At the top of a squat hill overlooking the Shubenacadie River, Dorene Bernard swings her SUV around to face a building clad in blue plastic siding. It’s a nondescript factory for plastic packaging, but the space it occupies is distinct. “[It’s] sitting in the footprint of where the school was,” Dorene says.

Between 1929 and 1967, more than a thousand Mi’kmaw and Wolastoqiyik children from around the Maritimes, as well as the Gaspé region in Quebec, were sent to this spot in Nova Scotia: the site of the former Shubenacadie Indian Residential School, the only federal residential school in the region. (The Maritimes includes New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Newfoundland and Labrador had its own residential schools, but these were not part of the federal system and only received an apology from Canada in 2017, nine years after the prime minister apologized to residential school students on behalf of the Government of Canada.)

In 1986, the school was demolished, and the plastics factory built in its place. Still, something of the school remains: in a semi-circle at the bottom of the school’s former driveway, three plaques lay out the history of the Shubenacadie residential school in English and French, as well as two orthographies each of Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqey.

From 1828 to 1997, 140 federal residential schools operated across Canada. When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission issued its Calls to Action in 2015, recommendation 79 addressed incorporating reconciliation in heritage work — including developing a national plan and strategy for commemorating school sites. Since then, the federal government has designated a handful of former schools as national historic sites; Shubenacadie was one of the first, in 2020. This fall, a commemorative park will open a short distance from the school, culminating the work of memorialization. 

For survivors and their descendants, many of whom have worked for years to have sites officially recognized, the designations are a complex phenomenon: former schools remain profoundly painful places and some communities have fought to have schools demolished. But while the history of residential schools is indelible for many survivors, collective memory is slippery, and among survivor groups, a patient effort is underway to preserve something of that past — to ensure Canada doesn’t forget what happened in residential schools, and what it took to survive them. 

“We want our descendants, and the ones that are to come to have a place to come learn about who they are … what our ancestors came through, [and] honour that, so that they can take that strength,” Dorene says. “That’s what this work is all about.”

Survivors led process for Shubenacadie commemoration

Dorene’s family bookends the school’s existence. Her father started when it opened in 1929; she and her siblings were some of the last to leave. When Dorene recalls the years she spent there, her voice is quiet. She felt abandoned, she says. Her older sister tried to take care of her, but despite those efforts, Dorene witnessed and was subjected to beatings and other forms of physical abuse; in one particularly awful moment, she remembers a nun sitting her on a stack of phone books while a travelling dentist pulled eight of her teeth without medication, resulting in jaw pain that affects her to this day. 

After the remaining children left in 1967, the imposing brick building sat empty for nearly 20 years, growing increasingly derelict. In the 1980s, a fire tore through the school, and shortly thereafter, the structure was demolished. In her book Out of the Depths, survivor Isabelle Knockwood recalls survivors gathering for the demolition and cheering as the wrecking ball tore through the walls. “There was no sadness, no tears at seeing the building finally being punished and beaten for having robbed so many Indian children of the natural wonders and simple pleasures of growing up,” she wrote. 

The demolition, and the visits survivors made to the school in the days leading up to it, marked a beginning for survivors collectively unpacking their experiences. In 1995, a group of Shubenacadie survivors led by Nora Bernard filed the first class-action lawsuit against Canada for compensation to residential school survivors. The suit precipitated a flurry of additional lawsuits that eventually resulted in the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement in 2007, which compensated tens of thousands of survivors. Another outcome of that agreement was the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Years later, when the Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre, an organization founded to preserve Mi’kmaw history and historic sites, began to work on the recommendations of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission, survivors were once again clear what they wanted: “[They said] ‘We want to make sure Canada — the world — never forgets what has happened to us at this place. So, we want to see the school designated as a national historic site,’ ” Tim Bernard, executive director of the cultural centre, says.

Tim’s own experience is a testament to the importance of having a record. In 1998, an Elder showed him a photograph of residents obtained from the archive of the Sisters of Charity — the nuns who staffed the school — vowing she was going to track down the name of every child in it. When she came back, she pointed out two boys: Tim’s father and uncle.

Tim had had no idea they had been taken there — his father had passed away, after a struggle with alcoholism, having never discussed his experiences. “For me, it heightens my awareness around trauma, and the impacts of trauma,” he says. It also made work to have the school designated personal, though he emphasizes it’s been led by survivors. 

Guided by those survivors, Tim sent a request in 2019 for a designation to Parks Canada, and in 2020, the federal government declared the former school a national historic site. The plaques were unveiled on Truth and Reconciliation Day a year later. Dorene, who led engagement work for the centre, says survivors had a lot of input into the wording — and insisted that it state that survivors considered residential school policy to be genocide. 

Being a national historic site doesn’t come with a lot of resources, Tim says. Still, the designation is a testament to the fact that survivors’ stories are true. 

“Other than us putting the plaques up, you would never know that the school was there,” he says. “I think that was [survivors’] intention, to remind people that this is a dark part of our history.”

Indigenous communities vary in approaches to former school sites

The National Program of Historical Commemoration has existed for more than a century. For much of its existence, its tone was celebratory, but that’s changed in the last several decades, Dominique Foisy-Geoffroy, director of history and commemoration for Parks Canada, says.

“Commemoration was seen as something generally positive, something to celebrate. Now it’s a bit different.”

The program is driven almost entirely by public requests and there are two main sets of criteria: sites must have national historic significance and have existed for at least 40 years. The federal government also designated the residential school system an event of national significance in 2019.

Following the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report, Foisy-Geoffroy says, Parks Canada began collaborating with Indigenous communities to determine what they wanted done with former schools. While some wanted a historic site designation, responses ranged, and others turned down federal commemoration: for some, demolishing buildings has been the more important step towards healing.

So far, five sites have been designated. Parks Canada focused its outreach on larger institutions where the main buildings are still standing, though Shubenacadie was prioritized as the only former site in the Maritimes. “It’s the history that is at the core of it, not [the buildings’] architectural value, of course. But the building is still important,” Foisy-Geoffroy says.

Since the 1960s, many school buildings have been torn down, though roughly 50 are still standing and in use — as gymnasiums, staff residencies and other outbuildings, including as schools. Others serve as offices, cultural centres or housing. At one — the former St. Eugene Mission School, on Ktunaxa territory near Cranbrook, B.C. — the Ktunaxa/Kinbasket Tribal Council applied for a national historic site designation in 1996. That application was rejected after the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs intervened, arguing commemoration decisions should be delayed until after the release of the final report by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, according to an essay published in the Journal of the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada. So instead, the five bands who share the land turned the school into a golf course and resort owned by the Ktunaxa Nation.

At other sites, communities have set aside school buildings as testimony to the residential school era, including the Portage La Prairie Residential School in Manitoba, which operated from 1891 to 1975. It’s on the Treaty 1 territory of the reserve lands of Long Plain First Nation, for which Dennis Meeches served as chief for 20 years, starting in 1998. 

By the time Meeches entered politics, the federal government had transferred the 45-acre school site to the nation, as part of a treaty land entitlement claim. For a time, the building hosted Yellowquill College, Manitoba’s first Indigenous-owned and operated post-secondary institution. Then, in the early 2000s, a Knowledge Keeper told Meeches the building should be converted to a museum. 

“I thought that actually made really good sense, in terms of being able to provide some education and awareness to [not only] Indigenous people … but everybody in general,” he says. “It was a sacred project in my eyes.”

In 2003, Long Plain declared the former school a historic site and began amassing material for the collection of what it named the National Indigenous Residential School Museum. Seventeen years later, the federal government issued its own designation— a step Meeches says was important, given the federal government’s role in the residential school system. Ultimately, he hopes being a national historic site will serve to bolster the vision for the museum.

Watching the plaque unveiling this past August, Meeches thought of what it took for his parents and grandparents to survive the system. Survivors are aging and passing away, he says, even as denial about the reality of residential schools continues to circulate — making it important to preserve a record of that history.

Nonetheless, not every community has wanted schools preserved. For years, c̓išaaʔatḥ (Tseshaht First Nation) on Vancouver Island has been demolishing the buildings of the former Alberni Indian Residential School. Today, just the gymnasium and the main building, called Caldwell Hall, remain, with demolition of the hall set to happen within a year. 

Elected Chief Councillor Wahmeesh (Ken Watts) says the presence of Caldwell Hall is an open wound in the community. While the nation’s leadership has had discussions with Parks Canada about a designation, they haven’t made a formal decision about how to proceed. “We were a little bit worried about what that actually meant … does that restrict us?” he says. “Even internally we asked ourselves, ‘Why should we let somebody designate something a historic site they were a part of creating in the first place?’ ”

Watts says they haven’t closed the door on a designation eventually, but for now, they’re listening to the community — and the community has been clear they want the buildings gone. “More important than giving some place a designation is actually tearing down and rebuilding new so that our community can heal.”

Other existing schools, like Shingwauk Indian Residential School on Robinson-Huron Treaty territory in Ontario, accepted a designation but turned down a plaque; survivors opted to use the money to restore an existing monument instead. 

Federal funding allocated to supporting national historic site designations ended in March 2025, but Foisy-Geoffroy says Parks Canada is committed to continuing to work with interested communities, with several more designations in the works. 

“All this is part of who we are … so it’s a way for us to make sure people — non-Indigenous and Indigenous alike — better understand their own history, and eventually try to build a better future, she says.

Commemoration honours survivors, keeps history alive

When Elmer Lewis started at the Shubenacadie residential school, he was five years old. He was given a number — one — which also put him first in line for punishments like humiliation for wetting the bed. “It’s hard to ever forget anything,” he says. “It’ll always be with me.”

For three years, Elmer stayed at the school year-round. It wasn’t until he was eight that he was allowed to return home for the summer, via the “freedom road” — the school’s driveway, which Elmer still dreams about, decades later. 

In 2021, on June 21— the annual date children were allowed to leave for the summer — survivors and their descendants gathered on that driveway and walked the half-kilometre route children once took to the train station that would take them back home.

The march now takes place every year. Elmer’s daughter Tara Lewis, from Eskasoni First Nation, started the event to honour her father after he shared a dream about a march on freedom day. Tara grew up visiting the site with her dad, and now takes her own children there. She says it’s important to keep the history of residential schools alive, and seeing survivors and descendants travel the route from the school to the train station made that history real. 

“I was so moved, because I could just picture my dad as a little boy. And I could see my dad, you know, 75 years old, walking and marching, not with sadness but with pride because he’s resilient and he’s a survivor,” she says.

This fall, Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre is unveiling a commemorative park and monument to celebrate the resilience of survivors and descendants, close enough to the school to see the former site, but far away enough that people feel safe. Tim says when the centre asked survivors what they wanted out of a commemorative park, they talked about a place that centred not on the school, but on hope and reclamation and how despite “everything that’s happened to us, look at all the good news stories … that we’ve been able to achieve.”

For Dorene, the park is the culmination of a long journey: first as a survivor, then as someone who’s spent over a decade working on commemoration. “This has been a long process and I think maybe it had to be that way,” she says, watching heavy equipment prepare the park in early September. 

She says it’s hard that in the time it’s taken to get the designation and start commemoration projects, so many survivors of the school have passed. There are at most a few hundred left. But the monument will stand as a reminder for future generations of what their ancestors came through.

Back by the school site, Dorene puts down tobacco at a place set aside for ceremonies on the banks of the Shubenacadie River. The day before, she had drummed for a baby-and-me group. Watching children do the things residential school had once taken from her, Dorene says, was like seeing her prayers come to life in front of her. “That’s where we should be,” she says. “That’s the power of our people coming, and I don’t see that going away ever again.”

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In a dark basement room at Dalhousie University in Halifax, geneticist Paul Bentzen surveys the tanks containing the final descendants of an ancient genetic lineage with hope — and with trepidation. 

In each tank, dark shapes dart through the water, fins occasionally breaking the surface. From above, the fish have a soft blue sheen; their torpedo-shaped bodies taper to snub noses. “That is partly, I hate to say it, being in captivity — they are bumping more,” Bentzen said ruefully. “Being a fish adapted to swimming in open water, hard walls are not a natural thing for them.”

There’s a lot that’s not natural in this environment for these fish, a critically endangered species known as Atlantic whitefish. Scientists estimate it diverged from its closest relatives 14 million years ago, and it was once found throughout Nova Scotia. But over the course of geological epochs, and in the human-scale epoch since colonization, this whitefish’s range has shrunk to just three lakes on Nova Scotia’s south shore — and to these tanks at a research facility known as the Aquatron, where much of the remaining hope for the species swims in languid circles against the current. “I am certain with every fibre of my being that there are more whitefish [at Dalhousie] than anywhere else,” Bentzen said. 

Though polar bears and spotted owls get more attention, Atlantic whitefish are a special species in Canada, distinguished by both their tiny range and their ancient ancestry. “It’s crazy how old it is,” Bentzen said. “It’s unique in every meaningful way.” Whitefish are also uniquely endangered: there are roughly 200 adults in tanks at Dalhousie, and likely far fewer in the wild. 

A team of government scientists, academics and non-profits are working to save the remaining whitefish, and to expand their range by introducing them to new lakes. Yet their efforts have been stymied by ongoing degradation of the whitefish’s remaining habitat, and with funding that threatens to disappear — even as the state of the population grows more dire. In 2019 (an especially good year for the species) researchers found 251 larval fish for the captive breeding program. In 2024, they captured six. Environmental DNA sampling in the Petite Riviere watershed, near the town of Bridgewater, N.S., has only picked up whitefish presence once in the last few years. 

Still, the fight isn’t over — with the right resources, whitefish could make a comeback. “The metaphor I use sometimes is ‘on life support,’ ” Bentzen said. “It’s just like the patient that’s hooked up to machines; you’re keeping them alive, hoping that something will happen that they can get up and be better.” But it’s a race against time, and the clock is running out. 

What happened to Atlantic whitefish in the wild? 

Whitefish belong to a highly vulnerable group. All four of Canada’s endemic freshwater species — also including Vancouver lamprey, blackfin cisco and copper redhorse — are at risk, and they’re far from alone. Scientists estimate North American freshwater fish are going extinct 877 times faster than the typical extinction rate of species in our planet’s history. A quarter of all freshwater fauna worldwide are currently at risk of extinction.

For whitefish, it took a long time to get to this point. Over millions of years, as glaciers advanced and retreated over North America, whitefish would have travelled across the continent — moving south as ice set in, pushing north as it melted. But by the time Atlantic whitefish first appeared in fossil records, they existed in only two places: the Tusket River watershed, at Nova Scotia’s southern tip, and the Petite Riviere watershed. 

How whitefish had come to exist in just two watersheds, 200 kilometres apart, is — like so much else about this species — a mystery. One theory is colonization: whitefish are an anadromous species, meaning they navigate from saltwater to freshwater to spawn. As Europeans dammed Nova Scotia rivers from the 1700s onward for hydropower, agriculture and water storage, whitefish were barred from completing an important part of their lifecycle, and disappeared from the landscape. 

Acidification from rainwater and the introduction of chain pickerel and smallmouth bass — non-native fish favoured by anglers — further diminished the species’ range. By the 1980s, whitefish had disappeared from the Tusket, and are now only found in the wild in the lakes of the Petite Riviere watershed.

This trajectory made whitefish the first fish species to be declared endangered by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, in 1984.

How whitefish got into Dalhousie University

Since then, there have been efforts to improve their odds of survival. Passage to the ocean was restored in 2018, after the dam owner and several  non-profits, including a local group called Coastal Action, added fish passages at dams along the Petite Riviere itself. This ended a century of whitefish being landlocked in the Petite Riviere lakes — though little whitefish activity has been detected at those structures.

But there have been as many drawbacks. In 2003, Coastal Action discovered smallmouth bass in the upper Petite Riviere watershed. Nine years later, they found chain pickerel. “It was quite disheartening, quite disheartening because pickerel are just such voracious predators,” Amy Russell, species at risk and biodiversity project coordinator at Coastal Action, told The Narwhal. “Chain pickerel and bass eat everything and anything that’s in the water.”

To preserve whitefish habitat in the Petite Riviere watershed, Coastal Action has been contracted by Fisheries and Oceans Canada to conduct electrofishing — using an electric current to stun and remove fish — to reduce invasive predators. 

By the early 2000s, it was already clear whitefish weren’t going to survive without help, Paul Bentzen said. In response, Fisheries and Oceans Canada began breeding whitefish at a facility on Nova Scotia’s south shore, to boost numbers and resolve scientific questions about the species. “We can produce so many more fish than what survives in the wild. It’s just exponential the amount that we can release compared to what would survive on their own,” Russell said.

In this, there have been hurdles too. When the Harper government was making cuts to federal scientific funding in 2012, the program was shut down. The whitefish were put back in the Petite Riviere watershed, and in a lake near Halifax from which they promptly vanished — and the facility was destroyed. “They literally bulldozed it,” Bentzen said. 

Six years later, Fisheries and Oceans had collected dozens of juvenile whitefish from the Petite Riviere watershed, and seemed poised to start breeding again, to Bentzen’s relief. But that fall, he got a message from a local CBC reporter, saying he’d just heard from an official that the fish were to be put back in the lakes the following week. Bentzen was apoplectic, and on a call with the federal department, impulsively offered to take over the breeding program at Dalhousie. “Actually, I had no idea whether we could or not,” he admitted. “I had not spoken to a single person at Dalhousie.” 

Yet the offer was accepted — and whitefish have been swimming in Aquatron tanks ever since. 

Bringing a natural environment into a dark basement room

Captive breeding whitefish is a delicate operation. In the spring, two-centimetre long larvae are collected from the Petite Riviere lakes by Coastal Action and Fisheries and Oceans Canada. To reduce their stress and improve survival, Coastal Action has started a streamside facility — a 17-foot utility trailer — where babies snack on zooplankton and fish feed to get stronger before being sent to Dalhousie. “We’re not taking any chances with these ones,” Russell said. 

The whitefish are delivered to the Aquatron, the largest aquatic research facility in the country. When they’re mature, staff mimic conditions for spawning (which occurs in the winter) using light and temperature. These efforts don’t always go according to plan — “since this fish has no really close relatives, we have nothing to go by,” Bentzen said — but they have produced offspring. In February, a darkened room at Dalhousie was lined with racks of clear plastic containers, their bottoms dotted with transparent whitefish eggs. “If you take a close look, you can actually see their little eyes in the embryos,” Aquatron aquarist Emily Allen explained, shining a flashlight into the tubs. 

As they grow up, these captive bred fish are used for genetic work, which aims to assess the species’ genetic diversity and reduce the risk of inbreeding, and for resolving questions like whitefish’s preferred spawning habitat, which is currently a mystery. 

Some are implanted with acoustic tags and released back into the lakes to track whitefish movement in a way that isn’t possible with wild adult fish, as they’re almost impossible to find and too precious to risk capturing anyway. Over a hundred tagged fish were released last year, and data will be analyzed this spring.

Long term, scientists are looking beyond the Petite Riviere watershed. Between warming waters due to climate change and invasive species, the current habitat may not be viable in the future. This means finding another lake in Nova Scotia’s northern half to expand the fish’s range. “It is challenging because we really don’t know a lot about the species requirements,” Jeremy Broome, a Fisheries and Oceans Canada biologist, said. The department has been leading the range expansion work, which involved surveying a shortlist of options that might have the qualities researchers think whitefish need. The next step is consultations with the province, Indigenous groups and local communities.

The scientists hoped to introduce tagged fish into a new lake this year,  but the work is slow-going — apart from the scientific challenges, moving the fish has complex policy considerations. “In essence, we’re creating a new invasive species by moving it into a new environment,” Broome said. In Europe, introductions of whitefish’s distant relatives have crowded out native fish. Scientists don’t believe Atlantic whitefish would have the same effect, based on the role they play in the ecosystem, but they could run rampant too.

This is painstaking work, with risks — but Broome points out that endemic species are a particularly important part of Canada’s biodiversity. “These are species that are present in our own backyard and are our entire responsibility,” Broome said. “No one else is coming to save Atlantic whitefish.”

Habitat and funding loss still threaten Atlantic whitefish

That responsibility includes legislated requirements; whitefish were listed as endangered when Canada’s Species at Risk Act came into place in 2003, which brought legal protection for the species. This includes prohibitions against killing, capturing and harassing the fish, as well as restrictions on destruction of critical habitat. Yet scientists and advocates say the treatment of whitefish hasn’t always reflected the fish’s special status, or its vulnerability.

This past December, work began on the road for a quarry that the province’s Department of Environment and Climate Change had approved on private land in the Petite Riviere watershed — even though the road runs over public land that citizens had proposed protection for years before.

In 2022, a local citizens’ group — with the support of non-government organizations and local governments — applied for a wilderness area designation for the watershed to protect whitefish in the lakes, as well as more than a dozen at-risk birds, reptiles and lichens in the surrounding forest. The lakes are also the water supply for the town of Bridgewater. 

But their original request to the province, along with a 2024 follow-up request for expedited protection, is in limbo — having been acknowledged but not approved — and advocates say the province appears to be ignoring their request, which predates the quarry approval. 

“What that says is that the province is not taking this seriously,” George Buranyi, representative of the Bridgewater Watershed Protection Alliance, said.

Nova Scotia’s Department of Environment and Climate Change did not respond to requests for a response to the concerns that the quarry approval could threaten whitefish, or concerns that the request for protection is being ignored. 

Bentzen fears the presence of a road could affect water quality in whitefish habitat and questions why more care isn’t being taken: “Rock is not a rare resource [in Nova Scotia]. The Atlantic whitefish is an unimaginably rare and special resource.”

But the bigger issue may be the precarity of the work that supports the species’ future. 

For decades, whitefish recovery has been trapped in a money merry-go-round that’s delayed progress on core scientific questions: funding exists for a period and then disappears, forcing researchers to start again from the beginning. 

Now, that work is on a knife’s edge again; much of the project is supported by Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s nature fund for aquatic species at risk. Without it, Dalhousie biologist Robert Lennox said the work is “not even close to possible.” That funding will run for another year, but is not guaranteed past that point. Additional Fisheries and Oceans funding supports the captive breeding program, but government money for species at risk is limited, and the crises are many. Bentzen said the department has encouraged the whitefish team to look for alternate sources of support.

“My huge worry is that this is a very unstable situation,” Bentzen said. Cutting funding “is just not the right decision to make — these fish can be saved.” 

In a statement, Fisheries and Oceans spokesperson Christine Lyons said, “protecting species at risk is a shared responsibility,” and the department remains committed to working with “Indigenous communities and organizations, provinces and territories, resource users, local groups, communities, industries and academia to help aquatic species at risk.” 

Hope for whitefish in the wild

While whitefish are few, each female produces thousands of eggs. That means reversing the fish’s trajectory is possible — but the declining state of the wild population makes this more challenging.

Whitefish suffers from its obscure status, too; many people in Nova Scotia, let alone in the rest of the country, are unaware of its existence. “That lack of awareness just kind of breaks my heart. I have to believe, if more people knew about this, that they would be behind it,” Lennox said of the researchers’ effort to ensure the survival of whitefish. “We need people to see the value in it, because it’s not an easy or an inexpensive thing to do, to save a species from extinction.”

In the basement of the Aquatron, Bentzen contemplates the shapes darting through the water. It’s urgent that the work is completed to find these fish a new home, Bentzen said — they won’t survive if left to their own devices in the Petite Riviere watershed. And after millions of years of darting through the waters of Nova Scotia, it’s sobering to think of them finishing their journey in these tanks. “It can’t end here. That would be terrible.”

Scientists working on whitefish compare them to a unicorn. It’s an unlikely comparison for a muted, snub-nose fish the length of one’s forearm. But it’s apt too — a thing so rare it’s almost mythical. Like the other species found only in Canada, they’re at risk of becoming legend altogether. Whether they stay in this world is up to us. 

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On a cloudy evening in early September, fisherman Darren Porter pulls an aluminum boat up to shore on Lake Pisiquid, a small body of water bordering the Nova Scotia community of Windsor. Two fish scientists aboard his boat hop out and begin dragging a seine net through the long grass poking out of the shallows, looking for juvenile fish.

For seven years, a monitoring team made up of the Mi’kmaw Conservation Group, Acadia University and Porter has been testing this site, along with others on the Avon and on an unobstructed tidal river across the bay, to establish the relative abundance of fish.

It’s a windless evening, and as the team brings the net to the beach to check its contents, the water mirrors the pastel sky above.

But Porter knows the situation on this lake is anything but calm.

“I got my car hit by a baseball bat a month ago, I got my truck keyed three weeks ago — it’s insane,” Porter says.

“This is very political now. It started out different.”

Lake Pisiquid is an artificial reservoir created by the construction of a causeway across the Avon River more than 50 years ago.

For much of its existence, the causeway — and the tidal gate, or aboiteau, built into the causeway to allow the Avon to flow out to the Bay of Fundy — has maintained the lake and protected land upstream. But because that protection has required the gate to be almost constantly closed, it’s come at the expense of the fish travelling upriver to spawn. 

In 2017, when the Nova Scotia government began the process to twin the highway running across the causeway, it convened an expert panel to find ways to improve fish passage at the aboiteau — work that included engaging Porter, the Mi’kmaw Conservation Group and Acadia University on monitoring. Then, in 2021, a ministerial order from Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) ordered the lake be drained and the aboiteau opened so fish could pass through.

Yet seven years later, fish passage remains obstructed, while the lake has been maintained by a provincial emergency order for over a year. Politically, the situation is at a stalemate, while the continued existence of the lake divides residents, places governments at a standoff and overrides the objections of the Mi’kmaq, who say their Treaty Rights are being violated.

At the centre of all of this is an ecosystem and a community that have been thrown out of balance. And both have reached a breaking point. 

Avon River becomes political wedge between lake community and environmental advocates

The Avon is one of the rivers flowing into the Bay of Fundy, an ecosystem that pulses with the rhythm of the world’s highest tides, sending saltwater and nutrients upriver and creating a shifting coastline downstream. 

For millennia, the tidal ecosystem sustained fish such as Atlantic sturgeon, Atlantic salmon and gaspereau (a kind of river herring), as well as Mi’kmaq communities who travelled the river and established settlements along its banks. In the 1600s, Windsor — an area originally known as Pesaquid or Pisiquid, a Mi’kmaq name meaning “junction of the waters” — was settled by Europeans. Two centuries later, a causeway was built across the mouth of the Avon to protect the community and surrounding agricultural lands from coastal flooding.

Work on the causeway began in 1968; even before it was finished, there were changes to the ecosystem. Sediment began accumulating on the seaward side, forming what is now an extensive saltmarsh that continues to expand. “We haven’t reached a new balance — the system is still adjusting,” Tony Bowron, CEO of a wetland restoration firm that has done work in the area, says. The Windsor saltmarsh is incredibly productive, Bowron says, but on the upstream side, saltmarshes disappeared as the river transitioned to a freshwater ecosystem. “What was one of our major tidal rivers is now essentially an impoundment,” he says.

Over time, different groups came to depend on that impoundment, including farmers, a ski hill, a canoe club and property owners and developers in Windsor and upstream.

Yet by 2017, it was clear something had to change. The highway had become dangerous and needed to be twinned, and the aboiteau had reached the end of its useful life, especially given climate change projections. But for the causeway highway project to proceed with federal funding, it had to have Fisheries Act authorization. Following Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s recommendation, the province put together a group of provincial and federal officials, fishers and Mi’kmaq to develop ideas for how to meet Fisheries Act requirements. The group members proposed an option that would have restored tidal flow, improving fish passage and flood protection, though with lower lake levels. 

But at a municipal council meeting for the area on Sept. 27, 2017, provincial officials explained the community had pushed back against the idea of changing lake levels and introduced a new option — option D — which would maintain the status quo but add additional fishways (structures to help fish navigate an obstacle). 

Paul LaFleche, who at the time was the deputy minister of transportation and infrastructure renewal (now the department of public works), told those gathered that the option could mean a future constitutional challenge. While LaFleche didn’t specify who that challenge might come from, constitutional challenges have been used by the Mi’kmaq to address violations of Treaty Rights.

Still, LaFleche said for his department, there were only two options at the time: option D, or leaving the aboiteau in place. 

For Porter, this marked the moment the process became political. 

“It’s simple: they were told what to do, then they had this meeting on the 27 of September, and they reversed it,” Porter says.

Mi’kmaq say Treaty Right to fish is being violated: ‘That, to me, is not reconciliation’

On the banks of the Avon River, on the opposite side of Lake Pisiquid from Windsor, two small buildings sit amid the marsh grass and the gravel of the stalled highway project.

In 2020, Nikki-Marie Lloyd, a member of Annapolis Valley First Nation, and other Mi’kmaq water protectors built a protest camp at this site. Llloyd called the site Treaty Truck House #2, a reference to the names used for trading posts between Europeans and Mi’kmaq that evokes the historic Mi’kmaq use of the river. “We wanted to bring a little bit of that back here.”

For months, Lloyd stayed at the site in protest of the aboiteau. On hot days, when there was very little water left on the downstream side of the barrier, she says she watched as thousands of migrating gaspereau struggled and died in the muddy water.

Even when the gates are open, passage is limited. And when they’re closed — as they are for more than 23 hours a day and for months at a time in the summer — the effects are clear. “It’s quite noticeable when the gate is not open,” Trevor Avery, a professor at Acadia University who’s working on the monitoring project, says. “The fish do not make it through.”

Meanwhile, at low tide, the water below the barrier is too warm and low in oxygen for fish to survive. Correspondence between Fisheries and Oceans Canada staff in June 2023 observed “large numbers of fish” dying as a result.

It’s too early to say whether there are any population level-effects for those species, as there are other rivers in the area where fish can spawn; that’s why long-term monitoring is important, Avery says. Yet the obstruction of one river can still have consequences for biodiversity. Research suggests some species of fish found in the river, like gaspereau, largely return to their birthplace to spawn, giving each river a unique genetic signature. If that site is lost, those genetics are lost too. 

Avery is wary of wading into politics — it’s not science, he notes — and the fate of the Avon has become very political. But on a personal level, he thinks the obstruction of the river is the wrong decision. “There’s just good advice that’s being ignored, in this case.” 

For Lloyd, the situation was especially infuriating; without fish being able to pass the barrier, there was no meaningful exercise of the Treaty Right to fish. “We hear a lot of talk about reconciliation, but then when you come here and you see everything that’s going on, especially politically, and you realize that a lake and a gated structure currently are trumping our rights — that, to me, is not reconciliation.”

Then, in March 2021, after Mi’kmaq groups raised concerns — and, according to a briefing note, after Mi’kmaq chiefs passed a resolution to pursue legal action if Fisheries and Oceans didn’t act — the department issued a ministerial order requiring the gate be opened for fish passage (which the department then renewed every two weeks). The lake quickly became a dry, and then dusty, plain.

For many Windsor residents, the resulting dust storms were miserable. To mitigate the problem, a coalition of environmental groups, government officials and the Mi’kmaq planted vegetation on the dry lake bed. For a minute, everyone was working together, Lloyd says. The saltmarsh began regenerating, and fish not seen in the river for decades appeared. Travelling the river on a bright green pool floaty in August 2021, seeing the diversity of fish and the marsh grass “was my all-time favorite moment,” Lloyd says.

In March 2023, West Hants municipal council — which encompasses the community of Windsor — wrote a letter to the federal fisheries minister acknowledging the lake may not return and expressing interest in reimagining the Windsor waterfront and surrounding area to realign with the new operating scenario of the aboiteau.

Then wildfire season started.

Minister claims lake necessary for fighting wildfire, but fire chief says that’s ‘ridiculous’

In May 2023, wildfires tore across Nova Scotia, including one that burned 23,525 hectares, the largest in the province’s history.

On June 1, 2023, the province declared a state of emergency for the area around Windsor. The only action associated with the state of emergency was to order the gates at the aboiteau closed, overriding the federal order that had opened them. The provincial order came just two weeks after Premier Tim Houston released a video with area MLA Melissa Sheehy-Richard describing the dry lake as “appalling” and calling for it to be refilled. 

The provincial minister responsible for the emergency management office, whose deputy was LaFleche, formerly of the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal, said in a statement that the dry lake posed a “significant risk during this wildfire season.” (The province did not respond to a question about what role LaFleche, or staff from his former department, played in the decision to issue the emergency order.)

In an interview with CBC, the provincial minister responsible for the office of emergency management , John Lohr, said the request had come at the request of local fire chiefs.

Others have disputed that statement. 

In response to the state of emergency, Porter launched a lawsuit, attempting to stay the order and reopen the gate. In an affidavit provided for that lawsuit, Windsor fire chief Jamie Juteau said neither he nor anyone he was aware of in the department had made “any request to Minister Lohr or his department or anyone else for water resources in Lake Pisiquid or to ‘reinstate’ Lake Pisiquid.”

Since then, the province has renewed the emergency order every 30 days, even after historic rain and flooding, including in Windsor.

Brett Tetanish is the fire chief for Brooklyn, another community in the same municipality as Windsor. He says fire suppression appeared to be an excuse to close the gates.

“I just thought how ridiculous that was,” he says. “There’s actually no need.”

Tetanish is an experienced wildland firefighter, and when parts of Nova Scotia were burning in 2023, his department was dispatched to those fires.

If there were a need for water, Tetanish points out there are many other sources a helicopter could draw from. What’s more, because the presence of the causeway has caused silt to built up, much of the lake is only a little more than a meter deep — too shallow for fixed wing aircraft to use, Tetanish says. 

The existence of alternatives was also outlined in a July 2023 report by the municipality’s emergency management office. The report noted if lake levels dropped again, the Windsor fire department would go back to its previous plan for water, and that the department “is confident operating in both scenarios.”

“[The minister] is using the fire service to get what they want,” Tetanish says. “It’s very disheartening that the government would do that.”

Advocates say the existence of alternatives for fire safety suggests the preservation of the lake serves interests beyond fire safety. 

‘LEAVE LAKE ALONE’: Rift in community grows deeper as mayor pleads for unity

Developer Mitch Brison, brother of former Liberal MP Scott Brison, has a house on the lake, and his company, Brison Developments, has residential projects in Windsor and the surrounding area. He wants the lake full.

“Is the town better off to have a body of water in front of your town, or is the town better off to have something that smells and has no water — I prefer the water,” Brison says. “I don’t see the benefit of taking it out, I really don’t.”

Brison says the municipal council now supports the lake, “so we got that reversed.” (Abraham Zebian, the mayor of West Hants, says the council has no official position on the lake.) And while he acknowledges there was movement toward reconciliation, he and most people he knows are tired “with the stuff that’s going on and the money that’s being thrown around in that direction.” 

“It’s time for us all to live and cooperate.”

Ultimately, he says resolving the situation will take a change in the federal government. 

Zebian says his personal position is that the lake is an asset for recreation, firefighting and community well-being. 

Yet he’s acknowledged has divided the town, including last July, when bristol board signs appeared in the community reading “F*CK DARREN PORTER,”and “LEAVE LAKE ALONE.” 

In the aftermath, Zebian took to Facebook to make an impassioned plea for unity. “I’m so disappointed in our community for the things that are being said in regards to the Avon River and Lake Pisiquid,” he wrote. “United we can do anything. Divided we all lose. WEST HANTS… I KNOW YOU ARE BETTER! NOW LET ME SEE IT!”

Over a year later, Zebian says it’s unfortunate the town is still caught in the middle of a fight between the province and the federal government.

Avon River situation at a standstill, as provincial and federal governments fail to find a solution

Documents shed light on the dynamics in the standoff over that fight. At issue is which directive takes precedence — the federal order to open the gate, or the provincial emergency order to keep the gate closed and the lake full — and at whose feet blame for the delay in a resolution can be laid.

The federal department has a legal mandate to protect fish and fish habitat, but it has yet to reissue the ministerial order, which it let lapse after the provincial state of emergency was declared. Documents obtained through access to information requests suggest the department has struggled to get information from the province. 

In an email sent on Aug. 31, 2023, Fisheries and Oceans Canada officials said they were still waiting to receive results of a Nova Scotia emergency management office assessment supporting the emergency order. 

Two months later, in an email regarding a Mi’kmaq proposal to address fire safety while improving fish passage, Fisheries and Oceans Canada regional director general Doug Wentzell wrote, “Bottom line is that this letter presents what seems to [be]reasonable solutions to be able to draw water from the Avon river to support emergency response — which was the stated objective of the province in issuing their continued states of emergency. The key piece of the puzzle for our purposes will be to obtain the province’s assessment around whether these, or other options, have been considered.”

The following spring, an April 2024 letter from Fisheries Minister Diane Lebouthillier to provincial ministers asked the province to take measures to ensure proper fish passage, and to communicate with her ministry about efforts to reconcile that with fire safety. 

In response to a question from The Narwhal about the information it provided to the federal government, Nova Scotia’s department of public works said information requested by the federal government was submitted in January 2024, and that this was “one of a series of requests we have responded to from [Fisheries and Oceans Canada] over several years.”

But an August letter to Public Works from Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s department of Ecosystem Management (which Porter provided), shows that in January, what the province proposed was to maintain the lake — a proposal that, as the letter noted, the province had already been told would not pass fish (or the Fisheries Act) — and that the information included with the application was ‘incomplete or inadequate.”

In other words, the situation is gridlocked, with the province proposing an option Fisheries and Oceans Canada can’t approve. 

For Porter, these documents raise questions of why Fisheries and Oceans Canada is hesitating to enforce its own legislation, in the meantime. 

In a 2023 internal presentation, a slide describes Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s intention to continue reissuing ministerial orders until the aboiteau is replaced, but the department let the last order expire after the state of emergency was declared in June 2023.

In a statement, Fisheries and Oceans Canada spokesperson Christine Lyons did not directly answer a question about whether the emergency order takes precedence, instead saying questions about the order and its duration should be directed to the province. Gary Andrea, spokesperson for the department of public works, said the state of emergency will be renewed as long as it is needed for public safety. 

Fisheries and Oceans Canada said it’s working proactively with the Nova Scotia department of public works on the proposed aboiteau, and that it remains committed to consultation with the Mi’kmaq. After the emergency order was first issued, the Assembly of Mi’kmaq chiefs sent a letter to the province, stating the lake contravened Mi’kmaq rights and title. (The Assembly of Mi’kmaq chiefs did not respond to a request for an interview.)

The department also said the province has a legal requirement to operate the aboiteau to allow the passage of fish, and that voluntary compliance is the expected and preferred approach. 

To advocates, this looks like the federal department is avoiding a fight in advance of an election. 

“They don’t want to give the province a wedge issue,” Porter says. “So they backed off, and nature suffers, the fish suffer, there’s a whole bunch of things that suffer because of those decisions — and they’re simply political.”

Emergency order remains in place, with no clear path forward for resolution

In September, members of the monitoring team on Lake Pisiquid finish noting the fish they’ve caught in gill nets and minnow traps— one striped bass, a couple of tomcod — and then head back upriver, to turn in for the night.

For now, the situation is at a stalemate. While Porter has a court date in November for his lawsuit against the emergency order, he’s not optimistic that it will bring any change. 

With a municipal election approaching on Oct. 19, current mayor Zebian said the uncertainty around the causeway continues to pit “neighbor against neighbor and family member against family member, and I think unfairly so, for my community.” The project was supposed to be completed in 2022, he notes; two years later, there’s no clear indication of a way forward.

Yet in other contexts, communities have found solutions. 

Three hundred kilometres from the Avon, water flows under a bridge over the tidal Petitcodiac River in New Brunswick. In 2021, the bridge was completed to replace a causeway built in 1968, despite the opposition of some homeowners, and biologists are already reporting greater numbers of fish. 

To the south, Peskotomuhkati Nation was instrumental in removing an aging hydroelectric dam on the St Croix/Skutik River this year, which runs between Maine and New Brunswick, and restoring fish passage. 

By comparison, advocates say the current situation with the Avon River aboiteau is a missed opportunity, where new infrastructure is needed anyway, to fix a problem.

That problem is a system out of balance — and not just on the Avon. For 400 years, people have been building structures to hold back the Bay of Fundy’s tides. Asking people to imagine a different relationship with this system is challenging. Yet in the 21st century, the costs of drawing hard lines across the landscape have become clear, severing ties between animals, people and the environment in which they all live. 

Whether work on the Avon will ever restore those links is far from clear. But for better or for worse in this dynamic, shifting ecosystem, there’s no going back to the past.

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