“Premature, ill-advised and respectfully should be reconsidered.” 

That’s how Pictou Landing First Nation Chief Tamara Young described Canada’s decision not to require a federal environmental review of two proposed 300-megawatt gas-fired power plants near her community. The comments came in a letter Young sent to the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada in July, two months after the agency declined to study the impacts of the Marshdale and Salt Springs natural gas power plants in Pictou County, N.S., an hour-and-a-half drive northeast of Halifax. 

The letter, shared with The Narwhal by the Mi’kmaw rights organization Kwilmu’kw Maw-klusuaqn, detailed “widespread Mi’kmaq and public opposition” to the proposed projects due to concerns about climate change, water use, public health, wildlife and other “cumulative effects associated with two large fossil-fuel facilities located approximately 20 kilometres apart.” These concerns, Young wrote, “require careful assessment in relation to Mi’kmaw Rights and the lands, waters and resources upon which those rights depend.” 

But according to Janiece Walsh, a spokesperson for the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada, these concerns don’t meet their threshold for a review. According to a statement she emailed The Narwhal, they fall outside “the potential adverse effects within federal jurisdiction.” 

The impacts on Indigenous Rights that Young called “significant constitutional, procedural and substantive concerns” are just one of the many issues raised in public comments about the two proposed plants. Dozens of comments submitted between Jan. 5 and Feb. 9, 2026, raised questions about public health, climate change, energy access and which level of government would monitor threats to endangered species like Atlantic salmon, mainland moose and black ash.

Then there are the concerns about speed. Unlike most big industrial projects, Marshdale and Salt Springs weren’t proposed by a company. Instead, they were floated by Nova Scotia’s Independent Energy Systems Operator, an agency created by the province in 2024 to manage the province’s electrical grid. According to Chris Milligan, vice president of planning and procurement for the operator, plants like these are necessary stopgaps for Nova Scotia to meet its goal of ending coal-fired electricity use by 2030. 

“Fast-acting natural gas-fired generators are the resource that can provide the firm capacity the province needs to meet demand when wind and batteries can’t,” he told The Narwhal. 

But comments to the federal review questioned this conclusion, including one from the Sipekne’katik First Nation, a Mi’kmaw community located south of the proposed plants. 

“Although the project may help reduce coal use specifically, it represents an additional investment in alternative fossil-fuel-based infrastructure,” it explained, calling that inconsistent with long-term climate commitments made by both the provincial and federal governments.

This all worries Anna Johnston, a staff lawyer at West Coast Environmental Law and member of the federal Minister of Environment and Climate Change’s advisory council on impact assessment. Johnston told The Narwhal she sees the Nova Scotia power plants issue not just as one isolated decision, but part of a broader “build baby build mentality” spreading across the country that is fast-tracking project approvals without adequately considering environmental and social impacts. 

“You’re effectively giving the green light to the project before you’ve done any of the studies on what the effects are going to be,” she said. “Before you’ve had any opportunities for meaningful consultation or engagement or participation. It’s a rubber stamp.” 

Nova Scotia claims power plants “not likely” to affect Mi’kmaq rights, despite dozens of impacts flagged by federal agencies, communities

In December 2025, the Nova Scotia government posted a project summary claiming the power plants would have a limited impact on “traditional Mi’kmaq land use.” 

“Overall, impacts on Mi’kmaq hunting, fishing, plant gathering or other traditional activities are anticipated to be low and confined to the project footprint,” it said. 

Around the same time, Young’s letter to the agency stated, the provincial government sent letters to Kwilmu’kw Maw-klusuaqn advising “the nature of this project is not likely to lead to appreciable adverse impacts to credibly asserted or established Mi’kmaq Aboriginal or Treaty Rights.” As such, the province asserted, the duty to consult was not triggered.

The same line alarmed Twila Gaudet, director of consultation for Kwilmu’kw Maw-klusuaqn, an association that advocates for Treaty Rights on behalf of the Assembly of Nova Scotia Mi’kmaw Chiefs. She quoted it in a letter she sent to a provincial environmental assessment officer in February 2026, in which she argued that assertion runs counter to what’s written in the actual project descriptions for the two plants. The section on Mi’kmaw community impacts states that “the Crown has a duty to consult with the Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia” before moving forwards. 

“The government has neglected their duty to consult,” Gaudet told The Narwhal.

Comments submitted to the federal review that were acquired by The Narwhal through an access to information request also raise questions about the assertion that these projects would have a marginal impact on Mi’kmaq communities. 

According to these documents, Mi’kmaw organizations and federal agencies, including Indigenous Services Canada, Environment and Climate Change Canada, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and Health Canada, submitted dozens of statements about the impacts these projects would have on Indigenous communities.

They included concerns about how water use and chemical pollution from the plants would impact threatened Atlantic salmon populations in local rivers, an important food source and cultural species for the Mi’kmaq. Kwilmu’kw Maw-klusuaqn shared similar worries about impacts on mainland moose. 

Some statements raised red flags about how air and water pollution could impact the health of downstream and nearby communities, a particularly important subject for Pictou Landing First Nation, which has already dealt with decades of industrial pollution in nearby Boat Harbour.Once a pristine tidal estuary known as A’se’k, or “the other living space,” Boat Harbour’s waters were used by Pictou Landing for generations. Then, in the late 1960s, a pulp mill was granted permission to discharge wastewater from a treatment facility into the area. It quickly became a toxic soup, and the community started dealing with a range of health impacts. The mills only stopped dumping waste into the estuary in 2020. 

This “dark history of large-scale industrial developments” is why “it is imperative that the local Mi’kmaq communities are adequately informed well in advance of large-scale projects such as the power plants,” Gaudet explained in her February 2026 letter to the province.

The federal agency grouped concerns from the review into five broad subject areas in its summary of issues: fisheries impacts, health conditions, land use and resources, cultural heritage and Indigenous and Treaty Rights. 

The agency also acknowledged that Mi’kmaq communities “raised concerns about inadequate consultation by governments” but said those concerns were considered in making its decision. 

“In determining whether further assessment is required, [the Impact Assessment Agency] considers several factors, including any adverse impacts the designated project may have on the rights of Indigenous Peoples of Canada,” Walsh said.

She added that provincial environmental assessment approvals require proponents to develop “a Mi’kmaq communication plan. This must include … seeking input from the Mi’kmaq on the development and implementation of project mitigation and monitoring plans.”But, Gaudet said, a communication plan isn’t the same as a consultation process that would address the nation’s “Section 35 constitutionally-protected rights and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.”

“The blatant disregard for the Mi’kmaq Nation and the impacts these power plants will have on our Mi’kmaw rights is disappointing and unacceptable,” she added.

Nova Scotia’s Department of Environment and Climate Change declined to comment for this story, citing an ongoing judicial review related to the two power plants that has been brought by Living Ecosystems and Power, a Pictou County community organization that launched in April 2026 to oppose the plants. 

Concerns that impact assessment agency ignores emissions 

One big question is which level of government — if any — will monitor or demand mitigation of the plants’ greenhouse gases. Because they’re going to be significant: the initial project plans estimated that each plant will produce 325,594 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide annually each, the equivalent of adding nearly 75,000 cars to the road. And those emissions are based on the plants only running for 2,190 hours, about one-quarter of their actual capacity. 

The federal government’s climate plan doesn’t track or apply to individual projects. 

When asked to comment on the projects’ potential climate impacts, Environment and Climate Change Canada recommended “greenhouse gas and climate change impacts be assessed and mitigated consistent with guidance in the Strategic Assessment of Climate Change.” 

But in 2024, the federal government amended Canada’s Impact Assessment Act, removing greenhouse gas emissions from federal jurisdiction, following a Supreme Court ruling that found this to be an overreach of constitutional authority.  

At the same time, Anna Johnston explained, impact assessments “do consider whether projects would hinder or contribute to Canada’s ability to meet its climate change commitments.” If that sounds confusing, it’s because it is. 

Basically, the agency can’t assess greenhouse gases as its own issue. But if greenhouse gases harm something within federal jurisdiction — “like fisheries, migratory birds and Indigenous peoples,” she explained — then the agency can trigger an assessment, and recommend ways to reduce or eliminate that harm.

Lori Skaine, executive director of the climate change division within Nova Scotia’s Department of Environment and Climate Change, responded to comments focused on emissions concerns that were sent in to the province’s project review. “The project’s overall [greenhouse gas] impact will depend a lot on how many hours the facility runs each year,” Skaine wrote, also noting the amount could vary depending on the fuel used, noting that these plants could run on diesel if natural gas isn’t available. 

Burning diesel produces up to 40 per cent more carbon emissions than natural gas. It also releases more fine particulate matter and increases local health risks. On-site diesel storage adds increased spill risk to the local ecosystem. 

Karen McKendry, senior wilderness outreach coordinator with the Ecology Action Centre, called potential changes to capacity or fuel type “scope creep.” Something, she said, there is no current remedy for. 

“Everything can change about the project, even after it was approved,” she says. “The environmental assessment process is a one-and-done.” 

A “material change” in the projects’ water use

When they were first proposed, the Marshdale and Salt Springs power plants planned to draw tens of thousands of litres of water from local watersheds each day to cool down turbines, clean equipment and mitigate emissions. But there’s a problem. According to Milligan, when the energy systems operator assessed the region, they determined there is not enough groundwater available on site to proceed with this plan. 

Instead, the operator pivoted to use dry technology systems that employ chemicals instead of water. The type and amount of chemicals have yet to be disclosed, and Milligan says that there are “several commercially available technologies routinely used at power generation facilities that can accomplish this.”

Young thinks this change should reopen the federal decision.

“These changes may materially affect the scope, effects, mitigation requirements and cumulative impacts of the projects,” she says.

They also heighten concerns about impacts on Atlantic salmon, which spawn in Eight Mile Brook, a tributary of the West River Pictou located about 300 metres from the proposed Salt Springs facility. 

It’s one of only a handful of rivers in Nova Scotia with Atlantic salmon populations robust enough that the province allows catch-and-release fishing. In their comments to the federal review, Kwilmu’kw Maw-Klusuaqn described Atlantic salmon as “a foundational food source across Mi’kma’ki.” 

“Loss of access to salmon threatens Mi’kmaq food security, self-determination and rights-based harvesting practice,” it added.

The salmon in the West River could soon be listed as a federally protected population after the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada determined that they were “endangered” in late 2025. Other threatened species impacted by this project include mainland moose, which has been listed under Nova Scotia’s Endangered Species Act since 2003, and black ash, which has been federally protected since 2018. Both were flagged as “culturally significant species for the Mi’kmaq” in the federal review. 

In her response to The Narwhal’s questions, Walsh of the federal assessment agency said it “was aware of this recommendation when it issued its determinations,” and that “the proponent is still required to follow the federal requirements of the Fisheries Act and the Species At Risk Act, as well as conditions issued by the province.” 

The federal government says impacts to these species can be managed without a federal impact assessment. But the provincial system has challenges. In 2020, the Nova Scotia Supreme Court found that the province had “a chronic systemic failure to implement action required” to enforce its Endangered Species Act. In February 2026, the provincial natural resources department eliminated its dedicated wildlife division.

In a statement, the department told The Narwhal “all wildlife-related functions are continuing as before” and that the move is simply a restructuring.“No scientists, biologists, forest technicians or wildlife staff were laid off, and no wildlife programs or services have been reduced, eliminated or transferred outside government,” the statement explained.But conservation groups disagreed, arguing that positions dedicated to biodiversity, ecosystems and habitat protection had been all but eliminated. They were backed up by sources within the department, who told the Halifax Examiner the changes were “absolutely gutting” the wildlife department. One source described them as something done “to punish the scientists working on behalf of wildlife and ecosystems.”

A worrying precedent for expedited project processes

On Sept. 9, the federal government announced plans to further expedite project reviews by shifting reviews for things like pipelines, power plants and oilsands mines from the impact assessment agency to the Canada Energy Regulator. These changes won’t apply to the Salt Springs or Marshdale power plants, but to Anna Johnston, they’re part of the same trend. One that she worries will “essentially eradicate federal environmental impact assessment, the best tool we had for avoiding the environmental harms of risky projects and often the only way for the public to have a say.” 

These most recent changes follow previous federal actions, including Bill C-5, which allowed the government to exempt projects from some stages of federal impact assessments, and agreements between Ottawa and the provinces to streamline joint reviews. Prime Minister Mark Carney and Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston signed one of these co-operation agreements back in March. And Ontario, British Columbia, New Brunswick, Manitoba, Prince Edward Island and Alberta all have similar agreements, while Quebec is in the process of finalizing one. 

The agreement with Nova Scotia states that the province can decide when the federal government should rely on provincially “applicable environmental assessment and regulatory processes” in reviewing and regulating major projects, as the Nova Scotia agreement puts it. The agreement also directs Canada’s impact assessment agency to “[avoid] duplicative decision-making processes related to assessments by relying on provincial processes.” 

Johnston worried this slew of agreements undermine the basic goals of impact assessments. 

“[There is] a risk that we’ve been flagging for a while that the federal government says, ‘Oh no, we don’t need to look at that, the province is going to do it,’ ” she explains. “Meanwhile, the province is saying ‘we don’t have a role here, or we’re going to fast-track,’ or for whatever reason, it’s not going to look at the issue.” 

That, she said, means no one is looking at the bigger picture, that “you’re getting an authorization under the Fisheries Act, you’re really only looking at the fisheries impacts, [and] if you’re getting a navigable waters permit, you’re only looking at impacts on navigation and navigability.”“Environmental impact assessment is meant to take a look at all of those effects under one umbrella, so that decision makers have a more comprehensive understanding of what the full-picture effects are and how they interact,” she said.  

With all of these questions about the process, opposition to the two power plants has been growing, with petitions and two rallies through the summer in New Glasgow, one outside of a speech directly targeting Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston. On Sept. 3, he weighed in on the plants, saying that he would like to see the energy system operator consider other technologies than natural gas. In a press conference, he said that the energy regulator had been “too focused on [natural] gas” and should consider “a proper and more fulsome assessment of different technologies.” 

The energy systems operator responded a week later with a press release announcing that it would open up the door to project proposals that could meet the same power generation needs of these two plants with “energy storage and other on-demand electricity generation technologies.” 

In the meantime, a legal challenge filed by Living Ecosystems and Power is moving through the Nova Scotia courts. And Twila Gaudet says that Mi’kmaw leadership is considering their next move, “which may include meetings with provincial and federal ministers, legal options [and] peaceful protest.” 

Johnston thinks these responses could multiply across the country as governments continue to try to fast-track project reviews. 

“I think that we’re going to see a much bigger wave of lawsuits,” she says. “That’s not good for taxpayers. Litigation is expensive, and Canadians end up paying for it.”

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In March 2025, the government of Nova Scotia repealed a ban on uranium exploration and mining that had stood for more than four decades. That May, it opened a request for proposals on three sites known to hold uranium deposits, with a deadline in June. Nobody applied.

But for the people who live near Millet Brook in Hants County, N.S., one of the sites chosen for exploration, the matter is far from settled.

“The lack of applications has provided some immediate relief, but it has not provided the sense of finality that many residents are hoping for,” municipal Councillor Kayla Leary-Pinch said. “For them, the concern was never solely about whether a company would come forward through this particular call for proposals. It is about the fact that the moratorium was removed in the first place and that the door remains open for uranium exploration in Nova Scotia.”

As councillor for Vaughan and Upper Falmouth, N.S., her district in the municipality of West Hants covers the Millet Brook site. 

“Until there is greater certainty about the long-term status of Millet Brook, I think that concern will remain,” she said. 

Those concerns include potential environmental impacts, especially to groundwater, as well as private property rights and what exploration now could mean for mining in the future, Leary-Pinch said.

“There is frustration with how quickly the issue moved forward and a feeling that communities were reacting to decisions rather than being meaningfully involved before those decisions were made,” Leary-Pinch said. 

Like many other governments in Canada, Nova Scotia is passing policy meant to supercharge resource extraction. The uranium moratorium, which dates back to 1981, became a legislated ban in 2009. The province repealed the ban as part of Bill 6, An Act Respecting Agriculture, Energy and Natural Resources, an omnibus bill that also amended the Petroleum Resources Act to allow fracking. 

It’s been more than a year since the ban ended and it’s still on community minds. On Sept. 8, 2026, two petitions were tabled at the provincial legislature with over 2,000 signatures asking for a “permanent legislative ban” on uranium exploration and extraction. These new signatures bring the grand total to 10,652 signatures collected since October 2025, NDP MLA Kendra Coombes said.

Despite half a century of scattershot uranium interest, Nova Scotia has never developed the industry. Now, the federal government, along with dozens of countries worldwide, is pushing for what’s often called a nuclear renaissance. Canada is among at least 38 countries that have pledged to work toward tripling global nuclear energy capacity by 2050. 

Part of uranium’s appeal is energy density. According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, a single uranium fuel pellet produces as much energy as one ton of coal, 149 gallons of oil or 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas. But that energy comes with a long-term cost. Canada has long been trying to find a permanent home for decades’ worth of nuclear waste, with a proposed $26 billion underground repository in northwestern Ontario still years from approval.

NS premier says uranium mining is essential to economic growth and clean energy transition

When the request for proposals was live in June 2025, a unanimous council vote made West Hants one of four municipalities, along with Annapolis, Lunenburg and Pictou, to request a pause on exploration. Premier Tim Houston responded with a letter saying the government was committed to moving forward “on all natural resource projects so long as they can be done thoughtfully and safely.”

The world needs uranium for nuclear energy and cancer treatments, Houston’s letter said. 

 “Uranium hasn’t changed but mining has,” it said, echoing the Mining Association of Nova Scotia, an industry group representing mining and quarrying companies. The group’s website says uranium mining today “is very different” from when the ban was put in place: specifically, it says a shift toward solution mining, also known as in-situ leaching, “produces basically no tailings or waste rock.” 

Uranium is essential to Nova Scotia’s economic growth, the premier said, adding that a blanket ban without discussion is lazy public policy.

“The sad reality is that when you look at the [gross domestic product] per capita across all 60 American states and Canadian provinces, Nova Scotia ranks last,” Houston said. “The worst performing economy in North America.”

But so far, uranium mining has not been an economic driver in the province. The June deadline came and went with no bids to pursue exploration.

In an email to The Narwhal, Lynette MacLeod, communications director for the Department of Natural Resources, said the repeal of the ban didn’t approve any uranium mining or exploration projects. 

“It removed a legislative prohibition and allows the province to better understand the occurrence of uranium using modern science and regulatory safeguards,” MacLeod said.

MacLeod said the province is not exploring for uranium but is doing research using existing data and core samples. She was clearer about the province’s broader mining ambitions.

The department’s focus is ensuring “Nova Scotia remains one of the most competitive jurisdictions for mineral exploration investment in Canada,” MacLeod said. The province is “expanding investment attraction efforts with our partners [and] supporting exploration through targeted funding programs.” 

That means implementing the provincial mining strategy; completing NovaMINE, a government website detailing regulatory requirements and listing the status of mining proposals and projects; digitizing the province’s assets and data; and continuing regulatory modernization, she said. 

Uranium has been on the federal critical minerals list since it was released in 2021, but it’s only been on Nova Scotia’s list since May 14, 2025, the same day Natural Resources Minister Tory Rushton announced a request for proposals for exploration sites at Millet Brook, East Dalhousie and Louisville.

“We’ve lifted blanket bans and we’re targeting minerals that are in great demand for the clean energy transition in Canada and around the world,” Rushton said in a press release. “We’re also focusing on minerals that will help us grow our economy and create good-paying jobs for Nova Scotians.”

The economic promises of uranium have never been enough to convince Nova Scotians it’s worth the cost, Karen McKendry at Halifax’s Ecology Action Centre said. Exploration by companies such as Shell and Esso in the late 1970s prompted a public inquiry that held 44 meetings across the province. The majority of submissions opposed uranium mining, and the government imposed a moratorium in 1981. In 2009, the NDP government led by Darrell Dexter turned that moratorium into a permanent legislative ban.

“We’ve learned that it very much is a radioactive zombie,” McKendry said. “It’s come back. This is the third time we’ve had a big fight around uranium.”

Even without a proposal on the table last year, people put up signs expressing opposition and began organizing in the areas most promising for exploration, she said. Locals heard there was a company considering a proposal, she said, and so they posted online to make their opposition clear.

“I think it scared them off,” McKendry said. “One thing that’s somewhat real in the mining industry is what they call social licence. Do you have community buy-in for the kinds of things you’re proposing?”

Experts say opposition and low quality make NS uranium unappealing to industry

Exploration is a high-risk economic activity, Erin Adlakha, a professor in the department of earth science at Saint Mary’s University, said.

“Fewer than one per cent of exploration targets ever become mines, so companies must rigorously vet historical data to ensure they are spending capital wisely,” Adlakha said. The province’s request for proposals was only open for four weeks, she said, requiring companies “to digest historical data from the late 1970s and 1980s, evaluate land access constraints, build a technical exploration strategy and allocate capital, on very short notice.”

Mining companies also want political stability, according to Brad Redden, the president of the Society for Safe and Responsible Resource Development, a non-profit dedicated to protecting communities and the environment in Nova Scotia’s resource sectors.

“These guys plan a long way into the future,” Redden said, adding it can sometimes take decades to bring a new mine online. “The Houston government won’t be forever, and when they’re gone, the Liberals or the NDP are going to be in power.”

While some parts of Canada have what companies consider stable mining policies, companies are very careful about volatile situations such as this one, he said.

Redden, who has worked as an exploration geologist and held public office as a municipal councillor and deputy warden in Annapolis County, said he is skeptical of the province’s interest in uranium. 

“I don’t think they genuinely thought there was uranium here,” he said, adding that fracking and uranium were probably bundled together on the same bill as part of a bigger industrial drive. “It’s a political statement to say we’re open for business.”

He said he wouldn’t work on a uranium project in Nova Scotia, because he doesn’t think the deposits here are good enough. Uranium in the province tends to sit in thin, centimetre-wide fractures rather than deep deposits and grades are far lower than in Saskatchewan’s uranium heartland, Redden said.

He offers as an example Cigar Lake in the Prairie province, which at a grade of 15 per cent is “the world’s highest grade uranium mine” according to its owner. Redden said this translates to 150,000 parts of uranium per million parts of rock. By comparison, New Ross, N.S., “has some higher-grade areas …but they are still less than one per cent,” or 10,000 parts per million. 

“Most of the grades reported in Nova Scotia are much lower, in the hundreds of parts per million,” Redden said. The Mining Association of Nova Scotia says the site at Millet Brook “is known to have 1.3 million pounds of 0.2 per cent uranium.”

The more important difference, Redden said, is that in Nova Scotia, uranium deposits tend to be closer to population centres than they are in Saskatchewan’s Athabasca Basin.

Last year, in his response to the West Hants council’s request for a pause, the premier noted provincial investments of more than $227 million in West Hants during his time in office.

“I have no doubt that your council has many more wants and needs,” the Houston letter said. “We would love to be able to meet every ask, but to do that, we need the resources to move forward.”

However things move forward at Millet Brook, Leary-Pinch said the people of West Hants deserve to be consulted about what the province intends to do in their backyard. “Many of the residents I have spoken with want to see the moratorium on uranium exploration and mining reinstated.” She said the absence of bids this time around was never the point. For the people of West Hants, she said it’s about closing  the door on uranium for good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Three hundred years after their ancestors chose peace on the same ground, the Mi’kmaq people returned to the Fort Anne National Historic Site in Mi’kma’ki.

Mi’kmaq leaders and community members gathered at what was then called Port Royal on June 4, 1726, when their ancestors signed a Peace and Friendship Treaty with the British Crown.

Under a bright Nova Scotia sky, they came back to the same ground to celebrate, to grieve, to demand and to hope.

Chief Leroy Denny of Eskasoni First Nation, co-chair of the Assembly of Nova Scotia Mi’kmaw Chiefs, said as he stood on the grass, he could feel the weight and power of what happened on the same grounds 300 years ago. 

“This 300th anniversary is a reminder that these were never land-surrender treaties; they were sacred agreements of peace, coexistence and nation-to-nation relationship building,” Denny said. 

“Our ancestors envisioned a future of mutual respect, and three hundred years later, these living treaties continue to guide us as we protect our rights and carry their legacy forward for future generations.”

The Peace and Friendship Treaty of 1726 outlined how Indigenous and European people could establish peaceful coexistence in the Maritime region. 

It was signed by Mi’kmaw, Wəlastəkokewiyik and Peskətəmohkatewey leaders amid rising conflicts as the British pushed to colonize the area and were concerned about relationships between local Indigenous Peoples and the French Crown.

The 1726 treaty was part of a series of Peace and Friendship agreements with the British Crown between 1725 and 1779.

But Mi’kmaq Grand Council Kji-Keptin (Grand Captain) Antle Denny came to speak plainly about what a 300-year treaty relationship has delivered and what it has not.

The relationship between Mi’kmaq nations and the provincial government has deteriorated sharply in the last year, in the wake of raids on Mi’kmaw cannabis dispensaries and the recent criminalization of logging protests.

Tensions were underscored by the notable absence of Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston from the Fort Anne celebration. Many in attendance felt that absence was not simply a scheduling matter. It was a statement.

The treaty signed on this ground 300 years ago was supposed to be a living commitment. What they were watching, many felt, was a provincial government treating it as a historical footnote.

This month’s commemoration at Fort Anne National Historic Site drew Mi’kmaq leaders, community members, Canadian officials and allies for a day of ceremony, cultural performance and the unveiling of a national historic plaque. 

Youth turned out in force. Elders undertook journeys that were not easy to make. And on the sun-warmed grass of the oldest administered national historic site in the country, Mi’kmaq people held a tenacity that textbooks have never quite managed to convey.

Under a tent, Eliza Gould, youth chief from Eskasoni First Nation, spoke quietly about Mi’kmaq history as other young people listened intently. 

Outside, the voice of Kalolin Johnson, a young vocalist and musician from Eskasoni First Nation, carried across the grass of the old fort. Beyond that, the Annapolis Basin shimmered in the heat. It was the kind of day that made the past feel very close.

Gould had learned about the treaties in school in almost every grade, she said. But learning about something and feeling it are different things.

“I’ve heard it so much I kind of became numb,” she said.

“But being here, seeing all the chiefs, all the people that actually care — I kind of wish more people came. Because this is our history. This is very much our history.”

The fisheries question, for Gould, was the sharpest example of how old agreements play out in present-day conflict. As part of the treaty, the British agreed not to interfere with Indigenous fishing rights — however, those rights are something that Mik’maq people have continued to fight to uphold.

“The fisheries, we take only as much as we need, but also respecting everything around us,” she said. “For others it’s greed, it’s money, it’s power.” 

She described watching the same arguments repeat year after year, the treaty invoked and dismissed in the same breath. “There’s no evenness,” she said. “It’s so back-and-forth.”

But as she looked out at the crowd filling the sunny grounds, Gould also felt the living impact of the agreement from hundreds of years ago. 

“It’s nice to see everyone here, not just Mi’kmaq people but others. You know, just like 300 years ago, it’s not just us and the French anymore,” she said. “There’s a better understanding.”

Assembly of First Nations Nova Scotia Regional Chief Andrea Paul brought that meaning into focus. 

“As we celebrate 300 years of treaty, we honour the wisdom of those who came before us, who chose peace and friendship as the foundation of our relationship,” she said. 

“Their teachings continue to guide us today, reminding us that treaties are not relics of the past, but living commitments that shape our future together.”

For JUNO award-nominated Mi’kmaq musician Morgan Toney, the reality of that history did not fully land until he walked the grounds that morning. 

He had read about the treaty, he said. But standing on the actual earth where it was signed was something else entirely.

“I never actually got to go on the grounds until earlier this morning,” he said. “And I was like, I have to tell my bandmates. This is where that treaty was signed. It was here, in this location, where you’re standing right now.”He shook his head slowly. “That’s crazy. That’s beautiful. That’s powerful.”

In a statement, federal Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations Rebecca Alty said the Peace and Friendship Treaty “is one of the foundational agreements in the history of Crown-Indigenous Relations in this country.”

In honour of the celebration, the federal government declared the signing of the treaty an event of national historic significance, and unveiled a commemorative plaque at the site.

“Three hundred years later to the day, and on the site of its signing, we honour the leaders of the Wabanaki Confederacy who negotiated this treaty and reaffirm our commitment to the relationship it represents,” she said.

“Designating this treaty as an event of national historic significance is a recognition of its enduring importance to the Mi’kmaq Nation and to all Canadians.”

Kji-Keptin Denny spoke about sovereignty. About his father going before the United Nations in the 1980s to seek recognition of the Mi’kmaq Nation, and foreign ambassadors telling his father privately that he was right, but that they could not move against Canada. 

He spoke about the cod fishery collapse, watching non-Indigenous fishermen exhaust the resource while Mi’kmaq were never compensated. 

He called for a Mi’kmaw treaty commissioner to hold Atlantic provinces, the federal fisheries department and police forces accountable.

“We’ve protected you for over 300 years,” he said. “You never protected us once.”

He called for Mi’kmaq youth to be supported into every professional field, including medicine, law and sport. He described a heart surgeon who had recently saved his life.

He spoke of wanting Mi’kmaq athletes at the Olympics, Mi’kmaq professionals in every sector.

“We need our youth to be working together with organizations and companies. Teach them. Instead of holding them down, we should be lifting them up.”

He ended by looking ahead. 

“It’s only been 300 years. But you have to learn our ways of protecting the environment, of taking what’s needed, of working together and helping each other,” he said.

“We’re human beings. Let’s look at the next 300 years and make sure all leadership helps one another. It does not matter what the colour of your skin is.”

Relationships between Mi’kmaq people and colonial governments have been strained at times, including in recent history. In December 2025, the Nova Scotia government issued a province-wide directive ordering police to raid illegal cannabis operations, which Mi’kmaq leaders have long asserted are protected under their treaty right to trade.

Premier Houston claimed the unregulated cannabis was laced with fentanyl. Both the Nova Scotia RCMP and Halifax Regional Police said that claim was false. Mi’kmaq chiefs called for an apology. None came.

Raids followed across multiple communities, including Eskasoni, shattering relationships between Mi’kmaq communities and police that had taken years to build.

Sipekne’katik First Nation passed a resolution banning Houston and two of his ministers from reserve lands, calling them “undesirables.”

Chief Leroy Denny, speaking for the Assembly of Nova Scotia Mi’kmaw Chiefs, said the raids “only further deteriorate our relationships with these Crown entities.”

Then came Hunters Mountain. Mi’kmaq land protectors established a checkpoint in September 2025 to oppose clear-cutting in Unama’ki, Cape Breton, gathering in what they described as an educational mawiomi to protect moose habitat and forest their ancestors depended on. 

Two weeks after the checkpoint was established, Houston’s government introduced Bill 127. 

On Oct. 3, 2025, two days after Atlantic Canada’s Treaty Day, it passed. The law criminalized blocking forest access roads on Crown land, with fines of up to $50,000 or six months in jail. Mi’kmaq leaders said they had not been consulted.

Former mayor of Annapolis Royal William MacDonald, who attended the commemoration, acknowledged the weight of the moment from the other side of the treaty relationship. 

“This is a live issue,” he said. “As a former mayor of this town, it’s been really important to me that we do everything we can to advance reconciliation. I’m happy to be here to support it.”

Back in the youth tent, as Kalolin Johnson’s voice carried across the grounds outside, the conversation returned to where it began. The youth. The next generation. The ones who will inherit this relationship and all of its weight.

Near the close of the ceremony, four Mi’kmaq youth representatives were called to the stage alongside the assembled leaders for the presentation of treaty medals.

Retired Canadian senator Daniel Christmas, from Membertou First Nation, said the presentation to young Mi’kmaq people and Crown representatives alike “demonstrates the timeliness, the enduring nature of the treaty relationship.”“It also seeks to look forward to the future and the obligation that we all have as treaty partners,” he said.

Christmas said that, in current times, there’s a very high awareness of the treaty relationship.

“People are taking the time to come and actually trying to understand what it means. How did this happen, and why did it happen. An event like today begins to answer some of those questions.”

Gould looked around at the crowd gathered in the June sunshine on the oldest treaty ground in what would become Canada, at the Elders who had traveled far to be here, at the chiefs who had stood and spoken difficult truths, at the young people sitting quietly in the tent around her, listening.

“I think the generation coming up now,” she said quietly. “I think they’re going to be the balance.”

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.

Editor’s note: It has come to The Narwhal’s attention that this story has been circulated via stickers that have been distributed in Saint John. The Narwhal had no involvement in creating these stickers.

Summary

• An AI computing company is proposing to fill in a wetland to build a massive data centre near the neighbourhood of Lorneville in Saint John, N.B.
• Once operating, the data centre will be one of New Brunswick’s largest carbon emitters and devour about 390 megawatts of electricity — more than 10 per cent of the province’s total energy demand.
• Residents of Lorneville are resisting the proposal, but provincial and municipal leaders have expressed support, arguing it will bring jobs and revenue to the region.

On a sunny Saturday in April, Adam Wilkins and Chris Watson trace a path through a forest a short distance from the Bay of Fundy. 

As he walks down a slope, Wilkins wonders aloud whether cleaning out the ditch upstream would make the trail easier to run on; for the past decade, he and his wife have been building forest trails in this area, to encourage more outdoor recreation and stewardship.

After about 10 minutes, at a fork in the path, Watson stops, pointing at the forest ahead: the area slated to become the site of the first hyperscale data centre in Atlantic Canada. That is, a data centre with massive scalable capacity, like those Apple, Google and Microsoft are building.  

For years, the City of Saint John and the New Brunswick provincial government have been working to expand an industrial park in Lorneville, a coastal community on the outskirts of Saint John. A $2-billion data centre built by Alberta company Beacon Data Centers and partially powered by a new gas plant is slated to be the first tenant.

Data centres provide the material backbone for cloud services, file sharing and artificial intelligence. A customer for Beacon Data Centers’ proposed New Brunswick facility has not been announced.

Officials have said Lorneville is an ideal location for business development, as the area offers large amounts of land and water, as well as abundant electricity and accessible fibre cables. The municipality has also said developing Lorneville would bring much-needed jobs and tax revenue to the city; the local Irving Oil refinery exports most of its products to the United States, while New Brunswick generally sends most of its seafood and lumber south of the border, making Saint John “Canada’s most tariff-exposed city” according to the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. 

Officials initially stated that they were actively attracting businesses to the expanded industrial park that would be focused in “green and clean” sectors. But residents have pushed back, noting that expansion of the industrial park, and construction of the data centre itself, would destroy rare old-growth forest and wetlands. If built, the data centre would rely on a gas plant for much of its power, making it one of the province’s largest emitters, while also increasing demand on the grid. And residents say the process to develop the data centre has suffered from a lack of transparency.

Documents obtained through provincial access to information legislation by The Narwhal and by residents show provincial officials were in discussions to bring a data centre to the park long before residents were told about the tenant — and that details of that data centre conflicted with the more low-impact vision for the industrial park advertised to residents.

Building AI data centres across Canada has been identified by the federal government as a priority, and dozens of new facilities have been proposed in the past year. Since early May, Beacon Data Centers has lobbied various federal departments four times to advocate for the role of data centres in supporting “national priorities,” and to request government support for the New Brunswick project. But many communities are concerned about environmental impacts of the water- and power-hungry facilities, as well as the lack of oversight and transparency regarding their impacts.

“For the past two years, this fight has been a huge stressor for people,” Wilkins says. “It’s all in the name of progress, or we need the taxes, or you need AI to generate your stupid images, but it impacts people’s lives.”

Data centre proposal reopening old wounds in Lorneville

This spring, billboards and bus ads began appearing around Saint John, promising the creation of 1,200 jobs from construction of the 390-megawatt data centre — an appealing prospect in a city reliant on trade with a volatile United States and a province facing a grim financial forecast.

But in those signs, many Lorneville residents saw something troubling. 

Lorneville was once a fishing village perched on the Bay of Fundy’s rocky shoreline. In the 1970s, a 3,600-hectare chunk of land along the coast was expropriated by the provincial government to develop an industrial project that — apart from a power plant built on the water — never materialized. Residents say a promise they were given to return the land if the project didn’t move forward never came to fruition either.

“My grandparents were still getting upset, even talking about it, until the day they were gone,” Cecil McCavour, whose family has been fishing in Lorneville since the 1840s, told The Narwhal. McCavour, along with his dad and cousin, are the last fishermen working from the community’s wharf. His family lost hundreds of acres to expropriation, he says. Now, the data centre is reopening old wounds. “Every decade something’s coming down the pipeline that does damage to our community.”

In subsequent years, a dump was established in the area, but was found to be insufficiently lined for modern-day standards, creating concerns contaminants were seeping into the groundwater.

Then, in July 2024, residents received letters in envelopes with no originating address. A consulting agency hired by the province stated that a proposal to clear and construct a 110-hectare “development-ready pad” for industry a short distance from their homes was in the works.

Instead, residents resisted, submitting dozens of letters, collecting hundreds of signatures and packing council meetings at which the expansion was debated. In response, the City of Saint John — which was pursuing the expansion along with New Brunswick’s Regional Development Corporation — paused the plan and initiated a task force in which residents and city officials were meant to work through concerns. 

Residents were not told which specific industries were being considered for the expanded industrial park, or if any potential tenants had come forward.

The documents obtained through access to information legislation by The Narwhal and residents show that before the task force began meeting, provincial officials were already in discussions to bring a data centre to the park. In emails from October 2024, Martin Luckett, an official with the province’s business development agency, Opportunities NB, wrote to a redacted recipient that the agency felt “strongly that there is considerable potential for one of your centers here in New Brunswick,” and describes the Lorneville area as a potential location. By November 2024, Beacon Data Centers had submitted a feasibility application to NB Power, according to emails. 

In May 2025, city council voted on whether to allow the expansion after a series of tense council meetings that stretched late into the evening. Dozens of people spoke out against the plan, while just three speakers spoke in favour. Still, the council voted unanimously to allow the expansion.

City staff initially attempted to assuage residents’ concerns by affirming businesses in the industrial park would be green and non-emitting. But the data centre — which was announced in October 2025 — has made people doubt that commitment, Wilkins says. “The first thing announced was a hyperscale data centre powered by a natural gas plant … what else is coming?”

Old-growth forests, wetlands would be cleared for data centre

In 2024, Chris Watson bought a house beside a large saltmarsh in Lorneville, recognized as a “provincially significant wetland” for its ecological value . In the forest behind his home, eastern cedar shade mossy swamps, while gnarled red spruce with lichen-covered branches grow nearby.

Watson was surprised when he read the environmental impact assessment for the industrial park expansion, which includes the forest behind his house, describing it as relatively low value.” His own observations, though not expert, suggested at least parts of it were exceptional.

He bought a tool for taking cores and gathered samples from the largest trees. Ben Phillips, who runs a dendrochronology lab — focused on the science of dating trees by their rings — at Mount Allison University, agreed to take a look.

Phillips was initially skeptical. Only about half a per cent of the forest in New Brunswick is old growth, he says, and most of that is found in inaccessible areas.

But examining the cores under a microscope, Phillips was astonished. 

In the oldest sample, Phillips counted 388 rings, meaning the tree was likely more than 400 years old, as it would have taken more than 12 years to get to the point from which the rings were counted. Other samples showed trees that were more than 300 years old, and many over 200 years — an age distribution typical of an old-growth forest. “[Old growth] is a mixed age, multi-storied stand that’s got lots of diversity in it,” he says. “This fit that exactly.”

The forest at Lorneville is likely the third-oldest forest in the province, Phillips says. Yet there’s no guarantee it will be spared. “These global pressures from big tech firms and AI and data centres and tariffs … are winning out against old-growth forest because we do not have a policy in place to protect it.”

The mayor of Saint John, Donna Reardon, has said she supports saving individual old trees, but declined an interview request for this story. The site for the data centre is specifically adjacent to, and partially overlapping, the industrial park expansion area, and wouldn’t flatten some of the oldest trees Watson found. But a more recent environmental assessment for the data centre itself stated that approximately 3.5 hectares of old-growth forest would be lost as “a long-term, irreversible, adverse effect of the project.”

The forest isn’t the only ecological concern. Much of the Lorneville area is made up of wetlands, including roughly 27 hectares in the area that would be cleared and infilled to make space for the data centre.

“This is basically the high point of the watershed,” Watson says, inspecting one of those wetlands in April — a peatland bog in the area behind his house. At the bog’s edge, Watson says he’d found trees that were 200 years old, suggesting an ecosystem that has been evolving for centuries. “What’s going to happen when all that freshwater flow is removed from this area?”

Roxanne MacKinnon, executive director of ACAP Saint John, an environmental non-profit organization, says the development of wetlands throughout Saint John already causes localized flooding.

“Wetlands are a very important part of our ecosystem,” she says. “From our perspective, the degradation of habitat, and particularly where all that water is going to go that is being contained within these wetlands currently, [is] a concern.”

For residents, there’s also the question of what the loss of wetlands will mean for their wells.

The initial expansion area for the industrial park would have infilled dozens of hectares of wetlands. A 2025 email from provincial engineer and hydrogeologist Gerard Souma to a New Brunswick environmental impact assessment specialist, obtained by residents through access to information legislation, noted this could affect the community’s older wells. Souma wrote, “It is my opinion that any owner having a well tapping their water supply from the surficial aquifer should be concern [sic] with 44 ha of wetland infilling by the project.”

Watson worries that the wetland infilling for the data centre could also affect downstream wetlands like the significant saltmarsh by his house, by changing the way water flows on the landscape.

In a statement, Lauren Armstrong, Beacon’s vice-president of corporate affairs, wrote that the wetlands at the site of the data centre have been assessed and categorized through the impact assessment, and that “the overall approach is to minimize the footprint, avoid the most sensitive areas and manage remaining effects.”

New Brunswick’s Regional Development Corporation referred a request for an interview to Saint John Industrial Parks.

If built, Saint John data centre would be one of the largest emitters and power users in the province

While the project stands to raze local forests and wetlands, it may also have broader impacts across the province. 

The proposed data centre is a 390-megawatt operation. Once built, it would also generate roughly 6.6 per cent of emissions in the province.

Part of the data centre’s energy is meant to come from an on-site natural gas-powered generation facility, built by Houston-based VoltaGrid, with the other 200 megawatts coming from New Brunswick’s grid. This demand could surpass 10 per cent of New Brunswick’s mean energy demands, where peak daily demand for electricity ranges from around 1,500 megawatts on a summer morning to roughly 3,030 megawatts on a cold winter’s day.

Beacon submitted a feasibility assessment for that grid demand in November 2024. In May 2025, emails from municipal and provincial officials displayed frustration with NB Power’s slow response. “This has not been the best first impression to say the least,” wrote Saint John Industrial Parks general manager Ian MacKinnon, to officials from Opportunities NB and Envision Saint John, the city’s business development group. “Nothing will proceed without a response and a commitment for power.” MacKinnon did not respond to a request for an interview.

Meanwhile, Opportunities NB wrote a letter to NB Power asking about the feasibility review, saying Beacon is “ready to progress their project in Saint John but can’t commit to anything without a path forward with NB Power.”

At that same time, NB Power and the U.S. company ProEnergy were putting forward an application for a controversial 500-megawatt, 10-turbine natural gas and diesel power plant in Tantramar, in southwest New Brunswick, to cope with rising electricity demand. 

That power plant, which was just approved by the province’s Energy and Utilities Board, would produce around 900,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, according to its environmental assessment.

VoltaGrid has said its gas plant on the data centre site is not at all related to the larger ProEnergy plant. NB Power put out the request for proposals for the gas plant in 2024, a year before the data centre plan was announced, though the same year Beacon submitted its feasibility application to the provincial utility. 

Still, advocates say the potential data centre has bearing on decisions about power generation. 

David Coon, leader of the Green Party of New Brunswick, says from his perspective, the projects are connected insofar as powering the data centre requires the ProEnergy gas plant. “There isn’t an extra 200 megawatts of capacity available on the grid to carry that load,” he says. “So it’s got to come from somewhere and that means they’ve got to build it.”

Watson wonders why officials were asking for grid approval of an energy-intensive facility at the same time the utility was forecasting an energy deficit by 2028 due to population growth. 

Meanwhile, VoltaGrid’s 190-megawatt natural gas-generating facility would produce roughly 750,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually, making it one of the province’s most prolific emitters, behind the Irving Oil Refinery and the Belledune coal-fired generating station.

VoltaGrid CEO Nathan Ough did not respond to a request for an interview, but Lauren Armstrong, with Beacon Data Centers, said in a statement that “the project is being designed with a combination of measures to reduce and manage emissions intensity over time. These include high-efficiency generation technologies, operational optimization, and the ability to integrate lower-carbon energy sources as they become available.”

Given the potential effects on power rates, on the province’s emissions targets and on the community, Coon is calling for a moratorium on data centre development until legislation can be developed for the industry. “The concern that everyone has, including me, is the costs will far outweigh the benefits of this, the way it’s being pursued.”

In a statement, Luke Randall, the minister responsible for Opportunities NB, said that projects like the data centre have the potential to contribute to the provincial economy by creating jobs and revenue for public services. These projects “will only proceed if they deliver clear economic value, align with environmental expectations and contribute meaningfully to the province’s long-term development.”

Randall also stated that Opportunities NB is “aware of the broader discussions regarding electricity supply and future demand. That is precisely why projects like this are subject to rigorous review, including technical analysis, environmental assessment and regulatory oversight.” 

In return, Saint John residents are being pitched an economic windfall in jobs and tax revenue, though of the advertised 1,200 jobs, most are in construction, and the figure also includes indirect jobs, which are service and supply-chain jobs created as a result of the data centre project. Just 210 jobs would be permanent, according to the company’s projections.

Lorneville residents say it’s unclear that the loss of wetlands and forest, and the increase in emissions, would be worth it. 

For now, they’re hoping to have the expansion of the industrial park reversed; residents have filed for a judicial review of the area’s rezoning, on the grounds that the city council’s decision was biased. In May, Lorneville resident Sherri Colwell-McCavour, who’s been vocally opposed to the project, was elected to Saint John City Council  — days after a protest in downtown Saint John, at which dozens of people called for a halt to the data centre.

If residents can’t stop the project, they say they intend to continue doing what they can to minimize the effects.

A data centre in the neighbourhood

After touring the wetlands and forest in the data centre footprint, Watson and Wilkins make their way to the road. A few minutes later, Wilkins’ wife, Leah Alexander, rolls along to pick them up. 

Alexander’s family has been in Lorneville for six generations. She has spent her whole life there, and she and Wilkins live just a few houses down from the one she grew up in.

She has vivid early memories of being taken door to door by her mother to advocate against the dump, she says. Now, the threat of the data centre has her strapping her baby to her chest to go to council meetings, and bringing her four-year-old along to hand out flyers.

Alexander has never imagined leaving Lorneville, but the data centre project has her questioning whether it’s a place her family can stay. For now, she’s sad to see the community go through the same struggle it’s faced in the past — and frustrated that they’ve had to do so much work to highlight what’s at risk of being lost: the gnarled and ancient trees, the deep mossy swamps. 

If the systems meant to provide protection are not doing their job, she says, then it leaves residents no choice. 

“People want their children to grow up here,” Alexander says. “They want them to stay here, and what are we leaving them? Like, if we don’t stand up and fight for it, what are we doing?”

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Nova Scotia’s Kejimkujik National Park and Historic Site is home to old-growth forests, white sand beaches, diverse wildlife and abundant natural beauty. But long before it was established as a national park in 1969, it was the site of Mi’kmaw fishing villages, hunting territories and burial grounds for thousands of years. Now, the Mi’kmaq will once again play a central role in deciding how that land, which is the keeper of their stories and memories, is cared for.

A new agreement between the Mi’kmaq and Parks Canada will allow both parties to govern almost all of Nova Scotia’s parks and historic lands together. Announced in December 2025, the Toqi’maliaptmu’k Arrangement, which means “we will look after it together,” reflects a relationship based in mutual respect and allyship — one that has taken decades to nurture and create.

Roughly 30 years ago, that relationship was essentially non-existent, Eric Zscheile says. He has been a legal advisor to the Mi’kmaq, who operate as one nation, since 1992 and negotiates on their behalf with the federal and provincial governments. 

Nova Scotia’s national parks (excluding Sable Island), as well as many more throughout Canada, were created from land that was directly taken from First Nations, often through “dubious land surrenders,” Zscheile says. For generations, the Mi’kmaq had no say in how unceded land was protected, used or accessed, and there was a deep sense of distrust toward the federal agency as a result. 

 “Most Mi’kmaq refused to even go into a national park because of the past,” Zscheile says. “There was a feeling that it was government appropriation.”

Then came the Marshall Case, a 1999 landmark decision in favour of Mi’kmaw fisherman Donald Marshall that affirmed First Nations’ Treaty Right to fish, hunt and gather for their livelihood. After that, Zscheile says, things slowly began to shift.

“ People within Parks [Canada] started looking at what was happening legally when it came to the rights of Indigenous Peoples and their relationship with Indigenous Peoples, not just in Nova Scotia but across the country,” he says. “There started to be a concerted effort to say, ‘I think we have to do things differently.’ ”

In the years since, progress has been gradual. Mi’kmaw leaders have worked with Parks Canada on a number of projects to help repair the community’s relationship with both the agency and the land they’d historically been excluded from. In 2012, they formed an arrangement to allow Mi’kmaq to enter national parks for free.

They’ve also worked to incorporate Mi’kmaw place names into official signage and interpretive displays, create visitor programs highlighting Mi’kmaw history and culture and organize harvesting, protection and restoration projects. One such project focused on white birch conservation and gave the Mi’kmaq access to white birch for traditional crafts, including building canoes.

Today, Parks Canada is lovingly seen by the community as the “least offensive federal agency,” Zscheile says. That’s thanks to years of collaboration and a willingness to listen and work together as equal partners. 

That status as equal partners is now official, according to the Toqi’maliaptmu’k Arrangement, which took nearly a decade of negotiations to bring to fruition.

The arrangement is unprecedented and monumental in its scope. While similar agreements exist in Gwaii Haanas in B.C., Newfoundland’s Torngat Mountains and Saoyú-ʔehdacho in the Northwest Territories, those partnerships apply only to individual parks. This agreement’s underlying principle is to recognize and implement Aboriginal and Treaty Rights within lands that have traditionally been governed, managed and utilized by the Mi’kmaq. 

Because of that wide scope, it’s the first agreement to apply province-wide and covers all Parks Canada-administered national parks and national historic sites in Nova Scotia.

The only exception is Sable Island Reserve, which was left out because it remains unclear if Mi’kmaq traditionally frequented and used Sable Island, Jonathan Sheppard, says. Sheppard is superintendent of Kejimkujik National Park and National Historic Site, one of the locations covered by the arrangement. Discussions about the governance and management of Sable Island are ongoing between Parks Canada and the Mi’kmaq.

The choice to create a province-wide agreement, rather than one focused on individual lands, was largely based on the Mi’kmaw preference for a collective approach because the Mi’kmaw communities in Nova Scotia operate as one unified political group, Sheppard says.

“[It was] really important for the ideas associated with self-governance and self-determination that this is a pan-Nova Scotia initiative, because it is ultimately about a nation-to-nation relationship and the nation-to-nation decision-making governance structure,” he says.

A shared vision 

Fundamentally, the arrangement is a framework to formalize the modern-day relationship while recognizing and implementing the Peace and Friendship Treaties, signed in the 1700s between the Crown and east-coast Indigenous communities.

 “This was not about negotiating rights and it was not about creating rights or extinguishing rights,” Sheppard says. “It was really about implementing rights originating from those original Peace and Friendship Treaties.”

In practice, the framework will be guided by a co-management board that will be made up of an equal number of Parks Canada and Mi’kmaw representatives. There will also be technical committees made up of Knowledge Holders, Elders and harvesters focused on specific topics, including language, culture and heritage; archeology; natural resource stewardship and harvesting; and economic opportunities.

While exact details will be developed over the coming months, the arrangement will include opportunities for practices on the land, including in protected heritage places. This will allow for practices such as ceremonies, Indigenous-led conservation activities and place-based learning and knowledge sharing.

The 10-year agreement has an option to extend or renew, although the Mi’kmaq are free to opt out at any point if they are dissatisfied. 

“ It was really clear to Parks Canada that there was a lot of overlap in vision about land stewardship, and that formed the basis for the agreement,” Sheppard says.

The Mi’kmaw concept of Netukulimk teaches about the respectful use of resources and only taking what you need from the land. It’s one of the principles Sheppard says aligns with Parks Canada’s vision for ecological integrity and preservation. Another is Msit No’kmaq, which suggests that all living beings are sacred and interconnected.

Etuaptmumk, or two-eyed seeing, is the concept at the very core of this new partnership, according to Lindsay Marshall, the Mi’kmaq relations advisor for the Cape Breton Field Unit for Parks Canada and a former chief of Potlotek First Nation.

Coined by Mi’kmaw Elder Albert Marshall, it means “looking at something with your western eye, and also with your Indigenous eye to come up with something truly beautiful and unique, and to understand it more,” he says. It is about combining both wisdoms to create a more holistic, in-depth approach. 

While the timeline to establish this arrangement was long, Marshall says it was the Mi’kmaq who set the pace, not the government. This required patience from Parks Canada at times, patience that helped demonstrate respect. So far, Sheppard says, the public response has been positive.

“ I’m really proud of the way the approach has been at the speed of the communities and not rushing, not being forceful in any way,” Marshall says. “That shows understanding and appreciation for culture.”

For First Nations in other provinces who may want to develop their own arrangements, Marshall suggests a similar strategy: go slow and build a real relationship before rushing into anything. 

And to federal agencies that may want to build partnerships with Indigenous communities, Marshall stresses the importance of doing the homework first. 

“Before you even set foot in the community, you should learn about the community,” he says. “You go at [their] speed and you approach with respect.”

Heal the people, heal the land 

For Clifford Paul, the moose management co-ordinator for the Unama’ki Institute of Natural Resources, this new arrangement is an opportunity for true healing among the Mi’kmaq.

“The Mi’kmaq language hasn’t been spoken in these areas in a long time,” Paul says. “The language belongs there. Our people belong there.”

It is also a chance to draw on Indigenous wisdom to help heal the land at a time when the environment is in dire need of protection. The Mi’kmaq have a proven track record of helping to improve the ecosystems in Nova Scotia’s parks, Paul says. In recent years, for example, they reintroduced pine martens into the boreal forest and helped to rectify an overabundant moose population through harvesting.

While the latter project was highly controversial — both with people who oppose hunting and non-Indigenous hunters who opposed being excluded — Paul says the Mi’kmaq successfully demonstrated their ability to get the job done safely while providing positive social impacts to their communities.

Restoring the spiritual connection between the Mi’kmaq people and the land is another crucial part of this deal, Paul says. Although the arrangement is about resource management and economic opportunities, it is also about harvesting knowledge from these sacred lands after hundreds of years of severed access.

“ When we go to these places and do our storytelling, it widens the breadth and scope of our Traditional Knowledge,” he says. “ You heal the people by taking them back to the land.” 

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Summary

• A tiny village in Newfoundland and Labrador could become the site of a major floating liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility
• Amid talk about exporting LNG from the east coast, some community members look to Kitimat, B.C., home to Canada’s first major LNG facility 
• Residents of the village of Fermeuse, home to about 300 people, may be tempted by the prospect of jobs but one Kitimat, B.C., resident warns: “The noise, pollution, traffic and burden on the infrastructure is not worth it”

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About an hour’s drive from St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, the little fishing village of Fermeuse sits on the shores of a deep harbour, sheltered from the tempestuous North Atlantic. Atop a hill overlooking the village, eight slow-turning turbines harvest energy from the nearly ever-present wind that flows from the open ocean. Generations of fishers have plied the waters off the coast, harvesting cod, crab and numerous other species.

More than 5,000 kilometres away, on the northwest coast of British Columbia, the town of Kitimat, B.C., is newly home to Canada’s first major liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility. LNG Canada started operations here last year, lighting up the night sky with its noisy and bright flare stack and welcoming a stream of supertankers to the deepwater channel that connects the community with pan-Pacific shipping routes. Years in the making, the LNG export project has undeniably changed life for those who live alongside it.[Pause 1s]

Fermeuse could be facing similar changes.

When the Atlantic cod fisheries collapsed in the 1990s — putting more than 35,000 people out of work across Newfoundland and Labrador — many left the village in search of good paying jobs, including in the province’s booming oil and gas sector. Now, as nearby offshore oil developments like Bay Du Nord get a boost from the federal government and the province eyes new revenues from the sector, the sleepy village of around 300 residents could become the focal point for an influx of new industry.

Crown LNG Holdings Ltd., under the name of its Newfoundland affiliate, Fermeuse Energy, plans to develop a swath of the harbour to support several projects, possibly including a liquefied natural gas processing and export terminal. The company is approved for a marine base but has not yet submitted an official proposal for an LNG plant. In late January, Fermuese Energy signed an agreement with Hanwha Ocean, a South Korean shipbuilding company and expert in offshore facilities, to “jointly advance the Newfoundland and Labrador LNG development project in Canada.”  

“If the political will and the community support comes along, then we will move ahead with the project by the end of this year or next year,” Swapan Kataria, CEO of Crown LNG, told The Narwhal in an interview.

Valerie Walsh, whose family has lived in Fermeuse for generations, said many in the community are tempted by an idea that “our sons and daughters who moved away for work will maybe move back to Fermeuse” to build the LNG project.

“It’s a sought-after harbour,” she said, explaining it’s protected from the open water and safe for large boats. “It could be really rough in the North Atlantic, but boats can come in here and they’re protected.” 

But Walsh is worried residents will be seduced by industry without knowing what they’re really signing up for.

“I don’t know if it’s because the fishery collapse just took the wind out of everybody’s sails and they’re just waiting for the saviour to come along, which is oil and gas,” she mused. “[The company] can make it seem safe. They can make it seem a lot of things. I think this will be the end of the harbour and any natural thing for us. … There will be no whales coming in anymore, no puffins, no fishery, no boats, no anything.” 

“I don’t know that the community really understands it.”

Details about the potential LNG project are vague, but the company has said plans could include a 380-kilometre pipeline along the ocean floor, trenched for part of that distance to protect it from icebergs, connecting untapped offshore gas reserves to the village. There, a floating liquefaction facility could supercool the gas, reducing its volume for marine transport to overseas destinations. Kataria said the facility, if built, would process and export up to 10 million tonnes of LNG per year. The company acknowledged an LNG project would bring change to the community and said if anything were to move ahead, public consultations and stakeholder engagements would be held.

“We are only approved for a marine base and I think it’s important to qualify that in order to avoid any future confusions,” Kataria said. “We are certainly there to service the offshore growth in the industry.” 

How the LNG project fits into the picture is that those same offshore areas are home to “a lot of gas reserves which nobody is going after,” he said. “We are connected with the industry, and we feel that there is gas which can be monetized.”

‘We don’t know what’s going to happen’: locals question how Fermeuse LNG would impact community

On the north coast of B.C., the massive LNG project was under construction for about five years, employing locals and flooding the community with thousands of out-of-town workers. It now employs around 300 people and will provide the community with $9.7 million in annual taxes for the first five years of operations.

Kitimat residents have experienced months of disruption to their daily lives since LNG Canada started flaring activities in late 2024. Flaring is the burning of excess or waste gas, a normal part of operating a liquefaction facility. In Kitimat, flaring has at times exceeded 90-metre-tall flames, about the height of London’s iconic Big Ben, in part due to an ongoing equipment issue. 

That causes light pollution, noise and emissions, as well as releases air pollution. Flaring at LNG facilities releases carbon monoxide, nitrous oxides, fine particulate matter and sulphur dioxide, all of which can have impacts on human health. For its part, LNG Canada in Kitimat says flaring is “safe, controlled and provincially regulated.” But that hasn’t stopped residents there from being concerned.

Walsh said she’s afraid ceding the harbour shores to an industrial hub for LNG and oil development would be a death knell for the villagers’ way of life.

“My father’s from here, his father and his father before that,” she told The Narwhal on a phone call. “We are literally closing the door on our way of life in this harbour if we let this industrial LNG come in.”

Brenda Aylward lives on the other side of the harbour from Walsh, where she raises sheep and grows vegetables while caring for her aging mother.

“It’s a fifth-generation farm and I’ve been involved pretty much my whole life,” she said. It’s a small farm-to-table operation she’s planning to expand — and she wonders what the impacts of an industrial project in the harbour would have on her livestock.

“I have fields that border the ocean,” she said, explaining the farm is just a few kilometres from the proposed industrial site. “Livestock are quite skittish, to noise and to light. Sheep are the most affected because they are the most skittish livestock.”

She said she has questions about how LNG operations and related marine traffic could alter the flock’s grazing and breeding patterns. Research from animal behaviour expert Temple Grandin has shown stress in livestock can cause agitation, increased thyroid activity and spikes in cortisol.

“[Will] I have my lambs when market time comes?” Aylward wondered. “We don’t know what’s going to happen there.”

Fermeuse Energy did not directly address questions about potential impacts and said there will be an opportunity for community members to get answers.

“We certainly understand that there will be questions from the residents of the area,” Stephen Tessier, a spokesperson with the company, wrote in an emailed statement. “We (Fermeuse Energy) are still in the discovery stage and we need to have a handle on actual product and political will in Newfoundland and Labrador in order to proceed.”

Tessier said before the company submits an application, it will conduct engineering and environmental studies.

“Once that happens, there will be public consultations and stakeholder engagements where the residents can ask questions, clarify their doubts and choose to support the project,” he wrote. “We look forward to working with the towns and residents as this project moves forward.”

One of Aylward’s neighbours, Jenny Wright, has similar questions about potential impacts to the community.

“We live right on the water,” she said. “We bought a traditional old Newfoundland home and my husband is a house builder and he’s renovated every last piece of it.”

She suggested the community should be looking at different options to create jobs beyond oil and gas.

“We are right on the East Coast Trail,” she said, referencing a 336-kilometre network of paths and trails, adding the region would be wise to capitalize on a growing tourism sector. “We can develop an economic plan here that is sustainable, like other towns in Newfoundland and Labrador have done, like Petty Harbour, who own their own fishery, have a co-operative plant and developed and promoted small businesses being around there — and then started a non-profit to educate people on the fishery.”

‘We depend on a clean coastline, clean water and a quiet environment’

Before the cod moratorium — an indefinite closure to the fishery implemented by the federal government in 1992 — came into effect, Fermeuse had a fish plant, too, and the harbour still supports an active fleet.

“Pretty soon — the end of March, early April — is the time for the crab boats going in and out,” Wright said. “Our first signs of spring are the fishery is up and going again. And then, of course, the whales that will come in shortly after that.”

She fears an influx of industry in the harbour would change everything.

“I’m exhausted with hearing everybody when they hear the word LNG go, ‘Oh, this is great, oil and gas is going to save us — it’s going to bring back jobs and all the young people, they’re going to come home and we’re going to flourish again.’ We’ve just done this over and over and over again, and we’re not learning from it.”

Walsh has been trying to get information about what the company wants to do — to little avail, she said — and help her community understand what’s at stake.

“Nobody can visualize it,” she said. “I don’t think they understand what it’s actually going to be like, physically, how the harbour will change. LNG is big money — a company can spin it whatever way they want. They can make it shiny and beautiful and never tell you the downsides.”

Kitimat’s story, some residents say, is a cautionary tale some places like Fermeuse can learn from.

“Expect all the promises they make never to materialize,” a Kitimat community member, who The Narwhal is calling James Smith to protect his family from repercussions, said. “And realize they often spend more effort trying to control the narrative than being transparent. You’re dealing with shiny on the outside, rotten to the core.”

Smith sent The Narwhal images of his property taken at night during recent overnight flaring activity.

“[My] house was lit up like daylight and shaking from the noise,” he wrote in a message accompanying the photos. “On top [of that] there was an ear-piercing whistle.”

Aylward, the sheep farmer, shuddered to think of her community changing so dramatically. 

“It’s devastating to think that something like that will come to this tiny little place,” she said. “We depend on a clean coastline, clean water and a quiet environment, for our food production and our lives. We do not want or need this here in our community.”

‘We already have the buyers’: Crown LNG says Fermeuse is well positioned to get gas to waiting markets 

Kataria agrees building an LNG facility in the harbour would mean significant change for residents of the fishing village.

“It is wrong of me to say that their life’s not going to change,” he said. “If you were looking at a peaceful water view, it is not going to remain the same. People’s expectations that the view is not going to change or the noise levels will not change or the traffic will not change, I think is wrong — because it will change. Industrialization will bring all those things.”

He said while the LNG development is in early stages, bringing industry to Fermeuse means jobs for a community that lost its base economy more than three decades ago.

“If I have the year right, it is 35 years plus [that] there has been no economic upswing in that community,” he said. “Let’s say it was a community of 1,500 people, or 2,000 people, gone down to 300. Do they need jobs? Do they need a change? I don’t know.”

“I think everybody understands that there is a give and take,” he added. 

Kataria said he’s optimistic about Prime Minister Mark Carney’s statements in recent months in support of LNG exports, but he hasn’t seen the political will to support an official proposal yet. 

If things do move forward, he said the main destination for exports from Newfoundland would be Europe, which continues, for now, to import fossil fuels to replace Russian gas since President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, but he also wants to tap into India’s “insatiable demand” for LNG. He noted the company could leverage an international loophole to get the gas there.

“There is a mechanism in place on international trading, where we could actually sell the cargo on the high seas to people taking it to Europe, and people bringing it from the other part of the world into Europe. We can take it from there and just hand it over to India.”

These kinds of high seas cargo swapping, or ship-to-ship transfers, are governed by rules set out by the International Maritime Organization — but the process is also used by the likes of the Russian shadow fleet, a cabal of shady shipping operators making vast sums of money by obscuring the origin of oil that would otherwise be heavily sanctioned.

“We already have a licence for importing 7.2 million tonnes in India,” Kataria said, adding the company is currently working on approvals to build a five-million tonne import facility in Scotland. 

“We are LNG terminal developers,” he explained. “We are not coming to Canada to … build a project and wait for somebody to come and buy the product from us — we already have the buyers. We’re coming there because we need it. It’s the other way around.” 

Lloyd Parrott, Newfoundland and Labrador’s energy and mines minister, told The Narwhal he considers natural gas a “key priority” for the province but he’s waiting on an official proposal for an LNG plant in Fermeuse.

“The department has not received a formal request for support for the Fermeuse energy project,” Parrott wrote in an emailed statement. “Our government will always make time to meet with companies to discuss potential projects that have the potential to provide benefits to Newfoundlanders and Labradorians.”

In Kitimat, Smith warned the promise of benefits may not be enough to offset the impacts of living beside an LNG plant.

“The noise, pollution, traffic and burden on the infrastructure is not worth it,” he said.

For her part, Walsh doesn’t want Fermeuse turned into an industrial hub.

“I just don’t want my community destroyed,” she said. “We’re at a crossroads. We’re caught up in this now. And I just don’t think it’ll be for the betterment of us, the people who live here.”

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After a secret ballot, global trade restrictions will not be placed on the species at the heart of Canada’s most lucrative fishery. But trade of American eels is also driving a massive, illegal economy — and advocates say the vote represents a failure to address this serious threat.

On Nov. 27, countries voted against listing the American eel and other eel species at the 20th meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES, in Uzbekistan. Canada was among the nations who voted against restrictions. At the meeting, the Canadian delegate said populations of American eel have remained stable for the last two decades, and that the proposal did not take into account advances in technology used to distinguish eel species. The vote was followed by an announcement this week that Canada will not list American eel under the Species At Risk Act, following more than a decade of deliberation.

The restrictions would have applied to the trade of 17 eel species, including American eel, which is the basis of a controversial fishery in Atlantic Canada. American eel are harvested as palm-size juveniles from Maritime rivers in the spring, and exported to Asia for rearing in aquaculture facilities. A kilogram of baby eels (called elvers) was fetching nearly $5,000 in 2023.

That price drives not only commercial and Indigenous fisheries, but also a large black-market fishery conducted by organized crime, experts say, making a coordinated response necessary. The Sustainable Eel group, a conservation group based in the U.K., says illegal eel sales are the “world’s greatest wildlife crime.” Despite its vote against the listing, experts say Canada, as a hub for the trade, has a particularly important role to play. 

“Canada could have played a role at this meeting, and actually led support for the proposal,” Katie Schleit, fisheries director at Oceans North says. “They’ve come out in all kinds of different arenas as being a champion to fight illegal, unreported, unregulated fishing, [but] … they aren’t taking responsibility for the role that Canada’s actually playing in the global illegal trade of eels right now.”

Illegal fishing, exports put pressure on American eel

Trade poses a significant threat to biodiversity, according to Sheldon Jordan, a wildlife crime consultant who formerly worked on wildlife enforcement at Environment and Climate Change Canada. “When [people] think of endangered species, they’re thinking of all the things in The Lion King, but the biggest threat is actually [to] the consumables. It’s the fish, it’s the wood, the things that we eat,” he says. With eel, “the demand is outstripping the supply. There is a conservation issue.” 

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, which has been ratified by 185 parties, is meant to address this. Since 1975, the convention has worked to regulate the trade in wild plants and animals, to maximize their chances of survival.

This year, the European Union, with the support of Honduras and Panama, nominated 17 species of eel to be included under an appendix that regulates trade, but doesn’t prevent it. While the proposal noted Japanese and American eel are particularly at risk, the parties nominated over a dozen freshwater species, noting that eels are often impossible to tell apart, making enforcement a challenge.

European eel — which has declined by up to 95 per cent in rivers across Europe — shows why this is important, Jordan says. 

The export of European eels from the European Union has been banned since at least 2011 (with European eel listed under CITES in 2009), but the ban did not stop the export of juvenile eels to Asia. Jordan says his Environment Canada officers in Vancouver and Toronto intercepted containers of frozen eel meat from Asia as late as 2017, almost a decade after the CITES listing. The meat was labelled as American eel, but genetic testing revealed up to 50 per cent was European eel that had been falsely declared to evade controls.

 “In the end, our officers confiscated 186 tonnes of eel meat,” Jordan says. “That was six, seven times more than our previous record when it came to endangered species being seized.” 

Jordan says he warned colleagues at Fisheries and Oceans Canada that given the low supply and high price of European eel, it was only a matter of time before demand exploded for North American exports. “And unfortunately, that has come to pass.”

In Canada, the target is American eel, which is also found throughout the eastern United States, the Caribbean and at the northern edge of South America. American eel have a complex life cycle that starts in an area of the Atlantic Ocean known as the Sargasso Sea. Larvae spend up to a year floating around in the ocean, before transparent juveniles swim up rivers in the spring.

The Canadian commercial quota for those elvers has been set at roughly 10,000 kilograms for decades, and in recent years, the fishery has been the subject of bitter conflict as high prices have increased fishing pressure. Meanwhile, as Jordan predicted, exports of elvers have soared; in 2022, imports of live elvers into East Asia from the Americas jumped to 157 tonnes, up from 53 tonnes in 2021, according to a paper published in Marine Policy.

Over the last five years, Fisheries and Oceans Canada has cancelled the elver season multiple times, citing illegal fishing and violence. Since then, the federal government has imposed new regulations to increase the traceability of the catch, including possession and export licences. 

At this year’s meeting of the endangered species trade convention, Canada’s delegate cited these regulations in its position against listing. The delegate also described recent advances in rapid genetic testing that they said addresses the lookalike problem, though an Environment and Climate Change Canada report from September notes these tests have a 20 per cent false positive rate, and an ideal operating range above 18 C, meaning they can’t be used on frozen meat.

Not everyone agrees on stability of American eel population

Whether harvested as part of the official commercial quota or not, Jordan says elvers are sent to Toronto, where the companies that prepare them to survive export are located. 

Jordan says this makes Toronto the intermediate destination for American eel from not just Canada, but also the Caribbean, including places like Haiti where political instability fuels poaching, and the Dominican Republic, which has been asking for help in controlling illegal trade. “Toronto is basically the hub of the legal and illegal elver trade in the Western Hemisphere, with almost all of the eels going through Canada on their way to Asia,” he says. 

Being a central hub for the eel trade across the Americas, Canada would have been “in a really strong place to play a positive, constructive role in regulating the international trade,” Jordan says. He thinks a stronger stance would have levelled the playing field for Canadian harvesters, who are currently held to a higher standard than in other countries. 

Yet Mitchell Feigenbaum, a commercial licence holder with a fishing business based in New Brunswick and member of an industry group, says while licence holders agree illegal trade is a problem, they were opposed to the listing.

Feigenbaum says initially, he saw a listing as just “more red tape.” But he became concerned when he saw the text of the proposal, which identified American and Japanese eel at serious risk of becoming endangered without regulation. He felt the push for the listing was an attempt by “environmentalists and scientists with a particular predisposition” to call into question the conservation status of eel. “It really just felt like it’s a slap in the face, or … a strategic move by opponents of the fishery to gain a political advantage.”

Feigenbaum suggested American eel are resilient and can recover when their population is depleted, pointing to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s 2015 decision not to list American eel as threatened. In its statement at the convention, the Canadian government referred to a 2025 Fisheries and Oceans scientific report indicating that populations were stable. 

Not everyone sees eel populations that way. 

Kerry Prosper, Mi’kmaw Elder and councillor for Paqtnkek First Nation, has been fishing and working with eels most of his life. In recent years, he’s noticed a significant decline in the population of adult eels that community members once fished for food. “It’s quite a contrast that we’re in, and it’s so sad.” 

Paqtnkek was offered a licence for the elver fishery by Fisheries and Oceans Canada, but turned it down, Prosper says. “We simply don’t have faith in their management plans.”

In 1990, a Supreme Court case known as Sparrow ruled that First Nations had the right to food, social and ceremonial fisheries, putting that right above commercial and recreational fisheries. Prosper says the ruling is being disregarded, and he worries the harvesting of baby eels harms the adult population, putting food security at risk.

Harvesting and exporting eels for commercial profit shouldn’t come “at the cost of the species itself and the Indigenous people who live near where it comes from,” he says. “It’s just total disregard and disrespect to the animal and to the people.”

Schleit, with Oceans North, points out that stability of the American eel population in recent decades comes after a period of steep decline. In its stock assessment, Fisheries and Oceans noted that the species has likely declined by more than 50 per cent since 1980 

Federal government announces American eel will not be added to species at risk

On Tuesday, the federal government announced they would not be listing American eel under Canada’s Species At Risk Act. In a statement, Fisheries and Oceans Canada said it had determined that the Fisheries Act “is most effective for conserving the species while also providing the greatest overall socio-economic benefits to Canadians.”

Not classifying eel as a species at risk could be an acceptable decision from a sustainability perspective, Schleit says, but the government still needs to demonstrate how else they’re effectively managing the species. By not promoting a CITES listing, she says Canada missed a chance to show global leadership.

In a statement, Fisheries and Oceans Canada spokesperson Barre Campbell confirmed that Canada voted against the listing, and said Canada “is committed to the sustainable and orderly management of fisheries for eel and elver.” He also said that the American eel did not meet criteria required for a CITES listing, which requires a 70 percent population decline, and that CITES regulations would create duplication for Canadian harvesters. 

Despite their opposition to the listing, many countries, including Canada, recognized the existence of an issue at CITES, and approved a non-binding resolution to work together to address illegal trade. Schleit says it’s possible to build on that momentum to continue to enact stronger protections for eels. In the meantime, she says, these enigmatic species remain at risk.

“European eel basically got traded to the point where it crashed,” she says. “We see a strong chance that that’s going to happen again with American eel.”

This story was updated on Dec. 5, 2025, at 11:05 ET to correct the units of measurement of Canada’s commercial quota for elvers.

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Just outside the town of Port Hawkesbury, N.S., the shoreline of the Strait of Canso is dotted with industry. “For Nova Scotia, this is one of the last outposts of industrial activity,” Amanda Mombourquette says, steering her SUV. Out one window, towering mounds of coal are piled outside the Point Tupper Generating Station, while tanks and pipelines from a former oil refinery carve up the slope. A short distance down the road, Nova Scotia’s last papermill standing stretches across the hill.

Although the area supports hundreds of jobs, there’s little traffic on a sunny October afternoon. Pulling her car to the side of Industrial Park Road, Mombourquette, who’s the deputy warden for the County of Richmond, and Brenda Chisholm-Beaton, mayor of neighbouring Port Hawkesbury, note that teenagers often use the road to learn how to drive. 

Yet Chisholm-Beaton and Mombourquette have become regular travellers on this road. For the last several years, they’ve been taking people on tours of the area, to pitch its involvement in a new type of industry: offshore wind.

“Our strong feeling is that if there are industries that are going to be located here and we’re going to ask our communities to engage and participate and to support these industries, there should also be a benefit to our communities,” Mombourquette says. 

They’re not alone in spying an opportunity. In Atlantic Canada, many are looking to offshore wind as a transformational force, providing renewable power in a province still heavily dependent on coal for electricity. Offshore wind could also provide a much-needed economic boost for coastal communities and the province. The impact might not stop there: in September, Nova Scotia’s pitch to export 60 gigawatts offshore wind to provide over a quarter of Canada’s electricity, dubbed Wind West Atlantic Energy, was included on a list of projects of potential national interest: it’s not quite developed enough to make the Liberals’ first two rounds of projects considered for fast-tracking, but it’s in their sightlines. 

Yet the rollout of nation-building renewable energy must also strike a delicate balance between the need for power and the effect that gigawatt-scale wind generation will have on an ecosystem that many Nova Scotians already rely on for their livelihoods, particularly fishers.

The industry is moving toward that, with the regulator now conducting the first round of public consultation that could lead to a licence for a project developer, though it’ll be years before the blades start spinning. Either way, few deny that offshore wind, whenever it unfurls, could be transformative — just not in a way that everyone welcomes. 

Optimal conditions for offshore wind offer economic promise for Nova Scotia communities

The phrase “world-class” gets bandied about a lot in Nova Scotia, in relation to everything from golf courses to Halifax’s convention centre, but when it comes to offshore wind, it’s demonstrably true. Far from land, wind speeds here average nine to 11 metres per second. This is comparable to Europe’s North Sea, which already has a thriving offshore wind industry.

Importantly, unlike Canada’s west coast, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland are surrounded by broad continental shelves. The Scotian Shelf provides a wide swath of relatively shallow seabed on which to build turbines, making offshore wind appealing financially — though scientists say that’s also what makes it appealing to marine life, and therefore fishers.

In recent years, legislation has emerged to support the industry. Offshore energy on the east coast is jointly regulated by the federal government and the provinces of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador. Historically this meant petroleum, but in 2024, the Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board’s scope was expanded to include offshore wind (with Newfoundland’s regulator following suit in 2025). 

The province and federal government have also conducted a regional assessment, meant to assess the potential impacts of the industry on the environment, local communities and other ocean users, and to support the identification of potential locations. That assessment was released in January, and in July, Nova Scotia designated four wind energy areas, located at least 20 kilometres off the province’s eastern shore and the northeast edge of Cape Breton.

While offshore wind could have broad economic benefits — with the province eyeing a four per cent royalty from offshore production, as well as jobs for more than 5,000 workers in construction and associated supply chain industries — it has the potential to be particularly impactful for communities close to the sites.

This includes the Port Hawkesbury region, which has a deep, ice-free port that could be used to marshal offshore wind components like blades and turbines. The town also has a community college campus, where the province’s first wind turbine technician program is launching September 2026. 

Green industry is key to the region’s future, Mombourquette says. She also hopes it could bring more affordable electricity to her constituents, who regularly tell her they can’t pay their power bills. It could also ease the transition from the area’s industrial past — nearly 100 people currently work at the Point Tupper’s generating plant, for instance, which will have to stop burning coal by 2030. 

“What’s going to happen to those people and what kind of economic impact will that have on the town, and on the county?” Mombourquette says. “It’s a concern.”

The Municipality of the District of Guysborough, directly to the south of Port Hawkesbury, is also looking to wind for a more sustainable future.

Three of the proposed wind energy areas are off Guysborough County, where existing infrastructure could be used for the industry, including a former plant for offshore gas, where power generated by wind could be transmitted ashore via underwater cables. Paul Long, warden of the municipality hopes this infrastructure could attract development to support the area’s small and spread-out population, which is older and lower-income than the rest of the province. 

“We’re losing a lot of our young people,” he says. “We need development to ensure that our residents get all the services and infrastructure that they deserve like anybody else. If we had to rely on our residential tax rate, it would not be a pretty situation.”

Some people aren’t as convinced. 

Fishers worry about possible impacts to Nova Scotia’s seafood industry

Ninety minutes down the shore from Port Hawkesbury, at the end of a long peninsula jutting into the Atlantic, sits the community of Canso. This has been a settler fishing community since the 1600s and a site of Mi’kmaw fishing long before that, and from a small building on the edge of town, the Guysborough County Inshore Fishermen’s Association continues to support people fishing for lobster, halibut, snowcrab and tuna along the county’s long coastline. 

“We fish whatever we can because if we have a little bit from each, then you’re not putting too much effort on a single stock,” Ginny Boudreau, the association’s executive director and one of its three employees, says.

For the past two years, Boudreau says much the organization’s time, has been taken up with offshore wind, even though “We don’t have a stick in the water yet.”

Two of the designated areas overlap with places where her members fish, Boudreau says. The association has had to respond to new legislation and the regional assessment, as well as develop a system to track vessels through the areas designated for turbines, to get a comprehensive picture of where people are currently fishing.

That location data is important; the Scotian Shelf is heavily fished, with few areas unexploited. Many people have fished the same spots for decades — and as wind turbines move in, fishers fear they’ll be muscled out. 

In Cape Breton, Michael Barron fishes for lobster, crab and halibut in Sydney Bight, where a 1,300-square-kilometre area has been designated for potential offshore wind. Barron, the president of his own local fishing association, worries about people having to move because turbines are in their way or disrupting fish migration patterns. 

Barron points out that Nova Scotia’s seafood is its main export commodity, valued at $2.4 billion annually. The price of getting into the fishery is hefty: a lobster licence can cost upwards a million dollars and a fishing vessel at least half that. 

“Younger captains are taking on a lot of financial debt,” Barron says. “They need good catch rates. They need good weather. They need lots of fishing grounds to be able to explore … to generate the income to pay those debts that they incurred to become part of a historical tradition.”

Despite that, Barron says there’s been “next to no” consultation with his association from the provincial and federal governments. While he says he’s not against green energy, he wants to see more engagement with the people on the water.

Even without turbines, those fishers are already facing uncertainty — catches for snow crab in Cape Breton this year were “catastrophically bad,” Barron says, though he notes that can’t yet be attributed to climate change. 

Boudreau is worried about those shifts too. Her members know better than anyone that climate change is happening: they see it every day on the water. And for environmental reasons as much as economic ones, she thinks offshore wind is inevitable. 

Given that, she wants a clear plan for how wind and fisheries will co-exist — and a written commitment of who will be holding the bag if they can’t. She says the province promised a framework for compensation, though her association is still waiting to see it.

In an emailed response, Nova Scotia Department of Energy spokesperson Adele Poirier said that offshore wind is a “proven technology that’s used successfully in other parts of the world and co-exists with fisheries, among other users of the ocean.” The statement also noted that federal and provincial governments have been consulting on offshore wind for years, and have already addressed some concerns from fishers.

On compensation, the department pointed to a provincial roadmap, which said compensation would be considered if co-existence is not possible. 

Robert Lennox, an associate professor of biology at Dalhousie University, says research could assuage concerns about potential impacts.

Those include turbines’ impacts on winds and currents, which could affect water cycling and the distribution of larval fish and lobsters.

Lennox, who is scientific director of the Ocean Tracking Network, says tracking technology could figure out how animals are moving through wind energy areas and what happens after turbines are installed. 

“We haven’t been prioritizing tracking them at these locations,” he says.

The organization plans to use its own funds to deploy a network of receivers in the Sydney Bight area, to help nudge those questions towards an answer, Lennox says. These receivers pick up the acoustic signal of tagged animals, though only those tagged by other similar groups around the region. 

One scientist says there’s also a wealth of government data that could be used to inform where wind turbines should go.

Kenneth Frank, a former Fisheries and Oceans Canada scientist who retired in 2019, says when he read the report from the regional assessment that informed the selection of areas for turbines, he was shocked by how it characterized the Scotian Shelf. 

The report made the shelf’s outer banks look like “biological deserts,” he says, rather than drawing on “a mountain of data” from existing surveys that show the ecosystem’s productivity. Frank was paid by the Seafood Producers Association of Nova Scotia to submit a comment on the report, though he says he probably would have done it without payment. 

“They’ve chosen the least desirable areas from a conservation perspective. They chose the shallowest areas on the shelf,” he says, speculating that this was for economic reasons. “There are areas that are far less productive but they happen to be in deeper water.”

The Department of Energy said in a statement that all feedback was considered in the designation of the four offshore wind energy areas, including Fisheries and Oceans feedback on biological considerations.

As climate change intensifies in Atlantic Canada, residents prepare for an uncertain future

These developments come amid a grim period for climate impacts in Nova Scotia. Over the summer, the province experienced multiple wildfires and a record-breaking drought.

Meanwhile, in the ocean, scientists reported a warming trend on the Scotian shelf, with a 3 C increase in bottom temperatures over a three decade period. 

It’s a reminder that with or without offshore wind, change is coming to the region. 

Driving along the Strait of Canso, Chisholm-Beaton and Mombourquette point out the ports that could receive components for offshore wind, musing about the other businesses that could benefit, like a local metal fabricator.

Those benefits could help the region chart a new path. For decades, many people in Nova Scotia, including Mombourquette’s husband, have had to leave the province for work. “It has a direct social impact on communities that I’ve been thinking about for a very long time, having gone through the experience of raising two kids with a husband who works out west back and forth.” Building a local wind industry could break that cycle, Mombourquette says. 

From the back seat, Chisholm-Beaton chimes in: “Export wind and not people.”

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When I ask Ricky Hicks about his business, he tells me about fishing. When I ask him about fishing, he says it’s so much bigger than business.

“Fishing is life,” he says.

Hicks’s business is a mobile tackle shop that he drags from the Northumberland Strait, which separates Prince Edward Island from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, to the Bay of Fundy.

“Wherever the fish are running,” Hicks says. “That’s where I’ll be.”

One of the fish he follows is the striped bass, a once-threatened species that has made a dramatic comeback in Atlantic Canada. From collapsing salmon runs to dwindling smelt populations, the limits of the ecosystem are being tested, and some say the big fish are among the stressors. Federal regulators have reopened commercial access to striped bass — and a conservation triumph has become a flashpoint for the region’s ecological and economic future.

Hicks says he’s usually on the Shubenacadie River, north of Halifax, in the spring for the spawning season. Then he heads to the Bay of Fundy for the summer and back to the Shubenacadie before the fish migrate into the lakes for the winter.

He makes a business of knowing where the fish are because he is supported by a network of striped bass anglers.

“I sell them all the stuff that they need to be successful,” Hicks says. He teaches them what he learned through years of observation.

“Bass are very temperature-temperamental. If it’s too cold they’re not moving. If it’s too warm they move offshore to cooler waters,” he says. 

Hicks sells bait to fishermen from as far away as Quebec and Maine, all travelling to Nova Scotia to catch striped bass.

Federal moves on striped bass divide commercial and recreational fishermen

The salmon fishery on the Miramichi River in New Brunswick has lured recreational anglers since at least the 19th century. The population on the river suffered as time went on, part of a trend Fisheries and Oceans Canada has tracked since the 1970s. Atlantic salmon populations declined by 68 per cent from 2003 to 2019 on the Miramichi, according to a research document prepared for the federal Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada in 2023.Factors affecting Atlantic salmon include high water temperatures, predators and other ecosystem changes caused by climate change and other human-induced pressures, the federal department told The Narwhal in an email.

Martin Mallet, the executive director of the Maritime Fishermen’s Union, says among those pressures is the explosion of striped bass. Salmon fishermen aren’t among his members, but he says the massive predator species is affecting other commercial catches, including lobster, herring, mackerel, gaspereau and smelts.

Mallet says it’s not just a question of predation. Striped bass get tangled in fishing gear and damage equipment and it’s “creating havoc for our fishermen,” he says.

In June, the Maritime Fishermen’s Union made an emergency request to Fisheries and Oceans Canada, asking the federal department to reopen the striped bass fishery for commercial bycatch — unwanted fish and marine creatures caught during commercial fishing for a different species — for the first time since 1996. The department complied: the order requires gaspereau harvesters to keep the first 500 striped bass caught each day between 50 and 65 centimetres and return the rest. 

At the same time, the department took other measures to manage striped bass stock. It reopened a section of the Northwest Miramichi River where striped bass spawn and raised the recreational limit on the Gulf of St. Lawrence from three to four fish per day. Fisheries and Oceans Canada also increased the Indigenous allocation of striped bass by 125,000 fish in July, an amount to be shared among First Nations in the gulf region, in addition to the 50,000 granted to Natoaganeg First Nation in 2018.

Mallet says his union didn’t request an emergency bycatch measure to protect salmon, but to protect commercial fishermen and their livelihood. He says early in the season, fishermen were catching so many striped bass they had to throw back their whole catch, losing days of work. 

“These are expenses for our fishermen,” he says. “Direct losses to their business. So, by enabling our fishermen to keep a portion of the bycatch … our guys can sell those and recuperate their costs.” Striped bass are an enormous potential resource, he says, especially since bycatch fish released from lobster traps often die anyway. 

Mallet says the new regulations were a step in the right direction. “We still think we need to go a little bit further,” he says, adding that while the union wants a healthy fishery, he’s not out to “destroy the striped bass population.” 

“There’s a balance there that needs to be met. We did not have this predation five to 10 years ago,” he says. 

Mike Brideau, a fishing guide on the Miramichi, disagrees. Posting on Facebook about the federal order, he echoed the fears of striped bass anglers in New Brunswick.

“Enjoy the fishery. It’s not going to be around forever,” Brideau wrote, warning the changes could crash the striped bass population.

Striped bass made a big comeback. But are they safe?

Brideau guides all over the province, living out of a tent to target different species for his clients, a nomadic lifestyle that is “part of the fun of the game.” He says he can adapt if bass stocks fail, but he thinks Fisheries and Oceans Canada doesn’t have any understanding of what fishermen remove from the water.

“Anecdotally, I can already say I feel the bass are past their peak in growth [in population] due to our shift in regulations,” he told The Narwhal in an email. “There’s no way the population can withstand taking upwards of a third of itself year over year.”

Tommi Linnansaari, the Atlantic salmon research chair at the University of New Brunswick, supports the re-opening of the commercial striped bass fishery as a pro-salmon move. 

“The predatory pressure could become large enough that the recovery of the salmon population is no longer possible,” he says. 

But he also says it’s unclear how much the striped bass population can shrink before triggering a catastrophic collapse like the one seen in the 1990s. He says the recreational fishery is a large “grey box,” since it is unlicensed and unmonitored and the impact of the increased First Nations quota and renewed commercial fishing won’t show up for at least a few years, as fishermen change their operations to accommodate new species. 

For now, “I do support the striped bass harvest levels,” Linnansaari says. “I don’t know yet whether it could withstand a larger harvest but I do think that we should see how this plays out.”Trevor Avery is the head of the striped bass research team at Acadia University. He says the success of the species should be received with cautious optimism, especially since numbers are trending downward since the population peaked.

“There’s a lot of them, but they only spawn in two places,” Avery says. “That level of threat is increased if their spawning area is impacted by humans or industry.”

Striped bass may be threatened by overfishing, pollution and water flow changes that affect habitat, according to a Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada report from 2004.

Better monitoring needed to identify true threats to Atlantic salmon

Avery says it’s easier for federal and local management efforts to affect striped bass because it is a coastal species, while salmon are targeted by offshore industrial fishing operations across the globe.

“Salmon go on these long treks, you know, up to Greenland or across to the U.K., and then they get vacuumed up in commercial fishing there,” he says. Fisheries and Oceans agrees, telling The Narwhal declining Atlantic salmon isn’t just a Miramichi River issue. Rivers throughout the eastern provinces, Quebec and Europe have seen substantial declines as well.

That’s one reason Avery says he isn’t convinced striped bass is the problem. 

“In a lot of these rivers we don’t find striped bass,” Avery says. “So, this smoking gun, direct effect of saying striped bass are eating all the salmon on the Miramichi … may not be the full picture.”

He adds that there were high populations of both salmon and striped bass in the past. “All that data is quite clearly there over the last 100 years,” he says. “It’s only recently that we have this mismatch in things where we have lots more striped bass and fewer salmon.” 

Linnansaari and Avery both want better monitoring of Atlantic fish, including measuring environmental and industrial impacts. With proper management, Avery says he believes the populations can co-exist.

“We don’t sacrifice one species for another. That’s not a conservation measure that has ever had any lasting good effects.”

Across much of the eastern seaboard, striped bass conservation has become a rallying cry. In the United States, the fish is managed under the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission through the Interstate Fishery Management Plan, supported by the federal Atlantic Striped Bass Conservation Act. When stocks decline, managers call emergency meetings, implement catch reductions and seasonal closures and tighten recreational and commercial rules. 

By contrast, in Atlantic Canada the recovery of the Gulf of St. Lawrence stock occurred under federal control, with limited public engagement and little regional coordination, the scientists say.

In Brideau’s opinion, Fisheries and Oceans Canada should close the salmon fishery on the Miramichi, instead of “trying to say we need to critically intervene in nature through killing native species.” He says the major threats to salmon are clear: increasing water temperatures due to climate change, commercial angling, forestry — which can degrade salmon habitats by altering waterflow, nutrients and sediment — and aquaculture, which can spread pathogens such as sea lice from farmed salmon to wild populations.

Every year, Brideau purchases a Crown reserve spot — a special fishing parcel in an area owned by the federal government, managed to control pressure on the fish population. He uses it to count the few salmon that remain, without catching any.

“I have no interest in harassing a species that’s on life support,” he says.

A house divided

Linnansaari sees the current move to reduce the predatory species as just one of two potential solutions. The other is to supplement the prey. “We should actually increase the salmon population,” he says.

This would encourage working together across fishing interests, and could be a more fertile approach, says Linnansaari.

But that approach, too, is debated. The North Atlantic Salmon Conservation Organization has said supplementing salmon can compromise the fitness of wild populations through interbreeding and pathogens. It also won’t help commercial fishing that targets other species, like those the Maritime Fishermen’s Union focuses on. 

Avery agrees that progress depends on co-operation.

“I think if we sit in two different camps, we’re going to stall,” Avery says. 

Hicks manages his own business amid the politics. Today there are more than 35,000 members in the Nova Scotia Striped Bass Facebook group and 29,000 in the NB Striped Bass Sports Fishing group, all of them looking to join the exclusive 40-inch club by snagging a lunker.

“I see a lot of new faces every year,” he says. “I do help them catch fish. I don’t just sell them fishing gear.”

The idea is to get them hooked.

“Some people are in it for life.”

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

At the top of a squat hill overlooking the Shubenacadie River, Dorene Bernard swings her SUV around to face a building clad in blue plastic siding. It’s a nondescript factory for plastic packaging, but the space it occupies is distinct. “[It’s] sitting in the footprint of where the school was,” Dorene says.

Between 1929 and 1967, more than a thousand Mi’kmaw and Wolastoqiyik children from around the Maritimes, as well as the Gaspé region in Quebec, were sent to this spot in Nova Scotia: the site of the former Shubenacadie Indian Residential School, the only federal residential school in the region. (The Maritimes includes New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Newfoundland and Labrador had its own residential schools, but these were not part of the federal system and only received an apology from Canada in 2017, nine years after the prime minister apologized to residential school students on behalf of the Government of Canada.)

In 1986, the school was demolished, and the plastics factory built in its place. Still, something of the school remains: in a semi-circle at the bottom of the school’s former driveway, three plaques lay out the history of the Shubenacadie residential school in English and French, as well as two orthographies each of Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqey.

From 1828 to 1997, 140 federal residential schools operated across Canada. When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission issued its Calls to Action in 2015, recommendation 79 addressed incorporating reconciliation in heritage work — including developing a national plan and strategy for commemorating school sites. Since then, the federal government has designated a handful of former schools as national historic sites; Shubenacadie was one of the first, in 2020. This fall, a commemorative park will open a short distance from the school, culminating the work of memorialization. 

For survivors and their descendants, many of whom have worked for years to have sites officially recognized, the designations are a complex phenomenon: former schools remain profoundly painful places and some communities have fought to have schools demolished. But while the history of residential schools is indelible for many survivors, collective memory is slippery, and among survivor groups, a patient effort is underway to preserve something of that past — to ensure Canada doesn’t forget what happened in residential schools, and what it took to survive them. 

“We want our descendants, and the ones that are to come to have a place to come learn about who they are … what our ancestors came through, [and] honour that, so that they can take that strength,” Dorene says. “That’s what this work is all about.”

Survivors led process for Shubenacadie commemoration

Dorene’s family bookends the school’s existence. Her father started when it opened in 1929; she and her siblings were some of the last to leave. When Dorene recalls the years she spent there, her voice is quiet. She felt abandoned, she says. Her older sister tried to take care of her, but despite those efforts, Dorene witnessed and was subjected to beatings and other forms of physical abuse; in one particularly awful moment, she remembers a nun sitting her on a stack of phone books while a travelling dentist pulled eight of her teeth without medication, resulting in jaw pain that affects her to this day. 

After the remaining children left in 1967, the imposing brick building sat empty for nearly 20 years, growing increasingly derelict. In the 1980s, a fire tore through the school, and shortly thereafter, the structure was demolished. In her book Out of the Depths, survivor Isabelle Knockwood recalls survivors gathering for the demolition and cheering as the wrecking ball tore through the walls. “There was no sadness, no tears at seeing the building finally being punished and beaten for having robbed so many Indian children of the natural wonders and simple pleasures of growing up,” she wrote. 

The demolition, and the visits survivors made to the school in the days leading up to it, marked a beginning for survivors collectively unpacking their experiences. In 1995, a group of Shubenacadie survivors led by Nora Bernard filed the first class-action lawsuit against Canada for compensation to residential school survivors. The suit precipitated a flurry of additional lawsuits that eventually resulted in the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement in 2007, which compensated tens of thousands of survivors. Another outcome of that agreement was the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Years later, when the Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre, an organization founded to preserve Mi’kmaw history and historic sites, began to work on the recommendations of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission, survivors were once again clear what they wanted: “[They said] ‘We want to make sure Canada — the world — never forgets what has happened to us at this place. So, we want to see the school designated as a national historic site,’ ” Tim Bernard, executive director of the cultural centre, says.

Tim’s own experience is a testament to the importance of having a record. In 1998, an Elder showed him a photograph of residents obtained from the archive of the Sisters of Charity — the nuns who staffed the school — vowing she was going to track down the name of every child in it. When she came back, she pointed out two boys: Tim’s father and uncle.

Tim had had no idea they had been taken there — his father had passed away, after a struggle with alcoholism, having never discussed his experiences. “For me, it heightens my awareness around trauma, and the impacts of trauma,” he says. It also made work to have the school designated personal, though he emphasizes it’s been led by survivors. 

Guided by those survivors, Tim sent a request in 2019 for a designation to Parks Canada, and in 2020, the federal government declared the former school a national historic site. The plaques were unveiled on Truth and Reconciliation Day a year later. Dorene, who led engagement work for the centre, says survivors had a lot of input into the wording — and insisted that it state that survivors considered residential school policy to be genocide. 

Being a national historic site doesn’t come with a lot of resources, Tim says. Still, the designation is a testament to the fact that survivors’ stories are true. 

“Other than us putting the plaques up, you would never know that the school was there,” he says. “I think that was [survivors’] intention, to remind people that this is a dark part of our history.”

Indigenous communities vary in approaches to former school sites

The National Program of Historical Commemoration has existed for more than a century. For much of its existence, its tone was celebratory, but that’s changed in the last several decades, Dominique Foisy-Geoffroy, director of history and commemoration for Parks Canada, says.

“Commemoration was seen as something generally positive, something to celebrate. Now it’s a bit different.”

The program is driven almost entirely by public requests and there are two main sets of criteria: sites must have national historic significance and have existed for at least 40 years. The federal government also designated the residential school system an event of national significance in 2019.

Following the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report, Foisy-Geoffroy says, Parks Canada began collaborating with Indigenous communities to determine what they wanted done with former schools. While some wanted a historic site designation, responses ranged, and others turned down federal commemoration: for some, demolishing buildings has been the more important step towards healing.

So far, five sites have been designated. Parks Canada focused its outreach on larger institutions where the main buildings are still standing, though Shubenacadie was prioritized as the only former site in the Maritimes. “It’s the history that is at the core of it, not [the buildings’] architectural value, of course. But the building is still important,” Foisy-Geoffroy says.

Since the 1960s, many school buildings have been torn down, though roughly 50 are still standing and in use — as gymnasiums, staff residencies and other outbuildings, including as schools. Others serve as offices, cultural centres or housing. At one — the former St. Eugene Mission School, on Ktunaxa territory near Cranbrook, B.C. — the Ktunaxa/Kinbasket Tribal Council applied for a national historic site designation in 1996. That application was rejected after the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs intervened, arguing commemoration decisions should be delayed until after the release of the final report by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, according to an essay published in the Journal of the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada. So instead, the five bands who share the land turned the school into a golf course and resort owned by the Ktunaxa Nation.

At other sites, communities have set aside school buildings as testimony to the residential school era, including the Portage La Prairie Residential School in Manitoba, which operated from 1891 to 1975. It’s on the Treaty 1 territory of the reserve lands of Long Plain First Nation, for which Dennis Meeches served as chief for 20 years, starting in 1998. 

By the time Meeches entered politics, the federal government had transferred the 45-acre school site to the nation, as part of a treaty land entitlement claim. For a time, the building hosted Yellowquill College, Manitoba’s first Indigenous-owned and operated post-secondary institution. Then, in the early 2000s, a Knowledge Keeper told Meeches the building should be converted to a museum. 

“I thought that actually made really good sense, in terms of being able to provide some education and awareness to [not only] Indigenous people … but everybody in general,” he says. “It was a sacred project in my eyes.”

In 2003, Long Plain declared the former school a historic site and began amassing material for the collection of what it named the National Indigenous Residential School Museum. Seventeen years later, the federal government issued its own designation— a step Meeches says was important, given the federal government’s role in the residential school system. Ultimately, he hopes being a national historic site will serve to bolster the vision for the museum.

Watching the plaque unveiling this past August, Meeches thought of what it took for his parents and grandparents to survive the system. Survivors are aging and passing away, he says, even as denial about the reality of residential schools continues to circulate — making it important to preserve a record of that history.

Nonetheless, not every community has wanted schools preserved. For years, c̓išaaʔatḥ (Tseshaht First Nation) on Vancouver Island has been demolishing the buildings of the former Alberni Indian Residential School. Today, just the gymnasium and the main building, called Caldwell Hall, remain, with demolition of the hall set to happen within a year. 

Elected Chief Councillor Wahmeesh (Ken Watts) says the presence of Caldwell Hall is an open wound in the community. While the nation’s leadership has had discussions with Parks Canada about a designation, they haven’t made a formal decision about how to proceed. “We were a little bit worried about what that actually meant … does that restrict us?” he says. “Even internally we asked ourselves, ‘Why should we let somebody designate something a historic site they were a part of creating in the first place?’ ”

Watts says they haven’t closed the door on a designation eventually, but for now, they’re listening to the community — and the community has been clear they want the buildings gone. “More important than giving some place a designation is actually tearing down and rebuilding new so that our community can heal.”

Other existing schools, like Shingwauk Indian Residential School on Robinson-Huron Treaty territory in Ontario, accepted a designation but turned down a plaque; survivors opted to use the money to restore an existing monument instead. 

Federal funding allocated to supporting national historic site designations ended in March 2025, but Foisy-Geoffroy says Parks Canada is committed to continuing to work with interested communities, with several more designations in the works. 

“All this is part of who we are … so it’s a way for us to make sure people — non-Indigenous and Indigenous alike — better understand their own history, and eventually try to build a better future, she says.

Commemoration honours survivors, keeps history alive

When Elmer Lewis started at the Shubenacadie residential school, he was five years old. He was given a number — one — which also put him first in line for punishments like humiliation for wetting the bed. “It’s hard to ever forget anything,” he says. “It’ll always be with me.”

For three years, Elmer stayed at the school year-round. It wasn’t until he was eight that he was allowed to return home for the summer, via the “freedom road” — the school’s driveway, which Elmer still dreams about, decades later. 

In 2021, on June 21— the annual date children were allowed to leave for the summer — survivors and their descendants gathered on that driveway and walked the half-kilometre route children once took to the train station that would take them back home.

The march now takes place every year. Elmer’s daughter Tara Lewis, from Eskasoni First Nation, started the event to honour her father after he shared a dream about a march on freedom day. Tara grew up visiting the site with her dad, and now takes her own children there. She says it’s important to keep the history of residential schools alive, and seeing survivors and descendants travel the route from the school to the train station made that history real. 

“I was so moved, because I could just picture my dad as a little boy. And I could see my dad, you know, 75 years old, walking and marching, not with sadness but with pride because he’s resilient and he’s a survivor,” she says.

This fall, Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre is unveiling a commemorative park and monument to celebrate the resilience of survivors and descendants, close enough to the school to see the former site, but far away enough that people feel safe. Tim says when the centre asked survivors what they wanted out of a commemorative park, they talked about a place that centred not on the school, but on hope and reclamation and how despite “everything that’s happened to us, look at all the good news stories … that we’ve been able to achieve.”

For Dorene, the park is the culmination of a long journey: first as a survivor, then as someone who’s spent over a decade working on commemoration. “This has been a long process and I think maybe it had to be that way,” she says, watching heavy equipment prepare the park in early September. 

She says it’s hard that in the time it’s taken to get the designation and start commemoration projects, so many survivors of the school have passed. There are at most a few hundred left. But the monument will stand as a reminder for future generations of what their ancestors came through.

Back by the school site, Dorene puts down tobacco at a place set aside for ceremonies on the banks of the Shubenacadie River. The day before, she had drummed for a baby-and-me group. Watching children do the things residential school had once taken from her, Dorene says, was like seeing her prayers come to life in front of her. “That’s where we should be,” she says. “That’s the power of our people coming, and I don’t see that going away ever again.”

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