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The northwest Montana prairie rests like a golden blanket over the uneven plateau, until it falls away suddenly over an unseen cliff. It’s easy to imagine how a stampeding herd of buffalo could be fooled into running straight over the precipice — and that’s exactly what they did for eons, feeding generation after generation of the Blackfoot who orchestrated their gravity-assisted demise.

Tyson Running Wolf, state representative and member of the Blackfeet Tribe, (one of four members within the Blackfoot Confederacy, whose territory extends across the Canada-U.S. border) stands at the top of the cliff and pictures what it would have looked like when hundreds of his ancestors worked in synchrony to hunt buffalo, the single most important species known to them and to the plains themselves. 

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” he says. 

What’s left now in the archaeological record is enough to establish a long pattern of use and occupation; across the creek from the buffalo jump is a campsite dated to the 14th century. In satellite images, dozens of ancient stone tipi rings stand out like cup rings on a bar top.

On the slope below the cliff, what looks like coarse gravel is a layer of buffalo bone fragments so thick it could be mistaken for a geologic epoch. At its base, there’s a stratum of ash, from where the Blackfoot burned the prairie. Above that is bone from the buffalo that moved in to graze on the new growth that flourished in the cleared and fertilized ground. On top is a layer of dust, accumulated over the centuries since the last great buffalo jumped from this cliff. 

A few kilometres away, a buffalo herd is meandering across a wide-open field. They’re carefully monitored by a select group of tribal members, occasionally harvested for cultural feasts and buttressed in their genetic makeup with inflows and outflows to and from other growing herds across the plains. 

But they also have a deeper purpose, one that could herald a stunning cultural revival: the Blackfeet are working toward a time when they can run the buffalo over the cliff once more.

Work to support Indigenous Guardians programs in Canada has provided something of a blueprint for this effort. But without dedicated government funding and a lack of a clear regulatory framework, the Blackfeet are forging a new path in Montana with implications that will reverberate across the Canada-U.S. border — one that could mean free-roaming buffalo again cross the border as they once did, as though it doesn’t exist at all.

The ‘total disappearance of the buffalo’

Unfathomable numbers of buffalo (“a ‘bison’ is what an Australian washes his face in,” Blackfeet Elder John Murray jokes) once moved across this landscape. As many as 60 million may once have roamed the continent between northern Mexico and Great Slave Lake, and east of the Rocky Mountains, according to anthropologist María Nieves Zedeño. Those numbers were run into the ground as part of a strategy to clear the plains and starve the Indigenous Peoples who depended on them. 

“I would not seriously regret the total disappearance of the buffalo from our western prairies, in its effect upon the Indians, regarding it as a means of hastening their sense of dependence upon the products of the soil and their own labours,” Columbus Delano, Secretary of the Interior, wrote in his 1873 report to Congress, referring to the trend of settlers trespassing on reservations “solely for the purpose of hunting buffalo, which are thus destroyed in large numbers.”

A contemporaneous Smithsonian Museum report estimated that in the three years between 1872 and 1874 (a period referred to in the report as the “great slaughter”) more than three million buffalo were killed by settlers. Half, it noted, were wasted. At the height of the extermination effort, Zedeño says, as many as 180,000 buffalo hides were floated down the Mississippi River alone each year. 

But in one of the greatest ecological comebacks of all time, the buffalo are returning — and Indigenous communities are once again in the middle of it all. 

In 1889, the Smithsonian report estimated there were just 891 wild buffalo left in all of North America. Today, at around 400 animals, the Blackfeet-owned herd is approaching half the total number of buffalo that were left when the deliberate process of extermination wound down at the end of the 19th century. And soon, they expect their herd will far surpass that number.

The Shield Keepers, Blackfeet buffalo guardians, seek land to reconnect habitat

A buffalo run took hundreds of people to move the herd, guide it along its path, funnel the stampeding animals toward the cliff and slaughter them at the bottom while corralling the surviving animals. Likewise, managing their return is a huge and multifaceted endeavour that requires a host of specialized skills and a dedicated group of people. 

Running Wolf found inspiration for what would become that group on a trip to the Heiltsuk Nation, on the central coast of B.C., in 2018. 

The Haíɫzaqv (Heiltsuk) are among the earliest First Nations to build a modern Guardians program, monitoring and stewarding their traditional territory. Running Wolf saw the nation had the answer to a question he’d been pondering since he was studying forestry at the University of Montana. 

Back then, he’d felt like his scientific and academic training was missing something essential. 

“All I’m doing is just practising what the white man wanted us to learn and just keep perpetuating being a colonizer,” he realized. The Coastal Guardian Watchmen of Haíɫzaqv had a different approach: blending the tools of western science with the knowledge of his people. That, he realized, was what he wanted for the Blackfeet. The Shield Keepers were born. There are four in the crew now, working, Running Wolf says, “to help make both worlds work together in harmony for the betterment of the environment, animals and people.” 

The role is particularly clear when it comes to the buffalo.

“That guardian is a conduit between the buffalo and the human,” Running Wolf says. “To make management decisions and social decisions amongst ourselves so that the buffalo can flourish and [we] can flourish, together.”

And Darrell Hall is the conduit between the Shield Keepers and the tribe’s herd of buffalo. 

“Just about anything that takes place with the buffalo, I’m there,” he says. That goes beyond what a typical caretaker of a ranch might do, from herding to culling, and veers into the spiritual realm. “We always include the iinii [buffalo] in our prayers — that they come back like we did. They were near extinction, just like the Blackfeet were.”

But a much more practical consideration dogs the Shield Keepers: the buffalo habitat is fragmented, and rebuilding it will require purchasing land.

Unlike Indigenous Guardians programs in Canada, many of which now receive government funding, training, support and, recently, even official delegated authority, the Shield Keepers are starting from zero: no dedicated state or federal government funding, no established network, no regulatory framework. Unlike in Canada, where guardians have become legislated parts of the parks system at the federal and provincial levels to varying degrees, the United States has no such multi-level cooperation.

Canada has more than 200 Guardians programs across the country, from coast to coast to coast, with $100 million pledged in federal funding. The United States has significantly less in the way of established programs and funding.

“Canada’s light years ahead of the U.S.,” says Chuck Striplen, who works in Indigenous stewardship for the California-based Resources Legacy Fund. Striplen, who belongs to the Amah Mutsun Tribe, has watched — and participated — as states and the federal government have begun returning thousands of hectares of land to Native American tribes and establishing joint management programs for fire, wildlife, fisheries and more. 

“It’s almost like the civil rights movement, trying to get the wider population to recognize history,” he says. 

It doesn’t help that there isn’t a coordinated central advocacy and training body in the U.S. like the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, which focuses on Canada but which also works south of the border. Work in Canada and Australia is providing a blueprint for that coordination — and an inspiration for how big things can get. Looking at the Guardian Watchmen, Running Wolf and Hall see what the Shield Keepers could become, given the proper resources. 

“They’ve received millions of dollars,” Hall says. “We’re just getting started.” 

But a similar funding model may be available to the Shield Keepers as was available to the Coastal Guardian Watchmen since their early days: carbon credits, which provide money in return for protecting or maintaining ecosystems that remove carbon from the atmosphere. In B.C., the Great Bear Rainforest Agreement raises money through carbon credits based on the deferred logging in the rainforest. Some of that funding goes to the guardians, allowing them to pay for their boats, trucks, equipment and salaries. 

The Shield Keepers are exploring a similar model. An agreement to sell carbon credits for deferred logging on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains, within Blackfeet territory, has already raised close to US$7 million. The Nature Conservancy, a global non-profit organization that operates in Canada as Nature United, helped to arrange the deal. It is encouraging the tribal leadership to direct that funding toward the Shield Keepers and land acquisition — particularly for the buffalo.

The current herd of 400 or so buffalo need more land to graze. The tribe hopes to someday steward a larger herd — Hall would like to see 6,000 buffalo on Blackfeet-owned lands one day, while Running Wolf pegs the goal at 2,000 — but the Shield Keepers have kept the numbers much lower through culls and sales to ranchers to prevent overgrazing. Adding more land is a complicated and expensive process, but it’s happening: on the front slopes of the sacred Chief Mountain, Hall says 17,000 hectares have already been set aside by the tribe. 

Buffalo were re-established in the area in 2023, after Glacier National Park announced it had received US$1.5 million from the federal government to study the reintroduction of bison to the Eastern Slope area of the park, which includes Chief Mountain.

But those buffalo had to be corralled again after fears arose that they would move beyond the park and on to private property in southern Alberta — where they might be shot by ranchers fearful of brucellosis, a bacterial infection, or other diseases. (There have been no documented cases of brucellosis transmission from buffalo to cattle, but it’s not unlikely; buffalo are immune to the disease but can carry it.) 

Now, the guardians are working with Canadian and American park officials to build fencing along the international border to keep the buffalo from wandering onto the ranches. Once that’s complete, the buffalo will be let out again, with the support of the park authorities.

“Everybody’s on board with the buffalo right now,” he says. “Wherever you go, it’s like, ‘the buffalo, the buffalo,’ so they’re making their way back.”

‘We’ve been trying to protect our grasslands since day one’

When birds line their nests with tufts of buffalo fur, their hatchlings have a higher likelihood of making it out of the nest alive. Ground squirrels use their fur for their nests as well. Buffalo wallows — picture an unusually tall and narrow Honda Fit rolling in the mud — create moist microhabitats that are preferred by insects and amphibians like frogs and salamanders. The trails buffalo make through the landscape are used by other species, including humans, because of their efficiency in connecting points of land through difficult terrain. Species richness as a whole has been found to increase after buffalo are reintroduced. For these reasons and countless more, buffalo are considered a “keystone species,” one whose presence — or absence — fundamentally alters the entire ecosystem of the prairies. 

North of the border, on the Kainai Nation in Alberta, Kansie Fox and her team of six Kainai grassland guardians started monitoring the land before the buffalo were brought back, to measure the differences the animals make. 

Fox is the environmental protection manager for the First Nation, which is also a member of the Blackfoot Confederacy. She ranks the buffalo program as her top priority, despite the breadth of her title. 

“Along with buffalo is grasslands,” she says. “And we’ve been trying to protect our grasslands since day one. … We’re trying to keep this space intact as much as possible.” 

“Intact” is a complicated notion for a landscape that depends on disturbance. An intact prairie landscape is not an untouched one — it’s one that’s been trampled and pooped on and burned and regrown and trampled all over again, Alvin First Rider, an environmental technician who is part of Fox’s team, explains. 

“Historically this area was managed through fire, that was what cleansed the earth. … Just like a flood on a river. The flood on a river is natural; it’s a huge disturbance but it’s natural,” he said. “We would burn one area and then move; it was a rotational burning and grazing.” That burning and grazing is what created the ash-bone pattern so evident on the hillside in Montana. The Kainai Guardians, formally established around 2018, have done a couple of cultural burns on the landscape. Then came the buffalo.

It’s been six years since 40 buffalo were let out on a pasture on the north end of the reserve, and the herd has since grown to nearly 80. Fox, First Rider and their colleague Truman Big Swallow have noticed an improvement in grassland bird species, but the landscape itself hasn’t seen major changes — something Fox counts as a win. 

“Seeing major changes right now in, say, vegetation, would mean that we’re overgrazing,” she explains. 

And a bigger, more significant change is already taking place. Fox is standing next to the backbone of a buffalo, left as an offering to the land after a buffalo was harvested here just an hour prior. It’s the fourth since September, when the first-ever buffalo was harvested from the Kainai herd.

A crowd of maybe 250 middle- and high-school students from the Kainai Nation gathered to witness the harvest. The buffalo was butchered on a tarp in the middle of the field as the excited students looked on, getting their hands and clothes bloody as they passed around a heart roughly the size and shape of a football.

Tim Bruised Head, who led the harvest ceremony, brought his own young kids as well. He sees the harvest as an essential part of Blackfoot youth developing an understanding of their own identity.

“It’s dropping the pebble in the pond,” Bruised Head explains. “It has to start somewhere.” 

Buffalo jump could ‘reignite’ relationships

The Blackfeet intention to build toward a traditional buffalo hunt — using a buffalo jump — comes as a surprise to the Kainai Guardians and Bruised Head. But each of them responds with a slight smile and a faraway look. 

“That would be something to see,” Bruised Head says. 

First Rider echoes his sentiment. “That’s the dream, right? To be able to participate in an actual buffalo jump,” he says. “That’s reigniting that relationship.” 

Back in Montana, a cold front has moved in, bringing freezing rain that patters on the tipi. But the couple dozen people seated around the fire inside are cozy as they take part in a ceremony as old as time. 

A pipe is packed; prayers are recited; stories are told about the buffalo that fed, clothed, sheltered and supplied the Blackfoot until the overlapping calamities of colonization shattered Blackfoot culture.

“Our way of life is like a puzzle,” Kent Ayoungman explains. He’s travelled from the Blackfoot member nation of Siksika in Alberta for the gathering here. “Some of it is intact, but most of it is scrambled.” 

Ceremonies like this are part of the process of putting that puzzle back together. The pieces are coming back together through these ceremonies, through Elders’ closely held knowledge, through scientific observation on the land, through unique funding mechanisms and cross-border collaborations — and maybe, one day, through the herd rumbling up the prairie, guided by the Blackfoot toward a buffalo jump. 

The fieldwork for this story was supported by a grant from the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, no foundation or outside organization has editorial input into our stories.

Updated Jan. 13, 2025 at 11:11 a.m PT: This story has been updated with additional context about The Nature Conservancy.

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.

With an uncontrollable wildfire burning its way toward Yellowknife in late July 2023, the senior civil servant in charge of the Northwest Territories capital, Sheila Bassi-Kellett, added a new routine to her day: every afternoon at 5 p.m., she would walk across downtown to meet with fire staff at the territorial Environment and Climate Change department.

One line of questioning dominated the discussion.

“What is [the fire] going to do? What are the winds gonna do? What are the weather predictions?” Bassi-Kellett would ask. 

“When it was at Boundary Creek, that’s when all bets were off,” she recalls.

The fire at Boundary Creek was still about 40 kilometres from City Hall, a distance that gave officials some comfort. But a different wildfire, a little more than 200 kilometres away on the southwestern side of Great Slave Lake, soon opened their eyes to the ferocious speed and power of this new era of fire. 

Driven by 90 km/h winds, the fire, known as SS052, made a mad dash southeast from Kakisa, moving 40 kilometres each day for two days in a row. “This fire more than doubled our worst-case forecasting for fire progression for the day,” Mike Westwick, a fire information officer for the territorial government, wrote in a summary of the fire. On the second day, it made it all the way to Enterprise, N.W.T., where it destroyed almost the entire town. 

“Everyone’s minds were blown about that Sunday south of the lake,” Bassi-Kellett says, referring to the day Enterprise was razed by the fire. With strong winds blowing the fire onward from Boundary Creek, wafting thick plumes of smoke through Yellowknife, one question was on everyone’s minds: could the same thing happen here? 

Within days, local and territorial states of emergency were declared and, on Aug. 16, the city was emptied of all but essential personnel.

Some new arrivals joined Bassi-Kellett and the other essential staff at City Hall. Among them was Coby Duerr, the commander of Canada Task Force 2, a government-run emergency response agency based in Calgary. The group deploys within four hours of getting the call, sending up to 75 specialists, equipment and supplies to the heart of a disaster — like the 2013 Calgary flood, the 2016 wildfire in Fort McMurray, Alta., or, in this case, Yellowknife. 

Duerr’s team urged the city staff to limit their 12-hour days to seven-day stretches.

“They said, ‘Great, after seven days, who’s going to trade off with you?’ ” Bassi-Kellet recalls. “We all looked around because every member of my team that was here was fully deployed.” 

The fire edged closer to the community. The state of emergency allowed the city to compel contractors to bring heavy equipment to the city’s western edge to dig massive fire breaks, and volunteers worked alongside professional firefighters (local and imported from all over the world) within the city to set up sprinkler systems to quell embers. The sprinklers could be necessary in a season where fires jumped rivers more than a kilometre wide. 

Those firebreaks are still in place today, as the scars left by the season fade and its lessons crystallize. Reviews are ongoing at many different levels: individual ministries and local governments alike are examining what they could have done better. 

But there are only a few short weeks left until the snow melts and the next fire season begins, and with an extreme drought blotting out much of the West, 2024 is likely to be yet another bad fire year. Two-thirds of the entire Northwest Territories was evacuated during the 2023 fire season as an area the size of Switzerland burned. Another 86,000 people were under evacuation orders in B.C. and Alberta. As officials reflect on lessons learned from past disasters, one thing is clear: evacuations are increasingly a new normal in the West, in part because fires — and floods — are getting worse due to climate change.

With few tools to immediately curb these disasters, we need to reimagine what people, and governments, do when they’re in the path of a wildfire. 

“We are seeing a very clear trend and events like these are happening more frequently,” Duerr says. “They’re bigger in nature, and they’re lasting longer than they ever have before. This is something that we need to look at holistically across the country, and say, ‘How are we going to support these into the future?’ ”

After the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, an entire community learned to live with fire

Jody Butz knows the feeling of watching a besieging disaster launch its assault: Butz was the operations section chief of the Fort McMurray fire department when an infamous wildfire, known locally as The Beast, roared into the community in 2016.

That fire was Canada’s costliest disaster ever, causing the evacuation of 88,000 people in a matter of hours and destroying 2,600 buildings. But Butz, now the city’s fire chief, credits it with instilling a new seriousness in Fort McMurray when it comes to wildfire, something that even the partial destruction of the nearby community of Slave Lake, Alta., five years prior, hadn’t been able to do. 

“Never let a disaster go to waste,” Butz says — and he hasn’t. Today the community considers fire risk in a whole new way when it plans new developments, from location to building materials. FireSmarting, a practice of removing fuel — like wood piles or flammable vegetation — from buildings and their surroundings, has taken off in Fort McMurray. 

There’s also been a shift in mindset, which Butz boils down to this: “We live in the middle of the boreal forest, and the boreal forest is dependent on fire for its survival.”

Butz knows how high the stakes are, but now he has the benefit of being part of a community that also knows, intimately, the costs of fire; it was their homes and treasured belongings that were lost, and their loved ones they feared for as they fled. Now, he says he sees the community self-policing risky activities on social media, like all-terrain vehicle use during restrictions on backcountry access, or burning during fire bans. 

“Community members will jump on that, say, ‘Don’t you dare!’ ” he says. 

The community’s emergency leadership strategy has also changed. In 2016, there was no plan for evacuating the entire city, so it had to happen on the fly. Today, every individual community within the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo (which includes Fort McMurray) has its own plan, created in consultation with its members. That’s not the case everywhere in Canada — and where there are thought-out local plans, implementation is the real test. 

Connor Corbett helped fight The Beast in 2016. Now a professional forester who works on wildfire resiliency, Corbett spent weeks last year travelling across northern B.C. talking to residents about wildfire preparations. One thing he heard again and again was that residents don’t feel they’re in the loop when a wildfire or an evacuation is coming. 

“Evacuation orders seem to come out of the blue,” he says. “A lot of people are often confused.” 

Despite these lessons, both surprise and confusion were defining elements of wildfire responses across the West again last summer. 

Evacuations are the new normal as few other options remain

Margaret Bell’s Yellowknife home had already been evacuated when she had to flee a second fire, this time as she visited her brother in Kelowna. She could see the fire growing across the lake in West Kelowna, the smoke plume undulating across the lake like a living thing. 

“It was eating the sky,” she recalls over the phone from Yellowknife. This was in mid-August, immediately following the horrors of the Maui fire, and as a result, she says, “My risk tolerance was at zero.”

In a split-second decision, she jumped in a car headed to Vancouver, where she caught a flight back across the smoke-filled mountains to Calgary. The city had procured hotel rooms for N.W.T. evacuees there, so she worked remotely on a borrowed laptop as she waited for her chance to return to Yellowknife. 

That would take three weeks from the time of the evacuation. That’s actually shorter than the norm, if B.C. is any indication: a Tyee analysis of B.C. evacuation data found nearly half of fire-related evacuations last 30 to 60 days.

Increasingly, evacuation may be the only option.

That’s in part because firefighting itself is already doing as much as it can to reduce risks, according to David Andison, a fire ecologist. Firefighting and fire management has come a long way in the past century, from a system of fighting every single fire — which built up fuel on the landscape and is part of the reason for today’s bigger, hotter fires — to one that looks more holistically at the potential losses and harms alongside the natural benefits of fire for ecosystems. 

But the flipside to that improvement is there isn’t a whole lot more that can be done to optimize firefighting itself, Andison says in an interview. 

“Any improvement we’re going to make now is going to be incremental,” he says. “We’ve kind of boxed ourselves in.”

Higher adoption of FireSmart techniques, with a few simple changes to fence design, yard layout or even cleaning the gutters can reduce the likelihood of losses by significant margins. Fire breaks, like those dug outside of Yellowknife or burned into the landscape ahead of an approaching fire, can help slow it down. 

But even if the fire is stopped, smoke is an increasing concern for people who are caught downwind. 

“The more research that comes out, the more it points to: smoke is really bad for you. Really,” Mike Flannigan, a fire scientist at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, B.C., says. “It’s even worse than we thought. And it’s even worse than we thought five years ago.” 

A 2020 study found short- and long-term exposure to wildfire smoke could be responsible for upwards of 2,500 premature deaths every year in Canada, and as much as $20 billion in health care costs. 

That all points more and more to evacuation as a means of avoiding human costs from fires, placing an ever greater burden on evacuees — and on the governments charged with supporting them. 

Wildfire evacuations come with costs, risks and confusion

After fleeing Kelowna, Bell got used to her new Calgary digs: a hotel in the middle of nowhere, packed with stressed-out evacuees, some of whom responded to the situation with copious alcohol, rising tempers and violence. 

“I’m hearing women screaming for help,” she says. “People are now stuck in very close quarters to each other, and they don’t have the resources or the safety that they may have been able to escape to if they’re in a domestic abuse situation.”

(Researchers and the World Health Organization have found domestic violence can increase during emergencies, particularly when there is no protocol in place to protect people fleeing abuse.)

She went back to Kelowna, where the fires were now under control, and waited it out. 

In Yellowknife, skies were clear: the wildfire’s terrifying advance that had driven the need to evacuate in the first place had been halted 15 kilometres from the city by a lucky bout of rain. It was time to figure out how to safely bring people back, in an orderly fashion and to start thinking about how to do things better next time. 

When The Narwhal reached her in March, Bassi-Kellett was still working on the latter, but she has since stepped down from her role, citing the impact of the extreme workload on her family.

“Two mass community evacuations from forest fire is enough for my career, that’s it,” she jokes. The other evacuation happened in 1995 while she was working in Tulita, N.W.T., northwest of Yellowknife about halfway to the Arctic Ocean.

Bassi-Kellett spent a lot of her final year on the job trying to make things better for the next fire emergency, because anxiety — over fire risk and the possibility of another evacuation — is lingering in the city like the smell of smoke in your hair after a bonfire. 

“I always think the best way to tackle anxiety is to control as much as you can,” she says.  

Several Indigenous governments have called for a public inquiry into the 2023 wildfire response at the territorial level, including the Tłı̨chǫ Government and Dene Nation. A majority of members of the territorial legislative assembly voted in favour of a public inquiry in February; the government hasn’t promised anything, but did hire a consultant for an independent review of the fire response, along with reviews at the Ministry of Municipal and Community Affairs and the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change.

The city hired KPMG to conduct its own independent review, and a new wildfire protection plan is being drafted with the help of the territorial government, with everything from fuel (read: tree) management to what to do with the sprinkler systems that are currently rolled up in shipping containers. The sports centre is being improved with better air quality management so people who can’t exercise outdoors have an indoor option. 

Communications are also being overhauled, with new information on the city’s website, which Bassi-Kellett admits was “lacking” last year. Others have put it in more disparaging terms, including the popular Instagram page, YellowknifeMemes, which posted a nonstop flood of images mocking confusing government messaging during the evacuation. In one meme, a viral interview clip of Jennifer Lawrence sobbing “What do you mean?” over and over is superimposed on a typically convoluted message from the City of Yellowknife regarding re-entry plans.

Bassi-Kellett wants to make sure that next time, people are getting the best information about the threat and how to prepare as quickly as possible, rather than the tangled web of information about different jurisdictions they received last year. 

“I’ve heard from enough people that said, ‘You know what, if I’m Citizen X, I don’t really give a shit about oh, well, the [territorial government’s] mandate is this and the city’s mandate is that.’ ”  

Across the West, governments and communities look to the future to prepare for more intense wildfires

Inter-jurisdictional wrangling is also evident in B.C. and Alberta. 

In the latter, the Rural Municipalities of Alberta association is lobbying the provincial government to standardize the level of service for evacuations — taking some of the guesswork out of providing service to evacuees, like those who flooded into Alberta from the Northwest Territories last summer. 

In B.C., a new Emergency and Disaster Management Act puts more responsibility on municipalities to prepare for and respond to emergencies, and the Union of BC Municipalities is asking for more funding from the province to implement the new act. 

Art Kaehn, a union area director with the Regional District of Fraser Fort George, lives in Hixon, B.C. Soon, “it’ll be flood season,” he says, “and then we’ll flip right into wildfire and then we could flip back.”

Those disasters routinely take up all the resources the town has, drawing in every available staff member to manage the emergency rather than their usual duties — sanitation or running facilities, for example. 

Duerr, with Canada Task Force 2, says the organization is already well into its preparations for the demands that will come this year.

The western drought is persisting with no end in sight. But a bad season this year is not yet certain: June rains could still saturate the ground and prevent another bad year, Flannigan says. 

Regardless of how bad it gets, he thinks it’s extremely unlikely that 2024 (or any other year for a decade or two) will be another 2023, which shattered records in the West. But that’s not to say it will be good. Climate change is “loading the dice,” he likes to say, for more and more disastrous years.

“If it’s cool — relatively cool — and wet, we’re not going to have a problem,” he says. “If it’s hot, dry and windy? Hey, we have a real problem.” 

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

The road is like a proving ground for the side-by-side quad we’ve borrowed for the day: slippery mud, jutting rocks, steep inclines and rocky traverses stand between the valley floor and the alpine vistas of Silvercup Ridge. But people have been using this road for generations — surely the latest in backcountry technology can at least afford us a view from the top. 

Less than an hour after leaving the parking lot, the Rady Creek road delivers us 1,500 metres above Trout Lake, a long, narrow body of water two hours north of Nelson, B.C.

“That’s the fastest access from valley bottom to the alpine I’ve ever had,” exclaims Judson Wright, a seasoned backcountry guide who is showing me around. 

But the road may not be providing that elevator to the top for long. For several years, the Rady Creek Forest Service Road has been on notice for deactivation, one of several in the area that may soon be gated, dug up or otherwise made inaccessible by government decree. 

Forestry and mining, together, make up around $2.4 billion in direct revenue for the provincial government, plus at least 20,000 jobs — and accessing those resources demands roads. But when the companies move on, the roads take on a new life as access points for recreation. That access comes at a cost, both in maintenance and environmental harm.

At the heart of the decision to close roads like Rady Creek is the effect on species like caribou and grizzly bears — species that need huge swaths of unbroken land to thrive. The more roads, the more people, the more disturbance, the less chance those species have of surviving.

But the thought of losing access to the ridge has set the whole community on edge. 

Jeanine Ross grew up here, and her father helped build the Rady Creek road. His ashes are scattered on top of the ridge. She doesn’t understand why the government is trying to take it away.

“We’re not asking for a lot,” she says. “We’re just asking for a few roads.”

Ross was on a snowmobile for the first time when she was three years old, and in the summertime, there are two quads parked in the driveway of her house. When she heard the government was planning to close the road, she wrote an open letter to then-forestry minister Katrine Conroy, pleading with the minister to cancel the order to remove the road. Later, a petition appeared online and gathered nearly 10,000 signatures.

So far, the government hasn’t changed its mind. 

The Rady Creek road was built in the early 20th century by local miners to access gold and silver at the top of the ridge. A so-called Government Actions Regulation order protecting caribou means there will no longer be any harvesting in the area — so there’s no need for a road. 

“The caribou have been used for a lot of things, and mainly, in my opinion, they seem to use them any time they want to shut down a controversial recreational activity,” says Steve Shannon, a professional outdoor photographer who started the petition. “Caribou seem to be an extremely convenient excuse.”

But to Shannon, as well as Ross and thousands of people like them, the value of the road isn’t the access it provides to resources. The road itself is a resource. Taking it away doesn’t sit right when, the way Ross sees it, the species being protected have enough space as it is.

“There’s thousands and thousands of hectares of land for grizzly bears and caribou,” Ross said. “They can be all by themselves out in the middle of nowhere and nobody will reach them.” 

For much of the southern part of the province, that’s often not the case. Roads have sliced up the landscape, cutting like lightning bolts through the terrain. And wherever roads go, people go — people who don’t want to give up access to places they treasure without a fight.

Along Silvercup Ridge, we encounter Steve Jaksitz, an electrician based nearby in Kaslo. He’s sprawled out on the alpine scrub, taking in the stunning view with a friend over a picnic lunch. He knows the road he drove up here may disappear, and the thought of it fills him with resentment.

“This gives me purpose; it feeds my soul,” he says, looking out across the alpine valley spread out below him. “I don’t want that to be taken away from me.”

How roads directly and indirectly harm wildlife 

Roads physically separate habitat, cutting it into smaller fragments with less value to species that need unbroken space. Roads provide ready access for predators, wicking them through the landscape at several times the speed they would otherwise be able to travel. Likewise for humans, and the noisy, polluting and disruptive activities we participate in, not to mention the hazard of the vehicles themselves. Roads scare animals away from food sources that may be nearby, like a huckleberry patch or a stream. Roads are also a major source of runoff, adding silt to waterways where fish feed and spawn. Roads on steep slopes can let go and contribute to landslides. They even help invasive species colonize more areas more quickly. 

Perhaps most important of all, though, for bears in particular but also for many hunted species, is that they are a convenient way for hunters to access their targets. 

“We know that most bears are killed within 500 metres of a road,” explains Michael Proctor, a grizzly biologist who has spent his career working in B.C.’s Kootenay region.

But, despite the problems, (some more intuitive than others) resource roads weren’t thought about much in the ecology world until 1996. That’s when a seminal paper was published, identifying for the first time how exactly roads harm grizzly bears — and how little road is required to make a difference. 

“That’s the watershed paper that I think changed everybody’s minds,” Proctor says. 

The study, conducted in Montana, found that open roads that see even a little traffic (more than 10 vehicles per day) could determine whether grizzlies are found there or not. They even worked out that a density of 600 metres of road per square kilometre acts as a threshold for bears visiting or avoiding the area, even if it has valuable resources like berries. 

The same has held true, with different specific numbers, for elk, caribou, mountain lions, lynx, moose, wolves and more. 

It stands to reason, then, that a key strategy for recovering populations of species like grizzly bears has been to close roads.

But knowing about the problem and doing something are two different things. Even that 1996 study noted how unpopular closures were. Since then, it’s only gotten worse. 

Working as a caribou biologist for the provincial government, Aaron Reid has stood in front of a lot of angry crowds in his life — quadders, snowmobilers, hunters — who depend on resource roads to do something they love and in some cases rely on. Something they’re not willing to walk away from.

“Any road deactivation or road restoration in general that I’ve ever had experience with, there’s nothing but opposition,” he said. “Every single group: huckleberry pickers, mushroom pickers, you can just go on and on and on and on.”

Every scientist who spoke to The Narwhal for this story echoed the same sentiment: removing or closing roads is the right thing to do for wildlife, and at the same time, it’s a very difficult step for human users to accept. 

“A lot of people really use the backcountry,” Proctor says. “We love that backcountry, so in a way you might say we’re loving it to death.” 

Government liability motivates road closures 

Road density is not the whole explanation for why roads like Rady Creek and another popular local access spot, Healy Creek Road, are facing removal by the province. 

It’s true closing the roads would likely benefit caribou and grizzly bears. But Reid says he didn’t ask for those roads to be closed in the name of caribou; the decision had already been made by the time it got to him.

“The caribou program didn’t identify that road,” Reid says. It wasn’t a decision driven primarily by ecological concerns; the province closes roads that are no longer being used for industry based on one reason above all others: liability.

A government spokesperson confirmed the primary reason the Rady Creek and Healy Creek roads are being shut down is public safety. B.C.’s network of backcountry roads just keeps growing and, with it, the risk that users will be injured or killed. The liability for that may ultimately fall to the government.

The way forest service road construction works in B.C. is that logging companies receive permits from the government to build the roads needed to access their leases, and are responsible for the upkeep of those roads to provincial standards. When the logging is finished, and when no industrial user is responsible for maintenance, they revert to the province’s care. But the province is falling behind on its part of the process.

Part of this problem comes down to maintenance. A 2020 auditor general report found districts received just a quarter of what they’d requested for maintenance work for forestry roads, with nearly $9 million worth of high priority work going unfunded. Inspections were way behind. Records were a mess.

A Resource Roads Act, which was announced by the previous B.C. Liberal government fizzled and has since been abandoned by the NDP. The act would have regulated the construction, maintenance and decommissioning of the roads, all under a single umbrella. Currently, multiple government branches handle different aspects of roads and there’s little incentive for the industries that build them to remove them when they’re finished.

‘Stuck with band-aid solutions’

Wright and I had been warned: the nearby Healy Creek Forest Service Road is only passable by dirt bike, or maybe by expertly piloted quad. At my insistence, we’d attempted the climb anyway, and here we were, stuck halfway along the steadily degrading road, with one tire of our somewhat wider off-road vehicle hanging way too far for comfort over the side of a slope that ended 150 feet downhill in the eponymous creek. 

Trying to move the machine forward or backwards would send it tumbling down the hill. Wright, behind the wheel, could be seriously injured or even killed. It’s happened before. Between 2010 and 2018 there were 70 deaths on logging roads, and according to the coroners service, 107 deaths on all-terrain vehicles in total. Those deaths and injuries can come back to haunt the provincial government, which recently faced a lawsuit for the injury of a driver whose pickup truck was hit by a tractor-trailer on a forest service road north of Kamloops.

The road along Healy Creek has been the subject of a drawn-out back-and-forth between the forestry industry and the government, centred around questions of liability and environmental harm. A 2012 audit of the road by the Forest Practices Board found “some of the highest levels of noncompliance it has ever encountered,” which the board found could endanger local trout and salmon, as well as the stability of the road itself. The forestry company that owned the road at the time, Meadow Creek Cedar, refused to decommission it — the company argued to the auditors that because the government had ordered it to stop logging in the area, the government should take charge of the road. 

The company went out of business shortly thereafter. The road was never fixed.  

Shannon told us going up the Healy Creek road in our vehicle was a foolish endeavour, but even if he hadn’t, the condition of the road was a dead giveaway. The bridges over the creek seemed to be dissolving into it, with yawning holes in their decks and rotting, often missing, rails lining them. The brush encroached on the trail like a parted sea that was slowly, inexorably, crashing back together. Forgotten offshoots of the road disappeared to the left and right. 

The Healy Creek Road is now on the chopping block for closure, but the equipment needed to deactivate it won’t be able to cross its crumbling bridges. So the province will first have to rebuild the bridges in order to remove them.

If the province removes this road, it will be a small contribution to reducing the overall size of the legacy resource road network in the province. But it will come at a moment when resource companies in the province are adding around 10,000 kilometres of new roads to more than 620,000 existing kilometres every year (meaning that every four years, B.C. is building enough roads to ring the planet). 

“We’re creating disturbance at a rate that far exceeds anything that we could ever restore,” Reid says. 

Instead of addressing the ongoing, worsening impact, he says, “We’re stuck with band-aid solutions left, right and centre.” 

Can closing roads make a difference? 

Closing roads to some kinds of traffic — even just closing them for part of the day — has shown to be an effective way to limit the harm they do. In the spring of 2014, Parks Canada began closing part of the Bow Valley Parkway from 10 p.m. until 8 a.m. It doubled the number of wildlife sightings on remote cameras installed along the road.

There are also more ambitious approaches. It’s possible to restore roads to a more natural state by digging them up, returning their original contours and replanting trees. It’s expensive, time-consuming and incapable of truly returning the landscape to the way it was, but it’s frequently pitched as an answer to the damage that’s still being wrought. 

Even Corey Bird, who has overseen a road restoration project in Splatsin First Nation territory, seems torn about whether restoration is truly making a difference.

“Everyone wants to feel like it’s the answer. We won’t know for decades if there’s been a benefit,” he says.” I think I’m largely discouraged because I feel like we’re being given some bait. There’s dollars, there’s lots of opportunity to go restore these areas. But at least in the areas I’m working, they’re still being impacted by forestry.”

If there is a plan to mitigate the damage wrought by the expanding road system, it’s restoration, not reduction in new building. But there is no automatic trigger that requires a company to restore a road when the logging is finished; in the four years between 2016 and the 2020 audit, less than 650 kilometres was deactivated, let alone restored, according to the auditor general report.  

Gates may be put up, but vehicles can get around them. Some roads, like Rady and Healy, have signs that say these roads will eventually be closed, while little is done to stop people using them. 

Meanwhile, on average across the province, every hour of every year, another kilometre of road is bulldozed into the landscape for new resource development projects.

Stranded in Healy Creek as we wait for a pair of Trout Lake locals to return with gear to pull us out of our mess, I wander down to the creek below. It’s shady and cool in contrast to the hot, dusty road that winds through the old logging cutblock above.

The water runs over smooth gravel and cobblestones — I spend far too long cracking open rocks for a sign of the gold that first brought settlers to Trout Lake and up into mountains — and then through a tangle of toppled trees, including big cedar trunks that brought a second wave of industry here. A few sets of unfamiliar animal tracks, one seeming to belong to an adult and one or two others belonging to their young, cross a drying muddy section of the riverbed. 

And then, our rescuers return. The sound of rushing water is not quite loud enough to drown out the motors.

The fieldwork for this story was supported by a grant from the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, no foundation or outside organization has editorial input into our stories.

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.

Cherisse Du Preez was staring at a monitor on the bridge of the coast guard ship John P. Tully as a single line worked its way across the screen. To her relief, the line was slowly rising, charting the shape of an underwater mountain as the sonar pings reflected off the bottom.

Then she noticed, with a twinge of regret, that not one but two lines were forming, contaminating the data she was depending on to prove the existence of the underwater mountain, known as a seamount. 

“It’s going to have this error on it,” she recalled thinking, disappointed. But the line kept rising, and the regret was soon replaced with elation as the peak of the seamount appeared on the monitor, pointing up through 1,100 metres of ocean. She had discovered a new mountain. It was among a flurry of more than 45 seamounts to be discovered off the coast of Vancouver Island in a seven-year period. 

“In 2016 the official number was 20 seamounts in our offshore area — for all of the Canadian Pacific,” Du Preez said. “Twenty was an impressive number. We’ve tripled it.”

It’s not typical for a biologist to make this kind of finding. “As a marine biologist I expected to discover species, not mountains,” she quipped — but a recent surge in interest in that patch off Vancouver Island has enabled discoveries of all sorts: from new animal behaviours to new species to new deep-sea ecosystems; even mountains. 

The mountains are part of an enormous, 133,000 square kilometre new marine protected area, more commonly referred to as an MPA, that’s expected to be announced at this week’s International Marine Protected Areas Congress in Vancouver. It’s located about 100 kilometres off the coast of Vancouver Island, and stretches to the western and southern edge of Canada’s ocean jurisdiction under international treaties.

It’s been in the works since before 2016, and an earlier iteration of the area would have protected an additional 6,000 square kilometres, an area larger than Prince Edward Island. (It’s not clear why that section, on the southwestern side of the protected area, was removed.) It was expected to be officially designated by 2020, but that didn’t happen. 

Now, the long-awaited announcement will cement into place one of Canada’s largest protected areas — and move Canada 2.31 per cent closer to its goal of protecting a quarter of its ocean territory by 2025.

The story behind Tang.ɢwan-ḥačxʷiqak-Tsig̱is

As the scientists aboard the John P. Tully celebrated their discovery on the bow of the ship, the pickup truck-sized head of a sperm whale broke through the water’s surface nearby. 

That’s when Du Preez put it together: it wasn’t an error in the data. It was a whale. 

The whale’s timing seemed to the scientists like a supernatural stamp of approval for their mapping work, but their analytical side also recognized it was no accident that a sperm whale would be spotted rising along the slope of a seamount: the underwater slopes are teeming with life, attracting predators like sharks and whales. 

The seamounts Du Preez and her colleagues have been charting had heretofore remained completely unknown except to some commercial fishers, who have shrewdly identified them as rich fishing grounds for the same reason the whales were there. The waters have also been used since time immemorial by First Nations for whale hunting and, more recently, their own commercial fishing.

The Tang.ɢwan-ḥačxʷiqak-Tsig̱is marine protected area got its name (which refers to “underwater mountains” and a “sea monster” in a blend of different First Nations’ languages) upon the signing of an agreement of principle with the Haida, Quatsino and Nuu-chah-nulth nations in 2022. The three First Nations will take part in the management of the area — and they’ll be naming the mountains that have been discovered there. 

The Nuu-chah-nulth are taking part because “we really want to make sure that our fishing territories are managed and protected,” Judith Sayers, Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council president, told First Nations newspaper Ha-Shilth-Sa when the agreement was signed. “We saw it as an opportunity to do that [and] to take part in environmental protection.”

‘It’s not whether these animals are going to die, it’s, “How are they going to die?” ’ 

There are three unique, otherworldly ecosystems in the area to be protected: seamounts, deep-sea hydrothermal vents and methane seeps. The first two are best described in superlatives.

“With some respects, this is the highest concentration of hydrothermal vents and the highest concentration of seamounts on the planet,” Du Preez said. 

Methane seeps are what they sound like: places where methane gas bubbles up from the ocean floor. The methane itself feeds unique creatures that chemically process the methane as sustenance, and in turn, those creatures feed others. 

But methane seeps, also prized among scientists for the habitat they create, form rocks in places that would otherwise just be a muddy sea floor. Like a bustling intersection of country roads that creates a small community, rocks in a flat plain are valuable habitat for invertebrates and fish alike. 

The actual presence of methane seeps hasn’t yet been confirmed, but Du Preez says there’s “really strong evidence” that the protected area includes an enormous one. 

“If we can check that out and confirm, it just heightens the value of this MPA,” she said. That confirmation might come this summer when the researchers are returning to the site for further study.

They’ll also be returning to study the seamounts, the most obvious feature in the protected area. 

The underwater mountain ranges contained within Tang.ɢwan-ḥačxʷiqak-Tsig̱is create chains of rare, special and vulnerable habitats in an otherwise featureless, muddy ocean floor.

“What you end up with is this submarine island oasis,” Du Preez said. The mountains give tiny floating larval creatures a place to anchor; they also provide hiding places for fish and scratching posts for whales and sharks. The slope itself acts as a ramp for currents, forcing nutrient-rich waters upwards and feeding shallower ecosystems, so fish and seabirds congregate higher up in the water too. 

That richness puts them in harm’s way for fishing, both bottom-contact trawling and fishing off the bottom. Everywhere Du Preez has looked there, she’s found abandoned fishing gear — up to 400,000 pieces of fishing gear on a single seamount, she estimates.

The other threats come in part as a byproduct of their geography, combined with climate change.

Consider a mountain’s slope: at its lower reaches, the trees are big, broad and tall. Further up the mountain, they dwindle until they disappear, leaving behind the scrubby alpine vegetation and lichens. For a seamount, the details are different but the forces work the same: like the changing conditions as you climb a mountain, the water takes on different properties from the top of a seamount to the bottom. 

Those properties are changing, with oxygen depleting at a fast clip; a paper Du Preez co-published in 2020 found there’s 15 per cent less oxygen in the water at some depths since the 1960s. It’s also acidifying. Some creatures, like fish, may be able to move to other habitats to compensate, until they reach the peak of the seamount and run out of places to go. Others, like corals and sponges, anchored to the bottom and growing and reproducing over hundreds or thousands of years, are stuck with life — or more likely, death — in the fast-changing conditions.

“Four thousand year-old coral doesn’t adapt very quick. You just lose those animals, because they don’t get to move,” Du Preez said. “The punchline of the paper is the most depressing sentence I’ve ever written: It’s not whether these animals are going to die, it’s, ‘How are they going to die?’ ” 

Marine protected area threatened by deep-sea mining

Deep-sea hydrothermal vents are the charismatic stars of Tang.ɢwan-ḥačxʷiqak-Tsig̱is, concentrated in one small area that’s already protected, in the middle of its southern half.

That 97 square kilometre area, the Endeavour Hydrothermal Vents marine protected area, was Canada’s first marine protected area, and falls entirely within the new one. It protects a handful of gargantuan structures with names like Salty Dawg and Sasquatch, strung out along 20 kilometres of a ridge, 2250 metres below the ocean’s surface. But there are many more spread out among the area to be protected — Magic Mountain, Explorer Deep, Not Dead Yet — amounting to 35 known vents described in a Fisheries and Oceans Canada report, though Du Preez says it’s likely there are more yet to be found given how hard they are to find.

The vents are a marvel of nature, nurturing life far beyond the sun’s reach in a rare violation to the rule that the sun is the Earth’s ultimate life-giver. Towering spires of mineral deposits spewing superheated water and gases and lousy with alien lifeforms: squat lobsters, dazzling red-feathered tubeworms, giant clams with no functional digestive system that instead use symbiotic hydrogen sulphide-eating bacteria, semi-blind fish that walk around on “tripods” and shrimps that dart in and out of the water in what Du Preez has called a “dance with death” to gather food at the risk of being boiled alive. 

A list of creatures seen at the vents repeatedly reverts to “species unknown,” and many of those that are known have only ever been found there. They also occur in incredible densities: a plot the size of a child’s school desk could hold half a million animals. 

The landscape was “mind-blowing,” Kim Juniper, one of the leaders in hot vent science, told me in 2019 when I first reported on an earlier phase of Tang.ɢwan-ḥačxʷiqak-Tsig̱is. “Nothing had ever been seen like that anywhere in the world.”

The good news for hydrothermal vents is that they’re stable: they’re below the part of the ocean that’s losing oxygen; they’re below the part of the ocean that’s becoming more acidic and they aren’t being bowled over and scraped bare by trawlers. All they need is the absence of deliberate harm.

“Hydrothermal vents are so deep, and they’re removed from our world in that they don’t rely on it for food, so if you leave them alone, they’re kind of fine — which is great,” Du Preez said. 

But we’re not leaving them alone — not everywhere. 

Deep-sea mining could be about to blow up worldwide, with a deadline expiring in June for the United Nations’ International Seabed Authority to come up with rules that would allow the practice.

“There are also seamounts literally 10 kilometres off our MPA that are technically in the high seas that have been slated for investigation for deep-sea mining,” Du Preez said.

Deep-sea mining is simultaneously high- and low-tech, using complex submersibles to strip the seafloor bare in search of valuable clusters of minerals like cobalt and rare earth minerals, and crushing everything they come across: living, dead and mineral alike. Doing so produces huge clouds of fine sediment — sediment that can contain radioactive materials and choke anything it comes into contact with. 

“If deep-sea mining — or when — deep-sea mining happens, the plumes will be on the order of hundreds of kilometres squared, Du Preez said. 

Everything at the mining site will die. But anything nearby — or wherever the sediment drifts — will also likely die. 

“That plume is also predicted for 100 per cent mortality for anything that swims through it,” she said. 

That’s outside of the protected area. Inside, there will be restrictions that could prevent direct impacts. 

“Canada and the co-managing First Nations are about to protect hydrothermal vents and seamounts within their control, while the rest of the world is looking to exploit hydrothermal vents and seamounts in a way that … we’ve never done before,” Du Preez said.

The precise list of what will be prohibited in the marine protected area hasn’t been set in stone yet. Kate MacMillan, ocean conservation manager for the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, hopes the government will be sticking to minimum standards established in 2019: no dumping, no seafloor mining, no oil and gas activities and no bottom-contact fishing. 

Some fishing will likely still be allowed. Hundreds of ships fish for tuna within the protected area’s borders, and that isn’t set to change; the fishery doesn’t directly harm the bottom-dwelling ecosystems. The fishery represents a fifth of Canada’s tuna catch. Likewise, even more intensive forms of fishing (so long as it doesn’t touch the bottom) could be allowed to persist: midwater trawling, which deploys immense nets to scoop up anything in its path, will likely be allowed outside of two prohibited areas, while hook-and-line fishing for species like sablefish, halibut, and rockfish will likely be allowed everywhere.

The precise definition of dumping, however, isn’t well defined; likewise, the government says that in some protected areas, for now, bottom trawling may still be allowed and those will still count toward protection targets. 

The fear from conservationists is that despite the protected area’s enormous size, it could end up as a “paper park,” protecting a lot on paper but nothing in practice. 

“It comes back to the fact that if [MPAs] aren’t being implemented in the way they were set out to — to meet these conservation goals — it proves them useless,” MacMillan said. 

But Du Preez is celebrating the win — and looking forward to another season watching the screens on the John P. Tully.

“It, hopefully, will be a year of discovery.”

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.

This story is a co-production between The Narwhal and VICE World News.

Two years after fisheries observers came forward to talk about harassment, intimidation, assault, sexual assault and threats aboard fishing vessels, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) has created a suite of new policies intended to limit harassment and is spending millions of dollars on modernization — but is refusing to talk about it. 

Whistleblowers within the trawl industry went on the record for investigations published in The Narwhal and VICE World News after DFO, Canada’s regulator of commercial fisheries, failed to take steps to make working conditions safer for at-sea observers.

While the department has been silent on its inner workings, internal documents released to VICE and The Narwhal through access to information legislation show that below the surface there has been a steady flow of activity at DFO offices in response to revelations published in the investigations. 

Observers are the eyes and ears of the public aboard fishing vessels, reporting information about illegal fishing, the kinds of fish being caught, accidental bycatch, vessel location and more to DFO, under whose purview observers are assigned to fishing vessels. But as earlier reporting revealed, observers — often young women, working alone on vessels mostly crewed by men — suffer from workplace abuse, with many recounting stories of being screamed at by boat captains, coerced into falsifying their reports and sexually abused, among other mistreatment. 

The result of that intimidation, whistleblowers say, is systematic under-reporting of the amount of accidentally caught fish and deliberate malfeasance — because observers do not feel safe enough to speak out about infractions that could jeopardize vessel permits and profits.

“You are all alone out there, and nobody wants you there,” said one female former observer, who said she, as a recent biology graduate, had spent a year being subjected to a gauntlet of sexual harassment and violent intimidation on trawlers before quitting. 

That reporting kicked off a lumbering internal response at DFO that, while happening behind closed doors, is still ongoing. 

More than 700 pages of documents, received by VICE and The Narwhal, show an emotional response within the department to the allegations raised in reporting published by both outlets in 2020 and 2021.

“This article is horrific,” wrote Adam Keizer, a DFO regional manager, in an email to three colleagues on Feb. 9, 2021, the morning the investigation was published in VICE. “I know we’ve discussed the limitations about what DFO can do with respect to harassment of [observers], but we must have a discussion about what is within our means to ensure [they] are protected.” 

The earlier discussions Keizer is referring to were regarding the incidents reported in the 2020 article in The Narwhal. 

“Agreed Adam, I’ve just finished reading this. It is very upsetting and extremely troubling,” a colleague, Neil Davis, replied. 

Keizer declined to comment for this article, citing DFO communications policies. Over the course of two years of reporting and interview requests, DFO has never made anyone available to talk about the allegations or the department’s response, preferring instead to send bullet-point written responses. Requests for interviews with three officers who the documents show were on the front lines of the response and pushing internally for change were also declined.

Multiple requests for interviews with federal fisheries minister Joyce Murray were initially deflected. In late February, a spokesperson for the minister wrote, “I spoke with my DComm [director of communications] who agrees with me that its (sic) important to Canadians that the minister speak on these issues.” 

A month later, the line had changed. The minister would not be made available at all. “Heather McCready is best positioned to get you the information that you’re looking for (sic) your story.”

McCready is the director general for conservation and protection, who has been leading the internal changes in response to the allegations over the past year.

That interview was cancelled two hours before it was set to begin. In an emailed statement, in lieu of an interview and sent at the same time, the department said it “does not and will not tolerate harassment of at-sea observers” — the exact same wording that appeared in media lines more than two years ago.

In the absence of access to DFO officials, the recently released documents shed light on a department that is both confused regarding its responsibility to the observers working on its behalf, and frustrated by its own inability to respond. The department recognizes the problem, but according to emails, briefing notes and meeting minutes, appears unsure of how to address it. 

However the internal documents also reveal the department quietly responded to the allegations with one major measure: entirely new sections of its nation-wide observer policy devoted to harassment, amounting to dozens of significant changes intended to protect observers. 

The revised policy was meant to be released last spring, but has yet to see the light of day. In an email to VICE and The Narwhal, five months after we received the documents and following repeated requests for comment, DFO cast doubt on the legitimacy of its own draft policy.

“The documents you have obtained through ATIP reflect work that has been done, and in some cases continues, to explore options for future consideration of the At-Sea Observers Program,” a spokesperson wrote. “We have nothing else to add in terms of your questions below – at this time, there isn’t a new policy related to the At-sea Observers Program.”

‘Shut him down’ 

A week into 2020, Misty MacDuffee, the wild salmon program director at the Raincoast Conservation Foundation, reached out to The Narwhal with a tip. MacDuffee had heard from an observer that people in his position were being mistreated at sea, and that it had major consequences for how bycatch — sea life that is unintentionally caught and sometimes has to be discarded — is reported.

“I think it is atrocious and needs to be exposed,” MacDuffee wrote in her email. 

That email set off the investigations that would run, respectively, in The Narwhal five months later and in VICE a year later. 

The investigations took a long time, in part, because of a lack of cooperation on the part of DFO. The first interview request was sent to DFO by the end of January 2020. 

“Communications responded to the reporter with approved messaging,” reads a record of the interaction obtained through a separate access to information request. Keizer suggested in an email to communications staff that he himself could be a good source to explain what was happening in closed-door meetings with industry. “I think there will be value in speaking with the reporter,” he said. 

“If he wants to speak about any of the allegations, then DFO should not be speaking nor providing any kind of comment. [Sentence redacted by DFO]. My response to him last night should have shut him down continuing to poke DFO staff on this,” the communications staffer wrote back. “Just so you know, we are back to being in a ‘no surprises’ environment.” 

When the investigation in The Narwhal ran on May 6, 2020, detailing the kind of harassment MacDuffee had raised in her email and which DFO had declined to respond to, MacDuffee herself was taken aback. “It was worse than what I thought,” she said. 

Two weeks after publication, Kelly Andersen, a trawling skipper that five whistleblowers named as being among the perpetrators of the harassment, resigned from the industry group that oversees the trawling fleet. Andersen’s ships are still actively fishing in B.C.

Despite Anderson’s resignation, the public response to the harassment allegations by DFO remained muted. What the documents now reveal is that while an internal investigation by DFO dragged on, it would take the second investigative piece in VICE to fully get the wheels turning. 

Limited at-sea observer companies may have stymied DFO response to allegations

Within five hours of the VICE investigation reaching DFO staffers’ desks on the morning of Feb. 9, 2021, a briefing note had been put together for then-fisheries minister Bernadette Jordan.

The focus of the briefing note was that DFO is not directly responsible for the treatment of the observers who work on its behalf. 

“Canada’s National At-Sea Observer Program places designated private-sector observers aboard fishing vessels to monitor fishing activity,” the note read. “At-sea observers who feel they are being harassed are encouraged to report instances to their employer, as well as their local police.” 

While DFO mandates at-sea observers must be present aboard fishing vessels, observer services are contracted through private fishery observer companies like Archipelago Marine Research, a company accused by whistleblowers of failing to protect employees or penalizing them for speaking out. The internal briefing note does not indicate any steps DFO intended to take to protect the observers by holding companies such as Archipelago accountable.

However, by October 2021, a month after the VICE story appeared, a working group had been established, and the department had met with Archipelago to rake them over the coals regarding their labour practices. 

“I have serious concerns about their labour operations,” Keizer wrote to a colleague who was looking at whether or not to renew the company’s designation — a critical approval the company needed to operate. But according to meeting minutes, a lack of competition meant the department had few options; DFO could not have cut off Archipelago’s designation even if it had wanted to (and there is no evidence it did want to) without dealing a serious blow to the West Coast fishing fleet’s ability to operate because there were no other companies that could step in to provide the observers.

In an email, DFO confirmed that Archipelago is still designated as an at-sea observer company — and that in the history of the program “no at-sea observer corporation has lost its designation for at-sea observer-related activities.”

Meanwhile, the people in charge of industry compliance were scrambling to speak with the same people whose solutions had been put forth in The Narwhal and VICE investigations, including Jaclyn Smith, an investigator for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Liz Mitchell of the Society for Professional Observers.

Ann Bussell, a DFO investigator, asked her U.S. counterpart Smith about potential improvements that had been raised in the investigations, including giving observers their own independent communications systems rather than forcing them to rely on the ships’ radios or internet.

Bussell reached out to WorkSafeBC on Feb. 18, who said they were working on a plan and talking to their federal counterparts. She reported in an email to colleagues that she was feeling “very encouraged” that the provincial organization was willing to take action.

“They are familiar with the trawl vessels and companies,” she wrote. “They want to do more work on this as they know there are problems.” 

But when Bussell spoke with Mitchell a month later about how to support observers and help them report incidents of harassment, the DFO officer sounded frustrated, Mitchell recalls. (Bussell declined to speak with VICE and The Narwhal for this story. She has since retired.)

“She sounded genuinely concerned, but because of the employment arrangement with the outsourced companies … that’s kind of a conflict of interest,” Mitchell says.

That conflict was created following deep cuts to DFO under Stephen Harper’s Conservative government last decade; until 2013, DFO funded the program rather than industry. So one possibility the department explored to deal with its lack of oversight power was to go back to how things had been originally: either operating the entire program within DFO, or at least funding the observer role rather than leaving it up to the fishing companies. It also considered adding “increased legal obligations” for the companies involved, including monetary penalties. 

“May need extreme consequences for the fleet,” someone wrote in the minutes for a meeting that included multiple DFO divisions involved in fisheries enforcement.

It’s unclear which of these options, if any, were adopted — or if any fishermen, skippers, fishing companies or observer companies have ever been charged for the mistreatment of an observer.

But one major change — a change for which some had been agitating for years — would be accelerated in the wake of the pandemic, and conveniently it helped solve the harassment issue at the same time: take the observers off the trawlers altogether.

A shift to electronic monitoring

Jon Eis was among the whistleblowers who spoke to The Narwhal in 2020. He said he had been threatened and intimidated out of accurately reporting how much halibut was being discarded aboard the trawler Raw Spirit — and that DFO, and the industry, had done nothing to protect him. 

Since the allegations surfaced, he’s had some hard conversations with people he had worked closely with for years, including fishermen, observers and the company that put him in that position, Archipelago. In all those conversations, he says no one has questioned the veracity of his story.

“No one’s ever called me a liar, in all of this. Even [Archipelago] has never called me a liar or a bullshitter.”

Now he’s working with industry insiders to create the next generation of technology that is already making observers like him obsolete.

Eis admits, in his classically straightforward fashion, that he has some discomfort now working within the industry: “I don’t know if I’m just a political pawn so they can tell DFO they’ve got the whistleblower.” But, he adds, “from what I can tell they’re absolutely taking this seriously.” 

The technological solution Eis is working on? Electronic monitoring. If the primary problems with observers are that they can’t be everywhere, electronic monitoring can be. If the problem is that observers can be cajoled or coerced into misreporting what they see, electronic monitoring can’t be. That’s the theory driving the technology forward, and it’s been underway since the mid 2010s. The pandemic, however, vastly accelerated the desire to replace people — who move from ship to ship and can spread COVID-19, potentially shutting multiple vessels down — with cameras.

When observers were abruptly ordered off ships in the early days of the pandemic, electronic monitoring was put forward as the natural replacement — on an interim basis.

“We had no choice; we couldn’t put observers on board [due to the pandemic]. Our whole fishery’s management is based on at-sea data collection,” says Bruce Turris, an industry insider who, along with Brian Mose, head of the Deep Sea Trawlers Association of British Columbia, is spearheading the work to make the change.

That data collection previously depended on the eyes and estimates of observers. Now, increasingly, it depends on high-definition cameras that are strategically placed throughout the ship. 

Every time the gear is moving, data is recording where the ship is and what is being used. Cameras capture every fish that passes through the sorting area, and grids all over the deck help size them. A human later watches a sample of that footage to compare it to what the ship’s own logbook recorded, and when discrepancies arise it costs the ship more money to pay for a deeper audit. 

It also costs the ship time if the audit has to be completed before it can leave the dock. That, Mose and Turris say, is the real deterrent.

The people doing that audit, often, are former observers themselves — only working from a warm, dry office instead of at sea.

Turris says that’s an improvement for everyone.

“[Electronic monitoring] works 24 hours a day and captures information in all places at all times, as opposed to an observer — even two observers.” 

Turris and Mose downplay the role the whistleblowers’ allegations played in the acceleration of their electronic monitoring program. 

“I don’t mind saying that the whistleblower … when we were made aware about his complaint, [the revelations were] certainly alarming and disappointing,” Mose said.

The revelation “helped to accelerate the move,” Turris says. But there was more at play, including efficiency gains and the pandemic: “To be completely honest, outside of that, we were already on the path to [electronic monitoring]. I think COVID accelerated this exponentially.”

But a DFO memorandum for then-minister Jordan in May 2021 suggests that from the government’s perspective, the issues were much more closely related. The briefing memo lumps together the big issues that have been plaguing the observer program — harassment and a lack of jurisdiction to deal with it,  the financial strain on observer companies, and the pandemic — as the reasons to more widely overhaul the system. The changes proposed to deal with the multitude of problems include electronic monitoring and the new, as-yet unreleased, observer harassment policy. 

In September 2020, four months after the first investigation was released in The Narwhal, then-fisheries minister Jordan approved the creation of a $2 million fund to modernize the at-sea observer program, “focusing on addressing the vulnerabilities resulting from the current delivery model.” According to a briefing note, those vulnerabilities included “challenges in recruitment and retention of qualified at-sea observers, particularly in light of recent media attention on incidents of harassment in the industry.” 

Archipelago is among the beneficiaries of that $2 million program as it works toward growing its electronic monitoring operations. Scott Buchanan, Archipelago’s vice president for operations, declined to comment for this article.

“We were disappointed with how Archipelago was presented in the [earlier] articles and as such do not wish to provide you with any information or our perspective on the ongoing changes being made as monitoring programs and fisheries continue to evolve,” he wrote in an email.

MacDuffee and Mitchell are wary of the shift toward electronic monitoring, though not opposed to it.

The observer companies that failed to deal with observer harassment, after all, are the same companies that will be handling the electronic data. And it will all be overseen by DFO, which has spent a decade turning a blind eye to problems in the industry.

“Are they suddenly going to start being super transparent? I don’t think so,” Mitchell says. “I think it’s more a move to avoid accountability.” 

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.

This feature was made possible by Humber College’s StoryLab, Faculty of Media and Creative Arts, and The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

The boat isn’t much, really: cracked windows, a couple of good engines, and a cabin not quite big enough to accommodate three people trying to maintain a physical distance. The aluminum craft rocks in any wave bigger than a ripple while the big ones reverberate through the hull. 

Compared with the powerful, expensive and well-manned ships of the Coast Guard, in fact, the boat barely registers. 

Except, crucially, it’s there.

Unlike government agencies without the manpower nor the reach to frequently penetrate the undulating, fractal coast, the boat is where it’s needed.

And it gets around. The people at the helm, two young Wuikinuxv (O-wik-een-oh) Guardian Watchmen, cover 120 kilometres a day, most days of the month. Over several months they’ll patrol about 2,000 square kilometres of coast by boat alone, according to data shared by the guardians with The Narwhal. Their neighbours, the Heiltsuk and Kitasoo/Xai’Xais will reach even larger areas — nearly 3,000 and 8,000 square kilometres, respectively. 

The boat and its crew are the front line of conservation on this part of the coast. They’re out on the water, watching for trouble, helping where it’s needed, collecting data and projecting the power of the Wuikinuxv First Nation to their sizeable portion of the coast. 

They’re not alone in their work. Up and down the coast, from the southern end of Vancouver Island all the way to Alaska, First Nations guardians are making their mark on their respective nations’ traditional territories. The idea has spread inland and across Canada, with guardians working in every province and territory in different ways. They’ve become intrinsic to national parks, resource projects, land restoration and much more. 

The Wuikinuxv Coastal Guardian Watchmen have been patrolling their marine territory for more than a decade. Adam Nelson and Corey Hanuse are newer to the job — Nelson has been doing it for seven years and Hanuse for only a month — but they say they don’t see the governments of Canada or British Columbia represented on their waters much. 

“We usually see DFO, and conservation officers and Coast Guard usually once a month, or twice a month, when they’re in the territory,” Nelson says. 

Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) monitors the coast for fisheries violations in coordination with two 43-metre Coast Guard ships, CCGS Captain Goddard and the CCGS M. Charles, and has spotty coverage of land-based officers in the bigger centres along the coast, like Prince Rupert, Bella Bella and Bella Coola. Those officers have fast inflatable boats that can patrol locally from those bases.

The Coast Guard also has several of its own lifeboat bases along the coast — but none in tiny communities like Wuikinuxv.

That means when emergencies happen in Wuikinuxv — or in most of the small villages of the coast — the cavalry is a long, long way away.

With the sun setting behind the mountains that frame Wuikinuxv’s narrow valley, Elder George Johnson was returning from upriver. As he navigated around the floating dock in the persistent current, his lines got tangled with the dock. He reached for his axe to free himself but before he had a chance to react the stern of his boat was sinking, and the rest soon followed. 

He found himself floating helplessly downriver in near-freezing glacial meltwater. 

Johnson didn’t have time for the Coast Guard to come up from Port Hardy, nearly 150 kilometres away. 

“I was so tired, trying to swim, it was almost like I was giving up,” he says. He made it back to shore, just in time for the first responders to reach him and give him blankets. 

Had the community been relying on outside help, Nelson says the outcome would have been different.

“It would have been too late,” he says. 

Before the Guardian Watchmen were patrolling the coast, and before “guardian” or “guardian watchman” was a profession available to many Indigenous people across Canada or even in places like nearby Wuikinuxv, the job was a longstanding tradition in many coastal cultures. 

Haida Gwaii, a rainforest archipelago off the north coast of British Columbia, was connected for millennia by trade, culture and warfare to mainland First Nations. Being aware of movements along the coast was essential.

“Go to each village, and you’ll find a place where the Watchmen had operated,” explains Guujaaw, a Haida leader and artist. A high hill with a good view of the ocean would give the Watchmen and their community ample warning about any intruders or returning parties. 

Even today, carved poles sit on the shorelines of Haida Gwaii, many crowned with Watchman figures, their three connected faces staring unblinkingly out to sea. 

The role persisted after the arrival of Europeans, who brought with them an exploitative mindset that was alien to the people of Haida Gwaii. Through the 1980s, the contrast in attitudes came to a head in the Lyell Island (Athlii Gwaii in the Haida language) old-growth logging dispute. 

“We figured in 12 years the whole thing would be logged off, and there would be nothing there to see now,” Guujaaw recalls. But it was about more than that island: the Canadian and B.C. governments approached resources as something to be drawn down, not to be stewarded in perpetuity. The same attitude extended to fisheries. 

“They can project the idea that the fishery is ‘managing’ and ‘conserving,’ but in reality they weren’t,” Guujaaw says. “They were exploiting and depleting.” 

The result of that confrontation was the first co-managed National Park in Canada, Gwaii Hanaas National Park Reserve. On the land and water, across Haida Gwaii now, representing the Haida and keeping visitors and cultural sites safe, are Guardian Watchmen. 

That’s where Hanuse first encountered guardians. As a teenager, coming from the city with his mental health in crisis, he found himself at a cultural rediscovery camp in T’aalan Stl’aang, an isolated bay at the northwestern tip of Graham Island.

He was welcomed with open arms to Haida territory. He would go for hikes just to be able to hang out with the guardians. 

“It was beautiful,” he says. “The guardian watchmen knew a lot about the territory, the sacred environment we were in. It kind of drew us back to our roots, really.”

He left feeling “better than I ever have.” As soon as the opportunity came up, he joined the Wuikinuxv Guardian Watchmen. 

“I just felt like, ‘I have a job to do. This is what I’m here for.’ ” 

The position in Haida Gwaii has been formalized now, with uniforms and training and vacation time, but the idea remains the same as it ever was: caring for the land and the people on it. 

For Guujaaw, creating the park was never about securing the approval, much less the permission, of the Canadian government. It was in fact the opposite: asserting that a government was already in control. The Haida government. 

“It wasn’t a situation where it depended on a formal recognition by the [federal] government,” he says. “It was a Haida designation.” 

And thanks in part to the success of the Haida in pushing for self-determination, the concept has been exported all over Canada.

Today there are more than 70 guardians programs in various stages of development in Canada, according to the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, which is pushing for more federal funding. Their goal is reaching a level comparable to Australia’s recent $650 million (CAD) investment in its Indigenous Rangers program. That infusion of money will keep the program running through 2028. 

The programs that currently exist employ as many as 18 guardians each, welcome jobs in mostly remote, rural places where employment is scarce and which have historically been disadvantaged. 

The idea has been taken further to include First Nations in their own Coast Guard auxiliaries, in which the central idea — self-sufficiency and local first response — remains. When help is a long way over the horizon, it’s always safer to have your own boat and motor, and someone who knows what to do.

Patrick Johnson wasn’t in need of a job. He already had one, and in fact he took a major pay cut to become a Wuikinuxv Guardian Watchman. 

Johnson, the brother of George, who capsized his boat, grew up in Rivers Inlet, and learned to drive a boat when he was six or seven years old. Today, in his fifties, he knows the waters around the village as well as anyone. 

“I wasn’t looking for a guardian job at the time,” he says. He was asked to show some younger guardians the ropes, teach them about the nearby waters. But after they quickly moved on to other jobs, Johnson was left manning the ship, taking more and more courses to get certified in safety and navigation and first aid. 

He sees real value in the program. “There’s stuff that happens out there; we get calls all the time, saying, ‘there’s something happening, there’s somebody out there, go check on them,’ ” he says. “We’ve got to know what’s happening at all times.” 

Like in Haida Gwaii, guardian watchmen are a way for the Wuikinuxv to check on their territory and do scientific assessments. Those assessments and other science are one major way the Wuikinuxv project their sovereignty over the territory. 

A crab survey ongoing for seven years is currently assessing the viability of that resource for commercial harvesting, and they’re currently monitoring rockfish and bear population health. The latter could mean life or death in a place where grizzly bears regularly meander through town in search of food. Wuikinuxv-driven studies of bear populations informed a big part of the B.C. government’s decision to end trophy hunting in 2017, and the First Nation recently published a scientific study showing how to limit human salmon harvests to ensure the bears have enough to eat. 

“If you want to have changes, you’ve got to get the public on your side, and you’ve got to be able to provide the science,” explains Jennifer Walkus, an elected councillor who has been the First Nation’s stewardship director. “It’s been peer reviewed. It’s made it through the process. And then you can use that to try and get support from public as well.”

When the public visits Wuikinuxv territory — or any territory with guardians — the guardians present a unified front that reinforces the sovereignty their science is propping up behind the scenes. 

Every summer, when yachters would return to the Central Coast, the guardians go out and remind visitors whose territory they’re visiting. That was Johnson’s favourite part: he met people from all over the world and had a chance to see his territory anew through their eyes. 

“They’re from California, they’re from Texas, they’re from, you know, everywhere — and it’s amazing, they remember you,” he says. “It feels good.”

The place those tourists come to visit is stunning territory indeed: the Coast Mountains drop off sharply from glacial peaks straight into the ocean here, where they plunge hundreds of metres deep. The sudden drop-off is also a boon to marine wildlife, with a combination of dissolved organic carbon from rivers and nutrients from the deep sea mixing to create an absolute feast for herring all the way up to orcas and humpback whales. 

In the wide eyes of these visitors, Johnson was being remembered and recognized as an authority on the waters of his territory, while doing valuable science and keeping people safe. 

Just up the coast, meanwhile, the Nuxalk Guardian Watchmen are out chasing bears out of Bella Coola at all hours of the night. The Kitasoo/Xai’Xais Guardians are going to be instrumental in a new Marine Protected Area in Kitasoo Bay. And in Heiltsuk territory to the west, guardians are keeping watch over the site of a devastating diesel spill where the Nathan E. Stewart tug sank in 2016. 

One day as I join the guardians on patrol, they’re checking on sites across the territory. First, we pull into the site of a forestry camp that was never cleaned up. A pickup truck filled with gaping rusty holes disintegrates into the ground, while runoff shoots out of culverts into the inlet. 

Satellite images show that above the site, logging is very much still active. 

The guardians stop in at a floating community at Dawson’s Landing, which serves mainly to service the fishing lodges that still run the length of Rivers Inlet. At one point, 13 industrial canneries dominated the fishing here, sucking the life out of what had been a wonder of the world — pulsing salmon runs that fed entire ecosystems from forests to bears to people and back down — but today they’re gone, replaced by smaller sport-fishing outfits. 

Nelson and Hanuse check in with the owners of the general store, pick up some supplies for the day, then push the boat off. Dawson’s Landing is the final stop, perched just inside the inlet, before exiting into Fitz Hugh Sound.

Fitz Hugh Sound is a frequent passage for boats of all kinds: the herring fishing boats that have pillaged the coast despite the protestations of the local First Nations; tugs like the Nathan E. Stewart; and cruise ships and ferries taking the protected Inside Passage to Prince Rupert or Alaska. 

Boats that are rarely seen here? Government patrols that would keep all of that traffic safe, and in line with laws and regulations. 

“In our part of the world we just don’t see them, unfortunately,” says Doug Neasloss, stewardship director for Kitasoo/Xai’Xais First Nation. “Drawing a line on a map is not going to protect your territories, people do.”

That was what made the Kitasoo/Xai’Xais start up their own guardian watchmen program: to fill in the gaps left on that endless stretch of coast. It was “the wild west,” he says of the 1990s when illegal fishing, grizzly poaching and illegal logging ran rampant in his nation’s territory. 

“We actually caught one guy red-handed; he had cut down a huge tract of forest,” he recalls. “If it comes down to it, we will do whatever we can to protect our territory.” 

Now the Kitasoo/Xai’Xais have begun a pilot project that entrusts guardians with the authority normally given to parks officers, like issuing tickets. But Neasloss reports they’re already seeing the benefits of their presence, with “a lot less illegal activity” happening since the guardians began their work. 

As the Wuikinuxv guardians’ boat moves into the open water, there’s no sign of a government presence there.

“Timing and frequency of [Bella Bella-based fisheries officer] patrols are done to maximize coverage and ensure compliance with the applicable acts and regulations governing the specific fisheries,” a DFO spokesperson wrote in an emailed response to questions. 

Whatever their usual timing, neither the small, fast boats of the DFO officers nor the sleek ships of the Coast Guard are anywhere to be seen — just a tug moving some logging equipment, a few fishing boats and some smaller craft motoring off in the distance. 

The sea is reflective under a brilliant sun, with barely a ripple on its surface. Every now and then, a column of ionized air particles plumes up from the surface: humpback whales stopping to feed on their migration between the tropics and the Gulf of Alaska. Swimming alongside the whales are a pack of sea lions, picking up the scraps as they feed. 

Ignoring the whales for the moment, we turn the corner into a protected bay, its white beach indicative of millennia of harvested clamshells crushed by the waves. Hidden in the woods is a tiny cabin owned by the First Nation, bunks lining the walls and a rusty barrel stove flaking by the wall. The site is special to them, having been a location for generations of Wuikinuxv families to gather at the end of their inlet.

The guardians stop for a smoke break and have a snack. They’re young — Hanuse is 18 and Nelson, in charge, is just 23. They’ve recently been joined by Soleil O’wadi, who is 22. 

“It’s the youngest guardian crew that Wuikinuxv has ever had, I think,” O’wadi tells me. 

Soleil, who uses they/them pronouns, didn’t grow up immersed in Wuikinuxv culture; they grew up on Vancouver Island. But now they’re getting to know their own territory. Sitting by a woodpile back in the village they are practically bouncing.

“I’m excited about everything,” they tell me. “About this entire job. I think first [I] was excited; I was excited to get to know the territory. I feel like I have a pretty good grasp of it now. But yeah. I’m excited to work the boat, and spend time with my boys.”

Being the eyes and ears of their nation is a point of pride. There’s a lot to be proud of — rescues, monitoring, the land itself and reconnecting to it every day. We zoom out of the protected bay and back out toward the whales, and are quickly surrounded. With the engine cut, the sound of the whales’ breathing booms over the water each time they resurface. A young calf exuberantly shoots out of the water again and again, slamming down on the surface to send up a wall of water around it. 

“I feel home here,” O’wadi says. “I feel safe.”Editor’s note: The Mapbox interactive map illustrates the area monitored by the Heiltsuk (Haíɫzaqv) Guardian Watchmen during a portion of their patrols over the course of one year. Some of the patrol data has been omitted to protect sensitive sites.The Narwhal is grateful to Humber College’s Indigenous Education and Engagement Department for consultation around reporting from within Indigenous communities.

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

The federal government is gearing up for a big bet on small modular nuclear reactors, or SMRs. There have been rumblings about the technology for years, but the SMR Action Plan, released in December, lays out Ottawa’s role in advancing the technology.

“Small modular reactors represent the next great opportunity for Canada — helping us to phase out coal and electrify carbon-intensive industries such as mining and petroleum extraction,” Minister of Natural Resources Seamus O’Regan said in a statement.

The governments of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario and New Brunswick have also thrown their support behind SMRs, signing a memorandum of understanding last summer. 

“This safe, emerging technology has the potential to provide needed power to remote communities, to lower emissions and further to diversify Alberta’s energy sector,” Alberta Premier Jason Kenney said in an August speech announcing the agreement. 

There is a real need for new electrical and energy technologies in remote communities. Diesel fuel is the current standard for off-the-grid communities and mines, causing air pollution, service disruptions and environmental liability. But whether small modular nuclear reactors are up to the task of replacing diesel is another question. 

Here, we break down the details and through the spin surrounding modular nuclear reactors.

Wait, how does nuclear power work again?

Sure, just give me a second and I’ll explain *checks notes* nuclear physics. 

In a nutshell, the splitting of radioactive atoms like uranium into smaller elements releases heat. That heat is either converted to electrical energy, usually through turning water into steam to drive a turbine.

The key benefit is that nuclear energy doesn’t rely on burning fuel like oil, gas or coal. That means no carbon emissions from generating electricity, which is why it’s often classified as a “green” energy source. 

But that green label is often called into question: nuclear waste remains highly radioactive and dangerous for much longer than a human lifespan. 

The other risk is a meltdown — essentially an out-of-control chain reaction within the reactor, which generates much more heat than is needed with potentially disastrous results. And that has happened, even recently, with lingering effects: the Fukushima-Daiichi accident in Japan in 2011 has left hundreds of thousands of tonnes of contaminated water with no plan for disposal. For more information on worst-case scenarios (one might say too much information), just Google “Chernobyl.”

What makes an SMR different from a regular nuclear reactor?

For one thing, small modular reactors are, well, small. And modular. The entire facility for some of these reactors could fit into an area about the size of a microbrewery, and be shipped by rail. Compare that with the footprint of a conventional nuclear facility like Ontario’s Bruce Power, which occupies four kilometres of shoreline. Some even fit inside submarines, ships or spacecraft.

But the “small” part more importantly refers to the power output: anything under 300 megawatts is considered “small.” (Bruce Power produces around 6,232 megawatts, enough to power more than a quarter of Ontario.)

For the North, though, where most communities don’t use anywhere near 300 megawatts of energy, think even smaller. 

“In terms of use in the North, what would really qualify as ‘small’ is something in the tens of megawatts,” explained Esam Hussein, the University of Regina’s dean of engineering and applied science, who recently released an extensive review of the design of small modular nuclear reactors. 

In many cases, the reactors would be less like a conventional nuclear plant, with fuel coming and going as it gets used up, and more like a battery. “You bring them in, they function for 20, 30 years, then you take them out,” Hussein said.

All in all there are more than 100 designs currently being explored, with many different fuels, technologies and advantages. 

Remote communities in Canada dependent on diesel fuel (orange), natural gas (black) and heavy oil (purple). Map: Natural Resources Canada

Canadian governments keen to use SMRs for remote mining and fossil fuel projects

Canada has a lot to gain by pursuing small modular nuclear reactors, and powering remote communities is just a part of that. 

Another explanation for the governments’ eagerness could be the multitude of remote mining and fossil fuel projects in need of power.

“This is more about providing low-cost, reliable energy to major natural resource projects,” said Kristen van de Biezenbos, an associate professor at University of Calgary’s Haskayne School of Business. “There must be some kind of economic upside, and selling [SMRs] to rural Canada has no economic upside.” 

Indeed, part of Jason Kenney’s enthusiasm for developing the technology for Alberta has been to get oilsands projects a cleaner source of energy. In-situ oilsands mines (those that melt the bitumen underground using steam) need a great deal of power, and currently that power mostly comes from natural gas. 

Nuclear reactors also need their own fuel, and Canada —  Saskatchewan, especially —  is home to vast reserves of uranium. All of Canada’s current uranium mines are located in northern Saskatchewan and have had their fair share of environmental and human health impacts. From radiation exposure in workers to the contamination of clean lakes with radioactive water, seven underground and open-pit uranium mines in the province come at a cost. 

Many of these mining operations also displaced Cree and Dene people from their homes and territories, Jamie Kneen, communications coordinator with MiningWatch Canada, told The Narwhal.

“Eighty-five per cent of the radioactivity that is in the rock is left behind in the mine waste. Then people need to know there are hundreds of millions of tonnes of that mine waste. And that that radioactivity does not diminish for, well, literally millions of years,” he added.

While the valuable uranium that is mined in Saskatchewan is shipped off for processing in Ontario, the waste products of polonium, radium and thorium are left behind in massive tailings ponds that pose a threat to local water tables, Kneen said.

“The people who live around there aren’t very happy about that.”

Canada has the world’s largest reserves of high-grade uranium according to Natural Resources Canada, and is currently the world’s second-largest producer. And that’s at today’s prices: with the higher demand that a large small modular nuclear reactor market would presumably generate, more uranium would be economically viable for mining. 

And then there’s the tempting possibility of being a first mover internationally.

“I keep thinking that there’s an eye on an export market,” van de Biezenbos said. 

Sure enough, the notion of exporting nuclear technology to other countries, especially developing countries like India looking to get off coal, makes its way into a lot of the press releases and reports surrounding the technology. Even Erin O’Toole’s campaign platform for the federal Conservative Party leadership included a section on exporting nuclear technology: “Canada is a world leader in safe nuclear technology and should continue that leadership role, including with Small Modular Reactors (‘SMRs’) that could assist in emission reduction in remote areas using Canadian technology that could be shared with and sold to the world.”

The Key Lake site in Saskatchewan where uranium was mined from 1983 to 1997. Milling ore for uranium continues on site to this day. Photo: Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission

Are remote communities interested in SMRs?

With all the talk of how this technology can benefit remote, primarily Indigenous, communities, one might be forgiven for assuming Indigenous peoples are behind it — or, at least, consulted on these plans. But there’s little evidence that that is happening. 

“There’s been very limited consultation,” said Nick Mercer, an energy researcher who recently published a paper on the views of Indigenous people in Labrador toward alternative energies. 

“We had all kinds of findings we did not anticipate,” Mercer said. For instance, the paper found communities expressed a surprising amount of support for their existing diesel systems. 

As for small modular nuclear reactors? Almost none. Just eight adults of 211 he interviewed expressed any support for the reactors. By contrast, even large-scale hydropower, which is deeply unpopular in Labrador due to projects like the Muskrat Falls and Churchill Falls plants, had 44 adults expressing support.

“It’s an absolutely shocking finding,” he said — though the underlying premise is understandable. People were “absolutely unwilling to support generation technologies they do not understand,” he said. Nuclear technology is an exceptionally complex and high-tech form of power generation, especially compared with the relatively simple concept of burning diesel.

As one participant put it in a 2016 study from the Fedoruk Centre: “Why would Inuvik be the guinea pig?”

But the affection for the current system was also linked with its job creation: diesel plants provide several well-paying local jobs. A small modular nuclear reactor that may act as more of a battery, with little maintenance and refuelling, might leave less money behind in the community. 

Will SMRs help reduce carbon emissions?

Yes. Currently most northern and remote Canadian communities, and remote mines, are dependent on diesel for power. According to a report from the Pembina Institute diesel-dependent communities burn 682 million litres per year, at great financial and environmental cost. That requires a great deal of emissions just to get the fuel to the community, and then it’s burned. 

Compared to the rest of the country, the three territories where most remote communities are located emit a small fraction of the CO2 equivalent of other parts of the country — just 2.5 megatonnes per year, less than a quarter of the emissions coming from Nova Scotia — but they produce twice as much carbon per unit of electricity than their on-the-grid counterparts. 

Nuclear reactors, by contrast, produce no emissions except for those required to mine and transport the uranium to begin with. 

Can SMRs out-compete renewables like wind and solar?

The declining cost of wind and solar — and the ready availability of these technologies — might make the prospect of SMRs less attractive.

The question, according to Sara Hastings-Simon, senior research associate at the Payne Institute for Public Policy, is “do we need SMRs to reach a fully decarbonized power grid?”

Hastings-Simon raised the question in a recent episode of the Energy vs. Climate podcast, where she noted decarbonization could possibly be achieved with a combination of batteries, transmission lines and even hydrogen energy. 

Add in the potential for geothermal, small run-of-river hydro, tidal energy and other sustainable energy alternatives and the pros of pursuing nuclear seem to diminish. 

“I would keep [SMRs] in the back pocket as an option for the future, sure. But I think it’s being much oversold by many who are saying it’s the only answer,” Hasting-Simon said. 

Solar panel installation. Some policy experts wonder if sources of renewable energy like wind and solar might be more readily available than small modular reactors. Photo: 100% Campaign / Flickr

What happens to the nuclear waste? And is nuclear weapons proliferation still a thing?

That’s the catch; as they say, there’s no free lunch unless you’re sneaking into a conference. Eight decades into the nuclear age and we still don’t really know what to do with nuclear waste.

“Should we burden future generations for benefits we’re getting now?” Hussein asks. For him, the answer is yes, because he doesn’t see spent nuclear fuel as “waste” per se. “I wouldn’t call it waste because 500 years from now that material will be very valuable.” 

Even that rosy outlook still leaves 500 years during which the spent fuel is a potentially dangerous material that can cause all manner of health problems if not handled correctly. Currently it’s stored at reactor sites and the Chalk River Laboratories in Ontario, first in deep pools to be cooled down, and then in containers that keep them isolated. But long-term, there is still not even a site selected for the storage of nuclear waste in Canada, 10 years into the site selection process.

But even more concerning to former federal Green Party leader Elizabeth May, is the connection between nuclear energy and nuclear weaponry.

The potential development of SMRs “definitely raises new and very serious weapons proliferation risks,” May noted on the Energy vs. Climate podcast. “This term small ‘S’ nuclear reactors makes people think that they’re kind of benign.” Concerns over the connection between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons stems from the fact that uranium enrichment processes used in energy are the same as those used to create weapons. Plutonium, a by-product of nuclear energy development, can also be used in nuclear weaponry.

SMRs can contribute more to concerns about nuclear proliferation because these small reactors are less efficient than large reactors and so create more waste.

“I think [SMRs] are actually, on the nuclear weapons proliferation side, even more distressing,” May said.

May also noted that Canada has not agreed to sign the new United Nations treaty for the abolition of nuclear weapons, which comes into force Jan. 22, 2021.

Are there other environmental concerns?

Nuclear energy has a history of horrifying accidents, with lasting consequences.

But small modular nuclear reactors aren’t another Chernobyl, Fukushima or Three Mile Island waiting to happen, as some fear when they hear the word “nuclear.” At the risk of sounding like the architects of the Titanic, proponents claim the small reactors are more or less un-meltdownable thanks to the inherent safety of their designs.

“Those three were all designed in the ’60s; we have learned a lot in the meantime,” Hussein said. 

In fact, Hussein argues that the much more significant risk is failing to meet the challenge of climate change.

“Right now we are facing a very stark choice between finding a way of dealing with climate change and simply disappearing as a species,” he said. “Every single energy source has a price — and it has benefits. And it’s a decision as a society we have to take.”

— With files from Carol Linnitt

Update January 13, 2021 1:45 p.m. PST: This article was updated to reflect the fact that polonium is left behind in tailings ponds and not plutonium as previously stated. Small letters. Big difference. We very much regret that editor’s error.

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This is the first part of Carbon Cache, an ongoing series about nature-based climate solutions.

Well, it’s 2020 now and the techno-fixes are, rather unfortunately, not in. 

No promise to geoengineer the skies or seed the ocean with iron or suck carbon out of the atmosphere has really come to fruition. 

Yet, all along, Canada’s seaweed, dirt and trees have managed to do something that’s seemed impossible for the world’s most advanced technocratic nations: provide a legitimate, ongoing and cost-effective climate solution.

It’s with no irony that the world’s foremost scientific institutions are now recommending that to save nature what needs to be done is, well, save nature.

Perhaps the biggest boost to the idea of these so-called ‘nature-based climate solutions’ came in late 2017 when a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the simple act of preserving wetlands, forests and grasslands could provide more than one-third of the emissions reductions needed to stabilize global temperature increases below 2 C by 2030 under the Paris Accord.

For countries looking to make quick climate gains, the idea of these nature-based climate fixes created quite the buzz.

Those findings also thrust Canada — home to 25 per cent of Earth’s wetlands and boreal forests, as well as endangered prairie grasslands and the world’s longest coastline — into playing a vital role in the global fight against climate change.  

Indigenous-led approaches to conservation

In early 2020, before the pandemic hit, hundreds of people from across the country gathered in Ottawa to discuss what a pivot to nature-based climate solutions in Canada might entail. 

In a cavernous, bright conference room — booked and rebooked several times as numbers expanded from dozens to more than 400 attendees — Environment and Climate Change Minister Jonathan Wilkinson delivered the keynote address.

“Nature-based solutions give us the opportunity to tackle the challenges of climate change and biodiversity at the same time,” Wilkinson said to the more than 400 attendees.

In addition to its global climate commitments, the federal government has also set a goal of protecting 30 per cent of lands and oceans by 2030.

As part of its 2019 election platform, the federal Liberal Party pledged to spend $3 billion on nature-based climate solutions, including the planting of 2 billion trees and other land-use projects that naturally sequester carbon. 

But at the conference another voice emerged to urge Canadians to think beyond the terms of “land-use” when it comes to nature’s role in the battle against climate change. 

“Land relationship planning,” Steven Nitah, Dene leader and former Northwest Territories MLA, pitched to the crowd. 

“Think of the phrase ‘land-use planning,’ ” he challenged the audience. “Land use — how we use the land. That doesn’t talk about land relationship planning.”

Nitah was the chief negotiator for Łutsel K’e Dene First Nations during the creation of Canada’s newest national park, the Thaidene Nëné National Park Reserve. The protected area, which covers 26,525 square kilometres of lakes, old-growth boreal forests, rivers and wildlife habitat, was uniquely designed with Indigenous land management in mind.

Steven Nitah, the Lutsel K’e Dene First Nation lead negotiator for Thaidene Nene National Park. Photo: Pat Kane

Nitah argued the concept of “land relationship planning” should enter the collective vocabularies of Canadians as the country imagines pathways forward for nature-based climate solutions. 

It’s a phrase that got stuck on the tongues of the crowd for the rest of the conference as various experts pooled around tables and in the halls to discuss Indigenous protected areas and undervalued grasslands and how farmers are reimagining their relationship with soil to be better carbon stewards. 

For climate solutions in particular, reimagining the relationship between humans and the land has never been more urgent.

Earth has regulated its own carbon cycle for eons, and it has only taken humanity 150 years to throw that cycle out of whack. Fortunately, the systems that balanced carbon in the atmosphere, in soil and the oceans, in living beings and inert rocks, still exist and still have the potential to recover. But doing that requires space.

“The capacity for nature to bounce back is incredible,” said Lara Ellis said of ALUS Canada, a national charity that works with farmers on projects that restore and benefit the natural landscapes, such as wetlands or good habitat for pollinators. 

A shrinking window for climate solutions

Protecting a forest is easier than recreating an entire forest, which itself is easier than building a machine to suck an equivalent amount of carbon from the air and store it. But the result, less carbon in the atmosphere, is the same.

The same holds for wetlands: artificial, built wetlands are both 150 per cent more expensive and significantly worse at storing carbon than simply protecting a wetland to begin with.

As climate change intensifies, many of the opportunities to harness nature’s own climate regulation systems are dimming. 

Canada’s forests have begun to emit more carbon than they store as wildfires, droughts, pests and diseases rage within them. Coastal wetlands are shrinking and flooding, while inland ones are facing droughts and fires. 

A map created by WWF-Canada for its 2019 wildlife protection assessment indicates the levels of forest biomass across Canada. Map: WWF-Canada

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that as many as 30 per cent of the planet’s species could be at risk — even in an optimistic 1.5 C temperature rise scenario. 

Because of the urgency of the climate emergency, it is necessary to rethink conservation efforts not just under the banner of preservation but of restoration.

The United Nations has already declared the years between 2021 and 2030 as the “decade on ecosystem restoration” in the fight against climate and the growing threats to human survival.

“There is still time to work with nature, not against it,” said Patricia Fuller, Canada’s ambassador for climate change, standing before the Ottawa conference.

“But the window to do so is shrinking rapidly.”

In that shrinking window, scientists, Indigenous leaders, experts and policy advisors have begun identifying the most critical regions in Canada for the implementation of nature-based climate solutions. 

Canada’s secret weapon: the boreal forest

The concentration of carbon in the soil follows the boreal forest almost perfectly as it swoops across Canada, dipping from northern Yukon east around Hudson Bay and spilling out to cover much of Quebec, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador. It’s a globally significant store of carbon that holds almost twice the carbon of the planet’s tropical forests.

A map created by WWF-Canada for its 2019 wildlife protection assessment indicates the levels of soil carbon across Canada. Map: WWF-Canada

But with that storage comes the potential for release when the land changes: as much as 15 per cent of global carbon emissions come from deforestation. Destruction of peatlands accounts for 10 per cent as well, while farming accounts for another 10 per cent.

“The boreal forest is one of the largest intact forests in the world,” James Snider, the vice-president of science, research and innovation for World Wildlife Fund Canada, told The Narwhal.

“That establishes us in an important place to be leading the charge to show how nature-based climate solutions ought to be implemented.” But the boreal’s effectiveness at storing carbon has to do with what’s happening to its landscapes — logging, climate change and wildfires have all emerged as threats to the boreal and its carbon storage potential. 

Canada’s boreal forest is a globally significant store of carbon that holds almost twice the carbon of the planet’s tropical forests. Photo: Stand.earth

Protecting those lands delivers other benefits to humans too. Forests purify the air, stabilize soil and provide places for recreation. 

Wetlands are exceptional water filtration systems that also provide habitat for birds and amphibians, while absorbing excess water, thereby protecting land from floods. 

Grasslands are home to the pollinators that keep agriculture alive. As an added bonus, the places that hold the most carbon are often the places that support the most biodiversity.

Building Canada’s resilience to climate change

Protecting an area isn’t always enough, if climate change and its impacts are coming for the landscape and its wildlife regardless.

The solution, Snider says, is to make sure those ecosystems have the protection they need to be more resilient. He points to the Hudson and James Bay Lowlands, an area five times the size of New Brunswick on the southern edge of Hudson Bay. On a map of the richest areas of carbon storage in Canada, the Hudson and James Bay Lowlands is clearly outlined in the deepest possible shade.

“That’s an area that’s accumulated carbon over thousands of years,” Snider says. “How do we avoid that becoming future emissions?” 

Canada is home to the world’s largest peatland carbon stores, with peatlands covering about 12 per cent of Canada’s total land area. The area is also mineral rich and being eyed for future mining projects.

Nature as part of Canada’s COVID-19 recovery

A big part of the protection required for Canada’s carbon-rich landscapes is likely to come from Indigenous protected and conserved areas, something the Cree Nation is working toward establishing. 

To date, the nation has protected 15 per cent of its territory in northern Quebec, which is home to vast tracts of boreal forest, and is seeking to reach 30 per cent. Such big protected areas create resilience by having interconnected systems that protect one another.

Looking for opportunities to work with communities on the landscapes they already inhabit is key to coming up with practical, workable nature-based climate solutions, Graham Saul, executive director of Nature Canada, said in a webinar months after the Ottawa conference.

“We can ground people who care about climate change in their own landscapes,” he says, adding that efforts to build buffers against climate change can actually restore people’s relationship to the land. 

This has become all the more important in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic devastation, Saul says.

A poll, released Tuesday and conducted by Pollara Strategic Insights for the International Boreal Conservation Campaign, found 70 per cent of 3,019 respondents across Canada want to see conservation of nature included as part of the economic recovery. The poll also found 72 per cent of respondents believe the government should invest in Indigenous stewardship as part of the economic recovery. 

Inspired by the Great Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps in the U.S., some are asking for the establishment of a corps of workers dedicated to nature-based climate projects as part of federally funded relief programs.

Others are calling for Indigenous-led conservation efforts to be recognized as part of coronavirus resilience and recovery efforts. 

“How do we ensure that nature is part of the recovery process?” Saul asks.

In the coming weeks, The Narwhal will look at the role of Canada’s natural landscapes in the fight against climate change. This Carbon Cache series is funded by Metcalf Foundation. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, the foundation has no editorial input into the articles.

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Indigenous guardians have been on the front lines of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic in their communities: they’ve been monitoring who is entering their communities, delivering groceries and firewood to Elders and carrying on field research when outside scientists couldn’t travel.

Now, as the country enters its recovery, some are calling for guardians — who monitor the land and water — to play an even bigger role.

“We know that recovery in this country is going to be oriented toward maintaining and hopefully creating jobs,” says Valérie Courtois, director of the Indigenous Leadership Initiative. “Well, in many of our Indigenous communities, guardians are major employers.”

“We don’t have a GM plant in Łutsel Kʼe — but we have guardians.”

Healing and hope: how Indigenous guardians are transforming conservation

 Thaidene Nëné National Park Reserve in Łutsel Kʼe, N.W.T., has generated nine or 10 full-time and seasonal jobs for guardians. For a community of 300 people, that’s a significant input — the equivalent adding tens of thousands of jobs in a city the size of Metro Vancouver.

The reach of that economic stimulus has extended all the way to Yellowknife, the regional hub, where half a million dollars has been spent in the last year on equipment and supplies, such as snowmobiles, for the guardians.

“What’s good for Łutsel Kʼe is definitely good for Yellowknife,” Courtois says.

The Northwest Territories is dealing with the recent closure of one of its lucrative diamond mines and the looming closure of the two that remain, resulting in the loss of billions of dollars of economic activity. Guardians will not be able to fill that void, but the jobs may facilitate new economic activity, possibly even new mines, that develop with the consent and participation of the communities.

Steven Nitah, Łutsel Kʼe Dene First Nation lead negotiator for the Thaidene Nëné National Park Reserve. Photo: Pat Kane

They “help create certainty for investors,” explains Steven Nitah, who was the chief negotiator for Thaidene Nëné on behalf of the Łutsel Kʼe Dene First Nation. “If Indigenous nations protect their special places … they know they have their guardians that can work with the interested industry, and will be reporting back to the nation.” 

In many cases the guardians are filling a need that the federal government hasn’t been able or willing to fill with its own staff, Courtois says.

“There are lots of instances, particularly in remote places, where the government isn’t even able to fulfill its own mandates in terms of environmental protection and management,” Courtois says. “There’s a value in having guardians fill that role.”

Steve Ellis, northern Canada program lead for MakeWay (formerly Tides Canada), takes that a step further. He believes guardians should be considered as just one element of a broader move towards First Nations stewarding their own lands, not simply acting as stand-ins for public government.

“Guardians aren’t just an instrument for public governments to do their jobs,” Ellis says, “but rather an expression of Indigenous governance over land.”

Six of eight Kaska land guardians pose by the Liard River in northern B.C. Robbie Porter (far right) teaches traditional knowledge to the Kaska land guardians, the community’s eyes and ears on the ground in their traditional territory. The Kaska Dena First Nation has proposed an Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area that covers 40,000 square kilometres of an area known as the “Serengeti of the North.” Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

Indigenous guardians and large-scale land protection

The Canadian government has pledged to protect 25 per cent of the country’s land and waters by 2025, and 30 per cent by 2030. According to Environment and Climate Change minister Jonathan Wilkinson’s mandate letter, meeting that goal should be “grounded in science, Indigenous knowledge and local perspectives.”

That wording suggests a renewed emphasis on Indigenous-led conservation efforts like those in the North. During Catherine McKenna’s final months as environment minister she told The Narwhal that she expects guardians to be a part of most new park negotiations going forward.

Thaidene Nëné heralds a new era of parks

With the federal government spending tens of billions of dollars on economic recovery, the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, of which Nitah and Courtois are a part, is angling to have the government direct some of that money to guardians.

“Why not invest in IPCAs [Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas] and associated guardians programs, where you can create thousands of jobs in areas that are hardest for job creation?” Nitah asks.

An initial investment of $25 million from the federal government in 2017 doubled the number of guardians programs across the country. The Indigenous Leadership Initiative previously asked for $500 million, which would pay for about 1,500 guardians.

Ellis says the challenge is in convincing governments of the knock-on benefits guardians provide. Governments are looking for opportunities to create “jobs that create jobs,” he says, which means simply creating a social program isn’t enough; the jobs need to generate other benefits.

Studies have been conducted to assess how effective Indigenous guardians programs are in returning value for money. With an investment of $4.5 million, one study found the Lutsel K’e guardians generated $11.1 million in social, economic, cultural and environmental value — things like training, access to traditional foods, language retention, decreased crime and violence against women, decreased obesity and additional funding leveraged from other sources. 

In the Great Bear Rainforest, the long-running Guardian Watchmen program boasts a 10:1 return on investment using similar metrics of success.

“It doesn’t just protect the land, it’s actually an incredible way of community healing,” Courtois says.

In Australia, the government recently announced AUD$700 million (CAD$650 million) for its Indigenous rangers, who helped inspire the model for formalized guardian programs in Canada. That money will set their programs up to run through 2028.

“We are certainly thinking at that scale,” Courtois says.

Jordan Wilson, a Heiltsuk Coastal Guardian Watchman, aboard one of the nation’s monitoring vessels. Six guardians are employed full-time in Heiltsuk territory, on B.C.’s central coast, and patrol the territory five days a week. The Heiltsuk have proposed the creation of an Indigenous Marine Response Center that would employ 37 full-time staff and crew. Photo: Louise Whitehouse / The Narwhal

‘They were talking about reviving Dene culture’

Across Great Slave Lake from Łutsel Kʼe, the Dehcho First Nations’ guardians program employs 23 people. The program was started thanks to the need to monitor the construction of Enbridge’s Line 21 pipeline as it crossed the Mackenzie River upstream of Fort Simpson.

“The only way we could support permits was if they supported our own people to do monitoring,” explains Dahti Tsetso, resource management coordinator with Dehcho First Nations.

That first summer of guardians work on Line 21 acted as a proof-of-concept for the Edéhzhíe Dehcho Protected Area/National Wildlife Area. Guardians now co-manage that new protected area as a formal part of the agreement, and are making new investments in infrastructure and equipment to do the job.

But they’re also generating connections within the community: Elders and people with bush skills like reading the weather or fixing a boat motor work with youth, who often bring tech skills to the table.

To Ellis, that’s a long overdue recognition of the skills that Indigenous Peoples can bring to the table, rather than assuming they need new skills instead.

Canada’s new Indigenous Protected Area heralds new era of conservation

“In Canada we have this economic mindset … that Indigenous Peoples need to be trained to participate in this economic system,” Ellis says — an approach that contributes to what he calls a “deficit mentality,” which is ultimately harmful to the people the programs purport to be helping. “If we look at guardian programs, we’re looking at asset-based economic development: what are people good at? Let’s give them a job to do that.”

Tsetso recalls going into meetings to talk about the guardians programs. She expected the meetings would talk about sampling systems and monitoring regimes. “Instead, they were talking about reviving Dene culture.”

“What you get isn’t just a paycheque,” she says, sitting outside with another Dene woman, fleshing a moose hide in the Dene tradition — which is also a part of her job.

“You get to practice and promote language, culture and a way of life, and it feels good.”

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B.C. is considering a proposal for a new coal mine, planned in the heart of critical habitat for the endangered Quintette caribou herd in the province’s Peace region. 

The population of the Quintette herd, which roams the mountains near Tumbler Ridge where the Sukunka coal mine would be built, dropped from an estimated 173 to 74 animals between 2008 and 2018.

In a map submitted to the province by the project’s proponent Glencore, coloured dots indicate how the Quintette herd utilizes the mountain range year round, roaming areas that will be impacted by multiple open pits, roads, a tailings pond and other mining facilities — should the project go ahead. 

Chief Roland Willson of West Moberly First Nations said it’s frustrating to see a new mine proposed in a region of B.C. where extraordinary measures are being taken to bring caribou back from the brink, including the nation’s costly maternity penning project for the endangered Klinse-Za herd that includes 24-hour armed security for pregnant cows and calves.

The open pits of Glencore’s Sukunka coal mine project shown in relation to caribou summer and wintering grounds in northeast B.C. The coloured dots and triangles show the location of caribou based on radio collar telemetry data. Map: Stantec

“For us it’s clear cut that the coal mine should not be going forward because you can’t mitigate the effects on the caribou in any way,” Willson says. “That project should be dead.”

But Willson says he has little confidence that the government will stand in the project’s way.

“When you look at the track record of how many projects have been approved that should not have been approved, B.C. does not have a good track record,” he says. “And Canada does not have a good track record.”

Mine will impact caribou herd in new protected area

The mine is located within the boundary of areas newly protected under a 30-year agreement between the provincial and federal governments and the West Moberly and Saulteau First Nations.

The agreement, announced in February, placed interim protections on 550,000 hectares in the mountainous area west of Hudson’s Hope and includes plans for a new 206,000-hectare provincial park.

The new protected areas were designed to bring six struggling caribou herds, including the Quintette, back from the brink in the Peace region, the epicentre of much of B.C.’s oil and gas and fracking development, forestry, hydro operations and mining.

At an announcement for the new agreement that would see members of the West Moberly and Saulteau act as land guardians to protect species, federal environment minister Jonathan Wilkinson said “we need to do things differently” to ensure development is sustainable. 

“This agreement is a model for caribou recovery efforts across this country,” he said at the time. 

Yet certain zones within the protected areas include special permissions for mining and allow for ongoing development in endangered caribou habitat. 

“You can see pretty clearly how some of the moratorium areas were essentially drawn around projects like Sukunka,” says Tim Burkhart, a program manager at the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative. 

A map showing protected areas in B.C.’s Peace region, announced in a February 2020 new partnership agreement between B.C. and the West Moberly and Saulteau First Nations. The area marked Zone A1 near Tumbler Ridge is where the proposed Sukunka coal mine is located. Map: Province of B.C.

Willson says the fact that the mine is being considered is a red flag that makes him question the validity of the caribou protections that were put in place in the new agreement. 

“If it’s going to hold water, that should be the test right there,” he says. 

According to Glencore, the Sukunka mine could initially produce as much as three million tonnes of steelmaking coal each year — with a potential to grow that capacity to six million tonnes. 

A company project description suggests the loss of habitat for caribou could result in fewer calves born, fewer adults surviving and better hunting for the wolves that prey on the.

Wildlife ecologists that prepared a short submission on the Sukunka mine for the B.C. Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy said the drastically diminished Quintette herd is currently being supported through a province-sponsored wolf cull and that the loss of the herd’s habitat will hinder recovery efforts. 

In an additional submission to the province, one of the ecologists, Dale Seip, noted the mine “will directly destroy 24 hectares of core high elevation winter range and 256 hectares of core high elevation summer range.”

“Any additional destruction of core caribou habitat is inconsistent with efforts to recover these endangered caribou herds, and will increase the risk of the animals being extirpated.”

The ecologists found that other mine expansions in the region forced caribou to abandon their high elevation ranges and while in lower elevation ranges they became easier prey for wolves.

They also found the total disturbed area of the project, including a buffer zone around the mine itself, could amount to nearly 20,000 hectares of core caribou habitat. Their report concluded that that scenario could result in caribou abandoning more than a quarter of their winter area. 

“The current habitat condition for Quintette caribou is unable to support a self-sustaining caribou herd, necessitating a wolf control program to maintain the caribou herd,” the ecologists wrote in their submission. 

“An objective to recover the herd to a self-sustaining condition would require the habitat condition to improve over time until the wolf control program is no longer needed. Any additional destruction of core habitat, including this mine proposal, is inconsistent with that objective.”

Environmental assessments ‘allowing caribou to fall through the cracks’

The environmental assessment process is designed to weigh the benefits of a proposed project against its anticipated environmental and social harms. 

Yet projects that enter into the environmental review process are rarely rejected, even despite notable impacts on caribou. 

A study released in March reviewed 65 environmental assessments for projects in caribou habitat that had potential adverse impacts on the species. 

All but one of the 65 projects were approved. 

Environmental assessments are often used as a means to justify projects in caribou habitat, explains study co-author and UBC geography professor Jessica Dempsey. 

“We know the state has multiple, conflicting obligations,” she says, and yet, environmental assessments are providing governments with a way to say,“ ‘We can have development, but we’ll just mitigate for the impacts.’ ”

Whether those impacts are actually being mitigated, however, is a question the government has been accused of ignoring. 

A 2011 report from the B.C. auditor general found the Environmental Assessment Office “is not evaluating the effectiveness of environmental assessment mitigation measures.”

The study found that having effective mitigation measures in place was not even required to pass through the environmental assessment process and have a project approved. 

In eight of the 65 assessments, the process determined that the measures were “inadequate, with significant adverse effects for caribou,” according to the paper, “but these projects proceeded anyway, on the promise that their positive [economic] effects would outweigh the costs.”

In the Sukunka project, one of the mine’s pits, which overlaps with caribou summer range, could feasibly be dug underground to minimize disturbance, but a technical study by Stantec found that would add cost, and recommended another open pit instead. 

A rendering of the proposed Sukunka coal mine. Photo: Glencore

Dempsey’s study ultimately found that environmental assessments, which are viewed as a tool for sorting harmful projects from benign ones and adding accountability along the way, often acted instead as a rubber stamp.

The authors of the study conclude that environmental assessment “is meant to be a site where the state balances its obligations to promote economic development and to protect people and ecosystems.”

These assessments are meant to achieve a “win-win” for development and protection and yet, the study concludes, when it comes to caribou the result is “win-almost always lose.”

Cumulative effects of ongoing development not considered

In 2018 the federal government estimated there are 3,764 animals left in all of B.C.’s southern mountain caribou herds. That’s 2,000 fewer than it counted just four years earlier.

Woodland caribou depend on large, undisturbed tracts of intact land to survive. They migrate from mountain top to valley bottom and spread out across vast landscapes to escape predators. That makes them especially sensitive to habitat loss and fragmentation — the kind of fragmentation that has accumulated on the landscapes over the course of the last century.

There are less than 300 caribou left to represent all six Peace region caribou herds — all of which are considered at immediate risk of local extinction.

One of the Peace’s caribou herds was officially declared locally extinct after its last member fell into a coal exploration pit in 2011 and died. 

“What’s happening to the caribou here is not something natural,” Willson says. 

The fast drop in population has been pinned squarely on the encroachment of human activity in caribou habitat, including logging, oil and gas, and mining development (and their associated road building) each of which are worth billions of dollars in gross domestic product in B.C.— and tens of thousands of jobs.

West Moberly Chief Roland Willson. Photo: Jayce Hawkins / The Narwhal

From Willson’s perspective, the caribou decline in the Peace region started with the construction of the WAC Bennett Dam along the Peace River. When it was completed in 1967, it flooded more than 1,700 square kilometres of the upper Peace River to create the Williston Reservoir, the third largest artificial lake in North America. That cut off the caribou migration, splintering herds and setting populations rolling off a cliff. 

The B.C. government apologized in 2016 for the damage the dam caused to First Nations communities. That hasn’t stopped it from proceeding with the Site C dam downstream. 

The failure to not only protect the caribou but actually return the herds to sustainable levels, Willson says, is in itself a violation of Treaty Rights. 

“We’re in a treaty infringement right now because we can’t hunt caribou,” he says. 

Willson has continued to see all manner of resource development criss-cross the territory, chopping up caribou habitat into ever-smaller pieces while the government promises to protect the caribou his people once depended on.

“B.C. doesn’t make money saving caribou,” he says. “They’re drunk on the natural resources of British Columbia.”

The benefits of economic development are all too often considered above the value of protected, undeveloped habitat.

A study published in May in the journal Conservation Science and Practice found that after 900 square kilometres of critical caribou habitat was formally mapped and identified on provincial lands in B.C., the government still allowed that land to be logged.

“That identification of critical habitat in 2014 didn’t really change anything,” lead author Eric Palm, a wildlife biology PhD candidate at the University of Montana, told The Narwhal. “The amount of critical habitat logged actually increased.” 

The forestry sector in B.C. alone employs nearly 20,000 people. “There are people’s jobs at stake,” Palm says. “That could be an argument that those job losses are more important than protecting caribou habitat.”

The B.C. Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development said in an emailed statement to The Narwhal, “Forest managers in B.C. recognize that forestry needs to be a part of the solution and past approaches are currently being reflected upon.”

Palm’s study found that, because of continued declines in southern mountain caribou numbers, ‘alternative mechanisms’ were needed to protect the species and their habitat. The authors proposed the use of a “cumulative effects framework” as a compliment to existing environmental assessment processes in order to assess and manage “effects that accumulate from multiple sources across the landscape on different ‘values’ such as old-growth forests.”

Considering the overlapping effects could improve the environmental assessment process that is currently failing, says biologist Aerin Jacob who was a co-author of the report and works with the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative.

“The very tool that is supposed to help guide us to make good decisions is over and over and over again allowing caribou to fall through the cracks,” she says. 

The concept of cumulative effects of industrial development recently made legal waves in a decision by Alberta appeals court justices to refuse a proposed oilsands project. The ruling, which has implications for the West Moberly First Nations and other Treaty 8 nations, found governments must consider the impacts multiple natural resource projects will have on Aboriginal Rights. 

Looking into the future, Willson sees hope in the First Nations’ maternity penning program, which he says the provincial government initially refused to permit. The project has increased the population of the Klinse-Za caribou herd from 16 animals to well over 100 in just six years. Willson said one day hopes the herd will be healthy enough to support traditional harvesting.

“They were a staple for food for the community,” he says, relating Elders’ stories of seeing caribou herds so large and widespread they were “as thick as bugs” across the landscape.

“You could always go and find a caribou in the mountains if you needed to.”

The caribou guardians

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A skipper accused by several fisheries observers of abuse aboard his trawlers has resigned his position as a director of the Canadian Groundfish Research and Conservation Society, The Narwhal has learned.

Kelly Andersen resigned on May 19, two weeks after The Narwhal published an investigation into workplace harassment within the at-sea fisheries observer program.

According to his resignation letter, Andersen said he held the director position for more than 20 years. He did not respond to a request for a comment.

Andersen was one of several skippers named by more than a dozen whistleblowers who reported facing threats and harassment while gathering data at sea. They said that led them to underreport bycatch pulled up in bottom trawler nets, resulting in a vastly underestimated quantity of wasted and illegally harvested fish.

“Recently, I have unfortunately become the focal point of negative discourse within and around the industry I have grown up in and care deeply for,” Andersen wrote in the May 19 letter obtained by The Narwhal.

During the reporting for the investigation, Fisheries and Oceans Canada told The Narwhal that an investigation into allegations made against Andersen is ongoing.

A copy of Kelly Andersen’s resignation letter, obtained by The Narwhal.

Fisheries and Oceans Canada to prioritize harassment response in new policy

In a May 14 emailed statement to The Narwhal following publication of the investigation, a spokesperson with Fisheries and Oceans Canada said the department “takes the issue of harassment of at-sea observers very seriously, and follows up on every reported instance.”

Fisheries and Oceans Canada has been holding annual face-to-face meetings to discuss how the observer program can be improved, the spokesperson said, adding, “most recently, these discussions have included how best to report and handle instances of harassment.”

The department is now prioritizing harassment reporting and response as part of a renewal of policies related to the program, the spokesperson said. New policy is expected to be revealed later this year.

“DFO [Fisheries and Oceans Canada] does not and will not tolerate harassment of at-sea observers. Every worker has the right to a safe and healthy workplace.”

Fisheries and Oceans Canada declined to provide any specific information regarding ongoing or previous investigations into harassment of observers.

The coronavirus pandemic has led to a temporary hold on the at-sea observer program; observers were removed from the ships in April, though fishing is still taking place. The United States has done the same.

The industry is using the time as a chance to pilot its electronic monitoring systems, which they argue are immune to the kinds of harassment that might cause an observer to under-report fish.

Long-term problems for observers

In the original investigation The Narwhal detailed three specific cases in which Andersen was accused of pressuring observers, usually with threats and other forms of harassment, to encourage under-reporting of bycatch.

Jon Eis, a former observer who spoke with The Narwhal, said he felt so threatened by Andersen he took to locking his cabin door at night.

Jon Eis came forward as a whistleblower to expose workplace abuse suffered by at-sea observers. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

Since the investigation was published, several other observers have come forward to corroborate the findings of the investigation and share similar experiences. Many of the observers who came forward to speak with The Narwhal said Archipelago Marine Research, the company responsible for providing observers to industrial trawlers under the federal at-sea observer program, did little to intervene when complaints of harassment were made.

The company has denied that it fails to support its employees who bring forward such allegations.

In an email sent to staff, later obtained by The Narwhal, the company also denies that the issue of bycatch under-reporting is widespread.

“Mr. Thompson’s [sic] article is informative and entertaining, but it does not represent the fishery and at-sea observer program as a whole. Nor does it provide any recognition for the hard work done by our staff to collect independent and reliable data for the fishery,” the company wrote.

“It is very much focused on exposing something some individuals feel is wrong within the program without understanding if the examples presented actually represent a widespread, chronic problem.”

A freedom of information request for documents related to enforcement of at-sea observer laws and regulations submitted to Fisheries and Oceans Canada yielded a heavily redacted 37-page document. (The Narwhal is pursuing a complaint with the Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada regarding the redactions.)

The documents contained references to court summonses for crew of the Raw Spirit — a bottom trawling ship co-owned by Andersen, Jim Pattison’s Canadian Fishing Company and two others — dating back to August of 2017, more than a year before Eis submitted an official complaint with the federal department.

The Canadian Fishing Company has not responded to a request for comment regarding its ongoing business relationship with Andersen following his resignation from the trawl society.

Heavily redacted pages released from Fisheries and Oceans Canada to The Narwhal in response to a freedom of information request. The request sought documents related to incidents of harassment and workplace abuse within the at-sea observer program.

Industry response

In an email to members announcing Andersen’s resignation, the society’s executive director, Bruce Turris, thanked Andersen “for his unwavering support” and “the many valuable contributions he has made as a director over the last two decades.”

Turris was contacted for comment but did not immediately respond.

In a letter to The Narwhal responding to the investigation, and copied to a wide swath of fisheries stakeholders including company executives and even boat brokers, Turris disputed many of the allegations of unsustainable practices that were presented.

“Observer programs don’t guarantee sustainability, they provide data used in managing a fishery sustainably,” he wrote. “Conservation of groundfish is much more robust than portrayed in the article.”

Turris cited many of the measures that have been taken to help improve the sustainability of the trawl fishery, such as the closure of the 800 Line in Haida Gwaii, the mandatory retention of rockfish and the implementation of a program to protect glass sponge reefs.

The latter program involves a system to avoid damaging the reefs by making certain areas out of bounds and reporting any areas where sponges are caught accidentally.

Observers have reported multiple instances of the glass sponge reef program being ignored or undermined.

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