“This body of records that has really important information of Survivors … is going to be destroyed,” Connie Walker says.

The Pulitzer and Peabody Award-winning investigative journalist and member of Okanese First Nation in Saskatchewan is talking about the 38,000 testimonies from residential school survivors collected by the federal government between 2007 and 2012.

They contain first-hand experiences recounted by some of the estimated 150,000 children who attended residential schools operated by the Canadian government. The schools operated for two centuries; the last to close was Kivalliq Hall, in Rankin Inlet, Nvt., in 1997. Many children experienced physical and sexual abuse, disease, neglect and despair. Over 3,200 deaths at residential schools have been confirmed, a far higher mortality rate than that of non-Indigenous children at the time — and the true number of deaths is likely greater. Those who died in institutions were usually buried there. 

These testimonies are the largest body of residential school records in Canada — an irreplaceable body of evidence, containing more than six times as many testimonies as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. And in September 2027, it is set to be destroyed. 

Walker is trying to stop them from being destroyed without giving survivors a choice. As an assistant professor and the Velma Rogers Research Chair at the Toronto Metropolitan University, she is leading the Indian Residential School Records Project, to raise awareness about the imminent destruction of records.

Along with the Yellowhead Institute, her partner on the project is lawyer Kimberly Murray, a member of Kanehsatà:ke Mohawk Nation and a former executive director of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In 2022, she was appointed the independent special interlocutor for missing children and unmarked graves and burial sites associated with residential schools.

“We know that some spoke about deaths and burials, and also about having dug the graves of other children that have died,” Murray tells The Narwhal of the testimonies. 

In 2024, Murray’s office released Sites of Truth, Sites of Conscience, a report examining “missing and disappeared” Indigenous children’s unmarked burials and mass graves across Canada. In its introduction, the report reads: “The buildings, burial grounds, and cemeteries on the sites of former Indian Residential Schools are etched deeply in Survivors’ memories. Once places of silence and suffering, they are now sites of truth.”

“Once places of brutal violence and genocide, they are now sites of conscience. Survivors can never forget the memories of trauma and death held in these sites; now Canada and all Canadians must do likewise.”

But the truth is at risk of being lost if Canada destroys the records. Murray says it would not just serve to hide the horrors that happened at the schools, but contribute to the disappearance of stories about Indigenous lives before children were taken from their families.

“They write about how they lived on the land, how they were being taught on the land by their parents and grandparents,” Murray says.  

Why is Canada set to destroy thousands of residential school records? 

The testimonies weren’t collected in an effort to document and preserve the history of residential schools. The process was a response to a tidal wave of lawsuits thousands of Survivors launched against the federal government and churches starting in the 1990s. 

In 2007, the federal government initiated a class-action settlement to deal with them all. It was designed to compensate Survivors of federal boarding schools (excluding thousands that attended day schools, or institutions run by religious orders or provincial governments). The base lump-sum payment was $10,000, plus $3,000 for each year of attendance. 

To receive more, Survivors were required to testify through the Independent Assessment Process, so an adjudicator could determine if their claims were credible and merited additional compensation. The process promised confidentiality to those who testified. In 2017, the Supreme Court of Canada determined that promise meant the records must be destroyed. 

The court created a 10-year window between the decision and the destruction, during which the government had to notify Survivors, who could choose to preserve their records. Walker and Murray are skeptical sufficient efforts have been made to contact them. 

“We talk to Survivors who don’t remember being notified, don’t remember if a letter came or an email,” Walker says. “Survivors who don’t even know these records are going to be destroyed.” 

Another hurdle is only the survivor can request their records be preserved, leaving no recourse for the many records of those who have since passed away.

Survivors can go through the My Records, My Choice website to request copies of their records, choose to have them preserved at the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation or allow their records to be destroyed. An April progress report by the records agent says 70 valid requests for record copies have been received since March 31, 2021, while 39 valid requests for records to be shared with the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation in the same period.

Important evidence is contained within these testimonies, Murray and Walker emphasize. Survivors’ stories were only used to determine compensation; allegations of abuse were not prosecuted and information about burials or gravesites was not investigated. But they still could be, even informally. 

As Indigenous communities across Canada search for unmarked graves and burial grounds at residential school sites, information about where to search is likely contained in countless testimonies. 

“We know that some may not have been buried on the site of the institution, but in a municipal cemetery or offsite,” Murray says. “These pieces of historical documents, these records that Survivors filed in courts — they may have some of that missing information that can help the communities doing these searches.” 

Residential school survivor testimonies to be destroyed as disinformation rises

The testimonies are also important bulwarks against the residential school denialism that has taken root. Fueled by disinformation, some Canadians have come to believe Survivors exaggerated — or fabricated — their experiences. But the Independent Assessment Process was one of intense, even brutal, scrutiny. 

Those who requested a hearing were required to name their abusers. Walker recounts reading the transcript, with names redacted, of a survivor who was asked to describe in graphic detail the sexual abuse he endured from a priest when he was eight or nine years old, including whether he was aroused at the time. Some Survivors, after recounting everything they could remember about their abuse often decades after it occurred, had their claims denied. 

The evidence in these claims is damning. But no matter how many testimonies were found credible, abusers did not face charges. 

As Walker and Murray fight to delay the destruction of this particular body of evidence, they’re also using the court filings that prompted the settlement process to construct another one.

Between 14,000 and 20,000 lawsuits were filed across the country, Walker says. With the help of law students at Toronto Metropolitan University, her team is pulling some of those court filings to investigate the histories of five residential schools in Ontario, including cross-referencing them with details from the testimonies to try and identify abusers. 

It’s a similar method she used making her 2022 podcast Stolen: Surviving St Michael’s. For that, she and a team of investigative journalists compiled 482 lawsuits filed by Survivors of the St. Michael’s Indian Residential School in Duck Lake, Sask., to document the widespread, harrowing abuse of children by priests and nuns who ran the school. 

“There’s this idea about the [Truth and Reconciliation Commission], like, ‘Oh, that happened, and now we know the truth.’ “ Walker says. “But actually, that should have been the beginning.”

On Sept. 30, Yellowhead Institute is hosting “The Right to Truth: Protecting Indian Residential Schools” featuring Connie Walker and Kimberly Murray, as well as former commissioner of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission Marie Wilson and former premier of the Northwest Territories Stephen Kakfwi. Registration is free. Attend in person in Toronto or online.

Updated Sept. 28, 2026 at 6:51 a.m. PT: This story has been updated to clarify that Walker and Murray’s project is focused on the survivors’ choice in the fate of their records.

Updated Sept. 29, 2026 at 1:25 p.m. PT: This story has been updated to add a link to the “My Records, My Choice” website.

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.

“Premature, ill-advised and respectfully should be reconsidered.” 

That’s how Pictou Landing First Nation Chief Tamara Young described Canada’s decision not to require a federal environmental review of two proposed 300-megawatt gas-fired power plants near her community. The comments came in a letter Young sent to the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada in July, two months after the agency declined to study the impacts of the Marshdale and Salt Springs natural gas power plants in Pictou County, N.S., an hour-and-a-half drive northeast of Halifax. 

The letter, shared with The Narwhal by the Mi’kmaw rights organization Kwilmu’kw Maw-klusuaqn, detailed “widespread Mi’kmaq and public opposition” to the proposed projects due to concerns about climate change, water use, public health, wildlife and other “cumulative effects associated with two large fossil-fuel facilities located approximately 20 kilometres apart.” These concerns, Young wrote, “require careful assessment in relation to Mi’kmaw Rights and the lands, waters and resources upon which those rights depend.” 

But according to Janiece Walsh, a spokesperson for the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada, these concerns don’t meet their threshold for a review. According to a statement she emailed The Narwhal, they fall outside “the potential adverse effects within federal jurisdiction.” 

The impacts on Indigenous Rights that Young called “significant constitutional, procedural and substantive concerns” are just one of the many issues raised in public comments about the two proposed plants. Dozens of comments submitted between Jan. 5 and Feb. 9, 2026, raised questions about public health, climate change, energy access and which level of government would monitor threats to endangered species like Atlantic salmon, mainland moose and black ash.

Then there are the concerns about speed. Unlike most big industrial projects, Marshdale and Salt Springs weren’t proposed by a company. Instead, they were floated by Nova Scotia’s Independent Energy Systems Operator, an agency created by the province in 2024 to manage the province’s electrical grid. According to Chris Milligan, vice president of planning and procurement for the operator, plants like these are necessary stopgaps for Nova Scotia to meet its goal of ending coal-fired electricity use by 2030. 

“Fast-acting natural gas-fired generators are the resource that can provide the firm capacity the province needs to meet demand when wind and batteries can’t,” he told The Narwhal. 

But comments to the federal review questioned this conclusion, including one from the Sipekne’katik First Nation, a Mi’kmaw community located south of the proposed plants. 

“Although the project may help reduce coal use specifically, it represents an additional investment in alternative fossil-fuel-based infrastructure,” it explained, calling that inconsistent with long-term climate commitments made by both the provincial and federal governments.

This all worries Anna Johnston, a staff lawyer at West Coast Environmental Law and member of the federal Minister of Environment and Climate Change’s advisory council on impact assessment. Johnston told The Narwhal she sees the Nova Scotia power plants issue not just as one isolated decision, but part of a broader “build baby build mentality” spreading across the country that is fast-tracking project approvals without adequately considering environmental and social impacts. 

“You’re effectively giving the green light to the project before you’ve done any of the studies on what the effects are going to be,” she said. “Before you’ve had any opportunities for meaningful consultation or engagement or participation. It’s a rubber stamp.” 

Nova Scotia claims power plants “not likely” to affect Mi’kmaq rights, despite dozens of impacts flagged by federal agencies, communities

In December 2025, the Nova Scotia government posted a project summary claiming the power plants would have a limited impact on “traditional Mi’kmaq land use.” 

“Overall, impacts on Mi’kmaq hunting, fishing, plant gathering or other traditional activities are anticipated to be low and confined to the project footprint,” it said. 

Around the same time, Young’s letter to the agency stated, the provincial government sent letters to Kwilmu’kw Maw-klusuaqn advising “the nature of this project is not likely to lead to appreciable adverse impacts to credibly asserted or established Mi’kmaq Aboriginal or Treaty Rights.” As such, the province asserted, the duty to consult was not triggered.

The same line alarmed Twila Gaudet, director of consultation for Kwilmu’kw Maw-klusuaqn, an association that advocates for Treaty Rights on behalf of the Assembly of Nova Scotia Mi’kmaw Chiefs. She quoted it in a letter she sent to a provincial environmental assessment officer in February 2026, in which she argued that assertion runs counter to what’s written in the actual project descriptions for the two plants. The section on Mi’kmaw community impacts states that “the Crown has a duty to consult with the Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia” before moving forwards. 

“The government has neglected their duty to consult,” Gaudet told The Narwhal.

Comments submitted to the federal review that were acquired by The Narwhal through an access to information request also raise questions about the assertion that these projects would have a marginal impact on Mi’kmaq communities. 

According to these documents, Mi’kmaw organizations and federal agencies, including Indigenous Services Canada, Environment and Climate Change Canada, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and Health Canada, submitted dozens of statements about the impacts these projects would have on Indigenous communities.

They included concerns about how water use and chemical pollution from the plants would impact threatened Atlantic salmon populations in local rivers, an important food source and cultural species for the Mi’kmaq. Kwilmu’kw Maw-klusuaqn shared similar worries about impacts on mainland moose. 

Some statements raised red flags about how air and water pollution could impact the health of downstream and nearby communities, a particularly important subject for Pictou Landing First Nation, which has already dealt with decades of industrial pollution in nearby Boat Harbour.Once a pristine tidal estuary known as A’se’k, or “the other living space,” Boat Harbour’s waters were used by Pictou Landing for generations. Then, in the late 1960s, a pulp mill was granted permission to discharge wastewater from a treatment facility into the area. It quickly became a toxic soup, and the community started dealing with a range of health impacts. The mills only stopped dumping waste into the estuary in 2020. 

This “dark history of large-scale industrial developments” is why “it is imperative that the local Mi’kmaq communities are adequately informed well in advance of large-scale projects such as the power plants,” Gaudet explained in her February 2026 letter to the province.

The federal agency grouped concerns from the review into five broad subject areas in its summary of issues: fisheries impacts, health conditions, land use and resources, cultural heritage and Indigenous and Treaty Rights. 

The agency also acknowledged that Mi’kmaq communities “raised concerns about inadequate consultation by governments” but said those concerns were considered in making its decision. 

“In determining whether further assessment is required, [the Impact Assessment Agency] considers several factors, including any adverse impacts the designated project may have on the rights of Indigenous Peoples of Canada,” Walsh said.

She added that provincial environmental assessment approvals require proponents to develop “a Mi’kmaq communication plan. This must include … seeking input from the Mi’kmaq on the development and implementation of project mitigation and monitoring plans.”But, Gaudet said, a communication plan isn’t the same as a consultation process that would address the nation’s “Section 35 constitutionally-protected rights and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.”

“The blatant disregard for the Mi’kmaq Nation and the impacts these power plants will have on our Mi’kmaw rights is disappointing and unacceptable,” she added.

Nova Scotia’s Department of Environment and Climate Change declined to comment for this story, citing an ongoing judicial review related to the two power plants that has been brought by Living Ecosystems and Power, a Pictou County community organization that launched in April 2026 to oppose the plants. 

Concerns that impact assessment agency ignores emissions 

One big question is which level of government — if any — will monitor or demand mitigation of the plants’ greenhouse gases. Because they’re going to be significant: the initial project plans estimated that each plant will produce 325,594 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide annually each, the equivalent of adding nearly 75,000 cars to the road. And those emissions are based on the plants only running for 2,190 hours, about one-quarter of their actual capacity. 

The federal government’s climate plan doesn’t track or apply to individual projects. 

When asked to comment on the projects’ potential climate impacts, Environment and Climate Change Canada recommended “greenhouse gas and climate change impacts be assessed and mitigated consistent with guidance in the Strategic Assessment of Climate Change.” 

But in 2024, the federal government amended Canada’s Impact Assessment Act, removing greenhouse gas emissions from federal jurisdiction, following a Supreme Court ruling that found this to be an overreach of constitutional authority.  

At the same time, Anna Johnston explained, impact assessments “do consider whether projects would hinder or contribute to Canada’s ability to meet its climate change commitments.” If that sounds confusing, it’s because it is. 

Basically, the agency can’t assess greenhouse gases as its own issue. But if greenhouse gases harm something within federal jurisdiction — “like fisheries, migratory birds and Indigenous peoples,” she explained — then the agency can trigger an assessment, and recommend ways to reduce or eliminate that harm.

Lori Skaine, executive director of the climate change division within Nova Scotia’s Department of Environment and Climate Change, responded to comments focused on emissions concerns that were sent in to the province’s project review. “The project’s overall [greenhouse gas] impact will depend a lot on how many hours the facility runs each year,” Skaine wrote, also noting the amount could vary depending on the fuel used, noting that these plants could run on diesel if natural gas isn’t available. 

Burning diesel produces up to 40 per cent more carbon emissions than natural gas. It also releases more fine particulate matter and increases local health risks. On-site diesel storage adds increased spill risk to the local ecosystem. 

Karen McKendry, senior wilderness outreach coordinator with the Ecology Action Centre, called potential changes to capacity or fuel type “scope creep.” Something, she said, there is no current remedy for. 

“Everything can change about the project, even after it was approved,” she says. “The environmental assessment process is a one-and-done.” 

A “material change” in the projects’ water use

When they were first proposed, the Marshdale and Salt Springs power plants planned to draw tens of thousands of litres of water from local watersheds each day to cool down turbines, clean equipment and mitigate emissions. But there’s a problem. According to Milligan, when the energy systems operator assessed the region, they determined there is not enough groundwater available on site to proceed with this plan. 

Instead, the operator pivoted to use dry technology systems that employ chemicals instead of water. The type and amount of chemicals have yet to be disclosed, and Milligan says that there are “several commercially available technologies routinely used at power generation facilities that can accomplish this.”

Young thinks this change should reopen the federal decision.

“These changes may materially affect the scope, effects, mitigation requirements and cumulative impacts of the projects,” she says.

They also heighten concerns about impacts on Atlantic salmon, which spawn in Eight Mile Brook, a tributary of the West River Pictou located about 300 metres from the proposed Salt Springs facility. 

It’s one of only a handful of rivers in Nova Scotia with Atlantic salmon populations robust enough that the province allows catch-and-release fishing. In their comments to the federal review, Kwilmu’kw Maw-Klusuaqn described Atlantic salmon as “a foundational food source across Mi’kma’ki.” 

“Loss of access to salmon threatens Mi’kmaq food security, self-determination and rights-based harvesting practice,” it added.

The salmon in the West River could soon be listed as a federally protected population after the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada determined that they were “endangered” in late 2025. Other threatened species impacted by this project include mainland moose, which has been listed under Nova Scotia’s Endangered Species Act since 2003, and black ash, which has been federally protected since 2018. Both were flagged as “culturally significant species for the Mi’kmaq” in the federal review. 

In her response to The Narwhal’s questions, Walsh of the federal assessment agency said it “was aware of this recommendation when it issued its determinations,” and that “the proponent is still required to follow the federal requirements of the Fisheries Act and the Species At Risk Act, as well as conditions issued by the province.” 

The federal government says impacts to these species can be managed without a federal impact assessment. But the provincial system has challenges. In 2020, the Nova Scotia Supreme Court found that the province had “a chronic systemic failure to implement action required” to enforce its Endangered Species Act. In February 2026, the provincial natural resources department eliminated its dedicated wildlife division.

In a statement, the department told The Narwhal “all wildlife-related functions are continuing as before” and that the move is simply a restructuring.“No scientists, biologists, forest technicians or wildlife staff were laid off, and no wildlife programs or services have been reduced, eliminated or transferred outside government,” the statement explained.But conservation groups disagreed, arguing that positions dedicated to biodiversity, ecosystems and habitat protection had been all but eliminated. They were backed up by sources within the department, who told the Halifax Examiner the changes were “absolutely gutting” the wildlife department. One source described them as something done “to punish the scientists working on behalf of wildlife and ecosystems.”

A worrying precedent for expedited project processes

On Sept. 9, the federal government announced plans to further expedite project reviews by shifting reviews for things like pipelines, power plants and oilsands mines from the impact assessment agency to the Canada Energy Regulator. These changes won’t apply to the Salt Springs or Marshdale power plants, but to Anna Johnston, they’re part of the same trend. One that she worries will “essentially eradicate federal environmental impact assessment, the best tool we had for avoiding the environmental harms of risky projects and often the only way for the public to have a say.” 

These most recent changes follow previous federal actions, including Bill C-5, which allowed the government to exempt projects from some stages of federal impact assessments, and agreements between Ottawa and the provinces to streamline joint reviews. Prime Minister Mark Carney and Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston signed one of these co-operation agreements back in March. And Ontario, British Columbia, New Brunswick, Manitoba, Prince Edward Island and Alberta all have similar agreements, while Quebec is in the process of finalizing one. 

The agreement with Nova Scotia states that the province can decide when the federal government should rely on provincially “applicable environmental assessment and regulatory processes” in reviewing and regulating major projects, as the Nova Scotia agreement puts it. The agreement also directs Canada’s impact assessment agency to “[avoid] duplicative decision-making processes related to assessments by relying on provincial processes.” 

Johnston worried this slew of agreements undermine the basic goals of impact assessments. 

“[There is] a risk that we’ve been flagging for a while that the federal government says, ‘Oh no, we don’t need to look at that, the province is going to do it,’ ” she explains. “Meanwhile, the province is saying ‘we don’t have a role here, or we’re going to fast-track,’ or for whatever reason, it’s not going to look at the issue.” 

That, she said, means no one is looking at the bigger picture, that “you’re getting an authorization under the Fisheries Act, you’re really only looking at the fisheries impacts, [and] if you’re getting a navigable waters permit, you’re only looking at impacts on navigation and navigability.”“Environmental impact assessment is meant to take a look at all of those effects under one umbrella, so that decision makers have a more comprehensive understanding of what the full-picture effects are and how they interact,” she said.  

With all of these questions about the process, opposition to the two power plants has been growing, with petitions and two rallies through the summer in New Glasgow, one outside of a speech directly targeting Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston. On Sept. 3, he weighed in on the plants, saying that he would like to see the energy system operator consider other technologies than natural gas. In a press conference, he said that the energy regulator had been “too focused on [natural] gas” and should consider “a proper and more fulsome assessment of different technologies.” 

The energy systems operator responded a week later with a press release announcing that it would open up the door to project proposals that could meet the same power generation needs of these two plants with “energy storage and other on-demand electricity generation technologies.” 

In the meantime, a legal challenge filed by Living Ecosystems and Power is moving through the Nova Scotia courts. And Twila Gaudet says that Mi’kmaw leadership is considering their next move, “which may include meetings with provincial and federal ministers, legal options [and] peaceful protest.” 

Johnston thinks these responses could multiply across the country as governments continue to try to fast-track project reviews. 

“I think that we’re going to see a much bigger wave of lawsuits,” she says. “That’s not good for taxpayers. Litigation is expensive, and Canadians end up paying for it.”

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.

A small town on northwestern Ontario’s border with the U.S. is quietly preparing for a worst-case scenario. It’s one that could mean a dramatic change for the community’s water supply.

Fort Frances, home to about 7,500 people, sits where Rainy Lake empties into the Rainy River and flows north into Lake of the Woods. Fort Frances’ drinking water comes from Rainy Lake, which is bisected by the Canada-U.S. border — and vulnerable to the whims of either country’s leadership. So is the town’s economy, which relies on fishing and tourism, as well as the rhythms of a border community built around the water.

Now, tensions between the U.S. and Canada threaten those rhythms. This spring, U.S. President Donald Trump took aim at a moratorium on mining in Rainy River’s watershed, and its waters that flow past Fort Frances and numerous First Nations communities around it. Last month, tensions ratcheted up, as Trump signed an order renaming Lake Ontario to “Lake America” amid an escalating trade dispute.

The watershed that surrounds Fort Frances is called Rainy-Lake of the Woods, and it straddles both sides of the border west of Lake Superior. About 450,000 hectares of protected forest, rivers and interconnected lakes on the U.S. side is known as the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, or colloquially, the Boundary Waters. In 2023, the Biden administration protected roughly 91,000 hectares of Superior National Forest just outside the Boundary Waters from mining for 20 years, citing the risk such development posed to the surrounding waters.

Mined copper-sulfide ore is processed to extract metals used in electrical wiring, electronics and rechargeable batteries. But when that ore is exposed to air and water, it can add sulfuric acid and heavy metals into nearby waters. When dissolved in water, that sulfuric acid breaks down into sulfate, which is toxic to wild rice, a plant central to Anishinaabe diet and culture — Minnesota has regulated sulfate in wild rice waters since 1973 for that reason. Sulfate also feeds the bacteria that convert otherwise harmless inorganic mercury into methylmercury, a neurotoxin that accumulates in fish and, through them, the people who eat them. 

But in April 2026, U.S. Congress reversed the protection for the stretch of Superior National Forest outside the Boundary Waters. The Senate voted 50 to 49 to lift the Biden administration’s moratorium that stood in the way of the Twin Metals mine, a project targeting copper, nickel and other metals, majority-owned by the Chilean mining conglomerate Antofagasta. 

President Trump signed the resolution into law in April.

In a statement to other media, Kathy Graul, director of public affairs and communications for Twin Metals Minnesota, said, “Any proposed project in this region, including Twin Metals, must undergo a yearslong, multi-agency regulatory review before earning permits to begin construction of a mine. The [Senate ruling] restores this process, and projects must prove they can meet the stringent environmental standards that have long been in place in Minnesota before moving forward.”

Back over the Canadian border, Fort Frances’ water treatment plant can handle natural fluctuations in the source water — but it wasn’t designed to handle the kind of contamination mining activity could potentially introduce, Travis Rob, the town’s manager of infrastructure and growth, told The Narwhal. Addressing that risk would mean either a costly overhaul of the plant’s treatment processes, or securing an entirely new water source, which would be “neither easy nor cheap,” Rob said. “This is what has me so concerned about the proposed mining activities.” 

He and his team have talked at length about what changes to watch for in the water that feeds the treatment plant and when the town would need to act, he said. But the stakes extend beyond Fort Frances itself. Couchiching First Nation and others also receive drinking water from the town’s treatment plant, Rob said. 

In August, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz issued a reprieve of sorts, signing an executive order directing state agencies to stop issuing leases or permits for copper, nickel and other non-iron ore mines on the U.S. side of the watershed, and to review all existing mineral leases in the area, including Twin Metals’. 

While this might hold up Twin Metals’ plans in part, the order is not immune to legal challenges from mining companies — or future actions of the Trump administration.

A smalltown mayor and First Nation’s chief seek support amid Trump’s mining push

The proposed Twin Metals mine sits at the headwaters of the Rainy-Lake of the Woods watershed.

The project has held leases in the area since the 1960s, under different owners proposing to mine copper, nickel, cobalt and platinum group metals from a deposit up to 1,300 metres below the surface, processing roughly 20,000 tons of ore a day for more than 25 years. 

According to the company, about half the waste rock, or tailings, would be stored underground; the rest would be dried out and kept above ground. Twin Metals says its processing “will remove most of the sulfide minerals,” meaning its tailings won’t result in acid drainage, and that the mine won’t discharge water used for that processing. Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness, an advocacy groups opposed to the project, has argued the risk  of acid drainage from the project’s tailings remains based on other mines, and exploration work in the watershed.

That same watershed carries north past Fort Frances, through Treaty 3 territory, the traditional lands of 28 Anishinaabe First Nations in northwestern Ontario and southeastern Manitoba, and eventually to Hudson Bay.

Gakijiwanong Anishinaabe Nation — formerly Lac La Croix First Nation — condemned the reversal in an April statement, according to NWONewswatch, saying neither it nor affected U.S. tribes were given the chance to testify before Congress voted.

Chief Carrie Atatise-Norwegian of Gakijiwanong Anishinaabe Nation, whose territory borders both the Boundary Waters and Quetico Provincial Park, has framed the stakes even more starkly. “This decision threatens the lives of our people, water resources and our ancestral lands,” she told CBC in April, after the U.S. Congress lifted the moratorium. “As stewards of our lands, [we] will be asserting, exercising and protecting our rights, jurisdiction and sovereignty as a nation.”

By May, Atatise-Norwegian was in Washington, D.C. In Minnesota Senator Tina Smith’s office, she signed a memorandum of understanding with the chairs of three U.S. tribal nations: Red Lake, Grand Portage and Bois Forte. They agreed to present a unified cross-border position on protecting the Boundary Waters and treaty-protected homelands, according to Red Lake Nation News. Atatise-Norwegian did not respond to The Narwhal’s request for an interview. 

The concerns of Gakijiwanong Anishinaabe Nation are shared by many Treaty 3 nations in Ontario. “This is not just a local issue, it is a transboundary concern that directly affects our waters, our environment and our way of life,” Ogichidaa (Grand Chief) Francis Kavanaugh of Grand Council Treaty 3, which represents 28 First Nations across northwestern Ontario and southeastern Manitoba, said in an April statement.

The day after the U.S. Senate voted to lift the moratorium, Fort Frances Mayor Hallikas emailed the office of Marcus Powlowski, the Liberal MP for Thunder Bay-Rainy River, urging him to speak out, and to reach out to Minnesota politicians directly. Hallikas said he also raised the issue with provincial politicians a few weeks later at the Northwestern Ontario Municipal Association’s conference in Thunder Bay, but was told it was a federal issue.

In May, the Rainy River District Municipal Association, of which Fort Frances is a member, wrote to Ontario Premier Doug Ford, aligning itself with Grand Council Treaty 3’s opposition to the mine. The letter states that sulfide-ore copper mining could cause “irreversible harm to water quality, wildlife, public health and a sustainable outdoor recreation-based economy.” It calls on “all levels of Canadian government” to engage with the U.S. and Minnesota on the issue.

“Any decision that could put [these waters] at risk is not solely a Minnesota matter,” Hallikas wrote in an email to The Narwhal. “It is an international and downstream concern that directly affects peoples in northwestern Ontario.”

He drew parallels to Grassy Narrows First Nation, where industrial mercury contamination, which can cause issues like tremors, cognitive effects and neuromuscular disorders, is one of the most consequential environmental health crises in Canadian history. 

“Northwestern Ontario understands the devastating consequences of mercury contamination,” he wrote. “That history demands vigilance, transparency and precaution.”

A binational board with no enforcement power, watching and waiting

In 1909, Canada and the U.S. signed the Boundary Waters Treaty, governing cross-border water disputes and creating the International Joint Commission to oversee exactly this kind of issue.

Merrell-Ann Phare, one of three Canadian commissioners, said the commission has no enforcement authority and no regulatory authority over water quality. Its role is to resolve disputes between nations, not enforce laws.

“We take great care to stay out of the domestic issues that are happening,” Phare said, so the commissions can preserve its neutrality for the moment a request to mediate comes in.

Only governments in Ottawa and Washington can jointly trigger that kind of review, known as a reference, under the treaty. Provinces, states and municipalities have no standing to request one directly, though Indigenous nations can be named partners.

The Ktunaxa Nation is a partner to a case in B.C.’s Elk Valley, where coal-mining pollution flows downstream into Montana and Idaho, causing unnaturally high selenium levels that have led to deformities in fish. It’s a problem the nation had raised for more than a decade before Ottawa and Washington formally asked the commission to step in, in March 2024.

That in itself is a point of concern for Johann Strube, an environmental sociologist who has studied water governance in northwestern Ontario, speaking in a personal capacity rather than as a spokesperson for Grand Council Treaty 3, where he is a natural resources policy analyst. The joint commission, he said, “was founded to advance the settler-colonial interests of Canada and the United States and explicitly excluded Indigenous nations from decision-making.”

The structure of the commission, Strube said, “still doesn’t involve Indigenous nations as nation-to-nation partners.”

Megan Garner is the Canadian co-chair of the International Rainy-Lake of the Woods Watershed Board, the regional organization that operates under the International Joint Commission.

She said the board is “aware of the termination of the mineral leasing moratorium … and is watching this issue closely.” The board is determining next steps, she said, and is committed to “balanced and representative input.” 

Garner later confirmed that, as of Aug. 19, the board “has not been in touch” with the Rainy River District Municipal Association or Gakijiwanong Anishinaabe Nation, and “has not requested input or information from any outside parties” on the mining issue, despite being aware, through its advisory groups, of a range of local perspectives.

A spokesperson for Global Affairs Canada, John Babcock, said, “Canada continues to work closely with the United States through existing bilateral mechanisms, including those established under the Boundary Waters Treaty, in support of our shared stewardship of transboundary waters.” He said they would continue to do this “as we take up the environmental challenges of the 21st century.”

Asked whether Canada had raised any new concerns with the U.S. administration specifically about the 2026 reversal, Babcock said in an emailed statement that the department continues “to monitor the ongoing developments in the region and to advocate that any increased mining activity be properly assessed and managed,” and that “the joint stewardship of the environment is a cornerstone of Canada-U.S. relations.”

Babcock did not respond to a follow-up question on whether or not Canada has requested the International Joint Commission review the issue of mine pollution leaching into the Rainy-Lake of the Woods watershed.

Canada’s caution here, Strube said, may have less to do with the technical question of jurisdiction than with the state of U.S.-Canada relations more broadly. Whether the Trump administration would feel bound by a 116-year-old water treaty, Strube said, is an open question.

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Twilight hangs over the Inlet Raider’s empty deck as it charges up the river. Its voyage has a single, cargo-free purpose: its crew was hired to find out whether the journey up the Taku River from Southeast Alaska past the B.C. border is possible.

If they succeed, this could be one of dozens of trips carrying construction supplies and infrastructure to the proposed New Polaris gold mine along the river, currently under review by the B.C. government and among its list of priority projects for expedited review.

The boat picks up speed, blasting up a passage nicknamed “the narrows” in honour of its thin, flute-shaped banks, which can host fierce, swirling currents. Its other concern lies underneath in braided river channels that can move at least annually to a new configuration, a common trait of glacial-fed rivers like this one. 

As the motor churns, the crew’s stream of banter is replaced by a tense silence punctuated by calls of encouragement as their barge follows a sonar-equipped motorboat guiding its journey up ahead.

“Three hours of boredom punctuated by 30 seconds of sheer terror,” says a joking voice off-screen, in a video posted to the captain’s Facebook page.

A few minutes later, the Inlet Raider makes it through.

New Polaris’s owner, Canagold Resources Ltd., acknowledges the transport challenges ahead. “We never said it’s easy,” Canagold’s chief executive officer, Catalin Kilofliski, tells The Narwhal in an interview. 

“But it’s doable.”

To avoid these precarious barge trips during operations, Canagold plans to transport its gold concentrate on cargo planes. It anticipates up to 15 flights a day, carrying a total of around 27,000 tonnes per year.

The goal is to capitalize on record-breaking gold prices by reopening New Polaris, a long-shuttered mine site on the Tulsequah River.

The project is among a select group featured in a federal prospectus document delivered to attendees of Canada’s recent investment summit in Toronto. This year, New Polaris was included in the federal government’s map of critical minerals projects, thanks to its potential to produce antimony — a heavy metal deemed “critical” by Canada for its use in a variety of applications from bullets to batteries. But Canagold’s feasibility study did not establish New Polaris’s antimony reserves and it does not include antimony in its projected revenues.

Meanwhile, B.C. has included New Polaris among its 35 priority major projects slated for expedited review.

In an emailed statement, the Environmental Assessment Office said New Polaris is on the list because of its “potential to make meaningful contributions to B.C.’s long-term economic growth” along with the other projects chosen.

“No project will be expedited at the expense of protecting the environment and communities or meeting our consultation obligations, which remain at the core of the [Environmental Assessment Office]’s mandate,” it added.

The company intends to create hundreds of direct jobs annually and provide around $500 million in federal and provincial tax revenue during its operations.

But some observers remain concerned that the mine’s potential risks, from water contamination to habitat loss, aren’t worth the financial benefits.

Environmental concerns with New Polaris

The Taku River watershed is one of the largest intact river systems on the Pacific Coast of North America, and one of the few remaining places where Pacific salmon populations are booming, meaning New Polaris’s riverside mine and tailings ponds naturally come with high stakes.

The mine sits around the riverbend from the also-dormant Tulsequah Chief mine site, which was owned by another company, where contamination has been seeping into the watershed for over 50 years.

Canagold has worked to distinguish New Polaris from the tarnished legacy of its next-door neighbour. The company has signed a collaborative engagement consent agreement with the Taku River Tlingit First Nation, whose territory extends across the mine site and surrounding regions on the Canadian side of the border. According to the nation, the agreement means it will have the final say on whether the project goes ahead. The nation did not respond to The Narwhal’s request for comment.

The company has altered its plans in response to concerns raised in its engagement with the public and with the Taku River Tlinigit. It no longer plans to process gold on site using cyanide, which, if spilled, can poison fish and watersheds. It’s also planning to dry out its tailings to reduce the risk of impacts and limit barge trips mostly to the construction phase. The barge trips will only happen in the high-water months, spring and summer, to reduce the risks of running aground — a change that means more flights and higher costs.

With gold prices above US$2,500 per ounce — a price reached for the first time in 2024 — the “projected cash flow and economics are outstanding,” according to a quote from Kilofliski on Canagold’s website.

But the company’s application hints at potential challenges ahead: the historic underground mine is leaching some levels of arsenic and antimony into the surrounding watershed, and rocks in the company’s largest targeted gold deposit appear capable of leaching more of the same. According to a report prepared for the company and included in its application, the mine’s proposed tailings facilities appear to be located within the flood zone of the Tulsequah glacier, which sends a massive deluge of water and sediment into the river below at least yearly. However, Kilofliski said in an email to The Narwhal that its facilities are “in a location that is naturally protected from the floods.”

According to a map in Canagold’s application, it appears New Polaris plans to put an airstrip atop part of a wetland and salmon spawning ground known as Flannigan Slough, although Kilofliski says it is located beside it.

These and many other issues worry Jill Weitz, intergovernmental affairs manager for the Central Council of the Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska.

“It’s this incredible, critical habitat for spawning and rearing of salmon,” she says, adding that the council questions if the mine is feasible given its transport challenges, and worries that, if it goes ahead, the project could “create irreparable damage to the watershed.” 

“We’re just not willing to risk it,” she says. 

Located just 13 kilometres upstream from the U.S. border, New Polaris’s barges will spend most of their travel time in U.S. waters. And any water contamination from the mine could also make its way south, including across the traditional territory of the Douglas Indian Association, which extends across the reaches of the Taku River. In a submission to the environmental assessment process, the association said it “strongly opposes” the mine “due to fears that a mining accident and subsequent mining pollution could devastate our salmon stocks.”

This year, B.C. made a legal amendment functionally removing its requirements to consult U.S. tribes on transboundary projects by stripping their previous status in environmental assessment processes. 

In an email, the Environmental Assessment Office noted that it will still “fulfill its constitutional obligations to consult with U.S. Tribes when there is a credible assertion of Indigenous Rights in Canada, and the potential for these rights to be impacted by a proposed project undergoing assessment.”

It added that the ministry has “considered and incorporated” feedback submitted by some U.S. Tribes to New Polaris’s application process.

Still, for many southeast Alaskans who have submitted letters of opposition to the company’s environmental assessment process, New Polaris presents an untenable threat.

Kilofliski says New Polaris’s environmental assessment application proves otherwise. 

 “The conclusion is that there are no material negative effects on the environment,” he says, adding the company has proven it will not require water treatment post-closure.

These comments seem to be contradicted by some parts of New Polaris’s environmental assessment application, including one section that notes: “The primary negative residual effect of groundwater quality will occur during post-closure.” 

“This is experts talking about scientific stuff,” he says when asked why the application appeared to have included a different analysis than his own. When asked again about incongruities between his comments and the application in a follow-up email, Kilofliski wrote that the application does identify a risk of metal leaching. “If anything I said informally differs from the application, please treat the application as correct.”

The Taku River watershed

From space, the Taku and its tributary, the Tulsequah, look like winding ribbons coloured steely grey and cotton-candy-blue — a product of the steady stream of silt and minerals delivered by the churn of glaciers over the mountaintops above. 

Their combined watershed forms a mecca for Pacific salmon that return to its waters each year. “I don’t know if there’s any place like it in western North America in terms of being a salmon stronghold and being so intact,” Jonathan Moore, an aquatic ecologist and lead at Simon Fraser University’s Salmon Watersheds Lab, says. Though the majority of B.C.’s salmon stocks are declining, the fate of salmon in the Taku watershed is looking up. Moore and his colleagues have mapped out salmon’s likely escape route as watersheds warm down south, and they predict they’ll seek refuge in the Taku’s glacial waters. 

But despite its remoteness, the region is no stranger to industry. First staked in the early 1900s, what’s now the New Polaris site was mined for gold between 1937 and 1951. It shut down after a departing barge sank in the midst of a storm. That year, the Tulsequah Chief mine opened up across the river, building a temporary bridge to carry its ore to New Polaris’s mills. After Tulsequah shut down just six years later, the New Polaris site sat dormant for decades.

Canagold’s predecessor, Canarc Resources Corp., acquired the property in 1988, and the company slowly dabbled in exploration work until 2022. That’s when its former founder and chair was ousted in a a vote led by a Swiss-based investment company, Sun Valley Investments, which is now the company’s largest shareholder. Kilofliski, Canagold’s CEO between 2014 and 2018, was reappointed and soon announced the company’s intentions in a press release.

“The time has come to take New Polaris across the finish line,” he said, adding that with the company’s “refocused ownership,” its board would expedite the project “to reward our company’s shareholders.”

A history of water concerns

Next door to New Polaris, the Tulsequah Chief mine continues to leach orange-crush-tinged effluent into the river downstream. Its decades-long pollution has galvanized a bipartisan uprising of Southeast Alaskans concerned B.C.’s government could allow another Tulsequah Chief to occur. 

In a January interview with the Alaska Beacon, Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski said B.C.’s efforts to clean up pollution at Tulsequah Chief had been “a complete failure.”

“They know that for projects going forward, they’re kind of stained by the operation there,” she added. 

Kilofliski says such conflations are misguided. “They associate our project with the other project, the Tulsequah Chief,” he says. “In our rocks, we do not have the potential for acid drainage like you see on the other side.”

Despite their close proximity, New Polaris and the Tulsequah Chief come from distinct types of ore deposits — Tulsequah Chief’s ocean-formed sulphide rocks are more readily associated with acid mine drainage, whereas New Polaris’s rocks are generally not.

That may have exceptions: a recent report commissioned by the company has noted some rocks contain potentially acid-generating properties, potentially including some of the historic waste carried over from the Tulsequah Chief mine, though some tests are still ongoing.

And even without the ingredients to leach acid, some rocks contain metals that can escape into waterbodies anyway. Heavy metals arsenic and antimony are frequent culprits of this kind of non-acidic leaching, and New Polaris’s targeted rocks have lots of both.

According to a previous report commissioned by the company and cited in its environmental assessment application, 15 samples from the mineral vein New Polaris plans to target had “high potential” to leach metals, particularly arsenic and antimony, due to the types of rocks present.

Non-acidic leaching has caused damage in B.C. before: New Polaris’s deposits are similar to those of the Bralorne gold mine near Lillooet, where seepage from the flooded mine includes levels of arsenic that far exceed Canadian effluent regulations.

In an email to The Narwhal, Kilofliski said: “I do not know the particulars of the Bralorne gold mine seepage issues but it is probable, based on the nature of these kinds of geological deposits, that the concerns would be analogous.” He elaborated, adding New Polaris is “a modern mine” which will leverage new science and technology for water management and ecological health.

“At Canagold we are focused on learning from the lessons of the past and building a modern mining project that provides demonstrable benefits to the Taku River Tlingit First Nation, the region and Canada’s economy,” he added. 

To help avoid the risk of metal leaching, the company plans to export a partially processed product called gold concentrate, which can include impurities like arsenic and antimony that would get smelted out elsewhere. 

“We take the antimony, we take the sulphur, we take the arsenic,” he told The Narwhal. “We recover 90-plus per cent of those metals into the concentrate.”

The remaining ten-or-so per cent of the metals and other materials leftover would be thickened and deposited into a tailings pond with an impermeable covering on top, Kilofliski says, helping to keep it isolated from the environment. During the operational phase, the mine plans to run a water treatment system, but Kilofliski tells The Narwhal he is confident the mine’s concentrate-extraction approach will avoid the need for long-term water treatment.

“We have demonstrated in the environmental assessment that no water treatment is required post-closure,” he says.

In a follow-up email, Kilofliski added the application “assesses a range of scenarios, including conservative cases where water treatment after closure could be needed.” If it is, “Canagold would be responsible for providing it until we are able to demonstrate that passive treatment (that is without active/chemical water treatment technologies) is able to manage the long-term water quality requirements,” he added.

New Polaris’s environmental assessment application suggests metal leaching may not be easily contained: historic contamination has already travelled below the site in a large plume of metals that is projected to grow if New Polaris proceeds. Leaching can also escape from the mine shaft, as it has from the historic mine portal at New Polaris. Groundwater seeping from the existing mine site contains arsenic and antimony above B.C.’s water quality guidelines, and is flowing directly into the salmon-bearing Whitewater Creek, according to the application, which added seepage may grow post-closure. Recent samples from the mine’s targeted deposits and waste rock reflected an extremely high concentration of arsenic and antimony — achieving the highest possible level on a 6-point scale for mineral concentration. 

This leaching risk is cited in parts of New Polaris’s environmental assessment application as a reason that water treatment may be required post-closure. 

In his email to The Narwhal, Kilofliski said “water was tested as part of mine dewatering programs for effects to fish, and the water was not determined to be acutely toxic, despite high levels of arsenic.”

What’s next for New Polaris?

September marks a major milestone in Canagold’s decades-long pursuit to mine New Polaris. By the end of the month, the company will receive its final guidance from the province’s environmental assessment office on how it could strengthen a revised application, which, once submitted, will be final. In meeting notes discussing the company’s application, B.C.’s environmental assessment office noted “significant gaps” in the company’s application, including “a notable lack of groundwater information,” a lack of analysis about the potential impacts of glacial floods and missing information about the site’s potential to leach metals. The Ministry of Environment noted the company’s hydrological information appeared to reflect “draft documents rather than final product.”

The office has informed Canagold that submitting another application “where significant issues remain unresolved” would “lead to a high level of uncertainty on the potential effects of the project.” 

Kilofliski suggests these kinds of issues are standard for projects like this. “They are very normal,” he says, adding that Canagold plans to fill any remaining gaps before it submits its final application, adding in a later email that the company has “continued to collect samples since the submission of the application, and we are updating our water modelling.”

But some uncertainties could remain during the assessment process by design: under B.C.’s mining laws, key aspects of New Polaris’s plans, including how it plans to manage leaching on site, how it will treat water and how it plans to deal with contaminants post-closure, would be determined in the permitting stage after the company receives its environmental assessment. 

Through the assessment and later permitting stages, Kilofliski remains confident that Canagold will establish its case. “We have to demonstrate,” he says, “because our word doesn’t mean anything.” 

“We have to prove, we have to show, and we have to test. … This is how it’s done.”

Updated on Sept. 18, 2026, at 8:52 a.m. PT: This story has been updated with Jill Weitz’s current professional title of intergovernmental affairs manager for the Central Council of the Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, as it has changed since the story was written.

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.

When the heat becomes unbearable inside Nicole Darlaston’s Brampton apartment, her son would get into the shower — and stay there.

“He would spend hours in there just trying to be comfortable,” Darlaston says.

Darlaston has lived for about 14 years in a high-rise near Bramalea City Centre. The building has central cooling, she says, but it is often turned on late in the season and does little to make her apartment comfortable. On a good day, her unit might stay around 23 C. More often, she says, it reaches 28 C. She has recorded temperatures as high as 35 C, with high humidity.

Darlaston and her son both have asthma. She says the heat has aggravated their symptoms and reshaped their summers. She saves vacation time so she can leave the apartment during the hottest weeks, sometimes staying with family in northern Ontario.

Cooking adds more heat. Cleaning becomes exhausting. Even opening a window offers little relief when the building has been warming for days, she says.

“It just continues to build and build and build.”

Her son is 20 now, but Darlaston says he has been dealing with the heat since he was about six. And it didn’t always end when he left home.

“He had that problem in his schools as well,” she says.

For children who live and learn in hot buildings, there can be little opportunity for their bodies to cool down. Researchers have warned the effects can accumulate when children spend a hot day at school only to return to a home without adequate cooling.

As students return to classrooms across Peel Region this month and summer weather remains longer than it has in previous years, that raises a basic question: where does a child go when neither school nor home offers reliable relief from the heat?

Inside Peel’s overheated classrooms

Jill Promoli has seen that problem as both a parent and a Peel District School Board trustee representing wards six and 11 in Mississauga, which includes Mavis-Erindale, Creditview, Erindale, Meadowvale Village and Streetsville.

On hot days, she says, some of the classrooms she visits become unbearable, including her son’s.

One of those visits was to her son’s elementary-school portable classroom in Mississauga, which became too hot to use in May 2025, she says. Students from two portables were moved into the school library, the same room meant to serve as a cooling station for everyone else.

“When you are using the cooling station for two classrooms, then that cooling station becomes unavailable for the rest of the school. But if the rest of the school is also hot, then there’s no more space available to give kids that break either,” Promoli says.

Then came two days of extreme heat in June 2025. Promoli says she brought a thermometer with her as she visited the schools she represents, asking principals to show her their hottest classrooms.

“Some of the classrooms were getting up to 39 C, and that’s not manageable,” she says.

Her son still had to attend school for his Grade 5 graduation practice. When Promoli arrived to pick him up, the blinds were closed and the lights were off.

“It was still so hot in the cooling centre that the kids were literally lying on the floor with the lights off, and they were just doing nothing because it was so hot in there. This is not functional,” she says.

Promoli says she heard from other families whose children left school early, stayed home the following day or sought medical care after feeling sick during the heat.

Peel District School Board did not provide the requested breakdown of how many schools or classrooms are air conditioned, or respond to detailed questions from The Narwhal. On its website, the board says every school has a designated cooling station, while some older buildings do not have air conditioning at all. Hot weather measures can include opening windows and doors, using fans, closing blinds, turning off lights and other heat-producing equipment, rotating students and staff through cooler areas and reducing strenuous or outdoor activities.

Heat isn’t only uncomfortable

Children are among the people Peel Public Health considers particularly vulnerable to extreme heat.

Alexa Caturay, the region’s medical officer of health, says young bodies do not regulate temperature in the same way adult bodies do. Chronic respiratory and heart conditions can make it harder to cope with heat as well.

As exposure increases, what begins as discomfort and thirst can progress to dehydration, faintness, a rapid heartbeat and difficulty breathing. In more serious cases, people can become dehydrated enough to require hospital treatment, Caturay says.

Health Canada similarly warns that children with asthma, heart or kidney problems, disabilities, developmental disorders or who take certain medications can face greater risks in extreme heat. Warning signs can include dizziness, nausea, headache, changes in behaviour, rapid breathing or heartbeat and extreme thirst. Confusion, unconsciousness or a high body temperature accompanied by a loss of sweating can signal heat stroke — a medical emergency.

The effect can show up in the classroom in many ways.

A recent U.S. report from a network of school-climate researchers convened with the American Psychological Association found younger children acclimatize to heat more slowly and may be less able to recognize when they need water or should reduce physical activity. It also points to evidence connecting poorly cooled and ventilated schools with increased absences and poorer learning outcomes.

Studies cited in that report found classroom temperatures around 20 C to 23 C were associated with better cognitive performance, while hotter conditions reduced the speed and accuracy of cognitive tasks. Other research found students performed worse on standardized tests on hotter days, with air conditioning reducing some of that effect.

The Peel school board’s plan for heat is tied up in Ontario’s Education Ministry

What Promoli saw that June in her son’s classroom eventually pushed her to take the issue to the Peel District School Board.

Her original motion asked the board to work with Peel Public Health to establish an upper temperature threshold for extreme heat days. It pointed to the board’s existing response to extreme cold and noted that many classrooms in the Peel region lacked air conditioning or other ways to substantially lower the temperature.

Promoli says the goal was to know when a hot classroom crossed from uncomfortable to unsafe.

“If we are hitting a point where it’s no longer safe to be operating, we have to know what those numbers look like and what we should be doing to properly meet the needs of our staff and students,” she says.

In August 2025, they passed an amended motion directing the Peel District School Board to work with Peel Public Health on a plan for extreme heat days, but without the proposed temperature threshold. In general, the health unit’s role is to issue heat alerts to municipalities, hospitals, schools and school boards, which can then activate their own response plans.

Promoli says she has not been aware of updates on that work since the Ministry of Education took control of the board earlier this year. The Ontario ministries of Education and Health did not respond to requests for comment.

Trying to stay cool at home

Tanya Burkart hears the same dilemma repeatedly from renters.

Burkart, chair of the Brampton Centre chapter of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), says members report hot apartments, older inefficient buildings and landlords charging additional fees for air conditioning.

She pointed, in particular, to older rental buildings and says tenants can face another problem when upgrades finally happen: landlords may seek above-guideline rent increases to recover the cost of major work.

The association’s “beat the heat” campaign is pushing municipalities to require landlords to keep rental buildings at no more than 26 C and to help low-income tenants obtain air conditioners. It has also called for cooling rooms inside buildings, free transit to cooling locations on extreme heat days and more transparent tracking of heat-related illness.

At the provincial level, the group wants greater support for electricity costs and broader access to air conditioning.

Without those supports, Burkart says some renters are “being forced to either choose between air conditioning or paying the rent or putting food on the table.”

Yet, heat is already considered one of the top five climate-related health hazards affecting Peel residents, according to the region. The Public Health Agency of Canada says the largely urban region is particularly vulnerable to the urban heat island effect, with that risk shaped by factors such as income, housing, age and outdoor work.

Income can shape how much choice a family has when temperatures climb.

The U.S. schools report specifically notes lower-income families face extra hurdles including lacking air conditioning, nearby cooling spaces or flexible schedules that allow children to avoid the hottest parts of the day.

In Peel, the help available depends partly on where someone lives and what kind of housing they are in.

Unlike Toronto, which provides portable air conditioners to low-income pregnant residents and families with infants, the Peel Region does not provide direct financial assistance to buy air conditioners.

Peel Housing Corporation, which has 75 sites, operates cooling rooms during extreme heat in buildings that do not have central air conditioning and provides tenants with heat-safety information.

The City of Brampton says it has no current plan to provide free air conditioners to low-income residents either. During heat events, it directs residents toward public facilities such as its nine library branches and 27 community centres as well as its pools and splash pads.

In Mississauga, about 57 per cent of low-income children live in areas where additional investment in green space would improve equity, according to Canadian Urban Environmental Health Research Consortium data cited in a 2025 Canadian Environmental Law Association report.

At the July 29 council meeting, Mississauga council approved a motion brought forward by Ward 7 Coun. Dipika Damerla, which asked staff to look at more ways to protect residents of purpose-built rental apartments during hot weather. 

Mississauga council has directed staff to review its current adequate temperature by-law and consider stronger cooling protections for renters, including access to cooling devices, building retrofits and other heat-mitigation measures. Staff are also looking at requiring apartment buildings to provide accessible common cooling spaces kept at or below 26 C, with recommendations expected before next summer.

Currently, the city’s by-law requires landlords who provide air conditioning to maintain indoor temperatures at or below 26 C but buildings without air conditioning are not subject to a maximum indoor temperature requirement.

“We have to recognize that climate patterns have changed in southern GTA at least, and our summers are hotter than ever before. Traditionally, we’ve built our homes and our condos and our apartment buildings around cold weather, because hot weather was rare and that was reasonable,” Damerla says. 

“But I think it’s changed now, and so it’s time for us to look at what are the other cooling options that we can provide for in purpose-built rentals.”

When does hot become too hot in schools?

Ontario does not currently set a maximum indoor temperature for schools.

The Education Act does require principals to pay attention to the “health and comfort” of students, including school temperature and ventilation. But without a maximum standard or equipment capable of cooling a building, advocates argue there is little clarity about when a classroom has become too hot to safely use.

The shortage of broader cooling infrastructure is not small. Ontario’s school repair backlog was estimated at $16.8 billion in 2022, even as the province committed billions toward school construction, repair and renewal.

The Canadian Environmental Law Association has recommended a 26 C maximum temperature for schools, more mechanical cooling and changes to the building code so new schools and major retrofits are designed with hotter conditions in mind. The group says 26 C should be treated as a starting point and revisited as more research emerges, specifically about children’s heat exposure.

There may be relief on the horizon. Ontario’s NDP put forward Bill 123, the Fighting Extreme Heat in Schools Act, which received first reading on May 26, 2026, and was ordered for second reading. If passed, it would require school buildings and school buses to remain at or below 26 C while students and workers are present.

School boards would also have to create annual heat-mitigation strategies and extreme-temperature emergency plans. The education minister would review those plans for gaps and inequities at least once every three years. Ontario’s legislature will return in late October and will likely continue debating this bill.

Rajpreet Sahota is a community and policy reporting fellow. Her position is funded in part by the Canadian Race Relations Foundation. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, the foundation has no editorial input.

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When the temperature climbs in Toronto’s Oakwood Village neighbourhood, the bottom floor of a former school-turned-community-centre becomes a hive of activity.

Split between a child care centre and community space, it’s where people gather to play music, garden, eat together or simply sit and talk. That includes members of the Oakwood Vaughan Community Organization, which is made up of residents who live in the area, many of whom are seniors, who invited The Narwhal to sit down with them for a gathering in late August.

The seniors describe building their days around the temperature. Some avoid cooking full meals and use toaster ovens instead. They wear cotton and linen, even switching their bedsheets to lighter fabrics. They seek out areas with more trees, stay indoors on particularly hot days and sometimes get on the subway simply because it is air conditioned.

Sharon Wyatt doesn’t have air conditioning in her two-storey house. During extended stretches of heat, the upper floor can become almost unusable.

“It’s like an Easy Bake Oven in very, very hot extended periods,” she says.

Instead, Wyatt moves downstairs and uses fans. 

Barbara Geiger has developed an even more precise routine: “I look at my weather app at least 20 times a day in the summer,” she says.

She checks a digital thermometer inside her bungalow nearly as often, deciding when to open the windows and when to close them before the outdoor temperature rises. When several hot days pile up and the house stops cooling overnight, she heads to the basement, where she has a guest bedroom and craft room. The temperature dictates where she sleeps, where she works and where she spends her day.

But not everyone has another floor to retreat to.

Angelo, another member of the group who asked to be identified only by his first name, says many people in the area live in apartments. The City of Toronto is working on a bylaw to limit maximum indoor temperatures in rentals, but it’s still a ways away from being enacted. 

And the scale of the problem goes well beyond a handful of buildings. City staff estimate about 54 per cent of private-market rental units and 67 per cent of non-market rental units in Toronto do not have landlord-provided air conditioning.

Angelo recalled one member whose building posted a notice saying residents who wanted air conditioning would have to pay an additional $400 a year. After residents contacted their local councillor, he says, the amount dropped to $200.

The tenant still didn’t install one. Angelo says they feared doing anything that could affect their original lease. “It’s not just the cost of the air conditioning, it’s the fear about being unhoused,” he says.

For older adults without a cool place to retreat to, the consequences can go far beyond discomfort — with extreme weather events across the country showing us just how far.

A deadly warning from B.C.

In June 2021, British Columbia showed how deadly the combination of age, health, isolation and inadequate cooling can become. Over one week, a heat dome settled over the Pacific Northwest, pushing temperatures above 40 C in many parts of the province.

B.C.’s chief coroner later identified 619 heat-related deaths. Ninety-eight per cent occurred indoors. Sixty-seven per cent of those who died were 70 or older, while more than half lived alone.

The deaths demonstrated something experts and advocates in Toronto are now trying to prepare for: the danger isn’t determined by the temperature outside alone, but by what happens when someone closes their front door.

And Toronto is expected to face more dangerously hot days.

The city projects the number of days each year with temperatures above 30 C could rise from an average of 10 days between 1971 and 2000 to between 36 and 44 days by the 2050s. By the 2080s, Toronto could experience between 46 and 78 days above 30 C annually, depending on future greenhouse gas emissions.

Kimber-lee Wargalla, the centre’s community outreach coordinator, says another problem in Ontario is knowing the full toll extreme heat is currently taking. The Advocacy Centre for the Elderly has pushed for better tracking of heat-related deaths.

“Without those numbers, how do you prove how big the issue is, other than the anecdotal conversations with the people who are suffering,” Wargalla says. 

Extreme heat can quickly move from uncomfortable to dangerous for an older adult, Stephanie Hatzifilalithis, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, says. Part of the reason is physiological.

As people age, the body’s ability to regulate its internal temperature can decline, Hatzifilalithis, whose work focuses on extreme heat’s impact on older adults, says. People may not sweat as effectively, blood flow to the skin can change and the body’s ability to recognize thirst and respond to heat may become weaker, she explains.

That means the same temperature can put greater strain on an older body than a younger one, causing dehydration, dizziness, fainting and heat stroke, Hatzifilalithis says. It can also worsen existing cardiovascular, respiratory and kidney problems.

A Toronto community thinking about heat

Oakwood Village sits just south of Eglinton Avenue West in midtown Toronto, next to Little Jamaica. It is a culturally diverse neighbourhood anchored by residential streets, independent businesses and community organizations that have long helped shape daily life in the area.

The city is now studying how the broader Little Jamaica and Oakwood-Vaughan area should grow. Residents consulted as part of the city’s draft planning framework have asked for more trees, public benches and seating, additional green space, greener schoolyards and better community access to school buildings outside school hours.

Eglinton Avenue West, a busy commercial corridor, runs through the Oakwood-Vaughan and Little Jamaica area. The street is lined with shops, restaurants and services, where long stretches of pavement and relatively sparse tree cover leave little relief from the heat. The Canadian Urban Environmental Health Research Consortium’s data shows trees cover less than one-fifth of the total area.

This creates what is known as the urban heat island effect.

For the seniors at Vaughan Road Academy, an air-conditioned school building, a patch of shade or a tree-lined street aren’t simply neighbourhood amenities. They can become part of an improved cooling network.

‘They’re stuck in these small boxes cooking’

For the Advocacy Centre for the Elderly, a legal clinic working with seniors in particular, those stories point to a much larger problem.

Wargalla says the people most likely to fall through the cracks include low-income seniors, newcomers living alone, renters, people in subsidized or seniors housing and those without family or community members checking in on them.

The Advocacy Centre for the Elderly was one of the groups pushing for a maximum indoor temperature standard that would require landlords to provide cooling when temperatures reach 26 C or higher. 

While the City of Toronto’s bylaw is at least a year away, the Ontario government hasn’t committed to introducing one at all. The Ontario Ministry for Seniors and Accessibility did not respond to requests for comment by publication time.

Wargalla says people with mobility limitations or chronic health conditions may not be able to walk to a cooling space in extreme temperatures. “It makes people suffer in silence, and unfortunately, with extreme heat, the suffering in silence can mean death,” Wargalla says. “They’re stuck in these small boxes, cooking.”

Even someone who can access a cooling space eventually has to leave because they aren’t open 24 hours a day.

“Cooling rooms are not a substitute for safe housing,” Wargalla says. “People need cooling in their own homes, and vulnerable seniors cannot spend entire heat waves sitting in common areas or on public transit or at the library.”

Zamani Ra, executive director of CEED Canada, works on climate issues in social housing communities and sees some of those challenges where she works. For residents on higher floors, coming downstairs can itself be cumbersome. And when they arrive, she says, there may be little to do other than sit in the room. Often, the coolest area is the lobby, she says, but there is limited space for people to gather. So residents improvise.

“Some people actually get on the bus and go to the mall,” Ra says. Others go grocery shopping or visit family members with air conditioning. “But for the most part, people stay in place,” she says.

Ra says programs also need to recognize that receiving an air conditioner may not be enough. Some older adults may not be comfortable navigating online applications. Some don’t have family members who can help install or replace a unit. Even the size and type of windows in an apartment can determine what cooling equipment is usable. She says governments should consider providing quality air conditioners, professional installation and potentially vouchers that allow seniors or their families to choose a unit appropriate for their home.

The consequences of failing to address extreme heat have already been seen elsewhere in Canada.

“This is not a marginal problem,” Wargalla says. “This is a housing system problem.”

When heat becomes an emergency — financial and otherwise

Sarah Sanford, a researcher at the Wellesley Institute, recently led a study examining provincial emergency benefits in Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta and Quebec.

Residents eligible for the Ontario Works or Ontario Disability Support Program can receive up to $400 every four years to purchase a cooling device. Other programs in the province can provide electricity credits, emergency help with utility arrears or energy-saving upgrades for qualifying households.

But the study found emergency benefit programs were often fragmented, narrowly targeted or difficult to access. 

“Staying safe can mean paying for air conditioning. It can mean paying for higher electricity bills, transportation to a cool place, food, medical expenses and then any other costs that might be associated with an unanticipated climate-related emergency,” Sanford says. “A senior who’s living on a low income might have to make really difficult choices about whether or not they cool their space or if they’re able to afford to purchase other necessities.”

The City of Toronto has started expanding its response, piloting an Air Conditioner Assistance Program in 2025. The city distributed close to 500 free portable units to low-income seniors with health-related cooling needs living in multi-unit residential buildings.

In 2026, the program expanded to approximately 1,500 portable air conditioners and broadened eligibility to include pregnant people and families with infants, while continuing to serve eligible seniors.

Council voted in May this year to make the program permanent, increasing funding from $200,000 in 2025 to $1 million to expand the program as part of the 2026 budget. This funding covers all costs for the program including program administration, delivery and installation.

Another new effort in west Toronto is trying to identify vulnerable residents before a heat emergency happens.

The West Toronto Ontario Health Team, a network of 44 health and social service agencies, launched a voluntary heat wave registry this summer. Health team director Kashtin Fitzsimons says the idea traces back to the wildfire season of 2023. 

“We realized that we didn’t have a coordinated response as a health system for how to respond to wildfire smoke,” Fitzsimons says. “The more we thought about it, we didn’t have much of one on the topic of extreme heat either.”

That fall, the health team began asking people across west Toronto what the health system could do to help communities respond to climate change. Fitzsimons says Paris, France, helped inspire the registry through a similar, voluntary system that contacts residents during periods of extreme heat and other dangerous weather. 

In west Toronto, people who register by themselves, or through a community group or primary care provider, receive a call from a volunteer when the city issues an extreme heat or air quality warning. Volunteers ask how they are doing, provide information about nearby cooling locations, answer heat safety questions and can connect people with health services. There are no restrictions on who can register, though organizations serving older adults, people living with chronic illness and others more vulnerable to extreme heat are encouraged to share the service.

Because the registry launched in 2026, full data on its impact has not yet been analyzed, but Fitzsimons says the calls are having a great impact and would like to see the approach grow beyond individual neighbourhood programs.

“The dream is to see a coordinated city response where no matter where you live in the city, you know what you can do,” he says. 

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The smell of decomposing garbage hits before the building comes into view — a sour, earthy odour that stings your teeth. Hidden by a curving driveway, large bright green trees and a set of lawn chairs, the entrance almost makes you forget that beyond it lies a waste-burning facility that is set to become one of North America’s largest incinerators.

The Emerald Energy from Waste incinerator sits on roughly six hectares of industrial land, tucked between Bramalea Road and Highway 407 in Brampton, Ont. Behind its rusting metal walls and towering smokestacks, transport trucks arrive throughout the day carrying loads of non-hazardous waste from across Ontario. Inside, garbage is unloaded, sorted and fed into combustion units, where the waste is burned to generate electricity for neighbouring businesses and homes.

The facility began operating in spring 1992, on former agricultural land that had become home to a rapidly developing industrial sector. Today, warehouses, manufacturing plants and trucking dominate the area immediately around the incinerator. But beyond this industrial zone are neighbourhoods that have expanded alongside one of Canada’s fastest-growing cities. Just a few kilometres southwest of the plant, cricket and soccer matches fill Emancipation Park on summer evenings. Minutes away, homes, recreation centres and places of worship serve a population transformed by decades of immigration, particularly from South Asia. What was once a facility close to the edge of Brampton now sits near communities where tens of thousands of people live, work and raise families.

Last year, the province approved the Environmental Assessment Screening Report which clears the path to a major expansion of the Emerald incinerator. The facility would process up to 900,000 tonnes of waste annually — roughly six-fold what it’s processing today, bringing even more garbage from various Ontario municipalities to Brampton. The Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks has not responded to The Local’s request for comment.

Emerald Energy from Waste argues that the expansion is needed to address Ontario’s looming landfill capacity crisis. According to Waste to Resource Ontario, an environmental services association, Ontario generated approximately 16.88 million tonnes of waste in 2024, with 12.75 million tonnes disposed in landfills; the province is projected to run out of landfill space by 2037.

“Ontario has a crisis in that we don’t have enough waste management capacity infrastructure in the province,” Joe Lyng, president of Emerald Energy from Waste, says. An expansion in Brampton, he argues, is the answer to multiple problems — diverting more garbage from landfills while also increasing the incinerator’s energy recovery rate, creating more power for an energy-starved province.

While that argument may be convincing for the province, locals feel differently. The incinerator expansion — which Emerald anticipates will begin in 2027 — has become one of Brampton’s most contentious environmental issues. Many residents question the province’s approval process. They worry about the potential health effects on nearby communities. And they wonder if anyone is looking out for the good of the people of Brampton, a city of racialized immigrants at the edge of Canada’s biggest metropolis.

“It’s a sacrifice zone,” Linda Gasser, co-founder of the advocacy group Zero Waste 4 Zero Burning, says. That’s the term for an area in which low-income and minority groups shoulder the environmental harms of clustered polluting industrial sites. For locals, the placement of the largest incinerator in Canada right in their community sends a message: that somewhere like Brampton won’t, or can’t, object to housing the region’s industry and waste. “One more polluting facility, what’s the big deal, right?” Gasser says. It’s a mindset that some residents are committed to fighting.

Incinerator’s English-only consultations create barriers in largely Punjabi-speaking neighbourhoods

There’s a misconception that Bramptonians don’t care about the environment. Once proudly known as The Flower City, Brampton is now grappling with a new online reputation as a “garbage city.” It’s a stereotype that has frustrated many residents — including those working to prove the opposite.

Born and raised in Brampton, Rajbalinder Ghatoura is an environmental activist dedicated to improving life in his community. When he was 12 years old, Ghatoura won an international environmental photography competition for a photo of a Tim Horton’s cup seemingly dissolving into its surroundings. It sparked a lifelong commitment to protecting the environment. Today, at 25, that commitment still shapes his activism. Environmental problems, Ghatoura says, often become hardest to confront when people can’t see them, which he believes goes beyond roadside litter.

In 2023, Ghatoura co-founded Kudrat Di Rakhia, a community organization based in Brampton. They’re members of the Brampton Environmental Alliance, and focus on advocacy and education.

To reach the South Asian population in Brampton, Ghatoura works with local gurdwaras. Raising awareness about environmental sustainability, starting with places of worship, Kudrat Di Rakhia has engaged with the Sikh community to participate in initiatives like tree planting and city cleanups.

Communicating directly with Punjabi-speaking residents is one of Kudrat Di Rakhia’s greatest strengths. By bridging the language barrier, the organization is able to connect with a broader diaspora of Brampton’s South Asian community that can be overlooked in environmental advocacy efforts. According to the 2021 census, Punjabi is the second most spoken language after English in Brampton. “It’s important for this information to be shared with the population, the demographics, and to be shared in a language that they understand,” says Ghatoura.

He says this wasn’t the case with the incinerator expansion. In 2022, the company took out a half-page ad in the Brampton Guardian, an English–only newspaper, to inform the public of their proposed expansion project. Informing the public of an undertaking like the proposed expansion is required under the Environmental Assessment Act. But despite the surrounding area being home to many immigrants and residents whose first language is not English, no information was provided in Punjabi or any other language.

Lyng says he looked into the demographics in Brampton and found that approximately 95 to 97 per cent were English-speaking residents. (While census data shows that approximately 95 per cent of Brampton residents have “knowledge” of English, it’s the mother tongue for roughly 42 per cent of the population.)

“We’re not going to reach out to, you know, the two or three per cent. It’s at our discretion and we didn’t see that as something that was necessary,” Lyng says.

Ghatoura himself only came to know of the proposed expansion a year ago, reading about it online, after much of the screening process had already been completed.

What he learned alarmed him.

Company president says incinerator expansion is safe, but won’t commit to publicly sharing real-time emission data

Energy-from-waste facilities, like the one in Brampton, are incinerators that recover energy during combustion. Heat is used to generate steam, powering a turbine to produce electricity. Although incinerators reduce the volume of garbage, they don’t completely eliminate it. After the waste is burned, the ash that remains in the stacks is typically disposed of in a landfill.

Expansion at the proposed scale would typically require a full environmental assessment. Because Emerald Energy from Waste has been a long-term operation, however, the project went through a streamlined environmental screening process. Lyng says that the process they conducted included technical studies as well as public consultations such as open houses and public liaison meetings. “We went above and beyond,” Lyng says.

For many — including anti-incineration activists, health officials, the region of Peel and concerned residents like Ghatoura — these assurances aren’t nearly enough. They insist that the incinerator do an individual environmental assessment, which would enable a public review of emission data and determine risks to the environment and public health.

Brampton resident Stacey Wilson has noticed an unsettling odour in the air for more than two decades. “When it’s a nice day, and I step out the door to go for a walk, and the first thing I notice is the smell of burning tires or burning plastic, that’s really upsetting to me,” she says. She’s filed multiple reports with the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks.

Wilson’s worried about the increased traffic that will come with the expansion. According to the incinerator’s website, the facility is currently licensed to process 500 metric tonnes of garbage per day, which Lyng says is unloaded by 30 to 35 trucks. The expanded incinerator, the website says, will process 2,500 tonnes a day, roughly five times the current amount. This could mean many more vehicles. But Wilson’s biggest concern is the uncertainty about what pollutants are being released: “How do we know what we’re breathing in now?” If there are any damaging health effects, she says, they won’t become apparent until years from now.

Lyng says that the incinerator’s emissions are carefully monitored. The facility’s annual stack tests, which measure air quality directly from the its exhaust stacks, show that every pollutant tested by the company remained within Ontario’s regulatory limits between 2020 to 2025. However, known pollutants, such as nitrogen oxide, sulphur dioxide and hydrogen chloride, have at times spiked to the edge of allowable limits.

“We have real-time emission monitoring,” Lyng says, referring to the meters that continuously monitor certain pollutants. If there are any issues with operations or emissions, they report it to the ministry and follow up with an action report.

Linda Gasser, of Zero Waste 4 Zero Burning, and Wendy Bracken, of the Durham Environment Watch, say that these monitoring efforts aren’t enough. Bracken says that while incinerator operators emphasize their continuous monitoring — with the implication being that if something is wrong they can shut things down — many pollutants are in fact only tested once a year.

Lyng confirms that the Emerald incinerator does not have a meter to continuously monitor all pollutants; instead, the facility conducts annual testing to measure their levels. He says the expansion will include a meter to conduct continuous monitoring for sulphur dioxide, unlike the current facility.

Since the emissions are self-monitored, the results cannot be viewed by residents remotely. Opponents of the incinerator contrast that with the monitoring done at the Durham York Energy Centre, an incinerator on the other side of the GTA owned by the Regions of Durham and York. There, emissions data is made public, through a real-time portal on their website. In addition to their continuous monitoring, the Durham York Energy Centre undergoes stack testing twice a year.

Lyng says that Emerald will not be publishing its emissions data online. “The public can come in and see the data at the plant,” Lyng says. “We can come and bring you up to the control room, show you this is what we do. It’s not some mystical process.”

It’s difficult to imagine members of the public taking Lyng up on his offer. The control room sits on the second floor of the facility, accessible by a narrow metal staircase. Operating data is displayed across multiple monitors running the facility’s original 1992 control system. During a recent tour, the room’s temperature exceeded 40 C.

Incinerator’s neighbourhood is populated by vulnerable communities, health unit says

Beyond data from the incinerator’s stacks, opponents of the expansion have another concern: how burning five times the waste it does today will affect a community that already grapples with pollution.

Last spring, Peel Public Health officials submitted a report to the regional council outlining their concerns about the incinerator project. Additional emissions from the expansion, they wrote, “results in an overall increase in cumulative exposure to air pollutants and can result in an increased risk of negative health effects to the surrounding community.”

The health unit found that some pollutants already exceed provincial and federal air quality limits, even before the expansion. In an email to The Local, Peel Public Health said they’d found that local background levels of benzo(a)pyrene — a toxic chemical that’s often the result of incomplete combustion of organic material — currently exceeds the air quality limits for both short and long-term exposures. Modeling under worst-case emission conditions, the health unit found that with the expansion, benzo(a)pyrene and nitrogen dioxide are estimated to exceed the short-term exposure limits set by the province by 115 per cent.

The proposed expansion is also predicated on collecting enough waste to generate profitable energy from incineration. That’s an approach that Peel Public Health’s report says is “counter to the promotion and sustainability of robust circular economy markets, which are crucial for minimizing waste, pollution and resource consumption.”

To fully understand the emissions and their impact on air quality in the surrounding community, Peel Public Health told The Local they need to know more about the pollution control technology at the expanded facility — information that will come in the next step of the approval process. Emerald Energy from Waste is required to include this information in their Environmental Compliance Approval application to the Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks.

What’s clear is that the expanded incinerator will be surrounded by existing vulnerable communities. Peel Region health status data shows that roughly 70 per cent of the people in the data zone containing the incinerator are racialized individuals. According to the Peel Public Health report, compared to Peel as a whole, residents in the communities living closest to the facility have more one-parent families, and a higher percentage of residents who didn’t complete high-school and are unemployed. They also have “higher rates of certain health conditions … that may be worsened by exposure to increased air pollution.”

Peel Public Health noted in its report that it hasn’t heard directly from residents about the proposed expansion. But the lack of inquiry doesn’t necessarily mean a lack of concern. The socio-economic realities flagged in the report are the very same ones that make it unlikely for community members to step forward. In order to oppose the expansion, residents first need to know about it.

Municipal councillors call for more scrutiny of incinerator proposal

For long-time Brampton resident Susan Colbert Wright, the fight over the incinerator is about more than the impact of a single industrial project. She raises larger questions about who gets to shape the future of Brampton and who bears the costs of development decisions. As plans move ahead to create Canada’s largest waste incinerator, Wright keeps returning to the most basic question: “How is more pollution okay?”

Wright has lived in Brampton since the 1960s. She’s witnessed Brampton become Canada’s fastest growing, multicultural municipality — one she and her family call home. She’s also watched Brampton become home to a disproportionate share of the region’s industrial footprint, with power plants, warehouses and trucking hubs, among other facilities that are reshaping the city’s environmental future.

One of the major barriers to public engagement, as Wright sees it, is a lack of easily accessible information, with reports and correspondence scattered across government websites. To address this gap, she’s building a website that will consolidate all records and resources. “It’s the one place where you can go to get the history, the information, rather than having to search all over the place,” Wright says.

Her primary goal is for the website to act as a conduit between residents and elected officials, making it easier for concerned residents to directly email MPs, submit public feedback and participate in opposition action.

Although Emerald aimed to start construction this fall, Lyng told The Local that because they haven’t finalized the design of the project, they won’t be able to begin until spring or summer of 2027. In the meantime, the planned expansion has become a political issue for local councillors.

Wards nine and 10 councillor Gurpartap Singh Toor, who sits on Brampton’s Environment Advisory Committee, says he received an influx of calls after provincial approval was announced.

Those calls, Toor says, are almost entirely from people strongly opposing the incinerator expansion and voicing their concerns for public health. “Our communities here in the City of Brampton are heavily racialized communities that are typically more prone to heart and lung diseases,” Toor says. “A lot of them live in very close proximity to where this project is getting built, and those are the communities that will face the more immediate effect.”

In a recent regional council meeting, wards seven and eight councillor Pat Fortini and councillor Toor passed a motion to submit new technological research presented by a local resident to MPs, to emphasize that there needs to be further environmental compliance ahead of the construction of the expansion.

“I definitely don’t want the Region of Peel or the City of Brampton to be the garbage burning capital of Canada,” Toor said during that meeting. He requested the region submit the motion to both the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks and Health in order to push them to review the expansion proposal once again.

‘This is our home’: Bamptonians love their city, and say they’ll fight to keep it clean and healthy

As the incinerator expansion moves forward, Ghatoura is still dedicating himself to making sure his community isn’t seen as a “sacrifice zone.”

This April, he says his organization brought their message directly to residents, setting up booths at Earth Month and Sikh Heritage Month events across the city, to lead discussions about various environmental issues, including the proposed expansion of the incinerator. “It’s surprising that when we talk to people, they have no idea that a waste incinerator exists there, and that they have plans for expansion,” says Ghatoura. “That is very concerning, because this is going to impact them every single day.”

As Ghatoura and other organizers spark those conversations in Brampton, he’s been heartened to see different age groups advocating for their communities. “Especially this issue with the waste incinerator, we’re getting a lot more youth involvement, which is amazing, we haven’t really seen that before,” he says.

On a summer evening this July, Ghatoura led a group of senior citizens — all South Asian men over 70 — to participate in a community cleanup, picking up empty coffee cups, plastic wrappers and old weathered flyers. They met at Luongo Park in western Brampton, and walked through the neighbourhood with trash picks, garbage bags and latex gloves, picking up garbage from people’s driveways, lawns and the street.

“This is our home,” says Sri Bansilal Singh, a 70-year-old man who rode his bicycle for two kilometres to join his friends for the cleanup. “Brampton is very beautiful, and because we’re grateful to live here, we’re happy to contribute to the community and want to help maintain its beauty.”

As they went about the cleanup, residents came out to pay their respects to the seniors. “People really love these guys, and have great respect for what they’re doing,” Ghatoura says. It’s one of the many reasons he questions why the incinerator is being built in Brampton. Historically, he says, environmental racism has meant that the burden of development often falls on the shoulders of the marginalized. But this only motivates him more — to educate and mobilize his community, to prove that Brampton deserves better.

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The sound of cars passing is a constant hum, so constant it’s almost meditative. Every so often one bleats out a honk of support. On the shoulder of the highway stands a man, holding a sign that reads: “Save the Salmon.”

Cheeks ruddy from the cold, he clutches it with gloved hands from behind a waist-high concrete highway barrier. Dark eyes glitter warmly behind glasses, and over his knitted wool toque is a black baseball cap emblazoned with the image of a tree, water and paddles. 

This is Tsartlip First Nation Elder Carl Olsen, also known by his traditional name, ZȺWIZUT. He’s 78 years old. For the last three years, he’s been coming out here every Tuesday — through rain, snow and even sickness — to stand out on the shoulder of the Malahat highway and protest.

It’s December 30, 2025. Olsen grins, surrounded by supporters who wave at cars and shake their own homemade signs. But it wasn’t always this way. When he first started out, it was just him, his granddaughter and a supporter from the local book club Olsen runs.

At his back is Goldstream Provincial Park, or as Olsen knows it, SELE₭TEȽ. At 477 hectares, it’s bigger than New York City’s Central Park, a verdant gem on the southern tip of Vancouver Island, just a 20-minute drive from Victoria. The park features waterfalls, Garry oak meadows, 600-year-old Douglas fir trees, flowering dogwood, western red cedar trees, Oregon grape and salmonberries.

In front of Olsen is the Malahat, a busy two-lane highway that cuts through the park and sees an average of 25,000 vehicles a day pass by. The park’s accessibility means more than 600,000 people visit each year to camp, hike and hang out. Many come in the fall to watch the huge runs of chum, Chinook and coho salmon that return each year to spawn in the Goldstream River.

What prompted Olsen to go out there in the early months of 2023 was learning of a proposal put forward by the province to widen the Malahat that would catastrophically affect the adjacent Chinook and coho salmon spawning habitat in the Goldstream River. 

According to the province, the highway expansion, estimated in 2024 to cost $162 million, was needed to improve safety and reliability along a 1.7-kilometre section that bisects the park.

One part that especially concerned Olsen was the expected “permanent loss or alteration of aquatic salmonid and amphibian habitat” next to the Goldstream River. This impact and others were detailed in a 139-page environmental assessment report commissioned by the province and completed in 2024 by consulting firm McElhanney. The area’s Chinook and coho salmon spawning habitat falls directly within the project’s footprint.

Within half a kilometre of the project site, at-risk species were likely to be affected, including western screech owls, northern red-legged frogs, wandering salamanders and the endangered sharp-tailed snake. Expand that to within five kilometres of the project site and that list lengthens to at least 200 endangered and threatened species possibly affected.

Olsen was also horrified to learn that, among a host of other environmental issues, approximately 715 trees would also be removed from an area along the highway during construction.

He thought about the owls and nesting birds, about the spe’uth (bears) that make their homes in SELE₭TEȽ and fed beside him while he and other nation members harvested fish for winter. He thought of how the noise and vibration from excavation and rock blasting might affect the vulnerable salmon fry, hiding out in the darkness under fallen logs in river pools until they were big enough to head to the ocean.

“The canopy that creates the coolness of the water in the stream — if that disappears, those fish will disappear, because then the water starts to get too hot. It’s about 12 degrees difference from the sun to the shade. So that’s what started me,” he says. “I thought, ‘Yeah, I can do this. I can be the voice for the salmon.’ ”

Every Tuesday for the last three years, Olsen wakes up at about 5 a.m. in the house his grandfather built, on the W̱JOȽEȽP Tsartlip reserve. He heads down to the beach right outside his door on the Saanich Inlet and starts his day with a prayer at the water’s edge. 

“I meditate about what I would like to see in my day,” he says.

After his prayer, Olsen heads to a local café for some toast and tea. 

Typically, a group of supporters show up to tag along with him to Goldstream Park. Others meet him there. Some are members of local churches and the Wilderness Committee, or participants in Olsen’s Indigenous authors book club.

One of those book club members is Christine Willes, a settler from a group called Goldstream Protectors that helped organize a protest with Olsen and others at the legislature in October. 

“What he says to anybody who asked him is, ‘Well, I can go and stand by the side of the highway,’ ” she says. “And that’s what he says to other people. ‘Do what you can.’ So I thought, well, I can go stand on the side of the highway too.”

For Olsen, this fight is now broader than the highway project. It’s a flashpoint in a much larger and contentious discussion around Indigenous land rights, title and reconciliation that has consumed the province, and has repercussions for the entire country. It’s also about the ability for Indigenous people to make land decisions in their own territory.

To the W̱SÁNEĆ people, of which Tsartlip are a part, SELE₭TEȽ is one of their oldest fishing villages, arguably protected by a treaty put to paper 174 years ago which clearly states they retain the rights to their village sites and to hunt and fish on those lands as they always have.

It’s one of 14 treaties negotiated in the 1850s by James Douglas, then-Governor of Vancouver Island, with the local First Nations. For many, the existence of these treaties may come as a surprise, as it’s well known that most of the province’s land mass was never ceded by its original inhabitants. 

Known collectively as the Douglas Treaties, multiple court cases since the 1960s have re-affirmed these treaty-protected rights, for both the W̱SÁNEĆ and the other Vancouver Island nations who signed them in the 1850s.

This fight to hold colonial governments to their word is what has kept Olsen out on the highway for three years.

‘It rightfully belongs to us’

On its website, the B.C. government states Goldstream Park was “given to the people of British Columbia by the Greater Victoria Water Board in 1958.” 

But the actual history is far more complicated.

“It rightfully belongs to us,” stated Jean Baptiste Paul, Tsartlip First Nation member and son of then-chief Thomas Paul, in an article published in the Daily Colonist on March 27, 1956. “We have never given it up, and never been offered anything for our fishing and hunting grounds there.”

Jean Baptiste recalled how he had hunted and fished at Goldstream as a child. He told the Daily Colonist that all of the Saanich Inlet, from Cherry Point to the hills south of Goldstream was Indigenous territory, and had been identified as such by his grandfather, former Tsartlip Chief Ben Paul.

Tsartlip and Malahat members had built fish-smoking shacks near the river and his grandfather had also constructed a log cabin in the area. But one day when no one was there, all the buildings were burned down, Paul told the paper.

At the time, Paul’s resistance was reported as little more than a passing curiosity with headlines such as, “Prospect of city giving park to B.C. has West Saanich Indians on warpath.” On June 26, 1958 B.C. went ahead and designated the area a park in celebration of British Columbia’s centennial.

Goldstream became a tourist attraction. Even though it was not yet officially open, the campground was quickly packed with vacationers. Newspaper columnists sung the praises of Goldstream’s beauty and touted its quick accessibility from Victoria. In the fall of 1960, thousands of onlookers crowded into Goldstream to watch the salmon run, a practice that continues to this day. 

However, these thousands of new visitors brought with them a host of new problems, says Eric Pelkey WEC’KINEM, hereditary chief of the Tsawout First Nation. Sometimes when nation members are down at the river harvesting fish, visitors to the park will confront them.

“They start cussing us up and down, saying that we’re destroying the fishery. We tell them, we have the right. We have the right to do this, to carry on our fishery and to just leave us alone. But there’s still a lot of racism that comes out at that time. People think we’re torturing the fish,” Pelkey says. 

The W̱SÁNEĆ carry on regardless. More recently, people have also been coming out there to support them, he adds.

Pelkey sits at a picnic table in the park, the gentle rush of the Goldstream River behind him. Barrel-chested, his voice a deep, gentle baritone, he wears a ball cap-style hat woven from cedar bark and a wool and feather headband. A cream-coloured traditional knitted blanket is wrapped around his shoulders.

These accusations are especially misplaced because, he explains, it’s the W̱SÁNEĆ who constantly steward the area and conduct their own assessments to monitor the health of the fish. 

For example, in 2023 the numbers of chum in the Goldstream were so low that nation members just went down to the river to observe. “Nobody took a fish,” according to Olsen, a long time volunteer at the Goldstream Hatchery.

Most of the environmental problems in the area are due to settler activity in the first place, Pelkey points out. Commercial fishing boats that come down the Johnstone Strait along the coast of Vancouver Island and into the Strait of Georgia take most of the salmon before they can even reach the Goldstream River, he says. In 2011 a fuel tanker truck crashed in the area, leaking tens of thousands of litres of gasoline and diesel into the river caused further stress on the salmon.

Members from all W̱SÁNEĆ nations harvest chum, Chinook and coho salmon from the Goldstream River as a winter food supply, and have for generations. When it’s smoked, the chum can last all winter, Pelkey says.

“I remember growing up, and we always had that smell in our house, because my parents would have sacks of smoked chum on top of our cupboards, burlap sacks,” he says.

A village displaced

In 1877, the Indian Reserve Commission parcelled out a fishing reserve along the south end of Finlayson Arm, an extension of the Saanich Inlet where the Goldstream River feeds into the ocean. However Goldstream Reserve no. 13, as it’s called, sits at the base of Mount Finlayson instead of in the area of the river where the community still harvests fish. 

“They carried out the survey of the old fishing village, but the surveyor is the one that took it from here and put it over there, off on the side of the mountain, instead of surveying where our village was,” says Pelkey. “This whole area here used to be filled with longhouses all along the river. Right over there, where that overhang is there, is actually where our family’s longhouse used to be.” 

He turns and points over his shoulder, to a structure not far from Goldstream Park’s gravel parking lot. 

“I was not aware of that until maybe I was in my 30s, when my grandfather asked me to bring him out here. We parked over there, walked down. And he said, ‘Oh, what is this building?’ ”

He told his grandfather, Marshall Pelkey, that it housed the washrooms and that this was now a public park. He became upset, Pelkey recalls.

Known as the “saltwater people,” the ocean is entwined within everything the W̱SÁNEĆ do, Pelkey says.

The W̱SÁNEĆ have maintained a wide and complex network of traditional reef net fishing sites throughout their territory, which encompasses what are currently known as the San Juan Islands, Boundary Bay, the Saanich Inlet and Saanich Peninsula. These reef net sites are not just places to harvest food, but are part of a wider spiritual and community practice. 

In and around Goldstream Park, community members also use streams that feed into the area for ritual bathing, and host a first salmon ceremony each fall to greet their returning salmon relatives. This is in an area right beside the province’s proposed road work site.

“Our people always fished here, no matter where the reserve was. Every winter, our people came here to fish. Conservation officers always tried to stop us, but we always just kept on and dared them to take us to court,” Pelkey says.

That’s exactly what happened one evening 30 years ago, when Olsen and another Tsartlip member, Ivan Morris, were caught hunting by conservation officers on their territory and arrested. 

To hunt and fish as formerly: what the Douglas Treaties really meant

Though it was early evening, it was already getting dark on Nov. 28, 1996, when two men, driving in the woods near Youbou, spotted what appeared to be the glow of deer eyes through the trees. 

They were showing two boys — eight and twelve years old — how to hunt at night with the help of a light. It was something their families had safely done for generations, but was previously done with burning pitch and bows and arrows. 

Morris pulled the vehicle over. Olsen took aim and fired a few shots. He then passed the rifle across the two boys to Morris, who got out of the vehicle and squeezed off two more.

They soon got a nasty surprise. The deer they shot at was, in fact, a decoy, complete with reflective eyes, set up by provincial conservation officers to trap illegal hunters. The vehicle was quickly swarmed by officers and the two men were arrested, Olsen recalls.

“There were probably a dozen or more conservation that surrounded us and even manhandled the kids that were there, threw them up against the hood of the car to search them,” he said.

The two were charged with hunting with a firearm during prohibited hours and hunting with an illuminating device, under provincial wildlife legislation. The subsequent trial revolved around the Crown’s argument that yes, Morris and Olsen had a right to hunt, but that did not include the right to hunt in a way that was “inherently unsafe,” as the trial judge put it.

At trial, the men’s lawyers countered with a vigourous legal defense. Not only were they using safe practices, they argued, their right as Tsartlip members to hunt as they always had was protected under the North Saanich Treaty of 1852, negotiated between nation members and Douglas.

The case dragged on for 10 years. Initially both men were convicted and it was upheld by the B.C. Court of Appeal. However, when it got to the Supreme Court of Canada, the convictions were overturned in a 4-3 vote.

Under consideration was the relevant text of the North Saanich Treaty, which guaranteed that village sites and enclosed fields were to be kept for the W̱SÁNEĆ and their children’s use, though the land itself was to become the “property of the white people for ever.” However it also clearly stated that its signatories were at liberty to hunt and carry on their fisheries “as formerly.”

But there are essentially two versions of what happened with the signing of the treaties — the written settler version backed by Douglas and others’ accounts, and the Indigenous oral version told through history by W̱SÁNEĆ members.

It’s generally understood that on Feb. 7 of 1852, Douglas met with 10 W̱SÁNEĆ members to agree on what became the South Saanich Treaty. He then requested W̱SÁNEĆ chiefs come to another meeting on February 11 during which he negotiated with 118 “men with beards,” as he later described them, in what ended up as the North Saanich Treaty.

Historians have different theories on why these two agreements were negotiated separately, but it’s important to understand the context in which they were negotiated. For a prior treaty with the Songhees Nation, Douglas said he asked the chiefs to sign marks at the bottom of a blank sheet of paper, later adding details above it that resulted in the acquisition of the area’s South Island. Experts believe it’s possible Douglas did the same thing as with the W̱SÁNEĆ as he did with the Songhees, and got them to sign blank paper.

Adding to the complications, the X marks on the North Saanich Treaty that represented signatures “were forged” in that they were supposedly signed by W̱SÁNEĆ members “but were in fact made by the clerk of the Hudson’s Bay Company,” declared Justice Douglas Lambert, in Olsen’s B.C. Court of Appeal case.

There is no evidence that the First Nations signatories saw the agreements after the fact, were given a copy, or knew what text was later added.

To this day, the text of the Saanich Treaties does not match W̱SÁNEĆ’s own oral version, which asserts that the treaties were likely agreements to share the land, not surrender it.

On this point, the court also came to a stunning conclusion in its final ruling, in Olsen’s favour: “The Douglas Treaties were the reflections of oral agreements reduced to writing by agents of the Crown” and that those oral promises made when the treaty was agreed to “are as much a part of the treaty as the written words.”

As the people who wrote the Douglas Treaties down were not the Indigenous people, the court “had to take into account what was the evidence of Indigenous people about what they thought the treaty meant,” says lawyer Louise Mandell, Olsen and Morris’s representative and one of the founding partners of Mandell Pinder, a law firm that specializes in Aboriginal and treaty rights law.

This was important for the legal cases that were to follow, she adds.

There are other reasons that the W̱SÁNEĆ think the treaties were likely land sharing agreements meant to stave off tensions that had arisen at that time for a variety of reasons, including a dispute over timber being harvested by settlers in Cordova Bay. 

Given that the Indigenous population on Vancouver Island at this time was approximately 11,700 people, compared with a settler population of about 700, there wouldn’t be any motivation for the W̱SÁNEĆ to sell off all their land, says Joni Olsen, the policy and negotiations manager for the W̱SÁNEĆ Leadership Council and Carl Olsen’s daughter.

“The concept of selling land at that point in history was not a thing for W̱SÁNEĆ people,” she says, especially in the context of B.C. being the last place in Canada that settlers came. “Maybe on the east coast, where they had been settled hundreds of years before, there were probably those concepts there already, but that didn’t happen here.”

Furthermore, the idea that the W̱SÁNEĆ would sell land in exchange for a “payment” of blankets doesn’t make sense culturally, and represents a fundamental lack of understanding around what gifting means to their people, Joni says.

“I mean, historically, to access land you would have married somebody’s daughter or something like that. There would have been an exchange. And it could have been through Potlatch, where you had an exchange of things like blankets. But it wasn’t to own. It was to share. It was to have access to.”

Last February, Joni helped negotiate a joint statement with the provincial and federal governments to acknowledge W̱SÁNEĆ’s oral version of the treaties. It states that “though Canada and British Columbia have long considered these agreements to be land purchase agreements, W̱SÁNEĆ oral histories hold that they were agreements to settle disputes and establish peaceful relations between the W̱SÁNEĆ Nation and the European settlers.”

But these peaceful relations remain a challenge when it comes to negotiations over the future of Goldstream Park.

Moving Indigenous court victories into the real world

Olsen stands on an outcropping of stone known as “The Rock.” It’s a scenic spot along Mill Bay Road in the Cowichan Valley that looks out across the waters of the Saanich Inlet, which is fed by the Goldstream River. In the distance are the western shores of the Saanich Peninsula; beyond that, a scattering of islands.

The sun is bright, and he cups a hand over his forehead as he looks across the water.

“When I was a kid, this bay was full of salmon. You could see it,” he says. “You really could see it.” These waters and lands were his garden and food source growing up.

“It’s where we harvested food plants, medicine plants, and berries. And when you come to the ocean like this, we harvested our food from the ocean. In fact, I was in my early teens before I even had a store-bought meal. It was like fish, ducks, deer, clams, oysters, seal meat. That was my diet before, up until maybe the mid ’60s,” he says.   

Though he was raised as a hunter and a fisherman, his father taught him those skills in private, under a cloud of fear.

“Most parents in our communities suffered from fear. Fear of losing their kids because of how the residential school would just take you away if there was a problem. They actually lived with that fear right up till the end, and so they never taught us on land here. My dad always taught me when we were out fishing on the boat, when there was nobody around. Nobody to come and take us away,” he says, overcome with emotion. “That’s how it affected the treaty as well. They had to go outside or to the islands to teach us our ways.”

That fear has continued to affect the exercising of their Douglas Treaty rights because those rights are still disrespected and uncertain, he adds.

“It only verifies the rights that I have, that’s what the Douglas Treaty does. Because that’s what we did before, hunting and fishing, being taught with hands-on teaching,” he says. “That fear is still there, because of the inability of the government to come and sit down with you to implement that court ruling.”

Of the five historical court cases that involved Douglas Treaty rights — including Olsen’s — each one resulted in victory. And every case presented its own legal challenge.

“It wasn’t as if we sat around, thinking about what all we have to do to win whatever,” says Mandell, the lawyer who represented Olsen and Morris. “In every case, we nuanced what the arguments were going to be, and we built the law — gradually.” 

In the 1980s Mandell worked on the 1987 Saanichton Marina case, around a development company’s intention to dredge and develop a commercial marina in Saanichton Bay that was home to eel grass beds, crabs, salmon and trout. 

The legal team wondered how they could assert the treaty “not as a shield but as a sword,” Mandell says. Rather than defend themselves from persecution, they would now assert their rights proactively, to protect the crab fishery and the Tsawout Nation’s traditional fishing grounds.

Essentially, Saanichton Marina Ltd.’s argument was that the “right to fish as formerly,” as stated in the treaties, meant the company could simply pick up and move the eel grass habitat elsewhere. The fish would still be there to harvest, so what was the problem?

The court agreed with Tsawout’s lawyers that found that a fishery is actually the place where fish are harvested, and the right includes the nation’s capacity and the capacity of a nation to care for it, so they’re not deprived of that right.  

“It’s both the incidental aspect and also the place itself. It’s not the right to put your fish net in the water and pull out a fish. It’s the right to continue to protect and harvest and steward and be reciprocal, inside the place that the fishing is happening,” Mandell says. 

This was a crucial and far-reaching finding, and directly relevant to the fight at Goldstream Park — the concept that nation members not only had the right to fish as formerly, but to protect their harvest. 

It’s been a rallying cry for Olsen ever since.

“My relatives fought for that. And the decision that came out of there was that they not only had the right to hunt and fish as formerly, they have the right to protect what they hunted and fished as formerly,” says Olsen. “That’s why I’m here. I’m protecting what belongs to us, our relatives that come up the stream that feed us.”

However, Mandell says there is a huge difference between winning a case and translating that legal victory into political action.

“I can’t tell you how many times we came home from the Supreme Court of Canada thinking we had died and gone to legal heaven, only to find out nothing much changed on the ground. I think that’s the difference between winning a legal point and actually having the capacity to move that victory into shifting the political landscape,” Mandell says.

Olsen, standing on the side of the Malahat protesting for the protection of Goldstream, embodies that distinction.

Despite decades of court cases and historical agreements which upheld the W̱SÁNEĆ people’s rights not only to their village site but also to their fishing grounds at SELE₭TEȽ, despite three years of weekly protests to highlight these rights, it appeared the government’s $162-million highway improvement plan was poised to go ahead.

That is, until Olsen received a phone call in February this year from some members of the W̱SÁNEĆ Leadership Council to tell him they had received some news.

‘Do what you can’

The province had an announcement to make about the Malahat highway. The widening project was being paused. The leadership council members congratulated him.

In a February news release, the province said additional work was required “to address environmental considerations in this sensitive area of Goldstream Park” and understand the project’s impacts.

“I thought, ‘Well, that’s great,’” Olsen says. But he also doubts whether the government will keep its word.

“In the past we’ve had meetings with businesses and government offices and in our longhouses here and come to agreements with them. Then not even a couple of days later, they break those agreements,” he says.

“This could be one of those issues. You know they said they were pausing it, and in their statement, they talk about how they need to better understand the environment and do more research on the environment there, which tells me we were right in thinking that they didn’t really have an environmental plan.”

From the beginning, the province wanted W̱SÁNEĆ members to accept their environmental assessment without question, Olsen says. But he always felt that there was something odd about being asked to accept something without fully agreeing to it. From what nation members could see, the environmental risks were obvious — even from the government’s own assessment report.

The purpose of the environmental assessment was to identify issues, and “some of these considerations were brought to light through that process,” Ministry of Transit and Transportation spokesperson Murray Sinclair stated in an email.

“This does not mean the report was incomplete. The purpose of an environmental assessment is to identify issues, and some of these considerations were brought to light through that process,” Sinclair stated. Given the complexity of the site and the sensitivity of the habitat, addressing those issues will take time, he added.

The ministry is currently conducting a review of crash data in the area as part of an update to its 2012 study of the Highway 1 Malahat corridor.

What about Olsen’s concern that the project is merely on pause, and not actually cancelled?

“It’s possible the project could be revisited in the future. However, there is no timeline or estimate for when that might occur,” stated Sinclair.

This is why, for now, Olsen has decided to keep up his weekly protests.

“We want better decisions made about Goldstream and protecting the watershed especially. It’s about protecting the whole area,” he says. “It’s really important that we recognize where we stand in the whole thing. I’m not going to leave. I think they expected me to leave. We’re still there.”

On-the-ground reporting for this story is made possible with support from Carleton University’s Peter Stursberg Award in Conflict Journalism and Media Studies. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, no foundation or outside organization has editorial input into our stories.

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

Beena Ruparelia does not need to check a thermometer to know when heat has settled into her northwest Toronto home.

She can see it on her skin.

“You see me sweating,” she says while waving a handheld fan and placing a standing fan right beside her. The temperature inside the rental home she shares with her husband, Peter, near Martin Grove and Albion roads, reaches as high as 40 C during heat waves, including this past July.

The couple does not have central air conditioning. Beena says their home traps heat throughout the day.

“So even having a shower, coming out, you’re literally sweating,” she says. “It’s unbearable.”

At night, the heat rises to the second floor, making it difficult to sleep. Peter, who recently turned 65, says there’s no escape.

“The way the sun is directed in, the morning sun comes right into our bedroom,” he says.

The couple use portable air conditioners overnight, but the units cool only part of the home and increase their electricity bill by about $20 to $30 a month during the summer, Beena says.

When the heat becomes stifling, they retreat to the semi-finished basement.

“We go right down,” Beena says. “That’s the only other place to go.”

The temperature also dictates what they eat. Turning on the stove would add even more heat, so Beena says she relies on sandwiches, microwaveable food and other meals that require little cooking.

The Ruparelias’ experience sits at the centre of a growing gap between provincial and municipal housing rules and the changing climate.

The Ruparelias’ home was built in the 1960s. Like much of Toronto’s rental housing, it was built for surviving winter, when keeping heat in was a greater concern than keeping it out. But as the city gets hotter, low-income renters are among those most vulnerable to extreme heat. 

Renters also have no legal right to a maximum indoor temperature. The City of Toronto will likely take at least another year to institute a maximum indoor temperature by-law, while the Ontario government hasn’t committed to introducing one at all. 

As Toronto experiences longer and more frequent periods of extreme heat, the debate is shifting from whether cooling in rental units is necessary to who should be responsible for providing it — and who should bear the cost.

“Is it on working-class people or is it, in this case, on landlords?” Bruno Dobrusin, co-chair of the Toronto Tenant Union, asks. He has become all too familiar with renters’ stories of frustration and, in some cases, desperation.

“I feel like the main change in the last few years has been mostly the scale: how many more people are going through this and how much more often we hear of tenants just fighting to have some form of cooling in their apartments,” Dobrusin says.

Unlike Mississauga to the west, Toronto does not have a maximum indoor temperature by-law for rental units. Dobrusin says tenants have reported being denied permission to install an air conditioner or being told they must pay an additional $50 to $80 a month to operate one, he says, mostly due to the increased electricity needed to run them.

“Another $50 a month is quite a bit on your budget,” he says.

He says residents often go to Tim Hortons or TTC stations as cooling spaces because they are widely available, require little or no spending, stay open late and allow people to remain for long periods without being disturbed. But they can’t sleep there. 

The lack of cooling cannot be separated from Toronto’s broader housing and affordability crises, he says.

As rents rise, more people are sharing homes. During extreme heat, multigenerational and crowded households can face an additional burden as several people share a space designed for just a few occupants.

Dobrusin says working-class tenants may also spend their days in poorly ventilated or inadequately cooled workplaces before returning to apartments that offer no relief.

“What people are going through are multiple crises that are exacerbated by the climate crisis,” he says.

Toronto was built for a different climate

The city projects the number of days each year with temperatures above 30 C could rise from an average of 10 days between 1971 and 2000 to between 36 and 44 days by the 2050s. By the 2080s, Toronto could experience between 46 and 78 days above 30 C annually, depending on future greenhouse gas emissions.

Climate change is accelerated by greenhouse gases concentrating in the atmosphere from many sources, but primarily from the burning of fossil fuels like oil and gas.

Health Canada data shows 66.3 per cent of the heat-related deaths recorded in Canada since 1981 occurred after 2016. More than one-third occurred in 2021, the year of the Western Canada heat dome.

Extreme heat can cause dehydration, fainting, heat rash and heat stroke. It can also worsen pre-existing health conditions of the heart and kidneys, as well as respiratory diseases. 

Children, seniors and people with existing health conditions can be more vulnerable to extreme temperatures.

And outdoor temperature alone does not determine who is most at risk.

Pavement, concrete and buildings absorb and radiate heat, while neighbourhoods with fewer trees and less vegetation lack natural sources of shade and cooling. This creates what is known as the urban heat island effect.

Karen Smith, an associate professor at the University of Toronto’s department of physical and environmental sciences, helped develop what’s known as a heat vulnerability index for Toronto.

Smith says heat vulnerability considers residents’ sensitivity to high temperatures and their capacity to adapt. That includes whether someone can afford an air conditioner or travel to a cooling space. A resident’s age, health, income and housing conditions can also determine whether a hot day becomes dangerous. 

What the index shows is that the areas with the highest heat vulnerability are also among the city’s lowest-income neighbourhoods, and have high concentrations of immigrants.

Overall, she says, city blocks highly concentrated with apartment towers are more vulnerable to heat than the rest of the city. And while a public cooling space may offer temporary relief, it does not necessarily help a tenant who returns to a hot apartment at night.

Toronto Public Health wrote in an email to The Narwhal that it is continuing to work with the University of Toronto to update the heat vulnerability index with additional indicators and more recent data, but otherwise referred questions to the City of Toronto. 

Why Rexdale faces overlapping risks

The Toronto and Region Conservation Authority has identified Rexdale, the area where Beena and Peter Ruparelia live, as a community facing overlapping environmental and socio-economic vulnerabilities.

A 2023 resilience strategy found apartments account for about 61 per cent of the neighbourhood’s housing and most of its housing stock was built before 1980. Jennifer Taves, senior manager of sustainable communities with the conservation authority, says the community also has older single-family homes that have not been retrofitted for central air conditioning. 

The strategy flagged heat stress, limited tree canopy in some areas, food insecurity, transportation barriers and flood risk as additional concerns. It also found that Rexdale has a higher proportion of children aged 14 and younger than Toronto as a whole.

Because of these risks, the conservation authority decided to prioritize Rexdale for climate adaptation strategies, creating a Sustainable Neighbourhood Action Program with help from community stakeholders.

In 2024, residents in three towers received 47 climate-resiliency kits containing things like instant cold packs and temporary window shades, as well as portable air purifiers and purifying plants for days the sky is filled with wildfire smoke. Taves says there are no current plans to expand that program, but some bigger projects involve gardening, tree planting and engagement efforts. 

“We know that heavily shaded neighbourhoods are much cooler than neighbourhoods that don’t have that shade canopy. So investing in that natural infrastructure or [shade] infrastructure is a very important part of preparing for these effects,” Taves says. The official term is shelterbelt infrastructure, which is when a line of trees and shrubs are planted in one or more rows to help lower surface temperatures like at Rowntree Mills Park and areas along Kipling Avenue.

What is the province doing about heat vulnerability

This past July, a three-year-old amendment to Ontario’s Residential Tenancies Act finally kicked in: now, tenants have the explicit right to install and use a window or portable air conditioner when the landlord does not provide cooling.

The change addresses one problem Beena and Peter say they faced for years: being told they were not supposed to use portable units.

The tenant must notify the landlord in writing. The air conditioner must be installed safely and must not damage the property. If electricity is included in the rent, the landlord can raise it to cover higher bills — but rent hikes can’t exceed the actual electricity cost or stay in place when the tenant removes the unit or stops using it for the season.

But even when a charge accurately reflects electricity use, it may remain unaffordable for a senior or another tenant living on a fixed income, according to Dania Majid, a staff lawyer and director of the tenant duty counsel program at the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario. 

Majid says her organization has heard concerns about lump-sum charges, administrative fees and installation requirements associated with air conditioners. Because the provincial provisions are new, many disputes have not yet been considered by the Landlord and Tenant Board.

She’s one of many tenant advocates that want Toronto to pass a legal maximum indoor temperature of 26 C that applies to all rental units, similar to the legislated minimum during colder months.

“We wouldn’t do that to them in the winter,” Majid says. “So why are we doing this to them in the summer?”

But the Federation of Rental-housing Providers of Ontario says a legislated maximum indoor temperature would raise significant logistical and financial questions.

The federation agrees tenants need protection from extreme heat, Marielle Hossack, the federation’s director of policy and regulatory affairs, says. That’s why it supported the  air-conditioner changes to the Residential Tenants Act, giving tenants the flexibility to buy their own. Even so, some older buildings may not have the electrical capacity to power an air conditioner in every apartment at the same time. 

Honouring a maximum temperature could require electrical upgrades, new mechanical systems and other major retrofits, she says. And that work would require time, planning, skilled labour and significant investment.

“Requiring landlords or housing providers to absorb the electricity cost is not a sustainable solution where electricity is included in rent,” she says.

Governments should instead provide targeted energy or income assistance to low-income or medically vulnerable tenants, Hossack says.

The Ontario Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing did not respond to questions by publication time.

The long, long road to a maximum temperature for Toronto renters 

Toronto does not currently have a maximum temperature that applies to all rental units.

When a landlord already provides air conditioning, it must be operated from June 1 to Sept. 30 and keep the unit at no more than 26 C. But if no air conditioner is installed when the tenant moves in, no maximum temperature applies.

As of June 1, apartment buildings that don’t offer in-unit cooling must keep at least one existing indoor amenity space at or below 26 C during the summer. This only applies to buildings that are three or more storeys and 10 or more units and does not apply if construction is needed to meet the requirement.

Toronto city council seems to be moving toward a broader maximum indoor temperature by-law, but slowly. In June, the city manager was instructed by council to report back by June 2027 on findings and key considerations for a by-law and implementation plan.

The city has also asked Ontario to establish a province-wide maximum temperature of 26 C and to prevent landlords from increasing the rent above the normal annual limit if the city does pass a by-law. Right now, landlords can hike rent if it’s meant to comply with municipal by-laws.

In an email to The Narwhal, a City of Toronto spokesperson wrote equity is central to the city’s Heat Relief Strategy.

“We continue to explore new ways to strengthen the strategy and help residents stay safe during periods of extreme heat,” it says. 

The city offers cooling spaces at libraries, community centres and civic centres, along with more than 700 park drinking fountains and mobile water trailers. Residents also have access to pools, splash pads, wading pools and supervised beaches, with some pools extending hours during heat warnings.

Toronto is also expanding programs intended to provide and install up to 2,400 air conditioners for low-income and vulnerable residents.

For Beena and Peter, organizing with other tenants has become part of that solution.

After years of feeling that she and her husband were dealing with the conditions in their home alone, they joined the Toronto Tenant Union. She says she wants governments to hear directly from the people living through extreme indoor heat.

“The first thing is that they need to come and speak to the landlords,” she says. “They need to fight on our behalf.”

Rajpreet Sahota is a community and policy reporting fellow. Her position is generously funded in part by the Canadian Race Relations Foundation. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, the foundation has no editorial input.

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.

“What are you going to do about wildland firefighter mental health?”

The question came to Jim Johansson — a former wildland firefighter and assistant professor in the faculty of nursing at the University of Alberta — from a student in December 2023. Canada had just experienced its deadliest wildfire season on record.

Eight wildland firefighting personnel died in 2023 in Western Canada and the Northwest Territories, prompting scrutiny of the profession’s hidden costs: chronic fatigue, physical and mental burnout and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Now, the 2026 fire season has made one thing unmistakingly clear: the psychological toll of wildland firefighting in North America has reached new levels. In June, two wildland firefighters and a bush pilot died in a plane crash near Fort Simpson, N.W.T. Several days later, three firefighters were fatally burnt while working on a wildfire along the Utah-Colorado border, while a fourth died on July 24 from injuries he sustained. 

Kylie Foisy, the nursing student who sent the email about mental health to Johansson back in 2023, had just wrapped up her rookie season as an initial attack crew member in northwestern Alberta. Initial attack crews are the first on the scene of new blazes, tasked with quickly extinguishing them. On her second day on the job in May 2023, Foisy’s crew was dispatched to a 5,000-hectare wildfire. “It was so crazy,” she says. “But so fun.”

She loved the intensity of the work and the strong bonds she developed with her crew, but the summer unfolded with more sobering events, including a fatal helicopter crash in her district. For Foisy’s crew it was “business as usual” the next day, she says. For the duration of the season she felt the impacts wearing on her mental well-being, and could see others were also struggling.

For Johansson, Foisy’s email was a call to action. And it was the very start of what is now Canada’s first wildland firefighter peer-support network. Johansson has assembled a team of veteran wildland firefighters, occupational health therapists, psychologists and climate specialists to co-create and launch a new peer-support network in Alberta “by wildland firefighters, for wildland firefighters” — the first of its kind in Canada.

Johansson hopes to apply what he’s learned over the past decade as a mental health nurse to bolster support for those on the frontlines of wildfire. A year after Foisy’s email landed in his inbox, he hired her as a research assistant. Together, they’re undertaking a qualitative research project to examine the mental health challenges related to wildland firefighting and climate change in Alberta.Already, they’ve heard stories from those who have experienced or witnessed crew members escape near-death scenarios, including close calls with fallen trees or vehicle collisions. Others were impacted by fatal tragedies, like in August 2024, when 24-year-old firefighter Morgan Kitchen was killed by a fallen tree while working on the Jasper wildfire. Last week, as the two-year anniversary of Kitchen’s death approached, six workplace safety charges were laid against Alberta’s Ministry of Forestry and Parks in relation to it, for failing to take measures to assess and control hazards related to dangerous trees — along with failing to adequately train firefighters to identify hazardous trees. The first court appearance is scheduled for this September, in Jasper.

Wildfire fighters lack the supports of municipal firefighters

Despite working on the frontlines of some of Canada’s most intense climate-related disasters, most wildland firefighters are classified as forestry workers — not first responders — under Canada’s national occupational classification system. They also often lack the wages, pensions and benefits afforded to municipal firefighters. 

Johansson was all too familiar with the working conditions on the frontlines of wildfires. He had worked as an initial attack firefighter in Alberta from 2001 to 2009, then taught up-and-coming crew members and leaders at the Hinton Training Centre until 2013. Johansson led an initial attack crew from 2005 to 2009, working 12- to 16-hour days over three-week shifts, hauling hose through muskeg and pumping water from swamps to extinguish wildfires.

Despite the low pay, the camaraderie and joy of spending days in the bush “got into his blood,” Johansson says. “There’s a culture of wildland firefighting that I felt so happy in, and that didn’t really exist anywhere else,” he says.

Yet, there were psychological hazards, too. In 2007, a helicopter carrying an initial attack crew crashed near Fort McMurray, killing 22-year-old Patrick Dominic Watters-Michaud. After the news arrived, Johansson had to “jump in a helicopter and go day-base that day,” he says. Day-basing involves relocating crews to high-risk wildfire areas to increase their chances of extinguishing the fires when they’re still small. The next day, wildland firefighters informally banded together, lowering the flags at bases across the province, “mourning the loss of one of our people,” Johansson recalls.

Alberta Wildfire managers raised the flags, citing that the firefighter did not meet the criteria of their flag-lowering policy. The policy changed in 2008 after crew leaders filed formal complaints. Alberta Wildfire did not respond to questions from The Narwhal about this incident or any other questions.

The incident opened Johansson’s eyes to the “legitimate danger” of wildland firefighting, and he became increasingly anxious to fly on helicopter patrols — a routine part of firefighting work where crew members survey the landscape for new ignitions. But it also shone a light on what he says is the government’s ongoing failure to provide safe, culturally relevant mental health support to wildland firefighters.

Johansson became increasingly vocal as a leader, advocating for the safety and well-being of his crew. He would eventually be “DNRed” by the Edson district — a term referring to Alberta Wildfire’s “Do Not Rehire” policy. Alberta Wildfire does not grant seasonal firefighters automatic recall rights from one season to the next, unlike other Canadian provinces like B.C. Alberta Wildfire did not respond to questions about whether this policy exists or how it’s applied.

After leaving wildfire, it felt like Johansson was “starting all over again,” he says. He decided to pursue higher education in nursing, specializing in mental health. 

Johansson doesn’t want his research limited to publishing papers.

“When I put my nursing lens on firefighting, I’m always looking for strengths and how we can mobilize those to help people. In wildfire, that strength is the people,” Johansson says. “That’s what keeps firefighters coming back every season.”

Climate change and gaps in mental health support put Alberta’s wildland firefighters at risk

For his research, Johansson interviewed 17 former and current wildland firefighters in Alberta. He shared preliminary results with The Narwhal.

Early data from Johansson’s qualitative research has raised some red flags. The majority of wildland firefighters Johansson spoke to agreed the 2023 fire season was a “turning point” in their careers. Crews spent a higher number of days actively fighting fires in increasingly risky and volatile environments. It’s “non-stop all season long,” and there’s fatigue and additional safety issues that come with that, researchers found.

Initial attack and unit crew leaders also spoke to Johansson about mental health challenges related to high turnover of crew members. “In the past, most crews would only have a small number of rookies each year,” Johansson says. An Alberta Wildfire document, leaked to The Narwhal, analyzes the results of a wildfire crew exit survey in 2023, and indicates that “60 per cent of all firefighters were either brand new, or entering their second year.” 

Alberta Wildfire did not respond to any questions about the findings of Johannson’s research.

Johansson’s research found leaders were worried about dividing their attention between managing large-scale wildfires, and simultaneously supervising a higher number of rookies less familiar with volatile fire behaviour and danger trees, whose unstable roots and surrounding soil could result in suddenly toppling over. In addition, some reported that third-year firefighters were being pushed prematurely into leadership roles, he says.

There are broader labour issues in Alberta too, including that wildland firefighters lack paid sick days and health benefits. There are some limited mental health services available — including a counselling hotline — but interviewees expressed hesitation, or lack of trust about confidentiality when using the services for fear they might not be hired back the following spring, Johansson says.

Wildland firefighters are left to fend for themselves in the off-season — when they often need supports the most

Johansson often compares the dynamics of wildland firefighting to that of soldiers returning from combat. “[Wildland firefighters] exist in these really high-intensity situations. They have a tight-knit peer support network that keeps them safe mentally,” he says.

But when the wildfire season ends in the fall and seasonal firefighters’ contracts are terminated, they suddenly lose that support network.

For Jessica Broder, a former wildland firefighter with the BC Wildfire Service, when she left her crew to spend the winters in other communities she lost her “sounding board for processing.” She also points to the reality of wildland firefighters relying on substances to cope through the off-season. A study of U.S. wildland firefighters found that nearly four in five respondents reported binge drinking before and after the fire season.

Broder worked on a unit crew in Revelstoke, B.C., in 2023, the summer her colleague Devyn Gale was killed by a fallen tree. The accident felt all too relatable, Broder says. She herself had narrowly avoided falling trees and knew others had experienced similar close calls. 

After Gale’s accident, she and her crew participated in critical incident stress management debriefs, and had access to a clinical counsellor with a history in wildland firefighting.

Broder and her crew accrued approximately 100 fireline days in the 2023 season (a unit crew would be happy if they got 60 days, according to Broder). While initial attack crews respond to wildfires with the goal of quickly extinguishing them, unit crews are 20-person crews that specialize in “sustained action,” or longer-term firefighting efforts on mega-fires. In September, her crew was deployed to northern B.C. to work on the Big Creek fire, which she described as her “breaking point.” The Big Creek fire grew to more than 175,000 hectares in 2023 and triggered evacuation orders in the Takla Lake First Nation. Broder led a night shift, working from 5 p.m. until 9 a.m. the next morning, and had to evacuate camp when the wildfire threatened to burn it.

Broder worries that increasingly destructive wildfire seasons are exposing firefighters to greater psychological strain. While BC Wildfire Service has some mental health training, including a course offered through the Canadian Mental Health Association, adapted specifically for wildfire, called Resilient Minds, Broder would like to see more preparatory training for all wildland firefighters.

“We’re not giving people the tools to tell someone at 4 a.m. that their house is not ‘an achievable objective,’ or to go into a rural or Indigenous community [to engage with community members],” she points out, referring to how wildland firefighters have to knock on doors and tell community members to leave their homes — and sometimes warn them they are unlikely to have a home to return to.

Recently, Johansson recruited Broder — today a student at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, B.C. — onto his team to research existing mental health support programs for wildland firefighters in North America. “It’s something that really lacks across Canada,” she says. “I think [a peer-support network] could be transformational.”

‘It’s not a hopeless endeavour’: veteran wildland firefighter

Over a 30-year career, Michelle Wigmore fought wildfires across Canada and North America, led a 20-person unit crew and developed national training courses. Today, she’s teaming up with Johansson to help launch the peer-support network.

Over the years, Wigmore has seen wildland firefighters struggle with mental health, but says “it’s often not in the way people think.” Busy seasons and long hours can be challenging, but they’re also “why people join fire and stay in it,” she says. “It’s the excitement, adrenaline, you’re working as a team — it’s the greatest thing ever.” But it comes with immense pressure.

Wigmore has lost colleagues to helicopter accidents, health conditions and suicide. One year, a crew member died by suicide on his day off. 

A recent survey in the U.S. found 22 per cent of wildland firefighters have attempted suicide, while 37 per cent reported suicidal ideation. 

Rainy seasons can be just as psychologically hazardous, Wigmore says. When wildfire activity is low, crews may spend extended periods away from home without the opportunity to earn overtime. “That’s when I’ve seen the most issues come up,” she says.

The solutions don’t always need to be complicated, Wigmore says, and they’re most effective when they come from the ground up. Crew morale is at the heart of it, she says. “It’s not a hopeless endeavour.”

What helped her crew the most when they lost a colleague to suicide, was the show of solidarity from other wildland firefighters on base. They collectively decided to construct a bench in honour of their colleague and flew it to a nearby mountaintop.

In 2023, Wigmore wasn’t hired back on — she was “DNRed.” The “do not rehire” policy in Alberta is “barbaric,” Wigmore says. Wildland firefighters deserve job security and automatic recall rights, so they’re not afraid of advocating for their well-being, or safety, says the veteran firefighter

But she’s quick to credit recent progress. The Alberta government and union signed a new agreement in 2025 that will increase wages for crew members with the most years of service by more than 19 per cent by 2027. Wages for longest-serving crew leaders and supervisors will rise by more than 27 per cent and 31 per cent, respectively. 

“This is career-changing for people,” Wigmore says. “[Firefighters] that were planning their exit strategy … are now planning to stay.” Other major wildfire agencies in Canada, including B.C. and Ontario should take note, Wigmore says.

BC Wildfire leads cultural shift in mental health awareness

The devastating losses of six firefighters in B.C.’s wildland firefighting community in 2023 “struck a chord” for the BC Wildfire Service, Olivia Goldney, a safety specialist with the organization, says. “We need to have a strengthened culture of care for our staff and develop trauma-informed systems that can allow our staff to do this job long-term,” she adds.

Aside from chronic fatigue and burnout, wildland firefighters are grappling with a profound sense of “ecological grief,” as their communities and landscapes are burnt over by wildfires. Goldney experienced post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from her experiences as an initial attack crew leader in 2021, witnessing the devastating events of the Lytton fire, which tore through the community in 15 minutes, destroying homes and businesses, and killing two people.

Today, she’s leading the development of a new psychological health and safety strategy within the BC Wildfire Service. “We want to align psychological injuries closer to how we approach physical injuries,” Goldney says.

All wildland firefighters in B.C. have automatic recall rights and benefits, including sick days and partially paid short-term disability leave, according to Goldney. Once they have worked over a certain number of hours, they also receive a $1,000 annual health and wellness allowance that can be used for services such as massage therapy and counselling. A counselling hotline is available to all firefighters, while First Nations firefighters can also access a crisis line to access culturally informed support. A 2021 survey found more than 50 per cent of Indigenous wildland firefighters in Canada had experienced additional risks related to cultural discrimination on the frontlines.

After the 2023 season, BC Wildfire Service also launched a recovery program, a four-day intensive retreat that provides firefighters with therapeutic tools for their long-term recovery from work-related traumatic stress.  

While wildland firefighting has long been dominated by a culture of stoicism — “a kind of buck up and do the job,” Goldney says — she’s seeing a cultural shift within BC Wildfire Service’s leadership to acknowledge and address the psychological toll of the work.

“From the bottom to the top, there’s this ‘shake’ that’s happening culturally,” Goldney says. “People are understanding the work we do has profound impacts on a person.”

She points to systemic changes that are underway in B.C.: wildland firefighters are becoming increasingly recognized by their first responder peers in the province. Recently, BC Wildfire Service was invited to join the BC First Responders Mental Health committee, Goldney says. In addition, B.C. wildland firefighters will soon have the most comprehensive cancer coverage in all of Canada. She’s hopeful that federal legislation will change to recognize wildland firefighters as first responders.

“I think only good things are to come,” Goldney says.

Wildland firefighting peer-support network sets sights on launching in early 2027

If you had asked Johansson at 25 whether he was struggling with his mental health, he would have shrugged and replied, “Job’s fine. I’m fine.” Twenty years later, he’s no longer sure that was really the case.

That realization is part of why Johansson sees value in long-term support. His team plans to build a year-round support network for both active and retired wildland firefighters, offering a space where those still processing their experiences can find an informed, listening ear.

“You could be two, three, five, 10 years out and still access [support],” he says. 

Come September, after the fire season, Johansson’s team will brainstorm what the network could look like. There are already ideas of starting an online platform, a peer-support counselling line, group fitness challenges or even integrating supports into video games. 

They plan to launch the pilot peer-support network in Alberta in the spring of 2027 with the broader goal of eventually expanding across Canada. 

Already he’s receiving overwhelmingly enthusiastic reception and support for the project, he says. “[People] are like, ‘Thank you for doing this’, or ‘How can I help?’ It’s obviously filling a need.”

It’s been a full-circle moment for the former wildland firefighter, although Johansson admits that, emotionally, a part of him has never really left. 

Gardening in his backyard in Calgary often evokes the memory of “digging in the dirt, looking for hot spots,” he says. Even the faintest trace of wildfire smoke has a way of transporting him back to the frontlines. “It’s total nostalgia,” Johansson says.

“For a minute, I’m back in it.”

Updated on Aug. 7, 12:52 pm PST: A number of photographs in this story have been changed. The images originally used did not show a wildfire, but an Indigenous cultural burn, and misidentified attendees at the burn as employees of BC Wildfire.

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Peter Cressey has been visiting the Carmanah and Walbran valleys for decades. Nestled between the Pacific Ocean and the sprawling spider-web of cutblocks and logging roads that mark the island’s interior, these two valleys form one of southern Vancouver Island’s largest remaining intact old-growth ecosystems. They’re home to centuries-old spruce trees, gnarled cedars and plants and animals that live in few other places.

“It’s not just the trees,” Cressey, who volunteers with Friends of Carmanah Walbran, says. “There’s a whole bunch of threatened species, the marbled murrelet, the screech owl, the specklebelly lichen and the dromedary jumping slug. There’s a whole list of very unique species that are facing some serious threats.”In the early 1990s, Cressey was arrested at a logging blockade in the region, part of a campaign that convinced the province to expand what was then called Carmanah Pacific Provincial Park to include parts of the Walbran in 1995.Today, the park is known as Carmanah Walbran. BC Parks describes it as “a luxuriously forested sanctuary that is without a doubt one of the most remarkable wild places on Vancouver Island.” But right now, they also say it’s “inaccessible by vehicle” and that “the day-use areas, campground, and trails are currently unmaintained.”

That’s because it’s blocked by landslides on one side and locked metal gates on the other. BC Parks didn’t provide a timeline for restoring park access. Instead, they directed questions to Tsawak-qin Forestry, the company responsible for both the metal gates and, they say, for clearing the landslides. 

In an emailed statement, Tsawak-qin told The Narwhal that they are “working with government and others to open access to the western, public access point of the park,” but didn’t offer a timeline. They promised to “provide more information when it becomes available.” 

Carmanah Walbran is one of many outdoor recreation areas in B.C. accessed by resource roads. Cressey and others say its ongoing closure raises questions about public access to public lands, and the province’s management of thousands of kilometres of resource roads that connect British Columbians to some of the province’s most spectacular back country regions.

Ministry approves gates to close park to recreational users, citing ‘safety concerns’

When Cressey talks about the logging protests of the 1990s, a period sometimes called the War in the Woods when activists and First Nations fought old-growth logging in Clayoquot Sound and up into the Carmanah Walbran region, there’s a hint of pride in his voice. But he’s also learned a lot since then, and though his passion for protecting old-growth forests remains, his tactics have changed.

Today, Cressey’s with the Friends of Carmanah Walbran, which is focused on protecting ancient forests through education and community building. Much of their work centres on the central Walbran Valley, a stand of old-growth forest just outside the southeastern edge of Carmanah Walbran Park. On a map, it looks like someone took an ice cream scoop to the park boundary. Torrance Coste, associate director of the Wilderness Committee, calls it “the bite.” 

That bite is not part of the park itself. According to Coste, activists remember it was left out at the request of logging companies. But decades of activism have kept the saws at bay, and the area is currently covered by a provincial old-growth deferral. Within it lies a network of trails and campsites built and maintained by Cressey and the Friends of Carmanah Walbran. Some of these trails, like the Anderson Lake and Marble Canyon trails, cross into the provincial park, while others sit outside the boundary entirely. All of them are maintained by volunteers.

For years, Friends of Carmanah Walbran have used trail maintenance trips and educational gatherings to bring people into the region to advocate for protecting the old-growth forests that still lie outside the park boundary. But this spring, something changed. 

In March, Cressey learned that the province approved Tsawak-qin Forestry’s request to put locked gates on roads east of Carmanah Walbran Park. These gates blocked access to both the bite and the trails from it that cross into the park. 

Cressey reached out to Tsawak-qin to request permission to pass through the gates for a birding event in early July. Initially, he says, the company seemed open to letting the birders through. He even offered to give them the names of everyone participating — a group of birders, artists and scientists. But eventually, Tsawak-qin told him they couldn’t allow the group through the gates. Cressey says they told him it was due to “public and worker safety issues.”Tsawak-qin didn’t directly address questions about the birders, but noted in an emailed statement to The Narwhal that the gates were put in place due to “several incidents [that] have occurred recently in the Walbran area that endangered people and caused damage to property,” citing a burnt bridge deck, damaged bridge cables and blocked drainage structures.

This “created unsafe road conditions,” Tsawak-qin Forestry said. “In addition, there is evidence of members of the public entering active work sites,” it added, though they did not give specific examples. 

There was a blockade in the Walbran between August and December 2025, which led to 13 arrests. The company didn’t reference this blockade directly, but Cressey thinks that it, and the continued presence of a nearby protest encampment, contributed to the company wanting to shut down access. 

On July 16, social media accounts from this camp posted a video of two people locked to one of the Tsawak-qin gates. In the video, one masked figure explained the action as a response to the company cutting off public access to “public land.”

British Columbia’s Forest and Range Practices Act allows resource companies to request permission to install and lock gates to prevent public access on back country resource roads. According to the province, these approvals are granted when “use of the road would likely endanger property, public health or public safety.” 

In the case of the eastern Carmanah Walbran gates, Coste says it’s unclear what the justification is, or what threat a birding event might pose to property or safety.

He worries that approvals for these kinds of gates have been increasing since the Fairy Creek blockades where more than 1,100 people were arrested opposing old-growth logging in the Fairy Creek watershed near Port Renfrew in 2020 and 2021.

When asked whether this was true, the Ministry of Forests declined to comment, explaining that finding the answer was “a complex ask during the middle of field season when resources for data gathering are limited.”

Coste thinks logging companies could be trying to solve that problem by “closing access to vast swaths of the island [and] the province to any and all other user groups.” Tsawak-qin did not comment when asked about any direct connections between logging protests and their request to gate these roads. 

“If logging companies have a problem with blockaders, that’s a political issue that they should take to the province, not deal with it with gates out on the back roads,” Coste says. “If companies can’t log without fear of people getting in the way of their operations, they have a social licence problem.”

Why aren’t public land access groups talking about the Carmanah Walbran?

For Cressey, part of the problem is that BC Parks isn’t clear about what qualifies as access points to Carmanah Walbran. The park’s website lists directions to access the park’s western side and the Ministry of Environment and Parks says that “there are no developed BC Parks facilities or designated BC Parks trails within the [eastern] portion of the park.” But the Ministry of Forests recommended park access routes on both the eastern and western sides of the park, adding that the public could still pass the eastern gates on foot.

For Cressey, using the western side of the park might have been the easiest solution to his locked gate problem. But the road on that side, called Rosander Main, was also blocked, not by gates, but by landslides that had come down in the fall of 2025. 

Neither BC Parks nor the Ministry of Forests have plans to clear the landslides. The responsibility for clearing that road, they say, lies with the logging companies that use it. 

Coste says that’s a problem, calling it “anti-democratic” that a private company can control public access to the park. “It’s a huge concern that access to an iconic provincial park like Carmanah depends on whether or not a private company is logging next to the park.”

As short-term closures at Joffre Lakes Park near Pemberton and Botanical Beach, a popular section of Juan de Fuca Park on Vancouver Island, both of which have instated reconnection periods for rights-holding First Nations members, have prompted an outcry, Coste says it’s notable the ongoing access issues at Carmanah Walbran Park haven’t gotten more attention.

“[Carmanah Walbran] has been closed for 10 times longer than Joffre Lakes will be closed this year,” Coste says. “And not a peep from the folks that are up in arms about the Joffre closure.” 

Among the groups concerned about the Joffre Lakes closures is the Public Land Use Society, an organization whose directors have close ties to the mining and mineral exploration industries, which was founded in 2025 to advocate for public land access. Its former director Caroline Elliott, who joined the society in May 2025 and left in January to run as a leadership candidate for the BC Conservative Party, has been a leading voice in opposing British Columbia’s decision to work with the Líl̓wat and N’Quatqua Nations on annual, short-term closures at Joffre Lakes, calling them an “ancestry-based park closure.” 

When The Narwhal reached out to the Public Land Use Society, its executive director, Warren Mirko, wasn’t aware that Carmanah Walbran Park was closed. 

“[The Public Land Use Society] has not yet heard from the public regarding this site and was unaware of the access issues,” Mirko wrote in an email. But while he agreed it was a concern, he differentiated it from Joffre Lakes, describing the latter as “a deliberate government-supported closure of a popular provincial park.”For Coste, the lack of attention to the Carmanah Walbran issue “underscores that it’s not really about access to the land and access to provincial protected areas” for groups like Mirko’s, but about opposing the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, which was passed with unanimous consent in B.C. in 2019 but has since become a locus of controversy. In his emailed statement, Mirko wrote that the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act and “other issues surrounding government’s reconciliation initiatives and agreements are central matters in respect of public access and provincial governance over Crown land.”

Access to parks is a province-wide problem in B.C.

While Mirko and Coste don’t agree on much when it comes to reconciliation and parks, both have concerns about how British Columbia manages resource roads. While Coste is worried about the road leading to Carmanah Walbran, Mirko is focused on an access road to the Incomappleux Valley near Revelstoke in the B.C. Interior. In June, his organization joined the Quad Riders Association of British Columbia in questioning the province’s decision to decommission the Incomappleux Forest Service Road. 

According to the province, the deactivation is due to road damage and plans to establish a conservancy, a type of park in which human access and natural resource development is limited to preserve ecological, recreational or cultural values, in the upper valley. But Mirko and the Quad Riders argue this closure would unfairly cut off property and trail access, questioning the province’s “authority to proceed” in a press release.The province outlined its authority in a document released in April 2025, citing the Forest and Range Practices Act — the same rationale used to approve the gates east of Carmanah Walbran Park. 

Issues with resource roads are nothing new for Louise Pedersen, executive director of the Outdoor Recreation Council of British Columbia.

“Outdoor recreation in British Columbia has co-evolved with forestry and other types of resource extraction,” Pedersen says. “So a lot of our access uses resource roads.” 

But those roads, Pedersen explains, aren’t managed for recreation. When the logging or mining operations pull out, they decommission the roads and leave them unmaintained, often cutting off access to recreation areas in Crown lands. And with an estimated more than 600,000 kilometres of resource roads criss-crossing the province, it’s a big deal — one that Pedersen says is getting worse. 

“In the last decades, things really have been accelerating,” she says. “With these big climate and weather events that we’ve been having, we are seeing a lot more kinds of disastrous outcomes like flooding and wildfires closing down these resource roads.” On top of that, Pedersen says, there are increasing numbers of “logging companies getting out of areas where they’ve been operating for a long time,” leaving roads unmaintained. In some places this is simply the result of logging operations finishing. In others, it’s being blamed on downturns in the forestry sector and sawmill closures. But whatever the reason, when the companies pull out, the roads revert to the care of the province. 

“When not being actively used for industrial purpose[s] the roads are classified as a ‘wilderness road’ and only maintained to address environmental concerns,” a statement from the Ministry of Forests explained. 

The problem, Pedersen explains, is “the province is not required to facilitate access or maintain these resource roads to support outdoor recreation.” So when you get a case like Carmanah Walbran, where the road was blocked by landslides, and no logging companies are working beyond them, no one is obligated to clear them.

It’s something she hopes British Columbia’s new outdoor recreation strategy will change. Launched in May, the province plans to create “a modernized framework for high-value recreation access and resource roads.”Pedersen isn’t sure yet what that means. But while she’s waiting, the Outdoor Recreation Council has launched a survey to gather information about priority roads where access to trailheads, campsites and parks is currently cut-off or at risk. 

“I’m sure we’ll find that there are going to be many thousands of kilometres that are of very limited interest, but there are some that will just kind of float to the top as priority resource roads,” she says. 

In the meantime, the Carmanah and Walbran valleys remain nearly inaccessible to the public. Coste worries about the long-term implications of cutting off public access to parks, especially ones with threatened ecosystems.  

“When people can’t visit these forests, can’t walk through them and see what’s at stake for themselves, it becomes much easier for old-growth logging to continue out of public view,” Coste says. “Access is a critical part of building public understanding and support for protecting what little remains.”

Updated on July 29, 2026, at 10:00 a.m. PT: This story has been updated to correct the connections between the directors of the Public Land Use Society and the mining and mineral exploration industries. Additionally, Caroline Elliott was previously referred to as a “first slate” director of the society, but joined nearly three months after its incorporation in March 2025.

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.