On a grassy slope in Kanaka Bar, a herd of goats frolic and play. But this isn’t a farm or a petting zoo — it’s an innovative wildfire mitigation effort from the First Nation.

Some of the goats loudly bleat as they chow down on invasive species and overgrown brush. 

“In the last five years, Kanaka community has been experiencing devastation with fire,” Pauline Michell told The Narwhal.

That includes two evacuations due to wildfires, as well as floods and mudslides that have closed roads and cut off her community from the world. And in Kanaka Bar, there is no fire truck or fire hall. “Kanaka has solely been on its own in regards to fire,” said Michell.

Located in Nlaka’pamux territory, 20 kilometres south of Lytton, Kanaka Bar Indian Band also goes by T’eqt’ aqtn’mux, “the crossing place people.” 

In 2021, the Lytton Creek wildfire devastated the area, evacuating numerous First Nations for years, while burning structures and homes to the ground. 

Later that year, an atmospheric river raged through the Fraser and Thompson Rivers, washing out roads and cutting people off from leaving Kanaka Bar.

According to a new report from the office of the B.C. human rights commissioner, between 2000 and 2024, First Nation reserves accounted for 36 of 37 communities where at least half of the total land area was burned by wildfire, with the only non-reserve community being Lytton.

Further, First Nation reserves in B.C. are four times more likely to be impacted by wildfire than non-reserve communities. 

This prompted Michell, an elected councillor in her community, to take a proactive approach to the wildfire season. 

Since late July, a herd of goats have been eating their way through the Kanaka Bar Indian Band, targeting areas with built up fuel and brush that would burn up in a fire. 

About 80 goats have been clocking in this summer, while a few goats like Dandelion and Cuddley are part of a rebel club in their own separate enclosure.

“This is a trial for Kanaka, to look at fuel management in this way,” said Michell. 

“Hearing about these goats being able to do this sounded really intriguing and interesting,” she added.

The idea came by accident, after an area grazed by sheep acted as a fire stop during a wildfire three years prior.

“Back in 2023, the Kookipi Creek fire came through … We had been grazing the sheep that we had out in this back area, and when that fire came through, it actually came pretty much all the way down to community, and then it stopped where the sheep had been grazing,” Emma Bryce told The Narwhal.

She recalled thinking, “This is really cool, we just kind of made our own fire break without really intending to.”

Bryce has been the nation’s food self-sufficiency lead since 2022, and after the sheep experience, started researching different animals to graze in the community.

“In conversations with chief and council, I brought it up and was like, ‘What if we used goats to do wildfire risk reduction?’ They were like, ‘okay, let’s do it.’” 

“This goat grazing project has been a passion project of mine for the last couple of years,” Bryce said, after she took the green light from Kanaka and ran with it. That’s when she met Bruce Bradley, who does contract work across B.C. with his herd of goats. 

Based on Vancouver Island, it took three trips by ferry to bring his herd to the mainland and then to Kanaka Bar this summer. But the Ainslie Creek and Brunswick Creek wildfires impacted initial operations back in July. 

As of Sept. 11, those wildfires remained burning 31 kilometres down the road from Kanaka Bar, though they  are now contained. Once it was safe, the goats got to work. 

Goat grazing benefits for biodiversity and wildfire

The goats have grazed about 12 hectares of ground since arriving in the community earlier this summer.

“We’re trying to get in all the nooks and crannies, especially around the houses and around the roads, the important spaces to make them more defensible and resilient to fire,” Bradley told the Narwhal.

On top of reducing wildfire risk, “the ecological benefits are huge because the goats are trampling, they’re fertilizing … and they’re especially effective for invasive weeds.”

“We’ve tackled this year quite a bit of Canadian thistle, Himalayan blackberry and Scotch broom.” 

Bradley’s been deploying his fire-mitigating goats since 2018, through his company BC Timber Goats.

“It’s a very unique tool, and I think a powerful tool to get wildfire risk reduction benefits and silviculture benefits on the same site, at the same time,” he said. 

According to the B.C. government, silviculture is “the thoughtful, deliberate and balanced management of forests and surrounding local ecosystems” that encourages tree diversity to increase resilience against threats like pests, climate change and disturbances.

The idea to start a goat grazing business came from Bradley’s experience in farming.

“I grew up on a farm that had lots of weed control issues. I’d always spray and mow, and we’d break the mowers. I’d get sick with the spray and so I thought, there’s got to be a better way,” he said.

Bradley said that in areas of the farm sprayed with pesticides, “everything would just turn brown, and half the time it would burn in wildfire in the summer.” 

Goat grazing achieves similar outcomes as pesticide use but is much healthier for the environment.

According to the University of Calgary, which piloted a goat-grazing project at their main campus last year, “targeted grazing is a proven land-management technique that uses livestock to naturally control vegetation growth. Unlike herbicides, which can have a lasting environmental impact, goats provide a natural way to reduce unwanted plant growth while encouraging native vegetation to thrive.”

Animals grazing through southern Interior communities has become less common with wildlife populations declining.

“Using goats actually mimics what you would have typically seen if you had large herds of elk moving through. … Goats mimic a natural system that this landscape would have evolved with already,” Bryce said.

An addition to the FireSmart toolbox 

Over the summer, the goats have been working alongside Kanaka Bar’s fuel management crew.

As the FireSmart team gathers fuel and brush into a pile, the goats eat until it’s gone. It’s a win-win situation: feeding the goats and disposing of the community’s built-up fuel.

“I don’t think there’s ever going to be a scenario where we don’t need people out on the ground, going out and doing the bigger fuel management,” Bryce said, adding goat grazing complements other fuel management strategies. 

“They can go in and defoliate, which is great to have more visibility when you’re out there working in really dense brush,” she said. 

Bryce and Bradley estimate the goats haven eaten 0.25 hectares of ground each day. They’re scheduled to wrap up their work on Sept. 21.

“The goats are going in and doing a really efficient job at something that is really challenging to do with just human crews alone,” she said. 

When the project was first brought forward to the community, residents were interested in learning more about it, but not exactly excited about goats – that quickly changed.

“Now it’s to the point where members want a couple of goats to tackle the brushes in their yard as well, so that’s really good,” said Michell.    

“When wildfire comes to Kanaka, we’ll be more prepared.”

Updated on Sept. 16, 2026, at 11:11 a.m. PT: This story has been updated to correct the dates that the goats are in Kanaka Bar.

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In the 1960s, David Crawford was boating in his backyard on Nipigon Bay when he thought he spotted raw sewage floating in the once-pristine waters of Lake Superior. Years later, he realized the “turds,” as Crawford describes them, were craft paper deposits from the nearby pulp mill in Red Rock, Ont. The mill was also known to billow a harmful smoke into the air and release a hot, foamy plume of effluent into the lake. If the noxious smell wasn’t enough, log drives filled the bay with floating timber and bark, meaning Crawford didn’t often tempt the tumultuous waters of Nipigon Bay.

Along with the pulp mill, raw sewage actually was poisoning the clear bay, coming from two inadequate municipal wastewater treatment plants, but trouble didn’t stop there. The unnatural rise and fall of the water level, due to four hydroelectric dams upstream on the Nipigon River, were causing riverbanks to erode, adding silt to the water, while simultaneously washing out fish spawning habitat.

The reality, Crawford said, was haunting: Nipigon Bay was on the verge of dying.

But in late August, as fishing boats glided across calm, turquoise water behind a podium set up at the Red Rock marina, it was easy to forget about the bay’s past.

A small crowd was gathered as federal Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin visited Red Rock, a town of fewer than 1,000 people, to celebrate those very waters. The air was fresh with the smell of wild mint and Canada geese migrating in undulating waves, stopping to feast in and by the water, honking their approval. Dabrusin spoke into the quiet space left by the calm waters, about “a bay that was heavily polluted and is healthy again. The fish came back, the habitat was rebuilt, and water that people once could not trust, they can trust again.”

Gone are fish with tumours, unnaturally fluctuating water levels, noxious odours, effluent foam barriers, mill plumes and drifting timber. Nipigon Bay is a success story that stretches beyond the Canadian border. It’s one worth noting at a time when the relationship between Canada and the U.S. is strained by President Donald Trump’s trade war and moves to rename another Great Lake — Lake Ontario — to Lake America.

In 1972, Canada and the United States agreed upon their mutual role in polluting a portion of the Great Lakes, which contain 20 per cent of the world’s fresh water. The two countries joined forces to create the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. In 1987, the agreement listed 43 official areas of concern where this industrial pollution was the most deleterious. Twelve of those were in Canada, including Nipigon Bay. 

It was a time when the countries were friendly neighbours, the type that could agree to clean up their backyards and prioritize clean drinking water for millions of people. Remedial action plans were created for the affected areas to create a pathway for healthy environments to thrive.

Which brings us to Nipigon Bay, on Aug. 28, 2026. Four decades after being identified as an area of concern, the federal government announced it was officially delisted at the small celebration beside the still waters of Lake Superior. It was attended by ministers, government officials, local First Nations and Crawford, who chairs a public advisory committee made up of local residents who help to monitor the remediation work.

For Crawford, witnessing the bay heal over his lifetime is a cup of water he’s happy to enjoy. He still worries about the pressures of a rapidly changing world. Currently, there’s a proposal to build a lithium processing plant on the shores of Nipigon Bay in Red Rock, talk of further dams being built upstream on Lake Nipigon and geopolitical tensions straining longstanding bilateral agreements. All the while, climate change has created greater pressure on fresh water and how humans interact with it, from floods to drought and invasive species. 

But for now, Nipigon Bay is one of four areas of concern in Canada that have been delisted. To Crawford, that’s worth celebrating.

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It was 6 a.m. when Qutxulenuhw Tim Kulchyski got the call.

On the phone was Elder Siilh’na’mut Ken Elliott, a fellow member of Cowichan Tribes. Elliott had been working in a place known as Fish Gut Alley, named after the abundant salmon that spawned and then decayed there. It’s a naturalized wetland spread out over nearly four hectares of Duncan, B.C., within Rotary and McAdam Parks, just north of the Cowichan River on Vancouver Island. It was June 2007, and he was restoring the natural habitat around the city’s sewage lagoons — essentially, large pond-like areas that local wastewater flows into.

That morning, Elliott, a Quw’utsun Knowledge Keeper and expert on native plants, had been taking inventory along Fish Gut Alley. As he moved downstream, a strange cacophony grew louder and louder.

“Crows, ravens, kingfishers — just an incredibly large amount of bird activity. Everyone was squawking and making a lot of noise,” he said.

Following the sounds, Elliott came across a scene that was “a blow to the gut,” he said. 

From bank to bank the river was filled with thousands of juvenile coho salmon on their sides, swimming in circles, mouths wide, gasping at the surface. Birds had descended on the area to feast on the dead and dying fish.

Elliott called Kulchyski, a biologist, and told him to get down to the river quickly.

Once he arrived, the two men began looking for the cause of the mass casualty event. “We ran up and down the stream looking for something that may have poisoned them, but we couldn’t find any gasoline or anything like that,” Elliott said.

Before leaving to meet Elliott, Kulchyski had phoned Willi Aquino, a local fishery officer with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, who soon joined them at the river.

“You could see where the fish had died,” recalled Aquino. “It was very close to this storm drain. So, it’s like, ‘OK, something’s coming out of there.’ ”

There had recently been significant rainfall in the area, Elliott recalled. At first, he thought maybe one of the local businesses had dumped something toxic into the storm drain system, which the rain could have washed into the river. Later that day he drove around to ask at dry cleaners, car washes and gas stations, but he found no leads.

Around the same time that Kulchyski, Elliott and Aquino were scratching their heads over the dead coho on Vancouver Island, marine researchers and streamkeepers in Washington state were investigating a similar phenomenon in their own neck of the woods: for decades, they had noticed dramatic die-offs of coho salmon in urban areas, close to roadways, but couldn’t figure out the cause. It wasn’t until 2020 that the Washington researchers hit on a major discovery — one that not only connected the dots for Kulchyski but solved an environmental mystery that had been puzzling scientists for decades.

The culprit: a highly toxic chemical compound called 6PPD-quinone. It comes from the breakdown of a compound called 6PPD, a preservative added to car tires to prevent the rubber from cracking as a result of ozone in the air.

Anti-ozonants like 6PPD came into widespread use in the 1960s so the rubber of car tires wouldn’t crack and wear down so fast. These days, each time a car is driven, its tires shed tiny amounts of 6PPD-infused rubber onto the roads. When it rains, the particles wash into nearby fish habitat, where UV exposure causes it to break down into 6PPD-Q, which can be lethal even in tiny amounts.

Kulchyski had started to hear “murmurs” in the scientific community about a compound that was killing coho salmon just as COVID-19 restrictions began to spread across the world.

Now, after years of research and testing in the area, he has no doubt this was what killed the salmon in Fish Gut Alley. And he’s on a mission to help the world understand the colossal problem 6PPD-Q presents, and how First Nations are on the front lines of dealing with it.

The salmon mystery solved

To understand how 6PPD-Q was discovered, one needs to travel back to the central California coast during the 1990s, when a host of different challenges meant coho salmon were driven nearly to extinction. By 2005, they had been classified as an endangered species in the United States. 

This led to an influx of resources aimed at habitat restoration in urban streams throughout the Pacific Northwest. And more boots on the ground meant more scrutiny, according to aquatic toxicologist Jenifer McIntyre. She’s an associate professor at Washington State University and researches Seattle-area streams in the Puget Sound. 

As researchers tromped around in streams, squinting into turbid waters watching, waiting, McIntyre and others began to notice something odd: large numbers of dead coho piled up along the sides of creeks that were still filled with eggs. This meant they had died before getting a chance to spawn.

“If you’re used to salmon and salmon fisheries, then you’re not surprised by dead fish in the fall, but the fact that they haven’t spawned is like … ‘Oh,’ ” McIntyre said.

Across seven years of field studies, a pattern emerged. The dead salmon were primarily coho, in the most urbanized areas of the Puget Sound. The deaths typically happened during or just after heavy rains, and as they died the fish exhibited a strange, specific behaviour: swimming in circles at the surface of the water, mouths gaping, spiralling and gasping. And the phenomenon was widespread: about 40 per cent of the Puget Sound area was affected and between 40 to 90 per cent of those salmon were dying before they spawned, within hours of being exposed. 

The weight of the evidence at this time suggested their deaths were somehow being caused by stormwater runoff, McIntyre said.

At first, researchers faced a long list of potential causes. Was it pesticides from a nearby golf course, or low oxygen? Could it be parasites? As they dug in and began to eliminate each of these factors, they slowly narrowed in on a possible cause. 

Cars. 

But there were so many chemicals associated with cars. The first year they began running tests on salmon, in 2016, McIntyre figured they only had the capacity to run tests on two things, and decided to look into car tires and exhaust particles. But it eventually proved to be too much to do two things, so they decided to focus on car tires.

When her team passed water through a mulch of worn tire particles to make a solution, it killed all of the coho salmon tested in their lab. That’s when they knew they were onto something, she said, though at first they didn’t know exactly what.

“Something about stormwater — okay. Something about roadway runoff — all right. Something about tires,” McIntyre recalled. “That’s when Ed joined the picture.”

Ed Kolodziej, a water and ecosystem health researcher and professor at the University of Washington, brought in critical chemistry expertise and a dream team of biologists and chemists. Assembled from government departments and universities from across the Pacific Northwest, they set to work trying to figure out what it was in the tires that was killing the fish.

“Out of the hundreds to thousands of chemicals that we were detecting in these samples, there were 57 chemicals that were always present when the coho salmon died, so we started to identify them,” Kolodziej said.

Over time, the list of chemicals got smaller and smaller until they managed to identify the composition of what they thought was the culprit, but there was one problem: it didn’t correspond to any known tire ingredients, McIntyre said.

An environmental chemist on the team named Zhenyu Tian noticed that the carbon and nitrogen in the molecule of their mystery chemical matched some of those on the tire list, though it differed in other ways.

Then Tian had a lightbulb moment: what if they were searching for a chemical that transformed into something else once it entered into the environment and broke down?

In the mountains of research materials, Tian found an old industrial rubber paper from 1983 that talked about a chemical added to tires called 6PPD. When it was ozonated — exposed to air and sunlight — the paper stated that it changed into the exact chemical formula they were searching for: 6PPD-quinone.

To confirm their theory, the scientists bought some 6PPD and tested it on the salmon in their lab. They died, showing the same characteristic twisting and gasping behaviours that had been seen in wild salmon.

The group’s evidence was compiled into a groundbreaking paper published in the journal Science at the end of 2020. It was a sensation in the scientific community, in part because it finally offered an explanation for a phenomenon that wasn’t new, and in part because it sounded an alarm over how toxic and widespread 6PPD-Q is.

One of its most remarkable — and alarming — features is just how little it takes to kill coho salmon. As one researcher put it, the equivalent of a grain of rice in an Olympic-sized swimming pool is enough to make the water lethal.

And it’s not just fish that have been exposed. A recent study out of China shows that 6PPD-Q has been detected in human urine and breast milk, though it’s not yet clear what effect, if any, it has on humans or other mammals. Researchers are also finding it not just in water but in air, dust and snow — basically everywhere there are tires.

“It is among the most toxic chemicals that we know of for aquatic life,” McIntyre said. “We reasoned that you would expect to find this chemical anywhere where tire particles were getting into the water.”

But the researchers still had questions to answer. Why were certain fish species, such as coho and coastal cutthroat trout, so uniquely sensitive to 6PPD-Q? How does it kill them? And, perhaps most important, how can its risks be contained? 

Finding 6PPD-Q hotspots

In February 2026, about 165 people attended the third and final Protecting Salmon From Tire Wear Toxicants workshop in downtown Nanaimo. 

Workshop presentations ranged from practical to dizzyingly technical, and represented an unusual cross-collaboration across disciplines, all focused on solving the same problem.

“If everyone’s a silo, we’re all probably trying to look for the same answers to the same questions, and you’ll get it from many different places, but it’ll happen a lot faster if you’re talking to people,” said Angelina Jaeger, a researcher with Vancouver Island University’s Centre for Health & Environmental Mass Spectrometry (CHEMS), one of the groups that organized the workshop series. “That’s what science should be.”

Like many researchers at the workshop, Jaeger is focused on finding solutions. One problem her team decided to focus on was implementing widespread 6PPD-Q testing in local streams and creeks.

It all started with that seminal 2020 Science paper, said Erik Krogh, a chemistry professor and co-director of Vancouver Island University’s CHEMS lab. Though he read it with a sense of dread, Krogh immediately saw a use for the technology his team had been working on for more than a decade, which would make it “faster, better and cheaper” to test water samples.

Already developed as a way to test for carcinogens in oilsands process water, the test dips a membrane into a water sample and, using a repurposed 3D printer to mix it around, it pulls out the chemical and sends it to be measured. Within a few months, they had repurposed this technology to mass-test for 6PPD-Q. 

Soon, researchers were able to process up to 100 samples a day and get results within minutes.

With hundreds of volunteers taking samples in waterways across Vancouver Island, over the last three years their lab has gathered what Krogh believes is the single largest dataset of 6PPD-Q samples in the world.

When Kulchyski heard about the team’s goal of finding 6PPD-Q “hotspots” on Vancouver Island, he put Fish Gut Alley onto their radar.

Kulchyski and the researchers wanted to understand what was going on in the area, past and present. Since their bleak early-morning discovery in June 2007, Kulchyski, Elliott and Aquino had witnessed other, similar fish kills in the area. At times, researchers say they can recognize urban stormwater that likely contains 6PPD-Q, visible as a cloudy sediment or sometimes an oily sheen. 

“To us it’s like a horror film, because you just see this big dark cloud, and then six or seven or eight thousand fish are dead,” said Kulchyski. 

Initially, everyone involved in the original Fish Gut Alley incident thought low oxygen levels must have been the culprit, and Elliott said he is still convinced that’s the case.

In this case, stormwater sits in a reservoir before being pumped out into the environment and bacteria end up growing in there and consuming the oxygen, and then when it is released it can kill the juvenile salmon, Elliott said.

But Aquino ran on-site tests at the time, and though oxygen levels were low, she said in her estimation they weren’t low enough to kill the fish. She also took a gasping, dying fish out to the Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo to run tests, but nothing came of it.

“We could never really figure it out,” she said. “There was no real smoking gun.”

But in March of 2024, the researchers at Vancouver Island University finally found a clue that connected everything. 

After several days of rain, a stormwater sample taken in the morning at Fish Gut Alley measured levels of 6PPD-Q at hundreds of nanograms per litre, far beyond the concentration that had killed coho in the lab.

“That concentration is certainly higher than most,” Jaeger said. And it’s not the only sample in the area that has tested well above what is safe. As a result, the team designated Fish Gut Alley a priority site and installed an automated collector there last summer to take samples every hour during rain events.

“It’s a great example where we’ve identified a hotspot, and so now we can work to solve it,” Krogh said. Urban streams can have dozens of storm drain outfalls, which means measuring stormwater for 6PPD-Q levels can be a huge task, he said. “Where do you start? Can we fix them all? I mean, that’s overwhelming. Let’s find which ones are problematic, and let’s address them.”

Can it be stopped?

Because 6PPD-Q is hydrophobic, like oil, it tends to stick not only to the test membranes used by the university researchers, but also to soil. And it turns out this is an important part of how the chemical might be mitigated.

Tests being run by researchers at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver show an approximate 90 per cent removal of 6PPD-Q from stormwater when they run it through “rain gardens.” These are green areas near roads that filter runoff through soil and plant roots before re-entering the environment. Krogh is currently working with his research partners on three rain gardens planned for various locations around Vancouver Island, and a fourth is already under construction in Langford, just outside of Victoria.

Promising results have also come from using filters made from coconut husks and biochar — a carbon-rich, charcoal-like substance made from dried plant waste.

At Washington State University, when roadway runoff went through a bioretention system made from 18 inches of sand and compost, it prevented salmon deaths for the entire 13 years the study ran, McIntyre said.

The upside of the whole thing is that researchers already know so much more about the problem now than they did even two or three years ago, Krogh said. For example, their team recently found that even when fresh water is repeatedly run through collected tire sediment samples, it doesn’t seem to dilute the concentration of 6PPD-Q. This means that when tire particles are sitting at the side of a creek, they remain a long-term contamination source despite repeated rains.

“It’s not just one and done. So we really have to deal with the particles and make sure that we handle those carefully, so that we’re not putting them somewhere else in the ecosystem or in the watershed and then they become a source somewhere else.”  

Krogh maintains a cautious sense of optimism that the problem is “solvable.” However, hurdles still exist. Regulating the high volume of 6PPD-Q in the environment is difficult, and finding an alternative chemical with the same properties, but less harmful, is also tricky.

The Canadian government included 6PPD and 6PPD-Q on a priority list for assessment starting in the winter of 2025. This is a step towards the chemical’s possible regulation, under the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act.

However, the Tire and Rubber Association of Canada (TRAC) tried to delay a potential assessment in 2024 to see what regulation happened in the U.S. first, according to documents obtained by The Narwhal through a freedom of information request.   

Governments should not prematurely restrict the use of 6PPD as it could “have enormous public safety and economic consequences,” wrote association president Carol Hochu to then-environment and climate change minister Steven Guilbeault, in an April 1, 2024 letter.

The association believes a deferral of regulation is still the best approach, given the “extensive regulatory activity” underway in the U.S., which includes a search for safe alternatives to 6PPD, communications manager Michal Majernik told The Narwhal by email.

Potential alternatives to 6PPD are being explored by the U.S. Tire Manufacturers Association, which releases a yearly analysis on its findings.

In response to the hurdles, researchers also published a paper in the scientific journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters in the summer of 2025, outlining what an international regulatory framework for 6PPD-Q might look like. It also highlighted some of the broader political issues at play.

For example, vehicle pollution disproportionately impacts “under-resourced and underserved communities, who tend to live closer to traffic.” The paper notes it also affects food sources for Indigenous Peoples, and describes this higher level of tire chemical exposure as an act of “environmental injustice.”

A warning for salmon

Kulchyski caught his first fish at eight years old — a coho salmon, with a spear he made himself. He gave it to his Elders, because that’s what you do when you catch your first fish, he said. It’s a cultural practice and a full-circle philosophy of generational caretaking.

“If you look after your family, when you become an Elder, then your family will look after you,” he said. “If we don’t look after them, it’s a sign that we’re not looking after ourselves. And so if we look after salmon, not only are they healthy and happy, they return and nourish us. It’s a pretty simple system.” 

He caught the coho in Fish Gut Alley, when historical runs of salmon were once so abundant the area was named after the mounds of decaying salmon that died there after spawning. That’s how it was when he was a kid, Kulchyski remembers. But in the decades since, things have changed.

In the broader Cowichan River system, coho numbers have shown a steady decline of more than 90 per cent since the 1970s, though they’ve rebounded somewhat in the last five years. 

“How we’ve treated the landscape, how we’ve treated the land, the dyking and all these other issues, have really pushed almost every pressure that there is that you can exert on fish and fish habitat on this one little stretch,” he said.

A verdant gem hidden in plain sight, Fish Gut Alley is nestled into a suburban neighbourhood in Duncan, and most of the dog walkers and joggers that use its wide gravel trails nearby are likely unaware they’re only steps away from crucial juvenile salmon rearing and spawning habitat.

Though unremarkable to the untrained eye, the area’s shallow protected pools, fallen logs and slow-moving streams are ideal for juvenile coho to hang out in and get strong before heading out to the ocean, Kulchyski said.

It’s hard to get around the negative mindset that things are hopeless, that everything could crash and salmon could just stop existing, Kulchyski said. But for him, giving up is simply not an option.

“That doesn’t exist in our mental scenario of the world. It’s kind of like saying, ‘Hey, you know what? You’re gonna lose one of your children,’ ” he said. “I don’t think so.”

Though 6PPD-Q is not the only problem facing salmon in the area, he views it as something that could  change the way people think about environmental protections, “sort of a stepping stone to introducing us into a new thought process and a new methodology that allows us to do things differently, treat these systems differently, think of fish differently,” he said.

At present, Kulchyski is working with university researchers and the City of Duncan to look at mitigating 6PPD-Q at source, by targeting the stormwater gathered from nearby streets that is held in reservoirs before flowing into salmon habitat.

“We are treating our water so poorly, and not looking after all the issues we bring forward. On all of the bridges and all of the highways, there’s 6PPD-Q coming in everywhere,” he said.

“I certainly don’t know all of the solutions, but I know if we actually start incorporating these concerns and these issues in building new bridges and building new treatment systems, it will immediately make a huge difference.”

On-the-ground reporting for this story was made possible with support from Carleton University’s Leonard Shifrin and Louise Dulude Canadian Social Policy Emerging Reporter Fund. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, no foundation or outside organization has editorial input into our stories.

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Sherry McIntyre lives an hour’s drive away from the nearest grocery store. Between gas prices, vehicle maintenance and rising grocery costs, the bills add up quickly. 

“Bringing all that food back is also a challenge. You need coolers,” McIntyre told The Narwhal. 

She’s an elected councillor from the Skuppah Indian Band, located two kilometres south of Lytton, B.C.

Forgetting your standard grocery bag will cost you a few dollars, while purchasing a cooler or thermal storage bag to properly store cold foods during long drives will cost you at least $20 during the summer months.

It’s one small way her remote community and others in the southern Interior experience inequities accessing food, while larger disasters have cut the community off from grocery store access completely.

But long before grocery stores existed in B.C., First Nations harvested and preserved salmon during summer fish camps, creating food security throughout the winter months.

Today, accessing wild salmon is more challenging, contributing to food insecurity and an overall disconnect from traditional food. But it’s also more important than ever.

McIntyre grew up fishing the country’s largest salmon run with her father and says that for younger generations today, including her children, “fishing has become so scarce.”

“When your harvest is not as big, you don’t get to fully process all of the salmon that you need. If you only end up with 20 fish a year, you’re just going to freeze it,” she said.

As of August 25th and according to the Pacific Salmon Commission, this year’s sockeye salmon run came in at 2.8 million. The organization estimated 7.7 million last winter.

As salmon are declining across the province, communities are stepping up to keep their access to traditional food strong.

A place to gather, process and store food

In August, Skuppah Indian Band members taught specialized fish preparations, including wind-dried fish, smoked fish and canned fish — all at the community’s food security centre.

The nation decided to build a food security centre back in 2019. Food access and affordability were already challenging at the time. 

During the global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, food became even harder to access amid lockdowns, staffing shortages and supply chain disruptions. Indigenous and remote communities were hit the hardest by food insecurity linked to the pandemic. Then came a year full of climate disasters in British Columbia. 

“In 2021, the Lytton fire took out all of the services in town and cut us off from travelling to get groceries,” McIntyre said. It was only the first record-breaking disaster of the year.

“The atmospheric river came in November and decimated any hope we had of feeding ourselves, because it blocked grocery trucks from coming.”

Those disasters informed the final stages of the Skuppah food security centre including adding private food storage for community members, with a generator installed in the event of a power outage.

“We really honed in on what the needs were for emergency response and climate change, building on the original concept of providing a place for community to gather and prepare food,” McIntyre said.

The space is equipped with a commercial kitchen, high-end pressure canners, freeze dryers to create shelf-stable food that lasts years and more, all designed to make community gatherings and food distributions as easy as possible. 

Since opening in 2022, the food security centre has served as a place for the Skuppah Indian Band to process and store food, including huckleberries and salmon.

The centre has a stockpile of food, a disaster precaution learned in 2021 when roads were flooded out or closed due to fire.

“We’ve had so much positive feedback from our members. Having a space like this does something special when you can come and gather, because it’s a space for loving one another and for supporting one another,” McIntyre said.

At Nlaka’pamux fish camp, traditional fishing techniques are passed on to the next generation

Raymond Phillips, a member of Lytton First Nation, facilitated dip net tying at this year’s community fish camp in Incluckcheen. He says that fish camps are a place for the community to exchange knowledge and create food security within the nation. 

“People leave the fish camp with food. This is survival food, but it’s also really good food. It’s high quality and very nutritious … it has sustained us for thousands of years,” he said. 

Phillips grew up fishing the Fraser and Thompson rivers, learning how to tie dip nets back in the 1980s. Dip nets are a traditional way of harvesting salmon in B.C., only allowed for First Nations in the province.

Tying the dip net and making the hoop and pole requires technique, patience and practice, all of which Phillips has spent decades accumulating.

“There’s a complexity to it,” he said, but once people get the hang of tying a certain knot, it becomes repetitive and easier to teach others.

His station at fish camp had people of all ages in attendance, wanting to learn about traditional fishing tools and harvesting techniques. In the Interior, dip nets are passed down in families for generations, but handmade nets are harder to come by these days.

“It’s becoming a lost art, so many people are buying commercially made aluminum or nylon nets,” he said. 

Traditionally, fir saplings were used to make the pole and hoop, with Spatsin used to make the net. Phillips and other Nlaka’pamux dip net makers hope to pass those skills on by sharing their knowledge at fish camps.  

Phillips is a provincial judge based out of Kamloops. Before that, he worked as a lawyer and represented Indigenous people charged by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

“As a lawyer I ended up helping quite a few people who were being charged with fishing at closed times, so it became a real challenge for the community to feed themselves in times of scarcity. That’s the cycle we’re in now, the salmon resources are becoming scarce,” he said.

When he was younger, salmon were abundant, but as time went on fishery closures became more common.

“The salmon, it’s one of the largest migrations in the world. They go from the Pacific, go into the Fraser and travel all the way to their spawning grounds. Every community along the way waits for that salmon to get there. It’s disheartening to wait and be told you can’t fish. The populations are dwindling, so it is concerning,” Phillips said. 

Despite those challenges, Indigenous communities work together each run to provide Elders, families and those experiencing food insecurity with salmon. 

That holds true for Cheam First Nation, located near Chilliwack, which hosts an annual community canning day.

Cheam community canning day

Every year, Cheam members look forward to gathering at the local gymnasium, ready to gut, fillet and preserve the year’s salmon. It’s a tradition Stó:lō nations in the Fraser Valley have fought to continue for decades. 

“The whole community is coming together on an assembly line to get our fish canned and vacuum packed,” Justin Pike said.

“We get the community together to help try and get fish out to everybody, not everybody knows how to do it, so it really helps,” he said. 

Pike is an elected councillor in Cheam, and one of many who harvested this year’s sockeye salmon haul to distribute among the community.

He was hands-on at the fish gutting station, with youth and community members watching closely, eager to learn and participate. Reflecting on the number of young people engaged, Pike is confident that his nation will continue its tradition of caring for salmon and harvesting and preserving salmon as a food source for the winter.

“We’re always super grateful to get some fish,” said Pike. 

While cultural knowledge remains strong in Cheam, wild salmon is becoming harder to access. Along with the dwindling salmon numbers and costly fishing gear, Cheam also has a history of facing off against the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada for their right to fish. 

“Cheam is known for defending our right to be on that river, our inherent right to these fish,” Wendy Kelly, a salmon processing facilitator, told The Narwhal.

“Years and years ago, they were one of the only bands that battled to go out fishing when the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada said ‘no, you can’t go fishing,’” she said. The nation had numerous stand-offs with the department in the late 1990s and early 2000s over access to salmon in their traditional waters, led by the late Chief Siōliya June Quipp. 

Cheam is located an hour-and-a-half from downtown Vancouver, home to some of the most lucrative seafood ports in the province and country. Communities located closer to the city are heavily monitored on the water, and with fisheries opening for a few days at a time, the struggle to access wild salmon persists. 

It makes Cheam’s annual canning day a powerful assertion of Indigenous Rights, following the footsteps of their ancestors.

Those rights are inherent to Cheam, but also affirmed in Section 35 of the Canadian Constitution, and by the renowned Sparrow and Marshall decisions made in the 1990s, which affirmed the rights of First Nations to fish, hunt and harvest without unjustified government interference. 

“It’s really medicine when you’re handling those fish,” Kelly said. 

In the Pacific Northwest, salmon is a sacred part of the culture, and has been a main food source for millennia. It’s a connection the Vancouver Aboriginal Health Society works to keep strong.

Urban access to culture and salmon

This month, the Vancouver Aboriginal Health Society is hosting salmon processing and jarring workshops, servicing cultural food and knowledge in the heart of the Downtown Eastside.

“This run came from Boston Bar, right from the river to the centre and processed within hours from the time it came out of the water,” Ruby Harry told The Narwhal.

They have access to salmon all year now,” she said, referring to workshop participants, who had the opportunity to clean, process and learn how to can salmon. 

Harry is from Tl’etinqox t’in, located near Williams Lake, but like many Indigenous people, now resides in an urban setting. She grew up eating traditional foods, and after moving to the city, wanted to help create that access for others.

And with Vancouver being one of the most expensive cities in North America, access to nutritious food can be a challenge. Salmon distributions help to fill that gap.

“Vancouver Aboriginal Health Society is one of the only organizations I know that has given the Downtown Eastside this opportunity to process cultural food,” Harry said. 

Harvesting traditional food must be done within your own territory, so for Indigenous people living away from theirs, wild salmon becomes harder to access. 

Salmon workshops create that opportunity for urban Indigenous people, and support food security with rising grocery costs. The workshops hosted by Harry have no cost for participants and create openings for cultural knowledge to be shared.

“Salmon brings lots of good medicine,” said Harry.

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.

The smell of decomposing garbage hits before the building comes into view — a sour, earthy odour that stings your teeth. Hidden by a curving driveway, large bright green trees and a set of lawn chairs, the entrance almost makes you forget that beyond it lies a waste-burning facility that is set to become one of North America’s largest incinerators.

The Emerald Energy from Waste incinerator sits on roughly six hectares of industrial land, tucked between Bramalea Road and Highway 407 in Brampton, Ont. Behind its rusting metal walls and towering smokestacks, transport trucks arrive throughout the day carrying loads of non-hazardous waste from across Ontario. Inside, garbage is unloaded, sorted and fed into combustion units, where the waste is burned to generate electricity for neighbouring businesses and homes.

The facility began operating in spring 1992, on former agricultural land that had become home to a rapidly developing industrial sector. Today, warehouses, manufacturing plants and trucking dominate the area immediately around the incinerator. But beyond this industrial zone are neighbourhoods that have expanded alongside one of Canada’s fastest-growing cities. Just a few kilometres southwest of the plant, cricket and soccer matches fill Emancipation Park on summer evenings. Minutes away, homes, recreation centres and places of worship serve a population transformed by decades of immigration, particularly from South Asia. What was once a facility close to the edge of Brampton now sits near communities where tens of thousands of people live, work and raise families.

Last year, the province approved the Environmental Assessment Screening Report which clears the path to a major expansion of the Emerald incinerator. The facility would process up to 900,000 tonnes of waste annually — roughly six-fold what it’s processing today, bringing even more garbage from various Ontario municipalities to Brampton. The Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks has not responded to The Local’s request for comment.

Emerald Energy from Waste argues that the expansion is needed to address Ontario’s looming landfill capacity crisis. According to Waste to Resource Ontario, an environmental services association, Ontario generated approximately 16.88 million tonnes of waste in 2024, with 12.75 million tonnes disposed in landfills; the province is projected to run out of landfill space by 2037.

“Ontario has a crisis in that we don’t have enough waste management capacity infrastructure in the province,” Joe Lyng, president of Emerald Energy from Waste, says. An expansion in Brampton, he argues, is the answer to multiple problems — diverting more garbage from landfills while also increasing the incinerator’s energy recovery rate, creating more power for an energy-starved province.

While that argument may be convincing for the province, locals feel differently. The incinerator expansion — which Emerald anticipates will begin in 2027 — has become one of Brampton’s most contentious environmental issues. Many residents question the province’s approval process. They worry about the potential health effects on nearby communities. And they wonder if anyone is looking out for the good of the people of Brampton, a city of racialized immigrants at the edge of Canada’s biggest metropolis.

“It’s a sacrifice zone,” Linda Gasser, co-founder of the advocacy group Zero Waste 4 Zero Burning, says. That’s the term for an area in which low-income and minority groups shoulder the environmental harms of clustered polluting industrial sites. For locals, the placement of the largest incinerator in Canada right in their community sends a message: that somewhere like Brampton won’t, or can’t, object to housing the region’s industry and waste. “One more polluting facility, what’s the big deal, right?” Gasser says. It’s a mindset that some residents are committed to fighting.

Incinerator’s English-only consultations create barriers in largely Punjabi-speaking neighbourhoods

There’s a misconception that Bramptonians don’t care about the environment. Once proudly known as The Flower City, Brampton is now grappling with a new online reputation as a “garbage city.” It’s a stereotype that has frustrated many residents — including those working to prove the opposite.

Born and raised in Brampton, Rajbalinder Ghatoura is an environmental activist dedicated to improving life in his community. When he was 12 years old, Ghatoura won an international environmental photography competition for a photo of a Tim Horton’s cup seemingly dissolving into its surroundings. It sparked a lifelong commitment to protecting the environment. Today, at 25, that commitment still shapes his activism. Environmental problems, Ghatoura says, often become hardest to confront when people can’t see them, which he believes goes beyond roadside litter.

In 2023, Ghatoura co-founded Kudrat Di Rakhia, a community organization based in Brampton. They’re members of the Brampton Environmental Alliance, and focus on advocacy and education.

To reach the South Asian population in Brampton, Ghatoura works with local gurdwaras. Raising awareness about environmental sustainability, starting with places of worship, Kudrat Di Rakhia has engaged with the Sikh community to participate in initiatives like tree planting and city cleanups.

Communicating directly with Punjabi-speaking residents is one of Kudrat Di Rakhia’s greatest strengths. By bridging the language barrier, the organization is able to connect with a broader diaspora of Brampton’s South Asian community that can be overlooked in environmental advocacy efforts. According to the 2021 census, Punjabi is the second most spoken language after English in Brampton. “It’s important for this information to be shared with the population, the demographics, and to be shared in a language that they understand,” says Ghatoura.

He says this wasn’t the case with the incinerator expansion. In 2022, the company took out a half-page ad in the Brampton Guardian, an English–only newspaper, to inform the public of their proposed expansion project. Informing the public of an undertaking like the proposed expansion is required under the Environmental Assessment Act. But despite the surrounding area being home to many immigrants and residents whose first language is not English, no information was provided in Punjabi or any other language.

Lyng says he looked into the demographics in Brampton and found that approximately 95 to 97 per cent were English-speaking residents. (While census data shows that approximately 95 per cent of Brampton residents have “knowledge” of English, it’s the mother tongue for roughly 42 per cent of the population.)

“We’re not going to reach out to, you know, the two or three per cent. It’s at our discretion and we didn’t see that as something that was necessary,” Lyng says.

Ghatoura himself only came to know of the proposed expansion a year ago, reading about it online, after much of the screening process had already been completed.

What he learned alarmed him.

Company president says incinerator expansion is safe, but won’t commit to publicly sharing real-time emission data

Energy-from-waste facilities, like the one in Brampton, are incinerators that recover energy during combustion. Heat is used to generate steam, powering a turbine to produce electricity. Although incinerators reduce the volume of garbage, they don’t completely eliminate it. After the waste is burned, the ash that remains in the stacks is typically disposed of in a landfill.

Expansion at the proposed scale would typically require a full environmental assessment. Because Emerald Energy from Waste has been a long-term operation, however, the project went through a streamlined environmental screening process. Lyng says that the process they conducted included technical studies as well as public consultations such as open houses and public liaison meetings. “We went above and beyond,” Lyng says.

For many — including anti-incineration activists, health officials, the region of Peel and concerned residents like Ghatoura — these assurances aren’t nearly enough. They insist that the incinerator do an individual environmental assessment, which would enable a public review of emission data and determine risks to the environment and public health.

Brampton resident Stacey Wilson has noticed an unsettling odour in the air for more than two decades. “When it’s a nice day, and I step out the door to go for a walk, and the first thing I notice is the smell of burning tires or burning plastic, that’s really upsetting to me,” she says. She’s filed multiple reports with the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks.

Wilson’s worried about the increased traffic that will come with the expansion. According to the incinerator’s website, the facility is currently licensed to process 500 metric tonnes of garbage per day, which Lyng says is unloaded by 30 to 35 trucks. The expanded incinerator, the website says, will process 2,500 tonnes a day, roughly five times the current amount. This could mean many more vehicles. But Wilson’s biggest concern is the uncertainty about what pollutants are being released: “How do we know what we’re breathing in now?” If there are any damaging health effects, she says, they won’t become apparent until years from now.

Lyng says that the incinerator’s emissions are carefully monitored. The facility’s annual stack tests, which measure air quality directly from the its exhaust stacks, show that every pollutant tested by the company remained within Ontario’s regulatory limits between 2020 to 2025. However, known pollutants, such as nitrogen oxide, sulphur dioxide and hydrogen chloride, have at times spiked to the edge of allowable limits.

“We have real-time emission monitoring,” Lyng says, referring to the meters that continuously monitor certain pollutants. If there are any issues with operations or emissions, they report it to the ministry and follow up with an action report.

Linda Gasser, of Zero Waste 4 Zero Burning, and Wendy Bracken, of the Durham Environment Watch, say that these monitoring efforts aren’t enough. Bracken says that while incinerator operators emphasize their continuous monitoring — with the implication being that if something is wrong they can shut things down — many pollutants are in fact only tested once a year.

Lyng confirms that the Emerald incinerator does not have a meter to continuously monitor all pollutants; instead, the facility conducts annual testing to measure their levels. He says the expansion will include a meter to conduct continuous monitoring for sulphur dioxide, unlike the current facility.

Since the emissions are self-monitored, the results cannot be viewed by residents remotely. Opponents of the incinerator contrast that with the monitoring done at the Durham York Energy Centre, an incinerator on the other side of the GTA owned by the Regions of Durham and York. There, emissions data is made public, through a real-time portal on their website. In addition to their continuous monitoring, the Durham York Energy Centre undergoes stack testing twice a year.

Lyng says that Emerald will not be publishing its emissions data online. “The public can come in and see the data at the plant,” Lyng says. “We can come and bring you up to the control room, show you this is what we do. It’s not some mystical process.”

It’s difficult to imagine members of the public taking Lyng up on his offer. The control room sits on the second floor of the facility, accessible by a narrow metal staircase. Operating data is displayed across multiple monitors running the facility’s original 1992 control system. During a recent tour, the room’s temperature exceeded 40 C.

Incinerator’s neighbourhood is populated by vulnerable communities, health unit says

Beyond data from the incinerator’s stacks, opponents of the expansion have another concern: how burning five times the waste it does today will affect a community that already grapples with pollution.

Last spring, Peel Public Health officials submitted a report to the regional council outlining their concerns about the incinerator project. Additional emissions from the expansion, they wrote, “results in an overall increase in cumulative exposure to air pollutants and can result in an increased risk of negative health effects to the surrounding community.”

The health unit found that some pollutants already exceed provincial and federal air quality limits, even before the expansion. In an email to The Local, Peel Public Health said they’d found that local background levels of benzo(a)pyrene — a toxic chemical that’s often the result of incomplete combustion of organic material — currently exceeds the air quality limits for both short and long-term exposures. Modeling under worst-case emission conditions, the health unit found that with the expansion, benzo(a)pyrene and nitrogen dioxide are estimated to exceed the short-term exposure limits set by the province by 115 per cent.

The proposed expansion is also predicated on collecting enough waste to generate profitable energy from incineration. That’s an approach that Peel Public Health’s report says is “counter to the promotion and sustainability of robust circular economy markets, which are crucial for minimizing waste, pollution and resource consumption.”

To fully understand the emissions and their impact on air quality in the surrounding community, Peel Public Health told The Local they need to know more about the pollution control technology at the expanded facility — information that will come in the next step of the approval process. Emerald Energy from Waste is required to include this information in their Environmental Compliance Approval application to the Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks.

What’s clear is that the expanded incinerator will be surrounded by existing vulnerable communities. Peel Region health status data shows that roughly 70 per cent of the people in the data zone containing the incinerator are racialized individuals. According to the Peel Public Health report, compared to Peel as a whole, residents in the communities living closest to the facility have more one-parent families, and a higher percentage of residents who didn’t complete high-school and are unemployed. They also have “higher rates of certain health conditions … that may be worsened by exposure to increased air pollution.”

Peel Public Health noted in its report that it hasn’t heard directly from residents about the proposed expansion. But the lack of inquiry doesn’t necessarily mean a lack of concern. The socio-economic realities flagged in the report are the very same ones that make it unlikely for community members to step forward. In order to oppose the expansion, residents first need to know about it.

Municipal councillors call for more scrutiny of incinerator proposal

For long-time Brampton resident Susan Colbert Wright, the fight over the incinerator is about more than the impact of a single industrial project. She raises larger questions about who gets to shape the future of Brampton and who bears the costs of development decisions. As plans move ahead to create Canada’s largest waste incinerator, Wright keeps returning to the most basic question: “How is more pollution okay?”

Wright has lived in Brampton since the 1960s. She’s witnessed Brampton become Canada’s fastest growing, multicultural municipality — one she and her family call home. She’s also watched Brampton become home to a disproportionate share of the region’s industrial footprint, with power plants, warehouses and trucking hubs, among other facilities that are reshaping the city’s environmental future.

One of the major barriers to public engagement, as Wright sees it, is a lack of easily accessible information, with reports and correspondence scattered across government websites. To address this gap, she’s building a website that will consolidate all records and resources. “It’s the one place where you can go to get the history, the information, rather than having to search all over the place,” Wright says.

Her primary goal is for the website to act as a conduit between residents and elected officials, making it easier for concerned residents to directly email MPs, submit public feedback and participate in opposition action.

Although Emerald aimed to start construction this fall, Lyng told The Local that because they haven’t finalized the design of the project, they won’t be able to begin until spring or summer of 2027. In the meantime, the planned expansion has become a political issue for local councillors.

Wards nine and 10 councillor Gurpartap Singh Toor, who sits on Brampton’s Environment Advisory Committee, says he received an influx of calls after provincial approval was announced.

Those calls, Toor says, are almost entirely from people strongly opposing the incinerator expansion and voicing their concerns for public health. “Our communities here in the City of Brampton are heavily racialized communities that are typically more prone to heart and lung diseases,” Toor says. “A lot of them live in very close proximity to where this project is getting built, and those are the communities that will face the more immediate effect.”

In a recent regional council meeting, wards seven and eight councillor Pat Fortini and councillor Toor passed a motion to submit new technological research presented by a local resident to MPs, to emphasize that there needs to be further environmental compliance ahead of the construction of the expansion.

“I definitely don’t want the Region of Peel or the City of Brampton to be the garbage burning capital of Canada,” Toor said during that meeting. He requested the region submit the motion to both the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks and Health in order to push them to review the expansion proposal once again.

‘This is our home’: Bamptonians love their city, and say they’ll fight to keep it clean and healthy

As the incinerator expansion moves forward, Ghatoura is still dedicating himself to making sure his community isn’t seen as a “sacrifice zone.”

This April, he says his organization brought their message directly to residents, setting up booths at Earth Month and Sikh Heritage Month events across the city, to lead discussions about various environmental issues, including the proposed expansion of the incinerator. “It’s surprising that when we talk to people, they have no idea that a waste incinerator exists there, and that they have plans for expansion,” says Ghatoura. “That is very concerning, because this is going to impact them every single day.”

As Ghatoura and other organizers spark those conversations in Brampton, he’s been heartened to see different age groups advocating for their communities. “Especially this issue with the waste incinerator, we’re getting a lot more youth involvement, which is amazing, we haven’t really seen that before,” he says.

On a summer evening this July, Ghatoura led a group of senior citizens — all South Asian men over 70 — to participate in a community cleanup, picking up empty coffee cups, plastic wrappers and old weathered flyers. They met at Luongo Park in western Brampton, and walked through the neighbourhood with trash picks, garbage bags and latex gloves, picking up garbage from people’s driveways, lawns and the street.

“This is our home,” says Sri Bansilal Singh, a 70-year-old man who rode his bicycle for two kilometres to join his friends for the cleanup. “Brampton is very beautiful, and because we’re grateful to live here, we’re happy to contribute to the community and want to help maintain its beauty.”

As they went about the cleanup, residents came out to pay their respects to the seniors. “People really love these guys, and have great respect for what they’re doing,” Ghatoura says. It’s one of the many reasons he questions why the incinerator is being built in Brampton. Historically, he says, environmental racism has meant that the burden of development often falls on the shoulders of the marginalized. But this only motivates him more — to educate and mobilize his community, to prove that Brampton deserves better.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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