A few days before I visited Devil’s Glen, a resident who lives near the Ontario provincial park got into a yelling match with a rock climber. It allegedly ended with the climber’s hands around the neighbour’s neck, and a call to the police. Over the years, there have also been allegations of litter stuffed into caverns used by at-risk bats, of centenary cedar trees sawed off, of cars egged and climbing routes sabotaged along this stretch of Niagara Escarpment in Clearview, Ont.

For that neighbour, Adam Pearce, concerns started shortly after he moved into his home nearly two decades ago. He began noticing rock-climbing routes on the escarpment abutting his property — hundreds of bolts on bald stretches of cliff face are a giveaway. After a climber fell eight metres and had to be rescued by fire crews and paramedics, Pearce redoubled his efforts to understand how the sport was being monitored and regulated by Ontario Parks. 

He learned it largely wasn’t. For years, rock climbing was just an illicit pastime he and parks ecologists worried about. Then, the Government of Ontario officially sanctioned it. 

I met Adam and his wife, Holly, at their house in late August. Flower beds and bird houses decorated the property, along with dozens of animal skulls the couple has found. We entered a trail out the back of their yard, where they’ve erected “No Trespassing” signs. Within minutes, we were in the park, beginning our descent along a thin slice of trail overlooking a steep drop into the forest below. I couldn’t help but think about these contested grounds, and what would happen if the Pearces came across a climber.

I knew the possibility for tension was high. For months before visiting, I’d been speaking with sources — including climbers themselves, residents and scientists — while reading more than 1,200 pages of documents detailing conflicts between rock climbers, neighbours, environmental organizations and government agencies about this slice of escarpment. 

Several document packages made accessible through freedom of information legislation and either obtained by or shared with The Narwhal show a paper trail of a conflict that goes far beyond squabbles between neighbours and climbers. It shows how the actions — or inactions — of Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks have allowed the situation to deteriorate so dramatically.

The most recent chapter of this story dates back to May 2023, when Ontario Parks, which falls under the provincial Environment Ministry, put up signs closing several climbing routes in particularly ecologically sensitive areas in Devil’s Glen. That summer, climbers spoke with news outlets, posted on social media, wrote blogs to criticize the “unprecedented” decision and, according to one of the document packages, emailed Ontario Parks staff to say the move was taken in “bad faith.”

By August that year, the documents show, the office of then-environment minister David Piccini had ordered all the remaining signs be removed — even though at least one government biologist argued removing the signs had “no scientific rationale.” Climbing has continued indiscriminately in the park since. Ontario Parks did not respond to a request for comment or specific questions for this story.

Creating a rock-climbing route is a fairly invasive procedure. Climbers use folding saws, garden shears and crowbars to pry off loose and wiggly rocks. In a detailed guide to “Route Building 101,” the Association of West Kootenay Rock Climbers in B.C. reminds climbers: “Bushes and small trees that stick out of cracks need to have the roots removed to avoid future growth. Hacking away at small stumps with a hatchet might be necessary.” Other advice is to use an “old ice axe” to remove roots from the cracks. Climbers use battery-powered hammer drills to affix bolts to the cliff face to clip on to — permanent anchors to catch them if they fall. 

The Narwhal spoke with Mike Penney, volunteer president of the Ontario Alliance of Climbers, about these concerns. He’s been targeted for disputing Ontario Parks’ efforts to close some areas off to climbing, and shared photos of posters in which his likeness is shown arguing about the scientific evidence behind those closures. The posters were shared on social media and, he said, left on the vehicles of climbers. “I’m not denying that there is an impact to our natural environment through climbing,” he says. “But I would argue that climbing has the least amount of impact out of any recreational sport that you could think of.”

The Pearces don’t agree with that assessment. They say they’ve seen sensitive plants ripped from the cliff face, tree limbs sawed off and a path built with gravel chipped off the side of the cliffs to allow for easier access. With more than 140 rock-climbing routes across the approximately 700 metres of escarpment within the park, they became increasingly worried about the ecosystem — the hundreds of bats that pour from caves and cracks in the fall and cedars that sprout from cliff faces in ways that seem to defy nature.

It made them de facto vigilantes. “We watched them start vandalizing the cliff and we reported it numerous times to Ontario Parks,” Pearce said, as we looked up at a route. Climbers are fond of quirky monikers, giving routes names such as Mystery of a Lost History, Hyperion and Sympathy for the Devil.

“Holly and I would come across them and say, ‘What are you doing? What’s going on? You’re not allowed to do that.’ And they tell us to mind our own business,” Pearce said. 

In turn, the Pearces have been accused by climbers of destroying routes, stealing equipment and egging cars — all of which they deny.

“We never thought that it would affect us on a level that it has,” Pearce said, saying the couple has received calls in the middle of the night with people threatening to burn their house down. “[The Ontario Provincial Police] told me I should always have a body cam walking in the park.”

The Ontario Provincial Police said it was unable to comment on detailed questions from The Narwhal about the number of calls for service, investigative actions or whether charges have been laid.

Over the years, the Pearces have sent more than 100 emails and made dozens of phone calls to Ontario Parks. In response, in 2026, the provincial agency issued them a cease and desist letter for excessive emails, phone calls and social media posts, which the ministry said are “inappropriate and serve no constructive purpose.” The consequences of breaking the cease and desist order were not specified, but the Pearces have continued emailing park staff.

To the Pearces, the letter is another roadblock in understanding how recreation and conservation are being balanced in the park — if they are at all.

“We’re not trying to say there shouldn’t be rock climbing,” Pearce said. “All we are asking for is that Ontario Parks does their job.”

A month after the Pearces were told to cease and desist, the Parks department issued a new management plan explicitly permitting climbing in Devil’s Glen. The plan, issued under current Environment Minister Todd McCarthy, states climbing “will be secondary to the protection of the cliff’s important geological, biological and cultural heritage,” and that a “leave no trace ethic” will act as the guiding principle. 

The plan sets out broad protections for the park, but doesn’t include details on how they’ll be enforced. As a “non-operating” park, there is no permanent office or on-site superintendent at Devil’s Glen. The plan does say park authorities can put up fencing and signs to keep climbers off particularly sensitive areas — again.

Derek Morningstar said he first visited Devil’s Glen in 2024, after being invited by an Ontario Parks specialist to research bats in the area. “We could tell right away that that was a pretty important place for bats,” the ecologist and founder of the bat research company Myotistar said in an interview. “There’s a huge amount of bats flying along there during the swarming season, and there are crevices and caves we think that haven’t been explored. Certainly they’re swarming there and probably hibernating there as well — several endangered species.”

Six of the province’s eight bat species have been found in the area, many of which are currently listed as endangered thanks to widespread fungal disease and habitat loss. This includes the eastern small-footed myotis and little brown bats, whose numbers have declined significantly in recent years.

In an April 2025 email contained in one of the document packages, Morningstar wrote to Ron Gould, an ecologist and protected areas specialist at Ontario Parks also studying the Devil Glen’s ecosystem. He shared his observations with the Parks staffer saying the location was one of the most significant swarming sites he had ever worked at: “It seems like during the swarming season, bats are just about everywhere in that area.”

His findings supported what Ontario Parks scientists had found, and sought to protect back in 2023 when the agency erected signs prohibiting climbing at 23 of the park’s existing routes. The signs went up in three sensitive areas that housed rare ferns, roosting bats and cliff-nesting birds across a 100-metre length of the escarpment in the park, a fraction of the climbable cliff face.

Gould said he was unable to give comment for this story due to fear of reprisal, but the documents contain an email he sent to his boss, Greg Wilson, the southwest zone manager for Ontario Parks, in May 2023. “These protection areas still leave a significant climbing opportunity,” wrote Gould, who has worked with species at risk and habitat protection at provincial agencies for more than two decades. 

For the Pearces, the signs were a win. But, the move was unpopular with climbers. In May 2023, Penney, with the Ontario Alliance of Climbers, wrote an email to Ontario Parks staff saying, “We are extremely disturbed by this development.” 

“If this is official signage, this is a statement by Ontario Parks that there is no longer any interest in ongoing communication, or a consultative relationship with the climbing community.”

Parks manager Wilson also declined to be interviewed for this story. But emails show his reply to Penney: “The signage was installed by Ontario Parks to protect the most sensitive ecological values in Devil’s Glen Provincial Park. … The intention of the signage is to notify park visitors that these areas should not be disturbed. We are still very much interested in an open and collaborative relationship with the [alliance].”

Things didn’t quite play out that way. 

“We realized that we actually needed to mobilize the climbing community,” Penney told The Narwhal. In an attempt to get the environment minister’s attention, the group solicited nearly 4,000 letters, he said, to reopen climbing in all areas of the park.

In his interview with The Narwhal, Penney said Ontario Parks had closed “the entirety of Devil’s Glen to rock climbing” in 2023. When The Narwhal asked about the discrepancy between that statement and Ontario Parks records showing only 23 routes of 140 routes had been closed, he replied: “I don’t really see why that matters,” adding the route count was incorrect, and that substantially more than 23 routes were closed. 

Penney said he used to spend 30 to 50 days each year climbing at Devil’s Glen. He loves the blue-ish grey limestone and the challenging routes. “One of the privileges in walking through these places is also learning about the environment and learning about some of the species that you’re now walking in amongst,” Penney said over the phone while driving home from his day job as a business development manager for a soup company.

He said he visits the area less now, given escalated tensions. He told The Narwhal that climbers have described being threatened, called racial slurs, filmed while relieving themselves in the woods and having the bolts they use to fasten themselves to the cliffs cut off.

He told The Narwhal about an email he received in his role at the alliance, sent from Adam Pearce to the climbers and other stakeholders in September 2025: “Let me be crystal clear: there will be hell to pay in Devil’s Glen if climbing access is granted.” But Pearce told The Narwhal this was taken out of context and was only part of the picture. The Narwhal reviewed the email, which read in full: “Let me be crystal clear: there will be hell to pay in Devil’s Glen if climbing access is granted without full transparency and accountability. The community will not tolerate policy built on silence and spin.” 

After the “No Climbing” signs went up in spring 2023, some of them were vandalized, according to an email from Wilson contained in a freedom of information package. Meanwhile, climbers’ protest letters flooded in and, in May 2023, Ministry of Environment staff had a meeting with representatives from the Ontario Alliance of Climbers. There, according to the minutes, Penney raised concerns about the “continued involvement” of unnamed Ontario Parks staff members and proposed bringing in third-party biologists to validate the agency’s science.

When asked about this by The Narwhal, Penney criticized the research done by Ontario Parks’ ecologists. He said he could not be more specific about the methodology or scope, as the alliance hadn’t actually seen the ministry’s research informing the closure decision, but said the route count Ontario Parks used when planning the closures was incorrect.

Within a few months, internal emails show, then-environment minister Piccini’s office specifically directed Ontario Parks to remove the signs. Soon after that, Gould raised concerns.

Weeks after the signs came down, Gould wrote to Wilson and other colleagues that he had received reports of climbers developing new routes in Devil’s Glen and “installing new bolts directly within our previously posted protection areas.”

In October, Gould wrote: “There has been no scientific rationale involved in the removal of the signed protection areas so hopefully we can get those back in place soon. These ongoing climbing activities within the sensitive areas are likely to cause further user conflicts and impacts to park values, both of which should be avoided in our protected areas.”

About a year later, records show Gould was told by his manager, Wilson, to postpone work at the park. “As a reminder, it is my expectation you will consult with me and receive approval from me prior to performing any work related to Devil’s Glen,” Wilson wrote in a September 2024 response to an email from Gould with subject line, “Trip safety plan for Devil’s Glen and [redacted].” Wilson continued that he “would like to hold on this work for the time being,” and added he was working to get an update on the proposed amendment to the park management plan.

Wilson did not respond to questions about why signs were removed, or whether Parks biologists were asked to hold off on work at Devil’s Glen.

Ontario Parks did not confirm whether Gould still worked on the Devil’s Glen file at the time of writing, and The Narwhal has since learned he was dismissed from his work at the agency altogether. An email sent to him on Oct. 6, bounced back, saying his account was not found on the Ontario government’s email service. He was the only protected areas specialist listed for Devil’s Glen and the larger southwest parks zone on Ontario Parks’ website.

Around the time Gould was directed to hold off of work at the park, in fall 2024, a member of the alliance’s Facebook page posted that they’d heard of a climber being “approached aggressively close and made to feel uncomfortable by a man and a woman” saying climbing was not allowed on a route in Devil’s Glen. 

Penney responded, encouraging climbers to use all portions of the park and adjacent Crown land, saying: “Climbing is permitted at Devil’s Glen Provincial Park, on the entirety of the cliff.” He wrote that climbing was allowed and encouraged by Ontario Parks and the Ontario Alliance of Climbers. “Please please please continue to climb at [Devil’s Glen], enjoy yourself.”

Penney wrote to The Narwhal in an Oct. 7, email saying, “We recognize that there are legitimate conservation concerns and strongly support responsible environmental stewardship. The concern is that the conflict has, in our view, escalated beyond a normal policy disagreement.”

The Niagara Escarpment curves up from western New York, through southern Ontario and runs along Georgian Bay and the Bruce Peninsula before heading back south to parts of Michigan and Wisconsin. Devil’s Glen sits along its eastern portion in Ontario, a part of the important, delicate ecosystem that researchers and Ontario Parks officials have understood the importance of protecting for decades.

Among those experts is Doug Larson, a retired researcher and University of Guelph professor, who began studying North America’s escarpments in the 1980s.

“We found trees that were almost 10 times older than anything found elsewhere in Ontario,” Larson said of the Niagara Escarpment, over the phone from his home in Guelph. “It really is the last undisturbed stand of forests in eastern North America because of the fact people can’t get to it.”

That is, unless they climb.

In his 2004 book about the ancient cliff face forests in the Niagara Escarpment, The Last Stand, Larson wrote about European immigrants who introduced rock climbing to the Niagara Escarpment after the Second World War. “Trees hundreds of years old came in direct contact with humans for the first time,” he wrote. 

Then, at the turn of the millenium, the advent of indoor climbing gyms and advances in climbing equipment made rock climbing more accessible and popular than ever. It spread across the escarpment. “Sawn stumps and branches are visual reminders that the climbers have not simply chosen rock with fewer trees,” Larson wrote.

The twisted trees, mostly cedars, cling to the face of the escarpment. Standing only one to three metres tall, with trunks as wide as a person’s leg, they may look stunted compared to the towering stereotype of old-growth forests, particularly in B.C. But, Larson said, they represent the oldest undisturbed forest ecosystem this side of the Rocky Mountains. And they’re a biodiversity hot spot, important for nesting birds and endangered mammals. A 2008 study by an Ontario Parks ecologist found Devil’s Glen has an “outstanding total of nine provincially rare” plants including male fern, smooth cliff-brake and green spleenwort.

Through the ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s, Larson’s research found climbed areas supported substantially fewer plants due to trampling, purposeful removal and soil compaction. He and his teams recommended new climbing routes be banned in protected areas. 

Not everyone was a fan. Ontario Rock Climbing, a website that sells climbing gear, published a post on the history of climbing in the province that references a 1991 study by Larson and colleagues. 

“This study had a very negative impact on the climbing community,” it read, calling this period the “Dark Ages” for outdoor climbing. “Although the results from the study were inconsistent, it led to … a number of other cliffs being closed to climbing. Public opinion became that climbing was not compatible with the Niagara Escarpment.”

Larson argued “there was nothing inconsistent” about his results: “We published that 30 years ago, and we got immediately despised by the climbing community because they didn’t like our story.”

“Climbers need to realize that some restrictions may be required to preserve the cliff face forest in perpetuity,” he wrote in 2004. “One of the main problems is that climbers have had free rein of the escarpment cliffs for over 50 years … it is extremely difficult to modify behaviour that has been entrenched for such a long period of time.”

Alerted by the Pearces, the conservation organization Ontario Nature has also taken an interest in Devil’s Glen. Conservation director Tony Morris said his organization isn’t debating whether climbing and nature can coexist, but whether efforts are actually being made to strike that balance.

“It’s about managing that activity in a way that doesn’t harm those sensitive ecological features,” Morris said. “It means not having just climbing routes appear all over the place, and ensuring climbers aren’t going into areas that bats are hibernating in and aren’t tying ropes off of cedars, 100-year-old cedar trees.”

Having also viewed one of the document packages before sharing it with The Narwhal, Morris said seeing expert staff seemingly being held back from monitoring ecosystems “raises some serious questions about the mandate of Ontario Parks” and about the management of other parks and beyond.

“If park ecologists, whose job it is to monitor ecological health of parks, aren’t allowed to visit the parks, that seems strange,” Morris said. He said he has struggled to get information from the Environment Ministry about internal scientific studies done at Devil’s Glen.

“This is just such a strange situation that it’s gone this far,” Morris said. “When you combine it with what else we’re seeing across the province in terms of attacks on natural heritage. It’s part of a bigger picture, in the sense that, even the areas that are supposed to be managed primarily for ecological integrity, it raises serious questions if that’s the case anymore.”

In 2025, two years after the ‘no climbing’ signs were put up and quickly removed, the Ministry of Environment posted a notice to amend the Devil’s Glen Provincial Park management plan on the provincial environmental registry, and opened it up for public comment. The amendment included listing rock climbing as a permitted use in the park. 

More than 600 comments were submitted. Over 90 per cent supported the proposal, emphasizing the importance of recognizing and managing rock climbing within the park. A minority expressed concerns about environmental impacts on cliff habitats and species such as ancient cedar trees and bats.

In April 2026, climbing became a permitted use in the park.

“Ecological integrity remains the top priority, and Ontario Parks will manage ecologically sustainable recreational uses and rock climbing at Devil’s Glen Provincial Park with ecological integrity in mind,” the decision reads.

The Ontario Alliance of Climbers credits this to their campaigning. One of its websites describes this regulation change as “the first such plan for an Ontario Provincial Park,” adding, “We are optimistic that this will be the first of many such plans. We need you, the climbing community, to write submissions supporting this plan … we are so close to clipping the chains.”

“I have a great relationship with Greg Wilson,” Penney told The Narwhal in mid-September about the alliance’s “productive conversations” with the Environment Ministry. “And they agreed that this was something that was long overdue, and put their support behind some resources to help Ontario Parks and help our partners there do what was necessary internally.” 

Penney told The Narwhal that “climbers are great stewards and advocates of our lands and of our climbing areas.”

When The Narwhal visited Devil’s Glen in August, shiny metal bolts were visible across the cliff face. There were no signs telling climbers which sensitive areas to avoid, even though Ontario Parks’ plan sanctioning climbing references a study that “recommended restricting climbing and access routes to the most disturbed areas where continued use is not likely to worsen existing impacts.”

The plan gives Ontario Parks the right to close routes deemed sensitive to climbing activity, and to prevent new routes from being established given that cliff area is “highly saturated … and the need or capacity to create new route opportunities is generally low.”

As we walked, the Pearces picked up garbage from the trail, stashing it in their backpack to throw out later. “You better wash your hands after,” Holly told her husband as he bent toward a personal hygiene product.

After about half hour of hiking, we came across two climbers, readying their gear and resting between routes. They were the only other people using the trail on the quiet Monday morning, and my stomach dropped, anticipating conflict. Holly, too, had readied her phone camera to capture the interaction. The climbers and Pearces exchanged polite, short greetings — remarking on the beautiful, mild weather.

Holly put her phone away. The climbers, now with full permission from Ontario Parks, surveyed their next climb.

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Aquatic global change ecologist Mary Jade (MJ) Farruggia found herself studying the impact of wildfires on lakes by accident. She was researching lakes in the mountains of California in the summer of 2020 when, in “a tragic turn of events,” wildfires swept through the area, smoke clouded the sky and her plans quickly changed.

“Wildfires are becoming more intense and more frequent, and so it just became a phenomenon that was getting harder and harder to ignore,” Farruggia, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder, told The Narwhal over the phone. “As lake scientists, we started wondering, ‘what’s the impact of this on the systems that we study?’ ”

Canada is home to two million lakes, more than any other country. And the last three wildfire seasons have been among the worst on record here, making research like Farruggia’s critical.

A record-breaking season in 2023 saw 15 million hectares of forest burned across Canada. The land hasn’t had much reprieve since. This year more than 4,700 fires burned more than four million hectares across the country by the end of August — many in Ontario.

“We as humans feel the impacts of [wildfire smoke],” Farruggia said. “If it’s affecting your own health, how is it also affecting your ecosystems and the nature around you and the systems that you rely on? Is your favourite lake going to be similarly impacted by smoke?”

‘Almost all’ North American lakes are exposed to wildfire smoke: researchers

Some of the direct impacts of wildfires on ecosystems are straightforward; as fires burn near lakes, they increase future flood risk, as plants that stabilize soil and filter runoff go up in smoke. Ash deposits contaminants and excess nutrients into the water, changing the makeup of watersheds.

For each lake and fire, the full impact depends on a slew of variables, including “the number of wildfires, their intensity, their location, the health of the ecosystem before the fire and even how much rain falls following a fire,” Terri-Lee Reid, a freshwater conservation researcher at the Canadian Wildlife Federation, said.

Less clear is how lake ecosystems far away from fires are being impacted as smoke travels, and Reid says there’s still more to learn. But, the science is much newer, and scientists like Farruggia and her colleagues spend their time designing and performing experiments to figure it out.

“Sometimes we get these summers where it feels like much of North America is covered in smoke,” said Steven Sadro, an associate professor of environmental science and policy at the University of California, Davis. He is also Farruggia’s co-author and former advisor. “This is smoke that’s affecting millions of lakes at continental scales.”

Sadro and Farruggia coined the term “lake-smoke day,” which provides a metric referring to the number of days a lake is exposed to smoke in a fire season. They found wildfire smoke can drift hundreds of miles away from its source, making its impact widespread.

“We found a pretty shocking response … that almost all lakes in North America experience some number of smoke exposure days,” Sadro said, adding that many of them were experiencing a full month or more over the course of a year.

“Smoke in the atmosphere can reduce the amount of sunlight that can reach the lake, and that can impact water temperature. It can impact the growth of algae and aquatic plants, and then that can have further consequences,” Reid said.

Their research suggests that smoke blocks sunlight from reaching lakes, lowering lake temperatures and reducing photosynthesis and respiration in the body of water. 

What happens next is harder to predict. A lake’s depth, clarity, size, location and nutrient levels all influence how it responds to smoke. Larger lakes can be more resilient while smaller, clearer lakes can experience more algae growth due to the new nutrient deposits.

“The jury is really out on the magnitude of the impact. I’m not trying to say that millions of lakes in North America are having very large impacts from wildfire smoke. Some of them certainly may be,” Sadro said. “We don’t know what those numbers are yet.”

‘When the land’s not healthy, the lakes aren’t healthy either’

While researchers work to untangle those relationships, Amy Cardinal Christianson, director of fire stewardship for the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, says Indigenous Knowledge has long recognized the interconnection between fire, water and land.

She pointed to historical examples along the west coast where Indigenous communities have been aware of the cooling effect of smoke on waterways that western science has also recently ventured into. For example in California, when it was too hot for salmon to spawn, Cardinal Christianson said cultural burns would be used to help create a layer of smoke over the water to cool it and help the fish.

But while fire can be used beneficially, it can also cause harm to waterways.

“People often think of [a] lake as its own ecosystem, which it is, but it’s really tied into everything that’s around it,” Cardinal Christianson said. “When the land’s not healthy, the lakes aren’t healthy either.”

She explained that, instead of having separate plans for forest management, watershed management and more, “we need to start looking at things much more holistically.”

“For Indigenous people, our teachings are that everything is interconnected and related. So when these fires are happening, one of the big concerns for us is the impacts on water,” Cardinal Christianson said. “It’s a constant worry in the back of my head, just like, what [are] going to be the long-term effects to the water that we rely on?”

The challenges of studying how wildfires affect lakes

Farruggia is part of a working group of 30 American and Canadian scientists looking for answers. The group includes Scott Higgins, senior research scientist with the International Institute for Sustainable Development Experimental Lakes Area — a natural freshwater laboratory spanning almost 60 lakes in Kenora in northwestern Ontario.

“We work in the field and we certainly notice, especially during those intensive fire years, the smog and the ash clouds that drift over our site,” Higgins said. The boreal forest that spans Canada, including around Kenora, is sometimes referred to as a “fire forest” because its ecosystems are both flammable, and reliant on fire to help remove insects, disease and aged trees, allowing for new life to emerge.

“This is a really lake-intensive part of Canada,” Higgins said. “When the boreal forest burns, undoubtedly lakes are directly impacted.”

But while interest in researching the impacts of wildfires on lakes has been increasing as fire seasons become longer and more intense, he said the science is still in its infancy.

One problem, he said, is that, “it’s tough to do experiments on actual wildfires.”

It is often difficult for researchers to get into an area quickly after a fire to study the immediate impacts. Even if they can, there often isn’t data from before the fire to compare it to. To try to counteract this and build a better understanding, Higgins said, his team is planning to use the extensive, long-term data collected at the Experimental Lakes Area to its benefit, including adding wildfire ash directly into a lake to study the outcome, and to work with Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources to use a prescribed burn for study. 

“We’ll be able to put some pretty good numbers on how important these fires are to nutrient cycles and to metal cycles and to what they mean for biota,” or the animals and plants living in that environment, Higgins said. “I think science is going to be able to provide in the next five to 10 years for sure.”

In the meantime, Farruggia said the early evidence offers reason to be hopeful — even in sensitive, smaller and more remote lakes. 

“Lakes are actually very resilient systems. Even though we see there’s lots of sensitivity, especially in smaller, lower nutrient lakes, we have seen that they recover pretty quickly so far,” Farruggia said. “Lake resilience is something that I think could be celebrated.”

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Five days before Ontario’s new, weaker species-at-risk law took effect in March, members of the Environment Ministry team tasked with enforcing it were thinking about bats. In particular, a delayed permit that was keeping a developer from clearing trees before at-risk bats returned to them for the season. 

The permit had been delayed because staff were waiting to learn what the government’s new rules for endangered species protections were going to look like. By the time they did, officials feared it was too late. 

“I know those bats are in those trees,” one government biologist said during a March 25 meeting of the species at risk branch. “I just know those bats won’t survive.”

“We’ve lost our impact on the process,” a senior official replied.

The meeting was one of the last chances for staff in Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks, to express concerns about the Species Conservation Act, which replaced the province’s Endangered Species Act — once considered a gold standard for at-risk species laws. 

The change, introduced under Bill 5 in June 2025, stripped provincial protection from several species and narrowed habitat protection for others — 106 species lost protections, a July 2026 report by Ontario Nature found. It also introduced a new model for environmental assessments that is “proponent-led,” leaving developers largely responsible for assessing their own environmental impact and cutting government biologists out of the process almost entirely.

A recording of the meeting, which involved about 25 staff members in the species at risk branch of the Ministry of Environment, was shared with The Narwhal by one participant and independently verified by two others. The Narwhal is not naming the officials who led the meeting or participated in it, to protect their privacy as public sector workers with limited authority.

At the meeting, staff voiced concerns about fielding calls from “angry clients” — developers who had spent weeks working through permits and mitigation measures, only to have that process nullified overnight, with no new guidelines in place. Senior officials leading the meeting told staff Environment Minister Todd McCarthy’s office had provided “questions and answers” they could use to address developers’ concerns. 

“Our jobs were changing quickly from being biologists and scientific experts to being administrative staff,” one former staffer told The Narwhal, speaking under the condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions. “We were no longer allowed to give our recommendations.”

The Narwhal spoke with and verified five current or former ministry employees, who agreed to speak confidentially as they feared repercussions. Three spoke on background, while two agreed to be quoted without their names being used, as did one outside expert who has worked closely with government biologists on permit applications. The Narwhal also tracked staffing changes through LinkedIn and the government’s public directory, INFO-GO, as well as WayBack Machine, a digital archive that allowed us to access past versions of government websites. 

A note on trust, integrity and unnamed sources+

This story uses information from sources The Narwhal has agreed not to name. The Narwhal only agrees to keep names confidential when we believe two things. First, that the person we’re speaking with is putting themselves at genuine risk, either personal or professional, by sharing this information with us. Second, that the information they’re sharing is in the public interest. Our decision to do so is never made lightly. 

There are two types of unnamed sources. A confidential source is someone whose name we know, but aren’t sharing. We make multiple attempts to verify their identity and information with other sources. If we aren’t able to get a second source, we say so. 

An anonymous source is someone whose name we don’t know. It is incredibly rare for The Narwhal to publish a story with a completely anonymous source. In these instances, we don’t publish until we have verified the information shared with us with at least one other source. 

And again, these stories must be in the public interest. 

As Canadian governments become increasingly secretive, the courage of whistleblowers is to be admired. We value them greatly. At the same time, our promise to readers is The Narwhal will always make sure the facts are airtight. 

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Together, these sources reveal the new act has had a significant impact on the people tasked with protecting Ontario’s most vulnerable species — reducing them from experts to rubber stamps, if anything at all, for the industries they once held to account.

They also show that, more than a year after the Species Conservation Act was proposed, a wave of departures has hit the ministry’s species at risk branch, as biologists leave for the private sector or other government roles. The Narwhal counted more than a dozen people who have moved on since February 2025, though some may have retired or wrapped up short-term contracts. The Narwhal could not confirm the exact number of positions that have been vacated since the Species Conservation Act passed, but sources suggest it has been a notable amount, and that the loss of people and expertise is palpable within the ministry.

“There were lots of opportunities to improve the Endangered Species Act,” a former official said, “but this rollback is way too far, and it just diminishes protection that is promised to Ontarians.”

Sources say the policy changes and departures weakened the scientific expertise Ontario’s Ministry of Environment once valued, reducing the ministry’s ability to protect the environment in an evidence-backed way.

“Yes, it hurts the species,” the first former ministry staffer said. “But it hurt all of us too.” 

“We were essentially silenced,” they said. “And it’s not fair.” 

The Narwhal sent an extensive list of questions to Environment Minister McCarthy’s office, the ministry’s communications department and the species at risk branch, which redirected our questions to the communications department. None responded by publication time.

‘Our jobs stopped feeling meaningful’: government biologists were kept out of the creation of the Species Conservation Act

Under the previous Endangered Species Act, ministry experts helped project proponents, such as developers, homeowners and industry, figure out a plan to avoid impacts to at-risk species and their habitat. If harm couldn’t be avoided, biologists and ministry staff helped to minimize that impact or offset it — for example, by requiring proponents to establish new habitat elsewhere. This process required a lot of government review and back and forth. 

The Species Conservation Act changed all of this. The new act only asks the proponent to submit a conservation plan that “should” include how it will minimize or offset harm to at-risk species. That plan is to be written by an expert — hired by the proponent, and very loosely defined — but the regulations don’t specify what exactly it needs to include. Once submitted, these plans are automatically accepted and greenlit. 

In the recording of the meeting before the act was finalized, staff are told clearly that they “can’t review” proponent-led plans. They can’t ask questions or ask for more information. 

“Once they’re in the system, we don’t check them unless there’s a complaint,” the former official told The Narwhal in an interview. “We had to accept what clients were proposing.” 

Former and current ministry officials told The Narwhal they were shut out of the process to create the Species Conservation Act. They say it was announced in a hybrid meeting, with staff both in the ministry’s various offices and online. “It was so quiet,” a second former official said. “Morale dropped right away.” 

According to the ministry sources, all of the new regulations were decided in the environment minister’s office with a few senior officials. Three people told The Narwhal that staff were not given a timeline for when the new act would come into force, what to tell proponents or how to update online guidelines.

One internal communication, reviewed by The Narwhal, outlines how branch staff were not shown the final draft regulations before they were finalized. When staff tried to push back and make recommendations, they were told “there’s no appetite for that,” the first source said. 

“It was a very heavy-hearted time,” the second former official said. “On one hand, there could have been so many improvements but, as we learned in hindsight, there were very few ways to do any good.”“Our jobs stopped feeling meaningful.” 

Laura Bowman, an environmental and Indigenous Rights lawyer with Macpherson Law, told The Narwhal that, for ministry experts, “there’s nothing to be done under an automatic registration scheme.”

“Once the proponent has filed the paperwork, however flawed, the registration is approved,” Bowman said. “I can definitely understand why people with deep technical expertise would want to use it somewhere else.”

“If technical staff are leaving the ministry, that’s extremely concerning,” Bowman said. “What you’re left with is a hollow shell when that happens.”

With “nobody watching,” she said, the quality of the work being done to protect and mitigate harm to at-risk species is likely to decline.

‘They didn’t want to do anything wrong’: project proponents valued ministry expertise

As questions started trickling in about how to get a permit under the new law, ministry sources who spoke to The Narwhal said they were given language to copy and paste. 

“A lot of the language was very ambiguous, non-committal and unhelpful to our clients,” the first official said. “To be fair, clients wanted our recommendations. They didn’t want to do anything wrong and many were frustrated that we couldn’t tell them anything.”

The Narwhal spoke with one biologist who has long worked with private industry to make sure projects are compliant with species at risk law, creating plans for species management and harm mitigation. She also raised concerns about the lack of input from ministry staff. “I’ve had no correspondence with [the ministry] on any of my files,” she said about the months since the new act passed. “I’m just kind of doing it on my own now, and hoping that I’m doing it right.” 

She said when replies do come, they are weeks later and often “stock text” that does not answer site-specific, nuanced questions.

As the ministry continues to shed technical expertise, there appear to be fewer people left to answer those questions — if they were even allowed.

“I think that staff are very bound in what they can and cannot share,” the source told The Narwhal.

And, given the lack of feedback from the ministry and guardrails of enforcement, she said some of her own clients have been increasingly aggressive about removing species at risk protections.

“We always will have clients that want to push that envelope as far as they can, and we used to have [the Ministry of Environment] come in and say, ‘Nope, this is the way it’s got to be,’ and then that was the end of the story.”

“But now that that doesn’t happen, we get a lot more pushback. Like, ‘What is stopping us from doing it this way?’ ”  

This source expressed concern that the current lack of oversight creates an incentive to do the bare minimum to remain competitive. 

The effects of these changes will reverberate for generations, former government staffers told The Narwhal. 

“Across the government around the environment, the first approach is to avoid harm, and then mitigate and find ways to work around. The very last resort is to fix harms,” the second former official said. “Now, due diligence has changed. They’re going to have a lot of long-term consequences to deal with.”

One of those will be the loss of decades of expertise. “You will just not have the quality of staff you need at the ministry to deliver oversight and protection,” the first official said. “The sense we get is they don’t want us anyways.”

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.

Starting next month, Ontario hunters will have a shot at sandhill cranes — for the first time in a century.

The long-legged, grey birds with a nearly two-metre wingspan are widespread across Ontario from the Great Lakes as far north as southern James Bay — nesting in wetlands and swampy areas after migrating up from the southern United States and Mexico in the spring.

Mark Peck recalls waking up at 4 a.m. to see thousands of sandhill cranes fly over the banks of the Platte River in Nebraska, where 80 per cent of the species migrate to rest and eat before flying back south for the winter. 

Like Peck, many of them travel from Canada, while others make the journey from Alaska and Siberia.

“It was an incredible experience. … There were about 10,000 sandhill cranes, all on the river,” Peck, president of Ontario Field Ornithologists, said. “As the sun was coming up, the birds were slowly leaving, but they were dancing and bugling, and it was just an awesome experience. … I think it would be hard to hunt after witnessing that.”

Sandhill cranes have a distinct, rattling bugle call that can be heard up to four kilometres away. To Peck, it’s akin to the call of a common loon or the howl of a wolf, a “beautiful sound of nature.” Their distinctive mating dance — wings flapping, beak pecking and legs strutting — have been widely captured and shared online.

While birders love them, sandhill cranes have a long and complex history in Ontario. 

In the early 20th century, the species was hunted to near-extirpation in the province, meaning they were almost locally extinct. In the last few decades, thanks to increased protection from unregulated hunting and more sources of food from agriculture, they have surpassed population expectations. To some, this is a huge success.

“It really is a wonderful, good news story,” Peck said. “They’ve made a remarkable comeback. I’m 67. When I was growing up, it was unusual to see a sandhill crane in southern Ontario. Now, they breed across the province.”

Not everyone sees it as good news, though. Farmers in Algoma, Timmins and as far as Thunder Bay have advocated for an open hunting season in northern Ontario. They say sandhill cranes have caused extensive damage to their crops, wreaking havoc in the spring by pulling up freshly planted seedlings, and again in the fall before harvest.

“It is very discouraging to certain farmers that they’re planting their spring crops, and these birds are coming in and just annihilating it,” Bill Groenheide, Northern Ontario director of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture, said. “Farmers are having an increase of up to 30 per cent loss in their crops.”

Birgit Martin, who farms on Manitoulin Island, told Ontario Grain Farmer Magazine she has had to replant 25 per cent of her corn acres due to sandhill crane damage. 

Sandhill cranes are omnivores and eat a wide variety of food including insects, plant roots, small animals like rodents and frogs, berries, seeds and even other small birds. But when they find themselves in agricultural areas during the fall migration, the crops hit the hardest are corn, soybeans and potatoes, Groenheide said — some of the most common, and profitable, crops for Ontario farmers.

“When so many birds come into one area and totally destroy your livelihood, there’s got to be compensation somewhere,” Groenheide said. The province’s wildlife damage compensation program focuses on livestock, and doesn’t cover crop losses to migratory birds. “There’s got to be something done about it.”

Ontario sandhill crane hunt allows for one bird per hunter per day

Ontario farmers have been asking the government to open a hunt for years. Environment and Climate Change Canada assessed the status of sandhill cranes earlier this year and found that a “conservative” hunt would have a “minimal impact” on the population of sandhill cranes — which is currently more than 103,000 strong, and considered to have a large, increasing population size. It proposed a hunt running for 14 days, with a “small bag limit” of one bird per day that will allow the federal government to carefully monitor the harvest in the first four years of implementation.

While Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources determines harvesting regulations for most wildlife in the province, the federal environment department oversees migratory birds, like sandhill cranes.

Environment and Climate Change Canada’s population objective for the cranes sits between 30,000 and 60,000, and explains on its website that a “managed harvest” could slow or stabilize population growth and potentially minimize crop damage.

The federal agency told The Narwhal in an email that the primary goal of this open season is to provide additional hunting opportunity, adding that “while the intent of the season is not to significantly decrease the sandhill crane population in Ontario and Quebec,” the season may also provide “some direct relief of conflicts.” They also said there may be some indirect reduction of conflicts as hunted sandhill cranes may respond better to scare techniques used by farmers to protect their crops, such as propane cannons that make loud noises.

“Obviously that’s great from a recovery perspective … that this population was able to rebound to that extent,” Matthew Robbins, a fish and wildlife biologist at Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters, said. “It also means that, based on the modelling that exists, they can certainly handle some sustainable use.” 

The current hunt will allow Canadian residents to hunt one sandhill crane per person per day in the area around Hudson and James Bay, from Sept. 1 through 14, and on farmland only in other parts of northern and central Ontario including Algoma, Nipissing and Temiskaming, on Sept. 12 through 25. A similarly limited hunt is being opened in Quebec this September as well. 

This new season creates opportunity for hunters and gourmets — sandhill cranes are known to some as “ribeye of the sky” for their rich, red meat — that the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters says is appropriately limited to start.

“The proposal is a very conservative approach,” Robbins said. He doesn’t anticipate a significant hit to the population as a result of the hunt, but says slowing the population growth by some amount may help those farm conflicts.

“It would be worth exploring expanding it in some capacity as long as we can ensure that that’s going to be sustainable,” Robbins said. “From a conservation perspective, it definitely makes sense to start this off from a fairly cautious position, and then go from there.”

Peck is also optimistic about the conservative nature of the hunt’s parameters. But conservation organizations like Ontario Nature have argued reinstating a sandhill crane hunt is a “controversial and concerning proposal.” The birds can live up to 30 years in the wild, meaning they take a long time to mature, while very few of their young survive to adulthood. This makes it more difficult for populations to replenish quickly if adults are killed off.  

The federal government said it received opposing comments from an animal welfare organization, ornithology and naturalist groups, birdwatchers, an unnamed First Nation and individuals during the public comment period last winter.

Environment and Climate Change Canada says on its website that the current strategy accounts for sandhill crane life history and low productivity by allowing only a very limited harvest. It argues the “daily bag limit is intentionally set below” the level the population can sustainably support, and that the population is still expected to grow, though more slowly than if there were no hunt.

At the same time, Groenheide from the Ontario Federation of Agriculture worries the plan for the hunt is not enough to protect farmers, but Environment and Climate Change Canada told The Narwhal it does not anticipate making changes to the proposed harvest framework until the end of the 2029-30 hunting season.

“In Canada, they want to regulate it because they want to drop the amount of birds [killed], and I do understand that,” Groenheide said. “But on the flip side, how do we protect the farmers?”

Farmers organization wants higher sandhill crane harvest and in more areas

In early 2024, the Ontario Federation of Agriculture released a statement recommending Environment and Climate Change Canada alter its plans. The organization wants farmers to be allowed to defend their crops from sandhill cranes at any point during the year, as well as increased hunting limits, more hunting areas and an earlier season. 

While changes have not been reflected in the final regulations, Groenheide said this year’s hunt is a good first step.

“It’s great to see these birds in great numbers. Don’t get me wrong,” Groenheide said. “But there has to be a playing field. Farmers are out there and the value of their crops is in big demand. There’s a lot of money put into this. They’re losing it all. They’re getting nothing for it. So there has to be a trade-off somewhere.”

He said the way this species is managed represents part of a larger picture related to expanding agriculture in northern Ontario, proposed by the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Agribusiness in April 2026.

“We have ministers now wanting to expand the north, wanting the great clay belt to be opened up and all that,” Groenheide said. “I always call it the great frontier of the north.”

“It’s great land,” Groenheide said, but farming new areas comes with new challenges. Wildlife like deer, bear, moose and elk can conflict with agriculture as farming expands northward, he said.

“It’s their territory, so how do we work around it? How do we compensate farmers if we are inviting them out there?” Groenheide said. “There’s got to be a plan.”

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.

Summary

• In 2025, a powerful storm crashed down on Samuel de Champlain Provincial Park outside North Bay, Ont., dropping trees on tents, trailers and an environmental education centre.
• Since then, park staff and Forests Canada have been working to replant some of the trees that were lost and clean up the park to allow visitors in again this season.
• Extreme weather is becoming more common and severe as the climate warms. At the same time, global warming means the type of trees that will thrive in northern environments like Samuel de Champlain is also changing, and the restoration work has to account for that.

Nearly four decades ago, Bill Steer — or Back Roads Bill, as he’s known locally — rode his mountain bike through the trails of Samuel de Champlain Provincial Park, about 50 kilometres east of North Bay, Ont. As he took in the landscape of towering pines and blue lakes, he recalls thinking, “This would be a great place to teach environmental science.”

It was here that Steer founded a “classroom without walls” where he and others taught students about environmental stewardship, leadership, ecology and wilderness survival. For years, the set-up worked — until a thunderstorm rattled the camp and the group woke to a big white pine tree fallen near one of their tents. So Steer built walls. Starting with a few cabins, he established what is now the Canadian Ecology Centre in the park. 

Then, nearly 30 years later, on the summer solstice in 2025, another, much more violent storm changed the game. It devastated the centre’s buildings and the park around it, right as Steer and colleagues headed into the height of their season. 

Ontario Parks called it “one of the most destructive weather events,” in the park’s history, complete with intense lightning, torrential rain and powerful winds. Some of the most beloved spots in the 2,550-hectare park, the size of more than 4,700 football fields combined, were affected. The hardest-hit areas were the Jingwakoki campground, looking out over Moore Lake, and the area of the Canadian Ecology Centre next to it. 

“Everyone thought it was a tornado. … The tree came through the roof,” Steer, now the centre’s general manager, said. The storm turned out to be a downburst, a series of powerful winds that crash down from a thunderstorm and spread outwards. In the park, wind speeds surpassed 100 kilometres per hour.

Steer said he expects the park to face more storms and wildfires in the future: “What happened that night was a devastating natural event, based on a changing climate.”

Along with rising temperatures and changing rain patterns, northern Ontario is experiencing more frequent and severe weather events like storms, floods and wildfires. And research from the University of Technology Sydney suggests downbursts in particular — like the one that hit Samuel de Champlain — are expected to increase in frequency and intensity due to climate change because of increased amounts of water vapour in the lower atmosphere that feed clouds.

During 2025’s summer storm, more than 300 people, trapped in campers and tents, were evacuated in the night. Trees fell on family trailers and sent people to the hospital. But in the morning, a fuller picture of the park’s damage was clear: roads were blocked and flooded, power lines downed and tens of thousands of trees across the park were toppled and snapped, including old-growth pines.

A year later, with the centre and parts of the park reopened as of May 2026, park managers are still repairing the damage, and deciding what kind of forest they should help to rebuild. Alongside immediate efforts to restore buildings and roads, thousands of trees are being planted using climate projections to meet a moment where global warming is expected to alter the distribution of tree species in Canada, “adding a level of uncertainty to forest management and planning,” according to the federal government.

But from the first moment visitors enter the park, the current scars on the landscape are clear; they see downed trees left on the ground, others cut and piled into logs and areas that were previously lush forest are now razed.

“It looks like a clearcut in some areas,” Steer said, explaining that over the last year, some fallen and damaged trees had been removed and chipped in an effort to clean up after the storm. “Everything is back to normal operation-wise, except the landscape has changed.” 

For decades to come, areas that were dense pine forest will be a meadow, “providing habitat for different species and fostering biodiversity,” according to an Ontario Parks blog post written by Heather Stern, a senior park clerk who has worked at Samuel de Champlain for seven years.

And, though the Ontario government is investing $4.75 million to rebuild and upgrade the provincial park, Stern wrote: “No matter how much time, effort or money is spent, Samuel de Champlain Provincial Park will be forever changed.”

Rebuilding a park after disaster strikes

Ontario Parks superintendent Warren Verina told The Narwhal in an email that forests “take generations to regrow, and even then, it will be impossible to replicate what we had before.” But, he added, that can be a good thing. 

“Honestly, I don’t think we want to replicate what was,” Verina said, explaining that the forest hit with the downburst was predominantly red pine. “While this was stunning to walk through, it wasn’t very diverse … This is an opportunity to make the campground better.”

Ontario Parks has taken “lessons learned from the downburst,” Verina said, to be better equipped. During the rebuild, for example, hydro lines within the park were buried as part of the repairs, rather than restrung on poles, so the park hopefully experiences fewer power outages from falling trees. As they resurfaced roads in 2026, the new designs included an eco-passage, turtle fencing, artificial nesting sites and escape ramps to protect animal species.

Steer is also optimistic.

“We’re in a new regreening phase. The park is going to look different in 10, 20, 50 years. I won’t be here, but it will grow back in the way it wants to grow back,” Steer said.

To encourage this natural regreening, Forests Canada planted 8,000 trees in fall 2025 and spring 2026 through the Ontario government’s species conservation program. Of these, 500 were more established trees including white pine, red maple, red oak, black cherry and bur oak that were grown in nursery pots for up to a few years prior to planting. An additional 7,500 were white and black spruce seedlings.

“Those are smaller trees, so you are expected to lose a few, for sure,” Verina told CBC in spring 2026 about the seedlings. But, so far, the weather conditions have co-operated.

“The trees are doing pretty well. We were fortunate enough to have a pretty good spring with a lot of moisture, and so that helped with a lot of the growing conditions,” Jessica Kaknevicius, CEO of Forests Canada, said. “You can see the physical impact that it’s having on restoring these areas.”

Kaknevicius told The Narwhal the goal of replanting is to help the forest recover faster than it would naturally. How effective it will be isn’t certain.

Ze’ev Gedalof, an associate professor at the University of Guelph who studies forest ecosystem dynamics and climate variability, said replanting can be a great method to revitalize a park environment. But that comes with a caveat: biodiversity is difficult to achieve when trying to restore a forest quickly, instead of allowing nature to run its course.

“Replanting, you tend to get fairly even-aged and evenly spaced and often pretty homogenous stands that come out of it,” he said. And in most cases, replanting skips the stage where smaller trees, shrubs and plants grow up beneath that bigger tree canopy, called the understory. “You might lose some of that understory as part of your goal to restore the forest overstory.”

But another aim of replanting the park is to help prepare today’s forest for the conditions of the future as the climate changes.

Replanting a forest with climate change in mind

To decide which trees to plant, Kaknevicius said Forests Canada selected species already found in the park, and also tried to predict what species could live in the area in the future. Samuel de Champlain is located in the transitional zone between the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence forest, which has a mix of deciduous and coniferous trees, and the primarily coniferous boreal forest of northern Ontario. But the forest is changing as the climate warms.

Forests Canada used computer modelling tools to predict future conditions and from that information, selected seedlings from down south that are used to warmer temperatures.

“When you see something grow … and you see forests coming back, I think it gives a sense of hope for people. We hope that we were able to contribute that to Samuel de Champlain,” Kaknevicius said.

But Gedalof said this science of prediction, while promising, is still being perfected.

“That kind of climate modelling works,” Gedalof said, but added that it’s a fairly recent science. “We’re talking about trees that can easily live for 100 years, and we try and predict what the climate is going to be like in 100 years. Those data aren’t really there yet. We’re just doing our best guesses.” 

He said it’s some of the same trees downed in the storm that will actually be some of the most important generators of biodiversity in the years to come. The dead trees left on the ground in areas not frequented by visitors are “really important habitat structures for all kinds of organisms” living in and under them.

“They’re also reservoirs of nutrients, and as they’re rotting, they become reservoirs of water that can help lifeboat some of that regenerating plant and animal material,” Gedalof said.

It will be a long recovery, but campers experiencing a radically different Samuel de Champlain than they have on trips in years past will see parts of the forest grow back, even if slowly. 

“Some of those big red pine trees will take 70 or 100 years to get to that kind of magnitude again,” Gedalof said. “But it’ll be a walkable forest within a few decades.” 

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.

Summary

• The Department of National Defence and City of North Bay have been working to clean up decades-old per- and polyfluoroalkyl, or PFAS, contamination, first announced to the public in 2017. 
• Residents have proposed a class-action lawsuit over the contamination and consequent loss of property value — though environmental and health hazards of the contamination aren’t a part of the case.
• An international company called Industrial Plastics Canada is among the 10 major importers of a Teflon-like subgroup of PFAS to Canada, and they opened a factory in North Bay in 2023.

Gathered in an arena in North Bay, Ont., in summer 2024, federal officials told hundreds of concerned citizens how they planned to remediate longstanding contamination of the city’s waterways left behind by the Department of National Defence. A few months later, officials gave a similar presentation to a packed hotel conference room.

For nearly a decade now, residents have known about the contamination. Some have been told not to drink the water from their own wells, and everyone in the city has been warned not to drink water or eat fish from a creek outside town.

The creek is part of a system of waterways where carcinogenic “forever chemicals” run downstream from a military base, emptying into Trout Lake, the source of the city’s drinking water. It sits at nearly double Health Canada’s guideline for PFAS in drinking water, measured in nanograms per litre. 

Health Canada published an “objective” level of 30 nanograms per litre in August 2024 for 25 chemicals in the PFAS family. That’s less than half of what Ontario currently recommends: 70 nanograms per litre, pertaining to just 11 PFAS chemicals. And that’s just a suggestion, not a binding regulation. 

The city did not reply to The Narwhal’s detailed questions regarding the current state of the drinking water supply, but CBC reported in February 2026 that Trout Lake contained around 58 nanograms of PFAS per litre of water.  

Thousands of substances classified as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as PFAS, are used to make everything from medical equipment to waterproof clothing. They can generate hazardous waste which, if not disposed of carefully, contaminates air, water and soil — where it can remain for 1,000 years, hence their other nickname, “forever chemicals.”

Statistics Canada reports almost all Canadians already have PFAS in their bodies, including in remote regions such as the Arctic and subarctic. 

In North Bay, the issue is top of mind, with a class-action lawsuit, a lengthy and expensive remediation plan and a new factory importing chemicals from the Teflon-like subgroup of PFAS, called PTFE. And the company behind that factory, Industrial Plastics Canada, is one of the 10 major importers of PTFE in Canada.

While PFAS have been making global headlines for years as an emerging threat to the environment and our bodies, North Bay knows the issue intimately; citizens fear for their water as politicians try to clean up the mess.

Here’s everything you need to know about PFAS in North Bay.

1. North Bay’s PFAS contamination comes from firefighting foam 

From the early 1970s to the mid-1990s, the Department of National Defence used a fire suppression foam containing PFAS to train firefighters across Canada, including near the North Bay Jack Garland Airport. In 2016, after the North Bay Parry Sound District Health Unit learned PFAS had been identified by the Department of National Defence in waterways around the city, it commissioned consulting firm Stantec to assess the impacts on soil and groundwater.

It’s the invisible nature of these chemicals that are part of what makes them so insidious; you can’t see them or smell them, so you don’t know they’re there without testing. 

“When you look at a mine, for example, you can see it and say, ‘That’s obviously disruptive to our ecosystem.’” North Bay-based environmental anthropologist Carly Dokis previously told The Narwhal. “But these things are invisible pollutants, which then tend to attract less public awareness.”

Stantec found PFAS from the foam had contaminated soil, bedrock, groundwater, private wells and several waterways in the region including Trout Lake, Lake Nipissing and Lees, Dorlan, Chippewa and La Vase creeks and surrounding areas.

In 2025, reporting by the Investigative Journalism Bureau surfaced a report by the Royal Military College showing the Department of National Defence found elevated PFAS levels around the base as far back as 2012. That means the department knew about the contamination for five years before revealing it to the City of North Bay in 2016, and the public in 2017.

2.  PFAS impacts health, environment and property values. Residents are seeking recompense

In late 2025, North Bay citizens filed a proposed class-action lawsuit asking for remediation, safe drinking water and $105 million in damages for residents living within a three-kilometre radius of the 22 Wing Canadian Forces Base and Jack Garland Airport. Some of the people who live closest to the contamination have been receiving bottled water from the government for years, but have had no other opportunity for recourse.

The proposed lawsuit, if certified by the court, would be against the City of North Bay and the Attorney General of Canada, on behalf of the Department of National Defence, focusing on the loss of property value and remediation costs. The case is also seeking punitive damages, contending that National Defence was aware of the contamination long before warning residents.

Not mentioned in the suit is the long list of health concerns associated with “forever chemicals.”

The United States Environmental Protection Agency lists potential health risks of exposure to PFAS, including reproductive problems like infertility, developmental effects in children, increased risk of certain cancers and weakening of the body’s immune system, including reduced vaccine response. The Canadian government says PFAS can be transferred through the placenta during pregnancy, and infants can be exposed through human milk. 

Ecosystems are affected, too. Studies have shown exposure to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances can stunt plant growth and cause reduced seed germination and ability to photosynthesize. The chemicals can build up in the organs of living creatures throughout the food chain. In the district of Nipissing, that poses a risk to people who hunt, fish and harvest from the land.

“These industrial areas are often surrounded by lower-income buildings and peoples and communities,” Curtis Avery, environment department manager with Nipissing First Nation, told The Narwhal in summer 2023. “We’re the most vulnerable group of people that utilize our lands — the lands are our grocery stores. … If these are being impacted, we need to know.”

3. Cost of North Bay clean-up grew five-fold, to more than $100 million

In 2021, the City of North Bay announced plans to begin remediation under a “shared responsibility” agreement between the Department of National Defence and the city. The federal department would cover 97 per cent of the costs, or $19.4 million, and the city would cover the remaining three per cent, at $600,000. But costs have ballooned since then; in December 2025, National Defence announced it would contribute another nearly $100 million to the remediation, with the city’s share rising to more than $3.6 million. The total for the cleanup project has risen to more than $122 million.

The remediation, which began on the ground in 2024, includes excavating and disposing of about 26,000 tonnes of PFAS-impacted soil; injecting activated carbon material into particularly dense patches of PFAS to stop the underground plume from spreading; and installing a filtration system to treat water leaving the site.

“We remain committed to addressing and managing the operational legacy of the Canadian Armed Forces responsibly,” Minister of National Defence David J. McGuinty said in a news release.

As part of the process, a notice went up on the federal Impact Assessment Agency registry on April 28, inviting the public to comment up until June 5 on a proposal to install a 250-metre permeable barrier in the ground to help filter impacted groundwater. A spokesperson for the agency said its role in the project is to offer advice on determining its environmental effects, as well as providing the opportunity to post the project on the registry.

Local organizations, including the environmental group Northwatch, said in a press release that they were concerned about “very limited public engagement over the last ten years since the public disclosure of the contamination,” counting only the two forums in 2024 and 2025, where there was “limited opportunities for the public to ask questions.” 

Northwatch’s project coordinator Brennain Lloyd told The Narwhal about the public notice period, which she said her organization only learned of in a daily bulletin from the Impact Assessment Agency listing multiple assessment notices from across the country.

“To the best of our knowledge there were no local announcements or invitations to comment issued to the many residents and organizations who have identified their interest in this program,” a release from Northwatch reads.

The Department of National Defence did not respond to questions from The Narwhal. 

4. North Bay’s not alone: contaminated military bases affect communities across Canada

Contamination on federal sites is an issue across Canada. There are thousands of contaminated sites listed on the federal contaminated sites inventory, and PFAS are found on more than 100 of them. These include at least 26 National Defence sites including bases in Trenton, Ont., Gagetown, N.B., and Moose Jaw, Sask.

And contaminants don’t stop at the fenceline. Health Canada says some contaminants can travel long distances through soil, water and air: “PFAS can be found in fresh water and drinking water in areas that are far away from where they entered the environment,” according to the department’s website.

5. Industry is still importing PFAS-class chemicals into North Bay

While the Canadian government no longer uses firefighting foam that contains PFAS, industry continues to bring these substances into the country. In 2023, The Narwhal reported on an international plastics conglomerate that opened its first Canadian location, Industrial Plastics Canada, in North Bay. The company has a presence across Europe as well as in India and China, billing itself as one of the “largest worldwide manufacturers of PTFE products.” 

PTFE, or polytetrafluoroethylene, is a Teflon-like product in a subgroup of PFAS known as fluoropolymers, or fluoroplastics. A company spokesperson previously told The Narwhal the use of PTFE at the factory will not produce waste and poses “no risk.” The company also says fluoropolymers aren’t as dangerous as other PFAS and are “considered safe, non-bioaccumulative and non-toxic.” 

But fluoropolymers have been found to be dangerous to human health, according to research published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science & Technology and others.

In 2023, Health Canada released a draft assessment of the state of PFAS in Canada to help decide how to regulate the class of chemicals. In it, the agency cited an industry-funded study that said fluoropolymers should be considered separately from other PFAS as “polymers of low concern.” A Health Canada spokesperson said the agency, along with Environment and Climate Change Canada, “examined information from a wide range of sources,” including scientific journals and reports while preparing the state of PFAS report.

The substances were ultimately excluded from the final report, released in March 2025, in which Health Canada proposed classifying the remaining PFAS chemicals as toxic substances under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act.

The Health Canada spokesperson said in an email that fluoropolymers “have specific properties that differentiates them from other PFAS,” which led to their exclusion from the final report. They added that the exclusion “should not be interpreted as meaning they are or are not of concern,” and that a separate fluoropolymer assessment is currently underway.

The exclusion of PTFE from that classification was a major priority for industry, Rémy Alexandre, toxics project lead at environmental law non-profit EcoJustice, told The Narwhal.

According to data collected by Alexandre, who studied Industrial Plastics Canada’s imports to North Bay, the company brought in almost 207,000 kilograms of PTFE from India and China from July 2025 to May 2026.

This puts the facility on the list of the 10 major importers of PTFE in Canada, alongside U.S.-based chemicals company Chemours, a spinoff of Dupont that has been arguing that the European Union should exempt fluoropolymers from their regulations, too. 

“The decision to site this plant in a community that is an existing hotspot for PFAS raises concerns,” Alexandre told The Narwhal. “And so does the selection of a jurisdiction that isn’t regulating fluoropolymers.”

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Summary

• A proposal by developer Cliff Bay Muskoka Corp. includes new condominium and hotel units, restaurants, a spa, an event centre and a marina in the small town of Gravenhurst, Ont., along with particularly controversial water villas over Lake Muskoka.
• The proposal relies on obtaining a Minister’s Zoning Order, or MZO, to bypass local municipal planning rules. 
• The MZO was a condition of the purchase when the developers bought it from the province, which one legal expert told The Narwhal could pose a conflict of interest.

Ontario cottage country — famous for its hundreds of clear lakes nestled in the Canadian Shield — is experiencing a first. 

The Cliff Bay resort project, proposed for the south end of Lake Muskoka, is planning for a Minister’s Zoning Order, a provincial decree that limits local government oversight in order to move development ahead. It’s known across the province as an MZO although, until now, Muskoka doesn’t appear to have experienced one. 

Now that it is, locals and cottagers have a lot to say. Throughout the town of Gravenhurst, Ont., lawn signs urge passersby to “Protect Muskoka Bay.” An attempt at an online public meeting initiated by the developers failed in May 2025, after its capacity of 100 attendees was quickly reached, with many more stuck in the waiting room eager to voice their concerns. 

The proposal by developer Cliff Bay Muskoka Corp., part of the KS Group of Companies, shows new condominium and hotel units, two restaurants, a spa, an event centre for weddings and a marina with space for 80 boats. While the developers originally proposed 1,400 units split between hotel and residential space, they told The Narwhal in an email that number has been “significantly reduced,” but didn’t say by how much.

All of this will spread across 33 hectares, or about the size of just under 50 soccer pitches.

A particularly controversial aspect of the Cliff Bay resort plan are additional water villas proposed to be built directly over the lake. Their construction would impact Crown lake-bed, which supports invertebrates and insects that are the backbone of the lake ecosystem.

“The building over water is what gets me the most,” Bruce Parlette, who spends half his time at his cottage on Lake Muskoka, told The Narwhal. Parlette began an online petition opposing the project that has accumulated more than 5,300 signatures over the last year.

By current municipal rules, buildings on the bay typically have to be at least 20 metres, in some cases 30, from the shoreline. “But they’re looking to build all these villas on the water … so the whole shoreline protection, that buffer zone, would be gone,” Parlette said.

So far, Gravenhurst’s leadership has been quiet on the project within its borders. A spokesperson told The Narwhal in an email that the town has not taken a position or issued any news releases or statements as “there hasn’t really been anything to share,” adding that they are awaiting the final proposal for “some form of statement or release.” 

When asked about public concerns over the impact of the project, the spokesperson said “the town does not own the property, process or decision here,” adding that council “certainly heard the concerns” at the developer’s public information session and might be able to take an eventual position when the process is further along.

The spokesperson did express council’s desire to see the property, a mix of undeveloped Crown land and a former sanatorium, put to productive use for the community. 

Meanwhile, Parlette and advocates at the Muskoka Lakes Association are selling the lawn signs, emailing officials and participating in public meetings about what the association calls the “deeply troubling details of a massive development proposal.”

“Nobody wants to see it done with an MZO, because then it’s going to override any local planning, zoning and decision-making,” Parlette said.

The developer website reads that, “in partnership with the Province of Ontario, we’re redeveloping this iconic site into a vibrant, mixed-use tourist complex,” in a project that reflects their “commitment to thoughtful growth, economic development and preserving the natural beauty of Muskoka for generations to come.”

The Narwhal also sent questions to Infrastructure Ontario, which sold the land to Cliff Bay, and the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing. Neither of the provincial agencies involved responded to detailed questions about the sale of the land, the Minister’s Zoning Order and public concerns about the impact of the project.

Muskoka’s first MZO and the Doug Ford government’s track record using them

A Minister’s Zoning Order is a powerful control tool. It lets the provincial Housing Minister unilaterally decide how land is used and developed by bypassing local municipal planning and public consultation processes that would otherwise be required under the Planning Act. 

After searching publicly available government records, The Narwhal was unable to find evidence of any other MZOs being issued in the Muskoka area, including in the three major towns of Gravenhurst, Bracebridge, Huntsville and smaller hubs like Bala and Port Carling. 

Phil Pothen, legal counsel and program manager of land use and Ontario environment at advocacy organization Environmental Defence, told The Narwhal the Muskoka proposal raises concerns because the developers stated publicly that obtaining a Minister’s Zoning Order was a condition of the purchase and sale agreement between Infrastructure Ontario and the developers.

“It would actually place the province in something of a conflict of interest,” Pothen said, “in the sense that [the province] is both the landowner who stands to gain more if the land is more highly valued and the regulator who’s actually making the decision.”

Discussion of the MZO came at a public information meeting held over Zoom in July 2025, a redo after the over-capacity attempt that May. There, Kirill Soloviev, head of strategic planning for Cliff Bay, told hundreds of attendees that, as part of the deal for the developer to buy the property from the province, a “Ministerial Zoning Order was included, and now it’s a formal part of the transaction.” Bob List, a land use and environmental planner acting as a consultant for the project, echoed the statement.

The Cliff Bay project’s developer wrote in an email to The Narwhal that a Minister’s Zoning Order was a “necessity” because mixed land use — mostly recreational and commercial — is currently not recognized in existing zoning for the property. Ensuring a Minister’s Zoning Order would come through was essential to the decision to purchase the land, as without it, the decision to rezone the property for the purposes of the resort would have been left with the township, and not guaranteed.

In 2024, the Office of the Auditor General of Ontario conducted an audit of Minister’s Zoning Orders in the province and found that between 2017 and 2023, 114 were issued. With the Doug Ford government first elected in 2018, that average of 23 per year represents a 17-fold increase from the prior two decades. The audit concluded that these orders “have been used to override municipal planning.”

The audit also found that most information packages prepared for the office of the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing as it evaluated each order “did not contain the kind of detailed risk information normally factored into municipal zoning decisions.” That included key information about the capacity of local roads, sewers and other infrastructure; the risks posed by natural hazards and the environment; and likely financial burdens to regions, municipalities and taxpayers.

These orders cannot be appealed at the Ontario Land Tribunal. Of the 25 Minister’s Zoning Orders the auditor general scrutinized for the report, they found that half showed “no evidence the ministry engaged with any affected Indigenous communities” prior to issuing the order. 

“This is a threat, frankly, to the rule of law in Ontario,” Pothen said. “It’s a process that is much more susceptible to impropriety than a conventional planning process where multiple individuals all need to be lined up in support of a proposal.”

What’s next for Cliff Bay resort in Ontario cottage country?

Right now, the area surrounding the site boasts a tree-lined shore spotted with cottages, ranging from quaint to luxurious. Docks surround the large, clear blue bay, with Muskoka chairs set up with views across the lake. Not far from the water on the site, the eerie, now-closed hospital building sits abandoned and overgrown.

Maintaining shorelines is critical to ecosystems and the wildlife they support; it’s where fish spawn, turtles lay eggs and birds nest. Healthy shoreline vegetation also filters rainwater and can even limit flooding, a risk that is increasing in the face of climate change.

In a response to questions from The Narwhal, the Cliff Bay developers said that upcoming changes to their plans will add more features for public use, like the beaches and public trails Soloviev mentioned during the public meetings, and address public comments they’ve received from people reaching out to them. 

In an email, they said no “significant or unusual environmental impacts are anticipated,” as sewage will be processed at an existing local treatment facility and because “there are no significant natural heritage features on the site.” The developers said they anticipate an updated draft of the Minister’s Zoning Order will be “available for further public review, Indigenous consultation and government processing in several months.”

Despite these efforts, Minister’s Zoning Orders do not come with any legally binding requirement to consult the public — a point project planner List repeated several times at the July 2025 Zoom meeting.

Pothen said the zoning orders provide a direct route for the minister to “leapfrog and circumvent the established planning laws of a municipality” and to approve a development even if it doesn’t conform with the official plan or with the government’s own provincial planning statement.

The Minister’s Zoning Order process does involve collecting comment from municipal governments. But, according to the auditor general’s report, there is no legislated requirement for the ministry to satisfy any municipal requests for specific conditions prior to the orders being issued. 

The Cliff Bay development will have to go through several environmental checks before being built — including a posting on the environmental registry of Ontario for public comment if the proposal goes through. 

There are cases where Minister’s Zoning Orders have been useful, Pothen told The Narwhal, such as during COVID-19 lockdowns, when they allowed for quick creation of emergency shelters.

“They are meant to be used, in our view, for very extreme and emergency circumstances,” Pothen said. “What’s being posed here, it’s really just a way to circumvent the rule, which raises the problem.”

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Summary

• The North Bay Parry Sound District Health Unit officially stopped testing water at public beaches.
• In place of testing, the health unit is updating public signage to warn swimmers of risks of heavy rainfall, murky water and large numbers of birds congregating — things that deteriorate water quality.
• Researchers and advocates argue beach water monitoring is important, especially as climate change makes cooling off in the water more necessary — and more hazardous, thanks to algal blooms and pathogens.

Kevin Marois wasn’t aware that the health unit spanning North Bay and Parry Sound, Ont., had stopped testing the water at local swimming spots.“I don’t think it’s a good decision,” Marois told The Narwhal after learning about it on a hot June day at Shabogesic Beach in North Bay. “Not having the information on water quality is the main [concern],” he said as he came out of the water, “And we know that there are problems with water quality during the summer.”

There were six harmful algal bloom events in the health unit’s area in 2025, and more than a dozen in 2024.

After announcing its plans earlier this year, the North Bay Parry Sound District Health Unit has officially stopped testing water at public beaches as of this summer. 

In its place, they’re offering public signage, which the health unit says will warn beachgoers to assess risks from recent heavy rainfall, visibly murky water or large numbers of birds in the water — all things that alter water quality and can make swimming unsafe due to high levels of E. coli or harmful algae.

Despite the updated signage, those who study beach water safety in Canada say ceasing testing could impact people’s ability to make informed decisions about safe swimming this summer. 

Meanwhile, researchers have argued a warming climate in Canada, including more severe summer heat waves, means swimmable water for people to cool off in is more important than ever. 

“We see changing climate patterns, we see urban heat island effects, we see heat domes, we see that there’s a tremendous need for community cooling spaces,” said Gregary Ford, vice-president and Lake Ontario Waterkeeper at Swim Drink Fish, an environmental non-profit that advocates for safe, usable water bodies. Its name comes from signs often posted on shorelines in Canada: no swimming, no fishing and no drinking. 

Ford explained that warmer temperatures and extreme weather events — a part of climate change, which is primarily driven by the burning of fossil fuels — also contribute to more harmful algal blooms and other pathogens that affect the health of the water and people who use it.

Health unit says water testing is resource-intensive and too slow

In March 2026, the North Bay health unit, which also covers Kearney, Nipissing and South River, sent a letter to member municipalities saying sampling the area’s 60 public beaches was too resource-intensive, and lab results took three or four days, limiting their usefulness when water conditions change quickly. The health unit also argued that the risk of illness from water recreation in the region is low. The water was only tested about three times each summer, it said.

Last year, Public Health Sudbury and Districts, a region which includes Manitoulin Island and French River, ended routine water sampling as well — one of many cuts made after the medical officer of health said their funding has not kept pace with inflation.

“Obviously, there are growing pressures on municipalities and public health units … and so we understand that compromises have to be made, but not in something that affects public health,” Ford said. “This is a trend that we see during periods of economic stress and strain … Unfortunately, as these scalebacks start happening, the public is left with less information about their water and, honestly, that becomes the most important part.”

Swim Drink Fish aggregates data from across swimming spots in North America into an app called Swim Guide. But these helpful third-party tools rely on local data collected by public health departments.

“It’s really important that municipalities also provide historical data, even if they’re not sampling today. They should at least publicly make available the data and information that has been collected over the last five years, the last 10 years, so people can still make a somewhat informed decision about where they spend their time,” Ford said. That’s not something made available by the North Bay Parry Sound Health Unit, either.

There are options for protecting beachgoers, but they can’t replace testing: experts

A recent study from Toronto Metropolitan University, which surveyed 4,085 beachgoers at seven beaches in Canada between 2023 and 2025, found that about 2.6 per cent of swimmers reported becoming sick, with children and elderly people facing higher risk of “recreational water illness,” such as stomach issues, ear and eye infections or rashes.

Ian Young, principal investigator on the Canadian Beach Cohort Study, tracking recreational water illness across Canada, said despite that low risk, “having a solid monitoring plan is important to give people confidence in the beach.”

He pointed to other methods being used across the country to help combat the slow, unreliable nature of current testing. For example, at Bluffer’s Park Beach in Scarborough, Ont., the City of Toronto implemented a bird management program, involving removing sources of food and training dogs to spur geese into flight, once they realized a substantial amount of the E. coli in the water at the beach was caused by birds.

Ford, from Swim Drink Fish, has seen other solutions; municipalities like Kingston and Hamilton are trying out new technology that alerts citizens in real-time when sewers and sewer bypasses are overflowing and contaminating beach water. But, he said, this does not replace the need for monitoring.

“It is a far second in terms of a solution. The best solution is to be continuing and continuously monitoring these beaches,” Ford said. “Resources can be stretched thin at times. This is a public health interest, it is a tourism interest and it is an individual health and wellness interest as well. So, this should be a priority for public health units, and it’s disappointing to see some of these decisions that are being made.”

To help mitigate risk, North Bay’s health unit recommends swimmers wash or sanitize hands before eating after swimming, towel off well to help prevent swimmer’s itch, check for hazards before entering the water and avoid getting water in their mouths.

But North Bay resident Ashley Brooker, standing at the shore of Lake Nipissing, said she still doesn’t feel good about the testing changes. “I am a risk-taker, but that doesn’t mean that I want to risk getting sick or catching something,” she said. “Safety is a big thing, and if we’re putting our tax money into something then we should be getting the resources back.”

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Summary

• In March 2026, the Doug Ford government formally replaced Ontario’s Endangered Species Act with weaker legislation that removes protections for some species and narrows protections for others.
• Documents obtained by The Narwhal reveal the dissent and concern raised by provincial staff, municipalities and Indigenous groups during consultations on the change.
• A major concern raised about the legislation is that many project proposals will no longer be posted for public comment, limiting public participation.

As the Doug Ford government prepared to replace the Endangered Species Act with new legislation, the province’s natural resources staff warned of weakened habitat protections, reduced oversight and new gaps in enforcement, according to documents obtained by The Narwhal.  

In March 2026, the Endangered Species Act was officially replaced with the Species Conservation Act, which removes or limits provincial protection from many threatened plants and animals.

Now, 275 pages of records, some publicly available and others only accessed through freedom of information legislation, show provincial bureaucrats worrying about the implications of the changes, as well as municipalities and Indigenous groups voicing dissent — before the government passed the law anyway.

The new act allows most projects, whether related to housing, mining or other industries, to begin as soon as proponents register online, in place of an expert review of permit applications. This approach “may weaken oversight and accountability, as self-regulation can be variable and potentially unreliable,” reads November 2025 feedback from the fish and wildlife policy branch of Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources to the provincial Ministry of the Environment, which is primarily responsible for species at risk. “Proponents may also misinterpret or manipulate rules and regulations.”

The natural resources ministry also raised concerns that the Species Conservation Act exempted a number of development actions from the second section of the Environmental Bill of Rights, which requires applications to do work that could potentially harm wildlife to be publicly posted on the provincial environmental registry. Without this, the chance for public review and comment is eliminated.

“The [Environmental Bill of Rights] was created to ensure that the people of Ontario have the ability to participate in decision-making processes,” reads the same feedback sent via email from the Ministry of Natural Resources. “Suggest being cautious if exempting [Species Conservation Act] permits and orders … as this may be seen as a way to avoid transparency, accountability and undermine public trust.”

Neither the Ministry of Natural Resources nor the Ministry of the Environment responded to The Narwhal’s detailed questions about this feedback by publication time.

In April, in response to questions from The Narwhal at a press conference, Premier Doug Ford said such changes are needed to clear the way for industry and development in the province. 

“As I’ve said, we aren’t going to hold up Highway 413, the Bradford Bypass, over a grasshopper — not happening,” Ford said of two highway projects set to cut through the protected Greenbelt and farmland. “We have a mandate to build. We’re going to build, and we’re going to respect the environment at all costs.”

Thousands of public comments about endangered species protections were also ignored: lawyer

Kerrie Blaise, a lawyer with the northern Ontario environmental non-profit Legal Advocates for Nature’s Defence, said these issues remained as the final legislation was passed, despite concerns being raised ahead of time.

That includes dropping the requirement for some permits for projects that could harm species being publicly posted.

“It’s a very sweeping exemption,” Blaise said. “It means we won’t know the name of the companies. We won’t know where it’s happening … the basic details: when, where, how much, what’s the harm? All of those details will be lacking.”

Blaise also registered her dissent before the new act passed. She told The Narwhal that Legal Advocates for Nature’s Defence sent more than 6,500 signed form letters asking the province to reconsider — even repeal — Bill 5, which proposed killing the old act and passing the new one. The organization is now representing two Indigenous interveners challenging the constitutionality of the bill in court. 

Blaise said it was “really great to hear” that natural resources staff spoke up. “I truly believe you have very dedicated individuals with expertise in this field … but their expertise and their knowledge is not being respected,” she said. 

“There are those with knowledge who can actually guide the government in a good way, and it’s really chilling when those individuals and departments within [the government] are themselves not being listened to.”

Blaise added she sees nothing in the final legislation showing that the province addressed the concerns raised by staff or those contained in thousands of public comments.

“If the province was actually looking to respect … what the public was actually saying, we would have a very differently worded Species Conservation Act,” Blaise said.

In the documents, Ministry of Natural Resources staff also warned that excluding federally protected species from provincial protections “could create regulatory gaps and inconsistencies.” This, too, echoes concerns from environmental groups. 

The province has argued a number of species —  including the redside dace, a minnow that became central to concerns over Ontario’s Highway 413 development — are already protected under federal laws. 

The federal government can extend emergency protections to provincial lands, but rarely does so. And in many cases, federal protection only extends to individual species under the federal Species At Risk Act and their dwelling places on federal lands, such as national parks or First Nations reserves. These spaces make up less than five per cent of the range of most terrestrial at-risk species, whose wider habitat in Ontario is now vulnerable. 

The documents show this concern was voiced by Steve Ganesh, commissioner of planning, building and growth management for the City of Brampton. He wrote to the province that, “By limiting ‘habitat’ to a species’ dwelling place and its immediate surrounding area, important areas may no longer be protected that are crucial for foraging, dispersal, migration and climate resilience.”

“This change could leave locally significant and rare populations unprotected and reduce the scientific basis for municipal planning, restoration and mitigation efforts.”

One species of particular concern is caribou, according to Allie Mayberry, a wildlife co-ordinator working with the sustainable development department of Biigtigong Nishnaabeg, a First Nation on the north shore of Lake Superior. Whittling protected species habitat down so severely provides little protection for an already threatened species that relies on large swaths of interconnected habitat to survive, she told The Narwhal.

“There’s a lack of clarity around how caribou habitat is going to be protected moving forward,” Mayberry said. “We’re already working with a baseline of a very disturbed habitat, and now through the new [Species Conservation Act] there’s much less of an imperative to protect what habitat there is left.”

Docs show Treaty Rights and loss of protection for threatened species were a concern

Other municipalities and First Nations had concerns about the legislation change, the documents show. 

A letter from the City of London, sent before the new act’s passage, argued the now-official Protected Species in Ontario List would remove protections for 106 species. “These changes undermine the municipality’s capacity to protect species that are rare, threatened or endangered within the city,” the letter reads, naming 20 species in London’s boundaries that have been removed from protection, along with their habitats. They include the chimney swift, eastern musk turtle and wood thrush. 

The documents show Indigenous groups also argued the new legislation disrespects not just the environment, but their Treaty Rights.

The Species Conservation Act was set to “fundamentally alter how the Haudenosaunee exercise rights guaranteed under the 1701 Nanfan Treaty,” reads a comment from Aaron Detlor, a delegate from the Haudenosaunee Development Institute, which represents the interests of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy Chiefs Council in the development of lands within Haudenosaunee jurisdiction. “These regulations restrict the free and undisturbed use of our territories that are foundational to Haudenosaunee sovereignty and self-determination.”

“Our review of these proposed regulations reveals no credible or equivalent process that could substitute for meaningful engagement on measures that directly affect our Treaty Rights. We see no mechanism by which the Haudenosaunee will have a meaningful opportunity to participate in decisions affecting species protection and our inherent right to exercise hunting and harvesting rights on our territory,” Detlor wrote.

At the April press conference, The Narwhal asked Ford how he would respond to government experts saying the changes could create serious gaps in protection for species at risk. “That’s a priority to make sure we protect all species at risk,” Ford replied. “There’ll always be consultation.”

Chief Duncan Michano of Biigtigong Nishnaabeg noted in a comment about Bill 5 on the Environmental Registry of Ontario that the new act failed to respect First Nations’ constitutional rights, arguing the legislation “fundamentally weakens environmental and cultural protections and reduces consultation requirements,” calling it a “direct violation of the Government of Ontario’s obligations to uphold the honour of the Crown.”

“The consultation process [on Bill 5 and the Species Conservation Act] has been extremely flawed all along,” Mayberry, Biigtigong Nishnaabeg’s wildlife co-ordinator, said. “We’ve participated in a number of different ways and what we’ve been met with is not a two way dialogue in an attempt to hear and meaningfully address any concerns.” 

Mayberry said consultation has “all just been a box-ticking exercise wherein Ontario continues to double down on their preferred approach, and they get the benefit of saying, ‘Well, we spoke to First Nations about this.’ ”

“We’ve taken a piece of legislation that was once considered the gold standard for species at risk protection and recovery in Canada, and now we have just whittled it down to a point that it’s barely even a species protection act anymore,” Mayberry said. “I’m not at all surprised to hear that there’s even concerns internally about this.”

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Summary

• The Ontario government intended to move radioactive waste from the shore of Lake Nipissing to a former mine site outside Sudbury, Ont.
• A lack of consultation around the new location led to strong local opposition, and delayed the remediation project conducted by Nipissing First Nation.
• The waste has now been moved to a disposal site outside Sarnia, Ont., and Aamjiwnaang First Nation, where emissions from the industrial area known as Chemical Valley have affected local air quality.

For decades, radioactive waste sat near the shore of Lake Nipissing. It looked like an innocuous pile of gravel in what was otherwise a stretch of forest. People began using it to backfill lots, fill spaces under decks and build fire pits. In the 1970s and ’80s, Nipissing First Nation began using it to build roads. 

It wasn’t normal gravel, though. It was mine tailings, containing the metal niobium, left there when the Nova Beaucage mine shuttered in 1956 after just seven months of operation. 

“The company just walked away and left it with no remediation at all,” Geneviève Couchie, business operations manager at Nipissing First Nation, said. Couchie led a project to clean up the tailings, which first started in 2019. After being interrupted by COVID-19 shutdowns, the remediation resumed in spring 2024 and lasted almost two years.

In the meantime, Couchie told The Narwhal, she fielded concerns about groundwater and lake contamination from residents living close to the site or to a nearby property owned by Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation that also stored the low-level radioactive tailings. Couchie said she struggled to get satisfactory answers from government agencies.

“The workers wore hazmat suits, and I remember saying from the beginning, ‘How can I tell people they have nothing to worry about when these guys are in full on suits?’ They’re literally 20 feet from someone’s window,” Couchie said. The majority of the workers remediating the site were from the nation, and dressed in protective gear so as not to carry radioactive dust home on their clothes. 

The plan was to load the waste into trucks to be transported to a tailings management area at Agnew Lake, in Sudbury District. It is the decommissioned site of a former mine, near the Township of Nairn and Hyman, and about 150 kilometres from Nipissing First Nation. The nation first had to excavate nearly 50,000 metric tonnes of the radioactive material — enough to build the Statue of Liberty, twice.

But the project faced another unexpected delay. The province had attempted to relocate the waste without consulting the Nairn community, sparking public outcry. Locals organized public meetings to raise awareness and ultimately stop the transfer. 

Eventually, in July 2025 — after nearly a year of advocacy in Nairn, and delay for Nipissing First Nation — the province capitulated, finding another place for the waste to go. This was welcome news for Nipissing First Nation, which is now hoping to transform the scarred land into a lakeside green space for the community to enjoy after years of worry.

“We just wanted to see this material moved off [Nipissing First Nation] lands, and so it was an unexpected disappointment that things were delayed like they were,” Couchie said. “We were pleased that they did end up finding another disposal site.”

“But,” Couchie said, it was “eye opening as well, that there was only one other facility in Ontario that was prepared to accept this.”

That facility is close to another Indigenous community — Aamjiwnaang First Nation, in the Sarnia region, where emissions from refineries and petrochemical plants have earned the area the moniker “Chemical Valley.” 

Sarnia facility accepting radioactive waste from Nipissing

The new destination for the radioactive tailings is Clean Harbors, a hazardous waste facility in Corunna, Ont. — 645 kilometres from its original dumping ground. It’s close to both Aamjiwnaang and Sarnia, which have experienced persistent air quality issues related to nearby industry.

Clean Harbors is the only government-licensed hazardous waste management complex in Ontario, and is “uniquely positioned,” its website reads, to offer safe disposal of naturally occurring radioactive material like the niobium tailings. 

But the facility’s history is dotted with dust-ups over environmental safety. In 2013, neighbours of the Clean Harbors site won a civil lawsuit over the impact of the waste facility’s emissions on their health and daily lives.

In 2019 the company was fined $100,000 for discharging contaminated smoke after a filter cloth soaked with coolant, oils and metal particles caught fire.

When the province conducted a study on environmental stressors in the Sarnia area in 2023, it found that while the majority of the 870 reports from residents about industrial pollution were related to petrochemical industries and refineries, a significant minority — 219 — were “related to the waste incineration facility in the area (Clean Harbors).”

And in 2025, the Ministry of Environment fined Clean Harbors $100,000 for failing to comply with an equipment requirement for monitoring the excavation of a waste-holding basin. 

Clean Harbors did not respond to The Narwhal’s questions about these claims and findings.

In a section of their 2025 annual report on legal, environmental and regulatory compliance risks, Clean Harbors asserted: “We are now, and may in the future be, a defendant in lawsuits brought by parties alleging environmental damage, personal injury and/or property damage, which may result in our payment of significant amounts.”

Aamjiwnaang First Nation Chief Janelle Nahmabin told The Narwhal she had not received any information about the niobium waste that was trucked to Clean Harbors nearly a year ago. Other environmental groups The Narwhal reached out to, including Climate Action Sarnia-Lambton, had not heard of this waste transfer, either.

“The plan now has been executed in a very different way,” said Brennain Lloyd, project coordinator at Northwatch, a northeastern Ontario environmental advocacy group. “It’s moving the waste into the territory of another First Nation that is already heavily impacted by all of the industrial activities.”

‘Under a real nuclear shadow’: radioactive waste in northern Ontario

The company behind the Nova Beaucage mine was looking for much-desired uranium in the early days of the Cold War. 

It found trace amounts of it on a small island in Lake Nipissing, along with niobium, a naturally occurring mineral used to strengthen and lighten steel, which is useful when building electronics, cars, bridges and pipelines. After excavating, the company barged the ore across the lake to a mill they established on shore, on Nipissing First Nation territory.

“In northeastern Ontario, we live under a real nuclear shadow,” Lloyd said.

In a letter to the federal Impact Assessment Agency in February 2026, the Anishinabek Nation cited the Nova Beaucage tailings as an example of the legacy of contamination that First Nations have been disproportionately impacted by due to poor government diligence. The letter puts the “toxic cocktail from Sarnia chemical valley” near Aamjiwnaang First Nation in the same category.

It was written in response to the proposal by the federally mandated Nuclear Waste Management Organization to store radioactive waste from nuclear power plants outside Ignace, Ont., a northern township between Thunder Bay and the Manitoba border. This waste has been temporarily stored in safe, but impermanent, containers for decades and finding a permanent solution has become an increasingly pressing issue — one that has only grown as Ontario ramps up nuclear power generation with small modular reactors in Bowmanville and a proposed full-scale nuclear facility in Port Hope. 

From First Nations in the Ignace area to those along the Ottawa River, concerned by leaks from a nuclear laboratory in 2024, communities have been pressing for better consultation when big radioactive waste decisions are made. The case of the Township of Nairn and Hyman illustrates why.

In June 2024, a Nairn and Hyman town councillor happened upon the planned dumping site for the niobium waste while out riding an all-terrain vehicle, or ATV, said Belinda Ketchabaw, the chief administrative officer of the township of less than 500 people. According to the township’s website, the councillor saw roadwork being done to facilitate the transportation of material the Ministry of Mines later told residents was naturally occurring radioactive material. Before that, residents say they had no idea about the relocation plan.

“We were aware that [the Agnew Lake] site was within our township. It’s been there for many, many years,” Ketchabaw told The Narwhal. “What we weren’t aware of is that the cover over the existing tailing site had depleted, through either people going across it on ATVs, or just rainwater eroding the cover.”

The Agnew Lake site already needed remediation, after uranium mining and milling operations ceased there in 1983. Tests from 2023 by the Ministry of Mines found uranium, radium, arsenic and more at the site. In a letter sent to the federal nuclear safety commission in the months after the councillor’s discovery, the township argued the arrival of niobium waste introduced “additional risks to an already precarious situation.” 

The province’s idea, according to an undated letter from the Ministry of Transportation, was for the niobium gravel to help provide an additional, less radioactive groundcover for the existing materials.

“I guess what they were trying to do is, for lack of a better word, kill two birds with one stone,” Ketchabaw said. She made it her personal mission to get answers about the waste disposal that she said were not provided by the province — although the Transportation Ministry letter, uploaded to the Nipissing First Nation website, says the site was identified by the Ministry of Mines as a potential disposal location in 2016. This same letter explained that studies done by the ministry in 2012 determined the potential “risks of the tailings to human health were low.”

Ontario’s Ministry of Energy and Mines did not respond to The Narwhal’s questions, including around its protocol for informing communities about plans to store radioactive waste nearby.

“Ministries that are doing this type of work have to have advanced and meaningful consultation with municipalities, First Nations and residents,” Ketchabaw said. Agnew Lake is a source of drinking water for the Nairn and Hyman communities. She said they were given no assurances the environment and health of the community would be protected with this disposal.

“We weren’t consulted at all in this project. We came upon it by mistake,” Ketchabaw said. “It really felt like they were hiding this, like they were just kind of trying to sneak it in the back door.”

Updated on May 6, 2026, at 12:10 p.m. ET: This story has been updated to correct a photo caption that stated nearly 50,000 metric tonnes of material were removed from the picture site, when in fact that collective amount was removed from multiple sites across the nation.

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After years of punishing drought that shrunk their herds, Canadian cattle farmers finally saw them growing at the start of 2026. It was a modest 2.5 per cent increase in the number of cows and calves, but after eight years of contraction — which also meant increased beef prices at the till — those in the industry are taking it as a win. 

Brenna Grant, executive director of CanFax, the research division of the Canadian Cattle Association, called this a “really modest” increase, urging patience for those hoping affordability will return soon. 

Canada’s beef prices are 23 per cent higher today than the national five-year average, and, in general, meat prices rose by the highest rate of any food category in 2025, according to research from Dalhousie University. 

The biggest concern driving beef prices high is weather, Grant said. Climate pressures on pasture conditions means less hay to feed animals and, consequently, smaller herds.

“All of the research would indicate that we are expected to see greater frequency and severity of extreme weather events, whether that be drought or flooding or even just greater volatility within the growing season,” Grant said. 

Ranchers are heading into summer with mounting uncertainty, given spotty and unpredictable rain and snow patterns in recent years. “That just means that this rebuild, in terms of increasing supplies, is going to take longer.”

Droughts in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, where the country’s cattle farming is concentrated, have become regular and severe. Drought insurance payouts to Alberta farmers reached a record $326.5 million in 2023, more than tripling the payouts from the 2021 drought. 

Droughts also hit southern Ontario last summer, impacting Trenton, Belleville and Prince Edward Country farmers. Dry conditions present a host of challenges, from reducing the availability of local, affordable feed to farmers not having enough water available for their herds. 

At the same time, more northern areas of Canada that haven’t historically been seen as cattle country are starting to grow their local bovine populations, as more moderate temperatures become a welcome refuge for farmers. Warmer weather has been a boon in typically colder zones, making it easier to grow feed crops instead of importing them. 

Northern Ontario is one of those areas, including Sudbury, Nipissing and Cochrane, which had built up a herd 100,000 strong as of 2018. 

Grant said the Peace Region that straddles the Alberta-B.C. border is also seeing longer growing seasons, allowing for more crop varieties, including of animal feed. The same is true for northeast Saskatchewan, once considered too cold and wet, where warmer, drier conditions have improved growing.

“It’s the right use of that land for the right product,” said Jason Leblond, president of Beef Farmers of Ontario, and a cattle farmer himself in Chisholm, Ont. “Beef cattle do very well in the north.”

But, he says, while the shift may benefit local producers, it is unlikely to ease rising beef prices anytime soon.

“When we see the first signs of the herd rebuild, which is what we’re seeing currently, it normally takes two years for it to hit the store shelves — that price reduction,” Leblond said.

Building up northern herds, he said, is a big part of “how we can get the prices more in check.” He’s increasingly seeing farmers step up in these long-dormant farming regions.

Northern Ontario’s growing herd of cattle

In the early 2000s and 2010s, cattle farmer Mike Tulloch recalls driving roads in Algoma, Ont., and seeing derelict farms, growing back up to brush and weeds — signs of a dying industry. Tulloch grew up in the area with a lifelong ambition to take over his father’s farm and watched the landscape closely.

In the last decade, he’s seen a growing number of farmers revitalizing the area’s farms, many coming from southern Ontario or farther. His own land, he said, doubled in value since he bought it in 2018. Now, he owns a farm with about 1,300 head of cattle. 

“The face of agriculture in Algoma and Manitoulin has changed dramatically,” Tulloch said. “It’s driven out of the relatively inexpensive value of the land and is being bought up hand over fist and turned back into productive farmland.”

Tulloch has found himself in one of the most hospitable remaining areas for raising cows.

“No question that the climate change has been more conducive to farming in the near-north: Algoma, Manitou and Sudbury, Nipissing,” Tulloch said. “This is a case where climate change in our area has been good for the farmers.”

The Algoma area, at the cusp of lakes Huron and Superior, has the longest growing period across all of northern Ontario, from Nipissing up. By 2050, temperatures are predicted to increase between 1 C and 4 C, making that growing season even longer. 

“We have warmer winters. We get on the land sooner, and the ground in the north here warms up sooner,” Tulloch said, compared to previous years. “For our cattle operations, we grow about 750 acres of corn. And, ten years ago, there wasn’t 750 acres of corn in the whole district.”

While many Canadian cattle farmers are battling extreme weather events like drought, floods and wildfires, northern Ontario is emerging as somewhat of a sanctuary. 

Moving north won’t fix the challenges climate change presents farmers

Experts and polls have demonstrated the biggest challenge for cattle farming in Canada is the increased frequency of adverse weather events. While the northerly migration has eased the challenges for some cattle farmers, it’s not a silver bullet — and prices will continue to reflect that, especially as consumer demand for protein remains extremely high.

“In the last five years, we’ve actually seen beef demand jump twice, once in 2020 and we maintained those levels, and then again in 2025,” Grant said. “What that means is that consumers were willing to pay a higher price for the same amount of beef.”

The high demand and weather uncertainties are being experienced across the world, including in Canada and the U.S., leading to a global shortage of beef as production falls in traditional centres.

There are also no guarantees conditions will remain hospitable for cattle farming in northern climates. 

“In some regions of the country, certainly, there will be some increased opportunity,” Kim Ominski, University of Manitoba research scientist, said. “But the challenge about these extreme weather events is it just introduces increased risk.”

Unpredictable growing conditions might bring a year where farmers are unable to source enough feed locally. Since feed is one of the largest costs of raising cattle, Ominski said, having to import it — especially if that requires swapping the usual meal with a more expensive crop — can really impact a farmer’s bottom line. 

Across Canada, research links extreme climate-driven weather events to rising mental-health strain on farmers, causing guilt, hopelessness and panic. Many are leaving the industry.

Even Tulloch acknowledges the gamble.

“The weather is more erratic,” Tulloch said. “You see that when the storms come, there are heavier storms and you have more risk of flooding.”

“It’s a risky venture.”

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