Aquatic global change ecologist Mary Jade (MJ) Farruggia found herself studying the impact of wildfires on lakes by accident. She was researching lakes in the mountains of California in the summer of 2020 when, in “a tragic turn of events,” wildfires swept through the area, smoke clouded the sky and her plans quickly changed.

“Wildfires are becoming more intense and more frequent, and so it just became a phenomenon that was getting harder and harder to ignore,” Farruggia, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder, told The Narwhal over the phone. “As lake scientists, we started wondering, ‘what’s the impact of this on the systems that we study?’ ”

Canada is home to two million lakes, more than any other country. And the last three wildfire seasons have been among the worst on record here, making research like Farruggia’s critical.

A record-breaking season in 2023 saw 15 million hectares of forest burned across Canada. The land hasn’t had much reprieve since. This year more than 4,700 fires burned more than four million hectares across the country by the end of August — many in Ontario.

“We as humans feel the impacts of [wildfire smoke],” Farruggia said. “If it’s affecting your own health, how is it also affecting your ecosystems and the nature around you and the systems that you rely on? Is your favourite lake going to be similarly impacted by smoke?”

‘Almost all’ North American lakes are exposed to wildfire smoke: researchers

Some of the direct impacts of wildfires on ecosystems are straightforward; as fires burn near lakes, they increase future flood risk, as plants that stabilize soil and filter runoff go up in smoke. Ash deposits contaminants and excess nutrients into the water, changing the makeup of watersheds.

For each lake and fire, the full impact depends on a slew of variables, including “the number of wildfires, their intensity, their location, the health of the ecosystem before the fire and even how much rain falls following a fire,” Terri-Lee Reid, a freshwater conservation researcher at the Canadian Wildlife Federation, said.

Less clear is how lake ecosystems far away from fires are being impacted as smoke travels, and Reid says there’s still more to learn. But, the science is much newer, and scientists like Farruggia and her colleagues spend their time designing and performing experiments to figure it out.

“Sometimes we get these summers where it feels like much of North America is covered in smoke,” said Steven Sadro, an associate professor of environmental science and policy at the University of California, Davis. He is also Farruggia’s co-author and former advisor. “This is smoke that’s affecting millions of lakes at continental scales.”

Sadro and Farruggia coined the term “lake-smoke day,” which provides a metric referring to the number of days a lake is exposed to smoke in a fire season. They found wildfire smoke can drift hundreds of miles away from its source, making its impact widespread.

“We found a pretty shocking response … that almost all lakes in North America experience some number of smoke exposure days,” Sadro said, adding that many of them were experiencing a full month or more over the course of a year.

“Smoke in the atmosphere can reduce the amount of sunlight that can reach the lake, and that can impact water temperature. It can impact the growth of algae and aquatic plants, and then that can have further consequences,” Reid said.

Their research suggests that smoke blocks sunlight from reaching lakes, lowering lake temperatures and reducing photosynthesis and respiration in the body of water. 

What happens next is harder to predict. A lake’s depth, clarity, size, location and nutrient levels all influence how it responds to smoke. Larger lakes can be more resilient while smaller, clearer lakes can experience more algae growth due to the new nutrient deposits.

“The jury is really out on the magnitude of the impact. I’m not trying to say that millions of lakes in North America are having very large impacts from wildfire smoke. Some of them certainly may be,” Sadro said. “We don’t know what those numbers are yet.”

‘When the land’s not healthy, the lakes aren’t healthy either’

While researchers work to untangle those relationships, Amy Cardinal Christianson, director of fire stewardship for the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, says Indigenous Knowledge has long recognized the interconnection between fire, water and land.

She pointed to historical examples along the west coast where Indigenous communities have been aware of the cooling effect of smoke on waterways that western science has also recently ventured into. For example in California, when it was too hot for salmon to spawn, Cardinal Christianson said cultural burns would be used to help create a layer of smoke over the water to cool it and help the fish.

But while fire can be used beneficially, it can also cause harm to waterways.

“People often think of [a] lake as its own ecosystem, which it is, but it’s really tied into everything that’s around it,” Cardinal Christianson said. “When the land’s not healthy, the lakes aren’t healthy either.”

She explained that, instead of having separate plans for forest management, watershed management and more, “we need to start looking at things much more holistically.”

“For Indigenous people, our teachings are that everything is interconnected and related. So when these fires are happening, one of the big concerns for us is the impacts on water,” Cardinal Christianson said. “It’s a constant worry in the back of my head, just like, what [are] going to be the long-term effects to the water that we rely on?”

The challenges of studying how wildfires affect lakes

Farruggia is part of a working group of 30 American and Canadian scientists looking for answers. The group includes Scott Higgins, senior research scientist with the International Institute for Sustainable Development Experimental Lakes Area — a natural freshwater laboratory spanning almost 60 lakes in Kenora in northwestern Ontario.

“We work in the field and we certainly notice, especially during those intensive fire years, the smog and the ash clouds that drift over our site,” Higgins said. The boreal forest that spans Canada, including around Kenora, is sometimes referred to as a “fire forest” because its ecosystems are both flammable, and reliant on fire to help remove insects, disease and aged trees, allowing for new life to emerge.

“This is a really lake-intensive part of Canada,” Higgins said. “When the boreal forest burns, undoubtedly lakes are directly impacted.”

But while interest in researching the impacts of wildfires on lakes has been increasing as fire seasons become longer and more intense, he said the science is still in its infancy.

One problem, he said, is that, “it’s tough to do experiments on actual wildfires.”

It is often difficult for researchers to get into an area quickly after a fire to study the immediate impacts. Even if they can, there often isn’t data from before the fire to compare it to. To try to counteract this and build a better understanding, Higgins said, his team is planning to use the extensive, long-term data collected at the Experimental Lakes Area to its benefit, including adding wildfire ash directly into a lake to study the outcome, and to work with Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources to use a prescribed burn for study. 

“We’ll be able to put some pretty good numbers on how important these fires are to nutrient cycles and to metal cycles and to what they mean for biota,” or the animals and plants living in that environment, Higgins said. “I think science is going to be able to provide in the next five to 10 years for sure.”

In the meantime, Farruggia said the early evidence offers reason to be hopeful — even in sensitive, smaller and more remote lakes. 

“Lakes are actually very resilient systems. Even though we see there’s lots of sensitivity, especially in smaller, lower nutrient lakes, we have seen that they recover pretty quickly so far,” Farruggia said. “Lake resilience is something that I think could be celebrated.”

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A small town on northwestern Ontario’s border with the U.S. is quietly preparing for a worst-case scenario. It’s one that could mean a dramatic change for the community’s water supply.

Fort Frances, home to about 7,500 people, sits where Rainy Lake empties into the Rainy River and flows north into Lake of the Woods. Fort Frances’ drinking water comes from Rainy Lake, which is bisected by the Canada-U.S. border — and vulnerable to the whims of either country’s leadership. So is the town’s economy, which relies on fishing and tourism, as well as the rhythms of a border community built around the water.

Now, tensions between the U.S. and Canada threaten those rhythms. This spring, U.S. President Donald Trump took aim at a moratorium on mining in Rainy River’s watershed, and its waters that flow past Fort Frances and numerous First Nations communities around it. Last month, tensions ratcheted up, as Trump signed an order renaming Lake Ontario to “Lake America” amid an escalating trade dispute.

The watershed that surrounds Fort Frances is called Rainy-Lake of the Woods, and it straddles both sides of the border west of Lake Superior. About 450,000 hectares of protected forest, rivers and interconnected lakes on the U.S. side is known as the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, or colloquially, the Boundary Waters. In 2023, the Biden administration protected roughly 91,000 hectares of Superior National Forest just outside the Boundary Waters from mining for 20 years, citing the risk such development posed to the surrounding waters.

Mined copper-sulfide ore is processed to extract metals used in electrical wiring, electronics and rechargeable batteries. But when that ore is exposed to air and water, it can add sulfuric acid and heavy metals into nearby waters. When dissolved in water, that sulfuric acid breaks down into sulfate, which is toxic to wild rice, a plant central to Anishinaabe diet and culture — Minnesota has regulated sulfate in wild rice waters since 1973 for that reason. Sulfate also feeds the bacteria that convert otherwise harmless inorganic mercury into methylmercury, a neurotoxin that accumulates in fish and, through them, the people who eat them. 

But in April 2026, U.S. Congress reversed the protection for the stretch of Superior National Forest outside the Boundary Waters. The Senate voted 50 to 49 to lift the Biden administration’s moratorium that stood in the way of the Twin Metals mine, a project targeting copper, nickel and other metals, majority-owned by the Chilean mining conglomerate Antofagasta. 

President Trump signed the resolution into law in April.

In a statement to other media, Kathy Graul, director of public affairs and communications for Twin Metals Minnesota, said, “Any proposed project in this region, including Twin Metals, must undergo a yearslong, multi-agency regulatory review before earning permits to begin construction of a mine. The [Senate ruling] restores this process, and projects must prove they can meet the stringent environmental standards that have long been in place in Minnesota before moving forward.”

Back over the Canadian border, Fort Frances’ water treatment plant can handle natural fluctuations in the source water — but it wasn’t designed to handle the kind of contamination mining activity could potentially introduce, Travis Rob, the town’s manager of infrastructure and growth, told The Narwhal. Addressing that risk would mean either a costly overhaul of the plant’s treatment processes, or securing an entirely new water source, which would be “neither easy nor cheap,” Rob said. “This is what has me so concerned about the proposed mining activities.” 

He and his team have talked at length about what changes to watch for in the water that feeds the treatment plant and when the town would need to act, he said. But the stakes extend beyond Fort Frances itself. Couchiching First Nation and others also receive drinking water from the town’s treatment plant, Rob said. 

In August, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz issued a reprieve of sorts, signing an executive order directing state agencies to stop issuing leases or permits for copper, nickel and other non-iron ore mines on the U.S. side of the watershed, and to review all existing mineral leases in the area, including Twin Metals’. 

While this might hold up Twin Metals’ plans in part, the order is not immune to legal challenges from mining companies — or future actions of the Trump administration.

A smalltown mayor and First Nation’s chief seek support amid Trump’s mining push

The proposed Twin Metals mine sits at the headwaters of the Rainy-Lake of the Woods watershed.

The project has held leases in the area since the 1960s, under different owners proposing to mine copper, nickel, cobalt and platinum group metals from a deposit up to 1,300 metres below the surface, processing roughly 20,000 tons of ore a day for more than 25 years. 

According to the company, about half the waste rock, or tailings, would be stored underground; the rest would be dried out and kept above ground. Twin Metals says its processing “will remove most of the sulfide minerals,” meaning its tailings won’t result in acid drainage, and that the mine won’t discharge water used for that processing. Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness, an advocacy groups opposed to the project, has argued the risk  of acid drainage from the project’s tailings remains based on other mines, and exploration work in the watershed.

That same watershed carries north past Fort Frances, through Treaty 3 territory, the traditional lands of 28 Anishinaabe First Nations in northwestern Ontario and southeastern Manitoba, and eventually to Hudson Bay.

Gakijiwanong Anishinaabe Nation — formerly Lac La Croix First Nation — condemned the reversal in an April statement, according to NWONewswatch, saying neither it nor affected U.S. tribes were given the chance to testify before Congress voted.

Chief Carrie Atatise-Norwegian of Gakijiwanong Anishinaabe Nation, whose territory borders both the Boundary Waters and Quetico Provincial Park, has framed the stakes even more starkly. “This decision threatens the lives of our people, water resources and our ancestral lands,” she told CBC in April, after the U.S. Congress lifted the moratorium. “As stewards of our lands, [we] will be asserting, exercising and protecting our rights, jurisdiction and sovereignty as a nation.”

By May, Atatise-Norwegian was in Washington, D.C. In Minnesota Senator Tina Smith’s office, she signed a memorandum of understanding with the chairs of three U.S. tribal nations: Red Lake, Grand Portage and Bois Forte. They agreed to present a unified cross-border position on protecting the Boundary Waters and treaty-protected homelands, according to Red Lake Nation News. Atatise-Norwegian did not respond to The Narwhal’s request for an interview. 

The concerns of Gakijiwanong Anishinaabe Nation are shared by many Treaty 3 nations in Ontario. “This is not just a local issue, it is a transboundary concern that directly affects our waters, our environment and our way of life,” Ogichidaa (Grand Chief) Francis Kavanaugh of Grand Council Treaty 3, which represents 28 First Nations across northwestern Ontario and southeastern Manitoba, said in an April statement.

The day after the U.S. Senate voted to lift the moratorium, Fort Frances Mayor Hallikas emailed the office of Marcus Powlowski, the Liberal MP for Thunder Bay-Rainy River, urging him to speak out, and to reach out to Minnesota politicians directly. Hallikas said he also raised the issue with provincial politicians a few weeks later at the Northwestern Ontario Municipal Association’s conference in Thunder Bay, but was told it was a federal issue.

In May, the Rainy River District Municipal Association, of which Fort Frances is a member, wrote to Ontario Premier Doug Ford, aligning itself with Grand Council Treaty 3’s opposition to the mine. The letter states that sulfide-ore copper mining could cause “irreversible harm to water quality, wildlife, public health and a sustainable outdoor recreation-based economy.” It calls on “all levels of Canadian government” to engage with the U.S. and Minnesota on the issue.

“Any decision that could put [these waters] at risk is not solely a Minnesota matter,” Hallikas wrote in an email to The Narwhal. “It is an international and downstream concern that directly affects peoples in northwestern Ontario.”

He drew parallels to Grassy Narrows First Nation, where industrial mercury contamination, which can cause issues like tremors, cognitive effects and neuromuscular disorders, is one of the most consequential environmental health crises in Canadian history. 

“Northwestern Ontario understands the devastating consequences of mercury contamination,” he wrote. “That history demands vigilance, transparency and precaution.”

A binational board with no enforcement power, watching and waiting

In 1909, Canada and the U.S. signed the Boundary Waters Treaty, governing cross-border water disputes and creating the International Joint Commission to oversee exactly this kind of issue.

Merrell-Ann Phare, one of three Canadian commissioners, said the commission has no enforcement authority and no regulatory authority over water quality. Its role is to resolve disputes between nations, not enforce laws.

“We take great care to stay out of the domestic issues that are happening,” Phare said, so the commissions can preserve its neutrality for the moment a request to mediate comes in.

Only governments in Ottawa and Washington can jointly trigger that kind of review, known as a reference, under the treaty. Provinces, states and municipalities have no standing to request one directly, though Indigenous nations can be named partners.

The Ktunaxa Nation is a partner to a case in B.C.’s Elk Valley, where coal-mining pollution flows downstream into Montana and Idaho, causing unnaturally high selenium levels that have led to deformities in fish. It’s a problem the nation had raised for more than a decade before Ottawa and Washington formally asked the commission to step in, in March 2024.

That in itself is a point of concern for Johann Strube, an environmental sociologist who has studied water governance in northwestern Ontario, speaking in a personal capacity rather than as a spokesperson for Grand Council Treaty 3, where he is a natural resources policy analyst. The joint commission, he said, “was founded to advance the settler-colonial interests of Canada and the United States and explicitly excluded Indigenous nations from decision-making.”

The structure of the commission, Strube said, “still doesn’t involve Indigenous nations as nation-to-nation partners.”

Megan Garner is the Canadian co-chair of the International Rainy-Lake of the Woods Watershed Board, the regional organization that operates under the International Joint Commission.

She said the board is “aware of the termination of the mineral leasing moratorium … and is watching this issue closely.” The board is determining next steps, she said, and is committed to “balanced and representative input.” 

Garner later confirmed that, as of Aug. 19, the board “has not been in touch” with the Rainy River District Municipal Association or Gakijiwanong Anishinaabe Nation, and “has not requested input or information from any outside parties” on the mining issue, despite being aware, through its advisory groups, of a range of local perspectives.

A spokesperson for Global Affairs Canada, John Babcock, said, “Canada continues to work closely with the United States through existing bilateral mechanisms, including those established under the Boundary Waters Treaty, in support of our shared stewardship of transboundary waters.” He said they would continue to do this “as we take up the environmental challenges of the 21st century.”

Asked whether Canada had raised any new concerns with the U.S. administration specifically about the 2026 reversal, Babcock said in an emailed statement that the department continues “to monitor the ongoing developments in the region and to advocate that any increased mining activity be properly assessed and managed,” and that “the joint stewardship of the environment is a cornerstone of Canada-U.S. relations.”

Babcock did not respond to a follow-up question on whether or not Canada has requested the International Joint Commission review the issue of mine pollution leaching into the Rainy-Lake of the Woods watershed.

Canada’s caution here, Strube said, may have less to do with the technical question of jurisdiction than with the state of U.S.-Canada relations more broadly. Whether the Trump administration would feel bound by a 116-year-old water treaty, Strube said, is an open question.

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In the 1960s, David Crawford was boating in his backyard on Nipigon Bay when he thought he spotted raw sewage floating in the once-pristine waters of Lake Superior. Years later, he realized the “turds,” as Crawford describes them, were craft paper deposits from the nearby pulp mill in Red Rock, Ont. The mill was also known to billow a harmful smoke into the air and release a hot, foamy plume of effluent into the lake. If the noxious smell wasn’t enough, log drives filled the bay with floating timber and bark, meaning Crawford didn’t often tempt the tumultuous waters of Nipigon Bay.

Along with the pulp mill, raw sewage actually was poisoning the clear bay, coming from two inadequate municipal wastewater treatment plants, but trouble didn’t stop there. The unnatural rise and fall of the water level, due to four hydroelectric dams upstream on the Nipigon River, were causing riverbanks to erode, adding silt to the water, while simultaneously washing out fish spawning habitat.

The reality, Crawford said, was haunting: Nipigon Bay was on the verge of dying.

But in late August, as fishing boats glided across calm, turquoise water behind a podium set up at the Red Rock marina, it was easy to forget about the bay’s past.

A small crowd was gathered as federal Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin visited Red Rock, a town of fewer than 1,000 people, to celebrate those very waters. The air was fresh with the smell of wild mint and Canada geese migrating in undulating waves, stopping to feast in and by the water, honking their approval. Dabrusin spoke into the quiet space left by the calm waters, about “a bay that was heavily polluted and is healthy again. The fish came back, the habitat was rebuilt, and water that people once could not trust, they can trust again.”

Gone are fish with tumours, unnaturally fluctuating water levels, noxious odours, effluent foam barriers, mill plumes and drifting timber. Nipigon Bay is a success story that stretches beyond the Canadian border. It’s one worth noting at a time when the relationship between Canada and the U.S. is strained by President Donald Trump’s trade war and moves to rename another Great Lake — Lake Ontario — to Lake America.

In 1972, Canada and the United States agreed upon their mutual role in polluting a portion of the Great Lakes, which contain 20 per cent of the world’s fresh water. The two countries joined forces to create the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. In 1987, the agreement listed 43 official areas of concern where this industrial pollution was the most deleterious. Twelve of those were in Canada, including Nipigon Bay. 

It was a time when the countries were friendly neighbours, the type that could agree to clean up their backyards and prioritize clean drinking water for millions of people. Remedial action plans were created for the affected areas to create a pathway for healthy environments to thrive.

Which brings us to Nipigon Bay, on Aug. 28, 2026. Four decades after being identified as an area of concern, the federal government announced it was officially delisted at the small celebration beside the still waters of Lake Superior. It was attended by ministers, government officials, local First Nations and Crawford, who chairs a public advisory committee made up of local residents who help to monitor the remediation work.

For Crawford, witnessing the bay heal over his lifetime is a cup of water he’s happy to enjoy. He still worries about the pressures of a rapidly changing world. Currently, there’s a proposal to build a lithium processing plant on the shores of Nipigon Bay in Red Rock, talk of further dams being built upstream on Lake Nipigon and geopolitical tensions straining longstanding bilateral agreements. All the while, climate change has created greater pressure on fresh water and how humans interact with it, from floods to drought and invasive species. 

But for now, Nipigon Bay is one of four areas of concern in Canada that have been delisted. To Crawford, that’s worth celebrating.

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For over a decade, Enbridge Energy’s Line 5 has been the centre of a political and environmental battle in Michigan. The legal conflict included state officials, federal agencies, tribal nations, environmental groups and the Canadian energy company fighting over what the future of the aging pipeline should look like.  

But, in recent weeks, that debate has only become more complicated. 

Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy issued a key environmental permit for a proposed tunnel on July 15, appearing to move the project closer to construction. 

Two weeks later, the construction timeline moved farther away after the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that the Michigan Public Service Commission did not adequately consider the tunnel’s environmental consequences when giving the project its own permit. The court sent the case back to the commission for further review.

The decision added another layer to a dispute that already involved state and federal courts, multiple government agencies and competing arguments about Michigan’s energy needs, the Great Lakes and tribal Treaty Rights.

“We’re still in a state of limbo,” Mike Shriberg, director of the University of Michigan Water Center, said. “The decisions in the last few weeks, rather than clarify, have probably muddied the waters more and extended the lifetime of the conversation and the decisions about the future of Line 5.”

And on Aug. 12, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued a long-desired permit for Enbridge for the construction of the tunnel. The next steps are securing the remaining permits and approvals needed for construction.

A long history

In 1953, Line 5 was built running 1,038 kilometres from Superior, Wisconsin, through Lake Michigan and Sarnia, Ont. Initially, the pipeline’s lifespan was supposed to be around 50 years. Its 50th birthday was 23 years ago. 

Most of the pipe is about 75 centimetres, with the exception of the position beneath the Straits of Mackinac. There, the pipe splits into two 50-centimetre lines that sit on the lake-bed for about seven kilometres.

That section has become the main bearer of controversy, with the central focus being a possible rupture that could release oil into the Great Lakes.

Safety concerns heightened after an approximately two-metre rupture in another Enbridge line, near Marshall, Michigan, in July 2010. The break released more than three million litres of heavy Canadian crude oil into Talmadge Creek and the Kalamazoo River.

In 2018, due to human error, a ship’s anchor hit Line 5 causing minor dents, but no oil was spilled. 

The proposed Great Lakes Tunnel Project would run beneath the lake-bed. Enbridge says the pipeline would sit about 30 metres below the lake-bed, protecting it from ship anchors. 

But the tunnel has yet to be built.

Why the debate is still ongoing

The newly proposed tunnel is only one piece of the larger Line 5 dispute.

In 2019, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel sued Enbridge in hopes of shutting down the existing pipelines in the Mackinac straits. She argued that Enbridge did not have a valid agreement to operate the pipeline under the straits — mainly that Line 5 was violating Michigan environmental laws.

This year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Nessel’s lawsuit belongs in state court after Enbridge attempted to move it to federal court.

Separately, a federal judge ruled in December that Michigan could not enforce its 2020 order to shut down Line 5 — saying the federal pipeline safety laws overruled the state’s order. Since then, Michigan has appealed the decision.

The result is a series of overlapping cases moving through different courts.

“I think it’s mostly because the legal system that we have is set up to make it easier to delay than to move forward,” Shriberg said. “It’s pretty easy in our legal system to draw things out, to appeal, to stop things from happening.”

That’s why Line 5’s problems are difficult to summarize in a single legal storyline.

“It’s a complicated array of things going on that’s very hard to explain in a straightforward manner,” Shriberg said.

Enbridge’s case for keeping the pipeline

Through the last decade of controversy, Enbridge has maintained that Line 5 is an important part of the region’s energy infrastructure.

Ryan Duffy, an Enbridge spokesperson, said the pipeline carries light crude oil and natural gas liquids, with about 80 per cent of the products being light crude oil and 20 per cent natural gas liquids.

The company says Line 5 transports as much as 540,000 barrels of product each day, a figure also cited by the Michigan Public Service Commission. The company estimates that Line 5 supplies 65 per cent of propane demand in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and 55 per cent of the state’s overall propane needs.

“A lot of people still heat their homes with propane in [Michigan’s Upper Peninsula],” Duffy said.

Line 5 is “at or near capacity,” Duffy said, adding that the only other pipeline moving product toward Sarnia is Line 78 which is also at or near capacity.

“There is really no viable alternative to transporting the product that Line 5 carries,” Duffy said.

Enbridge’s proposed solution to safety concerns is the tunnel.

According to Duffy, the tunnel was determined to be the best solution for protecting Line 5 in the Straits. He said the project would eliminate the possibility of oil or other products escaping into the Straits. 

Enbridge also points to the pipeline’s operating history. 

The company says the straits crossing has never leaked during more than 65 years of operation and is subject to continuous monitoring and maintenance.

Yet, Line 5 has experienced spills elsewhere along its route. In 2017, a National Wildlife Federation analysis identified 29 known spills, busts and equipment failures along the pipeline since 1968. Between those spills, more than three million litres of oil and natural gas have been released.

Concerns beyond safety

“The tunnel is really the common-sense solution going forward because it both protects the environment and makes sure that the product that people need continues to be delivered safely and reliably and affordably,” Duffy said.

For Bay Mills Indian Community President Whitney Gravelle, located in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Line 5 is not a question of safety or energy supply.

“For my tribal nation specifically, Line 5 is a threat to our way of life, to our tribal Treaty Rights, to our cultural resources,” Gravelle said.  

Line 5 crosses territory included in the 1836 Treaty of Washington, where tribal nations yielded millions of acres of property to the United States while retaining certain rights, including what the treaty describes as the “usual privileges of occupancy.”

Gravelle said those rights depend on the health of the natural resources around them.

“You can’t have a treaty right to fish without clean water for fish to spawn,” she said. “And you can’t have a treaty right to hunt if you’re cutting down forests and filling wetlands.”

Protecting the Great Lakes is inseparable from protecting the tribe’s culture for Bay Mills. 

“We cannot be Ojibwe, Anishinaabe, without the Great Lakes,” Gravelle said. “Our entire being, our culture, our language is interwoven into the Great Lakes.”

She says the tribe opposes the tunnel because it believes moving Line 5 underground would extend the pipeline’s operation rather than eliminate the threat. 

“We’re only focused on these four miles in the straits without looking at the 645 miles that Line 5 traverses and asking ourselves, 100 years from now, do we still want Line 5 in the state of Michigan?” Gravelle said. “Because that’s what the tunnel would do. It would cement Line 5’s existence for the rest of time.”

Others have raised similar concerns.

Jeffrey Insko, an English professor at Oakland University who writes a newsletter on Line 5, said the tunnel could lock in fossil fuel transportation for decades.

“What the tunnel really means is locking in fossil fuel transport for another 100 years,” Insko said.

For the tunnel, he said he is also concerned about whether the project would adequately protect the Great Lakes from environmental harm during construction.

“We need to be thinking about ways and investing in ways to reduce fossil fuel consumption rather than investing in prolonging the lives of fossil fuel consumption,” Insko said.

How needed is the pipeline?

At the heart of the disagreement is a key question: does Michigan need Line 5?

“The one thing that people haven’t looked into or covered enough is: What’s the need for Line 5?” said Shriberg of the University of Michigan. “There’s extremely good information out there that shows that Line 5 is not needed for use in the U.S.”

Enbridge says it is. Opponents say alternatives exist.

Gravelle said Enbridge should decommission Line 5 and instead use alternatives like using Line 78, which runs through southern Michigan from Indiana to Sarnia. She argues Michigan could continue getting energy supplies without Line 5. 

“This ultimately is about Enbridge’s profits. It’s not about energy infrastructure,” Gravelle said.

Over the years, the state should have used the time to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels, she said. 

“What could we have done in those 10 years to actually reduce our reliance on those issues?” Gravelle said. 

Enbridge disputes any claims that there could be other ways to supply what the line holds, saying there are no viable alternatives capable of replacing everything Line 5 currently carries.

What’s next

The immediate future of the Great Lakes tunnel is uncertain.

The Michigan Supreme Court’s July 31 decision requires the Michigan Public Service Commission to revisit its analysis of Enbridge’s tunnel proposal — which includes the environmental impacts that the court said were not adequately considered.

“The Great Lakes tunnel is on sort of an indefinite hold right now,” Shriberg said. “There’s not going to be any dirt moving in the near future.”

Duffy said the decision is disappointing and delays a project the company has spent years planning and permitting.

“We view that as disappointing because that is going to be an additional delay,” Duffy said.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has also issued a federal permit for the tunnel project, adding another approval to the project’s permitting process.

At the same time, the legal battle over whether the existing Line 5 pipelines can continue operating in the Straits remains separate from the tunnel permitting process.

“They’re on separate tracks,” Shriberg said.

The goal remains clear for Enbridge: keep Line 5 in operation and move the straits crossing into an underground tunnel.

After more than seven decades, the pipeline remains in operation. And after years of lawsuits, reviews and political battles, the question of what happens to Line 5 is still unsettled.

“I would not expect any final decisions on a Great Lakes tunnel until 2027 at the earliest,” Shriberg said.

For now, the pipeline continues to carry petroleum through the straits while the courts and regulators decide whether its future lies beneath the water, inside a tunnel, or somewhere else entirely.

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.

It’s the summer of data centre controversies in Ontario.

In a season where city council chambers are usually quiet, residents of Hamilton, Oakville, Mississauga, Burlington and Toronto have shown up to public meetings in droves. Many are there to resist proposals for massive new data centres in their backyards, worried about noise, water use and energy bills.

By mid-August, Oakville and Mississauga moved to freeze new data centre construction for a year. Hamilton came within an inch of doing the same.

On Aug. 13, Ontario Premier Doug Ford weighed in. 

Standing in front of a wall of servers at a government-owned data centre in Guelph, Ford unveiled the province’s new “data centre playbook” — and made clear he had little patience for local revolt against the boom he wants to usher in. 

“This is the way of the future,” he said. “Either we do it or Donald Trump’s going to do it, and I’m not giving Donald Trump nothing, absolutely nothing.”

Pushback is also happening in Fergus, Sault Ste. Marie and Armour Township, where a project was cancelled in June in the face of public opposition. Ford calls data centre skeptics “hypocritical,” suggesting residents fighting these projects were “misinformed.”“It just doesn’t add up,” he said, arguing that people can’t rely on artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud storage while also refusing the infrastructure that enables them. 

It was a blunt, campaign-style pitch for a $122-billion industry that has been lobbying hard to take root in Ontario, attracted by its clean electricity grid, temperate weather and proximity to the Great Lakes (four of the five count shorelines in the province). But the data centre push has sparked real concerns about the very few rules governing these massive facilities, and the resources needed to run them.

It’s a story with chapters being written across Canada — including Alberta, where more than 40 are proposed, and New Brunswick, stirring worries about the impacts on old-growth forests and wetlands. Around the world, communities are making it clear they view the centres and the technologies they enable with increasing caution.

And now Ontario is making moves. The province’s playbook has been posted online for public consultation until Sept. 12. It’s currently just a draft, not yet in force — and the legislature won’t be back to debate it until Oct. 27, after an extended summer break.

Here’s everything you need to know.

What are data centres — and why do they matter so much right now?

Strip away the technical jargon and a data centre is just a warehouse full of computers — racks and racks of servers that store and crunch the data behind everything from your email to chatbots to this very story. 

Whether you like them or not, data centres have become the backbone of the modern economy: cloud storage, artificial intelligence, banking systems, health care and government services all run on them. 

They’re not new — Ontario already has dozens — but artificial intelligence has supercharged their scale and size. Today’s data centres are requesting hundreds of megawatts of power, dwarfing older facilities that ran on less power and used less water to cool their servers. While artificial intelligence has its own tension points (which we won’t get into here, but feel free to check out our AI policy), resource use is the root cause of local concerns around the physical space occupied by data centres.

How does a data centre get built in Ontario?

Energy Minister Stephen Lecce has said the province “welcome[s] data centre entrants” — but that welcome comes with strings attached and an approval process that can take up to three years, maybe more. 

The groundwork for this process was laid out first in Bill 40, formally the Protect Ontario by Securing Affordable Energy for Generations Act — the first law governing data centres among provinces — and further in the new playbook.Between the two, it’s clear that data centres need to prove two things to be able to connect to Ontario’s grid.The first is to prove they will be able to cover the full cost of their own electricity connections and use — something other businesses aren’t required to do — so regular households aren’t stuck covering the cost. To enforce that, Ontario wants to create a new, higher electricity rate for any data centre over one megawatt. Quebec’s version of this rate kicks in at five megawatts, so Ontario’s lower bar would catch a lot more projects.

The second is to show the centre will be good for Ontario’s economy. The playbook lays out a three-part criteria to determine this: what jobs, investments and tax revenue it could bring to Ontario; whether it would keep local data in the province; and whether benefits to the host community outweigh the financial and environmental costs. If a data centre can’t satisfy these criteria, Bill 40 gives the energy minister the power to reject its grid connection request. 

“The bottom line is, if a data centre wants to come to Ontario, it is not your right,” Lecce said in a July press conference as the criteria were unveiled. “We now have the right to say no.”

Data centres also have to get approval from municipalities, which determine zoning and building permits. However, most Ontario municipalities don’t yet have zoning rules that specifically address data centres. This means projects can often move ahead on land already zoned for general industrial use, leaving councils with limited power to say no. 

Notably, data centres in Ontario do not have to go through a full environmental assessment, according to analysis from law firm McCarthy Tétrault. It’s also unclear if the province will enforce the constitutional duty to consult Indigenous communities on proposed data centre projects. 

But the province is ensuring other things. The playbook says the government will favour centres that use quieter equipment. It’s also encouraging companies to build their own power supply instead of relying entirely on the public grid, since that can get them running faster than waiting in line for a grid connection. Doing so would exempt a data centre from the process outlined in the playbook. It may also see data centre projects proposed with on-site natural gas plants, as we’re seeing in Alberta. 

One thing neither the playbook nor Bill 40 makes clear is what size of data centre the new process applies to.

How will data centres impact Ontario’s electricity demand?

Significantly — and the numbers keep increasing with every new forecast. 

In 2024, the system operator forecast Ontario’s overall electricity demand will grow 75 per cent by 2050 — a sharper jump than previously projected, driven largely by factories and data centres. The centres are expected to account for about 13 per cent of that new demand by 2035.

A more recent forecast suggested data centres could eventually make up close to nine per cent of all electricity used in Ontario by 2050.

What are data centres using all that electricity for? To stay running all the time; servers never sleep, constantly processing web traffic and requests. 

The province says it’s already fielding interest in data centre builds that would add up to roughly 30 per cent of Ontario’s current peak electricity demand. 

That’s a lot of energy demand — and brings us to the supply challenge ahead.

Will this increase in data centre energy demand result in Ontario using more natural gas?

Possibly, at least in the short-term future.Most of Ontario’s electricity comes from low-emissions sources like nuclear and hydro power. But when demand spikes, like during a heat wave when those who have air conditioners turn them on, natural gas plants are usually what fills the gap, since they can be switched on and off quickly.

That matters for data centres, which run around the clock. If a facility is drawing heavily during one of those peak moments, it could be leaning on gas power to do it. And that fossil fuel is primarily made up of methane, a potent greenhouse gas driving climate change and the worsened wildfire seasons, floods and other severe weather we’ve experienced as a result.

How will data centres impact Ontario’s water usage?

We don’t know yet. 

Existing large data centres use water-based cooling systems to keep servers from overheating. That means that all the water pulled into a centre absorbs the heat from the servers and evaporates into the air. Any water that doesn’t evaporate is reused and then sent to a local plant as wastewater. In closed-loop systems, water just circulates in pipes that cool the servers, so there is little lost to the air. 

According to one estimate, a single one-megawatt data centre can use up to 25.5 million litres of water a year just for cooling — about what all of the homes in the city of Mississauga use in a day. Many of the data centres being proposed in Ontario are larger than that, which means, depending on their cooling system, they could also be using a lot more water. 

Microsoft is building three data centres in Ontario, which share an estimated total demand of approximately 200 megawatts. One planned in Toronto’s Etobicoke area was approved to use up to about 40 litres of water every second for cooling — that’s about five bathtubs full every five seconds, and 1.2 billion litres a year. A separate Microsoft complex in Vaughan is expected to use about 730 million litres of municipal water a year.

The province’s playbook says Ontario will favour data centres that use water-free or closed-loop cooling and reuse waste heat — for instance, to help warm nearby buildings.

What are Ontario municipalities doing about data centres?

On Aug. 11, Oakville became the first Ontario municipality to pass a one-year pause on building new data centres. Mississauga is set to follow suit. Both were facing major AI data centre proposals, or at least land acquisitions that suggested them.

Other municipalities are taking different approaches. Hamilton voted down a proposed pause. Burlington and Waterloo Region have asked staff to review existing rules and impacts. Both, along with Toronto, have asked the province for clearer regulations. Centre Wellington and Sault Ste. Marie are sussing whether they can pass temporary bans.

Ford has resisted calls for a province-wide ban, saying local councils will still have a say and that he’d “rather go to a willing host.” While Ontario law requires municipalities to indicate their support before a wind or solar farm can be developed (usually through a council motion or resolution), no such formal rule was proposed in the data centre playbook.

What does Doug Ford mean when he says Ontario needs data centres to address ‘data sovereignty’?

Both Ford and various companies aspiring to build data centres in Ontario have framed this push as a matter of national security: keep the servers here or risk losing control of Canadians’ data to countries like the United States. 

But it’s harder said than done. Yes, building data centres would mean Ontarians’ data is kept in Ontario physically. But what actually determines control over data isn’t the building’s location — it’s who owns the company running it, and which country’s courts and laws they’re accountable to.

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While health officials urge people to stay indoors due to the smoke draping the Midwest, experts say we should remember the same polluted air affecting humans is also threatening animals. 

On July 16, Detroit ranked as the worst air quality in the world with a 724 index — climbing past the 300-point threshold on the Air Quality Index, where air quality is considered hazardous. In second place sat Toronto, then Minneapolis, Minnesota and in fourth place was Chicago.

According to Dr. Jack Harkema, a veterinary pathologist at Michigan State University, the effects of wildfire smoke on animals aren’t just a single symptom. 

“It doesn’t affect just the lungs, but also the cardiovascular system and the metabolic system,” Harkema said. “We’ve actually even looked at the effects on the brain, and there’s increased inflammation in the brain as well.”

Wildfire smoke may be even more harmful to animals than the everyday air pollution found in cities, he said. 

“Wildfire smoke is probably even more toxic than our regular urban particulate matter. These particles create a lot of oxidants, they damage tissue and they cause inflammation locally in the lung, but then that inflammation can spread to other organs.”

Wildfire smoke contains a mixture of pollutants, including fine particles known as PM2.5. Those microparticles are small enough to go deep into the lungs and, sometimes, enter the bloodstream.

“PM2.5 particles are inhalable,” Mayra Oyola, an assistant professor in the department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Wisconsin Madison, said. “They can get into the lungs and, just like in humans, they stay there. They can damage respiratory and cardiovascular tissue in anything that breathes. So it’s not just us.”

The fires that are impacting the Midwest are mainly contained toward the lower part of Ontario. But the smoke from these fires has migrated from wind paths to reach the Midwest.

“Animals close to the fires, that’s the biggest concern, because they will be displaced,” Oyola said. “More often than not, they move into human-populated areas. That creates risk for both humans and the animals.”

Birds are especially vulnerable to wildfire smoke because their respiratory system is more efficient than other mammals, according to research scientist at Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology Olivia Sanderfoot. While that helps them get more oxygen, it also means they breathe in more harmful particles from polluted air.

“Birds are able to take up twice as much oxygen with each breath compared to mammals, which also means they’re getting an extra-heavy dose of anything toxic in the air,” Sanderfoot said.

“We’ve known for a long time that birds are more vulnerable,” she said. “So I’m especially worried about them in this smoke.”

Other outdoor animals can also suffer. Because of respiratory diseases like heaves, livestock that spend their time outdoors are exposed for days or weeks to smoky conditions, which heightens risks, Harkema said.

“If this continues, you’re going to see more illness in humans and animals.”

For pet owners, Dr. Jennifer Henderson, a veterinarian at Vetco Total Care in Chicago, said taking the same precautions you would take for yourself is ideal. 

“The same concerns apply to our pets that apply to humans,” Henderson said. “You just want to keep them inside or limit their activity outside so it doesn’t cause any flare-up.”

Owners should also watch closely for signs that smoke may be affecting their animals.

“I think respiratory symptoms, with the coughing and the lethargy, are the main things to watch for,” Henderson said. 

She also recommends monitoring for bloodshot eyes, squinting or other signs of eye irritation. The guidance is ultimately simple, Henderson said: if the air isn’t healthy for people, it probably isn’t healthy for pets either.

“Similar to how they’re dealing with it for themselves, [they should] apply the same concerns and strategies to their pets,” she said. “You can’t put a mask on a dog, so it’s really just keeping them out of the environment or limiting their time.”

Harkema recommends limiting walks to brief bathroom breaks and avoiding strenuous exercise.

“You don’t want to exercise them because more of these particulate matter and other air toxicants can get into the lung and cause inflammation,” Harkema said.

Sanderfoot said keeping pets in cool, air-conditioned spaces with clean, filtered air whenever possible is best. 

As wildfire seasons grow longer and more intense, Sanderfoot says she expects poor air-quality events to become a more frequent occurrence across North America.

“The issue is that climate change is supercharging these fires and lengthening our fire season,” Sanderfoot said. “The bigger the fire, the more smoke.”

According to Oyola, research shows wildfire smoke will become a persistent problem.

“It’s very clear that climate change is real and that it’s not slowing down,” she said. “With drier conditions and warmer conditions, we should expect more events like this.”

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When a Michigan court shot down Enbridge’s plan to bury a section of its aging Line 5 pipeline in a concrete tunnel under two Great Lakes, Ontario Premier Doug Ford responded with a pipeline pitch of his own.  

“The fuel that powers Ontario’s economy should never be put at risk because of decisions made in another country,” Ford wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Aug. 1. “That’s why we’re building the Northern Shield Energy Corridor — a new Canadian pipeline, made with Canadian steel, by Canadian workers, exclusively within Canada’s borders.” 

Summary

• The Michigan Supreme Court cancelled the state regulator’s approval of Enbridge’s Line 5 tunnel project, telling it to reassess potential harm to two Great Lakes regions.
• Ontario Premier Doug Ford said the decision highlighted a need to build a new all-Canadian pipeline from Alberta to Ontario.
• Ford’s warnings about relying on energy “decisions made in another country” come as his government continues to push natural gas expansion, and the province increasingly relies on American supply.

His comment came a day after the Michigan Supreme Court ruled in a 6-1 decision against the state commission’s approval of Enbridge’s plan to build a tunnel under the Straits of Mackinac, a narrow, fast-moving waterway that joins Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. The purpose would be to bury a portion of the 73-year-old pipeline, which is currently exposed on the lakebed. 

The pipeline is 1,038 kilometres long, roughly the driving distance between Windsor and Timmins, Ont. It carries crude oil and natural gas liquids (such as propane and butane) from Superior, Wisconsin, passing through Michigan on its way to refineries in Sarnia, Ont.

The court found regulators hadn’t properly studied the environmental harm the project could cause to the lakes before approving it in 2023. Justices said the regulator must study not just the environmental impact of the underwater tunnel, but also how the tunnel would extend the lifespan of the pipeline and what the environmental consequences of that may be. Indigenous nations have said it will increase the risk of oil spills and increase greenhouse gas emissions from the fossil fuels it transports. 

“It is impossible to prevent or mitigate an environmental risk without understanding the nature of that risk,” the justices wrote.

As a result, the project’s approval is now cancelled, with the court ordering the commission to redo its review. The ruling doesn’t shut Line 5 down, but delays efforts to repair it and keep it in commission. 

Enbridge spokesperson Ryan Duffy called the decision disappointing in a statement to Bridge Michigan, saying the company remains committed to “the safe and responsible operation of Line 5,” while it reviews its legal options. 

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who has long fought to shut the pipeline down altogether, said “the pipeline is a ticking time bomb,” pointing to Enbridge’s 2010 spill in the state’s Kalamazoo River, the worst inland oil spill in U.S. history. 

Indigenous communities and environmental groups that brought the case to court celebrated it as a win for the Great Lakes.

Ford took a different route, using the court decision to re-up a pipeline concept he announced with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith in July. The Northern Shield Energy Corridor is a proposed 3,300-kilometre line to carry crude oil from Hardisty, Alta., through Saskatchewan and Manitoba to Sarnia.

If built, Northern Shield would retrace some of the route of the long-dead Energy East proposal from TransCanada, before the company scrapped it in 2017, citing regulatory delays and falling oil prices. That proposal also met significant Indigenous opposition.

Ford has framed it as an all-Canadian pipeline that would be immune to the kind of cross-border legal fights now delaying updates to Line 5. Northern Shield is undergoing a feasibility study, due by the end of the year, with no confirmed cost, timeline or construction approval.

That proposed route of Ford’s new pipeline ends in the same place Line 5 does: Sarnia, next to Aamjiwnaang First Nation. Chief Janelle Nahmabin told The Narwhal her community is “closely following” the discussions around Line 5 and the Michigan court decision. 

“While governments continue to debate energy security and future infrastructure, it is important that First Nation rights, environmental protection and community health remain at the centre of those discussions,” she wrote in an email. 

She pointed to an unresolved crisis in her community over benzene air pollution from industry, and a pipeline spill near Aamjiwnaang’s land into the St. Clair River in March 2026 as issues that need to be addressed before a new pipeline is considered. She said that these “cumulative impacts of industrial development” were the result of “decisions being made elsewhere.” 

“Communities that have carried disproportionate environmental burdens for decades should not be asked to shoulder even more,” she said.

Ford’s pitch for domestic supply comes amid growing reliance on U.S. gas

Ford’s warnings about relying on energy “decisions made in another country” come as his government continues its longstanding push to expand natural gas use, which increasingly relies on American supply. 

Natural gas is largely made up of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere. It is the primary source of heating for three-quarters of homes in Ontario.

According to Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator, natural gas accounts for nearly 30 per cent of the province’s total generating capacity, up from 28 per cent in 2020. The operator attributes that growth largely to nuclear facilities being taken offline for refurbishments as well as rising electricity demand. 

Ontario is underlaid with a network of pipelines supplying natural gas for heating. According to the province, 3.6 million homes and 160,000 businesses rely on natural gas.

Per analysis by the Canada Energy Regulator, Ontario’s historical reliance on natural gas from Alberta has declined as western producers focus on western U.S. markets. Meanwhile, production in the U.S. northeast has increased, making importing gas cheaper for eastern provinces. As a result, as of 2009, Ontario has become a net importer of gas from the U.S.

Between 2015 and 2020, the most recent data available, imports at three key crossings into Ontario increased by 31 per cent, with most coming through Niagara.

Ontario’s ties to natural gas have deepened under the Ford government

This increase in U.S. natural gas imports is compounded by recent provincial decisions that ensure natural gas remains a key part of Ontario’s energy mix. 

In December 2023, the government took the unprecedented step of overruling the independent Ontario Energy Board after it ordered Enbridge Gas to stop passing the cost of new gas hookups on to homeowners’ monthly bills. Documents obtained by The Narwhal through freedom of information requests showed Enbridge staff in frequent contact with officials in the premier’s office in the lead-up to that decision, and Ford personally called Enbridge to discuss a stalled gas connection. 

Meanwhile, a growing number of Ontario municipalities, including Guelph and Waterloo Region, have pushed back against a long-standing provincial rule that lets Enbridge Gas build pipelines under municipal roads and other public land for free. Enbridge Gas has these decades-long free-access agreements with more than 340 municipalities across the province.

When Guelph and Waterloo Region refused to renew their agreements last year, the dispute went to the Ontario Energy Board, where it is still being deliberated. Energy Minister Stephen Lecce said the province isn’t considering changing the rule despite the municipalities’ calls to do so. 

As all of this plays out, including the Line 5 saga, Enbridge has told investors it expects to return tens of billions of dollars to shareholders over the coming years, in part because of the strength of continued gas demand growth in Ontario.

Updated on Aug. 7, 2026 at 2:026 p.m. ET: This story was updated to include a statement from Aamjiwnaang First Nation Chief Janelle Nahmabin sent to The Narwhal after publication.

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Summary

• The Department of National Defence and City of North Bay have been working to clean up decades-old per- and polyfluoroalkyl, or PFAS, contamination, first announced to the public in 2017. 
• Residents have proposed a class-action lawsuit over the contamination and consequent loss of property value — though environmental and health hazards of the contamination aren’t a part of the case.
• An international company called Industrial Plastics Canada is among the 10 major importers of a Teflon-like subgroup of PFAS to Canada, and they opened a factory in North Bay in 2023.

Gathered in an arena in North Bay, Ont., in summer 2024, federal officials told hundreds of concerned citizens how they planned to remediate longstanding contamination of the city’s waterways left behind by the Department of National Defence. A few months later, officials gave a similar presentation to a packed hotel conference room.

For nearly a decade now, residents have known about the contamination. Some have been told not to drink the water from their own wells, and everyone in the city has been warned not to drink water or eat fish from a creek outside town.

The creek is part of a system of waterways where carcinogenic “forever chemicals” run downstream from a military base, emptying into Trout Lake, the source of the city’s drinking water. It sits at nearly double Health Canada’s guideline for PFAS in drinking water, measured in nanograms per litre. 

Health Canada published an “objective” level of 30 nanograms per litre in August 2024 for 25 chemicals in the PFAS family. That’s less than half of what Ontario currently recommends: 70 nanograms per litre, pertaining to just 11 PFAS chemicals. And that’s just a suggestion, not a binding regulation. 

The city did not reply to The Narwhal’s detailed questions regarding the current state of the drinking water supply, but CBC reported in February 2026 that Trout Lake contained around 58 nanograms of PFAS per litre of water.  

Thousands of substances classified as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as PFAS, are used to make everything from medical equipment to waterproof clothing. They can generate hazardous waste which, if not disposed of carefully, contaminates air, water and soil — where it can remain for 1,000 years, hence their other nickname, “forever chemicals.”

Statistics Canada reports almost all Canadians already have PFAS in their bodies, including in remote regions such as the Arctic and subarctic. 

In North Bay, the issue is top of mind, with a class-action lawsuit, a lengthy and expensive remediation plan and a new factory importing chemicals from the Teflon-like subgroup of PFAS, called PTFE. And the company behind that factory, Industrial Plastics Canada, is one of the 10 major importers of PTFE in Canada.

While PFAS have been making global headlines for years as an emerging threat to the environment and our bodies, North Bay knows the issue intimately; citizens fear for their water as politicians try to clean up the mess.

Here’s everything you need to know about PFAS in North Bay.

1. North Bay’s PFAS contamination comes from firefighting foam 

From the early 1970s to the mid-1990s, the Department of National Defence used a fire suppression foam containing PFAS to train firefighters across Canada, including near the North Bay Jack Garland Airport. In 2016, after the North Bay Parry Sound District Health Unit learned PFAS had been identified by the Department of National Defence in waterways around the city, it commissioned consulting firm Stantec to assess the impacts on soil and groundwater.

It’s the invisible nature of these chemicals that are part of what makes them so insidious; you can’t see them or smell them, so you don’t know they’re there without testing. 

“When you look at a mine, for example, you can see it and say, ‘That’s obviously disruptive to our ecosystem.’” North Bay-based environmental anthropologist Carly Dokis previously told The Narwhal. “But these things are invisible pollutants, which then tend to attract less public awareness.”

Stantec found PFAS from the foam had contaminated soil, bedrock, groundwater, private wells and several waterways in the region including Trout Lake, Lake Nipissing and Lees, Dorlan, Chippewa and La Vase creeks and surrounding areas.

In 2025, reporting by the Investigative Journalism Bureau surfaced a report by the Royal Military College showing the Department of National Defence found elevated PFAS levels around the base as far back as 2012. That means the department knew about the contamination for five years before revealing it to the City of North Bay in 2016, and the public in 2017.

2.  PFAS impacts health, environment and property values. Residents are seeking recompense

In late 2025, North Bay citizens filed a proposed class-action lawsuit asking for remediation, safe drinking water and $105 million in damages for residents living within a three-kilometre radius of the 22 Wing Canadian Forces Base and Jack Garland Airport. Some of the people who live closest to the contamination have been receiving bottled water from the government for years, but have had no other opportunity for recourse.

The proposed lawsuit, if certified by the court, would be against the City of North Bay and the Attorney General of Canada, on behalf of the Department of National Defence, focusing on the loss of property value and remediation costs. The case is also seeking punitive damages, contending that National Defence was aware of the contamination long before warning residents.

Not mentioned in the suit is the long list of health concerns associated with “forever chemicals.”

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

Ecosystems are affected, too. Studies have shown exposure to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances can stunt plant growth and cause reduced seed germination and ability to photosynthesize. The chemicals can build up in the organs of living creatures throughout the food chain. In the district of Nipissing, that poses a risk to people who hunt, fish and harvest from the land.

“These industrial areas are often surrounded by lower-income buildings and peoples and communities,” Curtis Avery, environment department manager with Nipissing First Nation, told The Narwhal in summer 2023. “We’re the most vulnerable group of people that utilize our lands — the lands are our grocery stores. … If these are being impacted, we need to know.”

3. Cost of North Bay clean-up grew five-fold, to more than $100 million

In 2021, the City of North Bay announced plans to begin remediation under a “shared responsibility” agreement between the Department of National Defence and the city. The federal department would cover 97 per cent of the costs, or $19.4 million, and the city would cover the remaining three per cent, at $600,000. But costs have ballooned since then; in December 2025, National Defence announced it would contribute another nearly $100 million to the remediation, with the city’s share rising to more than $3.6 million. The total for the cleanup project has risen to more than $122 million.

The remediation, which began on the ground in 2024, includes excavating and disposing of about 26,000 tonnes of PFAS-impacted soil; injecting activated carbon material into particularly dense patches of PFAS to stop the underground plume from spreading; and installing a filtration system to treat water leaving the site.

“We remain committed to addressing and managing the operational legacy of the Canadian Armed Forces responsibly,” Minister of National Defence David J. McGuinty said in a news release.

As part of the process, a notice went up on the federal Impact Assessment Agency registry on April 28, inviting the public to comment up until June 5 on a proposal to install a 250-metre permeable barrier in the ground to help filter impacted groundwater. A spokesperson for the agency said its role in the project is to offer advice on determining its environmental effects, as well as providing the opportunity to post the project on the registry.

Local organizations, including the environmental group Northwatch, said in a press release that they were concerned about “very limited public engagement over the last ten years since the public disclosure of the contamination,” counting only the two forums in 2024 and 2025, where there was “limited opportunities for the public to ask questions.” 

Northwatch’s project coordinator Brennain Lloyd told The Narwhal about the public notice period, which she said her organization only learned of in a daily bulletin from the Impact Assessment Agency listing multiple assessment notices from across the country.

“To the best of our knowledge there were no local announcements or invitations to comment issued to the many residents and organizations who have identified their interest in this program,” a release from Northwatch reads.

The Department of National Defence did not respond to questions from The Narwhal. 

4. North Bay’s not alone: contaminated military bases affect communities across Canada

Contamination on federal sites is an issue across Canada. There are thousands of contaminated sites listed on the federal contaminated sites inventory, and PFAS are found on more than 100 of them. These include at least 26 National Defence sites including bases in Trenton, Ont., Gagetown, N.B., and Moose Jaw, Sask.

And contaminants don’t stop at the fenceline. Health Canada says some contaminants can travel long distances through soil, water and air: “PFAS can be found in fresh water and drinking water in areas that are far away from where they entered the environment,” according to the department’s website.

5. Industry is still importing PFAS-class chemicals into North Bay

While the Canadian government no longer uses firefighting foam that contains PFAS, industry continues to bring these substances into the country. In 2023, The Narwhal reported on an international plastics conglomerate that opened its first Canadian location, Industrial Plastics Canada, in North Bay. The company has a presence across Europe as well as in India and China, billing itself as one of the “largest worldwide manufacturers of PTFE products.” 

PTFE, or polytetrafluoroethylene, is a Teflon-like product in a subgroup of PFAS known as fluoropolymers, or fluoroplastics. A company spokesperson previously told The Narwhal the use of PTFE at the factory will not produce waste and poses “no risk.” The company also says fluoropolymers aren’t as dangerous as other PFAS and are “considered safe, non-bioaccumulative and non-toxic.” 

But fluoropolymers have been found to be dangerous to human health, according to research published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science & Technology and others.

In 2023, Health Canada released a draft assessment of the state of PFAS in Canada to help decide how to regulate the class of chemicals. In it, the agency cited an industry-funded study that said fluoropolymers should be considered separately from other PFAS as “polymers of low concern.” A Health Canada spokesperson said the agency, along with Environment and Climate Change Canada, “examined information from a wide range of sources,” including scientific journals and reports while preparing the state of PFAS report.

The substances were ultimately excluded from the final report, released in March 2025, in which Health Canada proposed classifying the remaining PFAS chemicals as toxic substances under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act.

The Health Canada spokesperson said in an email that fluoropolymers “have specific properties that differentiates them from other PFAS,” which led to their exclusion from the final report. They added that the exclusion “should not be interpreted as meaning they are or are not of concern,” and that a separate fluoropolymer assessment is currently underway.

The exclusion of PTFE from that classification was a major priority for industry, Rémy Alexandre, toxics project lead at environmental law non-profit EcoJustice, told The Narwhal.

According to data collected by Alexandre, who studied Industrial Plastics Canada’s imports to North Bay, the company brought in almost 207,000 kilograms of PTFE from India and China from July 2025 to May 2026.

This puts the facility on the list of the 10 major importers of PTFE in Canada, alongside U.S.-based chemicals company Chemours, a spinoff of Dupont that has been arguing that the European Union should exempt fluoropolymers from their regulations, too. 

“The decision to site this plant in a community that is an existing hotspot for PFAS raises concerns,” Alexandre told The Narwhal. “And so does the selection of a jurisdiction that isn’t regulating fluoropolymers.”

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Summary

• Tick populations are spreading in Ontario, increasing the risk of Lyme disease.
• Of the 44 varieties of ticks found in the province, only one — blacklegged ticks — carry Lyme, but they make up more than half of all ticks here.
• Experts say people need to recognize the risk of ticks and Lyme in the outdoors, and check themselves and others.

With the kids in bed and the movie credits rolling, I turned to my partner and asked the question no man can resist: would you check me for ticks? We’d been out in the backyard most of the day, among a not-so-recently mowed lawn, shrubs and tall native grasses. They all could be harbouring any number of pests — including the one adding an extra element of terror to southern Ontario summers. Wildfire smoke? Check. Extreme heat? Check. Ticks? Check — no, really: check yourself for ticks.

The insects have been spreading across Canada as the climate changes, and southern Ontario has seen a dramatic increase among several species of ticks. Unfun fact: our province has 44 species in total, according to Public Health Ontario. But only one, the blacklegged tick, carries Lyme disease (we’ll get to that in a minute).

Ticks have been on the rise in Canada for the better part of the last decade, Manisha Kulkarni, a professor in University of Ottawa’s School of Epidemiology and Public Health, says.

“What we’re really seeing is the result of this multi-year trend of tick population expansion in North America,” she says. “And now we’re really seeing those populations establishing in more regions in southern parts of Canada, including in Ontario.”

With warmer weather, ticks in Ontario are spreading

There are a few factors encouraging the tick’s northward march, Kulkarni says, but “one of the main drivers is climate change.”

“We’re not seeing as cold winters that would normally prevent them from surviving and reproducing, so they’re able to survive in more regions,” she adds. 

That longer warm season allows more time for ticks to find hosts — like us — to feed on, and to reproduce. As a result, every year we’re seeing populations establish in new areas that now have desirable conditions for ticks.

So while my family in the Niagara region has been dealing with ticks every spring and summer for years, this summer they’ve become a shared foe within the family chat. The latest map from Ontario Public Health shows populations of blacklegged ticks as far north as Thunder Bay and Kenora, throughout the Ottawa Valley and in Owen Sound, on Lake Huron.

I’ve heard a few people seek a silver lining on the coldest days of winter, saying that at least long stretches of deep freeze will decrease the risks of ticks. They were — officially — wrong.

While we did have some bitingly cold temperatures in Ontario this winter, Kulkarni says, “We also had lots of snow, which is a great insulator.” Ticks burrow down in the leaf litter, blanketed by snow, and stay cozy even when we’re complaining about a stretch of -30 C days.

So depending on where you live, it might be time to draw the blinds, strip down … and turn on the lights.

How to check for ticks (or stop them before they get to you)

How exactly should you check yourself and loved ones for ticks? Cover as much surface area as possible, according to Health Canada. Check your chest and back, and in your hair — and don’t forget the crevices: armpits (and kneepits!), belly button and between your toes. Ticks also have a habit of going for the groin so … yeah.

To prevent ticks from reaching your skin in the first place, Health Canada suggests closed-toed shoes, long sleeves and pants — with your shirt tucked into your pants and your pants tucked into your socks. Ten minutes in a hot dryer will take care of any that hitched a ride on your clothes. 

Sticking to cleared paths and trails helps, too. 

And there may be ways to keep ticks away, more broadly, from outdoor spaces humans like to frequent. Kulkarni’s team at University of Ottawa recently released a study that found spreading wood chips at the edges of gardens and trails where ticks are prevalent effectively reduced the number that came looking for blood. 

How did they test that? Dragging a piece of flannel material across the ground before and after wood chips were laid to see how many latched on. It really tells you something about how easily ticks attach, doesn’t it?

Why do so many Canadian musicians have Lyme disease? Blame the deer

As ticks take on new territory, their presence isn’t just creepy and unwelcome, it’s actually a public health risk: ask Justin Bieber, Avril Lavigne or Shania Twain.

They’ve all publicly announced their diagnoses of the disease that, if left untreated, can cause neurological and cardiac issues, as well as arthritis.

Some areas of the country and our province, particularly around Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, have a higher concentration of ticks carrying bacteria that cause Lyme disease. Though it’s the most common disease people get from ticks, Lyme isn’t the only one they carry. And while not all types of ticks can pass on Lyme disease, more than half of the ticks found in Ontario are of the blacklegged variety that can, according to Public Health Ontario’s recent report. 

How does it happen, you ask? After mating on the backs of deer, the female blacklegged tick drops to the ground and, in the spring, lays eggs among the leaf litter, Kulkarni explains. Those eggs hatch into larvae, which quickly go looking for their first drink of blood. Down among the leaves, that’s usually from a small animal like a mouse or bird. If that animal is infected with the bacteria that causes Lyme, the tick takes on the infection. When it’s larger and more active, in the nymphal stage, the tick will find a bigger animal or human to feed on, and pass that infection on to them. As they mature into adults, white-tailed deer, dogs and humans are all on the menu.

“There’s several points in the cycle where humans are susceptible, but that tends to be during the nymphal peak of activity, in kind of the late spring and summer months, and then the adults, which are in the early spring and in the fall,” Kulkarni says.

For a general rule of where there might be a risk of ticks, consider if it’s a place populated by white-tailed deer, Kulkarni says.

Lyme disease diagnosis is up, so pull your pants down. But what do you do if you find one?

Across Canada, diagnoses of Lyme disease have skyrocketed from 104 cases in 2009 to a preliminary count of 7,105 cases in 2025, though the increase is likely due to awareness and increased testing, as well as a rise in cases. So far this year in Ontario, 236 cases have been identified by Public Health Ontario.

If you can remove the tick within a day, you can spare yourself a lot of trouble — it typically takes more than 24 hours after it attaches for the tick to pass on the bacteria that causes Lyme disease. Properly removing it means pulling the tick out straight, rather than twisting or bending, which risks leaving some of its mouthparts (unfortunately, that is the proper anatomical term) embedded. 

Next up? Keep the tick. Put that little sucker into a sealed container and take it to your doctor for testing (they’ll be thrilled). And if you can’t wait to know whether you’re holding a little blacklegged tick hostage — the kind that carries Lyme — you can also submit photos of the little offender online, where it will be quickly identified by kind-hearted insect enthusiasts.

If you have been bit, or even suspect you may have been, look out for Lyme symptoms like a rash or fever, headache or joint pain, Kulkarni says. These can occur even without the most famous Lyme symptom: a bullseye rash around the bite. “Not everybody actually gets the rash, so it’s important to look out for those other symptoms,” she says. If you have a summer fever, she adds, “that’s a good indication you should get checked out for Lyme, especially if you’ve been in an area where ticks are present.”

It’s not about being afraid to go outside, she adds, but equipping yourself with knowledge: both of the level of risk for ticks and Lyme wherever you’re going (there’s a map for that!) and how to properly remove one of it digs in (there are kits for that — and tweezers work, too!).

Kulkarni likens the threat of ticks to another unpleasant natural hazard. “There are settings where we know there’s poison ivy. People don’t go off the trail because they might brush along it, and if they do get a rash, they know what to do, right?,” she says. “Tick bites can be a bit more serious than that, but it’s the same concept: that being out in nature isn’t without risks, but by knowing what the risks are and how to manage them, you can really reduce any potential impacts.”

So check yourself, your kids, your pets — and your friends, if they need it. And if you’ve got a special someone at home, why not make 2026 the summer of sexy tick checks?

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Summary

• The North Bay Parry Sound District Health Unit officially stopped testing water at public beaches.
• In place of testing, the health unit is updating public signage to warn swimmers of risks of heavy rainfall, murky water and large numbers of birds congregating — things that deteriorate water quality.
• Researchers and advocates argue beach water monitoring is important, especially as climate change makes cooling off in the water more necessary — and more hazardous, thanks to algal blooms and pathogens.

Kevin Marois wasn’t aware that the health unit spanning North Bay and Parry Sound, Ont., had stopped testing the water at local swimming spots.“I don’t think it’s a good decision,” Marois told The Narwhal after learning about it on a hot June day at Shabogesic Beach in North Bay. “Not having the information on water quality is the main [concern],” he said as he came out of the water, “And we know that there are problems with water quality during the summer.”

There were six harmful algal bloom events in the health unit’s area in 2025, and more than a dozen in 2024.

After announcing its plans earlier this year, the North Bay Parry Sound District Health Unit has officially stopped testing water at public beaches as of this summer. 

In its place, they’re offering public signage, which the health unit says will warn beachgoers to assess risks from recent heavy rainfall, visibly murky water or large numbers of birds in the water — all things that alter water quality and can make swimming unsafe due to high levels of E. coli or harmful algae.

Despite the updated signage, those who study beach water safety in Canada say ceasing testing could impact people’s ability to make informed decisions about safe swimming this summer. 

Meanwhile, researchers have argued a warming climate in Canada, including more severe summer heat waves, means swimmable water for people to cool off in is more important than ever. 

“We see changing climate patterns, we see urban heat island effects, we see heat domes, we see that there’s a tremendous need for community cooling spaces,” said Gregary Ford, vice-president and Lake Ontario Waterkeeper at Swim Drink Fish, an environmental non-profit that advocates for safe, usable water bodies. Its name comes from signs often posted on shorelines in Canada: no swimming, no fishing and no drinking. 

Ford explained that warmer temperatures and extreme weather events — a part of climate change, which is primarily driven by the burning of fossil fuels — also contribute to more harmful algal blooms and other pathogens that affect the health of the water and people who use it.

Health unit says water testing is resource-intensive and too slow

In March 2026, the North Bay health unit, which also covers Kearney, Nipissing and South River, sent a letter to member municipalities saying sampling the area’s 60 public beaches was too resource-intensive, and lab results took three or four days, limiting their usefulness when water conditions change quickly. The health unit also argued that the risk of illness from water recreation in the region is low. The water was only tested about three times each summer, it said.

Last year, Public Health Sudbury and Districts, a region which includes Manitoulin Island and French River, ended routine water sampling as well — one of many cuts made after the medical officer of health said their funding has not kept pace with inflation.

“Obviously, there are growing pressures on municipalities and public health units … and so we understand that compromises have to be made, but not in something that affects public health,” Ford said. “This is a trend that we see during periods of economic stress and strain … Unfortunately, as these scalebacks start happening, the public is left with less information about their water and, honestly, that becomes the most important part.”

Swim Drink Fish aggregates data from across swimming spots in North America into an app called Swim Guide. But these helpful third-party tools rely on local data collected by public health departments.

“It’s really important that municipalities also provide historical data, even if they’re not sampling today. They should at least publicly make available the data and information that has been collected over the last five years, the last 10 years, so people can still make a somewhat informed decision about where they spend their time,” Ford said. That’s not something made available by the North Bay Parry Sound Health Unit, either.

There are options for protecting beachgoers, but they can’t replace testing: experts

A recent study from Toronto Metropolitan University, which surveyed 4,085 beachgoers at seven beaches in Canada between 2023 and 2025, found that about 2.6 per cent of swimmers reported becoming sick, with children and elderly people facing higher risk of “recreational water illness,” such as stomach issues, ear and eye infections or rashes.

Ian Young, principal investigator on the Canadian Beach Cohort Study, tracking recreational water illness across Canada, said despite that low risk, “having a solid monitoring plan is important to give people confidence in the beach.”

He pointed to other methods being used across the country to help combat the slow, unreliable nature of current testing. For example, at Bluffer’s Park Beach in Scarborough, Ont., the City of Toronto implemented a bird management program, involving removing sources of food and training dogs to spur geese into flight, once they realized a substantial amount of the E. coli in the water at the beach was caused by birds.

Ford, from Swim Drink Fish, has seen other solutions; municipalities like Kingston and Hamilton are trying out new technology that alerts citizens in real-time when sewers and sewer bypasses are overflowing and contaminating beach water. But, he said, this does not replace the need for monitoring.

“It is a far second in terms of a solution. The best solution is to be continuing and continuously monitoring these beaches,” Ford said. “Resources can be stretched thin at times. This is a public health interest, it is a tourism interest and it is an individual health and wellness interest as well. So, this should be a priority for public health units, and it’s disappointing to see some of these decisions that are being made.”

To help mitigate risk, North Bay’s health unit recommends swimmers wash or sanitize hands before eating after swimming, towel off well to help prevent swimmer’s itch, check for hazards before entering the water and avoid getting water in their mouths.

But North Bay resident Ashley Brooker, standing at the shore of Lake Nipissing, said she still doesn’t feel good about the testing changes. “I am a risk-taker, but that doesn’t mean that I want to risk getting sick or catching something,” she said. “Safety is a big thing, and if we’re putting our tax money into something then we should be getting the resources back.”

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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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