollution in the McLeod River watershed for four months after it was complete. The records also indicate Cooke was not permitted to participate in at least two media interviews or speak to a community group about his research, raising concerns the province is muzzling scientists and restricting the public’s access to tax-payer funded research.

The delays came as Alberta was embroiled in a public debate about the future of coal mining in the Rockies, with the government lifting its moratorium on coal mining in the eastern slopes not long after Cooke eventually got the greenlight to submit his study.

Cooke, an aquatic scientist who works for Alberta Environment and Protected Areas, has led multiple studies into the impacts of coal mining in Alberta’s Rocky Mountains. Working with scientists both inside and outside of government, Cooke’s research found historic coal mines in the Crowsnest Pass continue to pollute nearby waterways decades after they closed. He found snowpacks have been contaminated by windblown pollution from coal mines in southeast B.C. And more recently, he and his co-authors found concerning selenium concentrations in fish from Crowsnest Lake.

In a study published in October, Cooke and his co-authors found selenium concentrations downstream of three coal mines in the McLeod River watershed exceeded guidelines meant to protect aquatic life. This was after the mines were considered to be partially, and in one case almost entirely, reclaimed. While a small amount of selenium is essential for life, too much can be toxic, leading to deformities in fish and, in a worst-case scenario, reproductive collapse.

The research found reclamation — the process of restoring land impacted by mining to a state of equivalent capability as compared to before the mining — had so far failed to return selenium concentrations to pre-mining levels in a watershed that’s home to two at-risk fish species. The findings called into question the effectiveness of Alberta’s regulatory and mine restoration policies. It was this study Cooke was prevented from submitting for months after it was complete.

“It showed very clear impacts — negative impacts — on downstream water quality,” Bill Donahue, a co-author on the study and former head of environmental monitoring for the Alberta government, told The Narwhal.

“What our paper, I think, makes fairly clear is that there’s pretty much an utter failure of environmental management regulation and enforcement in relation to coal mining,” he said.

The Narwhal requested interviews with both Cooke and Environment and Protected Areas Minister Rebecca Schulz. Neither was granted.

Instead, in an emailed statement the minister’s press secretary Ryan Fournier said, “We take this issue seriously. That’s why we conducted this research, published it and even paid extra to make the paper open access and publicly available.” The journal that published Cooke’s McLeod River study, Environmental Pollution, allows authors or their institutions to make the study freely available without a subscription for a fee. “We’re conducting more research into coal remediation, and being more transparent, than any other government in Alberta’s history,” Fournier said.For Donahue, interference in the release and public communication of science is a major concern. “It’s really erosive to accountable and responsible government,” he said. And, he added, it raises serious questions like, “What else is not being published or released or communicated?”

Scientist repeatedly told to hold off submitting study to journal: internal emails

Cooke approached his superiors at Alberta Environment and Protected Areas in December 2023 to arrange briefings for senior officials about the McLeod River research, emails show. He noted the study, while not yet complete, could have “significant implications” for both Alberta Environment and the Alberta Energy Regulator.

Multiple pages in the records The Narwhal obtained were redacted, but they show the director of watershed sciences emailed Cooke months later, in mid-June 2024, to “reiterate the request to hold off on submitting the McLeod manuscript to a journal” until the Alberta Energy Regulator had been briefed.

That message, to hold off submitting the paper until leadership briefings were done, was repeated again by the executive director of the airshed and watershed stewardship branch in early July. “That message and direction is not unique to this manuscript, this topic area, or even our branch,” she said.

Later that month Cooke emailed the executive director and assistant deputy minister with the final manuscript. “Now that we have briefed the [Alberta Energy Regulator] on the paper are we ok to submit the manuscript? I was hoping to submit it next Friday (August 2),” he wrote.

That date came and went. In September, a briefing note about the new study was prepared for the minister. It noted the government had previously faced criticism for not analyzing environmental monitoring data sets or releasing draft reports based on environmental data. “This current report is now ready to be shared with other departments and submitted to a peer-reviewed scientific journal,” it said.

At the end of September, Cooke again emailed his superiors to ask if he was allowed to submit the study to the journal and was again told to wait.

The scientist followed up again in mid-October and early November.

In a statement, Fournier said, “This study took about two years to complete. Internal reviews are standard practice and necessary. This review period generated additional feedback on the paper — including as late as November 2024 — and helped assess if additional monitoring or other changes were needed.”

Concerns raised that Alberta has ‘returned to muzzling our scientists’

In mid-November 2024, Donahue, who left the government in 2019, expressed frustration about the delays in an email to Cooke. He said he would submit it himself if Cooke wasn’t allowed to.

“I suggest you inform the [assistant deputy minister] and chief scientist that I simply don’t accept that they are refusing to permit the publication of our manuscript, and that they should remind themselves of their legal duties, as stipulated by the Alberta’s Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act,” Donahue wrote in the email, which he shared with The Narwhal.

He said senior officials should be asking themselves, “What is worse, the public learning how badly coal mining in Alberta has been harming downstream water quality and aquatic ecosystems, or the public learning how badly coal mining in Alberta has been harming downstream water quality and aquatic ecosystems and that we’ve returned to muzzling our scientists in an attempt to cover it up while the government tries to convince Albertans that coal mining is environmentally benign?”

Six days later, Cooke, who had just returned from vacation, forwarded the email to his director. A week after that, he was allowed to submit the paper.

“I’m quite confident that my letter shook some trees,” Donahue said.

From his perspective there was no reasonable justification for the government to delay the study’s submission to a journal. He said there had been ample opportunity for briefings and noted it can take several months to go through the peer-review process after a study is submitted to a journal before it’s published.

By this point, Alberta had been embroiled, for years, in a fierce debate over the prospect of a renewed metallurgical coal mining industry in the eastern slopes of the Rockies (metallurgical coal is used in steel-making, as opposed to electricity generation). In January, not long after Cooke got the green-light to submit his study, the Alberta government rescinded the moratorium on coal mining in the eastern slopes it put in place in 2021 and 2022. The moratorium had come in response to public backlash to a government decision in 2020 to cancel the province’s previous long-standing coal policy from 1976.

Last December, Energy Minister Brian Jean said the province would return to the 1976 policy as it developed a new coal policy. He said the new policy, yet to be released, would require new mines to be underground or to use technologies to prevent selenium from entering waterways. But these measures would not apply to projects considered to be “advanced,” including the controversial proposal for the Grassy Mountain mine in the Crowsnest Pass.

Cooke’s paper, which was eventually published in October 2025, summarized decades of government and industry water quality monitoring at three Rocky Mountain coal mines in Alberta. Donahue noted the early years of data, now a couple decades old, revealed concerning selenium concentrations downstream of the mines. But little was done to address it, he said, suggesting the province has largely viewed monitoring as “a box-checking exercise.”

“Alberta Environment and the Alberta Energy Regulator have been asleep at the switch for 20 plus years when it comes to responding to clear evidence of very harmful downstream effects from coal mining,” he said.

Katie Morrison, executive director of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society’s southern Alberta chapter, said it’s “really frustrating to see the government trying to keep information from the public, but especially on something as important as water quality.”

“Albertans are really aware of and really concerned about the quality of our water in general, but particularly in this context of coal mining,” she said. “Research like this that shows these risks is so important to have in those conversations, so that we can hold the government accountable.”

Scientist prevented from accepting media request, community speaking invitation, emails suggest

As senior officials delayed the submission of the McLeod River study, Cooke was also seemingly being prevented from speaking to the media and community groups about previous research into coal mine pollution, emails included in the document release suggest.

In January 2024, a reporter for The Canadian Press requested an interview with either Cooke or co-author Craig Emmerton, another government scientist, about their recently published study describing lasting water quality impacts from more than a century of coal mining in Crowsnest Pass, the released emails show.

The executive director of airshed and watershed stewardship indicated in an email to Cooke that she was supportive of an interview, as was the director of communications and the assistant deputy minister. Days later, word came down from the assistant deputy minister that the minister’s office had taken the lead on the request.

The Canadian Press article was published later that month. The reporter noted neither of the government scientists involved in the study were made available for an interview.

In a statement to The Narwhal, Fournier, Schulz’s press secretary said, “The authors of these studies are trained scientists, not government spokespersons.”

In June 2024, Cooke received an interview request from a CBC producer to appear on the morning show in Kelowna the next day to talk about another study, which found toxic contaminants from coal mines in B.C.’s Elk Valley in snowpacks in the region. According to the emails, Cooke was told to direct the producer to Fournier, the minister’s press secretary.

“That’s the process for all media inquiries,” the director of communications for Alberta Environment and Protected Areas wrote in an email to Cooke. “[The minister’s office] will then assess and advise from there.”

The next day CBC’s Daybreak South interviewed co-author Alison Criscitiello, the director of the Canadian Ice Core Lab at the University of Alberta, not Cooke, who was the lead author.

Then, in September 2024, the Livingstone Landowners Group of ranchers and landowners concerned about the risks of coal mining on the eastern slopes of the Rockies invited Cooke to speak to their community about his research.

“I would like to do this,” Cooke wrote in an email to the director of watershed sciences asking what approvals he’d need. The director responded that she was supportive but said Cooke would need approval from the assistant deputy minister.

In an interview, Bill Trafford, the president of the Livingstone Landowners Group said Cooke was not able to present to the group.

“It’s very concerning because it’s very germane to the issues that we’re trying to deal with,” Trafford said. “I’m really surprised they can take a scientist and say he’s not allowed to present his material publicly.”

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Heavy rainstorms are once again causing flooding in the Fraser Valley region east of Vancouver this week, prompting evacuation orders, highway closures and renewed criticism that the provincial government has failed to adequately prepare.

As of the morning of Dec. 11, about 400 properties were under evacuation order, with another 1,800 under evacuation alert.

The flooding was triggered by a series of atmospheric rivers that pummelled Washington state and southwestern B.C. with heavy rains. While the rain has temporarily slowed, more is expected to hit the region in the days to come. 

Atmospheric rivers — the same weather phenomenon that drove catastrophic flooding in B.C. in 2021 — are expected to become bigger and more frequent due to climate change, increasing the risks of major floods.

In the wake of the 2021 disaster — which left five people and hundreds of thousands of livestock dead — the provincial government developed a new flood strategy. It committed to improve flood risk mapping, invest in new infrastructure, restore wetlands and other ecosystems to reduce flood risks and invest in community-led initiatives to relocate people from particularly risky areas.

But with Fraser Valley communities once again inundated with water, some question the government’s commitment to address flood risks.

Tyrone McNeil, president and Tribal Chief of the Stó:lō Tribal Council and chair of the Emergency Planning Secretariat, said B.C. has been too slow to act.

“They’re just not doing enough on resilience,” he said in an interview Thursday, noting the province has yet to invest in the new flood strategy.

“It’s a great policy, but it’s troublesome that there’s no resources to actually implement it,” he said.

In September, B.C. municipalities were told there was no new funding available for the flood strategy due to a growing provincial deficit. Though many municipalities have proposed projects to mitigate flood risks, representatives say they require funding from higher levels of government to implement them. 

“I get that the province is crying poor right now,” McNeil added. “But there’s got to be a way they can find funds for these proactive activities that keep people dry.”

Dozens of farms with livestock faced evacuation orders

As of Thursday morning, 66 farms with livestock were under evacuation order, with another 99 under evacuation alert, Agriculture and Food Minister Lana Popham said during a flood briefing.

While the water levels are not as high as they were during the 2021 floods, Casey Pruim, board chair of the BC Dairy association said, “It’s still drastic and has a huge impact on the families.”

Pruim, who is also a dairy farmer, is not directly impacted by the current floods. But he is concerned about a lack of investment in flood protection.

He said communication with the Ministry of Agriculture and emergency operations has improved relative to the 2021 floods.

“What, more importantly, has absolutely not improved is the level of investment in flood mitigation,” he said.

“It’s definitely concerning and for our friends who are living in the Sumas Prairie, it’s devastating,” he said. “I don’t think you can put into words the impact it has on these families.”

During the flood briefing Thursday, Popham said she had been in direct contact with farmers.

“I can tell you that the theme of a lot of those calls has been that, yeah, they’re pretty worried but they feel more prepared and so I think that’s going to be really helpful as we watch the next 12 hours play out,” she said.

Emergency Management and Climate Readiness Minister Kelly Greene warned Thursday that “we are not yet through this emergency.”

She said the ministry was holding regular coordination calls with at-risk communities and was continuing to deploy sandbags, tiger dams (large tubes that can be filled with water to form a flood barrier) and other flood defence assets to protect properties and livestock. At the same time, geotechnical experts were on the ground to assess risks across the region.

Aaron Sutherland, vice-president of the Insurance Bureau of Canada, called these latest floods a “wake up call.”

The bureau estimates insured damages from the 2021 floods reached $675 million, making it, at the time, “the most costly severe weather event in the province’s history.” Non-insured losses from 2021 flooding were estimated to range from $1.5 to $4.7 billion, according to research from Vancity and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Sutherland noted there hasn’t been a major flood event in the Fraser Valley since 2021 and he worries that may have lulled folks into a “false sense of security.”

“What we’re seeing in Abbotsford here, once again, is a reminder that we need to be increasing our investment to better protect our communities and particularly in those high-risk areas,” he said.

While the insurance industry in Canada does offer home insurance with flood protection, it’s only available to 90 to 95 per cent of British Columbians, Sutherland said. And, the five to 10 per cent of people who can’t access it are those living at highest risk of floods, he explained.

What that means is the people directly affected by the current flood situation likely don’t have insurance for it, he said. Instead, they’ll be reliant on government disaster assistance.

“Government is going to be paying for it one way or the other,” he said. It’s “much better to pay for it on the front end by building that resilience than pay for it year after year after year through disaster assistance and other government programs to pay for the recovery.”

As severe storms grow more frequent, some call for managed retreat in flood-prone areas

While climate change is driving more intense rainstorms, flooding has also become a significant risk in the Fraser Valley due to colonization and ongoing development. 

In 1924, Semá:th Xhotsa, or Sumas Lake, was drained and converted to agricultural land, which is now known as Sumas Prairie and is among the most fertile farmland in B.C. The lake, which supported salmon and sturgeon, as well as food and medicinal plants, had served as a natural flood mitigator, absorbing freshet, or heavy rains and snow-melt, from the Fraser River. A shadow of the lake returned in the 2021 floods, reopening the sensitive question of managed retreat and the possibility of allowing a portion of the lake to return to both reduce the risks of flooding and support wildlife.

Since the disaster four years ago, Semá:th First Nation, Leq’a-mel First Nation, Máthxwi First Nation, the cities of Abbotsford and Chilliwack and the province signed a collaborative framework for flood mitigation in the Sumas River watershed.

In an interview with The Narwhal last year, Murray Ned, executive director of the Lower Fraser Fisheries Alliance and an advisor to Semá:th First Nation, warned that with communities grappling with so many other urgent issues, preparations for the next flood too often fall by the wayside.

McNeil said there are key steps the province should be taking to build flood resilience. Developing better modelling to understand the risks of heavy rainstorms, for instance, would help identify the most at-risk flood areas. There are also hundreds of kilometres of historically fish-bearing streams through the Fraser Valley and the Lower Mainland that have been cut off from the Fraser River by railways, roads and dikes, McNeil said.

“Those are the same waterways that are going to be trying to carry this rainwater off the mountain sides, off the valley floor into the river, but they can’t make it,” he said. “My concern there is that farmers’ fields remain flooded a lot longer than they need to, lower-lying roadways are covered because the surface water can’t shed into the Fraser.”

Some of those waterways should be reopened and reconnected to the Fraser River, he said, not only to help clear out flood waters, but also to restore ecosystems.

— With files from Steph Kwetásel’wet Wood and Michelle Cyca

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B.C.’s minister of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship hopes to start working with the federal government toward a strategy to prevent train-wildlife collisions in the new year.

“It’s really concerning,” Randene Neill said in an interview with The Narwhal this week. “I wasn’t aware that the numbers are that high.”

Neill’s comments follow The Narwhal’s investigation into wildlife strikes in B.C., produced in partnership with CBC and the Global Reporting Centre. It showed hundreds of animals are killed on tracks owned and operated by Canada’s two major railway companies: Canadian National (CN) and Canadian Pacific Kansas City (CPKC).

The railways are required to report collisions to the B.C. government, but records obtained through freedom of information requests show reporting is both inconsistent and incomplete, obscuring the full scale of the problem.

“Now it’s definitely, definitely on our radar and we’re going to work to do what we can to work with the federal government and to reduce those types of collisions,” Neill said.

However, neither Ottawa nor B.C. seem willing to accept full accountability for the issue of train-wildlife collisions. Neill said the federal government has jurisdiction over transnational railways, suggesting any new regulations must ultimately come from Ottawa.

Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Transport Canada Minister Steven MacKinnon said the provincial government has authority over the issue. 

“As wildlife-railway collisions fall under provincial jurisdiction, we look forward to working with the Government of British Columbia on how we can best assist in addressing this issue,” a statement from the federal minister’s office said.

In response, a spokesperson for the B.C. ministry said, “While the province compiles provincial data and is responsible for wildlife management in B.C., the onus is on the federally-managed railways to manage this issue — not on B.C.’s wildlife to stop getting hit.”

Train collisions with wildlife take a toll 

The B.C. ministry is currently compiling data on wildlife collisions, which are reported to the province through various channels. “Getting those numbers and being able to really target those problem areas is important and probably a first step,” Neill said.

Asked whether she would commit to releasing the data, Neill said she would work to make it public, calling it “an important part of the process.” 

For now, it remains unclear exactly how many animals are struck and killed by trains in B.C. 

In the Elk Valley in the province’s southeast, collisions with trains and vehicles on Highway 3 are a leading cause of death for grizzly bears, according to wildlife scientist Clayton Lamb. 

Lamb has been monitoring bears in the area for more than a decade. In a particularly jarring incident he followed a few years ago, a mother grizzly and her three cubs were killed in a single collision with a train along the Elk River near Elko, B.C.

When Lamb arrived at the scene, he found the cubs lying in a row on the dry riverbed just below the train bridge and the mother’s body farther down the tracks.

The grizzly population in the area is dense and fairly stable, but with a high mortality rate, it’s not self-sustaining, Lamb said. Instead, it’s propped up by bears moving in from other areas like the Bull River, Flathead Valley and Kananaskis. Lamb’s concern is the steady stream of bears could one day dry up as more habitat is lost to development. “We don’t know the tipping point at which that fairly complicated dynamic will stop working,” he said.

Trains regularly strike wildlife in other areas as well, according to locomotive engineer Jim Atkinson, who worked for CN for more than three decades before retiring in 2008. For years, he travelled the picturesque route between Jasper National Park in Alberta and Blue River, B.C.

Wildlife collisions were “a huge issue,” he said. Whenever he saw an animal on the tracks, Atkinson would blow the whistle repeatedly, hoping to scare it out of harm’s way. At night, he’d also shut off the headlights, hoping to give it a better chance of escape by preserving its night vision. But it wasn’t always enough. Especially when winter snow was piled high on either side of the tracks, animals would too often choose the most obvious path and run straight down the tracks in a futile attempt at escape, he explained.

“You can’t see what’s going on because it’s dark and you’ve got the headlights off and you’re blowing the whistle and ringing the bell as hard as you can and then you hear them go underneath the engine,” he said. “It was difficult.”

But stopping wasn’t a feasible option — trains need up to two kilometres on average to slow to a stop.

Neill, a former journalist, said she’s observed the risks herself. She recalled seeing deer eating spilled grain along the railway tracks in the winter in Brandon, Man., where she began her journalism career. Now, she says she’s willing to work at reducing collisions not only in B.C. but across the country.

Companies ‘obscuring the facts to secure their bottom line’: BC Green Party leader

The Narwhal reached out to both the BC Conservatives and the BC Greens for comment on this story, but did not hear back from the Conservatives ahead of publication.

In an interview BC Green Party leader Emily Lowan called for an overhaul in the way the railways’ risks to wildlife are managed.

“It’s horrific,” she said. “And it’s the same story that we’ve seen across B.C. — massive corporations like CPKC and CN are obscuring the facts to secure their bottom line at the expense of our wildlife, our workers and our environment.”

“It seems like our government has completely abandoned its duty to hold these massive corporations accountable,” she said.

In response, Neill said transnational railways fall under federal jurisdiction. 

While railways are required to report strikes under B.C.’s Wildlife Act, Transport Canada previously told The Narwhal there are no specific requirements under the federal Railway Safety Act focused solely on train-wildlife collisions.

“We definitely want them to improve what they can to reduce these collisions and we’re willing to absolutely work with them to do that,” Neill said.

Both CN and CPKC previously told The Narwhal they report wildlife strikes to the B.C. government and take steps to reduce collisions. CN noted it continues to make investments in technology and pointed to specific efforts in Jasper National Park and northern B.C. where the company has installed limited fencing to reduce wildlife strikes. CPKC, meanwhile, said it has replaced about 6,000 older grain cars and manages vegetation along the tracks to avoid attracting wildlife and to give animals a clear escape path.

In a follow-up statement Thursday, a CPKC spokesperson reiterated a previous comment noting the company views this as “a complex problem, with no simple solutions” and continues to work with federal and provincial governments to reduce collisions.

CN did not respond to The Narwhal’s request for comment ahead of publication.

Researchers say there are potential solutions companies could deploy more broadly. These include using an early warning system to alert wildlife to oncoming trains, installing targeted fencing in high-risk areas, reducing grain leaks and spills and removing carcasses to avoid attracting other animals to the tracks and enhancing wildlife trails to give animals better alternative travel routes.

Both Lowan and Neill noted collisions aren’t just an issue for wildlife populations, but also for the locomotive engineers, who must deal with the trauma of hitting animals on the tracks.

“It’s in everybody’s interest to be able to work together to reduce those collisions,” Neill said. 

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At least 12,959 wild animals died on B.C. roads and highways between January 2023 and May 2025 — thousands of deer, hundreds of bears and coyotes, dozens of beavers and skunks killed in collisions. 

That’s only the fraction of animals killed by vehicles captured in the provincial wildlife accident-reporting system. Animals that fled the roadside before succumbing to their injuries and scores of amphibians crushed by passing cars often aren’t counted, meaning the true toll is likely much greater. 

Roads and highways are a problem for wildlife across the country and around the world: snapping turtles are regularly killed in Ontario, as are mountain lions in California and kangaroos in Australia. And it’s not just wildlife at risk when cars hit animals. People can be seriously injured or killed, too. These collisions can also be expensive. In B.C. they can cost about $40 million in insurance claims alone each year, according to estimates from Insurance Corporation of British Columbia (ICBC) based on data from 2009-2013. A spokesperson for ICBC said they could not provide updated data by publication time.

Governments in Canada and elsewhere have tried different measures to prevent collisions, including posting signs to warn drivers to look out for wildlife and testing wildlife detection systems to alert drivers when animals are on the road. But the gold standard so far is a combination of fencing and crossing structures — like those in Banff National Park.

Banff “really taught us a lot,” says Clayton Lamb, a wildlife scientist with the research institute Biodiversity Pathways. 

About 82 kilometres of highway were fenced and 44 crossing structures constructed in the famed national park beginning in the 1980s, when the Trans-Canada Highway was expanded from two lanes to four through the park. The wildlife system cut collisions by more than 80 per cent, according to Parks Canada. While these systems are expensive to build — the Banff system cost tens of millions of dollars — they can save money in the long run. Fewer collisions means less money spent on health care and insurance payouts.

In B.C.’s Rocky Mountains to the south, work is now underway on a project that aims to fence almost 30 kilometres of Highway 3 and retrofit a series of existing bridges to reduce collisions and give animals a safer way to cross the road. The project, called Reconnecting the Rockies, continues into neighbouring Alberta, where another 50 kilometres of fencing and crossing structures are partially complete. In this corridor alone, more than 300 collisions with large animals are reported each year.

“This project is designed to mirror that success in Banff and bring it to Highway 3,” Lamb, the lead scientist for the B.C. side, explains. 

Crowsnest Highway endangers wildlife, restricts animal movement

Driving the highway in early June, Lamb points out a blood splatter in the middle of the road and a bald eagle in the ditch, feeding on the remains of a whitetail deer likely hit that morning. It’s one of the insidious challenges of roadkill — when one animal is hit its carcass can attract another to the road, putting that animal in a risky spot as well. 

Highway 3, also known as the Crowsnest Highway, is the winding southern route across B.C., running from Hope through Osoyoos, Creston and Cranbrook all the way to Medicine Hat in Alberta.

The Reconnecting the Rockies project zeroes in on an 80-kilometre stretch running from outside Hosmer, B.C., to Lundbreck, Alta. The hope is it will eventually extend through the rest of the Elk Valley as well.

The Elk Valley is a complicated place. It’s home to a wide array of wildlife, like grizzly bears, elk, deer and bighorn sheep, and the habitats that support them. It also serves as a vital link between major protected areas like Banff to the north and Montana’s Glacier National Park to the south. At the same time, it’s home to several growing communities, mountain-top removal coal mines and a busy transportation corridor in Highway 3 and the railway, which trains carrying coal, grain and numerous other products travel every day. 

The highway is a challenge for a couple of reasons. It’s a barrier to animal movement, which can make it difficult for species to travel farther distances in search of food or mates, limiting a population’s gene pool and generally making an animal’s world smaller. More directly, animals are killed when they try to cross the road.

Most collisions between Jaffray, B.C., and the Alberta border involve elk and deer, with roughly 90 elk and 50 deer hit each year, according to a Reconnecting the Rockies progress report for 2020 to 2024.  

“It doesn’t seem consistent with how we want to relate to wildlife that are iconic and important to many people,” Lamb says. “And from a hunting and cultural harvest and food security standpoint, it’s also a bunch of elk that are being wasted.”

Jason Gravelle, the acting chief administrative officer for Yaq̓it ʔa·knuqⱡi’it, which is part of the Ktunaxa Nation, agrees. 

While not every member of his nation is reliant on locally harvested food, elk have become an important food source, he says, adding “We can’t head over the mountains to go hunt buffalo anymore.” 

With so many elk killed on the highway, the crossings project is “definitely needed,” he says. And it’s not just elk and deer at risk. A third of all reported grizzly bear collisions in B.C. happen in the Elk Valley, even though the area accounts for just one per cent of grizzly habitat in the province, according to Lamb’s research. For grizzlies in this region, it’s a leading cause of death. 

Choosing where to put wildlife crossings

Reconnecting the Rockies is the result of a broad collaboration involving the B.C. and Alberta governments, Parks Canada, conservation groups, First Nations, scientists and Elk Valley Resources, which operates several coal mines in the area. 

In B.C., it broke ground in 2020. By the end of 2024, fencing had been installed along 4.2 kilometres of highway and six underpasses had been retrofitted to make it easier for wildlife to cross the busy road. So far, B.C.’s Ministry of Transportation and Transit says it has spent about $3.7 million on the project.

There’s still a long way to go before the project as envisioned is complete, but monitoring shows wildlife is already using some of the upgraded underpasses more frequently.

Lamb walks down a gentle slope next to the Loop highway bridge that spans Michel Creek, about 10 kilometres east of Sparwood.

“This was just a wall of no access,” he says. The slope used to be steeper and it was almost entirely blocked off by old concrete footings and rebar.

Today, there’s a wide, gentle lane that runs down to the creek and alongside it below the highway. “It’s a beautiful underpass,” Lamb says. “It’s super comfy and elk can tell that there’s not, like, a cougar waiting on the other side.”

Another retrofit, at the Alexander Creek bridge, saw a path cleared through the protective wall of big, loose rocks that once angled sharply into the creek. 

In B.C., the project has so far focused on retrofitting existing road infrastructure to improve crossings. In large part because it’s the most cost-effective option, but it can also transform existing infrastructure into great wildlife crossings.

The Loop bridge underpass would have cost millions to build from scratch, Lamb said. Retrofitting the existing highway bridge over the creek meant creating an “amazing” wildlife underpass for a fraction of the cost.

But not every effort has been a success. Even with fencing and a new trail beneath the bridge, the Carbon Creek underpass is far from ideal, Lamb says. There’s not much clearance between the bridge and the creekside path and there’s poorer visibility than at more spacious underpasses. Wildlife only uses it occasionally. 

Gravelle said Yaq̓it ʔa·knuqⱡi’it cautioned the Reconnecting the Rockies team to do its homework before choosing crossing sites. They should be selected based on how wildlife uses the area, not what’s cheapest from an engineering perspective, he said.

“That’s something you always have to be careful of — they can look really good as dots on the map, but are they functionally big enough?” Lamb says.

Other existing underpasses were better suited to retrofits, especially those already proving useful. “We’ve had remote cameras under a lot of these structures before anything has been done to them and there are already animals using them even without fencing or any improvements on our end,” Lamb said. In some cases, those wildlife crossings increased two or three times after retrofits were complete.

There are also proposals to build new, dedicated crossing structures in particularly important corridors for wildlife. These include a wildlife bridge a few kilometres west of the provincial border. 

Meanwhile in Alberta, a major new underpass, which was estimated to cost about $10 million, was recently completed just west of Lundbreck. About 27 per cent of wildlife collisions recorded between Lundbreck and the B.C. border between 2018 and 2022 took place along a 7-kilometre stretch of Highway 3 where the new underpass is located. 

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Across the country, scores of animals are killed on the railway every year. Trains are a major cause of death for grizzly bears in places like Banff National Park in Alberta and B.C.’s Elk Valley. They’ve killed moose in northern Ontario and pronghorn antelope in the Prairies.

Inconsistent monitoring makes it challenging to know exactly how many animals are killed nationwide, but railways take a significant toll in some areas. At a time of increasing pressure on wildlife from habitat loss, the spread of disease and the impacts of climate change, finding ways to prevent collisions could offer a desperately needed win for wildlife. 

And, there are potential solutions. Take an early warning system developed by researchers at the University of Alberta about a decade ago. Like the railroad crossings people encounter on roads, the system uses a dinging noise and flashing lights to alert wildlife to an approaching train about 30 seconds before it arrives. 

Trials in Banff National Park between late-2016 and mid-2017 showed large animals like coyotes, elk and grizzly bears fled the railway about six and a half seconds sooner when alerted by the early warning system — seconds that can mean the difference between life and death.

It’s compelling evidence this type of system can help reduce collisions, according to University of Alberta ecologist Colleen Cassady St. Clair. She worked with Jonathan Backs, who combined his expertise in engineering and ecology to develop the system.  

But as far as St. Clair knows it still isn’t being used in Canada. She said there just isn’t enough public attention on the issue to push governments and railways to confront it on a broad scale.

“That’s very different from the highway situation, where public pressure from injuries and property damage has been an immense part of the wildlife mitigation,” she said.

The early warning system was developed out of a five-year grizzly bear research initiative launched in 2010 with a $1-million grant from Canadian Pacific, the railway company now known as Canadian Pacific Kansas City or CPKC. The project was a joint initiative with Parks Canada, focused on rail-wildlife collisions in two national parks straddling the B.C.-Alberta border, Banff and Yoho. 

St. Clair saw this convergence between three Canadian icons — Banff National Park, the railway and grizzly bears — as a unique opportunity to study a problem that plagues wildlife across the country and around the world.

The team’s goal was to understand the root cause of collisions, particularly between trains and bears, and to suggest ways to reduce them.

Between 1995 and 2018, hundreds of animals were killed on the railway, many with precisely known mortality sites, including 47 black bears, 15 wolves, 12 grizzlies, 328 elk, 116 whitetail deer and 66 mule deer, according to a 2020 study published in the journal Scientific Reports by St. Clair and her co-authors.

For wildlife, railways offer both an easy travel corridor and plenty of food. Light-loving plants like dandelions and buffalo berries grow alongside the tracks and significant amounts of grain leak from passing trains. In one 2017 study, researchers, including St. Clair, estimated about 100 tonnes of grain leak annually along a 134-kilometre stretch of railway inside Yoho and Banff national parks. That’s enough to feed about 50 bears for a year.

In a statement to The Narwhal, CPKC spokesperson Terry Cunha said the company has replaced about 6,000 older grain cars in the past several years and noted clean-up crews respond in the “rare event” of a spill.

Train speed, animal personalities, soundscapes can all factor into collisions

St. Clair said the grizzly bears her team monitored in Banff didn’t seem particularly drawn to grain. But grain is attractive to elk and deer and when those animals were hit by trains, their carcasses drew in the bears.

Only a few grizzlies the team monitored with GPS collars used the railway regularly, St. Clair said. And the two most frequent users were, in some ways, polar opposites. 

Bear 122, known colloquially as The Boss, seemed to have figured out that trains kill a lot of elk and deer, making it an easy place to find protein, she said. But he is also a “very shrewd bear” and “he seems to have a lot of respect for trains.”

Bear 128, who was orphaned as a two-year-old when his mother was killed by a train, also relied on the railway for food. But he never seemed to quite grasp the risks of fast-moving vehicles and was eventually killed by a truck on the highway, she said. 

“The Boss is this phenomenally successful bear eating a lot of protein and 128 was this feeble little teenager that was barely eking out an existence,” St. Clair said.

In an interview over Zoom, she showed a photo of Bear 128 and another bear, 126, on a railway. Bear 126 has its head up, alert, as if reacting to a noise, but 128 has his head down seemingly focused on eating, she explained. 

It’s just an anecdote, St. Clair said, but it speaks to how personality differences among individual animals can affect their fate in risky landscapes.

At the same time, the researchers learned there are “acoustic contexts” where a moving train can almost sneak up on you — places where there’s a lot of background noise, for example, or mountains that block the sound of a train as it moves around a bend. This makes collisions more common, the researchers found, as do spots where tracks run alongside water, limiting escape routes. 

But the biggest predictor they found is train speed.

St. Clair recounted the panicked reactions of bears as a train chugged toward them in videos taken from the front of locomotives. “They would bolt down the tracks and not be able to outrun a train,” she said.

The idea behind the early warning system was that some animals needed more time to detect a train, understand the danger and evade it by getting off the tracks. 

And it doesn’t need to be a scary sound, St. Clair said, just a unique one animals would eventually learn to associate with an approaching train.

Trials of the early warning system in Banff showed it’s “a mitigation that could work,” she said.

No clear commitment from governments or railways to adopt early warning systems 

While experiments with Backs’s prototypes, which cost about US$225 in materials in 2017, showed the early warning system’s potential for reducing collisions, St. Clair said better monitoring is needed to identify locations where it could have the greatest impact. The system itself would likely require further research and development before it could be widely deployed, she added. The challenge from her perspective is the railways don’t seem motivated to make the required investments voluntarily, and so far, governments haven’t required them to.

Neither Canadian National Railway (CN) nor CPKC agreed to be interviewed by The Narwhal. Instead both companies sent brief statements in response to emailed questions. 

CPKC spokesperson Terry Cunha said the company works with Parks Canada, the B.C. government and other experts to reduce wildlife conflict. 

He said CPKC manages vegetation to reduce plants that might attract animals, improve wildlife sight-lines and give animals room to safely get off the tracks.

He did not say whether CPKC is exploring expanded trials of the early warning system.

CN spokesperson Ashley Michnowski said the company monitors collisions and shares data with governments as required.

“We continue to invest in technology and work closely with government agencies to ensure safe, sustainable operations across our network,” Michnowski said, though she did not address questions about the early warning system specifically.

She said the company works to reduce wildlife mortality by building crossings and removing old telegraph lines and has targeted initiatives in places like Jasper National Park and northern B.C., where CN has led a wildlife mortality working group for more than 15 years. 

The Narwhal also asked B.C.’s Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship if the provincial government is exploring the use of early warning systems to prevent train-wildlife collisions and if it would require railways to use such a system. In response, a spokesperson for the ministry directed The Narwhal to the federal government. According to Transport Canada, “There are no specific requirements under the Railway Safety Act focused solely on train-wildlife collisions.”

Train-wildlife collisions call for ‘creative solutions’

There are other potential solutions which could be deployed, including cleaning up grain leaks and animal carcasses that draw other wildlife to the tracks.

In Banff, Parks Canada cleared 50 kilometres of wildlife trails to create and enhance alternative travel routes for bears near high-risk sections of railway tracks and is using remote cameras to monitor animal use. A spokesperson for the federal agency called preliminary results “promising.”

In northern B.C., meanwhile, concerns about moose mortality spurred the creation of the working group in 2007 that brought the provincial government, CN, academics and local groups together to study the problem between Smithers and Endako. 

Documents obtained by The Narwhal through a freedom of information request show surveys were used to count moose kills along a 200-kilometre stretch of track. Numbers were highest in heavy snow years: 155 dead moose were counted in the winter of 2014-15, which had the highest snowfall in eight years of monitoring. The following winter, one of the mildest snow years, that number dropped to about 36, according to the reports.

Fencing built along 6.8 kilometres of railway to keep moose off the tracks helped reduce, but not eliminate, collisions in that area. Moose were still able to access the tracks where the fencing ended — a challenge the working group was looking to address with wildlife guards made of stiff plastic board, the documents show.  

Short sections of fencing, particularly in high-risk collision areas could be part of a package of solutions deployed across a landscape, St. Clair said, though fence ends can pose a challenge.

While widespread fencing and safe crossings could reduce train-wildlife collisions, as they have along highways, some experts say the high expense may be harder for governments to justify when there’s little risk to human life or property. Highway collisions endanger people too, and carry a high cost for insurers.

And in some areas, the railway is tucked up against rivers or canyon walls that would make fencing a particular challenge, wildlife scientist Clayton Lamb said. Fencing and crossing structures can also restrict species movement across the landscape, which carries its own set of challenges.

“It kind of begs for other creative solutions,” Lamb said. 

He sees the potential for an early warning system to help reduce grizzly bear collisions in the Elk Valley. But it’s not something he can make happen alone.

Updated Nov. 27, 2025 at 7:27 a.m PT: This story incorrectly stated St. Clair’s research was published in Nature when it was in fact published in Scientific Reports. It was also updated to include that scores of animals were killed on the railway, beyond those with confirmed GPS locations. 

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Some of the hardest calls came in the middle of the night. An elk hit by a train. Its back was broken, or its legs crushed, and it was still alive. Frank de Boon struggled with those calls. There was nothing he could do until daylight. 

When morning came, he’d hike down the tracks, gun slung over his shoulder, to find the injured animal and put an end to its suffering. 

Most conservation officers get into it to protect animals or police fish and wildlife crime, de Boon said. He didn’t expect he’d have to euthanize so many elk and deer maimed on the railway. But it was a regular part of the job he did for 30-odd years in B.C.’s Elk Valley. 

“I think all conservation officers were concerned about it,” he said. “We were seeing it all the time.”

The B.C. government was alerted decades ago to the railways’ impact. In 1982, a wildlife biologist for B.C.’s environment ministry warned trains were killing hundreds of moose every year in the Central Interior alone. He said better reporting was needed to understand the true scope of the problem and cautioned that “failing to research solutions to recurrent rail-moose collisions now will, in time, prove to be an embarrassment.”

Companies are supposed to report rail kills to the B.C. government under the Wildlife Act, which requires any person who kills or injures wildlife accidentally to report the incident and location. But records obtained by The Narwhal through freedom of information requests show reporting is both inconsistent and incomplete, meaning B.C. still doesn’t have a clear sense of how big this problem really is. 

A handful of internal emails suggest at least some government biologists and conservation officers have been frustrated and keen to see better reporting and fewer strikes. One document summed up the sentiment succinctly: “Railway companies are difficult or impossible to work with.”

Wildlife collisions ‘generally under-reported’: government document  

In emailed statements to The Narwhal, both Canadian National (CN) and Canadian Pacific Kansas City (CPKC) railway companies said they report wildlife strikes to the B.C. government and take steps to reduce wildlife mortality on their railways. 

Between 2020 and the end of 2023, CN reported at least 340 wildlife collision incidents in B.C., including 202 incidents involving moose and 67 involving bears, according to a spreadsheet the B.C. government released to The Narwhal. 

Those numbers likely don’t capture the full extent of railway strikes. In 2021, for instance, it appears the company reported just four collisions, compared with 120 the year before and 136 the year after. 

In a statement, CN spokesperson Ashley Michnowski said “wildlife collisions can and do occur, despite our efforts to reduce them,” but did not address the inconsistency in the 2021 data. 

Despite the discrepancies, CN’s reporting does include dates, times and GPS locations for strikes — information scientists would need to identify collision hotspots. It’s also collected in a spreadsheet, which means the data can be analyzed more easily.

Documents The Narwhal obtained from the B.C. government show CPKC reports wildlife strikes to the Conservation Officer Service, which records the incidents in human-wildlife conflict reports. 

The Narwhal reviewed more than 350 pages of those reports and found CPKC reported trains hit about 182 animals in the Kootenays in 2022 and 2023, including at least 90 elk, 49 deer, 18 black bears and eight grizzlies. 

The company declined to comment on the wildlife strike numbers beyond reiterating that it reports collisions to relevant authorities.

However, internal records suggest at least some government officials are concerned railway companies are failing on that front: “Collisions are generally under-reported,” according to a document titled “Railway collision file — fast facts.” A ministry spokesperson said the document summarizes the results of a simple, non-scientific survey undertaken to help government staff learn more about wildlife collisions. According to the summary, the survey identified 53 dead elk along a 60-kilometre section of track in the Kootenays during the winter of 2022/2023.

While surveys have been used in some areas to monitor collisions, those efforts have not been expanded, a spokesperson for B.C.’s Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship said in a statement. “We continue to engage with CN and CKPC about survey opportunities.”

The ministry said it is working to collate data on rail-wildlife collisions, but the spokesperson noted it will take time to pull information from numerous sources. 

At the same time, the ministry is working to review and streamline requirements, improve data collection and assess options for reducing collisions, the spokesperson said.

An ‘out of sight, out of mind’ problem

Neither CPKC nor CN agreed to be interviewed by The Narwhal and instead sent statements in response to emailed questions. 

CN spokesperson Michnowski said trains need up to two kilometres to slow to a stop, on average, which can make it challenging to avoid collisions with wildlife.

She added that the company works to reduce wildlife mortality through various initiatives. In northern B.C., for instance, CN has led a wildlife mortality working group for more than 15 years. Alongside surveys to monitor collisions with moose, the working group has installed exclusion fencing along 6.8 kilometres of railway to keep moose off the tracks.

“We continue to invest in technology and work closely with government agencies to ensure safe, sustainable operations across our network,” Michnowski added.

In a separate statement, CPKC spokesperson Terry Cunha said the company works with Parks Canada, the B.C. government and other experts to reduce wildlife conflict. Clean-up crews respond to grain spills, which can attract wildlife to the tracks, Cunha said, noting the company has replaced nearly 6,000 older grain cars in the last several years.

Cunha added that CPKC also manages vegetation to reduce plants that might attract animals, improve wildlife sight-lines and give animals room to safely get off the tracks.

“This is a complex problem, with no simple solutions,” he said.

Neither company responded to questions asking how many collisions each reported to the B.C. government in 2024 and 2025. The ministry did not provide this information either.

In the Elk Valley of southeast B.C. — part of ʔamakʔis Ktunaxa, the traditional territory of the Ktunaxa Nation — the railway is just one of many challenges wildlife contends with today. Mountaintop removal coal mines, logging, growing communities and the Crowsnest Highway have all dramatically transformed habitats. But the railway’s toll gets little attention.

Jason Gravelle, the acting chief administrative officer for Yaq̓it ʔa·knuqⱡi’it First Nation questions why there’s seemingly been no repercussions for the railways. “There’s no accountability for their actions,” he said. 

People aren’t generally out walking on the railroad tracks, so they don’t see the carcasses. “It’s out of sight, out of mind,” he said. But Gravelle, like de Boon, has seen the issue in the Elk Valley first-hand — the remains of elk and other animals killed on the railway.

For some Yaq̓it ʔa·knuqⱡi’it members, elk have become an important food source, he said. “We can’t head over the mountains to go hunt buffalo anymore.”

He used to work for Nupqu, a Ktunaxa-owned consulting firm, collecting water samples, sometimes at sites right along the railway. He saw animals killed on the tracks a couple times a month, he said. They’d feed on the grain that leaked from passing trains and when they got hit, their carcasses drew in the bears.

Railway collisions threaten Elk Valley grizzly population 

When wildlife scientist Clayton Lamb began monitoring local grizzly bears with GPS collars more than a decade ago, the risks of the railway really started to come into focus for him. 

When I visited the Elk Valley with photojournalist Leah Hennel in early June, Lamb took us to the site of one of the more intense collisions he’s seen.

He turned down a narrow cut off a logging road just outside Elko, B.C. There was dense brush, lush and green with fresh spring growth, on either side, and just enough space between for his Ford F-150 to roll through. 

He pulled into a clearing near a rail bridge that crosses the Elk River. It was here, just a few years ago, that a train killed a mother grizzly and her three young cubs. 

Lamb had been monitoring the mother for a couple years by that point. He collared her on a rainy day in September 2019, just south of Fernie, and tagged her as EVGF97. Colloquially, he called her Willow. 

He spotted her from a helicopter the next spring with a male and made a note to watch for young the following year. Sure enough, in May 2021, he spotted her again, this time with three cubs. 

Willow’s home range was pretty compact, about 15 kilometres wide, Lamb said. And, like a lot of bears in the Elk Valley, she spent a fair bit of time up in the mountains. But she’d wander down into the valley floor near Elko every now and then, more often in the fall. It’s the time of year when grizzly bears are trying to pack on fat for their winter hibernation and the valley offers up a buffet. But it comes with risk.

“It’s hard to not cross a road or cross a highway or bump into a town when you’re a bear living in the Elk Valley,” Lamb said. “They navigate a pretty challenging landscape.” 

Over more than a decade, Lamb collared and monitored dozens of bears, each one offering insights into the unique, and fragile, dynamics that allow the species to survive in a valley chock full of potential threats.  

Today, there’s a dense and fairly stable grizzly population. But Lamb warns it’s not self-sustaining. Instead it’s propped up by bears moving in from other areas: the Bull River, the Flathead Valley, Kananaskis. The concern is the steady stream of bears could one day dry up as more habitat is lost to development. “We don’t know the tipping point at which that fairly complicated dynamic will stop working,” he says.  

Lamb pulls two damaged GPS collars from the back of his truck. One, made of Kevlar, a synthetic fabric known for its remarkable strength, was cut in half by a train that struck and killed the grizzly that was wearing it. The other sustained so much damage in another collision the lithium-ion battery caught fire. That bear died too.

Willow was killed in early October, when the forested hillsides were awash in the gold and orange hues of fall. Lamb was in Cranbrook, about a 45-minute drive away, when he got the call.

He found the cubs lying in a row on the dry riverbed just below the train bridge. And up on the tracks, a severed paw, a pile of intestines and a ways down, Willow. 

“Four dead grizzly bears was an intense collision,” he said.

Lamb suspects the train probably surprised Willow and her cubs. In a state of shock, the bears likely saw the path of least resistance — straight down the track — as their best chance of survival. It’s like tunnel vision, Lamb said: they didn’t see the escape paths into the bush on either side. 

Retired train engineer says more needs to be done to prevent collisions

That tunnel vision is something Jim Atkinson, a retired locomotive engineer, witnessed again and again. 

Atkinson spent more than three decades working for CN before retiring in late 2008. For years, he travelled the picturesque route between Jasper National Park in Alberta and Blue River, B.C., cutting through the rugged Rocky Mountains and following the meanders of two mighty, salmon-bearing rivers — the Fraser and North Thompson. He saw all manner of wildlife on those trips: moose and elk, bears and wolves, ravens and eagles. 

When he spotted an animal on the tracks, Atkinson did what a lot of train engineers do: he blew the whistle repeatedly, hoping the sharp noise would scare it out of harm’s way. It worked sometimes, more often in the summer when the shoulders were clear. But in the winter, when piles of snow lined either side of the tracks, animals would too often choose the only clear path in front of them and attempt, often futilely, to escape the immense steel predator barrelling after them by running straight down the tracks. 

“It was a big issue, a huge issue in the winter,” Atkinson said.

Stopping the train often wasn’t a feasible option. A locomotive engineer can’t just slam on the brakes like a driver can in a car. It takes time for a train to slow to a stop, Atkinson said. And engineers often don’t have that much time to react when they spot an animal on the tracks. 

Night posed an added challenge. “The headlight would blind them,” Atkinson said. “They couldn’t see and they couldn’t judge where the train was and how fast it was going.” Whenever he saw animals on the tracks at night, Atkinson would quickly turn off the headlight, hoping to give them a better chance of escape by preserving their night vision. It didn’t always work.

“That was very stressful,” he said. “You can’t see what’s going on because it’s dark and you’ve got the headlights off and you’re blowing the whistle and ringing the bell as hard as you can and then you hear them go underneath the engine.”

“It was difficult,” he said. “It was difficult.”

Atkinson said other engineers and rail workers shared his concerns about the piles of grain and corn the trains left behind, the snowbanks that blocked escape routes in the winter. As a union representative, he took those concerns to CN management, but said little was done, at least while he was there. 

In a statement, CN spokesperson Michnowski said the company “takes accuracy and accountability very seriously. We are continually learning and enhancing our processes to ensure we operate as a safe, sustainable railway while reliably serving our customers and supporting the North American economy.”

Grain train derailment spurred couple to keep pushing for solutions  

Judy Taylor-Atkinson, Atkinson’s wife, was a founding member of the Jasper Environmental Association. After hearing the gruesome stories about wildlife being killed on the railway and highway in Jasper National Park, she was keen to see something done about it. Working with Parks Canada, the group pushed CN to act. 

They did see some progress. The railway bought a vacuum truck to clean up spilled grain over a section of track in the park and installed fencing to keep bighorn sheep out of a tunnel where there had been collisions in the past, Taylor-Atkinson remembers. But it wasn’t enough, she said.

​​The Atkinsons grew even more concerned in the mid-aughts, after a train derailment outside Blue River spilled a huge amount of grain. At least eight bears were spotted near the tracks in the aftermath, Atkinson remembers. That’s when the couple took their concerns to the B.C. Conservation Officer Service.

When I met them in a conference room at their condo complex in a suburb of Vancouver, they had a stack of government documents they’d obtained through freedom of information requests. They also had a handful of old photos of bears on the train tracks — evidence of a longstanding problem.

According to those records, which The Narwhal reviewed, a conservation officer recommended in 2007 that CN be investigated for a series of alleged contraventions. The accusations included failing to report grain spills from two major train derailments north of Blue River in 2006 and 2007, which the officer said was required under the spills reporting regulation. The company was also accused of failing to report that two wolverines, two grizzly bears and as many as 50 moose had been killed along 60 kilometres of track, a pattern that was “allegedly occurring throughout the province of British Columbia,” the officer wrote.

CN did not respond to The Narwhal’s questions about these incidents. 

In a statement, a B.C. government spokesperson said it’s an offence to leave attractants out for dangerous wildlife, but noted moose, deer and other ungulates are not defined as dangerous wildlife under the Wildlife Act. When asked about the outcome of the conservation officer’s report into the company’s alleged contraventions, the spokesperson directed The Narwhal to the Transportation Safety Board. A spokesperson for the Transportation Safety Board confirmed the derailments and said the company had reported both to the board. 

Almost two decades later, the Atkinsons remain concerned that wildlife is still killed on the railway — and they’re not alone.

Even years after he retired, conservation officer de Boon still worries about the toll the railway takes on wildlife. 

In the Elk Valley this spring, he showed me the small piles of corn left by a passing train, and nearby, the carcass of a whitetail fawn. He showed me the field where a herd of elk comes to feed in the waning evening light, and maybe half a kilometre away on the railway, the mangled remains of an elk swarming with flies.

“Look at the money that’s being spent now on fencing the highways, and yet the railway track right beside the highway is having the same carnage, but nobody’s seeing it, so they’re not nearly as averse to it,” he said.

Credits:

Rail data analysis for this story was provided by the Global Reporting Centre at the University of British Columbia as part of its reporting collaboration on the rail industry led by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism. Through this work, The Narwhal connected with CBC, which produced its own on-the-ground reporting in B.C. informed by our findings.

Reporter:  Ainslie CruickshankVisualizations: Andrew MunroePhotography: Leah Hennel and Jimmy JeongEditors: Lindsay Sample and Denise BalkissoonFact-checking: Will PearsonAdditional fact-checking: Britnei Bilhete and Joy SpearChief-Morris, CBCVisualizations made with Protomaps, MapLibre and deck.gl

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.