It’s a grey September afternoon, and a small group is gathered for a special behind-the-scenes visit with Assiniboine Park Zoo’s newest resident. 

“Heeeeere, bubba,” animal-care specialist Caitlin Gordon-Hall hollers from between a double layer of chain-link fencing.

After a beat, a small white face appears at the entrance of the private enclosure. The polar bear cub sniffs the air before trundling toward the fence, where his keepers have been working to encourage calm behaviour around humans ahead of his public debut today.

Gordon-Hall offers sing-song affirmations while the cub, who is nearly 200 pounds and 10 or 11 months old, observes the fawning strangers with guarded curiosity. 

The young bear is objectively cute. With his round, fluffy frame and oversized paws, he looks more like a gift-shop stuffie than an apex predator.

A low, persistent growl, however, is a reminder that his natural instincts are still intact. 

“In the wild, his mama would have taught him: if there’s people there, make yourself big, make noise,” Gordon-Hall says. 

But his mama isn’t here. The cub, whose official zoo name will be chosen by public voting, is an orphan.

It’s been an intensive period of relearning for the cub, who, prior to arriving at the zoo in August, spent his days roaming the tundra near Churchill, Man. 

Today’s 20-minute visit is part of a series of exposure sessions designed to desensitize the bear to the zoo’s forthcoming crowds. A few minutes into the exercise and the cub is busy scratching his back on the fence, seemingly content that the nearby photojournalist’s long lens and camera shutter pose no threat. 

This isn’t the first polar bear cub to make the trek from the shore of Hudson Bay to a zoo enclosure. And he won’t be the last.

The plight of polar bears in the face of climate change has been well-documented, and the fate of bears with less sea ice has meant they get into trouble with humans more often, with bears usually paying the price. Policy has shifted over the decades, but young orphan cubs still stand little chance of survival in the wild. Life in a zoo may be an imperfect solution — but it’s one that keeps the bear alive.

As the session ends, the group heads through the locked gate of the cub care centre, where a pair of zoo visitors are peering through the slats. They pepper the staff with questions: How is the cub doing? Will he be rooming with the other six bears? When will we be able to see him?

It’s been nine years since the last orphaned cub was transferred from Churchill, the “Polar Bear Capital of the World,” to the Winnipeg zoo. Public excitement in the south is palpable, while some northern residents are wary of a previously wild animal spending the rest of its life in captivity.

Orphan cub’s mother was found near the Churchill dump — which has long posed issues for polar bears

Kelsey Eliasson, a Churchill polar bear guide and filmmaker, encountered the bear and his mother when they lived in the wild. He knew them by the nicknames “Marrón” or “Maury” and “Blanca” — Spanish for brown and white, respectively. 

“She was a super clean, super white bear, and then Marrón was kind of dirty and muddy, like every cub,” Eliasson says over the phone. 

Eliasson spent several days documenting the pair this summer as they hunkered down in the rocks along the shore of Hudson Bay. During the warmer months, bears can often be found in an area east of town hunting for seals while trying to beat the heat and bugs.

Blanca, who was recognizable by a scar on her ear, looked healthy while she wrestled and rested with her cub, Eliasson says.

But in mid-August, the mother bear was found dead roughly a kilometre from the Churchill garbage dump. Her cause of death remains unknown, and the results of a necropsy are still pending, a provincial spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

Bears have been visiting the dump with more frequency since the spring of 2024, when the town’s enclosed waste transfer facility was destroyed in a fire.

“Last year it was non-stop,” Geoff York, vice-president of science and policy for Polar Bears International, a non-profit research and conservation organization, says over a video call.

Sending orphan cubs to Winnipeg zoo has a complicated history

For a long time, there were few rules governing the lives of polar bears in Manitoba. 

The provincial government frequently exported orphaned cubs and problem bears to zoos around the world until the late 1990s, when three Churchill-born bears were discovered performing in a travelling Mexican circus. The bears had been purchased from a zoo in Germany and were living in sweltering conditions without access to water.

Widespread media coverage and public condemnation led to the creation of Manitoba’s Polar Bear Protection Act, which regulates the care and treatment of polar bears in captivity. Under the legislation, the province retains ownership of captive bears sent elsewhere, and their offspring, in perpetuity. 

The act changed Assiniboine Park Zoo’s relationship with the charismatic predators as well.

The zoo has housed polar bears since at least 1939, when an orphaned seven-week-old cub, dubbed Charmichael, arrived via train after his mother was shot by a trapper on the shore of Hudson Bay, according to a Winnipeg Tribune article from the time. 

Bears remained a popular fixture at the zoo until the death of Debby, the world’s oldest known polar bear, in 2008 at the age of 41. Her concrete enclosure was deemed too small and ill-equipped by Manitoba Conservation standards to host a new bear without significant renovations.

Amendments to the Polar Bear Protection Act created rules for rescuing orphaned cubs and paved the way for the Leatherdale International Polar Bear Conservation Centre. The $4.5-million research lab and cub transition centre opened at the zoo in 2012, followed by three new polar bear habitats at the 10-acre Journey to Churchill exhibit in 2014.

Decisions to send an orphaned cub to Winnipeg are made on a case-by-case basis with input from an advisory committee of provincial appointees, zoo administrators and polar bear experts. Age is a significant consideration since polar bear cubs typically spend two years with their mothers learning to hunt and navigate. Orphans less than a year old stand little chance of survival in the wild.

Eleven cubs were transferred to the zoo between 2013 and 2017 — a pace that sparked public outrage in Churchill and pushed the Winnipeg facility’s capacity to the limit. The zoo is currently home to seven rescued polar bears, including the new cub. 

 “There’s definitely been times when we were worried about our ability to take new bears,” Stephen Petersen, Assiniboine Park Conservancy’s director of conservation and research, says, referring to space constraints.

There are few other options. The province has conducted two foster parenting studies with the Born Free Foundation, a British animal welfare organization, to determine if mother polar bears with one healthy cub would adopt a second. The project was cancelled due to lack of success. 

A rare case of wild adoption was observed in Manitoba last year, when a mother polar bear was seen travelling with a second cub. It was the 13th documented case of adoption in the western Hudson Bay subpopulation.

Orphaned cubs raised in captivity can’t currently be returned to the wild because they lack hunting skills and natural instincts.

That leaves the zoo. The province has updated its cub management policy since the first influx of orphans and the zoo now only takes bears whose mothers have died through suspected conflict with humans, Petersen says.

One of those points of conflict can come from garbage dumps.

‘Polar bears will break into everything’: Churchill garbage dump struggles to keep bears out

Dealing with municipal garbage in a northern community like Churchill, which is surrounded by rocky, intermittently frozen ground and hundreds of polar bears, poses challenges. While the previous facility allowed for indoor garbage sorting and storage, the 2024 fire forced the Town of Churchill to return to an open-dump system with an electrified fence. 

“The trash doesn’t just sit nicely inside this little fenced-in area. It gets pulled out by animals, and it gets blown out by the wind. So it’s created quite an attractant,” York, who specializes in reducing conflict between bears and humans, says.

Dozens of bears were able to break into the dump site when the electric fence failed during a storm, he adds. The barrier has since been upgraded with funding from Polar Bears International. The group plans to install new bear-deterrent technology in the town and dumpsite.

Churchill is in the process of rebuilding its garbage facility and is developing a long-term waste management strategy, a municipal spokesperson said in an emailed statement. The town also plans to revisit the feasibility of trash incineration — a concept that was shelved following the fire but has proven beneficial in other northern communities, like Nuuk, Greenland, where the energy generated from burning household garbage is used to heat homes. 

Eliasson thinks incineration should be given higher priority.

“Churchill has been talking about an incinerator [for a long time] and … we’re just not building one. It’s the only solution,” he says. “Polar bears will break into everything else.”

Polar bears, impacted by climate change, are increasingly moving into towns

The western Hudson Bay subpopulation, which includes Churchill and ranges from Chesterfield Inlet in Nunavut to the Manitoba-Ontario border, is the most researched group of polar bears in the world, according to Polar Bears International. 

There are roughly 800 bears living in the territory today, representing a 30 per cent population decline over the last 46 years due to shrinking sea ice caused by climate change, Evan Richardson, a polar bear research scientist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, says.

“This is one of the most southern polar bear populations in the world, and it was among the first to show impacts of reduced sea ice availability on individual body condition, growth, reproduction and survival,” Richardson says. 

Polar bears make their living on the ice, using the frozen platforms to hunt for seals. Open water makes the speedy prey increasingly harder to catch. 

The Hudson Bay population is experiencing an era of relative stability thanks to several good ice seasons, Richardson says. While this gives current generations of bears a positive start, the survival of the species is dependent on the long-term health of their environment.  

“Polar bears don’t occur anywhere where there’s not persistent annual sea ice, and so as the habitat melts, it threatens the bears’ existence,” he says.

Climate change is further straining the coexistence of bears and humans in northern Manitoba. 

“It’s a bit of a perfect storm,” York says. “Less ice means the area is more accessible to more human activity. At the same time, more bears are spending more time on shore.”

As the ice-free season grows longer, Hudson Bay is seeing more traffic, whether it be freight, tourism or research. In Manitoba, the provincial and federal governments are keen to expand operations at the Port of Churchill to include year-round shipping, an all-weather road, an upgraded rail line and a liquefied natural gas terminal — all of which will bring more people and disturbance to the region. 

To ease the pressure on residents — bears and humans alike — York believes the governments should focus on shoring up local infrastructure, including Churchill’s garbage facility, before embarking on major national projects in remote northern communities.

“Take a quick step back and say, ‘Hey, what’s needed here today for the people who are there now?’ ” he says. “This waste management need has been acute, and we haven’t had the best luck getting the attention we think it merits, from the human-health side, but also the environmental-health and wildlife-health side.”

There have been 159 bear sightings and encounters reported so far this year in Churchill to the province’s Polar Bear Alert Program — a 24-hour hotline designed to minimize dangerous interactions while the animals move ashore from mid-July to mid-November.

If a bear is reported near the town or dump, Manitoba Conservation officers will chase them away with non-lethal scaring devices, such as noisemakers or flares. “Problem bears” that return repeatedly or refuse to leave the area are placed in the province’s polar bear holding facility near the Churchill airport and relocated more remotely via helicopter. Seven bears have been flown out of town this year.

The holding facility, colloquially known as polar bear jail, is also where orphaned cubs begin their journey to Winnipeg.

‘A really smart little bear, and he’s doing very well’

After his mother died, the zoo’s new cub was captured by conservation officers and held in polar bear jail while decisions were made about his future. Within a week, he was on a plane to Winnipeg accompanied by veterinary staff from the zoo. 

His first 30 days were spent in medical quarantine at the cub care centre, which includes indoor and outdoor enclosure space with a shallow pool, foliage and natural ground cover for digging. 

The cub’s introduction to captivity has been closely managed by a small circle of trainers.

“It has gone through a traumatic event of losing its mother,” Jackie Enberg, the zoo’s curator of animal care, says. “We’re here to offer a safe home and daily care. … A lot of that is relationship building and a good diet.”

Enberg has overseen the transitions for all of the cubs transferred to the zoo. Unsurprisingly, food is the fastest way to a polar bear’s heart.

Once the cub’s stomach adjusted to his new diet of ground meat, fish and “marine mammal chow” — a kind of dry kibble — his trainers added tong-feeding sessions to the menu. The goal is to associate humans with food delivery and reward calm behaviour, which can help with future vet checkups. 

Visitor exposure sessions were added post-quarantine. Over several weeks, the cub’s trainers paid close attention to his behaviour as larger groups of zoo staff and patrons stopped by his enclosure for longer periods of time. If he showed signs of distress, such as charging the fence or growling, the process was slowed, Enberg says.

So far, the cub has adapted to captivity as well as expected. (A fecal cortisol study conducted on bears at the zoo, and published in the Canadian Journal of Zoology earlier this year, found orphaned cubs can adjust to living under human care within two weeks of relocation.)

“I’m really impressed with how far he’s gotten. He’s just a really smart little bear, and he’s doing very well,” Enberg says. “And he’s spunky.” 

That spunky temperament may come into play when the cub is big enough to integrate with the zoo’s adult polar bears. Staff use personality assessments developed in the onsite research lab to determine which bears will mesh well together. The cub joins a long line of Assiniboine Park polar bears involved in local and international research programs — from non-invasive tracking techniques to whiskerprint identification to thermal imaging. Scientists at the zoo are also studying how climate change is impacting denning in the Arctic and how stress affects a bear’s DNA. 

“We really want the bears in our care to participate in as much research that contributes to wild bear and bear welfare overall as possible,” Petersen says.

For the zoo, the new cub promises to boost ticket sales as a novel attraction while serving as an ambassador for his northern brethren. 

It’s a tough sell for Eliasson, the Churchill polar bear guide, who would rather see orphaned cubs returned to the wild or paired with adoptive mothers. 

“It’s 2026, and Manitoba has a polar bear cub rehabilitation centre where the only option is to fly the cub to Winnipeg and put it in a zoo. To me, that doesn’t sound like rehabilitation,” he says. 

Petersen, however, says release isn’t a viable option. 

“Putting a grown, healthy bear that has relied on humans for all its food back on the landscape is just a huge risk to communities further north,” he says. 

Meanwhile, the cub is spending his days climbing logs and splashing in the pool of his enclosure as visitors watch from beyond the fence.

And soon, he’ll have a new name. The public can vote for Duke, Marly, Fletcher or Mantayo — ideas compiled by students from the Duke of Marlborough School in Churchill that speak to landmarks in the North.

Updated Oct. 13, 2026 at 11:56 a.m. CT: This story has been updated to correct the fact that Nuuk is located in Greenland, not Nunavut as previously stated.

Eva Wasney is a reporter covering environmental issues in Manitoba. Her position is part of a partnership between The Narwhal and the Winnipeg Free Press.

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.

Patricia Dutchak was devastated when she first saw the wide swaths of crushed grass and upturned soil at Winnipeg’s Rotary Prairie Nature Park, a municipal heritage site.

“This is a very rare ecosystem, a remnant of tallgrass prairie, there’s barely any left in the world, and to come here and see all this damage was heartbreaking,” Dutchak, chair of the Transcona Rotary Club’s parks committee, says. 

The club is responsible for maintaining the protected green space, which was significantly damaged this summer when a fence between the park and the neighbouring Amazon distribution centre was relocated.

The eight-hectare nature preserve is situated on a narrow tract of land on Regent Avenue West in the commercial heart of Winnipeg’s Transcona neighbourhood. The park received its municipal heritage designation in 1992 and is, today, surrounded by high-traffic streets, industrial warehouses and car dealerships. 

In early August, a contractor hired by Amazon moved a section of chain-link fence running along the distribution centre’s parking lot a couple of metres to the west toward the park. The work was carried out to allow for safer snow and ice removal over the winter, an Amazon spokesperson said in an email statement. 

During the process, grass and shrubs along both sides of the fence were mowed down and dumped in the park without permission from the Rotary Club. Wooden fence posts marking the western perimeter of the preserve were removed, leaving deep holes in the soil, and a black plastic pipe originating from the Amazon facility was left snaking through the grass.

Dutchak was alerted to the situation by a member of the public, who shared footage of a skid steer being driven inside the park, leaving wide tracks of trampled greenery. 

“The person I would really like to talk to is the operator of the equipment. What were you thinking? At the minimum, it’s trespassing,” Dutchak says during an interview at the site last Thursday.

She hopes those responsible for the damage will be held accountable for the park’s restoration.

The city is investigating and working toward a resolution, a city spokesperson said in a statement. 

The Amazon spokesperson says the company is reviewing its internal procedures, its oversight of the third-party contractor and plans to make a financial contribution to support the stewardship of the park. The Bezos Earth Fund, an environmental charity started by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has committed $2 billion globally to nature conservation projects.

New threats to an already-threatened tallgrass prairie landscape

Tallgrass prairie was once ubiquitous across North America, covering the central plains of the continent from southern Manitoba to the Gulf of Mexico. As European settlers colonized the prairies, much of the existing grassland was converted to farmland. 

Today, less than one per cent of the original tallgrass prairie habitat remains, making it one of the most endangered ecosystems in the world.

The Rotary Prairie Nature Park is an example of “wet” tallgrass prairie, meaning its heavy clay soil is especially effective at diverting and storing surface water, Rafael Otfinowski, associate professor of biology at the University of Winnipeg, says. 

“That could give away why it’s still conserved,” Otfinowski says. “If you’re trying to build or farm, often you go for the best land first. So some of the areas that are best preserved in Manitoba for tallgrass prairie … are very rocky and very poorly drained.”

In passing, the Rotary nature preserve looks like an overgrown field with a narrow walking path and a smattering of aspen. The ecological reality is much more complex. 

The area is a remnant prairie ecosystem, meaning it has never been ploughed. Surveys by the city’s naturalist services branch have identified 142 different plant species in the park since 1993. The site is also home to a number of rare native Manitoba plants, including blue flowering gentians, mountain sneezeweed and whorled milkweed. Small songbirds can be seen among the flora.

The park’s iconic grass, big bluestem, is commemorated in a metal sculpture at its southern entrance. Unlike the shallow root systems of lawn and ornamental grasses, bluestem roots can extend several metres underground. 

“They have very, very deep root systems, which means they can build, essentially, a composter that goes deep into the soil and does all kinds of wonderful things — from nutrients to carbon [sequestration] to water storage,” Otfinowski says. “That takes many years to develop … so they really do require a special, long-term, undisturbed environment where they can thrive.”

Winnipeg has several hectares of unconnected tallgrass prairie preserves. These islands act as important seasonal “cafeterias” for pollinators and migrating birds since native plants tend to have longer blooming periods than their cultivated counterparts.

Beyond the ecological benefits, the preservation of these sites can serve as a form of reconciliation, Otfinowski says.

“The cultural reasons, the historic reasons, the social reasons are huge — especially inside an urban area,” he says. “It’s a form of acknowledging what our ecosystems were before settlement.”

Dutchak worries about the external threats facing the green space. 

She has documented unauthorized encampments and fire pits on the grounds and has heard rumblings from residents about turning the grassland into sports fields.  

“I don’t want to be living in the generation where this is going to disappear,” she says.

How to bring back a tallgrass prairies

Restoring damaged tallgrass prairie is a time-sensitive process. 

“Within a year or two of disturbance happening, you can have a really bad non-native species takeover,” John Morgan, a retired ecologist who spent most of his career restoring tallgrass prairie ecosystems in Manitoba, says. 

Native prairie plants evolved under different circumstances than the opportunistic weeds brought over from Europe during colonization, Morgan explains. 

Most non-native species, such as dandelions and Canada thistle, have adapted to grow quickly in bare soil because they evolved alongside western agriculture, where the ground is tilled annually. Tallgrass prairies in North America, on the other hand, grew alongside 60 million grazing bison, Morgan says.

While prairie grasslands can withstand harsh above-ground conditions thanks to deep, slow-growing root systems, they struggle to compete with more aggressive plants when their landscape is disturbed. 

“They’re very tough as far as the climate goes and the vagaries of floods and droughts,” Morgan says. 

“[But] most of the grassland species here, with very few exceptions, are not really competitive. They didn’t have to be for thousands of years.”

Within the first few months of damage to a tall grass prairie, Morgan recommends replanting with native seeds and developing a long-term plan for weed control. It can be a challenging but worthwhile endeavour, he says.

“Every little bit that you lose is a significant amount of the remainder,” he says. “We all hear about the South American rainforest and how fast that’s disappearing … in Manitoba we have what I call the rainforest of the prairies, which is the tallgrass prairie.”

Eva Wasney is a reporter covering environmental issues in Manitoba. Her position is part of a partnership between The Narwhal and the Winnipeg Free Press.

Updated Oct. 6, 2026 at 12:08 p.m. CT: This article was updated to remove an image and a map that depicted grasslands that were not specifically tallgrass prairie grasslands.

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.

As other western provinces struggle to address the environmental and economic fallout from thousands of orphan oil and gas wells, only a tiny portion of Manitoba’s petroleum infrastructure is sitting idle and unclaimed. 

But it’s unclear, however, if the province’s small roster of orphan wells is the byproduct of effective regulation — or a historic lack of departmental oversight. Manitoba’s oil and gas industry is relatively small and generally opaque. None of the experts contacted for this story had direct knowledge of the province’s orphan-well landscape.

“My lab has probably measured the most non-producing wells in the country. I don’t think anybody I know is working on it [in Manitoba] who are in the academic realm,” Mary Kang, an associate professor in civil engineering at McGill University, says.

The province’s petroleum branch has only been compiling and sharing orphan-well data for the past five years. Its 2025 inventory lists 31 well sites without a legally or financially responsible owner, which make up less than one per cent of the 4,000 wells currently producing oil in Manitoba.

The reasons for this are many: Manitoba’s oil and gas industry is smaller than other western provinces, allowing for regular inspections of batteries and most producing wells, according to an emailed statement from a provincial spokesperson.

But the intricacies of regulation also differ across the provinces. At the same time, the government body tasked with keeping tabs on the issue has been chronically understaffed. Whether Manitoba offers a lesson for other provinces or if it should be eyeing the rapidly escalating orphan well inventories of its neighbours with caution remains to be seen.

Environmental impacts of old wells can include methane, contamination

Orphan wells are oil or gas drilling sites that have been left to languish without being properly cleaned up, often because the company that owns them has gone bankrupt. Wells are often thousands of metres deep and these sites can leak methane, a potent and volatile greenhouse gas, and contaminate soil, air and groundwater.

A 2025 study co-authored by Kang suggests Canada’s non-producing oil and gas wells emit a combined 230 kilotonnes of methane per year — a figure seven times higher than estimates from Environment and Climate Change Canada. Wells that have been properly sealed with cement and decommissioned are referred to as plugged or “abandoned.” Most orphan wells are not yet plugged.

“In general, plugged wells emit less [methane] and are less of an environmental concern,” Kang says, adding unplugged wells are a bigger concern. “But even among unplugged wells, some emit nothing and some emit a lot.”

Orphan well inventories can grow ‘in leaps and bounds’

Orphan wells are an issue that can expand quickly.

“The concern is that the inventory can grow in leaps and bounds from year to year. We just saw that happen here in Alberta,” Amanda Bryant, manager of the oil and gas program at the Pembina Institute, an Alberta-based environmental think tank, says. 

Alberta’s orphan-well inventory ballooned to more than 7,300 sites this year after thousands of wells owned by an insolvent Calgary-based oil company were transferred to the province’s Orphan Well Association.

The association — a non-profit funded by industry — is responsible for decommissioning and cleaning up orphan oil and gas sites. Alberta had fewer than 300 orphan wells when the organization was founded in 2002.

That exponential growth is due to poor provincial regulation, Bryant says. 

“The main problem is that there’s nothing stopping companies from deferring the costs of closure and cleanup,” she says. “The other half is the so-called liability-dumping behaviour that a lot of companies engage in.”

The practice of liability dumping cited by Bryant has made insolvency a growing concern as larger companies sell off risky assets to smaller companies, which critics say happens with too little financial vetting from the regulator.

As in Manitoba, oil and gas companies in Alberta are legally required to clean up well sites that are no longer in use. Yet, because the Alberta Energy Regulator provides no concrete timelines for closing unused wells, operators often leave the sites for years or decades to avoid paying clean-up costs. 

If a company files for bankruptcy prior to remediation, that cost is passed on to the Orphan Well Association. Taxpayers can be left footing some of  the bill for closure costs — which carry an estimated $1.66-billion price tag — due the association’s lack of adequate funding, while also covering delinquent oil and gas companies’ unpaid oil and gas land rent and taxes owed to municipalities.

To address the issue, the Pembina Institute has recommended increasing the orphan-well levy, enacting an escalating inactive-well fee and introducing strict timelines for cleanup.

The situation is similar in Saskatchewan, which has nearly 4,500 orphan wells, and British Columbia, which has 998.

Manitoba’s unique regulatory environment

Manitoba’s oil and gas industry is an outlier in several ways. 

For one, it has a comparatively small oil patch, which is concentrated in the southwest corner of the province and dominated by Tundra Oil & Gas — a locally owned subsidiary of James Richardson & Sons. 

It also differs in provincial regulation. Operators have to submit an application to suspend drilling at a well site to the petroleum branch. Suspensions are valid for a maximum of three years, after which the company needs to apply for an extension.

“What it means is that Manitoba has a much lower proportion of its wells that are in a suspended state,” Bryant says. “If [wells] sit there in a state of inactivity for a long time … there’s a risk that they’ll end up orphans, and so that’s a positive policy move that the province has taken.”

Unlike other provinces, where insolvency is a driving force, most of Manitoba’s orphan wells are the result of petroleum branch seizures following non-compliance of shutdown orders or failure to meet regulatory requirements, a provincial spokesperson said. 

If a seized well is capable of producing oil, the province can sell the facility or transfer the licence to a new owner.  

Nearly all of the companies with orphan wells are still actively drilling elsewhere in the oil patch.

Four inspectors are now employed in Manitoba’s petroleum branch, up from one

Manitoba has been addressing orphan wells for many years, according to the province, but only released its first consolidated inventory in 2021, with an update posted publicly last year. 

Of the 23 wells listed on the original inventory, all but six remained orphaned in 2025, according to a Narwhal/Free Press analysis of the publicly available records. The others were removed from the list after their status was updated to abandoned (as in, properly plugged) in 2022.

The 2025 batch of 25 seized wells is largely due to improved staffing capacity, allowing the department to clear a backlog of investigations, the spokesperson said.

Manitoba currently has four provincial petroleum inspectors, up from the single inspector employed in early 2024, when a major Imperial Oil pipeline shutdown prompted the government to address gaps in its monitoring program.

Mya Wheeler, a Winnipeg-based social scientist and researcher whose PhD thesis focused on the local oil and gas industry, found staffing was a perennial problem that undermined departmental efforts to adhere to legislated regulations. 

“As the ramping up of oil wells occurred, there was the same and then less staff, and there was a 600 per cent increase in drilling during the fracking boom,” she says.

“There’s not a lot of ability to make compliance happen because of low staffing.”

Eva Wasney is a reporter covering environmental issues in Manitoba. Her position is part of a partnership between The Narwhal and the Winnipeg Free Press.

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.

A northern Manitoba First Nation is calling for a voluntary closure of moose hunting in its traditional territory to protect the declining population and respond to what it sees as a lack of provincial intervention.

On Friday morning, Misipawistik Cree Nation issued a plea urging hunters to abstain from harvesting moose in provincial Game Hunting Area 10 — a 10,000-square-kilometre region of boreal forest north of Grand Rapids, Man. The request applies to this year’s moose-hunting seasons, which open Monday.

According to the province’s 2025 aerial big game survey, an estimated 281 moose reside in the area, roughly 60 of which are bull moose. That’s down from an estimated 346 moose in 2013, which the survey describes as a “relatively stable population” over the past decade.

This year, 124 licences and 62 bull moose tags were made available in the region during Manitoba’s annual hunting draw. 

“That is putting the entire population at risk of a collapse,” Misipawistik Chief Heidi Cook said in an interview with The Narwhal and Winnipeg Free Press ahead of the announcement. “There may be no moose next year. This is an emergency. We have to do something now to make sure that the population can recover.” 

According to an emailed statement from a provincial spokesperson, fewer hunters applied to the moose draw resulting in 37 licences allocated for the area with a projected harvest of nine bull moose this year.

The nation’s voluntary hunting closure begins immediately and runs through the fall and winter moose seasons, which close in December. There will be no enforcement of the closure, but members of Misipawistik’s Kanawenihcikewak Land Guardians program will be monitoring the game area and liaising with hunters, Cook said. 

The guardian program has been monitoring the local moose population and working to reduce poaching and roadkill incidents since 2018 after community hunters observed a decline in the number of animals in the area. Misipawistik hunters reportedly harvested no moose in the region during the 2025-26 season.

“Moose is an important cultural species for us. It’s not only a source of food, but the relationship surrounding a moose harvest — having that time as family groups to be on the land and maintaining those connections, and then passing on the intergenerational knowledge surrounding the moose harvest — all of that is lost,” Cook said.

In recent years, she said, local hunters have had to travel to Saskatchewan to find moose.

Misipawistik First Nation awaits court’s decision over case against Manitoba government’s moose hunting licences

Misipawistik has raised the concerns about moose hunting and food security with the province multiple times, including during a meeting with Natural Resources and Indigenous Futures Minister Ian Bushie earlier this year, Cook said.  

Minister Bushie did not respond to a request for comment by publication time. 

The First Nation filed a lawsuit against the provincial government last September, arguing licensed moose hunting infringes on the community’s Treaty Rights to harvest the animals for food on its traditional lands. The judge has yet to deliver a decision on the case.

“We need to take action as responsible hunters, people who care for the land and people who care for the moose, to self-regulate because there’s a failure on the part of the provincial government to do that right now,” Cook said.

Chris Heald, senior policy advisor with the Manitoba Wildlife Federation, a conservation organization representing hunters, commended Misipawistik’s intent, but said the number of tags issued by the province does not equate to the number of moose bagged during the season.

“Hunter success in that area traditionally has only been less than five per cent. So we’re talking about three or four moose, that’s likely all that gets harvested by licensed hunters,” Heald said. 

“The province thought this was a fair thing and if hunters are legally purchasing their licence and the season begins next week, then they should go,” he added.

Concerns around licensed moose hunting affecting Treaty Rights are shared with other First Nations in Manitoba

First Nations elsewhere in the province have also raised concerns about the impact of licensed hunting on moose populations and Treaty Rights.

Last fall, Bloodvein First Nation, located on the eastern shore of Lake Winnipeg, used a checkstop previously set up to prevent contraband goods from entering the nation to bar non-Indigenous hunters from entering its territory to harvest moose. The Manitoba Wildlife Federation asked the court for an interim injunction, but it was dismissed. 

Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak, a political advocacy organization representing several northern First Nations, has repeatedly called on the province to cancel the draw for moose licences in the north, including in Game Hunting Area 10. The organization issued a statement Friday in support of Misipawistik’s voluntary hunting closure. 

In 2024, the provincial government reduced the number of licences available by 75 per cent in four northern hunting areas. The move sparked a legal challenge by Pimicikamak Cree Nation, which argued the decision affected its members and ran counter to Manitoba’s obligation to consult and prioritize Indigenous hunters under Treaty 5 and the 1977 Northern Flood Agreement. The case was dismissed. 

The province has recognized that moose in Manitoba face significant threats from hunting, predation, disease, habitat loss and climate change. It has issued hunting bans in the Duck Mountain, Porcupine Provincial Forest and Turtle Mountain areas. 

Eva Wasney is a reporter covering environmental issues in Manitoba. Her position is part of a partnership between The Narwhal and the Winnipeg Free Press.

Updated on Sept. 18, 2026, at 4 p.m. CT: This story has been updated with information on the number of moose licences allocated this year, provided by the Government of Manitoba after publication.

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It’s been a whirlwind year for tornado researchers in Manitoba. 

“It’s the busiest we’ve ever been, by far,” John Hanesiak, a professor in the department of environment and geography at the University of Manitoba, says. 

Hanesiak is a collaborator with the Northern Tornadoes Project, a national research program based at Western University that aims to better understand tornadoes in Canada.

Since late May, Hanesiak and his team have spent 43 days in the field surveying damage caused by tornadoes and severe weather events across Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Previous seasons have required a maximum of 19 days on the road. 

Fifteen tornadoes have touched down in Manitoba so far in 2026, including two within the city of Winnipeg — and that number could still rise as other storms are evaluated. It’s a substantial  jump from the six to eight that typically occur in the province each summer, but doesn’t surpass the record of 18 tornadoes set in 1991.

It’s been a similarly busy season nationally, with 121 tornadoes recorded from northern Alberta to Nova Scotia. According to the federal government, Canada records an average of 97 tornadoes annually. 

“This may end up being a year where we have the biggest tornado count overall,” David Sills, director of the Northern Tornadoes Project, says. 

And the season isn’t over yet. 

Why have there been so many tornadoes in Manitoba this year?

High levels of humidity and a series of particularly strong weather systems have resulted in the above-average tornado season, Hanesiak explains. 

A tornado is a rapidly rotating vortex of air that stretches from the base of a thunderstorm cloud to the ground. Four ingredients are needed to generate thunderstorms capable of producing tornadoes.

The first is high humidity, which acts as atmospheric fuel and can lead to more intense storms. Second is a high degree of instability in the upper atmosphere due to temperature changes. Third is a trigger that moves air upwards, such as a low-pressure trough or weather front that causes warm surface-level air to rise vertically like a hot air balloon. And fourth is wind shear, or sudden changes in wind speed and direction at higher altitudes.

After several years of drought conditions in Manitoba, these ingredients have been converging more frequently this summer thanks to a deluge of rain in June that led to widespread flash flooding. 

“That just helps humidity, so you have a lot of potential storm energy available,” Hanesiak says. “And we’ve had some pretty intense weather systems.” 

The tornado-producing storms in Manitoba and Saskatchewan in early June caused more than $840 million in insured damage, according to the Insurance Bureau of Canada.

Why does it take so long to confirm if a tornado has touched down?

Tornadoes are small, fast-moving events that can’t be tracked in real time with existing weather radar technology. Suspected tornadoes can only be verified through damage surveys; as well as reports, photos and videos from witnesses — the analysis of which takes time. 

Researchers use the Enhanced Fujita scale to determine a tornado’s intensity based on the extent and degree of damage to foliage, vehicles and infrastructure. The weakest tornadoes are rated EF-0 and have a minimum estimated wind speed of 90 kilometres per hour, while the strongest are rated EF-5 and can reach wind speeds of 315 kilometres per hour or higher — about as fast as the top speed of a Formula 1 race car.

Most tornadoes fall on the weaker end of the spectrum. The strongest to hit Manitoba this year was an EF-3 near Rossburn, Man., which reached a maximum estimated wind speed of 230 kilometres per hour, destroyed two homes and levelled trees. Canada’s only recorded EF-5 tornado landed in Elie, Man., in 2007.  

Tornadoes that occur in remote, unpopulated areas are often confirmed well after they make landfall. At the end of the season, Northern Tornadoes Project staff spend hundreds of hours combing through satellite imagery of Canadian forests to find evidence of unreported tornadoes, which look like long narrow scars from above. 

“We usually find somewhere between 15 and 30 new tornadoes that we didn’t know about,” Sills says. 

The project also tracks downbursts, which can produce damaging winds when air drops rapidly toward the ground during a thunderstorm. There have been five confirmed downbursts in Manitoba, including in Selkirk and Caddy Lake, and 47 across the country this year.

When and where do tornadoes occur in Manitoba?

The severe storm season typically begins in May and ends in September. While most occur in southern Manitoba, tornadoes have been reported as far north as Churchill, according to historic data from Environment and Climate Change Canada.

The majority of tornadoes take place in rural areas because most of the province is rural — but they can happen anywhere. Case in point: two EF-1 tornadoes landed within the city of Winnipeg this year.

The first destroyed a home in the Whyte Ridge neighbourhood and travelled more than six kilometres through southwest Winnipeg in June. The second tore through the River Heights neighbourhood on Sunday with estimated wind speeds of 155 kilometres per hour. No one was injured, but the storm left thousands of residents without power.

It’s a common misconception cities are less likely to experience tornadoes due to their taller buildings or higher temperatures (a.k.a. the urban heat island effect). This is false, according to Hanesiak. Urban tornadoes are rarer simply because cities make up a smaller proportion of the map. 

“It certainly happens,” Hanesiak says, adding urban sprawl may affect this dynamic in the future. “As cities get larger there’s a higher probability of actually getting hit.”

Changing storm trends may also increase the likelihood of tornado activity more broadly, Sills adds.

How is climate change affecting tornadoes?

More research is needed to understand the complex relationship between tornadoes and climate change, but Canada’s warm-weather storm season appears to be starting earlier and ending later, according to Sills.

“We believe that the severe storm season is actually extending,” he says. “If you have a longer season, there’s more chances for tornadoes, more chances for the really big stuff.” 

A warming planet is likely to alter weather patterns in ways that both encourage and hinder the development of tornadoes.

Wildfires, for example, are becoming more frequent and can produce their own extreme weather events, such as lightning and tornadoes. At the same time, drifting smoke can cut down on the amount of sunlight that reaches the ground, Sills explains, creating cooler temperatures and reducing the amount of solar energy available for thunderstorms. 

“It’s really not just a case of climate change equals more tornadoes. It’s changing by region, changing by season,” he says.

North America’s “tornado alley” is also moving eastward. Over the past 40 years in Canada, the number of tornadoes in the Prairies has gone down, while the number of tornadoes in Ontario and Quebec has gone up. This trend carries into the United States, representing a subtle but significant continental shift, Sills says.

Is tornado forecasting improving in Canada?

Yes, gradually. 

Environment and Climate Change Canada is responsible for issuing tornado warnings and severe weather alerts across the country. In August, the department rolled out a new system called Convective Alert Modernization, which was designed to reduce “alert fatigue” by enabling forecasters to deliver more precise warnings to targeted areas.

The timeliness and accuracy of the department’s tornado warnings have improved from an F to a C since 2019, according to independent annual report cards issued by the Northern Tornadoes Project.

The project’s scope has grown since its founding in 2017. The project is now under the umbrella of the new Canadian Severe Storms Laboratory, which also collects data on hail storms. Flash flooding — a worsening phenomenon owing to climate change — is the lab’s next priority. 

“Anything we can do as a community to help improve community resilience, improve the way the prediction is done, it all helps us adapt to this new reality,” Sills says.

Days after Sills spoke with The Narwhal and the Winnipeg Free Press, staff at the Northern Tornadoes Project were busy analyzing the aftermath of another Manitoba storm using ground and drone surveys.

The project confirmed two more tornadoes touched down in the province on Sunday — the one in River Heights, the second west of Elie — leaving swaths of splintered trees, toppled Hydro poles and damaged cars and homes in their wake.

Eva Wasney is a reporter covering environmental issues in Manitoba. Her position is part of a partnership between The Narwhal and the Winnipeg Free Press.

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.