This story is part of Going with the Flow, a series that dives into how restoring nature can help with B.C.’s flood problems — and what’s stopping us from doing it.

Heavy rains have once again fallen in B.C., bringing back memories of a year ago when an atmospheric river flooded the Fraser Valley. The storm destroyed infrastructure and killed five people, hundreds of thousands of chickens, thousands of pigs and hundreds of cows. It cost billions in damage and losses and blocked highways and a railway for weeks. 

Since then, all levels of government, First Nations, other residents and agriculture and environmental groups have been hashing out how best to protect the area for the future, anticipating the next storm. 

But the question of how exactly to “build back better” on land that was once water — especially as climate change makes extreme weather events more common — is exposing tensions about whether or not we should build back in certain areas at all.

“If this road was washed out, what’s the likelihood of that road washing out again?” asked Tyrone McNeil, Stó:lō Tribal Council Chief and chair of the First Nations Emergency Planning Secretariat. “Let’s relocate that road and put in a bridge instead of a culvert. That will actually save us money over time.”

McNeil is part of a growing chorus of people around the world who believe that returning space to water can help protect communities from climate change, including bigger floods and droughts. That’s because it’s not just climate change causing these disasters, but also development choices that have interfered with the natural water cycle. 

Globally, 87 per cent of natural wetlands have been lost in the last 300 years, nearly all of them filled or drained by humans. People have intervened with dams and diversions on two-thirds of the world’s great rivers. Land area covered by cities, blocking water from sinking into the soil, has doubled just since 1992. To counteract this problem people are seeking to heal the water cycle by protecting and restoring wetlands, floodplains, mountain meadows and forests to help make communities more resilient. 

But relocating people and infrastructure is emotionally and politically difficult, which is why so-called “managed retreat” — planning to move a community out of hazardous areas in an equitable, just way — often only happens after repeated disasters. Instead, solutions proposed tend toward doubling down on human-designed engineering that attempts to control water.

How many disasters will it take in the Fraser Valley? Climate change may soon force the issue, McNeil said. 

“The Lower Mainland flood management strategy needs a hard reset,” McNeil said, referring to the plan that is primarily considering engineered interventions, such as raising dikes, dredging rivers and building more in flood-prone areas by raising the land first. “We need to be included in discussions as rights holders, not stakeholders. From there we put forward principles of salmon habitat, ecology, slowing the water, water storage.”

The province often seems more driven by election cycles, McNeil said. In contrast, his people make decisions based on caring for the next seven generations. “The dominant culture needs to have everybody’s interest [including other species] at heart on the table, not only those who are rich enough.” 

Under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, both the federal and provincial governments have pledged to incorporate Indigenous world views. 

More nature-based solutions need to be considered, collaborative says 

Federal Minister of Emergency Preparedness Bill Blair said Canada is being thoughtful about its approach to flood recovery. 

“We’re looking at this whole idea of designing resilience into our build back to make sure that we invest in things that respect nature,” he said in an interview. “At the same time, we need to respond to what is clearly a changing and more volatile condition that we have to deal with: climate change.”

The total cost to rebuild the Fraser Valley will exceed $9 billion, according to Blair, the latest in a century-long engineering effort to hold back four big rivers and pump out water from a lake that’s routinely trying to reoccupy its space. But the typical pattern for such disasters, supported by current provincial programs, is to build back to “the pre-disaster condition,” with little funding for what are dubbed “preventative measures” or “enhancements.”

That was the case after a big flood in the region in 1948, said Tamsin Lyle, lead engineer with Ebbwater Consulting, which specializes in helping communities mitigate risks from climate change. During that earlier build back, “the mandate was not to reduce risk to public safety but to reestablish public faith in the diking system,” she said.

Today, on the federal level, up to 15 per cent of disaster funding is earmarked for “mitigation” — but that’s not yet defined, according to Lyle. “It might be an opportunity to make your dike a little bit higher, but there’s no mechanism to say, ‘Hey, what if we didn’t have a dike at all?’ ”

McNeil and Lyle are part of the Build Back Better, Together Collaborative, an Indigenous-led working group that came together after the storm to help with flood recovery. The collaborative issued a press release last week to increase pressure on the provincial government to use what’s left of the billions of dollars of federal funding announced in December to support “best practices,” especially nature-based solutions. This would align with the federal and provincial governments’ commitments to the international Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. The framework outlines disasters as opportunities to rethink standard practices, noted the release.

The dominant culture’s mindset toward flooding needs to change, Lyle said, citing a 2014 paper in which international experts laid out the golden rules for flood management. Number one is accepting it’s impossible to prevent all flooding. Number two is to promote some flooding as desirable. That’s because, if people don’t give water enough space, it will take it by force. So it’s better to plan ahead where people can best tolerate it. 

“It’s not just climate change causing these disasters,” Lyle said, but also “stupid human decisions. We’re on the cusp of that recognition in Canada: that big engineering has failed us.” 

Perhaps the November 2021 flood will be a catalyst. To some extent, the province is supporting what are known as nature-based solutions, according to an email from a spokesperson for Emergency Management B.C., which did not make someone available for an interview. 

The spokesperson pointed to the B.C. Flood Strategy, open for public comment this fall, and “modernization” of its emergency management legislation, set for spring 2023, which strives to manage risk, rather than prevent disasters, and to co-develop the strategy with Indigenous Peoples under the principles of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

In B.C.’s 2022 budget, the province allocated $2.1 billion “to help people recover from the devastating floods and wildfires of last year and to better protect communities against future climate disasters,” according to a news release. Provincial programs, including $81.8 million for Green Infrastructure: Adaptation, Resilience and Disaster Mitigation and $110 million in budget 2022 for the province’s Community Emergency Preparedness Fund, could support nature-based solutions — but the money could also go toward engineered infrastructure.

“The flood gave a lot of people the idea that we need to work together,” Semá:th Chief Dalton Silver said. “I was able to present our position on a lot of things.” But both Silver and McNeil believe more is needed. 

“The extent of the consultations are not where they should be,” Silver said. 

McNeil added that the more settler governments open themselves up to Indigenous perspectives, the more they would benefit. “We’re actually alleviating risk for government by seeing our values reflected,” he said.

A long history of fighting against nature

At the heart of the debate around restoring space for water to prevent future flooding is Semá:th X̱ó:tsa (Sumas Lake).

A hundred years ago, Semá:th X̱ó:tsa lay between the current cities of Abbotsford and Chilliwack and stretched across the border into Whatcom County, Wash. It pulsed like a heartbeat, ebbing and expanding with the fall rains and freshet, or spring floods. It regularly went from 36 square kilometres to 65, frequently expanding far more in flood years, according to Chad Reimer, author of Before We Lost the Lake: A Natural and Human History of Sumas Valley. For the Semá:th (Sumas First Nation) and other bands in the Stó:lō Nation, the lake “was the provider for our people,” Silver said, extolling the bounty of sturgeon, salmon, mussels, trout, ducks and deer. The sturgeon also provided a strong, organic glue called eisenglass that was a major trade item. 

Bands of the Stó:lō Nation accepted water’s agency and worked within its rhythms. “We moved before the freshet,” McNeil said.

Silver explained they built no permanent structures on the wetlands surrounding the lake, and seasonal movements were intrinsic in their teachings.“My grandfather said the Stó:lō — which means river or water — is regarded as the great giver of life, but you need to be careful when you’re out there, travelling or harvesting fish,” Silver said. “Water is also a very powerful entity that can take your life as well.”

But settlers saw the lake as blocking them from perfectly good farmland, according to Reimer. “The view of the western world is very much a binary one,” Reimer said in an interview. “Stuff is either land or water. And where you have water on top of good land, you’ve got to get rid of that water.” 

Over a 50-year period, settlers endeavoured to turn water to land, eventually succeeding, more or less, in 1924. According to Reimer, it took 142 kilometres of dikes, canals and diversion ditches; floodgates to prevent river overflows into the lakebed; and a pump station. They optimistically redubbed the place Sumas Prairie and filled the former lake with homes and farms. 

In November 2021, “nothing surprised me about where the water wanted to go,” Reimer said. “The natural hydraulic conditions that created Sumas Lake are still there. We’re just holding it back.”

Bringing back Semá:th X̱ó:tsa (Sumas Lake) is not being considered

Despite ongoing concerns about flooding, the City of Abbotsford is not considering bringing back the lake or much in the way of nature-based solutions, according to an overview of its preferred option for long-term flood mitigation.

“I’m not sure how you would do that in Sumas Prairie, with all of the infrastructure that runs through there, including Highway 1, railways, pipelines transmission and hydro transmission lines,” Abbotsford Mayor Henry Braun said.

Lyle told The Narwhal the city seems to be taking a “build back bigger” rather than a “build back better” approach. “Abbotsford wants dikes up in 10 months,” she said.

The trouble with Abbotsford’s plan is “they haven’t considered the fragility of that system,” Lyle said, despite having just seen it fail. The Barrowtown pump station, which keeps the lakebed dry, was saved only because hundreds of people rushed to build sandbag walls around it through the night. If it had failed, water would have sat in the lakebed for months. “They’re not taking a risk lens to it,” Lyle said. “They just assume that engineers can get this right.” 

Dikes present a bit of a “catch-22,” Lyle explained. “The more you squish up the dikes, the faster and higher the water flows and the more likely the dike is to fail.”

The city’s plan is to build bigger dikes, with a few small setbacks to allow a little more space for water, and an additional pumping station, the latter of which would cost $800 million, according to Braun. 

“I’m responsible under the community charter to protect infrastructure and residents,” he said. 

Lyle said she appreciates his motivation. “Mayor Braun has really got his community at heart and feels like he’s protecting his community, but he’s just doing it — in my very biased opinion — totally wrong.”

Tara Martin, a forestry professor at University of British Columbia, Semá:th Councillor Murray Ned and their colleagues question whether building more infrastructure to hold back water is the best environmental, socially just and financial decision. 

Together, they are working on a peer-reviewed paper, calculating that buying out landowners and moving homes and business to higher ground to allow Semá:th X̱ó:tsa to reflood would cost about $3 billion, compared with $4.5 billion to maintain the status quo through 2050. Beyond that, ongoing costs are more uncertain. Restoring the lake would also be a start toward righting colonial wrongs, the authors wrote in a Globe and Mail op-ed, and help save 70 species currently at risk of extinction. 

Minister Blair acknowledged that it “may not be the right thing to rebuild” everywhere. But that principle seemingly doesn’t extend to Sumas Prairie. “I don’t think anyone is talking about returning the lake,” he said. “We’re always interested in the economic case. But it’s also about community and the activities they’re involved in,” he added, citing the area’s agricultural importance to the province and country.

Braun makes that argument too. “Fifty per cent of our dairy, poultry, eggs, turkeys, whatever it is, that’s consumed in British Columbia comes from Abbotsford,” he said. “We can do without a lot of things: food and water are not one of them.”

Reimer, who grew up in the area, is frustrated at the “unquestioned premise” that British Columbia must get its cheese, milk and eggs from the floodplains of the Fraser Valley. “That sounds completely logical, but it isn’t,” he said. “Nowadays, chickens and cows don’t see the light of day,” noting the barns they live in could be elsewhere. 

Holger Schwichtenberg, chair of the B.C. Dairy Association, acknowledges that most cows today do spend most of their lives in barns and could conceivably be raised elsewhere. But getting to that point requires answering many questions that most people are not yet contemplating. 

He listed some of them: “Where would you go? How would you get the milk to market? How would landowners be compensated?” With supply chain disruptions becoming more common, “being able to supply local food is a big deal,” he said.

Reimer acknowledged that truth and said one option would be to move livestock but continue growing some current foods, like berries, which would be lower value to lose in a future flood. But with floods becoming more frequent and severe, he said it’s time to start asking those difficult questions that Schwichtenberg raised.

“It was depressingly fast how everyone was thinking, we’ll just build bigger pumps,” Reimer said.

Both Silver and McNeil are circumspect when talking about the prospect of the lake’s return. If governments were to buy up land from settlers and return the lake or parts of it, “it would go a long ways to helping with wildlife and fish habitat,” Silver said. “And some of our people would be satisfied with that.” At the same time, he said he doesn’t want to see relatives and friends, including settlers, displaced. 

Learning from Washington State’s approach to water 

A significant contributor to the November 2021 flooding came from the Nooksack River, which originates in Washington and once flowed to Semá:th X̱ó:tsa. Centuries ago, it deposited sediment which created a natural levee at Everson, Wash., turning the river left. But in November 2021, unusually high flows overtopped this natural barrier and the Nooksack once again flowed straight downhill into Abbotsford. 

Some Canadians are a little testy about that and would like Americans to hold back the water. But the last big flood on this system, in 1990, spurred Washington to take a different path, asking hard questions as a first step to changing how and where people can restore natural systems. 

Its Floodplain Integrated Planning process makes space for water, reducing flood risk, restoring habitat for salmon and boosting climate resilience for agriculture and people. The planning team includes government staff, flood control and watershed improvement districts, tribes and people like Paula Harris, Whatcom County’s river and flood engineering manager. 

“We’ve developed a lot of trust over the last few years that we’re in this together and trying to get to the same end goal,” Harris said. “There’s gotta be a lot of winners. And ideally no losers. Or if they do lose, they’re compensated for their loss.”

Abbotsford Mayor Braun said, with some incredulity, that he just recently learned that Washington decided more than two decades ago not to build a dike at Everson, instead accepting the overflow path the river has chosen. The water has to go somewhere, Harris said. “When you start diverting water from one flow path into another, you own the increased damages in that other flow. It’s hard to make a conscious decision to flood other people worse.”

Elsewhere, along other tributaries that flow into British Columbia, Washington has already set back some levees where houses were washed away in the past, giving rivers more access to their floodplains. Designers placed logjams strategically in the floodplain to deflect water’s energy away from levees. During the November 2021 floods, those projects worked as intended, protecting people from flooding, Harris said. 

McNeil said he is impressed by Washington’s efforts. “They opened up the waterways, got the support of farmers and local governments. And since they modified the land base to store water, three out of the last five years, they reached [396 cubic metres per second] and nobody’s even noticed,” he said.

Cross-border talks have been underway, most notably between B.C.’s premier and Washington’s governor, but also among many others in various sectors and levels of government. 

The instinct to build a wall in response to a threat is deeply ingrained in the dominant culture. “The Euro-centric view is that human values are priority,” McNeil said, “that development is the number one priority, generation of wealth.” Prioritizing human needs as more important than animals or water and its systems leads to single-focus problem solving. Need water? Build a dam and collect it from elsewhere. Concerned about flooding? Build a wall to keep the water out. 

That viewpoint is diametrically opposed to that of the Semá:th, Silver said. “From our perspective, you’re supposed to respect that waterway and everyone else that lives there [including nonhuman beings] as much as you respect one another.” 

“There’s a lot of disrespect for everything out there that we see with the newcomers to our lands,” Silver said. “People fighting with water all the time … the very taking of the lake … was one of our very early environmental disasters.”

Blair said he’s listening. “I heard very clearly from [First Nations] the importance of incorporating Indigenous Traditional Knowledge into our response. And one of the things they did say to us is how important wetlands are to flood mitigation.” 

McNeil said the Stó:lō Nation is ready to lead, but they need buy-in from like-minded allies. To that end, he’s asking another set of hard questions: “How do we come together for our collective long-term aspirations that speak to resilience, that speak to promoting salmon and a broader ecological footprint here in the valley, rebuilding a lot of what was here before development started?” 

Updated on Nov. 14, 2022, 9:56 p.m. PT: This story was updated to correct the spelling of X̱ó:tsaUpdated on Nov. 17, 2022, 3:08 p.m. PT: A previous version of this story stated that the Fraser River flows from Jasper National Park. The story has been updated to clarify the Fraser River flows from headwaters in Mount Robson Provincial Park, near Jasper National Park.

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On a rainy October morning, a small boat heads north from Campbell River, B.C., threading through Discovery Passage en route to an inlet called Phillips Arm.

As we near our destination 90 minutes later, the rain slackens and the forested lands jutting out of the water come into focus. On a rocky outcrop, California sea lions lounge.

We have come to visit the traditional territory of the Kwiakah (KWEE-kah) First Nation, once one of the largest bands in what is now British Columbia. But today it is one of the smallest, with just 22 members remaining.

Their territory lies within the Great Bear Rainforest, a 6.4 million hectare planning area created in 2016, of which a little more than half is forested.

It is touted by the province as a “gift to the world” for protecting 85 per cent of those forests.

But the Kwiakah, in the far south of the designated area, say that, under the agreement, logging in their territory will increase, and that this deal negotiated by the timber industry, province, environmental NGOs and First Nations — 20 years in the making — came largely at their expense.

Disembarking, we walk over ferns and a creek near the Kwiakah’s roughly 20-hectare reserve at the site of an old village called Matsayno. During Matsayno’s heyday, the Phillips River was full of fish, including all five species of salmon, and people hunted grizzlies, mountain goats and other game.

Chief Steven Dick, who has led the Kwiakah for about 35 years, welcomes us to Kwiakah land.

“There were hundreds of people who lived here if not a thousand,” he said. “So it’s very important to the citizens of Kwiakah.”

Kwiakah First Nation Chief Steven Dick. Photo: Erica Gies \ The Narwhal

A sea lion feeds on a salmon near Phillips Arm. Photo: Tavish Campbell

These multitudes declined as people transferred to other nations, were lost in war with other First Nations and died from diseases brought by settlers, he said. Today, most of the remaining Kwiakah live in or near Campbell River on Vancouver Island. They left their territory in the 20th century in pursuit of jobs and services, after early clearcuts on their land and overfishing in their waters, which led to a provincial ban on local fishing.

But now the Kwiakah want to return to their old village site and set up a camp here, says Chief Dick, so they can reconnect with their land. His top priority for his people is “a secure land base where they could have their own community…to have a place where they can call home.”

A 2009 provincial land use order said that timber company Western Forest Products would be allowed to cut 27,000 cubic meters annually from the Kwiakah’s core territory in Phillips Arm. But under the Great Bear Rainforest agreement, B.C. Chief Forester Diane Nicholls gave Western permission to cut 41,600 cubic meters annually — 54 per cent more — in the area.

Then things turned even darker for the Kwiakah.

Last year, Western petitioned the B.C. Ministry of Forestry, Lands, and Natural Resource Operations to combine two timber licences it holds in the Great Bear Rainforest, which would theoretically allow it to cut 275,000 cubic meters annually from Kwiakah land, said Jeff Sheldrake, executive director of regional operations for the B.C. ministry.

A decision has not yet been made on Western’s application, he said. “But Kwiakah’s concern has been well noted.”

Logging in B.C.’s celebrated conservation area?

Although it may seem strange that an area touted for conservation would continue to allow logging, that is typical in Canada, where extractive industries dominate the economy.

In fact, ecosystem-based management, a logging practice meant to ensure that the whole ecosystem continues to function, still allows for clearcuts. Profit sharing with First Nations, whose trees these were originally, means they might get three to five per cent of the government’s share of profits.

That income for First Nations is part of the justification for allowing continued logging in the Great Bear Rainforest: it brings remote communities economic opportunity. Nevertheless, most First Nations that have territory within the Great Bear Rainforest boundary support the agreement in part because it reduced logging potential on their lands. But the Kwiakah territory is now at risk for increased logging, making it harder for them to get past the premise that the Crown controls their lands and sees them first as a timber resource.

The boundary of the Great Bear Rainforest dips down into the traditional territory of the Nanwakolas Council of member First Nations, of which the Kwiakah First Nation is a part. Image based on maps from the Nanwakolas Council and the province of B.C. Image: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

“These trees belonged to the nations who lived here,” said Frank Volker, manager of economic development for the Kwiakah. “The government steals the trees from the nation and sells them to a licensee [timber company]. The only reason why that is legal is because the government who is committing that ‘crime’ makes it legal. But that doesn’t make it OK.”

We are walking the boundary between the reserve and Western’s Tree Farm Licence 39, cutblock five, and some of the trees wear orange tags. Later, cocooned in the forest, we hear a helicopter pass directly overhead, perhaps doing early reconnaissance, said foresters in our group.

The making of the Great Bear Rainforest agreement

So why did the Kwiakah end up with such a bad deal?

Much more of the northern Great Bear Rainforest is now off-limits to logging under the agreement, but primarily because it is steeper, more remote and much more expensive to get logs to market. The south has more “valley bottom” habitat close to the water, ideal for timber harvesting, said Sheldrake.

“Parts of GBR [Great Bear Rainforest] do not contain any economic timber value,” he said. Industry is first interested in places where logging makes the most economic sense.

The Kwiakah also say they were excluded from the Great Bear Rainforest negotiations. An umbrella Indigenous group, the Nanwakolas Council, was negotiating on their behalf.

Chief Dick said the Nanwakolas Council kept the Kwiakah in the dark. “They told us about the deal just a few days before it was signed,” Chief Dick told The Narwhal. The Kwiakah rejected it, but at that point it was too late to make changes.

Dallas Smith, president of Nanwakolas Council, disputed the Kwiakah’s claim that they were excluded.

What’s undisputed is that, when the Kwiakah refused the deal, the provincial government began to talk with them directly, said Sheldrake.

Another problem is that the provincial government had a two-tier system in engaging with First Nations, said Jody Holmes, project director for Rainforest Solutions Project and one of the main environmental NGO negotiators of the Great Bear Rainforest deal. Groups “in the tent” had signed a strategic engagement agreement (SEA) with the province. Groups that hadn’t were termed nonaligned or nonparticipatory.

“They would withhold treats to try to get them to come in,” Holmes said. She estimated six to nine nations were non-aligned throughout the Great Bear Rainforest process.

Ultimately the Kwiakah signed a Strategic Land Use Planning Agreement (SLUPA) with B.C., which paid them $380,000. But that money is not a payment to the Kwiakah for logging in their territory, said the Kwiakah’s lawyer, Drew Mildon, with Victoria-based Woodward and Associates. It is intended to give the Kwiakah the resources they need to engage in  administrative duties that forestry requires in B.C., such as consultation.

“Kwiakah have not agreed to any areas or cut rates,” Mildon said. “They have taken the position that the annual allowable cut in the Phillips [area] set by the Crown is unreasonable and does not sufficiently protect wildlife.”

Volker added that the Kwiakah signed the Strategic Land Use Planning Agreement because their consent was needed to finalize the Great Bear Rainforest deal and they support its principle: an attempt to conserve the rainforest. And their lawyer Mildon advised them that signing did not mean that they were agreeing to annual allowable cut rates in the Phillips Arm area.

TimberWest Forest Corp. logging near Phillips Arm. Photo: Tavish Campbell

However, the province has a different legal interpretation: signing on to the Strategic Land Use Planning Agreement is viewed as the Kwiakah’s acknowledgment of the Great Bear Rainforest Land Use Order, Vivian Thomas, communications director for the Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development, told The Narwhal.

The province stopped short of saying explicitly that the Kwiakah had agreed to the annual allowable cut in the Phillips.

The dustup between Nanwakolas Council and the Kwiakah does raise the question of whether the Kwiakah had the opportunity to give informed prior consent, as is required, Holmes said.

Volker added despite the confusion, one thing is clear: the Kwiakah did not consent to the annual allowable cut rate.

Planning process cost-prohibitive, ‘designed to be difficult’

The advice given to those concerned about the fate of the land by Jeff Sheldrake, the regional director of B.C.’s Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations, is to “sit down and work hard at this landscape unit reserve design process” in which industry and First Nations negotiate with each other.

And yet, considering the ongoing concern that the province set First Nations on a collision course with companies by assigning industry cut rates on band territories, that position could be read as dismissive.

The landscape unit reserve design process was sold as a great opportunity for First Nations to influence how their land is managed and establish reserve areas where no logging should occur, Volker, manager of economic development for the Kwiakah, said.

“In reality it is a complicated and very expensive process that was designed with licensee [timber companies] interests in mind — not the interests of Indigenous peoples” or the environment, he said.

Chief Dick agreed.

The areas the province and industry identified to protect were in places “they’re not going harvest anyway,” he said. “There’s no need to protect those areas because they’re not at risk.”

On the other hand, the lower valley, which the Kwiakah want to protect — where timber is easily accessible and close to shipping routes — “they’re not wanting to use that area as protected,” Dick said.

Volker said he thinks this process is “designed to be very difficult to understand to make sure the average Joe doesn’t get it and won’t complain or identify the flaws.”

After. Photo: Tavish Campbell

Before. Photo: Tavish Campbell

To sift through its complexity, they hired a forestry consultant. The Kwiakah are taking a stand in the Phillips Arm area, the most important area in their traditional territory, and have already “spent tens of thousands of dollars” engaging in the design process, said Volker.

But they aren’t close to done or optimistic about the final result. And while there are three additional landscape units in their territory, “Any large scale participation of Kwiakah in the LRD [landscape unit reserve design] process for those landscape units was just cost prohibitive,” said Volker.

“We just cannot afford to be active at the same level as in Phillips.”

Logging threatens grizzly bear population, bear viewing business

Later in the day, the sun glances off the Phillips River, reflecting a spotlight onto our group in the otherwise dark forest. In the distance a grizzly bear gallivants into the water, swinging a giant salmon in his mouth.

This grizzly and his relations are a source of income for the Kwiakah. Beginning in 2007, they partnered with nearby Sonora Resort, which pays them an annual fee to take guests to see bears from boats and viewing platforms.

That business is threatened by the proposed logging. Phillips Arm has seen a lot of industrial activity already; poorly executed clearcuts from earlier times were devastating, especially to salmon habitat. Modern clearcuts continue.

Back on the boat in the afternoon, the sky turned blue. Clear cuts of differing ages are visible on the slopes all around us, giving the landscape the look of an uneven haircut.

An orca at home in Phillips Arm. Photo: Tavish Campbell

An important point to note in all of this, Volker said, is the Kwiakah aren’t against all logging.

For example, they signed an agreement with the province in 2018, which acknowledges the impact on Kwiakah rights and title from logging and the lost income from bear viewing due to the industrial disturbance. To compensate them for this loss, the province is allowing the Kwiakah to apply for a forest licence to harvest 30,000 cubic metres (once, not annually).

Ideally the Kwiakah would be able to find this volume in its own territory, Volker said, but they will not cut one tree from Phillips Arm. Not that they could: it is almost entirely licensed to big timber companies. Instead, they have to find an area assigned to a timber company but not yet licensed for cutting and convince both the company and any First Nation with overlapping rights to allow them to cut. Because of these hurdles, the Kwiakah may never see much in the way of profits.

Separately, Western talked about condensing five years’ worth of logging into 18 months, which would leave three-and-a-half years without bear-disturbing industrial activity. The Kwiakah are also pushing for Western to reduce its annual cut for those five years from 41,600 cubic meters to 10,000.

The bottom line is that the Kwiakah don’t think Phillips Arm can tolerate the levels of logging the province has authorized. That conclusion is based on independent scientific studies they commissioned to measure the health of their salmon and bear populations.

Clear-cut logging behind grizzly declines: biologist

Biologist Wayne McCrory, an independent consultant hired by the Kwiakah, is a veteran of more than 30 years of grizzly research. He conducted direct counts of individual bears based on four research trips to Phillips Arm.

“It’s the most messed up watershed I’ve ever seen.” — Biologist Wayne McCrory

In historic times he estimates the watershed likely supported 50 to 60 grizzly bears. But his research concluded that there are just 10 to 12 bears there today — numbers corroborated by another study using DNA hair snagging and remote cameras.

The cause of the grizzly population decline in the Phillips Arm area is primarily clear-cut logging, he said. Logging roads disturb critical grizzly habitat, and massive clear-cutting too close to salmon streams caused landslides, destroying spawning habitat.

A bear in the Phillips River. Photo: Miray Campbell

“It’s the most messed up watershed I’ve ever seen,” said McCrory. Part of the Great Bear Rainforest order calls for identifying watersheds that need recovery and doing restoration.

“In order to do that, you don’t keep clear cutting,” he said. “For a watershed that’s been so — pardon my language — fucked over by the timber industry, they should just leave it alone for 20, 25 years and let it recover and do some restoration.”

‘We have been burned’: Chief

The Kwiakah and Western Forest Products have been negotiating, but the Kwiakah feel burned by previous dealings with the company. The band remains concerned about Western’s application to amalgamate its Tree Farm Licences, which would allow it to potentially harvest its full 275,000 cubic meters annually from Phillips Arm.

In an April letter, Western assured Mildon, the Kwiakah’s lawyer, that, until 2026 when the province adjusts annual allowable cuts, it would not take more than the 41,600 cubic meters annually designated for its Tree Farm Licence that includes Phillips Arm.

In an e-mail, Seanna McConnell, director of Indigenous engagement for Western Forest Products, reiterated, “We will not harvest all of the annual allowable cut from a single geographic location. We will continue to maintain the partition on harvest from the Phillips and Broughton blocks of the TFL [Tree Farm Licence] once amalgamated.”

Despite the assurances, the Kwiakah have little trust in Western Forest Products.

And there’s reason for those misgivings: starting in 2013, Western was negotiating with the Kwiakah to reduce cut levels in the Phillips to 15,000 cubic meters a year and drafted a letter to the province, proposing this solution.

But in an overlapping time period from 2011 to 2014, the forest industry as a whole was negotiating with environmental non-profits. As of 2014, negotiations included a proposal to lift restrictions on logging in the Phillips in exchange for reduced logging in the Great Bear Rainforest as a whole, said Holmes of Rainforest Solutions Project.

“Neither the NGOs or Kwiakah First Nation were aware of the coexistence of these simultaneous and potentially conflicting negotiations with WFP [Western Forest Products],” she said.

Meanwhile, Western was also lobbying the province to increase the cut for the amalgamated Phillips and Broughton areas to 79,000 cubic metres a year, which the company could log entirely from Phillips.

Timber piles on Thurlow Island, adjacent to Phillips Arm. Photo: Tavish Campbell

“We learned about their betrayal in April 2016 when staff in the B.C. Chief Forester’s office informed us that she wanted to move forward with a decision on the new AAC [annual allowable cut] but had not consulted with Kwiakah,” Volker said.

Holmes acknowledges that the changes NGOs negotiated in ecosystem management — meant to protect at least 70 per cent of each type of ecosystem across the Great Bear Rainforest — ended up increasing the amount of logging allowed in Phillips’ valley bottom ecosystem.

In an October 2016 letter to Western Forest Products, Chief Dick wrote, “Kwiakah has worked in good faith to try and reach an agreement with WFP, only to end up feeling we have been duped into investing thousands of dollars and our time and energies in an attempt to negotiate with someone who appears to have never had any intention of reaching a fair agreement with us.”

Hoping to circumvent further struggle, Chief Dick proposed to buy out timber harvest rights in the Phillips.

“We weren’t prepared to enter into those sales negotiations,” Western’s McConnell said they responded via letter.

That reaction didn’t surprise Volker. Citing a price would create poor optics, he said, giving the Kwiakah the opportunity to say, “That’s what these guys think they can charge us for our own trees.”

After decades of advocating for his people, Chief Dick said he is impatient with the pace of change in Canada with regard to Indigenous people.

“I want to see that big shift,” he said, like the Maori, whose claim to self-determination is better recognized by New Zealand. He hopes some of that change will come about by the 10-year review of the Great Bear Rainforest agreement in 2026.

“I hope the political landscape within this province as well as in Canada changes to really take in to consideration the view of First Nations,” he said. “I mean, you’ve got this United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People — which Canada adopted — and I’m hoping to see those types of approaches be taken seriously.”

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Deny the problem, dispute the cause, claim the cost is too high: these tactics have worked to delay regulations on DDT, tobacco, carbon dioxide pollution and other interests.

Now these methods are being deployed in Canada by forestry corporations and other extractive industries, according to a paper published Monday in Wildlife Society Bulletin. Their goal is to delay habitat protection in Ontario for boreal woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou), a threatened species.

“Successful use of this strategy has weakened environmental protection, undermined public debate on policy solutions, enabled harmful activities to continue long after their danger was scientifically established, and even legitimized campaigns for industrial expansion,” write the authors.

The paper compares climate denial tactics with these efforts to block protections for caribou habitat. Both campaigns deploy deception, misdirection and fake news to manufacture uncertainty, said lead author Julee Boan, an ecologist and boreal program manager for Ontario Nature.

The caribou are supposed to be protected by the Species at Risk Act, which came into force in 2003 and requires provincial and federal governments to protect habitat and develop recovery plans to avoid localized extinction. But all over Canada, these tactics have delayed habitat protection, and caribou numbers continue to drop.

“All the ways that industry and government try to shoot the messenger, discredit science, discredit the scientists, and then sow doubt and confusion, and buy time, are rote,” said Mark Hebblewhite, associate professor of ungulate habitat ecology at the University of Montana, who happened to be on the peer-review panel for Boan’s paper. “There’s nothing new here.”

He recites the playbook he’s heard in his work on caribou conservation in Canada: “No 1. Caribou aren’t declining. But if they were declining … it’s not caused by humans. And even if it has to do with humans, it’s because of climate change.”

Tactic No. 1: Deny there’s a problem

As public awareness of environmental problems and sympathy for them rises, some industrial interests have learned that it’s better to question whether environmental degradation is actually happening, rather than the goal of protection, says the paper.

This complexity of ecosystems and the nature of the scientific method — never achieving 100 per cent certainty because it remains open to new evidence — makes it vulnerable to industry attacks. While skepticism and questioning are part of the scientific process, in these cases, industry interests are challenging conclusions well supported by evidence with opinions based on conjecture.

“Skepticism is based in truth-seeking; manufactured uncertainty is willful ignorance,” says the paper.

The Ontario Forest Industry Association and mayors of some forestry-dependent communities have disputed that caribou are threatened at all, citing population numbers for all caribou in Canada (although those figures are suspect, as one group said there were 1.28 million and another said more than 2.5 million). But, Boan said, that line of argument ignores the federal government’s Committee of the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada that said caribou’s different subspecies and eco-types (boreal, mountain, and migratory) are all “irreplaceable parts of Canada’s biodiversity.”  

The different caribou eco-types behave in different ways and evolved in different environments, Boan said. “Species conservation is not about a Noah’s ark approach: grab these genes here and there. It’s about the systems. And we don’t fully know how these systems all work together.”

Boan and her coauthors also detail instances of industry saying the science isn’t clear. In fact, boreal caribou are “one of the most well researched animals in Canada,” Boan said. Hebblewhite emphatically concurs. “Within one year in 2012, there were 1,700 caribou radio collared in Canada. There are hundreds of studies saying … they’re declining. It’s probably as certain as climate change studies that, No. 1, they’re declining, and no. 2, the declines are caused by humans.”

Tactic No. 2: Deny the cause of caribou declines

Despite numerous studies showing that human-caused habitat destruction and fragmentation — from forestry, oil and gas developing, mining and mineral exploration and hydroelectric, according to a 2012 report from Environment Canada — is the reason for caribou population declines, industrial interests continue to argue a lack of evidence.

This “Caribou Facts” website from the Forest Products Association of Canada gives a taste of industry arguments. Among them: It claims that boreal caribou populations are “healthier” in logged areas. And it claims that climate change is a significant factor in caribou declines.

“There isn’t one published paper that I can think of directly linking the previous declines of the past 30 years to climate change,” Hebblewhite said. As part of a critical habitat review in 2010, “We did not need climate to explain the range retraction of caribou in the country.”

Of course climate change will be a concern in the future, he said. But declines to date are primarily caused by cumulative disturbance from industrial activity.

Tactic No. 3: Too expensive to fix, so shoot the messenger

Whether fighting climate change or caribou habitat protection, industries often threaten economic decline and loss of jobs. For caribou conservation, those fears are stoked primarily by the forestry industry, says the study.

In fact, say the authors, forestry jobs in Canada have been in decline for two decades because of changing demand for forest products, high labour and energy costs, and declining investment in the sector.

Although the forestry sector accounted for just 0.6 percent of Ontario jobs in 2013, the industry message is getting through, Boan said. At a debate in Thunder Bay ahead of the recent election, the first question from the moderator was about the Endangered Species Act (ESA), she said.

“The way they framed it, the ESA was being pushed by well-funded environmentalists that have no understanding or stake in Northern Ontario and used fear-mongering tactics rather than science to push their agenda. This is the moderator. Not a member of the public.”

More information is not the answer

“These tactics are clear as day,” Hebblewhite said, “visible from 100,000 feet.” But they are working. Many studies on climate denialism have investigated why. “Climate change psychology tells us that people need to feel there’s hope to make a decision in the face of uncertainty,” he said. And because “there’s been so much denial about caribou declining for long, scientists have had to beat the drum.”

They’ve repeated their studies and their message that caribou are declining over and over, he said, “to the point where the average member of the public is like, “Oh, my god. These caribou are screwed.” That feeling of helplessness wedges the door open for the government and industry to not act to save them, Hebblewhite said.

Also playing roles are two psychological traits, said Jasper Fessman, public-interest communications strategist and professor of strategic communications at the University of West Virginia. They are confirmation bias — the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation your existing beliefs — and uncertainty avoidance, societal anxiety about uncertainty that leads people to minimize it or retreat from it.

He has a quibble with Boan’s paper: it doesn’t include a call to action.

“Raising awareness is not, by itself, going to change the problem,” he said. “An information campaign does not necessarily counter a disinformation campaign.”

Simple messaging wins the day

The best way of countering strategic communications is with better strategic communications, he said.

Boan’s paper says the complicated nature of caribou science, especially the different eco-types, is challenging for people to understand, so she tries to explain it. A better approach, Fessman said, would be to break it down into simple, easily graspable concepts. For example, if scientists project rates of decline over 100 years, “Are there any caribou left? That’s something people understand. If it continues as it is now, we will not have any caribou, and our kids will not remember what a caribou is?”

It may seem faintly ridiculous or counter to scientists’ nature to oversimplify and state the obvious to such a degree. But that is what the data indicates, Fessman said, so scientists would be saying something true. And industry is succeeding with equally simple — although often untrue — messages.

Also effective is to counter industry narratives with other relevant narratives. For example, when the forestry industry cites lost forestry jobs, talk about the impact on tourism because people want to see caribou or at least know that this symbol of wild Canada still exists. “That’s countering one business interest with another business interest,” he said, pointing to similar conservation efforts that have proved extremely effective in some African countries.

Despite the federal requirements to save the caribou, in Ontario, forestry industry lobbying, including these denial strategies, is working. The industry has repeatedly won provincial exemptions from requirements to recover caribou populations.

“For all intents and purposes they’ve never been subjected to recovery requirements since the law came into force in 2007,” Boan said.

And on the federal level, a recent report on the progress of caribou recovery, “looks like it could have been written by industry, instead of by a government worried about the effects of industry on caribou habitat,” Hebblewhite said. “It’s like this industry apologia, that industry is trying really hard, they’re doing everything they can.”

These machinations have serious consequences, Boan said. “This denial is delaying caribou conservation.”

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