Summary

• The amalgamation of Ontario’s 36 conservation authorities into nine regional bodies is expected to take effect in early 2027.
• A new directive from Environment Minister Todd McCarthy orders conservation authorities to halt any major decision-making processes, such as changing staffing structures or purchasing property, in the meantime.
• After a meeting between Environment Ministry officials and conservation authority staff on May 6, 2026, one public servant told The Narwhal, “The province has essentially handcuffed conservation authorities.”

On Friday, May 1, Ontario Environment Minister Todd McCarthy sent a letter to all conservation authority heads directing them to halt any “significant financial, asset or employment decisions” as the government begins consolidating the agencies tasked with protecting watersheds. 

The letter signals that the work to amalgamate authorities from 36 to nine, and shift oversight to a new government agency that takes direction from McCarthy’s office, has begun. 

Five days later, senior ministry officials told authority staff in an internal meeting that this reorganization will be complicated and still contains many unknowns. 

The directives “were not easy to write,” a senior official said at the meeting. “I’ll be frank to say that this required us to get into the [conservation authority] business in a way that we as a ministry aren’t typically.”

A recording of that meeting, which included discussion of the consolidation on drinking water protections, was shared with The Narwhal by one participant and independently verified by another. The Narwhal is not identifying the officials who led the meeting by name to respect their privacy as public sector workers with limited authority.

In it, a director in the ministry’s conservation and source protection branch notes the directive McCarthy sent out to authorities was not meant to affect the day-to-day business of conservation authorities, but to “put some guardrails in place that would sort of mitigate against any decision, like extraordinary decisions that would not be to the benefit of the regional [conservation authority].” 

Such guardrails are common in government-initiated mergers, the official said, to protect agencies and organizations from decisions that may harm their consolidated form. A staff member from McCarthy’s office, speaking unofficially, told The Narwhal this is “standard operating practice” for any amalgamation, designed to “essentially keep things stable.”  

Rhonda Bateman, chief administrative officer of Lower Trent Conservation, said in an email to The Narwhal, “It was not a surprise. We were expecting some direction.” 

“When businesses amalgamate or are merged, there needs to be a baseline of information available and I believe this is the intent behind the direction,” she said.

Along with the recording, The Narwhal was sent a copy of McCarthy’s letter, which was later publicly posted by the ministry. The Narwhal reached out to 10 conservation authority officials for comment, with most saying they were not allowed to comment, could not comment for fear of repercussions or were still trying to understand the implications of the directive. Five people agreed to speak to The Narwhal for this story, all on the condition of confidentiality. 

“The province has essentially handcuffed conservation authorities,” one public servant who attended the meeting told The Narwhal. “Conservation authorities are not in control now [of the consolidation], and it seems that they won’t be in control moving forward.” 

One conservation authority official in central Ontario said they were “surprised” by the “sweeping” nature of the directive, and felt that the consolidation was “out of our hands.”  

Conservation authorities are tasked with protecting Ontario watersheds by safeguarding local drinking water sources and reducing the risks from natural hazards like flooding, erosion and drought. The government’s move to amalgamate them from 36 agencies to nine is the biggest disruption since the agencies were created 80 years ago, and has created widespread concern about their continued ability to preserve access to fresh water for more than 80 per cent of Ontario residents.

The government’s 2026 budget officially greenlit the consolidation and gave the environment minister powers to issue directives as needed. It also created a new Ontario Provincial Conservation Agency, which will oversee the 36 conservation authorities during the transition, under the Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks. This agency will work with Hassaan Basit, a longtime conservation authority official who is now the province’s chief conservation executive, and is staffed by a handful of bureaucrats, with a five-person board of directors made up of deputy ministers from other ministries. The agency’s goal is to see resources equally shared among the consolidated conservation authorities.

McCarthy’s first directive on the consolidation restricts conservation authorities’ actions to what has already been set out in their 2026 budgets. That includes making any changes to staff or governance structure, acquiring or disposing of any land, approving any new projects (like wells, for example) or making major purchases without explicit authorization from the government.

The official from McCarthy’s office told The Narwhal they expect conservation authorities to be able to do things that are beyond their budget. “We’ll likely approve it,” they said. “Conservation authorities remain independent.” They also noted that the restrictions don’t apply to land donations, as “they are not an expense.” 

The directive notes there will also be exceptions in responding to “an immediate danger to human life, health or property.” The official from McCarthy’s office said, for example, this could be “if the conservation authority has a dam and the dam is on the verge of breaking and they need to make emergency repairs.” 

These restrictions are in place until at least Feb. 1, 2027, when the consolidation is expected to take effect. They can be amended any time “at the sole discretion of the minister,” according to the letter.

Ontario’s drinking water is tied up in conservation authority changes but officials have few details

The details of how McCarthy’s directive will affect conservation authorities’ work protecting drinking water remain unclear. 

The authorities work closely with community-led source protection committees, which include directors from industries like agriculture, manufacturing and tourism to protect and properly manage drinking water. 

The province’s 19 source protection committees were created on the heels of the deadly water contamination crisis in Walkerton, Ont. They are supported by staff from conservation authorities, who provide data and carry out protective actions as the source protection authority.

The Narwhal reported in April on the impacts of consolidation on source protection committees, and the fact that 15 of the 19 committees had vacant chair positions. The government began seeking people to fill the chair positions soon after.

Many source protection staff were in attendance at the May 6 meeting hosted by Ministry of Environment officials after McCarthy’s directive was issued. 

In the recording of the meeting, ministry officials are heard assuring attendees that they were happy to keep working with conservation authority staff, and that the government remains committed to preserving drinking water protections. But the officials repeatedly said things are still being figured out, with “a range of scenarios” being considered. They acknowledged the lack of answers was “not terribly reassuring” and “anxiety producing, probably” for conservation authorities.  

During the two-hour meeting, ministry officials did not answer direct questions about whether the source protection regions would also be consolidated. 

“I think that is probably the first question that needs to be answered, and we can’t answer it,” the official responded. “Obviously, that has to come from the decisions from whoever is making them.”

McCarthy previously told The Narwhal the 19 source protection committees will remain as they are and work with the nine regional conservation authorities, but said their jurisdictions are “a work in progress.” The government has said changes to the Clean Water Act will be needed but hasn’t specified what those changes will be.  

“We’ve got eight months to sort out the details,” the official from McCarthy’s office told The Narwhal. “The point is not to rush this. We just started the process.”

During the meeting, ministry officials gave two explanations for their inability to answer attendees’ questions. First, they said they weren’t directly part of the decision-making process as the transition is being run by the new Ontario Provincial Conservation Agency, “not the ministry.” And second, they cited cabinet confidentiality, referring to private policy deliberations between Premier Doug Ford, his ministers and senior ministry officials. 

“Typically, sometimes the reason you have to, like, back away and stop engaging is because things become cabinet confidential at a certain point,” a senior official said in the meeting. “I’m not allowed, right? Because it’s become a cabinet process.”

They continued that staff in the ministry were working to ensure source protection plans, for example, weren’t being unnecessarily rewritten, though much of the consolidation process was still being sorted out.

“This isn’t a change many people were asking for and want necessarily, and I fully appreciate that I can’t necessarily know what all this means to you,” one official said in the meeting. They added that they hoped to help conservation authorities understand “what our thinking has been around the transition planning.”

“This is a government that is set to do this,” the official said. “This is happening.”

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Summary

• The Canada Water Agency will cut about 13 jobs to absorb a $5-million budget cut, as Prime Minister Mark Carney seeks to reduce government spending.
• The agency leads ecosystem restoration and protection work in major freshwater ecosystems, such as the Great Lakes, Lake Winnipeg and the Mackenzie River.
• A spokesperson said the agency “remains fully committed to delivering on its mandate to improve freshwater management in Canada.”

Internal government emails show staff at the Canada Water Agency trying to make sense of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s budget cuts in response to questions from the media.

The Canada Water Agency launched in October 2024 to help protect Canada’s fresh water, including leading restoration work to clean up the Great Lakes, Lake Winnipeg and other important sources of drinking water. Canada is home to 20 per cent of the world’s fresh water, which is being threatened by climate-driven floods, droughts and algal blooms, as well as industrial contamination and other groundwater stressors.

Carney’s first federal budget proposed $3.8 million in lower spending by 2029-30 at the agency, and a further $1.2 million categorized as a separate “ongoing,” or permanent spending reduction, for a total of $5 million in cuts. They were part of Carney’s $60 billion in proposed cuts — split into $48 billion in spending reductions through 2029-30, and a further $12 billion in “ongoing” cuts with no given end date.

The Narwhal reported on the budget in November, summarizing the government’s proposal as cutting $5 million in total spending at the agency over a number of years. After that story was published, the agency emailed The Narwhal with a request for a “small correction,” asking that figure be changed to $3.8 million.

When The Narwhal asked the agency why it shouldn’t include the $1.2 million in ongoing spending cuts in the figure — which would make it $5 million — internal emails released under Access to Information law show staff reached out to Finance Canada, sharing a screenshot of the budget’s spending review page for the agency with the proposed “ongoing” cut circled in red. 

“Hello Finance Department colleagues, we are fact-checking an article in The Narwhal that mentions the [agency]’s budget cuts, and just want to make sure we are understanding the budget chart correctly,” the agency wrote. 

The water agency asked the Finance Department whether the $5-million figure, which it had already asked The Narwhal for a correction on, was in fact, correct.

After the Finance Department said it would look into the matter, the water agency asked for guidance on how to explain the permanent portion of the spending reductions to journalists.

“Do you have messaging you can share around communicating the ‘ongoing’ to the media?” the staff member asked.

The next day, an official at Finance Canada said the story did not need a correction after all.

Canada Water Agency to cut 13 jobs, but continue restoration and protection of fresh water

Last month, a Canada Water Agency planning document showed how it expected to absorb the first three fiscal years’ worth of cuts, amounting to $2.6 million by 2028-29. One result was the loss of roughly 13 jobs, or what’s known as full-time equivalent positions, from a workforce of 223.

It said it was also planning on “modernizing government operations” and “leveraging new technology” as well as making administrative and support functions more efficient.

At the same time, the agency plans to keep conducting water quality and ecosystem restoration, including in the Great Lakes, it said.

The federal budget says cuts are necessary to “rein in government spending” from pandemic highs. Carney has gone on to trumpet other multibillion-dollar investments in areas like the military, technology and infrastructure that could in turn pose new environmental challenges for water.

Last week, the Canada Water Agency took on a new task when the Carney government promised $3.8 billion to “protect nature” as part of a new environmental strategy. The agency will be working on the country’s first National Water Security Strategy meant to reflect Indigenous knowledge systems including water stewardship.

The Narwhal emailed the Canada Water Agency asking how its spending cuts will affect freshwater stewardship and restoration work.

A spokesperson said the government’s budget cuts would not impact the agency’s “planned activities, staffing and funding commitments for restoration and protection” of its eight freshwater ecosystem initiatives through Canada’s Freshwater Action Plan, a “signature” federal program.

The program includes the Great Lakes, lakes like Simcoe and Winnipeg and rivers like the St. Lawrence in Ontario and Quebec, and the Mackenzie in the Northwest Territories. Former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s 2023 federal budget allocated $650 million over 10 years to these freshwater initiatives.

“Like all federal organizations, the Canada Water Agency is contributing to the government’s plan to reduce spending, eliminate duplicative programs and focus resources on core priorities,” the spokesperson wrote.

“The agency remains fully committed to delivering on its mandate to improve freshwater management in Canada by providing leadership, effective collaboration federally and improved coordination and collaboration with provinces, territories and Indigenous Peoples to proactively address national and regional transboundary freshwater challenges and opportunities.”

The agency also told The Narwhal the reduction in jobs would be staggered, with four next fiscal year, followed by another four the year after and five more after that.

Asked how the agency was planning for the budget’s proposed $1.2 million in permanent cuts, the spokesperson reiterated the budget review was meant to ensure government spending was sustainable and funding cost-effective programs and activities.

Federal funds support water conservation in Ontario and the Great Lakes

The spending reductions come at a time when the Ontario government is amalgamating its watershed protection agencies, called conservation authorities, from 36 to nine, as well as moving to give itself the power to dictate more rules around drinking water. 

Federal funding has been important for conservation authorities because Ontario has not been investing as much in community science and ecosystem restoration, Catherine Febria, the Canada Research Chair in freshwater restoration ecology, said. 

An associate professor at the University of Windsor’s Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research, Febria said that the federal “scale of investment is something that the province was never able to do.”

“That was really exciting, it was like a leapfrog in progress with this single initiative, and a number of large-scale projects were invested in [over] the first two years,” she said, naming the freshwater ecosystem initiatives in places like the Great Lakes as one example.

The federal government and Ontario have been working together “for over 50 years” through a series of agreements on protecting and conserving the Great Lakes, the spokesperson for the Canada Water Agency said. 

As one example, the Canada-Ontario Agreement on Great Lakes Water Quality and Ecosystem Health lays out how the two will coordinate protection efforts.

“This partnership has led to remarkable improvements, including dramatic reductions in harmful pollutants, and the return of pollution-sensitive species such as bald eagles,” the spokesperson wrote.

Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks did not respond to questions from The Narwhal about how much provincial funding was going towards efforts to restore freshwater ecosystems, and to what extent the ministry was working with the federal water agency.

Febria said given the federal water agency is still relatively new, it’s still not clear what its full mandate will be, not to mention if or how the proposed cuts will impact its work or what exactly may be lost.

She said another Carney initiative, directing $1.7 billion toward a series of scientific initiatives, including research awards attracting high-level talent from abroad, holds promise. Some of the research awards will focus on water security, environment and climate resilience. 

Still, it’s a “tricky balance,” she added, between investing in research and also carrying out on-the-ground work to improve local areas.

“I think we need both,” she said. “When the pendulum swings towards a whole bunch of researchers, that’s great, but at the end of the day, we still need people and organizations and communities on the ground.”

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The cold snap held its grip on southern Ontario for weeks. On the shores of Lake Erie, some speculated this could be the year the ice makes it all the way across — something that hasn’t happened in three decades.

Erie, the shallowest of the Great Lakes, typically sees the most ice cover. Still, the most recent full freeze-up was in 1996, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data.

On a Sunday in early February, as ice cover crept over 95 per cent, locals and visitors braved frigid temperatures to look out across the frozen surface. 

Among them was photographer Carlos Osorio, who captured the lake and the people who set out across it — on foot, studded-tire bicycle or all-terrain vehicle. Wind had sculpted blowing snow into rippling waves, as if the water, on a blustery summer day, suddenly stood still.

“When you think about water freezing, you think about smooth ice, and then you come here and the ice almost looks like frozen waves,” Frank said. “You can just imagine the water swelling up and down, but it’s not, it’s just frozen.”

“This is exceptional,” Gerald Meyering said, marveling at the amount of ice and snow on the lake, compared to recent mild winters.

— With files from Carlos Osorio

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.

This story is part of a series called Shockwave: Rising energy demand and the future of the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes region is in the midst of a seismic energy shakeup, from skyrocketing data centre demand and a nuclear energy boom, to expanding renewables and electrification. In 2026, the Great Lakes News Collaborative will explore how shifting supply and demand affect the region and its waters.

As a study in troubled operation, the Palisades Nuclear Plant once was ranked by the United States federal government as one of the four worst-performing nuclear power stations in the country. The 51-year-old facility closed in 2022, joining Big Rock Point near Charlevoix and 11 other nuclear plants decommissioned outside Michigan in what appeared to represent the sunset of the era of splitting atoms to produce electricity.

Not so fast. Sometime in the next few months, a New Jersey-based company called Holtec International is expected to finish renovating Palisades, fire up the old reactor and add 800 megawatts of generating capacity to Michigan’s electricity supply. It would be the first time a decommissioned nuclear plant has ever restarted in the United States. 

And that’s not the only game-changing nuclear development occurring at the Palisades site along the Lake Michigan shoreline in the state’s southwest corner. Holtec is busy seeking permission from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the United States’ licensing and safety agency, to start construction for a new 680-megawatt nuclear generating station next door to the old reactor. The company wants to power the new plant with not one but two 340-megawatt advanced small modular reactors.

So-called “SMRs” are now viewed by the industry, government, utilities and big energy consumers as one of the go-to electrical generating technologies of the 21st century. Holtec’s planned Pioneer I and II small reactors, and its Palisades reactor restart, signal the opening of a new era of electrical supply and demand in the Great Lakes basin. 

Holtec’s commitment to nuclear power, like other developers in the U.S. nuclear sector, is motivated by several converging and unconfirmed projections that are prompting billions of dollars in investment. By far the most important are that the cost of building nuclear plants will fall, and that demand for electricity will significantly increase. Nuclear developers and utility executives have embraced both optimistic scenarios, especially that electrical demand could increase as much as 50 per cent by mid-century, driven by data centre construction, new manufacturing plants, growing cities and electrified transportation. Both of Holtec’s projects in Michigan, and several more developments by other companies in Wisconsin, Ohio, Illinois and Ontario, are giving nuclear power new purchase in the region’s energy landscape.

One of the most influential supporters is Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who is positioning Michigan at the lead of the nuclear revival era. She declared in a statement that opening Palisades and adding the small modular reactor plant “will lower energy costs, reaffirm Michigan’s clean energy leadership and show the world that we are the best place to do business.” 

Whitmer signed legislation in 2023 mandating that 100 per cent of the state’s electricity come from “clean power” sources, among them nuclear energy. Michigan awarded Holtec US$300 million to restart Palisades, a portion of the public funding package that included US$1.52 billion in loan guarantees from the U.S. Department of Energy. The Energy Department also awarded Holtec US$400 million more to develop the new SMR plant.

A study of small modular reactor development by the Department of Energy in 2023 found that construction costs for the first plants, like the one Holtec is planning, will be high because of limits on the supply chain providing parts, construction experience and unknown interest rates for financing. At current estimates of SMR construction costs of US$12 million to $15 million per megawatt, Holtec’s 680-megawatt plant could be put into operation at a cost of US$7 billion to $10 billion.

Michigan’s bid to stimulate new markets for nuclear energy, moreover, are still dogged by old concerns about safety, waste management and the cost of construction and operation. Three public interest groups filed a federal lawsuit in November asserting that opening the old Palisades reactor was illegal and unsafe. The case is pending in Federal District Court in Grand Rapids.

Safety, cost and waste addressed

By any measure, managing high-level radioactive waste from commercial reactors has not changed much in the last half century and persists as an issue because no permanent waste repository has been established in the U.S. But other considerations of the risks, benefits and cost of nuclear power are tilting in new directions, especially for SMR plants like the one Holtec is proposing in Michigan. 

Small modular reactor developers make a consistent case for proceeding with the new technology.

Water consumption looks to be an environmental advantage, particularly in water-abundant regions like the Great Lakes. Holtec’s environmental statement filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission reports that the two reactors will draw 95,000 litres a minute for operation — as much as 135 million litres a day. At that rate the new plant, which is 15 per cent smaller than the existing Palisades plant, will withdraw 75 per cent less water. 

Because of its more compact 50-hectare footprint, the new Holtec plant would easily fit onto the 175-hectare site that already encompasses the existing reactor. It will transmit electricity with the existing powerlines and infrastructure. And like other commercial reactors, small modular reactors don’t discharge climate-warming gases, a big factor in why nuclear power has gained considerably more support in public polling in recent years.

When it comes to operational safety, Holtec and other SMR plant developers say their designs also answer that concern. The advanced modular reactors are smaller and contain less fuel, produce lower levels of radiation and can operate at a lower temperature and pressure than big conventional reactors. Those properties enable engineers to design a reactor that can be cooled with water or air, and can be shut down with gravity-fed systems that don’t rely on mechanical pumps. 

“When it comes to safety the question is, ‘How do I keep this cool?’ ” Brendan Kochunas, associate professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Michigan, said. “And that comes back to the amount of fuel that you have in the core. SMRs have smaller cores. There’s less heat being produced so you need to remove less heat.”

Industry executives assert that because the reactors are smaller than conventional 1,000-megawatt plants, they will require fewer construction materials, take fewer years to build and be less expensive to operate. Industry executives say their goal is to standardize designs so that parts can be manufactured and new reactors can be assembled and shipped on trucks or by rail. And because SMR plants have multiple reactors, one can be shut down for maintenance while the others continue operating. 

“In discussions we’ve had about small modular reactors, there may be lower upfront costs and potentially faster deployment because you don’t have quite as much concrete,” Scott Burnell, the spokesperson for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said in an interview. “And once you get into operation, the concept is you’ve got several small reactors running. If you bring one down for maintenance, you still have others running, generating profit.”

Race for orders

Holtec is competing with 30 other small modular reactor developers in the U.S. to be among the first to bring its reactor to market. Patrick O’Brien, the Holtec spokesperson, explained that the company has spent 15 years designing the SMR-300, preparing architectural plans for the generating station and keeping the regulatory commission informed of its activities. Though the SMR-300 has not received an operating licence, O’Brien said Holtec is confident it will be approved and the plant would be operating in 2032. “A lot of the work was done up front,” he said. “We’re anticipating two and a half more years’ worth of licensing work from the [Nuclear Regulatory Commission]. And two and a half years of construction.”

That’s an optimistic schedule for new nuclear plants. NuScale, an SMR designer based in Oregon, licensed its first 66-megawatt reactor with the regulatory commission in 2023. It has yet to build a new plant. NuScale’s first project to install seven small modular reactors at a 462-megawatt plant in Idaho collapsed after construction cost estimates increased from under US$4 billion to more than $9 billion. 

The NuScale experience reveals that uncontrolled costs are a primary impediment not just for big traditional reactors but also to SMR development. Small modular reactors don’t exist in North America or Europe, and just three operate in the world — two 35-megawatt reactors operating on a ship in Russia and a third 125-megawatt small modular reactor in China. “One always has to remember that these are experimental technologies,” Joseph Romm, a physicist and senior research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, said. “Both the Russian and Chinese reactors had huge cost overruns.”

According to an important study published last year by the University of Michigan, small modular reactors also may produce new environmental risks that could attract more review. Small reactors, for instance, have the potential to introduce new and unregulated byproducts and increased levels of radioactivity due to the demand for highly enriched uranium fuel, according to the report, The Reactor Around The Corner.

Another likely environmental risk is deploying small reactors to power big industrial projects in the world’s wild and undeveloped places. Small modular reactors pack a lot of energy into a small and portable power source, said the report’s authors, who projected that the small reactors will enable construction of big mines and industrial plants in terrain that has been too expensive to reach or entirely inaccessible. “SMRs will introduce and exacerbate direct and indirect environmental harms, especially on marginalized communities, that complicate the justification for using them to mitigate climate change,” they wrote.

Midwest familiarity with atomic technology

To date, elected leaders and residents in Michigan and the other Great Lakes states have responded to the opening of a new era of nuclear development with much more enthusiasm than alarm. That may be due principally to the region’s pioneering role in fostering atomic energy. The first nuclear chain reaction occurred at the University of Chicago in 1942. Argonne National Laboratory opened in Illinois in 1946 to serve as the centre of atomic research and technology development. The Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania opened in 1957 as the first commercial nuclear generating station.

Not since the height of commercial nuclear energy construction in the 1960s and 1970s have Great Lakes states seen such a concentration of new nuclear projects either underway or planned. The Palisades restart would push the number of operating nuclear reactors in the eight states to 24, second only to the more than 30 big reactors operating in the six southeast states.

More big reactors could be on the way. DTE Energy notified the Nuclear Regulatory Commission last year that it is actively studying the development of a new reactor at its Fermi Nuclear Generating Station south of Detroit along Lake Erie. 

Small modular reactor plants, too, are attracting attention in the Great Lakes basin. Ontario Power Generation is constructing a 1,200-megawatt plant, composed of four 300-megawatt SMRs, at its Darlington Nuclear Generating Station along the shore of Lake Ontario. It could be the first operating commercial SMR plant in North America. 

Utah-based EnergySolutions is proposing to build “new nuclear generation” along the Lake Michigan shoreline in Wisconsin at the Kewaunee Power Station, which closed operation in 2013. Oklo Inc., a California company, is proposing a small modular reactor in Portsmouth, Ohio, where a closed federal plant once enriched uranium for nuclear weapons. The University of Illinois notified the regulatory commission that it is developing a gas-cooled SMR research reactor at its campus in Champaign-Urbana. 

The surge of interest is the second time this century that utilities, government and investors have tried to revive nuclear power in the U.S., and is driven by many of the same factors. One is federal policy to promote nuclear projects. The second is a tide of government financing that can be traced back to 2021 when then-president Joe Biden signed the US$1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that directed US$8 billion to nuclear energy. Three years later, Biden signed the ADVANCE Act to make it easier and less expensive for nuclear plant developers to license their designs with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

President Donald Trump also supports nuclear energy. He signed four executive orders in 2025 to accelerate the deployment and integration of advanced nuclear reactor technologies, and directed federal agencies to take aggressive action to build a nuclear production industry to mine and enrich uranium and construct manufacturing plants to fabricate fuel, reactors and parts. Earlier this month, the Department of Energy exempted small modular reactors from National Environmental Policy Act review. 

Westinghouse late last year signed an agreement with the U.S. government to build ten 1,000-megawatt reactors in the U.S. That agreement is tied to the pact that Trump reached with Japan last October to finance US$332 billion “to support critical energy infrastructure in the United States,” including the construction of ten Westinghouse AP1000 reactors and small modular reactors. The president also wants to develop the capacity to recycle nuclear fuel to reduce highly radioactive waste. 

Trump’s goal is to quadruple electrical generation capacity from nuclear power from 97 gigawatts today, powered by 94 operating reactors, to 400 gigawatts by 2050.

In the last five years, Congress has enacted more than US$20 billion in direct appropriations for nuclear energy programs, along with tax credits and federal loan authority that add billions more in federal support for existing and advanced reactors. 

U.S. technology giants like Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft also are getting involved.

Company executives are establishing formal agreements with nuclear developers to build and buy power for their data centres. Meta, for instance, has an agreement with Oklo Inc. to build a proposed 1,200-megawatt small modular reactor plant in Ohio. The high-tech stalwarts also joined 14 major global banks and financial institutions, 140 nuclear industry companies and 31 countries in signing a pledge last year in Texas to support tripling global nuclear capacity by 2050.

Just marketing?

The big unknown is how much of this fervour is grounded in reality, and how much is hype and marketing. During the last attempt to revive nuclear energy in the U.S., from 2007 to 2010, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission counted over 20 nuclear plant proposals to review. But the heat of atomic hope quickly cooled as fracking started to produce ample supplies of natural gas, and much less expensive wind and solar power was gaining momentum. Just two new reactors that started construction during that period actually got built and began operating at Georgia Power’s Plant Vogtle. It took the utility 15 years to finish the project in 2024 at a cost of more than US$30 billion. 

“Some vendors are overselling the vision,” Kochunas of the University of Michigan said. “I hope we do see some SMRs. They still have challenges in their economics. For it to succeed, one of these companies is going to need to establish a pretty substantial order book.” 

Could that be Holtec? 

“Yes,” Kochunas said. “I think they’ll get that built in Michigan. If they execute the project successfully, they will have opportunities to build more of them. Hopefully, you’ll see people lining up to get them. But if the execution of the project goes poorly and there’s significant delays and cost overruns and problems, it’s going to be hard to change that first impression.”

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.

This story is part of a series called Shockwave: Rising energy demand and the future of the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes region is in the midst of a seismic energy shakeup, from skyrocketing data centre demand and a nuclear energy boom, to expanding renewables and electrification. In 2026, the Great Lakes News Collaborative will explore how shifting supply and demand affect the region and its waters.

A six-decade history in the Great Lakes region of ecosystem and water protection is being put to the test as a dynamic era of energy investment, rising electricity demand, aging assets and political intervention dawns across the basin.

The energy story emerging today is one of tumultuous change in energy supply and demand coupled with conflicting state and federal objectives that are colliding with a buzzy economic narrative centred around artificial intelligence (AI) and data centres. Electricity consumption in the basin’s eight states and two provinces is climbing for the first time in at least a decade. 

Forecasts show electricity demand in the region growing two to three per cent annually over the next 10 years. The Trump administration, meanwhile, is injecting carbon-promoting policies into energy markets, requiring coal power plants in Michigan and Indiana to continue operating beyond their announced closure dates while also slowing solar and wind projects, two energy sources that emit no climate-altering carbon and use little to no water. 

Along with coal, another water-intensive energy source is being revived or reimagined to satisfy projected electricity demands. With nearly US$3 billion in federal and state financing, the 55-year-old Palisades Nuclear Generating Station is preparing to restart after a four-year shutdown. When it does, the old reactor will draw 370,000 litres a minute, 530 million litres a day, from Lake Michigan.  

In addition to these legacy energy sources, new gas-fired power plants, battery storage, transmission lines and a planned new nuclear plant north of Benton Harbor, in Michigan, are being added to keep pace with demand. Agriculture, the region’s biggest water consumer and water polluter, is playing a larger role in energy production — by converting corn into biofuel and producing methane from manure in industrial-scale biodigesters.

Liquid fuels also remain in the spotlight due to the lingering question of Line 5, an oil pipeline that crosses the Straits of Mackinac. The future of the 73-year-old pipeline is the subject of several lawsuits, with key legal and permitting decisions expected in 2026.

This is the first article in our Shockwave project, a series of reports that will investigate the rapid evolution of the energy landscape in the Great Lakes region and the consequences the new era will have for one of the world’s largest reserves of fresh water. Produced by the five partners of the Great Lakes News Collaborative — Bridge Michigan, Circle of Blue, Great Lakes Now, Michigan Public and The Narwhal — Shockwave will document the depth and breadth of the region’s energy transformation and its influence on water use and pollution.

“As electricity demand is soaring, in part due to data centres, we’re seeing changes in water use, we’re seeing changes in electricity consumption,” said Mike Shriberg, director of the University of Michigan Water Center. “And how our region responds to that over the long term will have a massive impact for the Great Lakes and for our energy future.”

Altogether, these changes amount to an inflection point in the region’s energy policy, one with as many questions as answers. Will data centre demand and the White House’s lifeline to fossil fuel units jeopardize state clean energy targets? Will the numerous binational, regional and state-level consultative bodies enable collaboration that reduces harm to waterways? Can local officials, researchers and lawmakers assemble the data to inform their responses? Will a decade-long decline in the energy sector’s water use continue or stall? Will the projected data centre demand for electricity materialize or will the energy buildout result in stranded assets?

What is certain is that the energy playing field today is set up for a different game than just a few years ago. These are still early days, but the region, its US$9.3-trillion economy, its border-crossing energy infrastructure and its world-class environmental riches stand at the threshold of a profound shift in some of its basic economic inputs and assumptions.

Top-down orders

The changes begin at the top. 

For political, ideological and grid reliability reasons, the Trump administration is adamant on propping up fossil fuels and shepherding a nuclear power revival. It is doing so through executive orders and agency action. 

The Department of Energy issued a series of emergency orders to prevent the coal-fired J.H. Campbell Power Plant, in West Olive, Michigan, on the shore of Lake Michigan, from shutting down last year. It issued a separate order in December to prevent the closures of the R.M. Schahfer Generating Station and F.B. Culley Generating Station in Indiana. 

In addition, the administration extended the deadline for closing coal waste dumps in Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, though none is directly within the basin. Though the administration asserts it is “clean,” coal is the dirtiest and among the thirstiest sources of electricity. 

The Department of Energy excluded small modular reactors, or SMRs, and other “advanced” nuclear generation technologies from National Environmental Policy Act review. SMR developers promote the new reactors as more mobile and less risky than the older generation of big reactors. SMRs are under development or have been proposed in Ontario, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Canada, too, has announced national energy strategies that appear certain to affect Great Lakes waters. Rebuffed and taunted by tariffs imposed by President Trump, Prime Minister Mark Carney told an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month, “We are an energy superpower.” Carney outlined his plan for $1 trillion in fast-tracked Canadian investments in energy, AI and critical minerals. He also promoted a national infrastructure campaign for oil pipelines, electricity transmission lines and mines.

Big political announcements are reinforced by facts on the ground. The numbers tell a story of rapid growth in electricity demand that has analysts reaching back decades for a historical equivalent. Some compare it to the push for rural electrification in the United States after the Second World War. Already rising, electricity demand in the Great Lakes region could soar ever higher if high-tech corporate interest in data centres manifests as real-world construction. This comes as the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a regulatory agency, warns that the Great Lakes region faces high risk of electricity shortfalls in the next five years due to rising demand and power plant retirements.

This represents a head-spinning, era-defining reversal in electrical demand. In Wisconsin, electricity sales had been on a downward slope since the 2007 recession began. By one estimate, data centre electricity demand in the state will increase seven-fold by 2030, amounting to more than four per cent of its electricity consumption. Data centre load in northern Illinois has climbed 27 per cent annually between 2022 and 2025, according to ComEd, the region’s electric utility. 

DTE Energy, the largest Michigan electric utility, announced a deal last fall to provide power to the 1,383-megawatt Green Chile Ventures data centre in Washtenaw County. The Michigan Public Service Commission conditionally approved the state’s first “hyperscale” development in December. 

Consumers, the second largest electric provider in Michigan, has 9,000 megawatts of projects in its development pipeline, mostly for data centre and manufacturing.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced a 20-year deal with Vistra last month to buy 2,100 megawatts from three nuclear plants while also expanding the generating capacity at those facilities. The agreement covers Perry and Davis-Besse, both located along Lake Erie in Ohio, as well as Beaver Valley, in Pennsylvania along the Ohio River. Meta also signed an agreement with California-based Oklo Inc. to build a 1,200-megawatt SMR plant in Ohio.

The rise in electricity demand could pose a challenge to state renewable energy goals. Illinois has a target of 100 per cent clean energy by 2050. For Michigan’s electric utilities, the deadline is sooner: 100 per cent clean energy by 2040.

That shift to renewables and the closure of water-intensive coal plants has been a net benefit for Great Lakes water so far. Water is drawn from lakes and rivers to cool the equipment at thermoelectric power stations, a category that includes fossil fuels and nuclear. Water withdrawals in the basin for thermoelectric power are down 24 per cent compared to a decade ago, according to a University of Michigan report prepared for the Conference of Great Lakes St. Lawrence Governors and Premiers. That decline is true for power plants that use once-through cooling as well as for those that have recirculating systems that reduce withdrawals but increase consumption.

There are “substantial water savings as the region transitions away from traditional fossil fuels,” the report found. Besides water demand, the shift away from thermoelectric plants means fewer fish sucked into cooling-water pipes or trapped against their screens. It means less thermal pollution of nearshore waters and rivers. It means less mercury deposited into waterways from coal plant air emissions.

The downward trend could shift upwards this year when the Palisades nuclear plant is scheduled to open, and may tilt higher as another shuttered nuclear plant in Wisconsin could reopen and new SMR plants come online. For data centres, the largest piece of their water use is not in direct operations. It is through the electricity they consume.

Years ago, the Great Lakes Commission, which represents the eight basin states and two Canadian provinces, was thinking about the same questions of water supply. In 2011, the commission published the findings from a multi-year project to identify water quality and quantity vulnerabilities in the U.S. portion of the Great Lakes basin due to thermoelectric power generation. 

The analysis, led by Sandia National Laboratories, considered multiple power generation projections and assessed three energy-related risk factors for the region’s water resources: water quality, thermal pollution of waterways and low stream flows. It was the first model to consider water resources in future electricity scenarios for the region. A fifth of the basin’s 102 subwatersheds scored a high risk in at least two categories.

The commission published the analysis, but largely moved on. No follow-up review was completed to determine the project’s effectiveness in shaping policy, said Erika Jensen, the commission’s executive director.

Today with data centres commanding so much attention, the water-energy connection resurfaced. That focus is partly due to growing public pushback against data centre growth. Lawmakers in Indiana, Michigan and Minnesota have introduced legislation to mandate more transparency from data centre operators on their water and energy use.

At its meeting last October, the Great Lakes Commission signaled its reengagement when the commissioners — largely high-ranking state officials and lawmakers — signed two new resolutions related to energy and water. One resolution encourages water reuse for industry, where appropriate. The other, on the water-energy nexus, asserts the “importance of coordinating and integrating water, energy and sustainable resource management” in the face of data centre development and related industries that are poised to increase energy demand and water use.

The resolutions reaffirmed that energy and water are back on the table at the highest levels, Jensen said. “We’re just getting restarted right now.”

Looking back, looking forward

Electricity is only part of the region’s evolving energy story. Aging legacy assets are also a part of the mix. 

The most noteworthy of these older assets is Line 5, the 1,000-kilometre oil pipeline that runs from Superior, Wisconsin, to Sarnia, Ont. Enbridge, the Canadian company that owns the pipeline, wants to drill a tunnel to house the structure so that it does not sit exposed on the lakebed. Michigan officials are seeking to shut down the line. Lawsuits are proceeding in both state and federal courts, with a U.S. Supreme Court hearing later this month to determine the appropriate venue. 

The outcome will be a bellwether for energy policy, Shriberg said. “It’s really symbolic and may be determinant of which direction this region and this country is headed on energy and water issues.”

Reliable water and cheap energy are foundational economic pieces. Historically, these resource inputs were the great engines of the Great Lakes economy. Water-intensive industries — tanneries, breweries, pulp mills, manufacturers and the like — were drawn to a region where they could extract water and pump out profits. Nuclear and coal-fired power plants were installed on the shores of Michigan, Ontario, Huron, Superior and Erie, the source of water to cool their electricity-generating equipment.

Today a different set of businesses has entered the market. The entire sweep of large water users catalyzed by the new energy economy — semiconductors, battery manufacturers — need to be part of the water-use equation, said Alaina Harkness, CEO of Current, a Chicago-based organization focused on water innovation.

“If we had better policy and planning frameworks, this could be a great place to do that relative to some of the water-scarce regions in the rest of the country,” Harkness said. “But again, we’ve got to shift our frameworks, got to look much more at water reuse and these water-energy connections.”

There is indeed opportunity in the new energy landscape, said Liesl Clark, director of climate action engagement at the University of Michigan and the former head of the state environment agency. Not just for a foothold in the 21st century economy, but also for continuing on a low-carbon path and strengthening the policies that ensure the region’s water is not abused in the process.

“How do we make sure we’re doing it in the most protective way possible in the state?” Clark asked.

As the new energy era takes shape, that is a prevailing question not just for Michigan but for the region as a whole.

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Alberta government scientists have produced several studies about pollution from coal mining in the Rockies in recent years, raising questions from a B.C. conservation group about a lack of similar research from the B.C. government.

“The best research is coming out of Alberta,” Simon Wiebe, the mining impacts and policy lead for Kootenay-based conservation group Wildsight, said in an interview. “B.C. is lagging way behind.”

Research from aquatic scientist Colin Cooke, who works for Alberta Environment and Protected Areas, and his co-authors found historic coal mines in the Crowsnest Pass continue to pollute nearby waterways decades after closing, as well as concerning selenium concentrations in fish from Crowsnest Lake. He found snowpacks have been contaminated by windblown pollution from coal mines in southeast B.C. And more recently, he found selenium contamination downstream of three coal mines in the McLeod River watershed exceeded guidelines even after the mines had been partially, and in at least one case almost entirely reclaimed.

“This is a warning bell,” Wiebe said of the McLeod River watershed study. “It should be extremely concerning for everybody who has any interest in making the world a decent place for future generations,” he said.

It also raised questions for him, such as, “What’s going on in B.C.? Why aren’t we doing our own research?”

Coal mining is big business in B.C., employing thousands of people and contributing tens of millions in dollars to government coffers at all levels. But there are also long-standing concerns about environmental impacts from coal mining, including extensive water contamination — now the subject of an international inquiry.

In response to questions from The Narwhal, a spokesperson for B.C.’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy said, “The Elk River watershed is one of the most intensively monitored and studied watersheds in British Columbia, with detailed programs to detect and assess impacts from coal mining and other development.” 

But that isn’t leading to peer-reviewed studies from government scientists. The spokesperson confirmed: “We do not produce publications for peer-reviewed journals.”

That’s a concern for Wiebe, who said independent, peer-reviewed studies like those produced by Cooke and his colleagues are “the gold standard, as they have no financial incentive to keep the status quo.” 

“All the independent research points to the same conclusion: coal mining produces huge environmental debts that will last for generations,” he said.

In the Elk Valley, leftover waste rock piles up as mountain tops are stripped to extract coal, and when those piles of rock are exposed to rain and snowmelt, naturally occurring contaminants like selenium leach into the water far more quickly than they would had no mining occurred. 

“When you take down a mountain, you end up really accelerating the natural weather processes of that rock,” Wiebe explained. “It causes a big problem.”

While all living things need selenium to live, too much of it can be toxic. For fish, its effect on reproduction is one of its most insidious threats. It can lead to deformities — curved spines, misshapen skulls, abnormal gills — and, in a worst-case scenario, reproductive collapse.

B.C. offers a ‘version of transparency’ but it’s ‘still not that useful’: scientist 

The spokesperson for B.C.’s Environment Ministry pointed The Narwhal to multiple sources of monitoring data and company monitoring reports and noted the Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship is studying high elevation grasslands, including impacts from coal mining, which will lead to future publications.

The statement noted surface water is monitored at roughly 130 sites and that data is publicly available, as is water quality compliance and trend information. Groundwater is also monitored in more than 130 wells and there are extensive biological and aquatic effects monitoring programs underway, the spokesperson said.

Elk Valley Resources, which owns the four steel-making coal mines in southeast B.C., is required by the province to run more than 25 studies and monitoring programs in the Elk Valley, the statement added. And required reports on water quality, aquatic effects and fish population monitoring reports are available on the Elk Valley Resources website.

The spokesperson noted these reports must be completed by qualified professionals, and designs and drafts are reviewed by an environmental monitoring committee composed of scientists and technical experts from the B.C. government, Ktunaxa Nation Council and an independent scientist.

Bill Donahue, a freshwater scientist and a former head of environmental monitoring for the Alberta government, said B.C. has “a version of transparency and data availability that isn’t available in a lot of other provinces, but it’s still not that useful.”

It doesn’t appear, for example, that you can batch download selenium data for a period of time across an entire region all at once, he noted. 

He also raised concerns about the conflict of interest when industry is responsible for doing environmental monitoring and reporting. And while companies may be required to retain “qualified professionals,” he said the quality of work to meet regulatory standards is typically lower than what’s required for peer-reviewed scientific studies.

There’s also more transparency in peer-reviewed studies, he said. For one thing, it’s clear who did the work. Studies published in reputable journals are also reviewed by other independent scientists with relevant expertise who are not involved in the research, he noted.

The monitoring reports available from Elk Valley Resources, some of which are hundreds or thousands of pages long, are also not easily comprehensible to the public, he added. 

Donahue noted the abstract, introduction and conclusions of scientific studies typically offer a big-picture takeaway. “You don’t tend to see that in these big regulatory reports,” he said. 

Wiebe credited B.C. with working to hold Elk Valley Resources and the mines’ previous owner Teck Resources accountable for water pollution with some measure of success, but said, “it is clear much more needs to be done.”

Meanwhile, scientific research is being produced in neighbouring Alberta, but there are concerns the government is muzzling scientists and stalling the release of studies. Internal emails and records obtained by The Narwhal through a freedom of information request show senior government officials delayed the submission of Cooke’s McLeod River watershed study for four months after it was complete and seemingly prevented him from participating in at least two media interviews or speaking about his research to a community group. In a statement to The Narwhal, Ryan Fournier, press secretary to Environment and Protected Areas Minister Rebecca Schulz, said the Alberta government takes the issue very seriously, noting internal reviews before publication “are standard practice and necessary.”

In a previous interview, Donahue, a co-author on the McLeod River study, raised concerns Alberta had viewed monitoring as a box-checking exercise. 

“The only thing that’s really of use publicly is an expert analysis of monitoring data and then an interpretation in a way that is comprehensible to the public,” he said.

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Senior Alberta government officials stalled the submission of a coal mine pollution study to a scientific journal and prevented the lead researcher from speaking publicly about his work, according to records The Narwhal obtained through a freedom of information request.

Emails included among more than 600 pages of documents show officials delayed government scientist Colin Cooke from submitting a study about selenium pollution in the McLeod River watershed for four months after it was complete. The records also indicate Cooke was not permitted to participate in at least two media interviews or speak to a community group about his research, raising concerns the province is muzzling scientists and restricting the public’s access to tax-payer funded research.

The delays came as Alberta was embroiled in a public debate about the future of coal mining in the Rockies, with the government lifting its moratorium on coal mining in the eastern slopes not long after Cooke eventually got the greenlight to submit his study.

Cooke, an aquatic scientist who works for Alberta Environment and Protected Areas, has led multiple studies into the impacts of coal mining in Alberta’s Rocky Mountains. Working with scientists both inside and outside of government, Cooke’s research found historic coal mines in the Crowsnest Pass continue to pollute nearby waterways decades after they closed. He found snowpacks have been contaminated by windblown pollution from coal mines in southeast B.C. And more recently, he and his co-authors found concerning selenium concentrations in fish from Crowsnest Lake.

In a study published in October, Cooke and his co-authors found selenium concentrations downstream of three coal mines in the McLeod River watershed exceeded guidelines meant to protect aquatic life. This was after the mines were considered to be partially, and in one case almost entirely, reclaimed. While a small amount of selenium is essential for life, too much can be toxic, leading to deformities in fish and, in a worst-case scenario, reproductive collapse.

The research found reclamation — the process of restoring land impacted by mining to a state of equivalent capability as compared to before the mining — had so far failed to return selenium concentrations to pre-mining levels in a watershed that’s home to two at-risk fish species. The findings called into question the effectiveness of Alberta’s regulatory and mine restoration policies. It was this study Cooke was prevented from submitting for months after it was complete.

“It showed very clear impacts — negative impacts — on downstream water quality,” Bill Donahue, a co-author on the study and former head of environmental monitoring for the Alberta government, told The Narwhal.

“What our paper, I think, makes fairly clear is that there’s pretty much an utter failure of environmental management regulation and enforcement in relation to coal mining,” he said.

The Narwhal requested interviews with both Cooke and Environment and Protected Areas Minister Rebecca Schulz. Neither was granted.

Instead, in an emailed statement the minister’s press secretary Ryan Fournier said, “We take this issue seriously. That’s why we conducted this research, published it and even paid extra to make the paper open access and publicly available.” The journal that published Cooke’s McLeod River study, Environmental Pollution, allows authors or their institutions to make the study freely available without a subscription for a fee. “We’re conducting more research into coal remediation, and being more transparent, than any other government in Alberta’s history,” Fournier said.For Donahue, interference in the release and public communication of science is a major concern. “It’s really erosive to accountable and responsible government,” he said. And, he added, it raises serious questions like, “What else is not being published or released or communicated?”

Scientist repeatedly told to hold off submitting study to journal: internal emails

Cooke approached his superiors at Alberta Environment and Protected Areas in December 2023 to arrange briefings for senior officials about the McLeod River research, emails show. He noted the study, while not yet complete, could have “significant implications” for both Alberta Environment and the Alberta Energy Regulator.

Multiple pages in the records The Narwhal obtained were redacted, but they show the director of watershed sciences emailed Cooke months later, in mid-June 2024, to “reiterate the request to hold off on submitting the McLeod manuscript to a journal” until the Alberta Energy Regulator had been briefed.

That message, to hold off submitting the paper until leadership briefings were done, was repeated again by the executive director of the airshed and watershed stewardship branch in early July. “That message and direction is not unique to this manuscript, this topic area, or even our branch,” she said.

Later that month Cooke emailed the executive director and assistant deputy minister with the final manuscript. “Now that we have briefed the [Alberta Energy Regulator] on the paper are we ok to submit the manuscript? I was hoping to submit it next Friday (August 2),” he wrote.

That date came and went. In September, a briefing note about the new study was prepared for the minister. It noted the government had previously faced criticism for not analyzing environmental monitoring data sets or releasing draft reports based on environmental data. “This current report is now ready to be shared with other departments and submitted to a peer-reviewed scientific journal,” it said.

At the end of September, Cooke again emailed his superiors to ask if he was allowed to submit the study to the journal and was again told to wait.

The scientist followed up again in mid-October and early November.

In a statement, Fournier said, “This study took about two years to complete. Internal reviews are standard practice and necessary. This review period generated additional feedback on the paper — including as late as November 2024 — and helped assess if additional monitoring or other changes were needed.”

Concerns raised that Alberta has ‘returned to muzzling our scientists’

In mid-November 2024, Donahue, who left the government in 2019, expressed frustration about the delays in an email to Cooke. He said he would submit it himself if Cooke wasn’t allowed to.

“I suggest you inform the [assistant deputy minister] and chief scientist that I simply don’t accept that they are refusing to permit the publication of our manuscript, and that they should remind themselves of their legal duties, as stipulated by the Alberta’s Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act,” Donahue wrote in the email, which he shared with The Narwhal.

He said senior officials should be asking themselves, “What is worse, the public learning how badly coal mining in Alberta has been harming downstream water quality and aquatic ecosystems, or the public learning how badly coal mining in Alberta has been harming downstream water quality and aquatic ecosystems and that we’ve returned to muzzling our scientists in an attempt to cover it up while the government tries to convince Albertans that coal mining is environmentally benign?”

Six days later, Cooke, who had just returned from vacation, forwarded the email to his director. A week after that, he was allowed to submit the paper.

“I’m quite confident that my letter shook some trees,” Donahue said.

From his perspective there was no reasonable justification for the government to delay the study’s submission to a journal. He said there had been ample opportunity for briefings and noted it can take several months to go through the peer-review process after a study is submitted to a journal before it’s published.

By this point, Alberta had been embroiled, for years, in a fierce debate over the prospect of a renewed metallurgical coal mining industry in the eastern slopes of the Rockies (metallurgical coal is used in steel-making, as opposed to electricity generation). In January, not long after Cooke got the green-light to submit his study, the Alberta government rescinded the moratorium on coal mining in the eastern slopes it put in place in 2021 and 2022. The moratorium had come in response to public backlash to a government decision in 2020 to cancel the province’s previous long-standing coal policy from 1976.

Last December, Energy Minister Brian Jean said the province would return to the 1976 policy as it developed a new coal policy. He said the new policy, yet to be released, would require new mines to be underground or to use technologies to prevent selenium from entering waterways. But these measures would not apply to projects considered to be “advanced,” including the controversial proposal for the Grassy Mountain mine in the Crowsnest Pass.

Cooke’s paper, which was eventually published in October 2025, summarized decades of government and industry water quality monitoring at three Rocky Mountain coal mines in Alberta. Donahue noted the early years of data, now a couple decades old, revealed concerning selenium concentrations downstream of the mines. But little was done to address it, he said, suggesting the province has largely viewed monitoring as “a box-checking exercise.”

“Alberta Environment and the Alberta Energy Regulator have been asleep at the switch for 20 plus years when it comes to responding to clear evidence of very harmful downstream effects from coal mining,” he said.

Katie Morrison, executive director of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society’s southern Alberta chapter, said it’s “really frustrating to see the government trying to keep information from the public, but especially on something as important as water quality.”

“Albertans are really aware of and really concerned about the quality of our water in general, but particularly in this context of coal mining,” she said. “Research like this that shows these risks is so important to have in those conversations, so that we can hold the government accountable.”

Scientist prevented from accepting media request, community speaking invitation, emails suggest

As senior officials delayed the submission of the McLeod River study, Cooke was also seemingly being prevented from speaking to the media and community groups about previous research into coal mine pollution, emails included in the document release suggest.

In January 2024, a reporter for The Canadian Press requested an interview with either Cooke or co-author Craig Emmerton, another government scientist, about their recently published study describing lasting water quality impacts from more than a century of coal mining in Crowsnest Pass, the released emails show.

The executive director of airshed and watershed stewardship indicated in an email to Cooke that she was supportive of an interview, as was the director of communications and the assistant deputy minister. Days later, word came down from the assistant deputy minister that the minister’s office had taken the lead on the request.

The Canadian Press article was published later that month. The reporter noted neither of the government scientists involved in the study were made available for an interview.

In a statement to The Narwhal, Fournier, Schulz’s press secretary said, “The authors of these studies are trained scientists, not government spokespersons.”

In June 2024, Cooke received an interview request from a CBC producer to appear on the morning show in Kelowna the next day to talk about another study, which found toxic contaminants from coal mines in B.C.’s Elk Valley in snowpacks in the region. According to the emails, Cooke was told to direct the producer to Fournier, the minister’s press secretary.

“That’s the process for all media inquiries,” the director of communications for Alberta Environment and Protected Areas wrote in an email to Cooke. “[The minister’s office] will then assess and advise from there.”

The next day CBC’s Daybreak South interviewed co-author Alison Criscitiello, the director of the Canadian Ice Core Lab at the University of Alberta, not Cooke, who was the lead author.

Then, in September 2024, the Livingstone Landowners Group of ranchers and landowners concerned about the risks of coal mining on the eastern slopes of the Rockies invited Cooke to speak to their community about his research.

“I would like to do this,” Cooke wrote in an email to the director of watershed sciences asking what approvals he’d need. The director responded that she was supportive but said Cooke would need approval from the assistant deputy minister.

In an interview, Bill Trafford, the president of the Livingstone Landowners Group said Cooke was not able to present to the group.

“It’s very concerning because it’s very germane to the issues that we’re trying to deal with,” Trafford said. “I’m really surprised they can take a scientist and say he’s not allowed to present his material publicly.”

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Cheryl Sinclair has been here before. Not this room, exactly — a conference room at Winnipeg’s Club Regent hotel — but it’s not the first time the Tyndall, Man., resident has shown up to a Sio Silica information session looking for answers.

“My concern is drilling into the aquifer, taking out sand and putting filtered water back in,” she says in an interview. “Can Sio Silica guarantee that the ground, the aquifer, will not be contaminated?”

On a Monday evening in mid-November, Sinclair is among the dozens of guests milling around at an open house hosted by the Alberta-based mining company that has spent the last decade devising a plan to extract silica sand from a southern Manitoba aquifer that serves more than 120,000 households.

The company has set up a trove of polished material: glossy handouts touting the economic benefits of the mine, posterboards outlining technical details about the proposed — and as yet unproven — airlift extraction method and its potential impacts on the aquifer, disposable water bottles wrapped in Sio Silica branding. A handful of engineers are stationed throughout the room to answer questions; some attendees hold hand-painted signs declaring their support for the project and the “#Jobs” it hopes to create; Churchill, the polar bear mascot for Winnipeg’s professional basketball team, the Sea Bears, mingles with attendees, helping promote an entry draw for game tickets.

“From my perspective, there’s an overwhelming amount of support,” Sio Silica president and East St. Paul Mayor Carla Devlin says, sitting in a small room across the hall from the event, with her private security guard at the door.

“I think that a lot of people that had questions got answers, and I think that we probably changed some minds and corrected some misinformation.” 

This is Sio Silica’s second crack at convincing the government, and the community, to approve its controversy-laden mine. 

The company believes it’s found a uniquely high-quality sand deposit that’s already low in iron — a characteristic needed for technical and industrial applications like touch-screen glass, solar panels and aerospace technology. That trait makes the sand easier and cheaper to process without the need for chemical treatments, the company says. Once purified, Sio Silica says the sand can be used to make lithium-ion batteries, fibre optics, medical glass and other advanced technologies.

“It’s like Frank’s hot sauce,” Devlin says.

The proposal has been shot down once before, when a newly elected NDP government axed the company’s environmental licence application in February 2024. The decision was one of the first major acts for the government, and bucked a years-long trend wherein Manitoba’s environmental licensing process was all but a formality. For residents of Springfield, Anola, Vivian and other communities served by the aquifer, that rejection was a hard-fought victory after years of protests, petitions, environmental hearings and local council debates.

Sio Silica has remained convinced its project has merit. In late October, more than a year and a half after the first environmental licence was denied, the company submitted a modified application — starting the licensing process from scratch. 

“I was angry,” Sinclair says of the new application. “It’s like we’ve got to go back to the battlefield and start protesting again.”

Devlin says the revised application was designed to show Sio Silica is listening to the community’s concerns. The biggest change is a significant reduction in the amount of sand the company plans to extract.

The original Vivian Sands project proposed extracting 1.36 million tonnes from more than 460 wells each year, with the wells arranged in clusters of seven. 

The new application, for the project now called “SiMBA,” proposes taking 100,000 tonnes in the first year and ramping up to a maximum of 500,000 tonnes by the fourth year. The company is now proposing to drill just 25 wells in Year 1 and scale up to 167 wells annually, this time in clusters of up to five. 

The overall footprint of the mine is projected to shrink, too. Sio Silica has access to more than 90,000 hectares of mineral claims across southern Manitoba, but plans to mine about 350 hectares in its first four years (a 45 per cent reduction from the original proposal) and 2,764 hectares over the lifetime of the project (a 66 per cent reduction). 

“We needed to show a gradual approach to build the trust and confidence,” Devlin says.

The company also plans to add filtering to its water treatment plan, to test its groundwater treatment process to “ensure compliance with provisions in an Environment Act licence,” and to draft plans to handle resident complaints and respond to any groundwater changes.

Not everyone is convinced. Katharina Stieffenhofer, a Winnipeg resident who has followed the company’s plans for years, says she still has “grave concerns” about the proposal.

“I’m concerned about the very likely injury — damage — to the aquifer, the drinking water, the landscape, the air, the roadways, and how it will impact the well-being and quality of life of Manitobans,” Stieffenhofer says.

“I’m also really concerned about their, shall we call it, public relations.”

Stieffenhofer says Sio Silica has been “greenwashing” its proposal.

“Initially they were going to use the silica sand for fracking. Then all of a sudden, we’re not doing that anymore, now it’s going to be all wonderful green economy, we’re going to make solar panels. Now this latest version is going to be for fibre optics for data because that’s the newest thing,” she says, referring to the way the company has marketed the aquifer sand.

“Who is really going to profit from this? I would say it’s not the people of Manitoba.”

In its final report, the Clean Environment Commission noted Sio Silica’s open houses and community consultation efforts were “hampered” by a lack of detail about the mining plan. The commission recommended “more effective two-way communication” with affected communities and suggested the province require Sio Silica to strike a local advisory committee where residents can weigh in on the project. 

Devlin acknowledges Sio Silica’s community engagement hasn’t been perfect, but going forward the company wants to be “an open book,” including “having community involved in [environmental oversight] committees.”  

Stieffenhofer wants to see government-funded, independent analysis of the proposed extraction method to mitigate the risks to the drinking water source.

“The silica sand acts as the kidneys and the liver. It filters our water, it has a function, and you take that away — what are we going to be left with, with 15 billion tonnes of silica sand missing?”

Devlin says the company has conducted four years of environmental monitoring that shows “no adverse effect to the aquifer, no ground movement.” 

The company has partnered with Aquatic Life, a Manitoba tech company developing groundwater monitoring tools, to provide realtime data about the Sandilands aquifer straight to community members and government.

It also plans to work with a University of Manitoba hydrology professor and PhD students to research and monitor the aquifer. Devlin says Sio Silica plans to be a “big contributor to the university” by committing research and development funding. 

Manitoba has shown it’s not completely opposed to silica sand mining. The same week it denied Sio Silica’s Environment Act licence, it approved another mining company’s plan to dig for sand in the Wapinigow region on the eastern side of the province.

In November, a third company, Silex Resources, submitted an application to mine for sand in a saline portion of the aquifer west of the Red River.

But Sio Silica’s project has been mired by political scandal: municipal council debates in Springfield unravelled to the point RCMP were called and the company’s lawyers threatened action against councillors; allegations that members of the former Progressive Conservative government pressured politicians to approve the project during the post-election transition period sparked a first-of-its-kind ethics investigation that ended with fines for the former premier and two MLAs. Two communities — Brokenhead Ojibway Nation and Springfield — have voted to reject the mine in referendums. 

Premier Wab Kinew has said the backroom political manoeuvring has left an air “of stink” around Sio Silica’s proposal, which needs clearing up before any further steps can be taken.

After nearly a decade in the province, Sio Silica isn’t ready to back away. In fact, Devlin is more optimistic than ever the project meets Manitoba’s needs.

“We check off all the boxes of a national interest project,” Devlin says, referring to the Carney government’s economic buzzword. “Everything written in [Manitoba’s] critical mineral strategy is Sio Silica. Everything the province is saying is everything that we offer, so I’m very optimistic we can move this province forward, build out our economy and boom like other provinces have.”

For residents, it means their years-long fight to protect the aquifer isn’t over either. 

The fate of Sio Silica’s mine is yet to be decided. Public comments closed Dec. 1, and the technical advisory committee will review the application and pose questions to the company before a final licensing decision is made. 

While the environment department weighs the risks and rewards of the sand mine, The Narwhal and the Winnipeg Free Press look back on Sio Silica’s tumultuous time in Manitoba. 

Sio Silica: the first 10 years

2015

• Oct. 26, 2015 — 1993502 Alberta Ltd. stakes its first claims in southern Manitoba Feisal Somji, Sio Silica’s CEO, began looking for sand deposits, hoping to find a source of proppant — a gritty material used to hold open fractures in the ground for oil extraction — to sell to the oil and gas industry for fracking, when he arrived in Manitoba. Under the banner of three numbered Alberta companies, the Calgarian mining executive started staking claims.“A friend of mine here in Steinbach said to me: ‘There is sand underground,’ ” Somji would later say. “That was the start of our hunt for the sand here.”

2016

• Sept. 29 — Drilling begins Drilling work continued until November 2018. In 2016, the company staked more than 400 claims across 98,000 hectares.

2017

• ‘Mystery’ mineral makes headlines Miners continued to scour the region, and residents began to take notice. Local headlines swirled with speculation about the “mystery” mineral deep in the rural farmland. It was rumoured to be gold, diamonds or lithium.The numbered companies were renamed HD Minerals and CanWhite Sands.

2018

• Drill, baby, drill With communications support from Winnipeg-based land-use planning firm Landmark Planning & Design, HD Minerals began working with landowners to conduct exploratory drilling. Between 2016 and 2019, the company shelled out a total of $45,000 to landowners who allowed boreholes to be drilled on their properties.Representatives for Landmark refused to say what they were looking for.Somji later told the Canadian Mining Journal, the company sought to secure the mineral rights to the entire Carman sand deposit.By 2019, the company had staked more than 500 mining claims covering more than 117,000 hectares.

2019

• April 9–11 — The big reveal HD Minerals held its first series of public information sessions in La Broquerie, Anola and Richer, where it revealed it planned to mine silica sand from an aquifer 60 metres below ground.
• April–December — A change of plans Chief operating officer Brent Bullen joined the project in April and began assessing the quality and potential of the sand. He noticed the sand is higher purity than expected, and shifted focus to high-tech applications. Meanwhile, the company’s engineers began working on a method to extract sand from the aquifer.

2020

• May 1 — Patent-pending CanWhite submitted a patent application for its unique airlift mining method, which it said would effectively vacuum sand and water out of the aquifer through wells. 
• June — The pushback begins A group of residents, concerned the plan could damage their source of drinking water, formed an organization called Our Line in the Sand to oppose the project, starting with a protest by one of CanWhite’s properties near Anola. The group called for an in-person open house and for the province to hold Clean Environment Commission hearings to review the project.
• June 17 — A pitch to council Winnipeg based urban-planning firm Richard + Wintrup, on behalf of CanWhite Sands, made a conditional use application to Springfield’s municipal council to build a sand processing facility near Vivian.
• July 2 — CanWhite applies for an Environment Act licence for its sand processing facility The company split its proposal in two: one licence for the processing facility, and another for the mining. Residents criticized this approach, arguing it failed to consider the cumulative impacts of the mine.

• Aug. 18–Sept. 28 — An appeal to Ottawa Community groups and First Nations, including Brokenhead Ojibway Nation, the Manitoba Métis Federation and citizen group What the Frack Manitoba, wrote to Canada’s impact assessment agency seeking a federal review of the mine.
• Oct. 8 — Petitioning against the project Our Line in the Sand presented a petition with more than 1,400 signatures to the Manitoba legislature, calling for a more independent and comprehensive environmental review.

2021

• Consultation and more consultation CanWhite Sands spent the year focused on community consultations. The company held meetings with representatives for the municipalities of Tache, Beausejour, Hanover, Ste. Anne, La Broquerie, Reynolds, Brokenhead and Springfield. On June 14, CanWhite presented the project to a “small group of leaders” from Brokenhead, with provincial representatives present.
• July 23 — CanWhite applied for an Environment Act licence for the sand extraction process.
• Nov. 15 — Manitoba’s environment minister directed the Clean Environment Commission to conduct a review of CanWhite’s mining proposal In her letter to Somji, then-environment minister Sarah Guillemard cited both “significant public interest” in the project and “the need for a thorough technical review” as reasons. 
• Dec. 7 — Ottawa says no The Impact Assessment Agency declined to conduct a review, deferring to the provincial licensing process.
• Dec. 16 — CanWhite granted an environmental licence for its sand processing facility, to be built near Vivian Opponents raised concern over the licence being granted while the mining process has been referred to the Clean Environment Commission for review. 

2022

• Jan. 1 — The rebrand CanWhite Sands rebranded as Sio Silica after the original name performed poorly in brand testing.
• May 20 — The municipality is asked to change its rules Richard + Wintrup, on behalf of Sio Silica, asked Springfield council to amend its bylaws to make it easier for the company to build its processing facility.
• June 23–29 — The municipality says no Springfield council voted against amending its bylaws.Richard + Wintrup appealed the decision to the Municipal Board, a quasi-judicial provincial body that settles disputes over property assessment and planning decisions.
• June 24 — Manitoba heavyweight joins the board David Filmon, a prominent Manitoba lawyer and son of former Progressive Conservative premier Gary Filmon, was appointed to Sio Silica’s board of directors.
• Oct. 5–22 — Provincial lobbying kicks off Jeremy Sawatzy, a consulting lobbyist, registered to arrange meetings with government representatives in the economic development, natural resources and environment branches on behalf of Sio Silica. 
• Oct. 19, 20, 28 — The bylaw debacle heats up Springfield council and Sio Silica appeared before the Municipal Board for a hearing about Richard + Wintrup’s proposed zoning amendment.Legislative changes meant the board had the power to overrule Springfield council and force the municipality to enter a deal with Sio Silica.

2023

• Jan. 17 — The solar panel pitch Somji and Peter Fath, CEO of German solar panel company RCT Solutions, met with Manitoba cabinet members to propose a $3-billion solar panel plant. Fath said Manitoba’s silica deposit and low-cost hydroelectricity make it “a really good place for solar manufacturing.” Fath said the plant could create 8,000 jobs when built. He noted he had investors with “deep pockets” ready to support the project, but “they won’t wait forever” for regulatory approval.
• February — Deal made Sio Silica and RCT Solutions signed an agreement to partner on the development of a solar panel manufacturing plant, which would exclusively use sand from Sio Silica’s mine.
• Feb. 27–March 15 — The Clean Environment Commission hearings Hearings took place over 12 days in Steinbach, Anola and Beausejour. The panel heard testimony from more than 70 people, including experts, representatives for Sio Silica and members of the public. The panel also received nearly 300 written submissions. The hearings focused on technical aspects of the project, including its potential impacts on the integrity of the aquifer and risks to water quality.

• March 8 — Council overruled The Municipal Board decided in favour of Richard + Wintrup and Sio Silica, ordering Springfield’s municipal council to amend its zoning bylaws and enter into a development agreement with the company.
• May 8 — New sponsorship deal Sio Silica announced it would sponsor the upcoming Winnipeg Blue Bombers training camp.
• June 13–19 — Debate takes chaotic turn Springfield council held several off-the-record meetings to debate the development agreement. Residents protested, arguing the municipality should have followed the normal procedure of public hearings and council debate. At one meeting, the mayor called RCMP to the community hall; in the next, more than 100 residents were locked out of the building. Councillors Andy Kuczynski and Mark Miller voted against the proposed development agreement, resulting in a tie. The agreement was referred back to the municipal board.

• June 20 — More economic muscle on board Michael Pyle, CEO of the Exchange Income Corporation and then-chair of the Winnipeg Football Club, the Manitoba First Fund and the Business Council of Manitoba, was appointed to Sio Silica’s board of directors. 
• June 23 — The Clean Environment Commission releases its final report The commission’s report showed concern the novel mining practice of airlifting sand from the aquifer could pose a risk to the region’s groundwater. The report made eight recommendations to the province aimed at gaining a better scientific understanding of the mine’s risks and strengthening project oversight before a licence is issued.Kevin Klein, Progressive Conservative environment minister at the time, presented the report to the public, pledging his office would review the proposal in light of the recommendations, adding “the process will take as long as the process needs to take.”
• July 26 — Manitoba makes a deal for solar panel production Manitoba’s mining minister at the time, Jeff Wharton, signed a memorandum of understanding with RCT Solutions, agreeing to support Fath in developing the solar glass manufacturing facility. 
• Aug. 11 — A letter from the company lawyers Springfield councillors Kuczynski and Miller received a letter from lawyers at MLT Aikins on behalf of Sio Silica, stating the company is “considering an action for misfeasance in public office.”“But for Councillors’ Miller and Kuczynski’s deliberate and bad-faith attempt to disrupt the land-use planning process, the development agreement would undoubtedly have been approved months ago,” the letter said.
• Aug. 13–Sept. 18 — Springfield residents vote no to Sio Kuczynski and Miller commissioned a phone-in referendum regarding the proposed mine. The survey received approximately 5,000 responses, with about 95 per cent voting “no.” 
• Sept. 15 — Manitoba environmental approvals branch shares a draft environmental licence with Sio Silica In the months following the environment commission hearing, Sio Silica and the environment department continued working toward licensing the mining proposal. In response to the commission’s recommendations, the draft licence is said to have included a staged approach that would “address any remaining environmental and technical concerns the government may have had with the commercial extraction process, before any commercial extraction actually occurred.”
• Oct. 3 — Election day New Democratic Party Leader Wab Kinew was elected premier, ending seven years of Progressive Conservative governance in the province.The government entered a caretaker period to allow for the changeover.
• Oct. 4–5 — Licensing pressure David Filmon contacted Cliff Cullen, then-Progressive Conservative deputy premier and head of the economic development, investment and trade department under the previous government, to follow up on the status of Sio Silica’s mining licence. Texts showed Filmon and Sio Silica were expecting a licence to be signed in the coming days.

• Oct. 6 — Talks ramp up during the transition Department staff and representatives from both parties held multiple meetings to discuss the project.An ethics commission investigation found some provincial staff claimed the licence had already been signed, while members of the Sio Silica team appeared to expect a licensing decision that day.Department staff discussed options to move forward with the licence during the transition period.

• Oct. 12 — Wharton urges the outgoing environment minister and deputy minister to approve Sio Silica’s Environment Act licence. Both refuse.
• Oct. 13 — Sio Silica reaches out to Peguis First Nation Sio Silica signed a memorandum of understanding with Peguis First Nation to conduct environmental monitoring of its mining. The status of that agreement is currently uncertain.
• Oct. 18 — Premier Wab Kinew and his cabinet are sworn in, marking the end of the caretaker period
• In the following months, several interdepartmental meetings took place to brief ministers on the project and plan next steps in licensing. Departmental staff calendars obtained through freedom of information requests showed at least a dozen such meetings between Oct. 24, 2023 and Feb.16, 2024.
• Nov. 13 — Sio Silica goes public through a merger with Pyrophyte Acquisitions, a shell company headquartered in the Cayman Islands Through the public offering, valued at $780 million, details about the company’s financial position and business deals — including signed agreements to sell sand to two semiconductor manufacturers in China — came to light.
• Nov. 20 — Pitching to the new government Sio Silica representatives presented the mine project to Ian Bushie, then-minister of municipal and northern relations and Indigenous economic development, and Jamie Moses, then-minister of economic development, investment, trade and natural resources

2024

• Jan. 12 — MLA requests an ethics investigation MLA Mike Moyes, a legislative assistant in the Environment department, formally requested Manitoba’s ethics commissioner investigate the former government’s efforts to approve Sio Silica’s environment licence during the caretaker period.

• Feb. 16 — Sio Silica’s extraction licence rejected “We have a responsibility to ensure we are not endangering Manitobans’ drinking water,” then-environment minister Tracy Schmidt said. “This proposal failed to adequately consider long-term impacts including potential aquifer collapse. That’s why we made the decision to not issue a licence for the Vivian sand extraction project.”In a statement, Sio Silica claimed the company was “working with Peguis Special Projects and Consultation to conduct environmental monitoring” and had “entered into discussions with Broken Head Ojibway Nation for the location of advanced manufacturing facilities on their lands.”

• Feb. 16 — Alberta lobbyist approaches the province Hal Danchilla, a conservative lobbyist from Alberta, registered to lobby Wab Kinew and Tracy Schmidt on behalf of Sio Silica.
• May 21 — Sio sponsors mining lobby day The Manitoba Prospectors and Developers Association hosted its Lobby Day at the legislature. Sio Silica was a premium sponsor of the event. Each MLA was presented with a “custom-made silica sand vial.”
• May 27 — From councillor to a lobbyist Shandy Walls formally registered as a lobbyist for Sio Silica. According to the lobbying registry, she had been lobbying on behalf of the company since May 2021, though no details of her lobbying were recorded. Walls is founder of the Springfield Chamber of Commerce, where Sio Silica is a member, and served on council from 2014 to 2018.
• June — Silicon makes the critical mineral list Canada released an updated critical mineral list with three new minerals, one of which is silicon metal, a potential application of silica sand. According to emails obtained through a freedom of information request, the Manitoba Prospectors and Developers Association had requested the federal government add silica sand to the list.
• June 29 — East St. Paul Mayor Carla Devlin is appointed vice-president of Sio Silica.
• July 21 — Sio approaches Brokenhead Sio Silica held a “major project meeting” with the newly elected chief and council.
• November–December — Company looks for First Nations’ support Sio Silica held consultations with several First Nations, focusing in particular on Brokenhead. At a series of roundtable sessions in November, members of the First Nation were presented an equity-sharing opportunity that would be valued at approximately $10 million per year.Sio Silica also held meetings with other Treaty One Nations, a council made up of leadership from seven southern Manitoba First Nations, including Brokenhead, Peguis, Roseau River Anishinabe and Long Plain First Nations.

2025

• Feb. 3 — Devlin is appointed president of Sio Silica
• March — Sio seizes ‘Elbows Up’ moment In the lead up to Canada’s federal election on March 9, sovereignty and economic security became dominant themes.Sio Silica, in the meantime, continued to meet with local officials, including Winnipeg Mayor Scott Gillingham, the mayors of Rockwood municipality and Steinbach and with Arctic Gateway Group, the consortium that owns the Port of Churchill. The company discussed the possibility of shipping sand through the port. 
• May 7 — Sio Silica goes stateside Sio Silica registered as a lobbyist in North Dakota. In a November interview, Devlin said the company is considering building a beneficiation facility stateside.
• May 13–14 — National security a new market Sio Silica CEO Feisal Somji spoke at the Critical Minerals Institute Summit IV in Toronto. His talk was titled “The Important Role of Silica in North American National Security and How Canada Can Take a Leading Role.”
• May 21 — Premier, MLAs found guilty of ethics law breach Then-ethics commissioner Jeffrey Schnoor released a 100-page report recommending fines totalling $40,000 for former premier Heather Stefanson and MLAs Cliff Cullen and Jeff Wharton, finding they acted improperly in attempting to secure a licence for Sio Silica during the caretaker period.

• May 28 — A new marketing campaign Sio launched a new marketing campaign — including radio advertisements, billboards and newspaper advertising — with the slogan “15 billion tonnes of opportunity. Stay in Manitoba. Build the Future.”
• Aug. 1–8 — Brokenhead votes ‘no’ Brokenhead, thought to be the “closest First Nation” to the project, held a referendum to decide whether to enter a revenue-sharing deal with Sio Silica. The community rejected Sio’s proposal by a vote of 181-129.
• Aug. 25 — Meetings in North Dakota Carla Devlin met with North Dakota Senator Kevin Cramer, who serves on the senate environment and public works committee, as well as the armed services committee.
• Aug. 28 — Reinforcing national security narrative Somji spoke as a part of a panel from the Critical Minerals Institute Masterclass series titled: “Silicon’s Strategic Trajectory — From High-Purity Silica to Semiconductors & National Security.”
• Oct. 7 — Fines issued The Manitoba government voted to impose fines on Heather Stefanson ($18,000), Cliff Cullen ($12,000) and Jeff Wharton ($10,000), as per the recommendations in the ethics commissioner’s report. Fines were fully paid by Nov. 4.
• Oct. 28 — A new licence application Sio Silica filed a second Environment Act licence application for its mining process. It was originally filed Aug. 18, but only made publicly available in late October. The revised project proposed reductions in the number of wells drilled, the quantity of sand extracted each year and overall footprint of the mine, starting with 25 wells and 100,000 tonnes removed across about 0.65 square kilometres in the first year.
• Oct. 31 — Long Plain First Nation enters scene Sio Silica signed a memorandum of understanding with Long Plain First Nation to conduct an environmental review of the project.The review is not an endorsement of the project, Chief David Meeches told the CBC, adding “if it is such that it is negative, we will walk away.”
• Nov. 24 — New-look SiMBA project unveiled Sio Silica hosted an open house in Winnipeg for its revised project application.
• Dec. 1 — Licence application in provincial hands The public comment period for the new environment licence application closed.

Julia-Simone Rutgers is a reporter covering environmental issues in Manitoba. Her position is part of a partnership between The Narwhal and the Winnipeg Free Press.

Updated Dec. 12, 2025 at 4:50 p.m. CT: This article originally stated consulting lobbyist Jeremy Sawatzy met with government officials on behalf of Sio Silica. While he did register to arrange meetings with those officials on behalf of the company, no meetings ultimately took place. It was also updated to correct a line describing Aquatic Life as a startup company.

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.

Seven months after the Liberal Party vowed to “immediately introduce and pass legislation” affirming the right of First Nations to clean drinking water, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government says they’re still working on it.

This comes as First Nations leaders call on the government to better protect the health of their communities from the threat of toxic waste in the Alberta oilsands.

The Alberta government is looking closely at recommendations made in September to speed up the creation of standards, so oilsands companies can treat and release their giant reservoirs of wastewater, called tailings ponds, into the Athabasca River.

The oil and gas industry has been asking for permission to release the treated wastewater. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has given Environment Minister Rebecca Schulz a mandate to come up with a plan for the reservoirs, which as of 2024 have grown to 1.5 trillion litres in volume, covering an area larger than the city of Vancouver.

Several First Nations communities downstream of the oilsands rely on the river for drinking water and to support the ecosystem that produces their food. They are against treating and releasing the wastewater into their watershed.

“The technology for treating these oil tailings is unproven and cannot guarantee that the water would be safe for my people to drink,” Mikisew Cree First Nation Chief Billy-Joe Tuccaro said during a Nov. 3 press conference in Ottawa.

The national chief of the Assembly of First Nations asked the federal government this month to reintroduce a Trudeau-era bill called the First Nations Clean Water Act. The bill, meant to establish legal pathways to protect drinking water sources flowing into First Nation territory, died when former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau prorogued Parliament in early 2025 right before leaving office.

Indigenous Services Minister Mandy Gull-Masty told The Narwhal in a statement she has been taking time to get the details right. She said ensuring safe drinking water for First Nations communities is a “top priority” for the government.

“I take this issue very seriously and hope to have more to say very soon,” Gull-Masty said.

“We are working carefully to make sure the new legislation is strong, effective and truly reflects the needs and priorities of First Nations communities.”

Some First Nations leaders opposed the water bill when it was first debated in Parliament, saying it doesn’t go far enough to protect Treaty Rights, or guard against toxic industrial byproducts, and have criticized the national chief for pushing the bill despite their concerns. Mikisew Cree First Nation is still opposed to its reintroduction.

‘Doing nothing’ is not sustainable: Alberta government

Oilsands mining processes need huge amounts of water. Extracting the petroleum substance bitumen creates toxic byproducts that are stored in tailings reservoirs.

Currently, oilsands operations have no federal authorization to release any wastewater into any natural water bodies. Schulz has said “doing nothing” while the tailings keep on swelling in size “is not a sustainable long-term approach.”

In addition to being toxic, the tailings are dangerous to wildlife, like in 2022 when hundreds of birds died from contaminated water at one site owned by Canadian Natural Resources Limited.

Mikisew Cree First Nation, residing on the shores of Lake Athabasca, is skeptical of the idea after spending years sounding the alarm about the cancer crisis it says it’s dealing with.

The community suspects its higher-than-average rates of some forms of cancer are tied to industrial activity on its traditional territory. The latest public data available from Alberta Health Services is from 2014 and showed higher-than-expected instances of cervical cancer and biliary tract cancer in the community.

The community’s health concerns were heightened, Chief Tuccaro said, when wastewater leaked from an Imperial Oil oilsands site in 2022 and went unreported to the public for nine months.

“Adding yet another significant, cumulative effect to an already fragile system is unacceptable,” he said.

“We continue to work with the federal government to explore the alternatives of treat and release, and we encourage them to continue that work to find a solution that keeps our community safe.”

Environment and Climate Change Canada has been working with Health Canada and nine Indigenous communities to assess the need for regulations overseeing treated oilsands mining waste, including exploring how to manage oilsands tailings, a spokesperson told The Narwhal.

The government published a paper early this year “developed collaboratively” with the group that discussed alternatives to treat-and-release and their potential benefits and risks.

The federal department expects to publish a draft regulatory framework by the end of next March — and then carry out more analysis of potential impacts to Indigenous Rights and other concerns. The group will then make final recommendations to Environment and Climate Change Minister Julie Dabrusin.

First Nations leaders have also long asked the federal government to complete a comprehensive study of health impacts in the oilsands region. In 2024, after decades of concern, the federal government announced it would spend $12 million over ten years to study the “impacts of the oilsands on community members’ health.”

Chief Tuccaro was joined by Treaty 8 First Nations of Alberta Grand Chief Trevor Mercredi, who said there are solutions available that could reduce the toxic tailings reservoirs — but they were considered expensive.

He didn’t give examples, but one potential solution that involves drying the tailings out so they become stackable “cakes,” for instance, requires high upfront and operating costs.

Mercredi argued the price shouldn’t matter. “If it increases the cost of a barrel of oil by $2 a barrel, then it has to be looked at. There is no price for the health of our people,” he said.

“We understand that Canada’s in a rough place right now, and we need development for a lot of this industry. Nobody up here is against any type of development or industry, but what we are against is the poisoning of our lands for many generations.”

Assembly of First Nations National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak also joined the two chiefs, and called on Carney to work with Treaty 8 First Nations and others on the issue of safe drinking water.

“Water sustains not just our bodies, but our spirits, our traditions, our way of life and our economy. First Nations are united in the belief that water is a fundamental human right,” she said.

Canada’s previously proposed clean water bill wasn’t the answer for everyone

In voicing concern about water protection, National Chief Woodhouse Nepinak called on Carney to “honour his promise during the election and reintroduce the First Nations Clean Water Act this month. It should have been done by now.”

During the 2025 spring election, the Liberal Party platform said they would “immediately introduce and pass legislation affirming that First Nations have a human right to clean drinking water.”

In June, provincial environment ministers in Ontario and Alberta called on the Carney government to abandon that plan, saying they feared it would “undermine competitiveness” and “delay project development.”

Despite the provincial pressure, Gull-Masty said over the summer the federal government was still planning to table a First Nations water bill “this fall.” As of Nov. 13, no such bill had been introduced.

The bill isn’t the answer for everyone. When a parliamentary committee studied it last year, Chief Tuccaro appeared as a witness and said he was in “total opposition” to it because of the powers it could hand Alberta.

Chief Sheldon Sunshine of Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation, in Treaty 8 territory, had also told the committee in October “this bill does not meet our needs or expectations.” He said it didn’t meaningfully incorporate inherent and Treaty Rights to water.

Asked whether Mikisew Cree First Nation still opposes the bill, even though the national chief was calling for its reintroduction, public relations director Tanya Adams said the nation’s position remains the same.

“The national chief stood with us to support our fight against the treat and release of toxic tailings into our water. We thank her for that. Unfortunately, she took this opportunity to reiterate the Assembly of First Nations executive’s support for Bill C-61 [the First Nations Clean Water Act] — something we have opposed and continue to oppose,” Adams said.

Adams said the bill would create “two tiers of drinking water guidelines.” The bill would establish standards for drinking water on First Nation lands as meeting the level of quality for either federal guidelines, or some other standards “in place in the province or territory where the First Nation lands are located.”

It also makes a distinction between water and “source water,” or the untreated fresh water that becomes drinking water, and allows the federal government to enter into agreements with provinces with respect to protecting it.

Mikisew Cree First Nation is worried these kinds of definitions surrender control over water to Alberta, while Canada’s constitution says the federal government has jurisdiction over navigable waters.

“This legislation will do nothing for our nation on the issue of toxic tailings,” Adams said, calling it “anti-treaty.”

She said the First Nation’s position was shared by many chiefs and nations across Canada.

A request for comment sent to the national chief’s office was not returned by publication time.

The Carney government’s first budget, released this month, does propose $2.3 billion over three years to renew the First Nations Water and Wastewater Enhanced Program, maintaining about 800 projects.

But a steering committee for Treaty 6, 7 and 8 territories said Nov. 5 that the funding for First Nations was “dramatically insufficient” to address infrastructure gaps across Alberta, especially for clean water.

Chief Troy Knowlton of the Piikani Nation near the Alberta-Montana border, called it “a small drop in the giant bucket that Canada created.”

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

When Scott Driver began work as fire chief in Cranbrook, B.C., in 2019, his mission was crystal clear: protect his town’s residents and buildings from fire. But it wasn’t until 2022, when a wildfire threatened the mountainside that collects his town’s drinking water, that he realized that in this warming climate, his responsibilities extend far beyond the city limits. 

The BC Wildfire Service was preparing to do everything it could to stop the rapidly growing flames of the Connell Ridge fire. There was just one problem, Driver says. That same slope it was about to raze, burn and dump retardants on was the main source of tap water for Cranbrook, supplying its 20,000 residents with drinking water. 

That’s when a light bulb switched on for him. “Not only do I have to protect the citizens in their houses and our infrastructure, but I have to protect the ability for them to stay in their house and drink water, cause it’s a piece of life,” he recalls thinking. 

He quickly brought his city’s water manager into the fire incident management team and BC Wildfire Service amended its action plan. This isn’t about houses, this is about drinking water, Driver remembers telling them.

The hotter a fire burns, the more the charred soil repels water long after the flames are extinguished. That leads to more sediment washing into streams, more harmful bacteria and warmer water — all of which make it harder and more expensive to treat drinking water. One study from the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found once one-fifth of a watershed’s footprint is burned in severe fire, it will experience increased runoff and water flows, which worsens water quality downstream as the healthy soils and vegetation that absorb and filter water are burned away. 

As climate change combines with decades of rapidly putting out most wildfires — leaving forests packed with dry fuel — the ripple effects are showing up in our tap water. Last summer, discoloured tap water flowing out of faucets in West Kelowna was likely caused by the wildfire that scorched the slopes feeding into the Rose Valley reservoir the previous summer, according to a city statement. 

An analysis by a team of environmental scientists published earlier this year examined 245 burned watersheds across the United States and found organic carbon and phosphorus remained elevated for five years post-fire, while nitrogen and sediment levels remained elevated for up to eight years. The scientists, from the Rocky Mountain Research Station in Colorado, found nitrogen levels in the surface water from watersheds burned in the 2002 Hayman fire, the largest recorded in the state’s history at the time, were still elevated almost 15 years after the fires.In emergency planning, responders plan around safeguarding critical infrastructure assets, but Driver sees a dangerous blind spot in B.C. when it comes to what’s considered critical. “The natural asset of a watershed isn’t currently top of mind for most,” he says. “That’s as important as the schools and the hospital.”

Wildfires are a threat to water security

Fortunately this is still a theoretical concern for Driver, but in many parts of the province, it’s already an issue. Most cities and towns in B.C. depend on reservoirs which collect surface water — the water we can see that comes from rain, melting snow, rivers, lakes and streams. There are more than 466 community watersheds in the province that supply many British Columbians with their water. “You cannot have a community without water,” Robert Gray, a wildland fire ecologist based in Chilliwack, B.C., explains. “The reality is we’re going to be facing more and more of these kinds of crises where we’ve had a significant impact to the watershed.”

In 2023, Canada’s worst wildfire season by a long shot, a record 2.84 million hectares burned in B.C. alone, an area almost as large as all of Vancouver Island. Of that total, 13,970 hectares burned in the Grouse Complex Wildfire that included the McDougall Creek fire in West Kelowna.

Following concerted firefighting efforts, West Kelowna’s brand new $75-million Rose Valley water treatment plant was spared, but the forested watershed which feeds the water plant was not so lucky. About 95 per cent of that watershed burned, a significant change to the landscape which has worsened water quality in the reservoir, increasing turbidity and concentrations of manganese — an unwelcome legacy expected to persist for at least five years after the burn, if not longer.

“We know the land surrounding the Rose Valley reservoir has been damaged because of the wildfire in 2023, and it means the contaminated source of water can be harder to treat because of the sediment, nutrients, metals and organic matter as a result of burned material,” Interior Health medical health officer Dr. Fatemeh Sabet told West Kelowna city council in June this year. 

In 2009, one of the main watersheds that supplied water to Lillooet, B.C., burned extensively in the Mount McLean fire. As a result, its water was contaminated by ash and fire retardant and was unusable altogether. It forced the district to ban water for irrigation in the short term to stretch its reduced water capacity. Since then, the town has developed alternative water sources with the help of $10 million in federal funds. 

“The frequency and intensity of the fire seasons has been overwhelming for a lot of us,” J. Ivor Norlin tells The Narwhal. As head of the drinking water systems program at B.C.’s Interior Health Authority, he’s seen an increase in impacts on water systems due to wildfires. “If it happened once in a while we might be able to focus resources. Now it’s happening every other year, or every three years, and it’s just more and more and more,” he says. In cases like West Kelowna’s McDougall Creek fire, the connection between the fire that burned in August 2023 and the rusty-coloured water with elevated manganese levels that poured out of the tap the following summer was clear. For other water quality impacts, it’s harder to connect the dots. 

Norlin says water managers are seeing the water quality in the entire Okanagan area change in recent years — everything from an increase in water temperatures to spikes in phosphorus and fine sediment have been documented. While the region saw dramatic wildfires in 2017, 2021 and again in 2023, whether these changes in the lake’s water are due entirely to wildfire, or a confluence of extreme weather events, is hard to pin down. “It’s also just part of those broader climate change impacts and just our reality of a shifting environment,” he says. It’s not just B.C. seeing water impacts from wildfires. The fire that struck Fort McMurray, Alta., in 2016 left a huge burn scar on either side of the Athabasca River from which the town’s water is collected. “The water treatment plant there is still dealing with the effects of that fire now,” Juliette O’Keeffe, a senior scientist at the National Collaborating Centre for Environmental Health explains. “Anyone that is operating a water treatment facility has to be aware that there is always a potential for risk of a wildfire.”“It’s not just the land that is burned; you can see downstream impacts as well. Water flows downhill.”

The path to fire-resilient watersheds — and the hurdles in the way

In the cases of West Kelowna and Fort McMurray, their plants have proven robust enough to ensure adequate water treatment despite challenges posed by downstream wildfire impacts, even if they have hiked up water treatment costs. But in Cranbrook, Driver is focused on mitigating the risks upstream, where he wants to make the land more fire-resilient in the first place. 

That way, when it catches fire, it won’t burn so hot and it can bounce back more readily. “We’re not going to stop fire from hitting the landscape,” Driver says. “What we need to do is stop it from wrecking the watershed. … What we want to do is be resilient enough that we can still drink the water after the fire’s been put out.”

He and his department have already begun work to increase the resilience of the city’s water catchment, doing landscape treatments across the parcel of Cranbrook-owned forest adjacent to the town’s water reservoir. They have removed fallen logs, thinned the forest and reduced the amount of fuel available to wildfire and have plans to do more. 

“We’re … planning to do logging and prescribed burning so that if a fire comes roaring down the mountain, it doesn’t come right up to the water’s edge and contaminate the reservoir of water that we use for drinking,” he explains. 

The interior Douglas fir forests surrounding Cranbrook are fire-adapted landscapes, able to recover readily from lower-temperature wildfires. Historic tree-ring analysis shows the forests in the area experienced fire every two to three decades over a period of about 250 years. Burning was a cultural practice of the Ktunaxa, who stewarded these lands for generations, using fire to renew the landscape, improve berry harvests and increase pasture. British Columbia banned cultural burns with the Bush Fire Act of 1874 – the first province in the country to do so. 

In spring 2023, members of ʔaq̓am, a Ktunaxa community, and crews from BC Wildfire Service and Cranbrook’s fire department conducted a 1,200-hectare prescribed burn. A little more than two months later, wildfires whipped through the area. Driver believes the cultural burn reduced fuel loads across the landscape significantly enough to redirect the uncontrolled wildfire away from assets like the airport and neighbouring communities. 

A growing body of scientific evidence shows pre-emptively burning landscapes in low-severity fires lowers their risk of experiencing high-severity fires later, including a recent study out of Stanford University which found prescribed burns lowered the severity of wildfires by 16 per cent and net smoke pollution by an average of 14 per cent. Another analysis found even greater gains of a 72 per cent reduction of severe wildfire risk if forests were thinned to reduce “ladder fuels” (vegetation that can catch fire, drawing flames from the ground up into the tree canopy) and small trees before prescribed burning. 

Driver and his fire department are empowered to reduce the flammability of the parcel of land around the town’s water reservoir because it’s city-owned. But when he looks uphill to the larger watershed that Cranbrook’s citizens rely on, he’s not sure there’s any path he can pursue to make that watershed fire-resistant, because it’s on Crown land. 

“What we need to do in the watersheds are fuel treatments … to mitigate or alleviate fire intensity and severity,” Gray says, adding that means thinning conifer stands, prescribed or cultural burning, converting conifer stands to hardwood or encouraging shrub fields. Most critically, it means asking the B.C. Ministry of Forests to pivot from its status quo model of timber management to more holistic ecosystem management practices that meet multiple objectives.

Currently, as both Gray and Driver note, the province will license a community to collect surface water from a watershed for its water, and with the other hand, permit a private company to harvest timber in that same watershed, with no provisions for the forestry company to log or manage that forest to mitigate its wildfire risk (whether its surface water is licensed to a community or not).

Historically, those two things — timber harvest and surface water collection — could happen in parallel without issue, but now that wildfires are threatening water security, and the best mitigation to safeguard that water source involves altering its management, the two are put in conflict. “Now your focus has to be reducing fire threat to the watershed and not just chasing timber,” says Gray. “The province should have this leadership role where they basically go to the [timber] licensee and say, the objective here in this piece is water quality and water quantity, and reduction of fire risk.” 

It’s possible for a forested watershed to be managed for both fire resilience and profitable harvests, protecting economic interests as well as water supply. In the U.S., Denver Water, the utility that provides the Denver area with clean water, spent tens of millions to repair infrastructure and remove sediment from its reservoirs in the aftermath of the 2002 Hayman Fire. It partnered with federal and state agencies in an initiative called “From Forests to Faucets” to restore fire resilience to the drainage basins that fed its reservoirs. Since 2010, the initiative has conducted treatments across 100,000 acres (roughly 40,000 hectares), ranging from planting within burned priority watersheds to fuel reduction treatments in unburned watersheds to reduce the risk of high-severity fires there.

But such an approach would require a shift in focus and new standards that the province has been unable or unwilling to negotiate for industry. “It takes an adult in the room to say, this is how we’re going to do it,” says Gray. “Right now we don’t have an adult in the room.” 

In an emailed statement, the B.C. Ministry of Forests referred The Narwhal to the newly updated “Silvicultural Systems Handbook for British Columbia” as an example of how the province is “advancing innovative silvicultural practices like selective thinning, fuel management and forest restoration” to advance its understanding “of how changes to forest, water and climate will influence sustainable resource management.” However this handbook provides guidance on best practices for practitioners, rather than enforceable regulations, and provides no specific guidance on how forests that collect surface water for communities downstream should be managed to reduce the risk from severe wildfire. 

The Ministry of Forests also pointed The Narwhal to its Forest Landscape Planning framework (its new forest management regime), which it writes gives “First Nations and non-Indigenous communities greater say in how forest management takes place in their community watersheds.”

And as Canada experiences its second-worst wildfire season on record, communities across B.C. are watching as their own watersheds are threatened and transformed by flames. 

When it comes to watershed management, Gray says, “If you hold to your current static plan, you’re already behind the eight ball.”

Updated Sept. 15, 2025, 11:35 a.m. PT: This article was updated to correct the year of a prescribed burn near Cranbrook, B.C. The burn took place in 2023.

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The B.C. government greenlit a watershed security strategy it co-developed with First Nations more than a year ago, according to an internal government document obtained by The Narwhal. But the province has failed to release the strategy despite repeated calls from First Nations partners to do so.

“I can’t tell you how deeply frustrating it is for me,” Xtli’li’ye Lydia Hwitsum, co-chair of the First Nations Water Caucus which co-developed the strategy, said in an interview. “We had done such good work.”

The BC NDP promised to develop a watershed security strategy during the 2020 election campaign. In early 2023, the province announced a $100-million endowment for a watershed security fund and launched public consultations through an intentions paper for the strategy. The paper outlined goals to strengthen local and Indigenous governance of watersheds, to build watershed knowledge and take a holistic approach to watershed management and ecosystem protection.

Cabinet approved the final strategy in early 2024, according to a December 2024 briefing document prepared for Water, Land and Resource Stewardship Minister Randene Neill, which The Narwhal obtained through a freedom of information request. 

A ministry spokesperson said its release was paused as the province built an implementation plan and worked to secure additional funding, but offered no timeline for when the strategy would be public. 

Aaron Hill, executive director of the conservation charity Watershed Watch Salmon Society, said “it’s very disappointing” the strategy hasn’t been released. 

“My impression of what happened is that the government got cold feet leading up to the last election and decided to put it on ice,” he said. “And that’s where it remains.”

Both Hwitsum and Hill said plans to release the watershed strategy seemed to stall amid public backlash to the government’s proposed changes to the Land Act, which would have brought the legislation in line with the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act. 

“When it came to our strategy, they just couldn’t get the courage together to do it,” said Hwitsum, a former chief of the Cowichan Tribes.

The ministry did not directly address these concerns in its response to The Narwhal’s questions.

Logging, urban development, climate change threaten watersheds across B.C.

In the meantime, watersheds across B.C. are under threat. Decades of clear-cut logging dramatically changed watersheds stretching from the coast through the Interior, Younes Alila, a hydrologist with the University of British Columbia’s faculty of forestry, told The Narwhal.

“We continue to lose our forest cover in B.C. at a very alarming rate,” he said. The result is a heightened risk of floods, drought and landslides, which threaten fish and other aquatic life, alongside the communities, farms and businesses that rely on access to clean water. 

Climate change compounds those threats, particularly in watersheds transformed by extensive urban and industrial development in ways that make them less resilient to extreme weather events. 

Just two years ago, pink salmon were left stranded and struggling for oxygen as water levels in xʔəl̓ilwətaʔɬ, the Indian River, dropped to dangerous lows amid an unrelenting drought. Two years before that, extreme rainstorms battered the province leading to widespread flooding and deadly landslides. 

“The situation is really scary,” Alila said, adding there’s “no doubt” a watershed security strategy is needed. Alongside investment in watershed restoration, he said the province needs to overhaul its forestry and water management policies to address the root causes that leave watersheds across the province in such a vulnerable state.

A more holistic approach is needed now, Hwitsum said, one that is co-developed with First Nations and places Indigenous Knowledge at the forefront. 

That the strategy the First Nations Water Caucus co-developed with the B.C. government has been set aside is “hugely deflating,” she said.

“We worked really hard for that and we were ready to hold that strategy up and say look, here’s a framework,” she said. 

The water ministry spokesperson said “the province agrees that more needs to be done to support watershed security and face the scale of the water challenges in B.C.” 

Alongside exploring options to bolster the water security fund, the spokesperson noted the government is working across ministries to reform water permitting, support farmers affected by drought and invest in community water conservation projects and critical infrastructure, including flood defences.

“The province is focused on supporting watershed security alongside First Nations, local governments, stakeholders, industry and the public,” the spokesperson said.

B.C. urged to raise industry water rates to bolster watershed security fund

As the First Nations Water Caucus continues to push for the strategy to be released, Hwitsum said the group is also looking at options to grow the watershed security fund.

The fund, which is currently co-managed by the Real Estate Foundation of BC and the First Nations Water Caucus, supports a range of projects focused on ecosystem health, reconciliation, climate resilience and sustainable economies. 

Earnings from the $100-million endowment are meant to provide annual funding for grants to support projects across B.C. But applications already exceed what it can afford to support while protecting the initial investment. In its first intake round in the spring of 2024, for instance, the fund received 131 applications requesting a total of $33.8 million in funding, but was only able to fund 26 projects totalling $5 million.  

In the December briefing document prepared for Minister Neill, government officials warned the fund “must grow to meet the scale of water challenges facing B.C.”

The water ministry spokesperson said the province has asked the federal government to contribute funds and is exploring other options including increasing government revenue to fund water priorities.

Hill sees a clear path forward: the province could increase the payments industrial users are required to pay for water.

“Quebec is a great model for this,” he said. It recently raised rates for companies that use water, but don’t store it, from $2.50 to $35 per million litres.

Currently, the B.C. government charges commercial water users — including mining, oil and gas and bottled water companies — $2.25 in rent for every million litres of fresh water they take. “We’re practically giving it away to large industrial users,” Hill said. 

“This is a huge province with these massive watersheds and all kinds of threats and issues that this fund is positioned to address,” he said. “It just needs more money.”

Editor’s note: The Real Estate Foundation of BC has financially supported work by The Narwhal. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, no foundation or outside organization has editorial input into our stories.

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.