Summary

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

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

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

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

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

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

2023 marked a shift in online wildfire misinformation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who benefits from wildfire misinformation on social media? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Summary

• Internal documents show LNG Canada’s original plans for the project included a commitment that operations would not include routine flaring. 
• While LNG Canada and the B.C. government have promoted the site as an environmental leader, the facility burned about 350 million cubic metres of gas in its first year of operation.
• LNG Canada did not directly respond to questions about the removal of the commitments and said it is currently working to “reduce flaring and progress toward steady, long-term operations.”

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

LNG Canada, the country’s first major liquefied natural gas export facility on B.C.’s West Coast, has made international headlines over the past year — for burning off the gas it should have been exporting. 

An issue with one of the facility’s flare stacks has caused the plant to burn off extra gas since starting up in late 2024. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

Early versions of LNG Canada’s operational plans included detailed environmental commitments — and a promise the Kitimat, B.C., plant would operate “without routine flaring.”

In 2019, the consortium of five foreign-owned companies behind the multi-billion-dollar project told the BC Energy Regulator its massive gas liquefaction and export facility would have minimum disturbance to the local community, assuring the provincial government the plant would be built to specifications that would ensure flaring — the burning of unused gas — would only need to be done in extraordinary circumstances. 

These promises appeared in multiple versions of regulatory reports submitted to the B.C. government. Six versions of the reports — drafts of LNG Canada’s flaring management plans marked as “restricted” — were included in hundreds of pages of government documents obtained by The Narwhal and UK-based investigative journalism outlet Point Source. 

In November 2023, the commitments vanished from the latest drafts — and remained absent from all subsequent drafts and the final version. The removal of commitments close to completion raises fresh questions about whether potential problems during construction may have led the company to downgrade its environmental targets.

A few months later, the mega-project started its commissioning process. Then came the flaring.

As The Narwhal and Point Source previously reported, LNG Canada burned approximately 350 million cubic metres of gas in 2025, making it one of the most polluting LNG facilities in the world. Some unplanned flaring events included multiple occurrences of flames reaching heights of 90 metres, roughly as tall as London’s Big Ben, along with plumes of black smoke settling over the community. 

“The fact that LNG Canada showed the regulator multiple draft documents which all said that the facility would not flare on a routine basis was beyond misleading,” Tim Doty, a former state oil and gas inspector from Texas, said in an interview. “This was totally false information.”

During his tenure with the Texas government, Doty managed thousands of air quality monitoring projects as part of environmental assessments of industrial facilities. He’s now a consultant who works on behalf of companies and organizations to assess and monitor emissions at oil and gas facilities around the globe. 

Unnecessary flaring of gas essentially wastes the resource — and creates carbon pollution.

Even after LNG Canada quietly dropped its planned commitment to operate without routine flaring, stakeholders continued to tout its environmental credentials. In June 2025, Shell CEO Wael Sawan said LNG Canada would be “one of the lowest-carbon [LNG] projects anywhere in the world,” speaking at the Energy Asia conference in Malaysia. 

B.C. Premier David Eby echoed the claim in July that year, saying gas processed at the Kitimat terminal is the “lowest-carbon LNG in the world.”

Many experts now say these claims were fundamentally untrue.

Christopher Doleman, an LNG and gas specialist at the U.S.-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, said the volume of flaring at the facility “undermines claims being made” about low-carbon LNG.

“Statements that have been made by officials saying that the LNG is the cleanest in the world now seem to be completely untrue,” he previously told The Narwhal.

The premier’s office did not reply to a request for an interview, referring questions to the Energy Ministry, which acknowledged it received the questions but ultimately did not respond.

LNG Canada did not directly respond to questions about the removal of the commitments and said it is currently working to “reduce flaring and progress toward steady, long-term operations.”

‘An extremely big polluter’: former oil and gas inspector

LNG Canada flared a minimum of 127,900 cubic metres of gas every day in 2025, with the daily average being much higher: almost one million cubic metres. Government data show 3,648 million cubic metres of gas were sent to the facility last year via the Coastal GasLink pipeline, meaning almost 10 per cent of all gas transported to the terminal was burned off without being used for power or exported.

The average household in Canada consumed around 2,216 cubic metres of natural gas in 2024, according to the Canadian Gas Association. That means LNG Canada burned off the equivalent amount of gas that could have provided energy to 157,942 homes.

Yet, LNG Canada’s documents submitted to the provincial government claim environmental excellence. 

“LNG Canada’s ‘commitment and policy on health, safety, security, environment and social performance’ focuses on ways to avoid and minimize negative environmental and social impacts resulting from our operations and enhance the positive impacts in a systematic manner,” the early documents noted.

Doty said regulatory plans for LNG facilities are often subject to multiple revisions by the government regulator. 

“It is normal for there to be a bit of back and forth between the operator and the regulator when documents are being prepared that are associated with operating permits which allow the company to release pollution,” he explained. “However, it does seem strange that these documents contained these environmental pledges that were later scrapped entirely.”

The BC Energy Regulator told The Narwhal and Point Source the early versions of the reports “included commitments and commentary that were outside of the intended scope of the report and not consistent with the design of their facility.”

“Routine flaring is authorized for specific purposes, including pilot systems, continuous purge systems, passing valves, manual sampling systems and online process analyzers,” a regulator spokesperson explained in a detailed response to questions.

Doty questioned whether the designs were ever intended for a facility that would operate without routine flaring or if something happened while building the plant. 

“You can see from the way that this facility was designed that there was always supposed to be some kind of combustion going on — and with that comes emissions,” he said, adding additional problems may have occurred early in the commissioning process.

The regulator spokesperson disagreed with the theory that the plant was designed for high rates of flaring. 

“The [BC Energy Regulator’s] reviews of the facility and LNG Canada’s submissions during design and construction … did not identify factors that would have contributed to increased flaring rates during operation,” the spokesperson noted.

James Smith, a Kitimat community member whose name has been changed to protect his family from potential repercussions, worked on the project during construction. He said he witnessed numerous problems on the job site, ultimately leading him to quit.

“They cut corners: it was about timelines and money,” he said. “They knew even before the flare arrived, before they started building it, that it wasn’t going to work. That was the word on the ground.”

The Narwhal could not independently verify Smith’s claims, and LNG Canada did not respond to questions about alleged problems during construction. 

In January, The Narwhal revealed an “integrity issue” with the facility’s flaring equipment resulted in LNG Canada burning significantly more gas than expected — and discovered it could take three to five years to fix.

The issue was identified shortly after the LNG plant started testing its equipment in late 2024, if not before, but the government regulator did not learn about the problem until April 2025.

“I’ve been assessing and monitoring facilities in the oil and gas sector for more than 30 years, and I can tell you that LNG Canada is an extremely big polluter,” Doty said. “In my opinion, it should not be allowed to operate with such excessive emission levels.”

The facility is currently operating with a cracked flare tip as well as several leaking valves, according to previous reporting from The Narwhal and technical reports since the issue was identified. A flare tip, which sits at the top of the flare stack, helps ensure the safe combustion of the gas.

The technical problems have increased the risk of flames from flares retreating back into the system’s pipes and causing an explosion. To stop this from happening, LNG Canada has substantially increased the gas flows to all of the facility’s flares.

“A replacement flare tip is currently being installed,” a spokesperson for the consortium wrote in an emailed statement. “While the replacement is expected to improve flare tip integrity, a longer-term redesigned tip is being developed.”

LNG Canada wants the B.C. government to let it increase flaring tenfold

Earlier this year, LNG Canada revealed it was planning to ask the B.C. regulator to increase its flaring limit tenfold for the next three years. The company’s deputy chief operating officer, Teresa Waddington, disclosed the plans during a Kitimat council meeting in March and at a recent presentation to Kitimat residents.

If approved, the new limit would allow the company to continually flare up to 300 tonnes of gas per day, an increase from its current limit of 28 tonnes per day. The company said the new, more permissive flaring limit would help accommodate operational problems which have led to higher-than-anticipated flaring volumes.

LNG Canada told The Narwhal and Point Source the proposed amendment is “not expected to materially increase emissions in the local air shed.”

“The original … authorization was based on long-term, stable operating conditions and did not reflect the higher flaring volumes typically seen during start-up and early operations at an LNG facility,” the spokesperson wrote. “LNG Canada is requesting a temporary, three-year provision that reflects overall flaring during the early operations period.”

However, flare tips are large and complex pieces of equipment and can take more than a year to procure, according to Waddington. As a result, she said LNG Canada wants to keep purging extra gas to prevent the flames from spreading downward into the pipes, likely until 2028.

“LNG Canada has said that it’s going to take three years to replace the flare [tip], but I can tell you that it doesn’t take three years to replace a flare [tip] like this,” Doty said. “The plant should be shut down. It should be properly repaired and engineered and then started back up again.”

Tracey Saxby, a marine scientist and executive director of non-profit environmental organization My Sea to Sky, worries LNG Canada is setting a precedent that other liquefaction and export facilities will follow.

“Woodfibre LNG in Squamish has estimated that flaring during startup will last for one month, with intermittent flare events of three to four days,” she said in an interview. “After that, during regular operations, they are saying they will only flare three per cent of the time, which is 11 days a year. But after what we have seen at LNG Canada and other facilities worldwide, this seems unrealistic.”

She said the excessive flaring at LNG Canada held against its previously stated commitments demonstrates there is “nothing anyone can do if the operator of one of these facilities breaks its promises about pollution.”

The regulator said it is “actively overseeing LNG Canada’s progress on short-term and long-term corrective actions and measures to reduce flaring from all facility flare systems.” 

“[BC Energy Regulator] technical experts review flaring and air contaminant discharge information submitted by LNG Canada, conduct inspections and take compliance actions where required,” the spokesperson noted, adding an “investigation into potential non-compliances is ongoing.”Updated on July 31, 2026, at 5:39 a.m. PT: This story has been updated to correct a statement that the BC Energy Regulator has promoted the LNG Canada facility as an environmental leader. It is the B.C. government that has made that claim.

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.

Peter Cressey has been visiting the Carmanah and Walbran valleys for decades. Nestled between the Pacific Ocean and the sprawling spider-web of cutblocks and logging roads that mark the island’s interior, these two valleys form one of southern Vancouver Island’s largest remaining intact old-growth ecosystems. They’re home to centuries-old spruce trees, gnarled cedars and plants and animals that live in few other places.

“It’s not just the trees,” Cressey, who volunteers with Friends of Carmanah Walbran, says. “There’s a whole bunch of threatened species, the marbled murrelet, the screech owl, the specklebelly lichen and the dromedary jumping slug. There’s a whole list of very unique species that are facing some serious threats.”In the early 1990s, Cressey was arrested at a logging blockade in the region, part of a campaign that convinced the province to expand what was then called Carmanah Pacific Provincial Park to include parts of the Walbran in 1995.Today, the park is known as Carmanah Walbran. BC Parks describes it as “a luxuriously forested sanctuary that is without a doubt one of the most remarkable wild places on Vancouver Island.” But right now, they also say it’s “inaccessible by vehicle” and that “the day-use areas, campground, and trails are currently unmaintained.”

That’s because it’s blocked by landslides on one side and locked metal gates on the other. BC Parks didn’t provide a timeline for restoring park access. Instead, they directed questions to Tsawak-qin Forestry, the company responsible for both the metal gates and, they say, for clearing the landslides. 

In an emailed statement, Tsawak-qin told The Narwhal that they are “working with government and others to open access to the western, public access point of the park,” but didn’t offer a timeline. They promised to “provide more information when it becomes available.” 

Carmanah Walbran is one of many outdoor recreation areas in B.C. accessed by resource roads. Cressey and others say its ongoing closure raises questions about public access to public lands, and the province’s management of thousands of kilometres of resource roads that connect British Columbians to some of the province’s most spectacular back country regions.

Ministry approves gates to close park to recreational users, citing ‘safety concerns’

When Cressey talks about the logging protests of the 1990s, a period sometimes called the War in the Woods when activists and First Nations fought old-growth logging in Clayoquot Sound and up into the Carmanah Walbran region, there’s a hint of pride in his voice. But he’s also learned a lot since then, and though his passion for protecting old-growth forests remains, his tactics have changed.

Today, Cressey’s with the Friends of Carmanah Walbran, which is focused on protecting ancient forests through education and community building. Much of their work centres on the central Walbran Valley, a stand of old-growth forest just outside the southeastern edge of Carmanah Walbran Park. On a map, it looks like someone took an ice cream scoop to the park boundary. Torrance Coste, associate director of the Wilderness Committee, calls it “the bite.” 

That bite is not part of the park itself. According to Coste, activists remember it was left out at the request of logging companies. But decades of activism have kept the saws at bay, and the area is currently covered by a provincial old-growth deferral. Within it lies a network of trails and campsites built and maintained by Cressey and the Friends of Carmanah Walbran. Some of these trails, like the Anderson Lake and Marble Canyon trails, cross into the provincial park, while others sit outside the boundary entirely. All of them are maintained by volunteers.

For years, Friends of Carmanah Walbran have used trail maintenance trips and educational gatherings to bring people into the region to advocate for protecting the old-growth forests that still lie outside the park boundary. But this spring, something changed. 

In March, Cressey learned that the province approved Tsawak-qin Forestry’s request to put locked gates on roads east of Carmanah Walbran Park. These gates blocked access to both the bite and the trails from it that cross into the park. 

Cressey reached out to Tsawak-qin to request permission to pass through the gates for a birding event in early July. Initially, he says, the company seemed open to letting the birders through. He even offered to give them the names of everyone participating — a group of birders, artists and scientists. But eventually, Tsawak-qin told him they couldn’t allow the group through the gates. Cressey says they told him it was due to “public and worker safety issues.”Tsawak-qin didn’t directly address questions about the birders, but noted in an emailed statement to The Narwhal that the gates were put in place due to “several incidents [that] have occurred recently in the Walbran area that endangered people and caused damage to property,” citing a burnt bridge deck, damaged bridge cables and blocked drainage structures.

This “created unsafe road conditions,” Tsawak-qin Forestry said. “In addition, there is evidence of members of the public entering active work sites,” it added, though they did not give specific examples. 

There was a blockade in the Walbran between August and December 2025, which led to 13 arrests. The company didn’t reference this blockade directly, but Cressey thinks that it, and the continued presence of a nearby protest encampment, contributed to the company wanting to shut down access. 

On July 16, social media accounts from this camp posted a video of two people locked to one of the Tsawak-qin gates. In the video, one masked figure explained the action as a response to the company cutting off public access to “public land.”

British Columbia’s Forest and Range Practices Act allows resource companies to request permission to install and lock gates to prevent public access on back country resource roads. According to the province, these approvals are granted when “use of the road would likely endanger property, public health or public safety.” 

In the case of the eastern Carmanah Walbran gates, Coste says it’s unclear what the justification is, or what threat a birding event might pose to property or safety.

He worries that approvals for these kinds of gates have been increasing since the Fairy Creek blockades where more than 1,100 people were arrested opposing old-growth logging in the Fairy Creek watershed near Port Renfrew in 2020 and 2021.

When asked whether this was true, the Ministry of Forests declined to comment, explaining that finding the answer was “a complex ask during the middle of field season when resources for data gathering are limited.”

Coste thinks logging companies could be trying to solve that problem by “closing access to vast swaths of the island [and] the province to any and all other user groups.” Tsawak-qin did not comment when asked about any direct connections between logging protests and their request to gate these roads. 

“If logging companies have a problem with blockaders, that’s a political issue that they should take to the province, not deal with it with gates out on the back roads,” Coste says. “If companies can’t log without fear of people getting in the way of their operations, they have a social licence problem.”

Why aren’t public land access groups talking about the Carmanah Walbran?

For Cressey, part of the problem is that BC Parks isn’t clear about what qualifies as access points to Carmanah Walbran. The park’s website lists directions to access the park’s western side and the Ministry of Environment and Parks says that “there are no developed BC Parks facilities or designated BC Parks trails within the [eastern] portion of the park.” But the Ministry of Forests recommended park access routes on both the eastern and western sides of the park, adding that the public could still pass the eastern gates on foot.

For Cressey, using the western side of the park might have been the easiest solution to his locked gate problem. But the road on that side, called Rosander Main, was also blocked, not by gates, but by landslides that had come down in the fall of 2025. 

Neither BC Parks nor the Ministry of Forests have plans to clear the landslides. The responsibility for clearing that road, they say, lies with the logging companies that use it. 

Coste says that’s a problem, calling it “anti-democratic” that a private company can control public access to the park. “It’s a huge concern that access to an iconic provincial park like Carmanah depends on whether or not a private company is logging next to the park.”

As short-term closures at Joffre Lakes Park near Pemberton and Botanical Beach, a popular section of Juan de Fuca Park on Vancouver Island, both of which have instated reconnection periods for rights-holding First Nations members, have prompted an outcry, Coste says it’s notable the ongoing access issues at Carmanah Walbran Park haven’t gotten more attention.

“[Carmanah Walbran] has been closed for 10 times longer than Joffre Lakes will be closed this year,” Coste says. “And not a peep from the folks that are up in arms about the Joffre closure.” 

Among the groups concerned about the Joffre Lakes closures is the Public Land Use Society, an organization whose directors have close ties to the mining and mineral exploration industries, which was founded in 2025 to advocate for public land access. Its former director Caroline Elliott, who joined the society in May 2025 and left in January to run as a leadership candidate for the BC Conservative Party, has been a leading voice in opposing British Columbia’s decision to work with the Líl̓wat and N’Quatqua Nations on annual, short-term closures at Joffre Lakes, calling them an “ancestry-based park closure.” 

When The Narwhal reached out to the Public Land Use Society, its executive director, Warren Mirko, wasn’t aware that Carmanah Walbran Park was closed. 

“[The Public Land Use Society] has not yet heard from the public regarding this site and was unaware of the access issues,” Mirko wrote in an email. But while he agreed it was a concern, he differentiated it from Joffre Lakes, describing the latter as “a deliberate government-supported closure of a popular provincial park.”For Coste, the lack of attention to the Carmanah Walbran issue “underscores that it’s not really about access to the land and access to provincial protected areas” for groups like Mirko’s, but about opposing the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, which was passed with unanimous consent in B.C. in 2019 but has since become a locus of controversy. In his emailed statement, Mirko wrote that the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act and “other issues surrounding government’s reconciliation initiatives and agreements are central matters in respect of public access and provincial governance over Crown land.”

Access to parks is a province-wide problem in B.C.

While Mirko and Coste don’t agree on much when it comes to reconciliation and parks, both have concerns about how British Columbia manages resource roads. While Coste is worried about the road leading to Carmanah Walbran, Mirko is focused on an access road to the Incomappleux Valley near Revelstoke in the B.C. Interior. In June, his organization joined the Quad Riders Association of British Columbia in questioning the province’s decision to decommission the Incomappleux Forest Service Road. 

According to the province, the deactivation is due to road damage and plans to establish a conservancy, a type of park in which human access and natural resource development is limited to preserve ecological, recreational or cultural values, in the upper valley. But Mirko and the Quad Riders argue this closure would unfairly cut off property and trail access, questioning the province’s “authority to proceed” in a press release.The province outlined its authority in a document released in April 2025, citing the Forest and Range Practices Act — the same rationale used to approve the gates east of Carmanah Walbran Park. 

Issues with resource roads are nothing new for Louise Pedersen, executive director of the Outdoor Recreation Council of British Columbia.

“Outdoor recreation in British Columbia has co-evolved with forestry and other types of resource extraction,” Pedersen says. “So a lot of our access uses resource roads.” 

But those roads, Pedersen explains, aren’t managed for recreation. When the logging or mining operations pull out, they decommission the roads and leave them unmaintained, often cutting off access to recreation areas in Crown lands. And with an estimated more than 600,000 kilometres of resource roads criss-crossing the province, it’s a big deal — one that Pedersen says is getting worse. 

“In the last decades, things really have been accelerating,” she says. “With these big climate and weather events that we’ve been having, we are seeing a lot more kinds of disastrous outcomes like flooding and wildfires closing down these resource roads.” On top of that, Pedersen says, there are increasing numbers of “logging companies getting out of areas where they’ve been operating for a long time,” leaving roads unmaintained. In some places this is simply the result of logging operations finishing. In others, it’s being blamed on downturns in the forestry sector and sawmill closures. But whatever the reason, when the companies pull out, the roads revert to the care of the province. 

“When not being actively used for industrial purpose[s] the roads are classified as a ‘wilderness road’ and only maintained to address environmental concerns,” a statement from the Ministry of Forests explained. 

The problem, Pedersen explains, is “the province is not required to facilitate access or maintain these resource roads to support outdoor recreation.” So when you get a case like Carmanah Walbran, where the road was blocked by landslides, and no logging companies are working beyond them, no one is obligated to clear them.

It’s something she hopes British Columbia’s new outdoor recreation strategy will change. Launched in May, the province plans to create “a modernized framework for high-value recreation access and resource roads.”Pedersen isn’t sure yet what that means. But while she’s waiting, the Outdoor Recreation Council has launched a survey to gather information about priority roads where access to trailheads, campsites and parks is currently cut-off or at risk. 

“I’m sure we’ll find that there are going to be many thousands of kilometres that are of very limited interest, but there are some that will just kind of float to the top as priority resource roads,” she says. 

In the meantime, the Carmanah and Walbran valleys remain nearly inaccessible to the public. Coste worries about the long-term implications of cutting off public access to parks, especially ones with threatened ecosystems.  

“When people can’t visit these forests, can’t walk through them and see what’s at stake for themselves, it becomes much easier for old-growth logging to continue out of public view,” Coste says. “Access is a critical part of building public understanding and support for protecting what little remains.”

Updated on July 29, 2026, at 10:00 a.m. PT: This story has been updated to correct the connections between the directors of the Public Land Use Society and the mining and mineral exploration industries. Additionally, Caroline Elliott was previously referred to as a “first slate” director of the society, but joined nearly three months after its incorporation in March 2025.

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Summary

• The World Cup prompted Vancouver to clear its False Creek harbour of abandoned boats, a sudden absence that highlights their usual presence in the city’s harbours.
• Abandoned boats are a jurisdictional challenge and environmental hazard across B.C. coastal communities, but in Vancouver they intersect with the city’s housing affordability crisis, as some rely on them for shelter.
• Provincial funding to support the removal of abandoned boats recently ended, but a new federal bill would prohibit the transfer of boats to people who cannot maintain them, offering another way to mitigate the issue.

Stephen Paetkau’s salvage boat, Lucky Dog, was built for the North Sea. When he bought the Norwegian-made vessel in 2021, the advertisement featured three giant moustached Norsemen on the deck, arms crossed and chests puffed out. Today, however, it is moored off Granville Island in Vancouver, on standby to recover abandoned boats in False Creek. It sits beside a black pirate ship that can be rented out for parties, where people don pirate hats and sail out into English Bay to drink and spray water cannons. Both vessels are designed for waters a little bigger than a narrow inlet in the heart of the city.  

Paetkau named it Lucky Dog after the Chinese zodiac year of his birth and because, he says, he’s “the luckiest man alive.” Ironically, much of Paetkau’s work begins when someone else’s luck has run out. 

Paetkau and his brother Jonathan run Skookum Yacht Services. Since 2020 the company has become the one most often called by Transport Canada when an abandoned boat sinks, washes up or breaks to pieces in the waters around Vancouver —  something that happens often enough the locals are used to seeing a boat on the beach or a half-submerged mast in the harbour. Paetkau says that since they began working with Transport Canada in 2020 they have lifted or removed close to 100 boats from the waterways, seabed and beaches of False Creek and English Bay. 

This June, the Paetkaus found themselves busier than usual. Transport Canada established an exclusion zone in False Creek for the duration of the FIFA World Cup — for which Vancouver is one of 16 host cities — forcing several boats normally anchored there to be moved elsewhere. 

Typically, if an abandoned vessel in False Creek — the inlet separating downtown Vancouver from the southern expanse of the city — is deemed hazardous to the public, infrastructure, navigation routes or to the environment, then the Canadian Coast Guard will act swiftly and have it removed. If it is not a hazard but, as Paetkau calls it, merely “offensive junk,” the issue is passed to Transport Canada, who try to find the owner of the vessel. 

In a statement to The Narwhal, Transport Canada stated the exclusion zone was created to “support marine safety and security during FIFA events at the request of RCMP and VPD.” Boats that were anchored in the restricted area were relocated to nearby waters, including off of Kitsilano and Jericho beach, which Paetkau says are difficult places to anchor. 

Though the boats will eventually return to False Creek, their temporary relocation brings attention to an issue coastal community harbours across British Columbia have been facing for years: the risks abandoned boats pose to navigation, public safety and marine ecosystems. But as housing costs continue to rise in Vancouver, some abandoned boats are also becoming makeshift homes, complicating efforts to remove them. 

Abandoned boats have environmental and cultural impacts

When I arrive at his office on Granville Island, Paetkau is on the phone with the Jericho Sailing Centre. After he hangs up, I ask him what has happened to the boats that have been relocated. 

“Well,” he says, gesturing to his phone, “one of them is crashing into the Jericho breakwater.”

Five minutes later, Jonathan walks in with more news.

“Another is on Kits Beach.” 

They don’t sound an alarm bell or take off running to their boat, but instead sigh and shake their heads. A lot more steps and phone calls are required first, a reminder of one of the more persistent issues facing abandoned boats in False Creek: jurisdiction. 

In an emailed statement, Transport Canada told The Narwhal the time required to address a vessel varies, but “in almost all cases, there is a minimum 30-day public notice period” to allow someone to claim ownership. The Vancouver Police Department puts up a notice and assists in monitoring the boat during this time.

If the abandoned boat is not claimed within the time period, a company like Paetkau’s is called in, and the removal is completed on the taxpayer’s dime. The process of moving the boats is slow and the water does not wait. Changing tides, strong winds and storms often blow the boats onto rocks or smash them into thousands of fibreglass fragments before Paetkau’s crew can get to them. 

According to Transport Canada, abandoned vessels start to become environmental hazards as they deteriorate, as they begin to leak oils, fuels and other toxic substances while releasing debris such as fibreglass and microplastics into fragile marine ecosystems.

In certain areas of Canada, these effects have been significant enough to have reached Parliament. In October 2024, John White, director of lands and natural resources for the Snuneymuxw First Nation, appeared before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans alongside Chief Lenora Joe of the shíshálh First Nation, a councillor from the Snaw-naw-as First Nation and an elected chief councillor of the Tseshaht First Nation. Together, they described the environmental and cultural impacts abandoned vessels are having on Indigenous coastal communities. 

Chief Joe told Parliament how abandoned vessels contaminate marine food sources that are central to life for the shíshálh Nation. “Our food is part of our culture,” she said. “The way we collect food, the way we gather it, the way we celebrate — everything that we do depends on the food that we can gather.” 

White pointed to impacts on Pacific salmon in Snuneymuxw territory, describing what he said was a historic decline in salmon on the Fraser River. According to White, sockeye runs that once numbered tens of millions dropped to approximately 500,000 in 2024. 

Two years later, White says the problem persists for the Snuneymuxw Nation, where abandoned boats continue to impact their clam beds and shellfish. “Until we change regulations or change acts and we change regulations on a higher level, we’re still going to fight this problem,” he says.

White also acknowledges opportunities for Indigenous communities to be part of the solution: “How can the First Nations be included in this and develop business around breaking down ships and being part of that process?”

Abandoned boats a symptom of the housing crisis in Vancouver

In False Creek, environmental damage is only part of what Paetkau encounters. When storms drive abandoned boats onto rocks, Paetkau says what he and his crew find inside looks like “desperation.” 

One call in particular has stayed with Paetkau. He boarded a boat that had crashed onto rocks in False Creek, with a hole ripped in the side. His job was to assess the damage and determine a responsible bid for its removal. But, when he climbed inside, he found a woman. 

It was February, and the boat was sitting in an area that would soon fill with seawater when the tide came in. She was wrapped in three flotation jackets and was insisting she could repair the boat that Paetkau knew was beyond saving. She told him she had nowhere else to go. What looked like a wreck had become to her a “paradise,” Paetkau says, even as the boat broke apart around her. 

Housing in Vancouver is among the most expensive in Canada. In a city where the average one-bedroom or studio apartment can cost thousands of dollars a month, even a broken-down boat begins to look like a viable alternative. 

To see how these boats become a symptom of the housing crisis, it helps to first understand how they often become abandoned. 

In B.C., cars must be registered and insured. But according to Paetkau, boats are typically bought and sold privately, often without any formal record of transfer. When a boat reaches the end of its life, both disposal and repairs can cost thousands. At that point, there is a clear incentive to pass it along. 

“I’ve known of boats that we charged the Canadian taxpayer seven or eight thousand dollars to get rid of,” he says, “that probably changed hands over nothing more than a handshake and a six-pack.”

Because of this, Paetkau says, there is little to no paper trail, ownership becomes unclear and the boats tend to drift between hands.

While they can provide shelter, many of the boats stay broken-down in the hands of people who don’t know how to operate or maintain them. As a result, these boats can become harmful for the people on board and for the environment.

Provincial funding ends, but other solutions emerging for abandoned boats

Between April 2025 and May 2026, Transport Canada removed 19 vessels in False Creek. But while Vancouver’s housing crisis may intensify the problem, abandoned boats are not confined to the city’s shoreline. “What I hear from Transport Canada is there are other harbours [in B.C.] where the problem of abandoned boats is worse,” Paetkau says. 

On the west coast of Vancouver Island, in towns such as Tofino and Ucluelet, and the First Nations communities Opitsaht, Tla-o-qui-aht and Ahousaht, the problem is familiar. Until recently, the removal of abandoned boats in their harbours was funded through the provincial Clean Coast, Clean Waters Initiative.

That funding ended this year, as planned, raising concerns in communities where a lack of infrastructure, such as boat lifts, can make vessel removals particularly costly. In an emailed statement, the B.C. Ministry of Environment and Parks told The Narwhal that at this time “there is no funding identified beyond this.” 

There are still signs of efforts to address the problem before the boats become wrecks. Bill C-244, also known as the Clean Coasts Act, was introduced in 2025 and would prohibit owners from transferring vessels to people they know (or ought to know) cannot safely maintain or dispose of them. The bill has passed second reading and is currently under committee review. 

Down the coast, Washington State has taken a similar preventative approach with its Vessel Turn-In Program that allows owners to surrender boats free of charge that are likely to become abandoned before they reach that point, reducing both environmental damage and cleanup costs. 

In Vancouver, preparations for the World Cup pushed many of the boats elsewhere, but it is unclear what changes will outlast the tournament. The version of False Creek projected to the world looked a little different than what locals were used to seeing, and yet the issues beneath the surface remain the same. 

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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.”

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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 227 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.

Updated July 17, 9:45 a.m. PT: This story has been updated to correct the number of translocation mitigation permits related to amphibians and reptiles. It is 227, not 229.

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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

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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.

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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