From the surface, a strip of water contained by docks at the southeastern edge of the Hamilton Harbour appears much like any other in the industrial centre, once known as “Steeltown.” Cargo ships bound for the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway line the boat slip’s western edge. On the eastern side are piles of black slag — the hard, clumpy by-product of steel processing.

But beneath the water lies a legacy of pollution, one which The Narwhal has learned is a decade behind in being cleaned up, in part due to the economic fallout of U.S. tariffs on the steel industry.

The sediment in the Kenilworth Avenue boat slip is contaminated with chemicals, including polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, and heavy metals that are toxic to fish and other aquatic organisms; exposure can cause reproductive problems, reduced growth and developmental effects.

The steel-maker Dofasco, which has operated on the shore since 1912 and was purchased by Luxembourg-based ArcelorMittal in 2006, owns the boat slip and has publicly pledged to contain the contaminated sediment. Decades of industrial activity contributed to the contamination: a 1999 scientific report published by Environment Canada’s Water Science and Technology Directorate identified runoff from the steel-maker’s coal piles as one source of metals and other toxins entering the water, along with industrial cooling water, stormwater and sewer overflows from various sources. 

According to a 2015 project description the company submitted to the federal environmental assessment office, some concentrations of chemicals found in the area were high enough to be considered hazardous waste under federal criteria. That means the waste would have to be transferred off-site to a landfill or contained within an engineered cap.

ArcelorMittal Dofasco proposed covering one contaminated area with such a cap. A separate containment structure along the eastern edge of the boat slip would lock in additional contamination, including some dredged up and pumped in from other areas.

Work was scheduled to begin in August 2016 and, aside from long-term monitoring, finish by June 2017. But more than nine years after that deadline, the cleanup remains unfinished, with no containment structures in place. According to company records reviewed by The Narwhal, as of 2025 the anticipated cleanup cost was US$28 million. By May 2026, a company statement given to a group coordinating efforts to restore Hamilton Harbour, and shared with The Narwhal, showed progress had stalled due to the economic pressure U.S. tariffs have put on Canada’s steel industry. 

ArcelorMittal Dofasco did not respond to detailed questions or multiple requests for comment by publication time.

The Narwhal reviewed annual reports, meeting notes and project updates going back to 1999. The documents lay out early efforts — and then years of delays — in removing the contaminated sediment and working toward the broader project of cleaning up Hamilton Harbour.

A former senior executive at the steel-maker, who requested their identity be kept confidential for fear of retribution, said the remediation was taken seriously while they worked there, before retiring in the past decade. “We had hired people to do the engineering work. We had put money aside in a special account, so everything was being set up,” they told The Narwhal, adding approximately $5 million had been allocated for the project at the time. (The company’s 2018 financial report notes it expected to spend US$5 million on the cleanup the following year.)

A note on trust, integrity and unnamed sources+

This story uses information from sources The Narwhal has agreed not to name. The Narwhal only agrees to keep names confidential when we believe two things. First, that the person we’re speaking with is putting themselves at genuine risk, either personal or professional, by sharing this information with us. Second, that the information they’re sharing is in the public interest. Our decision to do so is never made lightly. 

There are two types of unnamed sources. A confidential source is someone whose name we know, but aren’t sharing. We make multiple attempts to verify their identity and information with other sources. If we aren’t able to get a second source, we say so. 

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Although the original 2017 deadline passed, the former executive said the project continued advancing internally. Upon retirement, they believed it was close to moving into construction.

“It was just a matter of hiring a general contractor to do the work.”

But records show that work is far from done.

A history of contamination and efforts to clean up Hamilton Harbour

Kristin O’Connor, who coordinates efforts to remediate Hamilton Harbour at Conservation Halton, says the waterway’s transformation began as Hamilton expanded during the 1800s and 1900s.

“It was consciously decided that the Hamilton Harbour would be the dumping ground for industry and for sewage,” O’Connor said of her belief about how the contamination problem began across the harbour.

Over time, natural shorelines were filled in, wetlands disappeared and large sections of the waterfront were converted into industrial lands. The result was decades of deteriorating water quality, algae blooms, contaminated sediment and damage to fish and wildlife habitat. O’Connor points out a visiting urban planner described the harbour as the world’s largest and most beautiful septic tank in 1958.

In 1972, seeing a number of similarly degraded shorelines around the Great Lakes, Canada and the United States agreed to work together to clean up some of the most deeply polluted sites. The two countries signed the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement in 1987, which listed 43 official areas of concern, where industrial pollution was the most deleterious. Hamilton Harbour was one of them.

The harbour ultimately had 11 of 14 possible categories of environmental impairment identified through the Great Lakes restoration framework. Among them were restrictions on eating fish and the degradation of benthos — small organisms that live in or on sediment at the bottom of waterways. Those two concerns are particularly relevant to the Kenilworth boat slip.

How did ArcelorMittal Dofasco’s boat slip become contaminated?

The contamination in the Kenilworth Avenue boat slip didn’t come from a single incident. For generations, Hamilton Harbour, extending off of Lake Ontario, was shaped by steel-making, shipping, urban development and the discharge of industrial waste and sewage.

The 1999 scientific report examined contaminant levels in 1996 and found run-off from Dofasco’s coal piles was heavily contaminated with metals and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs. The group of chemicals is associated with sources including petroleum products, steel-making and coking operations — the process of heating coal at high temperatures to produce fuel for steel-making. Some are considered to be cancer-causing and toxic for aquatic life. After the study came out, Dofasco contracted work to capture and treat run-off from its coal piles.

Also found within the sediment, PCBs, once widely used in industrial equipment, can remain in the environment for long periods and accumulate in animal tissue. Environment and Climate Change Canada identifies the human-made chemicals as potential human carcinogens that are toxic to fish at low levels. The United Nations Environment Programme has reported they accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals, becoming more concentrated and harmful as they move up the food chain.

Dofasco acknowledged the sediment problem in its 2002 annual report, saying, “The company’s boat slip contains contaminated sediment from a time that pre-dates environmental awareness and control technologies.”

At the time, the company said it was working with the federal and provincial environment departments and other stakeholders to examine options for addressing the contamination. Neither Environment and Climate Change Canada nor Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks responded to requests for comment by publication time.

ArcelorMittal Dofasco’s 2015 project description acknowledged the pollution could negatively affect local aquatic organisms and noted the cleanup was intended to prevent them and other wildlife from coming into contact with the most heavily contaminated material.

The Canada Water Agency, the federal agency responsible for freshwater governance, said in a statement to The Narwhal that cleaning up the Kenilworth boat slip, along with a nearby contaminated site known as the Strathearne boat slip, remains necessary to reduce contamination from PCBs, PAHs and metals.

Enter the Hamilton Harbour Remedial Action Plan

After Hamilton Harbour was designated an area of concern, restoration efforts kicked off, starting with the development of a remedial action plan to address decades of environmental damage.

The Hamilton Harbour remedial action plan brings together governments, industry, conservation authorities, researchers and community organizations to restore the harbour. Dofasco and Stelco, Hamilton’s two major steel producers, have been involved in the process since its early years. O’Connor, the remedial action plan coordinator with Halton Conservation, says the Kenilworth boat slip was one of many environmental problems contributing to the harbour’s designation as an area of concern.

Over the decades, the partnership has worked on projects ranging from wastewater treatment improvements to shoreline restoration and fish habitat rehabilitation. One of its largest undertakings — and one that looks to be a model for success — is the cleanup of Randle Reef.

Located near the property of Stelco, Randle Reef was the largest contaminated sediment site on the Canadian side of the Great Lakes. A $138.9-million cleanup began in 2015, funded by the federal and provincial governments, municipalities, the port authority and industry. While Stelco was not deemed solely responsible for the pollution at Randle Reef, it supplied $14 million in steel to build a box to contain it. The sediment there was contaminated with the same toxins found at Kenilworth, and had to be dredged and moved into the steel container. The final phase, which involves installing a cap over the box, is scheduled for completion in 2027.

Kenilworth, however, has followed a different path.

ArcelorMittal Dofasco’s 2015 remediation plan outlines how it would contain the most contaminated sediment in the two proposed structures: one approximately 66 metres wide and 120 metres long and the other roughly 264 metres long and 44 metres wide. Less than 40,000 cubic metres of contaminated sediment was expected to be dredged from other areas of the boat slip and relocated into the containment structures.

Sediment containing naphthalene — the most volatile member of the PAH family — would be tested and, where required, transported to a licensed landfill for hazardous waste disposal. Other areas would be covered with sand to isolate contamination remaining after dredging. A temporary water treatment system would manage wastewater generated during the work, while long-term monitoring would assess the integrity of the containment structures. The approach was designed to minimize disruption to shipping operations while reducing exposure to contaminated sediment.

Unlike the multi-partner Randle Reef project, ArcelorMittal Dofasco was identified as the “sole proponent” for its boat slip remediation. O’Connor says the remedial action plan identifies the environmental work that needs to be completed, but individual partners are responsible for carrying out their own projects. “We don’t fund it. We don’t monitor it,” she said.

In its 2023 annual report, ArcelorMittal Dofasco listed a US$31-million environmental provision for the expected cost of remediating toxic sediment at the Kenilworth boat slip. The company’s 2025 annual report included a US$28-million provision for the project. These provisions are accounting estimates of expected environmental costs, not proof that money has been spent on remediation or that those amounts are held in a dedicated account.

The remediation timeline starts slipping

In 2020, the International Joint Commission, a Canada-U.S. organization that investigates and mediates transboundary issues involving fresh water, reported that ArcelorMittal Dofasco was expected to clean up contaminated sediment near the Kenilworth boat slip over two years beginning in 2021.

A Hamilton Harbour remedial action plan fact sheet originally published in 2018 and updated in 2023 continued to describe ArcelorMittal Dofasco as obtaining provincial approval to manage PCB, PAH and metal-contaminated sediment in the boat slip. Meanwhile, meeting records from the Bay Area Implementation Team, the group of partners responsible for implementing the remedial action plan, show the project remained under development.

At a June 13, 2023, meeting, ArcelorMittal Dofasco reported conducting additional sediment sampling and working with an engineering consultant to review the results. The company was preparing an updated environmental summary report as part of the permitting process and reviewing the engineering design.

A year later, the project still had not moved into construction. Meeting notes from June 20, 2024, state a tender was being prepared for proponents to bid on the remediation work. The notes state that technical options and logistics were being reviewed as well as further consultations with the Indigenous community.

By November 2025, the project timeline was still being reviewed, according to notes, but ArcelorMittal Dofasco remained committed to the cleanup.

The most recent update provided to the Bay Area Implementation Team came from ArcelorMittal Dofasco on May 29, 2026: “The current market context and threat to the Canadian steel industry as a result of the U.S. tariffs creates a very difficult environment for the company and the industry. So much so that every investment must be carefully reviewed and managed in order to continue to be a sustainable business. Given this, there is no further update or progress since the last meeting.”  

The statement comes amid substantial uncertainty facing Canadian steel producers.

U.S. President Donald Trump imposed 25 per cent tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum in March 2025, before doubling them to 50 per cent that June and escalating further with additional trade pressures through 2026. In steel-making communities, including Hamilton, workers have faced job losses as a result. That includes at Stelco, which has laid off hundreds of workers in the past weeks.

But that doesn’t account for the past decade of delays on remediating the Kenilworth boat slip.

Chris McLaughlin, executive director of the Bay Area Restoration Council, said the precise circumstances behind the years of delays remain unclear. He called for greater leadership from the federal and provincial government in addressing the project’s technical and economic obstacles, and said the public deserves clearer commitments and timelines from the company for completing the work.

“There is a moral imperative to reconcile with our destructive industrial past,” he said. “Effective cleanups and restorative actions with public engagement and community connections create meaningful improvements and sustain hope.”

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

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

A few days before I visited Devil’s Glen, a resident who lives near the Ontario provincial park got into a yelling match with a rock climber. It allegedly ended with the climber’s hands around the neighbour’s neck, and a call to the police. Over the years, there have also been allegations of litter stuffed into caverns used by at-risk bats, of centenary cedar trees sawed off, of cars egged and climbing routes sabotaged along this stretch of Niagara Escarpment in Clearview, Ont.

For that neighbour, Adam Pearce, concerns started shortly after he moved into his home nearly two decades ago. He began noticing rock-climbing routes on the escarpment abutting his property — hundreds of bolts on bald stretches of cliff face are a giveaway. After a climber fell eight metres and had to be rescued by fire crews and paramedics, Pearce redoubled his efforts to understand how the sport was being monitored and regulated by Ontario Parks. 

He learned it largely wasn’t. For years, rock climbing was just an illicit pastime he and parks ecologists worried about. Then, the Government of Ontario officially sanctioned it. 

I met Adam and his wife, Holly, at their house in late August. Flower beds and bird houses decorated the property, along with dozens of animal skulls the couple has found. We entered a trail out the back of their yard, where they’ve erected “No Trespassing” signs. Within minutes, we were in the park, beginning our descent along a thin slice of trail overlooking a steep drop into the forest below. I couldn’t help but think about these contested grounds, and what would happen if the Pearces came across a climber.

I knew the possibility for tension was high. For months before visiting, I’d been speaking with sources — including climbers themselves, residents and scientists — while reading more than 1,200 pages of documents detailing conflicts between rock climbers, neighbours, environmental organizations and government agencies about this slice of escarpment. 

Several document packages made accessible through freedom of information legislation and either obtained by or shared with The Narwhal show a paper trail of a conflict that goes far beyond squabbles between neighbours and climbers. It shows how the actions — or inactions — of Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks have allowed the situation to deteriorate so dramatically.

The most recent chapter of this story dates back to May 2023, when Ontario Parks, which falls under the provincial Environment Ministry, put up signs closing several climbing routes in particularly ecologically sensitive areas in Devil’s Glen. That summer, climbers spoke with news outlets, posted on social media, wrote blogs to criticize the “unprecedented” decision and, according to one of the document packages, emailed Ontario Parks staff to say the move was taken in “bad faith.”

By August that year, the documents show, the office of then-environment minister David Piccini had ordered all the remaining signs be removed — even though at least one government biologist argued removing the signs had “no scientific rationale.” Climbing has continued indiscriminately in the park since. Ontario Parks did not respond to a request for comment or specific questions for this story.

Creating a rock-climbing route is a fairly invasive procedure. Climbers use folding saws, garden shears and crowbars to pry off loose and wiggly rocks. In a detailed guide to “Route Building 101,” the Association of West Kootenay Rock Climbers in B.C. reminds climbers: “Bushes and small trees that stick out of cracks need to have the roots removed to avoid future growth. Hacking away at small stumps with a hatchet might be necessary.” Other advice is to use an “old ice axe” to remove roots from the cracks. Climbers use battery-powered hammer drills to affix bolts to the cliff face to clip on to — permanent anchors to catch them if they fall. 

The Narwhal spoke with Mike Penney, volunteer president of the Ontario Alliance of Climbers, about these concerns. He’s been targeted for disputing Ontario Parks’ efforts to close some areas off to climbing, and shared photos of posters in which his likeness is shown arguing about the scientific evidence behind those closures. The posters were shared on social media and, he said, left on the vehicles of climbers. “I’m not denying that there is an impact to our natural environment through climbing,” he says. “But I would argue that climbing has the least amount of impact out of any recreational sport that you could think of.”

The Pearces don’t agree with that assessment. They say they’ve seen sensitive plants ripped from the cliff face, tree limbs sawed off and a path built with gravel chipped off the side of the cliffs to allow for easier access. With more than 140 rock-climbing routes across the approximately 700 metres of escarpment within the park, they became increasingly worried about the ecosystem — the hundreds of bats that pour from caves and cracks in the fall and cedars that sprout from cliff faces in ways that seem to defy nature.

It made them de facto vigilantes. “We watched them start vandalizing the cliff and we reported it numerous times to Ontario Parks,” Pearce said, as we looked up at a route. Climbers are fond of quirky monikers, giving routes names such as Mystery of a Lost History, Hyperion and Sympathy for the Devil.

“Holly and I would come across them and say, ‘What are you doing? What’s going on? You’re not allowed to do that.’ And they tell us to mind our own business,” Pearce said. 

In turn, the Pearces have been accused by climbers of destroying routes, stealing equipment and egging cars — all of which they deny.

“We never thought that it would affect us on a level that it has,” Pearce said, saying the couple has received calls in the middle of the night with people threatening to burn their house down. “[The Ontario Provincial Police] told me I should always have a body cam walking in the park.”

The Ontario Provincial Police said it was unable to comment on detailed questions from The Narwhal about the number of calls for service, investigative actions or whether charges have been laid.

Over the years, the Pearces have sent more than 100 emails and made dozens of phone calls to Ontario Parks. In response, in 2026, the provincial agency issued them a cease and desist letter for excessive emails, phone calls and social media posts, which the ministry said are “inappropriate and serve no constructive purpose.” The consequences of breaking the cease and desist order were not specified, but the Pearces have continued emailing park staff.

To the Pearces, the letter is another roadblock in understanding how recreation and conservation are being balanced in the park — if they are at all.

“We’re not trying to say there shouldn’t be rock climbing,” Pearce said. “All we are asking for is that Ontario Parks does their job.”

A month after the Pearces were told to cease and desist, the Parks department issued a new management plan explicitly permitting climbing in Devil’s Glen. The plan, issued under current Environment Minister Todd McCarthy, states climbing “will be secondary to the protection of the cliff’s important geological, biological and cultural heritage,” and that a “leave no trace ethic” will act as the guiding principle. 

The plan sets out broad protections for the park, but doesn’t include details on how they’ll be enforced. As a “non-operating” park, there is no permanent office or on-site superintendent at Devil’s Glen. The plan does say park authorities can put up fencing and signs to keep climbers off particularly sensitive areas — again.

Derek Morningstar said he first visited Devil’s Glen in 2024, after being invited by an Ontario Parks specialist to research bats in the area. “We could tell right away that that was a pretty important place for bats,” the ecologist and founder of the bat research company Myotistar said in an interview. “There’s a huge amount of bats flying along there during the swarming season, and there are crevices and caves we think that haven’t been explored. Certainly they’re swarming there and probably hibernating there as well — several endangered species.”

Six of the province’s eight bat species have been found in the area, many of which are currently listed as endangered thanks to widespread fungal disease and habitat loss. This includes the eastern small-footed myotis and little brown bats, whose numbers have declined significantly in recent years.

In an April 2025 email contained in one of the document packages, Morningstar wrote to Ron Gould, an ecologist and protected areas specialist at Ontario Parks also studying the Devil Glen’s ecosystem. He shared his observations with the Parks staffer saying the location was one of the most significant swarming sites he had ever worked at: “It seems like during the swarming season, bats are just about everywhere in that area.”

His findings supported what Ontario Parks scientists had found, and sought to protect back in 2023 when the agency erected signs prohibiting climbing at 23 of the park’s existing routes. The signs went up in three sensitive areas that housed rare ferns, roosting bats and cliff-nesting birds across a 100-metre length of the escarpment in the park, a fraction of the climbable cliff face.

Gould said he was unable to give comment for this story due to fear of reprisal, but the documents contain an email he sent to his boss, Greg Wilson, the southwest zone manager for Ontario Parks, in May 2023. “These protection areas still leave a significant climbing opportunity,” wrote Gould, who has worked with species at risk and habitat protection at provincial agencies for more than two decades. 

For the Pearces, the signs were a win. But, the move was unpopular with climbers. In May 2023, Penney, with the Ontario Alliance of Climbers, wrote an email to Ontario Parks staff saying, “We are extremely disturbed by this development.” 

“If this is official signage, this is a statement by Ontario Parks that there is no longer any interest in ongoing communication, or a consultative relationship with the climbing community.”

Parks manager Wilson also declined to be interviewed for this story. But emails show his reply to Penney: “The signage was installed by Ontario Parks to protect the most sensitive ecological values in Devil’s Glen Provincial Park. … The intention of the signage is to notify park visitors that these areas should not be disturbed. We are still very much interested in an open and collaborative relationship with the [alliance].”

Things didn’t quite play out that way. 

“We realized that we actually needed to mobilize the climbing community,” Penney told The Narwhal. In an attempt to get the environment minister’s attention, the group solicited nearly 4,000 letters, he said, to reopen climbing in all areas of the park.

In his interview with The Narwhal, Penney said Ontario Parks had closed “the entirety of Devil’s Glen to rock climbing” in 2023. When The Narwhal asked about the discrepancy between that statement and Ontario Parks records showing only 23 routes of 140 routes had been closed, he replied: “I don’t really see why that matters,” adding the route count was incorrect, and that substantially more than 23 routes were closed. 

Penney said he used to spend 30 to 50 days each year climbing at Devil’s Glen. He loves the blue-ish grey limestone and the challenging routes. “One of the privileges in walking through these places is also learning about the environment and learning about some of the species that you’re now walking in amongst,” Penney said over the phone while driving home from his day job as a business development manager for a soup company.

He said he visits the area less now, given escalated tensions. He told The Narwhal that climbers have described being threatened, called racial slurs, filmed while relieving themselves in the woods and having the bolts they use to fasten themselves to the cliffs cut off.

He told The Narwhal about an email he received in his role at the alliance, sent from Adam Pearce to the climbers and other stakeholders in September 2025: “Let me be crystal clear: there will be hell to pay in Devil’s Glen if climbing access is granted.” But Pearce told The Narwhal this was taken out of context and was only part of the picture. The Narwhal reviewed the email, which read in full: “Let me be crystal clear: there will be hell to pay in Devil’s Glen if climbing access is granted without full transparency and accountability. The community will not tolerate policy built on silence and spin.” 

After the “No Climbing” signs went up in spring 2023, some of them were vandalized, according to an email from Wilson contained in a freedom of information package. Meanwhile, climbers’ protest letters flooded in and, in May 2023, Ministry of Environment staff had a meeting with representatives from the Ontario Alliance of Climbers. There, according to the minutes, Penney raised concerns about the “continued involvement” of unnamed Ontario Parks staff members and proposed bringing in third-party biologists to validate the agency’s science.

When asked about this by The Narwhal, Penney criticized the research done by Ontario Parks’ ecologists. He said he could not be more specific about the methodology or scope, as the alliance hadn’t actually seen the ministry’s research informing the closure decision, but said the route count Ontario Parks used when planning the closures was incorrect.

Within a few months, internal emails show, then-environment minister Piccini’s office specifically directed Ontario Parks to remove the signs. Soon after that, Gould raised concerns.

Weeks after the signs came down, Gould wrote to Wilson and other colleagues that he had received reports of climbers developing new routes in Devil’s Glen and “installing new bolts directly within our previously posted protection areas.”

In October, Gould wrote: “There has been no scientific rationale involved in the removal of the signed protection areas so hopefully we can get those back in place soon. These ongoing climbing activities within the sensitive areas are likely to cause further user conflicts and impacts to park values, both of which should be avoided in our protected areas.”

About a year later, records show Gould was told by his manager, Wilson, to postpone work at the park. “As a reminder, it is my expectation you will consult with me and receive approval from me prior to performing any work related to Devil’s Glen,” Wilson wrote in a September 2024 response to an email from Gould with subject line, “Trip safety plan for Devil’s Glen and [redacted].” Wilson continued that he “would like to hold on this work for the time being,” and added he was working to get an update on the proposed amendment to the park management plan.

Wilson did not respond to questions about why signs were removed, or whether Parks biologists were asked to hold off on work at Devil’s Glen.

Ontario Parks did not confirm whether Gould still worked on the Devil’s Glen file at the time of writing, and The Narwhal has since learned he was dismissed from his work at the agency altogether. An email sent to him on Oct. 6, bounced back, saying his account was not found on the Ontario government’s email service. He was the only protected areas specialist listed for Devil’s Glen and the larger southwest parks zone on Ontario Parks’ website.

Around the time Gould was directed to hold off of work at the park, in fall 2024, a member of the alliance’s Facebook page posted that they’d heard of a climber being “approached aggressively close and made to feel uncomfortable by a man and a woman” saying climbing was not allowed on a route in Devil’s Glen. 

Penney responded, encouraging climbers to use all portions of the park and adjacent Crown land, saying: “Climbing is permitted at Devil’s Glen Provincial Park, on the entirety of the cliff.” He wrote that climbing was allowed and encouraged by Ontario Parks and the Ontario Alliance of Climbers. “Please please please continue to climb at [Devil’s Glen], enjoy yourself.”

Penney wrote to The Narwhal in an Oct. 7, email saying, “We recognize that there are legitimate conservation concerns and strongly support responsible environmental stewardship. The concern is that the conflict has, in our view, escalated beyond a normal policy disagreement.”

The Niagara Escarpment curves up from western New York, through southern Ontario and runs along Georgian Bay and the Bruce Peninsula before heading back south to parts of Michigan and Wisconsin. Devil’s Glen sits along its eastern portion in Ontario, a part of the important, delicate ecosystem that researchers and Ontario Parks officials have understood the importance of protecting for decades.

Among those experts is Doug Larson, a retired researcher and University of Guelph professor, who began studying North America’s escarpments in the 1980s.

“We found trees that were almost 10 times older than anything found elsewhere in Ontario,” Larson said of the Niagara Escarpment, over the phone from his home in Guelph. “It really is the last undisturbed stand of forests in eastern North America because of the fact people can’t get to it.”

That is, unless they climb.

In his 2004 book about the ancient cliff face forests in the Niagara Escarpment, The Last Stand, Larson wrote about European immigrants who introduced rock climbing to the Niagara Escarpment after the Second World War. “Trees hundreds of years old came in direct contact with humans for the first time,” he wrote. 

Then, at the turn of the millenium, the advent of indoor climbing gyms and advances in climbing equipment made rock climbing more accessible and popular than ever. It spread across the escarpment. “Sawn stumps and branches are visual reminders that the climbers have not simply chosen rock with fewer trees,” Larson wrote.

The twisted trees, mostly cedars, cling to the face of the escarpment. Standing only one to three metres tall, with trunks as wide as a person’s leg, they may look stunted compared to the towering stereotype of old-growth forests, particularly in B.C. But, Larson said, they represent the oldest undisturbed forest ecosystem this side of the Rocky Mountains. And they’re a biodiversity hot spot, important for nesting birds and endangered mammals. A 2008 study by an Ontario Parks ecologist found Devil’s Glen has an “outstanding total of nine provincially rare” plants including male fern, smooth cliff-brake and green spleenwort.

Through the ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s, Larson’s research found climbed areas supported substantially fewer plants due to trampling, purposeful removal and soil compaction. He and his teams recommended new climbing routes be banned in protected areas. 

Not everyone was a fan. Ontario Rock Climbing, a website that sells climbing gear, published a post on the history of climbing in the province that references a 1991 study by Larson and colleagues. 

“This study had a very negative impact on the climbing community,” it read, calling this period the “Dark Ages” for outdoor climbing. “Although the results from the study were inconsistent, it led to … a number of other cliffs being closed to climbing. Public opinion became that climbing was not compatible with the Niagara Escarpment.”

Larson argued “there was nothing inconsistent” about his results: “We published that 30 years ago, and we got immediately despised by the climbing community because they didn’t like our story.”

“Climbers need to realize that some restrictions may be required to preserve the cliff face forest in perpetuity,” he wrote in 2004. “One of the main problems is that climbers have had free rein of the escarpment cliffs for over 50 years … it is extremely difficult to modify behaviour that has been entrenched for such a long period of time.”

Alerted by the Pearces, the conservation organization Ontario Nature has also taken an interest in Devil’s Glen. Conservation director Tony Morris said his organization isn’t debating whether climbing and nature can coexist, but whether efforts are actually being made to strike that balance.

“It’s about managing that activity in a way that doesn’t harm those sensitive ecological features,” Morris said. “It means not having just climbing routes appear all over the place, and ensuring climbers aren’t going into areas that bats are hibernating in and aren’t tying ropes off of cedars, 100-year-old cedar trees.”

Having also viewed one of the document packages before sharing it with The Narwhal, Morris said seeing expert staff seemingly being held back from monitoring ecosystems “raises some serious questions about the mandate of Ontario Parks” and about the management of other parks and beyond.

“If park ecologists, whose job it is to monitor ecological health of parks, aren’t allowed to visit the parks, that seems strange,” Morris said. He said he has struggled to get information from the Environment Ministry about internal scientific studies done at Devil’s Glen.

“This is just such a strange situation that it’s gone this far,” Morris said. “When you combine it with what else we’re seeing across the province in terms of attacks on natural heritage. It’s part of a bigger picture, in the sense that, even the areas that are supposed to be managed primarily for ecological integrity, it raises serious questions if that’s the case anymore.”

In 2025, two years after the ‘no climbing’ signs were put up and quickly removed, the Ministry of Environment posted a notice to amend the Devil’s Glen Provincial Park management plan on the provincial environmental registry, and opened it up for public comment. The amendment included listing rock climbing as a permitted use in the park. 

More than 600 comments were submitted. Over 90 per cent supported the proposal, emphasizing the importance of recognizing and managing rock climbing within the park. A minority expressed concerns about environmental impacts on cliff habitats and species such as ancient cedar trees and bats.

In April 2026, climbing became a permitted use in the park.

“Ecological integrity remains the top priority, and Ontario Parks will manage ecologically sustainable recreational uses and rock climbing at Devil’s Glen Provincial Park with ecological integrity in mind,” the decision reads.

The Ontario Alliance of Climbers credits this to their campaigning. One of its websites describes this regulation change as “the first such plan for an Ontario Provincial Park,” adding, “We are optimistic that this will be the first of many such plans. We need you, the climbing community, to write submissions supporting this plan … we are so close to clipping the chains.”

“I have a great relationship with Greg Wilson,” Penney told The Narwhal in mid-September about the alliance’s “productive conversations” with the Environment Ministry. “And they agreed that this was something that was long overdue, and put their support behind some resources to help Ontario Parks and help our partners there do what was necessary internally.” 

Penney told The Narwhal that “climbers are great stewards and advocates of our lands and of our climbing areas.”

When The Narwhal visited Devil’s Glen in August, shiny metal bolts were visible across the cliff face. There were no signs telling climbers which sensitive areas to avoid, even though Ontario Parks’ plan sanctioning climbing references a study that “recommended restricting climbing and access routes to the most disturbed areas where continued use is not likely to worsen existing impacts.”

The plan gives Ontario Parks the right to close routes deemed sensitive to climbing activity, and to prevent new routes from being established given that cliff area is “highly saturated … and the need or capacity to create new route opportunities is generally low.”

As we walked, the Pearces picked up garbage from the trail, stashing it in their backpack to throw out later. “You better wash your hands after,” Holly told her husband as he bent toward a personal hygiene product.

After about half hour of hiking, we came across two climbers, readying their gear and resting between routes. They were the only other people using the trail on the quiet Monday morning, and my stomach dropped, anticipating conflict. Holly, too, had readied her phone camera to capture the interaction. The climbers and Pearces exchanged polite, short greetings — remarking on the beautiful, mild weather.

Holly put her phone away. The climbers, now with full permission from Ontario Parks, surveyed their next climb.

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A document meant for a behind-closed-doors group of fossil fuel advocates earlier this year got right to the point: Canada’s policies to fight the climate crisis, protect nature and defend Indigenous Rights are a “problem,” and environmental organizations are “opponents.” 

The document, a copy of which was reviewed by The Narwhal, relates to a presentation that was scheduled to occur in January 2026. It was prepared by two advocacy groups called Energy United and Resource Works, both with connections to the country’s largest oil and gas lobby group, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. 

It was part of a session in which fossil fuel advocacy groups were to discuss shaping public perceptions in favour of the oil and gas industry and against the transition to clean energy, according to materials downloaded from a coordinating group’s website by The Narwhal and originally uncovered by Greenpeace Canada.

Under the heading “Knowing our opponents,” the document details work by environmental advocacy organizations and First Nations, and the funding that supports them.

It lays out how environmental non-profit groups are collaborative, well-funded — and effective. “The damage is real & intentional,” the document says of environmental advocacy in Canada, adding, “Every major ‘problem policy’ we fight traces back to an ENGO-authored framework or idea.” 

An ENGO is an environment-focused non-governmental organization. The document includes examples of “problem policies,” including the federal emissions cap, Canada’s commitment to protect 30 per cent of its lands and water by 2030 and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

The document also highlights funding for Coastal First Nations, and their stance against lifting the oil tanker ban in northern B.C. — a years-long thorn in the side of the fossil fuel industry and another “problem policy,” according to the document.

“So, what can we do about it?” the document asks of environmental advocacy in general. It proposes moving “from defence to offence” by launching “counter-campaigns,” “calling out hypocrisy” and filing “regulatory complaints” against environmental groups like the David Suzuki Foundation.

“They want to be on the attack,” Keith Stewart, senior energy strategist for Greenpeace Canada, said of oil and gas groups in an interview.

Stewart is one of the authors of the Greenpeace report “Manufacturing Petro-Populism,” which was published Oct. 8 and delves into the web of pro-fossil fuel organizations. 

The document was one of eight presentations scheduled to occur at the January “funders session,” according to an agenda published on the website of a coordinating network, Energy In Action. The session was organized for a group called Canadian Energy Prosperity. The Energy In Action website stated that it hosted a “showcase of a selection of our 30+ groups” Canadian Energy Prosperity works with.

The document was posted publicly on the Energy In Action website, where The Narwhal viewed it. The Narwhal emailed questions to Energy In Action on Oct. 5. The following day, the website became password protected.

Energy In Action and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers did not respond to requests for comment. Nor did the advocacy organizations Energy United and Resource Works. Canadian Energy Prosperity does not appear to have its own web presence or any publicly available contact information.

Media, including The Narwhal, singled out in internal oil and gas document

The document also singled out a government funding program called the Local Journalism Initiative. 

It included a screenshot of a story published by The Narwhal, written by journalist Matt Simmons, whose work has been supported by the initiative. The story recounts Simmons’ experience being followed by private security as he reported on a pipeline being built through Wet’suwet’en lands.

The Local Journalism Initiative is a federal program that funds news reporting in rural, remote and otherwise underserved communities. The Narwhal receives this funding for reporting in northwestern B.C. and northern Ontario.

To protect the independence of the press, the government does not directly fund media outlets. The program is delivered by independent non-profits representing different segments of Canada’s media industry. 

“It’s clear that they see some journalists as opponents,” Stewart said of the pro-fossil fuel groups behind the document. “They don’t want anyone looking too closely at what they’re actually doing.”

Material ‘appears to build on a long-standing public outreach program’: Greenpeace

Greenpeace Canada claims the Energy In Action network “appears to build on a long-standing public outreach program” by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, “which seems to have been repurposed to enable oil companies to spread their message via third parties.”

Energy United founder Tim McMillan was president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers for seven years, and is currently registered as a federal lobbyist on energy issues. Stewart Muir, the president of Resource Works, formerly lobbied for a pro-fossil fuel group organized by Resource Works called The Task Force For Real Jobs, Real Recovery. The task force’s website claims the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers is a “supporter.” 

Requests for comment to McMillan and Muir’s LinkedIn pages were not returned.

Greenpeace Canada’s report says the Energy In Action network operates “under the guise of independent and grassroots entities” but actually coordinates industry-linked activities designed to “shift public discourse and actively lobby against renewable energy initiatives.”

It said the network’s “hidden funders” are investing in campaigns targeting a large cross-section of Canadian demographics and regions, using different tools like lobbying, public advocacy and digital and traditional advertising.

The network’s activities and internal materials, it said, deploy “climate disinformation, covert influence campaigns and attacks against activists.”

The Energy In Action documents should be seen as part of a broader context of an industry that’s been proactive for years in trying to shape public opinion about its activities, its climate impacts and its economic benefits, according to Shane Gunster, a professor in the school of communication at Simon Fraser University who studies oil and gas populism.

In an interview, Gunster said his research has shown pro-oil-and-gas messaging shifted over the last decade from more expensive public relations campaigns to using social media to mobilize supporters. 

He said in recent years he’s seen greater use of what he calls “pop-up groups,” which appear to be self-contained entities that focus on a particular issue in a particular geographic location, and only appear for a limited time.

“Groups that are not explicitly connected to particular funders or industry itself can do things that industry itself would find challenging to do or to say,” he said.

He said the group of funders tied to the activities Greenpeace uncovered are supporting particularly aggressive messaging, but that isn’t always the case with pro-oil-and-gas campaigns.

Canada passed legislation in 2024 to crack down on greenwashing, which is when companies make misleading claims about how environmentally friendly their products or actions are. It created a requirement for companies in Canada to back up their green claims with evidence. After it passed, oil companies scrubbed their websites and social media feeds. 

Although Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government rolled back a clause stipulating that this evidence be based on internationally recognized standards, several oil companies were still citing the law as a reason why they can’t disclose more information. 

Gunster said he felt the anti-greenwashing changes were a factor, but not necessarily the driving force behind the pro-oil-and-gas messaging shift towards pop-up groups, which he began seeing before the anti-greenwashing law was in place.

There is public evidence that at least some of the entities Greenpeace connected to the Energy In Action network have received funding from oil companies themselves. 

According to corporate disclosure records, Cenovus, one of Canada’s largest oil and gas companies, has funded seven of them, including Resource Works. Cenovus is a member of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, and Cenovus president Jon McKenzie is also the chair of the association’s board.

Cenovus proactively discloses its advocacy funding, while some other prominent oil companies do not. 

There’s no indication that the funding Cenovus has provided is directly related to the public advocacy activities reported by groups such as Resource Works during the Canadian Energy Prosperity sessions. Cenovus did not return a request for comment.

Groups tied to Energy In Action are funding disinformation: Greenpeace

Another document, a video presentation viewed online by The Narwhal, introduced itself as a “performance update for CEP,” the acronym for Canadian Energy Prosperity. The beginning of the video is dated July 2, 2025, and states that it would take place at the Calgary Petroleum Club.

That video highlighted four pro-fossil fuel ad campaigns by the organization Debunk Inc., which claims its mission is to “challenge misinformation.” Debunk’s video said the campaigns were “thanks to CEP’s support,” but did not specify who funded them or how much funding they received.

One of Debunk’s ads defended the use of natural gas in homes. Another attacked a proposal to limit heat-trapping carbon pollution from the oil and gas industry. A third downplayed the necessity of transitioning to lower-emissions fuels, and a fourth suggested liquefied natural gas, or LNG, could lead to “lower” emissions.

A Harvard study has shown that low levels of pollutants seep into homes with gas heat, while gas stoves have been associated with increased risk of asthma in children. Scientists say a disputed theory long favoured by the industry, that LNG can displace coal power abroad, underestimates the climate impact of equipment leaking methane, the main component of natural gas.

Each of these campaigns achieved results, the video claimed. The most successful was the anti-emissions cap campaign. Debunk claimed it had reached “up to 1.5 million Canadians” each month, and scored 22.3 million total views in 2025. 

The Calgary Petroleum Club did not return a request for comment.

On the Energy In Action website viewed by The Narwhal, an individual webpage also featured content from Debunk, listing the four campaigns as well as a “top performing post” which claimed it is “debunking the ‘complete fabrication’ of climate change.” 

That post, which the webpage said received “over 3,000,000 views,” contained a video claiming carbon dioxide does not cause harmful climate change. Hundreds of global climate scientists working under the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have confirmed that the burning of fossil fuels is “unequivocally” responsible for recent global warming.

The Debunk webpage on the Energy In Action website featured a social media post claiming, “We’re wasting a lot of money for very little, if any, gain with all this climate hysteria.”

That post contains another video claiming the amount of human-caused carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere isn’t a significant problem. Concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have increased dramatically in less than two centuries, recently to levels that have not been seen in millions of years.

Debunk did not respond to requests for comment. Founders Anastasia Columbos and Britni Weston are described on the website as “two Canadians with deep roots in the energy industry.” Neither responded to requests for comment on LinkedIn.

Greenpeace is calling on “all entities, organizations and corporate partners” involved in the Energy In Action network to disclose their funding sources and any financial connections to Canadian Energy Prosperity.

It is also echoing UN Secretary-General António Guterres’s call for countries to ban fossil fuel advertisements.

Methodology+

The presentations and agendas for two “Canadian Energy Prosperity funders” meetings, one in mid-2025 and one in early 2026, were posted publicly on the Energy In Action website, energy-in-action.com. The contact email listed was hosted on the domain cep-eia.com, a combination of the acronyms for both Canadian Energy Prosperity and Energy In Action.

The Narwhal reviewed the material directly by downloading it from the Energy In Action website on Oct. 2 and Oct. 5. The Narwhal emailed questions to Energy In Action’s email on Oct. 5. The following day, the Energy In Action website became password protected. Energy In Action did not return the request for comment.

One of the documents mentioned in this article included reference to a handful of philanthropic organizations, several of which have provided funding to The Narwhal and are disclosed on our website along with all major donors. Greenpeace carried out its investigation with support from the Trottier Family Foundation, which also provides funding to The Narwhal. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, no foundation has any editorial input.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But it’s doable.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Environmental concerns with New Polaris

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Taku River watershed

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

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

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

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

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

A history of water concerns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s next for New Polaris?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five days before Ontario’s new, weaker species-at-risk law took effect in March, members of the Environment Ministry team tasked with enforcing it were thinking about bats. In particular, a delayed permit that was keeping a developer from clearing trees before at-risk bats returned to them for the season. 

The permit had been delayed because staff were waiting to learn what the government’s new rules for endangered species protections were going to look like. By the time they did, officials feared it was too late. 

“I know those bats are in those trees,” one government biologist said during a March 25 meeting of the species at risk branch. “I just know those bats won’t survive.”

“We’ve lost our impact on the process,” a senior official replied.

The meeting was one of the last chances for staff in Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks, to express concerns about the Species Conservation Act, which replaced the province’s Endangered Species Act — once considered a gold standard for at-risk species laws. 

The change, introduced under Bill 5 in June 2025, stripped provincial protection from several species and narrowed habitat protection for others — 106 species lost protections, a July 2026 report by Ontario Nature found. It also introduced a new model for environmental assessments that is “proponent-led,” leaving developers largely responsible for assessing their own environmental impact and cutting government biologists out of the process almost entirely.

A recording of the meeting, which involved about 25 staff members in the species at risk branch of the Ministry of Environment, was shared with The Narwhal by one participant and independently verified by two others. The Narwhal is not naming the officials who led the meeting or participated in it, to protect their privacy as public sector workers with limited authority.

At the meeting, staff voiced concerns about fielding calls from “angry clients” — developers who had spent weeks working through permits and mitigation measures, only to have that process nullified overnight, with no new guidelines in place. Senior officials leading the meeting told staff Environment Minister Todd McCarthy’s office had provided “questions and answers” they could use to address developers’ concerns. 

“Our jobs were changing quickly from being biologists and scientific experts to being administrative staff,” one former staffer told The Narwhal, speaking under the condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions. “We were no longer allowed to give our recommendations.”

The Narwhal spoke with and verified five current or former ministry employees, who agreed to speak confidentially as they feared repercussions. Three spoke on background, while two agreed to be quoted without their names being used, as did one outside expert who has worked closely with government biologists on permit applications. The Narwhal also tracked staffing changes through LinkedIn and the government’s public directory, INFO-GO, as well as WayBack Machine, a digital archive that allowed us to access past versions of government websites. 

A note on trust, integrity and unnamed sources+

This story uses information from sources The Narwhal has agreed not to name. The Narwhal only agrees to keep names confidential when we believe two things. First, that the person we’re speaking with is putting themselves at genuine risk, either personal or professional, by sharing this information with us. Second, that the information they’re sharing is in the public interest. Our decision to do so is never made lightly. 

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Together, these sources reveal the new act has had a significant impact on the people tasked with protecting Ontario’s most vulnerable species — reducing them from experts to rubber stamps, if anything at all, for the industries they once held to account.

They also show that, more than a year after the Species Conservation Act was proposed, a wave of departures has hit the ministry’s species at risk branch, as biologists leave for the private sector or other government roles. The Narwhal counted more than a dozen people who have moved on since February 2025, though some may have retired or wrapped up short-term contracts. The Narwhal could not confirm the exact number of positions that have been vacated since the Species Conservation Act passed, but sources suggest it has been a notable amount, and that the loss of people and expertise is palpable within the ministry.

“There were lots of opportunities to improve the Endangered Species Act,” a former official said, “but this rollback is way too far, and it just diminishes protection that is promised to Ontarians.”

Sources say the policy changes and departures weakened the scientific expertise Ontario’s Ministry of Environment once valued, reducing the ministry’s ability to protect the environment in an evidence-backed way.

“Yes, it hurts the species,” the first former ministry staffer said. “But it hurt all of us too.” 

“We were essentially silenced,” they said. “And it’s not fair.” 

The Narwhal sent an extensive list of questions to Environment Minister McCarthy’s office, the ministry’s communications department and the species at risk branch, which redirected our questions to the communications department. None responded by publication time.

‘Our jobs stopped feeling meaningful’: government biologists were kept out of the creation of the Species Conservation Act

Under the previous Endangered Species Act, ministry experts helped project proponents, such as developers, homeowners and industry, figure out a plan to avoid impacts to at-risk species and their habitat. If harm couldn’t be avoided, biologists and ministry staff helped to minimize that impact or offset it — for example, by requiring proponents to establish new habitat elsewhere. This process required a lot of government review and back and forth. 

The Species Conservation Act changed all of this. The new act only asks the proponent to submit a conservation plan that “should” include how it will minimize or offset harm to at-risk species. That plan is to be written by an expert — hired by the proponent, and very loosely defined — but the regulations don’t specify what exactly it needs to include. Once submitted, these plans are automatically accepted and greenlit. 

In the recording of the meeting before the act was finalized, staff are told clearly that they “can’t review” proponent-led plans. They can’t ask questions or ask for more information. 

“Once they’re in the system, we don’t check them unless there’s a complaint,” the former official told The Narwhal in an interview. “We had to accept what clients were proposing.” 

Former and current ministry officials told The Narwhal they were shut out of the process to create the Species Conservation Act. They say it was announced in a hybrid meeting, with staff both in the ministry’s various offices and online. “It was so quiet,” a second former official said. “Morale dropped right away.” 

According to the ministry sources, all of the new regulations were decided in the environment minister’s office with a few senior officials. Three people told The Narwhal that staff were not given a timeline for when the new act would come into force, what to tell proponents or how to update online guidelines.

One internal communication, reviewed by The Narwhal, outlines how branch staff were not shown the final draft regulations before they were finalized. When staff tried to push back and make recommendations, they were told “there’s no appetite for that,” the first source said. 

“It was a very heavy-hearted time,” the second former official said. “On one hand, there could have been so many improvements but, as we learned in hindsight, there were very few ways to do any good.”“Our jobs stopped feeling meaningful.” 

Laura Bowman, an environmental and Indigenous Rights lawyer with Macpherson Law, told The Narwhal that, for ministry experts, “there’s nothing to be done under an automatic registration scheme.”

“Once the proponent has filed the paperwork, however flawed, the registration is approved,” Bowman said. “I can definitely understand why people with deep technical expertise would want to use it somewhere else.”

“If technical staff are leaving the ministry, that’s extremely concerning,” Bowman said. “What you’re left with is a hollow shell when that happens.”

With “nobody watching,” she said, the quality of the work being done to protect and mitigate harm to at-risk species is likely to decline.

‘They didn’t want to do anything wrong’: project proponents valued ministry expertise

As questions started trickling in about how to get a permit under the new law, ministry sources who spoke to The Narwhal said they were given language to copy and paste. 

“A lot of the language was very ambiguous, non-committal and unhelpful to our clients,” the first official said. “To be fair, clients wanted our recommendations. They didn’t want to do anything wrong and many were frustrated that we couldn’t tell them anything.”

The Narwhal spoke with one biologist who has long worked with private industry to make sure projects are compliant with species at risk law, creating plans for species management and harm mitigation. She also raised concerns about the lack of input from ministry staff. “I’ve had no correspondence with [the ministry] on any of my files,” she said about the months since the new act passed. “I’m just kind of doing it on my own now, and hoping that I’m doing it right.” 

She said when replies do come, they are weeks later and often “stock text” that does not answer site-specific, nuanced questions.

As the ministry continues to shed technical expertise, there appear to be fewer people left to answer those questions — if they were even allowed.

“I think that staff are very bound in what they can and cannot share,” the source told The Narwhal.

And, given the lack of feedback from the ministry and guardrails of enforcement, she said some of her own clients have been increasingly aggressive about removing species at risk protections.

“We always will have clients that want to push that envelope as far as they can, and we used to have [the Ministry of Environment] come in and say, ‘Nope, this is the way it’s got to be,’ and then that was the end of the story.”

“But now that that doesn’t happen, we get a lot more pushback. Like, ‘What is stopping us from doing it this way?’ ”  

This source expressed concern that the current lack of oversight creates an incentive to do the bare minimum to remain competitive. 

The effects of these changes will reverberate for generations, former government staffers told The Narwhal. 

“Across the government around the environment, the first approach is to avoid harm, and then mitigate and find ways to work around. The very last resort is to fix harms,” the second former official said. “Now, due diligence has changed. They’re going to have a lot of long-term consequences to deal with.”

One of those will be the loss of decades of expertise. “You will just not have the quality of staff you need at the ministry to deliver oversight and protection,” the first official said. “The sense we get is they don’t want us anyways.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gass said such spills might go unnoticed.

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

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

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

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

‘No impact to the environment’: CNRL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CNRL pipelines exempt from clean-up timelines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Regulator ‘way too tied to industry’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Summary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Truly massive’ invisible emissions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Summary

• In 2025, the government under Premier Doug Ford replaced the long-standing Endangered Species Act with the less-stringent Species Conservation Act, despite significant opposition.
• Internal analysis from the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks, viewed by The Narwhal and validated by several sources, illustrates the level of concern the proposal saw.
• Of 17,000 comments made in response to the new at-risk species law, 98.98 per cent were opposed.

The Doug Ford government weakened Ontario’s species-at-risk law despite feedback from thousands of residents, conservation experts, municipal representatives, First Nations and more decrying the proposal as “a significant step backward in environmental protection.”

The opposition is outlined in internal analysis by Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks staff that was reviewed and verified by The Narwhal. 

It breaks down the more than 17,000 responses received about the government’s 2025 proposal to replace the Endangered Species Act — once considered the gold standard for at-risk species laws in Canada — with the Species Conservation Act, which removes provincial protection for many species and limits how habitat is considered and protected. 

Most of these responses were received through the provincial environmental registry, where the government is required to post certain changes to environmental regulations. While a summary of the concerns is available for the public to view on the registry, the internal ministry analysis viewed by The Narwhal provides a more granular breakdown, showing the government pushed forward despite overwhelming concern and opposition. 

The internal analysis reveals 98.98 per cent of responses to the proposed changes received were unsupportive. It says that nearly all the responses have “a strong criticism of prioritizing economic growth over environmental stewardship and concerns about the erosion of public trust and accountability.”

The analysis also includes summaries of informational meetings held by the ministry for government staff, as well as environmental experts and industry leaders. It shows there was “confusion” — a repeated word throughout — over many details, including which species were no longer protected and why, and who would be making decisions on permit applications under the new law. 

The new law also introduces an online registration system for permits to harm at-risk species that doesn’t require government review, and “allows most projects to begin as soon as they register,” according to the province. The government has previously said these changes would facilitate “sustainable economic growth.” 

But the internal analysis shows there was little clarity on how this would be achieved before the Species Conservation Act became law in March 2026. 

“The proposed changes are seen as a significant step backward in environmental protection, with potential long-term negative impacts on Ontario’s biodiversity and ecological integrity,” reads the internal ministry analysis from March. 

Neither the Ministry of the Environment nor the premier responded to The Narwhal’s questions before publication. 

Consultation on new at-risk species law drew ‘frustration’

The internal analysis viewed by The Narwhal shows that environmental concerns were repeatedly raised at the Ministry of the Environment’s series of information sessions in the fall of 2025, held for provincial, federal and municipal staff, as well as conservation authorities, conservation experts, mining and development leaders, lawyers and more. 

These stakeholders expressed concern about the effectiveness of the new law, including the lack of accountability mechanisms embedded in it. 

“Multiple questions expressed frustration over … limited opportunity for public input,” the internal analysis says. It also noted that participants of these sessions “questioned the rationale” for exempting development permit applications from public consultation under the new law. 

Federal staff expressed concern over the new law’s move to eliminate provincial recovery plans for endangered species. “A participant wondered how the province will know where it is going in terms of conservation without these plans,” the analysis says. In response, Ministry of the Environment staff explained the province is working on “a more strategic and flexible approach to recovery planning, focusing on high-need species.” 

This isn’t the only criticism of the new species-at-risk law from inside government. The Narwhal previously reported that provincial bureaucrats in Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources advised that the new act “may weaken oversight and accountability,” prior to it being enforced.

Ontario’s public postings on the Species Conservation Act shared some concerns and considerations

The province received comments on the proposed changes to at-risk species protections  when the Species Conservation Act was first proposed via Bill 5 in April 2025, and later when the proposed regulations for the law were released in September 2025. After comment periods on Ontario’s environmental registry close, the government generally provides a summary of comments made and concerns raised at the bottom of the post, as it did for those related to the at-risk species law. 

Under the public summary of comments made on the September posting, the province noted that changes were made to address some of the concerns. Amendments included adding a requirement that a qualified professional develop a conservation plan for affected species, and providing more detail about what types of development activities are permissible under the new law. 

In the past, the level of support and opposition for a government proposal has been shared publicly through the environmental registry. But, as the Auditor General of Ontario has reported, the Ford government has been using the registry selectively. 

In recent years, the government has exempted several projects from posting, including the Ontario Place redevelopment. It has also exempted specific activities: under Bill 5, the omnibus bill designed to expedite development in Ontario, there is no requirement to post applications for permits to harm at-risk species. 

The auditor general has repeatedly called out the Ford government for failing to adhere to its own laws — at times “deliberately” — that require it to meaningfully consult and inform the public through the registry.

In late 2022, for example, the government received more than 30,000 comments about its plans to remove land from the protected Greenbelt. Despite this, “no changes were made to the proposal as a result of public consultation,” the government’s posting on the registry read. One year later, amid public outcry, the province reversed its Greenbelt plan entirely.

Methodology: 

After The Narwhal viewed the internal government analysis on which this story is based, it was verified by speaking to two different sources with knowledge of the matter.Separately, The Narwhal also received feedback on the new Species Conservation Act via freedom of information legislation. The Narwhal reviewed these comments, which included those that are publicly available on the environmental registry, to confirm the volume of opposition highlighted in the internal analysis. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Many experts now say these claims were fundamentally untrue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Summary

• Two decades of records show Canadian politicians making big promises about carbon capture technology.
• In 2008, one government report claimed Canada could capture as much as 600 million tonnes of carbon a year — and carbon capture technology could be “implemented quickly.”
• From 2000 to 2024, a total of just 68.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide was captured across Canada and experts say the technology has yet to be proven at scale.

It was March 2007. Apple had just debuted the iPhone. The Iraq War was raging. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth had won two Oscars. And the prime minister of Canada was talking about “the exciting new technology called carbon capture and storage.”

“Instead of pumping tonnes of carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere, we may be able to collect it from our oilsands, our coal-fired electrical plants and other industrial emitters, and pump it deep underground where it will remain for eternity,” Stephen Harper told a crowd of journalists at an event in Edmonton that year.

“If we can perfect this technology, we can use it not only to curb Canada’s contribution to greenhouse gas production, but we could also export it around the world.”

It was the beginning of a long line of claims from political leaders in Canada about how carbon capture could slash planet-warming industrial emissions, including in the oilsands, the world’s fourth-largest proven oil reserve, where 159 billion barrels lie buried under Albertan sand and clay.

For close to 20 years, both Liberal and Conservative governments have talked about using carbon capture and storage technology to filter out carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, from exhaust streams and store it so it doesn’t get released into the atmosphere, where it traps heat and causes climate change. Yet, while oilsands carbon pollution more than doubled from 2007 to 2024 to 92 million tonnes, the ability of facilities in Canada to capture carbon from industrial sources hasn’t yet grown beyond a few million tonnes of emissions per year.

Meanwhile, the consequences of fossil fuels and climate change are being felt today. Life is more expensive, cities have dirtier air from wildfires, deadly heat waves and other extreme weather are more common, First Nations are disproportionately threatened with disasters and Canadians are more at risk of poverty, heart disease, cancer and premature death.

Around the time Harper spoke in Edmonton, mining the oilsands was thought to be generating 26 million tonnes of emissions. Since then, the federal national inventory report has recalculated historical emissions using updated methodologies and new data to find it was closer to 41 million tonnes. The petroleum in the oilsands starts as a viscous goo called bitumen, and takes large amounts of electricity, steam, fuel and heavy machinery to mine and transform into usable products. This extra activity means oilsands production has been associated with more emissions than some other oil deposits, adding to its climate impact when its end products like gasoline are eventually burned for energy.

There was also a boom happening when Harper made his remarks. Investment in the oilsands had tripled from 2003 to 2007, leap-frogging manufacturing, while oil and gas operating profits had doubled. Office space in Calgary, where many oil companies are headquartered, had dried up as the province rode a wave of record-low unemployment. By 2009, production levels from the oilsands would muscle out other forms of oil production in Canada.

Scientists agree the way to slow the chaos unleashed by climate change is to stop using so much oil, gas and coal. But Harper wasn’t about to impose strict government limits on oilsands emissions that day in 2007. Instead, he would talk about using carbon capture as a possible environmental and economic solution.

“This is a dream that could truly change the world,” he said.

“Friends, the era of empty rhetoric on the environment is over. We’re taking real action that will produce real, tangible results.”

Nineteen years later, that dream is still waiting to be realized.

From 2000 to 2024, 68.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide was captured in the country, Environment and Climate Change Canada confirmed to The Narwhal. That means the oilsands added more emissions to the atmosphere in one year, 2024, than carbon capture equipment has ever stopped from industrial sources over roughly a quarter-century.

It’s also a small fraction of the capture amounts once thought possible. A 2008 report that came out of Harper’s announcement said Canada could theoretically capture as much as 600 million tonnes a year, and that carbon capture could be “implemented quickly, within a decade, using existing technology.”

Carbon capture and storage “is a viable way to achieve significant domestic greenhouse gas reductions,” the report stated, and is a “must-have for western Canada which relies on fossil energy.”

Instead, after tremendous attention and investment, this year Canada will be able to capture “on the order of several [million] tonnes per year,” a Natural Resources Canada spokesperson told The Narwhal. (The department declined to offer a precise figure when asked.)

Capturing this amount when the oil industry is sending so much more into the air is equivalent to taking a million cars off the highway while 30 million more drive up the on-ramp.

“Carbon capture has never, ever been proven at scale, or price. That’s just a fact,” Catherine McKenna, a former environment minister under the Justin Trudeau government, said in an interview.

“The oil and gas companies talked to me about carbon capture and storage, and made promises, for like a decade. We have yet to see anything.”

Now, like Harper before him, Prime Minister Mark Carney is putting his faith in carbon capture technology to do the heavy lifting, while he advocates for more oil production.

Carney struck a deal with Alberta that promises not to follow through with a Trudeau-era proposal for an emissions cap on the oil and gas sector.

Instead, the deal, meant to grow oil production and get a new oil pipeline to the West Coast built, includes an agreement to build a carbon capture and storage network in the province.

In July, five oilsands companies agreed to terms that envision using carbon capture to suck out six million tonnes of oilsands emissions per year by 2035. The project, dubbed Pathways, is supposed to use a “range of technologies” to eventually capture 16 million tonnes per year by 2045.

“The Alberta [deal] will build carbon capture and storage,” Carney said in Parliament in January. “It will build our future.” The deal, he told reporters in June, is about “working together, getting results for the citizens.”

His minister of energy and natural resources, Tim Hodgson, a former oilsands company board member, told a Calgary business crowd last year that the government, as much as private industry, should be pulling to get Pathways off the ground.

“All of us — governments and industry — need to get the Pathways project done. This government will not be a government of talk, but a government of action,” Hodgson said.

The federal government was boasting about being ‘a world leader in carbon capture’ in 2011

Harper’s full remarks from that day in 2007 are held at the national archives in Ottawa, where The Narwhal listened to a recording of them in June.

But plenty of other comments exist online in the public record of others talking optimistically about carbon capture to lower emissions.

In 2011, for example, Harper’s then-natural resources minister Joe Oliver said Canada was “a world leader in carbon capture and storage” and was “in an excellent position to use this technology on a wide scale.”

The next year he repeated this message: “Canada is in an excellent position to lead the world in the development, implementation and deployment of carbon capture and storage technology.”

In 2013, he said the government was “devoting significant amounts of money to carbon capture and storage, and we are doing that in co-operation with companies.”

Oliver now opposes the latest carbon capture proposal in the oilsands, in part because of the technology’s spotty track record and uncertain impact.

The trend continued after Trudeau’s Liberal government won power in 2015. Trudeau’s first natural resources minister, Jim Carr, told a ballroom full of energy analysts in New York in 2016 that carbon capture is one of “the most pressing issues of the day.”

The next year, he said carbon capture improves Canada’s “environmental performance.”

One of Carr’s successors, Seamus O’Regan, would describe carbon capture as “an integral part of lowering emissions” and said it was part of “how we get to net zero.” In 2021, he told CBC News Canada was “on the cusp of doing a lot of these things.”

François-Philippe Champagne, who in 2024 was Trudeau’s industry minister and is now finance minister, described Canadian companies then as “world leaders in carbon capture” and portrayed it as one of the “clean-tech solutions for the net-zero economy.”

(Story continues below.)

Two decades of political support for carbon capture

• Jan. 23, 2006: Harper Conservatives win minority government
• May 11, 2006 “Canada is already on the right track, particularly in research on energy efficiency, alternative energy sources and carbon capture and storage technologies. These technological advances will help us reduce greenhouse gas emissions and will enable Canada to capitalize on its huge energy potential for the benefit of all Canadians.”— Christian Paradis, parliamentary secretary to the minister of natural resources, in Parliament
• March 8, 2007 “Instead of pumping tons of carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere, we may be able to collect it from our oilsands, our coal-fired electrical plants and other industrial emitters, and pump it deep underground where it will remain for eternity. … Friends, the era of empty rhetoric on the environment is over.”— Stephen Harper, prime minister, Library and Archives Canada
• April 4, 2008 “Our government is ensuring that Canada is at the leading edge of clean technologies to reduce emissions and adapt to environmental change. That is why in Budget 2008, we announced $5 million … [to] address outstanding issues in the deployment of carbon capture and storage technologies.”— Gary Lunn, natural resources minister, press release
• Oct. 14, 2008: Harper Conservatives win minority government
• Oct. 18, 2009 “Carbon capture and storage is the most viable technology for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Our government’s recent investment in large-scale demonstration projects further advances Canada’s leadership in this technology, while building a knowledge base to share this expertise with our global partners.”— Lisa Raitt, natural resources minister, press release
• March 16, 2010 “The $1-billion fund relating to green technology investments, including carbon capture and storage, which was set up in the 2009 budget, is not a research investment. These are demonstration projects investments. … The only known technology to abate carbon emissions from thermal coal plants is carbon capture and storage. It is the only technology that has ever been discovered that can actually abate emissions.”— Jim Prentice, environment minister, at committee
• May 2, 2011: Harper Conservatives win majority government
• June 24, 2011 “Canada is a world leader in carbon capture and storage and we are in an excellent position to use this technology on a wide scale.”— Joe Oliver, natural resources minister, press release
• March 27, 2012 “Canada is in an excellent position to lead the world in the development, implementation and deployment of carbon capture and storage technology.”— Joe Oliver, natural resources minister, at committee
• May 21, 2013 “We are devoting significant amounts of money to carbon capture and storage, and we are doing that in co-operation with companies, because that is the way to do it. Our government is a world leader in carbon capture and storage.”— Joe Oliver, natural resources minister, in Parliament
• Oct. 6, 2014 “We were proud to support the research and development of carbon capture and sequestration, and see the technology developed through commercialization at the Boundary Dam project, a technology that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions at that facility by 90 per cent. We remain committed to growing the economy and reducing greenhouse gas emissions with world-leading technologies.”—Greg Rickford, natural resources minister, in Parliament
• Feb. 19, 2015 “Since 2006, our government has made investments of over $10 billion to transition Canada toward a clean energy economy and help reduce greenhouse gas emissions over the long term. … These funds have helped establish Canada as a global leader in the research, development and demonstration of carbon capture and storage technologies.”— Colin Carrie, parliamentary secretary to the minister of the environment, in Parliament
• Oct. 19, 2015: Trudeau Liberals win majority government
• April 4, 2016 On a North American memorandum of understanding on climate and energy: “It’s an aspirational agreement that focuses our three countries on the most pressing issues of the day … [including] advancing the competitiveness of carbon capture, use and storage.”— Jim Carr, natural resources minister, prepared remarks for a speech
• Sep. 14, 2017 “Carbon capture and utilization technology creates new products and business revenue stream opportunities while improving our environmental performance, creating jobs and driving clean growth in the process.”— Jim Carr, natural resources minister, press release
• Nov. 9, 2018 About a $2-million investment in a carbon capture project: “This project leverages today’s traditional resources to deliver tomorrow’s clean energy solutions. Developing and adopting clean technologies will help Canada meet its domestic and international climate change commitments and help maintain our natural resource advantage for years to come.”— Amarjeet Sohi, natural resources minister, press release
• June 17, 2019 On signing two memorandums of understanding: “The second commits Natural Resources Canada and the Japan Coal Energy Center to work together on clean energy, including carbon capture utilization and storage technologies.”“Canada is taking a leadership role in the clean growth century by balancing the environment and economy both domestically and internationally.”— Paul Lefebvre, parliamentary secretary to the minister of natural resources, press release
• Oct. 21, 2019: Trudeau Liberals win minority government 
• June 15, 2020 “We see carbon capture and sequestration as an integral part of lowering emissions and making emissions more competitive, making our oil and gas industry more competitive.”— Seamus O’Regan, natural resources minister, at committee
• March 9, 2021 “Carbon capture technology creates jobs, lowers emissions and increases our competitiveness. This is how we get to net zero.”— Seamus O’Regan, natural resources minister, press release
• April 21, 2021 “I lead a department of scientists who are looking at things like carbon capture and storage, both onshore and offshore. … We are on the cusp of doing a lot of these things.”— Seamus O’Regan, natural resources minister, interview
• Sept. 20, 2021: Trudeau Liberals win minority government
• March 28, 2022 “We are taking bold action on climate change. … We see carbon capture and underground storage as part of the solution.”— Terry Duguid, parliamentary secretary to the minister of environment and climate change, in Parliament
• Feb. 7, 2023 “We are investing billions of dollars in climate action and into the new economy. We have eliminated six fossil fuel subsidies and are on our way to eliminating nine. We need to use every tool in the toolbox to reduce our emissions, including carbon capture.”— Terry Duguid, parliamentary secretary to the minister of environment and climate change, in Parliament
• May 8, 2024 “My colleagues are well aware that Canadian companies are world leaders in carbon capture and hydrogen fuel cell technology. That’s why we will continue to support the adoption of made-in-Canada clean-tech solutions for the net-zero economy.”— François-Philippe Champagne, industry minister, at committee
• April 28, 2025: Carney Liberals win minority government
• May 23, 2025 “We will invest in carbon capture, methane reduction and other technologies to ensure Canadian oil and gas is not only produced responsibly, but is the most competitive in the world. All of us — governments and industry — need to get the Pathways project done.”— Tim Hodgson, natural resources minister, prepared remarks for a speech
• April 13, 2026: Carney Liberals achieve majority government
• June 25, 2026 “We will deepen co-operative federalism with initiatives [like] Alberta’s proposed carbon capture and pipeline to the West Coast. … With the implementation agreement around carbon capture, [the government is] working together, getting results for the citizens.”— Mark Carney, prime minister, news conference (not online)

The Trudeau government’s emissions cap proposal came together after the Oil Sands Alliance, a group of major producers formerly known as the Pathways Alliance, had publicized a project they originally claimed could cut 22 million tonnes of oilsands emissions by 2030, with carbon capture being a central element of their plans.

The natural resources minister at the time, Jonathan Wilkinson, portrayed the emissions cap as a way to ensure the industry did what it said it could do.

Oilsands companies fought the proposal. A group of them pushed the government to delay and weaken the emissions cap’s rules, saying they needed “flexible and cost-effective” rules and a “long lead time” to prepare. By 2024, the boss of one of the country’s largest oil and gas companies was openly calling for the idea to be abandoned. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith also came out against the proposal.

Last year, after Carney won power, Canadian oil and gas executives and lobby groups called on him to “unwind the past decade” of Trudeau-era policy altogether, killing not only the emissions cap but also other environmental rules. The prime minister has ticked off several boxes on their wishlist.

The Narwhal reached out to more than a dozen current and former government officials to ask them if they stood behind their comments about carbon capture today, knowing what they know now.

Minister Hodgson’s spokesperson forwarded the questions to Natural Resources Canada. A spokesperson for his department responded that technologies like carbon capture are “important tools in Canada’s broader climate toolbox of measures to reduce or remove emissions, while strengthening growth and security.”

Carbon capture and storage “holds great opportunity to advance climate competitiveness, and is an area where Canada can lead internationally and sell components and expertise in global markets,” they said in an email to The Narwhal. It offers a “practical path to reduce emissions, protect and create jobs, sustain economic growth and keep Canadian industries globally competitive.”

A spokesperson for Champagne declined to comment. The others did not respond.

The Narwhal also sent separate questions to Natural Resources Canada directly. Another spokesperson claimed Canada’s industrial carbon capture rates will rise in the coming years.

“While Canada has already captured and stored or used significant volumes of [carbon dioxide] the sector is growing, with new projects and infrastructure expected to come online as technology improves and evolves,” the spokesperson said in an email.

There’s a “growing list of potential projects across multiple industrial sectors” today, they said, and “these projects are expected to increase capture volumes over time.”

Canada doesn’t publish an official forward-looking estimate of carbon capture potential, the department said. And the spokesperson pointed to a number of challenges with carbon capture adoption. For one, the projects are “large, capital‑intensive and technically complex.”

Carbon capture is expensive. The Pathways proposal was initially estimated at $16.5 billion and is now pegged at between $20 billion and $30 billion, despite lowering the amount of emissions it is intended to capture. At times it has seemed like it could struggle to break even, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

The government is offering federal financial incentives for carbon capture, and Carney reversed a Trudeau-era ban on companies from accessing that incentive when they pump the captured carbon into wells to loosen up more oil for extraction.

Despite hitting record profits in recent years, oil companies have in the past largely resisted spending the billions of dollars necessary to build out carbon capture equipment across their large properties. Instead the industry spent years lobbying the government for lucrative public subsidies to install and run carbon capture systems.

Scaling up carbon capture and storage also requires building new pipelines and storage hubs. A Natural Resources Canada spokesperson said the technology continues to “evolve” and investors are looking for enough “market demand for low‑carbon products,” which the government believes has been bolstered with the Alberta deal.

Globally, the technology has underperformed, according to the International Institute for Sustainable Development. One of Canada’s own flagship projects captured less carbon than initially thought. In 2022, more than 400 academics wrote an open letter to Canada saying carbon capture was “neither economically sound nor proven at scale,” despite decades of research.

Carbon capture used to secure social licence for pumping more oil

When it comes to techniques for keeping carbon out of the atmosphere, using carbon capture technology on industrial sources is only one approach.

Other types of technologies, collectively called carbon removal, can draw existing emissions from the atmosphere or store carbon permanently in other forms like rock.

There are 11 million tonnes worth of annual permanent carbon removal capacity in the planning stages in the country, according to Carbon Removal Canada, an independent non-profit. Those plans are for new projects such as direct air capture or carbon mineralization, but not industrial carbon capture.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body that provides governments with climate science, has said carbon capture and carbon removal technologies will have to be part of the mix of techniques that countries use to slow the rise in planetary temperatures causing climate change.

It’s a point Steven Guilbeault, who served as another environment minister under Trudeau and helped develop the emissions cap proposal with Wilkinson, raised several times in Parliament. Canada needed to look at every possible technology that could help reduce emissions, he argued.

But the United Nations panel was also clear these kinds of technologies are not a substitute for a “substantial reduction in fossil fuel use,” rather something to be used alongside those efforts.

In an interview with The Narwhal, Guilbeault said Canadian politicians have often misunderstood the difference, seeing carbon capture as “a way to continue pumping oil and gas in Canada.”

“It’s a technology we will need, but it’s not in lieu of reducing emissions, and unfortunately it seems that a lot of people haven’t understood that,” he said.

The technology “is a very convenient, theoretical, technical fix to a larger problem,” Guilbeault said. “We humans tend to look for easy fixes, sometimes, to complex problems.”

Evidence also suggests carbon capture has been popularized by the oil and gas industry to shield itself from criticism. In 2022, a U.S. Congressional probe found oil companies were talking about carbon capture publicly as a way to mitigate their climate impact, but internally were discussing it as a way to secure “social licence” to continue producing fossil fuels.

In June, the investigative outlets ProPublica and Drilled published evidence the oil company BP helped shape an academic paper that oversold carbon capture’s readiness, while the oil and gas industry funded research at universities that boosted the technology.

Guilbeault said he has “always been skeptical” of the oil industry’s carbon capture proposal in Alberta.

His skepticism is shared by former oilsands executive and former member of Parliament Martha Hall Findlay, who helped develop the industry’s initial Pathways carbon capture proposal. She now argues Canada should “postpone” the project and focus on other priorities.

Federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is also skeptical of Carney’s plan.

A former Harper government minister of democratic reform, and employment and social development, Poilievre has supported subsidizing carbon capture in the oil and gas industry in the past. In 2022, shortly after becoming leader, he said the Canadian energy industry was “leading in the world” on carbon capture, and accused the Trudeau government of being “slow to support it and insufficient in that support.”

In 2023 he asked, “Why do we not use technology instead of taxes to fight climate change? Why do we not support our energy sector in pumping the carbon back into the ground through carbon capture and storage?”

More recently, Poilievre has criticized Carney’s deal with Alberta for committing billions of dollars to a “money-losing carbon capture project that has never been proven anywhere.”

Asked by The Narwhal why he’s soured on support for carbon capture, Poilievre said he only sees value if it’s used to extract more oil.

“When you pump carbon back in the ground and pressurize the geology, and you can bring up more oil, they can then go out and make the world a better place,” he said.

“The other is just pumping air into the ground and getting nothing in return. … How’s it going to make money?”

Updated on July 22, 2026, at 11:48 a.m. ET: This story was updated to include the latest figure for 2007 oilsands emissions from the national inventory report. While a report from Alberta published in 2008 put the figure at 26 million tonnes, the national inventory report has recalculated historical emissions figures with updated methodology and additional data, putting it at 41 million tonnes of emissions.

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.

Morning light streams into the tiny, five-seat helicopter as it hovers above the Tranquil Creek watershed in Clayoquot Sound, B.C. It turns into what seems like a collision course with a cliff, but a landing pad appears just in time.

After a minute of careful positioning, the chopper touches ground on a bed of freshly cut grass and branches, allowing Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation’s natural resources manager Saya Masso and lead guardian Tattuuskulth (Tatt) Charlie to step outside.

They’ve come to see a mine shaft with an entranceway small enough that Masso ducks down to look inside. It looks like a relic from the gold rush, but there are a few conspicuously new things stashed at the entrance: a shiny white construction hat, plastic bags and a long orange hose coiled in a pile. 

For Masso and Charlie, they’re quiet reminders that what began here more than a century ago has yet to conclude.

In February, Canadian mining company Imperial Metals received a permit to explore for gold at the long-dormant Fandora mine site on Vancouver Island’s west coast. For the next five years, the company is allowed to pick and prod underground in the hopes of accessing the site’s mostly untapped resources. 

Masso is worried about Hiłsyaqƛis, the name for the Tranquil Creek watershed in Nuu-chah-nulth. Problems at this remote site in the middle of rain-drenched temperate forest could easily metastasize. 

“Positive change is gradual,” he says, “but negative change can happen so quick.”

Clayoquot Sound is home to the some of the largest intact old-growth forests on Vancouver Island, and remains a key refuge for massive red cedars, orcas and Pacific salmon. About 20 kilometres from the mine site, these lands and waters now underpin the tourism economy of Tofino, B.C. First Nations including Tla-o-qui-aht have spent decades protecting the region, helping to shape its economic future. According to Tourism Tofino, visitors spent $430 million in the region in 2024. 

Tofino Mayor Dan Law was careful to clarify the municipality has no jurisdiction over a prospective mine outside its boundaries, but says a mine in the sound “seems like a no-go.”

“Clearly, the wealth of Clayoquot Sound is not in resource extraction,” Law says from his office on a tree-lined street in the heart of town.

Masso puts things a little more bluntly. “A gold mine will never open in Clayoquot Sound in this tenure,” he says. The Tla-o-qui-aht have opposed Imperial Metals’ efforts to search for gold on the site for more than a decade.

“It goes against our spiritual plan, our cultural plan, our tourism plan, so we’re asking ministers and leaders in B.C. to help turn this around, to put a pause on it, put an injunction on it,” Masso says.

The Tofino Chamber of Commerce also opposes the plan. 

“This would be extensively damaging to our business community,” Graydon Clerk, executive director of the Tofino Chamber of Commerce, says. The association recently sent a letter to the province outlining its concerns.

Imperial Metals did not respond to The Narwhal’s multiple requests for comment. 

B.C.’s Ministry of Mining and Critical Minerals told The Narwhal the permit doesn’t allow activities beyond the current exploration plan. Anything more would require a new decision under the province’s Mines Act.

“The Ministry remains committed to strong environmental oversight, safe mining practices and ongoing consultation with First Nations and partners,” it added. 

Pressure from the growing price of gold

East of Clayoquot Sound, a broader debate over Canada’s future is unfolding.

“Canada has what the world wants,” Prime Minister Mark Carney told a room of the world’s elite at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, earlier this year, signalling his government’s open-for-business ethos. And the world wants gold.

Gold is among Canada’s largest exports, after oil and gas. Thanks to skyrocketing prices, the precious metal has boosted the profile of Canada’s stock exchange and contributed to the country’s claimed success diversifying its exports away from the U.S. To facilitate a resource-sector renaissance, Canada, B.C. and other provinces have promised to push major projects through — and quickly.

The Tla-o-qui-aht are no strangers to the treasures beneath their territory. Copper and gold from the region have long been used in ceremonies and to adorn regalia. “They had monumental value,” Tla-o-qui-aht Chief Elmer Frank tells The Narwhal in an interview. 

By the late 1800s, word had gotten out, and prospectors flooded the region as the north’s Klondike Gold Rush wound down. The efforts were buoyed by B.C.’s mining laws, which allowed settlers to stake out mineral rights simply by driving posts into the ground.

The Fandora mine site was first staked in the 1930s, but in 1940, the mine had yet to produce the equivalent of a large gold bar. It has sat mostly dormant for half a century. 

Meanwhile, Tofino grew. 

In 2000, Clayoquot Sound was declared a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, marking it as a global priority for conservation. The town’s new boom was in whale-watching, five-star hotels and fancy restaurants. Today, Tofino’s population surges from about 2,500 year-round locals to more than 12,000 during its summer peak.

But in February, as gold prices soared, British Columbia approved a five-year permit for Imperial Metals, under its wholly-owned subsidiary, Selkirk Metals Corp., to see whether Fandora’s reserves are worth the cost of constructing a mine. 

Documents obtained by The Narwhal show the company plans to dig a series of metre-wide trenches, some as long as two football fields, to determine if trace amounts of gold in the soil signal riches below. The company has also mapped out six drill pads, each roughly the size of a small house, some as close as 110 metres from the river. Drilling will likely require thousands of litres of water for each hole. On the company’s proposed exploration map, there are three “helicopter drill pad water sources” listed in Tranquil Creek’s tributaries. According to its permit, “road-access drilling” will not use water from Tranquil Creek or its tributaries. 

In its permit application materials, Imperial Metals noted it will seek to reuse and reduce water as much as possible. The company’s permit also requires it take steps to accommodate traditional harvest and cultural practices during its exploration work, among other requirements.

In the documents, Imperial Metals noted the intensity of this project in its first year will depend on how much funding the company obtains. “We may only drill one or two holes,” it added. Its permit allows it to drill another 15 house-sized drill pads in yet-undisclosed locations across the Tranquil Creek watershed and its adjacent valley.

The documents also suggest gold on the property extends farther than previously understood. “After a long hiatus in exploration, modern soil geochemistry was completed on the property, which successfully extended the anomalous gold horizon along strike of the known veins,” an August 2025 Notice of Work document obtained by The Narwhal states.

Imperial Metals did not respond to The Narwhal’s questions about its plans.

A mine surrounded by tribal parks

As the lead guardian for Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation, Charlie doesn’t miss a beat when asked which of his many tasks he prefers. 

“Hands down, my favourite is trail building,” he says.

Trails extend throughout the nation’s tribal parks, which now encompass Tla-o-qui-aht’s entire territory, more than 1,000 square kilometres. Within tribal parks, industry and economic development aren’t categorically excluded. But their acceptance is contingent on support from the nation and other locals who aim to ensure industry doesn’t come at the expense of what ecosystems and communities need to thrive. 

“It’s a vision that the region can stand behind,” Masso says. 

The province has yet to recognize tribal parks within its own legal system — and where some form of recognition exists, it has been hard-won.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, members of Tla-o-qui-aht and ʕaaḥuusʔatḥ (Ahousaht) First Nations discovered logging giant MacMillan Bloedel had plans to clear-cut almost all of Meares Island, home of ecologically important intact forests. In response, Tla-o-qui-aht declared its first tribal park across Meares in its entirety. The province granted the company’s logging permits anyway.

A blockade led by the Tla-o-qui-aht ensued, sparking the first of a series of blockades in Clayoquot Sound which eventually led to the War in the Woods. In 1985, the B.C. Court of Appeal decided the nations’ yet-to-be-recognized Aboriginal Title should outweigh the company’s right to short-term profit.

According a paper published by lawyer and professor Douglas Harris, the decision helped shape a key turning point. Indigenous Rights claims were no longer a point of curiosity for the courts. Now they had legal weight.

Today, Meares Island remains off-limits to logging, protecting the District of Tofino’s sole source of drinking water. But elsewhere in the territory, including in the Tranquil watershed, areas within tribal parks had no such safeguards.

That is, until recently.

‘Consent of affected First Nations is not a legal requirement,’ B.C. government says

In spring 2024, B.C., Tla-o-qui-aht and neighbouring ʕaaḥuusʔatḥ announced a set of protected areas across Clayoquot Sound and throughout the Tla-o-qui-aht Nation’s tribal parks. “It’s a monumental occasion,” Masso said at the time. 

In theory, the conservancies would recognize some principles of the Tla-o-qui-aht’s tribal parks within B.C.’s laws, and they came with commitments: B.C. promised the areas would have no commercial forestry within their boundaries, nor any mining activity. 

To Masso, it remains a partial victory: The Tranquil Creek conservancy B.C. put forward has a big hole in the middle, shaped seemingly to avoid overlap with Imperial Metals’ mining claims.

Masso says he remembers the province’s reassurances. “They said, ‘This is just the first step,’ ” he says. “‘We’ll make more as we do more work to resolve overlaps or tenures, and we’ll add it.’ ”

But that hasn’t happened. 

Instead, Masso received an email from the province in December 2025, which revealed Imperial Metals was about to return. After a few years of what Chief Frank described as “one-way” consultation, the company was on the precipice of receiving a renewed exploration permit.

Masso was stunned. “We said, ‘Wait a second, they’re considering issuing this,’ ” he says. “We wrote a very stern letter reminding them that they couldn’t.”

Two months later, the province approved Imperial’s permit anyway.

In an emailed statement, B.C.’s Ministry of Mines and Critical Minerals said its decision was based on the exploration activity alone. 

The ministry added “Consent of affected First Nations is not a legal requirement” but that it “seeks to reach consensus in decision making and considers all input from First Nations in that process.”

“Input received informs decision making,” it added. 

ʕaaḥuusʔatḥ, whose territory overlaps with areas within Imperial Metals’ Fandora claim, did not respond to The Narwhal’s interview request. 

Indigenous consent and the country’s relationship to it are an increasingly charged lightning rod in Canadian politics. In 2019, B.C. committed to integrate the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or UNDRIP, into its own laws, including the principle of free, prior and informed consent.

More recently, the B.C. Court of Appeal found the province’s mineral tenure system inconsistent with UNDRIP, as incorporated into provincial law through the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA). The province appealed the ruling, which is now waiting to be heard by the Supreme Court of Canada. In the meantime, Premier David Eby attempted to suspend parts of the Declaration Act, a move that was widely criticized and stopped, in part, by the NDP government’s own members. The government says it will revisit the issue in the fall legislative session.

Sara Ghebremusse, an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia’s Allard School of Law, cautions against efforts to go backwards, particularly given the growing body of international and national law recognizing the weight of Indigenous Rights. 

“This is going to be a long-term issue,” she says.

The cost of gold

At the Fandora site, gold comes wrapped up with sulphides. Under certain conditions, the compound turns water into acid that can leach heavy metals into the watershed.

To curb that risk, mines generally store waste rock underwater and away from oxygen. But in rain-drenched Clayoquot Sound, accumulating pools of tailings could overflow, meaning if built a mine would likely require long-term drainage systems and monitoring. 

“Water is always a problem,” Scott Dunbar, a professor of mining engineering at the University of British Columbia, says. “If an accident occurs, the first question is always ‘Where did the water get out?’ ”

For the time being, Imperial’s exploration permit requires it to mitigate the potential for acid mine drainage through identifying and safely disposing of rocks capable of causing it.

Gold is also famously stubborn for clinging to its host rocks, which means heavy-duty chemicals are used in extraction. Cyanide leaching is the most common method of choice. Companies aim to isolate the obviously noxious chemical and keep it contained, but tailings that are left over are likely contaminated.

Meanwhile, the Tranquil Creek watershed is already on life support. 

After the valley bottom was logged extensively in the 1960s and 1970s, loggers moved into the hills, destroying root systems that held the region’s crumbly till in place. Landslides ensued, helping turn Tranquil Creek, a key spawning ground for Pacific salmon, into a danger zone capable of suffocating salmon eggs beneath gravel or washing them out to sea. By 2017, resident Chinook and chum salmon had almost disappeared.

With the Redd Fish Restoration Society, Tla-o-qui-aht is working to restore the watershed, including installing a series of costly but effective human-made log-jams to slow the water and building terraces in the landslides to choke off the gravel taps. Collectively with other groups, about $6 million has been spent restoring the Tranquil so far. Recent years of boosted salmon returns are providing some hope.

Charlie warns of the risks of backsliding in the Tranquil. “Mining is one thing that will just throw it over the edge,” he says. 

In a recent article in the publication Ha-Shilth-Sa, Imperial Metals CEO Brian Kynoch noted the mine would “most likely” be underground, not in an open pit, and that it would target only “narrow” gold veins. He also said Imperial Metals “remains committed to engaging respectfully with First Nations and local communities as the project moves forward.”

Kynoch has previously described the project as “artisanal.”

But the company has a checkered past: In 2014, the company’s “crown jewel” gold and copper mine, Mount Polley, became the site of the largest mining waste disaster in Canada’s history when its tailings dam breached. More than 25 billion litres of water and mine waste, including lead, cadmium and arsenic, spilled into the surrounding watershed. Later reporting showed the province warned the company about stability concerns in its tailings dam at least five times before the disaster occurred. 

In 2018, the company faced significant financial challenges and there was concern it might file for bankruptcy. But even if a mine is never built, Imperial could profit from the claim. In B.C., mining companies stand to be compensated if they withdraw claims to make way for new protected areas. In 2022, Imperial Metals received $24 million to relinquish its claim area in the Skagit Headwaters. 

“It doesn’t make any sense at all to let them drill it if the only end result is to compensate them to not mine,” Masso says.

Imperial Metals did not reply to The Narwhal’s request for comment.

‘It’s still a beautiful place’

Once we’re back in the helicopter’s bucket seats, the chopper ascends from the cliff face and travels on through the Tranquil watershed. 

Uniform patches of short, stubby trees extend across the valley bottom, but the forests transform as we fly higher, farther from the reach of roads and access points. Soon the chopper tips toward the deep blue bowl of a mountain lake, its water still and inky blue. 

“It’s still a beautiful place,” Masso says. “Even if it’s still in recovery.”

From up above, Tofino’s growth is hard to ignore. Multimillion-dollar vacation homes sprawl across the coastline. Masso peers out the window, thinking about an old photo of Tofino in the 1960s with just a scattering of homes. He knows more change is on the way. 

“Imagine another 80 years from now,” he says. “People are gonna say, ‘Look at what it was like.’ ”

Tourism has its challenges: Tofino is short on water and housing. Charlie and the other Tla-o-qui-aht Guardians sometimes spend days cleaning up after visitors who leave their trash on the beach and backcountry. 

But these are the challenges that Tla-o-qui-aht and the town of Tofino are choosing to grapple with, and there is work underway to smooth out the industry’s edges. Local businesses, for example, are now encouraged to collect a one per cent “responsible visitor fee” from customers to support restoration and protection in Tla-o-qui-aht’s tribal parks program. 

“We live together,” Tofino Mayor Law says. “We see this as a present and future relationship.”

Back on the ground, Masso and Charlie get ready to return to their day’s business. Masso is thinking about the coming heat and wildfires, and asks to see the helicopter company’s firefighting equipment. Moments of pause are few and far between. 

Masso had hoped the nation’s tribal parks would ward off ill-fitting visions of the region’s future. 

“We could spend our time building longhouses and rebuilding rivers, doing positive things for our children,” he says.

“But now I have to spend the next couple of years opposing a gold mine.”

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