Summary

• Alberta’s plan to build a pipeline to B.C.’s south coast includes a new terminal capable of servicing supertankers sailing into the Salish Sea.
• If the project goes ahead, very large crude carriers (VLCCs) capable of carrying up to 2.2 million barrels of oil could be loading up at Roberts Bank in the Fraser River estuary.
• A major expansion of the Roberts Bank superport is already in the works with potentially catastrophic impacts on local endangered species.

At the mouth of B.C.’s largest river, industrial development has encroached on important ecosystems for decades. Now, Canada’s plans to boost shipping infrastructure and create a new terminal for oil tankers could increase stress on endangered species and critical habitat.

The Fraser River is truly vast. Its tributaries carry water from nearly one-quarter of B.C., and its delta — the area where the river’s waters mingle with the Salish Sea — stretches from the Vancouver neighbourhood of Point Grey to the American settlement of Point Roberts.

In between, there are mudflats, sandy beaches, eelgrass beds and salt marshes that provide critical habitat for young salmon, migrating birds and countless other species.

“These are really productive environments for fish, for shellfish, for mammals, for birds,” Misty MacDuffee, a salmon biologist and director of Raincoast Conservation Foundation’s wild salmon program, says. 

Freshwater from the Fraser pushes all the way out to the Gulf Islands and the tidal flow from the Salish Sea can make its way all the way to Mission, MacDuffee told The Narwhal. That mingling of freshwater and saltwater creates crucial habitat for young salmon as they make the transition from river living to ocean swimming.“We’ve got all five species of salmon going into the Fraser. It’s Canada’s most productive salmon system — our largest Chinook producer — and it’s really important for the rearing and the migrations of adult and juvenile salmon.”This region has long been subject to development, from canneries and agriculture, to airports and port infrastructure. But now the pressure is ramping up. 

The pipeline pivot to Roberts Bank

On July 2, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced federal support for $10 billion in infrastructure upgrades at the Roberts Bank superport as part of a memorandum of understanding with B.C. 

In the agreement, the federal government also pledged to preserve the ban on oil tankers transiting the waters near B.C.’s North Coast. Keeping the tanker ban in place “without alteration, suspension or narrowing of scope,” as the agreement states, removed the port at Prince Rupert as an option for the terminus of Alberta’s proposed pipeline. Prince Rupert is Canada’s deepest natural harbour, capable of accommodating very large crude carriers (VLCCs), huge tanker ships capable of carrying up to 2.2 million barrels of oil — three times as much as the largest oil tankers currently servicing the Trans Mountain pipeline.

Later the same day, Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announced plans for a new West Coast pipeline (funded primarily by state-owned pipeline company Trans Mountain), which would follow the same route as the current Trans Mountain pipeline with one key difference: it would detour further south to end at Roberts Bank, instead of in Burnaby. 

Alberta’s submission to the federal Major Projects Office includes a two-berth terminal able to serve very large crude carriers. These ships are 330 metres long — that’s more than three World Cup soccer pitches laid end to end — and have a fully loaded draft of 20 metres. To reach water deep enough for these massive vessels to float in, the terminal’s causeway and jetty would extend about five kilometres out into the Strait of Georgia.

If the project goes ahead, it would be the first time that oil tankers of this size have ever docked in B.C. The largest tankers that can fit beneath the Second Narrows bridge to service Westridge Marine Terminal — the current terminus of the Trans Mountain pipeline — are Aframax tankers, which have a maximum capacity of 800,000 barrels of oil. Currently, even those tankers can only be filled to about 80 per cent, so the port authority has applied to dredge Burrard Inlet to make room for larger loads (a plan the Tsleil–Waututh Nation is fighting). 

On land, the proposed oil terminal would take up 260 hectares — nearly two-thirds the size of Stanley Park. About half of that space would be covered with 15 storage tanks capable of holding 6.5 million barrels.Roberts Bank’s location — hemmed by wetlands, Tsawwassen First Nation treaty lands, parcels in the Agricultural Land Reserve and residential neighbourhoods — raises questions about whether there is enough room for Alberta’s proposal. The Major Projects Office did not respond when asked whether any assessments about fitting the proposed tanker terminal in that location have been completed.A question about whether the oil tanker terminal could be built in conjunction with the proposed port expansion or would have to wait until Roberts Bank Terminal 2 is complete also went unanswered.

The Fraser River estuary has lost 85 per cent of its salmon habitat to the effects of development and there are already plans to double the size of the terminal.

MacDuffee described the estuary as an “incredible natural asset” that has economic and environmental value.

“It supports these vibrant ecosystems that people are travelling from all over the world to visit, to see the Salish Sea, to see whales, to see birds, to see these migrations, to see these special places and here we are moving to take this incredible asset and turn it into an industrial sacrifice zone.”

Tanker terminal piles risk on top of risk

Roberts Bank Terminal 2, as the $3.5-billion planned port expansion is known, would increase the port’s container capacity by 50 per cent. The 2020 federal assessment of Roberts Bank Terminal 2 concluded the expansion’s impact on wetland function, Chinook and chum salmon and southern resident killer whales “is high in magnitude, permanent and irreversible.” In 2023, the federal cabinet concluded the public interest in the port expansion superseded those impacts and approved the project, subject to nearly 400 conditions.

In 2025, the Vancouver Port Authority submitted Roberts Bank Terminal 2 to the Major Projects Office, hoping to see it designated a “nation-building project” and fast-tracked for final approvals. That designation would mean streamlined regulatory processes and assessments.

Alberta’s proposal will also be evaluated by the Major Projects Office. The office did not respond to a question about whether the tanker terminal will be assessed to determine the potential cumulative effects of the project on the Fraser River estuary and Salish Sea.

The proposal to add another terminal and introduce oil supertankers to the Fraser estuary is raising concerns amongst B.C. environmentalists.

“This is supercharging the impact in case of an accident,” Anna Barford, Stand.earth’s oceans campaigner, said. “If we have a spill, if there is a critical problem, if one of these ships loses power and runs aground, we’re looking at incredible devastation in an area that is wildly biodiverse … at the mouth of a very important salmon-bearing river.”

The logistics of bringing such large vessels into the crowded waters of the Salish Sea is also a concern, Barford added.For MacDuffee, the tanker terminal proposal flies in the face of the federal government’s acknowledgement of the Fraser estuary’s importance. With more than $2 million in federal funds, Raincoast has been working to restore salmon habitat degraded by marine infrastructure.

“We’re allowing the flow of water — of nutrients, of sediment, of fish, of everything — back onto Sturgeon Bank, trying to restore the function of this estuary and the opportunity for rearing salmon,” MacDuffee told The Narwhal.

Port expansion poses significant risk to endangered species and critical habitat

Even without adding an oil tanker terminal to the mix, Roberts Bank Terminal 2’s impact on endangered species could be catastrophic, Barford said. 

“We’re looking at increased underwater noise, which we know is very difficult for fish and for creatures like southern resident killer whales that use echolocation to find their food.” 

More than 100 species in the Fraser River estuary are at risk of local extinction by 2045, a 2022 study found. At-risk species include the southern resident orca, whose population was just 74 individuals as of last year’s census. 

Many migrating bird species, including the western sandpiper, could also be negatively impacted by the terminal expansion. During their annual migration from Peru to Alaska, western sandpipers stop in the Fraser estuary, where they fuel up on biofilm, communities of microorganisms that flourish on the estuary’s mudflats. Losing access to this crucial food source would be a significant blow to western sandpipers and the many other migratory bird species.

“Roberts Bank is critical habitat,” Barford said. “Just because it looks muddy … doesn’t mean that it isn’t a paradise for endangered and migratory species.”

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.

Summary

• Research published in the The Journal of Wildlife Management highlights an important gap in translocation mitigation practices: whether species survive their relocation is not tracked in B.C.
• Translocation mitigation is when plants and animals are moved from one location to another in advance of development. B.C. has the largest proportion of at-risk amphibians, which are frequently relocated for industry.
• As B.C. gears up for a number of major projects, scientists worry about mounting impacts on vulnerable species.

“We all loved frogs growing up, then we forgot about them,” Megan Winand says. Now, the conservation biologist is hoping to remind B.C. of their existence — and how they’re impacted by industry in the province. She contributed to a study published in The Journal of Wildlife Management earlier this year, looking into the effectiveness of translocation mitigation, or the practice of moving animals to new locations to make way for development. 

Between 2019 and 2022, B.C. issued 629 translocation mitigation permits. The review found that 229 of them included reptiles and amphibians, with most of those projects happening in the South Coast region.

The review found over five million reptiles and amphibians have been relocated in B.C., most commonly for pipeline and culvert developments. Winand has worked on some of those projects. 

“I spent a lot of time questioning whether what I was doing was actually effective, if I was truly saving all of these amphibians from the harm that was being caused by development,” Winand says.

Translocation can be difficult for wildlife because successfully establishing in a new environment is never guaranteed. Research has identified several risks, including stress, increased mortality, increased movement due to homing behaviour, disease transmission and genetic concerns.

With no legal requirement to track if species survive their relocation in B.C., Winand and others decided to start tracking data themselves. 

In collaboration with provincial government scientists, the Martin Conservation Decisions Lab based out of the University of British Columbia published their findings in April. 

In a province like British Columbia, salmon, orcas and bears often make headlines — but amphibians are incredible indicators of the environment and health of an ecosystem.

“I truly believe amphibians are canaries of the wetland coal mine,” Winand said.

The saying “canary in the coal mine” originates in the mining industry, where early miners used canaries to detect toxic gases.

A 2023 paper from the Climate Change Resource Centre says amphibians are similarly sensitive indicators of ecological changes, due to their “moist, permeable skin” and their important position in the centre of many food webs. 

“Amphibians especially, despite the fact that they are so important … they are extremely vulnerable,” Winand said.

B.C. has the largest proportion of at-risk amphibians across Canada. Around the world, 41 per cent of amphibians and reptiles are facing extinction.

One is the northern leopard frog, which declined in the 1970s. Their vulnerability to extinction prompted the province to create a specialized northern leopard frog recovery team in 2001.

Male tadpole numbers have slowly increased thanks to translocation efforts: while only 19 have been documented in recent years, that represents an improvement over the sporadic one or two male tadpoles recorded prior to 2010. 

Another endangered species is the Oregon spotted frog. The long-legged friends used to roam from northern California into southwestern B.C., but have declined drastically. Only a few hundred frogs remained in 1999, prompting the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada to give the amphibian its first-ever emergency listing. Populations in California have gone extinct, while an estimated 364 frogs remained in B.C. in 2025. 

Climate change, habitat loss, invasive species, disease and development are all impacting these animals. 

And while B.C. has taken extra measures to step up conservation during projects by relocating all species during a development, outcomes are still not monitored, making the effectiveness of these initiatives unknown.

Translocation adopted during development for 2010 Olympics, but now experts call for reversal

In a paper published in Conservation Biology, 59 translocation projects were reviewed from around the world. The paper found “mitigation translocations have not achieved their potential as an effective applied science,” because long-term impact to receipt ecosystems were not addressed in the data samples, and metapopulations were not addressed either.

Most species exist within a metapopulation, linked together by the same landscape. According to the Government of Canada, “when disturbances occur in a habitat patch, there is an effect on that particular population, and there could be effects on other populations that are linked to it through dispersal or the broad metapopulation that occurs at the landscape scale.” 

Another paper published by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada, about fresh water fish and mussels, acknowledges the practice as a last resort, stating, “Ultimately, mitigation translocation is performed when no other options remain for preventing the imminent loss of individuals at their natal location.”

The push for translocation mitigation in B.C. was born out of the 2010 Winter Olympics, from public pressure to preserve wetland habitat during improvements to the Sea to Sky highway, which connects Vancouver and Whistler. 

Sixteen years later, amphibian and reptile lovers are calling on the province to avoid relocating species whenever possible, to invest in habitat creation or restoration projects and to enforce transparent reporting after species are relocated. 

There are several examples of habitat restoration projects that have supported amphibians in B.C. On Salt Spring Island, the Stqeeye’ Learning Society is restoring native vegetation and wetland to improve conditions for wildlife, including amphibians, at Xwaaqw’um (Burgoyne Bay). 

Near Tofino, Parks Canada and the Raincoast Education Society installed amphibian crossing tunnels and fencing along Highway 4, to reduce road mortality and improve habitat connectivity.

In an email to The Narwhal, B.C.’s Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship said that “long-term survival and population outcomes following relocation would require multi-year studies, specialized monitoring methods and significant resources.”

“While it is not always feasible to employ long-term tracking, it is within this process that appropriate risk management takes place,” the ministry wrote. 

“We need to have proper monitoring and research in place to better the outcomes, or at least understand the outcomes, because currently we don’t,” Winand said. 

And as Canada embarks on an ambitious slate of major projects, Winand says that reptiles and amphibians face mounting risks of fragmented landscapes and loss of habitat. To her, the path forward is clear.

“We really need to push to avoid translocation,” she said.

Updated on July 15, 2026, at 8:30 a.m. PT: This story has been updated to correct the names of scientific journals. The study on translocation mitigation was published in The Journal of Wildlife Management, not in The Wildlife Society. Additionally, the paper reviewing 59 translocation projects was published in Conservation Biology, not by the National Library of Medicine.

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.

What a week. Amidst the blur of World Cup shenanigans and Canada Day festivities, politicians dropped not one, not two, but three massive pipeline announcements. 

First, there was the multibillion-dollar federal commitment for infrastructure projects in B.C. What does this have to do with pipelines, you ask? Well, the agreement also included a promise to maintain the federal oil tanker ban off B.C.’s North Coast and $10 billion to upgrade the Roberts Bank export terminal (that’s the huge shipping terminal you can see from BC Ferries as you approach Tsawwassen, FYI). 

That brings us to the second announcement, which came just a few hours later when Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announced a plan for a southern route for a new oil pipeline to the West Coast that would largely follow the right-of-way for the Trans Mountain pipeline, except — surprise, surprise! — it would end at Roberts Bank. This theoretical pipeline would be planned and built by the federally owned Trans Mountain Corp., with Pembina Pipeline Corp. taking a 10 per cent stake in construction. Oh, and it would cost between $35 billion and $44 billion (mostly in taxpayer money).

As if that wasn’t enough to process, on Monday Ontario Premier Doug Ford and Smith proposed another pipeline called Northern Shield, which would take oilsands bitumen to refineries in Sarnia, Ont. There’s also no private backer for this pipeline and, notably, no formal federal support. The chief of Aamjiwnaang First Nation, meanwhile, says the nation hasn’t been consulted on the proposal thus far and notes it’s still in the midst of a benzene crisis and dealing with the fallout of a March 2026 pipeline spill.

The headlines have been coming so fast and furious, it’s been tough to keep up. I spent the week scouring the internet, trying to get my head around it all. Some of the most insightful commentary I came across was from Amy Janzwood, an assistant professor in political science and environment at McGill University — so I called her up to pick her brain on, well, all of it. 

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

What have you noticed about the pipeline discussion in the media over the last week? 

All the media coverage I saw has been stenography, basically. Just regurgitating all of the talking points of [Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Tim] Hodgson, Carney and Smith. It’s been extremely uncritical coverage. The kind of making of a pipeline out of literally nothing other than taxpayer dollars has been quite dizzying and shocking to see. 

The questions I was asked a year ago about pipeline politics are very different than the questions I get now. Before I’d get asked: “What’s the prospect of another major oil pipeline? Is this a political fantasy?” But now there’s a slippage into engaging on the terms of the Smith government. The lack of context I’ve seen in the reporting on this is in part because of the firehose of announcements, and media outlets are just not able to keep up.

You have noted before that legacy media often uncritically repeat the narratives of the oil industry. It sounds like you’re still seeing that? Are any particular examples coming to mind? 

Hodgson has basically become the voice of the industry and I see that repeated verbatim, without any kind of interrogation. One very clear example I see over and over again is the profitability narrative around the Trans Mountain pipeline when we know this is actually not a profitable pipeline. You could argue there are good reasons to have it and we can have that debate, but [federal politicians] like to say that this is a profitable pipeline, which is straight up not true, so that’s one example of things that I see kind of repeated very uncritically.

Given that it’s not a profitable pipeline, what are the real reasons you think we’re seeing such broad political support for it in this moment?

There has been incredibly powerful messaging from the Carney government that we can have it all. We’ve seen this misconstrual of economic anxiety, sort of pinned on the hopes of another pipeline, which couldn’t be further from the reality. 

Pipelines have become kind of a stand-in for the future of oil and gas. It’s become a stand-in for a lot of really difficult conversations.

Canadians are still broadly supportive of climate action and renewable energy, but they’re also more supportive of pipelines now than they have been for at least the last decade. What do you make of that contradiction? 

As political scientists, we’ve long known that public opinion can largely be shaped by our political elites. I’m not surprised when I hear things from our prime minister and minister of natural resources around the need to build more pipelines, that there is this slippage or confusion that this is going to reduce our reliance in any way on the U.S. If you’re not following this closely, then that sounds great, if you’re being told this is what we need to keep Canada prosperous and strong. 

But as someone who has studied pipelines for over 10 years, those are promises new pipelines will not be able to deliver on. I think the public has largely forgotten the cost and divisiveness about Energy East, about Northern Gateway, about Trans Mountain. Unless you’re directly affected and witnessing and experiencing the impacts of these projects, those costs to you, those environmental risks are not salient. It has long been difficult for folks to make that connection when we’re told this is necessary for our economy, and when the economic benefits are as overstated as they often are.

Canadians are repeatedly told that pipelines are what’s needed to keep Canada prosperous and strong. What are political leaders misrepresenting when they say that? 

Fundamentally when we’re talking about major new pipelines, you’re going to need significant greenfield oilsands expansion to fill it. [A greenfield project is a new project built on undeveloped land.] We’ve seen the economics of the oilsands have not been trending towards that for the last several years to decades. Investors in the oilsands were really pressuring companies to deliver on their dividends. There was not an appetite for massive new expansions; it was not economic and it still is not. It would actually harm the industry if they can’t fill the pipeline. 

If we’re now talking about a hypothetical West Coast pipeline, the volatility and the reliance on global oil prices and very uncertain demand … there is not a long-term case to be made for increasing oil expansion to the degree that would be required for a major new pipeline.

This is not economic for the industry, so this will be taxpayer-funded. And there’s no certainty about demand for this hypothetical oil that the industry does not seem willing to produce, although Smith has alluded to doing whatever she can to stimulate further oilsands production with additional provincial support. 

It’s quite misleading to suggest we would need a new pipeline to diversify away from the U.S. I do think we do need to have important conversations about how to become more resilient in light of having the Trump administration. But spending billions of dollars for a pipeline that we don’t think the industry can fill is not the way to do it. 

Politicians also increasingly claim that Canada can indefinitely expand oil and gas production while meeting our climate commitments. Is that actually possible?

The short answer is no. This myth was alive and well under the Trudeau government. The Trudeau government really pioneered this narrative that we can have Trans Mountain and the oil expansion that comes with it and meet our climate targets and use the money from Trans Mountain to pay for the clean energy transition.

The latest iteration of this argument is this promise of carbon capture and storage. My take is that this is something the industry has never really been serious about doing.

Since Pathways Alliance [now called Oil Sands Alliance] announced its carbon capture and storage project in 2022, we’ve seen absolutely no significant investment of any kind in this project. And we know that they’ve just quietly stepped back from the amount of emissions reductions they’re promising.

It’s been quite troubling to see the Carney government so unquestioningly provide this narrative that we can have decarbonized oil — which is, of course, a contradiction.

You have described expanding fossil fuel exports as like saving for retirement by doubling down at the casino. Can you explain why that is?

Let’s not forget that oil and gas is a relatively small part of Canada’s GDP … but looking at the media coverage, you would not know that. 

The conversation we’re having right now is a federal government that has continuously found new and ever-creative ways to subsidize fossil fuel expansions, whether that’s LNG [liquefied natural gas], oilsands or carbon capture and storage, and telling the public that this is necessary. 

Let’s set aside LNG for now (the economics of LNG are a bit different), but about oil specifically, this is an industry that’s had record profits that’s been unwilling to pay for its own pollution — it is a cost the industry has very successfully avoided, whether that’s orphan wells and cleanup or carbon. 

We’re told we need to double down and it’s necessary for economic prosperity. But what we’re seeing is the bill that’s racking up that taxpayers are on the hook for — when there’s an industry that can very well pay for it, and is unwilling to because they know they have a government that will backstop it. They now have a government that will buy a pipeline and that now has a state-owned pipeline company that is promising to be a backer for another new pipeline, which honestly, if you had told me that even 12 months ago, I would not believe you. It is absolutely mind-boggling. 

The Narwhal is going to be following all of these issues closely. If you have thoughts or a story tip email editor@thenarwhal.ca

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.

On an hour-long drive from Vancouver to the heart of B.C.’s Fraser Valley, I contemplate the most professional way to ask if I can pet this cat I’m about to meet. There’s journalistic value to being able to describe its fur, I imagine arguing, as I drive past bucolic fields and cheerless industrial parks. In the end, I don’t need to ask at all. “Do you want to feed him?” Mike Hopcraft says, holding out a dish of raw chunks of beef and a pair of long metal tweezers, as the cat glowers beside me. 

My commitment to gonzo cat journalism is wavering at the sight of my subject, who isn’t a typical pet. He’s a serval: a wild cat native to Africa who is, improbably, lounging on a grey couch in the nondescript warehouse that houses an animal rescue centre in Abbotsford. His name, even more improbably, is Gary. He growls and hisses impatiently as I tentatively extend a cube of meat before lunging across my lap to reach it. While Gary eats, I stroke him gently; his tawny fur, streaked and spotted with black, is as plush as I imagined. 

In the wild, servals are sinuous, slender and long-legged, like deadly feline supermodels with huge, pointed ears. At a sprint, they can reach speeds of 80 kilometres per hour. They leap two metres to snatch birds out of the air, and pounce on rodents or snakes with deadly accuracy; an individual serval is more likely to catch its prey than a pride of lions hunting together. An adult serval weighs up to 40 pounds, roughly the same size as a coyote or a six-year-old child. If Gary were to sit on my lap like a regular cat, I would have to look up at him — a terrifying prospect, now that I’ve seen him demolish a beef cube. For some people, I can imagine, this is the appeal. “It’s basically the biggest cat you can get that looks like a cheetah, without being a fucking cheetah,” Hopcraft says. 

Gary, however, does not look like a cheetah, or his wild cousins in Africa. He is pear-shaped and shamboling, his gait hindered by degenerative disc disease, a common affliction among servals in captivity. He also suffers from feline hyperesthesia syndrome, which causes cats extreme sensitivity to touch around their back and tail and can lead to self-mutilation. Shortly after Hopcraft rescued him in January 2025, Gary chewed his tail off while confined. Hopcraft has avoided caging him since, and lets him roam free, like the world’s biggest barn cat.

He now takes Prozac, stuffed surreptitiously into one of his daily beef cubes, for anxiety. He was declawed as a kitten — a brutal, previously common elective surgery, outlawed in B.C. in 2018, in which the claw and last bone of each toe is amputated — which means if he escaped, as pet servals often do, he would be helpless. 

Gary spent the first nine years of his life on Vancouver Island, until his owners divorced and surrendered him; Hopcraft, who runs an exotic animal rescue called Wild Education, took him in him after some hesitation. “I’ve worked with servals in the past on film sets and they’re crazy,” Hopcraft says. But it became clear that nobody else wanted him, so Hopcraft couldn’t say no. “In the end, we took him in, and he’s been doing amazing.”

When he’s not on the couch, he wanders among the aquariums and enclosures in the back of the rescue centre, full of Hopcraft’s other rescues: ferrets and chinchillas, tortoises and iguanas, scorpions and tarantulas, an inquisitive blue-and-gold macaw. There are hundreds of animals here, but only one of them is now illegal to buy or sell in B.C.: Gary. 

In May, the province amended its Controlled Alien Species Regulation to prohibit the “breeding, transport and future ownership” of non-domestic, non-native cat species, a category that includes servals, caracals, ocelots and a number of other species. (Large exotic cats, like tigers and lions, have been illegal to possess in B.C. since 2010.) Hopcraft and other exotic cat lovers can keep their pets, provided they apply for a permit by May 2027. Doing so requires signing away their rights to visitors. These cats can only interact with members of their households; in other words, my visit with Gary will soon be prohibited by provincial law. Violating the law could mean a fine of up to $250,000, a two-year prison sentence or both.

A deadly history of exotic cats in B.C. 

It’s impossible to say how many non-native wild cats are kept as pets in this province, because their breeding and ownership has always been unregulated. By email, the B.C. government admitted they “do not have this information.” But among the uncountable exotic cats, servals — which are often crossed with domestic cats to produce a hybrid species called a savannah — seem to be the most popular species. 

It’s equally hard to pinpoint when they entered the Canadian pet trade, but by the early 2000s there were ads in B.C. newspapers offering serval cubs for sale. But pet servals were in North America before that; the Long Island Ocelot Club, an association of exotic cat owners and enthusiasts, was founded in 1956. In 1986, the club issued an exciting announcement in their newsletter: a female Siamese cat and male serval had fathered a kitten in Pennsylvania. 

The new hybrid was called a savannah, the first of the eponymous breed, and soon took off in popularity. (Intriguingly, 1986 was also the year Savannah took off as a popular name for baby girls, according to the U.S. Social Security Administration.) Savannahs are categorized by how recently descended they are from servals: a filial 1, or F1, has a serval parent, while an F2 is bred from an F1 savannah and another domestic cat. (The same genetic terminology is applied in botany; peppermint, for instance, is an F1 descendant of spearmint and watermint.) Under the updated legislation, savannah cats remain legal — provided they’re at least four generations away from a serval. The trouble is, many people want a lot of serval in the mix. This is evident on breeder websites, in which prices descend along with generations: a savannah breeder in Quebec tells me first-generation savannah cats are priced between $15,000 and $22,000, while one in Kelowna, B.C., gives a range of $18,000 to $30,000. 

Much of the time, these servals and near-serval hybrids fly under the radar — except when they escape, which they’re pretty good at. Just last month, a pet serval was spotted under a porch in Vancouver, prompting a call to police. Sara Dubois, the senior director of animal welfare science and standards at the BC SPCA, tells me she knows of at least four other pet servals currently on the loose in B.C.: two reported on Vancouver Island and another two in the Lower Mainland. 

Restricting all exotic wild cats — those that are neither domesticated nor native to Canada — has been a long time coming, Dubois says. In May 2007, one of three pet tigers kept on a rural property near 100 Mile House, B.C., by a man named Kim Carlton, reached through the bars of its cage and clawed the leg of Carlton’s fiancée, Tanya Dumstrey-Soos; she bled to death in front of her teenage son. The incident prompted the B.C. ministers of environment and agriculture to meet with the SPCA to “prevent similar tragedies,” though at the time they declined to comment on any outright bans. Still, the province developed the controlled species regulation in 2009, restricting ownership of certain exotic animals. By the time this new law came into force, Carlton had procured two new lion cubs to replace his tigers. “I still cry every day because I miss [Tanya],” he told The Province, but “life has to go on.” 

After the incident, the SPCA asked for all exotic species to be listed in the regulation, but the government was just focused on “public safety,” Dubois says. Animals like tigers, monkeys and cobras were banned, but one could — and can still — procure a kangaroo or a zebra. And until recently, smaller exotic cats like servals — basically anything bigger than a tabby, but smaller than a cheetah — were unregulated.

But more than a decade later in July 2019, 10 adult servals and three kittens were seized from a breeder in Little Fort, B.C., about an hour north of Kamloops, after numerous complaints of sick and injured animals being sold. The investigation revealed “horrific” conditions, attracting enough attention to push the issue forward, but Dubois says there wasn’t sufficient support from the government until the 2024 election of Randene Neill as MLA for Powell River-Sunshine Coast. A former journalist, she had covered BC SPCA stories and was now the minister of water, land and resource stewardship. According to Dubois, Neill supported updating the regulation. (The minister and her staff declined to speak with The Narwhal for this story, but provided written answers to questions, as is typical when we reach out for an interview.) 

The challenge with changing cat laws

A basic challenge for the updated legislation, which allows existing owners to keep their exotic pets as long as they register them by next May, is that no one knows how many of those exotic pets there are, or even how many breeders. “Unless you have neighbours reporting that there’s something suspicious happening, we might never know,” Dubois says. And of course, not everyone wants to be a snitch. One resident of Sooke, B.C. — a hotbed of serval breeding and ownership based on the number of escaped animals reported in recent years — messaged me on Facebook to say a serval had been killing pets in her neighbourhood, but asked that I not mention her name in this article. “I don’t want my neighbours to hate me,” she wrote.

For owners like Hopcraft, the new laws are “a disaster.” He will have to submit an application detailing evidence of a secure enclosure where Gary will be kept, as well as a public safety plan in the event of escape. He also needs to demonstrate Gary’s welfare is taken into account, describing his diet, comfort, veterinary care and “freedom to express behaviours that promote well-being.” Gary, who currently has free rein in his warehouse, will have to be confined to a ministry-approved enclosure and will no longer be able to socialize with anyone outside of Hopcraft’s immediate family, including his staff. 

Hopcraft worries about Gary’s quality of life. In its announcement, the ministry wrote exotic cats “can pose risks to public safety, pets and wildlife,” though Hopcraft is skeptical of this justification. “When is the last time you heard of a serval attacking someone?” he asks. “Never, because they’re not that kind of animal.” 

The Narwhal asked the B.C. government if they had identified any known attacks on humans by servals. It did not directly answer the question; instead, it wrote public safety was “one of several factors considered” when updating the legislation. The tendency of escaped servals to kill other pets, however, is well-documented. 

For the BC SPCA, Dubois says, the priority is animal welfare. “But you know, that argument hasn’t been enough for the government to be concerned as well. They need to see some other reasons why this might be important for their policy agenda.” (By email, the government told The Narwhal, “The amendments reflect a precautionary and proportionate approach that accounts for the full range of potential risks to people, animals and ecosystems, while recognizing that existing animals can continue to be safely and humanely cared for under permit.”) 

The only thing more challenging than keeping a serval might be giving one up. Zoos won’t take exotic cats from the province’s unregulated pet trade, Dubois says, because there’s no way to determine the animal’s lineage, which means they can’t be used for breeding. The BC SPCA won’t take them either because “they’re not safe to have in our facilities,” Dubois says. Last year, during the forest fires on Vancouver Island, one owner reached out to ask if the BC SPCA could shelter his two servals. “We said, sorry, but no. Our enclosures are not set up, our staff are not trained. This is something you have to think about as an owner.” 

But people are probably not thinking about natural disasters or rehoming plans when they get a serval. They’re probably thinking: how cute! “It doesn’t help that social media is just exploding with these,” Dubois says; one Instagram account, Chloe the Serval, has more than 817,000 followers. “People do not know what they are getting into with these exotic cats.”

“Servals should not be available for pets,” Hopcraft says. “But when they put blanket laws in place, they screw over the rescues as well. The animals suffer in the end — because there is nowhere for them to go. There is nowhere for a serval in B.C. to go.” 

There is, in fact, nowhere at all in Canada for an unwanted serval to go. To surrender a pet serval, owners must look south of the border.

The reality of purchasing a wild animal 

The first exotic cat in Ian Ford’s life arrived in 1996, from a classified ad in an Oregon newspaper that caught his mother Cheryl’s eye: a “hybrid bobcat kitten.” It soon became apparent that BoBo was pure bobcat and not well-suited to living in a house. For one thing, he couldn’t be litter box-trained. (Neither can servals, according to everyone interviewed for this story, most of whom brought it up without being asked.) Cheryl was advised to euthanize BoBo or release him into the woods, but instead she transformed their eight-acre property in the Portland, Oregon, suburbs into a registered nonprofit cat sanctuary. 

Soon, Ford says, more cats arrived: a Canadian lynx. Two servals. A mountain lion. In 2010, their first tigers. “It just kind of snowballed from there.” Today, Ford is the administration director of WildCat Ridge Sanctuary, an 80-acre property an hour south of Portland. It’s home to around 85 exotic cats — or, as Ford calls them, residents. “We consider ourselves a retirement home,” he says. “They’re here to live out their life in as much comfort and dignity as possible.” 

It might also be fair to call it a palliative care ward. “The premise of everything we’re doing is to make it so that these animals — who didn’t need to be born, and certainly didn’t need to be born in captivity, who will essentially be in prison their entire lives — will at least have grass,” he says.  

WildCat Ridge is a no-contact facility — even the staff don’t get to pet the cats — and closed to the public. But from his couch, Ford can hear lions calling to one another while he plays video games. They have cats of all sizes: caracals, which look a bit like cougars with huge tufted ears, and Asian leopard cats, which are housecat-sized and deceptively adorable, and tigers, which everyone can already picture. And servals. Lots of servals.

“We have probably 30 servals,” Ford says, and six or seven have come from Canada. Each week, the sanctuary fields calls from more people who have exotic cats or hybrid offspring. Often, Ford says, they don’t even know what they really have on their hands, thanks to an unregulated market and unscrupulous breeders. 

Many animals arrive with injuries or disabilities. Often they’re declawed or missing teeth; one cat arrived with a pierced ear, Ford recalls, because its owners “thought it was cool.” Then there’s metabolic bone disease, where the animal’s skeleton weakens and decays because of a poor diet, leading to broken bones, arthritis and chronic pain. It’s primarily caused by nutritional deficiencies, as animals that should be catching and eating whole prey are given ground beef and dry cat food instead. Six of the servals at WildCat Ridge, Ford says, suffer from metabolic bone disease.

I think about Gary, lumbering painfully around his warehouse; his former owners, Hopcraft told me, used to feed him hot dogs. (In addition to beef cubes, Gary is now fed whole rats native to Africa, which Hopcraft breeds himself.)

The neglect and suffering Ford witnesses among his feline residents has made him jaded, he says, but he tries to have compassion for the owners who call him pleading for help. 

“I try to remember the human side of it too — people have just exhausted every possible thing. And, just like my mom, despite the fact that they made a horrible decision at first, they are trying to do the right thing.” 

A guardian angel for regretful exotic cat owners

Kelly Brook Allen is one of the people who tried to do the right thing. Fifteen years ago, she received a serval kitten from a breeder in Coquitlam, B.C., in exchange for designing a website. She named him Tigger. But in 2012, he escaped her Langley home during a storm; despite a blitz of attention from news outlets and social media, as well as the services of a professional pet tracker, he was never recaptured. Allen was devastated. The breeder, in sympathy, gave her a new serval: a five-week-old female named Duma, the Swahili word for cheetah. Allen put a tracking collar on her. If she knew then what she knows now, she says, she would have never taken either cat.

To supply Duma with a healthy diet, Allen purchased rodents in bulk from a supplier in Ontario, shipping them by air to B.C. every six weeks, and a neighbour next door raised rabbits to supplement Duma’s diet. “It cost $1,100 a month to feed her properly,” she says. Duma was beloved — but wild. “She almost killed my Jack Russell [terrier] twice — she had him by the neck.”

Breeders, she says, don’t give buyers enough information about how to care for their new pets. “People, like me, get them — and then you realize, you can’t house train them,” she says. “Anything F4 and above, they piss anywhere. They poop anywhere. They don’t bury their crap anywhere. And if they get out, they’ll be gone.” 

After the servals in Little Fort were seized, Allen began planning for Duma’s future. “I had her for 10 years, I was committed to her, I wanted to keep her,” she says. “But they were really pushing for a ban in B.C., so I started looking for sanctuaries.” She found WildCat Ridge, and obtained a permit to transport Duma across the border. But it was the summer of 2021 — the border was still closed to non-essential travel due to COVID-19, and much of the province was on fire. Allen was evacuated, and Duma spent three weeks in the back of a horse trailer. “Finally, I phoned down to the border and said, ‘Listen, my husband has a commercial licence. Can he drive this cat down to Oregon, and come back without getting a fine?’ And they said, ‘Absolutely.’ ”

For two years, Allen was unable to visit Duma. Then she got a call about a doctor on Vancouver Island with an F1 savannah who had prompted complaints from the neighbours. Allen called him, picked up the cat, had her spayed and drove her down to WildCat Ridge. Finally, she got to see Duma, who approached the edge of her enclosure and gazed at Allen for a long moment. Then she was gone. 

Allen has transported other servals and savannahs to WildCat Ridge, becoming a kind of guardian angel for regretful owners trying to finally do the right thing. She’s glad to see the updated legislation, but she doesn’t think enforcing it will be easy for anyone. 

“It’s going to be really tough for people to surrender their pets,” she says. “And how are they going to find half of them? They don’t know where they are.” 

Behind the walls of an exotic cat breeding den: ‘It was horrendous’

Carla Edge has more experience with servals than most people. Formerly a special provincial constable with the BC SPCA — tasked with enforcing laws around pet ownership and animal cruelty — Edge was responsible for the North Thompson and Cariboo regions. “I covered over 50,000 square kilometres on my own,” she says, a region that included Little Fort. “It was a huge area.” She knew of caracal owners in the province, but servals were the exotic cat species she became most familiar with. “Maybe they’re less aggressive than others, but they can cause a lot of damage,” she says. 

In her role, Edge could execute search warrants in cases of reported animal cruelty and had received reports from veterinarians of breeders in Little Fort who were selling servals with “serious metabolic disease.” That breeder, Edge adds, would put kittens in her bag to sneak them over the border for buyers in the United States. 

When Edge searched the Little Fort property, she and her fellow officers found 13 cats in total in a home and two RVs, confined to small spaces with the windows blacked out. The rooms, Edge says, reeked of urine and were caked with old, dried feces.

“It was very dark in the rooms as well. The trailers had windows that had been painted black, but over time that paint had worn off and you could see inside … the level of feces and ammonia, rotting food — it was horrendous … absolutely horrible.” 

The cats were removed, and transferred to sanctuaries in the United States, but the course of action was complicated by the lack of regulation. “Servals always fell in a grey zone,” Edge says, neither listed as controlled alien species nor domestic enough to treat as regular pets. Neither zoos nor the SPCA wanted to deal with them, and no single body took responsibility for them. 

Now the government is taking responsibility for exotic cats. “There is going to be a ton of pushback from serval owners,” Edge says. “It’s going to be a tough go.” Everyone thinks their pet is special, and many of them love their pets enough to break the rules. 

“I know of animal owners on the island, in Abbotsford — they are all over,” she says. And those owners are secretive, she adds. In 2023, Edge says, she and Allen were both contacted by someone looking for help rehoming two cats. “I was under the impression that these were the only two servals she had,” Edge says. “Turns out, she still has a couple more.” 

Edge has since left the BC SPCA to become a social worker, but she has spent most of her life in law enforcement. “And there isn’t another enforcement agency out there that has to cover the amount of legislation a [conservation officer] does,” she says. “So yeah, adding this to their plate — they’re going to have to make the determination of where the priorities come.” (By email, the Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship said, “Officers receive special training to handle the variety of reptiles and exotic animals that fall under [the controlled alien species regulation].”)

Finding the animals is one challenge. But the province’s plan relies, in part, on conservation officers being able to identify the difference between a now-restricted serval and a legal savannah hybrid. In 2022, a large cat was spotted in a residential Vancouver neighbourhood, and the province’s conservation officer service was dispatched. Later, they posted triumphantly on Twitter: “It wasn’t a cougar, cheetah or 200 pound jaguar. It was a savannah cat!” But many experts disagreed with their assessment — including Dubois, who told CBC Vancouver it was likely a serval. 

Edge is happy the legislation has come in but isn’t sure how it’s going to be enforced. “What’s going to happen to these animals? Should they be removed from those owners now? That I’m very curious about.” Edge has sent many servals to sanctuaries in the United States, including WildCat Ridge Sanctuary in Oregon — but she knows that most of those sanctuaries are full. There are too many of these exotic cats, and nowhere for them to go. 

A confession

Why all this interest in exotic cats? From the government, from the millions of Instagram users following serval accounts, from this particular journalist writing thousands of words about obscure pets and unruly legislation? There’s a simple answer: I have one of my own.

Well, sort of: I have a savannah cat, a fact I disclosed to everyone interviewed in this story, partly for transparency and partly to see if they’d ask for a photo. (“He is stunning,” Allen texted, gratifyingly.)

Like many owners of exotic cats, I obtained Azzy through unofficial channels. While visiting my sister in 2018, I met her new foster pet: a sinuous silver cat with huge ears, surrendered by his previous owners for being too challenging. Each night he slept on the guest bed with me, and in the morning I would wake up to find his paw in my outstretched hand. It felt like he was already mine; logic didn’t really enter into the decision. At the end of the week, I took him on a five-hour flight home, a harrowing experience I am still trying to forget. I have no access to his veterinary records, and I don’t know his pedigree. “By the look of his nose, he could be F4 or higher,” Allen texted, which is a chilling thought; any higher than F4, and Azzy too would fall under the same regulations as Gary. But then again, how could I know for sure? 

Azzy, like Gary, seems ill-suited to domesticity in some ways. He’s around 12 years old now — I’ll never know his exact age — but as a younger cat, he would literally bounce off the walls. Though he weighs 11 pounds, a typical size for an ordinary house cat, his long legs enable him to scale a refrigerator in a single leap. Like Gary, he takes Prozac for anxiety, which seems to calm him down. He still sleeps in bed with me each night and spends much of the workday intruding on my Zoom calls. I love him as best I can. But should I own him? Should anyone?

“A lot of people think, why put all this time and effort into it?” says Dubois, of the BC SPCA’s seven-year campaign to restrict ownership of exotic cats. Some see it as government overreach; others think owning an exotic cat is no big deal. “But it sends a message: we should not be breeding wild animals with domestic animals, we should keep our communities safe by having appropriate animals, and we should regulate breeding in general.” After the controlled alien species regulation was first introduced, people worried big cat owners would go underground too, she says, but that didn’t happen. A decade from now, she’s optimistic fewer exotic cats will be in B.C., living lives they were never meant for. 

Admittedly, it’s a regional solution to a broader problem: two breeders contacted by The Narwhal declined to be interviewed but said they were moving their cats to Ontario and Quebec where there aren’t the same restrictions. Gradually, the loopholes are closing, but not fast enough to prevent more Canadians from bringing an exotic cat home. There is still a market for them. And for tortoises, and tarantulas, and chameleons — all the hundreds of other rescues under Hopcraft’s care, still legal to breed and sell. 

When I peered into Hopcraft’s enclosures, at a drowsy chameleon or a skittish hedgehog, I found myself thinking about the day I took my first child home from the hospital. I could not believe that the nurses and doctors were content to let us take her home when we so clearly had no idea what we were doing. And yet, the logic of pet ownership has always been the same: the desire alone — to be responsible for another helpless living thing — is enough to claim it as a right. 

Laws are necessary, as we recognize animal neglect and cruelty as intolerable. But they are not exhaustive, and they can’t correct for our human failings: our impulses and desires, our short-sightedness, our greed. When desire outpaces reason, and owners find themselves in over their heads, it becomes everyone’s problem. Solving the riddle of human nature is beyond the reach of any law.

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.

Osoyoos Indian Band is working to revitalize forests in its territories that have been ravaged by wildfires — turning them into fire-resistant zones full of biodiversity, wildlife and medicinal plants for its members.

Band-owned company Nk’Mip Forestry is planning to revive two woodlands located above the First Nation’s reservation in the highlands between Oliver and Mount Baldy — making up just over 40 hectares combined. The forest tenure where the project is located is approximately 50,000 hectares in size, and is co-managed between the Osoyoos Indian Band and Gorman Bros.

The two forests — a drier Douglas fir ecosystem with ponderosa pine, and a montane spruce ecosystem dominated by dense lodgepole pile further up the hill — were both impacted by the 2021 Nk’Mip Creek wildfire, which is estimated to have burned just over 20,000 hectares.

After the fire, Vernon Louie, an Osoyoos Indian Band member and grounds operation manager with Nk’Mip Forestry, said animals in the area were displaced.  

“Twenty-plus years ago, there used to be deer and elk all over. Lots of moose up here, especially up Baldy you’d see them. Almost one every time you’d go up,” Louie told IndigiNews.

“Now, you’d be lucky to see a deer if you go up.”

These animals, he said, were forced to look for food sources at the valley bottom. Now, after five years, they’re starting to return to the highlands.

“But they need better ground, and more stuff to eat,” he said. “We want them to actually come back up and settle. But you gotta give them the opportunity to do that by clearing this stuff out.”

The first phase of the project’s operations, scheduled for late summer and into the fall, will see the burned, still-standing dead timber removed from both sites, to help make space for the planting of various berry and shrub plants, as well as deciduous and native trees.

“What we’re really doing here is trying to influence a bit of a change in this post-wildfire landscape, to encourage wildfire resiliency and ecosystem resiliency in the future,” project lead Eden Hardcastle, a forester-in-training with Nk’Mip Forestry, told IndigiNews.

“Instead of using the word restoration, I’ve used the term intervention.”

The dead timber will not be salvaged for profit, however. Instead, the trees will be processed into firewood materials for the community.

While both sites have unique planting prescriptions based on their ecosystems, there are prioritized shrub and deciduous tree species that will be planted across both areas.

The prioritized shrub species planned for planting include saskatoon berry, soopolallie (soapberry), huckleberry, thimbleberry and snowberry. Introducing deciduous trees such as birch, cottonwood and trembling aspen to the landscape is also part of the strategy.

“Most deciduous trees and shrubs are going to be really important for a live fire break,” Hardcastle said.“Not only do they retain more moisture, but they’re significantly less flammable, so it can really help slow down a fire.”

Having a diversity of species is critical for ecosystem adaptability, not just wildfire resilience, she said.

“We’re in a changing climate with changing external stimuli. Different trees — well, different plants, in general — can contribute different things to the ecosystem. Having that diversity is important for not only recovery, but long-term resilience in the area.”

Biodiversity in post-wildfire landscapes key to climate resiliency

Although lodgepole pine is a native tree, the species has taken over the site of the montane spruce ecosystem site. Hardcastle attributed its overgrowth to the tree’s serotinus pinecones that spread seeds after a fire sweeps through an area.

“When a fire comes through, that heat catalyzes to drop its seeds. That means that lodgepole pine comes back really fast and really thick after a fire.”

While it is a natural process, Hardcastle noted that it “also creates a bit of a fire hazard in the future, because that stand is really dense and very flammable.”

That’s why reintroducing biodiversity to the forest “is the key,” she added, for it helps with future climate resiliency. 

“It’s not just wildfires that put stress onto our forests. It’s temperature changes; it’s precipitation changes; it’s further human disturbance. Biodiversity helps with all of that. Some species are more resilient to some things than others. It contributes to overall tolerance to change.”

In addition to planting deciduous trees and different shrubs at the montane spruce ecosystem site, larch and douglas fir trees will also be planted there.

“Unfortunately here, we have nothing but lodgepole coming back. That was part of the decision-making there, Hardcastle said. “If we were getting species that we did want to see coming back naturally, we weren’t going to disturb it at all. That’s a process that we’re looking for.”

Once the dead trees have been removed, the plan is to invite Osoyoos Indian Band community members to help plant different trees and shrub species at the sites next spring.

The vision is to remove the dead trees from the forests while retaining the live ones, which will create more space and give shade for different trees and plants to grow, Peter Flett, the head of forestry operations at Nk’Mip Forestry, told IndigiNews. It will also help to attract more wildlife back to the area.

“More shade helps mitigate the heat from climate change. It keeps moisture in the soil. It helps shade-tolerant plants grow.”

The hope is to offer an abundance of food and cultural experiences for community members: more animals to hunt and a greater selection of berries and medicines to harvest.

Restoration project offers hope for community and future initiatives

Hardcastle said the project can act as a model for future similar initiatives and demonstrate how it can be applied on a larger scale. The project is being funded by Environment and Climate Change Canada, through their Climate-Smart Forestry grant, which is being administered by the Sustainable Forestry Initiative.

“Hopefully, in doing this, we can determine what that actual cost looks like for the future,” she said.

Hardcastle emphasized that the purpose of the restoration and intervention work is for the betterment of the Osoyoos Indian Band community.

“It’s for the environment, but this forested area is part of [Osoyoos Indian Band’s] culture,” she said.

“We also wanted to make sure that it was road-accessible, because we want this area to be usable as a foraging site for some of the shrubs that we’re planting. Like, for berries and other culturally significant plants.”

Louie said that Elders in the community have berry-picking spots across the two sites, and have given “all thumbs-up” for this project.

“This work is definitely needed. They want to see it restored. To restore it, you gotta take out the old stuff.”

“Berry picking, hunting, gathering, is really important.  Some of these areas are close to existing roads — the easier access for Elders, the better.”

Following the intervention, Hardcastle said she hopes to see an improvement in species composition, to show more biodiversity across the two sites, within the next five years.

“It would be great to see more wildlife up here,” she said.

“That short term is going to be really telling for what we did right and what we did wrong. Long term, I just hope it’s beneficial for the environment and the community: create a fire break, and create a pocket of diversity in an area that has very little diversity.”

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.

Summary

• In Simpcw First Nation, women are continuing traditions practiced by generations of women before them, including animal-hide tanning. 
• Tiffany Bowser and Roberta Haller are Secwe̓pemc women who grew up immersed in their culture and now teach others who want to learn through community workshops.
• While women have always tanned deer hide in B.C.’s interior, a smaller number practice the skill today, making the workshops hosted by Bowser and Haller a powerful assertion of Indigenous Rights.

Working with animal hides can be a messy process — and children in Tiffany Bowser’s community of Simpcw First Nation “absolutely love it.”

“They love scraping the hide. They love stretching it,” she shares.

“I don’t know why, but brain water is one of their favourite things,” she adds, laughing. “I’m like okay, just don’t get it in your mouth.”

Bowser hosts hide-tanning workshops in her First Nation, come-and-go style, so people with different needs can attend. Her workshops are also hosted during the school day, so children and youth from the Secwe̓pemc community — located north of Kamloops — are able to participate.

From hunting the animal, to skinning and tanning the hide, it is a lengthy, expensive and labour-intensive process that many people struggle to make time for. And finding people who carry the knowledge about how to properly tan an animal hide is becoming rare.

Despite those challenges, the tradition lives on in the Simpcw First Nation. In Secwe̓pemc culture, women are typically tasked with preparing animal hides — a responsibility that Bowser takes seriously.

“There’s not too many people on the reserve who know how to tan a hide,” Roberta Haller, who also teaches hide tanning in the community, says. “I feel very proud that I’m one of them.”

“I’ve been hunting since I was about three years old,” Bowser told The Narwhal.

“Some of my earliest memories are sitting on my dad’s shoulders, packing a handful of gophers around and fishing. It’s just something I grew up doing.”

This year, she hosted a 10-day workshop, calling her mentor Haller over the phone for advice each day. Haller was mentored by the late Virginia Donald, her aunt, who was known in the area for her tanned deer hides. 

“I’m probably pretty biased, but she was one of the best hide tanners out there. Her deer hides came out white and perfect,” Bowser says. 

Following the tradition of women who came before and taught them, Bowser and Haller support one another, teaching the next generation of hide tanners in their community how it’s done.

Hide tanning process and usage

While methods to prepare animal hides vary from person to person and community to community, Bowser and Haller follow the methods passed down to them from generations of Secwe̓pemc women. 

After harvesting and skinning the animal, Haller explains, the hide gets soaked in water. After it’s soaked, the hair is cut and scraped off the hide before it’s carefully placed on a frame. 

This part can be tricky: experienced tanners know where to cut holes to properly stretch the hide on the frame, without ruining it by piercing in the wrong places. 

Once on the frame, the hide is pounded and stretched, over a gentle heat source. “Not too hot, so it doesn’t try out too fast,” she says. 

After that, the hide is taken off of the rack and smoked, which adds colour, prevents stiffness and makes the fabric not water-resistant, but washable.

The next step is the brain water. 

“We take the brains from the deer and then we dissolve it in warm water so it becomes a milky liquid, in there we soak the hide again. As we’re soaking, we’re stretching it out again … then you put it back on the frame, pound it out again and start the whole process over again,” Haller says. All of this takes days, weeks or months, depending on the animal size, and what outcome the tanner is going for.

But if the steps aren’t completed properly, the whole process must be started over. Smaller game animals can take weeks to complete, while larger animals like moose can take up to a year. 

It takes time, commitment, muscles and know-how to make it all happen.

Passing the tradition through generations

Haller started working with animal hide in her 30s, wanting to pass the tradition onto her children. And since tanning was so intensive, she wanted to help her mentor Virginia continue the practice as she aged, while learning the practice from her. 

“Auntie Virginia didn’t like to take any shortcuts,” Haller tells The Narwhal. That meant skipping modern tools including pressure washers and trimmers to remove animal hair during the tanning process, which weren’t available back in her day.

“She just liked to do it the way she was taught, she didn’t try any other way. She knew one way would work, and that’s how she taught me, and that’s what we still do.”

Since learning from her auntie, Haller has mentored Bowser and anyone else who wants to learn at the community workshops in Simpcw First Nation. Though they focus on involving youth, anyone from the general community is also welcome to attend, as long as they are respectful of the animal hide.

One of those community participants is Fred Fortier, a Simpcw member who has attended many hide-tanning workshops hosted by Bowser and Haller. 

Fortier grew up connected to the land. After recovering from cancer five years ago, animal hide workshops have become a more accessible way for him to practice culture, although he still goes hunting sometimes. 

Visiting, speaking Secwepemctsín, sharing meals, telling hunting stories and laughing together at the workshops are “just a lot of fun,” Fortier says. 

Watching his grandchildren participate in the workshops is exciting. “I think that’s a really important component, our kids wanting to learn and not feeling ashamed to learn our cultural ways … for them to keep their head up and be proud,” he says.

He encourages hunters in the nation to keep the hide, bones and brains in mind when harvesting deer to be in alignment with Secwe̓pemc culture. 

“We have a lot of women in our community who have stepped forward to teach people our cultural ways,” he says. 

“For those people like Tiffany and Roberta, and all of the women who have stepped forward … I think they are the backbone of our community.”

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

At 7:30 a.m. on June 28, 2021, Ryan Ackerman sat down for a daily meeting. A paramedic and manager with BC Emergency Health Services, Ackerman had attended these meetings nearly every day since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. They had become routine. This one was different.

“A manager in the dispatch centre popped in very briefly and just said, ‘I’m sorry I can’t stay, things really got out of control overnight,’ ” Ackerman says.

Extreme heat was blanketing the province, and the vast majority of B.C.’s population was under public health heat warnings.

Overnight, calls flooded into 911. By morning, dispatchers were already backed up. Ackerman’s colleague told him there were hundreds of genuine emergencies, without enough teams to respond. 

“They need all hands on deck,” he remembers the colleague saying. So Ackerman decided to leave his desk and jump into an ambulance.

“I don’t think the scale of what we were walking into was really clear until we hit the button to go on the air to make ourselves available,” he says. “Immediately, a call came in, I listened to the radio and I heard all of the other units that were also on their way to cardiac arrest calls. It suddenly sank in: this is different, this is reaching natural disaster levels.”

The call Ackerman received was one of 11,970 emergency calls made by people in British Columbia that day, more than double the average number.

Ackerman saw the strain on his colleagues, as he watched them coming and going from the hospital. “They were exhausted, they were hot, they’d been through the heat themselves and they just kept going back out and doing more calls.”

The heat dome lasted eight days and claimed 619 lives in the province. Sarah Henderson, scientific director of Environmental Health Service at the BC Centre for Disease Control, called it “the most deadly weather event in Canadian history.” 

It pushed the ambulance service to the brink, but it also sparked action. In the five years since the heat dome, the province has invested millions to increase the number of paramedics and ambulances. They’ve built new departments and procedures for responding to extreme weather and even increased the scope of medications and treatments that first responders can use to save lives.

According to Ackerman, it’s a reflection of how the heat dome “fundamentally changed how we look at disaster and emergency management.” 

But those changes have yet to be tested by another heat dome of that scale. And as B.C. braces for another summer of extreme temperatures and dry conditions, some are wondering if we’ve gone far enough.

An ‘endless avalanche’ of cardiac arrests

For most paramedics in Vancouver, shift change happens around 6:00 am, as the night crew leaves and the day shift takes over. It’s usually cool, especially in Vancouver, where the ocean breeze helps moderate the temperatures. But on June 28, 2021, it was already 22 C and rising when Jayne Hamilton started her shift.

“I knew it was going to be hot, I knew it was going to be miserable,” she explains. “I didn’t, even with that, have an understanding of how hot it was going to be.”Like Ackerman, Hamilton was immediately dispatched to a cardiac arrest. By the time she cleared from that one, she was sent to another. 

“Somewhere between the second and third one, we started commenting out loud that ‘this is not normal,’ ” she says. “When you’ve made it to three cardiac arrests before 10 o’clock in the morning, it’s odd.” Hamilton is an advanced care paramedic. A specialist dispatched to the most serious emergencies, she has more training than the primary care paramedics who make up the bulk of the ambulance service. But even with that focus, Hamilton says “a heavy week of cardiac arrests” would be three in a four-day work block. But on June 28, she says she responded to 11 of the 27 that came across her dispatch computer. 

“It seemed endless, like just an endless avalanche,” she says.

When bodies heat up, they normally cool down by sweating and dilating the blood vessels near our skin. But extreme heat and exertion can stress these systems. When someone is exposed to these stressors for too long, their body gets overwhelmed. Heat cramps show up, then heat exhaustion, with profuse sweating, nausea and dizziness. Those can be stopped by cooling someone down, but if that doesn’t happen the condition can progress to heat-stroke, a life-threatening problem where organs start to shut down. Heat can also impact how medications work and compound existing health problems, especially related to the heart and kidneys. 

These are all things that paramedics like Hamilton learn in school. But outside of the classroom, heat emergencies are rare. 

“[Extreme heat] wasn’t something that organizations or the paramedics at large were really focused on,” she says, explaining that most heat emergencies happened at worksites or events, like races and summer festivals.

And it wasn’t just paramedics seeing a massive uptick in heat-related illnesses.

“I was working during the heat dome and I saw more cases of heat illness than I ever had in my entire career,” Vancouver-based family physician and president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, Melissa Lem says. 

“It affected so many people … If you didn’t have indoor cooling, you could not escape from the heat; it was everywhere.”

Unhoused and low-income communities impacted more by extreme heat, heat dome

The heat dome was experienced by people throughout B.C., but it didn’t impact everyone equally. In 2022, the BC Coroners Service released a report about this period which found “the elderly, persons with chronic health conditions, persons living alone, those with no access to cooling and those in particular geographic areas were more impacted by the heat.”It was a reality explored by the Union Gospel Mission in their 2024 report Unhoused Under Pressure, looking at how climate change is impacting unhoused people in the Downtown Eastside. It looked at flooding, cold, wildfire smoke and extreme heat, with a focus on how the heat dome hit the community.

“Vancouver’s 2021 heat dome lives vividly in the collective memory of Downtown Eastside residents,” the report explained. While the BC Coroners Service’s report didn’t break down deaths by neighbourhood, it did find that “material deprivation” and “social deprivation” were major contributors to heat-related deaths. So too was the lack of access to air conditioning or indoor cooling spaces, all problems, Wells explains, common in the Downtown Eastside.

“Heat is more harmful and prevalent in the Downtown Eastside because there are fewer plants, less shade and little to no access to air conditioning,” Nick Wells, a spokesperson with Union Gospel Mission, explains.

“The Downtown Eastside can get as hot as 49 degrees Celsius, and that’s incredibly dangerous,” Wells adds. “While you’re dealing with this heat, you’re also dealing with other kinds of comorbidities or issues, such as entrenched homelessness, systemic poverty, mental health issues, substance use and addiction. All these factors play in.”

‘You were in a natural disaster’

First responders train for natural disasters. They call them mass-casualty incidents and have systems to manage staff, triage patients and ensure resources get where they’re needed. But extreme heat doesn’t look like other disasters.

“What we worked through during the heat dome, in the truest sense of the word, was a natural disaster — no different than floods, earthquakes, that kind of thing,” Hamilton says. In addition to her work as a paramedic, Hamilton serves on Canada Task Force 1, a Vancouver-based search-and-rescue team deployed to natural disasters across Canada. “It was that scale of a disaster, [but] at the time, I don’t think, when we were in it, that we recognized it.”

Ackerman remembers “feeling just awful about the way the day had gone.” So much so that he brought it up with his supervisor.  

“He told me, ‘You were in a natural disaster, we just didn’t tell you [that] you were,” Ackerman says.

For some, that feelings of grief, exhaustion and frustration turned into anger when Darlene Mackinnon, then BC Emergency Health Services’ chief operating officer, told Global News that, in her eyes, the service had done “a really good job” responding to the heat dome.

A petition calling for Mackinnon’s firing was initiated, calling out BC Emergency Health Services for failing to prepare for the heat dome by staffing ambulances or dispatch centres appropriately, leaving some patients to wait hours for help. 

“I have never seen paramedics and dispatchers as angry as they are right now,” one paramedic, speaking anonymously to Global News, said in reply. “Everyone is absolutely livid and disgusted with the response.”

The petition calling for Mackinnon’s firing gathered thousands of signatures in a matter of days. The Ambulance Paramedics of British Columbia, the union representing paramedics and emergency dispatchers, later learned that Mackinnon was placed on leave. By December 2021, she moved on to a new role within the provincial health authority.

On July 14, Adrian Dix, then the province’s health minister, held a press conference announcing the hiring of Leanne Heppell to the new post of chief ambulance officer, and pledged millions of dollars to hire 85 new full-time paramedics and 30 full-time dispatchers. There was also money to buy 22 new ambulances and convert 22 rural ambulance stations from part-time, on-call service to full-time.

A year later, in 2022, the province announced $148 million in new funding to expand the ambulance service and hire new paramedics. They budgeted $2.1 billion for climate disaster preparedness, including funding for the Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience team. According to the government, by 2024, the BC Emergency Health Services budget was nearly $1 billion, an increase of more than $475 million since 2017. 

“It’s one of those events where we recognize, as an organization, that it shouldn’t have taken a tragedy like that to lead to improvements,” Ackerman says. But it has led to improvements. After the heat dome, Ackerman became a director of the disaster risk reduction and resilience department, a team he says he oversaw grow from two staff to more than 30.

“The immediate response was [that] we need to have an early warning system, we need to have proper preparation, we need to have a proper response [and] we need to have a proper recovery phase,” he explains. “That was the impetus for five years of iterative improvement to try and make sure that we are prepared well in advance of any event.”

Those preparations include what Ackerman calls an “operational readiness team” of paramedics who monitor forecasts from organizations such as Environment Canada and BC Wildfire Service. Ackerman says they use this data to produce daily risk scores for the service for categories of environmental issues, such as floods, wildfires and extreme temperatures.

These scores trigger a range of responses. It could be increasing staffing levels or moving ambulance crews to high-risk areas. There might be staff-wide warnings about travel conditions or how temperature extremes impact medications. Sometimes it requires out-of-the-box thinking, like when dozens of ambulances were deployed to the Vancouver airport to meet planes evacuating critically ill patients during the 2023 wildfires in the Northwest Territories.

The province also created something called the BC HEAT Committee after the heat dome. A multi-agency coordinating body housed in the BC Centre for Disease Control, Ackerman describes it as a heat alert and response system “that just didn’t exist before the heat dome.” 

“We’re able to respond well in advance and be prepared for these things and not get caught after it’s already escalated,” he says. 

There are also efforts to reduce the strain that heat events put on emergency services. For example, specialized paramedics will respond to non-life-threatening emergencies, helping move people to cooling centres and freeing up ambulances for Code 3 responses.

Climate change is a ‘prominent source of occupational stress’ for paramedics

Getting the ambulance service to understand the connections between climate change and medical emergencies was a focus for David Hollingworth before the heat dome ever hit. A primary care paramedic and the director of the Ambulance Paramedics of BC’s environment and climate change committee, he had spent years trying to make the link. While some supervisors supported him, he says that the higher ranks of the service didn’t seem interested.

“Seeing these [natural disaster] events and not seeing the link to climate change being made was infuriating,” he says.

But something changed after the heat dome. The death toll was one part, but so was the strain of working under extreme temperatures.

“I was making little bags of ice from the ice machine in the hospital,” Hollingworth recalls. “I was putting them in my breast pockets and moving them around to different pockets in my body, just to try to cool down.”

After the heat dome, he had a moment where he felt “a sense of this is what I’ve been talking about.”

“Health-care professionals now recognize that human health is interdependent on planetary health and the environment,” he explains. “By not doing anything about it, we’re just making our work more difficult and more dangerous, so it’s in all of our self-interest to do it.”

It’s an argument that resonates with Shannon Sherk. Now a paramedic, Sherk was a student at the University of Victoria when the heat dome hit. She was broadly interested in the connections between human health, the environment and health-care, but the events of 2021 sharpened that focus onto climate change and paramedics.

“I realized that no one had really looked into the relationship between paramedicine and environmental hazards,” she says. “Which seems a little bit ironic to me, considering it’s the facet of health-care that interacts the most [with people] outside of clinical settings.”

Sherk dug in, surveying over 100 paramedics from across the province about how climate change was impacting their work for a paper that was published in the June 2026 issue of the Journal of Disaster and Emergency Medicine.

“The big overarching conclusion is that paramedics are seeing environmental hazards impact both their patients and themselves,” she explains. “Patient outcomes are worse when you have extreme hazards, transport times or your time to get to patients is longer, and call volumes are higher.”

But while Sherk says that those are all pretty well understood realities, there’s less clarity around how paramedics are affected by events like extreme heat, wildfire smoke and atmospheric rivers — particularly when they’re already at their limit. 

“If you have a workforce that is operating at over 100 per cent capacity on a good day, what plans are there when you do have those additional stressors and there’s not really any extra resources or staff you can pull upon?” she asks. 

Her research found that climate impacts are a “prominent source of occupational stress” among paramedics. 

“The combination of a high call volume, higher acuity calls and an overstretched workforce creates optimal conditions for critical incident stress,” the report explains.

In August 2025, the Ambulance Paramedics of BC published a press release raising the alarm over a simmering mental health crisis within the service. Nine paramedics had already died in seven months prior to the release of the statement.

“While a majority of these deaths were due to health issues or accidents, many of these members died by suicide,” the statement explained. “Deaths that are very likely connected to the immense stressors of their jobs.”It noted 30 per cent of the 6,000-plus paramedics in the province were either off work for mental health reasons or working while dealing with a mental health issue.

When the CBC asked Nicki Ropp, a mental health and wellness coordinator for the union about why they were seeing this spike, she cited multiple factors, including impacts from climate change and extreme weather.“With the ongoing opioid crisis that continues to take up a lot of our call volume, the pandemic, the flooding, the heat dome, our staffing shortages, wildfires, everything. This is all compounding things,” she says.

Sherk worries that these issues are only going to worsen with the climate crisis. 

“You have all of these overlapping factors,” she says. “It’s hard to rally folks around figuring out what you do when there’s another really bad heat event, because we’re so focused on how to deal with how bad things are now.”

It’s a question of when, not if, we’ll experience another heat event. And it might not even take something as extreme as the heat dome. According to research published by Sarah Henderson in June 2025, “the risk of death spikes when people are exposed to both elevated levels of fine particulate matter from wildfire smoke and temperatures above 26 C.” 

That’s something we could easily see this summer. Environment Canada is forecasting a hot, dry summer for British Columbia. In late May, Weather Network meteorologists doubled down on that, predicting that the arrival of an El Niño pattern would lock in warmer summer temperatures for the province and contribute to elevated wildfire risk.That could mean increased strain on health-care and emergency services, because while heat and smoke are both dangerous on their own, they’re even more deadly together. That worries Lem, not only because of the health implications, but because she thinks that both the provincial and federal governments are rolling back climate action and forgetting the lessons of the heat dome. 

“It’s recency bias. … Our brains are wired to focus on what’s in front of us right now,” she says. “This summer is projected to be one of the hottest in history. If we have another deadly heat wave, they’re going to be talking about climate investments again. It’s unfortunately our short-term views that prevent us from acting longer-term.”

Still, Ackerman thinks that the ambulance service is much better prepared to respond to future climate events than it was back in 2021. He points to the increased staffing, better pay, the preparation from his disaster readiness team and even the expanding scope of practice as examples. 

But Sherk isn’t as confident. She’s had conversations with Ackerman’s department and thinks they’re doing “amazing” work in preparing for disaster events. And while she agrees that conditions within the ambulance service have improved through things like better pay and increased staffing levels, many of the external factors driving increased call volumes haven’t.“So much of the workforce is putting out fires and dealing with ongoing crises,” Sherk explains. “You have all of these overlapping factors — like the opioid crisis, the housing crisis, the impact of COVID-19 and terrible responder well-being — that it’s hard to rally folks around figuring out what you do when there’s another really bad heat event. We’re so focused on how we deal with how bad things are now.”For Sherk, it raises questions about whether disaster response plans will work when they depend on having excess resources. Her research suggests that many paramedics are still overworked and burned out, and if they’re already stretched to the limit, she’s worried that even the best- laid plans won’t be enough. 

“If you’re trying to identify what resources you can pull in during a heat event, it’s hard to imagine what that looks like when all available resources are being used all the time.”

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

The winding drive northward from Vancouver along the Sea to Sky Highway is a series of postcard moments — lush coastal rainforest, glimmering ocean and approaching mountain ranges. It’s easy to miss the closed Britannia mine nestled into the jagged northwest slopes.

The site, in Squamish Nation territory, was once a steep rockface sloping into the Pacific Ocean. In 1904, the Britannia mine opened and would grow to be one of the largest copper mines in the British Empire by the 1920s and ’30s. Little attention was paid to the environmental impacts of mining at the time. By the late ’90s, it became one of the most contaminated industrial sites in North America.

The mine shut down in 1974 and by 1975, the local historical society opened what’s now known as the Britannia Mine Museum. 

On a recent Saturday night this Pride Month, another evolution was underway, with 14 drag kings, queens and things strutting, lip-syncing and sashaying through the century-old Mill No. 3.

The Britannia mine had to transform to continue to exist, drag queen Dust Cwaine says, sitting on a giant tire and staring out at a rusty piece of discarded mining equipment. “When we look around, all you see is history.” 

The venue for tonight’s drag show, “Old Town, New Queens,” is the historic 20-storey mill, which once used gravity to help process ore, rock that contains minerals, dug up from the over 200 kilometres of tunnels inside the mountain. Large pieces would tumble down from the top of the mill, to be crushed, grinded and processed into the consistency of sand. A mixture of that powdered ore, water, aromatic oils and bubbles became a cakey copper concentrate, to later be sent out and processed with high heat and purified into copper.

From 1904 to 1974, the Britannia mine produced more than 45 million tonnes of ore. Tonight, the booming sounds of rock being crushed and grinded are far in the past, replaced by drag king Kyle Wiley turning it out to AC/DC’s You Shook Me All Night Long.

Britannia’s copper mill could have been left to “rust and rot” like others across the country, Derek A. Jang, the museum’s director of programs and guest experience, says before the show. His radio beeps and crackles as staff prepare for the evening and try to grab his attention.

Typically, when a mine in B.C. is closed or decommissioned, plans focus on returning the area back to what it was. The local community doesn’t always get a say.

Some closed mines have been remodelled in unique ways. The Sunken Garden in Victoria’s famous Butchart Gardens was once a limestone quarry. There’s an old silver mine in northern Ontario that has lived many lives including a bookstore, flower shop, grocery store and now a tea room. In Pennsylvania, an abandoned limestone mine has become a resort where visitors can ride all-terrain and other recreational vehicles through the darkness of underground tunnels.

The community of Britannia Beach shared its vision to turn the mine into a museum years before the last shift whistle blew on November 1, 1974, Jang says. The opening of the museum the next year was thanks to intentional efforts by a number of groups, including the Britannia Beach Historical Society.

Tonight, the old mine likely looks very different from what the founders ever imagined.

Community groups like Queer People in Mining, Sea 2 Sky Allies and Pride Squamish have booths set up in the gravel courtyard outside the mill. Rainbow hearts and balloons direct the crowd. Inside, there’s an archway — much like the one Madonna danced through in her iconic video Express Yourself — next to a sound system, smoke machine and stage lights.

“As a member of the 2SLGBTQ+ community myself, I don’t always feel seen when I go to different museum attractions,” Jang says, adding that Britannia exhibits have been dominated by images and stories of working white men. “This event, in some ways, is a bold way of saying ‘Let’s change that.’ ”

It took years of relationship building with the local 2SLGBTQ+ community for the museum to see the mine go from tunnels to tutus. Trevor Wulff, president of Pride Squamish, says the nearby town he grew up in wasn’t always a welcoming place. “It’s really amazing because it’s all about community … everyone deserves a sense of belonging,” Wulff says, looking around as a crowd of many ages and genders slowly grows.

It was important to think about how to make the event welcoming for young people, Jang says. He heard from community groups that youth “have very few opportunities to see queerness in action.”

Drag artists played with themes of tech advancements, “Giants at Werk,” a nod to Britannia Museum’s summer exhibit on big machinery and the mine’s legacy of pollution.

“We’re adding to a new history while honouring and respecting the past,” Dust Cwaine says in an interview during intermission, as performers Homo Hardware and Peter Packer prepare for their acts.

Decades ago, when the Britannia mine was operational, its lights illuminated the nights of Howe Sound. The night of the drag show, sunset slowly seeped in through the mill’s 14,416 panes of glass adding to the dramatic glow of Homo Hardware’s iridescent, shimmering wings.

Drag is “a vehicle for self expression,” Homo Hardware explained on a phone call before the show. “There are so many different ways that people can use that, whether that’s a more direct, literal message about a cause, or something a bit more abstract.” What makes drag so effective, they said, is the energy and connection that comes from being in a live performance space.

In the second act, drag thing Rose Butch lip synced to Hillary Duff’s Come Clean. The lyrics hit a bit differently than usual, invoking the environmental impacts of mining. Duff’s voice reverberates through the rafters — “I’m shedding, shedding every color / Tryna find a pigment of truth beneath my skin” — as Rose Butch parts through bubbles floating across the stage.

In one far corner of the mill, bright blue streaks of copper reacting with water shine bright. Rose Butch moves up and down hidden in a star-speckled cloud, holding an umbrella dripping with tinsel until their big reveal: the clouds part into a dress draping them in sequined bright blue skies.

The mine was once called “the single worst point source of metal pollution on the North American continent,” causing devastating effects to marine life in Howe Sound. Acidic water containing heavy metals leaked into nearby waterways for decades. Water leaving the site has to be treated at an estimated cost of $3.7 million per year, according to an email from the Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship. That treatment process has to happen in perpetuity — meaning the public will foot that bill for the foreseeable future.

That history isn’t lost on the organizers of the event. We’re all here because of the continuous efforts to keep the land clean, Dust Cwaine says. Work continues today to ensure “this place doesn’t poison our waters and poison our nature … It has this complicated existence … I think putting drag in it is this incredible juxtaposition.”

Just a few hours ago, Jang was wearing a plain black Britannia Mine Museum polo shirt, as he prepared for the show. Now, he’s on stage with a flashy new look, sharing another evolution of the mine — and a hope for more to come. The waters surrounding the mine site were once severely damaged, he tells the crowd, but there’s been incredible work done to bring back aquatic life and restore the ecosystem. 

“In the 2010s spawning salmon returned to Britannia Creek, for the first time, in what we suspect to be over 100 years,” he says to an eruption of cheers, through which Jang continues. 

“I worry [young people] think they’re inheriting a broken world that is beyond help … I hope that in some way Britannia Mine Museum can play a role in inspiring the next generation of great thinkers to remember that work is going to be hard, but solutions can be in reach.”

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.

Summary

• B.C. is a world-leading mushroom producer with much of the provincial crop being exported to the United States.
• Recently, the United States Department of Commerce added tariffs to Canadian-grown mushrooms on the grounds they receive unfair government subsidies.
• One B.C.-based mushroom farm is fighting the tariffs, but more could be coming by the end of the year.

Mushrooms may not be the first crop that comes to mind when you think of high-tech agriculture. But in B.C., Agaricus bisporus — the fungal species sold in grocery stores as button mushrooms, creminis and portobellos — are grown using cutting-edge techniques.

“If you go back 10 or 15 years, you would travel to Holland to find the most productive, leading-edge mushroom facilities in the world,” Lewis Macleod, CEO of South Mill Champs Mushrooms, said in an interview with The Narwhal. “Today, you travel to Holland and British Columbia.”

In 2017, Pennsylvania-based South Mill merged with Aldergrove-based Champ’s Mushrooms to form South Mill Champs. The company now supplies more B.C-grown mushrooms to the U.S. market than any other, around 22,675 tonnes per year. 

Before B.C.’s mushroom tech boom, farms often mimicked more natural growing conditions. Modern B.C. farms use what’s called the Dutch method: metal shelves heaped with a mixture of manure and straw to cultivate their crops. The mushrooms are grown in air-tight facilities that are closely controlled for temperature and humidity. Unlike other indoor crops, mushrooms don’t need much light to grow. The buildings are dim, the opposite of brightly lit commercial greenhouses. This method results in faster growing, better quality mushrooms and fewer pests, according to Macleod. But it’s not as common in the U.S.

Nearly all Canadian mushroom exports — 98 per cent in 2024 — are sold in the U.S. As B.C.’s technologically advanced mushroom industry has grown into a global leader, some American producers have accused Canadian growers of benefiting from unfair government subsidies. It’s set off a trade dispute that could reshape the cross-border market.

B.C. mushroom trade sparks U.S. concerns

If you ask B.C. Agriculture Minister Lana Popham, mushrooms are among the most unique of the province’s commercial crops.

“They have to be harvested 24 hours a day and they grow in the dark,” Popham said in an interview. “There’s been a lot of technology that’s been coming around, a lot of innovation that is allowing for different types of harvesting [and] different types of lighting conditions.”

This innovation may be part of what sparked a trade complaint from a group of U.S. mushroom producers last year.

A September 2025 petition to the U.S. Department of Commerce from the Fresh Mushrooms Fair Trade Coalition argued fresh Canadian mushrooms are being “unfairly” subsidized by government programs.

“Canadian producers are exporting fresh mushrooms to the United States at prices below fair value and are benefiting from countervailable subsidies provided by the government of Canada,” the petition says. “These practices have resulted in significant negative impacts on U.S. mushroom growers and packers, including lost sales, depressed prices and declining profitability.” 

In fact, none of the subsidies provided by Canadian governments specifically target the mushroom industry and are instead directed at farmers generally.

But in May, the Commerce Department agreed with the U.S. petitioners and applied duties on some Canadian mushroom producers. The preliminary decision concluded Canadian governments do unfairly subsidize mushroom production. 

For now, about two dozen Canadian mushroom producers are facing a 2.84 per cent tariff on the mushrooms they sell in the U.S.

South Mill Champs is contesting the Commerce Department’s decision, which Mushrooms Canada, the national trade association representing Canadian mushroom growers, called “deeply flawed.”

“It’s using regulatory tactics to stifle healthy competition,” Macleod said.

Champ’s Mushrooms was handed a 1.62 per cent tariff by the Commerce Department. 

The Commerce Department has yet to decide on whether to hit Canadian mushrooms with anti-dumping duties, a type of tariff applied to imported goods that are being sold at lower prices, as a way to protect domestic producers.

Government subsidies aren’t specific to mushrooms — and U.S. growers get them too

There’s no denying Canadian mushroom growers receive support from the government. B.C. producers do not have to pay provincial sales tax on equipment for their businesses and can also access grant programs that support agricultural operations.

The province also offers funding to help farms cover the cost of adopting new technologies, but Popham pointed out none of the province’s programs are targeted specifically at bolstering B.C. mushrooms.

“It’s not specific at all to the mushroom industry,” Popham said. “It’s just the way we support farmers in B.C.”

And that means the Fresh Mushrooms Fair Trade Coalition’s complaint lacks merit under U.S. trade law, according to Mushrooms Canada CEO Ryan Koeslag.

“It is difficult to reconcile Commerce’s preliminary approach with the fact that comparable agricultural tax treatment exists in the United States,” Koeslag said in a statement after the Commerce Department’s preliminary duties were announced. “Canadian mushroom growers are not receiving special treatment. They are operating under ordinary rules that apply to farmers.”

The Commerce Department did not respond to questions about these criticisms of its decision and whether it will assess tax exemptions available to U.S. mushroom farmers before reaching its final decision on the tariffs. The Narwhal also contacted Giorgio Fresh Co., one of the U.S. companies that formed the Fresh Mushrooms Fair Trade Coalition, for comment but did not receive a response.

Macleod doesn’t believe the trade complaint is really about subsidy programs at all.

“This case is not about the U.S. versus Canada — it’s about companies who have invested in new infrastructure and those who haven’t invested in new infrastructure,” he said.

Most Canadian-grown mushrooms are grown using the Dutch method, Macleod explained. This technique gives growers large, reliable yields quickly, he added, while also reducing pest pressures and creating mushrooms that consumers prefer.

In the U.S., the majority of mushrooms are grown on wood shelves, an older technique that isn’t as efficient as the Dutch method.

Growing mushrooms on wood makes it “very hard to consistently produce a fine-looking mushroom and ensure disease doesn’t at times of the year really damage the crop,” Macleod said.

South Mill Champs’ U.S. operations have learned a lot about the benefits of modern mushroom growing from their Canadian counterparts, he added.

Switching from wood-based cultivation to the Dutch method isn’t cheap, though government grant programs and tax exemptions can help take the edge off the costs. Macleod said it takes years for a mushroom farm to see a return on investment into a whole new cultivation set-up. But the new technology can reduce ongoing costs, increase revenue and open the door to further technological innovation, he added. 

With new cultivation systems in place, Popham said some B.C. farms are introducing robots to harvest their mushrooms.

“Technology is taking over what I would call mundane tasks,” she said, adding human workers are still needed to oversee the machines.

“They don’t expect, as they bring in technology, to see displacement of labour. It’s adding to a better quality of workplace, which is really cool.”

Robots can’t harvest mushrooms grown using wood-based shelving, Macleod said, potentially putting old-style producers at even more of a disadvantage.

“If you don’t have new infrastructure, you have to build from scratch,” he said.

Final decision on additional cross-border costs for B.C. mushroom growers could take months

While additional duties on Canadian mushrooms could be announced within weeks, a final determination by the U.S. Department of Commerce may not come for months. Macleod is hopeful the final determination will be that Canadian-grown mushrooms do not harm U.S. producers.

“I really do not think less mushrooms will be exported from Canada into the U.S.,” he said. “Duties paid will mean ultimately the consumer pays more for mushrooms, which is bad for the consumer and the industry.”

Popham believes that B.C.-grown mushrooms are popular because of the industry’s embrace of innovation and its proximity to the U.S. market.

“I hope that what results from this most recent challenge is that there’s an acknowledgement that we’re just doing it really, really well,” she said.

At a time when many British Columbians want to support locally grown food, mushrooms are a perfect choice, she added.

“When we talk about being more resilient and growing more at home, mushrooms have been there the whole time,”Popham said. “I think that when consumers understand how big of an industry it is here and I think that this is another feather in our cap.”

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.

Around 13,000 years ago, our blue planet got a lot whiter. 

Temperatures in the northern hemisphere dropped precipitously and in a relatively short time — decades, not centuries — big ice sheets spread down from the mountains, freezing out once-teeming habitats populated densely by flora and fauna. 

Humans, and our non-human relatives, had been flourishing for some 10,000 years in the warm afterglow that followed the previous deep freeze. Abundance had bloomed in the glacial melt and from the sediment left on the land. Life stretched out in the absence of ice. But then the ice came back.

The ensuing thousand-year period is called the Younger Dryas, named for a little Arctic flower called Dryas octopetala. In some places, like Greenland, the freeze took mere months. Other parts of the northern world succumbed more slowly, but the overall process, in geological time, was like the heartbeat of a hummingbird. And then it was quiet.

The onset of the Younger Dryas may have been abrupt, but it wasn’t catastrophic. Humans adapted. Clinging to refugia — pockets of the landscape where conditions were favourable enough to support plants and animals despite the pervasive cold — we endured. Ultimately, we thrived. When the period ended, as abruptly as it had arrived, so began the Holocene.

Like the humans who watched the world change so quickly to white and like their descendants who felt the rapid return of the sun, we are living through a period of dramatic and accelerating changes to our environment. 

But ours is a different time, one characterized not by ice, but by fire.

Last fall, while walking down an alleyway in my northern British Columbia town, I ran into an acquaintance. We traded the usual pleasantries and then talk turned, as it so often does, to the weather. It was hot and dry and the skies were choked with the haze from a spate of wildfires that had flared up after the season appeared to be mostly over.

“This isn’t normal,” my friend insisted. 

Unlike me, he grew up in the area. As an avid outdoors enthusiast and former mountain guide, he was well-positioned to say what’s normal and what’s not. He seemed unsettled, agitated. 

“I have never seen a September like this,” he said.

We are living in the Anthropocene, a term many geologists have adopted to characterize the era where humans are the primary agents of change on the planet. Our actions over the past few centuries have led to the increasingly erratic and unstable climatic systems wreaking havoc across the globe. As we grapple with the impacts of our collective past, we also need to grapple with ourselves as we come to terms with how we process the changes we are experiencing. We are reckoning with a restless world.

Those same wildfires that suffused my little mountain town with the smell of campfire blanketed the city of Vancouver with thick smoke. For a few days, the air quality there plummeted to rank as the worst in the world. It all felt surprising somehow, even as we collectively chided ourselves for being surprised. 

Humans are incredibly adaptable — but we crave certainty. We intuitively cling to patterns we’ve seen before to guide our expectations about what a day, month or year might bring. We plan around those expectations: picnics and road trips, soccer games and barbeques.

As the world around us continues to change, we begrudgingly change with it. We plan now for wildfire season — unheard of in my childhood. We slather our kids in sunblock and pack asthma inhalers. We don’t roast marshmallows on crackling fires anymore when we camp out in the woods in the summer because of months-long fire bans. But change is a painful and iterative process and we keep setting a new normal to anchor ourselves to, again and again and again.

Our preference for certainty can have profound impacts on mental health. Very little quantitative research has been done but there is a growing consensus that climate impacts — including the anticipation of those we have not yet experienced — are leading to a mental health crisis.

“Climate change has been associated with numerous mental health conditions including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, anxiety, grief, substance use disorders and suicidal ideation among many others,” Elizabeth Wiley, a physician, wrote in the BC Medical Journal in 2019.

We do plan further ahead, peeking into possible futures with predictive climate models to design and build infrastructure we hope will protect our communities from fires and floods and more. But our world is changing as fast as that flickering hummingbird heartbeat and we act as if each pulse will last forever. There’s only so far we can see. 

In our temporal myopia, we need to get more comfortable with not knowing — and embrace uncertainty as an essential part of our existence.

Our ancestors found refugia to withstand an icy world that became increasingly hostile to life. Now, as we speed inexorably into a hotter future, we are confronted with a growing list of urgent problems we need to prepare for, and adapt our existence to meet. We need to build our refugia.

David Stainforth, a physicist and climate scientist from Oxford, England, says policy makers and scientists need to pay closer attention to uncertainty — and build for unpredictable outcomes. He told me climate modelling has an important role to play in adaptation, but relying too heavily on a particular set of predictions, however sophisticated the models may be, can inadvertently fall prey to the human tendency to seek certainty. 

“It will kind of spuriously get rid of the uncertainty, meaning you can now build your flood defences — but you’re building the flood defences to protect yourself against the future in the model,” he said on a video call last year. “And the future in reality could be very, very different from that. There’s a danger you might misdirect society.”

In his 2023 book, Predicting Our Climate Future, Stainforth makes a case for embracing the uncertainties in climate models as a guiding principle for building resiliency at a community level. As he wrote in an essay for Aeon, uncertainties compound over decades until “almost everything can influence almost everything else.” 

“Changes in Arctic sea ice could influence the Indian summer monsoon,” he wrote. “Changes in rainfall in the North Atlantic could influence temperature patterns in central Africa.”

In essence, Stainforth argues we risk catastrophe if we are too reliant on the predictions of complex climate models — which can do many things but not all things — for the decisions we make about how to survive the inevitable changes that are coming. But by embracing uncertainty, he says, we can build refugia capable of withstanding impacts we haven’t yet imagined. 

Michele Koppes, a professor in the department of geography at the University of British Columbia, says accepting uncertainty can also provide a path through climate-related grief and anxiety. Koppes studies the effects of climate change on mountains and glaciers and works with communities living with the impacts, which include “dwindling water resources and increases in landslides and natural hazards like outburst floods.” That work began with a focus on the physical changes to the landscape, but has shifted to focus on the human side. 

“Who are the people that are living in the closest proximity to these impacts and what are their stories?” she said. “How are they perceiving this and what do they need in order to be resilient and to feel like they can continue their livelihoods and their lives in the face of all this change?”

She said asking these questions helped her process the loss and helplessness she was feeling as she watched the places she loved melt away. Reframing how we think about climate change asks us to accept uncertainty as a core principle — and while that can be deeply uncomfortable it also offers a truer understanding of the world around us. 

“The notion of certainty is a fallacy,” Koppes said. “Or maybe I’ll be more specific: the notion of control is a fallacy.” 

“The more I spend time on this earth, the more I recognize how we are just one small part of a complex system,” she explained. “And complex systems are the process of emergent phenomena — you never quite know where it’s going to go. The more we think that we understand or we have control, or we’re certain about one aspect, the further we are from truly knowing everything is a web of relations.”

Faced with the onset of the Younger Dryas, our ancestors probably didn’t sit around arguing about how to stop the ice from advancing. It’s far more likely they took stock of their surroundings and found ways to act quickly to protect the things they cared about most. 

“Some people will care about the decreasing glaciers and certain types of wildlife, whether that’s butterflies or polar bears, or whatever,” Stainforth said. “But I don’t think most people do. Their cares are smaller; their cares are more personal. I think the number one thing that we care about with respect to climate change is protecting our societies and our cultures. It’s the world that we have, the world we’ve grown up in, our support structure.”

Stainforth said grounding conversations in how climate change affects what we care about is essential to spurring action — and hope.

“There will be places where the train track needs rebuilding because of landslides, because of flooding or because of drought, or because of changes in the grasses that are growing there,” he said. “These things are going to happen, and they’re going to happen more and more frequently, because that’s what climate change is.” 

Responding to impacts will be a steady drain on government resources, he said, which in turn means “we won’t have resources for other things — and that can be culture, it can be transport, it can be sports facilities or it could be health or education.”

“It’s a threat to everything,” Stainforth said. In response, we have to decide what to save. “It’s about building a future that we want,” he said.

When American author and activist Rebecca Solnit wrote about hope, she emphasized the value of uncertainty.

“Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act,” she wrote in her 2004 book Hope in the Dark. “When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes — you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others.”

If we believe too firmly in a predictable future, Solnit writes, we risk setting ourselves on a path of apathy. Therein lies grief and anxiety and ruin. But if we accept uncertainty as a fundamental part of change, we can act accordingly.

Koppes believes we can see this belief at work in the next generation. Her students have loosened their grip on certainty, she says, but not in an apathetic way.

“There’s no longer any expectation that one can take a snapshot of time or a memory of place and that we can either get back to that time or that place — or that the environment and the climate was ever in a form of stasis,” she said. “They’re grasping at those components of their environments that are still bringing them joy, knowing that they might not exist for their lifetime.”

In other words, her students are accepting and embodying an existential truth: that everything is always in a state of change. And while we can’t be certain about the risks of the future, we also can’t predict how beautiful or resilient it might be. 

One day we might name this period for Chamaenerion angustifolium, the fireweed. Or maybe we’ll go for Delonix regia, sometimes called the Phoenix tree. Like our distant relatives, not just enduring but thriving, we’ll rise from the ashes into a world we co-created that protects all that we hold dear.

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.

Morning light streams into the tiny, five-seat helicopter as it hovers above the Tranquil Creek watershed in Clayoquot Sound, B.C. It turns into what seems like a collision course with a cliff, but a landing pad appears just in time.

After a minute of careful positioning, the chopper touches ground on a bed of freshly cut grass and branches, allowing Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation’s natural resources manager Saya Masso and lead guardian Tattuuskulth (Tatt) Charlie to step outside.

They’ve come to see a mine shaft with an entranceway small enough that Masso ducks down to look inside. It looks like a relic from the gold rush, but there are a few conspicuously new things stashed at the entrance: a shiny white construction hat, plastic bags and a long orange hose coiled in a pile. 

For Masso and Charlie, they’re quiet reminders that what began here more than a century ago has yet to conclude.

In February, Canadian mining company Imperial Metals received a permit to explore for gold at the long-dormant Fandora mine site on Vancouver Island’s west coast. For the next five years, the company is allowed to pick and prod underground in the hopes of accessing the site’s mostly untapped resources. 

Masso is worried about Hiłsyaqƛis, the name for the Tranquil Creek watershed in Nuu-chah-nulth. Problems at this remote site in the middle of rain-drenched temperate forest could easily metastasize. 

“Positive change is gradual,” he says, “but negative change can happen so quick.”

Clayoquot Sound is home to the some of the largest intact old-growth forests on Vancouver Island, and remains a key refuge for massive red cedars, orcas and Pacific salmon. About 20 kilometres from the mine site, these lands and waters now underpin the tourism economy of Tofino, B.C. First Nations including Tla-o-qui-aht have spent decades protecting the region, helping to shape its economic future. According to Tourism Tofino, visitors spent $430 million in the region in 2024. 

Tofino Mayor Dan Law was careful to clarify the municipality has no jurisdiction over a prospective mine outside its boundaries, but says a mine in the sound “seems like a no-go.”

“Clearly, the wealth of Clayoquot Sound is not in resource extraction,” Law says from his office on a tree-lined street in the heart of town.

Masso puts things a little more bluntly. “A gold mine will never open in Clayoquot Sound in this tenure,” he says. The Tla-o-qui-aht have opposed Imperial Metals’ efforts to search for gold on the site for more than a decade.

“It goes against our spiritual plan, our cultural plan, our tourism plan, so we’re asking ministers and leaders in B.C. to help turn this around, to put a pause on it, put an injunction on it,” Masso says.

The Tofino Chamber of Commerce also opposes the plan. 

“This would be extensively damaging to our business community,” Graydon Clerk, executive director of the Tofino Chamber of Commerce, says. The association recently sent a letter to the province outlining its concerns.

Imperial Metals did not respond to The Narwhal’s multiple requests for comment. 

B.C.’s Ministry of Mining and Critical Minerals told The Narwhal the permit doesn’t allow activities beyond the current exploration plan. Anything more would require a new decision under the province’s Mines Act.

“The Ministry remains committed to strong environmental oversight, safe mining practices and ongoing consultation with First Nations and partners,” it added. 

Pressure from the growing price of gold

East of Clayoquot Sound, a broader debate over Canada’s future is unfolding.

“Canada has what the world wants,” Prime Minister Mark Carney told a room of the world’s elite at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, earlier this year, signalling his government’s open-for-business ethos. And the world wants gold.

Gold is among Canada’s largest exports, after oil and gas. Thanks to skyrocketing prices, the precious metal has boosted the profile of Canada’s stock exchange and contributed to the country’s claimed success diversifying its exports away from the U.S. To facilitate a resource-sector renaissance, Canada, B.C. and other provinces have promised to push major projects through — and quickly.

The Tla-o-qui-aht are no strangers to the treasures beneath their territory. Copper and gold from the region have long been used in ceremonies and to adorn regalia. “They had monumental value,” Tla-o-qui-aht Chief Elmer Frank tells The Narwhal in an interview. 

By the late 1800s, word had gotten out, and prospectors flooded the region as the north’s Klondike Gold Rush wound down. The efforts were buoyed by B.C.’s mining laws, which allowed settlers to stake out mineral rights simply by driving posts into the ground.

The Fandora mine site was first staked in the 1930s, but in 1940, the mine had yet to produce the equivalent of a large gold bar. It has sat mostly dormant for half a century. 

Meanwhile, Tofino grew. 

In 2000, Clayoquot Sound was declared a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, marking it as a global priority for conservation. The town’s new boom was in whale-watching, five-star hotels and fancy restaurants. Today, Tofino’s population surges from about 2,500 year-round locals to more than 12,000 during its summer peak.

But in February, as gold prices soared, British Columbia approved a five-year permit for Imperial Metals, under its wholly-owned subsidiary, Selkirk Metals Corp., to see whether Fandora’s reserves are worth the cost of constructing a mine. 

Documents obtained by The Narwhal show the company plans to dig a series of metre-wide trenches, some as long as two football fields, to determine if trace amounts of gold in the soil signal riches below. The company has also mapped out six drill pads, each roughly the size of a small house, some as close as 110 metres from the river. Drilling will likely require thousands of litres of water for each hole. On the company’s proposed exploration map, there are three “helicopter drill pad water sources” listed in Tranquil Creek’s tributaries. According to its permit, “road-access drilling” will not use water from Tranquil Creek or its tributaries. 

In its permit application materials, Imperial Metals noted it will seek to reuse and reduce water as much as possible. The company’s permit also requires it take steps to accommodate traditional harvest and cultural practices during its exploration work, among other requirements.

In the documents, Imperial Metals noted the intensity of this project in its first year will depend on how much funding the company obtains. “We may only drill one or two holes,” it added. Its permit allows it to drill another 15 house-sized drill pads in yet-undisclosed locations across the Tranquil Creek watershed and its adjacent valley.

The documents also suggest gold on the property extends farther than previously understood. “After a long hiatus in exploration, modern soil geochemistry was completed on the property, which successfully extended the anomalous gold horizon along strike of the known veins,” an August 2025 Notice of Work document obtained by The Narwhal states.

Imperial Metals did not respond to The Narwhal’s questions about its plans.

A mine surrounded by tribal parks

As the lead guardian for Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation, Charlie doesn’t miss a beat when asked which of his many tasks he prefers. 

“Hands down, my favourite is trail building,” he says.

Trails extend throughout the nation’s tribal parks, which now encompass Tla-o-qui-aht’s entire territory, more than 1,000 square kilometres. Within tribal parks, industry and economic development aren’t categorically excluded. But their acceptance is contingent on support from the nation and other locals who aim to ensure industry doesn’t come at the expense of what ecosystems and communities need to thrive. 

“It’s a vision that the region can stand behind,” Masso says. 

The province has yet to recognize tribal parks within its own legal system — and where some form of recognition exists, it has been hard-won.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, members of Tla-o-qui-aht and ʕaaḥuusʔatḥ (Ahousaht) First Nations discovered logging giant MacMillan Bloedel had plans to clear-cut almost all of Meares Island, home of ecologically important intact forests. In response, Tla-o-qui-aht declared its first tribal park across Meares in its entirety. The province granted the company’s logging permits anyway.

A blockade led by the Tla-o-qui-aht ensued, sparking the first of a series of blockades in Clayoquot Sound which eventually led to the War in the Woods. In 1985, the B.C. Court of Appeal decided the nations’ yet-to-be-recognized Aboriginal Title should outweigh the company’s right to short-term profit.

According a paper published by lawyer and professor Douglas Harris, the decision helped shape a key turning point. Indigenous Rights claims were no longer a point of curiosity for the courts. Now they had legal weight.

Today, Meares Island remains off-limits to logging, protecting the District of Tofino’s sole source of drinking water. But elsewhere in the territory, including in the Tranquil watershed, areas within tribal parks had no such safeguards.

That is, until recently.

‘Consent of affected First Nations is not a legal requirement,’ B.C. government says

In spring 2024, B.C., Tla-o-qui-aht and neighbouring ʕaaḥuusʔatḥ announced a set of protected areas across Clayoquot Sound and throughout the Tla-o-qui-aht Nation’s tribal parks. “It’s a monumental occasion,” Masso said at the time. 

In theory, the conservancies would recognize some principles of the Tla-o-qui-aht’s tribal parks within B.C.’s laws, and they came with commitments: B.C. promised the areas would have no commercial forestry within their boundaries, nor any mining activity. 

To Masso, it remains a partial victory: The Tranquil Creek conservancy B.C. put forward has a big hole in the middle, shaped seemingly to avoid overlap with Imperial Metals’ mining claims.

Masso says he remembers the province’s reassurances. “They said, ‘This is just the first step,’ ” he says. “‘We’ll make more as we do more work to resolve overlaps or tenures, and we’ll add it.’ ”

But that hasn’t happened. 

Instead, Masso received an email from the province in December 2025, which revealed Imperial Metals was about to return. After a few years of what Chief Frank described as “one-way” consultation, the company was on the precipice of receiving a renewed exploration permit.

Masso was stunned. “We said, ‘Wait a second, they’re considering issuing this,’ ” he says. “We wrote a very stern letter reminding them that they couldn’t.”

Two months later, the province approved Imperial’s permit anyway.

In an emailed statement, B.C.’s Ministry of Mines and Critical Minerals said its decision was based on the exploration activity alone. 

The ministry added “Consent of affected First Nations is not a legal requirement” but that it “seeks to reach consensus in decision making and considers all input from First Nations in that process.”

“Input received informs decision making,” it added. 

ʕaaḥuusʔatḥ, whose territory overlaps with areas within Imperial Metals’ Fandora claim, did not respond to The Narwhal’s interview request. 

Indigenous consent and the country’s relationship to it are an increasingly charged lightning rod in Canadian politics. In 2019, B.C. committed to integrate the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or UNDRIP, into its own laws, including the principle of free, prior and informed consent.

More recently, the B.C. Court of Appeal found the province’s mineral tenure system inconsistent with UNDRIP, as incorporated into provincial law through the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA). The province appealed the ruling, which is now waiting to be heard by the Supreme Court of Canada. In the meantime, Premier David Eby attempted to suspend parts of the Declaration Act, a move that was widely criticized and stopped, in part, by the NDP government’s own members. The government says it will revisit the issue in the fall legislative session.

Sara Ghebremusse, an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia’s Allard School of Law, cautions against efforts to go backwards, particularly given the growing body of international and national law recognizing the weight of Indigenous Rights. 

“This is going to be a long-term issue,” she says.

The cost of gold

At the Fandora site, gold comes wrapped up with sulphides. Under certain conditions, the compound turns water into acid that can leach heavy metals into the watershed.

To curb that risk, mines generally store waste rock underwater and away from oxygen. But in rain-drenched Clayoquot Sound, accumulating pools of tailings could overflow, meaning if built a mine would likely require long-term drainage systems and monitoring. 

“Water is always a problem,” Scott Dunbar, a professor of mining engineering at the University of British Columbia, says. “If an accident occurs, the first question is always ‘Where did the water get out?’ ”

For the time being, Imperial’s exploration permit requires it to mitigate the potential for acid mine drainage through identifying and safely disposing of rocks capable of causing it.

Gold is also famously stubborn for clinging to its host rocks, which means heavy-duty chemicals are used in extraction. Cyanide leaching is the most common method of choice. Companies aim to isolate the obviously noxious chemical and keep it contained, but tailings that are left over are likely contaminated.

Meanwhile, the Tranquil Creek watershed is already on life support. 

After the valley bottom was logged extensively in the 1960s and 1970s, loggers moved into the hills, destroying root systems that held the region’s crumbly till in place. Landslides ensued, helping turn Tranquil Creek, a key spawning ground for Pacific salmon, into a danger zone capable of suffocating salmon eggs beneath gravel or washing them out to sea. By 2017, resident Chinook and chum salmon had almost disappeared.

With the Redd Fish Restoration Society, Tla-o-qui-aht is working to restore the watershed, including installing a series of costly but effective human-made log-jams to slow the water and building terraces in the landslides to choke off the gravel taps. Collectively with other groups, about $6 million has been spent restoring the Tranquil so far. Recent years of boosted salmon returns are providing some hope.

Charlie warns of the risks of backsliding in the Tranquil. “Mining is one thing that will just throw it over the edge,” he says. 

In a recent article in the publication Ha-Shilth-Sa, Imperial Metals CEO Brian Kynoch noted the mine would “most likely” be underground, not in an open pit, and that it would target only “narrow” gold veins. He also said Imperial Metals “remains committed to engaging respectfully with First Nations and local communities as the project moves forward.”

Kynoch has previously described the project as “artisanal.”

But the company has a checkered past: In 2014, the company’s “crown jewel” gold and copper mine, Mount Polley, became the site of the largest mining waste disaster in Canada’s history when its tailings dam breached. More than 25 billion litres of water and mine waste, including lead, cadmium and arsenic, spilled into the surrounding watershed. Later reporting showed the province warned the company about stability concerns in its tailings dam at least five times before the disaster occurred. 

In 2018, the company faced significant financial challenges and there was concern it might file for bankruptcy. But even if a mine is never built, Imperial could profit from the claim. In B.C., mining companies stand to be compensated if they withdraw claims to make way for new protected areas. In 2022, Imperial Metals received $24 million to relinquish its claim area in the Skagit Headwaters. 

“It doesn’t make any sense at all to let them drill it if the only end result is to compensate them to not mine,” Masso says.

Imperial Metals did not reply to The Narwhal’s request for comment.

‘It’s still a beautiful place’

Once we’re back in the helicopter’s bucket seats, the chopper ascends from the cliff face and travels on through the Tranquil watershed. 

Uniform patches of short, stubby trees extend across the valley bottom, but the forests transform as we fly higher, farther from the reach of roads and access points. Soon the chopper tips toward the deep blue bowl of a mountain lake, its water still and inky blue. 

“It’s still a beautiful place,” Masso says. “Even if it’s still in recovery.”

From up above, Tofino’s growth is hard to ignore. Multimillion-dollar vacation homes sprawl across the coastline. Masso peers out the window, thinking about an old photo of Tofino in the 1960s with just a scattering of homes. He knows more change is on the way. 

“Imagine another 80 years from now,” he says. “People are gonna say, ‘Look at what it was like.’ ”

Tourism has its challenges: Tofino is short on water and housing. Charlie and the other Tla-o-qui-aht Guardians sometimes spend days cleaning up after visitors who leave their trash on the beach and backcountry. 

But these are the challenges that Tla-o-qui-aht and the town of Tofino are choosing to grapple with, and there is work underway to smooth out the industry’s edges. Local businesses, for example, are now encouraged to collect a one per cent “responsible visitor fee” from customers to support restoration and protection in Tla-o-qui-aht’s tribal parks program. 

“We live together,” Tofino Mayor Law says. “We see this as a present and future relationship.”

Back on the ground, Masso and Charlie get ready to return to their day’s business. Masso is thinking about the coming heat and wildfires, and asks to see the helicopter company’s firefighting equipment. Moments of pause are few and far between. 

Masso had hoped the nation’s tribal parks would ward off ill-fitting visions of the region’s future. 

“We could spend our time building longhouses and rebuilding rivers, doing positive things for our children,” he says.

“But now I have to spend the next couple of years opposing a gold mine.”

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.