Summary

• The Ontario government intended to move radioactive waste from the shore of Lake Nipissing to a former mine site outside Sudbury, Ont.
• A lack of consultation around the new location led to strong local opposition, and delayed the remediation project conducted by Nipissing First Nation.
• The waste has now been moved to a disposal site outside Sarnia, Ont., and Aamjiwnaang First Nation, where emissions from the industrial area known as Chemical Valley have affected local air quality.

For decades, radioactive waste sat near the shore of Lake Nipissing. It looked like an innocuous pile of gravel in what was otherwise a stretch of forest. People began using it to backfill lots, fill spaces under decks and build fire pits. In the 1970s and ’80s, Nipissing First Nation began using it to build roads. 

It wasn’t normal gravel, though. It was mine tailings, containing the metal niobium, left there when the Nova Beaucage mine shuttered in 1956 after just seven months of operation. 

“The company just walked away and left it with no remediation at all,” Geneviève Couchie, business operations manager at Nipissing First Nation, said. Couchie led a project to clean up the tailings, which first started in 2019. After being interrupted by COVID-19 shutdowns, the remediation resumed in spring 2024 and lasted almost two years.

In the meantime, Couchie told The Narwhal, she fielded concerns about groundwater and lake contamination from residents living close to the site or to a nearby property owned by Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation that also stored the low-level radioactive tailings. Couchie said she struggled to get satisfactory answers from government agencies.

“The workers wore hazmat suits, and I remember saying from the beginning, ‘How can I tell people they have nothing to worry about when these guys are in full on suits?’ They’re literally 20 feet from someone’s window,” Couchie said. The majority of the workers remediating the site were from the nation, and dressed in protective gear so as not to carry radioactive dust home on their clothes. 

“We just wanted to see this material moved off [Nipissing First Nation] lands,” Geneviève Couchie, business operations manager at Nipissing First Nation, said. But the remediation was first interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic and then by the Ontario government’s attempt to relocate the waste without consulting the community meant to receive it. Photos: Supplied by Nipissing First Nation.

The plan was to load the waste into trucks to be transported to a tailings management area at Agnew Lake, in Sudbury District. It is the decommissioned site of a former mine, near the Township of Nairn and Hyman, and about 150 kilometres from Nipissing First Nation. The nation first had to excavate nearly 50,000 metric tonnes of the radioactive material — enough to build the Statue of Liberty, twice.

But the project faced another unexpected delay. The province had attempted to relocate the waste without consulting the Nairn community, sparking public outcry. Locals organized public meetings to raise awareness and ultimately stop the transfer. 

Eventually, in July 2025 — after nearly a year of advocacy in Nairn, and delay for Nipissing First Nation — the province capitulated, finding another place for the waste to go. This was welcome news for Nipissing First Nation, which is now hoping to transform the scarred land into a lakeside green space for the community to enjoy after years of worry.

“We just wanted to see this material moved off [Nipissing First Nation] lands, and so it was an unexpected disappointment that things were delayed like they were,” Couchie said. “We were pleased that they did end up finding another disposal site.”

“But,” Couchie said, it was “eye opening as well, that there was only one other facility in Ontario that was prepared to accept this.”

That facility is close to another Indigenous community — Aamjiwnaang First Nation, in the Sarnia region, where emissions from refineries and petrochemical plants have earned the area the moniker “Chemical Valley.” 

Sarnia facility accepting radioactive waste from Nipissing

The new destination for the radioactive tailings is Clean Harbors, a hazardous waste facility in Corunna, Ont. — 645 kilometres from its original dumping ground. It’s close to both Aamjiwnaang and Sarnia, which have experienced persistent air quality issues related to nearby industry.

Clean Harbors is the only government-licensed hazardous waste management complex in Ontario, and is “uniquely positioned,” its website reads, to offer safe disposal of naturally occurring radioactive material like the niobium tailings. 

But the facility’s history is dotted with dust-ups over environmental safety. In 2013, neighbours of the Clean Harbors site won a civil lawsuit over the impact of the waste facility’s emissions on their health and daily lives.

In 2019 the company was fined $100,000 for discharging contaminated smoke after a filter cloth soaked with coolant, oils and metal particles caught fire.

When the province conducted a study on environmental stressors in the Sarnia area in 2023, it found that while the majority of the 870 reports from residents about industrial pollution were related to petrochemical industries and refineries, a significant minority — 219 — were “related to the waste incineration facility in the area (Clean Harbors).”

And in 2025, the Ministry of Environment fined Clean Harbors $100,000 for failing to comply with an equipment requirement for monitoring the excavation of a waste-holding basin. 

Clean Harbors did not respond to The Narwhal’s questions about these claims and findings.

In a section of their 2025 annual report on legal, environmental and regulatory compliance risks, Clean Harbors asserted: “We are now, and may in the future be, a defendant in lawsuits brought by parties alleging environmental damage, personal injury and/or property damage, which may result in our payment of significant amounts.”

Aamjiwnaang First Nation Chief Janelle Nahmabin told The Narwhal she had not received any information about the niobium waste that was trucked to Clean Harbors nearly a year ago. Other environmental groups The Narwhal reached out to, including Climate Action Sarnia-Lambton, had not heard of this waste transfer, either.

“The plan now has been executed in a very different way,” said Brennain Lloyd, project coordinator at Northwatch, a northeastern Ontario environmental advocacy group. “It’s moving the waste into the territory of another First Nation that is already heavily impacted by all of the industrial activities.”

When the province conducted a study on environmental stressors in the Sarnia area in 2023, it found that while the majority of the reports from residents about industrial pollution were related to petrochemical industries and refineries, a significant minority were related to the waste incineration facility Clean Harbors. Photo: Carlos Osorio / The Narwhal

‘Under a real nuclear shadow’: radioactive waste in northern Ontario

The company behind the Nova Beaucage mine was looking for much-desired uranium in the early days of the Cold War. 

It found trace amounts of it on a small island in Lake Nipissing, along with niobium, a naturally occurring mineral used to strengthen and lighten steel, which is useful when building electronics, cars, bridges and pipelines. After excavating, the company barged the ore across the lake to a mill they established on shore, on Nipissing First Nation territory.

“In northeastern Ontario, we live under a real nuclear shadow,” Lloyd said.

Nipissing First Nation residents were concerned about potential groundwater and lake contamination from the former Nova Beaucage mill site and the nearby property owned by Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation, which also stored the low-level radioactive tailings. Photo: Leah Borts-Kuperman / The Narwhal

In a letter to the federal Impact Assessment Agency in February 2026, the Anishinabek Nation cited the Nova Beaucage tailings as an example of the legacy of contamination that First Nations have been disproportionately impacted by due to poor government diligence. The letter puts the “toxic cocktail from Sarnia chemical valley” near Aamjiwnaang First Nation in the same category.

It was written in response to the proposal by the federally mandated Nuclear Waste Management Organization to store radioactive waste from nuclear power plants outside Ignace, Ont., a northern township between Thunder Bay and the Manitoba border. This waste has been temporarily stored in safe, but impermanent, containers for decades and finding a permanent solution has become an increasingly pressing issue — one that has only grown as Ontario ramps up nuclear power generation with small modular reactors in Bowmanville and a proposed full-scale nuclear facility in Port Hope. 

From First Nations in the Ignace area to those along the Ottawa River, concerned by leaks from a nuclear laboratory in 2024, communities have been pressing for better consultation when big radioactive waste decisions are made. The case of the Township of Nairn and Hyman illustrates why.

In June 2024, a Nairn and Hyman town councillor happened upon the planned dumping site for the niobium waste while out riding an all-terrain vehicle, or ATV, said Belinda Ketchabaw, the chief administrative officer of the township of less than 500 people. According to the township’s website, the councillor saw roadwork being done to facilitate the transportation of material the Ministry of Mines later told residents was naturally occurring radioactive material. Before that, residents say they had no idea about the relocation plan.

“We were aware that [the Agnew Lake] site was within our township. It’s been there for many, many years,” Ketchabaw told The Narwhal. “What we weren’t aware of is that the cover over the existing tailing site had depleted, through either people going across it on ATVs, or just rainwater eroding the cover.”

The Agnew Lake site already needed remediation, after uranium mining and milling operations ceased there in 1983. Tests from 2023 by the Ministry of Mines found uranium, radium, arsenic and more at the site. In a letter sent to the federal nuclear safety commission in the months after the councillor’s discovery, the township argued the arrival of niobium waste introduced “additional risks to an already precarious situation.” 

The province’s idea, according to an undated letter from the Ministry of Transportation, was for the niobium gravel to help provide an additional, less radioactive groundcover for the existing materials.

Nipissing First Nation had to excavate nearly 50,000 metric tonnes of the radioactive material — enough to build the Statue of Liberty, twice. Photo: Supplied by Nipissing First Nation

“I guess what they were trying to do is, for lack of a better word, kill two birds with one stone,” Ketchabaw said. She made it her personal mission to get answers about the waste disposal that she said were not provided by the province — although the Transportation Ministry letter, uploaded to the Nipissing First Nation website, says the site was identified by the Ministry of Mines as a potential disposal location in 2016. This same letter explained that studies done by the ministry in 2012 determined the potential “risks of the tailings to human health were low.”

Ontario’s Ministry of Energy and Mines did not respond to The Narwhal’s questions, including around its protocol for informing communities about plans to store radioactive waste nearby.

“Ministries that are doing this type of work have to have advanced and meaningful consultation with municipalities, First Nations and residents,” Ketchabaw said. Agnew Lake is a source of drinking water for the Nairn and Hyman communities. She said they were given no assurances the environment and health of the community would be protected with this disposal.

“We weren’t consulted at all in this project. We came upon it by mistake,” Ketchabaw said. “It really felt like they were hiding this, like they were just kind of trying to sneak it in the back door.”

Updated on May 6, 2026, at 12:10 p.m. ET: This story has been updated to correct a photo caption that stated nearly 50,000 metric tonnes of material were removed from the picture site, when in fact that collective amount was removed from multiple sites across the nation.

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Internal studies about contamination at a Saskatchewan military base found evidence of dust contaminated with PFAS — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, often referred to as forever chemicals — and experts who reviewed the data say it could pose a risk to people who work there.

“The sampling results indicate that PFAS [are] present in dust,” the March 2025 study, obtained by The Narwhal, concluded. When The Narwhal asked independent experts to review the findings, one noted the concentrations were in some cases “very high,” while another flagged that several volatile organic compounds associated with increased cancer risk are also present.

The study looked at a building known as Building 143 at CFB Moose Jaw, home of the Snowbirds, where employees have been ringing alarm bells about what they say are concerning numbers of illnesses and deaths among employees and military members on base.

It took place about three months after three employees of the Moose Jaw base went to Ottawa to speak about cancers, infertility, neurological disorders and untimely deaths of colleagues — at a public hearing of the Standing Committee on National Defence in December 2024. At least one of these employees has since had to go on long-term disability insurance, and another submitted an official refusal to work in Building 143 and the base at large for fear of how it is impacting her health.

In response to employee concerns, the Department of National Defence initiated a study of contamination at CFB Moose Jaw earlier this year. The department asserts there is “no evidence” that buildings on the base are unsafe. But experts who reviewed the study told The Narwhal that’s not true. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

The concerns of the employees, National Defence told The Narwhal, eventually led the department to initiate the study published in March 2025, in what they called a “a transparent and evidence-based analysis to address the concerns expressed by some employees,” undertaken out “of an abundance of caution.”

The Department of National Defence told The Narwhal it is “committed to the health and safety of personnel and surrounding communities, as well as to responsible environmental management.”

“As part of this commitment, we conduct regular monitoring programs at bases and wings to assess environmental conditions and identify potential concerns,” the department shared, adding the reports are now available for all service members to review.

The department asserts it has “no concerns about the safety of this particular building at this time,” given there is “no evidence to suggest that 15 Wing buildings are unsafe or unfit for occupancy.” (15 Wing refers to the centre of the Royal Canadian Air Force activity at the Moose Jaw base.) But some experts disagree.

Is contamination on a Canadian Armed Forces base making employees sick?

PFAS are linked to cancers, infertility and more

Contamination on federal sites is an issue across Canada. There are thousands of contaminated sites listed on the federal contaminated sites inventory. PFAS are found or suspected on more than 100 of them, in large part from firefighting foam National Defence used to train military and civilian firefighters across Canada from the 1970s to the early 2010s.

At CFB Moose Jaw, employees have been concerned for years; they’ve compiled a list of nearly 200 illnesses and dozens of obituaries of colleagues. One building in particular, where at least five women who worked together had emergency hysterectomies, has been at the top of mind — Building 143. It’s a central building housing offices and medical centres for personnel where internal studies confirmed the presence of PFAS.

Here, employees told The Narwhal they were constantly wiping an unusual amount of dust off their coffee mugs and desks daily, and some say they smelled chemical smells wafting past their desks at various times of day.

Snowbird veteran Erin Zimmerman is on disability leave with an early onset diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. She’s pushing for answers about contamination at the Moose Jaw base where she worked, and she’s sharing her findings with other current and former employees. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

The United States Environmental Protection Agency lists potential health risks of exposure to PFAS, including reproductive problems like infertility, developmental effects in children, increased risk of prostate, kidney and testicular cancers and weakening of the body’s immune system, including reduced vaccine response. The Canadian government says PFAS can be transferred through the placenta during pregnancy and infants and children can be exposed through ingestion of human milk.  

Other carcinogens present at Building 143 are a risk no matter what the level: expert

The internal documents obtained by The Narwhal also show “airborne concentrations of several [volatile organic compounds]” — also known as VOCs. Some are associated with increased cancer risk, said Christine Oliver, a professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto, who reviewed the documents and has studied clusters of illnesses arising from contaminated workplaces for decades.

The carcinogens found in the studies include trichloroethylene (an industrial metal-degreaser), benzene (found in gasoline) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, which are produced by incomplete burning of coal, crude oil and gasoline. The Environmental Protection Agency says people can be exposed to mixtures of PAHs by breathing air contaminated with vehicle exhaust, or fumes from asphalt roads. The agency says several individual PAHs and some specific mixtures of PAHs are considered to be cancer-causing.

“That airborne concentrations of the [Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons] are below the [Occupational Exposure Limit] does not mean that they are harmless,” Oliver said. “For carcinogens, the existence of a threshold — i.e., a dose below which there is no cancer risk — is rare. I can think of none.”

The Department of National Defence told The Narwhal that Building 143 is not a suspected contaminated site, and there is “no subsequent environmental sampling required.”

The department did not respond to The Narwhal’s questions for responses to experts who believe the contracted reports are showing concerning levels of contaminants — enough to warrant exposure and health concerns in employees.

Contamination data at other bases found to be ‘incorrect’ and ‘biased’

Oliver is not the only expert who had concerns about the findings, though. 

Meg Sears is chair of the organization Prevent Cancer Now, whose board is composed of physicians, environmental advocates and at least one veteran. For decades, she has been working to help veterans in Gagetown, N.B., receive accurate data about their exposure to Agent Orange — the infamous herbicide mixture used by the American army during the Vietnam War — which was tested on-base in the 1960s.

Many military sites across Canada are known to be contaminated with pollutants associated with cancer, infertility and other human health impacts. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

Sears calls the findings of the federal government studies done at Gagetown “flimsy” — an opinion backed up last year by a commission in Maine, which looked into the health of National Guard members who had trained at the New Brunswick base and called Canada’s data “incorrect” and “biased.” So, despite the assurances provided to CFB Moose Jaw employees by their superiors, Sears is not convinced. 

“If there is some kind of selective choice of analyses being done or types of sampling being done, it’s not the first time that the Government of Canada has chosen to do these kinds of reports in perhaps not the most informing way,” Sears said, pointing to the fact that testing the building’s water supply, groundwater and soil from below the interior footprint of the building was “excluded from the scope of work” by the Department of National Defence.

The Department of National Defence told The Narwhal that the base’s drinking water, including Building 143’s, is supplied by the City of Moose Jaw, adding: “Drinking water is tested at all [Canadian Armed Forces] locations on a regular schedule,” and that current results don’t indicate any of the 25 polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) substances listed by Health Canada.

“The question for this study is, ‘What is the exposure to the people who are carefully walking around and just going straight to their work at their desk,” Sears said. “And what this is showing is that, even within the building, there is significant exposure to PFAS just from the dust.”

“Certainly there are significant quantities of PFAS there,” Sears said, adding: “The pattern is indicative of contamination from the Air Force.”

National Defence plans to solve its housing crunch by developing contaminated sites

Higher PFAS levels than soil beside chemical manufacturers: expert

When asked to review the studies, Sébastien Sauvé, a professor of environmental chemistry at Université de Montréal, who was called to the standing committee meeting late last year, also saw reasons for concern.

“Some of those concentrations are very high,” he explained. He said some of the dust samples’ PFAS values are higher than what he’s seen in contaminated soils right beside a PFAS chemical manufacturer.

Sauvé is no stranger to contaminated National Defence bases; in his home province of Quebec, he discovered that PFAS had spread from a contaminated military base in Bagotville, Que., to drinking water wells up to 10 kilometres away. 

A spokesperson from the Department of National Defence told The Narwhal that an indoor air assessment and hazardous substance assessment of Building 143 “did not identify any health issues,” and that “National Defence has no concerns about any other buildings across the base.”

A dozen former and current employees of CFB Moose Jaw attended a meeting in May 2025 to learn more about contamination at their workplace. Lynn Point, front, was one of the attendees. She believes her breast cancer is related to contamination at the base. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

“A typical case might be something that people would be focusing on, but that’s resulted in underestimation of people who are at the highest risk,” said Sears. “If we’re going to take precautionary approaches, we’re looking after the most vulnerable and the most exposed.”

Meanwhile, concerned employees are hoping the issue will be brought back to Ottawa this year, since the study has since been dropped when Parliament was prorogued for the election back in April 2025, meaning the planned study was not finalized. 

The Department of National Defence told The Narwhal investigation into contamination at 15 Wing Moose Jaw will be ongoing over the coming year, at Hangars 2 and 6 and the former site of Hangar 5, “ to ascertain the extent and impact of potential petroleum hydrocarbon contamination linked to the historical use of storage tanks.” Additionally, the department said it plans to construct four new buildings on 15 Wing Moose Jaw to support future aircrew training, which “will remove contaminated soil as part of the construction process.”

“I have a lot of hope, because I believe that while systematic issues are challenging, they can be addressed through proper government intervention, transparency and accountability,” said Erin Zimmerman, the former employee of Building 143 who had to take disability leave due to her worsening Parkinson’s symptoms.

Updated on Oct. 6, 2025, at 3:25 p.m MT: This story has been updated to remove photos of the armoury in Moose Jaw, which is not the subject of the reports mentioned.

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.

Gary Goode served as an infantry soldier at CFB Gagetown in New Brunswick for almost three and a half years in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. Decades later, Goode was diagnosed with lung cancer and, in 2005, he had his right lung removed. Goode said his thoracic surgeon explained his symptoms were aligned with exposure to Agent Orange — the infamous herbicide mixture used by the American army during the Vietnam War to destroy food crops and reduce hiding spots in the dense jungle.

Agent Orange and other herbicides were tested at Gagetown in 1966 and ‘67. During his recovery, Goode began to research the chemicals used at the base where he served. Goode said he was never told about the risks of these chemicals, which he never saw being sprayed — he believes it happened shortly before he began his service. 

“We could tell because everything was dead brown or yellow,” Goode told The Narwhal about the base. “We were drinking the water that was in the area [and] the dust would be sticking to us. … There was a lot of dust.” 

Now, Gagetown is one of the sites where Canada’s Department of National Defence plans to build new housing for military families, even though the base is listed on the federal government’s inventory of contaminated properties. These are sites where known chemicals in the water and soil include per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS, often referred to as “forever chemicals”), petroleum hydrocarbons and, at Gagetown, Agent Orange — contaminants that carry exposure risks including cancers, heart issues and immune dysfunction.

Sites owned by Canada’s Department of National Defence that are known (red diamonds) and suspected (yellow diamonds) to be contaminated. Source: Federal Contaminated Sites Inventory. Map: Nikita Wallia / The Narwhal

National Defence doesn’t deny the use of Agent Orange at CFB Gagetown. In 2007, Canada allotted $95.6 million toward compensating military members and civilians who may have been exposed to it from working at or living near the base when it was sprayed. Goode and more than 5,000 others have received $20,000 payments, even as the government maintained Agent Orange exposure didn’t mean an “increased risk for long-term, irreversible health effects.” It called these payments “ex gratia,” or made out of a moral imperative rather than a legal one. 

Goode is now chairman of Brats In The Battlefield, a group of veterans whose social club morphed into advocacy as the extent of the contamination issue at Gagetown became clear. The group still wants an independent investigation into the contamination. It questions the rigour of the government’s studies and assessments and says the scope of the problem and the long-lasting impacts have still not been properly understood.

The housing plan announced last January further convinced Goode that National Defence still isn’t taking the lingering effects of decades-old contamination seriously — not just at Gagetown, but on other sites the department owns that are among the thousands of listings in the massive public database of contaminated federal sites.

The military says it’s building 668 new housing units on bases across the country to help solve housing shortages for Armed Forces members and their families. Construction is supposed to take place over the next five years. 

The pressure to house military families will only grow: Prime Minister Mark Carney has pledged to more than double military spending by 2035 and National Defence has committed to “rebuilding” to 71,500 regular force and 30,000 reserve force members before 2032. Photo: Chris Young / The Canadian Press

Along with Gagetown, units are planned in Halifax, Edmonton, Esquimalt, B.C., Valcartier, Que., as well as in the Ontario communities of Trenton, Borden, Kingston and Petawawa. All of these bases already have housing and all are on the contaminated sites list: in a press release, the department said locations were chosen in part based on high numbers of new members. Some contamination has been remediated on several of them, including Trenton and Borden, but much has not been fully addressed.

Soon, there might be more military families looking for homes. Recruitment is set to increase — Prime Minister Mark Carney recently said Canada will more than double current military spending, in line with a pledge with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, to invest five per cent of annual gross domestic product on military spending by 2035. 

With National Defence committing to “rebuilding the military” to 71,500 regular force and 30,000 reserve force members before 2032 to help Canada address shifting security needs, the pressure to develop housing quickly will only grow. But advocates like Goode are hoping that housing won’t be just fast — but that it will also be safe for the military families who will call it home.

A long list of contaminants are present on federal sites across Canada

National Defence says it urgently needs more people. It also urgently needs more housing. A 2023 report said members of the Armed Forces and their families feel the impacts of the national housing crisis even more acutely than the average Canadian because many of their jobs require constant relocation. At the same time, CBC has reported, the military is short more than 13,600 members: in February, its surgeon general said the Forces will now consider applicants with “any and all conditions” for enrolment, including asthma. 

But fixing one problem shouldn’t cause another, according to former NDP member of parliament Lindsay Mathyssen. “It’s important that we’re obviously investing in housing, but safe housing where we don’t have to worry about those things. There’s a whole slew of issues here, both past, present and now, future, that have to be dealt with,” Mathyssen told The Narwhal in January 2025, before she lost her seat in the April election.

After her attention was drawn to a site in her Ontario riding, Mathyssen initiated a National Defence standing committee study of contaminated sites last winter. Goode and other veterans testified at the four meetings, including staff from CFB Moose Jaw in Saskatchewan, where many believe their illnesses are connected to on-site contamination. 

Is contamination on a Canadian Armed Forces base making employees sick?

Mathyssen told The Narwhal any housing plans for contaminated bases must ensure safety. “We’re asking so much of people; they put their faith, their trust, in their institutions and government and they defend them, sometimes with their lives,” Mathyssen said. “We can’t take that for granted.”

Typically, air, water and soil contamination is up to provinces to monitor, halt and remediate. But federal departments carry that responsibility for their properties. The National Defence website says it manages contaminated sites “by prioritizing sites based on human health and environmental risks.” For example, both Environment and Climate Change Canada and Health Canada told The Narwhal they have not studied the areas on or surrounding the Gagetown base for contaminants and their impacts, as it’s the responsibility of National Defence. New Brunswick’s Department of Health told The Narwhal provincial departments “only become involved when made aware of significant concerns regarding potential contamination that may pose a risk to human health in areas beyond, but excluding, the base itself,” which it said isn’t the case with CFB Gagetown.

An armoury in Moose Jaw, Sask. The National Defence website says it manages contamination “by prioritizing sites based on human health and environmental risks.” Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

Some of the contaminants on federal sites have made headlines, particularly PFAS, which are found on more than 100 of them across Canada, often due to foam used to train firefighters for decades. Of the proposed military housing sites, Trenton, Gagetown and Edmonton are listed as sites of the chemicals according to the federal inventory. The United States Environmental Protection Agency lists potential health risks of PFAS exposure including reproductive problems, developmental effects in children, increased risk of certain cancers and weakening of the immune system. The Canadian government says PFAS can be transferred through the placenta during pregnancy and through ingestion of human milk.

Several of the sites, including Petawawa in Ontario and Esquimalt in B.C., are further contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls, a group of synthetic chemicals known as PCBs. Once widely used for things like coolant in electrical appliances, PCBs have been illegal to release to the environment in Canada since 1985 because they can have persistent and hazardous impacts on health and the environment. The United Nations Environment Programme has reported that both PCBs and PFAS can accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals, becoming more concentrated and harmful as they move up the food chain. 

Other entries on the long list of contaminants at Trenton include a group of petroleum hydrocarbons known as BTEXs — benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene. BTEXs have numerous health impacts associated with inhaling them, accidentally ingesting them or making skin contact. According to a peer-reviewed study from the Journal of Hazardous Materials Advances, these include increased risk of respiratory and lung cancers, heart problems and heart failure, blood disorders, immune dysfunction and increased susceptibility to infections.

An air traffic control tower at CFB Moose Jaw in Saskatchewan. Retired aircraft technician George Westcott worked and lived at CFB Trenton in Ontario for decades, and said his late wife is one of a number of people whose cancer deaths he believes are linked to contamination on base. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

Former staff at CFB Trenton told The Narwhal it’s generally understood these sites are contaminated, even if the specific chemicals or effects aren’t common knowledge. Among them was retired aircraft technician George Westcott.

“You wouldn’t believe how many people that we worked with died while we were working there … from cancer,” Westcott said. He worked and lived on CFB Trenton for decades over his career, often working with jet fuel and other harmful solvents. “My wife included.” 

Westcott lived in on-base quarters with his wife, Pamela, who passed away in 2023 from a type of lung cancer called mesothelioma that quickly metastasized to her brain and bones. Being around asbestos — which is known to be present in non-residential buildings at CFB Trenton — is the biggest risk for this type of cancer. Westcott told The Narwhal he is concerned the contamination will continue to harm new families who live there, like he believes it harmed his. 

“I’m not asking for anything, but I would ask for it to get recognized for the next poor people so that it doesn’t happen to somebody again,” Westcott said. “God help the people that are going to be living there.”

National Defence told The Narwhal that Privacy Act limitations mean it is “not able to discuss the medical conditions of current or former members, nor the alleged causes.”

Some military sites have been cleaned up — but it’s expensive and time consuming

Contamination cleanup is underway on some military sites, but it takes time and money. In 2024-25 alone, National Defence received $66.6 million to reduce legacy contamination at sites including Esquimalt’s harbour, through a nationwide fund dedicated to dealing with the government’s contaminated properties problem. 

In December, an assistant deputy minister in the department said National Defence had spent nearly $273 million managing contaminated sites over four years. In that time, more than 250 sites had been closed, meaning remediated or risk-managed enough to come off the list. The department also said it was on track to spend another $65 million to close another 50 sites this year. 

CFB Borden is closed, according to National Defence, which told The Narwhal in an email that all necessary remediation work needed to construct the new barracks at the base was completed in 2021, at a cost of approximately $3.5 million. A bigger project to remediate PFAS-contaminated firefighting training areas, which entailed excavating and treating contaminated soil, cost another $16 million and was “substantially completed” by late 2022, the department said. 

Employees on a Canadian military base say contamination is making them sick. Here’s what you need to know

“We recognize the importance of being a good environmental steward and doing our part to address the effects of our operational legacy and safeguard the health of Canadians,” the department said in an email. It “employs a risk-based approach” to managing contaminated sites and generally does not tell employees or the local community what that approach is “until qualified environmental experts identify potential exposure risks.” It has had a 10-step approach in place since 1999 to identify potential hazards.

The department said that 16 years of ongoing cleanup at Trenton has included groundwater remediation and that it is assessing the effects of what’s been done before deciding on next steps. 

The department told The Narwhal that remediation at Gagetown, which its website says is focused on petroleum hydrocarbons, not herbicides or other contaminants, is in progress. The department also said it is “not planning any further activities at this time” at Gagetown.

Cadet barracks at CFB Valcartier in 2015. In 2020, a Quebec court awarded millions of dollars to current and former soldiers and military families who drank water at the base tainted with a cancer-causing chemical called trichloroethylene, which leached into the water table for decades. Photo: Jacques Boissinot / The Canadian Press

In Quebec, the department has deemed the Valcartier site safe enough for housing. In 2020, the Quebec Court of Appeal awarded millions of dollars to current and former soldiers and military families who drank water tainted with cancer-causing industrial degreaser, used to clean metal equipment. The chemical, called trichloroethylene, leached into the water table when it was used at Valcartier’s research facility and a nearby ammunition factory from the 1950s to 1990s. 

National Defence told The Narwhal it has implemented measures to ensure water on-site is safe to drink and that the trichloroethylene plume on the base is closely monitored, adding: “Importantly, the wells used for drinking water are located outside the boundaries of this plume, and testing confirms that the water drawn from them is not contaminated.”

It’s unclear what the next steps are for other proposed housing sites. The department said the Canadian Forces Housing Agency does not have a budget specifically for remediating sites proposed for new housing. It said it selects sites that either “have no known contamination,” or have “the potential to be remediated with reasonable costs.” 

Cleaning up toxic sites for housing is a ‘win-win,’ expert says: ‘The issue is money to do it’

Toronto Metropolitan University professor Christopher De Sousa has studied redevelopment of what are known as “brownfields” — abandoned or unused industrial land that may be polluted — for both private and public projects. He told The Narwhal it’s possible for the Department of National Defence to redevelop contaminated military bases into safe places to live, with enough investment.

“The use of these kinds of contaminated properties for housing, there’s decades worth of experience in doing that kind of work,” De Sousa said, adding it is “nice to see” National Defence trying to contend with contamination and adding underused federally owned land to the housing stock. “Take your worst site that you could think of; if you want to turn it into housing, you can. … The issue is money to do it.”

De Sousa pointed to the example of the Port Lands in Toronto, once one of the largest wetlands on Lake Ontario, where both water and soil became polluted with spills from industrial and commercial uses including petroleum refining and hydrocarbon products manufacturing, alongside effluent from sewers and sewage treatment plants. 

Construction work next to the waterfront in Toronto’s Port Lands, part of a long-term, $1.5-billion project to clean up the area where the Don River meets Lake Ontario. Photo: Christopher Katsarov Luna / The Narwhal / The Local

In 2017, all three levels of government made an initial investment of nearly $1.5 billion to begin to remediate the 356-hectare site. Eight years later, work is still ongoing — but in mid-July, part of it finally opened to the public, 20 hectares of a new park named Biidaasige, an Anishinaabemowin word meaning “sunlight shining towards us.” 

“There’s been more pressure for these sites to be assessed, remediated and converted into something that adds more public value,” De Sousa said. “You want to get that win-win where you’re not just cleaning a site for the sake of cleaning it, you’re getting a public benefit. … But you need to be secure that those contaminants have been cleaned up.”

It’s not cheap or easy. More than two million cubic metres of contaminated soil had to be dug up and moved to a “containment area,” treated to remove contaminants and then reintroduced for future landscaping. Two years ago, the Toronto Star reported the Port Lands project was $169 million over budget. And, it’s taken a while: the design was chosen back in 2007, but construction is behind schedule. With progress finally visible, the goal is that, along with a cleanup and added parkland, the revitalized wetlands will help with the Don River’s tendency to flood.

The $16-million PFAS cleanup at CFB Borden was smaller, but still complex. Between 2020 and 2022, the process included excavating 91,000 cubic metres of contaminated soil from the base’s firefighting training area and disposing of it in an on-site containment cell: “The soil is wrapped up and contained, like a burrito, so it can’t leach into the ground,” a team leader with the Crown corporation Defence Construction Canada said in a press release as the project neared completion. 

The limits of National Defence’s Agent Orange compensation in New Brunswick 

One of the frustrations for those dissatisfied with National Defence’s response to contamination at Gagetown is the department’s limits to who it considers at risk. 

Its terms for the one-time payment issued to Goode and others had strict requirements: individuals must have an illness associated with exposure to Agent Orange as determined by the U.S. National Academy of Medicine and must have worked at, trained at or lived within five kilometres of CFB Gagetown on the dates when Agent Orange was tested in 1966 and 1967. This limited compensation for members of groups like Military Widows on a Warpath, which claimed families were unfairly denied compensation because their service members died of contamination-related illnesses prior to the 2007 announcement.

Goode calls the proposed housing development in Gagetown “scary.” Apart from lung cancer like he had, Agent Orange is known to cause leukemia and bladder cancer, along with birth defects and Parkinson’s disease, according to the Cleveland Clinic. At least one toxin in Agent Orange can persist in the soil for up to 50 years, according to a study from the University of Illinois. 

“We just don’t want this to happen again. That’s all we’re looking for,” Goode said. “We’re looking for truth, honesty, accountability and justice. … We want people to be compensated for their exposure to these chemicals at Gagetown and the diseases that have been debilitating them.”

National Defence is planning to build new housing at CFB Gagetown in New Brunswick, where Agent Orange was used in the 1960s and toxins including PFAS and hydrocarbons are known to be in the water and soil. Photo: Lars Hagberg / The Canadian Press

In 2019, as Brats In The Battlefield continued to push for an independent public inquiry at the House of Commons, the department reiterated human health risk assessments conducted in 2005 “concluded that most people who lived and worked at or near CFB Gagetown were not at risk of exposure to herbicides,” including Agent Orange. The same assessments found potential long-term health risks were “identified as a possibility for only those individuals directly involved with the application of the herbicides or clearing of treated brush soon after herbicide application.” 

Meg Sears is chair of the organization Prevent Cancer Now, whose board is composed of physicians, environmental advocates and at least one veteran. She has been working to help Gagetown veterans and their families receive accurate data for decades. She calls the findings of the government study of Gagetown done between 2005 and 2007 “flimsy” — an opinion backed up last year by a commission in Maine, which looked into the health of National Guard members that had trained at the New Brunswick base and called Canada’s data “incorrect” and “biased.”  

In its 2024 report, the Maine commission also criticized National Defence for taking its reports from the fact-finding mission offline, saying data being inaccessible to the public “undermines their scientific credibility and usability” (the reports are still available on the Prevent Cancer Now website). That same year, a spokesperson for National Defence told CBC the government has no plans to conduct further studies at Gagetown to look into the health impacts of past herbicide use.

“I find that it’s difficult to get data, and when you do get it, you’re usually missing some important part of the data to really get a good picture of what’s happening,” Sears said. She doesn’t feel great about the plan to build housing on Gagetown and other known contaminated sites. 

“I don’t have a lot of confidence that the people who are going to be living on these bases are necessarily going to be as safe as they deserve to be in terms of their air quality and their drinking water quality,” Sears said.

“If CFB Gagetown is an indicator of how the Canadian Forces work in terms of protecting the people who step forward to look after us, I think that there’s an awful lot of room for improvement.”

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The slogan for the city of Moose Jaw, Sask., is “Canada’s Most Notorious City,” stemming from historical connections to Al Capone. The Canadian Armed Forces base nearby — home of the Snowbirds — is surrounded by a patchwork of quintessential Saskatchewan cropland and homes. 

As one of the city’s major employers, the base employs about 1,000 active military service members and federal public servants. Over the last year, some of them have begun to testify that they believe the workplace they have dedicated their lives to is making them very sick — in some cases, terminally so. 

These workers have attempted to get answers from their employer, the Department of National Defence, but say they have faced skepticism, criticism and retribution for asking questions and speaking out. Still, they are determined to fight for accountability. 

Staff vehicles and a plane on display at 15 Wing Moose Jaw, a Canadian Forces Base near Moose Jaw, Sask. The site, like many military bases, has environmental contaminants, including PFAS from things like solvents, fuels and firefighting foam. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

“Because you sign on that dotted line, the expectation is you’re going to die for your country. Well, dying doesn’t mean I should get sick because of a chemical that [the government] didn’t clean up properly,” one veteran, now undergoing chemotherapy for a rare form of breast cancer, told The Narwhal. Two of her colleagues and her former supervisor have died of breast cancer.

Many questions about the cluster of illnesses remain. Here’s what we know, so far. 

1. There are thousands of contaminated sites on the federal inventory

Contamination on federal sites is an issue across Canada. Thousands are listed on the federal contaminated sites inventory, including military bases with offices, hangars and warehouses on top of unremediated contamination sites.

Last week, The Narwhal published an investigation honing in on one military base: CFB Moose Jaw in southern Saskatchewan.

Is contamination on a Canadian Armed Forces base making employees sick?

It’s listed on the federal inventory of contaminated sites and numerous sites on the base — aircraft hangars, former convenience stores and landfills — are polluted. Military bases are also often home to housing for service members and their families.

2. PFAS (forever chemicals) are just one kind of contaminant among many at CFB Moose Jaw

One of the most attention-grabbing classes of chemicals found on some contaminated sites, including CFB Moose Jaw, are PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances.

PFAS have been making headlines for the last several years for contaminating drinking water near military bases. They are found or suspected on more than 100 federal sites in Canada, in large part from firefighting foam that National Defence used to train military and civilian firefighters across Canada from the 1970s to the early 2010s.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency lists numerous potential health risks of exposure to PFAS from fertility issues to cancer. The impacts aren’t limited to people. Ecosystems are affected, too, whether through reducing seed germination or building up in the organs of other creatures in the food chain. 

But PFAS aren’t the only concern.

Gord King lays out some of his plaques and service momentos from his service at his home in Moose Jaw, Sask. King worked at 15 Wing Moose Jaw Canadian Forces Base for 22 years and wonders if environmental contamination could have contributed to his stage 2 prostate cancer. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

Other chemicals on the long list of contaminants near the CFB Moose Jaw buildings are less widely known. There are BTEXs, a group of petroleum hydrocarbons, including benzene and toluene. They also have a long list of health impacts associated with them, from heart problems to cancers to neurological issues.

Another contaminant found at CFB Moose Jaw is a class of chemicals — present in coal, crude oil and gasoline — called PAHs, or polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, some of which are also considered to be cancer-causing. Oh, and then there’s the asbestos.

3. Canadian Armed Forces employees say dozens of their colleagues have become sick with cancers, neurological issues and more

Shaunna Plourde moved into housing at CFB Moose Jaw when she was pregnant with her first baby. Her husband, an aircraft engine technician, was employed at the base and she got a job there, too.

In December she told a public hearing of the Standing Committee on National Defence that it wasn’t long before she began experiencing medical issues. 

Then, after seven years on base, Plourde was diagnosed with a neurological disorder. In 2017, she had an emergency hysterectomy. 

“Since this time, four other women I work with have all needed to have this procedure. Many of us were employed in the same building — Building 143,” Plourde told the committee. “A simple, yet alarming, question started being discussed in the building I work in: ‘Do you think our building is safe?’ ” 

She’s not alone in her concerns, as other employees — with early-onset Parkinson’s, prostate cancer, a rare form of breast cancer and other diseases — have come forward to ask the same question.

Erin Zimmerman, a Snowbird veteran who also worked as a civil servant, was diagnosed with early-onset diagnoses of Parkinson’s disease. She’s concerned contamination is causing a rash of negative health impacts for people working and living on base. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

Erin Zimmerman, a Snowbirds veteran who also worked as a civil servant at CFB Moose Jaw, has compiled a list of nearly 200 illnesses and dozens of obituaries of her colleagues. 

“I learned that while I was serving, and even during my pregnancy, I’ve been working on, or next to, a contamination site,” Zimmerman told The Narwhal. “I also heard that others in our building were experiencing serious illnesses.”

4. The Canadian Armed Forces says ‘routine testing had not indicated issues’

For its part, the military says its activities can have effects on soil and water, but it strives “to minimize risks to Canadians and the environment,” adding it is committed to the health and safety of military personnel and surrounding communities, as well as to “responsible environmental management.” 

Responding to questions from The Narwhal, a spokesperson wrote the military “conducts regular monitoring programs at bases and wings to assess environmental conditions and identify potential concerns. Although routine testing had not indicated issues, following community concerns, we undertook extensive testing [in Moose Jaw] to ensure transparency and diligence in addressing concerns.”

The military has been engaging in activities that create contamination for decades, but it’s far from the only source of contamination in Canada — it’s just one with public records. Some experts say the main reason we know so much about the contaminants present on military sites is because the federal government keeps pretty good records.

5. People who live near CFB Moose Jaw fear the contamination spreading

“What is in the workplaces tends to get out,” said Christine Oliver, a doctor who specializes in occupational and environmental health. 

Health Canada says some contaminants can travel long distances through soil, water and air: “PFAS can be found in freshwater and drinking water in areas that are far away from where they entered the environment,” the department says on its website.

A farmer’s field butts up against the Canadian Forces Base near Moose Jaw. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

It’s impossible to quantify if or how much contamination has seeped off the base without publicly available studies, but some nearby farmers and residents are beginning to worry.

“I have obvious neurological problems,” one resident told The Narwhal. He was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and both his parents suffer neurological issues. “It just puts more questions into our minds, like, ‘Is that a potential factor?’ … I wouldn’t think a chain link fence would stop contaminants from moving around.”

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Erin Zimmerman, a 46-year-old mother, wife, artist, public servant and veteran, has called the small city of Moose Jaw, Sask., population 35,000, home for the last 25 years. She joined the Canadian Armed Forces in 2012 and since 2016 has been working as a financial clerk at the Moose Jaw military base, most recently in an office she now fears: Building 143. 

One morning in 2019, three years into her role, Zimmerman woke up with crossed eyes. At first she assumed she was having an odd migraine, but after seeing an eye doctor, it became clear the issue was brain-related, which Zimmerman said was terrifying. Since then, she’s seen neurosurgeons, ophthalmologists and other specialists. In early 2024, she was diagnosed with a rare form of early-onset Parkinson’s disease, a disorder of the brain and nervous system which worsens over time.

Erin Zimmerman researches environmental contamination at the Canadian Armed Forces base in Moose Jaw, Sask. Zimmerman, a Snowbird veteran who also worked as a civil servant, has early onset Parkinson’s disease and has been pushing for answers about environmental contaminants, suspecting they are causing a rash of negative health impacts for people working and living on base.

Zimmerman said her doctors explained her illness can be caused by a mix of genetic and environmental factors. They laid out the potential causes of a rare early-onset of the disease. One was severe head trauma, which Zimmerman never had. 

The other was exposure to toxic chemicals. For Zimmerman, the latter was “a red flag,” which led her to start investigating contamination and environmental hazards at her workplace.

“I learned that while I was serving, and even during my pregnancy, I’ve been working on, or next to, a contamination site,” Zimmerman said about going through government documents and collecting testimonies of others who had served. “I also heard that others in our building were experiencing serious illnesses.”

Zimmerman said her journey began as a personal health crisis but, since learning of her colleagues’ illnesses including autoimmune diseases, thyroid diseases, cancer and other undiagnosed health issues, has grown into a larger discussion about her workplace safety and her employer: the Department of National Defence. 

There are thousands of contaminated sites listed on the federal contaminated sites inventory, including military bases like CFB Moose Jaw, the home of the Snowbirds.

Contamination on federal sites is an issue across Canada. There are thousands of contaminated sites listed on the federal contaminated sites inventory, including military bases with busy offices, hangars and warehouses on top of unremediated contamination sites. CFB Moose Jaw is one of them. 

She told The Narwhal her research has exposed gaps in how contamination sites are communicated to those working and living in contaminated areas. She’s compiled a list of nearly 200 illnesses and dozens of obituaries of her colleagues. 

While it’s difficult to pinpoint one cause for the variety of health issues Zimmerman and colleagues report, there are steps experts take to determine environmental causes for illnesses. “You’re talking about wide environmental exposures and … you look for clustering of specific diseases,” said Christine Oliver, a professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto who specializes in occupational and environmental health. “[On] one of these military bases, even if they’re office workers, you can look to see if people with similar symptoms or similar diagnoses are performing similar jobs.” 

Zimmerman has compiled a list of nearly 200 illnesses and dozens of obituaries among her colleagues. She worries they became ill after being exposed to environmental contamination on the base. 

The Narwhal obtained internal studies of contamination at Moose Jaw released to employees this year by Defence Construction Canada, a Crown corporation. When asked to review the studies, Sébastien Sauvé, a professor of environmental chemistry at Université de Montréal, pointed to reasons for concern.

“Some of those concentrations are very high,” he explained. He said some of the dust samples’ PFAS (sometimes referred to as “forever chemicals”) values are higher than what he’s seen in contaminated soils right beside a PFAS chemical manufacturer, adding that “people working in some of those rooms would be exposed to PFAS from dusts.” In 2022, Suavé and a research team found these forever chemicals had spread from a contaminated military base in Bagotville, Que., to drinking water wells up to 10 kilometres away. 

“You sign on that dotted line, the expectation is you’re going to die for your country. Well, dying doesn’t mean I should get sick because of a chemical [the government] didn’t clean up properly.”

– Lynn Point, former employee at CFB Moose Jaw

Zimmerman is adamant something needs to be done on the base, including proactive disclosure by National Defence Canada about contaminants and their potential risks. 

“Not only was I unknowingly exposed, but many others may be at risk with no warning,” she said. “The diagnosis was life-changing, but it also feels like determination to find answers, not just for myself but others who may be affected.” Other employees of the base have begun publicly discussing illnesses they say are linked to the long-standing chemical contamination of the site.

The Department of National Defence is aware of concerns about contamination on military bases and says it does testing and is committed to minimizing risks to Canadians.

For its part, the military says its activities can have effects on soil and water, but “the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces are committed to the health and safety of personnel and surrounding communities,” as well as to “responsible environmental management.” Responding to questions from The Narwhal, a spokesperson wrote in an email the military “conducts regular monitoring programs at bases and wings to assess environmental conditions and identify potential concerns. Although routine testing had not indicated issues, following community concerns, we undertook extensive testing [in Moose Jaw] to ensure transparency and diligence in addressing concerns.”

But for active and former service members like Zimmerman, that’s little assurance when it seems to them that so many of their colleagues are getting sick.

PFAS exposure includes risks from infertility to cancer

Moose Jaw’s slogan is “Canada’s Most Notorious City,” stemming from its historical connections with Al Capone. The Canadian Armed Forces base nearby, 15 Wing, is a smattering of buildings including housing, offices, a gym, hospital and convenience store, alongside hangars and an airstrip surrounded by a patchwork of quintessential Saskatchewan cropland and homes. It’s the workplace for about 1,000 active military service members and also federal public servants. It’s also the home of the Snowbirds, Canada’s military aerobatics flight demonstration team, for which Zimmerman was an administrative clerk before moving to her current job. 

CFB Moose Jaw in Saskatchewan is home to a Royal Canadian Air Force base. Areas on the base are contaminated with PFAS (also known as forever chemicals), asbestos and other contaminants.

But 15 Wing is listed on the federal inventory of contaminated sites owned by the Canadian government. Sites on the base — aircraft hangars, former convenience stores and landfills — are polluted with several volatile organic compounds, petroleum hydrocarbons and PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) in the groundwater and soil. Asbestos has also been found in some places on base, according to a 2025 report about testing conducted on the base last year.

PFAS have been making headlines for the last several years for contaminating drinking water near military bases. They are found or suspected on more than 100 federal sites in Canada, in large part from firefighting foam that National Defence used to train military and civilian firefighters across Canada from the 1970s to the early 2010s. 

The United States Environmental Protection Agency lists numerous potential health risks of exposure to PFAS, including issues with fertility or in pregnancy, developmental effects in children, increased risk of prostate, kidney and testicular cancers and weakening of the body’s immune system, including reduced vaccine response. The Canadian government says PFAS can be transferred through the placenta during pregnancy and infants can be exposed through ingestion of human milk.

Ecosystems are affected, too. Studies have shown exposure to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances can cause reduced seed germination, stunted growth and reduced photosynthetic activity in plants. The chemicals can then build up in the organs of other creatures in the food chain. 

Contamination on the base stems from military use of solvents, fuels and firefighting foam.

Other chemicals on the long list of contaminants near the 15 Wing buildings are less widely known. There are BTEXs, a group of petroleum hydrocarbons consisting of benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene that can be found contaminating several sites on CFB Moose Jaw. They are used on military bases for many things, including as components of fuels; they can also be present from spills or leaks. 

They also have a long list of health impacts associated with inhaling them, accidentally ingesting them or making skin contact — including higher risks of respiratory and lung cancers, heart problems and heart failure, blood disorders and cancers, immune dysfunction and increased susceptibility to infections, according to a peer-reviewed study from the Journal of Hazardous Materials Advances. Another study from researchers at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences shows this group of BTEXs can play a role in neurological symptoms like Zimmerman’s headaches, nausea, and vision problems.

Another contaminant found at CFB Moose Jaw is a class of chemicals — present in coal, crude oil and gasoline — called PAHs, or polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. The Environmental Protection Agency says people can be exposed to mixtures of PAHs by breathing air contaminated with vehicle exhaust, or fumes from asphalt roads. The agency says that several individual PAHs and some specific mixtures of PAHs are considered to be cancer-causing. 

A bird takes flight from a chain-link fence around 15 Wing Moose Jaw.

The military has been engaging in activities that create contamination for decades, including the firefighting training with PFAS-containing foam. But it’s far from the only organization or industry that’s been contaminating land in Canada — it’s just the one with public records. Some experts say the main reason we know so much about the contaminants present on military sites is because the federal government keeps pretty good records about what land is being used for.

“A lot of this kind of disclosure and transparency relies on institutional memory. With the federal government, the documentation on those sites is probably much better than in other jurisdictions,” Cassie Barker, senior program manager for toxics at the advocacy organization Environmental Defence, said in an interview. “It’s not just on [military] lands that this occurs.” 

A Department of National Defence spokesperson responded to The Narwhal’s questions about contamination in an email. “We are aware that some employees working at 15 Wing Moose Jaw have expressed apprehensions about the health and safety of working within a building at Canadian Forces Base Moose Jaw.”

Dealing with environmental contamination on the CFB Moose Jaw base is the responsibility of the federal government and the municipality and the province have little involvement.

The email said the department “has no concerns about the safety of this particular building at this particular time” but has still started a “transparent and evidence-based analysis” including air quality monitoring and an ongoing survey of Building 143.

“Based on the contractor reports and feedback from multiple experts, there is no evidence to suggest that 15 Wing buildings are unsafe or unfit for occupancy,” the spokesperson added.

Five women who worked together at CFB Moose Jaw have had hysterectomies: testimony

In December 2024, Zimmerman and two other employees of the Moose Jaw base went to Ottawa to speak about their experiences — including cancers, infertility, neurological disorders and untimely deaths of colleagues — at a public hearing of the Standing Committee on National Defence. Current personnel and veterans from other bases also testified at the four meetings. 

Former NDP Member of Parliament and critic for National Defence Lindsay Mathyssen initiated the hearing after the issue of contamination in her Ontario riding came to her attention. (Mathyssen lost her seat in the April election and the fate of the study is uncertain.)

“Thirty-one years ago, I was a young, married woman full of excitement and hope for my future. My husband was an aircraft engine technician,” Shaunna Plourde, Zimmerman’s colleague, told the committee. 

Plourde explained she was expecting her first baby when the family moved into quarters on the base. She started working as a clerk at the base convenience store, CANEX.

People paint a fence around housing at 15 Wing Moose Jaw. Service members and their families who have lived on the base struggle with various health issues, from cancer to neurological disorders.

“I felt incredibly proud of the life we were building, one centred on service, community and the Canadian dream,” Plourde testified. “I never imagined this dream would turn into a nightmare from which I cannot wake.”

Plourde told the committee she soon began experiencing medical issues and, after seven years on base, was diagnosed with a neurological disorder. She said her children also struggle with health conditions including chronic lung issues. 

“I have lived and worked in buildings, sent my children to daycares and schools and used facilities that I now know are directly on contamination sites or within areas where contamination sites exist. Despite this, we were never told. … No one told us about the risks we were exposed to daily,” Plourde testified.

Plourde’s own condition has progressively worsened. In 2017, she had an emergency hysterectomy. 

“Since this time, four other women I work with have all needed to have this procedure. Many of us were employed in the same building — Building 143,” Plourde said. “A simple, yet alarming, question started being discussed in the building I work in: ‘Do you think our building is safe?’ ” 

As they began piecing together the puzzle, she said, the employees realized there had been dozens of deaths in short succession of people that had worked in seven buildings listed on the federal public inventory of contaminated sites. 

Active and former military members have started to question whether they have been adequately protected from contamination, after dedicating their lives to service. Gord King worked at 15 Wing Moose Jaw Canadian Armed Forces base for 22 years and wonders if environmental contamination could have contributed to his stage two prostate cancer.

The chief warrant officer, in charge of morale, welfare and quality of life of personnel at 15 Wing’s Canadian Armed Forces Flying Training School, acknowledged their concerns in an email to employees: “We acknowledge that concerns regarding Building 143 have been ongoing for some time, and we understand that this is a sensitive topic that evokes mixed emotions and concerns for many. The [Wing Commander] is fully aware of this, and is committed to addressing these matters with care and attention.” 

The Union of National Defence Employees told The Narwhal in an email that it is the “employer’s responsibility to provide a safe workplace,” saying that “Building 143 is not listed as a contaminated site. Further, the employer confirmed that there is no record of unsafe levels of PFAS in the building.”

Meanwhile employees working in the building have struggled to get recognition from their leadership. 

“Those of us who have sought answers have faced skepticism, criticism and, now, retribution, but we persist, for those we have lost, for those who are suffering and for those who may yet be affected,” Plourde told the committee, pointing to what she sees as attempts at silencing concerns and consequences for those speaking out anyway, including social alienation.

Had she known about the contamination, Plourde told The Narwhal, “I most likely never would have lived out there. I never would have worked out there. I probably would have stayed away from it as far as I possibly could.”

Some employees say they would never have taken the job at CFB Moose Jaw had they been better informed about contamination issues on the base.

Since the three colleagues took to Ottawa, dozens of others have spoken about their own experiences, though some say they are fearful of retribution at work and in their community. 

A spokesperson from National Defence told The Narwhal the “management of contaminated sites generally does not involve communication with employees or the local community until qualified environmental experts identify potential exposure risks.”

But for employees worried about their health, the lack of communication is only the start of their concerns.

‘There’s still people sitting in chairs with toxic waste under their seat and they don’t know about it’

For 12 years, Lynn Point worked on the Moose Jaw base in Building 143, organizing logistics for uniforms and other gear. Now, she is undergoing treatment, including chemotherapy, for a rare form of breast cancer on her chest wall that has spread into her lymph nodes. Point told The Narwhal that two of her colleagues and her former supervisor have all died of breast cancer. “They worked hard … and they didn’t get to retire.”

Point’s husband still works at 15 Wing, which concerns her: “I’m not happy with the fact that he’s still out there. I’d like him to relocate, but it’s not that simple. We need our jobs.”

“I love the job, love the people, but our government failed us,” Point told The Narwhal. “To wear a uniform doesn’t mean that they should be able to abuse you that way. Because you sign on that dotted line, the expectation is you’re going to die for your country. Well, dying doesn’t mean I should get sick because of a chemical that you didn’t clean up properly.”

Lynn Point, a 20-year veteran and a 12-year civilian employee of CFB Moose Jaw, believes her cancer is related to environmental contamination at the base. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2025, with a rare form that manifests on the chest wall rather than in breast tissue. She joined a meeting — current and former civil employees as well as veterans from the base — about the contamination at 15 Wing.

Another former employee who got cancer worked for a contractor on CFB Moose Jaw in a three-person department. “It changes your life,” he told The Narwhal about his cancer diagnosis and current recovery including surgery, 33 trips to Regina for radiation and two years of hormone therapy treatment. 

The employee, whose identity The Narwhal agreed to keep confidential, said he and both of his colleagues all got prostate cancer within six months of one another.

“There’s still people sitting in chairs with toxic waste under their seat and they don’t know about it,” said the employee, who served nearly 28 years in active duty, and 14 more in an office position on the Moose Jaw Base. “I just would like to make sure that they’ve done something so nobody else gets sick.”

Since three CFB Moose Jaw colleagues took to Ottawa to share their stories about illness, dozens of others have spoken about their own experiences, though some say they are fearful of retribution at work and in their community. 

This employee said he was never compensated for his illness, despite his formal requests: “Workplace compensation needed to hear from [my] employer, so they contacted the base. They never got a response from the base,” he said. “So my file was terminated.” 

The Department of National Defence did not answer The Narwhal’s specific questions about workplace compensation at CFB Moose Jaw.

Neighbours to Canadian Armed Forces contamination worry whether it seeped into drinking water

Cities and even provinces do not have much jurisdiction over what occurs on bases. Typically, though air, water and soil contamination falls under the jurisdiction of a province, military sites are different. It is the responsibility of the federal Department of National Defence to monitor and clean up contamination on its sites.

In Moose Jaw, the base is only about 15 kilometres from the city and is one of its major employers, with 15 Wing’s military aviation listed as one of the city’s “target industries,” on its website. When The Narwhal contacted the City of Moose Jaw and Mayor James Murdock, the city responded that since questions about contamination on the base and employees falling ill “pertains to an area outside the boundaries of the City of Moose Jaw,” it was unable to provide a comment. The mayor’s office also declined to respond to The Narwhal’s questions regarding the concerns of citizens living near the base. 

Moose Jaw is a community of 35,000 people in southern Saskatchewan. The military base is one of the major employers in the region.

“What is in the workplaces tends to get out,” Oliver, the doctor who specializes in occupational and environmental health, said. “It is workers that are primarily concerned but it won’t be very long, I think, before people who don’t work there are concerned about their exposures.”

Health Canada says some of these contaminants that are dangerous to public health can travel long distances through soil, water and air: “PFAS can be found in freshwater and drinking water in areas that are far away from where they entered the environment,” the department says on its website.

It’s impossible to quantify if or how much contamination has seeped off the base without publicly available studies, but some nearby farmers and residents are beginning to ask questions about what they might be exposed to, like Chey Craik, who lives just over three kilometres away.

A farmer’s field butts up against CFB Moose Jaw. “I wouldn’t think a chain link fence would stop contaminants from moving around,” said Chey Craik, who lives on a farm just over three kilometres away and whose family deals with health issues.

“I have obvious neurological problems. My parents both live here on the farm too [in] the house I grew up in,” Craik said. He was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Both his parents suffer neurological issues as well and have struggled to find diagnosis or cause for their symptoms.

Craik learned about contamination issues on base from employees. “It just puts more questions into our minds, like, ‘Is that a potential factor?’… I wouldn’t think a chain link fence would stop contaminants from moving around.”

When asked by The Narwhal about the scope of the problem at the base and the health issues and concerns of citizens nearby, the Saskatchewan Health Authority said any contamination at CFB Moose Jaw is the responsibility of National Defence to identify and address. The provincial Ministry of Environment declined to comment.

Raising awareness of contamination as a life’s mission

Back at Zimmerman’s family home, she has dedicated her life to helping veterans and other military civil servants who say they have been impacted by contamination on base. She paints portraits of veterans dying of terminal illnesses and collects their testimonies. She has been helping colleagues around the country file claims to get justice, accountability and hopefully, compensation for their illnesses. She has gained a reputation in Moose Jaw for refusing to drop this contamination issue. 

“When I joined [the military], I took an oath that I would risk my life for what Canada stood for,” she told The Narwhal. “I’m not going to stop until I make a change.”

Erin Zimmerman at home with an in-progress painting of her friend and mentor, Della Bennett. The women worked together at the Moose Jaw Canadian Armed Forces base, but Bennett died of cancer in 2021. Zimmerman has dedicated the rest of her years to raising awareness and pushing for solutions related to contamination on the military base she worked at.

She stressed that she does the work because she loves her neighbours: “Moose Jaw is an incredible community,” Zimmerman said. “The sense of connection and support is strong. It’s a place where people take care of each other, and that’s what makes it super special.”

Earlier this year, Zimmerman went on disability leave from her job without specific compensation for her Parkinson’s symptoms or official acknowledgment of the harms she’s suffered. Meanwhile, she said, she is acutely aware of her doctor’s prognosis that she may only have a decade left to spread the word about this issue.

Updated on Oct. 7, 2025, at 3:25 p.m MT: This story has been updated to remove some photos of the armoury in Moose Jaw, which is not the subject of the contamination concerns outlined in this story.

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This investigation is a collaboration between The Narwhal and the Investigative Journalism Foundation.

One of Canada’s largest oil and gas companies violated a deal it struck with B.C.’s energy regulator to address thousands of inactive pipelines in the province — and faced no financial penalties for doing so. 

Internal government documents obtained by The Narwhal and the Investigative Journalism Foundation reveal Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. (commonly called CNRL) failed to meet targets it proposed to the BC Energy Regulator to gradually deactivate more than 4,300 pipelines it operated across the province. 

Companies like CNRL operate thousands of short pipelines which connect natural gas wells — including fracking operations — to major pipeline networks. When the wells no longer produce gas, companies operating in B.C. are required to decommission pipelines within 18 months. The legal timeline is aimed at protecting the environment from leaks and damage as pipelines gradually decay. Deactivating a pipeline includes removing any fluid and disconnecting it from the system. The sealed-off pipeline will remain in the ground in perpetuity.

The B.C. agency overseeing oil and gas is about to get more powerful. Here’s why you should care

In 2020, the BC Energy Regulator found CNRL hadn’t deactivated thousands of pipelines and set out to get the company back into compliance with the law. CNRL proposed a detailed, multi-year plan for decommissioning its pipelines as part of an exemption from B.C.’s normal environmental regulations.Under that plan, CNRL was to deactivate a targeted number of pipelines each year until 2028, with exact annual targets ranging from 398 to 544.The regulator agreed and gave CNRL the extra eight years to get the work done. 

But in 2023, the regulator revoked CNRL’s exemption after learning the company “failed to deactivate the pipelines in accordance with the timelines set out in the plan,” according to the documents obtained under freedom of information legislation. The regulator later said in a statement that CNRL had failed to meet targets for three years in a row.

That led to the regulator issuing an order demanding CNRL clean up some of its pipelines. The company complied. The BC Energy Regulator then approved a second exemption for CNRL in 2024 and says the company is exceeding targets under that plan.

The regulator told The Narwhal and the Investigative Journalism Foundation in an emailed statement it did not fine CNRL (which posted gross revenues of more than $41 billion last year, according to its 2024 financial statements) because it did not deem it necessary to ensure the company got back into compliance. The regulator added it could still “pursue a contravention and the issuance of an administrative monetary penalty in the event CNRL does not meet its remaining deactivation requirements.” In early March, CNRL still had 865 pipelines to decommission, according to a previous statement from the regulator. 

It is unclear why the company failed to meet the requirements for deactivating its pipelines, including failing to follow its own plan. The company did not respond to multiple requests for comment made via email and over the phone. 

CNRL’s failure to deactivate pipelines is ‘consistent with a pattern’: legal expert 

The documents obtained by The Narwhal and the Investigative Journalism Foundation provide an inside look at the regulator’s approach to working with companies when they fail to follow the rules.

In March 2024, BC Energy Regulator vice-president Nicole Koosmann wrote to CNRL expressing concern that the company “failed to to complete the deactivation requirements under the initial plan” but said complying with the normal rules was “not reasonably practicable” given the thousands of pipelines that had to be shut down. 

“I am further satisfied that adherence to the targets and commitments set out in the updated plan remains the most effective and efficient way to achieve compliance with regulatory requirements and to minimize the risk associated with the remaining pipelines,” she wrote at the time. 

Koosmann’s letter to CNRL came after government officials discovered the company had “not met the targets for any of the years 2020, 2021 or 2022,” according to an unattributed statement from the regulator.

In 2020, the BC Energy Regulator exempted more than 4,000 pipelines owned by Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. from government regulations intended to protect the environment and public health and safety. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

That led the regulator to invoke a clause in the agreement that rendered it null and void if the company failed to meet its end of the bargain. The regulator then issued a general order, forcing the company to deactivate hundreds of pipelines, and renewed the pipeline exemption. The spokesperson said it struck the second deal with CNRL in part because of the “public interest in having the pipelines brought into compliance more quickly with less land disturbance.”

(Until previous reporting by The Narwhal and the Investigative Journalism Foundation, exemptions like this were not publicly disclosed — the regulator has since started developing a publicly available database.)

Martin Olszynski, the chair in energy, resources and sustainability at the University of Calgary’s law school, said CNRL has a track record of being slow to clean up and deactivate its assets. As of June 2, the Alberta Energy Regulator reported CNRL holds more than 20,000 inactive wells in that province — or more than 25 per cent of Alberta’s inactive wells. 

“It’s consistent with a pattern that I’ve seen that this is a company that has a really hard time dealing with the backends of its assets,” Olszynski said.

‘What teeth does the regulator have?’

CNRL is now “exceeding their targets for pipeline deactivation” under the new plan, which would see the company shut down all of the pipelines by 2028, according to the regulator.

Olszynski said the BC Energy Regulator’s approach — ordering the company to comply but stopping short of a fine — could be perceived as soft. But he also pointed out it seemed to produce the desired effect of jolting the company into compliance. 

“The regulator has been pushing and pulling. It has used the power that it has to force these guys to do the work,” he said. 

The regulator also has a vested interest in maintaining a good relationship with the company, he added. 

“As a regulator, they’re not about bringing down the man,” Olszynski said. “Capitalism, that’s beyond their wheelhouse.” 

Jeremy Valeriote, the interim leader of the BC Green Party, said the lack of penalties highlights a cultural problem of the province’s regulators being too lenient with oil and gas companies.

“It begs the question, what teeth does the regulator have?” he said. 

The BC Energy Regulator, formerly the BC Oil and Gas Commission, is mostly funded by levies on companies that run oil and gas projects. The sector has been expanding in recent years as B.C. gears up to become a major exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG). 

Valeriote said he worries the regulator is unwilling to confront companies that break the rules, and what that means as it takes on additional responsibilities. The B.C. government has been allocating extra powers to the BC Energy Regulator, including responsibility for overseeing renewable energy projects such as wind farms. 

“They need to prove to the public that they can fill the role, especially if they’re going into new areas and new sectors and they’re looking to build public trust,” he said.

Updated on July 7, 2025, at 12:40 p.m. PT: This story was updated to correct the spelling of Nicole Koosmann’s name.

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On a windless, warm fall day along the north shore of Lake Superior, a group of Lakehead University students were listening closely to their professor, until one of them broke down in tears. The professor, Robert Stewart, had been studying this area of Jackfish Bay, where Blackbird Creek pours into the greatest of the Great Lakes, since 2008. After all those years, he was used to the noxious mix of eggy sulphur and the steamy mist that stifles the air. But the students were getting queasy, so he paused his lecture. 

Between the smell and the wine-stained plume on the shore of a lake known to be pristine, the weight of industry was bearing down. On that day, Blackbird Creek wasn’t as it sounds. It’s a lovely name for the effluent canal of a pulp mill. 

A pulp and paper mill has operated intermittently since 1947 in Terrace Bay, Ont., under various owners.

Most recently, under Aditya Birla Group as the AV Terrace Bay pulp mill, seen here in October 2023.

About two months later, in January 2024, the mill shut down, and the company walked workers off the site.

In January 2024, the AV Terrace Bay pulp mill that had long pumped effluent through Blackbird Creek, en route to Lake Superior, closed. Just a few months later, Stewart along with Tim Hollinger, his former master’s student and now a remedial action plan coordinator, returned to the creek mouth and found the water teeming with oxygen — trout fry were jumping in the pools. Blackbird Creek was clear, cold and alive. 

Stewart and Hollinger were back in October 2024, collecting samples from various sites, and stopped for a moment to relax in the sunshine at the creek’s mouth on Jackfish Bay to reminisce. Hollinger remembers the people he brought to the creek over the years from scientists to students, paddlers to government officials, recalling the horror on their faces upon viewing the hot, foamy sludge: “People didn’t think it was possible in this day and age in Canada.” 

The Jackfish Bay Area of Concern, on the north shore of Lake Superior, extends along Blackbird Creek, which has long been used as a canal for effluent from a pulp and paper mill in Terrace Bay, Ont. Map: Shawn Parkinson / The Narwhal

The weather was serene on that fall day. The plume that had left a brown slick across Jackfish Bay had all but disappeared into the iridescent turquoise the lake is famous for, and the noxious smell was replaced by the earthy notes of fall in northwestern Ontario. It had been nearly 10 months since the AV Terrace Bay Pulp Mill walked employees off site, shuttering the mill that first opened in 1947. The resilience of nature was overcoming an industrial legacy of nearly 70 years. 

Blackbird Creek enters Lake Superior after winding 14 kilometres downstream from the pulp mill in Terrace Bay. When the mill is operating, the creek normally contains more wastewater effluent than flows of natural water.

Robert Stewart, a professor of geography and the environment at Lakehead University, began studying the Jackfish Bay area in 2008. Born and raised in Thunder Bay, Ont., on the north shore of Lake Superior, Stewart has spent his life surrounded by the impacts of extractive industries, and has devoted much of his career to remediating the contaminated environment he loves.

When the Terrace Bay pulp mill opened, an effluent canal was built to connect with Blackbird Creek — a convenient way to send its liquid waste into Lake Superior. It wasn’t until the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement was signed in 1972 that researchers started to focus on the impact industry was having on the Great Lakes. Following that agreement, in 1987 Jackfish Bay and 42 other sites across the Great Lakes in Canada and the U.S. were officially listed as areas of concern. New guidelines were created for discharging effluent into the Great Lakes and their tributaries, and remedial action plans were proposed. 

But the use of Blackbird Creek as an effluent canal was grandfathered into the Terrace Bay mill’s operations. When it first opened, the mill owner was entitled to choose where to monitor the receiving environment for its effluent. They chose Moberly Bay, the smaller bay at the mouth of Blackbird Creek, on Jackfish Bay. That means Ontario’s Environment Ministry regulates the mill’s wastewater up to the end of the pipe that pours into Blackbird Creek, requiring that it’s cleaned to current effluent standards, while Environment and Climate Change Canada monitors the effluent’s impact on the environment in Moberly Bay.

The creek is caught in between and left unregulated, monitored only by researchers like Stewart and Hollinger — who are hoping someone else starts paying attention.

Stewart, left, along with remedial action plan coordinator Tim Hollinger, prepare to take water quality readings inside a hut constructed over a section of Blackbird Creek. The hut was built to reduce the amount of mist from hot effluent discharge that causes nearby Highway 17 to ice over during frigid winter months.

Treated effluent from the Terrace Bay mill is discharged from a pipe into Blackbird Creek, a natural body of what that is not monitored by the federal or provincial governments. Video: Tim Hollinger

A pipe carries effluent from the mill, when in operation, and releases it into Blackbird Creek alongside culverts that run under Highway 17. Terrace Bay locals recall a story where a family, returning from a holiday in the Rockies, assumed the steamy creek was a sulphurous hot spring, similar to those out west. They were bathing in the creek when a mill worker noticed them from the highway and warned them to get out. According to various people who share the story around town, the family experienced rashes across their bodies.

Creating pulp, a fibrous cardboard-like material, begins with logging trees. At the mill, the tree bark is removed and turned into hog fuel, a form of biomass that is used to help heat or power the mill itself. The barkless trees pass through a chipper. Those chips are put into a giant pressure-cooker-like machine called a digester, where the white liquors are added to break down the fibres. The remaining wood product is washed and bleached, pressed into sheets and shipped to manufacturers around North America — and sometimes overseas — to use in toilet paper, diapers and greeting cards. In short, pulp is the first stage of creating paper products, and effluent is what’s left behind. 

Locals of Terrace Bay and nearby Schreiber, Ont., refer to Blackbird Creek as the  “liquor line” because of the liquors used and produced through the pulp refining process.

At a mill 200 kilometres down the road in Thunder Bay, Ont., treated effluent is piped straight into the Kaministiquia River, which flows into Lake Superior. But instead of the wastewater hitting the river at surface level, as is the case with Blackbird Creek, this effluent pipe is 4.5 metres underwater, so the effluent cools instantly and disperses, where it’s less impactful. The much larger river can absorb the effluent with far fewer environmental impacts. It’s not perfect, but it is the best practice to satisfy a wood-fibre hungry market.

The reality is, if the Terrace Bay mill reopens, Blackbird Creek will likely die. If it doesn’t reopen, the town itself is in a tough spot.

Jon MacDonald, a Métis hunter and angler, was raised in Terrace Bay and wants to see Blackbird Creek healthy. He’d love to see the environment clean in the next 30 years. He’d love to see trout swim in the pools again, but people need jobs and young people shouldn’t have to leave the region to find them, he says.

“It’s a double-edged sword,” MacDonald says of saving the mill and the environment. His own father moved to Terrace Bay to work in the pulp mill.

With sideways rain and an easterly gale pounding on the Terrace Bay Community Centre walls, Marianne Whitton and Kim St. Louis are putting together a 1,000-piece puzzle and are stumped by the intricacies. 

The two are helping run a $280,000 government-funded action centre to retool, train and help unemployed mill workers access jobs in and out of the region. Turnout has been low. Some skilled labourers were quick to snatch up available jobs, others were willing to collect employment insurance benefits and hope for the mill to reopen. As employment insurance nears its deadline for collection — just over 10 months in Ontario — former employees are starting to collect their severance pay from the mill, forfeiting their seniority and losing hope of finding employment in their hometown.

The action centre offers training and support for former pulp mill workers, including information on available jobs both in and outside the region.

Kim St. Louis, left, is one of three employees at the action centre for former pulp mill workers to find new employment. St. Louis worked at the Terrace Bay pulp mill for 35 years, 25 of which she spent mainly in the sale of pulp. The price of pulp is strong right now, she says, about US$1,700 per ton (current as of January 2025), and she misses the excitement of selling the town’s mainstay product.

Taylor Paulsen, a former pulp foreman and environmental technologist with the AV Terrace Bay mill, is currently working at the action centre. She wants the mill to reopen. She doesn’t want to move away but knows she’ll have to if things don’t change for her hometown. “The company is not communicating. That’s what is so frustrating for people, no one can move on. Now they brought in a package boiler and everyone thinks there’s hope; people are grasping at straws for rumours.”

Rumours circulate about new investors — there’s a boiler being installed to keep the mill warm through the winter — but Aditya Birla Group, the India-based owner of the Terrace Bay mill, has offered no word to anyone, seemingly not even the township. The company did not respond to The Narwhal’s questions about plans to reopen or whether an alternate plan for discharging effluent would be in place if it did. 

The few visitors to the action centre look at the puzzle and try to help. “This is 1,000 pieces of hell,” St. Louis says, finally standing up to take a break. She worked in pulp sales, finding a home for the town’s staple product in the broad North American market. “At least I’m getting paid to work on this puzzle, but I’d rather be at work selling pulp.” Others in the action centre nod their heads.

The town of Terrace Bay, with a population of about 1,500, sits at the shore of Lake Superior. About 400 people lost their jobs when the mill closed.

Darren McLean, left, who retired after 38 years at the Terrace Bay pulp mill, recalls Aditya Birla buying the shuttered mill and spending millions of dollars to refurbish it. He believes many more fixes are now needed to bring it back to a good state. Cassidy Dube, centre, was born and raised in Terrace Bay. Her entire family worked in the pulp mill until either retirement or its closure — she worked as a nurse in the mill for two years and was on duty when a worker was pulled into the rollers that compress fibre sheets. The worker was injured but survived. Cassidy’s husband Chris, right, is a teacher and town councillor in Terrace Bay who has spent many days surfing on Lake Superior’s rough waves. “If Blackbird Creek was closer to town, if it was visible, people would be really upset by it. But it’s remote, out of sight, out of mind,” he says. The Dubes founded a fall surfing event on the Lake Superior beaches near Terrace Bay called Waasaashkaa, meaning “the lake has waves” in Ojibway.

People who worked in the mill aren’t shy about its condition before it finally closed. They describe concrete falling from the ceilings, cracks in the floor and the lime kiln that was broken, creating a mountain of untreated lime they were hastily cleaning up.

In 2011, TJ Berthelot lost his life when a blow tank exploded, creating a nine-metre hole in the mill roof. AV Terrace Bay was fined $275,000 under the Occupational Health and Safety Act for the incident. Following a June 25, 2019, incident, the mill was fined $80,000 for not installing proper guards after a worker was pulled into the rollers that press the fibre sheets together. The worker was saved when another employee hit the emergency shutoff. 

The mill has also seen its share of environmental infractions. In 2015, AV Terrace Bay was fined $250,000 for not properly treating effluent discharged via Blackbird Creek into Lake Superior. In December 2020, AV Terrace Bay was fined $400,000 for releasing high levels of sulphur. The emissions were detected by two air monitoring stations in the community.

After many years trapping, Shaun Andrews of Schreiber, Ont., has observed that beavers from the “liquor line” would have a red tinge to their furs. Without effluent pumping daily into the creek, he says the beavers pelts have returned to a much more natural black colour.

Andrews’ shop is laden with tools and skinning knives — and a sense of humour.

Andrews recently trapped eight beavers that were damming the pulp mill’s tailings pond discharge canal. It was threatening to wash out Highway 17 if it burst. He stored them in his freezer to later sell.

The Jackfish Bay Area of Concern, which includes Blackbird Creek, was designated as “in recovery” in 2011. This recognized improvements made by the mill in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including installing a secondary treatment system for effluent and moving to chlorine-free pulp production. 

Importantly, the mill was shuttered when the area was deemed “in recovery,” and the plan was to revisit the designation should it reopen. The mill did reopen three years later, but the designation remained.

The review committee, along with several government bodies, acknowledged in the remedial action plan status report that some of the area “may not recover while industrial effluent is discharged,” but concluded “further remedial actions are not practical or feasible at this time.” 

What “in recovery” status means, practically, is that environmental monitoring will continue, but no interventions to help the environment are being explored or considered. And the designation could still be reviewed.

The mill will either reopen or it won’t, and the chips will fall where they may.

Known as the Jackfish Bend, the Canadian Pacific Railway makes a tight arc around the northern edge of Jackfish Bay, where Blackbird Creek flows into Lake Superior.

Much of the creek is only accessible by foot, so Stewart and Hollinger boat and hike in to take samples.

Each gathering point for water quality samples along the creek has a unique name to ensure the dataset can be properly compared and analyzed. The site at the bottom of the pipe from the mill, where roiling, noxious and hot foamy sludge pours into Blackbird Creek when the mill is in operation, is known as the devil’s rear end.

As nature continues to rebound, clean sediments will wash down Blackbird Creek and cap the contamination. And it would remain there if not for hundred-year storms, for floods, for beaver dams and the power of nature that upends even its own remedies. 

Stewart and Hollinger will be back to monitor any shifts in the environment, and to introduce a new group of students to the history of sanctioned pollution in these waters, with its future still uncertain.

All that is known right now is in northwestern Ontario, an industry is dying, a town is suffering — and Blackbird Creek has a new lease on life. 

Last spring, a few months after the mill closed in early 2024, Hollinger and Stewart arrived at Blackbird Creek to find trout fry, or minnows, jumping and swimming upstream — something they never saw when it flowed full of effluent. Blackbird Creek widens at one point into Moberly Lake, which was once five metres deep. After more than 70 years of collecting pulp effluent from the mill, it’s now less than one metre deep, but still a common landing place for ducks.

The pulp mill has long been the economic driver of Terrace Bay, but the small northwestern Ontario town now faces a future in the wake of industry, as nature slowly erases that past. Maybe the industry will return — or maybe not.

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In April 2024, at just 35 years old, Sierra Johnson-Caldwell was hospitalized for a heart attack. It’s the most recent health challenge faced by the Mohawk citizen, who grew up in a community contaminated by industrial waste. Since being discharged, she’s relied on a cane to get around, and her steps are still hesitant and unsteady. But she quips that she would have raced to rescue her little sister Marina Johnson-Zafiris, 26, who was among a group of Mohawk community members arrested for allegedly trespassing on Barnhart Island in unceded Akwesasne territory on May 21. She just couldn’t get there in time. 

Akwesasne is part of the Mohawk Nation, one of the six nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Its residents’ ancestral territory, which includes Barnhart Island, extends across the Canada-U.S. border, and includes parts of Ontario, Quebec and New York state. 

In 2022, a U.S. federal judge ruled that the State of New York unlawfully obtained Mohawk land in the 1800s, including Barnhart Island, seen on the far left of the map. Land defenders are urging Akwesasne leadership to refuse a proposed US$70-million settlement that would cede title of the island. Map: Shawn Parkinson / The Narwhal

Despite the restrictions of colonial borders, the residents of Akwesasne consider the communities of Kawehno:ke in Ontario, Kana:takon and Tsi Snaihne in Quebec, and Saint Regis Mohawk Indian Territory in New York state one community. And they all face the same challenges, including a legacy of devastating industrial contamination that has poisoned their lands and waters. 

But on Barnhart Island, where the sisters stand today, the breeze is sweet and the water is clear. For the land defenders who were arrested, reclaiming Barnhart Island goes hand-in-hand with protecting what’s left of their territory that is still healthy enough for them to gather medicine, hunt, fish, conduct ceremonies and heal. Johnson-Zafiris was planting tobacco seeds as others cleared a stretch of land to build a dwelling when they were all arrested. 

Kneeling on the bank of the St. Lawrence River in a strawberry-print ribbon skirt in late June, Johnson-Zafiris brushes her hand over the grass and reflects on the injustices that spur her to fight for Mohawk Rights to Barnhart Island. 

“We’ve been taken advantage of over and over again since colonization began,” she declares.

Her sister, Johnson-Caldwell, moves slowly towards the edge of the riverbank. Her posture is stooped, and her gestures are accompanied by a slight tremble. But there’s an unwavering look in her eyes as she pulls out her rattle and sings a warrior song, her voice echoing across the water. Like Johnson-Zafiris, she is determined to continue fighting for her homelands.

“The composition of my body is a reflection of what’s happening to this land. Because [poison] went through all my organs, and now my heart,” Johnson-Caldwell says. She believes her afflictions are linked to the toxic industrial waste that was dumped on her reserve and throughout Akwesasne territory for decades. She prays for her song to reach Mohawk allies living farther downstream. 

Sierra Johnson-Caldwell has grappled with complex and severe medical issues her whole life, which she and her family believe are linked to the industrial contamination on Akwesasne territory. Akwesasne citizens have high rates of many chronic diseases, which have been linked to the elevated levels of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) on their homelands.

Sierra Johnson-Caldwell embraces her family at the shore of the St. Lawrence River on Barnhart Island.

For more than 40 years, the ownership of the island has been the subject of a legal dispute between the State of New York and the Akwesasne Mohawks, who say they never surrendered it. The land defenders arrested in May are among a group of Mohawks refusing to accept a proposed US$70-million settlement for the island. While the elected tribal government is willing to accept the long-awaited money, which would cede title of the island to the State of New York, those arrested are unwilling to see all Mohawk claims to Barnhart Island extinguished forever.

For decades, the Mohawk Nation and a New York utility company have both claimed ownership of Barnhart Island

According to the New York state police, Barnhart Island is owned by the New York Power Authority. The eight individuals arrested didn’t have the power authority’s permission to be there on May 21. In its statement after the arrests, the police force said the group was trespassing and intentionally damaging the property. Some of the land defenders are registered with the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe, but the elected tribal government distanced itself from the group’s actions.

Photos of the the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribal Council at their office in the New York state region of Akwesasne.

The elected government issued a joint press release with the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne, whose 12 elected chiefs represent the districts in Canada, and the Mohawk Nation Council of Chiefs, which serves as the historical government of all Mohawk Nation communities on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border, including Akwesasne. Together, the three governments called the efforts of the Barnhart Island land defenders the “actions of a small group of individuals.”

“We understand the feelings of some tribal members that we own Barnhart Island since it is part of our historic homelands. However, we do not feel this action is productive or helpful and can set back our progress in the land claim settlement, which is nearing a positive resolution and could bring over 14,000 acres of Mohawk homelands to the community,” the statement read. 

The Narwhal reached out to the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe, the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne, St. Lawrence County District Attorney’s Office and the State of New York for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.

New York Power Authority responded to an emailed request, stating, “This matter is pending resolution before a federal magistrate. As such, we cannot comment on this pending litigation.” 

The Moses-Saunders Power Dam on Barnhart Island is gated and patrolled by New York Power Authority security agents.

Though they differ on what resolution they’re seeking, Akwesasne citizens contest the idea that the state has ever owned Barnhart Island. Their case was bolstered in 2022, when a U.S. federal judge ruled that the State of New York unlawfully obtained Mohawk land in the 1800s.

Karoniaktajeh Louis Hall designed this flag for the Mohawk Warrior Society in the 1980s. It has become a well-known symbol of Mohawk resistance.

Abram Benedict was the grand chief of of the 12-chief Mohawk Council of Akwesasne at the time of the arrests, and is now Regional Chief of the Chiefs of Ontario. He said sympathizes with the land defenders who were arrested.  

“The court should acknowledge that these are territorial lands, that these community members are exercising their right to the land,” he said. He notes Akwesasne’s border-straddling position puts the community in a difficult place when it comes to negotiating land settlements. “They are a lot more hardcore in the U.S. than the Canadian side,” Benedict said. 

Regional Chief Abram Benedict at his office in the Ontario region of Akwesasne.

He believes that refusing a settlement now could mean losing it forever. 

“We are in a tough spot. I guess there are kind of two options: one is to do nothing, right, but you do also have the risk of the court saying, ‘You know what, this is out of here.’ Will they give us another 40 years? Probably not.”

Benedict doesn’t think Barnhart Island would ever be returned to Akwesasne because of the Moses-Sauders power station. Constructed in the mid-20th century, the station required a dam be built in the St. Lawrence River between Cornwall, Ont. and the island. The abundant power it created is what drew polluting industries to Akwesasne.

“The challenge with respect to Barnhart, there’s physical infrastructure on there that the state wants to protect,” Benedict said. However, he added, the settlement includes access for Akwesasne members to practice traditional activities, albeit with permission and under New York Power Authority supervision. 

As for the pollution, he knows the damage to the reserve is done. 

“It will continue to plague our community for a long time. We have rates of cancer in this area that’s very high, the agriculture of the community was decimated, the fish that we relied on.”

The Kanien’kehá:ka, or Mohawk people, who were arrested believe traditional, hereditary government takes precedence over elected governments recognized by colonial powers. (One arrestee, Isaac White, is a reporter with the weekly Akwesasne newspaper Indian Time and was there as a member of the press, not a protestor. He declined to speak to The Narwhal.) In February 2023, the Kanien’kehá:ka, People of the Longhouse Akwesasne, sent a letter to U.S. President Joe Biden collectively declaring that no “organization, government or corporation has the authority to buy, sell, trade, barter or relinquish lands.” 

Johnson-Zafiris and others arrested say the land claim negotiations conducted by the elected band councils and the State of New York were done without transparency.

Some Mohawks from Akwesasne oppose the settlement offered by the State of New York, which will compensate the tribe US$70 million in exchange for the title to Barnhart Island.

A legacy of contamination in Akwesasne

The sun dips below the pine and maple trees that shadow the St. Lawrence River, casting a warm glow across the surface of the water as Johnson-Caldwell strolls barefoot along the shore. Barnhart Island is less than a 30-minute drive from her home on the Saint Regis reservation, but it feels like a different world, far away from the industrialization and pollution that has transformed the rest of her people’s territory. 

“When I’m here, I feel okay,” Johnson-Caldwell says.

“My ears don’t burn; my throat feels better. … We’re upwind. Downwind is only a few miles away. And it’s so fucking poisoned.” 

Sierra Johnson-Caldwell at the shore of the St. Lawrence River on Barnhart Island, where she says she can walk safely on the grass without shoes. In other more contaminated areas, Johnson-Caldwell says the skin on the bottoms of her feet tends to split without protection.

At age two, Johnson-Caldwell was diagnosed with Kawasaki disease, a rare heart condition that causes inflammation of blood vessels. She’s had two heart attacks, two brain tumours, kidney and liver problems, autoimmune dysfunction and hyperthyroidism. Her elder sister, Jamaica, began treatment for kidney disease in her teens; she has since received two kidney transplants and been diagnosed with lupus. “Everyone has something here,” their mother, Wanda Johnson, says. “Chronic illnesses, autoimmune diseases — everyone.” 

Johnson and her daughters hadn’t even been born yet when toxic chemicals began seeping into Akwesasne territory. In the early 1950s, corporations were drawn to the area after the completion of the St. Lawrence Seaway, a monumental feat championed by then-U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Canadian government that made way for large ships and tankers to sail from the Atlantic Ocean to Minnesota via the Great Lakes. 

The seaway coincided with the opening of the Moses-Saunders Power Dam, on the St. Lawrence River, just a few kilometres from the edge of the reserve. The dam brought a new era of hydroelectric power, and now provides electricity to millions of people in New York state and Ontario. Its construction flooded 486 hectares of Akwesasne reservation lands and 6,070 hectares of traditional land in 1958, and citizens were uprooted without consultation or compensation. 

Hydroelectric power infrastructure on Akwesasne territory.

The Dwight D. Eisenhower Lock, part of the St. Lawrence Seaway.

The Moses-Saunders Power Dam on the St. Lawrence River.

The Long Sault Dam releases water from its floodgates into the St. Lawrence River.

Abundant electricity led companies like General Motors, Reynolds Metals and Alcoa to set up shop on the St. Lawrence River, along the western portion of the Akwesasne reservation. And many of them spent years discharging harmful chemicals into the local waterways. Until the 1980s, they released volatile organic compounds, phenols and other hazardous substances into the environment. 

The Reynolds plant also discharged high levels of fluoride into the air near Akwesasne’s reserve on Cornwall Island, Ont., from 1959 until 1973. The fluoride killed surrounding pine trees and destroyed a profitable cattle and dairy industry in Akwesasne, after the animals suffered and died from fluoride poisoning. (Reynolds was acquired by Alcoa in 2000. An Alcoa spokesperson told The Narwhal, “Alcoa Corp. formed in 2016 when Alcoa Inc. split into two companies, Alcoa Corp. and Arconic Inc. Alcoa Corp. cannot comment on something that would have involved the predecessor company that was Alcoa Inc.”)

A former GM plant in St. Catharines is leaking toxic chemicals

Alcoa and Reynolds Metals built power-hungry aluminum smelters; General Motors established an aluminium casting foundry, where it used the metal to fabricate car parts. All three companies used polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, produced by Monsanto as hydraulic fluids. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has since classified PCBs as likely human carcinogens, and linked to reproductive, hormonal, cognitive and immune system issues. The production of polychlorinated biphenyls was banned in Canada in 1977 and in the United States in 1979 due to concerns about their impacts on human health, but not before seeping into Akwesasne territory for decades. (The Environmental Protection Agency did not respond to requests for comment from The Narwhal.)

For decades, a Reynolds aluminum smelter and other factories discharged harmful chemicals into the waterways around Akwesasne. It remains on a list of Superfund sites, a program by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to clean up some of the nation’s “most contaminated land.”

All three plants have since been designated as Superfund sites by the Environmental Protection Agency, a program for “cleaning up some of the nation’s most contaminated land.” In the 1980s, the Environmental Protection Agency issued 21 violations against General Motors, fining the company US$507,000 for alleged illegal dumping and storage of polychlorinated biphenyl-contaminated waste on-site and in the river. In 1995, General Motors dredged a section of the river near its discharge pipe: while some of the waste was shipped to hazardous holding facilities, some was kept on site after being “capped and armored” to reduce contamination. Though the plant closed in 2009, the company’s on-site disposal areas still contain PCB-contaminated waste, including a nearly five-hectare former landfill just steps from Akwesasne tribal lands. (The land is now owned by RACER Trust, an entity created in 2011 to clean up former General Motors properties. RACER Trust did not respond to a request for comment from The Narwhal.)

The heavily contaminated General Motors dump site on Akwesasne territory.

In 2013, Reynolds and Alcoa agreed to pay nearly US$20 million to tribal, state and federal authorities to help remediate the damage. The Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe independently pursued settlements from Monsanto and its corporate successors — including Bayer, which bought the company in 2018 — alleging that polychlorinated biphenyls exposure led to increased risks of cancer and other diseases among tribal members.

A site formerly occupied by Reynolds Metals Company on the St. Lawrence River includes a waste outflow and a tailings pond. Reynolds Metals discharged high amounts of PCBs into the surrounding water and air, leading to widespread contamination.

In response to emailed questions from The Narwhal, a company spokesperson for Monsanto said, “The terms of the settlement agreement are confidential but it fully resolved the claims alleged in the case and contained no admission of liability or wrongdoing by the company.”

Monsanto also wrote that it never manufactured or disposed of PCBs near the reservation. Regarding the designation of the Alcoa, Reynolds and General Motors sites as Superfund sites, the company wrote, “Monsanto was not identified as a responsible party in connection with those Superfund sites.”

David Carpenter, 87, is a physician and director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University at Albany, in New York state. A professor of public health and environmental health sciences, he first began studying the effects of polychlorinated biphenyls on human health in Akwesasne in the 1980s by tracking tribal members’ fish consumption. 

Over the years, Carpenter witnessed an increasingly wide range of serious harms linked to polychlorinated biphenyls — including heart disease, infertility and diabetes. According to the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne, the rate of diabetes in the community is 30 per cent, more than three times the Canadian prevalence of nine per cent. On the American side of the border, the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe and Health Services reports that diabetes affects 16 per cent of Mohawks living in Akwesasne, compared to eight per cent of the state population. 

“Everybody thinks that diabetes is a function of being obese. I don’t think it is. It’s much more related to [polychlorinated biphenyls] and other environmental exposures than it is to obesity,” Carpenter says, pointing out the high rate of diabetes in Akwesasne affects both the young and the old. 

He was called as an expert witness for the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe when it brought a lawsuit against Bayer over alleged effects of the Monsanto products used by companies like Alcoa, Reynolds and General Motors. The tribe reached a settlement in January 2024, before he could testify. The details of the settlement are private, but such settlements typically include clauses that absolve companies from future liability, which Carpenter finds worrisome since he believes long-term health effects are still being discovered.

“The government, Environmental Protection Agency and the companies have been absolving [themselves of] responsibility and saying, ‘Well, you live in a contaminated area, so deal with it,’ ” he says. “Now we’re finding all of these health effects that weren’t understood before. So, having a clause that says you’re not going to be sued again is just outrageous. I think it’s unethical.”

What’s more, no one knows how long polychlorinated biphenyls take to break down as they contaminate the air, water and soil; they’re often referred to as “forever chemicals.” The U.S. federal government also has a three-year statute of limitations on filing a claim related to cleanup or compensation of hazardous waste. “But the health effects don’t have a statute of limitations,” Carpenter points out.

Dr. David Carpenter, 87, a public health physician, has studied the effects of polychlorinated biphenyls on Akwesasne citizens for decades.

The contested history of Akwesasne

Akwesasne translates to “the land where the partridge drums.” Its cross-border land base sprawls across 10,667 hectares. Around 23,000 people live on its vibrant reservation lands, which extend across the international and provincial borders, in charming homes with neatly manicured lawns, where nearly every corner hosts a tax-free marijuana dispensary or tribal cigarette shop. Three significant rivers — the St. Lawrence, the Raquette and the Saint Regis — flow through Akwesasne, adding to the complexity of the land and water rights in the area.

The history of Akwesasne territory is intertwined with the colonial geopolitics and industrial advancements that shaped North America. Following the American Revolution, the 1783 Treaty of Paris delineated the boundary between British North America and the United States along the 49th parallel, somewhat north of the 45-degree latitude that marks much of the current Canada-U.S. border east of the Prairies. 

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection port-of-entry on Akwesasne territory in Massena, N.Y.

The border established by the Treaty of Paris placed Barnhart Island within British territory. Many Akwesasne inhabitants were displaced from their homelands, even though the Mohawks and other nations in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy had largely supported the British during the American Revolution. 

In 1796, a group allegedly representing Akwesasne, called the Seven Nations of Canada, ceded much of its territory except for a small area near the Saint Regis Village, including Barnhart Island. Douglas M. George-Kanentiio, a Mohawk scholar, argues in his book Iroquois on Fire that this treaty was not binding, writing, “That ‘treaty’ merely extinguished the non-existent land claims of the loose alliance of the Catholic Indian communities along the St Lawrence River, which, in fact, transgressed upon the aboriginal land of the Mohawks.”

But subsequent treaties between 1816 and 1845 further eroded Mohawk land claims, leaving them with approximately 5,666 hectares in New York, 2,988 hectares in Quebec and 830 hectares in Ontario, forming the present-day community.

Today, Akwesasne elected governments in two provinces and one state negotiate with two federal, two provincial and one state government over harvesting rights, consultation and, of course, land claims. And in 1958, it was the elected Akwesasne tribal governments that filed a land claim against the State of New York, arguing the signatories to the Treaty of Paris did not represent them and lacked the authority to cede Akwesasne land. 

Marina Johnson-Zafiris grew up away from here, living in Texas with her father after her parents separated. Her sister and mother would go to Barnhart Island and hope for her return.

“Wild strawberries always remind me of Marina, and they grow here,” Johnson-Caldwell says, adding her sister was born on a Strawberry Moon, the full moon in June. 

A wild strawberry at the shores of Barnhart Island.

Three and a half years ago, Johnson-Zafiris returned to Akwesasne to rebuild her relationships with her family and Mohawk traditions. Her connection to her homeland was profound and immediate. 

“It was so organic. That’s so magical and powerful and spiritual and it shows how strong our connections are to our roots, and to our medicines,” Johnson-Caldwell says, clutching her sister’s hand. 

Marina Johnson-Zafiris hangs a Ieweras Gray Warrior Woman flag, commemorating a Mohawk girl who died in 2014 with leukemia.

Marina Johnson-Zafiris with her niece.

Since returning, Johnson-Zafiris has started a doctoral degree at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., studying information science with a minor in American Indian and Indigenous studies. She’s also reclaiming her Kanien’kehá:ka language and culture and digging into the history of Akwesasne and its ongoing land claims. Much of it she learned from Kanietakeron (Larry) and Kakweraias (Dana Leigh) Thompson, a couple well-versed in sovereignty who were arrested with her in May. The Thompsons are People of the Longhouse, who follow the traditional and ancient form of Mohawk governance.  

The Mohawk longhouse form of governance involves a consensus decision-making process, Johnson-Zafiris says, which wasn’t taken into consideration by the leaders willing to accept a settlement and cede Akwesasne lands. This puts them out of protocol with ancestral governance, she says. Akwesasne is just a small part of the Mohawk homelands, which span millions of acres. “We have the Dish with One Spoon Treaty, which established that we were not going to alienate title,” she adds, referring to an ancient treaty among the Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous nations to steward the land and its resources in common with one another. “When you get into the intricacies of what is in the settlement documents, it’s the tribal government really trying to impose and state that it has full sovereign jurisdiction over this territory. And push aside all the other government entities that exist here.”

Traditionalists want nothing to do with surrendering their lands, not for any price. 

“This is our territorial homeland. And we’ve always firmly believed that it’s never been extinguished, ceded, quit, claimed — ever,” Johnson-Zafiris says. 

Marina Johnson-Zafiris pours over maps of her territory in Dana Leigh Thompson’s library of U.S. and Canadian law citations and Indigenous traditional governance.

Living with the legacy of contamination on Mohawk territory

In the early 1990s, Wanda Johnson was a single mother of four children and pregnant with her fifth. Three times a week, she drove her elder daughter to Plattsburg, N.Y., for dialysis. Her youngest, Caldwell-Johnson, had just received her Kawasaki diagnosis; her sons suffered from severe eczema. 

Johnson embarked on a desperate search for answers. She thought the illnesses might be linked to the factories that surrounded Akwesasne. “I went to every hospital within [a six-hour drive] for a year. I kept asking and asking to the point where they thought I was crazy, asking them to please just do a heavy metals test [on my kids]. They didn’t really know what I was talking about, or they just dismissed it,” Johnson recalls.

Wanda Johnson felt her concerns about the industrial contamination of Akwesasne were dismissed by tribal and state authorities.

The family was under enormous financial and emotional strain. Johnson brought her concerns to the state and local tribal authorities, but felt dismissed. The nearby Raquette Point Road was so contaminated that drinking water was delivered by the New York Department of Environmental Conservation — but Johnson, whose home was just a mile away, was not eligible for water delivery and couldn’t afford bottled water to drink. Finally, in the summer of 1994, Johnson’s home was condemned due to contamination, and the family lived in a shelter and temporary accommodation for half a year until the tribe built her a new home. 

Larry and Dana Leigh Thompson lived on Raquette Point Road, in Larry’s childhood home. As a kid, Larry swam in nearby Turtle Cove and regularly picked through the trash at the General Motors dump site directly across from the family property, looking for aluminum scraps to sell. He didn’t know it was filled with contaminants. 

Dana Leigh Thompson stands in front of Turtle Cove, near the General Motors dump site. Her husband Larry grew up swimming in its waters, unaware that it was contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls.

“There was a dog that went there (to the dump) and messed around in the wrong area,” Larry, 69, remembers.

“His hair started getting patches and sores. It didn’t dawn on us what the hell was going on. We’d drink out of the stream, and figured it was okay. We were only kids. My parents used to plant our garden just there.”

In 1981, scientists began showing up at the Thompsons’ door, asking to test the drinking water and ponds on their property. One of the scientists suggested that Dana Leigh read Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, and she devoured it, reading it four times over. Her eyes were suddenly opened to the contamination around her. 

“The scientists were looking at my beautiful garden, and they looked at me and they said, ‘Well, you know you’re poisoning your people.’ And I’m like, ‘What?’ They said, ‘This is all poison,’ ” she recalls. Dana Leigh was shocked, and pulled up her garden. After the scientists’ tests confirmed their water and land was contaminated, the Thompsons moved across the reserve and began campaigning for the removal of the dump. The toxic waste in the dump is capped and covered by a layer of topsoil, and considered remediated, but the Thompsons believe it is still leaching poison into the environment, a concern echoed by David Carpenter.

Turtle Cove in Akwesasne territory, neighbouring the General Motors dump site. David Carpenter says polychlorinated biphenyls continue to leach into the soil, air and water.

“As a mother, grandmother, it’s my responsibility because we’re doing it for the future,” Dana Leigh says. The tribal council members at the time were hesitant to act on her word, she says, and rather followed the orders of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Larry interjects to add tribal leadership drags their feet when it comes to conducting independent rigorous testing for contaminants due to fears of getting its funding cut by the U.S. government’s environmental body. “They don’t want to find what’s really there,” he says, leaning back in his chair. 

Larry Thompson at the home where he grew up. In the 1980s, he and Dana Leigh learned it was contaminated by polychlorinated biphenyls and that the produce they harvested from their garden was poisoned.

In 2011, he decided to take matters into his own hands. 

One morning, he started up his backhoe and drove it into the site, chaining himself to the steering wheel in case police showed up to try to remove him. He began digging into the topsoil of the mound of contamination. 

“General Motors claimed they had fixed the problem, but it was far from it,” he says. 

“So, I went in with my backhoe and I got enough broken up to where I can turn it around and get the big scoop. I went up this ramp where the railroad cars were, and I dumped this poison in there. And, I said, ‘What’s so hard about that? You know? You can do the same. Get this mound outta here!”

Larry was arrested and held in jail for a few days. He pled guilty to a reduced charge of criminal mischief, and says he has no regrets about taking a stand against the system that had poisoned his lands with willful negligence. He bends forward from his chair and recites a philosophy he lives by. 

“There are three kinds of people in the world: those that make things happen, those that watch things happen and those that wonder what happens. We’re the makers and the doers,” he says. 

“We gotta push because we don’t feel the tribal council or Environmental Protection Agency are doing their job.”

Since learning about the impacts to their home and territory, Larry and Dana Leigh Thompson have fought to get the General Motors dump site cleaned up and the contaminated soil removed.

“It was an instinct to simply stand our ground.”

On May 21, the day Johnson-Zafiris was arrested, she was delivering food and supplies to a small group of Mohawk men who were working to clear an area on Barnhart Island for the erection of a hunting shelter, one that community members could use while fishing and gathering. The structure was a symbolic refutation of the settlement agreement, a concrete reminder that the Mohawk do not require permission from colonial governments to practice their inherent rights.

Larry Thompson had travelled to Barnhart Island on the morning of May 21 with a clear intention. He knew the land claim settlement between Akwesasne and the State of New York was coming to a close. 

“I knew I got to do something to stop it or disrupt their negotiating with New York. So, I said, ‘To hell with it, I’m going to go in there.’ ”

The former steelworker hauled his trusty backhoe to the Robert Moses State Park on Barnhart Island and worked to clear a spot just off a main road. He called some friends for help and two of them showed up, one bringing along his 14-year-old nephew. After a few hours, he called Dana Leigh to bring the group some refreshments. 

Larry Thompson and the backhoe with which he attempted to clean up the General Motors dump site.

Meanwhile, park rangers arrived and asked what he was doing. 

“I said, ‘I’m making a slab to put a building here,’ ” he recalls. “And they didn’t say ‘You’re trespassing’; they didn’t say nothing.”

Later that afternoon, Dana Leigh arrived with food and water, accompanied by Johnson-Zafiris and Kimberly Terrance, 41. The three women left, returning in the evening with tents, tables and other supplies. As they returned to the island, Johnson-Zafiris noticed the presence of state troopers, Massena police and security guards, watching the group from a distance. As she planted tobacco seeds, the officers — she estimates there were around 35, all armed — suddenly approached, surrounding her and the others. 

“I was standing there, I’ve never been arrested before and I was like, ‘Holy shit. They could shoot, they could shoot at any moment,’ ”  she recalls. “And thankfully nothing physically violent happened, but it was definitely a weaponization of the authority that they know they can exercise.”

She looked to the Elders and other women, as well as a youth among their group, and became worried for their safety. 

“I was concerned that they would escalate it because at the very front of every trooper’s chest plate was an assault rifle, every single one of them.”

One officer announced that they were trespassing and demanded the group leave immediately. But time stood still, says Johnson-Zafiris, and her convictions about her ancestral territories took hold. 

“It was a decision. If we concede and step off those lands, that’s us admitting that we know that it is the State of New York or [New York Public Authority’s] lands and that we are trespassing. And me personally, I refuse that. I don’t believe in that. I don’t understand that. So, it was like a no brainer. It was an instinct to simply stand our ground.”

All eight people present were arrested, even though White identified himself as a member of the press. They were handcuffed and transported to the Massena County jail and held for several hours. When asked their names, Johnson-Zafiris says, some members of the group gave their onkwehonwe (Mohawk) names, which confused the officers during processing. “They told us we could be charged with impersonation,” she says. 

Larry was brought before a judge just after midnight and charged with second-degree criminal mischief for alleged property damage. Given his past criminal record related to self-determination and sovereignty actions, he could do jail time if convicted. The others face misdemeanour charges.

“When they tried to arraign me, I read them international papers that declare I’m a sovereign. I told them I don’t agree, I object,” to the charges, Larry says. 

“It’s ridiculous and should never have happened,” he continues. “They have no legal authority with an Indian. They’re pushing their laws on us and it’s not legal. They don’t own any land. And we were brought up like that, we know our roots. We don’t agree with the other faction [tribal council] that they’re in negotiations to sell their mother, Mother Earth.” 

The tobacco seeds that Marina Johnson-Zafiris was planting when she was arrested are still on the ground at Barnhart Island.

Larry Thompson on his homelands, in Akwesasne territory.

Dana Leigh said their interests in Barnhart Island are simple.

“The reason why we went there, it’s our land, number one. Number two, it’s above the poison.”

Akwesasne reserve lands are east of the factories and power infrastructure, Johnson-Zafiris explains, and the contamination has flowed downstream with the St. Lawrence River as it runs east toward the Atlantic Ocean. But the western side of Barnhart Island is pristine, upstream from the contamination.

Johnson-Zafiris first appeared in court on June 25, her 26th birthday. She addressed the judge with her Mohawk name, Taiewennahawi, meaning “we hear her voice coming.” She told the judge the court has no jurisdiction over her as a sovereign Kanien’kehá:ka. About two dozen people, including other Akwesasne land defenders, showed up to support Johnson-Zafiris, the Thompsons and the others.

Marina Johnson-Zafiris and her mother Wanda Johnson head to Marina’s hearing at the courthouse in Massena, N.Y.

Supporters turned up at the Massena courthouse for the land defenders who were arrested.

Johnson-Zafiris refused to enter a plea and did not hire legal representation. Doing so would mean participating in and subjecting herself to a foreign government’s legal process, she says. When she returned to court on Aug. 27, she asked the prosecutor if they could provide the deed to Barnhart Island. They could not.

“Well I brought with me a title to Barnhart,” Johnson-Zafiris recited her words from court to The Narwhal. “But I can’t provide you a copy. It’s the eggs in my ovaries. The way I was taught, the land title is held by the faces yet to come, stewarded and protected by the the clan carrying women of the rotinonshonni,” she said, using a word that refers to the Haudenosaunee people of the the longhouse.

She pointed at all the women in the court room who also hold that title.

Johnson-Zafiris and another arrested land defender, Brent Maracle, were offered a deal that would see their charges dismissed after six months if neither was charged with anything new in the meantime. She neither accepted or denied it, and repeated, “The court can do what it wants. We aren’t criminals for being on our land.”

Being arrested has only strengthened Johnson-Zafiris’s resolve. “It didn’t kill my spirit at all. If anything, I hope the arrest and now in the court situation that’s occurring brings more confidence to our people,” she says, “that they can step into that zone of land defence and into that space of knowing and holding a lot of power, fire, to say this is our land and you have no right to exercise your violent colonial authority over me, over us, over this land.”

Marina Johnson-Zafiris at the place where she was arrested on Barnhart Island.

The day after her arrest, Johnson-Zafiris went back to Barnhart Island with her mother and sister to lay down tobacco in acknowledgement of the land and water. 

“I just laid near the beach. I asked the Creator to put us on the path that we need to go forth with,” Johnson-Zafiris says. She noticed Johnson-Caldwell walking across the grass, experiencing a rare day without pain. 

“These are the moments that we do it for, because at that beach we have clean clay, we have clean land, and that’s what our kids deserve. That’s what Sierra deserves.”

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.

In recent weeks, news reports have said waste management giant GFL Environmental Inc. is reviewing potential buyout offers. Since its launch in southern Ontario in 2007, the Vaughan-based company now describes itself as the “fourth-largest diversified environmental services company in North America.” GFL does everything from collecting waste and running landfills to operating oil refineries and responding to hazardous spills. It employs more than 20,000 people, operates across Canada and much of the U.S. and has completed more than 260 acquisitions since its inception, according to its 2023 annual report. 

As it’s expanded, however, GFL has also accumulated numerous environmental violation warnings, reports of water contamination, fires at its facilities and complaints about odour pollution from people who live near its landfills. These kinds of issues are not unusual in the sector and GFL’s competitors have also been tied to various environmental problems. Nevertheless, it’s notable that GFL continues to receive government approvals that allow it to operate and grow despite its environmental record.

This waste management company says it’s ‘Green For Life’ — its neighbours disagree

While news of its buyout bids has brought fresh attention to the company’s financials, The Local and The Narwhal dug into instances where GFL was found to be out of compliance with environmental rules and examined the response from officials. GFL did not reply to our repeated requests for an interview or comment. Here’s a sampling of what we found at three of its Canadian locations. 

Dead fish in North Stormont, Ont.

GFL’s facilities in the township of North Stormont, southeast of Ottawa, were highlighted in a 2021 report by the office of the auditor general of Ontario as an example of how the provincial environment ministry allows companies to continue operating and growing despite repeat offences. 

In North Stormont, the auditor general’s report said, the ministry found GFL was contaminating surface water by repeatedly discharging treated leachate (sometimes described as “garbage juice”) “at concentrations resulting in 10 per cent fish mortality.” GFL, meanwhile, was falsely reporting test results to the ministry that showed zero per cent fish mortality, the report added. Despite this, the report said, the ministry granted new approvals to the company, including for the expansion of the landfill where the issue was occurring.

In an email, Craig Calder, chief administrative officer and clerk for the Township of North Stormont, did not directly answer our questions about how the township responded to this issue, nor whether the contamination was still happening.

Instead, Calder suggested we contact the Environment Ministry about any enforcement efforts pertaining to this landfill. 

“The safety and wellbeing of our community, and constituents, is of paramount importance to the Township of North Stormont,” Calder said. “The township has confidence that our provincial regulatory partners investigated, and took steps to remedy, any deficiencies identified.”

In May 2024, GFL made a $260,000 donation to the Township of North Stormont, Ont., for the purchase of fire service vehicles. Photo: Township of North Stormont

GFL has made significant financial contributions to the township over the years. In 2021, when the company announced a new 20-year contract with the township, which covers issues like disposal rates and community fees, GFL agreed to contribute $1.26 million in community benefits. That included a $500,000 donation toward the completion of a new community centre, presented in 2023, and a $260,000 donation to buy new fire service vehicles this May. In a press release, an industry expert hired by North Stormont to review the contract called it “truly a win-win deal,” noting the township would not only receive benefits in terms of infrastructure and the creation of jobs, “but directly to the Townships [sic] coffers in a material way.”

An Environment Ministry spokesperson said by email, “We appreciate the auditor general’s findings” and the ministry was “committed to continuous improvement to ensure that we address spills in a timely, effective, and transparent way.” Regarding the false test results on fish mortality, he said GFL said the error was the result of “clerical oversight,” and had fixed the issue.

This March, the ministry granted GFL approval to expand its North Stormont landfill by adding 15.1 million metres of disposal capacity over 20 years. In an email to The Local and The Narwhal, the spokesperson said an applicant’s past history of non-compliance doesn’t result in an automatic denial of its application for an environmental approval, though it may be considered. An appointed ministry director makes “site-specific decisions” for each application after a detailed review, he said. 

An inspection of GFL’s Abbotsford facility by B.C.’s Environment Ministry in 2022 found that it was discharging waste into the environment without proper authorization. Photo: B.C. Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy

Conflicting stories in Abbotsford, B.C.

GFL operates a hauling site, also known as a waste transfer facility, in Abbotsford, B.C. In March 2022, B.C.’s Environment Ministry issued a warning letter to the company. It stated that during an inspection, its officers found GFL was discharging waste into the environment without proper authorization, an offence that could carry a maximum fine of $1 million, up to six months in prison or both. (Such punishment is unlikely, though; B.C.’s Environment Ministry said it has not issued GFL any administrative penalties. “The ministry’s inspection reports outline the remedial actions needed, and the company has taken those steps to comply with our requirements,” the ministry told The Local and The Narwhal in an email.)

The warning letter explained inspectors found that effluent, or liquid waste, discharged from a stormwater drain into a ditch network that fed into Abbotsford’s Lonzo Creek contained multiple chemicals, including ammonia, arsenic and iron, at levels that were well above water quality guidelines. 

To test for toxicity, scientists take samples of effluent and see how different species react when they’re exposed to it. Effluent samples taken from that same drain within the facility killed 50 per cent of rainbow trout and a type of water flea at varying concentrations and exposure times in lab tests, the letter said. It ordered the company to cease unauthorized discharges into the environment.

A stormwater drain in GFL’s Abbotsford facility. In lab tests, at a certain concentration and exposure time, samples from this drain killed 50 per cent of rainbow trout. Photo: B.C. Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy

When asked about this issue, a B.C. Environment Ministry spokesperson said in an April 9 email that GFL had improved the facility since 2022, including hiring an environmental professional to carry out a site monitoring plan, installing and maintaining storm drain protection measures and reducing the volume of waste it received. 

Exceeding levels set by water quality guidelines “does not imply that unacceptable risks exist,” the ministry spokesperson said, only that “the potential for adverse effects may be increased” and additional investigation may be required. The ministry spokesperson said GFL submitted lab results from stormwater samples in January 2024, which showed no further action was required.

However, the spokesperson’s response to The Local and The Narwhal contradicted information posted to B.C.’s online natural resource compliance and enforcement database just days earlier. There, a second warning letter to GFL dated April 3 showed the Abbotsford facility was still out of compliance. Water quality data from January 2024 reviewed by an Environment Ministry officer showed effluent was being discharged that exceeded the guidelines for multiple chemicals, including some of the same ones previously identified.

Additionally, it said effluent was also discharged directly into the ground through “significant” cracks in the pavement. A supporting photo attached to that letter showed an intricate web of cracks across the facility’s asphalt surface. The letter repeated its warning of the potential for a fine or imprisonment if convicted.

Asked about the April 3 letter, the ministry spokesperson again said that the ministry determined immediate action was not required because the lab results were for samples collected from catch basins, where water is treated before being discharged into the environment. Regarding the concerns detailed in the April letter, he said: “It appears they’ve been addressed.”  

At GFL’s Stoney Creek landfill in Hamilton, Ont., residents have reported an overwhelming stench. Video: Christopher Katsarov Luna / The Local / The Narwhal

An unbearable stench in Hamilton

GFL’s Stoney Creek landfill — a Hamilton, Ont. facility the company acquired in 2022 — is only meant to accept non-hazardous industrial waste, like excavation materials and by-products from steel production. It doesn’t take in garbage, it says on its website, “so there are no garbage-related odours.”

Residents nearby, however, said that while they had detected occasional odours from the landfill in years past, last spring a sudden, overwhelming stench became pervasive and unbearable. It lasted throughout much of the summer, subsided during the winter, then returned intermittently this spring, residents said.

A provincial officer’s order from the Ontario Environment Ministry dated October 2023 said GFL had stated the site was generating elevated levels of leachate (“garbage juice,” remember?), which was pooling in the waste containment areas, known as cells. The officer said leachate issues were identified as the main source of the odours. 

The officer’s report also said air monitoring conducted around the landfill in September 2023 showed levels of total reduced sulphur compounds, a gaseous mix of chemicals, that exceeded the ministry’s standard.

Among other tasks, it ordered GFL to remove leachate from the site, provide weekly progress reports to the provincial officer and hire a qualified person to submit an air monitoring plan.

In April 2024, another provincial officer’s order was issued, this time regarding waste that was piled too high, which the officer believed was contributing to further odour issues. The order called for GFL to gradually lower the height of the waste piles, moving some of the contents into new cells it is constructing.

In an online community meeting this April, company officials told residents they still didn’t have a “cogent explanation” for what happened last spring, but said that the problem was being taken care of and the number of odour complaints had declined. Though they were confident they had taken adequate measures to reduce smells, they said active landfills generate intermittent odours as part of normal operations. 

Earlier this month, members of a community Facebook group called “Shut Down The Stoney Creek Dump” said the stench had returned. “It stinks again this morning. So glad they took care of the odour,” one resident posted.  

Updated on July 9, 2024, at 10:25 a.m. ET: A previous version of this story incorrectly described North Stormont as southwest of Ottawa. It is southeast.

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Back in the 1950s and ’60s, when Paul Fisher was growing up, the rural community of Snow Hill in Sampson County, North Carolina, was a welcoming, predominantly Black, working-class area. Fisher played baseball and joined a Boy Scouts troop, fished in local streams and hunted for rabbits and squirrels in the woods.

“Everybody knew everybody, and it was nice,” says Fisher, now 75. 

Most of his neighbours owned modest plots of farmland. His family, too, had a farm, where they grew cotton, tobacco, peanuts, wheat and oats, and kept a garden. 

After high school, like many of his peers, Fisher left Snow Hill in search of work. By 1975, when he came back home to settle with a young family in tow, a landfill had opened up in the community. Residents put up with it at first, since no one really knew what its impact might be, Fisher says. 

But when it expanded into a regional landfill in the early 1990s, he and other community members became concerned. 

Over the next decades, the landfill grew, undergoing ownership changes. Then, in 2018, a merger brought the landfill under the ownership of Canadian waste management giant GFL Environmental Inc. 

The Sampson County landfill looms behind Paul Fisher, who has been speaking out against it for years. Photo: Andrew Craft / The Local / The Narwhal

Headquartered in Vaughan, Ont., GFL is a major player in the North American waste management sector, offering services from collecting waste and running landfills to operating oil refineries and responding to hazardous spills. Starting in southern Ontario in 2007, it has aggressively expanded since. It now employs more than 20,000 people and operates in much of the U.S. and across Canada, including in about 40 cities and communities in Ontario.

A February notice of intent to sue the company from the non-profit Southern Environmental Law Center alleges that since GFL acquired the Sampson County landfill, the volume of waste that the landfill accepts has surged. A lawyer representing GFL did not reply to The Local and The Narwhal’s requests for a response to the notice of intent to sue. None of the Southern Environmental Law Center’s allegations have been proven in court.

What was once a 15-acre operation is now one of the largest landfills in the state, covering roughly 1,000 acres (about 400 hectares), and it is expected to swell to 41.6 million tons (37.7 million tonnes) of trash by 2043, the letter alleges. And those living in its vicinity are paying the price. Snow Hill is no longer the idyllic rural community of Fisher’s memories. 

The stench, he says, is “outrageous.” Turkey vultures, or buzzards, hover around the neighbourhood, leaving their feathers and droppings wherever they roost. On occasion, Fisher says he’s had to shoot his gun in the air to deter them from landing on his neighbour’s roof, where they tear off the shingles. And Snow Hill is no longer the close-knit community it once was. 

Illustration: Shawn Parkinson / The Narwhal / The Local

The Southern Environmental Law Center’s letter depicts a once-vibrant community that has now become spiritless and polluted. Residents deal with contaminated well water, truck traffic, trash blowing onto their property and pervading odours, the letter says. “Described as a ‘clammy miasma,’ and a ‘greasy, oily’ smell ‘like decaying flesh,’ the odour from the landfill wakes people up at night, stops adults from gardening and children from playing outside and ruins social events like cookouts and church gatherings,” it alleges.  

Roughly 1,100 kilometres away, in Northville Township, Michigan, David Drinan and Leslie Evans are dealing with similar issues, living downwind of the Arbor Hills landfill, a site acquired by GFL in 2020. They, too, describe being beset by constant odours, noise and traffic congestion from trucks hauling waste, as well as contamination of the area’s only cold-water trout stream. Their citizens’ group, The Conservancy Initiative, is fighting GFL’s plans to open a new landfill adjacent to its existing one. 

Meanwhile, across the Canada-U.S. border to the east, residents near GFL’s Stoney Creek landfill in Hamilton, Ont., say they’re fed up with the fetor that suddenly became so pervasive and vile last year they couldn’t open their windows or spend time outdoors for most of the summer. 

Even though the smell died down over the cold winter months, it had returned intermittently early this spring. 

“Still, you can feel it,” says homeowner Nelson Faria — a sickening pong that lingers in the back of your throat. 

Local residents say the odour coming from GFL’s Stoney Creek landfill in Hamilton became unbearable last spring. Photo: Christopher Katsarov Luna / The Local / The Narwhal

The firsthand experiences of the people who live near waste operations owned by GFL and its subsidiaries stand in stark contrast to the company’s eco-friendly image. Green, specifically the vivid shade associated with freshly sprouting leaves and used in the company’s logo, is the colour that makes GFL’s garbage trucks instantly recognizable. It’s also literally in the name, Green For Life. 

“GFL’s vision is to be green for life. It’s as simple as that,” Patrick Dovigi, the company’s smiling chief executive said in a 2022 video, produced for a business campaign on sustainability called Vision 2045.

GFL refers to its employees as “Team Green.” It boasts of various environmental awards from industry groups like the National Waste and Recycling Association. The company publishes sustainability reports that document its efforts to capture landfill gas to produce renewable natural gas, its use of alternative fuel vehicles in its fleet and the expansion of its recycling and material recovery operations. It also donates close to $1.5 million annually to local charities. “GFL is committed to supporting and giving back to the communities we work in and serve,” it said in its 2022 sustainability report. With that environmentally conscious brand image, the GTA company has become a heavyweight in the industry. It reported revenues of more than $7.5 billion in 2023. (To put it in perspective, that’s roughly the annual gross domestic product of Barbados.) And the company was among a group of waste haulers dubbed “market darlings” in a Globe and Mail headline this February, after GFL stock climbed more than 30 per cent within three months. 

Recent news that GFL is now eyeing buyout offers has brought fresh scrutiny to the company’s financials. Arguably less attention has been paid to its environmental track record. As GFL has grown over the years, so too has its list of environmental violations, out of compliance warnings and complaints from the public and citizens’ groups. A 2021 Ontario auditor general’s report said the provincial Environment Ministry had identified GFL as a “repeat offender” that “regularly contravenes the acts, regulations and legal documents overseen by the ministry.” It was the only waste management firm on the report’s list of most frequently reported spillers of hazardous substances in the province. To get the full scope of GFL’s environmental infractions in Ontario, I requested documents on all incidents of its non-compliance recorded by the province’s Environment Ministry, through freedom of information legislation. The ministry’s access and privacy office informed me this was too big of a request — one that could take years to complete. Over and over, residents living near GFL’s facilities who spoke with me characterized the company as a bad neighbour that seems to have little regard for their community’s air, water and land. The risk of fires, the potential release of toxic chemicals into the environment, methane emissions — all are common concerns when living next to a landfill.

While reporting on this story, I sent multiple emails to the company, delivered a list of questions to GFL’s office in Toronto and left phone messages seeking an interview with its chief executive — or anyone, for that matter — who could speak on GFL’s behalf about its environmental track record. The only response I received was from a GFL manager in Alberta, who said if I had reached out to the company’s CEO then he would be in touch if he was interested in providing commentary.

The fact that GFL’s impact on the environment hasn’t hampered its growth reveals a lack of regulatory oversight and enforcement over the industry in which the company has flourished — an industry that, by its very nature, is anything but green. Waste management companies can only thrive when there’s plenty of filth, rubbish and sludge to manage. The more of it people generate — to be picked up, transported, sorted, buried, burned, composted and, to some extent, recycled — the more money there is to be made.

GFL founder Patrick Dovigi: a former hockey player who realized there was money to be made in garbage

GFL’s history is inseparable from that of its founder and chief executive, Patrick Dovigi. (Dovigi did not respond to multiple interview requests.) In photos, he appears dark-haired, clean-cut, with a former athlete’s build that has softened with time. His path to becoming a garbage magnate is the kind of story that newspapers and magazines find irresistible, and has been retold by multiple media outlets over the years.

A relative of NHL stars Phil and Tony Esposito, Dovigi grew up playing hockey in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont. In his teens he played in the Ontario Hockey League and was drafted by the Edmonton Oilers. After leaving professional hockey, he studied business at what’s now Toronto Metropolitan University. There are conflicting reports about the specifics of what happened next. According to a story in Canadian Business, Dovigi got a job at a small investment bank called Standard Mercantile. But in most accounts, including in stories in The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star, Dovigi went to work for Brovi Investments, a company owned by businessman Romeo DiBattista. It was a job that involved, among other things, serving on the board of a broadcast venture led by KISS star Gene Simmons before it went bankrupt.

A 2015 report in The Globe’s Report on Business magazine said Dovigi was eventually ousted after a rift with the DiBattista family. Before his stint ended, however, Dovigi was assigned to clean up a troubled trash operation in which his employer had invested. That early foray into the waste management industry apparently sparked a realization in the young man that there was money — and lots of it — to be made in garbage.    

In 2007, Dovigi created Green For Life, using seed money from investors to buy up smaller waste operations. 

What we found at three Canadian GFL locations

GFL emerged from relative obscurity in 2011 when it won a contract with the City of Toronto to collect residential garbage on the west side of the city. Its bid for the seven-year agreement was $17.5 million per year, around $2.5 million less than the next lowest-bidding competitor, according to the Toronto Star. The contract got off to a rough start, amid criticism over the city’s decision to privatize trash collection under the late Mayor Rob Ford, early complaints of spotty service and a temporary downgrade by the province of GFL’s safety rating. While privatization reportedly saved the city more than $11 million in the first year, the savings were less apparent in the long term. A report from the city in 2021 found waste collection on the east side of Toronto, which is done in-house by municipal workers, cost roughly the same as contracted collection on the west.

Winning that 2011 contract was “a TSN Turning Point for GFL,” Dovigi told Report on Business — in other words, it was a game-changing moment for the company. 

Since then, GFL’s growth has been meteoric. According to its most recent annual report, the company has completed more than 260 acquisitions since 2007. 

GFL founder and CEO Patrick Dovigi (second from left) rings a ceremonial bell  celebrating the company’s public listing on the New York Stock Exchange on March 4, 2020. It debuted on the stock exchange with a market valuation of US$6.1 billion. Today, it is valued at US$13.9 billion. Photo: Richard Drew / Associated Press

This June, The Globe and Mail reported GFL had hired a financial adviser to examine two buyout offers. One offer is for its full business and a second is for its environmental services division, which includes managing industrial liquid waste. A source told the newspaper that discussions were in the preliminary stages and may not lead to a transaction. Michael Hoffman, a managing director at the wealth management and investment banking firm Stifel, told BNN Bloomberg that there are “a lot of interested parties” looking to purchase GFL, and that at a recent conference, Dovigi had acknowledged a buyout is something he would contemplate. Nevertheless, Hoffman expressed he was skeptical the company, which is currently listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange and New York Stock Exchange, would accept a deal to take it completely private.   

Dealing in waste has made Dovigi a very wealthy man. This May, The Globe reported GFL paid him more than $68 million in 2023, prompting two proxy adviser firms to recommend that shareholders oppose the company’s executive compensation. That pay package included a $2.1 million salary, a $7.8 million bonus, and $36.4 million in “share-based awards,” according to a management information circular from the company. In its 2022 article, Canadian Business put his estimated net worth at $1 billion. That kind of wealth has afforded him an elite lifestyle — with the ability to own a private island, a yacht, multi-million dollar homes and, presumably, the ability to live far away from anyone’s trash. 

Methane, seeping chemicals, stink and fire: even modern landfills are far from benign

Many of the people who live near GFL sites are not as fortunate. Despite our collective efforts to compost and recycle, landfills are still where the bulk of the 36 million tonnes of solid waste Canada generates each year winds up. No longer the open-pit garbage dumps of the past, the modern landfill typically has a liner system meant to prevent leachate (sometimes disgustingly described as garbage juice) from contaminating the soil and groundwater. They have systems to capture the gas created from decomposing waste, much of which is methane, a greenhouse gas that has much greater global warming potential, or ability to trap heat in the atmosphere, than carbon dioxide. Instead of great, haphazard heaps of it, trash is generally compacted systematically then covered with dirt or other material at the end of each day to keep odours and pests at bay. At the end of its lifespan, a modern landfill is closed, buried and turned into a grassy field. 

But the impact of landfills on the environment is still far from benign. Even the highest-quality lining can tear, allowing chemicals to seep into the ground. Coverings may minimize but not eliminate the stink. And gas-collecting systems don’t always capture 100 per cent of emissions. Despite ultimately being covered up by a grassy meadow, the mess still lurks below the surface. 

One big risk is fire, with the potential for flammable rubbish to come into contact with discarded batteries, or for chemical reactions to create sparks. The content of air pollution caused by these fires can vary widely, depending on what kind of waste a facility accepts, but can include small particulate matter, heavy metals and compounds like dioxins and furans that are linked to cancers, liver problems and other health problems. 

A simple Google search revealed news reports of at least 14 fires and one explosion that occurred at various GFL sites across Canada and the U.S. between 2020 and 2023 — that’s a rate of almost one every other month. These include an August 2022 blaze at a GFL recycling facility in Edmonton that reportedly lasted 20 hours before firefighters extinguished it, and a five-alarm blaze at a GFL recycling facility in B.C. in June 2021. B.C.’s Environment Ministry later issued GFL a non-compliance advisory letter for not reporting the spill of water that went into the ground when extinguishing it. 

Fires aren’t uncommon in the waste business. Nevertheless, waste expert Calvin Lakhan, a research scientist and director of the Circular Innovation Hub at York University, muttered “Wow,” when I mentioned how many fires at GFL facilities I found in my basic Google search. “That is a concerning amount,” he says.  

Beyond the fires, there are numerous incidents when GFL has failed to comply with environmental laws and regulations. 

In B.C.’s online Natural Resource Compliance and Enforcement Database, there are 25 records in which the company was found out-of-compliance in that province since 2018. Some of these are for issues like accepting waste materials that aren’t listed on its manifest. But others suggest a less hypothetical risk to the surrounding ecosystem. For example, in a March 2022 letter to the company, B.C.’s Environment Ministry noted that effluent  discharged at a GFL facility into a ditch network that fed into Abbotsford’s Lonzo Creek contained multiple chemicals, including ammonia, arsenic and iron, at levels that were well above water quality guidelines. In an email to The Local and The Narwhal, a ministry spokesperson said exceeding the guidelines doesn’t imply unacceptable risks exist. Rather, “the potential for adverse effects may be increased” and additional investigation may be needed.

As recently as April 3 of this year, another letter from the ministry stated the Abbotsford site was still out of compliance, and warned it could carry a fine of up to $1 million or up to six months in prison. (Such punishment is unlikely, though; contrary to that April letter, the ministry spokesperson’s email said the facility had been improved since 2022, and it appeared the issue had been resolved.)

In its 2021 report on hazardous spills, the office of the auditor general of Ontario said GFL was one of the “most frequent spillers” in that province. GFL is the only waste management company on the report’s list of 30 most frequent spillers, with 78 reported spills between 2016 and 2020. The auditor general’s office also pointed to GFL as an example of how Ontario’s Environment Ministry allows companies to continue operating and growing despite repeat offenses. Specifically in the township of North Stormont, southeast of Ottawa, the report stated, the ministry found GFL was contaminating surface water by repeatedly discharging treated leachate “at concentrations resulting in 10 per cent fish mortality.” The ministry also found GFL falsely reported test results showing zero per cent fish mortality, the report said. Despite violating its environmental approval, the auditor general’s office stated, the ministry granted new approvals to the company, including for the expansion of the very landfill where this issue was occurring.

Separately, GFL is listed on the federal environmental offenders registry, a public database of corporate convictions. The registry shows GFL pleaded guilty in 2018 to selling the chemical tetrachloroethylene to Ontario dry cleaners that lacked sufficient containment measures required by law. GFL was fined $300,000 for violating federal environmental regulations. 

Sampson County, North Carolina, is a predominantly Black, working-class community. A GFL site there is allegedly linked to the pollution of the community’s drinking wells, ground and surface water. Photo: Andrew Craft / The Local / The Narwhal

Environmental racism plays a part in where landfills are located

To those familiar with how waste management companies operate, these kinds of issues are not unusual in the sector. GFL’s competitors, including industry giant WM, formerly known as Waste Management, and Republic Services have also been tied to environmental problems, such as odour complaints, leachate issues and air-quality violations.  

“When you look through their track record, lawsuits, when you look through the complaints, when you look at how they treat their customers and all of this stuff, these companies are often very similar,” says Mary Finley-Brook, associate professor of geography, environment and sustainability at the University of Richmond in Virginia.

Finley-Brook believes that over time, as more environmental problems, like methane emissions and PFAS pollution, burble to the surface, we’ll discover that the industry has been able to get away with a lot. “There is not a huge amount of transparency and accountability,” she says. Understaffed regulators rely on companies’ self-reporting, says Finley-Brook. Inspections are infrequent, and harms to the environment are really only ever detected after the fact, when damage is already done.

Finley-Brook added that environmental racism or environmental colonialism is a persistent issue. The reality is that our convenience-loving society uses highly toxic materials and simply disposes of them in places where land is cheapest, often in communities of colour, of low wealth or of sparse population. Landfills and other waste facilities are often pitched to these communities as an opportunity for them to generate income, mainly from tax revenues or sometimes from other fees, like tipping fees, which are charges for disposing waste in a landfill. But companies often don’t pay the full cost, leaving communities on the hook for the costs of fires or other environmental damage. “People and communities are not valued equally,” says Finley-Brook. When a city needs some place to dump its waste, the thinking goes, what’s the big deal if an outlying community of only a few thousand people faces some odour problems?

Canada just pledged to tackle environmental racism. What does that mean?

It’s not just a matter of where all that waste goes, but what it comprises. In Ontario, Peter Hargreave, a long-time waste policy advisor and president of the consultancy Policy Integrity Inc., says there are fairly rigid requirements for waste management in the residential sector, where companies need to report the material they collect and process. But, he says, fewer requirements exist when it comes to managing commercial, institutional and industrial materials, which make up roughly 60 to 70 per cent of all non-hazardous waste.  

The use of cheap materials and the cost involved in sorting them mean a lot of waste gets mixed in together and isn’t properly processed, recycled or otherwise diverted from landfills. 

“There are incentives to make the wrong decisions because of the policies and economics that are in place right now,” Hargreave said.“I don’t think it’s a GFL issue. I think it’s a waste sector issue.”

But as GFL continues to grow, buying up competitors and expanding its services across the continent, the sheer number of spills, fires and records of non-compliance is hard to ignore.  

Lakhan, the research scientist at York, suggests the company’s aggressive growth may play a role in its environmental track record.

“They’ve kind of been known as focusing on expansion, but not necessarily on quality, if that makes sense,” Lakhan says. “GFL is known as kind of — I don’t want to characterize it as a bad player, but they’re known for playing fast and loose with the rules.”

Kathie Farraway stands outside GFL’s Stoney Creek landfill in Hamilton. Photo: Christopher Katsarov Luna / The Local / The Narwhal

On a brisk afternoon in March, a small group of protestors gathered on the shoulder of Highway 20, at the entrance of GFL’s Stoney Creek landfill in Hamilton. Passing motorists waved and honked as the protestors held up signs that read: “Gag For Life,” “Breathing Shouldn’t Hurt” and “Clean Air Is a Right, Not a Fight.”

Kathie Farraway has been living in this community, surrounded by open fields, for about 25 years. She didn’t even know she was living within hundreds of metres of a landfill until it suddenly started reeking last spring. Farraway says it got so bad, it made her vomit. Her neighbours complained of increased asthma attacks, sore throats and migraines.

The Stoney Creek landfill, which GFL acquired in 2022, is only meant to accept non-hazardous industrial waste, like excavation materials and by-products from steel production. It doesn’t take in garbage, according to its website, “so there are no garbage-related odours.” To be fair, that isn’t untrue; locals say the smell is more of a chemical-like mix of sulphur, gas and cat spray than the rotting-food odour of household garbage. 

In an online community meeting late this April, company officials told residents they still didn’t have a “cogent explanation” for what happened last spring, but said that the problem was being taken care of and the number of odour complaints it had received from the community had declined. Construction of a new cell for containing more waste was now underway, they said, and though they were confident they had set up proper measures, they said active landfills generate intermittent odours as part of normal operations. During the Victoria Day weekend, when temperatures climbed into the high 20s, some residents reported the stench had returned. 

In a subsequent online community meeting in May, company officials said the landfill was not the cause of the latest stink and emphasized there is no risk of exposure to toxic substances from the landfill.

Scenes from GFL’s Stoney Creek landfill in Hamilton, Ont. Photos: Christopher Katsarov Luna / The Local / The Narwhal

Resident Nelson Faria, however, says his main worry is what will happen years down the road; it’s only then that they’ll find out whether there are any long-term health consequences to whatever they’ve been breathing. “Forget about, you know, the value of your home,” says Faria, a father of three. “It’s your health that is the most concerning thing that we should be confronting.” 

For members of The Conservancy Initiative near GFL’s Arbor Hills landfill in Michigan, it’s not just the health of residents that’s a concern, but the health of the ecosystem, too. Through documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act, the citizens’ group discovered that a stormwater pond at the landfill was being discharged into a spring-fed, cold-water trout stream called Johnson Creek. The documents revealed samples from that pond contained high levels of a type of synthetic, persistent chemicals called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. There are thousands of PFAS, which do not break down easily or quickly and are regarded as potentially hazardous to human health. According to Health Canada, they may affect the immune and nervous systems, the liver, kidney and thyroid, and the reproductive system. Despite the finding, no corrective action was taken, The Conservancy Initiative said.

Members of the group, including David Drinan and Leslie Evans, have since periodically collected samples of their own from Johnson Creek, and have had them tested, revealing that the contamination continues.

“It bothers me a lot, because … it’s a great, pristine, water source,” Drinan says. “And I guess I’ll be honest, it annoys me a little bit they’re a Canadian corporation.”

Besides the fact that the landfill is Canadian-owned, close to 25 per cent of the municipal and commercial waste it accepted in 2022 and about 14 per cent in 2023 was actually generated in Canada, according to the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy. (Michigan’s governor has recently proposed increasing tipping fees to discourage imported waste from being disposed of in the state.) Ontario landfills are expected to fill up within nine years. Even though major Canadian cities quit sending their waste across the border in 2010, industrial and commercial businesses in Ontario continue to do so, since it’s cheaper to dispose of it in the U.S. 

“They bring their trash over from Canada and they’re polluting our resources and nothing’s being done,” Drinan says.  

Meanwhile, in Paul Fisher’s neighbourhood in North Carolina, the community is eyeing legal action.

Maia Hutt, lawyer for the Southern Environmental Law Center, has visited the area multiple times. Her client, the non-profit Environmental Justice Community Action Network, is advocating on behalf of the local community. 

The intensity of the odour from the Sampson County landfill, located less than a mile from Fisher’s house, depends on which way the wind blows. But it’s noticeable even on “good days,” Hutt says.

More insidious is the pollution of the community’s drinking wells, ground and surface water — including Bearskin Swamp, one of the streams where Fisher used to go hunting and fishing — that is alleged to be linked to the GFL site. In their notice of intent to sue GFL, Hutt and her colleagues pointed out that tests by North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality found high levels of PFAS in the groundwater at the landfill, in the surface waters around the landfill and in private well water that residents drink and use for bathing and cleaning. The letter alleged that the landfill has accepted PFAS-laden waste from the DuPont chemical company and its spinoff Chemours for years. (DuPont and Chemours are notorious in the state for releasing PFAS into the environment.) 

Though the landfill had been accepting waste from DuPont before GFL acquired it, the letter alleges: “GFL’s handling, storage, treatment and disposal of PFAS-laden sludge and other solid waste has contaminated Bearskin Swamp and residential drinking water wells with toxic PFAS pollution.”

Fisher says many of his neighbours are sick. Some have breathing problems, many rely on kidney dialysis and some have different types of cancer. The Environmental Justice Community Action Network has also heard anecdotal stories from the community about their concerns about chronic illnesses. It’s unknown whether their illnesses are tied to the landfill.

Fundamentally, Hutt says, her clients want clean water — to be able to drink from their wells, and to fish and enjoy Bearskin Swamp again.

“And so, what would be required in order to do that is a full-scale clean-up,” Hutt says. If the contamination were found to be linked to the landfill, she says, “GFL would need to take some accountability and fully investigate and remediate.” 

In a later email, Hutt said she and her team were keeping an eye on GFL’s potential buyout. Regardless of whether GFL is acquired, “we will continue to seek justice for our clients,” she said. Hutt added that if GFL was responsible for the contamination, they would not be able to avoid accountability through a buyout.

“Forget about, you know, the value of your home,” says a father of three who lives near GFL’s Stoney Creek landfill in Hamilton, Ont. “It’s your health that is the most concerning thing that we should be confronting.” Photo: Christopher Katsarov Luna / The Local / The Narwhal

Despite non-compliance and environmental violations, Ontario lets GFL operate — and expand

GFL seems to be well aware that if pressed to clean up its operations, the associated costs could put a dent in its bottom line.

Among its “risks factors,” it stated in its 2022 annual report that it may be liable for damage or the release of pollutants. At times in the past, it said, having to respond to enforcement actions and certain litigation increased its costs and required it to “make significant capital investments” to upgrade its facilities. The company added if it failed to receive various approvals or permits, it could also face hurdles to establishing new or expanding existing facilities.

So far, though, consequences to the company appear to have been relatively mild. 

Despite its log of GFL’s non-compliance, B.C.’s Ministry of Environment said by email that it has not issued the company any administrative penalties, explaining “the company has taken those steps to comply with our requirements.”

In Ontario, an Environment Ministry spokesperson directed me to the government’s website for information on convictions for the past five years. I found only two records involving GFL there. One was a $343,000 fine in March 2023 for nine environmental violations, occurring from 2018 to 2020, at sites in Toronto and Dorchester, in Ontario’s Middlesex County. The other was a $130,000 fine this May for violations occurring between April 2020 and November 2021 at its Unwin Avenue waste transfer facility near Toronto’s Cherry Beach. These fines are nominal, compared with GFL’s revenues.

Since the auditor general’s report documenting GFL’s repeat offenses was published in 2021, the ministry said it has granted GFL 49 approvals allowing it to continue or expand its operations. A company’s past history of non-compliance doesn’t result in an automatic denial of its application for approval, the ministry said. Rather, an appointed ministry director makes “site-specific decisions” for each application after a detailed review. In response to questions specifically about the auditor general’s report that GFL had given false test results on fish mortality, the ministry said that the company had confirmed the error was the result of clerical oversight and had rectified the issue. GFL has now become so big, and the sector has become so consolidated, that to some extent we’re all at its mercy. Lakhan, the researcher and scientist at York University, pointed out GFL’s growth has been financed by debt, an issue that has raised questions in the past about the company’s financial position. GFL reported total long-term debt of $8.8 billion for the year ended December 2023. Until recently, S&P Global Ratings gave it a credit rating of BB-, or “junk” status. That was upgraded to B+ this April.

Since the start of 2020, GFL has lost $2.2 billion, The Globe reported, noting it has lately become vulnerable to buyout offers amid investors’ worries about its debt load.

All of this matters for our waste management system because GFL is Ontario’s largest service provider, Lakhan says. “So if they face any economic constraints that threatened the operations of their business, the direct impact is that our waste-handling system begins to fail.”

Landfills are big business because of how much waste we make

The last time Torontonians were forced to confront the sheer magnitude of the waste they produce was during the 2009 municipal workers’ strike, when mountains of garbage accumulated in temporary drop-off sites throughout the city, attracting pests and causing an eye-watering stink. It was, perhaps, the closest Toronto got to sampling what Paul Fisher and his neighbours in Sampson County, N.C., report living with on a daily basis. 

It’s tempting to turn to recycling as the solution to our waste problem. (GFL, too, has indicated it is looking to grow its recycling business.) But the reality is that recycling isn’t as sustainable or effective as most of us would like to think. A lot of newer packaging materials, such as lightweight plastics, can’t be sorted at conventional recycling facilities, Lakhan explained, which drives up the overall costs. While almost all Canadian households actively recycle, about 70 per cent of the solid waste we generate, including recyclable materials and food waste, end up in landfills anyway. And the savings in carbon emissions aren’t nearly as much as people would expect. 

When it comes to encouraging GFL and other waste management companies to cause less pollution, rigorous oversight may be one place to start. Speaking specifically about Ontario, NDP MPP Sandy Shaw, the province’s official opposition environment critic, says when the government shows it doesn’t care about the environment, it sets the tone for everyone else.

“Why would a company comply when the government just basically is turning aside and saying, ‘Well, we’re not really serious about you having to comply?’ ” Shaw says. “Why would a company go the extra mile [when] it costs them money?”

There’s a facet of our waste problem, though, that goes even deeper than the need for stricter regulations and stronger enforcement. It’s the fact we’re producing far too much of it. 

The landfills owned by GFL are built to be fed. Every garbage day, a caravan of vivid green GFL trucks make their way across the city, hauling away our empty take-out containers and chip bags, our broken mugs and dryer lint. Once out of our hands, it becomes someone else’s problem. And no matter how green the method of managing it, the environmental impact will be felt someplace else, in the air, the ground or in the water. 

GFL’s business is to take our waste and deal with the mess elsewhere. With a burst of green marketing, a company slogan or a sustainability pledge, it can convince us that we can keep creating mountains of garbage, yet still be green for life. And business, so far, shows no sign of slowing. 

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.

Ingrid Waldron wrote a book about how pollution, contamination and other environmental ills in Canada affect Indigenous, Black and racialized communities more than others. Along with actor and film producer Elliot Page, she turned the book into a documentary of the same name, There’s Something in the Water. 

She moved from Toronto to Halifax to teach at Dalhousie University, where she did groundbreaking research centering Mi’kmaw and Black communities. In 2021, she went back to Ontario to become a professor in the global peace and justice program at McMaster University in Hamilton, where she holds the HOPE Chair in Peace and Health. 

The Montreal-born Waldron co-founded the Canadian Coalition for Environmental and Climate Justice. She taught classes, gave lectures and sat for interviews to explain what environmental racism is — and what it looks like in this country. And all that time, she was trying to get Canada to study the problem. 

That finally happened Thursday, with the passing of Bill C-226. The bill promises Canada will develop “a national strategy to assess, prevent and address environmental racism and to advance environmental justice.” Sponsored by Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, the text is similar, but not identical, to a bill Waldron co-wrote with former Nova Scotia MP Lenore Zann in 2020, which seemed to have support in Parliament but died when a snap election was called in 2021. 

Indigenous communities in Canada often bear the brunt of environmental harm. Here, Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation Chief Allan Adam speaks at a meeting in 2023, after Imperial Oil didn’t inform the public about a spill of least 5.3 million litres of toxic tailings from its Kearl Lake mine. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

“Some people are planning celebrations, but many of us say let’s just hold off until we hear,” Waldron said to The Narwhal in mid-May, as environmental and political circles buzzed that the Senate was about to begin its third reading of the bill. There was no point in getting excited and then disappointed when the process had already taken so long that Waldron occasionally told herself, “Ingrid, maybe it’s not going to happen in your time. When I’m gone, somebody else will pick it up and keep fighting and being persistent.”

But now, the good news is confirmed — the bill was adopted in the Senate, with 51 senators voting yes, 11 voting no, and four abstaining. It will become law when the Governor General gives royal assent. Here’s what Waldron has to say about what happens next.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

You’ve been trying to get something like Bill C-226 passed since at least 2015. We all know politics moves slowly, but did you think it was going to move this slowly?

No. (laughs) I did think it would move more quickly than it did. I thought maybe in early 2023 it would have passed.

The gist of Bill C-226 is that Canada needs to develop a national strategy around environmental racism and environmental justice. And that would be in consultation with affected communities. Is that right? 

Yes. That’s really important — in collaboration with affected communities. Typically, they are not included in decisions or policymaking. One of the definitions of environmental racism, or principles of environmental racism, is that the communities that are most impacted never have a seat at the table. They’re rarely engaged to participate in decision making and policymaking. 

You were a witness at the Senate committee on energy, environment and natural resources. I assume you said that. What else did you tell them?

Basically, it was that we can’t talk about environmental racism independent of all the other social ills that tend to happen in these communities. 

So, I was talking about the structural determinants of health. Environmental racism doesn’t simply manifest on its own. It manifests in tandem with economic challenges, food insecurity, income insecurity, poverty, low education, unemployment, public infrastructure challenges or fragile public infrastructure. Over-policing of racialized communities, a criminal justice system that’s unjust. 

We need to understand all the other sociopolitical factors within which environmental racism is allowed to flourish. We need to have a broader understanding of environmental racism that doesn’t solely focus on pollution and contamination.

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Is that why there isn’t an actual definition of environmental racism in the bill?

Well, I disagree with them on that. They’ve said a lot that there is no definition. That is incorrect. The definition is in my book. 

The definition was created by Dr. Robert Bullard, who is an African American. He created that definition way back in the 1990s. I put it in all of my presentations. There are five principles. Every one actually characterizes and describes exactly what’s happening in Canada and elsewhere. 

Certain individuals in government seem to want to work without a definition or come up with their own, which is fine, but to say that there isn’t one means that you haven’t done the research and it frustrates me. 

The definition of environmental racism by Dr. Robert Bullard, specifically, talks about disproportionate rates [of environmental harms] in certain communities, Indigenous and Black. It’s about who is more likely to be exposed. 

It talks about environmental policy. In other words, racism doesn’t just happen, it happens through decision making by policymakers in government. We actually see the spatial patterning of industry in certain communities.

The third principle is about the fact that all communities that are impacted have experienced slow cleanup. I think about Pictou Landing First Nation [in Nova Scotia], I think it had effluent being dumped into the boat harbor since 1967. And it only got to close the mill [producing the pollution] in 2020. There’s still cleanup.

Another principle is that the communities that are impacted have less political power and clout. Okay, let’s look at Indigenous and Black communities in Canada. Those communities are low income, they lack political power. They lack social power. They lack economic power, they lack economic clout. One of the reasons why they are ignored or there are delays addressing their issues is precisely because they lack power. 

Those are the five principles of environmental racism, and they speak perfectly to what is happening. So when people say there’s no definition that means you haven’t done the research. Trust me, there is a definition and I like it.

I did find it frustrating reading the Senate transcript from May 9, when Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne said: ‘For the first time, the hitherto little-known concept of environmental racism is being defined by name and legislation.’ It’s not little-known to you. It’s not little-known to me. 

Canadian governments have a long history of commissioning studies and inquiries into racism and harm to Indigenous communities and Black communities and then nothing happens with all of the research and recommendations. I worry this will be another example. 

So why do we need a strategy? What is the goal of a strategy, when many people already know a lot about environmental racism and some people have chosen not to know about it? 

I should mention that I was chosen to be a consultant on this strategy, along with Naolo Charles. We founded the Canadian Coalition for Environmental and Climate Justice. We were both selected last year by the policy department at Environment and Climate Change. In terms of our discussions, this is groundbreaking. It’s the first time that the government is going to do this type of work. 

Because not every child in Canada has access to swimming lessons, Black and other racialized people have a higher risk of drowning. A free swim program led by former Olympic coach Jacky Beckford Henriques, far right, at Ontario’s University of Waterloo is an attempt to change that. Photos: Alicia Wynter / The Narwhal

It’s really about identifying all of the communities across Canada that are impacted by environmental racism. Having consultations with community members that are impacted — not simply for them to share distress, but also for them to tell us what they think the strategy should comprise of. I think that’s important because once again, engagement in policymaking and decision-making. 

We’re giving them an opportunity to co-create the strategy with us. It’s not just about sharing their grief. I’m sure they’re tired of doing that. It’s about them saying, ‘And this is what I think this national strategy should include.’

A study is also being currently completed on environmental racism that’s going to look at disaggregated data based on race, socioeconomic status and health. That has never been done by the government. So they’re going to have the statistical data that’s showing impacts on what’s happening across Canada, for the first time ever. 

When Ingrid Waldron and the ENRICH Project plotted polluting industries and racialized communities on a map of Nova Scotia, a concerning correlation emerged. Map: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

The person who invited us to be consultants is also developing a map that’s going to show the impacts of environmental racism across Canada. And that map is also going to include health data. It’s something that Naolo and I had thought about doing way back in 2020 when we founded the coalition. I have one for Nova Scotia and he said ‘wouldn’t it be great if we did one for all of Canada?’ And that’s something Environment and Climate Change Canada is doing. This, to me, is very, very important. 

The other thing is an awareness campaign. Just because environmental racism is happening in certain communities, it doesn’t mean that those communities understand the term ‘environmental racism.’ So they want to engage the communities in discussions and to create awareness about how environmental racism manifests. 

I don’t take it lightly. As people tend to remind me, you can have a bill passed and nothing happens with it. Everybody’s happy. Everybody’s jumping up for joy. And then nothing ever happened. I really don’t want to see that. When we first founded the coalition, I said we need to be watchdogs to make sure that something actually happens. I want to make sure that there is follow-through.

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Another person who was a witness at the committee was Chief Chris Plain from Aamjiwnaang First Nation, which has been dealing with a serious benzene leak for weeks. His community has been facing versions of the same problem for decades. Did you tell me that there is going to be a separate bill for Indigenous communities? 

A separate national environmental justice strategy. Things keep changing, but last I heard, there will be a separate strategy for Indigenous communities. 

I understand your concern. You’re saying that these communities have been dealing with this forever, what’s going to be different? I agree with you. I think the difference is there’s a bill passed and when you have a bill sometimes there’s transparency that comes with that. The bill not only creates transparency, but it holds people’s feet to the fire. 

I agree with you, we do need to be cautious. Anything with government, not just with environmental racism. 

Secwépemc matriarch April Thomas is a land defender opposed to the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project going through sacred land on her traditional territories in Kamloops, B.C. Photo by Marissa Tiel / The Narwhal

You talked about communities where people sense that what’s happening is unfair, but they don’t have the language of environmental racism. During your work in Nova Scotia, what was the response like when you shared the term and concepts?

When I was starting to work in Nova Scotia, I first met with Louise Delisle, back in 2015. They had a dump in their community, Shelburne, since 1943. She was talking to me about all the high rates of cancer, multiple myeloma in her community, and this dump. I used the term ‘environmental racism,’ she said, ‘What? I’ve never heard of it. Is that what’s been happening to us?’

I said, ‘Well, environmental racism is more about a pattern, not just what’s happening in Shelburne, but what’s happening across Canada to different communities. We have to talk about it in terms of it being a pattern.’

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And she said ‘Oh, okay.’ I could tell by her reaction that now she had something to put her hat on. She was able to articulate many of the things that were happening in the community because she had that definition. 

With the Indigenous community in Nova Scotia, I always thought that they seem to be more reluctant to name racism. They were more likely to talk about colonialism. And the Black community was more likely to talk about racism. That’s what I found in Nova Scotia. 

Colonialism is a different framing, but it’s still a systemic framing. It’s a systemic disadvantage.

And it’s racism. To me, colonialism is racism. The situation of Indigenous communities in Canada today is a result of colonialism. We see them suffering on every social, economic and political indicator in Canada. That’s a product of racism. 

You’ve told me that you’re an optimist. What’s an optimistic thing to close on? 

I don’t think I ever envisioned the Senate. In the back of my mind, it was, ‘Yeah, that might happen.’ But I was kind of very cautious. So in a way I can’t believe we’re here. 

To me, that’s the first step. And now we can start to plan — what’s next? In terms of just the people that we’ve engaged, the community members, the organization, the environmental organizations — what’s next? What do we need to do to make sure that they live up to their commitment? I think together we can definitely do this. I’m very hopeful.

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.