Summary

• Every three years, the Labrador Winter Games draws athletes from communities across the region to Happy Valley-Goose Bay to compete in events that reflect Labrador’s distinct culture and history, like snowshoe biathlon and dog team races.
• Several athletes in the 2026 games found increasingly volatile winter conditions — which swung between severe cold and sudden warmth — are impacting how they train.
• A climatologist at Environment and Climate Change Canada says climate change is a contributing factor in unpredictable winter temperatures.

Sherri Wolfrey has competed in the Labrador Winter Games for 10 times now — but this winter, she says extreme weather made training difficult. An experienced athlete training in her hometown of Rigolet, Nunatsiavut, she endured some weeks of temperatures plunging below -30 C with high winds. 

“Practicing was really hard on the lungs, like trying to chisel a hole [in the ice], and you gotta be fully dressed in extra layers,” Wolfrey, who competes the Labrathon, snowshoe biathlon and target shooting, says. But the following week might be too warm. 

“We had a few mild days when [the snow] was almost too sticky to go with snowshoes on, because it will stick to your moose hides,” Wolfrey explains. 

The Labrador Winter Games, held every three years, took place between March 8 and 14 in Happy Valley-Goose Bay. Events like snowshoe races, skiing and dog team races are all games that require athletes to compete in Labrador’s winter elements. But athletes from all across Labrador are voicing their concerns about the conditions they trained in leading up to the 2026 games. 

Wolfrey is a school secretary and mother to four children in Rigolet, located on the north coast about 160 kilometres from Happy Valley-Goose Bay. And she was also one of many athletes that experienced the cancellation of the Labrathon at the 2023 Labrador Winter Games. 

The E.J. Broomfield Memorial Labrathon is one of the main events that athletes and spectators look forward to. The race tests athletes’ ability to live like trappers once did, as they race in snowshoes while pulling a toboggan. Along the course, they must light a fire to boil a kettle, shoot five targets, set a trap and saw a log of wood and chisel a hole through the ice, before racing to the finish line with their toboggan full of tools.

But the board of directors for the 2023 games cancelled the Labrathon due to “unprecedented weather conditions” that raised safety issues.

Wolfrey says that the cancellation of the 2023 Labrathon was “so disappointing, especially after all that training.” She and a few other athletes participated in their own Labrathon to prove that it could be done in the weather. 

Athletes experience extreme temperature changes and high winds while training

Jessica Roberts, a returning athlete from Labrador City near the Quebec border, says she believes the adverse weather that impacted her training for the 2026 Labrador Winter Games was caused by climate change.

“This year was a bit challenging as we had temperatures over -20 to -25 degrees Celsius, with wind gusts up to 50 and 80 kilometres an hour,” Roberts says. “The last two weeks [before the games] most of us haven’t been able to train at all.”

Roberts competed in outdoor games such as the snowshoe relay race and individual female snowshoe race this year, and previously competed in the 2019 games. 

She’s used to Labrador winters, but the high winds were the culprit in stopping her from training for the 2026 games multiple times. 

“I can handle the cold, and you can dress for the cold, but like the wind — it just takes the absolute breath completely from you,” Roberts says. She adds the temperature changes were also challenging. “Sometimes you’d get -14 and then the next week you’d have like -43,” she says.

While Roberts experienced difficulty training in the weather for the outdoor games, she and her team won gold in the snowshoe relay race, and she finished fourth overall in the individual female snowshoe race.

With the harsher temperatures and high winds, Shane Winters, from the north coast community of Makkovik, Nunatsiavut, trained indoors on a treadmill, without snowshoes, for the running part of the snowshoe race. 

“It’s the hardest part about it,” Winters says. “It’s easy to run a fast 1.2 kilometre without snowshoes, but certainly when you put the snowshoes on, it’s 10 times harder.”

He previously competed in the 2023 Labrador Winter Games, and says recent winters have been highly variable, with some delivering little snow and others bringing too much snow. “It was hard to get a good track, hard to get a good routine” to train for the 2026 Labrador Winter Games, he says. 

But his team from Makkovik still brought home silver medals in the snowshoe relay race. 

The science behind the extreme weather changes

Bob Whitewood, a climatologist at Environment and Climate Change Canada, says climate change is contributing to the weather variability that Labrador Winter Games athletes have faced in recent years.

Whitewood’s work focuses on historical trends in temperatures and precipitation compared to recent climate data. 

“The major change that you’ll see is average temperatures going up, but what happens when average temperatures go up, there is this band of high winds that go across the northern part of the country,” he explains, which in turn pulls frigid cold air down from the Arctic. 

These are Rossby waves, or planetary waves: huge oceanic and atmospheric waves that occur naturally due to Earth’s rotation. Rossby waves affect the climate and weather. 

“If you have a lot of differential between temperatures in high north and lower latitudes, this jet stream of air is pretty straight across the country. But as the temperature goes up in the north, and kind of gets closer to the temperatures that you’re seeing in the south, that straight line becomes kind of a wavy line,” Whitewood says. 

As a result,the Rossby waves’ jet stream “pulls cold air from the Arctic, and then as this loop goes past you, it pulls warm air up from the south,” which Whitewood says creates a fluctuation in temperature, as Labradorian athletes experienced while training this past winter. 

Across Canada, Whitewood says, temperatures are generally getting warmer over time due to climate change. But in northern regions, like Labrador, the temperatures are changing more rapidly. Compared to historic winter temperatures over a 78-year reference period, Whitewood says the Labrador region was around three and a half degrees warmer than average. He predicts that the next winter will be warmer than average as well.

Snowmelt impacting Labrador Winter Games training

“We tried to train in all of the weather, it was just a bit more blustery this year than other years,” Nikki Brown-Dyson, a returning athlete from Cartwright, says. “There was a lot more water on the ice and everything at home.” 

Brown-Dyson is a mother of four and a paramedic. Her community of Cartwright is about 225 kilometres east of Happy Valley-Goose Bay, on the south coast of Labrador.

While she was training for the ice-chiselling part of the Labrathon, the snow would melt in unseasonably warm temperatures.

“Some people like the chisel hole with the water,” Brown-Dyson says. “I do not. I find it harder to see where you’re chiselling.”

Despite the challenges of training, she took home the gold medal for the 2026 Labrador Winter Games women’s Labrathon for the second straight time after her gold medal win in 2019.

Still, the 2023 cancellation of the Labrathon was in the back of Brown-Dyson’s mind while training for this year’s Labrador Winter Games. “I think it was just a fear [that] because it was cancelled before, it was gonna happen again.”

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Summary

• The first round of investments from a $375-million fund for Indigenous-led conservation in the territory is being distributed to 21 Indigenous partner governments.
• The funds will support activities on three Tłı̨chǫ protected areas, which cover roughly half of Tłı̨chǫ territory and represent a region three times larger than Banff National Park.
• Funds will also support new and existing Guardians programs, which will generate steady jobs and preserve cultural knowledge that would otherwise be lost.

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A landmark initiative in the Northwest Territories is disbursing $21.6 million to Indigenous governments to support protected areas and Guardian programs.

The funds represent the first round of investments from the Our Land for the Future Trust. The trust came out of an agreement signed in 2024 by the federal government, territorial government, 21 Indigenous governments and private donors that invested $375 million into Indigenous-led conservation in the territory.

The investments were announced Feb. 26 at a meeting in Yellowknife, where the agreement’s partners gathered to review progress.

“It’s an exciting announcement,” Dahti Tsetso, the trust’s chief executive officer, told The Narwhal. With the agreement finalized and funds transferred to the trust’s account, money is now flowing to Indigenous governments to support conservation work at the community level: protecting diverse ecosystems, culturally and spiritually important areas and wildlife habitats.

That, she says, “was always the vision.”

In this first round of funding, Tsetso says each of the 21 Indigenous partner governments is getting resources to work toward area-based conservation goals as well as Guardian and stewardship goals.

In some cases, this will mean managing existing protected areas, such as Edéhzhíe in the Dehcho region or Thaidene Nëné near Łutsël K’é. In other cases, funds will support communities looking to explore or advance protected areas. Both Ka’a’gee Tu and Sambaa K’e First Nations, for example, have been working to establish protected areas that would conserve culturally and ecologically significant zones, home to wildlife such as moose, fish, waterfowl and caribou.

“There’s a number of initiatives that have been ongoing for quite some time,” Tsetso says. “Now the trust can help support their efforts.”

She adds that all of the Indigenous partners have ambitions to either initiate or expand their Guardian work. For instance, the K’ahsho Got’ine Guardians in Fort Good Hope are looking to expand, while the Gwich’in are developing a regional Guardian program.

Protecting roughly half of Tłı̨chǫ lands

The Our Land for the Future agreement covers existing protected areas in the territory, but it’s also expected to support 200,000 square kilometers of new protected and conserved areas, contributing to the federal government’s commitment to protect 30 per cent of Canada’s land and water by 2030. 

Last week’s announcement recognized a big step toward that goal. In November 2025, three protected areas on Tłı̨chǫ lands were officially recognized as Indigenous protected areas by the federal government and added to a national database. The online database is currently being updated to reflect more lands and waters protected as of the end of 2025, according to a spokesperson from Environment and Climate Change Canada.

The three protected areas are known as Tłı̨chǫ Nàowoò K’è Dèt’àhot’ı̨ı̨, Gowhaèhdǫǫ̀ Yek’e Aet’ı̨̀ı̨ K’è and Tıts’aàdı̀ı Nàdèe K’è Wexoedıı.

Altogether, they span 22,565 square kilometers— equivalent to about three times the size of Banff National Park, and encompassing about half of Tłı̨chǫ lands.

“It is a great piece of work,” Tłı̨chǫ Grand Chief Jackson Lafferty says.

He adds that there are also large areas where development is being promoted to support economic self-sufficiency. “It’s a balancing act,” he says. “We’re doing what we can to conserve and also develop.”

 Tłı̨chǫ Nàowoò K’è Dèt’àhot’ı̨ı̨ is aimed at preserving Chief Monfwi’s trails: traditional winter and summer travel routes that connect the four Tłıc̨hǫ communities as well as important cultural and harvesting areas, Brett Wheler, senior policy advisor on sustainability and resource management with the Tłı̨chǫ Government, says.

Similarly, Gowhaèhdǫǫ̀ Yek’e Aet’ı̨̀ı̨ K’è prioritizes the preservation of the ancestral Įdaà Trail, which connects Great Bear Lake to Great Slave Lake. There are important waterways and watersheds situated roughly halfway along the route.

Finally, Tıts’aàdı̀ı Nàdèe K’è Wexoedıı extends along the shoreline of the north arm of Great Slave Lake, and will protect habitat for birds and other wildlife such as caribou.

“These areas have been important for Tłıc̨hǫ people for a long time, basically forever,” Wheler says. Although Tłıc̨hǫ people have protected the areas since time immemorial, a lack of resources to get people on the land had kept them from fully realizing their vision of stewardship.  

The funds from the trust will support the “people component” of the protected areas, Wheler says, including Guardian work, environmental monitoring and cultural programming. One intention is to hire people full time — though the Tłıc̨hǫ Government already has several monitoring programs, patchy funding has meant most employees work on a part-time or casual basis.

The trust served as a catalyst for having the areas officially designated and recognized by the federal government, Wheler explains. In anticipation of funds flowing from the Our Land for the Future, Tłı̨chǫ law governing land protection was updated in 2023. In 2025, the federal government deemed the three areas equivalent to other protected areas, such as national or territorial parks, for achieving conservation goals. As a self-governing nation, the Tłı̨chǫ Government is the sole decision-making authority on its 39,000 square kilometres of land. A land claims and self-government agreement signed in 2003 gave the Tłı̨chǫ Government ownership of surface and subsurface rights on these lands.  

Stephanie Behrens, the Tłıc̨hǫ Government’s manager of lands protection and renewable resources, echoes Wheler.

“Our Elders have always said that the wildlife and the land need us to be out there,” she says. “Having this pot of money really ensures that we’re able to do that.”

Guardians funding will bring jobs, protect culture 

Behrens says the intent is to hire two full-time Guardians in each of the four Tłıc̨hǫ communities, along with a Guardian manager.

Employing Guardians full-time will also provide jobs in an economically challenging time for the region, Behrens says. The territory’s three diamond mines have long been major employers, but are all expected to close by the end of the decade. One is shutting down this month, and the two others are struggling financially.

Tłıc̨hǫ Guardians will help implement work set out for the protected areas, including stewardship, monitoring and harvesting. The work will support the Tłıc̨hǫ Government’s language and cultural programs, but also provide opportunities for individuals to exercise their culture, Wheler says. Elders will provide Guardians with guidance on how to re-establish and maintain cultural trails, along with a network of camps and cabins. 

A lot of that cultural knowledge might otherwise be lost.

“There are only a handful of people that actually know these historic trails,” Behrens says, adding much of her work is guided by her late grandfather’s vision. As an Elder, he was involved in negotiating the Tłıc̨hǫ self-government agreement.“To be able to utilize these trails once again in the way that our Elders and ancestors used to do, I think he would be extremely proud,” she says.

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The Arctic has been in the news a lot lately. Between the increased geopolitical interest in Greenland, claims over sovereignty, resource exploitation and the devastating impacts of climate change, the region has become a sentinel for global change.

But away from these headlines, a quieter crisis is unfolding that threatens Canada’s role in global environmental science, law and policy: the dismantling of research teams at the department responsible for Canada’s environmental policies and programs. The federal government’s plan to reduce the public service by 15 per cent over three years means that more than 800 positions at Environment and Climate Change Canada will be cut.

As an environmental scientist who has been involved in the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program since 2016 and an interdisciplinary legal scholar focused on water governance in Canada, we have seen how science can shape policy. For decades, Environment and Climate Change Canada research scientists have been integral to the work of the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, a working group that provides advice and assessments to the Arctic Council.

This intergovernmental group comprised of Indigenous Peoples, Arctic states and non-Arctic states with observer status is the major platform for protecting the environment and coordinating sustainable development initiatives in the Arctic.

Scientists at Environment and Climate Change Canada have played a leading role in more than 20 international reports on persistent organic pollutants and mercury. In fact, department researchers have acted as the largest group of chapter leads in these global assessments since the 1990s.

Budget cuts at the department raise concerns about how governments will develop effective policies and laws that rely upon scientific research.

The risks from budget cuts

Many of the scientists who lead projects on the long-term trends of toxins in Arctic wildlife face cuts or might lose their jobs entirely. Department scientists are often the ones to identify and assess “chemicals of emerging Arctic concern” — newly discovered chemical threats to human and environmental health that scientists are only just beginning to understand.

Losing the scientists who lead and interpret contaminant data in Arctic wildlife will take much more from Canada than scientific expertise; we risk losing our ability to understand and effectively react to chemical threats and their potential environmental and health impacts.

Data collection for unique monitoring datasets spanning up to 50 years is at risk of being discontinued. Even more concerning is the potential loss of national tissue archives if monitoring and research projects are cut. Contaminant data in Canadian wildlife have been instrumental to the listing of toxins under the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, an international treaty to control the global production and use of particularly hazardous chemicals.

Similarly, monitoring for mercury in Arctic air and biota is an important part of the rationale for the Minamata Convention, a global treaty designed to protect human and environmental health from mercury contamination.

In many ways, these global agreements exist because Canadian data, produced by Environment and Climate Change Canada scientists, proved that chemicals used thousands of kilometres away end up in the bodies of Arctic wildlife and Indigenous Peoples who rely on healthy wildlife for food security and cultural identity and practices.

These international treaties set out the norms, legal principles and regulatory schemes that have been incorporated into Canadian law. They support the risk assessment and management of many toxic chemicals under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act.

Losing these samples and monitoring programs would set back Canadian and global contaminant research and reinforce criticisms that Canada is a laggard in environmental law and policy.

Risk for Indigenous communities

Budget cuts could also intimately impact the daily lives of those living in the Arctic and raise questions of environmental justice. Indigenous communities in the Arctic face higher exposure to many toxins than other Canadians due to their reliance on foods like fish, belugas and seals.

Despite global efforts, blood mercury levels in many Inuit communities remain higher than the general Canadian population. Furthermore, concentrations of per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances, also known as “forever chemicals,” are consistently higher in these communities than in the south.

Without ongoing research, we risk creating a vacuum in environmental governance and law. Current legislation, like the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, aims to protect vulnerable populations and uphold the right to a healthy environment and environmental justice. But we cannot uphold these rights if we stop measuring how contaminants are impacting the health of the environment, food and water of the populations most affected by these chemicals.

Across Canada, the cuts undermine effective chemical management. Canada’s chemical management plan depends heavily on the expert assessment of government scientists. This expert-based risk assessment has enabled the discovery and monitoring of new chemical risks with comparatively few bureaucratic hurdles. However, it also means that the proposed cuts are particularly devastating to this program.

If we remove the scientists the regulatory system depends on, the system breaks. This means that these proposed cuts could not only cost jobs and reduce scientific excellence in Canada, but also leave the health of Canadians and our environment less protected.

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The marine town of Churchill, Man., cherished for its wildlife, landscapes and history, has recently taken on a new sense of national importance. Plans to expand Canada’s lone deepwater Arctic port on the shores of Hudson Bay have gained momentum — and investment — in the last year as the country looks north for solutions to an unprecedented conflict with its southern neighbours. 

Premier Wab Kinew has pitched the Port of Churchill as an answer to Canada’s trade concerns, and a means of galvanizing both provincial and national economies. Prime Minister Mark Carney has designated a plan to upgrade the port facilities as “transformative,” committing millions in federal dollars to the project and touting its merits in meetings with European trade partners. In late January, Kinew announced the province was in talks with several companies, including at least one major energy company, about investing in port expansion.

“I think a few of those companies are starting to say that they’re very serious about making an investment in Manitoba,” Kinew said in an interview earlier this month. “That would lead to infrastructure being built to do more export on Hudson Bay, which would be huge for our provincial economy.”

The Port of Churchill Plus proposal envisions a new resource corridor capable of transporting Western Canada’s natural resources, including liquefied natural gas, oil, mineral ores, potash, fertilizer and agricultural products, to Hudson Bay, where they can be shipped to international markets. 

It would likely include an upgraded northern railway, an all-season road, year-round shipping routes and a fossil fuel pipeline.

This is far from the first time the near-century-old port has garnered attention from politicians keen to see it reach its potential as an international trade hub. But where several attempts to grow the capacity of the historic grain port fizzled out, this latest proposal is gaining steam.  

Federal and provincial governments have already committed more than $500 million combined for infrastructure upgrades and preliminary research. A study to gauge industry interest in the project is underway, as is a study of the operational requirements to allow for year-round traffic in Hudson Bay. Manitoba has inked a memorandum of understanding with Alberta, Saskatchewan, British Columbia and the territories to collaborate on “nation-building infrastructure” and a west-to-east economic corridor. 

Past efforts to expand the port and diversify its trade potential were hampered by a lack of public and private investment. The remote location, difficult terrain and short ice-free shipping season make the port and associated Hudson Bay Railway particularly expensive.

“It wasn’t seen as a priority,” Barry Prentice, professor of supply chain management at the University of Manitoba, says in an interview. 

But threats to Canada’s Arctic sovereignty and tariffs from its largest trade partner have “stirred up the pot a bit,” he says. At the same time, new technologies and the realities of a rapidly changing northern climate have created opportunities to improve the economics of an Arctic trade route.

“The stars are kind of aligning so that Churchill again becomes a viable and maybe very attractive route,” Prentice says.

While experts are divided on whether the plans for a northern Manitoba resource corridor will come to fruition this time around, they agree the Arctic is changing — and it’s possible for Churchill to take on a more robust role in national trade.

From a ‘neglected port’ to a new vision for Churchill

When Arctic Gateway Group, a consortium of 29 First Nations, 12 local governments and corporate investors, purchased the port and the Hudson Bay Railway from its former American owners in 2018, the “neglected” infrastructure was in disrepair, president and chief executive officer Chris Avery says.

The railway washed out in 2017, cutting off communities in Manitoba and Nunavut that relied on the line for supplies and transportation. The rail line’s foundation was sinking in the muskeg, culverts were blocked, rail ties hadn’t been replaced. The port itself had rotting timber, exposed rebar and sinkholes in the wharf deck, Avery says. It had been shuttered in 2016. 

Led by Churchill Mayor Mike Spence and several northern Indigenous communities, Arctic Gateway Group thought: “Enough is enough. We need to take back control of this asset that communities are dependent on, and by the way, even the country is dependent on,” Avery explains.

The group secured government funding to repair and upgrade the existing infrastructure. Under the new ownership, port activity resumed: grain and northern supply shipments restarted in 2019 and the first critical mineral shipments in more than 20 years set sail in 2024. 

Momentum for the port swelled the following year, in the wake of U.S. President Donald Trump’s threats of Canadian annexation and skyrocketing tariffs. Canadian leaders stressed a need to strengthen Arctic sovereignty and open new avenues for trade; Kinew turned to the opportunity presented by the northern port.

“The whole [situation] with Trump and the U.S. has changed a lot of our thinking about the economy,” Kinew said last spring. “We’ve got minerals, we’ve got oil and gas. We’ve got all sorts of great goods that we want to export.”

During a meeting between premiers and Carney in June to pitch nation-building projects for a first-of-its-kind Major Projects Office, Kinew said a trade corridor to Hudson Bay could include a pipeline to carry Canadian oil and gas products, hydrogen, potash or other natural resources. 

And now Port of Churchill Plus has landed on the Major Projects Office’s list of transformative strategies, announced in September. 

Avery says the consortium’s vision is to support Canada’s efforts to diversify trade, assert northern sovereignty and advance Indigenous economic reconciliation by becoming “a major port.” 

To get there, it will need four significant pieces of infrastructure.

The existing railway needs to be upgraded to class one standards, meaning it can carry rail cars with a maximum weight of almost 130,000 kilograms. While that’s only about a seven per cent increase compared to current weight limits, “our customers tell us that seven per cent makes a big difference.” 

On top of rail, Churchill will need all-season road access to allow shippers and customers easier access to the port, with the added benefit of linking several northern communities that currently rely on an increasingly unpredictable winter-road network. Churchill, 1,000 kilometres north of Winnipeg, is only accessible by rail or plane. The provincial highway network currently ends near Gillam, Man., almost 300 kilometres southwest of the port town.

The port itself will need to accommodate year-round shipping, Avery says. Right now, it’s operational for about four months per year when the ice cover on Hudson Bay is at a minimum. Due to climate impacts, that’s expected to change in the coming decades, but Churchill will need icebreakers in the meantime. 

Finally, to capitalize on “the No. 1 Canadian export, which is energy products,” Avery says Manitoba will need a way to get those products to northern tidewater. While the company acknowledges oil and gas products can be shipped by rail (the port already transports diesel and other fuels as part of its northern re-supply shipments), he says “everything is being considered, including pipelines.” 

At least two companies have proposed pipeline routes from Alberta’s oilsands to Hudson Bay.

NeeStaNan, a Manitoba and Alberta-based company with First Nations owners, has proposed a “utility corridor” to Port Nelson, Man., a site 300 kilometres southeast of Churchill, that would be capable of exporting liquefied natural gas. The company’s website says it has secured support from two Canadian natural gas producers and is exploring the feasibility of exporting liquefied natural gas (LNG) via a facility at the mouth of the Nelson River. 

The other, an Alberta-based organization called Western Energy Corridor, proposes developing a link between Churchill and Western Canada that could contain “one or more combinations of a natural gas transmission system, an oil pipeline or a high-voltage electric transmission system.” The company’s website states it has mapped out a 1,560-kilometre corridor and drafted documents for initial regulatory filing.

Is a fossil fuel pipeline really feasible in the north?

Past proposals to pipe Alberta oil to Manitoba’s northern coast have failed. According to Heather Exner-Pirot, director of energy, natural resources and environment at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, that’s at least in part because: “The economics of a seasonal port are terrible.”

“The question isn’t: ‘Has a pipeline ever been built this far north?’ ” she says. “The question is: ‘Can you put this infrastructure in a seasonal port and still get a return, still attract investment and still attract shippers — does it make economic sense?’ ”

As of right now, Exner-Pirot says, the answer is no. 

What makes Churchill unique isn’t just that the port is in deep Arctic waters. Similar ports exist in Alaska, Greenland, Norway and Russia. But those are located in places with year-round access to open water, she says; Hudson Bay, by comparison, is covered in ice about seven months per year. 

Typically, these part-time ports are used for what Exner-Pirot calls destination shipping. Goods are shipped in and out of a specific location like a community or a mine over the course of a much shorter shipping season. 

“It’s more expensive, it’s logistically constrained and people can only sell … or receive their goods for a few months a year,” she says.

Exner-Pirot says there is “absolutely not” an economic case for building an oil or gas pipeline to Churchill, where the shipping season is about four or five months long.

“If you build an oil pipeline over 1,000 kilometres, you better be using it every day,” she says.

Pipelines take decades to build and cost billions; they also face significant regulatory hurdles and often staunch opposition from Indigenous communities, environmental advocates and residents. Liquefaction facilities for natural gas, which Kinew has floated as a possibility for Churchill, aren’t cheap either — a recently completed facility in Kitimat, B.C., cost $18 billion.

Opposition to pipeline development, alongside Impact Assessment legislation that empowers the federal government to review the environmental, social and economic impacts of major projects, has created conditions where “an interprovincial pipeline in Canada has borne an unacceptable political risk,” Exner-Pirot says.

“Pipelines are built every single day. We invest billions of dollars into pipelines every single year,” Exner-Pirot says. “It’s the … pipelines that have to cross either a provincial border or an international border that are the problem.”

Manitoba’s premier has already faced criticism for his recent support of new oil and gas infrastructure to Churchill. Former NDP vice-president Chris Wiebe told the Free Press the proposal was a reversal from the party’s “no new pipelines” stance during the election campaign, while Clayton Thomas-Müller, an author and environmentalist from Mathias Colomb Cree Nation, called the proposal “jarring and triggering” in The Globe and Mail.

Exner-Pirot believes funds to upgrade the Port of Churchill could be better spent on other, year-round rail and port infrastructure. The Port of Vancouver is in need of investment, she says, adding exporters in Prince Rupert, B.C., only have one class of rail line capable of carrying the heaviest loads. 

“Everyone is just begging the government to fix the West Coast port issues and they’re spending half of their political attention on Churchill,” she says. “It’s very frustrating.”

Developing a resource corridor through the tundra comes with additional costly challenges. The shifting muskeg and permafrost — increasingly unpredictable due to a rapidly changing climate — makes infrastructure more expensive to maintain. 

But University of Manitoba’s Prentice says these challenges aren’t insurmountable.

“They built an oil pipeline across Alaska, above ground, and it still functions,” he says. “I don’t think it’s something that the pipeline industry is incapable of doing again, it’s just a matter of the costs and whether you have an investor willing to do it.”

The Arctic is changing — so is Arctic shipping

For many, the most compelling argument for a more robust trade network through the Arctic is that climate change will open up shipping routes as sea ice melts.

Arctic Gateway Group is working with University of Manitoba researchers to better understand how the ice is changing and what impacts it will have on shipping. 

“The preliminary results of their study tell us that with climate change, the sea lanes can be open for six months of the year already … without any icebreakers or new types of equipment,” Avery says. “By the end of the century, or within the lifetime of our kids, the sea lanes will be open on a year-round basis for commercial shipping.”

Feiyue Wang, director of the Churchill Marine Observatory and one of the professors involved in the research, says the ice-free period in Hudson Bay gets about one day longer every year, based on observed ice cover between 1979 and 2025. That trajectory will likely accelerate in the latter half of the century, he says.

“Even at this moment, the shipping window is already much longer than the current operational window at the Port of Churchill,” Wang says.

Shipping is picking up, according to a report from Protection of the Arctic Marine Environment, an Arctic council working group. More ships passed through the Arctic polar code area in 2025 than in any of the last 12 years, with the number of unique ships increasing 40 per cent over that time.

While most were fishing vessels, nearly 200 boats carrying oil, oil products, gas or chemicals passed through the region last year — again 40 per cent more than in 2013.

Mining has prompted some of the shipping increase, the report notes. Bulk carriers, which carry cargo like mining ore, sailed 156 per cent more nautical miles in the Arctic last year than in 2013. Natural gas vessels were unheard of in Arctic waters in 2014, but as of 2025, there were 40 unique gas tankers in the North sailing more than 866,000 nautical miles combined.

But “just because the bay is ice-free, doesn’t mean it’s navigable,” Wang says.

Shipping routes through the Arctic require a continuous ice-free pathway. While much of Hudson Bay is covered by “first-year ice,” which forms in the winter and melts in the summer, multi-year ice in the high Arctic could float south and complicate pathways through the Northwest Passage. Ice conditions will likely be highly variable based on weather and climatic conditions, Wang says.

That means Canada will continue to need icebreakers to navigate the Arctic. 

More shipping increases risk of a spill. Researchers warn it could be devastating

With more tankers carrying oil and gas through the remote and extreme Arctic waters, the risk of an oil spill becomes harder to ignore. 

While part of Wang’s research has focused on understanding the changes to the shipping season as a result of climate change, he’s particularly passionate about another aspect of the marine observatory’s work: “How would you actually develop that shipping in a way that is not only economically viable, but environmentally sustainable and culturally appropriate?”

In the case of small leaks in warmer climes, the ocean is full of microorganisms that can quickly absorb oil and clean up a spill. 

“What really concerns us is if you have a moderate, or even worse, a major oil spill … how can we actually clean that up?” Wang says.

Typically, spills are recovered either by burning oil off the water, which gets rid of the majority of a spill but produces a potentially toxic smoke, or by dispersing the oil into the smallest droplets possible, which allows the contaminants to quickly flow into the “much larger volume of the ocean” and be absorbed and diluted by natural processes.

But those methods are designed for warmer oceans. “We know very little about how those will work out in a system like Hudson Bay,” Wang says.

The remote and dangerous nature of the Arctic, with its poor visibility, long hours of darkness and a maze of sea ice to navigate would likely mean a longer wait for cleanup to begin. Freezing temperatures slow the work of the ocean’s natural oil scrubbers, meaning spills would take longer to decompose. More concerning: existing cleanup plans assume an ice-free surface. If oil becomes trapped under the ice, it may be impossible to find and remove. 

“If you have an oil spill, the best time window to respond is right away,” Wang says. 

The longer oil is left to spread with the fast-moving currents, “more profound damage to the marine ecosystem” may occur.

In the case of a large spill, impacts on local ecosystems and communities could be devastating. Vegetation and animal life could be contaminated, damaging Indigenous food sources. Local fisheries and tourism industries would likely be affected too, with far-reaching economic consequences. Communities exposed to contaminants may also face human health risks.

“I’m obviously in favour of fossil fuel development, but I’m not in favour of doing it in the most expensive, most dangerous way possible,” Exner-Pirot, at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, says.

But from Wang’s perspective: “Just because there’s a risk of an oil spill does not mean we should not have increased shipping, right? Just because there’s always the risk of a car crashing does not mean that we should not drive on the highway.”

Wang believes the technology and tools to respond to an ecological emergency can — and will — be developed. Crucially, he says, they will need to be developed in partnership with Indigenous communities who have extensive Traditional Knowledge of the marine environment. 

Ideally, he says, governments will invest in not only the technology to detect and respond to spills in the Arctic, but also in training local communities to lead response efforts. 

‘Generational opportunities’ in Churchill: Arctic Gateway Group

Wang has worked closely with Indigenous communities around Churchill and in the Kivalliq region of Nunavut for over a decade. Overwhelmingly, he says, these communities want to see developments that improve career opportunities, living conditions and access to health and education — but only if those developments put the community’s interests front and centre.

“That’s where this environmental piece, to me, is the most important one,” Wang says. “Everyone is talking about this Port of Churchill Plus project as a potential nation-building project, but if the environmental aspect and the Indigenous aspect … are not addressed properly, I don’t think this project is going to go anywhere.” 

Manitoba’s leaders are taking a similar approach. In December, Kinew announced the Port of Churchill Plus project will be led by a new Crown-Indigenous Corporation, a first-of-its-kind leadership structure that will bring government representatives and Indigenous leaders together to guide development. The corporation is expected to be formally established in March. 

During a recent visit to Churchill to meet with community members and stakeholders to discuss the future of the port, Kinew joined federal representatives to announce $250,000 to study the feasibility of a marine conservation area in Hudson Bay. 

“When we’re talking about pursuing export and import along Hudson Bay, we can’t do that without thinking about the environment,” Kinew said during the announcement.

“Instead of just trying to build up some massive export terminal and then wait … to highlight the downsides years in the future, we’re saying let’s have that conversation now.”

In a subsequent interview, Kinew said Churchill residents expressed both excitement about the port’s potential and some concern about the environmental impacts. The resource corridor he envisions could include a pipeline, a transmission line, an all-weather road and an LNG terminal, but he cautions “that’s just one potential avenue.” 

“Likely, to make a big project work in Hudson Bay, it’s going to be a mix of products. You probably have critical minerals, agricultural products, manufactured goods, northern re-supply for Nunavut all working together there,” he said.

At Arctic Gateway Group, Avery says the company is already in talks with companies that produce many of these commodities, including critical minerals like nickel and copper, potash and silica sand and agricultural products. The communities that own the port and rail “want to see a balance,” he says. 

“They want to make sure that where they live is protected, but they also want to see generational opportunities for themselves, their kids and their grandkids.”

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

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Six hundred samples. Roughly 180 sites across the Canadian Arctic. And more than 3,000 microbes providing more than four trillion pieces of data on the genetic composition of the Arctic Ocean.

These are the quick numbers behind the work of Srijak Bhatnagar, an assistant professor at the University of Calgary and Athabasca University, who along with his team spent seven years studying and cataloguing environmental DNA from Canada’s most northern waters. 

Environmental DNA is genetic material shed by all organisms, including fish, birds, insects and microbes, into their environment. It includes feces, skin, tissues and mucus, which allows researchers to identify the creature that shed it, providing a picture of the living composition of the ocean and its inhabitants. 

Through samples collected over a six-year period by various researchers aboard the CCGS Amundsen, an icebreaker and Arctic research vessel, Bhatnagar’s team believes they can help identify more than 80 per cent of all environmental DNA found in the Arctic Ocean. 

The significance of this work goes beyond the numbers. According to Bhatnagar, collecting and cataloguing as much environmental DNA as possible is essential to understanding and combatting climate change. The data provides insight into populations and migration patterns for key species in the region, and tracking the impacts of diseases and other marine contaminants on the ecosystem and food security for local communities.

The team plans to make the information accessible to other researchers as well as Inuit and other Indigenous communities in the Canadian Arctic. They are currently building an online environmental DNA database with their ocean samples, which will be added to larger, publicly available databanks created and hosted by the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration, which includes DNA from both terrestrial and marine species in the Arctic. But they also travelled through Nunavut and Nunavik, hosting a series of workshops aimed at making the connection between genomic data and the environmental changes Inuit communities are seeing on the ground.

Bhatnagar’s team is also collaborating with researchers at Carleton University to build a larger, publicly accessible AI-supported system that will be fed by all genomics research taking place in the region, including the ocean environmental DNA his team has studied. The goal, he says, is making “the ChatGPT for genomic information.”

Such a platform, Bhatnagar says, could give communities the tools to answer critical questions: what can the DNA in Arctic waters tell us about mercury contamination in the region? What can local bacteria tell us about the impact of climate change on the population of key wildlife species?

“I cannot emphasize enough how many questions this could answer that I can’t even think of and only the future would reveal,” Bhatnagar says.

A safe, accessible and inexpensive method

Between 2013 and 2019, Bhatnagar’s team processed environmental DNA samples collected from the ocean by various researchers aboard the Amundsen, from across the Canadian Arctic archipelago and as far north as Nares Strait, which lies between Nunavut’s Ellesmere and Greenland. Genome Canada, a federally funded non-profit organization, provided more than $10 million in project funding to Casey Hubert, a professor at the University of Calgary and mentor of Bhatnagar’s. 

Hubert’s research aims to understand what kinds of microbes live in the Arctic Ocean, how abundant they are and how they may offer a nature-based solution in a region that is seeing less sea ice, more shipping and potentially greater chances of oil spills due to increased traffic. 

“Arctic Canada does not have capacity to mount a quick oil cleanup response,” he explains. “So what it comes down to is bacteria that are in the ocean that can actually degrade oil, crude oil or diesel.”

The collected samples have revealed significant quantities of microbes that can degrade various types of oil. They also provide a baseline for these microbes, so any change in the composition of microbes and marine life in the area can be measured after an incident, such as a spill. 

“Pollution incidents could also disturb the environment, disrupt the ecosystem,” Bhatnagar explains. “So how do we know that when the oil cleanup has happened, the environment is back to its old self, or has now moved on to a new self?” 

This method of research and data collection is also less harmful to the ecosystem than other techniques, he adds.

“Using an [environmental DNA] baseline is a lot faster and cheaper and less deadly than trawling [where you] pull up everything, count it and by the time [the marine organisms] come up, they’re already dead,” Bhatnagar says. 

“We use a gram of seafloor or a litre of water and that’s about it. It’s a lot less invasive and faster and cheaper, and it’s replicable,” he says, meaning researchers can compare samples over time. “They can see the changes happening over our lifetime because of climate change.” 

Changing populations, migration patterns and food sovereignty in the Arctic

Alongside making environmental DNA from the ocean samples accessible, Bhatnagar says funding from Genome Canada is also being used to increase the uptake of genomics to inform discussions around food sovereignty for Inuit. This includes discussions about population management and migration patterns, from co-managing herds to monitoring initiatives for local biodiversity. 

In order to do this, Bhatnagar and his team visited communities across Nunavik and Nunavut between January 2024 and March 2025, speaking to Elders, hunters and trappers committees and Inuit government representatives about how environmental DNA-based tools could support their goals. 

Reducing the impacts of research activities on local wildlife and marine life is significant, according to Allen Gordon, an Inuk historian, municipal councillor and wildlife technician in Nunavik who participated in a community workshop held in Kuujjuaq, Que., earlier this year. 

“With new techniques and with new genetics research, you may not need to just always kill — because to sample that beluga, [for example], you’ll have to kill it,” he says. 

“Now you may be able to get a lot of samples just from the water, and the water will tell you who’s been around, who’s left their mark.” 

Gordon adds that larger DNA information can help answer questions Inuit have about wildlife as a source of food that are unique to each community. In Nunavik, Inuit want to know more about belugas, which they have largely been prevented from harvesting in Ungava Bay for decades due to declining local populations. 

“The government came out in the ’80s saying, ‘No more hunting. Your [beluga] population is way too low. No more hunting at all,” Gordon recalls. “But then questions came [from Inuit]: are these whales that we still see and sometimes harvest — are they unique to Ungava Bay or are they the ones that move around to Churchill to join that big population?” 

Gordon adds that it’s an example of how science can help both the Canadian government and Inuit find consensus on their shared goal of maintaining a healthy beluga population: “For us Inuit being a harvesting society — we want to keep eating and killing belugas.”

Shivangi Mishra, a postdoctoral researcher who co-created the community workshops with Bhatnagar, says working with Inuit is essential for ensuring any digital technologies including the database reflect local knowledge that precedes, completes and complements scientific research on Arctic genomics. 

“Science is a very powerful tool, but grounding the science in Indigenous values and traditional values is more important,” she says. 

“Technologies are just a tool. They always complement, but it’s not like they are the only solutions.”

Through the workshops, Gordon says he has been happy to connect with other Inuit working with Bhatnagar’s team who are learning about genomics, making the science accessible to their communities and attempting to apply it to local decision-making. In one meeting, he heard from Emily Angulalik, the executive director for the Pitquhirnikkut Ilihautiniq Kitikmeot Heritage Society in Cambridge Bay, Nvt., who shared that Inuit in the community are seeing more diseases and parasites in muskox. This was surprising for Gordon because over in Nunavik, the local muskox population is healthy and currently growing by nine per cent each year, according to 2024 statistics from the Government of Quebec.

With Angulalik’s participation, Gordon says the conversation around food sovereignty and research in the region was more expansive. The two of them shared with the team the importance of involving communities, valuing their knowledge and ensuring scientific research returns to Inuit.  

“We had a lot of similarities of Inuit knowledge that in the past had not really been taken into account,” Gordon says. 

‘We must use our language to learn our ways’

The AI chatbot will function as a mix between a search engine like Google and an AI-overview system like ChatGPT, Bhatnagar says, that will use the most current and comprehensive genomic research available. 

Bhatnagar says decisionmakers will be able to ask the chatbot questions about local species, the researchers studying them and community involvement in the work.

“The platform will tell me that, for example, polar bears [in that area] are actually thriving. So if we were to hunt polar bears, we go to that side and not to this side, and that information helps [people] with decision-making, from an individual level to territorial and federal government levels.”

While the system will not host the environmental DNA itself, it will draw from all publicly available research and the environmental DNA that Bhatnagar’s team is adding to the larger databanks at the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration. 

Christy Caudill, a systems scientist at Carleton University, is working alongside Bhatnagar to build this platform in partnership with Angulalik and the Pitquhirnikkut Ilihautiniq Kitikmeot Heritage Society. She says the AI tool will function as “a knowledge mobilization system.”

Caudill notes communities like Cambridge Bay have been using both actual genomic science and Inuinnait knowledge around genomics as part of their local monitoring programs for a long time. But there are gaps between Inuit ways of knowing and genomics, particularly when it comes to terminology. 

“We must use our language to learn our ways,” Annie Atighioyak, president of the Kitikmeot Heritage Society, says of this work. “Through spoken Inuinnaqtun, observation, hands-on activities and not just the written form. Let the learners see, hear, feel, practise or taste the language and culture.” 

With Angulalik and Elders at Pitquhirnikkut Ilihautiniq Kitikmeot Heritage Society in Cambridge Bay, the team translated hundreds of terms used in genomic science to Inuinnaqtun. Together, they co-created a definition that incorporates scientific information but is rooted in the culture and Inuinnaqtun dialect. Elder Mary Kaotalok and Angulalik translated ‘genomics’ as: “Aallanngurninga uumajuvaluit ihumaaluktut qanurinninganik, aulavallianinganik, nunaujiurnirmilu naunairutikhangit.”

Alongside these translations, Angulalik and Caudill have also been developing knowledge models that identify the linkages between Inuit and scientific ways of knowing, and ensuring the platform is rooted in both. 

For example, Angulalik and Elder Mabel Etegik described the relationship between their knowledge of muskox and their knowledge of climate change, culture, weather and working together. Their knowledge of this keystone cultural species and its connections and context will be indexed by the AI tool and can be searched and summarized for users.

Caudill adds the process has also led to important discussions about “how [genomics] can be expressed in an everyday context to people” as well. 

“The term ‘genomics’ is inherently difficult to fully understand, unless that is your field of study. It can take years of specialty study to truly understand the concept of wildlife genomics as it relates to larger contexts and informs areas such as conservation,” she says. 

“But, for the first time, it can now be said in only four lines in Inuinnaqtun and understood by those speakers in its holistic context. I think that is a brilliant example of the strength of language itself and the power that it has to relay information.””

Angulalik agrees, adding this work will make genomics research more accessible to Inuinnait moving forward. 

“It’s a slow process but the terms will be used in our future — for our youth and for the generations to come,” she says.

“It’s also so important for our Elders and for Inuinnaqtun speakers [today] to understand the importance of the terms.” 

Meanwhile, Caudill and Angulalik are hoping to present an initial version of the AI platform at the ArcticNet conference in Calgary this December and have it ready for public use by August. It will include more than 100 translations from genomics science co-developed with Inuit partners, some of them in Inuinnaqtun. 

Caudill and Angulalik are now engaging in discussions about data sovereignty and digital ownership with Inuit as well. 

“Consistently, our Inuit partners have said, ‘We welcome science. We welcome Western science. We welcome technologies. We welcome innovations. And also, we’re taking that seat with you at the table,’” Caudill says. 

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

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

To witness a hunt is truly a memorable sight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Building a strong conservation economy for Inuit is at the heart of a landmark $270-million agreement that is now being implemented in the Qikiqtani region of Nunavut. 

Launched in Iqaluit on Nov. 13, the 10-year SINAA agreement is a partnership between the Qikiqtani Inuit Association, the Government of Canada and philanthropic partners including the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Aajuraq Conservation Society. 

The federal government has committed $200 million in funding for this agreement, while the remaining $70 million will be provided by philanthropic donors. That money will see the creation of new jobs, infrastructure and training opportunities within the conservation field, including support for Nauttiqsuqtiit Guardians and conservation centres. 

SINAA, which means “the floe edge” or “the place where land, ice and sea meet” was signed in February by former prime minister Justin Trudeau and Qikiqtani Inuit Association president Olayuk Akesuk. It follows years of consultation with Inuit in all 13 communities that are part of the Qikiqtani region, which stretches from Sanikiluaq, on an island in southern Hudson Bay, to Grise Fiord in the High Arctic. 

The agreement covers 989,879 square kilometres of Qikiqtani land and waters and may help Canada meet its larger climate targets: Through the creation of new marine protected and conserved areas, SINAA will contribute almost four per cent to the country’s goal of protecting 30 per cent of land and oceans by 2030. As well, it adds to the area of Canada’s marine territory that will be under Inuit governance and stewardship, bringing the total proportion of Canadian oceans under Inuit-led protection to 12.3 per cent. 

SINAA will create economic opportunities and address regional concerns for Inuit

Implementing the agreement will involve the creation of specific economic opportunities through conservation, according to Richard Paton, assistant executive director for marine and wildlife conservation at the Qikiqtani Inuit Association. 

“Under SINAA, we will have approximately 130 new jobs for Inuit. The initiative includes funding for Nauttiqsuqtiit centres — that’s our conservation centres. And building on infrastructure, the opportunity to train Inuit in the conservation economy while supporting local monitoring and research that’s done by our Nauttiqsuqtiit Guardians program,” he said.

Paton says SINAA has been years in the making. In 2022, the Qikiqtani Inuit Association spearheaded discussions of a regional conservation approach that would connect all Qikiqtani Inuit. 

“That shift was significant because we recognized that as we were speaking to [the federal government] about new conservation areas, the focus was generally on the community directly adjacent to that conservation area. And historically, many Inuit communities and Inuit directly were not engaged in a way that reflects our understanding and our relationship with the environment,” he said. 

Through the regional conservation approach, Paton said Qikiqtani Inuit Association began identifying conservation outcomes that will support the local economy while also helping alleviate systemic and ongoing challenges faced by Inuit across the region. 

One such challenge is food insecurity, which is linked to many factors including the high cost of living, declining access to country food and fewer opportunities for Inuit to both practice and pass on their culture and tradition, especially in light of growing climate change impacts. In addition to creating employment opportunities for Inuit, Paton says SINAA will address food insecurity. 

“All of [our Nauttiqsuqtiit] Guardians understand the environment around them and will be able to harvest marine animals and bring those back to the communities and to share and [contribute to a] typical Inuit cultural diet that offsets food insecurity,” he explained. “This will also be an opportunity to adjust Inuit diets in a way that could offset some of the health impacts that we’ve had over the last 50 years.” 

Ecologically critical Qikiqtani region will be protected by Inuit Guardians

Alongside a regional conservation model, Oceans North executive director Sheena Kennedy said an essential aspect of SINAA is also the protection of the larger environment at a time of changing geopolitics in the region. 

Larger than British Columbia and more than twice the size of California, the Qikiqtani region is close to a million square kilometres in size. It covers roughly 10 per cent of Canada’s land and marine area, and encompasses more than 1,500 islands and up to 35 polynyas (open-water areas that remain unfrozen even in winter).

The region is also home to some of the most productive marine ecosystems and a critical habitat for key Arctic species including the world’s largest subpopulation of polar bears, the endangered Peary caribou and 75 per cent of the global narwhal population. 

“Having eyes and ears on the water is really important for sovereignty and security, and there’s nobody better to be out on the land than the people who know it the best,” Kennedy, who attended the announcement in Iqaluit last week, said.“That’s a really important component of this work, especially at this time. For millennia, the Qikiqtani region has sustained Inuit, and Inuit know it the best. That is essential to both maintaining ongoing cultural continuity, food security but also sovereignty, which is really important right now.” 

SINAA is one of four Canadian projects being funded under the Project Finance for Permanence model, which is a public-private financing model bringing together Indigenous organizations, governments, non-governmental organizations and philanthropic partners to collaborate on shared goals and establish long-term funding for conservation initiatives on the ground. Inspired by an approach used by Wall Street executives, the model requires funders to finance all key aspects of the conservation plan at once. 

“I think it helps to show the partners — in this case, the Qikiqtani Inuit Association and all of the Inuit in the region — that they have a lot of support from government and from non-profit partners to advance their vision and to realize it,” Kennedy said. 

For Paton, SINAA is significant because it will ensure the protection of this diverse environment and its interconnected local economies are guided by those who know it best. 

“As decisions are made in new conservation areas, [SINAA] will be led by Inuit and decisions will be made by Inuit.”

Updated Nov. 24, 2025, at 11:53 a.m. PT: This story has been updated to correct the area covered by the SINAA agreement. A previous version of this story used an estimate from 2023.

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Succulent scents of caribou, moose, muskrat and beaver — boiled, roasted and fried — waft from the kitchen. Young children chase one another around the community centre, clutching bags of dried caribou, strings of meat stuck in their teeth. The stage is set with pink iridescent streamers and the band’s fiddles, guitars and drums, ready for a night of music and jigging. 

Adults and youth alike give their names to a coordinator with a notebook, signing up to join in the games, including caribou head skinning, log sawing and muskrat-calling. Outside, there’s still ice on the Porcupine River — break-up is late this year, locals say. There’s no caribou in sight, but people know they’re close by. The spring migration is underway.

Several hundred people from across the North have gathered here in Old Crow, Yukon, a subarctic community at the 67th parallel, to celebrate Vadzaih Choo Drin, or “Big Caribou Days.” It’s the 25th anniversary of the event celebrating the seasonal return of the Porcupine caribou herd, one of the largest barren-ground caribou populations in North America, as they migrate toward their summer calving grounds in Ivvavik National Park and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. The Gwich’in refer to the calving grounds as Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit — the sacred place where life begins.

“My grandparents, they taught me about caribou. They take me out to the caribou when they’re coming, they show me the different age groups and tell me the names of these caribou,” Randall Tetlichi, a Vuntut Gwitchin Elder, says at the opening ceremony in late May.

Before he was allowed to hunt, Tetlichi had to learn how to distinguish between the big bulls, young bulls, one- and two-year-olds, pregnant females and the “old females with dried-up udders” who grunted up the hill behind the others. The last group was the one to harvest, he says. This knowledge of caribou traditionally guided the way the Vuntut Gwitchin managed the herd that migrates across the Porcupine River every spring and fall.

“Our job is to teach the young people,” Tetlichi says, offering a song and prayer for vadzaih, Gwich’in for “caribou,” welcoming them back home to Old Crow.

“I wanted the kids to have that taste of what our grandparents worked so hard for in Crow Flats,” Teresa Frost, an event coordinator with the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation (VGFN), says to the crowd, as volunteers hand out bags of caribou dry meat and bone grease.

Old Crow Flats, located north of Old Crow, is a traditional place where people camp, trap muskrat and hunt for what remains their most important food source — caribou.

The fate of the Porcupine caribou herd — considered one of North America’s last remaining healthy herds at an estimated 218,000 animals — is bound up with the fate of the Gwich’in people. The story of the Gwich’in people and caribou is a story about a multi-generational struggle to advocate for the permanent protection of the Porcupine caribou herd’s calving grounds in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. 

But the fate of the caribou — and the Gwich’in way of life — is now intricately tangled up in U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent moves to expand oil and gas activity in the refuge. The refuge has long been an ideological battleground between those in favour of drilling and those against it, but with Trump at the helm, the stakes have never been higher, pitting the Gwich’in people against what they’re calling an unprecedented threat as they work together to protect the caribou they depend on.

Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ poses immediate threats to the Porcupine caribou herd

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is a richly biodiverse ecosystem covering over 78,000 square kilometres, roughly the size of New Brunswick or South Carolina. It stretches from the Brooks Range mountains to the Arctic Ocean coastline, teeming with migratory birds, grizzly and polar bears, wolves and pregnant caribou who gather together to drop gangly calves onto the tundra. For the Gwich’in, it’s sacred territory. Here, there are stories told about the Gwich’in trading half of their heart with the heart of the caribou.

For decades, U.S. governments have been pushing for exploration and development within the refuge, including Ronald Reagan in 1987 and George W. Bush in the 2000s, with the goal to open up oil and gas development in an area known as “the 1002,” a 6,000-square-kilometre tract of land within the refuge. The United States Geological Survey estimates there could be somewhere between 4.3 to 11.8 billion barrels of oil in the area, but no one can say for sure — while a 2D seismic test was done in the 1980s, today’s more advanced technique of 3D seismic testing has never been done.

For decades, the Gwich’in have been organizing to prevent exploration — agreeing with Western science that finds drilling in the calving grounds would likely cause calf mortality and devastating declines in the herd’s size and resilience, which refers to its ability to cope with changes in the environment.

In 1988, Gwich’in Elders and leaders from communities in Alaska and Canada gathered in Arctic Village, Alaska, to found the Gwich’in Steering Committee with the goal of collectively lobbying U.S. policymakers for the permanent protection of the refuge. For the Gwich’in it was a pivotal moment, having been divided by the border as part of colonization, to unite and strengthen their nation’s collective voice.

For years, Gwich’in advocacy worked to keep oil and gas out, while lobbying for the permanent protection of the refuge. In 2015, President Barack Obama recommended Congress designate over 49,000 square kilometres of the refuge as “wilderness,” but it failed to pass. In 2017, the political pendulum swung back with President Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which mandated two oil and gas lease sales in the refuge to offset corporate tax cuts. Despite being slapped with a lawsuit by the Gwich’in Steering Committee in 2020, Trump held the first lease sale on Jan. 6, 2021, offering 22 tracts of land, equal to five percent of the refuge. The Gwich’in people and their allies urged oil and gas companies and banks not to bid and the sale didn’t go as planned. Only three companies bid, generating US$14.4 million — a long shot from Trump’s estimated US$1.8 billion.

From 2021 to 2024, former president Joe Biden’s administration sought to undo what Trump had done in the refuge, including cancelling all of the leases, citing insufficient analysis under the national Environmental Policy Act. Despite this, Biden was still legally bound to the second lease sale laid out in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. In December 2024, no companies bid. Shortly after, the state of Alaska sued the Biden administration over the cancelled leases — and in March, a judge ruled in its favour.

At Caribou Days in Old Crow in May, the games gave way to more sobering discussions about what Trump’s re-election in January — and his executive order to “drill, baby, drill” and reinstate the terminated leases — could mean for the future of the refuge.

“Over the next few years, more than ever, we’re going to need to come together,” Harold Frost Jr., deputy chief for the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation, told the crowd, warning the community about what would come to be signed into law on July 4 — Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”

The new budget bill — which critics argue is an extension of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — doubles the number of lease sales in the refuge, stipulating that four additional sales, no less than 1,600 square kilometres per lease, must take place within the next 10 years. The Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society Yukon told the Narwhal that Trump could be attempting to create market stability for oil and gas companies over a longer duration of time. Even if a democratic government were elected, it could be exceedingly difficult to change the new bill, as Biden failed to do with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

Today, the Alaska industrial development agency, holding the reinstated seven leases in the refuge, is on the brink of undertaking 3D seismic testing for the first time in history — one step closer to drilling in the calving grounds.

“We are no longer dealing with a familiar threat,” Frost Jr. told the Narwhal, after the signing of the new bill. “We are facing an administration willing to bypass reason, disregarding science and economic logic, to achieve its goal of drilling. We must organize. We must amplify our voices. We must protect this sacred place with everything we have.”

Gwich’in relationship with caribou begins ‘in our mother’s womb’

“The first time I tasted caribou was when I was born,” Tetlichi says over the sound of fiddle music and boots stomping along to the beat. He was born in Johnson Creek, 140 kilometres south of Old Crow, but moved north when he was eight years old.

When Tetlichi was 13 years old, he remembers camping in Old Crow Flats with his grandparents and witnessing the spring migration of the Porcupine caribou herd. He waited with a rifle and watched the caribou draw closer. He spotted an “older, dry cow that didn’t have a calf in her” and his grandfather gave him the okay. As Tetlichi skinned the caribou and cut the ribcage, his grandfather brought over a cup and filled it with the animal’s blood. He handed it to his grandson after he’d finished skinning the caribou. “Drink this,” his grandfather said.

“He said, ‘Now you can call yourself a hunter because you drank that blood and the caribou is part of you. The caribou is in your body and now you’re going to understand the movement of the caribou,’” Tetlichi says. “I felt happy and proud.”

The Gwich’in people have been intertwined with the Porcupine caribou herd for thousands of years. There is archeological evidence of their close bond at different sites across northern Yukon and Alaska, including Van Tat Gwich’in Teechik, a hunting camp located 60 kilometres east of Old Crow where archeologists discovered tools made from stone, caribou antler and bone, some estimated to be 3,000 years old.

When he was growing up, Tetlichi’s Elders told him stories about “caribou fences,” large structures built from spruce logs that measured kilometres wide at the mouth and funnelled caribou into a corral where they’d be snared and speared.

“The whole community was part of it,” Tetlichi says, referring to building the fences — carrying trees from places that were sometimes kilometres away — and also the hunt.

With the onset of colonization and introduction of firearms, people stopped using caribou fences. But there are 46 known caribou fence sites in Alaska and northern Yukon with seven located in Vuntut National Park to the north of Old Crow.

Oil exploration to the south and north of Old Crow began in the 1950s. In the late ‘60s and through the ‘70s, Tetlichi and other men from Old Crow travelled north to work at drilling sites in the Mackenzie Delta. “We didn’t question it,” he says. But after a decade, he recognized the negative impacts of oil and gas on the land and people.

“I seen it, I felt it,” he says. “They’re not good.”

When the Gwich’in Steering Committee formed in 1988 to lobby against oil and gas in the Porcupine herd’s calving grounds in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Tetlichi was chosen to travel to Washington, D.C., on one of the first delegations. He remembers sleeping on a church basement floor and experiencing culture shock from the city’s traffic and noise. He was afraid, but Tetlichi knew he was there to talk to people about what caribou meant to the Gwich’in people and what would be lost if they opened up the refuge for oil and gas exploitation — so that’s what he did. He shared stories with politicians and citizens alike. Four decades later, he hasn’t stopped.

Lorraine Netro, a Vuntut Gwitchin Elder who was born and raised in Old Crow and today lives in Whitehorse, agrees about the importance of speaking out. “The Elders in our nation asked us to educate the outside world about why we need to protect that sacred place where life begins,” she says. Disturbance to the calving grounds will “destroy the caribou and destroy us as a people,” she adds.

Netro says the sacred connection with caribou begins “in our mother’s womb, when we taste caribou.” 

She remembers watching her mother hunt and skin caribou in Crow Flats, and the feeling of happiness, knowing they’d have food to eat and new moccasins and clothing to wear. No part of the animal was wasted. Her grandmother made sinew from the tendons.

In the late ‘90s, Netro joined the advocacy efforts to protect the Porcupine caribou herd. In 1999, she followed in Tetlichi and other Gwich’in leaders’ footsteps, participating in a lobby delegation to Washington. It opened her eyes to the power of storytelling — even when they had only “five, ten minutes” to speak with U.S. politicians — to change people’s minds and shape policy and decision-making. The Gwich’in have “touched many, many people”, she says.

“It’s part of our responsibility. It’s about our future generations — seven generations and beyond — so that our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren can be blessed to have that spiritual and sacred connection to the caribou.”

Gwich’in members and Elders have been travelling to the U.S. to advocate for caribou for decades

Kris Statnyk, a member of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation, remembers watching a video of his own grandmother, Dr. Reverend Ellen Bruce, speaking at the Gwich’in gathering in Arctic Village in 1988, and family members travelling to Washington to lobby politicians. Even as a child, advocating for caribou felt like a kind of rite of passage.

Today, Statnyk is an Indigenous Rights lawyer based in Gitxsan Territory in northern B.C. and the co-chair of the Gwich’in Council International, along with the head of delegation for the Arctic Council. He continues to work closely with Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation and a large part of that, Statnyk says, is continuing his ancestors’ legacy of advocacy for the Porcupine caribou herd.

Despite more than a hundred years of colonization, he says, caribou continues to be a mainstay of Gwich’in life, culture and food security. While the majority of other barren-ground caribou herds in Canada are threatened — their habitat fragmented by industrial development — Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation has worked to protect the Porcupine herd in Canada by negotiating their land claim agreement in 1993 and creating Vuntut National Park in 1995, protecting key habitat in Yukon where no industrial development can occur.

But across the border, the calving grounds in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — and influence over U.S. politicians — has always remained something the Vuntut Gwitchin can’t directly control, Statnyk says, and now, perhaps, more than ever.

He travelled to Old Crow in May to speak at Caribou Days and take part in the festivities and discussions on the urgency of the times.

“Seismic activity could be happening in [the refuge] within a year — that’s just the reality,” Statnyk says. “We haven’t really come close to that before. We can try to slow down the regulatory process and dissuade companies and banks from supporting projects in that area, but it’s difficult to prevent this U.S. administration from greenlighting things they want.”

Oil and gas development in the sacred calving grounds in the refuge is “a clear violation” of the Gwich’in people’s rights to self-determination as expressed in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Statnyk says. (While the U.S. has officially endorsed the declaration since 2010, it is not legally binding. Today, Indigenous groups are calling on Trump to operationalize the declaration.) In addition, the U.S. is failing to to implement its responsibility to consult with Gwich’in and other Indigenous communities in Canada, as stipulated in the Canada-United States agreement on Porcupine caribou conservation, a treaty signed in 1987.

“On the Canadian side, we’ve never, ever been invited directly [by the U.S. government] to participate in any of these regulatory processes,” Statnyk says. “It’s always been on our own initiative where we’re asserting and showing up.”

Despite the political situation they’re up against, Statnyk is heartened by the legacy of relationships that have been built over the past decades with people, politicians and communities in the Lower 48 and across Canada.

“We’re always told [by our Elders] to go out and make friends, to do this in a ‘good way,’ ” Statnyk says. “It means a lot of things for how we conduct ourselves, even when people are making decisions as if we don’t exist, or don’t matter.”

The long game has always been the permanent protection of the coastal plain, which requires congressional legislation, but it’s a goal the Gwich’in remain committed to.

‘I’m up here hauling all my water to soak my hides. We don’t need all of this gas’

Christine Creyke, a member of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation and Tahltan First Nation, carefully hangs her caribou and moose hides on a spruce beam outside her home in Old Crow, lovingly inspecting each one. Days, weeks, months of physical work went into processing these hides: fleshing, scraping, wringing, softening and smoking.

When she’s working on hides, Creyke feels a strong sense of identity and community.

“There are conversations that happen around hide work in terms of culture and what it means to be Indigenous,” Creyke says. “These relationships, both the ones made between people working on hides together and the ones made between people and caribou through the process of hide tanning are important for healthy communities.”

Every hide is unique, she explains, pointing to a cream-coloured caribou hide pricked with small holes. The holes look like stars scattered against the night sky. They’re scars from warble flies, parasitic flies that lay their eggs in the legs of caribou. The hatched larvae migrate onto the caribou’s back where they feed off the animal, causing major energy losses.

“I want to sew something special with this,” Creyke says, handling the scarred hide with affection. “I always try to think about the animal and honour what they endured.”

As a result of climate change and warming temperatures, warble flies may be developing earlier in the summer, which could harm caribou — particularly during the calving season. Creyke is worried how cumulative pressures from oil and gas, along with climate change, could impact herd resiliency.

In 2024, Creyke, who works as the lands manager with Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation, was appointed on behalf of Old Crow to serve on the Gwich’in Steering Committee and advocate for the Porcupine caribou herd. It’s been a huge learning curve to navigate U.S. politics and the environmental assessment process in Alaska, Creyke says, but it’s one she’s embracing. In addition, Creyke was recently appointed to the Gwich’in Council International.

“I feel immense responsibility,” she says, acknowledging the support and inspiration of her mentors, including Netro and Norma Kassi. Kassi, a member of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation who was raised in Old Crow and today lives in Whitehorse, served as an MLA for Old Crow from 1985 to 1992 and has travelled around the world advocating for the Porcupine caribou herd.

Creyke points out the disparities that exist between northern and southern communities, particularly when it comes to drilling for oil and gas in the sacred calving grounds on the Alaska side, as well as their wintering grounds in the Eagle Plains Basin, south of Old Crow, on the Canadian side.

Chance Oil and Gas, a Canadian-owned company, currently holds eight oil and gas leases in the Eagle Plains Basin on 4,000 square kilometres of the Porcupine herd’s wintering grounds.

“I see these huge mega oil and gas projects as part of a way to fuel a world that is so far removed from ours,” Creyke says. “There’s just so much energy consumption in the world. I’m up here hauling all my water to soak my hides. We don’t need all of this gas. What I need is for my hides to be soft, and my caribou herds to be healthy, and my freezer to be full.”

She points to the startling declines of other barren-ground caribou herds in Canada, including the Bathurst herd in the Northwest Territories, which plummeted from 470,000 in the mid-1980s to 6,240 today. There is no harvest of the Bathurst herd allowed in the Northwest Territories, while a limited hunt is permitted in Nunavut.

“I can’t imagine what that means for people who relied on their herd for everything — food, clothing, culture and way of being,” Creyke acknowledges. “When I think about my kids and them wanting to work on hides in the future, … I have to do this advocacy work now.”

‘Trump’s not going to stop’: Gwich’in people organize to fight back for the caribou

Across the U.S.-Canadian border in the Gwich’in community of Arctic Village, Alaska, Kristen Moreland, executive director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee, was devastated to receive the news of the “Big Beautiful Bill” mandating four new lease sales in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

“Hearing it was four more lease [sales] has our people on edge. Trump’s not going to stop,” Moreland says. “But that’s just going to make us work even harder to advocate for our land. With everything going on in this world, we need to stand together more than ever to protect the Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit — the sacred place where life begins.”

Recently, the steering committee announced an emergency Gwich’in gathering in Arctic Village on Sept. 4 for Gwich’in communities to come together to explore options — raising awareness, lobbying companies and financial institutions or taking legal action — for how to move forward as a unified front. Moreland says that’s critical to hear from Elders.

“It’s going to be like our first Gwich’in gathering in Arctic Village in 1988 when our Elders came together from Canada and Alaska, to come in solidarity for the opposition of oil and gas,” she says. “Our Elders need to guide us, right now more than ever, because they know what’s at stake.”

Gwich’in communities are already feeling the loss of another vital food source, Moreland points out. Much like caribou, salmon have sustained Gwich’in and other Indigenous communities for millennia. But the collapse of different salmon populations in the North has resulted in empty freezers and pantries. Many communities haven’t been able to fish for the past five years. In 2024, a transboundary seven-year moratorium on fishing salmon in the Yukon River was implemented.

Eighty percent of the Gwich’in diet comes from the land, Moreland says, with caribou being the most important source of meat. They can’t afford to lose another critical food source.

“The caribou are not just a species to us. They’re essential to our food security and our survival. It’s not a metaphor. It’s lived reality.”

According to the Big Beautiful Bill, the first oil and gas lease sale in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge must occur before July 4, 2026, with the others to follow over the next nine years.

Despite the gravity of what this means for the fate of the Porcupine caribou herd — and the Gwich’in people — Moreland says their resolve to continue fighting for the protection of the calving grounds is stronger.

“No amount of money can justify what is taking place, and we will continue to stand up to anyone who seeks to contribute to this destruction of our sacred lands,” Moreland says. “We have a lot of people on our side. We will not stop fighting. We’re Gwich’in Strong.”

Updated on Aug. 20, 2025, at 7:55 a.m. PT: This story has been updated to correct a statement suggesting seismic testing has never been done in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In fact, a 2D seismic test was done in the 1980s, but the more advanced technique of 3D seismic testing has not been done.

Updated on Aug. 25, 2025, at 6:06 a.m. PT: This article has been updated to correct the name of Arctic Village, Alaska.

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In December 2023, Hilu Tagoona was sent a pair of maps depicting the area around her Nunavut community of Baker Lake. One map showed mining claims as of August that year. The other showed claims as of December. Tagoona was struck by the scale of the staking. Over a matter of months, the area under active mining claims had overtaken a large swath of land to the west of her community.

Tagoona is senior Arctic advisor for Oceans North, an organization that supports marine conservation. She is also involved with Friends of Land Use Planning, a small group run partly by volunteers that has been advocating for the adoption of the Nunavut Land Use Plan — a document that outlines where development should be allowed and where environmental protection needs to be prioritized. 

The process of building this plan started nearly two decades ago. When The Narwhal spoke to Tagoona three years ago, there was some hope a draft of the plan from 2021 would soon be adopted. But even after being revised in 2023, it remains in limbo, and the claims keep piling up.

Tagoona was not only surprised by the amount of land being staked, but by the fact some mining claims overlapped with zones proposed as “limited use” under the latest draft of the land use plan, including caribou calving grounds and freshwater crossings. In these areas, industrial development would generally be off-limits.

“This is cause for concern,” Tagoona says. “The staking of these sites is almost challenging or going against what communities and Inuit Knowledge Keepers have indicated are areas that need to be protected.”

The region around Baker Lake isn’t the only area that has seen a staking rush in recent years. Across the territory, upwards of 52,000 square kilometres of active mining claims have been staked, according to federal data — an area almost twice the size of Vancouver Island. More than half of these claims have been issued in the past two years.

Friends of Land Use Planning recently commissioned a series of maps that show where mining claims overlap with proposed limited use areas. Drawing on federal and territorial data, they found that, as of May 2025, 14,962 square kilometres have been staked within areas that would be designated limited use zones had the plan been approved.

“Honestly, it’s crazy,” Qajaaq Ellsworth, an outfitter and cinematographer in Iqaluit who is also involved in Friends of Land Use Planning, says. “There seems to be a concentrated effort to stake as much as possible before any limitations are put in.”

In the last few years, mining claims in Nunavut have increased dramatically in what some advocates see as an effort to stake claims before limitations are enacted through the Nunavut Land Use Plan. Existing claims prior to 2020 are shown in yellow on this map, with newly added claims marked in pink. Zoom in to see the increase in claims staked across the territory. Map: Nikita Wallia

Land use plan is a key piece of Nunavut’s creation

The Nunavut Land Use Plan is the largest outstanding piece of the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement, signed in 1993 by the federal government, the Government of the Northwest Territories and Tunngavik Federation of Nunavut, which represented Inuit at the time and later became Nunavut Tunngavik Inc.

The agreement led to the creation of Nunavut, which previously fell within the borders of the Northwest Territories. It gave Inuit surface rights to roughly 18 per cent of the land in Nunavut and subsurface rights to two per cent of the territory. It also mandated the creation of co-management institutions, including a commission responsible for land use planning, that would give Inuit a say in decision-making about land, waters and wildlife. Once finalized, the land use plan will be the largest of its kind in the world.

Developing such a sprawling plan has been a monumental endeavour, ongoing for the past 19 years. It has involved five drafts and extensive consultation with communities, governments, Inuit organizations, industry and conservation groups, among others

To come into effect, the plan needs to be approved by the Government of Nunavut, the Government of Canada and Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., which is responsible for ensuring promises made under the territory’s land claims agreement are carried out. Since the latest draft was released two years ago, however, none of the signatories have signed off on it. And it’s not entirely clear why.

All the while, northern development has become a major talking point. In March, the federal government committed to reaffirming Arctic sovereignty by “unleashing the North’s economic potential.” Similarly, the Government of Nunavut and Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. — along with the mining industry — have proposed that unlocking the territory’s critical mineral potential could strengthen Canada’s economy, security and sovereignty.

Mining forms the backbone of Nunavut’s economy, comprising nearly half of the territory’s GDP in 2023. In a region marked by high levels of unemployment and limited economic opportunities, the industry supports employment, training and community development.

“No one is arguing against the fact that we need more investment in the North,” Brandon Laforest, lead specialist in Arctic conservation for the World Wildlife Fund Canada, says.

But without a plan in place to guide development, Laforest adds, continued staking in limited use areas and intense pressure to develop the Arctic is likely to create conflict.

“There’s just a major storm brewing,” he says.

A plan nearly two decades in the making stalls out

In 2006, the Nunavut Planning Commission began work on the land use plan to direct resource use and development, starting with broad planning policies and goals. Since then, it has undertaken a behemoth effort of gathering input and information on various types of land use, including culturally important areas, wildlife habitat, future conservation areas and regions with economic potential.

The land use plan aims to promote the well-being of Nunavut residents, striving for a balance between environmental protection and sustainable economic development. It covers the entirety of the Nunavut Settlement Area, which encompasses one-fifth of Canada’s land mass, as well as marine areas between Arctic islands.

Over the past 19 years, the commission has conducted in-person meetings in all Nunavut communities, held hours of public hearings and received hundreds, if not thousands, of written submissions.

The latest draft of the plan assigns areas to one of three land use designations: limited use, conditional use and mixed use. 

Limited use are those areas with year-round prohibitions on certain activities. They include caribou calving grounds and freshwater crossings, as well as some migratory bird habitats and certain watersheds that supply communities’ drinking water. In these areas, land uses such as mineral exploration and production, quarries, roads and hydroelectric infrastructure are generally not allowed. Overall, about 20 per cent of land is designated limited use.

Conditional use areas make up about 12 per cent of the territory. These areas permit all types of activities — including mining and other industrial developments, roads, research and tourism — although there are certain restrictions during specific seasons. For instance, icebreaking for shipping is not allowed in some areas when caribou typically migrate across sea ice, and activities can’t take place too close to polar bear dens during denning season. Mixed use areas, which allow all activities with no restrictions, make up 65 per cent.

“The beauty of this draft is that it was designed by Inuit Knowledge Keepers in the communities,” Tagoona says.

Although there have been some changes to the plan over the years, from a high-level perspective, the past few drafts have held fairly constant, Paul Crowley, a lawyer and consultant in Iqaluit who is involved with Friends of Land Use Planning, says. 

Some parties, including the World Wildlife Fund Canada, Friends of Land Use Planning and community and wildlife groups, hoped to see the 2021 draft adopted. In a 2023 letter to the Nunavut Planning Commission, however, the signatories highlighted several issues.

One area of concern was that limited use and conditional use areas on Inuit-owned lands would impinge on the rights of Inuit organizations to manage those lands. Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., in particular, objected to the impact the draft plan would have on Inuit-owned lands. 

Legal questions were also raised about the plan’s approach to grandfathering pre-existing land use rights, such as mineral claims. Usually, if a project were to undergo a “significant modification” — for instance, if an exploration project were to advance to a mining project — it would be required to conform to the land use plan. The 2021 draft, however, lists 52 projects with existing mineral rights in limited use areas that would be exempt from prohibitions.

In their 2023 letter, the signatories pointed out this approach, which doesn’t give the commission the authority to exempt some projects and not others, does not align with the Nunavut Project Planning and Assessment Act.

Projects with existing rights would also only be subject to some of the land use plan’s restrictions, depending on the work being conducted and when the rights were acquired, according to a legal analysis commissioned by Nunavut Tunngavik Inc.

Ultimately, the signatories rejected the 2021 draft. The Nunavut Planning Commission released a revised version of the plan in June of 2023.

In the latest draft, prohibited activities are allowed to proceed in limited use areas that overlap with Inuit-owned lands, provided they have support from the relevant Inuit organization.

The draft also lists 89 projects with existing rights as of September 30, 2023 — 37 more than the previous draft. These projects, which include 86 mineral rights and exploration agreements, as well as three licenses that give companies exclusive rights to explore for or develop fossil fuels, are exempt from prohibitions when they undergo significant modifications, as long as the project remains within the same footprint.

The federal government still administers mineral rights in most of the territory. But with a devolution agreement signed last year, the territorial government is expected to take over responsibility for lands and resources, including minerals, by 2027.

If the 2023 draft land use plan were approved, projects with rights acquired after September 30, 2023, would not be eligible for exemptions, according to Jonathan Savoy, the Nunavut Planning Commission’s director of policy and planning.

It’s unclear if the commission has the power to set this cut-off date, however. According to the legal analysis on the 2021 draft, the commission’s use of a “specifically prescribed and limited list” of projects raises jurisdictional concerns.

And still, not everyone is happy with the latest draft. In a 2024 letter, the NWT and Nunavut Chamber of Mines urged the signatories to reject the plan. The draft imposes substantial restrictions on areas with high mineral potential, the chamber wrote. The approach to existing rights also doesn’t allow for the development of infrastructure needed to support mining, such as all-season roads, airstrips and power generation facilities.

The draft plan “could notionally negate around 60 per cent of Nunavut’s currently known critical mineral potential,” the chamber wrote in an email to The Narwhal.

Others see the plan as good enough.

“We’re not happy with every aspect of it. No one is happy with every aspect of it,” the World Wildlife Fund’s Laforest says.

Given the plan will be reviewed and amended periodically, he added, it doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to be finalized.

Since the draft was released in 2023, the signatories have shared little information on the plan’s status.

In an email to The Narwhal, Jacinthe Goulet, a media relations officer with Indigenous Services Canada and Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, said the Government of Canada is collaborating with Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. and the Government of Nunavut to understand their perspectives before each party makes a final decision on whether to accept or reject the plan. 

“The decision-making process is taking time, given that the plan is complex and has weighed many interests and objectives, some of which are competing,” she wrote. 

Goulet added the federal government is examining the plan for legal compliance and consistency with federal policies, as well as whether it can be easily implemented, whether it contributes to the regulatory system’s efficiency, and whether the planning process was appropriate.

The Government of Nunavut’s Department of Environment and Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., meanwhile, did not respond to requests for interviews or written comments before publication, despite several attempts to contact them over the past month.

“There hasn’t been a lot of movement,” Ellsworth says. “It seems to be kind of a waiting game.”

A missing piece of the regulatory process

Over the past few months, several members of the legislative assembly have sought updates in Nunavut’s Legislative Assembly.

“Many of my colleagues have been asking questions about why it is taking so long for the draft Nunavut Land Use Plan to be approved by the three parties,” Joseph Inagayuk Quqqiaq, MLA for the Netsilik riding, said in May.

“Can the minister provide a clear explanation today as to what specific issues have been causing the delays, and can he clarify what our government’s position is regarding these issues?” he asked.

In June, MLA for Iqaluit-Tasiluk George Hickes similarly pressed the territorial minister of environment for answers.

“When are we going to find out the timeline for the Nunavut Land Use Plan approval or denial?” he asked.

The response to these questions has generally been that the plan is still under review, and that specific issues and legal considerations are being worked out.

“It is with considerable effort that we are trying to balance the needs of different stakeholders,” David Joanasie, the territory’s minister of environment, told the Legislative Assembly in June. He added the three signatories are meeting weekly to discuss the plan.

Hickes told The Narwhal that his understanding is recent elections at the federal government and Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. have caused delays. With a territorial election scheduled to take place in October, decisions about the land use plan may fall to the next government, which Hickes worries could cause further delays.

Indecision about the draft plan creates uncertainty about how projects will be allowed to proceed, according to Hickes, which affects investment in the territory.

A lack of an approved land use plan also means a layer of the regulatory system is missing. The Nunavut Planning Commission is supposed to provide the first level of screening to check whether proposed projects align with any applicable land use plan before they can move on to the next stage in the regulatory process.

In the absence of an approved territory-wide plan, the regulatory system has become heavily reliant on the Nunavut Impact Review Board, which generally assesses the impacts of individual projects rather than cumulative effects, according to Laforest.

Relying on the review board also places a heavy burden on communities, he says. It means residents have to keep tabs on individual projects proposed around their communities and make sure they take the time to submit comments, often reiterating their concerns about development in some areas — the same areas they have indicated should be off-limits in the land use plan.

“The tragedy of it is, there’s so much happening all the time around our communities, and many of us don’t have the resources and capacity to continuously submit to every single project,” Tagoona says.

If the land use plan were adopted, she added, it would direct companies away from areas where projects are bound to face local opposition. As an example, she points to a massive, proposed exploration project near Baker Lake, which the Nunavut Impact Review Board recently decided should be modified or abandoned due to its potential for unacceptable environmental and socio-economic impacts. The project would have overlapped with limited use areas.

Tagoona worries about other proposed projects around her community, especially in light of the recently passed federal Bill C-5, the One Canadian Economy Act, which would allow projects determined to be in the national interest to be expedited for development.

While the Act is not expected to change regulatory processes in the territory, Tagoona is concerned the focus on fast-tracking might reduce opportunities for community consultation.

According to Crowley, recent political pressure to develop the Arctic underscores the need for the land use plan.

“There’s only so much investment you can get into this territory. It’s best placed where it’s going to have the best chance of success,” he says.

Crowley added the plan could support the implementation of the One Canadian Economy Act by outlining where projects of national interest might be supported. The latest draft outlines corridors for linear developments, like roads and power lines, some of which territorial leaders have pitched as nation-building projects. One of them is the so-called Arctic Security Corridor, a proposed all-season road and deepwater port that would provide access to mineral-rich areas in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories.

According to Goulet, with Indigenous Services Canada and Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, northern and Indigenous governments and organizations are informing the federal government about their priorities, including nation-building infrastructure projects.

With big decisions on large-scale projects ahead, Laforest says it’s high time the plan is adopted.

As the signatories’ review drags on, however, the staking continues. 

Reflecting on the delays, Ellsworth refers to John Amagoalik, an Inuk leader who played a crucial role in the signing of the Nunavut Agreement.

Speaking about the motivation for pursuing land claims in 1976, Amagoalik said: “We want to protect as much as possible of what we have left.”

The longer the process for finalizing the land use plan goes on, Ellsworth says, the less and less there is left.

“Time is not working in our favour,” he says.

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A small group of men and women clad in brightly coloured coveralls with hoses in tow wind their way through thigh-high foliage and short (by southern Canadian standards) trees on the outskirts of Kuujjuaq, the largest village in Nunavik, the Inuit homelands in Arctic Quebec.

A logo emblazoned on the sleeve of many of the jumpsuits reads, “Kativik Civil Security,” which is effectively the emergency management arm of the Kativik Regional Government that delivers public services in Nunavik.

The group consists mostly of firefighters, volunteer or otherwise, from communities across the region. They’re here as part of a two-day wildfire first responder course being taught by the Société de protection des forêts contre le feu, otherwise known as SOPFEU, the non-profit organization that serves as the province’s wildfire service.

Though geographically below the Arctic Circle, the Nunavik region has a mix of Arctic and subarctic climate and straddles the treeline, where forest fades to tundra. Training to fight wildland fire in an area surrounded by lakes and covered by green vegetation beaded by droplets of rainwater may seem confusing, perhaps even more so given that this area is covered by snow and ice from November until April or May. But for Larry Shea, a firefighter in Kuujjuaq, it makes total sense.

“We would like to be prepared for all eventualities,” Shea says. A structural firefighter for 25 years, Shea has recently found himself face-to-face with wildfires on the outskirts of Kuujjuaq, including one not far from where he now stands in his bright red overalls. That includes a 2023 wildfire that burned across the Koksoak River from Kuujjuaq, clearly visible to the fewer than 3,000 residents who call it home.

Mitch Vail, a civil security coordinator for the regional government, calls the 2023 fire “a wake-up call,” reinforcing that “These types of events can happen even in the north.” The next year, Vail reached out to SOPFEU to request training.

He wasn’t alone. Quebec’s record-breaking 2023 wildfire season saw 4.5 million hectares burn, an all-time record for the province. The following year, the number of training requests exploded. “I think 2023 opened a lot of people’s minds to the threat of wildfire,” SOPFEU liaison agent Frédéric Lalague says. Though he predominantly works with Indigenous communities across the province, he was on the fire lines in 2023.

“I think we all kind of remember where we were,” says Lalague, of the day fires exploded across the province. “We were geared up to maybe fight, you know, 30 to 40 fires at the same time, or one major fire … we had, I think, close to 150 ignitions in one day.”

In wildfire fighting, logistics “is the name of the game,” Lalague says. In Quebec, SOPFEU responds to major wildfires, but in Nunavik, the logistics of using firefighters from outside the region quickly become complicated.

All 14 communities are fly-in only, which means no ability to transport heavy, trailer-based firefighting equipment. It also means increased travel time for southern-based firefighters to get to the North and raises questions about where those firefighters would sleep, what they would eat and what they would drink when they got there.

Of course, the challenges for getting people and equipment into Nunavik communities also extend to getting people out. In Nunavik, it’s not only fires that can prompt emergency evacuations, but also community-wide issues with water supplies or power, which comes from diesel generators.

“If we’re in the south, you get in your vehicle and you drive to the next community,” Vail says. “It’s not an option here.” While the Kativik Regional Government is developing an evacuation model for communities, Vail says it’s also looking at potentially creating designated sites in or near communities that would be safe from wildfires.

Ultimately, the ideal situation is to avoid all of these complicated scenarios. That’s why SOPFEU is here: the plan is to give each community in Nunavik the training and equipment needed to act as wildfire first responders that could contain and extinguish a fire or, at the very minimum, buy some time until southern reinforcements arrive.

Satellite monitoring doesn’t assess wildfire risk as far north as Nunavik

The Kuujjuaq-based course consists of one day in the classroom and one in the field. Last summer, it was offered to communities located in the treeline: the southern edge of the region, where warmer conditions allow for more vegetation, making the threat of wildfire higher. Each community was given hoses and pumps and trained on how to use them. This year, treeline communities that couldn’t attend were invited back, and an invitation was extended to fire departments above the treeline, too.

Firefighting capability farther north is important, because even tundra is vulnerable to wildfire. The treeless tundra, which is largely characterized by ground-hugging vegetation like mosses, lichens and small plants “can be very volatile,” Vail says. “It can still cause significant damage.”

In August 2023, a tundra fire threatened Bathurst Inlet, Nvt., a seasonal community roughly 320 kilometres east of Kugluktuk, prompting a state of emergency and evacuation order. Had nobody been in Bathurst Inlet to report the fire, there’s a chance it would have consumed the site, which includes a lodge, cabins and a former Hudson’s Bay trading post.

Given the remoteness of areas where tundra fires occur, spotting them at all is a challenge and is often only possible via remote sensing. They’re not a regular occurrence in Canada, but researchers now think they happen more than previously believed.

According to satellite data from NASA and the United States Geological Survey, there were roughly 70 recorded tundra fires in Canada between 1986 and 2022. But last year, researchers with Natural Resources Canada’s Northern Forestry Centre published a reanalysis of that data done with new software, identifying an additional 209 fires during that 36-year time span.

It’s information that helps paint a better-defined picture of what “normal” may have looked like — even as climate change makes wildfires generally less predictable, as well as bigger and hotter. According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2024 was the Arctic’s second-warmest year on record, which means more hot days, but also a medley of other noticeable climate-driven changes.

For Shea, this means seeing bugs, birds and animals — like moose — that he never used to. For Vail, it’s the vegetation: longer growing seasons and unfamiliar plants and trees. “If you look around, you’re probably not going to see a 200-year-old tree, but you would in the south,” he says. “The trees are moving farther north … and it’s happening faster than one might think.”

Satellites are also how SOPFEU detects everything from wildfires to lightning strikes across Quebec, including Nunavik. But its monitoring doesn’t provide any data specifically about fire risk above the 55th parallel — making it impossible for Far North communities to have the types of wildfire information and precaution systems common in the south, like a sign on the side of a highway advising passers-by of local risk level.

Given that neither the treeline nor the threat of wildland fire stops at the 55th parallel, Vail is exploring how that data can be obtained, particularly given how fast conditions can change in the north.

“We have a heat warning coming up,” Vail said in early July. “Three days of significant heat can really dry out the topography and really cause a more serious risk.”

Originally, Vail’s plan was to offer the firefighting course for two years, which he thought would be enough time to ensure each community had a chance to receive it. Now, he believes it’s going to be an annual event, both to ensure enough community members are trained and, hopefully, to continually add to the equipment being made available.

“This is a way for us to be proactive in terms of climate change, because it is going to be posing more of a risk,” Vail says.

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In May, researchers from the U.K. company Real Ice were wrapping up their second winter of tests near Cambridge Bay, Nvt. Their big idea? To drill holes into the Arctic ice and pump seawater to the surface to make the sea ice thicker and potentially combat the effects of global warming. 

Real Ice says their goal is to ensure that sea ice remains in the Arctic year-round, giving humanity more time to adapt to and mitigate against climate change. And residents in the largely Inuit community say thicker, longer-lasting ice could help preserve their traditions and way of life. 

We sent reporter Chloe Williams and photographer and videographer Gavin John up to Cambridge Bay to learn more, and they came back with some incredible stories and visuals — that’s why we’ve got an extra special longform video to share.

You can also learn more about this fascinating experiment by reading Chloe’s deep dives into Real Ice’s plan — and what it means to the people who depend on the ice.

Want to make sure you don’t miss our latest work? Subscribe to our channel on YouTube and follow us on TikTok. 

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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.