LNG Canada is already the largest liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility in the country. Now, the Shell-led project is set to double its production. 

The consortium of companies behind the massive LNG export facility announced the decision to green-light spending on Sept. 28. Shell, along with its partners Petronas, PetroChina, Mitsubishi and Korea Gas, were originally approved by the provincial and federal governments to build two phases of the Kitimat, B.C., plant in 2015. Operations of the initial phase started last year, with the first shipments leaving Canada in late June.

Prime Minister Mark Carney touted the investment decision in Vancouver this morning. “Canada is building big again,” he said, speaking to a room of company executives, politicians, First Nations elected and hereditary chiefs, municipal leaders and stakeholders. “Today’s investment — as you know, over $30 billion in LNG Canada 2 — will make LNG Canada the second-largest facility of its kind in the world.”

“This is a very big deal indeed,” BC NDP leader David Eby said at the same announcement. “It will change lives, here and around the world.”

The $33 billion investment decision comes as the first phase continues to face problems with its equipment.

As first reported in The Narwhal, an integrity issue with the facility’s flare stack was identified in the early commissioning stage after the company began testing its equipment in late 2024. LNG Canada later reported the problem to the BC Energy Regulator and the facility has been continually in non-compliance with its government-issued permits since. For months, Kitimat community members were subjected to excessive noise, black smoke, a towering flame — at times reaching the height of New York’s Statue of Liberty or London’s Big Ben — and a concoction of unidentified chemical smells and various other emissions as plant operators tried to get things under control. 

LNG Canada and the BC Energy Regulator maintain emissions from the plant are not harmful to human health, but many residents worry the combined output from the new liquefaction facility and Kitimat’s aluminum smelter may impact respiratory conditions and cause other health issues.

Burning excess methane gas, or flaring, is a normal safety procedure at liquefaction facilities. It releases greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide as well as emitting dangerous pollutants such as sulfur dioxide and small particulate matter, which affect human health.

Earlier in September, LNG Canada held community meetings in Kitimat so locals could weigh in on plans for a permit amendment. The consortium wants an increase in allowable emissions levels to account for its need to keep the flare burning 24/7 — until the stack can be redesigned in 2028. 

“There is an operational issue with the flare design where at very low flow rates, the gas being burned moves from the tip of the flare to within the flare tip itself, causing a hot spot in the metal there,” Teresa Waddington, a senior executive at LNG Canada and registered professional engineer, previously told The Narwhal. “To prevent these hot spots, more gas is sent through the flare system … to push the flame back up to the top of the flare tip.”

This “assist gas” amounted to around 10 per cent of all gas that was sent to the coastal plant last year. As The Narwhal and Point Source reported, LNG Canada flared 350 million cubic metres of gas in 2025, making it one of the highest sources of LNG flaring emissions globally.

What exactly is the LNG Canada Phase 2 expansion?

LNG Canada was approved for two phases: the second adds two processing units, called trains, to increase the liquefaction capacity from 14 to 28 million tonnes of LNG per year. This expansion also means Coastal GasLink, the contentious 670-kilometre pipeline supplying the export plant, needs to double its capacity. That will be done by building five new compressor stations along the route. 

“Thanks to LNG Canada’s decision today, TC Energy is moving forward with its own multi-billion-dollar Phase 2 of the Coastal GasLink pipeline,” Carney said. “That means doubling capacity, creating an additional 2,000 jobs and maximizing the value of … one of the most prolific natural gas basins.”

Coastal GasLink, which was built between 2019 and 2024 by Calgary-based TC Energy, faced widespread opposition in support of Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs, who argued the company did not receive free, prior and informed consent from the Aboriginal title holders to land intersected by the pipeline.

When Indigenous land defenders and their supporters tried to stop construction, a series of infamous RCMP raids led to dozens of arrests and solidarity protests across the country.

In its announcement yesterday, LNG Canada noted the investment decision includes an equity option agreement secured this summer with “a limited partnership of the economic development organizations of five First Nations neighbouring LNG Canada’s operations: Gitga’at Nation, Gitxaała Nation, Haisla Nation, Kitselas First Nation and Kitsumkalum First Nation.” That agreement “represents one of the largest Indigenous ownership positions in major Canadian infrastructure,” according to the company.

LNG Canada also said the expansion has “the potential to generate more than $50 billion in government revenues” over the 40-year life of the project.

“A year ago, the federal government referred LNG Canada Phase 2 to our Major Projects Office. One office. One point of contact. One goal: get to the right decision, rapidly and efficiently,” Carney said. “Working with Shell and LNG Canada, British Columbia, and First Nations, we have accomplished exactly that.”

What comes next?

Construction on the pipeline and at the Kitimat facility will begin immediately, Carney said in his speech. According to the company, around 4,000 workers will be hired to build the expansion at the plant and around 2,000 people will build the pipeline compressor stations.

Community members in Kitimat continue calling for transparency and investment in health facilities and studies. 

“I wish that they could acknowledge [emissions from the plant] could be a problem,” one young resident, who asked not to be named, told The Narwhal. “We’re gonna have to be around the flaring either way.”

LNG Canada said a redesign of the malfunctioning flaring equipment will be implemented in 2028. In the meantime, the company plans to request an amendment to its permits to account for continued higher levels of flaring emissions. 

The BC Energy Regulator said “LNG Canada has reported ongoing instances where flaring from one or more of the facility’s flare systems is not consistent with the requirements of its air discharge permit to the [regulator, but] these instances have not had a measurable impact on local air quality.”

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As the September sun dips down towards the mountains on the western side of the Kitimat Valley in northwestern B.C., a blueish haze hovers over the coastal community. 

The familiar plume from Rio Tinto’s aluminum smelter, a source of local air pollution for more than seven decades, now mixes with emissions from the LNG Canada gas liquefaction and export facility, which started shipping cargoes overseas last year. At the centre of the sprawling industrial site, an orange flame glows continuously from the top of a red and white tower. That’s the flare stack, which earned the new gas plant the dubious distinction of being among the world’s highest sources of flaring emissions last year. 

LNG Canada, owned and operated by a consortium of five foreign companies led by Shell, maintains its emissions are safe. Some residents aren’t so sure.

At open-house events at the town’s recreation centre over two days in mid-September, company executives, engineers and other employees field questions from members of the public. Moments after walking into the fluorescent-lit room, I’m recognized by a company representative who asks if I plan to interview anyone while I’m there. I laugh, shaking my head incredulously. He grins and says he’s read my reporting. A few minutes later, Teresa Waddington, a senior executive at LNG Canada and registered professional engineer, approaches to shake my hand.

LNG Canada is holding the event so community members can weigh in on plans for a permit amendment. The consortium wants an increase in allowable emissions levels to account for its need to keep the flare burning 24/7 — until the stack can be redesigned in 2028. 

Waddington tells me it’s not a perfect solution to problems that have plagued the flaring system since commissioning began in late 2024, but says the company has made significant progress to reduce flaring levels over the past couple of months. She says the original permit didn’t account for “higher flaring volumes” associated with getting an LNG plant up and running. 

But that’s not the whole story.

Kitimat sits at the end of a 100-kilometre long fjord, hemmed in by mountains. Its geography means the town experiences a specific set of weather conditions: regular high winds, temperature inversions, rollercoaster pressure systems fed by the Pacific Ocean and more. LNG Canada’s flare stack wasn’t built to handle those conditions.

When the liquefaction facility fired up its flare stack, locals and workers alike quickly realized something was wrong. As first reported in The Narwhal, an integrity issue with the main stack was identified and later reported to the BC Energy Regulator. For months, the community was subjected to excessive noise, towering flames lighting the night sky, black smoke and a concoction of unidentified chemical smells and various other emissions as plant operators tried to get things under control. 

“There is an operational issue with the flare design where at very low flow rates, the gas being burned moves from the tip of the flare to within the flare tip itself, causing a hot spot in the metal there,” Waddington tells me later in an email, after I follow up on our conversation. “To prevent these hot spots, more gas is sent through the flare system … to push the flame back up to the top of the flare tip.”

This “assist gas” amounted to around 10 per cent of all gas that was sent to the coastal plant last year. Locals nicknamed the flare, which reached heights of around 90 metres at times, the “Eye of Mordor” after J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

While LNG Canada is working to amend its permits, the consortium also appears poised to make a final investment decision on an approved expansion, which would double production at the Kitimat plant. As Reuters recently reported, a decision on the project’s second phase could come as early as October. Both the federal and provincial governments have signalled strong support for the expansion.

In the community, vast work camps built to support construction of the LNG plant sit vacant and quiet. Today, the flare burns low, a dull fiery glow at the heart of the haze like the ember of a cigarette seen across a dimly lit room. It’s been calmer and quieter lately — but problems persist, and the gas being burned daily continues to exceed government permits.

Flaring not a danger to human health, LNG Canada says

Kitimat is no stranger to industry. The community was built on Haisla lands in the 1950s as a company town — serving what was then known as the Aluminum Company of Canada, or Alcan. 

The town’s residents, while not accustomed to living alongside a liquefied natural gas plant, are familiar with being an industrial hub. As Kitimat mayor Phil Germuth previously told The Narwhal: “Being a town that was built by industry, people understand that every once in a while you’re going to have to put up with something to get the bigger goal in the end.” 

Kitimat is also a small town, with a population of around 8,000, and a major industry like LNG Canada has extensive connections throughout the community that might make dissenting residents think twice about openly voicing their opinions. 

Several community members The Narwhal spoke to, who asked not to be identified, said they’re grateful for LNG Canada grants they’ve received or sponsored programs they’ve participated in, but worry about how the combined emissions from the two major industrial facilities might be affecting their health. Most who shared their views say they’re not against having a gas plant in town — but they’re skeptical about claims the emissions aren’t harmful.

One resident tells me they avoid strenuous activity outdoors now — just in case. Another, who owns and operates a local business, wonders why Rio Tinto, which produces more hydroelectricity than it uses and sells the balance to BC Hydro, and LNG Canada, which is liquefying natural gas extracted from deposits in the northeast, don’t provide the town with free electricity and gas.

“I’d much rather not pay for hydro and gas,” they shrugged.

According to LNG Canada and the provincial regulator, excess flaring isn’t a problem for human health. Because the gas is burned at the flare stack, it’s mostly converted to carbon dioxide and water vapour, Waddington says. In other words, more gas being flared doesn’t necessarily increase local pollution levels — which have remained below provincial guidelines, according to the BC Energy Regulator. This claim is substantiated by local air quality monitoring, much of which was implemented when Rio Tinto underwent a major expansion between 2011 and 2015.

“There is a long-established air quality monitoring network that monitors ambient air quality in the Kitimat region, on an ongoing basis … to ensure no impact to human health,” Waddington says.

They’ve reduced the flaring volumes significantly since installing a new flare tip in July, Waddington adds, but until the whole system can be redesigned they will still need to burn more gas than originally planned.

The new flare tip has “the same design [with] upgraded metallurgy [that enables it to] operate with a bit more backburn and manage hot spots,” which she explains reduces the amount of extra gas being flared by about 60 per cent. “We are working with the company that designed the flare tip to improve this design further and to ensure it operates as expected in real-world conditions.”

But there are other emissions from the plant, too, including black smoke from the stack, which indicates particulates and unburned gases. As The Narwhal recently reported, LNG Canada predicted black smoke would be emitted between 15 and 60 minutes one to three times per year while it stabilized early operations, but the plant has exceeded that estimate. 

In April, the BC Energy Regulator ordered LNG Canada to identify the root cause and implement a fix by October. On Sept. 21, the regulator posted the first report since implementing these measures, which identified “20 black smoke events that occurred between April 22 and July 31, 2026, including events that LNG Canada self-reported as non-compliances.” The regulator noted LNG Canada also reported “four additional black smoke events during August 2026” and community members told The Narwhal of at least one event in September.

Still more types of emissions, visible only through an optical gas imaging camera, are also being released at the plant. Details of these emissions were published in August by The Narwhal and Point Source after being observed by Tim Doty, a former oil and gas inspector with the state of Texas.

“The emissions that could not be seen with the bare eye were shocking,” he said at the time, after monitoring emissions at the Kitimat facility with a camera earlier in the year.

In Strawberry Meadows, the residential neighbourhood closest to the plant, several homes and serviced lots are listed for sale. They’re nice houses: modern design, tucked in amongst the trees on quiet streets. But while the entire town is adjusting to living with the new industrial project, it’s this area that has experienced the most noise and emissions. 

Around this time last year, one resident of the neighbourhood told The Narwhal he and his family couldn’t sleep for days on end.

“We maybe got two hours’ sleep this whole weekend. I’m just useless now.” 

Because of the imminent provincial election, the regulator was unable to answer questions, noting “government is in a caretaker mode” and communications, including from Crown agencies like the BC Energy Regulator “are limited to critical health and public safety information.” A spokesperson sent links to data — LNG Canada’s daily and monthly flaring amounts, the latest air quality data map and B.C.’s air quality objectives and standards — along with a statement about its ongoing oversight of the liquefaction facility.

Residents ‘more curious than concerned:’ LNG Canada executive

At the open house, community members speak quietly with company reps, asking questions about flaring, emissions, smells and more.

Joanne Spencer, another senior executive with LNG Canada, says most residents who come through are more curious than concerned. Between four sessions over two days, around 120 people stop by.

“This is quite an engaging way to talk to members of the public,” she says, gesturing around the room at clusters of employees speaking with residents. “If you’re looking at somebody in the eyes, it gives the opportunity for you to acknowledge that they’ve understood or [see if they] have another question.”

For her part, Waddington says she’s committed to show up at council meetings and “many other places where people congregate to engage in the conversation on what LNG Canada is doing well and where we need to improve.” 

She tells me she previously worked as a plant manager at a Shell gas facility in Scotland where flaring “attracted community interest and concern.”

“As a result of a prolonged flaring incident, many of the staff from the facility were facing hard questions from concerned community members in their day-to-day lives,” she says, explaining she experienced tension while going about the community. 

“It was important to me then, as it is to both me and LNG Canada now, that the company engages directly with [the] community when they have concerns to provide information, listen for what matters and how we can improve in those areas or better communicate about them.”

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A major Canadian oil and gas company reported dozens of incidents at its pipelines after the provincial regulator exempted thousands of its pipelines from normal clean-up timelines. 

According to provincial data reviewed by the Investigative Journalism Foundation and The Narwhal, Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., or CNRL, reported 45 incidents since 2020, many of them spills of unspecified amounts of natural gas and other toxic cargo caused by metal corrosion at aging pipelines. 

Those spills came after a 2020 decision from the BC Energy Regulator to exempt roughly 4,300 of the company’s pipelines from the usual requirement that inactive pipelines be fully decommissioned within 18 months. Decommissioning, or deactivating, a pipeline includes removing any fluid and disconnecting it from the system. The sealed-off pipeline will remain in the ground in perpetuity. 

A CNRL spokesperson did not directly respond to a question about whether the spills occurred at pipelines associated with the exemption. Neither did the BC Energy Regulator.

Most of the pipelines operated by CNRL are short, transporting fracked natural gas and other fuels from wells scattered across northeastern B.C. to larger pipelines which carry the products to consumers or exporters. But even after those wells have run dry, the pipelines associated with them can still leak leftover contaminants into the local environment.  

“If it’s not properly [decommissioned] after its end of life, you have a substantial risk of groundwater contamination,” Philip Gass, a director of the energy program at the Ottawa-based International Institute for Sustainable Development, said in an interview. 

Gass said such spills might go unnoticed.

“If it’s been sitting there for a long time, you have to be really careful about the monitoring because this isn’t an active pipeline where you would notice a spill right away,” Gass said.The BC Energy Regulator reports for the CNRL incidents include leaks of natural gas, liquid hydrocarbons and produced water — a byproduct of oil and gas extraction that often contains heavy metals and hydrocarbons. Of the 45 reported instances, 23 were due to metal loss, often internal corrosion that allowed toxic fluids to escape.The regulator said incidents don’t automatically mean spills, since they can also include “incidents with the potential to affect pipeline integrity.” But many of the CNRL incident reports explicitly indicate that they resulted in spills or pipeline failure.

The regulator did not say how much of each fluid leaked into the surrounding environment or if there was any ecological damage associated with those spills.

Critics argue the spills are further evidence the regulator erred in giving CNRL such a broad exemption, which they called a sign of the undue influence the oil and gas industry has on provincial regulators. 

“It doesn’t give us a lot of faith that the regulatory system is operating as it should,” BC Green Party MLA Jeremy Valeriote said. 

‘No impact to the environment’: CNRL

For comparison, in the six years prior to 2020, CNRL reported 25 incidents at its pipelines, 17 of which were due to metal loss. 

A CNRL spokesperson said the company operates 14,896 kilometres of pipelines in B.C. and that spills are dealt with properly and promptly. 

“Clean-up and remediation activities were completed, resulting in no impact to the environment,” the spokesperson said of the 45 incidents since 2020. “When events occur, such as equipment malfunction that results in an incident, we have safety and environmental management systems in place to quickly manage these events. To mitigate any impacts, incidents are quickly and effectively managed in accordance with our structured emergency management and spill preparedness programs.”

Daryl Foley, president of Group 10 Engineering, said producers like CNRL work hard to minimize incidents.

“Their intention is to do the right thing and to prevent spills because it costs them an enormous amount of money when they have a substantial spill,” he said in an interview. Foley’s Calgary-based company works with companies and producers on pipeline integrity issues and advises the Alberta and B.C. regulators on best practices. “I’m not claiming that everybody’s perfect — if perhaps they’re ignoring it and there is a residual risk of environmental impact, well, they need to pull up their socks and get after it and prioritize based on where the highest risks are.”

Foley said corrosion affecting pipelines has been an issue for decades, but fracking can exacerbate the problem.

“The challenges are real,” he said. “Northeast B.C. in particular, they’re fracking these wells to try to enhance production. The challenge is after fracking, they’ve run into issues where they can get some of these frac solids, and some of them can be really aggressive sulphur compounds.”

Frac solids are a mixture of silica sand, water and chemicals used in fracking to extract oil or gas trapped in underground rock formations. Those mixtures, if not properly removed from sections of pipeline that move material from wells to larger, safer transportation pipelines, can damage the metal and cause leaks or spills. Foley said any pipelines with potential or identified corrosion issues associated with active wells should be prioritized.

“Are these wells known to have been discontinued properly?” he wondered. “That’s really what they should be checking in on and making sure of. Any that hasn’t been discontinued properly, that needs to be dealt with immediately.”

CNRL pipelines exempt from clean-up timelines

The BC Energy Regulator said a 2020 audit identified thousands of CNRL pipelines that were either inactive or soon would be. The regulator said that’s what prompted it to strike a deal with the company, one of the largest oil and gas producers in the country.Under that deal — which was not publicly disclosed at the time — the regulator agreed to exempt thousands of CNRL pipelines from normal clean-up timelines in exchange for the company committing to deactivate all of them by 2028, with targets to meet every year until then. 

The regulator later found in 2023 that the company was not meeting those commitments, but reinstated the deal without penalizing CNRL.

A regulator spokesperson said the deal was “the most effective way to bring CNRL into compliance” and claimed the agreement “was not a removal of oversight.” 

As of this month, the regulator said only 474 pipelines remain to be deactivated out of an original total of 4,312.

“As such, CNRL continues to meet and exceed the required deactivation targets set out in the conditions of the exemption,” the spokesperson said.

Drew Yewchuk, an environmental lawyer and PhD student at the University of British Columbia, said it’s not clear what the regulator or the public gained from the deal with CNRL. 

“The regulator is getting less than what the legal requirements are, and the company only has to do less than what was the legal requirement. So what is the regulator getting from these deals?” Yewchuk said.

He said oil companies often argue meeting regulatory requirements would endanger their operations, putting pressure on politicians to intervene.

“They don’t want to cause job losses, and that’s the threat that companies always have in the background,” Yewchuk said. “They say, ‘Look, if you force us to invest too much here, we’re going to move out of this jurisdiction.’ ” 

But he said CNRL isn’t a struggling company. The Calgary-based company reported net earnings of $10.8 billion in 2025.

“CNRL is not out of money,” Yewchuk said. 

Regulator ‘way too tied to industry’

Gass said oil and gas remediation can become a public responsibility if the operating company goes bankrupt. Some provinces, including B.C. and Alberta, charge oil and gas companies an annual levy to clean and shut down so-called “orphan wells” left by defunct firms.

But if the company is still active and profitable, the regulator’s role should be to enforce the rules, Gass said.

“In an ideal situation you have a regulatory regime that assures the accountability and has the enforceability to level penalties for actors that don’t do the remediation as needed,” Gass said. 

The BC Energy Regulator, like other regulators in Canada, is funded by an annual levy charged to oil and gas companies.

While proponents argue an industry-funded regulator is sustainable, critics like the Green Party’s Valeriote argue it creates a dependence that gives energy companies undue leverage in negotiations.

Valeriote said granting exemptions like the one given to CNRL is unfair to other companies following the rules and is “erosive to the regulator’s reputation.”

“I think there’s probably a cultural and systemic issue there and that they’re way too tied to the industry,” Valeriote said. 

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This investigation is a collaboration between The Narwhal and Point Source, a U.K.-based investigative journalism organization.

LNG Canada told the BC Energy Regulator its Kitimat, B.C., gas export facility was likely to emit black smoke continuously for multiple days, a warning that came ahead of key environmental permits being granted, according to recently released documents.

The new documents, obtained by The Narwhal and U.K.-based investigative journalism organization Point Source through freedom of information legislation, raise questions over whether the regulator should have sought more assurances about measures to stop this kind of pollution before permits were granted.

Summary

• LNG Canada has been emitting more black smoke than originally planned and some Kitimat, B.C., residents are concerned.
• Black smoke can indicate gas is not burning efficiently, releasing higher levels of toxic pollutants, according to one expert.
• The BC Energy Regulator knew about the smoke ahead of giving the project approvals but has now ordered LNG Canada to make changes.

In July 2022, LNG Canada — a consortium of five foreign-owned companies led by Shell — submitted a document to the provincial government outlining its expectations around black smoke emissions.

“Given the unpredictable nature of these types of events, it is not possible to give a frequency of them occurring although an estimate is provided,” the consortium wrote. 

The colour of black smoke is caused by a concentration of particulates and unburned fuels, which is toxic. The estimate provided to the regulator said black smoke would be emitted at the facility for between 15 and 60 minutes one to three times per year prior to the facility completing 200 shipments. LNG Canada sent its 100th shipment in mid-June, nearly one year after its first. It also estimated slightly less dark smoke would be emitted continuously from the facility for between five and 15 days on four to six occasions in the first year.

Despite this information, the regulator issued LNG Canada a facility permit requiring that black smoke not be continuously emitted for more than 15 minutes. The company committed to that limit, but has failed to keep to it.

On Jan. 6 2026, the export terminal emitted black smoke emissions during non-emergency conditions for more than seven hours. The next day, it emitted black smoke for over two hours. 

In April, the BC Energy Regulator told LNG Canada to identify the root cause of black smoke emissions during flaring at its facility in Kitimat, and implement a fix by October.

In late June, the regulator instituted new requirements, including mandated reporting of instances of black smoke emissions.

A spokesperson with the regulator said the facility’s permit “contains clear statutory requirements regarding black smoke emissions designed to minimize air pollutants to protect public safety and the environment.” 

“When our oversight activities identify non-compliances, such as in this case, we can place additional requirements (e.g., having to report black smoke) on permit holders,” the spokesperson noted in an emailed statement.

Black smoke from the flare stack of a LNG facility usually indicates that gas from the facility is not being burned off in an efficient manner and higher levels of toxic pollutants are being released, according to Tim Doty, a former oil and gas inspector with the Texas state government.

“The black smoke that can be visually seen being emitted from the flare is soot, basically,” Doty said in an interview. “In theory, flares are designed to burn in an efficient way that doesn’t produce this black smoke.”

According to the regulator’s reply to detailed questions, LNG Canada’s new requirements as of June include:

• Report to the BC Energy Regulator (BCER) all instances of black smoke that exceeds 15 minutes in duration and provide operational details concurrent with such instances;   
• By Aug. 15, 2026, submit a report completed by a qualified professional to the BCER that identifies the root causes of the emission of black smoke and measures to prevent the emission of black smoke; 
• By October 15, 2026, identify and implement measures to prevent the emission of black smoke based on the root cause analysis as required by the report; 
• For the months of October 2026 to March 2027, submit a monthly report to the energy regulator BCER completed by a qualified professional that assesses the effectiveness of the measures implemented .

‘I want to have a family’: community members concerned about potential health impacts

For some community members, the black smoke and presence of other potential pollutants are a source of great concern. 

The Narwhal and Point Source spoke to a young resident who we are calling Avery Sutherland, to keep her name confidential and protect her identity. Kitimat is a small town where LNG Canada is a significant employer and a major donor to local causes, and criticism is often seen as a threat to that.

Avery Sutherland said she tried on multiple occasions to get answers to questions about potential health concerns, but LNG Canada representatives would not respond.

“As a young person, I want to have a family,” she said in an interview. “There’s been a lot of back and forth I’ve seen over the last couple of years at different talks that LNG [Canada] gives, where they refuse to directly acknowledge the studies that have been done on the impacts of flaring on women who are pregnant and their children, and how that often leads to like more birth complications and more premature births.”

In response to questions about this, the regulator spokesperson said: “It is important to note for the benefit of residents of Kitimat that air quality measurements in the Kitimat Valley have remained below B.C. Ambient Air Quality Objectives since LNG Canada received its air discharge permit.”

But some critics claim the air quality monitoring program is insufficient.

“The current ambient air pollution monitoring is not sufficient to get a real handle on what the health implications are for the people that are living close to this facility,” Tracey Saxby, executive director of environmental non-profit, My Sea to Sky, said in an interview. “When you dig into the data you realize that there aren’t enough sensors, they aren’t gathering data in the right places and not enough of the sensors are continually operating.” 

The Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment has said the facility’s flaring activity has exposed residents to “health-harming chemicals, including black carbon and benzene.”

“They are not consistently monitoring for some of the most harmful pollutants, like benzene,” Saxby said. “These are big monitoring gaps.” Health Canada has labelled benzene a known carcinogen since 1993.

In 2024, the U.S.-based Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice published a report highlighting how LNG export facilities degrade air quality by releasing pollutants known to cause respiratory illnesses, cancer and birth defects from prolonged exposure.

Scientific studies have shown that burning gas also releases other toxic pollutants as a result of incomplete combustion, such as volatile organic compounds, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and fine soot particles, which are directly associated with respiratory and cardiovascular diseases and risks to fetal development.

“When you see this kind of pollution, it’s a sign that the flare isn’t being operated correctly and usually that comes with a lot of other emissions that are actively being released that are not visible to the naked eye,” Doty explained.

“It’s likely that the real world pollution levels are far worse than the picture painted by the current data,” Saxby said. “Even though the existing data is very sparse, it shows worrying spikes in benzene levels that raise a lot of questions about the health impacts from the LNG Canada facility.”

As The Narwhal and Point Source recently reported, LNG Canada originally told the regulator it would operate its facility without routine flaring — and then quietly removed this commitment months before commissioning. 

Sutherland wishes the consortium that owns LNG Canada was more forthcoming with information. Its presence in the community has been divisive for as long as the facility has been in development, which means for young residents like herself, it’s been a factious issue for most of their lives. 

“When I was growing up, there were schoolyard and classroom arguments about this since as long as I can remember,” she said of the facility, which was proposed in 2013.

James Smith, another Kitimat resident whose name has been changed to protect his privacy, worked at the plant during construction. He said while he was expecting problems to occur at the facility, he didn’t predict the scale of the impacts. 

“I wasn’t expecting the black smoke,” he said. 

Smith said he’s experienced excessive noise and bad smells at his house since the facility started operations and on multiple occasions found his yard covered in a thin film of black residue.

Doty said the ongoing problems suggest to him the facility’s problem with its flare tip could be causing the black smoke.

“Flares like this should be operating with about 98 per cent combustion efficiency, but there is no way that the flare is operating with anything close to that efficiency,” he said. “If there’s too much pressure going to it, you’re never going to get things to combust properly — and that seems to be what is happening at LNG Canada.” 

In response to questions from The Narwhal and Point Source, the regulator spokesperson noted: “The causes of the black smoke events have not yet been definitively determined.” 

‘Truly massive’ invisible emissions

On top of the elevated levels of flaring at the LNG Canada export terminal, there are increasing concerns about the facility routinely releasing natural gas into the atmosphere.

Natural gas is mostly composed of methane, which is an invisible, odorless and an extremely potent greenhouse gas. When released directly into the atmosphere it is 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide for its short-term warming impact on the climate.

“If people could actually see the invisible emissions that are being released from the LNG Canada facility that are detectable with an optical gas imaging camera, it would really blow them away,” Doty said. He monitored emissions at the Kitimat facility with a camera.“The emissions that could not be seen with the bare eye were shocking. They were truly massive.”

Doty said the emissions — both visible and invisible — could have “very negative health implications for nearby communities and downwind receptors.” 

“If I was living nearby, I would be very concerned, and I would want the plant shut down, at least in the short term, while it is re-engineered,” he said. He noted the unburned gas could contain volatile organic compounds such as benzene and butane, in addition to the climate-warming methane.

“At the moment, the program to monitor ambient air pollution in the area isn’t effective and doesn’t have enough monitors in place to truly calculate how air quality is being impacted,” he said.

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Summary

• Internal documents show LNG Canada’s original plans for the project included a commitment that operations would not include routine flaring. 
• While LNG Canada and the B.C. government have promoted the site as an environmental leader, the facility burned about 350 million cubic metres of gas in its first year of operation.
• LNG Canada did not directly respond to questions about the removal of the commitments and said it is currently working to “reduce flaring and progress toward steady, long-term operations.”

This story is a collaboration between The Narwhal and Point Source, a U.K.-based investigative journalism organization.

LNG Canada, the country’s first major liquefied natural gas export facility on B.C.’s West Coast, has made international headlines over the past year — for burning off the gas it should have been exporting. 

An issue with one of the facility’s flare stacks has caused the plant to burn off extra gas since starting up in late 2024. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

Early versions of LNG Canada’s operational plans included detailed environmental commitments — and a promise the Kitimat, B.C., plant would operate “without routine flaring.”

In 2019, the consortium of five foreign-owned companies behind the multi-billion-dollar project told the BC Energy Regulator its massive gas liquefaction and export facility would have minimum disturbance to the local community, assuring the provincial government the plant would be built to specifications that would ensure flaring — the burning of unused gas — would only need to be done in extraordinary circumstances. 

These promises appeared in multiple versions of regulatory reports submitted to the B.C. government. Six versions of the reports — drafts of LNG Canada’s flaring management plans marked as “restricted” — were included in hundreds of pages of government documents obtained by The Narwhal and UK-based investigative journalism outlet Point Source. 

In November 2023, the commitments vanished from the latest drafts — and remained absent from all subsequent drafts and the final version. The removal of commitments close to completion raises fresh questions about whether potential problems during construction may have led the company to downgrade its environmental targets.

A few months later, the mega-project started its commissioning process. Then came the flaring.

As The Narwhal and Point Source previously reported, LNG Canada burned approximately 350 million cubic metres of gas in 2025, making it one of the most polluting LNG facilities in the world. Some unplanned flaring events included multiple occurrences of flames reaching heights of 90 metres, roughly as tall as London’s Big Ben, along with plumes of black smoke settling over the community. 

“The fact that LNG Canada showed the regulator multiple draft documents which all said that the facility would not flare on a routine basis was beyond misleading,” Tim Doty, a former state oil and gas inspector from Texas, said in an interview. “This was totally false information.”

During his tenure with the Texas government, Doty managed thousands of air quality monitoring projects as part of environmental assessments of industrial facilities. He’s now a consultant who works on behalf of companies and organizations to assess and monitor emissions at oil and gas facilities around the globe. 

Unnecessary flaring of gas essentially wastes the resource — and creates carbon pollution.

Even after LNG Canada quietly dropped its planned commitment to operate without routine flaring, stakeholders continued to tout its environmental credentials. In June 2025, Shell CEO Wael Sawan said LNG Canada would be “one of the lowest-carbon [LNG] projects anywhere in the world,” speaking at the Energy Asia conference in Malaysia. 

B.C. Premier David Eby echoed the claim in July that year, saying gas processed at the Kitimat terminal is the “lowest-carbon LNG in the world.”

Many experts now say these claims were fundamentally untrue.

Christopher Doleman, an LNG and gas specialist at the U.S.-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, said the volume of flaring at the facility “undermines claims being made” about low-carbon LNG.

“Statements that have been made by officials saying that the LNG is the cleanest in the world now seem to be completely untrue,” he previously told The Narwhal.

The premier’s office did not reply to a request for an interview, referring questions to the Energy Ministry, which acknowledged it received the questions but ultimately did not respond.

LNG Canada did not directly respond to questions about the removal of the commitments and said it is currently working to “reduce flaring and progress toward steady, long-term operations.”

‘An extremely big polluter’: former oil and gas inspector

LNG Canada flared a minimum of 127,900 cubic metres of gas every day in 2025, with the daily average being much higher: almost one million cubic metres. Government data show 3,648 million cubic metres of gas were sent to the facility last year via the Coastal GasLink pipeline, meaning almost 10 per cent of all gas transported to the terminal was burned off without being used for power or exported.

The average household in Canada consumed around 2,216 cubic metres of natural gas in 2024, according to the Canadian Gas Association. That means LNG Canada burned off the equivalent amount of gas that could have provided energy to 157,942 homes.

Yet, LNG Canada’s documents submitted to the provincial government claim environmental excellence. 

“LNG Canada’s ‘commitment and policy on health, safety, security, environment and social performance’ focuses on ways to avoid and minimize negative environmental and social impacts resulting from our operations and enhance the positive impacts in a systematic manner,” the early documents noted.

Doty said regulatory plans for LNG facilities are often subject to multiple revisions by the government regulator. 

“It is normal for there to be a bit of back and forth between the operator and the regulator when documents are being prepared that are associated with operating permits which allow the company to release pollution,” he explained. “However, it does seem strange that these documents contained these environmental pledges that were later scrapped entirely.”

The BC Energy Regulator told The Narwhal and Point Source the early versions of the reports “included commitments and commentary that were outside of the intended scope of the report and not consistent with the design of their facility.”

“Routine flaring is authorized for specific purposes, including pilot systems, continuous purge systems, passing valves, manual sampling systems and online process analyzers,” a regulator spokesperson explained in a detailed response to questions.

Doty questioned whether the designs were ever intended for a facility that would operate without routine flaring or if something happened while building the plant. 

“You can see from the way that this facility was designed that there was always supposed to be some kind of combustion going on — and with that comes emissions,” he said, adding additional problems may have occurred early in the commissioning process.

The regulator spokesperson disagreed with the theory that the plant was designed for high rates of flaring. 

“The [BC Energy Regulator’s] reviews of the facility and LNG Canada’s submissions during design and construction … did not identify factors that would have contributed to increased flaring rates during operation,” the spokesperson noted.

James Smith, a Kitimat community member whose name has been changed to protect his family from potential repercussions, worked on the project during construction. He said he witnessed numerous problems on the job site, ultimately leading him to quit.

“They cut corners: it was about timelines and money,” he said. “They knew even before the flare arrived, before they started building it, that it wasn’t going to work. That was the word on the ground.”

The Narwhal could not independently verify Smith’s claims, and LNG Canada did not respond to questions about alleged problems during construction. 

In January, The Narwhal revealed an “integrity issue” with the facility’s flaring equipment resulted in LNG Canada burning significantly more gas than expected — and discovered it could take three to five years to fix.

The issue was identified shortly after the LNG plant started testing its equipment in late 2024, if not before, but the government regulator did not learn about the problem until April 2025.

“I’ve been assessing and monitoring facilities in the oil and gas sector for more than 30 years, and I can tell you that LNG Canada is an extremely big polluter,” Doty said. “In my opinion, it should not be allowed to operate with such excessive emission levels.”

The facility is currently operating with a cracked flare tip as well as several leaking valves, according to previous reporting from The Narwhal and technical reports since the issue was identified. A flare tip, which sits at the top of the flare stack, helps ensure the safe combustion of the gas.

The technical problems have increased the risk of flames from flares retreating back into the system’s pipes and causing an explosion. To stop this from happening, LNG Canada has substantially increased the gas flows to all of the facility’s flares.

“A replacement flare tip is currently being installed,” a spokesperson for the consortium wrote in an emailed statement. “While the replacement is expected to improve flare tip integrity, a longer-term redesigned tip is being developed.”

LNG Canada wants the B.C. government to let it increase flaring tenfold

Earlier this year, LNG Canada revealed it was planning to ask the B.C. regulator to increase its flaring limit tenfold for the next three years. The company’s deputy chief operating officer, Teresa Waddington, disclosed the plans during a Kitimat council meeting in March and at a recent presentation to Kitimat residents.

If approved, the new limit would allow the company to continually flare up to 300 tonnes of gas per day, an increase from its current limit of 28 tonnes per day. The company said the new, more permissive flaring limit would help accommodate operational problems which have led to higher-than-anticipated flaring volumes.

LNG Canada told The Narwhal and Point Source the proposed amendment is “not expected to materially increase emissions in the local air shed.”

“The original … authorization was based on long-term, stable operating conditions and did not reflect the higher flaring volumes typically seen during start-up and early operations at an LNG facility,” the spokesperson wrote. “LNG Canada is requesting a temporary, three-year provision that reflects overall flaring during the early operations period.”

However, flare tips are large and complex pieces of equipment and can take more than a year to procure, according to Waddington. As a result, she said LNG Canada wants to keep purging extra gas to prevent the flames from spreading downward into the pipes, likely until 2028.

“LNG Canada has said that it’s going to take three years to replace the flare [tip], but I can tell you that it doesn’t take three years to replace a flare [tip] like this,” Doty said. “The plant should be shut down. It should be properly repaired and engineered and then started back up again.”

Tracey Saxby, a marine scientist and executive director of non-profit environmental organization My Sea to Sky, worries LNG Canada is setting a precedent that other liquefaction and export facilities will follow.

“Woodfibre LNG in Squamish has estimated that flaring during startup will last for one month, with intermittent flare events of three to four days,” she said in an interview. “After that, during regular operations, they are saying they will only flare three per cent of the time, which is 11 days a year. But after what we have seen at LNG Canada and other facilities worldwide, this seems unrealistic.”

She said the excessive flaring at LNG Canada held against its previously stated commitments demonstrates there is “nothing anyone can do if the operator of one of these facilities breaks its promises about pollution.”

The regulator said it is “actively overseeing LNG Canada’s progress on short-term and long-term corrective actions and measures to reduce flaring from all facility flare systems.” 

“[BC Energy Regulator] technical experts review flaring and air contaminant discharge information submitted by LNG Canada, conduct inspections and take compliance actions where required,” the spokesperson noted, adding an “investigation into potential non-compliances is ongoing.”Updated on July 31, 2026, at 5:39 a.m. PT: This story has been updated to correct a statement that the BC Energy Regulator has promoted the LNG Canada facility as an environmental leader. It is the B.C. government that has made that claim.

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Around 13,000 years ago, our blue planet got a lot whiter. 

Temperatures in the northern hemisphere dropped precipitously and in a relatively short time — decades, not centuries — big ice sheets spread down from the mountains, freezing out once-teeming habitats populated densely by flora and fauna. 

Humans, and our non-human relatives, had been flourishing for some 10,000 years in the warm afterglow that followed the previous deep freeze. Abundance had bloomed in the glacial melt and from the sediment left on the land. Life stretched out in the absence of ice. But then the ice came back.

The ensuing thousand-year period is called the Younger Dryas, named for a little Arctic flower called Dryas octopetala. In some places, like Greenland, the freeze took mere months. Other parts of the northern world succumbed more slowly, but the overall process, in geological time, was like the heartbeat of a hummingbird. And then it was quiet.

The onset of the Younger Dryas may have been abrupt, but it wasn’t catastrophic. Humans adapted. Clinging to refugia — pockets of the landscape where conditions were favourable enough to support plants and animals despite the pervasive cold — we endured. Ultimately, we thrived. When the period ended, as abruptly as it had arrived, so began the Holocene.

Like the humans who watched the world change so quickly to white and like their descendants who felt the rapid return of the sun, we are living through a period of dramatic and accelerating changes to our environment. 

But ours is a different time, one characterized not by ice, but by fire.

Last fall, while walking down an alleyway in my northern British Columbia town, I ran into an acquaintance. We traded the usual pleasantries and then talk turned, as it so often does, to the weather. It was hot and dry and the skies were choked with the haze from a spate of wildfires that had flared up after the season appeared to be mostly over.

“This isn’t normal,” my friend insisted. 

Unlike me, he grew up in the area. As an avid outdoors enthusiast and former mountain guide, he was well-positioned to say what’s normal and what’s not. He seemed unsettled, agitated. 

“I have never seen a September like this,” he said.

We are living in the Anthropocene, a term many geologists have adopted to characterize the era where humans are the primary agents of change on the planet. Our actions over the past few centuries have led to the increasingly erratic and unstable climatic systems wreaking havoc across the globe. As we grapple with the impacts of our collective past, we also need to grapple with ourselves as we come to terms with how we process the changes we are experiencing. We are reckoning with a restless world.

Those same wildfires that suffused my little mountain town with the smell of campfire blanketed the city of Vancouver with thick smoke. For a few days, the air quality there plummeted to rank as the worst in the world. It all felt surprising somehow, even as we collectively chided ourselves for being surprised. 

Humans are incredibly adaptable — but we crave certainty. We intuitively cling to patterns we’ve seen before to guide our expectations about what a day, month or year might bring. We plan around those expectations: picnics and road trips, soccer games and barbeques.

As the world around us continues to change, we begrudgingly change with it. We plan now for wildfire season — unheard of in my childhood. We slather our kids in sunblock and pack asthma inhalers. We don’t roast marshmallows on crackling fires anymore when we camp out in the woods in the summer because of months-long fire bans. But change is a painful and iterative process and we keep setting a new normal to anchor ourselves to, again and again and again.

Our preference for certainty can have profound impacts on mental health. Very little quantitative research has been done but there is a growing consensus that climate impacts — including the anticipation of those we have not yet experienced — are leading to a mental health crisis.

“Climate change has been associated with numerous mental health conditions including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, anxiety, grief, substance use disorders and suicidal ideation among many others,” Elizabeth Wiley, a physician, wrote in the BC Medical Journal in 2019.

We do plan further ahead, peeking into possible futures with predictive climate models to design and build infrastructure we hope will protect our communities from fires and floods and more. But our world is changing as fast as that flickering hummingbird heartbeat and we act as if each pulse will last forever. There’s only so far we can see. 

In our temporal myopia, we need to get more comfortable with not knowing — and embrace uncertainty as an essential part of our existence.

Our ancestors found refugia to withstand an icy world that became increasingly hostile to life. Now, as we speed inexorably into a hotter future, we are confronted with a growing list of urgent problems we need to prepare for, and adapt our existence to meet. We need to build our refugia.

David Stainforth, a physicist and climate scientist from Oxford, England, says policy makers and scientists need to pay closer attention to uncertainty — and build for unpredictable outcomes. He told me climate modelling has an important role to play in adaptation, but relying too heavily on a particular set of predictions, however sophisticated the models may be, can inadvertently fall prey to the human tendency to seek certainty. 

“It will kind of spuriously get rid of the uncertainty, meaning you can now build your flood defences — but you’re building the flood defences to protect yourself against the future in the model,” he said on a video call last year. “And the future in reality could be very, very different from that. There’s a danger you might misdirect society.”

In his 2023 book, Predicting Our Climate Future, Stainforth makes a case for embracing the uncertainties in climate models as a guiding principle for building resiliency at a community level. As he wrote in an essay for Aeon, uncertainties compound over decades until “almost everything can influence almost everything else.” 

“Changes in Arctic sea ice could influence the Indian summer monsoon,” he wrote. “Changes in rainfall in the North Atlantic could influence temperature patterns in central Africa.”

In essence, Stainforth argues we risk catastrophe if we are too reliant on the predictions of complex climate models — which can do many things but not all things — for the decisions we make about how to survive the inevitable changes that are coming. But by embracing uncertainty, he says, we can build refugia capable of withstanding impacts we haven’t yet imagined. 

Michele Koppes, a professor in the department of geography at the University of British Columbia, says accepting uncertainty can also provide a path through climate-related grief and anxiety. Koppes studies the effects of climate change on mountains and glaciers and works with communities living with the impacts, which include “dwindling water resources and increases in landslides and natural hazards like outburst floods.” That work began with a focus on the physical changes to the landscape, but has shifted to focus on the human side. 

“Who are the people that are living in the closest proximity to these impacts and what are their stories?” she said. “How are they perceiving this and what do they need in order to be resilient and to feel like they can continue their livelihoods and their lives in the face of all this change?”

She said asking these questions helped her process the loss and helplessness she was feeling as she watched the places she loved melt away. Reframing how we think about climate change asks us to accept uncertainty as a core principle — and while that can be deeply uncomfortable it also offers a truer understanding of the world around us. 

“The notion of certainty is a fallacy,” Koppes said. “Or maybe I’ll be more specific: the notion of control is a fallacy.” 

“The more I spend time on this earth, the more I recognize how we are just one small part of a complex system,” she explained. “And complex systems are the process of emergent phenomena — you never quite know where it’s going to go. The more we think that we understand or we have control, or we’re certain about one aspect, the further we are from truly knowing everything is a web of relations.”

Faced with the onset of the Younger Dryas, our ancestors probably didn’t sit around arguing about how to stop the ice from advancing. It’s far more likely they took stock of their surroundings and found ways to act quickly to protect the things they cared about most. 

“Some people will care about the decreasing glaciers and certain types of wildlife, whether that’s butterflies or polar bears, or whatever,” Stainforth said. “But I don’t think most people do. Their cares are smaller; their cares are more personal. I think the number one thing that we care about with respect to climate change is protecting our societies and our cultures. It’s the world that we have, the world we’ve grown up in, our support structure.”

Stainforth said grounding conversations in how climate change affects what we care about is essential to spurring action — and hope.

“There will be places where the train track needs rebuilding because of landslides, because of flooding or because of drought, or because of changes in the grasses that are growing there,” he said. “These things are going to happen, and they’re going to happen more and more frequently, because that’s what climate change is.” 

Responding to impacts will be a steady drain on government resources, he said, which in turn means “we won’t have resources for other things — and that can be culture, it can be transport, it can be sports facilities or it could be health or education.”

“It’s a threat to everything,” Stainforth said. In response, we have to decide what to save. “It’s about building a future that we want,” he said.

When American author and activist Rebecca Solnit wrote about hope, she emphasized the value of uncertainty.

“Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act,” she wrote in her 2004 book Hope in the Dark. “When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes — you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others.”

If we believe too firmly in a predictable future, Solnit writes, we risk setting ourselves on a path of apathy. Therein lies grief and anxiety and ruin. But if we accept uncertainty as a fundamental part of change, we can act accordingly.

Koppes believes we can see this belief at work in the next generation. Her students have loosened their grip on certainty, she says, but not in an apathetic way.

“There’s no longer any expectation that one can take a snapshot of time or a memory of place and that we can either get back to that time or that place — or that the environment and the climate was ever in a form of stasis,” she said. “They’re grasping at those components of their environments that are still bringing them joy, knowing that they might not exist for their lifetime.”

In other words, her students are accepting and embodying an existential truth: that everything is always in a state of change. And while we can’t be certain about the risks of the future, we also can’t predict how beautiful or resilient it might be. 

One day we might name this period for Chamaenerion angustifolium, the fireweed. Or maybe we’ll go for Delonix regia, sometimes called the Phoenix tree. Like our distant relatives, not just enduring but thriving, we’ll rise from the ashes into a world we co-created that protects all that we hold dear.

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Summary

• On May 27, Canada announced an agreement to supply Germany with one million tonnes of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, annually beginning in the early 2030s.
• The federal government says the deal will help Canada reduce its dependence on the U.S. market as trade relations grow more uncertain under President Donald Trump.
• Climate experts say the deal raises questions about the long-term costs of expanding fossil fuel exports.

Last week, the Canadian government celebrated a deal with Germany to supply the European country with one million tonnes of liquefied natural gas (LNG) per year, starting in the early 2030s. The agreement — essentially a handshake deal, yet to be finalized — is part of a broader federal scheme encouraging investment in major industrial developments across the country.

Natural gas is a fossil fuel mostly composed of methane, a potent greenhouse gas and major contributor to global climate change. Fossil fuels account for around 68 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions and nearly 90 per cent of all carbon dioxide emissions. The more greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere, the bigger the effect on global warming and the stronger the impacts felt on the ground. More frequent and intense extreme weather is one significant effect, and one that Canada is already experiencing.

In 2023, smoke from wildfires in Canada caused more than 80,000 premature deaths across the globe. Of those who died, more than 20,000 lived in Europe. That same year, nine-year-old Carter Vigh died in B.C. of an asthma attack aggravated by wildfire smoke.

The following year, fires burned through Jasper, Alta., killing a young firefighter named Morgan Kitchen and causing more than $880 million in insured damages. According to the Insurance Bureau of Canada, nationwide losses related to “severe weather” surpassed $9.4 billion in 2024, including $3 billion in a single hour during a hailstorm in Calgary.

In 2025, around 85 per cent of Canada experienced severe drought conditions. Meanwhile, a storm surge flooded the northern community of Tuktoyaktuk, N.W.T., with water levels rising to the highest ever recorded in the region at 2.62 metres.

Canada touts the new export agreement with Germany as a necessary move to diversify the economy by decreasing its reliance on trade with the United States, which has become increasingly volatile since the re-election of President Donald Trump.

“We must build projects that strengthen our economy, that diversify our supply chains and enhance our energy sovereignty as well as expand our exports beyond a single market,” Canada’s Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Tim Hodgson said on May 27.

When asked how Canada squares its stated climate commitments with support for expansion of fossil fuel production, a spokesperson with Natural Resources Canada said LNG produced in Canada is “widely recognized for its low emissions intensity compared to global averages.”

Canadian LNG is often positioned as a “transition fuel” helping countries reduce reliance on other energy sources, like coal. But many European countries, including Germany, have been importing LNG as a means to replace Russian gas since the Ukraine war began in 2022. The current U.S.-Israel war on Iran has put further pressure on countries with gas contracts in the Middle East.  

Environmental economist Dave Sawyer said the new agreement clearly shows how the narrative of Canadian LNG as a climate solution is “patently false.”

“This notion that LNG is reducing global emissions is blown out of the water by this German deal,” he told The Narwhal. “This LNG is not being used to displace coal. There’s no incremental emission benefit from Canadian LNG in this deal.”

‘Just be honest’

Increasing long-term reliance on fossil fuel exports is also a risky economic maneuver, according to Steven Haig, policy advisor with the International Institute for Sustainable Development.

“The costs of climate change are being felt now and we shouldn’t lose sight of that,” Haig told The Narwhal in an interview. “They will get worse as time goes on and emissions increase — but this is a problem today, not just a problem for the future.”

Wildfires, droughts and floods are among the many increasing climate impacts claiming lives and diverting government funds to emergency response and health services. These costs will need to be met by higher taxes, placing a heavier burden on lower-income households.

A recent New York University School of Law cost-benefit analysis of U.S. LNG exports found that “climate damages greatly exceed economic benefits.” The analysis showed that a conservative accounting of damages — described in the report as “likely underestimates” — are roughly double the economic benefits. In other words, LNG exports cost twice as much as the revenues they earn.

“These are costs that are expected to increase as temperatures continue to rise, meaning that reducing carbon pollution today is an economic imperative,” Haig said. “Good climate policy is good economic policy and the two shouldn’t be considered [in] opposition.”

In 2022, Sawyer worked on a Canadian Climate Institute report analyzing the macroeconomic effects of climate impacts. The report detailed how the federal and provincial governments are increasingly forced to allocate public funds to respond to climate disasters and how this impacts the cost of living for all Canadians.

“Replacing and repairing damaged infrastructure, back-stopping weather-related disaster costs and funding increased health care needs all place greater demands on government budgets,” the report noted. 

Sawyer said LNG exports are like an ATM.

“It is a profitable business — it generates a lot of money for some,” he said. “But it is climate damaging and there are costs associated with climate damages. Just be honest about it.”

Canada should not subsidize fossil fuel exports: experts 

The new agreement with Germany’s state-owned energy importer is the third supply deal secured by Ksi Lisims LNG, a provincially and federally approved floating export facility in British Columbia. 

Ksi Lisims aims to produce up to 12 million tonnes of LNG annually, sourcing its gas from northeast B.C. and transporting it through an 800-kilometre pipeline. Construction has not started on the facility and its owners have not reached a final investment decision, the crucial last step before companies decide to spend the vast sums required to build a major project.

“This deal with Germany … only covers around eight per cent of Ksi Lisims’ projected annual export capacity, so that’s not a lot of LNG that we’re talking about,” Haig noted. “The broader market trends still point to long-term risks for high-cost LNG exporters like Canada.”

The deal also isn’t really a deal — yet. So far, the parties have signed a non-binding preliminary document known as a “heads of agreement.” An official purchase agreement would need to be finalized before Ksi Lisims could use it to attract investment.

Ksi Lisims is owned by Texas-based Western LNG, in partnership with the Nisga’a Lisims Government and a coalition of gas producers called Rockies LNG Partners. The owners have already signed deals with Shell and TotalEnergies to provide each with two million tonnes of LNG per year. 

Canada has long been a major producer of oil and gas, mainly exporting to the U.S. via a network of cross-border pipelines, but the country’s economy is not reliant on the sector like some petrostates. According to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the industry accounts for about 3.8 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product.

Canada’s ambitions to become a global player in liquefied natural gas exports were first realized last year, when LNG Canada sent its initial shipments of the fossil fuel across the Pacific Ocean to Asia. Construction of LNG Canada was heavily subsidized by the B.C. and federal governments.

The federal government’s public investment agency, the Canada Infrastructure Bank, is considering providing new financial support for projects like Ksi Lisims LNG, according to recent reporting by the Globe and Mail.

“The government of Canada should not be subsidizing oil and gas development — they can bet their own money,” Sawyer said. “The government’s job is to put the safeguards in place, not spend money.”

Haig agreed.

“If Canada’s LNG projects can’t stand on their own two feet, then public dollars should not prop them up,” he said. “These are highly risky investments and public subsidies effectively shift that risk away from private corporations onto Canadian taxpayers.”

“[That], in turn, makes it more likely that projects go ahead even if they may lose money in the long run, becoming stranded assets that may need to be cleaned up with public funds.”

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Wearing regalia bearing the raven crests of his mother’s clan, S’mooygyet (Chief) Algax’m Hax, Murray Smith, of the Gitwilgyoots Tribe, shared where he comes from. Sharing his lineage is a necessary precursor to welcoming visitors to his lands, he explained.

“When I get up here to speak, I have to tell you who I really am,” he told a group gathered in Prince Rupert, B.C., earlier this month. “My grandfather is Haida. My mother’s mother was Ts’msyen from Lax Kw’alaams.”

“There’s a word in my language called sg̱an,” he continued. “Sg̱an is a welcome mat made out of cedar and they place it at the bow of a canoe. When the Chief steps off, he doesn’t step on the ground, he steps on the welcome mat.”

“Chiefs, matriarchs, high-ranking women, young people that are here: the welcome mat is out,” he declared.

Algax’m Hax is a Hereditary Chief of the Gitwilgyoots, one of the Nine Allied Tribes of Lax Kw’alaams. Ten years ago, he and other chiefs signed the landmark Lelu Island Declaration, placing vital salmon habitat in the Skeena River estuary under the protection of Indigenous laws. In solidarity with the Gitwilgyoots Chiefs, leaders of First Nations and elected officials from across the region signed onto the declaration, which extended an invitation to all to join in “defending this unique and precious place and to protect it for all time.”

At the time, the estuary — one of the most productive and ecologically important salmon habitats in B.C. — was threatened by the looming prospect of a major liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal, which was to be built on the island. The following year, Malaysian oil and gas giant Petronas cancelled its plans to build the Pacific Northwest LNG facility. A totem pole was raised on the island, to keep watch and assert stewardship. Two years later, the Prince Rupert Port Authority imposed a development moratorium over the sensitive area.

This spring, as juvenile salmon migrated from the creeks and rivers out to the ocean, Indigenous leaders and allies met to mark the anniversary of the declaration and talk about the future of salmon stewardship in the estuary and watershed. Algax’m Hax spoke to the importance of salmon and expressed solidarity with all who give of themselves to protect the species.

“I see you all here fighting for one thing, and that’s for our salmon,” he said. “So goes the salmon, so do we.”

He looked around the room and said he was called to speak by his fellow chief, Yahaan, who wasn’t able to attend the gathering. He said he phoned Yahaan the night before the event and asked what he should say.

“He said, ‘You’ll find your words,’ ” Algax’m Hax recounted. “It’s easy when I sit amongst people that care, people that dedicate themselves to the wellness of our salmon here on the North Coast, on the coast altogether. I take my hat off to you.”

Salmon connect ‘communities, cultures and generations’

The protection of Lelu Island — and Flora and Agnew Banks, the delicate estuarine habitat around the island — took years of dedication and sacrifice by Indigenous and non-Indigenous leaders and community members. 

Loggers, commercial fishers, scientists, politicians and more agreed building a massive LNG facility in the sensitive estuary would be a catastrophic mistake with far-reaching impacts on the livelihoods and cultures of communities across the region. Weaving Indigenous science and academic research, allyship and land defence, people from across the Skeena watershed and beyond came together to stand up for the salmon, sending ripples far and wide.

“Salmon do something extraordinary,” Julia Hill, executive director of SkeenaWild, said at the two-day event. “They connect ecosystems … communities, cultures and generations. They’re part of the social, cultural and economic fabric of this place.”

In the years since the declaration was signed, Indigenous and non-Indigenous salmon stewardship and science has been ongoing throughout the Skeena watershed. At the gathering, representatives from Fisheries and Oceans Canada presented alongside environmental organizations, academics and First Nations. 

Jonathan Moore, director of the Salmon Watersheds Lab at Simon Fraser University, said the reason the species is able to thrive today is because of this unity and the continuity of stewardship.

“Right now, as we gather, literally hundreds of millions of young salmon are migrating down from throughout the Skeena, potentially hundreds of kilometres away, and they’re all coming down just around the corner and they’re hitting the ocean,” he said, grinning. “It gives me chills, honestly, to think about that phenomenon that unfolds every year because of these intact ecosystems that have been stewarded for millennia.”

But while the protections of Lelu Island remain in place, wild salmon continue to face multiple threats. Many populations across the watershed are struggling. 

“This region is experiencing enormous pressure and rapid change, from climate change and warming waters to industrial expansion and growing global demand for resources,” Hill said. “At the same time, many communities here depend on resource-based economies. So the question isn’t development or no development. The question is how much, where and to whose benefit.”

That tension is rising amid talk about new pipelines from Alberta and the spectre of lifting the oil tanker moratorium on the North Coast. A slew of projects supported by the provincial and federal governments are putting increased pressure on already-impacted salmon habitat throughout the northwest. 

All of this is set against a backdrop of talk by the provincial government about amending or repealing B.C.’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act. It leads some to fear hard-won battles like the protection of Lelu Island could be undermined by an onslaught of new industrial developments that would provide little benefit to the communities who would pay the highest costs.

“We’re witnessing this backlash against Indigenous Rights, against Indigenous stewardship, against title to the land being recognized,” Naxginkw Tara Marsden, Wilp sustainability director with the Gitanyow Hereditary Chiefs, said. “We’re at a critical juncture for salmon stewardship and for the well-being of our communities.”

Marsden emphasized the intersection between rights and responsibilities.

“If we receive a full basket, we have to make sure we pass on a full basket,” she said. “So in my lifetime, if I see the salmon stocks decline to a point of extirpation, then I haven’t done my job for my kids, my grandkids.”

‘This impacts everybody’

For Grace Vickers, daughter of Andrea Vickers and revered carver Roy Henry Vickers, all conversations about stewardship and economy need to start from a shared baseline. Introducing herself as Heiltsuk belonging to the House of Walkus, she spoke about the importance of place-based knowledge.   

“What’s important today is what is sustaining us,” she said, during a youth panel at the gathering. “It’s the air we breathe, it’s the fish we eat and it’s the water we drink.”

Vickers and four other young women — Nasya Moore, Oasis Cleveland, Drew Harris and Kayla Mitchell — shared what it’s like being young at a time when so much is changing. They spoke about cultural disconnection and reconnection and the strength and restorative value of spending time on the land, harvesting and processing fish.

Harris, who is Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan, said she sees how land protections, human rights and stewardship of the likes of salmon can become siloed.

“Like: there’s the fish, there’s the land, there’s the people, there’s the health,” she said. “But it’s all connected. We can’t just silo these things and differentiate them and not talk about it together. Just seeing the different connections and looking from a different perspective can really help you understand the full picture and how to treat that problem.”

She said acknowledging the scale of the problems facing communities can be unifying and called out fossil fuel expansions as a global issue.

“Everywhere we go, we meet the youth and they all have their own projects that they’re fighting,” she said. “It’s sad but it connects us all together.”

“This fight isn’t just for the Indigenous people,” she added. “This impacts everybody.”

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The average home in British Columbia uses around 10,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per year.

There are approximately 2.2 million homes in B.C. This means the province needs to make sure the grid has enough energy to supply about 22 billion kilowatt hours every year to keep those homes warm and the lights on.

And that’s just for homes. It doesn’t include all the electricity needed for industry, businesses and a rapidly expanding electric-vehicle market.

In B.C., the average resident pays around $100 a month for electricity, roughly $1,200 per year for those 10,000 kilowatt hours.

Residential rates just went up on April 1, when BC Hydro increased its rates by 3.75 per cent. That’s partly to start paying off some of the sunk costs the government has already invested in building new power infrastructure. 

Electricity demand is only going to rise over the coming decades, as B.C. tries to reduce its use of fossil fuels while also bringing a whole lot of industrial projects onto the grid.

So where will all this energy come from, where is it going — and who will pay for it? There’s much we don’t know (yet) but here’s what we do.

First, let’s clear up a couple of things about the units of measurement — because utility companies use a variety of terms to describe electricity generation, output and consumption.

Kilowatts, megawatts and gigawatts represent an amount of power, at a single point in time. 

1,000 kilowatts is one megawatt. And 1,000 megawatts is one gigawatt.

Add the word “hours” to the end of any of those units and it describes how much of that power gets used up (or is generated) over time. Kilowatt hours is the unit most British Columbians will encounter, on their monthly bills, so while the others are useful to know we’ll stick to that measurement as much as possible.

Take a fridge, for example. If yours sucks up about 200 watts per hour (a large, older fridge might use twice as much) that means you’ll use around 1,750 kilowatt hours per year to keep the milk fresh. To meet the demand of millions of fridges, power producers need to make sure they have enough capacity to send all that electricity across the province every day. 

Ensuring there’s enough electricity to go around is getting expensive for the B.C. government — and the taxpayers that fund it.

B.C.’s newest source of hydroelectricity, the Site C dam, produces about 5,100 gigawatt hours (GWh) per year, or 5.7 billion kilowatt hours. It added about eight per cent more power to the province’s existing grid.

Site C cost around $16 billion.

BC Hydro doesn’t expect to pay off the costs of building Site C until 2094, 70 years after the project began producing electricity.

Now, the province is planning to invest at least $6 billion to build the first two phases of the North Coast Transmission Line, a network of around 450 kilometres of high-voltage power lines spanning the northwest. The B.C. government says it is building the line to “enable development” of mining and LNG projects. A third phase is proposed, for power lines heading north to service mines and Ksi Lisims LNG. If that happens, the final cost for the transmission network could rival Site C.

To state the obvious: this is a lot of public money. It’s hard to grasp just how big these numbers are. Understanding the difference between one million and one billion, expressed in time, might help. 

One million seconds is about 11.5 days. One billion seconds is more than 30 years.

So when the estimated cost of the first two phases of the North Coast Transmission Line doubled from $3 billion to $6 billion in 2025, that’s like jumping from 90 years to 180 years.

On top of infrastructure investments like Site C and the transmission lines, B.C. spends public money enticing private companies to build big industrial projects. Those subsidies are eventually reflected in residential utility bills — and in other ways across the economy. 

Take the push to grow the province’s LNG industry. Last year, the B.C. government coughed up $200 million to connect Cedar LNG, a liquefaction and export facility being built in Kitimat, to the grid.

Or take LNG Canada, the country’s first major liquefaction and export facility, also in Kitimat. It received a suite of subsidies, including reduced rates for the small amount of hydroelectricity it uses, as well as tax credits and an exemption from B.C.’s industrial carbon tax for the first two years of operations. Between the provincial and federal governments, public investments in LNG Canada are estimated to be almost $4 billion.

In the years ahead, homes and businesses in B.C. are going to need more power. BC Hydro predicts annual demand for electricity is likely to climb from 58,400 gigawatt hours in 2025 to more than 87,600 gigawatt hours by 2050. These amounts are way too big to wrap your head around if we convert them to kilowatt hours, but let’s just say it’s a lot.

The more things we need to plug into the grid, the more power the grid needs to be able to deliver. The sooner we plug things in, the faster BC Hydro has to find ways to meet that demand.

Electricity demand in B.C. could rise even faster if the province prioritizes providing power to industries, which are eager to portray their products as “clean” or “green” in an increasingly climate-conscious market. LNG facilities that plan to power their operations with B.C.’s electricity are already advertising their products as “low carbon” and “net zero.”

B.C.’s history of abundant, cheap and low-emission electricity has been hailed as one reason the province is well-positioned to supply LNG to countries like South Korea and Japan.

But liquefying natural gas requires an enormous amount of energy. As a liquid, methane takes up a fraction of the space that it does as a gas, making it viable for transport overseas. That process requires not just chilling the gas, but supercooling it, which LNG Canada does by burning gas to power massive turbines. But other approved facilities, like Ksi Lisims LNG and the aforementioned Cedar LNG, want to use electricity instead. Hence, the new power line with a multi-billion dollar price tag.

So how much power does all this industrial infrastructure need?Well, Ksi Lisims, a floating LNG facility proposed for B.C.’s North Coast requested the equivalent of around 5,200 gigawatt hours, or 5.2 billion kilowatt hours, from BC Hydro.

That’s more than the electricity output of the Site C dam potentially going to power just one project.

Cedar LNG expects to use up to 1,800 gigawatt hours, or 1.8 billion kilowatt hours.

Powering just those two LNG projects could use up to the equivalent electricity that would keep power flowing to 700,000 homes.

All that electricity isn’t free, of course. But it is cheaper for industrial users. Residential customers currently pay $118.70 for the first 670 kilowatt hours they use in a month.

That climbs to around $140 for each additional 1,000 kilowatt hours. Small businesses pay about the same as heavy-use households. 

But for larger businesses it’s the opposite: the more they use, the less they pay.

Large industrial customers — consumers that use more than 550,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per year — pay $67.90 per 1,000 kilowatt hours, slightly over half the residential rate.

So what does all this mean for the average British Columbian?

Well, to keep the lights on in homes across the province over the coming decades, B.C. will continue to build out more power capacity. It will also keep trying to find ways to use industrial revenues to balance the government’s budget, so homeowners don’t have to pay (much) more per kilowatt hour consumed. But the province is up against the clock — and a moving target. 

Less than six months after releasing a new forecast for electricity demand, BC Hydro now anticipates needing to supply an additional 2.7 billion kilowatt hours to its customers. The LNG industry is identified as a driving force behind that increase.

Because B.C. relies heavily on hydroelectric dams, the province’s ability to meet demand with power produced domestically is subject to droughts. When this happens, the province imports electricity from its neighbours, including Alberta.

Whether on monthly bills or in other ways spread out across the economy, taxpayers are paying for provincial support of massive industrial projects, including the push to get those projects on the grid. Those hidden costs could eventually surface on utility bills or through cuts to other government services.

Either way, future British Columbians will pay for decisions made today about how to make sure all that electricity keeps flowing through the wires.

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Avi Bryant grew up in a middle-class neighbourhood in Vancouver. By the time he was 30, he was well on his way to becoming a millionaire. 

He calls his path “sheer luck” — but it’s more nuanced than that. Bryant got lucky, sure, meeting the right kinds of friends and acquaintances (executives at Twitter, for example) at the right times. He also made good business and financial choices, including taking stock options in lieu of some of his pay while at Stripe, that eventually propelled him into the so-called one per cent.

Now, instead of kicking back and sipping martinis with the economic elite, he’s joined a growing chorus of wealthy individuals calling for nations to stop catering to the ultra-rich. In fact, he says, Canada needs to tax the rich more — a lot more.

Doing so could change the lives of all Canadians, he says, and help the country accelerate its transition away from fossil fuels. With more tax dollars at its disposal, the federal government would be in a position to make major investments in electrification, solar projects and more. 

Enter the Patriotic Millionaires, a newly registered federal lobbying group that Bryant belongs to, which is advocating for changes to the country’s tax regime. 

From his home on Galiano Island, B.C., Bryant told The Narwhal why he believes Canada needs to target its wealthiest citizens, and some of what it can do with the proceeds.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you tell us about yourself? Did you grow up wealthy?

We were kind of typical middle class. I certainly did not grow up in a wealthy household. At the same time, I grew up in what felt like a very privileged household where there was lots of education, lots of books around, lots of support, a very safe neighbourhood with lots of resources. I didn’t grow up in anything that felt like poverty or lack of privilege, but it certainly was not wealth. 

I ended up doing a computer science degree at [the University of British Columbia] and got into the tech world after graduating, starting a small company in Vancouver. We’re talking early 2000s, kind of post dot-com bust. I made a lot of connections with a lot of people who turned out to be useful people to know. In 2010, we ended up selling the company to Twitter, which was starting out at that time. That considerably changed our financial situation. It also meant that we moved down to San Francisco for a couple of years and made a lot more connections.

Someone who I had met in Vancouver, in those early startup days, I got to know a lot better when we were in San Francisco: Patrick Collison, who started a company called Stripe. I joined Stripe in early 2013, when that company was still, again, very small. I mean, it was 40 people or something at that point. That company then grew to be thousands of people and worth hundreds of billions of dollars. As an early employee, I had effectively been an early investor and that was just sheer luck. There was no way to predict that my tiny percentage of Stripe was going to end up being worth a large amount of money. 

I left Stripe in 2019, feeling like [my wife and I] had this responsibility to do something with our time and resources that was not just motivated by profit and commerce, that was more about having an impact on the world.

Why do you want to be taxed more?

Society is better off if everyone has their basic needs met and I see that as a function of government. Obviously, Canada has lots of social services … but I believe the government can and should be doing more — and that’s going to require more money. I think the obvious place to get that money is from taxing people who have a lot of it. 

[It’s] about the marginal utility of money: if you’re living on $20,000 a year and you lose 10 per cent of that, you’re losing $2,000 — that’s a big deal. If you’re living on $3 million a year and you lose 10 per cent of that, you’re down $300,000. So what? It’s not going to change your lifestyle. 

We do have progressive taxation. We increase the percentage you’re taxed as you make more, but the top bracket starts at around $260,000. So we don’t distinguish between someone who’s making a quarter-million a year and someone making $2.5 million a year, or $25 million a year. Those situations are very different.

From my point of view, there’s an obvious opportunity to increase taxes on the people who are making millions of dollars a year. There’s also an opportunity to increase taxes on people who hold scarce, valuable resources. Land is the obvious one here. If we’re using land so someone can have a beautiful, 200-acre waterfront estate … I mean, fine, but let’s tax the shit out of it.

I think we have an opportunity to do that without particularly changing people’s lifestyles. It’s not going to make them move out of the country. That’s just not going to happen. They’re here because they want to be here. I’m here because I want to be here. I can afford to pay a lot more in tax than I do without changing my lifestyle and that money can be used to improve the lives of other Canadians.

You touched on the typical argument against this idea: if Canada puts those things into place — vacation home taxes and other types of taxes targeting the wealthy — then those people will just take their money and go elsewhere. What would you say to that?

The only other thing I would say is good riddance. Ultimately, for the handful of people who’d say, “If you raise taxes on the wealthy, I’m going to move to Barbados,” — it’s like, okay, fine. Like: bye Felicia.

Canada is a wonderful place to live. I could live anywhere I want. This is where my family chooses to live, because we truly believe that this is the best place to be living. And that’s true whatever the tax rate is.

Do you think this proposition, that the government adjust its tax systems, would create benefits for climate and ecosystem health?

One of the functions of government is to do large-scale investment, often infrastructure investment. I think climate is one area we can and should be making large-scale investments. We should be taking a page from China’s book and building very large-scale solar power plants to shift load away from fossil fuel plants. We should be investing in more efficient transportation, like train networks. We should be electrifying as quickly as we can — because we have to.

The key climate fight here is we know how to transition our electrical production off of fossil fuels. But we also need to shift the demand for things that are currently not electric to electric — and transportation is a big piece of that. Obviously, electric cars have been successful. But trucking, marine, aviation … These are all things that currently depend heavily on fossil fuels. I very much see that as a government function, making investments in shifting those loads from fossil fuel to electricity.

So by taxing the rich, you add more money into the government’s capability to invest in infrastructure — which it can allocate as subsidies and investments to support climate mitigation projects?

Exactly. I think we should be taxing the rich and we should be using that money to invest in, broadly speaking, electrification projects. From a climate point of view, I think that’s the best thing we can be doing — and just doing everything we can to move off of oil. Alberta is going to fight us tooth and nail, but let’s find a way to transition that economy to a renewable economy. If we have to sink a lot of federal money into it, that’s worth doing, because our dependence on fossil fuels is bad for everyone.

Do you think philanthropy plays a role in solving these bigger existential problems?

I do. With the government, we’re kind of entrusting all of our collective money and the government, as a result, tends to be quite risk-averse. The government doesn’t want to put a lot of capital into something that might fail and they get blamed and they won’t get re-elected or whatever. I think that caution is actually quite appropriate with public money, but at the same time when they do decide it’s worth doing something, they can do it on a very large scale. 

I think philanthropy can be the other side of that coin, which is to say individual philanthropists can take risks with their money and explore ideas that are not as proven. And then, hopefully, having proved some of them right, the government can come in and scale that up. So I think that’s worthwhile. That said, does that philanthropy need to be tax deductible? I don’t really think so.

Who are the Patriotic Millionaires?

Patriotic Millionaires is an organization that began in the U.S. It’s a very focused advocacy organization of people who have wealth who are asking for higher taxes on people who are wealthy. [They] opened a sort of sister organization in the U.K. and last year opened a Patriotic Millionaires in Canada. My wife and I are both members and she is now on the board.

I can see some opposition from powerful minorities, but I think most people can get behind the idea of everyone paying a fair share.

And yet the capital gains exclusion that was on the table for former prime minister Justin Trudeau came off with Prime Minister Mark Carney. Speaking for myself, not the organization, we need to understand why that is. It seems to me the loud minority won that fight. I don’t understand the politics there, but I think that in order to figure out what to do next, we need to understand.

I was listening to a podcast on fashion, of all things, about tariffs and the economy and this idea that we need to tax the wealthy more. They put it in this framing of “join us.” 

Like, “You guys are off in this little corner and having to hide your money and put it in all these different places and do these different things to avoid being like the rest of us. Come be like the rest of us; join us.” I’m curious for your thoughts on that.

One part of our story is that wealth was a relatively new thing for us and there was a period of a few years where we were really trying to hide from our friends and neighbours how wealthy we were. There’s kind of a social norm there, right? You don’t talk about money. And the dissonance there was so hard.

It feels so much better to be much more open about this with people — and, yeah, to join them. We live on Galiano Island: it’s a small community, it’s a tight community. It’s much better to have those close relationships with people in honesty and solidarity.

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This investigation is a collaboration between The Narwhal and Point Source, a U.K.-based investigative journalism organization.

Summary

• LNG Canada burned 350 million cubic metres of gas in 2025, more than the estimated highest source of LNG flaring emissions in the world in 2024.
• The high levels of flaring call into question environmental claims made about the facility, which government officials have repeatedly said produces the cleanest LNG in the world. 
• Ongoing problems at the plant, which hopes to double production by building a second phase, could persist for three to five years.

An LNG facility in Western Canada burned more gas in 2025 than any other liquefied natural gas (LNG) export facility on record in 2024, raising concerns about Canada’s claim it’s producing the cleanest LNG in the world. 

Burning excess methane gas, or flaring, is a normal safety procedure at liquefaction facilities. It releases greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide as well as emitting dangerous pollutants such as sulfur dioxide and small particulate matter, which affect human health. The LNG Canada facility in British Columbia flared 350 million cubic metres of gas in 2025, according to figures submitted to the provincial regulator and analyzed by The Narwhal in partnership with U.K.-based journalism organization Point Source. That means Canada’s first major LNG facility is one of the highest sources of LNG flaring emissions globally.

The flaring volumes reported by LNG Canada to the regulator are around 50 per cent higher than estimates for the world’s most polluting LNG export terminals in 2024, according to data that was used as the basis for the World Bank’s most recent Global Gas Tracker report.

The data was published by the Earth Observation Group at the Colorado School of Mines, a research team that specializes in producing nighttime satellite imagery to track gas flaring.

According to the group’s estimates, Nigeria’s Bonny Island LNG terminal was the highest-flaring facility of 2024. It burned an estimated 234.4 million cubic metres of gas, closely followed by the Arzew-Bethioua terminal in Algeria, which burned 233 million cubic metres.

Global flaring data from LNG facilities operating in 2025 have not yet been published but the Canadian facility will be among the world’s top sources of flaring at LNG terminals, according to Mikhail Zhizhin, a researcher at the Payne Institute for Public Policy in Colorado. Zhizhin was instrumental in the development of technology to monitor gas flaring from space.

“If the flaring data that has been supplied by LNG Canada to the regulator is accurate, it puts the facility amongst the highest flaring LNG facilities in the world,” Zhizhin said in an interview.

In an emailed statement, LNG Canada attributed the flaring to the facility being at an early phase and said it will be infrequent during normal operations.

The high volume of flaring from the $40-billion Canada-based facility raises new questions about ongoing problems with some of the terminal’s key mechanical components — and concerns about what it could mean for the local community, Kitimat, B.C. 

According to government data, LNG Canada flared a minimum of 127,900 cubic metres of gas every day in 2025, with the daily average being much higher: almost one million cubic metres. The worst month for flaring was June 2025, when the facility burned almost 110 million cubic metres. The data show 3,648 million cubic metres of gas were sent to LNG Canada last year, meaning almost 10 per cent of all gas transported to the terminal was burned off without being used for power or exported.

“This is definitely high,” Christopher Doleman, an LNG and gas specialist at the U.S.-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, said. “Proponents may argue that it is regular during commissioning, but the several instances of unplanned flaring by the company suggest that this is out of the ordinary.”

Some of those unplanned flaring events included flames reaching heights of 90 metres, roughly the size of London’s Big Ben, along with plumes of black smoke settling over the community.

The export plant sent its first shipment of LNG overseas on June 30, 2025.

Flaring at LNG Canada has consistently exceeded allowable amounts permitted by the provincial government. According to the regulator, LNG Canada — owned by Royal Dutch Shell, Petronas, Korea Gas, PetroChina and Mitsubishi — has been flaring at levels that are “not consistent” with government permits, meaning the facility has been breaking provincial regulations for several months.

In January, The Narwhal revealed an “integrity issue” with the facility’s flaring equipment resulted in LNG Canada burning significantly more gas than expected — and it could take three to five years to fix. The issue was identified shortly after the LNG plant started testing its equipment in late 2024, but the government regulator did not learn about the problem until April 2025. 

Company officials have since met with local politicians but have failed to provide the public with details of why the issue might take so long to fix.

LNG Canada declined to answer this question, though the spokesperson said “we continue to tune the equipment to real-world conditions.”

“In normal operations at LNG Canada flaring will be related to infrequent activities such as maintenance, planned turnarounds and facility upsets,” the spokesperson wrote.

‘Completely untrue’: experts question environmental claims about Canadian LNG

Analysts believe the high flaring levels at LNG Canada raise serious questions about environmental claims that have been made about the facility.

Last summer, the premier of British Columbia, David Eby, said gas processed at the Kitimat terminal is the “lowest-carbon LNG in the world.”

Discussing why energy-importing countries would benefit from purchasing fuel processed at the facility, he said: “They should be using Canadian LNG that’s produced ethically, that promotes environmental protection, as well as high-quality labour standards and safety standards.”

Shell CEO Wael Sawan similarly said last year that LNG Canada would be “one of the lowest carbon projects anywhere in the world.”

Speaking in India in March, Prime Minister Mark Carney said: “Canada is well-positioned to contribute as a reliable supplier of the world’s lowest-carbon, responsibly-produced LNG from our West Coast.” 

Eby declined an interview request and did not respond to questions about the current state of the facility. Shell did not respond to questions. Carney also declined an interview request and referred questions to the federal Energy Ministry, which did not respond by publication time.

Doleman said the new information calls these environmental claims into question. 

“This flaring data undermines the claims that are being made about the facility producing low-carbon LNG,” he said in an interview. “Statements that have been made by officials saying that the LNG is the cleanest in the world now seem to be completely untrue.”

LNG Canada said high levels of flaring are normal during the start-up phase of a project of this type. The spokesperson said air quality data recorded in Kitimat show levels of nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide remained “consistently low” in 2025.

“LNG Canada continues to prioritize the safety of its people, the community and its assets, to support safe and responsible operations,” the spokesperson wrote.

There is significant uncertainty about the true volumes of global gas flaring due to the difficulty of measuring emissions via satellite. Recent research by the Colorado School of Mines has suggested the true levels of flaring from the world’s LNG facilities may be significantly higher than previously estimated, Zhizhin said.

The fact that LNG Canada flared a significant volume of gas every single day in 2025 is unusual, according to researchers. A peer-reviewed paper published last September found LNG terminals in a start-up phase have a 90 per cent chance of flaring less than six days a year and only a 10 per cent chance of flaring for as many as 255 days in a single year.

Laura Minet, lead author of the paper and head of the Clean Air Lab at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, explained “the probabilities are based on what has been happening in other facilities around the world between 2012 and 2022.” She said the frequency of flaring at LNG Canada does not appear to be typical, especially compared to LNG facilities that have moved from commissioning into regular operations. But, she said, because companies around the world aren’t required to track how much gas is flared, getting accurate data can be challenging.

“The fact that LNG Canada is saying the technical issue is going to take three years to fix is concerning,” Minet added. “It raises questions over what is getting prioritized and where the likely environmental and health impacts from this pollution fit into those priorities.”

Doleman agreed.

“The operators and project proponents should tell people why this plant is flaring so much and tell them exactly how they are going to address this issue,” he said.

LNG markets subject to instability as U.S.-Israel war on Iran continues

The ongoing global energy crisis in the wake of the U.S.-Israel attacks on Iran in late February has seen the price of LNG more than double for some importers and led to windfall profits for some exporters. 

A second phase of the LNG Canada project, which would double output from the plant, was recently given federal support and placed on a list of projects deemed to be of national importance. The consortium of companies behind the facility are actively seeking investment in the expansion.

The U.S. is currently the world’s largest LNG exporter, followed by Australia and Qatar. Geopolitical instability caused by the war in the Middle East — which saw Qatar halt LNG production in March — could influence importing countries like South Korea and Japan as they balance energy needs.

However, the current wave of high prices could have lasting impacts on demand for LNG as importing nations look to cheaper alternatives, Doleman said. Recently, a planned LNG import terminal in China was cancelled by state-owned Sinopec, which reallocated its investments to the development of domestic gas reserves. In New Zealand, plans for an import terminal are being reconsidered as the country’s government weighs the financial risks. 

“The current high price environment is killing long-term demand for LNG around the world and it is going to be interesting to see how things pan out for the [Canadian] facility over the coming years,” Doleman said.

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