Few of us will admit to loving coyotes. The distaste for this exclusively North American canid runs deep: in a 1985 Yale University study respondents ranked them beneath skunks, rattlesnakes and vultures in terms of popularity. But are they simply misunderstood?

I have been fortunate to photograph many coyotes over the years, including three adorable pups in rural southern Ontario. I have learned much of the negativity directed at them comes from fear. 

Urban coyotes have followed humans to dense population centres where rodents are in abundant supply, providing an ample food source. Despite talk of modern “coywolves,” these are the same eastern canids previous generations knew, whose crossbreeding with wolves happened over a century ago.

Naturally, there are occasional encounters with citizens — and their pets — which become news. If a coyote acts aggressively and bites someone it is widely reported, usually without important context.

A study from 2011 found, on average, three people are bitten by coyotes annually in Canada, compared with 300,000 dog bites. When coyotes do attack, it’s often after humans have fed them, either intentionally or inadvertently. Sadly, the common response to a coyote attack is for the animal to be culled.

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Rural coyotes face a different problem. Having become the top predator in regions where traditional apex predators have been extirpated, coyotes sometimes target lambs and calves — if they can get inside their pens. But again, coyotes get blamed even when other species — such as dogs — might be responsible. The provincial government compensates farmers for livestock lost to predators. But coyote casualties and death by dog are treated much differently.

Losses due to coyotes are covered under the Ontario Wildlife Damage Compensation Program. Of the approximately $1.5 million paid out to farmers in 2024-2025, more than $1.2 million was for alleged coyote predation.

Domestic dogs aren’t covered by that program at all. Those losses fall under Ontario’s Protection of Livestock and Poultry from Dogs Act, which offers generally lower compensation than the wildlife damage program.

All over the world farmers complain of livestock loss due to dogs, so it’s curious why it is not widely acknowledged here. It’s a reason conservationists have suggested coyotes might be taking some of the blame for dogs.

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No doubt coyotes are more than a nuisance to some farmers. If a coyote, particularly one with mange, hangs around their house they will shoot them.

But many I speak with say coyotes around fields are mostly left alone, because they control populations of rats, mice and even groundhogs — a significant role. Coyotes are amazingly resilient, and their populations quickly rebound after attempts to cull them. They’ve migrated to every U.S. state (barring Hawaii) and every Canadian province and territory.

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In a typical coyote family only the parents will mate, but if one or both parents are killed any females will come into estrus earlier or disperse to find mates and start a family. And they will have larger litters if the food supply is abundant.

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But their bad reputation remains. In Ontario, hunting and trapping of coyotes is allowed all year, everywhere except in and around some provincial parks — a restriction put in place not for the coyotes’ sake, but to protect the endangered eastern wolf, which can look similar. In much of southern Ontario there is no limit to the number of coyotes that can be hunted. 

In Ontario, provincial law empowers municipalities to kill coyotes that pose a threat. Until recently, one outdoor store in Belleville, Ont., held an annual coyote killing contest. Animal conservationist groups took the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry to court in 2022 arguing they were not complying with the law preventing bounty hunting. Although they lost the case, the contest does not appear to have been held since.

But those of us who appreciate the animal for its resiliency, its devotion to family and its adaptability, know getting rid of them is nearly impossible. It is estimated the coyote species can withstand a kill rate of 70 per cent of their population, year after year.

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It’s denning season now across Ontario and in the coming months coyote pups will appear. I, for one, hope people can accept them as a valuable species, playing a vital part in our ecology.

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The cold snap held its grip on southern Ontario for weeks. On the shores of Lake Erie, some speculated this could be the year the ice makes it all the way across — something that hasn’t happened in three decades.

Erie, the shallowest of the Great Lakes, typically sees the most ice cover. Still, the most recent full freeze-up was in 1996, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data.

On a Sunday in early February, as ice cover crept over 95 per cent, locals and visitors braved frigid temperatures to look out across the frozen surface. 

Among them was photographer Carlos Osorio, who captured the lake and the people who set out across it — on foot, studded-tire bicycle or all-terrain vehicle. Wind had sculpted blowing snow into rippling waves, as if the water, on a blustery summer day, suddenly stood still.

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“When you think about water freezing, you think about smooth ice, and then you come here and the ice almost looks like frozen waves,” Frank said. “You can just imagine the water swelling up and down, but it’s not, it’s just frozen.”

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“This is exceptional,” Gerald Meyering said, marveling at the amount of ice and snow on the lake, compared to recent mild winters.

— With files from Carlos Osorio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Escaping enslavement required expert outdoor survival skills

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Standing on the Athabasca Glacier in Jasper National Park, Alta., the wind picks up with an icy bite. 

It will be a lot warmer down there, our guide tells me, pointing to a moulin, a hole in the glacier formed by meltwater.

Trusting my rope, I, like the others, lean back and descend 35 metres down until my spiked feet land inside a sculpture of perfect blue ice. 

Every spring and fall since 2022, photographers Jim Elzinga and Roger Vernon, with mountain guide Dylan Cunningham, venture to the Columbia Icefield. Their mission is to capture the vast glacial expanse straddling the Alberta and British Columbia border before it’s gone.

“This is the beauty,” Elzinga says. “But this is what we’re potentially going to lose.”

Glaciers in Western Canada are melting faster than ever, and the last four years have been particularly devastating. From 2021 to 2024, glaciers receded twice as fast as in the last decade due to low snow, high temperatures and wildfires darkening glacial ice as ash and soot on the surface absorb heat, according to recent research published in Geophysical Research Letters. 

On our current trajectory, Environment and Climate Change Canada predicts glaciers in the Canadian Rockies are likely to all but vanish by 2100, according to a statement emailed to The Narwhal. The consequences are far-reaching, impacting everything from water security to infrastructure to ecosystems and contributing to sea level rise. 

But below the surface of the Athabasca Glacier, encapsulated in its water-sculpted walls, that’s easy to forget. The ethereal blue seems endless, engulfing our senses and filling our peripheral vision.

It’s inescapable — a feeling Elzinga and Vernon strive to replicate with their photography. 

Vernon made sure everyone touched the ice with their bare hands to experience the smooth texture. 

Capturing the beauty of the Columbia Icefield glaciers 

For three decades, Elzinga and Vernon were in the same social circles in the mountain community of Canmore, Alta. But it wasn’t until 2021, when Vernon got a call from Elzinga asking to collaborate on a glacier project, that the pair got to know each other. It was a natural pairing.

“When we came together there was such a common language,” Vernon says. 

Their goal too, was shared. In a world inundated with images, they want to take photos that grab people’s attention at a scale that’s difficult to ignore. 

“We wanted to have our images so big that if you stood back at this distance,” he says, holding his arm out wide, “it still smacked you in your face, commanded your presence.

That shared vision led to Meltdown — a photography project exhibited in large scale at galleries and museums capturing the beauty of the Columbia Icefield glaciers before they are gone. It’s part of a larger initiative by an educational non-profit called Guardians of the Ice which Elzinga cofounded. The group aims to raise awareness of the consequences of losing Western Canada’s glaciers by marrying art and science.

For Vernon, it’s a bit of a shift from his other life behind the camera on the big screen, where he has a long history as a cinematographer, including documentary films and Academy Award–winning movies. 

Elzinga, meanwhile, is an accomplished alpinist who has spent a lifetime guiding and exploring in the mountains at high altitudes. In 1986, he led an expedition when the first North American woman summitted Mount Everest.

While both Elzinga and Vernon have accomplished much in their careers, they brush it off when we talk. The current mission takes centre stage — they are living and breathing glaciers.

Vernon first became aware of the impact of glacier melt when volunteering with a Calgary-based non-profit focused on water security. His work there took him around the world, to Zambia, Ethiopia and Congo. When Elzinga approached him for Guardians of the Ice, Vernon saw an opportunity to have an impact on water security locally.

“Imagine 50 years from now when we don’t have our glaciers. … Those folks aren’t going to have the water,” Vernon says, pointing to downstream Alberta communities. “That’s our food production.”

Water from glaciers in the Columbia Icefield joins rivers, streams and eventually the Pacific, Arctic and Atlantic oceans. As glaciers retreat, declining meltwater supply may impact freshwater availability as early as 2050, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada.

Elzinga, who studied photography in university, dreamt of photographing mountains since the 1980s but had to wait for technology to catch up with his vision. Elzinga and Vernon use a high-resolution camera capable of aerial mapping and space quality imagery to capture the detail and scale of their photography.

The team uses a Phase One camera, a high-resolution camera that allows Elzinga and Vernon to capture the scope of the mountains and glaciers without sacrificing fine details.

Elzinga and Vernon use a technique called photo stacking which combines multiple images to increase the quality of their photos. The technique has been useful for capturing moulins, in particular.

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Witnessing glaciers disappear

Before everyone ventures into the moulin, Elzinga and Vernon stand to the side of the opening, looking at their phones. They wait for Cunningham, the mountain guide who supports their work, to text photos to the pair so they can preview the spot and make sure the imagery is what they’re looking for.

Together, Elzinga and Vernon have the mountaineering experience required for the project, but they’re now in their 70s, so they enlisted Cunningham to focus on safety and technical requirements while they focus on the art. 

“We get wrapped up in the minutia of what’s in our eyes,” Elzinga says.

Today we’re also joined by alpine guide and long-time climbing partner of Elzinga’s, Ian Welsted, who volunteered his time to facilitate bringing a reporting team on the shoot. While Elzinga and Vernon take photos, Welsted explores the darker reaches of the moulin.

Behind the camera, Elzinga and Vernon can work together almost wordlessly, an important skill when conditions get rough, they say, like the cold winds and snow when I visit. 

While finding the exact image is a know-it-when-you-see-it scenario, the areas photographed are very intentional. 

A few days after the photoshoot, at Vernon’s home base in Canmore, Alta., he unfolds a map with mountain peaks marked one through 12, the starting point four years ago, when the duo was planning where to photograph. 

The mountains flanking the icefields are known as the “guardians of the ice,” he says, the origin of the non-profit’s name.“Now all that glacier is gone,” Vernon says, pointing to different spots on the map. He points to another area — “gone.” And another, gone.

 Features the photographers planned to capture had vanished or receded remarkably year over year, like the Columbia Glacier, which they estimate to have receded 100 metres from one photograph to the next.

The art of changing people’s minds

While Cunningham has always felt a responsibility toward the environment, working with Elzinga has had a “profound” impact on his outlook, he says. 

When Cunningham gets cynical about climate change, Elzinga’s optimism has the power to pull him back.

“You can’t think that way,” Elzinga will tell him. “We can solve this, we’re making a difference, and we’re going to keep pushing.” 

Giving up isn’t an option for Elzinga.

“It’s really easy to look at this stuff and be overwhelmed by it,” he says. “My attitude is, well, at least you’ve got to try and do something.” 

The non-profit supplies Alberta Tomorrow, a free educational platform, with their materials from the icefields, and plans to expand to the university level as well as experiment with other mediums, like virtual reality. 

Elzinga hopes that awareness will then ripple through every aspect of people’s lives, including the ballot box. “It’s at government levels that you can get policy change,” he says. 

The climate crisis is like a virus, Elzinga says. Even if people are aware of it, they can’t really see it. And as the urgency increases rapidly, maybe art can help show people what’s at stake. 

Among the photographs displayed in the Columbia Icefield Glacier Discovery Centre, where Meltdown is exhibited across from the Athabasca Glacier from May to September until 2027, a wall titled “no action too small” encourages visitors to be mindful of their environmental impact through pledging to take small actions such as eating less meat or divesting from fossil fuel. 

Not everybody who sees the images will make choices for the planet, but some might, and for Vernon and Elzinga, that’s what counts. 

“Sometimes people say, ‘Well, what I do is not going to make a big difference,’ ” Elzinga says. His comeback is to flip the concept of a drop in the bucket on its head. 

“A lot of raindrops go into a rain barrel and then eventually that rain barrel is overflowing.”

As he sees it, if 75,000 people see the images at the gallery, not everybody will make a change — but the percentage of them that do, he says, will “go out and within their circle, they can make a difference.”

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I’ve spent 18 years documenting Prairie life in western Manitoba, mostly photographing the people who make up the province’s small towns, farms, Hutterite colonies and First Nations. As photojournalists, we are constantly in and out of people’s lives, which is an amazing privilege — but it can also be exhausting.

This year, I decided to spend my time with bees.

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My friends and apiarists Andrew and Hiltje Vander Velde happily agreed to allow me to come and go from their hives, letting myself in and out of the electric fence meant to deter bears looking for honey. I spent hours at a time in the early morning and late evening watching the honeybees work, collecting pollen from near and far and bringing it back to the hives. I got to see the different colours of the pollen up close.

I wanted to capture the detailed lives of bees, including macro-lens portraits. This was not an easy task. Macro lenses have narrow depths of field — and flying bees move quickly and erratically, usually coming in and out of my focal plane faster than I or the camera could register. I wanted photos that felt like portraits, so I set up backdrops, relying on crafting or scrapbooking items I purchased. I’d pick a colourful piece of cardboard paper, line it up vertically against a side of a hive and focus my camera on the action just outside the entrance so I could get bees returning to their home or heading out on their missions. It might sound simple — but it required taking thousands of photos each sitting to get a few that were in focus. 

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I sat in the grass, my face and camera lens inches from the upper entrance to the hive, my neck and shoulders contorted into uncomfortable positions. And I photographed, while enveloped in the droning sound of thousands of bees at work. Sometimes I listened to podcasts, other times I listened to the songs of the western meadowlarks, bobolinks and least flycatchers. 

Some days I’d wear the full beekeeper suit that Andrew and Hiltje lent me, other days just a T-shirt and shorts. Aside from one poor bumblebee that inadvertently got pinched in my elbow crease, I was only stung less than six times in total, each when I was wearing my beekeeper suit. Most were just one sting at a time, on an exposed bit of wrist or ankle. 

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Once I had a group of angry bees following me back to my car. I’m not sure how I inadvertently caused them stress that day, but I could register their agitation in the change of pitch in their buzzing — the wing vibrations they use to communicate. 

The mesh head covering, which hung off a rimmed hard hat, was a pain in the ass to photograph through so I’d often ditch it, especially in the evenings when the bees were calmer. Over the years I’ve learned to follow beekeepers’ leads. My friends at Deerboine Hutterite Colony rarely wear any protective covering so if I’m around them, I also don’t wear anything. When I came across apiarist Mike Clark, director of the Manitoba Beekeepers’ Association, pulling honey boxes from hives amid a strong late summer wind, he also wasn’t wearing any protective gear. Meanwhile, thousands of honeybees, blown out from frames of honeycomb with a leaf blower, filled the prairie air with chaos. 

“Shallow breaths,” Clark told me. “They’re attracted to carbon dioxide.” That day was magical. Dozens — if not hundreds — of bees explored and rested on my arms, legs and torso while I photographed their hives shortly after their honeycomb was collected. I didn’t get stung once; I gently brushed them off my body as I changed positions. 

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The backdrop to all of this, of course, is that bees are under threat. Canada is home to more than 800 species of wild bees, many of which are rare. The threats to them are many: pesticides, invasive species, climate change and more. Honeybees are also under threat. Mites and the viruses they spread led to 30 per cent of honeybees dying in Canada last winter, according to the Canadian Honey Bee Council, though not all apiarists experienced this same level. However, the conversations around the threats are nuanced and complicated. Beekeepers tout the importance of honeybees in pollination and how they can benefit wild bees and wildflowers. Not to mention, the harms versus benefits are situational, based on competition for pollen and other factors. 

But this project wasn’t about the big picture. It was about looking closely, and enjoying the moments with a tiny insect many of us never turn our full attention to. It was a case study in zooming in and slowing down.

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Summer evenings at the hives were especially beautiful. The low sun backlit the bees, still active in the airspace above their hives, with trees in shade providing a dark backdrop to their glow. There’s something beautiful about getting to know a subject beyond the surface level. I spent hours watching bees take evening naps on plants just outside their hives, or casting shadows on and through the delicate petals of poppies in the garden at Deerboine Colony. 

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The beauty was in the details: leafcutter bees store their collected pollen on the bottom of their abdomens using specialized hairs called scopa to grasp the powdery plant fertilizer. When leafcutters plunge themselves headfirst into flowers, their pollen-covered back ends stick out. Bumblebees, of which Manitoba has several species, sometimes climb out of flowers looking like they fell into a vat of pollen, with it clinging to every part of their fuzzy, barrel-shaped bodies. Patches of goldenrod and fireweed were the bee equivalent of a Manitoba social. 

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Some evenings at the hives, shortly after the sun had set, coyotes filled the air with their cries from every direction. Activity slowed as bees entered their hive for the night, congregated on discarded honeycomb or rested on plants in the field. 

The occasional firefly would glow alongside the bees still moving across the dusk-blue sky. 

I sat and watched the activity slowing — and felt lucky to be there in that moment.

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The woods surrounding the Highwood Pass, a mountain valley southwest of Calgary, are quiet. The traffic snarls of fall, which brought day trippers flocking to see larch trees pop yellow against the green hills, are gone. The road through the pass is closed until the spring. 

Gone too is a temporary camp and barrier across a logging road, set up to protest in advance of clear-cut operations in this popular corner of Kananaskis Country along the rocky spine of southwestern Alberta. At least for now. 

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At first blush, it’s odd for protesters opposed to logging to leave the area before the logging starts, but that wasn’t really the point of the camp set up by a group called Defenders of the Eastern Slopes. 

“Yes, we want to protect these valleys from the logging and protect the fish from the logging, but one of our goals is also to start the process of creating a culture of civil disobedience,” one of the organizers, Michael Sawyer, says. 

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It’s not something generally associated with Alberta and it’s not something Sawyer has always focused on. He’s spent decades fighting through more official/polite/formal channels: in courts, through letters, within environmental organizations and without. But in this time and place, he thinks a more direct approach is needed. 

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“I would argue that, given the politics in this province, and I would even say nationally, we need more and more citizens who are prepared to stand up against undemocratic and illegal activities by the government.”

So while the camp is gone and the woods are still, the group behind regular gatherings on the outskirts of the cutblock are ready to put their bodies on the line at the first sign of activity.

“We’re keeping an eye on things,” Colin Smith, another member of Defenders of the Eastern Slopes, says. “We’ve got eyes and ears out there.”

The area in question and why it matters

The area in question is surrounded by protected land in the multi-use area known as Kananaskis Country — a mishmash of parkland, recreational spaces and industrial activity along the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains. 

It’s an area popular with residents of nearby Calgary, but has been set aside for logging since before Kananaskis was established. It’s also the headwaters for all of the creeks and rivers throughout southern Alberta and into the wider Prairies. 

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In 2024, an earlier clear-cut plan covering 1,100 hectares, an area the size of over 2,000 football fields, was shelved after pushback and the sale of Spray Lake Sawmills to B.C.-based West Fraser Timber. Now, it’s been revived.

New permits have been issued by Fisheries and Oceans Canada for the construction of logging bridges across rivers and creeks in the valley. Those permits allow disruptions to habitat for endangered native trout species in the valley — a fact that frustrates the group.

In an emailed statement, West Fraser Timber said it understands “how important it is to protect bull trout and westslope cutthroat trout habitat in the Highwood” and that as part of its planning, the company will be “monitoring conditions before and after harvest to help inform responsible stewardship.”

The company said it paused Spray Lake’s earlier plans to “hear from people who live, work or recreate near our operations,” and added operations won’t start until its planning processes are complete. It did not say whether or not those operations would start this winter.

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But it’s not just logging the group is concerned about. The eastern slopes face multiple threats, from clear-cutting to the potential for new coal mines south of Kananaskis, all of which could impact the water that flows from these headwaters across the Prairies. 

Denuded hills don’t hold on to water, which exacerbates the risk of flooding during rainfall and leaves the area more parched during droughts. Pollution from reopened mines would rush off the hills and into irrigation channels and drinking water. 

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Sawyer, who lives in nearby Nanton, says his tap water comes from these hills.  

“We’re treating our foothills headwaters like they don’t matter from a water point of view, but they’re absolutely critical, and the government is just not paying attention to it,” Sawyer says.

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West Fraser Timber said it will establish buffers of at least 30-metres around watercourses.

The office of the Minister of Forestry and Parks did not respond to an interview request prior to publication.

We’re suing the RCMP to fight for press freedom

In November 2021, photojournalist Amber Bracken was arrested by the RCMP while on assignment for The Narwhal. So we launched a lawsuit to take a stand for press freedom. Now, we’re in the middle of our trial.

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The eastern slopes: ‘vital’ to ecosystems, water and more

The Rocky Mountain headwaters have been the subject of increasing concern to Albertans. The United Conservative government is working to reopen coal mining to the south of the pass, at the same time that reservoirs and rivers across the province have seen consecutive years of depletion due to droughts. 

Mike Judd, another member of the Defenders of the Eastern Slopes, says the government and industry hold too much power, which allows them to enforce a narrative focused squarely on resource extraction.  

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“They have the propaganda machinery to keep a constant conservative message out there, which is the eastern slopes are a warehouse of treasures that keep the Alberta economy rolling,” he says. In his mind, that’s a narrow definition of wealth. 

“There’s not a thing in their message that’s about the eastern slopes being the vital water source for Alberta, about it being the vital place for so many different species of birds, fish and animals, and for being the vital place for so many people to have a recreational outlet.”

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It’s another reason Judd and Sawyer believe civil disobedience is a necessary tool — to draw attention to their fight and, as Judd puts it, “rattle the chains” a little. 

Starting in October, the defenders hosted weekend events nearby, to introduce people to the issues and the idea of civil disobedience. The community made art that could be hung on the barrier across the logging road. 

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Without any current logging or bridge building to oppose, there was no standoff or risk of arrest — yet. 

“It’s just giving people who have been interested in doing something like this a place to show up and meet other people,” Smith says.

“This hopefully can be a catalyst to future actions.”

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Group hopes to ‘bridge political polarization’ over shared concern for headwaters

The Defenders of the Eastern Slopes isn’t solely focused on the Highwood Pass. The group might plan blockades in other areas of the vast stretch of woods and mountains that skirt the border of B.C. and Alberta, according to Smith. 

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He’s been contacted by the RCMP, who sent out a liaison officer and he’s heard the company doesn’t plan to start operations this winter, but there’s no confirmation as yet. 

The RCMP did not response to a request for comment by publication time.

Smith says the threats to the region are a unifying force. He said that, while at the camp this fall, he had conversations with hunters and a coal worker that involved both disagreement, and finding common ground.

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“Water and land protection and stewardship can bridge political polarization — especially water,” he says. “Most people can agree that we need clean water.”

— With files from Amber Bracken

Updated on Dec. 19, 2025, at 10:39 a.m MT: This story has been corrected to identify larch trees properly. Lark trees, as previously written, is not a tree species.

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For the past 12 winters I have been photographing and observing snowy owls in farmers’ fields northwest of Elmira, Ont. — with permission from the landowners, and a pocketful of dog treats to befriend off-leash farm dogs.

While snowy owls typically roost on the ground, they prefer a higher perch — a tree, a fencepost or hydro pole from which to hunt prey.

To witness a hunt is truly a memorable sight.

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Their feathers allow near-silent flight as they swoop down to attack their prey, such as meadow voles, mice and birds. But it takes practice; I’ve witnessed inexperienced young owls chase pigeons round and round a grain silo and fail. Meanwhile, a mature female I encountered one winter targeted a pigeon 300 metres across a field and snatched it out of the sky.

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In a good year, I might have seen as many as 10 snowy owls in the roughly 10-square kilometres I routinely cover. But in the past two years, only two or three have made their way to these fields for the winter, after spending the summer on the Arctic tundra. Birders and ecologists across Ontario and Quebec have also reported fewer sightings in recent years. 

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Although some snowy owls remain in the Arctic year-round, many begin migrating southward in late autumn. In years when an abundance of lemmings can be found on the tundra, the number of chicks born — or the clutch size — can be larger. The young owls aren’t ready to compete with experienced hunters, meaning they are pushed south.

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Some migrants enjoy wintering in Ontario’s lake country, where waterfowl are abundant, while many prefer flat, open farmland that resembles tundra. With incredible eyesight, the ability to turn their heads about 270 degrees and phenomenal hearing, they are able to home in on mice and voles across a field.

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But snowy owls that find their way south face human-related threats such as electrocution from power lines and rodenticide poisoning in the mice and voles they eat. Automobile collisions, though, appear to be the most common cause of death among snowy owls wintering in eastern North America.

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In the North, climate change has severely impacted Arctic ecology, with the region warming three times faster than the global average, threatening the survival of many plant and animal species including the snowy owl. As the treeline creeps north in the warming climate, the snowy owl’s tundra is also giving way to forest.

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Lemmings are their main source of food in the Arctic, and breeding success is intertwined with any fluctuation in the population of these rodents. A healthy number of lemmings generally means more “snowies.” The opposite is also true. As snow cover thaws and refreezes amid warmer temperatures and rainfall, lemmings — who can forage plants and lichen through snow — are prevented from reaching their food sources by the ice. 

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Warmer temperatures could also see the northward advance of insect borne diseases such as West Nile virus, which has been found in migrating snowy owls. Snowy owls are also gradually losing their circumpolar habitat as mining interests grow in the Canadian North and oil and gas interests take up space, such as along Alaska’s northern slope. The massive oilfield in Prudhoe Bay is 300 kilometres east of a traditional snowy owl breeding site in Utqiagvik, Alaska. And there is also the looming threat of legacy oil spills in the area, south of Utqiagvik, the town formerly known as Barrow. 

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There has been a 30 per cent reduction in the breeding snowy owl population over three generations, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Since 2017, the International Union has classified snowy owls as vulnerable to extinction. The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada reported in May that, with a population decrease of more than 40 per cent over the past two decades, snowy owls are now threatened — one step away from endangered. 

The winter still brings snowy owls south. But for how much longer?

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Under heavy rain, an electronic sign by the side of the road in a small northwestern B.C. town warns passersby, “Flare height will vary.” It flashes to the next message: “Between 15 meters [sic] and 90.”

Kitimat, B.C., a coastal community about 1,400 kilometres north of Vancouver, is home to around 8,000 people — and Canada’s largest liquefied natural gas (LNG) processing facility. For the past 14 months, LNG Canada has been periodically burning excess or waste gas, a process known as flaring. At its highest, the flame is about as tall as London’s Big Ben or New York’s Statue of Liberty — not just the statue’s torch but the whole lady herself.

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Speaking in the neighbouring community of Terrace, B.C., on Thursday, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced another LNG export facility — Ksi Lisims LNG — will be referred to the federal government’s newly established Major Projects Office. Projects flagged to the office are developments the Canadian government is endorsing as part of its efforts to diversify trade away from the United States, and considering fast-tracking through certain environmental and other approvals. 

“We are home to the world’s fourth largest reserves of natural gas and we have the potential to supply 100 million tonnes annually of new LNG exports to Asia,” Carney said.

Ksi Lisims LNG will be built about 200 kilometres north of Kitimat and supplied by the 800-kilometre Prince Rupert Gas Transmission pipeline, yet to be built. At full capacity, it will export around 12 million tonnes of LNG per year.

Meanwhile, the flare in Kitimat has been impacting the lives of residents and raising concerns about health and climate impacts. On social media, some Kitimat residents are grieving the loss of the night sky, posting photos and videos of a dull orange glow looming over the town. Others worry about the impact of emissions on their health, citing research on toxins emitted during LNG operations. Many have compared the near-omnipresent flame to the “Eye of Mordor,” from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

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Natural gas is mostly composed of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that is invisible and odourless. Methane, which is responsible for around one-third of global warming since the industrial revolution, traps 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. In other words, methane emitted now — or leaked into the atmosphere from industrial infrastructure — will directly increase the likelihood of climate disasters like wildfires, floods and droughts over the next two decades.

Burning excess gas, as LNG Canada is, reduces the amount of methane that ends up in the atmosphere by instead turning it into carbon dioxide and other toxins — meaning it still comes at a cost for locals, and the planet. 

LNG Canada — a consortium of foreign-owned fossil fuel companies led by multinational oil and gas giant Shell — maintains flaring activity is a regular part of start-up operations and says its emissions fall within provincial standards.

“Flaring is a provincially regulated safety measure that ensures the controlled, efficient combustion of natural gas during specific operational phases,” LNG Canada said in a public notification.

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On Nov. 9, the consortium told the public that “flaring associated with the start-up … will be extended beyond the originally anticipated timeframe” and warned residents this would mean “intermittent” noise and emissions. LNG Canada previously offered to pay to temporarily relocate some residents living close to the flare, according to a leaked document reviewed by The Narwhal and confirmed by the consortium.

The facility is currently in its first phase, operating four gas-powered turbines that supercool the gas to -162 C, reducing its volume for transport. An already approved and permitted second phase would double the plant’s production, adding another four turbines, corresponding flaring facilities — and, presumably, more warnings to residents.

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A proposed expansion at Canada’s busiest port could be fast-tracked by the federal government. The impact could be felt by many species, including a tiny but mighty bird and its source of superfood that’s uniquely plentiful in the Fraser estuary of Metro Vancouver. 

Microscopic organisms make up the food — called biofilm — which supports the round, fluffy western sandpiper. Biofilm provides the little shorebird fuel as it makes an epic journey between Peru and Alaska. Thousands of western sandpipers fly in artistic murmurations and gently poke their pointy beaks into the mud, scooping up biofilm with hairy tongues. Biofilm is part of the foundation of the food chain that also supports crabs and fish, bears and whales. 

But Roberts Bank Terminal 2, the expansion at Canada’s biggest container terminal Deltaport, is on the path to double in size. The goal is to bring in larger cargo ships and even more imported items from overseas — a development many scientists conclude will weaken the Fraser estuary’s ability to be a refuge for wildlife.

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The 2020 federal assessment of the project concluded the expansion’s impact on wetland function, Chinook and chum salmon and southern resident killer whales “is high in magnitude, permanent and irreversible.” The review panel concluded it could not say with certainty how the expansion may disrupt biofilm and western sandpipers since it’s a new area of research — but acknowledged there is no known way to recreate the habitat. Biofilm, a naturally occurring phenomenon, has not been successfully re-engineered by humans in all its natural complexity.

The provincial assessment also concluded the expansion would have negative effects, and federal and provincial environment ministers agreed with the conclusions. But Canada approved the project anyway in 2023 — arguing it is in the “national interest” — subject to 370 environmental conditions. B.C. ministers cited environmental concerns, but said the province does not have jurisdictional power to stop the project.

Now, in the face of escalating trade tensions with the United States, both British Columbia and Canada are looking to expedite major industrial projects, raising concerns from environmental organizations and First Nations that environmental considerations may be pushed to the wayside. Roberts Bank Terminal 2 was on a draft list of 32 projects to potentially fast-track under the Building Canada Act, according to an internal government document obtained by the Globe and Mail.

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‘The science is being ignored’

Biofilm is made up of diatoms — microscopic organisms a fraction of a hair’s width wide. It’s a widespread phenomenon, but at the Fraser estuary, the biofilm is very “activated” and “rich” compared to nearby estuaries, Elner explained.

Bob Elner, scientist emeritus with Environment and Climate Change Canada and adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University, said evidence suggests this unique richness is due to the spring influx of fresh water from the Fraser River into the salt water, which causes a “shock” in the tiny diatoms, causing them to be highly active and pulse out rich omega-3 fatty acids and other nutrients.

Elner said Roberts Bank “is the largest old unaltered, intertidal estuary” in the province; equivalent banks have been impacted by development. He closely studies western sandpipers, but said they aren’t the only creatures that may decline as a result of changing the biofilm. 

“Really, it’s much bigger than that, because those same fatty acids [in the biofilm] are responsible for the eulachan fishery, salmon fisheries and it goes up to orcas and marine mammals. It’s really that transfer of fat — these fatty acids — through the system,” he explained.

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The Vancouver Fraser Port Authority, the federal agency that pitched the project, touts the economic payoff of expanding the cargo terminal and argues more cargo capacity is needed. But Elner emphasized the estuary is a “high-value” system that could be “fundamentally, ecologically destroyed.”

“This isn’t that ports are bad,” he said. “Biofilm is really valuable, and we’ve got options in terms of how we get containers from wherever back to wherever, so trade doesn’t trump the environment.”

“I believe in science,” he added. “The science has been ignored.”

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Between Peru and Alaska, every western sandpiper will likely stop in the Fraser estuary

Deltaport connects the West Coast to the world of international trade. Clothing, electronics and manufacturing parts are packed in the thousands of cargo containers that pass through the port every day — more than all five other ports in Canada combined.

Roberts Bank is a significant stop on the Pacific Flyway shorebird migration route. It’s widely assumed every western sandpiper will stop at Roberts Bank at least once in its lifetime, Elner said, between breeding in Alaska and wintering down south.

You can go down to Roberts Bank and watch the birds roll in and out with the tide as they go north in spring and south in late summer. “It’s quite magnificent to see them flying in these huge flocks,” he said.

Western sandpipers’ next major stop in their spring migration is in the Stikine estuary, about 1,000 kilometres northwest. The tiny birds are far less likely to survive the journey without the bountiful biofilm at Roberts Bank, Elner explained.

“Every year, less and less birds will make it to the Arctic. There will be less numbers successfully breeding. We can interpret that in a fairly short number of generations, we’ll be looking at a species that’s a vestige of what it once was,” he explained.

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“The risk this will occur is very, very high, and the outcome is very predictable — species-wide impact, but also impacts at the fisheries level.”

Shorebirds are one of the “fastest declining groups” of birds in the world, he added. “Much of it, in my professional opinion, is tied to the removal of these sources of active biofilm.”

The Fraser River estuary has already lost 85 per cent of its salmon habitat, and the proposed project would deplete an additional 177 hectares. A 2022 study found 102 species in the Fraser estuary are at risk of local extinction between now and 2045.

Federally mandated biofilm research at Roberts Bank must remain rigorous if project fast-tracked: scientist

The federal conditions include convening an arm’s-length panel of scientists to oversee research and monitoring of biofilm and shorebirds up until construction begins. If it’s determined the ecosystem is being compromised, the port could be required to remove the structure, redesign it or mitigate it. 

Elner believes it’s a “credible” process that could effectively identify risk and require a dramatic correction to reduce that risk. But as Roberts Bank Terminal 2 is on a preliminary list of candidates to be fast-tracked, Elner emphasized environmental processes need to remain rigorous.

The Port of Vancouver sees $275 billion of trade pass through every year, exporting goods like pulp, lumber, coal and crops. The port includes other sectors, like automobiles and bulk goods, but the expansion only affects the container terminal.

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The Vancouver Fraser Port Authority says its forecasts show more container capacity is needed, and the expansion meets the projected demand. The project would widen the rail causeway leading to the port and build an artificial island about the size of 330 football fields to house three new berths, increasing container capacity on the West Coast by about 30 per cent. It would increase the port’s container capacity by nearly 50 per cent, meaning it could handle an additional 2.4 million 20-foot shipping containers each year.

The port authority anticipates construction will begin in 2027 and the terminal will take about six years to build, becoming operational in the early- to mid-2030s. It projects the terminal will add $3 billion to the economy every year. The Narwhal asked the port authority whether the original $3.5-billion price tag to build the terminal has changed due to economic factors and inflation, but the port authority said that was confidential as it tries to procure a construction partner. 

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Port authority says environmental conditions will be met, but independent scientists say they need more information about how

The Vancouver Fraser Port Authority declined to be interviewed by The Narwhal and instead sent an emailed statement in response to questions. It said it is on track to meet the hundreds of environmental conditions from the federal and provincial government.

The total sandpiper population is estimated at 3.5 million birds, and it’s likely all of them will stop at Roberts Bank at some point. The port authority said “studies show even with the project in place, there will be sufficient biofilm to support one million sandpipers in a single day.” It did not provide specific studies in its statement or after The Narwhal asked for such evidence, but referred us to hundreds of pages of documents. In them, we could only find the port authority referencing its own models to make this prediction.

The port authority said it does not expect any impacts on sandpipers, but will “avoid, monitor and — if required — mitigate any potential effects.”  

But scientists have reaffirmed multiple times they cannot confidently conclude negative effects will not impact biofilm or migratory shorebirds. In 2022, Environment and Climate Change Canada said the project “will likely be unmitigable and irreversible,” leading to higher risk to the “viability” of western sandpipers and have “major” effects on the quality of biofilm.

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The port authority has often said the federal review panel found the project would not result in adverse effects on biofilm in its 2019 report. But in 2022, Environment and Climate Change Canada called this an “incomplete” description by the port authority, explaining there is “uncertainty” since science around biofilm is quite new, and emphasizing this means the review panel could not say the expansion would not have negative impacts either.

The independent scientific body that has been overseeing the port authority’s monitoring of biofilm and sandpipers — mandated as part of the 370 federal conditions to approve this project — underlined this uncertainty in its most recent report earlier this year. 

The group of independent scientists called for more details about how the port authority plans to execute its monitoring or analyze the data it collects. They outlined the challenge of using local data to make any assumptions about changes to the entire population, and said it’s unclear how the port authority will make this connection. It said “more precision” is needed in the plans or else they risk producing “erroneous” results.

The group of scientists wanted to see more evidence from the port showing its methods will produce reliable information. Specifically, they said the port may need to extend how long it monitors the birds. Right now, the port wants to monitor for three years after the proposed terminal is built, but the scientists pointed out that any decline would likely result from fewer birds reproducing year over year, so population decline may not be detectable until more than three years later.

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The scientists pointed out some of the port’s proposed monitoring would only detect if there was a 50 per cent change in population or higher over two years, and any change under 50 per cent would not be detected. 

“Changes considerably smaller than 50 per cent may be biologically significant, especially if they occurred over such a short time interval,” the scientists pointed out.

Additionally, counting western sandpipers is difficult, and there’s potential for the port’s plans to result in incorrect counts, scientists added, which may under- or over-estimate the impacts on birds. 

The port authority told The Narwhal the western sandpiper population is trending upwards, and only 17 per cent relies on Roberts Bank during spring migration. The Narwhal found other scientific sources that suggest western sandpipers could be declining, and up to 64 per cent of the population relies on Roberts Bank.

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The expansion was originally estimated to cost $3.5 billion. The Narwhal asked if there is an updated figure, due to inflation and other economic factors, but the port authority said the cost estimate is “confidential” as it tries to procure a construction team.

The port authority has signed 27 mutual benefits agreements with the 28 Indigenous governments it is seeking agreements with.

Prime Minister Mark Carney announced the launch of the Major Projects Office in August, with the goal to “fast-track nation-building projects by streamlining regulatory assessment and approvals and helping to structure financing.”

The office said it will help the proponents finish the final regulatory steps and information will be shared online the same as it typically is, and no research or monitoring timelines have been condensed. Fast-tracking will come from “upfront certainty regarding approvals” and some processes happening simultaneously rather than sequentially, it added.

“While we are moving forward on projects that will build Canada … we are equally committed to upholding Canada’s environmental protections.”

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 first lake at the famous Joffre Lakes Park is quiet and empty. Usually, the viewpoints are clamouring with people. But on this cool spring morning, Lhpat (Maxine Bruce) stands alone at the shore, holding her drum. No cameras, no crowds.

When she sings, her voice and the beat of the drum travel uninterrupted across the calm water. A bird is perched on a branch behind her, and its trills also cut through the still air. Between silent trees, only the songs of Lhpat and the bird can be heard.

A few years ago, this peaceful moment couldn’t have happened. The area’s original name is Pipi7íyekw in Ucwalmícwts, the language spoken by the Líl̓wat (Lil’wat) and N’Quatqua nations. For generations, their people have been in relationship with the area, gathering plants and practicing ceremony. But ever since the park got Instagram-famous around 2018, community members have barely been able to access the area. The parking lot fills up and the paths are packed.

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British Columbia and the nations are implementing periodic closures to allow the park to rest from the feet and noise — and allow the nations to care for the area, harvest and connect. For three weeks over April and May, two weeks in June and one month in early autumn, the park was closed to everyone except members of Líl̓wat and N’Quatqua.

During the spring closure, the nations set up a sweat lodge in the parking lot. In the fall closure, between Sep. 2 and Oct. 3, people are busy picking berries, mushrooms, swamp tea and other medicines. They call these closures reconnection periods.

“Nature needs a rest,” Lhpat explains. “Mother Earth loves us every day … Every day, we need to love Mother Earth too, and give back.”

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Because of the park’s popularity, a day pass system was implemented in 2022 to deal with overcrowded trails. But the free passes are gone within minutes of being posted at 7:00 a.m. two days in advance, and aspiring park-goers are frustrated. Sometimes, people try to sneak in while the park is closed, or without passes during opening hours. During the reconnection period, some have asked for special permission to enter the park anyway; others have gone online to vent their frustration about the nations’ members exercising their rights.

The nations are frustrated too — not only because of the challenges they’ve experienced while executing their co-management agreement with B.C., but also because of the hate and misinformation that has been directed at them online.

Amid the combative discourse, some of it led by B.C. politicians, the nations’ intentions can get lost in the conversation.

“B.C. sees this as recreation,” Casey Gonzalez, director of k̓wezúsmin̓ (title and rights) for Líl̓wat, says at Pipi7íyekw. “We see this as medicine, as cultural.”

Líl̓wat didn’t make the decision to allow photographer Paige Taylor White and me into the park during the reconnection periods lightly. But with so much disinformation and hate swirling online, community members wanted to show people directly why the closures matter. With the fall closure ending this Friday, Oct. 3, they wanted people to see the space at rest.

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‘Heaven on Earth’

“It’s peaceful up here,” Terry Jameson says, looking out at the third and final lake on the hike. It’s his first time here.

The water is turquoise under the sun. He and his wife, Lightning Rose Jameson, are thinking of renewing their vows at Pipi7íyekw because the turquoise matches their wedding colours.

“It feels really amazing,” she says. “I honestly feel like this is a heaven on Earth, for sure — and this is only our backyard, you know? I’ve been here before, but this is my first time making it to the third lake and … I’m just happy.”

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They are exploring the area in September, the last closure of the year. Líl̓wat members are running into each other excitedly, laughing and chatting, in between quiet stretches of having the trail to themselves.

Crowds have deterred Jessie-Lynne Joe from visiting before — it’s her first time, too. Now she wants to come back.

“I’m pretty happy that I made it,” she says.

Hearing about the crowds and seeing the traffic the rest of the year, “it’s kind of intimidating to even think of coming,” community member Lisa Peters says after finishing the hike.

“I feel really good I was here on our territory and with family.”

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Instagram fame put pressure on ecosystem and community services

After it got online-famous, Joffre Lakes stayed busy. The trail became hectic, with people parking illegally along the highway and spilling onto the road.

“It was ridiculous,” Lightning Rose says. “The traffic was blocking the road pretty much.”

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Gonzalez, whose ancestral name is Pasít, saw an Instagram video of someone taking the classic photo everyone wants — standing on a log at the second lake — before panning behind to the line-up of people waiting to take a near-identical picture.

“That doesn’t look like fun in nature,” she says.

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In 2018, Líl̓wat, N’Quatqua and B.C. signed an agreement to co-manage the park. It was a joint priority, since annual visits more than tripled between 2010 and 2019.

After COVID-19 hit and many urban residents went looking for uncrowded areas, the nearby forest road became overrun with campers, Lhpat and Gonzalez say, and the affordability and housing crises in the years since have kept people living out there.

The small community became anxious about what the influx of people could mean for its limited emergency and medical services. Now, there were people camping long-term — not always legally — and showing up ill-equipped for the hike or sneaking in when no staff were around.

It’s not just Joffre Lakes. People have breached safety closures in other areas as well. When a road was closed in Líl̓wat territory due to landslide risk, Gonzalez says people brought a cutting torch and plywood to run their ATVs over the gate.

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The Joffre closures bring privacy to Líl̓wat and N’Quatqua folks who have to go off the trail to pick berries, but don’t want hundreds of strangers “thinking they can do the same,” Gonzalez says.

The nations are concerned about the trail, which has begun to widen, spilling further into the ecosystem. They’re also worried about wildlife being driven out of the area and busier roads further limiting animals’ movements.

B.C. and the nations introduced the first closures in 2023.

The visitor use management strategy aims to improve visitor experience by reducing crowds, protecting the area from being overworked and giving nation members access.

“These reconnection periods are not to exclude people from Pipi7íyekw,” Gonzalez says. “They’re for Pipi7íyekw to regenerate and heal.”

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‘Our communities need this’

The spring closure was aligned with Declaration Day, a celebration in May shared by Líl̓wat, N’Quatqua and the nine other St’át’imc communities that commemorates when their chiefs signed a declaration in 1911 asserting their sovereignty. Feather runners and horseback riders go from nation to nation, spreading the word about which nation is going to host the celebration that year. Gonzalez explains they imagined the runners being able to fulfill their journey without being surrounded by so many cars, and people able to stop at the lakes while travelling between communities.

Gonzalez says the park brings important spiritual and mental health benefits, especially for young people facing mental health and addiction issues due to interwoven socioeconomic factors. She says giving them time and space in important cultural places brings feelings of empowerment.

“For us to be up here … It lifts the hearts of the people,” Lhpat says.

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There was one economic trade-off — less business at the nation’s gas station during the closures. Gonzalez says Líl̓wat leadership is considering how to counteract that effect. But the closures bring benefits that are harder to quantify than numbers.

“Our communities need this,” Gonzalez says. “Our communities are suffering hugely by the toxic drug crisis, by mental health. It all leads back to colonization, and our communities really need to reconnect with the land and our teachings.”

Many aspiring visitors want to be an ‘exception’ to the rules

During the closure in June, a group of people came out of the trees at Joffre Lakes Park, heading to their car — but they were not from the community.

“We did have a group of sneaker-inners,” BC Parks ranger Alexandra Beech tells us. “We had nation members show up, and I made [the group] apologize.”

It’s not a one-time occurence: people regularly try to sneak in outside the park’s open hours and that’s continued during the reconnection periods.

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Again and again, people say they want to be the exception. They say they understand the park is really busy, but think they are a worthy, special case.

I travelled so far to be here. I flew in for this place.

Can I take wedding photos while it’s empty?

Can I just go to the first lake?

We only got five passes online. Can the nation give us permission to bring two more people? (“We don’t issue the day passes,” Gonzalez says.)

Still, Gonzalez says the vast majority of interactions are positive. Many people are interested and want to respect the reconnection periods. But there’s a loud and noticeable minority — mostly “keyboard warriors,” Lhpat says, who are angry about the closures. She believes educating the public can bring “positive change,” but it takes conscious effort that can leave her feeling overwhelmed.

“We need to open our minds and hearts to each other — because we’re going to be here,” she adds.

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‘Figuring out what reconciliation actually is’

Lhpat shows us the spot in the parking lot where a sweat lodge was set up earlier this year.

“We paved paradise and put up a parking lot,” she says, referencing Joni Mitchell’s song Big Yellow Taxi. “Every now and then, that song comes out on the radio and, man. It really hits home for me.”

The nation has been working with B.C. since 2018 in a significant effort at collaboration, but the partnership still hasn’t been perfect. The nations were upset this summer when the province chose closure dates without their buy-in, making them a full month shorter than the nations requested. Despite their opposition. B.C. made the call to allow public access over Labour Day weekend.

On a Friday morning in August, the nations held a ceremony and blocked traffic on Highway 99 to bring attention to what they saw as the province’s betrayal of their partnership.

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To Gonzalez, BC Parks announcing new closure dates without the nations’ buy-in meant they were holding onto a “back-minded mentality that they are the ultimate decision-makers of our unceded territories,” she says.

In an emailed statement, B.C. told The Narwhal the shorter closure still “allows the park to recover from a busy summer” and time for nation members to carry out cultural practices.

“We acknowledge that the Nations had requested additional closure dates beyond what the province was prepared to agree to,” it said. “Although a final agreement for 2025 was not reached, this year’s closure schedule honoured the approach agreed to for the 2024 season.”

“We have a responsibility to support public access to parks while also respecting First Nations cultural practices and conservation goals,” the ministry continued. “We greatly value our relationship with the Líl̓wat Nation and N’Quatqua, and are committed to a continued collaborative planning process.”

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Historically, parks were created without consent from Indigenous Peoples, sometimes forcibly displacing people from their homes, erasing villages and expelling people from their harvesting and hunting areas. These nations are among many that want to ensure true collaborative management for the future.

Legally enshrined Indigenous Rights include the right to access traditional territories and engage in activities such as harvesting, fishing and gathering medicines. Canada’s adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2021, and B.C.’s own Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act in 2019, require the federal and provincial governments to uphold those rights. But also, there were 20.8 million parks visitors across the province from 2013 to 2014; a decade later, that figure had grown by nearly 30 per cent to just over 27 million. Balancing Indigenous Rights to access these places with demand from Canadians and visitors alike is a challenge — and leads to thorny conversations.

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“I think there’s also this level of fear and unknown … [and] discomfort while we go through figuring out what reconciliation actually is,” Gonzalez says.

“I’m just as unsure what to say … I feel uncomfortable. But if I don’t say it, then I’m complacent with where we’re at.”

But Gonzalez is not content with where things are at. She wants to see big changes. She wants Indigenous Peoples to be included equally in early planning of all management decisions around parks. She wants Indigenous Peoples to have safe, protected access to their territories that have been disrupted in so many ways.

For her part, Lhpat would like to see a Guardians program launched in Joffre Lakes Park. She’d also like more jobs at BC Parks to be prioritized for nation members.

She wants everyone, non-Indigenous as well, to feel love and responsibility to care for the land, not just use it.

“Look at what we’ve done,” she says, referring to the destruction of ecosystems. “But if we leave it alone for a while, the land will forgive us and recoup itself.”

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.