After years of punishing drought that shrunk their herds, Canadian cattle farmers finally saw them growing at the start of 2026. It was a modest 2.5 per cent increase in the number of cows and calves, but after eight years of contraction — which also meant increased beef prices at the till — those in the industry are taking it as a win. 

Brenna Grant, executive director of CanFax, the research division of the Canadian Cattle Association, called this a “really modest” increase, urging patience for those hoping affordability will return soon. 

Canada’s beef prices are 23 per cent higher today than the national five-year average, and, in general, meat prices rose by the highest rate of any food category in 2025, according to research from Dalhousie University. 

The biggest concern driving beef prices high is weather, Grant said. Climate pressures on pasture conditions means less hay to feed animals and, consequently, smaller herds.

“All of the research would indicate that we are expected to see greater frequency and severity of extreme weather events, whether that be drought or flooding or even just greater volatility within the growing season,” Grant said. 

Ranchers are heading into summer with mounting uncertainty, given spotty and unpredictable rain and snow patterns in recent years. “That just means that this rebuild, in terms of increasing supplies, is going to take longer.”

Droughts in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, where the country’s cattle farming is concentrated, have become regular and severe. Drought insurance payouts to Alberta farmers reached a record $326.5 million in 2023, more than tripling the payouts from the 2021 drought. 

Droughts also hit southern Ontario last summer, impacting Trenton, Belleville and Prince Edward Country farmers. Dry conditions present a host of challenges, from reducing the availability of local, affordable feed to farmers not having enough water available for their herds. 

At the same time, more northern areas of Canada that haven’t historically been seen as cattle country are starting to grow their local bovine populations, as more moderate temperatures become a welcome refuge for farmers. Warmer weather has been a boon in typically colder zones, making it easier to grow feed crops instead of importing them. 

Northern Ontario is one of those areas, including Sudbury, Nipissing and Cochrane, which had built up a herd 100,000 strong as of 2018. 

Grant said the Peace Region that straddles the Alberta-B.C. border is also seeing longer growing seasons, allowing for more crop varieties, including of animal feed. The same is true for northeast Saskatchewan, once considered too cold and wet, where warmer, drier conditions have improved growing.

“It’s the right use of that land for the right product,” said Jason Leblond, president of Beef Farmers of Ontario, and a cattle farmer himself in Chisholm, Ont. “Beef cattle do very well in the north.”

But, he says, while the shift may benefit local producers, it is unlikely to ease rising beef prices anytime soon.

“When we see the first signs of the herd rebuild, which is what we’re seeing currently, it normally takes two years for it to hit the store shelves — that price reduction,” Leblond said.

Building up northern herds, he said, is a big part of “how we can get the prices more in check.” He’s increasingly seeing farmers step up in these long-dormant farming regions.

Northern Ontario’s growing herd of cattle

In the early 2000s and 2010s, cattle farmer Mike Tulloch recalls driving roads in Algoma, Ont., and seeing derelict farms, growing back up to brush and weeds — signs of a dying industry. Tulloch grew up in the area with a lifelong ambition to take over his father’s farm and watched the landscape closely.

In the last decade, he’s seen a growing number of farmers revitalizing the area’s farms, many coming from southern Ontario or farther. His own land, he said, doubled in value since he bought it in 2018. Now, he owns a farm with about 1,300 head of cattle. 

“The face of agriculture in Algoma and Manitoulin has changed dramatically,” Tulloch said. “It’s driven out of the relatively inexpensive value of the land and is being bought up hand over fist and turned back into productive farmland.”

Tulloch has found himself in one of the most hospitable remaining areas for raising cows.

“No question that the climate change has been more conducive to farming in the near-north: Algoma, Manitou and Sudbury, Nipissing,” Tulloch said. “This is a case where climate change in our area has been good for the farmers.”

The Algoma area, at the cusp of lakes Huron and Superior, has the longest growing period across all of northern Ontario, from Nipissing up. By 2050, temperatures are predicted to increase between 1 C and 4 C, making that growing season even longer. 

“We have warmer winters. We get on the land sooner, and the ground in the north here warms up sooner,” Tulloch said, compared to previous years. “For our cattle operations, we grow about 750 acres of corn. And, ten years ago, there wasn’t 750 acres of corn in the whole district.”

While many Canadian cattle farmers are battling extreme weather events like drought, floods and wildfires, northern Ontario is emerging as somewhat of a sanctuary. 

Moving north won’t fix the challenges climate change presents farmers

Experts and polls have demonstrated the biggest challenge for cattle farming in Canada is the increased frequency of adverse weather events. While the northerly migration has eased the challenges for some cattle farmers, it’s not a silver bullet — and prices will continue to reflect that, especially as consumer demand for protein remains extremely high.

“In the last five years, we’ve actually seen beef demand jump twice, once in 2020 and we maintained those levels, and then again in 2025,” Grant said. “What that means is that consumers were willing to pay a higher price for the same amount of beef.”

The high demand and weather uncertainties are being experienced across the world, including in Canada and the U.S., leading to a global shortage of beef as production falls in traditional centres.

There are also no guarantees conditions will remain hospitable for cattle farming in northern climates. 

“In some regions of the country, certainly, there will be some increased opportunity,” Kim Ominski, University of Manitoba research scientist, said. “But the challenge about these extreme weather events is it just introduces increased risk.”

Unpredictable growing conditions might bring a year where farmers are unable to source enough feed locally. Since feed is one of the largest costs of raising cattle, Ominski said, having to import it — especially if that requires swapping the usual meal with a more expensive crop — can really impact a farmer’s bottom line. 

Across Canada, research links extreme climate-driven weather events to rising mental-health strain on farmers, causing guilt, hopelessness and panic. Many are leaving the industry.

Even Tulloch acknowledges the gamble.

“The weather is more erratic,” Tulloch said. “You see that when the storms come, there are heavier storms and you have more risk of flooding.”

“It’s a risky venture.”

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Summary

• Farmers in Saskatchewan are dealing with variable weather, exacerbated by climate change. For many, this has meant hotter, drier summers, but the experience is far from universal.
• In some areas of Saskatchewan, growing conditions have improved with a changing climate.
• Farmers are also better equipped to deal with harsh weather, as new technologies and farming practices develop.

Scott Hepworth’s great-grandma used to have to shovel dirt out of the kitchen after dust storms swept across the Prairies.

More than a century later, drought is still a factor on Hepworth’s fifth-generation family farm near Assiniboia, Sask. In fact, it remains a defining feature of the land, which sits within the Palliser Triangle, one of Canada’s driest agricultural regions. 

But despite increasingly volatile weather in recent years, including long dry spells, record heat and sharp swings between extended drought punctuated by patchy rain, Hepworth says his crops aren’t suffering — instead, they’re performing better than expected in these conditions. 

He estimates that since he began farming in 2004, his crop yields during hot, dry summers have roughly doubled compared to what they were a few decades ago. 

It’s come as a surprise to some farmers across the Prairies: they are seeing the impacts of climate change, yes. But those impacts haven’t necessarily been bad for their bottom lines.

Only a few hours away from Hepworth’s farm, in northeast Saskatchewan — a region once considered too cold and wet — warming temperatures and drier conditions have improved growing conditions. 

“We were the worst place in the province to farm when I started farming, and now we’re the best place,” Ted Cawkwell, who owns a farm in the area with a couple partners, says.

On his land, fields that were historically difficult to seed and harvest are now more reliable. And he hasn’t seen damaging early frosts, once common every few years, in decades. 

Cawkwell says yields on his farm have improved dramatically over the past decade. The area overall has seen some of the highest yields in the province in recent years.

While there are several reasons for this — including better crop genetics and farming practices — Cawkwell believes changing weather patterns have been a major factor, too. 

“Twenty years ago, I would have never guessed the climate could change like this. You think of climate change as in tens of thousands, or millions, of years — not twenty. And that’s kind of the scary part of this.”

Farming wins are a combination of changing weather and new practices

Of course, the story is nuanced. On Hepworth’s farm, it’s not just the changing climate that has improved his crops. Conserving moisture has long been a focus for the family. Hepworth’s dad adopted what’s known as minimal-till seeding in the 1980s — essentially, reducing or eliminating the need to plough the soil when planting new seeds. This has improved soil health and reduced erosion. Another practice that Hepworth believes has benefited his farm is called continuous cropping, meaning every acre has a crop on it every year; roots in the ground rather than bare fields help retain moisture and protect the soil.

Advances in crop genetics have also played a big role, Hepworth says. He also serves as a director for SaskWheat, the Saskatchewan Wheat Development Commission — a farmer-funded organization that invests in wheat research and crop variety development. Over the past several decades, hundreds of millions of dollars in public and farmer funding have gone into developing new wheat and durum varieties in Canada. Hepworth is now able to grow drought-tolerant wheat and durum varieties bred to be shorter and better able to withstand stress.

It’s all helped. Hepworth, now in his early 40s, has his own memories from his childhood, of dust storms so intense he couldn’t see across the yard. Largely because of improved farming practices and soil management, he hasn’t seen one since. 

For Hepworth, a combination of climate, farming methods and technology have led to increased success.

But the experience is anything but universal.

“It’s been quite variable, even within a few kilometres,” he says. 

In parts of southern Saskatchewan, particularly deeper into the Palliser Triangle, recent conditions have had a very different impact.

A few hours southwest of Hepworth’s farm is Climax, Sask. — one of the driest regions in the province. 

Here, farmer Cody Glenn says he has experienced about six consecutive years of drought on his farm. 

In 2021, the worst year for drought in Saskatchewan in two decades, Glenn says 260 acres of barley resulted in almost nothing. The crop couldn’t even be properly harvested, producing just a couple bales of low-quality feed.

In other recent years, his barley yields were around a quarter of what they should be. 

In light of all this, he says his current strategy is just to stay viable. 

Despite changing weather, crop yields overall are holding — and even rising across the province

Even though there’s no question some farmers have struggled under increasingly variable weather across the Prairies, crop production has not declined as sharply as some predicted. 

The reality is far more nuanced, Dave Sauchyn, a leading Canadian climate scientist with a focus on the Prairies, says. 

“There’s no single climate,” he says. “It varies a lot from place to place.” 

Across the Prairies, climate change is showing up most clearly through warmer winters and longer frost-free seasons, rather than consistent increases in extreme summer heat, he says. 

In many areas, peak temperatures still haven’t exceeded those seen in the 1930s, in the “Dust Bowl” era.

Water patterns, however, are shifting in more complex ways, he adds. Snow is generally melting earlier, more precipitation is falling as rain instead of snow and less water is available later in the summer. 

As a result, Sauchyn says, drought remains the main concern. That pressure is most acute in the Palliser Triangle, where dryness has long shaped farming practices. But in recent years, moisture stress has also become more common in parts of the northern and eastern grain belt — areas that historically faced fewer drought constraints.

And not all these changing patterns are bad for farming regions. 

Fewer and shorter cold periods are extending the growing season. In some regions — particularly along the northern and western margins of Saskatchewan — this is actually improving production, as Cawkwell has seen on his farm.

And despite increased variability, overall crop performance has remained relatively strong. Yields for major Saskatchewan crops such as wheat and canola have generally trended upward over the last couple decades, with many recent years coming in at, or above, long-term averages. 

Jeff Schoenau, a soil scientist at the University of Saskatchewan, says this reflects decades of improvements in farming practices.

He says comparisons of Prairie soil samples from 1996 to 2018 show significant gains in key indicators such as microbial biomass, respiration and organic matter — factors that contribute to healthier, more resilient soils. These improvements are the result of smarter farming practices, he says. That includes conservation tillage (avoiding or minimally ploughing a field every year), diverse crop rotations (not planting the same monocrop in the same field year after year) and more precise use of fertilizers.  

Combined with advances in crop genetics and other improved farming strategies, Schoenau says crops today can withstand conditions that would have caused far greater losses in the past.

And while climate scientists like Sauchyn expect continued variability — and potentially more severe drought — Schoenau believes farmers will continue to adapt. 

“Farmers are pretty resilient, and when things change, they adapt and they use all of the resources and ingenuity and expertise available.”

Some scientists and farmers are cautiously optimistic — but not all

Sauchyn is also cautiously optimistic. 

He is clear that prolonged drought would pose serious challenges, particularly in a warmer climate. It will be critical, he says, to understand the difference between what’s a short-term blip and what is a long-term trend. 

But his team’s projections, based on large geospatial datasets of climate, soils and yields, suggest that northern and western margins of the grain belt may continue to benefit. That’s because it’s getting warmer and growing seasons are getting longer.

This offers little hope to farmers like Glenn, who lost the lottery in terms of farm placement. 

He says farmers in his area are displaying their despair.

“There’s more land for sale down here than there is buyers.”

For now, he hopes crop insurance will help carry him through, but if dry conditions persist, the path forward becomes less clear — particularly in areas where irrigation options remain limited. 

“I know I’m an optimist. I always have been, but it’s really hard to see the future currently.”

Hepworth is inspired greatly by his great-grandparents, who persisted through their own tough times.

“We’re in a dry cycle now, but farmers always find ways to adapt, and we’re always looking for ways to improve our soil health and leave our land in better shape for the next generation,” he says. 

“I feel as though every generation on this farm has had it better than the last, and that’s what motivates me.”

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Summary

• Indigenous women in B.C. are leading projects and organizations committed to mitigating wildfire risk and restoring traditional practices. 
• Cultural burns are making a comeback in the province, thanks to years of advocacy from Indigenous firekeepers.
• First Nations women in the province’s Interior are decolonizing fire management through their work.

In 2017 Jaci Gilbert was 12 years old when she was evacuated from Tsq’escen’ First Nation because of a wildfire. Four years later, more wildfires impacted her community, located in B.C.’s central interior, prompting some Elders to be evacuated to the Lower Mainland.

Gilbert, who is Secwépemc and Tsilhqot’in, volunteered both at the emergency operations centre during the partial evacuation in 2021, and as a fire camp logistics assistant near 100 Mile House during those fires.

“After being involved in the emergency operations centre I caught the bug of wanting to do emergency and wildfire management,” Gilbert told The Narwhal.

Gilbert works for First Nations Emergency Services Society as a cultural and prescribed fire specialist. She is part of a cohort of First Nations women in B.C. who are leading the way in wildfire management in their communities — demonstrating leadership and stewardship as blazes continue each year.

Being a young person, and a woman, Gilbert struggled to get into the field of emergency management, but reaching out to organizations and women in the field is a good place to start, she said.

“Youth have been managing emergencies in their personal lives for a long time, especially Indigenous youth, so using these skills I developed on reserve I’m able to handle [emergencies] well, whereas with a typical office or customer service job I don’t handle [those] very well,” Gilbert said.

“We’re seeing a shift in dynamics. I’m noticing a lot more Indigenous women in fire research and in the fire community.”

Indigenous firefighters bring cultural knowledge to their work

Sheresa Brown, a Nlaka’pamux woman from Lytton First Nation, has been involved with fire since firefighting in high school. Brown works as a field technician and archaeological monitor with Nlaka’pamux Nation Tribal Council, specializing in protecting cultural heritage values.

After her hometown Lytton, B.C., was devastated by fire in 2021, Brown evacuated to Merritt and was looking for a job when she called her former boss from the BC Wildfire Service. 

Back on the frontlines, Brown noticed a crew member cut down a culturally modified tree in Vernon, commonly referred to as a CMT, to clear a pathway for a hose. 

“[First Nations] make that [symbol on the tree] so they can come back to harvest the sap, they can use it to make different types of medicines. And it was a very utilized tree that just got cut down,” Brown told The Narwhal.

She recommended scanning for culturally modified trees before clearing to her crew lead, who received it well. A year later Brown was deployed on another fire near Lytton, teaching BC Wildfire Service crews about the land’s cultural values.

She said she’s willing to take people on the land if they are willing to learn and be respectful, noting that sometimes people do not know they are in a culturally significant area, especially when firefighters are deployed from another province or country. 

“I know if a man can do it, I can do it too, and probably even better,” Brown said, reflecting on her experience being a First Nations woman in the fire industry.

Bringing back cultural burns

Brown and Gilbert are carrying the torch lit by trailblazers in the field like Leona Antoine, who has 30 years of experience. Antoine is a Nlaka’pamux woman who is no stranger to cultural burning or firefighting. 

She practices traditional burning, is a registered forest technologist, a Type 1 (or first-response) firefighter with the BC Wildfire Service, and is a board director and chair of the Salish Fire Keepers Society. 

When Antoine’s firefighting journey with the BC Wildfire Service began in the early 2000s, she was one of few women on a 20-person unit crew. 

“Because there were no women on the crews before, they didn’t know how to have a woman around,” Antoine told The Narwhal.  

“It took probably about a month for the crew to get used to women being on the crew. You know, putting all the women’s posters and magazines away,” she said. 

Although men on the crew were initially uncomfortable around women, and had to be taught boundaries, “I broke those barriers,” she said. 

Another barrier at the time was getting the province and general public to see the value of cultural burning. B.C. was the first province in Canada to ban the practice in 1874.

After a year of devastating fire in 2017, and following the release of a report Addressing the New Normal: 21st Century Disaster Management in British Columbia in 2018, cultural burns started being taken more seriously by the province, with official amendments to the Wildfire Act in B.C. to support the practice taking effect in 2024.

This is work that the Salish Fire Keepers Society has been advocating for since its inception in 2016. The non-profit is made up of Interior Salish nations who experience some of Canada’s hottest wildfires, and promotes the restoration of cultural burning practices.

Gilbert contributed to a cultural burning guide, Workbook to Create a Cultural Burn Pathway, made in partnership with the Indigenous Leadership Initiative. 

“As I’ve become more involved with emergency and wildfire management, cultural burning comes up a lot, especially as an Indigenous person that’s interested in Indigenous solutions to modern problems,” she said. 

First Nations Emergency Services Society is an emergency management non-profit organization in B.C. “We were initially created as a result of a lot of Indigenous deaths related to structural fires,” Gilbert said during her presentation at the Salish Fire Keepers Society gathering in Kamloops on Mar. 17. 

The workbook guides readers through different considerations when planning a cultural burn, and was created through a series of community interviews by Amy Cardinal Christianson and Natasha Caverley.

“My role in [its] creation has been trying to make sure that it’s accessible for First Nations. I’m not much on the technical side, I’m … looking at the art and how that can help tell the story for people without strong English backgrounds,” she said.

During the March 2026 gathering, Antoine and the rest of the society’s board gifted each guest speaker with sweetgrass and sage, two traditional medicines among many First Nation cultures across Canada. 

There were many women in attendance, underscoring how things are beginning to shift.

This is an initiative she championed. “We are taught by our Elders when you ask for information or stories, you validate their teachings and what … they have taught. You honour them with medicine,” she said.

Prioritizing traditional protocols, ceremony, and medicine at this year’s fire gathering is an example of how Antoine brings balance to the fire space.

Not only has she broken down barriers for women to come after her, she also creates opportunities for those in the fire industry to connect, heal, and share knowledge – work that can be forgotten for those in the heat of fire. 

Antoine said “we’re in fire dependent ecosystems, the land needs fire.”

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This story is part of Generating Futures, a series from The Narwhal exploring clean energy sovereignty among B.C. First Nations.

On the northwestern corner of Vancouver Island, wind and storms will often rip through Quatsino Sound. The wild west coast weather means Quatsino First Nation experiences frequent power outages.

There are few ways in and out of the community, roughly a six-hour drive northwest from Victoria. If they’re blocked by rough weather, “we’re closed off from society,” Quatsino member Kara Wilson says. 

But that weather has also created opportunities. A wind farm opened in 2013, which the nation has partial ownership in, and Quatsino is working to build more renewable energy infrastructure. It is on the cusp of completing the third and final phase of its 150-kilowatt solar project in the spring.

But Quatsino isn’t stopping there — it is pushing to deploy a tidal energy system later this year, which would be one of the first pilot projects of that technology on the west coast, Wilson says.

Through its energy projects, the nation aims to provide reliable power at lower costs to its population of roughly 600 people, along with bringing jobs and independence. Quatsino is pursuing these renewable projects so members can “have that comfort at home that they’re always going to have energy no matter what,” Wilson says.

Wilson is the energy champion for Quatsino First Nation, a title that means she leads conversations about the nation’s energy projects with business partners  and community members. It also means she’s seen all the funding hurdles, manufacturing interruptions and bureaucratic hiccups that can make it hard for small, remote communities to launch their own projects. But after pushing through those challenges, she says Quatsino hopes to share its successes to show other communities “it is possible.”

Challenges to launching small, local energy projects

Quatsino completed the first two phases of its solar project in the first half of 2025, working with Canadian company Shift Energy Group to install solar panels and battery storage at the nation’s daycare and administration building. The third phase, providing power to the nation’s school, was delayed due to U.S. tariffs and a broad public service strike in B.C. late last year.

The efforts go back to 2017, when Quatsino began working with Barkley Project Group, a sustainable energy consultancy on Vancouver Island, to develop a community energy plan. Community members identified lowering energy costs, improving efficiency and exploring renewables as priorities. In 2020, the nation began installing heat pumps in homes, and seeking funding for other projects, like its solar installations.

Wilson hopes these projects will also help create good jobs in construction and maintenance close to home for Quatsino members and people in the nearby community of Port Hardy, B.C.

“A lot of our people are having to relocate because of a lack of work here and the cost of living,” she explains.

But creating a local energy source, just big enough to meet a remote community’s needs, can be a tough sell for support and funding, she says. Most of BC Hydro’s calls for power — open application periods for renewable energy projects across the province —have been for larger projects, built to have extra energy to sell, versus small projects focused on bringing sustainable, resilient energy to remote communities. For example, the 2024 and 2025 calls for power required applications to have a minimum capacity of 40 megawatts — or 40,000 kilowatts — compared to the 150 kilowatts Quatsino’s solar panels will generate.

Many projects First Nations are trying to get off the ground are smaller than 40 megawatts. Wilson says the nation had been ready for a while to invest in smaller scale projects but it was hard to get support for those, and they had to wait until they were ready to take on something bigger.

These projects don’t provide the obvious economic impact of being able to sell excess energy, but they provide a relief to community members with lower energy bills.

“All across B.C., everybody everywhere is struggling with the ongoing rises with rent, with the basic essentials to do with having a roof over your family,” Wilson says. 

First Nations have ‘a central role’ in B.C.’s clean energy future: BC Hydro

Many First Nations across B.C. have ambitions to pursue renewable energy, but are hindered by a lack of capacity and funding opportunities. In response, the province has created new funds, and BC Hydro required 25 per cent Indigenous equity in applications to its 2024 and 2025 calls for power. 

In an emailed statement, BC Hydro said the 2024 call for power delivered majority First Nations ownership for almost every project it funded and up to $3 billion in equity ownership for First Nations, and the 2025 call “is also designed to ensure First Nations play a central role in the province’s clean energy future.”

BC Hydro said it’s also supporting smaller projects, partly by working with off-grid communities since 2019 to support them in designing and developing renewable energy to use less diesel, along with supporting other programs for microgrid and on-grid communities like the Community Energy Diesel Reduction program. 

The utility is focusing on “partnering with communities rather than building projects ourselves” and purchasing energy from the communities, the statement said.

As for personal consumption, BC Hydro said it has among the lowest electricity rates in North America, and that residential rates are third lowest and half of what Albertans pay. It said it has eliminated higher electricity rates for 14 off-grid communities, which are primarily First Nations. In 2024, it contributed $80 million to support lower income households, social housing and Indigenous communities in programs and rebates through its Energy Efficiency Plan.

Nation is pursuing energy cost savings and independence

Quatsino estimates the solar panels will annually save the nation over $18,000 annually through reduced BC Hydro usage by the daycare, administration building and school. 

“The way we got leadership on board was highlighting those estimated savings,” Wilson said, and the fact those savings could support “other programs that [they’re] wishing to either revitalize, restructure or start new.”

If these projects create jobs that can keep people in the community, Wilson hopes that will also give them more opportunity to connect with revitalizing cultural and traditional art practices within Quatsino — some of which may be supported and powered by the new energy sources.

The nation is hoping the solar power can supply its youth culture camp at the ancient village of Xwatis, also called Old Quatsino. It’s a significant cultural site where Quatsino people lived before they were relocated farther north to their current reserve.

The nation wants to diversify from hydroelectricity partly because people are concerned about its impacts, as it diverts water and can contribute to drought and hydrological issues, Wilson says.

To branch out into new forms of energy, Quatsino sourced funds from New Relationship Trust (which the B.C. government supports) and Natural Resources Canada. It also applied to B.C.’s First Nations Clean Energy Business Fund, which has allocated $1.49 million to 12 First Nations so far. Quatsino was also accepted with the Accelerating Community Energy Transformation initiative at University of Victoria.

Quatsino had also hoped to receive funds from the BC Hydro rebate program for solar panels and battery storage for Indigenous communities, but interest in the program was so great it had to pause intake of applications, including Quatsino’s.

Among B.C. First Nations, the momentum seems to be building. Last year, Ulkatcho First Nation broke ground on its solar project, while Nlaka’pamux launched its own in October. Another went online in December owned by Tll Yahda Energy, a partnership of Skidegate Band Council, Old Massett Village Council and the Council of the Haida Nation.

Quatsino’s broad energy sovereignty vision includes more than the solar project and tidal energy device. The nation is also exploring the feasibility of electrifying four fish farms. It’s also possible Quatsino could eventually take over majority ownership of the Cape Scott wind farm from the current majority owner, Engie.

In 2025, the nation also received funding from Island Coastal Economic Trust to partner with Ehattesaht, Ka:’yu:’k’t’h’/Che:k:tles7et’h’, Nuchatlaht and Mowachaht/Muchalaht First Nations to pursue a transmission line to the North Island to improve connection with the BC Hydro grid, ensuring more reliable power for communities.

Wilson says she takes immense pride in her role as energy champion and what the nation has accomplished so far. She was once intimidated by the technical details of these projects, but now, she’s the one breaking them down for community members.

“I emotionally got invested because I have two boys at home that I want to set the example for, about how they can become a leader and how even when you run into hiccups — that it’s still possible, as long as you keep pushing and don’t give up.”

Generating Futures is made possible with support from the Real Estate Foundation of BC. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, no foundation or outside organization has editorial input into our stories.

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Alberta can have another pipeline to the West Coast — at least theoretically — but only if the oil and gas industry puts carbon capture systems in place to ensure the bitumen that flows through it is “low-emission.”

That tradeoff is at the heart of the “grand bargain” unveiled by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and Prime Minister Mark Carney in November 2025, when they both expressed support in principle for a new pipeline to connect Alberta’s landlocked oilsands to international markets.

What will make this bitumen cleaner than what currently flows through Alberta’s pipelines? The answer has nothing to do with the product itself, but with the processes that will be used to create it.

According to the terms of Smith and Carney’s memorandum of understanding, the federal government’s support for Alberta’s new pipeline is contingent on the success of a massive carbon capture project being pitched by the Pathways Alliance, a coalition of Canada’s major oilsands companies.

If Pathways companies build the carbon capture infrastructure they’re promising, and use it to “decarbonize the production of their bitumen,” to use Smith’s words, then they can have their new pipeline and ship their product to their collective hearts’ content, the prime minister has promised. (That is, of course, if a company or consortium signs on to acquire the necessary approvals and actually build it — the memorandum stipulates the pipeline will be built by the private sector, with opportunities for Indigenous co-ownership.)

You’re likely to hear a lot more about carbon capture technology, now that Carney has adopted it as a key strategy to thread the needle and reduce Canada’s emissions without forgoing the economic benefits of the nation’s number one export. His office identified the Pathways carbon capture project as a contender for a federal “major project” designation late last year, meaning it could see fast-tracked federal approvals, and his government has extended Trudeau-era subsidies for constructing carbon capture projects.

So, what is carbon capture? And can it really save our planet from the worst impacts of climate change? Read on to find out.

What is carbon capture and storage?

Technologies to lower carbon emissions from industrial processes, which Carney and other politicians are embracing, are known as carbon capture, utilization and storage — often abbreviated as CCUS or CCS.

These technologies capture carbon before it escapes into the atmosphere, and then bury it deep underground (“storage”) or repurpose it to make other products (“utilization”). These systems are often designed with the goal of capturing 90 per cent of the emissions produced by an industrial process — but early carbon capture projects in Canada have failed to achieve that threshold. 

Captured carbon can’t be stored just anywhere. The process requires a porous rock formation deep underground into which the carbon can be injected. On top of that, an impermeable “cap-rock” layer is necessary to seal the carbon in for centuries to come. 

In many cases, sites where oil has previously been removed prove suitable for carbon storage. That’s one reason why the Prairie provinces have so far been the epicentre of carbon storage activities in Canada. According to one estimate, Saskatchewan and Alberta are home to approximately nine per cent of the total onshore carbon storage capacity in North America. 

But the search is on for “pore space” elsewhere, too. The Ontario government has identified the lakebeds and shorelines of lakes Erie and Huron as potential carbon storage locations.

In addition to projects that capture carbon as it’s emitted, there is also technology under development that sucks carbon right out of the air. That’s called direct air carbon capture. It is a less developed and less proven technology, but some companies are trying to make it work — including Deep Sky, a venture capital-funded startup that wants to build a direct air carbon capture facility in rural Manitoba.

What projects already exist? And what is the Pathways Alliance planning?

There are a few dozen carbon capture, utilization and storage projects in operation around the world, but they’ve yet to reach a scale that would make a meaningful dent in emissions. According to the Global CCS Institute, existing projects have the capacity to capture about 64 million tonnes of carbon per year — that’s about 0.1 per cent of global emissions. A recent study estimated that more than 383 million tonnes of carbon dioxide have been stored underground worldwide since 1996.

Comparatively, the latest federal figures show annual emissions from Alberta’s oilsands were 89 megatonnes in 2023, with the broader oil and gas sector in Canada contributing 208 megatonnes of carbon emissions in that year.

The Pathways Alliance proposal doesn’t include the actual capture of any carbon. Rather, it’s a plan for a shared carbon transportation network and storage facility, with individual companies expected to build their own infrastructure for capturing carbon at their facilities and feeding it into the Pathways network. The companies stated in 2023 that their project could lead to a net reduction of between 10 and 12 megatonnes of emissions per year by 2030.

A handful of the world’s carbon capture and storage projects are already located in Canada.

Cumulatively, Canadian carbon capture and sequestration projects stored roughly five megatonnes in 2023, according to federal figures. That is a small fraction of what the projects were predicted to store. That number doesn’t account for all the carbon that was captured: some is injected into the earth to help extract more oil, a process known as enhanced oil recovery.

In Alberta, Shell Canada’s Quest project has been in operation for just over a decade. Quest syphons carbon from one of the company’s Edmonton-area plants and transports it by pipeline to a storage area where it’s injected and stored more than two kilometres underground. The project, which cost more than $1 billion to build, captures and stores about one million tonnes of carbon each year.

Also in Alberta, the Carbon Trunk Line hauls captured carbon from a fertilizer plant and a refinery and pipes it 240 kilometres south to old oil reservoirs. The pipeline has the capacity to transport up to 14 million tonnes of carbon per year, though it only transported 1.5 megatonnes in 2023.

In Saskatchewan, the best-known carbon capture project is the Boundary Dam coal-fired power plant, operational since 2014 and the world’s first commercial-scale coal plant with the technology. Carbon from the Boundary Dam is transported by pipeline to a largely depleted oil field near Weyburn, Sask., where it is injected into reservoirs to loosen up the remaining oil. The plant has never achieved its original goal of capturing one megatonne per year, but it was also an early demonstration project.

How are Canadian governments supporting carbon capture technology?

By paying for it.

The cost to build carbon capture, utilization and storage facilities typically runs into the billions of dollars. Then, there are operational expenses. A 2025 analysis found Alberta’s two major carbon capture and storage facilities each cost tens of millions of dollars per year to operate.

Alberta’s oilsands companies — which collectively posted more than $29.1 billion in profits in 2024 — find those costs too high. The Pathways Alliance has stated on its website that its carbon capture plan “will require ongoing collaboration” with governments, including “making significant investments together.” In theory, carbon pricing should encourage more carbon capture projects, as the more expensive carbon emissions are, the more likely a company is to implement emission reductions strategies.

Yet in 2024, Edmonton-based power generator Capital Power abandoned its plans for a facility, saying carbon capture and storage was “not economically feasible.”

If the industrial carbon tax is a stick, our governments are also dangling carrots in front of major polluters in the form of subsidies.

Under former prime minister Justin Trudeau, the federal government introduced a refundable tax credit that subsidizes up to 50 per cent of the cost of eligible carbon capture, storage and utilization projects. The tax credit first became available in 2022, and the Parliamentary Budget Office has estimated its cost will rise to more than $2 billion per year by 2027-28, as companies start to build their projects and take advantage of the subsidy.

The Alberta Carbon Capture Incentive Program, meanwhile, provides additional provincial grants to companies building carbon capture projects in Alberta.

In Carney and Smith’s memorandum of understanding, both the federal and Alberta governments committed to extending their respective incentive programs to support the Pathways project, which means a significant portion of the megaproject’s $16-billion price tag is likely to be publicly funded. That agreement also included a provision that tax credits for carbon capture extend to projects for enhanced oil recovery — which was previously excluded, as the Trudeau government responded to critics pointing out that extracting more oil results in more carbon emissions not just during production, but when the fossil fuel is eventually used by consumers.

Can carbon capture technology make a dent in climate change?

On its own? No.

Combined with other efforts, especially an overall reduction in fossil fuel use? It might help a little.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said the technology has the potential to decrease global emissions, but not by anywhere near as much as transitioning to renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. It’s also a more expensive mitigation strategy than moving to renewables.

According to the International Energy Agency, carbon capture, utilization and storage could achieve eight per cent of the emissions reductions needed to reach net-zero in the energy sector by 2050.

In Canada, the oil and gas sector accounted for 30 per cent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2023; reducing the sector’s emissions through carbon capture, utilization and storage would be a win.

But there’s a catch. That accounting only considers carbon emissions from the industrial processes that make oil and gas products — not the emissions associated with their use.

It’s important for an oil refinery to reduce its own emissions, but carbon capture projects don’t address the emissions produced by the car that eventually burns the fuel produced by that refinery. This is a big deal, because most of the carbon footprint associated with a barrel of oil — 70 to 80 per cent, according to one estimate — comes from the oil product’s end use. In Canada, the highest emitting industry after oil and gas is transportation.

That’s why carbon capture and storage isn’t a silver bullet in the fight against climate change. According to the World Resources Institute, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report makes clear there are “no scenarios in which [carbon capture, utilization and storage] would allow continued use of fossil fuels at current levels, let alone expanded oil and gas production.”

The Alberta government estimates the province has about 160 billion barrels of oil still available for extraction in the oilsands. The new pipeline — if it ever gets built — will drastically increase the amount of bitumen that can be shipped to international markets.

By that time, Canada’s billion-dollar investments into carbon capture, utilization and storage technologies might have helped clean up the industries that produce oil in Alberta. But they will have done nothing to address the bigger problem: the use of the oil products themselves.

— With files from Drew Anderson and Carl Meyer

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.

Quebec National Assembly member Sylvie D’Amours bears no ill will toward the person who fired a pellet gun at her constituency office windows in October 2024, peppering them with small dents. She wasn’t there when the incident occurred, and she doesn’t think the person responsible meant to harm anyone. 

“It seemed like it was just an act of mischief — a way of saying, ‘I’m shocked and I’m showing you my anger.’ It wasn’t personal,” the elected official for the riding of Mirabel told The Narwhal in French.

D’Amours suspects the incident had something to do with early versions of the province’s new flood maps, which had just been released by the Communauté métropolitaine de Montréal, a regional planning organization for the Greater Montreal Area. The maps were in a preliminary report that announced 15,508 buildings in Greater Montreal — including nearly 20,000 homes, representing close to $10 billion in property value — would now fall within the province’s newly drawn flood zones. Across the province, The Canadian Press reported, as many as 77,000 homes could be included within the new flood zones.

The weeks following lent themselves to her theory of what prompted the pellets. D’Amours, whose riding encompasses multiple suburbs along Montreal’s North Shore, said she began facing a flurry of hostility over the flood maps: threats on social media, angry phone calls, even a confrontation at the grocery store. Many were angry at how the government was going about modernizing the maps and upset at how the maps might affect their home values. The situation was serious enough that she closed her office out of concern for her safety and that of her employees.

What should have been a technical exercise in Quebec quickly became a political flashpoint, one playing out across the country. 

As provinces and municipalities amend decades-old flood maps and strengthen flood preparedness measures in the face of inclement climate change, a vocal minority of homeowners are pushing back. Some argue governments have failed to properly consult local communities and overlooked personal, on-the-ground mitigation measures. Others say their elected officials are focusing too much on penalizing property owners instead of initiatives that would reduce flood risk. But most express concern about their home values and insurance costs: last year, insurance company Desjardins announced it would no longer offer mortgages in Quebec’s high-risk flood zones.

The result has been a country-wide string of reversals and delays in flood-risk planning. On Nov. 17, 2025, the town of Summerside, P.E.I., rejected a bylaw that would have designated more of the city as a floodplain after residents warned it could hurt property values. Last year, Nova Scotia’s government scrapped robust flooding-related legislation that had already secured all-party support following consultations with concerned homeowners. In Calgary, a neighbourhood association argued in November that government-funded infrastructure upgrades, not development restrictions, should be the city’s first line of protection. And as B.C.’s Fraser Valley coped with another atmospheric river in December, dairy farmers, Indigenous leaders and the Insurance Bureau of Canada all criticized the province’s failure to fulfil flood mitigation promises made after similar catastrophic floods in 2021. 

Kate Sherren, director of Dalhousie University’s School for Resource and Environmental Studies, said the task of updating flood maps is technically complicated, given the uncertainties of climate change, as well as politically fraught.

“I’m not an engineer, but I certainly wouldn’t like to have to come up with a really reliable flood-risk map,” she said. “It’s very difficult, but we kind of have to try, right?”

Canada is ‘20 years behind’ on flood planning

Daniel Henstra, co-lead of the University of Waterloo’s Climate Risk Research Group, said flooding remains the dominant climate risk across Canada.

According to Public Safety Canada, 80 per cent of Canadian cities are located on floodplains — including major cities like Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa and Fredericton. In 2020, the federal agency estimated that 1.5 million households, or 10 per cent of all households in Canada, were highly exposed to flooding.

And yet, Henstra said, “We’re probably 20 years behind other countries on this.”

Canada was the last G7 country to introduce residential insurance coverage for overland flooding because existing flood maps were so outdated. It remains the only G7 country without national, publicly available flood maps — a problem the federal government is trying to fix. A 2020 University of Waterloo survey of 2,500 people in Canada living in designated flood-risk areas found only six per cent knew they were at risk.

That lack of experience with flood maps — combined with the lack of action from governments — contributes to homeowners being upset when maps are updated, Henstra said. 

“[Homeowners] are not used to it, and therefore they don’t necessarily trust the process,” Henstra said. “They already have very low awareness of their own flood risk when new maps suddenly appear and declare that their neighborhood is at high risk. It stands to reason that they would worry about their property value when they go to sell their house.” 

He emphasized that flood maps are important to public safety, but also economic stability: when risk is disclosed upfront, he said research shows property values typically dip by two to six per cent, often temporarily. But after a major flood, values can collapse, insurers pull out and governments face pressure to rebuild homes in the same high-risk locations.

“That doesn’t preserve wealth. It just transfers the cost of inaction onto future homeowners and taxpayers,” Henstra said. By contrast, risk disclosure allows buyers, sellers, lenders, realtors and insurers, “to plan appropriately” and invest in protection and resilience at both the property and community level.

Opposition to new flood maps in Quebec cites lack of government education and care

D’Amours thinks many Montreal residents panicked because they assumed the draft maps the Communauté métropolitaine de Montréal published were final and about to be adopted by the Quebec government. In fact, the maps were only preliminary, with final maps expected to be published progressively as they are approved, starting in March 2026.

But Marie-Claude Nolin understood the maps weren’t final. Yet the recently retired education worker from the Montreal suburb of Vaudreuil-Dorion became a co-founder of the advocacy group Regroupement des citoyens riverains du Québec, or the Quebec Shoreline Residents’ Association. The group launched a petition urging the provincial government to pause the rollout of new flood-risk maps until residents better understand how the changes will affect them and what they perceive to be errors are addressed.

Nolin said too many residents have yet to even see the preliminary maps. She said residents have told her they initially dismissed invitations from the municipalities to attend public consultations: “Several people … thought, ‘I live so far from the water, this must be a mistake.’ ”

Fellow organizer Pier-Luc Cauchon, a construction project manager in Île Bizard — just off the coast of the Island of Montreal — said he doesn’t understand the methodology behind the new zones. At a public meeting in 2024, Cauchon said the Communauté métropolitaine de Montréal’s chief engineer had told him the province had added extra “risk coefficients” on top of the usual international standards for flood recurrence, using the worst-case scenario for projected high-water levels. When Cauchon asked for the calculations, none were provided, he said.

Another of Nolin and Cauchon’s objections is that the current system has no specific point of contact for airing concerns, which makes contesting the maps difficult. Cauchon says he’s heard cases of people being able to get modifications after persistent lobbying but “The average citizen who doesn’t have the time can’t get it changed. There’s injustice in that.”

Nolin and Cauchon eventually received a total of 2,395 signatures on their petition. They say they haven’t heard back from the province. 

Both the Communauté métropolitaine and Quebec’s Environment Ministry defended their consultation process in emails to The Narwhal. 

Jennifer Guthrie, a communications consultant for the Communauté métropolitaine, said the additional “risk coefficients” account for “climate-change uncertainty” across all rivers and waterways, as well as the risk of “compromised management of dams and reservoirs” that help mitigate flooding on rivers such as the Ottawa and St. Lawrence. 

Louis Potvin, a spokesperson for Quebec’s Environment Ministry, said the flood mapping is based on internationally recognized scientific principles developed through consultations with academic, municipal, governmental and private-sector experts. Potvin said the methodology was set out in a new provincial guide published in June 2025, which is nearly a year after the Communauté métropolitaine’s initial consultations.

Potvin did not respond to The Narwhal’s questions about why the province has not formally replied to the petition or whether the government plans to engage directly with its signatories. He acknowledged the preliminary maps have raised concerns and said residents can submit questions through an online form that the ministry responds to systematically. He added that a mechanism to request revisions will be clarified once the final maps are officially released.

In the meantime, Nolin says people they know are already being affected. “We’ve had new homeowners say they’ve seen insurance costs double,” she said in French.

This, too, is a problem Canada could have anticipated. A federal promise to offer insurance support in highest-risk flood areas has been languishing for years.

The problem with exemptions

Nolin insists her group’s goal is not to deny the increased flood risks brought on by climate change, but simply to be better consulted on determining who is at risk. 

Alain Bourque, executive director of Ouranos, a climate-focused research consortium that collaborated with the Quebec government on the new flood maps, doesn’t deny governments can stumble in consultations and fail to show empathy for those affected. 

However, he said, exemptions can help set the stage for costly disasters. He highlights as examples the 2017 and 2019 floods in Montreal. Catastrophe Indices and Quantification, a firm that tracks and tallies insured losses from natural disasters, estimated that the Halloween storm that hit Eastern Canada in 2019 caused $189 million in insured damages in Quebec alone. More recently, the firm estimated Hurricane Debby in 2024 caused close to $2.5 billion in insured flooding-related damages in Quebec.

Bourque said impacts were so severe “because [the government] was too relaxed on regulation — you pile up value here, you develop the economy there and then it gets seriously damaged and wiped out. And everyone expects the government to pay the bill at the end of the day.”

And one homeowner’s actions, including attempts to get exempted, inevitably affects neighbours. Take Cauchon’s argument that Montreal’s maps should take into account individual flood-proofing measures — such as elevated foundations — when assigning a risk level. Sherren, from Dalhousie, said a rush to lift single homes could increase flooding risk for next door neighbours that now live at the bottom of a slope.

That’s why in Truro, N.S., she said, development is still allowed in some high-risk areas, but with a key condition: builders can’t truck in new soil to raise homes and must instead use what’s already on the property. The logic is that any ground they raise is offset by a lower area elsewhere on the lot—leaving floodwaters somewhere to go, rather than pushing the risk onto neighbouring properties. 

Neighbourliness is the same reason why Toronto has stopped allowing most homeowners to pave over their yards for parking: if hard surfaces prevent water from soaking into the ground, it diverts to the gutter and eventually a storm drain, which increases flood risks elsewhere.

A vocal minority can delay or prevent public education about true flood risk

Sherren has studied public attitudes toward flood mapping in Nova Scotia. She has found most respondents favour the idea, viewing flood-risk information as useful whether they’re buying or renting a home. But opinions shifted when people were asked to consider potential impact on property values: a minority of respondents argued flood-risk maps should be private and accessible only to the property owner, not the broader public.

“But even a very small minority of unhappy people — particularly if they have money, if they have power — can come in and cause entire mapping programs to be kind of withdrawn, because the political will isn’t strong enough to hold when these people get angry,” she said.

In February 2024, the Conservative government of Nova Scotia announced it was scrapping the Coastal Protection Act, despite it undergoing three rounds of public consultation and passing in 2019 with all-party support.

Documents obtained by CBC through access-to-information laws show that, in the years when the act had stalled, most public submissions to Environment Minister Tim Halman supported the legislation. Only a small number of property owners and real-estate interests warned of lower land values or limited redevelopment. Yet Halman pointed to those concerns when announcing another round of “targeted” consultations. 

Had it taken effect, the act would have “outlined exactly how and where people can build in a way that protects them from rising seas,” CBC reported. Instead, the government released an online mapping tool that shows the “worst-case scenario for coastal properties in the year 2100 based on current sea-level projections,” letting citizens make an “informed decision” about their property.

But Sherren said the tool’s narrow focus on the coastline doesn’t account for storm surges, coastal topography or even the buffering effects of tidal wetlands. It also omits the potential for rain-driven flooding.

She believes the decision to scrap the act blindsided more than a few municipalities, which might have held off developing their own rules, assuming the province’s framework was imminent. “It put them five or 10 years behind,” Sherren said.

Concerns that Quebec’s new flooding regulations will affect home prices have drawn serious political support: two provincial politicians have publicly endorsed Nolin and Cauchon’s petition. A coalition of 26 Quebec mayors have also released an open letter arguing for the need to accommodate homeowners’ concerns. 

“We believe that the government proposal submitted for consultation can be improved by modifications that will minimize the impact on property values and reduce the uncertainty that citizens have to deal with,” the coalition wrote in French. 

The letter did not specify how the province should achieve that balance. The Canadian Climate Institute said the mayors’ statement amounted to “political pressure” to weaken the proposed framework, arguing that updated and accessible flood-risk maps do not significantly affect access to insurance or mortgages.

Eight months after announcing its first preliminary maps, Quebec officials downgraded the number of homes that would fall in the newly-designated flood zones from 77,000 to 35,000. Officials also emphasized no one would be forced to leave their homes under the new management plan. But the rules would bar new construction in the highest-risk areas and prohibit rebuilding if houses in those zones are destroyed by flooding.

Henstra said flood mapping is more effective when framed as “shared problem solving,” rather than something being done to people. Flood risk in Canada, he adds, is also highly concentrated: roughly 10 per cent of homes account for more than 90 per cent of losses. 

“If we know where those areas are, and that is all transparent,” he said, “we can stop spraying money around the country on disaster mitigation and focus our scarce resources.”

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.

They come from driving a car or taking the bus to the office. Or when employees are given a company-owned smartphone. They can even result from a three-course dinner at a holiday gala — or that box of doughnuts at a meeting. And for companies that extract fossil fuels, they also come when customers use their products.

All are examples of the creation of Scope 3 emissions: greenhouse gases that are indirectly produced by a corporation or institution’s supply chain and everyday operations. 

Employees’ commutes use fuel in the form of gas or electricity. Every step of manufacturing the electronics used at work — from design to mining to parts fabrication and product assembly — creates emissions. Greenhouse gases are also created when the food and drink at company events is procured, transported and prepared. They’re also produced when Canadian oil and gas is used as fuel, whether in this country or another one. 

These emissions will still get into the atmosphere and heat the planet even if oil and gas producers succeed in their ambitious plans to capture and bury the emissions they create when extracting fossil fuels. Yet attempts to get Canadian companies to report them — even voluntarily — keep getting delayed. 

The term “Scope 3 emissions” is technical and bureaucratic. But these emissions, like all greenhouse gases, have real, on-the-ground consequences. The heat-trapping effect of fossil fuel use is driving extreme weather events in Canada and around the world, putting humans, wildlife and ecosystems at risk.

Here’s how to understand these arm’s-length emissions, and why scientists think it’s important to keep track of them, no matter how far away they are. 

What exactly are Scope 3 emissions?

The goal of the Scope scale is to categorize emissions to help understand where they come from and how to reduce them. Scope 1 are direct emissions, which come from sources owned or controlled by a company and include what’s produced by its facilities and vehicles. Scope 2 are indirect emissions produced by generating the many forms of energy — electricity, steam, heating and cooling — households and businesses use day-to-day.

Scope 3 are the least immediate. They encompass both “upstream” emissions made when a company uses a product or service and “downstream” emissions made when its own products or services are used. 

Sara Hastings-Simon, an associate professor in the department of earth, energy and environment at the University of Calgary, said labelling and, hopefully, tracking these emissions is a way to hold companies responsible for emissions created by the goods and services they are producing and encouraging people to purchase and use. Coined in 2001 and formalized in 2011, the term “Scope 3 emissions” considers the ripple effects of a company’s activities on global emissions. 

“Companies have a role, often, in creating the demand for their product,” Hastings-Simon said, which is why she believes they should be held accountable for emissions made all along its supply and use chain. 

Scope 3 are not some intangible drop in the pond of global emissions. They are frequently the “largest source” of emissions for companies and represents the “most significant” opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas globally, according to the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, a Washington, D.C.–based organization that creates global standards to measure emissions. Think about the Alberta oilsands: yes, mining and upgrading bitumen creates emissions. But the burning of the products — say, in consumers’ cars — creates far more of an impact. 

Scope 3 emissions aren’t just a big deal for the oil and gas industry. The Climate Disclosure Project, a non-profit based in the U.K., estimates that more than 90 per cent of emissions from sectors including real estate, financial services, capital goods and mining can be classified as Scope 3.

Canadians in favour of Scope 3 reporting have argued the same. In 2022, the federal NDP stated Scope 3 represent “an overwhelming majority” of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions, in a report from the Standing Committee on Natural Resources looking at Canada’s long-debated emissions cap. 

In the report, the NDP said that in 2019, emissions from fossil fuels exported by Canada were 954 million tonnes, while total domestic emissions were just 730 million tonnes.“To leave them out of any regulation under a cap would be irresponsible,” the party stated.

What are the criticisms of tracking Scope 3 emissions? 

Some fossil fuel companies have said making them responsible for Scope 3 emissions could lead to actions that are actually contrary to climate goals.

Companies like ExxonMobil, Shell and BP do disclose Scope 3 emissions across their operations worldwide. For example, Shell reported customer emissions from using Shell products in 2024 totaled nearly half a billion tonnes of Scope 3 emissions. 

But a February 2022 report by environmental academics in Japan noted that ExxonMobil argued that reporting Scope 3 could be “misleading.” The paper cited a 2021 ExxonMobil report in which the company argues that if it were to sell natural gas to a country that then reduced the use of coal, it “would result in an overall reduction of global emissions but would increase Scope 3 emissions reported by the Company.”

Others have argued that tracking Scope 3 is “double counting”: because Scope 3 emissions involve so many businesses and producers in a supply chain, they may each be claiming the same emissions. It’s a potential overlap critics say could lead to a distorted view of emissions reductions. The argument is that a manufacturer might track the transportation of its goods as Scope 1 emissions — but all of the retailers and distributors who receive those goods could track them as Scope 3.

Several academic studies and frameworks note ways to make a precise calculation that avoids double counting. 

And Steven Young, an industrial ecologist and associate professor at the University of Waterloo, said calculating Scope 3 isn’t about tracking the total amount of emissions — it’s about companies taking responsibility for the entire supply chain they’re part of creating. 

“Part of the ambition was, well, it’s sort of double counting who’s responsible, but that’s kind of a good thing, if more than one organization is looking out for emissions reductions and management,” he said. 

Hastings-Simon said Scope 3 emissions calculations become essential if a company is claiming to be a part of a “low-carbon solution.” This gets back to the ambitious plans for carbon capture in Canada’s oilsands: even if all the emissions created during production were kept out of the atmosphere, exported fossil fuels would still create greenhouse gases when used elsewhere. 

“If there isn’t a credible explanation for how Scope 3 emissions will be reduced … then from a risk perspective a company should be able to explain why they see a market for their products in a future if there are broad global commitments to move to a net-zero future,” she said. 

The non-profits InfluenceMap and Greenpeace have criticized the Pathways Alliance group of Canadian oilsands companies for not including Scope 3 emissions in public plans to reduce the effect of their emissions, including through carbon capture. Pathways Alliance did not respond to a list of questions from The Narwhal about its Scope 3 emissions or these criticisms. 

Oil and gas companies “aren’t just meeting a demand but actually creating more demand and thus can be considered responsible for some of these emissions,” Hastings-Simon said, pointing to the explosive growth of investment in petrochemical-based plastic production as one example. 

Those in favour of Scope 3 reporting also say it’s key to identifying western corporations that place the most environmentally damaging parts of their supply chains in the Global South. Shifting the burden of those emissions onto those nations while the west seemingly meets climate targets, is a practice scholars call “Carbon Colonialism.”

At the heart of creating — and regulating — these standards is the understanding that global carbon emissions must be drastically cut to avoid the most severe effects of climate change. 

To be specific, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol reports the world needs to reduce emissions by as much as 85 per cent below what we put out in 2000 by 2050 in order to prevent the global temperature from increasing beyond 2 C above pre-industrial levels. Above that level “will produce increasingly unpredictable and dangerous impacts for people and ecosystems” — and Canada is already experiencing an increase in extreme weather that Environment and Climate Change Canada has linked to climate change. 

Are Scope 3 emissions regulated in Canada?

Fun fact: right now, there’s no universal requirement for Canadian corporations to disclose the full range of their emissions. 

Some industries are subject to a patchwork system of disclosure regulations, particularly concerning Scope 1. Since 2004, the federal government has required facilities that produce 10,000 tonnes or more of greenhouse gases annually to report emissions every year. Many provinces have similar regulations that kick in around 10,000 tonnes — although in Manitoba, the threshold is 50,000 tonnes. 

Attempts to introduce Scope 3 reporting — even voluntarily — have been delayed.

Last year, the Canadian Sustainability Standards Board gave corporations a deadline of 2027 to start reporting voluntarily — a timeline it said would prevent the move having an overly negative effect on markets. 

As of 2024, the federal Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions started requiring banks and insurance companies to report on plans to address the impact of climate change on their operations. The office has said the rationale behind the move is to protect those industries from legal accusations that they failed to protect investors from risks associated with climate change, such as the cost of extreme weather damages. 

Technically, those regulations make Scope 3 reporting mandatory — but that requirement, too, has been delayed, until 2028. The office said it wanted to align with the Canadian Sustainability Standards Board’s choice to push back Scope 3 reporting policies. It kept Scope 1 and Scope 2 disclosure deadlines in place: depending on the size of the institution, those kick in this year and early next. 

And in April, the Canadian Securities Administrators also delayed its December 2024 pledge to develop “a climate-related disclosure rule.” The group, an umbrella organization of provincial and territorial securities regulators, said in a press release it was pausing plans to figure out disclosure rules for both climate risks and employee diversity, as “in recent months, the global economic and geopolitical landscape has rapidly and significantly changed.”

Climate experts say movement on the issue is too sluggish given the urgency of global warming. Especially since the standards will be voluntary anyway. 

Hastings-Simon said delays on Scope 3 reporting raise a lot of “red flags,” as Scope 3 is a long-established concept corporations should be prepared for. She’s concerned a longer timeline gives companies time to push back against climate regulation altogether.

“Why is there this need for delay?” she said, emphasizing the importance of the government and its agencies having the full picture of Canada’s emissions. If investors or the public want to understand if a company is prioritizing decarbonization, it’s impossible to get the full picture without a Scope 3 disclosure, she said.

How can we reduce Scope 3 emissions?

The Greenhouse Gas Protocol has suggestions on how companies can start tackling Scope 3 emissions. These include reducing the distance between the supplier and the consumer and reducing commutes by offering remote work.

John Robinson, a professor of global affairs and the environment at the University of Toronto, has been leading a team examining how the school can cut its Scope 3 footprint. He said there are essentially two options: either reduce the activity producing the emissions or switch to an alternative activity that results in fewer greenhouse gases. 

He said the first option is under an institution’s direct control. For example, The University of Toronto is trying to make its campus more pedestrian-friendly, so that staff and students can move around emissions-free. 

It’s harder to control the emissions coming from manufacturing and shipping of goods and services it doesn’t produce. 

“Since the activity … can’t always be eliminated or reduced, there is a lot of focus on finding lower-emissions alternatives,” Robinson said.

The tool then is lifecycle assessment, he said. The process aims to calculate the total amount of emissions produced by the goods and services that went into creating an item, allowing institutions to make informed decisions about alternatives. If the school were purchasing desks, for example, it could consider multiple desks from multiple suppliers, comparing how much wood each uses, along with what kind of wood it is and where it came from. Then it could choose the option with the lowest emissions. 

Several consulting firms have software that can help with this calculation, Robinson said. And his own students can do it — as long as they have the information. 

What is the Carney government doing about Scope 3 emissions?

In short, not much. 

Even when the Canadian Sustainability Standards Board’s list comes into play, it will be voluntary. “It doesn’t have much teeth. You can put the information out there and some decision-makers will act on it, but it’s a pretty weak tool,” Young said. 

He said what’s proven to be more effective is carbon pricing — being charged for making emissions as an incentive to reduce them. But one of the first things Mark Carney did after becoming prime minister was remove Canada’s consumer carbon tax. While there is still a price for large emitters, Young said that misses smaller actors in the supply chain.

Meanwhile, Carney has repeatedly said Canada should be a leader in carbon capture and storage, which involves containing the carbon dioxide at the point of emission and then burying it deep underground. 

It’s a technology that has yet to be done at scale and it won’t tackle Scope 3 emissions at all. It’s also expensive. 

Young said carbon capture is a “pacifier” for the oil industry. “It’s a delay tactic, and it won’t work,” he said. “Why would we waste billions trying to come up with a techno fix that only prolongs a bunch of industries that don’t want to change?” 

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This summer, The Narwhal launched Habitat, a solutions-focused series exploring the intersections of the housing crisis and the climate crisis in British Columbia. Like pretty much everywhere else in Canada, B.C. is grappling with a shortage of affordable, safe and resilient housing, as well as the increasingly extreme effects of a warming planet: heavy floods, deadly heat waves and serious droughts. 

Is it possible to address these two massive, complicated challenges together? We looked for solutions and ideas in communities across the province — and on Tuesday, we hosted Housing and the Climate Connection, a webinar to share some of what we learned during our reporting. It featured: 

• Steph Kwetásel’wet Wood, B.C. reporter, who discussed the housing vision of the Heiltsuk Nation and a Tsilhqot’in housing prototype designed to withstand wildfire season
• Shannon Waters, B.C. politics and environment reporter, who talked about the costs of rebuilding after disaster and the non-profits building resilient, affordable homes
• Michelle Cyca, bureau chief of conservation and fellowships, moderated the discussion

More than 300 people joined us for that discussion, and many of them had great questions of their own. Over 100, in fact, which meant we couldn’t get to all of them! But we thought we would round up some of those great questions (and our answers).

You can also read all the stories in our Habitat series, or just start by diving right into the questions below. (Those discussed in the call have been condensed and edited — watch the recording to hear the full answers from Steph and Shannon.)

How do you make housing adaptable to climate change (floods, wildfires, etc.)?

This looks different in every community, but some interesting solutions are found in Shannon’s reporting on social housing in New Westminster, B.C. Two key elements of energy-efficient and climate-adapted homes are good air quality and temperature control, which protect residents from the impacts of things like wildfire smoke and extreme heat. Her story also looks at examples of retrofitting old buildings to improve heating and cooling systems, which can be done in some cases without temporarily displacing residents.

For mitigating more extreme risks, Steph’s reporting on a wildfire-resistant prototype home built for the B.C. Interior considers the materials, landscaping and design elements that can withstand flames and extreme temperatures. — Michelle

How can we make housing more climate-friendly and accessible, especially for those who can’t easily move or renovate?

Look at what’s available in your area! There’s a variety of programs and rebates at the local, provincial and national level. Even as a renter, knowing what’s available in your area and what you can push for at the local government level is something tangible you can do. While some of the FireSmart and flood mitigation technologies are more expensive, many are more approachable. (For more on this, read Chloe Williams’ reporting on FireSmart recommendations.) Using your voice to advocate for these issues in front of local government is also an effective tool. — Steph

One more suggestion on this point: tapping social resources! Writer Mandy Len Catron considered the critical role of neighbours and communities in preparing for climate change. It’s not a fight we have to wage alone. — Michelle

What role do policymakers have in supporting tenants, homeowners and builders with the costs of building new resilient homes and retrofitting existing ones? Who pays for those incremental cost increases, when the energy savings only kick in over the long term? 

There’s no simple answer there. The provincial government has a larger tax base than local governments; the federal government has an order of magnitude higher, so that’s one way of measuring that responsibility. One thing to consider is that we have a tremendous amount of financial inequity in our society, so even if everyone pays the same amount, it has very different impacts on Canadians with different incomes. Another inequity is renting versus owning; in B.C., the province recently expanded eligibility for heat pumps in rental buildings, but the landlord has to permit it, and they get the rebate and retain the heat pump when the tenant moves out. That’s another tricky thing to navigate. So — it’s an important question to ask, and an important discussion to have. — Shannon

How do we keep the conversation with our neighbours and politicians focused on climate when everyone is so desperate for housing?

It needs to be an “and” conversation, not an “either or” conversation. One thing we see a lot is governments talking about constraints — costs, time — and while those are real challenges that have to be met, our climate resilience policies and housing policies are interconnected. We need to push back on the idea that we can only have one or the other — climate action or housing. We have to remind elected officials that we need to have climate-resilient housing and we also need it to be affordable and accessible, otherwise we won’t address the housing crisis, and we could risk making it worse. — Shannon

Everyone feels an urgency when it comes to protecting their homes and accessing safe housing — whether you’re an owner and you’re worried about the biggest investment in your life, or you’re a renter and you’re worried about your housing security. You may face extreme weather and disasters no matter your situation. When these conversations come up, bring in those connections: if the discussion is insurance, consider the impacts of disasters on insurance claims. If it’s density, talk about the effects of urban sprawl on ecosystems. These are related to affordability and safety — and we know that’s something everyone cares about. Everyone feels deeply about their homes, so when reporting we try to keep that at the heart of these stories. — Steph

What is one thing I can do today to address this issue? 

Building social connections and sharing information with one another. You can see in the chat that people have a ton of local knowledge about where they live! Also, something people brought up in the reporting was the desire for self-sufficiency — gaining the skills and resources to build things locally, particularly after COVID-19 underscored the vulnerabilities in our supply chains. So, finding out what’s in your backyard, and thinking about how you can be a part of building those things too. — Steph

As a renter in Victoria who moved recently, something we’ve been doing is looking at getting the doors sealed, for instance — because we can see light underneath, which is not a sign of a well-sealed home! We’re looking at window coverings, we installed a rain barrel — it’s very empowering, as an individual, to know you can take these steps without that much effort or expense. And knowing that if you and your neighbours nearby and across the country take these steps, it really will make a difference. — Shannon

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This story is part of Habitat, a series from The Narwhal which looks at how communities are working to address the housing and climate change crises simultaneously

Since wildfires tore through his Yunesit’in community in 2017, Russell Myers Ross has been pursuing a dream: building a fire-resistant house that will survive everything climate change can throw at it. 

“I sometimes joke that we could make this good enough to have a grandmother stay in here and live through the apocalypse,” Ross says with a laugh.

His community, one of six in the Tsilhqot’in Nation, was severely damaged in the 2017 wildfire season. Afterward, Ross, who was elected chief at the time, began envisioning a housing solution. The design includes a white, highly reflective metal roof that deflects heat and is fire-resistant, gravel lining the house and sprinklers facing the walls — using easily accessible technologies for a resilient home that makes sense for the dry, hot interior of B.C.

The fire-resistant house is designed to be built with high-quality materials that fend off flame and smoke while incorporating the elements of traditional Yunesit’in pit homes — round and set in the ground. Ross wants more for his community than the houses introduced with the Indian Act, which were often low-quality.

“We should build houses that are better than the ‘INAC shacks,’ ” Ross says, referring to the nickname for houses provided by the former department of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada (which has since had many similar names and is now two separate federal departments).

In 2016, Ross began talking to professor John Bass from the University of British Columbia’s school of architecture and landscape architecture to realize his vision, and work took off in earnest in 2018 after the destructive wildfires. On Monday they released videos of the prototype that include a three-dimensional walk-through of the design and community members speaking to the importance of getting this house built.

“This work has been done. It’s just about finding a funder to get a prototype,” Bass says.

Outdoor space includes space for a fire and a smokehouse

The 2017 fires burned 2,326 square kilometres around Yunesit’in — a region almost as big as Metro Vancouver. Since then, the Yunesit’in government wrote a report on how to prepare for future wildfires, which included more resilient housing. The Tsilhqot’in National Government has been revitalizing cultural burning, which was outlawed by the province for decades even though it helps clear the forest understory to reduce the chance of highly catastrophic fires.

In a 2019 report by the Tsilhqot’in National Government, community members said their top housing concerns are the need for major repairs, the high cost of energy, overcrowded homes and mold — which, like smoke, is a respiratory health risk. The concerns made it crystal clear to Ross that people need higher quality housing. In a 2019 survey done by Yunesit’in, people also said they wanted storage sheds, renewable energy options, smokehouses, gardens and outdoor space.

Ross now works in an array of positions, including advancing fire stewardship in the Dasiqox Tribal Park, led by Yunesitʼin and the Xeni Gwetʼin First Nations, and being the online program and operations manager to the Bachelor of Indigenous Land Stewardship at the University of British Columbia, but remains committed to the fire-resistant house. He says Indigenous concepts of homes are expansive, reflecting each nation’s territory, history and values. Building a culturally specific home may mean prioritizing emissions reduction or hiring community members as builders. It can mean ample outdoor or shared community spaces. 

“It’s trying to get a feel of what a liveable space is for people,” Ross says.

For this design, it means extending beyond walls — the outdoor space, which includes plans for a fire pit, space to process meat and a smokehouse, is just as important, he says, as what’s built indoors.

Because so much family time centres around preparing and enjoying food together, the space was designed so that residents can move seamlessly from inside to the fire and food-processing area outside. “That was the most important cultural idea — living happens outside as much as it happens inside,” Bass says. 

They wanted the home to reflect a Tsilhqot’in pit house, and to be simple and durable. Although this design is not round like a pit house, they tried to emulate the feeling by placing a central skylight above a stove marking the centre of the home and columns along the edges.

The design is made to fit Yunesit’in’s needs, but Ross hopes the template can be adapted for other Indigenous cultures — imagining, for example, a design that reflects the long houses of coastal First Nations.

Clean air, fire-resilient wood and energy efficiency

Reflecting members’ desire for sustainability, the house includes a heat pump for cooling during heat waves, solar panels for energy efficiency, a membrane to prevent mold and high-efficiency air filtration (called HEPA) for smoke. The design meets step 4 of the BC Energy Step Code, which is almost at a passive house level. A passive house is a voluntary standard to make a building highly efficient due to passive elements of its design (like being well-sealed and using high-quality materials and insulation) versus relying on active heating and cooling.

The home is also designed with heat recovery ventilation (HRV) technology, which replaces stale indoor air with fresh outdoor air without compromising the energy-efficient seal of the home.

Some technology, like the HEPA filtration, is simple to install and available in hardware stores but still rarely found on reserve, Bass says. “They’re commonly understood but cost money,” he explains.

In addition to gravel around the house, fire protection includes naturally fire-resistant berry hedges that can capture burning embers from fires. It includes rainwater harvesting for irrigation and fire emergencies, and sprinklers to spray against the walls and moisten them to help prevent them catching fire.

The walls were one area culture and economics came into play — Bass wanted metal walls, but community members wanted wood. The final compromise was to use charred wood, which has a scorched exterior. “It’s harder to ignite — but in an intense fire, it’s going to burn,” Bass says.

Ross says they were considering what resources they have available.

“Part of it, for us, was like, ‘What can we build from our own landscape?’ … We were trying to think long-term in that regard,” Ross says. He was thinking of what resources can be depended on and what jobs can be locally supported and maintained over time. “If we’re going to design something, we’ve got to design it with all of our interests in mind,” he adds.

Bass says that he has learned how important it is to adapt when working with capacity-strapped communities. In this case, he and his students had to focus on designing with Yunesit’in ideas at the centre, even if that meant deadlines extended outside of the academic calendar. “It’s their project,” he emphasizes. The goal is to help a community realize their vision — not “burden” them with imposed timelines.

The housing problem requires ‘many solutions’ for many First Nations contexts

Like Yunesit’in with the University of British Columbia, other B.C. First Nations are forming partnerships to build housing that reflects their cultures and visions for the future, including the realities of climate change. 

Bass and his students also worked with Haíɫzaqv (Heiltsuk) Nation to build four tiny homes. The community faces a similar housing shortage and is looking for ways to install clean energy infrastructure and build climate-resilient homes to survive heat waves, sea-level rise and wildfires.

On Vancouver Island, Cowichan Tribes is building River’s Edge, a project of over 200 rental townhomes, with priority given to community members for some of the below-market units. To account for possible flooding of the Cowichan River, the development involves removing sediment from the river to prevent build-up and deepen the river to prevent overflow. That sediment has been used at other construction sites, with royalties going back to the nation.

“We’re obviously experiencing climate chaos,” Renée Olson, interim chief executive officer of Cowichan’s Khowutzun Development Corporation, says. “So to mitigate when floods will happen, we’re very conscientious about sediment removal.”

Cowichan Tribes developed its project through the BC Builds program, run by the Crown corporation BC Housing. It focuses on rental housing, keeping rental costs down through low-interest financing, finding ways to speed the development process and utilizing public lands.

“One of the reasons housing has become out of reach, especially in dense residential [areas], is shareholders were demanding a rate of return,” Olson says. “This is why this BC Builds program is so important … It’s about creating opportunities for community land.”

Cultural elements of River’s Edge include spacious indoor kitchens, a shared outdoor kitchen, a community garden and native plants.

Cowichan has more than 5,500 citizens, and the plan is for money generated from the development to go back into building homes on reserve — where many more are needed.

“It takes many solutions, different solutions, to tackle this complex problem,” Olson adds.

Construction and housing costs higher than ever

Ross says the main obstacle to getting the first prototype house built is funding — not just enough to get the walls up, but to benefit the community.

Since COVID-19 hit in 2020, construction costs have skyrocketed, Bass explains, all while housing problems also ballooned. It’s now harder than ever to catch up, he says, but they’ll be contacting government, industry, foundations and private donors for potential support. 

For Ross, getting this house built is just one step in a larger vision. He wants to build more high-quality homes, but also a local economy, including training and hiring members to build and maintain the homes — something that would require a locally owned mill. He sees a self-sustaining future.

“The idea was to have a circular economy — so we’re building from our community, but with the hope that we could build enough capacity to help our other surrounding communities,” he says.

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

What do homes have to do with climate change? Everything. From Heiltsuk Nation’s vision for resilient housing to efforts to retrofit aging apartment blocks in Vancouver, communities across British Columbia are thinking about — and building for — the future of our warming world.

Catch up on our free Zoom event for more insights from Habitat, our recent series on housing and climate, featuring B.C. reporters Steph Kwetásel’wet Wood and Shannon Waters. Michelle Cyca, bureau chief for conservation and fellowships, moderated the conversation.

The online panel discussion took place on Tuesday, Sept. 16, and was made possible with support from the Real Estate Foundation of BC. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, no foundation or outside organization has editorial input into our work.

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

The threat of flooding may seem far away during the hot, dry days of summer, but millions of Canadians live in homes that could be threatened by floodwaters in just a few months. 

Frequent flooding means more insurance claims, which drive up insurance premiums, especially for high-risk homes. Since 2013, flooding has resulted in about $850 million in insured losses every year. About 10 per cent of Canadian households now face such a high risk of flooding they can’t get flood insurance to protect their homes and belongings, according to the Insurance Bureau of Canada.

“As a result of this increased risk that’s being driven by climate change … we’re seeing that some insurers are reducing their coverage or their exposure in certain regions,” Craig Stewart, the bureau’s vice president of climate change and federal issues, told The Narwhal.

When insurance companies stop offering coverage to high-risk areas, governments are left to fill the gap with programs like disaster financial assistance, which support rebuilding efforts in Canadian communities hit by disasters.

But doling out cash in the wake of a recurrent risk like flooding can be a bit like slapping a Band-Aid on a leak: it may offer short-term relief but it doesn’t address the factors creating the risk in the first place, things like location, construction and community infrastructure.

Ryan Ness, director of adaptation with the Canadian Climate Institute, said in an interview that disaster relief also doesn’t incentivize communities or individuals to reduce their risk. “There’s just an assumption that you’ll be covered if something goes wrong and you don’t have to take any action to reduce the likelihood that you will be flooded and experience a lot of damage,” he told The Narwhal.

A national flood insurance program, first floated by former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2019, could offer a more proactive response to flood-prone Canadian communities. Basically, public funding would be dedicated to lowering insurance premiums for high-risk homes to help more Canadians get coverage. But progress has been slow. The 2023 federal budget dedicated $31.7 million over three years to kickstart the program with Public Safety Canada and the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation leading the effort. A consultation period on the program’s possible parameters ended just before the 2025 federal election was called. 

A well-designed program would incentivize both homeowners and communities to take steps to lower the risk of future floods, Ness said.

“Say, for example, the premiums are lower if you install a backflow valve or if your community invests in dykes — you can send price signals with insurance that encourage people and communities to do things to reduce the risk,” he said. 

Ness and Stewart agree Canada’s national flood insurance program has to be paired with investments in flood mitigation and protection. If it isn’t, flood risks are likely to continue increasing and could eventually push premiums past the point of affordability once again.

“We need to be thinking about the future and prioritizing adaptation while we’re developing a flood insurance program,” Stewart said.

“Any sort of insurance scheme will be unsustainable unless it’s viewed as a stop gap, if you will, while municipal and provincial governments invest to reduce the risk.”

B.C. minister says she hasn’t heard much from Ottawa about progress on the program this year

Trudeau’s proposed flood insurance program is still a ways from becoming a reality. Since it was first announced, Canadian communities have suffered a number of catastrophic floods, including a billion-dollar Toronto flood and two atmospheric rivers in B.C. that caused massive damage to communities in the Fraser Valley as well as several tragic deaths. 

On the campaign trail this April, the federal Liberal Party pledged $450 million over five years for a national flood insurance program with a launch date of April 2026. But Public Safety Canada, the federal department leading the program’s development, would not confirm the April 2026 timeline.

In an emailed statement to The Narwhal, a department spokesperson said work to develop a national flood insurance program is ongoing.

“More information on the timeline for the program will be shared as it becomes available,” the spokesperson wrote.

Kelly Greene, B.C.’s minister of emergency management and climate resilience, is eager to see the program move forward but said she hasn’t heard much from Ottawa on the issue since being appointed to her post in November 2024.

“My concerns right now are that the program appears to be stalled,” Greene said in an interview. “I haven’t really received a substantive update on any progress that’s been made.”

Stewart has been advocating for the federal government to get moving on national flood insurance for years and remains hopeful about the program’s future.

“The program has certainly taken much longer to roll out than we had anticipated,” he said. “We are hopeful that the new Carney government will prioritize the program and get it over the finish line this year and we’re working as collaboratively as possible with them to make that happen.”

Greene wants to see Ottawa treat the program with urgency.

“We know that climate risk doesn’t go away, so I’m hoping for hearing back from the federal government in a timely way about details on how they see the program going forward so that we can provide feedback on that,” she told The Narwhal. 

Public flood insurance should be affordable and targeted: advocates

B.C. wants to ensure the program provides affordable insurance options for people living in flood-prone areas, Greene said, and doesn’t impose overly high costs on provincial governments.

“It’s really important that we’re targeting it where it is needed the most, but also not unduly burdening British Columbia or British Columbians with additional costs,” she said. 

Provinces will likely be required to contribute toward the national program in some way, Stewart said, such as providing funding for subsidized premiums or risk mitigation. While provincial governments might prefer Ottawa bear the brunt of the program’s costs, he believes provincial contributions should reflect the significant role provincial policies play in reducing or boosting risk.

“If provincial governments are going to increase the overall liability by adding housing in flood plains, for example, then they need to take ownership for subsidizing the insurance for those properties,” Stewart said.

Canada’s housing crisis does have the potential to exacerbate the risk of disasters, from floods to fires. A February 2025 report from the Canadian Climate Institute concluded unless precautions are taken to keep new homes from being built in high-risk zones, more than 540,000 homes could be built in flood-prone areas by 2030, adding up to $2 billion in extra damages every year. Even if precautions are taken, annual flood damage could increase by $340 million per year due to newly built homes, the report concluded.

One way to deter development in high-risk areas, Ness said, would be to make those homes ineligible for the national flood insurance program.

“Otherwise, you’ll send a message that if you build new homes in flood risk zones, the public insurance program will cover them,” he added. “An insurance program should only be intended to cover people that are already at risk.”

Asked about the role her ministry plays in ensuring B.C. communities are not building in risky areas, Greene said she plans to discuss potential building code changes with federal Housing Minister Gregor Robertson during an upcoming meeting. 

“One of the things I want to talk about is … how we can look at building code as a way to build resilience into communities,” she said. 

Even with a national flood insurance program in place, Greene acknowledges that making sure high-risk B.C. communities are as protected as they can be from flooding will have to remain a high priority for the province. So far this year, the province has dedicated about $28 million to community-led projects aimed at mitigating climate-driven hazards. Greene also highlighted the more than $370 million her ministry has provided to flood-prone communities, including Merritt, Princeton and Abbotsford.

“Insurance alone is not the answer,” she said. “We know that and I think that that’s reflected in all of the work that we’ve been doing helping communities to reduce their risk across B.C., particularly on flood hazard. It’s a very devastating impact to communities. It affects infrastructure. It affects people’s ability to get employment. It affects everything.”

Updated Aug. 19, 1:45 p.m. PT: This article was updated to correct Kelly Greene’s title. She is the minister of emergency management and climate readiness.

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