Summary

• Historically, First Nations in B.C. who lived near floodplains respected tides and lived nomadically, until settlers disrupted water flow, creating dikes to pursue agriculture and urban development.
• Xwíʔləm̓nəc, or Addington Point Marsh, has been restored to a wetland after three years of collaboration led by Katzie First Nation.
• Restoring wetlands brings life to countless species and helps restore Indigenous people’s connection to their traditional territories. The marsh is part of Canada’s largest salmon-bearing watershed.

On a late April morning, a group of Katzie First Nation land guardians, conservation workers, government representatives and others trek down to Xwíʔləm̓nəc (Addington Point Marsh).

They gather in the First Nation’s Lower Mainland territory to celebrate the long-awaited completion of a wetland restoration project connecting to the Stó:lō (Fraser River).

Mike Leon leads Katzie’s team of eight guardians, and has been involved with the marsh restoration project from the beginning. After everyone bypasses a locked gate — there to reduce the risk of bear-human encounters — they stop by the water, and he addresses the group.

“I would really like to raise my hands to all of you, to the hard work and willingness to work with us, to be with us, to be with this land,” he said.

The restoration project was funded by the B.C. government and the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans, implemented by Katzie First Nation, Resilient Waters, Ducks Unlimited Canada and the Nature Trust of British Columbia, with many helping hands involved.

For three years the partners worked together to reestablish waterflow in the marsh. The wetlands connection to the Pitt River and South Fraser River system was disconnected when early settlers installed a dike, which has since been removed. 

“I love doing the work. I love being on our territory and helping the environment,” Mackenzie Adams, another Katzie guardian, added. Adams monitored the site throughout the project, and collected water and bird surveys to compare data before and after restoration. 

According to the B.C. Wildlife Federation, wetland monitoring is just as important as the initial restoration during a project. “Monitoring, maintenance, and data collection help us evaluate the effectiveness of restoration techniques and improve the performance and function of future projects,” it reads on their website.

Xwíʔləm̓nəc is now letting nature take its course, and with the area being home to one of the country’s largest salmon runs and smallest sandhill crane populations, monitoring the wetland is critical work for Katzie Guardians. 

“I was there one of the first days … comparing the first day to the last day was pretty eye opening because you can already see the differences from the river water coming in. It will be an awesome habitat for all birds and salmon fry,” Adams said. 

While the exact impact is currently unknown, wetland restoration benefits are well documented. Leon’s team will be on top of that data, working with partners to restore and conserve native plants and animals in the area.

Relationships between Katzie Guardians and partners in the project have flourished. A local property owner who attended the celebration shared their initial concerns after seeing excavation equipment clearing a path to the dike, and their relief after learning more about the endeavour. Beyond its environmental impacts, the project has brought people together from all walks of life who want to see salmon and wildlife in and around the Fraser River thrive.

Restoration project had many partners, but Katzie had final say

Dan Straker, the manager for the Resilient Waters project, was a lead organizer under the direction of Katzie Guardians and leadership. 

“With Katzie First Nation, it was determined early on they would have final decision making and be informing the project along the way. All the partners fell in line with that idea and thinking,” Straker told the Narwhal. 

“What we ended up with was this really nice blended way of doing things, from a more two-eyed seeing approach.” 

Leon added that, throughout the endeavour, Katzie brought in their customs, culture and laws.

“It’s really important and special to us to know our place names in our territory. When we have our guardians come out, we’re honored to be on those place names such as Xwíʔləm̓nəc,” Leon said. 

It’s a sentiment shared by Katzie’s guardian coordinator April Pierre. In a quiet moment of emotion in the circle, she addressed a reality shared by many First Nations people: growing up away from her homelands.

The Xwíʔləm̓nəc restoration project gave Pierre an opportunity to spend time on land she had never been to — the land of her ancestors. It’s one emotional moment of many that were shared during the celebration, as others reflected on the marine and wildlife already making appearances in the marsh.

Dikes were built to create flat land for agriculture in the area since the late 1800s. Restoring the marsh’s connection to the river has immense ecological benefits and cultural benefits for local First Nations.

“Conservation organizations in previous decades had a different approach to conservation land management that I think sometimes excluded other organizations and nations,” Ducks Unlimited senior restoration biologist, Eric Balke, said.

“I think we are learning new and better ways of moving forward, more collaborative ways, and this project is a great example of that.”

Balke has been involved with restoring Xwíʔləm̓nəc since brainstorming and planning days, eventually passing the reins to his colleague Alison Martin.

“What excites me about this project is it’s all about restoring relationships,” he said. “You’re restoring the relationship between the river and these wetlands that were formerly alienated by dikes. You’re restoring the relationship between Xwíʔləm̓nəc and juvenile salmon that previously were prevented from accessing the site … it’s also restoring the relationship between Katzie and their kin.”

Wetland restoration benefits salmon

In the Pacific Northwest, both people and the ecosystem know how important salmon is. Xwíʔləm̓nəc is connected to Canada’s largest salmon-bearing watershed, the Fraser River. 

According to the Pacific Salmon Foundation, “floodplains provide critical, food-rich habitat for juvenile salmon. These low-lying areas adjacent to stream channels allow young salmon to grow healthy and strong before their journey to the ocean.”

But dikes disrupt the river’s connection to the marsh, blocking valuable nutrients and harming the salmon and other species.

“Wetlands, such as tidal marshes, help to collect sediment that build up the marsh platform, helping to protect our communities from flooding,” Balke said.

“This land that settlers found is super valuable for farming and agriculture, it was valuable because of the sediment that was delivered, because of the nutrients that were delivered by the river,” he said.

“When we construct dikes we disconnect the river from its floodplain. The river can no longer deliver those critical ingredients.”

A huge benefit of restoring tidal marshes is that they are one of the most effective ways of capturing and storing carbon, contaminants and pollutants that flow downstream. 

Further, Xwíʔləm̓nəc is home to wapoto and tule, two traditional plants for Katzie First Nation that have been impacted from dikes. Restoring the wetland is giving members of the nation hope that these plants can be harvested for food and mat-making once again.

The marsh is also home to sandhill cranes, whose local population has hovered around 30 to 35 birds for decades, Myles Lamont told the Narwhal. He was brought into the project by Katzie as a sandhill crane consultant.

“The remaining birds seem to nest in golf courses and some very small regional parks … Unfortunately they’ve been getting struck by golf balls. Quite commonly over the last 10 to 15 years, I’ve had to rescue a few birds that have had broken legs or injuries as a result of golf ball strikes, particularly in Richmond,” Lamont said. 

He is hopeful that restoring Xwíʔləm̓nəc to a wetland will bring in enough water to create a nesting habitat for the birds, drawing them away from golf courses. As folks went around the sharing circle, Lamont spotted one overhead, calling out, “Crane!” 

“It’s really cool being a part of it. Just knowing that we’re making a difference, I’m making a difference,” Adams said.“The salmon habitat has a place to go throughout the winter and so do the sandhill cranes and birds. It’s a good feeling … I feel accomplished.”

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Summary

• As other provinces move to restrict access to public records, B.C. insists its proposed changes are about efficiency.
• Critics say these changes could make it harder for British Columbians to access public records.
• B.C.’s citizens services ministry is receiving fewer FOI requests now than it was in 2020, but those requests are producing more pages than ever before.

Maybe you’ve heard the famous lyric from Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi”: “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone?”

That wistful lament about the environmental impacts of development seems unfortunately applicable to freedom of information systems across Canada these days.

The federal government is mulling shielding some forms of government communications from the public. Ontario’s government recently passed a law that exempts documents created by the premier’s office, cabinet ministers and parliamentary secretaries from freedom of information requests. The changes are part of the government’s omnibus bill and are retroactive, potentially stopping hundreds of active requests in their tracks. Meanwhile, Alberta enacted a new freedom of information regime last year, one that significantly restricts access rights and gives the government sweeping powers to withhold requested information or reject requests entirely.

The B.C. government’s freedom of information — known as FOI — legislation is different, at least according to Citizens Services Minister Diana Gibson. Since introducing Bill 9, Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Amendment Act, Gibson has repeatedly talked about other Canadian governments “pulling back” on access to information.

“We are not,” Gibson told reporters. “That’s why these amendments are here, to clarify that we are maintaining oversight and access and one of the strongest FOI acts in Canada.”

Broadly, Bill 9 has two areas of focus. Parts of the bill aim to make it easier for public bodies to share information in response to requests, cutting down on the need for people to contact multiple agencies to get the information they seek. 

Other changes seem geared toward getting more FOI requests rejected, critics say. Currently, the law says an FOI request must give “enough detail to enable an experienced employee of the public body, with a reasonable effort, to identify the record sought.” Bill 9 adds that an experienced employee must be able to identify requested records in “a reasonable amount of time” in “the opinion of the head of the public body.” That potentially gives public sector executives a lot of power to refuse to fulfill requests.

“It degrades freedom of information under the guise of administrative convenience, making the government both judge and juror over what the public can access,” Green Party MLA Rob Botterell said in a statement about the changes. Botterell, who helped draft the original law, which passed in 1992, called Bill 9 an “evisceration of this cornerstone legislation.”

Gibson has accused critics of spreading misinformation and cherry-picking data about B.C.’s FOI system to suit their own narratives.

Let’s unpack the politics and posturing and dig into the current state of B.C.’s freedom of information system and the changes the government is proposing.

What is freedom of information?

Freedom of information is the idea that citizens have the right to access documents and records held by public entities, such as school districts, police forces and government ministries. In Canada, freedom of information rights are laid out in federal and provincial laws. Members of the public can request a range of information from various public entities, from meeting notes and staff communications to databases and documentation about new policies.

Journalists like me can request information to better understand the impact train collisions have on wildlife or uncover a significant equipment malfunction at B.C.’s first liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility.

Most Canadian jurisdictions introduced freedom of information laws around 40 years ago, before the digital revolution. In the years since, the amount of documents public bodies create has grown significantly and many of those documents are subject to freedom of information laws.

How many people actually file freedom of information requests?

B.C. is fielding fewer FOI requests than it once did. In 2020, the citizens services ministry logged a total of 8,347 general requests compared to 4,691 in 2025 — a 44 per cent drop that can likely be at least partly attributed to the creation of a $10 fee for requests implemented by the provincial government in 2021.

But the number of pages generated in response to the average request has increased. The Ministry of Citizens Services says its FOI operations office processed 1.64 million pages in 2020 compared to 2.18 million pages in 2025 — a 33 per cent increase. The average general FOI request filed in 2025 in B.C. yielded 366 pages.

That suggests the public bodies may not be managing information as efficiently as they could be, Mike Larsen, president of the BC Freedom of Information Association, said.

“If we have better ways for people to organize information and if that’s followed consistently, then it shouldn’t be a problem to provide efficient and effective access,” he said. “I think that the minister is not wrong to say that there’s been a shift in the terrain here, but to respond to this with the idea of needing to perhaps curtail access rights in some way, I think, is a step in the wrong direction.”

Larsen also points out that focusing on the quantitative aspects of the FOI system — number of requests filed and pages processed — doesn’t give a complete picture of how well the system is functioning.

An FOI request could, for instance, yield 300 pages, but hundreds of those pages could be redacted, offering no useful information to the requester. In cases like that, knowing the number of pages a public body produced but not how many of those pages contained useful information gives a “totally skewed” impression of the system, Larsen added.

The minister takes issue with the idea that FOI requests are down overall.

“Personal requests are up and those are bigger and more complex,” Gibson told reporters. “Overall, the issue is about sensitive Ministry of Children and Family Development files, where there are multiple parties involved and a lot of sensitive information, thousands of pages. So it isn’t just about numbers being down. Actually, that’s not accurate.”

Gibson is partly right. FOI requests to the Ministry of Children and Family Development — which is responsible for sensitive personal information about adoption, child protection and foster care — have increased. In 2025, the ministry received 2,372 requests, up from 1,858 in 2020.

However, overall requests are still down significantly, from 10,205 in 2020 to 7,063 last year. Citizens Services declined to provide data for the most recent fiscal year, telling The Narwhal those figures are still being reviewed.

How is the government proposing to change B.C.’s FOI law?

Gibson introduced Bill 9 on Feb. 26.

“Taken together, these amendments strengthen [the law] for the future,” she said during her second reading speech. “They protect privacy. They uphold access to information. They enable better services for British Columbians, and they support a more transparent, efficient and people-centred public sector.”

But in addition to the changes aimed at improving information sharing between public bodies, some parts of the legislation broadens the grounds on which public bodies can refuse to respond to requests. That includes allowing a public body to reject requests that “would unreasonably interfere” with its operations or the government’s more broadly. “Abusive” or “malicious” requests could also be thrown out.

Larsen worries public bodies operating with reduced budgets or poor information management policies could use the unreasonable interference language to reject requests “simply because they’re overwhelmed — for reasons that aren’t due to the requester’s actions or the nature of the request in question.”

“If you’re unreasonably resourced, then a reasonable request can look unreasonable,” he said.

If your FOI request is rejected, you can appeal to the FOI and privacy commissioner, Gibson points out.

“The independent office of the privacy commissioner oversees any requests that would be denied,” she said. “What we’re talking about here is things like … death threats or white powder in envelopes. This is about being able to manage that kind of behavior, so that citizens with requests that we want to serve can get served quickly.”

Relying on complaints to ensure good requests still make it through the system doesn’t sit well with Larsen.

“That really worries me when people say, ‘We’re changing things in a way that may make it likely that people are dissatisfied, but don’t worry, there’s an appeals process!” he said.

“Going through a review as a way of trying to manage the scope of requests, that’s just completely inefficient.”

The minister did not directly answer questions about whether the commissioner will get a funding increase to deal with the additional stream of complaints Bill 9 could create. Instead, she touted the government’s proactive disclosure policies and promised Bill 9 will result in the release of more information without FOI request.

“This isn’t about making the situation worse,” Gibson told reporters. “This is about making it better.”

So what is proactive disclosure? And how will Bill 9 expand it?

One way governments can reduce the need for members of the public to file requests is to release documents without being asked, a practice known as proactive disclosure. The B.C. government proactively releases 17 types of records, including binders for new cabinet ministers, lists of briefing notes and expense claims and records requested via freedom of information request.

Typically, these records are kept confidential for months before being published, although the timeline can vary. However, as of the publication of this story, the B.C. government has “temporarily paused” proactive disclosures while it develops and launches a new system to publish these records. (The pause has lasted more than a month so far.)

Gibson did not mention the suspension and, when asked about it directly, did not explain why the old publication platform could not continue until the new one was ready to launch.

“We haven’t stopped doing proactive disclosures. What we’ve got is a new and more modernized system that’s going to deliver better on proactive disclosure and also a new proactive disclosure coming in Bill 9,” she told reporters. “But there’s a temporary gap while we move to the new, more modern system, and we’re hoping to have that online as soon as possible.”

The Citizens Services Ministry said the “pause is temporary and technical in nature,” and that the new system is expected to be operational any day.

How many new types of documents will Bill 9 add to the proactive disclosure schedule? Many or none, depending on how you look at it. The new proactive disclosure provisions in the bill apply only to personal information, not records created by the government.

The changes will give government ministries the ability “to disclose personal information back to the individual the information is about, without going through an FOI request,” according to Citizens Services.

Larsen sees value in making it easier for people to access personal information from public bodies, especially with proper privacy protections in place.

“That’s not the same thing as proactive disclosure of public records, though,” he added. “It’s a very different and meritorious thing to do, but it’s important not to conflate those things.”

If — when? — Bill 9 passes, when will these changes take effect?

The B.C. legislature has just nine sitting days left before the summer break. If Bill 9 doesn’t pass by May 28, it will be October before it passes.

The bill is just about to begin committee stage, the point at which opposition MLAs can ask the minister responsible questions about the effect of the changes proposed and put forward changes of their own, though these don’t often end up in the final version.

Gibson has already tabled amendments to Bill 9, ones she says clarify the powers of the information and privacy commissioner.

“I’m really looking forward to committee [stage] where we actually get to speak to the merits of the legislation and have a real debate about the content,” Gibson said. “It’s also a good opportunity to correct some real misinformation and misunderstandings about the bill.”

The B.C. Green and B.C. Conservative caucuses oppose Bill 9 in its current form. Interim Conservative Leader Trevor Halford even tried to have debate on the bill suspended for six months to allow for further consultation, a move that led to hours of late-night debate before the motion was defeated with the support of the NDP caucus and a pair of independent MLAs.

Odds are good Bill 9 will pass this spring, even if the government has to cut debate short to make it happen. Some of its changes will take effect immediately, including the requirement that requests provide enough detail to be located in a “reasonable amount of time.” Most of the others won’t take effect until the ministry has developed regulations to provide more detail about their function.

That process could take weeks, months or more. At least one piece of legislation that passed last spring has yet to take full effect because the regulations are still being developed.

It will likely be a year or more before we know if the changes really will improve B.C.’s FOI system, as Gibson claims. One of her predecessors made similar comments about the bill that created the $10 FOI filing fee, claiming those changes would help unclog the FOI system and result in faster responses to FOI requests. Five years later, we know she was wrong. 

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.

This story is part of Generating Futures, a series from The Narwhal exploring clean energy sovereignty among B.C. First Nations.

Summary

• Haida Gwaii is one of 44 remote communities in B.C. that are not connected to the provincial electrical grid. For power, most rely on diesel, which has heavy environmental and human health costs. 
• Solar North, a two-megawatt solar project by Haida-owned Tll Yahda, came online in December — the first project of its kind to be built on a remote grid in B.C., and a big step forward in the First Nation’s plans to transition off diesel.
• Whether operating independently or with BC Hydro, remote projects require funding to get off the ground. However, a key federal grant program by Natural Resources Canada to fund diesel reduction will end next year.

On a hot, sunny day in 2023, a flatbed truck sidled up to the flat patch of grass at the Masset airport on Haida Gwaii. Kevin Brown, Patrika McEvoy and Sean Brennan had rushed to the site when they heard the solar panels had arrived. After decades of advocating, planning and waiting, the Haida Nation’s first utility-scale solar energy project — the first of its kind on a remote grid in B.C. — was ready to be built. 

All three remember the moment when Brown, energy coordinator for Old Massett Village Band Council, reached out his finger to touch one. 

“Shit just got real,” he says.

Across much of the province, B.C.’s mostly hydropowered centralized electricity system blurs into the background, delivering easily accessible, relatively affordable power at the flick of a switch.

But Haida Gwaii’s archipelago off the Pacific Coast is truncated from B.C.’s grid, making it one of around 44 remote communities in B.C. most of which rely on diesel for their power. There, diesel is delivered perilously by trucks and tankers, and leaves toxins lingering in the air. It remains a problem that the province has promised, but so far failed, to fix. In 2017, B.C. announced a target to reduce diesel on remote grids by 80 per cent by 2030, a goal that currently appears far out of reach.

But this past December, Tll Yahda Energy, an independent power producer and a partnership between the Council of the Haida Nation, Skidegate Band Council and Old Massett Village Council, made a sizable leap when their two-megawatt solar project, Solar North, officially came online. It marks the first time in B.C. that an intermittent energy source like solar has made a sizable dent in a diesel-driven remote grid. 

“We expected to have to do some trailblazing,” Brennan, manager at Tll Yahda and a lead on the project, says. “But it was basically reinventing that entire trail.”

If all goes as planned, Haida Gwaii’s project will soon be joined by a stream of others, including the Ulkatcho First Nation’s completed four-megawatt solar farm in the Chilcotin Plateau, the Nuxalk Nation’s run-of-river hydroelectric project on the Central Coast and the Uchucklesaht Tribe’s efforts on western Vancouver Island to build a 750-kilowatt solar and battery-storage project, among many others. Many are in development and partially funded, but require more support to move forward.

But as federal and provincial governments’ priorities shift, there are signs the window could begin to close again. That could spell trouble for communities with in-between projects, and for Haida Gwaii, whose journey to displace diesel still has a long way to go.

‘This is not something we want to risk anymore.’

Since the first electric light in the Pacific Northwest beamed out over a harbour near Victoria almost 150 years ago, power and access to it have developed asymmetrically. Wires and transmission lines quickly fanned out across the province, etching their way across Indigenous territories, targeting congregations of settler populations and the bursts of resource extraction they tended to follow.

Elsewhere, and in many First Nations communities, electric power was scarce until it came by way of diesel generators, which use diesel-fueled pistons to produce a magnetic field, generating electricity. But diesel power comes at a high cost for ecosystems and communities.

In the early hours of October 13, 2016, the Nathan E. Stewart tugboat ran into one of the many rocks tracing the shoreline in Heiltsuk territory. By around 10 a.m. the next morning, the tug had sunk, spilling more than 100,000 litres of diesel fuel and other pollutants into nearby Gale Pass, leaving a rainbow-coloured sheen across the water.  

The tug was among many that haul diesel to generators along the coast, including to Haida Gwaii. 

It was yet another alarm bell that propelled the nation’s resolve to get off diesel, Brennan says. “That was really what led to us saying ‘This is not something we want to risk anymore.’”

On a regular basis, Haida Gwaii is visited by barges carrying diesel up through the Inside Passage and then through the Hecate Strait, which has been called the most dangerous water body on Canada’s coast, threatening ocean ecosystems and the nation’s coastal economy that depends on them. Even on land, diesel fuel tends to splatter and spill despite its handlers’ best efforts, leaving contaminated soil at loading docks and generating stations.

In the air, combusted diesel fumes produce pollutants like nitrogen dioxide and fine particulates, known to exacerbate asthma, cancer and risk of premature death. It also releases copious amounts of carbon dioxide. Haida Gwaii represents around three per cent of the province’s electrical emissions.

The Haida Nation’s work to shift from diesel galvanized in the mid-2000s, Brown explains. Community members tallied data across communities and realized the true scale of their diesel demand.

Inertia, political will posed challenges for transition away from diesel in B.C.

In theory, the province was also concerned about the amount of diesel being burned in remote communities.

Gordon Campbell’s Liberal government made the first move, directing BC Hydro to take over energy provision in additional remote communities, including some remote First Nations that had been operating their own energy systems with federal funding. Ideally, BC Hydro would help communities bring more clean energy to their grids. 

But that’s not what happened. 

The utility housed some deep-rooted inertia, according to Nick Hawley, a former manager on remote community electrification for BC Hydro at the time.

“They had diesel mechanics and diesel electricians,” Hawley, now an energy consultant, says. He describes an institution that was risk-averse and reticent to change. “They knew diesel.” 

As a monopoly utility, BC Hydro decides where and when it buys power, and from whom in the regions it services. It held prospective renewable projects to a strict test: It would only consider those that could beat the price of diesel fuel, not including the substantial costs of maintenance and replacing things like generators. They also required that projects cover the often sizable cost of connecting to the remote grid. Under those circumstances, says Hawley, it was difficult to get new renewable projects through.

In 2012, BC Hydro put a call out for energy projects on Haida Gwaii. Old Massett Band Council was one of many renewable projects that applied with a proposal for a 5.6 megawatt wind project. None were accepted.

The Haida Nation had begun moving forward anyway. 

“We’ve been on a long journey,” Nangkilslas Trent Moraes, deputy chief councillor of the Skidegate First Nation, says. Communities started out working on smaller changes, beginning with things like solar water heaters and heat pumps. Soon, solar panels popped up on roofs across the islands, including the Haida Heritage Centre built in 2017 — B.C.’s largest community-owned renewable energy installation at the time. 

“That was the beginning of how we got into the power field,” he says. 

Still, the communities’ long-held goal of owning and operating a larger-scale renewable project remained out of reach. 

That changed when, beginning in 2019, Haida Gwaii’s southern band council, Skidegate, and northern council, Old Massett, began meeting to discuss energy issues with the Council of the Haida Nation. 

Together, the bands and nation pooled their efforts and resources, enabling them to pursue a project that wouldn’t have been possible in isolation. This allowed the nation to remain the project’s sole owner and decision-maker, absent the influence of investors or other companies. 

“I was thankful that we were able to acquire ownership for this project and not have third parties involved,” McEvoy, former chair of energy on the Tll Yahda board of directors and energy consultant for the Council of the Haida Nation, says.

BC Hydro had long argued that its ability to spend more on remote grids was constrained by the utility regulator’s legal requirement that new projects not unduly impact other ratepayers, a challenge for some renewable energy projects. As the plans for Solar North came together, McEvoy worked with a group of remote First Nations communities advocating for legal change, designing an amendment to remove that potential obstruction: for a temporary period, cabinet could now direct the utility regulator to accept these projects, even if they came at a higher cost than diesel.  

“That was a lot of blood, sweat and tears,” McEvoy says. The regulatory amendment was finally passed in 2024, and will remain until the end of 2029.

BC Hydro now had a clear legal runway to support renewable projects in the 14 remote grids — called “non-integrated areas” — it services. But the clock was ticking: the amendment was passed six years after B.C. set a target to reduce 80 per cent of its diesel emissions by 2030, and no projects in BC Hydro’s service regions had been achieved. Last December, Haida’s project became the first, soon to be followed by a solar farm in Anahim Lake led by the Ulkatcho First Nation, which is set to come online this year. Meanwhile, remote communities who had operated their energy systems independently had collectively reduced their diesel use by 84 percent since 2019, mostly through small hydroelectric projects.

In an emailed statement, BC Hydro said that it “took time” for the utility to incorporate new communities into its operating practices, to “ensure that the levels of reliability are brought to utility standards” adding that the remote grids they service tend to be larger and more complex to decarbonize than independently operated remote energy systems. It also added that since 2018 BC Hydro has been working with new sources of federal and provincial funding “to support a more cost-effective transition from diesel to renewable energy.” It also added that the province’s 2030 diesel reduction target is “not BC Hydro’s target.”

But by the time the legal amendment came in 2024, Tll Yahda’s work on Solar North was already well underway, having decided on a utility-scale solar farm on the north grid in an already-disturbed area near the airport. They ensured training opportunities were available for members, and hired 16 solar installers on the island, says Brennan.

Then they began to build.

The invisible wall

Even as the panels were placed and the wires hooked up, there was another problem to solve before Solar North’s diesel-replacing potential could be fully realized: it needed a place to store its energy. 

Electricity is notoriously finicky, requiring a steady stream of electrons delivered through conductive wires at all times to work well. When these electrons falter or pile up, lights flicker, clocks fall out of date, or, in more severe cases, the power can drop or surge, frying appliances.

Remote grids like Haida Gwaii’s are particularly hard-pressed to avoid such swings.

Imagine a concert-goer attempting to crowd-surf in a room of just three people: if one person trips or someone else decides to pile on, the effort could easily collapse. Similarly, a remote grid with just a few power sources can fail if one of its inputs suddenly drops out or an entire community turns on their dishwashers at once. On the other hand, B.C.’s large, interconnected grid has the resilience of a packed concert hall — disruptions like these are almost imperceptible. 

On-again, off-again renewables like solar and wind are particularly unpredictable, whereas the on-demand qualities of diesel fuel are more likely to hold weight when needed. 

Luckily, solutions have arrived. “The technologies have evolved very rapidly,” Mark Mitchell, global lead of distribution and smart grid at the consulting firm Hatch, says. Mitchell adds that, in remote communities, storage systems like lithium-ion batteries and microgrid controllers are newly equipped to smooth out such dips and surges. 

“It’s really been one of the main enablers for bringing more renewables online.”

For BC Hydro and for the Haida Nation, grappling with these cutting-edge storage systems was new: they had to decide who would own the battery and control systems — BC Hydro would in the end — and who to buy it from, a challenge thanks to limited supply chains for systems scaled to the needs of small, remote communities. 

“BC Hydro had never done a project where it’s connecting a renewable energy project to a diesel grid before,” Brennan says. 

“We didn’t realize all the implications that went with that.”

Today, Solar North is still waiting for its battery system to be installed. In the meantime, it’s displacing around 70 per cent of the diesel it is capable of. 

And when it’s expanded to match the size of its battery and grid upgrades, Solar North has the potential to displace around six per cent of the island’s electrical diesel consumption. The Nation is currently working with BC Hydro to determine the sizing for an expansion of Solar North that could push that displacement higher still.  

In many remote regions, displacing 100 per cent of the diesel brings challenges that batteries alone still can’t fix, Mitchell says. Today’s batteries are ideal for short-term storage, which can help even out daily dips and lows in solar power, but not longer seasonal shifts like Haida Gwaii’s stormy winters, when the sun is in short supply. 

“Essentially, what we’re going to do here is run into an invisible wall with solar,” Brennan says. At that point, solar energy will produce diminishing returns. 

Tll Yahda is studying ways to make solar work better for their communities, including a pilot project to test how solar panels matched with small-scale batteries could make the system run more efficiently. It’s also conducting analyses to test out how hybrid combinations of renewables behave on the grid.

In renewable electricity, the right kind of complexity is key, Garrett Russ, climate action coordinator with the Skidegate Band Council, says. “I’m looking at this whole system as a whole complete project.” 

He’s seen the consequences of siloed efforts, including the nearly 50 heat pumps in his workshop that need fixing — thanks in part to a lack of trained workers on the island to keep them in good repair. Russ has since launched a training program, teaching Haida and other remote community members in B.C. how to maintain the systems while providing needed employment. 

A birds-eye view is a challenge because of project-by-project funding cycles and governments that tend to move in slow, incremental steps, Russ says. But he’s making the most of the opportunities he can create, and studying how wind and solar could work together. 

Whether operating independently or with BC Hydro, remote projects require funding, and Russ worries that the door may be about to close. Already, a key federal program has not had its funding renewed. In an emailed statement, Natural Resources Canada confirmed that funding through a key diesel-reduction grant program will end next year, but added that there are other “ongoing programs” that will continue to support the effort. 

“I believe there’s going to be a very significant cut possibly coming up,” Russ says. In preparation, he is working on as many projects as he can “in a very short time.”

“If that does happen, then at least I changed as much as I could.”

‘We have to keep going.’

A ten-minute walk from the arrow-shaped panels of Solar North sits B.C. Hydro’s diesel generating station, ringed in the spring by salal and salmonberries that McEvoy makes sure to avoid. 

Diesel still helps power Haida Gwaii’s grid, but the work to reduce it continues.

McEvoy and others across the islands have been asking their community members what kind of energy transition they’d like to see. Meanwhile, BC Hydro has begun to do energy planning with remote communities — for the first time in its history. The process design for those plans fell short of what many nations had hoped for: it doesn’t have legal standing, and remains, in many ways, on the utility’s terms. McEvoy says it remains an important step.

McEvoy likens the process to paddling a canoe in a stormy ocean. “All we can see is dark, black clouds ahead,” she says. “We have to keep going.” 

At some point, she says, the clouds will break. 

“That’s us, and the work we’re putting in.”

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It’s been five years since an atmospheric river dropped a month’s worth of rain on Princeton, British Columbia, in a matter of days. But even with a herculean recovery and rebuilding effort, the impacts of those 2021 floods still mar the landscape. 

Hills are scarred by landslides, and buildings are abandoned. Sun-bleached logs sit far from the river as a reminder of how far the water spread. Then, there’s the old train bridge. 

Part of the Kettle Valley Rail Trail, a 500-kilometre abandoned rail line turned multi-use trail between Hope and Midway, B.C., the bridge was one of more than 60 locations where the 2021 floods washed out the trail. About 20 metres of steel, concrete and timber on its eastern end were swept away by the surging waters. Today, the Tulameen River flows beneath the gap between Princeton and what’s left, with a faded, graffiti-covered “trail closed” sign standing on the shore. 

For years, many Princeton locals were hopeful the bridge and trail would be rebuilt. But in early February, they learned the province was planning to not only scrap the bridge, but to decommission the entire 67-kilometre stretch of trail connecting Princeton to the Coquihalla Highway. 

In an announcement, the province said repairing that segment “would cost an estimated $60 million,” while “the cost of decommissioning the damaged Princeton section is estimated at $20 million.”

“The decision to decommission a section of the Kettle Valley Rail Trail near Princeton exemplifies the harsh realities of climate-impacted management,” the Ministry of Environment and Parks explained. 

It’s a decision that’s left locals and outsiders who care about the Trans Canada Trail reeling. 

At more than 29,000 kilometres, the Trans Canada Trail is the longest multi-use trail network on the planet. In 2017, it was officially “connected” across the entire country, making it possible to traverse Canada by a combination of foot and paddling trails. The decommissioning of the Kettle Valley segment will be the first permanent break in that connection. That’s a big part of why Stacey Dakin, the Trans Canada Trail’s chief program officer, thinks there has been concern about this decision outside of Princeton.

“With the Trans Canada Trail, there’s a sense of national pride and unity,” Dakin says. “We’ve heard more and more that people are connecting to each other just because they’re on the trail.

To Dakin, the Kettle Valley decision was “shocking.” But it reflects the growing risk that climate change poses to trails across the country, as jurisdictions must weigh the cost of repairs against the likelihood of future disasters.

More than just a trail

For Princeton mayor Spencer Coyne, the town at the confluence of the Tulameen and Similkameen rivers has always been home. A member of the Upper Similkameen Indian Band, he remembers when trains still ran on the Kettle Valley line.

“There was a dirt bike and bicycle trail beside the tracks,” he says. “We would ride our bikes out to Tulameen and go swimming in the summer. It’s just a part of who we are.”

Coyne, who was first elected in 2018, decided to run for mayor after a massive 2017 wildfire opened his eyes to just how vulnerable Princeton was to climate change.

“We’ve been in a state of emergency every single year since,” Coyne explains. “The trail is kind of a microcosm.”

The decommissioning decision stunned Coyne. Especially given all of the work the community was doing to rebuild and recover after the 2021 floods.

“[I was] super disappointed in the way that unrolled … It took a bunch of people by surprise.”

One of those people is Todd Davidson, manager of the Princeton Museum.

“When the news about decommissioning the Kettle Valley Rail Trail first came out, we were all kind of surprised and shocked,” he says.

He describes the trail as a tourist draw, with visitors using it for day trips and multi-day expeditions. In winter, he says, locals relied on it as a snowmobile route to get supplies from town. He also thinks the trail should be preserved for historical reasons, as the remnants of a rail line that moved minerals, timber and people between the coast and the Interior for nearly a century.

It’s a history that still lives in people like Tom Reichert. He worked on the line for the decade before it was shut down in 1989. Today, he and his wife, Kelly, own Reichert Sales & Service, an off-road vehicle shop in Tulameen. “The closure has definitely had an impact on our business,” he says. “It’s impacted both sales and service.”

They’ve also shut down an off-road vehicle rental program they estimate brought in around $30,000 a year before the floods. 

But beyond the business impact, the Reicherts worry what losing the trail will mean for the community. They remember when the trail was busy with hikers, cyclists and all-terrain vehicle users. It’s a big part of why they’ve gotten involved in efforts to oppose decommissioning. Now, there’s a large sign on the front door of Reichert Sales & Service promoting a “Save the KVR” Facebook group and a petition that, as of writing, has more than 12,000 signatures.

The Reicherts, Coyne and Davidson all point out that many of those petition signers have never even been to Princeton, but care because the Kettle Valley is part of the Trans Canada Trail.

Managed retreat

Most of the time, the Vedder River is a calm, azure blue ribbon that flows from Chilliwack into the Fraser River. But when it rises, it transforms into a raging torrent, a pale brown rush of water that inundates the forest and ravages the trails that run along its banks.

“We had three 50-year storms within four months, back to back to back,” Drew Pilling says. “Which really took a toll on our system.”

Pilling, the senior parks and trails operations technician for the City of Chilliwack, is talking about three atmospheric rivers that hit Chilliwack between December 2025 and March 2026, with each one damaging the same stretch of the Vedder Rotary Loop Trail.

“It’s quite a cost,” says Pilling. “It’s a lot of gravel that comes back in, it’s a lot of machine time, a lot of man-hours.” 

This wasn’t the first time this trail had washed away. The same 2021 storm that ripped through the Kettle Valley trail also ravaged the Vedder Rotary Loop Trail. And although Chilliwack has so far been willing to bear the cost of repairs, Pilling thinks there may come a point where, year after year, flooding and trail repair become an issue.

“That’s for sure gonna be a topic of conversation with the council and the mayor,” he says. “Depending on their decisions, it might change the nature of the trails.” 

This changing nature is top of mind for Thomas Schoen. The chief executive officer of First Journey Trails, Schoen has been building trails across British Columbia since 1998. But it wasn’t until 2017, when a cross-country mountain bike trail he helped build connecting Williams Lake First Nation to the local trail network burned in a wildfire, that the situation really hit him.

“It was a multi-year project,” Schoen says. “We started by training Indigenous trail builders and trail maintenance crews. It was a really successful project.” 

For a few years, the trail’s popularity grew, with both locals and visitors from further afield. Then it was engulfed by a wildfire that Schoen says “absolutely destroyed that trail.” 

He and others tried to rebuild it, but the landscape was fundamentally different.

“You had tens of thousands of burnt, standing dead trees along this open trail corridor,” he explains. “The amount of tree falls on this trail was, and still is, so significant that it’s almost impossible with volunteer efforts to keep this trail open.”

Losing that trail was “extremely emotional” for Schoen, and changed the way he thinks about trails and climate change. 

“Some trails can’t be revived,” he says. “Some trails, we just don’t have the manpower or the financial power to rebuild them or open them back up again.”

Climate policy experts might categorize Schoen’s comments and the province’s decision to abandon the Kettle Valley trail as “managed retreat.” 

It’s a strategy for dealing with climate change impacts that a provincial planning document describes as the “strategic relocation of people and structures out of harm’s way, often accompanied by ecological restoration and a permanent change in land use.”

But when done properly, it’s a strategy developed with communities, not for them. 

“These decisions cannot just be made by the government or by one ministry,” Schoen says. “[They] need to be made in partnerships between many different groups … First Nations at the table with trail user clubs.” 

Hundreds of thousands of kilometres of trails

For Ryan Stuart, community engagement lead with the Outdoor Recreation Council of BC, the biggest issue with the Kettle Valley trail decision was the voices that were left out. 

“Where was the conversation beforehand?” he asks. Conversations that he argues are even more important given the growing challenge of maintaining trails in a changing climate. 

And the province has a lot of trails to maintain. According to the province’s 2013 trail strategy, the province has at least 30,000 kilometres of formally recognized trails and “hundreds of thousands of kilometres” of informal trails.

And while the strategy didn’t discuss climate change, a 2020 progress report on it listed an “increase in climate-related events such as wildfires and flooding, which can damage the trail systems,” as a top challenge. It’s a sentiment echoed by another 2025 report by Climate Data Canada exploring how climate change impacts trails across the country. 

Stuart worries that the cost and effort issues are particularly challenging due to long-standing issues with trail funding in the province.  

Among applications to the Outdoor Recreation Fund of BC, a $10-million, multi-year grant to support trail building and maintenance overseen by the Outdoor Recreation Council, he says “lots of the funding requests are for rehabilitation of damaged infrastructure from fires or floods.” 

And the fund just isn’t big enough to support everything. Earlier this year, the council described the fund as “heavily oversubscribed” and able to “support only about 15 per cent of grant requests.” 

And it’s not like the province isn’t aware of the challenges.

“Many of British Columbia’s provincial parks, recreation sites and trails are experiencing a climate-driven transformation,” the Ministry of Environment and Parks wrote in a statement to The Narwhal.“As extreme weather events like the 2021 and 2024 atmospheric rivers become more frequent, the province is navigating a difficult balance between preserving historic recreation opportunities and ensuring long-term environmental and fiscal sustainability.”

Stuart understands “the provincial government is in tough financial shape and needs to look at everything,” but thinks there still needs to be more transparency in how decisions are being made. He points out that the government spent millions rebuilding both the Berg Lake Trail in Mount Robson Provincial Park and the Juan de Fuca Trail on Vancouver Island, while abandoning the Kettle Valley.  

“I’ve heard members of the Outdoor Recreation Council ask, ‘How was that decision made?’ ” he says.

The ministry didn’t directly answer questions about those decisions. Instead, they called Berg Lake “a blueprint for ‘building back better.’ ”

“Following catastrophic weather damage, the trail’s multi-phase reopening has a climate resilience focus,” the ministry statement explained. That focus involved moving trails out of vulnerable flood-plains, relocating bridges to places better able to “withstand heavy flow,” and hardening tent pads. 

They also said the Juan de Fuca trail would need some of “these same resilient engineering strategies.”

‘No new trails’

How the Kettle Valley decision was made also frustrates people in Princeton.

“What they want to do here is just throw in the towel,” Todd Davidson says. “We feel really quite ignored.” 

It’s a sentiment that Coyne understands all too well.

“The fact that the three … main municipalities that were impacted in 2021 didn’t get a lick of funding from the province or from the [federal government] speaks volumes,” he says, referring to Abbotsford and Merritt, which like Princeton were denied support from the federal Disaster Mitigation and Adaptation Fund.

He sees the Kettle Valley decision as a “mirror image of what we’re trying to deal with” around broader flood recovery and climate adaptation. And while he understands the idea of managed retreat, he questions how it’s being applied.

“Ultimately, would we like to look at putting the river back to a more natural state? Of course, but nobody wants to pay for it,” he says. In 2022, Coyne applied for $55 million in federal funding to support a new diking plan for the town. Two years later, that application was rejected.

“Nobody’s coming to help us with that,” he says.

That lack of funding also worries Pilling. While Chilliwack was able to access some funding to rebuild after 2021, he’s not sure this latest round of trail work will qualify. 

“A lot of that funding is for infrastructure that is deemed necessary,” he says. And while trail advocates will argue that trails are necessary, providing benefits for physical and mental health, serving as travel corridors and, in some cases, being used for wildfire resilience, Pilling thinks most of the costs of trail repairs will “end up on the city’s bill.” 

For Coyne, this comes with an added sting. While he’s been fighting to try to reverse the decommissioning decision, he’s also been in meetings about marketing Princeton’s outdoor recreation. 

“We have a branch of the province actively marketing this entire trail network, and we have other departments that are cutting the funding and cutting the feet out from under them,” he says.

The province released its Tourism Sector Action Plan in March. The plan promised to grow B.C.’s outdoor recreation economy, which it claimed “generates approximately $17 billion annually in participation-based revenue, contributing $4.8 billion to provincial GDP.”But the strategy didn’t include any new funding for trails or recreation infrastructure. That’s a problem not just because of the new challenges posed by climate change, but also because of the province’s long-standing maintenance backlog.

In 2015, BC Parks estimated they had “approximately $700 million of investment in infrastructure that requires maintenance.” The province hasn’t updated this number since it was released, but the ministry did say they have further invested “approximately $200 million in campground expansions, accessibility upgrades and improvements to trails, parking and facilities since 2017.”

For Schoen, this calls for a radical rethink of how we approach trail building.“My philosophy is no new trails, period,” he says. “It’s unbelievable how much money we need for trail maintenance, and that money simply isn’t there.”

An uncertain future for the Kettle Valley

When it comes to the future of the Kettle Valley trail, Coyne is torn. He understands the threat that climate change poses to the region, but he also knows how important the trail is to his community. That’s why he keeps fighting for it, and after multiple meetings with the province, he’s starting to see a path forward.

“We’re not going to get everything we’re asking for, we’re not going to get a total rebuild of the trail,” he says.

But in early April, the Regional District of Okanagan-Similkameen passed a motion supporting a new regional trails strategy. 

What the province will say is yet to be seen, but Coyne feels clear on one thing: if the community wants to keep the trail, the onus will be on them to make it happen.

“At the end of the day, if local government or regional government isn’t willing to shoulder this burden, then your trail is probably going to go away,” he says. 

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Summary

• B.C.’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act has been a point of tension for the provincial government and First Nations leaders since December 2025.
• After months of vowing to change the law by June, Premier David Eby now says amendments will wait until at least October.
• In the meantime, the province and First Nations leaders will try to find a solution that both sides can agree on.

The showdown over B.C.’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act is not over, but the future of the landmark law is now on hold until the fall.

For several months, B.C. Premier David Eby claimed the Declaration Act — also known as DRIPA — had to be changed, and quickly. First he said the law would be amended, then paused, and now he’s said legislation to change the law can wait until the fall session.

“It is absolutely possible, as a leader, to move off confidently in the wrong direction,” Eby told reporters at the legislature on April 20.

Eby has moved in many directions on DRIPA this year. Initially, he maintained that changing the law was non-negotiable because of legal liability, and something that had to be done before the legislature’s summer break.

Then — after First Nations leaders told him his “approach was totally unacceptable” — the premier proposed suspending DRIPA for up to three years. That, according to Eby, would allow the province’s appeal of a recent court decision to be heard by the Supreme Court of Canada.“This will be a confidence vote,” Eby said at the time, raising the possibility that DRIPA could trigger a provincial election.While the premier said he was confident the “strong and united” NDP caucus would back his plan, that turned out not to be the case. Two weeks later, Eby said no changes to DRIPA would be made this spring.

Instead, the B.C. government and First Nations leaders have committed to spend the summer seeking a solution that can address “the government’s stated legal concerns, while upholding the title and rights and human rights of First Nations,” according to an April 20 joint statement from the premier’s office and the First Nations Leadership Council.

Whether the discussions will result in legislation that both the government and First Nations support is far from certain.

“There is no guarantee, simply because we reached this agreement that come fall legislative session, that we will have that agreement, but I’m certainly hopeful that we will,” Eby told reporters. 

So … what is going on with DRIPA?

Why does the government want to change DRIPA?

Let’s go back to December 2025. That’s when the B.C. Appeal Court determined the government’s obligations under DRIPA are legally enforceable. This created “unlimited legal liability” for the province, according to Eby.

The appeal court’s ruling was the result of a challenge to part of a 2023 B.C. Supreme Court ruling launched by the Gitxaała and Ehattesaht First Nations. That ruling agreed with the nations’ claim that B.C.’s mineral claim-staking regime did not fulfill the government’s obligations to consult with First Nations.The 2023 decision also concluded that DRIPA was not legally enforceable. The nations appealed that part of the ruling and, in December 2025, the court agreed with their arguments. 

According to the premier, the legal threat the province faces is twofold.In ruling that the government’s obligations under DRIPA — to align provincial laws with the principles of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples — are legally enforceable, the court has opened the door to further challenges of any provincial law on the grounds that it does not align with DRIPA.That’s not the incremental approach the province was prepared to take when DRIPA was introduced, Eby said.“Instead of eating the elephant one bite at a time, the court has invited us to do it all at once and that is just not possible,” he told reporters on April 2.

Secondly, the appeal court’s December decision can now be used in other court cases, which often refer to existing court rulings. According to Eby, more than 20 lawsuits involving the province have been launched or amended since the Gitxaala decision was released.

In an open letter to B.C. MLAs released on April 19, the First Nations Leadership Council described Eby’s arguments as “not only misleading but … also inherently wrong.”

“We are dismayed at the degree to which the court cases and DRIPA are being misrepresented, mischaracterized and conflated as rhetoric and fearmongering,” the council wrote. “The risk before the legislators and all British Columbians is not created by DRIPA — it is created by the decisions to undermine it through unilateral action.”

Why do First Nations leaders oppose those changes?

First Nations leaders have called Eby’s plans for DRIPA “a unilateral betrayal and an abandonment of the province’s commitment to principled reconciliation, as well as serving to create a climate of uncertainty.”

Altering, suspending or repealing DRIPA — as the B.C. Conservative opposition has proposed — will not eliminate B.C.’s obligations to consult with First Nations on issues related to Indigenous Rights and title. And it will not prevent First Nations from seeking to exert those rights in the courts, a more expensive and time-consuming option and one where First Nations have seen victories time and again.

“I think that we have an obligation and a responsibility to remember that no one is giving First Nations anything,” Huy’wu’qw Shana Thomas, Hereditary Chief of Lyackson First Nation, said during an April 10 press conference. “First Nations people continue to assert their inherent rights and title and prefer reconciliation, prefer negotiations.”

What does DRIPA have to do with the Cowichan decision?

B.C.’s back and forth on DRIPA is being connected by some with the Cowichan decision.

In 2014, the Cowichan Tribes filed a case with the B.C. Supreme Court, asserting Aboriginal Title over lands along the Fraser River, in what is now known as Richmond, B.C. The lands claimed included a traditional summer village site, known as Tl’uqtinus, and the tribes’ suit also asserted rights to fish and gather food in the claimed area.In its August 2025 ruling, B.C.’s Supreme Court affirmed the Cowichan Tribes’ Aboriginal Title. All of the defendants in the case, including B.C. and the federal government, are appealing the decision, which has been at the centre of a national — and often misinformed — debate about property rights.

The Cowichan case only named governments and government agencies, and the tribes have repeatedly said they have no intent of trying to take away any private property as a result of the court ruling.

Since announcing the province’s appeal of the ruling, Eby has said his government will “go to the wall” to protect the rights of private property owners.

The premier has also linked the Cowichan Tribes and Gitxaala cases, calling them “dramatic, overreaching and unhelpful court decisions.”

But DRIPA and the Cowichan decision actually have little to do with each other, besides being related to Indigenous Rights. The case was launched prior to DRIPA becoming law and turned on Section 35 of the Canadian Constitution, not provincial law.

Does DRIPA ‘create uncertainty’ for industry?

Short answer: it depends on who you ask. 

Section 7 of the law allows for joint decision-making agreements with First Nations regarding industrial projects on their traditional territories. DRIPA’s goal is to “provide certainty and stability” about how projects can move toward approval by clearly defining the responsibilities of the provincial government and First Nations.

That Section 7 agreements enabled by DRIPA have helped advance some natural resource projects is a point on which Eby and First Nations leaders actually agree.Take the plan to reopen the Eskay Creek mine on Tahltan Nation territory.

In 2022, the B.C. government and the Tahltan Nation signed an agreement under Section 7 of the Declaration Act. The section allows the government to undertake a joint decision-making process with First Nations. 

In December 2025, Tahltan Nation members voted in support of the Eskay Creek revitalization project and the province announced its approval of permits for the mine in January 2026.

The Red Chris mine and the Galore Creek mine have also advanced under Section 7 agreements and, on Vancouver Island, another agreement involving forestry tenures on ‘Namgis Nation territory is in the works.

Continuing to deliver these types of agreements is evidently a high priority for the province. Eby’s proposal to suspend DRIPA would not have affected the sections of the law that enable these agreements.

What happens now?

Well, the legislature will shut down for the summer on May 28. MLAs aren’t scheduled to return until October. In the meantime, the government will continue to discuss the future of DRIPA with First Nations leaders and try to find a solution that both sides can support. 

Attorney General Niki Sharma, who Eby credited with convincing him not to pursue a legislated solution this spring, has expressed confidence that a mutually agreeable solution is achievable.

“I have faith in partnership and the fact that when we come to the table to sort out challenging issues, that we can come to solutions that last,” she told reporters at the legislature on April 21. “If we can get to sitting down and rolling up our sleeves and fixing things that are challenging in a way that lasts, then we’ve solved it for generations to come, and I see that pathway.”

If — and it remains a pretty big if — the provincial government and First Nations leaders do agree on DRIPA’s future, any changes to law could be made during the fall sitting of the legislature, which is scheduled to wrap at the end of November. 

By then, things could be quite different in the legislature. The B.C. Conservative Party will have a new leader, possibly one without a seat in the legislature. The Conservatives want DRIPA repealed and all candidates running the leadership race have backed that position, so it’s likely Conservative MLAs will vote against whatever changes the government eventually proposes.

The B.C. Greens have criticized the government’s proposals to change DRIPA so far, backing First Nations calls for the law to be left as is.

Currently, there are also six MLAs that do not belong to a caucus, although all were at one time B.C. Conservative members. Three of those MLAs have vocally opposed Indigenous Rights, reconciliation and DRIPA. The other three may be open to overtures from the government to support legislation to amend DRIPA.

To pass legislation without support from the opposition, Eby will need to get his entire caucus on side — something he was not able to do this spring.

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Nine-year-old John Smithers cradles a tiny burrowing owl in his hands, preparing to release it into the grasslands of Upper Nicola Band territory.

Like other young syilx people, he’s grown up hearing stories about the small birds of prey that have nearly disappeared from his Thompson-Okanagan homelands in the last century or so.

The owls – known in syilx culture as guardians, guides or messengers – were “once a common element” in landscapes stretching from the southern Interior of B.C. all the way to Manitoba, according to Canada’s Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife. 

Now, burrowing owl sightings are rare. In 2003, the Government of Canada listed the burrowing owl as endangered under the federal Species At Risk Act. According to the Burrowing Owl Alliance, the bird’s population in the country has declined by over 96 per cent since 1987. Experts link the bird’s decline to the gradual loss of its grassland habitats over the last century. 

“Lots of animals can come and get them,” Smithers said about the lack of protective habitat for the burrowing owl. 

Aware of the owls’ importance and decline, earlier this year Smithers became N’kwala School’s annual student ambassador to a regional burrowing owl recovery program that’s being led by the First Nation. 

As ambassador, he was invited to be the first person of the year to release a captive-born burrowing owl into the wild on April 22, in his home community of spax̌mn (Douglas Lake) in B.C.’s Nicola Valley.

The release, which coincided with Earth Day, marked 10 years since Upper Nicola Band began releasing captive-born burrowing owls onto their homelands.

In return, those captive-raised owls have produced 125 “wild-born” baby owls — or fledglings — since being released from the community’s restoration site.  

Despite high winds and the risk of ticks, dozens of excited people from all age groups turned out in high spirits for the release. 

Students, nature enthusiasts and Elders alike shared laughs and smiles at the sight of the precious birds, with their round heads, short stature and long legs.

Framed by grassy hills, Smithers released the owl under the warm sunshine with the help of Dawn Brodie, one of the main field technicians who has been involved in the program since its inception.

The nervous bird nearly escaped from his grasp and into the open air. But thanks to the quick reflexes of the adults around him, helping hands connect the captive-born owl back to the land and down an artificial nesting burrow that had been prepared by the Upper Nicola Band stewardship department.

“Soft” is the word Smithers used to describe the feeling of holding the owl. 

Soon after, several guests in attendance – from program partners to youth and Elders – were invited by the field technicians to release an owl down different burrows that were created by the recovery program and its partners.

Some of the owls wore amusingly bewildered expressions as they waited in the gentle grasp of human hands before being placed into a burrow.

In total, 11 captive-born owls — six males and five females — were released into five of the site’s 35 artificial burrows that day. They are all just under one year old.

“The program has exceeded all our expectations,” Loretta Holmes, an Upper Nicola Band member and senior resource technician with the band’s stewardship department, said.

“The owls, which we call sq̓əq̓axʷ, have responded better than we dared to hope ten years ago. And community interest and involvement has been strong since the start.”

Owls released into artificial burrows filled with frozen mice

The tiny burrows are connected through a network of underground tunnels hidden under the grassland hills above spax̌mn. 

Each artificial burrow consists of a small, corrugated tube in the ground that serves as its entrance, which feeds into the larger network of tunnels. The entry points are camouflaged in the field by grass and large rocks. 

Before any captive-raised owls are released, handfuls of frozen mice are inserted into the burrows and tunnels.

“That helps them not have to go as far to hunt as often. It encourages them to lay more eggs, and helps them rear their young ones when they’re hatched,” Holmes said.

Once released, the burrow entrances are closed off for a few days, explained Chris Gill, a project biologist with the band’s Species-At-Risk program.

“It’s to let them acclimatize and calm down, basically. And potentially bond with the mate that’s in there,” Gill said.

Breeding gets underway as soon as two owls choose each other as mates, and Gill said that eggs are laid in June.

The burrow tunnels, which protect the owls from predators, are connected to a nest box. The nest box has an opening at ground level, allowing technicians to observe how many eggs have been laid and monitor activity. 

Technicians also attach leg bands to the newly-hatched birds here, to track future migration.

Mice are also delivered to the burrows two to three times a week. Holmes said that this type of care results in nests that carry nine to 10 eggs — more than the average of six to eight laid by burrowing owls in the wild.

The mice are “giving them a big head start and maximizing the chances of producing healthy fledglings, and healthy parents as well,” Gill said.

The owls stay in the site’s burrow network anywhere from four days to up to a week, depending on weather conditions, and are then free to fly around in the open air.

“They mostly stick at the site, even after you release them out of the burrow, because they’re now used to the site,” Gill said.

“They may have paired up, or they may choose another mate from the site.”

By July, fledglings will start to emerge from the burrows, and the owls usually start to migrate south in September and October. They’ll return to the breeding sites next April.

Tracked migration data from burrowing owls who left the site in previous years revealed that the birds travel as far as San Jose, California.

“It’s just so amazing that they went all the way somewhere, wintered in those conditions and came back,” Holmes said. 

“It’s wonderful.”

Owl recovery “one piece of a larger puzzle” in restoring ecosystem health

In the last decade, more than 100 burrowing owls have been raised in captivity at the Kamloops Wildlife Park by the Burrowing Owl Conservation Society, before being released at spax̌mn. There’s a site in Oliver that supports the program as well.

The captive-raised owls all come with identification tags on their legs, which are documented by field technicians before they are released into the burrows.

Many of the 120-plus wild-born owls have left the Upper Nicola Band site and returned, including four who came back this spring; two males and two females, three of which were born at the site last year.

While the conservation efforts are helping to re-populate the burrowing owl species in this part of the country, Upper Nicola Band views this work as only one piece of the larger puzzle of how to protect the community’s rare and sensitive grassland ecosystem habitats. 

By stewarding these ecosystems — and restoring and supporting the biodiversity that has been depleted — it’s also an act by the band to protect their cultural identity and fulfill generational responsibilities around caring for the land and for all living things.

“Conserving a species at risk, like a burrowing owl, it’s about far more than a single bird or species. It’s about upholding relationships, responsibilities and balance with the living world,” Holmes said.

Animals like the burrowing owl are part of an interconnected system that has sustained Indigenous Peoples for generations, she said.

“If one species declines, it signals that the relationship between people and the land is out of balance. Conservation becomes an act of restoring harmony and respect in that system,” she said.

“Protecting species at risk aligns with Indigenous laws that emphasize caretaking. Conservation efforts honour the principle that decisions made today must ensure the healthy lands and wildlife for our relatives yet to come.”

It’s just one of many projects under the community’s stewardship department’s larger Species-At-Risk program, which is designed to protect and restore endangered species populations on their lands.

The program also looks at restoration efforts for species including the American badger, Lewis’s woodpecker and Great Basin spadefoot — all of which have been federally recognized as threatened or at-risk. 

Penticton Indian Band — a fellow syilx community that’s under the Okanagan Nation Alliance (ONA) along with Upper Nicola Band — also released burrowing owls through their own similar program that same week.

“In British Columbia, burrowing owls are extirpated. That means that they’re not actually existing on the landscape without reintroduction programs, like the Upper Nicola Band’s,” Gill said. 

But Traditional Ecological Knowledge gathered from Elders and advisors confirmed that burrowing owls historically existed on the spax̌mn landscape.

In 2015, a year before the burrowing owl recovery program launched, the Species-At-Risk team conducted surveys on reserve lands to determine a suitable habitat for the birds. 

They settled on the grasslands above the Upper Nicola Band community as the reintroduction program’s site.

“We found suitable habitat for burrowing owls — but no burrowing owls present,” said Gill.

The birds traditionally nested in the underground burrows that were dug and abandoned by different animals, from badgers to marmots and coyotes, he said.

But because of a lack of badgers, there weren’t any natural burrows out on the land.

“That’s why the Upper Nicola Band put in these artificial burrows,” he said.

“There are actually badgers on that reserve, but there are very few — and far in-between — so we can’t rely on a burrowing owl finding a badger burrow.”

According to the province, “several small” burrowing owl nesting sites were identified in the Okanagan and Thompson valleys from 1900 to 1928. 

Historical nesting areas include Osoyoos, Oliver, Penticton, White Lake, Lower Similkameen Valley, Vernon, Kamloops and Douglas Lake.

But between 1928 and 1980, only four nesting sites were recorded.

The federal government attributed the “conversion of grassland to cropland” as the “ultimate factor responsible for the decline in burrowing owls.” It estimates that the species experienced a 90 per cent population decline from 1990 to 2000.

Also contributing to the owl’s population decline is the “gauntlet” of issues they face on their migration route, Holmes said.

This includes fatalities occurring from collisions with wind turbine farms and motor vehicles. Pesticides targeting insects and rodents that the birds feed upon indirectly poison them as well. 

In 2004, the estimated population of burrowing owls in Canada was recorded at 795 mature individuals. In 2015, it had plunged to approximately 270. 

Burrowing owl populations are “in a nose dive,” Gill said.

He called the burrowing owl “a canary in a coal mine” in measuring the state of ecosystem health.

“A badger, a burrowing owl — those species are the indicator species. If they’re not doing well, then that’s a sign of something bigger that’s not doing well,” he said.

Upper Nicola Band’s grassland ecosystem is “incredibly resilient,” but grasslands across Canada are critically endangered 

Along with Holmes and Brodie, Gill helped initiate the burrowing owl reintroduction program 10 years ago. He called the two women “the work horses” of the program.

“We monitor the owls, and write really good data collection on it,” said Brodie, a veterinary technician who supports the program as a burrowing owl consultant.

The program has been a success, Gill said, not just because of the region’s “great grasslands.”

“But it’s also the stewardship that’s going on with these owls,” he said.

“It’s one of the most productive sites in B.C. for releasing our fledging owls.”

In the wild, burrowing owls can live anywhere from four to six years, according to Lauren Meads, the executive director of the Burrowing Owl Conservation Society of BC. 

Meads, who was joined at the release event by the society’s 11-year-old educational burrowing owl, Pluto, added that in captivity they can live up to 15 years.

According to the Government of B.C., grasslands made up less than one percent of the province’s land area in 2004, adding that “only a small percentage of our grasslands are protected.”

But grasslands surrounding the Upper Nicola landscape are “some of the most intact and incredibly resilient grasslands” Gill has observed, he said.

“Grasslands are one of the most endangered ecosystems in Canada. … They’re very, very rare. It looks like we have a lot, but this is one little spot,” he said.

Holmes added that protecting grasslands also protects the burrowing owls. 

“That’s their home. It works hand-in-hand,” she said.

Owl conservation, protection is a cultural responsibility 

Holmes said that the burrowing owl’s population decline and status as an endangered species is not just an ecological matter, but a cultural issue as well. 

sq̓əq̓axʷ are a “symbol of our cultural identity,” she said.

“Owls can be messengers, teachers or indicators in an Indigenous knowledge system. They’re often associated with observation, protections and indicators of change.”

The loss of burrowing owls “erodes the stories, the teachings and our ways of understanding the land that has been passed down through generations,” she added.

Upper Nicola Chief Dan Manuel said in a statement that burrowing owls are deeply woven into syilx culture.

“For our people, the cultural, spiritual and environmental importance of sq̓əq̓axʷ are one,” Manuel said.

“Our culture is rooted in co-existence with the world around us. We have a responsibility to care for the land and the beings on it. We must help rebuild what has been lost, and it will continue to support us.”

Holmes said that having a dedicated conservation program fulfills those duties that are owed to the land and to all living beings. 

“It treats our relatives with respect,” she said.

“The land, the animals, the plants — everything that’s there — provides us with sustenance. So it’s our responsibility to take care of them as well. We see all those things as our relatives.”

She emphasized that Indigenous Peoples have inherent responsibilities as stewards of their territories — responsibilities that originate in syilx laws, teachings and oral traditions, also known as captikʷł. 

“That predates colonial conservation frameworks,” she said.

Upper Nicola Band Elder Casey Holmes thanked all the staff and volunteers involved in the community’s stewardship program, especially for their work in supporting the restoration of the burrowing owl population.

“People are making a difference. Even if it doesn’t look like a difference, they made a difference today, to make this a success – to make this a part of history that we’re not losing,” said Casey.

When the community loses a tmixʷ (all living things) relative, Casey said that “we lose a part of history.”

“Bringing back this, is regaining back that history,” he said.

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The average home in British Columbia uses around 10,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per year.

There are approximately 2.2 million homes in B.C. This means the province needs to make sure the grid has enough energy to supply about 22 billion kilowatt hours every year to keep those homes warm and the lights on.

And that’s just for homes. It doesn’t include all the electricity needed for industry, businesses and a rapidly expanding electric-vehicle market.

In B.C., the average resident pays around $100 a month for electricity, roughly $1,200 per year for those 10,000 kilowatt hours.

Residential rates just went up on April 1, when BC Hydro increased its rates by 3.75 per cent. That’s partly to start paying off some of the sunk costs the government has already invested in building new power infrastructure. 

Electricity demand is only going to rise over the coming decades, as B.C. tries to reduce its use of fossil fuels while also bringing a whole lot of industrial projects onto the grid.

So where will all this energy come from, where is it going — and who will pay for it? There’s much we don’t know (yet) but here’s what we do.

First, let’s clear up a couple of things about the units of measurement — because utility companies use a variety of terms to describe electricity generation, output and consumption.

Kilowatts, megawatts and gigawatts represent an amount of power, at a single point in time. 

1,000 kilowatts is one megawatt. And 1,000 megawatts is one gigawatt.

Add the word “hours” to the end of any of those units and it describes how much of that power gets used up (or is generated) over time. Kilowatt hours is the unit most British Columbians will encounter, on their monthly bills, so while the others are useful to know we’ll stick to that measurement as much as possible.

Take a fridge, for example. If yours sucks up about 200 watts per hour (a large, older fridge might use twice as much) that means you’ll use around 1,750 kilowatt hours per year to keep the milk fresh. To meet the demand of millions of fridges, power producers need to make sure they have enough capacity to send all that electricity across the province every day. 

Ensuring there’s enough electricity to go around is getting expensive for the B.C. government — and the taxpayers that fund it.

B.C.’s newest source of hydroelectricity, the Site C dam, produces about 5,100 gigawatt hours (GWh) per year, or 5.7 billion kilowatt hours. It added about eight per cent more power to the province’s existing grid.

Site C cost around $16 billion.

BC Hydro doesn’t expect to pay off the costs of building Site C until 2094, 70 years after the project began producing electricity.

Now, the province is planning to invest at least $6 billion to build the first two phases of the North Coast Transmission Line, a network of around 450 kilometres of high-voltage power lines spanning the northwest. The B.C. government says it is building the line to “enable development” of mining and LNG projects. A third phase is proposed, for power lines heading north to service mines and Ksi Lisims LNG. If that happens, the final cost for the transmission network could rival Site C.

To state the obvious: this is a lot of public money. It’s hard to grasp just how big these numbers are. Understanding the difference between one million and one billion, expressed in time, might help. 

One million seconds is about 11.5 days. One billion seconds is more than 30 years.

So when the estimated cost of the first two phases of the North Coast Transmission Line doubled from $3 billion to $6 billion in 2025, that’s like jumping from 90 years to 180 years.

On top of infrastructure investments like Site C and the transmission lines, B.C. spends public money enticing private companies to build big industrial projects. Those subsidies are eventually reflected in residential utility bills — and in other ways across the economy. 

Take the push to grow the province’s LNG industry. Last year, the B.C. government coughed up $200 million to connect Cedar LNG, a liquefaction and export facility being built in Kitimat, to the grid.

Or take LNG Canada, the country’s first major liquefaction and export facility, also in Kitimat. It received a suite of subsidies, including reduced rates for the small amount of hydroelectricity it uses, as well as tax credits and an exemption from B.C.’s industrial carbon tax for the first two years of operations. Between the provincial and federal governments, public investments in LNG Canada are estimated to be almost $4 billion.

In the years ahead, homes and businesses in B.C. are going to need more power. BC Hydro predicts annual demand for electricity is likely to climb from 58,400 gigawatt hours in 2025 to more than 87,600 gigawatt hours by 2050. These amounts are way too big to wrap your head around if we convert them to kilowatt hours, but let’s just say it’s a lot.

The more things we need to plug into the grid, the more power the grid needs to be able to deliver. The sooner we plug things in, the faster BC Hydro has to find ways to meet that demand.

Electricity demand in B.C. could rise even faster if the province prioritizes providing power to industries, which are eager to portray their products as “clean” or “green” in an increasingly climate-conscious market. LNG facilities that plan to power their operations with B.C.’s electricity are already advertising their products as “low carbon” and “net zero.”

B.C.’s history of abundant, cheap and low-emission electricity has been hailed as one reason the province is well-positioned to supply LNG to countries like South Korea and Japan.

But liquefying natural gas requires an enormous amount of energy. As a liquid, methane takes up a fraction of the space that it does as a gas, making it viable for transport overseas. That process requires not just chilling the gas, but supercooling it, which LNG Canada does by burning gas to power massive turbines. But other approved facilities, like Ksi Lisims LNG and the aforementioned Cedar LNG, want to use electricity instead. Hence, the new power line with a multi-billion dollar price tag.

So how much power does all this industrial infrastructure need?Well, Ksi Lisims, a floating LNG facility proposed for B.C.’s North Coast requested the equivalent of around 5,200 gigawatt hours, or 5.2 billion kilowatt hours, from BC Hydro.

That’s more than the electricity output of the Site C dam potentially going to power just one project.

Cedar LNG expects to use up to 1,800 gigawatt hours, or 1.8 billion kilowatt hours.

Powering just those two LNG projects could use up to the equivalent electricity that would keep power flowing to 700,000 homes.

All that electricity isn’t free, of course. But it is cheaper for industrial users. Residential customers currently pay $118.70 for the first 670 kilowatt hours they use in a month.

That climbs to around $140 for each additional 1,000 kilowatt hours. Small businesses pay about the same as heavy-use households. 

But for larger businesses it’s the opposite: the more they use, the less they pay.

Large industrial customers — consumers that use more than 550,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per year — pay $67.90 per 1,000 kilowatt hours, slightly over half the residential rate.

So what does all this mean for the average British Columbian?

Well, to keep the lights on in homes across the province over the coming decades, B.C. will continue to build out more power capacity. It will also keep trying to find ways to use industrial revenues to balance the government’s budget, so homeowners don’t have to pay (much) more per kilowatt hour consumed. But the province is up against the clock — and a moving target. 

Less than six months after releasing a new forecast for electricity demand, BC Hydro now anticipates needing to supply an additional 2.7 billion kilowatt hours to its customers. The LNG industry is identified as a driving force behind that increase.

Because B.C. relies heavily on hydroelectric dams, the province’s ability to meet demand with power produced domestically is subject to droughts. When this happens, the province imports electricity from its neighbours, including Alberta.

Whether on monthly bills or in other ways spread out across the economy, taxpayers are paying for provincial support of massive industrial projects, including the push to get those projects on the grid. Those hidden costs could eventually surface on utility bills or through cuts to other government services.

Either way, future British Columbians will pay for decisions made today about how to make sure all that electricity keeps flowing through the wires.

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Summary

• British Columbia is home to the country’s longest-standing Indigenous Guardian program, the Haida Gwaii Watchmen, founded in 1982, and the province leads leads the way for national investment.
• Indigenous Guardian programs support conservation targets, create jobs in rural areas and have a high return on investment. 
• While programs across the country are seeing budgets slashed, Indigenous Guardians received an unexpected $230M investment by the federal government in March — but questions remain.

Ida Peter knew she had to apply to protect mule deer populations in Tsal’alh traditional territory, located in B.C.’s Central Interior, when B.C. first announced $8.9 million for Indigenous Guardians programs in 2023. 

“We have a really big concern about [them] in our territory because traditionally we’re known as the deer people,” Peter said. 

“I would say in the last 50 years the population of deer has declined drastically. Where we used to see hundreds of deer, now we’re lucky to see in those same areas maybe 10 or 20,” she said.

Mule deer are a significant species of concern in the Southern Interior region of the province, which means they are at risk of being endangered because of wildfires, resource extraction and human development.

Peter is an elected councillor in her nation, and manages the culture and heritage department. The Tsal’alh Guardians were born out of Peter’s proposal and are a small but mighty team of three who steward the territory.

It’s one of over 240 Indigenous Guardian initiatives that have been implemented across the country with the support of federal funding: an initial investment of $25 million to pilot Indigenous Guardians programs in 2018-2022 which was bolstered by an additional $100 million announced in 2021. But with both B.C. and federal guardian funding streams set to expire in 2026, Indigenous Guardians across the country were bracing for major cuts. 

That was until an announcement on Mar. 31. 

To the surprise of many First Nations, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government committed an additional $230 million into Indigenous Guardian programming, including for the creation of a new Arctic Indigenous Guardians Program. 

Though the announcement was welcomed by Indigenous communities, many are still wondering when those funds will begin flowing — and who will benefit from them.

Funding will be administered over the next five years, Emily Jackson from Environment and Climate Change Canada confirmed in an email to the Narwhal.

“Information on Indigenous priorities, including initiatives, eligibility, and timelines, will be shared as it becomes available.”

The Indigenous Guardian movement has deep roots in B.C.

Indigenous Guardians in British Columbia have led the way, implementing the longest-standing program in the country, which has been in operation since 1982: the Haida Gwaii Watchmen, established by volunteers.

Before B.C. or Canada began investing in these programs, Haida people took it upon themselves to steward their homelands. The goal was to preserve Gwaii Haanas village sites, according to the nation’s website. 

“It was very common for looters to come to these sites and take artifacts that were very important to the living culture of the Haida Nation, the work done by these volunteers was incredibly important in preserving the village sites that are now protected,” it reads.

Now the Watchmen are funded by Parks Canada, one of four programs the department is supporting across Canada, with three of those programs based in B.C. The province is also home to the highest number of guardian programs funded last year.  

According to an economic analysis from Makeway, a national charity that supports conservation, and the CoEvaluation Lab, a Canadian organization that provides reporting and research support, Indigenous Guardian programs put between $1.43 to $5.37 back into the economy for every dollar invested. 

Another analysis by Social Ventures Australia, which examined a different selection of Indigenous Guardian programs in Canada, had similar findings. For every dollar invested, approximately $2.50 was generated for stakeholders. 

Those returns on investment come from employment outcomes, improved health and wellness, increased tax revenues and benefits to the environment.

For Dallas Smith, president of Nanwakolas Council, the thinking behind the programs has evolved.

“First it was about having eyes, ears and boots on the ground out there. But as we’ve started trying to build a conservation economy in the Great Bear Rainforest, we realized that there were other returns to be made, not only in helping us balance our conservation vision, but also [to] build sustainable economic development visions,” he told The Narwhal.

The council supports six member nations on B.C.’s South Coast and Vancouver Island in negotiations with government and industry. 

“Having the guardians in place whether we protect something or develop something has been monumental,” Smith said. 

While the $230 million announcement came as a welcome surprise, with no clear guidelines about where the funding is going, and with B.C.’s funding still set to expire, staff at some programs are concerned.

“Some [guardian programs] have models that have trust funds … where we’re able to back the guardian program up with some foundational funding that we’re able to live off the interest of,” Smith said. 

“For some of the other guardian programs that are in development … I bet there’s definitely some concern out there about where the next set of funding comes from to get through the next season.” 

Meanwhile, the federal government and various provinces, including B.C. and Ontario, passed bills that faced First Nation opposition last year, among them Bills 14 and 15 in B.C., Bill 5 in Ontario and federal Bill C-5, all of which critics have said privilege industry over Indigenous rights and consultation.

Long term funded is needed to sustain programs

Indigenous Guardians protect the land and natural resources across Canada, maintaining the ecosystem for everyone, while contributing to local economies, businesses and relationships that allow industry into Indigenous territory. 

“The people of this territory would like to see the environment better protected for future generations, so that in generations to come, they’re able to go out and harvest berries and get the meat and fish they need,” Peter said. 

In her nation, interest in becoming a guardian is growing, with renewed funding needed to continue the program. 

“Long-term funding makes it all happen. It takes away the anxiety of chasing grant after grant … being able to secure long term stable funding gives you the ability to plan around it and invest in it,” Smith said. 

Funding gaps, even temporary ones, could undermine the investment and benefits in guardian programs.

And while loss of employment is a huge harm, disruptions in Indigenous Guardian funding can have deadly consequences for the environment.

For example, programs like the Wuikinuxv Guardian Watchmen monitor coastal waters for spills, mitigating risk from industry and acting as a first responder for the environment. 

“Too many people want First Nations to either protect everything or develop everything, they don’t understand the balance we’re trying to reach. The guardians are a living example of creating balance,” said Smith.

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Summary

• In 2024, an extreme cold event caused many B.C. wineries to lose most of their grapes. In response, the province allowed wineries to join a program allowing the import of U.S. grapes, a practice usually reserved for larger commercial labels. 
• The full rules about how sales of wine made with U.S. grapes would be taxed were released months after wineries had already bought foreign fruit. Each winery got a sales tax exemption on a specific quantity of wine — after that, taxes could reach as high as 89 per cent. 
• These taxes apply to all sales for as long as wineries sell any wine made with U.S. fruit, even if the actual bottle in question is made with 100 per cent B.C. grapes. The result, winemakers say, is losing out on years of profits and, possibly, going out of business.

The program offered a lifeline when the forecast was unequivocally dire. In January 2024, temperatures dropped below -25 C in B.C.’s Okanagan, Thompson and Similkameen Valleys — the province’s agricultural breadbasket. 

The cold snap in the Interior came right after unseasonable daytime highs of 10 to 13 C. The weather whiplash hit the area’s fruit trees hardest: acres of peaches, pears, plums, apples and nectarines were damaged, with the plants’ buds dead come spring. The ripe, juicy produce tourists flock to the Okanagan for in summer and fall never arrived.

The deep freeze also crushed one of B.C.’s most prized commodities: wine grapes. More than 90 per cent of the Interior’s annual harvest was lost, which meant nearly 90 per cent of the province’s total vineyard acreage. Suddenly, a $3.75-billion industry was in crisis. 

“There were zero grapes,” Paul Sawler, vice-president and general manager of Dirty Laundry Winery, a mid-sized winery in Summerland, B.C., recalls. The winery’s 100 acres of vineyards produced almost no fruit.

“Where we would normally see 300 to 400 tonnes [of grapes], we got less than half a tonne from all the vineyards combined,” Sawler says.

The solution seemed clear at the time: “There was no way to survive except to buy Washington State grapes.” 

In British Columbia, alcohol is regulated by the BC Liquor Distribution Branch, a government body long assigned to the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General. In July 2025, it was transferred to the Ministry of Agriculture and Food — a nod to the realities of producing a weather-dependent consumer good in an increasingly volatile 21st-century climate. For winemakers and grape growers, who had seen several difficult years of damage to their vineyards from extreme weather, it was a welcome move.

Under the liquor branch’s policy, certain wineries — mostly larger operations that hold a commercial winery designation — are allowed to import foreign grapes to complement their B.C. fruit. Often acquired from the U.S., these grapes produce wines that the liquor branch taxes at high sales mark-ups — the dollar amount the branch charges a winery when it sells its wines directly to consumers, restaurants or other distributors.

Regulations normally prevent most small and mid-sized B.C. wineries from purchasing foreign grapes. This is part of the liquor branch’s complex policy, which involves different regulatory and taxation systems not just for different types of wineries, but also for direct-to-consumer sales versus sales through the liquor branch. The short version is that independent, “land-based” wineries are required to use exclusively B.C. fruit, in exchange for which a good chunk of their sales are tax-exempt. 

After the 2024 freeze, the liquor branch relaxed these rules, allowing a wider range of wineries to import grapes to salvage their businesses. But bringing in foreign grapes meant signing on to a program that limited each winery’s tax-exempt sales. 

“We really had no choice,” Sawler says of his decision at Dirty Laundry. Though most Okanagan wineries were committed to making B.C. wines with B.C.-grown grapes, the weather had decided for them. 

“If we didn’t buy the grapes, we would have had to lay off half our staff,” Sawler says. “We probably would have had wine to sell at the winery, but we would have lost our whole outside market — a market that we spent the last 20 years building.”

So, Dirty Laundry and 91 other wineries in the area rolled the dice and brought in foreign grapes to make their 2024 wines. 

“I don’t regret buying them,” Sawler reflects. “The quality was good; the pricing was good. It worked out well.” 

But the decision has come with a latent — and significant — unanticipated cost. The limit on wineries’ tax-exempt sales was based on a complicated calculation many did not understand at the outset. In fact, some didn’t understand they’d be subject to mark-ups at all. Now that the program is in its second year, some wineries have wine they can’t sell without a significant financial hit.

“A program that was basically designed to help wineries, in some cases may actually kill some wineries,” Sawler tells The Narwhal. “Those are extreme cases … but it is happening”

“We know how devastating the 2024 freeze event was for grape growers and wineries in the Okanagan and we’ve worked together with the B.C. wine industry to help them recover,” Minister of Food and Agriculture Lana Popham told The Narwhal in an emailed statement. 

“The Liquor Distribution Branch will continue to work closely with wineries and Wine Growers BC.”

A program that brought wine flowing back into B.C. has soured

The vintage replacement program, or just “the program,” as many in the industry refer to it, was first announced in July 2024 and laid out in fine print in a liquor branch memorandum that October. Importantly, this was after most wineries had already purchased U.S. and foreign grapes. 

For the 2024 vintage, the BC Liquor Distribution Branch would permit wineries that opted in to the program to purchase foreign grapes or a partially fermented product known as unfinished juice, and would treat any wine produced from those products the same as B.C.-grape wine. That meant the liquor branch would offer the tax exemption usually reserved for certain types of 100 per cent B.C. wine to all B.C. wineries using foreign grapes.

This main component of the program was a success. Wineries like Dirty Laundry and many smaller, newer wineries kept their staff, juiced their grapes and made wines they were proud of. The wider industry, which supports a substantial economy of restaurants, hotels, hospitality workers, supply companies, migrant agricultural workers and small family businesses remained afloat.

But the details were a shock to many.

The exemption wasn’t a blanket exemption. Each winery had what was known as a “support cap,” or a limit on tax-free exemptions. Wineries’ individual caps were based on an “Olympic average” of five years of previous mark-up exemption totals — for land-based wineries, of their B.C.-grape wines; for commercial wineries, of B.C.-grape wines certified by the BC Wine Authority’s Vintner’s Quality Alliance, or BCVQA. This was a dollar value calculated by taking the mark-up exemption on sales numbers from the past five years, dropping the highest and lowest numbers, and averaging the three remaining years. 

Sales over that limit were taxed at the liquor branch’s standard rates for foreign-grape wines — as high as 89 per cent on the first $11.75 of the wine’s per-litre value, and 27 per cent after that. 

The calculation didn’t pose a problem for many commercial wineries used to importing foreign grapes — and selling huge volumes. It was also doable for many established wineries that had relatively steady sales over the period in question and dedicated accounting departments. It did pose an issue for many newer, growing independent wineries, though. 

Another surprise was how long a program meant to help with one bad year was going to last. The ability for wineries to buy foreign grapes for tax-exempt wine was extended for the 2025 vintage, to account for any lingering cold snap effects on the province’s vineyards. Additionally, once participating wineries brought in foreign grapes, they were tied to the vintage replacement program until they’d sold every last bottle of wine containing U.S. grapes.

This all means the support cap will remain in effect until March 2028, to account for the added year of foreign grapes, and sales of wines that take longer to produce, like reds or sparklings. 

All that, and the mark-up exemption limit each participating winery received was not exclusive to its U.S.-grape wines. Post-limit taxes would be applied to all the wine a participating winery sold. 

Let’s say a winery had 5,000 cases of U.S.-grape wine — “replacement” wine — left to sell, starting this year. That newer stuff would likely share shelf space with bottles of carefully cellared, 100 per cent B.C.-grape wine from years past, too. Signing onto the program meant this B.C.-grape wine would count toward the winery’s annual mark-up exemption limit. Which means that once the winery hit the annual limit set by its Olympic average, this 100 per cent B.C.-grown-and-produced wine would be taxed the same way as malbec from Argentina: at up to 89 per cent. 

In an emailed statement on behalf of the liquor branch, the Ministry of Agriculture said that “to ensure revenue neutrality and fairness across the sector, the annual support cap … includes all wines sold within the fiscal year, including vintage replacement wines, BCVQA and 100 per cent B.C. grape wines.” 

The ministry added that a support cap based on historical sales data was recommended by Wine Growers BC.

“From the outset, there were very clear guidelines communicated to the wine industry about eligibility and annual support caps, and it was intended to help the industry keep the lights on during a very serious agricultural emergency,” Minister Popham told The Narwhal.

“It is in everyone’s interest to return to producing 100 per cent B.C. wine production.,” the liquor branch-attributed statement concluded.

Small, new B.C. wineries suffering the most under program’s limits

Paul Sawler’s neighbour in Summerland, Ron Kubek, started Lightning Rock, a small, family-owned business just up the road from Dirty Laundry, in 2017. It’s grown steadily ever since. 

“I think the problem in the wine business is that too many people in ownership or in the tasting room want to show how smart they are,” he says. His greatest pride is his winery’s consistent five-star ratings on Google, which show that everyday people appreciate Lightning Rock’s approach.

“Wine is supposed to be something that’s enjoyed among friends and family. Some of my favourite reviews are, ‘It was my first time in the tasting room and they didn’t make me feel dumb.’ We can talk about the technical stuff, but we’d rather just have fun.”

Kubek hasn’t shied away from sharing his views on the program, which his winery also opted into after losing its 2024 harvest. 

“We’re still small, but we’ve experienced tremendous growth, from just a few bottles in 2018 and 2019 to [when] the pandemic hit and wine sales went through the roof,” he tells The Narwhal. 

But that initially promising upward trajectory is now proving an impetus to further growth. The program calculated Lightning Rock’s mark-up limit using the low sales volumes of its early years, and now the winery isn’t eligible to sell much tax-exempt wine.

Kubek says his situation is “not because we brought in too many grapes from the U.S. — we brought in about 60 per cent of what we would normally do in a year after the catastrophic [harvest] loss — but because … [the liquor distribution branch] took what was a simple program and misapplied the Olympic average to help jack up revenues and get their bonuses.” 

Lightning Rock’s speciality is single-varietal wines, a large portion of which are reds and sparklings that take several years to age. That means Kubek will likely have to remain in the program until 2028. As a result, he has to carefully calculate the amount of wines from previous B.C. vintages he can sell each year without losing too much profit.

“The problem is that my previously B.C. [tax-]exempt wines are now being taxed or in danger of being taxed,” he says. “So I’m trying to grow, but I have a limitation, because if I do grow, I’m suddenly hit with an 89 per cent tax.” 

So Kubek, like many Okanagan winery owners, was holding back sales in March when he spoke with The Narwhal — waiting anxiously for the liquor branch’s fiscal-year turnover of April 1 to reset his mark-up limit. For a small winery with hard-won personal relationships with restaurants and other distributors, the cost is significant. 

“I’m having to tell my sales agents, ‘Hey slow down on sales,’ because I’m very, very close to going over my Olympic average and then suddenly I’m going to be paying 89 per cent tax on a bottle of wine.”

Kubek says he would have been able to sell an additional 1,000 cases of wine in the last fiscal year if it weren’t for his mark-up cap.

In response to The Narwhal’s questions about these limitations, the agriculture ministry noted, “While some wineries accessing the temporary supports have exceeded their annual cap and are facing payment obligations, many other wineries planned their operations around the annual support cap or chose not to access the temporary supports. Any changes to the policy directives or requirements mid-stream would not be fair to these businesses.”

Kubek feels frustrated. “I lost all my fruit. I had to pay for fruit to come in and now the government’s penalizing me if I try to grow.” 

He believes the program has hurt wineries like his the most. 

The support cap clause in the vintage replacement program was meant to prevent some of the Okanagan’s biggest wineries from bringing in more cheap foreign grapes than they normally would while paying below-normal sales taxes, Kubek says. It was supposed to prevent these grapes from flooding the B.C. market, which could have changed the industry’s local fingerprint and provided an unfair advantage to some. 

But what the government feared never happened, and the little guys are the ones now being hurt, Kubek says. He pointed to two wineries under the same ownership — Kelowna’s Mt. Boucherie Estate winery and Rust Wine Co., a smaller winery in Oliver — which confirmed they have had to lay staff off as a result of tax bills currently exceeding $500,000.

The agriculture ministry told The Narwhal, “In recognition of the payment obligations for those that exceeded their cap last fiscal, the [BC Liquor Distribution Branch] will continue to work with wineries to explore flexible payment arrangements within reasonable timelines.”

B.C. wine industry is pushing for solutions to a complex situation

Jeff Guignard is the CEO of Wine Growers BC, the primary industry marketing and lobbying organization for B.C. wines. He has heard his fair share of complaints about the vintage replacement program, including from Kubek, who he speaks to nearly daily. He also speaks with the provincial government every week, trying to find a solution for wineries who say the taxation approach has pushed them to the financial brink.

“This program was an essential lifeline to industry in a moment of generational crisis,” Guignard says. “It literally saved people’s businesses. There are wineries in B.C. that would not be in operation without this program. So we’re immensely grateful to government for that.” 

But, he adds, “It’s now clear — because things were rushed, and though everyone was doing their best — that the program has had some unintended consequences.” 

Guignard says the constraints built into the program for good reason are now injuring the very people and businesses the program was designed to support. 

“The constraint is acting as a limit on sales,” he says. “You could be selling, right now, a 100 per cent made-and-bottled-and-grown-in-B.C. wine, that was bottled years ago, prior to the freeze, and prior to the program being developed. But it counts against your business as though it were part of the program.” 

Guignard says the problem with the program is its one-size-fits-all approach, when the province’s wine industry ranges from huge, established players like Arterra Wines Canada or Andrew Peller Ltd., which both own multiple wineries, to medium-sized operations like Dirty Laundry and smaller newcomers like Lightning Rock. 

He says he knows of over a dozen wineries that have gone over their support cap and received invoices from the provincial government — businesses being treated “as though they were importing foreign wine into the province.”

“The program was designed to help you not have to do that,” he says, adding that one person told him, “ ‘I wish I hadn’t brought any fruit in. I would have had no wine, and I would have had to lay off all my staff, but my business would actually be in a better place, financially.’ ”

Adding to the challenge is the fact that the 2025 grape harvest in the Okanagan and Similkameen was — to everyone’s surprise — highly productive. Many of the vines that had survived the cold freeze produced abundant fruit, but grape growers unattached to specific wineries were left without customers. Businesses trapped in the “golden handcuffs” of the program, as Guignard terms it, weren’t buying, because they weren’t looking to make new wines they couldn’t turn a profit on. 

With growers, too, facing financial hardship, the program has in some ways simply deferred the crisis it was trying to prevent. The crucial support the program offered when the industry seemed on the brink of collapse has turned into an albatross hanging over some winemakers’ necks. 

“From a Dirty Laundry perspective, I’ve taken the position that if I had 1,000 cases of imported wine left over at the end of March next year, I’d dump it before I’d stay in the program another year,” Sawler says. “That’s the amount of impact it’ll make on our winery. We’d be better off to throw the wine away or to sell it for nothing … to make it go away.”

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.

This investigation is a collaboration between The Narwhal and Point Source, a U.K.-based investigative journalism organization.

Summary

• LNG Canada burned 350 million cubic metres of gas in 2025, more than the estimated highest source of LNG flaring emissions in the world in 2024.
• The high levels of flaring call into question environmental claims made about the facility, which government officials have repeatedly said produces the cleanest LNG in the world. 
• Ongoing problems at the plant, which hopes to double production by building a second phase, could persist for three to five years.

An LNG facility in Western Canada burned more gas in 2025 than any other liquefied natural gas (LNG) export facility on record in 2024, raising concerns about Canada’s claim it’s producing the cleanest LNG in the world. 

Burning excess methane gas, or flaring, is a normal safety procedure at liquefaction facilities. It releases greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide as well as emitting dangerous pollutants such as sulfur dioxide and small particulate matter, which affect human health. The LNG Canada facility in British Columbia flared 350 million cubic metres of gas in 2025, according to figures submitted to the provincial regulator and analyzed by The Narwhal in partnership with U.K.-based journalism organization Point Source. That means Canada’s first major LNG facility is one of the highest sources of LNG flaring emissions globally.

The flaring volumes reported by LNG Canada to the regulator are around 50 per cent higher than estimates for the world’s most polluting LNG export terminals in 2024, according to data that was used as the basis for the World Bank’s most recent Global Gas Tracker report.

The data was published by the Earth Observation Group at the Colorado School of Mines, a research team that specializes in producing nighttime satellite imagery to track gas flaring.

According to the group’s estimates, Nigeria’s Bonny Island LNG terminal was the highest-flaring facility of 2024. It burned an estimated 234.4 million cubic metres of gas, closely followed by the Arzew-Bethioua terminal in Algeria, which burned 233 million cubic metres.

Global flaring data from LNG facilities operating in 2025 have not yet been published but the Canadian facility will be among the world’s top sources of flaring at LNG terminals, according to Mikhail Zhizhin, a researcher at the Payne Institute for Public Policy in Colorado. Zhizhin was instrumental in the development of technology to monitor gas flaring from space.

“If the flaring data that has been supplied by LNG Canada to the regulator is accurate, it puts the facility amongst the highest flaring LNG facilities in the world,” Zhizhin said in an interview.

In an emailed statement, LNG Canada attributed the flaring to the facility being at an early phase and said it will be infrequent during normal operations.

The high volume of flaring from the $40-billion Canada-based facility raises new questions about ongoing problems with some of the terminal’s key mechanical components — and concerns about what it could mean for the local community, Kitimat, B.C. 

According to government data, LNG Canada flared a minimum of 127,900 cubic metres of gas every day in 2025, with the daily average being much higher: almost one million cubic metres. The worst month for flaring was June 2025, when the facility burned almost 110 million cubic metres. The data show 3,648 million cubic metres of gas were sent to LNG Canada last year, meaning almost 10 per cent of all gas transported to the terminal was burned off without being used for power or exported.

“This is definitely high,” Christopher Doleman, an LNG and gas specialist at the U.S.-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, said. “Proponents may argue that it is regular during commissioning, but the several instances of unplanned flaring by the company suggest that this is out of the ordinary.”

Some of those unplanned flaring events included flames reaching heights of 90 metres, roughly the size of London’s Big Ben, along with plumes of black smoke settling over the community.

The export plant sent its first shipment of LNG overseas on June 30, 2025.

Flaring at LNG Canada has consistently exceeded allowable amounts permitted by the provincial government. According to the regulator, LNG Canada — owned by Royal Dutch Shell, Petronas, Korea Gas, PetroChina and Mitsubishi — has been flaring at levels that are “not consistent” with government permits, meaning the facility has been breaking provincial regulations for several months.

In January, The Narwhal revealed an “integrity issue” with the facility’s flaring equipment resulted in LNG Canada burning significantly more gas than expected — and it could take three to five years to fix. The issue was identified shortly after the LNG plant started testing its equipment in late 2024, but the government regulator did not learn about the problem until April 2025. 

Company officials have since met with local politicians but have failed to provide the public with details of why the issue might take so long to fix.

LNG Canada declined to answer this question, though the spokesperson said “we continue to tune the equipment to real-world conditions.”

“In normal operations at LNG Canada flaring will be related to infrequent activities such as maintenance, planned turnarounds and facility upsets,” the spokesperson wrote.

‘Completely untrue’: experts question environmental claims about Canadian LNG

Analysts believe the high flaring levels at LNG Canada raise serious questions about environmental claims that have been made about the facility.

Last summer, the premier of British Columbia, David Eby, said gas processed at the Kitimat terminal is the “lowest-carbon LNG in the world.”

Discussing why energy-importing countries would benefit from purchasing fuel processed at the facility, he said: “They should be using Canadian LNG that’s produced ethically, that promotes environmental protection, as well as high-quality labour standards and safety standards.”

Shell CEO Wael Sawan similarly said last year that LNG Canada would be “one of the lowest carbon projects anywhere in the world.”

Speaking in India in March, Prime Minister Mark Carney said: “Canada is well-positioned to contribute as a reliable supplier of the world’s lowest-carbon, responsibly-produced LNG from our West Coast.” 

Eby declined an interview request and did not respond to questions about the current state of the facility. Shell did not respond to questions. Carney also declined an interview request and referred questions to the federal Energy Ministry, which did not respond by publication time.

Doleman said the new information calls these environmental claims into question. 

“This flaring data undermines the claims that are being made about the facility producing low-carbon LNG,” he said in an interview. “Statements that have been made by officials saying that the LNG is the cleanest in the world now seem to be completely untrue.”

LNG Canada said high levels of flaring are normal during the start-up phase of a project of this type. The spokesperson said air quality data recorded in Kitimat show levels of nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide remained “consistently low” in 2025.

“LNG Canada continues to prioritize the safety of its people, the community and its assets, to support safe and responsible operations,” the spokesperson wrote.

There is significant uncertainty about the true volumes of global gas flaring due to the difficulty of measuring emissions via satellite. Recent research by the Colorado School of Mines has suggested the true levels of flaring from the world’s LNG facilities may be significantly higher than previously estimated, Zhizhin said.

The fact that LNG Canada flared a significant volume of gas every single day in 2025 is unusual, according to researchers. A peer-reviewed paper published last September found LNG terminals in a start-up phase have a 90 per cent chance of flaring less than six days a year and only a 10 per cent chance of flaring for as many as 255 days in a single year.

Laura Minet, lead author of the paper and head of the Clean Air Lab at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, explained “the probabilities are based on what has been happening in other facilities around the world between 2012 and 2022.” She said the frequency of flaring at LNG Canada does not appear to be typical, especially compared to LNG facilities that have moved from commissioning into regular operations. But, she said, because companies around the world aren’t required to track how much gas is flared, getting accurate data can be challenging.

“The fact that LNG Canada is saying the technical issue is going to take three years to fix is concerning,” Minet added. “It raises questions over what is getting prioritized and where the likely environmental and health impacts from this pollution fit into those priorities.”

Doleman agreed.

“The operators and project proponents should tell people why this plant is flaring so much and tell them exactly how they are going to address this issue,” he said.

LNG markets subject to instability as U.S.-Israel war on Iran continues

The ongoing global energy crisis in the wake of the U.S.-Israel attacks on Iran in late February has seen the price of LNG more than double for some importers and led to windfall profits for some exporters. 

A second phase of the LNG Canada project, which would double output from the plant, was recently given federal support and placed on a list of projects deemed to be of national importance. The consortium of companies behind the facility are actively seeking investment in the expansion.

The U.S. is currently the world’s largest LNG exporter, followed by Australia and Qatar. Geopolitical instability caused by the war in the Middle East — which saw Qatar halt LNG production in March — could influence importing countries like South Korea and Japan as they balance energy needs.

However, the current wave of high prices could have lasting impacts on demand for LNG as importing nations look to cheaper alternatives, Doleman said. Recently, a planned LNG import terminal in China was cancelled by state-owned Sinopec, which reallocated its investments to the development of domestic gas reserves. In New Zealand, plans for an import terminal are being reconsidered as the country’s government weighs the financial risks. 

“The current high price environment is killing long-term demand for LNG around the world and it is going to be interesting to see how things pan out for the [Canadian] facility over the coming years,” Doleman said.

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.

Early in the afternoon of Oct. 10, 2015, John Ashley Pryce noticed something strange in his yard. A garbage bag was torn open, and trash was “strewn about the property” in Eastgate, B.C., a small community just east of E.C. Manning Provincial Park.

Pryce took in the scene, his eyes passing over yellowing leaves and dried grass before coming to rest on a massive creature sniffing the detritus. Its fur was mottled with shocks of brown, blonde and black. His eyes traced a prominent hump behind its shoulders and a round, dish-shaped face, both hallmark characteristics of a grizzly bear. 

Pryce grabbed his camera. The shutter snapped as he took a photo. The bear looked up at him for a few seconds before tearing off down the hill and disappearing.

Pryce couldn’t have known it at the time, but this would be the last confirmed grizzly sighting recorded in the North Cascades. A range of mountains, glaciers, rivers and forests stretching from Lytton, B.C., to just east of Seattle, Wash., it is one of the wildest transboundary ecosystems anywhere along the Canada-U.S. border. It is also home to one of the most endangered grizzly bear populations on the continent. 

Scientists estimate that, at most, six grizzly bears still live in the North Cascades. It’s not clear how many bears were once there, but according to Hudson’s Bay Company records, some 3,788 grizzly pelts were shipped from forts in the region between 1827 and 1859. Later records from miners, surveyors and settlers make note of dozens of grizzlies killed throughout the region. 

Today, many experts call the North Cascades grizzly an extirpated species, meaning locally extinct. The International Union for Conservation of Nature has “red-listed” the bears, labelling them “critically endangered.”

Since the bears were listed as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act in 1975, efforts have been made on both sides of the border to recover the population. Most recently, in 2024, the U.S. National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced they would begin reintroducing bears into North Cascades National Park — an effort derailed after Trump’s return to office led to funding and staffing cuts for both agencies. 

But an Indigenous-led project called the Joint Nations Grizzly Bear Initiative has continued to move forward. Led by the Okanagan Nation Alliance, the project is a collaboration with First Nations throughout the region, including the S’ólh Téméxw Stewardship Alliance, the Nlaka’pamux Nation Tribal Council, the Lillooet Tribal Council, the Upper Similkameen Indian Band, Simpcw First Nation and the St’át’imc and Sekw’el’was. Together, they’re hoping to begin reintroducing grizzlies to the North Cascades in 2026. 

Cross-border grizzly efforts hindered by false starts and government cuts

The mountaintops in Manning Park were still dusted with snow when Joe Scott arrived in early June 2024. He had travelled from his home in Washington for the first in-person gathering of the Joint Nations Grizzly Bear Initiative. For Scott, the trip was decades in the making. He started working at Conservation Northwest, a transboundary conservation group based in Washington that was then called the Northwest Ecosystems Alliance, in 1998. At the time, he explains, “It was the only group that was advocating for grizzly bear recovery. Nobody else would touch it.”

When the Joint Nations gathering began, it had been only a few months since U.S. agencies announced their reintroduction plan. Grizzly advocates felt that they were closer than ever to bringing bears back to the North Cascades. But Scott had seen recovery efforts fail before. 

In the 1990s, budget constraints forced then-U.S. grizzly bear recovery coordinator Chris Servheen to choose between recovering bears in Montana or in the North Cascades. In what Servheen called a “command decision” he picked Montana, arguing that the Montana project seemed more likely to succeed.British Columbia came close a few years later. In 2001, they were on the verge of moving bears from Wells Gray Provincial Park in the B.C. Interior to Manning Park. But when the BC Liberal Party swept to power, it cut wildlife and conservation programs, prematurely ending that effort. Since then, according to Scott, North Cascades grizzly recovery has been a series of “lurching fits and starts.”

At the June 2024 meeting, conversations among the more than 70 Indigenous leaders, community members, researchers and conservationists connected Western and Indigenous science. Participants spoke about preparing for grizzlies’ return to the landscape, discussed challenges in public education and coexistence strategies. They outlined plans to mitigate human-bear conflict and shared ways to manage garbage and other attractants. 

Matt Manuel, natural resource coordinator for the Lillooet Tribal Council, described it as looking for “solutions within a common habitat that needs to be shared between the grizzly bear and those that are occupying or using the land” in a video produced at the gathering.

Much of the conversation at the Manning Park gathering focused on the North Cascades National Park Grizzly Restoration Plan, which would have relocated three or five bears per year on the American side of the border. At that rate, attendees expected it would take decades to establish a healthy population in the park, and even longer for the bears to move into surrounding lands or up into Canada. Still, the gathering closed with palpable excitement. 

But something nagged at Scott. He was “sitting there on pins and needles with full awareness that the [2024 presidential] election is going to make all the difference in whether this gets done.”

When President Donald Trump was re-elected and unleashed Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency on federal agencies, the worst-case scenario followed: more than a thousand national park rangers, scientists and other staff were laid off in February 2025. Facing an uncertain future, many others resigned. According to the National Parks Conservation Association, the Park Service had lost 24 per cent of its permanent workforce by the summer. The impact on grizzly reintroduction was devastating. 

“Park Service loses staff, Fish and Wildlife loses staff,” Scott explains. “They’re already behind the eight ball with a lack of capacity, and then at this point, they just said, ‘We don’t have the people to do this,’ so it just died.”

The collapse of the plan was a blow, but there was still hope. At the Manning Park gathering, the Joint Nations Grizzly Bear Initiative had not only been preparing for the U.S. plan to bring bears back into North Cascades National Park. They were also developing their own plan, a comprehensive strategy that included habitat conservation, community engagement, public education and, eventually, restoring grizzlies on this side of the border.

First Nations-led effort rooted in Indigenous knowledge of the region

Mackenzie Clarke had never seen a grizzly before she packed up her life and moved from Saskatchewan to the Kootenays to work on a grizzly research project with Garth Mowat, the B.C. government’s large carnivore specialist. Soon, she was hooked. 

Eventually, working on grizzlies brought her to the Joint Nations Grizzly Bear Initiative, where she works as the tmixʷ (wildlife) program lead on the project.

Clarke’s role is unique in wildlife conservation. Rather than a nonprofit or government agency, she works for the Okanagan Nation Alliance, a First Nations government. As someone with settler roots, she thinks it’s an important shift in how wildlife conservation happens. “There wasn’t a lot of Indigenous involvement or consultation” in previous North Cascades grizzly recovery efforts, she explains.

Despite this, Indigenous knowledge has long been key to understanding the history of North Cascades grizzlies. After grizzlies were listed as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, researchers began looking for at-risk populations. When researchers began studying North Cascades grizzlies, they struggled to find bears. Researchers found evidence of bears, including tracks, scat, digs and bear dens. They set up fur-snagging traps, lengths of barbed wire hung near scented lures and used the gathered fur samples in genetic testing that confirmed the presence of bears. Despite all the evidence of grizzlies, no live bear has ever been captured or collared in the region. 

In the late 1980s, some scientists and politicians argued that researchers’ struggles to capture a bear were evidence against a historic grizzly presence in the North Cascades. So researchers turned to Indigenous knowledge to prove their case. 

“There’s a lot of historical knowledge from the communities on where the bears used to be,” Clarke says. 

Early efforts relied on anthropological research from the first half of the 20th century, which included accounts from Indigenous people of grizzlies near the Chilliwack and Fraser rivers and among high-elevation berry patches. According to late archaeologist William Duff, the Stó:lō knew grizzlies to be “particular frequenters of the high country.”

But by the late 1990s, First Nations were leading their own studies. In 2001, the Stó:lō published a Traditional Knowledge study as part of the B.C. recovery effort. They interviewed more than a dozen community members, recording decades of grizzly bear sightings throughout their territory. 

Both this study and the anthropological records included stories about the unique nature of grizzly bear harvests before settlers arrived in these lands. Grizzlies were not seen as a major food source. They would be eaten if killed, but the nature of the harvest suggested a deeper connection between people and bears. 

Grizzly bear hunters would track the animals while carrying a sharpened bone about the length of their forearm. When they found the grizzly, the hunter would attempt to jam the bone into the bear’s open mouth with the sharp end pointed up. When the bear slammed its mighty jaws, the bone would strike a killing blow into the grizzly’s brain. The stories noted that many grizzly bear hunters ended up one-handed.

In 2014, the Okanagan Nation Alliance’s Chief Executive Council passed a resolution declaring grizzly bears “at-risk and protected within Syilx Territory.” They directed staff to work with scientists and communities to support “immediate action to assist [grizzlies] from disappearing due to low numbers and habitat isolation.”

By 2018, the resolution was starting to bear fruit. They launched field surveys and began writing their own recovery plan. They also started meeting with other First Nations interested in North Cascades grizzlies.

“The governments of all the nations mobilized,” Scott explains, who at the time helped to funnel conservation funding to the efforts. “The intent was to move the recovery process along by identifying the needs and filling the various gaps.” 

That February, the Okanagan Nation Alliance, alongside the Stó:lō, St’ati’mc, Nlaka’pamux and Secwepemc launched a “multi-nation approach for grizzly bear recovery efforts” that would help launch the Joint Nations Grizzly Bear Initiative in 2021. 

Restoring grizzlies benefits the environment — but also cultures and communities 

Jordan Coble was in university when the first pieces that would become the Joint Nations Grizzly Bear Initiative were being put in place. But now, serving as both a councillor with the Westbank First Nation and as the chair of the Okanagan Nation Alliance’s Natural Resource Committee, he’s grateful for “the courage of those that come forward and say, ‘We should do this, and we must do this, and we must do it together.’ ” 

To Coble, the extirpation of grizzly bears from the landscape echoes what happened to Indigenous Peoples. 

“Where we’re at today is rebuilding from 150 years of colonization, of separation and forced removal and isolation from our land itself,” he says. In this context, he sees restoring grizzly bears as a way to restore not just a creature but also landscapes, communities and relationships. 

“Guiding the path forward has been interesting because colonization was quite effective in separating our communities from one another [and] separating our communities from the land itself,” he explains. “Now that we’re turning back to those practices where we’re reminding ourselves that we have interconnections beyond our communities, beyond our nations.”  

This relational approach extends to the natural world as well. For Coble, North Cascades grizzly bear recovery is just one piece of a bigger project. 

“The nation started returning salmon back to the Okanagan, and then saw the success from that built out into forestry and other aspects,” he says. “That interconnection of all those living species, right from salmon to the tops of the mountains where the grizzly bears live, is really important. It’s kind of nice to think about it that way, that we kind of worked our way up into the mountains.”

North Cascades region can sustain grizzlies, expert says

In late July 2025, a little more than a year after the gathering in Manning Park, Michelle McLellan was back in the North Cascades. McLellan, an expert in the relationship between grizzlies and the landscapes where they live, had been at the 2024 meeting. She had also been hired by the Joint Nations team to evaluate North Cascades habitats for potential reintroduction.

Using studies from the Coast Range, which extends from Yukon to the Fraser River, and other regions where researchers had tracked grizzlies with radio collars, she correlated bear movements with habitat factors such as landscape, climate and plant cover, and used the data to build a model of the potential grizzly bear habitat in the North Cascades.

It was a good start, but McLellan “felt it was important to go to the landscape and see what that looks like.” She and a group of researchers, park rangers and conservationists spent the better part of a week ground-truthing the maps. They bushwhacked through overgrown forests, taking note of the horsetail ferns and sedges that bears like to eat in the spring. They climbed into the alpine, looking for whitebark pines with cones that make a calorie-dense grizzly snack. They counted blueberry and huckleberry bushes, snacking on sweet purple huckleberries as they moved through the landscape, considering the locations of roads, campgrounds and other human pressures that could impact bears or bring them into conflict with people. 

“There’s definitely sufficient food to sustain a population there,” McLellan says, though not as high-quality as the grizzly habitat of the Coast Range or the Rocky Mountains. “In general, we did find some good patches that were far from people … the kind of remote valleys you couldn’t just walk into.”

The habitat evaluation was a big step, but it is only one piece of a complex puzzle that reflects the long history of challenges with recovering bears in the North Cascades. 

One of the more notable chapters in that history was the story of a grizzly bear named Winston. In 1992, Winston was captured near Pemberton, B.C. He had already been relocated once but had returned and was getting into trouble with local farmers. 

Winston was released in eastern Manning Park later that year. He travelled south, crossing into the Pasayten Wilderness, Wash., on the eastern edge of the North Cascades. From there, he headed northwest, through Manning Park and into the Chilliwack River Valley, where hunters picked up his trail and chased him north. 

On Dec. 30, 1992, his radio collar pinged near Bridal Falls, B.C., a small community just east of Chilliwack. Researchers lost track of Winston through the winter, but in April they picked up his trail again and headed north along the banks of Harrison Lake. Whether he had swum across the Fraser River or used a bridge is anyone’s guess. 

By that June, he was back in the Lillooet River Valley close to Pemberton. His radio collar fell off sometime that summer, and for a few years, no one knew what happened to Winston. Then, in 1999 bear with similar markings to Winston was captured again in the Pemberton Valley. This time, the bear had been going after chickens on a local farm. It was relocated to the Anderson River Valley near the town of Boston Bar, where it destroyed its radio collar and was never seen again.

It’s still a topic of some debate whether that last bear was truly Winston. And while North Cascades grizzly researchers like to tell this story, they use it mainly to point out the myriad ways bear relocation has improved since then. For one, male grizzlies, which require massive habitat ranges and have strong homing instincts, aren’t typically used for relocation programs meant to recover grizzly populations. Successful programs in other regions have taught scientists that sub-adult females have the highest success rate. They have also learned to source bears from ecosystems with food profiles similar to those of the recovery area and have developed rigorous evaluation criteria to identify the best candidates for relocation. 

It’s also why grizzly bear augmentation is a slow and meticulous process, expected to take decades to restore populations to a level where they might begin to interact with people. 

For McLellan, success might look like moving 20 bears in the next 10 years. 

Coble takes an even longer view of it.“I feel like we’re not going to know until 20 to 50 years down the road if there’s grizzly bears back in the North Cascades in a sustainable manner,” he says. 

Opposition and concern over grizzly reintroduction lingers, but support is widespread.

Still, when McLellan talks about the project in public, she hears a lot of people worried that “all of a sudden, there’ll be grizzly bears all over the landscape.” 

This isn’t a new concern. Scott describes North Cascades grizzly recovery as “a relatively simple body of work that has been made really complex by people who don’t want to see it happen.” 

Opposition to grizzly bear reintroduction has been loudest on the eastern side of the North Cascades, where livestock operations raised concerns about depredation. In 1993, government representatives at a public meeting about reintroduction held in Okanogan, Wash., faced death threats. In 2001, B.C.’s reintroduction efforts faced opposition from cattle ranchers in the Nicola Valley, including one who told the Vancouver Sun he was “hoping this whole friggin’ program will go away.”

Over the years, many of the concerns of those opposed to reintroduction have been addressed by government agencies and conservation groups. Today, opposition to reintroduction is a small minority. According to polling released by the National Parks Conservation Association in 2023, 85 per cent of Washington residents support the reintroduction of grizzly bears in the North Cascades. There isn’t specific polling on the North Cascades in B.C., but a majority of the public regularly supports efforts to protect grizzly bears across the province. 

Still, the Joint Nations project isn’t taking any chances. When reintroduction seemed imminent in 2024, they began ramping up public education, stakeholder engagement and community efforts. 

“We’ve been trying to make sure that nobody’s going to be surprised that bears are going to be coming back to the landscape,” Clarke says. 

She sees education, habitat restoration and conflict management as critical to the long-term viability of the North Cascades grizzly recovery. Building up support for grizzly recovery in communities is also essential.

“It’s okay to take this community by community, but also, step by step,” Coble explains. “Building that awareness, building the understanding that, more than anything, it’s important that the grizzly bears are here.” 

For Clarke, this community work also means increasing the sense of agency that people throughout the region feel about coexisting with bears. She points out that some of this work is already underway in communities where black bears live. But she also points to a range of other ways for communities to get involved, such as conducting community bear-hazard assessments, developing attractant management plans and engaging Indigenous Guardian programs in bear management.They’re also working to spread the word in non-Indigenous communities. Groups like Conservation Northwest and Coast to Cascades, an organization that aims to restore connectivity among bears in the Cascade and Coast mountain ranges, have long been partners. In B.C., the Joint Nations Grizzly Bear Initiative is increasingly working with the Hope Mountain Center for Outdoor Learning, an outdoor education non-profit based in Hope, B.C. that runs a phone line for reporting North Cascades grizzly sightings. 

Clarke admits it’s an ambitious project with many moving parts. But she is also optimistic about recovering bears and about being ready to support both bears and communities once that happens. 

“There’s not really that many bears,” she says, “so you can set things out properly before, and hopefully, have all the resources in place.” 

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.