When the fire came to the Okanagan Indian Band on Aug. 1, Sienna Belanger’s first instinct was to catch her horses.

Winds reached 115 kilometres per hour, with sustained speeds of 80 kilometres per hour, according to the BC Wildfire Service. Six-foot-tall flames ripped through the grassland, prompting evacuation orders for thousands of people.

“I only managed to get one of my horses,” she said. “Then we just opened up the gate and ran with them down to our bottom field. They got loose. All I could do was hope and pray.”

Sienna did not know the syilx word qwilmiʔst when the Bradley Creek wildfire came, but she lived it. The teaching describes a person who pulls together their physical skills, their sharpest thinking, their deepest intuition and their spiritual awareness and acts without hesitation. 

It is what the Old People call on when facing anything serious. To hold back part of yourself is to risk everything. To give your whole self is how you meet the unknown.

As the fire grew closer, the flames were everywhere. Sienna ran through the smoke, through the flames, to turn on the water at her mother’s barn. 

She started dousing the flames. She does not remember making the decision, but she remembers her body moving.

“It was just like that adrenaline moment where you do something or you freeze, and my loved ones froze, and I just couldn’t in that moment myself not do anything,” she said. 

“I just felt like a different switch turned on, and I was like, ‘Okay, there are things to do, things I need to organize.’ ”

She was not thinking or hesitating, she was qwilmiʔst. All of herself was in motion.

A land worker, a horsewoman, a dreamer

Sienna has remained at home on the Okanagan Indian Band since the fire came over the hill on Aug. 1. She and her neighbours at Abel Cove were under evacuation order, but with such a short time to leave, they chose to stay.

Her papa had always been intentional about who lived in this community.

“My papa did really good in picking his people for his community,” Sienna says. “He chose people that would be helpful, that would be a good contribution to his family and an extension. And so all of these families who have stayed have been people who I’ve known my whole life.”

Even though he’s gone, she says, his efforts are still here. The people he chose knew how to fight fire. They knew how to hold their ground.

So, with no time to flee, or to pack, it was just Sienna, the fire, the wind and her horses.

The Bradley Creek wildfire has destroyed or damaged an estimated 245 structures on Okanagan Indian Band land, according to a formal assessment by Canada Task Force 1, a specialized search and rescue team deployed in urban environments. The team examined 513 structures over three days. As of Aug. 19, the fire was classified as “being held,” with more than 100 firefighters and six helicopters still working the perimeter.

For at least two weeks, there was a constant presence of blades chopping, of shadows of helicopters crossing the sky, of the distant rumble of bombers dropping fire retardant on the hillside above Sienna’s mother’s place and her grandmother’s house at the beach.

Sienna, 25, is a syilx sqilx’w youth born and raised at the Okanagan Indian Band. Her nsyilxcen name is xixʷutm, a name she carries from her great-granny Mary.

Sienna and her mother, Mariel Belanger, own and operate Studio Síspl̓k on the Okanagan Indian Band reserve, welcoming community organizations, schools and wellness programs for workshops that bring together storytelling, visual arts, land-based learning, food forest knowledge sharing and n’syilxcen language. It’s the kind of work she’s been doing for years: creek rehabilitation, forest restoration, plant identification, seed harvesting — work that has always been about connection. 

That work is rooted in the nsisúlaʔxʷ Food Forest Project, a living, land-based classroom and gathering place where Sienna’s food plants, medicines and community are able to grow in kinship with one another. She’s also been on a language revitalization journey for six years, learning to speak the words her ancestors spoke.

She has been building a food forest on 10 acres of her family’s property, dreaming of a space where her people could harvest berries and medicines.

The fire took Sienna’s food forest. More than 100 plants, berries, medicines — the careful work of years— reduced to ash. It took her prospector tent and a platform she had built for outdoor education. It took her plans for a creative space.

Coyote is destroyed. Fox gathers the bits. Coyote comes back to life.

In the captikʷɬ, the syilx law story system, there is a pattern that repeats again and again. Coyote is destroyed through his own foolishness, through greed, through ignorance. And Fox always comes along to gather the bits, the hair, the bone, the fragments of what remains, and breathes them back to life. Something is lost. Something is gathered. Something is brought back. These stories are how knowledge is renewed. These stories are how people survive.

Sienna does not talk about the loss of her food forest with self-pity. She talks about it with survivor’s guilt.

“Even though my work burned, we survived compared to the rest of the community, who’ve totally lost everything,” she says.

And yet, just two weeks after the fire, she says, “There are some parts of my food forest coming back. I’ve been checking on it every day and am seeing new life already, little green shoots are starting to come up.”

Sienna is Fox. She is gathering the bits. She is watching for the green shoots. She is breathing new life into what remains.

Sienna’s grandmother has been staying with her through all of this, offering emotional support. She has watched Sienna work herself to exhaustion, caring for the horses, checking on the food forest, organizing supplies, making sure everyone else was okay before she ever stopped to breathe.

One day, she sat Sienna down and told her something Sienna is still trying to hold onto.

“My grandma recognized what I was going through and told me, you are allowed to accept kindness right now.”

Sienna’s grandmother has seen fire take what her people built. She has seen them rebuild. She knows survivor’s guilt is heavy, and that accepting help is part of the ceremony of healing.

Grief needs a witness

On the morning after the fire passed by her house, a chestnut stallion appeared at Sienna’s fence. She recognized him.

Her cousin Devyn McMillan runs Rewild Ranch, which provides equine-assisted therapy — workshops and events where people can connect with horses. 

“I sent my cousin a message,” Sienna says. “I was like, ‘Hey, your red stallion’s here. He’s okay. I hope you guys are okay.’ I had no idea at that time that her house was gone until my grandma told me that her family barely escaped.”

It was then that Sienna and her grandmother decided it was time to go look for her cousin Devyn’s horses and to finally go and acknowledge themselves what happened to her family’s homestead. 

As they passed what had been the family homestead, there was nothing left but chimneys standing against the sky. Her grandmother started crying.

“We wanted to look away, we didn’t want to see what happened,” Sienna says, tearing up.

But they looked together. That is what you do. In syilx teachings, you do not turn from grief. You face it and let it be witnessed.

Sienna cried too. She let the tears come down, but she did not stop; she knew she had work to do.

She drove to her cousin’s property and saw the horses standing there. 

“I got there and started counting, one, two, three, four, there were 12 of them, and I had one of the stallions at my house, it was 13, I was so happy, it was all of them,” she said.

Sienna grabbed a bucket and a lead rope and walked into the field. She caught one horse and led it into the sand arena. Then she went back for the rest.

“At that time, my heart just totally broke for my cousin because it’s such a hard thing to go through, to lose everything,” Sienna says. “She had built her hopes and dreams on those horses, and I understand because we both love horses in the same way.”

Sienna doesn’t see herself as the hero of this story. She didn’t know a convoy was already on its way; she just knew what needed to be done. She also noticed something that said everything about Devyn’s horses: they were still together, still standing in the place they knew. Scattered horses run. “That’s how you know they are well-trained horses,” Sienna says. “They know to stay together. They know home.”

Friends and family came together anyway. Neighbours organized a supply run with 16 bags of horse feed and a box of groceries. It was the Old Way. The people came together, and what one could not carry, many could.

“It was truly that moment when a village came together to help,” Sienna says. “I just felt so blessed and touched.”

Sienna is also quick to acknowledge the community that surrounded her. Mary’s Emerald Bay, she says, is where people stuck to the teachings her papa passed down about fire safety. They came together in their time of need, saving themselves, saving their neighbours and saving the animals. They even rescued a burnt kitty.

Of the 21 homes at Mary’s Emerald Bay, only one has minimal fire damage. The rest survived because of the people who knew what to do and did it together.

‘If I can fight flames, I can get on the back of a horse again’

As of mid-August, helicopters were still flying. Evacuation orders are slowly being lifted, but Sienna and her community are still under an evacuation order zone. They’ve been actively trying to get permits to leave, but technically, they’re still stuck, unable to leave for two weeks now. The waiting is the hardest part.

“Since being stuck here and being isolated, it’s been a little hard on our mental health,” Sienna says. “The land work was a way for me to keep busy and keep all my mental health issues at bay. Fire really has done a number on that.”

And yet, being isolated has also given her time to return to something she thought she had lost: horse training. Years ago, her horse Lily kicked her in the head, fracturing her skull and leaving her deaf in one ear. The accident left her with lingering brain damage, with issues that still follow her today. She has not been able to fully get back on Lily since.

But she says something changed in her after she walked through the flames.

“In my mind, if I can fight flames, I can get on the back of a horse again,” she says.

She has started slowly, partially sitting on Lily for brief moments. She has not been able to do that since the accident.

She is learning to trust her body again. To trust the horse, and to trust that she can survive what has already happened to her. The fire taught her that if she could face the flames, she could face her fear. She could get back on. “It’s been so rewarding,” she says. 

She is still planning: packaging seeds she harvested from the food forest, traditional sunflowers and vegetable garden varieties for a seed sale. A concert with music collective Kinfolk Nation that she is hoping will still happen in September. Black, Indigenous and queer artists, coming together on the land. Food harvested from the land, cooked on the land.

“My dream was to create a space that was organic for plant material, for berries, for harvesting, for all of our people’s traditional uses,” she says.

She has been sketching a new design for her food forest. Since her tractor survived, she has the ability to move soil, to transform her place again.

“I’ve been trying to step out of that guilt so I can get back to what I was doing,” Sienna says.

The fire could not take her, or her horses. It could not take the green shoots pushing through the ash of her food forest, and it could not take the teachings her grandmothers and papa passed down. It could not take the courage she found in the smoke, and it could not take her dream.

So she is still here, moving, and gathering the bits and breathing them back to life. And now, she is sitting on Lily’s back again, learning to trust herself and the horse, because if she could fight flames, she could get back on, so she did.

That is qwilmiʔst. That is Fox. And Sienna will still be here — breathing new life into what remains.

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My parents were farmers before they came to Canada in the late 1980s. So were my grandparents. I grew up here, never farming, but also never entirely distant from it.

Some of my strongest connections to my family’s history in Punjab came from the back seat of my parents’ car. I remember trips to farms in and around Brampton, Ont., to find vegetables my parents grew up eating in India: okra, bitter gourd, fenugreek, coriander and other produce that would later be cooked into sabzi, a lightly sautéed vegetable dish eaten with flatbreads like roti.

For me, those trips meant getting a taste of a country I hadn’t grown up in.

For my parents, they meant something different.

They brought back memories of working alongside their parents and siblings. After immigrating to Canada, their family members eventually scattered to different countries and continents and those experiences became harder to return to.

Going to the farm offered a small piece of it.

Thousands of people now experience this nostalgia through their phones. In the past few years, several farmers in the Brampton area have taken to social media to share their crops, farming practices and the knowledge behind how they grow food. There’s King Subzi Farm (@kingsubzifarm) northwest of the city, in Caledon, Ont., along with Balle Balle Heritage Farm (@balleballeheritagefarm).

Sarbat Farm (@sarbatfarm), northeast of Brampton, has just over 5,000 followers on TikTok alone, watching reel after reel of daily life on the farm and chickens roaming the land. Driving there, in early August, I got to see it in person, this time from the front seat: fields filled with fresh garlic and serrano chilli peppers, tractors moving through the land and families arriving to buy produce — and a taste of home.

South Asians were farming in Canada in the early 1900s

The connection between farming, food and migration has existed in Canada for more than a century. Tarlok Singh Sahota is the director of the Lakehead University’s agricultural research station in Thunder Bay, Ont., and studied agronomy at Punjab Agricultural University in India. He says Punjabi farmers have been involved in Canadian agriculture for generations, particularly in British Columbia.

Historical records compiled by the South Asian Studies Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley show that by 1909, 35 South Asians were working on farms in Mission and Matsqui in B.C.’s Lower Fraser Valley. By 1923, records listed 25 farms among businesses owned or operated by the province’s relatively small South Asian community. The earliest record in Ontario is 1914, when a group of Sikh men worked as farmhands on an estate near Pickering, east of Toronto.

Today, Statistics Canada data shows 8,960 Sikh people worked in agriculture in Canada in 2021, representing about 2.1 per cent of people working in the industry. By comparison, 771,790 Sikhs live in Canada, making up 2.1 per cent of the country’s total population.

“Farming is in our blood, so they started owning farms or farming as soon as possible so they could do it,” Sahota says.

In places such as Brampton, which 340,000 South Asians call home, that history of farming is meeting a growing market for vegetables that are everyday ingredients in Punjabi kitchens, Sahota says, but less common on conventional Ontario farms.

Many of these vegetables can require intensive watering and care to ensure a controlled and reliable moisture supply, separate from natural rainfall throughout the growing season, he says.

There is also the knowledge that comes from understanding the crop itself, what it looks like, how it grows and when it should be harvested.

“That’s why most of these things are grown by Punjabis or Asian communities,” Sahota says.“For most people here, this is a specialized cultivation, specialized farming. It is what you call high-value crops in a way.” 

Whether farmers can grow those crops commercially ultimately comes down to demand.

“Because there’s a big population, then there’s a demand,” Sahota says of Brampton. “Whatever you grow, if there is no demand, you won’t grow that.”

Family, friends and farming outside Brampton, Ont.

Jaswinder Singh Sran came to Canada in 2008. His 19-year-old son, Gurveer Singh Sran, says his father grew up farming in India and had long dreamed of doing it again.

Gurveer remembers hearing stories about his father operating a combine — the machine used to harvest a variety of crops from oats to rice and more — when he was about 18 and travelling to other parts of India where farmers would pay him to harvest their crops.

“My dad always had a dream to farm in Canada,” Gurveer says. But it would be years before that opportunity arrived.

The family started farming the 400-acre property in 2020. There is a whole team behind Sarbat Farm, from those tending and harvesting the vegetables that sprawl across tree-lined fields, to the people selling the goods at a farmstand on the property. When I visit on a Sunday, it’s teeming with customers, filling bags of green chickpeas and pattypan squash, under a big, white tent. 

Balkaran Dhillon is also a part of that team. He bought land in 2017 that became the site of Sarbat Farm.

Dhillon, too, grew up farming in India. “When I was three years old, I always went with my parents to sit with the tractors and grow vegetables and other crops like wheat, mustard, chickpeas and cotton,” Dhillon says.

He moved to Canada in 2001. Dhillon met Jaswinder, who was doing general contracting work, in 2020. They set about starting the farm together.

The name Sarbat derives from the phrase “Sarbat da bhala” in the Punjabi language, Dhillon says, which translates to “blessings or welfare for all.” They chose the name to reflect their desire to help feed everyone.

Adapting farming practices for the climate and environment

While much of the team at Sarbat brought knowledge of farming from India to Ontario, it has required adaptation.

The biggest difference, Dhillion says, is the weather.

“It is hard, especially because of the very small [growing] season and winter,” Dhillon says.

But they have found ways to stretch the growing season and learned some of the local norms for seasonal planting. Garlic is planted in the fall, Dhillon says, whereas in India bulbs could be buried into the winter months. Some plants are started in greenhouses in February, allowing them to be transplanted soon after temperatures rise in the spring.

A couple years after starting the farm, the owners converted to organic farming practices, Sarjeet Singh Jhabelwali, another family friend who oversees some of the farming operations, explains.

“We want to prove that farming can be done without chemicals and fertilizers. Farming can be done without tampering with nature,” he says in an interview, conducted in Punjabi.

For Jhabelwali, the approach is part of a broader vision for agriculture that he wants the community to understand, particularly younger generations.

“We are polluting the environment. Species are disappearing,” he says. He attributes this, in part, to the use of pesticides. Health Canada studies and regulates pesticide use – what is allowed and how much – but generally recognizes that pesticides are one of several factors contributing to the loss of pollinators and other impacts on humans and the environment.

Dhillon says avoiding pesticides makes the work more labour-intensive because weeds have to be removed by hand rather than sprayed, but it’s better for the environment and creates jobs.

He estimates the operation employs about 40 to 50 people, many of them relatives, friends and older workers who already know how to farm.

For Gurveer, who helps during the summer and around his school schedule, the fields represent both his father’s past and something his family could carry forward.

“Everything is hand-cultivated, so just seeing the fields itself, without any weeds, without using pesticides, that’s a big achievement,” he says.

Passing farming knowledge to a new generation

The farming knowledge at Sarbat, and other farms in the area, may be coming from an older generation, but the way the farm reaches customers is distinctly modern.

Sarbat Farm began using TikTok to promote its produce in 2024. At first, the family simply experimented with posting videos. Then one went viral.

“Our main message is to attract people toward pesticide-safe food produce because there’s definitely a taste difference,” Gurveer says. 

But Jhabelwali sees the social media presence as more than advertising. He says about 50,000 people visited the farm last year and expects that number to double this year. The more people who see the farm online and visit in person, he says, the more opportunities there are to show people how their food is grown.

“The people who visit will come and see how the vegetables are being grown. The new youth who come will gain awareness,” Jhabelwali says.

He believes younger generations are particularly well-positioned to seek out that information. “Our new youth have good language skills and command. They read and write. They use ChatGPT and search for everything we’re talking about,” he says.

The farming tradition once passed primarily through generation to generation can now reach thousands of people through a phone screen. And those screens are, perhaps surprisingly, bringing people back onto the land, Jhabelwali says.

“The community is what supports us,” Gurveer says.

Dhillon notices it most among older visitors. They come to see the tractors. They walk through the fields. Some want to pick their own vegetables — an experience the farm has been considering expanding.

“A lot of people come here to refresh their memory,” Dhillon says.

Gurveer hears it directly from visitors.

“People feel connected with their roots here,” he says. 

“You don’t get to feel that a lot in Canada.”

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

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When Michelle Brown-Colistro became pregnant with her second child in 2024, she and her husband decided to find a two-bedroom place to house their growing family. They managed to find a home in Vancouver’s notoriously expensive housing market that they could afford: a 1970s-era wooden-sided walk-up in Hastings-Sunrise, a historically working-class residential neighbourhood on the city’s east side. She knew her apartment-lined street was a designated truck route, and that container trucks had begun using it to reach the Port of Vancouver after the port’s Clark Drive entrance was closed to container trucks in 2011. But weeks after moving in, surrounded by unpacked boxes in her toddler’s bedroom, she became aware of the non-stop assault to her senses from the heavy-duty truck traffic outside. 

“Just the smell of the diesel through our window was so extreme,” she recalls. “It’s like a train of trucks. You barely get a break between them.” 

Brown-Colistro wasn’t the only resident concerned about the impacts of truck traffic. In the following months, she and her neighbours learned that the Port of Vancouver had decided to make the temporary detour permanent; changing its status as a truck route would also require approvals from Translink, the regional transit authority and the City of Vancouver. 

That summer, the fumes from truck exhaust on Brown-Colistro’s street were so cloying she had to keep their windows shut even on the hottest days rather than subject her toddler’s little lungs to the pollution. She bought air purifiers and ran them constantly, concerned about the risk of inhaled pollutants to her developing fetus. After her second child was born, Brown-Colistro rallied a city councillor, Lisa Dominato, and her MLA, Nikki Sharma, to her cause, but their efforts were futile. She was informed that the city’s engineers were concerned that re-routing traffic from her street would merely shift the burden onto other streets, equally unequipped to handle increases in heavy-duty traffic. 

In Vancouver, the heaviest burden of that traffic lands in the city’s east side, which encompasses heavily used truck routes, including the one outside Brown-Colistro’s apartment. The eight-kilometre-long Clark-Knight corridor, which runs north from the Fraser River toward the port’s newly expanded container terminal on Burrard Inlet, brings an average of 33,000 vehicles through the Clark and Broadway intersection each day and is the most heavily used truck route in the city. Of 25 air quality monitoring stations Metro Vancouver operates, the one adjacent to that intersection consistently records the worst nitrogen dioxide levels.

A 2018 study found that the air quality at this location was as poor — and at times poorer — than that along Ontario’s 401 highway, the busiest highway in all of North America, despite having one-twelfth as much traffic. The researchers’ conclusion? It wasn’t the number of vehicles so much as the higher proportion of heavy-duty diesel-burning trucks that spiked airborne pollutants. Though large trucks account for only six per cent of traffic at this intersection, they contribute a disproportionate amount of pollutants; compared to Sundays, when few trucks are on the road, on weekdays the levels of concerning pollutants are up to 2.8 times higher.

“The air quality objectives across Metro Vancouver, as they report to us, are met except for the monitors near our downtown area and also the Vancouver Clark Drive station,” Michael Schwandt, a medical health officer with Vancouver Coastal Health, explains. “It’s also a major problem because as we see increasing population density and all of the amenities that people need to live healthy lives — whether that’s schools, childcare, workplaces — often cluster in these areas.”

“The port is such an important economic engine for the country,” Christine Davis, a neighbourhood parent, whose child attends elementary school right on the truck route says. “But where does that leave the immediate neighbours that have to deal with the pollution and the traffic?” 

A more toxic beast

Not only has diesel exhaust been linked to cardiovascular impacts and compromised lung function, increasing incidences of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, but it is also made up of a cocktail of nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides, ozone, formaldehyde, benzene and smaller organic molecules that the World Health Organization classifies as a known carcinogen. 

“Diesel exhaust is different from gasoline exhaust, and diesel exhaust does generate compounds with higher levels of toxicity,” Marianne Hatzopoulou says. Hatzopoulou is an engineering professor at the University of Toronto who studies transportation systems and air pollution generated by traffic. “There’s definitely non-questionable evidence out there right now that the major contributors of traffic-related air pollution are the diesel vehicles — so, primarily the heavy-duty and the medium-duty trucks.” 

One in five childhood asthma cases in Canada are linked to traffic-related pollution, according to Vancouver Coastal Health research scientist Michael Brauer, who co-authored a 2019 study examining the global burden of NO2-caused pediatric asthma, which was published in the medical journal Lancet Planetary Health.

There are documented links to cancer, too. One study of French children reported the risk of childhood leukemia rises with exposure to nitrogen dioxide, black carbon and fine particulates — hallmarks of diesel exhaust. Health Canada states “there is sufficient evidence that the relationship between [traffic-related air pollution] exposure and childhood leukemia is likely to be causal.” It also notes links between adult lung cancer and breast cancer. Researchers have also found infants and children exposed to traffic air pollution are more likely to develop allergies and ADHD, while living near busy roadways is linked with a greater incidence of dementia, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and multiple sclerosis in adults.

There are shorter-term impacts on brain functioning from traffic-related air pollution too. Chris Carlsten, Director of the Centre for Lung Health at the University of British Columbia, has found that two-hour-long exposures to diesel exhaust temporarily dull the brain’s ability to concentrate and do basic tasks. In one experiment, he and his colleagues found that those exposed to diesel exhaust showed impairment comparable to someone with a blood alcohol level of 0.05 per cent, the equivalent of two or three drinks for an average-sized man. 

The Port of Vancouver did not make anyone available for an interview. By email, they wrote, “We recognize community concerns about impacts associated with commercial vehicle traffic and continue to engage with residents, government and industry partners to gain a clearer understanding of traffic impacts, both related to the port and otherwise. We remain committed to minimizing the impacts of trade-related activity on surrounding communities while supporting the safe and efficient movement of goods that Canadians rely on.”

What’s equally concerning for Carlsten is the invisible toll that traffic exhaust exacts on the lungs of young children, which can impact them decades later. “Suddenly all these early life insults become much, much more significant,” he says, describing how someone in their 50s or 60s might experience deteriorating lung capacity that actually originated from their exposure to traffic-related exhaust in childhood and adolescence. “I think it’s fair to say that schools in general just should not be within 300 metres of high traffic routes. I mean, it makes no sense; it’s where the kids are spending most of their days,” Carlsten says. “Given the level of evidence of adverse effects of traffic-related air pollution on children, it’s hard for me to understand how that can be possibly justified.”

And yet, 10 of Vancouver’s 89 public elementary schools are located within 300 metres — the distance from major roadways in which pollution levels are most concentrated — of the Clark-Knight corridor route to the port. Based on 2024 enrolment data, that means around six per cent of all public elementary school students in the city are breathing air that health experts believe is dangerously compromised. Across Canada, a 2022 analysis by Health Canada found that almost half of schools were located within 200 metres of major roads. (In Vancouver, it’s more than half.)

“We are promised as citizens of Vancouver that we will have access to this beautiful clean air that’s heavily marketed to us. I constantly feel like: Who is that accessible to?” Brown-Colistro says. “It’s certainly not low-income people. It’s certainly not a lot of young families who, due to the housing crisis, are forced to live along these busy corridors. It’s certainly not school kids.”

A tangled web of regulations presents challenges for decreasing vehicle emissions

In 1992, an emissions reduction program for light-duty vehicles was implemented in B.C. AirCare required vehicles to pass regular emissions testing before it was ended in 2014. Coupled with improved vehicle technology and cleaner fuels, vehicle emissions were reduced by 89 per cent between 1992 and 2014, according to the B.C. Ministry of Environment. Overall, the air quality in the region has improved in recent decades, thanks to these policies and regulations, despite significant population growth. However, the equivalent of mandatory AirCare for heavy-duty diesel vehicles was never instated, despite a 2013 MetroVancouver report showing it could have cut their emissions by more than 76 per cent.

“Heavy-duty vehicles, especially trucks, don’t have as stringent emission standards as we’ve historically done for light-duty vehicles,” Hatzopoulou explains.

But the gap with regulations for on-road heavy-duty diesel trucks remains significant in British Columbia, and nationally too, since many of these vehicles drive across the country, crossing provincial borders. Interestingly, Metro Vancouver has managed to move the dials to clean up non-road diesel engine emissions, from construction or industrial work, significantly. The regional authority introduced regulations around the emissions of non-road diesel engines in 2012, which cut pollution from construction, industrial and commercial sites.

In 2021, the regional district further strengthened the regulations, banning older diesel engines with zero emission controls (as well as older engines that have slightly reduced emissions) from operating within 100 meters of hospitals, elementary schools, day cares or community care facilities. In explicit recognition of the public health costs of the status quo, Metro Vancouver is now phasing in higher fees for those operating more polluting engines to offset their higher health costs to the region. 

Though B.C. and Metro Vancouver have tried to run mandatory emissions testing programs for heavy-duty diesel trucks, some of which are older, poorly maintained or whose emissions control systems have been tampered with after-market to burn dirtier, these efforts were abandoned after lobbying efforts from trucking industry groups.

Trucking in B.C. doesn’t have to be this dirty

Since 2006, the Port of Los Angeles, the largest and busiest port on the continent, has implemented policies to reduce emissions and pollutants. Their investments and policies include a US$10 tariff per 20-foot container, excepting zero-emissions trucks, which is used to fund clean truck deployment. As of May 2025, 546 zero-emissions trucks operate at the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach, most of which were bought with vouchers collected through the tariff or similar incentives. Since 2005, the Los Angeles port’s diesel particulate matter and nitrogen oxides emissions have been cut by 92 and 77 per cent, respectively.

In fact, all over the world, federal jurisdictions are actively tackling the problem of heavy-duty diesel truck emissions. Germany has built a one-kilometre section of its Bavarian Autobahn to wirelessly charge e-trucks as they transit the inductive roadway. Sweden now requires older vehicles to be retrofitted for pollution reduction before they can drive in the country’s designated low emission zones. The health benefits of these “clean air zones,” which restrict access for for vehicles that do not meet emissions standards, are significant. One study tracking several thousand elementary school-aged children in London, England documented improvements in children’s lung growth and health following the introduction of London’s “ultra low emission zone,” which led to 22 per cent reduction of nitrogen dioxide exposure in children over five years years. “That complacency … I would say it’s just in Canada,” Hatzopoulou says. 

In Vancouver, that complacency is hard to change. The Port of Vancouver was going to implement a Rolling Truck Age program that banned the oldest, most polluting trucks from accessing the port, however the program was postponed three times before being abandoned altogether, following opposition from truckers. By email, the Port of Vancouver said any new trucks applying for port access are required to be 2018 models or newer. However, drivers with trucks older than 2018 models who have already been approved can renew their access.

As a result, of the fleet of 1,700 container trucks that are licensed to access the port, more than half are older than 2018 models (and just under 10 per cent are 2007 models or older, the worst polluters), according to the port. By email, the port told The Narwhal it “does not have enforcement authority or capability for container truck inspections.” And as the port points out, its container trucks are not the only heavy-duty diesel engines on Vancouver’s roads. Any regulation or enforcement has to come from the federal or provincial level to meaningfully transform the roads. 

On one hand, getting the oldest, most polluting trucks off the Clark-Knight corridor should be low-hanging fruit for public health and transportation policy. But Dave Earle, president and CEO of the BC Trucking Association, says, “It is white hot politically.” Despite the dirtiest-running trucks — from 2007 and earlier — comprising a small minority of the port’s truck fleet, they are “driven by a couple of hundred extremely vocal, very, very politically active and well-connected folks,” Earle says. Yet the public health burden posed by this small minority of older trucks is outsized. A study led by McGill researchers and published this July concluded that removing pre-2007 heavy duty vehicles in Toronto and Montreal would prevent more than 3,300 premature deaths a year.

The current costs of electric heavy-duty trucks, after government rebates, is still around twice as much as a diesel truck. In June 2026, HTEC opened Canada’s first high-pressure hydrogen refuelling station for heavy-duty trucks on Tsawwassen First Nation industrial lands, 45 minutes south of the Port of Vancouver, but hydrogen-powered vehicles currently cost two to four times as much as a diesel model. Smaller but more accessible improvements could be made by replacing pre-2007 trucks with newer diesel models that run 10 to 20 per cent more efficiently, says Earle: “The quicker we can get the old stuff off the road and the new stuff on, the better off we’re going to be.” Running container trucks on natural gas, which reduces greenhouse gas emissions by upwards of 30 per cent and nearly eliminates particulates in exhaust, should also be explored, he adds. There are other changes he thinks the industry could make: tires that improve fuel efficiency, or retrofitting auxiliary power units so to reduce emissions while trucks are idling. (The province did offer rebates for trucks to retrofit their auxiliary power units, but the program’s funding was cut in 2024). 

But absent any changes to regulations and policy incentives, the problem is only going to get worse as trade disruptions with the U.S. hike the number of overseas trade coming in and out of Vancouver’s port. Last year, the equivalent of 3.7 million 20-foot-long shipping containers moved through the port’s four container terminals, two of which are located in Vancouver — a nine per cent increase from the previous year. Though the port is now running six all-electric trucks — part of a $3-million pilot project with Transport Canada and the province — this is just a drop in the bucket for Brown-Colistro and her neighbours, who see more than 2,000 container trucks and 6,000 heavy-duty vehicles pass by their homes each week. 

In the absence of leadership from government or jurisdictional authorities, there are signs of progress in the transportation industry. R.R. Plett in Langley, for example, operates eight electric trucks in their drayage fleet, one of few operators in Western Canada to have zero-emission heavy-duty trucks on the roads. Edison Motors has just received approval to manufacture class-8 diesel-electric hybrid trucks at its manufacturing facility in Donald, B.C., and is securing funding to do so. The Vancouver International Airport is exploring how it can use zero-emission electric barges to reduce congestion on Vancouver’s roads, innovating an air-to-marine model of cargo movement that circumvents the dirty heavy-duty vehicles altogether in favour of short-sea shipping over local waterways. 

“I just see a real desperation amongst my neighbors and the people I talk to,” says Brown-Colistro. “We’ve been knocking on proverbial doors and we get promises, but we don’t get solutions that are enacted.” 

In 1971 a group of 25 mothers in East Vancouver blockaded the railroad cutting through their neighbourhood to protest the danger to children who had to cross the tracks on their way to and from school. Their efforts were successful in spurring the city to finally build a pedestrian overpass. While the truckers’ threats of job action have moved the needle among decision makers to protect the status quo, despite the disproportionate health costs to children, a modern echo of the ‘70s Militant Mothers of Raymur looks more necessary all the time. “Everybody is dragging their feet so much about it,” Davis, the fellow neighbourhood mother, says. “At a certain point … do we have to do civil unrest or something? Do we have to block traffic to get noticed?”

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On the first Saturday of August, near the Tyne Valley United Church, dozens of members of the Hardy family are dressed in rags, faded fishing bibs and painted head to toe as zombies. The family staggers in unison as they practise their carefully choreographed dance to Michael Jackson’s Thriller for the Tyne Valley Oyster Festival parade, an annual celebration of Prince Edward Island’s world-famous shellfish. 

The Hardy family has fished the waters of P.E.I. since the mid-1800s, and they’re a fixture at the small rural community’s annual festival, which also includes a hoedown, oyster-shucking competition and Miss Oyster Pearl pageant. But this year, a funereal mood hangs over the celebrations, reflected in the family’s choice of costume and performance: most of the island’s oyster farmers are grappling with catastrophic losses from disease, and the industry is on the verge of collapse. 

Up west, away from the crowded sidewalks of Charlottetown, is the heartland of P.E.I. oysters, where determined rural communities hug the cold shallow bays that house the majority of the island’s world-renowned shellfish. But since first being detected in 2024, a parasitic disease called multinucleate sphere unknown, or MSX, has decimated crops. Last summer, another deadly disease called Dermo arrived in P.E.I. waters, though so far its impact is much more muted. 

While the Canadian Food Inspection Agency confirms the diseases pose no risk to human health, the economic toll is devastating. Farmers pulling up their cages have said they found a mortality rate of nearly 100 per cent, wiping out millions of earnings and leaving many with little — or nothing — to sell for years to come.

There’s a glimmer of hope: MSX-resistant broodstock and oyster seed from across the border in Maine could help staunch the losses in the short-term. But the long-term survival of the industry may depend on breeding a new kind of oyster, unique to P.E.I.

A seed of hope for P.E.I. oyster growers and harvesters

The provincial and federal governments have announced supports for the oyster industry that include interest relief for growers and processors, wage and retraining assistance and a licence buy-back program for wild harvesters. Ask anyone on the water and they’ll say they welcome the help, but fear it’s come too late. This crisis has been looming since MSX was declared on the island in July 2024, with little to no support or plan for the growers and harvesters.

Monique Horne, a farmer whose family owns and operates a 50-acre oyster lease, is prepared to persist through the crisis, but insists they need help. 

“We will make it through it, but we do need both provincial and federal governments to work collaboratively with industry and be quick to respond with the help we need when we need it for the next three to five years,” Horne says. “Our economy depends on it.”

In the meantime, a desperately needed boost arrived on the island on June 11, after the Canadian Food Inspection Agency approved the import of MSX-resistant broodstock and oyster seed from across the border in Maine to help stem the tide in the coming years.

Soon after its arrival, I joined Horne on the water with her father, Pat O’Brien, and son Connor, travelling to their oyster lease to plant the new U.S. seed. 

On this quiet June morning, theirs is the only fishing boat on Foxley River. The water is eerily still — as if mirroring the stark reality for oyster farmers in the region — as Connor navigates the boat around thousands of rows of cages that, in any other year, would be roiling with activity.

“It’s pretty quiet out here,” Horne says. “It’s not normal.”

Once Connor cuts the engine, the three generations of oyster growers begin filling slim suitcase-sized cages with the precious cross-border seed. Using a medium Tim Hortons coffee cup discarded on a work bench, Horne and her father ensure an equal amount of the Cheerio-sized oyster seed is distributed for each of their leases.

There’s no guarantee the lab-grown seed will take in P.E.I.’s waters. 

“It’s an experiment,” Horne confesses. “We’re willing to try it. What other options are there? Other than waiting for local hatcheries to find a resistant strain.”

The family members move smoothly around one another, hauling used cages that held diseased oysters from the line and seamlessly setting the new cages pregnant with oyster seed.

It’s a faster-growing seed, so if they grow well with a reasonable mortality rate of around 10 per cent, it’s possible the oysters could be harvested and sold by the fall of 2027. 

“Hopefully this works,” O’Brien says. He’s got decades of experience on the water, and hauled hundreds of oyster cages in his life. “If it does, we’ll feel safe. If it doesn’t, we’re gone.”

P.E.I. researchers chase solution to oyster disease

Playing a key role in the urgent search for an answer to the crisis is the team at Onda, a P.E.I.-based contract research organization specializing in aquaculture.

Tirosh Shapira, a scientist at Onda, says once the MSX infection first broke out on the island in 2024, he and other researchers jumped into action.

“These are our neighbours. This is our community. We have the facilities here … so we just said, ‘How can we help?’ ”

One of the main areas of focus for Shapira and the team is pinpointing the cause of the infection, which they believe is through a secondary host — similar to how malaria is transmitted by mosquitos. This means infected oysters can’t transmit the disease directly to healthy ones. But no one knows what the secondary host is. 

“Despite the disease being out there … infecting oysters all across the East Coast [of North America], there’s surprisingly little known about it,” Shapira admits.

When the MSX parasite wiped out the oyster population in Chesapeake Bay in the United States in the early 1960s, most watermen pivoted to clams and softshell crab. Opting to use natural selection as a means to fight the disease, it took over 20 years for any form of significant recovery of the oyster population — though oyster numbers never returned to their pre-MSX levels.

To crack the mystery of MSX infection, Onda is developing an infection model, creating the specific conditions to observe how disease is transmitted. At Rutgers University and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, Shapira says American research teams have been using Dermo to breed disease-resistant oysters. He says Onda plans to follow their example and generate the disease in their infection models, “as Dermo resistance also bestows resistance to MSX.” 

The most recent testing detected Dermo present in only 0.4 per cent of tested oysters from across the province, and isolated in the east. On the other hand, MSX has caused such widespread damage that Shapira says, the additional impact of Dermo is “not significant at the moment.” 

According to Shapira, and many other leaders in the aquaculture space, the way out of the crisis is through breeding a local line of disease-resistant oysters unique to P.E.I.

“That’s how it worked anywhere that survived and came out of it,” Shapira says. “There are no scientific questions about it!”

This, however, takes time. Even if an MSX-resistant line was achieved today, it would take three breeding cycles — six years in total — until that new line of disease-resistant oysters could be propagated across the island.

It will take persistence, Shapira says. “P.E.I. is going to solve this. This is our culture. This is who we are. We are oyster farmers. We are not going to stop being oyster farmers.”

Back at the oyster festival, four generations of Hardy family members are putting the finishing touches on their parade float. The crash of thousands of lifeless oysters bounces off the walls of the Britannia Hall community theatre as buckets of dead shellfish are dumped around a gruesome mummified corpse.

Gordon Hardy, one of eight siblings whose parents, Leslie and Shirley, run the family business, is part of four generations frantically getting into position here today. As the last of the dead oysters — part of this year’s disease-ridden harvest — are being carefully positioned around severed skeleton parts, he steps back and evaluates the scene.

“Well, things aren’t really that great at the moment,” Hardy says when asked how the family business has been faring. But, as if embodying the resolve of all the island’s oyster growers and fishers, an encouraging smile buoys his face as he digs in his shirt pocket to pull out a single hopeful disease-resistant oyster seed.

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The sound of cars passing is a constant hum, so constant it’s almost meditative. Every so often one bleats out a honk of support. On the shoulder of the highway stands a man, holding a sign that reads: “Save the Salmon.”

Cheeks ruddy from the cold, he clutches it with gloved hands from behind a waist-high concrete highway barrier. Dark eyes glitter warmly behind glasses, and over his knitted wool toque is a black baseball cap emblazoned with the image of a tree, water and paddles. 

This is Tsartlip First Nation Elder Carl Olsen, also known by his traditional name, ZȺWIZUT. He’s 78 years old. For the last three years, he’s been coming out here every Tuesday — through rain, snow and even sickness — to stand out on the shoulder of the Malahat highway and protest.

It’s December 30, 2025. Olsen grins, surrounded by supporters who wave at cars and shake their own homemade signs. But it wasn’t always this way. When he first started out, it was just him, his granddaughter and a supporter from the local book club Olsen runs.

At his back is Goldstream Provincial Park, or as Olsen knows it, SELE₭TEȽ. At 477 hectares, it’s bigger than New York City’s Central Park, a verdant gem on the southern tip of Vancouver Island, just a 20-minute drive from Victoria. The park features waterfalls, Garry oak meadows, 600-year-old Douglas fir trees, flowering dogwood, western red cedar trees, Oregon grape and salmonberries.

In front of Olsen is the Malahat, a busy two-lane highway that cuts through the park and sees an average of 25,000 vehicles a day pass by. The park’s accessibility means more than 600,000 people visit each year to camp, hike and hang out. Many come in the fall to watch the huge runs of chum, Chinook and coho salmon that return each year to spawn in the Goldstream River.

What prompted Olsen to go out there in the early months of 2023 was learning of a proposal put forward by the province to widen the Malahat that would catastrophically affect the adjacent Chinook and coho salmon spawning habitat in the Goldstream River. 

According to the province, the highway expansion, estimated in 2024 to cost $162 million, was needed to improve safety and reliability along a 1.7-kilometre section that bisects the park.

One part that especially concerned Olsen was the expected “permanent loss or alteration of aquatic salmonid and amphibian habitat” next to the Goldstream River. This impact and others were detailed in a 139-page environmental assessment report commissioned by the province and completed in 2024 by consulting firm McElhanney. The area’s Chinook and coho salmon spawning habitat falls directly within the project’s footprint.

Within half a kilometre of the project site, at-risk species were likely to be affected, including western screech owls, northern red-legged frogs, wandering salamanders and the endangered sharp-tailed snake. Expand that to within five kilometres of the project site and that list lengthens to at least 200 endangered and threatened species possibly affected.

Olsen was also horrified to learn that, among a host of other environmental issues, approximately 715 trees would also be removed from an area along the highway during construction.

He thought about the owls and nesting birds, about the spe’uth (bears) that make their homes in SELE₭TEȽ and fed beside him while he and other nation members harvested fish for winter. He thought of how the noise and vibration from excavation and rock blasting might affect the vulnerable salmon fry, hiding out in the darkness under fallen logs in river pools until they were big enough to head to the ocean.

“The canopy that creates the coolness of the water in the stream — if that disappears, those fish will disappear, because then the water starts to get too hot. It’s about 12 degrees difference from the sun to the shade. So that’s what started me,” he says. “I thought, ‘Yeah, I can do this. I can be the voice for the salmon.’ ”

Every Tuesday for the last three years, Olsen wakes up at about 5 a.m. in the house his grandfather built, on the W̱JOȽEȽP Tsartlip reserve. He heads down to the beach right outside his door on the Saanich Inlet and starts his day with a prayer at the water’s edge. 

“I meditate about what I would like to see in my day,” he says.

After his prayer, Olsen heads to a local café for some toast and tea. 

Typically, a group of supporters show up to tag along with him to Goldstream Park. Others meet him there. Some are members of local churches and the Wilderness Committee, or participants in Olsen’s Indigenous authors book club.

One of those book club members is Christine Willes, a settler from a group called Goldstream Protectors that helped organize a protest with Olsen and others at the legislature in October. 

“What he says to anybody who asked him is, ‘Well, I can go and stand by the side of the highway,’ ” she says. “And that’s what he says to other people. ‘Do what you can.’ So I thought, well, I can go stand on the side of the highway too.”

For Olsen, this fight is now broader than the highway project. It’s a flashpoint in a much larger and contentious discussion around Indigenous land rights, title and reconciliation that has consumed the province, and has repercussions for the entire country. It’s also about the ability for Indigenous people to make land decisions in their own territory.

To the W̱SÁNEĆ people, of which Tsartlip are a part, SELE₭TEȽ is one of their oldest fishing villages, arguably protected by a treaty put to paper 174 years ago which clearly states they retain the rights to their village sites and to hunt and fish on those lands as they always have.

It’s one of 14 treaties negotiated in the 1850s by James Douglas, then-Governor of Vancouver Island, with the local First Nations. For many, the existence of these treaties may come as a surprise, as it’s well known that most of the province’s land mass was never ceded by its original inhabitants. 

Known collectively as the Douglas Treaties, multiple court cases since the 1960s have re-affirmed these treaty-protected rights, for both the W̱SÁNEĆ and the other Vancouver Island nations who signed them in the 1850s.

This fight to hold colonial governments to their word is what has kept Olsen out on the highway for three years.

‘It rightfully belongs to us’

On its website, the B.C. government states Goldstream Park was “given to the people of British Columbia by the Greater Victoria Water Board in 1958.” 

But the actual history is far more complicated.

“It rightfully belongs to us,” stated Jean Baptiste Paul, Tsartlip First Nation member and son of then-chief Thomas Paul, in an article published in the Daily Colonist on March 27, 1956. “We have never given it up, and never been offered anything for our fishing and hunting grounds there.”

Jean Baptiste recalled how he had hunted and fished at Goldstream as a child. He told the Daily Colonist that all of the Saanich Inlet, from Cherry Point to the hills south of Goldstream was Indigenous territory, and had been identified as such by his grandfather, former Tsartlip Chief Ben Paul.

Tsartlip and Malahat members had built fish-smoking shacks near the river and his grandfather had also constructed a log cabin in the area. But one day when no one was there, all the buildings were burned down, Paul told the paper.

At the time, Paul’s resistance was reported as little more than a passing curiosity with headlines such as, “Prospect of city giving park to B.C. has West Saanich Indians on warpath.” On June 26, 1958 B.C. went ahead and designated the area a park in celebration of British Columbia’s centennial.

Goldstream became a tourist attraction. Even though it was not yet officially open, the campground was quickly packed with vacationers. Newspaper columnists sung the praises of Goldstream’s beauty and touted its quick accessibility from Victoria. In the fall of 1960, thousands of onlookers crowded into Goldstream to watch the salmon run, a practice that continues to this day. 

However, these thousands of new visitors brought with them a host of new problems, says Eric Pelkey WEC’KINEM, hereditary chief of the Tsawout First Nation. Sometimes when nation members are down at the river harvesting fish, visitors to the park will confront them.

“They start cussing us up and down, saying that we’re destroying the fishery. We tell them, we have the right. We have the right to do this, to carry on our fishery and to just leave us alone. But there’s still a lot of racism that comes out at that time. People think we’re torturing the fish,” Pelkey says. 

The W̱SÁNEĆ carry on regardless. More recently, people have also been coming out there to support them, he adds.

Pelkey sits at a picnic table in the park, the gentle rush of the Goldstream River behind him. Barrel-chested, his voice a deep, gentle baritone, he wears a ball cap-style hat woven from cedar bark and a wool and feather headband. A cream-coloured traditional knitted blanket is wrapped around his shoulders.

These accusations are especially misplaced because, he explains, it’s the W̱SÁNEĆ who constantly steward the area and conduct their own assessments to monitor the health of the fish. 

For example, in 2023 the numbers of chum in the Goldstream were so low that nation members just went down to the river to observe. “Nobody took a fish,” according to Olsen, a long time volunteer at the Goldstream Hatchery.

Most of the environmental problems in the area are due to settler activity in the first place, Pelkey points out. Commercial fishing boats that come down the Johnstone Strait along the coast of Vancouver Island and into the Strait of Georgia take most of the salmon before they can even reach the Goldstream River, he says. In 2011 a fuel tanker truck crashed in the area, leaking tens of thousands of litres of gasoline and diesel into the river caused further stress on the salmon.

Members from all W̱SÁNEĆ nations harvest chum, Chinook and coho salmon from the Goldstream River as a winter food supply, and have for generations. When it’s smoked, the chum can last all winter, Pelkey says.

“I remember growing up, and we always had that smell in our house, because my parents would have sacks of smoked chum on top of our cupboards, burlap sacks,” he says.

A village displaced

In 1877, the Indian Reserve Commission parcelled out a fishing reserve along the south end of Finlayson Arm, an extension of the Saanich Inlet where the Goldstream River feeds into the ocean. However Goldstream Reserve no. 13, as it’s called, sits at the base of Mount Finlayson instead of in the area of the river where the community still harvests fish. 

“They carried out the survey of the old fishing village, but the surveyor is the one that took it from here and put it over there, off on the side of the mountain, instead of surveying where our village was,” says Pelkey. “This whole area here used to be filled with longhouses all along the river. Right over there, where that overhang is there, is actually where our family’s longhouse used to be.” 

He turns and points over his shoulder, to a structure not far from Goldstream Park’s gravel parking lot. 

“I was not aware of that until maybe I was in my 30s, when my grandfather asked me to bring him out here. We parked over there, walked down. And he said, ‘Oh, what is this building?’ ”

He told his grandfather, Marshall Pelkey, that it housed the washrooms and that this was now a public park. He became upset, Pelkey recalls.

Known as the “saltwater people,” the ocean is entwined within everything the W̱SÁNEĆ do, Pelkey says.

The W̱SÁNEĆ have maintained a wide and complex network of traditional reef net fishing sites throughout their territory, which encompasses what are currently known as the San Juan Islands, Boundary Bay, the Saanich Inlet and Saanich Peninsula. These reef net sites are not just places to harvest food, but are part of a wider spiritual and community practice. 

In and around Goldstream Park, community members also use streams that feed into the area for ritual bathing, and host a first salmon ceremony each fall to greet their returning salmon relatives. This is in an area right beside the province’s proposed road work site.

“Our people always fished here, no matter where the reserve was. Every winter, our people came here to fish. Conservation officers always tried to stop us, but we always just kept on and dared them to take us to court,” Pelkey says.

That’s exactly what happened one evening 30 years ago, when Olsen and another Tsartlip member, Ivan Morris, were caught hunting by conservation officers on their territory and arrested. 

To hunt and fish as formerly: what the Douglas Treaties really meant

Though it was early evening, it was already getting dark on Nov. 28, 1996, when two men, driving in the woods near Youbou, spotted what appeared to be the glow of deer eyes through the trees. 

They were showing two boys — eight and twelve years old — how to hunt at night with the help of a light. It was something their families had safely done for generations, but was previously done with burning pitch and bows and arrows. 

Morris pulled the vehicle over. Olsen took aim and fired a few shots. He then passed the rifle across the two boys to Morris, who got out of the vehicle and squeezed off two more.

They soon got a nasty surprise. The deer they shot at was, in fact, a decoy, complete with reflective eyes, set up by provincial conservation officers to trap illegal hunters. The vehicle was quickly swarmed by officers and the two men were arrested, Olsen recalls.

“There were probably a dozen or more conservation that surrounded us and even manhandled the kids that were there, threw them up against the hood of the car to search them,” he said.

The two were charged with hunting with a firearm during prohibited hours and hunting with an illuminating device, under provincial wildlife legislation. The subsequent trial revolved around the Crown’s argument that yes, Morris and Olsen had a right to hunt, but that did not include the right to hunt in a way that was “inherently unsafe,” as the trial judge put it.

At trial, the men’s lawyers countered with a vigourous legal defense. Not only were they using safe practices, they argued, their right as Tsartlip members to hunt as they always had was protected under the North Saanich Treaty of 1852, negotiated between nation members and Douglas.

The case dragged on for 10 years. Initially both men were convicted and it was upheld by the B.C. Court of Appeal. However, when it got to the Supreme Court of Canada, the convictions were overturned in a 4-3 vote.

Under consideration was the relevant text of the North Saanich Treaty, which guaranteed that village sites and enclosed fields were to be kept for the W̱SÁNEĆ and their children’s use, though the land itself was to become the “property of the white people for ever.” However it also clearly stated that its signatories were at liberty to hunt and carry on their fisheries “as formerly.”

But there are essentially two versions of what happened with the signing of the treaties — the written settler version backed by Douglas and others’ accounts, and the Indigenous oral version told through history by W̱SÁNEĆ members.

It’s generally understood that on Feb. 7 of 1852, Douglas met with 10 W̱SÁNEĆ members to agree on what became the South Saanich Treaty. He then requested W̱SÁNEĆ chiefs come to another meeting on February 11 during which he negotiated with 118 “men with beards,” as he later described them, in what ended up as the North Saanich Treaty.

Historians have different theories on why these two agreements were negotiated separately, but it’s important to understand the context in which they were negotiated. For a prior treaty with the Songhees Nation, Douglas said he asked the chiefs to sign marks at the bottom of a blank sheet of paper, later adding details above it that resulted in the acquisition of the area’s South Island. Experts believe it’s possible Douglas did the same thing as with the W̱SÁNEĆ as he did with the Songhees, and got them to sign blank paper.

Adding to the complications, the X marks on the North Saanich Treaty that represented signatures “were forged” in that they were supposedly signed by W̱SÁNEĆ members “but were in fact made by the clerk of the Hudson’s Bay Company,” declared Justice Douglas Lambert, in Olsen’s B.C. Court of Appeal case.

There is no evidence that the First Nations signatories saw the agreements after the fact, were given a copy, or knew what text was later added.

To this day, the text of the Saanich Treaties does not match W̱SÁNEĆ’s own oral version, which asserts that the treaties were likely agreements to share the land, not surrender it.

On this point, the court also came to a stunning conclusion in its final ruling, in Olsen’s favour: “The Douglas Treaties were the reflections of oral agreements reduced to writing by agents of the Crown” and that those oral promises made when the treaty was agreed to “are as much a part of the treaty as the written words.”

As the people who wrote the Douglas Treaties down were not the Indigenous people, the court “had to take into account what was the evidence of Indigenous people about what they thought the treaty meant,” says lawyer Louise Mandell, Olsen and Morris’s representative and one of the founding partners of Mandell Pinder, a law firm that specializes in Aboriginal and treaty rights law.

This was important for the legal cases that were to follow, she adds.

There are other reasons that the W̱SÁNEĆ think the treaties were likely land sharing agreements meant to stave off tensions that had arisen at that time for a variety of reasons, including a dispute over timber being harvested by settlers in Cordova Bay. 

Given that the Indigenous population on Vancouver Island at this time was approximately 11,700 people, compared with a settler population of about 700, there wouldn’t be any motivation for the W̱SÁNEĆ to sell off all their land, says Joni Olsen, the policy and negotiations manager for the W̱SÁNEĆ Leadership Council and Carl Olsen’s daughter.

“The concept of selling land at that point in history was not a thing for W̱SÁNEĆ people,” she says, especially in the context of B.C. being the last place in Canada that settlers came. “Maybe on the east coast, where they had been settled hundreds of years before, there were probably those concepts there already, but that didn’t happen here.”

Furthermore, the idea that the W̱SÁNEĆ would sell land in exchange for a “payment” of blankets doesn’t make sense culturally, and represents a fundamental lack of understanding around what gifting means to their people, Joni says.

“I mean, historically, to access land you would have married somebody’s daughter or something like that. There would have been an exchange. And it could have been through Potlatch, where you had an exchange of things like blankets. But it wasn’t to own. It was to share. It was to have access to.”

Last February, Joni helped negotiate a joint statement with the provincial and federal governments to acknowledge W̱SÁNEĆ’s oral version of the treaties. It states that “though Canada and British Columbia have long considered these agreements to be land purchase agreements, W̱SÁNEĆ oral histories hold that they were agreements to settle disputes and establish peaceful relations between the W̱SÁNEĆ Nation and the European settlers.”

But these peaceful relations remain a challenge when it comes to negotiations over the future of Goldstream Park.

Moving Indigenous court victories into the real world

Olsen stands on an outcropping of stone known as “The Rock.” It’s a scenic spot along Mill Bay Road in the Cowichan Valley that looks out across the waters of the Saanich Inlet, which is fed by the Goldstream River. In the distance are the western shores of the Saanich Peninsula; beyond that, a scattering of islands.

The sun is bright, and he cups a hand over his forehead as he looks across the water.

“When I was a kid, this bay was full of salmon. You could see it,” he says. “You really could see it.” These waters and lands were his garden and food source growing up.

“It’s where we harvested food plants, medicine plants, and berries. And when you come to the ocean like this, we harvested our food from the ocean. In fact, I was in my early teens before I even had a store-bought meal. It was like fish, ducks, deer, clams, oysters, seal meat. That was my diet before, up until maybe the mid ’60s,” he says.   

Though he was raised as a hunter and a fisherman, his father taught him those skills in private, under a cloud of fear.

“Most parents in our communities suffered from fear. Fear of losing their kids because of how the residential school would just take you away if there was a problem. They actually lived with that fear right up till the end, and so they never taught us on land here. My dad always taught me when we were out fishing on the boat, when there was nobody around. Nobody to come and take us away,” he says, overcome with emotion. “That’s how it affected the treaty as well. They had to go outside or to the islands to teach us our ways.”

That fear has continued to affect the exercising of their Douglas Treaty rights because those rights are still disrespected and uncertain, he adds.

“It only verifies the rights that I have, that’s what the Douglas Treaty does. Because that’s what we did before, hunting and fishing, being taught with hands-on teaching,” he says. “That fear is still there, because of the inability of the government to come and sit down with you to implement that court ruling.”

Of the five historical court cases that involved Douglas Treaty rights — including Olsen’s — each one resulted in victory. And every case presented its own legal challenge.

“It wasn’t as if we sat around, thinking about what all we have to do to win whatever,” says Mandell, the lawyer who represented Olsen and Morris. “In every case, we nuanced what the arguments were going to be, and we built the law — gradually.” 

In the 1980s Mandell worked on the 1987 Saanichton Marina case, around a development company’s intention to dredge and develop a commercial marina in Saanichton Bay that was home to eel grass beds, crabs, salmon and trout. 

The legal team wondered how they could assert the treaty “not as a shield but as a sword,” Mandell says. Rather than defend themselves from persecution, they would now assert their rights proactively, to protect the crab fishery and the Tsawout Nation’s traditional fishing grounds.

Essentially, Saanichton Marina Ltd.’s argument was that the “right to fish as formerly,” as stated in the treaties, meant the company could simply pick up and move the eel grass habitat elsewhere. The fish would still be there to harvest, so what was the problem?

The court agreed with Tsawout’s lawyers that found that a fishery is actually the place where fish are harvested, and the right includes the nation’s capacity and the capacity of a nation to care for it, so they’re not deprived of that right.  

“It’s both the incidental aspect and also the place itself. It’s not the right to put your fish net in the water and pull out a fish. It’s the right to continue to protect and harvest and steward and be reciprocal, inside the place that the fishing is happening,” Mandell says. 

This was a crucial and far-reaching finding, and directly relevant to the fight at Goldstream Park — the concept that nation members not only had the right to fish as formerly, but to protect their harvest. 

It’s been a rallying cry for Olsen ever since.

“My relatives fought for that. And the decision that came out of there was that they not only had the right to hunt and fish as formerly, they have the right to protect what they hunted and fished as formerly,” says Olsen. “That’s why I’m here. I’m protecting what belongs to us, our relatives that come up the stream that feed us.”

However, Mandell says there is a huge difference between winning a case and translating that legal victory into political action.

“I can’t tell you how many times we came home from the Supreme Court of Canada thinking we had died and gone to legal heaven, only to find out nothing much changed on the ground. I think that’s the difference between winning a legal point and actually having the capacity to move that victory into shifting the political landscape,” Mandell says.

Olsen, standing on the side of the Malahat protesting for the protection of Goldstream, embodies that distinction.

Despite decades of court cases and historical agreements which upheld the W̱SÁNEĆ people’s rights not only to their village site but also to their fishing grounds at SELE₭TEȽ, despite three years of weekly protests to highlight these rights, it appeared the government’s $162-million highway improvement plan was poised to go ahead.

That is, until Olsen received a phone call in February this year from some members of the W̱SÁNEĆ Leadership Council to tell him they had received some news.

‘Do what you can’

The province had an announcement to make about the Malahat highway. The widening project was being paused. The leadership council members congratulated him.

In a February news release, the province said additional work was required “to address environmental considerations in this sensitive area of Goldstream Park” and understand the project’s impacts.

“I thought, ‘Well, that’s great,’” Olsen says. But he also doubts whether the government will keep its word.

“In the past we’ve had meetings with businesses and government offices and in our longhouses here and come to agreements with them. Then not even a couple of days later, they break those agreements,” he says.

“This could be one of those issues. You know they said they were pausing it, and in their statement, they talk about how they need to better understand the environment and do more research on the environment there, which tells me we were right in thinking that they didn’t really have an environmental plan.”

From the beginning, the province wanted W̱SÁNEĆ members to accept their environmental assessment without question, Olsen says. But he always felt that there was something odd about being asked to accept something without fully agreeing to it. From what nation members could see, the environmental risks were obvious — even from the government’s own assessment report.

The purpose of the environmental assessment was to identify issues, and “some of these considerations were brought to light through that process,” Ministry of Transit and Transportation spokesperson Murray Sinclair stated in an email.

“This does not mean the report was incomplete. The purpose of an environmental assessment is to identify issues, and some of these considerations were brought to light through that process,” Sinclair stated. Given the complexity of the site and the sensitivity of the habitat, addressing those issues will take time, he added.

The ministry is currently conducting a review of crash data in the area as part of an update to its 2012 study of the Highway 1 Malahat corridor.

What about Olsen’s concern that the project is merely on pause, and not actually cancelled?

“It’s possible the project could be revisited in the future. However, there is no timeline or estimate for when that might occur,” stated Sinclair.

This is why, for now, Olsen has decided to keep up his weekly protests.

“We want better decisions made about Goldstream and protecting the watershed especially. It’s about protecting the whole area,” he says. “It’s really important that we recognize where we stand in the whole thing. I’m not going to leave. I think they expected me to leave. We’re still there.”

On-the-ground reporting for this story is made possible with support from Carleton University’s Peter Stursberg Award in Conflict Journalism and Media Studies. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, no foundation or outside organization has editorial input into our stories.

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Assar Grinde is the kind of man whose calm is infectious, even as he rattles off an encyclopedic knowledge of facts about drought, water and the impacts of fracking on the region he calls home. A cattle rancher by trade who studied geology at the University of Alberta, you get the sense he’d rather be tending his herd than fighting with regulators and oil and gas companies.

But on a Sunday in early July after a morning on the ranch, he sits in the back of his friend Daniel Iseli-Otto’s truck, sporting a sweater knit by Iseli-Otto’s mom, and talks about the reasons he can’t just walk away.

It started three years ago when Lloyd Creek — a tributary of the Blindman River, which runs through the land Grinde’s family has ranched for generations — dried up. It was something he’d never seen before and he says the oil and gas companies were still pulling water from the river.

“We wanted to make sure that the river didn’t dry up because we thought that was crazy,” Grinde says.

He and Iseli-Otto helped found the Blindman River Watershed Society and dove into the labyrinth of data used by the Alberta Energy Regulator and the equally bewildering bureaucratic divisions of the provincial government.

It’s a funny time to be talking about the stress on the Blindman River watershed and the concerns he and Iseli-Otto have when it comes to the vast quantities of fresh water being used by oil and gas companies for hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

The fields around Rimbey, Alta., about 200 kilometres north of Calgary, are saturated in surreal hues of green, stark against the grey skies of an abnormally wet July that has brought much-needed rain.

It’s a far cry from the drought-like conditions of May and June, conditions that have become all too common in a region suffering through a decade-long dry spell.

But the sudden rush of water isn’t enough to quell the concerns of area ranchers and residents who watched that creek run dry and their drinking wells drop. They say the rain isn’t enough to make up for how much has been lost from the aquifers — the deep underground natural reservoirs that feed those wells.

And then there’s the issue of oil and gas companies using billions of litres of water to crack open the earth beneath those green fields and exploit one of the hottest gas fields going, the Duvernay. They take surface water when there isn’t any to spare, and a fleeting moment of plenty might only make it worse, according to landowners who met with The Narwhal.

Grinde says promises were made by those companies, but rarely kept.

“ ‘We’re going to be taking the water at high flows when there’s too much of it, and we’ll store it and then use it when we need it.’ That was the industry’s sales pitch,” he says, driving through the region southwest of Edmonton along with Iseli-Otto. “But then we’ve been in a drought eight of the last 10 years, and they are still pulling water down.”

Dana Kreil, the chair of the nearby Medicine River Watershed Society, and a councillor for Lacombe County, says there’s no trust in the province to monitor the water and to intervene. Her society has bought its own monitoring equipment and is pressuring the government for solutions.

“You can’t fool the locals,” she says, making it clear she’s speaking for the watershed society and not the county. “There are people telling me the top of their runners wouldn’t get wet in that river. So you can’t tell me that those are acceptable levels for pumping from there.”

‘You only get conflict when there’s scarcity’

The Blindman River, as well as the Medicine, aren’t among the great waterways of the world. With enough momentum, it wouldn’t be hard to leap from one bank to the other. They are slow and meandering, but they are critical to ranchers and farmers.

They are also tenuous.

Neither river is fed by the mountain glaciers to the west. They rely instead on spring runoff and underground aquifers to keep water flowing. This year’s early-summer drenching is an indication of the feast and famine cycles expected to be the norm as the climate shifts — droughts with sudden onslaughts of rain. Grinde says his ranch received almost as much rain in June as it did the entire year previous.

For decades, fracking companies here have been injecting water deep into the ground to break up rock holding gaseous wealth in tight crevasses. That water, vast quantities of it, is almost entirely permanently lost to the water cycle as it remains trapped in the reservoirs that previously held gas. The practice was largely accepted by area landowners, but then water became scarce and drilling activity increased.

“We haven’t had to care about fresh water because we never had this issue before,” Grinde says. “You only get conflict when there’s scarcity, and you have that imbalance between supply and demand, and that’s really what’s happened in the last few years.”

Once Grinde and others started paying attention, they discovered a system of what they say is weak oversight, weak data and regulatory capitulation.

Water use is overseen by both Alberta’s Environment Ministry and the energy regulator — depending on who’s using the resource — and Grinde says it leads to a lot of plausible deniability. Water monitoring in the area is based on a federal government sensor 50 kilometres away in Blackfalds, Alta., but Grinde says it doesn’t actually measure the flow of the river, just the water pressure. Even if it did, Grinde thinks the minimum flows established by the province to determine when a company can pull river water for fracking are too low.

The Alberta Energy Regulator did not answer a question about the monitoring situation on Blindman River, but said monitoring is used to inform when a company can divert water. It noted that monitoring can be seen on the Alberta Rivers site.

The regulator says companies are responsible for measuring flow if there is no station nearby.

“So then that kind of led us down this path of trying to figure out: ‘Do you guys have rules around it?’ ” asked Grinde.

For some in the area, the answer is more uncertain than they’re comfortable with.

Company wants to pull billions of litres from critical freshwater aquifer

In March, Spartan Delta, a fracking company operating in the area, applied for a water licence to pump a maximum of 475 million litres of water per year — about 2.4 million bathtubs’ worth — from the Paskapoo Formation, a vast underground freshwater reservoir that stretches south past Calgary and north past the Athabasca River near Fox Creek.

That raised red flags for those in the region already worried about a strained system.

Grinde wants the government to prevent oil and gas companies from accessing shallow fresh groundwater for fracking, implementing a ban now so that it doesn’t have to draft new rules in the midst of a full-blown crisis.

“Right now [the companies] say, ‘Well, we don’t have any more surface water available to get licensed, we’re just going to start drilling shallow groundwater wells,’ which is really concerning because we don’t know enough about the groundwater, and it’s so vital to everybody who’s living here,” he says.

Tens of thousands of wells tap into the aquifer for drinking water, as do towns across Alberta. According to a report by the federal government, the Paskapoo “supports more groundwater wells than any other aquifer system in the Canadian Prairies,” making it “the most significant supply of groundwater” in the whole region.

That same federal report — published almost 20 years ago — also cautioned the aquifer is slow to recharge and the amount of water that can be pulled from the aquifer might be limited and may have already been exceeded in 2008.

Spartan Delta already pumps water from the Medicine River, with hoses stretching along ditches and culverts throughout the region pulling water into massive reservoirs. It also uses recycled water from its operations, but that only accounts for approximately 10 per cent of its use.

In 2024, the latest year of data from the Alberta Energy Regulator, Spartan Delta used approximately 171 million litres of fresh water for fracking. Its latest application shows the company estimates it will need much more than this, around 1.5 billion litres per year for the next 10 years.

The company did not answer emailed questions but sent a statement instead, saying it is focused on “responsible, sustainable development of oil and gas.”

Spartan Delta said it adheres to all rules and regulations set out by the regulator, Alberta’s Environment Ministry and local bylaws.

“All of our water use is determined by Alberta Environment,” reads a portion of its statement. “The company receives temporary diversion approvals, term licences and has undergone several audits to validate we are in compliance with all of the terms of the water approvals. All resident concerns are evaluated by the appropriate regulating body of our activities during the approval process.”

The regulator also did not directly answer questions emailed by The Narwhal, but did provide information on water use. An unidentified spokesperson said the regulator reviews all water licence applications and considers risks to individuals and the environment. The spokesperson added there are restrictions on water use if levels drop below prescribed thresholds and that restrictions can also be implemented in response to “landowner concerns.”

Analysis on aquifers is conducted by hydrogeology experts, the email said.

Though landowners are concerned about Spartan Delta’s water use, the company is a small player compared to others.

Parallax Energy Operations used almost one billion litres in 2024, while Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., one of the largest oil and gas companies in Canada, used 2.9 billion litres of fresh water for operations across the province. Overall, fracking consumed 20 billion litres of fresh water in 2024, up sharply from the seven billion litres consumed in 2013.

Grinde’s goal is to prove to the province and the regulator that the aquifer is dropping, realizing that officials could just turn around and say, well, it’s a drought.

“But even if it is a drought, the volume of water that the companies are using for fracking is accelerating that,” he says. “It could be that if there’s only a certain amount of water, you have to justify the use for certain things, right? So maybe you have to talk about hierarchy of use.”

Time and again, Grinde, Kreil and Iseli-Otto talk about the amount of work required to collect information, to get in touch with provincial officials, to make someone listen. Without decades of data, the response from officials and companies is: prove it.

“It’s the province’s job,” Kreil says. “It’s not the watershed society’s job. We’re volunteers.”

The provincial government did not respond to questions emailed by The Narwhal.

Alberta ranchers say their bison herd collapsed when a fracking company moved in

It’s easy to look out across the fields and patches of trees and imagine the landscape in central Alberta is largely unchanged, but Iseli-Otto, who works as a carpenter and has lived here his whole life, looks out his truck window and remembers bush where fields now stretch — a child’s wilderness transformed into cropland. It’s a reminder of how quickly things can change. How the immutable becomes a memory.

The change can be slow, or it can come on in a relative blink.

Tucked into a secluded corner of the countryside, is the home of Butch and Nicole Smith, two bison ranchers who have lived and worked in the area for decades, with the dream — shared by one of their daughters — of passing their ranch to the next generation.

Inside the home, a stuffed cougar looks down from its final perch above the kitchen, and the walls are covered in framed rodeo photos showing the victories of the family’s horses. Tail Light was the “team roping heading horse of the year.” Hickory, the “2011 pole bending horse of the year.” Their daughters have won an astonishing number of championship rodeo belts and saddles, all of which are on display.

A hint of the Smiths’ directness, and their frustration, comes in the form of a small sign by the kitchen table: “What (and I can’t stress this enough) the f*ck,” it reads.

Over bison burgers and sausages, the Smiths talk about how Spartan Delta cleared the land across from their feedlot and built two massive reservoirs two years ago to store the vast quantities of water the company pumps. They talk about how construction and pumping for the reservoirs, which bisect a wetland, led to startling changes in their bison herd.

“We started seeing the wildest behaviour from them,” Nicole says. “They’re very habitual animals.”

The herd was refusing to move to the areas they usually feed, and there was a sudden drop in their herd.

Nicole says they had 240 pregnant cows in the fall of 2024, but only 194 live births.

“We had many dead calves, aborted calves and calves that starved as stressed mothers produce not enough milk,” she says.

The Smiths blame the stress of the industrial activity and the disruption to stubborn routines.

The Smiths, however, aren’t the types to sit back and watch. They say they’ve spoken with their MLA, Jason Nixon, with the premier, with two environment ministers — Rebecca Schulz and RJ Sigurdson — and Energy Minister Brian Jean. They are working with Ecojustice, an environmental legal outfit, and were invited by the Alberta NDP to sit in the legislature last spring after speaking with MLA Nagwan Al-Guneid.

Now, after two years of fighting, they’re losing faith and plan to move.

“Neither one of us is a — how do I say it — a sitter arounder. I’m not gonna sit here and be miserable. I can’t even walk anymore because both ways just reminds you of all of it,” Nicole says.

“I’m raging when I hit the end of my driveway — every single time.”

‘There’s very little oversight right now’

Tensions are high in the region where fracking butts up against homes and ranches. In early July, a rumour spread that some of the hoses that pump water from ponds and rivers were shot at, but the Alberta RCMP said there were no reports of an incident on that day. Perhaps most telling was that none of the people who spoke with The Narwhal seemed surprised, although no one supported the idea and warned of the danger of puncturing the high-pressure lines.

There is a real sense that landowners have been abandoned in favour of oil and gas.

Kreil, whose society includes representatives from eight municipalities, including Red Deer, Lacombe County and Sylvan Lake, said the group recently met with the minister of Environment and Protected Areas and the CEO of the Alberta Energy Regulator to talk about the stress on the watershed. In its presentation, the society noted more than half of all fresh water in their watershed is allocated for oil and gas. Temporary water licences are almost entirely for fracking.

She says the minister told them to write a resolution calling for policy changes through the Rural Municipalities of Alberta — an organization which represents towns and districts across the province.

“I think he felt that he had dealt with us enough to say: ‘Write a resolution,’ ” she says.

Kreil stresses she’s not opposed to oil and gas, or to fracking in particular, but there has to be a balance.

“When we went to the minister, we said we want some solutions,” she says. “We’re not just coming here to bellyache and complain.”

Her organization wants to see more wastewater treated and reused, including municipal wastewater, to reduce or eliminate fresh water use. It wants better data on the state of the watersheds and a better understanding of drought and its impacts. And it wants new regulations governing use by agriculture, oil and gas and municipalities.

But those critical of the way fracking companies are operating all point their finger at the regulator when asked what the biggest problem is. The rules are weak and out of touch, responsibility is passed on and there’s no enforcement, they say.

“The problem with the Alberta Energy Regulator is there’s very little oversight right now,” Kreil says.

Iseli-Otto says he tried alerting a contact at the regulator about companies pumping from the Blindman River in May when the water levels were worryingly low, but nothing came of it.

Two days later, he was driving home and the pumps were running.

“So I texted him and I said, ‘Hey man, pumps are running, what’s going on? Why is this happening?,’ ” he says. In screenshots of the text messages shared with The Narwhal, Iseli-Otto then asks if someone from the regulator had checked to see if the pumps had stopped.

“That’s the point at which I got the automated text message saying this number is not monitored.”

Alberta pushes to double production, build pipelines

The regulator is an arms-length government body, but that doesn’t mean it’s entirely independent. The government sets the overall policy direction for the regulator to follow, for example, and the government appoints the regulator’s board of directors.

Recently, it appointed David Yager to the board, a long-time friend of Premier Danielle Smith who also acts as one of her special advisors, and tasked him with overseeing a revamp of the organization.

There have also been revelations of direct intervention from the provincial government into regulatory decisions.

And the direction from the government is clear: it wants to double oil and gas production and it’s willing to incentivize companies to do so, even as it helps finance a new pipeline to the West Coast.

With the push for more production and without more stringent rules on water use, the problems in the area are likely to continue, or increase.

“We’ve had companies tell us ‘We’re not doing anything differently until the government tells us to,’ because it’s a competitive industry,” Grinde says.

“We said to the minister, as long as this is free, they will never change,” Kreil adds.

But in the end, something has to give, she says.

“You can’t be running the people out of water for oil.”

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Summary

• Indigenous culture camps are happening across Canada this summer. Revitalizing cultural practices, spending time on the land, and participating in ceremonies is the focus of most camps. 
• Despite dozens of wildfires across B.C., organizers are fulfilling their commitments, highlighting the importance of hosting communities and organizations.
• Some culture camps have been happening for decades, while other communities hosted their first camp this year.

For 10 days in July, Qaqaqam Chris Wells spent time on the land camping with Líl̓wat youth, teaching Lil̓wat7úl cultural protocols, songs and stories. The Kwáozán̓tsut cultural summer camps have been “a long time coming,” he said. 

“Bringing our children back onto the land is teaching them land based healing and learning,” Wells told the Narwhal. “It was really awesome to bring back our culture.”

Hosted at Klháka7min, previously known as the Coast Mountain Outdoor School, two separate age groups camped for five days each between July 6th and July 17th. 

Though the youth were a bit shy at first, Wells and fellow camp leaders Ánwasúlmec Brett Wallace and Sík Sík Joshua Anderson say that by the end of each cohort, seeing how the participants had come out of their shells was a highlight.

“It was extra special for me: I had two of my daughters there, one in each age group,” Anderson said. “It was an opportunity to spend more time with them during the busy summer.”

During this year’s culture camp, a wildfire prompted evacuations in Pemberton, located approximately 25 kilometres down the road. Despite the nearby fire, the culture camps were a success — connecting youth with tradition, the land and culture. 

“We were pretty safe from all the fires happening around us,” Wells said. He’s stewarded the territory since he was a youth.

Land-based learning, education and connection

Between the two age groups — 9 to 12-year-olds, and teens — 30 youth attended the camps. 

Líl̓wat Elders took youth out onto the land, teaching them about edible berries and teas that grow in the area during that time of year.

“Every evening we had singing and drumming, and talked about cultural protocols. We talked about the origin of the songs. We talked about our ceremonies,” Wells said. 

Archery, axe throwing and rifle shooting with the older age group all took place with laughter and storytelling throughout. 

Youth had the opportunity to make traditional rattles and smudge bowls, ceremonial items that can be hard to access for a young person. Anderson said numerous parents reached out to him after the camp, sharing how their child went home wanting to practice their culture more through smudging. 

The youth even made a swimming hole to jump into cold glacier water, adding some casual fun into the mix, and relief from the hot summer days. 

“You can’t forget the fun part of it. We had the opportunity to play bone game in the evening time,” Anderson said, which showed the youth “how disputes were settled in a traditional manner.” 

The bone game is a traditional game used historically as an alternative to war by nations along the Salish Sea, and has other names such as “stick game” or “hand game” in other regions of Western Canada.

Youth were also split into three groups and tasked with helping in the kitchen. Local Lil̓wat7úl chef Casey Gabriel taught them how to cook for the group and clean up afterwards. 

The Kwáozán̓tsut Cultural Summer Camps were championed by the organizing trio of Anderson, Wells and Wallace, who are no strangers to hosting culture camps. But despite hosting camps in St’át’imc Nation communities for years, it took some time to prepare and build the trust required to host youth camps in their own nation. 

Now the Líl̓wat Nation wants to host another culture camp this fall. Wells, Wallace and Anderson are all looking forward to sharing their knowledge and helping out.

Now in its 15th year, Nlha’7kapmx annual culture camp is a ‘safe haven’

Excitement for future camps is a sentiment shared by Michelle Isaac, who always lends a helping hand at an annual Nlaka’pamux culture camp hosted at Pasulko Lake, located in B.C.’s Southern Interior.

“My stepmom at the time, Amy Chapman, brought me up to what used to be called the healing gathering. All I remember from there was how much of a difference it made in my life,” Isaac told the Narwhal. 

She attended the healing gathering after surviving a severe car accident, but over the years, the annual gathering lost volunteers and resources. 

Having experienced the healing energy of gathering herself, and meeting with the service agency about how to support community members, Isaac and a group of ladies working for Nlha’7kapmx Child and Family Services decided to spearhead a community based culture camp.

Now in its 15th year, people in the area look forward to gathering at Pasulko Lake each summer, practicing culture and being together on the land. 

This year, a mix of cultural activities, including drum making, cedar weaving and language friendship bracelet making took place, along with activities such as a tug-of-war game between youth and the local firefighting group, the Lytton Rattlers, and a performance by local band Ritchie and the Fenderman.

Isaac attends camp each year with her children, who are part of the Lower Nicola Indian Band community. While Isaac is not Indigenous herself, she still attends with an open heart and mind, supporting in any way she can. When wildfires are burning, she sees the camps as an especially important place for youth. 

“They’re able to come up there and do the activities, do the crafts, I find it takes a lot of stress and fear from the fire away from them,” Isaac said. This year, it’s also been an important refuge for her as well, after she was evacuated in July due to the nearby Brunswick Creek wildfire.

“Fire-wise, for me it was a safe haven. My one daughter came up as well, who was also evacuated, and hung out all week there. It gave me a safe place,” she said.

Across B.C. and Canada, wildfires disproportionately impact First Nations communities. Though they represent only five per cent of the population, it’s estimated that First Nations make up 42 per cent of all wildfire evacuations. 

As wildfires blaze all around the Interior, the camp offered a break from smoke for those in attendance. On event posters this year, air quality warnings were addressed, with evacuation routes marked along the way to camp as a precaution.

People who attended camp were asked to register at the sign in desk daily, to track who was there, and were informed about a muster point in the event of evacuation. 

The decision to continue on with both culture camps was deliberated by organizers carefully, with designated people monitoring surrounding wildfires.

Renegerating the land through fire

B.C. was the first province or territory in Canada to ban cultural burning in 1874, prohibiting generations of Indigenous people from stewarding their territories with fire. In 2024, 150 years later, the province officially amended wildfire regulations to support cultural burns. Today, many nations are in the process of reclaiming this practice, including Líl̓wat. 

“We can’t look at fire as dangerous all of the time. We gotta look at it as an element that helps us regenerate, and help us repurpose the land,” Wallace added.

An example of fire regenerating the land was visible to those at Líl̓wat’s culture camps through an abundance of berries, following a cultural burn several years before.

“That specific area was culturally burnt seven or eight years ago and now finally it’s starting to reproduce huckleberries,” Wallace said. “It’s not just a small piece of land, it’s a really big area, and the whole area was covered in huckleberries and raspberries because of these cultural burns that happened.”

Youth were able to harvest these berries, and surrounding wildlife have a tasty treat. 

And in the era of technology, culture camps give youth the opportunity to disconnect from the internet, and to connect with the natural world. 

“Back in our time, we didn’t have technology to hold us back from being out on the land,” Wells said. “It’s important to return to land-based healing … to be St’át’imc, and to do St’át’imc things.”

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Summary

• As climate change causes the Arctic to warm, the region’s permafrost — a layer of soil that stays frozen throughout the year — is beginning to thaw.
• In the Inuit community of Nain in Labrador, residents are witnessing the impacts of permafrost thaw. Ground that used to be solid is becoming unsteady, putting buildings at risk.
• Permafrost thaw also threatens to accelerate climate change, because permafrost releases carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere as it melts.

In central Nain, the largest community in northern Labrador, Joey Angnatok used shipping containers to build his warehouse.

He placed the two sea cans on hefty steel H-beams, leaving some room beneath them, should he need to jack up one end or the other against the sloping, ever-changing ground.

The land under them, he says, is “alive, like it’s always moving.” 

Some of the Nunatsiavut region, the Labrador Inuit Land Claims Agreement area in northern Labrador where Nain is located, is underlaid with permafrost. It’s a layer of soil and sediment, rock and ice — sometimes all of them together — that remains frozen for more than two years. Permafrost is ubiquitous across the Arctic and much of the subarctic, with some of the oldest layers believed to have remained frozen for hundreds of thousands of years.

But despite its longevity in some places, as the climate warms, permafrost thaw is becoming an increasingly inescapable problem.

“I hate it because I own a few properties around town, and unfortunately the melting of the permafrost is playing havoc with the foundations and movements of the buildings and all that kind of stuff,” Angnatok says. 

That’s why he built his warehouse to mitigate the undulating effects of permafrost thaw. “Because the land was so bad there, I figured we’d try something different instead of your normal ‘pour the concrete down and then build your wood structure on that,’ ” he explains. 

Three years after building, he says he’s still holding his breath. 

Nain is a community at the forefront of change. What’s happening here is being seen elsewhere in the North, and will continue to as the climate warms, thawing and reshaping the foundations on which communities are built.

As Canada eyes expansion and development in the Arctic, thawing permafrost could have a big impact. So what is it — and how fast is it changing?

Climate change and human activity are driving permafrost thaw

In another part of the community, there used to be a convenience store called Puffin Snacks, where everything — including the building — was tilted to one side. “If you walked into the building, you just started running in because it was just so sloped,” Michelle Saunders, a Nain resident and research manager for the Nunatsiavut Government, recalls. 

Puffin Snacks, too, was built on permafrost — a study on permafrost in Nain, published in 2021, shows that much of the infrastructure across the community has been impacted in some way as the ground shifts and sinks beneath it.

As the climate changes — far faster in the Arctic than elsewhere around the world — permafrost is thawing as temperatures rise. 

Robert Way, an associate professor at Queen’s University in the Department of Geography and Planning, is from Labrador and is one of the authors of the study on permafrost in Nain. Spending three to four months each year in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Labrador, and the rest of his time in Kingston, Ont., he studies the impacts of climate change in the subarctic region. 

In addition to climate change, Way says human activities such as construction of buildings and roads can also impact permafrost. “Building a house over top of permafrost, especially in areas where the permafrost is relatively warmer, often will contribute more heat into the system and will result in permafrost starting to thaw,” he says. Building roads also leads to stripping vegetation and piling up snow, which he says can also impact the permafrost underneath. 

These changes are on the minds of Saunders and her colleagues, as they manage and facilitate research programs in and with Nunatsiavut communities. And it affects their personal lives too.

Saunders, who moved to Nain five years ago, is thinking of building a cabin. Permafrost thaw, she says, is a risk she considers with possible locations. “Is this actually a good spot? Will this cause my cabin to shift over time? And I am not totally sure how to figure that out.” Because permafrost thaw is a recent phenomenon, she cannot use knowledge from Elders or other knowledge holders to help figure out where to build on lands with no permafrost.

For her and other residents of Nain, the ground shifting under their feet is a reality that can’t be ignored. “I think it’s something you have to think about now, for sure,” she says.

Permafrost thaw can damage not only infrastructure but also vegetation and wildlife found on top of it.

Across the North, Way says, the permafrost layer can range from a single metre to thousands of metres thick. 

If the average year-round temperature in a region is zero degrees or below, Way says, you generally start to encounter permafrost. “You really start to have a lot of permafrost once you get in the vicinity of Nain, and moving north from there,” Way says.

Way says that with permafrost thaw, change is gradual at first — and then sudden. “It actually takes a lot of energy to melt that ground ice,” he says, adding, “What you’ll see happen is it’ll take sort of a while before it thaws, maybe numbers of years. But, then once it starts to thaw, you start to see the surface usually sinking down.”

Permafrost thaw impacts everything in the natural environment

Nain sits at the edge of the Labrador Sea, at 57 degrees north — roughly on parallel with Fort McMurray, Alta.

It’s surrounded by rocky mountains covered in lichen, capped in snow well into May.

The gravel airstrip hugs the community’s shore, suitable only for a twin otter plane or smaller, with the smell of sea salt wafting up from the Labrador Sea. 

The houses are colourful, standing out against the red, green and white of shrubs and trees, some standing unevenly on sloping ground.

As well as being the largest, Nain is the northernmost community in Nunatsiavut, a 72,520-square-kilometre, Inuit-governed area that includes five communities in total. The permafrost found here is discontinuous, which means it’s interspersed with patches of unfrozen ground, Way says.

Permafrost is also found in the southern regions of Labrador, in high mountains and hills that have blowing wind patterns in winter, and along the south coast in peatland areas. Way says that in Labrador, snow thickness is one of the most important controls on the distribution of permafrost. He says thicker snow insulates the ground, leading to more peatland permafrost in the most wind-exposed sites where snow is less likely to accumulate.

And it can be found beneath the ocean in shallow waters in the High Arctic, Way says. There’s a rare patch of more southerly subsea permafrost in Webb Bay, north of Nain.

As permafrost thaws, it releases carbon dioxide and methane, which both contribute to global warming. Around the world, permafrost stores as much as 1.7 gigatons of carbon dioxide — about three times more than what’s currently found in the atmosphere. And while permafrost has historically acted as a “carbon sink” — storing massive amounts of carbon from dead plants and decaying organic matter underground — that thaw may turn it into a carbon emitter.

Subsea permafrost thaw beneath coastal waters also releases greenhouse gases, and the warming Arctic Ocean could release up to 250 gigatons of carbon dioxide by the year 2100, according to 2021 estimates from the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative. Another estimate, from the European Space Agency Climate Office, predicts that by the end of this century, thawing permafrost will emit more greenhouse gases each year than all of the European Union countries combined, amplifying climate change more than what it is now.

Beyond greenhouse gases, permafrost thawing contains other risks — including the carcinogen radon, and the remains of humans and animals, which may contain still-active pathogens. The Canadian Wildlife Association says infectious diseases such as smallpox, anthrax and the 1918 influenza are among the potential risks, as well as unknown pathogens from generations ago. 

Thawing permafrost has impacts on daily life in Nain

Angnatok is a fisherman in Nain, and turns his fishing boat into a research vessel at the end of the fishing season. He has been a part of various research teams, including one studying permafrost thaw around Nain, and he’s seen how it plays into everyday life in Labrador — for the better and the worse.

He recalls collecting Arctic char from fishermen along the north coast of Labrador, where they would use snow to keep the fish frozen and then when the snow melted, “they would start digging away the ground,” he says, to reach the permafrost. “They would start chopping that ice down and using that to keep their char cold.” 

He’s also seen it shift, like near Nain’s airport building. “If you dig down, even just three or four inches, you’ll hit solid permafrost.” The airstrip is one of many sites around town listed in the 2021 report as having permafrost underneath. That report recommends long-term temperature monitoring at depth to study permafrost, and cautions that future community expansion and site-selection initiatives need to factor in permafrost. 

As well as climate change thawing permafrost, it can also thaw due to human activities, such as building roads or houses, which makes the ground underneath warmer and changes the way the environment is managed. 

In much of the Arctic, homes and other buildings are constructed on stilts and piles to keep them from warming the permafrost below. 

Chaim Andersen is the infrastructure planning coordinator for the Nunatsiavut Government, and sees the impacts of permafrost thaw in the community. “It’s a huge problem, especially for housing, because obviously we get really cold winters.” If the ground thaws and shifts, it can damage the housing above it. “Then there’s opportunities for cracks to be in the wall and for drafts to come through during the winter, which makes it really difficult to heat the home,” Andersen says, adding that the costs of heating are already high in the region. 

Andersen’s role includes planning and implementing infrastructure projects, navigating what housing needs in the community exist and also what infrastructure needs there are. She says in the remote community, accessing materials for repairs can be challenging.

“If there are any kind of identified areas in community that have permafrost, there’s kind of two things that happen. One is either it makes the land difficult to develop on, or you can’t develop it all because the buildings need to be up to standard and having that foundational instability makes it really difficult,” Andersen says. 

Permafrost, land and water: it’s all connected

Yifeng Wang, a research scientist for the federal government on permafrost research, says that permafrost can impact other parts of the ecosystem, and vice versa. 

“If you have shrubs, they tend to trap the snow in the winter, and that creates a thick, insulating blanket almost over the ground.” This can cause permafrost to thaw. 

Vegetation found on mounds of permafrost in northern Labrador includes lichen, and berries such as bakeapples, redberries or blueberries, Wang says. Animals like caribou rely on these plants as a food source, and are impacted by permafrost thaw.  

Angnatok wonders if the Arctic char habitat around Nain is being affected by subsea permafrost thawing, “because the permafrost below the ocean appears to be melting also, so therefore the waters are warming during the summer season in the areas. What effects is that having on, like, say char or anything else in that area?” Species that were never found near Nain, like salmon, are now being observed in the surrounding rivers; he and other community members wonder if this shift is linked to the permafrost thaw. 

Permafrost thaw in the Arctic and subarctic is impacting everything in the ecosystem, including the people who have built their lives on top of it. As shifting ground becomes more common beneath northern communities, damaging infrastructure and altering the landscape, the growing challenge of thawing permafrost is a reality that can’t be ignored.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘This is their land’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prevention better than the alternatives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Practical steps Haines Junction has taken to support grizzly bear coexistence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The laws of living with grizzlies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bear 141

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She’s doing what a bear should do.”

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

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.