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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Summary

• The Ontario government has officially repealed its Endangered Species Act and replaced it with weaker legislation, almost a year after first proposing to do so.
• The province’s new Species Conservation Act removes provincial protections for many species and applies protections to a more narrow range of habitat for others.
• Conservation experts say the new law puts threatened species at further risk, but the Doug Ford government says the change will speed up road, mining and housing developments.

Ontario’s Endangered Species Act is now officially repealed. The province says the move will allow quicker approvals for road, mining and housing developments, while experts say it could streamline destruction of critical habitats, further threatening wildlife such as woodland caribou, barn owls and the golden eagle.

The Endangered Species Act, passed in 2007, set explicit provincial goals for species recovery and stewardship. It was once considered the gold standard for species protection in Canada, prohibiting anyone from killing or harming endangered or threatened plants and animals, or engaging in activities that would cause harm.

In 2025, the Doug Ford government passed Bill 5, the Protect Ontario by Unleashing our Economy Act, ultimately repealing the Endangered Species Act. It has been replaced with the Species Conservation Act, which removes provincial protection from many species, leaving some threatened fish and birds only protected by federal laws that are limited to federal land and waters. 

The new law limits how habitat is considered and protected. It replaces expert review of permit applications for activities that could harm at-risk species with an online registration that doesn’t require government review, and “allows most projects to begin as soon as they register,” according to the province.

Experts say the new law will put threatened species at further risk.

Introducing the Species Conservation Act

“The original goal of the Endangered Species Act was to allow the species to recover,” Laura Bowman, an Indigenous Rights and environmental lawyer at Macpherson Law, said. “We’ve effectively abandoned those objectives, and that means that species will continue to decline. Probably their decline will accelerate very rapidly.”

Some of the major interim changes, passed in June under Bill 5, include narrowing what counts as a “habitat” — redefining habitats to the specific area an animal dens in, for example, rather than the larger area it uses to travel or find food. This could pose problems for wide-ranging species-at-risk such as woodland caribou, which rely on large, connected habitats to survive.

The province also no longer requires recovery strategies that guide efforts to bring an endangered species population back to health, laying out the required habitat and other critical factors. The province has argued former legislation was too rigid, preventing the government from focusing its resources to best benefit species.

The new act also removes provincial protections for migratory birds and fish, including redside dace, the minnows that became central to concerns over Ontario’s Highway 413 development, and the red-headed woodpecker. The province has argued they are already protected under federal laws. But in many cases that 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, which make up less than five per cent of the range of most terrestrial at-risk species. The federal government can extend its protections to provincial lands through emergency orders and other means, but rarely does so.

The new act, the province says, is proposed to reduce duplication with federal regulations and allow projects to progress in a “more efficient and cost-effective way.” Bowman, however, said “federal protections for species at risk are extremely limited,” adding that there will be “many, many species and their habitats that are not protected under federal law.”

“There’s going to be a lot of really tragic stories coming out of the rollout of this change,”  Bowman said.

Ontario’s at-risk species protections ‘relying on a voluntary mechanism’

Under the Endangered Species Act, companies proposing industrial or development projects had to demonstrate that a number of criteria were met before moving ahead with development that could affect at-risk species. It was meant to prevent impacts so severe a species couldn’t survive or recover, Bowman said.

“Now that’s not part of the equation. It’s an automatic registration system. So we’re going to see a lot more habitat destruction in particular happening, but also potentially direct harm to species,” Bowman said.

This has been a big sticking point for Kerrie Blaise, a lawyer with the northern Ontario environmental non-profit Legal Advocates for Nature’s Defence. The organization is currently representing two Indigenous interveners challenging the constitutionality of Bill 5 in court.

“When you look at the new act we’re dealing with, it’s effectively relying on a voluntary mechanism,” Blaise said, whereby companies can share key project information, including — in some cases — a conservation plan.

Another matter of concern, Blaise said, is actions under the Species Conservation Act are exempted from the Environmental Bill of Rights, which requires a public posting on the provincial environmental registry. That means applications for work that could potentially harm wildlife no longer have to be posted for public review and comment.

“How are people supposed to weigh in?” Blaise said. “These are decisions that impact communities.”

The new act also sets out activities that do not require any registration or permits to proceed. These include cutting down endangered black ash or butternut trees or hunting threatened eastern wolves or northern bobwhite, a quail found in southern Ontario.

Tens of thousands respond to Species Conservation Act. One northern Ontario city supports it

Much of what was originally proposed for the Species Conservation Act last April under Bill 5 is being carried forward, despite more than 61,000 public comments fielded during the 30-day mandatory public comment period last spring. 

At the time, the full regulations hadn’t yet been set for the Species Conservation Act. Those were released on March 30, nearly a year after the act was first proposed.

Another 1,800 comments were submitted in fall 2025 around the regulations themselves, which now allow the act to practically come into force. Many of the comments call for greater First Nations consultation and a return to the Endangered Species Act’s original principles — including from the cities of Toronto and Markham, Anishinabek Nation and environmental groups.

Some municipalities, including the City of North Bay, are happy with the changes.

“We welcome the proposed changes, which appear to strike a more effective balance between responsible development and the protection of vulnerable species,” the city wrote in its public comment. “The proposed registration-first model aligns with the city’s long-standing advocacy for a more predictable, proponent-driven approach.”

North Bay’s member of Parliament, Vic Fedeli —– who is also Ontario’s minister of economic development, job creation and trade —– is a supporter of the Ring of Fire mining development in Ontario’s Far North, leading the region with a development-first mindset. Fedeli told BayToday in June 2025 that Ontario will lose billions of dollars of new investment “if projects are going to take ten years to get shovels in the ground,” and that Bill 5 is about unlocking Ontario’s “true economic potential.”

Blaise said the lands and waters of northern Ontario are critical for many endangered species, including cougars and several species of bat, adding that, “It’s not surprising that [the Ontario government is] looking for that agenda, which is disregard for species, disregard for habitat — their recovery, their protection.”

“It’s a very disappointing response,” Blaise said. “It shows that now, more than ever, citizens, community members, individuals, really need to practice their environmental rights. That means being informed, having a say, and communicating that — whether that’s to your municipal level of government, your provincial MPP or the federal MP.”

Updated on April 7, 2026, at 5:23 p.m. ET: This story has been updated to remove reference to golden eagles as having federal protections, and therefore being de-listed under the Species Conservation Act. Golden eagles are still listed under the new act, so receive provincial protection for their nesting area only.

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Mycologist Aishwarya Veerabahu regularly walks the forests near her home in Wisconsin, marvelling at the myriad shapes and colours of mushrooms, sometimes foraging for something to bring home and sauté in garlic and butter. It’s a landscape she knows well, but in the last few years, she’s been noticing a worrying and unfamiliar presence: a vibrant yellow, tightly clustered invasive making itself at home. 

Known as golden oyster, it’s a ’shroom completely altering native fungi communities in North America.

“Golden oysters will grow in an order of magnitude more than any other mushroom that you’d see. If you come up on a log with golden oysters on it, there’s always a ton of them, multiple clusters,” Veerabahu said.

The popular mushrooms, often found on menus and supermarket shelves, are native to forests in Russia and Asia. They were first brought to North America in the early 2000s for cultivation, and took to the forests by 2010, expanding their numbers and range rapidly.

“There are some times where I’ve gone through a forest and teared up because I know that there are other mushrooms that were in that wood that aren’t there anymore,” Veerabahu said. “It can be a very sad thing when now it’s just dominated by this one species.”

A researcher at the University of Madison-Wisconsin, Veerabahu published a study last August that used data from citizen scientists to confirm the trend she’s been seeing locally. Golden oyster mushrooms — scientific name Pleurotus citrinopileatus— are quickly invading North America, including Ontario. 

And, scientists say, a booming home-growing trend may be accelerating their spread into forests and impacting biodiversity.

Golden oysters have been found in 25 states, “after escaping cultivation” of commercial growers and hobbyists. They’ve made their way to Ontario, where there have been more than 80 sightings logged on the iNaturalist app of the clusters growing out of dead hardwood in forests, provincial parks and even residential neighbourhoods. 

While most golden oysters in Canada are still concentrated closer to the border with the United States, the species has already travelled as far north as Magnetawan, Ont., near Parry Sound, and is increasingly established around Georgian Bay, on Lake Huron. The speed and distance of its spread has been surprising, Veerabahu said.

“It has thoroughly been unleashed and rapidly spread over the course of a short decade,” she said, adding that the mushrooms have more recently appeared in Quebec. “The best thing that we can do now is to try and prevent it from getting to new regions.” 

Provincial invasive species regulations don’t capture golden oyster mushrooms

Cassidy Mailloux is a guide at the Ojibway Prairie Complex in Windsor, Ont., who takes guests through the nature reserves year-round. She’s also working on a biodiversity study of the region’s native mushrooms as part of her master’s degree at the University of Windsor and has posted golden oyster sightings on iNaturalist, observations that helped inform Veerabahu’s study.

“We’ve only seen it in one of our parks out of the entire complex … and that’s one of our heavily foot-trafficked and most travelled parks,” she said, adding that this is a good sign that the invasion “hasn’t fully taken off yet.”

Still, she worries about the effect of invasive golden oysters on rarer species of fungi, such as the coral pink marulius, which is uncommonly reported but in large abundance in the Ojibway Prairie Complex. 

“I’m worried the golden oyster mushroom might take precedence,” Mailloux said, given golden oysters are an aggressive species that can grow quickly and prolifically in many kinds of wood and even sawdust — unlike some native species that require specific conditions to thrive. Both the city and her organization are still trying to figure out the best way to manage the invasive — and say visitors documenting sightings can inform this work. 

“Encouraging citizens to upload these observations can really help management and our ecosystem,” Mailloux said, “and just keeping a track on how bad it might be getting in the area.”

Despite the threat, the Government of Ontario has not added live oyster mushrooms to its prohibited or restricted invasive species lists, which would make it illegal to import, buy, sell — or sometimes even possess — an ecologically harmful strain.

Without this regulation, Veerabahu said, live cultures continue to be transported across borders. And, she said once golden oysters colonize an area, fewer other unique fungal species will be found there. The communities that do exist are also entirely changed. 

“Let’s say in an uncolonized dead tree, you had a nice, rich community of fungi A, B, C, D, E. Once golden oyster colonizes, now it’s golden oyster and fungi X, Y, Z,” Veerabahu said. 

This makes her concerned about a domino effect because fungal communities are primary wood decomposers of forests, playing an important role in cycling nutrients and storing carbon. “The identity of which species are able to coexist in that space is changing.” 

Monica Liedtke, terrestrial invasive plant coordinator for the Invasive Species Centre, in Sault St. Marie, Ont., agreed. She told The Narwhal via email that non-native invasive fungi can significantly disrupt Ontario’s ecosystems and environmental processes that have developed over thousands of years.

“When non-native invasive fungi establish, they can interfere with important symbiotic relationships between native fungi, trees and plants,” Liedtke told The Narwhal. Golden oysters can quicken the rate of wood decay, which then impacts the birds and bugs that use dead and dying trees for homes and food. “Over time, these disruptions can affect biodiversity across the entire ecosystem.”

Meanwhile, climate change is creating warmer conditions that will make Ontario even more hospitable to these mushrooms, allowing them to expand their range. Veerabahu and her team used a climate prediction model developed by NASA to predict what might happen in the next 15 years. The model predicted that the North American region climatically suitable for golden oyster mushrooms to grow would almost double. 

Grow-your-own mushroom kits threaten Ontario forests

Kyle McLoughlin, an arborist and supervisor of forest planning and health for the City of Burlington, said the reason he fears golden mushrooms is exactly why they’re popular among amateur growers.

“From an ecological perspective, they don’t have a niche. They can go anywhere. They’re very wide-ranging. They’re very comfortable in a lot of different types of wood and a lot of different environments,” McLoughlin said of golden oysters. “This is also why you can grow them so well.”

Kits with detailed growing instructions are readily available on the internet, with prices between $20 and $40. These are a “major source of their invasion,” McLoughlin said. 

“It’s literally being introduced into people’s homes and their properties through grow kits,” McLoughlin said. “We shouldn’t be selling people potential invasive species to bring into their homes.”

Still, grow kits remain widely sold with little public awareness of the risks. Consumers are often not warned when they buy a grow kit that tossing spent soil onto the compost pile, or leaving a kit outdoors, could unintentionally help an invasive spread.

There are some ways people can help slow the spread if they spot oyster mushrooms. If someone sees a log on their own property pop with golden oysters for the first time, it could be helpful to burn it, Veerabahu explained. People can also forage the mushrooms from forested areas, collecting them in closed containers to prevent spores from spreading.

The challenge is to muster enough public awareness and political will before things get out of control.

“It’s kind of like cockroaches. Once you start to see them, you know there’s a heck of a lot more in your walls,” McLoughlin said. “They are putting billions of spores into the air when they’re fruiting. And this is happening constantly.”

Some companies that have sold these kits around the world, like Far West Fungi, North Spore and MycoPunks have since discontinued some products due to concern. In a blog post titled “Yellow Oyster Disaster Zone,” MycoPunks wrote: “No shade intended on any other vendors who choose to keep selling golden oyster kits … we’ve all got our own different moral codes, but it’s not something we feel able to do in good conscience any more.”

But, given a lack of regulation in the province, it’s still easy to import kits from within Canada or around the world to grow in Ontario.

“Gardeners [and] hobby farmers should carefully consider the species they are cultivating. Choosing native species helps to reduce ecological risk,” Liedtke, from the Invasive Species Centre, said. Some kits sell species such as lion’s mane or chestnut mushrooms, which are both edible and native to Ontario. 

For those who are growing golden oysters, the Invasive Species Centre advises that used grow kits should be sealed in a garbage bag and left in the sun for several days to a week; this process, called solarization, helps kill remaining spores and fungal material. Then, the bag should be disposed of in municipal waste — not compost. 

“Neither the producer nor the consumer wants to be part of that spread,” Veerabahu said. “The mushroom grow kits are a huge point of concern. They’re essentially a live culture that can be transported anywhere, but they’re not being regulated and I’ll never blame hobby mushroom growers for that.”

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Summary

• Natural burial can reduce death’s environmental impact and honour humanity’s relationship with the Earth.
• But a range of policy restrictions make it nearly impossible to hold a natural burial in some jurisdictions.
• As interest in green death practices increases, advocates in Ontario are removing the barriers and opening some of the country’s first fully natural cemeteries.

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Kyle Moore was “the quintessential tree-hugger,” his father says. He was dedicated to shoreline conservation; he held a belief that people are part of the natural world, not apart from it — even after death. 

When he was diagnosed with a recurrence of brain cancer in 2015, his family was too dedicated to finding the right treatment to save his life to think about where it might end.

“We were really focused on trying to keep his spirits up, and focused on trying to beat it a second time,” Terry Moore, Kyle’s father, says from his home outside Minden, Ont., overlooking a frozen lake. “That delayed any conversation with respect to end-of-life planning.”

When Kyle passed away in 2019, after a four-year battle, his family wanted a way to honour the way he had lived his life.

“We owed it to Kyle to try to create a legacy for him that embodied his view,” Moore, a retired union negotiator and organizer, says. “That’s the origin … of how we came to understand greener natural burial. Up to that point, I hadn’t given two thoughts to that in my entire life.”

Moore has spent years organizing climate action in his community. He hosts the podcast Planet Haliburton, where he investigates environmental justice issues with experts, and is a vocal member of the group Seniors for Climate Action Now.

He thinks a lot about environmental issues, but the ways they connect to end-of-life choices are seldom discussed by the funeral industry, nor the jurisdictions that govern cemeteries. In many cases, that puts the burden of researching environmental burial options on grieving loved ones and places restrictions on their choices. 

The Moores — Terry, his wife Shirley and their two daughters — discovered they could lay Kyle to rest in biodegradable materials without embalming chemicals. They could restore his grave-site with native grasses, flowers and trees. Such a method uses less energy and water, avoids toxic preservatives and returns a body to the earth more gently than conventional burial, while providing habitat for plants and wildlife.

But as they got up to speed on end-of-life options, the family quickly ran into a barrier shaping burial choices across Ontario: it was February, and all four townships in Haliburton County prohibited winter burials.

“It was just a complete embargo,” Moore says. Burials without cremation require storage over the winter, until the ground thaws. But in order to use the cemetery storage in the county, bodies have to be embalmed with chemicals to delay decomposition, Moore explained.

“Green burial was an impossible option locally and we then basically decided that, well, that needed to change,” Moore says.

Terry and Shirley Moore launched into years of advocacy, forming the Haliburton Highlands Green Burial Society with other community members, to create a space for green burials to take place year-round. After seven years of speaking with like-minded advocates, giving presentations to local leaders and holding public meetings to help educate their neighbours, they found a path for green burials close to home, and without resorting to cremation as the only alternative.

While cremation conserves land, the process of using heat to turn remains to ash emits carbon and mercury (especially from burning older fillings), as well as other pollutants into the air. One study found that each cremation produces carbon emissions equivalent to driving 1,124 kilometres in a car. That’s still significantly below the emissions of a standard burial, which are equivalent to 4,000 kilometres driven.

Other communities in Ontario are beginning to venture down the path of green burials as more people seek out options that reflect their values, though access remains uneven and strictly regulated, leaving many families without local burial options for loved ones.

“There’s an inertia that’s built up within municipalities who run cemeteries … the barriers that they themselves put in place, [are] in fact, catering to the trend toward cremation,” Moore says. 

“What we’re asking them to do is embrace a more environmentally sustainable practice, which they’ve never had to advocate for, or they’ve never had to think in those terms before. They just follow demand. They don’t lead it.”

The environmental cost of funerals, and the opportunity to go natural

A major sticking point, Moore says, for green winter burials in Haliburton County, was the local government’s concern over the additional equipment and staff training required to remove snow, manage extreme weather and penetrate frozen ground. To help develop capacity for year-round burials, Moore’s society hosted a winter burials best practice workshop to help introduce county administration and staff to the available options, and brought in private companies for instruction on proper tools and techniques for winter burials. 

The Green Burial Society of Canada, founded in 2013, outlines five principles: no embalming; bodies are buried in biodegradable materials; grave-sites must be naturalized, allowing the area to integrate with surrounding ecosystems; memorialization must be simple, instead of using elaborate tombstones; and land use must be maximized so green burial sites remain as sustainable as possible into the future.

But, the most popular option for Canadians, comprising nearly 77 per cent of deaths as of 2024, is cremation. 

The other typical option in Canada is burial using embalming chemicals and sturdy, often elaborate caskets containing non-biodegradable materials. ​​The maintenance for these burials is also intensive, requiring upkeep with pesticides, synthetic fertilizers and heavy machinery.

Much like Moore, when Susan Greer first heard about natural burials — while listening to the radio in 2018 — she says it was a “lightbulb moment.” Now the executive director of the volunteer-run, province-wide non-profit Natural Burial Association in Ontario, she appreciated that loved ones are involved in natural ceremonies, decorating graves with cedar boughs or flowers and helping lower a loved one into the ground before filling the grave themselves. 

“What might not sound intuitive is that the more that one puts thought into the goodbye, [the more] it actually helps with the grieving process,” Greer says.

But when families and loved ones are in the throes of grief, any barriers to the ceremony can seem insurmountable. It’s why advocates like Moore and Greer want to make natural burials accessible rather than prohibitive.

Greer imagined one call to the planning department in Toronto, where she lives, would get a natural burial ground underway. In reality, it was an eight-year-long process that is still ongoing.

Finally, in 2025, she found an off-market dairy farm to transform into a 38-hectare natural burial ground in Simcoe County, near Oro-Medonte, Ont. She has undertaken myriad municipal approval processes, including hydrogeological and archeological studies and zoning amendments. She has also faced public concern from neighbours that the burial ground would contaminate well water.

“It was just extraordinarily complicated to start a cemetery,” Greer says.

After years of work, if all goes as planned, more than 24,000 people, Greer says, will be able to be buried at the natural burial ground in Simcoe County among forest and fields, which will become wildflower meadows. Now, she helps advocates around the province, like Moore, by providing the documentation and guidance on the many logistics that come with creating opportunities for natural burials. 

This follows the model of Canada’s first standalone natural burial ground on Salt Spring Island, B.C., surrounded by old-growth forest. More common, though, is a hybrid model, where one section of a traditional cemetery is carved out for natural burials — like the cemetery the Moores established in their town.

The green burial movement is seeing growth worldwide. Data from the U.S.-based National Funeral Directors Association shows 61 per cent of respondents to a 2025 survey were interested in exploring “green” funeral options, up from 55 per cent in 2021, and the U.S. industry is expected to reach $2 billion by the end of 2025.

“There’s also those that would consider it undignified or … aren’t interested in entertaining natural burial,” Greer says, explaining that part of her work is proving demand exists to the funeral industry. “The demand is huge. It’s really, really huge.”

Along with the environmental benefits, natural burials can be more affordable, advocates say, which may resonate with the 46 per cent of Ontarians worried about affording funeral costs for family members. A 2024 report shows the average cost of a funeral in Canada was more than $7,700, reaching up to $17,000 for burial and $14,000 for cremation. 

Natural burial costs also vary and are changing as the practice develops, but some sources say prices currently range from $3,000 to $8,000, depending on the region and cemetery, due to lower costs for more simplistic caskets and markers. Although green burial plots require less upkeep in terms of fertilizers, pesticides and landscaping, they’re still subject to a maintenance fee of 40 per cent of the price of an in-ground grave, per the Bereavement Authority of Ontario’s regulations, which Greer is hoping will change. 

It’s a fee that the Natural Burial Association calls a “tax on grieving,” when compared to the national average, which the association says is 13 per cent to maintain and preserve the cemetery in perpetuity, including cutting grass and repairing roads and markers.

“The affordability and the cost of end of life is a huge, huge worry for Ontarians, and we have some fees in Ontario that are just insane compared to the rest of Canada and North America,” Greer says. “We’re trying to combat that.”

As cities in Ontario and around the world warn that land for cemetery space near urban centres is a resource that will soon run out, Greer is also advocating for land ‘renewal.’ This is the idea that a plot of land used to naturally bury someone can be used again for a burial years later. 

That isn’t legal in Ontario yet, but is practised in parts of Europe and Asia.“This is all about reconnecting with nature, so that we can see that we’re all part of the web of life, the greater cycle of life, and giving ourselves back to the earth that sustained us in life,” Greer says.

“You can’t have life without death,” Greer says. “This is a demonstration of that.”

The long history of natural burials

Since Canada’s first urban green-burial site opened in 2008 in Victoria, more than a dozen have followed. In Ontario, spaces for natural burials have opened in Kingston, Guelph and Niagara Falls. But the notion of burials with a low impact on the environment has a long history.

While practices vary, First Nations burial rituals often recognize the connection between the person and the land, using natural, biodegradable materials such as sweetgrass, cedar, sage or tobacco to pay respects. Likewise, some religious traditions provide guidance for today’s secular green burial advocates. 

“Traditionally Jews and Muslims use a very simple plywood casket,” Sabi Ahsan, chair of the Toronto Muslim Cemetery Corporation, says. “People have now also come up with cardboard caskets … so that I think will be even more environmentally friendly.”

In Judaism, the plain pine casket is seen as an equalizer — a reminder that status and wealth don’t come with us to the grave. In Islam, the premise is similar, prioritizing humility and modesty while allowing the body to return to the earth quickly.

“Man was made from earth, according to the Quranic stories, and so he’s returned to it,” Ahsan says.

In both Islam and Judaism, people must be buried very quickly — ideally within 24 hours of death. As a result, Muslim community advocacy groups in Ontario, including the Northern Muslim Association, have raised concerns about limited access to natural burials, especially in the winter. A representative of the group told the CBC in 2024 that families across Ontario have to ship deceased loved ones to cemeteries in Toronto and Ottawa for a natural burial, costing thousands of dollars and requiring family members to travel hundreds of kilometres to visit the grave-sites. 

Ahsan has seen it at his cemetery in Toronto, with people arriving from northern Ontario for a proper Muslim burial. This has lessened, he added, since the Barrie Mosque purchased plots for Muslim burials at the Innisvale Cemetery in Barrie, Ont., in 2020.

A green resting place, close to home

In late 2024, Shirley was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. As with Kyle, the Moores hoped when the time came to be able to give her a natural burial, close to home. But winter burials were still not permitted at the local cemetery.

When she passed away in March 2025, Moore says, the local council quickly moved on its bylaw to allow winter burials to create the county’s first dedicated green burial site, usable year-round. It passed just a few days after her death, finally bringing the option of a green burial, simple and beautiful, to the community, with Shirley the first person buried there.

“It’s a bit sobering, a bit ironic,” Moore says, “but we managed to pull it off.”

Operating already, the opening ceremony for the green burial section in St. Stephen’s Cemetery is scheduled to take place in May 2026, Moore says. Neighbouring Highlands East plans to also open a natural burial area later this spring and, in Oro-Medonte in early February 2026 the council approved the zoning amendment to allow Greer’s natural burial ground.

Moore still attends countless meetings to show cemetery and municipal leadership that green burials are something people want and need. He continues to advocate, he says, because individual environmental choices feel increasingly critical.

“Our bodies are important nutrients, not waste to be pumped into [the] atmosphere to help make the climate emergency worse,” Moore says. “We’re hopeful now that this is going to help spur it on in other places.”

Shirley is buried in a corner of St. Stephen’s Cemetery, next to a timber-framed gazebo and two large stones that will soon be engraved with the names of those buried here. Kyle is buried about ten metres away. 

The cemetery is just off a quiet rural road. In the spring, local volunteer gardeners will continue to plant small native trees and shrubs. Trees line the fence and the cemetery’s edge. Terry Moore is a few minutes away.

“People want to be close when they pass,” he says. “They want to be close to what they love.”

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Summary

• Salt applied to roads and parking lots in winter is washing into the Lake Simcoe watershed and others throughout Ontario.
• Increasing salinity in the Lake Simcoe watershed is a threat to biodiversity and drinking water.
• One possible solution to the problem is introducing limited liability for owners of commercial parking lots, so they aren’t tempted to oversalt their properties to protect against “slip and fall” lawsuits.

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In February 2025, a small freshwater stream in Newmarket, Ont., was saltier than the ocean. The source? Winter road salt, washing off local parking lots and highways into the Lake Simcoe watershed.

As a result, concentrations of chloride — one of two minerals that make up table salt — in Western Creek exceeded 26,000 milligrams per litre of water. Meanwhile seawater typically sits at 19,400 milligrams of chloride per litre of water, according to the local conservation authority. 

For Christopher Wellen, an environmental scientist focused on hydrology and associate professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, this finding was not surprising: the Simcoe region, and many others across southern Ontario, have big salt problems. 

“It washes away from the roads, but it doesn’t just disappear,” Wellen said. “It goes where the water goes — that’s our groundwater, it’s our lakes, it’s our rivers — and has effects there.” 

For decades, the concentration of road salt in Lake Simcoe has been on the rise: 120,000 tonnes of it are used by communities in the watershed annually, Lake Simcoe Region Conservation Authority has reported. That amounts to roughly 227 kilograms of salt per person in the region every year.

Heavy salting in winter is not unusual, but Lake Simcoe has been monitored for decades, so it can act as a case study of exactly what happens when this much road salt is being applied. And it illuminates the environmental impact across the province where high-traffic areas, surrounded by cities, towns and a dense network of roadways, are inundated with salt.

Road salt and fresh water

Road salt is primarily made up of sodium chloride and is used to remove ice from roadways in the winter. But oversalting has widespread impacts on ecosystems, harming aquatic life and depleting biodiversity year-round.

“Every organism that lives in streams and rivers and lakes … has tolerances for all sorts of things like temperature fluctuations and salt fluctuations,” Wellen said. “If the water becomes too salty, they can find it really difficult to reproduce and thrive and continue to exist, basically.”

All this chloride does not break down, or simply wash away. It accumulates over time. 

“It’s quite possible that, if things don’t change, the food web could be quite affected,” Wellen added. The problem starts at the bottom of the food chain, he said, and makes its way up.

Since fish are mobile, they can generally avoid areas with high salt concentrations. The pronounced impacts are on the more stationary species, like critters that live in riverbeds. They also make up the base of the food chain, so when they are unable to survive the salty water, organisms higher up lose their food supply.

The Lake Simcoe Region Conservation Authority says on its website that winter salt has become a topic of “great concern” in the watershed, particularly because there isn’t an effective way to remove it. And Lake Simcoe, the largest lake wholly in southern Ontario, supplies drinking water for hundreds of thousands of residents — with hundreds of thousands more relying on groundwater aquifers in the watershed.

How salty is Lake Simcoe?

In Canada, the federal government provides long- and short-term guidelines for exposure to chloride before aquatic life is affected. At a concentration of 640 milligrams of chloride per litre of water for as little as 24 hours, aquatic life could be severely affected. For longer-term exposure, concentrations beyond 120 milligrams of chloride​ per litre of water would see harm to aquatic life such as a fish species declining over time.

David Lembcke, director of watershed science and monitoring at Lake Simcoe Region Conservation Authority, jokingly equates the latter threshold to a pack-a-day cigarette habit: “You’re going to have long-term impacts from that. There are some sensitive biota in the lake that will probably have reproductive, developmental, long-term impacts at those levels.” 

The authority produced a report more than a decade ago that already showed chloride concentrations were impacting these aquatic species in 64 per cent of the Lake Simcoe watershed.

In the lake itself, the concentration in February was around 61 milligrams of chloride​ per litre of water, Lembcke said, which is about half of the long-term exposure guideline set by the province. But that level has been steadily increasing by 0.7 milligrams of chloride per litre of water annually, according to the conservation authority. Elsewhere in the watershed, especially in tributaries in urban areas like Hotchkiss Creek and West Holland River, concentrations regularly exceed both guidelines, Lembcke said, and long after winter ends.

“We have this incredibly persistent, relentless increasing trend in lake [salt] concentrations,” Lembcke said. “Certainly the potential is there: if we don’t curb the amount of salt that we’re using, drinking water could be impacted.”

For drinking water, the Ontario objective is 250 milligrams of chloride​ per litre of water, but this is based on taste, not health considerations. For people who need to limit their sodium intake for things like high blood pressure, or kidney or liver diseases, Health Canada recommends that salt in water shouldn’t exceed 20 milligrams per litre.

In Waterloo, Ont., groundwater and consequently drinking water has already been impacted; given high concentrations in some areas, the city has to mix groundwater from different wells to average out chloride levels across the region. They’ve campaigned hard for curbing road salt use, since current water and wastewater treatment doesn’t remove salt, and the municipality explains on their website that removing it requires expensive, energy-intensive treatment. And that would mean higher water costs for the community.

How do you solve a problem like road salt?

While some communities look to solutions such as replacements for road salt, they also carry their own challenges: alternatives like beet juice or sodium acetate can be prohibitively expensive, and their long-term effects on ecosystems aren’t entirely known. 

Some experts and activists are looking to stop the problem at its source. Commercial parking lots are among the biggest culprits for oversalting, likely since they are liable for any injury that occurs on snow or ice on their properties.

“The problem that we keep seeing is that small businesses or big parking lots are oversalting, and it’s a perverse incentive structure where they feel like they have to do it to protect themselves against the slip and fall [lawsuits],” Jonathan Scott, executive director of the Rescue Lake Simcoe Coalition, said. Scott is chair of the Nottawasaga Valley Conservation Authority and a Bradford West Gwillimbury councillor.

“It’s not any safer. It’s worse for the environment. It’s worse for small businesses in terms of increased costs,” he said.

Proponents including Scott and Lembcke are arguing to modernize the law by offering limited liability, or a stronger defence against being sued, to those businesses who get an accepted certification such as Smart About Salt, and learn how to implement best salting practices for public safety and the environment alike. 

“If you’re following best practices and if you’re doing the right thing as a winter maintenance operator, that should be a defence for the operator and the property owner against slip and fall claims,” Scott said. “It seems like such a simple pro-business, pro-environment legal reform that wouldn’t cost us anything.” 

Scott points to New Hampshire, a state with comparable winter conditions to Ontario, as an example. The state reduced its salt pollution by 25 to 45 per cent by granting limited liability protection to certified commercial salt applicators. 

Wellen and his team have done modelling studies to see what would happen if a legal reform like this was adopted in the Lake Simcoe area; he said the results are promising, finding it could decrease the concentrations in the lake significantly by the end of the century.

But the province, who would have to make that regulatory change, has yet to sign on.

“It seems to be one of those problems that’s entirely of our own making, in which case it should be something that we can fix,” Lembcke said. “I’m optimistic that it’s something that we can address.”

— With files from Fatima Syed

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Matt Thomson spends his free time pushing toward his yearly goal of biking 10,000 kilometres around Orillia, Ont. A furniture-maker by trade, he also builds bat boxes and installs pollinator gardens to support the forests, lakes and wetlands he’s loved his entire life. Lately, he’s been getting worried.

A few kilometres from his home in Severn Township, the pinch of land between lakes Couchiching and Simcoe and Georgian Bay, developer LIV Communities and its partner Bosseini Living, cut a trail through a wetland, clearing trees and catching the community off-guard. The trail connects a private beachside park with the approximately 180-home subdivision the developers are building. Thomson began raising the issue to neighbours, the municipality and then local news in early 2024 to see what could be done.

“People were concerned,” Thomson said. “A lot of people were thinking … ‘If this developer can get away with building a road through a wetland, who else is going to do it?’ ” Residents worry the disruption could worsen flooding in the area this spring but municipal officials say they have no authority to intervene. And, ultimately, the approximately 250-metre long path has already been laid and opened to residents of the Serenity Bay subdivision — with cameras making sure no one else trespasses.

In June, Severn Township Mayor Mike Burkett told Orillia Matters that to him, the path is “not a walkway. It’s a road,” calling it “upsetting.” But in late November, Severn Township told The Narwhal in a statement that “The trail is not a road.” The township said the subdivision application, “which encompasses the multi-use trail within its limits, underwent a thorough review during the approval process by the Township of Severn and the County of Simcoe, the ultimate authority for subdivision approvals.” That review included an environmental impact study, archaeological assessment and stormwater management report, according to the statement.

 “The actions undertaken by the developer to establish a pathway are within their rights,” it continued.

However, the statement explained, once the Serenity Bay pathway was built, “the work was more extensive than what was proposed, and we learned about it through local media.” At the time, Burkett told Orillia Matters he was surprised by the development, adding he wished “residents had said something” before the path was built, but “It was all done before we even were aware.” At this point, according to the statement, the township notified the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry.

The province can hand down fines for degrading a wetland, among other measures. The primary regulation is the Conservation Authorities Act, under which the ministry can fine $50,000 or more, mandate the developer to remediate the land or even order jail time. But the wetland crossed by the path lies just beyond the border of two different conservation authorities, putting it outside their jurisdiction. And LIV Communities does not appear to have broken any rules.

For Thomson, the options are few. He could attempt to challenge the development at the Ontario Land Tribunal — a process he feels is too expensive and uncertain, or hope the ministry steps in. Neither seems likely.

“The damage is already done,” he said. “Once a wetland is destroyed, you can’t really undo that.”

LIV Communities, Bosseini Living and the Ministry of Natural Resources did not respond to The Narwhal’s detailed questions about building in provincially significant wetlands. Rama First Nation, whose traditional territory includes the wetland, said it was not consulted by the developer or province. “Chief and Council of Chippewas of Rama First Nation are deeply concerned by reports of unauthorized road construction through a protected wetland in our traditional territory,” it told The Narwhal in an emailed statement.

The chief and council continued that wetlands are sacred to Anishinaabe people, and “carry spirit and memory, and their protection is a shared responsibility.”

The nation said developments that may adversely affect Treaty Rights must be preceded by consultation with First Nations. “Meaningful consultation is a legal responsibility and requirement — not an optional step of the planning process. We call on all levels of government to ensure accountability, require immediate remediation and work in partnership with Rama First Nation to prevent further harm,” the statement said.

What happened in Severn reflects a much larger shift across Ontario, one that experts warn is reshaping the province’s wetlands far beyond a single disputed path.

Ontario contains about six per cent of the world’s wetlands, but has lost nearly three-quarters of what it once had. Those losses have continued under recent provincial policies encouraging rapid development and easing restrictions for environmentally sensitive areas. “We’re getting a taste of how things are going across the province, because we’re forcing a lot of these housing projects,” Thomson said. “Environmental stuff comes last.”

Ontario wetlands are now ‘pretty easy’ to ‘take a bite out of,’ experts say

Swamps, fens, marshes and bogs, like the sprawling peatlands of northern Ontario, are critical in the face of mounting climate change. They’ve been called “nature’s kidneys,” for their ability to purify environmental pollutants. They support 20 per cent of species at risk, significantly reduce floods and the consequent damage costs by up to 38 per cent and store 29 billion tonnes of carbon in the province. 

And the Orillia area is a powerhouse. In a 2023 study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, Florin Pendea and others from Lakehead University found the type of wetlands in the Lake Simcoe watershed were 50 per cent more effective in storing carbon than other wetland ecosystems they studied, second only to salt marshes along seashores. This is because the areas are nutrient-rich, highly productive and frequently flooded — all conditions that boost organic matter build-up while slowing decomposition.

The wetland where the new path appeared is listed as provincially significant on government maps, meaning it’s identified by the province as being valuable for its ability to store groundwater and manage flooding, provide wildlife habitat and support biodiversity, among other measures. Provincially significant wetlands, like this one, are granted stricter protections than others, but under environmental protection zoning for the area in Severn, “passive outdoor recreational activities, such as trails,” are allowed, according to the township. While the Severn wetland falls just outside the jurisdiction of any conservation authority, the watershed monitoring agencies generally regulate areas like this across southern Ontario and some of the north.

But it’s getting harder and harder to protect any wetland under the current Ontario government.

Under changes introduced by Premier Doug Ford in the last few years, including Bill 23, the Build Homes Faster Act, the Ontario Wetland Evaluation System was rewritten in ways that make it easier for developers to downgrade or remove protections. 

Species at risk no longer factor into evaluations. Wetlands that function as interdependent ecosystems can no longer be “complexed” together, which means portions of larger interconnected wetland systems can be carved off and lose protection. And consultants hired by developers can re-evaluate wetlands and upload revised maps directly to the provincial database with no oversight from the ministry.

“Many wetlands that were formerly protected — under these new, more loosey-goosey rules [they] don’t meet that bar anymore, and so developers can go and re-evaluate them and have portions of a provincially significant wetland complex de-listed,” Rebecca Rooney, the founder of the Waterloo Wetland Laboratory at the University of Waterloo, said. “That has occurred in many watersheds across Ontario.” Earlier this year, Mississippi Valley Conservation Authority reported this sort of delisting in their jurisdiction east of Ottawa.

When the changes were proposed in 2022, Rooney and a group of more than 70 aquatic scientists and experts, as part of the group Save Ontario Wetlands, signed a letter saying these changes remove key oversight responsibilities, create a piece-meal and under-resourced evaluation process and disregard the importance of these areas for threatened species.

Further, changes to the Conservation Authorities Act have included the recently proposed consolidation of the number of watershed protection agencies across Ontario from 36 into seven, and weakened these authorities’ ability to protect wetlands.

While the province announced a $9.6-million investment to “restore and enhance wetlands” to protect communities from flooding and other climate-driven events in fall 2025, the question of enforcement and consequences when wetlands are destroyed remains. 

Insurance companies are also recognizing the importance of protecting these ecosystems for their bottom line. Intact Financial Corporation is funding research on maintaining wetlands in their natural state to reduce flood damage. A computer simulation of a pilot site in Waterloo calculated a savings of $51.1 million in damage costs, thanks to a natural wetland.

Yet changes to the evaluation system makes it possible for wetlands to quietly disappear on paper long before anyone recognizes the consequences on the ground. “There’s no watchdog, nobody’s really tracking what’s happening,” Rooney said. “It’s pretty easy now to take a bite out of a provincially significant wetland.”

The trials of citizen wetland monitors in Ontario

In 2023, a Severn resident was reprimanded for dredging and operating a vehicle in a provincially significant wetland, according to local media. The penalties were a $4,000 invoice from the township for the cost of gates to keep him out and a stop-work order from the Ministry of Natural Resources. 

At the time, Mayor Burkett told Orillia Matters the small township relies on complaints from the public to respond to these issues, echoing his stance on the Serenity Bay development. But it has proven difficult to figure out just what development is happening, and if it’s legal, before shovels are in the ground. 

After, there’s little to no recourse.

For residents like Thomson, the Ontario Land Tribunal is often the only remaining avenue to challenge development. 

Rooney served as an expert witness in one such case involving an area of the Greater Cataraqui Marsh in Kingston, Ont., part of which is a provincially significant wetland where homes and commercial buildings were proposed. Kingston’s city council originally denied the developer’s application, defending this decision at the tribunal after the developer filed an appeal. 

During the hearings, it came to light that a portion of the wetland was no longer listed as provincially significant. This is despite prior protection as part of the larger complex, according to Laura Jean Cameron, a professor of geography and planning at Queen’s University, and one of several residents who opposed the project. But it was hard for citizens to determine what was no longer listed.

“It’s endlessly frustrating,” Cameron said.

Even with a background in historical geography, Cameron struggled to find clear records showing how parts of the Kingston marsh had been designated provincially significant in the past, and when those borders changed. Using provincial maps, she learned the borders of the wetland complex had been updated in 2024. 

Then, in the hearing, Cameron said it was confirmed the developer paid for the re-evaluation that resulted in the map being changed.

“It’s not straightforward at all,” she said. “Citizens can have the up-to-date information, but there’s no legacy information to make the comparison, so you don’t know what’s changed.”

To understand all of this, Cameron worked with geospatial librarians and data scientists, assembling information from past wetland maps to see how and when the wetland’s designation changed and which carved out portions could now be built upon more easily. It’s work most residents would never have the time or expertise to do.

“If citizens are supposed to speak up, they need people to help interpret these sources of information,” Cameron said.

Despite the effort, after five weeks of hearings in early 2024, the tribunal sided with the developer and zoning was ultimately approved by the province, allowing the development to move ahead for further approvals. “Because of the expense and all the time, it’s going to make people just feel like there’s no point in fighting these things at that tribunal level,” Cameron said. 

For the area in Severn, where the provincially significant wetland status still stands, Cameron sees troubling parallels. “My worry for the citizens of Orillia is that no action will be taken by the ministry or anyone — that the developer will face no consequences,” she said in an email to The Narwhal. “And ‘fixing’ their mistake would be a matter of permit signing and paperwork, not the removal of the road or an attempt to repair the wetland.” 

Thomson fears the same. He continues biking in the area, watching construction advance. He worries about flooding come next spring. “There’s very little attention paid to what’s being lost,” Thomson said.

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Internal studies about contamination at a Saskatchewan military base found evidence of dust contaminated with PFAS — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, often referred to as forever chemicals — and experts who reviewed the data say it could pose a risk to people who work there.

“The sampling results indicate that PFAS [are] present in dust,” the March 2025 study, obtained by The Narwhal, concluded. When The Narwhal asked independent experts to review the findings, one noted the concentrations were in some cases “very high,” while another flagged that several volatile organic compounds associated with increased cancer risk are also present.

The study looked at a building known as Building 143 at CFB Moose Jaw, home of the Snowbirds, where employees have been ringing alarm bells about what they say are concerning numbers of illnesses and deaths among employees and military members on base.

It took place about three months after three employees of the Moose Jaw base went to Ottawa to speak about cancers, infertility, neurological disorders and untimely deaths of colleagues — at a public hearing of the Standing Committee on National Defence in December 2024. At least one of these employees has since had to go on long-term disability insurance, and another submitted an official refusal to work in Building 143 and the base at large for fear of how it is impacting her health.

The concerns of the employees, National Defence told The Narwhal, eventually led the department to initiate the study published in March 2025, in what they called a “a transparent and evidence-based analysis to address the concerns expressed by some employees,” undertaken out “of an abundance of caution.”

The Department of National Defence told The Narwhal it is “committed to the health and safety of personnel and surrounding communities, as well as to responsible environmental management.”

“As part of this commitment, we conduct regular monitoring programs at bases and wings to assess environmental conditions and identify potential concerns,” the department shared, adding the reports are now available for all service members to review.

The department asserts it has “no concerns about the safety of this particular building at this time,” given there is “no evidence to suggest that 15 Wing buildings are unsafe or unfit for occupancy.” (15 Wing refers to the centre of the Royal Canadian Air Force activity at the Moose Jaw base.) But some experts disagree.

PFAS are linked to cancers, infertility and more

Contamination on federal sites is an issue across Canada. There are thousands of contaminated sites listed on the federal contaminated sites inventory. PFAS are found or suspected on more than 100 of them, in large part from firefighting foam National Defence used to train military and civilian firefighters across Canada from the 1970s to the early 2010s.

At CFB Moose Jaw, employees have been concerned for years; they’ve compiled a list of nearly 200 illnesses and dozens of obituaries of colleagues. One building in particular, where at least five women who worked together had emergency hysterectomies, has been at the top of mind — Building 143. It’s a central building housing offices and medical centres for personnel where internal studies confirmed the presence of PFAS.

Here, employees told The Narwhal they were constantly wiping an unusual amount of dust off their coffee mugs and desks daily, and some say they smelled chemical smells wafting past their desks at various times of day.

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 prostate, kidney and testicular 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 and children can be exposed through ingestion of human milk.  

Other carcinogens present at Building 143 are a risk no matter what the level: expert

The internal documents obtained by The Narwhal also show “airborne concentrations of several [volatile organic compounds]” — also known as VOCs. Some are associated with increased cancer risk, said Christine Oliver, a professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto, who reviewed the documents and has studied clusters of illnesses arising from contaminated workplaces for decades.

The carcinogens found in the studies include trichloroethylene (an industrial metal-degreaser), benzene (found in gasoline) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, which are produced by incomplete burning of coal, crude oil and gasoline. The Environmental Protection Agency says people can be exposed to mixtures of PAHs by breathing air contaminated with vehicle exhaust, or fumes from asphalt roads. The agency says several individual PAHs and some specific mixtures of PAHs are considered to be cancer-causing.

“That airborne concentrations of the [Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons] are below the [Occupational Exposure Limit] does not mean that they are harmless,” Oliver said. “For carcinogens, the existence of a threshold — i.e., a dose below which there is no cancer risk — is rare. I can think of none.”

The Department of National Defence told The Narwhal that Building 143 is not a suspected contaminated site, and there is “no subsequent environmental sampling required.”

The department did not respond to The Narwhal’s questions for responses to experts who believe the contracted reports are showing concerning levels of contaminants — enough to warrant exposure and health concerns in employees.

Contamination data at other bases found to be ‘incorrect’ and ‘biased’

Oliver is not the only expert who had concerns about the findings, though. 

Meg Sears is chair of the organization Prevent Cancer Now, whose board is composed of physicians, environmental advocates and at least one veteran. For decades, she has been working to help veterans in Gagetown, N.B., receive accurate data about their exposure to Agent Orange — the infamous herbicide mixture used by the American army during the Vietnam War — which was tested on-base in the 1960s.

Sears calls the findings of the federal government studies done at Gagetown “flimsy” — an opinion backed up last year by a commission in Maine, which looked into the health of National Guard members who had trained at the New Brunswick base and called Canada’s data “incorrect” and “biased.” So, despite the assurances provided to CFB Moose Jaw employees by their superiors, Sears is not convinced. 

“If there is some kind of selective choice of analyses being done or types of sampling being done, it’s not the first time that the Government of Canada has chosen to do these kinds of reports in perhaps not the most informing way,” Sears said, pointing to the fact that testing the building’s water supply, groundwater and soil from below the interior footprint of the building was “excluded from the scope of work” by the Department of National Defence.

The Department of National Defence told The Narwhal that the base’s drinking water, including Building 143’s, is supplied by the City of Moose Jaw, adding: “Drinking water is tested at all [Canadian Armed Forces] locations on a regular schedule,” and that current results don’t indicate any of the 25 polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) substances listed by Health Canada.

“The question for this study is, ‘What is the exposure to the people who are carefully walking around and just going straight to their work at their desk,” Sears said. “And what this is showing is that, even within the building, there is significant exposure to PFAS just from the dust.”

“Certainly there are significant quantities of PFAS there,” Sears said, adding: “The pattern is indicative of contamination from the Air Force.”

Higher PFAS levels than soil beside chemical manufacturers: expert

When asked to review the studies, Sébastien Sauvé, a professor of environmental chemistry at Université de Montréal, who was called to the standing committee meeting late last year, also saw reasons for concern.

“Some of those concentrations are very high,” he explained. He said some of the dust samples’ PFAS values are higher than what he’s seen in contaminated soils right beside a PFAS chemical manufacturer.

Sauvé is no stranger to contaminated National Defence bases; in his home province of Quebec, he discovered that PFAS had spread from a contaminated military base in Bagotville, Que., to drinking water wells up to 10 kilometres away. 

A spokesperson from the Department of National Defence told The Narwhal that an indoor air assessment and hazardous substance assessment of Building 143 “did not identify any health issues,” and that “National Defence has no concerns about any other buildings across the base.”

“A typical case might be something that people would be focusing on, but that’s resulted in underestimation of people who are at the highest risk,” said Sears. “If we’re going to take precautionary approaches, we’re looking after the most vulnerable and the most exposed.”

Meanwhile, concerned employees are hoping the issue will be brought back to Ottawa this year, since the study has since been dropped when Parliament was prorogued for the election back in April 2025, meaning the planned study was not finalized. 

The Department of National Defence told The Narwhal investigation into contamination at 15 Wing Moose Jaw will be ongoing over the coming year, at Hangars 2 and 6 and the former site of Hangar 5, “ to ascertain the extent and impact of potential petroleum hydrocarbon contamination linked to the historical use of storage tanks.” Additionally, the department said it plans to construct four new buildings on 15 Wing Moose Jaw to support future aircrew training, which “will remove contaminated soil as part of the construction process.”

“I have a lot of hope, because I believe that while systematic issues are challenging, they can be addressed through proper government intervention, transparency and accountability,” said Erin Zimmerman, the former employee of Building 143 who had to take disability leave due to her worsening Parkinson’s symptoms.

Updated on Oct. 6, 2025, at 3:25 p.m MT: This story has been updated to remove photos of the armoury in Moose Jaw, which is not the subject of the reports mentioned.

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.

Laurent Robichaud loves rivers. He loves rafting them, canoeing them and watching sturgeon swim in them. The self-proclaimed “sturgeon whisperer” lives in the northern Ontario town of Timmins, built along the Mattagami River, where mining has been the economic driver for more than a century.

A lookout with panoramic views of the city, overlooking an open-pit mine, is a popular attraction. The Hollinger gold mine was active on and off for more than a century, only ceasing operations in late 2024. When it was active, security guards kept onlookers at a safe distance during blasting, which loosened nearly 30,000 tonnes of rock at a time, while they strolled and picnicked.

While the foundation of Timmins’ mining history is laid in gold, its future may lie in vast reserves of nickel, which are ushering in a different kind of rush.

Nickel is a “critical mineral,” needed for clean energy technology like batteries. It falls under the federal government’s controversial critical minerals strategy, which is meant to clear the way for mining projects that present a “generational opportunity for Canada,” and move us toward a greener, digital economy. It does this in part by fast-tracking environmental assessments and, critics say, limiting community participation in decision-making and underemphasizing the ecological importance of resource-rich areas.

Global demand for nickel is expected to double by 2050. Around Timmins, several mining projects are underway that would collectively extract much of Canada’s 2.2 million tonnes of nickel. That’s two per cent of the global reserve of nickel. In 2023, Ontario supplied nearly 60 per cent of the country’s entire nickel production, and other mines are planning all-season access roads farther north to tap into the region’s abundant deposits. But in Timmins and elsewhere, concerns abound about what this mining rush means for the land, as well as animals and people who rely on it. 

About 40 kilometres north of Timmins, Canada Nickel has proposed the massive Crawford Nickel mine near several tributaries of the Mattagami River. If the project becomes a reality, it could be the second largest nickel mine in the world, alongside an on-site mill.

Canada Nickel CEO Mark Selby tells The Narwhal it will be in production by 2028 — at which point, treated effluent will be discharged into two natural creeks that flow into the Abitibi River.

Robichaud, a director of the Ontario Rivers Alliance, sits on an environmental committee that works directly with the Crawford mine and has sought answers for how that effluent will impact the river and the species within it, like the sturgeon, which he sees less and less nowadays.

“To me, we’re talking water, we’re talking watersheds,” Robichaud says.

According to Canada Nickel’s federal impact assessment filing, the mine is anticipated to “result in the unavoidable harmful alteration, disruption or destruction” of 147 hectares of fish habitat.

Canada’s Impact Assessment Agency provided nearly 25 pages of commentary from federal departments and experts on this assessment, including notes on the “substantial” amount of “seepage” that is predicted to bypass the mine’s drainage and water collection systems while the mine is in operation. This seepage, which Environment and Climate Change Canada expects to contain arsenic, chloride, uranium and other minerals that are risky at high levels, will be deposited in several rivers, creeks and eight lakes currently used by Indigenous communities where the agency noted “toxicity effects on aquatic life are likely.”

Beyond the water, the mine’s construction will remove an estimated 11,785 hectares of critical wildlife habitat for threatened woodland caribou and endangered northern long-eared bats.

Selby is pitching the Crawford project to media and investors as a major untapped resource, according to Northern Ontario Business, and the mine as emissions free. That’s due to its patent-pending system called “in-process tailings carbonation,” which proposes to store up to 1.5 million tonnes of carbon captured from the mine’s production in the mine waste. This experimental storage method has received more than $3 million in funding from the federal government.

In early September, the Crawford mine was listed on an internal draft of 32 projects prioritized for fast-tracked federal approval, leaked to the Globe and Mail. It did not make the top five list of projects to be considered for fast-tracking, released by the Prime Minister’s Office shortly after, but was named on a second list of projects to be considered, released Nov. 13.

Selby says the project will create approximately 2,000 jobs during construction, which should break ground in 2026, and up to 1,300 jobs when the mine is built and operational about two years later. He wrote in an email to The Narwhal, “the project will also create spinoff opportunities for local businesses and suppliers, supporting a strong economic ecosystem for decades to come.”

Despite Robichaud’s concerns about impacts on local waterways, he really wants the Crawford Nickel mine to go through: “We don’t have much to offer as far as any new developments in Timmins,” Robichaud says. “Growth-wise, we’re depending on … all these new mining operations that could help our economy.”

A huge opportunity for Timmins, but not without caveats

Hillary Laughren, co-chair of the Timmins chapter of Women in Mining Canada, is also excited about the prospects of the massive Crawford Nickel project.

“Mining is in our blood,” Laughren says. Born and raised in the area, she is a supply chain manager at a mineral exploration company. “Timmins is the place to be for mining,” she says.

Canada Nickel’s project could operate for almost 45 years, producing up to 240,000 tonnes of ore per day.

“There’s lots of opportunity for new jobs,” Laughren says. “It has potential for a really long mine-life and so, I think it could be really good for women in mining, it could be really good for the community of Timmins and other communities that surround us.”

With the Kidd Creek copper and zinc mine, which its owner says employs 800 workers and contractors, scheduled to close next year, Laughren says another mine is needed to fill that void.

Timmins has a significantly higher unemployment rate and lower rate of food security than the Ontario average. A growing homeless population is visible in its small downtown, where it seems almost every other business is boarded up.

A decade ago, the city lost more than three per cent of its residents when the mining sector contracted, including the closure of Canada’s oldest gold mine. Statistics Canada listed Timmins among the 10 slowest growing communities in the country in 2016.

The boom and bust cycle is an attribute of resources-based economies, and Timmins is finally circling back toward a boom. Since the downturn of 2016, Timmins has grown by nearly five per cent to a population of just under 45,000, recovering to a size not seen in more than a decade. The Crawford mine could solidify that trajectory.

“The size of the project, it speaks for itself, it would be just a substantial benefit to the city,” Tom Faught Jr., former president of the Timmins Chamber of Commerce, says.

Experts watching closely also see northern Ontario’s mines as necessary to Canada’s progress in a world that needs more critical minerals every year.

“[The next] generation is going to need a hell of a lot of copper, nickel, cobalt, lithium, beryllium, rare earths,” says Graeme Spiers, an emeritus professor in environmental and earth sciences at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ont., who works with the Mining Innovation Rehabilitation and Applied Research Corporation.

Spiers tells The Narwhal he believes existing mining regulations are strict enough to curb negative environmental impacts. He’s seen these historic impacts firsthand around Sudbury, another mining hub in northern Ontario.

“Society and industry, years ago, wasn’t really worried about the impact on landscapes,” Spiers says, adding that people in communities like Sudbury and Timmins began to realize the effect of mining on their homes. “Suddenly, everybody, both sides of the border, were saying, ‘We want clean water.’ ”

Spiers says much of this public push for a cleaner environment drove the government to put regulations in place that better protect the environment, and require companies to remediate the land after the mine closes.

Canada Nickel has already submitted its closure plan for when the Crawford mine is tapped out, projected to be sometime in the 2070s. The proposal suggests “water quality would be expected to return to conditions close to baseline following decommissioning and closure,” and “habitat will continue to regenerate.”

What happens in between opening and closure isn’t quite as clear.

The human and wildlife costs of nickel mines

Around Timmins, public spaces are named after mines from decades past. The city itself was named after Noah Timmins, president of Hollinger Mines. Hollinger Park sits in place of a lake that was previously backfilled with mine tailings and then remediated.

Today, it’s green space with a splashpad and sports field, though one that has borne the traces of its industrial past: in 2016, the local public health unit had to issue a heavy metals warning for Hollinger Park due to “higher than normal” levels of lead, arsenic and antimony in the soil. The notice may have been reassuring for Timmins residents, though perhaps not so soothing for those in other mining towns: “While the levels found are above what would be found in most parks, they are well below those found in many similar communities in Ontario and Canada with metal smelters or past mining activities.”

Alexandra Bridges is a member of Mattagami First Nation, which has lived along the Mattagami River for centuries and is a signatory to Treaty 9, covering much of northern Ontario, including Timmins and the mineral rich Ring of Fire region, northwest of it. Bridges is a program manager at Keepers of the Circle, an organization for Indigenous women and families funded by the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada to support Indigenous women’s participation in impact assessments, like the one Canada Nickel undertook. 

Infusions of mine money are helpful to communities that don’t have extra dollars to build public projects themselves, Bridges says, but do little to help a town weather the busts of an economy built on resource extraction alone. It’s also little recompense for scars left on the landscape.

“I don’t think people realize the scale and size of how big this nickel mine will be and the level of impact it will have,” Bridges says. “I do think that we’re headed towards an area where we’re going to rip up the entire boreal shield.”

Bridges researches methods to improve the regulatory process and Indigenous consultation. She’s looking for ways resource developers can lessen negative impacts on Indigenous communities, while increasing benefits of these massive operations.

As it stands, she doesn’t see mining’s legacy impacts being positive for northern communities.

“I live here, and I work here,” Bridges says. She points to rampant drug use, alcoholism, crime and human trafficking in northern communities, which research has linked to extractive industries forming “boom towns” in remote areas. “I want a healthy environment for my children, and I just don’t see that emerging,” she says.

Growing up in Sudbury, Timmins and Cochrane, Ont., during renewed mining exploration activities, as well as living and working in northern Alberta near the oilsands, Bridges has spent her life witnessing the impacts of resource development up close.

“There’s a lot of entities that come in, they take from the north and give nothing back,” Bridges says. “People are really changing their entire lives to accommodate an industry that is designed to extract resources as quickly and efficiently as possible.”

Advocacy groups, including Keepers of the Circle and Robichaud’s Ontario Rivers Alliance, submitted comments for the federal impact assessment of the Crawford Nickel mine and raised questions about a lack of details and transparency on its possible short and long-term effects.

The public comment period closed in February 2025, and the Impact Assessment Agency followed up with a summary of key issues raised about the developer’s plan. This includes concerns about effluent releases potentially increasing levels of methylmercury, a toxic, bioaccumulative form of mercury, in downstream rivers. It also noted potential for spills: “The scenario of a rail accident resulting in the release of nickel concentrate still needs to be addressed,” the federal government’s response reads.

For Bridges, the economic opportunity presents a lot of familiar risks.

“I’m intrigued, but I’m also very worried, because there already is a lot of historic and current mining operations in the area,” she says. “This project is going to have a cumulative effect on the area, on the surrounding waterways.”

A legacy and a new look for nickel

Known historically as “devil copper,” nickel has a long, tarnished past in northern Ontario. In 1928, Falconbridge Nickel Mine opened near Sudbury, in a farming community called Happy Valley. At its peak, Happy Valley was only home to about 100 people in 23 homes that ranged from shacks to stuccoed bungalows. About half of the families were directly employed by the mine.

In the early 1970s, residents started to notice extreme air pollution from the mine; trees were dying and residents could see clouds of pollution over the valley. After years of pressure to act, the Ontario government helped the entire community abandon their homes in Happy Valley and relocate to nearby towns and cities.

Happy Valley became what a Globe and Mail reporter in 1974 called the “first pollution ghost town.” Another Globe article from the time called it “the most misnamed place in the country.”

A 1975 study on the Whitefish Lake First Nation reserve, near Happy Valley, found concentrations of nickel in most lakes in the area at abnormally high levels, harmful to aquatic species. The study also found the rain in the region to be 15 to 30 times the natural acidity of average rainwater due to the sulphur released from multiple mines in the area. Much of these problems in the Sudbury area have since been remediated and transformed in the decades following, though there is remaining mine waste that has to be ​​actively managed.

But it’s not always the mines taking on these challenges. A 2016 report by Ontario’s Auditor General report noted that, of 10 contaminated sites with the largest provincial rehabilitation cost, four are former mines. Taxpayers — by way of the government — have been left with a bill of $968 million to clean up contamination caused by just these four mines “because mining companies have failed to do so.”

Nowadays, mines have to provide financial security covering the estimated cost of closure and land reclamation, in cash, bonds or other less tangible way of proving the company is in good standing; in theory, this mitigates the risk of a miner going bankrupt, and project remediation costs falling to the government.

“Crawford represents a new generation of mining. Unlike older operations, closure and reclamation are built into our design from day one,” Canada Nickel’s Selby told The Narwhal in an email. “Our goal is that when the mining is complete, Crawford will leave a positive environmental legacy instead of the challenges of the past.”

He acknowledged, though, that Crawford is a “sizeable project with a large footprint,” which makes it hard to “avoid impacts” on fish and wildlife habitat.

Nickel is naturally occurring, but mining can create harmful levels of exposure if operations contaminate water and soil, especially making it into dust and water runoff that spreads quickly.

When it’s inhaled, or comes in contact with skin for extended periods, nickel can cause health issues in humans like heart and kidney diseases, lung fibrosis, lung and even nasal cancer, according to a peer-reviewed study from the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

Nickel mining can also have detrimental impacts on wildlife when not managed properly. Animals exposed to nickel-contaminated soil and water through their fur, feathers or skin have stunted growth and poor survival rates, a peer-reviewed study from Environmental Reviews shows. The same study explains that for newly hatched mallard ducklings, chronic exposure to nickel through plants they eat and water they drink leads to neurological diseases and death.

New research conducted by the University of Edinburgh with data from hundreds of international nickel mines found the footprint of nickel mining could be 400 to 500 times greater than previously reported. This is from typically unaccounted emissions released into the atmosphere when forests are cleared for mines and their natural carbon storage capabilities are lost.

“Any project of this magnitude is going to create huge environmental liabilities, and those have to be very carefully managed over, in this case, decades of operation,” Jamie Kneen, Canada co-lead of advocacy group, MiningWatch says.

Federal and provincial oversight of these mines leaves much to be desired, Kneen says.

Who is keeping Ontario mines in check?

In Ontario, mineral claims can be staked online from anywhere in the world, and First Nations are given 30 days to respond — a challenging deadline when the frequency of claims is high, as it is in much of northern Ontario. Grassy Narrows First Nation, which is still dealing with a legacy of mercury pollution from a nearby pulp mill, took the province to court over the mineral-staking system, arguing it infringed upon Indigenous Rights. The case went as high as the Supreme Court, which ruled against the nation, affirming Ontario’s Mining Act.

 “Canada’s and the province’s approach to regulation … is pretty laissez-faire,” Kneen says.

Under Ontario’s current mining laws, companies aren’t required to have a provincial environmental assessment. Depending on the scale of the project, many mines, like Crawford Nickel, are required to go through a federal impact assessment and to adhere to federal regulations around effluent releases, but critics say oversight stops there.

While the impact assessment process lays out certain conditions and recommendations to limit the negative impacts of a mine, there is no formal follow-up process that reviews how those are implemented, Kneen says: “It’s a major weakness of the whole system.”

In Ontario, companies do have to report spills, or instances where their emissions go above allowable levels, but in many cases, operators only voluntarily conduct tests per provincial regulations on impacts to the land, water and air on a regular basis. According to the Auditor General, companies do not usually volunteer to do so, and if they do, the cumulative effects of multiple ongoing projects are not being assessed.

Meanwhile, some protections that did exist in the province are being peeled away even further.

The province passed the Building More Mines Act in 2023 as part of Ontario’s push to position itself as a leader in critical minerals, which put decisions on mine closure plans in the hands of the mining minister, rather than ministry staff.

In spring 2025, the Ontario government passed Bill 5, the Protect Ontario by Unleashing Our Economy Act. The controversial legislation is aimed at accelerating resource development and reducing the burden of regulations for industries including mining — similar to the federal government’s Bill C-5, seeing its priority projects move ahead.

A key piece of the new law gives the province power to create “special economic zones” that don’t have to adhere to municipal or provincial laws. Premier Doug Ford suggested the Ring of Fire will be one of these.

“We’re having the critical mineral boom now, and it’s going to devastate northern Ontario, and the province is just ready to let that happen and [is] really taking away any barriers that would lead to more responsible development,” Bridges, from Keepers of the Circle, tells The Narwhal.

She points in particular to Bill 5 repealing the Endangered Species Act, limiting protections for those most at risk. “They’re trying to get rid of any ambiguity that would lead to more positive or cautious scientific decision-making, in my opinion, and it’s really worrisome.”

Canada Nickel CEO Selby told CBC that Bill 5 is “a big step forward” for the mining industry in the province, though he tells The Narwhal the bill hasn’t changed their approach: “Our focus is on building responsibly and transparently, with community and environmental stewardship at the core.”

Deputy Chief Derek Archibald, from the nearby Taykwa Tagamou Nation, sees both sides of the coin. He is supportive of the Crawford Nickel project, with his small nation of about 700 people investing $20-million for a 8.9-per cent stake and a seat on the board of directors. But when it comes to Bill 5 and its suite of changes, he sees the provincial government trying to “bulldoze” over rights and “fast-track these projects.” It’s counterproductive, he says, as First Nations are willing to work with developers when approached properly, in his experience.

“First Nations don’t need to be bypassed; we’re ready to lead and jump in … we’re building a partnership based on consent,” Archibald tells The Narwhal.

“We look at this investment as [a way] to build economic sovereignty … too often, First Nations are always viewed as anti-development,” Archibald says. “We literally flipped the script.”

In the past, he says though the nation and its traditional territories have been deeply impacted by mines, they missed out on benefits, or were only consulted “later on in the process, when everything’s been figured out.” This time, Archibald hopes the economic returns of Crawford Nickel will actually make it to his community; building generational wealth, improving social services and expanding trades programs for youth.

“By making this investment, we have the opportunity to sit at the table,” he says.

Updated on Oct. 31, 2025, at 2:45 p.m. ET: This story has been updated to correct a figure stating the mine will produce 240,000 tonnes of nickel per day. In fact, the mine will produce 240,000 tonnes of ore per day.

Updated on Sept. 25, 2025, at 2:50 p.m. ET: This story has been updated to correct a line that stated treated effluent from Crawford mine would flow into tributaries of the Mattagami River. The effluent will flow into two creeks that reach the Abitibi River.

Updated on Nov. 13, 2025, at 3:05 p.m. ET: This story has been updated to include information about the Crawford Nickel mine being added to the Government of Canada’s list of projects to be considered for fast-tracking through certain federal approvals and processes.

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.

On a warm night in late July, a dozen people gather over barbecued burgers and hotdogs in Shawanaga First Nation, about 30 kilometres northwest of Parry Sound, Ont. They’re not just here to snack and socialize, though. Clad in headlamps and settled into folding chairs, when the clock strikes 10 p.m., their nets will open. 

The small crowd gathers near an abandoned church, where the community knows 200 to 300 bats come to roost. They’re here to help Shawanaga’s species-at-risk team net and tag bats, mostly the little brown myotis species, as they emerge at dusk to hunt for insects. Nearby is a specially designed “bat condo” built by Shawanaga member Dave Pawis in 2022, which offers an alternative roost for at least 1,000 bats. The air is filled with enthusiastic anticipation, along with thousands of mosquitoes.

Soon, bats are landing in the carefully set traps and the biologists — some from Shawanaga’s species-at-risk-team and another handful from neighbouring First Nations — handle them one by one. They record their gender, weight and age before tagging and releasing them. More Shawanaga residents come by after the local baseball game to take a peek, and even tag some bats’ wings themselves.

“They’re just so tiny … I’m glad they’re very gentle with them,” Patty Walsh, a community Elder who lives just down the street from the roost, says. While some might be freaked out by the idea of a bat condo in their neighborhood, Walsh tells The Narwhal she doesn’t mind: “I like the fact that the condo is right there because I see them more.”

Bats in Ontario are critical — and at risk

Despite their important role in the ecosystem as predators of nocturnal insects (like the mosquitoes plaguing biologists and community members this very night), there is a lot we don’t know about Ontario’s bats, including many details of their hibernation and movement. And time is not on our side: seven of Ontario’s eight bat species, all found within the Georgian Bay area on Lake Huron, are currently listed as endangered provincially or federally thanks to widespread fungal disease and habitat loss. This includes the little brown myotis.

To better understand and help the bat populations survive, Shawanaga’s team of biologists, technicians and land guardians have been conducting extensive surveys and monitoring projects. Their strategy uses an Indigenous-led approach combining Traditional Ecological Knowledge and western science. An important part of this strategy involves community outreach to get citizens involved in studying and caring for the critters. 

“Bats in general need a lot of help,” Steven Kell, head biologist for Shawanaga First Nation, tells The Narwhal. In 2019, he began working with the nation and helped found its species-at-risk program — a massive endeavour for a reserve of only about 180 residents. His team has been hosting community bat nights for five years.

Over the last two decades, bats across North America have experienced mass die-offs because of white-nose syndrome caused by a fungus that grows in humid and cold environments like caves. Human activity in caves is believed to contribute to the spread. Infected bats wake frequently during hibernation, which depletes their fat stores and causes them to emerge from hibernation too early. Sadly, these bats usually freeze or starve in the frigid Ontario winter. At some hibernation sites, white-nose syndrome has wiped out more than 90 per cent of local populations.

“There’s a lot of knowledge gaps that we don’t know about, but we also just want people to care about bats,” Kell says. “Since we’re doing all this bat work, like putting up the bat condo, people are more easy-going about bats … they’re seen in a much more positive light.”

He’s particularly excited that the abandoned church at the centre of the community bat night appears to be a maternity colony of endangered little brown myotis. That means several generations live together.

“They’re so cool,” Kell says. “The big maternity roost is like, hundreds of mostly females and generations of females. And they’re super social, they can find their way back to their pups within those big social groups, they know who’s related to them.”

Bat research draws several First Nations together, but future of the program is uncertain 

Shawanaga First Nation also developed the Apakwaanaajiinh Mnidoo Gamii, the Bats of Georgian Bay Project, a new partnership project involving several First Nation communities in the region as well as organizations like the Georgian Bay Biosphere.

Since the project began, they’ve captured more than 1,000 bats around Georgian Bay, including all eight species found in Ontario. They have also found over 85 roosts, including one of the first-known hoary bat roosts in the area, and identified 10 new hibernation spots and swarming sites, where bats congregate in the fall to mate and teach their young to find a good place to hibernate. All partner First Nations have also hosted a public bat night to share knowledge with community members.   

But there’s still so much to learn about their hibernation, mating and the long-term impacts of the catastrophic white-nose syndrome. While provincial and federal funding has been available for the last few years to encourage such research, it’s been pulled back drastically in the last year. The scientists watching funding closely say they believe the sudden struggle is due to a combination of election year priorities pointing elsewhere federally, and agencies in Ontario waiting to see what will happen in the wake of the province’s pro-development legislation, Bill 5 — the Protecting Ontario by Unleashing our Economy Act. All of this leaves the future of the bat program uncertain. 

“We’ve created this really core group, but … we’re trying to figure out how to move to the next step and make sure that it continues without running out of funding,” Kell says, explaining that he’s been adding projects including snake telemetry, sturgeon monitoring and turtle incubation to continue attracting funders so his team can continue their species-at-risk conservation. “To be able to get more funding, we have to add more projects.”

Still, the effort to protect Georgian Bay’s bats is an all-season endeavour. While Kell leads community bat nights in the summer, in the winter he can be found crawling through claustrophobically tight tunnels — some of the only safe remaining spots for bats to hibernate as part of the nation’s Tunnels Project. Here, bat populations have found refuge in the disused railroad tunnels blasted through the bedrock over 100 years ago. 

“We got some funding to basically explore all these tunnels underneath the railway,” Kell says. “We’ve confirmed the first six hibernation sites, [the] first known ones for this whole region.” 

One of the scientists who helped Kell identify these tunnels is ecologist Derek Morningstar, who founded an independent bat research company called Myotistar. With more than 20 years of experience studying Ontario bats, Morningstar has both the tools and the knowledge to help.

For bat night, Morningstar has come prepared to catch dozens of bats in his makeshift office, complete with folding chairs, a laptop, a scale, pliers and other tools under a pop-up canopy. He’ll be there well past 2 a.m. He’s also laid out dozens of bat-themed books, from field guides to children’s books like Bats at the Ballgame to pique the interest of onlookers.

“It’s hard to catch them, it’s hard to see them, it’s hard to know where they are,” Morningstar says, adding that it’s important to take the time to learn. “Just like birds and other species, it’s a holistic approach. Bats are also important, and they’re really hard to study.”

That’s what Morningstar is doing at Shawanaga’s bat night, and at similar events across Georgian Bay: empowering the conservation teams at First Nations to do this important work.

“A big part of what we do is training the First Nation staff on how to study bats themselves … and then they use that data [in a way that’s] meaningful for them, and it’s different for each community,” Morningstar says. “I encourage them to try and use that data for their own policy development, not listening to what somebody else wants.”

“I wanted to support them and let them know that [they] do a great job,” Walsh, the community Elder, says as she makes her way home. “I always come out when I can to help support them.”

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Gary Goode served as an infantry soldier at CFB Gagetown in New Brunswick for almost three and a half years in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. Decades later, Goode was diagnosed with lung cancer and, in 2005, he had his right lung removed. Goode said his thoracic surgeon explained his symptoms were aligned with exposure to Agent Orange — the infamous herbicide mixture used by the American army during the Vietnam War to destroy food crops and reduce hiding spots in the dense jungle.

Agent Orange and other herbicides were tested at Gagetown in 1966 and ‘67. During his recovery, Goode began to research the chemicals used at the base where he served. Goode said he was never told about the risks of these chemicals, which he never saw being sprayed — he believes it happened shortly before he began his service. 

“We could tell because everything was dead brown or yellow,” Goode told The Narwhal about the base. “We were drinking the water that was in the area [and] the dust would be sticking to us. … There was a lot of dust.” 

Now, Gagetown is one of the sites where Canada’s Department of National Defence plans to build new housing for military families, even though the base is listed on the federal government’s inventory of contaminated properties. These are sites where known chemicals in the water and soil include per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS, often referred to as “forever chemicals”), petroleum hydrocarbons and, at Gagetown, Agent Orange — contaminants that carry exposure risks including cancers, heart issues and immune dysfunction.

Sites owned by Canada’s Department of National Defence that are known (red diamonds) and suspected (yellow diamonds) to be contaminated. Source: Federal Contaminated Sites Inventory. Map: Nikita Wallia / The Narwhal

National Defence doesn’t deny the use of Agent Orange at CFB Gagetown. In 2007, Canada allotted $95.6 million toward compensating military members and civilians who may have been exposed to it from working at or living near the base when it was sprayed. Goode and more than 5,000 others have received $20,000 payments, even as the government maintained Agent Orange exposure didn’t mean an “increased risk for long-term, irreversible health effects.” It called these payments “ex gratia,” or made out of a moral imperative rather than a legal one. 

Goode is now chairman of Brats In The Battlefield, a group of veterans whose social club morphed into advocacy as the extent of the contamination issue at Gagetown became clear. The group still wants an independent investigation into the contamination. It questions the rigour of the government’s studies and assessments and says the scope of the problem and the long-lasting impacts have still not been properly understood.

The housing plan announced last January further convinced Goode that National Defence still isn’t taking the lingering effects of decades-old contamination seriously — not just at Gagetown, but on other sites the department owns that are among the thousands of listings in the massive public database of contaminated federal sites.

The military says it’s building 668 new housing units on bases across the country to help solve housing shortages for Armed Forces members and their families. Construction is supposed to take place over the next five years. 

Along with Gagetown, units are planned in Halifax, Edmonton, Esquimalt, B.C., Valcartier, Que., as well as in the Ontario communities of Trenton, Borden, Kingston and Petawawa. All of these bases already have housing and all are on the contaminated sites list: in a press release, the department said locations were chosen in part based on high numbers of new members. Some contamination has been remediated on several of them, including Trenton and Borden, but much has not been fully addressed.

Soon, there might be more military families looking for homes. Recruitment is set to increase — Prime Minister Mark Carney recently said Canada will more than double current military spending, in line with a pledge with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, to invest five per cent of annual gross domestic product on military spending by 2035. 

With National Defence committing to “rebuilding the military” to 71,500 regular force and 30,000 reserve force members before 2032 to help Canada address shifting security needs, the pressure to develop housing quickly will only grow. But advocates like Goode are hoping that housing won’t be just fast — but that it will also be safe for the military families who will call it home.

A long list of contaminants are present on federal sites across Canada

National Defence says it urgently needs more people. It also urgently needs more housing. A 2023 report said members of the Armed Forces and their families feel the impacts of the national housing crisis even more acutely than the average Canadian because many of their jobs require constant relocation. At the same time, CBC has reported, the military is short more than 13,600 members: in February, its surgeon general said the Forces will now consider applicants with “any and all conditions” for enrolment, including asthma. 

But fixing one problem shouldn’t cause another, according to former NDP member of parliament Lindsay Mathyssen. “It’s important that we’re obviously investing in housing, but safe housing where we don’t have to worry about those things. There’s a whole slew of issues here, both past, present and now, future, that have to be dealt with,” Mathyssen told The Narwhal in January 2025, before she lost her seat in the April election.

After her attention was drawn to a site in her Ontario riding, Mathyssen initiated a National Defence standing committee study of contaminated sites last winter. Goode and other veterans testified at the four meetings, including staff from CFB Moose Jaw in Saskatchewan, where many believe their illnesses are connected to on-site contamination. 

Mathyssen told The Narwhal any housing plans for contaminated bases must ensure safety. “We’re asking so much of people; they put their faith, their trust, in their institutions and government and they defend them, sometimes with their lives,” Mathyssen said. “We can’t take that for granted.”

Typically, air, water and soil contamination is up to provinces to monitor, halt and remediate. But federal departments carry that responsibility for their properties. The National Defence website says it manages contaminated sites “by prioritizing sites based on human health and environmental risks.” For example, both Environment and Climate Change Canada and Health Canada told The Narwhal they have not studied the areas on or surrounding the Gagetown base for contaminants and their impacts, as it’s the responsibility of National Defence. New Brunswick’s Department of Health told The Narwhal provincial departments “only become involved when made aware of significant concerns regarding potential contamination that may pose a risk to human health in areas beyond, but excluding, the base itself,” which it said isn’t the case with CFB Gagetown.

Some of the contaminants on federal sites have made headlines, particularly PFAS, which are found on more than 100 of them across Canada, often due to foam used to train firefighters for decades. Of the proposed military housing sites, Trenton, Gagetown and Edmonton are listed as sites of the chemicals according to the federal inventory. The United States Environmental Protection Agency lists potential health risks of PFAS exposure including reproductive problems, developmental effects in children, increased risk of certain cancers and weakening of the immune system. The Canadian government says PFAS can be transferred through the placenta during pregnancy and through ingestion of human milk.

Several of the sites, including Petawawa in Ontario and Esquimalt in B.C., are further contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls, a group of synthetic chemicals known as PCBs. Once widely used for things like coolant in electrical appliances, PCBs have been illegal to release to the environment in Canada since 1985 because they can have persistent and hazardous impacts on health and the environment. The United Nations Environment Programme has reported that both PCBs and PFAS can accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals, becoming more concentrated and harmful as they move up the food chain. 

Other entries on the long list of contaminants at Trenton include a group of petroleum hydrocarbons known as BTEXs — benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene. BTEXs have numerous health impacts associated with inhaling them, accidentally ingesting them or making skin contact. According to a peer-reviewed study from the Journal of Hazardous Materials Advances, these include increased risk of respiratory and lung cancers, heart problems and heart failure, blood disorders, immune dysfunction and increased susceptibility to infections.

Former staff at CFB Trenton told The Narwhal it’s generally understood these sites are contaminated, even if the specific chemicals or effects aren’t common knowledge. Among them was retired aircraft technician George Westcott.

“You wouldn’t believe how many people that we worked with died while we were working there … from cancer,” Westcott said. He worked and lived on CFB Trenton for decades over his career, often working with jet fuel and other harmful solvents. “My wife included.” 

Westcott lived in on-base quarters with his wife, Pamela, who passed away in 2023 from a type of lung cancer called mesothelioma that quickly metastasized to her brain and bones. Being around asbestos — which is known to be present in non-residential buildings at CFB Trenton — is the biggest risk for this type of cancer. Westcott told The Narwhal he is concerned the contamination will continue to harm new families who live there, like he believes it harmed his. 

“I’m not asking for anything, but I would ask for it to get recognized for the next poor people so that it doesn’t happen to somebody again,” Westcott said. “God help the people that are going to be living there.”

National Defence told The Narwhal that Privacy Act limitations mean it is “not able to discuss the medical conditions of current or former members, nor the alleged causes.”

Some military sites have been cleaned up — but it’s expensive and time consuming

Contamination cleanup is underway on some military sites, but it takes time and money. In 2024-25 alone, National Defence received $66.6 million to reduce legacy contamination at sites including Esquimalt’s harbour, through a nationwide fund dedicated to dealing with the government’s contaminated properties problem. 

In December, an assistant deputy minister in the department said National Defence had spent nearly $273 million managing contaminated sites over four years. In that time, more than 250 sites had been closed, meaning remediated or risk-managed enough to come off the list. The department also said it was on track to spend another $65 million to close another 50 sites this year. 

CFB Borden is closed, according to National Defence, which told The Narwhal in an email that all necessary remediation work needed to construct the new barracks at the base was completed in 2021, at a cost of approximately $3.5 million. A bigger project to remediate PFAS-contaminated firefighting training areas, which entailed excavating and treating contaminated soil, cost another $16 million and was “substantially completed” by late 2022, the department said. 

“We recognize the importance of being a good environmental steward and doing our part to address the effects of our operational legacy and safeguard the health of Canadians,” the department said in an email. It “employs a risk-based approach” to managing contaminated sites and generally does not tell employees or the local community what that approach is “until qualified environmental experts identify potential exposure risks.” It has had a 10-step approach in place since 1999 to identify potential hazards.

The department said that 16 years of ongoing cleanup at Trenton has included groundwater remediation and that it is assessing the effects of what’s been done before deciding on next steps. 

The department told The Narwhal that remediation at Gagetown, which its website says is focused on petroleum hydrocarbons, not herbicides or other contaminants, is in progress. The department also said it is “not planning any further activities at this time” at Gagetown.

In Quebec, the department has deemed the Valcartier site safe enough for housing. In 2020, the Quebec Court of Appeal awarded millions of dollars to current and former soldiers and military families who drank water tainted with cancer-causing industrial degreaser, used to clean metal equipment. The chemical, called trichloroethylene, leached into the water table when it was used at Valcartier’s research facility and a nearby ammunition factory from the 1950s to 1990s. 

National Defence told The Narwhal it has implemented measures to ensure water on-site is safe to drink and that the trichloroethylene plume on the base is closely monitored, adding: “Importantly, the wells used for drinking water are located outside the boundaries of this plume, and testing confirms that the water drawn from them is not contaminated.”

It’s unclear what the next steps are for other proposed housing sites. The department said the Canadian Forces Housing Agency does not have a budget specifically for remediating sites proposed for new housing. It said it selects sites that either “have no known contamination,” or have “the potential to be remediated with reasonable costs.” 

Cleaning up toxic sites for housing is a ‘win-win,’ expert says: ‘The issue is money to do it’

Toronto Metropolitan University professor Christopher De Sousa has studied redevelopment of what are known as “brownfields” — abandoned or unused industrial land that may be polluted — for both private and public projects. He told The Narwhal it’s possible for the Department of National Defence to redevelop contaminated military bases into safe places to live, with enough investment.

“The use of these kinds of contaminated properties for housing, there’s decades worth of experience in doing that kind of work,” De Sousa said, adding it is “nice to see” National Defence trying to contend with contamination and adding underused federally owned land to the housing stock. “Take your worst site that you could think of; if you want to turn it into housing, you can. … The issue is money to do it.”

De Sousa pointed to the example of the Port Lands in Toronto, once one of the largest wetlands on Lake Ontario, where both water and soil became polluted with spills from industrial and commercial uses including petroleum refining and hydrocarbon products manufacturing, alongside effluent from sewers and sewage treatment plants. 

In 2017, all three levels of government made an initial investment of nearly $1.5 billion to begin to remediate the 356-hectare site. Eight years later, work is still ongoing — but in mid-July, part of it finally opened to the public, 20 hectares of a new park named Biidaasige, an Anishinaabemowin word meaning “sunlight shining towards us.” 

“There’s been more pressure for these sites to be assessed, remediated and converted into something that adds more public value,” De Sousa said. “You want to get that win-win where you’re not just cleaning a site for the sake of cleaning it, you’re getting a public benefit. … But you need to be secure that those contaminants have been cleaned up.”

It’s not cheap or easy. More than two million cubic metres of contaminated soil had to be dug up and moved to a “containment area,” treated to remove contaminants and then reintroduced for future landscaping. Two years ago, the Toronto Star reported the Port Lands project was $169 million over budget. And, it’s taken a while: the design was chosen back in 2007, but construction is behind schedule. With progress finally visible, the goal is that, along with a cleanup and added parkland, the revitalized wetlands will help with the Don River’s tendency to flood.

The $16-million PFAS cleanup at CFB Borden was smaller, but still complex. Between 2020 and 2022, the process included excavating 91,000 cubic metres of contaminated soil from the base’s firefighting training area and disposing of it in an on-site containment cell: “The soil is wrapped up and contained, like a burrito, so it can’t leach into the ground,” a team leader with the Crown corporation Defence Construction Canada said in a press release as the project neared completion. 

The limits of National Defence’s Agent Orange compensation in New Brunswick 

One of the frustrations for those dissatisfied with National Defence’s response to contamination at Gagetown is the department’s limits to who it considers at risk. 

Its terms for the one-time payment issued to Goode and others had strict requirements: individuals must have an illness associated with exposure to Agent Orange as determined by the U.S. National Academy of Medicine and must have worked at, trained at or lived within five kilometres of CFB Gagetown on the dates when Agent Orange was tested in 1966 and 1967. This limited compensation for members of groups like Military Widows on a Warpath, which claimed families were unfairly denied compensation because their service members died of contamination-related illnesses prior to the 2007 announcement.

Goode calls the proposed housing development in Gagetown “scary.” Apart from lung cancer like he had, Agent Orange is known to cause leukemia and bladder cancer, along with birth defects and Parkinson’s disease, according to the Cleveland Clinic. At least one toxin in Agent Orange can persist in the soil for up to 50 years, according to a study from the University of Illinois. 

“We just don’t want this to happen again. That’s all we’re looking for,” Goode said. “We’re looking for truth, honesty, accountability and justice. … We want people to be compensated for their exposure to these chemicals at Gagetown and the diseases that have been debilitating them.”

In 2019, as Brats In The Battlefield continued to push for an independent public inquiry at the House of Commons, the department reiterated human health risk assessments conducted in 2005 “concluded that most people who lived and worked at or near CFB Gagetown were not at risk of exposure to herbicides,” including Agent Orange. The same assessments found potential long-term health risks were “identified as a possibility for only those individuals directly involved with the application of the herbicides or clearing of treated brush soon after herbicide application.” 

Meg Sears is chair of the organization Prevent Cancer Now, whose board is composed of physicians, environmental advocates and at least one veteran. She has been working to help Gagetown veterans and their families receive accurate data for decades. She calls the findings of the government study of Gagetown done between 2005 and 2007 “flimsy” — an opinion backed up last year by a commission in Maine, which looked into the health of National Guard members that had trained at the New Brunswick base and called Canada’s data “incorrect” and “biased.”  

In its 2024 report, the Maine commission also criticized National Defence for taking its reports from the fact-finding mission offline, saying data being inaccessible to the public “undermines their scientific credibility and usability” (the reports are still available on the Prevent Cancer Now website). That same year, a spokesperson for National Defence told CBC the government has no plans to conduct further studies at Gagetown to look into the health impacts of past herbicide use.

“I find that it’s difficult to get data, and when you do get it, you’re usually missing some important part of the data to really get a good picture of what’s happening,” Sears said. She doesn’t feel great about the plan to build housing on Gagetown and other known contaminated sites. 

“I don’t have a lot of confidence that the people who are going to be living on these bases are necessarily going to be as safe as they deserve to be in terms of their air quality and their drinking water quality,” Sears said.

“If CFB Gagetown is an indicator of how the Canadian Forces work in terms of protecting the people who step forward to look after us, I think that there’s an awful lot of room for improvement.”

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.