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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘This is their land’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prevention better than the alternatives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Practical steps Haines Junction has taken to support grizzly bear coexistence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The laws of living with grizzlies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bear 141

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She’s doing what a bear should do.”

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

Summary

• As wildfire smoke worsens across Canada, volunteers are teaching people to build low-cost DIY air purifiers.
• The fan-and-filter devices can perform as well as commercial HEPA air purifiers while costing around $60 to make.
• Organizers say the workshops provide practical protection from smoke while building community in the face of climate change.

On a sunny Saturday in July, a few dozen people file into a United Church on a quiet, tree-lined street near Victoria. Outside, the sky is clear and cloudless — a far cry from the wildfire smoke blanketing other parts of Canada. Inside, people are taking steps to protect themselves from the toxic smoke that has become a regular feature of Canadian summers.

As climate change makes summers hotter and drier, wildfire season becomes, on average, longer and more severe. More Canadians are experiencing the impacts with every breath they take and three-quarters say they’re concerned about wildfire smoke impacting their air quality. Once smoke rolls in, air purifiers — filtration machines capable of removing toxic chemicals and tiny particulates from the air — can be difficult to find in stores, even for those who can afford them.

But at the church, participants are learning to build simple, effective air purifiers at a workshop organized by Bill Darnell, a local resident who helped found Greenpeace in 1970.

“I’ve been involved in social justice and climate action pretty much all my adult life and it’s kind of discouraging that I’m still having to do it at this point,” Darnell tells The Narwhal.

Darnell was inspired to organize the event after learning about a similar workshop that took place in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. He and other volunteers use information compiled by the BC Lung Foundation and Simon Fraser University to help people build DIY air purifiers, using simple and accessible components like box fans, furnace filters and duct tape.

A 2023 study conducted at the National Collaborating Centre for Environmental Health found these air purifiers can perform as well as commercial air purifiers equipped with high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters. While HEPA-equipped air purifiers often cost hundreds of dollars, the materials for these DIY versions cost less than $60. Since 2023, the BC Lung Association has logged more than 160 community workshops where participants have built more than 3,200 air purifiers.

B.C. has recorded 634 wildfires since April 2026 and 98 are currently burning across the province. The fires have put thousands of British Columbians on evacuation alert, while others have been evacuated — like the community of Boston Bar in the Fraser Valley, where a rapidly spreading wildfire nearby also closed the Trans-Canada Highway for four days in early July. Even so, wildfire smoke has — so far this year — had less of an impact on air quality than in previous years. Most of the province is experiencing low-to-moderate-risk air quality. Meanwhile, intense wildfire activity in Ontario made Toronto’s air quality the worst in the world on July 15.

Darnell describes the DIY air purifier workshop as an opportunity to build community and educate people while also empowering them to take action in the face of a direct threat like climate change.

“It really is important to come together when you’re facing a catastrophe,” he says. “There’s the fast-moving ones like floods and fires, and there’s the slower-moving ones like climate change and smoke. The most important resource is the people around you.”

A fan, a filter, a roll of duct tape: a simple solution for cleaner air

Wildfire smoke is more toxic than everyday air pollution. It can travel thousands of kilometres and linger in the air for weeks. 

The smoke contains gases, such as carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide, and volatile organic compounds, like benzene, toluene and butene. There is also particulate matter, which can include soot, dust, pollen and spores, as well as chemical particles. The particles are classified according to size and fine particulates — the really tiny ones, less than 2.5 microns in diameter and typically referred to as PM2.5 — pose the greatest threats to human health because they can travel deeper into the lungs than larger ones. 

Fine particulates found in smoke and other types of air pollution have been linked to damage in several organ systems, including the heart, brain and reproductive system. 

Certain air filters are capable of removing particulates from the air. The DIY air purifiers use a single MERV 13, commonly used in furnaces and available in Canada for less than $20 per filter, which need to be changed out regularly to maintain performance.

The 20” filters fit perfectly on the back of a 20” box fan, which costs about $35. Duct tape seals the filter to the fan, allowing air to be drawn through the filter and pushed out through the fan. To increase the air purifier’s efficiency, a “shroud” can be placed on the side of the fan opposite the filter. Made of duct tape or cardboard, the shroud blocks off the corners of the fan face, preventing air backflow.

It takes about 25 minutes to assemble one air purifier, which can be used immediately to clean the air in a space of up to 400 square feet. At the Victoria workshop, each table soon sports at least one, some of them decorated with colourful duct tape designs, others sleek and white. 

Community in the face of climate crisis

Among the workshop attendees is Victoria city councillor Dave Thompson, who is considering putting on a workshop in the neighbouring municipality.

“I wanted to see how it got organized,” Thompson says. “We’ve been very active on climate change and this is a piece we haven’t done yet.”

Many participants express a desire to do what they can in the face of the climate emergency.

“I feel like whatever we can do on an individual basis for ourselves and our families is always helpful,” Mary Jean, a nurse, tells fellow participants at her table.

Around the room, several signs feature prompts for conversations about climate change and climate action.

“According to polls, 80 per cent of Canadians are worried about climate, but we often think we’re the only ones,” Darnell says. “So what we’re providing is a place where we can come, do something positive, have fun and know that we’re among people and we can talk about it.”

Climate change is making wildfires more likely and more intense. Between 1948 and 2024, annual average temperatures in Canada increased by an average of 2.8 C, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada.

In B.C., wildfires have burned about 10 million hectares of land, more than in the previous six decades combined, according to the BC Wildfire Service. 

While Darnell feels discouraged about the state of climate action at the provincial and federal level, he sees the importance of people gathering. 

“A lot of the province, particularly to the east of us, is on fire at the moment and certainly in the rest of Canada as well. We are trying to provide practical help for people in the community,” he says. 

“People really need a place to come together and just say, ‘Am I crazy?’ No, you’re not. The behaviors of our economy, of our corporations and our government are crazy at the moment.”

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 World Cup prompted Vancouver to clear its False Creek harbour of abandoned boats, a sudden absence that highlights their usual presence in the city’s harbours.
• Abandoned boats are a jurisdictional challenge and environmental hazard across B.C. coastal communities, but in Vancouver they intersect with the city’s housing affordability crisis, as some rely on them for shelter.
• Provincial funding to support the removal of abandoned boats recently ended, but a new federal bill would prohibit the transfer of boats to people who cannot maintain them, offering another way to mitigate the issue.

Stephen Paetkau’s salvage boat, Lucky Dog, was built for the North Sea. When he bought the Norwegian-made vessel in 2021, the advertisement featured three giant moustached Norsemen on the deck, arms crossed and chests puffed out. Today, however, it is moored off Granville Island in Vancouver, on standby to recover abandoned boats in False Creek. It sits beside a black pirate ship that can be rented out for parties, where people don pirate hats and sail out into English Bay to drink and spray water cannons. Both vessels are designed for waters a little bigger than a narrow inlet in the heart of the city.  

Paetkau named it Lucky Dog after the Chinese zodiac year of his birth and because, he says, he’s “the luckiest man alive.” Ironically, much of Paetkau’s work begins when someone else’s luck has run out. 

Paetkau and his brother Jonathan run Skookum Yacht Services. Since 2020 the company has become the one most often called by Transport Canada when an abandoned boat sinks, washes up or breaks to pieces in the waters around Vancouver —  something that happens often enough the locals are used to seeing a boat on the beach or a half-submerged mast in the harbour. Paetkau says that since they began working with Transport Canada in 2020 they have lifted or removed close to 100 boats from the waterways, seabed and beaches of False Creek and English Bay. 

This June, the Paetkaus found themselves busier than usual. Transport Canada established an exclusion zone in False Creek for the duration of the FIFA World Cup — for which Vancouver is one of 16 host cities — forcing several boats normally anchored there to be moved elsewhere. 

Typically, if an abandoned vessel in False Creek — the inlet separating downtown Vancouver from the southern expanse of the city — is deemed hazardous to the public, infrastructure, navigation routes or to the environment, then the Canadian Coast Guard will act swiftly and have it removed. If it is not a hazard but, as Paetkau calls it, merely “offensive junk,” the issue is passed to Transport Canada, who try to find the owner of the vessel. 

In a statement to The Narwhal, Transport Canada stated the exclusion zone was created to “support marine safety and security during FIFA events at the request of RCMP and VPD.” Boats that were anchored in the restricted area were relocated to nearby waters, including off of Kitsilano and Jericho beach, which Paetkau says are difficult places to anchor. 

Though the boats will eventually return to False Creek, their temporary relocation brings attention to an issue coastal community harbours across British Columbia have been facing for years: the risks abandoned boats pose to navigation, public safety and marine ecosystems. But as housing costs continue to rise in Vancouver, some abandoned boats are also becoming makeshift homes, complicating efforts to remove them. 

Abandoned boats have environmental and cultural impacts

When I arrive at his office on Granville Island, Paetkau is on the phone with the Jericho Sailing Centre. After he hangs up, I ask him what has happened to the boats that have been relocated. 

“Well,” he says, gesturing to his phone, “one of them is crashing into the Jericho breakwater.”

Five minutes later, Jonathan walks in with more news.

“Another is on Kits Beach.” 

They don’t sound an alarm bell or take off running to their boat, but instead sigh and shake their heads. A lot more steps and phone calls are required first, a reminder of one of the more persistent issues facing abandoned boats in False Creek: jurisdiction. 

In an emailed statement, Transport Canada told The Narwhal the time required to address a vessel varies, but “in almost all cases, there is a minimum 30-day public notice period” to allow someone to claim ownership. The Vancouver Police Department puts up a notice and assists in monitoring the boat during this time.

If the abandoned boat is not claimed within the time period, a company like Paetkau’s is called in, and the removal is completed on the taxpayer’s dime. The process of moving the boats is slow and the water does not wait. Changing tides, strong winds and storms often blow the boats onto rocks or smash them into thousands of fibreglass fragments before Paetkau’s crew can get to them. 

According to Transport Canada, abandoned vessels start to become environmental hazards as they deteriorate, as they begin to leak oils, fuels and other toxic substances while releasing debris such as fibreglass and microplastics into fragile marine ecosystems.

In certain areas of Canada, these effects have been significant enough to have reached Parliament. In October 2024, John White, director of lands and natural resources for the Snuneymuxw First Nation, appeared before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans alongside Chief Lenora Joe of the shíshálh First Nation, a councillor from the Snaw-naw-as First Nation and an elected chief councillor of the Tseshaht First Nation. Together, they described the environmental and cultural impacts abandoned vessels are having on Indigenous coastal communities. 

Chief Joe told Parliament how abandoned vessels contaminate marine food sources that are central to life for the shíshálh Nation. “Our food is part of our culture,” she said. “The way we collect food, the way we gather it, the way we celebrate — everything that we do depends on the food that we can gather.” 

White pointed to impacts on Pacific salmon in Snuneymuxw territory, describing what he said was a historic decline in salmon on the Fraser River. According to White, sockeye runs that once numbered tens of millions dropped to approximately 500,000 in 2024. 

Two years later, White says the problem persists for the Snuneymuxw Nation, where abandoned boats continue to impact their clam beds and shellfish. “Until we change regulations or change acts and we change regulations on a higher level, we’re still going to fight this problem,” he says.

White also acknowledges opportunities for Indigenous communities to be part of the solution: “How can the First Nations be included in this and develop business around breaking down ships and being part of that process?”

Abandoned boats a symptom of the housing crisis in Vancouver

In False Creek, environmental damage is only part of what Paetkau encounters. When storms drive abandoned boats onto rocks, Paetkau says what he and his crew find inside looks like “desperation.” 

One call in particular has stayed with Paetkau. He boarded a boat that had crashed onto rocks in False Creek, with a hole ripped in the side. His job was to assess the damage and determine a responsible bid for its removal. But, when he climbed inside, he found a woman. 

It was February, and the boat was sitting in an area that would soon fill with seawater when the tide came in. She was wrapped in three flotation jackets and was insisting she could repair the boat that Paetkau knew was beyond saving. She told him she had nowhere else to go. What looked like a wreck had become to her a “paradise,” Paetkau says, even as the boat broke apart around her. 

Housing in Vancouver is among the most expensive in Canada. In a city where the average one-bedroom or studio apartment can cost thousands of dollars a month, even a broken-down boat begins to look like a viable alternative. 

To see how these boats become a symptom of the housing crisis, it helps to first understand how they often become abandoned. 

In B.C., cars must be registered and insured. But according to Paetkau, boats are typically bought and sold privately, often without any formal record of transfer. When a boat reaches the end of its life, both disposal and repairs can cost thousands. At that point, there is a clear incentive to pass it along. 

“I’ve known of boats that we charged the Canadian taxpayer seven or eight thousand dollars to get rid of,” he says, “that probably changed hands over nothing more than a handshake and a six-pack.”

Because of this, Paetkau says, there is little to no paper trail, ownership becomes unclear and the boats tend to drift between hands.

While they can provide shelter, many of the boats stay broken-down in the hands of people who don’t know how to operate or maintain them. As a result, these boats can become harmful for the people on board and for the environment.

Provincial funding ends, but other solutions emerging for abandoned boats

Between April 2025 and May 2026, Transport Canada removed 19 vessels in False Creek. But while Vancouver’s housing crisis may intensify the problem, abandoned boats are not confined to the city’s shoreline. “What I hear from Transport Canada is there are other harbours [in B.C.] where the problem of abandoned boats is worse,” Paetkau says. 

On the west coast of Vancouver Island, in towns such as Tofino and Ucluelet, and the First Nations communities Opitsaht, Tla-o-qui-aht and Ahousaht, the problem is familiar. Until recently, the removal of abandoned boats in their harbours was funded through the provincial Clean Coast, Clean Waters Initiative.

That funding ended this year, as planned, raising concerns in communities where a lack of infrastructure, such as boat lifts, can make vessel removals particularly costly. In an emailed statement, the B.C. Ministry of Environment and Parks told The Narwhal that at this time “there is no funding identified beyond this.” 

There are still signs of efforts to address the problem before the boats become wrecks. Bill C-244, also known as the Clean Coasts Act, was introduced in 2025 and would prohibit owners from transferring vessels to people they know (or ought to know) cannot safely maintain or dispose of them. The bill has passed second reading and is currently under committee review. 

Down the coast, Washington State has taken a similar preventative approach with its Vessel Turn-In Program that allows owners to surrender boats free of charge that are likely to become abandoned before they reach that point, reducing both environmental damage and cleanup costs. 

In Vancouver, preparations for the World Cup pushed many of the boats elsewhere, but it is unclear what changes will outlast the tournament. The version of False Creek projected to the world looked a little different than what locals were used to seeing, and yet the issues beneath the surface remain the same. 

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 Manitoba Métis Federation and U.K.-based Renewable Energy Systems are proposing a 200-megawatt wind farm in rural Manitoba as part of a provincial push to install 600 megawatts of majority Indigenous-owned wind power by 2035.
• Residents of Polonia, Man., are opposed to the plan. They worry it would be a blight on the beautiful landscape, cause negative health impacts and saddle the local community with new expenses.
• Manitoba lags behind other provinces when it comes to wind power capacity, and the provincial utility says new wind projects could help to address a looming electricity shortfall and make progress toward net-zero targets.

Leonard Kaspick can list just about every household in Polonia, Man. 

“There’s someone living right across the northeast, someone living behind here, about a quarter mile there’s a house there, then a half mile there’s another house there, I’m here, and then on top of the hill there’s someone else there,” he says, standing in the heartbeat of the hamlet: a community hall just off the main road. 

Besides the hall and the smattering of homes, there’s a historic (though out-of-commission) church next door and a single general store further down the road. 

“There’s less people here now than there was in 1885,” 83-year-old Kaspick jokes as he wraps up a condensed history of the Western Manitoba community. 

“The people that come here like the solitude and the beauty of the area.”

Polonia itself isn’t in the census, but together with the five nearby towns that make up the Rural Municipality of Rosedale, the population is listed at just over 1,500. Situated 13 kilometres beyond the southern tip of Riding Mountain National Park and more than 200 kilometres west of Winnipeg, it sits along the edge of the Manitoba Escarpment, a steep ridgeline carved out by the glacial Lake Agassiz thousands of years ago.

It is not a typical Prairie landscape. Instead of open patchwork fields stretching flat across the horizon, the valley is all rolling hills, dotted with cattle farms, crop lands, wetlands and forests. The ecology is unique; microclimates and fertile soils allow for rare and diverse species of plants and animals.

It’s unique in another way too: thanks in part to the ridgeline, this pocket of the province boasts some of the strongest winds in southern Manitoba, according to federal wind atlas data. And with its proximity to the Manitoba Hydro substation in Neepawa, it’s an ideal place for wind turbines.

In April, the Manitoba Métis Federation and U.K.-based Renewable Energy Systems announced a joint proposal to build a 200-megawatt wind farm in the area. 

The Fleury Winds project, majority owned by the Métis Federation, would consist of about 30 turbines, each more than 700 feet tall, situated on private farmland in and around Polonia.

The pitch is part of a provincial initiative to install 600 megawatts of majority Indigenous-owned wind power by 2035 to both address a looming electricity shortfall and progress toward net-zero targets.

“When we think about these projects and the meaningfulness for us, it’s as much about provision of energy for the province and the opportunity to participate economically as it is … a source of pride to be part of a project of this size and scope for our people,” Lorne Pelletier, senior economic advisor to Manitoba Métis Federation president David Chartrand, says in an interview.

Fleury Winds is the first energy infrastructure project to be undertaken by the Red River Métis Power Corporation, a newly created arm of the Métis Federation.

But many in Polonia aren’t sold on the project.

Some object to wind turbines disrupting the region’s beauty and tranquility, Kaspick says. Others worry the turbines could cause negative health effects, disturb wildlife habitat and migratory birds or strain the municipality’s infrastructure. 

“I looked at the map and where my house is located, straight out my picture window, I will see a roughly 705-foot-tall wind tower,” Polonia resident Trevor Bennett says. “And they say I will not only see it, I potentially will hear it all the time and will potentially even feel it.” 

While the Métis Federation and the energy company have been putting the final touches on a proposal that will be presented to Manitoba Hydro in July, some Rosedale residents, including Bennett, have formed a citizen group that’s working to elevate community concerns and preserve their “piece of heaven.”

Fleury Winds turbines would tower over every other structure in the region

Bennett works in the agricultural equipment industry and has a young family. After about 15 years working in nearby Neepawa, he moved his family to Polonia a little over a year ago for “the peace and quiet and tranquility,” he says. 

“I moved here because there wasn’t stuff like that [the wind farm] here.” 

Several months ago, he started hearing “rumblings” his countryside oasis was being considered as the site for a major wind-power development. 

He later learned the project proponents were meeting with landowners to secure lease agreements that would allow wind towers to be built on their land in exchange for financial compensation. 

In April, some landowners who have signed agreements with the Fleury Winds project told the Brandon Sun the opposition may not reflect the feelings of all community members. Pelletier says the project has “a strong base of landowner support.”

But according to James Mitchell, another Polonia-based member of Piece of Heaven, the citizen group opposing the Fleury Winds project, those early whispers created a sense of secrecy around the development. The first time Mitchell and Bennett heard any concrete details was during an open house at the community hall in April. 

“It went from ‘that’s just a rumour’ to a reality for me,” Bennett says.

The town hall was structured as a drop-in information session. Representatives from the Métis Federation and Renewable Energy Systems were stationed around the room with poster boards outlining the basic details of the proposal.

The project would consist of between 28 and 36 wind turbines, situated on private farmlands between the towns of Neepawa, Minnedosa, Birnie and Hilltop. A project map highlighted the 40-odd properties that had already signed agreements, the locations of nearby houses and the proposed turbine sites.

Each of these “modern” turbines would be up to 210 metres (705 feet) tall, including the length of the blades, and built atop concrete foundations more than 20 metres wide and buried four metres deep. 

They would generate between six and eight megawatts each for a total project capacity of 200 megawatts — enough to power 59,000 homes — in ideal circumstances. This energy would be linked to the Manitoba Hydro grid via buried cables connected to an existing substation in Neepawa. 

“It’s an incredible way of generating energy and electricity for Manitobans,” Pelletier, who attended the open house, says. 

“It means a lot to our people: the job creation that it entails, the opportunity that it presents for us to be … contributors in the economy, and the benefits that it will bring not just for Red River Métis but all Manitobans.”

But some Polonia residents, including Mitchell and Bennett, believe the company should have done more to build trust in the community in advance. Now that the proposal is in motion, it feels like it can’t be stopped, Bennett says.

“I think they were trying to label it as a consultation. I really don’t feel that was a consultation at all,” Bennett says.

As a father, Bennett worries how living so close to a tower might affect the well-being of his children.

As wind turbines have become more common worldwide, several jurisdictions have reported receiving complaints of hearing issues, heart palpitations, vertigo, poor sleep, migraines and other noise-related health impacts from people living in close proximity to the towers. The majority of peer-reviewed research has found no direct correlation between these symptoms and turbine noise. Many studies do, however, acknowledge turbines can cause “annoyance.”     

Other residents in Polonia worry about the impacts of shadow flicker — a term for the intermittent shadows created by spinning turbine blades. And they are concerned for the birds, bats and other wildlife that criss-cross the region’s fields and could be driven away — or killed — by the turbines.

The area is, as Mitchell describes it, “strictly rural.” The largest industrial developments are a handful of gravel quarries. Off the main highway, the roads are all gravel; some are hardly more than twin tire tracks scything through the rugged hills. The tallest structure around is a spindly 250-foot-tall cell tower. 

“Imagine something two-and-a-half times as high on a base that’s 100 feet in diameter. It’s not just a little pole up in the air, it’s a massive, massive structure,” Mitchell says. 

To put it in perspective, the tallest building in downtown Winnipeg — 300 Main St. — is about 465 feet tall. The turbines at Manitoba’s existing wind farms are about 120 metres, or 400 feet. The proposed Fleury Winds turbines would dwarf them both.

Mitchell worries the equipment needed to build these behemoth towers — cement and gravel trucks, massive trailers hauling 90-metre-long turbine blades — will cause costly damage to the town’s roads.

When the towers reach the end of their life 30 years down the line, Bennett and Mitchell worry Polonia will be left to clean up the aging infrastructure while the company takes its money elsewhere. 

“My big concern is that the proposed economic benefits to individuals and the [rural municipality] … is not even going to come close to outweighing the drawbacks,” Mitchell says.

Manitoba Métis Federation surprised at pushback, while opponents say consultation was lacking

With these and many other questions in mind, a group of residents took to the hall’s stage partway through the April open house, turning what was conceived as a smattering of one-on-one conversations into a community-led question-and-answer period. While Mitchell believes the company’s representatives were trying their best, the information they offered was broad, and many of the questions remained unanswered.

At the Manitoba Métis Federation, Pelletier says the meeting’s spontaneous turn came as a surprise. While he understands that some community members felt the open house lacked transparency, the project group thought it would be more respectful to speak directly with residents and answer questions as they arose, he explains.

“We went there with the intent to talk about the project, present the project, but really to engage one-on-one with the community,” he says. 

The project is still in early stages; the open house is just the beginning of the planned consultation. While figuring out the timing of engagement sessions like the open house can be “tricky,” the Métis Federation takes the community’s concerns seriously, he adds. If the project is selected, the organizations expect to undergo two years of licensing and permitting before construction would begin in 2029.  

“The project is proposed within our homeland as Indigenous people, and we have a long-standing and very strong commitment on the part of our government for environmental stewardship,” Pelletier says.

Renewable Energy Systems Canada’s director of development, Isabelle Deguise, said in a statement: “There will be real opportunity in the months and years ahead to sit down with people in the Polonia area again, hear what matters to them and shape this project together.” 

“We know residents have questions, and we want to listen. Our commitment is to keep turning up, keep listening and keep working with this community throughout the life of the project.”

Manitoba and federal governments see wind farms as the future of power

Wind power developments are not new in Manitoba. The St. Leon and St. Joseph wind farms, built in 2006 and 2011 respectively, are located about 100 kilometres south of Winnipeg and together produce about four per cent of the provincial power supply.

St. Leon has about 70 turbines; St. Joseph has 60. Each produces approximately two megawatts and their towers, including the blades, stand roughly 120 metres tall.

Pattern Energy, which operates the St. Joseph farm, estimates that over the project’s first 27-year power sale contract, it will pay $44 million in property taxes and generate $38 million in revenues for landowners.  

At the time it was built, St. Joseph was one of the largest wind farms in Canada, according to then-premier Greg Selinger. 

“This project builds on Manitoba’s position as a leader in renewable energy development, complementing our existing hydroelectricity supply, geothermal activities, biofuel production and aggressive energy-conservation programming,” Selinger said in a news release the day the turbines started spinning.

But momentum for wind power developments petered out after St. Joseph was built. As of 2025, Manitoba has installed fewer than 260 megawatts of wind power, while neighbouring Saskatchewan has more than 800 megawatts, Quebec has more than 4,000 megawatts and Ontario and Alberta have more than 5,500 megawatts each. 

Some in the province would like to see Manitoba pick up the pace of wind-power development. According to research from Climate Action Team Manitoba, the technology is well-suited to winter production, with Manitoba’s existing wind farms already generating more energy in fall and winter than summer and the province is no stranger to the kinds of high-wind speeds that make turbines a sensible investment. At the national level, the Canada Energy Regulator projects wind will make up about 70 per cent of renewable energy growth in the coming years. 

Scott Blyth, a retired doctor from nearby Brandon, volunteers with the Manitoba committee of Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment. Following the open house, he wrote an opinion article criticizing Polonia residents for “hijacking” the meeting. 

Reflecting on that article in an interview last month, Blyth said he could “understand people’s concerns” about the turbine development, but stressed his excitement for renewable energy projects in the province. 

“There’s so much good that can come from this approach to generating energy, and boy, my bottom line is, get rid of fossil fuels … and why haven’t we done this sooner?” he says.

Fleury Winds is part of a provincial initiative that looks to turn the tide on wind power in Manitoba by installing 600 megawatts of majority Indigenous-owned, utility-scale wind farms.

The initiative was first introduced as part of the provincial government’s 2024 affordable energy plan, then re-affirmed in 2025, when Hydro released a roadmap outlining its path to a reliable net-zero energy grid. 

The initiative is intended to help add capacity to the province’s strained energy grid, while providing Indigenous Nations “new opportunities to participate and benefit from the energy transition,” according to the affordable energy plan.

The additional grid capacity is necessary to address a projected shortfall as soon as 2030, the utility noted in 2025. Other measures outlined included efficiency programs to reduce demand, enhancements to the existing hydropower grid, new natural gas-powered combustion turbines (currently slated to be built in Brandon) and the addition of five megawatts of utility-scale battery storage.

While the best-case scenario for wind power in the province is 600-megawatts of production, the reality is that wind — and the power it produces — is intermittent. Manitoba Hydro expects that in reality, the wind power developments will generate 120 megawatts of reliable, accredited capacity.

Hydro issued the official call for proposals in March, with submissions due by early July. 

It received proposals from 11 eligible proponents representing seven Indigenous Nations (including the Métis Federation, Swan Lake, Dakota Tipi, Gambler and Pinaymootang First Nations, Fisher River Cree Nation, and Keeseekoowenin Ojibway First Nation) and six established wind power companies.  

The utility is expected to announce its preferred proponents in spring 2027, with projects complete by 2035.

Polonia isn’t the only community pushing back against the proposed developments. 

A wind farm proposed by Swan Lake First Nation and Innergex Renewable Energy is facing opposition from residents from the Rural Municipality of Lorne, some 150 kilometres southwest of Winnipeg. They worry about negative environmental and economic impacts in the agriculture-dominant region, and would like to see towers built on Crown land, or further north.

Polonia, Man., wind farm wouldn’t come online until 2035

Progress will be slow. The proposed turbines are not expected to come online until 2035, according to Manitoba Hydro. 

In the meantime, proponents whose projects are selected by Hydro will need to complete environmental licensing processes to address a myriad of environmental and community impacts. 

The provincial wind power guidelines require companies to assess the extent of shadow flicker within 1.5 kilometres of each turbine, the impact of noise across the entire development and the potential impacts to wildlife including migratory birds, bats, roosting and foraging habitats and endangered species.

As for human impacts, a 2013 Health Canada study that surveyed about 1,200 Ontario and P.E.I. households in proximity to wind towers found no correlation between negative symptoms such as headaches, tinnitus and dizziness and turbine noise levels. 

The study did, however, find a correlation between turbine noise and community annoyance, with participants highlighting the effects of shadow flicker, vibrations, sound, visual impacts and blinking lights. 

Long-term annoyance was linked to stress indicators such as high blood pressure and cortisol, the study found, particularly for those living closest to the turbines.

As a result, best practices indicate turbines should not be built within close proximity to people’s homes. In Manitoba, turbines may not be within one kilometre of a residence.

Pelletier stresses the well-being of community members and the local environment is paramount for the Métis.

“These are our lands too, right? We’re not just a corporation coming in from afar. We live in the area, we demonstrate a strong commitment to environmental stewardship,” he says.

Turbine technology has evolved, he adds, and many of the community’s concerns can be mitigated by choosing turbines with lower noise specifications, conducting thorough environmental assessments and by taking responsibility for the turbines through their lifetime and decommissioning. 

“For us, it’s not just about meeting the regulatory requirements, it’s pushing beyond that. From an Indigenous perspective, these are things that are integrated in the way we think,” he says.   

The Piece of Heaven group plans to keep making their voices heard. Most recently, they organized a letter-writing campaign delivering a list of concerns to municipal councillors, MLAs and provincial ministers.

Response from Rosedale councillors has been positive, Bennett says. Some have reached out to arrange meetings and hear more about residents’ concerns, while the provincial government sent acknowledgement letters, he adds. 

Bennett could envision a version of the project with smaller towers, larger setbacks and more equity for landowners. He would like to see more stringent regulations on where the turbines are placed, given the existing rules were written for smaller turbines. 

But there are others, like Mitchell, who would rather the project be moved out of the area entirely. In his mind, the rewards will never outweigh the risks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A deadly history of exotic cats in B.C. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The challenge with changing cat laws

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The reality of purchasing a wild animal 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A guardian angel for regretful exotic cat owners

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A confession

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Tofino Chamber of Commerce also opposes the plan. 

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

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

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

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

Pressure from the growing price of gold

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile, Tofino grew. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A mine surrounded by tribal parks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is, until recently.

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

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

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

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

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

But that hasn’t happened. 

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

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

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

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

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

“Input received informs decision making,” it added. 

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

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

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

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

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

The cost of gold

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kynoch has previously described the project as “artisanal.”

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

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

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

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

‘It’s still a beautiful place’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Three hundred years after their ancestors chose peace on the same ground, the Mi’kmaq people returned to the Fort Anne National Historic Site in Mi’kma’ki.

Mi’kmaq leaders and community members gathered at what was then called Port Royal on June 4, 1726, when their ancestors signed a Peace and Friendship Treaty with the British Crown.

Under a bright Nova Scotia sky, they came back to the same ground to celebrate, to grieve, to demand and to hope.

Chief Leroy Denny of Eskasoni First Nation, co-chair of the Assembly of Nova Scotia Mi’kmaw Chiefs, said as he stood on the grass, he could feel the weight and power of what happened on the same grounds 300 years ago. 

“This 300th anniversary is a reminder that these were never land-surrender treaties; they were sacred agreements of peace, coexistence and nation-to-nation relationship building,” Denny said. 

“Our ancestors envisioned a future of mutual respect, and three hundred years later, these living treaties continue to guide us as we protect our rights and carry their legacy forward for future generations.”

The Peace and Friendship Treaty of 1726 outlined how Indigenous and European people could establish peaceful coexistence in the Maritime region. 

It was signed by Mi’kmaw, Wəlastəkokewiyik and Peskətəmohkatewey leaders amid rising conflicts as the British pushed to colonize the area and were concerned about relationships between local Indigenous Peoples and the French Crown.

The 1726 treaty was part of a series of Peace and Friendship agreements with the British Crown between 1725 and 1779.

But Mi’kmaq Grand Council Kji-Keptin (Grand Captain) Antle Denny came to speak plainly about what a 300-year treaty relationship has delivered and what it has not.

The relationship between Mi’kmaq nations and the provincial government has deteriorated sharply in the last year, in the wake of raids on Mi’kmaw cannabis dispensaries and the recent criminalization of logging protests.

Tensions were underscored by the notable absence of Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston from the Fort Anne celebration. Many in attendance felt that absence was not simply a scheduling matter. It was a statement.

The treaty signed on this ground 300 years ago was supposed to be a living commitment. What they were watching, many felt, was a provincial government treating it as a historical footnote.

This month’s commemoration at Fort Anne National Historic Site drew Mi’kmaq leaders, community members, Canadian officials and allies for a day of ceremony, cultural performance and the unveiling of a national historic plaque. 

Youth turned out in force. Elders undertook journeys that were not easy to make. And on the sun-warmed grass of the oldest administered national historic site in the country, Mi’kmaq people held a tenacity that textbooks have never quite managed to convey.

Under a tent, Eliza Gould, youth chief from Eskasoni First Nation, spoke quietly about Mi’kmaq history as other young people listened intently. 

Outside, the voice of Kalolin Johnson, a young vocalist and musician from Eskasoni First Nation, carried across the grass of the old fort. Beyond that, the Annapolis Basin shimmered in the heat. It was the kind of day that made the past feel very close.

Gould had learned about the treaties in school in almost every grade, she said. But learning about something and feeling it are different things.

“I’ve heard it so much I kind of became numb,” she said.

“But being here, seeing all the chiefs, all the people that actually care — I kind of wish more people came. Because this is our history. This is very much our history.”

The fisheries question, for Gould, was the sharpest example of how old agreements play out in present-day conflict. As part of the treaty, the British agreed not to interfere with Indigenous fishing rights — however, those rights are something that Mik’maq people have continued to fight to uphold.

“The fisheries, we take only as much as we need, but also respecting everything around us,” she said. “For others it’s greed, it’s money, it’s power.” 

She described watching the same arguments repeat year after year, the treaty invoked and dismissed in the same breath. “There’s no evenness,” she said. “It’s so back-and-forth.”

But as she looked out at the crowd filling the sunny grounds, Gould also felt the living impact of the agreement from hundreds of years ago. 

“It’s nice to see everyone here, not just Mi’kmaq people but others. You know, just like 300 years ago, it’s not just us and the French anymore,” she said. “There’s a better understanding.”

Assembly of First Nations Nova Scotia Regional Chief Andrea Paul brought that meaning into focus. 

“As we celebrate 300 years of treaty, we honour the wisdom of those who came before us, who chose peace and friendship as the foundation of our relationship,” she said. 

“Their teachings continue to guide us today, reminding us that treaties are not relics of the past, but living commitments that shape our future together.”

For JUNO award-nominated Mi’kmaq musician Morgan Toney, the reality of that history did not fully land until he walked the grounds that morning. 

He had read about the treaty, he said. But standing on the actual earth where it was signed was something else entirely.

“I never actually got to go on the grounds until earlier this morning,” he said. “And I was like, I have to tell my bandmates. This is where that treaty was signed. It was here, in this location, where you’re standing right now.”He shook his head slowly. “That’s crazy. That’s beautiful. That’s powerful.”

In a statement, federal Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations Rebecca Alty said the Peace and Friendship Treaty “is one of the foundational agreements in the history of Crown-Indigenous Relations in this country.”

In honour of the celebration, the federal government declared the signing of the treaty an event of national historic significance, and unveiled a commemorative plaque at the site.

“Three hundred years later to the day, and on the site of its signing, we honour the leaders of the Wabanaki Confederacy who negotiated this treaty and reaffirm our commitment to the relationship it represents,” she said.

“Designating this treaty as an event of national historic significance is a recognition of its enduring importance to the Mi’kmaq Nation and to all Canadians.”

Kji-Keptin Denny spoke about sovereignty. About his father going before the United Nations in the 1980s to seek recognition of the Mi’kmaq Nation, and foreign ambassadors telling his father privately that he was right, but that they could not move against Canada. 

He spoke about the cod fishery collapse, watching non-Indigenous fishermen exhaust the resource while Mi’kmaq were never compensated. 

He called for a Mi’kmaw treaty commissioner to hold Atlantic provinces, the federal fisheries department and police forces accountable.

“We’ve protected you for over 300 years,” he said. “You never protected us once.”

He called for Mi’kmaq youth to be supported into every professional field, including medicine, law and sport. He described a heart surgeon who had recently saved his life.

He spoke of wanting Mi’kmaq athletes at the Olympics, Mi’kmaq professionals in every sector.

“We need our youth to be working together with organizations and companies. Teach them. Instead of holding them down, we should be lifting them up.”

He ended by looking ahead. 

“It’s only been 300 years. But you have to learn our ways of protecting the environment, of taking what’s needed, of working together and helping each other,” he said.

“We’re human beings. Let’s look at the next 300 years and make sure all leadership helps one another. It does not matter what the colour of your skin is.”

Relationships between Mi’kmaq people and colonial governments have been strained at times, including in recent history. In December 2025, the Nova Scotia government issued a province-wide directive ordering police to raid illegal cannabis operations, which Mi’kmaq leaders have long asserted are protected under their treaty right to trade.

Premier Houston claimed the unregulated cannabis was laced with fentanyl. Both the Nova Scotia RCMP and Halifax Regional Police said that claim was false. Mi’kmaq chiefs called for an apology. None came.

Raids followed across multiple communities, including Eskasoni, shattering relationships between Mi’kmaq communities and police that had taken years to build.

Sipekne’katik First Nation passed a resolution banning Houston and two of his ministers from reserve lands, calling them “undesirables.”

Chief Leroy Denny, speaking for the Assembly of Nova Scotia Mi’kmaw Chiefs, said the raids “only further deteriorate our relationships with these Crown entities.”

Then came Hunters Mountain. Mi’kmaq land protectors established a checkpoint in September 2025 to oppose clear-cutting in Unama’ki, Cape Breton, gathering in what they described as an educational mawiomi to protect moose habitat and forest their ancestors depended on. 

Two weeks after the checkpoint was established, Houston’s government introduced Bill 127. 

On Oct. 3, 2025, two days after Atlantic Canada’s Treaty Day, it passed. The law criminalized blocking forest access roads on Crown land, with fines of up to $50,000 or six months in jail. Mi’kmaq leaders said they had not been consulted.

Former mayor of Annapolis Royal William MacDonald, who attended the commemoration, acknowledged the weight of the moment from the other side of the treaty relationship. 

“This is a live issue,” he said. “As a former mayor of this town, it’s been really important to me that we do everything we can to advance reconciliation. I’m happy to be here to support it.”

Back in the youth tent, as Kalolin Johnson’s voice carried across the grounds outside, the conversation returned to where it began. The youth. The next generation. The ones who will inherit this relationship and all of its weight.

Near the close of the ceremony, four Mi’kmaq youth representatives were called to the stage alongside the assembled leaders for the presentation of treaty medals.

Retired Canadian senator Daniel Christmas, from Membertou First Nation, said the presentation to young Mi’kmaq people and Crown representatives alike “demonstrates the timeliness, the enduring nature of the treaty relationship.”“It also seeks to look forward to the future and the obligation that we all have as treaty partners,” he said.

Christmas said that, in current times, there’s a very high awareness of the treaty relationship.

“People are taking the time to come and actually trying to understand what it means. How did this happen, and why did it happen. An event like today begins to answer some of those questions.”

Gould looked around at the crowd gathered in the June sunshine on the oldest treaty ground in what would become Canada, at the Elders who had traveled far to be here, at the chiefs who had stood and spoken difficult truths, at the young people sitting quietly in the tent around her, listening.

“I think the generation coming up now,” she said quietly. “I think they’re going to be the balance.”

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One by one, snowmobiles pulling qamutiit — traditional wooden sleds — navigate their way through the snowy streets of Igloolik, Nvt.

There, on the ice of the nearby bay, nine teams of qimmiit (Inuit sled dogs) sit waiting amid the blowing snow.

It’s April 9 as the teams assemble at the start line for this year’s Nunavut Quest, the territory’s only major dogsled race.

But this year, bad weather has forced them to delay the teams’ start by two days.

The route will take the dogs, mushers and their support teams roughly 580 kilometres north over the course of a week.

The arduous journey takes them north — winding across sea ice, frozen lakes and rivers, before eventually arriving in Mittimatalik (Pond Inlet) the next week.

Nunavut Quest’s original rules were simple: the qamutiit must be four metres long, give or take 30 centimetres, and teams must have between 10 and 12 dogs secured to the sled with a traditional fan hitch.

Its origins trace back to 1999 — the year Nunavut was declared the country’s newest territory.

Home to just over 40,000 residents today, Nunavut spans roughly two million square kilometres — by far the largest of any province or territory, comprising a fifth of the entire country.

Just ahead of its founding, four residents of Ikpiarjuk (Arctic Bay) wanted to create a dogsled race as a one-off event to celebrate the historic event.

They initially called it the North Baffin Quest, a race open only to teams that used the official animal of the new territory: Inuit sled dogs.

The inaugural event was so successful that it was repeated the next year, but renamed Nunavut Quest.

An endangered tradition

The race has helped revitalize an endangered tradition.

In the 1950s and ’60s, the RCMP slaughtered more than 1,000 Inuit sled dogs across the North.

It was part of an onslaught of colonial acts Canada committed in the Arctic, including forced relocations and residential schools.

The RCMP claimed in 2006 that no coordinated dog slaughter ever even took place.

But the force later insisted it was actually done “for public health and safety reasons, in accordance with the law.”

But the 2007–2010 Inuit-led Qikiqtani Truth Commission “quickly and soundly rejected” the force’s assertions.

According to Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the national Inuit organization, the RCMP’s actual reason for the dog cull was “to terminate Inuit mobility.”

In 2019, Canada apologized to Inuit for what it admitted were “colonial,” “traumatic” and “harmful” abuses, including the mass killing of qimmiit.

The sled dog cull left families “haunted by painful stories of the loss of qimmiit … losing the ability to travel and hunt for food safely and effectively,” the federal government admitted, “becoming unable to feed your families.”

“The commission was mandated to look in particular at community relocations and the killing of qimmiit in the region,” the apology noted, but its mandate expanded to scrutinizing the overarching “massive and traumatic disruption” to Inuit life and culture.

Nunavut Quest’s funding is drawn from a qimmiit revitalization program set up after the commission to “connect Inuit to our traditional activities and culture.”

Sponsored by the Qikiqtani Inuit Association, Nunavut Quest now offers $100,000 in prizes.

Harnessing the power of dogs — and connectivity

This year’s race saw its nine qimuksiqtiit (dog-sledders) span generations — from seasoned veterans like 77-year-old Natalino Piugattuq, to relative newcomers like Jinneal Nanuraq Uttak.

Uttak only joined the race three years ago, but stunned fans when he won first place in both of his first two years.

Although the stars of the race are the qimuksiqtiit and their teams of sled dogs, they can’t win on their own.

Each racer is supported by two others who travel by snowmobile, along with other support drivers. Those teams create the trail mushers will follow each day, ranging from 55 kilometres to nearly 100 kilometres.

These support drivers — often mushers’ friends or family members — not only transport supplies such as food for the dogs, tents and other gear, but they also assist with overnight camp life and caring for the animals.

The camps reflect contemporary northern life.

Today’s amenities include generators, tracking devices and satellite internet dishes — allowing friends and family to share the experience with loved ones back home.

This year, like the last two years, a group of youth harnessed that technology to provide daily updates to local and national media outlets, sharing their experiences with classrooms across the country.

The youth also chronicled everything from encounters with caribou to whiteouts, a disorienting weather phenomenon where the horizon and landmarks disappear from sight.

The end of a journey

Eight days after leaving Igloolik, each of this year’s teams crosses the finish line in Mittimatalik, the first with just over 28 hours of race-time.

There, a large crowd greets each musher — hoisting them, qamutiik and all, off the ground in celebration.

At a closing ceremony several days later, officials announce the results of their 27th annual event.

Winning with an 88-minute lead, the $20,000 first-place prize goes to Jinneal Nanuraq Uttak.

For the up-and-coming rookie, it’s his third Nunavut Quest victory in a row.

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Editor’s note: It has come to The Narwhal’s attention that this story has been circulated via stickers that have been distributed in Saint John. The Narwhal had no involvement in creating these stickers.

Summary

• An AI computing company is proposing to fill in a wetland to build a massive data centre near the neighbourhood of Lorneville in Saint John, N.B.
• Once operating, the data centre will be one of New Brunswick’s largest carbon emitters and devour about 390 megawatts of electricity — more than 10 per cent of the province’s total energy demand.
• Residents of Lorneville are resisting the proposal, but provincial and municipal leaders have expressed support, arguing it will bring jobs and revenue to the region.

On a sunny Saturday in April, Adam Wilkins and Chris Watson trace a path through a forest a short distance from the Bay of Fundy. 

As he walks down a slope, Wilkins wonders aloud whether cleaning out the ditch upstream would make the trail easier to run on; for the past decade, he and his wife have been building forest trails in this area, to encourage more outdoor recreation and stewardship.

After about 10 minutes, at a fork in the path, Watson stops, pointing at the forest ahead: the area slated to become the site of the first hyperscale data centre in Atlantic Canada. That is, a data centre with massive scalable capacity, like those Apple, Google and Microsoft are building.  

For years, the City of Saint John and the New Brunswick provincial government have been working to expand an industrial park in Lorneville, a coastal community on the outskirts of Saint John. A $2-billion data centre built by Alberta company Beacon Data Centers and partially powered by a new gas plant is slated to be the first tenant.

Data centres provide the material backbone for cloud services, file sharing and artificial intelligence. A customer for Beacon Data Centers’ proposed New Brunswick facility has not been announced.

Officials have said Lorneville is an ideal location for business development, as the area offers large amounts of land and water, as well as abundant electricity and accessible fibre cables. The municipality has also said developing Lorneville would bring much-needed jobs and tax revenue to the city; the local Irving Oil refinery exports most of its products to the United States, while New Brunswick generally sends most of its seafood and lumber south of the border, making Saint John “Canada’s most tariff-exposed city” according to the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. 

Officials initially stated that they were actively attracting businesses to the expanded industrial park that would be focused in “green and clean” sectors. But residents have pushed back, noting that expansion of the industrial park, and construction of the data centre itself, would destroy rare old-growth forest and wetlands. If built, the data centre would rely on a gas plant for much of its power, making it one of the province’s largest emitters, while also increasing demand on the grid. And residents say the process to develop the data centre has suffered from a lack of transparency.

Documents obtained through provincial access to information legislation by The Narwhal and by residents show provincial officials were in discussions to bring a data centre to the park long before residents were told about the tenant — and that details of that data centre conflicted with the more low-impact vision for the industrial park advertised to residents.

Building AI data centres across Canada has been identified by the federal government as a priority, and dozens of new facilities have been proposed in the past year. Since early May, Beacon Data Centers has lobbied various federal departments four times to advocate for the role of data centres in supporting “national priorities,” and to request government support for the New Brunswick project. But many communities are concerned about environmental impacts of the water- and power-hungry facilities, as well as the lack of oversight and transparency regarding their impacts.

“For the past two years, this fight has been a huge stressor for people,” Wilkins says. “It’s all in the name of progress, or we need the taxes, or you need AI to generate your stupid images, but it impacts people’s lives.”

Data centre proposal reopening old wounds in Lorneville

This spring, billboards and bus ads began appearing around Saint John, promising the creation of 1,200 jobs from construction of the 390-megawatt data centre — an appealing prospect in a city reliant on trade with a volatile United States and a province facing a grim financial forecast.

But in those signs, many Lorneville residents saw something troubling. 

Lorneville was once a fishing village perched on the Bay of Fundy’s rocky shoreline. In the 1970s, a 3,600-hectare chunk of land along the coast was expropriated by the provincial government to develop an industrial project that — apart from a power plant built on the water — never materialized. Residents say a promise they were given to return the land if the project didn’t move forward never came to fruition either.

“My grandparents were still getting upset, even talking about it, until the day they were gone,” Cecil McCavour, whose family has been fishing in Lorneville since the 1840s, told The Narwhal. McCavour, along with his dad and cousin, are the last fishermen working from the community’s wharf. His family lost hundreds of acres to expropriation, he says. Now, the data centre is reopening old wounds. “Every decade something’s coming down the pipeline that does damage to our community.”

In subsequent years, a dump was established in the area, but was found to be insufficiently lined for modern-day standards, creating concerns contaminants were seeping into the groundwater.

Then, in July 2024, residents received letters in envelopes with no originating address. A consulting agency hired by the province stated that a proposal to clear and construct a 110-hectare “development-ready pad” for industry a short distance from their homes was in the works.

Instead, residents resisted, submitting dozens of letters, collecting hundreds of signatures and packing council meetings at which the expansion was debated. In response, the City of Saint John — which was pursuing the expansion along with New Brunswick’s Regional Development Corporation — paused the plan and initiated a task force in which residents and city officials were meant to work through concerns. 

Residents were not told which specific industries were being considered for the expanded industrial park, or if any potential tenants had come forward.

The documents obtained through access to information legislation by The Narwhal and residents show that before the task force began meeting, provincial officials were already in discussions to bring a data centre to the park. In emails from October 2024, Martin Luckett, an official with the province’s business development agency, Opportunities NB, wrote to a redacted recipient that the agency felt “strongly that there is considerable potential for one of your centers here in New Brunswick,” and describes the Lorneville area as a potential location. By November 2024, Beacon Data Centers had submitted a feasibility application to NB Power, according to emails. 

In May 2025, city council voted on whether to allow the expansion after a series of tense council meetings that stretched late into the evening. Dozens of people spoke out against the plan, while just three speakers spoke in favour. Still, the council voted unanimously to allow the expansion.

City staff initially attempted to assuage residents’ concerns by affirming businesses in the industrial park would be green and non-emitting. But the data centre — which was announced in October 2025 — has made people doubt that commitment, Wilkins says. “The first thing announced was a hyperscale data centre powered by a natural gas plant … what else is coming?”

Old-growth forests, wetlands would be cleared for data centre

In 2024, Chris Watson bought a house beside a large saltmarsh in Lorneville, recognized as a “provincially significant wetland” for its ecological value . In the forest behind his home, eastern cedar shade mossy swamps, while gnarled red spruce with lichen-covered branches grow nearby.

Watson was surprised when he read the environmental impact assessment for the industrial park expansion, which includes the forest behind his house, describing it as relatively low value.” His own observations, though not expert, suggested at least parts of it were exceptional.

He bought a tool for taking cores and gathered samples from the largest trees. Ben Phillips, who runs a dendrochronology lab — focused on the science of dating trees by their rings — at Mount Allison University, agreed to take a look.

Phillips was initially skeptical. Only about half a per cent of the forest in New Brunswick is old growth, he says, and most of that is found in inaccessible areas.

But examining the cores under a microscope, Phillips was astonished. 

In the oldest sample, Phillips counted 388 rings, meaning the tree was likely more than 400 years old, as it would have taken more than 12 years to get to the point from which the rings were counted. Other samples showed trees that were more than 300 years old, and many over 200 years — an age distribution typical of an old-growth forest. “[Old growth] is a mixed age, multi-storied stand that’s got lots of diversity in it,” he says. “This fit that exactly.”

The forest at Lorneville is likely the third-oldest forest in the province, Phillips says. Yet there’s no guarantee it will be spared. “These global pressures from big tech firms and AI and data centres and tariffs … are winning out against old-growth forest because we do not have a policy in place to protect it.”

The mayor of Saint John, Donna Reardon, has said she supports saving individual old trees, but declined an interview request for this story. The site for the data centre is specifically adjacent to, and partially overlapping, the industrial park expansion area, and wouldn’t flatten some of the oldest trees Watson found. But a more recent environmental assessment for the data centre itself stated that approximately 3.5 hectares of old-growth forest would be lost as “a long-term, irreversible, adverse effect of the project.”

The forest isn’t the only ecological concern. Much of the Lorneville area is made up of wetlands, including roughly 27 hectares in the area that would be cleared and infilled to make space for the data centre.

“This is basically the high point of the watershed,” Watson says, inspecting one of those wetlands in April — a peatland bog in the area behind his house. At the bog’s edge, Watson says he’d found trees that were 200 years old, suggesting an ecosystem that has been evolving for centuries. “What’s going to happen when all that freshwater flow is removed from this area?”

Roxanne MacKinnon, executive director of ACAP Saint John, an environmental non-profit organization, says the development of wetlands throughout Saint John already causes localized flooding.

“Wetlands are a very important part of our ecosystem,” she says. “From our perspective, the degradation of habitat, and particularly where all that water is going to go that is being contained within these wetlands currently, [is] a concern.”

For residents, there’s also the question of what the loss of wetlands will mean for their wells.

The initial expansion area for the industrial park would have infilled dozens of hectares of wetlands. A 2025 email from provincial engineer and hydrogeologist Gerard Souma to a New Brunswick environmental impact assessment specialist, obtained by residents through access to information legislation, noted this could affect the community’s older wells. Souma wrote, “It is my opinion that any owner having a well tapping their water supply from the surficial aquifer should be concern [sic] with 44 ha of wetland infilling by the project.”

Watson worries that the wetland infilling for the data centre could also affect downstream wetlands like the significant saltmarsh by his house, by changing the way water flows on the landscape.

In a statement, Lauren Armstrong, Beacon’s vice-president of corporate affairs, wrote that the wetlands at the site of the data centre have been assessed and categorized through the impact assessment, and that “the overall approach is to minimize the footprint, avoid the most sensitive areas and manage remaining effects.”

New Brunswick’s Regional Development Corporation referred a request for an interview to Saint John Industrial Parks.

If built, Saint John data centre would be one of the largest emitters and power users in the province

While the project stands to raze local forests and wetlands, it may also have broader impacts across the province. 

The proposed data centre is a 390-megawatt operation. Once built, it would also generate roughly 6.6 per cent of emissions in the province.

Part of the data centre’s energy is meant to come from an on-site natural gas-powered generation facility, built by Houston-based VoltaGrid, with the other 200 megawatts coming from New Brunswick’s grid. This demand could surpass 10 per cent of New Brunswick’s mean energy demands, where peak daily demand for electricity ranges from around 1,500 megawatts on a summer morning to roughly 3,030 megawatts on a cold winter’s day.

Beacon submitted a feasibility assessment for that grid demand in November 2024. In May 2025, emails from municipal and provincial officials displayed frustration with NB Power’s slow response. “This has not been the best first impression to say the least,” wrote Saint John Industrial Parks general manager Ian MacKinnon, to officials from Opportunities NB and Envision Saint John, the city’s business development group. “Nothing will proceed without a response and a commitment for power.” MacKinnon did not respond to a request for an interview.

Meanwhile, Opportunities NB wrote a letter to NB Power asking about the feasibility review, saying Beacon is “ready to progress their project in Saint John but can’t commit to anything without a path forward with NB Power.”

At that same time, NB Power and the U.S. company ProEnergy were putting forward an application for a controversial 500-megawatt, 10-turbine natural gas and diesel power plant in Tantramar, in southwest New Brunswick, to cope with rising electricity demand. 

That power plant, which was just approved by the province’s Energy and Utilities Board, would produce around 900,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, according to its environmental assessment.

VoltaGrid has said its gas plant on the data centre site is not at all related to the larger ProEnergy plant. NB Power put out the request for proposals for the gas plant in 2024, a year before the data centre plan was announced, though the same year Beacon submitted its feasibility application to the provincial utility. 

Still, advocates say the potential data centre has bearing on decisions about power generation. 

David Coon, leader of the Green Party of New Brunswick, says from his perspective, the projects are connected insofar as powering the data centre requires the ProEnergy gas plant. “There isn’t an extra 200 megawatts of capacity available on the grid to carry that load,” he says. “So it’s got to come from somewhere and that means they’ve got to build it.”

Watson wonders why officials were asking for grid approval of an energy-intensive facility at the same time the utility was forecasting an energy deficit by 2028 due to population growth. 

Meanwhile, VoltaGrid’s 190-megawatt natural gas-generating facility would produce roughly 750,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually, making it one of the province’s most prolific emitters, behind the Irving Oil Refinery and the Belledune coal-fired generating station.

VoltaGrid CEO Nathan Ough did not respond to a request for an interview, but Lauren Armstrong, with Beacon Data Centers, said in a statement that “the project is being designed with a combination of measures to reduce and manage emissions intensity over time. These include high-efficiency generation technologies, operational optimization, and the ability to integrate lower-carbon energy sources as they become available.”

Given the potential effects on power rates, on the province’s emissions targets and on the community, Coon is calling for a moratorium on data centre development until legislation can be developed for the industry. “The concern that everyone has, including me, is the costs will far outweigh the benefits of this, the way it’s being pursued.”

In a statement, Luke Randall, the minister responsible for Opportunities NB, said that projects like the data centre have the potential to contribute to the provincial economy by creating jobs and revenue for public services. These projects “will only proceed if they deliver clear economic value, align with environmental expectations and contribute meaningfully to the province’s long-term development.”

Randall also stated that Opportunities NB is “aware of the broader discussions regarding electricity supply and future demand. That is precisely why projects like this are subject to rigorous review, including technical analysis, environmental assessment and regulatory oversight.” 

In return, Saint John residents are being pitched an economic windfall in jobs and tax revenue, though of the advertised 1,200 jobs, most are in construction, and the figure also includes indirect jobs, which are service and supply-chain jobs created as a result of the data centre project. Just 210 jobs would be permanent, according to the company’s projections.

Lorneville residents say it’s unclear that the loss of wetlands and forest, and the increase in emissions, would be worth it. 

For now, they’re hoping to have the expansion of the industrial park reversed; residents have filed for a judicial review of the area’s rezoning, on the grounds that the city council’s decision was biased. In May, Lorneville resident Sherri Colwell-McCavour, who’s been vocally opposed to the project, was elected to Saint John City Council  — days after a protest in downtown Saint John, at which dozens of people called for a halt to the data centre.

If residents can’t stop the project, they say they intend to continue doing what they can to minimize the effects.

A data centre in the neighbourhood

After touring the wetlands and forest in the data centre footprint, Watson and Wilkins make their way to the road. A few minutes later, Wilkins’ wife, Leah Alexander, rolls along to pick them up. 

Alexander’s family has been in Lorneville for six generations. She has spent her whole life there, and she and Wilkins live just a few houses down from the one she grew up in.

She has vivid early memories of being taken door to door by her mother to advocate against the dump, she says. Now, the threat of the data centre has her strapping her baby to her chest to go to council meetings, and bringing her four-year-old along to hand out flyers.

Alexander has never imagined leaving Lorneville, but the data centre project has her questioning whether it’s a place her family can stay. For now, she’s sad to see the community go through the same struggle it’s faced in the past — and frustrated that they’ve had to do so much work to highlight what’s at risk of being lost: the gnarled and ancient trees, the deep mossy swamps. 

If the systems meant to provide protection are not doing their job, she says, then it leaves residents no choice. 

“People want their children to grow up here,” Alexander says. “They want them to stay here, and what are we leaving them? Like, if we don’t stand up and fight for it, what are we doing?”

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Summary

• Historically, First Nations in B.C. who lived near floodplains respected tides and lived nomadically, until settlers disrupted water flow, creating dikes to pursue agriculture and urban development.
• Xwíʔləm̓nəc, or Addington Point Marsh, has been restored to a wetland after three years of collaboration led by Katzie First Nation.
• Restoring wetlands brings life to countless species and helps restore Indigenous people’s connection to their traditional territories. The marsh is part of Canada’s largest salmon-bearing watershed.

On a late April morning, a group of Katzie First Nation land guardians, conservation workers, government representatives and others trek down to Xwíʔləm̓nəc (Addington Point Marsh).

They gather in the First Nation’s Lower Mainland territory to celebrate the long-awaited completion of a wetland restoration project connecting to the Stó:lō (Fraser River).

Mike Leon leads Katzie’s team of eight guardians, and has been involved with the marsh restoration project from the beginning. After everyone bypasses a locked gate — there to reduce the risk of bear-human encounters — they stop by the water, and he addresses the group.

“I would really like to raise my hands to all of you, to the hard work and willingness to work with us, to be with us, to be with this land,” he said.

The restoration project was funded by the B.C. government and the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans, implemented by Katzie First Nation, Resilient Waters, Ducks Unlimited Canada and the Nature Trust of British Columbia, with many helping hands involved.

For three years the partners worked together to reestablish waterflow in the marsh. The wetlands connection to the Pitt River and South Fraser River system was disconnected when early settlers installed a dike, which has since been removed. 

“I love doing the work. I love being on our territory and helping the environment,” Mackenzie Adams, another Katzie guardian, added. Adams monitored the site throughout the project, and collected water and bird surveys to compare data before and after restoration. 

According to the B.C. Wildlife Federation, wetland monitoring is just as important as the initial restoration during a project. “Monitoring, maintenance, and data collection help us evaluate the effectiveness of restoration techniques and improve the performance and function of future projects,” it reads on their website.

Xwíʔləm̓nəc is now letting nature take its course, and with the area being home to one of the country’s largest salmon runs and smallest sandhill crane populations, monitoring the wetland is critical work for Katzie Guardians. 

“I was there one of the first days … comparing the first day to the last day was pretty eye opening because you can already see the differences from the river water coming in. It will be an awesome habitat for all birds and salmon fry,” Adams said. 

While the exact impact is currently unknown, wetland restoration benefits are well documented. Leon’s team will be on top of that data, working with partners to restore and conserve native plants and animals in the area.

Relationships between Katzie Guardians and partners in the project have flourished. A local property owner who attended the celebration shared their initial concerns after seeing excavation equipment clearing a path to the dike, and their relief after learning more about the endeavour. Beyond its environmental impacts, the project has brought people together from all walks of life who want to see salmon and wildlife in and around the Fraser River thrive.

Restoration project had many partners, but Katzie had final say

Dan Straker, the manager for the Resilient Waters project, was a lead organizer under the direction of Katzie Guardians and leadership. 

“With Katzie First Nation, it was determined early on they would have final decision making and be informing the project along the way. All the partners fell in line with that idea and thinking,” Straker told the Narwhal. 

“What we ended up with was this really nice blended way of doing things, from a more two-eyed seeing approach.” 

Leon added that, throughout the endeavour, Katzie brought in their customs, culture and laws.

“It’s really important and special to us to know our place names in our territory. When we have our guardians come out, we’re honored to be on those place names such as Xwíʔləm̓nəc,” Leon said. 

It’s a sentiment shared by Katzie’s guardian coordinator April Pierre. In a quiet moment of emotion in the circle, she addressed a reality shared by many First Nations people: growing up away from her homelands.

The Xwíʔləm̓nəc restoration project gave Pierre an opportunity to spend time on land she had never been to — the land of her ancestors. It’s one emotional moment of many that were shared during the celebration, as others reflected on the marine and wildlife already making appearances in the marsh.

Dikes were built to create flat land for agriculture in the area since the late 1800s. Restoring the marsh’s connection to the river has immense ecological benefits and cultural benefits for local First Nations.

“Conservation organizations in previous decades had a different approach to conservation land management that I think sometimes excluded other organizations and nations,” Ducks Unlimited senior restoration biologist, Eric Balke, said.

“I think we are learning new and better ways of moving forward, more collaborative ways, and this project is a great example of that.”

Balke has been involved with restoring Xwíʔləm̓nəc since brainstorming and planning days, eventually passing the reins to his colleague Alison Martin.

“What excites me about this project is it’s all about restoring relationships,” he said. “You’re restoring the relationship between the river and these wetlands that were formerly alienated by dikes. You’re restoring the relationship between Xwíʔləm̓nəc and juvenile salmon that previously were prevented from accessing the site … it’s also restoring the relationship between Katzie and their kin.”

Wetland restoration benefits salmon

In the Pacific Northwest, both people and the ecosystem know how important salmon is. Xwíʔləm̓nəc is connected to Canada’s largest salmon-bearing watershed, the Fraser River. 

According to the Pacific Salmon Foundation, “floodplains provide critical, food-rich habitat for juvenile salmon. These low-lying areas adjacent to stream channels allow young salmon to grow healthy and strong before their journey to the ocean.”

But dikes disrupt the river’s connection to the marsh, blocking valuable nutrients and harming the salmon and other species.

“Wetlands, such as tidal marshes, help to collect sediment that build up the marsh platform, helping to protect our communities from flooding,” Balke said.

“This land that settlers found is super valuable for farming and agriculture, it was valuable because of the sediment that was delivered, because of the nutrients that were delivered by the river,” he said.

“When we construct dikes we disconnect the river from its floodplain. The river can no longer deliver those critical ingredients.”

A huge benefit of restoring tidal marshes is that they are one of the most effective ways of capturing and storing carbon, contaminants and pollutants that flow downstream. 

Further, Xwíʔləm̓nəc is home to wapoto and tule, two traditional plants for Katzie First Nation that have been impacted from dikes. Restoring the wetland is giving members of the nation hope that these plants can be harvested for food and mat-making once again.

The marsh is also home to sandhill cranes, whose local population has hovered around 30 to 35 birds for decades, Myles Lamont told the Narwhal. He was brought into the project by Katzie as a sandhill crane consultant.

“The remaining birds seem to nest in golf courses and some very small regional parks … Unfortunately they’ve been getting struck by golf balls. Quite commonly over the last 10 to 15 years, I’ve had to rescue a few birds that have had broken legs or injuries as a result of golf ball strikes, particularly in Richmond,” Lamont said. 

He is hopeful that restoring Xwíʔləm̓nəc to a wetland will bring in enough water to create a nesting habitat for the birds, drawing them away from golf courses. As folks went around the sharing circle, Lamont spotted one overhead, calling out, “Crane!” 

“It’s really cool being a part of it. Just knowing that we’re making a difference, I’m making a difference,” Adams said.“The salmon habitat has a place to go throughout the winter and so do the sandhill cranes and birds. It’s a good feeling … I feel accomplished.”

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It’s been five years since an atmospheric river dropped a month’s worth of rain on Princeton, British Columbia, in a matter of days. But even with a herculean recovery and rebuilding effort, the impacts of those 2021 floods still mar the landscape. 

Hills are scarred by landslides, and buildings are abandoned. Sun-bleached logs sit far from the river as a reminder of how far the water spread. Then, there’s the old train bridge. 

Part of the Kettle Valley Rail Trail, a 500-kilometre abandoned rail line turned multi-use trail between Hope and Midway, B.C., the bridge was one of more than 60 locations where the 2021 floods washed out the trail. About 20 metres of steel, concrete and timber on its eastern end were swept away by the surging waters. Today, the Tulameen River flows beneath the gap between Princeton and what’s left, with a faded, graffiti-covered “trail closed” sign standing on the shore. 

For years, many Princeton locals were hopeful the bridge and trail would be rebuilt. But in early February, they learned the province was planning to not only scrap the bridge, but to decommission the entire 67-kilometre stretch of trail connecting Princeton to the Coquihalla Highway. 

In an announcement, the province said repairing that segment “would cost an estimated $60 million,” while “the cost of decommissioning the damaged Princeton section is estimated at $20 million.”

“The decision to decommission a section of the Kettle Valley Rail Trail near Princeton exemplifies the harsh realities of climate-impacted management,” the Ministry of Environment and Parks explained. 

It’s a decision that’s left locals and outsiders who care about the Trans Canada Trail reeling. 

At more than 29,000 kilometres, the Trans Canada Trail is the longest multi-use trail network on the planet. In 2017, it was officially “connected” across the entire country, making it possible to traverse Canada by a combination of foot and paddling trails. The decommissioning of the Kettle Valley segment will be the first permanent break in that connection. That’s a big part of why Stacey Dakin, the Trans Canada Trail’s chief program officer, thinks there has been concern about this decision outside of Princeton.

“With the Trans Canada Trail, there’s a sense of national pride and unity,” Dakin says. “We’ve heard more and more that people are connecting to each other just because they’re on the trail.

To Dakin, the Kettle Valley decision was “shocking.” But it reflects the growing risk that climate change poses to trails across the country, as jurisdictions must weigh the cost of repairs against the likelihood of future disasters.

More than just a trail

For Princeton mayor Spencer Coyne, the town at the confluence of the Tulameen and Similkameen rivers has always been home. A member of the Upper Similkameen Indian Band, he remembers when trains still ran on the Kettle Valley line.

“There was a dirt bike and bicycle trail beside the tracks,” he says. “We would ride our bikes out to Tulameen and go swimming in the summer. It’s just a part of who we are.”

Coyne, who was first elected in 2018, decided to run for mayor after a massive 2017 wildfire opened his eyes to just how vulnerable Princeton was to climate change.

“We’ve been in a state of emergency every single year since,” Coyne explains. “The trail is kind of a microcosm.”

The decommissioning decision stunned Coyne. Especially given all of the work the community was doing to rebuild and recover after the 2021 floods.

“[I was] super disappointed in the way that unrolled … It took a bunch of people by surprise.”

One of those people is Todd Davidson, manager of the Princeton Museum.

“When the news about decommissioning the Kettle Valley Rail Trail first came out, we were all kind of surprised and shocked,” he says.

He describes the trail as a tourist draw, with visitors using it for day trips and multi-day expeditions. In winter, he says, locals relied on it as a snowmobile route to get supplies from town. He also thinks the trail should be preserved for historical reasons, as the remnants of a rail line that moved minerals, timber and people between the coast and the Interior for nearly a century.

It’s a history that still lives in people like Tom Reichert. He worked on the line for the decade before it was shut down in 1989. Today, he and his wife, Kelly, own Reichert Sales & Service, an off-road vehicle shop in Tulameen. “The closure has definitely had an impact on our business,” he says. “It’s impacted both sales and service.”

They’ve also shut down an off-road vehicle rental program they estimate brought in around $30,000 a year before the floods. 

But beyond the business impact, the Reicherts worry what losing the trail will mean for the community. They remember when the trail was busy with hikers, cyclists and all-terrain vehicle users. It’s a big part of why they’ve gotten involved in efforts to oppose decommissioning. Now, there’s a large sign on the front door of Reichert Sales & Service promoting a “Save the KVR” Facebook group and a petition that, as of writing, has more than 12,000 signatures.

The Reicherts, Coyne and Davidson all point out that many of those petition signers have never even been to Princeton, but care because the Kettle Valley is part of the Trans Canada Trail.

Managed retreat

Most of the time, the Vedder River is a calm, azure blue ribbon that flows from Chilliwack into the Fraser River. But when it rises, it transforms into a raging torrent, a pale brown rush of water that inundates the forest and ravages the trails that run along its banks.

“We had three 50-year storms within four months, back to back to back,” Drew Pilling says. “Which really took a toll on our system.”

Pilling, the senior parks and trails operations technician for the City of Chilliwack, is talking about three atmospheric rivers that hit Chilliwack between December 2025 and March 2026, with each one damaging the same stretch of the Vedder Rotary Loop Trail.

“It’s quite a cost,” says Pilling. “It’s a lot of gravel that comes back in, it’s a lot of machine time, a lot of man-hours.” 

This wasn’t the first time this trail had washed away. The same 2021 storm that ripped through the Kettle Valley trail also ravaged the Vedder Rotary Loop Trail. And although Chilliwack has so far been willing to bear the cost of repairs, Pilling thinks there may come a point where, year after year, flooding and trail repair become an issue.

“That’s for sure gonna be a topic of conversation with the council and the mayor,” he says. “Depending on their decisions, it might change the nature of the trails.” 

This changing nature is top of mind for Thomas Schoen. The chief executive officer of First Journey Trails, Schoen has been building trails across British Columbia since 1998. But it wasn’t until 2017, when a cross-country mountain bike trail he helped build connecting Williams Lake First Nation to the local trail network burned in a wildfire, that the situation really hit him.

“It was a multi-year project,” Schoen says. “We started by training Indigenous trail builders and trail maintenance crews. It was a really successful project.” 

For a few years, the trail’s popularity grew, with both locals and visitors from further afield. Then it was engulfed by a wildfire that Schoen says “absolutely destroyed that trail.” 

He and others tried to rebuild it, but the landscape was fundamentally different.

“You had tens of thousands of burnt, standing dead trees along this open trail corridor,” he explains. “The amount of tree falls on this trail was, and still is, so significant that it’s almost impossible with volunteer efforts to keep this trail open.”

Losing that trail was “extremely emotional” for Schoen, and changed the way he thinks about trails and climate change. 

“Some trails can’t be revived,” he says. “Some trails, we just don’t have the manpower or the financial power to rebuild them or open them back up again.”

Climate policy experts might categorize Schoen’s comments and the province’s decision to abandon the Kettle Valley trail as “managed retreat.” 

It’s a strategy for dealing with climate change impacts that a provincial planning document describes as the “strategic relocation of people and structures out of harm’s way, often accompanied by ecological restoration and a permanent change in land use.”

But when done properly, it’s a strategy developed with communities, not for them. 

“These decisions cannot just be made by the government or by one ministry,” Schoen says. “[They] need to be made in partnerships between many different groups … First Nations at the table with trail user clubs.” 

Hundreds of thousands of kilometres of trails

For Ryan Stuart, community engagement lead with the Outdoor Recreation Council of BC, the biggest issue with the Kettle Valley trail decision was the voices that were left out. 

“Where was the conversation beforehand?” he asks. Conversations that he argues are even more important given the growing challenge of maintaining trails in a changing climate. 

And the province has a lot of trails to maintain. According to the province’s 2013 trail strategy, the province has at least 30,000 kilometres of formally recognized trails and “hundreds of thousands of kilometres” of informal trails.

And while the strategy didn’t discuss climate change, a 2020 progress report on it listed an “increase in climate-related events such as wildfires and flooding, which can damage the trail systems,” as a top challenge. It’s a sentiment echoed by another 2025 report by Climate Data Canada exploring how climate change impacts trails across the country. 

Stuart worries that the cost and effort issues are particularly challenging due to long-standing issues with trail funding in the province.  

Among applications to the Outdoor Recreation Fund of BC, a $10-million, multi-year grant to support trail building and maintenance overseen by the Outdoor Recreation Council, he says “lots of the funding requests are for rehabilitation of damaged infrastructure from fires or floods.” 

And the fund just isn’t big enough to support everything. Earlier this year, the council described the fund as “heavily oversubscribed” and able to “support only about 15 per cent of grant requests.” 

And it’s not like the province isn’t aware of the challenges.

“Many of British Columbia’s provincial parks, recreation sites and trails are experiencing a climate-driven transformation,” the Ministry of Environment and Parks wrote in a statement to The Narwhal.“As extreme weather events like the 2021 and 2024 atmospheric rivers become more frequent, the province is navigating a difficult balance between preserving historic recreation opportunities and ensuring long-term environmental and fiscal sustainability.”

Stuart understands “the provincial government is in tough financial shape and needs to look at everything,” but thinks there still needs to be more transparency in how decisions are being made. He points out that the government spent millions rebuilding both the Berg Lake Trail in Mount Robson Provincial Park and the Juan de Fuca Trail on Vancouver Island, while abandoning the Kettle Valley.  

“I’ve heard members of the Outdoor Recreation Council ask, ‘How was that decision made?’ ” he says.

The ministry didn’t directly answer questions about those decisions. Instead, they called Berg Lake “a blueprint for ‘building back better.’ ”

“Following catastrophic weather damage, the trail’s multi-phase reopening has a climate resilience focus,” the ministry statement explained. That focus involved moving trails out of vulnerable flood-plains, relocating bridges to places better able to “withstand heavy flow,” and hardening tent pads. 

They also said the Juan de Fuca trail would need some of “these same resilient engineering strategies.”

‘No new trails’

How the Kettle Valley decision was made also frustrates people in Princeton.

“What they want to do here is just throw in the towel,” Todd Davidson says. “We feel really quite ignored.” 

It’s a sentiment that Coyne understands all too well.

“The fact that the three … main municipalities that were impacted in 2021 didn’t get a lick of funding from the province or from the [federal government] speaks volumes,” he says, referring to Abbotsford and Merritt, which like Princeton were denied support from the federal Disaster Mitigation and Adaptation Fund.

He sees the Kettle Valley decision as a “mirror image of what we’re trying to deal with” around broader flood recovery and climate adaptation. And while he understands the idea of managed retreat, he questions how it’s being applied.

“Ultimately, would we like to look at putting the river back to a more natural state? Of course, but nobody wants to pay for it,” he says. In 2022, Coyne applied for $55 million in federal funding to support a new diking plan for the town. Two years later, that application was rejected.

“Nobody’s coming to help us with that,” he says.

That lack of funding also worries Pilling. While Chilliwack was able to access some funding to rebuild after 2021, he’s not sure this latest round of trail work will qualify. 

“A lot of that funding is for infrastructure that is deemed necessary,” he says. And while trail advocates will argue that trails are necessary, providing benefits for physical and mental health, serving as travel corridors and, in some cases, being used for wildfire resilience, Pilling thinks most of the costs of trail repairs will “end up on the city’s bill.” 

For Coyne, this comes with an added sting. While he’s been fighting to try to reverse the decommissioning decision, he’s also been in meetings about marketing Princeton’s outdoor recreation. 

“We have a branch of the province actively marketing this entire trail network, and we have other departments that are cutting the funding and cutting the feet out from under them,” he says.

The province released its Tourism Sector Action Plan in March. The plan promised to grow B.C.’s outdoor recreation economy, which it claimed “generates approximately $17 billion annually in participation-based revenue, contributing $4.8 billion to provincial GDP.”But the strategy didn’t include any new funding for trails or recreation infrastructure. That’s a problem not just because of the new challenges posed by climate change, but also because of the province’s long-standing maintenance backlog.

In 2015, BC Parks estimated they had “approximately $700 million of investment in infrastructure that requires maintenance.” The province hasn’t updated this number since it was released, but the ministry did say they have further invested “approximately $200 million in campground expansions, accessibility upgrades and improvements to trails, parking and facilities since 2017.”

For Schoen, this calls for a radical rethink of how we approach trail building.“My philosophy is no new trails, period,” he says. “It’s unbelievable how much money we need for trail maintenance, and that money simply isn’t there.”

An uncertain future for the Kettle Valley

When it comes to the future of the Kettle Valley trail, Coyne is torn. He understands the threat that climate change poses to the region, but he also knows how important the trail is to his community. That’s why he keeps fighting for it, and after multiple meetings with the province, he’s starting to see a path forward.

“We’re not going to get everything we’re asking for, we’re not going to get a total rebuild of the trail,” he says.

But in early April, the Regional District of Okanagan-Similkameen passed a motion supporting a new regional trails strategy. 

What the province will say is yet to be seen, but Coyne feels clear on one thing: if the community wants to keep the trail, the onus will be on them to make it happen.

“At the end of the day, if local government or regional government isn’t willing to shoulder this burden, then your trail is probably going to go away,” he says. 

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