The parking lot off the highway is busy and there’s a line-up for the outhouses next to a Parks Canada information stand featuring maps from years past. To the left, a wide accessible trail leads to the well-trod bridges and pathways crisscrossing Marble Canyon in Kootenay National Park in southern B.C. just 50 kilometres from the Alberta border. 

The walk up the length of the canyon is short, barely a kilometre, with a little detour near its end where the ubiquitous red chairs of the national park system sit on a rise looking back toward the parking lot. It’s about as far as most people venture, but those red chairs don’t mark the end of the trail system through the valley. 

A few more steps and walkers encounter a sign warning that the trail ahead — still listed on those yellowing maps — is no longer maintained. The sign doesn’t lie. Heading up through Tokumm Creek valley requires climbing over and under fallen trees, over collapsed log bridges and through overgrown brush. 

It’s the sort of trek that eats at Trevor Willson, the president of the Canadian Backcountry Trails Preservation Society. 

“I’m an engineer,” he says, driving through the Rocky Mountains toward Marble Canyon one fall weekend. “So if you have a problem, you don’t ignore the problem, you solve the problem.”

His organization is trying to convince Parks Canada to reinvest in trails it says have been abandoned, hindering backcountry access in parks at a time when more and more people are visiting. That’s particularly true for the Rocky Mountain parks of Banff, Kootenay and Jasper.

According to Willson, the cost of his plan to fix the nation’s parks is minimal, approximately $50 million to replace bridges and fix all of the existing trails, plus one-to-two million dollars per year in maintenance. Parks Canada, he says, doesn’t want to spend the money in an era of budget cuts, and doesn’t want volunteers taking on some of the load. 

But the question runs deeper than dollars and cents, touching on a philosophical debate about the purpose of Canada’s national parks and whether to prioritize recreation, conservation or some balance between the two. 

“Hiking and horseback riding are the classic activities to do in the mountains,” Willson says. “If you want to see the national park, you need to get out of the town of Banff because it’s beautiful, but it’s a very civilized, very well-developed little chunk of real estate.”

It should not be, he says, a “drive-through park.”

‘Proverbial pulling of teeth’: backcountry hikers frustrated with perceived lack of action from Parks Canada

Willson has been involved in trail building and maintenance for years, including building bridges and negotiating partnership agreements with governments. He was inspired to start his society when he tried to convince Jasper National Park to replace a bridge along a historic passage across its northern border — and was rebuffed. 

The Simon Creek bridge broke around 2015, severing a trail that was once a thoroughfare for First Nations and then the fur trade. Willson says he approached Jasper National Park about fixing it but was told there wasn’t enough money. Not one to take no for an answer, Willson found private funding but says he was eventually told rebuilding the bridge would have a negative impact on the ecology of the area. 

Willson and his organization focus their efforts on existing trails and areas where bridges once spanned significant waterways. They do not, as he puts it, campaign to get rid of all obstacles or prevent your feet from getting wet. 

“The point is, if you come to a river or creek and it’s impassable — like you can’t get across — and therefore you have to turn back, that bridge should be replaced,” he says, adding the bridge on Smith Creek crosses a section of fast, opaque and boulder-filled water.

Gavin Fitch, a fellow society member and environmental lawyer based in Calgary, says the group had a formal meeting with Jasper National Park officials in April, but still haven’t received a response. 

“Our optimism has, I would say, changed to pessimism,” he says.

Not only is the Canadian Backcountry Trails Preservation Society trying to convince the government to make investments in trails and bridges — potentially one of Willson’s own designs — but to allow certified volunteers to help maintain the trails. That’s common in provincial parks, particularly in B.C., but Parks Canada has moved away from the practice and is reluctant to change tact, Willson says.

Parks Canada did not directly answer questions emailed by The Narwhal, but says it regularly reviews investments in the more than 8,000 kilometres of trails in its network based on visitation and conservation priorities. 

“These decisions help ensure available resources are focused where they provide the greatest benefit to visitors, Indigenous partners, communities and protected places,” spokesperson Charlotte Bordeleau says in an email. 

“In Kootenay National Park, for example, maintenance on portions of the Tokumm Creek Trail above Marble Canyon was discontinued as part of broader wilderness management decisions designed to support conservation objectives and wildlife habitat protection.”

Climbing over trees and scrambling through brush on the hike from Marble Canyon, Fitch says abandoning infrastructure doesn’t just prevent access to the backcountry, it erases public trails.

The trails are not decommissioned, simply allowed to deteriorate, he says. Then they disappear from government websites. Soon, the hiking apps used by modern adventurers downvote them into near obscurity. 

It’s one reason Fitch carries around a well-worn trail book from 1990, an encyclopedic guide to routes across the Rocky Mountain region that’s fading in the digital age.

“One of the issues here is — now I’m putting on my administrative lawyer’s hat — these are decisions that Parks Canada makes with zero consultation,” he says. 

“And of course, once the decision’s made, as we are finding out, trying to get them to reverse a decision that they’ve made on maintaining a trail is like proverbial pulling of teeth.”

Who is a national park for?

It’s only a matter of minutes up the valley from Marble Canyon and those red chairs before the crowds feel far away. It is quiet and empty and the trees blocking the route multiply as you move farther in. The live trees are short, showing only about 20 years of growth since a fire ripped through this area. Skeletal burnt trunks still hover high amidst the green. 

The quiet, even this close to a highway tourist stop, isn’t uncommon in the sprawling mountain parks that hug that Alberta-B.C. border. The vast majority of land in these parks is tucked far away from main thoroughfares. In Jasper, Willson says his own calculations show 83 per cent of the land is more than five kilometres from a highway. 

“If you don’t have trails to access that 83 per cent, that’s a huge loss,” he says.

But not everyone would agree. 

Bordeleau says Parks Canada has invested approximately $155 million in trail infrastructure since 2015, a figure that goes beyond backcountry trails. But she says the first priority of the agency is protecting the ecological integrity of the parks. 

Willson argues that focus is too restrictive and ignores Parks Canada’s commitment to enjoyment of these vast public spaces.

“Ecological integrity is the number one priority in national parks. It’s written into the National Parks Act, and it states that the national park shall be maintained for future generations, which is fine, is great,” he says. “But they interpret that as ‘Keep people out of the back country.’ ”

At the same time, he says, more and more people are crowding into tourist hot spots. 

According to data from Parks Canada, more than 11,000 people visited Lake Louise in Banff National Park each day in 2025, and the park itself set a new record with 4.5 million visitors that year.

Data from digital tools could help inform Rocky Mountain trail decisions: conservation advocate

Nadine Raynolds, the director of communities and conservation at the environmental group Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, says there are ways to balance human access with ecological integrity, given the proper data and funding. 

But that doesn’t necessarily mean maintaining existing or historic routes and will depend on wildlife routes, the specific species that use an area, the impact of human activities and even the time of year. 

“What is the information that we need to support decision-making on the landscape?” she says. “Often what that leads to is making choices about where those trails should be and where is a place where we maybe shouldn’t put trails because of the wildlife needs.”

Unlike Fitch and his guidebook, her organization leans into digital apps and technologies to determine what areas are popular among humans and wildlife as it decides where to invest tight budgets. And she argues those tools can be effective in monitoring. 

“Land managers that we spoke with in B.C. and Alberta were really keen to explore all these options because they need this information,” Raynolds says, adding those managers don’t have the staff or resources to implement sufficient monitoring programs. 

When it comes to underused backcountry trails, the impact of human activity is unlikely to be significant, and it would be easy to manage numbers with trail restrictions and campsite access. 

But Fitch acknowledges the calculus could work against them, precisely because the number of people who want to trek in the backcountry is small. 

“So I think it would be the bean-counter argument, that the scarce resources which we have should be put to use on essentially front-country infrastructure, so the stuff you can reach easily from the highway,” he says.

‘A very quintessential Canadian thing’

In March, the federal government announced $3.8 billion for initiatives it says will protect Canada’s natural landscapes. Of that, $267 million will go to the creation of two new protected areas overseen by Parks Canada. The plan also calls for private partnerships and investments in Indigenous-led stewardship. 

It’s unclear if those moves will include a reinvestment in backcountry trails, but Willson and Fitch aren’t waiting to find out. They’re stepping up lobbying efforts, meeting with Corey Hogan, the sole Liberal MP in Calgary, and hoping that one of the doors they knock on opens.

Raynolds says the tools and the research exists to plan trails and parks that benefit both wildlife and recreation. But implementing those plans will take political will and a bit of investment.  

Willson hopes there’s more to it than a simple cost-benefit analysis. 

“The park is not only the highways and the towns,” Willson says. “The park is the trails too. Walking and hiking on a trail in wilderness is a very quintessential Canadian thing.”

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Gail Krantzberg spent decades working on Great Lakes policy and protection — years before this whirlwind year of politics on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border crept into the ways the lakes are protected. 

In Canada, U.S. President Donald Trump’s ongoing trade war has seen federal and provincial legislation introduced in the name of national sovereignty, with major implications for the land, water and air. Now, Trump has given Lake Ontario a new name — at least for the purposes of the U.S. federal government and a couple online mapping services — like Google — that (controversially) followed suit. 

But changing the name doesn’t change the international boundary running through the lake. Nor does the executive order change the agreements and institutions developed by Canada and the United States to manage their shared waters, Krantzberg said.

Krantzberg, now a McMaster University professor, previously served as director of the Great Lakes regional office under the International Joint Commission, an independent organization established by the two countries more than a century ago to resolve disputes over transboundary waters.

Lake Ontario’s name dates back to the 17th century and comes from the Wendat word Ontarïio’, which means the lake is beautiful and great. It’s a part of the Great Lakes system where pollution, invasive species and the effects of a changing climate don’t stop at an international boundary. Protecting the lakes has long depended on governments, scientists and communities on both sides of the border working together.

The framework for that co-operation dates back to the 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty. The treaty set out how the U.S. and Canada would manage shared waters, including the Great Lakes.

That co-operation expanded in the 1970s as serious pollution problems emerged in Lake Erie. High levels of phosphorus contributed to major algae growth and fish deaths, prompting Canada and the United States to sign the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement in 1972. The agreement was updated in 1978, 1987 and again in 2012. It sets shared priorities for protecting the lakes, including controlling invasive species, reducing agricultural pollution or responding to the effects of climate change.

Amidst everything else going on, many people are questioning what, if anything, Lake Ontario’s name change actually means for the Great Lake and the many transboundary efforts to protect it. Here’s what Krantzberg had to say.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What are your biggest concerns about Lake Ontario right now, in light of the Trump administration changing its name — particularly when it comes to environmental protection and governance?

The name change is, in a way, a distraction from what’s actually happening to the lake. So we start worrying about the name change, and how he can do that and about hundreds of years of history of native naming of Ontario. There’s all this conversation, but it steers the conversation away from what Trump is actually doing for Ontario and all the Great Lakes. 

He’s pro-deregulation. Air emissions from coal-fired utilities, for example, continue to put out more mercury, and that mercury gets into the Great Lakes, the fish and the wildlife or humans that consume them. 

The pushback on banning and phasing out of very persistent chemicals like perfluorinated chemicals or PFASs — some people call them forever chemicals. These things will last in the Great Lakes for centuries, they basically do not break down. They have very detrimental effects on the health of humans as well as wildlife.

The cutting of monitoring — atmospheric monitoring, surveillance monitoring for weather forecasting and climate change modelling — puts not just our understanding of how the lakes are going to behave, but actually shipping at risk. We need to be able to forecast severe weather events so that cities can protect their drinking water for their people and shipping can be protected. 

The cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are really very, very serious. In fact, its Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory was cut by about 35 per cent. You lose the capacity to monitor and understand the lakes, and if you can’t understand the lakes, you can’t protect the lakes.

Beyond changing the name on U.S. maps and federal documents, does this have any practical effect on jurisdiction over Lake Ontario?

No. The only thing that that rename applies to is U.S. federal agencies and institutions. Of course, Trump has managed to get Google and Amazon and others to change their map online. If you go into the map online in the states, you’ll see Lake America. If you go to Canada, you’ll see Lake Ontario. If you go internationally, you’ll see both. 

But frankly, it’s the same body of water and it’s governed the same way. The states do not have to pay attention to it. In fact, we’ve heard the New York State governor say it’s Lake Ontario. Our prime minister and our premier said it’s Lake Ontario and it will always be Lake Ontario. 

In the states, certain federal administrations have to abide by the president’s order. It only applies to their name of Lake America. We don’t know yet, but it should not apply to how it’s managed or the nature of the challenges and threats to the lake.

Does either country have the legal ability to unilaterally assert greater control or jurisdiction over Lake Ontario? If so, what are the limits?

There is no way. Any control is only in terms of control of levels and flows of the lakes. So we can control the levels and flows just to protect commerce, people and ecosystems. For various reasons, we need to control levels and flows and that responsibility lies with the International Joint Commission. It is not driven by a desire by Canada or the United States to do one thing or another.

That said, nobody, no one really controls the lakes. That’s a massive piece of water — you can’t control that. What you can do is make it better or worse on your side of the border. And what we’re worried about right now is that it’s going to get worse on the U.S. side of the border, which means since the water goes all through the system, it will get worse on the Canadian side. One country cannot protect without the other country protecting.

Could a move like this affect the long-standing system of collaboration and shared management between Canada and the United States?

The name of the lake is only about how Trump and Ford don’t like each other, and so Trump said, ‘You know what, bully Mr. Ford. I’m not going to call it Ontario because I don’t like Ontario, so I’m going to call it America.’ That’s all that that is. 

This whole thing about American federal scientists in the United States having a censor happened well over a year ago. I remember getting invited to a conference where this particular invitation said, ‘If you are U.S. federal scientists, check with your administration whether you can attend because this is an international gathering.’ So that was a warning. It’s an international gathering. You may not be able to come and share your knowledge because you’ve been told you’re not supposed to share. 

Now, I don’t know what the rationale is behind that because we’ve always shared information. We’ve always shared science. In fact, when we monitor the Great Lakes, we coordinate surveillance and monitoring. A lot of that monitoring data is now not available to a lot of Canadian scientists who collaborated with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on hydrological modelling to understand climate change in the Great Lakes.

I believe co-operation on both sides of the border will continue. And I’ll say this because we have the Conference of the Great Lakes St. Lawrence Governors and Premiers. They are motivated to work together as a unit, regardless of country. The Great Lakes are a precious resource for their economy, for their social well-being, for their culture and for their people. They continually work on projects and programs to build, strengthen and protect the economy of the Great Lakes region, which is a multitrillion-dollar economy.

That co-operation and collaboration at the governor level is happening. At the mayor’s level, it’s happening. The Great Lakes St. Lawrence Cities Initiative has more than 400 mayors from both sides of the border. They’re passing resolutions on what they will do collectively to protect the waters of the Great Lakes for their shared benefits. 

The only collaboration that will be paused — and I think that’s the right word — is collaboration with U.S. federal scientists. But there are a lot of other scientists in the U.S. that collaborate with Canadian scientists, and that continues. 

But the overall collaboration, we’ve seen before. We saw when Trump came in and wanted to destroy, zero out funding for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, which is a $300-million or so initiative to restore degraded areas around the Great Lakes. The governors said no way. The governor stopped them. It didn’t matter if they were Democrat or Republican. They said that’s jobs, that’s the environment, that creates wealth, that creates beauty in our waterfronts, that increases property values, that’s tax revenue. Like, hands off. This is not frivolous tree-hugging stuff. This is restoration of waters and of well being, and they stopped that.

Do you feel there has been a gap in coverage or public understanding of what this name change actually means for Lake Ontario?

There’s a lot of anger. There’s some people who laugh. You can call it what you want. It’s still Lake Ontario. 

But I would hope that the focus is on how we all work to ensure the lake stays protected. How do we ensure we do what we can, even as individuals, to do our part to be stewards for the lakes?

One of the messages that I’m hoping will come out of all of this is let’s not get distracted by a name change that will eventually be reversed anyway. Once Trump is gone, it’s not going to stick. That’s my prediction. I could be wrong. Let’s not get distracted by a political jockeying of position and power mongering. Let’s focus on what’s important, and that is the health of the Great Lakes.

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

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.

It’s a grey September afternoon, and a small group is gathered for a special behind-the-scenes visit with Assiniboine Park Zoo’s newest resident. 

“Heeeeere, bubba,” animal-care specialist Caitlin Gordon-Hall hollers from between a double layer of chain-link fencing.

After a beat, a small white face appears at the entrance of the private enclosure. The polar bear cub sniffs the air before trundling toward the fence, where his keepers have been working to encourage calm behaviour around humans ahead of his public debut today.

Gordon-Hall offers sing-song affirmations while the cub, who is nearly 200 pounds and 10 or 11 months old, observes the fawning strangers with guarded curiosity. 

The young bear is objectively cute. With his round, fluffy frame and oversized paws, he looks more like a gift-shop stuffie than an apex predator.

A low, persistent growl, however, is a reminder that his natural instincts are still intact. 

“In the wild, his mama would have taught him: if there’s people there, make yourself big, make noise,” Gordon-Hall says. 

But his mama isn’t here. The cub, whose official zoo name will be chosen by public voting, is an orphan.

It’s been an intensive period of relearning for the cub, who, prior to arriving at the zoo in August, spent his days roaming the tundra near Churchill, Man. 

Today’s 20-minute visit is part of a series of exposure sessions designed to desensitize the bear to the zoo’s forthcoming crowds. A few minutes into the exercise and the cub is busy scratching his back on the fence, seemingly content that the nearby photojournalist’s long lens and camera shutter pose no threat. 

This isn’t the first polar bear cub to make the trek from the shore of Hudson Bay to a zoo enclosure. And he won’t be the last.

The plight of polar bears in the face of climate change has been well-documented, and the fate of bears with less sea ice has meant they get into trouble with humans more often, with bears usually paying the price. Policy has shifted over the decades, but young orphan cubs still stand little chance of survival in the wild. Life in a zoo may be an imperfect solution — but it’s one that keeps the bear alive.

As the session ends, the group heads through the locked gate of the cub care centre, where a pair of zoo visitors are peering through the slats. They pepper the staff with questions: How is the cub doing? Will he be rooming with the other six bears? When will we be able to see him?

It’s been nine years since the last orphaned cub was transferred from Churchill, the “Polar Bear Capital of the World,” to the Winnipeg zoo. Public excitement in the south is palpable, while some northern residents are wary of a previously wild animal spending the rest of its life in captivity.

Orphan cub’s mother was found near the Churchill dump — which has long posed issues for polar bears

Kelsey Eliasson, a Churchill polar bear guide and filmmaker, encountered the bear and his mother when they lived in the wild. He knew them by the nicknames “Marrón” or “Maury” and “Blanca” — Spanish for brown and white, respectively. 

“She was a super clean, super white bear, and then Marrón was kind of dirty and muddy, like every cub,” Eliasson says over the phone. 

Eliasson spent several days documenting the pair this summer as they hunkered down in the rocks along the shore of Hudson Bay. During the warmer months, bears can often be found in an area east of town hunting for seals while trying to beat the heat and bugs.

Blanca, who was recognizable by a scar on her ear, looked healthy while she wrestled and rested with her cub, Eliasson says.

But in mid-August, the mother bear was found dead roughly a kilometre from the Churchill garbage dump. Her cause of death remains unknown, and the results of a necropsy are still pending, a provincial spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

Bears have been visiting the dump with more frequency since the spring of 2024, when the town’s enclosed waste transfer facility was destroyed in a fire.

“Last year it was non-stop,” Geoff York, vice-president of science and policy for Polar Bears International, a non-profit research and conservation organization, says over a video call.

Sending orphan cubs to Winnipeg zoo has a complicated history

For a long time, there were few rules governing the lives of polar bears in Manitoba. 

The provincial government frequently exported orphaned cubs and problem bears to zoos around the world until the late 1990s, when three Churchill-born bears were discovered performing in a travelling Mexican circus. The bears had been purchased from a zoo in Germany and were living in sweltering conditions without access to water.

Widespread media coverage and public condemnation led to the creation of Manitoba’s Polar Bear Protection Act, which regulates the care and treatment of polar bears in captivity. Under the legislation, the province retains ownership of captive bears sent elsewhere, and their offspring, in perpetuity. 

The act changed Assiniboine Park Zoo’s relationship with the charismatic predators as well.

The zoo has housed polar bears since at least 1939, when an orphaned seven-week-old cub, dubbed Charmichael, arrived via train after his mother was shot by a trapper on the shore of Hudson Bay, according to a Winnipeg Tribune article from the time. 

Bears remained a popular fixture at the zoo until the death of Debby, the world’s oldest known polar bear, in 2008 at the age of 41. Her concrete enclosure was deemed too small and ill-equipped by Manitoba Conservation standards to host a new bear without significant renovations.

Amendments to the Polar Bear Protection Act created rules for rescuing orphaned cubs and paved the way for the Leatherdale International Polar Bear Conservation Centre. The $4.5-million research lab and cub transition centre opened at the zoo in 2012, followed by three new polar bear habitats at the 10-acre Journey to Churchill exhibit in 2014.

Decisions to send an orphaned cub to Winnipeg are made on a case-by-case basis with input from an advisory committee of provincial appointees, zoo administrators and polar bear experts. Age is a significant consideration since polar bear cubs typically spend two years with their mothers learning to hunt and navigate. Orphans less than a year old stand little chance of survival in the wild.

Eleven cubs were transferred to the zoo between 2013 and 2017 — a pace that sparked public outrage in Churchill and pushed the Winnipeg facility’s capacity to the limit. The zoo is currently home to seven rescued polar bears, including the new cub. 

 “There’s definitely been times when we were worried about our ability to take new bears,” Stephen Petersen, Assiniboine Park Conservancy’s director of conservation and research, says, referring to space constraints.

There are few other options. The province has conducted two foster parenting studies with the Born Free Foundation, a British animal welfare organization, to determine if mother polar bears with one healthy cub would adopt a second. The project was cancelled due to lack of success. 

A rare case of wild adoption was observed in Manitoba last year, when a mother polar bear was seen travelling with a second cub. It was the 13th documented case of adoption in the western Hudson Bay subpopulation.

Orphaned cubs raised in captivity can’t currently be returned to the wild because they lack hunting skills and natural instincts.

That leaves the zoo. The province has updated its cub management policy since the first influx of orphans and the zoo now only takes bears whose mothers have died through suspected conflict with humans, Petersen says.

One of those points of conflict can come from garbage dumps.

‘Polar bears will break into everything’: Churchill garbage dump struggles to keep bears out

Dealing with municipal garbage in a northern community like Churchill, which is surrounded by rocky, intermittently frozen ground and hundreds of polar bears, poses challenges. While the previous facility allowed for indoor garbage sorting and storage, the 2024 fire forced the Town of Churchill to return to an open-dump system with an electrified fence. 

“The trash doesn’t just sit nicely inside this little fenced-in area. It gets pulled out by animals, and it gets blown out by the wind. So it’s created quite an attractant,” York, who specializes in reducing conflict between bears and humans, says.

Dozens of bears were able to break into the dump site when the electric fence failed during a storm, he adds. The barrier has since been upgraded with funding from Polar Bears International. The group plans to install new bear-deterrent technology in the town and dumpsite.

Churchill is in the process of rebuilding its garbage facility and is developing a long-term waste management strategy, a municipal spokesperson said in an emailed statement. The town also plans to revisit the feasibility of trash incineration — a concept that was shelved following the fire but has proven beneficial in other northern communities, like Nuuk, Greenland, where the energy generated from burning household garbage is used to heat homes. 

Eliasson thinks incineration should be given higher priority.

“Churchill has been talking about an incinerator [for a long time] and … we’re just not building one. It’s the only solution,” he says. “Polar bears will break into everything else.”

Polar bears, impacted by climate change, are increasingly moving into towns

The western Hudson Bay subpopulation, which includes Churchill and ranges from Chesterfield Inlet in Nunavut to the Manitoba-Ontario border, is the most researched group of polar bears in the world, according to Polar Bears International. 

There are roughly 800 bears living in the territory today, representing a 30 per cent population decline over the last 46 years due to shrinking sea ice caused by climate change, Evan Richardson, a polar bear research scientist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, says.

“This is one of the most southern polar bear populations in the world, and it was among the first to show impacts of reduced sea ice availability on individual body condition, growth, reproduction and survival,” Richardson says. 

Polar bears make their living on the ice, using the frozen platforms to hunt for seals. Open water makes the speedy prey increasingly harder to catch. 

The Hudson Bay population is experiencing an era of relative stability thanks to several good ice seasons, Richardson says. While this gives current generations of bears a positive start, the survival of the species is dependent on the long-term health of their environment.  

“Polar bears don’t occur anywhere where there’s not persistent annual sea ice, and so as the habitat melts, it threatens the bears’ existence,” he says.

Climate change is further straining the coexistence of bears and humans in northern Manitoba. 

“It’s a bit of a perfect storm,” York says. “Less ice means the area is more accessible to more human activity. At the same time, more bears are spending more time on shore.”

As the ice-free season grows longer, Hudson Bay is seeing more traffic, whether it be freight, tourism or research. In Manitoba, the provincial and federal governments are keen to expand operations at the Port of Churchill to include year-round shipping, an all-weather road, an upgraded rail line and a liquefied natural gas terminal — all of which will bring more people and disturbance to the region. 

To ease the pressure on residents — bears and humans alike — York believes the governments should focus on shoring up local infrastructure, including Churchill’s garbage facility, before embarking on major national projects in remote northern communities.

“Take a quick step back and say, ‘Hey, what’s needed here today for the people who are there now?’ ” he says. “This waste management need has been acute, and we haven’t had the best luck getting the attention we think it merits, from the human-health side, but also the environmental-health and wildlife-health side.”

There have been 159 bear sightings and encounters reported so far this year in Churchill to the province’s Polar Bear Alert Program — a 24-hour hotline designed to minimize dangerous interactions while the animals move ashore from mid-July to mid-November.

If a bear is reported near the town or dump, Manitoba Conservation officers will chase them away with non-lethal scaring devices, such as noisemakers or flares. “Problem bears” that return repeatedly or refuse to leave the area are placed in the province’s polar bear holding facility near the Churchill airport and relocated more remotely via helicopter. Seven bears have been flown out of town this year.

The holding facility, colloquially known as polar bear jail, is also where orphaned cubs begin their journey to Winnipeg.

‘A really smart little bear, and he’s doing very well’

After his mother died, the zoo’s new cub was captured by conservation officers and held in polar bear jail while decisions were made about his future. Within a week, he was on a plane to Winnipeg accompanied by veterinary staff from the zoo. 

His first 30 days were spent in medical quarantine at the cub care centre, which includes indoor and outdoor enclosure space with a shallow pool, foliage and natural ground cover for digging. 

The cub’s introduction to captivity has been closely managed by a small circle of trainers.

“It has gone through a traumatic event of losing its mother,” Jackie Enberg, the zoo’s curator of animal care, says. “We’re here to offer a safe home and daily care. … A lot of that is relationship building and a good diet.”

Enberg has overseen the transitions for all of the cubs transferred to the zoo. Unsurprisingly, food is the fastest way to a polar bear’s heart.

Once the cub’s stomach adjusted to his new diet of ground meat, fish and “marine mammal chow” — a kind of dry kibble — his trainers added tong-feeding sessions to the menu. The goal is to associate humans with food delivery and reward calm behaviour, which can help with future vet checkups. 

Visitor exposure sessions were added post-quarantine. Over several weeks, the cub’s trainers paid close attention to his behaviour as larger groups of zoo staff and patrons stopped by his enclosure for longer periods of time. If he showed signs of distress, such as charging the fence or growling, the process was slowed, Enberg says.

So far, the cub has adapted to captivity as well as expected. (A fecal cortisol study conducted on bears at the zoo, and published in the Canadian Journal of Zoology earlier this year, found orphaned cubs can adjust to living under human care within two weeks of relocation.)

“I’m really impressed with how far he’s gotten. He’s just a really smart little bear, and he’s doing very well,” Enberg says. “And he’s spunky.” 

That spunky temperament may come into play when the cub is big enough to integrate with the zoo’s adult polar bears. Staff use personality assessments developed in the onsite research lab to determine which bears will mesh well together. The cub joins a long line of Assiniboine Park polar bears involved in local and international research programs — from non-invasive tracking techniques to whiskerprint identification to thermal imaging. Scientists at the zoo are also studying how climate change is impacting denning in the Arctic and how stress affects a bear’s DNA. 

“We really want the bears in our care to participate in as much research that contributes to wild bear and bear welfare overall as possible,” Petersen says.

For the zoo, the new cub promises to boost ticket sales as a novel attraction while serving as an ambassador for his northern brethren. 

It’s a tough sell for Eliasson, the Churchill polar bear guide, who would rather see orphaned cubs returned to the wild or paired with adoptive mothers. 

“It’s 2026, and Manitoba has a polar bear cub rehabilitation centre where the only option is to fly the cub to Winnipeg and put it in a zoo. To me, that doesn’t sound like rehabilitation,” he says. 

Petersen, however, says release isn’t a viable option. 

“Putting a grown, healthy bear that has relied on humans for all its food back on the landscape is just a huge risk to communities further north,” he says. 

Meanwhile, the cub is spending his days climbing logs and splashing in the pool of his enclosure as visitors watch from beyond the fence.

And soon, he’ll have a new name. The public can vote for Duke, Marly, Fletcher or Mantayo — ideas compiled by students from the Duke of Marlborough School in Churchill that speak to landmarks in the North.

Updated Oct. 13, 2026 at 11:56 a.m. CT: This story has been updated to correct the fact that Nuuk is located in Greenland, not Nunavut as previously stated.

Eva Wasney is a reporter covering environmental issues in Manitoba. Her position is part of a partnership between The Narwhal and the Winnipeg Free Press.

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

A document meant for a behind-closed-doors group of fossil fuel advocates earlier this year got right to the point: Canada’s policies to fight the climate crisis, protect nature and defend Indigenous Rights are a “problem,” and environmental organizations are “opponents.” 

The document, a copy of which was reviewed by The Narwhal, relates to a presentation that was scheduled to occur in January 2026. It was prepared by two advocacy groups called Energy United and Resource Works, both with connections to the country’s largest oil and gas lobby group, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. 

It was part of a session in which fossil fuel advocacy groups were to discuss shaping public perceptions in favour of the oil and gas industry and against the transition to clean energy, according to materials downloaded from a coordinating group’s website by The Narwhal and originally uncovered by Greenpeace Canada.

Under the heading “Knowing our opponents,” the document details work by environmental advocacy organizations and First Nations, and the funding that supports them.

It lays out how environmental non-profit groups are collaborative, well-funded — and effective. “The damage is real & intentional,” the document says of environmental advocacy in Canada, adding, “Every major ‘problem policy’ we fight traces back to an ENGO-authored framework or idea.” 

An ENGO is an environment-focused non-governmental organization. The document includes examples of “problem policies,” including the federal emissions cap, Canada’s commitment to protect 30 per cent of its lands and water by 2030 and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

The document also highlights funding for Coastal First Nations, and their stance against lifting the oil tanker ban in northern B.C. — a years-long thorn in the side of the fossil fuel industry and another “problem policy,” according to the document.

“So, what can we do about it?” the document asks of environmental advocacy in general. It proposes moving “from defence to offence” by launching “counter-campaigns,” “calling out hypocrisy” and filing “regulatory complaints” against environmental groups like the David Suzuki Foundation.

“They want to be on the attack,” Keith Stewart, senior energy strategist for Greenpeace Canada, said of oil and gas groups in an interview.

Stewart is one of the authors of the Greenpeace report “Manufacturing Petro-Populism,” which was published Oct. 8 and delves into the web of pro-fossil fuel organizations. 

The document was one of eight presentations scheduled to occur at the January “funders session,” according to an agenda published on the website of a coordinating network, Energy In Action. The session was organized for a group called Canadian Energy Prosperity. The Energy In Action website stated that it hosted a “showcase of a selection of our 30+ groups” Canadian Energy Prosperity works with.

The document was posted publicly on the Energy In Action website, where The Narwhal viewed it. The Narwhal emailed questions to Energy In Action on Oct. 5. The following day, the website became password protected.

Energy In Action and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers did not respond to requests for comment. Nor did the advocacy organizations Energy United and Resource Works. Canadian Energy Prosperity does not appear to have its own web presence or any publicly available contact information.

Media, including The Narwhal, singled out in internal oil and gas document

The document also singled out a government funding program called the Local Journalism Initiative. 

It included a screenshot of a story published by The Narwhal, written by journalist Matt Simmons, whose work has been supported by the initiative. The story recounts Simmons’ experience being followed by private security as he reported on a pipeline being built through Wet’suwet’en lands.

The Local Journalism Initiative is a federal program that funds news reporting in rural, remote and otherwise underserved communities. The Narwhal receives this funding for reporting in northwestern B.C. and northern Ontario.

To protect the independence of the press, the government does not directly fund media outlets. The program is delivered by independent non-profits representing different segments of Canada’s media industry. 

“It’s clear that they see some journalists as opponents,” Stewart said of the pro-fossil fuel groups behind the document. “They don’t want anyone looking too closely at what they’re actually doing.”

Material ‘appears to build on a long-standing public outreach program’: Greenpeace

Greenpeace Canada claims the Energy In Action network “appears to build on a long-standing public outreach program” by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, “which seems to have been repurposed to enable oil companies to spread their message via third parties.”

Energy United founder Tim McMillan was president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers for seven years, and is currently registered as a federal lobbyist on energy issues. Stewart Muir, the president of Resource Works, formerly lobbied for a pro-fossil fuel group organized by Resource Works called The Task Force For Real Jobs, Real Recovery. The task force’s website claims the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers is a “supporter.” 

Requests for comment to McMillan and Muir’s LinkedIn pages were not returned.

Greenpeace Canada’s report says the Energy In Action network operates “under the guise of independent and grassroots entities” but actually coordinates industry-linked activities designed to “shift public discourse and actively lobby against renewable energy initiatives.”

It said the network’s “hidden funders” are investing in campaigns targeting a large cross-section of Canadian demographics and regions, using different tools like lobbying, public advocacy and digital and traditional advertising.

The network’s activities and internal materials, it said, deploy “climate disinformation, covert influence campaigns and attacks against activists.”

The Energy In Action documents should be seen as part of a broader context of an industry that’s been proactive for years in trying to shape public opinion about its activities, its climate impacts and its economic benefits, according to Shane Gunster, a professor in the school of communication at Simon Fraser University who studies oil and gas populism.

In an interview, Gunster said his research has shown pro-oil-and-gas messaging shifted over the last decade from more expensive public relations campaigns to using social media to mobilize supporters. 

He said in recent years he’s seen greater use of what he calls “pop-up groups,” which appear to be self-contained entities that focus on a particular issue in a particular geographic location, and only appear for a limited time.

“Groups that are not explicitly connected to particular funders or industry itself can do things that industry itself would find challenging to do or to say,” he said.

He said the group of funders tied to the activities Greenpeace uncovered are supporting particularly aggressive messaging, but that isn’t always the case with pro-oil-and-gas campaigns.

Canada passed legislation in 2024 to crack down on greenwashing, which is when companies make misleading claims about how environmentally friendly their products or actions are. It created a requirement for companies in Canada to back up their green claims with evidence. After it passed, oil companies scrubbed their websites and social media feeds. 

Although Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government rolled back a clause stipulating that this evidence be based on internationally recognized standards, several oil companies were still citing the law as a reason why they can’t disclose more information. 

Gunster said he felt the anti-greenwashing changes were a factor, but not necessarily the driving force behind the pro-oil-and-gas messaging shift towards pop-up groups, which he began seeing before the anti-greenwashing law was in place.

There is public evidence that at least some of the entities Greenpeace connected to the Energy In Action network have received funding from oil companies themselves. 

According to corporate disclosure records, Cenovus, one of Canada’s largest oil and gas companies, has funded seven of them, including Resource Works. Cenovus is a member of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, and Cenovus president Jon McKenzie is also the chair of the association’s board.

Cenovus proactively discloses its advocacy funding, while some other prominent oil companies do not. 

There’s no indication that the funding Cenovus has provided is directly related to the public advocacy activities reported by groups such as Resource Works during the Canadian Energy Prosperity sessions. Cenovus did not return a request for comment.

Groups tied to Energy In Action are funding disinformation: Greenpeace

Another document, a video presentation viewed online by The Narwhal, introduced itself as a “performance update for CEP,” the acronym for Canadian Energy Prosperity. The beginning of the video is dated July 2, 2025, and states that it would take place at the Calgary Petroleum Club.

That video highlighted four pro-fossil fuel ad campaigns by the organization Debunk Inc., which claims its mission is to “challenge misinformation.” Debunk’s video said the campaigns were “thanks to CEP’s support,” but did not specify who funded them or how much funding they received.

One of Debunk’s ads defended the use of natural gas in homes. Another attacked a proposal to limit heat-trapping carbon pollution from the oil and gas industry. A third downplayed the necessity of transitioning to lower-emissions fuels, and a fourth suggested liquefied natural gas, or LNG, could lead to “lower” emissions.

A Harvard study has shown that low levels of pollutants seep into homes with gas heat, while gas stoves have been associated with increased risk of asthma in children. Scientists say a disputed theory long favoured by the industry, that LNG can displace coal power abroad, underestimates the climate impact of equipment leaking methane, the main component of natural gas.

Each of these campaigns achieved results, the video claimed. The most successful was the anti-emissions cap campaign. Debunk claimed it had reached “up to 1.5 million Canadians” each month, and scored 22.3 million total views in 2025. 

The Calgary Petroleum Club did not return a request for comment.

On the Energy In Action website viewed by The Narwhal, an individual webpage also featured content from Debunk, listing the four campaigns as well as a “top performing post” which claimed it is “debunking the ‘complete fabrication’ of climate change.” 

That post, which the webpage said received “over 3,000,000 views,” contained a video claiming carbon dioxide does not cause harmful climate change. Hundreds of global climate scientists working under the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have confirmed that the burning of fossil fuels is “unequivocally” responsible for recent global warming.

The Debunk webpage on the Energy In Action website featured a social media post claiming, “We’re wasting a lot of money for very little, if any, gain with all this climate hysteria.”

That post contains another video claiming the amount of human-caused carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere isn’t a significant problem. Concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have increased dramatically in less than two centuries, recently to levels that have not been seen in millions of years.

Debunk did not respond to requests for comment. Founders Anastasia Columbos and Britni Weston are described on the website as “two Canadians with deep roots in the energy industry.” Neither responded to requests for comment on LinkedIn.

Greenpeace is calling on “all entities, organizations and corporate partners” involved in the Energy In Action network to disclose their funding sources and any financial connections to Canadian Energy Prosperity.

It is also echoing UN Secretary-General António Guterres’s call for countries to ban fossil fuel advertisements.

Methodology+

The presentations and agendas for two “Canadian Energy Prosperity funders” meetings, one in mid-2025 and one in early 2026, were posted publicly on the Energy In Action website, energy-in-action.com. The contact email listed was hosted on the domain cep-eia.com, a combination of the acronyms for both Canadian Energy Prosperity and Energy In Action.

The Narwhal reviewed the material directly by downloading it from the Energy In Action website on Oct. 2 and Oct. 5. The Narwhal emailed questions to Energy In Action’s email on Oct. 5. The following day, the Energy In Action website became password protected. Energy In Action did not return the request for comment.

One of the documents mentioned in this article included reference to a handful of philanthropic organizations, several of which have provided funding to The Narwhal and are disclosed on our website along with all major donors. Greenpeace carried out its investigation with support from the Trottier Family Foundation, which also provides funding to The Narwhal. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, no foundation has any editorial input.

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.

Poll after poll says B.C. voters are most concerned with affordability and health care. But interim BC Conservative Party Leader Lorne Doerkson had a different answer when asked what his top priority would be if his party wins: scrapping the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, or DRIPA.

“I will repeal DRIPA,” Doerkson told reporters in Vancouver on Sept. 22.

The act’s future has been a hot-button issue for much of the year. After years of touting the law as a major step toward working with First Nations in a better, more equal way, NDP Leader David Eby abruptly changed his tune in December 2025. His about-face came after a ruling from the British Columbia Court of Appeal that found the government’s obligations under the Declaration Act are legally enforceable — meaning First Nations can take the province to court for failing to uphold the law.

In response, Eby vowed to change the law, a commitment he stood by at the start of the election campaign. 

“We do have to respond to that court decision, it’s not up for debate,” he said on Sept. 25. “We’ve been working with First Nations over the summer to see if we can find a path forward that we all agree on.”

Eby’s plan to change DRIPA proved unpopular with many First Nations leaders. When the election campaign began, the BC Assembly of First Nations called on B.C. politicians “to reflect on the divisiveness, misinformation and fearmongering that has defined this last year.”

“It is in the best interest of all British Columbians to reject these divisive politics and support First Nations by upholding the human rights of First Nations Peoples under DRIPA and returning their focus to the issues that matter most to British Columbians,” Terry Teegee, Regional Chief with the assembly, said.

Discussions about DRIPA are often rife with misinformation. Critics have claimed the law jeopardizes private property rights (it doesn’t) and gives First Nations a veto over proposed developments (also untrue). Campaign trail soundbites and promises from politicians aren’t likely to improve things.

“A lot of the challenges … have been created by the politicians themselves jumping out ahead of this issue for their own political benefit,” Adam Olsen, a former BC Green Party MLA, told The Narwhal. “It’s not for the benefit of British Columbians because the benefit to British Columbians is a calm, thoughtful, constructive relationship.”

“Politicians have an obligation not to promote racism against Indigenous people because when they are elected, they’re going to be the ones that are implementing reconciliation,” Cynthia Callison, a partner with Callison & Hanna Law who has advocated for First Nations in B.C. for 29 years, said in an interview.

Let’s cut through the rhetoric and dig into some of the claims about what the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act is, what it does and what lies ahead.

Fact check: Does DRIPA give First Nations a ‘veto’ over development?

When B.C.’s Declaration Act was introduced, the government stressed it did not amount to a veto for First Nations on issues like resource development. DRIPA does not alter provincial requirements regarding consultation with First Nations, and the provincial law has no impact on Section 35 of the Canadian Constitution, which recognizes and affirms Indigenous Rights. 

DRIPA isn’t explicitly about industrial projects or resource development, but conservative political parties and others have claimed the law makes it more difficult for proposed projects to move forward.

“It isn’t taking one side or another in a project,” Dallas Smith, president of the Nanwakolas Council, said in an interview. “It’s saying, ‘This is a list of things that should be contemplated and discussed and worked through as you go through these processes to get towards final investment decisions.’ ”

Some of the confusion may come from the fact that provincial project evaluation processes often involve asking First Nations to grant consent to a project. But consenting or not doesn’t make a nation the statutory decision-maker, Callison said. Legally, final say on whether projects are granted provincial permits rests with B.C. cabinet ministers.

“Now, are they going to consider whether First Nations consented or not? Yes, they are, but they’re also going to consider other factors,” Callison said. 

Ministers also consider potential economic benefits and environmental impacts when deciding whether a project gets the go-ahead. The FortisBC LNG expansion, approved right before the election call, for example, involved consulting eight First Nations; some of which consented, and some that didn’t.

DRIPA is about more than getting shovels in the ground, Smith pointed out. Applied properly, it makes projects more certain as they are less likely to hit legal hurdles or on-the-ground opposition.“It’s about how do we get a working relationship that is increasing investment opportunities, as opposed to chasing them out of British Columbia,” he said. “Unfortunately, because of the lack of clarity, political opportunism has made it look like DRIPA is chasing these investment opportunities out of town, where really, if applied properly, it can enhance them.”

Fact check: Has DRIPA always been controversial?

It may seem hard to believe now, but when the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act passed in the B.C. legislature in 2019, every MLA voted in favour of it. It’s rare to see such unanimity in the legislature.

At the time, the government described the act as “a path forward” for relations between First Nations and the province. The idea was that the legislation would hold the government legally accountable to its stated commitments on reconciliation and to align provincial laws and regulations with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. 

For years, there was little controversy or even public discussion about DRIPA. During that time, B.C.’s Declaration Act Secretariat — a government agency created to guide the law’s implementation — worked with First Nations and issued annual reports on its progress.

“They have focused on social issues like education and emergency services and child welfare,” Callison said.

The secretariat is also responsible for determining which laws and regulations get top priority to be aligned with the UN declaration. The Declaration Act offers few concrete details for what the province is bound to do and when, and that vagueness has contributed to misunderstandings and self-interested interpretations. 

“Everybody has their own subjective view beyond the legislation that’s in place,” Smith said. He believes DRIPA was introduced with the hopes it would be “sort of a silver bullet” for some of the tougher conflicts between the provincial government and First Nations — some of which resulted in lengthy and costly court battles. Instead, he said DRIPA has become “a political football” tossed around by party leaders, First Nations representatives, industry groups and think tanks.

Too often, it’s the perceived downsides of DRIPA that get put in the spotlight, he added.

“I really wish people would start looking at what are the opportunities as opposed to what are the shortcomings and what are the potential perceived failures around this.”

DRIPA provides a rubric that can help First Nations and companies navigate the ins and outs of project development, from the planning and assessments needed to determine whether a proposed project goes ahead, to what will have to happen when a mine or logging operation winds down. A handful of projects have already moved ahead under a specific section of the law.

Fact check: Does DRIPA create uncertainty for industry?

Members of the BC Conservative caucus have repeatedly claimed that DRIPA creates a climate of uncertainty that makes companies rethink their investments in the province. However, DRIPA’s stated goal is to “provide certainty and stability” about how projects can move toward approval by clearly defining the responsibilities of the provincial government and First Nations. And there are several examples of natural resource projects that have seen this benefit.

Section 7 of the law allows for joint decision-making agreements with First Nations regarding industrial projects on their traditional territories. These agreements enabled by DRIPA have helped advance a few natural resource projects, including the Eskay Creek revitalization, the Red Chris mine and the Galore Creek mine.

DRIPA’s goal of giving companies a set of expectations and a framework for engaging with First Nations on proposed projects was a good one, Smith said.

“My years in working with different industries on the coast of British Columbia have told me that industry just wants to know where they can and can’t operate,” he said. “DRIPA should have been a powerful tool to help illustrate that a little bit more.”

If anything, Callison argues, it’s the B.C. government’s handling of DRIPA that has created uncertainty. The 2025 ruling that caused Eby’s flip-flop was in response to a legal challenge brought by the Gitxaała Nation and Ehattesaht First Nation about the province allowing mining claims on their territory without their input. 

“Why did the Gitxaała case happen? Because the province did not make it a priority to amend the free miner system under the Mineral Tenure Act, and so the First Nation went to court,” Callison said.

A year of political punting and lingering uncertainty about DRIPA’s future has not improved economic confidence in B.C., according to Smith.

“It’s slowing down our ability to actually build certainty because we don’t know whether this legislation is going to get tinkered with or not,” he said.

Fact check: Does DRIPA threaten people’s ownership of homes and businesses?

The claim that DRIPA threatens private property rights in B.C. has come up again and again and again over the past year.

“That’s untrue,” Callison said. “Nowhere in DRIPA are they saying that reconciliation includes taking private property away.”

This claim is likely due to people conflating two separate court rulings — the Gitxaała decision and the Cowichan decision — which were issued just four months apart in 2025. 

The Gitxaała decision is the one that spooked Eby, in which the B.C. Court of Appeal ruled First Nations can take B.C. to court for failing to uphold DRIPA. 

The Cowichan decision dates back to 2014, when the Cowichan Tribes filed a case with the B.C. Supreme Court, asserting Aboriginal Title over lands along the Fraser River, in what is now known as Richmond, B.C. The lands claimed included a traditional summer village site, known as Tl’uqtinus, and the tribes’ suit asserted rights to fish and gather food in the claimed area. Although the claim was brought in B.C., it was launched prior to DRIPA becoming law and turned on Section 35 of the Canadian Constitution, not provincial law.

In August 2025, 11 years after the case was filed, B.C.’s Supreme Court affirmed the Cowichan Tribes’ Aboriginal Title under the constitution. The Cowichan case only named governments and government agencies, and the tribes have repeatedly said they have no intent of trying to take away any private property as a result of the court ruling. What the ruling made clear is the B.C. government cannot ignore the tribes’ federal Aboriginal Title rights but must negotiate with them to reconcile their Title with the interests of existing property owners.

“I haven’t heard one First Nation come out and say, ‘Well, yeah, we’d like to cancel people’s title and get rid of fee simple ownership,’ ” Callison pointed out.

The B.C. government appealed the ruling, and Eby has said his government will “go to the wall” to protect the rights of private property owners. He has also linked the Cowichan Tribes and Gitxaała cases, calling them “dramatic, overreaching and unhelpful court decisions.”

But DRIPA and the Cowichan decision actually have little to do with each other legally, besides being related to Indigenous Rights. Again, the Gitxaała case concerns the province’s actions — allowing mining claims to be staked on First Nations territory without notification or consent — and whether violating DRIPA makes them legally accountable. Meanwhile, the Cowichan case is about federally recognized rights that guarantee Indigenous Peoples access to traditional territories and to cultural practices.

Fact check: Would repealing DRIPA resolve all of these issues?

The BC Conservatives and others who support DRIPA’s repeal imply that getting rid of the law will clear away all friction of Indigenous Rights, Aboriginal Title and consultation obligations with First Nations. That is almost certainly not the case.

“That’s not the end of it; that’s the beginning of it,” Olsen said. 

“Simply just repealing it isn’t going to do anyone any service,” Smith agreed. “I wish the opposition parties would be a lot clearer about what the alternative is, because they all know there has to be an alternative.”

DRIPA’s repeal could prompt public protest from some First Nations, Smith added, while others would continue ongoing discussions with companies interested in operating on their land.

“A lot of us have deals that are in the making right now that we simply can’t stop because there’s an election,” he said. “So while the government’s in caretaker mode, we’re still talking with a lot of the industries that are looking at investing in collaboration with First Nations.”Getting rid of DRIPA would not eliminate the constitutionally guaranteed right of First Nations, which can be hashed out in the courts, and have been, Callison pointed out. 

Legal responsibilities aside, reconciliation should remain a priority for whichever party forms the next B.C. government, she added — something those parties should keep in mind as the election campaign rolls on.

“Why not take a little lesson out of history? If you are elected, you’re going to have to reconcile with Indigenous people in British Columbia.”

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.

Patricia Dutchak was devastated when she first saw the wide swaths of crushed grass and upturned soil at Winnipeg’s Rotary Prairie Nature Park, a municipal heritage site.

“This is a very rare ecosystem, a remnant of tallgrass prairie, there’s barely any left in the world, and to come here and see all this damage was heartbreaking,” Dutchak, chair of the Transcona Rotary Club’s parks committee, says. 

The club is responsible for maintaining the protected green space, which was significantly damaged this summer when a fence between the park and the neighbouring Amazon distribution centre was relocated.

The eight-hectare nature preserve is situated on a narrow tract of land on Regent Avenue West in the commercial heart of Winnipeg’s Transcona neighbourhood. The park received its municipal heritage designation in 1992 and is, today, surrounded by high-traffic streets, industrial warehouses and car dealerships. 

In early August, a contractor hired by Amazon moved a section of chain-link fence running along the distribution centre’s parking lot a couple of metres to the west toward the park. The work was carried out to allow for safer snow and ice removal over the winter, an Amazon spokesperson said in an email statement. 

During the process, grass and shrubs along both sides of the fence were mowed down and dumped in the park without permission from the Rotary Club. Wooden fence posts marking the western perimeter of the preserve were removed, leaving deep holes in the soil, and a black plastic pipe originating from the Amazon facility was left snaking through the grass.

Dutchak was alerted to the situation by a member of the public, who shared footage of a skid steer being driven inside the park, leaving wide tracks of trampled greenery. 

“The person I would really like to talk to is the operator of the equipment. What were you thinking? At the minimum, it’s trespassing,” Dutchak says during an interview at the site last Thursday.

She hopes those responsible for the damage will be held accountable for the park’s restoration.

The city is investigating and working toward a resolution, a city spokesperson said in a statement. 

The Amazon spokesperson says the company is reviewing its internal procedures, its oversight of the third-party contractor and plans to make a financial contribution to support the stewardship of the park. The Bezos Earth Fund, an environmental charity started by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has committed $2 billion globally to nature conservation projects.

New threats to an already-threatened tallgrass prairie landscape

Tallgrass prairie was once ubiquitous across North America, covering the central plains of the continent from southern Manitoba to the Gulf of Mexico. As European settlers colonized the prairies, much of the existing grassland was converted to farmland. 

Today, less than one per cent of the original tallgrass prairie habitat remains, making it one of the most endangered ecosystems in the world.

The Rotary Prairie Nature Park is an example of “wet” tallgrass prairie, meaning its heavy clay soil is especially effective at diverting and storing surface water, Rafael Otfinowski, associate professor of biology at the University of Winnipeg, says. 

“That could give away why it’s still conserved,” Otfinowski says. “If you’re trying to build or farm, often you go for the best land first. So some of the areas that are best preserved in Manitoba for tallgrass prairie … are very rocky and very poorly drained.”

In passing, the Rotary nature preserve looks like an overgrown field with a narrow walking path and a smattering of aspen. The ecological reality is much more complex. 

The area is a remnant prairie ecosystem, meaning it has never been ploughed. Surveys by the city’s naturalist services branch have identified 142 different plant species in the park since 1993. The site is also home to a number of rare native Manitoba plants, including blue flowering gentians, mountain sneezeweed and whorled milkweed. Small songbirds can be seen among the flora.

The park’s iconic grass, big bluestem, is commemorated in a metal sculpture at its southern entrance. Unlike the shallow root systems of lawn and ornamental grasses, bluestem roots can extend several metres underground. 

“They have very, very deep root systems, which means they can build, essentially, a composter that goes deep into the soil and does all kinds of wonderful things — from nutrients to carbon [sequestration] to water storage,” Otfinowski says. “That takes many years to develop … so they really do require a special, long-term, undisturbed environment where they can thrive.”

Winnipeg has several hectares of unconnected tallgrass prairie preserves. These islands act as important seasonal “cafeterias” for pollinators and migrating birds since native plants tend to have longer blooming periods than their cultivated counterparts.

Beyond the ecological benefits, the preservation of these sites can serve as a form of reconciliation, Otfinowski says.

“The cultural reasons, the historic reasons, the social reasons are huge — especially inside an urban area,” he says. “It’s a form of acknowledging what our ecosystems were before settlement.”

Dutchak worries about the external threats facing the green space. 

She has documented unauthorized encampments and fire pits on the grounds and has heard rumblings from residents about turning the grassland into sports fields.  

“I don’t want to be living in the generation where this is going to disappear,” she says.

How to bring back a tallgrass prairies

Restoring damaged tallgrass prairie is a time-sensitive process. 

“Within a year or two of disturbance happening, you can have a really bad non-native species takeover,” John Morgan, a retired ecologist who spent most of his career restoring tallgrass prairie ecosystems in Manitoba, says. 

Native prairie plants evolved under different circumstances than the opportunistic weeds brought over from Europe during colonization, Morgan explains. 

Most non-native species, such as dandelions and Canada thistle, have adapted to grow quickly in bare soil because they evolved alongside western agriculture, where the ground is tilled annually. Tallgrass prairies in North America, on the other hand, grew alongside 60 million grazing bison, Morgan says.

While prairie grasslands can withstand harsh above-ground conditions thanks to deep, slow-growing root systems, they struggle to compete with more aggressive plants when their landscape is disturbed. 

“They’re very tough as far as the climate goes and the vagaries of floods and droughts,” Morgan says. 

“[But] most of the grassland species here, with very few exceptions, are not really competitive. They didn’t have to be for thousands of years.”

Within the first few months of damage to a tall grass prairie, Morgan recommends replanting with native seeds and developing a long-term plan for weed control. It can be a challenging but worthwhile endeavour, he says.

“Every little bit that you lose is a significant amount of the remainder,” he says. “We all hear about the South American rainforest and how fast that’s disappearing … in Manitoba we have what I call the rainforest of the prairies, which is the tallgrass prairie.”

Eva Wasney is a reporter covering environmental issues in Manitoba. Her position is part of a partnership between The Narwhal and the Winnipeg Free Press.

Updated Oct. 6, 2026 at 12:08 p.m. CT: This article was updated to remove an image and a map that depicted grasslands that were not specifically tallgrass prairie grasslands.

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Aquatic global change ecologist Mary Jade (MJ) Farruggia found herself studying the impact of wildfires on lakes by accident. She was researching lakes in the mountains of California in the summer of 2020 when, in “a tragic turn of events,” wildfires swept through the area, smoke clouded the sky and her plans quickly changed.

“Wildfires are becoming more intense and more frequent, and so it just became a phenomenon that was getting harder and harder to ignore,” Farruggia, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder, told The Narwhal over the phone. “As lake scientists, we started wondering, ‘what’s the impact of this on the systems that we study?’ ”

Canada is home to two million lakes, more than any other country. And the last three wildfire seasons have been among the worst on record here, making research like Farruggia’s critical.

A record-breaking season in 2023 saw 15 million hectares of forest burned across Canada. The land hasn’t had much reprieve since. This year more than 4,700 fires burned more than four million hectares across the country by the end of August — many in Ontario.

“We as humans feel the impacts of [wildfire smoke],” Farruggia said. “If it’s affecting your own health, how is it also affecting your ecosystems and the nature around you and the systems that you rely on? Is your favourite lake going to be similarly impacted by smoke?”

‘Almost all’ North American lakes are exposed to wildfire smoke: researchers

Some of the direct impacts of wildfires on ecosystems are straightforward; as fires burn near lakes, they increase future flood risk, as plants that stabilize soil and filter runoff go up in smoke. Ash deposits contaminants and excess nutrients into the water, changing the makeup of watersheds.

For each lake and fire, the full impact depends on a slew of variables, including “the number of wildfires, their intensity, their location, the health of the ecosystem before the fire and even how much rain falls following a fire,” Terri-Lee Reid, a freshwater conservation researcher at the Canadian Wildlife Federation, said.

Less clear is how lake ecosystems far away from fires are being impacted as smoke travels, and Reid says there’s still more to learn. But, the science is much newer, and scientists like Farruggia and her colleagues spend their time designing and performing experiments to figure it out.

“Sometimes we get these summers where it feels like much of North America is covered in smoke,” said Steven Sadro, an associate professor of environmental science and policy at the University of California, Davis. He is also Farruggia’s co-author and former advisor. “This is smoke that’s affecting millions of lakes at continental scales.”

Sadro and Farruggia coined the term “lake-smoke day,” which provides a metric referring to the number of days a lake is exposed to smoke in a fire season. They found wildfire smoke can drift hundreds of miles away from its source, making its impact widespread.

“We found a pretty shocking response … that almost all lakes in North America experience some number of smoke exposure days,” Sadro said, adding that many of them were experiencing a full month or more over the course of a year.

“Smoke in the atmosphere can reduce the amount of sunlight that can reach the lake, and that can impact water temperature. It can impact the growth of algae and aquatic plants, and then that can have further consequences,” Reid said.

Their research suggests that smoke blocks sunlight from reaching lakes, lowering lake temperatures and reducing photosynthesis and respiration in the body of water. 

What happens next is harder to predict. A lake’s depth, clarity, size, location and nutrient levels all influence how it responds to smoke. Larger lakes can be more resilient while smaller, clearer lakes can experience more algae growth due to the new nutrient deposits.

“The jury is really out on the magnitude of the impact. I’m not trying to say that millions of lakes in North America are having very large impacts from wildfire smoke. Some of them certainly may be,” Sadro said. “We don’t know what those numbers are yet.”

‘When the land’s not healthy, the lakes aren’t healthy either’

While researchers work to untangle those relationships, Amy Cardinal Christianson, director of fire stewardship for the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, says Indigenous Knowledge has long recognized the interconnection between fire, water and land.

She pointed to historical examples along the west coast where Indigenous communities have been aware of the cooling effect of smoke on waterways that western science has also recently ventured into. For example in California, when it was too hot for salmon to spawn, Cardinal Christianson said cultural burns would be used to help create a layer of smoke over the water to cool it and help the fish.

But while fire can be used beneficially, it can also cause harm to waterways.

“People often think of [a] lake as its own ecosystem, which it is, but it’s really tied into everything that’s around it,” Cardinal Christianson said. “When the land’s not healthy, the lakes aren’t healthy either.”

She explained that, instead of having separate plans for forest management, watershed management and more, “we need to start looking at things much more holistically.”

“For Indigenous people, our teachings are that everything is interconnected and related. So when these fires are happening, one of the big concerns for us is the impacts on water,” Cardinal Christianson said. “It’s a constant worry in the back of my head, just like, what [are] going to be the long-term effects to the water that we rely on?”

The challenges of studying how wildfires affect lakes

Farruggia is part of a working group of 30 American and Canadian scientists looking for answers. The group includes Scott Higgins, senior research scientist with the International Institute for Sustainable Development Experimental Lakes Area — a natural freshwater laboratory spanning almost 60 lakes in Kenora in northwestern Ontario.

“We work in the field and we certainly notice, especially during those intensive fire years, the smog and the ash clouds that drift over our site,” Higgins said. The boreal forest that spans Canada, including around Kenora, is sometimes referred to as a “fire forest” because its ecosystems are both flammable, and reliant on fire to help remove insects, disease and aged trees, allowing for new life to emerge.

“This is a really lake-intensive part of Canada,” Higgins said. “When the boreal forest burns, undoubtedly lakes are directly impacted.”

But while interest in researching the impacts of wildfires on lakes has been increasing as fire seasons become longer and more intense, he said the science is still in its infancy.

One problem, he said, is that, “it’s tough to do experiments on actual wildfires.”

It is often difficult for researchers to get into an area quickly after a fire to study the immediate impacts. Even if they can, there often isn’t data from before the fire to compare it to. To try to counteract this and build a better understanding, Higgins said, his team is planning to use the extensive, long-term data collected at the Experimental Lakes Area to its benefit, including adding wildfire ash directly into a lake to study the outcome, and to work with Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources to use a prescribed burn for study. 

“We’ll be able to put some pretty good numbers on how important these fires are to nutrient cycles and to metal cycles and to what they mean for biota,” or the animals and plants living in that environment, Higgins said. “I think science is going to be able to provide in the next five to 10 years for sure.”

In the meantime, Farruggia said the early evidence offers reason to be hopeful — even in sensitive, smaller and more remote lakes. 

“Lakes are actually very resilient systems. Even though we see there’s lots of sensitivity, especially in smaller, lower nutrient lakes, we have seen that they recover pretty quickly so far,” Farruggia said. “Lake resilience is something that I think could be celebrated.”

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There was a brief, telling moment when Prime Minister Mark Carney was onstage at a Calgary Chamber of Commerce event last year, following the announcement of a memorandum of understanding with the Alberta government for a new “private sector constructed and financed pipeline” to the West Coast. 

Deborah Yedlin, the CEO of the chamber, mentioned the agreement’s stipulation: the project needed a private proponent rather than public funding. Then she said the project required “derisking.”“Are you saying there’s no room for the government to derisk something for a period of time in order to attract private capital that’s needed for a project like that?” she asked Carney. In other words, how far was Carney willing to go to protect industry from losses?Carney listed off moves his government was making, including regulatory clarity, tax incentives and loan guarantees to move the project forward. And then he said: “In essence, the Asian pipeline will be a private sector project …”

That one word, essence, bore considerable weight. 

So too did the timing of the Oct. 1 announcement that the pipeline — now known as Pacific Link — would be the first project of national interest listed under the federal government’s sweeping Building Canada Act. It comes just over two weeks before Alberta holds a referendum on whether to hold an independence referendum, as well as a slew of questions aimed mostly at immigrants. 

From the beginning, the pipeline plan was a political one, based on a calculus that can be hard to understand outside of Alberta, where decades of government and industry messaging has succeeded in tightly weaving oil and gas into the province’s culture. 

Never has that narrative been pushed harder than by the United Conservative Party government, first under former premier Jason Kenney and now amplified even more under Premier Danielle Smith. 

Having directly linked the future of the country with deregulation for the oil and gas sector, Smith now faces the headwinds of that rhetoric in the form of a burgeoning separatist movement. It’s one she has aided to protect herself from an influential secessionist base in her party. 

It’s a situation Carney has recognized and attempted to shape, acquiescing to Alberta’s demands in an effort to shore up a united front as threats from the United States grow more stark. 

The prime minister might have promised Canadians a “private sector constructed and financed pipeline” in last fall’s memorandum. But it was clear from the beginning he was willing to pay a premium to achieve peace. 

How Alberta’s politics of wealth and alienation fuelled the Pacific Link promise

After their first meeting in March of last year, Smith threatened Carney with an “unprecedented national unity crisis” if he did not respond to a list of demands almost entirely focused on boosting the oil and gas sector. 

It was part and parcel of a wider campaign to link Alberta’s political and economic fortunes more tightly with fossil fuels, including moves to designate emissions data as critical infrastructure to prevent the federal government from accessing it and put up regulatory and economic hurdles to block renewable energy development. 

Smith’s actions are part of a long history of resentment that stretches back as far as the creation of the province, when the federal government denied Alberta control over its natural resources, a move that was later reversed. 

There’s an entire mythology of eastern Canadian domination built up around the National Energy Program introduced by Pierre Elliot Trudeau in the early 1980s, which still resonates with separatists and mainstream conservatives alike. In this century, the climate actions of his son Justin Trudeau inflamed a new sense of subjugation in the oil patch. 

Those resentments and mythologies have been curated by successive Alberta governments as an easy way to rally Albertans to their cause and help cover up internal failures, particularly when it comes to budget crashes. And now it has reached a fever pitch. 

Carney, a veteran of Brexit and big brain amidst big brain money makers, recognized the weight of Smith’s threat and an especially restless Alberta, particularly as the geopolitical landscape shifted under his feet. He wasted no time in wooing her, and her province. 

He has proven willing to deregulate and slash emissions programs and targets to help industry. Now, he’s opening the federal government’s hefty purse to buy peace. The pipeline will cost billions, without any promise that price will be enough to please Smith’s government and the powers it has unleashed. 

Pacific Link pipeline promise is rushing to meet a very specific moment

Pacific Link is moving fast, because it’s meant to meet this specific moment: oil prices are high, Alberta separation is occupying vital political real estate, and a trade war with the U.S. is both threatening Canadian well-being and galvanizing political will for big risks and fast action. 

In this rush, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that many important details still aren’t finalized — such as the route, financing and oilsands companies meeting requirements for a massive carbon capture and storage project.

All of this makes meeting this specific moment difficult, to say the least. It will be years before the pipeline is online. 

There are also serious questions about investing billions of taxpayer dollars into a project for a sector facing possible reductions in demand and a global shift away from the uncertainty of oil markets. Not to mention concerns over the impacts of increased emissions and the reduced ambitions for carbon capture. 

Despite this announcement, the referendum will still take place. The provincial government is spending millions to tell Albertans to send Ottawa a message and stand up for a more sovereign province. Its list of demands remains, even if Smith is playing nice with Carney for the time being.

The willingness of the Alberta government to act in good faith is also questionable. Only days after it signed last fall’s memorandum with the federal government, it went ahead with changes which undermined its industrial carbon price that it promised to strengthen in the agreement. 

That’s the same memorandum containing the broken promise of a “private sector constructed and financed pipeline.” It all suggests Donald Trump isn’t the only Western leader who signs agreements in pencil. 

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Yvonne Zawada leads us down a long hallway where pipes and electrical conduits snake their way along walls.

We’re deep in the guts of the Lemieux Island Water Purification Plant, on the eponymous island in the middle of the Ottawa River.

“It’s a little bit like a maze,” plant manager Zawada says as we emerge into a high-ceilinged room filled with industrial-sized pumps, generators and other equipment.

She crouches next to one of the screens used to remove debris like branches and leaves, and opens up a service panel. Inside, the raw river water smells musty.

“What we pull in is this tea-like coloured water,” she says. It’s an apt comparison: the colour comes from organic materials like decomposing plant matter, which release tannins into the water just like tea leaves.

But in drinking water, it’s one of the many components that need to be screened out, filtered and disinfected before it can be sent through roughly 3,000 kilometres of distribution pipes.

Along with the Britannia plant in the west end of the city, Lemieux Island treats most of the 275 million litres of drinking water that close to a million Ottawans consume each day. (For residents in outlying communities, the city also has six groundwater well systems that are treated separately.)

What comes out of most Ottawans’ taps originates in the Ottawa River’s drainage basin, a huge, mostly forested landscape that stretches across 146,300 square kilometres of Quebec and Ontario. It covers roughly as much area as the Atlantic provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.

The river draws on a dense network of tributaries and many wetlands that act as natural filters.

Because the Lemieux Island and Britannia plants draw directly from the Ottawa River, their operations rely on governments safeguarding that source water — not only by continuing to carry out rigorous treatment and testing, but also by protecting the watershed.

Those protections could be threatened, critics say, by recent federal legislation that would shift the way environmental projects are assessed, along with a provincial government push to speed up development by overhauling the system for managing watersheds.

Access to clean water is not equal across Canada

If you live in a big Canadian city, it’s easy to take the clean drinking water that flows from your taps for granted.

But as of Sept. 10, the federal government is still tracking 38 active long-term drinking water advisories on First Nations reserves across the provinces, except for in British Columbia where figures are tracked separately. As of Aug. 31, there were a total of 30 long-term drinking water advisories in effect across B.C.

In 2015, then-prime minister Justin Trudeau promised to end drinking water advisories on First Nations reserves within five years (although he was excluding B.C. First Nations when he made that promise.)

The Trudeau government admitted in 2020 that, although it had lifted close to 100 advisories by then, it would still miss its target.

Under Prime Minister Mark Carney, the government has refused to commit to a new deadline for ending drinking water advisories, although it says it is still working towards lifting them. In December 2025, the Federal Court found Canada has a certain duty to First Nations to take reasonable measures to provide them with safe drinking water, and in June, the government unveiled new legislation it said would help “unlock” funding for communities to tackle their drinking water issues properly.

That bill is currently sitting at the beginning of the process for getting legislation passed in Canada, so the government will have to move it forward before it can become law.

Straight to the source of Ottawa’s drinking water

Even where there is purportedly clean drinking water, crises do occur. In 2000, in the southern Ontario town of Walkerton, seven people died and roughly 2,300 people became sick after farm manure contaminated a well. The fallout from the crisis led to the creation of committees that oversee the sources of drinking water in Ontario, called source protection committees.

Ottawa has its own history of ignoring waterborne health threats, to tragic results, and it’s one of the reasons the Lemieux Island plant exists.

For much of its existence in the 19th and 20th centuries the national capital region, which includes Ottawa on the south side of the river and Gatineau on the north side in Quebec, has dealt with successive public health concerns over sanitation.

There was pollution from sawmills during the timber trade, and even raw sewage dumped into the river as the local population began to climb, leading to waves of typhoid fever in the early 20th century.

For years, the poorer districts of the town dealt with typhoid-related deaths that were effectively ignored, even though health officials would have known by then that chlorine could be used as a disinfectant, according to a column by James Powell, a director of the Historical Society of Ottawa.

A typhoid epidemic between 1911 and 1912 killed 185 people in Ottawa, with thousands of other cases reported, Powell wrote.

Construction on the Lemieux Island Water Purification Plant began in 1928 and the plant opened in 1932. Standing in the marble-clad main hallway, Zawada said the city “built this plant in response to public health concerns.” It received a heritage designation in 2024.

The capital region continued to deal with contamination, from industrial activity as well as sewage. Ottawa opened a wastewater treatment plant in 1962 that continues to operate today as well as a sewage overflow tunnel in 2020.

While the water quality is much better than it was in the decades past, there are still issues and threats to that source water.

For one, there are the more simple challenges, like those brought on by Ottawa’s infamous winters, when slush and tiny ice particles called frazil ice can build up on the metal surfaces of the intake at Lemieux Island, Zawada said.

“If you go to Dairy Queen and get a slushie, that’s kind of what it is,” she said. “We call them slush puppies, or slush pods, because they float on the water and they can plug up our screens.”

Then there are the more complicated threats. In early 2026, for example, the federal government fined a Quebec company $1.35 million under the Fisheries Act for discharging sodium chlorite, which is harmful to fish, from its chemical manufacturing plant into the Lièvre River, which drains into the Ottawa River.

Ottawa Riverkeeper, a charitable organization, says other threats, spanning from municipal and agricultural runoff to the destruction of wetlands, alterations to the river from its many dams and other human impacts like boating, are also applying pressure on the watershed.

Another issue is climate change: more than 6,000 people reported flooded basements after intense summer rainstorms in July and August overwhelmed drainage systems. July was the rainiest month in Ottawa’s history.

Federal climate scientists have concluded that heavy rains and flash floods will become more frequent and more severe in Canada due to climate change.

City officials say that, while the drainage systems “could not move water away quickly enough,” drinking water services themselves remained operational.

Providing clean drinking water also doesn’t end at the plant. A recent Canadian Environmental Law Association report found a few schools in Ottawa have high levels of lead in their drinking water.

No matter how pure the water is coming out of a treatment plant, it can still pick up contaminants, for example if it runs through pipes in older buildings that aren’t flushed properly or tested regularly.

Aside from being treated, how is water protected in Canada?

Health Canada sets out thresholds for concentrations of certain substances in water, like lead or mercury, drinking water is ultimately regulated by the provinces.

In Ontario, that’s seen its share of changes.

For one, the Ford government is moving ahead with amalgamating the conservation authorities tasked with protecting watersheds, from 36 organizations into nine regional authorities.

That shift, which becomes official in February 2027, has raised concerns among staff at authorities and the source protection committees that work closely with them. The province has said it’s not making any “fundamental” changes to source protection committees.

The federal government is also proposing changes to environmental oversight through new legislation, Bill C-39.

Among many changes, the bill proposes to force all projects subject to federal reviews to be approved or rejected within one year. That would mean all environmental and other analyses would be carried out over a matter of months.

Standing in front of a map of the watershed, Zawada argues there’s limited development that affects the water quality of the Ottawa River. “It has very little impact because of the region that it covers being forested,” she said.

The environmental advocacy group Centre québécois du droit de l’environnement has warned this timeline won’t work for large-scale projects that can often involve complex risks to watersheds, as well as to other factors like wildlife.

These risks can require long-term studies, and their complexity demands meaningful consultations with First Nations and significant public input, they said.

After the federal government proposed a series of similar changes for environmental assessments in a discussion paper back in May, Ottawa Riverkeeper said it could “significantly weaken environmental protections.”

To keep drinking water safe, it takes environmental protections for watersheds, health and safety rules and diligent 24/7 testing and monitoring — like the more than 100,000 water quality tests each year done by the City of Ottawa.

“We have some of the best water around the globe, because of our source water and the process that we use,” Zawada says. “Our water is very safe.”

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Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew says a former Brandon-area campground acquired by the province will help educate future generations about the horrors of residential schools.

“We live in an era where people are trying to deny what happened in residential schools,” Kinew said during a Tuesday afternoon visit to Turtle Crossing Campground, near the former Brandon Indian Residential School. “It’s an important part of our national history, and keeping that truth alive.”

Kinew officially announced the province’s plan Tuesday, in partnership with the City of Brandon, to acquire and protect the site where the bodies of more than 50 Indigenous children are located.

The premier said the property has “huge national significance” for education about residential school history because it is one of the “most documented” in the country. He carried photographs, and some 20th century newspaper clippings from the Brandon Sun around the site Tuesday.

Kinew attended a ceremony Wednesday, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, at the site of the former Brandon Indian Residential School.

The graves of at least 56 children who attended the school are located at the campground, Sioux Valley Dakota Nation First Nation has said, pointing to a geophysical study conducted by an archaeology firm in 2018.

Signs were erected at the former campground Tuesday morning declaring the property is “no longer operated as a campground, RV park, or recreational site.” The sign said that the property is now in a period of transition, care and planning under the guidance of Indigenous communities and partner organizations.

Investigation at the site, which will be spearheaded by Sioux Valley First Nation, will be Indigenous-led, its chief said.

“Technical expertise and community knowledge will guide the work, with respect for the children, their families and this sacred site at every stage,” Sioux Valley Chief Jennifer Bone said in a news release.

Chris Mancuso, principal investigator with the First Nation’s Brandon Indian Residential School Missing Children Investigation, said the first goal is to identify the “true” boundaries of the cemetery, which is currently a fenced space within the former Turtle Crossing Campground.

The researcher expects to discover additional signs of burials outside the cemetery’s limits, leading the cemetery to be expanded.

Technologies such as ground penetrating radar, magnetism and electromagnetics, which are non-invasive, will be used at the site to investigate the boundaries of the cemetery, he said.

Sioux Valley has a two-year budget drawn up for research at the site, spanning all four seasons, and work started Tuesday, he said. An archaeologist walked the property and tagged characteristics, such as fence post holes and utility infrastructure, to prepare for future ground research at the site.

Mancuso said the purchase of the land will improve research by enabling it.

“It allows access,” Mancuso said. “For the technical investigation, we need to be physically on site with our tools. And the investigation is not just a one day search. So, having sustained access gives the chance to protect this cemetery.”

Randell Wasicuna, a councillor with Sioux Valley, called the move a “victory.”

“This has been a long-time coming and it’s been a long battle with the owner and I think it’s great to finally have this move forward, as it has been stalled for almost a decade,” Wasicuna said. “It’s a huge relief.”

He hopes the work in Manitoba, and partnerships between First Nations and government, sets an example — and precedent — for other communities and the federal government.

An interview request with Canada’s Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations Rebecca Alty was not accommodated Tuesday.

At the campground site, there have been longstanding concerns from Indigenous leaders and community members that people were camping on the resting place of children victimized by colonialism.

The school, which was located about five kilometres northwest of Brandon, operated from 1895 to 1972. It used a grave site near the Assiniboine River until 1912, with grave markers removed in 1921 so the area could be transformed into a park.

The City of Brandon sold the park privately in 2001, and in 2007, it was acquired by Mark Kovatch and his wife, Joan.

The former owner said he made efforts to raise awareness about the graves at the site over the years and took issue with others saying he was limiting access, noting he installed a fence around the site.

He would not disclose how much the province paid for the campground.

“I wish them well. That’s all I can say,” he said.

Brandon’s mayor, who visited the site Tuesday, said the path towards reconciliation has been a team effort between governments and First Nations.

“I believe that there’s a great opportunity for the region and for the community to build on it now,” said Fawcett. “… I know for a fact being out there with leaders today, there’s a great sense of relief and a great sense of optimism in talking about the past and moving into the future.”

Daryl Hapa, another councillor with Sioux Valley First Nation, said he regularly thinks about students at the school — including his late father.

“It was heartbreaking,” Hapa said of the stories he was told by his father.

He is pleased the territory will be under Indigenous control and hopes families will learn more.

“Hopefully, we’ll get all of these children’s names (and get) them back home to their communities,” he said. “Families will have some piece of mind that all these children who attended these residential schools haven’t been forgotten.”

Bone said the announcement was meaningful to the community as Sioux Valley has been working on its residential school project since 2012.

“This is years of work and advocacy, not even just Sioux Valley, but Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak and the City of Brandon,” Bone said. “The announcement is a huge step towards reconciliation.”

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“Look at the size of that logjam,” Richard Bussanich exclaims with excitement as we fly low over one of the upper reaches of the Skagit River just north of the U.S.-Canada border. Bussanich, a senior biologist for the Okanagan Nation Alliance, and two of his colleagues are surveying the upper Skagit River and its main tributaries north of the border. They want to understand if salmon could survive here — after more than a century of absence. 

The Skagit originates in the B.C. Cascades, following the mountain range south into Washington state before flowing west to the Puget Sound. But ever since the 1920’s construction of the Gorge Dam in Washington state, the Canadian waters of the Skagit have been devoid of salmon. It was the first of three dams built on the river south of the border by Seattle City Light, Seattle’s public electricity provider, which today supply about 20 per cent of the utility’s power. None of these dams’ construction included fish passage. But that might finally be about to change.

After decades of pressure from tribes and conservation groups, the publicly owned utility is now committing to design and implement a plan to allow salmon to once again reach the upper river.

A landmark multilateral legal settlement between Seattle City Light, several tribes and non-governmental organizations, as well as various federal, state and county governments, was reached in March 2026. It commits the utility to funding nearly US$1 billion over the next 24 years to restore salmon runs and create fish passage. The agreement by the utility represents a reversal of its long-held claim that salmon never reached the upper Skagit before the dams — a position contradicted by historical records, archaeological evidence and Indigenous Knowledge.

The agreement is prompting First Nations in British Columbia to consider what the return of salmon could mean on their side of the border. Bussanich is excited by the chance to witness and support the return of salmon on this stretch of river. “If you provide them the opportunity, the fish will find a way,” he says.

Assessing salmon habitat from the sky

Every 30 to 50 years, the three dams on the Skagit have required an updated permit from the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to legally continue operations.

The project’s recent permit expired in 2025. Since then, the dams have been operating on annual licenses as negotiations for the terms of the new permit are settled. As part of the relicencing process, the public utility is required to carry out numerous studies to look at how the dams affect a variety of environmental, economic and social considerations and how to mitigate harmful impacts. This created the window for action by U.S. tribes to push the utility to deal with their role in depressing salmon runs across the entire Skagit River system.

The March legal settlement dictating the terms of the future management of these dams followed an ambitious lobbying campaign and legal action spearheaded by the Upper Skagit Indian Tribe in Washington state, along with pressure from the neighbouring Sauk-Suiattle Indian Tribe, conservation organizations and the public spurred by regional and national investigative journalism.

At the signing ceremony for the legal agreement in May 2026, Scott Schuyler, a member of the Upper Skagit Tribe and its cultural and policy representative for natural resources, shared some hope and history. 

“Today is a day of reflection for the Upper Skagit People,” he said. “We do appreciate everything that has occurred over the last eight years [of negotiations] but this journey actually began 124 years ago for the Upper Skagit when we were not allowed a voice or a choice.”

The day after the settlement was signed, an engineering firm was hired to start work on designing fish passage, Schuyler later told The Narwhal. With the public utility committing to create a pathway for salmon to access areas above each of its three dams, and thereby potentially unlocking spawning habitat in Canada, the Okanagan Nation Alliance is interested in how this effort will interface with the lands and waters it is part of stewarding north of the international border. 

 “Our mandate is ‘kł cp̓əlk̓ stim̓, ’causing to bring back’ water and salmon,” Bussanich says during the field trip to the Skagit. “Salmon reintroduction … and restoring habitat and protecting it is the core of everything, that the Okanagan and its members in the nation adhere to and guide us.”

The goal of the upper watershed’s aerial survey Bussanich and his team are doing is to better understand conditions on the ground for returning salmon. According to Bussanich, the flight is part of ongoing work being carried out collaboratively by the Okanagan Nation Alliance (representing the Upper Similkameen Indian Band), Stó:lō Nation, Parks Canada, the Washington-based organization Conservation Northwest and a consulting company called Biodiversity Pathways. Their collective goal is to protect the area and its sensitive species through Indigenous-led conservation efforts.

We touch down briefly on a sandbar on the river on the Canadian side of the border to survey conditions more closely at the location. Bussanich carefully photographs and notes the structure of another impressive logjam and the side channel it helped create.

“Coho will spawn in side channels like this,” he says. In the Okanagan River east of here, the Okanagan Nation Alliance and its partners have been creating artificial logjams to restore streams where the wood was removed and the streambed was straightened for flood control and agriculture. Here, on the upper reaches of the Skagit, the braided channel and natural woody structure provide a template for what they aim to create elsewhere for salmon habitat. Through Bussanich’s eyes, this part of the river appears in excellent condition for the return of anadromous (fish that are born in freshwater, migrate to the sea and return to freshwater to spawn) salmon. Now they just need a path to reach it.

As we cross the border into the U.S., we fly over the massive reservoir backed up behind the Ross Dam, the northernmost of the three Skagit dams. Around us, the high peaks of North Cascades National Park rise up from the reservoir shores. Bussanich is impressed with the quality of the spawning habitat in several of the tributaries entering the reservoir we fly over. Some locations look better for sockeye, others for Chinook and coho, according to Bussanich’s keen eye.

Then we see the Ross Dam. At 160 metres tall, it is the largest of the three hydroelectric dams on the river. The height of the dam itself is still a formidable challenge for engineers to figure out how to get migratory fish around. In the first half of the 20th century, it was considered insurmountable.

The long road to salmon recovery

From the Ross Dam, we fly downstream over the Diablo and then the Gorge dams. Immediately below the Gorge lies a stretch of the river that is completely dewatered by Seattle City Light, with the entire river’s flow diverted into a tunnel leading to a power-generating station about three miles downstream in the town of Newhalem, Washington, a former village site of the Upper Skagit Tribe. After passing through the power station’s turbines, the water is returned to the Skagit, which continues unimpeded the rest of the way to the sea, meeting the completely undammed Sauk River, its largest tributary, along the way. 

Below the dams, the Skagit River is home to runs of Chinook, coho, pink, sockeye and chum salmon, as well as steelhead trout. The Chinook and steelhead populations are both listed as threatened under the United States Endangered Species Act and noted as a species of greatest conservation need in Washington state. In the U.S., the Upper Skagit Indian Tribe, the Sauk-Suiattle Indian Tribe and the Swinomish Tribe all retained their right to fish these runs— a right that has been deeply impacted by the steep declines in fish returns in the river. These declines also affect other species that depend on salmon such as the endangered population of resident orcas in the Salish Sea.

The construction of the Gorge Dam cut off about 40 per cent of the watershed from anadromous fish, while also depriving the river downstream of sediments critical for refreshing fish habitat and the estuary downstream. The subsequent construction of Diablo and Ross dams upstream went forward also without fish passage. 

In the legal settlement agreed to in March, Seattle City Light committed to returning water to the reach of the river downstream of the Gorge Dam, a culturally significant stretch of the river for the Upper Skagit Tribe, and a vital step toward connecting the lower and upper rivers for anadromous fish. The utility also committed to funding studies of the technology needed to move fish back and forth over each of its three dams and to work on this collaboratively with the other stakeholders in the settlement, including the U.S. tribes whose territory includes the Skagit River.

The utility lists 38 different participants in the licensing agreement for the three dams, including conservation organizations and county, state and U.S. federal agencies, as well as 10 U.S. tribes and two First Nations in Canada, the Nlaka’pamux Nation and the Stó:lō Nation.

Tribes that signed the Treaty of Point Elliot in 1855 explicitly retained their right to harvest salmon in their usual and accustomed locations. This right was upheld in court in 1974. This fact provides a large portion of the legal leverage that tribes are using to pressure Seattle City Light to do more to protect and restore salmon, including creating access above the dams.

On May 12, the Mayor of Seattle formally signed the settlement agreement for the Skagit River dams. At the signing ceremony, Scott Schuyler, who led the Upper Skagit Tribe’s efforts, reflected on the moment. “We were not allowed a voice or a choice when the first dam was built,” he shared. “We see redemption today by signing this agreement. We do have that voice from now on.”

However, he also noted the signing of the agreement is not the same as real action on the ground. “Today is not the day to celebrate for the Upper Skagit. The celebration will come in the future. When we see the river return to its banks, the Upper Skagit people will rejoice and celebrate. When we see the first salmon pass over the dams and the dams start contributing to these depressed runs, then the Upper Skagit will celebrate.”Schuyler tells The Narwhal that while design work for fish passage above the dams has already begun, it could be years before we see water flowing again in the bypass reach of the river, or salmon moving back and forth over the dams, due to permitting and engineering. “I would like to see it done in my lifetime, but you never know.”

Editor’s note: David Moskowitz is involved in long-term documentary work of the Okanagan Nation Alliance and grizzly bears.

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