At COP15, the United Nations Biodiversity Conference, Canada focused on biodiversity protection, meaningful partnership with Indigenous Peoples and science-based policies. 

Yet when the rubber hits the road on each of these priorities with cases like the oilsands tailings ponds, Canada is headed the wrong way. It is time for the government to put a stop to the oil industry’s toxic takeover of lands.

Tailings ponds are industry-made reservoirs the size of lakes that store nearly 1.4 trillion litres of toxic byproduct from oil production. They cover vast swaths of the boreal forest in Northern Alberta, currently taking up over 300 square kilometres — enough to cover the city of Paris three times over. They contain dangerous chemicals such as ammonia, lead, mercury, benzene and naphthenic acids, and are known to leak and evaporate their toxic content into the surrounding environment. 

More than one million migratory birds fly over the oilsands region during their spring and fall migrations, including endangered species such as whooping cranes. Birds mistake tailings “ponds” for safe rest stops along their migratory route and either perish or suffer later on due to the acute toxicity of the mixture.

Fish have been spotted with tumours, while Indigenous communities using the land report a noticeable decline in wildlife in the area, from big caribou to small muskrats. The very existence of the “ponds” destroyed hundreds of square kilometres of carbon-sequestering peatlands, which cannot be restored.

Tailings pollution in the oilsands is a symbol of colonial injustice. Since the creation of the “ponds,” the nations downstream of the oilands, including Mikisew Cree First Nation, have been participating in federal and provincial consultations, monitoring programs and environmental assessments. 

Not once in nearly fifty years, since the oilsands operations began had there been an acknowledgment of the risks posed by the tailings — despite the nations voicing their concerns for ecological and human wellbeing and asking for adequate risk studies to be conducted.

Government considering allowing oilsands companies to release tailings ponds into river

Now, a new plan is being hatched in the oilsands: oil companies want to flush partially treated tailings ponds into the Athabasca River, which the Fisheries Act currently forbids. 

Canada has been considering obliging the industry’s request. But if Canada is sincere about its commitment to science-based policy, it should listen to the scientists calling for an independent risk assessment of the proposed release. Any authorized release should also commit to the highest possible water-quality standards.  

The ecological value of the potentially impacted area can not be overstated. The Athabasca River is one of the headwaters of the Mackenzie River Basin, the largest watershed in Canada and the most intact large-scale ecosystem on the continent. As an integral part of the Arctic drainage basin, it is the Arctic Amazon. The nearby Wood Buffalo National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is already in jeopardy due to industrial activity in the area and the threat of tailings release.

The communities and species of the area already feel the cumulative impacts of oilsands exploitation and other industrial activity. While operators tout the safety of their operations, there are already numerous ways in which oilsands waste is released to the environment, from aerial emissions and deposition of volatile compounds, seepage to groundwater and release of other industrial wastewaters. 

Mikisew Cree First Nation experiences high rates of auto-immune disease and rare cancers, especially bile duct cancer. Despite these alarming cases, there has been no baseline health study to attempt to understand the causes. 

Canada must seek consent from impacted nations to release tailings ponds fluids

Canada must make a public commitment that it will not move forward in authorizing the release without the consent of the impacted nations. Dene lawyer Daniel T’seleie argues Canada has a legal obligation to obtain the consent of all nations impacted by the release due to its passing of Bill C-15, which stipulates “Canada must take all measures necessary to ensure that its laws are consistent with the United Nations Declaration on the Right of Indigenous Peoples.”

Canada must also bring Indigenous nations, oilsands operators and relevant provincial authorities to the same table and negotiate a plan for fulsome reclamation of the area, paid for by the operators. 

Finally, Canada must ensure that solutions to the tailings issue are supported by thorough and independent risk assessment to align with Minister of Environment and Climate Change Steven Guilbeault’s statement during COP15 that “this government’s core value is science underpinning policy.”

We will be watching the government’s actions very closely to see if they align with those values.

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.

After some tense moments, including a brief breakdown in talks, 196 countries reached a new global agreement at COP15 to stem the stunning loss of biodiversity worldwide.

Though not quite as ambitious as many hoped it would be, the new Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework lays out a series of 23 targets that — if met — could help prevent further extinctions.

Among the targets, countries agreed to ensure at least 30 per cent of the world’s land and waters are effectively conserved and managed by 2030, to significantly reduce the risk of extinction, to phase out or reform at least $500 billion in subsidies that harm biodiversity and to reduce the risks from pesticides and other harmful chemicals by at least half. 

“The health of our forests, oceans, animals and all biodiversity underpins the very strength and stability of our societies. We cannot take that for granted any longer,” Environment and Climate Change Canada Minister Steven Guilbeault said in a statement Dec. 19 from COP15, the United Nations biodiversity summit held in Montreal during the last two weeks.

“Here in Montreal, we have set a new course. Now it is time to deliver,” he said.

“This agreement is a critical achievement and if implemented fully could take great strides towards combatting extinction and conserving biodiversity,” Charlotte Dawe, a policy and conservation campaigner with Wilderness Committee, said in a statement Monday.

She warned, however, “there is much more work to be done and governments must use policy change to achieve the targets.” 

“Currently, businesses are trusted to ‘do the right thing’ when it comes to nature protection, and they fail every time,” Dawe said.

The question now is whether governments will take the necessary action to meet the targets they’ve adopted. Their track record so far is poor. 

Countries failed to fully achieve any of the targets adopted in 2010 under the previous agreement. 

And in the 30 years since the first countries signed onto the international biodiversity treaty, under which these 10-year agreements are negotiated, the state of nature has declined dramatically.

Today, biodiversity is shrinking faster than at any other point in human history. Numerous species have already been erased from the planet and one million more are at risk of extinction.

Canada made big conservation commitments at COP15, but big promises have been made before

In Canada, more than 5,000 wild species are at some risk of extinction, according to the most comprehensive assessment of biodiversity ever undertaken here.

Guilbeault and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau signalled a renewed commitment to the conservation of biodiversity with a flurry of announcements at COP15.

They committed $800 million over seven years to four Indigenous-led conservation initiatives, announced support for the First Nations Guardians Network, next steps towards the creation of two significant Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas and committed millions of dollars for ocean restoration projects. The first in a series of bilateral nature agreements between the federal and provincial and territorial governments was also announced between Canada and the Yukon. The long awaited agreement with B.C. is expected in the New Year. 

Throughout the conference, Canada pushed countries to formally adopt the 30 per cent protection by 2030 target (commonly referred to as 30 by 30) at COP15, positioning it as a sort of north star for biodiversity in the same way that limiting warming to 1.5 C is for climate change.

Trudeau told reporters during a roundtable discussion he was optimistic Canada had a clear path to conserving 25 per cent of lands and waters by 2025 on its way to meeting the 30 by 30 goal. (Canada had conserved 13.5 per cent of lands and freshwater as of the end of last year and 14.66 per cent of marine areas as of June.)

At the same time, the federal government committed to a major shift in the way conservation and land use decisions are made to one that ensures Indigenous nations are in the “driver’s seat.”

“They’re saying everything we want to hear, but there’s a little bit of a ‘well, let’s just see,’ because the track record — it’s not a great track record,” Clarissa Sampson, an ecological economist at the David Suzuki Foundation, told The Narwhal. 

In B.C. — the province with the highest number of species at risk — Premier David Eby recently directed his new minister of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship, Nathan Cullen, to work towards protecting 30 per cent of B.C.’s lands by 2030, which will be critical to meeting Canada’s international targets because the province has currently only protected about 15 per cent of land.

In a sit-down interview with The Narwhal at COP15, B.C. Energy, Mines and Low Carbon Innovation Minister Josie Osborne and Environment and Climate Change Strategy Minister George Heyman said the province is also changing the way land use decisions get made.

Heyman noted the province has committed to implementing the recommendations from a 2020 review of the way it manages old-growth forests. A key recommendation was to shift away from an industry-first approach to one that prioritizes ecosystem health and determines from there how economic activity fits in, he said.

“To me, it’s a matter of understanding that both environmental and ecosystem health and economic activity are interdependent,” Heyman said.

Osborne added that the creation of the Ministry of Water, Land and Stewardship was a significant step as it brought land-use planning and natural resource policy-making under one roof so to speak.

“That really is a recognition of the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act and the fact that we must do business differently in the province,” she said.

Osborne said B.C. is shifting its approach to conservation away from the “hard edges” of parks and other protected areas, echoing comments Trudeau made earlier this month about leaving a parks-style approach to conservation behind.

Instead, the province is looking at ways to preserve “the ecosystem services that we all rely on, but at the same time, allow for certain activities done in the right place in the right way by the right people,” Osborne said.

Conservation groups worry B.C. may rely on ‘fancy’ accounting to meet goals

Internal government documents obtained by The Narwhal suggest B.C. plans to rely on old-growth management areas, ungulate winter range designations and wildlife habitat areas — which do not ensure long term protection — to meet its conservation goals.

Dawe worries the approach is “a fancy way of basically hitting those 30 by 30 targets on paper.”

“In actuality there’s no way you can log a forest and call it protected,” she said.

“Anyone now that goes for a drive in a forested area or a mountainous area will see scars, cutblock scars across the land, so I think this green idea of B.C. is really starting to crack and break,” Dawe said.

Old-growth forests hold an immense amount of biodiversity. When they’re destroyed, so is their ability to support plants and animals, including endangered caribou and spotted owls. Their loss is also felt deeply by communities.

“Since I’ve been in Montreal at COP15 they’re going full bore deforesting my ancient lands. And I don’t know what to say, it’s disheartening,” Kwakiutl Hereditary Chief Walas Namugwis, whose English name is David Mungo Knox, told The Narwhal.

“We’re not us without our old-growth trees, we can’t make our totem poles, we can’t carve our big houses, we can’t carve canoes, without our medicines we can’t heal. So it’s another cultural genocide,” he said, at a hotel restaurant across the street from Montreal’s Palais des Congrès where negotiations were underway.

Back in his home territory on Vancouver Island, trees were being cut down near where coho salmon had recently spawned and in the habitat of the northern red-legged frog, a species of special concern under the federal Species at Risk Act.

“Governments need to grow a spine, push back against big corporate industrial market approaches and then let a more diverse economy flourish,” Mark Worthing, director of Awi’nakola Foundation, a new organization that combines Indigenous Kknowledge, scientific research and the arts to conserve and restore forests.

“We’ve lost the taste for announcements,” he said. “Stop talking about it, start doing it.”

“That’s pretty much been my take home from this too. We need radical change and that needs to come now,” Ma’amtagila Hereditary Chief Makwala, whose English name is Rande Cook, said. 

“We’re in a place right now where it literally is about the planet and we’re putting a timeline on the existence of humanity. For the health of all of us we need to make some real radical changes,” Cook, who is also part of the Awi’nakola Foundation, said.

Asked at what point the B.C. government would, for instance, issue a hard stop of logging in critical caribou habitat, Osborne noted the “importance of land use planning with Indigenous nations and really truly listening.”

“So incorporating those worldviews, those values and understanding what the solutions are we can provide together so that we know and we agree together enough is enough,” she said.

Osborne added that it’s also important to understand decisions around resource and land use impact communities.

“Simply stopping an activity overnight isn’t going to provide the kind of assistance or security or ability for a community to determine what its next steps are, how people are going to continue to support themselves and their communities and that has to be part of this conversation as well,” she said.

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

The eighth largest lake in the world is one step closer to becoming an Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area. 

Tsá Tué, or Great Bear Lake, is the backyard, the highway and the provider for the community of Délı̨nę, according to Délı̨nę Ɂek’wahtı̨dǝ́ (Chief) Danny Gaudet. Tsá Tué covers more than 31,000 square kilometres — roughly the same size as Vancouver Island.

The Délı̨nę Got’ı̨nę Government, Northwest Territories and Canada committed to establishing the proposed Sahtú K’aowe Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area, which would conserve Tsa ́Tué, by signing a letter of intent on Dec 17. The announcement was made at COP15, the United Nations biodiversity conference, which is concluding in Montreal on Kanien’kéha territory. The letter of intent also commits to exploring options for long-term funding.

Tsá Tué will bring Canada about 0.3 per cent closer to its goal of protecting 25 per cent of land and water by 2025. The three levels of government agreed to include Tsá Tué in Canada’s protected and conserved areas database. Gaudet said they reached the terms of the letter of intent over the past month, and aim to have an agreement finalized in the spring and do all the necessary work to fully establish Sahtú K’aowe by 2025.

It may seem quick, but it’s the culmination of decades of work and a consistent vision from their Elders, Gaudet said.

“All the Elders, they’ve pushed really hard last month to try to make sure that our interest is taken care of and to support Canada in what its initiatives are,” he said.

“We owe a big part to the Elders teaching us the direction and the vision.”

The announcement came on the heels of Manitoba, Canada and four First Nations also committing to complete a feasibility study for the proposed Seal River Watershed Indigenous protected area, which would protect eight per cent of Manitoba.

“Supporting Indigenous-led conservation initiatives through strong partnerships such as this one makes meaningful contributions to targets in Canada,” federal Minister of Environment and Climate Change Steven Guilbeault said in a statement about protecting Tsá Tué. “By continuing to work together, we all benefit, and it’s the only way we can achieve our collective conservation goals.”

The next step in a decades-long journey to conserve Great Bear Lake

The Sahtú K’aowe protected area is blanketed by boreal forest, and is home to muskox, barren-ground caribou, moose and grizzly bears. The lake is the homeland of the Sahtúgot’ı̨nę, the Bear Lake People. The self-governing community Délı̨nę, which means ‘where the water flows,’ is the only community in the watershed.

The Sahtúgot’ı̨nę have been on a long path to protect Tsá Tué. From the 1940s to 1960s, 740,000 tonnes of uranium tailings were dumped in the lake, as documented in an episode of TVO’s Striking Balance. 

The Sahtúgot’ı̨nę advocated for conserving the lake within their 1993 land claim, but the other levels of government refused. 

Years later, in 2016, the Sahtúgot’ı̨nę successfully established the Tsá Tué Biosphere Reserve. The massive 93,000-square-kilometre reserve was the first to be established north of the 60th parallel, and the first to be led by Indigenous Peoples.

While the proposed Sahtú K’aowe Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area is called a “protected” area, Gaudet emphasized how they will still engage with the land. They will still hunt, fish and rely on the resources the lake provides — but in a respectful way according to their own laws.

“We still intend to develop resources around the lake,” he said. But what sets them apart from non-Indigenous extraction is that after they go into the bush and harvest resources there is “no evidence that we were there.”

“For us, that’s conservation,” he explained. “We’re certainly water-rich, we’re resource-rich, we have tons of minerals in and around the lake. So there’s still this idea that we could go and develop our resources, but we want to do it in a manner that’s respectful of the environment, it’s respectful of the lake and all the animals, plants and trees around us.”

Countries at COP15 biodiversity conference agree to protect third of planet by 2030

Another element in the letter of intent that remains to be worked out is long-term funding. The Sahtú K’aowe protected area is connected to the Project Finance for Permanence Initiative in the Northwest Territories, which is a pilot project that aims to create funding agreements between private funders and all levels of governments that can “sustain healthy lands and local economies” for the long term.

The federal government recently committed to provide up to $800 million over seven years to support up to four projects for permanence Indigenous-led initiatives, which it says could protect one million square kilometres.

The letter of intent was signed just days before countries signed an agreement at COP15 to preserve 30 per cent of the world’s lands and waters. The agreement, reached on Monday, acknowledged the importance of Indigenous conservation.

According to a draft report of the COP15 meeting, Minister Guilbeault said: “Government has a central role but must work closely with civil society, the private sector, foundations, academia, citizens and the Indigenous and First Nations Peoples.”

Target One of the agreement outlines the goal to halt biodiversity loss by 2030 “while respecting the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities.”

Sahtú K’aowe is home to at-risk caribou and melting ice

The region is facing challenges with both biodiversity loss and climate change. The barren-ground caribou population has fallen from over two million in the 1990s to about 800,000 in 2015. In 2018, the Northwest Territories listed eight of its nine barren-ground caribou herds under its Species at Risk legislation.

The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada assessed barren-ground caribou as threatened in 2016, but they are not yet listed under federal species at risk legislation. The federal government announced $3.8 million towards barren-ground caribou conservation in the Northwest Territories earlier this month.

Gaudet said he has seen climate change affecting the landscape. 

“Ice, when we were young, was about eight feet. Now we’re lucky to get five, maybe six feet,” he said.

Winters start later, ice takes longer to freeze and it melts earlier, he said. 

“Last year, we had the water on the lake drop a little over a foot. That’s probably the first time in my lifetime that it dropped that fast in one season,” he said. He believes it’s related to melting permafrost.

“We don’t get the runoff that we’re supposed to. The water’s just into the ground, versus running off to the river or to the lake.”

Gaudet said Elders have been preparing for a future where water is scarce. And that’s why Elders said it was so important for Délı̨nę to ensure self-government — preparing for a future where outsiders come for the precious freshwater.

“People will need food, so they will come to this lake … Elders wanted to make sure that our laws, our customs and our beliefs, are adhered to by people that come to live amongst us,” he said.

Their goal, he explained, is preserving fresh water and resources for future generations.

“We certainly have to start being ready [for climate change],” he said. “We don’t want to be reactive. We want to be prepared.”

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.

“People never knew how special it was, before — this place we call home,” Stephanie Thorassie told me on Thursday morning, during a rare break from the COP15 biodiversity conference in Montreal. 

Now, all eyes are on the Seal River Watershed — that place Thorassie calls home — as it takes one step closer towards being formally recognized as an Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area. If established, it would protect eight per cent of Manitoba, and habitat that is crucial for beluga whales, polar bears and, of course, seals.

The watershed is dotted with lakes and wetlands, and sandy hills left behind by glacial rivers, called eskers, snake across the land. 

“It’s virtually untouched,” Thorassie said. “It’s pretty special.”

The watershed is located in the traditional lands of the Sayisi Dene, the Northlands Dene, the Barren Lands First Nation and the O-Pipon-Na-Piwin Cree Nation. Together they make up the Seal River Watershed Alliance, which has been pushing for the establishment of an Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area for years.

Ernie Bussidor, a member of the Sayisi Dene First Nation, began pushing for the protected area in 2016 and the alliance was founded in 2019, and received federal funding that year.

All of that hard work led to the announcement on Wednesday that Manitoba and the federal government will be supporting the alliance in undertaking a study to assess the feasibility of establishing the protected area. The next step is to sign a memorandum of understanding between the three levels of government to decide what will be included in the feasibility study.

“It’s great momentum,” Thorassie, who is from the Sayisi Dene community Tadoule Lake and executive director of the Seal River Watershed Alliance, said. “The federal and the provincial government are formally recognizing the work that we’ve been doing.” 

“It’s a really great way to start this work, because the three years of late nights, long hours and heavy pushing that we’ve been doing is starting to show.”

The 50,000-square-kilometre protected area would preserve the Seal River as the last major undammed river in Manitoba. Up to 70 per cent of Manitoba’s wetlands have been lost or degraded, and most rivers have been diverted or altered by dams.

Seal River watershed stores 1.7 billion tonnes of carbon emissions

Thorassie said they’ve already done “a lot of homework” to prepare for this stage, including recently publishing a report that outlines the watershed’s ecological, social and cultural values.

The report outlines the area’s significance for culturally important species like barren-ground caribou, which the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada lists as threatened. As well, the landscape stores a whopping 1.7 billion tonnes of carbon — about eight years’ worth of total greenhouse gas emissions in Canada. If that carbon was released, it would cause $314.5 billion in economic damages, according to the report.

The report estimated many values the watershed provides, including $192 million per year in value for conservation of species, $9.56 million in mental health services from visiting natural areas and recreation and $10.97 million per year in ecotourism revenue.

Memorandum of understanding to come for Seal River Watershed protected area

There are no specifics on the timeline or cost of the study yet — that will come after the memorandum of understanding is agreed upon.

Ninety per cent of feasibility studies in Manitoba have resulted in areas being protected, Ron Thiessen, executive director of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society’s Manitoba chapter, said

“Feasibility studies are a positive sign, as they signal interest and intent,” he explained.

Taking on the significant cost and resources required for this kind of study shows “a willingness of all parties to do the work needed to conserve nature and advance reconciliation,” he said.

Federal Minister of Environment and Climate Change Steven Guilbeault also said the feasibility study was an important step forward to establishing the protected area.

“This milestone demonstrates how much we can achieve to protect nature when we work together, advancing the goals of reconciliation,” he said in a press statement.

‘It’s our job now to make sure that they can see themselves doing this work’

Thorassie spoke to The Narwhal on the phone from COP15, while she was doing Christmas shopping, her first time actually walking around Montreal amid her busy schedule. She’s given 10 presentations so far, with two more planned. She said the alliance and two levels of government were negotiating right up until the evening before the feasibility study was announced.

It’s a lot of work and requires being in spaces like COP15 — but she said she remains grounded focusing on the communities’ needs.

She brought up the experience of her community, Tadoule Lake, just one generation ago. The government forcibly moved the Sayisi Dene to Churchill in 1956, separating them from the land and caribou they relied on.

“We lost one-third of our community during the 17 years we lived in Churchill,” Enie Bussidor, a member of the Sayisi Dene First Nation and senior advisor for the Seal River Watershed Initiative, told The Narwhal in a previous interview. He was born in Churchill and only returned home later in life.

Healing from these experiences is top of mind for Thorassie as she does this work.

“We’ve been in situations where it’s outsiders making decisions for us,” she said. “Governments making decisions for people that they have no connection to causes real harm to people.”

But with this Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area, the communities’ leadership has been at the forefront of decision-making, and will continue to be. And to Thorassie, this protected area is centred in healing and the good of the community.

“All I can really think about is how can we change the narrative for people in the communities who are still really struggling to break free from the trauma bonds that hold them together?”

She said the other next steps are creating jobs and training so youth can take on those jobs — many youth who don’t see themselves taking on these “science-y” positions.

“It’s our job now to make sure that they can see themselves doing this work,” she said.

She’s hopeful and confident as they take this task on. The watershed alliance received federal funding for its Guardians program, which launched this year, and they hosted a firearms licencing course. Both adults and youth guardians took part. And the person who beat out everyone else? A youth from Northlands Denesuline First Nation.

“That five-foot-two, 17-year-old girl who’s shy and quiet and kind of sitting in the background, got the highest score on these two tests,” Thorassie said, her voice filled with pride and excitement.

“These young women that are coming, I think we have to watch out for them.”

She said this is the ultimate goal going forward: supporting youth with education and Traditional Knowledge to set them up as “forces to be reckoned with.”

For now, she’s excited to finish up COP15 and go home to Tadoule Lake.

“I want to go out on the snowmobile. I want to see the caribou … I want to see my grandma.”

“I am looking forward to going home and setting my feet back on the land that I’ve been so busy advocating for.”

Updated on Dec. 16, 2022, 1:00 p.m. PT: This story was updated to include the fact that Ernie Bussidor, a member of the Sayisi Dene First Nation, began pushing for the Seal River Watershed protected area in 2016 and the Seal River Watershed Alliance was founded in 2019. It was also updated to correct a typo in Ron Thiessen’s name.

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 2019, three Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas were announced in the Northwest Territories in rapid succession.

Since then, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has voiced support for Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas — more commonly called IPCAs — with plenty of fanfare as it invested in 27 of them. 

But, according to the government of Canada, the three IPCAs created in 2019 are still the only ones officially established and recognized in the eyes of the federal government: the Ts’udé Nilįné Tueyata, Edéhzhíe and Thaidene Nëné. So, what’s the holdup?

Steve Ellis, one of Łutsel K’e Dene First Nation’s negotiators in establishing Thaidene Nëné, pointed out the three IPCAs established in the Northwest Territories seemed to happen in a flurry, but they were all in negotiations for at least two decades. For Thaidene Nëné, talks first started in 1969 and the agreement was signed 50 years later. It took that long to develop an agreement the community was confident in — and rightly so, he said.

“One thing that’s really bothered me in the whole IPCA thing is literally Trudeau being like, ‘IPCAs for all, celebrate! Money for everybody!’ ” Ellis said.

“And the real narrative behind it is: it’s not all that progressive, really. It’s a good opportunity, but it comes with all the same old strings that we’re used to from the federal government.”

Most, including Trudeau, have agreed that Indigenous-led conservation is key to Canada meeting conservation targets. 

The federal government has committed to protect 30 per cent of land and water by 2030, an international commitment that is centre stage during COP15, the United Nations biodiversity conference, in Montreal on Kanien’kéha territory. Canada needs to double its protected areas to meet that commitment — and Indigenous Peoples have proven how effectively they can protect lands, waters, plants and animals. 

With 500,000 square kilometres of proposed IPCAs across the country, vying for funding from government and private donors, the question remains: what’s getting in the way of progress?  

Long-term funding needed for Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas

While the Liberal government has made historic investments in Indigenous conservation, it has a ways to go in providing sustainable, long-term core funding to make IPCA proposals sustainable, Valérie Courtois said. As the director of the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, which helps establish IPCAs, she argues funding is not keeping up with the growing momentum of Indigenous conservation. She thinks the federal government has an obligation to provide core funding to get IPCAs off the ground — in part due to its ‘30 by 30’ promise.

“I’d like to see some sort of permanence around this,” Courtois, who is a member of the Ilnu community of Mashteuiatsh, said.

Short-term funding makes it hard for IPCAs to take off, and maintains a “paternalistic” relationship where the federal government hands out funding like an “allowance” rather than working with Indigenous Peoples nation-to-nation, she said.

“You don’t fund the U.S. as a ‘program,’ you fund exchanges with the U.S. as a partnership.”

Environment and Climate Change Canada told The Narwhal it has contributed $132.7 million since 2018 towards 98 “Indigenous-led area based conservation projects.” In 2021, the federal government announced $340 million in funding over five years to support Guardians programs and IPCAs. 

The ministry “continues to negotiate contribution agreements,” a spokesperson said in an email, adding that the ministry held an open call for Indigenous-led conservation proposals that closed in November.

A key to the establishment of Thaidena Nëné was establishing financial independence through a trust fund. This took the Łutsel K’e Dene First Nation about a decade of engagement with prospective donors, according to Ellis. The trust fund secured $15 million from private donors and $15 million from the federal government.

The trust fund assures Thaidene Nëné independence to spend the money as it sees fit, rather than being reliant on others. It uses the investment income to fund its operations.

“There’s such mistrust of government that I don’t think people [in the community] would have even signed the agreement without the knowledge that there was financial independence,” Ellis said.

For IPCAs that are already established, Ellis said it’s “almost impossible” to set up a trust. The land is the leverage, he said — if you establish the IPCA first, you lose that leverage.

That’s because typically the federal government and donors’ primary interest is being part of putting new “lines on maps” around protected areas, he said.

“The Indigenous stewardship is a ‘nice-to-have,’ not a ‘need-to-have.’ ”

‘We have to be very, very careful when it comes to people’s lives’

Courtois worries about what the road ahead looks like in establishing these protected areas long-term, and helping nations fully realize their visions.

“One thing that keeps me up at night, namely, is that there’s huge energy towards the establishment of new protected areas, but it’s not yet clear what the management and long-term financing of these areas look like,” she said.

She thinks about setting up young people on career paths within IPCAs — and the worst possible outcome she imagines is for those projects “to fall apart.”

“We know that you can’t set up youth with all kinds of hope and then have [IPCAs] fail. We have to be very, very careful when it comes to people’s lives.”

This requires Indigenous governments doing “as much internal work as possible” before establishing a protected area, Ellis said.

“As much time as you’re spending at the negotiating table making deals to establish a protected area, you should be spending twice as much time strengthening the governance of your nation, building your institutional strength.”

Thaidene Nëné’s final agreement requires consent from both the Łutsel K’e Dene First Nation and federal government to make decisions. Łutsel K’e Dene First Nation had some distinct advantages in establishing Thaidene Nëné, he explained. First, they had a lot of land on the table: 26,000 square kilometres.

“Size matters when it comes to raising money for this sort of stuff,” Ellis said. Parks Canada was interested and private donors were excited by the massive proposal.

The nation also had the advantage of time — and not all communities have that luxury, Ellis admitted. Their land wasn’t under threat when discussion of the proposal began, while many proposed IPCAs run up against the competing interests of industrial tenures like mining, forestry and oil and gas.

Ellis believes IPCAs are a way to push things forward, “dragging these governments behind us, as opposed to us waiting for them.” But he worries there are very few IPCAs that exist in practice, fully backed by Indigenous enforcement on the ground.

“There are some good success stories — but there’s some real pitfalls to avoid, that’s for sure.”

‘Knowing the government will break their promises … do we trust ourselves?’

Another fundamental barrier to joining co-governance agreements with Canada to run protected areas is the country’s dismal history of keeping its promises to Indigenous Peoples, Ellis said.

When the Thaidene Nëné agreement was almost complete, this was the concern he heard from community members: the Crown has not kept promises for 100 years, so why would they do that now?

Ellis said he answered these community members by telling them they were right. 

“Knowing that the government will break their promises and not fulfill their commitments … we have to rely on ourselves,” he said. 

“Do we trust ourselves to implement the provisions of this agreement? Do we trust our own capacity and our own people to do this? That was the real decision.”

The community voted 88 per cent in favour of the protected area. He said it’s not that anyone didn’t want the IPCA — the real vote was whether they felt the nation had built the financial and institutional tools necessary to take it on.

“That’s the question all Indigenous governments have to ask themselves. If you enter into these arrangements with Crown governments, they will disappoint you. So, are you confident enough that you won’t disappoint yourself?”

Disputed title and jurisdiction over land

To Ellis, IPCAs are a tool for co-jurisdiction with the Crown, but they do not meet the “ultimate objective” that most Indigenous Peoples have: exclusive sovereignty. At best, IPCAs are just one step in that direction, he said.

Jurisdiction is another hurdle. Indigenous Peoples never gave up jurisdiction over their lands and have constitutionally protected Indigenous Rights. But, so far, the only way to get the federal government to truly acknowledge Indigenous title to the land is going to court or through negotiations that can take decades and cost millions, Ellis said. That means there is disputed title to land in the vast majority of existing and proposed IPCAs.

“There’s no question that the federal government and provincial governments are not going to acknowledge any Indigenous sovereignty through IPCAs being established,” he said. “It’s not the final solution.”

Breanne Lavallée-Heckert, research manager for Indigenous Climate Action, agreed. She has her misgivings about IPCAs because of government involvement.

“We’re not going to solve things through frameworks developed by the state, because all of those frameworks have been built in maintaining the state,” she said.

It’s important to remember that Indigenous Peoples fiercely protect their lands and waters whether colonial governments acknowledge Indigenous territories as protected or not, she added

“The reality is all of Turtle Island is an Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area. All of this land is Indigenous land.”

To Ellis, the best IPCAs can do is leave the title question unanswered, as the Thaidene Nëné agreement does: the federal government and Łutsel K’e Dene First Nation acknowledge each party comes to the table with all its titles and jurisdictions intact, but does not define what those are since they have never been agreed to.

If there was one solution Ellis would want to see, it would be “easier pathways to have Indigenous title recognized.”

Provincial powers a challenge for IPCA recognition

Another piece of the jurisdiction puzzle when it comes to Indigenous-led conservation is the provinces. Most have not formally endorsed IPCAs. 

Lavallée-Heckert said this tension is top of mind when she hears Canada talk about its international biodiversity commitments.

“How much can the federal government actually make promises in the COP15 space when, structurally, Canadian federalism doesn’t even give them the authority to make those types of decisions?” she asked. 

There is inconsistent support for IPCAs across provinces and territories. Ontario’s Minister of Northern Development and Indigenous Affairs complained Canada’s approach to IPCAs “encroached upon [Ontario’s] jurisdiction,” according to documents obtained by The Narwhal.

While B.C. has shown some hesitance, a shift may be taking place. In B.C.’s recent cabinet shuffle, new Minister of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship Nathan Cullen was directed to work with Indigenous communities to reach the 2030 goal, including through the creation of IPCAs. 

“I’m hopeful that this signals a new approach on the part of the province of B.C. in supporting IPCAs,” Georgia Lloyd-Smith, staff lawyer for West Coast Environmental Law, told The Narwhal.

Meanwhile the Northwest Territories passed legislation that enabled co-governance of protected areas with Indigenous governments in 2019.

Ellis said it’s “not a bad tool as far as Crown legislation goes,” but that it has limitations — primarily how much money the territorial government has to spend on it. Thaidene Nëné receives resources from Parks Canada as a National Park reserve.

He said there can be more bureaucratic issues bouncing around different provincial and territorial departments, while Parks Canada is more stream-lined. But he noted the legislation has a lot of “deference” for Indigenous agency.

“I think it’s fairly progressive … It goes pretty far, but not far enough,” he said. 

As a next step, co-designed legislation is a solution Courtois encouraged.

“There are other regions of the world and the country that could really benefit from that,” Courtois said.

Sharing successes and failures to advance IPCAs

Capacity building is top of mind for Indigenous nations pursuing protected areas, Eli Enns, Tla-o-qui-aht political scientist and president of the IISAAK OLAM Foundation, said.

Enns co-chaired the Indigenous Circle of Experts, which first defined the concept of IPCAs in a 2018 report, after being tasked by the federal government to explore how Indigenous conservation could help Canada meet its international biodiversity commitments while improving Canada’s relationship with Indigenous Peoples, Enns said.

The circle named four things, or “moose in the room,” that would need to be addressed: jurisdictional solutions, financial solutions, cultural keystone species and capacity development.

To help address the capacity-building need, Enns co-led the establishment of the Pacific IPCA Innovation Centre, which centres education and innovation, offering workshops and curriculum to focus on capacity-building for IPCAs. The centre will grow into a network of campuses from Alaska to Costa Rica, Enns said. The first satellite campus, called Clayoquot Campus, was established in 2021 in Tla-o-qui-aht territory. It was established as a “legacy outcome” of the Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership, which is co-led by the IISAAK OLAM Foundation, the Indigenous Leadership Initiative and the University of Guelph.

“We on the IPCA innovation side are not leading the creation of IPCAs. That’s for the Indigenous governments,” Enns said. “The innovation side is about gathering and galvanizing all of the supportive elements that may be needed to support Indigenous leadership in the creation of IPCAs, sort of like pre-rehearsal, getting people together and building their core competencies.”

The partnership also created an IPCA knowledge basket, an online resource to share and gather resources for establishing IPCAs, and has the goal to establish a National IPCA Alliance to provide organizational supports to governments.The Indigenous Leadership Initiative announced another venue to help build capacity in December, supported by the federal government: a First Nations National Guardians Network, which will connect guardians across the country and create a more streamlined process to access funds. According to Courtois, it is the first program of its kind in the world.

Building up peer-to-peer sharing is helpful for Indigenous Peoples negotiating IPCAs with government, Ellis said. He said a formalized network would be “powerful.”

“[Crown] government, they have their institutional memory. But as Indigenous governments, which are disparate and spread out, there’s not that collective knowledge,” he said. “Every successive agreement, and every success or failure, should result in the next First Nation building on that and not failing the same way.”

Industry tenures can be a costly hurdle

New legislative tools co-developed with Indigenous nations, which “recognize underlying Indigenous jurisdiction and laws,” would be a big step, Lloyd-Smith said. She hopes the nature agreement between B.C. and Canada, which hasn’t been made public yet, could kickstart better tools for the recognition of IPCAs and Indigenous jurisdiction.

She’d like to see existing protected area legislation amended to recognize Indigenous jurisdiction as well.

Another central solution she’d like to see is provinces taking steps to limit the compensation that tenure holders receive when they are bought out.

“Crown governments are picking and choosing which IPCAs to support,” she said. “When an IPCA is in an area with a lot of industrial activity that Crown governments are benefitting from, it may be harder for nations to establish IPCAs in those areas.”

It often costs a lot of money to remove those existing tenures to create a protected area.For example, The Narwhal obtained B.C. government documents about the Kaska Dena’s proposed protected area in northern B.C. that revealed that buying out mineral tenures for the Kaska IPCA could cost between $24 million and $40 million.

Provinces can limit compensation amounts for tenures to make it easier for protected areas to be created, Lloyd-Smith said.

Ellis said a key element of establishing Thaidene Nëné was the federal government placing interim protections on the land while the agreement was negotiated, which blocked any new resource interests in the proposed area.

Otherwise, resource interests can buy up licences, even simply for the desire to get paid out, he said.

Dene Kʼéh Kusān: ‘always be there’

The Kaska Dena IPCA is an example of how many of these barriers can play out. The Kaska Dena face existing mineral tenures, and are figuring out how to build capacity, raise funds and engage the public. They received some federal funding, but have not received official recognition from the provincial and federal governments of their IPCA called Dene Kʼéh Kusān, which means “always be there.” They have struggled to get B.C. to the table for years, Gillian Staveley, a member of the Kaska Dena, told The Narwhal.

At the heart of Dene Kʼéh Kusān is caribou. Both of Staveley’s parents both worked with them.

“That is how they met — the caribou were their love story, and it became mine listening to them passionately talk about them around the dinner table,” she said.

She joined her dad on caribou recovery projects. She’d say she was too sick to go to school, just to ask to go on fieldwork trips with her dad — and once and a while, he’d let her skip to join him. But even then, the warming climate was causing ice to melt. She only became more aware of the threats.

“I’ve seen, within my lifetime, the impacts on northern mountain caribou with my own eyes,” she said. Many caribou herds across B.C. have been dwindling with some on the edge of local extinction.

“If my dad was still alive today, he’d be the first one to tell me how truly important it is for us to sustain lands for our brother species, but also to help strengthen our communities. The caribou strengthen the Kaska,” Staveley, who is a director at the Dena Kayeh Institute, said.

The Kaska Dena are holding out for an official agreement with the two levels of government to establish their IPCA. Until recently, they had trouble even getting discussions with B.C. off the ground. But Staveley said conversations with the province have improved, and she thinks they are at “a turning point.”

“I think so many of us are focused on building bridges, not barriers,” she said. “So how do we come together to figure out what needs to be done?”

Lavallée-Heckert with Indigenous Climate Action also talked about the land, waters and animals as relatives, and said there needs to be a centring of Indigenous worldviews in global decision-making to halt biodiversity loss and the climate crisis.

“Land back and Indigenous sovereignty is the solution to climate change, because we know how to work within these lands,” she said.

This requires a huge societal shift in how people and states consider value. Indigenous worldviews vary widely, but they overlap in centring relationships, Courtois said.

“Generally speaking, we all have a value of ensuring that the future generations have just as much opportunity as we do, if not more,” she said, bringing a sense of “responsibility” rather than entitlement to the earth.

“What good is a right if we exhaust it?” she asked.

“I have a right to hunt caribou. But I’ll be damned if I’m the one to hunt that last caribou.”

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.

B.C. Premier David Eby’s newly appointed cabinet is about to decide the fate of a handful of proposed projects, each of which comes with a slew of implications to biodiversity and climate. 

While provincial ministers wrestle with the decisions, delegates from across the country and around the world are gathered at COP15, the United Nations biodiversity conference in Montreal. The aim of the conference is to secure government commitments to slow the global biodiversity crisis underway — the crisis is sometimes referred to as the sixth mass extinction and is the first to be human-caused.

How B.C.’s NDP government balances industry and economy with protections for at-risk species matters more than just to the animals and ecosystems directly impacted by proposed projects. It’s the proverbial beat of a butterfly’s wings: decisions made in B.C. have impacts felt far beyond. As politicians at COP15 make promises to conserve land and water for biodiversity, it remains to be seen whether their provincial counterparts will green-light projects that eat away at critical habitat and fuel the climate crisis imperiling species on a global scale.

The projects B.C. will soon need to make a call on include the Sukunka open-pit coal mine in the province’s northeast, FortisBC’s Tilbury liquefied natural gas expansion in the Lower Mainland, the Cedar LNG floating terminal in the northwest and a Port of Vancouver expansion in the Fraser River estuary.

In the lead up to the United Nations conference, Canada was criticized for allegedly putting its forest industry ahead of conservation after a leaked letter from the Canadian ambassador to the European Union asked the EU to put the brakes on proposed regulation on deforestation-free products.

Last year, the world watched as the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history unfolded in B.C. — more than 1,100 people trying to stop the logging of old-growth forests were arrested, many of whom were subsequently charged with criminal contempt.

B.C. also continues to approve logging permits in tracts of old-growth forest, home to one of the last viable caribou herds in the southern part of the province. And the provincial government has faced criticism for subsidizing industries like oil and gas, a sector that has had severe impacts on caribou habitat in the province’s northeast. 

B.C. is negotiating a nature agreement with the federal government, a framework for how the two jurisdictions will work together to meet conservation goals. While the details are unknown, it could signal a significant step towards protecting the numerous threatened and endangered species living in the province’s forests, mountains, wetlands, rivers and ocean. But will the agreement do enough to protect the likes of endangered caribou and dwindling salmon populations?

Here’s what you need to know about four projects B.C. is about to green-light or kibosh — each with huge potential impacts on endangered species and ecosystems. 

1. The Sukunka coal mine in northeast B.C. would be built in critical caribou habitat

An open-pit coal mine called the Sukunka project, proposed by Swiss multinational resource company Glencore, would annually extract up to as much as six million tonnes of metallurgical coal — that is, coal burned to make steel. To get at all that black gold, the Canadian mining company would blast a remote mountain near Chetwynd on Treaty 8 territory in the northeast, stripping the surface of the mountain to get at the fossil fuel inside. 

The proposed mine overlaps critical caribou habitat. The population of the Quintette herd is estimated at around 120 individuals, according to provincial data. A lot of government time and money has gone into restoration efforts, including culling wolves, replanting disturbed areas and signing an agreement with First Nations to set up an Indigenous Guardians program and, eventually, create a 206,000 hectare park. The 2020 agreement also established interim protections for 550,000 hectares of habitat — the proposed mine is inside those boundaries. 

Not far away, after years of pleading with the province to take decisive action, two First Nations took matters into their own hands in a last-ditch effort to prevent neighbouring caribou herds from extirpation, or local extinction. Setting up a maternity pen on a remote mountain, West Moberley and Saulteau First Nations established a breeding program to nurse the population back from the brink. 

On Oct. 17, B.C.’s environmental assessment office referred the project to George Heyman and Josie Osborne, the ministers of Environment and Climate Change Strategy and Energy, Mines and Low Carbon Innovation, respectively. A decision was supposed to be made by Dec. 1, according to the requirements of the Environmental Assessment Act. But the province told The Narwhal the ministers can extend the deadline — retroactively.

“While the Environmental Assessment Act does require the ministers to make a decision within 45 calendar days, the act also allows this deadline to be retroactively extended so that ministers are able to take the time they need to thoroughly review the materials, seek additional information or carry out additional consultation,” a spokesperson wrote in an email. “We are not able to provide an estimate of the timeline for decision at this time.” 

2. FortisBC’s liquefied natural gas expansion in the Lower Mainland would increase emissions and marine traffic in sensitive salmon habitat

The proposed expansion of FortisBC’s Tilbury facility in the city of Delta would see the provincially regulated utility operator increase current production of liquefied natural gas (LNG) by more than 2.8 million tonnes per year. The expansion would also include building a new marine jetty in the Fraser River estuary, where salmon populations have been in steep decline for decades. 

The jetty and the expansion are subject to separate environmental assessments, with the proposed jetty currently under review. Like Sukunka, the legislated deadline for decision has passed. The project’s environmental assessment was sent to ministers Rob Fleming, with the transportation ministry, and Heyman, with the environment ministry, on Oct. 11.

“For both the Sukunka project and Tilbury Marine Jetty project, the ministers are carefully reviewing the final assessment reports and supporting materials from the Environmental Assessment Office (EAO) before making decisions on whether or not the projects should be approved to proceed,” the spokesperson wrote.

The point of the expansion project, according to the company’s description, is to supply gas to overseas markets and provide fuel for ships travelling to and from the greater Vancouver area, while also increasing the amount of fuel kept on hand in case of local emergency.

But First Nations and others are concerned a local emergency could end up flooding the entire facility. Tilbury — and most of the city — sits on a floodplain protected by a complex system of dikes and drainage. Delta dodged the worst of last year’s catastrophic flooding but the city faces an estimated $1.9 billion to upgrade its system.

Neighbouring municipalities, including the City of Vancouver, oppose the expansion, on the grounds that an increase in gas extraction, liquefaction and export runs counter to the region’s climate commitments.

It’s unclear whether struggling salmon populations can survive more development in an already heavily impacted environment. Any additional declines in a keystone species like salmon has a ripple effect throughout the broader ecosystem. Chinook salmon are an important food source for endangered orcas. The orcas will also face additional threats if the project is approved. Sound pollution from marine traffic negatively impacts orcas and whales and collisions with ships regularly kill marine mammals — and the Tilbury expansion would bring hundreds more ships into the Fraser River estuary every year. 

There’s a caribou connection as well: B.C. LNG comes from the northeast, where underground shale systems are fracked to free the gas. The whole region is heavily impacted by hydroelectric dams, forestry and oil and gas activity, which is how the Quintette and neighbouring herds ended up in such a precipitous position. Any increase in gas liquefaction on the coast means a corresponding increase in extraction — adding to habitat destruction and fragmentation. 

3. The floating gas liquefaction and export facility on Haisla territory on the north coast would add pressure to declining salmon and dwindling caribou populations

The Haisla Nation, in partnership with Pembina Pipeline Corporation, is proposing to build and operate a floating liquefaction and export facility a stone’s throw from the LNG Canada project, currently under construction in Kitimat. 

Cedar LNG would receive 400 to 500 million cubic feet of gas from the contentious Coastal GasLink pipeline daily, according to a project description. The facility would then cool the gas to  -162 C, reducing it to around 0.2 per cent of its original volume for transport overseas. That works out to three to four million tonnes of LNG annually.

Like the proposed Tilbury expansion, the project would have upstream impacts to caribou habitat and other species as demand for fracked gas increases.

At the local level, Kitimat has seen decades of industrial development. The town was built in the 1950s to support a newly minted aluminum smelter, now owned and operated by Rio Tinto Alcan, a Montreal-based subsidiary of the global metals and mining giant. Rio Tinto is just one of several major industrial operations in the northern valley — and Cedar LNG is part of a new wave of projects proposed for the town.

“We’re really in the midst of this gold rush, this energy industrial boom,” Mike Langegger, president of the Kitimat rod and gun club, told The Narwhal in a previous interview.

Powered by turbines fed via a reservoir on the far side of a mountain range, the aluminum smelter’s operations have had major impacts on salmon and endangered white sturgeon in the Nechako River. Rio Tinto’s hydroelectric generation produces more power than it needs for the smelter, selling the surplus to BC Hydro. Two First Nations downstream of the Kenney dam have been fighting in the courts for years to have some of the excess sent back into the river system.

Cedar LNG’s plans are contingent on receiving power from BC Hydro. Earlier this year, responding to public concerns, the company said “it is this critical design decision that will enable Cedar to produce LNG with one of the lowest [greenhouse gas] intensities in the world. Cedar is actively working with BC Hydro, who has confirmed that it has sufficient electricity for the project.”

If approved, the project would lead to an increase in shipping traffic in the Douglas Channel, potentially impacting migratory behaviours of whales and fish. Cedar LNG has argued against these concerns, writing in a technical memo about the project “marine species within Kitimat Arm already experience shipping traffic (existing levels of underwater noise already periodically exceed the … threshold for sensory disturbance); therefore, movement patterns of marine species are likely already affected.”

According to legislated deadlines, ministers Heyman and Osborne, as well as federal Minister of Environment and Climate Change Steven Guilbeault, should hand down a decision about the project on Dec. 31.

4. Endangered orcas and threatened salmon are at risk from the proposed Vancouver port expansion 

A decision on a proposed expansion of the Port of Vancouver was expected this year, but citing the need for approval by both federal and provincial decision makers, the assessment review deadline was recently extended to Dec. 16, 2023. 

The expansion would require building an artificial island in the Fraser River estuary and any unavoidable impacts to sensitive habitat would have to be offset by repairing or restoring other impacted areas in the watershed. 

In February, a group of concerned scientists wrote a letter to federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault urging the government to reject the expansion.

“Even at a fraction of their former abundance, it is still the rearing and migration grounds for Canada’s largest runs of Pacific salmon,” they wrote.

The group honed in on probable impacts to Chinook salmon populations and endangered orcas. 

“Due to the importance of Fraser Chinook to fisheries in both British Columbia and the United States, and their importance as primary prey for southern residents [orcas], Terminal 2 has implications for the persistence of these two significant transboundary species.”

Pointing out the incongruity of approving impacts to species and habitat, while also funding recovery efforts for threatened species, the group concluded, “if the conservation and recovery of Canada’s endangered and iconic wildlife species are a priority for the government of Canada (as previously stated), then the proposed Roberts Bank Terminal 2 project must be rejected.”

In previous email correspondence with The Narwhal, a spokesperson for the port authority said the federal Crown corporation is confident “the project can be built in a responsible way that protects and enhances the environment, brings lasting benefits to Indigenous groups and local communities, creates tens of thousands of high-paying supply chain jobs and supports economic resiliency.”

It argued the expansion of Canada’s busiest port is necessary in a report prepared for the federal ministry in September 2021.

“Federal and provincial governments have invested significantly in road and rail infrastructure that support the Port of Vancouver’s Roberts Bank terminals as a part of Canada’s west coast supply chain, but marine side capacity is urgently needed to support future trade.”

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.

When Jane Goodall visited Victoria earlier this year, she had an air of serenity about her. The octogenarian began to walk on-stage in front of a sold-out crowd, leaning on an assistant’s shoulder and using a cane to assist her. But then she abruptly hopped across the stage, lithe as can be — no cane necessary.

“That was poor 88-year-old Jane Goodall,” she quipped from the mic. 

The world’s best-known naturalist isn’t slowing down for anyone or anything — least of all her age. But when I caught up with her five months after her visit to Victoria, via Zoom, she seemed a little weary of all of her time on the road.

Bundled up in a turtleneck and puffy jacket, she told me that wherever she goes she tries to find a little pocket of nature — even in downtown L.A., where she was travelling at the time of our call. 

“If I go to a hotel, and there’s one tree, I will sometimes move my whole bed around so that I can just be there and see the tree,” she said. “A little bird comes on the palm tree outside the window. I like it.” Despite her attempts to find these little pockets, a day spent in nature “doesn’t happen very often,” she said — in part because of her relentless schedule to spread the message she learned from observing chimpanzees in their natural habitat.

That message — that we are part of and not separated from the animal kingdom and that we all have a part to play in saving our planet — is arguably more important now than ever before, as the world grapples with runaway climate change and the sixth mass extinction in history. 

“The absurd thing is the idea that’s been prevalent in economics for so long, that you can have unlimited economic development everywhere. But the planet has finite natural resources,” she said. “We can’t go on demanding more and more … So we have to have a different kind of business and a different kind of economy and a different definition of success.”

I chatted to Goodall about how she stays hopeful, Zoom fatigue and the dramatic changes to the natural world she’s witnessed during her lifetime.

You talk often about hope. I’ve noticed lately that it seems almost a little bit fashionable to be cynical, to kind of throw up your hands and say ‘it’s all hopeless.’ But you’ve said that hope is a survival skill that enables us to keep going in the face of adversity. Why do you think so many people seem to be giving up hope these days?

Well, it’s very obvious. If you just look around the world, then you can’t help but lose hope. I mean, you have feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. If you look at what’s happening politically, socially, environmentally. You’ve got the war with Ukraine, there’s major loss of biodiversity, we’re still losing forests, we’ve got industrial agriculture poisoning the land and soil, with its pesticides and herbicides damaging biodiversity. And so, you know, the picture globally is grim. And you can’t look around and not feel sort of despairing. So when people come to me and say, they’re losing hope, or they’ve lost hope, I say, ‘Well, you know, stop looking all around the world, just think about where you are, or some project that you really care about, and roll up your sleeves and do something about that.’

Throughout all the things that have happened in your life, have you ever felt yourself personally lose hope?

Well, I’ve been in a situation. I don’t know if it’s losing hope, but feeling desperate, because things had gone so wrong. Like when four of my students were kidnapped, and all the funding melted away from Gombe, and it looked as though it would have to be closed. And I knew that that could not be. So I had to go around with my hat in my hand, at the same time as finding a new executive director for the Jane Goodall Institute in the U.S. It just seemed hopeless. But we managed to steer through. And that was a pretty bad time. But I don’t think I’ve ever lost hope. I’ve been with my back against the wall. But that makes me determined to fight.

So is one of your tricks to staying hopeful to kind of turn that sense of anger or pressure around?

Yes, into action. Because being angry and depressed isn’t helping anything. And feeling angry, yes, one of course feels angry. And then you can channel that anger into making a difference. And the same when you feel kind of desperate and depressed. 

You’re 88 years old now. Looking back on your life, do you have any regrets?

Not really. I mean, I’ve made mistakes. But you know, we all make mistakes. And I’ve tried to learn from them. I suppose, in a way, I wish my first marriage had lasted but it couldn’t. So that was a shame for my son particularly. But that’s life. It just wasn’t working. And so it had to end. But apart from that, I don’t think I’ve had major regrets. I mean, I’ve done things that were silly, and had to go back and redo them. 

Right now, scientists and leaders of countries from all over the world are meeting in Montreal, for COP15, the global biodiversity convention, and hoping to reach an agreement to reverse biodiversity loss. How have you witnessed biodiversity change during your lifetime?

Massively. I just need to think of the house I grew up in. Me and my sister, we own it, she lives there with her family, and I go back between trips. And I would say, 50 per cent of the birds that I knew around that area as a child have gone, due mostly to herbicides and pesticides on people’s lawns, the proliferation of roads and traffic. They used to have hedgehogs. Gone. No more hedgehogs around there anymore. And when I was a child, if you opened the windows at night, then with the light on, your room was filled with bugs of all sorts. Now I get excited if one moth comes in — the insects have just gone. And that, of course, is one of the reasons why we’ve lost birds. So just in that one place, I’ve seen the result of loss of biodiversity.

And what kind of commitments do you think world leaders should be making at this COP15 in Montreal right now?

Well, I wish they would do more than make pledges. And somehow, we could find a way of having them actually do what they say they’re going to do. Because so many of the COPs have been all these wonderful pledges. And if you go back to the Paris Agreement, I don’t think any country lived up to what they promised in the way of emissions. So I don’t know. I mean, one always hopes. I think the main thing that goes on at these COPs is the networking that goes on and brings groups all passionate about the same area of conservation getting together, agreeing to collaborate, because it’s collaboration that we need, if we’re going to reverse climate change and loss of biodiversity. And those two go together, because climate change is definitely affecting the loss of biodiversity.

Earlier this year, when you visited Canada after a three-year COVID hiatus, what conservation work did you learn about that you found the most interesting or exciting?

Well, for one, I actually visited the re-greening of Sudbury. I was there as part of an IMAX film. I was there before, and the change was enormous. So that’s very exciting. And then I know that the Jane Goodall Institute of Canada is doing an awful lot of work with Indigenous people. And they’re using the approach of community-led conservation that we use all over the world, that they’re trying to get protection for more and more of the Indigenous lands. 

Do you ever want to just kind of slow down a bit and travel less and do less? Like, what is keeping you going at this point?

Well, lots of people said it must have been lovely during the height of COVID to be at home and stop travelling. I’ve never ever been as exhausted in my entire life, because I was doing up to four Zooms a day, all around the world. And my voice has never recovered. It just got so overused. So it was virtual conferences, virtual lectures, virtual panels, then it was messages. It was stuff for the different Jane Goodall Institutes — 27 of them. And it was just nonstop. I didn’t have one day off. I didn’t have one weekend off. I didn’t have one holiday. We decided that because during the pandemic, the number of hits on social media for me went up dramatically from about a million at the beginning of the pandemic to now about 1 billion. So it was decided, well, Jane should travel less and do more Zooms and social media, you know, that kind of thing. So what happens? Now I’m doing the travelling and having to do the Zooms as well. 

So you’re doing even more? I mean, I guess that comes back to the why question. You know, theoretically, you could do less, but you keep doing all of these things. Why?

I think I came to this world with a reason. I think I have a mission. And the mission is to keep hope alive. And encourage people to take action now, not just moan and groan, not just talk about what should be done, but actually roll up their sleeves and get to work and do it, and help people understand every day we live, we make some kind of difference. And we can choose what kind of difference we make. So if enough people are making ethical choices in how they live, then that’s going to move towards a much better world.

And where do you recommend that people start? 

Well, I feel one of the major problems we’re facing vis-a-vis climate change, loss of biodiversity, is industrial agriculture, and particularly farming of animals — billions and billions of animals around the world are in factory farms, so that they all need to be fed, huge areas of land cleared to grow the food to feed them, lots of fossil fuel used to move the food, get the grain to the animals, get the meat to the table and sometimes around the world. And so, they also produce methane gas, which is a very, very virulent greenhouse gas, and all these things are contributing to climate change. So moving towards a vegan diet if possible, and you know, otherwise, please be vegetarian. But when you learn how the laying hens are treated, when you learn how the milk cows are treated, it makes you so sick that you don’t want to eat those eggs or drink that milk. So I just stopped.

How long have you been vegan for? 

I won’t say I’m 100 per cent vegan. During the pandemic I was because I was at home, and you could choose the food. But you know, when you’re traveling all the time, you just cannot be unless you take food with you. We ask people to do vegan meals. I went vegetarian in 1969 when I read Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation, and I am vegan as much as I can now. 

What does a perfectly happy day look like for you?

Well, a happy day for me is if I can be out in nature somewhere. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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.

A First Nations Guardians Network, announced Friday, is the first of its kind in the world, Valérie Courtois, director of the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, said. And it’s all thanks to the demands that Indigenous guardians made themselves back in 2014.

At that meeting, Indigenous guardians — who steward and monitor their territories — called for a national guardians network, stable funding and for the role of guardians to be established as a profession in Canada. 

After years of engaging with government and communities, on Dec. 9 Courtois announced the official launch of the First Nations Guardians Network to meet those demands.

“This is the culmination of over 40 years of work of Indigenous Nations,” Courtois said during the announcement, acknowledging the original modern Guardian program, the Haida Watchman. “It’s worth celebrating.”

She announced the network at COP15, the United Nations biodiversity conference in Montreal, on Kanien’keha:ka territory. She said the network sets an example on the world stage.

“Canada is a global leader in conservation and that’s due in no small part to [Indigenous] leadership on the ground,” Courtois said, in an interview with The Narwhal.

“If we can serve as a model to other regions … it’ll be good for all of us.”

To start, the network will receive $5.8 million from the federal government to cover operations through to 2026. Funding the federal government previously announced to support Guardian programs is still rolling out, Courtois said during a media scrum after the announcement. In the 2021 budget, the Canadian government committed up to $100 million to support Guardian programs over five years.

“With initiatives like the Indigenous guardians we can fight the twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss, strengthen relations between our nations and build a better future for everyone,” Environment and Climate Change Canada Minister Steven Guilbeault said during the announcement of the new guardians network.

The network will serve as a one-stop funding shop, allowing Guardian programs to access needed resources more quickly, efficiently and in a way that aligns with the network’s values, Courtois said.

David Flood, a member of Matachewan First Nation, said the network’s streamlined funding will provide Indigenous governments a “stop-gap,” enabling them to do the work to build a “self-sustaining” program.

Flood helps run a Guardians program as general manager for Wahkohtowin, an organization that focuses on economic development and cultural revitalization, as envisioned by the Northeast Superior Regional Chiefs’ forum in Ontario in 2015.

Flood said guardians will be able to focus on their nation’s priorities, rather than worrying where the next year’s money will come from.

“That’s our inherent right,” he said. “We shouldn’t be scrounging for these kinds of resources, if our treaty counterparts would step forward in a meaningful way.”

New network to free guardians to focus on work on the ground

In less than a decade, the number of Guardians programs has grown from 30 to more than 120, Courtois said.

The new network will not only connect guardians who are from far-apart Indigenous territories, enabling them to learn from each other, it will also provide support on common issues, such as data management.

“As the network grows, it will be meeting what is an existing and growing demand on the ground,” Courtois explained.

While Environment and Climate Change Canada will still provide funding, the network, rather than individual Guardian programs, will “bear the burden” of accountability to the federal government.

“Essentially, what that means is that the Guardian programs can do what they’re good at, which is be guardians, as opposed to filling out application forms and reporting and all that administrative burden that comes from accessing federal funds,” Courtois said.

“I remember when I was managing the Innu Nation Guardian program, 80 per cent of my time was filling out applications and writing reports,” she said.

Jimmy Morgan, lead Guardian for the Gitanyow Guardian program in northern B.C., has been doing this work for nine years. Morgan is familiar with the capacity issues Guardians programs face — he is part of Nature United’s technical support team for Indigenous guardians that aims to tackle that very issue, and he was part of the working group that got the national guardian network off the ground.

Morgan said most programs don’t have the money to hire someone dedicated to all that report-writing to cobble together small grants and short-term funding. Like Courtois, he sees that means nations are taking biologists or guardians out of the field to meet the administrative demand, which hinders their capacity.

“You can’t move forward or develop if you’re still stuck in one position,” he said.

Indigenous guardians network to address funding delays and precariousness

The  new network will ensure Guardian programs have access to stable, certain funding. Morgan said this consistent core funding has the potential to make a huge difference in meeting the everyday needs of guardians, like buying a truck to get around the territory.

“Sometimes it takes so long to get that money that the truck you had in your proposal isn’t even there anymore,” he said. 

Courtois said there have also been cases where guardians have been laid off because programs were having to wait too long for funding.

“This is a serious career path for young people and the worst thing that can happen is you lose your job because the funding doesn’t flow yet or it’s run out,” Courtois noted.

Funding delays interrupt and impede the important work guardians do, whether it’s helping to manage parks and other protected areas or tracking the relationship between people and wildlife, Courtois said.

For now, the Indigenous Leadership Initiative (ILI) is serving as a sort of secretariat for the guardian network, Courtois explained.  But the plan is for the network to be an independent body. And once the staff and structures are fully in place the initiative will step back, she said.

“ILI’s goal is that every First Nation that wants a Guardian program should be supported and enabled to have one,” Courtois said. And, the organization will continue to advocate for more funding and support for guardians.

Morgan hopes the network will also help establish the guardian profession and gain them recognition for their roles being the “eyes and ears” on the territory for their leadership and communities.

Morgan said not only do guardians bring practical skills like search and rescue and wildlife monitoring, but they are also part of a much bigger movement of reasserting leadership and stewardship on the land.

“It’s a chance to assert your authority over territory. Not that we own it, but that we’re here to take care of it,” he said.

Network announced in wake of $800 million commitment from the feds

The launch of the network comes on the heels of an announcement on Wednesday that Canada will invest up to $800 million for four large-scale Indigenous-led conservation initiatives — though no agreements are in place and no details are public yet.

“It’s groundbreaking and fundamental,” Flood said about the investment. In his 30 years advocating for Indigenous Rights, he said he is finally seeing more support for Indigenous conservation within bureaucracy, even though there is still a way to go.

He said one challenge is the fact provinces aren’t always on the same page when it comes to climate change, biodiversity and Indigenous conservation. 

Six provinces lack species at risk legislation. Flood sees issues in Ontario, which has cut environmental protections. In October, three First Nations brought Ontario to court over its management in the boreal forest. Meanwhile, The Narwhal obtained documents showing Ontario feared Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas imposed on provincial jurisdiction.

But Flood is full of optimism about the national guardians network, and believes it will bring empowerment and mentorship to Indigenous Peoples as they pursue their goals for their lands and cultures.

“I just can’t help but think that the network of guardians is going to elevate that pool of knowledge systems, awareness and sharing — and accelerate cultural revitalization that is reversing the impacts of the residential schools in a very accelerated way,” he said.

“I see bright, positive, real opportunities to help the world, Indigenous Peoples around the world, and showcase some of the work we can do in the Canadian context.”

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

The B.C. government has committed to protecting 30 per cent of the province’s land by 2030, joining global efforts to protect nature and reverse potentially disastrous biodiversity loss.

The commitment to double B.C.’s current land protections was made in Premier David Eby’s mandate letter to Nathan Cullen, B.C.’s new Minister of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship. Eby instructed Cullen to ensure land operations in the province guarantee sustainability for future generations and to work closely with Indigenous communities to achieve that goal.

“We have seen the impacts of short-term thinking on the British Columbia land base — exhausted forests, poisoned water and contaminated sites,” Eby’s letter states. “These impacts don’t just cost the public money to clean up and rehabilitate, they threaten the ability of entire communities to thrive and succeed.”

The letter instructs Cullen to partner with the federal government, industry and communities, and to work with Indigenous communities to reach the 2030 protection goal, including through the creation of Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas. Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs) are gaining recognition worldwide for their role in preserving biodiversity and securing a space where communities can actively practice Indigenous ways of life.

“By planning carefully, we can ensure our province enjoys the best of economic development while conserving wild spaces,” Eby writes. “Indigenous partners in this critical work can bring their expertise, knowledge and priorities to the table to ensure this effort lasts for generations.”

B.C. is poised to announce a long-awaited nature agreement with the federal government that will include a commitment to new protected areas and, according to internal documents obtained by The Narwhal, new protections for “high profile” species such as boreal caribou and spotted owls. The agreement is referenced in Cullen’s mandate letter, but no details are provided other than that it includes the goal to protect 30 per cent of the province by 2030.

About 15 per cent of B.C.’s land is currently conserved in provincial and federal protected areas. 

All members of B.C.’s new cabinet received mandate letters Dec. 7 following a cabinet shuffle that saw Cullen’s predecessor Josie Osborne moved to the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Low Carbon Innovation.

In Cullen’s letter, Eby also asks the MLA for Stikine to work with other ministries to develop a “new conservation financing mechanism to support protection of biodiverse areas.” 

Conservation groups were quick to applaud the commitments — made as delegates from around the world gather in Montreal for COP15, the United Nations biodiversity conference — calling the news “very encouraging,” “fantastic” and “worthy of international and national attention.” 

“It’s great to see provinces like B.C. and Quebec recognizing that the environment and protecting nature is critical, not just for nature, but for the well-being of people and the prosperity of our society,” Dan Kraus, director of national conservation for Wildlife Conservation Society Canada, told The Narwhal, referring to a recent commitment by the Quebec government to protect 30 per cent of its territory by 2030.

Ken Wu, executive director of the Endangered Ecosystems Alliance, said B.C. should be commended for committing to federal targets for protecting nature and biodiversity. 

“It’s more than what most provinces have done,” Wu said in an interview. “With the exception of Quebec, most provinces have been conservation laggards both in terms of target and in terms of providing funding. So this is an important step.”

Gillian Staveley, director of land stewardship and culture with the Dena Kayeh Institute, said she is pleased the B.C. government is “finally” talking about Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas. She praised the “cross-government approach” and called the minister’s letter a “strong mandate.” 

“We look forward to rolling up our sleeves and meeting with Minister Cullen as soon as possible to get discussion underway in the work with B.C. to really make our proposed IPCA a reality for the benefit of all British Columbians,” Staveley texted as she boarded a flight to Montreal to attend COP15.

The Kaska Dena aim to protect a wildlife-rich area in their territory, known as the “Serengeti of the North,” through a proposed Indigenous protected area that would conserve a 40,000 square-kilometre region. 

The Kaska protected area in northern B.C. would surround or connect to six existing protected areas, conserving watersheds and critical habitat for caribou and other species at risk of extinction while creating sustainable jobs. Staveley noted that Cullen has always been supportive of Dene K’eh Kusān, which in Kaska Dena means “always will be there.”

“Having 30 by 30 as a policy priority is also a big step towards the action we need,” Staveley said. “It leaves us hopeful that Premier Eby intends to be an activist premier and he understands the urgency to getting these protections in place to address climate change and loss of biodiversity.”

B.C. called the ‘biodiversity jewel’ of Canada

Wu and Kraus said they will be watching closely to see which areas of B.C. are protected, noting it’s of paramount importance to conserve areas at the highest risk of biodiversity loss.

Kraus called B.C. the “biodiversity jewel” of Canada. The province has almost 700 globally imperilled species, more than any other province or territory, and a high number of globally threatened ecosystems — 88 at last count, but Kraus noted that ecosystems are not tracked nearly as well as individual species. B.C. also ranks number one in Canada for endemic species, which top 100. Endemic species do not occur naturally in any other part of the world. 

“What happens in B.C. is critical for meeting both national and global biodiversity targets,” Kraus said. 

Places with high numbers of threatened species and globally imperilled ecosystems include the Lower Mainland and Okanagan area in B.C.’s interior, as well as the provincial capital area of Victoria where almost nothing remains of the now-rare Garry Oak ecosystem that once carpeted the region. 

“We do know where those places are,” Kraus said. “And that focus on biodiversity areas allows us to protect habitat that will [conserve] a whole bunch of species at risk — globally imperiled species [and] nationally imperiled species that aren’t yet listed under the Species At Risk Act … we can be proactive in conserving them by protecting those habitat areas.”

Eby’s letter also instructs Cullen to “protect wildlife and species at risk.” It makes no mention of enacting a stand-alone law to protect B.C.’s growing number of species and ecosystems at risk of extinction, as promised in the 2017 mandate letter for B.C. Minister of Environment and Climate Change George Heyman — but then quietly dropped by the B.C. NDP government.

Instead, Cullen is asked to protect and enhance B.C.’s biodiversity by implementing the recommendations of an old-growth strategic review panel and a somewhat vague, previously announced strategy called Together for Wildlife. 

Wu said Eby’s commitment to create a new conservation financing mechanism “may just be words” but the words signify the province is on the right path to establish economic development funding for First Nations tied to protecting places at the greatest risk of biodiversity loss. 

“If they follow through with that, without spin, then that is a monumental leap forward,” he said, cautioning that the province has undertaken “creative accounting” in the past regarding how it counts protected areas. Designations such as old-growth management areas, ungulate winter range and wildlife habitat areas lack permanence or the standards of legally protected areas, Wu pointed out. 

“Some of these conservation regulations are sort of like the cryptocurrency of protected areas,” he said. 

New initiatives could end B.C.’s ‘war in the woods’

Other key elements of Cullen’s mandate include working with First Nations to “improve the protection and stewardship of forest resources, habitats, biodiversity and cultural heritage in the Great Bear Rainforest Agreement” and to “work toward modern land use plans and permitting processes rooted in science and Indigenous knowledge that consider new and cumulative impacts to the land base.” 

Cullen was also instructed to work with the Ministry of Forests to begin implementation of recommendations made by an old-growth strategic review panel, which called for a paradigm shift in the way B.C. manages its forests and immediate deferrals from logging for old-growth forests at the highest risk of biodiversity loss. 

In a 2019 United Nations report, scientists warned global biodiversity is declining at an unprecedented rate, with about one million species facing extinction. They also said there is still time to turn things around with transformative change. 

At the biodiversity conference underway in Montreal, close to 200 countries are working to finalize an agreement to reverse biodiversity loss and avoid devastating outcomes from the sixth mass extinction event in the Earth’s history, caused by human activity. 

The global agreement aims to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030 and achieve its full recovery by 2050.

Wu said B.C. must develop protection targets for all ecosystems and prioritize protection for the most endangered and least represented ecosystems. Economic development funding for First Nations should be tied to the protection of the most at-risk most productive old-growth forests, he said. Old-growth forests with the highest productivity — the biggest trees and the most species at risk of extinction — are found in valley bottoms. 

Wu said the province will “get the job done” with a land acquisition fund that can also be used to buy private lands with endangered ecosystems. 

“If they protect the valley bottoms, southern parts of the province, lower elevations most at risk, [and] old-growth forests and ecosystems, then they could put an end to the 50-year-old war in the woods.” 

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.

Canada is on track to conserve 25 per cent of lands and waters by 2025, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Wednesday during a roundtable with media, including The Narwhal, as COP15, the United Nations biodiversity summit, officially got underway in Montreal.

Trudeau’s comments came on the heels of an $800 million federal investment to support four Indigenous-led conservation initiatives in Canada that could see an additional one million square kilometres protected in the coming years.

“There is a clear path to 25 by 25 that we’re really, really happy about,” Trudeau said, noting more conservation announcements were coming down the pipe.

Canada had conserved 13.5 per cent of lands and freshwater as of the end of last year and 14.66 per cent of marine areas as of June.

James Snider, vice president of science, knowledge and innovation for World Wildlife Fund Canada, told The Narwhal “we can be optimistic” about reaching the 2025 targets. But only if the government continues to support conservation with strong policy and funding, which, he said, needs to “be done in the right way.” 

An outstanding question, Snider said, is “what do we mean by protected and conserved areas.”

The “quality of protection is so important if protected areas are really going to be a mechanism to stop the loss of biodiversity globally,” he said.

During the roundtable, Trudeau said some resource extraction may be allowed in conserved areas.

“Building national parks is a great way of protecting very vulnerable areas, but as soon as you delineate one square and say that’s protected, what are you implicitly saying about everything outside of that square? That it’s suddenly just not protected, or it doesn’t matter at all?”

In a diverse country like Canada, faced with competing interests within communities, “that sort of binary approach doesn’t make a huge amount of sense,” he said. 

Instead, there could be various levels of protection within vast conserved areas — strong protection for vulnerable watersheds in one area married with responsible mining or commercial hunting in another, Trudeau said. 

Snider said a big conversation ahead is how those lands will be managed. But the primary goal, he said, must be the “stewardship of biodiversity.”

Charlotte Dawe, conservation and policy campaigner for the Wilderness Committee, said the quality of protection is critical.

“I have stood in freshly logged ‘protected areas’ supposedly made for the conservation of wildlife. If that’s what this government has in mind for meeting 30 by 30, it’s all smoke screen,” she said in an emailed statement to The Narwhal.

Conserving 30 per cent of lands and waters is ‘not a ceiling’ but ‘a floor’, Guilbeault says

The prime minister said not only is he optimistic Canada will meet the 2025 targets, he’s also confident Canada will meet the next major target of conserving 30 per cent of lands and waters by 2030.

Given the country’s size, achieving that goal could be a significant milestone in efforts to reverse biodiversity loss. Thirty per cent of Canada’s land is equal to the entire European Union, Environment and Climate Change Canada Minister Steven Guilbeault noted.

Canada is now pushing for other countries to adopt the 30 by 30 target as part of a new global agreement to save nature under negotiation at COP15.

Trudeau said he’s confident at least 120 countries are on board.

But Guilbeault warned the target is “not a ceiling, it’s a floor.”

Up to 50 per cent of lands and waters may need to be conserved to maintain biodiversity and ecosystem services globally, according to a recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“There’s a large area in Canada that will need to be protected in the coming years if we’re going to be successful in meeting these goals,” Snider said. 

Importantly, he said, “the government is supporting Indigenous led-conservation, supporting Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas as the primary means to get the 30 per cent protection, and that is the only way, if it’s going to be an equitable and just approach, for this level of conservation that we require.”

Indigenous leadership, collaboration between governments key to saving biodiversity

Tyson Atleo, the natural climate solutions program director at Nature United, told The Narwhal earlier this week that he remains hopeful Canada will meet its ambitious conservation targets, but he agreed the Canadian government can’t do it alone.

“The federal government can set these targets, but really the leadership of Indigenous communities and the provinces are absolutely essential to achieving these targets,” he said.

“Indigenous governments play and will continue to play a very active and strong role in the management of lands and waters and natural resources,” Atleo, who is line to be a hereditary chief of the Ahousaht Nation, said. 

But more resources are needed to support Indigenous-led conservation and land and resource management, he said, noting that when Indigenous Peoples take the lead, it usually yields “stronger environmental outcomes.”

At the same time, Atleo said there’s a need to establish “clear and shared” mandates between federal, provincial and Indigenous governments when it comes to conservation and resource management.

“Where there isn’t alignment between the federal government and the provinces, we see a lack of implementation on the ground,” he said.

During the media roundtable Wednesday, Trudeau said “the fact that there’s not always full alignment between the provinces and the federal government on the way to build a stronger future is going to be one of the challenges to work through.”

Atleo said he hopes to see a return to “reciprocal relationships with these natural systems that give us life.”  

“I hope people can start to realize our dependence on thriving natural systems for the well-being of our societies,” he said.

Atleo has witnessed a severe decline of Pacific salmon in his home territory of Clayoquot Sound on Vancouver Island.

“These are populations of salmon that our people depended on for thousands of years, suddenly at risk of extirpation,” he said, noting that loss threatens the well-being and health of his community.

A key shift moving forward, Guilbeault said, is it won’t be colonial governments or corporations imposing unilateral decisions on communities.

Indigenous nations will be in the “driver’s seat” on conservation and land use going forward.

“We’re completely shifting the way we make decisions on these things,” Guilbeault said.

The clash between mining and biodiversity in Canada

But, even as Canada takes steps to reverse biodiversity loss, the federal government is encouraging new mining for critical minerals, used for instance to create batteries for electric cars or solar panels.

Trudeau said it’s a matter of finding balance between those two goals. Considering, for instance, the environmental impacts of a new mine, whether they can be managed, whether the mine is proposed in a particularly sensitive ecological area or in a place that “all things considered is not a terrible place to have a mine overall.”

It’s a matter of “making sure you’re listening to all the range of voices, making sure that there’s proper science done, making sure there’s accountability on the business case — that means that there’s money to clean it up if it goes belly up,” he said. “All those different things have to be included in the decision making upfront.”

“As the world tries to move away from fossil fuels, Canada has an important role to play, but we have to do it right,” Guilbeault said.

However, Canada has a long history of prioritizing the needs of industry over those of nature to overcome. Across Canada there are numerous examples of governments approving new logging, mining, oil and gas extraction or urban development in habitat that’s critical to endangered caribou, salmon, whales and other at-risk species.

Canada has positioned itself as “progressive on biodiversity and on nature and environment related issues,” Aliénor Rougeot, climate and energy program manager at Environmental Defence, said in an interview earlier this week. But “there’s an ongoing story of sacrificing biodiversity for the benefit of short-term economic gains.”

She pointed, for instance, to ongoing concerns about the devastating impacts of Alberta’s massive tailings ponds in the oilsands.

There is hope for a better future for nature and people. Rougeot noted Canada has made progress on its nature commitments and it’s possible to do more quickly.

“Resilient, rich biodiversity could be a huge asset in the fight against climate change,” she added.

“The one caveat,” Rougeot said, is “we can’t keep making exceptions for industries.”

‘Humanity has become a weapon of mass extinction’

There are high hopes COP15 will produce a strong global biodiversity agreement and mark a turning point for saving species after countries failed to fully meet any of the targets in the last agreement in place between 2010 and 2020.

Scientists warn a million species are at risk of extinction worldwide as biodiversity declines faster than at any other point in human history.

The dramatic decline in biodiversity has been called the “forgotten crisis” because it hasn’t garnered the same attention as the climate crisis, Rougeot said. 

The hope, she said, is that the Montreal summit underway now could be for biodiversity what Paris was for climate in 2015.

But that outcome is far from certain. Countries made limited progress during pre-negotiations over the weekend. And the draft framework remains riddled with bracketed text, which signal points of disagreement among the 196 parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity.

On Tuesday United Nations Secretary General António Guterres pressed governments to meet the urgency of the moment.

“With our bottomless appetite for unchecked and unequal economic growth, humanity has become a weapon of mass extinction,” he said.

“It’s time to forge a peace pact with nature.”

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

The B.C. government appears poised to announce new protections for “high profile” species at risk of extinction, including boreal caribou and spotted owls, as part of a long-awaited nature agreement with the federal government, according to documents obtained by The Narwhal through a Freedom of Information request.

One document suggests the B.C. government’s decision to sign a nature agreement with Ottawa is motivated by a desire to sidestep potential federal interventions to protect at-risk species and their habitat. Details of the nature agreement have not yet been announced but speculation is it will be released any day to coincide with COP15, the United Nations biodiversity conference that opened Nov. 6 in Montreal. 

Federal Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault recently said the federal government will step in if B.C. and other provinces fail to protect habitat for at-risk species such as caribou, telling provinces “the party is over.” Under a rarely used provision in Canada’s Species at Risk Act, Ottawa has the right to override provincial land use decisions, such as whether to issue logging permits, if a species faces imminent threats to its recovery.

“Advancing a nature agreement is one strategy to reduce the risk of federal intervention in provincial land use,” says an April 29 briefing note to Lori Wanamaker, then deputy minister to former B.C. Premier John Horgan. 

A draft briefing note for Josie Osborne, B.C. Minister of Lands, Water and Resource Stewardship, says B.C. and Canada are looking to establish a “path forward” for the recovery of “high profile” species, listing boreal caribou and spotted owls as two examples.

The April 13 note says the nature agreement will position B.C. and Ottawa to “work more collaboratively to achieve shared recovery goals” for species at risk of extinction. 

Funding for the agreement will be shared equally between B.C. and Canada, while the agreement will “maintain provincial jurisdiction,” according to the briefing notes. As one example, Osborne’s briefing note says B.C. will “proactively” demonstrate “effective protection and piloting planning for species not yet listed like the fisher and western bumblebee.” 

The term “not yet listed” refers to vulnerable species that have not yet been listed under Canada’s Species at Risk Act, which could potentially trigger federal interventions aimed at preventing local or global extinctions.

Charlotte Dawe, conservation and policy campaigner for the Wilderness Committee, said the strategy to deal with at-risk species in B.C., as outlined in the briefing notes, will not fundamentally change the trend of species extinction in B.C., which has more at-risk species than any other jurisdiction in the country and no stand-alone legislation to protect them. 

“This signals to me a way for the B.C. government to get the federal government off their backs,” Dawe said. “They’re going to be basically protecting a few species and continuing with business as usual, in the habitat of the rest of the 1,900 species at risk of extinction in B.C.”

“This isn’t the system change that we need. It’s just more incremental steps to sort of appease the federal government and appease the public and hope that they can get away with just doing this — the bare minimum.”

Ecojustice law reform specialist Victoria Watson said the environmental law charity has been concerned for some time that the nature agreement will focus on a few high-profile species and areas “while doing little overall to protect and restore interconnected ecosystems.”

“In our view, the key measures of a good federal-provincial nature agreement are, first, how much habitat for at-risk species do Indigenous knowledge holders and scientists say we need to protect? And second, how much of that determined habitat is genuinely protected through the agreement or other measures?” Watson said in an emailed statement from Montreal, where she is attending the COP15 conference. 

She said Ecojustice also sees “some good reasons for hope” because the freedom of information documents help show the importance of Indigenous-led conservation and stewardship initiatives.

B.C.’s best shot at tackling the biodiversity crisis is a new law to protect the province’s biodiversity, Watson added.  

Concerns B.C. nature agreement won’t include long-term protections

The briefing note for Wanamaker also says  several conservation initiatives underway in B.C. — as yet unannounced — “will make use of protection measures that do not include establishment of a park.” Old-growth management areas, ungulate winter range designations and wildlife habitat areas “are likely to be used for species at risk and for old-growth management,” the note says. 

Dawe pointed out such designations do not confer long-lasting protection.

“I’ve stood in the forest of an ungulate winter range and wildlife habitat area, [and] old-growth forest, and I’ve stood in it after it was clear cut,” she said. “So these do not offer permanent protection. And I think that’s exactly why the government is relying on these rather than legal protection through something like a park, or something like law reform, which would limit companies from logging in [at-risk species] habitat in the first place.”

The nature agreement was first announced almost two years ago, in response to a petition the environmental law charity Ecojustice sent to federal Minister of Environment and Climate Change Steven Guilbeault on behalf of the Wilderness Committee. The petition demanded the federal government issue an emergency order under Canada’s Species at Risk Act to protect the three remaining spotted owls in B.C., which rely on old-growth forests for their survival. (Since then, two owls have died, leaving only one wild-born spotted owl in the Canadian wild.) Only vague information about the nature agreement was released at the time. 

In an emailed statement in response to questions, the B.C. Ministry of Lands, Water and Resource Stewardship said the province is committed to working with the federal government to ensure “we manage and maintain” B.C.’s biodiversity. The ministry said negotiations on the B.C.-Canada nature agreement are ongoing and the government will provide an update “in the near future.” 

According to the briefing notes, topics covered in the nature agreement include: ecosystem and habitat conservation, protection, restoration and stewardship; species at risk recovery and protection; Indigenous conservation-based leadership and partnerships; and ecosystem knowledge and information.

The briefing note to Wanamaker says the commitment to develop the nature agreement arose as part of addressing Ecojustice’s legal petition “seeking federal intervention for spotted owl habitat protection” under the Species at Risk Act. The note described the Act as a “safety-net legislation” designed to “assert federal control over provincial interests if provinces fail to implement effective conservation actions.” 

It goes on to call the Act “a powerful and highly prescriptive legislative framework for [species at risk] recovery that forces relatively inflexible planning and process requirements.” 

It also states that the federal legislation “treats all listed species as equal” and puts primary emphasis on the identification and protection of critical habitat to meet recovery objectives.

Dawe questioned the sincerity of the B.C. government’s stated commitment to protecting species at risk. “The fact that we have environmental groups and law groups that have to legally take the government to court in order for them to do anything to halt extinction in the province is just not the way it should be,” she said. “The onus should not be on the public and organizations to force the government to do what they’re supposed to do.”

B.C. lacks legislation to protect endangered species

B.C., along with three other provinces and the Yukon, lacks stand-alone legislation to protect at-risk species, despite a 1996 commitment to enshrine legal protections. Canada’s Species at Risk Act applies automatically only to species on federal land, about five per cent of the country, meaning that most at-risk species in Canada have few, if any, meaningful protections. 

The B.C. Ministry of Land, Water and Resource Stewardship said it is engaged in a number of processes and initiatives aligned to halt biodiversity loss and support the recovery of at-risk species. In addition to the nature agreement, the ministry said they include the implementation of all 14 recommendations made by an old-growth strategic review panel, the implementation of a strategy called Together for Wildlife and “assessment of conservation policy tools and statutes,” including planning for an update of species at risk legal lists. 

The ministry also said “new legislation and improvements to existing legislation and policies are being considered.”

The B.C. cabinet approved the nature agreement to be scoped as a bilateral agreement, with “check-ins” with key Indigenous partners and “some strategic engagements with Indigenous leadership focused on shaping B.C.’s position on Canada’s protected area targets,” the briefing note to Osborne says. 

Wanamaker’s briefing note discusses criticism by Ecojustice and the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, which take umbrage with B.C.’s claim that it has protected four per cent of the provincial land base through a mechanism called “other effective area-based conservation measures.” 

Other effective area-based conservation measures are areas that contribute to the conservation of species, habitats and ecosystems outside of protected areas. The two groups argued such areas, included in B.C.’s protected areas tally, do not meet all of the federal criteria and fail to prevent activities incompatible with conservation from occurring, according to the briefing note. The following half-page is redacted, while a summary of land conservation initiatives is completely redacted. 

The Narwhal received a 19-page document. Eight pages were partially redacted, and 11 were fully redacted. Redactions were made on the grounds that the information was subject to cabinet and local body confidences, that they contained policy recommendations and that disclosure could be harmful to intergovernmental relations or negotiations or to the financial or economic interests of a public body. 

The briefing note to Osborne says the nature agreement “provides a new mechanism for coordinating B.C.’s natural resource sector collaboration with the federal government to promote the stewardship of a range of values and effective protection and recovery for species at risk.” It says federal funding will be aligned with cross-ministry provincial priorities.

“This coordinated approach has the potential to improve the strategy and effectiveness of B.C.’s natural resource sector relations with the federal government,” the document notes.  

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.