A major Canadian oil and gas company reported dozens of incidents at its pipelines after the provincial regulator exempted thousands of its pipelines from normal clean-up timelines. 

According to provincial data reviewed by the Investigative Journalism Foundation and The Narwhal, Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., or CNRL, reported 45 incidents since 2020, many of them spills of unspecified amounts of natural gas and other toxic cargo caused by metal corrosion at aging pipelines. 

Those spills came after a 2020 decision from the BC Energy Regulator to exempt roughly 4,300 of the company’s pipelines from the usual requirement that inactive pipelines be fully decommissioned within 18 months. Decommissioning, or deactivating, a pipeline includes removing any fluid and disconnecting it from the system. The sealed-off pipeline will remain in the ground in perpetuity. 

A CNRL spokesperson did not directly respond to a question about whether the spills occurred at pipelines associated with the exemption. Neither did the BC Energy Regulator.

Most of the pipelines operated by CNRL are short, transporting fracked natural gas and other fuels from wells scattered across northeastern B.C. to larger pipelines which carry the products to consumers or exporters. But even after those wells have run dry, the pipelines associated with them can still leak leftover contaminants into the local environment.  

“If it’s not properly [decommissioned] after its end of life, you have a substantial risk of groundwater contamination,” Philip Gass, a director of the energy program at the Ottawa-based International Institute for Sustainable Development, said in an interview. 

Gass said such spills might go unnoticed.

“If it’s been sitting there for a long time, you have to be really careful about the monitoring because this isn’t an active pipeline where you would notice a spill right away,” Gass said.The BC Energy Regulator reports for the CNRL incidents include leaks of natural gas, liquid hydrocarbons and produced water — a byproduct of oil and gas extraction that often contains heavy metals and hydrocarbons. Of the 45 reported instances, 23 were due to metal loss, often internal corrosion that allowed toxic fluids to escape.The regulator said incidents don’t automatically mean spills, since they can also include “incidents with the potential to affect pipeline integrity.” But many of the CNRL incident reports explicitly indicate that they resulted in spills or pipeline failure.

The regulator did not say how much of each fluid leaked into the surrounding environment or if there was any ecological damage associated with those spills.

Critics argue the spills are further evidence the regulator erred in giving CNRL such a broad exemption, which they called a sign of the undue influence the oil and gas industry has on provincial regulators. 

“It doesn’t give us a lot of faith that the regulatory system is operating as it should,” BC Green Party MLA Jeremy Valeriote said. 

‘No impact to the environment’: CNRL

For comparison, in the six years prior to 2020, CNRL reported 25 incidents at its pipelines, 17 of which were due to metal loss. 

A CNRL spokesperson said the company operates 14,896 kilometres of pipelines in B.C. and that spills are dealt with properly and promptly. 

“Clean-up and remediation activities were completed, resulting in no impact to the environment,” the spokesperson said of the 45 incidents since 2020. “When events occur, such as equipment malfunction that results in an incident, we have safety and environmental management systems in place to quickly manage these events. To mitigate any impacts, incidents are quickly and effectively managed in accordance with our structured emergency management and spill preparedness programs.”

Daryl Foley, president of Group 10 Engineering, said producers like CNRL work hard to minimize incidents.

“Their intention is to do the right thing and to prevent spills because it costs them an enormous amount of money when they have a substantial spill,” he said in an interview. Foley’s Calgary-based company works with companies and producers on pipeline integrity issues and advises the Alberta and B.C. regulators on best practices. “I’m not claiming that everybody’s perfect — if perhaps they’re ignoring it and there is a residual risk of environmental impact, well, they need to pull up their socks and get after it and prioritize based on where the highest risks are.”

Foley said corrosion affecting pipelines has been an issue for decades, but fracking can exacerbate the problem.

“The challenges are real,” he said. “Northeast B.C. in particular, they’re fracking these wells to try to enhance production. The challenge is after fracking, they’ve run into issues where they can get some of these frac solids, and some of them can be really aggressive sulphur compounds.”

Frac solids are a mixture of silica sand, water and chemicals used in fracking to extract oil or gas trapped in underground rock formations. Those mixtures, if not properly removed from sections of pipeline that move material from wells to larger, safer transportation pipelines, can damage the metal and cause leaks or spills. Foley said any pipelines with potential or identified corrosion issues associated with active wells should be prioritized.

“Are these wells known to have been discontinued properly?” he wondered. “That’s really what they should be checking in on and making sure of. Any that hasn’t been discontinued properly, that needs to be dealt with immediately.”

CNRL pipelines exempt from clean-up timelines

The BC Energy Regulator said a 2020 audit identified thousands of CNRL pipelines that were either inactive or soon would be. The regulator said that’s what prompted it to strike a deal with the company, one of the largest oil and gas producers in the country.Under that deal — which was not publicly disclosed at the time — the regulator agreed to exempt thousands of CNRL pipelines from normal clean-up timelines in exchange for the company committing to deactivate all of them by 2028, with targets to meet every year until then. 

The regulator later found in 2023 that the company was not meeting those commitments, but reinstated the deal without penalizing CNRL.

A regulator spokesperson said the deal was “the most effective way to bring CNRL into compliance” and claimed the agreement “was not a removal of oversight.” 

As of this month, the regulator said only 474 pipelines remain to be deactivated out of an original total of 4,312.

“As such, CNRL continues to meet and exceed the required deactivation targets set out in the conditions of the exemption,” the spokesperson said.

Drew Yewchuk, an environmental lawyer and PhD student at the University of British Columbia, said it’s not clear what the regulator or the public gained from the deal with CNRL. 

“The regulator is getting less than what the legal requirements are, and the company only has to do less than what was the legal requirement. So what is the regulator getting from these deals?” Yewchuk said.

He said oil companies often argue meeting regulatory requirements would endanger their operations, putting pressure on politicians to intervene.

“They don’t want to cause job losses, and that’s the threat that companies always have in the background,” Yewchuk said. “They say, ‘Look, if you force us to invest too much here, we’re going to move out of this jurisdiction.’ ” 

But he said CNRL isn’t a struggling company. The Calgary-based company reported net earnings of $10.8 billion in 2025.

“CNRL is not out of money,” Yewchuk said. 

Regulator ‘way too tied to industry’

Gass said oil and gas remediation can become a public responsibility if the operating company goes bankrupt. Some provinces, including B.C. and Alberta, charge oil and gas companies an annual levy to clean and shut down so-called “orphan wells” left by defunct firms.

But if the company is still active and profitable, the regulator’s role should be to enforce the rules, Gass said.

“In an ideal situation you have a regulatory regime that assures the accountability and has the enforceability to level penalties for actors that don’t do the remediation as needed,” Gass said. 

The BC Energy Regulator, like other regulators in Canada, is funded by an annual levy charged to oil and gas companies.

While proponents argue an industry-funded regulator is sustainable, critics like the Green Party’s Valeriote argue it creates a dependence that gives energy companies undue leverage in negotiations.

Valeriote said granting exemptions like the one given to CNRL is unfair to other companies following the rules and is “erosive to the regulator’s reputation.”

“I think there’s probably a cultural and systemic issue there and that they’re way too tied to the industry,” Valeriote said. 

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When Michelle Brown-Colistro became pregnant with her second child in 2024, she and her husband decided to find a two-bedroom place to house their growing family. They managed to find a home in Vancouver’s notoriously expensive housing market that they could afford: a 1970s-era wooden-sided walk-up in Hastings-Sunrise, a historically working-class residential neighbourhood on the city’s east side. She knew her apartment-lined street was a designated truck route, and that container trucks had begun using it to reach the Port of Vancouver after the port’s Clark Drive entrance was closed to container trucks in 2011. But weeks after moving in, surrounded by unpacked boxes in her toddler’s bedroom, she became aware of the non-stop assault to her senses from the heavy-duty truck traffic outside. 

“Just the smell of the diesel through our window was so extreme,” she recalls. “It’s like a train of trucks. You barely get a break between them.” 

Brown-Colistro wasn’t the only resident concerned about the impacts of truck traffic. In the following months, she and her neighbours learned that the Port of Vancouver had decided to make the temporary detour permanent; changing its status as a truck route would also require approvals from Translink, the regional transit authority and the City of Vancouver. 

That summer, the fumes from truck exhaust on Brown-Colistro’s street were so cloying she had to keep their windows shut even on the hottest days rather than subject her toddler’s little lungs to the pollution. She bought air purifiers and ran them constantly, concerned about the risk of inhaled pollutants to her developing fetus. After her second child was born, Brown-Colistro rallied a city councillor, Lisa Dominato, and her MLA, Nikki Sharma, to her cause, but their efforts were futile. She was informed that the city’s engineers were concerned that re-routing traffic from her street would merely shift the burden onto other streets, equally unequipped to handle increases in heavy-duty traffic. 

In Vancouver, the heaviest burden of that traffic lands in the city’s east side, which encompasses heavily used truck routes, including the one outside Brown-Colistro’s apartment. The eight-kilometre-long Clark-Knight corridor, which runs north from the Fraser River toward the port’s newly expanded container terminal on Burrard Inlet, brings an average of 33,000 vehicles through the Clark and Broadway intersection each day and is the most heavily used truck route in the city. Of 25 air quality monitoring stations Metro Vancouver operates, the one adjacent to that intersection consistently records the worst nitrogen dioxide levels.

A 2018 study found that the air quality at this location was as poor — and at times poorer — than that along Ontario’s 401 highway, the busiest highway in all of North America, despite having one-twelfth as much traffic. The researchers’ conclusion? It wasn’t the number of vehicles so much as the higher proportion of heavy-duty diesel-burning trucks that spiked airborne pollutants. Though large trucks account for only six per cent of traffic at this intersection, they contribute a disproportionate amount of pollutants; compared to Sundays, when few trucks are on the road, on weekdays the levels of concerning pollutants are up to 2.8 times higher.

“The air quality objectives across Metro Vancouver, as they report to us, are met except for the monitors near our downtown area and also the Vancouver Clark Drive station,” Michael Schwandt, a medical health officer with Vancouver Coastal Health, explains. “It’s also a major problem because as we see increasing population density and all of the amenities that people need to live healthy lives — whether that’s schools, childcare, workplaces — often cluster in these areas.”

“The port is such an important economic engine for the country,” Christine Davis, a neighbourhood parent, whose child attends elementary school right on the truck route says. “But where does that leave the immediate neighbours that have to deal with the pollution and the traffic?” 

A more toxic beast

Not only has diesel exhaust been linked to cardiovascular impacts and compromised lung function, increasing incidences of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, but it is also made up of a cocktail of nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides, ozone, formaldehyde, benzene and smaller organic molecules that the World Health Organization classifies as a known carcinogen. 

“Diesel exhaust is different from gasoline exhaust, and diesel exhaust does generate compounds with higher levels of toxicity,” Marianne Hatzopoulou says. Hatzopoulou is an engineering professor at the University of Toronto who studies transportation systems and air pollution generated by traffic. “There’s definitely non-questionable evidence out there right now that the major contributors of traffic-related air pollution are the diesel vehicles — so, primarily the heavy-duty and the medium-duty trucks.” 

One in five childhood asthma cases in Canada are linked to traffic-related pollution, according to Vancouver Coastal Health research scientist Michael Brauer, who co-authored a 2019 study examining the global burden of NO2-caused pediatric asthma, which was published in the medical journal Lancet Planetary Health.

There are documented links to cancer, too. One study of French children reported the risk of childhood leukemia rises with exposure to nitrogen dioxide, black carbon and fine particulates — hallmarks of diesel exhaust. Health Canada states “there is sufficient evidence that the relationship between [traffic-related air pollution] exposure and childhood leukemia is likely to be causal.” It also notes links between adult lung cancer and breast cancer. Researchers have also found infants and children exposed to traffic air pollution are more likely to develop allergies and ADHD, while living near busy roadways is linked with a greater incidence of dementia, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and multiple sclerosis in adults.

There are shorter-term impacts on brain functioning from traffic-related air pollution too. Chris Carlsten, Director of the Centre for Lung Health at the University of British Columbia, has found that two-hour-long exposures to diesel exhaust temporarily dull the brain’s ability to concentrate and do basic tasks. In one experiment, he and his colleagues found that those exposed to diesel exhaust showed impairment comparable to someone with a blood alcohol level of 0.05 per cent, the equivalent of two or three drinks for an average-sized man. 

The Port of Vancouver did not make anyone available for an interview. By email, they wrote, “We recognize community concerns about impacts associated with commercial vehicle traffic and continue to engage with residents, government and industry partners to gain a clearer understanding of traffic impacts, both related to the port and otherwise. We remain committed to minimizing the impacts of trade-related activity on surrounding communities while supporting the safe and efficient movement of goods that Canadians rely on.”

What’s equally concerning for Carlsten is the invisible toll that traffic exhaust exacts on the lungs of young children, which can impact them decades later. “Suddenly all these early life insults become much, much more significant,” he says, describing how someone in their 50s or 60s might experience deteriorating lung capacity that actually originated from their exposure to traffic-related exhaust in childhood and adolescence. “I think it’s fair to say that schools in general just should not be within 300 metres of high traffic routes. I mean, it makes no sense; it’s where the kids are spending most of their days,” Carlsten says. “Given the level of evidence of adverse effects of traffic-related air pollution on children, it’s hard for me to understand how that can be possibly justified.”

And yet, 10 of Vancouver’s 89 public elementary schools are located within 300 metres — the distance from major roadways in which pollution levels are most concentrated — of the Clark-Knight corridor route to the port. Based on 2024 enrolment data, that means around six per cent of all public elementary school students in the city are breathing air that health experts believe is dangerously compromised. Across Canada, a 2022 analysis by Health Canada found that almost half of schools were located within 200 metres of major roads. (In Vancouver, it’s more than half.)

“We are promised as citizens of Vancouver that we will have access to this beautiful clean air that’s heavily marketed to us. I constantly feel like: Who is that accessible to?” Brown-Colistro says. “It’s certainly not low-income people. It’s certainly not a lot of young families who, due to the housing crisis, are forced to live along these busy corridors. It’s certainly not school kids.”

A tangled web of regulations presents challenges for decreasing vehicle emissions

In 1992, an emissions reduction program for light-duty vehicles was implemented in B.C. AirCare required vehicles to pass regular emissions testing before it was ended in 2014. Coupled with improved vehicle technology and cleaner fuels, vehicle emissions were reduced by 89 per cent between 1992 and 2014, according to the B.C. Ministry of Environment. Overall, the air quality in the region has improved in recent decades, thanks to these policies and regulations, despite significant population growth. However, the equivalent of mandatory AirCare for heavy-duty diesel vehicles was never instated, despite a 2013 MetroVancouver report showing it could have cut their emissions by more than 76 per cent.

“Heavy-duty vehicles, especially trucks, don’t have as stringent emission standards as we’ve historically done for light-duty vehicles,” Hatzopoulou explains.

But the gap with regulations for on-road heavy-duty diesel trucks remains significant in British Columbia, and nationally too, since many of these vehicles drive across the country, crossing provincial borders. Interestingly, Metro Vancouver has managed to move the dials to clean up non-road diesel engine emissions, from construction or industrial work, significantly. The regional authority introduced regulations around the emissions of non-road diesel engines in 2012, which cut pollution from construction, industrial and commercial sites.

In 2021, the regional district further strengthened the regulations, banning older diesel engines with zero emission controls (as well as older engines that have slightly reduced emissions) from operating within 100 meters of hospitals, elementary schools, day cares or community care facilities. In explicit recognition of the public health costs of the status quo, Metro Vancouver is now phasing in higher fees for those operating more polluting engines to offset their higher health costs to the region. 

Though B.C. and Metro Vancouver have tried to run mandatory emissions testing programs for heavy-duty diesel trucks, some of which are older, poorly maintained or whose emissions control systems have been tampered with after-market to burn dirtier, these efforts were abandoned after lobbying efforts from trucking industry groups.

Trucking in B.C. doesn’t have to be this dirty

Since 2006, the Port of Los Angeles, the largest and busiest port on the continent, has implemented policies to reduce emissions and pollutants. Their investments and policies include a US$10 tariff per 20-foot container, excepting zero-emissions trucks, which is used to fund clean truck deployment. As of May 2025, 546 zero-emissions trucks operate at the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach, most of which were bought with vouchers collected through the tariff or similar incentives. Since 2005, the Los Angeles port’s diesel particulate matter and nitrogen oxides emissions have been cut by 92 and 77 per cent, respectively.

In fact, all over the world, federal jurisdictions are actively tackling the problem of heavy-duty diesel truck emissions. Germany has built a one-kilometre section of its Bavarian Autobahn to wirelessly charge e-trucks as they transit the inductive roadway. Sweden now requires older vehicles to be retrofitted for pollution reduction before they can drive in the country’s designated low emission zones. The health benefits of these “clean air zones,” which restrict access for for vehicles that do not meet emissions standards, are significant. One study tracking several thousand elementary school-aged children in London, England documented improvements in children’s lung growth and health following the introduction of London’s “ultra low emission zone,” which led to 22 per cent reduction of nitrogen dioxide exposure in children over five years years. “That complacency … I would say it’s just in Canada,” Hatzopoulou says. 

In Vancouver, that complacency is hard to change. The Port of Vancouver was going to implement a Rolling Truck Age program that banned the oldest, most polluting trucks from accessing the port, however the program was postponed three times before being abandoned altogether, following opposition from truckers. By email, the Port of Vancouver said any new trucks applying for port access are required to be 2018 models or newer. However, drivers with trucks older than 2018 models who have already been approved can renew their access.

As a result, of the fleet of 1,700 container trucks that are licensed to access the port, more than half are older than 2018 models (and just under 10 per cent are 2007 models or older, the worst polluters), according to the port. By email, the port told The Narwhal it “does not have enforcement authority or capability for container truck inspections.” And as the port points out, its container trucks are not the only heavy-duty diesel engines on Vancouver’s roads. Any regulation or enforcement has to come from the federal or provincial level to meaningfully transform the roads. 

On one hand, getting the oldest, most polluting trucks off the Clark-Knight corridor should be low-hanging fruit for public health and transportation policy. But Dave Earle, president and CEO of the BC Trucking Association, says, “It is white hot politically.” Despite the dirtiest-running trucks — from 2007 and earlier — comprising a small minority of the port’s truck fleet, they are “driven by a couple of hundred extremely vocal, very, very politically active and well-connected folks,” Earle says. Yet the public health burden posed by this small minority of older trucks is outsized. A study led by McGill researchers and published this July concluded that removing pre-2007 heavy duty vehicles in Toronto and Montreal would prevent more than 3,300 premature deaths a year.

The current costs of electric heavy-duty trucks, after government rebates, is still around twice as much as a diesel truck. In June 2026, HTEC opened Canada’s first high-pressure hydrogen refuelling station for heavy-duty trucks on Tsawwassen First Nation industrial lands, 45 minutes south of the Port of Vancouver, but hydrogen-powered vehicles currently cost two to four times as much as a diesel model. Smaller but more accessible improvements could be made by replacing pre-2007 trucks with newer diesel models that run 10 to 20 per cent more efficiently, says Earle: “The quicker we can get the old stuff off the road and the new stuff on, the better off we’re going to be.” Running container trucks on natural gas, which reduces greenhouse gas emissions by upwards of 30 per cent and nearly eliminates particulates in exhaust, should also be explored, he adds. There are other changes he thinks the industry could make: tires that improve fuel efficiency, or retrofitting auxiliary power units so to reduce emissions while trucks are idling. (The province did offer rebates for trucks to retrofit their auxiliary power units, but the program’s funding was cut in 2024). 

But absent any changes to regulations and policy incentives, the problem is only going to get worse as trade disruptions with the U.S. hike the number of overseas trade coming in and out of Vancouver’s port. Last year, the equivalent of 3.7 million 20-foot-long shipping containers moved through the port’s four container terminals, two of which are located in Vancouver — a nine per cent increase from the previous year. Though the port is now running six all-electric trucks — part of a $3-million pilot project with Transport Canada and the province — this is just a drop in the bucket for Brown-Colistro and her neighbours, who see more than 2,000 container trucks and 6,000 heavy-duty vehicles pass by their homes each week. 

In the absence of leadership from government or jurisdictional authorities, there are signs of progress in the transportation industry. R.R. Plett in Langley, for example, operates eight electric trucks in their drayage fleet, one of few operators in Western Canada to have zero-emission heavy-duty trucks on the roads. Edison Motors has just received approval to manufacture class-8 diesel-electric hybrid trucks at its manufacturing facility in Donald, B.C., and is securing funding to do so. The Vancouver International Airport is exploring how it can use zero-emission electric barges to reduce congestion on Vancouver’s roads, innovating an air-to-marine model of cargo movement that circumvents the dirty heavy-duty vehicles altogether in favour of short-sea shipping over local waterways. 

“I just see a real desperation amongst my neighbors and the people I talk to,” says Brown-Colistro. “We’ve been knocking on proverbial doors and we get promises, but we don’t get solutions that are enacted.” 

In 1971 a group of 25 mothers in East Vancouver blockaded the railroad cutting through their neighbourhood to protest the danger to children who had to cross the tracks on their way to and from school. Their efforts were successful in spurring the city to finally build a pedestrian overpass. While the truckers’ threats of job action have moved the needle among decision makers to protect the status quo, despite the disproportionate health costs to children, a modern echo of the ‘70s Militant Mothers of Raymur looks more necessary all the time. “Everybody is dragging their feet so much about it,” Davis, the fellow neighbourhood mother, says. “At a certain point … do we have to do civil unrest or something? Do we have to block traffic to get noticed?”

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The sound of cars passing is a constant hum, so constant it’s almost meditative. Every so often one bleats out a honk of support. On the shoulder of the highway stands a man, holding a sign that reads: “Save the Salmon.”

Cheeks ruddy from the cold, he clutches it with gloved hands from behind a waist-high concrete highway barrier. Dark eyes glitter warmly behind glasses, and over his knitted wool toque is a black baseball cap emblazoned with the image of a tree, water and paddles. 

This is Tsartlip First Nation Elder Carl Olsen, also known by his traditional name, ZȺWIZUT. He’s 78 years old. For the last three years, he’s been coming out here every Tuesday — through rain, snow and even sickness — to stand out on the shoulder of the Malahat highway and protest.

It’s December 30, 2025. Olsen grins, surrounded by supporters who wave at cars and shake their own homemade signs. But it wasn’t always this way. When he first started out, it was just him, his granddaughter and a supporter from the local book club Olsen runs.

At his back is Goldstream Provincial Park, or as Olsen knows it, SELE₭TEȽ. At 477 hectares, it’s bigger than New York City’s Central Park, a verdant gem on the southern tip of Vancouver Island, just a 20-minute drive from Victoria. The park features waterfalls, Garry oak meadows, 600-year-old Douglas fir trees, flowering dogwood, western red cedar trees, Oregon grape and salmonberries.

In front of Olsen is the Malahat, a busy two-lane highway that cuts through the park and sees an average of 25,000 vehicles a day pass by. The park’s accessibility means more than 600,000 people visit each year to camp, hike and hang out. Many come in the fall to watch the huge runs of chum, Chinook and coho salmon that return each year to spawn in the Goldstream River.

What prompted Olsen to go out there in the early months of 2023 was learning of a proposal put forward by the province to widen the Malahat that would catastrophically affect the adjacent Chinook and coho salmon spawning habitat in the Goldstream River. 

According to the province, the highway expansion, estimated in 2024 to cost $162 million, was needed to improve safety and reliability along a 1.7-kilometre section that bisects the park.

One part that especially concerned Olsen was the expected “permanent loss or alteration of aquatic salmonid and amphibian habitat” next to the Goldstream River. This impact and others were detailed in a 139-page environmental assessment report commissioned by the province and completed in 2024 by consulting firm McElhanney. The area’s Chinook and coho salmon spawning habitat falls directly within the project’s footprint.

Within half a kilometre of the project site, at-risk species were likely to be affected, including western screech owls, northern red-legged frogs, wandering salamanders and the endangered sharp-tailed snake. Expand that to within five kilometres of the project site and that list lengthens to at least 200 endangered and threatened species possibly affected.

Olsen was also horrified to learn that, among a host of other environmental issues, approximately 715 trees would also be removed from an area along the highway during construction.

He thought about the owls and nesting birds, about the spe’uth (bears) that make their homes in SELE₭TEȽ and fed beside him while he and other nation members harvested fish for winter. He thought of how the noise and vibration from excavation and rock blasting might affect the vulnerable salmon fry, hiding out in the darkness under fallen logs in river pools until they were big enough to head to the ocean.

“The canopy that creates the coolness of the water in the stream — if that disappears, those fish will disappear, because then the water starts to get too hot. It’s about 12 degrees difference from the sun to the shade. So that’s what started me,” he says. “I thought, ‘Yeah, I can do this. I can be the voice for the salmon.’ ”

Every Tuesday for the last three years, Olsen wakes up at about 5 a.m. in the house his grandfather built, on the W̱JOȽEȽP Tsartlip reserve. He heads down to the beach right outside his door on the Saanich Inlet and starts his day with a prayer at the water’s edge. 

“I meditate about what I would like to see in my day,” he says.

After his prayer, Olsen heads to a local café for some toast and tea. 

Typically, a group of supporters show up to tag along with him to Goldstream Park. Others meet him there. Some are members of local churches and the Wilderness Committee, or participants in Olsen’s Indigenous authors book club.

One of those book club members is Christine Willes, a settler from a group called Goldstream Protectors that helped organize a protest with Olsen and others at the legislature in October. 

“What he says to anybody who asked him is, ‘Well, I can go and stand by the side of the highway,’ ” she says. “And that’s what he says to other people. ‘Do what you can.’ So I thought, well, I can go stand on the side of the highway too.”

For Olsen, this fight is now broader than the highway project. It’s a flashpoint in a much larger and contentious discussion around Indigenous land rights, title and reconciliation that has consumed the province, and has repercussions for the entire country. It’s also about the ability for Indigenous people to make land decisions in their own territory.

To the W̱SÁNEĆ people, of which Tsartlip are a part, SELE₭TEȽ is one of their oldest fishing villages, arguably protected by a treaty put to paper 174 years ago which clearly states they retain the rights to their village sites and to hunt and fish on those lands as they always have.

It’s one of 14 treaties negotiated in the 1850s by James Douglas, then-Governor of Vancouver Island, with the local First Nations. For many, the existence of these treaties may come as a surprise, as it’s well known that most of the province’s land mass was never ceded by its original inhabitants. 

Known collectively as the Douglas Treaties, multiple court cases since the 1960s have re-affirmed these treaty-protected rights, for both the W̱SÁNEĆ and the other Vancouver Island nations who signed them in the 1850s.

This fight to hold colonial governments to their word is what has kept Olsen out on the highway for three years.

‘It rightfully belongs to us’

On its website, the B.C. government states Goldstream Park was “given to the people of British Columbia by the Greater Victoria Water Board in 1958.” 

But the actual history is far more complicated.

“It rightfully belongs to us,” stated Jean Baptiste Paul, Tsartlip First Nation member and son of then-chief Thomas Paul, in an article published in the Daily Colonist on March 27, 1956. “We have never given it up, and never been offered anything for our fishing and hunting grounds there.”

Jean Baptiste recalled how he had hunted and fished at Goldstream as a child. He told the Daily Colonist that all of the Saanich Inlet, from Cherry Point to the hills south of Goldstream was Indigenous territory, and had been identified as such by his grandfather, former Tsartlip Chief Ben Paul.

Tsartlip and Malahat members had built fish-smoking shacks near the river and his grandfather had also constructed a log cabin in the area. But one day when no one was there, all the buildings were burned down, Paul told the paper.

At the time, Paul’s resistance was reported as little more than a passing curiosity with headlines such as, “Prospect of city giving park to B.C. has West Saanich Indians on warpath.” On June 26, 1958 B.C. went ahead and designated the area a park in celebration of British Columbia’s centennial.

Goldstream became a tourist attraction. Even though it was not yet officially open, the campground was quickly packed with vacationers. Newspaper columnists sung the praises of Goldstream’s beauty and touted its quick accessibility from Victoria. In the fall of 1960, thousands of onlookers crowded into Goldstream to watch the salmon run, a practice that continues to this day. 

However, these thousands of new visitors brought with them a host of new problems, says Eric Pelkey WEC’KINEM, hereditary chief of the Tsawout First Nation. Sometimes when nation members are down at the river harvesting fish, visitors to the park will confront them.

“They start cussing us up and down, saying that we’re destroying the fishery. We tell them, we have the right. We have the right to do this, to carry on our fishery and to just leave us alone. But there’s still a lot of racism that comes out at that time. People think we’re torturing the fish,” Pelkey says. 

The W̱SÁNEĆ carry on regardless. More recently, people have also been coming out there to support them, he adds.

Pelkey sits at a picnic table in the park, the gentle rush of the Goldstream River behind him. Barrel-chested, his voice a deep, gentle baritone, he wears a ball cap-style hat woven from cedar bark and a wool and feather headband. A cream-coloured traditional knitted blanket is wrapped around his shoulders.

These accusations are especially misplaced because, he explains, it’s the W̱SÁNEĆ who constantly steward the area and conduct their own assessments to monitor the health of the fish. 

For example, in 2023 the numbers of chum in the Goldstream were so low that nation members just went down to the river to observe. “Nobody took a fish,” according to Olsen, a long time volunteer at the Goldstream Hatchery.

Most of the environmental problems in the area are due to settler activity in the first place, Pelkey points out. Commercial fishing boats that come down the Johnstone Strait along the coast of Vancouver Island and into the Strait of Georgia take most of the salmon before they can even reach the Goldstream River, he says. In 2011 a fuel tanker truck crashed in the area, leaking tens of thousands of litres of gasoline and diesel into the river caused further stress on the salmon.

Members from all W̱SÁNEĆ nations harvest chum, Chinook and coho salmon from the Goldstream River as a winter food supply, and have for generations. When it’s smoked, the chum can last all winter, Pelkey says.

“I remember growing up, and we always had that smell in our house, because my parents would have sacks of smoked chum on top of our cupboards, burlap sacks,” he says.

A village displaced

In 1877, the Indian Reserve Commission parcelled out a fishing reserve along the south end of Finlayson Arm, an extension of the Saanich Inlet where the Goldstream River feeds into the ocean. However Goldstream Reserve no. 13, as it’s called, sits at the base of Mount Finlayson instead of in the area of the river where the community still harvests fish. 

“They carried out the survey of the old fishing village, but the surveyor is the one that took it from here and put it over there, off on the side of the mountain, instead of surveying where our village was,” says Pelkey. “This whole area here used to be filled with longhouses all along the river. Right over there, where that overhang is there, is actually where our family’s longhouse used to be.” 

He turns and points over his shoulder, to a structure not far from Goldstream Park’s gravel parking lot. 

“I was not aware of that until maybe I was in my 30s, when my grandfather asked me to bring him out here. We parked over there, walked down. And he said, ‘Oh, what is this building?’ ”

He told his grandfather, Marshall Pelkey, that it housed the washrooms and that this was now a public park. He became upset, Pelkey recalls.

Known as the “saltwater people,” the ocean is entwined within everything the W̱SÁNEĆ do, Pelkey says.

The W̱SÁNEĆ have maintained a wide and complex network of traditional reef net fishing sites throughout their territory, which encompasses what are currently known as the San Juan Islands, Boundary Bay, the Saanich Inlet and Saanich Peninsula. These reef net sites are not just places to harvest food, but are part of a wider spiritual and community practice. 

In and around Goldstream Park, community members also use streams that feed into the area for ritual bathing, and host a first salmon ceremony each fall to greet their returning salmon relatives. This is in an area right beside the province’s proposed road work site.

“Our people always fished here, no matter where the reserve was. Every winter, our people came here to fish. Conservation officers always tried to stop us, but we always just kept on and dared them to take us to court,” Pelkey says.

That’s exactly what happened one evening 30 years ago, when Olsen and another Tsartlip member, Ivan Morris, were caught hunting by conservation officers on their territory and arrested. 

To hunt and fish as formerly: what the Douglas Treaties really meant

Though it was early evening, it was already getting dark on Nov. 28, 1996, when two men, driving in the woods near Youbou, spotted what appeared to be the glow of deer eyes through the trees. 

They were showing two boys — eight and twelve years old — how to hunt at night with the help of a light. It was something their families had safely done for generations, but was previously done with burning pitch and bows and arrows. 

Morris pulled the vehicle over. Olsen took aim and fired a few shots. He then passed the rifle across the two boys to Morris, who got out of the vehicle and squeezed off two more.

They soon got a nasty surprise. The deer they shot at was, in fact, a decoy, complete with reflective eyes, set up by provincial conservation officers to trap illegal hunters. The vehicle was quickly swarmed by officers and the two men were arrested, Olsen recalls.

“There were probably a dozen or more conservation that surrounded us and even manhandled the kids that were there, threw them up against the hood of the car to search them,” he said.

The two were charged with hunting with a firearm during prohibited hours and hunting with an illuminating device, under provincial wildlife legislation. The subsequent trial revolved around the Crown’s argument that yes, Morris and Olsen had a right to hunt, but that did not include the right to hunt in a way that was “inherently unsafe,” as the trial judge put it.

At trial, the men’s lawyers countered with a vigourous legal defense. Not only were they using safe practices, they argued, their right as Tsartlip members to hunt as they always had was protected under the North Saanich Treaty of 1852, negotiated between nation members and Douglas.

The case dragged on for 10 years. Initially both men were convicted and it was upheld by the B.C. Court of Appeal. However, when it got to the Supreme Court of Canada, the convictions were overturned in a 4-3 vote.

Under consideration was the relevant text of the North Saanich Treaty, which guaranteed that village sites and enclosed fields were to be kept for the W̱SÁNEĆ and their children’s use, though the land itself was to become the “property of the white people for ever.” However it also clearly stated that its signatories were at liberty to hunt and carry on their fisheries “as formerly.”

But there are essentially two versions of what happened with the signing of the treaties — the written settler version backed by Douglas and others’ accounts, and the Indigenous oral version told through history by W̱SÁNEĆ members.

It’s generally understood that on Feb. 7 of 1852, Douglas met with 10 W̱SÁNEĆ members to agree on what became the South Saanich Treaty. He then requested W̱SÁNEĆ chiefs come to another meeting on February 11 during which he negotiated with 118 “men with beards,” as he later described them, in what ended up as the North Saanich Treaty.

Historians have different theories on why these two agreements were negotiated separately, but it’s important to understand the context in which they were negotiated. For a prior treaty with the Songhees Nation, Douglas said he asked the chiefs to sign marks at the bottom of a blank sheet of paper, later adding details above it that resulted in the acquisition of the area’s South Island. Experts believe it’s possible Douglas did the same thing as with the W̱SÁNEĆ as he did with the Songhees, and got them to sign blank paper.

Adding to the complications, the X marks on the North Saanich Treaty that represented signatures “were forged” in that they were supposedly signed by W̱SÁNEĆ members “but were in fact made by the clerk of the Hudson’s Bay Company,” declared Justice Douglas Lambert, in Olsen’s B.C. Court of Appeal case.

There is no evidence that the First Nations signatories saw the agreements after the fact, were given a copy, or knew what text was later added.

To this day, the text of the Saanich Treaties does not match W̱SÁNEĆ’s own oral version, which asserts that the treaties were likely agreements to share the land, not surrender it.

On this point, the court also came to a stunning conclusion in its final ruling, in Olsen’s favour: “The Douglas Treaties were the reflections of oral agreements reduced to writing by agents of the Crown” and that those oral promises made when the treaty was agreed to “are as much a part of the treaty as the written words.”

As the people who wrote the Douglas Treaties down were not the Indigenous people, the court “had to take into account what was the evidence of Indigenous people about what they thought the treaty meant,” says lawyer Louise Mandell, Olsen and Morris’s representative and one of the founding partners of Mandell Pinder, a law firm that specializes in Aboriginal and treaty rights law.

This was important for the legal cases that were to follow, she adds.

There are other reasons that the W̱SÁNEĆ think the treaties were likely land sharing agreements meant to stave off tensions that had arisen at that time for a variety of reasons, including a dispute over timber being harvested by settlers in Cordova Bay. 

Given that the Indigenous population on Vancouver Island at this time was approximately 11,700 people, compared with a settler population of about 700, there wouldn’t be any motivation for the W̱SÁNEĆ to sell off all their land, says Joni Olsen, the policy and negotiations manager for the W̱SÁNEĆ Leadership Council and Carl Olsen’s daughter.

“The concept of selling land at that point in history was not a thing for W̱SÁNEĆ people,” she says, especially in the context of B.C. being the last place in Canada that settlers came. “Maybe on the east coast, where they had been settled hundreds of years before, there were probably those concepts there already, but that didn’t happen here.”

Furthermore, the idea that the W̱SÁNEĆ would sell land in exchange for a “payment” of blankets doesn’t make sense culturally, and represents a fundamental lack of understanding around what gifting means to their people, Joni says.

“I mean, historically, to access land you would have married somebody’s daughter or something like that. There would have been an exchange. And it could have been through Potlatch, where you had an exchange of things like blankets. But it wasn’t to own. It was to share. It was to have access to.”

Last February, Joni helped negotiate a joint statement with the provincial and federal governments to acknowledge W̱SÁNEĆ’s oral version of the treaties. It states that “though Canada and British Columbia have long considered these agreements to be land purchase agreements, W̱SÁNEĆ oral histories hold that they were agreements to settle disputes and establish peaceful relations between the W̱SÁNEĆ Nation and the European settlers.”

But these peaceful relations remain a challenge when it comes to negotiations over the future of Goldstream Park.

Moving Indigenous court victories into the real world

Olsen stands on an outcropping of stone known as “The Rock.” It’s a scenic spot along Mill Bay Road in the Cowichan Valley that looks out across the waters of the Saanich Inlet, which is fed by the Goldstream River. In the distance are the western shores of the Saanich Peninsula; beyond that, a scattering of islands.

The sun is bright, and he cups a hand over his forehead as he looks across the water.

“When I was a kid, this bay was full of salmon. You could see it,” he says. “You really could see it.” These waters and lands were his garden and food source growing up.

“It’s where we harvested food plants, medicine plants, and berries. And when you come to the ocean like this, we harvested our food from the ocean. In fact, I was in my early teens before I even had a store-bought meal. It was like fish, ducks, deer, clams, oysters, seal meat. That was my diet before, up until maybe the mid ’60s,” he says.   

Though he was raised as a hunter and a fisherman, his father taught him those skills in private, under a cloud of fear.

“Most parents in our communities suffered from fear. Fear of losing their kids because of how the residential school would just take you away if there was a problem. They actually lived with that fear right up till the end, and so they never taught us on land here. My dad always taught me when we were out fishing on the boat, when there was nobody around. Nobody to come and take us away,” he says, overcome with emotion. “That’s how it affected the treaty as well. They had to go outside or to the islands to teach us our ways.”

That fear has continued to affect the exercising of their Douglas Treaty rights because those rights are still disrespected and uncertain, he adds.

“It only verifies the rights that I have, that’s what the Douglas Treaty does. Because that’s what we did before, hunting and fishing, being taught with hands-on teaching,” he says. “That fear is still there, because of the inability of the government to come and sit down with you to implement that court ruling.”

Of the five historical court cases that involved Douglas Treaty rights — including Olsen’s — each one resulted in victory. And every case presented its own legal challenge.

“It wasn’t as if we sat around, thinking about what all we have to do to win whatever,” says Mandell, the lawyer who represented Olsen and Morris. “In every case, we nuanced what the arguments were going to be, and we built the law — gradually.” 

In the 1980s Mandell worked on the 1987 Saanichton Marina case, around a development company’s intention to dredge and develop a commercial marina in Saanichton Bay that was home to eel grass beds, crabs, salmon and trout. 

The legal team wondered how they could assert the treaty “not as a shield but as a sword,” Mandell says. Rather than defend themselves from persecution, they would now assert their rights proactively, to protect the crab fishery and the Tsawout Nation’s traditional fishing grounds.

Essentially, Saanichton Marina Ltd.’s argument was that the “right to fish as formerly,” as stated in the treaties, meant the company could simply pick up and move the eel grass habitat elsewhere. The fish would still be there to harvest, so what was the problem?

The court agreed with Tsawout’s lawyers that found that a fishery is actually the place where fish are harvested, and the right includes the nation’s capacity and the capacity of a nation to care for it, so they’re not deprived of that right.  

“It’s both the incidental aspect and also the place itself. It’s not the right to put your fish net in the water and pull out a fish. It’s the right to continue to protect and harvest and steward and be reciprocal, inside the place that the fishing is happening,” Mandell says. 

This was a crucial and far-reaching finding, and directly relevant to the fight at Goldstream Park — the concept that nation members not only had the right to fish as formerly, but to protect their harvest. 

It’s been a rallying cry for Olsen ever since.

“My relatives fought for that. And the decision that came out of there was that they not only had the right to hunt and fish as formerly, they have the right to protect what they hunted and fished as formerly,” says Olsen. “That’s why I’m here. I’m protecting what belongs to us, our relatives that come up the stream that feed us.”

However, Mandell says there is a huge difference between winning a case and translating that legal victory into political action.

“I can’t tell you how many times we came home from the Supreme Court of Canada thinking we had died and gone to legal heaven, only to find out nothing much changed on the ground. I think that’s the difference between winning a legal point and actually having the capacity to move that victory into shifting the political landscape,” Mandell says.

Olsen, standing on the side of the Malahat protesting for the protection of Goldstream, embodies that distinction.

Despite decades of court cases and historical agreements which upheld the W̱SÁNEĆ people’s rights not only to their village site but also to their fishing grounds at SELE₭TEȽ, despite three years of weekly protests to highlight these rights, it appeared the government’s $162-million highway improvement plan was poised to go ahead.

That is, until Olsen received a phone call in February this year from some members of the W̱SÁNEĆ Leadership Council to tell him they had received some news.

‘Do what you can’

The province had an announcement to make about the Malahat highway. The widening project was being paused. The leadership council members congratulated him.

In a February news release, the province said additional work was required “to address environmental considerations in this sensitive area of Goldstream Park” and understand the project’s impacts.

“I thought, ‘Well, that’s great,’” Olsen says. But he also doubts whether the government will keep its word.

“In the past we’ve had meetings with businesses and government offices and in our longhouses here and come to agreements with them. Then not even a couple of days later, they break those agreements,” he says.

“This could be one of those issues. You know they said they were pausing it, and in their statement, they talk about how they need to better understand the environment and do more research on the environment there, which tells me we were right in thinking that they didn’t really have an environmental plan.”

From the beginning, the province wanted W̱SÁNEĆ members to accept their environmental assessment without question, Olsen says. But he always felt that there was something odd about being asked to accept something without fully agreeing to it. From what nation members could see, the environmental risks were obvious — even from the government’s own assessment report.

The purpose of the environmental assessment was to identify issues, and “some of these considerations were brought to light through that process,” Ministry of Transit and Transportation spokesperson Murray Sinclair stated in an email.

“This does not mean the report was incomplete. The purpose of an environmental assessment is to identify issues, and some of these considerations were brought to light through that process,” Sinclair stated. Given the complexity of the site and the sensitivity of the habitat, addressing those issues will take time, he added.

The ministry is currently conducting a review of crash data in the area as part of an update to its 2012 study of the Highway 1 Malahat corridor.

What about Olsen’s concern that the project is merely on pause, and not actually cancelled?

“It’s possible the project could be revisited in the future. However, there is no timeline or estimate for when that might occur,” stated Sinclair.

This is why, for now, Olsen has decided to keep up his weekly protests.

“We want better decisions made about Goldstream and protecting the watershed especially. It’s about protecting the whole area,” he says. “It’s really important that we recognize where we stand in the whole thing. I’m not going to leave. I think they expected me to leave. We’re still there.”

On-the-ground reporting for this story is made possible with support from Carleton University’s Peter Stursberg Award in Conflict Journalism and Media Studies. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, no foundation or outside organization has editorial input into our stories.

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On Aug. 6, with much of southern B.C. blanketed in wildfire smoke, Minister of Energy and Climate Solutions Adrian Dix kicked off a Campbell River press conference by thanking wildfire fighters and the BC Hydro employees working to address infrastructure damaged by the flames.

“The impact of climate change and the impact of wildfires presents challenges to BC Hydro,” Dix acknowledged, adding wildfires had knocked out power for about 24,000 B.C. homes over the previous week.

A few days prior to the minister’s announcement, wildfires near the central B.C. communities of Clinton and Vernon had destroyed hundreds of homes and prompted evacuation orders affecting about 8,000 people.

But Dix wasn’t on Vancouver Island to talk about the wildfires. He was there to announce the purchase of Island Generation, a 275-megawatt natural gas-fired power plant, by BC Hydro. Despite a mandate that all electricity generated in B.C. come from renewable sources by 2030, BC Hydro now says it needs to continue getting electricity from gas to meet an anticipated surge in power demand over the next few years: a 20 per cent increase by 2030 and a 50 per cent increase by 2050.

That surge in demand is driven largely by mining and liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects, as well as increasing numbers of electric vehicles and heat pumps in B.C. homes.

Keeping gas in BC Hydro’s generation mix will allow the provincial power utility to focus on developing more renewable energy sources, Dix argued.

“It’s better to continue to build out clean electricity and to ensure that resources like Island Generation stay in B.C. and support the system,” he said, calling climate action “essential” to B.C.’s environmental, economic, social and cultural well-being.“Surely things like our own wildfires, and then witnessing what’s happened, for example, in France, in Spain, in other parts of the world, demonstrate this,” he said.

The day after the Campbell River announcement, the Bald Ridge fire ignited near Summerland in southern B.C., leading to the evacuation of more than 20,000 people. On Aug. 8, Premier David Eby declared a provincial state of emergency due to the wildfires. B.C. is now in its third state of emergency in five years, including those prompted by the November 2021 atmospheric river and the extreme wildfires of 2023.

“Climate scientists have connected the dots to all three of those emergencies and been able to identify that climate change made them both more likely and more extreme,” Dan Woynillowicz, a climate policy expert and principal with Polaris Strategy + Insight, said after watching Eby declare a state of emergency. “And neither the premier nor either of his ministers made even passing reference to climate change in that whole press conference.”

Some might say that connecting the “explosive and extremely dangerous” conditions driving this year’s wildfires to climate change is in poor taste while people are being displaced and losing their homes, but Woynillowicz takes a different view. 

“I think British Columbians are sophisticated enough to be able to hear those different messages,” he said. “What we need to continue to do to better prepare and adapt to a world in which we are going to be experiencing this with greater frequency and greater extremity, but also what we need to do to prevent even worse impacts in the future by reducing our combustion of fossil fuels that are that are creating the problem and making it worse.”

Failure to plan for future electricity demand makes Island Generation purchase an ‘unfortunate necessity’

Gas isn’t a big part of BC Hydro’s electricity generation, about 2.5 per cent. The emissions reduction from BC Hydro ditching gas would not be huge, and there are arguments for keeping facilities like Island Generation online as energy demands grow across B.C.Island Generation is what’s known as a peaker plant, mostly called on to generate power at times of peak demand like hot summer days and cold winter nights. Over the past five years, it’s been running for about five days per year and BC Hydro expects that will continue. 

The plant can create enough electricity to power about 125,000 homes — about one-quarter of all the electricity that can be produced on Vancouver Island, making it an important local asset.Evan Pivnick, associate director of public affairs for Clean Energy Canada, called the Island Generation purchase an unfortunate necessity — one that shows BC Hydro’s planning has not kept pace with the growing electricity demand it faces.

“This needs to be an opportunity to learn from those mistakes, so that we truly look at natural gas as an option of last resort, not as something that plays a growing role in our electricity systems,” he said. 

B.C. is set to achieve just half of its legislated target of reducing emissions by 40 per cent below 2007 levels by 2030, according to the most recent climate accountability report. 

“Rather than closing the gap to the 2030 target year after year, we’ve been getting further away from it,” Kathryn Harrison, a political science professor at the University of British Columbia who studies climate and energy policy, told The Narwhal.

“Since that report was published [in 2025], the B.C. government has weakened some climate policies and, as far as I can tell, abandoned others,” she added, citing B.C.’s discarded pledges to develop an oil and gas emissions cap and reduce medium- and heavy- truck emissions, as well as the elimination of the consumer carbon tax.

Electrification — replacing fossil fuel power sources with electricity — is central to almost all of B.C.’s emissions reduction goals. But as B.C. fast-tracks energy-intensive resource projects, BC Hydro has yet to figure out how and when it would have those resources ready to supply them with power. 

“There was no accompanying electricity strategy,” Pivnick said. “There was a disconnect where the ambitions around electrifying industry, electrifying households, never translated into what does this mean for our electricity system and how do we think about the buildout of the supply that’s required?”

Even the 50 per cent increase in electricity demand by 2030 that BC Hydro is currently working to meet is likely a conservative estimate. Woynillowicz noted the federal government’s electricity strategy projects a doubling in electricity demand across Canada by 2030.

“BC Hydro has continued planning for, relatively speaking, a lower-growth future, and I think that is now coming back to bite,” Woynillowicz said.He wondered whether a more proactive planning approach could have allowed BC Hydro to develop renewable resources and avoid continuing to rely on Island Generation. Despite launching the CleanBC program in 2018 and investing $3.5 billion in its efforts to cut greenhouse gases, B.C. has not been successful at reducing emissions in the province and has admitted the program’s goals are no longer “accurate or workable.”   

“Hindsight is 20/20, but I think it raises questions,” he said. “Between BC Hydro and the government, was planning happening in the way that it needed to be? I would say that no, it wasn’t. That there was fundamentally a disconnect between CleanBC and the future that BC Hydro was planning for.”

LNG ambitions could lead to electricity crunch and higher gas prices

The pressing need for power that B.C. faces is relatively new. Before the NDP government committed to completing the Site C dam, some experts estimated the province would not need the 1,100 megawatts the dam can produce for a decade or more after it began operating. There were also those who argued renewable power sources would be a better bang for the B.C. government’s buck.

But just electrifying all proposed LNG terminals in B.C. — something the government has made a condition for those projects to proceed — and some of the gas infrastructure to supply them would take 40,000 gigawatts per year. That’s 7.5 times the capacity of Site C, as noted in the CleanBC review co-authored by Woynillowicz and fellow climate expert Merran Smith.

Electrification is key to the main marketing slogan for B.C.’s LNG, as Premier Eby emphasized during a recent press conference.

“Our LNG is the lowest carbon in the world because it is electrified as much as possible throughout the chain [and] because we have high standards around methane leakage and emissions,” he said. 

“We take climate change very seriously, but we also recognize that B.C. can play a role in driving down carbon pollution around the world.”

But the massive electricity demand for LNG could put B.C.’s electrification and emission reduction goals in peril.

“If we don’t have enough electricity to power LNG and potentially also electric vehicles and home electrification and other industries, we will end up either not pursuing those projects or increasing our emissions,” Harrison said. 

She also pointed out that B.C.’s most recent emission projections don’t include some of the LNG projects the provincial government has been pushing hard to see built: LNG Canada Phase 2 and Ksi Lisims. If those facilities fire up, it will add “many millions of tonnes difference” to how realistic the province’s emissions reduction goals are.

The economic opportunities offered by becoming a global LNG supplier are real, Pivnick said, but they may not outweigh the downsides.

“The world would be very happy to see Canada and B.C. invest in more and more fossil fuel projects that ensure there’s a secure supplier available to purchase from as they go through their own transitions, but that’s Canada and B.C. choosing to invest as essentially a shock absorber for a world that’s trying to move away from our goods,” he said.

A robust LNG industry will also mean much higher demand for natural gas in B.C. The province’s 2026 budget banks on a doubling of natural gas prices. That could be bad news for affordability in B.C. down the road, given natural gas accounts for about 31 per cent of all energy used in the province, while electricity accounts for about 18 per cent.

“Whether we’re talking about burning natural gas in our homes or burning natural gas for electricity, continuing to have that reliance at the same time that we’re actively trying to secure higher prices, [that is] good for the oil and gas sector, good for the province in terms of royalties, but it’s actually pretty lousy for British Columbians from an affordability perspective,” Woynillowicz said.

Back in April, Dix told the legislature Island Generation had been having trouble with its gas supply, an issue he attributed to demand from the Woodfibre LNG project in Squamish. In July, The Narwhal’s questions to the Energy Ministry, Island Generation and Woodfibre LNG about the supposed supply issue mostly went unanswered.

At the Aug. 6 announcement, Dix said he is confident Island Generation will be able to get the gas it needs, but offered no further information.

Concern for climate change has spiked as wildfire smoke spreads, creating an opportunity for conversation

A very dim silver lining to the summer’s wildfires is that they seem to have put climate change back on many Canadians’ radar. A recent Angus Reid poll found 21 per cent of Canadians put climate change as their top concern, up from 14 per cent in March. In B.C., 25 per cent of respondents said climate change was their top concern, putting the issue in third place behind cost of living and healthcare.

That’s a notable shift from the past few years, when climate change has consistently polled low as a priority for many Canadians. But just because people aren’t telling pollsters climate change is a top concern doesn’t mean they aren’t worried about the impacts of a warming world, Harrison argued.

“I don’t think it is the case that that means people are willing to sacrifice their safety from wildfires, their children’s health from breathing smoke, their elderly parents’ safety in extreme heat in exchange for a lower cost of living today,” she said. “They’re just not connecting those dots.”

That lack of connection isn’t helped, she said, by politicians who claim they take climate change seriously while continuing to support fossil fuel development and failing to address emissions effectively.

“Politicians are reassuring people, ‘Don’t worry, we’ve got the whole climate change thing in hand,’ and people at the same time are worried about the economy,” she said.

Instead of offering reassurances that things will be okay, Woynillowicz wishes politicians would communicate what they are doing to directly and effectively address climate change.

“One of the messages we’re hearing from government is that they’ve got our backs,” he said. 

“I would feel more comfortable that they’ve got my back and my kids’ backs if I knew that … they are actually being proactive, both in terms of helping make us more resilient to future impacts that we know are coming — but also what they’re doing to prevent even worse impacts in the future by doing more to reduce the pollution that’s causing the problem.”

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The wildfire that tipped B.C. into a state of emergency this August was described as “a bomb going off” to Premier David Eby by a fire official. Flames from Bald Range, in the interior of the province, grew to heights of 90 metres as the fire spread rapidly after igniting on Aug. 7. More than 20,000 people in the region were evacuated. At least one person died while trying to flee. And all of that is due to just one of more than 100 fires burning across the province.

Experts around the world have called extreme fire weather our “new normal” and Eby even used the term at a press conference earlier this week. But as fire scientist Mike Flannigan looks at B.C.’s wildfires of the past, he rejects the term. “We’re moving into uncharted territory. This is our new reality. Some people might say ‘normal,’ but to me, normal sounds like a plateau. We’re on a trajectory, and it’s downward.” 

Flannigan is a professor of wildland fire at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops whose expertise has earned him the BC Innovation Research Chair in predictive services, emergency management and fire Science. He’s been studying fire for decades. He recently spoke to The Narwhal from Kamloops and shared some data that showed a dramatic increase in area burned across the province in the last 10 years compared to the previous six decades. We asked him to break down what this all means for the future of wildfires in B.C. and the country.

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

What are the conditions in Kamloops right now? How’s the air quality there?

We got a bit of relief today. It’s better. I went out without a mask today because it was good enough. But the last week has been horrific. Just awful, awful air quality. I’m sick and tired of this smoke. You want to enjoy summer, and it’s hard to enjoy it when you’re either trapped indoors or choking on smoke.

We’re in mid-August and there are currently more than 100 wildfires burning across the province and thousands of people have been evacuated. What are you thinking as you look at Canada and B.C. right now?

We’ve had three bad fire seasons in Canada immediately prior to 2026. About eight per cent of our forests burned 2023 to 2025, and there’s no modern analog for this. We’ve never had three fire seasons like we’ve just seen. 

And my narrative up to now has always been: yes, there’ll be bad fire seasons, but there’ll be cooler, wetter years, and the fire season will be quiet. I still believe that regionally. Like, Ontario’s had a bad fire season this year. Next year may be really quiet. 

But nationally, we’re such a big country that every year, somewhere we’re going to see this combination or episodes of dry fuels, ignitions and hot, dry, windy weather. You get all three, you have fire. 

In Canada, about three per cent of fires are responsible for 97 per cent of our area burned. Much of this happens on a relatively small number of days of hot, dry, windy conditions. We call them ‘spread days,’ and that’s when you see explosive fire growth, like we saw in the Bald Range fire. 

It’s really important people report fires right away if they see a wildfire, because all fires start small and that’s our window. If you don’t get on top of it within 30 minutes, the horse has left the barn.

What causes ‘spread days’?

What we’re seeing is a lot more extreme fire weather in large measure due to climate change. And I’ll be even more specific: human-caused climate change. A warmer world for Canada means more fire. 

The warmer we get, the longer the fire seasons are and we’re seeing that across Canada. 

Second, the warmer we get, the more lightning we expect. Now, in Canada, just over half of our fires are started by lightning, but they’re responsible for about 92 per cent of our area burned.

The third reason is probably the most important. As the atmosphere warms, the ability to suck moisture out of dead forest floor fuels increases rapidly. The forecast for the future is we’re not going to see enough rain. Bottom line? It means more of that fuel on the forest floor has dried out and is available to burn, which leads to these higher intensity fires that are difficult or impossible to extinguish. 

I would argue that B.C. is the pointy end of the climate change spear in terms of fire in Canada. We have seen an abrupt increase. 

To me the big driver is extreme fire weather and ignitions. I have lots of colleagues who want to blame what we see on land management, forest management, fuel build-up. They are playing a role, but they’re really minor. It is extreme fire weather conditions. 

Recent studies suggest more than 1.5 million people prematurely die every year globally due to wildland fire smoke, and that number is only going to increase as we see more larger populations impacted by smoke.

You recently looked at how much area has burned in B.C. going back to the 1950s. What did you notice?  

There were big years in the past. 1958 was an active year. 2003 was an active year. The Barriere fire in 2003 devastated part of the town. Kelowna had a number of homes lost. But more area has burned this year than in 2003. That was really a big fire year in those years. Now it’s considered not that much. 

In 2017 it’s like somebody flipped the switch. It was record-breaking. Followed by 2018, which was record-breaking. Then came along 2023, which said, ‘Oh, I’m going to almost double you’ and broke a record. 2023 the whole province was on fire. 2024 and 2025 were active in the northeast, not so much down south. 

2026 is mostly the Cariboo and southern regions that are seeing the fire. If you look at a drought map, you’ll see that’s where the drought is. Drought doesn’t guarantee fire, but sets the stage for an active fire season.

Is there a way to contextualize how much area in B.C. burned in 1950 to 2016 compared to 2017 to 2026? 

A fair bit more area burned between 2017 and 2026 than the previous 67 years, 1950 to 2016.

2026 is still burning as we speak. To put the numbers in context, the area burned in the first 67 years — 1950 to 2016 — is just over twice the size of Vancouver Island. Whereas the last decade is trying to approach three times the size of Vancouver Island in 10 years versus 67 years.

What are the most urgent takeaways this data is showing?

It is showing that the impacts of climate change on fire activity are here and are worsening. There’s a couple ways they’re worsening. 

Historically, nighttime temperatures went down, relative humidity went up, the wind generally went down. The fire would go quiet, firefighters could catch their breath and prepare for the next day. Now we’re seeing fires burning into and through the night. Fire management, to their credit, has responded by fighting fire at night. They have night vision helicopters in places like B.C., Alberta, California. But that’s one challenge. 

An even bigger challenge is we’re seeing the intensity of these fires increase. There are recent studies showing globally where the increases are occurring, and western North America and the boreal forests are playing a major role. 

Many of these are what we call pyrocumulonimbus, fire-generated thunderstorms. These are monsters. Fire management cannot fight these. The only strategy is to get out of the way.  

How can looking at the past six decades help us today?

I would say we need to look even farther back in time. We’re in uncharted territory. There is no historical analog for this kind of rapid increase in fire activity. 

There’s a recent paper by Chelene Hanes and others that looks at changes in the fire regime from 1959 to 2024. We’re seeing larger fires and we had been seeing lightning fires increase, but human-caused fires were going down. We were all patting ourselves on the back, saying, “Hey, you know education’s working. Fire bans are working.” 

But this most recent study is now detecting an upswing in human-caused fires. Are people becoming more careless? I don’t think so. It’s because the fuels are drier that it’s more receptive whether it’s lightning strikes or human activities. Most fires are accidental. Arson does play a role, unfortunately, but typically a fairly small number of fires are started by arson. There’s other things that start fires like our infrastructure, power lines, railways, burning trash, agricultural burning, four-wheel vehicles and quads.

Another tool is forest closures. In some years, you may never have to close the forest, but when it’s extreme, you should close the forest. Unpopular, of course, with industry and people who want to do recreation, but it’s a very effective tool, and allows fire management.

What questions should emergency management and researchers be asking when looking at these numbers?

How can we be better prepared for the future? Every community should have an emergency management plan for fire and floods, but include climate change. Metro Vancouver has a really good emergency management plan. Not only does it deal with fire, but also talks about climate change and the expected increase in fire activity. 

We should be looking at FireSmart, making it mandatory in high-risk locations to protect homes and buildings. We should be providing funding or incentives to make that happen. It’s kind of happening through insurance already. 

I’ll give you another positive example. Jasper is rebuilding and they’re making two FireSmart principles mandatory: using non-flammable building materials and making a 1.5 metre buffer zone around your home non-flammable. Fire typically enters a community through a rain of embers — burning bits of twig, bark, sometimes even pine cones — and it’s probing. It’s opportunistic. It’s looking for something to burn. It lands on mulch or a conifer shrub right beside your home. Your home catches fire and then your neighbour’s home catches fire. Domino, just the whole block goes. 

Continuing to educate the public is also a path forward. 

I also advocate for a national firefighting force. In the last three years, about two-thirds of the days in 2023 to 2025, we did not have enough resources in Canada, so we called on the United States. This year, the United States is having a very active fire season having nothing to spare. Right now, we have firefighters from Mexico, New Zealand and Australia. There’s talk about the Canadian Armed Forces. We should have a FEMA-type agency, a Federal Emergency Management Agency, to deal with fire, floods, earthquakes and hurricanes. We’re the only G7 country without one. 

We have an early warning system for hurricanes. Why can’t we do that for fire? I am doing fire weather outlook right now as a first step in our early warning system. It’s a research project that is publicly available. We have models to predict fire occurrence, lightning, and human caused. So, if we know where the extreme fire will be, and if we know where the new fire starts will be, we should be moving resources proactively ahead of time to those locations. It will cost money, absolutely. But if it saves one Jasper, one Fort McMurray, one Summerland, it kind of pays for itself.

Looking at this data, it can feel pretty bleak. Are you feeling any hope?

I used to be more optimistic than I am. Our track record with dealing with greenhouse gases is abysmal. Building another pipeline is like adding a nail in our coffin. We really have to get off fossil fuels. I don’t know what else I can say. I just see, “drill, baby, drill” and “build, baby, build” and rather than a serious thoughtful conversation of, ‘How can we build a better Earth for the next generation?’ ’’

We need to do something as a global society, and not just for fire. I would like to leave the place better than we found it, and we’re not doing that. We’re making it much worse than what we found it. People can change behaviour. We can change.

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When temperatures drop, people who rent their homes in B.C. have a right to stay warm. Heating is considered an essential service under the province’s Residential Tenancy Act, something landlords must supply.

But when extreme heat hits, it’s a different story. As temperatures soared last month, smashing record highs across B.C., landlords in most parts of the province held on to the power to prohibit their tenants from installing and using air conditioners.

“It’s in my lease agreement,” Nadine Nakagawa, a city councillor in New Westminster, says. 

Summary

• B.C. doesn’t have a provincial law addressing maximum temperatures in rental units.
• In recent years, a number of B.C. municipalities have voted to change their bylaws to protect tenants from extreme heat.
• Local politicians and advocates say better rebates and other support for renters’ ‘right to cool’ must come from the provincial government.

Safety concerns are often used to justify air conditioning bans in rental units, especially in older buildings where electrical systems might struggle in high-demand situations. But that’s not always the case; the building Nakagawa lives in was built in 2019.

Nakagawa knows some of her neighbours flout the air conditioner prohibition, running the risk of eviction when temperatures rise. It’s a risk she argues they shouldn’t have to take.

“Individual tenants being brave really can’t be the answer in a housing market that does make people extremely precarious.”

Cooling devices — air conditioners or, increasingly, heat pumps — aren’t just a matter of comfort. As climate change increases the likelihood of heat waves and hotter summers, access to cool spaces is becoming a matter of life and death. Only 45 per cent of B.C. households report having an air conditioner — well below the national rate of 68 per cent, according to Statistics Canada. And while more than three-quarters of homeowners have access to an air conditioner, just over half of tenants said the same. 

In late June 2021, the Pacific Northwest heat dome made the lack of cooling devices a deadly reality for many British Columbians for the first time. Over one sweltering week, temperatures in many parts of the province approached 40 C. The heat caused the deaths of 619 people, 98 per cent of whom died indoors. Many of them were seniors without access to adequate cooling in their homes, according to B.C.’s chief coroner. 

Many also lived in low-income neighbourhoods where apartment buildings tend to be older. This often means rent is more affordable, but comes with leaky windows, poor ventilation, dated electrical systems and an absence of cooling devices — characteristics that leave their residents vulnerable to extreme weather.

In the years since the heat dome, the B.C. government has taken some steps to protect people from extreme heat, including funding for air conditioning and ventilation in seniors’ homes and long-term care facilities and access to free air conditioners for a small number of vulnerable people. A 2024 update to the BC Building Code requires every unit in new residential buildings to have one room where the temperature does not exceed 26 C, even during summer heat. 

But most B.C. tenants don’t live in new buildings and the province has yet to address their “right to cool,” as policies focused on protecting people from extreme heat are sometimes called. The lack of provincial action has pushed some councillors, including Nakagawa, to tackle the issue at the municipal level. 

“We have known for a number of years that we are going to be having hotter and hotter summers,” she says. “In the next heat dome, we cannot say that we did not know and didn’t expect it. That’s why we have to take action right now.”

Who pays to keep B.C. renters cool?

So far, six B.C. municipalities, including New Westminster, have voted to change their bylaws to bar landlords from banning the use of cooling devices in rented homes. As of this month, that list includes Victoria. Emily Rogers, director of operations with the Together Against Poverty Society, calls the decision “a move in the right direction.”

“It is long overdue and necessary to prevent heat-related injury and death,” she says. “I’ve had this public conversation every year since 2021.”

The society helps renters living in poverty navigate B.C.’s Residential Tenancy Act. When it comes to making the right to cool official, Rogers argues that even though the act currently lacks specific temperature requirements around extreme heat, it already implies rental homes should not get dangerously hot.

“It’s already the landlord’s responsibility to provide safe housing conditions and in this new era of climate change, that includes the right to cooling,” Rogers says.

Many landlords in B.C. are well aware “that cooling is a huge issue,” David Hutniak, CEO of LandlordBC, says.

Our concern is that some of the solutions suggested in these bylaws are ignoring the complexity of the problem,” he told The Narwhal. The organization is working with its members to ensure they understand the new bylaws popping up in municipalities.

“Right now, there’s a fair bit of confusion and uncertainty on the part of owners,” he says.

Hutniak points out that some buildings will require significant electrical upgrades to handle the power demand. Those may be difficult to do quickly and require large investments by building owners, he adds. That’s where planning becomes key. LandlordBC runs the Rental Apartment Retrofit Accelerator, a program that helps landlords plan for energy-efficiency upgrades and access rebates and other financial support from governments.

“We’re chipping away at it here as best we can,” Hutniak says. “It’s a complex issue, but I think over time here we can have some reasonable solutions that will make sense for everybody.”

Provincial support is limited. Free portable air conditioners are only available to people enrolled in home care or mental health and substance use programs, and even then require a recommendation letter from the local health authority. 

In 2025, B.C. broadened its heat pump rebates to include renters and people living in strata buildings. But installing a heat pump as a tenant is complicated and costly, which can be a deterrent. 

Interested renters have to get permission from their landlord. Even landlords that agree might not be willing to pay costs not covered by the rebate — and B.C. allows landlords to pass along the costs of significant upgrades and repairs to their tenants via rent increases. Yet, according to B.C.’s energy ministry, “Since the heat pump is a permanent fixture installed in the building, it becomes part of the property and stays with the unit even if the tenant moves out.” 

Victoria city councillor Susan Kim lives in a rental apartment that will have to lift its ban on cooling devices after the city amended its bylaws. But after reviewing the heat pump rebate program, she decided it wasn’t worth approaching her landlord about it. “You’re subsidizing the landlord by building their equity as well as putting your own sweat equity and labour into it,” Kim says.

Landlords who opt to invest in heat pumps or air conditioners can apply to the Residential Tenancy Branch to raise rents beyond the annual allowable increase. In recent decisions, the branch has allowed the full costs to be recouped. For one multi-unit building, the $145,000 cost of heat pumps led to an additional $41 in monthly rent per unit. In that case, the landlord said the “heat-related death of an elderly resident during a heat wave” spurred the installation.

In another case, the $5,775 cost of an air conditioner for a single unit led to an extra $62 per month.

Rogers points out that income assistance in B.C. is just $1,060 per month to cover all living costs. Even purchasing a $200 air conditioner isn’t feasible for these tenants, she says. 

“Most folks that I speak with are telling their kids that they had enough to eat through the day because they don’t want their kid to feel bad about them not eating dinner with the family, so that the kids can have enough to eat that night.”

Not every method of addressing extreme heat in rental buildings is expensive 

New Westminster adopted a bylaw prohibiting bans on cooling devices in 2025. This spring, the city pushed its right to cool practices further. Now all landlords — not just those with new buildings — must meet the BC Building Code standard that one room in every unit stay below 26 C overnight.

The bylaw sprang from a motion Nakagawa co-sponsored with the aim of putting the onus for maintaining safe temperatures “on the building owner, on the landlord … rather than the tenant.”

The new rule doesn’t dictate how landlords address the issue. Shades and awnings, window glazing, ventilation improvements or even painting the roof white could help bring a building into compliance. So-called passive cooling measures can help reduce or slow indoor temperature gains and have the added benefit of requiring little to no electricity, cutting costs for tenants and working even during power outages.

Those kinds of upgrades, Nakagawa says, could yield benefits year-round. 

“If you have better insulation, it might help it be warmer in the winter as well.”

So far, the new bylaw hasn’t resulted in much conflict with landlords, New Westminster Mayor Patrick Johnstone says. 

“I actually expected there would be more pushback; I’ve been quite surprised.”

It’s up to tenants to alert the city about non-compliance, Johnstone says, and the city’s focus is on working with landlords to make sure their rental units meet the new temperature standard, rather than handing out fines.

“I think by being proactive and being a partner with landlords, we can actually bring people into compliance,” he says.

Nagakawa worries the new bylaw won’t address the problem of pricey appliances or retrofit costs being passed on to tenants. She thinks the province should get rid of that option, at least for upgrades aimed at preventing dangerous indoor temperatures.

“At the end of the day, I also have to live with the idea that I don’t want more tenants in my municipality to die in the next heat dome.”

The right to cool needs to be addressed at the provincial level in B.C. 

Everyone The Narwhal spoke with agreed the issue needs to be dealt with by the B.C. government. Provincial legislation could protect tenants from rent increases related to costs landlords incur to keep buildings cool, while providing support for landlords that need it. 

“If the province is using its own powers to put this in place, they can also use their own powers to intervene and make it doable,” Kim says. 

One approach could be to alter the Residential Tenancy Act to make adequate cooling an essential service, just like heating. The Ministry of Housing and Municipal Affairs did not answer when asked whether it is considering altering the act to protect tenants from extreme heat. A question about whether the ministry is considering preventing landlords from passing along the installation costs also went unanswered.

In lieu of answering The Narwhal’s specific questions, the ministry sent a statement, saying it is in the process of developing additional building code requirements “to address climate change adaptation and mitigation in existing buildings and result in new standards by 2030.”

Hutniak is hopeful that the issue is getting needed attention, but sees downsides to the “piecemeal approach” currently happening. “Because of the scale and scope of the challenge, it will require senior levels of government to be more involved, strategically and in terms of some financial support,” he says. “This is just not something that can get solved through municipalities passing bylaws.”

Until other levels of government are ready to take action, Nakagawa says municipalities can be proactive about understanding tenant needs and local vulnerabilities. “There’s a whole bunch of steps they could take, if they’re not feeling quite ready to bring in the same bylaw that we’ve brought,” she says. For example, the Victoria capital regional district has created a map to help residents understand where heat risks are highest. 

New Westminster has been collecting data on heat vulnerability among renters, part of a move to beef up its tenant protections in recent years, including creating an anti-eviction bylaw. It’s been using annual fire inspections as a chance to gather data about which buildings have “heat challenges,” Johnstone says, after which emergency services and community organizations then helped “identify vulnerable people who were in those buildings.”

But the mayor agrees that the issue is bigger than New Westminster. “We can’t have, across the province, 160 municipalities all with different rules making it up as they go along,” Johnstone says. 

“Ultimately, this is a healthcare concern. Ultimately, this is a housing concern and ultimately, this should be regulated at the provincial level.”

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.

LNG Canada told the BC Energy Regulator its Kitimat, B.C., gas export facility was likely to emit black smoke continuously for multiple days, a warning that came ahead of key environmental permits being granted, according to recently released documents.

The new documents, obtained by The Narwhal and U.K.-based investigative journalism organization Point Source through freedom of information legislation, raise questions over whether the regulator should have sought more assurances about measures to stop this kind of pollution before permits were granted.

Summary

• LNG Canada has been emitting more black smoke than originally planned and some Kitimat, B.C., residents are concerned.
• Black smoke can indicate gas is not burning efficiently, releasing higher levels of toxic pollutants, according to one expert.
• The BC Energy Regulator knew about the smoke ahead of giving the project approvals but has now ordered LNG Canada to make changes.

In July 2022, LNG Canada — a consortium of five foreign-owned companies led by Shell — submitted a document to the provincial government outlining its expectations around black smoke emissions.

“Given the unpredictable nature of these types of events, it is not possible to give a frequency of them occurring although an estimate is provided,” the consortium wrote. 

The colour of black smoke is caused by a concentration of particulates and unburned fuels, which is toxic. The estimate provided to the regulator said black smoke would be emitted at the facility for between 15 and 60 minutes one to three times per year prior to the facility completing 200 shipments. LNG Canada sent its 100th shipment in mid-June, nearly one year after its first. It also estimated slightly less dark smoke would be emitted continuously from the facility for between five and 15 days on four to six occasions in the first year

Despite this information, the regulator issued LNG Canada a facility permit requiring that black smoke not be continuously emitted for more than 15 minutes. The company committed to that limit, but has failed to keep to it.

On Jan. 6 2026, the export terminal emitted black smoke emissions during non-emergency conditions for more than seven hours. The next day, it emitted black smoke for over two hours. 

In April, the BC Energy Regulator told LNG Canada to identify the root cause of black smoke emissions during flaring at its facility in Kitimat, and implement a fix by October.

In late June, the regulator instituted new requirements, including mandated reporting of instances of black smoke emissions.

A spokesperson with the regulator said the facility’s permit “contains clear statutory requirements regarding black smoke emissions designed to minimize air pollutants to protect public safety and the environment.” 

“When our oversight activities identify non-compliances, such as in this case, we can place additional requirements (e.g., having to report black smoke) on permit holders,” the spokesperson noted in an emailed statement.

Black smoke from the flare stack of a LNG facility usually indicates that gas from the facility is not being burned off in an efficient manner and higher levels of toxic pollutants are being released, according to Tim Doty, a former oil and gas inspector with the Texas state government.

“The black smoke that can be visually seen being emitted from the flare is soot, basically,” Doty said in an interview. “In theory, flares are designed to burn in an efficient way that doesn’t produce this black smoke.”

According to the regulator’s reply to detailed questions, LNG Canada’s new requirements as of June include:

• Report to the BC Energy Regulator (BCER) all instances of black smoke that exceeds 15 minutes in duration and provide operational details concurrent with such instances;   
• By Aug. 15, 2026, submit a report completed by a qualified professional to the BCER that identifies the root causes of the emission of black smoke and measures to prevent the emission of black smoke; 
• By October 15, 2026, identify and implement measures to prevent the emission of black smoke based on the root cause analysis as required by the report; 
• For the months of October 2026 to March 2027, submit a monthly report to the energy regulator BCER completed by a qualified professional that assesses the effectiveness of the measures implemented .

‘I want to have a family’: community members concerned about potential health impacts

For some community members, the black smoke and presence of other potential pollutants are a source of great concern. 

The Narwhal and Point Source spoke to a young resident who we are calling Avery Sutherland, to keep her name confidential and protect her identity. Kitimat is a small town where LNG Canada is a significant employer and a major donor to local causes, and criticism is often seen as a threat to that.

Avery Sutherland said she tried on multiple occasions to get answers to questions about potential health concerns, but LNG Canada representatives would not respond.

“As a young person, I want to have a family,” she said in an interview. “There’s been a lot of back and forth I’ve seen over the last couple of years at different talks that LNG [Canada] gives, where they refuse to directly acknowledge the studies that have been done on the impacts of flaring on women who are pregnant and their children, and how that often leads to like more birth complications and more premature births.”

In response to questions about this, the regulator spokesperson said: “It is important to note for the benefit of residents of Kitimat that air quality measurements in the Kitimat Valley have remained below B.C. Ambient Air Quality Objectives since LNG Canada received its air discharge permit.”

But some critics claim the air quality monitoring program is insufficient.

“The current ambient air pollution monitoring is not sufficient to get a real handle on what the health implications are for the people that are living close to this facility,” Tracey Saxby, executive director of environmental non-profit, My Sea to Sky, said in an interview. “When you dig into the data you realize that there aren’t enough sensors, they aren’t gathering data in the right places and not enough of the sensors are continually operating.” 

The Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment has said the facility’s flaring activity has exposed residents to “health-harming chemicals, including black carbon and benzene.”

“They are not consistently monitoring for some of the most harmful pollutants, like benzene,” Saxby said. “These are big monitoring gaps.” Health Canada has labelled benzene a known carcinogen since 1993.

In 2024, the U.S.-based Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice published a report highlighting how LNG export facilities degrade air quality by releasing pollutants known to cause respiratory illnesses, cancer and birth defects from prolonged exposure.

Scientific studies have shown that burning gas also releases other toxic pollutants as a result of incomplete combustion, such as volatile organic compounds, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and fine soot particles, which are directly associated with respiratory and cardiovascular diseases and risks to fetal development.

“When you see this kind of pollution, it’s a sign that the flare isn’t being operated correctly and usually that comes with a lot of other emissions that are actively being released that are not visible to the naked eye,” Doty explained.

“It’s likely that the real world pollution levels are far worse than the picture painted by the current data,” Saxby said. “Even though the existing data is very sparse, it shows worrying spikes in benzene levels that raise a lot of questions about the health impacts from the LNG Canada facility.”

As The Narwhal and Point Source recently reported, LNG Canada originally told the regulator it would operate its facility without routine flaring — and then quietly removed this commitment months before commissioning. 

Sutherland wishes the consortium that owns LNG Canada was more forthcoming with information. Its presence in the community has been divisive for as long as the facility has been in development, which means for young residents like herself, it’s been a factious issue for most of their lives. 

“When I was growing up, there were schoolyard and classroom arguments about this since as long as I can remember,” she said of the facility, which was proposed in 2013.

James Smith, another Kitimat resident whose name has been changed to protect his privacy, worked at the plant during construction. He said while he was expecting problems to occur at the facility, he didn’t predict the scale of the impacts. 

“I wasn’t expecting the black smoke,” he said. 

Smith said he’s experienced excessive noise and bad smells at his house since the facility started operations and on multiple occasions found his yard covered in a thin film of black residue.

Doty said the ongoing problems suggest to him the facility’s problem with its flare tip could be causing the black smoke.

“Flares like this should be operating with about 98 per cent combustion efficiency, but there is no way that the flare is operating with anything close to that efficiency,” he said. “If there’s too much pressure going to it, you’re never going to get things to combust properly — and that seems to be what is happening at LNG Canada.” 

In response to questions from The Narwhal and Point Source, the regulator spokesperson noted: “The causes of the black smoke events have not yet been definitively determined.” 

‘Truly massive’ invisible emissions

On top of the elevated levels of flaring at the LNG Canada export terminal, there are increasing concerns about the facility routinely releasing natural gas into the atmosphere.

Natural gas is mostly composed of methane, which is an invisible, odorless and an extremely potent greenhouse gas. When released directly into the atmosphere it is 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide for its short-term warming impact on the climate.

“If people could actually see the invisible emissions that are being released from the LNG Canada facility that are detectable with an optical gas imaging camera, it would really blow them away,” Doty said. He monitored emissions at the Kitimat facility with a camera.“The emissions that could not be seen with the bare eye were shocking. They were truly massive.”

Doty said the emissions — both visible and invisible — could have “very negative health implications for nearby communities and downwind receptors.” 

“If I was living nearby, I would be very concerned, and I would want the plant shut down, at least in the short term, while it is re-engineered,” he said. He noted the unburned gas could contain volatile organic compounds such as benzene and butane, in addition to the climate-warming methane.

“At the moment, the program to monitor ambient air pollution in the area isn’t effective and doesn’t have enough monitors in place to truly calculate how air quality is being impacted,” he 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.

The Bradley Creek wildfire ignited on reserve lands at nk̓maplqs (the head of Okanagan Lake) on Friday, July 31. More than 30 band members have lost their homes, while around 200 homes and structures belonging to non-band members are also gone. kelsie, who was evacuated and has not yet returned home, shared her reflections in the midst of the evacuation. This story was co-published with IndigiNews.

Saturday, Aug. 1, started like any other day.

I woke up early with my partner. We sat on the front deck, coffee in hand, watching the morning unfold. We talked about the day ahead, my son Skookamina’s graduation party and my grandmother’s 83rd birthday. There was meat to smoke, cakes to bake, tables to set. The day felt like a blessing because we had so much to celebrate.

I checked my phone. A small fire had started the night before, nothing unusual for this time of year. Our Okanagan Indian Band fire department is amazing. I figured it’d be out by noon, so I kept moving.

I seasoned the meat, I lit the smoker, and I sang while I cooked, the way I always do in my kitchen.

But I kept checking my phone, as we had family that was traveling in for the event.

Mid-morning, we decided as a family to move the party from the beach in town to my uncle’s house in the community. Some of our family had community obligations they’d need to tend to if the fire got out of control. We wanted to be close.

Everyone was there. My grandmother sat in her chair, full of joy as each person arrived. Skookamina was surrounded by his cousins, and the sound of our family filled the air, aunties laughing loud, making outlandish jokes, the familiar banter of people who know each other’s rhythms.

For one hour, we were just a family celebrating, living our lives the way we always do.

Then, one by one, family members started picking up their phones.

Some stood up. They’d been put on evacuation alert. They had to go home, pack, and wait. I watched them go, first one, then another, then a handful until the room thinned. The laughter quieted and my grandmother sat in her chair, watching her grandchildren leave, one by one. She didn’t say much, she didn’t need to, she knew this dance, she’d done it before.

Eventually, I had to leave too.

We packed the rest of the food. We hugged. We said “see you soon,” and we meant it. Then everyone went home. My father had to evacuate with only minutes to spare. I raced to my dad’s house and we helped him pack what we could as the fire grew at an alarming speed toward him. He was evacuated two minutes from my house, so I knew I was next.

By the time I got home, our family friends were already there, packing for me. They’d already been evacuated without time to take anything with them. Now they were saving us while their own home burned behind them.

One minute I was laughing with my son. The next minute I was grabbing what I could carry. I was not thinking about taking what was valuable, I only grabbed what was irreplaceable. Old ceremony blankets, medicine necklace materials, baskets, photographs, my computers with language recordings and the eagle feather my son gave me. Everything else I left.

On my way out, I looked back, and the smoke was climbing toward us. Flames moved over the ridge toward my house, and the sky was turning black. I felt an overwhelming need to just get out, this fire had taken on a life of its own. I could tell this fire doesn’t know our names the way our cultural burns do. It was consuming everything equally, the sacred and the ordinary, the medicine plants and the invasive brush. 

But, even as I watched the fire consume everything in its path, I realized this is exactly what my people prepared me for. This is why they taught me about grief.

They taught me that grief is not a destination, it’s like a creek — you don’t stop it. You discipline yourself to sit beside it, make kin with it, let it flow, and let it carry away what it needs to carry.

They taught me that grief has a shape. They taught me that grief is so special to us that it has its own ceremony, its own songs, its own prayers for specific losses. I was always told, “Name your grief, give it boundaries. Tell it, I see you. You are welcome here. But you will not take me with you.”

They taught me that the deeper you love, the deeper you grieve. That grief and joy are not enemies. That you can weep and laugh in the same breath. That you can feed people even when you can’t eat yourself.

My people taught me that a community that grieves together stays together. To suppress grief is to go against our own syilx intellect, against the very way we are made to commune with the world. Feeling is not weakness, we are to honour that it is our Way of Knowing. It is the thread that connects us to what we love, to cut it is to sever ourselves from the land, from each other, from the truth of what we carry.

My people taught me that grief is not something to outrun. It is something to sit beside, to name, to sing, to let drip into each other’s minds, drop by drop, until a shared truth emerges. The image of that process is enowkinwixw, the syilx word for a gentle way of coming to understanding together. The word itself conjures liquid being absorbed drop by drop through the mind, filling in gaps, softening resistance, building a common picture. The process is about finding clarity, where each person is offering what they know, no matter how small, until the whole circle sees more clearly. That is how we hold the loss in the centre of the circle and face it together.

So now I think about that morning. Coffee on the deck, with my partner beside me. The sun rising over the valley. I didn’t know it would be the last ordinary morning for a while. I didn’t know I would spend the next few days learning what my people have always known, that you can lose everything and still have everything that matters.

Okanagan Indian Band Chief naspəpʕásəs Dan Wilson confirmed as of Aug. 5, more than 30 band members have lost their homes to the fire, and numerous other structures are also gone. Some families have been contacted directly, and others are still waiting, still hoping, still not knowing if their homes are standing. 

He told IndigiNews, “Our loss is measured in the family histories that have been lost — especially the Elders who have lost their homes. The old pictures, the memorabilia; the Salish baskets.”

As I write this, it’s Aug. 6. I wash dishes in someone else’s sink. I cook without my grandmother’s tools. Today, I am learning to grieve the way my people taught me, by sitting with it, and letting it flow like the little creek that runs beside my house.

Tomorrow I will wake up and make coffee. I will stand on whatever deck I am given and be grateful for it. I will look out at whatever sky is above me and I will remember that I am grateful to be sqilx’w in these times, I am blessed to be syilx, and I am proud to be from the Okanagan Indian Band, proud to have called it home my entire life. Now, I have both the responsibility and the profound honour to continue dreaming, as we have been directed by our Creator to do, and that does not end when the smoke clears.

 If you are a member of the Okanagan Indian Band and are struggling, help is available through the OKIB Mental Health and Wellness team at 250-540-7416. Resources are also available from First Nations Health Authority and Interior Health.

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Summary

• Indigenous culture camps are happening across Canada this summer. Revitalizing cultural practices, spending time on the land, and participating in ceremonies is the focus of most camps. 
• Despite dozens of wildfires across B.C., organizers are fulfilling their commitments, highlighting the importance of hosting communities and organizations.
• Some culture camps have been happening for decades, while other communities hosted their first camp this year.

For 10 days in July, Qaqaqam Chris Wells spent time on the land camping with Líl̓wat youth, teaching Lil̓wat7úl cultural protocols, songs and stories. The Kwáozán̓tsut cultural summer camps have been “a long time coming,” he said. 

“Bringing our children back onto the land is teaching them land based healing and learning,” Wells told the Narwhal. “It was really awesome to bring back our culture.”

Hosted at Klháka7min, previously known as the Coast Mountain Outdoor School, two separate age groups camped for five days each between July 6th and July 17th. 

Though the youth were a bit shy at first, Wells and fellow camp leaders Ánwasúlmec Brett Wallace and Sík Sík Joshua Anderson say that by the end of each cohort, seeing how the participants had come out of their shells was a highlight.

“It was extra special for me: I had two of my daughters there, one in each age group,” Anderson said. “It was an opportunity to spend more time with them during the busy summer.”

During this year’s culture camp, a wildfire prompted evacuations in Pemberton, located approximately 25 kilometres down the road. Despite the nearby fire, the culture camps were a success — connecting youth with tradition, the land and culture. 

“We were pretty safe from all the fires happening around us,” Wells said. He’s stewarded the territory since he was a youth.

Land-based learning, education and connection

Between the two age groups — 9 to 12-year-olds, and teens — 30 youth attended the camps. 

Líl̓wat Elders took youth out onto the land, teaching them about edible berries and teas that grow in the area during that time of year.

“Every evening we had singing and drumming, and talked about cultural protocols. We talked about the origin of the songs. We talked about our ceremonies,” Wells said. 

Archery, axe throwing and rifle shooting with the older age group all took place with laughter and storytelling throughout. 

Youth had the opportunity to make traditional rattles and smudge bowls, ceremonial items that can be hard to access for a young person. Anderson said numerous parents reached out to him after the camp, sharing how their child went home wanting to practice their culture more through smudging. 

The youth even made a swimming hole to jump into cold glacier water, adding some casual fun into the mix, and relief from the hot summer days. 

“You can’t forget the fun part of it. We had the opportunity to play bone game in the evening time,” Anderson said, which showed the youth “how disputes were settled in a traditional manner.” 

The bone game is a traditional game used historically as an alternative to war by nations along the Salish Sea, and has other names such as “stick game” or “hand game” in other regions of Western Canada.

Youth were also split into three groups and tasked with helping in the kitchen. Local Lil̓wat7úl chef Casey Gabriel taught them how to cook for the group and clean up afterwards. 

The Kwáozán̓tsut Cultural Summer Camps were championed by the organizing trio of Anderson, Wells and Wallace, who are no strangers to hosting culture camps. But despite hosting camps in St’át’imc Nation communities for years, it took some time to prepare and build the trust required to host youth camps in their own nation. 

Now the Líl̓wat Nation wants to host another culture camp this fall. Wells, Wallace and Anderson are all looking forward to sharing their knowledge and helping out.

Now in its 15th year, Nlha’7kapmx annual culture camp is a ‘safe haven’

Excitement for future camps is a sentiment shared by Michelle Isaac, who always lends a helping hand at an annual Nlaka’pamux culture camp hosted at Pasulko Lake, located in B.C.’s Southern Interior.

“My stepmom at the time, Amy Chapman, brought me up to what used to be called the healing gathering. All I remember from there was how much of a difference it made in my life,” Isaac told the Narwhal. 

She attended the healing gathering after surviving a severe car accident, but over the years, the annual gathering lost volunteers and resources. 

Having experienced the healing energy of gathering herself, and meeting with the service agency about how to support community members, Isaac and a group of ladies working for Nlha’7kapmx Child and Family Services decided to spearhead a community based culture camp.

Now in its 15th year, people in the area look forward to gathering at Pasulko Lake each summer, practicing culture and being together on the land. 

This year, a mix of cultural activities, including drum making, cedar weaving and language friendship bracelet making took place, along with activities such as a tug-of-war game between youth and the local firefighting group, the Lytton Rattlers, and a performance by local band Ritchie and the Fenderman.

Isaac attends camp each year with her children, who are part of the Lower Nicola Indian Band community. While Isaac is not Indigenous herself, she still attends with an open heart and mind, supporting in any way she can. When wildfires are burning, she sees the camps as an especially important place for youth. 

“They’re able to come up there and do the activities, do the crafts, I find it takes a lot of stress and fear from the fire away from them,” Isaac said. This year, it’s also been an important refuge for her as well, after she was evacuated in July due to the nearby Brunswick Creek wildfire.

“Fire-wise, for me it was a safe haven. My one daughter came up as well, who was also evacuated, and hung out all week there. It gave me a safe place,” she said.

Across B.C. and Canada, wildfires disproportionately impact First Nations communities. Though they represent only five per cent of the population, it’s estimated that First Nations make up 42 per cent of all wildfire evacuations. 

As wildfires blaze all around the Interior, the camp offered a break from smoke for those in attendance. On event posters this year, air quality warnings were addressed, with evacuation routes marked along the way to camp as a precaution.

People who attended camp were asked to register at the sign in desk daily, to track who was there, and were informed about a muster point in the event of evacuation. 

The decision to continue on with both culture camps was deliberated by organizers carefully, with designated people monitoring surrounding wildfires.

Renegerating the land through fire

B.C. was the first province or territory in Canada to ban cultural burning in 1874, prohibiting generations of Indigenous people from stewarding their territories with fire. In 2024, 150 years later, the province officially amended wildfire regulations to support cultural burns. Today, many nations are in the process of reclaiming this practice, including Líl̓wat. 

“We can’t look at fire as dangerous all of the time. We gotta look at it as an element that helps us regenerate, and help us repurpose the land,” Wallace added.

An example of fire regenerating the land was visible to those at Líl̓wat’s culture camps through an abundance of berries, following a cultural burn several years before.

“That specific area was culturally burnt seven or eight years ago and now finally it’s starting to reproduce huckleberries,” Wallace said. “It’s not just a small piece of land, it’s a really big area, and the whole area was covered in huckleberries and raspberries because of these cultural burns that happened.”

Youth were able to harvest these berries, and surrounding wildlife have a tasty treat. 

And in the era of technology, culture camps give youth the opportunity to disconnect from the internet, and to connect with the natural world. 

“Back in our time, we didn’t have technology to hold us back from being out on the land,” Wells said. “It’s important to return to land-based healing … to be St’át’imc, and to do St’át’imc things.”

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“What are you going to do about wildland firefighter mental health?”

The question came to Jim Johansson — a former wildland firefighter and assistant professor in the faculty of nursing at the University of Alberta — from a student in December 2023. Canada had just experienced its deadliest wildfire season on record.

Eight wildland firefighting personnel died in 2023 in Western Canada and the Northwest Territories, prompting scrutiny of the profession’s hidden costs: chronic fatigue, physical and mental burnout and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Now, the 2026 fire season has made one thing unmistakingly clear: the psychological toll of wildland firefighting in North America has reached new levels. In June, two wildland firefighters and a bush pilot died in a plane crash near Fort Simpson, N.W.T. Several days later, three firefighters were fatally burnt while working on a wildfire along the Utah-Colorado border, while a fourth died on July 24 from injuries he sustained. 

Kylie Foisy, the nursing student who sent the email about mental health to Johansson back in 2023, had just wrapped up her rookie season as an initial attack crew member in northwestern Alberta. Initial attack crews are the first on the scene of new blazes, tasked with quickly extinguishing them. On her second day on the job in May 2023, Foisy’s crew was dispatched to a 5,000-hectare wildfire. “It was so crazy,” she says. “But so fun.”

She loved the intensity of the work and the strong bonds she developed with her crew, but the summer unfolded with more sobering events, including a fatal helicopter crash in her district. For Foisy’s crew it was “business as usual” the next day, she says. For the duration of the season she felt the impacts wearing on her mental well-being, and could see others were also struggling.

For Johansson, Foisy’s email was a call to action. And it was the very start of what is now Canada’s first wildland firefighter peer-support network. Johansson has assembled a team of veteran wildland firefighters, occupational health therapists, psychologists and climate specialists to co-create and launch a new peer-support network in Alberta “by wildland firefighters, for wildland firefighters” — the first of its kind in Canada.

Johansson hopes to apply what he’s learned over the past decade as a mental health nurse to bolster support for those on the frontlines of wildfire. A year after Foisy’s email landed in his inbox, he hired her as a research assistant. Together, they’re undertaking a qualitative research project to examine the mental health challenges related to wildland firefighting and climate change in Alberta.Already, they’ve heard stories from those who have experienced or witnessed crew members escape near-death scenarios, including close calls with fallen trees or vehicle collisions. Others were impacted by fatal tragedies, like in August 2024, when 24-year-old firefighter Morgan Kitchen was killed by a fallen tree while working on the Jasper wildfire. Last week, as the two-year anniversary of Kitchen’s death approached, six workplace safety charges were laid against Alberta’s Ministry of Forestry and Parks in relation to it, for failing to take measures to assess and control hazards related to dangerous trees — along with failing to adequately train firefighters to identify hazardous trees. The first court appearance is scheduled for this September, in Jasper.

Wildfire fighters lack the supports of municipal firefighters

Despite working on the frontlines of some of Canada’s most intense climate-related disasters, most wildland firefighters are classified as forestry workers — not first responders — under Canada’s national occupational classification system. They also often lack the wages, pensions and benefits afforded to municipal firefighters. 

Johansson was all too familiar with the working conditions on the frontlines of wildfires. He had worked as an initial attack firefighter in Alberta from 2001 to 2009, then taught up-and-coming crew members and leaders at the Hinton Training Centre until 2013. Johansson led an initial attack crew from 2005 to 2009, working 12- to 16-hour days over three-week shifts, hauling hose through muskeg and pumping water from swamps to extinguish wildfires.

Despite the low pay, the camaraderie and joy of spending days in the bush “got into his blood,” Johansson says. “There’s a culture of wildland firefighting that I felt so happy in, and that didn’t really exist anywhere else,” he says.

Yet, there were psychological hazards, too. In 2007, a helicopter carrying an initial attack crew crashed near Fort McMurray, killing 22-year-old Patrick Dominic Watters-Michaud. After the news arrived, Johansson had to “jump in a helicopter and go day-base that day,” he says. Day-basing involves relocating crews to high-risk wildfire areas to increase their chances of extinguishing the fires when they’re still small. The next day, wildland firefighters informally banded together, lowering the flags at bases across the province, “mourning the loss of one of our people,” Johansson recalls.

Alberta Wildfire managers raised the flags, citing that the firefighter did not meet the criteria of their flag-lowering policy. The policy changed in 2008 after crew leaders filed formal complaints. Alberta Wildfire did not respond to questions from The Narwhal about this incident or any other questions.

The incident opened Johansson’s eyes to the “legitimate danger” of wildland firefighting, and he became increasingly anxious to fly on helicopter patrols — a routine part of firefighting work where crew members survey the landscape for new ignitions. But it also shone a light on what he says is the government’s ongoing failure to provide safe, culturally relevant mental health support to wildland firefighters.

Johansson became increasingly vocal as a leader, advocating for the safety and well-being of his crew. He would eventually be “DNRed” by the Edson district — a term referring to Alberta Wildfire’s “Do Not Rehire” policy. Alberta Wildfire does not grant seasonal firefighters automatic recall rights from one season to the next, unlike other Canadian provinces like B.C. Alberta Wildfire did not respond to questions about whether this policy exists or how it’s applied.

After leaving wildfire, it felt like Johansson was “starting all over again,” he says. He decided to pursue higher education in nursing, specializing in mental health. 

Johansson doesn’t want his research limited to publishing papers.

“When I put my nursing lens on firefighting, I’m always looking for strengths and how we can mobilize those to help people. In wildfire, that strength is the people,” Johansson says. “That’s what keeps firefighters coming back every season.”

Climate change and gaps in mental health support put Alberta’s wildland firefighters at risk

For his research, Johansson interviewed 17 former and current wildland firefighters in Alberta. He shared preliminary results with The Narwhal.

Early data from Johansson’s qualitative research has raised some red flags. The majority of wildland firefighters Johansson spoke to agreed the 2023 fire season was a “turning point” in their careers. Crews spent a higher number of days actively fighting fires in increasingly risky and volatile environments. It’s “non-stop all season long,” and there’s fatigue and additional safety issues that come with that, researchers found.

Initial attack and unit crew leaders also spoke to Johansson about mental health challenges related to high turnover of crew members. “In the past, most crews would only have a small number of rookies each year,” Johansson says. An Alberta Wildfire document, leaked to The Narwhal, analyzes the results of a wildfire crew exit survey in 2023, and indicates that “60 per cent of all firefighters were either brand new, or entering their second year.” 

Alberta Wildfire did not respond to any questions about the findings of Johannson’s research.

Johansson’s research found leaders were worried about dividing their attention between managing large-scale wildfires, and simultaneously supervising a higher number of rookies less familiar with volatile fire behaviour and danger trees, whose unstable roots and surrounding soil could result in suddenly toppling over. In addition, some reported that third-year firefighters were being pushed prematurely into leadership roles, he says.

There are broader labour issues in Alberta too, including that wildland firefighters lack paid sick days and health benefits. There are some limited mental health services available — including a counselling hotline — but interviewees expressed hesitation, or lack of trust about confidentiality when using the services for fear they might not be hired back the following spring, Johansson says.

Wildland firefighters are left to fend for themselves in the off-season — when they often need supports the most

Johansson often compares the dynamics of wildland firefighting to that of soldiers returning from combat. “[Wildland firefighters] exist in these really high-intensity situations. They have a tight-knit peer support network that keeps them safe mentally,” he says.

But when the wildfire season ends in the fall and seasonal firefighters’ contracts are terminated, they suddenly lose that support network.

For Jessica Broder, a former wildland firefighter with the BC Wildfire Service, when she left her crew to spend the winters in other communities she lost her “sounding board for processing.” She also points to the reality of wildland firefighters relying on substances to cope through the off-season. A study of U.S. wildland firefighters found that nearly four in five respondents reported binge drinking before and after the fire season.

Broder worked on a unit crew in Revelstoke, B.C., in 2023, the summer her colleague Devyn Gale was killed by a fallen tree. The accident felt all too relatable, Broder says. She herself had narrowly avoided falling trees and knew others had experienced similar close calls. 

After Gale’s accident, she and her crew participated in critical incident stress management debriefs, and had access to a clinical counsellor with a history in wildland firefighting.

Broder and her crew accrued approximately 100 fireline days in the 2023 season (a unit crew would be happy if they got 60 days, according to Broder). While initial attack crews respond to wildfires with the goal of quickly extinguishing them, unit crews are 20-person crews that specialize in “sustained action,” or longer-term firefighting efforts on mega-fires. In September, her crew was deployed to northern B.C. to work on the Big Creek fire, which she described as her “breaking point.” The Big Creek fire grew to more than 175,000 hectares in 2023 and triggered evacuation orders in the Takla Lake First Nation. Broder led a night shift, working from 5 p.m. until 9 a.m. the next morning, and had to evacuate camp when the wildfire threatened to burn it.

Broder worries that increasingly destructive wildfire seasons are exposing firefighters to greater psychological strain. While BC Wildfire Service has some mental health training, including a course offered through the Canadian Mental Health Association, adapted specifically for wildfire, called Resilient Minds, Broder would like to see more preparatory training for all wildland firefighters.

“We’re not giving people the tools to tell someone at 4 a.m. that their house is not ‘an achievable objective,’ or to go into a rural or Indigenous community [to engage with community members],” she points out, referring to how wildland firefighters have to knock on doors and tell community members to leave their homes — and sometimes warn them they are unlikely to have a home to return to.

Recently, Johansson recruited Broder — today a student at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, B.C. — onto his team to research existing mental health support programs for wildland firefighters in North America. “It’s something that really lacks across Canada,” she says. “I think [a peer-support network] could be transformational.”

‘It’s not a hopeless endeavour’: veteran wildland firefighter

Over a 30-year career, Michelle Wigmore fought wildfires across Canada and North America, led a 20-person unit crew and developed national training courses. Today, she’s teaming up with Johansson to help launch the peer-support network.

Over the years, Wigmore has seen wildland firefighters struggle with mental health, but says “it’s often not in the way people think.” Busy seasons and long hours can be challenging, but they’re also “why people join fire and stay in it,” she says. “It’s the excitement, adrenaline, you’re working as a team — it’s the greatest thing ever.” But it comes with immense pressure.

Wigmore has lost colleagues to helicopter accidents, health conditions and suicide. One year, a crew member died by suicide on his day off. 

A recent survey in the U.S. found 22 per cent of wildland firefighters have attempted suicide, while 37 per cent reported suicidal ideation. 

Rainy seasons can be just as psychologically hazardous, Wigmore says. When wildfire activity is low, crews may spend extended periods away from home without the opportunity to earn overtime. “That’s when I’ve seen the most issues come up,” she says.

The solutions don’t always need to be complicated, Wigmore says, and they’re most effective when they come from the ground up. Crew morale is at the heart of it, she says. “It’s not a hopeless endeavour.”

What helped her crew the most when they lost a colleague to suicide, was the show of solidarity from other wildland firefighters on base. They collectively decided to construct a bench in honour of their colleague and flew it to a nearby mountaintop.

In 2023, Wigmore wasn’t hired back on — she was “DNRed.” The “do not rehire” policy in Alberta is “barbaric,” Wigmore says. Wildland firefighters deserve job security and automatic recall rights, so they’re not afraid of advocating for their well-being, or safety, says the veteran firefighter

But she’s quick to credit recent progress. The Alberta government and union signed a new agreement in 2025 that will increase wages for crew members with the most years of service by more than 19 per cent by 2027. Wages for longest-serving crew leaders and supervisors will rise by more than 27 per cent and 31 per cent, respectively. 

“This is career-changing for people,” Wigmore says. “[Firefighters] that were planning their exit strategy … are now planning to stay.” Other major wildfire agencies in Canada, including B.C. and Ontario should take note, Wigmore says.

BC Wildfire leads cultural shift in mental health awareness

The devastating losses of six firefighters in B.C.’s wildland firefighting community in 2023 “struck a chord” for the BC Wildfire Service, Olivia Goldney, a safety specialist with the organization, says. “We need to have a strengthened culture of care for our staff and develop trauma-informed systems that can allow our staff to do this job long-term,” she adds.

Aside from chronic fatigue and burnout, wildland firefighters are grappling with a profound sense of “ecological grief,” as their communities and landscapes are burnt over by wildfires. Goldney experienced post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from her experiences as an initial attack crew leader in 2021, witnessing the devastating events of the Lytton fire, which tore through the community in 15 minutes, destroying homes and businesses, and killing two people.

Today, she’s leading the development of a new psychological health and safety strategy within the BC Wildfire Service. “We want to align psychological injuries closer to how we approach physical injuries,” Goldney says.

All wildland firefighters in B.C. have automatic recall rights and benefits, including sick days and partially paid short-term disability leave, according to Goldney. Once they have worked over a certain number of hours, they also receive a $1,000 annual health and wellness allowance that can be used for services such as massage therapy and counselling. A counselling hotline is available to all firefighters, while First Nations firefighters can also access a crisis line to access culturally informed support. A 2021 survey found more than 50 per cent of Indigenous wildland firefighters in Canada had experienced additional risks related to cultural discrimination on the frontlines.

After the 2023 season, BC Wildfire Service also launched a recovery program, a four-day intensive retreat that provides firefighters with therapeutic tools for their long-term recovery from work-related traumatic stress.  

While wildland firefighting has long been dominated by a culture of stoicism — “a kind of buck up and do the job,” Goldney says — she’s seeing a cultural shift within BC Wildfire Service’s leadership to acknowledge and address the psychological toll of the work.

“From the bottom to the top, there’s this ‘shake’ that’s happening culturally,” Goldney says. “People are understanding the work we do has profound impacts on a person.”

She points to systemic changes that are underway in B.C.: wildland firefighters are becoming increasingly recognized by their first responder peers in the province. Recently, BC Wildfire Service was invited to join the BC First Responders Mental Health committee, Goldney says. In addition, B.C. wildland firefighters will soon have the most comprehensive cancer coverage in all of Canada. She’s hopeful that federal legislation will change to recognize wildland firefighters as first responders.

“I think only good things are to come,” Goldney says.

Wildland firefighting peer-support network sets sights on launching in early 2027

If you had asked Johansson at 25 whether he was struggling with his mental health, he would have shrugged and replied, “Job’s fine. I’m fine.” Twenty years later, he’s no longer sure that was really the case.

That realization is part of why Johansson sees value in long-term support. His team plans to build a year-round support network for both active and retired wildland firefighters, offering a space where those still processing their experiences can find an informed, listening ear.

“You could be two, three, five, 10 years out and still access [support],” he says. 

Come September, after the fire season, Johansson’s team will brainstorm what the network could look like. There are already ideas of starting an online platform, a peer-support counselling line, group fitness challenges or even integrating supports into video games. 

They plan to launch the pilot peer-support network in Alberta in the spring of 2027 with the broader goal of eventually expanding across Canada. 

Already he’s receiving overwhelmingly enthusiastic reception and support for the project, he says. “[People] are like, ‘Thank you for doing this’, or ‘How can I help?’ It’s obviously filling a need.”

It’s been a full-circle moment for the former wildland firefighter, although Johansson admits that, emotionally, a part of him has never really left. 

Gardening in his backyard in Calgary often evokes the memory of “digging in the dirt, looking for hot spots,” he says. Even the faintest trace of wildfire smoke has a way of transporting him back to the frontlines. “It’s total nostalgia,” Johansson says.

“For a minute, I’m back in it.”

Updated on Aug. 7, 12:52 pm PST: A number of photographs in this story have been changed. The images originally used did not show a wildfire, but an Indigenous cultural burn, and misidentified attendees at the burn as employees of BC Wildfire.

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Summary

• The 2026 wildfire season in Canada, which has been particularly severe in Ontario, has prompted significant interest on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok.
• Many of these posts contain misinformation, including AI-generated maps with incorrect details on the locations or severity of fires across Canada, or conspiracy theories linking wildfires to lasers, 15-minute city initiatives or eco-terrorism.
• Many posts focus on mismanagement and place blame on Canadian governments, which complicates valid critiques of wildfire response and funding with destabilizing misinformation.

Ontario is grappling with one of the worst wildfire seasons in recorded history, which has put thousands of people, especially those in the province’s north, at risk. Last month, two Indigenous communities — Namaygoosisagagun First Nation and Whitewater Lake First Nation — were burned to the ground. The scale of the crisis has made headlines around the world, and prompted a blaze of posts on social media.

But many of those posts contain misinformation, both AI-generated and hand-crafted: maps that purport to show Ontario wildfires labelled with communities that don’t exist; false information about air quality and evacuation alerts; captions with conspiracy theories about 15-minute cities and arson. 

Look closely and you might see clues about what’s real and what isn’t. One viral AI-generated graphic purports to show the location of Ontario wildfires, but directs people to a non-existent Ontario government website. Another, claiming 10,000 people in Alberta were under evacuation orders as of July 16 (not true), includes a map where Jasper National Park appears to cover most of the province. One map puts Ontario on the West Coast, Quebec over the southern United States and Alberta up around Alaska — and includes a province called “Onjebio,” where the wildfire situation looks pretty bad. 

But just as often, it’s hard to tell fact from fiction. And it’s getting harder: in May, Statistics Canada reported 43 per cent of Canadians find it more difficult to distinguish between facts and misinformation online, compared to three years ago. Those with less trust in news media reported even more difficulty. 

Each year, it seems, the onset of wildfire season in Canada is accompanied by the onset of wildfire misinformation season on social media. As AI-generated content becomes more ubiquitous — and often tougher to spot — across social media, it presents new challenges to Canadians looking for trustworthy information about unfolding crises across the country. Wildfires are getting worse because of climate change. But what’s driving the escalation of misinformation?

2023 marked a shift in online wildfire misinformation

Gwen Roley, a digital verification journalist covering Canada for the international outlet Agence France-Presse, recently reported on some of the AI-generated maps spreading across social media platforms. “The labels on it were really wonky, and the symbols for the wildfires didn’t make sense,” she says. Roley has covered wildfire misinformation extensively, and there are certain trends that pop each year — “eco-terrorists, directed energy weapons,” also known as lasers — but this year’s maps struck her as a new trend. 

Roley has been debunking wildfire misinformation since 2023 — a “really superlative year, as we all remember,” she says. In addition to being the worst year for wildfires in Canada so far, there were also devastating fires in Hawaii. “These were almost like never-before-seen events, very scary events, where people are looking for explanations,” she says. In some parts of Canada, wildfires are familiar, even if the scale of recent years is not. But when wildfires rage in New Brunswick or the Northwest Territories or Hawaii, they may prompt more fear — and more speculation — than usual. When something that feels extraordinary happens, people are inclined to look for extraordinary explanations: even back in 1954, residents of Bellingham, Wash., became convinced hydrogen bomb tests or space rays were responsible for a sudden rash of damage to car windshields. 

Climate change denial, likewise, is not a new phenomenon. Chris Russill is an associate professor in the school of journalism and communication at Carleton University, where he’s also an academic director of Re.Climate, a centre focused on public engagement and climate communication. He says denial or skepticism of climate science dates back decades. 

But he agrees 2023 was an inflection point for wildfire misinformation online. Some of that was because of what was happening in the real world, such as the impact of Canadian fires on American air quality. 

But many were linked to shifts happening on major social media platforms: “Elon Musk had just bought Twitter,” he recalls. The Canadian government had passed the Online News Act, an attempt to make foreign social platforms pay to share news. Instead, Russill remembers, “Meta was refusing to negotiate with journalists around the News Act and stripped out Canadian journalism [from its platforms Facebook and Instagram].” It was also the first wildfire season since the widespread adoption of generative artificial intelligence; within two months of its release in November 2022, ChatGPT had more than 100 million monthly active users.

That chain of events is definitely still reverberating today: though Canadian news has been banned by Meta since 2023, a majority of Canadian users still don’t know that, according to a June 2026 report by the Media Ecosystem Observatory at McGill University. Of 1,518 Canadians surveyed for the report, only one in four Instagram users knew that news outlets in Canada could not publish on Meta platforms. Many people believe they’re seeing news on Facebook and Instagram when what they’re seeing is misinformation and conspiracy theories. And users searching Google for wildfire updates are shown AI-generated summaries, which launched in Canada in October 2024, and may contain inaccuracies. (Over the August long weekend, a Narwhal editor looking for air quality information at a lake in the B.C. Interior was shown a summary that incorrectly stated the lake was closed — information pulled from social media posts about two different places that were closed.)

Russill also attributes the 2023 sea change to the post-pandemic atmosphere of suspicion. “There was a more adversarial, conspiratorial way that climate was being dragged into other culture-war type issues that were becoming more and more salient through the [COVID-19] period,” he says.

This year, once again, Canadian wildfire smoke is impacting the United States, triggering posts from President Donald Trump on his Truth Social platform and AI-generated graphics that distort the impact of smoke on Americans.

Who benefits from wildfire misinformation on social media? 

As much as they complain about it, Russill says American politicians are also finding an opportunity in the effects of wildfire smoke on air quality. 

“The U.S. politicians, MAGA politicians, definitely have an interest in leveraging narratives — misinformation, conspiracies, false and misleading content — around wildfires to pursue a narrative they have about Canada as a bad neighbour, and leveraging that for trade and security,” he says. In a post on July 17, Trump threatened that the “cost of this pollution must of necessity be added to the TARIFFS Canada is currently paying.”

Researchers call this “participatory disinformation,” in which political leaders and influencers seed disinformation across platforms, and it’s then amplified and reproduced by ordinary users, in this case shaping online narratives about extreme weather events. (Disinformation is distinguished from misinformation by the intentions of the person sharing it. While people may unintentionally share misinformation, disinformation is false information shared on purpose.)

The McGill report on Canadian news notes, “When journalism loses visibility on social media, it is not replaced by nothing — it is replaced by content that serves a different function.” Conspiracy theories and images that distort the reality of wildfires get engagement, and a real crisis presents a fertile opportunity for content generation. 

Ad revenue from Google and other ad exchanges is another motivating factor, the Media Ecosystem Observatory also reported in June: the push behind a coordinated, international network of Facebook accounts pushing “news slop” — AI-fabricated stories — onto Canadian users. 

It’s easy for everyday users to get caught up in spreading untruths, too. Across social media, engagement is currency, which may provide an incentive to use the most dramatic or striking images without checking — or caring — about accuracy. “You can find a real map that you can very easily take a screenshot of that is using real data,” Roley says. But the real maps aren’t as dramatic as the AI-generated ones, “where it looks like all of Ontario has been burnt to a crisp, or one of the videos I saw where it looks like the wildfires are visible from space.” And lingering on those images — even if we’re skeptical of them — rewards the algorithm. 

As Russill points out, it’s “faster, easier and cheaper than ever before to generate fake and misleading content with AI.” It’s also easy to see what does well with your audience, and react accordingly, he says. “Like, let’s make the smoke bigger. Let’s put a fleeing polar bear in there. Who knows, right?” Some people may be diehard believers in climate conspiracies, and others might be deliberately seeding disinformation, but some are almost certainly agnostic to the culture wars; they just want the engagement. 

Whether users want to gain followers or further a political agenda, Russill says, they have “almost nothing to lose.” While AI posts may be flagged and removed on some platforms, it’s easy to replace them. “In these moments like wildfire evacuations and emergencies, this surges forward because it’s a real high engagement opportunity,” he says. 

This happened in 2025, he adds, prompting the BC Wildfire Service to warn of AI-generated images circulating on social media. And it’s happening this year, too.

From climate change denial to ‘mismanagement’: the narrative online has shifted

Misinformation typically downplays or denies the role of climate change in worsening wildfires, and displaces it onto other, implausible explanations. A few years ago, it was space lasers and 15-minute cities.

But no part of the world’s media ecosystem is free of Trump’s influence, including reporting on wildfires. After the 2025 wildfires in Los Angeles, which killed 31 people, the president blamed mismanagement of California forests. (Experts attributed the disaster to climate change, prolonged drought and southern California’s high winds, which spread the fire rapidly.)

“So the impacts people were seeing were a result of government mismanagement, not climate, not other types of things,” Russill says. The same argument is now being directed at Canada; in July, a Michigan senator posted on X, “Unless you want to become the 51st state, learn to manage your forests.” Such a task would be impossible in Canada, which has 369 million hectares of forest — covering more than a third of its landmass — 260 million of which is boreal forest in the sparsely populated north. Much of these forests have never been “managed,” but are experiencing more severe and frequent wildfires because the planet is getting hotter, a crisis that cannot be solved with rakes.

In part, this is a problem of our own making. In 2023, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith dodged a question about climate change and wildfire by pivoting to arsonists. And she’s not the only Canadian leader minimizing the severity of the climate crisis, while pushing more fossil fuel investments. “As politicians everywhere have gotten more quiet about climate, it becomes more difficult for people to understand why these [wildfire] situations are becoming much more unmanageable,” Russill says. 

The question of government responsibility is legitimate, he adds. There are valid criticisms of the Ontario government’s response to recent wildfires, or its habitual underfunding of emergency wildfire response. But in a news ecosystem rife with disinformation, it can be hard to balance valid criticism with simply undermining Canadian authorities. “It’s being leveraged as a frame in which to challenge and create distrust of authorities during these moments of crises in a more substantive way,” he says. 

Wildfire misinformation can bring real-world risk to Canadian firefighters — and everyone else

AI-generated images are annoying and possibly being weaponized to destabilize democracy. What researchers don’t know yet is if they are also putting individual lives at risk. 

“One of the things I would be curious to know is how it’s impacting people’s understanding of wildfires,” Roley says. “Like, is someone fleeing from their home because they saw this AI-generated map? I have no idea.” 

Wildfire agencies are now also spending precious time and resources combatting misinformation or pushing back on AI-generated images — especially when it targets them. Russill says that degrades trust that is already wearing thin. “In B.C., you know, BC Wildfire is not trusted by every rural community that experiences wildfire, so they already have that issue to deal with.” The effect of untruths and conspiracy theories on public trust is just one of the mental health stresses faced by frontline firefighters. 

Russill adds people might also be overly reliant on AI overviews to check for news on evacuation orders, park access or campfire guidelines. “But I think more likely it’s inducing a sort of widespread cynicism or distrust or confidence in people.” 

Online misinformation is a problem without a simple solution. Providing facts is important, but there is a depressingly robust body of research suggesting they’re not enough to change peoples’ minds or strongly-held beliefs.

“Certainly around moments of crisis like this, [providing fact checks] can introduce friction into the ways people are engaging with content,” Russill says. “Maybe they share a little less. Maybe they reset and ground-truth on something that’s happening, as opposed to letting their feelings start to overwhelm them.” 

Wildfires are still at their worst during hot, dry seasons; misinformation can burn all year long. At least for now, you can still limit your exposure to one of those risks by closing an app.

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