Nathan Cullen, British Columbia’s minister of water, land and resource stewardship, has confirmed what many suspected: the NDP isn’t interested in an endangered species law.

A federal Species At Risk Act has been in place for decades, and has immense power when enforced. But it almost never is, and has done nothing to protect B.C.’s ever-growing list of endangered species. Provincial legislation has therefore long been a key demand of conservation groups. 

Until recently, the B.C. NDP vocally supported the idea of a provincial act: “We’re one of the only provinces in the country without stand-alone species at risk legislation,” the party’s 2017 campaign platform lamented, promising to change that if elected. After forming government that year, then-premier John Horgan’s first mandate letter to Environment Minister George Heyman directed him to “enact an endangered species law.” 

But this language soon softened. There was no mention of endangered species legislation in Heyman’s 2020 mandate letter; instead, the premier urged him to “continue to work with partners to protect species at risk.” Protection for endangered species did not appear at all in his 2022 mandate letter.

I interviewed Minister Heyman in late 2021 and asked him if the B.C. NDP had abandoned its pursuit of species at risk legislation. “No, we haven’t made that decision at all,” he said then. Officials have been cagey on this subject ever since.

But last week, in a wide-ranging sit-down interview with Minister Cullen and Murray Rankin, the minister of Indigenous relations and reconciliation, Cullen finally acknowledged species-specific legislation is officially off the table. 

Then he spoke about what we’re getting instead.  

Prioritizing ecosystems over single species

“It’s the Biodiversity and Ecosystem Health Framework,” Cullen told me. That wonky phrase invokes a vast new architecture of land-use legislation that Cullen’s ministry is now drafting: since conservation and species at risk protection is inextricably linked to Indigenous Rights, it’s being done, in close collaboration with Rankin’s ministry and the more than 200 First Nations in B.C.  

The province published its draft framework last November. It was open to public input through January; Cullen’s ministry is still reviewing the “thousands” of submissions it received, according to a spokesperson. A finalized framework is expected later this year. 

As spelled out in the draft, the framework’s purpose is “to provide strategic direction that sets the course for changes in legislation and current practices that aligns the province’s commitment to [the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples] with specific goals that are intended to maintain and enhance biodiversity and ecological integrity.” 

In other words the framework is a blueprint for the legislation we’re getting instead of a provincial species at risk act, but not the legislation itself. 

All this is inextricably linked to implementing the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act. That’s why the minister of Indigenous relations and reconciliation took part in an interview that was notionally about ecosystems. 

As Rankin put it: “How can you set aside land, how can you deal with new land use arrangements, without the involvement of the people who have rights and title in the area? It’s just not doable.”

The Narwhal reached out to the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, the BC Assembly of First Nations and the First Nations Leadership Council in B.C. for comment, but none responded by publication time.

Cullen called the coming legislation a more “holistic” approach to nature protection than an endangered species law, in part “because it includes people into the conversation.” He described species at risk legislation as “a very blunt instrument” that provokes so much public pushback, including from First Nations, it’s often unviable. 

“It doesn’t do any economic analysis, it doesn’t incorporate land use planning, it’s just a ‘Thou Shalt,’ ” Cullen said, when the focus should be “not just on one species, not just in one valley, but across an entire landscape.” 

Following through on the Old Growth Strategic Review

The concept of “biodiversity and ecosystem health” comes directly from the province’s landmark 2020 Strategic Old Growth Review, which had a profound influence over the NDP’s environmental policy. The authors — two registered professional foresters, one a member of the Tahltan Nation — delivered 14 recommendations for overhauling the way resource extraction is carried out in this province. The NDP endorsed every one. 

The first recommendation was to “engage the full involvement of Indigenous leaders and organizations.” The second was for the government to declare the “ecosystem health and biodiversity of British Columbia’s forests as an overarching priority and enact legislation that legally establishes this priority for all sectors.” 

“That was a pretty profound commitment,” Jessica Clogg, executive director and senior counsel for West Coast Environmental Law, said. “It opened up a potential for law reform that quite frankly had felt closed before that time.” 

Clogg explained the second recommendation “arose from the analysis of how our existing legal structures are hardwired for failure — they’re set up to prioritize resource extraction” over ecosystem health. Flipping that equation on its head is at the heart of the “paradigm shift” British Columbians have been hearing a lot about lately. (That term also appears in the Strategic Review.) 

Prior to 2020, West Coast Environmental Law spent years advocating for endangered species legislation. But once the province announced support for an ecosystem-based approach, “we could see the potential for that type of legislation,” Clogg said. 

Cullen talked about shifting paradigms, too. “The lens through which we looked at land-use planning for most of this province’s existence has been a forestry-dominant lens,” he said. That was written into the legal fabric of B.C.; one of the more egregious examples both Cullen and Clogg mentioned was the Forest and Range Practices Act’s “unduly clause,” which gave forestry a trump card to play over any concerns — whether from First Nations, recreational users or other industry — that might “unduly” affect a harvest.

The NDP scrapped the unduly clause in February 2023. That was one year after the creation of the ministry Cullen now heads, itself an example of the NDP’s huge legislative manoeuvres. In just two years, the Ministry of Water, Lands and Resource Stewardship has amassed immense power, taking partial or total control of several pieces of legislation, including the Water Sustainability Act, Wildlife Act, the Land Act and 24 more. 

It’s encouraging that a ministry tasked with mandating province-wide ecosystem protection appears to have real clout. But progress has been achingly slow, especially in light of the rapacious pace of industry. As Clogg noted, the Old Growth Strategic Review’s authors recommended laws, not a multi-year-process to create a blueprint for those laws. “I don’t think a non-binding framework is a replacement for a legislative regime,” she said. 

Last dash for cash

You don’t have to look far to see industry exploiting the slow advance of legislative change to make a last dash for riches. Invariably, this happens with the help of other ministries of the same government.

Consider two prominent examples: first, as reported by resource policy analyst Ben Parfitt, the number of drilling permits the BC Oil and Gas Commission granted to Malaysian energy giant Petronas on Treaty 8 territory, in northeast B.C., rose by an order of magnitude once Blueberry River First Nations entered their historic court battle against the cumulative impacts of industry. By the time Blueberry River won in 2021 and new drilling permits were paused, Petronas and another company, Tourmaline, had acquired enough permits to keep fracking for about 25 years on Treaty 8 territory. 

Exhibit B is the poster child of B.C. endangered species: the spotted owl. The last wild member of the species in Canada lives in the old growth canyons of the lower Fraser River, in Spuzzum First Nation territory. Logging continues there, too, authorized by the Ministry of Forests against the express wishes of the nation. 

I spoke to Spuzzum Chief James Hobart a week before my conversation with Cullen. “Nothing has changed,” on the ground, Hobart told me. “There was a letter that came out from the BC Timber Sales, and it says right on there: if the First Nations respond back that they need more time or they don’t want to consult at this moment, it’s business as usual for old growth taking.” 

For Hobart, that’s unacceptable.

“Logging on old growth has to stop until we have a fulsome discussion,” he said. “And industry has to know that it may never start up again.”

But Cullen and Rankin said there are overlapping Indigenous claims to the territory Spuzzum regards as its own, and other nations have asked for logging to continue. When I asked chief Hobart about this, he acknowledged that Indigenous-owned companies are carrying out some of the logging, but denied there was any ambiguity over whose territory it is.

“It’s almost like they’re pitting First Nations against First Nations,” Hobart said.

Cullen made clear he regarded a blanket ban on old growth logging until discrepancies can be sorted out as overly extreme.

“The set-aside within the Spuzzum territory is significant,” he insisted, referring to the amount of primary forest placed under protection. “The set-aside we did across the province is massive. It’s the largest set-aside of old growth within the province’s history by a long shot.”

Throughout our conversation, Cullen was at pains to emphasize the needle his ministry is threading: biodiversity, ecosystem health and the rights and title of First Nations are essential, but so is the consent of a democratic society whose economic well-being has long been at odds with these principles.

“We ask and insist upon industry to evolve in this regime,” he said. “We also make the same insistence on those who are interested in conservation.”

Jury’s out on how exactly biodiversity will be protected

However that statement grabs you, it’s clear the societal 180-degree turn that a genuine paradigm shift demands has already caused a degree of cultural whiplash — something any government ignores at its peril. One hundred fifty years of colonial indifference to biodiversity and Indigenous rights have baked in certain attitudes. Paradigms may be shifting, but the old way of seeing things has hardly been extinguished.

The recent debacle over amendments to the Land Act — one of countless statutory tweaks Cullen’s ministry is trying to implement, in this case aimed at sharing decision-making authority over land use with First Nations — showed how easily these shifts can be weaponized. “It is an assault on your private property rights and our shared rights to use Crown land,” John Rustad, leader of the B.C. Conservative party, said even though the amendments were spelled out in the Declaration Act that he, like every single member of the legislature, voted for in 2019.

BC United Leader Kevin Falcon, whose party also voted unanimously for this in 2019, declared his party “cannot support giving veto power to five per cent of the population with impacts to over 95 per cent of the land.” 

Even as the paradigm shift proceeds too slowly for many, the appearance of moving too fast presents a direct threat to the NDP in an election year. Minister Cullen ultimately blinked: at the end of February, he announced a pause on the Land Act amendments, “to take the time to further engage with people and demonstrate the real benefits of shared decision-making in action.”  

“There’s a need to have a dialogue, and essentially socialize folks to the reality that it isn’t whether they’re going to do this, but how,” Clogg allowed. 

But the question at the heart of these conversations remains the same, cutting sharper every day: how many species will disappear while British Columbians negotiate the best way to save them?

Updated on March 22, 2024, at 6:21 a.m. PT: This story has been updated to correct a statement that BC United Leader Kevin Falcon voted for the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act in 2019. Falcon was not an MLA in 2019, but his party voted unanimously for the act.

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I’d just begun my phone call with Oliver Brandes, when the polar vortex blew into Vancouver on January 12. A frigid windstorm shook my townhouse and rattled the windows; just beyond the glass, crows and seagulls scattered, joined in the air by alleyway debris. The scene stood in stark contrast — or so it seemed — to the subject of my call: heat, drought and the end of winter as we know it.

“We’re off the charts in many ways,” said Brandes, who leads the University of Victoria’s POLIS Water Sustainability Project and advises the B.C. government on water issues. After an abnormally warm and dry early winter (the local denouement to the hottest year in global history) B.C. had just released its “Snow survey and water supply bulletin,” which showed the province entering 2024 with barely half its usual snowpack. That’s a provincial average; in many places the situation was far worse, with 15 snow stations recording all-time lows as of January 1, most of them in the interior.  

Despite fall rains and a wet second half of January bringing some relief to the coast, the bulletin made clear that B.C.’s drought is now pushing into winter. Much of the province just experienced a brown Christmas; aquifers that would normally be recharging remain depleted across the province; major rivers, including the Columbia, the Peace and the Fraser are flowing at historic lows. “We’re in trouble in January,” Brandes exclaimed. It’s a disastrous portent for what summer could bring to a province that depends on snowmelt for everything from agriculture to electricity and drinking water, not to mention fighting wildfire.

Brandes has been talking about this kind of scenario since long before water scarcity was a public concern in Canada’s wettest province. He advised the province on its drafting of the Water Sustainability Act, passed in 2016, which gives the province wide-ranging powers to limit water use during times of scarcity. Drought has struck repeatedly since then, though not until the summer of 2023 did it affect the whole province at once.

When we last spoke in August, Brandes expressed some frustration provincial authorities weren’t using those powers more aggressively; they waited until July to warn British Columbians a province-wide drought had settled in, and even then Bowinn Ma, minister for emergency preparedness and climate change, limited herself to requesting citizens take voluntary measures like shorter showers. The first real order didn’t come until Aug. 16, when forage-crop farmers were told to stop drawing water from the north Okanagan’s Salmon River to protect spawning chinook. By then, that basin had been in Stage 4 drought for over a month.

Brandes said he’s seen some signs of improvement in the province’s approach to the crisis since then. Above all, he cited the consolidation of authority for water management under Nathan Cullen’s Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship. That transfer was announced in October. Previously, water management had also fallen under the Forestry and Emergency Preparedness ministries causing much confusion and delay. Brandes sees the reorganization as a sign Premier Eby and his cabinet are waking up to the urgency — “the gears are creaking into place” — but the true test won’t come until spring. 

“There are no more excuses,” he said. “We’ve had our trial run, it didn’t go particularly well but we learned some valuable lessons. The B.C. government has reorganized itself for potential success. Now it’s time to execute.”

But even Brandes was caught off guard by the severity of this winter’s drought, and what it says about the speed at which B.C.’s climate is changing.

“I didn’t anticipate doing this level of really catastrophic response stuff this soon,” he said. “I thought I’d be doing this at the end of my career.” 

The desiccation of Western Canada

The wind had subsided by the time our conversation ended. But the temperature kept dropping and now clouds converged above the city. When I started my next call, the first snowflakes of 2024 had begun to fall on Vancouver. 

This time I was talking to John Pomeroy, the Canada Research Chair in water resources and climate change, from the University of Saskatchewan. He didn’t sound impressed when I told him it was snowing on the coast — it would take more than a single weather system to impact the bigger picture.

What was that bigger picture?

“We’re starting to see the desiccation of Western Canada,” he told me. A perfect example came from McBride, the village of nearly 700 residents in eastern B.C., which recently made headlines for its ongoing state of emergency. After a wildfire forced residents to evacuate last May, the river that once fed its reservoir ran dry, forcing residents to ration water while they weigh options for a new water supply. As Pomeroy explained, a few dry months wouldn’t have brought the village to its knees this way in the recent past. “Their stream used to have glaciers feed into it, which helped them through droughts. But the glaciers have receded out of that watershed and don’t contribute to it now.” This has left McBride utterly vulnerable to droughts it could once have withstood.

Glaciers, and the vital drought-proofing service they provide, are disappearing all across the Rockies. “We’ll have lost most of them by the end of the century,” Pomeroy said.

In the nearer term, the mountains’ winter snowpack — not to be confused with glaciers — is increasingly unreliable. Lower elevation regions in particular are getting more rain and less snow and the snow they do get tends to melt sooner. With the past two record-warm winters, “we’re actually seeing some of the worst-case scenarios for the end of the century under climate change, and we’re seeing them right now,” Pomeroy said. On top of that, precipitation patterns are becoming more volatile, veering between protracted drought and short bursts of intense rain, as happened with the atmospheric rivers of 2021. 

These shifts are already wreaking havoc on critical infrastructure throughout Western Canada. Drought forced BC Hydro to import a record amount of energy in 2023. Farmers from B.C. to Saskatchewan, having just endured a catastrophically dry summer of 2023, are bracing for an even worse year ahead. In Alberta, the South Saskatchewan River and other basins are also running so low that the Alberta Energy Regulator warned oilsands operators they may have to curtail production in the coming months. Farther north, the Mackenzie River — a vital conduit to the Western Arctic fed by the Peace and Athabasca rivers — ran so low in 2023 that barges could no longer bring food and fuel to northern communities, forcing them to fly in crucial supplies at far greater expense. These are just a few examples from a litany of consequences stretching into every walk of life.

“Our systems were built for a snowmelt runoff system that had a lot of reliability and didn’t change much from year to year,” Pomeroy said. The end of that reliability “is going to challenge everything we do.”

Winter isn’t over … yet

Two hours later I was driving my daughter home from school in a blizzard, with heavy wet flakes landing on warm concrete in rapidly freezing conditions. Vancouver is famous for what these conditions do to traffic; as I gripped the wheel with both hands, praying to get home in one piece, my concerns about the end of winter began to feel misplaced. 

We made it. Then I checked in on my parents. They live in Edmonton, where temperatures were approaching 40 below; the weather station at Edmonton’s international airport hit 45.9 degrees below zero, one of 38 cold-weather records broken across the province that day. My 91-year-old dad had barricaded himself inside his house for the week. He was warm, he had food, he was OK. But my mom, who’s 83, revealed that her furnace had conked out the day before. She was wearing a parka and lying in bed under multiple blankets, waiting for a repairman to show up. No big deal, she said. She stuck it out for 48 frigid hours until Saturday, when workers arrived and installed a new furnace. 

All that weekend, Alberta’s power grid balanced on a knife edge, coming closer than it ever has to overloading. This would have triggered rolling blackouts and sent untold thousands of homes into my mother’s situation. Despite BC Hydro’s woes, and the fact that our province also used a record amount of energy that weekend, we were able to send just enough energy across the border to help stave off disaster in Alberta. 

By Monday, the polar vortex had crossed the American border, burying states from Oregon to New York to Kansas in snow and freezing temperatures. But in the Arctic, where all this cold air came from, it was balmy, hovering just above zero. The hemisphere had flipped. How could this be? At first I thought this was one more manifestation of climate change; all over social media, people were explaining — incorrectly — that global warming has weakened the jet stream that normally keeps the coldest air within the Arctic Circle; a weakened jet stream allows cold air to spill south, while our warmer air rushes north to fill the vacuum. I spread this message myself.

But then I learned there’s almost no evidence supporting this. Climate change is indeed warming up the Arctic — for Iqaluit to hit 3 C in January, as it did that Monday, is in fact abnormal — but there’s no demonstrable link between that northern warmth and southern cold snaps. Polar vortexes have always been with us, are not increasing in number or severity, and remain perfectly normal. This week of seemingly crazy weather was just winter being winter. 

That in itself felt surprising, and even — now that my mom had a working furnace — hopeful.

Still, it didn’t change the bigger picture that Pomeroy and Brandes had described to me. “Yes, we might still get out of this drought, but we still need to be thinking about it in this more systematic way,” Brandes told me. “We have to shift our whole mindset to say that drought is here with us. Water scarcity and water limits are going to be part of what we’re dealing with.” Looking forward to the summer ahead, he noted, “we have a clear indication in January that we’re going to have a very problematic season and year ahead. What are we going to do differently than last year?”

When I asked Brandes what, specifically, B.C. could do differently, he rapid-fired off a list of queries: “Is groundwater licensing completed? Is there a provincial drought plan that makes meaningful triggers to the legal tools that are available to us? Do we have critical flow thresholds set in high risk areas? Do we have regional drought plans so we know, when there’s limited water, how we’re going to share it so we don’t get angry with our neighbours? These are some of the fundamental actions I and many on the ground want to see.” 

Nobody’s seen them yet. When I asked B.C.’s Ministry of Water, Lands and Resource Stewardship how they were preparing for drought in 2024, their response was standard boilerplate, low on specifics, high on enthusiasm, seemingly designed to confirm (as more than one person has recently observed to me in private) that B.C.’s drought response plan is actually a communications plan. “We are doing the work now to better prepare for this year,” their email promised, naming three initiatives: “Updating our Drought Response Plan,” “making sure we’re communicating with water licensees ahead of the drought season,” and “strengthening communication to the agricultural sector.” 

“If a community would like to discuss drought planning or requires assistance, they can reach out to their local Emergency Management and Climate Readiness regional office,” they added. 

Outside my window, Vancouver’s skies had cleared. But the next day, blizzards buried most of southern B.C., and we got a record 27 centimetres of snow. This time the whole city shut down. My daughter experienced her first snow day, as schools closed across the region. 

Let’s enjoy it while we can, we agreed, and spent the day outside building snowmen.

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A few days before Christmas, I watched as Guujaaw, former president of the Council of the Haida Nation, testified at the B.C. Supreme Court. The legendary Haida chief was the Crown’s star witness in a $75 million lawsuit brought by Teal Cedar Products Ltd. against the province of B.C. and the Haida Gwaii Management Council.

The suit has been going on for months, but not until Guujaaw arrived did the judge hear an Indigenous perspective on what the forest industry has done to the landscape, and people, of Haida Gwaii.

As The Narwhal reported in September, Teal (better known as Teal-Jones, the logging company that made Fairy Creek famous) is suing B.C. for profits it claims to have lost when the company was forced to stop logging old growth on Haida Gwaii in 2011. That’s when the Haida Gwaii Management Council imposed ecosystem-based management on forestry operations throughout the archipelago, including the two tenures Teal operated there at the time.

The Haida Gwaii Management Council — a co-defendant in the case — is a five-member board that has authority over all resource extraction on Haida Gwaii; the province and the Council of the Haida Nation each appoint two members, and jointly choose a chair. As their lawyers took great pains to demonstrate, the management council is an independent body. But its creation was a result of the Haida Gwaii Reconciliation Act of 2010, and questions of reconciliation are at the heart of this case: Teal’s core argument is that the rules weren’t changed to protect the forest, which would have been contractually valid, but rather to appease the Haida Nation.

The province counters that reconciliation was but one thread in a fabric that included forest health and public interest. According to Crown lawyers, a government may protect any or all of those things, reconciliation very much included, without having to compensate a business. “Teal did not have a private law right to be insulated from the effects of the evolving forest management regime, the effects of the evolution of public values, or the effects of the evolving imperative to reconcile,” the province argued.

Whoever wins, the precedent set in this case will reverberate throughout the country. But it wasn’t the future I thought about while listening to Guujaaw speak for almost two straight days. It was the past.

Indigenous land claims tell the story of this country

Guujaaw is in his seventies, with long silver hair braided down a gently stooped back. His presence in the courtroom was a physical reminder of the turbulent history underpinning this lawsuit. That history is something the very infrastructure of court can seem designed to suppress; the ornate decor, the elaborate costumes of the judges and lawyers, its relentless adherence to demonstrable fact and calm, orderly argument, all conspire to separate feeling from knowing.

Guujaaw’s testimony brought those two qualities together, in stark contrast to the bureaucrats, politicians, registered foresters and corporate executives who’d taken the stand before him. They had all described the forests of Haida Gwaii in numerical terms: annual allowable cuts, cubic meters of cedar, fir and hemlock, market values, company spreadsheets, declining profit margins. But not until Guujaaw started talking 52 days into the proceedings did Haida Gwaii itself, and the people who live there, come into view.

Guujaaw described a time near the end of the last ice age when his homeland was a tundra; his people got there before the trees. Then cedar arrived, and his ancestors learned to use it for everything from canoes and totem poles to big houses. Beneath the canopy, an undergrowth filled with food and medicine proliferated. Guujaaw described growing up among aunts and uncles who’d spent their summer childhoods hidden in remote camps so that Indian agents, who took children to residential schools, wouldn’t find them.

In the 1960s, logging took off on Haida Gwaii, pushing beyond the shoreline to penetrate the steep watersheds filled with old growth. Guujaaw’s father was a part-time logger who told his son about a day his logging crew scooped gravel from a creek to pave a logging road. The road sparkled with millions of red salmon eggs. Hundreds of gulls descended to feast, stirring one of the truckers to drive through the flock and see how many birds he could run over.

The industry “accelerated and accelerated” as Guujaaw grew up, he said. By the 1980s, when the rate of clearcutting peaked, forestry meant “absolute plunder. You know, landslides are occurring, creeks are getting wiped out. All in front of the people who are supposed to be managing it.” It was, in his view, “a full-on colonial disruption of the land.”

Watching all this turned a young Guujaaw into one of the most radical land defenders in Canadian history. He led the historic blockades that began in Haida Gwaii in the 1980s before spreading to Clayoquot Sound, spurring the first War in the Woods, which at the time was the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history.

But as Guujaaw made clear, the Haida weren’t alone in their struggle to protect their archipelago from the ravages of a logging industry that had the full support of the provincial government in Victoria. From the very beginning, the Haida were joined by the non-Indigenous residents of Haida Gwaii, including many of the loggers (some Haida themselves) and government employees, too. All helped the Haida figure out where the next cut block was set to fall, which watershed was slated for destruction.

“Loggers would tell us, ‘You better see what they’re doing up in block so-and-so’,” Guujaaw recalled of his blockading days. “People who worked at the ministry of forests would give us a heads up. Government people that were stuck in a system, you know. They would warn us, and we’d have to go out and deal with these problems. But we would always be told by someone.”

After the blockades, the battles moved to court. By then president of the Council of the Haida Nation, Guujaaw became the appellant in one of the most important Supreme Court decisions to shape Indigenous law: the 2004 Haida decision, which established the Crown’s duty to consult. That momentous decision didn’t just change how the province dealt with the Haida Nation, or how logging would proceed on their land. It marked a turning point in resource extraction throughout the country, an end to the days when governments and corporations could ignore whose land they were operating on.

Aboriginal Title and reconciliation

The matter of sovereignty over Haida Gwaii remains a point of conflict between the Haida Nation and the province of B.C., and that conflict goes much deeper than Teal’s current fight with the province. “Our people never, ever acquiesced to the colonial government,” Guujaaw said at one point, essentially rejecting the entire premise of Teal’s case: in his view, the province never had any authority to hand out logging tenures over Haida Gwaii in the first place. “We have a totally different view of what they’re doing. They’re encroaching on our land.”

That view is about to be tested in court. Even as the Teal case plays out, Guujaaw and the Haida Nation are preparing to finish what they started twenty years ago. In 2004, they began a quest for recognition of Aboriginal title over Haida Gwaii, and new hearings will begin in 2026. When that happens, the same Crown that just called Guujaaw as a friendly witness will be on the opposite side of the table arguing against him.

It’s another way in which Guujaaw embodies the strange duality of nation-to-nation affairs in Canada: having been ordered by the courts to recognize some measure of Indigenous jurisdiction, the Crown is simultaneously an adversary and reluctant ally to First Nations, carrying out reconciliation with one hand while fighting Aboriginal title with the other. Guujaaw brought that up, too.

“Currently we’re sitting down with the government, trying to reconcile and do what we can before we go into court,” he said. “Because from the beginning that’s what the Supreme Court has said: ‘Yes, there’s Aboriginal title. It exists, and here’s what it means. So go back and try to figure it out.’ And a big part of it is reconciling with the people who live [on Haida Gwaii]. You know, to us, that’s probably the most important part of it. How are we going to live together?”

That’s more than a legal question on Haida Gwaii, where roughly half the five thousand inhabitants are Haida and the other half non-Indigenous. As Guujaaw made clear, the question of how to live together is a daily matter. “We’re just all living there, working, raising our families, kids going to school, intermarried. We’re all just people.”

Teal, of course, has no interest in such matters. Its only concern is to prove that B.C. breached the terms of Teal’s forestry tenure by allowing reconciliation to get in the way of logging old growth. When Teal’s turn to cross-examine came, its lawyer focused largely on getting Guujaaw to acknowledge that the changes to Haida Gwaii’s forestry regime — including the creation of the Haida Gwaii Management Council itself — were all part of a “journey of reconciliation.” Guujaaw didn’t disagree. But like many other witnesses before him, he made the point that reconciliation is ultimately inextricable from environmental protection.

Whether the judge concludes that reconciliation did indeed cost Teal $75 million, and that taxpayers should reimburse them for that expense, is something we won’t know until the second half of 2024, when the decision is expected.

A rising tide of Indigenous land claims

In the meantime, I was left to reflect on the countless cases like this one that have occupied Canadian courts since 1982, when the concept of Aboriginal Rights was formally written into the Constitution with the addition of Section 35. These fights have occupied entire generations like Guujaaw’s. And they are still gathering steam.

On the day Guujaaw finished his testimony, a news item blipped across national headlines: the federal government spent $26 billion on Indigenous legal claims in 2023 and expects to spend nearly $76 billion more on pending claims that are currently in court, or “contingent liabilities” in the language of Public Accounts of Canada. That $76 billion is a seven-fold increase from 2015.

According to the federal government, this expenditure “reflects the progress the federal government has made to advance reconciliation.” But none of that money was willingly spent. Indigenous nations had to fight for every penny in court. When I read that line, I was reminded of something Guujaaw said on the stand.

“Reconciliation wasn’t as if some government or another said, ‘Oh, that’s a good idea,’ or ‘That’s the right thing to do,’” he told the court. “No. We dragged them kicking and screaming to the table.”

Updated Jan. 8, 2024, at 3:23 p.m. PT: A previous version of this story stated the War in the Woods was widely regarded as the birth of Canada’s environmental movement. It has been updated to state the War in the Woods was, at the time, the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history.

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Ever since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau removed home-heating oil from the federal carbon levy at the end of October, Canadians have been hearing about it almost daily. The scheme — popularly known as the carbon tax, though it isn’t technically a tax — may be facing its greatest battle. Conservatives across the country have redoubled their “Axe the tax” campaign, with B.C. United Leader Kevin Falcon (who supported carbon pricing until now) joining the throng on Oct. 31. Even Premier David Eby has complained British Columbians who heat their homes with oil deserve the same break some other provinces now get.

The reason they aren’t getting it is B.C. has its own provincial price on carbon. Both the price and the rebate are synchronized with the federal levy, making them virtually identical — except when the federal government tweaks its version. That means British Columbians are excluded from the heating oil carve-out and the additional heat pump incentive Trudeau attached to it. Eby, who fully supports carbon pricing, wants Ottawa to extend the offer to B.C. 

It all gets complicated in a hurry. Conservatives have countered that complexity with a much simpler picture, dumbed down for maximum political punch. In their telling, the “carbon tax” massively raises inflation while failing to lower emissions. 

That’s easy to comprehend. It’s also patently false. And you don’t need a degree in economics to see why — we can break it down here in a few paragraphs.

How carbon pricing works

Before getting into what carbon pricing doesn’t do (explode affordability), let’s start with what it does.

The first thing to know is that most Canadians — 80 per cent, according to the Parliamentary Budget Office — get more money back from the rebate than the price on carbon costs them. The size of the rebate varies according to where you live and how much you earn, but on average, a B.C. family of four earning under $90,000 per year will get roughly $900 back. This will rise in lockstep with the price, currently at $65 per tonne of carbon and rising $15 each year through 2030, where it will max out at $170 per tonne. 

Crucially, your rebate isn’t affected by how much you spend on things like gasoline. That family of four will get their $900 even if they find ways to lower their fuel costs (say, by driving a smaller car, using more transit or switching to a heat pump). Therein lies the incentive to use less fossil fuel: the less you spend on carbon, the more of the rebate you pocket.

Every good lie is based on a kernel of truth, and there’s one place that carbon pricing critics have a point: the impact on gasoline, diesel and home heating is something we’re starting to feel.

“The war against carbon pricing is a campaign of mass distraction.”

The current price on carbon is now adding some 14 cents to a litre of gasoline, or $7 to a 50-litre fill; by 2030, it will almost triple. Many Canadians commute to work, which means they feel it every day. 

The same is true for home heating, albeit to a lesser extent. The carbon price currently adds more than 12 cents per cubic metre of gas, which translates to about $24 per month extra on your home heating bill. The people who get hit hardest are that tiny proportion of Canadians who heat their homes with oil. This is by far the most expensive way to heat your home — $2,800 per year on average, three times the cost of a natural gas furnace and about nine times more than a heat pump. 

That’s why the Liberals carved out the exemption for oil-heated homes that kicked off this whole mess. It’s also why they offered some owners of oil-heated homes heat pumps for free, or close to it. 

Still, it’s true: transportation and home heating are bills we pay regularly, and places where we can feel the price of carbon. This is especially so for those 84,000 homes in British Columbia that are heated with oil; Eby’s right that it would only be fair for the federal government to offer those homeowners the same carbon-price exemption and heat-pump subsidy they now get in other provinces. There’s also a strong argument for farmers, First Nations and other rural communities receiving a break, given their outsize expenditures on gasoline and diesel.

At the end of the day, though, carbon pricing does require sticks as well as carrots. The engineers of the carbon price and other climate policies (like the phaseout of coal power) have bent over backwards to minimize the pain of the energy transition, but they can’t anaesthetize us completely. 

That’s not to say the affordability crisis afflicting Canadians isn’t real and incredibly painful. It is both of those things.

It’s also almost entirely unrelated to the price on carbon.

What’s really causing inflation

Here’s where the kernel of truth in Conservative claims shrinks to a dust mote.

Inflation peaked last year at over eight per cent, and today is lingering at just over three per cent. The carbon price’s contribution to that has been around 0.15 per cent. That’s not nothing, but it’s pretty close.

If your goal was to identify the root causes of inflation, you’d look for a bigger culprit. And if that search was genuine, you would conclude that the single biggest source of today’s inflation is none other than carbon pricing’s target: fossil fuel itself.

This comes from two sources: first, the war in Ukraine, which sent the cost of oil and gas through the roof. Second, the rise in extreme weather, which has begun hammering global harvests of staples like wheat and rice.

Let’s look at each in turn.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, it shut off oil and gas exports to Europe. The resulting fossil fuel crunch ricocheted through global markets. That was the year gas prices exploded in Canada (like everywhere), with our national average peaking in June 2022 over $2 per litre. By no coincidence, that was when inflation peaked too, at 8.1 per cent. This happened to countries all over the world, regardless of whether they had a carbon levy. Estimates vary on how much the Ukraine war raised the global cost of living; Barron’s estimate of two per cent in 2022 (more than 10 times the carbon levy) is about average.

By no coincidence, 2022 was also the year oil companies, Canada’s included, logged the highest profits in their industry’s history, doubling their previous year’s income. Oddly, we never heard Conservative leaders complain about this, nor suggest taxing some portion of that windfall to ease the extraordinary pain it caused Canadians at the pumps and beyond. 

Then there’s extreme weather and agriculture. It wasn’t just Lytton, B.C., that burned in 2021: the Canadian Prairies suffered one of their worst droughts in history that year, causing a 39-per-cent drop in our national wheat production. In the U.S., that same drought caused an 11-per-cent rise in the cost of fresh vegetables and an 8.9-per-cent rise in fruit. That’s why food inflation surpassed the general average, reaching 10 per cent in Canada in 2022. 

In case it needs to be said, fossil fuels are by far the greatest contributor of greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change and its fallout.

But you can’t talk about inflation without acknowledging the devastation of global supply chains wrought by the pandemic. Unlike war and extreme weather, this had nothing to do with fossil fuels; it just happened to strike in tandem with those other two shocks (the term “perfect storm” comes up a lot when you start looking into this). According to the bank of Canada, supply chain bottlenecks accounted for 33-to-37 per cent of inflation at their peak. Thankfully, supply chains are coming back online now. This helps explain why inflation is also less than half what it was in 2022, even though the carbon price keeps going up.

There are too many other contributors to inflation to name here. The point is, these big three absolutely dwarf the impact of the carbon tax. All of them result from global crises. That’s why inflation in just about every developed country on Earth followed precisely the same curve over the past three years, regardless of whether that country has a price on carbon or not.

Because carbon pricing has nothing to do with it.

But does the ‘carbon tax’ lower emissions?

You don’t have to look at inflation to know that climate change is expensive: the cost of last summer’s wildfires in B.C. are estimated at $817 million. Two years ago, the atmospheric rivers of 2021 and extreme weather in general cost upwards of $10 billion. Nationwide, the Canadian Climate Institute estimates climate-induced damages will cost the country $25 billion a year by 2025. Even if you don’t care about the environment, there’s a powerful financial incentive to lower emissions. 

There aren’t many Conservatives in Canada who acknowledge this. Those who do, like Kevin Falcon, insist carbon pricing doesn’t lower emissions anyway, so why bother?

The truth is, there isn’t a ton of data either way, in large part because carbon pricing is so new. B.C. has had a price on carbon since 2008, but it started at $10 per tonne. Even so, one early study found it lowered emissions by five-to-15 per cent. And another study found that Sweden’s carbon pricing scheme (introduced in 1991) has lowered emissions from transportation by almost 11 per cent. 

In Canada, carbon is just now reaching a price you’d expect to impact behaviour. Remember: even if you don’t spend a penny on gasoline, you still get the full rebate — good incentive to drive less or get a smaller car. Canadians drive the least fuel-efficient cars in the world. That’s a choice. We have one of the world’s highest carbon footprints per capita, thanks to our sprawling cities, our fossil-heated homes, some of the cheapest gasoline on Earth (even with the carbon price) and, yes, our cold climate. 

But pricing carbon isn’t the only way to change behaviour and lower emissions. It’s just one of a huge array of climate policies currently deployed at both the provincial and national level. The B.C. NDP and federal Liberals alike have many other policies in play that could benefit from some healthy political competition. 

The war against carbon pricing is a campaign of mass distraction. If Conservatives think they have a better way to lower Canadians’ carbon footprint (a massive boost to public transit? A wartime footing on green housing? Big investments in clean energy?) they’re welcome to share it. Until they do, it’s hard to believe lowering inflation or emissions is really what they’re after.

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It’s been an extraordinary month for nature protection in British Columbia. A slew of unprecedented funding and legislative announcements have come in almost too fast to keep up with. Taken together, they underscore a sea change in the stewardship of Canada’s most biodiverse province. This marks a historic turning point for B.C., and a potential road map for the rest of Canada — one that was unimaginable when Premier David Eby first took office under the cloud of an ugly tussle with the environmental movement just one year ago.

The changes are so vast that “nature protection” fails to capture the magnitude of events. What’s happening before our eyes is a whole-of-society restructuring. Think of it as a personal makeover for a region twice the size of France, trying to recover from the hangover of 150 years of colonial plunder. 

Garry Merkel, the Tahltan co-author of the Old Growth Strategic Review, described this to me in January as the creation of a “governance superstructure.” The goal is to integrate a system of governance that already exists — the provincial government — with a collective First Nations body being created in the wake of the Declaration on the Rights Of Indigenous Peoples’ Act. Those two bodies will have joint decision-making power over resource extraction throughout the province, in consultation with local communities and individual First Nations. 

Crucially, those decisions will be guided by ecosystem-based management — the “paradigm shift” that Merkel and others have urged for years, whereby policymakers prioritize ecosystem health over industry profit. That’s a feat very few jurisdictions on Earth have managed to pull off.

To be clear, B.C. hasn’t pulled it off yet either. But a lot more than words are on the table now. Back in January, Merkel could only promise that big things were coming. Now some of those big things have arrived, and the contours of B.C.’s superstructure are finally coming into view. 

So what’s actually happened? 

B.C.’s big moves on nature protection

On Oct. 26, Premier Eby unveiled a $300-million conservation-financing fund for old-growth protection, to be administered by First Nations. Indigenous-led conservation financing had been a core demand of First Nations and environmental groups for years, and they were quick to celebrate the news. “This is a big deal,” Ken Wu, executive director of the Endangered Ecosystems Alliance, told The Narwhal at the time. “It’s the money that’s needed.”

Another $700-million announcement was made one week later. On Nov. 3, federal Minister of Environment and Climate Change Steven Guilbeault announced a tripartite “nature agreement,” signed between the federal and provincial governments and the First Nations Leadership Council of B.C. As with the conservation-financing fund, Indigenous-led conservation is at the heart of this agreement. An overarching goal is to fulfill the province’s 2022 commitment to protect 30 per cent of British Columbia by 2030.

Then on Nov. 15, the province released a draft of its long-awaited Biodiversity and Ecosystem Health Framework. This is far more significant than the wonky title may suggest. The framework contains the seeds of legislation that will give teeth to the ambiguous goal of protecting biodiversity articulated in previous agreements. It’s open to public consultation until Jan. 15, 2024; after that the government has promised to codify the framework’s recommendations into law. Victoria Watson, a lawyer and law reform specialist with Ecojustice, said it marked “the B.C. government’s first concrete step towards legally enshrining the prioritization of biodiversity and ecosystem health over industry interests.” 

When progressive values collide

First step remains the critical caveat. Industry lobbyists still have plenty of time to blunt the teeth of any coming legislation, or to carve out precious exemptions from soon-to-be-protected areas. Old-growth is still being logged at this moment; the ongoing construction of the Site C dam and Trans Mountain pipeline expansion continue to wreak environmental havoc and the Coastal GasLink pipeline promises to lock in decades of fracking in the province. 

“We’ve been on this ride with government before,” cautioned Charlotte Dawe from the Wilderness Committee on Nov. 15. “We know logging and mining companies will again be lobbying hard to protect the status quo.” Echoing her counterparts at Ecojustice, Sierra Club and other environmental groups, Dawe urged the public to stay vigilant and ensure the government follows through with its promise to “truly put biodiversity ahead of corporate interests.” 

But these particular corporate interests aren’t ponying up the way they used to, and no one knows it better than the government. As tech, services and real estate have come to dominate our economy, revenue from resource extraction has shrunk to a mere fraction of the province’s total income, roughly six per cent in 2022. 

Zoom in on forestry, which built this province more than any other industry and now stands to be most affected by the nature agreements. This year, provincial revenue from forestry is expected to be around $850 million, roughly one per cent of the $77 billion B.C. will take in. That’s down from the $1 billion forestry earned us 15 years ago, back when our total revenue was just $39 billion. The picture’s just as bleak in terms of jobs: up until 2000, forestry employed about 100,000 of B.C.’s four million residents; today that’s almost down to 40,000 jobs in a population that’s surged past five million. 

Those trends help explain how and why the B.C. NDP is finally starting to square one of the world’s most stubborn circles, which pits two progressive values against each other: how do you protect workers (as a labour party must) and the environment, in a society whose jobs have historically been dominated by resource extraction? Answer: you wait until  the most valuable resources (that is, ancient trees) are gone. Then, you start making bold announcements about a paradigm shift.

Rights of Indigenous Peoples at the heart of protecting biodiversity in B.C.

But there’s another, less cynical piece of this picture, one that’s central to the project B.C. is now embarking on. That’s the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People’s Act, which B.C. became the first jurisdiction in Canada to sign into law in 2019.

A statistic you come across often in environmental circles is that 80 per cent of the world’s biodiversity exists in territories owned, occupied or used by Indigenous Peoples. In B.C., which is almost entirely unceded, that’s an understatement. Now B.C. is showing the world what it means to act on that knowledge in legal and economic terms, first through the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People’s Act and then the nature agreements which build on that legislation. 

Remember, once the Biodiversity and Ecosystem Health Framework is finalized — in direct collaboration with First Nations — the province has charged itself with writing new legislation that will actually enforce the protection of biodiversity and ecosystem health over corporate profits. Wu has described this as flipping the old model upside down: whereas it used to be government aimed to minimize the impact of conservation targets on industry (say, by protecting mountaintops no loggers were looking at anyway), going forward the government will strive to minimize the impact of industry on conservation targets.

This coming legislation was among the recommendations of the Old Growth Strategic Review, which made clear that noble ideals like “managing for ecosystem health” are useless without laws to back them up. In laying out what that legislation should look like, the Strategic Review’s authors explicitly named the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People’s Act as a model construct.

Everything now depends on what, exactly, the province does next. Will it place immediate protections on endangered ecosystems and species while the new legislation is being mulled, and the money is slowly deployed? How far will that new legislation really go to protect biodiversity over industry profits? Will the negotiated demands of First Nations be met in good faith? What kinds of loopholes will be left?

Those are critical questions to bear in mind. But no less critical is the national context in which the news of these past weeks has taken place. A new brand of right-wing conservatism, disdainful of  environmental protection, is sweeping Canada. Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario are already within its grip, with Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives poised to take over federal governance in the next election. It is impossible to imagine B.C. signing anything like the nature agreement with a Conservative government. 

In light of those developments, we should pause to acknowledge and celebrate the moves that B.C.’s NDP is making. Not just to be nice, but to show them — and the rest of Canada — that these kinds of deals can win elections, too.

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Five continents. Sixty-five countries. Over five hundred cities. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of protesters. The activist wing of the climate movement came out of its long pandemic slumber over the weekend, reigniting protests in the first global climate strike since Greta Thunberg sailed to New York in 2019.

The March To End Fossil Fuels has a straightforward demand for world leaders attending the United Nations’ Climate Ambition Summit in New York this week: “All we’re asking for is a plan,” said Tzeporah Berman, executive director of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, a key coalition member of this weekend’s strike. “A plan to manage the decline of fossil fuel production.” 

Other protesters had harsher words or more specific demands relating to whichever pipeline happened to bisect their territory, but all shared the same fundamental ask: quit prevaricating. Start executing the phase-down of fossil fuel production, and take care of workers while you do it.

In Vancouver, where I live, roughly 5,000 people turned out. We staged at city hall, then marched across Cambie Bridge to the Vancouver Art Gallery, under a fittingly scorching sun. I brought my seven-year-old daughter; she experienced the event as a carnival of strange delights, waving her hand-drawn placard (planet, cosmos, witches), impressed by the spectacle and indifferent to the calculus of political impact that drove so many adults to chant incomprehensible couplets, play instruments she’d never seen or heard before and don costumes six weeks before Halloween.

Unlike climate policy, a successful street march relies heavily on vibe, and this one was full of it.

And yet, throughout that Friday afternoon, I couldn’t help wondering: what should we make of the numbers?  

For as vibrant as it was, Vancouver’s turnout in 2023 was a mere shadow of 2019’s, when 100,000 people swarmed the exact same route. That, too, was a Friday afternoon, so you couldn’t blame the work day. A similar diminution marked the whole global movement: three times more countries hosted rallies in 2019 than this year. In New York, then as now, the strike’s epicentre, organizers estimated 250,000 people came out to see Greta Thunberg in 2019; four years later, the number dropped to 75,000.

Fossil fuel production, meanwhile, has gone in the opposite direction. Canada has doubled its output of oil and gas since 2010, and today is second only to the U.S. for planned expansion of oil and gas production. Although production falls under provincial jurisdiction, Ottawa does have the power to impose an emissions cap, something Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been promising for almost two years. A central demand of protests across Canada was for Trudeau to finally deliver on that promise.

As Caroline Brouillette, executive director of the Canadian chapter of the Climate Action Network, told me: “We need more than just vibes from the prime minister on this policy.”

Tempered expectations from climate march organizers 

There’s a powerful temptation, when describing a movement you admire, to wrap it in positive spin. To emphasize the good, zoom in on small victories, elide big disappointments. That tendency was apparent in most of the speeches I heard on Friday. Much as I sympathized — you’re trying to inspire the masses, not depress them — I also felt my hackles rise. That style of narration embodies the slick slope from reporting to propaganda; once you slide down, it’s all but impossible to climb back up.

And so for me, the weekend was both joyous and laden with self-reckoning: could I describe what I saw honestly without sounding defeated? Would that not be a disservice to the countless hours of unpaid labour the organizers had put in, for a cause I too hold dear? Mightn’t their literal labour of love validate a narrative that’s hopeful and honest?  

“Pretty much every spare minute of my daily life has been consumed by this,” an organizer with the grassroots climate group For Our Kids told me a few days before the Vancouver rally. He asked me not to use his name, for fear his employer would frown on how much this march had cut into his work life. His children were a prime motivation. “When they grow up, if they ever ask me, ‘how did this happen,’ I want to be able to at least look my son in the eyes and tell him that I tried.”

Like others I spoke to, this organizer never expected to draw the same numbers as 2019 had pulled; the pandemic had taken too much of a toll on the movement, here and everywhere. The success of Vancouver’s 2019 strike was thanks to the inspired efforts of a youth group called the Sustainabiliteens; but like Greta Thunberg, those teens had all since graduated, leaving an organizational vacuum in their wake.

For Our Kids and a handful of other coalition partners had to fill that void from scratch, with less than three months’ notice (the global strike wasn’t announced until early July). “It just kind of fell in our lap,” the organizer said. “What we’re trying to do in organizing this strike is bring back some of that energy that in 2019 was a real tipping point.”

“Organizing and movements are all about momentum,” Brouillette said. In 2019, the movement had a breathtaking amount of it: Extinction Rebellion had just stormed the streets of London with such theatrical panache that the U.K. declared a climate emergency weeks later, inspiring chapters to form in dozens of countries. At the same time Greta Thunberg was cresting to fame, bringing Fridays For Future to cities all over the world and lending her star power to the blockbuster climate-strike weekend of 2019. Six months later came the global lockdown. 

“So this is only the start, the restart and the reignition of this energy,” Brouillette said.

Something worth pushing for

It’s too early to know if reality will live up to that sentiment. But activism isn’t the only branch of the climate movement; another is the clean-energy business, which had a far more successful pandemic than grassroots organizers did. The explosion of renewables is no longer a matter of wishful thinking, but rather a concrete phenomenon — one that’s much easier to quantify than the policy impacts of activism. 

Even those impacts, ephemeral as they are, may be coming into view. It could be mere coincidence that California chose the first day of the climate strikes as the day to announce the state’s historic lawsuit against five of the biggest oil companies on Earth, suing Exxon, BP, Shell, ConocoPhillips and Chevron, for their decades of climate disinformation. It isn’t the first lawsuit of its kind, but it is by far the biggest, with the leader of the world’s fifth largest economy — itself founded on the proceeds of oil — personally endorsing the suit. “The climate crisis is after all a fossil fuel crisis, period,” Governor Gavin Newsom said right around the time my daughter and I were marching across the Cambie Bridge. “The scale and scope of what California can do, we think, can move the needle.”

Now that’s a speech worth cheering for. Let’s hope our own prime minister is listening, and preparing some needle-moving measures of his own. Until then, is there any choice but to keep pushing?

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As wildfires continue their march across British Columbia and the Fairy Creek protests reignite, a related drama is about to unfold to much less fanfare in room 35 of the B.C. Supreme Court in Vancouver. The case pits a forestry company against two unlikely co-defendants: the Province of B.C. and the Haida Gwaii Management Council. The company is suing them for $75 million — the cost, it claims, of being forced to stop logging old-growth forests on Haida Gwaii. 

The company in question? Teal Cedar Products Ltd., a division of the Teal-Jones Group, the same one operating at Fairy Creek. 

The trial began in May and adjourned for the summer in June, after several weeks of eye-opening testimony that offered a window into the government’s thinking on reconciliation, resource extraction and ecological protection. It resumes today, with more high-profile witnesses to come. Chief among them is Pat Bell, B.C.’s former minister of forests, who Teal claims made the company a verbal promise it would be “kept whole” in the wake of sweeping forestry reforms on Haida Gwaii more than a decade ago. 

In many ways, Teal’s lawsuit is a dark-mirror inversion of the conflict playing out at Fairy Creek, the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history. For as protesters return to logging roads on southern Vancouver Island, an awkward fact remains: the elected and hereditary leadership of the nations there oppose the blockades and support Teal-Jones. This has given Teal a precarious high ground in Fairy Creek, one that Pacheedaht Chief Jeff Jones emphasized in the memorandum of understanding his nation signed with Teal two years ago: “Since taking responsibility for managing Tree Farm License 46 in our territory in 2004, Teal-Jones has consistently demonstrated respect for our rights and values.” 

But what if the First Nation decided it wanted to stop logging old-growth? Would Teal-Jones continue to respect their rights and values, or would they turn from partner to adversary? 

Those aren’t hypothetical questions. They were put to Teal-Jones on Haida Gwaii in 2010, and the company answered by suing for damages. 

The lawsuit has enormous implications that go well beyond Haida Gwaii, or even B.C. One of the people watching closely is Estair Van Wagner, co-director of Osgood Hall Law School’s Environmental Justice and Sustainability Clinic, and an associate law professor at York University.

“At the core of the real public interest here,” she told me, “is what happens when there are conflicts between these big important movements we’re making as a society, and that governments make on our behalf towards reconciliation — what happens when those kinds of efforts clash with private interests?”

Amid protest and court battles, Haida Gwaii sets a model for B.C.

Teal began logging on Haida Gwaii in 1999 after acquiring two tenures — Tree Farm License 58 and Forest License A16870 — from the previous owner, TimberWest (the purchase was formally completed in 2008, for $4.8 million). Both tenures had seen substantial logging, yet retained significant stands of old-growth. 

But anti-logging protests had rocked the archipelago since the mid-1980s, and continued to erupt sporadically through the early 2000s. Those protests were channeled into the Haida Nation’s court battle against the province’s Ministry of Forests, which culminated in the Supreme Court of Canada’s historic 2004 Haida decision, entrenching in law the government’s “duty to consult” First Nations on matters affecting their territory.

The Haida decision marked a turning point, not an end, in the Haida Nation’s ongoing struggle to regain autonomy over their lands and waters. It also coincided with a massive public movement to protect British Columbia’s dwindling stands of ancient forest. Both were repeatedly cited by the province in court last spring.

“We came to a point where society’s expectations for the management of their public resource had shifted, and policy, legislation and management framework had not,” Albert Nussbaum, B.C.’s current deputy chief forester, recalled when he was asked to describe the evolution of provincial forest policy. “It has become, over the course of my career, very apparent that our responsibilities toward First Nations are unique and require a whole level of collaboration now that wasn’t even conceived of when I started my career.”

The government Nussbaum works for didn’t reach that conclusion on its own. For decades, it deployed armies of lawyers to fight the very notion of a duty to consult, along with the principle that duty is grounded in underlying Aboriginal Title. This carried on well after the Haida decision should have put the matter to rest, right up until the Tsilhqot’in Nation defeated the Crown to become the first nation in Canada to win Aboriginal Title over a swathe of its traditional territory. In that case, which concluded in 2014, one of the Crown prosecutors arguing against the Tsilhqot’in was Graham Underwood; today Underwood, still a Crown prosecutor, is on the other side of the table, arguing the government has every right to protect a First Nation’s interests against a logging company. 

In 2009, the province and Haida Nation signed the Kunst’aa guu – Kunst’aayah Reconciliation Protocol, “which reflected the parties’ intention to implement joint and shared decision making over forest management on Haida Gwaii,” according to the Crown’s opening argument. That intention was made manifest one year later through the creation of the Haida Gwaii Management Council. The council has ultimate authority over resource extraction on Haida Gwaii, and is comprised of five board members: two appointed by the council of the Haida Nation, two appointed by the province and one chair who is mutually agreed on by both parties.

The Haida Gwaii Management Council’s current chair is Hereditary Haida Chief Allan Davidson. “For my whole life, I have been a member of a nation that has been locked in conflict with the province,” Davidson told me. “When I was young on Haida Gwaii, the rate of logging was staggering and we as a nation had no say over it.” 

“I remember watching huge logging barges loaded down with old-growth leaving the island almost every day,” he said. “So when it comes to working with the province, we definitely have some history to overcome. But things can change. During my lifetime, we have made big strides reclaiming what is ours.”

In 2012, the Haida Gwaii Management Council reduced the annual allowable cut for Haida Gwaii by half. It also imposed a new regime of ecosystem-based management over what was left, on top of prohibitions to protect culturally sensitive areas. This put the remaining old-growth in Teal’s two tenures out of reach. In 2016, Teal sold the tenures to A&A Trading, then proceeded to sue the province and Haida Gwaii Management Council for the profits lost from not being able to log as planned. Should Teal win, the province — which is to say, taxpayers — will pay the entire cost.

If $75 million in lost profits doesn’t sound like much, consider that this is just one case, and the province has sold hundreds of forestry tenures to logging interests across B.C. All are on First Nations territory; all are now subject to the paradigm shift first enacted on Haida Gwaii. As Nussbaum, the deputy chief forester, explained in his testimony: “The planning done in Haida Gwaii had that ecological focus, and now it might expand from there across the province.”

In saying “might” instead of “will,” Nussbaum revealed the true stakes of this case. Neither Teal-Jones nor the province would speak with me about a matter that’s before the courts. But a spokesperson for B.C.’s attorney general did answer one of my questions by email: “There is no legislation in place that protects the Crown and First Nations from similar lawsuits going forward.”

The heart of the matter: reconciliation

In its opening arguments, Teal acknowledges that any forest license is subject to changing regulations; the annual allowable cut and other parameters are constantly being adjusted to reflect changing conditions in forest health, among other considerations. But according to Teal, reconciliation falls outside the suite of policy considerations a government may invoke when changing regulations.

“Teal does not question the laudability of the reconciliation objectives,” the company told the judge last May. “This case is about the private law implications of that decision: where the province’s pursuit of reconciliation results in a breach of the private law rights of third parties, this gives rise to private law remedies — including damages.”

The Crown, of course, disagrees. 

“This case is about the province exercising its public law powers to reflect changes in public values over the management of a public resource,” it said in the first line of its opening statement. “Teal did not have a private law right to be insulated from the effects of the evolving forest management regime, the effects of the evolution of public values or the effects of the evolving imperative to reconcile.” 

The province further disputes Teal’s characterization of what it had bought in the first place. “Tenures represent an opportunity, not a guarantee,” the province said. “Tenures do not guarantee a value, profit, particular mix or grade of timber, a particular forest management regime to operate under, or an achievable allowable annual cut.”

According to the province, reconciliation was but one factor — albeit the most significant — behind the changes that Teal argues amounted to a breach of contract. “A timber supply crisis in a languishing coastal forest industry, rapid change in understanding the legal and moral duty to reconcile with Indigenous Peoples and public demands for protection of non-timber values in public forests” all combined to bring dramatic reforms to Haida Gwaii, reforms now being contemplated for the entire province. “Instead of responding to this changing landscape,” the province charged, “Teal shut down its operations on Haida Gwaii and sold its tenures.”

And then, of course, it sued.

Which precedent will be set?

The Haida Gwaii Management Council will be the last of the three parties to present their arguments in court, with testimony from Davidson and others. They’ll begin after the province concludes its arguments and Teal completes its cross-examination, this month. The trial is expected to wrap by Christmas, after which the judge will have six months to write her decision. 

So it could be almost a year before we learn which precedent this conflict sets. Will reconciliation and the sweeping industrial reforms the B.C. NDP has promised expose taxpayers to untold billions in compensatory lawsuits? Or will the province be able to fulfill its obligations without fear of similar reprisals down the road?

That’s no small matter. But regardless of the outcome, this trial has already delivered a powerful lesson into the mechanics of social change. Through its own opening statement and the testimony of multiple senior bureaucrats, the government portrayed new legislation as the direct result of mass protest combined with legal challenges. 

The saga playing out in courtroom 35 is just the latest iteration of that larger story. This time, however, the government finds itself under attack from the very interests it spent the last 150 years protecting.

Updated Sept. 6, 2023, 10:50 a.m. PT: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated A&A Trading is a Haida-owned forestry company. The company is not Haida-owned.

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Near the end of July, I found myself discussing grasshoppers with an organic farmer named Thomas Tumbach.

I’d asked how his six-hectare Okanagan farm was faring amidst what’s shaping up to be the worst drought in B.C.’s history, expecting an answer that had something to do with water shortage. But Tumbach told me the drought wasn’t hitting his crop so directly; like most farms in the Okanagan, his irrigation water comes from a highland lake that isn’t in any immediate danger of running dry.  

It’s the knock-on effects that are killing him, he explained. One in particular: as the surrounding landscape desiccates, irrigated farms become oases that draw pests desperate for moisture. This year an unprecedented grasshopper infestation has laid waste to Tumbach’s vegetable harvest. He estimates the bugs will cost him more than $50,000 this year, a crippling blow for any small farmer.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. Nor is his an isolated case: grasshoppers are devouring crops from the Similkameen Valley in southwest B.C. all the way to Alberta.

And they’re just one of many drought impacts being overshadowed by this summer’s wildfires — an understandable distraction. Tumbach’s own home has been repeatedly threatened by wildfire in recent years, so he knows as well as anyone that when flames are bearing down, nothing else matters.

But water is life. In the long run its absence is even more lethal and far-reaching than fire, which is but one of drought’s many consequences. Others are playing out in every corner of the province right now, in ways both surprising and predictable. They range from insect plagues and parched crops to dead salmon, mental health issues, infrastructure crises and an overstretched public service.

So what’s to be done? Can the B.C. NDP do it? The provincial government has passed a number of policies that could help communities and ecosystems struggling to adapt to hotter, drier summers. Unfortunately, it seems afraid to use them.  

Two canaries on the coast

“As a society, we have to get over the idea that we have a limitless water supply,” said Donna McMahon, director of the Sunshine Coast Regional District for Elphinstone, a district studded with small farms. 

Since 2015, the Sunshine Coast has imposed Stage 4 water restrictions five times. Farmers have been prohibited from watering crops for periods ranging from two weeks in 2018 to three months in 2022. 

Most years, drought has been confined to small pockets of B.C. That, combined with the Sunshine Coast’s relative isolation, has made the region’s water scarcity seem unique. But this year, two thirds of B.C.’s water basins were at drought level 4 or 5 — the most extreme rating — by the end of July and water restrictions are coming into place in almost every corner of the province. The Sunshine Coast is no longer exceptional. “We may have been a bit of a canary in the coal mine, but our situation is far from unique,” McMahon said.

Part of that “situation” involves the bureaucratic obstacles to getting new water infrastructure in place. Silas White, mayor of Gibsons, the southernmost town on the Sunshine Coast, articulated the problem in an open letter to Premier David Eby published on May 31.

Crucial water-supply and storage projects are “mired in administrative and operational delays,” White wrote, adding that the impact went well beyond infrastructure. “My primary reason for writing you is to share with you this significant mental health and social phenomenon that has become absolutely real in our community, because it does not show up in our water licence applications or technical reports.”

These are issues that communities all over the province, especially rural ones, are now grappling with. 

Another isolated community whose water crisis is veering from exceptional to emblematic happens to be among the rainiest places on earth: Tofino, B.C. 

By July 20, the town had received just 20 mm of rain in three months, about one fifteenth of the 275 mm it historically gets over that period. 

Although voluntary water restrictions were in place, Mayor Dan Law was hopeful his community could “race the drought to the end and we won’t have to take those drastic stage 4 measures.”

Tofino gets all its water from nearby Meares Island – the same island MacMillan Bloedel planned to clearcut in the early 1980s, only to be repelled by Tla’o’qui’aht and Ahousaht nations and the small army of activists they inspired. Four decades later, the reservoir supplying Tofino’s residents and the one million tourists that pass through each year, mostly in summer, is being replenished almost solely by moss, which absorbs moisture from fog and dew and drips it back into the ground. That moss, in turn, requires the shade and protection of primary forest to flourish. 

“So because of the vision and action of Tla’o’qui’aht First Nation, specifically Chief Moses Martin, in the 1980s, we have a healthy watershed,” Law said. “I think that’s extremely important for all of us to realize: the action that we take today, the wisdom of it may only become apparent in 40 years, and likely the inaction may become apparent too. ”

Highlighting the link between healthy ecosystems and water security isn’t the only lesson Tofino offers. As the town weighs its own options for expanding its water supply and enhancing conservation, memories of 2006 are top of mind. That year, drought forced the community to close all businesses, including resorts, turning visitors away and crippling the local economy as it came to the brink of running out of tap water. 

That experience galvanized the community to increase its reservoir and impose water metering on several big resorts. Thanks to those actions, 2023 has yet to reach the dire circumstances of 2006, despite this year being drier, Law explained. 

Are B.C. authorities leading, or reacting?

In 2016, B.C. passed the Water Sustainability Act, which gave the province wide-ranging powers to monitor water levels and enforce conservation measures. In 2021, the province launched a $27 million Healthy Watersheds Initiative that continues to evolve and expand, most recently with a $100 million endowment from the province in March 2023. The Watershed Security Fund, as it’s now called, will go toward habitat restoration, improving water-supply infrastructure and mapping watersheds across the province; an intentions paper in collaboration with First Nations is still in the works.

The problem, Oliver Brandes said, is that after giving itself those powers, the province has largely failed to exploit them. “We’ve got all these wonderful tools,” Brandes, project lead of the University of Victoria’s POLIS Water Sustainability Project, said. “Use them.” 

“The province has an unbelievably important role in providing confidence and management in drought. And that is the concern here,” Brandes said. He feels that provincial officials have — yet again — been caught flat-footed by a predictable emergency: B.C. didn’t issue its first official warning of impending drought until June 23 and that warning came with a request for voluntary water conservation rather than a mandate. “We knew it was coming in May and June, so where are the orders? Where are the fish protection orders, the critical flow orders? Where are the enforcement actions on unregulated groundwater users? Are we enforcing the rules?”

One crucial gap between water-policy intent and execution in B.C. is the province’s failure to register thousands of unlicensed, non-domestic water users, a category that encompasses water-bottlers, farmers, tourism operators and small industries. “If you’re going to manage the system, you’ve got to know who’s using the water and how much they’re taking,” Brandes said. 

Instead, provincial authorities are largely flying blind. Under the Water Sustainability Act, the province set a March 2022 deadline for an estimated 20,000 such non-domestic users to license their water use; only 7,900 applied. The result has been a haphazard enforcement of water restrictions, with a handful of unlicensed water users being cut off while thousands more have yet to suffer any consequence, and licensed users now find themselves subject to restrictions.

The Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship and the Ministry of Emergency Management and Climate Readiness both declined an interview request. They sent a joint emailed response instead that read, in part, “We are calling on everyone in B.C. — including industrial water users – to reduce their water usage … the province is actively monitoring conditions, and will not hesitate to establish Temporary Protection Orders to restrict water usage by water licence holders if voluntary compliance does not result in the necessary reductions.” The email cited the water policies the province has passed, including the sustainability act. 

Brandes allowed that the province’s new policies and legal tools articulated “exactly the right commitment” but enforcement and application should have begun years ago. “Look at how many droughts there have been since 2016. We passed the legislation knowing full well this world was coming … There’s no excuse to say, ‘oh, I didn’t see a drought coming in 2023,’ ” Brandes said.

Aaron Hill, executive director of Watershed Watch Salmon Society, has tried to get the NDP government to be more aggressive with water management. “The unlicensed users should be their highest priority and they should be putting the full weight of the law behind enforcing that regulation, and they’re not,” he said.

“We brought this to their attention last year.”

But the society’s attempts to engage the B.C. government sound like a scene from Catch-22, with the Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship directing Hill to the Ministry of Emergency Management and Climate Readiness, who pointed him to the Ministry of Forests and so on. “It was a clown show,” he said. 

I asked both Brandes and Hill if there wasn’t a chance that B.C.’s public service was simply overextended; this year’s drought, after all, is but the latest in a series of unprecedented catastrophes that go well beyond climate disasters. Both felt I was being too soft. “I don’t believe it’s just a staff problem,” said Brandes. “It’s really a priorities problem.”

But Donna McMahon, the Sunshine Coast Regional District director, felt otherwise. “Everybody’s overwhelmed,” she agreed when I put the same question to her. “The civil service that supports the Water Sustainability Act – when they put that Act through, they did not adequately resource it. And those people are overwhelmed, and they’re absolutely years behind in trying to process things like water licences.”

Tofino’s mayor, Dan Law, also had a far more sympathetic view of the NDP’s leadership. “The province has been excellent,” he told me, describing a productive relationship with numerous ministries which were all attentive to his feedback. Law is keenly aware this summer’s B.C. drought is no one-off, but rather a sign of things to come. Did he honestly feel that B.C.’s NDP saw things the same way?

“Absolutely,” he said. “This is really the start of hopefully a new relationship, where the province starts to look at everything in light of a changing climate … The costs are enormous to the province and they’re very well aware of that.”

Law’s confidence seems optimistic: the province has had years to factor the costs of climate change into its water policy. But bureaucracies move slowly, and this isn’t John Horgan’s NDP anymore. As a new generation of leaders assume key cabinet positions under Eby, they now have a chance to start using the policy tools at their disposal and proactively preparing this province for a hotter, drier future.

Properly speaking, it isn’t just a chance: it’s an imperative.

Updated on Aug. 18, 2023, at 1:58 p.m. PT: This story has been updated to clarify that the March 2022 deadline set by B.C. authorities was for non-domestic users to licence their water use, not register their wells.

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Humanity is on the verge of two drastically different futures: one hopeful, one disastrous. 

Toppling like a set of happy dominoes are advancements in clean energy uptake — rapid transitions to wind and solar in particular that are set to push coal off a cliff. But we’re also breaking a bunch of doomsday records, including Canada’s worst wildfire season ever, oceans smashing temperature highs, Antarctic sea ice extent at a new low and record heat waves blossoming from China to Mexico.

The bad stuff adds up: in early June, Earth’s average global surface air temperature flicked temporarily across the 1.5 C threshold for the first time in history. That number is symbolic, but it represents a concrete threat: beyond 1.5 C above pre-industrial temperatures, the likelihood of major Earth systems flipping from one state to another — of permafrost melting, monsoon season shifting or major ocean currents slowing down and stopping — increases dramatically.

Because of the unfathomably complex interplay between those planetary systems, it’s impossible to predict exactly when, say, the Amazon will become a savannah. But it’s widely agreed, as the Yale School of Environment warned in March, “surpassing 1.5 C could trigger a cascade of tipping points, which would irreversibly alter the global climate system.”

But not all tipping points are bad, and the good stuff adds up too.

In 2021, it became cheaper to replace existing coal-powered plants with wind and/or solar than to just keep burning coal. The next year, growth in solar capacity alone surpassed that of all other sources of energy combined. Now power-sector emissions have peaked, and will fall in 2023 for the first time since electricity was invented.

These are enormously important thresholds. Electricity generation is (for now but not much longer) the single biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions, almost double that of transportation.

What exactly is a tipping point? 

Mini-tipping points are now proliferating throughout the global economy. Last year, Europe marked a new first by generating more power from wind and solar than from any other source. In the U.S., thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act’s $66-billion per year investment in clean energy, heat pumps outpaced furnace installations in new buildings last year, for the first time ever.

“This is the pivotal decade in the energy transition,” agrees a new report from the Rocky Mountain Institute. “Renewables will hit price tipping points in every major area of energy demand.” 

It all adds up. By 2025, renewables will supplant fossil fuels as the world’s number one source of electricity, prompting the International Energy Agency’s director Fatih Birol to declare in February, “We are close to a tipping point.”

Let’s pause for a moment to recall exactly what a “tipping point” is. 

“The moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point,” is how journalist Malcolm Gladwell described it in his debut book, The Tipping Point, which launched both writer and subject to fame. Tipping points are moments of sudden transformation and, as Gladwell discovered, they occur in all sorts of systems — consumer fads and epidemics, chemical reactions and political revolutions; earth scientists sometimes call it a “regime shift” when an ecosystem flips, or collapses. 

Climate change was notably absent from Gladwell’s bestseller, which came out in 2000 (right when Canadian forests began emitting more carbon than they absorb). Still, he deployed some accidental foreshadowing when he defined a tipping point as “that magic moment when an idea, trend or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips and spreads like wildfire.” 

Fire itself is the perfect illustration of a tipping point: if you keep adding heat to a fuel source, the moment of critical mass will announce itself as flame, beyond which no more input is required. Once lit, a fire feeds itself.

In the context of climate change, that’s terrifying. Considered in light of the clean energy explosion transforming the global economy, it is the ultimate cause for optimism.

Fossil fuel pressures impacting progress 

Of course there are obstacles — namely, the $2 trillion in annual profits generated by existing fossil fuel infrastructure, and the political momentum that money has captured. “Many energy actors cannot conceive of a world of change and work actively to maintain the status quo,” the Rocky Mountain Institute report politely observes. 

One Canadian embodiment of that status quo maintenance is the Pathways Alliance, a coalition of the country’s largest oil producers that have cloaked their pursuit of unlimited growth in a promise to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. “Last year was a record year for global oil demand,” the Alliance’s vice-president, Mark Cameron, told the Globe and Mail in response to a new report from the Canada Energy Regulator, which outlined the devastating impact an aggressive energy transition will have on Canada’s oilpatch. “So I don’t think I would assume that we’re going to … all of a sudden be on that global net-zero track,” Cameron said.  

But assumptions are no longer a determining factor. “The crucial thing is, before a tipping point, the force in the system is trying to hold back the transition … it takes real effort to try and help the new technology grow and establish itself,” Simon Sharpe, author of Five Times Faster: Rethinking the Science, Economics and Diplomacy, said in a recent interview with BBC’s Future Planet. 

“But beyond the tipping point,” Sharpe continued, “it’s reversed and the momentum is with the new technology. It’s growing fast, and it’s benefiting from these really strong, reinforcing feedbacks — the more people buy it, the more people invest in it, its cost comes down, it improves and then more people want to buy it, and this keeps going … That’s when the transition really takes off.”

Our federal government — despite its pipeline-buying ways — is at least aware of this. “These are forces that are well beyond the government of Canada,” Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said in response to that Canada Energy Regulator report. “This is about global demand and global price.” 

That demand, and those prices, have finally combined to produce the fastest energy transition in human history. It’s exploding all over the world, right now. But will it be fast enough? Emissions remain higher today than ever before; can we really reverse fossil fuel’s momentum fast enough to stop runaway climate change? 

This is the decade we’ll find out. But exciting as it is to watch — and really, what could be more gripping — this isn’t a spectator sport. Fossil fuel interests may not be able to prevent their own demise, but they can postpone it long enough to bring the rest of us down with them. Indeed, they’re actively working to do so. That means we have to push back: every election in every jurisdiction; every climate rally; every letter to your editor or member of parliament counts. You don’t have to be an activist. Donations and dinner table conversations matter too, as does knowing where your pensions and RRSP investments go. What we’re after is critical mass.  

That is, after all, one of the more salient features of a tipping point, the quality that ought to inspire fear and hope in equal measure: once you’ve reached the threshold, a tiny push is all it takes.

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On June 8, a pair of old-growth logging deferrals protecting Fairy Creek and much of the neighbouring central Walbran Valley on southwest Vancouver Island are set to expire. The deferrals were the direct result of a major campaign to protect old-growth forest, which became the biggest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history — more than 1,100 arrests were made. But, despite having two years to prepare for the white-hot political deadline, the B.C. NDP government has yet to reveal any hint of a post-deferral plan.

In lieu of an interview, the B.C. Ministry of Forests provided a written statement to The Narwhal that reads, in part: “We continue to work together with the Pacheedaht, Ditidaht and Huu-ay-aht First Nations on the long-term strategy for managing old-growth in the area. To support this work, an extension of the Fairy Creek watershed and central Walbran deferrals is under consideration and an update will be available soon.” 

The spokesperson declined to specify exactly how soon.

None of the three First Nations whose territory encompasses the deferral areas responded to The Narwhal’s interview requests. They were the ones who initially requested the deferrals, which came into effect on June 9, 2021, at the height of the protests. At the time, the First Nations said they were creating a long-term forest management plan, a process that appears to be ongoing.

The Teal-Jones Group, the forestry company that holds the tenure affected by the deferrals (tree farm licence 46), said nobody should expect chainsaws to fire up on June 9.

“We don’t have any current plans for the deferred areas in [tree farm licence] 46,” Conrad Browne, Teal-Jones’ director of Indigenous engagement, told The Narwhal. “We also don’t know what the province might do with the deferred areas. They have not been communicating with us.”

Browne’s evident frustration with the B.C. NDP’s lack of transparency may be the one thing he and Teal-Jones have in common with the “environmentalist protesters” he repeatedly decried.

“Government transparency is really problematic, and this is a great example,” Torrance Coste, campaign director with the Wilderness Committee, said in an interview. Old-growth logging deferrals are “a major environmental issue that the province has made some big promises on, and there’s so little clarity about what exactly is happening,” Coste said.

Conservation financing needed, Green Party leader says 

Sonia Furstenau, leader of the B.C. Green Party, also expressed frustration at the provincial government’s silence on this file. 

“If the proposal for First Nations is ‘you can have the logging activity on your territory and you can benefit from that with some revenue, or you can have no benefit and no revenue,’ then that puts First Nations in a very difficult position,” Furstenau said. “So the conversation has to include conservation financing,” whereby provincial and federal governments compensate First Nations and forestry companies for leaving old-growth untouched. 

That model protected 70 per cent of the old-growth forests in the Great Bear Rainforest on B.C.’s north central coast. “That’s what we should expect,” Furstenau said. “And if it’s not that, then it’s another example of this government failing to keep its word, particularly when it comes to protection of old-growth.”

In a mandate letter to Minister of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship Nathan Cullen, B.C. Premier David Eby instructed Cullen to work with other ministries to develop a “new conservation financing mechanism to support protection of biodiverse areas.” But so far the B.C. government has declined to match a $50-million commitment from the federal government for old-growth protections. 

In its statement, the Forests Ministry said it has instituted deferrals covering 2.1 million hectares of old-growth forests across the province, with more to come. “Out of respect for the confidentiality of the engagement process, the province is not proactively disclosing the responses of individual First Nations,” the statement said. 

Those 2.1 million hectares belong to a wave of “voluntary” deferrals, distinct from the “regulation based” deferrals like Fairy Creek and central Walbran, where it is illegal to log — at least until those deferrals expire. But no such legal protection applies to the voluntary deferrals.

As a result, some old-growth logging has continued in those areas. An independent analysis conducted by Stand.earth using satellite imagery estimates more than 55,000 hectares of old-growth — equivalent to more than 27 Fairy Creeks — has been logged since the voluntary deferrals were put in place. The NDP government hasn’t shared precise figures on what’s been logged, just as it hasn’t disclosed where progress stands on negotiations with First Nations.

Fairy Creek negotiations happening behind closed doors 

So, is the province hiding behind its “respect for the confidentiality of the engagement process,” or is it genuinely embroiled in the gargantuan task of giving more than 200 First Nations the time they need to make long-term, ecosystem-based management plans?

“It’s a bit of both,” according to Coste. “But at the end of the day they did make some promises on old-growth on a province-wide basis. They, of course, have nation-to-nation responsibilities with every First Nation, but they need to square those two. That’s their responsibility. They made the promises.”

Those promises have generated as much suspicion from logging companies as they have from environmentalists and opposition parties, for opposite reasons. In a December 2021 interview, Conrad Browne, from Teal-Jones, said: “I think that the province has now switched into the propaganda stage. … Our forestry — no matter what the environmentalist protesters or governments try and tell you — our forestry practices lead the world. So when the government is out there knocking our current forest practices it’s really hard to take.”

That statement may sound laughable to the blockaders and others concerned about old-growth logging –– for one thing, the B.C. NDP has taken infinite flack for not criticizing Teal-Jones or the aggressive tactics RCMP sometimes used to arrest protesters on the company’s behalf; for another, a simple flight over Vancouver Island reveals the devastating legacy of industrial logging here. But Browne is right about at least one thing: The Pacheedaht, Ditidaht and Huu-ay-aht First Nations have a much better relationship with Teal-Jones than they do with the people who swarmed their territory in 2021, refusing to leave despite repeated requests from the nations’ leaders.

“Since taking responsibility for managing tree farm licence 46 in our territory in 2004, Teal-Jones has consistently demonstrated respect for our rights and values,” Pacheedaht Chief Jeff Jones is quoted as saying in the memorandum of understanding his nation signed with the company in September 2022. The memorandum commits the two parties to jointly develop “a world-class integrated resource management plan to ensure responsible stewardship of at-risk species and ecosystems within the Nation’s traditional territories now and for future generations.” 

Browne said he doesn’t know what forest management plans the Pacheedaht Nation is negotiating with the province, or when they will be announced. 

“Teal-Jones is waiting for the government to declare what is happening within the deferred area, and the outcome of that will then kick off our conversation with Pacheedaht Nation,” Browne said. “We’re the meat in the sandwich here.”

Protests or lawsuits: B.C. faces unsavoury choices as it contemplates renewing deferrals

B.C.’s Forest Act allows the province to ban logging within a tenure for up to four years before the affected company can sue for damages. So one easy out, and perhaps the likeliest outcome, is for the provincial government to renew the deferrals and buy themselves two more years.

Either way, a reckoning is coming. If the government re-opens the deferred areas to logging, they risk a fresh round of protests. If, on the other hand, they work out an agreement with First Nations to permanently protect the old-growth in their territory, they run an equal risk of being sued by Teal-Jones.

Neither risk is hypothetical. RCMP spending at Fairy Creek has already cost the province more than $18 million, plus untold political capital. Yet in a separate case, Teal-Jones is suing the province for $75 million in damages it claims resulted from the imposition of ecosystem-based management on two of its tenures in Haida Gwaii, after the Crown reached an agreement with the Council of Haida Nations to reform forestry there. 

That trial is currently underway at the B.C. Supreme Court in Vancouver, and is expected to run well into the fall. The government and Teal-Jones both refused to comment on the matter while it’s before the courts. 

But when it comes to the June 8 deadline looming over Fairy Creek, public opinion is the only court involved. In that room, the government’s silence is getting louder, and costlier, every day.

This work is made possible with the support of the glasswaters foundation. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, no foundation or outside organization has editorial input into our stories.

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The federal government has approved the Port of Vancouver’s proposal to build a second container ship terminal at the mouth of the Fraser River. Roberts Bank Terminal 2 will double the port’s current footprint, destroying 177 hectares of an estuary where more than 100 species are already at risk of local extinction. It’s a devastating blow to Canada’s mightiest salmon river and the vast coastal ecosystem it nourishes. 

Happy Earth Week. 

The Roberts Bank decision was the first major test of the federal Liberals’ promise to protect 30 per cent of Canada’s lands and waters by 2030. “Nature is under threat; in fact it’s under attack,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in December at the United Nations’ landmark biodiversity conference in Montreal. There, Canada helped persuade almost 200 nations to sign the 30 by 30 pledge.

But you couldn’t paint a clearer picture of that assault than the port expansion that was just approved.

Minister of Environment and Climate Change Canada Steven Guilbeault, whose office issued this approval, undoubtedly knows this. The federally appointed review panel whose findings supposedly guided his decision spelled out the project’s ecological price tag in no uncertain terms. The panel’s 2020 report chronicled “significant adverse and cumulative effects” on killer whales, the salmon on which they rely, western sandpipers, barn owls, Dungeness crabs and too many more creatures to list (the term “adverse effect” appeared 278 times in the report). 

“ ‘Significant adverse effects’ is code for ‘this is an endangered population, and if you don’t dramatically reverse the threats this population is under, it is going extinct,’ ” Misty MacDuffee, a conservation biologist with Raincoast Conservation Foundation, said in an interview. 

But Guilbeault says they’ve got legally binding conditions that will protect the environment, wildlife and Indigenous Peoples’ ability to use the land. 

“With 370 environmental protection measures that the port must meet, we have set a high bar for this project to proceed. For the first time ever, we are asking a proponent to put up $150 million to guarantee the strict environmental conditions are met and habitats are protected,” reads Guilbeault’s quote in a press release announcing the project approval. 

The conditions include monitoring noise levels to remain at or below a certain baseline level to protect Southern Resident killer whales and infrastructure to allow fish to pass safely.

The Port of Vancouver declined my interview request for this story. 

“We are confident that the project can be delivered in an environmentally responsible way,” a spokesperson wrote via email. “We have completed more than 100 technical studies and reports, which represents the contributions by hundreds of scientists, biologists and engineers and over 59,000 hours of fieldwork.”

The Port of Vancouver believes it can mitigate adverse effects by building 86 hectares of mud flats, eelgrass beds, gravel banks and rock reefs to replace the ones Terminal 2 will destroy (the term “offset” appears 261 times in the review panel’s report). “This is nearly three times the amount initially proposed in our environmental impact statement,” the Port said in a press release, failing to mention that 86 hectares is still less than half the area now slated for destruction. 

Even hectare for hectare, habitat offsetting is a notoriously unreliable method of ecological atonement. In this case, a core problem is that none of the offsets will be located in the delta itself, but rather upstream. What little remains of the Fraser’s critical shoreline habitat is simply irreplaceable. “It doesn’t matter whether you can improve habitat quality further up the river,” MacDuffee said. “All those fish have to get through the estuary. It’s still a bottleneck.”

Damning as it was, the review panel’s report still failed to capture the full magnitude of what’s at stake. That’s partly by design: federal impact assessments are forbidden from considering anything beyond the specific project in question, meaning the collective impact of other industrial proposals approved or proposed for the Salish Sea (like the coming seven-fold increase in tanker traffic resulting from the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion) are ignored. The review panel also used current conditions as a baseline, ignoring the fact that 85 per cent of the lower Fraser has already been obliterated by human infrastructure. 

In this death by a thousand cuts, review panels treat each slice like it’s the only one.

As even the briefest of glances reveals, the wounds are legion and extend far beyond the Salish Sea. A true accounting of the impact of Roberts Bank Terminal 2 would place it in a continental context: 30 years after northern cod disappeared from the Maritimes, history is repeating itself out west. Wild Pacific salmon have already been all but extinguished in California, Oregon and Washington, as river after river goes dark. Every major watershed south of here is functionally dead; the two nominal exceptions, the Columbia and San Joaquin rivers, rely on hatcheries to maintain salmon populations whose prospects are bleak even with life support. 

The Fraser is now the southernmost bastion for wild salmon on the west coast of North America. Even on its knees, with runs of all five species decimated, it remains a vital regional force. “The Fraser is one of the biggest and most important estuaries on the whole West Coast of North America,” MacDuffee said. “That estuary forms these linkages with other birds and other mammals that extend across thousands of kilometers of the North Pacific ecosystem.”

It isn’t too late to rehabilitate this river mouth. A recent study, led by University of British Columbia conservation scientist Tara Martin, concluded that investing just $15 million per year in habitat restoration, transport regulation and other strategies would be enough to halt the cycle of destruction and give the estuary’s 102 species at risk a long term chance of survival. 

Expanding the port is a massive step in the other direction. As a February 2022 letter to Guilbeault from 28 scientists who study these waters concluded: “If the recovery of Canada’s endangered and iconic wildlife is a priority for the government of Canada, as stated, then it must reject the proposed Terminal 2 project.”

But the federal government insists the project is needed, calling the port expansion “key to supporting Canada’s economic growth over the coming years.”

“Without this port expansion, $3 billion in added GDP would be jeopardized by capacity shortages. The project is also expected to create hundreds of jobs during construction, and several hundred more both onsite and off-site during operations,” according to the release. 

Roberts Bank Terminal 2 approval shows nature and economic growth on a collision course 

At times like this, it’s almost impossible not to feel cynical about the abyss between Ottawa’s rhetoric and policy. ‘Hypocrisy’ doesn’t seem to come close. But there may be a better way to interpret the decision: as proof, not of brazen insincerity, but of conflicting imperatives. 

After all, biodiversity isn’t the only thing Trudeau has promised to protect. He has also sworn to preserve economic growth. 

Trudeau has argued these priorities are compatible for as long as he’s been in office. “A strong economy and healthy environment go hand in hand,” he said at the United Nations’ Paris climate conference in 2015, one month after his election. He’s been rebranding our relentless increase in consumption as “clean growth” in speeches and budgets ever since. 

Nowhere do those two priorities collide more spectacularly than at the mouth of the Fraser. For just as the estuary pumps life into the coast, the Port of Vancouver — Canada’s largest port and our primary gateway to Asian markets —serves as a mainline for the Canadian economy. 

More than 140 million tons of cargo, worth $240 billion, flow through here each year. The problem is, that’s about as much as it can handle. In 2021, a new survey by the World Bank and S&P Market Intelligence found Vancouver ranked 368th out of 370 ports globally in terms of efficiency; ships spend more time waiting to unload and reload their goods here than almost anywhere else on earth. That traffic is only getting worse. In the wake of supply chain crises, inflation and a population growing by a million citizens per year, the pressure to expand is immense — not just for the port, but for a federal government desperate to ease the cost of living for an impatient electorate. 

The review panel’s final report reflects this. On the same page as they summarized the project’s ecological impact, the authors acknowledged expansion “is consistent with Canada’s role as a trading nation,” and would support  “economic sustainability.” They cited Transport Canada’s support for the project and quoted the Canada Marine Act’s directive “to promote the success of ports for the purpose of contributing to the competitiveness, growth and prosperity of the Canadian economy.” 

What the authors didn’t do was try to square the world’s most stubborn circle. That wasn’t their job. Instead, they placed two incontrovertible facts side by side for the federal government to consider: Roberts Bank Terminal 2 will be as good for business as it is bad for the environment.

At least for a while. National economies can withstand the collapse of a regional ecosystem or two but eventually, things have a way of catching up. In fact they already are: back in 2021, it wasn’t lack of capacity that made ships wait so long in the Port of Vancouver, but climate change. Historic forest fires and atmospheric rivers crippled B.C.’s rail and highway infrastructure, which the port relies on to move goods on and off the ships.

In other words, Trudeau’s been right all along. Environment and economy really do go hand in hand. Just not in the way he hopes.

April 21, 2023, 3:20 p.m. ET: This story was updated to clarify that it was the office of the Minister of Environment and Climate Change Canada, Steven Guilbeault, which issued this approval.

This work is made possible with the support of the glasswaters foundation. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, no foundation or outside organization has editorial input into our stories.

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