Summary

• Canada’s updated national building code puts limits on new buildings’ greenhouse gas emissions, though provinces can choose whether or not to implement them.
• The new rules could reduce the use of natural gas, a fossil fuel, to heat Canadian buildings.
• Documents obtained by The Narwhal reveal an effort by the Canadian Gas Association to lobby against the changes.

Natural gas companies lobbied against federal building guidelines that could help weaken the fossil fuel industry’s iron grip on Canadian communities, according to documents obtained by The Narwhal. 

In December 2025, a federal-provincial body published a new national building code that, for the first time, limits the volume of greenhouse gases that can be emitted by a building, whether from a gas-burning stove, heating system or hot-water tank. As they developed the code, officials held years of consultations with groups including the gas industry, to hear thoughts on changes that could set a precedent that limits natural gas use in new builds.

These limits are called “operational greenhouse gas emissions provisions.” In practice, they mean builders have to consider whether the heating, cooling and cooking systems they outfit a home with will produce emissions that push it beyond that threshold.

Natural gas, a fossil fuel mostly made up of the greenhouse gas methane, represents almost half the energy used in residential buildings in Canada — and almost two-thirds of their carbon pollution. Burning natural gas to heat Canadian homes and water is a big reason why buildings here are the third-largest climate polluter by economic sector, after other fossil fuel-dependent industries like transportation and oil and gas production.

Natural gas also poses threats to public health. While the industry takes steps to limit human exposure, research shows oil and gas fracking can impact birth and respiratory outcomes. When gas is used in the house, it exposes the occupants to air pollutants. When it’s liquefied for export, that’s often done at a facility that flares off excess gas, which also releases pollutants that affect human health. Methane itself, which traps heat in the atmosphere and drives climate change, is on Canada’s toxic substances list.

Coupled with the government’s push to fast-track large-scale housing projects nationwide, the new code could represent a big change in how many Canadians rely on fossil fuels in their homes. That is, if provincial governments play along. The new guidelines aren’t likely to be enforced nationwide anytime soon. It’s up to the provinces to pick and choose what parts to implement, if any; Ontario’s building code, for example, hasn’t been updated in years. 

What’s more, the new limits may not even impact new gas hookups for buildings at all: the code offers a range of standards, and the least restrictive still accommodate “current construction practices using natural gas for space and water heating,” according to the documents, which were obtained through access to information law.

None of that, however, stopped the lobby group Canadian Gas Association from complaining about the new rules.

The industry group has a board of directors made up of executives at companies in the business of distributing gas. During the consultations, it “raised concerns about newly introduced operational greenhouse gas emissions provisions and their potential impacts on housing affordability and energy costs,” according to a January 2026 briefing note for Canada’s deputy minister of housing, infrastructure and communities.

According to the industry group, the rules “could effectively ban natural gas, increase housing and energy costs and favour electrification without considering affordability or infrastructure feasibility,” the briefing note continued. 

The building code development process is governed by a federal-provincial body called the Canadian Board for Harmonized Construction Codes, while the National Research Council provides support once the codes are developed. Both of those organizations were “aware” of the gas lobby group’s concerns and were “working to address them,” the briefing note said.

The Narwhal asked the office of federal Housing and Infrastructure Minister Gregor Robertson how the government planned on addressing the industry’s lobbying. A spokesperson for the ministry responded that it “is one of several government institutions that have been lobbied on the issue of building codes, as per private groups’ and individuals’ right to communicate with elected or appointed government officials,” adding that records of that lobbying are publicly available. The department “will continue to work with its partners at all levels of government and all industries to help ensure that Canadian infrastructure and housing reflect the diverse needs of communities across the country, while continuing to support Canada’s commitments on climate mitigation and resilience.”

The Canadian Gas Association did not respond to a request for comment.

Cities and provinces say natural gas limits will hinder homebuilding

If provinces enforce the highest performance levels in the building code, it’s possible natural gas hookups wouldn’t pass muster, according to Kevin Lockhart, the director of the Pembina Institute’s buildings program.

But it was a “mischaracterization to call it a ban,” he said, since builders have different options in the code to help them meet different aspects and building requirements.

The difficulty of reducing emissions in older buildings is a key reason limiting natural gas in new buildings is important, Betsy Agar, director of buildings policy at Efficiency Canada at Carleton University, said. 

New builds are a tiny portion of Canada’s overall building stock, she said, “less than two per cent of square floor area every year, and 80 per cent of our buildings that exist today will still exist in 2050. Those are the ones that are hard to electrify.”

The enormous task of retrofitting older buildings is one reason it’s difficult to justify rules that would let brand-new construction continue to install natural gas, when other options are available, Agar said. Especially since infrastructure and agreements that allow gas companies to access land and customers are proving hard to dislodge.

B.C. has previously strived for ambitious building code standards. But in Vancouver, where an estimated three-fifths of carbon pollution comes from burning gas for heat, city council voted in May to pause rules that tracked emissions and limited natural gas heating in new homes. 

Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim argued that allowing gas heating in new homes would catalyze new home construction, but critics say the city is rolling back climate action.

In Ontario, the Doug Ford government has also been a strong defender of natural gas as an energy source delivered to both buildings for heating, and to power plants to generate electricity. Early in its tenure, the Progressive Conservatives cancelled hundreds of renewable energy contracts and then awarded new contracts to natural gas plants in 2022.

In late 2023, the province’s energy regulator found gas hookups in new builds may not be the most economical option for the ratepayers that foot the bill for those connections. The regulator ruled developers should pick up that cost, urging them towards cleaner and more cost-effective systems. 

Within days, and after much communication with Enbridge Gas, the Ford government vowed to overturn the ruling, and made good on that promise in August 2024.

Agar said in most cases, industry is “really resistant to strict regulations.” Building codes that drive toward electrification, she said, have particularly been in industry’s crosshairs.

“There’s just been this visceral response to it,” Agar said. But, she added, “the sooner that you adopt these codes, it means that people are living in better, more efficient, more comfortable homes, then all those new builds that we’re building don’t need to be retrofitted years down the line.”

Build Canada Homes will ‘encourage’ energy efficiency — but feds still support natural gas

The January briefing note was prepared for a meeting scheduled between the deputy minister of housing, infrastructure and communities and two members of the Canadian Gas Association, documents show. At that meeting, the deputy minister was expected to ask gas companies about their alternative proposals to the building code rules.

None of the lobby group’s proposals listed in the briefing note were focused on eliminating gas access in new builds. They included “reducing emissions from the gas supply stream,” meaning reducing methane escaping from pipelines that deliver the gas to markets. Another was “hybrid heating,” or pairing an electric heat pump with a natural gas furnace. 

There was also a proposal to blend more “renewable natural gas” — methane captured from food waste and compost, for example — into the system, which may reduce underground extraction of natural gas, but won’t necessarily make a big dent in emissions. And there was mention of blending in hydrogen, which is commonly produced with fossil fuels. There was no comment in the briefing notes about how the government received these proposals.

Build Canada Homes, the federal agency meant to respond to the housing crisis, has said it will “favour projects that demonstrate energy efficiency and climate performance.” The briefing note said Build Canada Homes “will encourage proponents to meet higher energy efficiency tiers” of the building code, but only “where practical and cost-effective.”

Lockhart, at the Pembina Institute, said the federal government could try harder to “drive higher performance in buildings.” That could include making emissions standards in the building code a formal prerequisite for any new homes that receive Build Canada funding.

It’s difficult to predict how Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government will respond to industry’s displeasure with the code. His election platform promised to phase out fossil fuel use in government-owned buildings by 2030, as well as ensure “new federal buildings” would adopt the top performance tiers for energy efficiency and emissions reductions. 

His platform also committed to “reforming and simplifying national building codes,” a promise reiterated in his spring economic update as a way to speed up construction. 

The spring also saw the release of the Carney government’s electricity strategy, which predicts at least a doubling of electricity demand, in part to address the electrification of buildings.

At the same time, the electricity strategy has an entire page devoted to “Natural gas’ strategic role,” where it describes the fossil fuel’s use for electricity generation in glowing terms like “reliable,” “affordable,” “secure,” “flexible” and “abundant.”

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 March 2026, the Doug Ford government formally replaced Ontario’s Endangered Species Act with weaker legislation that removes protections for some species and narrows protections for others.
• Documents obtained by The Narwhal reveal the dissent and concern raised by provincial staff, municipalities and Indigenous groups during consultations on the change.
• A major concern raised about the legislation is that many project proposals will no longer be posted for public comment, limiting public participation.

As the Doug Ford government prepared to replace the Endangered Species Act with new legislation, the province’s natural resources staff warned of weakened habitat protections, reduced oversight and new gaps in enforcement, according to documents obtained by The Narwhal.  

In March 2026, the Endangered Species Act was officially replaced with the Species Conservation Act, which removes or limits provincial protection from many threatened plants and animals.

Now, 275 pages of records, some publicly available and others only accessed through freedom of information legislation, show provincial bureaucrats worrying about the implications of the changes, as well as municipalities and Indigenous groups voicing dissent — before the government passed the law anyway.

The new act allows most projects, whether related to housing, mining or other industries, to begin as soon as proponents register online, in place of an expert review of permit applications. This approach “may weaken oversight and accountability, as self-regulation can be variable and potentially unreliable,” reads November 2025 feedback from the fish and wildlife policy branch of Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources to the provincial Ministry of the Environment, which is primarily responsible for species at risk. “Proponents may also misinterpret or manipulate rules and regulations.”

The natural resources ministry also raised concerns that the Species Conservation Act exempted a number of development actions from the second section of the Environmental Bill of Rights, which requires applications to do work that could potentially harm wildlife to be publicly posted on the provincial environmental registry. Without this, the chance for public review and comment is eliminated.

“The [Environmental Bill of Rights] was created to ensure that the people of Ontario have the ability to participate in decision-making processes,” reads the same feedback sent via email from the Ministry of Natural Resources. “Suggest being cautious if exempting [Species Conservation Act] permits and orders … as this may be seen as a way to avoid transparency, accountability and undermine public trust.”

Neither the Ministry of Natural Resources nor the Ministry of the Environment responded to The Narwhal’s detailed questions about this feedback by publication time.

In April, in response to questions from The Narwhal at a press conference, Premier Doug Ford said such changes are needed to clear the way for industry and development in the province. 

“As I’ve said, we aren’t going to hold up Highway 413, the Bradford Bypass, over a grasshopper — not happening,” Ford said of two highway projects set to cut through the protected Greenbelt and farmland. “We have a mandate to build. We’re going to build, and we’re going to respect the environment at all costs.”

Thousands of public comments about endangered species protections were also ignored: lawyer

Kerrie Blaise, a lawyer with the northern Ontario environmental non-profit Legal Advocates for Nature’s Defence, said these issues remained as the final legislation was passed, despite concerns being raised ahead of time.

That includes dropping the requirement for some permits for projects that could harm species being publicly posted.

“It’s a very sweeping exemption,” Blaise said. “It means we won’t know the name of the companies. We won’t know where it’s happening … the basic details: when, where, how much, what’s the harm? All of those details will be lacking.”

Blaise also registered her dissent before the new act passed. She told The Narwhal that Legal Advocates for Nature’s Defence sent more than 6,500 signed form letters asking the province to reconsider — even repeal — Bill 5, which proposed killing the old act and passing the new one. The organization is now representing two Indigenous interveners challenging the constitutionality of the bill in court. 

Blaise said it was “really great to hear” that natural resources staff spoke up. “I truly believe you have very dedicated individuals with expertise in this field … but their expertise and their knowledge is not being respected,” she said. 

“There are those with knowledge who can actually guide the government in a good way, and it’s really chilling when those individuals and departments within [the government] are themselves not being listened to.”

Blaise added she sees nothing in the final legislation showing that the province addressed the concerns raised by staff or those contained in thousands of public comments.

“If the province was actually looking to respect … what the public was actually saying, we would have a very differently worded Species Conservation Act,” Blaise said.

In the documents, Ministry of Natural Resources staff also warned that excluding federally protected species from provincial protections “could create regulatory gaps and inconsistencies.” This, too, echoes concerns from environmental groups. 

The province has argued a number of species —  including the redside dace, a minnow that became central to concerns over Ontario’s Highway 413 development — are already protected under federal laws. 

The federal government can extend emergency protections to provincial lands, but rarely does so. And in many cases, federal protection only extends to individual species under the federal Species At Risk Act and their dwelling places on federal lands, such as national parks or First Nations reserves. These spaces make up less than five per cent of the range of most terrestrial at-risk species, whose wider habitat in Ontario is now vulnerable. 

The documents show this concern was voiced by Steve Ganesh, commissioner of planning, building and growth management for the City of Brampton. He wrote to the province that, “By limiting ‘habitat’ to a species’ dwelling place and its immediate surrounding area, important areas may no longer be protected that are crucial for foraging, dispersal, migration and climate resilience.”

“This change could leave locally significant and rare populations unprotected and reduce the scientific basis for municipal planning, restoration and mitigation efforts.”

One species of particular concern is caribou, according to Allie Mayberry, a wildlife co-ordinator working with the sustainable development department of Biigtigong Nishnaabeg, a First Nation on the north shore of Lake Superior. Whittling protected species habitat down so severely provides little protection for an already threatened species that relies on large swaths of interconnected habitat to survive, she told The Narwhal.

“There’s a lack of clarity around how caribou habitat is going to be protected moving forward,” Mayberry said. “We’re already working with a baseline of a very disturbed habitat, and now through the new [Species Conservation Act] there’s much less of an imperative to protect what habitat there is left.”

Docs show Treaty Rights and loss of protection for threatened species were a concern

Other municipalities and First Nations had concerns about the legislation change, the documents show. 

A letter from the City of London, sent before the new act’s passage, argued the now-official Protected Species in Ontario List would remove protections for 106 species. “These changes undermine the municipality’s capacity to protect species that are rare, threatened or endangered within the city,” the letter reads, naming 20 species in London’s boundaries that have been removed from protection, along with their habitats. They include the chimney swift, eastern musk turtle and wood thrush. 

The documents show Indigenous groups also argued the new legislation disrespects not just the environment, but their Treaty Rights.

The Species Conservation Act was set to “fundamentally alter how the Haudenosaunee exercise rights guaranteed under the 1701 Nanfan Treaty,” reads a comment from Aaron Detlor, a delegate from the Haudenosaunee Development Institute, which represents the interests of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy Chiefs Council in the development of lands within Haudenosaunee jurisdiction. “These regulations restrict the free and undisturbed use of our territories that are foundational to Haudenosaunee sovereignty and self-determination.”

“Our review of these proposed regulations reveals no credible or equivalent process that could substitute for meaningful engagement on measures that directly affect our Treaty Rights. We see no mechanism by which the Haudenosaunee will have a meaningful opportunity to participate in decisions affecting species protection and our inherent right to exercise hunting and harvesting rights on our territory,” Detlor wrote.

At the April press conference, The Narwhal asked Ford how he would respond to government experts saying the changes could create serious gaps in protection for species at risk. “That’s a priority to make sure we protect all species at risk,” Ford replied. “There’ll always be consultation.”

Chief Duncan Michano of Biigtigong Nishnaabeg noted in a comment about Bill 5 on the Environmental Registry of Ontario that the new act failed to respect First Nations’ constitutional rights, arguing the legislation “fundamentally weakens environmental and cultural protections and reduces consultation requirements,” calling it a “direct violation of the Government of Ontario’s obligations to uphold the honour of the Crown.”

“The consultation process [on Bill 5 and the Species Conservation Act] has been extremely flawed all along,” Mayberry, Biigtigong Nishnaabeg’s wildlife co-ordinator, said. “We’ve participated in a number of different ways and what we’ve been met with is not a two way dialogue in an attempt to hear and meaningfully address any concerns.” 

Mayberry said consultation has “all just been a box-ticking exercise wherein Ontario continues to double down on their preferred approach, and they get the benefit of saying, ‘Well, we spoke to First Nations about this.’ ”

“We’ve taken a piece of legislation that was once considered the gold standard for species at risk protection and recovery in Canada, and now we have just whittled it down to a point that it’s barely even a species protection act anymore,” Mayberry said. “I’m not at all surprised to hear that there’s even concerns internally about this.”

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

• Ranchers in some parts of Alberta are earning six figures from oil and gas sites on public land they lease from the government for below market value. 
• An analysis by The Narwhal shows millions in tax dollars are going to the ranchers to cover debts owed by delinquent oil and gas companies. 
• Ranchers argue the money is fair compensation for impacts from oil and gas operations; the auditor general has criticized the “personal financial benefit” for ranchers as being too high.

Some ranchers leasing public land from the Alberta government are receiving windfalls from oil and gas wells drilled on that land, according to a new analysis from The Narwhal. In some cases, taxpayers are on the hook for those payments. 

Though successive governments have long known of the multi-million dollar issue, none have acted to stop it. 

An auditor general report in 2015 castigated the province for allowing ranchers to earn undue profit off of public land. “Personal financial benefits are being derived from public assets,” the auditor general wrote. The auditor general pointed to examples at the time where ranchers were receiving five times in oil and gas compensation compared to what they paid in rent.

In other jurisdictions, like Saskatchewan, compensation from oil and gas companies does not go to ranchers using public land to graze cattle. It goes to the government.

Yet, to this day in Alberta, the system remains and problems have only increased as more and more oil and gas companies walk away from wells, or stop paying the compensation they owe to use the land, leaving the bills to taxpayers and languishing well sites to ranchers. It’s the result of decades of regulatory failure. 

Compensation from oil and gas companies, similar to a surface lease on private land, is for impact and damage from those operations, including everything from chasing cattle after gates are left open, to weed control, loss of access to land as well as pollution and noise. 

There are approximately 5,700 grazing leases across Alberta, covering roughly 5.2 million acres, or about five per cent of the province’s land base. To get a clearer picture of the issues in 2026, The Narwhal focused on Cypress County, the County of Newell and what are called the Special Areas in southeastern Alberta. We sourced public records, including leaseholder maps and government payments to landowners when oil and gas companies fail to pay what’s owed.

An analysis of data from the Land and Property Rights Tribunal, a government body that directs tax dollars to landowners and leaseholders when oil and gas companies don’t pay their rent, found that since 2021, $5 million in taxpayer money has been paid to grazing leaseholders in the region to cover company debts.

The Narwhal tried to verify the total with the tribunal. Executive director Mike Hartfield said the tribunal’s database is “designed to be self-service in nature.”

“Given the nature of this request and the time and staff resources it would take, we’re unable to verify this figure,” he said by email. 

The issue is political, and particularly acute in the deeply conservative ridings of Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and federal Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre. Here, a significant percentage of the land is public and rented to ranchers to graze their cattle — although some plots are so thick with wells it’s difficult to imagine enough room to graze. It’s a potential boon, but also a significant headache, for ranchers.

“[Grazing leaseholders] are rich and influential in their communities, and not just a little bit on either point,” Shannon Phillips, the NDP environment minister at the time of the auditor general’s report in 2015, said in a recent interview. “Historically, it’s an area of Alberta that has flexed its muscles within conservative movements. And, once again, not just a little bit.”

The Narwhal contacted seven Alberta ranchers with grazing leases in southern Alberta, all of whom either didn’t reply, or declined interviews, but did speak with Lindsye Murfin, who represents both a leaseholder and stock grower association.

The office of Grant Hunter, the minister of environment and protected areas who is responsible for the grazing leases, did not respond to questions from The Narwhal.

“I don’t know why anybody in their right mind would touch this topic,” one leaseholder, who declined to be interviewed, said over the phone. 

Cheap land, free money — and government bailouts

Across Alberta, landowners are struggling with increasing numbers of inactive and orphan wells on their land, or active wells owned by oil and gas companies that do not pay what’s owed to operate on their land. When an oil and gas company doesn’t pay, the tribunal can order the government to pay on their behalf. Those payouts have dramatically increased in recent years.

Previous reporting from The Narwhal has shown only a small fraction of payments made by the government on behalf of delinquent companies, less than one per cent, is ever recovered from the companies. 

Ranchers who lease public land from the government can face the same troubles getting the money they’re owed from oil and gas companies. But the financial rewards can also be significant. 

The current system in place across the province allows ranchers to rent public land from the government for a fluctuating yearly price based on a complex formula that includes how much land is needed to feed a cow, as well as market prices and costs. In return, the rancher is expected to maintain the land and pay for upgrades such as fencing, as well as cover property taxes. 

Those ranchers also have to deal with oil and gas companies, including signing contracts when the companies come knocking. In Alberta, no one can deny access to an oil and gas company that wants to drill, even if the land is public land earmarked for grazing.

It’s impossible to know the exact cost of a particular grazing lease without seeing the private contract between the government and the rancher, but estimates are possible. A report by the University of Alberta’s Alberta Land Institute estimated in 2014 that the average lease in southern Alberta was $850 per year. 

Those statistics, however, can be misleading, according to Murfin, the manager of the Alberta Grazing Leaseholders Association, which advocates for ranchers grazing cattle on public land, as well as the general manager of the Western Stock Grower’s Association, which advocates for ranchers. Murfin said, in general, grazing leases can range from 14 acres to 14 sections of land (one section is 640 acres), although she’s not sure of the exact range. In the north, they tend to be smaller, while in the south, they sprawl. A grazing lease at $850 per year would represent a smaller plot, with a 14-section stretch costing an estimated $6,000 or more in 2014. 

Between 2015 and 2026, the government’s rates have gone up three and a half times, meaning that same average would be $3,024 today, or approximately $22,000 for a 14-section lease. 

It’s also difficult to pinpoint the compensation paid by oil and gas companies to ranchers, as each is negotiated in a private contract. However, tribunal payments covering delinquent companies offer some insight, where yearly payouts of $1,500 per well per site are the norm. That’s also the price the auditor general determined was the average price per oil and gas site back in 2015.

The number of wells on leases can range from zero to hundreds, with a select few grazing areas, particularly in southern Alberta, hosting huge numbers of oil and gas wells. And that means reaping significant financial rewards. 

Critics of the system say grazing lease rates are too low, even after recent increases, and say some ranchers are making too much profit off oil and gas operations on public land. 

Phillips, the former NDP environment minister, said the oil and gas companies are “a pain in the ass” and that ranchers should be compensated for impacts, but said there should be limits.“It shouldn’t just be a free for all,” she said. 

Phillips said it’s a classic example of socializing the risk and privatizing the reward. 

“It is socialism at its finest, but only for rich people — for a smaller and smaller sliver of people — and it is our public land base that gives those gifts.” 

Some ranchers are earning six figures from oil and gas on public land: analysis

The Narwhal looked specifically at data from Cypress County, the Country of Newell and the large and sparsely populated Special Areas region that stretches across a wide swath of the province approximately 200 kilometres east of Calgary. The Special Areas have a unique government structure, represented by an elected board which reports to the province. 

The Alberta Land Institute report noted that while almost half of all provincial grazing leases do not have oil and gas sites, most are located in the south of the province. Meanwhile, 61.2 per cent of all wells on provincial grazing lands are located in the South Saskatchewan region.

That was particularly true in the Special Areas, where the density of wells was slightly higher than the rest of the province, with 5.24 wells per lease, according to the report.

The Narwhal examined public land maps that show who controls specific grazing leases, as well as which oil and gas sites on those plots. 

Assuming an average price of $1,500 per oil and gas well site, The Narwhal’s analysis finds some ranchers are earning well over $100,000 per year from oil and gas payments. According to The Narwhal’s analysis, one rancher with 233 wells spread across a grazing area is earning an estimated $349,500 each year in oil and gas leases alone. Another rancher, with 164 oil and gas wells, is earning an estimated $250,000.

In some instances, it’s difficult to know who is benefitting from oil and gas compensation, with some ranchers tied to several corporations, according to corporate registry documents obtained by The Narwhal. 

The Alberta Land Institute tracked down one leaseholder in 2014 with the “largest estimated amount of annual compensation paid on a single lease” — $1,218,000. The lease contained 812 wells.

Grazing associations can earn even more, although that money is distributed to members. The auditor general found one grazing association in 2013 “paid the province $68,875 in rent for its multiple leases and collected $348,068 in payments from industry operators for activity on its leased land.” That’s five times more in oil and gas compensation payments than they paid in rent.

Beyond what oil and gas companies pay to leaseholders, there are also millions of dollars paid to ranchers by the government. The Narwhal scraped data on payouts in the areas in question between 2021 and 2026 from the Land and Property Rights Tribunal website.

There were 3,263 decisions in total when the analysis was done at the beginning of April.

Since 2021, $5 million has been paid to grazing leaseholders to cover the debt owed by oil and gas companies for sites on public land, including significant individual payments. That estimate is based on the tribunal data. 

One leaseholder received almost $600,000 in tribunal payments over that period. One grazing association was paid almost $1 million.

Big payouts, but also big disparities

Murfin takes issue with the idea that leaseholders are unduly benefiting from the current system and said the compensation is fair considering the impacts of oil and gas operations and the costs incurred by ranchers. 

A grazing lease, she said, is similar to any other lease of public land, from oil and gas to gravel pits to forestry. 

“The leaseholder has purchased the right from the province to be the occupant of that land,” she said. “And with those rights come a lot of responsibilities.”

She also says the impacts from oil and gas operations can be significant. “I know a guy who has to have someone hired, not for ranch work, but to manage the oil and gas companies,” she said.That ranch has extensive native grassland and without someone “managing the damage, it would be much worse.” 

“The beef industry in Alberta is a multi-billion-dollar contributor to the economics of the province, instrumental in the maintenance and survival of rural communities and the singular reason we have large tracts of contiguous native grassland in this province,” she said.

When asked about leases where the density of wells would seem to make it impossible to actually ranch, Murfin said that just makes the job of the leaseholder more challenging and that compensation should be paid. She rejects the notion of capping the amount of money a rancher should receive from oil and gas sites on public land. 

“Their management of grazing is hard,” she said. “The grazing lease system is a stewardship-based system, so the grazing leases are inspected to make sure that the forage resource is kept healthy and productive.”

Successive governments have declined to reform the system

The Alberta Grazing Leaseholder Association was founded in 1998 in response to efforts to revamp the system by Ralph Klein’s Progressive Conservative government. 

That year, a government report called for caps on payments to leaseholders. A year later, the government introduced legislation that was quickly passed, but never proclaimed into law. 

Bill 31 would have set rates per well for leaseholders that started at $300 per well, gradually dropping to $100 per well if there were ten or more sites on a grazing lease. The bill would have capped the amount of money that could be earned from surface leases on public grazing land at $5,000 annually.

The reforms received fierce pushback from ranchers and their advocacy organizations. The Alberta Grazing Leaseholders Association’s purpose was to resist the Klein government “directly attacking property rights of leaseholders.”

Phillips, the former environment minister under Premier Rachel Notley, said her government also faced pressure when the auditor general’s report came out in 2015 and said there simply wasn’t enough time, or political will, to change the system. 

“People who have never governed will hear it as an excuse, but I’m sorry it’s just not,” she said in an interview. “You only have so much bandwidth to do so many controversial things in a four-year term.”

The NDP government was already mired in controversy with ranchers and farmers for legislating workplace insurance and safety standards for their operations. The government also faced the impacts of an oil price crash. 

“Some elements within the grazing leaseholders certainly signalled a willingness to be less than cooperative on re-examining some of the large asks that they benefited from,” Phillips said.

That sort of pressure and the complexities of reforming the system aren’t new in Alberta and the provincial debate isn’t the only example. 

Just to the east of Cypress County, the Municipal District of Taber recently brought in reforms that have split the community. 

The municipality manages its own portfolio of grazing leases and already charged ranchers higher rates than the province, as well as restricting the amount of money a rancher on public land can receive in oil and gas compensation. Those rules were tightened even further in April: among the changes, rates were raised even more and now, after the 10-year grazing leases expire, ranchers must bid for them competitively. 

The decisions have been contentious. Among other reasons, provincial grazing leases also exist within the Municipal District of Taber, meaning neighbouring leases could have drastically different costs and returns. 

Tamara Miyanaga, the reeve of the municipal district, said balancing the wishes of long-time leaseholders against those that want to bid on that land is the most challenging thing she’s done during her time at the municipality. 

“Unfortunately, I think it will still create a divide in the community,” she said in an interview. “But council has made their decision, and now we will go forward to continue serving the residents of the [Municipal District] of Taber the best we can.”

As wells age, more public dollars could flow

In the area of southern Alberta where grazing leases sprawl and wells are dense on the landscape, the oil and gas industry is changing. 

Reservoirs that once fuelled Alberta booms, filling pockets and government coffers alike, are dwindling. More and more companies are failing to live up to their end of the bargain and the costs of cleanup continue to rise. It’s a region with some of the highest concentrations of orphan wells.

That means more public dollars will flow, even as revenues from wells in the area diminish or disappear. 

Murfin said her organization is also concerned about the issue of aging wells and delinquent operators, but it’s not something that only impacts her members. “It’s going to fall on every taxpayer in Alberta to pay for that,” she said.She’s not convinced the government will be able to fix the problem, and takes issue with its plan to deal with old oil and gas wells. 

The government’s plan, she said, is “just a scheme that has been cooked up by somebody who has been in oil and gas his whole life.”

For Murfin, the government is moving even further away from the polluter pays principle, which would see oil and gas companies pay to clean up their messes. 

Instead, she believes the government is “downloading all the costs of reclamation on landowners and municipalities and taxpayers.”

Methodology

The Narwhal’s Prairies reporter Drew Anderson and web developer Andrew Munroe created estimates for this story from data gathered from a public government database of decisions regarding compensation oil and gas companies are supposed to pay to landowners when they put infrastructure on their land. The database is called the Land and Property Rights Tribunal database and contains tens of thousands of records of rulings. Each ruling contains information on the oil and gas company that failed to pay its bill, the land or leaseholder to whom the debt was owed, the amount owed and more. It is an extensive database, with each individual ruling page containing data on company names and grazing leaseholders or landowners, the amount paid and whether or not the site is located on a grazing lease.

Information regarding well sites located on grazing leases was obtained by purchasing municipal land maps on an app named iHunter, which provides the names of grazing leaseholders, contact information and outlines oil and gas sites on those lands.

Updated on Apr. 30, 2026, at 10:19 a.m. MT: An earlier version of this story said there was no response from the Western Stock Growers’ Association. However, after publication The Narwhal was told Lindsye Murfin is both the general manager of that association as well as the manager of the Alberta Grazing Leaseholders Association.

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

• Last spring in Manitoba marked the start of the second-worst wildfire season in Canadian history. Experts warn these types of fires are becoming more common with climate change.
• A Narwhal and Winnipeg Free Press analysis found $500 million in costs directly tied to the Manitoba wildfires, including evacuations, emergency costs, insured losses, healthcare costs and many more.
• The Manitoba government alone spent seven times its projected budget on emergency response — more than the operating budgets of two of its departments combined.

A little more than a year ago, during a time usually marked by lingering snowbanks and the first hints of spring, parts of Manitoba were engulfed in flames.

An early heat wave on the heels of several months of drought combined to produce ideal conditions for spring fires. 

Within days, the province was at the epicentre of what would become the second-worst wildfire season in Canadian history.

Between May and August, fires tore through 2.3 million hectares, decimated provincial parklands and forced more than 33,000 residents out of their homes. Two people died; at least one firefighter was severely injured.

The scale of the disaster was unprecedented — so were the costs.

An analysis by The Narwhal and the Winnipeg Free Press found at least $500 million in expenses directly attributable to the wildfires — costs tied to emergency response, evacuations, damaged infrastructure, shuttered businesses, lost homes and much more. The true cost will never be known, as the impacts are far-reaching and far less tangible, and likely far, far higher.

But the tangible costs are many: wildfires scorched the provincial economy, burning through hundreds of millions in public funds, searing the bottom lines of several local businesses and taking a heavy toll on thousands of families’ finances. 

In the fiscal year including those wildfires, Manitoba spent $383 million on government emergency expenditures. Nearly all of that, $375 million, was attributed to wildfires, seven times more than what was budgeted.

To put that figure in perspective, the combined operating budgets of the Environment and Climate Change Department ($117 million) and the Department of Natural Resources ($147 million) totalled $264 million, meaning Manitoba spent 42 per cent more on emergency wildfire expenses last year than it did on the operating budgets for those two departments combined.

In a statement in response to a detailed list of questions, the government said a full picture of wildfire costs won’t be available until public accounts are released in September — after the next wildfire season has passed.

The statement described last year’s fires as “generational in nature,” but experts warn many of the same fire-prone conditions are still present. Fire weather is expected to be the norm in the future, as warmer temperatures dry out fuel sources and trigger more lightning storms, among other factors. 

The provincial budget’s risk outlook acknowledges the potential cost of that threat: “If similar conditions persist in 2026 — with climate change contributing to more frequent extreme weather events such as droughts — the province could face continued risks to employment, labour displacement, reductions in tourism and agricultural output and overall economic performance.”

Despite that, Manitoba’s $50-million emergency expenditure budget wasn’t changed for 2026. The government said it is “a sizable emergency expense contingency,” while also noting an increase in funding for wildfire preparedness, prevention and emergency management. 

The government has earmarked more than $4.5 million in new funding for additional seasonal firefighter positions and emergency management staff, upgraded weather and fire-mapping tools and aerial firefighting services.

Another year of devastating wildfires could further strain an economy navigating several stressors at once. Beyond the direct costs linked to firefighters, air tankers and evacuation support, natural disasters have profound indirect — though often unmeasurable — costs that ripple throughout the economy.

table of contents

• Wildfire protection budgets
• Out-of-province firefighters
• Largest evacuation in Manitoba history costs millions
• Damaged property, damaged infrastructure
• Business closures dampen economic activity
• Intangible impacts

Wildfire protection budgets

In 2025, the province spent about $70 million across four departments to manage emergency wildfire response, including fire suppression equipment, provincial firefighters and emergency management teams. 

That’s expected to increase this year as the province aims to hire another 19 emergency firefighters, four conservation workers and 15 emergency management personnel. 

However, the budget for wildfire suppression — just under $14 million — has been relatively unchanged since 2022, even as Canada experienced two of its worst-ever fire seasons in 2023 and 2025. 

Two years earlier, in 2020, the wildfire suppression budget was more than double what it is today, at just under $30 million.

As for staff, the Manitoba Government and General Employees’ Union, which represents members of the province’s wildfire service, released a report in December that noted 64 fire ranger positions and 25 per cent of wildfire division positions were vacant when the fire season began. 

“Our staffing levels are ’70s, ’80s levels — not current,” one staff member told the union. 

While the union has applauded this year’s five per cent increase to the conservation and wildfire service budget, it noted a full complement of staff with adequate training, equipment and compensation (Manitoba firefighters make the second-lowest hourly wage in the country) could help mitigate the growing risks associated with wildfires. 

“The 2025 fire season was not an outlier, but the new normal as the impacts of climate continue to wreak havoc on communities and natural areas,” the report said.

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Out-of-province firefighters

The severity of the fire season — combined with the depleted complement of firefighters — meant Manitoba needed significant out-of-province support to battle the summer blazes. 

Manitoba brought in more than 250 personnel, both from Parks Canada and provincial fire teams from Alberta, British Columbia, Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. The province also hosted another 250 firefighters from the United States, 200 from Mexico, 40 from France and 65 from New Zealand and Australia. 

The province did not provide a breakdown of its payments to other jurisdictions.

Instead, The Narwhal and Free Press reviewed publicly disclosed provincial government contracts valued over $10,000 and labeled: “Emergency services related to forest fires.” The review found 20 contracts worth a combined $6.5 million inked with other government departments.

The Société de protection des forêts contre le feu, a non-profit fire protection agency based in Quebec, received about 40 per cent of those funds. The agency sent more than 150 firefighters from Quebec and France, as well as logistics support, through June and July. While Manitoba’s records show contracts totalling $2.8 million, the agency’s annual report indicates it billed Manitoba for more than $5.1 million in 2025. This suggests some out-of-province payments are not yet recorded in Manitoba’s contract records.

The province also paid $2.7 million to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, which “coordinates the sharing of firefighting resources” across Canada, and helped mobilize aircraft and international personnel to fight the Manitoba fires, according to a statement from the centre. Manitoba also recorded eight contracts worth just under $500,000 for “other firefighting equipment.”

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Largest evacuation in Manitoba history costs millions

According to Manitoba’s recently released interim review of the wildfire season, it was “one of the largest evacuation operations in Manitoba’s history.” 

Consider the numbers: 59 communities impacted, more than 33,000 residents evacuated, including 4,100 air evacuations by the Canadian Armed Forces and 2,300 people temporarily relocated outside the province.

Both the Canadian and American Red Cross were called on to support evacuations; many evacuees lived in congregate shelters in Winnipeg, Thompson, Winkler and Portage la Prairie after hotels became overwhelmed. 

These evacuations, some of which lasted several weeks, others months, took an unprecedented toll. Evacuees suffered mental health impacts owing to the fear, uncertainty and stress of being separated from family and their homes, many missed school and work, or were forced to close their businesses. First Nations evacuees, particularly those in remote, northern communities, reported additional strain as they were relocated to urban environments, isolated from familiar foods, community and culture. 

Not all of these impacts can be quantified, but will nonetheless have long-lasting effects on many Manitoba communities.

The financial responsibility for evacuee support is spread across federal, provincial and local governments, with Indigenous Services Canada responsible for evacuations affecting First Nations, and the federal government providing disaster financial assistance to affected municipalities. According to the interim review, nine disaster financial assistance payments have been made thus far, totalling $3.4 million.

While the province did not specify how much of the $375-million emergency expenditures were earmarked for evacuees, government contracts show Manitoba spent upwards of $60 million on accommodations, food, transportation and other evacuation support. 

Most of that money — $53 million — was paid to the Canadian Red Cross, which helped lead evacuations. These payments do not include the Red Cross’s work with Manitoba First Nations, which is paid for by Indigenous Services Canada. 

Contracts show approximately $4 million in space rental and cleaning fees, including a $1.7 million contract with Canad Inns, and 40 other contracts with hotels, inns and resort centres across Manitoba and western Ontario, where some evacuees were sheltered. 

Catering, groceries and other food bills amounted to $813,000, while the bill for planes, cars, fuel and other transportation was more than $3 million. 

Evacuations are particularly challenging for residents living in hospitals and personal care homes, or receiving regular medical care like dialysis appointments. According to Shared Health, Manitoba’s provincial health authority, the Flin Flon hospital was evacuated in May, as were personal care homes in Flin Flon, Lynn Lake and Thompson.

“The evacuation in the north was the biggest the province has seen,” Shared Health wrote in a May 2025 press release. 

Those patients were transported either by commercial, chartered or, in some cases, individual medivac flights, Jessica Davis, who served as the provincial air ambulance manager for Shared Health through the 2025 wildfire season, said in an interview. 

MedEvac flights cost between $10,000 and $20,000 each direction, she said, while commercial medical flights come with costs between $50,000 and $60,000. 

Shared Health has not yet compiled the final figures, but estimates more than 100 patients were evacuated from hospitals and personal care homes in northern communities. While some of the evacuation costs were shared with the federal government, Kristyn Ball, director of patient flow, noted at least one health-care facility sustained “significant damage,” and many others were costly to shut down and start up again during the evacuations. Davis emphasized the overtime accrued by health-care staff added to the evacuation costs.

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Damaged property, damaged infrastructure

Governments typically absorb the bulk of natural disaster costs, spreading the economic impacts across multi-billion-dollar budgets. For homeowners in the fire’s path, the impacts are acute.

According to the Insurance Bureau of Canada, insurers handled several thousand claims related to the Manitoba wildfires last year, the majority of which came from homeowners. 

In the wake of a natural disaster, Canada’s insurance companies navigate an influx of claims, ranging from “the worst, which is when people have lost everything,” to claims for evacuation-related expenses like hotel rooms and rental cars, Aaron Sutherland, the bureau’s Pacific and Western region vice-president, said in an interview. 

When the sum of insurance claims reaches $30 million, the industry conducts surveys to estimate the total recovery costs. The fires in the Flin Flon and Lac du Bonnet regions both met those thresholds, Sutherland said. 

Estimates compiled in September pegged insured damages from the Flin Flon and Lac du Bonnet fires at $250 million and $60 million respectively. They’re expected to be updated as the one-year mark approaches.

While these estimates help form a picture of the individual costs to rebuild after a fire, they’re only part of the picture. About 90 per cent of Canadians have some form of property insurance; those without may incur steep losses that are neither recoverable or tracked. 

“There’s a real human toll to these events as well,” Sutherland added. “If you’re in the unfortunate situation where you have lost everything, that has a massive impact on your life. Even if you’ve got your insurer there to help you begin to put those pieces back together, you’re looking at belongings, mementos, pictures, things like that, that you may never get back, and it’s absolutely devastating.”

Even for those whose personal property is unscathed, damage to wider infrastructure can have knock-on effects.

Last year’s fires damaged more than 1,200 Manitoba Hydro poles, interrupting electrical service in several communities. Five generating stations were temporarily shut down or evacuated — the first time the utility has ever evacuated its power infrastructure — leading to about 70 megawatts of lost generating capacity. 

In addition to power interruptions, “telecommunications disruptions affected multiple communities, boil-water advisories were issued and postal and other essential services were suspended in several areas,” the review notes. 

According to a statement from the Crown utility, 1,500 customers were affected by power outages, “including some communities where the outages lasted for weeks or months.”

Manitoba Hydro estimates the wildfires cost the utility approximately $50 million between infrastructure repairs, emergency response crew wages and service interruptions.

It was “without doubt the most impactful wildfire season in Manitoba Hydro’s history, in terms of the number of assets impacted, employees involved in wildfire response, and communities impacted by power outages,” Peter Chura, Hydro’s media relations officer said.

Meanwhile, the increasing frequency of wildfires, severe floods and other natural disasters is causing concern for the insurance industry. In time, it could lead to increased premiums as insurers look to balance growing recovery costs.

“Insurers, for a long time, have been a bit of a canary in the coal mine,” Sutherland said. 

“We are trending in the wrong direction in terms of the cost of these types of events. It’s a clear indication of the need for us, as a society, to improve our resilience.”

Insured damages from weather-related disasters totalled $14 billion nationwide between 2006 and 2015. In the decade since, that total has more than doubled to $37 billion, according to the Insurance Bureau of Canada. The average number of claims has doubled, too. 

“Insurance price is risk; that risk is growing. If we want to see a more affordable insurance marketplace, we have to take action to begin to reduce the risk facing communities, facing our properties and facing our families,” Sutherland said.

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Business closures dampen economic activity

In 2025, Natural Resources Canada released a research paper outlining a method to estimate the direct and indirect costs of extreme wildfires, acknowledging there are “numerous gaps” in the current understanding of socioeconomic impacts from wildfires.

The study notes it can take several months to fully understand how wildfires have impacted regional economies as business disruptions, lost opportunity costs and the impacts of ecosystem loss ripple through industries. 

Natural resource sectors including mining and forestry, as well as local tourism economies, tend to be most directly impacted by wildfires. For communities in the north, these industries are often the backbone of the local economy.

Last June, Statistics Canada estimated the potential economic disruption from the 2025 wildfires, and found 2.4 per cent of Manitoba’s GDP, including one quarter of the northern region’s economy, was at risk of fire-related disruption — the largest share of any province.

The fires that tore through the eastern portion of the province forced several popular provincial parks to remain closed throughout the busiest season. 

While it’s still too early to pinpoint the exact impact the 2025 wildfires had on visitation and revenue (numbers will be available in August), Travel Manitoba conducted an internal survey of tourism operators last summer to gauge the scope of the impacts, chief operating officer Angela Cassie said in an interview. 

A little more than half of tourism operators — from lodges and outfitters to campgrounds, festivals and outdoor recreation services, to restaurants and transportation — reported cancellations, Cassie said. 

Forty per cent reported lost revenue due to decreased visitation and 18 per cent had to close their businesses entirely for mandatory evacuations, she added.

Impacted businesses reported average revenue losses of about $175,000. 

“The earnings from that summer season often sustains their businesses all year,” Cassie said. “A lot of them are looking at the summer of 2025 as a lost summer.” 

For some businesses, the impacts will extend far beyond one season of depleted revenues. Five per cent reported damaged or lost property as a result of the fires, while others lost habitat, which could impact future bookings. 

One in 10 tourism operators reported mental-health challenges in response to the crisis, Cassie said. 

The high-profile nature of last year’s wildfires had an impact too. As Manitoba declared successive province-wide states of emergency, countries in Europe, for example, warned travellers of the risks of visiting Manitoba. As the province worked to shelter tens of thousands of evacuees, Premier Wab Kinew asked tourists to avoid booking hotel rooms. 

“There’s the physical loss because of cancellations or just people not booking last year but then are you losing people who are maybe now choosing other locations for the summer and not choosing Manitoba?” Cassie said.

Travel Manitoba is on a mission to “earn that business back” with a $1.35-million marketing campaign. The industry group has earmarked an additional $1.35 million for a wildfire assistance program that will cover up to 90 per cent of the cost of fire prevention equipment (such as sprinklers, hoses and water pumps) and training for tourism businesses. 

“This year will be really important for a lot of [businesses]. They’ve come through this winter extremely lean, so this summer is going to be extremely important,” Cassie said. 

The province’s mining industry was impacted, too, with at least four companies reporting shutdowns, evacuations or delays related to the wildfires. 

The Tanco lithium mine in eastern Manitoba, owned by Chinese company Sinomine, was evacuated in early May. Hudbay’s Snow Lake operation was shut down for seven weeks in July and August, incurring more than US$4 million in costs, according to the company’s financial reporting. Grid Metals’ Makwa facility was shuttered for several months, from early May until late July, and was only able to complete one day of field work in the second quarter.

Alamos Gold, near Lynn Lake, was investigated in connection with a major fire in the region, after a burn pile reignited at the MacLellan mine site. 

The company was forced to evacuate, delaying the ramp up of construction on a new mine and contributing to a 48 per cent increase in capital funding for the project, according to the company’s latest quarterly report.

Mining companies also contributed to evacuation and firefighting efforts in the communities where staff live and work, and donated a combined $1.25 million to the Red Cross relief effort.

While impacts to Manitoba’s forestry industry are not yet tabulated, analysis of fire boundaries shows 1.2 million hectares of the province’s logging licence areas burned — about 10 per cent of Manitoba’s regularly harvested forests.

According to the province’s economic development council, “wildfires lead to reduced supply, processing shutdowns and volatile price swings” for the forestry industry. The 2023 wildfires prompted a 20 per cent dip in June and July lumber production compared to the previous five-year average, according to a report from the Canadian Climate Institute.

“Whole regions now have nothing but young trees. There’s nothing to harvest,” B.C.-based wildfire researcher Bob Gray said last October.

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Intangible impacts: health, carbon emissions will add to future costs

The costs compiled here represent only a portion of the long-term economic impacts wildfires will have on Manitoba’s economy. It will take several months for government agencies and private companies to finish taking stock of the damage; some losses will never show up in financial records or industry reports.

For example, communities are left to clean up debris, remediate damaged sites and conduct inspections; these costs can be difficult to tabulate, according to the federal government’s report on the economic impacts of wildfires. 

Other indirect impacts are unlikely to be formally tied to the 2025 fires, making them challenging to capture when calculating the costs of a natural disaster.

The Manitoba wildfires released a total 44 megatonnes of cumulative carbon emissions by mid-summer — a provincial record — according to data from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, part of the European Union’s environmental monitoring programme. That’s equivalent to two years of Manitoba’s annual, human-caused emissions. 

“As a result, smoke plumes repeatedly blanketed large parts of Canada and North America, and on several occasions travelled across the Atlantic, reaching western, central and eastern Europe,” the Copernicus report notes.

Wildfire smoke increases risk of respiratory and cardiovascular illness, putting long-term strain on health-care systems.

A Health Canada study published in 2024 estimates that between 2013 and 2018, air pollution from wildfire smoke contributed to 240 deaths from short-term exposure and 2,500 from long-term exposure, and generated annual health-care costs between $4.7 and $20 billion.

There were 18 days between May and October last year where Winnipeg’s daily average concentration of fine particulate matter — one way to measure wildfire pollutants — exceeded federal limits of 27 micrograms per cubic metre. The average concentration peaked at 57 micrograms per cubic metre in early June.

Only nine days exceeded federal limits in Winnipeg amid Canada’s worst-ever wildfires in 2023.

The trauma of fires, evacuations and destruction will also have far-reaching mental health impacts for impacted communities and the front-line workers responding to the crisis. 

“The mental-health support part of the [health-care] system is one that’s required long after the fire is out,” Jeff Martin, director of emergency and continuity management for Shared Health, said in an interview. 

With its interim review, Manitoba has started to strengthen its wildfire preparedness and response systems across several government departments. In addition to financial investments to boost emergency staffing and firefighting resources, the province plans to improve evacuee support with more culturally-responsive services, smoother registration systems, more robust financial support and more assistance geared at vulnerable populations. It plans to streamline its overall emergency funding processes, update its wildfire response guidelines and improve coordination and communication between agencies and jurisdictions. 

“We were as prepared as we could possibly have been for a season like we had,” Lisa Naylor, the minister responsible for the Emergency Management Organization, said at a news conference this week for the release of the interim report.

“We hope we won’t see a season like that this year and, at the same time, we’re going to be even more prepared.”

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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.

Updated Friday, April 24, 2026, at 9:16 CT: This article has been updated to correct how much more the Manitoba government spent on emergency wildfire expenses compared to the total operating budgets of two of its departments. It was 42 per cent more, not 35, as previously stated.

Updated Friday, April 24, 2026, at 10:50 CT: This article has also been updated to correct an earlier statement from the Insurance Bureau of Canada about the total of insured damages from weather-related disasters in recent decades. The bureau clarified the figures were cumulative, not annual, as they had previously stated.

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.

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

Summary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doleman agreed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Under the Clean Water Act, community-led groups called source protection committees write plans and oversee the protection of drinking water sources in Ontario.
• The jurisdiction of the committees is aligned with the boundaries of conservation authorities, and experts say the recent amalgamation of authorities could also affect the committees.
• The province has not appointed 15 of the 19 source protection committee chairs, leaving some experts questioning whether change is afoot.

As the Doug Ford government moves to consolidate conservation authorities from 36 to nine, many are concerned about the impact on Ontario’s drinking water. 

Conservation authorities have long been tasked with protecting Ontario watersheds by safeguarding local drinking water sources and reducing the risks from natural hazards like flooding, erosion and drought. But the government’s legislation for their amalgamation — the biggest disruption to the agencies in 80 years — indicates there may be changes coming to the way they help preserve access to fresh water for more than 80 per cent of Ontario residents. 

Since 2006, municipal drinking water has been governed by 19 source protection committees, community-led groups with directors from industries like agriculture, manufacturing and tourism that hold conservation authorities and municipalities accountable for properly managing drinking water. Within each conservation authority, designated staff serve as liaisons to these committees, providing necessary data and carrying out any suggested protective actions.

“Source protection committees are purposefully local. They’re the people that drink the water they are protecting,” Katie Stammler, water quality scientist and project manager for the source water protection committee at the Essex Region Conservation Authority, told The Narwhal.

The committees were created on the heels of the water contamination crisis in Walkerton, Ont. In May 2000, seven people died and some 2,300 people became ill when manure from a nearby farm leached into a well due to a failure of safety checks in the local water treatment system. 

An inquiry into the crisis resulted in dozens of recommendations, including creating source protection committees. These groups were officially enacted by the passage of the Clean Water Act. Each one was designed with the boundaries of conservation authorities in mind and tasked with writing a plan to protect the sources of drinking water in that region from threats such as fuel, sewage, road salt and agricultural runoff.

In the years since they were formed, source protection committees seemed to be “untouchable,” Lynn Dollin, once long-time chair of the South Georgian Bay-Lake Simcoe Source Protection Committee, told The Narwhal. Successive Ontario governments didn’t want to change anything “because no one wants to risk another Walkerton.”But things might be changing now.

The Ontario government’s move to reduce the number of conservation authorities has meant that each authority now covers a much larger area. The Narwhal obtained a government slide deck presented to conservation authorities leaders earlier this month that shows drinking water source protection “remains a core mandated responsibility” for the nine proposed regional authorities, and that source protection plans “will continue to be carried out.” 

But in the same slide deck, the government also notes “changes may be needed under the Clean Water Act and associated regulations” to “clarify” how source protection committees would operate under the new structure. 

“We’re not making any fundamental changes [to source protection committees],” Ontario Environment Minister Todd McCarthy said in an interview with The Narwhal: the 19 committees will remain as they are and work with the nine newly proposed regional conservation authorities, though he said their jurisdictions are “a work in progress.”  

“Clean water is absolutely essential, and Ontario’s is best protected in the world. That’s going to continue,” he said. “The idea is to make sure it doesn’t change by better resourcing and better supporting [them] equally across Ontario.”

McCarthy added that there may be some legislative “housekeeping” in the fall to ensure “alignment” between the new regional conservation authorities and source protection committees. 

The absence of details raises red flags for experts. 

“They cut. Now they cut and tinker,” one central Ontario conservation authority official said. “They’re saying nothing is going to change, but in practice, that remains to be seen. … All the changes they’ve made so far have delayed work operations. They like to pretend otherwise.”

The Narwhal spoke to 12 people, including lawyers, members of three source protection committees and several conservation authority staff, many of whom spoke anonymously for fear of retribution. As conservation authorities get bigger, these experts worry about the loss of local input, knowledge and protections. 

Already, the chair positions at 15 of the 19 committees are vacant. To many, this quiet erosion of leadership and a loosening of water laws in the province are indicators that a system put in place to prevent another drinking water crisis is now in flux. 

Most source protection committees still don’t have government-appointed leaders

Nearly 20 years ago, Dollin, now mayor of Innisfill, Ont., was one of 19 source protection committee chairs appointed by the Ontario government to help take care of the province’s complex system of local drinking water sources.

Back then, her committee’s first task was “a little unnerving,” she said. “I was shocked how there was no good, complete list of where our municipal drinking water systems were.” So they created one, along with guidelines on how to protect them to ensure local drinking water sources don’t become contaminated or overused. 

Dollin’s term as head of South Georgian Bay-Lake Simcoe Source Protection Committee ended in August 2025; she was told by a ministry official she would not be reappointed, though she said no reason was given. Her position hasn’t been filled since. 

As of April 14, the government had not appointed several chairs — something it is legally required to do under the Clean Water Act — since summer 2025.

“The absence of appointed chairs over the past year has created some uncertainty at the committee level, particularly around governance, leadership continuity and decision-making authority,” John Mesman, managing director of property, conservation, lands and community outreach for South Nation Conservation, told The Narwhal. 

A lack of chair appointments, others say, may indicate source protection committees are a low priority amidst the amalgamation of Ontario’s conservation authorities. Many told The Narwhal communication between conservation authorities and ministry staff have been eroding since the government under former premier Mike Harris first cut funding in 1995.

“It seems the ministry doesn’t understand the source protection program, so it doesn’t bother to think about it,” the central Ontario conservation authority staff member said. “We started getting alarmed by ministry decisions a while ago on a number of issues. It’s been consistent, our comments are not being heard.”

That’s especially challenging as water supply gets more complicated. In recent weeks, the government has proposed permitting communal wells for private development. That would mean a new subdivision, for example, could draw from its own well instead of tapping into municipal water services. Sources who spoke to The Narwhal were concerned about this because communal wells aren’t currently overseen by source protection committees. 

“We need source protection leaders now more than ever to be present at the table,” a conservation authority official in western Ontario said. “As this government pushes approvals for development, we need to make sure water is not an afterthought.” 

A Ministry of Environment official told The Narwhal, “a competitive process will soon be underway” for source protection committee chair appointments. 

New boundaries of conservation authorities could affect source protection committees 

Not only do many source protection committees not have leaders right now, but they also don’t know what their jurisdictions will be post-conservation authority amalgamation.

“I don’t think [the government] contemplated a whole scale change like this,” Theresa McClenaghan, executive director of the Canadian Environmental Law Association, said. “A lot of people don’t realize that most local drinking water sources are protected by plans that were created by these committees over many years.” 

Per the requirements of the Clean Water Act, the government has two options, McLenaghan said: realign source protection boundaries and governance to reflect the new larger regional conservation authorities or maintain the current structure within the new regional authorities. 

Minister McCarthy told The Narwhal the boundaries “are not changing at this time,” but the exact boundaries will be finalized in the fall, informed by consultations with new local watershed councils the ministry is creating to facilitate the transition. 

“We’ll have to see how this works out,” he said. “Right now, the reality is nine watershed-based regional conservation authorities are what we proposed … and with those 19 [source protection committees], we’ll have to see how their boundaries match up or align.” 

McLenaghan said if the committees stay as they are, “that’s good news,” but “there will still be some potential disruptions” as several source protection regions combine under a single conservation authority.

Right now, some source protection areas, such as Essex County, stand alone, while others like the Thames-Sydenham Source Protection Region, combine several conservation authority jurisdictions. Per a preliminary analysis by the Canadian Environmental Law Association, the amalgamation would see the inverse of this, where one regional conservation authority has several source protection regions within it. For example, both the Lake Huron and Western Lake authorities would each incorporate three source protection agencies.

The new regional conservation authorities will be “very, very busy” managing so many source protection committees under the new system, the central Ontario conservation authority official said.

Under the amalgamation plan, Stammler’s Essex County Conservation Authority now falls under the Western Lake Erie regional authority, which has boundaries spanning from Niagara through Halton and Peel Region.

She, and others, said they’re concerned this will result in a reduction in the hyper-localized focus on water that conservation authorities provide.

“I think it’s going to undermine Ontario’s ability to protect drinking water,” Ontario Greens Leader Mike Schreiner said. “I think the amalgamation of [conservation authorities] is going to contravene the recommendations of the Walkerton inquiry around source water protection.”“I mean, how can you have 19 source water protection committees across the province and nine [conservation authorities]? And how is that going to work together, especially when you’re undermining local decision-making expertise?”

It’s something local industry representatives are similarly concerned with. 

Chris Snip, an independent agronomist and water protection advocate from Essex County, has built a career helping farmers grow better crops with less impact on the environment from fertilizer use. He joined the Essex region’s source water protection committee six years ago to support the group’s understanding of agriculture and the sector’s role in maintaining water quality.

As with many in Ontario’s farming community, the Walkerton tragedy casts a long shadow for Snip. With the Ford government’s changes to water protection, in favour of easing development, Snip wonders if the province is forgetting lessons of the past.

“People died, and the policies around source water protection were based on recommendations from those deaths and injuries, and this provincial government is basically, you know, turning its nose up to it, not caring about what happened then,” he said.

“History is bound to repeat itself, especially if we don’t remember.”

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Summary

• Internal documents reveal the Ontario government does not intend to publicly release recovery plans for several endangered species, including the eastern wolf.
• Conservation scientists say species recovery plans are important tools that guide their work and inform decision-making around where to invest resources.
• Recent legislative changes under Bill 5 have removed the requirement for Ontario to prepare recovery plans for endangered species, but the plans in question were already under development when those changes came into effect.

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Ontario’s plans to recover struggling wolf, butterfly and bat populations will not be released to the public, The Narwhal has learned.

Last April, the Doug Ford government announced it planned to amend and then ultimately replace the Endangered Species Act, slashing the requirement to develop recovery strategies that set out the steps to bring endangered species back from the brink. 

Now, a set of internal emails released through freedom of information legislation show the province intends to continue with a few strategies that were underway when Bill 5 passed — and also intends not to share them with the public.

Since 2007, the province has been required to not only publish recovery strategies but to put them into action, under the Endangered Species Act. That ended in June, with the passage of Bill 5, the Protect Ontario by Unleashing our Economy Act.

The emails show a handful of recovery plans were in the works when the Protect Ontario act became law, and confusion inside the Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks about what to do next. 

The draft plans represent years of work researching the habitat and current state of the eastern wolf, a butterfly called the northern oak hairstreak and three migratory bat species. 

The strategy for the eastern wolf, for example, has been nearly a decade in the making, with a draft put out for public consultation in 2018 and revised in 2025. The 2018 draft to protect the animal — which has a unique genetic ancestry not found anywhere else in the world — was once available on the Environmental Registry of Ontario, but is not there any longer. 

In the fall, The Narwhal asked the Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks, which is responsible for producing recovery plans, whether the strategy for the eastern wolf would be made public. The ministry did not respond to The Narwhal’s questions in the fall, nor to repeated requests for comment on this story made between Jan. 28 and March 5. 

But the emails released through freedom of information legislation chronicle staff in the at-risk species branch of the Ministry of Environment attempting to confirm up the chain the next steps for drafted recovery plans before and after Bill 5 passed. One email thread is in response to a question from a private contractor hired to write one of the strategies, asking how to move forward.

The week after the bill was proposed, on April 17, internal government emails note “the plan is to proceed with the recovery strategy agreements that are underway” up to the stage where drafts are usually posted publicly, but “We are not likely to proceed with the public posting at this time (given changes underway).”

Laura Bowman, an environmental lawyer, told The Narwhal keeping the recovery strategies private tramples the right of public groups, including First Nations, researchers and conservationists, to know how Ontario is managing endangered species. 

It also limits anyone seeking permits and approvals for work that affects endangered species.

“One would think they would want to be making reference to the recovery strategy and what mitigation measures might be appropriate,” she said. “So to keep that internal and not post it seems like a very strange move, even just from that perspective.”

The recovery plans that were in the works when Bill 5 passed were, according to the email, still being circulated for review by other provincial ministries and federal agencies, such as the Canadian Wildlife Service and Parks Canada.

Emails from the at-risk species branch to those departments, seeking feedback on the eastern wolf recovery plan, said the province is still “committed to providing information and guidance on the conservation of species in Ontario” even though recovery plans are no longer legislatively required.

“Under the amended [Endangered Species Act], the ministry has the flexibility to focus the development of conservation guidance when and where it is needed and makes sense to do so,” the email said. 

The Endangered Species Act is being replaced by the Species Conservation Act. Ten months after Bill 5 passed, regulations for that have not yet been announced.

Recovery strategies no longer required in Ontario following passage of Bill 5

The mottled duskywing, a medium-sized brown-speckled butterfly, has a strong preference for a prairie shrub called New Jersey tea. It’s hard to come by in southern Ontario. 

As a result, the butterfly that depends on it was listed as endangered across Canada in 2012 and in Ontario in 2014. Under the Endangered Species Act, a recovery plan for the mottled duskywing was published in 2015.

Ryan Norris, a professor of wildlife biology at the University of Guelph, has been working with a team trying to stabilize duskywing populations in Ontario. In 2020, the team of researchers received federal funding to re-introduce the species to two locations in Ontario. 

“In putting that grant proposal together, we used the recovery strategy as a guiding document for what needed to be done,” Norris said. The strategy provided crucial information about existing populations and the butterfly’s habitat — including tallgrass savannas where fire is needed for plants including New Jersey tea to regenerate.

The team’s efforts paid off at Pinery Provincial Park near London, Ont., where controlled burns have restored the oak savanna, letting New Jersey Tea thrive. In 2022, a mottled duskywing was spotted at the park for the first time in 30 years.

The foremost expert on mottled duskywing — in fact, the scientist who wrote the recovery strategy for the province — led Norris’s team. So they, specifically, could have pulled off their win without the recovery strategy to guide them. But a loss of thoroughly researched public plans limits who can be involved in bringing species back, he said. 

“Imagining somebody else being interested in it, mottled duskywing, and wanting to recover it but not having any background. That would be extremely hard,” Norris said.

It’s an example of the value of recovery strategies, which are themselves seemingly going extinct.  

The strategies also guide government experts as they offer feedback to teams like his or approve funding for species recovery.

Now, Norris is part of a group working to reintroduce another savanna-loving butterfly, frosted elfin, which is extirpated, or locally extinct, in Ontario. The group has applied for funding under the provincial Species Conservation Fund, but had yet to hear back as of early March.

“The recovery strategies acted as a guidepost for them to assess the applications,” he said, as researchers often highlight specific points in the recovery plan and explain how their proposal could address them. 

“So, it’s important for the government. It’s important for the practitioners, the researchers and so forth,” Norris said. “I don’t know why you would get rid of it.”

Eastern wolves and other species with private plans for recovery

On June 9, four days after Bill 5 passed, a coordinator in the at-risk species branch emailed the branch director at the Ministry of Environment, seeking approval to move ahead with provincial and federal agency reviews of the draft recovery strategy for the eastern wolf. After that, the strategy author would consider any comments for another revision. The email notes the same was being done with the recovery strategies for the northern oak hairstreak and migratory bats. 

The email continues, including bolded text, that, “The proposed approach for those strategies is to complete Stage 2, but to withhold any public posting on the Environmental Registry of Ontario until further direction is given … .”

The coordinator’s email said this approach would leave the ministry with a near-final recovery strategy for the species, “which can be used (if needed) as the basis for some new conservation guidance for the species down the road, once the ministry has selected its new streamlined approach to issuing conservation guidance ….”

About a week later, on June 17, that approval came.

Linda Rutledge is an adjunct professor in forestry and conservation at both University of British Columbia and Trent University. She has contributed to reports on endangered species and written on how Bill 5 could impact the eastern wolf’s recovery. She said there needs to be transparency around the province’s decision not to publish the remaining recovery strategies, in part because recovery plans are an important educational tool.

“Without it being publicly available, it makes it feel like the government is really limiting the public knowledge base,” she said, adding that there are more stakeholders than just the public and those working to conserve eastern wolves. “I would think that there would be a lot of industry who would want to know what their impact is going to be on this iconic species.”

Rutledge said an enormous amount of work goes into developing these plans to set a clear path forward. For the eastern wolf, Rutledge said, that path was clearly laid out in the 2018 draft that is no longer public: create a recovery zone.

Right now, the wolves are protected from hunting and trapping only within and immediately around a few provincial parks, including Algonquin, Killarney, Kawartha Highlands and Queen Elizabeth II Wildlands. A recovery zone would provide safe corridors for the wolves to move between them.

“You can’t have a patchwork of protection for a wide-ranging animal like a wolf,” Rutledge said. “They don’t pay attention to park borders or things like that.” When wolves leave those boundaries, they’re at risk of hunting and trapping, as well as roads. 

“So this one single thing the government could do, that is very straightforward, is expand the harvest ban to that recovery zone,” Rutledge said. While some hunter and trapper organizations are resistant, she said there’s a lot of shared interest across the province in seeing the eastern wolf population thrive.

“I think, in the middle, most people really want the same thing, and this is the protection of natural heritage and the ability to appreciate wildlife and the outdoors,” she said.

The idea of cutting red tape, Rutledge said, isn’t a bad thing; she’s experienced bureaucratic barriers in her own work. And she appreciates the concerns around threats to Canada’s economy as a result of U.S. tariffs. But, she said, the lack of clarity and transparency on the decisions being made creates concern.

She hopes the province is working with the federal government to put protections in place for endangered species, including the eastern wolf, even if they aren’t planning to inform the public about them.

“I’m hopeful that the next time Prime Minister Carney and Premier Ford are sharing a drink by the fire at his Muskoka cottage,” she said, “that they hear these wolves howling in the background, and know their move to recognize that the economy isn’t the only thing that’s worthy of their attention and cooperation.”

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Canada’s first major liquefied natural gas (LNG) export plant, on the B.C. coast, has been having problems with a key piece of equipment since the facility fired up in late 2024. The companies behind the project, a consortium of foreign-owned corporations, have said it will take three years to fix the problem — a timeline experts have questions about. 

Earlier this year, The Narwhal revealed LNG Canada has been flaring, or burning off, more than 15 times the amount of gas its permits allow. Internal documents obtained by The Narwhal found this unexpected increase is due to an “integrity issue” with one of its flare stacks. For several months, residents of Kitimat, B.C., have been voicing concerns with the intermittent 90-metre-high flames, noise and air quality issues due to the increased flaring.

To understand why this is happening and what it could mean for residents of the coastal community, The Narwhal spoke to legal, policy and engineering experts. They speculate the three-year timeline is more likely a financial decision for LNG Canada, combined with a lack of enforcement by the BC Energy Regulator, the provincial agency tasked with regulating energy resource activities.

“Nobody wants a bunch of flaring at these kinds of volumes,” Matthew Johnson, the scientific director of the Energy and Emissions Research Laboratory at Carleton University, said. 

LNG Canada told the BC Energy Regulator it needed to flare an additional 170,000 cubic metres of gas daily to mitigate the issue, which would produce roughly 430 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per day — equal to driving a gasoline-powered car roughly 1.5 million kilometres. The regulator has told The Narwhal the actual average of gas flared due to the issue was even higher, averaging more than 205,000 cubic metres per day over the summer and early fall.

Flaring burns off excess gas, such as methane, produced at the plant when liquefied natural gas is processed. That waste gas is sent up a metal tube that stands more than a hundred metres high and ignited by a pilot light, converting the raw gas into carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide — among other potential gases — and water vapour. If the flare isn’t designed correctly, the gas may not make it to the pilot flame. As a result, more gas has to be used to increase the pressure to reach that flame.

Johnson wouldn’t speculate on the specific issue or its fix without seeing all of the technical documents, but questioned why LNG Canada didn’t appear to be able, or willing, to fix the problem sooner. Other mechanical engineers The Narwhal spoke to suggested the delay is likely a financial decision rather than a manufacturing one: shutting down the facility to replace the equipment would likely be more costly than continuing to flare gas that could be sold.

A spokesperson from LNG Canada responded to questions about the three-year timeline by referring back to a previous statement emailed to The Narwhal in mid-January. It stated LNG Canada is focused on safety and, as the facility is in early operations phase, flaring is a normal occurrence. It noted disruptions will be reduced during “regular operations.” 

“We continue to meet regularly with community members, First Nations, local stakeholders and government agencies to listen and respond to any concerns raised about our activities. LNG Canada extends its continued appreciation to the Kitimat community and to the Haisla Nation for their continued support,” the spokesperson said.  

Johnson still questions the three-year timeline. “We should pay attention to this issue, and should try to force them to get this under control,” he said. Johnson is especially worried about what has been reported about the observations and experiences of Kitimat residents.

“Anecdotes about sooty films on cars, if true, would be especially concerning,” he said, regardless of whether the flare was operating properly or not.

The BC Energy Regulator maintains “there have not been any measurements in the Kitimat Valley in excess of the B.C. Ambient Air Quality Objective metrics attributable to LNG Canada’s operations.” It referred The Narwhal to publicly available data. However, since learning about the issue in April, the regulator has required LNG Canada to submit daily reports related to elevated flaring and the presence of black smoke.

‘It’d be nice to have some transparency’

It was never a secret that LNG Canada would be one of the province’s largest polluters. Project documents produced in 2014 include estimates that, once complete, the facility will emit roughly four million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent annually for at least 25 years. Most of the project’s emissions are expected to come from its turbines and acid gas incinerators — not flaring.

B.C. rules require flares to convert 98 per cent of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, to carbon dioxide, though Johnson said there’s no reliable way to independently verify how much is burnt off in real time.

Neither the B.C. Environmental Assessment Office, which was responsible for approving the greenhouse gas management plan for the project, nor the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada, responsible for making sure the project adheres to the environmental protection and impact mitigation conditions under which the project was approved, responded to questions of when or if they had been informed of the integrity issue.

The Impact Assessment Agency of Canada specified in an email that one of the major concerns for flaring was the impact on migratory birds. One of the conditions for LNG Canada was to limit flaring to “what is necessary for maintenance or emergency situations.” In LNG Canada’s 2024-2025 annual report, released in April, the company listed no malfunctions had occurred during the reporting year.

LNG Canada’s first phase was always expected to increase B.C.’s total emissions by about 6.6 per cent, according to the 2015 assessment report by the B.C. Environmental Assessment Office. With the additional flaring due to the integrity issue, the emissions are 4.5 per cent higher than anticipated, based on the flare data provided to the regulator. 

Despite the additional gas being flared, it’s still a fraction of what will be shipped and sold from LNG Canada: an estimated 14 million tonnes of gas per year. Choosing to prioritize profits might be a “pragmatic decision and maybe that’s the correct decision,” Johnson said, “But it’d be nice to have some transparency.”

BC Energy Regulator inspected LNG Canada when flaring issue was present, found it ‘in compliance’

Public records on the BC Energy Regulator’s compliance and enforcement website show just two inspections of LNG Canada since the flaring issue was identified: one in February 2025, three months after the company identified the integrity issue but two months before the company informed the regulator. That inspection was marked “in compliance,” and another in August was listed simply as “inspected.”

To date, the regulator has issued no penalties, no inspection reports and no formal non-compliance findings. Last summer, the regulator recategorized the additional flaring from “non-routine,” a designation that allows for as much flaring as needed in emergency situations, to “routine,” meaning the company was required to submit daily non-compliance reports for exceeding the permit limit, internal documents showed.

“What you’ve discovered regarding LNG Canada is the latest example of the persistent (and frankly disgraceful) non-enforcement of environmental law in Canada against industrial polluters,” David R. Boyd, a professor of law, policy and sustainability at the University of British Columbia, told The Narwhal by email. Boyd recently co-authored a report examining air pollution enforcement across Canada, which found governments often rely on “co-operative and non-responsive” approaches and rarely impose penalties on repeat offenders. 

“Canada and B.C. governments pay lip service to the widely accepted polluter-pays principle but rarely apply it in practice,” he told The Narwhal. “Large corporations frequently break environmental laws but are rarely penalized for doing so.” 

A spokesperson for the BC Energy Regulator told The Narwhal the daily reports filed by LNG Canada are because the flaring is “not consistent” with the facility’s permits, using that term instead of the term “non-compliant.” In order for the activities to be found non-compliant, they have to be identified in an inspection by the regulator and then documented and investigated. 

“It seems very much the kind of thing that the regulator and the permitting conditions were designed to prohibit,” Amanda Bryant, manager of the Pembina Institute’s oil and gas program, said. “They’ve got the tools. I think it’s about willingness to escalate and willingness to enforce.”

The regulator did not specify whether the consortium would be facing any penalties for the permit violations for flaring, but noted “an enforcement action could occur at any time in a three-year period following the date of discovery if the facts of an investigation support compliance action.”

However, that would also mean three years of emissions before a potential penalty is levied. “It’s really difficult to see how waiting three years to actually solve the problem is in the public interest,” Bryant said.

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Amid his usual slate of year-end sit-downs and lookahead interviews in late December, Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew delivered a surprise announcement: the political ethics scandal involving Sio Silica’s controversial sand mine isn’t over yet. 

Starting as early as this year, he said, the province would hold a public inquiry into the previous Conservative government’s attempt to license the mine — which proposes using a previously untested airlift method to extract silica sand, a resource used in advanced technologies like batteries and solar glass, from a southeastern Manitoba aquifer — days after losing the 2023 election. Part of the inquiry’s work, he added, would be to examine whether Manitoba’s lobbying rules are “strong enough … to make sure that you, the average person, know what’s going on with your government officials.” 

As for the laws as they stand now, he told CBC, “I think we can do better.” 

Kinew is one of few politicians in the last decade to publicly critique the province’s lobbying legislation. The Lobbyists Registration Act came into force in 2012 and outside a handful of tweaks — most notably a ban on gifts to politicians — has remained virtually unchanged.

But following an ethics investigation that culminated in three provincial cabinet members, including former premier Heather Stefanson, being fined for violating conflict-of-interest policies, the regulations that govern relationships between government officials and those who seek to influence their decision-making are under the spotlight. 

In his final report, then-ethics commissioner Jeffrey Schnoor found board members, executives and consultants working on behalf of the mining company had met and communicated with public officials during the transition period between governments, in some cases urging the province to move ahead with the licence approval. The Narwhal and the Winnipeg Free Press found many of these communications were not listed in the lobbyist registry.

While Schnoor did not indicate any lobbying regulations had been broken, Paul Thomas, a University of Manitoba professor emeritus in political science, believes these off-the-book activities highlight gaps in the rules.

“Sio Silica is kind of a major example of what, in the worst-case scenario, can happen,” he said in an interview.

Lobbying, Thomas said, is as old as government itself. It is, fundamentally, a process by which individuals and groups can advocate their interests to the government and shape policy, law and funding. But it is often viewed with “an aura of suspicion,” he said, because of the possibility for conflicts of interest and “back-door” tactics. 

To mitigate those risks and ensure transparency, lobbying activities are guided by a set of conduct rules and recorded in a publicly available registry. Through the registry, members of the public should be able to understand who is trying to influence government decisions — and what they’re hoping to achieve.

Thomas believes Manitoba’s rules are “far behind” best practices in other provinces: the registry is hard to navigate and lacking in detail, the penalties for improper lobbying lack teeth and the law leaves plenty of room for informal, undisclosed activities.

Despite its flaws, Manitoba’s registry offers valuable insight into the voices seeking to shape government decision-making.

The Narwhal and Winnipeg Free Press set out to better understand what is — and is not — known about the voices seeking to influence government decision-making by analyzing the lobbyist registry over the first two years of the NDP government. 

Here’s what we found.

What’s in the registry?

All lobbyists working in Manitoba are required to file returns, called registrations, detailing their activities, including who they contacted, what organization they lobbied for and what they were lobbying about. These registrations, filed periodically, have been collected and stored in the registry since 2012. 

The level of detail included in the registration is left up to the lobbyist, and varies widely throughout the registry.

There were just shy of 1,500 registrations between Oct. 1, 2023, and Oct. 31, 2025. 

They show Manitoba officials were contacted by more than 600 lobbyists representing more than 250 organizations and 50 lobbying firms.

All told, these lobbyists reported 3,557 activities — defined for this analysis as one subject matter reported by one lobbyist in the activities portion of their registration. 

For every activity, the registry lists target contacts — public officials that the lobbyists contacted, or attempted to contact, about a particular subject. In all, lobbyists recorded more than 71,500 target contacts in the first two years of the NDP government.

To help illustrate what we know about who the lobbyists are and what topics were discussed, each square of this grid will represent 10 lobbying activities.

Who are the lobbyists?

The office of the lobbyist registrar has a flowchart to help prospective lobbyists decide whether their efforts to get in touch with the government technically count as lobbying. If an individual is being paid to communicate with a public official to influence a decision or to set up a meeting with a third party, and they are not acting in their official capacity as a government employee, a diplomat, a representative of an Indigenous group or a charity — they are a lobbyist.

If they are lobbying on behalf of an organization they work for and spend (either individually or with a team) more than 100 hours per year lobbying, they are considered an in-house lobbyist. If they’re lobbying on behalf of a third party, they are considered a consultant.

The 100-hour rule is among the more outdated provisions in Manitoba’s legislation, Thomas said. Other jurisdictions have largely done away with time-based cutoffs, given they are largely reliant on the honour system and difficult to monitor. 

The rules for in-house and consultant lobbyists are slightly different: consultants need to file registrations within 10 days of starting any lobbying work, while in-house staff have a representative, called the senior officer, who files a report approximately every six months detailing the activities of all of the organization’s lobbyists. 

About four out of every five lobbyists who got in touch with Manitoba public officials between October 2023 and 2025 were in-house lobbyists. These in-house representatives registered nearly 90 per cent of all lobbying in that time frame. 

Lobbyist backgrounds vary widely. Some are legal professionals, others have experience in politics or government relations. Some are experts in a particular field, or are staff of a non-profit. 

As is the trend across the country, there are a handful of former provincial politicians who took on lobbying roles after leaving government. Former Manitoba MLAs Cameron Friesen, Gord Mackintosh and Scott Fielding are each registered as consultant lobbyists and recorded a combined 50 activities. Under conflict of interest legislation, former cabinet members are not permitted to lobby about subjects they were previously involved with for 12 months.   

Which organizations have hired lobbyists?

The registry shows 266 organizations lobbied the provincial government in its first two years. Almost a third — 80 in total — were health-care or pharmaceutical organizations. About 20 were from the energy, oil and gas sector. There were also five mining organizations and two forestry companies. Other sectors represented among the lobbying organizations include agriculture, construction, finance, education, automotive manufacturing, housing and telecommunications.

Ten organizations — including four pharmaceutical companies, three professional associations, an international mining company and a national oil and gas company — conducted more than half of all lobbying activity in that time, with an average of 12 lobbyists and 188 activities each. 

The Canadian Federation of Independent Business, a non-profit advocating for the interests of small and medium-sized businesses nationwide, dominates the registry with more than 700 activities across its 14-person in-house lobby team. 

At the other end of the spectrum, nearly half of the organizations registered just one lobbyist, and about a third conducted just one lobbying activity.

While laws are meant to ensure anyone can influence the decisions made by government officials, critics caution larger organizations are sometimes able to exert more influence over policymakers. 

“The lobbying community has some more active, more aggressive, more well-connected actors and institutions that have potentially disproportionate impact on the formulation of public policy, bills and regulations and budgets,” Thomas said. 

While more resources mean you “probably get listened to, it doesn’t necessarily guarantee that your advice is accepted,” he added. Instead, those larger organizations likely have more resources to monitor political developments in their area of interest, and more opportunities to informally meet with public officials at industry events. 

What are they lobbying about?

Over the first two years of the NDP government, lobbyists registered activities relating to 44 subject categories. Health care was by far the most common with over 1,000 registered activities — nearly 30 per cent of all activities in that time. 

The focus on health care is not surprising: the NDP campaigned on a promise to rebuild the provincial health-care system and has spent the largest portion of its last two budgets within the health, seniors and long-term care department.

Energy and economic development were the next-most popular subjects with 199 activities each, followed by the environment at 152.

Energy, oil and gas and other resource extraction companies made up more than half of energy-related activities, one-tenth of economic development activities and one-third of environmental activities. 

TransCanada Pipelines, Enbridge, Imperial Oil, South Bow Services, the Canadian Fuels Association and the Explorers and Producers Association of Canada, are particularly well represented among these subjects, registering a combined 156 activities. 

Renewable energy and electrification-focused organizations, including the Canadian Renewable Energy Association, hydrogen and helium producers, sustainable fuel organizations and electric vehicle infrastructure companies, combined for 43 activities in the same subject categories.

Data shows lobbyists took a variety of strategic approaches. 

Some more prolific organizations spread their lobbying across topics and departments — the Canadian Federation of Independent Business registered 25 different subject matters, Brazil-based mining company Vale, which ran one of Manitoba’s largest nickel mining operations for several decades and was once the largest employer in the northern city of Thompson, lobbied 21 subjects. 

Other groups appeared to focus their efforts on a single subject. The Canadian Medical Association, for example, conducted 259 activities (the second most by a single organization) focused exclusively on health, while Enbridge’s 49 activities all focused on energy.

Who is being lobbied?

Lobbyists targeted 356 public officials across approximately 120 government departments and agencies during the two-year time period.  

Staff in the health, seniors and long-term care department were targeted most often, followed by the premier’s office, then the department of Finance, the department of Business, Mining and Trade and the Environment department. 

When reaching out to departmental staff, lobbyists tend to target the relevant minister, at an average 84 per cent of the requests. Other staffers that tend to be targeted include deputy and assistant deputy ministers, chiefs of staff and program directors. The economic development and health departments saw the largest proportion of activities targeting non-ministerial staff.

Aside from government departments, lobbyists targeted staff at public agencies and Crown corporations, such as Manitoba Hydro and the Hydro-Electric Board, the Manitoba Housing and Renewal Corporation and the Securities Commission. 

About 60 per cent of target outreach was aimed at MLA offices, regardless of political party. Each office received approximately 800 requests in the two-year period, with the exception of Tuxedo and Transcona, with 628 and 303 requests respectively. The vast majority of these MLA requests — 92 per cent — were made by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. 

What do lobbyists want out of it?

The idea behind a transparent registry is to understand how some corporations or organizations are able to influence government decisions in their favour. To understand what impact organizations have, it’s important to know what they hope to gain.

In Manitoba, lobbyists are able to choose one or more of six pre-written “outcomes” in their filings. There’s also room to further describe activities, though the amount of additional detail varies widely.

Here’s what we do know: more than half of activities seek to “influence the development, amendment or termination of a program or policy”; one-quarter aim to “influence the development of a legislative proposal.”

Additional outcomes include setting up meetings between public officials and other people, influencing the making or amending of regulations, shaping the content, passage or defeat of bills in the legislature and, finally, influencing the awarding of a grant or other financial benefit. 

Lobbyists are expected to outline any “legislative proposal, bill, resolution, regulation, program, policy, contract or financial benefit” relevant to their activities, but not every organization does so consistently. 

Vale Canada, for example, registered 122 activities over the two-year period, all aimed at influencing a program, policy, bill or resolution. For all but 10, the “detail” section simply reads: “to accelerate development of critical minerals.” 

By contrast, the Explorers and Producers Association, an oil and gas industry group, notes its activities advocate for “policy, fiscal and royalty provisions that ensure Manitoba remains a competitive and attractive destination for investment” as the province reviews its drilling incentive program and related royalty regimes.

There’s also no requirement to outline any outcomes that came as a result of the lobbying efforts. For example, organizations looking to secure funding are not required to report whether or not it was provided. There is a section in the registry for organizations to list any government funding they receive, but they are not required to list when it was allocated, or under which programs. 

This is another area where Thomas believes the registry can be strengthened.

“You need to make it more demanding on lobbyists to indicate who they’re lobbying and the subject matter beyond glittering generalities,” he said. 

How else could the registry be improved?

There’s a balance to be struck when it comes to reporting requirements for lobbyists, Thomas explained. 

Stringent and demanding rules provide more transparency for the public, but can create barriers for smaller organizations with fewer resources.

“Not all lobbyists have the same political clout. If you write rules that are too burdensome and demanding, non-profits will find them difficult to comply with and spend too much time filling in forms, recording every interaction they have with the government,” Thomas said.

An ideal set of regulations, he explained, would have “reporting requirements proportional to the size and scope of the organization that’s interacting with government officials.” Legislation to this effect is currently being developed at the federal level. 

For lobbyists that don’t comply with the rules, Thomas said the legislation needs a stronger enforcement mechanism. As it stands, the lobbyists registrar does not have its own enforcement power, and violations of the act must be handled by police. The penalty for a violation is a fine of up to $25,000, but the office of the lobbyists registrar said in an email it is not aware of any prosecutions or penalties having been applied to date.

Thomas suggests tiered administrative penalties and the possibility of a temporary lobbying ban — similar to the penalty structure under British Columbia’s laws — would give the province more opportunity for effective enforcement. 

Every year, the lobbyist registrar should provide an annual report — as is the case at the federal level and in other provinces — summarizing trends and compliance, he added. In Manitoba, the lobbyist registrar also serves as the ethics commissioner. Since 2023, the ethics commissioner’s annual report has included a short section related to lobbying.

Finally, Thomas believes the province should draft a code of conduct to clarify the “legal and ethical norms of lobbying” and help promote trust between the lobbying community and the public. 

All of these changes, Thomas said, could be achieved without an inquiry into one particular scandal. But they’re adjustments he hopes will come sooner than later.

“You want to build a made-in-Manitoba solution,” Thomas said. “But we’re not there yet.” 

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.

Methodology+

The Narwhal and the Winnipeg Free Press created an independent database of registered lobbying activities between Oct. 1, 2023, and Oct. 31, 2025, including lobbyist names and firms, lobbying organizations, subject matter details, lobbying dates, intended outcomes and target contacts, as entered in the provincial registry. Each individual subject matter recorded in a registration was treated as a separate data point, for a total of 3,557 activities. These activities were analyzed for trends in lobbyist names and organizations, subject matters, intended outcomes and target contacts.

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In the fall of 2024, LNG Canada fired up its flare in Kitimat, B.C., for the first time, burning off gas to test its systems. By December, company officials knew something was wrong.

Residents were also concerned, but had little explanation as 90-metre-high flames lit up the night sky and a deep roaring sound permeated the town.

More than a year later, complaints escalated enough that Kitimat District council sat down for a special meeting with Teresa Waddington, the deputy chief operating officer at LNG Canada. About an hour into the meeting, councillor Terry Marleau asked specifically about flare tips. The response from Waddington was jumbled.

“Uh, I’d say we’re, we’re reviewing the flare tips design,” she said. “We are looking long term at what else could we do other than just reduce flaring in order to make sure that we get to a better place.”  

A couple of minutes later, Marleau leaned into the mic: “So, is there an issue with the flare stacks themselves?” 

“It’s part of the learning curve of new equipment,” Waddington replied. “So on one hand, you know, great that we brought in a technology that gets such high levels of incineration, which results in less slippage of gas, which means you have lower [greenhouse gas emissions] overall, but on the same note, it’s not perfectly working.”

Just a few kilometres away from the nearest residential neighbourhood, LNG Canada had been feeding gas into its flaring system by a magnitude of more than 15 times the typical amount to compensate for what was described as an “integrity issue.” 

Flaring is the burning of excess or waste gas produced during operations. Methane and other gases that escape the Kitimat facility during processing are sent up a metal tube that stands 122 metres high, where they meet a pilot flame and ignite, converting the raw gas into carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and water vapour. There are also often additional gases such as nitrous oxide, sulfur dioxide, volatile organic compounds and particulates released during the process. 

It’s a necessary safety protocol — if the flare is not designed correctly for the operating environment, the gas may not make it to the pilot flame and instead the flare can creep down the tube and melt the infrastructure. The solution is to increase the pressure, increase the volume of gas and increase the size of the flame. If all the gas is not fully combusted by the pilot, black smoke appears.

The Narwhal reviewed more than 2,000 pages of documents released through freedom of information legislation about the flaring issue in Kitimat. They showed how LNG Canada officials were discussing the flaring issues internally — and that they waited approximately four months to tell the provincial energy regulator. 

We also spoke with several industry insiders, former employees and local residents and analyzed publicly available permits and other government documents to piece together a timeline of events and impacts on the community. The documents reveal regulator and industry officials grappled with the issue for months while community members and local politicians asked questions about the flaring, some complaining about excessive noise and others expressing concerns about potential toxic emissions, black smoke and particulate matter. 

Among the documents is one prepared by the BC Energy Regulator, a government agency that oversees the oil and gas sector and other industries. It detailed an “emerging integrity concern related to one of LNG Canada’s flares” in April 2025, and noted LNG Canada said the issue would take three years to be resolved. 

In the meantime, the facility was “routing additional gas” to the flare to mitigate the problem, according to the document. The system should be fine to operate by burning 11,000 cubic metres of gas per day, but due to the issue it would need to burn at least 170,000 cubic metres daily, the document stated. Burning the extra gas would result in “a noticeable impact in the community with respect to noise, light and visual disturbance,” according to the regulator’s internal briefing note.

When asked about this document, a spokesperson with the regulator confirmed awareness of the issue and said the average numbers were even higher. LNG Canada reported flaring an average of “approximately 205,000 cubic metres per day between July 1 and Nov. 30, 2025,” the spokesperson said via email. 

The email included detailed data and showed that on Sept. 1, 2025, LNG Canada flared 1,708,649 cubic metres of gas, making it the highest single day, according to the data. 

The spokesperson did not answer questions about whether the government agency communicated the problem with flaring equipment to the public, instead explaining LNG Canada had “fully mitigated” the integrity issue by “ensuring additional gas is flowed through the flare tip facilitating appropriate combustion.” The regulator spokesperson added LNG Canada is required to notify residents and local authorities “regarding certain flaring events.”

The Narwhal asked LNG Canada several detailed questions about the integrity issue, including why it did not appear to communicate clearly with members of the public, but a spokesperson with the consortium declined to answer.

“The LNG Canada facility has been commissioning and is currently in its early operations phase,” the spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement. “Flaring during commissioning and early operations is a normal occurrence in any LNG asset. In regular operations, flaring activities and associated noise reduce significantly.”

BC Energy Regulator officials kept the flaring issue quiet for more than six months

Kitimat sits at the end of a long fiord, surrounded by mountains and subject to extreme weather. Dramatic shifts in air pressure, high winds and other local environmental factors exacerbate the problems LNG Canada faced with its flare. As The Narwhal previously reported, community members have documented black plumes of smoke from the flare and some residents living close to the facility have said their yards, houses and vehicles are often left covered in a thin film of black residue.

According to the documents, LNG Canada — a consortium of foreign-owned companies led by Shell — first reported non-compliance with government permits in May 2025, citing increased emissions were required to mitigate the integrity concern. The company said a replacement part, called a flare tip, would be needed and it could take up to three years to fully integrate the new equipment, but interim changes could be made. The BC Energy Regulator responded, asking the company to clarify the environmental and health risks of any modifications and said the company might also need to apply to amend its Air Waste Discharge Permit.

In July, the regulator wrote to LNG Canada officials saying the company was on the hook for the additional emissions and needed to fix the problem. The reason, it explained, was that because the additional flaring was for the purpose of “long-term integrity management,” it was not considered a “process upset,” a designation that would exempt it from permit limits. The regulator also required the company to report any emissions exceedances. After the consortium successfully sent its first shipment of LNG overseas in late June 2025, the regulator also issued a requirement for LNG Canada to file daily reports and updates.

The regulator told The Narwhal the consortium filed six “monthly self-disclosures [related] to document flaring which is not consistent” with the facility’s permits and noted it has not issued any penalties for non-compliance. 

“The [BC Energy Regulator] does not disclose information with respect to any ongoing investigations that may be underway, but to date, no penalties have been issued to LNG Canada.”

The regulator also noted it ordered LNG Canada to contract a third-party assessment of air quality in July, which concluded “no measured adverse impacts to air quality from the increased flaring rate.”

“The [BC Energy Regulator] is engaging with LNG Canada to minimize flaring rates from all facility flares,” the spokesperson added.

The Narwhal asked LNG Canada why it didn’t communicate the problems with the flare tip to the public. We also asked for clarification on the nature of the issue, its impacts on operations and the community, including noise, emissions and other issues raised by community members. The Narwhal asked what had been done to ensure residents were kept informed about the risks posed by faulty or inadequate equipment. 

LNG Canada did not directly answer these questions.

“We continue to remain focused on safely operating the facility and minimizing disruptions to the community,” the spokesperson wrote, adding the 37th shipment is scheduled to depart in the coming days.

“We continue to meet regularly with community members, First Nations, local stakeholders and government agencies to listen and respond to any concerns raised about our activities. LNG Canada extends its continued appreciation to the Kitimat community and to the Haisla Nation for their continued support.”

Between September 2024 and January 2026, LNG Canada posted more than 27 notifications of flaring events on its website and social media, some preparing the community for weeks or months of flaring.

“Flaring is a provincially regulated safety measure that ensures the controlled, efficient combustion of natural gas during specific operational phases,” LNG Canada regularly said in these notifications. “It is a critical part of safely operating a facility of this scale and is not expected to be routine during regular operation.”

But the consortium was not telling the public why the flare was so big nor explaining why so many “unplanned” flaring events were occurring. In early November 2025, for example, LNG Canada published a notification warning residents flaring would extend beyond the “originally anticipated timeframe.” It noted this would mean more “intermittent” noise and more emissions, without explaining why. 

Around the same time, the consortium offered to temporarily relocate some residents who had expressed concerns about the noise and emissions, if they agreed to “not make any complaints or raise any concerns or objections with respect to LNG Canada, the LNG facility or the works with any third parties, including but not limited to members of the media, the [BC Energy Regulator] or the District of Kitimat” related to flaring activities.

But complaints from residents continued to come in.

Just a few months ago, in that late November 2025 council meeting, Waddington addressed questions about the flaring from Marleau and other members of council. She was accompanied by a sound analyst hired to monitor ambient noise over Kitimat.

There had been more than 30 complaints from the town’s residents about unexpected noise since the LNG export facility started flaring excess gas a year earlier, Waddington said at the meeting. The council wanted to see the results of the consortium’s monitoring, understand the cause and hear how the company was managing the disruption.

Waddington assured Marleau, and council, the company was investigating.

“If you look at how the LNG Canada startup has gone, it’s actually been smoother than most,” Waddington concluded. “We are actually kind of setting the bar.” On Jan. 5, 2026, LNG Canada published its first notification of the year, of a week-long flaring event that had already begun.

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Senior Alberta government officials stalled the submission of a coal mine pollution study to a scientific journal and prevented the lead researcher from speaking publicly about his work, according to records The Narwhal obtained through a freedom of information request.

Emails included among more than 600 pages of documents show officials delayed government scientist Colin Cooke from submitting a study about selenium pollution in the McLeod River watershed for four months after it was complete. The records also indicate Cooke was not permitted to participate in at least two media interviews or speak to a community group about his research, raising concerns the province is muzzling scientists and restricting the public’s access to tax-payer funded research.

The delays came as Alberta was embroiled in a public debate about the future of coal mining in the Rockies, with the government lifting its moratorium on coal mining in the eastern slopes not long after Cooke eventually got the greenlight to submit his study.

Cooke, an aquatic scientist who works for Alberta Environment and Protected Areas, has led multiple studies into the impacts of coal mining in Alberta’s Rocky Mountains. Working with scientists both inside and outside of government, Cooke’s research found historic coal mines in the Crowsnest Pass continue to pollute nearby waterways decades after they closed. He found snowpacks have been contaminated by windblown pollution from coal mines in southeast B.C. And more recently, he and his co-authors found concerning selenium concentrations in fish from Crowsnest Lake.

In a study published in October, Cooke and his co-authors found selenium concentrations downstream of three coal mines in the McLeod River watershed exceeded guidelines meant to protect aquatic life. This was after the mines were considered to be partially, and in one case almost entirely, reclaimed. While a small amount of selenium is essential for life, too much can be toxic, leading to deformities in fish and, in a worst-case scenario, reproductive collapse.

The research found reclamation — the process of restoring land impacted by mining to a state of equivalent capability as compared to before the mining — had so far failed to return selenium concentrations to pre-mining levels in a watershed that’s home to two at-risk fish species. The findings called into question the effectiveness of Alberta’s regulatory and mine restoration policies. It was this study Cooke was prevented from submitting for months after it was complete.

“It showed very clear impacts — negative impacts — on downstream water quality,” Bill Donahue, a co-author on the study and former head of environmental monitoring for the Alberta government, told The Narwhal.

“What our paper, I think, makes fairly clear is that there’s pretty much an utter failure of environmental management regulation and enforcement in relation to coal mining,” he said.

The Narwhal requested interviews with both Cooke and Environment and Protected Areas Minister Rebecca Schulz. Neither was granted.

Instead, in an emailed statement the minister’s press secretary Ryan Fournier said, “We take this issue seriously. That’s why we conducted this research, published it and even paid extra to make the paper open access and publicly available.” The journal that published Cooke’s McLeod River study, Environmental Pollution, allows authors or their institutions to make the study freely available without a subscription for a fee. “We’re conducting more research into coal remediation, and being more transparent, than any other government in Alberta’s history,” Fournier said.For Donahue, interference in the release and public communication of science is a major concern. “It’s really erosive to accountable and responsible government,” he said. And, he added, it raises serious questions like, “What else is not being published or released or communicated?”

Scientist repeatedly told to hold off submitting study to journal: internal emails

Cooke approached his superiors at Alberta Environment and Protected Areas in December 2023 to arrange briefings for senior officials about the McLeod River research, emails show. He noted the study, while not yet complete, could have “significant implications” for both Alberta Environment and the Alberta Energy Regulator.

Multiple pages in the records The Narwhal obtained were redacted, but they show the director of watershed sciences emailed Cooke months later, in mid-June 2024, to “reiterate the request to hold off on submitting the McLeod manuscript to a journal” until the Alberta Energy Regulator had been briefed.

That message, to hold off submitting the paper until leadership briefings were done, was repeated again by the executive director of the airshed and watershed stewardship branch in early July. “That message and direction is not unique to this manuscript, this topic area, or even our branch,” she said.

Later that month Cooke emailed the executive director and assistant deputy minister with the final manuscript. “Now that we have briefed the [Alberta Energy Regulator] on the paper are we ok to submit the manuscript? I was hoping to submit it next Friday (August 2),” he wrote.

That date came and went. In September, a briefing note about the new study was prepared for the minister. It noted the government had previously faced criticism for not analyzing environmental monitoring data sets or releasing draft reports based on environmental data. “This current report is now ready to be shared with other departments and submitted to a peer-reviewed scientific journal,” it said.

At the end of September, Cooke again emailed his superiors to ask if he was allowed to submit the study to the journal and was again told to wait.

The scientist followed up again in mid-October and early November.

In a statement, Fournier said, “This study took about two years to complete. Internal reviews are standard practice and necessary. This review period generated additional feedback on the paper — including as late as November 2024 — and helped assess if additional monitoring or other changes were needed.”

Concerns raised that Alberta has ‘returned to muzzling our scientists’

In mid-November 2024, Donahue, who left the government in 2019, expressed frustration about the delays in an email to Cooke. He said he would submit it himself if Cooke wasn’t allowed to.

“I suggest you inform the [assistant deputy minister] and chief scientist that I simply don’t accept that they are refusing to permit the publication of our manuscript, and that they should remind themselves of their legal duties, as stipulated by the Alberta’s Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act,” Donahue wrote in the email, which he shared with The Narwhal.

He said senior officials should be asking themselves, “What is worse, the public learning how badly coal mining in Alberta has been harming downstream water quality and aquatic ecosystems, or the public learning how badly coal mining in Alberta has been harming downstream water quality and aquatic ecosystems and that we’ve returned to muzzling our scientists in an attempt to cover it up while the government tries to convince Albertans that coal mining is environmentally benign?”

Six days later, Cooke, who had just returned from vacation, forwarded the email to his director. A week after that, he was allowed to submit the paper.

“I’m quite confident that my letter shook some trees,” Donahue said.

From his perspective there was no reasonable justification for the government to delay the study’s submission to a journal. He said there had been ample opportunity for briefings and noted it can take several months to go through the peer-review process after a study is submitted to a journal before it’s published.

By this point, Alberta had been embroiled, for years, in a fierce debate over the prospect of a renewed metallurgical coal mining industry in the eastern slopes of the Rockies (metallurgical coal is used in steel-making, as opposed to electricity generation). In January, not long after Cooke got the green-light to submit his study, the Alberta government rescinded the moratorium on coal mining in the eastern slopes it put in place in 2021 and 2022. The moratorium had come in response to public backlash to a government decision in 2020 to cancel the province’s previous long-standing coal policy from 1976.

Last December, Energy Minister Brian Jean said the province would return to the 1976 policy as it developed a new coal policy. He said the new policy, yet to be released, would require new mines to be underground or to use technologies to prevent selenium from entering waterways. But these measures would not apply to projects considered to be “advanced,” including the controversial proposal for the Grassy Mountain mine in the Crowsnest Pass.

Cooke’s paper, which was eventually published in October 2025, summarized decades of government and industry water quality monitoring at three Rocky Mountain coal mines in Alberta. Donahue noted the early years of data, now a couple decades old, revealed concerning selenium concentrations downstream of the mines. But little was done to address it, he said, suggesting the province has largely viewed monitoring as “a box-checking exercise.”

“Alberta Environment and the Alberta Energy Regulator have been asleep at the switch for 20 plus years when it comes to responding to clear evidence of very harmful downstream effects from coal mining,” he said.

Katie Morrison, executive director of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society’s southern Alberta chapter, said it’s “really frustrating to see the government trying to keep information from the public, but especially on something as important as water quality.”

“Albertans are really aware of and really concerned about the quality of our water in general, but particularly in this context of coal mining,” she said. “Research like this that shows these risks is so important to have in those conversations, so that we can hold the government accountable.”

Scientist prevented from accepting media request, community speaking invitation, emails suggest

As senior officials delayed the submission of the McLeod River study, Cooke was also seemingly being prevented from speaking to the media and community groups about previous research into coal mine pollution, emails included in the document release suggest.

In January 2024, a reporter for The Canadian Press requested an interview with either Cooke or co-author Craig Emmerton, another government scientist, about their recently published study describing lasting water quality impacts from more than a century of coal mining in Crowsnest Pass, the released emails show.

The executive director of airshed and watershed stewardship indicated in an email to Cooke that she was supportive of an interview, as was the director of communications and the assistant deputy minister. Days later, word came down from the assistant deputy minister that the minister’s office had taken the lead on the request.

The Canadian Press article was published later that month. The reporter noted neither of the government scientists involved in the study were made available for an interview.

In a statement to The Narwhal, Fournier, Schulz’s press secretary said, “The authors of these studies are trained scientists, not government spokespersons.”

In June 2024, Cooke received an interview request from a CBC producer to appear on the morning show in Kelowna the next day to talk about another study, which found toxic contaminants from coal mines in B.C.’s Elk Valley in snowpacks in the region. According to the emails, Cooke was told to direct the producer to Fournier, the minister’s press secretary.

“That’s the process for all media inquiries,” the director of communications for Alberta Environment and Protected Areas wrote in an email to Cooke. “[The minister’s office] will then assess and advise from there.”

The next day CBC’s Daybreak South interviewed co-author Alison Criscitiello, the director of the Canadian Ice Core Lab at the University of Alberta, not Cooke, who was the lead author.

Then, in September 2024, the Livingstone Landowners Group of ranchers and landowners concerned about the risks of coal mining on the eastern slopes of the Rockies invited Cooke to speak to their community about his research.

“I would like to do this,” Cooke wrote in an email to the director of watershed sciences asking what approvals he’d need. The director responded that she was supportive but said Cooke would need approval from the assistant deputy minister.

In an interview, Bill Trafford, the president of the Livingstone Landowners Group said Cooke was not able to present to the group.

“It’s very concerning because it’s very germane to the issues that we’re trying to deal with,” Trafford said. “I’m really surprised they can take a scientist and say he’s not allowed to present his material publicly.”

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