Summary

• Alaska-caught salmon are more likely to be found in B.C. grocery stores than salmon caught in-province, partly because the Alaskan fishery is so much bigger than B.C.’s.
• Alaskan fisheries have also been more successful at obtaining certification as sustainable operations, even though some experts claim Alaskan fisheries are depleting salmon populations.
• Indigenous fisheries in B.C., such as the one owned and operated by Lake Babine Nation, prioritize sustainable harvests, and their products can still be purchased — though maybe with a little extra effort.

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Walk into a grocery store in British Columbia and you’ll likely see bright red sockeye salmon for sale, one of the province’s most iconic foods. You might assume the sockeye was caught fresh in B.C. — but it’s far more likely the fish was caught by Alaskan fisheries, and frozen before it reached this store.

Buying Canadian products is a top priority for many people, especially in the face of U.S. tariffs and annexation threats. Some Canadian conservation groups argue Alaska fisheries are unsustainable. So why is salmon from Alaska so much more common? 

A major challenge is volume: Alaska caught 194.8 million salmon in 2025 and 103.5 million in 2024. Some of those salmon would have spawned in B.C., Washington and Oregon — though it’s hard to say exactly how many of those would have returned to B.C. specifically. The catch includes all five species of wild Pacific salmon: sockeye, coho, Chinook, chum and pink. 

Meanwhile, B.C. caught 2.9 million salmon in 2025 and 2.4 million in 2024. 

Those are just commercially caught and retained salmon. Critics are concerned about how many fish are caught in commercial bycatch — those unintentionally caught while targeting other species. Recreational fisheries have an impact, too; catch-and-release can kill significant numbers of fish.

Alaska’s salmon fisheries also have something B.C. salmon fisheries don’t: a globally recognized certification that tells stores and consumers its fish are caught sustainably. The Marine Stewardship Council certification faces some criticisms from conservation groups, but having it helps get fish on shelves and into shopping baskets.

So, why don’t B.C. salmon fisheries have it? How do we find B.C. salmon in stores, and how could there be more of it? What’s the most sustainable? Read on.

Why does Alaska have a leg-up on B.C. in selling salmon?

Alaska catches more salmon, which means it can sell them for less. Smaller fisheries pay more to process and ship fish to the store. The sheer volume also means frozen Alaska-caught salmon is available all year.

Big grocery stores “don’t necessarily care about the story,” Brittany Matthews, chief executive officer of Talok Fisheries in central B.C., says. “Price is going to win every time.” And Talok, owned and operated by Lake Babine Nation, can’t compete on price alone. “That’s what we’re fighting with, to add that care, to add that story, to add the power of an Indigenous product on the shelves and make people think about it versus just grabbing the Alaska fillet,” Matthews says.

And Alaska’s Marine Stewardship Council certification can act as a golden ticket, selling the message to stores and consumers that the fish is sustainably caught. “Major retailers, almost bar none, want [that] certification,” Greg Taylor, fisheries advisor to Talok, explains.

The Marine Stewardship Council says, globally, fisheries responsible for 19 per cent of the world’s total marine catch have its certification. Getting it requires fisheries to go through a rigorous auditing process.

Due to climate change, forestry and overfishing, B.C. salmon fisheries “no longer produce the volumes to satisfy the Canadian market,” Taylor says.

The fact no B.C. salmon fisheries are certified “says a lot about how poorly our fisheries are managed,” Taylor argues.

Conservation groups have pointed out flaws in the Marine Stewardship Council certification program.

Smaller B.C. fisheries may choose not to take on the task and additional costs of meeting stringent reporting requirements — meaning they are less likely to be stocked in stores.

In 2019, the Canadian Pacific Sustainable Fisheries Society pulled the B.C. fisheries it represented out of the program, since it was likely to fail an upcoming audit, largely because of a lack of good data on the health and abundance of salmon.

Separately, conservation groups have argues the Marine Stewardship Council sometimes certifies unsustainable fisheries. In 2024, a group of Canadian conservation groups formally objected to Alaska salmon fisheries being recertified, but were unsuccessful. They argue that while Canada has been cutting down allowable salmon catch, Alaska is catching too many.

“Alaska’s indiscriminate harvest is preventing the recovery of vulnerable Chinook, chum, sockeye, coho and steelhead that are headed for Canada,” Aaron Hill, executive director of Watershed Watch Salmon Society, said in a statement about the objection.Misty MacDuffee, biologist and wild salmon program director with Raincoast Conservation Foundation, argues the Alaskan Chinook fishery “deprives endangered southern resident killer whales of their primary food source.”

Broadly, salmon are struggling. Lake Babine Nation paused its Ts’etzli food fishery in 2024 due to salmon struggling in shallow, warm water of the Babine River. “They’ve had a food fishery there for 8,000 years, and they stopped it two years ago because of climate change,” Taylor says.

Concerns about the Marine Stewardship Council’s certifications go beyond salmon: in March, the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition objected to the Marine Stewardship Council’s decision to recertify the Antarctic krill fishery.

The council’s Canada program director, Kurtis Hayne, says certifications are led by independent experts and include stakeholder input and peer review. The council itself does not lead assessments. Certification requirements include effective management and responsiveness to environmental conditions.

“We are confident in the credibility and outcomes of [our] assessment process,” he said in an emailed statement.

Where do these sustainability concerns about commercial practices come from in the first place?

In the open ocean, most commercial salmon is caught using purse seines and gillnets, which can scoop up non-targeted species, including from endangered stocks. Marine fisheries often catch salmon when they are still far away from their spawning grounds, and in B.C., operate on Canada’s best projections of what returns may be — but in reality, returns can be lower or higher than expected. If they’re lower, there’s no way to un-catch those fish.

Salmon have lost habitat due to development and are impacted by flooding, drought and warming water temperatures. Meanwhile, federal monitoring has declined, leaving spotty data for many populations.

Scientists and conservationists see the value in what First Nations have done for millennia: selectively fishing close to spawning grounds, a sustainable management practice called a terminal fishery. These in-river fisheries enable close monitoring of how many have returned to spawn.

Talok Fisheries, where Matthews is chief executive officer and Taylor is an advisor, is a terminal fishery that is preparing to apply for Marine Stewardship Council certification with support from Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Matthews says.

“Indigenous-produced, sustainably harvested, selectively caught — they hit all the buttons to what a sustainable fishery should be,” Taylor says.

The council told The Narwhal the Quinsam River pink salmon in-river fishery has nearly finished its assessment to be certified as well.

So how can a B.C. fishery compete with Alaska?

Talok salmon is stocked at Costco, Sobeys and Thrifty Foods, thanks to its partnerships with distributors North Delta Seafoods and Premium Brands. It also sells fish through Authentic Indigenous Seafood, a collective that shares processing and shipment costs across Indigenous fisheries. These partnerships have been essential and gave Talok the chance to explain its selective practices, Taylor says.

Otherwise, “for small producers to get into Loblaws or Sobeys is next to impossible,” he says, because the fees are too high and it’s hard to compete with bigger fisheries that can beat them on pricing.

Talok is one of the biggest commercial sockeye operations in B.C., but it still relies on just a couple boats and a beach seine net hauled by the nation’s members who remove fish by hand traditionally. That means a smaller carbon footprint than a fleet of fishing vessels on the ocean, Taylor argues.

During roughly the first two weeks of the season, Talok sees the brightest red salmon. They “have beautiful meat colour early on in our lake harvest,” Matthews says. When processed for the store, they don’t have the “shiny silver skin” buyers love. Alaska “floods the market” with silver-skinned, whole fillets, and has ample fish caught early “before any other B.C. inland fisheries have the opportunity,” she explains. Top that with the price, grocery stores are “going to take the Alaska fish — hand over fish,” she says.

After two weeks at Talok, the fish gets paler. Matthews explains those pale fish are harder to sell to grocery stores but are great for smoking.

The paler fish are sold internationally to be processed into food like fish flakes. The roe from these fish is also good quality, but there’s a limited market for it in B.C., Taylor says.

Alaska’s Bristol Bay sockeye fishery, which is Alaska-origin, is the world’s largest sockeye run. “Even in weaker years, Alaska still dwarfs B.C.’s total output,” Matthews says, and that “sets the tone for pricing, market expectations and buyer relationships.” 

Meanwhile, B.C. has smaller, more variable runs, “chronic” conservation issues and time restrictions. “Markets hate inconsistency — Alaska offers the opposite,” she says.

Talok targets enhanced stocks, which are boosted through hatchery programs, not sensitive wild stocks. Those enhanced stocks return to specific spawning channels.

“If you reduce harvest rates on the coast, all those surplus fish end up at the spawning channels,” Taylor says. This means Talok can target different stocks appropriately, which is good for populations, and also efficient: “like shooting fish in a barrel.”

People count the fish passing the Babine fish fence. Once a million fish pass the fence, they get the green light to fish commercially. It’s prep, wait, then “fish like crazy” in the roughly four weeks they have, Matthews says. Last year they caught 191,872 salmon, according to Taylor.

“We will never fish until we know we have a healthy number to sustain the channels,” Matthews explains. Fisheries and Oceans Canada allows a specific number of these enhanced salmon to enter the spawning channels to maximize productivity in the habitat, and then closes a gate to the channel. Talok harvests fish still heading to that channel, which would have died with their spawn in them if they weren’t harvested. Matthews says the fishery leaves enough for the eagles, the bears and the river system while preventing too many from going to waste.

There’s some debate around spawning channels, since surplus stranded fish can affect productivity of the surrounding habitat. Taylor believes they ultimately should be removed, but it’s best to catch the surplus fish while they’re there. If removed, resources in those spawning channels, like flow control, could be directed to recovering wild streams instead, and Talok could catch a smaller yield.

So why do Alaska fisheries have this designation if B.C. fisheries have found it hard?

First is the capacity to meet monitoring and auditing requirements. Then comes the contention over whether the designation is applied fairly. Alaska and B.C. have interception fisheries, meaning they catch fish in the ocean before they reach their home waters in another country, not in their own jurisdiction. 

Alaska’s constitution requires fish to be maintained on a “sustained yield principle” in its own state, basically meaning “don’t deplete it.” But it allows a fishery to intercept fish returning to Canadian rivers where salmon stocks are experiencing depletion.

“It’s frustrating to see them wipe out the stocks that we have — and then also in the grocery store chain market, to compete against the Alaska fisheries is tough,” Matthews says.

Taylor says “it’s appalling” for Alaska to apply a different standard to B.C. fish and the Marine Stewardship Council “is letting them get away with it.”

Though Taylor objects to this discrepancy he sees, he compliments Alaska for setting escapement goals for its own salmon stocks (meaning how many adults “escape” being caught and return to spawn). Most B.C. salmon stocks don’t have escapement goals. 

“You have to give Alaska credit for managing their own fishery. They do a much better job than Canada does — except when it comes to fishing our populations that are passing through their waters,” he says.

What does Alaska say?

Forrest Bowers, the Alaska Department of Fish & Game’s director of the division of commercial fisheries, says Alaska sells more fish partly because it has more salmon generally, and the vast majority of salmon caught spawn in Alaska. He agreed the Marine Stewardship Council certification helps get Alaska’s fish sold worldwide. He also points to the state’s escapement goals — the same ones Taylor commends — which prioritize sustaining populations into the future “over all other uses of salmon, including harvests.”

Bowers adds that Canada transferred allocation from commercial to recreational fisheries. In some parts of B.C., the recreational fishery catches more than the commercial.

In an emailed statement, Bowers said the cross-boundary fisheries are managed under the Pacific Salmon Treaty, and “a minute amount” of Alaska’s harvest would spawn outside the state. He says Alaska carefully monitors catches of Canadian-origin salmon to meet treaty requirements, “often forgoing harvest opportunity on our own stocks.”

Alaska’s commercial sector is made up of marine fisheries, though they can still be close to a river’s mouth. Pink and chum are its biggest catches. Bowers says in-river fisheries are not viable for Alaska because salmon spawn in thousands of waterways that aren’t connected by roads and would require airplane access.

“Attempting to harvest millions of pink and chum salmon in-river is not only impractical, but it would also lead to lower quality food products since pink and chum salmon sexually mature quickly in fresh water,” he says. He adds commercial operations in-river could lead to conflict with recreational and subsistence fisheries.

How many Canada-origin fish is Alaska actually taking?

Taylor says the reality is “no one knows what that number is.” It takes several years to finalize annual estimates, and even then, specific numbers are difficult to obtain because they would require extensive genetic testing to be completely sure, he explains. Alaska gave The Narwhal a preliminary catch estimate of 260,000 B.C. salmon in 2025 (excluding some fisheries managed separately under the treaty) but said it doesn’t typically generate those estimates. Other observers think it could be much higher.

The Pacific Salmon Commission, which implements the treaty, told The Narwhal “there are no straightforward answers” in tallying a cumulative number of how many fish each nation intercepts from the other. Estimates of each salmon run are made separately because they “come with important caveats that make summing them together across fisheries and species problematic.”

What does Canada’s fisheries department say?

Fisheries and Oceans Canada (commonly called DFO) was not able to arrange an interview, despite repeated requests made several weeks in advance of publication. In a statement the department said it’s up to fisheries to apply for the Marine Stewardship Council certificate, but it supports applicants by providing data on stocks and compliance and explaining conservation measures.

The department says that while no B.C. salmon fisheries currently have the designation, B.C.’s groundfish trawl fishery has the certification for 16 groundfish species and the offshore hake and halibut fisheries are certified as well.

While the certification affects grocery store decisions, Fisheries and Oceans Canada says it “does not alter [the department’s] regulatory authority or consultation obligations.”

I want to support B.C.-caught salmon — what can I do?

Smaller, locally-owned shops may be more likely to carry B.C. salmon, and you can search and ask around for what B.C. fish is carried by bigger stores. You can find local fisheries in your area and see how you can support in-river operations. Fisheries and Oceans Canada responds to questions from civilians, and the Pacific Salmon Foundation and Pacific Salmon Commission have lots of public data so you can find out which stocks are doing well and which are struggling.

On the larger scale, protecting Pacific salmon relies heavily on co-operation between Canada and the U.S. The two countries signed an agreement in 2024 to suspend fishing of Yukon River Chinook for seven years, so such agreements are possible. Contacting your elected representative is one way to add your voice to the issue. You can also decide how you’re able to support local initiatives to restore salmon habitat and improve monitoring and share information among your peers.

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.

‘Na̱mg̱is Chief Ho’miskanis, Don Svanvik, is on the phone when I walk off the little ferry in Alert Bay, B.C.

“Standing water and wood is never good,” he says to the person on the other end. “I can come by after I drop my truck off, maybe tomorrow.” 

Svanvik, a hereditary chief and former elected chief, hangs up and tells me he was talking to someone in Port McNeill, B.C., about a support system for a totem pole he helped carve. 

“Usually we put them at the back,” he explains. He drives us to the ‘Na̱mg̱is burial grounds, where he wants to show me the steel braces at the backs of the poles there, overlooking the bay. The Port McNeill pole, he says, has a brace in the middle — which is aesthetically pleasing but not great at withstanding the weather.

Alert Bay is a quiet community on a little island near the northern tip of Vancouver Island. Sea otters and seals swim the semi-protected waters of the bay as eagles lazily circle above the trees at the top of the hill that climbs steeply up from the shoreline. The weather here can be relentless, especially this time of year. Winter storms batter the community with heavy winds that regularly knock out the power, sometimes for days on end. Svanvik says things have changed since he was young. Then, he says, the island would often be blanketed under deep snow for weeks at a time. Now, snow is a rarity and the storms are unpredictable, sometimes blowing in from the opposite direction to the prevailing winds.

As we drive around the island, we talk about stewardship and sovereignty and how the ‘Na̱mg̱is, who are part of the Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw, or Kwakʼwala-speaking peoples, made ‘Ya̱lis, a winter village on the little island, their permanent home. He says when the colonial government set up the reserve system and allocated land to settlers, ‘Na̱mg̱is were told they didn’t need it.

“I don’t know how many acres we have but it’s not much,” he says. “They said we didn’t need the land because we had the ocean.”

Winter here moves at a slow pace. Around 1,000 people, give or take, live on Cormorant Island, which is about four kilometres long and one kilometre wide. Little in the way of shops and restaurants are open and the town’s mayor, Dennis Buchanan, says it’s hard to attract businesses, in part because of the regular power outages.

“One year we had 21 power outages,” he tells me over a cup of coffee. “The grocery store here lost over $40,000 in product one time.”

Still, Buchanan says he wouldn’t trade it for anything. Arriving here in the 1970s, he fell in love with the place (and a woman) and never left.

At the far end of the bay, past the village of ‘Ya̱lis, a handful of derelict boats sit on the gravelly beach, tilted at crazy angles. Lorne Smith, a clam-digger, stands on the deck of one, tying off a rope. He says he’s hoping to salvage the radar mast when the tide comes in.

John Webster pulls up in his truck, poking around to see if there’s anything worth snagging for his boat. Among other jobs, he fishes up north with the Haida. The two joke with each other and tell me about the challenges of getting fish these days. Both remain hopeful about the future but there’s a wistfulness to their stories that says times are hard.

While the fishing fleet here is a shadow of its former size, the ‘Na̱mg̱is and non-Indigenous allies are working to rebuild struggling fish populations and develop land-use plans that support sustainable forestry practices. Elected Chief Victor Isaac wasn’t available to meet in person, but tells me on a phone call the nation is making strides at getting the provincial government to respect ‘Na̱mg̱is sovereignty.

“Everyone was in their siloes before,” he says. “They didn’t listen to us, the stewards.”

He says things are slowly changing and people are coming together, listening at last.

G̱ilakas’la (thank you) to the ‘Na̱mg̱is, stewards of all the places photographed for this story, and to everyone who made time to speak with me.

Updated on Feb. 13, 2026, at 8:44 p.m. PT: This story was updated to correct the location of a totem pole in Port McNeill, not Port Hardy. It was also updated to add context that the village of ‘Ya̱lis predates the arrival of settlers.

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.

Though his father is a famous carver, it’s not lost on writer Julian Brave NoiseCat that their Secwépemc and St’at’imc ancestors were best-known for their intricate weaving. In his new book We Survived the Night, he pays tribute to their traditions by braiding memoir and on-the-ground reporting into the arc of a Coyote Story — legends of the trickster forefather of the Interior Salish peoples. In his 2024 documentary Sugarcane, co-directed with Emily Kassie, NoiseCat investigated the history of the St. Joseph’s Mission, a residential school near Williams Lake, B.C. where his father was rescued from an incinerator as a newborn baby, and mapped the intergenerational impacts of residential school on his family and community of Canim Lake.

We Survived the Night widens the lens, looking at the ways colonialism has disrupted Indigenous lives, pushing many nations to the brink of annihilation and erasure — as well as the resilience and power of people who continue, like Coyote, to persist in survival, mischief and resistance. His reporting takes him to communities across the continent, from the unrecognized Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina to the Nuxalk Nation in coastal B.C. to the Tlingit waters in Sitka, Alaska, where he reported the excerpt below.

– Michelle Cyca, bureau chief of conservation and fellowships

This is an excerpt from the chapter “Red Herring” in We Survived The Night, published Oct. 14, 2025 by Random House Canada.

Down at the docks, I clambered aboard a Depression-era vessel named Ellie IV captained by Steve Johnson. Ellie IV is outfitted with a skiff, but the skiff’s motor was broken. So, when Steve’s crew went out to pull trees loaded down with herring eggs, they had to row like the old times. Steve is on the water about 270 days per year. He set 73 trees in 2022, yielding thousands of pounds of eggs to feed many Tlingit. Steve pointed the bow north, and we motored out of town past Daxeit Mountain. But the herring were nowhere to be found. So, when we reached Nakwasina Bay, Steve gave up on fish eggs and started looking for seals instead.

At Nakwasina, a mountain named Anaahootz towers over the site of Steve’s ancestral summer village. In the alpine, Steve says you can still see breakwaters built by Tlingit ancestors during the Great Floods. On the shoreline, you can see where rocks were leveled for canoe landings and houses. After the creation of the Tongass National Forest in 1907, the Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian were displaced from villages and harvesting spots across southeast Alaska, like this one. Because they were considered “trespassers,” their dwellings and structures were sometimes even burned.

But the Tlingit way is coming back. Steve tries to live how his grandfathers and grandfathers’ grandfathers lived. “I think our way of life is better than the Western way,” he told me. “A lot of it is difference in worldview. Western culture is focused on giving status for what you are or what you own. Native culture is focused on what you give back and give away.” He continued, “Humans aren’t supposed to be super capitalistic and hoarding. Most civilizations are based on helping each other.”

Puttering around his ancestral bay, Steve couldn’t find herring, seal, or any of the other plenties of the past. Just a few generations ago there were many successful harvesters. But it’s all dwindling: fish, fisherfolk and fish-based civilization. With neither fish nor seal in sight, Steve turned Ellie IV around and offered a poem instead.

The red herring,

does he cross the mighty Bering? 

Nobody knows what he sees,

but his eggs taste good

to you and me.

Oh, the mighty herring

he cannot fight.

He only lives

because of flight!

Everything in the sea

waits to eat thee,

but he is still, oh so free.

Come with me

and cut a tree

and herring eggs

there will be.

The Tlingit see fewer herring in the sea; 2022 was a better year than the ones immediately prior, but according to harvesters, things look precarious. More whales and sea lions have started journeying up to Alaska from California. They eat a lot of herring. So do hatchery salmon. There was a diesel spill north of Sitka during the herring spawn. It’s unclear how that impacted the fish. And it’s also unclear what effect climate change is having.

What is certain is that commercial fishermen pluck thousands of tons of herring out of the sea, killing them for their roe before they spawn. Historically, everywhere else the commercial sac roe fishery has gone in Southeast Alaska, the herring have been brought to the brink. Sitka is one of the only places where enough fish remain to support a commercial fishery.

Native harvesters say the surviving herring don’t act like their ancestors. Perhaps this is because fewer fish make it past age five. Or perhaps it’s because the fish have to dodge a high-octane fleet before they spawn. Or maybe there’s something else happening out in the warming, plastic-filled Pacific that harvesters and scientists don’t yet see. Whatever the reason, the herring have become less predictable, making local and traditional knowledge less valuable while the harvest becomes more challenging and expensive. With gas prices soaring, subsistence isn’t so cheap. Which all made the Sitka Tribe of Alaska, the activist Herring Protectors and the Tlingit wonder why, in 2022, the Department of Fish and Game authorized the largest-to-date herring catch of more than 45,000 tons.

And I was wondering the same thing. Because I came to Alaska to see how the Tlingit were cultivating and protecting herring. But what I witnessed was less straightforward. At the Board of Fish meeting, the number of voices for herring conservation vastly outnumbered those for herring commerce. But Louise Brady’s Herring Protectors and the Sitka Tribe of Alaska were fighting a losing battle.

For one, the Board of Fish does not base its decisions on the number of people who testify at meetings. It bases them on aerial surveys as well as the number of fish projected in population models. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game predicted a large spring herring run. Activists pointed out that herring were not consistently surveyed by fish and game until the last half century and that by then the fish had already been decimated. This meant that, in their view  the view of a people whose oral histories and management of fish populations stretch back centuries and even millennia, rather than decades — the department’s baselines were far too low. And here was a fundamental problem. Activists and regulators were telling completely different stories based on different facts and philosophies. State regulators said they were managing the fish well, that the industry was being responsible and that as a consequence there were more fish in Sitka Sound and that those fish could be safely caught in higher numbers than ever before. Activists and tribal leaders, in contrast, said that the state was managing herring irresponsibly, that the industry had brought fish populations to the brink across Southeast Alaska and that the commercial fishery needed to be curtailed if not shut down in Sitka Sound. Each side relied on its own body of knowledge and each side was working from its own belief system about the proper relationship between people and fish. And so the Board of Fish was presented with two diametrically opposed perspectives.

To bridge this yawning divide, the Sitka Tribe of Alaska suggested amendments to the department’s management practices to protect older male herring, who Tribal Knowledge Keepers say lead the schools to their spawning grounds. They also suggested that rules governing the commercial herring take in Sitka be made more conservative to match the rest of Southeast Alaska. Neither recommendation was seriously entertained by the Board of Fish. But that was not the Herring Protectors’ and the Sitka Tribe of Alaska’s only problem. Nor was it their most significant.

The greater issue the allied activists and tribal leaders faced was that they were less practiced at influencing the Board of Fish and more divided than the commercial herring industry. While activists and tribal leaders agreed herring needed to be conserved, they disagreed on almost everything else. At times, Louise Brady and the Herring Protectors seemed to argue that the commercial herring fishery should not just be curtailed, but completely shut down. Moreover, they believed the state fundamentally did not have the right to manage herring in the first place. According to the Herring Protectors, herring should still be under the management of the Kiks.ádi, who stewarded the fish for millennia. The Sitka Tribe of Alaska agreed with the Herring Protectors on the importance of Tlingit knowledge and the need to conserve fish, but they did not want to shut down the commercial fishery, merely reel it in. And while the tribe had filed a lawsuit claiming the state failed to effectively manage the herring fishery for subsistence use, they did not go so far as to question the authority of the Board of Fish.

Meanwhile, the commercial herring industry was more unified politically and economically than ever before. Most commercial fishermen had recently formed an informal co-op to fish together and split profits, a move that largely marked the end of the every-man-for-himself days of the herring season. These commercial fishermen and the fish processors who buy their fish had grown so cocksure that they even filed proposals with the Board of Fish to regulate the subsistence herring fishery more aggressively via a permit system for harvesters, and to deregulate the commercial fishery by opening herring spawning areas previously closed to their boats. With stunning bravado, they filed a proposal to do away with a regulation requiring the Board of Fish to balance commercial and subsistence interests in its management of the herring fishery. While activists and tribal leaders sought to curtail the commercial herring fishery, the industry sought to curtail the infinitesimally smaller subsistence herring harvest. The industry group filing these proposals even called itself the Southeast Herring Conservation Alliance. It was shockingly bold. And it worked. 

As the Board of Fish neared a decision, three of its members approached the Sitka Tribe’s leadership, offering an off-the-record hotel room meeting at which Louise Brady and the Herring Protectors were not welcome. The tribe was under the impression they would be meeting with a friendly group of seiners. But that was at best a misunderstanding and at worst a bait and switch. Because when tribal leaders showed up at the Hotel Captain Cook, they came face-to-face with the Southeast Herring Conservation Alliance. And they could not walk away. Because the Board of Fish members present made it clear that if the two parties did not come to a compromise then and there, their obstinance would influence the board’s votes.

After that meeting, the Sitka Tribe of Alaska abandoned their proposals and the Southeast Herring Conservation Alliance abandoned theirs. The status quo would remain. And the Herring Protectors could do nothing but protest.

While tribal leaders, industry executives and state regulators were focused on the Board of Fish, harvesters confided in me that they were equally concerned about a stealthier threat: the herring egg thief.

One subsistence harvester said about half of his 73 trees were stolen. Paulette didn’t set quite that many but lost a similar portion. A third harvester netted only about 25 or 30 bags of eggs and was unable to fill his freezer. A fourth said he had to set more branches than ever before to provide. “Theft is becoming more of a problem,” that last harvester told me. “People don’t want to do the work.”

Everyone had a theory of whodunit. Maybe it was one of the out-of-towners who didn’t have eggs to harvest in their own bays? Maybe it was a harvester who had promised to fill too many freezers? Maybe it was someone dealing eggs?

I was told a freezer box of herring eggs could fetch as much as US $600 on the black market. At least one herring egg dealer has faced years of jail time. And one harvester was accused of making his living off the trade.

Or maybe, said others, it wasn’t a Native but a spiteful seiner? A couple of commercial fishing boats had distributed eggs on branches to community members one weekend in an effort to repair race relations. But when had those guys learned to set trees?

No, no, said others. Those trees were set directly in the flow of treated sewage that drains into Sitka Sound. Those eggs weren’t stolen. They were shitty!

Paulette’s honey, Andrew, recorded a suspicious figure unloading a boat in the middle of the night. His footage looked like one of those grainy Bigfoot videos. He showed it to a few trusted friends—ones who had been ruled out in the townwide game of Herring-Egg-Thief Clue. But none of them could make out the man or his boat.

Meanwhile, I kept waiting around for someone to be transformed into an owl. That is the traditional Tlingit sentence for greedy harvesters, after all. But no one has gone poof! and hooted off just yet. The Tlingit Grinch remains at large.

On her way into Sitka’s Totem Park, Louise drove past the blue house in the Presbyterian settlement where her great-grandfather Peter Simpson once lived. She had just lost her fight at the Board of Fish and she needed to figure out her next move. “When I’m feeling tired, I remember everyone who fought for us to live as we are intended to live,” she said. “This is a really sacred place because this is where our people died.”

Totem park sits on a point that juts into Sitka Sound beside Ḵaasda Héen, more commonly known by its English name, Indian River. The small park has a trail lined with about 20 poles and house posts from multiple Tlingit clans as well as the Kaigani Haida, but none from the Kiks.ádi. About half are replicas carved by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s. Over the years, the replicas have been restored, recarved and replaced. But long before Totem park was a public space full of other clans’ poles, it was the site of the Kiks.ádi’s last stand against the Russians.

In 1799, the Russians built a fort at Starrigavan Bay on the north side of Sitka. There, they abused Kiks.ádi women and tried to turn Kiks.ádi men into servants, like they had with the Unangax̂ (Aleuts). Conflict was brewing when, according to Tlingit oral history, the Russians tricked an unwitting Kiks.ádi aristocrat into eating human flesh — an unthinkable taboo. To protect their home, dignity and pride, Louise’s forebears formed an alliance with some of the other Tlingit clans and took revenge on the Russians, burning their fort to the ground and killing about 150 people — 20 Russians and 130 of their Unangax̂ allies.

After the Kiks.ádi chased the Russians out of Sitka in 1802, a shaman named Stoonook predicted Alexander Baranov, the first governor of Russian America, would return with his fleet for retribution. The Kiks.ádi built Shísgi Noow (Young Second-Growth Fort) from over a thousand second-growth spruce logs. The fort comprised fourteen buildings and had an angled palisade designed to deflect cannonballs away from the structures and into Ḵaasda Héen. Gunports were carved into the walls and a trench was dug all the way around. The point was chosen because its surrounding shallow waters would help keep Russian ships and their guns at a distance. The clan moved all seven of their clan houses inside the fortification. And they sent messengers to the neighboring clans who fought with them in 1802 requesting military assistance.

The shaman Stoonook was correct and as summer turned to fall in 1804, the Russians sailed out from the Russian American capital in Kodiak. The first Russian vessel to arrive in Sitka was the Neva captained by Yuri Lisyansky. The Kiks.ádi and the Russians scouted out each other’s forces and positions, intermittently meeting to negotiate. Both sides, it seems, were at least half-heartedly trying to avoid conflict. But they were also biding their time. The Russians needed more ships and men if they were going to take Shísgi Noow. The Kiks.ádi needed neighboring clans to come to their aid if they were going to drive out the Russians. According to Lisyansky’s journal, the Kiks.ádi met with the Russians. Their head men performed a chiefly dance demonstrating their status, ferocity and physical prowess. The next day, three Russian ships outfitted for war plus 250 Unangax̂ kayaks arrived to join up with the Neva.

With not one other clan answering the Kiks.ádi’s call to arms, the Indigenous Sitkans prepared for war alone. According to lore, most of their gunpowder was hidden on a nearby island. So, before they could engage in battle, a canoe full of young high-caste Kiks.ádi men, all future clan leaders, paddled out to retrieve the munitions. They were brash and traveled without cover of darkness. And on their way back, they were spotted by the Russians. A firefight ensued. Accounts differ, but either a Russian round or the spark of a Kiks.ádi musket ignited the gunpowder. The canoe blew up, killing all aboard.

With clan opposites nowhere to be found and future clan leaders dead, a warrior named K’alyaan prepared the remaining Kiks.ádi force of about 800 for what he believed would be his last stand. K’alyaan wore a helmet made of cedar gnarl carved into an effigy of a raven. He painted his face and right hand black in the “Fallen Raven” style, signifying he intended to fight to the death. He carried a dagger, but his main weapon was a blacksmith’s hammer taken from the first Russian killed near Starrigavan in 1802.

The Unangax̂ towed one of the Russian ships to the mouth of Ḵaasda Héen. The ship opened fire. Then the Russians sent in a landing party fronted by the Unangax̂ as cannon fodder. The Kiks.ádi split their forces. One group emerged from the fortress howling like sea lions: “HU-HU-HUUU!” They met their attackers head-on. Another emerged from the forest at their flank. Meanwhile, K’alyaan hid on a log floating downriver and then snuck up from behind, attacking the enemy with his hammer. His helmet, considered sacred clan property by the Kiks.ádi, has a notch cut into its beak by a Russian axe. The outflanked Russians and Unangax̂, their guns and other metal weapons gleaming in the sun, looked like a school of herring out on the water to the Kiks.ádi defenders. As the Kiks.ádi closed in, the attackers fled for their lives. Most of the men in the landing force were either killed or wounded, including Baranov, who was hit in the right arm by a ricocheting Tlingit bullet. That night, the Kiks.ádi women stripped the bodies of their enemies and left them naked on the shoreline. The white men gleamed like slain fish, according to Kiks.ádi tradition.

With Baranov incapacitated, Captain Lisyansky took charge of the Russian forces. The captain, however, was in the middle of Russia’s first circumnavigation of the globe. Wary of another defeat, Lisyansky took a more cautious approach heavy on siege tactics: bombardment, negotiations and waiting. The battle went on for days. Every so often, as the Russians and Kiks.ádi traded shots from afar, the defenders scampered out of Shísgi Noow, collected cannonballs that had glanced off their fortress and fired them right back at the fleet. But as their ammunition dwindled, the Kiks.ádi knew they could not hold out. They convened a council to discuss options while continuing to negotiate with Lisyansky. A few days into the battle, the two sides reached agreement. That night, the warriors inside the fort sang one last song. “It was an extremely sad song from the heart of everyone in the fort. It expressed their pain and anguish at the outcome of this great battle,” recalled Kiks.ádi historian Herb Hope. “The song ended with a loud drumroll and a wail of anguish.”

The next morning, Lisyansky sent in a landing party. When they entered Shísgi Noow, the fort was almost completely abandoned. The Kiks.ádi had left behind a few cannons, a couple dozen canoes, as well as dried salmon and herring roe. With the clan gone, a conspiracy of ravens had taken up residence. It was as though the clan had gone poof! and transformed into one of their crests.

Lisyansky had been played. The negotiations were a ruse. For days, the Kiks.ádi had been evacuating Shísgi Noow under cover of trees and night. Elders and young children went first, according to oral histories, followed by mothers with infants. Adult men formed a rear guard as the clan marched north past Nakwasina Bay, where Steve Johnson still harvests herring eggs.

At Point Craven in the Peril Strait across from Angoon, the Kiks.ádi set up a new settlement called Cháatl Káa Noow (Halibut Man Fort). This location, according to Kiks.ádi oral sources, was chosen to blockade Sitka and give the clan a base from which they could return to the sound to fish and harvest. The Kiks.ádi did not begin to resettle in Sitka until 1821. By then the Russians had built their own impregnable fortress, renamed Sitka “Novo Arkhangelsk” (New Archangel) and designated the Kiks.ádi homeland the capital of Russian America. When the original Sitkans returned, the Russians kept a cannon trained on their village at all times.

But in the long run, it was the clan houses and not the Russian American outpost that remained. In 1867, the Russians sold Alaska to the United States for US $7.2 million — even though the Russians never signed treaties with Alaska Natives like the Tlingit to legally acquire that vast territory. In the 1980s and 1990s, Louise’s father, Bill Brady, helped another Kiks.ádi, Herb Hope, retrace the route of their clan’s survival march across Baranov Island. And in 2019, archaeologists rediscovered Shísgi Noow.

As Louise walked the land where her ancestors fought and died for their clan’s survival, she came upon fresh eagle down on the forest floor, the kind Kiks.ádi leaders wear in their headdresses and blow onto the ground as a blessing at the beginning of their chiefly dances — another sign of her connection to this place, her clan and their past. Louise’s situation was like that of the Kiks.ádi Ravens after the Battle of Sitka. She threw herself into the Herring Protectors’ fight at the Board of Fish. But her strategy didn’t align with the Sitka Tribe of Alaska’s. Like the clans in 1804, their forces were divided and, partially as a result, defeated.

Louise gave up studying the Board of Fish and the thousands of ways to influence it. “The Board of Fish is really soulless,” she told me. “It’s numbers and it’s formulas.” She was retreating from the Board of Fish process, which she views as inherently colonial. “We’ve been trying for a long time not to rock the canoe,” Louise said. “And where has that gotten us?” According to Louise, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has no right to govern herring. She believes the fish fared better under the jurisdiction of clans like the Kiks.ádi. And when you take a regional, multigenerational view — an Indigenous view — that is likely true. Rather than spending time debating the wonky details of proposals, models and formulas, Louise wants to focus her energy on bringing back ancient clan governance. “The koo.éex’ is our policy. The ceremony is our policy. The coming together as allies is our policy,” she said. To achieve this end, Louise said she was pondering more confrontational tactics, to take the fight directly to the fleet in future herring seasons, like K’alyaan with the Russians some 220 years ago.

From the shores of Ḵaasda Héen, Louise and I looked out at the sound where the Russian fleet once anchored. Louise remembers when herring spawn was so thick here, you could stick a paddle in the water and it would stand up on its own. “Our ancestors didn’t die in vain,” she said. “When I said, ‘I am a Herring Lady’ and ‘I am Kiks.ádi’ for the first time, I didn’t know what that meant.” 

As the Herring Woman mulled her next move, it felt like she was determined to walk the path of a martyr. And I wondered if that was the only way to save these fish. Then an eagle, Louise’s clan opposite, called out, its high-pitched whistling cry carrying across the water out into the vast Pacific.

Excerpted from We Survived the Night: An Indigenous Reckoning by Julian Brave NoiseCat. Copyright © 2025 Julian Brave NoiseCat. Published by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved. 

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When I ask Ricky Hicks about his business, he tells me about fishing. When I ask him about fishing, he says it’s so much bigger than business.

“Fishing is life,” he says.

Hicks’s business is a mobile tackle shop that he drags from the Northumberland Strait, which separates Prince Edward Island from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, to the Bay of Fundy.

“Wherever the fish are running,” Hicks says. “That’s where I’ll be.”

One of the fish he follows is the striped bass, a once-threatened species that has made a dramatic comeback in Atlantic Canada. From collapsing salmon runs to dwindling smelt populations, the limits of the ecosystem are being tested, and some say the big fish are among the stressors. Federal regulators have reopened commercial access to striped bass — and a conservation triumph has become a flashpoint for the region’s ecological and economic future.

Hicks says he’s usually on the Shubenacadie River, north of Halifax, in the spring for the spawning season. Then he heads to the Bay of Fundy for the summer and back to the Shubenacadie before the fish migrate into the lakes for the winter.

He makes a business of knowing where the fish are because he is supported by a network of striped bass anglers.

“I sell them all the stuff that they need to be successful,” Hicks says. He teaches them what he learned through years of observation.

“Bass are very temperature-temperamental. If it’s too cold they’re not moving. If it’s too warm they move offshore to cooler waters,” he says. 

Hicks sells bait to fishermen from as far away as Quebec and Maine, all travelling to Nova Scotia to catch striped bass.

Federal moves on striped bass divide commercial and recreational fishermen

The salmon fishery on the Miramichi River in New Brunswick has lured recreational anglers since at least the 19th century. The population on the river suffered as time went on, part of a trend Fisheries and Oceans Canada has tracked since the 1970s. Atlantic salmon populations declined by 68 per cent from 2003 to 2019 on the Miramichi, according to a research document prepared for the federal Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada in 2023.Factors affecting Atlantic salmon include high water temperatures, predators and other ecosystem changes caused by climate change and other human-induced pressures, the federal department told The Narwhal in an email.

Martin Mallet, the executive director of the Maritime Fishermen’s Union, says among those pressures is the explosion of striped bass. Salmon fishermen aren’t among his members, but he says the massive predator species is affecting other commercial catches, including lobster, herring, mackerel, gaspereau and smelts.

Mallet says it’s not just a question of predation. Striped bass get tangled in fishing gear and damage equipment and it’s “creating havoc for our fishermen,” he says.

In June, the Maritime Fishermen’s Union made an emergency request to Fisheries and Oceans Canada, asking the federal department to reopen the striped bass fishery for commercial bycatch — unwanted fish and marine creatures caught during commercial fishing for a different species — for the first time since 1996. The department complied: the order requires gaspereau harvesters to keep the first 500 striped bass caught each day between 50 and 65 centimetres and return the rest. 

At the same time, the department took other measures to manage striped bass stock. It reopened a section of the Northwest Miramichi River where striped bass spawn and raised the recreational limit on the Gulf of St. Lawrence from three to four fish per day. Fisheries and Oceans Canada also increased the Indigenous allocation of striped bass by 125,000 fish in July, an amount to be shared among First Nations in the gulf region, in addition to the 50,000 granted to Natoaganeg First Nation in 2018.

Mallet says his union didn’t request an emergency bycatch measure to protect salmon, but to protect commercial fishermen and their livelihood. He says early in the season, fishermen were catching so many striped bass they had to throw back their whole catch, losing days of work. 

“These are expenses for our fishermen,” he says. “Direct losses to their business. So, by enabling our fishermen to keep a portion of the bycatch … our guys can sell those and recuperate their costs.” Striped bass are an enormous potential resource, he says, especially since bycatch fish released from lobster traps often die anyway. 

Mallet says the new regulations were a step in the right direction. “We still think we need to go a little bit further,” he says, adding that while the union wants a healthy fishery, he’s not out to “destroy the striped bass population.” 

“There’s a balance there that needs to be met. We did not have this predation five to 10 years ago,” he says. 

Mike Brideau, a fishing guide on the Miramichi, disagrees. Posting on Facebook about the federal order, he echoed the fears of striped bass anglers in New Brunswick.

“Enjoy the fishery. It’s not going to be around forever,” Brideau wrote, warning the changes could crash the striped bass population.

Striped bass made a big comeback. But are they safe?

Brideau guides all over the province, living out of a tent to target different species for his clients, a nomadic lifestyle that is “part of the fun of the game.” He says he can adapt if bass stocks fail, but he thinks Fisheries and Oceans Canada doesn’t have any understanding of what fishermen remove from the water.

“Anecdotally, I can already say I feel the bass are past their peak in growth [in population] due to our shift in regulations,” he told The Narwhal in an email. “There’s no way the population can withstand taking upwards of a third of itself year over year.”

Tommi Linnansaari, the Atlantic salmon research chair at the University of New Brunswick, supports the re-opening of the commercial striped bass fishery as a pro-salmon move. 

“The predatory pressure could become large enough that the recovery of the salmon population is no longer possible,” he says. 

But he also says it’s unclear how much the striped bass population can shrink before triggering a catastrophic collapse like the one seen in the 1990s. He says the recreational fishery is a large “grey box,” since it is unlicensed and unmonitored and the impact of the increased First Nations quota and renewed commercial fishing won’t show up for at least a few years, as fishermen change their operations to accommodate new species. 

For now, “I do support the striped bass harvest levels,” Linnansaari says. “I don’t know yet whether it could withstand a larger harvest but I do think that we should see how this plays out.”Trevor Avery is the head of the striped bass research team at Acadia University. He says the success of the species should be received with cautious optimism, especially since numbers are trending downward since the population peaked.

“There’s a lot of them, but they only spawn in two places,” Avery says. “That level of threat is increased if their spawning area is impacted by humans or industry.”

Striped bass may be threatened by overfishing, pollution and water flow changes that affect habitat, according to a Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada report from 2004.

Better monitoring needed to identify true threats to Atlantic salmon

Avery says it’s easier for federal and local management efforts to affect striped bass because it is a coastal species, while salmon are targeted by offshore industrial fishing operations across the globe.

“Salmon go on these long treks, you know, up to Greenland or across to the U.K., and then they get vacuumed up in commercial fishing there,” he says. Fisheries and Oceans agrees, telling The Narwhal declining Atlantic salmon isn’t just a Miramichi River issue. Rivers throughout the eastern provinces, Quebec and Europe have seen substantial declines as well.

That’s one reason Avery says he isn’t convinced striped bass is the problem. 

“In a lot of these rivers we don’t find striped bass,” Avery says. “So, this smoking gun, direct effect of saying striped bass are eating all the salmon on the Miramichi … may not be the full picture.”

He adds that there were high populations of both salmon and striped bass in the past. “All that data is quite clearly there over the last 100 years,” he says. “It’s only recently that we have this mismatch in things where we have lots more striped bass and fewer salmon.” 

Linnansaari and Avery both want better monitoring of Atlantic fish, including measuring environmental and industrial impacts. With proper management, Avery says he believes the populations can co-exist.

“We don’t sacrifice one species for another. That’s not a conservation measure that has ever had any lasting good effects.”

Across much of the eastern seaboard, striped bass conservation has become a rallying cry. In the United States, the fish is managed under the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission through the Interstate Fishery Management Plan, supported by the federal Atlantic Striped Bass Conservation Act. When stocks decline, managers call emergency meetings, implement catch reductions and seasonal closures and tighten recreational and commercial rules. 

By contrast, in Atlantic Canada the recovery of the Gulf of St. Lawrence stock occurred under federal control, with limited public engagement and little regional coordination, the scientists say.

In Brideau’s opinion, Fisheries and Oceans Canada should close the salmon fishery on the Miramichi, instead of “trying to say we need to critically intervene in nature through killing native species.” He says the major threats to salmon are clear: increasing water temperatures due to climate change, commercial angling, forestry — which can degrade salmon habitats by altering waterflow, nutrients and sediment — and aquaculture, which can spread pathogens such as sea lice from farmed salmon to wild populations.

Every year, Brideau purchases a Crown reserve spot — a special fishing parcel in an area owned by the federal government, managed to control pressure on the fish population. He uses it to count the few salmon that remain, without catching any.

“I have no interest in harassing a species that’s on life support,” he says.

A house divided

Linnansaari sees the current move to reduce the predatory species as just one of two potential solutions. The other is to supplement the prey. “We should actually increase the salmon population,” he says.

This would encourage working together across fishing interests, and could be a more fertile approach, says Linnansaari.

But that approach, too, is debated. The North Atlantic Salmon Conservation Organization has said supplementing salmon can compromise the fitness of wild populations through interbreeding and pathogens. It also won’t help commercial fishing that targets other species, like those the Maritime Fishermen’s Union focuses on. 

Avery agrees that progress depends on co-operation.

“I think if we sit in two different camps, we’re going to stall,” Avery says. 

Hicks manages his own business amid the politics. Today there are more than 35,000 members in the Nova Scotia Striped Bass Facebook group and 29,000 in the NB Striped Bass Sports Fishing group, all of them looking to join the exclusive 40-inch club by snagging a lunker.

“I see a lot of new faces every year,” he says. “I do help them catch fish. I don’t just sell them fishing gear.”

The idea is to get them hooked.

“Some people are in it for life.”

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W̱SÁNEĆ Hereditary Chiefs are “deeply frustrated” with Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s decision to increase this year’s herring harvests in B.C.’s Salish Sea despite their call for a moratorium.

They are concerned the department, commonly known as DFO, is putting industry before the well-being of herring, which are a food source for salmon and whales and a cultural food staple for First Nations. Stocks collapsed in the 1960s due to overfishing, leading to a years-long closure of commercial fisheries. Since the late 1970s, herring fisheries have been closed intermittently — an action that W̱SÁNEĆ chiefs say is needed now.

Instead, Fisheries and Oceans Canada increased the allowable harvest, from 10 per cent of the estimated total biomass in 2024 to 14 per cent this year.

“How can DFO justify increasing herring harvests while stocks are in steep decline in our territories?” Tsawout Hereditary Chief Eric Pelkey, or W̱IĆKINEM, said in a statement. 

The chiefs argue keeping the commercial fishery open violates their W̱SÁNEĆ Douglas Treaty right to carry on fisheries “as formerly” before contact, which they said will be “impossible should the fragile herring population collapse.”

“The Strait of Georgia is now the only one of the five major spawning areas along the B.C. coast still open to a herring fishery — four others were closed because the stocks collapsed. This decision further jeopardizes the health of our waters and our way of life.”

Feds maintains herring are ‘highly productive’

At the centre of the tension is a disagreement about how well herring are doing. 

The chiefs emphasize herring stocks have plummeted across B.C. in recent years. In response the federal government closed commercial fisheries in late 2021 — except for those in the Georgia Strait. But the chiefs have witnessed less spawning in the strait, and say a more precautionary approach is needed to prevent similar declines. 

Fisheries and Oceans maintains its approach is precautionary, and told The Narwhal in a statement herring in the strait have “remained highly productive.” The department argued data shows the spawning in the Georgia Strait is strong enough to allow a commercial harvest.

The department surveys the five major Pacific herring stock areas: Prince Rupert District, Haida Gwaii, Central Coast, Strait of Georgia and West Coast Vancouver Island. The department said it engages with First Nations on the annual pacific herring integrated fisheries management plan, and concerns are “carefully considered along with the best available science, Indigenous Knowledge and understanding of fisheries practices.” 

It said its decisions are based on input gathered “through our extensive consultation and engagement efforts.”

Pelkey said they have not been able to set up a call or meeting with the department. “We have had no response at all to our inquiries,” he said on Thursday. “Nothing.”

Scientists investigate how habitat loss impacts spawning 

The Pacific Salmon Foundation is leading a project to investigate herring’s role in the salmon food web, and also look at why herring are shifting where they spawn. 

They confirmed herring used to spawn broadly in the Georgia Strait, but have moved in recent decades. Loss of habitat is part of the puzzle.

“Herring need vegetation to spawn on,” Jake Dingwall, a research assistant who is leading the habitat assessment, said on the foundation’s website. “It’s an easy equation: if the vegetation is unhealthy, or missing entirely, there won’t be a successful spawn.”

The research is funded by the federal and provincial governments as part of the British Columbia Salmon Restoration and Innovation Fund, but it’s years away from reaching concrete conclusions.

Rob Morley, chair of the Herring Industry Advisory Board, agreed water temperature, food sources and habitat changes in the Salish Sea have led to herring spawning elsewhere. But he argued herring haven’t decreased, they’ve just moved.

“They don’t spend as much time [in the strait] as they used to, because the food sources aren’t there. They’re moving to respond to the environment,” he said.

The key dispute is whether this move is a worrying signal of decline or not. The chiefs point to data showing declines in the commercial catch, but DFO said that doesn’t reflect the total population. While Morley said herring don’t return to one spot, another biologist, Doug Swanston, told CBC some evidence suggests they may have a homing instinct similar to salmon.

The WSÁNEĆ Hereditary Chiefs are hosting a forum called HELIT TŦE SȽOṈ,ET (Let the Herring Live) on Feb. 13 in Tsawout territory, also known Saanichton, to bring together community leaders, politicians and scientists to discuss the plight of herring. They’re worried for the future of all the living creatures in the Strait of Georgia if herring leave those waters. 

“Without the herring there can be no salmon, no seals, no killer whales as a result of no salmon,” W̱IĆKINEM told The Narwhal when the chiefs first called for a moratorium. 

“All these things all depend on herring to thrive.”

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On an overcast afternoon in early August, Siyamexwelalexw (Troy Ganzeveld) paces up and down the bank of the Vedder River in Stó:lō territories. 

He was hoping to have had the fish weir in place by now. Water levels are higher than average, because of a late snowmelt, and a part of him wonders whether the weir will succumb to the river’s relentless flux.

As the crew cranes the metal weir into the river, no one is confident whether it will stay. 

“It’s a mixture of nervousness, tension and excitement,” says one biologist. 

Heavy concrete slabs are lowered into the weir’s trap box, along with sandbags filled with pea gravel — more friendly to spawning salmon than sandy sediment — in the hopes they will provide enough weight and stability to withstand heavy surges of passing water. 

Fish weirs, a traditional freshwater fishing technology designed for shallow, slow-moving streams, were used by Indigenous communities as a sustainable fishing method for thousands of years prior to colonization. 

From carefully placed rocks in a U-shape, to a wooden fence driven into the riverbed, weirs varied from community to community depending on specific environments, fish species, and cultural practices. 

Traditionally, the Semá:th (Sumas First Nation) would have secured wooden fences to the riverbed, often with a walkway overtop, extending across the entire width of the river. 

But the Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) — which is funding a large chunk of the project through investments made under the Pacific Salmon Strategy Initiative — has forbidden any permanent structure that would anchor the weir to the river bank or bottom, or extend the full width of the canal.

This is likely to limit the impact on the environment and save money, says Ganzeveld, an elected councillor for Sumas First Nation), but he believes there are also politics at play.

“I think there would be some pushback from the recreational sector if a First Nation established a permanent location for their fishing site,” he says.

Ganzeveld has been overseeing a scientific study on behalf of Sumas First Nation. In partnership with the Centre for Indigenous Fisheries at the University of British Columbia (UBC), the First Nation is attempting to reintroduce a weir on its traditional territory for the purpose of studying its impacts.

But in late August, just weeks after the scientific team’s hopeful construction efforts, the region experienced record breaking rainfall and Ganzeveld’s fears were realized. The fish weir was swept away. 

“How do you achieve structural stability in a weir if you can only cover two thirds of the channel?” Jared Connoy, a PhD candidate involved in the project, asks. 

Ganzeveld adds that the heavy flows of water lifted the weir and trap box from below, making it inoperable. 

These environmental challenges are, in many regards, a legacy of law and policy decisions. The draining of Xhotsa (Sumas Lake) a century ago, and the construction of a narrow, channelized canal — stripped of natural friction from vegetation, irregular surfaces, and meandering curves — has left the system vulnerable to the effects of heavy rainfall, which courses through it with intensified force.

“The environmental and the bureaucratic challenges aren’t necessarily separable from each other,” says Connoy, “and so we’re having to deal with both.”

‘What if we drained the lake?’

The last time the Semá:th fished with their own weir, the territory looked vastly different. Cradled between the Kwekwei:qw (Sumas) and Qoqó:lem (Vedder) Mountains, the First Nation, along with their eastern neighbours, the Ts’elxwéyeqw Tribe, shared a weir that stretched 200 feet across the width of Xhotsa. 

During the postglacial period, this vast body of water covered 85,000 acres of land, nearly twice the size of the City of Vancouver, with continuous nourishment from the Semá:th and Chilliwack River systems — Mother Nature’s gift from the last Ice Age. 

Although salmon spawned in the millions around Xhotsa, it was better known for its sturgeon. This was the preferred catch from the weir, which grew villages at either end, as well as many other villages around the lake.

According to Chad Reimer’s 2018 history Before We Lost the Lake, the Semá:th weir was constructed from about five pairs of large wooden poles driven into the clay bottom at an angle, forming a groove for more poles to rest on. 

A wooden gate was then plunged down into the clay and a walkway three poles thick would allow for travel and harvesting. A generation later, Stó:lō Elder Bob Joe recounted:

“In the mornings, when the water was fairly clear, one could see sturgeon resting against the weir, held by the current. Carefully a noose was slipped over the head of the fish, then it was harpooned, quickly dragged away from the others, and landed in shallow water. When enough sturgeon had been caught, the weir was opened.”

Once the most widespread salmon fishing technique practiced by Indigenous fishers from California to Alaska, weirs, typically used on rivers, would block upriver migrations of returning adult salmon. Fishers would use dip nets or spears to harvest salmon, often leaving the females to spawn. Once a fisher harvested what they needed, the weir would open, leaving the rest of the salmon free to continue their travels.

But in 1894, weirs, along with spears and other traditional traps, were outlawed in British Columbia following pressure from canners — the most influential voice in fisheries policy at the time — who wanted better access to salmon. This ban, coupled with the broader 1888 Fisheries Act, were part of a deliberate colonial strategy to dismantle Indigenous fishing rights and practices, while eroding Indigenous economies and knowledge systems in favor of commercial and settler fisheries. 

Meanwhile, as more settlers arrived in the Semá:th Valley in their quest for gold, they found it necessary to adapt, begrudgingly, to the marshy landscape, and its recurring floods and mosquitos. Dreams of intensive agriculture planted in them an idea: “What if we drained the lake?”

A history of criminalizing Indigenous fisheries

One hundred years ago this past November, settlers successfully purged more than 1,200 square kilometres of watershed, transforming the landscape into farmland, while displacing Indigenous communities that were already decimated by smallpox and other diseases of the day. The loss of the lake severed their deep reliance on its abundant natural resources, further eroding their way of life.

Before long, in place of muskrats, ducks and sturgeon, grew tobacco, hops and livestock feed. 

Of the millions of people who drive through Sumas Prairie each year, few are aware of its lush, swampy history. Only major floods like the atmospheric river event of 2021, remind locals and news followers of the region’s wetland origins.

In place of Xhotsa, where the massive Semá:th weir once operated, flows the diked Vedder River (renamed in 2018 from Vedder Canal). 

Roughly five kilometres in length, the pin-straight man-made channel was constructed to permanently redirect the Chilliwack River, draining Xhotsa into the Semá:th River just short of its confluence with the Fraser River mainstem. 

For the Semá:th to restore its traditional lake fishing practices, they needed to think creatively about where and how to do so. 

The nation partnered with the Centre for Indigenous Fisheries at UBC, and together, they applied for a scientific licence to study salmon using a fish weir. 

Connoy has dedicated the last two years to helping obtain the licenses from DFO and carry out scientific research during summer and fall salmon returns. He’s tasked with tracking the survival of fish released from the weir, which he can compare to popular licensed methods such as gillnetting and angling.

“And so our goal was to compare those gears and to understand which gears would be best for fish in these systems,” Connoy says from the seat of his UBC truck.

He records some basic observations like sex, length, maturity, wounds. Then, depending on the species of fish, he inserts either a tiny pit tag the size of a piece of long-grain rice, which will detect whether the fish made it back to the Chilliwack River Hatchery, or a larger radio tag, the size of a thumb, which will track the fish to five points along the 40-kilometre route upstream back to the same hatchery. 

But it’s not the science that was the most challenging part for Connoy. When the team first proposed their project to DFO, he ran into significant challenges securing science permits “because of [DFOs] perception that a weir could impede Pacific salmon migrations to their spawning grounds,” he says. According to Connoy, DFO was particularly concerned about fish weirs because of their ability to block all fish from passing. 

“But that’s not how weirs ever worked,” Connoy says. “It all comes back to the history of criminalizing these [traditional technologies].”

In an email, DFO says that the goal of the project is to assess “the feasibility of safe and effective fish capture, handling, release and by-pass through behavioral assessments.” DFO did not provide a response to a question from IndigiNews and The Narwhal about their reported concerns that the fish weir could block all fish from passing. 

‘We’re going to find a way forward, with or without you’

Connoy says he spent a long time trying to communicate to DFO that his project had no intention of harming all the migrating salmon. They were simply asking to monitor and tag some that were swimming by. 

Kwilosintun (Murray Ned) retired as an elected councillor in 2022 and was one of the visionaries for Semá:th’s conservation, guardianship and harvest program, of which the fish weir project is part. He believes the scientific license is important for Semá:th’s ability to manage salmon as a resource. 

“It’s about conservation,” he said. “It’s about being more involved with the management side of things, the science side of things, and then ‘ground truthing’ everything with our own Indigenous Knowledge.”

Ned, who is also the executive director of the Lower Fraser Fisheries Alliance and serves as a commissioner with the Pacific Salmon Commission, says that despite asking the DFO and the provincial government to partner and invest in the fish weir project, they wouldn’t invest until the nation began “pushing the envelope” without them. 

“We’re going to find a way forward, with or without you, that’s meaningful for the fish and our people,” he says, explaining why the nation chose to forge ahead with their own plans for the weir without the support of the federal and provincial governments.

Eventually, DFO granted the licence under terms that the weir be partial and mobile, spanning two-thirds of the canal only, allowing one-third as a salmon escape route. Ganzeveld said this rule also prioritizes summer float-tubers to enjoy bobbing down the canal, a rule reportedly set by the Canadian Navigable Waters Act under Transport Canada.

‘A lot of people were getting kicked out of their fishing spots’

Ned’s great grandfather, who carried the ancestral names Selesmelton and Kwa:losintun, was chief when the lake was drained and was the first to oppose it, Ned says. 

Although the draining didn’t affect his immediate family’s fishing sites, it destroyed the entire nation’s food security, livelihood and cultural practices. In the 1980s and again in 2014, dike stabilization efforts destroyed many of his Semá:th relatives’ sites, including Thiyō:qweltel/The:táx (Chris Silver)’s father’s fishing site. 

Silver, a current Sumas First Nation councillor, goes fishing “here and there” but doesn’t have a strong connection to the practice, largely because of the destruction of his family’s fishing sites. As a child, he strongly opposed fishing. He saw how it destroyed his family — or so he thought.

“A lot of people were getting kicked out of their fishing spots,” he says. “It was more illegal than drug dealing.”

Silver’s parents, who were on social assistance when he and his four siblings were young, relied on selling salmon illegally to get by. Silver remembers DFO raiding his house. 

“And I mean like — raided,” he says. Silver says DFO confiscated all salmon-related memorabilia from the family home.

“I remember there was like a huge collage of salmon on the wall. My mom loved it. And then as soon as we came home, I was like, where did all the pictures go?” 

Silver says growing up under the Indian Act felt like always being on the run, either from child and family services, or the DFO. 

“Both of those things went hand-in-hand, and it’s because we were poor,” he says. 

Silver believes it’s part of “poverty culture.” He says he could clearly see the stigma of fishing from a young age, that “only poor people do this, only broke people do this, only the welfare people do this. And that becomes a part of your culture.” He thinks that’s why there are fewer and fewer Indigenous fishers each year.

Access also plays a role in the number of Indigenous fishers participating in food, social and ceremonial — or FSC — fisheries. According to Ned, harvesting opportunities for First Nations fisheries has declined by about 90 per cent in the last three decades: from three days per week in the early 1990s, to about 15 days total in 2021.

This decline persists in spite of the landmark 1990 R. v. Sparrow Supreme Court of Canada decision, which affirmed that Indigenous people have “an Aboriginal right to fish for food, social and ceremonial (FSC) purposes and that after conservation, this right takes priority,” as stated on DFO’s website. 

However, Ned argues that First Nations are still treated as stakeholders alongside the commercial and recreational sectors. This stems from the fact that the Integrated Fisheries Management Plans and the Pacific Salmon Treaty, which guide annual fisheries allocations, were developed at a time when Indigenous Rights and Title were not formally recognized.

“The socio-economics of [the commercial and recreational] fisheries has been a key driver for the Fisheries minister in the past, and still is to this day,” says Ned.

It’s why the food, social and ceremonial fisheries are often seen using gill nets, says Ned, which are one of the least selective gears, with higher rates of mortality. 

“We don’t have time nowadays, especially if you only have three weekends to get your food fish.” 

If the food, social and ceremonial fishers were allowed to pick and choose the days they could go out and fish, things would look different. 

“But that’s my mentality now, which is unfortunate. You got to get in, and get out,” he says.

Given the limited number of days allotted for fishing, it’s easy to see why sports fishers are quick to assert that Indigenous fishers, and their gill nets, don’t belong.

Ganzeveld says he knows how it feels to be a sports fisher. He gained Indian status in 1985, the year Bill C-31 passed into law, which allowed those forcibly enfranchised under the Indian Act, like his mother, to regain their Indian status. 

But before 1985, Ganzeveld and his dad enjoyed countless days on the water together year-round.

“I definitely understand the connection that a lot of recreational fishers have — the relaxation, the satisfaction you get going out and harvesting your own — but it’s still not the same experience,” he reflects. According to Sq’éwlets, a Sto:lo community, finned food (salmon, sturgeon, eulachon, trout) was once as much as 90 per cent of the Sto:lo diet. 

“That’s absolutely amazing,” Ganzeveld says.

“It is challenging now to think of the limited access that we have to the resource.” 

Until five years ago, DFO didn’t permit any gill net fishing on the Semá:th and Chilliwack rivers, but after closing all recreational salmon fisheries on the Fraser River in an attempt to recover species of concern, the Semá:th and Chilliwack opened up for sports fishers, heightening tensions between sport and food, social and ceremonial fishers who found themselves crammed together in the name of scarcity. 

With the weir destroyed in late August, Connoy and Ganzeveld debated whether pitching to receive more money from DFO would be a good idea, but it seemed too unrealistic that late into the season. They shifted to a new plan: beach seining, which uses a huge, weighted net. It takes significant people power to haul the net through shallow water, trapping fish within its enclosure, where they can be selectively removed with a dip net.

Since the fall, the team has been working after sundown to avoid the shoulder-to-shoulder crowds of sports fishers, and because night-time fishing is more successful anyways — the fish don’t see you coming. 

Clashes with non-Indigenous fishers continue

During a particularly dark evening of beach seining in October, Ganzeveld noticed a huddle of bodies in the shallow water near the crew’s net. No one paid much attention at first, they’d seen sport fishers out this late before, despite the DFO rule against salmon fishing after sunset. But eventually they approached to see what was going on.

“Their fishery had basically closed an hour prior to [us speaking to them],” Ganzeveld recalls. When he approached the sport fishers, he explained that they were undergoing a scientific study with a DFO licence, and asked them what they were doing.

“Are you Indigenous?” asked one of the settlers, to which Ganzeveld replies he was and that he was also an elected councillor for Sumas First Nation. 

The settlers laughed. “That’s not even a nation around here,” one said, standing on Semá:th lands. 

Ganzeveld called the DFO, who called the RCMP, who arrived after the sport fishers had left. According to Ganzeveld, the RCMP officers who responded didn’t know the intricacies of the Fisheries Act anyways. They stood for a long time on their phones looking it up. 

“We’re probably not calling as often as we should,” Ganzeveld says. “I mean, every night that we’ve been out, there’s been guys that have stayed longer than they should have.” 

But this time felt different, he adds. “The ignorance of whose territory they’re actually on, and the arrogance of him being out, openly fishing, and not caring about the regulations or anything else.”

The fish weir project was not what Connoy anticipated. He thought it would be about community-driven science — about how fish interact with traditional technologies, about bringing back those technologies. Now, he realizes that the bureaucratic, environmental and social challenges are a big part of what the team needs to address — and overcome, if they hope to restore their traditional practices.

“It’s just going to take a really long time before some of the more selective fishing methods can be returned,” Connoy says.

To prepare for the coming year, Ganzeveld is developing a plan for a new weir he thinks will be more structurally secure against the elements. He said Sumas First Nation is also looking at what it would take to rewild the Semá:th River, currently void of any complex habitat. 

Ned says discussions are happening between the nation, the city and the province about the return of — some — of the lake. Since the catastrophic flooding of the Fraser Valley that followed record-breaking rains in November 2021, the communities have grappled with the best path forward in an era marked by the volatile impacts of climate change.

“Could we have the whole lake back? Probably not. Can we have a portion of the lake back? It’s probably a good idea,” he says. 

Ned believes it’s in the interests of farmers and politicians, too.

“I think if the farmers and politicians were thinking longer term about these appearances of more droughts, more floods, more fires, then they should make some room for those drought years, where you can have storage for the water, and then the farmers can still have access to that.”

According to Ned, another flood is inevitable, “whether you want it or not.” 

The problem, he says, is how dirty and potentially toxic the water will be in the case of an unintentional flood. “If we bring water back, for me, it has to be productive. It has to be meaningful for fish, waterfowl and other beings that rely on water.” 

‘Trial and error’

In 2023, Sumas First Nation along with academics at UBC and a handful of non-profits released a paper that found that restoring Xhotsa in a controlled, meaningful way, what the authors call a “managed retreat,” would cost half as much as maintaining the current flood defence systems while improving resilience to future climate events. 

“It helps tell our side of the story a little bit,” says Ned, who adds that whenever the nation starts talking about bringing back the lake, local farmers begin pushing back that they’ll become displaced and lose their livelihoods. It’s just another one of the social challenges that Sumas First Nation has to address.

“If you see the stark contrast between what occurred in 1924 where our people were removed, to now where we’re talking about bringing some of the lake back and maybe displacing a few people,” he says.

In some ways, reviving the lake seems to mirror the struggle to reintroduce a fish weir. Both are bound by a legacy of colonial laws and policies that prioritizes settler economies over Indigenous Rights and ecological balance. 

“But that’s the thing about bringing back former practices in modern day with new kinds of materials,” says Ned. “It’ll be trial and error for a bit to figure out a way forward.”

Reporting for this story was made possible in part through a grant from the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources.

Updated Jan. 9, 2024, at 2 p.m. PT: A previous version of this article stated in the headline that weirs were banned under the Indian Act. In fact they are banned under the Fisheries Act.

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Imperial Metals, the company that owns the Mount Polley mine in B.C.’s Interior, has been charged on 15 counts under the federal Fisheries Act.

The charges come more than 10 years after a Mount Polley tailings pond dam failed, sending 25 billion litres of toxic sludge into Polley Lake, Hazeltine Creek and Quesnel Lake in what became one of the worst mining waste disasters in Canadian history.

The company will appear in B.C. Supreme Court in Vancouver on Dec. 18, according to a media release the B.C. Conservation Officer Service posted on Facebook.

The release said possible contraventions of the federal Fisheries Act were jointly investigated by the B.C. Conservation Officer Service, Environment and Climate Change Canada and Fisheries and Oceans Canada, which worked together as the Mount Polley Integrated Investigation Task Force.

According to the release, no statements will be issued by the investigating agencies, as the matter is before the courts.

Fines for violating the Fisheries Act are increasingly hefty. In 2021, Teck Resources was ordered to pay $60 million — the biggest fine ever issued for Fisheries Act violations — after pleading guilty to polluting fish-bearing waterways in the Elk Valley, where the company operated metallurgical coal mines. 

Mount Polley disaster spilled lead, cadmium and arsenic

The waste surge from the Mount Polley tailings storage facility failure — with a total volume that would fill about 10,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools — turned Hazeltine Creek into a broad channel lined with stumps and debris. About 19 billion litres of tailing slurry entered into the water where the creek flowed into Quesnel Lake, home to fish such as lake trout and sockeye salmon.

All told, the tailings pond breach dumped tonnes of debris and heavy metal into the local watershed, including 134.1 tonnes of lead, 2.8 tonnes of cadmium and 2.1 tonnes of arsenic, according to a national inventory of harmful substances released into the environment. The spill contained 92 per cent of the lead dumped into Canada’s environment in 2014, Environment Canada estimated. 

In July, Imperial Metals applied to expand the tailings storage facility and raise the height of the repaired dam by four metres. The company also applied for a permit to continue discharging wastewater into Quesnel Lake. The applications are currently under review and no decisions have been made, the B.C. Environment Ministry confirmed in an email. 

B.C. taxpayers covered $40 million in cleanup costs for Mount Polley mine disaster

Until now, Imperial Metals has never been fined or faced legal repercussions for the tailings dam failure. B.C. taxpayers covered $40 million in cleanup costs. And the company, with provincial Environment Ministry permits in hand, is still pumping wastewater from Mount Polley into Quesnel Lake.

Jamie Kneen, Canada program co-lead for Mining Watch Canada, said it’s not yet clear if the charges are “meaningfully different” than charges filed in 2016. “What I can say is that it is good news to see any kind of enforcement action, even after 10 years,” Kneen told The Narwhal. 

“However, we’re still deeply troubled that the company is allowed to dump essentially untreated effluent into Quesnel Lake.” 

In October 2016, MiningWatch Canada filed a private prosecution against the B.C. government and the Mount Polley Mining Corporation for violations of the federal Fisheries Act in connection with the tailings pond disaster. “MiningWatch is taking action now because it is concerned that, almost two-and-a-half years after the disaster, and despite clear evidence of impacts on waters, fish and fish habitat, the Crown has failed to lay charges and enforce the Fisheries Act,” the group said at the time. 

Kneen said the Crown took over the charges and asked the court to stay them. “I don’t know if this is a reactivation of any of those charges, or a different set of charges,” he said. 

In an emailed statement in response to questions, B.C.’s Ministry of Environment said it will not be commenting as the matter is before the courts. The ministry was not immediately able to say if the charges are the same ones the Crown took over, or a different set of charges.

‘So important to see charges finally being laid’ in Mount Polley disaster: advocate

Andrew Gage, a staff lawyer with West Coast Environmental Law, said in a statement he is happy charges have been laid. “But this is long overdue,” Gage said. “Environmental offenders, and their investors, need to know that there will be consequences that flow quickly and inevitably from their unlawful actions. Communities need to know that their water will be protected from those who harm it.”

Gage also said a 10-year delay in laying charges “undermines the deterrence message that needs to be sent to other irresponsible mining companies and other polluters, particularly given how few environmental offences actually result in charges.”

Nikki Skuce, director of Northern Confluence, a group aiming to improve land-use decisions in B.C.’s salmon watersheds, said the Mount Polley mine “seemed to only get more permits to continue polluting and operating” following the tailings storage facility breach.

“It’s so important to see charges finally being laid against Imperial Metals over a decade later,” she said in an emailed statement. “Although we don’t know all the details at this time, there really needs to be some kind of justice and accountability for the largest environmental disaster in B.C.” 

Skuce, who is also the co-chair of the B.C. Mining Law Reform Network, said she hopes the recent charges bring attention back to some of the changes recommended after the Mount Polley mine disaster to reduce risks of tailings failures to communities and watersheds. 

In a news release, Imperial Metals said the charges were outlined in an indictment filed with the Supreme Court of British Columbia on Dec. 6, which the company received on Dec. 9. 

The company said it will not make further statements while the matter is before the courts. 

— With files from Shannon Waters

Updated Dec. 11, 2024, at 11:14 a.m. PT: This story was updated to add information from the B.C. Environment Ministry, received after publication, about Imperial Metals’ permit application amendments for the Mount Polley mine.

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On a cloudy evening in early September, fisherman Darren Porter pulls an aluminum boat up to shore on Lake Pisiquid, a small body of water bordering the Nova Scotia community of Windsor. Two fish scientists aboard his boat hop out and begin dragging a seine net through the long grass poking out of the shallows, looking for juvenile fish.

For seven years, a monitoring team made up of the Mi’kmaw Conservation Group, Acadia University and Porter has been testing this site, along with others on the Avon and on an unobstructed tidal river across the bay, to establish the relative abundance of fish.

It’s a windless evening, and as the team brings the net to the beach to check its contents, the water mirrors the pastel sky above.

But Porter knows the situation on this lake is anything but calm.

“I got my car hit by a baseball bat a month ago, I got my truck keyed three weeks ago — it’s insane,” Porter says.

“This is very political now. It started out different.”

Lake Pisiquid is an artificial reservoir created by the construction of a causeway across the Avon River more than 50 years ago.

For much of its existence, the causeway — and the tidal gate, or aboiteau, built into the causeway to allow the Avon to flow out to the Bay of Fundy — has maintained the lake and protected land upstream. But because that protection has required the gate to be almost constantly closed, it’s come at the expense of the fish travelling upriver to spawn. 

In 2017, when the Nova Scotia government began the process to twin the highway running across the causeway, it convened an expert panel to find ways to improve fish passage at the aboiteau — work that included engaging Porter, the Mi’kmaw Conservation Group and Acadia University on monitoring. Then, in 2021, a ministerial order from Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) ordered the lake be drained and the aboiteau opened so fish could pass through.

Yet seven years later, fish passage remains obstructed, while the lake has been maintained by a provincial emergency order for over a year. Politically, the situation is at a stalemate, while the continued existence of the lake divides residents, places governments at a standoff and overrides the objections of the Mi’kmaq, who say their Treaty Rights are being violated.

At the centre of all of this is an ecosystem and a community that have been thrown out of balance. And both have reached a breaking point. 

Avon River becomes political wedge between lake community and environmental advocates

The Avon is one of the rivers flowing into the Bay of Fundy, an ecosystem that pulses with the rhythm of the world’s highest tides, sending saltwater and nutrients upriver and creating a shifting coastline downstream. 

For millennia, the tidal ecosystem sustained fish such as Atlantic sturgeon, Atlantic salmon and gaspereau (a kind of river herring), as well as Mi’kmaq communities who travelled the river and established settlements along its banks. In the 1600s, Windsor — an area originally known as Pesaquid or Pisiquid, a Mi’kmaq name meaning “junction of the waters” — was settled by Europeans. Two centuries later, a causeway was built across the mouth of the Avon to protect the community and surrounding agricultural lands from coastal flooding.

Work on the causeway began in 1968; even before it was finished, there were changes to the ecosystem. Sediment began accumulating on the seaward side, forming what is now an extensive saltmarsh that continues to expand. “We haven’t reached a new balance — the system is still adjusting,” Tony Bowron, CEO of a wetland restoration firm that has done work in the area, says. The Windsor saltmarsh is incredibly productive, Bowron says, but on the upstream side, saltmarshes disappeared as the river transitioned to a freshwater ecosystem. “What was one of our major tidal rivers is now essentially an impoundment,” he says.

Over time, different groups came to depend on that impoundment, including farmers, a ski hill, a canoe club and property owners and developers in Windsor and upstream.

Yet by 2017, it was clear something had to change. The highway had become dangerous and needed to be twinned, and the aboiteau had reached the end of its useful life, especially given climate change projections. But for the causeway highway project to proceed with federal funding, it had to have Fisheries Act authorization. Following Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s recommendation, the province put together a group of provincial and federal officials, fishers and Mi’kmaq to develop ideas for how to meet Fisheries Act requirements. The group members proposed an option that would have restored tidal flow, improving fish passage and flood protection, though with lower lake levels. 

But at a municipal council meeting for the area on Sept. 27, 2017, provincial officials explained the community had pushed back against the idea of changing lake levels and introduced a new option — option D — which would maintain the status quo but add additional fishways (structures to help fish navigate an obstacle). 

Paul LaFleche, who at the time was the deputy minister of transportation and infrastructure renewal (now the department of public works), told those gathered that the option could mean a future constitutional challenge. While LaFleche didn’t specify who that challenge might come from, constitutional challenges have been used by the Mi’kmaq to address violations of Treaty Rights.

Still, LaFleche said for his department, there were only two options at the time: option D, or leaving the aboiteau in place. 

For Porter, this marked the moment the process became political. 

“It’s simple: they were told what to do, then they had this meeting on the 27 of September, and they reversed it,” Porter says.

Mi’kmaq say Treaty Right to fish is being violated: ‘That, to me, is not reconciliation’

On the banks of the Avon River, on the opposite side of Lake Pisiquid from Windsor, two small buildings sit amid the marsh grass and the gravel of the stalled highway project.

In 2020, Nikki-Marie Lloyd, a member of Annapolis Valley First Nation, and other Mi’kmaq water protectors built a protest camp at this site. Llloyd called the site Treaty Truck House #2, a reference to the names used for trading posts between Europeans and Mi’kmaq that evokes the historic Mi’kmaq use of the river. “We wanted to bring a little bit of that back here.”

For months, Lloyd stayed at the site in protest of the aboiteau. On hot days, when there was very little water left on the downstream side of the barrier, she says she watched as thousands of migrating gaspereau struggled and died in the muddy water.

Even when the gates are open, passage is limited. And when they’re closed — as they are for more than 23 hours a day and for months at a time in the summer — the effects are clear. “It’s quite noticeable when the gate is not open,” Trevor Avery, a professor at Acadia University who’s working on the monitoring project, says. “The fish do not make it through.”

Meanwhile, at low tide, the water below the barrier is too warm and low in oxygen for fish to survive. Correspondence between Fisheries and Oceans Canada staff in June 2023 observed “large numbers of fish” dying as a result.

It’s too early to say whether there are any population level-effects for those species, as there are other rivers in the area where fish can spawn; that’s why long-term monitoring is important, Avery says. Yet the obstruction of one river can still have consequences for biodiversity. Research suggests some species of fish found in the river, like gaspereau, largely return to their birthplace to spawn, giving each river a unique genetic signature. If that site is lost, those genetics are lost too. 

Avery is wary of wading into politics — it’s not science, he notes — and the fate of the Avon has become very political. But on a personal level, he thinks the obstruction of the river is the wrong decision. “There’s just good advice that’s being ignored, in this case.” 

For Lloyd, the situation was especially infuriating; without fish being able to pass the barrier, there was no meaningful exercise of the Treaty Right to fish. “We hear a lot of talk about reconciliation, but then when you come here and you see everything that’s going on, especially politically, and you realize that a lake and a gated structure currently are trumping our rights — that, to me, is not reconciliation.”

Then, in March 2021, after Mi’kmaq groups raised concerns — and, according to a briefing note, after Mi’kmaq chiefs passed a resolution to pursue legal action if Fisheries and Oceans didn’t act — the department issued a ministerial order requiring the gate be opened for fish passage (which the department then renewed every two weeks). The lake quickly became a dry, and then dusty, plain.

For many Windsor residents, the resulting dust storms were miserable. To mitigate the problem, a coalition of environmental groups, government officials and the Mi’kmaq planted vegetation on the dry lake bed. For a minute, everyone was working together, Lloyd says. The saltmarsh began regenerating, and fish not seen in the river for decades appeared. Travelling the river on a bright green pool floaty in August 2021, seeing the diversity of fish and the marsh grass “was my all-time favorite moment,” Lloyd says.

In March 2023, West Hants municipal council — which encompasses the community of Windsor — wrote a letter to the federal fisheries minister acknowledging the lake may not return and expressing interest in reimagining the Windsor waterfront and surrounding area to realign with the new operating scenario of the aboiteau.

Then wildfire season started.

Minister claims lake necessary for fighting wildfire, but fire chief says that’s ‘ridiculous’

In May 2023, wildfires tore across Nova Scotia, including one that burned 23,525 hectares, the largest in the province’s history.

On June 1, 2023, the province declared a state of emergency for the area around Windsor. The only action associated with the state of emergency was to order the gates at the aboiteau closed, overriding the federal order that had opened them. The provincial order came just two weeks after Premier Tim Houston released a video with area MLA Melissa Sheehy-Richard describing the dry lake as “appalling” and calling for it to be refilled. 

The provincial minister responsible for the emergency management office, whose deputy was LaFleche, formerly of the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal, said in a statement that the dry lake posed a “significant risk during this wildfire season.” (The province did not respond to a question about what role LaFleche, or staff from his former department, played in the decision to issue the emergency order.)

In an interview with CBC, the provincial minister responsible for the office of emergency management , John Lohr, said the request had come at the request of local fire chiefs.

Others have disputed that statement. 

In response to the state of emergency, Porter launched a lawsuit, attempting to stay the order and reopen the gate. In an affidavit provided for that lawsuit, Windsor fire chief Jamie Juteau said neither he nor anyone he was aware of in the department had made “any request to Minister Lohr or his department or anyone else for water resources in Lake Pisiquid or to ‘reinstate’ Lake Pisiquid.”

Since then, the province has renewed the emergency order every 30 days, even after historic rain and flooding, including in Windsor.

Brett Tetanish is the fire chief for Brooklyn, another community in the same municipality as Windsor. He says fire suppression appeared to be an excuse to close the gates.

“I just thought how ridiculous that was,” he says. “There’s actually no need.”

Tetanish is an experienced wildland firefighter, and when parts of Nova Scotia were burning in 2023, his department was dispatched to those fires.

If there were a need for water, Tetanish points out there are many other sources a helicopter could draw from. What’s more, because the presence of the causeway has caused silt to built up, much of the lake is only a little more than a meter deep — too shallow for fixed wing aircraft to use, Tetanish says. 

The existence of alternatives was also outlined in a July 2023 report by the municipality’s emergency management office. The report noted if lake levels dropped again, the Windsor fire department would go back to its previous plan for water, and that the department “is confident operating in both scenarios.”

“[The minister] is using the fire service to get what they want,” Tetanish says. “It’s very disheartening that the government would do that.”

Advocates say the existence of alternatives for fire safety suggests the preservation of the lake serves interests beyond fire safety. 

‘LEAVE LAKE ALONE’: Rift in community grows deeper as mayor pleads for unity

Developer Mitch Brison, brother of former Liberal MP Scott Brison, has a house on the lake, and his company, Brison Developments, has residential projects in Windsor and the surrounding area. He wants the lake full.

“Is the town better off to have a body of water in front of your town, or is the town better off to have something that smells and has no water — I prefer the water,” Brison says. “I don’t see the benefit of taking it out, I really don’t.”

Brison says the municipal council now supports the lake, “so we got that reversed.” (Abraham Zebian, the mayor of West Hants, says the council has no official position on the lake.) And while he acknowledges there was movement toward reconciliation, he and most people he knows are tired “with the stuff that’s going on and the money that’s being thrown around in that direction.” 

“It’s time for us all to live and cooperate.”

Ultimately, he says resolving the situation will take a change in the federal government. 

Zebian says his personal position is that the lake is an asset for recreation, firefighting and community well-being. 

Yet he’s acknowledged has divided the town, including last July, when bristol board signs appeared in the community reading “F*CK DARREN PORTER,”and “LEAVE LAKE ALONE.” 

In the aftermath, Zebian took to Facebook to make an impassioned plea for unity. “I’m so disappointed in our community for the things that are being said in regards to the Avon River and Lake Pisiquid,” he wrote. “United we can do anything. Divided we all lose. WEST HANTS… I KNOW YOU ARE BETTER! NOW LET ME SEE IT!”

Over a year later, Zebian says it’s unfortunate the town is still caught in the middle of a fight between the province and the federal government.

Avon River situation at a standstill, as provincial and federal governments fail to find a solution

Documents shed light on the dynamics in the standoff over that fight. At issue is which directive takes precedence — the federal order to open the gate, or the provincial emergency order to keep the gate closed and the lake full — and at whose feet blame for the delay in a resolution can be laid.

The federal department has a legal mandate to protect fish and fish habitat, but it has yet to reissue the ministerial order, which it let lapse after the provincial state of emergency was declared. Documents obtained through access to information requests suggest the department has struggled to get information from the province. 

In an email sent on Aug. 31, 2023, Fisheries and Oceans Canada officials said they were still waiting to receive results of a Nova Scotia emergency management office assessment supporting the emergency order. 

Two months later, in an email regarding a Mi’kmaq proposal to address fire safety while improving fish passage, Fisheries and Oceans Canada regional director general Doug Wentzell wrote, “Bottom line is that this letter presents what seems to [be]reasonable solutions to be able to draw water from the Avon river to support emergency response — which was the stated objective of the province in issuing their continued states of emergency. The key piece of the puzzle for our purposes will be to obtain the province’s assessment around whether these, or other options, have been considered.”

The following spring, an April 2024 letter from Fisheries Minister Diane Lebouthillier to provincial ministers asked the province to take measures to ensure proper fish passage, and to communicate with her ministry about efforts to reconcile that with fire safety. 

In response to a question from The Narwhal about the information it provided to the federal government, Nova Scotia’s department of public works said information requested by the federal government was submitted in January 2024, and that this was “one of a series of requests we have responded to from [Fisheries and Oceans Canada] over several years.”

But an August letter to Public Works from Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s department of Ecosystem Management (which Porter provided), shows that in January, what the province proposed was to maintain the lake — a proposal that, as the letter noted, the province had already been told would not pass fish (or the Fisheries Act) — and that the information included with the application was ‘incomplete or inadequate.”

In other words, the situation is gridlocked, with the province proposing an option Fisheries and Oceans Canada can’t approve. 

For Porter, these documents raise questions of why Fisheries and Oceans Canada is hesitating to enforce its own legislation, in the meantime. 

In a 2023 internal presentation, a slide describes Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s intention to continue reissuing ministerial orders until the aboiteau is replaced, but the department let the last order expire after the state of emergency was declared in June 2023.

In a statement, Fisheries and Oceans Canada spokesperson Christine Lyons did not directly answer a question about whether the emergency order takes precedence, instead saying questions about the order and its duration should be directed to the province. Gary Andrea, spokesperson for the department of public works, said the state of emergency will be renewed as long as it is needed for public safety. 

Fisheries and Oceans Canada said it’s working proactively with the Nova Scotia department of public works on the proposed aboiteau, and that it remains committed to consultation with the Mi’kmaq. After the emergency order was first issued, the Assembly of Mi’kmaq chiefs sent a letter to the province, stating the lake contravened Mi’kmaq rights and title. (The Assembly of Mi’kmaq chiefs did not respond to a request for an interview.)

The department also said the province has a legal requirement to operate the aboiteau to allow the passage of fish, and that voluntary compliance is the expected and preferred approach. 

To advocates, this looks like the federal department is avoiding a fight in advance of an election. 

“They don’t want to give the province a wedge issue,” Porter says. “So they backed off, and nature suffers, the fish suffer, there’s a whole bunch of things that suffer because of those decisions — and they’re simply political.”

Emergency order remains in place, with no clear path forward for resolution

In September, members of the monitoring team on Lake Pisiquid finish noting the fish they’ve caught in gill nets and minnow traps— one striped bass, a couple of tomcod — and then head back upriver, to turn in for the night.

For now, the situation is at a stalemate. While Porter has a court date in November for his lawsuit against the emergency order, he’s not optimistic that it will bring any change. 

With a municipal election approaching on Oct. 19, current mayor Zebian said the uncertainty around the causeway continues to pit “neighbor against neighbor and family member against family member, and I think unfairly so, for my community.” The project was supposed to be completed in 2022, he notes; two years later, there’s no clear indication of a way forward.

Yet in other contexts, communities have found solutions. 

Three hundred kilometres from the Avon, water flows under a bridge over the tidal Petitcodiac River in New Brunswick. In 2021, the bridge was completed to replace a causeway built in 1968, despite the opposition of some homeowners, and biologists are already reporting greater numbers of fish. 

To the south, Peskotomuhkati Nation was instrumental in removing an aging hydroelectric dam on the St Croix/Skutik River this year, which runs between Maine and New Brunswick, and restoring fish passage. 

By comparison, advocates say the current situation with the Avon River aboiteau is a missed opportunity, where new infrastructure is needed anyway, to fix a problem.

That problem is a system out of balance — and not just on the Avon. For 400 years, people have been building structures to hold back the Bay of Fundy’s tides. Asking people to imagine a different relationship with this system is challenging. Yet in the 21st century, the costs of drawing hard lines across the landscape have become clear, severing ties between animals, people and the environment in which they all live. 

Whether work on the Avon will ever restore those links is far from clear. But for better or for worse in this dynamic, shifting ecosystem, there’s no going back to the past.

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This story is a collaboration with the newspaper The Guardian. 

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On a clear August morning, Skookum John maneuvers his fishing boat, Sweet Marie, out of the Tofino harbour and into the deep blue waters of Clayoquot Sound on Canada’s west coast. 

On shore, the late summer sun shines on visitors from all over the world who have flocked to Tofino, a bustling fishing town on Vancouver Island, to wander in and out of surf shops, art galleries and restaurants and pile into small boats in the hope of glimpsing orca, humpback and grey whales.

“You’ll never find this anywhere in the world,” John says, gesturing through Sweet Marie’s window at the mosaic of islands and mountains, cloaked in thick green rainforests, that form part of the Clayoquot Sound UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. 

The Sweet Marie motors deeper into Clayoquot Sound, past a web of inviting channels and inlets, and cruises past a raft of sea otters resting in the gentle swells. Once hunted nearly to extinction, sea otters are one of the iconic species found in the biosphere reserve, along with sea lions, seals, wild salmon and bald eagles.

John, a member of Ahousaht First Nation, makes his living on the water, where he helps train Coast Guard members in marine rescue, ferries passengers to islands and hot springs and takes visitors on whale watching tours. Today, John is taking members of Clayoquot Action, a local conservation organization focused on protecting wild salmon, to the site of one of the area’s more controversial industries: open-net pen salmon farms.

Dan Lewis, the co-founder and executive director of Clayoquot Action, is incredulous that industrial salmon farming is allowed to take place in a globally recognized protected area.

“Why are we doing this here?” he wonders, gesturing at the rich waters, home to a colourful array of sea life that includes giant rock scallops, tufted anemones in green, pink and white, dark green kelp forests, red sea urchins and purple-tinged Dungeness crabs.

Clayoquot Sound is also home to some of the last 60 salmon farms left on Canada’s west coast. For decades, as many as 100 farms in Canadian waters have raised mostly non-native Atlantic salmon in pens in the Pacific Ocean. 

But now the salmon farming industry, blamed for contributing to the collapse of wild salmon stocks, faces an uncertain future. In June, the Canadian government announced open-net pen salmon farming will be banned from coastal waters in July 2029, as part of a commitment “to protecting wild salmon and promoting more sustainable aquaculture practices.”

Concerns about the industry’s impact on wild salmon played a major role in the closure of about three dozen farms in the province of British Columbia over the past seven years, after Clayoquot Action and other groups documented sea lice outbreaks and other diseases such as piscine orthoreovirus in farmed fish, including at farms along migration routes for wild salmon. 

Sea lice are parasites that feed on fish, causing stress and damage to their immune systems and making them more vulnerable to disease, while piscine orthoreovirus causes damage to the heart, liver, spleen and other internal organs in salmon.

The decision to ban all remaining British Columbia farms, lauded by conservation groups and wild salmon advocates, has been soundly criticized by Canada’s salmon farming industry, which largely consists of multinational corporations that farm salmon around the world, including in the U.K. The industry says moving salmon farming to closed containment systems on land or in the water, as the government suggests, is not logistically feasible and would be prohibitively expensive. 

For John, who has been campaigning against salmon farms since 2015, the Canadian government’s new 2029 deadline may just be an empty promise, following its earlier, unfulfilled commitment to remove open-net pen salmon farms by 2025.

“I won’t believe anything that the government says until I see it happen,” John says as the Sweet Marie slowly circles a floating salmon farm nestled into a small bay, barely a stone’s throw from the seaweed-strewn shore.

John’s skepticism is shared by Hasheukumiss, a Hereditary Chief of the Ahousaht Nation and president of the Maaqutusiis Hahoulthee Stewardship Society, which manages economic development for the nation. But the two men have very different perspectives on the salmon farming industry, mirroring broader divisions about whether open-net pen farms should be allowed to operate in Canadian waters.

In 2010, the Ahousaht Nation inked an agreement allowing Cermaq Global, a Mitsubishi subsidiary that also farms salmon and trout in Norway, Chile and Scotland, to operate in its territorial waters. The agreement was subsequently renewed with changes, according to Hasheukumiss, also known as Richard George.

“One of the things that I wanted to address was the environmental concerns because we are the true stewards of our backyard,” he says. “It was the sea lice and the pathogens that were the biggest concerns we had.”

According to Hasheukumiss, Cermaq was responsive and worked with the nation to address that concern. 

Hasheukumiss’ assessment of the Canadian government’s handling of fish farms is less rosy. Since he inherited his title in 2020, he says he has discussed the issue with three different fisheries ministers, yet has seen little in the way of consultation with his nation.

A five-year transition away from open-net pen farms is not a realistic timeline for the industry to achieve a paradigm shift, he maintains. “In five years, there is no way this industry — or any industry — can go to fully contained systems.” 

As the Sweet Marie noses slowly towards a rectangle of floating walkways bordered by black net fencing, John stands, slips the engine into neutral and flips back the tarp that tops the modest cabin. He calls out to one of the overall-clad salmon farm workers, jokingly asking why he’s pretending to be busy. It’s his nephew, who recently started working at the Cermaq farm, one of 13 facilities in Clayoquot Sound that employ about 20 Ahousaht members. 

The two banter while Lewis stands at the Sweet Marie’s bow, peering through the nets to get a view of the interior of the pens, as part of the group’s regular monitoring of the industry’s operations. 

At an unstocked salmon farm nearby, the Cermaq’s delousing boat, Aqua Service, towers over the Sweet Marie from its berth. The vessel has a large back deck outfitted with a patented water-based delousing system. The system pulls fish from the pens and uses seawater to flush off the lice. The treatment process takes just 0.2 seconds, aiming to reduce stress and fish death.

In Ahousaht territory, Cermaq has been experimenting with technology to reduce the industry’s impact on wild salmon. A semi-closed containment system — consisting of a semi-permeable bag that stretches 25 metres below the water — is used to raise young salmon smolts while reducing their exposure to sea lice. The bag draws water from deep in the water column where sea lice can’t survive. 

Fewer sea lice on the farmed smolts make it less likely wild salmon swimming past the farms will pick up the parasites. After one year, the young salmon are moved to open-net pens to grow to marketable size.

The semi-closed containment system Cermaq is trialling is expensive — running it costs $20,000 per month in diesel alone. Brian Kingzett, executive director of the BC Salmon Farmers Association, representing Cermaq and other companies, says there is little appetite to make big investments and navigate the time-consuming licensing process for new technology, especially with the future of the industry in limbo.

“There’s lots of reasons why farmers want to go to closed containment for that first year; Cermaq has been trying to do it,” he says. “It took them six years to get a licence. We only have a five-year window.” 

Kingzett says the industry was “completely gobsmacked” by the Canadian government’s decision to remove open-net pen salmon farms by 2029, calling closed containment “an unfeasible option.” 

Setting up enough land-based salmon farming capacity to replace current open-net pen production could cost $1.8 billion, according to a 2022 report commissioned by the British Columbia government. The report’s authors said it was difficult to estimate the costs of setting up medium and large-scale farms because there are no land-based salmon farms in the world that are reliably producing large amounts of fish.

B.C.’s first land-based salmon farm, Kuterra, is now raising steelhead trout, after achieving barely one-third of its production target, according to the B.C. government report. Another land-based venture, West Creek, has stopped farming salmon altogether. And on the other side of the country, near the Atlantic Ocean, the land-based salmon farm Sustainable Blue suffered a mass die-off in November 2023 and is now in receivership. 

But Lewis says closed containment systems on land are the only option if the Canadian government is serious about protecting wild salmon stocks.

“To our understanding, there is nothing that can actually have zero discharge that’s in the water,” Lewis says. “What we want to see in the next five years is all the farms come out of the water. We don’t believe there are any in-water solutions.”

Kingzett says closing down open-net pen salmon farms will harm small coastal communities. Any land-based containment systems will need to be close to plentiful power and water supplies, not to mention customers, he notes.

If B.C.’s salmon farms disappear, Kingzett is confident farmed salmon will still be sold in the country’s supermarkets – but it will come from places like Chile and Norway.

Inside the Sweet Marie’s cabin, John has placed a sticker with the hashtag #FishFarmsOut near the helm. He is eager for the industry to leave Ahousaht territory, even if it means the money fish farming has brought to the community goes with it.

“Wealth isn’t money,” he says. “What we have in our territory, what we have in the ocean, what we have in the air, that’s wealth.”

Updated on Oct. 8, 2024, 4:50 p.m. PT: This story has been updated to clarify that the three cabinet ministers Hasheukumiss met with were fisheries ministers.

Story updated on Oct. 22, 2024, at 10:49 a.m. PT: This story has been updated to remove reference to a medium-sized land-based farm costing $1.8 billion to set up, according to a report commissioned by the B.C. government. In fact, the B.C. government report stated that setting up enough land-based salmon farming capacity to replace current open-net pen production could cost $1.8 billion.

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On Aug. 4, 2014, a tailings dam breach at the Mount Polley mine in B.C.’s Interior flooded the local watershed with contaminated water and debris. 

The faulty dam released 25 billion litres of water mixed with mining waste — enough to fill about 10,000 Olympic swimming pools — into Polley Lake, Hazeltine Creek and Quesnel Lake. Contaminants included 134.1 tonnes of lead, 2.8 tonnes of cadmium and 2.1 tonnes of arsenic, according to a national inventory of harmful substances released into the environment. 

It was, and still is, the worst mine waste disaster in Canadian history.

Ten years later, here are five things you should know about the Mount Polley mine and Imperial Metals, the company that owns it.

Metals from the 2014 tailings dam breach are still detectable in Quesnel Lake

About 19 billion litres of toxic sludge poured into Quesnel Lake, the deepest lake in the province. The heavier elements eventually settled over six kilometres of lake bed in a waste plume up to two kilometres wide and up to 10 metres deep.

A decade later, tailings debris still coats the bottom of Quesnel Lake. Seasonal currents stir the material back up into the lakewater that flows out into the Quesnel River, a major tributary of the Fraser River.

“The fact that 10 years on we still see sediment enriched in copper coming out of the lake is quite amazing,” researcher Phil Owens told The Narwhal.

Owens and his colleague Ellen Petticrew are both research chairs at the Quesnel River Research Centre and professors at the University of Northern British Columbia. They have detected higher-than-usual concentrations of metal in zooplankton, a food source for local fish including lake trout and sockeye salmon. 

And the pair didn’t just find those metals in Quesnel Lake. 

Water samples collected from lower Hazeltine Creek also contained high levels of metals, including copper, which can disrupt the migration of fish like salmon and make them more susceptible to disease.

“We don’t know where that’s coming from,” Owens, who teaches environmental science, said. 

“There’s a problem somewhere and they don’t seem to be willing to deal with it,” Petticrew, a geography professor, added. “While they [Imperial Metals] say that they’re finished remediation, it’s not fixed.”

Imperial Metals never faced fines or legal repercussions for the disaster

An expert report commissioned by the B.C. government found the Mount Polley dam breach was the result of poor design that failed to account for a weak glacial silt layer underneath the tailings facility.

Eventually, the unstable ground underneath the tailings dam caused it to shift and shear, resulting in the breach, the 2015 report concluded.

Imperial Metals reports paying $70 million to clean up the spill and remediate Hazeltine Creek. 

But the company has never been fined or faced legal repercussions for the tailings dam failure — and B.C. taxpayers covered $40 million in cleanup costs.

Mount Polley is still operating and dumping wastewater into Quesnel Lake

Imperial Metals didn’t wait very long after the breach to restart mine operations. In 2017, the B.C. Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy granted the company a permit to discharge wastewater into the fish-bearing Quesnel Lake. 

“Their water treatment only removes solids. It does not remove any of the dissolved chemicals, like nutrients and metals,” Doug Watt, who lives on the shores of Quesnel Lake and used to work at the mine, told The Narwhal. “They’re still dumping that into the lake.”

In December 2020, the provincial Environment Ministry issued a $9,000 administrative penalty to Imperial Metals for failing to investigate and test long-term water treatment systems at the mine in accordance with its permit. The company tried to have the fine reduced, an attempt rejected by B.C.’s Environmental Appeal Board in September 2021.

One year later, in 2022, Imperial Metals re-launched gold and copper mining operations at Mount Polley, which employs about 350 people. 

Imperial Metals now wants to extend the height of the same tailings dam

Imperial Metals is now seeking to expand the Mount Polley mine pit. The company wants to extend the same tailings pond dam by another four metres and continue discharging wastewater into Quesnel Lake. 

Notice of the public consultation period for the company’s application for the proposed tailings dam expansion is expected to go out by mid-August, according to an email from the B.C. Mines Ministry.

Imperial Metals under-reported emissions, inspections uncovered compliance issues

The B.C. Environment Ministry says it conducted 14 inspections of the mine since 2017 and issued five notices of compliance, five advisories and three warnings, as well as the 2020 monetary penalty. The ministry’s most recent Mount Polley inspection took place in 2021; a ministry spokesperson said the mine is scheduled for reinspection this year. 

According to a database of compliance and enforcement actions against natural resource companies, the ministry’s December 2021 review of the mine’s annual environmental and reclamation report found key information was missing. 

A January 2024 inspection to determine if Imperial Metals was obeying provincial greenhouse gas reporting rules found the company had under-reported its emissions by more than 6,600 tonnes and failed to have its figures verified by a third party, as required. The company subsequently corrected its reporting, the Environment Ministry said.

In its email responding to questions from The Narwhal, the Mines Ministry said officials have conducted five inspections at the Mount Polley mine since April 1. Those inspections resulted in a warning for improperly storing aerosol cans, an advisory about the potential need for a permit amendment and requests for more information about the tailings storage and dam, according to the ministry.

The Mines Ministry said it plans to conduct “a minimum of 12 inspections” at Mount Polley in the 2024-2025 fiscal year.

Updated on Aug. 1 at 3:15 p.m. PT: This story has been updated to add that B.C. taxpayers paid $40 million in clean-up costs following the Mount Polley dam breach.

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Food harvested from British Columbia’s Elk Valley is higher in selenium than food from the grocery store or food harvested from regions not affected by Teck Resources’ coal mines, according to a human health risk assessment the mining company was required to undertake..

The assessment found eating an average of one meal a day of fish harvested from waters polluted by the company’s coal mines — an amount the Ktunaxa Nation considers to be sukiⱡ ʔiknaⱡa or eating good — could pose potential health risks due to selenium contamination.

Eating the same fish from the rivers and creeks downstream of Teck’s five coal mines in southeast B.C. less often, say a few times a month, poses negligible selenium risks, the study mandated by the B.C. government also indicates.

Selenium occurs naturally in rocks in the Elk Valley. When massive piles of waste rock leftover from mining are exposed to air, rain and snowmelt, the mineral leaches from the rock, contaminating local waterways.

While some amount of selenium is essential to life, too much of it over an extended period of time can cause a condition called selenosis, leading to hair and nail loss, skin lesions, tooth decay and impacts to the nervous system, the human health risk study explained. Those symptoms typically clear up when the selenium exposure is addressed, the report said.

“It’s rare but it can happen,” Silvina Mema, the deputy chief medical health officer with Interior Health, told The Narwhal. Sometimes people develop selenosis because they’ve taken too much selenium as a dietary supplement, she explained, or by a combination of supplements and dietary sources.

“Brazil nuts, for example, have a high content of selenium. So if people were eating a bunch of Brazil nuts every day and on top of that they were supplementing with vitamins, they could be putting themselves at risk of selenosis,” she said.

The human health risk assessment was prepared by the consulting firm Ramboll Americas Engineering Solutions in consultation with an expert working group, which included representatives from the B.C. Environment Ministry, Interior Health Authority, First Nations Health Authority and Ktunaxa Nation.

The 406-page study analyzed data on contaminants found in water and food harvested from the Elk Valley to assess the potential risks Teck’s coal mines pose to human health and determine if any changes are needed in water quality management. It focused on water pollution and did not consider risks unique to mine workers or from breathing in dust from the mines.

The report evaluated the potential for health risks under different exposure scenarios based on age and consumption rates. But it did not assess the incidence or prevalence of disease in the community. It also cautioned that human health risk assessment “is not an exact science and cannot be used to predict actual health risks in a community.” 

In a statement to The Narwhal, a spokesperson for B.C.’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy noted Teck Resources and the province are working with environmental professionals to implement a decade-old Elk Valley water quality plan. The plan, which the B.C. government ordered Teck to develop in 2013, aims to stabilize and reverse the trend of selenium pollution from the mines in the region’s water, among other goals. 

“The [human health risk assessment] shows we’re making progress on our goals and did not find any significant human health risks,” the spokesperson said, adding “we know more needs to be done.”

While a graph posted to the Elk Valley water quality hub shows Teck’s water treatment facilities are successfully removing selenium from the water they treat, over the course of a year most selenium pollution continues to flow downstream untreated. Federal water monitoring data shows concentrations of the mineral in the Elk River have continued to increase in recent years despite the treatment facilities.

Ktunaxa Nation Council was not available to comment on the assessment before publication time. 

The nation has repeatedly raised concerns about the toll the mines have taken.

“We know we can’t drink out of our rivers because of the mines. We can’t do activities, like fishing in the Elk River, that we did as children, because we know we can’t eat it. We can’t do those activities with our children and grandchildren,” Yaq̓it ʔa·knuqⱡi ‘it Nasuʔkin (Chief) Heidi Gravelle said in a 2022 Ktunaxa Nation Council submission to the province regarding a proposal for a new coal mine Teck proposed in the Elk Valley. “Our way of life, our cultural practices, our survival, is impacted on a daily basis.” 

Selenium risks higher than other water pollutants from Teck Resources mines, assessment finds

According to a B.C. government summary, the health risk assessment found “occasional drinking of surface water with elevated amounts of selenium or other mine-related substances is unlikely to pose a risk to human health.”

But the report warned surface water affected by the mines should not be used as a daily drinking water source and in particular should not be used to reconstitute baby formula to avoid exposure to nitrates, which can cause methemoglobinemia, also known as blue baby syndrome. Nitrates left over from blasting at Teck’s mines are the biggest source of the contaminant, which also occurs naturally in the Elk Valley according to the province’s water quality hub.

Overall, the assessment did not find elevated risks from mine contaminants in its analysis of groundwater wells, according to the provincial summary. But the risk assessment noted data wasn’t available for all area wells and recommended well owners get their water tested.

Teck Resources has been monitoring private and municipal drinking water wells since 2014. Selenium levels exceeding provincial drinking water guidelines have been detected in multiple wells.

Eating fish from mine-affected waters is one of the primary ways people may be exposed to selenium, according to the report. But risks vary based on a person’s body size and the amount of fish they eat.

The selenium risks were found to be negligible for average consumers, or people who eat about 15 meals a year of fish harvested from the study area, as well as for “upper percentile consumers” — people who eat between 60 and 64 fish meals a year, according to the assessment.

For “people fishing occasionally and consuming fish from the valley occasionally, the risk is not higher than fishing anywhere else,” Mema, of Interior Health, said. “I wouldn’t be too concerned about that.”

But people who eat fish from mine-affected waters at Ktunaxa Nation’s preferred rate, the level required for sukiⱡ ʔiknaⱡa, could face potential health risks due to selenium exposure, the study found.

Mema said the health risk assessment doesn’t mean that everyone who eats fish every day from rivers downstream of the mines are at increased risk from selenium because it depends where they fish and what type of fish they eat.

“Exposure from other types of foods like game, berries, rose hips, those would not result in elevated risk to health,” she said.

Fish from Koocanusa Reservoir, a large lake created by Montana’s Libby Dam that the Elk River flows into, pose negligible selenium risks even at Ktunaxa Nation’s preferred rate of fish consumption, according to the risk assessment. However, mercury may be a concern for people who eat 60 fish meals or more annually from the reservoir, according to the report. The risk assessment said mercury levels in the reservoir are not related to the coal mines and are comparable to other lakes in the region.

There is some uncertainty in the health risk assessment findings because fish samples were not necessarily collected from areas where people prefer to fish or of the species people prefer to eat. For instance, the study included longnose suckers from Goddard Marsh, directly downstream of the mines: while the report found the suckers had elevated selenium concentrations and should not be consumed, it also noted people don’t typically fish in Goddard Marsh.

The B.C. government directed Teck Resources to work with the human health working group to develop a program to address gaps identified in the risk assessment, including assessing the health risks of eating popular fish from common harvesting areas.

‘We don’t inherit the Earth, we’re supposed to be taking care of it’

Kevin Podrasky, the president of the East Kootenay Wildlife Association, who previously worked for Teck, said he wasn’t surprised by the risk assesment’s findings.

“Even the aquatic side, it wasn’t a deep surprise to me that there are potential risks,” Podrasky, whose association of hunters, fishers and conservationists is affiliated with the B.C. Wildlife Federation, said in an interview. Podrasky said the number of fish he eats from waterways downstream of Teck’s mines is low enough that he isn’t personally concerned about health risks.

The number of people fishing in the Elk Valley has grown significantly, he noted. “You can’t drive past Fernie without seeing a guide boat,” Podrasky said. “There’s a big industry now.”

Many people are out there for recreation and not necessarily to harvest food, he said, noting, “it’s not a catch-and-keep fishery for a lot of the river.”  

Podrasky said he would like water quality issues stemming from the mines to be addressed.

While the B.C. government recommends the 30-day average concentration for selenium in water should be two parts per billion to protect aquatic life, Teck is not required to meet this objective downstream of its mines. Instead, the province has set substantially higher limits for Teck’s mines. 

Teck mostly met its selenium limits at monitoring sites downstream of mines over the past several years, according to data from January 2022 to March 2024 posted to the Elk Valley water quality hub. At times, however, the company exceeded selenium limits during the late winter or early spring.  

For instance, in February and March this year, selenium concentrations in the Fording River, downstream of Teck’s Greenhills mine operation, exceeded the 57 parts per billion limit the B.C. government set for that stretch of river. Farther south, selenium concentrations in the Elk River, upstream of Grave Creek, also exceeded the 19 parts per billion limit established for the monitoring location.

According to the Elk Valley water quality hub, the poorest water quality is usually seen between January and March when water levels in rivers and creeks tend to be at their lowest and mine contaminants aren’t as diluted as they are later in the spring and summer when the rivers swell with melted snow from the mountains.  

The risk selenium poses to fish is one of the primary concerns about the contamination stemming from the mines. At high enough concentrations, the element can lead to deformities and reproductive failure. 

As Teck Resources plans to sell coal mines to Glencore, long-term water treatment questioned

In its summary of the human health risk assessment, the B.C. government says water treatment and other measures to improve water quality are expected to reduce risks to human health and aquatic life.

Teck has invested $1.4 billion in treatment and other water quality measures, company spokesperson Chris Stannell said in an emailed statement to The Narwhal. The company plans to invest an additional $150 million to $250 million by the end of this year.

Teck’s four water treatment facilities can treat a total of 77.5 million litres of water daily and the company plans to construct six more treatment facilities by 2027.

“We have made significant progress implementing the Elk Valley water quality plan, which is successfully improving water quality in the region,” Stannell said.

Despite these investments, Podrasky wonders who will run the water treatment facilities in the decades to come — especially if the planned sale of Teck coal mines to Swiss mining giant Glencore goes ahead.

In November, Glencore announced it had reached a deal to buy a majority share in Teck’s Elk Valley coal mines. While the deal needs federal approval, Glencore has said it intends to spin off its thermal coal mines in Australia, South Africa and Colombia into a separate company, and will include the Elk Valley steel-making coal mines if that deal goes through.

On July 4, the federal government  announced it had approved Glencore’s takeover of the Elk Valley coal mines, subject to a number of conditions. Those include requiring Glencore to be financially accountable until 2050 for environmental obligations under Canadian law — beyond reclamation obligations covered by an existing mining bond required by the B.C. government.

The deal is expected to close on July 11, according to a Teck press release.

Podrasky is clear he’s not opposed to resource development in the Elk Valley. “I made a very good living out of the coal mines and so do my family,” he said.

But he does worry about what the future holds. “You have to have very deep pockets to be managing these issues,” he said. He pointed to contaminated mine sites in northern B.C. “We can’t afford to let that happen down here.” 

And it’s not just the mines, but the combined impacts from extensive logging, increasing recreation — and what he calls mismanagement by the provincial government.

“I’m not afraid to say that I’ve shed many tears watching what it’s become now,” he said. “We don’t inherit the Earth, we’re supposed to be taking care of it for the next generation.”

Dust from Teck’s Elk Valley coal mines remains a ‘huge concern’

A key concern the human health risk assessment did not directly address is the risk of breathing in dust from the coal mines.

“A lot of us are deeply concerned about the particulate matter in the air,” Podrasky, from the East Kootenay Wildlife Association, said.

A recent study in the journal Environmental Science & Technology found “vast quantities” of toxic contaminants called polycyclic aromatic compounds are blown downwind of the mines.

According to the study, Teck Resources is not required to report emissions of polycyclic aromatic compounds, but does report overall particulate matter emissions.

The study says annual particulate matter emissions increased more than ten fold between 2006 and 2021, rising from 11,618 to 164,339 tons.

In January, the B.C. government also directed Teck to undertake a scoping study to better understand exposure and health risks from mine dust in consultation with the human health working group.

“The recent research has clearly shown that airborne coal dust is an issue, not only near the mines, but downwind of it as well,” Simon Wiebe, mining policy and impacts researcher with the conservation group Wildsight, said. “It’s definitely a huge concern for locals,” he said. “But it’s not something to be ignored, even if you live in the neighbouring province.”

The final human health risk assessment report was submitted to the provincial government in October 2023, accepted in January 2024 and quietly posted to B.C.’s Elk Valley water quality hub website in February.

At the time, the provincial government made several recommendations, including to “communicate results of the [risk assessment] and next steps publicly using accessible language.”

Although a plain language summary of the risk assessment was posted on the water quality hub, it doesn’t appear the provincial government, Interior Health or Teck issued a press release to notify the media or the public.

“It’s publicly available, but they really aren’t advertising it,” Wiebe told The Narwhal.

Mema acknowledged the need for a risk assessment communication plan. “We are working towards that,” she said.

The Narwhal asked for an interview with Environment and Climate Change Strategy Minister George Heyman but was turned down.

When asked about the lack of public communication around the health risk assessment, a spokesperson for the Environment Ministry said “public communication about human health risks are led by experts at the health authority.” The spokesperson added the ministry would continue to work with the Ktunaxa Nation Council to support communication with Ktunaxa citizens.

Updated on July 4, 2024, at 5:29 p.m. ET: This story has been updated with news on the federal government expected to approve the sale of Teck’s coal operations to Glencore.

Updated on July 5, 2024, at 8:27 a.m. PT: This story has been updated to note the federal government has approved Glencore’s takeover of Teck’s Elk Valley coal mines. 

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