Nine-year-old John Smithers cradles a tiny burrowing owl in his hands, preparing to release it into the grasslands of Upper Nicola Band territory.

Like other young syilx people, he’s grown up hearing stories about the small birds of prey that have nearly disappeared from his Thompson-Okanagan homelands in the last century or so.

The owls – known in syilx culture as guardians, guides or messengers – were “once a common element” in landscapes stretching from the southern Interior of B.C. all the way to Manitoba, according to Canada’s Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife. 

Now, burrowing owl sightings are rare. In 2003, the Government of Canada listed the burrowing owl as endangered under the federal Species At Risk Act. According to the Burrowing Owl Alliance, the bird’s population in the country has declined by over 96 per cent since 1987. Experts link the bird’s decline to the gradual loss of its grassland habitats over the last century. 

“Lots of animals can come and get them,” Smithers said about the lack of protective habitat for the burrowing owl. 

John Smithers, a nine-year-old student from Upper Nicola Band’s N’kwala School, prepares to release a captive-born burrowing owl down an artificial nesting burrow and into the wild.

Aware of the owls’ importance and decline, earlier this year Smithers became N’kwala School’s annual student ambassador to a regional burrowing owl recovery program that’s being led by the First Nation. 

As ambassador, he was invited to be the first person of the year to release a captive-born burrowing owl into the wild on April 22, in his home community of spax̌mn (Douglas Lake) in B.C.’s Nicola Valley.

The release, which coincided with Earth Day, marked 10 years since Upper Nicola Band began releasing captive-born burrowing owls onto their homelands.

In return, those captive-raised owls have produced 125 “wild-born” baby owls — or fledglings — since being released from the community’s restoration site.  

Despite high winds and the risk of ticks, dozens of excited people from all age groups turned out in high spirits for the release. 

Students, nature enthusiasts and Elders alike shared laughs and smiles at the sight of the precious birds, with their round heads, short stature and long legs.

Upper Nicola Band Elder Howard (Howie) Holmes prepares to release a captive-born burrowing owl down an artificial nesting burrow. 

Framed by grassy hills, Smithers released the owl under the warm sunshine with the help of Dawn Brodie, one of the main field technicians who has been involved in the program since its inception.

The nervous bird nearly escaped from his grasp and into the open air. But thanks to the quick reflexes of the adults around him, helping hands connect the captive-born owl back to the land and down an artificial nesting burrow that had been prepared by the Upper Nicola Band stewardship department.

“Soft” is the word Smithers used to describe the feeling of holding the owl. 

Soon after, several guests in attendance – from program partners to youth and Elders – were invited by the field technicians to release an owl down different burrows that were created by the recovery program and its partners.

Some of the owls wore amusingly bewildered expressions as they waited in the gentle grasp of human hands before being placed into a burrow.

A captive-born burrowing owl prior to being released into an artificial nesting burrow. Some attendees were amused by the owls’ bewildered facial expressions.

In total, 11 captive-born owls — six males and five females — were released into five of the site’s 35 artificial burrows that day. They are all just under one year old.

“The program has exceeded all our expectations,” Loretta Holmes, an Upper Nicola Band member and senior resource technician with the band’s stewardship department, said.

“The owls, which we call sq̓əq̓axʷ, have responded better than we dared to hope ten years ago. And community interest and involvement has been strong since the start.”

Owls released into artificial burrows filled with frozen mice

The tiny burrows are connected through a network of underground tunnels hidden under the grassland hills above spax̌mn. 

Each artificial burrow consists of a small, corrugated tube in the ground that serves as its entrance, which feeds into the larger network of tunnels. The entry points are camouflaged in the field by grass and large rocks. 

Artificial nesting burrows are scattered throughout the grassland hills above Upper Nicola Band, at the community’s burrowing owl restoration program site in spax̌mn (Douglas Lake). The decline in badgers on the territory has led to a decline in natural burrows.

Before any captive-raised owls are released, handfuls of frozen mice are inserted into the burrows and tunnels.

“That helps them not have to go as far to hunt as often. It encourages them to lay more eggs, and helps them rear their young ones when they’re hatched,” Holmes said.

Once released, the burrow entrances are closed off for a few days, explained Chris Gill, a project biologist with the band’s Species-At-Risk program.

“It’s to let them acclimatize and calm down, basically. And potentially bond with the mate that’s in there,” Gill said.

Breeding gets underway as soon as two owls choose each other as mates, and Gill said that eggs are laid in June.

The burrow tunnels, which protect the owls from predators, are connected to a nest box. The nest box has an opening at ground level, allowing technicians to observe how many eggs have been laid and monitor activity. 

Frozen mice are placed into the artificial burrows to fuel the owls as they adjust to the wild, and encourage them to lay more eggs.

Technicians also attach leg bands to the newly-hatched birds here, to track future migration.

Mice are also delivered to the burrows two to three times a week. Holmes said that this type of care results in nests that carry nine to 10 eggs — more than the average of six to eight laid by burrowing owls in the wild.

The mice are “giving them a big head start and maximizing the chances of producing healthy fledglings, and healthy parents as well,” Gill said.

The owls stay in the site’s burrow network anywhere from four days to up to a week, depending on weather conditions, and are then free to fly around in the open air.

“They mostly stick at the site, even after you release them out of the burrow, because they’re now used to the site,” Gill said.

“They may have paired up, or they may choose another mate from the site.”

Chris Gill, a project biologist with the Upper Nicola Band’s Species-At-Risk program, addresses attendees of the release event at the playground of N’kwala School in in spax̌mn (Douglas Lake).

By July, fledglings will start to emerge from the burrows, and the owls usually start to migrate south in September and October. They’ll return to the breeding sites next April.

Tracked migration data from burrowing owls who left the site in previous years revealed that the birds travel as far as San Jose, California.

“It’s just so amazing that they went all the way somewhere, wintered in those conditions and came back,” Holmes said. 

“It’s wonderful.”

Owl recovery “one piece of a larger puzzle” in restoring ecosystem health

In the last decade, more than 100 burrowing owls have been raised in captivity at the Kamloops Wildlife Park by the Burrowing Owl Conservation Society, before being released at spax̌mn. There’s a site in Oliver that supports the program as well.

The captive-raised owls all come with identification tags on their legs, which are documented by field technicians before they are released into the burrows.

Two captive-born burrowing owls from the Kamloops Wildlife Park — one female and one male — are transported to their artificial burrow for release. Soon after release, the owls will choose a mate and begin to lay eggs.

Many of the 120-plus wild-born owls have left the Upper Nicola Band site and returned, including four who came back this spring; two males and two females, three of which were born at the site last year.

While the conservation efforts are helping to re-populate the burrowing owl species in this part of the country, Upper Nicola Band views this work as only one piece of the larger puzzle of how to protect the community’s rare and sensitive grassland ecosystem habitats. 

By stewarding these ecosystems — and restoring and supporting the biodiversity that has been depleted — it’s also an act by the band to protect their cultural identity and fulfill generational responsibilities around caring for the land and for all living things.

“Conserving a species at risk, like a burrowing owl, it’s about far more than a single bird or species. It’s about upholding relationships, responsibilities and balance with the living world,” Holmes said.

Animals like the burrowing owl are part of an interconnected system that has sustained Indigenous Peoples for generations, she said.

Loretta Holmes, an Upper Nicola Band member and senior resource technician with the band’s stewardship department, wears owl-themed earrings made by a Kamloops-based Indigenous artist.

“If one species declines, it signals that the relationship between people and the land is out of balance. Conservation becomes an act of restoring harmony and respect in that system,” she said.

“Protecting species at risk aligns with Indigenous laws that emphasize caretaking. Conservation efforts honour the principle that decisions made today must ensure the healthy lands and wildlife for our relatives yet to come.”

It’s just one of many projects under the community’s stewardship department’s larger Species-At-Risk program, which is designed to protect and restore endangered species populations on their lands.

The program also looks at restoration efforts for species including the American badger, Lewis’s woodpecker and Great Basin spadefoot — all of which have been federally recognized as threatened or at-risk. 

Penticton Indian Band — a fellow syilx community that’s under the Okanagan Nation Alliance (ONA) along with Upper Nicola Band — also released burrowing owls through their own similar program that same week.

“In British Columbia, burrowing owls are extirpated. That means that they’re not actually existing on the landscape without reintroduction programs, like the Upper Nicola Band’s,” Gill said. 

A captive-born burrowing owl is released into an artificial nesting burrow. The burrows will be sealed for a few days, to give the owls a chance to acclimate (and dine on frozen mice).

But Traditional Ecological Knowledge gathered from Elders and advisors confirmed that burrowing owls historically existed on the spax̌mn landscape.

In 2015, a year before the burrowing owl recovery program launched, the Species-At-Risk team conducted surveys on reserve lands to determine a suitable habitat for the birds. 

They settled on the grasslands above the Upper Nicola Band community as the reintroduction program’s site.

“We found suitable habitat for burrowing owls — but no burrowing owls present,” said Gill.

The grassland ecosystem landscape above the Upper Nicola Band community is the site of their burrowing owl restoration program. Grassland ecosystems are critically endangered, covering only around one per cent of B.C. — and only a small fraction of those are protected.

The birds traditionally nested in the underground burrows that were dug and abandoned by different animals, from badgers to marmots and coyotes, he said.

But because of a lack of badgers, there weren’t any natural burrows out on the land.

“That’s why the Upper Nicola Band put in these artificial burrows,” he said.

“There are actually badgers on that reserve, but there are very few — and far in-between — so we can’t rely on a burrowing owl finding a badger burrow.”

According to the province, “several small” burrowing owl nesting sites were identified in the Okanagan and Thompson valleys from 1900 to 1928. 

Historical nesting areas include Osoyoos, Oliver, Penticton, White Lake, Lower Similkameen Valley, Vernon, Kamloops and Douglas Lake.

Artificial nesting burrows are scattered throughout the grassland hills above Upper Nicola Band.

But between 1928 and 1980, only four nesting sites were recorded.

The federal government attributed the “conversion of grassland to cropland” as the “ultimate factor responsible for the decline in burrowing owls.” It estimates that the species experienced a 90 per cent population decline from 1990 to 2000.

Also contributing to the owl’s population decline is the “gauntlet” of issues they face on their migration route, Holmes said.

This includes fatalities occurring from collisions with wind turbine farms and motor vehicles. Pesticides targeting insects and rodents that the birds feed upon indirectly poison them as well. 

In 2004, the estimated population of burrowing owls in Canada was recorded at 795 mature individuals. In 2015, it had plunged to approximately 270. 

Burrowing owl populations are “in a nose dive,” Gill said.

He called the burrowing owl “a canary in a coal mine” in measuring the state of ecosystem health.

“A badger, a burrowing owl — those species are the indicator species. If they’re not doing well, then that’s a sign of something bigger that’s not doing well,” he said.

Upper Nicola Band’s grassland ecosystem is “incredibly resilient,” but grasslands across Canada are critically endangered 

Along with Holmes and Brodie, Gill helped initiate the burrowing owl reintroduction program 10 years ago. He called the two women “the work horses” of the program.

“We monitor the owls, and write really good data collection on it,” said Brodie, a veterinary technician who supports the program as a burrowing owl consultant.

The program has been a success, Gill said, not just because of the region’s “great grasslands.”

“But it’s also the stewardship that’s going on with these owls,” he said.

“It’s one of the most productive sites in B.C. for releasing our fledging owls.”

In the wild, burrowing owls can live anywhere from four to six years, according to Lauren Meads, the executive director of the Burrowing Owl Conservation Society of BC. 

Meads, who was joined at the release event by the society’s 11-year-old educational burrowing owl, Pluto, added that in captivity they can live up to 15 years.

A student from N’kwala School in spax̌mn (Douglas Lake), B.C., pets Pluto, an 11-year-old educational burrowing owl with the Burrowing Owl Conservation Society of BC, at the school gym. In captivity, burrowing owls can live up to 15 years.

According to the Government of B.C., grasslands made up less than one percent of the province’s land area in 2004, adding that “only a small percentage of our grasslands are protected.”

But grasslands surrounding the Upper Nicola landscape are “some of the most intact and incredibly resilient grasslands” Gill has observed, he said.

“Grasslands are one of the most endangered ecosystems in Canada. … They’re very, very rare. It looks like we have a lot, but this is one little spot,” he said.

Holmes added that protecting grasslands also protects the burrowing owls. 

“That’s their home. It works hand-in-hand,” she said.

Community members walk toward an artificial nesting burrow at the Upper Nicola Band’s burrowing owl restoration site. The release event drew community members of all ages to celebrate the tiny owls and their release.

Owl conservation, protection is a cultural responsibility 

Holmes said that the burrowing owl’s population decline and status as an endangered species is not just an ecological matter, but a cultural issue as well. 

sq̓əq̓axʷ are a “symbol of our cultural identity,” she said.

“Owls can be messengers, teachers or indicators in an Indigenous knowledge system. They’re often associated with observation, protections and indicators of change.”

The loss of burrowing owls “erodes the stories, the teachings and our ways of understanding the land that has been passed down through generations,” she added.

Upper Nicola Band Elders Howard (Howie) Holmes, pictured here with Linda Intalin Holmes, released one of the 11 captive-born owls.

Upper Nicola Chief Dan Manuel said in a statement that burrowing owls are deeply woven into syilx culture.

“For our people, the cultural, spiritual and environmental importance of sq̓əq̓axʷ are one,” Manuel said.

“Our culture is rooted in co-existence with the world around us. We have a responsibility to care for the land and the beings on it. We must help rebuild what has been lost, and it will continue to support us.”

Dawn Brodie, one of the main field technicians who has been involved in Upper Nicola Band’s burrowing owl restoration program since its inception, leads the release event of 11 captive-born owls.

Holmes said that having a dedicated conservation program fulfills those duties that are owed to the land and to all living beings. 

“It treats our relatives with respect,” she said.

“The land, the animals, the plants — everything that’s there — provides us with sustenance. So it’s our responsibility to take care of them as well. We see all those things as our relatives.”

She emphasized that Indigenous Peoples have inherent responsibilities as stewards of their territories — responsibilities that originate in syilx laws, teachings and oral traditions, also known as captikʷł. 

“That predates colonial conservation frameworks,” she said.

Upper Nicola Band Elder Casey Holmes speaks at the playground of N’kwala School, prior to the release event for 11 captive-born owls into the community’s burrowing owl restoration site in spax̌mn (Douglas Lake) on April 22, 2026. 

Upper Nicola Band Elder Casey Holmes thanked all the staff and volunteers involved in the community’s stewardship program, especially for their work in supporting the restoration of the burrowing owl population.

“People are making a difference. Even if it doesn’t look like a difference, they made a difference today, to make this a success – to make this a part of history that we’re not losing,” said Casey.

When the community loses a tmixʷ (all living things) relative, Casey said that “we lose a part of history.”

“Bringing back this, is regaining back that history,” he said.

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

Summary

• Indigenous women in B.C. are leading projects and organizations committed to mitigating wildfire risk and restoring traditional practices. 
• Cultural burns are making a comeback in the province, thanks to years of advocacy from Indigenous firekeepers.
• First Nations women in the province’s Interior are decolonizing fire management through their work.

In 2017 Jaci Gilbert was 12 years old when she was evacuated from Tsq’escen’ First Nation because of a wildfire. Four years later, more wildfires impacted her community, located in B.C.’s central interior, prompting some Elders to be evacuated to the Lower Mainland.

Gilbert, who is Secwépemc and Tsilhqot’in, volunteered both at the emergency operations centre during the partial evacuation in 2021, and as a fire camp logistics assistant near 100 Mile House during those fires.

“After being involved in the emergency operations centre I caught the bug of wanting to do emergency and wildfire management,” Gilbert told The Narwhal.

Gilbert works for First Nations Emergency Services Society as a cultural and prescribed fire specialist. She is part of a cohort of First Nations women in B.C. who are leading the way in wildfire management in their communities — demonstrating leadership and stewardship as blazes continue each year.

Being a young person, and a woman, Gilbert struggled to get into the field of emergency management, but reaching out to organizations and women in the field is a good place to start, she said.

“Youth have been managing emergencies in their personal lives for a long time, especially Indigenous youth, so using these skills I developed on reserve I’m able to handle [emergencies] well, whereas with a typical office or customer service job I don’t handle [those] very well,” Gilbert said.

“We’re seeing a shift in dynamics. I’m noticing a lot more Indigenous women in fire research and in the fire community.”

Indigenous firefighters bring cultural knowledge to their work

Sheresa Brown, a Nlaka’pamux woman from Lytton First Nation, has been involved with fire since firefighting in high school. Brown works as a field technician and archaeological monitor with Nlaka’pamux Nation Tribal Council, specializing in protecting cultural heritage values.

After her hometown Lytton, B.C., was devastated by fire in 2021, Brown evacuated to Merritt and was looking for a job when she called her former boss from the BC Wildfire Service. 

Back on the frontlines, Brown noticed a crew member cut down a culturally modified tree in Vernon, commonly referred to as a CMT, to clear a pathway for a hose. 

“[First Nations] make that [symbol on the tree] so they can come back to harvest the sap, they can use it to make different types of medicines. And it was a very utilized tree that just got cut down,” Brown told The Narwhal.

She recommended scanning for culturally modified trees before clearing to her crew lead, who received it well. A year later Brown was deployed on another fire near Lytton, teaching BC Wildfire Service crews about the land’s cultural values.

She said she’s willing to take people on the land if they are willing to learn and be respectful, noting that sometimes people do not know they are in a culturally significant area, especially when firefighters are deployed from another province or country. 

“I know if a man can do it, I can do it too, and probably even better,” Brown said, reflecting on her experience being a First Nations woman in the fire industry.

Bringing back cultural burns

Brown and Gilbert are carrying the torch lit by trailblazers in the field like Leona Antoine, who has 30 years of experience. Antoine is a Nlaka’pamux woman who is no stranger to cultural burning or firefighting. 

Leona Antoine is director and chair of the Salish Fire Keepers Society, a non-profit organization founded in 2016, advocating for cultural burns to be revitalized in B.C. Photo: Aaron Hemens / IndigiNews

She practices traditional burning, is a registered forest technologist, a Type 1 (or first-response) firefighter with the BC Wildfire Service, and is a board director and chair of the Salish Fire Keepers Society. 

When Antoine’s firefighting journey with the BC Wildfire Service began in the early 2000s, she was one of few women on a 20-person unit crew. 

“Because there were no women on the crews before, they didn’t know how to have a woman around,” Antoine told The Narwhal.  

“It took probably about a month for the crew to get used to women being on the crew. You know, putting all the women’s posters and magazines away,” she said. 

Although men on the crew were initially uncomfortable around women, and had to be taught boundaries, “I broke those barriers,” she said. 

Another barrier at the time was getting the province and general public to see the value of cultural burning. B.C. was the first province in Canada to ban the practice in 1874.

After a year of devastating fire in 2017, and following the release of a report Addressing the New Normal: 21st Century Disaster Management in British Columbia in 2018, cultural burns started being taken more seriously by the province, with official amendments to the Wildfire Act in B.C. to support the practice taking effect in 2024.

This is work that the Salish Fire Keepers Society has been advocating for since its inception in 2016. The non-profit is made up of Interior Salish nations who experience some of Canada’s hottest wildfires, and promotes the restoration of cultural burning practices.

Over 100 people gathered in Kamloops, B.C., on March 17 and 18 for the Salish Fire Keepers Society spring gathering, discussing all things fire ahead of this year’s wildfire season. Photo: Aaron Hemens / IndigiNews

Gilbert contributed to a cultural burning guide, Workbook to Create a Cultural Burn Pathway, made in partnership with the Indigenous Leadership Initiative. 

“As I’ve become more involved with emergency and wildfire management, cultural burning comes up a lot, especially as an Indigenous person that’s interested in Indigenous solutions to modern problems,” she said. 

First Nations Emergency Services Society is an emergency management non-profit organization in B.C. “We were initially created as a result of a lot of Indigenous deaths related to structural fires,” Gilbert said during her presentation at the Salish Fire Keepers Society gathering in Kamloops on Mar. 17. 

The workbook guides readers through different considerations when planning a cultural burn, and was created through a series of community interviews by Amy Cardinal Christianson and Natasha Caverley.

“My role in [its] creation has been trying to make sure that it’s accessible for First Nations. I’m not much on the technical side, I’m … looking at the art and how that can help tell the story for people without strong English backgrounds,” she said.

During the March 2026 gathering, Antoine and the rest of the society’s board gifted each guest speaker with sweetgrass and sage, two traditional medicines among many First Nation cultures across Canada. 

There were many women in attendance, underscoring how things are beginning to shift.

This is an initiative she championed. “We are taught by our Elders when you ask for information or stories, you validate their teachings and what … they have taught. You honour them with medicine,” she said.

Prioritizing traditional protocols, ceremony, and medicine at this year’s fire gathering is an example of how Antoine brings balance to the fire space.

Not only has she broken down barriers for women to come after her, she also creates opportunities for those in the fire industry to connect, heal, and share knowledge – work that can be forgotten for those in the heat of fire. 

Antoine said “we’re in fire dependent ecosystems, the land needs fire.”

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

• A recent gathering of the Salish Fire Keepers Society brought together over 100 experts and community members to discuss the role of fire on Indigenous territories in Interior B.C.
• Over a century of fire suppression practices have left Interior B.C. vulnerable to catastrophic wildfires, like the one that destroyed Lytton in 2021.
• Indigenous firekeepers advocate for the use of cultural and prescribed fire to manage risks and restore balance to ecosystems.

In 2022, one year after wildfire tore through the Village of Lytton, a blaze broke out at the nearby Stein Valley Nlaka’pamux Heritage Provincial Park.

The site, co-managed by Lytton First Nation and the B.C. government,  contains pictographs, petroglyphs and culturally modified trees, along with more important cultural sites.

So the BC Wildfire Service called in Sheresa Brown, a 31-year-old Lytton First Nation member who works as a field technician and archaeology monitor with the Nlaka’pamux Nation Tribal Council. When fires happen near registered archaeological sites, Brown works with BC Wildfire Service crews and structural protection specialists to safeguard cultural heritage. 

“I was all for it,” Brown says. “But I wanted to do it in the right way.”

To avoid the pictographs washing away from firefighting efforts, Brown outlined a 75- to 100-metre buffer zone around the cultural site. 

Sprinklers were set up around the buffer zone, and crews watched as the sprinklers stopped the flames from reaching the pictographs.

“That really helped me confirm that this was a good idea,” she said.

In other wildfires, she has helped to determine which registered archaeological sites are within a fire’s boundaries and are along its projected path, directing crews where to work. For example, she will advise where heli-pads can be constructed to avoid cutting down culturally modified trees, and will guide where hoses can be laid to protect artifacts — such as arrowheads — on the ground.

“We make sure that everything is done in a very respectful way,” she said.

When fires happen near registered archaeological sites, Brown works with BC Wildfire Service crews and structural protection specialists to safeguard cultural heritage, including guiding where hoses can be laid to protect artifacts — such as arrowheads — on the ground.

Brown was one of more than a dozen experts and technicians drawn from the realm of Indigenous fire stewardship — from researchers to Indigenous land managers and fire practitioners — who gave panel talks at the Salish Fire Keepers Society “Reigniting The Land” spring assembly on March 17 and 18. Around 100 people attended in-person in Tk’emlúps (also known as Kamloops, B.C.) in Secwepemcúl’ecw, with more tuning in virtually.

Secwepemcúl’ecw is the traditional territory of the Secwepemc Nation, which stretches across approximately 180,000 square kilometres of Interior B.C. and encompasses 17 Secwepemc communities.

The panel discussions ranged from protecting cultural heritage sites and values in the event of wildfire, to the experiences of youth engaged in cultural burning and different approaches to land management post-wildfire. 

While honouring the work of their ancestors and the efforts by Indigenous firekeepers in recent decades, the gathering also gave insight into the role that Indigenous youth are having in the future of fire stewardship and emergency response.

Resources around building capacity for community-based fire stewardship and emergency response initiatives were also highlighted, and there was dialogue in bridging opportunity gaps between the BC Wildfire Service and Indigenous communities.

“We need to collaborate with our people. We need to share. We gotta look at those imaginary lines and get rid of those, and work together,” George Campbell, a Nlaka’pamux Nation member from the Boothroyd Indian Band, said. Campbell is a wildfire officer for the Fraser Fire Zone with the BC Wildfire Service.

George Campbell, right, a Nlaka’pamux Nation member from the Boothroyd Indian Band and a wildfire officer for the Fraser Fire Zone with the BC Wildfire Service, is pictured during a prescribed burn in his home community in May 2024.

Fire Keepers Society brings Indigenous nations together to share knowledge, experiences

Comprised of Elders, youth, Knowledge Holders and firekeepers from Salish communities — including the Nlakaʼpamux, syilx, Secwepemc and Stʼatʼimc Nations — the Fire Keepers Society is a grassroots initiative that started in 2016 as a means to promote awareness around culturally prescribed burns throughout the province.

The society annually hosts a spring and fall gathering, where they aim to build connections between Indigenous nations by sharing knowledge, and promoting and supporting fire stewardship opportunities in different communities.

“We as nations, need to be working together,” Tiffany Traverse, a Secwepemc Nation member who serves as one of the society’s board of directors, said.

“We have shared territories. We have shared family members and family lineages.”

Salish Fire Keepers Society founding members Craig Shintah, left, and Joe Gilchrist, are honoured with a blanket ceremony led by the Stʼatʼimc Bear Dancers group.

Fellow board director Darian Edwards, a Stʼatʼimc Nation member from Tsʼkwʼaylaxw First Nation, said that the society is looking to build support and create opportunities for Indigenous youth around fire stewardship initiatives in their respective communities.

“Youth are going to be taking over the work. They are going to be stewarding our lands after us,” Edwards said.

A century of fire suppression

Before settler colonialism outlawed the use of fire on the land through legislation such as the provincial Bush Fire Act of 1874, Interior Salish Nations had been prescribing fire to the land for thousands of years. 

Burn cycles were designed to nurture certain landscapes and ecosystems, often to sustain diversity for hunting areas and to promote the growth of berries and medicinal plants — which all supported various ceremonial purposes.

This work of regular burning ultimately helped to maintain the ecological health of the land by limiting overgrowth and mitigating fuels.

However, settlers and their rapid fire suppression practices effectively removed fire from the ecosystem in the last century. This has resulted in the spread of trees across landscapes that were not historically forested, all of which has led to the accumulation of wildfire fuels and debris across landscapes.

“Those managing forestry are not aware of the historical ecology of our lands and how they were changed through a century of fire suppression and how they were afforested,” Jennifer Grenz, a Lytton First Nation member who is a restoration ecologist and assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, said.

In the past, she noted, “so much of our territories didn’t have trees all over them.”

“They were not meant to be these high-density, single or two-species tree plantations that they were transformed into,” she said.

Jennifer Grenz, a Lytton First Nation member who is a restoration ecologist and assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, worries about the encroachment of forests on areas that were once managed through cultural burns.

Grenz made the comments during her panel presentation on the restoration work she conducted following the 2021 McKay Creek wildfire that broke out near Lilloet in St’at’imc territory.

Last summer, four years after the fire, she and a team of researchers found that burned landscapes are at risk of invasion by fast-growing, fire-prone invasive species of grasses.

However, they also identified historic berry-gathering areas that had once been cultivated and maintained by Indigenous people. 

These sites were sprouting in locations that were impacted by the fire, and did not see any human intervention efforts post-fire.

“Several areas have managed to survive being forested for tree plantations and these mega-fires to remind us of these very large areas that people created — that our people created,” she said.

While many of these areas are recovering on their own post-fire, she noted that “those are the first places that we’re seeing tree planting occurring.”

“The provincial government is going in and planting on top of these areas,” she said.

“This is where I really feel like there’s a really important piece for us to take back greater territorial land management, and find these areas and assert them, as these are our historic berry-gathering areas, food areas. And we don’t want to find trees planted on top of them.”

Grenz said that Indigenous communities know that the mega-fires of today “are not our fires.”

“This is just a totally different level of trying to figure out what to do next,” she said.

‘It’s really important to expose our youth to this work in a good way’

During a panel discussion led by three Indigenous youth, Skuppah Indian Band member Amber Wilber from the Nlaka’pamux Nation said that there’s a lot of trauma in her community around fire, especially among youth.

Skuppah Indian Band is located just two kilometres south of the Village of Lytton, which was the site of a devastating wildfire that swept through the area in 2021 and burned down 90 per cent of the village. Nearly five years after the fire, communities in the area, such as Lytton First Nation, are still in the process of rebuilding their homes and infrastructure.

Lytton, B.C., was destroyed by a fire in 2021, and five years later the town and surrounding communities are still struggling to rebuild.

“I’d love to see that fear of fire shift to a respect for fire — learning that fire can be a tool that we can use to manage our land, and help bring balance to it, instead of something to be feared,” Wilber, who is in her second year working with BC Wildfire Service, said.

Wilber said growing up, she used to watch from inside her family home as her dad and grandpa burned patches of land outside to support berry harvesting. She would later help her uncle with fuel management work — it was her uncle who taught her that the practice is “an important tool that brings balance to the ecosystem.”

“Not only when it comes to fire prevention and fire management, but also, creating balance in an ecosystem for birds, for elk as well, in our local area. Making way for them to travel through our forests, and giving birds good nesting places,” Wilber explained.

“We also use fuel management and cultural burning in our area as a way to knock down the tick population, because they can be quite pesty in the spring.”

Indigenous youth panelists speak at the Salish Fire Keepers Society’s 2026 spring gathering. From left to right: Santana Dreaver, a Saulteaux and Plains Cree journalist who works with The Narwhal and IndigiNews; Takoda Castonguay, the assistant executive director of Oskâpêwis Gladue Services from the Sapotaweyak Cree Nation; and Amber Wilber, a Skuppah Indian Band member working with BC Wildfire Service.

She described this experience as a young person practising and revitalizing fire stewardship knowledge in her community as “eye-opening.”

“It’s really ignited a connection to the land in a way that I don’t think I ever would’ve gotten anywhere else,” she said. 

“It’s very unique, and it makes me have a lot of appreciation for traditions and cultures. It makes me feel connected to my ancestors in a big way.”

She advised Indigenous youth to get involved in cultural burning “in any way you can” — from listening to family members, to seeking out firekeepers in their communities. 

For the more seasoned firekeepers in the room, she encouraged them to involve their youth in burns, no matter the size of the fire. 

“Bring them out, even if it’s just a small job,” she said. 

“It’s really important to expose our youth to this work in a good way. And let them see your mistakes as well. … Later on, they’ll have that experience, too. They’ll have more grace for you and understanding. It’ll help them feel a little more humanized as well.”

A workbook to educate on cultural burns

Last summer, the First Nations’ Emergency Services Society (FNESS) and the Indigenous Leadership Initiative (ILI) released their “Worksheets To Create A Cultural Burn Pathway” workbook, which is both a physical and digital resource designed to guide Indigenous Nations in creating cultural burn programs within their community.

The workbook is the product of multi-years of community based-research, where more than 50 Elders and Knowledge Keepers were consulted, with additional input coming from gatherings and workshops.

Jaci Gilbert, a prescribed fire specialist with FNESS from the Secwépemc and Tsilhqot’in Nations, contributed to the workbook and gave a presentation about it during the Fire Keepers’ gathering.

“The aim of the workbook is to help nations navigate cultural burning with the impacts of climate change. We are not seeing the indicators that we’re used to, or seeing them at different times that don’t align with our burn windows,” Gilbert said.

“We hope that this workbook will help nations do burning in this new time.”

The workbook is divided into seven worksheets. The ILI, however, recognizes on their website that, “cultural fire is culture and location specific. So instead of a prescriptive approach, each worksheet poses a set of questions and prompts that can be answered collectively.”

Around 100 people attended in-person, with more turning in virtually, for the Salish Fire Keepers Society’s 2026 “Reigniting The Land” spring gathering in Tk’emlúps (Kamloops) in Secwepemcúl’ecw.

Amy Cardinal Christianson, a Cree-Métis senior fire advisor for the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, helped lead the development of the workbook. 

She appeared virtually at the gathering, and said that the workbook has been used by Indigenous land guardian programs, such as the Kainai Nation’s (Blood Tribe) fire guardian program.

“It’s a really easy resource to use for communities. It also talks a lot about the importance of governance,” Christianson said.

She said that Indigenous fire stewardship is not just limited to culturally prescribed burns.

“Yes, culturally burning — but it can also be firefighting, emergency response, post-fire recovery,” she said.

“It’s any activity where Indigenous people are asserting their jurisdiction and exercising their rights related to fire on the land.”

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Summary

• Every three years, the Labrador Winter Games draws athletes from communities across the region to Happy Valley-Goose Bay to compete in events that reflect Labrador’s distinct culture and history, like snowshoe biathlon and dog team races.
• Several athletes in the 2026 games found increasingly volatile winter conditions — which swung between severe cold and sudden warmth — are impacting how they train.
• A climatologist at Environment and Climate Change Canada says climate change is a contributing factor in unpredictable winter temperatures.

Sherri Wolfrey has competed in the Labrador Winter Games for 10 times now — but this winter, she says extreme weather made training difficult. An experienced athlete training in her hometown of Rigolet, Nunatsiavut, she endured some weeks of temperatures plunging below -30 C with high winds. 

“Practicing was really hard on the lungs, like trying to chisel a hole [in the ice], and you gotta be fully dressed in extra layers,” Wolfrey, who competes the Labrathon, snowshoe biathlon and target shooting, says. But the following week might be too warm. 

“We had a few mild days when [the snow] was almost too sticky to go with snowshoes on, because it will stick to your moose hides,” Wolfrey explains. 

The Labrador Winter Games, held every three years, took place between March 8 and 14 in Happy Valley-Goose Bay. Events like snowshoe races, skiing and dog team races are all games that require athletes to compete in Labrador’s winter elements. But athletes from all across Labrador are voicing their concerns about the conditions they trained in leading up to the 2026 games. 

The Labrador Winter Games draw competitors from all across Labrador — and this year, athletes from every corner of the region experienced challenging training conditions.

Wolfrey is a school secretary and mother to four children in Rigolet, located on the north coast about 160 kilometres from Happy Valley-Goose Bay. And she was also one of many athletes that experienced the cancellation of the Labrathon at the 2023 Labrador Winter Games. 

The E.J. Broomfield Memorial Labrathon is one of the main events that athletes and spectators look forward to. The race tests athletes’ ability to live like trappers once did, as they race in snowshoes while pulling a toboggan. Along the course, they must light a fire to boil a kettle, shoot five targets, set a trap and saw a log of wood and chisel a hole through the ice, before racing to the finish line with their toboggan full of tools.

Sherri Wolfrey lights a fire at one of the stops during the Labrathon. The race requires athletes to pull a toboggan full of tools across the course and complete tasks at four stops, called tilts, which reflect the trapping skills once required to survive in the region.

But the board of directors for the 2023 games cancelled the Labrathon due to “unprecedented weather conditions” that raised safety issues.

Wolfrey says that the cancellation of the 2023 Labrathon was “so disappointing, especially after all that training.” She and a few other athletes participated in their own Labrathon to prove that it could be done in the weather. 

Athletes experience extreme temperature changes and high winds while training

Jessica Roberts, a returning athlete from Labrador City near the Quebec border, says she believes the adverse weather that impacted her training for the 2026 Labrador Winter Games was caused by climate change.

“This year was a bit challenging as we had temperatures over -20 to -25 degrees Celsius, with wind gusts up to 50 and 80 kilometres an hour,” Roberts says. “The last two weeks [before the games] most of us haven’t been able to train at all.”

Roberts competed in outdoor games such as the snowshoe relay race and individual female snowshoe race this year, and previously competed in the 2019 games. 

Wild temperature changes made it hard for Jessica Roberts to train, though her team ultimately won gold in the snowshoe relay race.

She’s used to Labrador winters, but the high winds were the culprit in stopping her from training for the 2026 games multiple times. 

“I can handle the cold, and you can dress for the cold, but like the wind — it just takes the absolute breath completely from you,” Roberts says. She adds the temperature changes were also challenging. “Sometimes you’d get -14 and then the next week you’d have like -43,” she says.

While Roberts experienced difficulty training in the weather for the outdoor games, she and her team won gold in the snowshoe relay race, and she finished fourth overall in the individual female snowshoe race.

With the harsher temperatures and high winds, Shane Winters, from the north coast community of Makkovik, Nunatsiavut, trained indoors on a treadmill, without snowshoes, for the running part of the snowshoe race. 

Shane Winters says recent winters have been variable, with some delivering too little snow and others bringing too much snow.

“It’s the hardest part about it,” Winters says. “It’s easy to run a fast 1.2 kilometre without snowshoes, but certainly when you put the snowshoes on, it’s 10 times harder.”

He previously competed in the 2023 Labrador Winter Games, and says recent winters have been highly variable, with some delivering little snow and others bringing too much snow. “It was hard to get a good track, hard to get a good routine” to train for the 2026 Labrador Winter Games, he says. 

But his team from Makkovik still brought home silver medals in the snowshoe relay race. 

The science behind the extreme weather changes

Bob Whitewood, a climatologist at Environment and Climate Change Canada, says climate change is contributing to the weather variability that Labrador Winter Games athletes have faced in recent years.

Whitewood’s work focuses on historical trends in temperatures and precipitation compared to recent climate data. 

“The major change that you’ll see is average temperatures going up, but what happens when average temperatures go up, there is this band of high winds that go across the northern part of the country,” he explains, which in turn pulls frigid cold air down from the Arctic. 

These are Rossby waves, or planetary waves: huge oceanic and atmospheric waves that occur naturally due to Earth’s rotation. Rossby waves affect the climate and weather. 

Sherri Wolfrey competes in the Labrathon, which was cancelled in 2023 due to weather-related safety concerns. Bob Whitewood, a climatologist for Environment and Climate Change Canada, says extreme temperature fluctuations are likely to continue due to climate change.

“If you have a lot of differential between temperatures in high north and lower latitudes, this jet stream of air is pretty straight across the country. But as the temperature goes up in the north, and kind of gets closer to the temperatures that you’re seeing in the south, that straight line becomes kind of a wavy line,” Whitewood says. 

As a result,the Rossby waves’ jet stream “pulls cold air from the Arctic, and then as this loop goes past you, it pulls warm air up from the south,” which Whitewood says creates a fluctuation in temperature, as Labradorian athletes experienced while training this past winter. 

Across Canada, Whitewood says, temperatures are generally getting warmer over time due to climate change. But in northern regions, like Labrador, the temperatures are changing more rapidly. Compared to historic winter temperatures over a 78-year reference period, Whitewood says the Labrador region was around three and a half degrees warmer than average. He predicts that the next winter will be warmer than average as well.

What an effort to save Arctic sea ice means to the people who depend on it

Snowmelt impacting Labrador Winter Games training

“We tried to train in all of the weather, it was just a bit more blustery this year than other years,” Nikki Brown-Dyson, a returning athlete from Cartwright, says. “There was a lot more water on the ice and everything at home.” 

Brown-Dyson is a mother of four and a paramedic. Her community of Cartwright is about 225 kilometres east of Happy Valley-Goose Bay, on the south coast of Labrador.

Nikki Brown-Dyson comes from Cartwright, around 225 kilometres east of Happy Valley-Goose Bay. But unpredictable winter temperatures are being felt all across the region.

While she was training for the ice-chiselling part of the Labrathon, the snow would melt in unseasonably warm temperatures.

“Some people like the chisel hole with the water,” Brown-Dyson says. “I do not. I find it harder to see where you’re chiselling.”

Despite the challenges of training, she took home the gold medal for the 2026 Labrador Winter Games women’s Labrathon for the second straight time after her gold medal win in 2019.

Still, the 2023 cancellation of the Labrathon was in the back of Brown-Dyson’s mind while training for this year’s Labrador Winter Games. “I think it was just a fear [that] because it was cancelled before, it was gonna happen again.”

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This story is part of Generating Futures, a series from The Narwhal exploring clean energy sovereignty among B.C. First Nations.

Summary

• Directional gatherings hosted by Indigenous Clean Energy strengthen relationships for Indigenous energy leaders across Canada.
• Indigenous communities are central to Canada’s energy transition, and renewable projects on reserves and traditional territories quadrupled between 2009 and 2020.
• Five gatherings hosted across Canada brought approximately 200 people together in different regions.

We’re trying out staff-written summaries. Did you find this useful? YesNo

When most people think of an energy conference in Canada, they probably imagine people dressed in suits, seated in rows of chairs under fluorescent lighting, looking at a PowerPoint presentation. 

Well, not this gathering. 

Indigenous Clean Energy’s directional gatherings are a special place in the energy industry. They prioritize wellness, time on the land with local Indigenous Elders and connecting with one another outside of panels or breakout sessions.

“For me it’s super important to make sure that we bring [wellness] forward, and make it normal for people when they are attending gatherings,” organizer Danika Crow told The Narwhal.

“With wellness you gotta make sure people are healthy, right? To focus on and build clean energy projects, [wellness] is one of our goals out of these gatherings,” she said.

Crow, who is from Big Grassy River First Nation in northwestern Ontario, is the wellness and gatherings manager for Indigenous Clean Energy, a non-profit organization that delivers capacity-building programs for Indigenous people and communities across Canada who are looking to develop energy projects.

“Past cohorts wanted more connection to the land, and more culture, so I think that’s what we brought them with the directional gatherings. Taking the whole day to … build connections with each other on the land, and to learn about the different territories we’re on and their culture,” Crow said.

Elder Dave Bodaly, a member of Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island, shared teachings about the land with Indigenous Clean Energy directional gathering participants. Photo: Lina Forero / Indigenous Clean Energy

Indigenous Clean Energy has hosted gatherings in five directions: Iqaluit, representing the north, Fredericton, representing the east, Manitoulin Island, Ont., representing the south, Nanaimo, B.C., representing the west, and Whitecap Dakota First Nation in Saskatchewan representing central Canada.

The gatherings reflect the growing visibility of Indigenous people in Canada’s energy transition. More than 90 per cent of privately owned clean energy projects in B.C., known as independent power producer projects, have Indigenous participation, either through full ownership, as equity partners or through royalty agreements.

And B.C. is not alone.

In northeast B.C., fresh food is scarce. This First Nation hopes geothermal energy could change that

On its website, the federal government says “renewable energy projects on traditional Indigenous territory or reserve lands increased steadily since the 1970s, and more than quadrupled from 2009 to 2020.” 

Indigenous values a core part of directional gatherings, programming

At the Nanaimo gathering in late February, the days began with a smudging ceremony, a common practice for First Nations people, where traditional medicines are burned to create smoke that cleanses the energy of anything it touches. 

Crow says when Indigenous Clean Energy began looking for venues to host directional gatherings, it focused on Indigenous-owned spaces to ensure smudging could be part of programming, as many businesses do not permit smoke inside of their buildings.

Another unique cultural consideration was spending the entire first day of the gathering on the land with local Elder Dave Bodaly.

Bodaly, a member of Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island, took participants to old village sites while sharing teachings about the land, traditional medicines and local animals.

“For our participants from the West Coast, [we wanted to] remind them of all the tools they have in their own region,” Crow said, noting that spending time on the land and in community can offer something not found in books. 

Prioritizing time on and teachings about the land is important to Indigenous Clean Energy. Photo: Lina Forero / Indigenous Clean Energy

That sentiment holds true for Dakota Marsden, a participant at the Nanaimo directional gathering who has attended numerous Indigenous Clean Energy events in the past.

“I saw this program with Indigenous Clean Energy and I didn’t have any idea what to expect. It was called Generation Power. … I was part of the first cohort and started learning about what clean energy could be,” Marsden told The Narwhal. The Generation Power program employs Indigenous youth from across Canada in the energy sector, lasting from three to nine months, and paired with mentors in the field. 

‘It is possible’: this tiny First Nation’s big renewable energy strategy

She says what keeps her coming back to these events are the networking opportunities and the heavy emphasis on mentorship. Marsden travels to gatherings with her son Hawk, who turns two years old this month. 

“I find that Indigenous organizations are more open to little ones coming, right? I did start taking Hawk quite young into these spaces: he was two months old.”

Dakota Marsden’s son, Hawk, began attending Indigenous Clean Energy events when he was just two months old, including a gathering jointly hosted by SevenGen Energy and Student Energy in Iqaluit. Photo: Michel Albert / SevenGen Energy

“In the beginning I didn’t see any other babies, it was just Hawk. … At this gathering I saw a lot more babies and children. It was very nice to see that they’re being included in these gatherings and capacity-building programs,” she said. 

Participants find community at directional gatherings

Five years after the initial launch of the Generation Power program, Marsden still attends events all over the country with Indigenous Clean Energy, strengthening relationships and creating new ones. At the Nanaimo gathering, her only criticism was that she wanted more dedicated time to hear about everyone’s energy projects.

Marsden is employed as the lands manager in her nation, Pinaymootang First Nation in Manitoba, so she is used to energy projects coming across her desk. 

So far, her nation has installed level three electric-vehicle chargers — the fastest available — and solar panels at the local conference centre. The nation has also submitted a proposal to Manitoba Hydro to answer a call for 600 megawatts of wind-generated power. 

Marsden was initially not sure about clean energy, but the guidance and mentorship provided through Indigenous Clean Energy programming has been crucial in her journey.

Participants from across B.C. and Canada gathered for two days in Nanaimo, spending the first day on the land and the second day in clean energy themed break out sessions. Photo: Lina Forero / Indigenous Clean Energy

She is one example of many who return to and find community at these events, as confirmed by the organization’s director of energy and climate Freddie Campbell, who is Michif from Ktunaxa Kinbasket territory in B.C., with her Métis family name coming from Lac La Biche, Alta. 

“We wanted to offer another opportunity to gather and really open that space for folks to have these conversations about what people are experiencing in their regions in terms of energy needs, gaps and future dreams,” Campbell told The Narwhal, emphasizing the importance of land-based programming. 

“It can be easy to get caught up or distracted in the colonial system that we are existing in, so I think that taking that time on the land really allows us to get back to that space of connection, to come together and dream about systems that are our own,” she said. 

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Dave Armstrong struggles to describe the smell that sometimes wafts onto his property just outside Dawson Creek, B.C. 

“It’s sharp, foul and it’s an oily smell, but not like a refined oil,” Armstrong says. “This has a real foul, strong odour and it’s not nice. It really irritates you fast.”He lives about one kilometre from an oil and gas waste disposal facility. Sometimes, the smell is just an unpleasant annoyance. Other days, he says, it’s much more.

“There are times where it will just be an instant headache when it hits,” Armstrong says. “And if it’s in the summertime and the windows are open in the house … it takes a long time to get that odour out.”

Brenda Delamont lives just down the road from Armstrong. She associates two distinct smells with the facility owned by Calgary-based Secure Waste Infrastructure Corp.

“One is like a burnt chemical and then one is like a sour, noxious smell,” Delamont says. “When the burnt smell is in the air, it doesn’t make your eyes water, but it kind of sticks in your mucous membranes and kind of irritates your throat.”

The facility began operating in 2010, the same year Delamont and her husband moved to their home just outside of Dawson Creek. Secure receives waste produced by the oil and gas industry, including contaminated water, drilling by-products and industrial sludge. The facility is licensed by B.C.’s Ministry of Environment and Parks and the BC Energy Regulator to handle a variety of hazardous waste products. Some waste — including contaminated water — is treated on site before being injected into underground wells. Other materials are sent for disposal at different facilities.

Brenda Delamont and her husband bought their seven-acre property in Rolla, B.C., planning to retire there along with their dogs and horses. But smells from Secure’s facility, which you can see on the horizon, have her questioning whether they should say.

Before construction began, nearby residents say Secure told them smells from the facility wouldn’t be a problem; they’d build a “state of the art vapour collection and recovery system to ensure no fugitive emissions and prevent odours.” A letter Armstrong received from the company in May 2009 states the facility would use the collection and recovery system when receiving “sour liquid loads” — an industry term for liquid waste containing high levels of toxic chemicals. Secure’s letter specifically mentions hydrogen sulfide, a flammable and highly toxic gas that typically smells like rotten eggs.

Armstrong vividly remembers sitting down at his kitchen table with a representative from Secure while the facility was still in the planning stage.

“My concern was offsite odours and they said there would not be any,” he recalls. “And we have found out otherwise.”

Over the years, Armstrong and Delamont say they and their family members have made hundreds of calls to Secure, the Environment Ministry and the energy regulator to report strong chemical smells on their properties. Both say those smells only appear when the wind is blowing from the waste facility toward their homes.

About a kilometre away from Brenda Delamont and Dave Armstrong’s properties, you can drive down a gravel road to Secure’s disposal facility, which receives waste products from the oil and gas industry, including liquids containing highly toxic chemicals such as hydrogen sulfide.

After years of raising concerns, they are frustrated.

“We still don’t know what it’s from,” Delamont says. “We’ve never gotten an answer as to why you smell the smells, what the smells are from and how toxic or noxious they are over the long term or short term.”

After attempts to reach the company by phone went unanswered, The Narwhal sent detailed questions about Delamont and Armstrong’s concerns to Secure via the company’s online contact form and by email. In an emailed response, Secure said it “takes community concerns seriously and works closely” with provincial regulators. The BC Energy Regulator conducted 33 inspections of the facility in 2025, according to the company, and found no compliance issues.

“When concerns are raised, we investigate them and continue working with regulators and nearby residents to address them,” the company said.

In the Peace, oil and gas is ‘a fact of life’ but companies need to be good neighbours

You don’t have to drive far outside the town of Dawson Creek to enter farming country. Last August, combines churned across golden fields, kicking up dust and pulling in cereal crops. The southern slice of British Columbia’s Peace region — named for the Peace River that flows from the Rocky Mountains across the northern prairie and into Alberta — produces the majority of the province’s canola and grain crops. Almost one-third of all the farmland in the province is located in the Peace, where cattle and forage crops are also big business.

The Peace region produces most of B.C.’s canola and grain crops. In late summer, farm vehicles crawl golden fields during and after harvest.

Armstrong is one of those farmers. He bought the property just outside of Dawson Creek in 1980 and moved up from the Fraser Valley in 1985 to begin building a hay farming operation from scratch. These days, he sells hay to customers from Alaska to Vancouver Island.

But farming isn’t the only big business in the area. Sprawling summer fields dotted with hay bales and buttressed by grain silos are also criss-crossed by pipelines and studded with well pads serving the oil and gas industry. Tanker trucks regularly traverse the highways that snake past sprawling gas plants with flame-tipped flares and lights that conjure the impression of a city skyline.

The Peace region is home to all of B.C.’s 4,700 active well sites. To receive and process waste products from the industry, the region also hosts 63 active disposal stations permitted by the BC Energy Regulator. Secure operates nine disposal stations in the Peace and another nine facilities permitted by the regulator.

The oil and gas industry and a love for rural life are what brought Delamont to the Peace. Her husband works in the industry and they live on a seven-acre property. She works as a chef at a local seniors’ home and spends much of her free time with her horses.

For many residents of the Peace, rural life and the oil and gas industry coexist quite well.

Oil and gas infrastructure studs the landscape around Dawson Creek, often sitting within productive farmland.

“It’s just part of living up here,” Delamont says. “Oil and gas is lots of times in your backyard.”

Well drilling can be a noisy business for nearby neighbours, with large vehicles coming and going, creating noise and dust. But once the drilling work is done, “it becomes just a quiet, small square, basically,” Delamont explains.

When issues do arise, she and Armstrong have both found the companies operating nearby wells are usually responsive to complaints.

“They’ve had a few flub-ups, but they deal with it right away,” Armstrong says. “They come and apologize and ask if there’s anything they can do and it usually doesn’t happen again.”

At first, the waste disposal facility operated by Secure seemed like just another aspect of the industry they were used to living with.

“It just didn’t seem like it was going to be that big of a problem,” Delamont says.

A love of rural life is part of what brought Delamont to the Peace region in 2010. She spends a lot of her free time with her horses. Photo: Supplied by Brenda Delamont

Authorities have made ‘feeble attempts’ to address residents’ concerns

When Secure’s waste disposal facility first opened its gate, it was a bright and noisy neighbour but not an especially bothersome one. Vacuum trucks would drive up — sometimes so many they would form a line stretching back to the road — pump out their loads of wastewater and leave. Dust, vehicle noise and the facility’s round-the-clock floodlights were a manageable annoyance.

In 2011, the BC Energy Regulator granted Secure a “major facility expansion,” allowing the company to increase the number of tanks used to store waste products and bring in new equipment to treat waste. The expansion also allowed the facility to build a flare stack, a vertical pipe system used to burn off waste gas. According to the BC Energy Regulator, residents within about three kilometres of the facility were notified of the change.

The BC Energy Regulator granted Secure a “major facility expansion” in 2011, allowing the company to increase the number of tanks to store waste products and build a flare stack.

Odours became an issue a couple of years after the waste disposal facility started operating, according to Delamont and Armstrong. They say calls to Secure haven’t always yielded much of a response.

“Occasionally, Secure will say they are having something going on and that they will remedy it,” Delamont says. “It’ll get better for periods of time, but then the smells come back.” Secure did not directly respond to a question about its response to residents’ concerns.

When calls to the company failed to fix the issue, residents have called the BC Energy Regulator or the Ministry of Environment. But often, odours waft away or the wind direction changes, meaning incidents are over by the time inspectors arrive, residents say.

“We have had a couple of times where [a BC Energy Regulator employee] came out and went, ‘Yep, we can smell it.’ But then we still haven’t heard, what was that that we smelled?” Delamont says.

Armstrong’s calls to the regulators ebb and flow. Sometimes, he calls again and again. Others, the lacklustre or non-existent response gets him so frustrated he stops reporting the incidents at all.

Both he and Delamont have been left feeling that neither the ministry nor the regulator have much ability or interest in enforcing the rules they oversee.

“I get the impression of feeble attempts,” Armstrong says. 

Secure’s facility is surrounded by farm fields where canola, hay, oats, peas and other crops are grown.

In an email, the ministry reported receiving a total of 36 complaints about Secure’s waste disposal facility since 2017. The BC Energy Regulator says it “has taken sustained and escalating action to manage odour complaints associated with” the facility, including increasing the number of inspections and, in 2024, ordering Secure to identify and mitigate odours associated with its operations. According to the regulator, the company found multiple potential odour sources at its site, including from solid waste, processing and ventilation equipment, and trucks offloading waste products. In an emailed response to The Narwhal, the regulator said Secure’s report in response to the order confirmed “existing engineered and administrative controls are in place” and that the company had taken additional steps to mitigate odours. 

“There’s waste in every industry but how we deal with it is important,” Delamont says. “We like to say that Canadian energy is the cleanest and we have lots of regulations, but then you have a waste facility that seems to not be as regulated as you would expect.”

‘If you’re not being penalized for not following regulations, are you going to change?’

In June 2024, there was an explosion at the Secure facility in which two workers were injured. That October, the company was fined more than $42,000 by WorkSafe BC for failing to take precautions before proceeding with welding work near flammable chemicals. 

In December 2024, the Ministry of Environment and the BC Energy Regulator conducted a joint inspection of Secure’s waste disposal facility to determine whether Secure was complying with its permits and B.C.’s Hazardous Waste Regulation. Several Secure employees, including the facility manager, were on site.

The regulator seemed satisfied, issuing an inspection report in March 2025 that found Secure was complying with the relevant parts of the Energy Activities Act, which governs oil and gas and other energy-related industries.

In March 2025, the Ministry of Environment issued a warning letter after inspecting Secure’s facility, outlining several compliance failures and incomplete paperwork.

The Environment Ministry on the other hand, was not as content. The same inspection led it to write a warning letter to the company outlining several compliance failures and incomplete paperwork. 

“Secure is not taking reasonable measures to identify all hazards associated with the hazardous waste” before proceeding with disposal, the Environment Ministry’s letter stated. 

The letter also noted the facility did not have an approved spill containment system or contingency plan and it was unclear if the plan for how to safely close the facility had been approved.

The facility’s groundwater monitoring program “fails to detect potential impacts to groundwater,” according to the letter, which notes issues dating back to 2011. Despite recommendations from the ministry, “Secure has not proposed an alternative program that determines if the groundwater has been affected by leakage or leachate,” putting it out of compliance with the Hazardous Waste Regulation. Since 2020, the facility’s annual reports have stated groundwater monitoring was not done because the wells it used to collect samples were dry, according to the ministry.

Documents show on two occasions, the Secure facility accepted tens of thousands of litres more toxic waste than its licence allowed — more than 50 times the 500-litre maximum. Secure did not respond to a question about these occurrences.

Another item on the warning letter raised questions about whether the company was complying with rules regarding emissions. Secure had decommissioned two pieces of equipment it was permitted to use to treat waste and installed two new boilers not authorized under its permit. The letter says ministry staff could not determine whether the new equipment complied with emissions regulations and directed the company to check and confirm.

The ministry did not issue a fine or other penalty for the equipment lacking permits. 

One year later, it’s unclear what steps the company has taken to bring its facility into compliance with provincial laws and regulations and clear up the murky paperwork. The company did not respond to questions about its response to the warning letter.

“Secure was instructed to verify their permit aligns with Hazardous Waste Regulation emission specifications,” the Environment Ministry said in a statement to The Narwhal. Because of last year’s findings, the facility “will be prioritized for reinspection in the next fiscal year.”

Armstrong can’t understand why provincial authorities have not taken more action to ensure a facility handling toxic waste is complying with all requirements under the law.

“If you’re not being penalized for not following regulations, are you going to change?”

Politicians say there’s no evidence anything is wrong with Secure’s operations

Disappointed and frustrated with the response from regulatory authorities and the company, Delamont, Armstrong and some of their neighbours have contacted their elected representatives about their concerns.

Local MLA Larry Neufeld is the BC Conservative Party’s critic for oil, gas and liquefied natural gas (LNG) and worked in the industry for decades. 

“I have met with the company on numerous occasions, I’ve met with the landowners on numerous occasions and I know that there are significant mitigation efforts and measures in place,” he says. “That being said, I’m not discounting the concerns from the landowners.”

Neufeld called the situation “very unfortunate,” adding that — like Armstrong and Delamont — he has found most companies working in the Peace region’s oil and gas sector are responsive to residents’ concerns.

In its email to The Narwhal, Secure included documents outlining actions “to mitigate odour concerns” at the facility, such as installing additional equipment, filters and deodorizing materials. On June 1, 2025, the company said it installed new infrastructure to capture vapour from part of its site and send it to a unit designed to neutralize odours. After receiving an odour complaint in October 2025, the company said it investigated and concluded the smell was related to a product being used to clean concrete at the site because that work was being done at the time the complaint was made. “Secure immediately acted and switched suppliers of the degreaser to a less odourous product,” the company wrote.

Despite finding multiple compliance failures, including that the facility accepted thousands of litres more hazardous waste than its permit allowed, the Environment Ministry did not issue any penalties or fines to Secure. The ministry did issue a warning letter directing the company to fix the issues identified.

Secure’s efforts to address residents’ concerns also included offering to install an air-quality monitor on Delamont’s property to measure methane, hydrogen sulfide, volatile organic compounds, wind direction and temperature, Neufeld noted — an offer her household declined.Armstrong did accept an air-quality monitor from the company several years ago. He periodically checks the data collected online and doesn’t think it’s been working properly.

“It was not picking up anything other than wind direction,” he told The Narwhal. “The sensors for picking up carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide were just flat lines, so I knew they weren’t working.”

Part of the problem, he says, is that it isn’t maintained. After Secure installed it about six years ago, he does not recall it being checked by the company until earlier this year.

“I have worked in the oil field myself and worn personal air monitors and they have to be calibrated and bump-checked every day,” Armstrong says. 

The company did not respond to questions about Armstrong’s concerns about the air quality monitor on his property, but did say that air quality testing conducted by a third party at the facility found concentrations of volatile organic compounds, benzene and hydrogen sulphide were “below applicable regulatory and health-based guidelines.”

Delamont and Armstrong want to know what is causing the odours they’ve been experiencing on their properties for years — and whether they could impact their health and the health of their animals.

Armstrong says he appreciates that Neufeld will listen, even if the conversations have yet to result in much action. He’s less appreciative of the way Energy Minister Adrian Dix responded to a letter he, Delamont and several of their neighbours sent late last year.Dix’s letter acknowledges residents’ concerns, which the minister said he discussed with Neufeld in early December 2025. It also outlines the BC Energy Regulator’s “comprehensive compliance approach” to the facility, which the letter says includes enhanced weekly inspections focused “specifically on odour-related concerns.”

“The province remains committed to ensuring that industrial activity does not compromise public health or rural livelihoods,” Dix wrote. “We will continue working in close collaboration with the BC Energy Regulator to maintain robust oversight and ensure ongoing regulatory compliance.”

“It was a political response, in my opinion — didn’t really say much,” Armstrong says.

The minister’s letter was copied to the regulator’s chief executive officer and commissioner Michelle Carr, with directions to respond to specific issues outlined in the letter from residents. 

“When you’re concerned about something and everybody else around you seems to be like, ‘Well, no, it’s not that big of a deal,’ that causes undue stress,” Delamont says.

‘I don’t know where I would go’

After years of calls and letters, Delamont and Armstrong want B.C. authorities to answer one big question about Secure’s waste disposal operation: What are we smelling?

“It’s frustrating not knowing what’s in those emissions,” Armstrong agrees. “If it gives you a wicked headache, it can’t be good for you, in my opinion.”

While neither has been told to evacuate as a result of Secure’s operations, both Delamont and Armstrong say their families have chosen to leave their homes on occasions where the smells have been especially intense. Both worry about the effect the odours — and whatever chemicals or chemical reactions cause them — may be having on their horses and other animals, which aren’t easy to move.

After receiving an initial response from Secure, The Narwhal followed up with detailed questions, including about what it is that the residents are smelling. Secure did not respond with this information.

“Secure remains committed to responsible operations and to working constructively with regulators and community members regarding the ongoing operation of the facility,” a representative from the company said via email. 

Delamont and Armstrong enjoy living in a rural area, where neighbours aren’t too near and there is room for their animals to thrive. But after years of dealing with “foul” chemical smells, they have both thought about moving from their current homes.

Armstrong has considered leaving the home and business he built from the ground up. “It’s crossed my mind, but the thought of starting over … I don’t know where I would go,” he says. “But you wonder what your health is doing too. I’m torn on that one, and it’s frustrating.”

Delamont and her husband have also considered leaving the property where they once planned to spend their retirement years. Their enjoyment of the wide-open spaces has been marred.

“We’ve thought recently about moving, trying to find somewhere away from Secure that we can relax a little bit more and not worry about our health and surroundings,” she says. “It’s supposed to be, ‘Oh, you live in the country, you get to breathe fresh air!’ Not always.” 

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

• The Rainbow, Jordan and Frisby valleys in British Columbia’s rare inland temperate rainforest are home to endangered species and ancient trees.
• Two logging companies hold licences to log in the old-growth valleys, while the government agency BC Timber Sales has operating areas there.
• A 2019 proposal to permanently protect 10,500 hectares in the three valleys as a provincial park has gained renewed interest as Revelstoke city council announced in February that it supports increased conservation of the critically endangered inland temperate rainforest.

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Toby Spribille trickles water onto a rare dark grey lichen that looks like a crumpled piece of paper someone set on fire and left to smoulder. It’s a bright summer day in the Rainbow Valley rainforest, in British Columbia’s southern interior. Sunbeams slant through ancient cedar trees as tall as 20-storey buildings. Moss unfurls across the forest floor like bright green shag carpet. But the small, shrivelled lichen on a stunted hemlock tree is what Spribille, a scientist, is eager to show us: smoker’s lung lichen. “It looks a little bit like the pictures on the warning packages of cigarettes,” he says with dark humour, noting the lung lichen is perfectly healthy even though it’s almost black.

As Spribille mimics rainy weather with his water bottle, the lichen begins to uncrumple, as if it’s waking up and stretching. Despite its name, smoker’s lung lichen thrives only when the air is pure. Spribille is amazed to find the lichen, which is at risk of extinction in Canada and other countries, so far south. He peers at the lichen’s underside: ashy black with irregular white polka dots. The specimen, he declares, is “utterly spectacular.”

Spribille, who teaches at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, is one of the world’s leading lichenologists. He’s tall and sturdy, with a greyish blonde ponytail, black-rimmed glasses and the authoritative enthusiasm of David Attenborough narrating a film. Late one night in 2017, Spribille had been surfing Google Earth the way some people binge Netflix. For hours, he searched for somewhere he could study lichens in B.C.’s globally rare inland temperate rainforest. Lying in scattered valleys in the Columbia and Rocky mountains, the rainforest is home to trees more than 1,000 years old and harbours an extraordinary diversity of species, including the world’s only deep-snow caribou. 

An inland temperate rainforest, far from the sea, is found only in three places on the planet: Russia’s far east, southern Siberia and British Columbia. The inland temperate rainforest in B.C. is home to endangered species and cedar trees more than 1,000 years old.

But all Spribille saw in valley after valley were checkerboards of logging clearcuts and fragments of forest too small to support many sensitive species.

Then his cursor landed on a dark green U-shaped valley about 40 kilometres north of Revelstoke, B.C., a resource and tourism town in the Columbia Mountains. As Spribille zoomed in, he saw the trees had conspicuously large crowns; he guessed they were cedars at least half a century old. Silvery streams meandered through the valley, which had no clearcuts and no roads. “Oh my word, this must be quite the valley,” he remembers thinking. “I just couldn’t believe it.” The valleys on each side, folded into the mountains like green origami, were also unlogged and unloaded, a rarity in a landscape fractured by decades of industrial forestry.

The discovery of three adjacent intact old-growth valleys has led to increasing calls to halt logging and protect the area once and for all. For Spribille and others, it’s clear the valleys are utterly unique.

When Spribille and other biologists took a small motor boat across the Revelstoke hydro-electric reservoir the following year and hiked into two of the valleys, Rainbow and Frisby, they found ancient forests so luxuriant they seemed to be from primeval times. Grove after grove of enormous red cedar trees stretched unbroken for kilometres. Seas of feathery ferns lapped at their waists. Supersized skunk cabbage leaves brushed their chests and thickets of spiky devil’s club towered over their heads.

On research trips to the Rainbow and Frisby valleys in B.C.’s rare inland temperate rainforest, Amber Peters and other biologists found habitat suitable for two dozen bird, reptile and mammal species at risk of extinction, including wolverine, grizzly bear, short-eared owl and western painted turtle.

Streams fed by mountain icefields cooled and moistened the valleys, boosting biological diversity. One mycologist found 112 species of mushrooms in the Frisby Valley — in just five hours. On a single trip, a botanist documented 49 species of mosses and 182 species of vascular plants. Biologists found habitat suitable for two dozen bird, reptile and mammal species at risk of extinction — wolverine, grizzly bear, short-eared owl and western painted turtle among them. 

Spribille and a colleague documented hundreds of lichen species, including rare and at-risk species with evocative names like Methuselah’s beard and cryptic paw. “We also found species new to science,” Spribille says. “They haven’t been named yet.”

Spribille’s latest research trip to the Rainbow Valley, in July 2023, was organized by the Valhalla Wilderness Society, a non-profit group that aims to protect Canada’s vanishing inland temperate rainforest and its wildlife. These incredibly rare rainforests grow far from the ocean and exist in only three places on the planet: Russia’s far east, southern Siberia and here, in British Columbia.

In 2019, Valhalla put together a proposal to permanently protect 10,500 hectares of rare and undisturbed ecosystems in the Rainbow Valley and adjacent Frisby and Jordan valleys as a provincial park. But the inland temperate rainforest valleys, which sit on Crown land, remain unprotected and are open to industrial logging.

The old-growth Rainbow, Frisby and Jordan valleys in B.C.’s rare inland temperate rainforest are unprotected and open to industrial logging. Valhalla Wilderness Society has put together a proposal to protect the valleys in a provincial park (outlined in green). Map: Shawn Parkinson / The Narwhal

Two forestry companies, Downie Timber Ltd. and Stella-Jones Inc., hold operating licences in the valleys, according to the B.C. forests ministry. The provincial government agency BC Timber Sales, which manages about one-fifth of the province’s allowable cut, also has operating areas in the three valleys. 

Neither of the forestry companies responded to The Narwhal’s emails and phone calls, while the B.C. Forests Ministry says there are no plans for BC Timber Sales to log “at this time,” with both private and government-run operations currently avoiding harvesting here. 

But the ministry also says the province has not recommended the three valleys for park protection. That’s led to a renewed push to protect the area. 

“I cannot single-handedly influence British Columbia forest policy,” Spribille says, adding he doesn’t see that as his job as a scientist. “But one of the things I can do is highlight areas where there are jewels still intact.” The Rainbow and Frisby valleys are two such ecological gems, he says. “There’s no reason on earth why we should go in and log.”

Lichenologist Toby Spribille has studied the Rainbow and Frisby valleys and says there’s ‘no reason on earth’ to log them. Spribille and other scientists have found extraordinary biodiversity and species new to science in the valleys, which form part of B.C.’s disappearing inland temperate rainforest.

Spribille says it’s likely rare and endangered lichens, and possibly species new to science, will also be found in the Jordan Valley. Satellite imagery shows the Jordan Valley has the same attributes as Frisby and Rainbow; it’s cooled by icefields, has large tree tops indicative of ancient trees and is unlogged and almost entirely unroaded. But unlike Rainbow and Frisby, which scientists can easily hike into from the Revelstoke reservoir, the Jordan Valley’s old-growth inland temperate rainforest is hard to access.

While provincial support to protect the region remains elusive, Valhalla’s efforts were recently given a boost by Revelstoke city council, which passed a resolution in February pointing out the inland temperate rainforest is under-represented in protected area networks and saying it supports increased conservation efforts for the Rainbow-Jordan wilderness and the inland temperate rainforest. Ktunaxa Nation council also supports Valhalla’s proposal to protect the three valleys.

Biologist Amber Peters is working with Valhalla Wilderness Society to secure permanent protection for the Rainbow, Frisby and Jordan valleys in B.C.’s rare, old-growth inland temperate rainforest.

Revelstoke council noted local governments throughout B.C. “bear direct responsibility and expense for responding to the downstream impacts of deforestation,” acknowledging old-growth forests provide benefits like climate regulation and mitigation, fresh water and biodiversity conservation — and reduce the risk of hazards such as wildfires, flooding and landslides. At the annual Union of BC Municipalities meeting in September, Revelstoke will ask other municipalities to support increased protection for the Rainbow-Jordan wilderness and the inland temperate rainforest.

B.C. rainforest is home to world’s only deep-snow caribou 

A century ago, Canada was home to an estimated 1.3 million hectares of inland temperate rainforest. Today, less than five per cent of the core, old forest still stands. So little of the ancient rainforest remains that scientists and ecologists warn the ecosystem is close to collapse.

That collapse has already begun. The International Union for Conservation of Nature — the global authority on the status of the natural world and measures necessary to safeguard it — lists B.C.’s inland temperate rainforest as “critically endangered,” posing existential risks to wildlife. Biologists are building fake old-growth trees to save endangered rainforest bats, while pregnant deep-snow caribou are helicoptered to mountain-top pens until their newborn calves are old enough to stand a better chance of survival in the fractured landscape. 

B.C.’s deep-snow caribou get their name because in late winter they eat hair lichens they reach by splaying their feet to walk on top of metres-deep snow. But as Canada’s inland temperate rainforest has disappeared, so have the caribou that depend on the rainforest for shelter and food. “Not enough has been protected,” Amber Peters, a biologist who works for the Valhalla Wilderness Society, tells The Narwhal. Peters, who guides a reporter and photojournalist through the Rainbow Valley, has a no-nonsense attitude and an amiable yet commanding presence. She carries a can of bear spray clipped to the front of her backpack, near a two-way radio and an emergency satellite communication device.

Biologist Amber Peters from the Valhalla Wilderness Society is one of the scientists studying B.C.’s rare inland temperate rainforest.

As Peters picks her way through a patch of devil’s club toward a sun-splashed grove of giant cedars, she stoops and peers at something on the ground. “This is some scat that we just found and it looks like caribou poo,” she says as the rest of us catch up. “And that would be amazing.” She sets down her pack and pulls out a clear plastic bag, kneeling on the ground as she gingerly moves aside devil’s club stems lined with tiny spikes as sharp as needles. “It’s my most glamorous scat-collecting moment,” she jokes.

The scat, which resembles chocolate-covered almonds, is well-camouflaged among oat ferns, foam flowers, bunchberry and small clusters of brown needles shed by the cedars. It’s too old to show the grooves that indicate caribou scat; Peters will take it home and freeze it until genetic analysis can be done. “Why is this amazing?” she continues. “Because as far as we know, there are only six [animals] left in the Frisby-Boulder-Queest herd. So to find them in this park proposal area would be really important.” 

Biologist Amber Peters collects scat in the Rainbow Valley that could be from endangered caribou.

Frisby Valley is lush with vegetation and has many old-growth trees.

Eight deep-snow caribou herds in southeast B.C. have winked out over the past 20 years, including the Frisby-Boulder-Queest herd, which biologists say is too small to survive. The remaining ten herds are on the cusp of extinction.

“A major part of this ecosystem is the deep-snow mountain caribou, which we have nowhere else on earth,” Peters says. “And these animals are showing us what’s happening to the ecosystem with their decline. That’s why we call them an indicator species, or a canary in a coal mine.”

When the group takes a lunch break, Valhalla cofounder and co-director Craig Pettitt lies back contentedly next to an enormous cedar tree, half-hidden by ferns. The vegetation is so dense it muffles sounds; the fluting song of a nearby Swainson’s thrush seems very far away. Pettitt, a former parks ranger, wildland firefighter and ski-touring company owner, has seen large swaths of ancient cedar trees clearcut in the inland temperate rainforest, including in critical habitat for deep-snow caribou herds. “The whole past philosophy has been to cut them all down because they aren’t worth anything for lumber,” he says, referring to old cedars that are often hollow. 

Craig Pettitt, a cofounder and co-director of the Valhalla Wilderness Society, says the B.C. government doesn’t focus enough on protecting wildlife and species diversity.

The cedars, which are often used for fence posts and garden mulch, make excellent wildlife habitat when they are left standing or topple over from age or in a windstorm. Bears den in their root bowls, bats roost in crevices in thick, sloughing bark and birds nest in their foliage. When the cedars fall, they become bridges across streams and creeks for animals like bears and bobcats, as well as nurse logs that create microhabitats for insects and plants. Pettitt says the B.C. government’s primary focus on lumber values doesn’t take wildlife into account. “They don’t look at species diversity.”

Logging isn’t imminent, but clear protection plans aren’t either: government  

Despite the BC NDP government’s promise to safeguard old-growth forests at the highest risk of biodiversity loss, Peters says the government’s response to Valhalla’s park proposal has been lukewarm at best. Last September, Peters, Pettitt and two other Valhalla representatives met with B.C. Minister of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship Randene Neill and other government representatives. 

Peters says Neill told them to contact B.C. Forests Minister Ravi Parmar to discuss the park proposal, and that they tried, twice, but were first deferred then ignored. In an emailed response to questions, the Forests Ministry says it is aware of Valhalla’s “rich and unique” proposal for a provincial park and values the group’s work in identifying, mapping and researching the region. The ministry says it looks forward to engaging and partnering with First Nations and other governments and “working with all.” It notes the province has not recommended the three valleys for provincial park protection, saying the government looks forward to engaging and partnering with First Nations and other governments and “working with all” to explore conservation opportunities “as they arise.”

The Sinixt, Ktunaxa, Okanagan (Syilx) and Secwépemc all consider parts of the Rainbow, Frisby and Jordan their territories. “Because of these very complex overlapping First Nations territory claims, we leave that to government-to-government negotiations to resolve,” Peters says. “Our role is to bring the ecological significance of the area to the public.”

A creek fed by mountain ice fields cools the Rainbow Valley in the inland temperate rainforest.

Fallen trees give rise to new life in the old-growth Frisby Valley.

In an emailed statement, Ktunaxa Nation council notes Valhalla’s park proposal aligns with the recommendations of B.C.’s old-growth strategic review, saying “conserving rare, old-growth ecosystems is essential to ensure ʔa·kxam̓is q̓api qapsin (all living things) continue to thrive in ʔamakʔis Ktunaxa for generations to come.” Marilyn James, Autonomous Sinixt Smum iem matriarch, says protection “is mandatory to study and preserve what these ancient forests have yet to reveal.” James points to the value of the three valleys for old-growth forests, at-risk species and species new to science. “These are areas that need to be preserved, that are the very root and foundation of not only creating corridors, but critical habitat for very threatened, red-listed species,” she says in an interview.

Jarred-Michael Erickson, chairman of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation and the Sinixt Confederacy, says he will need to have a conversation with his full council before deciding whether to support protection for the three valleys, adding the tribes “tend to support” initiatives to protect caribou and the inland temperate rainforest. The Sinixt Confederacy was created by the confederated tribes following a landmark court decision recognizing the tribes’ rights in Canada. (The Narwhal also reached out to Okanagan and Secwépemc nations, which were not able to respond before publication time.) 

The Rainbow-Jordan wilderness park proposal is one of three park proposals Valhalla has developed to protect important areas of the inland rainforest that remain open to industrial logging and other development. “We’re focusing on the richest remnants that are still intact of this very rare ecosystem type,” Peters explains, “but also on creating landscape connectivity and including these valley bottom, very old and ancient inland temperate rainforests which have almost totally been left out of our parks system.”

The old-growth Rainbow Valley, sitting below mountain ice fields, is still intact. Logging is inching closer to the valley.

Although the B.C. government worked with Valhalla and First Nations to create a large conservancy about 50 kilometres southeast in 2023, that’s not enough to prevent ecosystem collapse, according to Peters and other biologists. The Rainbow, Frisby and Jordan valleys are especially valuable because they represent intact and connected ecosystems, from mountain top to valley bottom, making the area more resilient to the impacts of climate change, Peters says. “There are really steep mountainous areas that mean that you don’t get really hot, beating sun in the valleys. And so they’re cooler, and they maintain a deep snow pack later in the year, and they maintain moisture. They’re incredibly important.” 

In an emailed response to questions, the B.C. Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship says voluntary old-growth logging deferrals in the valleys “are not permanent protections” and additional planning work is underway to develop long-term solutions. The Rainbow-Jordan park proposal and Valhalla’s other two park proposals are not currently recommended for protections but “may be considered as part of future recommendations,” the ministry says. The ministry also points to a collaborative habitat planning initiative for caribou that includes parts of the inland temperate rainforest. The initiative seeks to identify habitats that could benefit from increased conservation efforts, “ranging from improved management to protection,” the ministry says, noting specific areas have not yet been identified.

Rare and endangered lichens found in three unlogged sister valleys 

Back in the Rainbow Valley, Spribille bounds from lichen to lichen and plant to plant, peering at the lichens through a magnifying lens with an LED light that hangs from his neck on a lanyard. He stops near a shiny, four-leafed plant and announces he’s just found a plant that hasn’t previously been documented in the Frisby and Rainbow valleys. The plant, a herb commonly known as boreal bedstraw or northern wild licorice, is a species of concern in B.C. Until that moment, Spribille says the southernmost known locality of the plant was the Seymour Valley, some 60 kilometres away. 

He pulls out a hammer and chisel from his pack and crouches down beside a large boulder with a thick overcoat of vibrant green mosses. A bare patch of the rock looks like it’s covered in small black dots. With the magnifying glass, Spribille sees “a world of its own,” which he later describes as a “miniature landscape of tiny mosses and lichens that have their own peaks and valleys and fruiting features and a thousand different hues of green.” He chips off a small piece and pops it into one of the brown paper lunch bags he carries for samples, labelling it with the GPS coordinates.

Lichenologist Toby Spribille uses a hammer and chisel to chip off a piece of rock with lichen growing on it in the Rainbow Valley. He will take the sample back to his lab to study.

Then Spribille’s eye lands on a cluster of orange tufts on the rock. Magnified, they look like the tops of truffula trees from the Dr. Seuss book The Lorax. The tufts aren’t rare, and they aren’t lichens, Spribille explains. They’re a special group of algae called trentepohlia, or golden hair. Their genomes and the way they replicate DNA — “some of the very basic stuff about how they do life” — is unusual, Spribille says. “They’ve got very, very strange biology.” The golden hairs can photosynthesize — converting sunlight into energy — but they can also feed themselves by breaking down decaying organic matter, the way fungi and bacteria do. No one has ever been able to sequence or annotate their genomes. Spribille chips off a sample to bring back for one of his students to study.

On earlier research expeditions in the Frisby Valley, Spribille found rare greater green moon lichen — which depends on old-growth forests with pristine air quality — and cryptic paw lichen, a federally threatened species strongly associated with old-growth cedar and hemlock forests. Cryptic paw, which has fruiting bodies that face downward like the pads of a dog’s paw, is part of a group of species mostly found in rainforests in the southern hemisphere. In Canada, it grows only in B.C.

In the Frisby Valley, hiking near waterfalls that divide the upper and lower parts of the valley, Spribille and a colleague were stunned to see large colonies of Methuselah’s beard lichen, also known as old man’s beard. The pale green lichen, which drapes from tree branches and shrubs like Christmas tinsel, is threatened or lost from most of its historic range. Only small fragments had previously been found anywhere in the inland temperate rainforest.

Coral lichens are abundant in part of the Frisby Valley rainforest.

Lichens and mosses are plentiful in B.C.’s rare inland temperate rainforest.

After spending time in the Rainbow and Frisby valleys, Spribille sometimes reflects on the 15 years he lived in Europe, where many ancient forests have disappeared. Germany’s Black Forest has become a mythological place, even though many of its habitats are gone. “I went to places that they considered their trophy remaining old-growth forests and they’re so sad. They have been completely, in some cases, reduced to very small, postage stamp sizes, or with the superimposing pollution on them they’ve lost all their lichens of any kind of conservation significance.”

British Columbia still has a chance to protect old-growth rainforests and rare habitats and lichens with conservation significance, Spribille says. He believes there might be species new to science in the three valleys that biologists haven’t had a chance to see. What they’ve found so far on brief research trips continues to astound and excite him. “I feel it’s our responsibility to report back to society about what the public needs to know.”

Without pausing for breath, he says, “there’s some stuff on that rock that I’m gonna grab real quick,” and dashes off.

Updated on March. 3, 2026, at 12:52 p.m. PT: This story has been updated to correct an error in a photo caption that misidentified Valhalla’s cofounder and co-director. He is Craig Pettitt not Craig Peters.

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Summary

• Synapse Data Centre Inc. has a $10-billion plan to build a sprawling data centre, along with a natural gas power plant to supply the electricity, in rural Alberta.
• Residents of Olds, Alta., have questions about air and water pollution — as well as the plan to use relatively new technology to keep the systems cool using less water. They first learned of the proposal in late January.
• Many of those questions remain unanswered, even as the company races towards its goal to get permits in place and begin construction in March.

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Just past the sign that welcomes drivers to Olds, Alta., sits a parcel of farmland. It’s on the edge of town, across the street from homes and tucked behind the old municipal building, which was sold to the local Co-op two years ago. 

It’s where a developer is proposing to build a $10-billion data centre, along with the second-largest power plant in Alberta, to satisfy the world’s seemingly voracious appetite for data. 

The natural gas facility, proposed by Synapse Data Centre Inc., will produce 1.4 gigawatts of energy each day, solely to power what could become the largest artificial intelligence (AI) data centre in the country. 

That’s equivalent to the daily demand for the entire city of Edmonton.

This parcel of farmland in Olds, Alta., was recently rezoned to allow for the proposed data centre. A natural gas plant is also planned for the site to power the data centre, which will use about as much electricity as the city of Edmonton.

For some, including a town council wrestling with debt and eager to find new income, it’s a boon. For others, including residents caught off guard by a fast-moving developer, it raises concerns over air and water pollution, noise and more.  

That sort of investment in a town of just under 10,000 is significant.

The developer approached the town last November, and went public near the end of January regarding its plans. Synapse has said it wants to start construction in March — something Mayor Dan Daley calls “pretty optimistic.”

The data centre, if built, would be the biggest project amidst a potential building boom in Alberta, pushed by a provincial data centre strategy launched in 2024 that seeks to attract $100 billion worth of investment to the province. 

It’s also a significant test of the government’s “bring your own energy” part of that strategy, which prioritizes data centre projects that include on-site power generation, separate from the provincial electricity grid.

The AI data centre boom is here. What will it mean for land, water and power in Canada?

But closer to home, the project has raised more immediate concerns for residents of Olds.

Janae Johnson, who lives near the proposed facility, worries about how close the data centre will be to homes, but also the wetlands and fields of Olds College, just across the street. She worries about air pollution, water, noise and a project that seems to be moving fast with little public information. 

“We’re talking about the biggest plant, that’s using new technology that hasn’t been proven, that is not typically located right in a residential area,” she says.

Janae Johnson lives near the proposed data centre. She’s concerned about potential air and noise pollution from the centre and its associated gas power plant.

Olds AI project announced in January — company wants to start construction in March

The Synapse data centre will actually be ten data centres and ten power plants, cobbled together on the same parcel of land on the edge of Olds, across from the agriculture and technology college. All together, the computer servers alone would eat up a gigawatt of electricity daily. 

The company says it will use a closed-loop water cooling system for both its data centre and the attached power plant, claiming it only needs to pull water to fill the systems once, a relatively new technology for data centres. The power will be produced by natural gas units tapping local reservoirs of gas.

AI data centres are the backbone of plans to dramatically ramp up artificial intelligence use in all aspects of life, from surfing the internet to use in hospitals, military applications and so much more. Data centres themselves are largely unassuming: inside are what look like rows of neatly arranged boxes — servers stacked on what look like bookshelves. 

Sandra Blyth, the economic development manager for the town’s investment agency, Invest Olds, says she signed a non-disclosure agreement with Synapse to protect some of the more detailed information, so she’s limited in what she can reveal about more technical aspects of the plan. 

She says the company approached the town in November and then moved quickly, with the project announced on Jan. 27. The land in question was rezoned to allow the project on Feb. 9 and the company says it wants to start construction in March.

Sandra Blyth is the economic development manager for Invest Olds. She says Synapse Data Centres Inc. first approached the town with its proposal in November 2025.

Synapse still has to go through the regulatory process with the Alberta Utilities Commission, the provincial regulator of the electricity grid, and Alberta Environment and Parks, making the March construction start date unlikely. 

“There’s a lot of regulation to get through, and so it’s hard to say, but that’s the target,” Blyth says about the construction timeline. “Targets are good.”

But the speed of that target has caused concern.

Residents concerned about emissions, water contamination and more

Johnson, who lives near the site, says there’s been a lack of clarity on the project and a lack of transparency from council, which doesn’t help convince her of the project’s benefits. She also learned about the development in late January, when three representatives from Synapse knocked on her door. 

“My biggest concern is going to be air pollution, noise pollution,” she says. “We have populations of deer and geese and loons and beavers. What is the impact of this going to be? That has not been addressed whatsoever.”

She’s not alone. Dozens of letters and comments sent to town council in February reveal extensive concern.

“Has there been any consideration of the amount of emissions that the gas-fired power plant will create?” one resident wrote to the town council. 

“How will wastewater be disposed of as it will likely be contaminated?” the same resident asked.

Community members attended an information session at the local community centre earlier this month to learn more about the proposed data centre.

Others wanted to see examples of existing closed-loop systems, remediation plans for the site, clarity on how air quality will be monitored and information on how contraventions would be enforced. 

Standing in the parking lot of the Co-op building, overlooking the site, Peter Grenier says he’s opposed to the project. He lives across the street from the proposed data centre.He thinks the project is too close to homes and is upset with what he sees as late consultation. 

Daley, the mayor of Olds, says he’s sympathetic to residents’ concerns, but there aren’t many answers he can provide. 

“A lot of their questions and concerns that they had directed towards council, we didn’t have answers on yet because these studies and assessments haven’t taken place yet,” he says.

Electricity use of proposed data centres in Alberta would be more than double the province’s average

Jason van Gaal, the president and CEO of Synapse, says the company has submitted applications to the utility regulator and the government, both of which are focused on the power generation aspect of the project. 

He says the company could, “in theory,” start construction on the data centre prior to receiving those approvals.

The natural gas power generation will produce greenhouse gas emissions as well as pollutants including nitrous oxides, something van Gaal says is a focus of provincial regulations.

“What the province wants to see is nitrous oxides below a certain threshold, and other things as well, but the reason they focus on nitrous oxide is because that is, typically, for natural gas plants, the hardest one to be compliant with.”

Van Gaal wasn’t able to provide figures on greenhouse gas emissions from the project. Natural gas produces methane, a potent greenhouse gas. He did say there could be carbon capture on the power plant in the future. 

The Synapse project isn’t the only project of its scale proposed for Alberta. The list of data centres that want to connect to the provincial grid include one project near Red Deer that would reach 1.8 gigawatts, another near Calgary requiring 1.4 gigawatts and several nearing the one-gigawatt mark. 

The province capped the total amount of power that could be drawn from the grid for all data centres at 1.2 gigawatts for the first round of applications. All of that power went to two projects, both near Edmonton, leaving 40 to wait in the queue or build their own power source.

In total, power demand for proposed data centres currently listed by the Alberta Electric System Operator sits at 21.2 gigawatts per day — more than double the average electricity use for the entire province. And that figure doesn’t yet include the Synapse project.

“Someone asked me at one of the meetings, are you okay living beside it? And I said, ‘Sure, no problem.’ The more I’ve gone down this, the less concerned I would be about it,” says van Gaal. “If the community wants me to live beside the natural gas plant myself, I don’t have a problem doing it.”

‘Feeling the pinch’: huge AI investment could help Olds’ finances

The prospect of a multibillion-dollar investment is particularly attractive, as Olds has struggled financially in recent years. Olds lost millions building a local fibre optic network that it recently sold to Telus at a loss, a large cannabis operation pulled up stakes in 2022 and provincial funding for municipalities has dried up. The town has eaten into reserves and cut services as it fights to balance the books.

The town of Olds, Alta., has struggled financially in recent years, and some municipal leaders are eyeing the proposed data centre as a way to boost property tax revenue. Mayor Dan Daley says the municipality is “feeling the pinch” of provincial funding cutbacks.

Mayor Daley says Synapse would be responsible for paying to bring utilities such as water and sewage to the area, a significant investment that could attract more businesses to that currently unserviced area of town. 

“The tax revenue that’s going to come off of that will definitely help,” he says. “As all other municipalities in Alberta, we’re feeling the pinch of the cutbacks to our funding from the provincial government.”

While that funding shrinks, the province is busy promoting data centres as an economic driver. There’s also more than $1 billion from the federal government as part of a data sovereignty strategy. 

That funding, and the enormous amounts of corporate money being dumped into the building boom, mean the dilemma of data centres is something more and more communities will face. 

Grenier, who worries about looking out over the data centre instead of the sunrises he has enjoyed for years, expresses a sort of fatalism about it, especially after Alberta Premier Danielle Smith weighed in with her support, saying on Facebook she’s “thrilled” to welcome the project.

“Once your premier has it on her Facebook page — she’s done, boys,” Grenier says.

Updated on Feb. 23, 2026, at 2:28 p.m. MT: This story has been updated to correct a typo. A previous version of this article stated Synapse Data Centre Inc. could become the largest artificial intelligence data centre in the county. It could be the largest in the country, not the county.

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‘Na̱mg̱is Chief Ho’miskanis, Don Svanvik, is on the phone when I walk off the little ferry in Alert Bay, B.C.

“Standing water and wood is never good,” he says to the person on the other end. “I can come by after I drop my truck off, maybe tomorrow.” 

Svanvik, a hereditary chief and former elected chief, hangs up and tells me he was talking to someone in Port McNeill, B.C., about a support system for a totem pole he helped carve. 

“Usually we put them at the back,” he explains. He drives us to the ‘Na̱mg̱is burial grounds, where he wants to show me the steel braces at the backs of the poles there, overlooking the bay. The Port McNeill pole, he says, has a brace in the middle — which is aesthetically pleasing but not great at withstanding the weather.

Alert Bay is a quiet community on a little island near the northern tip of Vancouver Island. Sea otters and seals swim the semi-protected waters of the bay as eagles lazily circle above the trees at the top of the hill that climbs steeply up from the shoreline. The weather here can be relentless, especially this time of year. Winter storms batter the community with heavy winds that regularly knock out the power, sometimes for days on end. Svanvik says things have changed since he was young. Then, he says, the island would often be blanketed under deep snow for weeks at a time. Now, snow is a rarity and the storms are unpredictable, sometimes blowing in from the opposite direction to the prevailing winds.

As we drive around the island, we talk about stewardship and sovereignty and how the ‘Na̱mg̱is, who are part of the Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw, or Kwakʼwala-speaking peoples, made ‘Ya̱lis, a winter village on the little island, their permanent home. He says when the colonial government set up the reserve system and allocated land to settlers, ‘Na̱mg̱is were told they didn’t need it.

“I don’t know how many acres we have but it’s not much,” he says. “They said we didn’t need the land because we had the ocean.”

‘Na̱mg̱is Chief Ho’miskanis, Don Svanvik.

Winter here moves at a slow pace. Around 1,000 people, give or take, live on Cormorant Island, which is about four kilometres long and one kilometre wide. Little in the way of shops and restaurants are open and the town’s mayor, Dennis Buchanan, says it’s hard to attract businesses, in part because of the regular power outages.

“One year we had 21 power outages,” he tells me over a cup of coffee. “The grocery store here lost over $40,000 in product one time.”

Still, Buchanan says he wouldn’t trade it for anything. Arriving here in the 1970s, he fell in love with the place (and a woman) and never left.

Mayor Dennis Buchanan.

Once a bustling hub of the West Coast commercial fishing industry, the boats moored in Alert Bay now are mostly sailboats. ‘Na̱mg̱is recently bought a seine boat and local fishers still harvest herring, shellfish and other species.

Cameron lives with his cat Uno on a boat in the harbour. He says the cat just showed up one day, shortly after his dog passed.

At the far end of the bay, past the village of ‘Ya̱lis, a handful of derelict boats sit on the gravelly beach, tilted at crazy angles. Lorne Smith, a clam-digger, stands on the deck of one, tying off a rope. He says he’s hoping to salvage the radar mast when the tide comes in.

John Webster pulls up in his truck, poking around to see if there’s anything worth snagging for his boat. Among other jobs, he fishes up north with the Haida. The two joke with each other and tell me about the challenges of getting fish these days. Both remain hopeful about the future but there’s a wistfulness to their stories that says times are hard.

John Webster says he’s slowly restoring an old seine boat. When I ask him about the unexpected warmth of the day, he laughs and says he expects he’ll still have frozen fingers when he’s tying off nets to fish the herring at the end of February.

Lorne Smith, a commercial clam digger, salvages parts from a derelict boat beached near the village of ‘Ya̱lis.

While the fishing fleet here is a shadow of its former size, the ‘Na̱mg̱is and non-Indigenous allies are working to rebuild struggling fish populations and develop land-use plans that support sustainable forestry practices. Elected Chief Victor Isaac wasn’t available to meet in person, but tells me on a phone call the nation is making strides at getting the provincial government to respect ‘Na̱mg̱is sovereignty.

“Everyone was in their siloes before,” he says. “They didn’t listen to us, the stewards.”

He says things are slowly changing and people are coming together, listening at last.

‘Na̱mg̱is Big House, Gukwdzi. First raised in 1966, its enlarged front was redesigned and painted by Doug Cranmer in 1987. Ten years later, an arsonist set fire to the building, burning it down. It was rebuilt and reopened in 1999.

G̱ilakas’la (thank you) to the ‘Na̱mg̱is, stewards of all the places photographed for this story, and to everyone who made time to speak with me.

Updated on Feb. 13, 2026, at 8:44 p.m. PT: This story was updated to correct the location of a totem pole in Port McNeill, not Port Hardy. It was also updated to add context that the village of ‘Ya̱lis predates the arrival of settlers.

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Ken Johnston walks north on a gravel road through southern Ontario farmland on a July morning. It’s cool just after sunrise, but in a few hours everything will be enveloped in thick midsummer humidity.

“By 10 or 11 o’clock, the land was just on fire, like walking in an oven,” Johnston says. He wasn’t expecting this heat in Canada, he says, nor the bugs. He dabs his face with a bandana.

“Look how dense it is in there,” he points to a thick stand of trees in Wellington County, about an hour west of Toronto, as mosquitos buzz around him. “Freedom seekers would have had to fight their way through that.”

Gravel crunches under Johnston’s brisk footsteps. On his pack swings a placard that reads “Northern Underground Railroad — Niagara Falls, NY to Owen Sound, ON” and a leather strap of jangling bells.

“These are not bear bells,” he says. “They’re bells I wear to signal to the ancestors and spirits that I’m here, if they want to reach out and communicate.”

Since 2018, Johnston has been retracing freedom routes used by African Americans escaping slavery on the Underground Railroad, through his project Walk to Freedom.

He followed the footsteps of abolitionist and conductor Harriet Tubman from her home in Maryland to Niagara Falls, N.Y., and is, on this hot July day in 2025, closing out the final 265 kilometres from the U.S. border to Owen Sound, Ont., a major terminus for the Railroad. When he finishes, he will have walked more than 1,360 kilometres on this route.

Many of Ontario’s early Black settlers put down roots just over the border from Michigan. Others travelled farther north, including along a route from Niagara Falls to Owen Sound that Ken Johnston retraced over many years. Map: Shawn Parkinson / The Narwhal

Johnston has commemorated other freedom struggles on walks through the Deep South, Massachusetts, Puerto Rico, Texas and Northern Ireland — in total, he’s trekked some 3,540 kilometres. When he’s not walking, the 65-year-old works in visitor services at the Penn Museum, an archeology- and anthropology-focused museum in Philadelphia.

The ancestors “willed me to do this walk,” he says. Months earlier, he had been waffling on whether to commit to this particular trip when he saw a U-Haul truck parked in front of his home. On its side was an illustration of a freedom-seeking woman, carrying a lantern and peering warily into the unknown. Behind her was a map of eastern Canada and the U.S. marked with arrows pointing north. “Venture across Canada,” the slogan cheerily invited, with a write-up of the Underground Railroad.

“The woman is literally staring right at my front door,” he laughs. “I remember looking up to the sky and going, ‘I hear you! I hear you!’ ”

Johnston, who lives in Philadelphia, has retraced Black history and freedom struggle routes in the mainland United States, Puerto Rico and Northern Ireland. His walk through southern Ontario taught him some of Canada’s history of enslavement, racism, freedom and farming.

Not all freedom seekers ventured all the way to British North America, which had abolished slavery in 1834. Movement accelerated after 1850, when U.S. Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act. Escaped slaves and free folk in the northern free states could be kidnapped by slavecatchers and sent back to the South, which meant northern states were no longer a safe haven.

An estimated 30,000 to 40,000 freedom seekers pushed to Canada. They came overland on foot, but when possible also used trains, horses, wagons and carriages. Ships carried them across the Detroit, Niagara or St. Lawrence rivers and through the Great Lakes to port towns like Owen Sound.

“The American narrative is they made it to Canada and then they were free. Well, the story continues on the other side, and that’s what I discovered when I reached St. Catharines,” Johnston says. “They had extraordinary lives.”

Ontario towns such as St. Catharines, Windsor, Hamilton, Guelph and Chatham became cultural and economic hubs for these refugees, full of settlements, churches, businesses, newspapers, schools and abolitionist organizations. As one example, Chatham’s population was one-third Black and regarded as a “Black Paris” in the 1850s, according to Kristin Moriah, an associate professor of African-American literary studies at Queen’s University.

Photos of Josiah Henson and Harriet Tubman are seen behind Johnston as he speaks to people in Dresden, Ont. The municipality was one of Ontario’s earliest Black settlements.

“This idea of being able to start your own businesses, to support the Black community, to really celebrate the kind of freedom you specifically had in Canada, makes that area very special,” she says.

These are the Railroad stops on Johnston’s walk: Tubman’s church in St. Catharines, monuments, early settlements that fostered economic independence and the museums dedicated to preserving these local Black histories.

Connecting the stories and places of the Underground Railroad is an intentional part of his walks, Johnston says, amid efforts by U.S. President Donald Trump to round up undocumented immigrants, crack down on Black Lives Matter protests, scrub government websites of Black histories and end diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

“Democracy in the United States is backsliding, and here in 2025, in the second Trump administration, protecting and preserving civil rights is more important than ever,” he says. “That’s sort of the idea behind these walks: to encourage people, to meet them one-on-one in their communities, in the streets, to engage in conversations with them about some of the erosion of civil rights we’re seeing.”

In an era when so much political activism happens online and furiously, he finds intention in the slow act of walking — as people did during the Montgomery bus boycotts or on civil rights marches in the 1950s.

“It generated a lot of activity and forced people to engage. … The energy of that movement I feel is what’s been lost,” Johnston says. “We saw a little bit of it after George Floyd’s death, there was a spontaneous movement of Black Lives Matter, but then that dissipated and there was no leadership to really keep it moving forward. So this is my way of encouragement to get that movement back, to find that energy.”

On the road, he channels the same struggles, suffering and emotions as his freedom-seeking ancestors, but also meditates on his own life.

“I’ve enjoyed the ebb and flow of marriage, the delight in raising a child, the profound grief of losing a child and finally divorce,” Johnston writes on his website. His daughter, who passed in 2008, had severe disabilities. He wrestled with the way the world engaged with her, and in return what autonomy and access she had. 

“After all these experiences, I’ve learned one has to keep going in life because another horizon awaits you over the next mountain.”

Escaping enslavement required expert outdoor survival skills

Walking up the shoulder of Highway 6, Johnston follows the rough trajectory of Garafraxa Road, which first connected Guelph to Owen Sound. Garafraxa was one of many colonization roads criss-crossing southern Ontario, which cleared the first paths for British expansion and opened up new areas for settlement. 

It provided access to a region called Queen’s Bush, stretching from Waterloo, Ont., to Lake Huron. Though it’s now a paved two-lane highway, when Garafraxa was first surveyed in 1837 it would have been a boggy, densely wooded and miserable stretch.

“It required a huge amount of backcountry skills to be comfortable walking the trails, navigating as you made your way north,” Jacqueline L. Scott, a Toronto-based scholar on race and nature and contributor to The Narwhal, says. “You are working out your route as you go along, not knowing what’s around the bend or corner. You mostly hiked in the evenings because when you run into white people, you don’t know if they are friend or slavecatcher.”

It was a rough journey up this corduroy road, made of timber laid down in the mud. On one stretch dubbed “The Long Swamp,” wagons and oxen would sometimes slip off these bumpy, jolting roads and sink to their doom in the water and mud. In total, the 113-kilometre trip from Fergus to Owen Sound would have been a four- or five-day journey.

During the days of the Underground Railroad, making the journey from Fergus, Ont., to Owen Sound meant traversing bumpy roads surrounded by treacherous mud.

One person who escaped enslavement only to find themselves on this mucky route to freedom was John Little, who fled Tennessee in 1841. Little’s testimony is included in the 1856 collection The Refugee: or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada. He recounted how he and his wife Eliza were on the run for three months before finally arriving in Windsor, Ont.

Six months later, “​​We heard of the Queen’s Bush, where any people might go and settle, colored or poor, and might have a reasonable chance to pay for the land,” he recalled.

With $18, two axes, a few kitchen tools, flour, pork, a blanket and bedquilt, he and Eliza “marched right into the wilderness, where there were thousands of acres of woods which the chain had never run round since Adam. At night we made a fire and cut down a tree, and put up some slats like a wigwam. This was in February, when the snow was two feet deep.”

Wolves, bears and lynx roamed the bush, thick with old-growth maple, beech, elm, birch and ash trees. The land was so thick that often only three or four acres could be cleared and cultivated in a year.

Little was proud of their grit, producing thousands of bushels of produce and livestock out of nothing: “The man who was ‘a bad n—r’ in the South, is here a respected, independent farmer.”

Freedom Road in Dresden, Ont., was once home to Josiah Henson. After discovering his American enslaver had cheated him out of an agreement to buy his freedom, he escaped with his wife and four children.

Freedom seekers were indeed expert survivalists. Whatever food they could not carry, purchase, beg or steal they supplemented with foraged plants, fish and small game.

Tubman’s early life prepared her for the 13 missions she took back to Maryland to lead about 70 friends and family out of slavery. Her enslavers tasked her to harvest timber, trap muskrats and work the fields. Like a modern wilderness guide, Tubman navigated water and land, read stars, foraged for food and plant medicine — and did so all while keeping her fellow freedom seekers alive.

The idyll of a summer hike doesn’t capture the terror of fleeing for one’s life in midwinter, without the luxury of waterproof boots or Gore-Tex, Scott says. “When I look at what they had to do on that trek, it loses a lot of its romance. It’s not an outdoor adventure … to prove I can walk 500 kilometres in however many days, right? That’s an adventure quest.”

Many birds are named for enslavers, colonizers and white supremacists. That’s about to change

These traumas shape how Black folks relate to the outdoors today, Scott says. Off-leash dogs on a hiking trail can evoke the slavecatchers’ hounds. Police are still a common threat for Black people in nature, like birdwatcher Christian Cooper, who was falsely accused of threatening a white woman in New York’s Central Park, or Ottawa cyclist Ntwali Bashizi, who had 911 called on him by a white woman that accused him of blocking her path in a park.

Canada can’t achieve its land conservation goals without nurturing future generations of racialized outdoors enthusiasts, especially when a quarter of Canadians identify as what Statistics Canada calls visible minorities, Scott says. “Why should we care when we’ve never felt like we belonged there or were invited to be there?”

Canada’s complicated history of enslavement, Black Loyalists and Indigenous displacement

Canada was the Promised Land, in both the aspirations of freedom seekers and our present-day mythologies. While that narrative should rightly be celebrated, slavery is, as Scott puts it, “as Canadian as our snow or maple syrup.”

Olivier Le Jeune was the first documented person of African descent to be enslaved in what is now Canada. Sold as a child, Le Jeune was brought to Quebec City during English occupation around 1629 to 1632.

“By 10 or 11 o’clock, the land was just on fire, like walking in an oven,” Johnston said of southern Ontario last July. He wasn’t expecting the heat — or the bugs.

Over the next 200 years, some 7,000 people, including Indigenous individuals, were enslaved in British and French colonies. It’s just a fraction of the 12 million African lives stolen in the transatlantic slave trade, but chattel slavery is very much part of Canada’s foundation.

Ships built in Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Newfoundland carried captured Africans from as early as 1725 until the early 1800s. The worst, cheapest grades of cod fished from the North Atlantic were shipped south to the Caribbean to feed the enslaved on British plantations. 

Even after Britain abolished slavery, racist sentiments remained. The Ontario-based newspaper Provincial Freeman, published by abolitionist, educator and lawyer Mary Ann Shadd Cary, put it plainly in 1853: “Prejudice against negroes, so prevalent in various parts of the Province, as maintained by many persons of all nations … is one of the strongest pro-slavery influences that disgraces and degrades our fair country.”

Still, leaders like Shadd Cary were committed to the idea of Black settlement in Canada. “She really supported the British colonial project, and I think that she thought of it as a project that was directly in opposition to the evils of U.S. chattel slavery,” Moriah, of Queen’s University, says.

On his trips to Ontario, Johnston met a lot of people, including attendees of a medieval festival in Fergus, Josiah Henson’s great-great-granddaughter Barbara G. Carter and fellow walker Zacheé Nzeyimana.

Viewed today, with an understanding of how colonization harmed Indigenous nations, this is an uncomfortable position. But Scott lays out the scant choices for a Black Loyalist, the name given to Black people who supported the Crown in the war against the United States. “You’ve fought for Canada because the fear was that if the U.S. won, the U.S. would reimpose slavery in Canada. … You know that freedom is hanging by a thin thread. Your reward is to be given land grants. … But it’s Indigenous land grants that you’re given.”

“And so the intertwining of that complex history — freedom for one group, the promise of freedom, of economic prosperity — it’s based on taking away the land from a different group,” Scott says. 

Canada’s promises to Black Loyalists were hollow. Most weren’t awarded the land they were owed, while others received “the worst land grants, smaller size, in the middle of nowhere, so far from the roads and later far from the railways, so it was economically unfeasible,” to earn a living there, Scott says.

Many lost their homes after white labourers, resentful of perceived wage undercutting, instigated the first recorded race riot in North America in Shelburne, N.S., in 1784. Disillusioned, more than 1,000 people, representing a third of Nova Scotia’s Black Loyalists, left for Sierra Leone just eight years later.

Some who lived along Johnston’s route were left disappointed, too. On Highway 6, near Williamsford, Ont., Johnston stops at an intersecting dirt road. Here, where a stream meets old Garafraxa Road, some 50 families of Loyalists and freedom seekers settled in what became the Negro Creek Settlement.

Just after Boxing Day, Johnston walked with Black descendants of freedom seekers and local residents at the site of the Dawn settlement in Dresden, Ont.

Black settlers were among the first non-Indigenous residents of the Queen’s Bush, as early as the 1820s. Their presence predated county surveys in 1851 that carved up plots of land. Though they had done the hard work to clear their land, many of these families could not afford to buy it. Without titles, land agents regarded them as squatters. Other families could not afford the land payments.

What followed were threats, evictions, harassment and coercion to sell or simply walk away. By the early 1850s, families migrated out of the area. Only a handful were established enough to hold onto their plots. By the 1960s, the community cemetery had been desecrated. All that remained were the signs for Negro Creek Road.

In 1995, perceiving the name to be politically incorrect, Holland Township announced the street would be renamed Moggie Road after an early white settler. Descendants of early Black settlers marched in protest, calling it an erasure of their families’ presence, and filed a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Commission. Nearly two years later, the town backed down.

This spring, community members intend to break ground on a memorial park on two acres of land donated by Jim Douglas, a descendant who still owns his family’s 300-acre parcel. Descendants continue to gather their histories in an online archive.

Dresden, Ont., was the site of Canada’s first racial discrimination trial. In the 1950s, local civil rights activists began organizing against businesses that refused to serve Black customers.

Johnston’s route doesn’t quite reach the town of Priceville, Ont., just 34 kilometres away, where Black residents were also pushed out violently. Eventually all that was left was a cemetery, which was razed in the 1960s for a potato field. Some tombstones were hidden in a stone pile near the local school, while others lined the floor of a barn and the basement of a farmhouse, as revealed in the 2000 documentary Speakers for the Dead.

Local white kids played baseball using a piece of a broken headstone for home plate. “I think it said Margaret,” one resident tells the camera with a laugh. “Pitch it to Maggie!”

In Dresden, Ont., an emotional meeting with descendants of early Black settlers

As 2025 drew to a close, Johnston was called again by the ancestors to walk. He set off from Detroit on Boxing Day, bound for the Black settlements of southwestern Ontario.

His trip landed during a cold snap. Some freedom seekers chose — or seized the opportunity — to leave in winter, when the long dark nights provided more cover. In freezing temperatures, they would have been able to walk over the frozen Detroit and St. Clair rivers.

“One of the things I did not fully understand was the psychological journey for these people coming across,” Johnston says. “They were happy to be free, but the psychological weight of the cold as I experienced in the last week dampened my spirit a little.”

On his route were sites with rich Black history: Chatham, Amherstburg, North Buxton and Dresden.

Turning 200 uncleared acres into a home meant “settling upon wild lands which we could call our own; and where every tree which we felled, and every bushel of corn we raised, would be for ourselves,” Henson wrote in his 1849 autobiography.

The Dawn settlement in Dresden was founded in 1841 by the abolitionist, preacher and Underground Railroad conductor Josiah Henson. Enslaved in Maryland and Kentucky, he had been permanently disabled by beatings that left him unable to lift his arms above his head. After discovering his enslaver had cheated him out of an agreement to buy his freedom, he escaped at the age of 41 with his wife and four children.

Henson, who advocated for economic independence and self-reliance, built a co-operative farm, church and vocational school to teach residents the skills to work at nearby sawmills and gristmills. His life was the inspiration for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s often-misunderstood anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and his home sits on what is now Freedom Road.

On those 200 acres, Dawn’s early residents began the task “of settling upon wild lands which we could call our own; and where every tree which we felled, and every bushel of corn we raised, would be for ourselves; in other words, where we could secure all the profits of our own labor,” Henson wrote in his 1849 autobiography.

A century later, the area became a part of Black history as the site of Canada’s first racial discrimination trial. Many businesses in Dresden refused to serve Black customers, most notoriously Kay’s Café and Emerson’s Soda Bar Restaurant.

Hugh Burnett, a Dawn descendant, and his neighbours formed the National Unity Association in 1948 and lobbied town council and then the provincial government to pass anti-discrimination legislation. They succeeded in 1954, but some local businesses refused to comply. Two years later, after sit-ins and two drawn-out provincial trials, the owner of Kay’s Café finally served his first Black customers in 1956.

“It has been stated you can’t make a law to make one man love another — I think they knew very well the law would not do that — but it would eliminate the act of discrimination,” Burnett said in a 1954 National Film Board documentary.

On the final day of his walk, Johnston was greeted at the foot of Freedom Road by several dozen Black residents, many of them descendants of Dawn settlers. They walked arm-in-arm toward the museum, singing a gospel hymn.

Retracing Ontario’s Black history ‘touched me to my core’: Johnston

For those who made it to the end of the Underground Railroad, life was bittersweet. Though many freedom seekers found a piece of their Promised Land, the pains of dispossession, prejudice and slavery were ever-present.

“I reached Canada about a year ago. Liberty I find to be sweet indeed,” Henry Atkinson recalled in 1856, after escaping enslavement in Virginia. “I found an opportunity to escape, after studying upon it a long time.”

“But it went hard to leave my wife; it was like taking my heart’s blood: but I could not help it — I expected to be taken away where I should never see her again, and so I concluded that it would be right to leave her. I never expect to see her again in this world — nor our child.”

After the American Civil War and emancipation in 1865, this yearning drew many freedom seekers back to the U.S. in the hopes of being reunited with their families, Moriah says. Having achieved economic success in Ontario settlements like Elgin (in what is now North Buxton) which grew to 1,000 Black residents at its peak, families chased opportunities in bigger cities like Detroit or Toronto. Today these clans are transnational, slipping between countries with family, friends, school and work on both sides.

The moon rises over farm fields on Freedom Road in Dresden, Ont.

The magnitude of these many journeys hit Johnston when he first arrived at the border divide in Niagara Falls.

“I’ve been tracing the footsteps of Harriet Tubman, from the banks of the Choptank River in Maryland on the eastern shore all the way to St. Catharines,” he says. “Harriet Tubman rescued her brothers in Christmas of 1854. They made that journey to St. Catharines in one month. It has taken me five years.”

“Just looking back and seeing how extraordinary that journey was that they made, and the sacrifice that many people made — many people left their families and they weren’t going back,” he says, pausing as he tears up.

“I had the privilege of knowing I was going back home to my family and friends. It touched me to the core of my bones just what that walk meant to them.”

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When the turbines began turning at Bear Mountain Wind Park in 2009, it became the first fully operational wind power project in B.C. The park’s 34 wind towers run along the crest of a rocky ridge just south of Dawson Creek, looking out over the flattening foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Together, the towers supply 102 megawatts of electricity to the provincial power grid, roughly enough to power 41,000 homes for a year.

The project marked a major milestone for the Peace Energy Cooperative, which spearheaded the development of the wind park. At that point, Don Pettit, the co-op’s executive director, was optimistic about the future of wind power and co-op energy projects in B.C.

“It was pretty good for our first go,” Pettit recalled. “It worked really well, so we assumed that we’d be able to do that in the future.”

But, despite Bear Mountain’s success and the expertise Peace Energy picked up while developing the project, things didn’t pan out that way. Big infrastructure projects are notoriously costly and there are restrictions on how much seed money co-ops — even investment co-ops like Peace Energy — can raise from their members. Peace Energy partnered with Aeolis Wind Power Corporation in the early stages of developing the project because the company had experience working with other co-ops. 

When it came time to build, the co-op raised capital from its members and struck a partnership with AltaGas, an energy company that mostly builds oil and gas infrastructure, to help cover construction costs. Then, Peace Energy faced a big choice: whether to maintain an ownership stake in the project and shoulder a share of the park’s maintenance and operating costs, or sell.

“We decided to go with a royalty agreement instead,” Pettit said, adding that the deal provides the co-op with a stable, modest income stream that helps cover its operating costs.

In Dawson Creek, Don Pettit and the team at Peace Energy Cooperative help their neighbours learn about and install solar power.

Since selling its stake in Bear Mountain, Peace Energy has focused mostly on community-scale solar power projects, including helping the District of Hudson’s Hope set up the largest municipal solar project in the province in 2018. Located just upriver from the Site C dam in the heart of B.C.’s oil and gas country, Hudson’s Hope now generates much of the power for its municipal buildings — anywhere from 50 to 100 per cent — from solar. The district estimates its solar power project saves $74,000 per year on electricity costs.

But Pettit still thinks of Bear Mountain Wind Park as a “precedent-setting example” of how renewable power can be developed in B.C.

“And that’s the last time it ever happened,” he told The Narwhal.

There aren’t many energy co-ops in Canada. A recent study by researchers at Royal Roads University found 82 active energy co-ops across the country. Together, they own or co-own 214 renewable energy projects. By contrast, there were 847 energy co-ops operating in Germany in 2023 while the Netherlands is home to 713 active energy co-ops.

Bear Mountain Wind Park produces enough electricity to power thousands of homes, but it’s also a public recreation site and a space where local ranchers can graze cattle. Preserving public access to the site was a priority during the development phase.

The gap between Canada and other countries is partly because not many provinces have policies that support small and localized energy generation. Instead, governments are used to working with big organizations that can invest big bucks into energy projects and infrastructure. It can be tough for small, community-oriented organizations to get a foothold in a system that favours larger, corporate entities. 

In a statement, B.C.’s Ministry of Energy and Climate Solutions said the province supports the growth of B.C.’s co-operative renewable energy sector and acknowledged energy co-op projects “can increase the energy resilience of neighbourhoods and communities.”

But Pettit believes the government underestimates the value energy co-ops bring to the table.

“The co-operative movement in energy in B.C., it’s ignored,” he said. “There’s no sense of, do we want local people to own local energy resources? I think the answer to that question, provincially, is no, we don’t. If they did, they would be encouraging co-operative involvement.”

What is an energy co-op? And why do we have so few of them?

Co-operative businesses — referred to as co-ops for short — are owned and run by a group of people who share common goals. Profits are shared among co-op members and decisions are made democratically, with each member getting one vote. While traditional businesses typically prioritize producing profits that can be paid out to shareholders, co-ops often have a social focus and seek to fill a need that isn’t being well served by the traditional market.

In Canada, co-ops are more common in some sectors. You may have shopped at a food co-op, lived in co-op housing or used a credit union. But energy co-ops are fairly rare.

“Where co-ops work well is where there’s a strong, intimate user relationship,” Martin Boucher, dean of research at NorQuest College and president of Community Energy Cooperative Canada, said.

Most people probably don’t feel as connected to their local power grid as they do to their local food supply, their home or the daycare their children attend. Electricity isn’t exactly a warm, fuzzy subject, even if it is essential. In B.C., the energy sector is highly centralized and pretty much everything electricity-related flows through BC Hydro, the public power utility created in the 1960s. 

BC Hydro is responsible for managing and maintaining most of B.C.’s power supply, from the massive hydro dams that generate electricity to the infrastructure that keeps the province humming.

“The logic of utilities, and rightly so, has been economies of scale,” Boucher said. BC Hydro and other Canadian power utilities have historically focused on building big electricity generation projects along with the infrastructure to deliver that power to customers, all while keeping electricity rates as low as possible. 

Don Pettit and other members of the Peace Energy Cooperative spent years working to make Bear Mountain Wind Park a reality.

B.C. is barrelling toward extensive electrification of its economy, including supplying power-hungry resource sector projects like mines and liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities. Doing so will require a significant increase in the province’s power supply, one BC Hydro has not yet mapped out how to supply, according to its most recent resource plan. Boucher believes co-ops could help fill the gap.

“The kind of world we’re entering into is a high energy world with data centres, AI, electric vehicles, this sort of thing,” he said. “My baseline philosophy is energy diversification requires all hands on deck to really move this forward.”

Centralized electricity generation and distribution systems have served many communities well for decades, Boucher said, but they can be a barrier to co-operatively owned energy projects, which are often smaller scale with different goals than traditional energy companies. 

“They’re very antithetical to that kind of business model,” he said.

Because the energy sector is so highly regulated, co-ops interested in energy projects are “completely at the mercy of policy,” Boucher added.

In Canada, it’s fairly easy to see where energy co-ops have been encouraged.

Provinces without a public power utility like BC Hydro tend to have more renewable energy co-ops. Ontario, for instance, is home to roughly 75 per cent of Canada’s renewable energy co-ops while Alberta, with its open access electricity market and a strong tradition of co-op businesses, also has a relatively high number. 

“From the perspective of the electricity system, we might as well consider our provinces 10 different countries,” Boucher said. 

“There’s more alignment between countries in Europe on electricity policy and sharing than there are between provinces in Canada.”

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Despite their differences, most provinces provide pretty reliable access to affordable power so there has not been a lot of demand for alternative options, according to Julie MacArthur, an associate professor in Royal Roads University’s faculty of management whose work focuses on energy transitions and the political economy of energy projects.

“Energy systems in general are not super top of mind to most people in a developed country, until you have huge power outages or there’s some problem with it or it’s too expensive,” MacArthur said.

“I think there are a lot of activities co-ops could be contributing to that they’re not because they’re not recognized necessarily as legitimate actors in this space or there’s not a lot of policy attention on them,” she added. “But in every province, the need is going to be slightly different.”

With the right support, community solar could offer B.C. a bright future, co-op co-founder says

With climate change boosting the intensity and frequency of natural disasters, co-op energy models could become more appealing to more people. On Galiano Island, the Salish Sea Renewable Energy Co-op was born out of residents’ desire to take concrete action on climate change and reduce their dependence on fossil fuels. Since 2015, the co-op has helped set up more than 110 solar power installations across B.C.’s Gulf Islands.

“We got sick and tired of just demonstrating and writing letters, and we actually wanted to do something,” Tom Mommsen, a founding member of the co-op, told The Narwhal. 

“We give talks, we do initial assessments. We help people to go solar and then we hand it over to commercial installers and they do the rest.”

Over the past 10 years, the Salish Sea Renewable Energy Co-op has helped set up more than 110 solar power installations across B.C.’s Gulf Islands. Founding co-op member Tom Mommsen sees solar as a powerful tool to help decarbonize B.C.’s power supply and empower people to better understand their energy use. Photo: Risa Smith

Solar power is by far the most popular form of energy for co-ops in Canada, accounting for 91 per cent of the renewable energy projects they operate.

Mommsen, a retired academic who still works with the University of Victoria’s School of Environmental Studies, spends a lot of time researching the latest solar energy policies and technologies so the co-op can share the information with community members.

Most people, Mommsen said, do not know much about the electricity that powers their homes and, in more and more cases, cars.

“Nobody understands what a kilowatt hour is,” he told The Narwhal. “Once these people have solar and they look at the solar production … they know very well what a kilowatt hour is. The best education is just to have solar in your backyard or on your roof.”

Support for solar can spread quickly, in Mommsen’s experience.

“Someone starts with solar and then a couple of years later, there will be five or six … neighbours with solar because they talk.”

More than 90 per cent of co-operatively owned renewable energy projects in Canada involve solar power. Photo: Province of B.C. / Flickr

Research bears out the knock-on effects community energy initiatives can have, MacArthur said. People may find it easier to trust the experiences of their friends and neighbours than the pitches made to them by government bureaucrats or private companies.

“If they get the information about it from their neighbour or when they’re chatting with someone at school, there’s that feeling of, ‘Okay, I trust that this is not because the person has an interest in getting money from me or having me pay them,’ ” she said. 

“It makes a difference to energy system behaviours, a huge difference that is really undervalued and under-recognized when people are thinking about balancing massive systems.”

B.C. does offer rebates on solar panels and battery storage, but Mommsen wants to see the province do more to encourage community-owned energy projects, especially solar. In his opinion, provincial policymakers remain too focused on maintaining B.C.’s highly centralized electricity system when the future demands a distributed grid.

“The future of any grid under climate change has to be distributed,” Mommsen said. “What we need is a distributed system that is resilient under climate change and that helps the community. It empowers the communities and also it will help them understand energy.”

Despite the success of Bear Mountain Wind Farm, Peace Energy Cooperative executive director Don Pettit thinks B.C.’s energy policymakers have yet to fully realize the role co-ops could play in the energy sector.

Boucher agrees. He also sees the current economic moment as an opportunity for co-ops as politicians look to boost homegrown businesses that pay dividends in their communities.

“Done well, this is a very powerful local economic development strategy and boy oh boy, does the timing seem right for local economic development in this country,” he 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.