“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.

Summary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rebuilding a park after disaster strikes

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

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

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

Steer is also optimistic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Replanting a forest with climate change in mind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At recess, Abby Burtnick watches her Grade 4 and 5 students play in the schoolyard that borders an aspen and spruce forest in the Village of Haines Junction, Yukon. 

Known as Dakwäkäda by the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations, meaning “high cache” in Southern Tutchone, the valley is hemmed in by the glacier-capped mountains of neighbouring Kluane National Park and Reserve.

Burtnick’s students “check in,” scanning the bush as they play. From an early age, kids in Haines Junction are taught to confirm there are no grizzly bears or black bears around. Growing up in one of the densest grizzly bear corridors in Yukon — with a range of 14 to 40 grizzly bears per 1,000 square kilometres — kids learn young about the “things you should do in bear country and the things you shouldn’t do,” Burtnick says.

Most kids are unfazed when conservation officers call the school because there’s a bear in the area. When the rules are respected, grizzlies “don’t really cause issues,” Burtnick says. “They just exist.”

In 2024, not one but six grizzly bears were spotted along the five-kilometre trail of the school’s annual cross-country race that loops through a forested ravine. Conservation officers and wildland firefighters fanned out along the race route to ensure that the bears stayed off the trail. Burtnick was at the start-line, holding back 200 students, when she overheard a radio call about a grizzly on the race trail, followed by an update of two grizzlies mating.

The school delayed the race for an hour to give the grizzlies space to breed and move on. It’s the kind of thing that “only happens in the movies,” Burtnick says with a laugh. Or, in Haines Junction.

Communities in B.C. and Alberta are reporting higher rates of human-grizzly interactions and conflict — due, in part, to climate change, shifting food availability and habitat loss, along with more people living and recreating on the landscape. There are reactions ranging from fear to outright intolerance from communities who aren’t accustomed to sharing space with one of Canada’s largest apex predator species. Recently, authorities confirmed that two male subadult grizzly bears had been illegally shot along a highway near Sundre, Alta. 

Meanwhile, the Village of Haines Junction has quietly coexisted with grizzly bears for decades. For First Nations people, millennia. 

Here, people are proud — and even protective, Burtnick says — of the grizzly bears who den in the mountains and wander down to gorge on plants and berries in the valley below.

Grizzly bears in Haines Junction aren’t sold as a tourist commodity in the same way they are in other Canadian towns that overlap with bears — like Banff, Alta., or Churchill, Man. — and residents say they prefer it this way. They don’t want the “bear jams” that crowd highways down south and can lead to grizzlies being killed by vehicle traffic, Burtnick says.

So how does this small mountain community in southwest Yukon make it work? 

‘This is their land’

When John Fingland meets a grizzly bear on a trail, he heeds advice from Elders. He speaks calmly to the bear, addressing him as “Ä́’sía,” the Southern Tutchone word for “grandfather.”

“Bears are very spiritual to us. We treat them like human beings,” Fingland, a member of the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations, says.

Fingland works as a guide and storyteller at the Da Kų Cultural Centre, which showcases his First Nation’s history and culture in Haines Junction. The village was established in 1942 with the construction of the Alaska Highway, which carves east and west through the valley. But the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations, along with the Kluane First Nation and White River First Nation, hunted, fished and travelled through the region for millennia before that.

There’s a kind of code of conduct that develops when you’ve lived so closely with grizzlies for 10,000 years. Fingland doesn’t speak badly or make jokes about bears. He even steps around piles of scat. Stepping over would be considered disrespectful — a show of dominance, he explains.

“We have a very strong belief that this is their land,” Fingland says. But not everyone has the same relationship with bears — or even a relationship at all. Especially tourists. Every summer, upwards of 40,000 people flow through Haines Junction on their way to Kluane National Park — home to the majority of Canada’s tallest mountains — to camp, paddle on Kluane Lake or hike to the Kaskawulsh Glacier.

At the village welcome centre, visitors are directed to the local bakery to buy or rent cans of bear spray. Bear spray contains capsaicin, the chemical compound that gives chili peppers their burning heat, and is considered highly effective at deterring aggressive bear behaviour. A study of 83 incidents of bear spray use from 1985 to 2006 showed 98 per cent of people who carried bear spray in close-range incidents were uninjured. Outside the bakery, there’s a sign with a QR code that links to online instructions for using bear spray. Inside, baristas whip up lattes, and offer essential tips to tourists: Do not spray into the wind.

Some residents carry it, too, even if they’re just out for a stroll. Marguerite Richard, who’s lived in Haines Junction since 1988, says she doesn’t need to see bears to know that they’re around. That’s not to say she’s “bearanoid,” she adds, but rather “situationally aware.” 

While walking, or trail running, Richard doesn’t wear ear buds. She stays alert. In town, Richard sometimes finds grizzly tracks or piles of scat. She’ll even take a closer look to get a read on how recently the bear was around, and what it was feeding on. 

“Coexistence is like a recipe, but it isn’t a teaspoon of this or that,” Richard says. It’s about risk assessment and modifying her own behaviours based on the season, or the bears she encounters.

Richard relies on reports from neighbours and a community-run Facebook page, where a typical photo post might include the caption, “Grizzly out between the airport road and Pine Lake, don’t use the trail!” 

The valley is a smorgasbord for bears. In early spring, grizzlies feed on green grass, dandelions and alpine sweetvetch, known aptly as “bear root,” along the highway. If they get the chance, they’ll prey on moose, sheep or caribou calves, along with smaller mammals like ground squirrels. Berries ripen through the summer into early fall as grizzlies undergo a metabolic state called hyperphagia, an extreme desire to pack on the calories.

It’s when bears are given a chance to habituate to anthropogenic food sources — including garbage, livestock, meat caches or domestic fruit bushes, that trouble comes knocking on people’s doors in Haines Junction. “That’s a really dangerous situation for everybody and that bear is going to die,” Richard says, point-blank.

That’s one law of living with grizzlies that everyone in Haines Junction seems to understand is non-negotiable: a fed bear is a dead bear.

Prevention better than the alternatives

Perhaps no one knows grizzly bears better in Haines Junction than the conservation officers tasked with managing them. Fortunately, according to Russel Oborne, a conservation officer with the Yukon government, responding to a case of food-conditioned grizzlies is a rare occurrence in Haines Junction.

For 26 years, Oborne has lived and worked in various Yukon communities. Nineteen of those years he’s spent in Haines Junction. While every local community is unique in their cultural approach to living with wildlife, he says Haines Junction is one of the most tolerant of coexisting with grizzly bears.

“People are very aware that they can’t have standing garbage on their properties,” Oborne says. “They really understand what you need to do to keep the community safe and keep the bears safe.”

He points to cooperation between the Village of Haines Junction, Yukon government, First Nations governments and Parks Canada to prevent food habituation. They’ve identified areas for potential risk, including a new bike park for youth, where they plan to uproot female soapberry plants — only the female plants produce fruit — this summer.

While agriculture and ranch lands can be “ecological traps” for carnivores, Oborne says the number of farm-related conflicts in Haines Junction are very low. Nataschaa Chatterton lives adjacent to a grizzly bear hot spot along the Alaska Highway, and raises goats, horses and dairy cows, along with free-range chickens. “We’ve never felt any threat,” she says.

Occasionally, she’ll find bear scat along the perimeter of the property. But she’s never had a negative interaction with a grizzly bear. She credits her two land guardian dogs, Pyrenees mixes, for keeping the bears at bay. “I know when there’s a bear around because their bark has a different tone,” she says. “It goes to a deeper tone — it’s a bigger sound.”

Licensed hunters can legally harvest one grizzly bear every three years in the Yukon, however females with cubs are off limits and roadside hunting is prohibited in some areas. In a recent government survey of 700 resident hunters, nearly half indicated that they’d only harvest a grizzly bear in a conflict situation. The majority of hunters reported efforts to mitigate such a scenario with a grizzly, including that after a successful hunt, they’d take the meat only and leave behind the gut-pile — the latter which is strong-smelling and a major bear attractant.

Yukon Conservation, along with Champagne and Aishihik First Nations and Kluane First Nation, have mobile electric fencing units that hunters can temporarily use while they process the meat, Oborne says. 

“People will hang a moose for about a week before they cut it up,” he says. “Of course, it’s just this delicious-smelling dead moose to a grizzly bear.”

There have been incidents in the past with grizzlies hanging around unfenced meat caches. Oborne advises people to process and get the meat into freezers, as quickly as possible, and remove bones and other attractants. “Usually, that solves the problem,” he says.

If it doesn’t, Oborne adds, there are protocols in place to capture and relocate bears — if they haven’t shown aggression towards people. Worst-case scenario, and an outcome that nobody wants, Oborne says, they euthanize. “It’s a really hard cycle to break with the bears once they’re into attractants.”

While relocation is often perceived by the public as a “good news story,” Oborne says, most conservation officers know that there’s a high probability of the grizzly wandering back, especially if it’s a male. Even if it’s been moved 300 kilometres or more from the original location. Sometimes bears return in worse body condition, even more motivated to find food.

Relocation and euthanization are a last resort, Oborne says. He encourages residents to prevent food conditioning from occurring in the first place by keeping a clean property, or camp. “The proactive is way better than the reactive course of action,” he says.

Practical steps Haines Junction has taken to support grizzly bear coexistence

A gang of glossy black ravens perch on a small mountain of garbage at the Haines Junction landfill. 

Beyond the heaps of trash, you can make out a five-foot-tall fence — consisting of seven steel wires — running around the entire perimeter of the dump. A current of 10,000 volts runs through those wires: one touch to a curious bear’s snout, and ZAP! It’s an effective way to teach a bear you’re not welcome here without harming it.

In 1992, Haines Junction became the first Yukon community to electrify its garbage dump, Dan Drummond says. Drummond, a retired conservation officer who worked here from 1986 to 2007, says previously “all the dumps were open to all wildlife.” Black bears frequented the dump during the summer, while grizzly bears — most often big males who wandered over from Kluane — tended to dominate in early to late fall. Locals and tourists also used to flock there to take photographs. The combination of attractants and attention led bears to become dangerously habituated to people. 

“Human waste was available to bears at the bear’s discretion,” Drummond says. “Bears died at an unreasonable rate because of their proximity to people and people’s garbage.”

Drummond was a part of the village’s effort to secure funding and install a trial 300-metre electric fence around the pit. It was part of a broader North America-wide movement from the late 1970s to early 1990s to improve bear management practices around garbage dumps in high-density wildlife areas. 

The fence was immediately effective, Drummond says. One zap and the bears got the point. 

The community of Faro followed suit, then Whitehorse, he says. Today, all communities in the Yukon have electric fences installed around their landfills, or waste facilities. 

Following the dump enclosure, however, many bears had to be put down. Mature bears who’d spent their entire life gorging on garbage were conditioned to source it elsewhere. Some diverted to the neighbouring community of Champagne to raid meat caches and outdoor freezers, Drummond says. Dozens were shot.

Some residents remember the story of a grizzly, dubbed the “burglar bear,” smashing through a residential door at night, tempted by a Thanksgiving turkey carcass left in a garbage bag. The only barrier between the bear and the owner and her two young children was a plastic baby gate. Quietly, she and her children escaped through the bedroom window. Later, it was determined the same bear had broken into cabins along Dezadeash Lake, more than 40 kilometres away.

Drummond shot the burglar bear from a helicopter, he says.

Once you “break the cycle” with those food-conditioned bears, “you’re dealing with wild bears, and it’s not so hard to keep them out of the dump.”

Two years ago, the Haines Junction dump expanded into a regional waste facility. There’s a recycling depot, which will soon be joined by a composter, all enclosed by an electric fence. The only wildlife spotted inside, an attendant says, are eagles and ravens. 

They haven’t had an issue with a bear in nearly a decade.

The laws of living with grizzlies

Ellen Bielawski has stopped counting how many grizzlies she’s seen near her off-grid cabin, situated in a dense spruce forest west of Haines Junction toward the Alsek Valley. 

But some encounters stand out, including the night she stepped outside to brush her teeth and looked up to see a mother grizzly and her two yearling cubs, less than 20 metres away. Shocked, everything Bielawski knew about bear encounters went flying out the window. “Did I remember to face the bear? I ran into the cabin with my electric toothbrush,” she laughs.

The retired archeologist and professor has lived here for the past 20 years. She previously worked in the Arctic in polar bear country, where she slept in a tent with a loaded rifle by her side.

But here, grizzly bears tend to keep to themselves, Bielawski says. 

“People have always said to me, ‘Aren’t you afraid of bears?’ And I say, ‘I’m way less afraid of bears than I am being a woman alone in a parkade in the city.’ ”

Recently, she and her husband cut down and cleared trees and bushes within 30 metres around the cabin to make it less susceptible to wildfires. The catch-22 is an increase in grizzly susceptibility, as disturbed forest promotes the fresh growth of bear foods like grass and berries. But the upside is that it’s now easier to see if a grizzly bear is around, Bielawski says, and they can avoid surprise encounters.

She’s extra cautious in the spring when bears come out of the den, motivated to find food and mate, and fall, when bears are preparing to hibernate. “I worry far more about November bears than I do the rest of the year,” she says. In late November 2018, a woman and her baby were fatally attacked at their remote trapping cabin in east-central Yukon by an emaciated grizzly bear that hadn’t yet denned. Authorities determined that the bear didn’t have enough body fat to hibernate. 

Bielawski avoids recreating at dawn or dusk, when grizzlies tend to be more active. Even walking out to the clothesline, less than ten metres away from her cabin, she carries an air-horn on one hip and bear spray on the other.

But the Alsek Valley is notoriously windy, with katabatic winds barreling through the valley at 100 kilometres an hour. It’s not an ideal place to detonate a can of pepper spray.

She’d like to see more workshops that allow participants the chance to fire an inert can of bear spray, and to understand how many seconds the contents of a can lasts for (roughly eight seconds). Adrenaline, Bielawski says, has the potential to take over in human-bear encounters. “It’s flight or fight,” she says. 

Although bear attacks are rare in Haines Junction, they have occurred in the past. On June 30, 2024, a resident was jogging with her dog along the Pine Lake trail which runs along the highway, east of town, when she came upon multiple grizzlies. There had been many sightings of family groups and courting pairs, grazing on grasses in the ditch, that spring, Oborne tells me. The dog broke free from its leash and triggered a defensive attack by one of the bears, who then turned on the jogger, according to a statement made by Yukon Conservation.

The jogger was critically mauled and required hospitalization, but survived — along with the dog. A recent study of human-bear conflicts found “the presence of a dog more than doubled the odds of a bear conflict.”

Conservation officers put down three bears. Weeks later, the willows along the trail were cleared and mulched to improve visibility along the trail. Yukon Conservation, along with the village council, also put up a cautionary sign that reads: “This path is a high-use area for grizzly bears. Encounters are likely.” It encourages people to carry bear spray and keep dogs leashed. 

One source described the 2024 attack as a “lightning rod” for conversation in the community, questioning why a recreational trail would be built through a well-known grizzly bear corridor — and why the jogger, a resident, chose to run late in the evening, without bear spray. Others expressed frustration that the bears were euthanized when it had been a defensive attack. Another indicated support for the conservation officers’ call. Ultimately, everyone was relieved that the individual survived. 

But no one raised the question of whether or not grizzlies belong.

Bear 141

As Burtnick drives to school, she scans the ditches for a small female grizzly bear that has been showing up in the community every spring since 2023. She’s easy to identify due to a visible scar around her neck where a wire had been wrapped. The grizzly has become colloquially known to people as “Snare Bear,” Burtnick says. 

To conservation officers, she’s known as Bear 141, Oborne says. In 2023, he and his colleagues attempted to capture the small grizzly and remove the wire from her neck, but after a few days, she disappeared. He didn’t think she’d survive the winter. 

Much to his surprise, Bear 141 returned in the spring of 2024, grazing comfortably beside the highway. Fortunately, the wire had fallen off. Although she hadn’t displayed any aggression, or caused any issues, they decided to relocate her 200 kilometres northwest of town near the Donjek River — for her own safety, Oborne says.

“Of course, she came right back to Haines Junction.” 

But the small female kept to herself and didn’t cause any trouble, so they let her stay. Last year, Burtnick and fellow teachers traded stories of their Bear 141 sightings, routinely spotted grazing in her habitual location along the same recreational trail where the attack occurred. 

“I actually think they’ve got this attachment to her,” Burtnick says, adding that residents feel protective of her when tourists idle in their vehicles, along the shoulder of the highway, taking photographs of the grizzly. “They want her to stay wild,” Burtnick says.

 By late June, no one had reported seeing Bear 141 yet this year. But if the small grizzly does amble back to her favourite spot along the recreational trail again, says Oborne, they’ll leave her be.

“She’s doing what a bear should do.”

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

On an hour-long drive from Vancouver to the heart of B.C.’s Fraser Valley, I contemplate the most professional way to ask if I can pet this cat I’m about to meet. There’s journalistic value to being able to describe its fur, I imagine arguing, as I drive past bucolic fields and cheerless industrial parks. In the end, I don’t need to ask at all. “Do you want to feed him?” Mike Hopcraft says, holding out a dish of raw chunks of beef and a pair of long metal tweezers, as the cat glowers beside me. 

My commitment to gonzo cat journalism is wavering at the sight of my subject, who isn’t a typical pet. He’s a serval: a wild cat native to Africa who is, improbably, lounging on a grey couch in the nondescript warehouse that houses an animal rescue centre in Abbotsford. His name, even more improbably, is Gary. He growls and hisses impatiently as I tentatively extend a cube of meat before lunging across my lap to reach it. While Gary eats, I stroke him gently; his tawny fur, streaked and spotted with black, is as plush as I imagined. 

In the wild, servals are sinuous, slender and long-legged, like deadly feline supermodels with huge, pointed ears. At a sprint, they can reach speeds of 80 kilometres per hour. They leap two metres to snatch birds out of the air, and pounce on rodents or snakes with deadly accuracy; an individual serval is more likely to catch its prey than a pride of lions hunting together. An adult serval weighs up to 40 pounds, roughly the same size as a coyote or a six-year-old child. If Gary were to sit on my lap like a regular cat, I would have to look up at him — a terrifying prospect, now that I’ve seen him demolish a beef cube. For some people, I can imagine, this is the appeal. “It’s basically the biggest cat you can get that looks like a cheetah, without being a fucking cheetah,” Hopcraft says. 

Gary, however, does not look like a cheetah, or his wild cousins in Africa. He is pear-shaped and shamboling, his gait hindered by degenerative disc disease, a common affliction among servals in captivity. He also suffers from feline hyperesthesia syndrome, which causes cats extreme sensitivity to touch around their back and tail and can lead to self-mutilation. Shortly after Hopcraft rescued him in January 2025, Gary chewed his tail off while confined. Hopcraft has avoided caging him since, and lets him roam free, like the world’s biggest barn cat.

He now takes Prozac, stuffed surreptitiously into one of his daily beef cubes, for anxiety. He was declawed as a kitten — a brutal, previously common elective surgery, outlawed in B.C. in 2018, in which the claw and last bone of each toe is amputated — which means if he escaped, as pet servals often do, he would be helpless. 

Gary spent the first nine years of his life on Vancouver Island, until his owners divorced and surrendered him; Hopcraft, who runs an exotic animal rescue called Wild Education, took him in him after some hesitation. “I’ve worked with servals in the past on film sets and they’re crazy,” Hopcraft says. But it became clear that nobody else wanted him, so Hopcraft couldn’t say no. “In the end, we took him in, and he’s been doing amazing.”

When he’s not on the couch, he wanders among the aquariums and enclosures in the back of the rescue centre, full of Hopcraft’s other rescues: ferrets and chinchillas, tortoises and iguanas, scorpions and tarantulas, an inquisitive blue-and-gold macaw. There are hundreds of animals here, but only one of them is now illegal to buy or sell in B.C.: Gary. 

In May, the province amended its Controlled Alien Species Regulation to prohibit the “breeding, transport and future ownership” of non-domestic, non-native cat species, a category that includes servals, caracals, ocelots and a number of other species. (Large exotic cats, like tigers and lions, have been illegal to possess in B.C. since 2010.) Hopcraft and other exotic cat lovers can keep their pets, provided they apply for a permit by May 2027. Doing so requires signing away their rights to visitors. These cats can only interact with members of their households; in other words, my visit with Gary will soon be prohibited by provincial law. Violating the law could mean a fine of up to $250,000, a two-year prison sentence or both.

A deadly history of exotic cats in B.C. 

It’s impossible to say how many non-native wild cats are kept as pets in this province, because their breeding and ownership has always been unregulated. By email, the B.C. government admitted they “do not have this information.” But among the uncountable exotic cats, servals — which are often crossed with domestic cats to produce a hybrid species called a savannah — seem to be the most popular species. 

It’s equally hard to pinpoint when they entered the Canadian pet trade, but by the early 2000s there were ads in B.C. newspapers offering serval cubs for sale. But pet servals were in North America before that; the Long Island Ocelot Club, an association of exotic cat owners and enthusiasts, was founded in 1956. In 1986, the club issued an exciting announcement in their newsletter: a female Siamese cat and male serval had fathered a kitten in Pennsylvania. 

The new hybrid was called a savannah, the first of the eponymous breed, and soon took off in popularity. (Intriguingly, 1986 was also the year Savannah took off as a popular name for baby girls, according to the U.S. Social Security Administration.) Savannahs are categorized by how recently descended they are from servals: a filial 1, or F1, has a serval parent, while an F2 is bred from an F1 savannah and another domestic cat. (The same genetic terminology is applied in botany; peppermint, for instance, is an F1 descendant of spearmint and watermint.) Under the updated legislation, savannah cats remain legal — provided they’re at least four generations away from a serval. The trouble is, many people want a lot of serval in the mix. This is evident on breeder websites, in which prices descend along with generations: a savannah breeder in Quebec tells me first-generation savannah cats are priced between $15,000 and $22,000, while one in Kelowna, B.C., gives a range of $18,000 to $30,000. 

Much of the time, these servals and near-serval hybrids fly under the radar — except when they escape, which they’re pretty good at. Just last month, a pet serval was spotted under a porch in Vancouver, prompting a call to police. Sara Dubois, the senior director of animal welfare science and standards at the BC SPCA, tells me she knows of at least four other pet servals currently on the loose in B.C.: two reported on Vancouver Island and another two in the Lower Mainland. 

Restricting all exotic wild cats — those that are neither domesticated nor native to Canada — has been a long time coming, Dubois says. In May 2007, one of three pet tigers kept on a rural property near 100 Mile House, B.C., by a man named Kim Carlton, reached through the bars of its cage and clawed the leg of Carlton’s fiancée, Tanya Dumstrey-Soos; she bled to death in front of her teenage son. The incident prompted the B.C. ministers of environment and agriculture to meet with the SPCA to “prevent similar tragedies,” though at the time they declined to comment on any outright bans. Still, the province developed the controlled species regulation in 2009, restricting ownership of certain exotic animals. By the time this new law came into force, Carlton had procured two new lion cubs to replace his tigers. “I still cry every day because I miss [Tanya],” he told The Province, but “life has to go on.” 

After the incident, the SPCA asked for all exotic species to be listed in the regulation, but the government was just focused on “public safety,” Dubois says. Animals like tigers, monkeys and cobras were banned, but one could — and can still — procure a kangaroo or a zebra. And until recently, smaller exotic cats like servals — basically anything bigger than a tabby, but smaller than a cheetah — were unregulated.

But more than a decade later in July 2019, 10 adult servals and three kittens were seized from a breeder in Little Fort, B.C., about an hour north of Kamloops, after numerous complaints of sick and injured animals being sold. The investigation revealed “horrific” conditions, attracting enough attention to push the issue forward, but Dubois says there wasn’t sufficient support from the government until the 2024 election of Randene Neill as MLA for Powell River-Sunshine Coast. A former journalist, she had covered BC SPCA stories and was now the minister of water, land and resource stewardship. According to Dubois, Neill supported updating the regulation. (The minister and her staff declined to speak with The Narwhal for this story, but provided written answers to questions, as is typical when we reach out for an interview.) 

The challenge with changing cat laws

A basic challenge for the updated legislation, which allows existing owners to keep their exotic pets as long as they register them by next May, is that no one knows how many of those exotic pets there are, or even how many breeders. “Unless you have neighbours reporting that there’s something suspicious happening, we might never know,” Dubois says. And of course, not everyone wants to be a snitch. One resident of Sooke, B.C. — a hotbed of serval breeding and ownership based on the number of escaped animals reported in recent years — messaged me on Facebook to say a serval had been killing pets in her neighbourhood, but asked that I not mention her name in this article. “I don’t want my neighbours to hate me,” she wrote.

For owners like Hopcraft, the new laws are “a disaster.” He will have to submit an application detailing evidence of a secure enclosure where Gary will be kept, as well as a public safety plan in the event of escape. He also needs to demonstrate Gary’s welfare is taken into account, describing his diet, comfort, veterinary care and “freedom to express behaviours that promote well-being.” Gary, who currently has free rein in his warehouse, will have to be confined to a ministry-approved enclosure and will no longer be able to socialize with anyone outside of Hopcraft’s immediate family, including his staff. 

Hopcraft worries about Gary’s quality of life. In its announcement, the ministry wrote exotic cats “can pose risks to public safety, pets and wildlife,” though Hopcraft is skeptical of this justification. “When is the last time you heard of a serval attacking someone?” he asks. “Never, because they’re not that kind of animal.” 

The Narwhal asked the B.C. government if they had identified any known attacks on humans by servals. It did not directly answer the question; instead, it wrote public safety was “one of several factors considered” when updating the legislation. The tendency of escaped servals to kill other pets, however, is well-documented. 

For the BC SPCA, Dubois says, the priority is animal welfare. “But you know, that argument hasn’t been enough for the government to be concerned as well. They need to see some other reasons why this might be important for their policy agenda.” (By email, the government told The Narwhal, “The amendments reflect a precautionary and proportionate approach that accounts for the full range of potential risks to people, animals and ecosystems, while recognizing that existing animals can continue to be safely and humanely cared for under permit.”) 

The only thing more challenging than keeping a serval might be giving one up. Zoos won’t take exotic cats from the province’s unregulated pet trade, Dubois says, because there’s no way to determine the animal’s lineage, which means they can’t be used for breeding. The BC SPCA won’t take them either because “they’re not safe to have in our facilities,” Dubois says. Last year, during the forest fires on Vancouver Island, one owner reached out to ask if the BC SPCA could shelter his two servals. “We said, sorry, but no. Our enclosures are not set up, our staff are not trained. This is something you have to think about as an owner.” 

But people are probably not thinking about natural disasters or rehoming plans when they get a serval. They’re probably thinking: how cute! “It doesn’t help that social media is just exploding with these,” Dubois says; one Instagram account, Chloe the Serval, has more than 817,000 followers. “People do not know what they are getting into with these exotic cats.”

“Servals should not be available for pets,” Hopcraft says. “But when they put blanket laws in place, they screw over the rescues as well. The animals suffer in the end — because there is nowhere for them to go. There is nowhere for a serval in B.C. to go.” 

There is, in fact, nowhere at all in Canada for an unwanted serval to go. To surrender a pet serval, owners must look south of the border.

The reality of purchasing a wild animal 

The first exotic cat in Ian Ford’s life arrived in 1996, from a classified ad in an Oregon newspaper that caught his mother Cheryl’s eye: a “hybrid bobcat kitten.” It soon became apparent that BoBo was pure bobcat and not well-suited to living in a house. For one thing, he couldn’t be litter box-trained. (Neither can servals, according to everyone interviewed for this story, most of whom brought it up without being asked.) Cheryl was advised to euthanize BoBo or release him into the woods, but instead she transformed their eight-acre property in the Portland, Oregon, suburbs into a registered nonprofit cat sanctuary. 

Soon, Ford says, more cats arrived: a Canadian lynx. Two servals. A mountain lion. In 2010, their first tigers. “It just kind of snowballed from there.” Today, Ford is the administration director of WildCat Ridge Sanctuary, an 80-acre property an hour south of Portland. It’s home to around 85 exotic cats — or, as Ford calls them, residents. “We consider ourselves a retirement home,” he says. “They’re here to live out their life in as much comfort and dignity as possible.” 

It might also be fair to call it a palliative care ward. “The premise of everything we’re doing is to make it so that these animals — who didn’t need to be born, and certainly didn’t need to be born in captivity, who will essentially be in prison their entire lives — will at least have grass,” he says.  

WildCat Ridge is a no-contact facility — even the staff don’t get to pet the cats — and closed to the public. But from his couch, Ford can hear lions calling to one another while he plays video games. They have cats of all sizes: caracals, which look a bit like cougars with huge tufted ears, and Asian leopard cats, which are housecat-sized and deceptively adorable, and tigers, which everyone can already picture. And servals. Lots of servals.

“We have probably 30 servals,” Ford says, and six or seven have come from Canada. Each week, the sanctuary fields calls from more people who have exotic cats or hybrid offspring. Often, Ford says, they don’t even know what they really have on their hands, thanks to an unregulated market and unscrupulous breeders. 

Many animals arrive with injuries or disabilities. Often they’re declawed or missing teeth; one cat arrived with a pierced ear, Ford recalls, because its owners “thought it was cool.” Then there’s metabolic bone disease, where the animal’s skeleton weakens and decays because of a poor diet, leading to broken bones, arthritis and chronic pain. It’s primarily caused by nutritional deficiencies, as animals that should be catching and eating whole prey are given ground beef and dry cat food instead. Six of the servals at WildCat Ridge, Ford says, suffer from metabolic bone disease.

I think about Gary, lumbering painfully around his warehouse; his former owners, Hopcraft told me, used to feed him hot dogs. (In addition to beef cubes, Gary is now fed whole rats native to Africa, which Hopcraft breeds himself.)

The neglect and suffering Ford witnesses among his feline residents has made him jaded, he says, but he tries to have compassion for the owners who call him pleading for help. 

“I try to remember the human side of it too — people have just exhausted every possible thing. And, just like my mom, despite the fact that they made a horrible decision at first, they are trying to do the right thing.” 

A guardian angel for regretful exotic cat owners

Kelly Brook Allen is one of the people who tried to do the right thing. Fifteen years ago, she received a serval kitten from a breeder in Coquitlam, B.C., in exchange for designing a website. She named him Tigger. But in 2012, he escaped her Langley home during a storm; despite a blitz of attention from news outlets and social media, as well as the services of a professional pet tracker, he was never recaptured. Allen was devastated. The breeder, in sympathy, gave her a new serval: a five-week-old female named Duma, the Swahili word for cheetah. Allen put a tracking collar on her. If she knew then what she knows now, she says, she would have never taken either cat.

To supply Duma with a healthy diet, Allen purchased rodents in bulk from a supplier in Ontario, shipping them by air to B.C. every six weeks, and a neighbour next door raised rabbits to supplement Duma’s diet. “It cost $1,100 a month to feed her properly,” she says. Duma was beloved — but wild. “She almost killed my Jack Russell [terrier] twice — she had him by the neck.”

Breeders, she says, don’t give buyers enough information about how to care for their new pets. “People, like me, get them — and then you realize, you can’t house train them,” she says. “Anything F4 and above, they piss anywhere. They poop anywhere. They don’t bury their crap anywhere. And if they get out, they’ll be gone.” 

After the servals in Little Fort were seized, Allen began planning for Duma’s future. “I had her for 10 years, I was committed to her, I wanted to keep her,” she says. “But they were really pushing for a ban in B.C., so I started looking for sanctuaries.” She found WildCat Ridge, and obtained a permit to transport Duma across the border. But it was the summer of 2021 — the border was still closed to non-essential travel due to COVID-19, and much of the province was on fire. Allen was evacuated, and Duma spent three weeks in the back of a horse trailer. “Finally, I phoned down to the border and said, ‘Listen, my husband has a commercial licence. Can he drive this cat down to Oregon, and come back without getting a fine?’ And they said, ‘Absolutely.’ ”

For two years, Allen was unable to visit Duma. Then she got a call about a doctor on Vancouver Island with an F1 savannah who had prompted complaints from the neighbours. Allen called him, picked up the cat, had her spayed and drove her down to WildCat Ridge. Finally, she got to see Duma, who approached the edge of her enclosure and gazed at Allen for a long moment. Then she was gone. 

Allen has transported other servals and savannahs to WildCat Ridge, becoming a kind of guardian angel for regretful owners trying to finally do the right thing. She’s glad to see the updated legislation, but she doesn’t think enforcing it will be easy for anyone. 

“It’s going to be really tough for people to surrender their pets,” she says. “And how are they going to find half of them? They don’t know where they are.” 

Behind the walls of an exotic cat breeding den: ‘It was horrendous’

Carla Edge has more experience with servals than most people. Formerly a special provincial constable with the BC SPCA — tasked with enforcing laws around pet ownership and animal cruelty — Edge was responsible for the North Thompson and Cariboo regions. “I covered over 50,000 square kilometres on my own,” she says, a region that included Little Fort. “It was a huge area.” She knew of caracal owners in the province, but servals were the exotic cat species she became most familiar with. “Maybe they’re less aggressive than others, but they can cause a lot of damage,” she says. 

In her role, Edge could execute search warrants in cases of reported animal cruelty and had received reports from veterinarians of breeders in Little Fort who were selling servals with “serious metabolic disease.” That breeder, Edge adds, would put kittens in her bag to sneak them over the border for buyers in the United States. 

When Edge searched the Little Fort property, she and her fellow officers found 13 cats in total in a home and two RVs, confined to small spaces with the windows blacked out. The rooms, Edge says, reeked of urine and were caked with old, dried feces.

“It was very dark in the rooms as well. The trailers had windows that had been painted black, but over time that paint had worn off and you could see inside … the level of feces and ammonia, rotting food — it was horrendous … absolutely horrible.” 

The cats were removed, and transferred to sanctuaries in the United States, but the course of action was complicated by the lack of regulation. “Servals always fell in a grey zone,” Edge says, neither listed as controlled alien species nor domestic enough to treat as regular pets. Neither zoos nor the SPCA wanted to deal with them, and no single body took responsibility for them. 

Now the government is taking responsibility for exotic cats. “There is going to be a ton of pushback from serval owners,” Edge says. “It’s going to be a tough go.” Everyone thinks their pet is special, and many of them love their pets enough to break the rules. 

“I know of animal owners on the island, in Abbotsford — they are all over,” she says. And those owners are secretive, she adds. In 2023, Edge says, she and Allen were both contacted by someone looking for help rehoming two cats. “I was under the impression that these were the only two servals she had,” Edge says. “Turns out, she still has a couple more.” 

Edge has since left the BC SPCA to become a social worker, but she has spent most of her life in law enforcement. “And there isn’t another enforcement agency out there that has to cover the amount of legislation a [conservation officer] does,” she says. “So yeah, adding this to their plate — they’re going to have to make the determination of where the priorities come.” (By email, the Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship said, “Officers receive special training to handle the variety of reptiles and exotic animals that fall under [the controlled alien species regulation].”)

Finding the animals is one challenge. But the province’s plan relies, in part, on conservation officers being able to identify the difference between a now-restricted serval and a legal savannah hybrid. In 2022, a large cat was spotted in a residential Vancouver neighbourhood, and the province’s conservation officer service was dispatched. Later, they posted triumphantly on Twitter: “It wasn’t a cougar, cheetah or 200 pound jaguar. It was a savannah cat!” But many experts disagreed with their assessment — including Dubois, who told CBC Vancouver it was likely a serval. 

Edge is happy the legislation has come in but isn’t sure how it’s going to be enforced. “What’s going to happen to these animals? Should they be removed from those owners now? That I’m very curious about.” Edge has sent many servals to sanctuaries in the United States, including WildCat Ridge Sanctuary in Oregon — but she knows that most of those sanctuaries are full. There are too many of these exotic cats, and nowhere for them to go. 

A confession

Why all this interest in exotic cats? From the government, from the millions of Instagram users following serval accounts, from this particular journalist writing thousands of words about obscure pets and unruly legislation? There’s a simple answer: I have one of my own.

Well, sort of: I have a savannah cat, a fact I disclosed to everyone interviewed in this story, partly for transparency and partly to see if they’d ask for a photo. (“He is stunning,” Allen texted, gratifyingly.)

Like many owners of exotic cats, I obtained Azzy through unofficial channels. While visiting my sister in 2018, I met her new foster pet: a sinuous silver cat with huge ears, surrendered by his previous owners for being too challenging. Each night he slept on the guest bed with me, and in the morning I would wake up to find his paw in my outstretched hand. It felt like he was already mine; logic didn’t really enter into the decision. At the end of the week, I took him on a five-hour flight home, a harrowing experience I am still trying to forget. I have no access to his veterinary records, and I don’t know his pedigree. “By the look of his nose, he could be F4 or higher,” Allen texted, which is a chilling thought; any higher than F4, and Azzy too would fall under the same regulations as Gary. But then again, how could I know for sure? 

Azzy, like Gary, seems ill-suited to domesticity in some ways. He’s around 12 years old now — I’ll never know his exact age — but as a younger cat, he would literally bounce off the walls. Though he weighs 11 pounds, a typical size for an ordinary house cat, his long legs enable him to scale a refrigerator in a single leap. Like Gary, he takes Prozac for anxiety, which seems to calm him down. He still sleeps in bed with me each night and spends much of the workday intruding on my Zoom calls. I love him as best I can. But should I own him? Should anyone?

“A lot of people think, why put all this time and effort into it?” says Dubois, of the BC SPCA’s seven-year campaign to restrict ownership of exotic cats. Some see it as government overreach; others think owning an exotic cat is no big deal. “But it sends a message: we should not be breeding wild animals with domestic animals, we should keep our communities safe by having appropriate animals, and we should regulate breeding in general.” After the controlled alien species regulation was first introduced, people worried big cat owners would go underground too, she says, but that didn’t happen. A decade from now, she’s optimistic fewer exotic cats will be in B.C., living lives they were never meant for. 

Admittedly, it’s a regional solution to a broader problem: two breeders contacted by The Narwhal declined to be interviewed but said they were moving their cats to Ontario and Quebec where there aren’t the same restrictions. Gradually, the loopholes are closing, but not fast enough to prevent more Canadians from bringing an exotic cat home. There is still a market for them. And for tortoises, and tarantulas, and chameleons — all the hundreds of other rescues under Hopcraft’s care, still legal to breed and sell. 

When I peered into Hopcraft’s enclosures, at a drowsy chameleon or a skittish hedgehog, I found myself thinking about the day I took my first child home from the hospital. I could not believe that the nurses and doctors were content to let us take her home when we so clearly had no idea what we were doing. And yet, the logic of pet ownership has always been the same: the desire alone — to be responsible for another helpless living thing — is enough to claim it as a right. 

Laws are necessary, as we recognize animal neglect and cruelty as intolerable. But they are not exhaustive, and they can’t correct for our human failings: our impulses and desires, our short-sightedness, our greed. When desire outpaces reason, and owners find themselves in over their heads, it becomes everyone’s problem. Solving the riddle of human nature is beyond the reach of any law.

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Summary

• While Black and racialized farm workers make up a large chunk of the country’s agricultural workforce, Black farm owners are still a slim minority in Canada.
• This wasn’t always the case, and historical Black Canadian settlements, like the Black Settlement in Oro Township near Barrie, Ont., provided land and housing for Black farmers in the early 19th century.
• One of the primary barriers to farm access and ownership is the high cost of land; programs like farm rentals and urban farms are trying to bridge the gap.

Along a dusty bike trail of crushed gravel, the blue-grey waters of Kempenfelt Bay shimmer through large trees with leafy branches overhead. On one side stands an Ontario Heritage Trust plaque, recognizing the historic Black community of Oro, Ont. 

On bicycle rides along the Great Lakes Waterfront Trail, I ride for fun and adventure and to find the Black history hidden in the countryside. As a scholar and writer, I research how race intersects with nature. In this case, it is how farming and farmlands — a part of nature we can all connect with — criss-cross with race.

In southwestern Ontario, I’ve taken detours to visit the former Black villages known as the Buxton Settlement and the Puce River Community, near the border with Detroit. In other places I look for Ontario Heritage plaques, old churches and fading headstones in unregistered cemeteries. These are often the only indicators that Black communities once thrived in rural Ontario and that Black farmers owned their farms.

In the 19th century, the area around Lake Simcoe, including Oro (now Oro-Medonte), was filled with Black farmers and their families. There are similar heritage plaques scattered across rural areas and small towns in Ontario such as Fergus, Cainsville, Lucan and Dresden. Once a common sight, today Black farm owners are rare, while Black farm workers are a backbone of agricultural labour in Canada. Each year, some 36,000 Black and brown farm workers come to Canada for the farming season.

The average age of a farmer is 56 years in Canada. They are getting old and tired, greying out of the years of dawn-to-dusk work on the farm. While there has been an increase in the number of female farmers, one statistic has barely changed — the tiny number of Black, Indigenous and racialized farmers. In Ontario, only five per cent of farmers are from diverse ethnocultural groups, which includes racialized groups.

Yet, in Toronto, some 56 per cent of the population is racialized, according to Statistics Canada. This demographic drift is not reflected in farming. So, where will the next generation of young farmers come from in Ontario? Who will grow the food that we all need to eat and live?

Farmland is precious to both farmers and non-farmers, but the competition for farmland is fierce. Data from Ontario Farmland Trust shows Ontario has lost 18 per cent of its farmland in recent decades to urban development and aggregate mining. Each day, Ontario is losing 319 acres, or 129 hectares, of farmland to development. Once the farmland is paved over, it is lost forever.

“The number one issue is access to land for Black farmers,” Claire Perttula, president of the BIPOC caucus of the National Farmers Union, said. “Land is so expensive. To put together a down payment you need millions. Working in agriculture you won’t make that down payment.” 

Created in 2021, the caucus represents racialized farmers, land stewards and farm workers from across the country. It builds community and advocates for their interests.

“Farmland should be treated as a public good and not just as a private one for profit,” Perttula said. “We need a different system of farm ownership and use that would prioritize the people farming the land. This helps them make a go of it and earn a living.”

No Black farmers but lots of Black farm workers

Cycling along the backroads of the Niagara Wine Route in Ontario, I passed scores of Black men tending to grapevines in vineyards, apples in orchards and peas and beans in fields. I stopped to chat with them as they were the only other Black people I had seen so far that summer in the countryside. The men were Jamaican and migrant farm workers. 

Farm workers till the land, plant the seeds and harvest the crops. In Canada, those farm workers are most likely to be Black or brown. The labourers are migrants from the Caribbean, Mexico and Latin America who are hired under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program. Each year, they arrive in Canada in the spring, and must leave in autumn when their contracts end. Nearly half of all agricultural workers in Canada are hired under this program. They labour in every province where there are farms. Some farm workers have been coming to Canada for decades. As temporary foreign workers, they are mostly ineligible for citizenship.

On the other side of the country, Jamaican migrant workers also labour in the wineries and orchards of the Okanagan Valley, B.C. I now expect to see them everywhere in my travels in rural areas or small towns. So why the stark racial divide in farming in Canada, where white farmers reap the profits and Black and brown farm workers sweat under the sun? 

Free farmland for some

In the United States, Black farmers were proverbially promised “40 acres and a mule” — immortalized in the name of Spike Lee’s film production company — a reparation of sorts, at the end of slavery. No such promises were made to formerly enslaved people in Canada, when slavery was abolished here in 1834. 

White homesteaders, however, got their free acres of land under various land grant schemes. In Ontario, for instance, the 1868 Free Grants and Homestead Act gave free land to farmers, who got the title and legal ownership if they cleared the forested land and built a farmhouse within five years. Roads to support colonization were constructed across the province to make it easier for the settlers to arrive and claim their free land. The railways did the same across the country a few decades later. The free farmland was, and still is, all Indigenous land.

The only land scheme in southern Ontario that was specifically for Black people was the Black Settlement in Oro Township, near Barrie, Ont. The free land grants were in part a reward for the Black veterans who fought to protect Canada in the War of 1812 when the United States invaded. However, over time the settlement faded as the land was poor for farming, and it was too far from major roads and thus difficult to reach markets to sell the produce. 

“The problem is not just for Black farmers alone, but it’s worst for them,” Bamidele Adekunle said. He is an adjunct professor at the University of Guelph, and co-editor of the book Eat Local, Taste Global: How Ethnocultural Food Reaches Our Tables.

“It’s the commodification of land,” Adekunle said. “There is a serious competition between real estate and agriculture for land. When land is commodified, its use moves to things that are more profitable. It moves out of the reach of most farmers.”

Access to modern farmland is a massive challenge for any new farmer. Those that don’t inherit the family farm can buy their own, but only if they have the money, and prices are increasing each year. In 2024 the price for a hectare of farmland and buildings in Ontario was $20,782.

Consider an average city block is roughly one hectare in size. The average size of a farm in Ontario is now 249 acres, or 100 hectares. That means an average commercial farm in Ontario costs about $5 million. This means that small family-owned farms are fading into the past along with milk pails, churning butter by hand and Anne of Green Gables. 

Buying traditional farmland is out of reach for many Black farmers, without some form of financial help. The FarmStart program was supposed to kickstart that help. Started in 2005, the program was an incubator for potential farmers, providing them with mentoring, and teaching farming and technical skills. One thing the now-shuttered program struggled to provide was access to land to grow food. 

New solutions for an old farmland problem

“There are some alternative and affordable pathways into farming,” Martin Straathof, the executive director of the Ontario Farmland Trust, said. The non-profit was set up to keep farmers farming by protecting farmland from non-agricultural uses. The trust has advocated for solutions to make farming accessible, such as a conservation easement agreement, which guarantees land will continue to be used for farming.

“The easement creates stability for tenant farmers who can rent the farmland,” Straathof said. “It gives new farmers access to land and the security that they need to keep farming.” 

The farmland is still the private property of the owners under the conservation easement agreement, but it can only be used for farming. Similarly, farmland trusts keep agricultural land protected for that use, even after farming families move on. Some farmers may not have anyone to inherit the family farm or want to leave farmland as their legacy. They can donate the land to a farmland trust, which in turn can lease the land to tenant farmers.

Around the Greater Toronto Area, nature is protected from urban sprawl by the Greenbelt Act. There are calls for similar legislation to shelter prime farmland from development, known as a foodbelt. Bill 21, the Protect Our Food Act, passed first reading in parliament in 2025 and proposes to protect the fertile agricultural lands of southern Ontario from non-agricultural uses. Put forward by Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner and Independent MPP Bobbi Ann Brady, the act could help curve the rapid loss of farmland across southern Ontario.

Additionally, climate change is affecting agriculture in Canada. It is uprooting assumptions about what can and can’t be grown in the land of the “Great White North.” The warming climate impacts crops, farm animals, the soil, insects and diseases. Some traditional crops such as wheat and canola don’t do well when stressed by heat. 

The warmer and longer growing season caused by climate change means that some tropical crops can be farmed in Canada, though. Sweet potatoes are now grown in Ontario as a commercial crop. If the climate change even further, it might be possible to grow other tropical staples such as yam, rice and bananas. However, you need farmers who know how to do so. These are familiar crops for Black and other racialized farmers. They already have the skill and knowledge to grow them. But they can’t use the skills or meet the potential demand for the crops if they have no access to farmland.

“You need a minimum of five acres to be a commercial farmer,” said Jacqueline Dwyer, the farmer and co-founder of Toronto Black Farmers and Food Growers Collective. “The system is against us. The lack of finance. The lack of resources. The lack of land. The system won’t change without pressure.”

Urban farms are another accessible route into farming for Black farmers. There are quite a few Black urban farmers or farm organizations in the Toronto area such as Afri-Can Food Basket, Black Creek Community Farm, Adinkra Farm and Zawadi Farm. Each of these play an important role in reconnecting people to the source of their food and provide culturally appropriate foods for the Black community. These foods include yam, callaloo and okra. However, urban farms have their limits as there is no pathway from there to owning or operating a rural farm for Black farmers. 

“Youth are not getting into agriculture because there is no land,” Dwyer said. “Young people are pushed out of farming. They call themselves landless farmers.”

In many ways, farming is at a crossroads in Ontario. The pipeline into farming is leaking, due to a mismatch between old and new farmers, and it will worsen in the future unless things change. The majority of farmers are old, White and near retirement. They own farmland. The province is multiracial due to demographic shifts and so the next generation of young farmers are most likely to be Black and racialized. They do not own farmland. 

The gap between those who have and do not have farmland must close if we are all going to eat. 

Spring is here and fresh joy fills the air. The birds and butterflies are returning from the tropics. So too are the Black and brown migrant farmer workers. The farmland is awake and it is time to sow. We need Black farmers now, and they too need to reap, if we are all to eat.

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Osoyoos Indian Band is working to revitalize forests in its territories that have been ravaged by wildfires — turning them into fire-resistant zones full of biodiversity, wildlife and medicinal plants for its members.

Band-owned company Nk’Mip Forestry is planning to revive two woodlands located above the First Nation’s reservation in the highlands between Oliver and Mount Baldy — making up just over 40 hectares combined. The forest tenure where the project is located is approximately 50,000 hectares in size, and is co-managed between the Osoyoos Indian Band and Gorman Bros.

The two forests — a drier Douglas fir ecosystem with ponderosa pine, and a montane spruce ecosystem dominated by dense lodgepole pile further up the hill — were both impacted by the 2021 Nk’Mip Creek wildfire, which is estimated to have burned just over 20,000 hectares.

After the fire, Vernon Louie, an Osoyoos Indian Band member and grounds operation manager with Nk’Mip Forestry, said animals in the area were displaced.  

“Twenty-plus years ago, there used to be deer and elk all over. Lots of moose up here, especially up Baldy you’d see them. Almost one every time you’d go up,” Louie told IndigiNews.

“Now, you’d be lucky to see a deer if you go up.”

These animals, he said, were forced to look for food sources at the valley bottom. Now, after five years, they’re starting to return to the highlands.

“But they need better ground, and more stuff to eat,” he said. “We want them to actually come back up and settle. But you gotta give them the opportunity to do that by clearing this stuff out.”

The first phase of the project’s operations, scheduled for late summer and into the fall, will see the burned, still-standing dead timber removed from both sites, to help make space for the planting of various berry and shrub plants, as well as deciduous and native trees.

“What we’re really doing here is trying to influence a bit of a change in this post-wildfire landscape, to encourage wildfire resiliency and ecosystem resiliency in the future,” project lead Eden Hardcastle, a forester-in-training with Nk’Mip Forestry, told IndigiNews.

“Instead of using the word restoration, I’ve used the term intervention.”

The dead timber will not be salvaged for profit, however. Instead, the trees will be processed into firewood materials for the community.

While both sites have unique planting prescriptions based on their ecosystems, there are prioritized shrub and deciduous tree species that will be planted across both areas.

The prioritized shrub species planned for planting include saskatoon berry, soopolallie (soapberry), huckleberry, thimbleberry and snowberry. Introducing deciduous trees such as birch, cottonwood and trembling aspen to the landscape is also part of the strategy.

“Most deciduous trees and shrubs are going to be really important for a live fire break,” Hardcastle said.“Not only do they retain more moisture, but they’re significantly less flammable, so it can really help slow down a fire.”

Having a diversity of species is critical for ecosystem adaptability, not just wildfire resilience, she said.

“We’re in a changing climate with changing external stimuli. Different trees — well, different plants, in general — can contribute different things to the ecosystem. Having that diversity is important for not only recovery, but long-term resilience in the area.”

Biodiversity in post-wildfire landscapes key to climate resiliency

Although lodgepole pine is a native tree, the species has taken over the site of the montane spruce ecosystem site. Hardcastle attributed its overgrowth to the tree’s serotinus pinecones that spread seeds after a fire sweeps through an area.

“When a fire comes through, that heat catalyzes to drop its seeds. That means that lodgepole pine comes back really fast and really thick after a fire.”

While it is a natural process, Hardcastle noted that it “also creates a bit of a fire hazard in the future, because that stand is really dense and very flammable.”

That’s why reintroducing biodiversity to the forest “is the key,” she added, for it helps with future climate resiliency. 

“It’s not just wildfires that put stress onto our forests. It’s temperature changes; it’s precipitation changes; it’s further human disturbance. Biodiversity helps with all of that. Some species are more resilient to some things than others. It contributes to overall tolerance to change.”

In addition to planting deciduous trees and different shrubs at the montane spruce ecosystem site, larch and douglas fir trees will also be planted there.

“Unfortunately here, we have nothing but lodgepole coming back. That was part of the decision-making there, Hardcastle said. “If we were getting species that we did want to see coming back naturally, we weren’t going to disturb it at all. That’s a process that we’re looking for.”

Once the dead trees have been removed, the plan is to invite Osoyoos Indian Band community members to help plant different trees and shrub species at the sites next spring.

The vision is to remove the dead trees from the forests while retaining the live ones, which will create more space and give shade for different trees and plants to grow, Peter Flett, the head of forestry operations at Nk’Mip Forestry, told IndigiNews. It will also help to attract more wildlife back to the area.

“More shade helps mitigate the heat from climate change. It keeps moisture in the soil. It helps shade-tolerant plants grow.”

The hope is to offer an abundance of food and cultural experiences for community members: more animals to hunt and a greater selection of berries and medicines to harvest.

Restoration project offers hope for community and future initiatives

Hardcastle said the project can act as a model for future similar initiatives and demonstrate how it can be applied on a larger scale. The project is being funded by Environment and Climate Change Canada, through their Climate-Smart Forestry grant, which is being administered by the Sustainable Forestry Initiative.

“Hopefully, in doing this, we can determine what that actual cost looks like for the future,” she said.

Hardcastle emphasized that the purpose of the restoration and intervention work is for the betterment of the Osoyoos Indian Band community.

“It’s for the environment, but this forested area is part of [Osoyoos Indian Band’s] culture,” she said.

“We also wanted to make sure that it was road-accessible, because we want this area to be usable as a foraging site for some of the shrubs that we’re planting. Like, for berries and other culturally significant plants.”

Louie said that Elders in the community have berry-picking spots across the two sites, and have given “all thumbs-up” for this project.

“This work is definitely needed. They want to see it restored. To restore it, you gotta take out the old stuff.”

“Berry picking, hunting, gathering, is really important.  Some of these areas are close to existing roads — the easier access for Elders, the better.”

Following the intervention, Hardcastle said she hopes to see an improvement in species composition, to show more biodiversity across the two sites, within the next five years.

“It would be great to see more wildlife up here,” she said.

“That short term is going to be really telling for what we did right and what we did wrong. Long term, I just hope it’s beneficial for the environment and the community: create a fire break, and create a pocket of diversity in an area that has very little diversity.”

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At 7:30 a.m. on June 28, 2021, Ryan Ackerman sat down for a daily meeting. A paramedic and manager with BC Emergency Health Services, Ackerman had attended these meetings nearly every day since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. They had become routine. This one was different.

“A manager in the dispatch centre popped in very briefly and just said, ‘I’m sorry I can’t stay, things really got out of control overnight,’ ” Ackerman says.

Extreme heat was blanketing the province, and the vast majority of B.C.’s population was under public health heat warnings.

Overnight, calls flooded into 911. By morning, dispatchers were already backed up. Ackerman’s colleague told him there were hundreds of genuine emergencies, without enough teams to respond. 

“They need all hands on deck,” he remembers the colleague saying. So Ackerman decided to leave his desk and jump into an ambulance.

“I don’t think the scale of what we were walking into was really clear until we hit the button to go on the air to make ourselves available,” he says. “Immediately, a call came in, I listened to the radio and I heard all of the other units that were also on their way to cardiac arrest calls. It suddenly sank in: this is different, this is reaching natural disaster levels.”

The call Ackerman received was one of 11,970 emergency calls made by people in British Columbia that day, more than double the average number.

Ackerman saw the strain on his colleagues, as he watched them coming and going from the hospital. “They were exhausted, they were hot, they’d been through the heat themselves and they just kept going back out and doing more calls.”

The heat dome lasted eight days and claimed 619 lives in the province. Sarah Henderson, scientific director of Environmental Health Service at the BC Centre for Disease Control, called it “the most deadly weather event in Canadian history.” 

It pushed the ambulance service to the brink, but it also sparked action. In the five years since the heat dome, the province has invested millions to increase the number of paramedics and ambulances. They’ve built new departments and procedures for responding to extreme weather and even increased the scope of medications and treatments that first responders can use to save lives.

According to Ackerman, it’s a reflection of how the heat dome “fundamentally changed how we look at disaster and emergency management.” 

But those changes have yet to be tested by another heat dome of that scale. And as B.C. braces for another summer of extreme temperatures and dry conditions, some are wondering if we’ve gone far enough.

An ‘endless avalanche’ of cardiac arrests

For most paramedics in Vancouver, shift change happens around 6:00 am, as the night crew leaves and the day shift takes over. It’s usually cool, especially in Vancouver, where the ocean breeze helps moderate the temperatures. But on June 28, 2021, it was already 22 C and rising when Jayne Hamilton started her shift.

“I knew it was going to be hot, I knew it was going to be miserable,” she explains. “I didn’t, even with that, have an understanding of how hot it was going to be.”Like Ackerman, Hamilton was immediately dispatched to a cardiac arrest. By the time she cleared from that one, she was sent to another. 

“Somewhere between the second and third one, we started commenting out loud that ‘this is not normal,’ ” she says. “When you’ve made it to three cardiac arrests before 10 o’clock in the morning, it’s odd.” Hamilton is an advanced care paramedic. A specialist dispatched to the most serious emergencies, she has more training than the primary care paramedics who make up the bulk of the ambulance service. But even with that focus, Hamilton says “a heavy week of cardiac arrests” would be three in a four-day work block. But on June 28, she says she responded to 11 of the 27 that came across her dispatch computer. 

“It seemed endless, like just an endless avalanche,” she says.

When bodies heat up, they normally cool down by sweating and dilating the blood vessels near our skin. But extreme heat and exertion can stress these systems. When someone is exposed to these stressors for too long, their body gets overwhelmed. Heat cramps show up, then heat exhaustion, with profuse sweating, nausea and dizziness. Those can be stopped by cooling someone down, but if that doesn’t happen the condition can progress to heat-stroke, a life-threatening problem where organs start to shut down. Heat can also impact how medications work and compound existing health problems, especially related to the heart and kidneys. 

These are all things that paramedics like Hamilton learn in school. But outside of the classroom, heat emergencies are rare. 

“[Extreme heat] wasn’t something that organizations or the paramedics at large were really focused on,” she says, explaining that most heat emergencies happened at worksites or events, like races and summer festivals.

And it wasn’t just paramedics seeing a massive uptick in heat-related illnesses.

“I was working during the heat dome and I saw more cases of heat illness than I ever had in my entire career,” Vancouver-based family physician and president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, Melissa Lem says. 

“It affected so many people … If you didn’t have indoor cooling, you could not escape from the heat; it was everywhere.”

Unhoused and low-income communities impacted more by extreme heat, heat dome

The heat dome was experienced by people throughout B.C., but it didn’t impact everyone equally. In 2022, the BC Coroners Service released a report about this period which found “the elderly, persons with chronic health conditions, persons living alone, those with no access to cooling and those in particular geographic areas were more impacted by the heat.”It was a reality explored by the Union Gospel Mission in their 2024 report Unhoused Under Pressure, looking at how climate change is impacting unhoused people in the Downtown Eastside. It looked at flooding, cold, wildfire smoke and extreme heat, with a focus on how the heat dome hit the community.

“Vancouver’s 2021 heat dome lives vividly in the collective memory of Downtown Eastside residents,” the report explained. While the BC Coroners Service’s report didn’t break down deaths by neighbourhood, it did find that “material deprivation” and “social deprivation” were major contributors to heat-related deaths. So too was the lack of access to air conditioning or indoor cooling spaces, all problems, Wells explains, common in the Downtown Eastside.

“Heat is more harmful and prevalent in the Downtown Eastside because there are fewer plants, less shade and little to no access to air conditioning,” Nick Wells, a spokesperson with Union Gospel Mission, explains.

“The Downtown Eastside can get as hot as 49 degrees Celsius, and that’s incredibly dangerous,” Wells adds. “While you’re dealing with this heat, you’re also dealing with other kinds of comorbidities or issues, such as entrenched homelessness, systemic poverty, mental health issues, substance use and addiction. All these factors play in.”

‘You were in a natural disaster’

First responders train for natural disasters. They call them mass-casualty incidents and have systems to manage staff, triage patients and ensure resources get where they’re needed. But extreme heat doesn’t look like other disasters.

“What we worked through during the heat dome, in the truest sense of the word, was a natural disaster — no different than floods, earthquakes, that kind of thing,” Hamilton says. In addition to her work as a paramedic, Hamilton serves on Canada Task Force 1, a Vancouver-based search-and-rescue team deployed to natural disasters across Canada. “It was that scale of a disaster, [but] at the time, I don’t think, when we were in it, that we recognized it.”

Ackerman remembers “feeling just awful about the way the day had gone.” So much so that he brought it up with his supervisor.  

“He told me, ‘You were in a natural disaster, we just didn’t tell you [that] you were,” Ackerman says.

For some, that feelings of grief, exhaustion and frustration turned into anger when Darlene Mackinnon, then BC Emergency Health Services’ chief operating officer, told Global News that, in her eyes, the service had done “a really good job” responding to the heat dome.

A petition calling for Mackinnon’s firing was initiated, calling out BC Emergency Health Services for failing to prepare for the heat dome by staffing ambulances or dispatch centres appropriately, leaving some patients to wait hours for help. 

“I have never seen paramedics and dispatchers as angry as they are right now,” one paramedic, speaking anonymously to Global News, said in reply. “Everyone is absolutely livid and disgusted with the response.”

The petition calling for Mackinnon’s firing gathered thousands of signatures in a matter of days. The Ambulance Paramedics of British Columbia, the union representing paramedics and emergency dispatchers, later learned that Mackinnon was placed on leave. By December 2021, she moved on to a new role within the provincial health authority.

On July 14, Adrian Dix, then the province’s health minister, held a press conference announcing the hiring of Leanne Heppell to the new post of chief ambulance officer, and pledged millions of dollars to hire 85 new full-time paramedics and 30 full-time dispatchers. There was also money to buy 22 new ambulances and convert 22 rural ambulance stations from part-time, on-call service to full-time.

A year later, in 2022, the province announced $148 million in new funding to expand the ambulance service and hire new paramedics. They budgeted $2.1 billion for climate disaster preparedness, including funding for the Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience team. According to the government, by 2024, the BC Emergency Health Services budget was nearly $1 billion, an increase of more than $475 million since 2017. 

“It’s one of those events where we recognize, as an organization, that it shouldn’t have taken a tragedy like that to lead to improvements,” Ackerman says. But it has led to improvements. After the heat dome, Ackerman became a director of the disaster risk reduction and resilience department, a team he says he oversaw grow from two staff to more than 30.

“The immediate response was [that] we need to have an early warning system, we need to have proper preparation, we need to have a proper response [and] we need to have a proper recovery phase,” he explains. “That was the impetus for five years of iterative improvement to try and make sure that we are prepared well in advance of any event.”

Those preparations include what Ackerman calls an “operational readiness team” of paramedics who monitor forecasts from organizations such as Environment Canada and BC Wildfire Service. Ackerman says they use this data to produce daily risk scores for the service for categories of environmental issues, such as floods, wildfires and extreme temperatures.

These scores trigger a range of responses. It could be increasing staffing levels or moving ambulance crews to high-risk areas. There might be staff-wide warnings about travel conditions or how temperature extremes impact medications. Sometimes it requires out-of-the-box thinking, like when dozens of ambulances were deployed to the Vancouver airport to meet planes evacuating critically ill patients during the 2023 wildfires in the Northwest Territories.

The province also created something called the BC HEAT Committee after the heat dome. A multi-agency coordinating body housed in the BC Centre for Disease Control, Ackerman describes it as a heat alert and response system “that just didn’t exist before the heat dome.” 

“We’re able to respond well in advance and be prepared for these things and not get caught after it’s already escalated,” he says. 

There are also efforts to reduce the strain that heat events put on emergency services. For example, specialized paramedics will respond to non-life-threatening emergencies, helping move people to cooling centres and freeing up ambulances for Code 3 responses.

Climate change is a ‘prominent source of occupational stress’ for paramedics

Getting the ambulance service to understand the connections between climate change and medical emergencies was a focus for David Hollingworth before the heat dome ever hit. A primary care paramedic and the director of the Ambulance Paramedics of BC’s environment and climate change committee, he had spent years trying to make the link. While some supervisors supported him, he says that the higher ranks of the service didn’t seem interested.

“Seeing these [natural disaster] events and not seeing the link to climate change being made was infuriating,” he says.

But something changed after the heat dome. The death toll was one part, but so was the strain of working under extreme temperatures.

“I was making little bags of ice from the ice machine in the hospital,” Hollingworth recalls. “I was putting them in my breast pockets and moving them around to different pockets in my body, just to try to cool down.”

After the heat dome, he had a moment where he felt “a sense of this is what I’ve been talking about.”

“Health-care professionals now recognize that human health is interdependent on planetary health and the environment,” he explains. “By not doing anything about it, we’re just making our work more difficult and more dangerous, so it’s in all of our self-interest to do it.”

It’s an argument that resonates with Shannon Sherk. Now a paramedic, Sherk was a student at the University of Victoria when the heat dome hit. She was broadly interested in the connections between human health, the environment and health-care, but the events of 2021 sharpened that focus onto climate change and paramedics.

“I realized that no one had really looked into the relationship between paramedicine and environmental hazards,” she says. “Which seems a little bit ironic to me, considering it’s the facet of health-care that interacts the most [with people] outside of clinical settings.”

Sherk dug in, surveying over 100 paramedics from across the province about how climate change was impacting their work for a paper that was published in the June 2026 issue of the Journal of Disaster and Emergency Medicine.

“The big overarching conclusion is that paramedics are seeing environmental hazards impact both their patients and themselves,” she explains. “Patient outcomes are worse when you have extreme hazards, transport times or your time to get to patients is longer, and call volumes are higher.”

But while Sherk says that those are all pretty well understood realities, there’s less clarity around how paramedics are affected by events like extreme heat, wildfire smoke and atmospheric rivers — particularly when they’re already at their limit. 

“If you have a workforce that is operating at over 100 per cent capacity on a good day, what plans are there when you do have those additional stressors and there’s not really any extra resources or staff you can pull upon?” she asks. 

Her research found that climate impacts are a “prominent source of occupational stress” among paramedics. 

“The combination of a high call volume, higher acuity calls and an overstretched workforce creates optimal conditions for critical incident stress,” the report explains.

In August 2025, the Ambulance Paramedics of BC published a press release raising the alarm over a simmering mental health crisis within the service. Nine paramedics had already died in seven months prior to the release of the statement.

“While a majority of these deaths were due to health issues or accidents, many of these members died by suicide,” the statement explained. “Deaths that are very likely connected to the immense stressors of their jobs.”It noted 30 per cent of the 6,000-plus paramedics in the province were either off work for mental health reasons or working while dealing with a mental health issue.

When the CBC asked Nicki Ropp, a mental health and wellness coordinator for the union about why they were seeing this spike, she cited multiple factors, including impacts from climate change and extreme weather.“With the ongoing opioid crisis that continues to take up a lot of our call volume, the pandemic, the flooding, the heat dome, our staffing shortages, wildfires, everything. This is all compounding things,” she says.

Sherk worries that these issues are only going to worsen with the climate crisis. 

“You have all of these overlapping factors,” she says. “It’s hard to rally folks around figuring out what you do when there’s another really bad heat event, because we’re so focused on how to deal with how bad things are now.”

It’s a question of when, not if, we’ll experience another heat event. And it might not even take something as extreme as the heat dome. According to research published by Sarah Henderson in June 2025, “the risk of death spikes when people are exposed to both elevated levels of fine particulate matter from wildfire smoke and temperatures above 26 C.” 

That’s something we could easily see this summer. Environment Canada is forecasting a hot, dry summer for British Columbia. In late May, Weather Network meteorologists doubled down on that, predicting that the arrival of an El Niño pattern would lock in warmer summer temperatures for the province and contribute to elevated wildfire risk.That could mean increased strain on health-care and emergency services, because while heat and smoke are both dangerous on their own, they’re even more deadly together. That worries Lem, not only because of the health implications, but because she thinks that both the provincial and federal governments are rolling back climate action and forgetting the lessons of the heat dome. 

“It’s recency bias. … Our brains are wired to focus on what’s in front of us right now,” she says. “This summer is projected to be one of the hottest in history. If we have another deadly heat wave, they’re going to be talking about climate investments again. It’s unfortunately our short-term views that prevent us from acting longer-term.”

Still, Ackerman thinks that the ambulance service is much better prepared to respond to future climate events than it was back in 2021. He points to the increased staffing, better pay, the preparation from his disaster readiness team and even the expanding scope of practice as examples. 

But Sherk isn’t as confident. She’s had conversations with Ackerman’s department and thinks they’re doing “amazing” work in preparing for disaster events. And while she agrees that conditions within the ambulance service have improved through things like better pay and increased staffing levels, many of the external factors driving increased call volumes haven’t.“So much of the workforce is putting out fires and dealing with ongoing crises,” Sherk explains. “You have all of these overlapping factors — like the opioid crisis, the housing crisis, the impact of COVID-19 and terrible responder well-being — that it’s hard to rally folks around figuring out what you do when there’s another really bad heat event. We’re so focused on how we deal with how bad things are now.”For Sherk, it raises questions about whether disaster response plans will work when they depend on having excess resources. Her research suggests that many paramedics are still overworked and burned out, and if they’re already stretched to the limit, she’s worried that even the best- laid plans won’t be enough. 

“If you’re trying to identify what resources you can pull in during a heat event, it’s hard to imagine what that looks like when all available resources are being used all the time.”

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Summary

• B.C. is a world-leading mushroom producer with much of the provincial crop being exported to the United States.
• Recently, the United States Department of Commerce added tariffs to Canadian-grown mushrooms on the grounds they receive unfair government subsidies.
• One B.C.-based mushroom farm is fighting the tariffs, but more could be coming by the end of the year.

Mushrooms may not be the first crop that comes to mind when you think of high-tech agriculture. But in B.C., Agaricus bisporus — the fungal species sold in grocery stores as button mushrooms, creminis and portobellos — are grown using cutting-edge techniques.

“If you go back 10 or 15 years, you would travel to Holland to find the most productive, leading-edge mushroom facilities in the world,” Lewis Macleod, CEO of South Mill Champs Mushrooms, said in an interview with The Narwhal. “Today, you travel to Holland and British Columbia.”

In 2017, Pennsylvania-based South Mill merged with Aldergrove-based Champ’s Mushrooms to form South Mill Champs. The company now supplies more B.C-grown mushrooms to the U.S. market than any other, around 22,675 tonnes per year. 

Before B.C.’s mushroom tech boom, farms often mimicked more natural growing conditions. Modern B.C. farms use what’s called the Dutch method: metal shelves heaped with a mixture of manure and straw to cultivate their crops. The mushrooms are grown in air-tight facilities that are closely controlled for temperature and humidity. Unlike other indoor crops, mushrooms don’t need much light to grow. The buildings are dim, the opposite of brightly lit commercial greenhouses. This method results in faster growing, better quality mushrooms and fewer pests, according to Macleod. But it’s not as common in the U.S.

Nearly all Canadian mushroom exports — 98 per cent in 2024 — are sold in the U.S. As B.C.’s technologically advanced mushroom industry has grown into a global leader, some American producers have accused Canadian growers of benefiting from unfair government subsidies. It’s set off a trade dispute that could reshape the cross-border market.

B.C. mushroom trade sparks U.S. concerns

If you ask B.C. Agriculture Minister Lana Popham, mushrooms are among the most unique of the province’s commercial crops.

“They have to be harvested 24 hours a day and they grow in the dark,” Popham said in an interview. “There’s been a lot of technology that’s been coming around, a lot of innovation that is allowing for different types of harvesting [and] different types of lighting conditions.”

This innovation may be part of what sparked a trade complaint from a group of U.S. mushroom producers last year.

A September 2025 petition to the U.S. Department of Commerce from the Fresh Mushrooms Fair Trade Coalition argued fresh Canadian mushrooms are being “unfairly” subsidized by government programs.

“Canadian producers are exporting fresh mushrooms to the United States at prices below fair value and are benefiting from countervailable subsidies provided by the government of Canada,” the petition says. “These practices have resulted in significant negative impacts on U.S. mushroom growers and packers, including lost sales, depressed prices and declining profitability.” 

In fact, none of the subsidies provided by Canadian governments specifically target the mushroom industry and are instead directed at farmers generally.

But in May, the Commerce Department agreed with the U.S. petitioners and applied duties on some Canadian mushroom producers. The preliminary decision concluded Canadian governments do unfairly subsidize mushroom production. 

For now, about two dozen Canadian mushroom producers are facing a 2.84 per cent tariff on the mushrooms they sell in the U.S.

South Mill Champs is contesting the Commerce Department’s decision, which Mushrooms Canada, the national trade association representing Canadian mushroom growers, called “deeply flawed.”

“It’s using regulatory tactics to stifle healthy competition,” Macleod said.

Champ’s Mushrooms was handed a 1.62 per cent tariff by the Commerce Department. 

The Commerce Department has yet to decide on whether to hit Canadian mushrooms with anti-dumping duties, a type of tariff applied to imported goods that are being sold at lower prices, as a way to protect domestic producers.

Government subsidies aren’t specific to mushrooms — and U.S. growers get them too

There’s no denying Canadian mushroom growers receive support from the government. B.C. producers do not have to pay provincial sales tax on equipment for their businesses and can also access grant programs that support agricultural operations.

The province also offers funding to help farms cover the cost of adopting new technologies, but Popham pointed out none of the province’s programs are targeted specifically at bolstering B.C. mushrooms.

“It’s not specific at all to the mushroom industry,” Popham said. “It’s just the way we support farmers in B.C.”

And that means the Fresh Mushrooms Fair Trade Coalition’s complaint lacks merit under U.S. trade law, according to Mushrooms Canada CEO Ryan Koeslag.

“It is difficult to reconcile Commerce’s preliminary approach with the fact that comparable agricultural tax treatment exists in the United States,” Koeslag said in a statement after the Commerce Department’s preliminary duties were announced. “Canadian mushroom growers are not receiving special treatment. They are operating under ordinary rules that apply to farmers.”

The Commerce Department did not respond to questions about these criticisms of its decision and whether it will assess tax exemptions available to U.S. mushroom farmers before reaching its final decision on the tariffs. The Narwhal also contacted Giorgio Fresh Co., one of the U.S. companies that formed the Fresh Mushrooms Fair Trade Coalition, for comment but did not receive a response.

Macleod doesn’t believe the trade complaint is really about subsidy programs at all.

“This case is not about the U.S. versus Canada — it’s about companies who have invested in new infrastructure and those who haven’t invested in new infrastructure,” he said.

Most Canadian-grown mushrooms are grown using the Dutch method, Macleod explained. This technique gives growers large, reliable yields quickly, he added, while also reducing pest pressures and creating mushrooms that consumers prefer.

In the U.S., the majority of mushrooms are grown on wood shelves, an older technique that isn’t as efficient as the Dutch method.

Growing mushrooms on wood makes it “very hard to consistently produce a fine-looking mushroom and ensure disease doesn’t at times of the year really damage the crop,” Macleod said.

South Mill Champs’ U.S. operations have learned a lot about the benefits of modern mushroom growing from their Canadian counterparts, he added.

Switching from wood-based cultivation to the Dutch method isn’t cheap, though government grant programs and tax exemptions can help take the edge off the costs. Macleod said it takes years for a mushroom farm to see a return on investment into a whole new cultivation set-up. But the new technology can reduce ongoing costs, increase revenue and open the door to further technological innovation, he added. 

With new cultivation systems in place, Popham said some B.C. farms are introducing robots to harvest their mushrooms.

“Technology is taking over what I would call mundane tasks,” she said, adding human workers are still needed to oversee the machines.

“They don’t expect, as they bring in technology, to see displacement of labour. It’s adding to a better quality of workplace, which is really cool.”

Robots can’t harvest mushrooms grown using wood-based shelving, Macleod said, potentially putting old-style producers at even more of a disadvantage.

“If you don’t have new infrastructure, you have to build from scratch,” he said.

Final decision on additional cross-border costs for B.C. mushroom growers could take months

While additional duties on Canadian mushrooms could be announced within weeks, a final determination by the U.S. Department of Commerce may not come for months. Macleod is hopeful the final determination will be that Canadian-grown mushrooms do not harm U.S. producers.

“I really do not think less mushrooms will be exported from Canada into the U.S.,” he said. “Duties paid will mean ultimately the consumer pays more for mushrooms, which is bad for the consumer and the industry.”

Popham believes that B.C.-grown mushrooms are popular because of the industry’s embrace of innovation and its proximity to the U.S. market.

“I hope that what results from this most recent challenge is that there’s an acknowledgement that we’re just doing it really, really well,” she said.

At a time when many British Columbians want to support locally grown food, mushrooms are a perfect choice, she added.

“When we talk about being more resilient and growing more at home, mushrooms have been there the whole time,”Popham said. “I think that when consumers understand how big of an industry it is here and I think that this is another feather in our cap.”

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Summary

• In early May, 49 birds were found in tailings ponds at Imperial Oil’s Kearl oilsands mine. Later in the month, 95 birds were found dead at the Suncor Firebag site.
• The Alberta government’s oilsands mine water steering committee made recommendations in 2025 to speed up creating standards for treating and releasing tailings, which are generated as a by-product of the oil extraction process.
• Treating and releasing tailings into rivers has been criticized by downstream First Nations, including Mikisew Cree First Nation.

At Jean L’Hommecourt’s cabin north of Fort McMurray, the birdsong is frequently interrupted by the hollow booming of a cannon, a stark reminder of the proximity of the oilsands in an otherwise tranquil setting of muskeg and boreal forest. 

L’Hommecourt got another reminder of her toxic neighbour last month. Announcements about oiled birds in tailings ponds have L’Hommecourt, who is from Fort McKay First Nation, and other community members thinking about the 1.4 billion cubic litres of tailings ponds upstream of their water supply and food sources in northern Alberta. 

The booming cannons heard from L’Hommecourt’s cabin are an attempt to scare away birds that might otherwise land on tailings ponds and perish — but they don’t always work. Fort McKay First Nation notified members that 49 birds were found in tailings ponds at Imperial Oil’s Kearl oilsands mine between May 1 and 8. “Detection and deterrent systems, including the use of drones for hazing, have remained active during this spring migration period,” the notice to members said. The Narwhal reached out to Imperial Oil to ask whether the birds were found deceased, or if any birds had been retrieved and rehabilitated, but the company did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

“It’s claiming the lives of our waterfowl. That is our traditional foods,” L’Hommecourt, who has been an advocate for clean drinking water, said.  

L’Hommecourt’s cabin is 13 kilometres away from the Kearl mine site and she no longer harvests plants or berries from the area. She is concerned about the effects of air pollution, though she and her husband will still harvest moose, as they live on a diet of traditional foods as much as possible. 

95 more birds found dead at Suncor site in May

Living downstream of tailings ponds has long been a concern for residents in and around Fort McKay, which is in the middle of much oilsands mining activity, as well as in Fort Chipewyan, a remote fly-in community accessible only by plane or winter road that is downstream of the oilsands. Fort Chipewyan has three Indigenous groups: Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, the Fort Chipewyan Métis and the Mikisew Cree.

On May 24, Mikisew Cree First Nation also notified members that birds were found dead at one of Suncor’s oilsands sites, known as the Suncor Firebag site. 

“After a thorough search of the area, a total of 95 birds have been found deceased in the north-east quadrant of the site, not near any bodies of water,” a spokesperson for Suncor said in a statement.

Birds land on tailings ponds to rest as they migrate. Lights from the work camps, changes in temperature and even a change in headwinds can mean the migrating birds need these pit stops.

When a bird lands in a tailings pond they can become coated with oil, which can reduce the waterproofing in their feathers and can cause them to sink. Birds that can get out of the tailings pond and have the oil removed may have reduced insulation and other negative effects that can lead to hypothermia even from small amounts of oil, according to a federal government report on annual bird mortality in the oilsands.

The Alberta Energy Regulator said it was conducting an inspection of the Firebag site for more information about the dead birds. 

A spokesperson for the regulator said by email that oilsands operators typically use a number of deterrents to stop birds or other wildlife from ending up in tailings ponds, including propane-fired cannons and loudspeakers, scarecrows, human effigies and kites shaped like hawks.

The Narwhal previously reported on an unreleased internal document from the Alberta Energy Regulator in 2021 that showed an “emphasis on the appearance of sophisticated bird protection over data that demonstrate it.”

L’Hommecourt said she is upset that even though there is ample time to plan new deterrents, communities are still receiving notifications about oiled birds and bird deaths. 

Suncor added in a statement that it has a monitoring and mitigation program to prevent its sites from harming wildlife. The cause of death for the birds is currently unknown. 

Bird deaths continue as Alberta plans a new treat-and-release approach to tailings

The announcements have spurred further concern about pollution issues downstream of the oilsands. Mikisew Cree First Nation Chief Billy-Joe Tuccaro went to Ottawa in November to call on the federal government to manage tailings ponds and other industrial waste in a way that protects nearby communities like Fort Chipewyan, where he said he doesn’t feel Indigenous sovereignty or community concerns about water are being taken seriously. 

“So, what they’re saying is that it’s safe. Well, if it’s so safe, build a pipeline, put it right by the [legislature] in Edmonton. The premier can drink it first, then send another pipeline to Calgary, then the Bow, they can drink it as well, those corporate people, and then build one, go to the east, and then Carney could drink it too,” he told The Narwhal. 

“And then they could be the science experiments, the subjects, because we’re tired of it.”

The Alberta government’s oilsands mine water steering committee made recommendations in 2025 to speed up creating standards for treating and releasing the water generated as a by-product of the oil extraction process.

The liquid is a mixture of residual bitumen, heavy metals, clay and sand. Studies show that the “oilsands process-affected water,” as it is called in industry, also contains a toxic slurry of naphthenic acids, volatile organic compounds and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. These can cause health effects including narcosis (cell poisoning) and disrupt the endocrine system, which can cause issues with diabetes, fertility, thyroid malfunction and increased cancer risk.

Tuccaro said there have not been enough studies into the cumulative effects of oilsands mining. While the focus on water safety tends to be on drinking water from the taps, he added there is also an effect from consuming traditional foods such as berries and fish from the area. 

All three Indigenous communities in the Fort Chipewyan area — the Mikisew Cree, the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and the Fort Chipewyan Métis — have expressed concerns about the Alberta government’s plans to treat and release tailings pond water. 

Tany Yao, the MLA for the area, did not respond to a media request about the birds in the tailings ponds nor about the Fort Chipewyan residents’ concerns about the plans to eventually treat and release tailings pond water.

Updated June 17, 2026, at 6:43 a.m. MT: Due to an editing error, a previous version of the summary at the top of this article stated all 49 birds found in tailings ponds at Imperial Oil’s Kearl oilsands mine had died. In fact, the company did not respond to questions about whether the birds were confirmed dead, as the article states. The summary also stated birds at the Suncor site were found dead in tailings ponds when the company said they were not found in water, as the article says.

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Summary

• Urban forests cool city streets, sequester and store carbon and absorb stormwater runoff, among other benefits.
• But city trees face compounding stressors, from disease and pests to heat waves and droughts, which makes looking after them an intensive process.
• In Winnipeg, the municipal government has increased its efforts to nurture the urban forest, with a goal of growing canopy coverage to 24 per cent by 2065.

Only a handful of years ago, the outlook for Winnipeg’s iconic urban forest was grim. 

The ash and elm-dominated canopy, best known for its elegant boulevard archways, had fallen into the clutches of Dutch elm disease and a scourge of emerald ash borer beetles. The city was losing public trees far faster than they could be replaced, planting just one tree for every three removed, according to the city’s 2021 “State of the Urban Forest” report.

But the introduction of Winnipeg’s urban forest strategy in 2023 changed the trajectory. 

The comprehensive planning document laid out a 20-year path to restore forest health, grow the city’s picturesque tree canopy and minimize the risks to tree assets.  

In response, the city hired more forestry staff and increased the department’s spending from approximately $11 million (where it had hovered since 2016) to an average of more than $17 million between 2023 and 2025, according to a review of city budgets.

Results followed: Winnipeg had planted an average 2,500 public trees each year between 2018 and 2022. In the years since the urban forest strategy was finalized, it has planted more than 6,000 per year.

Since 2023, the city has replaced felled trees on public lands at about a one-to-one pace (though this does not account for trees on private property or in natural areas such as the Assiniboine forest or the city’s riverbanks). 

But planting alone does not guarantee Winnipeg will make progress toward the urban forest strategy’s ultimate goal: to grow the city’s tree canopy cover from 17 to 24 per cent by 2065. 

Young trees must survive heat waves, droughts, severe storms, pests and disease to reach maturity and deliver the full benefits of the urban canopy. 

How a municipality cares for its trees — especially under increasing climate pressures — is just as critical to forest health as planting.

Planting a tree is just the first step. Then comes the weekly watering and the hand-weeding

According to Dave Domke, Winnipeg’s manager of parks and open space, the city’s trees are managed by a mosaic of forest stewards. Trees in new neighbourhoods are planted and maintained by developers, while the city’s urban forestry crews are responsible for replacing felled trees on boulevards or in parks. 

Community groups, neighbourhood associations and volunteers also plant and care for smaller trees in natural areas. Typically, these trees are planted as seedlings.

Domke calls the bigger trees the city looks after “large, ornamental trees.” These trees leave the nurseries when they are between seven and 10 years old and their trunks have grown to a 60-millimetre diameter.

“They need to be a substantial size in order to withstand our snow,” Domke said in an interview. “It also gives a nice aesthetic and it’s quite a nice size to grow on into the future.” 

After planting, volunteer groups, developers and city staff are then responsible for two years of dedicated tree maintenance called the “establishment period.”

“When you remove a tree from the nursery, you’re leaving about 80 per cent of the roots in the ground. You’re trying to get the trees re-established as quickly as you can,” Domke said.

During this time, trees are watered, weeded, mulched and protected according to a detailed list laid out in the city’s tree-planting and maintenance specification. 

Crews are expected to water trees immediately upon planting, then every one to two weeks throughout the summer. Trees should be hand-weeded during this time, the specifications say, and supported with protection collars and stakes.

Domke said the city’s maintenance work has been successful. Newly planted trees on boulevards and in parks survive about 90 per cent of the time, he said, about on par with the city’s expectations. 

Smaller trees in natural areas have a much lower survival rate, between 50 and 80 per cent, because they face more environmental challenges, he noted. The city compensates for the higher mortality rate by over-planting trees in these areas.

“We’re dealing with living things here, and you’re not going to be 100 per cent successful,” he said.

A healthy urban tree cools city streets and sequesters carbon — and costs at least $1,000

Healthy and mature trees provide a variety of environmental, health and affordability benefits to communities. 

A robust tree canopy provides shade, which can cool city streets, reduce the risk of heat-related illness and reduce air conditioner use by up to 30 per cent, according to the urban forest strategy. Winnipeg’s forest also stores an estimated 500,000 tonnes of carbon and sequesters nearly 40,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide each year — roughly double the city’s annual emissions from building electricity. At the same time, the city’s trees scrub pollutants from the air and produce approximately 15,000 tonnes of oxygen annually. Trees also absorb stormwater runoff, reducing strain on sewer systems.

But these benefits don’t come without maintenance, according to the Green Municipal Fund, an endowment group that supports Canadian municipalities investing in sustainability projects, including urban forestry initiatives. 

“Trees should be considered valuable natural assets, and like all assets they require maintenance,” communications director Julie Smithers said in an email.

But unlike traditional, grey infrastructure, which has a peak value when it’s first installed and deteriorates over its lifetime, trees are least valuable when first planted, but mature into their peak value over a period of several decades. 

“Given that the benefits of trees grow with time, maximizing their health and life expectancy is essential,” Winnipeg’s urban forest strategy says. “Tree assets cost the most at the beginning and end of their life cycles (planting and removal), so extending their time in healthy maturity ensures the urban forest maximizes the return on investment in tree planting and maintenance.”

The strategy gives the example of a single linden tree planted on a Winnipeg street: the city pays for its planting and annual maintenance until its removal. If it lives a long life, the strategy says, it will produce enough benefits — including carbon storage, avoided runoff, energy savings and pollution scrubbing — to give the city a positive return on its investment. 

But if it dies before maturity and must be repeatedly replaced, that single linden tree can cost the city a net loss of $18,000 over 100 years. That figure doesn’t account for the lost opportunity costs of having a healthy, mature tree over the same time period.

Climate change makes maintenance more challenging. More frequent storms mean more pruning is necessary, and more frequent droughts and heat waves necessitate more watering — especially for young, vulnerable trees. 

While the city does not have exact figures outlining the cost to maintain a tree throughout its lifetime, Domke said the average public tree costs roughly $1,000 to plant and care for through the establishment period.

Winnipeg’s public tree inventory valued at up to $740 million

Winnipeg has used that $1,000 figure, called the replacement cost, as a baseline to define the value of its trees. The city’s 2018 asset management plan valued the public tree inventory at just $226 million, based on a replacement cost of $740 at the time.

“This replacement valuation did not account for the fact trees grow and their value increases with size, age and health,” the urban forest strategy noted. 

“Valuing trees based on their size and condition would provide a better indication of the true cost of replacing Winnipeg’s tree assets, and the cost avoided by investing in maintenance to maximize their safe useful life expectancy.”

The forestry strategy recommended valuing trees according to a diameter-based replacement system, which it already employed for trees removed for construction. Small trees, with diameters of less than 10 centimetres, are valued at $1,000, while larger trees must be appraised according to a standardized formula.

According to the strategy, this approach pegs the value of the city’s tree inventory between $683 million and $740 million — more than double the asset management plan’s previous assessment.

Cities across Canada are employing tree appraisals and other natural asset valuation systems to better account for the benefits of urban forests, according to Tree Canada, a national rural and urban forestry non-profit. 

Using remote sensing and mapping technologies, as well as on-the-ground sampling, cities are better able to quantify the ecological and economic benefits of the forest canopy, Tree Canada notes in its urban forestry guide. 

These valuations make it easier for municipalities to measure the return on investment in tree maintenance.

In 2014, TD Economics estimated the ecological and economic value of forests in Toronto, Vancouver, Halifax and Montreal, and found every dollar invested in maintenance generated between $1.88 and $12.70 in benefits. 

A similar valuation strategy is on the horizon in Winnipeg, Domke said. The city is planning a flyover to analyze the tree canopy cover and support a more robust quantification of the forest’s value. 

“We all know they look good and are beautiful, but how much carbon sequestration are they undertaking? How much of the stormwater sewer management do they contribute to? What oxygen production is coming out?” Domke said. 

“These are the kinds of things that other cities have started to quantify, and Winnipeg is now on the road to doing that.”

Julia-Simone Rutgers is a reporter covering environmental issues in Manitoba. Her position is part of a partnership between The Narwhal and the Winnipeg Free Press.

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