“Look at the size of that logjam,” Richard Bussanich exclaims with excitement as we fly low over one of the upper reaches of the Skagit River just north of the U.S.-Canada border. Bussanich, a senior biologist for the Okanagan Nation Alliance, and two of his colleagues are surveying the upper Skagit River and its main tributaries north of the border. They want to understand if salmon could survive here — after more than a century of absence. 

The Skagit originates in the B.C. Cascades, following the mountain range south into Washington state before flowing west to the Puget Sound. But ever since the 1920’s construction of the Gorge Dam in Washington state, the Canadian waters of the Skagit have been devoid of salmon. It was the first of three dams built on the river south of the border by Seattle City Light, Seattle’s public electricity provider, which today supply about 20 per cent of the utility’s power. None of these dams’ construction included fish passage. But that might finally be about to change.

After decades of pressure from tribes and conservation groups, the publicly owned utility is now committing to design and implement a plan to allow salmon to once again reach the upper river.

A landmark multilateral legal settlement between Seattle City Light, several tribes and non-governmental organizations, as well as various federal, state and county governments, was reached in March 2026. It commits the utility to funding nearly US$1 billion over the next 24 years to restore salmon runs and create fish passage. The agreement by the utility represents a reversal of its long-held claim that salmon never reached the upper Skagit before the dams — a position contradicted by historical records, archaeological evidence and Indigenous Knowledge.

The agreement is prompting First Nations in British Columbia to consider what the return of salmon could mean on their side of the border. Bussanich is excited by the chance to witness and support the return of salmon on this stretch of river. “If you provide them the opportunity, the fish will find a way,” he says.

Assessing salmon habitat from the sky

Every 30 to 50 years, the three dams on the Skagit have required an updated permit from the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to legally continue operations.

The project’s recent permit expired in 2025. Since then, the dams have been operating on annual licenses as negotiations for the terms of the new permit are settled. As part of the relicencing process, the public utility is required to carry out numerous studies to look at how the dams affect a variety of environmental, economic and social considerations and how to mitigate harmful impacts. This created the window for action by U.S. tribes to push the utility to deal with their role in depressing salmon runs across the entire Skagit River system.

The March legal settlement dictating the terms of the future management of these dams followed an ambitious lobbying campaign and legal action spearheaded by the Upper Skagit Indian Tribe in Washington state, along with pressure from the neighbouring Sauk-Suiattle Indian Tribe, conservation organizations and the public spurred by regional and national investigative journalism.

At the signing ceremony for the legal agreement in May 2026, Scott Schuyler, a member of the Upper Skagit Tribe and its cultural and policy representative for natural resources, shared some hope and history. 

“Today is a day of reflection for the Upper Skagit People,” he said. “We do appreciate everything that has occurred over the last eight years [of negotiations] but this journey actually began 124 years ago for the Upper Skagit when we were not allowed a voice or a choice.”

The day after the settlement was signed, an engineering firm was hired to start work on designing fish passage, Schuyler later told The Narwhal. With the public utility committing to create a pathway for salmon to access areas above each of its three dams, and thereby potentially unlocking spawning habitat in Canada, the Okanagan Nation Alliance is interested in how this effort will interface with the lands and waters it is part of stewarding north of the international border. 

 “Our mandate is ‘kł cp̓əlk̓ stim̓, ’causing to bring back’ water and salmon,” Bussanich says during the field trip to the Skagit. “Salmon reintroduction … and restoring habitat and protecting it is the core of everything, that the Okanagan and its members in the nation adhere to and guide us.”

The goal of the upper watershed’s aerial survey Bussanich and his team are doing is to better understand conditions on the ground for returning salmon. According to Bussanich, the flight is part of ongoing work being carried out collaboratively by the Okanagan Nation Alliance (representing the Upper Similkameen Indian Band), Stó:lō Nation, Parks Canada, the Washington-based organization Conservation Northwest and a consulting company called Biodiversity Pathways. Their collective goal is to protect the area and its sensitive species through Indigenous-led conservation efforts.

We touch down briefly on a sandbar on the river on the Canadian side of the border to survey conditions more closely at the location. Bussanich carefully photographs and notes the structure of another impressive logjam and the side channel it helped create.

“Coho will spawn in side channels like this,” he says. In the Okanagan River east of here, the Okanagan Nation Alliance and its partners have been creating artificial logjams to restore streams where the wood was removed and the streambed was straightened for flood control and agriculture. Here, on the upper reaches of the Skagit, the braided channel and natural woody structure provide a template for what they aim to create elsewhere for salmon habitat. Through Bussanich’s eyes, this part of the river appears in excellent condition for the return of anadromous (fish that are born in freshwater, migrate to the sea and return to freshwater to spawn) salmon. Now they just need a path to reach it.

As we cross the border into the U.S., we fly over the massive reservoir backed up behind the Ross Dam, the northernmost of the three Skagit dams. Around us, the high peaks of North Cascades National Park rise up from the reservoir shores. Bussanich is impressed with the quality of the spawning habitat in several of the tributaries entering the reservoir we fly over. Some locations look better for sockeye, others for Chinook and coho, according to Bussanich’s keen eye.

Then we see the Ross Dam. At 160 metres tall, it is the largest of the three hydroelectric dams on the river. The height of the dam itself is still a formidable challenge for engineers to figure out how to get migratory fish around. In the first half of the 20th century, it was considered insurmountable.

The long road to salmon recovery

From the Ross Dam, we fly downstream over the Diablo and then the Gorge dams. Immediately below the Gorge lies a stretch of the river that is completely dewatered by Seattle City Light, with the entire river’s flow diverted into a tunnel leading to a power-generating station about three miles downstream in the town of Newhalem, Washington, a former village site of the Upper Skagit Tribe. After passing through the power station’s turbines, the water is returned to the Skagit, which continues unimpeded the rest of the way to the sea, meeting the completely undammed Sauk River, its largest tributary, along the way. 

Below the dams, the Skagit River is home to runs of Chinook, coho, pink, sockeye and chum salmon, as well as steelhead trout. The Chinook and steelhead populations are both listed as threatened under the United States Endangered Species Act and noted as a species of greatest conservation need in Washington state. In the U.S., the Upper Skagit Indian Tribe, the Sauk-Suiattle Indian Tribe and the Swinomish Tribe all retained their right to fish these runs— a right that has been deeply impacted by the steep declines in fish returns in the river. These declines also affect other species that depend on salmon such as the endangered population of resident orcas in the Salish Sea.

The construction of the Gorge Dam cut off about 40 per cent of the watershed from anadromous fish, while also depriving the river downstream of sediments critical for refreshing fish habitat and the estuary downstream. The subsequent construction of Diablo and Ross dams upstream went forward also without fish passage. 

In the legal settlement agreed to in March, Seattle City Light committed to returning water to the reach of the river downstream of the Gorge Dam, a culturally significant stretch of the river for the Upper Skagit Tribe, and a vital step toward connecting the lower and upper rivers for anadromous fish. The utility also committed to funding studies of the technology needed to move fish back and forth over each of its three dams and to work on this collaboratively with the other stakeholders in the settlement, including the U.S. tribes whose territory includes the Skagit River.

The utility lists 38 different participants in the licensing agreement for the three dams, including conservation organizations and county, state and U.S. federal agencies, as well as 10 U.S. tribes and two First Nations in Canada, the Nlaka’pamux Nation and the Stó:lō Nation.

Tribes that signed the Treaty of Point Elliot in 1855 explicitly retained their right to harvest salmon in their usual and accustomed locations. This right was upheld in court in 1974. This fact provides a large portion of the legal leverage that tribes are using to pressure Seattle City Light to do more to protect and restore salmon, including creating access above the dams.

On May 12, the Mayor of Seattle formally signed the settlement agreement for the Skagit River dams. At the signing ceremony, Scott Schuyler, who led the Upper Skagit Tribe’s efforts, reflected on the moment. “We were not allowed a voice or a choice when the first dam was built,” he shared. “We see redemption today by signing this agreement. We do have that voice from now on.”

However, he also noted the signing of the agreement is not the same as real action on the ground. “Today is not the day to celebrate for the Upper Skagit. The celebration will come in the future. When we see the river return to its banks, the Upper Skagit people will rejoice and celebrate. When we see the first salmon pass over the dams and the dams start contributing to these depressed runs, then the Upper Skagit will celebrate.”Schuyler tells The Narwhal that while design work for fish passage above the dams has already begun, it could be years before we see water flowing again in the bypass reach of the river, or salmon moving back and forth over the dams, due to permitting and engineering. “I would like to see it done in my lifetime, but you never know.”

Editor’s note: David Moskowitz is involved in long-term documentary work of the Okanagan Nation Alliance and grizzly bears.

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LNG Canada is already the largest liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility in the country. Now, the Shell-led project is set to double its production. 

The consortium of companies behind the massive LNG export facility announced the decision to green-light spending on Sept. 28. Shell, along with its partners Petronas, PetroChina, Mitsubishi and Korea Gas, were originally approved by the provincial and federal governments to build two phases of the Kitimat, B.C., plant in 2015. Operations of the initial phase started last year, with the first shipments leaving Canada in late June.

Prime Minister Mark Carney touted the investment decision in Vancouver this morning. “Canada is building big again,” he said, speaking to a room of company executives, politicians, First Nations elected and hereditary chiefs, municipal leaders and stakeholders. “Today’s investment — as you know, over $30 billion in LNG Canada 2 — will make LNG Canada the second-largest facility of its kind in the world.”

“This is a very big deal indeed,” BC NDP leader David Eby said at the same announcement. “It will change lives, here and around the world.”

The $33 billion investment decision comes as the first phase continues to face problems with its equipment.

As first reported in The Narwhal, an integrity issue with the facility’s flare stack was identified in the early commissioning stage after the company began testing its equipment in late 2024. LNG Canada later reported the problem to the BC Energy Regulator and the facility has been continually in non-compliance with its government-issued permits since. For months, Kitimat community members were subjected to excessive noise, black smoke, a towering flame — at times reaching the height of New York’s Statue of Liberty or London’s Big Ben — and a concoction of unidentified chemical smells and various other emissions as plant operators tried to get things under control. 

LNG Canada and the BC Energy Regulator maintain emissions from the plant are not harmful to human health, but many residents worry the combined output from the new liquefaction facility and Kitimat’s aluminum smelter may impact respiratory conditions and cause other health issues.

Burning excess methane gas, or flaring, is a normal safety procedure at liquefaction facilities. It releases greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide as well as emitting dangerous pollutants such as sulfur dioxide and small particulate matter, which affect human health.

Earlier in September, LNG Canada held community meetings in Kitimat so locals could weigh in on plans for a permit amendment. The consortium wants an increase in allowable emissions levels to account for its need to keep the flare burning 24/7 — until the stack can be redesigned in 2028. 

“There is an operational issue with the flare design where at very low flow rates, the gas being burned moves from the tip of the flare to within the flare tip itself, causing a hot spot in the metal there,” Teresa Waddington, a senior executive at LNG Canada and registered professional engineer, previously told The Narwhal. “To prevent these hot spots, more gas is sent through the flare system … to push the flame back up to the top of the flare tip.”

This “assist gas” amounted to around 10 per cent of all gas that was sent to the coastal plant last year. As The Narwhal and Point Source reported, LNG Canada flared 350 million cubic metres of gas in 2025, making it one of the highest sources of LNG flaring emissions globally.

What exactly is the LNG Canada Phase 2 expansion?

LNG Canada was approved for two phases: the second adds two processing units, called trains, to increase the liquefaction capacity from 14 to 28 million tonnes of LNG per year. This expansion also means Coastal GasLink, the contentious 670-kilometre pipeline supplying the export plant, needs to double its capacity. That will be done by building five new compressor stations along the route. 

“Thanks to LNG Canada’s decision today, TC Energy is moving forward with its own multi-billion-dollar Phase 2 of the Coastal GasLink pipeline,” Carney said. “That means doubling capacity, creating an additional 2,000 jobs and maximizing the value of … one of the most prolific natural gas basins.”

Coastal GasLink, which was built between 2019 and 2024 by Calgary-based TC Energy, faced widespread opposition in support of Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs, who argued the company did not receive free, prior and informed consent from the Aboriginal title holders to land intersected by the pipeline.

When Indigenous land defenders and their supporters tried to stop construction, a series of infamous RCMP raids led to dozens of arrests and solidarity protests across the country.

In its announcement yesterday, LNG Canada noted the investment decision includes an equity option agreement secured this summer with “a limited partnership of the economic development organizations of five First Nations neighbouring LNG Canada’s operations: Gitga’at Nation, Gitxaała Nation, Haisla Nation, Kitselas First Nation and Kitsumkalum First Nation.” That agreement “represents one of the largest Indigenous ownership positions in major Canadian infrastructure,” according to the company.

LNG Canada also said the expansion has “the potential to generate more than $50 billion in government revenues” over the 40-year life of the project.

“A year ago, the federal government referred LNG Canada Phase 2 to our Major Projects Office. One office. One point of contact. One goal: get to the right decision, rapidly and efficiently,” Carney said. “Working with Shell and LNG Canada, British Columbia, and First Nations, we have accomplished exactly that.”

What comes next?

Construction on the pipeline and at the Kitimat facility will begin immediately, Carney said in his speech. According to the company, around 4,000 workers will be hired to build the expansion at the plant and around 2,000 people will build the pipeline compressor stations.

Community members in Kitimat continue calling for transparency and investment in health facilities and studies. 

“I wish that they could acknowledge [emissions from the plant] could be a problem,” one young resident, who asked not to be named, told The Narwhal. “We’re gonna have to be around the flaring either way.”

LNG Canada said a redesign of the malfunctioning flaring equipment will be implemented in 2028. In the meantime, the company plans to request an amendment to its permits to account for continued higher levels of flaring emissions. 

The BC Energy Regulator said “LNG Canada has reported ongoing instances where flaring from one or more of the facility’s flare systems is not consistent with the requirements of its air discharge permit to the [regulator, but] these instances have not had a measurable impact on local air quality.”

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As the September sun dips down towards the mountains on the western side of the Kitimat Valley in northwestern B.C., a blueish haze hovers over the coastal community. 

The familiar plume from Rio Tinto’s aluminum smelter, a source of local air pollution for more than seven decades, now mixes with emissions from the LNG Canada gas liquefaction and export facility, which started shipping cargoes overseas last year. At the centre of the sprawling industrial site, an orange flame glows continuously from the top of a red and white tower. That’s the flare stack, which earned the new gas plant the dubious distinction of being among the world’s highest sources of flaring emissions last year. 

LNG Canada, owned and operated by a consortium of five foreign companies led by Shell, maintains its emissions are safe. Some residents aren’t so sure.

At open-house events at the town’s recreation centre over two days in mid-September, company executives, engineers and other employees field questions from members of the public. Moments after walking into the fluorescent-lit room, I’m recognized by a company representative who asks if I plan to interview anyone while I’m there. I laugh, shaking my head incredulously. He grins and says he’s read my reporting. A few minutes later, Teresa Waddington, a senior executive at LNG Canada and registered professional engineer, approaches to shake my hand.

LNG Canada is holding the event so community members can weigh in on plans for a permit amendment. The consortium wants an increase in allowable emissions levels to account for its need to keep the flare burning 24/7 — until the stack can be redesigned in 2028. 

Waddington tells me it’s not a perfect solution to problems that have plagued the flaring system since commissioning began in late 2024, but says the company has made significant progress to reduce flaring levels over the past couple of months. She says the original permit didn’t account for “higher flaring volumes” associated with getting an LNG plant up and running. 

But that’s not the whole story.

Kitimat sits at the end of a 100-kilometre long fjord, hemmed in by mountains. Its geography means the town experiences a specific set of weather conditions: regular high winds, temperature inversions, rollercoaster pressure systems fed by the Pacific Ocean and more. LNG Canada’s flare stack wasn’t built to handle those conditions.

When the liquefaction facility fired up its flare stack, locals and workers alike quickly realized something was wrong. As first reported in The Narwhal, an integrity issue with the main stack was identified and later reported to the BC Energy Regulator. For months, the community was subjected to excessive noise, towering flames lighting the night sky, black smoke and a concoction of unidentified chemical smells and various other emissions as plant operators tried to get things under control. 

“There is an operational issue with the flare design where at very low flow rates, the gas being burned moves from the tip of the flare to within the flare tip itself, causing a hot spot in the metal there,” Waddington tells me later in an email, after I follow up on our conversation. “To prevent these hot spots, more gas is sent through the flare system … to push the flame back up to the top of the flare tip.”

This “assist gas” amounted to around 10 per cent of all gas that was sent to the coastal plant last year. Locals nicknamed the flare, which reached heights of around 90 metres at times, the “Eye of Mordor” after J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

While LNG Canada is working to amend its permits, the consortium also appears poised to make a final investment decision on an approved expansion, which would double production at the Kitimat plant. As Reuters recently reported, a decision on the project’s second phase could come as early as October. Both the federal and provincial governments have signalled strong support for the expansion.

In the community, vast work camps built to support construction of the LNG plant sit vacant and quiet. Today, the flare burns low, a dull fiery glow at the heart of the haze like the ember of a cigarette seen across a dimly lit room. It’s been calmer and quieter lately — but problems persist, and the gas being burned daily continues to exceed government permits.

Flaring not a danger to human health, LNG Canada says

Kitimat is no stranger to industry. The community was built on Haisla lands in the 1950s as a company town — serving what was then known as the Aluminum Company of Canada, or Alcan. 

The town’s residents, while not accustomed to living alongside a liquefied natural gas plant, are familiar with being an industrial hub. As Kitimat mayor Phil Germuth previously told The Narwhal: “Being a town that was built by industry, people understand that every once in a while you’re going to have to put up with something to get the bigger goal in the end.” 

Kitimat is also a small town, with a population of around 8,000, and a major industry like LNG Canada has extensive connections throughout the community that might make dissenting residents think twice about openly voicing their opinions. 

Several community members The Narwhal spoke to, who asked not to be identified, said they’re grateful for LNG Canada grants they’ve received or sponsored programs they’ve participated in, but worry about how the combined emissions from the two major industrial facilities might be affecting their health. Most who shared their views say they’re not against having a gas plant in town — but they’re skeptical about claims the emissions aren’t harmful.

One resident tells me they avoid strenuous activity outdoors now — just in case. Another, who owns and operates a local business, wonders why Rio Tinto, which produces more hydroelectricity than it uses and sells the balance to BC Hydro, and LNG Canada, which is liquefying natural gas extracted from deposits in the northeast, don’t provide the town with free electricity and gas.

“I’d much rather not pay for hydro and gas,” they shrugged.

According to LNG Canada and the provincial regulator, excess flaring isn’t a problem for human health. Because the gas is burned at the flare stack, it’s mostly converted to carbon dioxide and water vapour, Waddington says. In other words, more gas being flared doesn’t necessarily increase local pollution levels — which have remained below provincial guidelines, according to the BC Energy Regulator. This claim is substantiated by local air quality monitoring, much of which was implemented when Rio Tinto underwent a major expansion between 2011 and 2015.

“There is a long-established air quality monitoring network that monitors ambient air quality in the Kitimat region, on an ongoing basis … to ensure no impact to human health,” Waddington says.

They’ve reduced the flaring volumes significantly since installing a new flare tip in July, Waddington adds, but until the whole system can be redesigned they will still need to burn more gas than originally planned.

The new flare tip has “the same design [with] upgraded metallurgy [that enables it to] operate with a bit more backburn and manage hot spots,” which she explains reduces the amount of extra gas being flared by about 60 per cent. “We are working with the company that designed the flare tip to improve this design further and to ensure it operates as expected in real-world conditions.”

But there are other emissions from the plant, too, including black smoke from the stack, which indicates particulates and unburned gases. As The Narwhal recently reported, LNG Canada predicted black smoke would be emitted between 15 and 60 minutes one to three times per year while it stabilized early operations, but the plant has exceeded that estimate. 

In April, the BC Energy Regulator ordered LNG Canada to identify the root cause and implement a fix by October. On Sept. 21, the regulator posted the first report since implementing these measures, which identified “20 black smoke events that occurred between April 22 and July 31, 2026, including events that LNG Canada self-reported as non-compliances.” The regulator noted LNG Canada also reported “four additional black smoke events during August 2026” and community members told The Narwhal of at least one event in September.

Still more types of emissions, visible only through an optical gas imaging camera, are also being released at the plant. Details of these emissions were published in August by The Narwhal and Point Source after being observed by Tim Doty, a former oil and gas inspector with the state of Texas.

“The emissions that could not be seen with the bare eye were shocking,” he said at the time, after monitoring emissions at the Kitimat facility with a camera earlier in the year.

In Strawberry Meadows, the residential neighbourhood closest to the plant, several homes and serviced lots are listed for sale. They’re nice houses: modern design, tucked in amongst the trees on quiet streets. But while the entire town is adjusting to living with the new industrial project, it’s this area that has experienced the most noise and emissions. 

Around this time last year, one resident of the neighbourhood told The Narwhal he and his family couldn’t sleep for days on end.

“We maybe got two hours’ sleep this whole weekend. I’m just useless now.” 

Because of the imminent provincial election, the regulator was unable to answer questions, noting “government is in a caretaker mode” and communications, including from Crown agencies like the BC Energy Regulator “are limited to critical health and public safety information.” A spokesperson sent links to data — LNG Canada’s daily and monthly flaring amounts, the latest air quality data map and B.C.’s air quality objectives and standards — along with a statement about its ongoing oversight of the liquefaction facility.

Residents ‘more curious than concerned:’ LNG Canada executive

At the open house, community members speak quietly with company reps, asking questions about flaring, emissions, smells and more.

Joanne Spencer, another senior executive with LNG Canada, says most residents who come through are more curious than concerned. Between four sessions over two days, around 120 people stop by.

“This is quite an engaging way to talk to members of the public,” she says, gesturing around the room at clusters of employees speaking with residents. “If you’re looking at somebody in the eyes, it gives the opportunity for you to acknowledge that they’ve understood or [see if they] have another question.”

For her part, Waddington says she’s committed to show up at council meetings and “many other places where people congregate to engage in the conversation on what LNG Canada is doing well and where we need to improve.” 

She tells me she previously worked as a plant manager at a Shell gas facility in Scotland where flaring “attracted community interest and concern.”

“As a result of a prolonged flaring incident, many of the staff from the facility were facing hard questions from concerned community members in their day-to-day lives,” she says, explaining she experienced tension while going about the community. 

“It was important to me then, as it is to both me and LNG Canada now, that the company engages directly with [the] community when they have concerns to provide information, listen for what matters and how we can improve in those areas or better communicate about them.”

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On the eve of B.C.’s 44th general election, FortisBC’s bid to significantly expand its liquefied natural gas (LNG) production was given a key green light by the B.C. government.

Less than 24 hours before David Eby’s snap election call sent cabinet ministers out onto the campaign trail, Environment and Parks Minister Tamara Davidson and Energy and Climate Solutions Minister Adrian Dix announced the project received its environmental assessment certificate. The approval was issued roughly two months after the final public comment period on the project ended.

Environmental groups condemned the government’s speedy approval as a rubber stamp.

“Approving more new fossil fuel infrastructure in a climate crisis is reckless and irresponsible, and yet more evidence that Premier David Eby is happy to break his past promises on fighting climate change,” Isabel Siu-Zmuidzinas, climate campaigner with the Wilderness Committee, said.

The final press release from this version of the Eby government published on Sept. 21 touted the major expansion at Tilbury — a tenfold increase in the facility’s liquefied natural gas production capacity — as “a major economic, clean-energy opportunity for B.C.” But even if the expansion is powered by electricity, as planned, experts worry chemical emissions from the facility could affect the health of people living and working in nearby communities, including Delta, Richmond and New Westminster.

The Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment has called for the B.C. government to fully assess the potential health impacts of the LNG industry, from the fracking fields in northern B.C. to LNG production and shipping facilities, like LNG Canada in Kitimat.

“If this industry is safe, the province should be willing to prove it before our families and our healthcare system pay the price,” Dr. Kai Irani, B.C. representative for the doctors’ association, said in the wake of the Tilbury Phase 2 approval.

FortisBC’s Tilbury LNG plant currently produces about 250,000 tonnes of LNG per year, which is used as fuel by some marine vessels and to heat homes and businesses. The Phase 2 expansion could allow the facility to produce up to 3.4 million tonnes each year, with roughly 2.5 million set aside for export. That’s slightly more than the 2.1 million tonnes Woodfibre LNG in Squamish expects to export once it begins operations.

The project’s environmental assessment certificate includes 18 conditions aimed at mitigating its impacts, including air quality monitoring and emission reduction. B.C.’s environmental assessment will inform the federal government’s own assessment of the project and pending decision on whether to approve Tilbury’s expansion.

FortisBC has been working on beefing up its operations at the Tilbury site for about a decade. In July, Minister of Energy and Climate Solutions Adrian Dix announced the government’s support of an earlier expansion proposal, known as Phase 1B, which will add a marine jetty to the site and increase production capacity to 650,000 tonnes of LNG per year. Once Phase 1B is completed, Tilbury LNG will be able to fuel more marine vessels with LNG, which is a lower-emission fuel than the diesel many ships use for power. 

A July cabinet order signed by Dix exempted Phase 1B from review by the B.C. Utilities Commission. That means the expansion will not undergo an independent assessment to examine whether it is necessary and serves the public interest. Last year, the B.C. government also exempted the North Coast transmission line from such a review.

Dix’s order prompted one of his fellow cabinet ministers to take the unusual step of speaking out against a government decision. Kelly Greene, who served as Minister of Emergency Preparedness and Climate Readiness, said she was disappointed with the decision to advance the Tilbury expansion. She has since decided not to seek re-election in the Richmond—Steveston riding she won in 2020.

The order also created the option for First Nations co-ownership of the project, which the Musqueam Indian Band has expressed interest in. 

Tilbury LNG Phase 2 is a separate proposal for the same site in Delta that would see the construction of a new LNG storage tank with a capacity of up to 142,400 cubic metres, about 57 Olympic swimming pools. There would also be new gas liquefaction facilities capable of producing up to 7,700 tonnes of LNG per day, along with other infrastructure needed to support the expanded operations.

B.C. is betting on major projects as Canada looks to open new markets and reduce its reliance on the U.S. Tilbury Phase 2 is among the 41 energy and mining projects the province has identified as a priority. 

Here’s what you need to know.

Why this project?

Tilbury’s Phase 2 expansion will boost the gas system in the Lower Mainland and help meet peak demand for heat during cold weather, according to the provincial government. Building the project will support 1,210 jobs, the province’s major projects site states — though how many people will be employed after the expansion is built is not yet known.

The project description does not mention the LNG export aspect of the expansion.

FortisBC’s website describes the Phase 2 expansion as a way to “continue reliably serving our customers in a lower-carbon energy future while providing economic growth and benefits to local and Indigenous communities.”

Increasing Tilbury’s LNG production capacity will allow the company to “respond to the growing demand for LNG as a lower-carbon fuel,” according to the site.

In an emailed statement, a FortisBC spokesperson highlighted that the Tilbury facility runs on electricity and therefore has “a lower carbon footprint compared to fossil fuel-based power sources commonly used in LNG production elsewhere.”

“The proposed Phase 2 expansion will be required to meet all applicable regulatory, environmental and permitting requirements, including those established by Metro Vancouver.”

What’s different about Tilbury LNG?

While the other LNG facilities operating or under construction in B.C. are located at some distance from nearby communities, Tilbury LNG is an urban facility.

It sits on the banks of the Fraser River, just across the water from Richmond and downstream from New Westminster, making it the only urban LNG facility in the province. Highway 17, one of the Lower Mainland’s major transportation corridors, runs right alongside it.

“It is a 10-minute walk … to the nearest brewery,” Anna Barford, oceans campaigner for Stand.earth, said in an interview. 

Loaded LNG tankers leaving the Tilbury facility will have to transit the south arm of the Fraser River mouth to make their way out into the Salish Sea, a busy shipping corridor that could become much more crowded over the next few years if and when a number of other projects come to fruition.

How does this fit into a bigger conversation about shipping traffic?

At Roberts Bank, just south of where LNG tankers from Tilbury would enter the Salish Sea, the Port of Vancouver is planning to expand its existing container port by 50 per cent. If that $3.5-billion proposed expansion goes ahead, the port location could handle an additional 2.4 million 20-foot (six-metre) shipping containers each year, adding hundreds of container ship transits to the Salish Sea’s waters.

Meanwhile, the completed Trans Mountain pipeline expansion is expected to increase tanker traffic in the area by nearly 350 tankers per year.

And then there’s Alberta’s proposed pipeline to the Pacific coast, which would also terminate at Roberts Bank. The tanker terminal would be built to accommodate very large crude oil carriers, massive ships capable of carrying 2.2 million barrels of oil that are longer than three World Cup soccer pitches laid end to end.

“These are enormous vessels that the Tilbury tankers are going to navigate around — they will each need to sort of make way for each other,” Barford said. “This is also critical habitat for southern resident killer whales, who we know vessel traffic is a problem for.”

The Environmental Assessment Office will consider potential impacts on southern resident killer whales and other local species and their habitats as part of its evaluation of the Tilbury LNG Phase 2 proposal. Measures by FortisBC to mitigate those impacts will also be assessed.

What exactly will the expansion look like?

To enable the facility to process more gas, the Phase 2 expansion includes a ground flare — basically, an outlet to burn off excess gas when needed. Instead of a flare stack like the one high above the LNG Canada facility in Kitimat, B.C., Tilbury LNG will burn off excess gas at ground level. 

The ground flare option was chosen because it “limits the opportunity for wildlife interactions with flames and greatly reduces noise and flame-related visual effects,” a FortisBC spokesperson said in an email.

The expansion would increase Tilbury LNG’s emissions to one million tonnes per year, according to a report from the Pembina Institute. Most of those emissions — 0.7 million tonnes — would come from so-called upstream emissions, related to the fracked gas and its transportation to Tilbury LNG via pipelines. The other 0.3 million tonnes of emissions would come from the facility’s operations. 

However, the assessment excludes emissions during the start-up phase, a time when LNG facilities often flare more gas than they would once they are established. Flaring involves burning off gas as waste rather than shipping it or using it. LNG Canada, which has been operational for two years now, has been flaring up to 15 times more gas than it was expected to, due at least in part to an issue with the facility’s flare tip. LNG Canada reported flaring 350 million cubic metres of gas in 2025, according to figures reported to the BC Energy Regulator — 10 per cent of all the gas transported to the plant that year. 

What are the possible health impacts for people living near the project?

Experts say significantly expanding an LNG facility in an urban area raises a range of concerns, including possible impacts on human health.

Emissions from an expanded Tilbury LNG will be entering an airshed already permeated with pollution, Tim Takaro, a physician-scientist in environmental medicine, said. Exhaust from vehicles, including heavy trucks travelling to and from port facilities, mingle with emissions from industrial operations along the Fraser River. 

“There’s just no reason to build a new fossil energy facility in a populated area,” he said.

New Westminster and Richmond had some of the highest levels of nitrogen dioxide of any community in B.C. in 2024, according to a report from the BC Lung Foundation. Nitrogen dioxide is a product of high-temperature fossil fuel combustion and is pushed into the air from vehicle tailpipes and industrial smokestacks. Long-term exposure is linked to impaired lung growth in children and more frequent asthma attacks.

For Takaro, also a member of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, Tilbury LNG’s impact needs to be considered in the context of existing air quality conditions. 

“What does this facility add to the existing air quality?” he said. “Because that’s what people breathe — they don’t just breathe the new part.”

The Tilbury expansion’s ground flare is also a point of concern for Takaro.

“Their flare is going to be at ground level, which is, of course, where people live,” he said.

B.C.’s Environmental Assessment Office is in the final stages of evaluating the Phase 2 expansion. The last public comment period ended in July and the office received 631 completed surveys about the project.One of the survey’s 18 questions asked respondents to select any issues they believed had not been appropriately assessed or that lacked information. A majority of respondents flagged greenhouse gas emissions as an area of concern. Impacts on wildlife, fish and habitat were also selected on a majority of surveys.

Ground flares are often about the height of a single-story building, said Tim Doty, a former employee of Texas’s environmental agency who spent years inspecting oil and gas facilities across the state.

“In theory, that’s going to bring the emissions closer to the community,” he said. 

“I would expect this facility, as it expands, to further impact the community and air quality around Delta and the Vancouver [area].”

Tilbury Phase 2’s environmental assessment takes into account current air quality and modelling of the expansion’s effects, according to an emailed statement from the assessment office.

The federal government’s pending decision can now be informed by B.C.’s environmental assessment. This provincial environmental green light allows the federal process to continue moving, saving Tilbury LNG Phase 2 from lingering in limbo as the snap election unfolds.

Updated, Sept. 24, 2026 at 11:00 a.m. PT: This story incorrectly stated Isabel Siu-Zmuidzinas is a climate campaigner with Stand.earth, in fact she works for the Wilderness Committee. The story has been corrected.

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British Columbians are heading back to the provincial polls on Oct. 24, just two years after the 2024 election where the BC NDP barely held on to power.

David Eby justified his decision to call a snap election on Tuesday, pointing to threats posed by trade issues with U.S. President Donald Trump and chaos on B.C.’s political right.

Eby said British Columbians can choose between “the chaos, the cuts [and] the cozying up to Trump of the Conservative caucus” or his party’s pledge to “stand shoulder to shoulder across the country with Canadians.”

During his speech, Eby repeatedly used fire imagery, comparing the situation in the United States to a spreading wildfire. “We need to build a firebreak around the things that make British Columbia special, things that matter most to British Columbians,” he said. “A firebreak, yes, against Trump’s economic attack, but a firebreak against our dependence on the United States, and a firebreak against the Trump-style politics that threatens to infect our province.”

Eby’s decision will also cost the province tens of millions of dollars and disrupt the work of government, leaving legislation in limbo and throwing wrenches into all kinds of timelines. Calls for B.C.’s auditor general to investigate the billion-dollar error in the province’s gas royalty calculations will remain unanswered. Legislation to enact a treaty between B.C. and the Kitselas First Nation could be delayed by months. And the future of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act will be uncertain at least a little longer. 

The premier’s choice to call a snap election now has angered many local government representatives. Municipal elections will take place across B.C. on Oct. 17, and the final weeks of those campaigns will now be overshadowed by the looming provincial election.

“It’s two conversations at one dinner table — it’s noisy, it’s hard to understand and only the loudest voices will be heard,” Cori Ramsay, a city councillor from Prince George who served as the president at the Union of B.C. Municipalities, said at the organization’s annual conference last week. “Overlapping elections will lead to less scrutiny, less accountability, and it’s not in the public interest.”

At the conference, delegates endorsed an emergency resolution calling on the B.C. government to keep a provincial election campaign separate from the scheduled municipal elections. 

Kathryn Harrison, a political science professor at the University of British Columbia, said Eby is taking a calculated risk calling an election so soon after the last one.

“Will the NDP be able to make a credible case for voters that this economic moment justifies an election compared to the case that their opponents will make that this is premature?” she asked.

This isn’t the first time in recent memory a BC NDP premier has called a snap election during a fraught historical moment. In fall 2020, former Premier John Horgan decided to go to the polls, arguing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic required a majority government to effectively serve British Columbians.

Horgan’s gamble paid off, with the NDP winning 57 of the B.C. legislature’s 87 seats.

“I assume that experience is top of mind for Premier Eby and the NDP this time round,” Harrison said. “Can they make the wartime mandate argument, given that Donald Trump’s threats to Canada — threats to the B.C. economy, especially — were not something that was foreseen?”

Despite the risk, Eby has decided to proceed with a snap election call. Here’s why and what it means for some of the significant policies affecting B.C.’s environment.

Why call a B.C. election now?

If the justifications seem flimsy, it may be because all signs point to a major factor in Eby’s decision being the state of the BC Conservative Party, B.C.’s official opposition.

To briefly recap: John Rustad resigned as the party’s leader in December 2025 after weeks of caucus infighting. The race to replace Rustad resulted in Kerry-Lynne Findlay, a former Conservative Party of Canada MP and cabinet minister, becoming leader of the BC Conservative Party on May 30. Findlay’s victory was narrow; she won 51 per cent of party members’ votes, barely beating out second-place finisher Caroline Elliott.

Findlay’s tenure as party leader was spectacularly brief and chaotic. Multiple members of the BC Conservative caucus publicly criticized her leadership style and staffing choices. Over a six-week span this summer, 10 MLAs left the BC Conservative caucus, citing a lack of confidence in Findlay’s leadership. Three others were removed from the caucus, including Rustad (though he has since been invited to rejoin the BC Conservative caucus).

Findlay resigned as party leader on September 20, leaving the BC Conservatives to appoint Cariboo-Chilcotin MLA Lorne Doerkson as interim leader. Following the snap election call, many of the ousted MLAs rejoined the BC Conservatives and joined Doerkson for an afternoon press conference in Vancouver.

“I think David Eby is going to regret this,” Doerkson said. “Because this election actually offers an opportunity for hope and for real change.”

He rejected Eby’s claim the BC Conservatives support Trump, calling the U.S. president a bully.

B.C. politics is infamous for dramatic developments and unprecedented situations, but the unravelling of the BC Conservatives — a party that came within a handful of votes of driving the NDP out of government in 2024 — over the past two years is truly remarkable. For Eby, leader of an aging government with a tenuous grip on power, the chaos enveloping the BC Conservatives presents an irresistible opportunity to potentially trounce his political opponents.

After a week of mounting speculation about a snap election call at the Union of B.C. Municipalities conference, the B.C. government issued a flurry of announcements in the days before Eby confirmed his decision.

Over the weekend, the BC NDP announced a pair of significant investments into healthcare, and on Monday, published 16 press releases, twice the number of any other day this month. They highlighted millions in government spending, including $27 million from the Clean Industry Fund for 17 emission-reduction and efficiency projects.

Tilbury LNG Phase 2 was promoted twice. First, Environment and Parks Minister Tamara Davidson and Energy and Climate Solutions Minister Adrian Dix announced the project received its environmental assessment certificate, less than two months after the final public comment period ended.

The final government press release of the day touted the major expansion — a 10-fold increase in the facility’s liquefied natural gas production capacity — at Tilbury as “a major economic, clean-energy opportunity for B.C.”

The flood of press releases made it seem the B.C. government was working to clear the decks of government business before an election call prompted a shift into campaign mode. 

B.C. election comes amid criticism of gas royalty framework

The election call also comes amid criticism and controversies facing the BC NDP. Including that fossil fuel companies will pay B.C. hundreds of millions of dollars less than anticipated over the next few years due to an error in the province’s natural gas royalty calculations, as reported by Business in Vancouver last month. The miscalculation means the province will collect $306 million less than projected this fiscal year, according to the Ministry of Finance, though experts told Business in Vancouver B.C. could end up losing out on $500 million per year.

The B.C. government explained the error as a simple calculation mistake which has been rectified, but West Moberly First Nations Chief Roland Willson wants a more detailed explanation.

“I don’t think they know what they’re doing,” Willson said in an interview.

Treaty 8 First Nations, including West Moberly First Nations, flagged the error to the province in the midst of consultations on a new pricing structure for natural gas extracted in B.C. The incoming royalty framework is meant to collect a fair share of profits from companies extracting natural gas from land owned by the province. The new framework is scheduled to take effect in January 2027 and will replace a temporary system that has been in place since 2022, after an independent assessment found the existing system needed a complete overhaul.

In 2022, the B.C. government said the new royalty framework would collect half of company profits from natural gas, but Treaty 8 First Nations have since concluded the new framework may capture just 11 per cent.

Willson wants the new framework paused until a thorough and independent review can be done.

“The auditor general should do a complete review and it should be transparent,” he told The Narwhal. “I think they should make it public because this would affect B.C.’s revenues — the fiscal health of the province — for decades.”

On Sept. 14, Finance Minister Josie Osborne said the Ministry of Energy and Climate Solutions was communicating with the Office of the Auditor General about the budget error and possibility of a review. The Office of the Auditor General told The Narwhal it does not comment on potential reviews. The Ministry of Energy and Climate Solutions did not respond to an email sent Sept. 17, requesting confirmation that an auditor general’s review had been requested.

The legislature was scheduled to convene on Oct. 5 for a five-week sitting. Eby’s snap election call either significantly shortens the amount of time MLAs will spend in the house this fall or eliminates it altogether.

The future of DRIPA

It may seem like a long time ago now but B.C.’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, known as DRIPA, was at the centre of major political drama this spring.

Following a December 2025 court ruling, Eby kicked off the spring session vowing to amend the law to shield the provincial government from legal liability over the pace and scope of its reconciliation work. At first, he claimed changing the law was non-negotiable, and something that had to be done before the legislature’s summer break.

Eby went so far as to vow to make his DRIPA amendments a confidence vote, thereby staking the future of his government on its outcome

But First Nations leaders rejected Eby’s plan and told him his “approach was totally unacceptable.” That prompted the then premier to propose suspending DRIPA for up to three years, an approach he soon abandoned in the face of steady opposition from First Nations leaders.

By the time the legislature’s summer break arrived, Eby had settled on continuing discussions about DRIPA’s future with First Nations and tabling unspecified amendments during the fall session.

“We’re still at the table with First Nations leadership and it’s important work and we’re going to continue that work,” Eby said of the DRIPA discussion during a Sept. 8 press conference.

Without a fall session, any changes to DRIPA will wait until the spring, leaving lingering uncertainty about the future of the law.

In the meantime, the BC Conservatives have continued to call for DRIPA’s repeal. In August, Elections BC approved an initiative petition backed by BC Conservative MLA Harman Bhangu that aims to repeal DRIPA. If Bhangu collects signatures from 10 per cent of registered voters in each of B.C.’s 93 ridings by Jan. 25, the petition will be submitted to the legislature for a vote.

Kitselas treaty bill

If the fall session doesn’t happen, the legislature may not reconvene until February, shortly before the B.C. government traditionally presents its throne speech and introduces its budget.

Before the throne speech, a process called prorogation wipes the legislative slate clean, giving legislators a fresh start. Any legislation left lingering on the order paper is erased and must be reintroduced before starting the process to become law all over again.

If that happens following this election, three pieces of legislation will be sent back to the drawing board. One is Bill 21, the Kitselas Treaty Act, which received first reading on April 15. If passed, the bill would be the provincial government’s first step to implement the treaty with Kitselas First Nation. 

If the treaty is ratified by both the B.C. and Canadian governments, Kitselas First Nation would no longer be controlled by the federal Indian Act and instead governed by its own constitution. Work on the Kitselas Treaty began in 1993 and Kitselas members voted in favour of the draft treaty in April 2025. 

David Try, senior negotiator with the Kitselas treaty team, expects the election will delay the passage of the bill by up to six months, depending on when the legislature reconvenes.

While the delay is disappointing, Try is hopeful B.C.’s next government would make the Kitselas treaty bill a priority in its first legislative session.

“When you negotiate something for 30 years, there’s a certain implicit commitment to bring it home,” Try said. “We think that the treaty would be back on the legislative agenda, but how do we know? We don’t.”

The Lax Kw’alaams and Nine Allied Tribes dispute the scope of the Kitselas Treaty’s territorial claim and the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs called for both treaty bills to be paused until the territorial boundary disputes with neighbouring First Nations were addressed.

Eby’s choice to call an election is predicated on his confidence that they will win back seats lost to the BC Conservatives in 2024. However, this victory is far from guaranteed. After Oct. 24, B.C. might have a new party in power — or it might be the same one, its power weakened or consolidated. None of the possible outcomes guarantees the provincial priorities will stay the same.

Updated Sept. 22, 2026, at 4:53 p.m. PT: This story was updated following a press conference with interim BC Conservative leader Lorne Doerkson

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Coming face to face with the pelt of a now-extinct Salish woolly dog was an emotional experience for Jordan Wilson.

The curator from xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam Indian Band) attended an unveiling at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver as the ancestor was welcomed back to its home territories earlier this month.

The pelt is on loan from the Smithsonian institution, where it was in storage for more than a century. It will be at Museum of Anthropology until August of 2027. 

Belonging to a dog from Stó:lō territories known as Mutton, it’s the only known Salish woolly dog pelt in existence.

As the pelt was unveiled to its Salish relatives on Sept. 4, Wilson attended along with other Salish community members from Vancouver Island and the Fraser Valley.

“For me personally, I was caught off guard at the emotional quality of it,” Wilson told the Narwhal.

“Seeing this pelt in person, seeing its little paws and seeing its little nose, realizing that this was a living being that was alive 160 years ago.”

Renowned Musqueam weaver Debra Sparrow was there with her daughter and grandson.

“You watch as they unveil it, pieces of the wood come off, and then the containers open, and there he is. There’s a sense of welcome you feel instinctively,” she said.

“It’s historical that the woolly dog arrived back home.”

Once ubiquitous among Indigenous communities in the Pacific Northwest, Salish woolly dogs went extinct during the late 1800s, as settlers arrived on the coast. Through storytelling, oral history, literature and artwork, woolly dogs have remained a sacred part of Coast and Interior Salish culture. 

The pelt came to Vancouver from Seattle, where it was on loan from the Smithsonian and temporarily exhibited for the first time.

Indigenous people travelled from up and down the Salish Sea to spend time with the woolly dog pelt at MOA before it was open to be viewed by the public on September 4th.

“They were very important to every village, all through the territory of Salish people,” Sparrow said about the dogs. Their traditional territory spans from southwestern B.C., into Washington state and Oregon.

“People will come to feel connected to it. It’s amazing how one little pelt can bring all the people back together.”

Genetic makeup confirms Salish oral history

This specific dog, with Stó:lō roots from the Chilliwack area, belonged to an American naturalist George Gibbs, who named the dog “Mutton.” 

Because of specific storage requirements, the pelt is being hosted at the Museum of Anthropology on Musqueam territory at the request of Stó:lō leaders.

It’s a caretaking responsibility that museum curator Wilson takes seriously. He began working on the Pacific Northwest and contemporary Indigenous art exhibit, where the pelt is being shown, last year.

“This is the highlight of the work that I do … being able to help facilitate things like this,” he said.

“This specific breed dates back thousands of years,” he added. “That goes to show how important this breed was to our ancestors.”

Sparrow recalled that, as settlers arrived in British Columbia, “the first thing many of the European sailors said was that the people have these little dogs with them in their canoes.” 

Combined with mountain goat wool, Salish woolly dog fur was spun into a weaving fibre, used to make clothes, blankets, regalia and other textiles. 

The woolly relatives were fed a rich salmon and elk diet to keep their coats soft and shiny, and in exchange providing Salish communities with safety, companionship and fluffy white hair. 

But the deep connection between Salish people and the woolly dog was severed as the important animal went extinct.

Kwulasultun, Eliot White-Hill, an artist from Snuneymuxw First Nation, said he never heard about the Salish woolly dog while he was growing up.

Once he became an artist and started asking Elders in his community questions, knowledge and stories about them began resurfacing.

“It’s profoundly meaningful to have that woolly dog come back to this part of the world, to be able to reconnect with the communities that it came from,” he said. 

“These blankets are almost like currency to us. They’d be given away at potlaches and they were robes of nobility and protection, and there’s a very important spiritual aspect to them.”

He curated his own exhibit about Salish woolly dogs at the Field Museum in Chicago. They have one of the largest collections of Coast Salish materials outside of the Pacific Northwest. 

“Woolly dogs are so important to Coast Salish culture. They were at the centre of so many different artistic, cultural and economic systems that our ancestors had in place,” White-Hill said.

“Where I come from on Vancouver Island, we didn’t have sheep prior to contact. Mountain goats, another major source for fibre, were only on the mainland. It was expensive and hard to trade for that, so instead we had the woolly dogs.”

The dogs were often raised on small islands to avoid interbreeding with other dog breeds, and passed down through the matrilineal line in families.

These woolly dogs were genetically distinct from the European dog breeds settlers were familiar with. According to the book The Teachings of Mutton: A Coast Salish Woolly Dog, “very few dog breeds have any precolonial [ancient DNA]. An exception is the Chihuahua, which has two to three per cent precolonial DNA.” 

Mutton’s genetic ancestry has been analyzed by numerous specialists in Canada and the United States. Though he died more than a century ago, techniques exist to analyze ancient DNA, or aDNA, which is drawn from sources that lived long ago. 

“Mutton himself has 16 per cent European ancestry. This means he had one great-grandparent that was a European dog … The rest, or 84 per cent of his [ancient DNA], points to precolonial ancestors from thousands of years ago,” the book reads.

“That little being is not a canine, it’s its own entity,” Sparrow said. “It doesn’t belong to the canine world. People always want to compare European philosophies with ours, and it’s not.”

How the pelt, from a dog named Mutton, was found

The woolly relative’s journey home has been decades in the making. In 2002, historian Candace Wellman was undertaking archival research that would eventually lead her into asking a question with lasting impact for Indigenous nations situated along the Salish Sea.

“I was researching the life of Dr. Caleb Kennerly, who married an important Semiahmoo woman,” Wellman said, whose first book was about inter-marriages in the region.

She went to the Smithsonian Museum, where Kennerly had been a naturalist, and obtained photocopies of all his letters back to the museum.

“One night at 3 o’clock in the morning I woke up and realized that one of the things he had sent in was a woolly dog pelt specimen,” she said.

Aware of how important woolly dogs are to Coast Salish culture, and women in particular, Wellman wrote to the Smithsonian curator of mammals, who later confirmed the pelt was there, intact and in a drawer.

“I wrote and said, this is really important because the Coast Salish women alive today have never been able to see the hair that their great-great-grandmothers used to weave the beautiful white blankets,” she said. 

Wellman asked for a hair sample to show Coast Salish women on the West Coast. The museum took it to a committee and they agreed. 

Now, that sample is housed at the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham, Wash, where Wellman has resided for most of her life. 

Wellman explains the dog hair has never been displayed to the public, but has been used to authenticate items, such as a Coast Salish blanket woven with woolly dog fibre that is on display.

The woolly dog’s return to B.C. for the first time in more than a century is historic but bittersweet.

“I have really complicated feelings about the pelt, the name Mutton, and the whole story behind that dog,” White-Hill shared.“It’s really sad to me.”

It’s a sentiment shared by Sparrow. Reflecting on the woolly dog pelt, she said, “It makes me sad — happy that he’s here, but sad they’re non-existent now.”

While the woolly dog pelt is set to return to the Smithsonian next year, White-Hill hopes that it can eventually make its way back to its homelands permanently.

“We need to return this ancestor to its home so it can rest.”

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Twilight hangs over the Inlet Raider’s empty deck as it charges up the river. Its voyage has a single, cargo-free purpose: its crew was hired to find out whether the journey up the Taku River from Southeast Alaska past the B.C. border is possible.

If they succeed, this could be one of dozens of trips carrying construction supplies and infrastructure to the proposed New Polaris gold mine along the river, currently under review by the B.C. government and among its list of priority projects for expedited review.

The boat picks up speed, blasting up a passage nicknamed “the narrows” in honour of its thin, flute-shaped banks, which can host fierce, swirling currents. Its other concern lies underneath in braided river channels that can move at least annually to a new configuration, a common trait of glacial-fed rivers like this one. 

As the motor churns, the crew’s stream of banter is replaced by a tense silence punctuated by calls of encouragement as their barge follows a sonar-equipped motorboat guiding its journey up ahead.

“Three hours of boredom punctuated by 30 seconds of sheer terror,” says a joking voice off-screen, in a video posted to the captain’s Facebook page.

A few minutes later, the Inlet Raider makes it through.

New Polaris’s owner, Canagold Resources Ltd., acknowledges the transport challenges ahead. “We never said it’s easy,” Canagold’s chief executive officer, Catalin Kilofliski, tells The Narwhal in an interview. 

“But it’s doable.”

To avoid these precarious barge trips during operations, Canagold plans to transport its gold concentrate on cargo planes. It anticipates up to 15 flights a day, carrying a total of around 27,000 tonnes per year.

The goal is to capitalize on record-breaking gold prices by reopening New Polaris, a long-shuttered mine site on the Tulsequah River.

The project is among a select group featured in a federal prospectus document delivered to attendees of Canada’s recent investment summit in Toronto. This year, New Polaris was included in the federal government’s map of critical minerals projects, thanks to its potential to produce antimony — a heavy metal deemed “critical” by Canada for its use in a variety of applications from bullets to batteries. But Canagold’s feasibility study did not establish New Polaris’s antimony reserves and it does not include antimony in its projected revenues.

Meanwhile, B.C. has included New Polaris among its 35 priority major projects slated for expedited review.

In an emailed statement, the Environmental Assessment Office said New Polaris is on the list because of its “potential to make meaningful contributions to B.C.’s long-term economic growth” along with the other projects chosen.

“No project will be expedited at the expense of protecting the environment and communities or meeting our consultation obligations, which remain at the core of the [Environmental Assessment Office]’s mandate,” it added.

The company intends to create hundreds of direct jobs annually and provide around $500 million in federal and provincial tax revenue during its operations.

But some observers remain concerned that the mine’s potential risks, from water contamination to habitat loss, aren’t worth the financial benefits.

Environmental concerns with New Polaris

The Taku River watershed is one of the largest intact river systems on the Pacific Coast of North America, and one of the few remaining places where Pacific salmon populations are booming, meaning New Polaris’s riverside mine and tailings ponds naturally come with high stakes.

The mine sits around the riverbend from the also-dormant Tulsequah Chief mine site, which was owned by another company, where contamination has been seeping into the watershed for over 50 years.

Canagold has worked to distinguish New Polaris from the tarnished legacy of its next-door neighbour. The company has signed a collaborative engagement consent agreement with the Taku River Tlingit First Nation, whose territory extends across the mine site and surrounding regions on the Canadian side of the border. According to the nation, the agreement means it will have the final say on whether the project goes ahead. The nation did not respond to The Narwhal’s request for comment.

The company has altered its plans in response to concerns raised in its engagement with the public and with the Taku River Tlinigit. It no longer plans to process gold on site using cyanide, which, if spilled, can poison fish and watersheds. It’s also planning to dry out its tailings to reduce the risk of impacts and limit barge trips mostly to the construction phase. The barge trips will only happen in the high-water months, spring and summer, to reduce the risks of running aground — a change that means more flights and higher costs.

With gold prices above US$2,500 per ounce — a price reached for the first time in 2024 — the “projected cash flow and economics are outstanding,” according to a quote from Kilofliski on Canagold’s website.

But the company’s application hints at potential challenges ahead: the historic underground mine is leaching some levels of arsenic and antimony into the surrounding watershed, and rocks in the company’s largest targeted gold deposit appear capable of leaching more of the same. According to a report prepared for the company and included in its application, the mine’s proposed tailings facilities appear to be located within the flood zone of the Tulsequah glacier, which sends a massive deluge of water and sediment into the river below at least yearly. However, Kilofliski said in an email to The Narwhal that its facilities are “in a location that is naturally protected from the floods.”

According to a map in Canagold’s application, it appears New Polaris plans to put an airstrip atop part of a wetland and salmon spawning ground known as Flannigan Slough, although Kilofliski says it is located beside it.

These and many other issues worry Jill Weitz, intergovernmental affairs manager for the Central Council of the Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska.

“It’s this incredible, critical habitat for spawning and rearing of salmon,” she says, adding that the council questions if the mine is feasible given its transport challenges, and worries that, if it goes ahead, the project could “create irreparable damage to the watershed.” 

“We’re just not willing to risk it,” she says. 

Located just 13 kilometres upstream from the U.S. border, New Polaris’s barges will spend most of their travel time in U.S. waters. And any water contamination from the mine could also make its way south, including across the traditional territory of the Douglas Indian Association, which extends across the reaches of the Taku River. In a submission to the environmental assessment process, the association said it “strongly opposes” the mine “due to fears that a mining accident and subsequent mining pollution could devastate our salmon stocks.”

This year, B.C. made a legal amendment functionally removing its requirements to consult U.S. tribes on transboundary projects by stripping their previous status in environmental assessment processes. 

In an email, the Environmental Assessment Office noted that it will still “fulfill its constitutional obligations to consult with U.S. Tribes when there is a credible assertion of Indigenous Rights in Canada, and the potential for these rights to be impacted by a proposed project undergoing assessment.”

It added that the ministry has “considered and incorporated” feedback submitted by some U.S. Tribes to New Polaris’s application process.

Still, for many southeast Alaskans who have submitted letters of opposition to the company’s environmental assessment process, New Polaris presents an untenable threat.

Kilofliski says New Polaris’s environmental assessment application proves otherwise. 

 “The conclusion is that there are no material negative effects on the environment,” he says, adding the company has proven it will not require water treatment post-closure.

These comments seem to be contradicted by some parts of New Polaris’s environmental assessment application, including one section that notes: “The primary negative residual effect of groundwater quality will occur during post-closure.” 

“This is experts talking about scientific stuff,” he says when asked why the application appeared to have included a different analysis than his own. When asked again about incongruities between his comments and the application in a follow-up email, Kilofliski wrote that the application does identify a risk of metal leaching. “If anything I said informally differs from the application, please treat the application as correct.”

The Taku River watershed

From space, the Taku and its tributary, the Tulsequah, look like winding ribbons coloured steely grey and cotton-candy-blue — a product of the steady stream of silt and minerals delivered by the churn of glaciers over the mountaintops above. 

Their combined watershed forms a mecca for Pacific salmon that return to its waters each year. “I don’t know if there’s any place like it in western North America in terms of being a salmon stronghold and being so intact,” Jonathan Moore, an aquatic ecologist and lead at Simon Fraser University’s Salmon Watersheds Lab, says. Though the majority of B.C.’s salmon stocks are declining, the fate of salmon in the Taku watershed is looking up. Moore and his colleagues have mapped out salmon’s likely escape route as watersheds warm down south, and they predict they’ll seek refuge in the Taku’s glacial waters. 

But despite its remoteness, the region is no stranger to industry. First staked in the early 1900s, what’s now the New Polaris site was mined for gold between 1937 and 1951. It shut down after a departing barge sank in the midst of a storm. That year, the Tulsequah Chief mine opened up across the river, building a temporary bridge to carry its ore to New Polaris’s mills. After Tulsequah shut down just six years later, the New Polaris site sat dormant for decades.

Canagold’s predecessor, Canarc Resources Corp., acquired the property in 1988, and the company slowly dabbled in exploration work until 2022. That’s when its former founder and chair was ousted in a a vote led by a Swiss-based investment company, Sun Valley Investments, which is now the company’s largest shareholder. Kilofliski, Canagold’s CEO between 2014 and 2018, was reappointed and soon announced the company’s intentions in a press release.

“The time has come to take New Polaris across the finish line,” he said, adding that with the company’s “refocused ownership,” its board would expedite the project “to reward our company’s shareholders.”

A history of water concerns

Next door to New Polaris, the Tulsequah Chief mine continues to leach orange-crush-tinged effluent into the river downstream. Its decades-long pollution has galvanized a bipartisan uprising of Southeast Alaskans concerned B.C.’s government could allow another Tulsequah Chief to occur. 

In a January interview with the Alaska Beacon, Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski said B.C.’s efforts to clean up pollution at Tulsequah Chief had been “a complete failure.”

“They know that for projects going forward, they’re kind of stained by the operation there,” she added. 

Kilofliski says such conflations are misguided. “They associate our project with the other project, the Tulsequah Chief,” he says. “In our rocks, we do not have the potential for acid drainage like you see on the other side.”

Despite their close proximity, New Polaris and the Tulsequah Chief come from distinct types of ore deposits — Tulsequah Chief’s ocean-formed sulphide rocks are more readily associated with acid mine drainage, whereas New Polaris’s rocks are generally not.

That may have exceptions: a recent report commissioned by the company has noted some rocks contain potentially acid-generating properties, potentially including some of the historic waste carried over from the Tulsequah Chief mine, though some tests are still ongoing.

And even without the ingredients to leach acid, some rocks contain metals that can escape into waterbodies anyway. Heavy metals arsenic and antimony are frequent culprits of this kind of non-acidic leaching, and New Polaris’s targeted rocks have lots of both.

According to a previous report commissioned by the company and cited in its environmental assessment application, 15 samples from the mineral vein New Polaris plans to target had “high potential” to leach metals, particularly arsenic and antimony, due to the types of rocks present.

Non-acidic leaching has caused damage in B.C. before: New Polaris’s deposits are similar to those of the Bralorne gold mine near Lillooet, where seepage from the flooded mine includes levels of arsenic that far exceed Canadian effluent regulations.

In an email to The Narwhal, Kilofliski said: “I do not know the particulars of the Bralorne gold mine seepage issues but it is probable, based on the nature of these kinds of geological deposits, that the concerns would be analogous.” He elaborated, adding New Polaris is “a modern mine” which will leverage new science and technology for water management and ecological health.

“At Canagold we are focused on learning from the lessons of the past and building a modern mining project that provides demonstrable benefits to the Taku River Tlingit First Nation, the region and Canada’s economy,” he added. 

To help avoid the risk of metal leaching, the company plans to export a partially processed product called gold concentrate, which can include impurities like arsenic and antimony that would get smelted out elsewhere. 

“We take the antimony, we take the sulphur, we take the arsenic,” he told The Narwhal. “We recover 90-plus per cent of those metals into the concentrate.”

The remaining ten-or-so per cent of the metals and other materials leftover would be thickened and deposited into a tailings pond with an impermeable covering on top, Kilofliski says, helping to keep it isolated from the environment. During the operational phase, the mine plans to run a water treatment system, but Kilofliski tells The Narwhal he is confident the mine’s concentrate-extraction approach will avoid the need for long-term water treatment.

“We have demonstrated in the environmental assessment that no water treatment is required post-closure,” he says.

In a follow-up email, Kilofliski added the application “assesses a range of scenarios, including conservative cases where water treatment after closure could be needed.” If it is, “Canagold would be responsible for providing it until we are able to demonstrate that passive treatment (that is without active/chemical water treatment technologies) is able to manage the long-term water quality requirements,” he added.

New Polaris’s environmental assessment application suggests metal leaching may not be easily contained: historic contamination has already travelled below the site in a large plume of metals that is projected to grow if New Polaris proceeds. Leaching can also escape from the mine shaft, as it has from the historic mine portal at New Polaris. Groundwater seeping from the existing mine site contains arsenic and antimony above B.C.’s water quality guidelines, and is flowing directly into the salmon-bearing Whitewater Creek, according to the application, which added seepage may grow post-closure. Recent samples from the mine’s targeted deposits and waste rock reflected an extremely high concentration of arsenic and antimony — achieving the highest possible level on a 6-point scale for mineral concentration. 

This leaching risk is cited in parts of New Polaris’s environmental assessment application as a reason that water treatment may be required post-closure. 

In his email to The Narwhal, Kilofliski said “water was tested as part of mine dewatering programs for effects to fish, and the water was not determined to be acutely toxic, despite high levels of arsenic.”

What’s next for New Polaris?

September marks a major milestone in Canagold’s decades-long pursuit to mine New Polaris. By the end of the month, the company will receive its final guidance from the province’s environmental assessment office on how it could strengthen a revised application, which, once submitted, will be final. In meeting notes discussing the company’s application, B.C.’s environmental assessment office noted “significant gaps” in the company’s application, including “a notable lack of groundwater information,” a lack of analysis about the potential impacts of glacial floods and missing information about the site’s potential to leach metals. The Ministry of Environment noted the company’s hydrological information appeared to reflect “draft documents rather than final product.”

The office has informed Canagold that submitting another application “where significant issues remain unresolved” would “lead to a high level of uncertainty on the potential effects of the project.” 

Kilofliski suggests these kinds of issues are standard for projects like this. “They are very normal,” he says, adding that Canagold plans to fill any remaining gaps before it submits its final application, adding in a later email that the company has “continued to collect samples since the submission of the application, and we are updating our water modelling.”

But some uncertainties could remain during the assessment process by design: under B.C.’s mining laws, key aspects of New Polaris’s plans, including how it plans to manage leaching on site, how it will treat water and how it plans to deal with contaminants post-closure, would be determined in the permitting stage after the company receives its environmental assessment. 

Through the assessment and later permitting stages, Kilofliski remains confident that Canagold will establish its case. “We have to demonstrate,” he says, “because our word doesn’t mean anything.” 

“We have to prove, we have to show, and we have to test. … This is how it’s done.”

Updated on Sept. 18, 2026, at 8:52 a.m. PT: This story has been updated with Jill Weitz’s current professional title of intergovernmental affairs manager for the Central Council of the Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, as it has changed since the story was written.

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On a grassy slope in Kanaka Bar, a herd of goats frolic and play. But this isn’t a farm or a petting zoo — it’s an innovative wildfire mitigation effort from the First Nation.

Some of the goats loudly bleat as they chow down on invasive species and overgrown brush. 

“In the last five years, Kanaka community has been experiencing devastation with fire,” Pauline Michell told The Narwhal.

That includes two evacuations due to wildfires, as well as floods and mudslides that have closed roads and cut off her community from the world. And in Kanaka Bar, there is no fire truck or fire hall. “Kanaka has solely been on its own in regards to fire,” said Michell.

Located in Nlaka’pamux territory, 20 kilometres south of Lytton, Kanaka Bar Indian Band also goes by T’eqt’ aqtn’mux, “the crossing place people.” 

In 2021, the Lytton Creek wildfire devastated the area, evacuating numerous First Nations for years, while burning structures and homes to the ground. 

Later that year, an atmospheric river raged through the Fraser and Thompson Rivers, washing out roads and cutting people off from leaving Kanaka Bar.

According to a new report from the office of the B.C. human rights commissioner, between 2000 and 2024, First Nation reserves accounted for 36 of 37 communities where at least half of the total land area was burned by wildfire, with the only non-reserve community being Lytton.

Further, First Nation reserves in B.C. are four times more likely to be impacted by wildfire than non-reserve communities. 

This prompted Michell, an elected councillor in her community, to take a proactive approach to the wildfire season. 

Since late July, a herd of goats have been eating their way through the Kanaka Bar Indian Band, targeting areas with built up fuel and brush that would burn up in a fire. 

About 80 goats have been clocking in this summer, while a few goats like Dandelion and Cuddley are part of a rebel club in their own separate enclosure.

“This is a trial for Kanaka, to look at fuel management in this way,” said Michell. 

“Hearing about these goats being able to do this sounded really intriguing and interesting,” she added.

The idea came by accident, after an area grazed by sheep acted as a fire stop during a wildfire three years prior.

“Back in 2023, the Kookipi Creek fire came through … We had been grazing the sheep that we had out in this back area, and when that fire came through, it actually came pretty much all the way down to community, and then it stopped where the sheep had been grazing,” Emma Bryce told The Narwhal.

She recalled thinking, “This is really cool, we just kind of made our own fire break without really intending to.”

Bryce has been the nation’s food self-sufficiency lead since 2022, and after the sheep experience, started researching different animals to graze in the community.

“In conversations with chief and council, I brought it up and was like, ‘What if we used goats to do wildfire risk reduction?’ They were like, ‘okay, let’s do it.’” 

“This goat grazing project has been a passion project of mine for the last couple of years,” Bryce said, after she took the green light from Kanaka and ran with it. That’s when she met Bruce Bradley, who does contract work across B.C. with his herd of goats. 

Based on Vancouver Island, it took three trips by ferry to bring his herd to the mainland and then to Kanaka Bar this summer. But the Ainslie Creek and Brunswick Creek wildfires impacted initial operations back in July. 

As of Sept. 11, those wildfires remained burning 31 kilometres down the road from Kanaka Bar, though they  are now contained. Once it was safe, the goats got to work. 

Goat grazing benefits for biodiversity and wildfire

The goats have grazed about 12 hectares of ground since arriving in the community earlier this summer.

“We’re trying to get in all the nooks and crannies, especially around the houses and around the roads, the important spaces to make them more defensible and resilient to fire,” Bradley told the Narwhal.

On top of reducing wildfire risk, “the ecological benefits are huge because the goats are trampling, they’re fertilizing … and they’re especially effective for invasive weeds.”

“We’ve tackled this year quite a bit of Canadian thistle, Himalayan blackberry and Scotch broom.” 

Bradley’s been deploying his fire-mitigating goats since 2018, through his company BC Timber Goats.

“It’s a very unique tool, and I think a powerful tool to get wildfire risk reduction benefits and silviculture benefits on the same site, at the same time,” he said. 

According to the B.C. government, silviculture is “the thoughtful, deliberate and balanced management of forests and surrounding local ecosystems” that encourages tree diversity to increase resilience against threats like pests, climate change and disturbances.

The idea to start a goat grazing business came from Bradley’s experience in farming.

“I grew up on a farm that had lots of weed control issues. I’d always spray and mow, and we’d break the mowers. I’d get sick with the spray and so I thought, there’s got to be a better way,” he said.

Bradley said that in areas of the farm sprayed with pesticides, “everything would just turn brown, and half the time it would burn in wildfire in the summer.” 

Goat grazing achieves similar outcomes as pesticide use but is much healthier for the environment.

According to the University of Calgary, which piloted a goat-grazing project at their main campus last year, “targeted grazing is a proven land-management technique that uses livestock to naturally control vegetation growth. Unlike herbicides, which can have a lasting environmental impact, goats provide a natural way to reduce unwanted plant growth while encouraging native vegetation to thrive.”

Animals grazing through southern Interior communities has become less common with wildlife populations declining.

“Using goats actually mimics what you would have typically seen if you had large herds of elk moving through. … Goats mimic a natural system that this landscape would have evolved with already,” Bryce said.

An addition to the FireSmart toolbox 

Over the summer, the goats have been working alongside Kanaka Bar’s fuel management crew.

As the FireSmart team gathers fuel and brush into a pile, the goats eat until it’s gone. It’s a win-win situation: feeding the goats and disposing of the community’s built-up fuel.

“I don’t think there’s ever going to be a scenario where we don’t need people out on the ground, going out and doing the bigger fuel management,” Bryce said, adding goat grazing complements other fuel management strategies. 

“They can go in and defoliate, which is great to have more visibility when you’re out there working in really dense brush,” she said. 

Bryce and Bradley estimate the goats haven eaten 0.25 hectares of ground each day. They’re scheduled to wrap up their work on Sept. 21.

“The goats are going in and doing a really efficient job at something that is really challenging to do with just human crews alone,” she said. 

When the project was first brought forward to the community, residents were interested in learning more about it, but not exactly excited about goats – that quickly changed.

“Now it’s to the point where members want a couple of goats to tackle the brushes in their yard as well, so that’s really good,” said Michell.    

“When wildfire comes to Kanaka, we’ll be more prepared.”

Updated on Sept. 16, 2026, at 11:11 a.m. PT: This story has been updated to correct the dates that the goats are in Kanaka Bar.

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How can you tell when a Crown corporation is fulfilling its obligations and goals?

For BC Hydro, one place to start is the provincial utility’s annual service plan report. Released every year, usually in late summer, the document outlines the utility’s finances and progress toward specific goals and objectives. Within its pages, phrases like “meet growing customer demand” are examined through performance metrics, such as whether it has achieved the goal of freeing up 350 gigawatt hours through energy efficiency and conservation programs (for 2025-26, the answer was yes, plus an extra 111 gigawatt hours).

Did BC Hydro cut greenhouse gas emissions from its operations by 44 per cent? Page 12 of the most recent report confirms the Crown corporation did even better, reducing its emissions by 56 per cent (mostly because the natural gas-powered Fort Nelson generating station ran less often than expected).

Among all these straightforward answers, one important piece of information is harder to find. Was all of the power generated or bought by BC Hydro in the past year clean electricity?

BC Hydro has been publicly reporting its achievements related to the province’s climate targets in its annual service plan report for fifteen years. Currently, the clean electricity standard requires all electricity BC Hydro sells in the province or exports to other markets come from low-emissions sources. By 2030, the provincial government has directed the Crown corporation to completely phase out fossil-fuel generated electricity.

But BC Hydro’s 2025-26 annual report does not mention the clean electricity standard at all. 

In 2024-25, BC Hydro met that objective, according to that year’s annual report. But its most recent report lacks that declaration, as former BC Utilities Commissioner Richard Mason recently noticed.

“The loss of transparency is a problem; we should be told whether the provincially-owned utility is meeting these objectives,” Mason wrote in a post on his website, Just and Reasonable. BC Hydro has also removed the clean electricity standard from the list of corporate objectives in its most recent service plan, he noted.

In a statement, BC Hydro told The Narwhal it whittled the performance measures in its service plan from 28 to 12, “focusing on key strategic priorities and aligning with benchmarking practices used by comparable North American utilities.”

Going forward, the statement said information about BC Hydro’s achievement of the clean electricity standard will be published in its annual sustainability report published in August. In 2026, BC Hydro fell just short of the standard at 99 per cent, according to the report.

Clean electricity metrics should be ‘front and centre’ in BC Hydro’s plan: experts

Mason argues the clean electricity standard performance metric should be part of BC Hydro’s main annual report. 

“I believe it has the most value in an annual report because you can put the climate reporting in context with everything else that BC Hydro is doing,” he told The Narwhal in an interview.

BC Hydro publicly communicates about its activities, achievements and finances across several reports, some of which are updated yearly, including the sustainability and annual reports. Others, like the service plan and integrated resource plan, publish less frequently. In addition, the utility releases unscheduled updates and quarterly financials. 

Anyone interested in deeply understanding what BC Hydro is up to and how it is fulfilling its obligations has to wade through a lot of information, noted Mark Zacharias, an adjunct professor in the public administration school at the University of Victoria.

“BC Hydro has a legal requirement to supply 100 per cent clean electricity by 2030,” Zacharias, a former executive director of Clean Energy Canada, told The Narwhal. “With growing industrial loads, an electrifying economy and a changing climate, how BC Hydro will meet this requirement is an important conversation that should be front and centre in the annual service plan.”

There are other reasons to wonder about the ongoing importance of BC Hydro’s clean electricity commitments. Earlier this year, the Crown corporation submitted an argument to the BC Utilities commission that its obligations under the Clean Energy Act, which requires it to generate and purchase enough energy to meet demand, trumps the direction to phase out fossil fuels by 2030. 

Weeks after BC Hydro’s submission, Minister of Energy and Climate Solutions Adrian Dix announced BC Hydro’s intent to purchase Island Generation, a natural gas-powered plant in Campbell River. Natural gas is largely made up of methane, a fossil fuel that traps heat in the atmosphere and drives climate change. 

To Green MLA Jeremy Valeriote, BC Hydro appears to be “making up for lost time in terms of not having anticipated demand,” which is projected to rise 20 per cent by 2030 and 50 per cent 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.

“Suddenly, that’s used to justify any number of non-clean electrical sources,” Valeriote said.

He described the removal of the clean electricity standard reporting from BC Hydro’s annual report as disheartening.

“It’s the slow whittling away of some of the principles that were being applied,” he added.

Sourcing more electricity does seem to have become a top priority for BC Hydro, Mason said, partly as a way to secure economic growth.

“Growing electricity production in the province is a good thing,” he said. “I suspect, however, they’ve realized they can’t do it all with clean electricity.”

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It was 6 a.m. when Qutxulenuhw Tim Kulchyski got the call.

On the phone was Elder Siilh’na’mut Ken Elliott, a fellow member of Cowichan Tribes. Elliott had been working in a place known as Fish Gut Alley, named after the abundant salmon that spawned and then decayed there. It’s a naturalized wetland spread out over nearly four hectares of Duncan, B.C., within Rotary and McAdam Parks, just north of the Cowichan River on Vancouver Island. It was June 2007, and he was restoring the natural habitat around the city’s sewage lagoons — essentially, large pond-like areas that local wastewater flows into.

That morning, Elliott, a Quw’utsun Knowledge Keeper and expert on native plants, had been taking inventory along Fish Gut Alley. As he moved downstream, a strange cacophony grew louder and louder.

“Crows, ravens, kingfishers — just an incredibly large amount of bird activity. Everyone was squawking and making a lot of noise,” he said.

Following the sounds, Elliott came across a scene that was “a blow to the gut,” he said. 

From bank to bank the river was filled with thousands of juvenile coho salmon on their sides, swimming in circles, mouths wide, gasping at the surface. Birds had descended on the area to feast on the dead and dying fish.

Elliott called Kulchyski, a biologist, and told him to get down to the river quickly.

Once he arrived, the two men began looking for the cause of the mass casualty event. “We ran up and down the stream looking for something that may have poisoned them, but we couldn’t find any gasoline or anything like that,” Elliott said.

Before leaving to meet Elliott, Kulchyski had phoned Willi Aquino, a local fishery officer with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, who soon joined them at the river.

“You could see where the fish had died,” recalled Aquino. “It was very close to this storm drain. So, it’s like, ‘OK, something’s coming out of there.’ ”

There had recently been significant rainfall in the area, Elliott recalled. At first, he thought maybe one of the local businesses had dumped something toxic into the storm drain system, which the rain could have washed into the river. Later that day he drove around to ask at dry cleaners, car washes and gas stations, but he found no leads.

Around the same time that Kulchyski, Elliott and Aquino were scratching their heads over the dead coho on Vancouver Island, marine researchers and streamkeepers in Washington state were investigating a similar phenomenon in their own neck of the woods: for decades, they had noticed dramatic die-offs of coho salmon in urban areas, close to roadways, but couldn’t figure out the cause. It wasn’t until 2020 that the Washington researchers hit on a major discovery — one that not only connected the dots for Kulchyski but solved an environmental mystery that had been puzzling scientists for decades.

The culprit: a highly toxic chemical compound called 6PPD-quinone. It comes from the breakdown of a compound called 6PPD, a preservative added to car tires to prevent the rubber from cracking as a result of ozone in the air.

Anti-ozonants like 6PPD came into widespread use in the 1960s so the rubber of car tires wouldn’t crack and wear down so fast. These days, each time a car is driven, its tires shed tiny amounts of 6PPD-infused rubber onto the roads. When it rains, the particles wash into nearby fish habitat, where UV exposure causes it to break down into 6PPD-Q, which can be lethal even in tiny amounts.

Kulchyski had started to hear “murmurs” in the scientific community about a compound that was killing coho salmon just as COVID-19 restrictions began to spread across the world.

Now, after years of research and testing in the area, he has no doubt this was what killed the salmon in Fish Gut Alley. And he’s on a mission to help the world understand the colossal problem 6PPD-Q presents, and how First Nations are on the front lines of dealing with it.

The salmon mystery solved

To understand how 6PPD-Q was discovered, one needs to travel back to the central California coast during the 1990s, when a host of different challenges meant coho salmon were driven nearly to extinction. By 2005, they had been classified as an endangered species in the United States. 

This led to an influx of resources aimed at habitat restoration in urban streams throughout the Pacific Northwest. And more boots on the ground meant more scrutiny, according to aquatic toxicologist Jenifer McIntyre. She’s an associate professor at Washington State University and researches Seattle-area streams in the Puget Sound. 

As researchers tromped around in streams, squinting into turbid waters watching, waiting, McIntyre and others began to notice something odd: large numbers of dead coho piled up along the sides of creeks that were still filled with eggs. This meant they had died before getting a chance to spawn.

“If you’re used to salmon and salmon fisheries, then you’re not surprised by dead fish in the fall, but the fact that they haven’t spawned is like … ‘Oh,’ ” McIntyre said.

Across seven years of field studies, a pattern emerged. The dead salmon were primarily coho, in the most urbanized areas of the Puget Sound. The deaths typically happened during or just after heavy rains, and as they died the fish exhibited a strange, specific behaviour: swimming in circles at the surface of the water, mouths gaping, spiralling and gasping. And the phenomenon was widespread: about 40 per cent of the Puget Sound area was affected and between 40 to 90 per cent of those salmon were dying before they spawned, within hours of being exposed. 

The weight of the evidence at this time suggested their deaths were somehow being caused by stormwater runoff, McIntyre said.

At first, researchers faced a long list of potential causes. Was it pesticides from a nearby golf course, or low oxygen? Could it be parasites? As they dug in and began to eliminate each of these factors, they slowly narrowed in on a possible cause. 

Cars. 

But there were so many chemicals associated with cars. The first year they began running tests on salmon, in 2016, McIntyre figured they only had the capacity to run tests on two things, and decided to look into car tires and exhaust particles. But it eventually proved to be too much to do two things, so they decided to focus on car tires.

When her team passed water through a mulch of worn tire particles to make a solution, it killed all of the coho salmon tested in their lab. That’s when they knew they were onto something, she said, though at first they didn’t know exactly what.

“Something about stormwater — okay. Something about roadway runoff — all right. Something about tires,” McIntyre recalled. “That’s when Ed joined the picture.”

Ed Kolodziej, a water and ecosystem health researcher and professor at the University of Washington, brought in critical chemistry expertise and a dream team of biologists and chemists. Assembled from government departments and universities from across the Pacific Northwest, they set to work trying to figure out what it was in the tires that was killing the fish.

“Out of the hundreds to thousands of chemicals that we were detecting in these samples, there were 57 chemicals that were always present when the coho salmon died, so we started to identify them,” Kolodziej said.

Over time, the list of chemicals got smaller and smaller until they managed to identify the composition of what they thought was the culprit, but there was one problem: it didn’t correspond to any known tire ingredients, McIntyre said.

An environmental chemist on the team named Zhenyu Tian noticed that the carbon and nitrogen in the molecule of their mystery chemical matched some of those on the tire list, though it differed in other ways.

Then Tian had a lightbulb moment: what if they were searching for a chemical that transformed into something else once it entered into the environment and broke down?

In the mountains of research materials, Tian found an old industrial rubber paper from 1983 that talked about a chemical added to tires called 6PPD. When it was ozonated — exposed to air and sunlight — the paper stated that it changed into the exact chemical formula they were searching for: 6PPD-quinone.

To confirm their theory, the scientists bought some 6PPD and tested it on the salmon in their lab. They died, showing the same characteristic twisting and gasping behaviours that had been seen in wild salmon.

The group’s evidence was compiled into a groundbreaking paper published in the journal Science at the end of 2020. It was a sensation in the scientific community, in part because it finally offered an explanation for a phenomenon that wasn’t new, and in part because it sounded an alarm over how toxic and widespread 6PPD-Q is.

One of its most remarkable — and alarming — features is just how little it takes to kill coho salmon. As one researcher put it, the equivalent of a grain of rice in an Olympic-sized swimming pool is enough to make the water lethal.

And it’s not just fish that have been exposed. A recent study out of China shows that 6PPD-Q has been detected in human urine and breast milk, though it’s not yet clear what effect, if any, it has on humans or other mammals. Researchers are also finding it not just in water but in air, dust and snow — basically everywhere there are tires.

“It is among the most toxic chemicals that we know of for aquatic life,” McIntyre said. “We reasoned that you would expect to find this chemical anywhere where tire particles were getting into the water.”

But the researchers still had questions to answer. Why were certain fish species, such as coho and coastal cutthroat trout, so uniquely sensitive to 6PPD-Q? How does it kill them? And, perhaps most important, how can its risks be contained? 

Finding 6PPD-Q hotspots

In February 2026, about 165 people attended the third and final Protecting Salmon From Tire Wear Toxicants workshop in downtown Nanaimo. 

Workshop presentations ranged from practical to dizzyingly technical, and represented an unusual cross-collaboration across disciplines, all focused on solving the same problem.

“If everyone’s a silo, we’re all probably trying to look for the same answers to the same questions, and you’ll get it from many different places, but it’ll happen a lot faster if you’re talking to people,” said Angelina Jaeger, a researcher with Vancouver Island University’s Centre for Health & Environmental Mass Spectrometry (CHEMS), one of the groups that organized the workshop series. “That’s what science should be.”

Like many researchers at the workshop, Jaeger is focused on finding solutions. One problem her team decided to focus on was implementing widespread 6PPD-Q testing in local streams and creeks.

It all started with that seminal 2020 Science paper, said Erik Krogh, a chemistry professor and co-director of Vancouver Island University’s CHEMS lab. Though he read it with a sense of dread, Krogh immediately saw a use for the technology his team had been working on for more than a decade, which would make it “faster, better and cheaper” to test water samples.

Already developed as a way to test for carcinogens in oilsands process water, the test dips a membrane into a water sample and, using a repurposed 3D printer to mix it around, it pulls out the chemical and sends it to be measured. Within a few months, they had repurposed this technology to mass-test for 6PPD-Q. 

Soon, researchers were able to process up to 100 samples a day and get results within minutes.

With hundreds of volunteers taking samples in waterways across Vancouver Island, over the last three years their lab has gathered what Krogh believes is the single largest dataset of 6PPD-Q samples in the world.

When Kulchyski heard about the team’s goal of finding 6PPD-Q “hotspots” on Vancouver Island, he put Fish Gut Alley onto their radar.

Kulchyski and the researchers wanted to understand what was going on in the area, past and present. Since their bleak early-morning discovery in June 2007, Kulchyski, Elliott and Aquino had witnessed other, similar fish kills in the area. At times, researchers say they can recognize urban stormwater that likely contains 6PPD-Q, visible as a cloudy sediment or sometimes an oily sheen. 

“To us it’s like a horror film, because you just see this big dark cloud, and then six or seven or eight thousand fish are dead,” said Kulchyski. 

Initially, everyone involved in the original Fish Gut Alley incident thought low oxygen levels must have been the culprit, and Elliott said he is still convinced that’s the case.

In this case, stormwater sits in a reservoir before being pumped out into the environment and bacteria end up growing in there and consuming the oxygen, and then when it is released it can kill the juvenile salmon, Elliott said.

But Aquino ran on-site tests at the time, and though oxygen levels were low, she said in her estimation they weren’t low enough to kill the fish. She also took a gasping, dying fish out to the Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo to run tests, but nothing came of it.

“We could never really figure it out,” she said. “There was no real smoking gun.”

But in March of 2024, the researchers at Vancouver Island University finally found a clue that connected everything. 

After several days of rain, a stormwater sample taken in the morning at Fish Gut Alley measured levels of 6PPD-Q at hundreds of nanograms per litre, far beyond the concentration that had killed coho in the lab.

“That concentration is certainly higher than most,” Jaeger said. And it’s not the only sample in the area that has tested well above what is safe. As a result, the team designated Fish Gut Alley a priority site and installed an automated collector there last summer to take samples every hour during rain events.

“It’s a great example where we’ve identified a hotspot, and so now we can work to solve it,” Krogh said. Urban streams can have dozens of storm drain outfalls, which means measuring stormwater for 6PPD-Q levels can be a huge task, he said. “Where do you start? Can we fix them all? I mean, that’s overwhelming. Let’s find which ones are problematic, and let’s address them.”

Can it be stopped?

Because 6PPD-Q is hydrophobic, like oil, it tends to stick not only to the test membranes used by the university researchers, but also to soil. And it turns out this is an important part of how the chemical might be mitigated.

Tests being run by researchers at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver show an approximate 90 per cent removal of 6PPD-Q from stormwater when they run it through “rain gardens.” These are green areas near roads that filter runoff through soil and plant roots before re-entering the environment. Krogh is currently working with his research partners on three rain gardens planned for various locations around Vancouver Island, and a fourth is already under construction in Langford, just outside of Victoria.

Promising results have also come from using filters made from coconut husks and biochar — a carbon-rich, charcoal-like substance made from dried plant waste.

At Washington State University, when roadway runoff went through a bioretention system made from 18 inches of sand and compost, it prevented salmon deaths for the entire 13 years the study ran, McIntyre said.

The upside of the whole thing is that researchers already know so much more about the problem now than they did even two or three years ago, Krogh said. For example, their team recently found that even when fresh water is repeatedly run through collected tire sediment samples, it doesn’t seem to dilute the concentration of 6PPD-Q. This means that when tire particles are sitting at the side of a creek, they remain a long-term contamination source despite repeated rains.

“It’s not just one and done. So we really have to deal with the particles and make sure that we handle those carefully, so that we’re not putting them somewhere else in the ecosystem or in the watershed and then they become a source somewhere else.”  

Krogh maintains a cautious sense of optimism that the problem is “solvable.” However, hurdles still exist. Regulating the high volume of 6PPD-Q in the environment is difficult, and finding an alternative chemical with the same properties, but less harmful, is also tricky.

The Canadian government included 6PPD and 6PPD-Q on a priority list for assessment starting in the winter of 2025. This is a step towards the chemical’s possible regulation, under the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act.

However, the Tire and Rubber Association of Canada (TRAC) tried to delay a potential assessment in 2024 to see what regulation happened in the U.S. first, according to documents obtained by The Narwhal through a freedom of information request.   

Governments should not prematurely restrict the use of 6PPD as it could “have enormous public safety and economic consequences,” wrote association president Carol Hochu to then-environment and climate change minister Steven Guilbeault, in an April 1, 2024 letter.

The association believes a deferral of regulation is still the best approach, given the “extensive regulatory activity” underway in the U.S., which includes a search for safe alternatives to 6PPD, communications manager Michal Majernik told The Narwhal by email.

Potential alternatives to 6PPD are being explored by the U.S. Tire Manufacturers Association, which releases a yearly analysis on its findings.

In response to the hurdles, researchers also published a paper in the scientific journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters in the summer of 2025, outlining what an international regulatory framework for 6PPD-Q might look like. It also highlighted some of the broader political issues at play.

For example, vehicle pollution disproportionately impacts “under-resourced and underserved communities, who tend to live closer to traffic.” The paper notes it also affects food sources for Indigenous Peoples, and describes this higher level of tire chemical exposure as an act of “environmental injustice.”

A warning for salmon

Kulchyski caught his first fish at eight years old — a coho salmon, with a spear he made himself. He gave it to his Elders, because that’s what you do when you catch your first fish, he said. It’s a cultural practice and a full-circle philosophy of generational caretaking.

“If you look after your family, when you become an Elder, then your family will look after you,” he said. “If we don’t look after them, it’s a sign that we’re not looking after ourselves. And so if we look after salmon, not only are they healthy and happy, they return and nourish us. It’s a pretty simple system.” 

He caught the coho in Fish Gut Alley, when historical runs of salmon were once so abundant the area was named after the mounds of decaying salmon that died there after spawning. That’s how it was when he was a kid, Kulchyski remembers. But in the decades since, things have changed.

In the broader Cowichan River system, coho numbers have shown a steady decline of more than 90 per cent since the 1970s, though they’ve rebounded somewhat in the last five years. 

“How we’ve treated the landscape, how we’ve treated the land, the dyking and all these other issues, have really pushed almost every pressure that there is that you can exert on fish and fish habitat on this one little stretch,” he said.

A verdant gem hidden in plain sight, Fish Gut Alley is nestled into a suburban neighbourhood in Duncan, and most of the dog walkers and joggers that use its wide gravel trails nearby are likely unaware they’re only steps away from crucial juvenile salmon rearing and spawning habitat.

Though unremarkable to the untrained eye, the area’s shallow protected pools, fallen logs and slow-moving streams are ideal for juvenile coho to hang out in and get strong before heading out to the ocean, Kulchyski said.

It’s hard to get around the negative mindset that things are hopeless, that everything could crash and salmon could just stop existing, Kulchyski said. But for him, giving up is simply not an option.

“That doesn’t exist in our mental scenario of the world. It’s kind of like saying, ‘Hey, you know what? You’re gonna lose one of your children,’ ” he said. “I don’t think so.”

Though 6PPD-Q is not the only problem facing salmon in the area, he views it as something that could  change the way people think about environmental protections, “sort of a stepping stone to introducing us into a new thought process and a new methodology that allows us to do things differently, treat these systems differently, think of fish differently,” he said.

At present, Kulchyski is working with university researchers and the City of Duncan to look at mitigating 6PPD-Q at source, by targeting the stormwater gathered from nearby streets that is held in reservoirs before flowing into salmon habitat.

“We are treating our water so poorly, and not looking after all the issues we bring forward. On all of the bridges and all of the highways, there’s 6PPD-Q coming in everywhere,” he said.

“I certainly don’t know all of the solutions, but I know if we actually start incorporating these concerns and these issues in building new bridges and building new treatment systems, it will immediately make a huge difference.”

On-the-ground reporting for this story was made possible with support from Carleton University’s Leonard Shifrin and Louise Dulude Canadian Social Policy Emerging Reporter Fund. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, no foundation or outside organization has editorial input into our stories.

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.

Sherry McIntyre lives an hour’s drive away from the nearest grocery store. Between gas prices, vehicle maintenance and rising grocery costs, the bills add up quickly. 

“Bringing all that food back is also a challenge. You need coolers,” McIntyre told The Narwhal. 

She’s an elected councillor from the Skuppah Indian Band, located two kilometres south of Lytton, B.C.

Forgetting your standard grocery bag will cost you a few dollars, while purchasing a cooler or thermal storage bag to properly store cold foods during long drives will cost you at least $20 during the summer months.

It’s one small way her remote community and others in the southern Interior experience inequities accessing food, while larger disasters have cut the community off from grocery store access completely.

But long before grocery stores existed in B.C., First Nations harvested and preserved salmon during summer fish camps, creating food security throughout the winter months.

Today, accessing wild salmon is more challenging, contributing to food insecurity and an overall disconnect from traditional food. But it’s also more important than ever.

McIntyre grew up fishing the country’s largest salmon run with her father and says that for younger generations today, including her children, “fishing has become so scarce.”

“When your harvest is not as big, you don’t get to fully process all of the salmon that you need. If you only end up with 20 fish a year, you’re just going to freeze it,” she said.

As of August 25th and according to the Pacific Salmon Commission, this year’s sockeye salmon run came in at 2.8 million. The organization estimated 7.7 million last winter.

As salmon are declining across the province, communities are stepping up to keep their access to traditional food strong.

A place to gather, process and store food

In August, Skuppah Indian Band members taught specialized fish preparations, including wind-dried fish, smoked fish and canned fish — all at the community’s food security centre.

The nation decided to build a food security centre back in 2019. Food access and affordability were already challenging at the time. 

During the global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, food became even harder to access amid lockdowns, staffing shortages and supply chain disruptions. Indigenous and remote communities were hit the hardest by food insecurity linked to the pandemic. Then came a year full of climate disasters in British Columbia. 

“In 2021, the Lytton fire took out all of the services in town and cut us off from travelling to get groceries,” McIntyre said. It was only the first record-breaking disaster of the year.

“The atmospheric river came in November and decimated any hope we had of feeding ourselves, because it blocked grocery trucks from coming.”

Those disasters informed the final stages of the Skuppah food security centre including adding private food storage for community members, with a generator installed in the event of a power outage.

“We really honed in on what the needs were for emergency response and climate change, building on the original concept of providing a place for community to gather and prepare food,” McIntyre said.

The space is equipped with a commercial kitchen, high-end pressure canners, freeze dryers to create shelf-stable food that lasts years and more, all designed to make community gatherings and food distributions as easy as possible. 

Since opening in 2022, the food security centre has served as a place for the Skuppah Indian Band to process and store food, including huckleberries and salmon.

The centre has a stockpile of food, a disaster precaution learned in 2021 when roads were flooded out or closed due to fire.

“We’ve had so much positive feedback from our members. Having a space like this does something special when you can come and gather, because it’s a space for loving one another and for supporting one another,” McIntyre said.

At Nlaka’pamux fish camp, traditional fishing techniques are passed on to the next generation

Raymond Phillips, a member of Lytton First Nation, facilitated dip net tying at this year’s community fish camp in Incluckcheen. He says that fish camps are a place for the community to exchange knowledge and create food security within the nation. 

“People leave the fish camp with food. This is survival food, but it’s also really good food. It’s high quality and very nutritious … it has sustained us for thousands of years,” he said. 

Phillips grew up fishing the Fraser and Thompson rivers, learning how to tie dip nets back in the 1980s. Dip nets are a traditional way of harvesting salmon in B.C., only allowed for First Nations in the province.

Tying the dip net and making the hoop and pole requires technique, patience and practice, all of which Phillips has spent decades accumulating.

“There’s a complexity to it,” he said, but once people get the hang of tying a certain knot, it becomes repetitive and easier to teach others.

His station at fish camp had people of all ages in attendance, wanting to learn about traditional fishing tools and harvesting techniques. In the Interior, dip nets are passed down in families for generations, but handmade nets are harder to come by these days.

“It’s becoming a lost art, so many people are buying commercially made aluminum or nylon nets,” he said. 

Traditionally, fir saplings were used to make the pole and hoop, with Spatsin used to make the net. Phillips and other Nlaka’pamux dip net makers hope to pass those skills on by sharing their knowledge at fish camps.  

Phillips is a provincial judge based out of Kamloops. Before that, he worked as a lawyer and represented Indigenous people charged by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

“As a lawyer I ended up helping quite a few people who were being charged with fishing at closed times, so it became a real challenge for the community to feed themselves in times of scarcity. That’s the cycle we’re in now, the salmon resources are becoming scarce,” he said.

When he was younger, salmon were abundant, but as time went on fishery closures became more common.

“The salmon, it’s one of the largest migrations in the world. They go from the Pacific, go into the Fraser and travel all the way to their spawning grounds. Every community along the way waits for that salmon to get there. It’s disheartening to wait and be told you can’t fish. The populations are dwindling, so it is concerning,” Phillips said. 

Despite those challenges, Indigenous communities work together each run to provide Elders, families and those experiencing food insecurity with salmon. 

That holds true for Cheam First Nation, located near Chilliwack, which hosts an annual community canning day.

Cheam community canning day

Every year, Cheam members look forward to gathering at the local gymnasium, ready to gut, fillet and preserve the year’s salmon. It’s a tradition Stó:lō nations in the Fraser Valley have fought to continue for decades. 

“The whole community is coming together on an assembly line to get our fish canned and vacuum packed,” Justin Pike said.

“We get the community together to help try and get fish out to everybody, not everybody knows how to do it, so it really helps,” he said. 

Pike is an elected councillor in Cheam, and one of many who harvested this year’s sockeye salmon haul to distribute among the community.

He was hands-on at the fish gutting station, with youth and community members watching closely, eager to learn and participate. Reflecting on the number of young people engaged, Pike is confident that his nation will continue its tradition of caring for salmon and harvesting and preserving salmon as a food source for the winter.

“We’re always super grateful to get some fish,” said Pike. 

While cultural knowledge remains strong in Cheam, wild salmon is becoming harder to access. Along with the dwindling salmon numbers and costly fishing gear, Cheam also has a history of facing off against the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada for their right to fish. 

“Cheam is known for defending our right to be on that river, our inherent right to these fish,” Wendy Kelly, a salmon processing facilitator, told The Narwhal.

“Years and years ago, they were one of the only bands that battled to go out fishing when the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada said ‘no, you can’t go fishing,’” she said. The nation had numerous stand-offs with the department in the late 1990s and early 2000s over access to salmon in their traditional waters, led by the late Chief Siōliya June Quipp. 

Cheam is located an hour-and-a-half from downtown Vancouver, home to some of the most lucrative seafood ports in the province and country. Communities located closer to the city are heavily monitored on the water, and with fisheries opening for a few days at a time, the struggle to access wild salmon persists. 

It makes Cheam’s annual canning day a powerful assertion of Indigenous Rights, following the footsteps of their ancestors.

Those rights are inherent to Cheam, but also affirmed in Section 35 of the Canadian Constitution, and by the renowned Sparrow and Marshall decisions made in the 1990s, which affirmed the rights of First Nations to fish, hunt and harvest without unjustified government interference. 

“It’s really medicine when you’re handling those fish,” Kelly said. 

In the Pacific Northwest, salmon is a sacred part of the culture, and has been a main food source for millennia. It’s a connection the Vancouver Aboriginal Health Society works to keep strong.

Urban access to culture and salmon

This month, the Vancouver Aboriginal Health Society is hosting salmon processing and jarring workshops, servicing cultural food and knowledge in the heart of the Downtown Eastside.

“This run came from Boston Bar, right from the river to the centre and processed within hours from the time it came out of the water,” Ruby Harry told The Narwhal.

They have access to salmon all year now,” she said, referring to workshop participants, who had the opportunity to clean, process and learn how to can salmon. 

Harry is from Tl’etinqox t’in, located near Williams Lake, but like many Indigenous people, now resides in an urban setting. She grew up eating traditional foods, and after moving to the city, wanted to help create that access for others.

And with Vancouver being one of the most expensive cities in North America, access to nutritious food can be a challenge. Salmon distributions help to fill that gap.

“Vancouver Aboriginal Health Society is one of the only organizations I know that has given the Downtown Eastside this opportunity to process cultural food,” Harry said. 

Harvesting traditional food must be done within your own territory, so for Indigenous people living away from theirs, wild salmon becomes harder to access. 

Salmon workshops create that opportunity for urban Indigenous people, and support food security with rising grocery costs. The workshops hosted by Harry have no cost for participants and create openings for cultural knowledge to be shared.

“Salmon brings lots of good medicine,” said Harry.

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