Dave Armstrong struggles to describe the smell that sometimes wafts onto his property just outside Dawson Creek, B.C. 

“It’s sharp, foul and it’s an oily smell, but not like a refined oil,” Armstrong says. “This has a real foul, strong odour and it’s not nice. It really irritates you fast.”He lives about one kilometre from an oil and gas waste disposal facility. Sometimes, the smell is just an unpleasant annoyance. Other days, he says, it’s much more.

“There are times where it will just be an instant headache when it hits,” Armstrong says. “And if it’s in the summertime and the windows are open in the house … it takes a long time to get that odour out.”

Brenda Delamont lives just down the road from Armstrong. She associates two distinct smells with the facility owned by Calgary-based Secure Waste Infrastructure Corp.

“One is like a burnt chemical and then one is like a sour, noxious smell,” Delamont says. “When the burnt smell is in the air, it doesn’t make your eyes water, but it kind of sticks in your mucous membranes and kind of irritates your throat.”

The facility began operating in 2010, the same year Delamont and her husband moved to their home just outside of Dawson Creek. Secure receives waste produced by the oil and gas industry, including contaminated water, drilling by-products and industrial sludge. The facility is licensed by B.C.’s Ministry of Environment and Parks and the BC Energy Regulator to handle a variety of hazardous waste products. Some waste — including contaminated water — is treated on site before being injected into underground wells. Other materials are sent for disposal at different facilities.

Brenda Delamont and her husband bought their seven-acre property in Rolla, B.C., planning to retire there along with their dogs and horses. But smells from Secure’s facility, which you can see on the horizon, have her questioning whether they should say.

Before construction began, nearby residents say Secure told them smells from the facility wouldn’t be a problem; they’d build a “state of the art vapour collection and recovery system to ensure no fugitive emissions and prevent odours.” A letter Armstrong received from the company in May 2009 states the facility would use the collection and recovery system when receiving “sour liquid loads” — an industry term for liquid waste containing high levels of toxic chemicals. Secure’s letter specifically mentions hydrogen sulfide, a flammable and highly toxic gas that typically smells like rotten eggs.

Armstrong vividly remembers sitting down at his kitchen table with a representative from Secure while the facility was still in the planning stage.

“My concern was offsite odours and they said there would not be any,” he recalls. “And we have found out otherwise.”

Over the years, Armstrong and Delamont say they and their family members have made hundreds of calls to Secure, the Environment Ministry and the energy regulator to report strong chemical smells on their properties. Both say those smells only appear when the wind is blowing from the waste facility toward their homes.

About a kilometre away from Brenda Delamont and Dave Armstrong’s properties, you can drive down a gravel road to Secure’s disposal facility, which receives waste products from the oil and gas industry, including liquids containing highly toxic chemicals such as hydrogen sulfide.

After years of raising concerns, they are frustrated.

“We still don’t know what it’s from,” Delamont says. “We’ve never gotten an answer as to why you smell the smells, what the smells are from and how toxic or noxious they are over the long term or short term.”

After attempts to reach the company by phone went unanswered, The Narwhal sent detailed questions about Delamont and Armstrong’s concerns to Secure via the company’s online contact form and by email. In an emailed response, Secure said it “takes community concerns seriously and works closely” with provincial regulators. The BC Energy Regulator conducted 33 inspections of the facility in 2025, according to the company, and found no compliance issues.

“When concerns are raised, we investigate them and continue working with regulators and nearby residents to address them,” the company said.

In the Peace, oil and gas is ‘a fact of life’ but companies need to be good neighbours

You don’t have to drive far outside the town of Dawson Creek to enter farming country. Last August, combines churned across golden fields, kicking up dust and pulling in cereal crops. The southern slice of British Columbia’s Peace region — named for the Peace River that flows from the Rocky Mountains across the northern prairie and into Alberta — produces the majority of the province’s canola and grain crops. Almost one-third of all the farmland in the province is located in the Peace, where cattle and forage crops are also big business.

The Peace region produces most of B.C.’s canola and grain crops. In late summer, farm vehicles crawl golden fields during and after harvest.

Armstrong is one of those farmers. He bought the property just outside of Dawson Creek in 1980 and moved up from the Fraser Valley in 1985 to begin building a hay farming operation from scratch. These days, he sells hay to customers from Alaska to Vancouver Island.

But farming isn’t the only big business in the area. Sprawling summer fields dotted with hay bales and buttressed by grain silos are also criss-crossed by pipelines and studded with well pads serving the oil and gas industry. Tanker trucks regularly traverse the highways that snake past sprawling gas plants with flame-tipped flares and lights that conjure the impression of a city skyline.

The Peace region is home to all of B.C.’s 4,700 active well sites. To receive and process waste products from the industry, the region also hosts 63 active disposal stations permitted by the BC Energy Regulator. Secure operates nine disposal stations in the Peace and another nine facilities permitted by the regulator.

The oil and gas industry and a love for rural life are what brought Delamont to the Peace. Her husband works in the industry and they live on a seven-acre property. She works as a chef at a local seniors’ home and spends much of her free time with her horses.

For many residents of the Peace, rural life and the oil and gas industry coexist quite well.

Oil and gas infrastructure studs the landscape around Dawson Creek, often sitting within productive farmland.

“It’s just part of living up here,” Delamont says. “Oil and gas is lots of times in your backyard.”

Well drilling can be a noisy business for nearby neighbours, with large vehicles coming and going, creating noise and dust. But once the drilling work is done, “it becomes just a quiet, small square, basically,” Delamont explains.

When issues do arise, she and Armstrong have both found the companies operating nearby wells are usually responsive to complaints.

“They’ve had a few flub-ups, but they deal with it right away,” Armstrong says. “They come and apologize and ask if there’s anything they can do and it usually doesn’t happen again.”

At first, the waste disposal facility operated by Secure seemed like just another aspect of the industry they were used to living with.

“It just didn’t seem like it was going to be that big of a problem,” Delamont says.

A love of rural life is part of what brought Delamont to the Peace region in 2010. She spends a lot of her free time with her horses. Photo: Supplied by Brenda Delamont

Authorities have made ‘feeble attempts’ to address residents’ concerns

When Secure’s waste disposal facility first opened its gate, it was a bright and noisy neighbour but not an especially bothersome one. Vacuum trucks would drive up — sometimes so many they would form a line stretching back to the road — pump out their loads of wastewater and leave. Dust, vehicle noise and the facility’s round-the-clock floodlights were a manageable annoyance.

In 2011, the BC Energy Regulator granted Secure a “major facility expansion,” allowing the company to increase the number of tanks used to store waste products and bring in new equipment to treat waste. The expansion also allowed the facility to build a flare stack, a vertical pipe system used to burn off waste gas. According to the BC Energy Regulator, residents within about three kilometres of the facility were notified of the change.

The BC Energy Regulator granted Secure a “major facility expansion” in 2011, allowing the company to increase the number of tanks to store waste products and build a flare stack.

Odours became an issue a couple of years after the waste disposal facility started operating, according to Delamont and Armstrong. They say calls to Secure haven’t always yielded much of a response.

“Occasionally, Secure will say they are having something going on and that they will remedy it,” Delamont says. “It’ll get better for periods of time, but then the smells come back.” Secure did not directly respond to a question about its response to residents’ concerns.

When calls to the company failed to fix the issue, residents have called the BC Energy Regulator or the Ministry of Environment. But often, odours waft away or the wind direction changes, meaning incidents are over by the time inspectors arrive, residents say.

“We have had a couple of times where [a BC Energy Regulator employee] came out and went, ‘Yep, we can smell it.’ But then we still haven’t heard, what was that that we smelled?” Delamont says.

Armstrong’s calls to the regulators ebb and flow. Sometimes, he calls again and again. Others, the lacklustre or non-existent response gets him so frustrated he stops reporting the incidents at all.

Both he and Delamont have been left feeling that neither the ministry nor the regulator have much ability or interest in enforcing the rules they oversee.

“I get the impression of feeble attempts,” Armstrong says. 

Secure’s facility is surrounded by farm fields where canola, hay, oats, peas and other crops are grown.

In an email, the ministry reported receiving a total of 36 complaints about Secure’s waste disposal facility since 2017. The BC Energy Regulator says it “has taken sustained and escalating action to manage odour complaints associated with” the facility, including increasing the number of inspections and, in 2024, ordering Secure to identify and mitigate odours associated with its operations. According to the regulator, the company found multiple potential odour sources at its site, including from solid waste, processing and ventilation equipment, and trucks offloading waste products. In an emailed response to The Narwhal, the regulator said Secure’s report in response to the order confirmed “existing engineered and administrative controls are in place” and that the company had taken additional steps to mitigate odours. 

“There’s waste in every industry but how we deal with it is important,” Delamont says. “We like to say that Canadian energy is the cleanest and we have lots of regulations, but then you have a waste facility that seems to not be as regulated as you would expect.”

‘If you’re not being penalized for not following regulations, are you going to change?’

In June 2024, there was an explosion at the Secure facility in which two workers were injured. That October, the company was fined more than $42,000 by WorkSafe BC for failing to take precautions before proceeding with welding work near flammable chemicals. 

In December 2024, the Ministry of Environment and the BC Energy Regulator conducted a joint inspection of Secure’s waste disposal facility to determine whether Secure was complying with its permits and B.C.’s Hazardous Waste Regulation. Several Secure employees, including the facility manager, were on site.

The regulator seemed satisfied, issuing an inspection report in March 2025 that found Secure was complying with the relevant parts of the Energy Activities Act, which governs oil and gas and other energy-related industries.

In March 2025, the Ministry of Environment issued a warning letter after inspecting Secure’s facility, outlining several compliance failures and incomplete paperwork.

The Environment Ministry on the other hand, was not as content. The same inspection led it to write a warning letter to the company outlining several compliance failures and incomplete paperwork. 

“Secure is not taking reasonable measures to identify all hazards associated with the hazardous waste” before proceeding with disposal, the Environment Ministry’s letter stated. 

The letter also noted the facility did not have an approved spill containment system or contingency plan and it was unclear if the plan for how to safely close the facility had been approved.

The facility’s groundwater monitoring program “fails to detect potential impacts to groundwater,” according to the letter, which notes issues dating back to 2011. Despite recommendations from the ministry, “Secure has not proposed an alternative program that determines if the groundwater has been affected by leakage or leachate,” putting it out of compliance with the Hazardous Waste Regulation. Since 2020, the facility’s annual reports have stated groundwater monitoring was not done because the wells it used to collect samples were dry, according to the ministry.

Documents show on two occasions, the Secure facility accepted tens of thousands of litres more toxic waste than its licence allowed — more than 50 times the 500-litre maximum. Secure did not respond to a question about these occurrences.

Another item on the warning letter raised questions about whether the company was complying with rules regarding emissions. Secure had decommissioned two pieces of equipment it was permitted to use to treat waste and installed two new boilers not authorized under its permit. The letter says ministry staff could not determine whether the new equipment complied with emissions regulations and directed the company to check and confirm.

The ministry did not issue a fine or other penalty for the equipment lacking permits. 

One year later, it’s unclear what steps the company has taken to bring its facility into compliance with provincial laws and regulations and clear up the murky paperwork. The company did not respond to questions about its response to the warning letter.

“Secure was instructed to verify their permit aligns with Hazardous Waste Regulation emission specifications,” the Environment Ministry said in a statement to The Narwhal. Because of last year’s findings, the facility “will be prioritized for reinspection in the next fiscal year.”

Armstrong can’t understand why provincial authorities have not taken more action to ensure a facility handling toxic waste is complying with all requirements under the law.

“If you’re not being penalized for not following regulations, are you going to change?”

Politicians say there’s no evidence anything is wrong with Secure’s operations

Disappointed and frustrated with the response from regulatory authorities and the company, Delamont, Armstrong and some of their neighbours have contacted their elected representatives about their concerns.

Local MLA Larry Neufeld is the BC Conservative Party’s critic for oil, gas and liquefied natural gas (LNG) and worked in the industry for decades. 

“I have met with the company on numerous occasions, I’ve met with the landowners on numerous occasions and I know that there are significant mitigation efforts and measures in place,” he says. “That being said, I’m not discounting the concerns from the landowners.”

Neufeld called the situation “very unfortunate,” adding that — like Armstrong and Delamont — he has found most companies working in the Peace region’s oil and gas sector are responsive to residents’ concerns.

In its email to The Narwhal, Secure included documents outlining actions “to mitigate odour concerns” at the facility, such as installing additional equipment, filters and deodorizing materials. On June 1, 2025, the company said it installed new infrastructure to capture vapour from part of its site and send it to a unit designed to neutralize odours. After receiving an odour complaint in October 2025, the company said it investigated and concluded the smell was related to a product being used to clean concrete at the site because that work was being done at the time the complaint was made. “Secure immediately acted and switched suppliers of the degreaser to a less odourous product,” the company wrote.

Despite finding multiple compliance failures, including that the facility accepted thousands of litres more hazardous waste than its permit allowed, the Environment Ministry did not issue any penalties or fines to Secure. The ministry did issue a warning letter directing the company to fix the issues identified.

Secure’s efforts to address residents’ concerns also included offering to install an air-quality monitor on Delamont’s property to measure methane, hydrogen sulfide, volatile organic compounds, wind direction and temperature, Neufeld noted — an offer her household declined.Armstrong did accept an air-quality monitor from the company several years ago. He periodically checks the data collected online and doesn’t think it’s been working properly.

“It was not picking up anything other than wind direction,” he told The Narwhal. “The sensors for picking up carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide were just flat lines, so I knew they weren’t working.”

Part of the problem, he says, is that it isn’t maintained. After Secure installed it about six years ago, he does not recall it being checked by the company until earlier this year.

“I have worked in the oil field myself and worn personal air monitors and they have to be calibrated and bump-checked every day,” Armstrong says. 

The company did not respond to questions about Armstrong’s concerns about the air quality monitor on his property, but did say that air quality testing conducted by a third party at the facility found concentrations of volatile organic compounds, benzene and hydrogen sulphide were “below applicable regulatory and health-based guidelines.”

Delamont and Armstrong want to know what is causing the odours they’ve been experiencing on their properties for years — and whether they could impact their health and the health of their animals.

Armstrong says he appreciates that Neufeld will listen, even if the conversations have yet to result in much action. He’s less appreciative of the way Energy Minister Adrian Dix responded to a letter he, Delamont and several of their neighbours sent late last year.Dix’s letter acknowledges residents’ concerns, which the minister said he discussed with Neufeld in early December 2025. It also outlines the BC Energy Regulator’s “comprehensive compliance approach” to the facility, which the letter says includes enhanced weekly inspections focused “specifically on odour-related concerns.”

“The province remains committed to ensuring that industrial activity does not compromise public health or rural livelihoods,” Dix wrote. “We will continue working in close collaboration with the BC Energy Regulator to maintain robust oversight and ensure ongoing regulatory compliance.”

“It was a political response, in my opinion — didn’t really say much,” Armstrong says.

The minister’s letter was copied to the regulator’s chief executive officer and commissioner Michelle Carr, with directions to respond to specific issues outlined in the letter from residents. 

“When you’re concerned about something and everybody else around you seems to be like, ‘Well, no, it’s not that big of a deal,’ that causes undue stress,” Delamont says.

‘I don’t know where I would go’

After years of calls and letters, Delamont and Armstrong want B.C. authorities to answer one big question about Secure’s waste disposal operation: What are we smelling?

“It’s frustrating not knowing what’s in those emissions,” Armstrong agrees. “If it gives you a wicked headache, it can’t be good for you, in my opinion.”

While neither has been told to evacuate as a result of Secure’s operations, both Delamont and Armstrong say their families have chosen to leave their homes on occasions where the smells have been especially intense. Both worry about the effect the odours — and whatever chemicals or chemical reactions cause them — may be having on their horses and other animals, which aren’t easy to move.

After receiving an initial response from Secure, The Narwhal followed up with detailed questions, including about what it is that the residents are smelling. Secure did not respond with this information.

“Secure remains committed to responsible operations and to working constructively with regulators and community members regarding the ongoing operation of the facility,” a representative from the company said via email. 

Delamont and Armstrong enjoy living in a rural area, where neighbours aren’t too near and there is room for their animals to thrive. But after years of dealing with “foul” chemical smells, they have both thought about moving from their current homes.

Armstrong has considered leaving the home and business he built from the ground up. “It’s crossed my mind, but the thought of starting over … I don’t know where I would go,” he says. “But you wonder what your health is doing too. I’m torn on that one, and it’s frustrating.”

Delamont and her husband have also considered leaving the property where they once planned to spend their retirement years. Their enjoyment of the wide-open spaces has been marred.

“We’ve thought recently about moving, trying to find somewhere away from Secure that we can relax a little bit more and not worry about our health and surroundings,” she says. “It’s supposed to be, ‘Oh, you live in the country, you get to breathe fresh air!’ Not always.” 

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Michael Geselbracht was out for a Saturday run in Nanaimo, B.C., when he came across soil piled up in a special area he knew was part of a native Garry oak ecosystem. 

That particular spot — across from a row of houses on View Street, parallel to a railway — had been an improbably dense and thriving meadow of a native plant called slimleaf onion. The patch was something of a terrestrial island, approximately 50 square metres surrounded by introduced grasses and weeds. Still, the onions persisted. They had given an especially impressive show of white and the rarer pink flowers in the last wet spring. 

But in October 2025, thousands of nickel-sized bulbs were turned up by heavy machines and strewn like pebbles across the soil’s surface when the meadow became a construction site. The transformation was part of an effort to develop a multi-use trail corridor along the railway route by a group called the Island Corridor Foundation — a trail that, unbeknownst even to many local conservationists, routed through the rare patch of slimleaf onions.

Slimleaf onion is a blue-listed species in B.C., designated of “special concern, vulnerable to extirpation or extinction.” But it’s also just one of more than 100 plants and animals on the province’s species-at-risk list in the critically endangered Garry oak ecosystem it belongs to.

The biodiverse and fire-adapted Garry oak ecosystem has been tended by Indigenous Peoples for thousands of years. But after 150 years of settlement, less than five per cent of the Garry oak ecosystem remains in a near-natural state. Some also hang on in remnants like the one on View Street, adulterated by invasive plants, mostly forgotten, hard to spot out of season, disconnected from other Garry oak plant communities and, more often than not, totally legal to destroy.

‘No Garry oak ecosystem that has been unimpacted’

Geselbracht spends most days outside teaching kids to love the natural world in the Nanaimo Forest School. He’s helped restore the local Cat Stream for salmon, and has spent more than 70 hours pulling invasive plants like trailing blackberry and English ivy from his neighbourhood.  

Like many Nanaimo residents, he was thrilled with the prospect of more trails — for cycling and for access to more community projects, like the food forest he helped clear from a weedy abandoned lot. It all seemed worth a bit of mud and machines. 

“It’s the connectivity, you know — the more that we have these connected trails, the more people start to use them,” Geselbracht says. 

But he hadn’t expected the route to go through the native plants; he knew something should be done. So he spread the word and texted pictures of the bulldozed area to others in Nanaimo. Some people salvaged bulbs — a pair of cupped hands can hold more than 50. A biologist living in the neighbourhood stopped by with specific suggestions to prevent further harm. The Nanaimo Area Land Trust sent a letter to the city, imploring them to mitigate the damage. “Even when there’s this tiny remnant, you just feel the loss of it, in terms of death by a thousand cuts,” Linda Brooymans, stewardship manager for the land trust, told The Narwhal.

Residents in Nanaimo, B.C., became concerned when they realized that rare — and tiny — slimleaf onion bulbs were dug up to build a new trail. Photos: Supplied by Hunter Jarratt

Since the City and the Island Corridor Foundation were alerted to the presence of the onion, workers have put in small culverts to direct water to the remaining bulbs — the plants rely on seasonal wetlands called vernal pools. They also replaced the soil, laid straw in an effort to protect the site and built a fence to protect the area from foot traffic. By January some of the bulbs were sprouting.

But native plant advocate Hunter Jarratt says the fence caused further disruption and, positioned at the back of the patch, won’t do anything to keep people from walking on the plants. Jarratt knew that spot for the rare slimleaf onion and was shocked to find it scraped to bedrock.

Only the spring will tell if the ground will hold water like it did before, how many of the plants will survive and whether the straw or site disturbance will result in a weed boom. No matter what, Jarratt says the slimleaf onion population will never again be what it was in numbers or genetic diversity.

“It was beautiful, and it’s all gone. And what was the reason, you know?”

At the heart of the ecosystem disappearing act is a simple conflict — the inviting flower-filled meadows occur where people want to live. Fire suppression, aggressive invasive plants and the impact of off-road vehicles adds to the threat. 

But there is little legal protection for Garry oak ecosystem remnants — and plants like slimleaf onion often fall through the cracks. 

No environmental assessment needed for trail construction

Advocates worry the slimleaf onion, though rare, is not meaningfully protected by any level of government.

Locally, the City of Nanaimo has bylaws protecting trees, like the Garry oaks themselves, and has included known ecosystems for plants like slimleaf onion in environmentally sensitive zoning, which triggers extra requirements like professional assessment and protection during development. Some municipal ecosystems are protected from development by park areas like Nanaimo’s Lotus Pinnatus Park or Victoria’s Beacon Hill Park. 

Provincial legislation includes mandates for threatened plant species — but only applies within specified areas, like designated ecological reserves or in public forests (Crown land). The often-narrow parameters for designating protection can also lag behind — for example, the Forest and Range Practices Act hasn’t updated its list of protected plants since 2006. In any case, none of the existing provincial rules would apply to the View Street slimleaf onion. 

Neither is slimleaf onion on the list of plants recognized by the federal Species At Risk Act. The plant could potentially benefit tangentially from an ecosystem recovery plan created for five other Garry oak ecosystem plants, though that plan is only automatically enforceable on federal lands — that’s just four per cent of Canada and around one per cent of land in B.C. On private land in B.C.— such as the rail corridor — enforcement is voluntary. On public land, there is “piecemeal legislation” and “non-legal recommendations and guidance,” according to a 2022 audit. 

The federal government has the power under the Species At Risk Act to make emergency protection orders, but rarely does. 

When City of Nanaimo councillors unanimously approved the path extension in July of 2025, none of the laws protecting species at risk applied. And at just over 700 metres of gravel path, the Island Corridor Foundation project — on private land and not zoned as environmentally sensitive — didn’t require a permit or an environmental assessment. 

Charlotte Davis, Nanaimo’s Parks and Natural Areas deputy director, says the small area wasn’t zoned for protection because it wasn’t found during the last assessment — but she’s hopeful imaging advancements will make it easier to find small areas like these in the next one, as early as 2028.  

Davis also notes the project has increased access to safe trail for locals but that more engagement before construction “would have allowed us to be more aligned with the local naturalist community, with whom we share so many values, from the outset.” 

The plant advocates want to protect the slimleaf onion — and other rare plants — even when they grow outside legislated or bylawed protection areas, like the View Street meadow. 

“It wasn’t perfect, but there’s no Garry oak ecosystem that has been unimpacted. This is the best we have left,” Jarratt says.

“How do we control [the disturbance of native ecosystems] if we don’t even have them mapped, or we don’t even know where they are?” he asks. 

Slimleaf onion isn’t protected under the Species At Risk Act, leaving most habitat in B.C. subject to patchwork rules and largely voluntary protection. Photo: Supplied by Thomas Bevan

But B.C.’s Garry oak ecosystem hasn’t been comprehensively mapped since 1993. The last analysis, noting only five per cent of the ecosystem remaining, came from a 2006 study. 

With population growth and urban development, advocates say that measurement has changed in the last 20 years.

There are proposed projects in known Garry Ook ecosystem around Nanaimo; residential and industrial development in Cable Bay, nearly 200,000-square-foot data centre on East Wellington Road, housing in Linley Valley and a new subdivision in Harewood Plains — city council has asked provincial and federal governments for help protecting the latter. 

Nanaimo zoning bylaws require developers to take extra measures in noted sensitive areas but don’t prohibit new construction.

What is harder to measure are the unmapped survivors on private land — they can be legally built over, perhaps without anyone knowing they were there. “There’s just examples of this kind of stuff happening all the time, everywhere,” Jarratt says.

Vancouver Island railway project hopes to promote sustainability and recreation

The Nanaimo trail expansion is one small part of a larger vision for Vancouver Island’s rail corridor. 

The railway was originally built in the late 1800s by British Columbia’s coal king, Robert Dunsmuir on 800,000 hectares of Coast Salish, Nuu-Chah-Nulth and Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw land. But by the early 2000s, the railway was faltering and the Island Corridor Foundation was formed to keep the corridor intact. 

“We are the little railway that could,” Island Corridor Foundation Chief Executive Officer Thomas Bevan says. A team of just four people, including himself, manage nearly 300 kilometres of rail corridor on Vancouver Island.

The Island Corridor Foundation is working to balance access and infrastructure needs, including trail development, with environmental considerations, Chief Executive Officer Thomas Bevan says. Photo: Supplied by Thomas Bevan

The foundation has a vision for sustainable transportation — passenger and freight rail service, alongside walking and cycling paths. Considering environmental and financial concerns as well as the interests of Indigenous groups and diverse local stakeholders — such as native plant advocates — is fraught. As Bevan puts it, nobody’s going to get everything they want. 

Still, environmental concerns figure strongly in the foundation’s mandate, and Bevan says they do what they can, like the $600,000 the group spent clearing invasive Scotch broom and blackberry along 125 kilometres of rail corridor, from Victoria to Qualicum Beach, B.C., in 2024 and 2025. Bevan says they are looking for funding to deal with the regrowth and other areas of the corridor.

Finding out too late

If there had been a voluntary environmental assessment of the trail expansion in Nanaimo, a qualified biologist would have done a survey, perhaps even checked the iNaturalist database where multiple slimleaf onion and other Garry oak plants were logged on View Street. They would have established a baseline for the existing population and potentially found other threatened species. They may have recommended shifting or narrowing the course of the path to avoid the most sensitive habitat. 

Instead, Bevan found out about the slimleaf onion after the fact, and says, as someone who follows Jarratt’s native plant advocacy, he felt awful. 

Going forward, Bevan says the Island Corridor Foundation will work on new policy for sensitive areas and has allocated $10,000 for restoration efforts — potentially weeding or reintroducing native plants. They are seeking a community partner to execute the work. 

Geselbracht, the forest school teacher, imagines a future where all the neighbours know more about the Garry oak ecosystem plants and remnants in their backyard, and help to bolster them — like he wishes he had done sooner.

For four years Geselbracht has been tending Garry oak seedlings with hopes to eventually reintroduce them in the View Street native plant patch, with his students. “If I’d had them doing some planting then maybe, on their walk to school, when they saw the excavator there, they would have said something.” 

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When the turbines began turning at Bear Mountain Wind Park in 2009, it became the first fully operational wind power project in B.C. The park’s 34 wind towers run along the crest of a rocky ridge just south of Dawson Creek, looking out over the flattening foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Together, the towers supply 102 megawatts of electricity to the provincial power grid, roughly enough to power 41,000 homes for a year.

The project marked a major milestone for the Peace Energy Cooperative, which spearheaded the development of the wind park. At that point, Don Pettit, the co-op’s executive director, was optimistic about the future of wind power and co-op energy projects in B.C.

“It was pretty good for our first go,” Pettit recalled. “It worked really well, so we assumed that we’d be able to do that in the future.”

But, despite Bear Mountain’s success and the expertise Peace Energy picked up while developing the project, things didn’t pan out that way. Big infrastructure projects are notoriously costly and there are restrictions on how much seed money co-ops — even investment co-ops like Peace Energy — can raise from their members. Peace Energy partnered with Aeolis Wind Power Corporation in the early stages of developing the project because the company had experience working with other co-ops. 

When it came time to build, the co-op raised capital from its members and struck a partnership with AltaGas, an energy company that mostly builds oil and gas infrastructure, to help cover construction costs. Then, Peace Energy faced a big choice: whether to maintain an ownership stake in the project and shoulder a share of the park’s maintenance and operating costs, or sell.

“We decided to go with a royalty agreement instead,” Pettit said, adding that the deal provides the co-op with a stable, modest income stream that helps cover its operating costs.

In Dawson Creek, Don Pettit and the team at Peace Energy Cooperative help their neighbours learn about and install solar power.

Since selling its stake in Bear Mountain, Peace Energy has focused mostly on community-scale solar power projects, including helping the District of Hudson’s Hope set up the largest municipal solar project in the province in 2018. Located just upriver from the Site C dam in the heart of B.C.’s oil and gas country, Hudson’s Hope now generates much of the power for its municipal buildings — anywhere from 50 to 100 per cent — from solar. The district estimates its solar power project saves $74,000 per year on electricity costs.

But Pettit still thinks of Bear Mountain Wind Park as a “precedent-setting example” of how renewable power can be developed in B.C.

“And that’s the last time it ever happened,” he told The Narwhal.

There aren’t many energy co-ops in Canada. A recent study by researchers at Royal Roads University found 82 active energy co-ops across the country. Together, they own or co-own 214 renewable energy projects. By contrast, there were 847 energy co-ops operating in Germany in 2023 while the Netherlands is home to 713 active energy co-ops.

Bear Mountain Wind Park produces enough electricity to power thousands of homes, but it’s also a public recreation site and a space where local ranchers can graze cattle. Preserving public access to the site was a priority during the development phase.

The gap between Canada and other countries is partly because not many provinces have policies that support small and localized energy generation. Instead, governments are used to working with big organizations that can invest big bucks into energy projects and infrastructure. It can be tough for small, community-oriented organizations to get a foothold in a system that favours larger, corporate entities. 

In a statement, B.C.’s Ministry of Energy and Climate Solutions said the province supports the growth of B.C.’s co-operative renewable energy sector and acknowledged energy co-op projects “can increase the energy resilience of neighbourhoods and communities.”

But Pettit believes the government underestimates the value energy co-ops bring to the table.

“The co-operative movement in energy in B.C., it’s ignored,” he said. “There’s no sense of, do we want local people to own local energy resources? I think the answer to that question, provincially, is no, we don’t. If they did, they would be encouraging co-operative involvement.”

What is an energy co-op? And why do we have so few of them?

Co-operative businesses — referred to as co-ops for short — are owned and run by a group of people who share common goals. Profits are shared among co-op members and decisions are made democratically, with each member getting one vote. While traditional businesses typically prioritize producing profits that can be paid out to shareholders, co-ops often have a social focus and seek to fill a need that isn’t being well served by the traditional market.

In Canada, co-ops are more common in some sectors. You may have shopped at a food co-op, lived in co-op housing or used a credit union. But energy co-ops are fairly rare.

“Where co-ops work well is where there’s a strong, intimate user relationship,” Martin Boucher, dean of research at NorQuest College and president of Community Energy Cooperative Canada, said.

Most people probably don’t feel as connected to their local power grid as they do to their local food supply, their home or the daycare their children attend. Electricity isn’t exactly a warm, fuzzy subject, even if it is essential. In B.C., the energy sector is highly centralized and pretty much everything electricity-related flows through BC Hydro, the public power utility created in the 1960s. 

BC Hydro is responsible for managing and maintaining most of B.C.’s power supply, from the massive hydro dams that generate electricity to the infrastructure that keeps the province humming.

“The logic of utilities, and rightly so, has been economies of scale,” Boucher said. BC Hydro and other Canadian power utilities have historically focused on building big electricity generation projects along with the infrastructure to deliver that power to customers, all while keeping electricity rates as low as possible. 

Don Pettit and other members of the Peace Energy Cooperative spent years working to make Bear Mountain Wind Park a reality.

B.C. is barrelling toward extensive electrification of its economy, including supplying power-hungry resource sector projects like mines and liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities. Doing so will require a significant increase in the province’s power supply, one BC Hydro has not yet mapped out how to supply, according to its most recent resource plan. Boucher believes co-ops could help fill the gap.

“The kind of world we’re entering into is a high energy world with data centres, AI, electric vehicles, this sort of thing,” he said. “My baseline philosophy is energy diversification requires all hands on deck to really move this forward.”

Centralized electricity generation and distribution systems have served many communities well for decades, Boucher said, but they can be a barrier to co-operatively owned energy projects, which are often smaller scale with different goals than traditional energy companies. 

“They’re very antithetical to that kind of business model,” he said.

Because the energy sector is so highly regulated, co-ops interested in energy projects are “completely at the mercy of policy,” Boucher added.

In Canada, it’s fairly easy to see where energy co-ops have been encouraged.

Provinces without a public power utility like BC Hydro tend to have more renewable energy co-ops. Ontario, for instance, is home to roughly 75 per cent of Canada’s renewable energy co-ops while Alberta, with its open access electricity market and a strong tradition of co-op businesses, also has a relatively high number. 

“From the perspective of the electricity system, we might as well consider our provinces 10 different countries,” Boucher said. 

“There’s more alignment between countries in Europe on electricity policy and sharing than there are between provinces in Canada.”

Grid alerts: what you need to know as electricity demand ramps up in Alberta

Despite their differences, most provinces provide pretty reliable access to affordable power so there has not been a lot of demand for alternative options, according to Julie MacArthur, an associate professor in Royal Roads University’s faculty of management whose work focuses on energy transitions and the political economy of energy projects.

“Energy systems in general are not super top of mind to most people in a developed country, until you have huge power outages or there’s some problem with it or it’s too expensive,” MacArthur said.

“I think there are a lot of activities co-ops could be contributing to that they’re not because they’re not recognized necessarily as legitimate actors in this space or there’s not a lot of policy attention on them,” she added. “But in every province, the need is going to be slightly different.”

With the right support, community solar could offer B.C. a bright future, co-op co-founder says

With climate change boosting the intensity and frequency of natural disasters, co-op energy models could become more appealing to more people. On Galiano Island, the Salish Sea Renewable Energy Co-op was born out of residents’ desire to take concrete action on climate change and reduce their dependence on fossil fuels. Since 2015, the co-op has helped set up more than 110 solar power installations across B.C.’s Gulf Islands.

“We got sick and tired of just demonstrating and writing letters, and we actually wanted to do something,” Tom Mommsen, a founding member of the co-op, told The Narwhal. 

“We give talks, we do initial assessments. We help people to go solar and then we hand it over to commercial installers and they do the rest.”

Over the past 10 years, the Salish Sea Renewable Energy Co-op has helped set up more than 110 solar power installations across B.C.’s Gulf Islands. Founding co-op member Tom Mommsen sees solar as a powerful tool to help decarbonize B.C.’s power supply and empower people to better understand their energy use. Photo: Risa Smith

Solar power is by far the most popular form of energy for co-ops in Canada, accounting for 91 per cent of the renewable energy projects they operate.

Mommsen, a retired academic who still works with the University of Victoria’s School of Environmental Studies, spends a lot of time researching the latest solar energy policies and technologies so the co-op can share the information with community members.

Most people, Mommsen said, do not know much about the electricity that powers their homes and, in more and more cases, cars.

“Nobody understands what a kilowatt hour is,” he told The Narwhal. “Once these people have solar and they look at the solar production … they know very well what a kilowatt hour is. The best education is just to have solar in your backyard or on your roof.”

Support for solar can spread quickly, in Mommsen’s experience.

“Someone starts with solar and then a couple of years later, there will be five or six … neighbours with solar because they talk.”

More than 90 per cent of co-operatively owned renewable energy projects in Canada involve solar power. Photo: Province of B.C. / Flickr

Research bears out the knock-on effects community energy initiatives can have, MacArthur said. People may find it easier to trust the experiences of their friends and neighbours than the pitches made to them by government bureaucrats or private companies.

“If they get the information about it from their neighbour or when they’re chatting with someone at school, there’s that feeling of, ‘Okay, I trust that this is not because the person has an interest in getting money from me or having me pay them,’ ” she said. 

“It makes a difference to energy system behaviours, a huge difference that is really undervalued and under-recognized when people are thinking about balancing massive systems.”

B.C. does offer rebates on solar panels and battery storage, but Mommsen wants to see the province do more to encourage community-owned energy projects, especially solar. In his opinion, provincial policymakers remain too focused on maintaining B.C.’s highly centralized electricity system when the future demands a distributed grid.

“The future of any grid under climate change has to be distributed,” Mommsen said. “What we need is a distributed system that is resilient under climate change and that helps the community. It empowers the communities and also it will help them understand energy.”

Despite the success of Bear Mountain Wind Farm, Peace Energy Cooperative executive director Don Pettit thinks B.C.’s energy policymakers have yet to fully realize the role co-ops could play in the energy sector.

Boucher agrees. He also sees the current economic moment as an opportunity for co-ops as politicians look to boost homegrown businesses that pay dividends in their communities.

“Done well, this is a very powerful local economic development strategy and boy oh boy, does the timing seem right for local economic development in this country,” he said. 

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.

Standing on the Athabasca Glacier in Jasper National Park, Alta., the wind picks up with an icy bite. 

It will be a lot warmer down there, our guide tells me, pointing to a moulin, a hole in the glacier formed by meltwater.

Trusting my rope, I, like the others, lean back and descend 35 metres down until my spiked feet land inside a sculpture of perfect blue ice. 

Every spring and fall since 2022, photographers Jim Elzinga and Roger Vernon, with mountain guide Dylan Cunningham, venture to the Columbia Icefield. Their mission is to capture the vast glacial expanse straddling the Alberta and British Columbia border before it’s gone.

“This is the beauty,” Elzinga says. “But this is what we’re potentially going to lose.”

Glaciers in Western Canada are melting faster than ever, and the last four years have been particularly devastating. From 2021 to 2024, glaciers receded twice as fast as in the last decade due to low snow, high temperatures and wildfires darkening glacial ice as ash and soot on the surface absorb heat, according to recent research published in Geophysical Research Letters. 

On our current trajectory, Environment and Climate Change Canada predicts glaciers in the Canadian Rockies are likely to all but vanish by 2100, according to a statement emailed to The Narwhal. The consequences are far-reaching, impacting everything from water security to infrastructure to ecosystems and contributing to sea level rise. 

But below the surface of the Athabasca Glacier, encapsulated in its water-sculpted walls, that’s easy to forget. The ethereal blue seems endless, engulfing our senses and filling our peripheral vision.

It’s inescapable — a feeling Elzinga and Vernon strive to replicate with their photography. 

Vernon made sure everyone touched the ice with their bare hands to experience the smooth texture. 

Capturing the beauty of the Columbia Icefield glaciers 

For three decades, Elzinga and Vernon were in the same social circles in the mountain community of Canmore, Alta. But it wasn’t until 2021, when Vernon got a call from Elzinga asking to collaborate on a glacier project, that the pair got to know each other. It was a natural pairing.

“When we came together there was such a common language,” Vernon says. 

Their goal too, was shared. In a world inundated with images, they want to take photos that grab people’s attention at a scale that’s difficult to ignore. 

“We wanted to have our images so big that if you stood back at this distance,” he says, holding his arm out wide, “it still smacked you in your face, commanded your presence.

That shared vision led to Meltdown — a photography project exhibited in large scale at galleries and museums capturing the beauty of the Columbia Icefield glaciers before they are gone. It’s part of a larger initiative by an educational non-profit called Guardians of the Ice which Elzinga cofounded. The group aims to raise awareness of the consequences of losing Western Canada’s glaciers by marrying art and science.

For Vernon, it’s a bit of a shift from his other life behind the camera on the big screen, where he has a long history as a cinematographer, including documentary films and Academy Award–winning movies. 

Elzinga, meanwhile, is an accomplished alpinist who has spent a lifetime guiding and exploring in the mountains at high altitudes. In 1986, he led an expedition when the first North American woman summitted Mount Everest.

While both Elzinga and Vernon have accomplished much in their careers, they brush it off when we talk. The current mission takes centre stage — they are living and breathing glaciers.

Vernon first became aware of the impact of glacier melt when volunteering with a Calgary-based non-profit focused on water security. His work there took him around the world, to Zambia, Ethiopia and Congo. When Elzinga approached him for Guardians of the Ice, Vernon saw an opportunity to have an impact on water security locally.

“Imagine 50 years from now when we don’t have our glaciers. … Those folks aren’t going to have the water,” Vernon says, pointing to downstream Alberta communities. “That’s our food production.”

Water from glaciers in the Columbia Icefield joins rivers, streams and eventually the Pacific, Arctic and Atlantic oceans. As glaciers retreat, declining meltwater supply may impact freshwater availability as early as 2050, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada.

Elzinga, who studied photography in university, dreamt of photographing mountains since the 1980s but had to wait for technology to catch up with his vision. Elzinga and Vernon use a high-resolution camera capable of aerial mapping and space quality imagery to capture the detail and scale of their photography.

The team uses a Phase One camera, a high-resolution camera that allows Elzinga and Vernon to capture the scope of the mountains and glaciers without sacrificing fine details.

Elzinga and Vernon use a technique called photo stacking which combines multiple images to increase the quality of their photos. The technique has been useful for capturing moulins, in particular.

The following photographs were taken by Elzinga and Vernon.

Photo: Jim Elzinga and Roger Vernon

Witnessing glaciers disappear

Before everyone ventures into the moulin, Elzinga and Vernon stand to the side of the opening, looking at their phones. They wait for Cunningham, the mountain guide who supports their work, to text photos to the pair so they can preview the spot and make sure the imagery is what they’re looking for.

Together, Elzinga and Vernon have the mountaineering experience required for the project, but they’re now in their 70s, so they enlisted Cunningham to focus on safety and technical requirements while they focus on the art. 

“We get wrapped up in the minutia of what’s in our eyes,” Elzinga says.

Today we’re also joined by alpine guide and long-time climbing partner of Elzinga’s, Ian Welsted, who volunteered his time to facilitate bringing a reporting team on the shoot. While Elzinga and Vernon take photos, Welsted explores the darker reaches of the moulin.

Behind the camera, Elzinga and Vernon can work together almost wordlessly, an important skill when conditions get rough, they say, like the cold winds and snow when I visit. 

While finding the exact image is a know-it-when-you-see-it scenario, the areas photographed are very intentional. 

A few days after the photoshoot, at Vernon’s home base in Canmore, Alta., he unfolds a map with mountain peaks marked one through 12, the starting point four years ago, when the duo was planning where to photograph. 

The mountains flanking the icefields are known as the “guardians of the ice,” he says, the origin of the non-profit’s name.“Now all that glacier is gone,” Vernon says, pointing to different spots on the map. He points to another area — “gone.” And another, gone.

 Features the photographers planned to capture had vanished or receded remarkably year over year, like the Columbia Glacier, which they estimate to have receded 100 metres from one photograph to the next.

This is the Columbia Glacier in 2024, photographed by Elzinga and Vernon.

This is the Columbia Glacier in 2025, photographed by Elzinga and Vernon

The art of changing people’s minds

While Cunningham has always felt a responsibility toward the environment, working with Elzinga has had a “profound” impact on his outlook, he says. 

When Cunningham gets cynical about climate change, Elzinga’s optimism has the power to pull him back.

“You can’t think that way,” Elzinga will tell him. “We can solve this, we’re making a difference, and we’re going to keep pushing.” 

Giving up isn’t an option for Elzinga.

“It’s really easy to look at this stuff and be overwhelmed by it,” he says. “My attitude is, well, at least you’ve got to try and do something.” 

The non-profit supplies Alberta Tomorrow, a free educational platform, with their materials from the icefields, and plans to expand to the university level as well as experiment with other mediums, like virtual reality. 

Elzinga hopes that awareness will then ripple through every aspect of people’s lives, including the ballot box. “It’s at government levels that you can get policy change,” he says. 

The climate crisis is like a virus, Elzinga says. Even if people are aware of it, they can’t really see it. And as the urgency increases rapidly, maybe art can help show people what’s at stake. 

Among the photographs displayed in the Columbia Icefield Glacier Discovery Centre, where Meltdown is exhibited across from the Athabasca Glacier from May to September until 2027, a wall titled “no action too small” encourages visitors to be mindful of their environmental impact through pledging to take small actions such as eating less meat or divesting from fossil fuel. 

Not everybody who sees the images will make choices for the planet, but some might, and for Vernon and Elzinga, that’s what counts. 

“Sometimes people say, ‘Well, what I do is not going to make a big difference,’ ” Elzinga says. His comeback is to flip the concept of a drop in the bucket on its head. 

“A lot of raindrops go into a rain barrel and then eventually that rain barrel is overflowing.”

As he sees it, if 75,000 people see the images at the gallery, not everybody will make a change — but the percentage of them that do, he says, will “go out and within their circle, they can make a difference.”

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.

The woods surrounding the Highwood Pass, a mountain valley southwest of Calgary, are quiet. The traffic snarls of fall, which brought day trippers flocking to see larch trees pop yellow against the green hills, are gone. The road through the pass is closed until the spring. 

Gone too is a temporary camp and barrier across a logging road, set up to protest in advance of clear-cut operations in this popular corner of Kananaskis Country along the rocky spine of southwestern Alberta. At least for now. 

A valley in Kananaskis Country in southwestern Alberta, on the eastern edge of the Rockies, is threatened by West Fraser Timber’s plans to log the area. Activists are concerned the permitted logging will change the hydrology of the Highwood River, which runs alongside Highway 40 and provides habitat for threatened bull trout.

At first blush, it’s odd for protesters opposed to logging to leave the area before the logging starts, but that wasn’t really the point of the camp set up by a group called Defenders of the Eastern Slopes. 

“Yes, we want to protect these valleys from the logging and protect the fish from the logging, but one of our goals is also to start the process of creating a culture of civil disobedience,” one of the organizers, Michael Sawyer, says. 

Defenders of the Eastern Slopes operated a camp in Kananaskis Country through the fall, and while the camp has since been shut down, protesters continue to oppose logging in the area.

It’s not something generally associated with Alberta and it’s not something Sawyer has always focused on. He’s spent decades fighting through more official/polite/formal channels: in courts, through letters, within environmental organizations and without. But in this time and place, he thinks a more direct approach is needed. 

Michael Sawyer, one of the Kananaskis organizers, says a more direct approach is needed to protesting environmental destruction in Alberta. He has fought for years through more official channels, but believes part of his work now is ”creating a culture of civil disobedience.”

“Yes, we want to protect these valleys from the logging and protect the fish from the logging, but one of our goals is also to start the process of creating a culture of civil disobedience.”

The forest in Kananaskis Country is a diverse ecosystem populated by many different plants and animals. It’s also a popular destination for wilderness lovers drawn to the Rockies and their majestic beauty.

“I would argue that, given the politics in this province, and I would even say nationally, we need more and more citizens who are prepared to stand up against undemocratic and illegal activities by the government.”

So while the camp is gone and the woods are still, the group behind regular gatherings on the outskirts of the cutblock are ready to put their bodies on the line at the first sign of activity.

“We’re keeping an eye on things,” Colin Smith, another member of Defenders of the Eastern Slopes, says. “We’ve got eyes and ears out there.”

The area in question and why it matters

The area in question is surrounded by protected land in the multi-use area known as Kananaskis Country — a mishmash of parkland, recreational spaces and industrial activity along the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains. 

It’s an area popular with residents of nearby Calgary, but has been set aside for logging since before Kananaskis was established. It’s also the headwaters for all of the creeks and rivers throughout southern Alberta and into the wider Prairies. 

Kananaskis Country is a protected area that includes parkland, recreational spaces and industrial activity. The area in question has been earmarked for logging since before the area was even created.

Tourists’ cars line these Rocky Mountain roads. Soon logging trucks will haul the trees away

In 2024, an earlier clear-cut plan covering 1,100 hectares, an area the size of over 2,000 football fields, was shelved after pushback and the sale of Spray Lake Sawmills to B.C.-based West Fraser Timber. Now, it’s been revived.

New permits have been issued by Fisheries and Oceans Canada for the construction of logging bridges across rivers and creeks in the valley. Those permits allow disruptions to habitat for endangered native trout species in the valley — a fact that frustrates the group.

In an emailed statement, West Fraser Timber said it understands “how important it is to protect bull trout and westslope cutthroat trout habitat in the Highwood” and that as part of its planning, the company will be “monitoring conditions before and after harvest to help inform responsible stewardship.”

The company said it paused Spray Lake’s earlier plans to “hear from people who live, work or recreate near our operations,” and added operations won’t start until its planning processes are complete. It did not say whether or not those operations would start this winter.

Logging bridges across the rivers and creeks of the Highwood Pass valley would threaten sensitive habitat for bull trout, a species native to the area.

But it’s not just logging the group is concerned about. The eastern slopes face multiple threats, from clear-cutting to the potential for new coal mines south of Kananaskis, all of which could impact the water that flows from these headwaters across the Prairies. 

Denuded hills don’t hold on to water, which exacerbates the risk of flooding during rainfall and leaves the area more parched during droughts. Pollution from reopened mines would rush off the hills and into irrigation channels and drinking water. 

The group of organizers is also concerned about the possibility of new coal mines opening south of Kananaskis, which, like the impacts from logging, could disrupt the water reserves in the area. The eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains are the headwaters for all of the creeks and rivers that run through southern Alberta and provide important water reservoirs in times of drought.

Sawyer, who lives in nearby Nanton, says his tap water comes from these hills.  

“We’re treating our foothills headwaters like they don’t matter from a water point of view, but they’re absolutely critical, and the government is just not paying attention to it,” Sawyer says.

Michael Sawyer, who lives in Nanton. Alta., is concerned about the impact logging and mining could have on the area.

West Fraser Timber said it will establish buffers of at least 30-metres around watercourses.The office of the Minister of Forestry and Parks did not respond to an interview request prior to publication.

We’re suing the RCMP to fight for press freedom

In November 2021, photojournalist Amber Bracken was arrested by the RCMP while on assignment for The Narwhal. So we launched a lawsuit to take a stand for press freedom. Now, we’re in the middle of our trial.

The eastern slopes: ‘vital’ to ecosystems, water and more

The Rocky Mountain headwaters have been the subject of increasing concern to Albertans. The United Conservative government is working to reopen coal mining to the south of the pass, at the same time that reservoirs and rivers across the province have seen consecutive years of depletion due to droughts. 

Mike Judd, another member of the Defenders of the Eastern Slopes, says the government and industry hold too much power, which allows them to enforce a narrative focused squarely on resource extraction.  

Mike Judd, one of the camp organizers, helped set up the logging blockade at Kananaskis this fall. He believes the Alberta government sees the vital resources of the Rockies’ eastern slopes as a ”warehouse of treasures that keep the Alberta economy rolling.“

“They have the propaganda machinery to keep a constant conservative message out there, which is the eastern slopes are a warehouse of treasures that keep the Alberta economy rolling,” he says. In his mind, that’s a narrow definition of wealth. 

“There’s not a thing in their message that’s about the eastern slopes being the vital water source for Alberta, about it being the vital place for so many different species of birds, fish and animals, and for being the vital place for so many people to have a recreational outlet.”

Finn Rosenegger, 15, one of the blockaders, climbs a wooden gate activists built along the logging road.

It’s another reason Judd and Sawyer believe civil disobedience is a necessary tool — to draw attention to their fight and, as Judd puts it, “rattle the chains” a little. 

Starting in October, the defenders hosted weekend events nearby, to introduce people to the issues and the idea of civil disobedience. The community made art that could be hung on the barrier across the logging road. 

Supporters came together in the fall to make art for the barrier along the logging road and to share resources and dialogue around civil disobedience.

Without any current logging or bridge building to oppose, there was no standoff or risk of arrest — yet. 

“It’s just giving people who have been interested in doing something like this a place to show up and meet other people,” Smith says.

“This hopefully can be a catalyst to future actions.”

Supporters gather in a tent at the logging camp. Organizers hope the movement can provide an opportunity for community members to connect with each other.

Colin Smith helped organize weekend workshops to introduce people to the cause. ”This hopefully can be a catalyst to future actions,” he said.

Group hopes to ‘bridge political polarization’ over shared concern for headwaters

The Defenders of the Eastern Slopes isn’t solely focused on the Highwood Pass. The group might plan blockades in other areas of the vast stretch of woods and mountains that skirt the border of B.C. and Alberta, according to Smith. 

“Water and land protection and stewardship can bridge political polarization — especially water,” Colin Smith says. “Most people can agree that we need clean water.”

He’s been contacted by the RCMP, who sent out a liaison officer and he’s heard the company doesn’t plan to start operations this winter, but there’s no confirmation as yet. 

The RCMP did not response to a request for comment by publication time.

Smith says the threats to the region are a unifying force. He said that, while at the camp this fall, he had conversations with hunters and a coal worker that involved both disagreement, and finding common ground.

A view of Kananaskis Country near Longview, Alta., in November.

“Water and land protection and stewardship can bridge political polarization — especially water,” he says. “Most people can agree that we need clean water.”

— With files from Amber Bracken

Updated on Dec. 19, 2025, at 10:39 a.m MT: This story has been corrected to identify larch trees properly. Lark trees, as previously written, is not a tree species.

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.

Erin Zimmerman, a 46-year-old mother, wife, artist, public servant and veteran, has called the small city of Moose Jaw, Sask., population 35,000, home for the last 25 years. She joined the Canadian Armed Forces in 2012 and since 2016 has been working as a financial clerk at the Moose Jaw military base, most recently in an office she now fears: Building 143. 

One morning in 2019, three years into her role, Zimmerman woke up with crossed eyes. At first she assumed she was having an odd migraine, but after seeing an eye doctor, it became clear the issue was brain-related, which Zimmerman said was terrifying. Since then, she’s seen neurosurgeons, ophthalmologists and other specialists. In early 2024, she was diagnosed with a rare form of early-onset Parkinson’s disease, a disorder of the brain and nervous system which worsens over time.

Erin Zimmerman researches environmental contamination at the Canadian Armed Forces base in Moose Jaw, Sask. Zimmerman, a Snowbird veteran who also worked as a civil servant, has early onset Parkinson’s disease and has been pushing for answers about environmental contaminants, suspecting they are causing a rash of negative health impacts for people working and living on base.

Zimmerman said her doctors explained her illness can be caused by a mix of genetic and environmental factors. They laid out the potential causes of a rare early-onset of the disease. One was severe head trauma, which Zimmerman never had. 

The other was exposure to toxic chemicals. For Zimmerman, the latter was “a red flag,” which led her to start investigating contamination and environmental hazards at her workplace.

“I learned that while I was serving, and even during my pregnancy, I’ve been working on, or next to, a contamination site,” Zimmerman said about going through government documents and collecting testimonies of others who had served. “I also heard that others in our building were experiencing serious illnesses.”

Zimmerman said her journey began as a personal health crisis but, since learning of her colleagues’ illnesses including autoimmune diseases, thyroid diseases, cancer and other undiagnosed health issues, has grown into a larger discussion about her workplace safety and her employer: the Department of National Defence. 

There are thousands of contaminated sites listed on the federal contaminated sites inventory, including military bases like CFB Moose Jaw, the home of the Snowbirds.

Contamination on federal sites is an issue across Canada. There are thousands of contaminated sites listed on the federal contaminated sites inventory, including military bases with busy offices, hangars and warehouses on top of unremediated contamination sites. CFB Moose Jaw is one of them. 

She told The Narwhal her research has exposed gaps in how contamination sites are communicated to those working and living in contaminated areas. She’s compiled a list of nearly 200 illnesses and dozens of obituaries of her colleagues. 

While it’s difficult to pinpoint one cause for the variety of health issues Zimmerman and colleagues report, there are steps experts take to determine environmental causes for illnesses. “You’re talking about wide environmental exposures and … you look for clustering of specific diseases,” said Christine Oliver, a professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto who specializes in occupational and environmental health. “[On] one of these military bases, even if they’re office workers, you can look to see if people with similar symptoms or similar diagnoses are performing similar jobs.” 

Zimmerman has compiled a list of nearly 200 illnesses and dozens of obituaries among her colleagues. She worries they became ill after being exposed to environmental contamination on the base. 

The Narwhal obtained internal studies of contamination at Moose Jaw released to employees this year by Defence Construction Canada, a Crown corporation. When asked to review the studies, Sébastien Sauvé, a professor of environmental chemistry at Université de Montréal, pointed to reasons for concern.

“Some of those concentrations are very high,” he explained. He said some of the dust samples’ PFAS (sometimes referred to as “forever chemicals”) values are higher than what he’s seen in contaminated soils right beside a PFAS chemical manufacturer, adding that “people working in some of those rooms would be exposed to PFAS from dusts.” In 2022, Suavé and a research team found these forever chemicals had spread from a contaminated military base in Bagotville, Que., to drinking water wells up to 10 kilometres away. 

“You sign on that dotted line, the expectation is you’re going to die for your country. Well, dying doesn’t mean I should get sick because of a chemical [the government] didn’t clean up properly.”

– Lynn Point, former employee at CFB Moose Jaw

Zimmerman is adamant something needs to be done on the base, including proactive disclosure by National Defence Canada about contaminants and their potential risks. 

“Not only was I unknowingly exposed, but many others may be at risk with no warning,” she said. “The diagnosis was life-changing, but it also feels like determination to find answers, not just for myself but others who may be affected.” Other employees of the base have begun publicly discussing illnesses they say are linked to the long-standing chemical contamination of the site.

The Department of National Defence is aware of concerns about contamination on military bases and says it does testing and is committed to minimizing risks to Canadians.

For its part, the military says its activities can have effects on soil and water, but “the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces are committed to the health and safety of personnel and surrounding communities,” as well as to “responsible environmental management.” Responding to questions from The Narwhal, a spokesperson wrote in an email the military “conducts regular monitoring programs at bases and wings to assess environmental conditions and identify potential concerns. Although routine testing had not indicated issues, following community concerns, we undertook extensive testing [in Moose Jaw] to ensure transparency and diligence in addressing concerns.”

But for active and former service members like Zimmerman, that’s little assurance when it seems to them that so many of their colleagues are getting sick.

PFAS exposure includes risks from infertility to cancer

Moose Jaw’s slogan is “Canada’s Most Notorious City,” stemming from its historical connections with Al Capone. The Canadian Armed Forces base nearby, 15 Wing, is a smattering of buildings including housing, offices, a gym, hospital and convenience store, alongside hangars and an airstrip surrounded by a patchwork of quintessential Saskatchewan cropland and homes. It’s the workplace for about 1,000 active military service members and also federal public servants. It’s also the home of the Snowbirds, Canada’s military aerobatics flight demonstration team, for which Zimmerman was an administrative clerk before moving to her current job. 

CFB Moose Jaw in Saskatchewan is home to a Royal Canadian Air Force base. Areas on the base are contaminated with PFAS (also known as forever chemicals), asbestos and other contaminants.

But 15 Wing is listed on the federal inventory of contaminated sites owned by the Canadian government. Sites on the base — aircraft hangars, former convenience stores and landfills — are polluted with several volatile organic compounds, petroleum hydrocarbons and PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) in the groundwater and soil. Asbestos has also been found in some places on base, according to a 2025 report about testing conducted on the base last year.

PFAS have been making headlines for the last several years for contaminating drinking water near military bases. They are found or suspected on more than 100 federal sites in Canada, in large part from firefighting foam that National Defence used to train military and civilian firefighters across Canada from the 1970s to the early 2010s. 

The United States Environmental Protection Agency lists numerous potential health risks of exposure to PFAS, including issues with fertility or in pregnancy, developmental effects in children, increased risk of prostate, kidney and testicular cancers and weakening of the body’s immune system, including reduced vaccine response. The Canadian government says PFAS can be transferred through the placenta during pregnancy and infants can be exposed through ingestion of human milk.

Ecosystems are affected, too. Studies have shown exposure to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances can cause reduced seed germination, stunted growth and reduced photosynthetic activity in plants. The chemicals can then build up in the organs of other creatures in the food chain. 

Contamination on the base stems from military use of solvents, fuels and firefighting foam.

Other chemicals on the long list of contaminants near the 15 Wing buildings are less widely known. There are BTEXs, a group of petroleum hydrocarbons consisting of benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene that can be found contaminating several sites on CFB Moose Jaw. They are used on military bases for many things, including as components of fuels; they can also be present from spills or leaks. 

They also have a long list of health impacts associated with inhaling them, accidentally ingesting them or making skin contact — including higher risks of respiratory and lung cancers, heart problems and heart failure, blood disorders and cancers, immune dysfunction and increased susceptibility to infections, according to a peer-reviewed study from the Journal of Hazardous Materials Advances. Another study from researchers at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences shows this group of BTEXs can play a role in neurological symptoms like Zimmerman’s headaches, nausea, and vision problems.

Another contaminant found at CFB Moose Jaw is a class of chemicals — present in coal, crude oil and gasoline — called PAHs, or polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. The Environmental Protection Agency says people can be exposed to mixtures of PAHs by breathing air contaminated with vehicle exhaust, or fumes from asphalt roads. The agency says that several individual PAHs and some specific mixtures of PAHs are considered to be cancer-causing. 

A bird takes flight from a chain-link fence around 15 Wing Moose Jaw.

The military has been engaging in activities that create contamination for decades, including the firefighting training with PFAS-containing foam. But it’s far from the only organization or industry that’s been contaminating land in Canada — it’s just the one with public records. Some experts say the main reason we know so much about the contaminants present on military sites is because the federal government keeps pretty good records about what land is being used for.

“A lot of this kind of disclosure and transparency relies on institutional memory. With the federal government, the documentation on those sites is probably much better than in other jurisdictions,” Cassie Barker, senior program manager for toxics at the advocacy organization Environmental Defence, said in an interview. “It’s not just on [military] lands that this occurs.” 

A Department of National Defence spokesperson responded to The Narwhal’s questions about contamination in an email. “We are aware that some employees working at 15 Wing Moose Jaw have expressed apprehensions about the health and safety of working within a building at Canadian Forces Base Moose Jaw.”

Dealing with environmental contamination on the CFB Moose Jaw base is the responsibility of the federal government and the municipality and the province have little involvement.

The email said the department “has no concerns about the safety of this particular building at this particular time” but has still started a “transparent and evidence-based analysis” including air quality monitoring and an ongoing survey of Building 143.

“Based on the contractor reports and feedback from multiple experts, there is no evidence to suggest that 15 Wing buildings are unsafe or unfit for occupancy,” the spokesperson added.

Five women who worked together at CFB Moose Jaw have had hysterectomies: testimony

In December 2024, Zimmerman and two other employees of the Moose Jaw base went to Ottawa to speak about their experiences — including cancers, infertility, neurological disorders and untimely deaths of colleagues — at a public hearing of the Standing Committee on National Defence. Current personnel and veterans from other bases also testified at the four meetings. 

Former NDP Member of Parliament and critic for National Defence Lindsay Mathyssen initiated the hearing after the issue of contamination in her Ontario riding came to her attention. (Mathyssen lost her seat in the April election and the fate of the study is uncertain.)

“Thirty-one years ago, I was a young, married woman full of excitement and hope for my future. My husband was an aircraft engine technician,” Shaunna Plourde, Zimmerman’s colleague, told the committee. 

Plourde explained she was expecting her first baby when the family moved into quarters on the base. She started working as a clerk at the base convenience store, CANEX.

People paint a fence around housing at 15 Wing Moose Jaw. Service members and their families who have lived on the base struggle with various health issues, from cancer to neurological disorders.

“I felt incredibly proud of the life we were building, one centred on service, community and the Canadian dream,” Plourde testified. “I never imagined this dream would turn into a nightmare from which I cannot wake.”

Plourde told the committee she soon began experiencing medical issues and, after seven years on base, was diagnosed with a neurological disorder. She said her children also struggle with health conditions including chronic lung issues. 

“I have lived and worked in buildings, sent my children to daycares and schools and used facilities that I now know are directly on contamination sites or within areas where contamination sites exist. Despite this, we were never told. … No one told us about the risks we were exposed to daily,” Plourde testified.

Plourde’s own condition has progressively worsened. In 2017, she had an emergency hysterectomy. 

“Since this time, four other women I work with have all needed to have this procedure. Many of us were employed in the same building — Building 143,” Plourde said. “A simple, yet alarming, question started being discussed in the building I work in: ‘Do you think our building is safe?’ ” 

As they began piecing together the puzzle, she said, the employees realized there had been dozens of deaths in short succession of people that had worked in seven buildings listed on the federal public inventory of contaminated sites. 

Active and former military members have started to question whether they have been adequately protected from contamination, after dedicating their lives to service. Gord King worked at 15 Wing Moose Jaw Canadian Armed Forces base for 22 years and wonders if environmental contamination could have contributed to his stage two prostate cancer.

The chief warrant officer, in charge of morale, welfare and quality of life of personnel at 15 Wing’s Canadian Armed Forces Flying Training School, acknowledged their concerns in an email to employees: “We acknowledge that concerns regarding Building 143 have been ongoing for some time, and we understand that this is a sensitive topic that evokes mixed emotions and concerns for many. The [Wing Commander] is fully aware of this, and is committed to addressing these matters with care and attention.” 

The Union of National Defence Employees told The Narwhal in an email that it is the “employer’s responsibility to provide a safe workplace,” saying that “Building 143 is not listed as a contaminated site. Further, the employer confirmed that there is no record of unsafe levels of PFAS in the building.”

Meanwhile employees working in the building have struggled to get recognition from their leadership. 

“Those of us who have sought answers have faced skepticism, criticism and, now, retribution, but we persist, for those we have lost, for those who are suffering and for those who may yet be affected,” Plourde told the committee, pointing to what she sees as attempts at silencing concerns and consequences for those speaking out anyway, including social alienation.

Had she known about the contamination, Plourde told The Narwhal, “I most likely never would have lived out there. I never would have worked out there. I probably would have stayed away from it as far as I possibly could.”

Some employees say they would never have taken the job at CFB Moose Jaw had they been better informed about contamination issues on the base.

Since the three colleagues took to Ottawa, dozens of others have spoken about their own experiences, though some say they are fearful of retribution at work and in their community. 

A spokesperson from National Defence told The Narwhal the “management of contaminated sites generally does not involve communication with employees or the local community until qualified environmental experts identify potential exposure risks.”

But for employees worried about their health, the lack of communication is only the start of their concerns.

‘There’s still people sitting in chairs with toxic waste under their seat and they don’t know about it’

For 12 years, Lynn Point worked on the Moose Jaw base in Building 143, organizing logistics for uniforms and other gear. Now, she is undergoing treatment, including chemotherapy, for a rare form of breast cancer on her chest wall that has spread into her lymph nodes. Point told The Narwhal that two of her colleagues and her former supervisor have all died of breast cancer. “They worked hard … and they didn’t get to retire.”

Point’s husband still works at 15 Wing, which concerns her: “I’m not happy with the fact that he’s still out there. I’d like him to relocate, but it’s not that simple. We need our jobs.”

“I love the job, love the people, but our government failed us,” Point told The Narwhal. “To wear a uniform doesn’t mean that they should be able to abuse you that way. Because you sign on that dotted line, the expectation is you’re going to die for your country. Well, dying doesn’t mean I should get sick because of a chemical that you didn’t clean up properly.”

Lynn Point, a 20-year veteran and a 12-year civilian employee of CFB Moose Jaw, believes her cancer is related to environmental contamination at the base. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2025, with a rare form that manifests on the chest wall rather than in breast tissue. She joined a meeting — current and former civil employees as well as veterans from the base — about the contamination at 15 Wing.

Another former employee who got cancer worked for a contractor on CFB Moose Jaw in a three-person department. “It changes your life,” he told The Narwhal about his cancer diagnosis and current recovery including surgery, 33 trips to Regina for radiation and two years of hormone therapy treatment. 

The employee, whose identity The Narwhal agreed to keep confidential, said he and both of his colleagues all got prostate cancer within six months of one another.

“There’s still people sitting in chairs with toxic waste under their seat and they don’t know about it,” said the employee, who served nearly 28 years in active duty, and 14 more in an office position on the Moose Jaw Base. “I just would like to make sure that they’ve done something so nobody else gets sick.”

Since three CFB Moose Jaw colleagues took to Ottawa to share their stories about illness, dozens of others have spoken about their own experiences, though some say they are fearful of retribution at work and in their community. 

This employee said he was never compensated for his illness, despite his formal requests: “Workplace compensation needed to hear from [my] employer, so they contacted the base. They never got a response from the base,” he said. “So my file was terminated.” 

The Department of National Defence did not answer The Narwhal’s specific questions about workplace compensation at CFB Moose Jaw.

Neighbours to Canadian Armed Forces contamination worry whether it seeped into drinking water

Cities and even provinces do not have much jurisdiction over what occurs on bases. Typically, though air, water and soil contamination falls under the jurisdiction of a province, military sites are different. It is the responsibility of the federal Department of National Defence to monitor and clean up contamination on its sites.

In Moose Jaw, the base is only about 15 kilometres from the city and is one of its major employers, with 15 Wing’s military aviation listed as one of the city’s “target industries,” on its website. When The Narwhal contacted the City of Moose Jaw and Mayor James Murdock, the city responded that since questions about contamination on the base and employees falling ill “pertains to an area outside the boundaries of the City of Moose Jaw,” it was unable to provide a comment. The mayor’s office also declined to respond to The Narwhal’s questions regarding the concerns of citizens living near the base. 

Moose Jaw is a community of 35,000 people in southern Saskatchewan. The military base is one of the major employers in the region.

“What is in the workplaces tends to get out,” Oliver, the doctor who specializes in occupational and environmental health, said. “It is workers that are primarily concerned but it won’t be very long, I think, before people who don’t work there are concerned about their exposures.”

Health Canada says some of these contaminants that are dangerous to public health can travel long distances through soil, water and air: “PFAS can be found in freshwater and drinking water in areas that are far away from where they entered the environment,” the department says on its website.

It’s impossible to quantify if or how much contamination has seeped off the base without publicly available studies, but some nearby farmers and residents are beginning to ask questions about what they might be exposed to, like Chey Craik, who lives just over three kilometres away.

A farmer’s field butts up against CFB Moose Jaw. “I wouldn’t think a chain link fence would stop contaminants from moving around,” said Chey Craik, who lives on a farm just over three kilometres away and whose family deals with health issues.

“I have obvious neurological problems. My parents both live here on the farm too [in] the house I grew up in,” Craik said. He was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Both his parents suffer neurological issues as well and have struggled to find diagnosis or cause for their symptoms.

Craik learned about contamination issues on base from employees. “It just puts more questions into our minds, like, ‘Is that a potential factor?’… I wouldn’t think a chain link fence would stop contaminants from moving around.”

When asked by The Narwhal about the scope of the problem at the base and the health issues and concerns of citizens nearby, the Saskatchewan Health Authority said any contamination at CFB Moose Jaw is the responsibility of National Defence to identify and address. The provincial Ministry of Environment declined to comment.

Raising awareness of contamination as a life’s mission

Back at Zimmerman’s family home, she has dedicated her life to helping veterans and other military civil servants who say they have been impacted by contamination on base. She paints portraits of veterans dying of terminal illnesses and collects their testimonies. She has been helping colleagues around the country file claims to get justice, accountability and hopefully, compensation for their illnesses. She has gained a reputation in Moose Jaw for refusing to drop this contamination issue. 

“When I joined [the military], I took an oath that I would risk my life for what Canada stood for,” she told The Narwhal. “I’m not going to stop until I make a change.”

Erin Zimmerman at home with an in-progress painting of her friend and mentor, Della Bennett. The women worked together at the Moose Jaw Canadian Armed Forces base, but Bennett died of cancer in 2021. Zimmerman has dedicated the rest of her years to raising awareness and pushing for solutions related to contamination on the military base she worked at.

She stressed that she does the work because she loves her neighbours: “Moose Jaw is an incredible community,” Zimmerman said. “The sense of connection and support is strong. It’s a place where people take care of each other, and that’s what makes it super special.”

Earlier this year, Zimmerman went on disability leave from her job without specific compensation for her Parkinson’s symptoms or official acknowledgment of the harms she’s suffered. Meanwhile, she said, she is acutely aware of her doctor’s prognosis that she may only have a decade left to spread the word about this issue.

Updated on Oct. 7, 2025, at 3:25 p.m MT: This story has been updated to remove some photos of the armoury in Moose Jaw, which is not the subject of the contamination concerns outlined in this story.

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Editor’s note: Before this photo essay was published, Claire Cardinal passed away on Aug. 11, 2024, as a result of her illness. Her husband still wants her story told.

Residents of Fort Chipewyan, Alta., have been worried about their water for decades. 

They live downstream from “ponds” of toxic oilsands tailings on the Athabasca River, filled with a trillion litres of byproducts including arsenic, mercury and lead. 

There are also naphthenic acids, compounds present in most petroleum sources that are notably corrosive to refinery machinery. Some research has found them to be harmful to the reproductive cycle of certain frogs and fish. 

The federal government recently agreed to assess the compounds for toxicity and impacts on human health — an investigation requested by Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and Mikisew Cree First Nation in Fort Chipewyan.

Drinking water here became world news when Imperial Oil discovered a tailings leak at its Kearl oilsands mine in 2022 — and failed to tell downstream residents for nine months. Meanwhile, the largely Métis, Dene and Cree population continued to hunt, fish, harvest — and drink the water. 

Elders are not just worried about water quality, but quantity too. They say oilsands water use and upstream BC Hydro dams, including the Site C dam on the Peace River, have had a major impact on the amount of water available in the Peace-Athabasca Delta. They’ve noticed low water levels and interrupted flood cycles. Not only that: muskrat numbers have dwindled and it’s increasingly difficult to navigate by boat.

But it’s the chemicals in the water that worry them most.

Some people say the water in Fort Chipewyan — known locally as Fort Chip — smells “oily” and they’ve seen fish with lesions and deformities. In 2014, Alberta Health Services concluded “the total number of cancers and most types of cancers in the Fort Chipewyan area were the same as rates in the rest of Alberta.”

Nearly everyone in town knows multiple people fighting cancer, including rare cancers. But  despite requests, the federal government has not yet completed a conclusive study of the issue.

While officials monitor the water, and have repeatedly declared it safe, most people who can afford to still choose bottled water instead.

Meanwhile, people are raising families, working, living and dying with unanswered questions about their water. Here, they share their experiences in their own words. 

These conversations have been edited for length and clarity.

Claire Cardinal, 61, and Kenneth Whiteknife, 58, former oilsands workers

Kenneth and Claire were married for 15 years. They were both working at Suncor in 2019 when they started to get sick. Kenneth, who has never been a smoker but worked in the oilsands for 27 years, was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis and had a double lung transplant. It took Claire a year and a half to get a breast cancer diagnosis — by then it was stage four. In April, after 12 rounds of chemo, her doctors told her there were no more treatment options. 

Kenneth Whiteknife: I was on the trapline all my life with my dad in the summer and winter. Hunting in the fall time. Then, when my dad passed away, I just stayed in Chip and I worked in the plant — [the work was] fly in, fly out so I didn’t go out on the trap line.

The money was good there. I was getting paid every Thursday because I was in a union and everything was great. I didn’t think about my health or getting sick or anything like that. But after the last four years I found out I needed new lungs then I realized it: all this money and everything meant nothing. 

Everything’s changed now. Money is the root of all evil. Ever since the oil companies and all the money, it’s all changed that now. On the trap-line we never had no iPads or anything. We just lived our own nomadic life trapping every day.

Claire Cardinal: I never heard of cancer. When I was a kid I didn’t know what it was. So when one of my uncles got cancer, in the ’80s, I don’t know what kind of cancer he had, but he died of cancer. That’s how it started. You live in that fear because people are starting to get cancer and it’s kept going and going and going. Now it’s getting worse. People are dying of cancer every year. You hear about it right away — some are lucky some are not.

They have different doctors that come in and out. They gave me a bunch of pills. I have a big bag of pills that I didn’t even take because I knew that wasn’t [vertigo]. I knew deep inside. I knew there was something, I knew there was cancer, but I couldn’t prove it.

[To get treatment] you fly from here with aviation, then you’ve got to jump on the bus, then you go to your appointment and then they send you right back the next day. So you can’t rest, you’re just so tired. Especially when you’re a cancer patient and you’re going to chemo and you can’t stand the smell of anything. 

But I’m fighting for my life. And I’m content, I’m just gonna keep doing it. And hopefully I can beat this. I want to be on this earth for another at least 10 years — just to see my grandson when they graduate and the two younger ones. Yeah. Fighting, fighting, fighting.

I’m really angry with the water because I grew up in Fort Chip. I knew how beautiful our water was and how blue it was. Now I look at it — it’s all black and brown and you can’t even see the fish in the lake anymore. We used to see all that so it just hurts me. As soon as I hear somebody has cancer I just cry because I know what they have to go through.

Jennell Vermillion, 44, cook 

A cook at a Mikisew Cree First Nation work camp, Jennell moved back to Fort Chipewyan with her kids in 2021 after 14 years away. They live on the nearest Cree reserve, a community that deals with intermittent boil water advisories.

I have a three-year-old. I want to live till I’m old because of that. But I also want to make sure that her home in Fort Chip stays safe to live in.

The town’s really divided. Half the town says there’s nothing wrong with the water and the other half says there is. And I’m just kinda like, “we die, we die.” I don’t know what else to say about that.

There were three boiling water advisories before we noticed and we were drinking the water and we were perfectly fine. 

Maybe I should have been taking it seriously. Like, am I gonna get cancer in the long run? Are my kids gonna get cancer? Are we gonna get sick from something? Yeah, we might not be taken seriously now, but is it gonna come back and bite us? Me and my kids?

For one example, no one was told anything about [the tailings pond leak]. And we were just drinking the water right there. That is an example of me thinking the water was okay when it really wasn’t and that’s where my trust issues come into play.

Vast quantities of water are used to retrieve bitumen from the oilsands in northern Alberta. Here, a tailings pond flows with wastewater at an open pit mine operated by Suncor.

I almost feel like the only thing that defines Fort Chip is murdered and missing women and dirty water, like, that’s how I feel. But we have so much more good going on here. I think that we have great leadership here. I’m really proud of the three nations and how they’re working together and our high school and the amount of high school graduates they have here. 

All these educated people, and we still got dirty water.

Is it toxic? Is it not toxic? Is it safe to drink? Is it not safe to drink? And who do we believe at the end of the day? 

Jason Castor, 42, carpenter 

Jason came back to Fort Chipewyan as a young adult after spending time in foster homes. He worked in oil, then left that job to become a hunter, fisherman and carpenter in community housing. 

Me and my wife started working full time. And then we rarely saw each other. We were giving all our time to this money for this big vacation, that we didn’t realize that we were spending so much hours being gone from our family. 

I was 22 years old, making $100,000 salary a year, like I’m just a young guy.

That was my way of being a father — buying stuff for my children — and I realized after so long it’s not a life I wanted.

I wanted to teach my children how to become self-sustaining on your own land.

I had to relearn my heritage, again, that I had to get taught from my family members and cousins. And it was a real challenge. But I stuck with it. And I got good at it. And I learned to teach others.

When I go to the land, it’s like, everything stops, the noise. The hustle and bustle of working in Fort Chipewyan and in modern society, when you’re out there, everything just kind of fades away.

It all started in 1967, when Great Canadian Oil Sands, now Suncor Energy, launched the world’s first large-scale oilsands open-pit mine. Now 500 square kilometres of boreal forest, peatland and muskeg are being mined, an impact visible from space.

[After the tailings spill] I was doing a community hunt for ducks and geese. We were doing a good deed to try to feed the community, Elders and people who can’t hunt. And here I am harvesting all these birds that have been tainted and all these fish that have been tainted. And for me, it makes me feel like I just fed somebody something that you wouldn’t feed your dog. And it kind of makes me feel like I shouldn’t be hunting anymore. I don’t want to harvest fish and I don’t want to harvest ducks. And then that boils down to I’m gonna lose my heritage.

I feel like I just want to grow my children up here, and then maybe move to another place, which is kind of sad, because I made a decision to move back home. And now I’m leaving again. Not literally, but it’s in my mind. Like, do I want to be another statistic of that cancer? Do I want to pass away at 65 or 70 years old from a rare cancer?

I do love the community, I do love the vibrant connection to the land and the people, the brothership, the way we come together.

Lionel Lepine, 46, single father

Working on a project to record Elders’ stories, Lionel learned how much the land and water had changed in a short time. Since then, he has spoken in London, Paris, Amsterdam and Brussels advocating for clean water for the people in his community.

They assure us the water is clean, our tap water is clean, but a lot of our people won’t take chances with the tap water. So we have got to buy water. 

The Alberta Energy Regulator came into town, they brought up a case of water for themselves. So it’s kind of funny, like, somebody took a picture of him at the airport, you know, the guy’s walking with a big case of water, you know, somebody asked him, “What is that for?” They said, “To drink.” So obviously, they don’t even trust our water. But their job is to protect our water and to protect our lives.

The Alberta Energy Regulator should have strongly enforced these regulations years ago, to prevent this from happening. But it happened twice. And they tried to cover up and they tried to, you know, sweep it under the rug. But they can’t do that. Because like I said, it’s so noticeable. Our people have lived here for thousands of years, we know that something’s wrong.

But first and foremost, is a grief. Because there’s a lot of people in that graveyard that shouldn’t be there.

That’s where the anger comes. Because they know damn well that water is unsafe.

Jean L’Hommecourt, 61, Knowledge Keeper

Jean lives in Fort McKay but her cabin — inherited from her mother —  is only 13 kilometres from Imperial Oil’s Kearl oilsands mine — and she says she was never formally notified about the leak. At a community meeting with Imperial Oil representatives, she tried to express her concerns personally to a company representative but says he was walking out and didn’t seem to listen. 

Alberta Energy Regulator officials are not doing their jobs. They don’t have any answers, all they have is lies, lies and cover up lies, more lies. That’s all they’re about. The government is all lies. 

I remember the last time they blew me off and I’m like, they’re not going to blow me off this time.

I want to see them go to court. And I want to see them answer to all the stuff that happened. All those secrets that they kept from us and all that.

I don’t see real actions. [Industry is] still going full bore ahead with all their plans.

I live right beside the water. It’s good to look at, but then, really, when you go to try to consume it, is it doing harm to you?

Even when I go out [on the land] I have to think about water. I go out berry picking and I have to bring water, because of what happened over there at Imperial. 

I have faith in my ancestors from their perseverance from long ago, which is why we’re still here. I have to go out there and remind myself all the time to keep connected to them, like at my mom’s trapline. Her spirit is over there, where she roamed and walked and we did stuff together and travelled and hunted — those connections give me a feeling that my ancestors are with me, watching out and looking out for us. 

So I keep going. I keep returning to those places that keep me connected, to my ancestors, to my roots. From that I feel good to carry on. To protect those areas for my future great grandchildren. 

Roy Ladoucer, 70, Elder

Roy has hunted, fished and harvested medicines his entire life and says he’d rather be out on the land than to go anywhere else in the world.

[As a child] my job was to get in a three-pound pail. My granny had a five- or 20-pound pail, morning and evening. That’s every day. Didn’t matter if it was -30 C, -40 C below, you had to do that. I used to just go down a creek bed there and punch a hole in the ice. And when you looked at the ice it was crystal dark blue. No contaminants in that water, that’s how pure the water was.

I love the way of life.

When you go and connect with the Earth out there on the land, when you live there long enough, when you observe, when you live most of your entire being out in the land, Mother Earth is the sole teacher of all teachers, not technical equipment.

I’ve never seen the water level this low — where in God’s name are they going to be getting water from, moving on to the future? Even to a point now you can’t even go anywhere along the lakeshore here without having issues and navigational hazards.

Where’s all the [muskrats?] Why all the rats have disappeared? 

Now where’s the buffalo? The delta and the park are all drying up. 

The wild abundance of wildlife that used to be around here, it’s all disappearing now. The movement of mankind was pushed way way too fast in all places up in the north zone here. And that’s got to be controlled.

You can’t be doing this, it’s man-made self-destruction.

Our young people, they need to have [tradition] and we need to guide them along. Today’s technology, that’s fine. But they have to remember who they are, and where they are because the last resource is going to be the land itself, and the watershed and the fresh water and whatever is left of wildlife north of Fort McMurray.

I don’t look at it as a hope, it is there to happen, and it can be made to happen. That’s why I keep reminding people, I don’t care who it is, never give up. Never give up. 

Nothing is ever, ever, ever too late until after the fact.

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As soon as you arrive in the Alberta boomtown of Fort McMurray you can smell the oil — it’s like a sharp cousin to hot asphalt. 

You can see it too — evidence of its extraction is visible in the few tailings ponds along the highway north of town, where plumes of exhaust drift, ever expanding above refineries. 

This is the oilsands — the home of billions of barrels of tarry crude oil that lies under 142,000 square kilometres of northern Alberta, driving the local economy and bolstering provincial budgets. 

But it’s not until you’re in the air the scope of the oilsands becomes clear — a sprawling landscape teeming with enormous trucks outfitted with tires taller than two F-150 trucks stacked together. 

As the sun rose over the frozen earth last winter, The Narwhal flew to see the oilsands mines. On our way out of the city the pilot pointed to land cleared for a subdivision that hasn’t been built — a sign the booms of the past, when there were more workers than housing, might not come back. 

Soon the pink-hued snow gives way to a moonscape where boreal forest is being scraped away. 

A Suncor site with the emissions from both the Suncor Base plant and the Syncrude Mldred Lake plant near Fort McMurray, Alberta on Friday, March 24, 2023. Amber Bracken for The Narwhal

Even then, it’s hard to grasp what you see. 

Off to the east, the Suncor Base Plant spreads pipes and tubes like fingers across a vast industrial complex, crawling with an average of 6,000 workers each day.

To the northwest are Syncrude’s Mildred Lake facilities, a similar maze of pipelines and stacks, where bitumen is diluted and upgraded before being sent by pipeline to refineries like those in Edmonton, some 500 kilometres away. 

The scale is difficult to comprehend. Reference points help — those enormous dump trucks are specks on the landscape, the buildings and trailers even smaller. It helps snap the mind into focus.

But that view encompasses only two of the eight oilsands mines currently in operation. 

People had known about the oilsands for centuries before anyone started to think about ways to dig them up. In the 1950s, a plan emerged to detonate a nuclear bomb below the crude oil deposits.

That plan fizzled and in 1967 Great Canadian Oil Sands, now Suncor Energy, launched the world’s first large-scale oilsands open-pit mine. 

The goal has remained the same in the decades since: extract the oily sand from below the surface. It’s mixed with water and often chemicals and cooked in separators to release the valuable oil. The resulting mix of sand, silt, clay, water, residual hydrocarbons and chemicals are dumped in clay-lined pits to settle. 

There are lakes of mine tailings in various states — from young pits of muddy bitumen- and-chemical-soaked water, to mature tailings ripe with the glossy sheen of oil, to pits back-filled with sand for reclamation.

If you were to take all of the tailings ponds from all of the oilsands mines, they would cover an area twice the size of Vancouver, 300 square kilometres.

They’re not really ponds — these industry-made reservoirs store nearly 1.4 trillion litres of byproducts from the mining of oilsands, including arsenic, naphthenic acids, mercury, lead and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.

While there has never been a comprehensive federal study, many people believe these chemicals are linked to higher rates of rare cancers in nearby Fort Chipewyan (the Alberta government’s data shows “higher than expected” rates of bile duct cancer in the region). 

The tailings ponds are ever growing. A recent analysis from the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society found Suncor’s Fort Hills oilsands mine expansion will add 60 square kilometres of new tailings ponds over the project’s lifetime — an area large enough to cover the island of Manhattan.

The analysis also estimated the mine will result in 732 million cubic metres — 300,000 Olympic swimming pools — of new tailings fluid.

This is just a fraction of oilsands activity. Approximately 80 per cent of Alberta’s oilsands reserves are so deeply buried it can only be extracted through the much smaller footprint of what’s known as in-situ extraction, most often by pumping hot steam deep into the oil deposit in a technology known as steam assisted gravity drainage. The infusion of steam melts the oil, allowing it to be drawn up to the surface.  

But it’s the open-pit mines where the trees, muskeg and layers of earth are methodically removed — so deeply Niagara Falls could be tucked neatly below the surface. 

The soil structure here has been forming for millions of years. It’s so ancient an oilsands worker accidentally dug up a 112-million-year-old dinosaur, Alberta’s oldest, at Suncor’s Millennium mine in 2011. Those layers are moved truckload by truckload, to get at the tar-like oil trapped in dirt.

Whether from open-pit mines or in-situ extraction, the resulting tarry substance is too viscous and is not yet marketable. Upgrading can involve making the bitumen less thick (converting it to what’s known as “dilbit”) so it can be transported by pipeline to refineries across North America.

Refineries essentially distill the oil into higher value petroleum products — like gasoline, diesel, lubricating oil and jet fuel. 

The process brings tremendous wealth to the companies who produce it — depending on the price of a barrel — and the operations fatten Alberta’s budget in eye-watering ways. 

For the fiscal year 2022-2023, provincial revenues from the oilsands — including recovery from in-situ extraction that does not involve open pit mines — amounted to almost $17 billion, the largest slice of Alberta’s financial pie for the year.

No matter your perspective, it’s hard to take it all in. 

The numbers here are as expansive as the landscape.

$35 billion in profits for six companies in 2022.

$17 billion in government royalties in 2022, making it the largest source of revenue for the year.

3.3 million barrels produced per day.

81 million metric tonnes of carbon pollution in 2022 — the equivalent of burning 90 billion pounds of coal.

1,097 square kilometres mined, 0.1 per cent certified reclaimed.

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All at once, RCMP officers came out of their hiding spots to fill the courtyard surrounding a tiny house at a site known as Coyote Camp in Wet’suwet’en territory. Police wore both regular blue uniforms and a militarized green version, the latter laden with assault rifles and tactical equipment. The scene has already become known across Canada — police dogs barking and whining as officers used an axe and a chainsaw to enter the small structure to arrest seven unarmed and peaceful individuals. 

Soon they would take my cameras from me. After that, my rights.

Some of the first advice I was given as a baby journalist was: “Don’t get arrested. You can’t make any pictures from the back of a police car.” This maxim has served me well most of my career, which has taken me into zones of conflict and protest across North America.

But covering the Wet’suwet’en pipeline opposition last month, I realized its limit: I could not both do my job as a journalist and avoid arrest. On Nov. 19, the RCMP made that impossible for me.

Being a photojournalist stripped of my gear in a moment of profound national importance heightened my senses. 

As I’m escorted away from the camp along the main access road, I began to register all the photos I couldn’t make: the mountain forest road lined with Coastal GasLink trucks, heavy machinery and workers. As we drive by, a worker waves to the RCMP officers. 

A Gitxsan woman holds her cedar headpiece in her hands, a discordant echo of the two tighter circles of the steel handcuffs on her wrists. In the back of a police van, strained faces turned to joy at the news that arrestees Jocey Alec, daughter of Chief Woos, and Teka’tsihasere (Corey Jocko), Haudenosaunee supporter of the Coastal GasLink opposition, were newly engaged, the big question being popped on the eve of RCMP enforcement. 

At the Houston detachment where we are processed, Gidimt’en spokesperson Sleydo’ (Molly Wickham) places her hand on a wall of thick glass brick, reaching towards a distorted view of her mother’s hand on the other side. Eyes peer through food slots and cheeks press against the floor, straining to see and hear past heavy metal doors. 

These are all images I couldn’t capture after I was arrested on the  second day of an RCMP raid of opponents to the Coastal GasLink pipeline that saw 30 arrests. I have been reporting on this national story for over three years, but that day, I was forced to become part of it. I watched in agony as so many poignant moments slipped by, only recorded in my memory. I felt kidnapped. Having never been arrested before, it is the best word I can think of to describe being taken so abruptly out of my life and work, in violation of Canadian Charter rights protecting freedom of the press.  

That day I was documenting as Sleydo’ and her supporters locked themselves inside a tiny house adjacent to the pipeline right of way. Next to me in the cramped space was freelance reporter Michael Toledano, filming a documentary for the CBC. After RCMP arrived by helicopter, they surrounded the building, cut all communications, then broke down the door. Chunks of wood flew across the small space, before they switched to a chainsaw. As soon as there was a big enough hole, they pointed weapons at the unarmed group standing inside with hands raised. I kept photographing but adrenaline vibrated my entire body as I contemplated but decided against the risk of turning my back to the door, officer and gun. 

Just outside, a police dog barked incessantly as police arrested everyone — including me. I clearly said “I’m a member of the media,” but one police officer responded, “well you’re under arrest right now, so step out. You’re under arrest.” 

It also didn’t matter that The Narwhal had notified the RCMP ahead of time I would be on site, that I was displaying a Narwhal press pass, or that the RCMP had been tracking me as a journalist. They knew exactly what I was doing there. My arrest, and the arrest of other media covering Wet’suwet’en, is part of a pattern of police interference with reporting on Indigenous resistance movements. 

Most of those arrested that day were treated worse than I was — officers cut a medicine bag and ripped cedar regalia from Sleydo’, a hereditary wing chief. She says it was the only time she cried during the whole experience. Afterwards, they put her in a cell alone to worry about her kids, since they had also arrested her husband. Two racialized trans women were asked invasive questions about their bodies, denied important medication several times, put into the men’s side of prison and addressed by male pronouns.

A militarized police officer aims his gun into a tiny house full of unarmed individuals on Friday, Nov. 19, 2021. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

We were all detained for days in cold cells. If the charges had been criminal, rather than the less serious civil breach of injunction, we would have been afforded the right to see a judge within 24 hours — I could have signed release conditions and regained my freedom. They took most of our clothes, denied us soap and toothbrushes, and only allowed us to speak to our lawyers. We all listened as Wet’suwet’en, Gitxsan and traditional struggle songs reverberated through the metal and concrete halls, their rounds of harmony transforming the cell blocks into cathedrals of the human spirit. 

When I was released, headlines across the world celebrated my freedom, even as Sleydo’, the two trans women and several other supporters still sat in the Prince George correctional centre. 

One of my first freedom calls was from a good friend, who is Indigenous. She was proud of me for following the story, but joked “so, how does it feel to be treated like a native?” Her point was clear — Indigenous people are criminalized every day. 

My experience of jail is not unique, but RCMP efforts to suppress press freedom — especially around stories that focus on Indigenous issues — is critically important in this moment.

The police prevented me from doing my job. I should have been documenting as the RCMP arrested the other land defenders. I should have been there to photograph as police and industry workers dismantled Coyote Camp and burned another cabin to the ground. I should have been present to capture the Gitxsan nation organizing solidarity actions, militarized police patrolling them, and as supporters gathered on roadsides and at the jails to sing.

Instead, my camera sat in lockup. I sat on cinder block benches and was transported between detachments in metal boxes. 

The public record of what happens in Wet’suwet’en territory should be beyond police interference. The arrest of Indigenous Peoples on their land concerns every single person in Canada as we wrestle with our collective history and future. 

The Wet’suwet’en Nation has never signed a treaty or ceded their territory, a vast area of 22,000 square kilometres, roughly the size of New Jersey. In the 1997 Delgamuukw decision, a case brought by Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan hereditary chiefs, the Supreme Court of Canada affirmed both nations’ Aboriginal Rights and Title are intact and that the nation’s territory had never been ceded to the Crown. In the Delgamuukw case the hereditary chiefs established that the Wet’suwet’en have a system of Indigenous law that existed before the creation of elected band councils enacted under the Indian Act. ​​​​​​Within Wet’suwet’en law, hereditary chiefs hold responsibility for territorial lands. These hereditary chiefs are the forces leading the opposition to the Coastal GasLink pipeline.

At the time of the Delgamuukw decision the Supreme Court also said that a second case would be needed to define the territory’s exact boundaries, but the nation’s claim was clear enough that the B.C. government and various industries began scrambling to try and extinguish that title to create more certainty for development. Although much has been made of the Wet’suwet’en elected chiefs who vocally support the pipeline project and the benefit agreements they’ve signed, the question of whether or not the project’s approval is in violation of Wet’suwet’en rights has not been resolved in the courts. The hereditary chiefs maintain, however, that the pipeline being forced through their territory is in violation of Wet’suwet’en law. 

The elected system was imposed along with the Indian Act and reservations, while the hereditary system predates colonization. Elected Wet’suwet’en chiefs fulfill a crucial role for their respective communities on multiple reserves. But the Coastal GasLink pipeline route doesn’t cross Wet’suwet’en reserve land, it crosses traditional territory where it’s hereditary chiefs who are tasked with ancient responsibilities, and where they have been recognized as stakeholders by B.C.’s Supreme Court. 

Industry, government pushed to abolish Aboriginal title at issue in Wet’suwet’en stand-off, docs reveal

Despite the staunch opposition of the hereditary chiefs, the government has permitted a project through the most intact portion of Wet’suwet’en territory without consent — and the RCMP has been directed by the courts to suppress pipeline opposition, a task they’ve taken on with paramilitary force.

Regardless of who has a right to consent to the project, the show of force against Wet’suwet’en occupation camps — and the suppression of related coverage — is in itself worth talking about. 

The North-West Mounted Police formed in 1873 “to bring Canadian authority” to present day Alberta and Saskatchewan. Later they would be renamed the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and gain national jurisdiction. This paramilitary force was instrumental in pushing Indigenous people from their land to make way for settlers and the railway. 

On Wet’suwet’en territory 150 years later, RCMP are back in military formation, with guns in hand, to remove people from the land. Over the last three years, police with authority to use lethal force have arrested more than 60 people on behalf of Coastal GasLink. 

This reality, especially images of militarized officers wielding advanced weapons, is an uncomfortable one for both the RCMP and governments in an era enamoured with the concept of reconciliation. British Columbia recently passed its two-year anniversary of codifying Indigenous rights in the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act. In June Canada implemented the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which calls for free, prior and informed consent of natural resource and development projects on Indigenous lands. With Canada’s minister of Crown-Indigenous relations acknowledging “it’s time to give land back,” it’s no wonder Canadians and Indigenous Peoples are experiencing a kind of reconciliation disorientation. 

Stories that fit the comfortable reconciliation narrative are much easier for reporters to tell. I’ve never seen tactical weapons at a press conference announcing a benefits agreement between an industry company and a First Nation. I’ve never been arrested reporting on new federal funding for Indigenous protected areas, or when politicians are included in First Nations’ ceremonies. 

Coastal GasLink, operated by TC Energy, formerly TransCanada, also runs a sophisticated press strategy. Its narrative — of economic benefit for all, including nearby First Nations — gets coverage in the regular news grind, often generated by industry-supplied press releases. It’s much more difficult to tell the untold sides of the pipeline story. I’ve talked to journalists from multiple outlets who have also been frustrated by half answers or no answer at all to questions about the pipeline from company spokespeople. And forget about any unsupervised conversation with workers or a chance to get a close look at what’s actually unfolding on project sites and in construction zones.

For a full understanding of this issue, what actually happens to Indigenous people who assert land rights or challenge official narratives, it’s critical every Canadian has the opportunity to see and viscerally understand what’s happening on the ground. 

I was eventually released from Prince George, some four and a half hours from where I had been arrested. I had to literally dig my personal belongings out of the wreckage from Coyote Camp, which had been scooped up with heavy machinery and dumped along with ice, rocks and mud at the bottom of the mountain. Now that I’m safely back home, I’m finally catching up with the notes of concern and notes of solidarity from other journalists in Canada who have been through similar experiences. The following are just a few notable examples. 

The most famous photograph of a standoff between Canadian force and Indigenous land defenders — the young military man facing off with an Ojibwe warrior at Oka, Quebec, in 1990 — was taken by a photographer named Shani Komulainen, but not many people realize she was arrested, strip searched and detained for five hours as she left the scene. Army operatives tried their best to discredit Komulainen and the other journalists who ventured inside the razor wire. Officers were annoyed at contradictions to their official account. They spied on journalists. They ordered reporters to leave. They blocked supplies and the outflow of stories and film. They denied members of the media re-entry if they left the protest zone. 

Months after her arrest, Komulainen was charged with possession of a weapon or an imitation of a weapon, threatening and interfering with the work of a peace agent and participating in a riot. It cost The Canadian Press and its members over $100,000 to defend Komulainen, but the charges against her were eventually dropped. Komulainen says she had so much pent up emotion from the months of the trial (and her recovery from a terrible car accident) that she surprised herself by bawling, instead of celebrating, when the ‘not guilty’ verdict was read.

At the 1995 Gustafsen Lake standoff, a dispute over land rights for a Secwepemc Sun Dance ceremony, RCMP responded to the group of 24 with at least 400 heavily armed officers. No media was present when, on Sept. 11, the situation culminated in a 45 minute firefight, where police deployed land mines and thousands of rounds of ammunition. RCMP are alleged to have prevented media from speaking to Indigenous leaders during the standoff. At trial, a video was entered into evidence showing RCMP officers discussing “a disinformation or a smear campaign.” RCMP would later disavow it as “a joke.” Despite the incredible show of militarized police force and continued calls for an official inquiry, there is no public record of that day. Gustafsen Lake remains one of the most obscured Indigenous land rights disputes in Canada.

Much more recently, in 2016, Justin Brake, working as a freelancer for The Independent, followed a group of Inuit and their supporters into the Muskrat Falls dam site, and spent several days inside as the occupation stopped work on the project. When an injunction named and accused him of trespassing, Brake had to decide if he would face arrest in order to cover the story. He decided to leave before police enforced the injunction, but was still burdened with both civil and criminal charges.

It took four long years, but again, all of the charges against Brake were dismissed. When the civil charges were dismissed in 2019 in the Newfoundland and Labrador Court of Appeal, the ruling definitively affirmed the rights of journalists in Canada to report from within injunction zones, like I did. In his judgement, Justice Derek Green outlined specific parameters that apply to journalists following newsworthy stories. Notably, he emphasized that “particular consideration should be given to protests involving Aboriginal issues.” 

When I speak to police officers, I bring up the Brake decision all of the time — very few have even a peripheral awareness of the case. 

In the summer of 2020, Ontario police waited until Oneida journalist Karl Dockstader had already returned home before telling him to turn himself in after he covered LandBack Lane. Dockstader was arrested and charged with mischief and failure to comply with a court order, again for reporting from within another injunction zone. His charges were also dropped months later, along with charges against 24 other people.

Since 2018, Jesse Winter, Jerome Turner (who is Gitxsan), Melissa Cox, Dan Loan and at least two other filmmakers have all been corralled, detained, removed from the area or arrested while covering the Wet’suwet’en reoccupation camps. Media have routinely been denied access to RCMP “exclusion zones.” In 2020, I was threatened with arrest for having stepped on a blocked road as I documented police apprehending Howilhkat (Freda Huson), her family and supporters. I believe I was only saved from that set of handcuffs because of scrutiny on RCMP at the time, who were being criticized for their deployment of illegal media exclusion tactics and vocal threats of media arrests. 

Freda Huson, centre, and her sister, Brenda Michell, stand in ceremony while they wait for police to enforce Coastal GasLink’s injunction in February of 2020. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

And most recently, over this past spring, the ongoing protest against old-growth logging at Fairy Creek, became notorious for RCMP harassing and unreasonably restricting journalists. One reporter, Paul Johnson of Global News, compared the situation to his experience in China and other repressive countries. 

The situation was so bad that a coalition of media organizations, including the Canadian Association of Journalists and The Narwhal, launched a successful legal challenge against the RCMP’s illegal suppression of press freedoms at Fairy Creek. 

On July 20, 2021, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Douglas Thompson addressed the RCMP practice of creating vast exclusion zones and media access points, stating the “geographically extensive” areas weren’t necessary for police operations. He also reminded the RCMP of “the media’s special role in a free and democratic society, and the necessity of avoiding undue and unnecessary interference with the journalistic function.” This was a way past due affirmation of press freedoms in Canada and journalists were collectively pretty excited.

But less than a month later, on August 10, 2021, Victoria Buzz photojournalist Colin Smith was arrested at Fairy Creek. He was detained in the back of a prisoner transport in the hot sun. As he became claustrophobic, feeling faint, sweaty and visibly shaking, Smith says an officer advised him to take deep breaths but didn’t open the doors. Eventually Smith was released without charges but the experience left a mark — he says that when he went back to the site his fear of the police and the looming threat of being put back in the metal wagon interfered with his ability to document what was going on. At least two other independent media photographers were also arrested and detained at Fairy Creek, and many more have been threatened or severely limited.

Mere months after Thompson’s decision, and two years after Green’s decision on considerations for journalists covering Indigenous protest in injunction zones, the state of press freedom in Canada is worse than ever. 

On the first day of enforcement of the Coastal GasLink injunction in November, filmmaker Melissa Cox was the first person arrested at another Wet’suwet’en camp. Her footage wasn’t released until days later and as a result those 15 arrests, that included Wet’suwet’en Elders, legal observers and some people who were hit with clubs, punched, thrown on the ground and contorted, did not see as much coverage.

For two days in a row during the enforcement, APTN journalist Lee Wilson’s attempts to report on the situation were blocked by RCMP. The first day, the officers on the ground told him “no,” he couldn’t go up the access road, such decisions were left up to the local detachment. The next day he was told “no” by the local detachment, because the decision had to come from officers on the ground. Those officers finally gave him a flat “no” — he would absolutely not be getting access to the area. 

Wilson had found himself in a similar situation in 2020: the only difference was that now, instead of explicitly calling the area “an exclusion zone” or an “injunction zone,” RCMP were now conscientiously using the term “police checkpoint.” 

It seems the only thing the RCMP have learned from Fairy Creek is to police their language. 

Hours after Wilson was prevented from doing his job, an officer told me that if I was “any credible media person [I] would have left.” 

The threat of arrest does have a dampening effect on reporting. Karyn Pugliese, now at the CBC, was at APTN when she jumped in to support Justin Brake back in 2016. In an interview with Canadaland, Pugliese spoke about her anxieties as an assigning editor, forced to contend with escalating police tactics as she sends journalists into the field: “What if she ends up in jail? I’m responsible for that. What if I can’t protect her? And that’s where you start creeping into this police state.”

Police use exclusion zones, arrest and the threat of arrest to control media access to newsworthy places: places where Indigenous people and land defenders are resisting industry, government and corporate mandates on their territories, and where the RCMP or the OPP are spending millions in militarized response. No one in Canada should tolerate police efforts to intimidate journalists or limit news coverage.  

There is no doubt in my mind that my arrest was intended to frighten, humiliate and deter me from continuing to cover this story. Both Toledano and I faced police interference with our ability to report. We both now face civil charges. 

One of the more surreal moments of this experience was at the Prince George courthouse. When it was my turn to see the judge, sheriffs escorted me in socked feet down a series of institutional hallways and up a narrow staircase. At the end a door abruptly opened from the echoing gloom onto a bright room hushed by thick red carpet, upholstery and courtroom protocol. By that point, I had been wearing my now filthy nylon-thin leggings and sweatshirt for days. They had taken my glasses, my hair tie and my bra. I wouldn’t have opened the door for a delivery driver dressed like that — I felt indecent. The oak-panelled room held very few observers, including Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs Woos and Madeek. Everyone else was fully clothed, as were the sheriffs and the court reporter. Madam Justice Marguerite Church presided from the raised bench in her black judge’s robes, as I sat barely dressed and cold in the prisoners box. I was supposed to feel small. 

But my arrest actually makes me a big part of a national reckoning with press freedoms, and what reconciliation means for journalism. I know I am not alone in doing this work or in dealing with the fallout. So many media friends and colleagues have rallied behind us. I am eternally grateful. 

Many more have said it — “truth before reconciliation” but that can’t happen if journalists are routinely criminalized in pursuit of this truth. 

Our courts affirm the rights of journalists to access and report on these issues, Indigenous people are shouting to be heard and yet we let police be the arbiters of this crucial conversation. Let this be the last time. 

Police put me in handcuffs when I should have been doing my job. I wanted to be doing my job. And I am furious.

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.

In the pre-dawn morning on Friday, Nov. 19, Sleydo’ Molly Wickham, a wing chief in Cas Yikh house of the Gidimt’en clan, checks communications in a tiny house stationed next to a Coastal GasLink drill site along the Wedzin Kwa (Morice) River.

Although light hasn’t yet broken into the small wooden structure, Wickham is already performing media interviews. Her fellow supporters in the one-room structure begin to sit up as they hear Wickham tell a reporter that “several RCMP buses have been spotted coming up the hill.”

By afternoon an RCMP tactical team and specially trained officers with the Community-Industry Response Group is advancing on the small structure, with snipers and canine units at the ready. Shaylynn Sampson, a Gitxsan supporter, has her ear to the door, listening, when the action comes. She leaps back moments before an axe smashes the door, sending jagged shards of wood flying into the crowded space. A police dog barks and whines incessantly and a chainsaw snarls as RCMP continue to tear down the door.

Inside, five peaceful land defenders stand waiting for their inevitable arrest. They do not resist. They hold no weapons. An officer, armed with an assault rifle and clad in military-style gear, pushes the barrel of his gun through the broken door. 

“Lower your gun!” Wickham yells. “This is sovereign Wet’suwet’en land, you guys need to leave right now. You have no authority here.” Wickham asked the RCMP if they had a warrant to enter the residence. The RCMP responded they were entering under the authority of a Coastal GasLink injunction, secured against opponents of the 670-kilometre gas pipeline in December of 2019.

The RCMP’s use of force on this day will become roundly criticized as excessive as a response to a small collective of peaceful Indigenous pipeline opponents. More than 40 media outlets and press-freedom organizations have called on Canada’s Public Safety Minister, Marco Mendicino, to investigate the RCMP’s arrest of journalists and prevent them from taking place in the future.

In total, 15 people, including myself and documentary filmmaker Michael Toledano, were arrested that day and incarcerated by the RCMP for several nights under civil contempt of court charges. More than 30 individuals were arrested throughout the week. Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs, who have staunchly opposed the construction of pipelines across their unceded territory in northern B.C., issued an eviction order against the company on Jan. 4, 2020, but work on the pipeline is ongoing.Upon the arrests of media, RCMP officers confiscated recording devices, so the public has been unable to see documentary photos and footage of Friday’s arrest until recently.

Shaylynn Sampson, Gitxsan Lax Gibuu Wilp Spookxw, left, and Sleydo’ Molly Wickham rest in the tiny house at Coyote camp in Gidimt’en territory near Houston, B.C., on Thursday, Nov. 18, 2021.

Fireworks are set off from the heat of a fire at a barricade constructed on the road outside of Coyote camp on Thursday.

A structure built as a barricade was set aflame on Thursday, presumably to deter police from coming in as the sun was setting.

The tiny house residence at Coyote camp where RCMP officers arrested seven individuals, including two journalists on Friday, Nov. 19.

A Gidimt’en flag flies on the camp kitchen as the sun rises on Friday.

Wickham rises in the predawn to check communications and to take a media interview.

Media and supporters rise for the day in the tiny house. Documentary filmmaker Michael Toledano, left, was arrested by the RCMP, despite notifying officers he is a member of the media.

Wickham and Sampson start to plan for the day at the Coyote camp.

Militarized police move in to Coyote camp on Friday, Nov. 19, 2021. The Gidimt’en clan held Coyote camp, adjacent to the Coastal GasLink pipeline right of way and a drill pad site, since Sept. 25, 2021. Coastal GasLink has had an injunction since December of 2019, preventing pipeline opponents from blocking access to their worksites and public forestry roads.

The view through the peephole as police move out of the woods and into view at Coyote camp.

Wickham covers her face with a red hand print, to signify missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, as she waits for police.

Militarized police run to cut power, radio and internet supply to the tiny house prior to breaking down the door and conducting arrests.

A police helicopter approaches Coyote camp.

The helicopter lands to drop off police officers prior to the arrests at the tiny house.

Wickham and Sampson peer out to monitor police activity prior to their arrest.

Sampson stands at the door moments before police break it down with an axe and a chainsaw.

A piece of the door flies through the air as police breach the tiny house and arrest all who are inside.

Supporters keep their hands raised as officers enter the house.

A crowd of officers, including militarized police, wait in the courtyard outside of the tiny house dwelling as supporters and media are arrested.

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.

On Sunday, Nov. 14, pipeline company Coastal GasLink was given eight hours to immediately evacuate Gidimt’en clan territory near Houston, B.C. Hereditary chiefs served the mandatory order for all company workers and sub-contractors.

Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Dinï ze’ (Chief) Woos, Frank Alec, granted a two hour extension to the evacuation timeline, but of the estimated 500 individuals housed at Coastal GasLink’s two remote work camps, only a handful left. Since then, land defenders seized a Coastal GasLink excavator and bulldozer and used them to dismantle parts of the Morice Forest Service Road, the main point of access to project sites and work camps.

The Gidimt’en clan and supporters have occupied a Coastal GasLink drill site near the Wedzin Kwa, or Morice River, to prevent drilling under the glacial river, since Sept. 25, 2021.Gidimt’en camp spokesperson Sleydo’ Molly Wickham said inaction from B.C. and the federal government and failure to address and resolve Right and Title claims forced land defenders to take matters into their own hands and enforce an eviction order originally issued on Jan. 4, 2020, by Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs, who oppose construction of the 670-kilometre pipeline.

“We were sending a clear message to the province, to Canada, and they weren’t acting on it — they weren’t hearing what we were saying — so we had to get a little bit louder,” Wickham told The Narwhal in an interview. “They’re destroying absolutely everything that is important to us in our territory. And they have been continuing to do work, despite the eviction order last year.”

Opposition to any pipeline’s construction has been strong from the Wet’suwet’en and their supporters for well over a decade. In December of 2019, a court issued an injunction against blockaders, giving RCMP officers authorization to make dozens of arrests last year, when land defenders blockaded the road and prevented work by the pipeline company and contractors.

Supporters stand guard to secure a road closure along the Morice Forest Service Road at kilometre 39 in Gidimt’en territory on Sunday, Nov. 14. Up until the road closure, the service road was a major thoroughfare for the pipeline project. The people who keep watch at Gidimt’en camp logged a convoy of six heavy trucks running through the road twice each day, carrying supplies, as well as a convoy of seven semi-trailer trucks carrying pipe each morning around 7 a.m. These individuals estimate hundreds of pickup trucks also travel the road each day carrying workers, security and police patrols.

Sleydo’ Molly Wickham greets supporters after they enforced the road closure. Wickham said she was happy to hear of Gitxsan solidarity actions taking place that included the temporarily closure of a rail line in New Hazelton.

Supporters stand under a tarp to mask their numbers from a helicopter suspected of carrying out surveillance. An RCMP spokesperson told The Narwhal “The RCMP is aware of the protest actions and we have, and will continue to have, a police presence in the area conducting roving patrols.”

Mohawk supporter Aktsi’io (centre) sings a song while Indigenous musician Logan Staats, from the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario, looks on. “They think we are angry and hating but it’s not about that, it’s about burying the hatchet and moving to a place of respect and honour,” Aktsi’io said.

Haudenosaunee supporters, left to right, Logan Staats, Teka’tsihasere (Corey Jocko), who also goes by the artist name Jayohcee, and Skyler Williams ride a seized Coastal GasLink excavator as they work to close the service road.The Haudenosaunee have been allies for the Wet’suwet’en since the 2020 enforcement action, and contributed to the #shutdowncanada movement those arrests sparked. This year, Mohawk supporters have walked police out of Coyote camp twice.

Supporters fell trees to create barricades.

Coastal GasLink security workers wearing cameras and masks arrive to speak with supporters.

The workers deliver a copy of the a B.C. Supreme Court injunction against opponents of the pipeline.

Teka’tsihasere (Corey Jocko) whoops and issues a war call in response to a Coastal GasLink security worker reading a statement from the company. “We’re here from the Coastal GasLink project,” the worker read. “We are here to conduct work on behalf of the Coast GasLink project and you are impeding us. Can you please move your blockade out of the area?”

Supporters burned the copy of the injunction Coastal GasLink workers delivered to the blockade.

Coastal GasLink pipeline’s right of way cutting through Gidimt’en territory. The 670-kilometre gas pipeline crosses over 190 kilometres of relatively intact Wet’suwet’en territory.

Haudenosaunee supporters Skyler Williams, back, and Aktsi’io look on as trees are felled along the service road.

A Coastal GasLink worker leaves Gidimt’en territory in the early morning of Nov. 14.

Freezing breath is caught in a flashlight beam used to help signal to oncoming drivers that there are obstructions on the road while land defenders and their supporters stand guard.

Haudenosaunee supporters help to maintain the road closure.

Jocko helps enforce the road closure.

A supporter uses a flare to mark the road closure.

Supporters escort a Coastal GasLink vehicle off of Gidimt’en territory.

Staats smudges himself after helping to enforce the road closure.

An excavator is hung with red dresses to signify the epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls at Coyote camp.

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