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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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Tofino Chamber of Commerce also opposes the plan. 

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

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

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

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

Pressure from the growing price of gold

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile, Tofino grew. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A mine surrounded by tribal parks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is, until recently.

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

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

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

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

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

But that hasn’t happened. 

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

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

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

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

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

“Input received informs decision making,” it added. 

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

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

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

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

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

The cost of gold

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kynoch has previously described the project as “artisanal.”

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

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

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

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

‘It’s still a beautiful place’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summary

• An AI computing company is proposing to fill in a wetland to build a massive data centre near the neighbourhood of Lorneville in Saint John, N.B.
• Once operating, the data centre will be one of New Brunswick’s largest carbon emitters and devour about 390 megawatts of electricity — more than 10 per cent of the province’s total energy demand.
• Residents of Lorneville are resisting the proposal, but provincial and municipal leaders have expressed support, arguing it will bring jobs and revenue to the region.

On a sunny Saturday in April, Adam Wilkins and Chris Watson trace a path through a forest a short distance from the Bay of Fundy. 

As he walks down a slope, Wilkins wonders aloud whether cleaning out the ditch upstream would make the trail easier to run on; for the past decade, he and his wife have been building forest trails in this area, to encourage more outdoor recreation and stewardship.

After about 10 minutes, at a fork in the path, Watson stops, pointing at the forest ahead: the area slated to become the site of the first hyperscale data centre in Atlantic Canada. That is, a data centre with massive scalable capacity, like those Apple, Google and Microsoft are building.  

For years, the City of Saint John and the New Brunswick provincial government have been working to expand an industrial park in Lorneville, a coastal community on the outskirts of Saint John. A $2-billion data centre built by Alberta company Beacon Data Centers and partially powered by a new gas plant is slated to be the first tenant.

Data centres provide the material backbone for cloud services, file sharing and artificial intelligence. A customer for Beacon Data Centers’ proposed New Brunswick facility has not been announced.

Officials have said Lorneville is an ideal location for business development, as the area offers large amounts of land and water, as well as abundant electricity and accessible fibre cables. The municipality has also said developing Lorneville would bring much-needed jobs and tax revenue to the city; the local Irving Oil refinery exports most of its products to the United States, while New Brunswick generally sends most of its seafood and lumber south of the border, making Saint John “Canada’s most tariff-exposed city” according to the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. 

Officials initially stated that they were actively attracting businesses to the expanded industrial park that would be focused in “green and clean” sectors. But residents have pushed back, noting that expansion of the industrial park, and construction of the data centre itself, would destroy rare old-growth forest and wetlands. If built, the data centre would rely on a gas plant for much of its power, making it one of the province’s largest emitters, while also increasing demand on the grid. And residents say the process to develop the data centre has suffered from a lack of transparency.

Documents obtained through provincial access to information legislation by The Narwhal and by residents show provincial officials were in discussions to bring a data centre to the park long before residents were told about the tenant — and that details of that data centre conflicted with the more low-impact vision for the industrial park advertised to residents.

Building AI data centres across Canada has been identified by the federal government as a priority, and dozens of new facilities have been proposed in the past year. Since early May, Beacon Data Centers has lobbied various federal departments four times to advocate for the role of data centres in supporting “national priorities,” and to request government support for the New Brunswick project. But many communities are concerned about environmental impacts of the water- and power-hungry facilities, as well as the lack of oversight and transparency regarding their impacts.

“For the past two years, this fight has been a huge stressor for people,” Wilkins says. “It’s all in the name of progress, or we need the taxes, or you need AI to generate your stupid images, but it impacts people’s lives.”

Data centre proposal reopening old wounds in Lorneville

This spring, billboards and bus ads began appearing around Saint John, promising the creation of 1,200 jobs from construction of the 390-megawatt data centre — an appealing prospect in a city reliant on trade with a volatile United States and a province facing a grim financial forecast.

But in those signs, many Lorneville residents saw something troubling. 

Lorneville was once a fishing village perched on the Bay of Fundy’s rocky shoreline. In the 1970s, a 3,600-hectare chunk of land along the coast was expropriated by the provincial government to develop an industrial project that — apart from a power plant built on the water — never materialized. Residents say a promise they were given to return the land if the project didn’t move forward never came to fruition either.

“My grandparents were still getting upset, even talking about it, until the day they were gone,” Cecil McCavour, whose family has been fishing in Lorneville since the 1840s, told The Narwhal. McCavour, along with his dad and cousin, are the last fishermen working from the community’s wharf. His family lost hundreds of acres to expropriation, he says. Now, the data centre is reopening old wounds. “Every decade something’s coming down the pipeline that does damage to our community.”

In subsequent years, a dump was established in the area, but was found to be insufficiently lined for modern-day standards, creating concerns contaminants were seeping into the groundwater.

Then, in July 2024, residents received letters in envelopes with no originating address. A consulting agency hired by the province stated that a proposal to clear and construct a 110-hectare “development-ready pad” for industry a short distance from their homes was in the works.

Instead, residents resisted, submitting dozens of letters, collecting hundreds of signatures and packing council meetings at which the expansion was debated. In response, the City of Saint John — which was pursuing the expansion along with New Brunswick’s Regional Development Corporation — paused the plan and initiated a task force in which residents and city officials were meant to work through concerns. 

Residents were not told which specific industries were being considered for the expanded industrial park, or if any potential tenants had come forward.

The documents obtained through access to information legislation by The Narwhal and residents show that before the task force began meeting, provincial officials were already in discussions to bring a data centre to the park. In emails from October 2024, Martin Luckett, an official with the province’s business development agency, Opportunities NB, wrote to a redacted recipient that the agency felt “strongly that there is considerable potential for one of your centers here in New Brunswick,” and describes the Lorneville area as a potential location. By November 2024, Beacon Data Centers had submitted a feasibility application to NB Power, according to emails. 

In May 2025, city council voted on whether to allow the expansion after a series of tense council meetings that stretched late into the evening. Dozens of people spoke out against the plan, while just three speakers spoke in favour. Still, the council voted unanimously to allow the expansion.

City staff initially attempted to assuage residents’ concerns by affirming businesses in the industrial park would be green and non-emitting. But the data centre — which was announced in October 2025 — has made people doubt that commitment, Wilkins says. “The first thing announced was a hyperscale data centre powered by a natural gas plant … what else is coming?”

Old-growth forests, wetlands would be cleared for data centre

In 2024, Chris Watson bought a house beside a large saltmarsh in Lorneville, recognized as a “provincially significant wetland” for its ecological value . In the forest behind his home, eastern cedar shade mossy swamps, while gnarled red spruce with lichen-covered branches grow nearby.

Watson was surprised when he read the environmental impact assessment for the industrial park expansion, which includes the forest behind his house, describing it as relatively low value.” His own observations, though not expert, suggested at least parts of it were exceptional.

He bought a tool for taking cores and gathered samples from the largest trees. Ben Phillips, who runs a dendrochronology lab — focused on the science of dating trees by their rings — at Mount Allison University, agreed to take a look.

Phillips was initially skeptical. Only about half a per cent of the forest in New Brunswick is old growth, he says, and most of that is found in inaccessible areas.

But examining the cores under a microscope, Phillips was astonished. 

In the oldest sample, Phillips counted 388 rings, meaning the tree was likely more than 400 years old, as it would have taken more than 12 years to get to the point from which the rings were counted. Other samples showed trees that were more than 300 years old, and many over 200 years — an age distribution typical of an old-growth forest. “[Old growth] is a mixed age, multi-storied stand that’s got lots of diversity in it,” he says. “This fit that exactly.”

The forest at Lorneville is likely the third-oldest forest in the province, Phillips says. Yet there’s no guarantee it will be spared. “These global pressures from big tech firms and AI and data centres and tariffs … are winning out against old-growth forest because we do not have a policy in place to protect it.”

The mayor of Saint John, Donna Reardon, has said she supports saving individual old trees, but declined an interview request for this story. The site for the data centre is specifically adjacent to, and partially overlapping, the industrial park expansion area, and wouldn’t flatten some of the oldest trees Watson found. But a more recent environmental assessment for the data centre itself stated that approximately 3.5 hectares of old-growth forest would be lost as “a long-term, irreversible, adverse effect of the project.”

The forest isn’t the only ecological concern. Much of the Lorneville area is made up of wetlands, including roughly 27 hectares in the area that would be cleared and infilled to make space for the data centre.

“This is basically the high point of the watershed,” Watson says, inspecting one of those wetlands in April — a peatland bog in the area behind his house. At the bog’s edge, Watson says he’d found trees that were 200 years old, suggesting an ecosystem that has been evolving for centuries. “What’s going to happen when all that freshwater flow is removed from this area?”

Roxanne MacKinnon, executive director of ACAP Saint John, an environmental non-profit organization, says the development of wetlands throughout Saint John already causes localized flooding.

“Wetlands are a very important part of our ecosystem,” she says. “From our perspective, the degradation of habitat, and particularly where all that water is going to go that is being contained within these wetlands currently, [is] a concern.”

For residents, there’s also the question of what the loss of wetlands will mean for their wells.

The initial expansion area for the industrial park would have infilled dozens of hectares of wetlands. A 2025 email from provincial engineer and hydrogeologist Gerard Souma to a New Brunswick environmental impact assessment specialist, obtained by residents through access to information legislation, noted this could affect the community’s older wells. Souma wrote, “It is my opinion that any owner having a well tapping their water supply from the surficial aquifer should be concern [sic] with 44 ha of wetland infilling by the project.”

Watson worries that the wetland infilling for the data centre could also affect downstream wetlands like the significant saltmarsh by his house, by changing the way water flows on the landscape.

In a statement, Lauren Armstrong, Beacon’s vice-president of corporate affairs, wrote that the wetlands at the site of the data centre have been assessed and categorized through the impact assessment, and that “the overall approach is to minimize the footprint, avoid the most sensitive areas and manage remaining effects.”

New Brunswick’s Regional Development Corporation referred a request for an interview to Saint John Industrial Parks.

If built, Saint John data centre would be one of the largest emitters and power users in the province

While the project stands to raze local forests and wetlands, it may also have broader impacts across the province. 

The proposed data centre is a 390-megawatt operation. Once built, it would also generate roughly 6.6 per cent of emissions in the province.

Part of the data centre’s energy is meant to come from an on-site natural gas-powered generation facility, built by Houston-based VoltaGrid, with the other 200 megawatts coming from New Brunswick’s grid. This demand could surpass 10 per cent of New Brunswick’s mean energy demands, where peak daily demand for electricity ranges from around 1,500 megawatts on a summer morning to roughly 3,030 megawatts on a cold winter’s day.

Beacon submitted a feasibility assessment for that grid demand in November 2024. In May 2025, emails from municipal and provincial officials displayed frustration with NB Power’s slow response. “This has not been the best first impression to say the least,” wrote Saint John Industrial Parks general manager Ian MacKinnon, to officials from Opportunities NB and Envision Saint John, the city’s business development group. “Nothing will proceed without a response and a commitment for power.” MacKinnon did not respond to a request for an interview.

Meanwhile, Opportunities NB wrote a letter to NB Power asking about the feasibility review, saying Beacon is “ready to progress their project in Saint John but can’t commit to anything without a path forward with NB Power.”

At that same time, NB Power and the U.S. company ProEnergy were putting forward an application for a controversial 500-megawatt, 10-turbine natural gas and diesel power plant in Tantramar, in southwest New Brunswick, to cope with rising electricity demand. 

That power plant, which was just approved by the province’s Energy and Utilities Board, would produce around 900,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, according to its environmental assessment.

VoltaGrid has said its gas plant on the data centre site is not at all related to the larger ProEnergy plant. NB Power put out the request for proposals for the gas plant in 2024, a year before the data centre plan was announced, though the same year Beacon submitted its feasibility application to the provincial utility. 

Still, advocates say the potential data centre has bearing on decisions about power generation. 

David Coon, leader of the Green Party of New Brunswick, says from his perspective, the projects are connected insofar as powering the data centre requires the ProEnergy gas plant. “There isn’t an extra 200 megawatts of capacity available on the grid to carry that load,” he says. “So it’s got to come from somewhere and that means they’ve got to build it.”

Watson wonders why officials were asking for grid approval of an energy-intensive facility at the same time the utility was forecasting an energy deficit by 2028 due to population growth. 

Meanwhile, VoltaGrid’s 190-megawatt natural gas-generating facility would produce roughly 750,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually, making it one of the province’s most prolific emitters, behind the Irving Oil Refinery and the Belledune coal-fired generating station.

VoltaGrid CEO Nathan Ough did not respond to a request for an interview, but Lauren Armstrong, with Beacon Data Centers, said in a statement that “the project is being designed with a combination of measures to reduce and manage emissions intensity over time. These include high-efficiency generation technologies, operational optimization, and the ability to integrate lower-carbon energy sources as they become available.”

Given the potential effects on power rates, on the province’s emissions targets and on the community, Coon is calling for a moratorium on data centre development until legislation can be developed for the industry. “The concern that everyone has, including me, is the costs will far outweigh the benefits of this, the way it’s being pursued.”

In a statement, Luke Randall, the minister responsible for Opportunities NB, said that projects like the data centre have the potential to contribute to the provincial economy by creating jobs and revenue for public services. These projects “will only proceed if they deliver clear economic value, align with environmental expectations and contribute meaningfully to the province’s long-term development.”

Randall also stated that Opportunities NB is “aware of the broader discussions regarding electricity supply and future demand. That is precisely why projects like this are subject to rigorous review, including technical analysis, environmental assessment and regulatory oversight.” 

In return, Saint John residents are being pitched an economic windfall in jobs and tax revenue, though of the advertised 1,200 jobs, most are in construction, and the figure also includes indirect jobs, which are service and supply-chain jobs created as a result of the data centre project. Just 210 jobs would be permanent, according to the company’s projections.

Lorneville residents say it’s unclear that the loss of wetlands and forest, and the increase in emissions, would be worth it. 

For now, they’re hoping to have the expansion of the industrial park reversed; residents have filed for a judicial review of the area’s rezoning, on the grounds that the city council’s decision was biased. In May, Lorneville resident Sherri Colwell-McCavour, who’s been vocally opposed to the project, was elected to Saint John City Council  — days after a protest in downtown Saint John, at which dozens of people called for a halt to the data centre.

If residents can’t stop the project, they say they intend to continue doing what they can to minimize the effects.

A data centre in the neighbourhood

After touring the wetlands and forest in the data centre footprint, Watson and Wilkins make their way to the road. A few minutes later, Wilkins’ wife, Leah Alexander, rolls along to pick them up. 

Alexander’s family has been in Lorneville for six generations. She has spent her whole life there, and she and Wilkins live just a few houses down from the one she grew up in.

She has vivid early memories of being taken door to door by her mother to advocate against the dump, she says. Now, the threat of the data centre has her strapping her baby to her chest to go to council meetings, and bringing her four-year-old along to hand out flyers.

Alexander has never imagined leaving Lorneville, but the data centre project has her questioning whether it’s a place her family can stay. For now, she’s sad to see the community go through the same struggle it’s faced in the past — and frustrated that they’ve had to do so much work to highlight what’s at risk of being lost: the gnarled and ancient trees, the deep mossy swamps. 

If the systems meant to provide protection are not doing their job, she says, then it leaves residents no choice. 

“People want their children to grow up here,” Alexander says. “They want them to stay here, and what are we leaving them? Like, if we don’t stand up and fight for it, what are we doing?”

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

Summary

• In early May, BC Parks announced Pipi7íyekw/Joffre Lakes Park will be restricted to members of the Líl̓wat and N’Quatqua nations from June 20-27 and Sept. 8-30. 
• Líl̓wat Nation has since released its own statement with different closure dates, saying the trust with the province has been broken. 
• Since 2018, the two First Nations have been working with BC Parks on visitor management and the temporary closures — called reconnection periods — have been implemented since 2023. However, negotiations broke down last year over a dispute over the 2025 closure length.

Once again, one of B.C.’s most popular parks is implementing temporary closures this summer — and no one is happy about it.

Since 2023, Pipi7íyekw/Joffre Lakes Park has closed for brief reconnection periods, when entry is restricted to members of Líl̓wat and N’Quatqua First Nations, whose unceded territories encompass the park. During these periods, members can harvest traditional medicines, participate in cultural events and ceremonies and enjoy a part of their territory that is often too crowded with visitors for them to access at all, trampled and strewn with trash by the end of peak season. Since 2018, the two nations have worked with BC Parks on a joint strategy for managing visitors.

Last year, things went off the rails. Backlash over the temporary closures spiked as politicians — including BC Conservative leadership candidate Caroline Elliott and OneBC leader Dallas Brodie — used the closures to argue Indigenous Rights had gone too far. On X, Brodie claimed that park access across the province may someday be “dependent upon your racial status.”

Then came a dispute over the length of the final 2025 reconnection period. The nations planned for two months, from late August to the end of October, but BC Parks went with about half that time, between the Labour Day weekend and Oct. 3. The decision sparked protests from members and supporters of the two nations and allies. 

Which brings us to May 7, when BC Parks announced the closure dates for this year: one week in June, which includes National Indigenous Peoples’ Day on June 21, and from Sept. 8 until the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation on Sept. 30. Neither nation was part of the announcement. They have not met with BC Parks as a working group since last fall’s dispute, according to the Ministry of Environment and Parks, which said it “has been working to try and re-engage” the nations ever since.

On May 27, almost three weeks after the BC Parks announcement, Líl̓wat Nation released a statement calling on the B.C. government to implement its desired reconnection period for the fall, spanning Aug. 23 to Oct. 5. That’s roughly three weeks longer than the province’s stated closure, and the nation made it clear the unilateral announcement by the province “has further undermined an already fractured relationship.”

In an emailed statement, Líl̓wat Nation said this year’s letter has also been signed by N’Quatqua First Nation, “reflecting continued alignment between the two nations on the importance of the closure periods and the broader management concerns at Pipi7íyekw/Joffre Lakes.” 

The planned reconnection period has once again unleashed “an unspeakable amount of online racism,” Green MLA Jeremy Valeriote said in the legislature on May 19. Valeriote, whose West Vancouver-Sea to Sky riding includes Pipi7íyekw, added the ministry’s lack of consultation with the First Nations, as well as the public disagreement over closure dates, may fuel the growing misinformation and mistrust surrounding Indigenous Rights in B.C. 

During question period, he asked Minister of Environment and Parks Tamara Davidson: “How is this collaboration? It seems that the government is either blaming the nations or waving the problem away instead of doing the actual work to alleviate the confusion in the minister’s estimation. Have the Líl̓wat and N’Quatqua Nations become collateral damage in the toxic reconciliation dialogue we’re experiencing?”

Major spike in visitors at Pipi7íyekw/Joffre Lakes

Just three provincial parks in B.C. require visitors to reserve a free day-use pass in advance during busy months — Pipi7íyekw/Joffre Lakes, Garibaldi Park and Golden Ears Park, all located within driving distance of Vancouver. Though there are more than a thousand parks in the province, these three and a handful of others become magnets for visitors. 

According to BC Parks, provincial parks on the south coast have seen a 52 per cent increase in visitor traffic since 2010 — and in Pipi7íyekw/Joffre Lakes, visits increased by 222 per cent between 2010 and 2019. 

“The overtourism leading up to the day-pass system was pretty significant. … I don’t think people fully appreciate what it’s like to have 200,000 people tramping through a relatively small park,” Valeriote told The Narwhal.

The stampede put a strain on the park, which can be accessed only through a single out-and-back route: trails were packed, cars spilled out of the parking lot, trash cans overflowed. Temporary closures were implemented to ensure rights-holding First Nations could access their territory, as well as give the land itself an opportunity to rest.

The nations’ proposed 2025 closure dates reflected “the time required for our communities to reconnect with the land, conduct ceremonies, gather food and medicines, and allow Pipi7íyekw the rest it needs to heal,” according to an August statement. “The province’s refusal to honour these dates undermines both reconciliation and the health of the land and people.”

History is repeating itself in 2026, with another disagreement over dates. 

In a statement sent to The Narwhal on May 27, the Ministry of Environment and Parks said it’s aware of the discrepancy between its 2026 dates and those given by Líl̓wat Nation. “The province reached out to the Líl̓wat Nation and N’Quatqua First Nations starting in February, reiterating a desire to identify long-term solutions that provide predictability and support the needs of all park users,” it said. According to the statement, the length of the 2026 closure dates align with “a commitment the province made in 2023 for 30 days of closures” — though in 2024 and 2025, the park was closed for nearly twice as many days. 

Parks Minister Davidson declined an interview with The Narwhal, but said by email the government values its relationship with both nations and hopes “to return to the table to collaborate on long-term solutions that provide predictability and support the needs of all park users.”

When asked if the province has a plan in place for protests or blockades that might arise over the disputed closure dates — as they did in 2025 — Minister of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation Spencer Chandra Herbert did not answer directly, but said the province supported peaceful protest but not blockades.

Green MLA concerned about the politicization of parks closures

Valeriote told The Narwhal he worries the ministry’s unilateral communications, contradicted by Líl̓wat, will exacerbate growing tensions in B.C. over Indigenous Rights and reconciliation. 

The claim that the closures are race-based — rather than rights-based — has been deployed frequently.

“I won’t mince words: the Conservatives and OneBC are using this as a political wedge issue,” Valeriote said. “It’s fully opportunistic. They’re talking about … ‘We no longer have access to our public land.’ It’s pure fear mongering, and it’s irresponsible,” he said. “But in our political system, they’re taking advantage of an opportunity. That’s unfortunately how this political system works.”

Valeriote alluded to the recent tension over the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, or DRIPA, which spiked in the wake of a court decision affirming that Cowichan Nation holds Aboriginal Title over a former village site in Richmond, B.C., which is now privately owned land. Despite Cowichan asserting repeatedly that they do not intend to seek claim to private land, the ruling has sparked panic among some property owners, with politicians rushing to reassure them — or amplify their fears. 

“They’re using [parks] to argue that Indigenous people are getting too good of a deal, and we should all be scared and, you know, private land ownership is playing into that.”

Misinformation is circulating, and not only about the closure dates, but who exactly is being kept out. B.C. politics reporter Rob Shaw posted on X that the BC Parks closure is “to allow First Nations to practice cultural and conservation traditions.” In fact, while there are 203 First Nations in B.C. — and residents of the province who are members of other First Nations across the country — only Líl̓wat and N’Quatqua members can access the parks during those periods.

Do B.C. and the First Nations see the park the same way?

In her emailed statement, Davidson emphasized balancing “predictable access” and visitor experience with reconciliation. “As one of BC Parks’ busiest destinations, welcoming thousands of visitors each year, we have a responsibility to carefully manage visitation in [the] park so people can have the most enjoyable experience.” When asked in the legislature on May 28 if trust had been broken with the First Nations, Davidson said, “I think we’d have to go back to Líl̓wat and N’Quatqua to ask them. But for our part, we’re working together and we’re trying to build that relationship back up again.” (In their August 2025 statement, the nations wrote, “We have lost trust in working with BC Parks.”)

But Líl̓wat’s statement makes it clear the First Nation sees the park differently, writing that reconnection periods are required “so our people can harvest, hold ceremony, teach our children on the land and carry out our stewardship responsibilities in Pipi7íyekw.”

In other words, a park is not just for enjoyment; it’s also a responsibility and a relationship. And that responsibility requires acknowledging that predictability is an increasingly unrealistic goal as climate change wreaks havoc on the planet, including Canadian parks. In recent years, parks across the country have closed after being damaged and destroyed by storms and floods. Many parks — including Jasper in Alberta, and Nopiming in Manitoba — have closed after being scorched by wildfire.

There is no certainty when it comes to our future access or enjoyment of nature. And the likelihood that parks will be around for anyone to enjoy is diminished when stewardship is treated as less important than on-demand access. The province knows this — despite the repeated emphasis on widespread access, only 500 daily passes are available, often booked up within moments of reservations opening.

“We see [a park] as a kind of piece of infrastructure, like a building, that’s supposed to be able to handle constant traffic and constant stress,” Valeriote told The Narwhal. “And I appreciate the Indigenous way of looking at it: it’s cyclical, and it’s a cultural asset that isn’t just about monetizing or utilizing 365 days a year. Sometimes it does need time to rest and reset,” he said. “I think the small amount of solitude that the Líl̓wat and N’Quatqua Nations can get in that cultural place is worth inconveniencing locals or tourists for a relatively few days a year.” 

Líl̓wat has asked the ministry to respond by Tuesday, June 2, and urged it to align the closure dates with those identified by the First Nation. 

“Reconciliation must be matched by action,” Líl̓wat Nation’s Chief Dean Nelson said in the statement. “If the province is serious about building a relationship based on mutual respect, it must start by respecting our reconnection periods.”

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

Summary

• In March 2026, the Doug Ford government formally replaced Ontario’s Endangered Species Act with weaker legislation that removes protections for some species and narrows protections for others.
• Documents obtained by The Narwhal reveal the dissent and concern raised by provincial staff, municipalities and Indigenous groups during consultations on the change.
• A major concern raised about the legislation is that many project proposals will no longer be posted for public comment, limiting public participation.

As the Doug Ford government prepared to replace the Endangered Species Act with new legislation, the province’s natural resources staff warned of weakened habitat protections, reduced oversight and new gaps in enforcement, according to documents obtained by The Narwhal.  

In March 2026, the Endangered Species Act was officially replaced with the Species Conservation Act, which removes or limits provincial protection from many threatened plants and animals.

Now, 275 pages of records, some publicly available and others only accessed through freedom of information legislation, show provincial bureaucrats worrying about the implications of the changes, as well as municipalities and Indigenous groups voicing dissent — before the government passed the law anyway.

The new act allows most projects, whether related to housing, mining or other industries, to begin as soon as proponents register online, in place of an expert review of permit applications. This approach “may weaken oversight and accountability, as self-regulation can be variable and potentially unreliable,” reads November 2025 feedback from the fish and wildlife policy branch of Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources to the provincial Ministry of the Environment, which is primarily responsible for species at risk. “Proponents may also misinterpret or manipulate rules and regulations.”

The natural resources ministry also raised concerns that the Species Conservation Act exempted a number of development actions from the second section of the Environmental Bill of Rights, which requires applications to do work that could potentially harm wildlife to be publicly posted on the provincial environmental registry. Without this, the chance for public review and comment is eliminated.

“The [Environmental Bill of Rights] was created to ensure that the people of Ontario have the ability to participate in decision-making processes,” reads the same feedback sent via email from the Ministry of Natural Resources. “Suggest being cautious if exempting [Species Conservation Act] permits and orders … as this may be seen as a way to avoid transparency, accountability and undermine public trust.”

Neither the Ministry of Natural Resources nor the Ministry of the Environment responded to The Narwhal’s detailed questions about this feedback by publication time.

In April, in response to questions from The Narwhal at a press conference, Premier Doug Ford said such changes are needed to clear the way for industry and development in the province. 

“As I’ve said, we aren’t going to hold up Highway 413, the Bradford Bypass, over a grasshopper — not happening,” Ford said of two highway projects set to cut through the protected Greenbelt and farmland. “We have a mandate to build. We’re going to build, and we’re going to respect the environment at all costs.”

Thousands of public comments about endangered species protections were also ignored: lawyer

Kerrie Blaise, a lawyer with the northern Ontario environmental non-profit Legal Advocates for Nature’s Defence, said these issues remained as the final legislation was passed, despite concerns being raised ahead of time.

That includes dropping the requirement for some permits for projects that could harm species being publicly posted.

“It’s a very sweeping exemption,” Blaise said. “It means we won’t know the name of the companies. We won’t know where it’s happening … the basic details: when, where, how much, what’s the harm? All of those details will be lacking.”

Blaise also registered her dissent before the new act passed. She told The Narwhal that Legal Advocates for Nature’s Defence sent more than 6,500 signed form letters asking the province to reconsider — even repeal — Bill 5, which proposed killing the old act and passing the new one. The organization is now representing two Indigenous interveners challenging the constitutionality of the bill in court. 

Blaise said it was “really great to hear” that natural resources staff spoke up. “I truly believe you have very dedicated individuals with expertise in this field … but their expertise and their knowledge is not being respected,” she said. 

“There are those with knowledge who can actually guide the government in a good way, and it’s really chilling when those individuals and departments within [the government] are themselves not being listened to.”

Blaise added she sees nothing in the final legislation showing that the province addressed the concerns raised by staff or those contained in thousands of public comments.

“If the province was actually looking to respect … what the public was actually saying, we would have a very differently worded Species Conservation Act,” Blaise said.

In the documents, Ministry of Natural Resources staff also warned that excluding federally protected species from provincial protections “could create regulatory gaps and inconsistencies.” This, too, echoes concerns from environmental groups. 

The province has argued a number of species —  including the redside dace, a minnow that became central to concerns over Ontario’s Highway 413 development — are already protected under federal laws. 

The federal government can extend emergency protections to provincial lands, but rarely does so. And in many cases, federal protection only extends to individual species under the federal Species At Risk Act and their dwelling places on federal lands, such as national parks or First Nations reserves. These spaces make up less than five per cent of the range of most terrestrial at-risk species, whose wider habitat in Ontario is now vulnerable. 

The documents show this concern was voiced by Steve Ganesh, commissioner of planning, building and growth management for the City of Brampton. He wrote to the province that, “By limiting ‘habitat’ to a species’ dwelling place and its immediate surrounding area, important areas may no longer be protected that are crucial for foraging, dispersal, migration and climate resilience.”

“This change could leave locally significant and rare populations unprotected and reduce the scientific basis for municipal planning, restoration and mitigation efforts.”

One species of particular concern is caribou, according to Allie Mayberry, a wildlife co-ordinator working with the sustainable development department of Biigtigong Nishnaabeg, a First Nation on the north shore of Lake Superior. Whittling protected species habitat down so severely provides little protection for an already threatened species that relies on large swaths of interconnected habitat to survive, she told The Narwhal.

“There’s a lack of clarity around how caribou habitat is going to be protected moving forward,” Mayberry said. “We’re already working with a baseline of a very disturbed habitat, and now through the new [Species Conservation Act] there’s much less of an imperative to protect what habitat there is left.”

Docs show Treaty Rights and loss of protection for threatened species were a concern

Other municipalities and First Nations had concerns about the legislation change, the documents show. 

A letter from the City of London, sent before the new act’s passage, argued the now-official Protected Species in Ontario List would remove protections for 106 species. “These changes undermine the municipality’s capacity to protect species that are rare, threatened or endangered within the city,” the letter reads, naming 20 species in London’s boundaries that have been removed from protection, along with their habitats. They include the chimney swift, eastern musk turtle and wood thrush. 

The documents show Indigenous groups also argued the new legislation disrespects not just the environment, but their Treaty Rights.

The Species Conservation Act was set to “fundamentally alter how the Haudenosaunee exercise rights guaranteed under the 1701 Nanfan Treaty,” reads a comment from Aaron Detlor, a delegate from the Haudenosaunee Development Institute, which represents the interests of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy Chiefs Council in the development of lands within Haudenosaunee jurisdiction. “These regulations restrict the free and undisturbed use of our territories that are foundational to Haudenosaunee sovereignty and self-determination.”

“Our review of these proposed regulations reveals no credible or equivalent process that could substitute for meaningful engagement on measures that directly affect our Treaty Rights. We see no mechanism by which the Haudenosaunee will have a meaningful opportunity to participate in decisions affecting species protection and our inherent right to exercise hunting and harvesting rights on our territory,” Detlor wrote.

At the April press conference, The Narwhal asked Ford how he would respond to government experts saying the changes could create serious gaps in protection for species at risk. “That’s a priority to make sure we protect all species at risk,” Ford replied. “There’ll always be consultation.”

Chief Duncan Michano of Biigtigong Nishnaabeg noted in a comment about Bill 5 on the Environmental Registry of Ontario that the new act failed to respect First Nations’ constitutional rights, arguing the legislation “fundamentally weakens environmental and cultural protections and reduces consultation requirements,” calling it a “direct violation of the Government of Ontario’s obligations to uphold the honour of the Crown.”

“The consultation process [on Bill 5 and the Species Conservation Act] has been extremely flawed all along,” Mayberry, Biigtigong Nishnaabeg’s wildlife co-ordinator, said. “We’ve participated in a number of different ways and what we’ve been met with is not a two way dialogue in an attempt to hear and meaningfully address any concerns.” 

Mayberry said consultation has “all just been a box-ticking exercise wherein Ontario continues to double down on their preferred approach, and they get the benefit of saying, ‘Well, we spoke to First Nations about this.’ ”

“We’ve taken a piece of legislation that was once considered the gold standard for species at risk protection and recovery in Canada, and now we have just whittled it down to a point that it’s barely even a species protection act anymore,” Mayberry said. “I’m not at all surprised to hear that there’s even concerns internally about this.”

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Summary

• Last week, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government proposed major changes to the federal assessment process for mining, oil and gas and other infrastructure projects.
• The proposed changes include shifting assessments from an agency under the federal environment minister to regulators that report to the natural resources minister.
• Former ministers, First Nations and environmental advocates are criticizing the proposal, some calling it a more significant rollback of environmental law than was seen under former prime minister Stephen Harper.

Last year, Prime Minister Mark Carney established an office tasked with fast-tracking handpicked major industrial projects. Now, he says that’s not enough. He has a new proposal on the table meant to roll out the red carpet for all projects requiring federal approval, including pipelines, mines, transmission lines and other infrastructure.

The proposal, unveiled last week, would create “federal economic zones” where certain developments can be “pre-approved,” and provide exceptions to several rules governing fossil fuel and nuclear oversight, habitat preservation, species at risk protection and major project reviews.

It would fundamentally change the way the country scrutinizes industrial development and consults with Indigenous Peoples, in some cases shifting reviews at an agency under the purview of the environment minister over to federal bodies that report to the natural resources minister.

The government outlined its plan in two discussion papers, but it will need to flesh out the details and formally introduce them as part of new legislation, before they can be implemented in law. The Liberals are now able to pass legislation much easier, after they secured a Parliamentary majority following April’s byelections and the addition of five floor-crossing MPs to their caucus.

The House of Commons is on a two-week break, scheduled to return May 25. Meanwhile, the proposal is open for public comment through June 7. 

Here’s what you need to know.

Who wanted this change? Who didn’t?

The government says the alterations are necessary so Canada can better compete with other countries for investment dollars, and strengthen the Indigenous consultation process. It said the process to build things is “often slow, expensive and confusing” and the government must “go further to streamline review and approvals processes.”

The Canadian Chamber of Commerce, which represents businesses across the country, also believes the government’s fast-tracking regime has “not gone far enough” and is hoping Carney continues to “peel back some of the red tape layers that have been holding back business success.”

Canada’s oil and gas industry has consistently advocated since Carney took office for his government to overhaul environmental assessments to turbocharge fossil fuel growth. Industry executives have personally pushed this position despite the industry enjoying big profits off the war in Iran, and despite the scientific conclusion that carbon pollution, of which the oil and gas industry is the largest contributor in Canada, is furthering destructive climate change that is leading to myriad health problems and premature death for Canadians.

Two former Liberal environment ministers have harshly criticized Carney’s proposal. Liberal MP Steven Guilbeault, who was the federal environment minister from 2021 to 2025, told the Toronto Star Carney’s plan is “worse” than the changes under former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper, which resulted in some high-profile legal challenges. Former Liberal MP Catherine McKenna, who held the same post from 2015 to 2019, told the Canadian Press Carney’s proposal will lead to a “lack of trust” and lawsuits, ultimately making the project approval process slower, not faster.

Ecojustice, an environmental law charity, has described the changes as potentially ushering in “the biggest rollback of environmental protections in a generation.” The Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, which represents 63 First Nations in that province, said it raises “serious concerns that Canada is moving toward a system where speed takes precedence over Treaty obligations, environmental stewardship and First Nations consent.”

The government wants to create ‘federal economic zones’ where developments are ‘pre-approved’

Carney’s government wants to legalize “federal economic zones” which it says could include areas designated for energy production and transmission, industrial regions, transportation and telecommunications. 

Inside these zones, the government would “pre-approve” certain developments, subject to conditions, and exempt projects from requiring individual environmental reviews — instead just requiring one overarching assessment.

It said the zones, and the activities allowed in them, would be “clearly defined.” Consultation with Indigenous Peoples would be a “key part” of the process, it added, including on determining the conditions for development inside the zones. The agreement of provinces is also “essential,” it said.

“This co-operation between federal and provincial governments would allow projects to be fast-tracked under both federal and provincial regimes,” reads the discussion paper. 

Sound familiar? Ontario passed similar legislation last year

A provincial regime is already in place in Ontario, after Premier Doug Ford’s government passed Bill 5 last year. The bill established the similar-sounding Special Economic Zones Act. Inside Ontario’s economic zones, the government can select certain proponents and projects, and exempt them from some municipal by-laws and provincial laws, including environmental protections. 

Critics have said Ontario’s law threatens wetlands, watersheds, peatlands and endangered species, and the Indigenous communities who rely on them. It’s subject to a court challenge from First Nations, asking for the law to be found unconstitutional.

The federal economic zones would be enabled through regional assessments, which are already an approach used by the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada to examine the cumulative effects of development in a given area. 

There is currently an ongoing federal regional assessment in the Ring of Fire, the mineral-rich area in the James Bay Lowlands known as Bakitanaamowin Aki, or “the Breathing Lands,” and Mammamattawa, or “many rivers coming together,” by the First Nations that call it home. 

Days after passing Bill 5, Ford said he would designate the Ring of Fire a special economic zone under Ontario law “as quickly as possible.” But in March this year, in a sudden shift in tone, Ford said he didn’t “need” to use these powers anymore to develop the area due to partnerships with several, but not all, First Nations communities in the region.

The Ontario government has long spoken about the region becoming a major mining hub. But an interim Ring of Fire regional assessment report has pointed to the need for environmental monitoring in the area’s boreal forest and peatlands, and the need for communities to urgently access health care. 

The provincial government, meanwhile, has been withholding scientific data and funding as part of the assessment process, and is not at the table with the First Nations and federal government representatives seeing it through, The Narwhal has reported.

New rules would change the role of the federal environmental review agency

Carney’s proposal would remove the ability of the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada to examine any pipeline projects that cross provincial or national borders, as well as any transmission lines or “offshore renewable energy projects.”

The agency, accountable to Environment, Climate Change and Nature Minister Julie Dabrusin, examines projects for sustainability, environmental protection and Indigenous Rights. It carries out its assessments “grounded in sound science, rigorous process and due diligence,” according to its website.

“Does Canada need to weaken its environmental laws to allow projects to proceed? No,” the agency declares on a frequently asked questions page. “Do federal policies prevent LNG, oil or pipeline projects from moving forward in Canada? No.”

Carney’s government is now of the opinion that issues like “poor coordination between government departments” are slowing down projects like pipelines. The government is proposing to shift assessments of certain projects away from the agency and over to two regulators that report to Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson. 

The job of reviewing all cross-border pipelines, transmission lines and offshore renewables would go to the Canada Energy Regulator, while the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission would handle project reviews related to nuclear and uranium projects.

The government would also have the power to declare major pipelines “in the public interest,” before the energy regulator is required to complete its review of the project’s conditions or where the pipe would actually be laid.

At the same time, the government is proposing that the Impact Assessment Agency become the home of a new “Crown consultation hub” that would “ensure that each Indigenous group affected by a major project goes through one clear and coordinated consultation process for each project.” 

It is also proposing to assign the federal review coordinator at the agency the job of ensuring project assessments and federal permits “stay on track.” The government said it would change the law to ensure project reviews and permit reviews “happen at the same time” and that a federal decision would take no longer than one year.

Sound familiar again? Carney isn’t the first leader to try to fast-track industrial projects

Carney’s proposal is reminiscent of a shift that happened under Harper’s government, which tried to accelerate environmental assessments by moving more oil and gas oversight to the energy regulator’s predecessor, the National Energy Board, in 2012.

Years later, the National Energy Board came under scrutiny after the Federal Court of Appeal quashed the government’s approval of the Trans Mountain oil pipeline expansion project, saying the board’s review of the project was flawed. The former Northern Gateway pipeline proposal also had its federal permits overturned by the Federal Court.

Former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s government passed the Impact Assessment Act and Canadian Energy Regulator Act, collectively through Bill C-69, allowing the government to consider the impact of natural resource projects on issues like climate change. But a Supreme Court of Canada decision in 2023 found the assessment scheme “largely unconstitutional,” forcing Trudeau’s government to introduce a revised version of the law in 2024.

There will be new exemptions to Canada’s species at risk law and fish permits

Carney’s government wants to change “some federal laws” that it argued can make the regulatory process “slow, repetitive and less flexible.” One of these appears to be the Species At Risk Act, a federal law passed in 2002 that is meant to prevent species extinction and help with population recovery. 

The law has a clause known as the “jeopardy test,” that restricts permits for an activity affecting a species or its critical habitat, unless the government believes the activity “will not jeopardize the survival or recovery of the species.”

Carney’s proposal would give the government the power to exempt projects from the application of this test. It said the power would be “limited” and have a “high threshold to be met,” would have to be in the “public interest” and would have to come after the proponent has made “all reasonable efforts” to avoid impacts.

The government also wants to offer more flexibility for permits that impact fish and fish habitat, when it comes to compensating for environmental harm. And it would allow “some early construction activities to start” before the government decides on the merits of a project, “if necessary permits are approved.”

Carney’s proposal also allows ministers to adjust certain conditions of a project assessment “in exceptional circumstances” and “adjust environmental conditions for projects of national interest, when needed.”

And it would hand the environment minister the power to issue a single federal document for certain projects that would include all federal decisions “required for a project to move forward.” It said experts in different departments would still review the project and provide advice, and enforcement would still be handled by the departments responsible. 

The changes come after Ford’s government in Ontario also removed the province’s Endangered Species Act and replaced it with the Species Conservation Act this year. That has had the effect of removing protection from many species.

After Ontario’s change, some threatened fish and birds are now only protected by federal laws. 

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Canada’s vast landscape, which boasts 20 per cent of the world’s fresh water, a quarter of global wetlands and 28 per cent of its boreal forests, is critical to its economy. Natural resource industries — forests, farms, fisheries, mining and oil and gas — together make up approximately seven per cent of Canada’s gross domestic product. 

Tension exists between expanding these industrialized sectors and protecting the ecosystems on which they depend. In Manitoba, some worry protecting the Seal River Watershed, which spans more than 50,000 square kilometres in the province’s north, will hinder opportunities in mineral resources and hydro; to the east, critical mineral mining ambitions in Ontario’s Ring of Fire clash with the protection of the Hudson and James Bay Lowlands, the second-largest carbon sink on earth; and in B.C., Coastal First Nations have protested that lifting the large tanker ban through their waters will endanger the protected Great Bear Rainforest.

These tensions make it easy to frame nature as the antithesis of economic activity, if it’s always put in opposition to projects that are described as growing Canada’s wealth, sovereignty and security. But a growing chorus of economic and policy leaders, alongside conservation groups, are making the case for nature to be seen as a critical financial asset — not a barrier, but another opportunity for economic growth. 

The federal government’s vision for conservation, laid out in its 2026 nature strategy, is of a nation that “protects, restores, and values nature as a foundation of our economy, sovereignty, and well-being.” 

One of the pillars to achieving that vision is “valuing nature and mobilizing capital,” according to the strategy. It estimated the value of “ecosystem services” — the direct and indirect contributions of nature to well-being and quality of life — to be $3.6 trillion, or “more than double our 2018 GDP.” In other words, the government is looking to spur more private sector investment in conservation by showing businesses how valuable nature is to their bottom lines.

The numbers show conservation is comparable with many of Canada’s major industries. While it may not produce the same scale of economic value as major resource extraction sectors like oil and gas — which does not approach the value of sectors like health care or education — it is a significant contributor to Canada’s economy. And the return on investment is high: a recent analysis by the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS) found every dollar spent on protected areas generated more than $3.50 in visitor spending, helping fuel local economies and generate government revenues. 

Like the oil and gas sector, Canada can choose to invest in the potential of conservation and champion it as a cornerstone of our country’s economic future. And as Canadians grapple with the increasingly severe impacts of the climate crisis, the role of intact ecosystems becomes even more valuable. 

These nine charts capture some of the value of Canada’s natural environments, and the economic potential of conservation.

Economic contributions from protected areas — by province

Gross domestic product (GDP) contributions of selected Canadian industries

How are the industries defined?+

Statistics Canada tracks economic activity indicators for a wide range of sectors using the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), which assigns a code to specific activities and sectors. Industries and government agencies tally these statistics in different ways to determine overall sector impacts. 

This analysis uses Statistics Canada’s data, and defines each industry as follows:

Agriculture: Crop and animal production (farming), related support activities and food manufacturing, including mills, bakeries, meat and dairy production.

Fisheries: Aquaculture, fishing, hunting and trapping and seafood product preparation.

Forestry: Forestry and logging, related support activities, wood and paper product manufacturing. 

Mining: Mineral mining (ore, non-metals, potash) and quarrying activities, including related support. Also includes mineral product manufacturing and metal manufacturing. 

Oil and gas: Oil and gas extraction and related support activities, petroleum and coal product manufacturing, natural gas distribution and pipelines.

Transportation: Air, rail, water, truck and transit and ground transportation (including public transit and taxis). 

Utilities: Electric power generation, transmission and distribution and water and sewage systems.

Jobs and compensation

More than 150,000 people work in protected and conserved areas — not far behind the oil and gas and forestry sectors. As the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society points out, many of these jobs are in Indigenous, rural and remote communities, where unemployment rates are high compared to urban areas. In parts of Canada where other economic opportunities are scarce, protected and conserved areas offer the opportunity to create long-term stable employment. 

Conservation provides value, but how are conservation workers valued? Compensation for the approximately 150,000 Canadians who work in protected areas is low, compared to other sectors; on average, an oil and gas worker makes nearly four times as much annually. 

Tax revenues and subsidies

Governments collected more than $1.4 billion in tax revenues from parks and protected areas in 2024, most of which stemmed from visitor spending, according to the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society’s analysis. That’s comparable to government tax revenues from the forestry industry, at $1.2 billion. Major resource industries like forestry and oil and gas also create government revenue through royalties and other fees. 

But for many of these industries, government revenues can be offset by tax breaks, grants and other subsidies.

Governments invested $2.3 billion in parks and protected spaces in 2024, generating $0.62 in revenue for every dollar invested. By comparison, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) estimates the federal government spent $3.17 billion USD (or $4.34 billion CAD) on fossil fuel subsidies — almost $1 billion USD more than the United States spent on subsidies, despite their industry’s far greater output. That number is likely an underestimate, as a lack of clear data and complex incentive structures make it difficult to track how much governments give out to industry. 

Environmental Defence, which releases an annual report tracking Canadian fossil fuel subsidies, estimates the government doled out more than $30 billion in subsidies and financing to fossil fuel companies in 2024. Most of that funding came in the form of a $20-billion loan for the Trans Mountain Expansion project. 

Carbon storage

The Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society estimated the carbon stocks stored in Canada’s existing protected areas by comparing protected area boundaries to data showing the carbon concentration in soil, vegetated areas and seabed sediments. 

It found a total 51.4 gigatons of carbon stored in the country’s protected forests, peatlands, wetlands, soil and seabeds. 

If this carbon was all emitted as carbon dioxide, the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society estimates, it would equate to 188.4 gigatons of emissions. 

By protecting these regions from industrial disturbances like mining, logging or draining, that carbon stays in the ground. If released, that carbon comes at a cost. 

Canada’s industrial carbon price, which charges businesses for emissions that exceed a predetermined limit, is $110 per tonne as of 2026. A carbon credit — doled out for activities that remove or avoid carbon emissions — is worth the same.

At that price, the carbon stored in Canada’s protected areas is worth $20.7 trillion. 

That’s about 10 times the value of Canada’s global mining assets ($352.6 billion), global energy assets ($827 billion) and domestic farm sector assets ($992.4 billion) combined.

Annual carbon capture

Protected and conserved areas remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, a process known as “carbon capture.” Manitoba’s Riding Mountain National Park, for example, removed an average of 108,328 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year from the atmosphere between 1990 and 2020. This is significantly less than Shell’s Quest carbon capture and storage project, but it’s also just one of hundreds of parks and protected areas across Canada.

Most parks, like the ones included in this chart, are sequestering carbon each year. However, when parks or protected areas are hit by wildfires, they can become carbon emitters.

– With files from Michelle Cyca

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It’s a windy night and unusually warm for October, as visitors gather at the Prince Edward Point Bird Observatory in Milford, Ont., for the “Starry Nights with Saw-whets” event. One barred owl was caught early in the evening, before any of the participants arrived, and is being kept in an owl carrier for closer observation later in the night. But now, word is getting around: it’s probably too warm to see any saw-whet owls, a disappointment to the attendees who have come to see them up-close and learn about nighttime migration monitoring. “South wind,” station manager Ashley Jensen mutters as she checks her phone for radar weather updates. It’s not the right kind of wind current for the migrating owls that are making their way from the north. 

At the observatory, volunteers gather for bird banding, a scientific technique in which a small, uniquely numbered metal ring is attached to a bird’s leg to track movement, migration routes and lifespan. Jensen is the bander-in-chief, while another bander, Ketha Gillespie, has donned a felt owl suit for the public event. Other visitors are humming with excitement despite the unpromising weather.

Prepared with thermoses and blankets, they gather in front of the banding station as Mira Furgoch, the observatory’s vice-president, gives a presentation about the owls and the station’s conservation efforts using a television that will also show live footage of the birds being handled. That is, if any are found. 

Bird-banding stations like Prince Edward Point collect data and conserve natural spaces that are invaluable habitats. They respond to factors affecting avian populations like disease, climate change, birth rates and more, while engaging the public in the natural world and promoting conservation. As of July 2025, the North American Bird Banding Program database includes 85 million banding records and 5.5 million encounters with banded birds. That includes both encounters reported by the public and recaptures reported by bird banders. 

Unlike people, birds cross borders freely, and the program relies on migration data collected and shared by both Canada and the United States. But the stability of American bird-banding efforts is at risk. The 2026 U.S. federal budget proposes eliminating the Ecosystems Mission Area, the parent agency overseeing scientific bird-banding efforts.

The possibility of disruption to scientific efforts in Canada as a result of what’s happening in the United States is real, and it is causing anxiety among some Canadian banding stations. If there were to be a shutdown on the U.S. side, Matthew Fuirst from Birds Canada explains that it would affect the collection of data that promotes conservation efforts. “If there was no U.S. bird-banding program, Canada would lose a crucial part of North America’s migratory bird science. It would really hinder our data availability, past and future, for population estimates, habitat protection and hunting regulations,” Fuirst says.

Despite these looming threats, the mood among the group waiting for owls at the Prince Edward Point observatory is peaceful. 

Engaging the public

Under the stars in Prince Edward Point, an audio lure designed to draw in saw-whet owls plays on repeat into the night. To everyone’s delight, one owl is caught before the event ends. A member of the public symbolically adopts the owl, makes a donation to the observatory and spends a few extra moments with it before it is released into the night.

Owl bander Gillespie, who also runs a youth ornithology program that introduces bird observation and banding to school-age children and teens, began her volunteer journey with a casual interest in birds. “I didn’t know a huge amount when I started here. I just came as a volunteer one day and was like, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s so cool,’ and I saw birds I didn’t know.” From there, she started volunteering and “put my mind to learning.”

She also sees banding as a way to promote conservation, and to enrich the lives of people who live near the bird observatory but might not know about it. This reflects a public engagement challenge for many observatories: their remote locations. In the Prince Edward observatory area of Ontario’s Prince Edward County, tourism and wineries play a big part in the local economy. Gillespie sees an opportunity to expose the migrant workers who labour in these industries to bird banding, giving labourers the chance to see new birds as well as birds they may already be familiar with from their home countries. 

There have been changes to improve accessibility at the Prince Edward Point Bird Observatory, including the addition of walking canes and foldable seats to accommodate mobility needs, and a taxidermied owl display offering a tactile way to interact with bird bodies for visitors who might have limited vision. 

Some banders can recall a negative experience with the public, owing to an unfavourable perception of bird banding that is usually cleared up with education and an explanation of the process. Birds waiting in nets can look alarming to someone unfamiliar with banding, which is why net lanes at bird-banding stations are closed to the public. “They may try to remove or cut the birds from the net if they don’t understand what’s going on,” Jensen says, which adds an extra layer of stress for the bird. 

“Once people know what you’re doing and get to see birds up close, or even get a chance to hold a bird and let it go, then they’re really usually pretty good with it.”

A day of banding

On a fall day at the Bruce Peninsula Bird Observatory in Lion’s Head, Ont., as a beaver swims across the bay, three bird banders take note of bird migration patterns from their temporary home in Wingfield Cottage.

It’s not easy to get here. The location is remote and currently not open to the public, only accessible by a closed unpaved road. But the cabin, perched on the water and surrounded by trees peppered with colourful autumn leaves, is the perfect pit stop for migrating birds, and the banders who stay on-site can expect to interact with a variety of species each season. This is just one of the stations that bring people together to monitor migrating birds in the fall and spring, deepening their knowledge of the natural world. 

The banders at Bruce Peninsula wake up before sunrise, put up the mist nets and wait for birds to fly into them. Weaving through well-trodden but narrow forest trails, they check to see if any birds have been caught before carefully extracting them, placing them in a small cloth bag and carrying the birds back to a small shed for processing. 

During processing, the bird is identified and its data recorded: species, weight, wing-span, age and sex (where possible) and the date and location of capture. To determine the amount of fat the bird is carrying, banders blow lightly on its chest to separate the feathers for observation. Lastly, a metal band is attached to the bird’s leg before it’s released to continue its migration. 

In between net checks, banders cast a trained eye for birds. A small shuffle in a faraway bush might catch everyone’s attention: in moments, they’ve identified a bird that an untrained eye may not even see. “Junco.” “Hermit thrush.” They peer through binoculars.

The banders also take census on observation days: a walkthrough at the start and end of the day, slowly and attentively, identifying as many birds as they can. 

Bruce Peninsula’s bander-in-charge and station scientist, Stéphane Menu, has been doing this for nearly 20 years. His colleagues Michaela Parks and Catherine Lee-Zuck bring their own set of skills: Parks is also a photographer who donates her work to the organization, and Lee-Zuck is an ornithologist who has been banding for three years. They share the work of observing, documenting and banding birds during the fall migration season.  

Menu describes the importance of the information being gathered: “We provide a lot of data that we think is very useful for not just general knowledge, but also for the government to make management decisions on the cheap.” 

Much of the bird-banding labour is done by volunteers, who may receive a small daily food stipend like they do at the Bruce Peninsula Bird Observatory. In more remote areas, some locations offer accommodations, but banding stations in more urban areas allow for volunteers to come and go for their shifts. During my visit to Bruce Peninsula, locals come by the banding station to offer their help on a stonemasonry repair that needs to be done. It’s all in the spirit of collaboration.

The banders’ cabin is full of bird reference books and sunlight. There’s a large stone fireplace in the living room, a big open kitchen where Menu makes pancakes between net checks, and a couple cozy rooms — including one with bunk beds — that give the place an atmosphere of bird summer camp. Parks shows me some of the nature photography she has made during her stay at the observatory. Later, Menu describes the wildlife: “We have black bears, we have rattlesnakes, we have beavers here on a daily basis. You can see otters. I feel very privileged to be here.” 

Even though she’s sharing a space with her fellow banders, Lee-Zuck describes the period at the end of the banding day as her “me time.” Looking out over the bright blue bay in the sunshine, it makes sense.

“Birds don’t see borders”

Some Ontario station managers and banders are concerned about the political instability in the United States and its potential impact on cross-border collaborations. “It would be super unfortunate not to have that level of connection, getting band returns and sharing information back and forth with our American colleagues would be really unfortunate,” Jensen, the station manager at the Prince Edward Point observatory, says. 

Matt Fuirst of Birds Canada explains what such a loss would mean. “If there was no U.S. bird-banding program,” he says, “Canada would lose a crucial part of North America’s migratory bird science.” It would hinder data availability, population estimates, habitat protection and hunting regulations. “It would kind of force Canada to determine a new system for regulating and tracking migratory bird data.”

“The Canadian Wildlife Service is committed to the bird-banding program in Canada,” Fuirst says, adding they plan to “continue operations as normal, continue bird banding, be maybe more conscious of reporting encounter data, or maintaining accurate band inventories.” The aim is to collectively stay on top of potential shortages of physical bands, which are manufactured in the U.S., while continuing data collection. He says the service has been “taking precautionary measures to ensure a mitigation plan.”

At Bruce Peninsula, Menu says he tries not to think about losing the collaborative relationship between nations. “It’s not just bird banding, it’s a service that’s been done since the late ’60s. Sixty years of breeding-bird surveys gone, and it’s done by volunteers. The organization and the collection of the data and the analysis of data is done by a federal agency, but the running of it is by volunteers.” 

Different places; same mission

Rick Ludkin, the co-founder of Haldimand Bird Observatory in southern Ontario, says birds are “telling us very clearly that our environment is declining in quality.”

Birds also show the impacts of good conservation practices, according to Ludkin. After soybean fields were replanted with prairie grass at Haldimand Bird Observatory, the number of birds banded increased from 90 to 450 birds in one year. 

Ludkin says the observatory has been getting rid of buckthorn, “a terrible invasive plant,” and also thinning out the walnuts. “Both of those species inhibit the growth of native shrubs and trees, and the impact of that has been pretty astounding.”

Jason Smyrlis, who has one year of banding experience, camps at the observatory when weather permits as a way to cut down on travel time. With the early mornings associated with banding, that creative solution to no on-site accommodations makes plenty of sense, even when it requires a double sleeping bag and multiple layers. “The light levels at night are tremendously reduced. It truly is a fabulous place to spend time,” he says. 

Different bird-banding stations have their own look and feel to them, but there are some common threads. For one, there’s the bander’s tools: the bands themselves sit on strings of wire before they’re attached to birds. Special rulers to measure the wing-spans sit on wooden desks; in some places these desks are doodled with highly accurate bird cartoons. 

There are also scales to weigh the birds, and small cylinders that house the birds while they are weighed. Different stations get creative with these containers in their own ways. At one place, empty Pringles cans suggest a love for snacks that conveniently supports science. At others, there are empty tennis ball canisters. At another, an empty tube that once carried a whiskey bottle.

What makes a volunteer?

To someone who isn’t familiar with the process, bird banding may seem almost like a secret club. “People that have been here will talk to other people about it,” Ludkin explains. “I kind of like the way we’re doing it, because you get people that really are interested and want to be here.”

To become a bander, the first important thing is the ability to identify birds by sight and sound. Volunteers can receive training to become banders but, says Jensen, “If they ever want to get to the point of being an independent bander, you have to be able to ID every single bird before you put the band on it. You cannot band a bird until you know what the species is.” 

With some popular banding sites like Long Point receiving more volunteer applications for banders than there are positions, finding a place to volunteer can be competitive. According to Menu, “It’s competitive because there are not a ton of positions but there are also not a ton of people with the skills. And then not just the skills but the desire to do this kind of work.” 

At Toronto’s Tommy Thompson Bird Research Station, located on Lake Ontario, volunteer positions are given by priority to those with a genuine passion for birds and those who intend to pursue a career in ornithology. Bander-in-charge Shane Abernethy says it’s important for volunteers to know how to handle animals, drawing comparisons to those with experience as vet techs or pet groomers. Even something seemingly random like playing a wind instrument, he says, can be a valuable asset at a banding station, as it can help with blowing on a bird’s chest to evaluate fat.

There is also a lifestyle factor: you must be willing to work according to migration season hours, often in isolation and with no days off save for the occasional weather day. “If you’re gone for two months in the spring and almost the same or more in the fall, it’s not necessarily a life that works well with what you can call a normal lifestyle,” Menu says.

All volunteers follow bander’s ethics: guidelines set out by regulatory bodies such as the North American Banding Council that are meant to guide people through the best ways to handle and interact with birds while conducting research. The code prioritizes the well-being of birds and the standardization of data collection and accountability. 

For stations that publish photos or share content on social media, photographic standards ensure the public image of bird banding promotes bird safety. “It’s admittedly very easy for the public to see a photo of a bird and think what we’re doing is bad. It happens more than you would realize,” explains Bird Canada’s Fuirst.

Birds and people are a double act

Thilini Samarakoon, a volunteer bander who just completed her third season, started out as a birder in Sri Lanka at the age of 13. Through a youth exploration society at school, she became very interested in birds and butterflies. 

Now she lives in London, Ont., and with her husband who is also a bander, she travelled to the Long Point Bird Observatory in Port Rowan, Ont., Canada’s oldest birding station. There, they met another bander visiting from Peru, and used an online translator tool to communicate.

There can be a special camaraderie among banders – after all, they spend time together hunkered down in some beautiful strips of nature, united by a common interest. Some return every year to these locations. Fuirst describes Long Point Bird Observatory as “a migration of people in addition to birds.”

“People from all across the country are spending their winter at home, and then spring comes, and the birds return. And the people also make this migration to a very specific spot. You know, this one trail that I love to walk every year. And it’s the same thing as what the birds are doing,” Fuirst says.

The interconnectedness of the birds and their environments is hard to ignore. Banders, whether they be volunteers or trained scientists, share stories about a love of nature and passion for wildlife that spans many years, often starting in childhood. It’s a deep passion for many, and one that quite literally moves people across borders. 

Faced with uncertainty about what the future of scientific collaboration may look like with the United States, the day-to-day reality of bird banding in Ontario bird observatories is quite normal. The NatureCounts database, which is an open data platform by Birds Canada that collects, interprets and shares biodiversity data, is running as usual. Volunteers, who have always been willing to give their time and expertise in exchange for some closeness with birds and time in beautiful natural settings, are still motivated to contribute their skills. 

Birds migrate. People migrate, too. Scientists and bird enthusiasts travel, sometimes internationally, to visit banding stations during migration seasons in order to earn banding experience, deepen their knowledge, receive training, get credentials, complete university studies, conduct research, make friends. 

“For me, I like birds but I also like migration. Birds connect the world,” Bruce Peninsula Bird Observatory’s Menu says. “They don’t really see borders.”

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.