Any day now, a piping plover will make its seasonal return to Wasaga Beach, as it has done every spring for nearly 20 years. This time, its beachfront home could be a little less secure, which is why a new court case is pressuring the federal government to ensure the plover is kept safe. 

The world’s longest freshwater beach provides the perfect habitat for the tiny endangered birds, offering natural sand dunes and shrubbery for nesting and growing their population. 

For decades, both the Georgian Bay beach and the plover have been protected by the Ontario government through two main tools. First, the designation of Wasaga Beach as a provincial park, which meant  development and disruption of the sandy shore was off-limits. Second, the plover was offered extra protection under the provincial Endangered Species Act. 

Neither of those protections stand anymore.

Last fall, the Doug Ford government removed a majority of the beachfront from Wasaga Beach Provincial Park and transferred it to the local municipality in an effort to boost tourism development. And just last month, the government officially repealed the Endangered Species Act and replaced it with much weaker legislation that no longer recognizes the plover on its list of protected species.

The town has promised it will protect the plover after the transfer — and has begun working with Birds Canada on its habitat protection — but residents are not convinced. Two local officials agreed to speak to The Narwhal on the condition their names be kept confidential, for fear of retribution. They said on Apr. 13, a tractor owned by the municipality was seen raking more beachfront than was previously permitted — an action that could damage habitat and destroy plover nests. Though the raking hasn’t been repeated, many are concerned the beach is unprotected. The town did not respond to The Narwhal’s request for comment by the time of publication. 

As a result, environmental groups are taking the matter to federal court. 

In January, Ecojustice, on behalf of Environmental Defence and Ontario Nature, petitioned the federal government for an emergency order to offer protections for the piping plover by March, before machines are brought in to clear the beach after winter, and the birds begin migrating back. The federal government did not respond by that deadline.

In response, the groups have asked for a judicial review by the Federal Court of Canada into the delay and to compel Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin to make a recommendation to cabinet to issue the emergency protection.

The groups have also asked the court for an urgent, temporary order — or an injunction — to prohibit any raking or harmful development on the beach, which is federally recognized as a critical habitat. 

Here’s what you need to know about the tiny bird and its fate in Wasaga Beach.

What are piping plovers? And why are they endangered?

Piping plovers are sprightly shorebirds, each no bigger than a cotton ball, that can sometimes be seen bounding over Great Lakes beaches in the summertime. But seeing them isn’t easy — their sandy colour blends into their surroundings and they’ve become extremely rare in Ontario due to human encroachment.

“The main threat to the piping plover is human disturbance,” according to the Government of Ontario, “since the sandy beaches where plovers live are also popular for human recreation which can destroy nests.”

Plovers generally spend winters in the United States and Mexico, but return to more northern climates to nest for the summer.

For a long time, the Great Lakes were a prime destination for would-be plover parents. It’s been estimated that the region was once home to up to 800 breeding pairs. But the Great Lakes plover population cratered in the 1960s and ’70s, and the bird was considered extinct in Ontario by 1986.

But in recent decades, plovers have been staging a tentative comeback in the Great Lakes. A breeding pair returned to Sauble Beach (now Saugeen Beach) in 2007, sparking hope and enthusiasm among bird watchers and conservationists in the area. The birds have been spotted in the region annually since then.

But plovers’ hold is anything but secure. Some years pass with only a handful of breeding pairs observed, and other years come and go with no fledglings reaching maturity.

Why is Wasaga Beach important to plovers? And what do they like about it?

“Wasaga Beach is the most important and most productive nesting site for piping plovers in our province.”

That’s what Sydney Shepherd, the Ontario piping plover coordinator for Birds Canada, told The Narwhal last summer. The beach has been home to 59 nests and 87 fledglings since the birds returned about two decades ago, according to Birds Canada, a national conservation group. 

While plovers have been observed on other beaches in the Great Lakes region, none are anywhere near as popular with plovers as Wasaga Beach. The plovers that have been born on Wasaga Beach make up nearly 50 per cent of all fledglings in Ontario, and many of them have gone on to establish their own nests elsewhere in the region. 

Plovers tend to value Wasaga Beach for different reasons than human beachgoers. While tourists might prefer a well-groomed beach for lounging, plovers require naturalized shorelines: shrubbery and sand dunes offer cover from predators. That means of all the 14 kilometres of beachfront at Wasaga, only a small fraction near the northeastern tip of the park is suitable plover habitat.

What’s happening at Wasaga Beach?

The fortunes of the Town of Wasaga Beach have long been tied to the sandy shoreline that gives the town its name. Tourism to the area is the main economic driver, drawing more than 1.6 million visitors a year according to the municipality’s website.

But while tourism brings opportunity to the residents of Wasaga Beach, it also puts pressure on plover habitat. Until recently, that tension was managed by staff at Wasaga Beach Provincial Park, who were mandated to preserve and protect the sand dunes and other beach areas that plovers frequent.

The vast majority of the beachfront had long been within the boundaries of Wasaga Beach Provincial Park, and some in the town believed the park hindered efforts to spruce it up and develop new amenities and attractions to boost tourism revenue.

The Doug Ford government heard those concerns and acted on them. Ontario would sever more than half of the beachfront from the park and hand it over to the town to manage, Ford announced in 2025. Earlier this year, the province confirmed its intention to move forward with that plan, despite 98 per cent of formal citizen feedback on the plan being negative.

The Narwhal confirmed that transfer has now happened. 

All of the suitable plover habitat on Wasaga Beach is within the land set to be removed from the provincial park, meaning the habitat will no longer be protected by a provincial park designation.

The town, for its part, says it’s committed to protecting piping plovers. But it has yet to release its full redevelopment plans, and that leaves conservationists worried that the beach’s plover habitat is threatened.

Shepherd told The Narwhal this week that Birds Canada is in the process of formalizing their role with the Town of Wasaga Beach. The group is “seeking a committed partnership” to support the long-term protection and recovery of piping plovers that would enable them to monitor and protect the nests and the birds, and also increase education and awareness of the species. 

“So far, we have collaborated for one training session for [town] staff to begin to introduce what piping plover conservation entails,” she said in an email.

Are piping plovers otherwise protected?

The removal of provincial park designation from plover habitat on Wasaga Beach comes on the heels of other policy changes that weaken species protection in Ontario.

In 2025, Ontario repealed its Endangered Species Act and replaced it with new legislation called the Species Conservation Act, a weaker set of rules that drops some key protections.

One difference between the two acts is the newer one adopts a more narrow definition of “habitat” than the former act. When it comes to legal protections for the habitats of endangered species, the new legislation’s scope is limited to the specific area an animal nests or dens in, rather than the larger area it uses to travel or find food.

But even that limited protection doesn’t stand for piping plovers, which have been removed from Ontario’s list of protected species. With the loss of provincial park status, the plover habitat has been stripped of another protection that could have restricted the beach grooming activities that render Wasaga Beach unsuitable for plovers — and appear to have already begun.

That’s why environmental groups are now turning to the federal government to fill the gap. Nationally, there is a species-at-risk law that can be invoked for the protection of an endangered species and the broader habitat it needs to survive. The question is whether the federal government will use it to save the piping plover’s favourite Ontario beach.

Updated on April 22, 2026, at 2:55 p.m. ET: this story has been corrected to note that piping plovers have been removed from the Government of Ontario’s list of protected species, meaning even the individual and its nest are not provincially protected.

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The Narwhal is celebrating a deluge of award nominations and honours, as our non-profit newsroom is recognized in Canada and the United States for our dogged investigative journalism and our community-first, solutions-focused reporting.

In recent weeks, six journalism award programs have named The Narwhal as either a winner or a nominee, with two dozen honours in total!

Summary

• Canadian Journalism Foundation: The Narwhal, in partnership with the Investigative Journalism Foundation, is up for the prestigious Jackman Award. We also made the shortlist for the award for climate solutions reporting.
• National Magazine Awards: we’re nominated twice — in the investigative journalism and service journalism categories.
• Digital Publishing Awards: The Narwhal earned 11 (!) nominations across nine categories, including the award for general excellence.
• Canadian Association of Journalists: The Narwhal is a finalist for four awards across various categories.
• Nonprofit News Awards: we’re up for awards in two categories, for reporting led by Manitoba reporter Julia-Simone Rutgers, in partnership with the Winnipeg Free Press.
• Society of Environmental Journalists: the judges honoured reporting by The Narwhal with one second-place prize and two honourable mentions.

Two nods from the Canadian Journalism Foundation, including for its prestigious Jackman Award

Notably, the Canadian Journalism Foundation announced on April 17 that The Narwhal is a finalist for its prestigious Jackman Award.

The Jackman Award honours Canadian journalism that makes a social impact through courageous and original reporting, and northwest B.C. reporter Matt Simmons is nominated for his investigation into the BC Energy Regulator’s failure to enforce compliance with environmental and health regulations. Simmons is up for the award alongside peers at the Investigative Journalism Foundation, who collaborated with him on the project.

“Rigorous and fair reporting on oversight bodies such as the BC Energy Regulator is crucial to our democracy,” The Narwhal’s executive editor, Denise Balkissoon, said. “We’re proud that Matt’s efforts to hold the regulator to account have been nominated for one of the highest honours in Canadian journalism.”

We’re also on the shortlist for the Canadian Journalism Foundation’s award for climate solutions reporting. Freelancer Chloe Williams and photographer Gavin John earned that nod for their story about a bold plan to save the melting sea ice around Cambridge Bay, Nunavut.

The Canadian Journalism Foundation will announce the winners in Toronto on June 10.

17 additional nominations across Canada’s top journalism awards

The Narwhal’s work turned heads at the National Magazine Awards, Digital Publishing Awards and Canadian Association of Journalists awards— with a whopping 17 nominations between them.

At the National Magazine Awards, Drew Anderson’s dogged reporting on the owners behind some of the country’s biggest delinquent oil and gas companies scooped a nomination for the best investigative journalism. In the best service journalism category, freelancer Canice Leung’s story, “How to have your period in the woods,” scored a nomination for its informative and creative approach.

Over at the Digital Publishing Awards, we’re up for the top award, which honours general excellence in digital publishing. 2025 Indigenous editorial fellow Savannah Ridley is on the shortlist for emerging excellence. Our journalism is also nominated across seven additional categories:

• Best digital editorial package: Collision course: Animals killed on Canada’s railways, by Ainslie Cruickshank
• Best data journalism: Collision course: Animals killed on Canada’s railways, by Ainslie Cruickshank
• Investigative journalism: Our investigation, in partnership with the Investigative Journalism Foundation, about lax enforcement in B.C.’s oil and gas industry, with reporting led by Matt Simmons
• Best reporting on climate change: On solid ice: the plan to refreeze the Arctic, by Chloe Williams, with photography by Gavin John
• Best reporting on climate change: A new way to fight climate change: cataloguing the DNA of the Arctic Ocean, by Meral Jamal
• Best reporting on climate change: One year the ice is slushy. This year on the Prairies? -35 C with the wind, by Julia-Simone Rutgers, in partnership with the Winnipeg Free Press
• Best feature article: In the Rockies, more and more people are heading to the woods. Are we pushing animals deeper into the night?, by Sara King-Abadi
• Best online mini-documentary: Trouble in the Headwaters, by Daniel J. Pierce
• Best photo storytelling: Tiny birds, and their tiny superfood, could decline due to ‘irreversible’ effects of Vancouver port expansion, with photography by Isabelle Groc

“It’s so rewarding to see such a breadth of our reporting nominated,” said Balkissoon. “From hard-hitting investigations into lax regulatory systems in B.C. and Alberta to a sweeping, photo-rich story on Arctic ice to a practical guide to camping while menstruating — this is testament to the broad talents of The Narwhal’s amazing staff and freelance journalists. So is our Digital Publishing Awards nomination in the general excellence category. It all shows the reality that every story is an environment story.”

And the Canadian Association of Journalists has named The Narwhal a finalist in four award categories:

• Data journalism: Manitoba reporter Julia-Simone Rutgers and Malak Abas, reporter with the Winnipeg Free Press, analyzed and mapped the unequal impacts of a transit overhaul in Winnipeg
• Scoop: Matt and Zak Vescera, reporter with the Investigative Journalism Foundation, revealed that oil and gas giant TC Energy successfully lobbied the federal government to gain access to sensitive information gathered by Canada’s spy agency
• Labour reporting: Matt earned a second nomination for his investigation into sexism and gendered violence in the tree-planting industry
• Emerging Indigenous journalist: Savannah Ridley’s body of work as The Narwhal’s 2025 Indigenous editorial fellow earned her a spot as a finalist

Julia-Simone Rutgers is a finalist at the Nonprofit News Awards — twice!

Meanwhile, across the border, the U.S.-based Institute for Nonprofit News announced earlier this month that The Narwhal’s Manitoba reporter, Julia-Simone Rutgers, is a double-finalist at this year’s Nonprofit News Awards.

Rutgers is nominated in the community champion category for her coverage of Winnipeg’s transit system, which underwent a massive redesign in 2025. Winnipeg’s bus route shakeup was a topic of heated debate in the city last year, and Rutgers used GIS mapping software and other data analysis tools to deepen the civic discourse. Most significantly, her reporting revealed that the drastic route changes were not equitably distributed, and disproportionately impacted low-income neighbourhoods.

The community champion award honours reporting that makes “a significant contribution to the well-being of its community through a journalism-centered project or service,” according to the Institute for Nonprofit News.

Rutgers is also a finalist in the awards’ explanatory category for a piece she wrote making sense of the potential impacts of American tariffs on the agricultural sector. As U.S. President Donald Trump hurled tariff threats over the border last year, Rutgers cogently explained how a trade war would hurt farmers on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border, earning her a nomination for providing “insight and understanding of a significant and complex subject.”

Rutgers’ position is part of an innovative partnership between The Narwhal and the Winnipeg Free Press that sees our two outlets co-assigning, co-editing and collaboratively publishing her stories on environmental topics.

“Today’s realities of journalism funding in Canada mean local markets sometimes struggle to sustain deeply-reported journalism in their communities,” The Narwhal’s managing editor, Sharon J. Riley, noted. “Not so in Winnipeg — we’re thrilled that our partnership with the Winnipeg Free Press is bearing fruit and making in-depth environmental reporting available to audiences in Winnipeg.”

The winners of the Nonprofit News Awards will be announced during a ceremony in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on June 16.

Three honours from the Society of Environmental Journalists

The Society of Environmental Journalists also recently feted Rutgers’ work. The organization awarded her second place in the feature category of its annual awards program.

That prize recognized Rutgers’ on-the-ground look at the devastating impacts of hydro dam flooding in Indigenous territories, and how Cree communities are working to restore their lands in the wake of that damage.

The story was a “standout piece of solutions-focused storytelling [that] treats Indigenous-led conservation with respect and empathy,” judges wrote of Rutgers’ story. “It weaves Traditional Ecological Knowledge and oral history into a narrative that feels grounded and uplifting.”

The Society of Environmental Journalists also awarded a second honourable mention to freelancer Chloe Williams and photographer Gavin John for their story on the attempt to slow the impacts of climate change in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, by artificially thickening sea ice. Judges said their story did “a great job at centering Inuit voices in a conversation about geoengineering to save the Arctic.”

Northwest B.C. reporter Matt Simmons also turned heads at the U.S.-based Society of Environmental Journalists, where judges recently awarded him a first honourable mention in the beat reporting category for his ongoing coverage of energy politics in B.C. “Delivering stories like this requires reporters to go the extra mile,” judges said of Matt’s work covering B.C.’s energy industry. “These stories also had a real-world impact.”

“It’s no secret that journalists across Canada are working under increasingly difficult conditions,” Balkissoon said. “At The Narwhal, we’re lucky to have more than 7,300 members who donate regularly to make our work possible and a stellar team of dedicated journalists who won’t give up. Congratulations to all the nominees and winners.”

Updated April 30, 2026 at 2:00 PT: This article was updated to include recent award nominations from the Digital Publishing Awards, the National Magazine Awards and the Canadian Association of Journalists.

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

Summary

• Narwhal reporter Leah Borts-Kuperman is one of three finalists in the investigative category at this year’s National Newspaper Awards.
• Borts-Kuperman’s journalism shone a light on environmental contamination issues at Canadian Armed Forces bases in 2025.
• The winners of the National Newspaper Awards will be announced in Toronto on April 24.

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A major investigation by The Narwhal’s newest staff reporter has earned her a nomination at the prestigious National Newspaper Awards.

Leah Borts-Kuperman, who wrote a series of stories about contamination on Canadian military sites for The Narwhal in 2025, is one of three finalists for the George Brown Award for Investigations, the National Newspaper Awards announced on March 20.

“The Narwhal was proud to publish Leah’s ambitious investigation,” managing editor Sharon J. Riley, who edited the stories, said. “And we’re even more proud of Leah now that her work has been recognized as some of the best in the country.”

Leah’s efforts to shine a light on contamination at Canadian Armed Forces bases started in 2024. She was following federal hearings of the Standing Committee on National Defence, and listened as former employees described health conditions they believed were the result of chemical contamination at their workplaces.

Leah knew this would be a challenging story to report, but she pitched the idea to The Narwhal anyway. What followed was almost a year of work. Leah parsed massive government databases, supported anxious sources to speak on the record, obtained government documents from confidential sources and tracked down experts to review the data she compiled.

The result was a deeply researched feature that foregrounded the experiences of Canadian Armed Forces members at CFB Moose Jaw as they fought for answers about their contaminated workplace.

One military employee told Leah she “took an oath that I would risk my life for what Canada stood for.” But she never expected that risk to take the form of carcinogenic contaminants in her office.

A few weeks after the first investigation was published, Leah wrote a follow-up article detailing the Canadian military’s plans to build housing on several of its bases that are known to be contaminated.

“Investigations such as Leah’s are labour-intensive,” Denise Balkissoon, executive editor of The Narwhal, said. “We’re grateful to The Narwhal’s 7,000-plus members, whose donations enable us to report complex stories with care, nuance and rigour.”

Leah wrote these stories as a freelancer. But she recently joined The Narwhal as our first-ever northern Ontario reporter, so you’ll be seeing her byline on The Narwhal a lot more going forward. She was only a few days into her new job when she learned of the nomination.

“I am grateful to the brave people who shared very personal stories to bring awareness to the issue of contamination on military bases,” Leah said. “And I’m determined and excited to tell many, many more important stories with The Narwhal now as a staff reporter.”

Leah is nominated for the award alongside two other finalists. Teams of journalists from Le Journal de Montréal and The Globe and Mail are also up for the prize. The winners of the National Newspaper Awards will be announced in Toronto on April 24.

The Narwhal is a non-profit news outlet that relies on readers to give whatever they can each month or year to make our reporting possible. This March, all new members will receive a Narwhal tote bag as thanks for their support.

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

Alberta can have another pipeline to the West Coast — at least theoretically — but only if the oil and gas industry puts carbon capture systems in place to ensure the bitumen that flows through it is “low-emission.”

That tradeoff is at the heart of the “grand bargain” unveiled by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and Prime Minister Mark Carney in November 2025, when they both expressed support in principle for a new pipeline to connect Alberta’s landlocked oilsands to international markets.

What will make this bitumen cleaner than what currently flows through Alberta’s pipelines? The answer has nothing to do with the product itself, but with the processes that will be used to create it.

According to the terms of Smith and Carney’s memorandum of understanding, the federal government’s support for Alberta’s new pipeline is contingent on the success of a massive carbon capture project being pitched by the Pathways Alliance, a coalition of Canada’s major oilsands companies.

If Pathways companies build the carbon capture infrastructure they’re promising, and use it to “decarbonize the production of their bitumen,” to use Smith’s words, then they can have their new pipeline and ship their product to their collective hearts’ content, the prime minister has promised. (That is, of course, if a company or consortium signs on to acquire the necessary approvals and actually build it — the memorandum stipulates the pipeline will be built by the private sector, with opportunities for Indigenous co-ownership.)

You’re likely to hear a lot more about carbon capture technology, now that Carney has adopted it as a key strategy to thread the needle and reduce Canada’s emissions without forgoing the economic benefits of the nation’s number one export. His office identified the Pathways carbon capture project as a contender for a federal “major project” designation late last year, meaning it could see fast-tracked federal approvals, and his government has extended Trudeau-era subsidies for constructing carbon capture projects.

So, what is carbon capture? And can it really save our planet from the worst impacts of climate change? Read on to find out.

What is carbon capture and storage?

Technologies to lower carbon emissions from industrial processes, which Carney and other politicians are embracing, are known as carbon capture, utilization and storage — often abbreviated as CCUS or CCS.

These technologies capture carbon before it escapes into the atmosphere, and then bury it deep underground (“storage”) or repurpose it to make other products (“utilization”). These systems are often designed with the goal of capturing 90 per cent of the emissions produced by an industrial process — but early carbon capture projects in Canada have failed to achieve that threshold. 

Captured carbon can’t be stored just anywhere. The process requires a porous rock formation deep underground into which the carbon can be injected. On top of that, an impermeable “cap-rock” layer is necessary to seal the carbon in for centuries to come. 

In many cases, sites where oil has previously been removed prove suitable for carbon storage. That’s one reason why the Prairie provinces have so far been the epicentre of carbon storage activities in Canada. According to one estimate, Saskatchewan and Alberta are home to approximately nine per cent of the total onshore carbon storage capacity in North America. 

But the search is on for “pore space” elsewhere, too. The Ontario government has identified the lakebeds and shorelines of lakes Erie and Huron as potential carbon storage locations.

In addition to projects that capture carbon as it’s emitted, there is also technology under development that sucks carbon right out of the air. That’s called direct air carbon capture. It is a less developed and less proven technology, but some companies are trying to make it work — including Deep Sky, a venture capital-funded startup that wants to build a direct air carbon capture facility in rural Manitoba.

What projects already exist? And what is the Pathways Alliance planning?

There are a few dozen carbon capture, utilization and storage projects in operation around the world, but they’ve yet to reach a scale that would make a meaningful dent in emissions. According to the Global CCS Institute, existing projects have the capacity to capture about 64 million tonnes of carbon per year — that’s about 0.1 per cent of global emissions. A recent study estimated that more than 383 million tonnes of carbon dioxide have been stored underground worldwide since 1996.

Comparatively, the latest federal figures show annual emissions from Alberta’s oilsands were 89 megatonnes in 2023, with the broader oil and gas sector in Canada contributing 208 megatonnes of carbon emissions in that year.

The Pathways Alliance proposal doesn’t include the actual capture of any carbon. Rather, it’s a plan for a shared carbon transportation network and storage facility, with individual companies expected to build their own infrastructure for capturing carbon at their facilities and feeding it into the Pathways network. The companies stated in 2023 that their project could lead to a net reduction of between 10 and 12 megatonnes of emissions per year by 2030.

A handful of the world’s carbon capture and storage projects are already located in Canada.

Cumulatively, Canadian carbon capture and sequestration projects stored roughly five megatonnes in 2023, according to federal figures. That is a small fraction of what the projects were predicted to store. That number doesn’t account for all the carbon that was captured: some is injected into the earth to help extract more oil, a process known as enhanced oil recovery.

In Alberta, Shell Canada’s Quest project has been in operation for just over a decade. Quest syphons carbon from one of the company’s Edmonton-area plants and transports it by pipeline to a storage area where it’s injected and stored more than two kilometres underground. The project, which cost more than $1 billion to build, captures and stores about one million tonnes of carbon each year.

Also in Alberta, the Carbon Trunk Line hauls captured carbon from a fertilizer plant and a refinery and pipes it 240 kilometres south to old oil reservoirs. The pipeline has the capacity to transport up to 14 million tonnes of carbon per year, though it only transported 1.5 megatonnes in 2023.

In Saskatchewan, the best-known carbon capture project is the Boundary Dam coal-fired power plant, operational since 2014 and the world’s first commercial-scale coal plant with the technology. Carbon from the Boundary Dam is transported by pipeline to a largely depleted oil field near Weyburn, Sask., where it is injected into reservoirs to loosen up the remaining oil. The plant has never achieved its original goal of capturing one megatonne per year, but it was also an early demonstration project.

How are Canadian governments supporting carbon capture technology?

By paying for it.

The cost to build carbon capture, utilization and storage facilities typically runs into the billions of dollars. Then, there are operational expenses. A 2025 analysis found Alberta’s two major carbon capture and storage facilities each cost tens of millions of dollars per year to operate.

Alberta’s oilsands companies — which collectively posted more than $29.1 billion in profits in 2024 — find those costs too high. The Pathways Alliance has stated on its website that its carbon capture plan “will require ongoing collaboration” with governments, including “making significant investments together.” In theory, carbon pricing should encourage more carbon capture projects, as the more expensive carbon emissions are, the more likely a company is to implement emission reductions strategies.

Yet in 2024, Edmonton-based power generator Capital Power abandoned its plans for a facility, saying carbon capture and storage was “not economically feasible.”

If the industrial carbon tax is a stick, our governments are also dangling carrots in front of major polluters in the form of subsidies.

Under former prime minister Justin Trudeau, the federal government introduced a refundable tax credit that subsidizes up to 50 per cent of the cost of eligible carbon capture, storage and utilization projects. The tax credit first became available in 2022, and the Parliamentary Budget Office has estimated its cost will rise to more than $2 billion per year by 2027-28, as companies start to build their projects and take advantage of the subsidy.

The Alberta Carbon Capture Incentive Program, meanwhile, provides additional provincial grants to companies building carbon capture projects in Alberta.

In Carney and Smith’s memorandum of understanding, both the federal and Alberta governments committed to extending their respective incentive programs to support the Pathways project, which means a significant portion of the megaproject’s $16-billion price tag is likely to be publicly funded. That agreement also included a provision that tax credits for carbon capture extend to projects for enhanced oil recovery — which was previously excluded, as the Trudeau government responded to critics pointing out that extracting more oil results in more carbon emissions not just during production, but when the fossil fuel is eventually used by consumers.

Can carbon capture technology make a dent in climate change?

On its own? No.

Combined with other efforts, especially an overall reduction in fossil fuel use? It might help a little.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said the technology has the potential to decrease global emissions, but not by anywhere near as much as transitioning to renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. It’s also a more expensive mitigation strategy than moving to renewables.

According to the International Energy Agency, carbon capture, utilization and storage could achieve eight per cent of the emissions reductions needed to reach net-zero in the energy sector by 2050.

In Canada, the oil and gas sector accounted for 30 per cent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2023; reducing the sector’s emissions through carbon capture, utilization and storage would be a win.

But there’s a catch. That accounting only considers carbon emissions from the industrial processes that make oil and gas products — not the emissions associated with their use.

It’s important for an oil refinery to reduce its own emissions, but carbon capture projects don’t address the emissions produced by the car that eventually burns the fuel produced by that refinery. This is a big deal, because most of the carbon footprint associated with a barrel of oil — 70 to 80 per cent, according to one estimate — comes from the oil product’s end use. In Canada, the highest emitting industry after oil and gas is transportation.

That’s why carbon capture and storage isn’t a silver bullet in the fight against climate change. According to the World Resources Institute, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report makes clear there are “no scenarios in which [carbon capture, utilization and storage] would allow continued use of fossil fuels at current levels, let alone expanded oil and gas production.”

The Alberta government estimates the province has about 160 billion barrels of oil still available for extraction in the oilsands. The new pipeline — if it ever gets built — will drastically increase the amount of bitumen that can be shipped to international markets.

By that time, Canada’s billion-dollar investments into carbon capture, utilization and storage technologies might have helped clean up the industries that produce oil in Alberta. But they will have done nothing to address the bigger problem: the use of the oil products themselves.

— With files from Drew Anderson and Carl Meyer

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

Like most of us, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson drinks water every day. 

It’s an ordinary act. But the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and artist says it’s also a deep expression of our connection to the natural world.

In recent years, Simpson has come to see her body as a node that “connects, through water, to every other living being and every other group of people on the planet,” she said during an interview with Métis artist Christi Belcourt at the Toronto Reference Library in April, adding that “our women have been walking around lakes and bringing attention to water for years and years and years.” 

The intuition that water is a connective force has grounded Simpson’s recent work, from her 2021 record Theory of Ice, which was shortlisted for the Polaris Music Prize, to her latest book, Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead. In that book, Simpson listens to and learns from water as she imagines a world beyond the myriad social injustices of our time. She draws on her deep familiarity with Nishnaabe knowledge and lifeways — learned in part through a decades-long apprenticeship with Doug Williams, an Elder from Curve Lake First Nation near Peterborough, Ont. — and brings it to bear on our shared contemporary moment.

Simpson has a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Manitoba, and adds her latest record, Live Like the Sky — released this Friday, Oct. 24 — to a long list of artistic accomplishments.

As Simpson awaited the album’s release, she took a moment to answer The Narwhal’s Moose Questionnaire. Here’s what she had to say about land-based learning, making awe a regular practice and the items in her “emotional support backpack.”

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. All opinions are the subject’s own.

What’s the most awe-inspiring natural sight you’ve witnessed between the Pacific, Atlantic, 49th parallel and Hudson Bay, i.e. Canada?

This is a dorky answer but the most awe-inspiring natural sight I’ve witnessed is mino bimaadiziwin — the continuous rebirth and reproduction of life on our shared planet. The ecological network that reproduces life. The water cycle. The moon. The spiritual and material strains that connect us. Our only responsibility is to live within that system and bring forth more life. Not just human life, but all life.

For me the trick is to find awe and inspiration in every piece of the natural world and in every Indigenous homeland and body of water, regardless of how much harm they carry from extraction, neglect and exploitation.

Also monarch butterflies. The whole “being soup in a tiny sleeping bag hanging on a milkweed plant to rebuild yourself into the most fragile weird flying saucer thing that travels en masse to Mexico, and knows how to wing your way across Lake Ontario as a warm-up.” Like come on, do that humans.

Also I was at the Mnoominkewin Festival at Curve Lake First Nation in September celebrating wild rice. I was down on the shore of Chemong Lake and a large group of participants were in canoes planting seeds in a growing rice bed. That was a tremendous thing to witness. The wild rice on that lake used to be so thick the lake looked like a prairie. That was all destroyed by the Trent Severn Waterway, cottage development and pesticides, so to see this resurgence of a cherished Nishnaabeg way of caring for our community was pretty wonderful.

What’s the most awe-inspiring natural sight you’ve witnessed outside of Canada?

The Sakiya project is a land-based education project in the West Bank in Palestine, whose vision is: “Liberation through a society whose confidence is rooted in traditional and contemporary ecological practices, whose tolerance echoes nature’s diversity, whose generosity springs from collective labour, whose creativity is enriched by the intersections between art, science and agriculture and whose prosperity is shared beyond boundaries.” 

I visited the centre during the Palestine Festival of Literature in 2023 and really loved to see all the ways they were deepening their connection to their homeland, to cultural production and creative practice and to sharing that knowledge.

Think of three iconic Canadian animals. Choose one each to kiss, marry and kill. 

I’d put tobacco down and ask a moose to give up its life for me, so that I could share the meat, bones, hide and nose with people in our communities. One moose can nourish a lot of people.

I’d live in sin with a beaver. Their orange chisel-like incisors! Their nictitating membrane! Nishnaabeg people have a story of someone who married a beaver and we gained a tremendous insight into how to live with beavers as a result. 

I’d kiss a lynx, entirely because I think the shyness and reluctance on both of our parts would make consent and the actual kiss next to impossible to pull off.

Outdoor cats: yes or no?

All the power to lynxes, bobcats, mountain lions and cougars.

Name one person who could significantly help mitigate the climate crisis if they really wanted to.

All the fascists, elected officials, genocide deniers, billionaires and tech bros. 

And all of us. If each one of us found three people and organized to make something in our local communities better, we would be making a different future.

Rocky Mountains or Great Lakes?

The Great Lakes made me.

Researchers at Yale University, the France-based Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society and other institutions have found women tend to be more concerned about climate change than men. Why do you think that is?

This is another dorky answer. I turned off the robots and looked up the actual study, and read it because I highly recommend critical thought. This study is dated. It focused on men and women in the United States. It conforms to a colonial gender binary and erases queer and gender fluid identities. It seems to not account for other factors like race, education level and socio-economic factors. 

The study does clock a change in 2010. Apparently, prior to 2010, men and women had a similar knowledge of climate change and then it shifted, and the study suggests women in the U.S. are less likely than men to know certain scientific facts about climate change. This is another red flag to me because it’s conforming to the Barbie-is-bad-at-math kind of misogyny. We also know that in our present moment, climate deniers, genocide deniers, science deniers, MAGA people and the right target and recruit young white men and that they were successful in getting Trump elected. That’s the issue we should be studying and organizing against. 

In Indigenous communities all genders are concerned about climate change because our ancestors saw it was going to be a huge problem once settlers set foot on Turtle Island, disregarded our sovereignties, laws and ethical practices and imposed colonialism and capitalism on us. 

Sorry, I went all professor there.

If you could dip a toe off Canada’s coastline, which ocean would it be in?

I’m wishing for the empty Pacific.

What’s a beautiful or useful thing you’ve owned for a really long time?

I’m on the road a lot and so my backpack is actually an emotional support backpack, jammed with everything from portable chargers to nail clippers to tea bags to a portable espresso maker. One time my emotional support backpack broke in the Vancouver airport and the 4,000 items in it were spilling out as I was running for a connecting flight. I ended up having to buy a large tote bag which my kids call “the millennial mom bag,” even though it’s pretty obvious from this answer I’m generation X.

What’s the farthest north you’ve ever been and what did you do there?

I spent a lot of time in the North teaching in Denendeh, Kaska Dena territory and Inuvik, which is part of Gwichi’in and Inuvialuit homelands, for the Dechinta Centre of Research and Learning, which is based in Yellowknife. It’s an Indigenous-led, land-based post-secondary education program. We take Elders, students and their children out on the land to learn from and with the land in a multi-generational Indigenous context.

The students spend part of the day learning from Elders and part of the day learning from people like me, and they can earn Indigenous Studies credits from the University of British Columbia. We provide childcare, meals, accommodation and all kinds of academic and wellness support to ensure that we are channelling resources into northern Indigenous communities and to make sure our programming is meaningful to people of all genders and sexual orientations. 

I’ve also done writing workshops in Sapmi (northern Finland, Sweden and Norway). I think the farthest north I’ve been is Tuktoyaktuk in Inuvialuit territory but it might be Igloolik in Nunavut. This year I helped teach hide-tanning courses in Inuvik with Montana and Delaney Prynuk. It was pretty amazing tanning hides near the former sites of residential schools.

What’s one way you interact with the natural world on a daily basis?

I drink water. Every day.

Yes, you have to choose: smoked salmon or maple syrup?

Maple smoked salmon.

Would you rather be invited to visit David and Victoria Beckham at their Muskoka, Ont., cottage, or Harry and Meghan Sussex at their B.C. oceanic escape?

No.

Camping: yes or no?

Yes.

Enjoying the Moose Questionnaire? Read more from the series here.

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

As a young boy growing up near the Bow River in Calgary, Kevin Van Tighem followed his father into the woods for hunting and fishing expeditions. Those trips — undertaken in all manner of weather — provided Van Tighem with “early and intimate connections” to the natural world, creating memories he treasures decades later.

It was the beginning of a life dedicated to learning from the landscapes of southern Alberta. A biologist by training, Van Tighem worked at several of Alberta’s national parks during his career, eventually becoming superintendent of Banff National Park before retiring in 2011.

Since then, Van Tighem has turned to writing as a way to share his love for the native prairies, Rocky Mountain foothills and other ecosystems that matter most to him. He’s penned hundreds of essays, articles and stories, some of which have been collected into books such as Wild Roses Are Worth It and Our Place: Changing the Nature of Alberta.

Van Tighem told us his writing is part of an effort to “re-story” our culture and help readers to feel their way back into a healthier relationship with nature. “Most of us have a very dysfunctional relationship with place,” he said. “We have built our culture around the othering of our relatives – reducing them to resources, reducing ourselves to consumers, reducing every relationship to a transaction.”

“We all need help with how we know and value our relations.”

As his latest book, Understory: An Ecologist’s Memoir of Loss and Hope, hits bookshelves across the country this fall, we asked Van Tighem to take The Narwhal’s Moose Questionnaire.

This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity — all opinions are the subject’s own.

What’s the most awe-inspiring natural sight you’ve witnessed between the Pacific, Atlantic, 49th parallel and Hudson Bay, i.e. Canada?

That is such a hard question, but I finally settled on a golden eagle I once saw in Banff. It was on the Panther River, a couple long days into the backcountry. It came in high, and I could see that it was carrying something, and then it dropped its load. Probably a marmot or something about that size. Whatever it was just dropped like a shot, and then the eagle tucked into a long, curving dive and, just when it should have crashed into the trees, swept up, grabbed its prey out of midair, and continued the same curve up to land on the side of its nest. 

I’ve never seen such a display of perfect athleticism and skill. And it seemed clear that the eagle had done it for the sheer pleasure of it. It certainly inspired awe in me.

What’s the most awe-inspiring natural sight you’ve witnessed outside of Canada?

White-throated swifts skimming along the edge of the Grand Canyon. They’re one of the fastest birds in the world, with long pointed wings and a little chittering call. The sunset light turned them pink as they went skimming past, with those layers of ancient earth memory fading into shadow below. Turn around, and it’s just a quiet evening in the ponderosa pine forest; turn back and there is that aerial dance over an enormity of time and space too immense to possibly comprehend. It was magic.

Think of three iconic Canadian animals. Choose one each to kiss, marry and kill.

Kiss: a cutthroat trout, underwater, in a mountain creek. No tongue involvement, though. There have to be boundaries.

Marry: a wolf. The places we would go together! And it would be nice to have a mate who’s also a hunting companion, and better at it than me. But then there’s those guns and snares, I suppose. Still: lovers in a dangerous time. It could be one of those tragic, doomed loves. A Boris Pasternak kind of thing.

Kill: horseflies. I know they have their place on this planet. But they’re such ruthless little thugs. Sometimes the death penalty just seems warranted.

Name a person or group doing something meaningful for the environment that everyone should know about.

At this stage of my life it’s almost impossible to name just one. I’ve been privileged to know and work with so many. 

But I think I’d name Nikki Jean and Patrick Tanner. They were inspired, after scrambling some peaks in Waterton Lakes National Park, to climb up and put smudge boxes on as many of those summits as they could in order to demonstrate the sacredness of those places to other visitors who were leaving less appropriate mementos behind. Given the importance of Ninaistako (Chief Mountain) in the Blackfoot way of being, they then went on to organize a series of hikes to its summits for other Kainai and Piikani people who had never been there. They didn’t do it as part of some grand initiative, but just because it was something they could do and it felt necessary and important. And I believe it was.

You don’t need to be some famous scientist or passionate political activist to do something meaningful for the environment; you just need to step up and step out.

Name one person who could significantly help mitigate the climate crisis if they really wanted to.

The temptation is to say Elon Musk or King Charles or Pope Leo or even (heaven help us) Gina Rinehart. But I think the one person who is most critical at helping to mitigate the climate crisis is the one we see in the mirror each morning. Each of us chooses daily how to spend our money, how to transport ourselves around, who to talk with and what to talk about. Each of us votes, and each of us has the capacity to tell politicians what they need to do to earn our votes and retain our support. 

Right now, it’s hard to have any faith in democracy — certainly here in Alberta where we have a government that seems determined to open our mountain headwaters to coal mining regardless of the opposition, and even more so when we see the tragedy unfolding on the other side of the 49th parallel. But all power, ultimately, comes from people, and when people organize their lives around matters of principle, they become unstoppable. Ignore Trump; remember Ghandi.

Outdoor cats: yes or no?

No. For crying out loud. There are three billion fewer birds on this continent than when I was a kid. Why turn pampered, well-fed predators loose on those that remain when we can choose not to?

Tell us about a time you changed your mind about something, environmental or otherwise.

I’ve mostly changed my mind about domestic cattle. 

The more I look around at the ecosystems that most matter to me: native prairie and the montane foothills of southern Alberta, the more I realize that my simplistic “beef yummy; cows bad” position was in conflict with what the land was telling me. The last, best surviving tracts of healthy prairie are those that are being managed for cattle production, by ranchers. The rest have been lost to crop monocultures, urban sprawl, gravel mining and a host of other insults. Native temperate grasslands are among the most threatened ecosystems on the planet and where they survive it’s almost always because ranchers have managed to keep everyone else’s economic ambitions at bay. 

Having said that, I have no love for the intensive livestock production systems that produce much of our beef. A lot of cows are raised wrong and treated horribly. But I’ve become a strong advocate for policies that perpetuate cattle grazing as an economic use of native grasslands. These habitats survive in no small part because of cattle ranching. It would be easier if things were more binary, more black and white, but they rarely are.

Tell us about a time you tried to change someone else’s mind about something, environmental or otherwise.

One time I remember trying, and failing, was when three of us got a meeting with the Alberta government’s environment minister, maybe fifteen years ago or so. We were asking for land use changes that would reduce the devastation being wrought by motorized recreation and industrial clear-cutting in the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains. She brought a deputy minister with her. The minister leaned forward, asked questions, tried to look really engaged, because of course she was a politician and that was her job. And maybe she even was interested. But the deputy minister leaned back, out of her line of sight, and sneered at us through the whole meeting. I left knowing that my fifteen minutes with her wasn’t going to carry as much weight as that deputy minister’s four hours with her on their drive back to Edmonton.

Yes, you have to choose: Rocky Mountains or Great Lakes?

Rocky Mountains. I grew up with them on the western edge of my world. They inspired my imagination of the wild from before I can even remember and, later, became the places where I lived some of my best days. Nothing against the Great Lakes, but they’re outside my home range. Others, no doubt, have been inspired by them. And that’s good, too.

Researchers at Yale University, the France-based Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society and other institutions have found women tend to be more concerned about climate change than men. Why do you think that is?

I don’t know, but I do believe it’s true. Certainly in Alberta, where the oil industry has spent half a century doing all it can to divert young men into oil jobs where they become addicted to big paycheques. A lot of men — and it’s mostly men in those oil jobs, even today — become stubborn defenders of that industry. 

I think a lot of gender roles and gender perspectives are still hard-wired into our culture, so there may be a tendency for women to worry about family and community health and well-being more, and men to feel they have to be cool and just tough it out. Whatever the reason, it’s one reason why I think it’s a hopeful sign that more women are in decision-making roles and active in political life than in the past. 

But again, I’m from Alberta: we currently have some unfortunate exceptions here.

If you could dip a toe off Canada’s coastline, which ocean would it be in?

The Pacific. Those waters lap against the shores of Haida Gwaii, Kamchatka, the Philippines, all those places that are most unlike the places from which my ancestors came. There are five species of salmon in those waters, and in their annual spawning runs they marry the sea to the mountains behind me in ways that really fire the imagination.

What’s a beautiful or useful thing you’ve owned for a really long time?

My senses. And my health.

What’s the farthest north you’ve ever been and what did you do there?

When I retired, my nephew Graham called me from Whitehorse and said that, after all the years that he had spent tagging along on hunting trips with me in southern Canada, he’d like to treat me to a caribou hunt. We ended up at a small lake near the head of the Pelly River. Only thing is, there were no caribou there. We ended up with a moose instead, and I drove almost non-stop back from Whitehorse, through unseasonably warm weather, to get my two quarters of that animal home so that we could get it into the freezer before it spoiled. We ate Yukon memories for a couple years, and they were all good.

What’s one way you interact with the natural world on a daily basis?

Of late, I find myself either walking along the Highwood River floodplain through cottonwood forests or sitting beside the Oldman River listening to what it has to say. It has a great deal more to say than I can understand, but I believe it’s worth listening anyway.

If you could ask one person, alive or dead, about their thoughts on climate change, who would it be?

It might be interesting to get Mark Twain’s opinion. It might not be well-informed, but it would certainly be colourful.

Yes, you have to choose: smoked salmon or maple syrup?

Smoked salmon, if I really have to choose. Salmon are like bison or northern caribou – they are sacred beings that feed our souls and our relationship with the world as much as they feed our bodies. But fortunately, I don’t have to choose: we can get smoked, maple syrup-cured, wild sockeye salmon here. Canada, eh?

Who, in your life, has had the greatest impact on your connection to nature?

I would have to say my father, Jack Van Tighem. Dad was an introvert, a man of rigid principles, who allowed himself and his family few indulgences. He worked hard, and he worked long hours, because of his value system. And on weekends, or during his vacation time in summer, he fished and hunted. In his view, that’s what Saturdays and holidays were for, regardless of the weather. I think a couple times I came close to serious hypothermia while fishing in sleet storms or hunting during prairie blizzards. 

But that regimen of getting out into nature, in all her moods, at all seasons, was what brought me into early and intimate connections with the places and fellow beings that now pretty much form my identity. I still find myself dwelling on memories from those brief childhood years tagging along behind Dad.

Whose relationship with the natural world would you most like to have an impact on?

Everyone’s, I guess. We are such a disconnected culture; most of us have a very dysfunctional relationship with place, with other beings, with the real world. We have built our culture around the othering of our relatives — reducing them to resources, reducing ourselves to consumers, reducing every relationship to a transaction. I overstate it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not fundamentally true. My latest book, Understory, goes into this more deeply.

In my writing, I try to do my part in re-storying our culture, in hopes that some readers at least will start to rethink and re-feel the way we live. We are not in a good place these days, and we may be heading for some very dark times. I don’t have any particular demographic or target I would like to have an impact on; our problem is cultural and so it involves almost all of us. We all need help with how we know and value our relations. So I suppose the answer is: everyone’s. I’m still working on myself, frankly.

Would you rather be invited to Victoria and David Beckham’s Muskoka cottage, or Harry and Meghan Sussex’s B.C. escape?

I think I’d choose the Beckhams’ Muskoka cottage, mostly out of curiosity. I don’t know Ontario’s landscapes very well. First thing I’d do is ditch both of them, and head off into the woods with my binoculars and a sandwich. There’d be some things worth meeting there, I’m sure. Trilliums, maybe. Prothonotary warblers, perhaps. Beckhams and Sussexes, though? Meh.

Camping: yes or no?

Yes. But at my age that comes with new issues. Like getting up and down off the ground: it’s not as straightforward as it was back in the day. And those dark night visits to the outhouse, of which aging increases the frequency. But the patter of rain on a tent fly, the sound of birdsong through canvas, the smell of morning coffee mixed with woodsmoke — of course it’s yes.

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