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.

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.”

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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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After 24 days of being forbidden from entering the forest, some Nova Scotians are returning to nature. The province lifted its wildfire-related ban in Halifax and counties farther northeast on Aug. 29, with Premier Tim Houston saying in a news release that conditions were “heading in the right direction in certain parts of the province.” 

Every Atlantic province had some form of fire or burning restriction at different points during the dry summer of 2025, but Nova Scotia invited fresh controversy when it banned all access to the woods provincewide on Aug. 5. The province set its fine for violating the woods ban at $25,000, the same amount it fines those that set illegal fires. According to CBC, more than $1 million in fines has been issued for illegal burning in the last two and a half years. 

New Brunswick followed Nova Scotia’s lead and restricted industrial and recreational activities on Crown land, a ban that was mostly lifted on Aug. 26. 

Nova Scotia’s problems aren’t over. Crews are still battling fires in Long Lake, along the province’s north shore in the Annapolis Valley region. Despite the continued risk and considerable damage — over 1,000 residents were evacuated because of the Long Lake fire and 20 homes were lost — not everyone agrees with the restriction on entering the woods, which remains in place in 11 of the province’s 18 counties. In mid-August, Jeff Evely of Westmount, N.S., recorded himself violating the ban.

“I want to challenge this in court,” Evely says to Department of Natural Resources officers in the video. “And the only way for me to do that is to get the fine. So, I’m not trying to make trouble for you guys, okay? I just want a piece of Tim Houston and I want to be as accommodating and as nice as I can be.”

Evely, a veteran who was a People’s Party of Canada candidate for Sydney-Glace Bay in last spring’s federal election, wasn’t alone. The social media response to the woods ban invoked COVID-inspired debates about safety and government overreach. 

Opinions were just as mixed last weekend in Halifax’s Point Pleasant Park and Shubie Park in Dartmouth, as families, dog-walkers and runners headed back into the woods. Some parkgoers said they were glad to follow the rules to help keep the province safe from fire, while others said at least some public spaces should have stayed open. 

Everyone said they were happy to be back.

Interviews have been condensed and edited for clarity.

Point Pleasant Park — Halifax

James Byers, public servant

What he was doing in the park: walking his dog.

“It gets boring walking the same routes and I like feeling grounded, but I think the ban was a good preventative measure and I think that most people respected it. I had coworkers that lost their cottages and had to evacuate last year with the fires out in the Beechville, Hammonds Plains area.

We did our camping and our summer trips earlier in the season, so it didn’t impact our vacation plans. We had family who went camping and couldn’t light a fire but they still had a good time.”

Chris Webster, student, and Lauren Theriault, film and television costumer

What they were doing in the park: walking their dog.

Theriault: “We’ve had a sad dog. It was really hard because it was too hot during the day to walk her on pavement.”

Webster: “It’s been a long month and a half. I think the worst thing was trying to get the unhoused community in Halifax out of the woods. They have nowhere else to go and they’re already kicking them out of encampments. They go to the woods to get away from the city that they’re being kicked out of and then they’re being kicked out of the woods.”

Abdoulaye Barry, founder, Ten Toes Down run club

What he was doing in the park: leading a run.

“I’m the type of guy that loves the outside, and every member here loves Point Pleasant. We tried running at [a local track called] The Oval but a lot of people didn’t like it that much.

Honestly, Point Pleasant, there’s no better place to run. I think a place like this should always be open to the public, because everyone has reasons why they’re here. For the run club, it’s health benefits, right? Social benefit and psychological growth.

I live downtown in an apartment that has a gym and equipment. So, when it came to physical fitness, I had other [options], but I’m sure other people were affected.”

Jay Gaerlan, digital creator

What he was doing in the park: running with Ten Toes Down.

“This community really started in Point Pleasant Park. To have that taken away was really awful. It feels good to be back. A lot of people relieve stress by being in nature. It felt like something was missing.  

We almost had to evacuate when there was a fire in Bayer’s Lake. My house was like a kilometre away.”

Shubie Park — Dartmouth, N.S.

Jared MacPhee, comic artist

What he was doing in the park: walking his dog.

“I have a very high-maintenance dog and the ban prevented me from going to parks in the area, so he was going stir crazy in my house.

I thought it was reasonable. I understand the precautions. Obviously, I don’t want forest fires. Obviously, post-COVID you never like government lockdowns. A bit of a PTSD situation, but I go along with the rules, even if I don’t like them.

There’s a little trail in the woods that we walk every day. It’s just weird, having a little slice of your neighbourhood you’re not allowed to go into anymore.”

Roberto Guebara, chef

What he was doing in the park: showing a friend from Italy “one of the most beautiful parks we have in the city.”

“Feels great, bringing the kids back to breathing fresh air and enjoying the views, seeing this beautiful thing we have here. I’m not really completely in agreement with the ban but we had to follow the rules and respect the fires that were happening.”

Donna King, anesthesia assistant

What she was doing in the park: walking her dog.

“I think it was a little over the top. I wish they’d have kept those city parks open, because it wasn’t deep in the woods. There’s not many places to go in the city. It’s tough not being able to take [my dog] Dino to water.”

Cheryl Cort, retired, and Kimberlee McTaggart, film and television editor

What they were doing in the park: running with the Heart and Sole Running Club.

Cort: “If it had to be, it had to be. We don’t want fires. That’s what they thought was necessary.”

McTaggart: “I’m glad they left the path along Lake Banook open. I really wish they would have opened the waterfront trail, which is a paved path through a tiny bit of woods that people use as commuters.

I like to bikepack and I was hoping to get one more weekend in August. My usual is out to Dollar Lake. That was the only thing that affected me and I wasn’t that upset about it because we needed to do it.

We have a place in Porter’s Lake and there was a fire nearby, mostly in Lake Echo. It didn’t hit us but it hit Mineville Road and it felt like it was on the way.”

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“Eh, we’re humble Canadians,” is how chef Michael Smith sums up the response from Prince Edward Island’s fishermen when he first began raving about their bluefin tuna catch. The American-born chef has been to Sweden, Tanzania and everywhere in between — and he genuinely believes Canada’s tiniest province has some of the world’s most delicious foods. 

But, he says, it took him a while to convince the farmers, fishers and others who harvested its bounty of how special it was. He first landed on the island 35 years ago, and since then has made it his life’s work to persuade them. 

“Sometimes we need an outside perspective to see our very best,” Smith says. “Changing people’s minds on the interesting value of what’s around me here on Prince Edward Island has instinctively been a part of my approach here for 35 years.” 

Today, Smith and his wife own The Inn at Bay Fortune, where he was a young cook all those years ago. Its menu is highly Island-centric, featuring local catch, food grown on the on-site farm and treats picked wild from the land around it. “We’re one of just a handful of restaurants in North America with a full-time forager,” Smith says. Both his latest TV show, Chef on Fire, and cookbook, Wood, Fire & Smoke, celebrate another passion he gets to practice at the inn: cooking over an open flame.

Here’s what Smith had to share about his relationship with the natural world when he sat down to take our Moose Questionnaire. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. 

What’s the most awe-inspiring natural sight you’ve witnessed between the Pacific, Atlantic, 49th parallel and Hudson Bay, i.e. Canada?

I think just getting out on the land around me, on Prince Edward Island. I’ve had the opportunity to travel Canada. I’ve seen the mountains. I’ve seen the Prairies. I stood in the Prairies for the first time and felt like the weight of the continent was on my shoulders in this incredibly visceral way. But I come home, and time and time again, it’s Prince Edward Island. It’s those first glimpses as you dip below the flowers of the quilt — the patchwork quilt of the island. I know this island. I know it inside and out. So when I see it at a distance, I see all that time spent exploring every little corner around me. For me, awe-inspiring is not just this thing that you look at from a distance.

What’s the most awe-inspiring natural site you’ve witnessed outside of Canada?

New Zealand, Tasmania and the Southern Ocean. That feeling of sailing out of Hobart, Tasmania, heading into the great unknown. It’s the only place on the planet where the wind blows unimpeded, completely around the globe. That was pretty awe-inspiring.

Think of three iconic Canadian animals. Choose one each to kiss, marry and kill.

Golly. Well, I guess I would kiss a beaver, marry a fox and kill a bluefin tuna to celebrate.

Name a person or a group doing something meaningful for the environment that everyone should know about.

The good people at the Souris watershed group, the advocacy group for the watersheds in my community. Any of the small advocacy groups that exist around all of us in every community in Canada. They’re not always the big ones that are all well-funded and have a presence. They tend to be just good people that are genuinely concerned with a particular part of the environment around them. Here in eastern Prince Edward Island, the watershed folks are just so committed, and they’ve done such good work. They’ve restored so many of the streams around us and natural habitats. It’s just a joy to see that kind of understanding and connection with a shared environment.

Name one person who could significantly help mitigate the climate crisis if they wanted to.

Hmm, all of us? Our politicians. Everyone. I mean, that’s low-hanging fruit. We all need to do a better job. This idea that somebody else needs to do a better job is where we get stuck and nothing gets done. Every one of us needs to take personal responsibility. 

Outdoor cats, yes or no?

One of the four. Coco’s outdoor, but Nimbus and Delphine and Aurora stay inside. Coco’s nine years old and she always went out, so now it’s like, “Oh, go on.” She comes back, and she leaves us little treasures by the door. She seems to do just fine out there.

Tell us about a time you changed your mind about something, environmental or otherwise.

I’ve changed my mind on organic. Once upon a time, [I saw it as] a shining light on the hill, and now I understand it as barely a starting line. It’s a word, a label. It’s regulated. I don’t trust it, and instead, advocate for what we do on our farm every single day. The culinary farm at The Inn on Bay Fortune is legendary for our sustainable, regenerative agriculture. We’re 10 years in and it’s just crazy how alive our soil is.

When have you tried to change someone else’s mind about something, environmental or otherwise?

I think helping artisan producers around me understand their role in a global economy. I’m not taking credit, but I was very much a part of helping, for instance, local fishermen understand the real value of a bluefin tuna and how they might change their practices to accentuate that value. And other fishery stories. All of them from this place of, “Eh, we’re humble Canadians”: sometimes we need an outside perspective to see our very best. Changing people’s minds on the interesting value of what’s around me here on Prince Edward Island I think has instinctively been a part of my approach here for 35 years.

Rocky Mountains or Great Lakes?

You know, I love looking at the Rocky Mountains, but I’m a sailor at heart, so I’d take 30 knots out of the north any day.

Researchers at Yale University, the France-based Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society and other institutions have found women tend to be more concerned about climate change than men. Why do you think that is?

Because women seem to be just more connected with Mother Earth, and more open to the idea that there’s this thing at our feet that’s alive, that’s with us, and that maybe it’s not just something we should be getting some benefit out of. I mean, obviously it’s a loaded question, and there’s a bunch of different ways I could answer it, but I do believe, through my own personal experience, that women in our society often have an easier time expressing their creativity and their empathy.

If you could dip a toe off Canada’s coastline, which ocean would it be in?

Well, I’ve swum in the Pacific, I’ve swum all over the Atlantic, but I’ve never swum in the Arctic. I guess I would go with a nice raging bonfire on the shore ready to rip and then a quick plunge in the Arctic.

What is the farthest north that you’ve ever been? And what did you do there?

I’ve been to Iqaluit, here in Canada, and I’ve been a little bit farther north in Sweden.

In Iqaluit, I spent some time with Indigenous communities, looking at food traditions and how they might use those in a tourism sense and develop authentic products to share with the world. Iqaluit’s a pretty fascinating place. For me it always feels a bit like just scratching the surface, coming in and out over a few days. A week or so here or there really isn’t living or feeling it, but it is certainly among the coolest places I’ve ever been on planet Earth.

What is a beautiful or useful thing you’ve owned for a really long time?

My Joy of Cooking, a cookbook that I’ve had for 40 years. It’s bound now with duct tape. It’s stuffed with notes and ideas and postcards and random bits and bobs from a long cooking career. It’s got every bit of the how, the why. It’s something special. It’s a book I think about a lot when I write my own books and try to emulate the storytelling of it.

What’s one way that you interact with the natural world on a daily basis?

I’m blessed to interact with the natural world on a daily basis. I’m blessed to be surrounded by a team of people that interact daily through our culinary farm — how we connect it to our kitchen, how our cooks participate daily on the farm, the foraging that we do. I’ve already been down this morning to a stream nearby, to gather the day’s watercress for our salad bowl tonight. That connection to the land and to the environment grounds me, and I know it grounds the people around me and makes us the best versions of ourselves.

Who in your life has had the biggest impact on your connection to nature?

I think my mom really gave me the “get up and go, get outside.” All of that time spent running wild as a kid in the woods, making sailboats on the lake and stuff — every bit of that made me the man I am. [It was] her love of nature. My mom, for sure.

Whose relationship with nature would you like to have an impact on?

My kids. And all the young chefs I work with. [I’d like to help] them connect meaningfully to the environment here on Prince Edward Island and see the stories behind our ingredients, and go to sea for a day and fish some lobster, and get in a boat and go get oysters and meet every farmer in sight … That’s what I hope to do.

If you could ask one person, alive or dead, their thoughts on climate change, who would it be?

I think I would want to go back in time and ask somebody, like, “What the fuck, dude, why weren’t you paying attention and why didn’t you take action?” In the last 100 years all of this was known, all of this was seen, and it was just that sort of Victorian ethos of, “More and more and more for us, us, us — damn the engines, full speed ahead.” Here we are, all these years later, and look at us now.

Smoked salmon or maple syrup?

Oh, smoked salmon all the way! Just before we started chatting, I lit my smokehouse for the day. I chose applewood from our property. I’m smoking a salmon, I believe, from Nova Scotia. That is as sustainable as it could possibly be. [But I also] love my maple syrup. I often cure salmon with maple syrup.

Would you rather be invited to Victoria and David Beckham’s Muskoka cottage, or Harry and Meghan Sussex’s B.C. escape?

Neither. I would go with, “Hey, come see my joint,” and whoever comes, there’s my pick.

Camping, yes or no?

Absolutely. Camp, camp, camp. Get outside. Stay.

Enjoying the Moose Questionnaire? Read more from the series here.

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Onstage, Jeremy Dutcher sings in a deep, yearning tenor. On the phone, he giggles as he attempts to choose his favourite of Canada’s natural sites, considering options around the country before giving up. 

“I’m very, very fortunate as a musician. We get to see a lot of the country that I don’t think a lot of people always get to,” Dutcher says. “There’s a lot of beautiful places out there.” 

But the pianist’s heart will always be in Wolastokuk, or Fredericton, N.B., where he grew up as a member of Tobique First Nation. For centuries, it’s been the home of the Wolastoqiyik, or “people of the beautiful river:” both the land and the community are named for the Wolastoq, or Saint John River, that winds up from the Bay of Fundy. 

Honouring the language is central to Dutcher’s work. His 2018 debut album, Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, integrated century-old wax cylinder recordings of traditional songs, while 2023’s Motewolonuwok featured new songs in both English and Wolastoqey. Both won the Polaris Prize. Dutcher says there are fewer than 100 people left who are fluent in Wolastoqey, also known as Maliseet-Passamaquoddy. 

“Our Elders say ‘the language is the land, and the land is the language,’ ” he says. “There are certain words in our language that are really an onomatopoeia for what we’re hearing. For example, the word for bird or birds is ‘sipsisok.’ You can kind of hear the flutter of their wings.”

Along with working on a horror movie score, Dutcher has performances coming up in Canada and beyond. After playing with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra on June 21, the Two-Spirit musician will head to Norway for a Pride gig, before summer festivals in Elora, Ont., and Dawson City, Yukon. Next, some stops in Japan, followed by concerts in Prince George, Vernon and Oliver, B.C., this fall. 

Each trip is a chance to witness even more of the world’s natural beauty. When we connected with Dutcher, he told us what he’s seen so far. 

This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity — all opinions are the subject’s own.

What is the most awe-inspiring natural sight you’ve witnessed between the Pacific, Atlantic, 49th parallel and Hudson Bay, i.e. what people call Canada? 

To just pick one is to do a disservice to the rest. I was just in Iqaluit, Nvt., for the first time, at -40 C. The land is really inspiring, but it’s the people everywhere that really light me up. Last summer, I was in Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland and that was another place that took my breath away. 

For me, to be around mountains is awe inspiring. I just got back from the Banff Centre for the Arts, which is nestled within the mountains. It’s dry as hell. My lips and my skin were in a riot. But it was so beautiful, it’s just really stunning.

Sorry, I couldn’t pick one. 

What is the most awe-inspiring natural sight you’ve seen outside of Canada?

Last summer, I played an Indigenous music festival among the Sami people, the Indigenous people of Scandinavia. This concert was in northern Norway. To get to fly into the fjords and then take a bus all throughout the mountains — the way that water meets rock, I’ll remember that for a long time. It’s really stunning up there. We got to go out on the water in these see-through kayaks, so we’re able to really watch what’s above and below. That was a really special time. 

Think of three iconic Canadian animals and choose one each to kiss, marry and kill. 

It’s probably gonna be kill moose. They’re so nice and fuzzy but like, kill a salmon, you feed your family, kill a moose, you feed your community for a month. Sorry, moose. 

Beavers are not so friendly. But I feel like I could get him on my side. Marry him and work on him. 

I’ve already kissed the cod, so why not do it again? 

Name a person or group doing something meaningful for the environment that everyone should know about.

This is going to be a bit of a sideways answer, but hear me out. It is a climate solution, but it’s also something that’s really near and dear to my heart. About three years ago, my mother, Lisa Perley-Dutcher, and some members of our community started the first language immersion school for the Wolastoqey language, Kehkimin. It’s on this beautiful lake. The whole philosophy is that our language can’t really be learned in a classroom like a European language. You need to go out and experience the land and have a relationship in order for the language to come. 

They go out and walk with Elders every day. It’s this beautiful reframing of educational space, environmentalism and how it’s really connected with language. These young people are having a deepened relationship with place and space through language and through community connectivity. For me, this is the most beautiful and grassroots way of enabling our land defenders. 

Name a person who could significantly help mitigate the climate crisis if they really wanted to. 

My quick and flippant answer is Mark fucking Carney. 

My other answer is me. I mean that like the royal me — wait, it’s the royal ‘we,’ isn’t it? All of us could be doing better.  

But also Mark Carney. Our leadership, who have been democratically elected, are not moving with what the majority of the country would like — which is not to see our beautiful lands put in danger with pipeline projects. It’s really out of step with the direction a lot of us know we need to be going. This is what the land has been telling us.

Listen to the ones that are speaking from a place of knowledge and that are in relationship with this place in a way that we’re not. I saw the movie Yintah a couple weeks ago. It’s about the Wet’suwet’en land disputes. It’s really a cool insight on us being strong in who we are as sovereign Indigenous people and speaking for this place, how that can actually have a tangible impact on these resource projects. We can say no. And when we do say no, it’s been affirmed in the courts again and again and again, from Delgamu’ukw to the Marshall decisions. We have a right to say what happens in our unceded territories and — how did I get on this trip? 

Oh, Mark Carney. I don’t know that he has that good intention. The ways in which I’ve heard him speak have been like ‘drill, baby, drill.’ That feels regressive to me.

Researchers at Yale University, the France-based Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society and other institutions have found women tend to be more concerned about climate change than men. Why do you think that is? 

We’re so sick, we’re so gender sick. The same functions and institutions that seek to suppress our women and girls are a detriment to all. That weight sits heavy on all. 

The aggression and extractive mentalities that are so much of what we’re seeing in masculine presentation today — I don’t think they’re actually a fundamental part of a healthy masculinity, but I do think this state we find ourselves in, there’s a violence to it. It’s not surprising to me that it bears out in research. 

There is a mentality which values accumulation, whether that’s of resources or of capital. In order to accumulate vast capital, you need to do something to the land. There’s hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years of men doing this — which is not to say that there aren’t female CEOs and oil executives that are doing bad by the globe. Any group that thinks that it can take, take, take, without offering and replanting and re-sowing: if we let our societies be run by this particular kind of person, we find ourselves in this place, which is our Earth crying out for something else. And I think a lot of people are too. 

The province that I come from, New Brunswick, for the last eight years we had an Irving oil executive as our premier, but now we have a Liberal woman in and I wonder if that might change the nature of how we think about land and space and place, rematriate our society. I think this is also a climate solution, to encourage our strong women into leadership. 

The logics and philosophies that got us into this place — extractive mentalities and patriarchy and all of these heavy things — they’re not going to be the same methodology that get us out of it. We need to fundamentally rethink the spaces of power and who gets to speak. 

Outdoor cats, yes or no?

Outdoor everything. Yes.

Tell us about a time you changed your mind about something, environmental or otherwise. 

I have a bad habit of smoking and I used to be a little careless with the butts. And a friend said ‘hey, dogs eat those up sometimes and it makes them quite sick. My dog got sick that way.’

What might feel like a small form of littering, when we think about our size and the size of those around us, we should try to walk lightly all the time. This is such a small, stupid example, but I try to take a little thing to put my butts in so I can dispose of them.

Tell us about a time you tried to change someone else’s mind about something.

For me, it’s less about trying to change anybody’s mind, but about being a little more vocal about what’s in my mind. Trying to let that shine towards people and offer them solutions, too.

I was talking about the school earlier, with my mother. After Canadians started to have a lot of conversations about residential schools and survivors, people wanted to help. They want to be part of the solution, to make our society more equitable. But it feels intangible, because for so long, they haven’t had relationships with Indigenous people. What I’ve realized telling people about this school is they want to put their energy, their good, their spirit, towards something that can help heal. 

I really feel like that’s the work we need to be doing right now, rather than giving anybody advice.

Rocky Mountains or Great Lakes? 

Sometimes in the fall my friend Melody McIver, this amazing Anishinaabe violist and Earth-worker, they gather this beautiful food called manoomin, what in English people call wild rice. It’s harvested in the Great Lakes, it actually grows right on that lake water. You go in your canoe and you have these sticks and you hit those grains of rice into your boat. It’s a real process, but it’s a beautiful one. I haven’t been in a couple years to go up and rice with my friend Melody, but that’s such a strong memory for me. 

So I have to stick with the Great Lakes. They’re beautiful. They feed us, both in our spirit and literally, with the rice in our bodies, too. 

What’s a beautiful or useful thing you’ve owned for a really long time?

Probably my hand drum. It was passed down to me, so it’s been around for a really long time. Old things, whether it’s objects or people or ideas, we need to be careful with them and we need to protect them and we need to go slow and we need to listen. Old things always remind me to be mindful. 

If you could dip a toe off of Canada’s coastline, what ocean would you pick?

It has to be the Atlantic. I’m an East Coast person, through and through and through. Not many places feel like home other than the beaches of the Atlantic Ocean. I long for that place all the time, but I live in Montreal for now.

Who in your life has had the greatest impact on your connection to nature? 

It’s my oldest brother, Shane Perly-Dutcher. He’s a beautiful artist and metalsmith. We are 14 years apart. He was very much taking me around as a young person and showing me how to work with the land, harvesting red willow roots and stripping bark. We’d go around and harvest and pick fiddleheads. That helped me to not just think about the land as abstract, that only a national park is a sacred place. No, it’s all sacred. The side of the road over there is sacred too. This is all beautiful land. He showed me that. 

Smoked salmon or maple syrup? 

There’s a restaurant in Vancouver called Salmon n’ Bannock, and they have a salmon sampler. You can try salmon done in like six different ways and it is insanity. One of them is a maple salmon situation. Ever since then, I’m like, why choose? We can do both. 

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.

In November, Susan Holt became New Brunswick’s first female premier. Since making history, she’s been busy with immediate concerns — like grappling with the province’s soaring electricity costs. She’s also working to make her campaign promises come true, including improving indoor and outdoor air quality in the province, and getting a handle on greenhouse gas emissions. 

And, like everyone across Canada, she’s coping with the tumultuous state of cross-border relations, a big deal in a tiny province that shares a longer border with Maine than it does with Quebec. 

It’s a lot, but the Fredericton-born politician still makes time to appreciate the natural beauty around her. “I love camping, kayaking, canoeing, swimming, hiking, any mix of water and forest activities, and New Brunswick is the absolute best place for it!” she says. In our Moose Questionnaire, she tells us more about her relationship to the natural world. 

What’s the most awe-inspiring natural sight you’ve witnessed between the Pacific, Atlantic, 49th parallel and Hudson Bay, i.e. Canada?

I’m torn between the highest tides in the world in the Bay of Fundy, watched from the top of rugged cliffs on the Fundy footpath, or the black spruce, white pine and balsam fir for as far as the eye can see from the top of Mount Carleton.

What’s the most awe-inspiring natural sight you’ve witnessed outside of Canada?

Uluru in Australia, at dawn.

Think of three iconic Canadian animals. Choose one each to kiss, marry and kill.

Kiss: a moose before the hunting season opens.

Marry: the black-capped chickadee.

Kill: Shediac lobster, yummm.

Name a person or group doing something meaningful for the environment that everyone should know about.

Eastern Charlotte Waterways, or ECW, is an innovative, community-rooted non-governmental organization in New Brunswick making meaningful advancements in community well-being through environmental health.

If you could dip a toe off Canada’s coastline, which ocean would it be in? 

The Atlantic, of course!

What’s a beautiful or useful thing you’ve owned for a really long time? 

My Jeux Canada Games / Festival Saskatoon duffle bag from 1989. I still take it on work trips!

What’s the farthest north you’ve ever been and what did you do there?

Nunavut, for board meetings with [youth science education organization] Actua, where we got to enjoy an amazing local meal with Sheila Watt-Cloutier and her daughter.

Who, in your life, has had the greatest impact on your connection to nature? 

My counsellor-in-training leader from 1992, Jamie “Duncan” Hines from YMCA Camp Glenburn on Belleisle Bay, who taught us low-impact solo camping, how to walk the forest barefoot and to use all our senses to experience nature.

Whose relationship with the natural world would you most like to have an impact on?  

My kids.

Camping: yes or no? 

YES! Backcountry!

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In a dark basement room at Dalhousie University in Halifax, geneticist Paul Bentzen surveys the tanks containing the final descendants of an ancient genetic lineage with hope — and with trepidation. 

In each tank, dark shapes dart through the water, fins occasionally breaking the surface. From above, the fish have a soft blue sheen; their torpedo-shaped bodies taper to snub noses. “That is partly, I hate to say it, being in captivity — they are bumping more,” Bentzen said ruefully. “Being a fish adapted to swimming in open water, hard walls are not a natural thing for them.”

There’s a lot that’s not natural in this environment for these fish, a critically endangered species known as Atlantic whitefish. Scientists estimate it diverged from its closest relatives 14 million years ago, and it was once found throughout Nova Scotia. But over the course of geological epochs, and in the human-scale epoch since colonization, this whitefish’s range has shrunk to just three lakes on Nova Scotia’s south shore — and to these tanks at a research facility known as the Aquatron, where much of the remaining hope for the species swims in languid circles against the current. “I am certain with every fibre of my being that there are more whitefish [at Dalhousie] than anywhere else,” Bentzen said. 

Though polar bears and spotted owls get more attention, Atlantic whitefish are a special species in Canada, distinguished by both their tiny range and their ancient ancestry. “It’s crazy how old it is,” Bentzen said. “It’s unique in every meaningful way.” Whitefish are also uniquely endangered: there are roughly 200 adults in tanks at Dalhousie, and likely far fewer in the wild. 

A team of government scientists, academics and non-profits are working to save the remaining whitefish, and to expand their range by introducing them to new lakes. Yet their efforts have been stymied by ongoing degradation of the whitefish’s remaining habitat, and with funding that threatens to disappear — even as the state of the population grows more dire. In 2019 (an especially good year for the species) researchers found 251 larval fish for the captive breeding program. In 2024, they captured six. Environmental DNA sampling in the Petite Riviere watershed, near the town of Bridgewater, N.S., has only picked up whitefish presence once in the last few years. 

Still, the fight isn’t over — with the right resources, whitefish could make a comeback. “The metaphor I use sometimes is ‘on life support,’ ” Bentzen said. “It’s just like the patient that’s hooked up to machines; you’re keeping them alive, hoping that something will happen that they can get up and be better.” But it’s a race against time, and the clock is running out. 

What happened to Atlantic whitefish in the wild? 

Whitefish belong to a highly vulnerable group. All four of Canada’s endemic freshwater species — also including Vancouver lamprey, blackfin cisco and copper redhorse — are at risk, and they’re far from alone. Scientists estimate North American freshwater fish are going extinct 877 times faster than the typical extinction rate of species in our planet’s history. A quarter of all freshwater fauna worldwide are currently at risk of extinction.

For whitefish, it took a long time to get to this point. Over millions of years, as glaciers advanced and retreated over North America, whitefish would have travelled across the continent — moving south as ice set in, pushing north as it melted. But by the time Atlantic whitefish first appeared in fossil records, they existed in only two places: the Tusket River watershed, at Nova Scotia’s southern tip, and the Petite Riviere watershed. 

How whitefish had come to exist in just two watersheds, 200 kilometres apart, is — like so much else about this species — a mystery. One theory is colonization: whitefish are an anadromous species, meaning they navigate from saltwater to freshwater to spawn. As Europeans dammed Nova Scotia rivers from the 1700s onward for hydropower, agriculture and water storage, whitefish were barred from completing an important part of their lifecycle, and disappeared from the landscape. 

Acidification from rainwater and the introduction of chain pickerel and smallmouth bass — non-native fish favoured by anglers — further diminished the species’ range. By the 1980s, whitefish had disappeared from the Tusket, and are now only found in the wild in the lakes of the Petite Riviere watershed.

This trajectory made whitefish the first fish species to be declared endangered by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, in 1984.

How whitefish got into Dalhousie University

Since then, there have been efforts to improve their odds of survival. Passage to the ocean was restored in 2018, after the dam owner and several  non-profits, including a local group called Coastal Action, added fish passages at dams along the Petite Riviere itself. This ended a century of whitefish being landlocked in the Petite Riviere lakes — though little whitefish activity has been detected at those structures.

But there have been as many drawbacks. In 2003, Coastal Action discovered smallmouth bass in the upper Petite Riviere watershed. Nine years later, they found chain pickerel. “It was quite disheartening, quite disheartening because pickerel are just such voracious predators,” Amy Russell, species at risk and biodiversity project coordinator at Coastal Action, told The Narwhal. “Chain pickerel and bass eat everything and anything that’s in the water.”

To preserve whitefish habitat in the Petite Riviere watershed, Coastal Action has been contracted by Fisheries and Oceans Canada to conduct electrofishing — using an electric current to stun and remove fish — to reduce invasive predators. 

By the early 2000s, it was already clear whitefish weren’t going to survive without help, Paul Bentzen said. In response, Fisheries and Oceans Canada began breeding whitefish at a facility on Nova Scotia’s south shore, to boost numbers and resolve scientific questions about the species. “We can produce so many more fish than what survives in the wild. It’s just exponential the amount that we can release compared to what would survive on their own,” Russell said.

In this, there have been hurdles too. When the Harper government was making cuts to federal scientific funding in 2012, the program was shut down. The whitefish were put back in the Petite Riviere watershed, and in a lake near Halifax from which they promptly vanished — and the facility was destroyed. “They literally bulldozed it,” Bentzen said. 

Six years later, Fisheries and Oceans had collected dozens of juvenile whitefish from the Petite Riviere watershed, and seemed poised to start breeding again, to Bentzen’s relief. But that fall, he got a message from a local CBC reporter, saying he’d just heard from an official that the fish were to be put back in the lakes the following week. Bentzen was apoplectic, and on a call with the federal department, impulsively offered to take over the breeding program at Dalhousie. “Actually, I had no idea whether we could or not,” he admitted. “I had not spoken to a single person at Dalhousie.” 

Yet the offer was accepted — and whitefish have been swimming in Aquatron tanks ever since. 

Bringing a natural environment into a dark basement room

Captive breeding whitefish is a delicate operation. In the spring, two-centimetre long larvae are collected from the Petite Riviere lakes by Coastal Action and Fisheries and Oceans Canada. To reduce their stress and improve survival, Coastal Action has started a streamside facility — a 17-foot utility trailer — where babies snack on zooplankton and fish feed to get stronger before being sent to Dalhousie. “We’re not taking any chances with these ones,” Russell said. 

The whitefish are delivered to the Aquatron, the largest aquatic research facility in the country. When they’re mature, staff mimic conditions for spawning (which occurs in the winter) using light and temperature. These efforts don’t always go according to plan — “since this fish has no really close relatives, we have nothing to go by,” Bentzen said — but they have produced offspring. In February, a darkened room at Dalhousie was lined with racks of clear plastic containers, their bottoms dotted with transparent whitefish eggs. “If you take a close look, you can actually see their little eyes in the embryos,” Aquatron aquarist Emily Allen explained, shining a flashlight into the tubs. 

As they grow up, these captive bred fish are used for genetic work, which aims to assess the species’ genetic diversity and reduce the risk of inbreeding, and for resolving questions like whitefish’s preferred spawning habitat, which is currently a mystery. 

Some are implanted with acoustic tags and released back into the lakes to track whitefish movement in a way that isn’t possible with wild adult fish, as they’re almost impossible to find and too precious to risk capturing anyway. Over a hundred tagged fish were released last year, and data will be analyzed this spring.

Long term, scientists are looking beyond the Petite Riviere watershed. Between warming waters due to climate change and invasive species, the current habitat may not be viable in the future. This means finding another lake in Nova Scotia’s northern half to expand the fish’s range. “It is challenging because we really don’t know a lot about the species requirements,” Jeremy Broome, a Fisheries and Oceans Canada biologist, said. The department has been leading the range expansion work, which involved surveying a shortlist of options that might have the qualities researchers think whitefish need. The next step is consultations with the province, Indigenous groups and local communities.

The scientists hoped to introduce tagged fish into a new lake this year,  but the work is slow-going — apart from the scientific challenges, moving the fish has complex policy considerations. “In essence, we’re creating a new invasive species by moving it into a new environment,” Broome said. In Europe, introductions of whitefish’s distant relatives have crowded out native fish. Scientists don’t believe Atlantic whitefish would have the same effect, based on the role they play in the ecosystem, but they could run rampant too.

This is painstaking work, with risks — but Broome points out that endemic species are a particularly important part of Canada’s biodiversity. “These are species that are present in our own backyard and are our entire responsibility,” Broome said. “No one else is coming to save Atlantic whitefish.”

Habitat and funding loss still threaten Atlantic whitefish

That responsibility includes legislated requirements; whitefish were listed as endangered when Canada’s Species at Risk Act came into place in 2003, which brought legal protection for the species. This includes prohibitions against killing, capturing and harassing the fish, as well as restrictions on destruction of critical habitat. Yet scientists and advocates say the treatment of whitefish hasn’t always reflected the fish’s special status, or its vulnerability.

This past December, work began on the road for a quarry that the province’s Department of Environment and Climate Change had approved on private land in the Petite Riviere watershed — even though the road runs over public land that citizens had proposed protection for years before.

In 2022, a local citizens’ group — with the support of non-government organizations and local governments — applied for a wilderness area designation for the watershed to protect whitefish in the lakes, as well as more than a dozen at-risk birds, reptiles and lichens in the surrounding forest. The lakes are also the water supply for the town of Bridgewater. 

But their original request to the province, along with a 2024 follow-up request for expedited protection, is in limbo — having been acknowledged but not approved — and advocates say the province appears to be ignoring their request, which predates the quarry approval. 

“What that says is that the province is not taking this seriously,” George Buranyi, representative of the Bridgewater Watershed Protection Alliance, said.

Nova Scotia’s Department of Environment and Climate Change did not respond to requests for a response to the concerns that the quarry approval could threaten whitefish, or concerns that the request for protection is being ignored. 

Bentzen fears the presence of a road could affect water quality in whitefish habitat and questions why more care isn’t being taken: “Rock is not a rare resource [in Nova Scotia]. The Atlantic whitefish is an unimaginably rare and special resource.”

But the bigger issue may be the precarity of the work that supports the species’ future. 

For decades, whitefish recovery has been trapped in a money merry-go-round that’s delayed progress on core scientific questions: funding exists for a period and then disappears, forcing researchers to start again from the beginning. 

Now, that work is on a knife’s edge again; much of the project is supported by Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s nature fund for aquatic species at risk. Without it, Dalhousie biologist Robert Lennox said the work is “not even close to possible.” That funding will run for another year, but is not guaranteed past that point. Additional Fisheries and Oceans funding supports the captive breeding program, but government money for species at risk is limited, and the crises are many. Bentzen said the department has encouraged the whitefish team to look for alternate sources of support.

“My huge worry is that this is a very unstable situation,” Bentzen said. Cutting funding “is just not the right decision to make — these fish can be saved.” 

In a statement, Fisheries and Oceans spokesperson Christine Lyons said, “protecting species at risk is a shared responsibility,” and the department remains committed to working with “Indigenous communities and organizations, provinces and territories, resource users, local groups, communities, industries and academia to help aquatic species at risk.” 

Hope for whitefish in the wild

While whitefish are few, each female produces thousands of eggs. That means reversing the fish’s trajectory is possible — but the declining state of the wild population makes this more challenging.

Whitefish suffers from its obscure status, too; many people in Nova Scotia, let alone in the rest of the country, are unaware of its existence. “That lack of awareness just kind of breaks my heart. I have to believe, if more people knew about this, that they would be behind it,” Lennox said of the researchers’ effort to ensure the survival of whitefish. “We need people to see the value in it, because it’s not an easy or an inexpensive thing to do, to save a species from extinction.”

In the basement of the Aquatron, Bentzen contemplates the shapes darting through the water. It’s urgent that the work is completed to find these fish a new home, Bentzen said — they won’t survive if left to their own devices in the Petite Riviere watershed. And after millions of years of darting through the waters of Nova Scotia, it’s sobering to think of them finishing their journey in these tanks. “It can’t end here. That would be terrible.”

Scientists working on whitefish compare them to a unicorn. It’s an unlikely comparison for a muted, snub-nose fish the length of one’s forearm. But it’s apt too — a thing so rare it’s almost mythical. Like the other species found only in Canada, they’re at risk of becoming legend altogether. Whether they stay in this world is up to us. 

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.