For two years, as Ontario fell behind other provinces on climate policy and protecting land, the provincial government has sat on expert recommendations to kickstart Indigenous-led land conservation.

The expert recommendations from Ontario’s handpicked Protected Areas Working Group, aimed at helping the government conserve more nature, were never made public. Environmental charity the Wilderness Committee obtained an undated slideshow outlining them through freedom of information legislation, and provided it to The Narwhal. 

When the working group was announced in April 2021, then-environment minister Jeff Yurek said expanding protected lands and waters in Ontario — like provincial parks, marine conservation areas or privately conserved land — was a “top priority” for the government. “​​We want to find new, innovative ways to meet this commitment,” he added. 

After two months of work, the working group put together four recommended actions for the government: better accounting for land that’s already protected, seizing on opportunities to quickly conserve more, launching a fund for more projects in the future and writing a plan to guide long-term work. At the centre of it all, the recommendations said, was the need for Indigenous Peoples to take the lead, through Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas [IPCAs] and Indigenous Guardians programs. 

“We cannot advance protected areas in Ontario in a meaningful way without addressing IPCAs and Guardians,” read the recommendations. “This will need to be done through committed Nation to Nation dialogue.”

Grassy Narrows First Nation in northwestern Ontario is one of four to declare Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas in the province, without the backing of the Progressive Conservative government. Joseph Fobister, the Grassy Narrows land protection team lead, said he was “surprised” to see the working group’s recommendations, as the province has refused for years to collaborate on the nation’s Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area.

“We specifically asked Ontario for a copy of this report because we saw their press release about forming this group,” Fobister said in an email.

“But Ontario hid the report from us and refused to even negotiate with us about partnering on our Indigenous Protected Area.”

The Ontario Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks didn’t respond to detailed questions from The Narwhal about the working group’s recommendations, the government’s progress on them and whether it has any plans to put support behind Indigenous-led conservation. The office of current Environment Minister David Piccini, who took over the role later in 2021, also didn’t answer. 

Katie Krelove, Ontario campaigner for the Wilderness Committee, said citizens should be asking why the government hasn’t released the recommendations publicly, nor committed to a timeline for turning them into a reality. She also questioned whether the government is willing to push back against industries like mining and logging, which have pushed for fewer restrictions on where and how natural resources can be harvested. 

“It will take money, it will take resources,” Krelove said. “There have to be some tough decisions.”

The proposed Kaska Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area in Kaska Dena traditional territory, in B.C. Photo: Maureen Garrity

Across Canada, several provincial governments have been hesitant to support Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas. In 2022, a Gitxsan Nation house group in B.C. announced the creation of a new Indigenous Protected Area in the upper Skeena River watershed. Photo: Marty Clemens / The Narwhal

Sakitawak, a proposed Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area in Saskatchewan, sits at the convergence of three rivers and is blanketed by wetlands. Photo: Jeremy Williams / River Voices Productions

The members of the working group included representatives from environmental advocacy groups, various foundations, the private sector and Indigenous conservation experts. Staff from the Metcalf Foundation and the Ivey Foundation, both of which have given financial support to The Narwhal, were among that group. (The Narwhal does not allow funders to direct news coverage — see our ethics policy here.)

One of the members of the working group was David Flood, general manager at Wahkohtowin Development GP Inc., a partnership beteween Chapleau Cree, Missanabie Cree and Brunswick House First Nations. In an interview with The Narwhal, Flood said the government’s lack of action on the group’s recommendations is “brutal.”

“We made a report, it went in and they haven’t done anything with it,” Flood said.

Instead of backing Indigenous-led conservation, Ontario has been resistant 

The working group’s recommendations echo a growing global consensus that Indigenous-led conservation — lands and waters managed by Indigenous Peoples, using traditional laws and knowledge — must be a cornerstone of effective environmental policy. Lands managed by Indigenous Peoples contain about 80 per cent of Earth’s dwindling biodiversity. That’s crucial because intact ecosystems sequester carbon at a time when countries around the world are racing to reduce emissions. These ecosystems can help mitigate natural disasters such as floods and droughts, too.

The working group outlined a few ways the Ontario government could shift its focus onto Indigenous-led conservation: it should issue a call for interest to First Nations to identify potential Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas, it said, and quickly begin work on two or three pilot projects. There would likely be “significant federal and philanthropic funding available,” the presentation noted. The working group also said the Indigenous-led projects should be announced to the public by spring 2022, along with several other new conservation measures. 

Since then, Ontario has pursued some conservation projects, including plans for a new urban provincial park in Uxbridge, east of Toronto. But none have been led by Indigenous communities.

Caldwell and Walpole Island First Nations are set to co-manage the future Ojibway National Urban Park in Windsor, Ont., which the Ontario government has contributed to by agreeing to transfer land. But so far, Ontario has not pursued Indigenous-led conservation projects. Photo: Kati Panasiuk / The Narwhal

Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas, where Indigenous Peoples steward the territories where they have lived for millennia, already exist across Canada under the laws of various nations. Aside from Grassy Narrows, three First Nations have declared them in Ontario: Shawanaga First Nation on Georgian Bay, Moose Cree First Nation on the North French River watershed, and Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug in the Far North.

The Ontario government hasn’t thrown its support behind any of them, nor has it publicly announced any other Indigenous-led conservation plans. Canada’s federal and provincial governments often do not respect Indigenous jurisdiction — for example, the Ontario government has allowed a flood of mining claims in the Grassy Narrows Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area, even though the nation has forbidden industrial activity there.

Instead, the province has pushed back against the concept. In 2019, Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources said it had not recommended any of the four Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas to the federal government, which gave funding to each. The Ontario government has also raised concerns about federal support for the protected areas, according to a federal document reported by The Narwhal last year.

Fobister said the working group’s recommendations support what Grassy Narrows has asked for all along.

“It will be a good day for everyone in Ontario when the government finally stops fighting us and decides to partner with us in respecting our people’s decision to protect our land.”

Joseph Fobister, the land protection team lead for Grassy Narrows, said the Ontario government has not come to the table for discussions about the First Nation’s Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area. Photo: The Globe and Mail / CP Images

Ontario has done the opposite of some working group recommendations 

The working group spent two months putting together its recommendations, based on feedback from more than 70 other experts. 

The panel concluded that Ontario has fallen behind on protecting land and its Environment Ministry lacks the resources to do more. As of 2021, Ontario ranked eighth among the provinces and territories in terms of area protected or conserved. It protected just over 3,000 hectares in the five years before the working group’s recommendations were produced, the report noted, while 20 million hectares were protected across the country. 

Progress has remained slow since the group handed in its findings. By December 2020, the latest data available before the recommendations were produced, Ontario had protected 11,489,600 hectares, representing about 10.7 per cent of the lands and waters in the province. As of December 2022, that number has ticked up to 10.9 per cent, or an additional 200,000 hectares protected — an area a bit smaller than Manitoulin Island. 

Though Ontario has not committed to a federal goal to conserve 25 per cent of the lands and waters in Canada by 2025 — and 30 per cent by 2030 — the working group also outlined a path that it said could bring the province closer to that target.

The first step, it said, would be better recognition of nine types of land that are already conserved in some ways but not currently counted in Ontario’s official total. For example: lands held by conservation authorities, areas marked as environmentally sensitive in municipal land-use plans or forests the province has marked as not to be logged. 

Ontario Environment Minister David Piccini didn’t answer detailed questions from The Narwhal about the working group’s recommendations. Photo: Carlos Osorio / The Narwhal

In at least one case, the province appears to have done the opposite of what the panel recommended. Last year, the Ontario government announced it would compel conservation authorities — which manage key watersheds — to identify and potentially give up land instead, if they are holding any that could be used for housing. It also removed “conservation of land” from the agencies’ mandates. 

The panel recommended the government not just track protected areas better, but also move swiftly to expand them to “avoid criticism that this is simply an ‘accounting exercise’ ” and “demonstrate a commitment to biodiversity and habitat conservation.”

Ontario could, the panel noted, work relatively quickly to conserve 44 sites, or 0.2 per cent of the lands and waters in Ontario, that were already identified for protection in 1999 under former Progressive Conservative premier Mike Harris. Of those, 34 “may be regulated relatively simply,” the working group said. Another 10 have ongoing land claims attached — the panel recommended the government engage with First Nations to “determine interest in resolving land claims and establishing [Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas] on these sites.”

The recommendations also outline other lands that could be officially conserved. For example, the government already owns land near provincial parks and conservation reserves that likely could be protected under Ontario law, or transferred to another entity like a conservation authority or land trust. “Private foundations” and the federal government are marked as potential funders. 

The same section of the recommendations notes significant wetlands — which are technically marked as off-limits to development — on lands the province identifies as Crown land could be another opportunity for an “immediate good news story.” The province isn’t supposed to allow development on these wetlands, but in some cases, that’s happened anyway.

Ontario’s Protected Areas Working Group advised the province to consider securing the long-term protection of some significant wetlands, but the government does not appear to have followed that advice. Photos: Christopher Katsarov Luna / The Narwhal

The province appears to have gone in the opposite direction on this as well. Last fall, the Progressive Conservatives altered the criteria used to classify protected wetlands so that it’s harder for swamps and bogs to qualify and easier to have the designation removed. 

The Ontario government hasn’t publicly moved forward on the group’s other two recommendations — for the province to start an accelerator fund for new protected and conserved areas, and to write a long-term strategy to guide further measures.

The Environment Ministry didn’t answer questions about whether it has worked on either concept over the last two years.

The working group said in its recommendations that Ontario hasn’t had a target-based strategy for conserving land since the ’90s and now has an opportunity to catch up, for the good of both the public and of resource industries, which it noted are “looking for clarity.” 

“Historic top-down (government-led) approaches to land-use planning and reliance on regulatory tools have created conflict and are no longer appropriate,” the recommendations said. “An innovative strategy is needed, driven by approaches that are regionally relevant, economically sound and built from the community up.” 

Flood said the working group was aiming for low-hanging fruit — things the government could do quickly and easily to make progress.

“It wasn’t like getting on the mountain saying, ‘We’re gonna hit 30 per cent by 2030. We’re going to initiate a province-wide, Indigenous-led process to get there,’” he said. “No, we’re gonna scrape and scrap and scrounge, that’s how we’re gonna do it first. You can hear the disappointment in my voice, right?” 

A clearcut in the boreal forest in Ontario. The province’s Protected Areas Working Group recommended Ontario look into conserving areas that have already been set aside from logging. Photo: River Jordan / NRDC

The public supports new parks and Indigenous-led conservation, according to a poll commissioned by the working group

The working group’s recommendations also included findings from a round of public polling, commissioned in May 2021.

Of more than 2,000 people surveyed by the firm Campaign Research, 86 per cent said they supported the creation of more parks and protected areas. The finding was relatively consistent across Ontario in all age groups, and with both women and men. 

The poll also found broad support in Ontario for Indigenous governments and communities to manage parks and protected areas — 44 per cent liked the idea, while 24 per cent were against and the remaining 33 per cent weren’t sure. 

Krelove said the polling shows the government has a strong mandate from the public to protect more nature. 

“People are feeling the crunch of not enough space in parks, impossible to get reservations, overcrowding when they are there,” Krelove said. 

“But I think people also want transparency. They want to see the province embark on a project that would obviously unite a lot of the province.”

Updated June 15, 2023 at 10:10 a.m. ET: This article was updated to correct the region where Grassy Narrows First Nation is located.

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The last remaining untouched parcel of natural land in Windsor, Ont., is intimidatingly surrounded by the gargantuan industrial structures that loom along the Detroit River that naturally divides Canada and the United States. 

The invasion of human activity on the small stretch of sandy, tree-lined beach that makes up Ojibway Shores is somehow both gorgeous and grim. To the left, near the city’s salt mine, an enormous wheat-carrying ship stands silently docked in the shimmering water — one of more than 600 that cross through Ontario’s third-largest port every year. To the right, a power plant spews smoke in the air above another pitch-black ship, a grey aggregate factory, a forgettable Canadian Border Services Agency processing plant and the half-built skeleton of the Gordie Howe Bridge, soon-to-be the longest cable-stayed bridge in North America. Across the river is the black automotive and steel jungle Henry Ford helped build. 

On this beach, the hums of industry harmonize confusingly with the chirps, rattles, whistles, trills and croaks of 252 species of animals, half of which are migratory birds. But as you walk away from the beach into one of the very few old-growth forests left in the province, the buzz of manufacturing — an excavator backing up, a jackhammer drilling, generators vibrating — fades away. Among 261 different types of plants, the silence that can only be found in intact nature fills your senses. 

“This land means everything,” says Mary Duckworth, Chief of Caldwell First Nation, one of two nations that claim these shores as their once-stolen homes. 

This clear, sunny March afternoon was the second time Duckworth had been back on the beach to perform ceremony since January. She gestures to all the industry the light touches. Centuries ago, before the Detroit River became the busiest border crossing in North America, multiple communities of Anishinaabe lived here freely. Her people were concentrated to the south at Point Pelee before they were brutally forced out, first unofficially by settlers and then officially by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Until 2020, Caldwell First Nation was one of the few First Nations in Canada without a reserve. 

Up the river and around the bend is Walpole Island — or Bkejwanong, meaning “where the waters divide” — the name of another First Nation, which has the distinction of living on entirely unceded territory, never legislated, established or set apart as a reserve. 

People might not remember how her community used to live, roam, hunt and fish across and all around the river, but water and land have memory, Duckworth says, as she crouches on the sand and cups her hand into the river, swirling it around to create ripples that fade away. That memory has remained even as the land’s original stewards were forced to abandon it. It has remained as the auto industry rose in the 1960s, U.S.-Canada environmental law emerged in the 1970s and Windsor expanded all along the riverbanks in the 1980s. It remained as shipping across the river increased after the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in the 1990s and development intensified in the 2000s.  

“Just look around. Listen closely,” Duckworth says. “This land, this water, it’ll tell you everything.” 

Multiple communities of Anishinaabe, including Caldwell First Nation, once lived freely on the shores of the Detroit River. Driven out by settlers, Caldwell First Nation is one of two nations in conversation with Parks Canada to reinstate their rights to co-manage the stewardship of a new national urban park that will be created on their once-stolen lands, including Ojibway Shores — the last intact natural area in Windsor.

Today, the water and land are telling us its future. Soon, this plot of land will become the latest addition to Canada’s national parks system, marked by the iconic beaver logo, Ojibway National Urban Park. It will be the first national park in Ontario to be officially co-managed by First Nations, and only the country’s second national urban park — a protected green space that exists in a densely developed city.

The creation of Ojibway National Urban Park has been more than 50 years in the making. It’s an ambitious exercise to connect and protect nearly 365 hectares (900 acres), the scattered remnants of old-growth forests, wetlands, tallgrass prairies, oak savannah and riverbank in one of the country’s most developed centres, which also happens to be one of its largest endangered-species hotspots. 

Creating a national park in the 21st century is not easy: the sheer number of people and institutions involved and land needed makes it an enormous task every single time. Canada has successfully created 10 parks since 2000, but perhaps none as complex as this one. Each parcel of land that will make up Ojibway National Urban Park is currently in different hands — three levels of government, a handful of private landowners, a port authority and two First Nations. There are multiple visions from vastly different political processes about how best to bring them together. 

Parks Canada is working on a new program to build more urban parks across the country, to preserve biodiversity and nature in the face of the climate emergency. This program is the federal agency’s preferred route to making Ojibway happen because it offers them greater flexibility to build a green space in the confines of a city environment. But even as that process plays out, an NDP MP has introduced a private member’s bill to get Windsor a park sooner, an attempt to accelerate the tried-and-tested national parks process that created 48 iconic natural preserves across the country, including the world-renowned Banff and Jasper national parks in Alberta. 

Then there are two First Nations — Caldwell and Walpole Island — that will retain and reinstate their rights to co-manage the stewardship of the park alongside government institutions. All that, plus an extremely invested community of academics, environmentalists, urban planners and youth that are trying to help, while relearning how to embrace nature in a way that centres Indigenous Knowledge and inclusive practices. 

Residents of Windsor have limited access to nature, with some estimating less than one per cent of the sprawling, largely industrial city is green space. That’s why many want the last remaining parcels of nature (highlighted here) to be protected in a national urban park. Map: Shawn Parkinson / The Narwhal

A lot is happening in Windsor right now. The potential for electric vehicles to reincarnate the city’s auto industry is stoking excitement and nervousness, as it also spurs urban sprawl into the last vestiges of open farmland in order to house an anticipated influx of workers.

But Windsor also has limited access to nature: some estimate less than one per cent of the city is green space, one of the smallest amounts for an Ontario city. You can see it jarringly on any map — small blobs of green at the westernmost point of an otherwise grey, structure-filled, man-made city.

That’s the backdrop to the formation of Ojibway National Urban Park. These disconnected spaces are already the only guarantee of nature for the city’s residents, the best place to find trees in an otherwise leafless urban core. So everyone supports the creation of the national urban park, even if the many roadmaps to creating it are slightly different.

“Ojibway started with an idea, and it’s ending with people,” Duckworth says. “There’s a lot of good intentions. There’s a lot of people that want to see this park. I don’t know who is going to … I don’t know how Parks Canada will … ,” she says, trailing off and pausing as she tries to vocalize how messy and political the park’s creation has been. “Well, I don’t know how exactly it’ll happen.”

“But I know this park will be here forever, because we’re here to take care of it again.” 

If the story of Ojibway National Urban Park is about reconnection, relearning and reconciliation, then what happens next will have ripple effects across the country. This could be a springboard for Indigenous-led conservation and the poster park for sustainable development against all odds. It’s almost a reality, perhaps even opening to the public next year, minus the ironing-out of a few hundred details. 

Caldwell First Nation Chief Mary Duckworth says the creation of Ojibway National Urban Park in Windsor is full of “good intentions” that will ultimately centre Indigenous stewardship.

Chief Duckworth holds a feather during her visit to Ojibway Shores. “I know this park will be here forever,” she says, “because we’re here to take care of it again.”

Ojibway National Urban Park could be the first created after Parks Canada promise of 15 new urban parks by 2030

Ojibway Shores is a 14-hectare chunk of shoreline at the western edge of what will be Ojibway National Urban Park. Just before World War One, it was poised to become the anchor site of a great steel town. That didn’t happen; the failure to transform the land for industry — because of war and the depressions that followed — allowed the woodlands and prairie lands to survive. The city bought the shoreline in 1957 from the Canadian Salt Company and declared it a protected natural area four years later. Since then, the people of Windsor have been embroiled in a debate about what to do with land as the city encroached all around it, even as they’ve largely been kept out.

For the last 14 years, the only human being officially allowed to walk through the sandy beach and the trees that hide it has been Peter Berry, a harbour master with the Windsor Port Authority, which has owned a significant portion of Ojibway Shores since 1997. Members of Caldwell First Nation call Berry the keeper of the land until it comes back to them. It’s not been an easy task. Berry has had to safeguard the land from smugglers, party-goers, drug dealers, members of the motorcycle gang Hell’s Angels and others he says showed “a total disregard for nature.” 

Despite all that, Berry says “this is the most peaceful spot in the whole city.” He knows every physical and historical corner of the shores, the place where he comes to “get things out of my mind.” He points to the east of the beach: there, he says, was the short-lived site of one of Canada’s first wooden roller-coasters in the late 19th century. Further down from that, he recalls, beautiful mosaic tiles were discovered, souvenirs of beautiful New Age 1920s hotels that once hosted Great Gatsby-level parties on the riverbanks of the two countries. 

For the last 14 years, Peter Berry, a harbour master with the Windsor Port Authority, has been the sole protector and keeper of Ojibway Shores, keeping humans out as much as possible to keep nature intact.

Inside the forest, Berry remembers every animal he’s seen: the deer that ran out in front of him with a coyote on its tail and, his “favourite,” the red fox. On the outskirts is the ditch that was once a dumping ground for old computers, refrigerators and tires, which he helped clean up with his kids and thousands of volunteers. 

Berry placed concrete blocks all along the roadway to the shoreline, wide enough so bicycles and wildlife could pass through but narrow enough to stop vehicles from wrecking the land. As construction of the Gordie Howe bridge began in full force, Berry helped install a protection fence that ran from the Detroit River to the highway a couple of blocks away to prevent animals from going on the road. He bought a padlock and placed it on the only gate to keep the beach safe from, well, humans. He hated it, but it’s been there — keeping people out, ever since.

“I think I’ve done a good job protecting all this,” he says. “What’s important about this land is that it’s still here. It hasn’t been destroyed yet.”

“But I’m tired. I’m getting old fast. And I can’t do it alone.” 

No one knows who exactly came up with the idea of protecting the shores as part of a national urban park. Berry empathetically says it wasn’t him, although he knew they needed to be protected the minute he walked onto the sand. “It’s just special, it feels special, I don’t know how else to describe it,” he says. The consensus is that the whole community dreamt of it over decades — the thought occurred to every single resident that knows Ojibway, who had seen the beach on a map, spotted it from the bridge, accidentally ran up to it. 

Ojibway Shores is a 14-hectare chunk of shoreline at the western edge of what will be Ojibway National Urban Park. Once poised to be the site of a burgeoning steel industry, it is now the last untouched natural area in all of Windsor.

Logistically, however, the vision started becoming a reality in 2013, when the Windsor Port Authority faced major blowback for announcing plans to bulldoze Ojibway Shores to make room for big-box stores. It backed down, and made a public commitment to protect the land. Last May, after years of discussion with the federal government, the port authority relinquished control of the shores to Parks Canada for $4 million. As part of the agreement, the port authority agreed to boost and protect fish habitat on the waterfront.

As Parks Canada inked the land transfer, it also began speaking to Caldwell and Walpole Island First Nations and hundreds of people in various neighbourhoods, schools and community centres across Windsor. It wanted to hear their thoughts about turning the shores into not just a national park, but a national urban park: a green space that can, in theory, be accessed by transit from across a sprawling city. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted an urgent need for access to nature by city dwellers and in 2020, then-environment minister Johnathan Wilkinson canvassed Canadians for their advice on the work of Parks Canada. The number one ask was more urban parks. Eighty-two per cent of Canadians live in cities and, they said in their letters to Wilkinson, getting “a slice of nature in the hubbub of urban life” would be “so important to our mental health during these unprecedented times” 

Wilkinson instructed Parks Canada to come up with a policy to increase green spaces in the country’s most developed centres. The government agency successfully created one just eight years ago to mark the 100th anniversary of Canada’s national parks system — Rouge National Urban Park on the eastern edge of Toronto, made real by former Prime Minister Stephen Harper in his 2011 speech from the throne. Twenty per cent of Canada’s population lives across the Greater Toronto Area, and Rouge Park allows them to escape to a world of bluebirds and salmon. Fifty-plus years after it was first imagined, the largest urban park in North America now protects ancient forests, creeks, farms, beaches and marshes, even as highways, suburban dwellings and industry encroach all around it.

Catherine Febria, a biologist and naturalist with the University of Windsor, is one of many residents advocating for a national urban park. She hopes the protection of the last green spaces in the city will help reconnect the urban environment to the many waterways that have been lost.

“Doesn’t that sound like exactly what we need here?” asks Catherine Febria, Canada Research Chair and assistant professor at the Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research at the University of Windsor. 

When Febria moved to Windsor from New Zealand in 2019, she immediately looked for water and trees, and found Ojibway Park. “This is our second home,” she says, away from her actual home 10 minutes away. 

As a researcher, Febria soon discovered the redirected and built-over streams hidden all across the park lands, both above and below ground. She doesn’t know yet how many there are, just that along its edges, the thin, meandering, babbling waterways collide with ever-growing suburban and industrial development, disappearing into the concrete. Some of the streams have been bulldozed entirely, but some, she believes, can be saved, maybe even restored. Febria wants everyone to imagine water running through Windsor again, connecting the park to the city, the natural to the built environment. 

“Here, there’s been a systematic removal of rivers from their landscape, a systematic removal of people from its land,” Febria says. “The scientist in me knows it’s not going to be science that is going to solve the problem. It’s going to be the local communities, the people that are going to protect this forever. The story of this park is the story of reconnection.” 

Just as she says that, five grazing deer appear behind her, cautiously watching the humans walking by. Two bright red cardinals fly onto branches near them and fill the air with chirps. “See what I mean?” Febria says. 

Ojibway National Urban Park is home to over 500 species of plants and animals, maybe more, including dozens of species at risk that can’t be found anywhere else in Ontario.

Febria has been among those who have been advocating for the idea of a national urban park here for years. But it wasn’t until after the 2021 federal election that the idea transformed into a plan. Wilkinson’s successor, Steven Guilbeault, was allocated $130 million to create 15 national urban parks: one step towards the goal of preserving a quarter of Canada’s lands and waters by 2025, a promise Guilbeault made last December at the global biodiversity conference COP15 in Montreal.

After Guilbeault’s pledge, Parks Canada began creating a new policy to create such parks. Simultaneously, the agency also began talks with six other cities with the goal of giving each a park by 2025: Edmonton, Halifax, Saskatoon, Victoria, Winnipeg and Montreal. 

The creation of both policy and parks is happening in tandem because the goal is to “actually create” parks in Canada’s biggest cities, Caroline Macintosh, executive director of protected areas establishment at Parks Canada, told The Narwhal. She believes this way Canadians avoid a tradeoff: the agency could either spend years developing the perfect policy to build parks in complicated city environments or give residents much-needed access to nature now. 

“Policy is faster to develop, and it’s more flexible, which is really helpful in an urban environment where you have a lot of different lands, a lot of different landowners and just a very complicated situation,” Macintosh said. The agency is collecting feedback nation-wide to ensure the policy is modern, effective, balanced and nuanced enough to deliver parks across Canada, she says. “This way, our work can remain really relevant.”

Ojibway National Urban Park in Windsor could theoretically be the first one created under this new policy. It has the impossible job of connecting six parcels of land, maybe more, each with its own unique biologically significant ecosystem and owner. But political processes are never simple or tidy, even though everyone agrees about protecting these lands.  

Ojibway National Urban Park is home to some of the oldest trees in Ontario, some of which are around 200 years old.

People vs. paper: one Windsor MP wary of Parks Canada timeline for developing less colonial, more flexible parks process

Ojibway National Urban Park will be in Windsor — but it will be created 750 kilometres away, by elected officials in Canada’s capital region. And for the last year, the House of Commons has been in a bureaucratic and political debate about whether a park is first created on paper or by people.

As bureaucratic and boring as it sounds, all but one of Canada’s national parks have been created through legislative amendment and an act of parliament. Theoretically, the process should be simple: find a beautiful green space full of magical biodiversity, insert its geographic coordinates into the century-plus-old National Parks Act and protect it forever. But the creation of Rouge National Urban Park proved creating green spaces in urban centres didn’t work that way. Simple geographic coordinates couldn’t capture the complexities of the various parcels of land and sheer number of groups that had to be connected. 

And Parks Canada increasingly understood the need to contend with the history of national park creation as an act of colonization: doing things the old way would contradict government promises of truth and reconciliation. Even though the National Parks Act mandates the agency to make agreements with Indigenous Nations, many of Canada’s national parks have been formed by shutting Indigenous people out of the process, perhaps even the land itself, without consulting them properly or respecting them as the stewards of the lands they have always been. 

Parks Canada didn’t plan to completely upend the traditional national parks process but it did aim to make it more modern and less colonial. That’s why, in the spring of 2021, one of the first consultations the agency did about Ojibway was with members of Caldwell and Walpole Island First Nations. The idea was to create a collaborative governance model that integrated both First Nations, as well as the provincial and local governments. 

Holding such consultations before legislating exact coordinates hadn’t been done before and long-time NDP MP Brian Masse for Windsor West was concerned about its effectiveness. Objecting to what he described to The Narwhal as “some weird draft process that is nothing more than a patchwork of pieces of paper,” Masse introduced a private member’s bill, C-248, in February 2022, aiming to amend the National Parks Act to include the geographic coordinates of the future Ojibway National Urban Park. “We need to do it the right way, and the right way is to keep it consistent with every other national park,” Masse reasons, noting the traditional process has ensured the “highest standards of environmental protection and stewardship.” 

A lifelong Windsorite, Masse spent one of his first jobs after university offering employment support to people with physical disabilities near the Spring Garden Natural Area, an area he describes as “a beautiful piece of nature that I had never been exposed to in that way in my city before.” In 2002, he became MP for Windsor West, encountering the idea of protecting Spring Garden about 10 years ago when an endangered rattlesnake was discovered at a nearby development site: the community rallied to ensure it wasn’t harmed and relocate it safely. Masse has been pushing for the creation of a park ever since. 

Still, Masse’s bill is not without its challenges. It doesn’t specifically note that the First Nations will co-govern the park. Caldwell First Nation, as the primary holders of Aboriginal title to the land, has been deeply embedded in Masse’s consultations since 2013. But Walpole Island First Nation, which is the secondary holder of Aboriginal title, was only informed of the Masse’s intentions properly a year ago and says the bill doesn’t include all the natural spaces they’d like to see protected.

Chief Dan Miskokomon says his people are still “understanding the process.” 

Walpole Island First Nation Chief Dan Miskokomon says his nation is working to understand how Ojibway National Urban Park will be created as it also consults its entire community about the role they want to play in managing and restoring the lands.

Walpole has just started consulting its nearly-2,000 person community about the park, its design and their role. Miskokomon is certain they want to be co-managers of the lands, with half of the jobs — everything from operational management to restoration, stewardship and public engagement — to be filled from their communities. 

“I’m excited. This park is right in here,” Miskokomon says, pointing at his heart. “But this cannot be an isolated or private attempt. It has to be a collective approach and our members are key to the knowledge of how to do it.” Next month, Walpole is planning to welcome Indigenous leaders that have created Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas or helped steward other parks across Canada to the island to share knowledge. It takes time, but the work has started, the Chief says. 

In April, Guilbeault spoke to Miskokomon over Zoom to discuss next steps, including opportunities to address Walpole Island First Nation’s concerns with the bill. For his part, Masse says that he deferred all consultation with Walpole Island to Caldwell, as the two nations have a relationship.

But that’s not how it should work, says Irek Kusmierczyk, a second-term Liberal MP for Windsor-Tecumseh. He defended Parks Canada’s goals and the time it is taking to envision a new, modern policy that will set “the gold standard for consultation.” 

Kusmierczyk, too, has been thinking about how to protect this land for a long time. He’s spent every weekend in Windsor’s parks since his family moved here as refugees from Poland in 1983. During the height of the 2007 recession, he spent five months walking through the five city-owned parks that make up what’s known as the Ojibway Prairie Complex, identifying species at risk and meeting biologists to learn the history of every blade of grass. Protecting the lands was his first request in his first meeting with the Prime Minister’s Office when he was elected in 2019.

Kusmierczyk insists Masse’s bill and the Parks Canada process are not in competition with each other, but he believes the park will be actualized by the agency in the end. That’s evident in what the agency has already accomplished, he says: the public consultations and completed land transfers are “real, tangible milestones.” 

“There’s value in [Masse’s] bill, but the Parks Canada process will deliver this park,” Kusmierczyk says. “You can either create a park superficially on paper, or you can work with everyone on the ground to legitimately make a park that lasts forever.”

Masse’s bill would unilaterally enshrine Ojibway park lands in legislation before important details are hashed out. In House of Commons committee meetings about his bill, Parks Canada officials said their biggest concern is that if the bill passes, any provincial or city infrastructure — sewer lines, power grids, streets and roadways — within the legislated geographic region will become subject to Parks Canada’s regulations. 

Parks Canada is concerned that once Brian Masse’s bill passes all the lands will unilaterally fall in their jurisdiction, including any provincial or city infrastructure like sewer lines, power grids, streets and roadways.

This has the potential to create a headache of jurisdictional, liability and legal issues: Rouge National Urban Park posed a similar challenge, which is why it was given its own act within the broader parks legislation. Having learned lessons from Rouge, Parks Canada said some of these issues could be avoided if Ojibway was established with the more consultative and flexible national urban parks process under development. 

“This bill will essentially create an instant park by short-cutting around some important steps, leaving details to be worked out after the fact,” Darlene Upton, vice-president of protected areas establishment and conservation at Parks Canada, told the committee last fall. 

Upton further explained Parks Canada’s forthcoming urban parks policy could create a model where the agency doesn’t need to own all park land. The goal is to create a stewardship plan that guides different owners and stakeholders to work together, including various levels of government and First Nations. She said the agency “would like more time” to understand how to best create parks in urban settings in a way that centres reconciliation, conservation and access to nature. 

“The private member’s bill is a new and unknown territory,” Upton said last October. “No national park or national urban park today has been created this way.” She explained there are a series of steps that have to be completed before a park becomes a park: land transfers are usually negotiated in advance, complete and meaningful consultations with Indigenous Peoples, stakeholders and the public are conducted and funding is secured.

“The process for creating protected areas takes time. It calls for creating relationships and waiting. Although it takes time, it is worth it. At the end of the process, we have a place that will be co‑managed, which is good for everyone,” Upton said. 

“Our process will take a little bit longer than this bill but will achieve the same result in the end.”

Parks Canada’s Macintosh also told The Narwhal the agency is continuing its consultations about Ojibway. “Whatever way this gets done, the goal is to have a national urban park in Windsor,” she says. Officially, the timeline is 2025 but, as things are progressing quickly, she says the park could open by next year. 

Despite the various concerns, many in Windsor support Masse’s bill, saying it has accelerated the creation of Ojibway. Without the bill, some believe they’d be still dreaming of a park, instead of on the verge of watching it be created. 

Others say the politics around this park has made the process endlessly and unnecessarily complicated and confusing. Just this week, Parks Canada announced the finalization of significant land transfers — including Ojibway Shores from Port Windsor to Transport Canada to Parks Canada, and a one-acre (0.4-hectare) private property adjacent to the park lands that was bought by the City of Windsor so it too can be included in the national urban park. At the press conference, Kusmierczyk thanked Masse for “advocating tirelessly for the protection of Ojibway Shores and the creation of a national urban park.” 

It was a warm, conciliatory public acknowledgment that attendees hadn’t heard before. One said that that’s the effect of a national park: “The beaver shows up, and everyone gets on their best behavior.”

It feels like we’ve continually been moving towards this moment. The city has never wavered in their desire to protect this.

Karen Cedar, retired City of Windsor naturalist

But Masse wasn’t present to hear it: he was the only official missing in a room where politicians from the city, the province and the federal government were standing in support of the park with Parks Canada officials and members of Walpole Island First Nation. Even as the park was declared ready for its next steps, politicians were bickering over who was invited and with how much notice.

Politics as usual — getting a park, fast — seems, at this point, to be winning out over the more complex goal of decolonizing the parks process, at least a little. Masse expects the bill will pass on April 26 with unanimous support across party lines. That would make Ojibway the first national park to be created by a private member’s bill. It also gives the NDP MP a political win, despite his failure to consult Walpole First Nation, and despite the federal government’s stated intent to make sure the creation of Canada’s next 15 parks is significantly different from the first 48.

As people across Canada push for a different, better kind of park, the federal government’s rumoured support of Masse’s bill — instead of allowing Parks Canada time to figure out how to build relationships with both First Nations and a more inclusive process — wouldn’t seem to indicate things are changing drastically, yet.

For his part, Masse says he’s leaving the rest of the park process “in [Parks Canada’s] hands now.” 

“Yes, of course, politics and legislation is messy, but creating anything is messy,” Masse says. “And we’re all trying to create something that will last forever.” 

Since 2021, Parks Canada has been working on a policy that will guarantee city dwellers across Canada access to pockets of nature, like Ojibway Shores.

How Ojibway National Urban Park will stitch together scattered green spots with different owners to make one big green space in Windsor

Karen Cedar was eight when she first visited Ojibway Park on a school trip. “I remember the trees, I remember the deer,” she recalls, laughing. “From my eight-year-old brain, it feels the same: a place that’s old and not urban. It doesn’t feel created.” 

For 33 years, Cedar has worked at the City of Windsor, most recently as its naturalist. Even though she officially retired a few months ago, she is still representing the city in conversations about the national urban park with Parks Canada. She is a fountain of institutional knowledge, recounting how the city started buying park lands outside its boundaries in the 1950s when residential development ramped up because these lands just felt “special.” The province bought a property as well, and through the years the federal government gave the city money to buy and protect more. 

“Everything was growing, but everyone hesitated when they came to this area,” she says. “It feels like we’ve continually been moving towards this moment. The city has never wavered in their desire to protect this.” 

For 33 years, Karen Cedar has worked at the City of Windsor, most recently as its naturalist, working to find a way to connect people to nature while preserving biodiversity. Now, she’s helping the city create Ojibway National Urban Park.

The challenge, then and now, was perfecting a balancing act that allowed people to come and fall in love with these lands while also leaving animals and plants to go through their life cycles uninterrupted. There are many levers, Cedar says, but if everyone presses all of them something amazing will happen.

The results of that are starting to show: a complex, intricate, extremely large ecosystem of people trying to protect an equally complex, intricate, extremely large ecosystem of nature.

Six areas totaling 365 hectares, some held by private owners, others by various levels of government, will be pulled together to make Ojibway National Urban Park. Now officially owned by Parks Canada, Ojibway Shores is the smallest parcel of land in the network, on the westernmost edge. 

South of the shores are five parks owned by the City of Windsor, known as the Ojibway Prairie Complex. These were once filled with corn fields, the efforts of the first major European settler farming community in southern Ontario. They contain one of the most endangered ecosystems in Canada — tallgrass prairie, which once covered large sections of the province, but now can’t be found anywhere else in Ontario, and is a crucial sponge during Windsor’s annual floods. 

There’s Black Oak Heritage Park, home to old-growth trees around 200 years old, as well as extremely rare native plants and butterflies. It also hosts many nesting birds that are hard-to-find near an urban area: scarlet tanagers, rose-breasted grosbeaks, eastern bluebirds and Cooper’s hawks.

Ojibway Park is where most Windsor residents spend their outdoor time, sharing several nature trails through the meandering forest with deer and foxes. Tallgrass Prairie Heritage Park has the largest pond system in the Ojibway complex. It is home to rare prairie wildflowers like tall green milkweed and the slender bush clover that haven’t been found anywhere else in Canada. 

Ojibway National Urban Park is trying to connect six scattered parcels of nature in the western part of the city of Windsor, maybe more. Each is owned by a different entity. Each has its own unique ecosystem. Video: Shawn Parkinson / The Narwhal

The last two city-owned parks are Spring Garden Natural Area — a mixed landscape of prairie, swamp and a really old lagoon, where trees hide a rich site for butterflies and an endangered, and declining, population of eastern massasauga rattlesnakes — and Oakwood Natural Area, a 14-hectare provincially significant wetland that serves as an important stopover for migrating birds in the spring and fall. 

Windsor has agreed to give the federal government all its green spaces. Mayor Drew Dilkens says since the park predates his birth, it’s only right it lasts long after him, too. “For many years, we were never able to find the perfect deal that made everyone happy,” Dilkens says. Now that it’s happening, the city will be able to host a pathway to move humans and animals from the Detroit River to the centre of the urban core. Dilkens wants to build a $23-million bridge, or a six-lane wide wildlife overpass, that connects Ojibway Park and Black Oak Heritage Park as the first attempt to stitch two parcels together. 

“Having that national beaver logo on a park and everything that comes with it, well that’s going to be special,” he says. “And yes, a private member’s bill to protect land is a very blunt instrument. It makes everyone nervous. But it got us here. It got the federal government acting. It actually served its purpose.” 

“All of this takes time,” Dilkens says. “We’ve been talking about it so long, we’re excited to see some positive momentum. … Everyone is acting in good faith.”

Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkens points at Ojibway Shores on a map in his office. The city has transferred all its remaining green lands to the federal government at no cost to speed up their protection in a national urban park.

There are a few spaces that aren’t locked down yet, like South Cameron Woodlot, which has large natural sections that are privately held. Chappus Natural Area is partially privately owned and partially owned by the provincial Ministry of Transportation. And the southernmost part of Ojibway National Urban Park could be formed from parks in the neighbouring Town of LaSalle. 

And up until this week, the major holdout was the provincial Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks, which owns Ojibway Prairie Provincial Nature Reserve. This potential park parcel contains more rare plants than any other park in Ontario: in the fall, eight- to 13-foot tall wildflowers, like the big bluestem and Indian grass, line its trails.

Ontario only joined the Ojibway National Urban Park discussion in February 2023, when Ontario Environment Minister David Piccini sent a letter to Caldwell’s Chief Duckworth. In it, Piccini said he understood why the First Nation wanted a national park instead of a provincial one: “As you mentioned in our last meeting, First Nation communities are the ‘child’ of the federal government,” Piccini wrote. “I respect your feelings on this and understand the value of incorporating this into the national discussion we are having on urban parks.” 

The provincial minister promised to “work collaboratively” to achieve shared stewardship but expressed “grave concerns” about selling Ojibway Prairie Provincial Nature Reserve to Parks Canada as well as the “political nature” of Masse’s bill.  

“Bottom line for Ontario is that we remain committed to building meaningful relationships; to shared stewardship; and protection of the land — regardless of whose banner this new park would ultimately fall under,” Piccini concluded, promising to stay at the Parks Canada table. 

Piccini and his office did not respond to multiple interview requests from The Narwhal. At the announcement held by Parks Canada and Kusmierczyk this week, he made a surprise public commitment — or “intent” —  to transfer the Ojibway Prairie Provincial Nature Reserve lands to Parks Canada. Details of how the province would do this have not yet been released.

Walpole Island First Nation Chief Dan Miskokomon (right) and Clint Jacobs, the nation’s natural heritage coordinator, (left) are also re-learning the laws of stewardship as part of the co-governance of Ojibway National Urban Park.

While the lands are coming together, both Caldwell and Walpole Island First Nations also need to define co-governance with Parks Canada, and that will take some time. 

“We understand Parks Canada has its own laws. So do we. But our laws aren’t written down,” says Clint Jacobs, Walpole Island’s natural heritage coordinator, who has been at his job for 25 years. “Our Elders tell us our laws are written on our heart and we’re meant to practise them on a regular basis and a lot of us do. But at the same time, a lot of us need to re-learn what those laws are just because of residential schools and the genocidal impacts on us. We need to unlearn, in some cases, and relearn, and then together co-learn a lot of this.” 

He gives an example: language. He explains generations called grasslands “weeds,” noting “it wasn’t a drug term, just the closest English word we had. To us, it didn’t mean something to get rid of.” 

But his grandparents called the grasslands “mskhoden,” or “the place where fires go through,” in Anishinaabemowin, harkening back to a time when controlled burns on the Prairies helped maintain their health and abundance. 

“The park will be representative of what used to be there and we could have it back,” Jacobs says. 

Behind the scenes, “a staunchness of aunties” — a group of municipal leaders, biologists, naturalists, Indigenous stewards and mothers, including Catherine Febria (second from left) and Karen Cedar (centre) — have been working hard to help define the governance of Ojibway National Urban Park.

Meanwhile, local environmentalists, advocates and academics are trying to stay out of the political back-and-forth to focus on reframing the city’s relationship with nature so it’s Indigenous-led and inclusive. The behind-the-scenes work has been endless as Febria and her colleagues — a group of municipal leaders, biologists, naturalists, Indigenous stewards and mothers she’s dubbed “a staunchness of aunties” — work to finalize and honour “a decolonized process.” To help it take shape, these women are building a stewardship program with Walpole Island and Caldwell that will train Indigenous youth to be the guides and protectors of the lands, as they also take up other aspects of the park’s governance. Meanwhile, local city-builders have started thinking about how to connect future development to the soon-to-be-created park. These lands can’t be sacrificed, they all say, staunchly. 

“This feels like our last chance,” Febria says. “We’re all unlearning and relearning. And we’re filling this gap with Indigenous Knowledge first and foremost.” 

“Of course, it’s complicated,” Cedar says. “But for all the complexity and nuance, there’s not a single person who knows about this park who says this is a bad idea.”

Liz Akiwenzie, knowledge keeper and cultural healer with Caldwell First Nation, leads Chief Mary Duckworth, council and Parks Canada officials in their first ceremony on Ojibway Shores earlier this year to mark the return of the land to Indigenous stewardship. Photo: Tobi Olawale / Caldwell First Nation

‘So much more’: The creation of Ojibway is just the start of a city’s renewed relationship with nature 

Ojibway National Urban Park will exist, if only by the sheer will of the community, and it starts with Ojibway Shores. Berry’s solo watch over the still-untouched land began to end last January when Caldwell First Nation was able to come back to their land for the very first time in centuries. This moment is the beginning of everything for them: this year, a long-landless nation will also break ground on its permanent home, a new reserve a mere 50 kilometres from the shores.

In January, the process started with a ceremony on Ojibway Shores to pay homage to the water and the land that had witnessed what they had only been told, as Parks Canada officials watched. “If they’re going to take over, we wanted to make sure that they understood how significant this all was,” Chief Duckworth says. 

On April 18, Berry went to Ojibway Shores as its official caretaker for the last time to remove the padlock he bought and put on its gate to protect the shoreline and trees that hid it. 

Now, the gate has a Parks Canada padlock. “It was bittersweet,” he says. “I’ll go back all the time. I just won’t have the key.”

Peter Berry, a harbour master with the Windsor Port Authority, looks over Ojibway Shores last month, in one of his last visits as the official caretaker of the lands.

Canada’s newest national urban park is being created at warp speed. That’s good, but it’s also complicated. If Masse’s bill pans out and the park opens in 2025 or sooner, everyone has a few months before the opening of the Gordie Howe bridge the same year and the increase in human invasion it will bring: the light pollution, the never-ending noise, the gas-guzzling traffic, the sheer number of people that will use the planned bike lanes and transit. There’s a need to educate people so they understand the natural gem they’re passing through everyday and their duty to preserve it in perpetuity.

The sheer amount of considerations, present and future, means that creating urban parks is “no small feat,” Environment Minister Guilbeault said in a message to The Narwhal. It requires “engaging with Canadians on what their park should look like,” wherever they are. But Windsor is “leading the way,” setting an example of how quickly various groups across a community can come together for the other six proposed national urban parks across the country. Because in the end, the park depends on the people.

“The most valuable lesson is that of communication and collaboration,” Guilbeault wrote. “When everyone works together, comes to the table with ideas and solutions, we can accomplish great things like this!” 

Many urban parks have been created as an escape from urban sprawl, but Ojibway National Urban Park could be “so much more” — the three words everyone who talks about the park exhales with a smile. It could connect a city that has forgotten nature back to the spirits of the species desperately trying to survive there. As Jacobs of Walpole says, “This park is Mother Nature’s medicine chest. It could heal all of us from everything we’ve created.”

Back on Ojibway shores, Duckworth has the same thought. “Reconciliation is just a word. You have to put an action behind that,” she says. “This park, it’s an action. Just watch. It’s going to be awesome.” 

Berry quietly nods, as he stands on the rocks stoically looking over Ojibway Shores. “I’m not the guy who protects it anymore. Now I get to be the tour guide and a visitor,” he says. “My job is done. I can retire thinking we accomplished something. Because, look …” He gestures at members of Caldwell, sitting on the sand, talking to each other as the water laps against them. 

“Here’s a people. Here’s the original caretakers.” 

Updated on April 20, 2023, at 9:45 a.m. PST to correct Parks Canada’s promise to create 15 new national urban parks by 2030, not 2025, in two places.

Updated on April 25, 2023 at 5:31 p.m. ET: This story was updated with additional information about how Parks Canada is mandated by the National Parks Act to reach agreements with First Nations during the process of establishing a park. 

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When dignitaries from 196 countries converge in Montreal next week to rub shoulders and hash out a new global agreement to save nature, money will be on the agenda.

Hundreds of billions of dollars more are needed each year to reverse biodiversity loss — to restore forests and grasslands, establish protected areas, build monitoring programs and transition to more sustainable agriculture.

But it’s not just a question of ramping up investment in biodiversity conservation. Governments also need to stop subsidizing its destruction.

Each year, the world spends at least $1.8 trillion “on subsidies that are driving the destruction of ecosystems and species extinction,” according to a 2022 report from Business for Nature and The B Team, coalitions of business and conservation groups focused on sustainability. That’s equivalent to two per cent of the monetary value of all the goods and services the world produces.

Canada is no exception. Through direct subsidies, tax breaks and other support federal and provincial governments incentivize companies to mine for metals and minerals, extract fossil fuels, convert grasslands to industrial agriculture and build roads and pipelines. Often subsidies bolster industrial development in habitat critical to the survival of caribou, salmon and other species at risk of extinction.

The B.C. government heavily subsidized the fossil fuel sector, including companies that drilled more than 1,500 wells in habitat critical to endangered caribou. Photo: Garth Lenz / The Narwhal

The global biodiversity framework agreement set to be finalized at COP15, the United Nations biodiversity conference, could see countries commit once again to phase out subsidies harmful to nature.

Globally, the track record so far has been dismal. Back in 2010, at a meeting in Aichi, Japan, 190 countries — including Canada — committed to phase out harmful subsidies as part of the previous global biodiversity framework agreement, known as the Aichi targets.

“Governments missed the target, and we cannot afford for history to repeat itself,” the Business for Nature and The B Team report said.

With COP15 just days away, here’s what you need to know about harmful subsidies.

First, what are subsidies?

Subsidies come in different forms. They might be government grants for oil and gas companies to clean up old wells, loans for new pipeline projects or tax breaks for new mines.

In theory, “there’s only one reason why we justify a subsidy,” Sumeet Gulati, co-director of the wildlife and conservation economics laboratory at the University of British Columbia explained. And that’s because the subsidy incentivizes something positive that might not otherwise happen — think of funding to support vaccine development that will benefit society but may not be a money maker.

But sometimes subsidies incentivize environmental harms — not benefits — that might not occur otherwise. For instance, subsidies that encourage fossil fuel production at a time when the world is scrambling to cut emissions to combat climate change.

How much do Canadian governments spend on mining and fossil fuel subsidies?

A lack of government transparency can make it difficult to get a full accounting of exactly how much public money is being spent to help industries that threaten biodiversity.

But when groups like the International Institute for Sustainable Development investigate, they find billions of dollars in government handouts for the fossil fuel sector, including companies that extract natural gas in endangered caribou habitat, for instance, or build pipelines that cross sensitive ecosystems and destroy wetlands.

The governments of B.C., Alberta, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland and Labrador handed out at least $2.5 billion in fossil fuel subsidies in the 2020/2021 fiscal year, according to a report by the International Institute for Sustainable Development.

The organization also reported at least $1.9 billion in federal fossil fuel handouts in 2020. But that number could be much higher, according to the non-profit group Environmental Defence. In its own report, the environmental organization found Canada announced or issued nearly $18 billion in subsidies to the oil and gas sector in 2020, including more than $3 billion in direct subsidies and more than $13 billion in financing. Subsidies were lower in 2021, but still significant at $8.6 billion, according to a subsequent report from Environmental Defence.

The B.C. and federal governments have subsidized the contentious Coastal GasLink pipeline as well as the LNG Canada liquefied natural gas export facility it will feed. Photo: Matt Simmons / The Narwhal

Coastal GasLink construction involved logging in habitat critical to endangered caribou. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

The federal government is also planning significant investments to encourage mining for certain minerals as it finalizes Canada’s critical mineral strategy. Jessica Dempsey, a University of British Columbia geographer who studies the political and economic systems that lead to biodiversity loss, worries that could have consequences for biodiversity.

The 2022 federal budget outlines several measures aimed at making new mining projects less risky for companies, including up to $1.5 billion over seven years for new infrastructure and a 30 per cent critical mineral exploration tax credit.

“What I want to see is commitment from governments to actually disclosing and really working through what those subsidies are, because my sense is that many governments don’t even know because they’re scattered in different ministries and in obscure tax codes,” Dempsey said in an interview.

An independent review of subsidies for mining, forestry and other resource sectors, she said, is “long overdue.”

The Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society has similarly called on Ottawa to undertake a “whole of government review” next year to “identify expenditures, which include subsidies and other fiscal policies that undermine the federal government’s nature commitments,” Sandra Schwartz, the executive director of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society told The Narwhal.

By 2024, CPAWS and other groups, want to see the government remove or repurpose that spending to better “align and frankly, in some cases even to incent progress toward our country’s nature and climate commitments,” she said.

How do subsidies cause harm to biodiversity?

Government subsidies can allow projects to proceed when they otherwise wouldn’t be economically feasible. 

Decades ago, the federal and B.C. governments invested several billion dollars in road and port infrastructure to foster a coal mining industry in the province’s northeast. The governments later offered tax breaks for three mines and their investors, according to a 2020 Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives report Dempsey co-authored.

Despite the public investment, jobs, production and tax revenue fell well short of initial forecasts, the report found. Caribou populations, meanwhile, declined.

Central mountain caribou are listed as threatened under the federal Species at Risk Act. But in 2014, the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada found they were in worse shape than previously thought and recommended their status be changed to endangered. Habitat loss from coal mining and oil and gas were listed among the key threats to the populations.

Caribou herds have experienced dramatic declines in B.C.’s Peace River region, where First Nations are leading a costly maternity penning effort to bring one herd back from the brink. Photo: Ryan Dickie / The Narwhal

“Taxpayers have subsidized habitat degradation in the northeastern region of B.C. and, therefore, caribou’s path to extinction,” the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives report said.

At the same time, the B.C. government heavily subsidized oil and gas development in the region. Companies operating more than one-half the oil and gas wells in critical caribou habitat in northeast B.C. have received subsidies in recent years, according to University of British Columbia research.

“In light of these findings, we conclude that public funds are subsidizing caribou extinction,” the authors found.

Dempsey is also concerned about the potential consequences of Canada’s hoped-for critical minerals rush.

“It is certain that mines for critical minerals will be located in endangered species habitat in Canada, and mining is identified as a driver of endangerment for many species in Canada,” Dempsey and Rosemary Collard, an associate professor of geography at Simon Fraser University, wrote in a letter to Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault.

“The critical minerals strategy does not explain how the [environmental assessment] process — which accepts unproven mitigation measures and has overseen decades of continued if not escalating wildlife declines — will protect these endangered species from further declines caused by critical mineral extraction boom in their habitat,” the letter said.

What steps are Canadian governments taking to address harmful subsidies?

Since 2009, Canada has promised repeatedly to phase out harmful subsidies. First, the federal government, along with other G20 countries, agreed to eliminate “inefficient” — a term still largely undefined — fossil fuel subsidies. Then in 2010, it agreed to look more broadly at subsidies that harm biodiversity as part of the Aichi targets.

For years, little progress was made. More recently, the federal government has ramped up its commitments. It has promised, for instance, to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies by 2023, two years earlier than previously planned.

The government also committed to cut public financing for international fossil fuel projects by the end of 2022 and to eventually eliminate public financing for the sector at home.

Earlier this year, a parliamentary committee studied how Canada plans to meet its commitments, as well as the criteria for determining whether a subsidy is “inefficient.”

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau government has committed to phasing out fossil fuel subsidies by 2023, two years earlier than planned. At the same time its promising new investments to encourage mining for critical minerals, which some experts worry could have consequences for biodiversity. Photo: Adam Scotti / Prime Minister’s Office

A report outlining the committee’s findings has not yet been published, but NDP environment critic Laurel Collins worries the government isn’t following through on its commitment.

Collins, the MP for Victoria and a member of the parliamentary committee, said a number of expert witnesses noted the federal government continues to hand out a “mind boggling” level of subsidies to oil and gas companies.

In B.C., the provincial government announced changes to its oil and gas royalty system in the wake of an expert assessment last year that described the system as “broken.”

The province eliminated a significant credit for digging deep wells that companies could use to reduce royalty payments to the government. For now, the change only applies to new wells. Several billion dollars in outstanding credits for existing wells remain available for companies to use to reduce royalty payments over the next few years.

In Canada, “I wouldn’t want to make the claim that there has been no progress,” Schwartz said. “Have they been doing it quite as quickly as perhaps we want? The answer to that is no.” 

Meeting Canada’s ambitious conservation targets will require removing “systemic barriers to expanding the protected area system,” she said. “And we know that one of the major systemic barriers to that is some of the incoherent policies and investments.”

What does the draft global biodiversity framework say about subsidies?

Target 19 of the draft global biodiversity framework focuses on financing for restoring and conserving nature.

As negotiations continue, countries are considering commitments that would ramp up financing for biodiversity to US $700 billion, by cutting out $500 billion in harmful subsidies and investing $200 billion in conservation each year.

Canada’s federal Liberal government has made record investments in conservation, dedicating several billion dollars over five years in 2021.  

The government supports increasing resources for biodiversity conservation, including by addressing harmful subsidies and funding for conservation both domestically and internationally, Kaitlin Power, press secretary for Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault, said in a statement.

She pointed out that Canada recently endorsed the United Kingdom, Ecuador and Gabon-led 10-Point Plan for Financing Biodiversity and encourages other countries to follow suit.  

“It emphasizes the need for countries to increase funding for nature and for dedicating a portion of climate finance for biodiversity,” Power added.

The plan also commits countries to “review national subsidies and to redirect or eliminate all subsidies and incentives harmful to biodiversity, and for nature-positive incentives to be scaled up as soon as possible.”

There will be a day devoted to finance and biodiversity among the various side events at COP15. During a plenary hosted by the World Bank, finance ministers are expected to discuss harmful subsidies and other issues.

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 article was originally published on Capital Daily.

Kelly Jeffrey loves being out on the West Coast Trail when the weather turns stormy: the big waves crashing against the rocks, the sound of the rain falling through the trees, the wind whipping through the coastal vistas.

When a thunderstorm rolled through in early August — a rarity on the West Coast — Jeffrey watched in awe from his vantage point at the Tsuquadra guardian cabin as dark clouds grew and flashes of lightning lit up the roiling ocean. Standing there, he could feel the rumble of the thunder build up in the ground and through his body. 

It’s amazing, he said, to witness the beautiful power of mother nature.

The day before the storm, Jeffrey had been busy building new boardwalks in the area. The boardwalks are simple — long pieces of wood raised up on logs, and embellished with a grippy crosshatch pattern chainsawed onto the flat surface — but they do their job well to keep hikers out of the mud. This year in particular, there has been a lot of rain and, therefore, a lot of mud. 

Jeffrey is used to wet conditions. As one of the Ditidaht First Nation’s West Coast Trail Guardians, Jeffrey spends seven months of the year working out on the trail in every kind of weather, hauling 60 pounds of gear to cut back encroaching undergrowth, maintain the weathered structures, and remove fallen trees from the paths. 

“Most people’s backpacks are less than what my chainsaw weighs,” he laughs. 

The Ditidaht guardians stay at the Tsuquadra guardian cabin while working on the trail. Photo: Kelly Jeffrey

The West Coast Trail runs along a rugged 75-kilometre stretch of coastline between Port Renfrew and Bamfield on the southwest corner of Vancouver Island. It’s one of the world’s most iconic treks, among the likes of Peru’s Inca Trail or Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro, attracting upwards of 7,000 hikers and adventure-seekers from around the world each year. 

Throughout the trail’s history, it has been well used by shipwreck survivors, to adventure seekers, to the very peoples who have inhabited this land since time immemorial. Because while the trail is now part of Pacific Rim National Park, it is first and foremost on the territories of the Pacheedaht, Ditidaht, and Huu-ay-aht First Nations. 

The guardians — four or five from each nation — are there to help maintain the trail, but more than that, they’re there to protect and share their culture and the history of the land.

As Jeffrey tells me about the work that he’s completed recently — boardwalk building and undergrowth brushing — he intersperses it with stories of the land. At Tsuquadra, where his guardian cabin sits, there are still some remnants of the post and beam homes that were built along the coast. He talks about the food that the Ditidaht people ate and where they would often hunt, fish, and gather seafood. They would make canoes — č̓apacs in the diitiidʔaaʔtx̣ language — out of the giant cedars, and paddle along the shorelines. 

The view from the guardian cabin at Tsuquadra. The domed structure on the left is a comfort cabin rented out by hikers. Photo: Kelly Jeffrey

In the ’70s, the land was incorporated by Parks Canada into Pacific Rim National Park without consultation — effectively removing the nations, their history, and culture from the government’s narrative of the trail. As the years went on, this injustice became more apparent. The volume of hikers increased and so did the problems. 

Twenty-seven years ago, the situation came to a head. That’s when the guardians started on the trail. 

West Coast Trail: the hike of a lifetime

The 75-kilometre, well-travelled trail between Port Renfrew and Bamfield passes through lush forested valleys, sandy beaches bordered by towering sea stacks, coastal boulder fields, and rocky shelves pockmarked by thousands of tidepools. It is a place where adventure-seekers test their endurance on series of towering ladders and while trudging through knee-deep mud or soft, stamina-sucking sand. 

The number of hikers that can step onto the trail each day has been capped at 70 to reduce overcrowding and wear on the trail — but even still, the amount of maintenance that’s required of guardians like Jeffrey is astounding. 

Storms knock over trees, damage structures, and flood creeks. Thousands of footsteps and seemingly infinite raindrops turn dirt trails into deep, slippery mud pits and cause boardwalks to collapse and ladder rungs to fail.

All this adds up to make a long journey a dangerous one. About one in every 75 hikers is evacuated off the trail because of injury or illness. 

My cousin navigates the deep mud in an area where the boardwalk has long since ceased to function as a boardwalk. Photo: Jolene Rudisuela / Capital Daily

In some places, hikers have to watch out for rotten boardwalks and nails. Photo: Jolene Rudisuela / Capital Daily

The trail’s beginning, however — a century ago when the conditions were much worse — was as a lifesaving route.

Rusting ship parts still lie on beaches, evidence of the dozens of ships that sank along the coast from the late 1800s to 1900s. At the north end of the so-called Graveyard of the Pacific, unpredictable weather conditions, fog, and dangerous shorelines caused ships to meet their end, forcing thousands to traverse the section of Island coast to find help. 

The federal government installed a telegraph line in the 1890s to help with communication along the coast in the hopes of saving mariners’ lives. After the Valencia sank in 1906, leading to the deaths of more than 125 people, public outcry led to the government building a new lighthouse and the life-saving trail itself. 

As the years went by and technology reduced the threat of this coastline to ocean vessels, the trail became less about escaping the wilderness for the safety of the city, and more about escaping the city for the wilderness. In 1973, the trail became a part of the newly established Pacific Rim National Park. 

This coast has always been a place that brings things together: shipwreck survivors found the help they needed; hikers bond with like-minded trekkers from around the world; West Coast Trailers unplug and connect with their beautiful surroundings. This section of land connected First Nations all along the coast. And now it connects hikers with the story of the land on which they walk.  

A section of trail had recently been brushed by Ditidaht guardians near Dare Beach, around kilometre 40. Photo: Jolene Rudisuela / Capital Daily

The start of the West Coast Trail guardians

The first time Carl Edgar Jr. saw a hiker on the trail was in June of 1968. 

He was a teenager at the time, living at Whyac at the mouth of Nitinaht Narrows in the centre of the trail, when a man he didn’t know appeared out of the trees. 

“He was across the Narrows, walking on the beach,” Edgar recalls. “One of the other kids said, ‘There’s somebody over there, and he’s got something on his back.’ ”

They had never seen a backpack like that before. 

Edgar isn’t a guardian, but he has lived and worked out on the Narrows for the majority of his life. That wouldn’t be the last hiker he saw; in fact, he built a successful family business centred around the trail. 

Carl Edgar fishes with his grandson. Photo: submitted by Carl Edgar

The owner of the famed floating Crab Shack, Edgar and his family have served locally caught crab and fish to hikers passing through since 1999. In recent years, he’s added a few cabins up the hill from the restaurant for hikers to rent out. Through Nitinat Wilderness Charters, Edgar also gives rides across the Narrows and in and out from the third entrance at Nitinaht Lake. Now that his kids are all grown, he and his wife have also opened their home as a bed and breakfast.

It all started in the early ’70s when Edgar would go out onto the Narrows to fish in his dugout canoe with a 20 horsepower Johnson outboard motor attached to the back. As hikers appeared out of the trees, he would give them a ride across the deep, tidal waters to the other side. He’d take no more than two people across at a time — “because everybody thought my canoe was tippy” — and charge them a dollar each for the ride. 

Carl Edgar, his wife, Shelley, and his family have been serving hikers fresh fish and crab at the Crab Shack for 23 years. Carl also brings hikers back and forth across the Nitinaht Narrows from the floating platform. Photo: Jolene Rudisuela / Capital Daily

In 1975, Parks Canada began subsidizing him, paying $1,500 each month to cover his expenses and keep costs down for hikers. He eventually graduated to a fiberglass boat, then later an old herring skiff that he modified so hikers could step onto it safely.

“At first it was really rough because there was no regulations and no structure in place. I would just show up and the hikers would say that they’re waiting for a ferry that has no schedule,” he said. 

But as hikers began picking up, the lack of regulations became more and more apparent. He would see 100 to 140 people every day at the Narrows, and the volume of hikers began to cause problems with overcrowding at the campsites. 

That’s also when the looting started. The hikers would take things from houses in Nitinaht and the nearby villages of Clo-oose and Cheewhat. “People never used to lock their doors; they trusted everybody,” Edgar said. “And then the hikers started coming out and they thought they’re all abandoned, so they used to help themselves and take things.”

A sign notifying hikers that they are now entering Ditidaht lands. Photo: Jolene Rudisuela / Capital Daily

Ancient petroglyphs scratched on the rocks were vandalized with dirty pictures and words. Sacred sites were desecrated.  

“They even started taking bones from the burial caves and different artifacts that our people used to bury our people with,” Edgar said. “It troubled me and disturbed me.”

Edgar saw the behaviour firsthand working directly with the hikers. But he was one of the few who knew the extent of the problem. 

Edgar, who was on the Ditidaht band council at the time, approached the chiefs and councils of the Pacheedaht, Ditidaht, and Huu-ay-aht First Nations to tell them his concerns and convince them that something needed to be done to protect and manage the land. 

“It took two years to convince them because at that time, that’s when they started learning about what’s happening out there, because they were unaware that there was no registration and no fees paid,” he said. “There was just a wide open free-for-all.”

Each nation agreed to take part, and Quu’as (meaning “real people” in the Ditidaht language) West Coast Trail Group was formed in 1995. Modelled after the Haida Gwaii Watchmen program — the first program of its kind in Canada — the guardians from the three nations would work with Parks Canada to protect and maintain the land, while providing cultural interpretation to visitors. 

“It’s a partnership; it’s a collaboration,” said Tammy Dorward, First Nations program manager at Pacific Rim National Park Reserve and a member of the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation. “It’s supporting Parks Canada and supporting Indigenous Peoples, and also ensuring that their rights and these economic opportunities are available to them to be able to work in their homelands and to share their homelands with visitors.”

Edgar is glad that there is a focus on cultural interpretation on the trail. And with the increase in knowledge, Edgar says some of the stolen artifacts and bones have been returned by the families of some of the first hikers to the Ditidaht First Nation. 

But in some ways, the damage has already been done. After years of desecration by hikers, the burial caves have been barricaded with steel and cable. No one can enter anymore. 

“We don’t tell the public where any of these sacred sites are. Lots of them walk right over the burial caves and they don’t even know they’re there,” Edgar said. 

“It’s better that way.”

‘Historical trespass’

The guardian program did not have a seamless start: members of the nations were wary of working with Parks Canada. The relationship between the government entity and the nations had not been symbiotic — since the early 1900s when the lifesaving trail was created, to the incorporation of Pacheedaht, Ditidaht, and Huu-ay-aht land into the national park in the ’70s, the federal government had always just taken from the nations. 

For decades, the nations received no economic benefit from the increase in hikers — all permit fees went to the federal government. The national park, put in place without consultation, also removed the First Nations’ timber rights. 

“This is a historical trespass dating back to the creation of the lifesaving trail,” Robert Botterell told the Nanaimo Daily News in 1998 as the nation waited to negotiate a settlement deal for the use of Huu-ay-aht territory for the park. At that time, the Ditidaht First Nation had already successfully negotiated its own settlement for the use of the land and loss of logging rights.

The guardian program put the nations back into the equation in a tangible way, creating jobs and opportunities — but that didn’t remove decades of hurt. It took some convincing to get people to apply for the guardian positions.

“A lot of our people were still angry with what happened to us and how we were treated by the government organization,” said Wally Samuel Sr., who managed the Quu’as West Coast Trail Society for 10 years starting in 1997. “I let them know, you know, we’re here to work together.” 

Likewise, not all Parks Canada staff — who continue to have a role in maintaining the trail today — took kindly to the new guardians on the trail.

“At first there was some animosity between the wardens and our guardians because the wardens thought we were trying to take over their jobs,” Edgar said. “We had to convince them that we just wanted to work together and not take away their responsibilities.”

For the first decade of the program, guardians from each nation received training together, and worked across the entire trail, sharing the common responsibility of taking care of the territories and respecting each other’s cultural heritage.

Samuel, who is from the Ahousaht First Nation, played an integral role in shaping the guardian program, working with the hires, liaising with Parks Canada, and setting up training sessions for the guardians on boating, first aid, and safety. Each guardian was trained in communication in order to share their stories and their connection to the land with the visitors. He also worked on marketing the West Coast Trail, including promoting the Indigenous-owned businesses in the area like the Crab Shack and the Pacheedaht Campground. 

In 2007, Quu’as dissolved, and the Pacheedaht, Ditidaht and Huu-ay-aht First Nations each began to hire and manage their own crew of guardians separately to work in their own 25-kilometre sections. Each nation negotiates their own deal with Parks Canada and provides their own training. All 12 or 13 guardians only meet a couple times a year for a pre- and post-season meeting. 

While this shift may have started out as divisive and political, Edgar doesn’t see it as such anymore. He says the work is divided more equally this way.  

“It’s not political,” he said. “This is business.”

The land

When reached on the phone at his home at the head of Nitinaht Lake in June, Jeffrey had just returned from four days out on the trail. It had been a wet spring, so the underbrush was growing thick and fast. He and his crewmate had been working to beat back the salal and salmon berry bushes that were creeping into the forested trail. At the rate things were growing, he expected to have to return to these sections and do another round of brushing in a few months. 

Jeffrey works four days on, three days off with one other guardian from the Ditidaht Nation. On Sundays, he’ll take a boat out across Nitinaht Lake, then hike out to the small one-room wooden cabin where he stays while out on the trail. It has a couple of bunks and a propane stove, but it’s quite comfortable out there, he says. 

He enjoys the physical work, but for him, the biggest joy of the job is simply being out on the land and talking with the hikers who pass by. He introduces himself, shares where he’s from, and tells them about his culture, the history of the trail, and the peoples who lived on the land long before the first settlers arrived. 

“I feel more alive being out there,” Jeffrey said. “I feel more of a connection to my people and myself on the land than I do when I’m here up at the village. It’s where my mother, my grandparents lived. It’s a part of my history and my culture. It’s a part of my being.”

As one of the Ditidaht First Nation’s West Coast Trail Guardians, Jeffrey is out on the trail seven months of the year. Photo: submitted by Kelly Jeffrey

Jeffrey knows practically every inch of the 25-kilometre section of trail in which he works. He regularly walks upwards of 20 kilometres in a day — carrying more weight than the average hiker. Sometimes at the end of the day, he’ll add on another few kilometres to hike out to one of the campsites and sit with the backpackers

“I love it all out there,” he said. “Being on different parts of different beaches, thinking of the different fishing areas and what [my ancestors] would do.”

This is an area that holds a lot of meaning to him. His mother grew up in Clo-oose, a small Ditidaht village that sat just south of the mouth of the Nitinaht Narrows. That’s where Edgar lived for five years of his youth as well. He remembers eight post-and-beam houses tucked into the trees, one of which he lived in with his five brothers and four sisters. 

Growing up, they lived freely on the land. At five years old, Edgar and the other children would hike the nine kilometres southeast to Carmanah Point where they would explore and gather shellfish and urchins from the tide pools. 

“We still say today, ‘When the tide is out, our table is set,’ ” he said. “That’s what we lived on as little kids.” 

Along with fishing and hunting, the coastal nations were also whalers, Jeffrey said. The hunters would harpoon the whale, and use sealskin floats to slow it down and weaken it as it swam. Once the whale was killed, one man would jump into the water to sew the whale’s mouth shut to prevent it from sinking as they towed it to shore. 

“After it was done, they would bring it to shore and get it ready and they would celebrate, have a big celebration — a big feast. The hereditary chief would get the first piece,” Jeffrey said. 

There hasn’t been a whale hunt on this coast in decades, but the legacy still lives on. 

A few weeks ago, Jeffrey brought his 17-year-old and 10-year-old sons with him out onto the trail. He said it was amazing to show them the work that he does, and the land that has such meaning to their family. 

Building connections

Kevin Peters, from the Huu-ay-aht Nation, has worked as a guardian on the trail for 23 years, ever since he finished high school. I met him at the end of my own trek at the beginning of August. As I walked towards the end point at the Pacheena Bay Parks Canada office — five kilometres south of Bamfield — I was greeted by a picnic table covered in tinfoil, lemons and salmon. Soon, a truck pulled up with three men squished into the small cab. They unloaded a barbeque and set it next to the picnic table. 

The salmon is free for anyone who wanders into Pacheena Bay on Thursdays, Peters explained, as he fired up the grill. Usually they would cook the salmon the traditional way, he added, if it weren’t for the fire ban.

Soon enough the smell of cooked salmon permeated the air, and Peters started handing out plates to the growing group. “Sharing is caring,” he said. 

Kevin Peters (left) and Joseph Jules both work as guardians with the Huu-ay-aht First Nation. Photo: Jolene Rudisuela / Capital Daily

As we ate, a woman at the table cut up a devil’s club stalk with a saw, sanding the light wood and poking a hole through the soft core. The beads will protect us from evil spirits, she told us, adding the plant is highly medicinal and can be turned into tea. 

This is the first year the guardians have done these salmon cook outs; Peters loves sharing the fish with the people who find themselves at Pacheena Bay. He hopes they’ll do it again next year. 

Salmon waiting to be eaten in front of devil’s club, waiting to be carved into beads. Photo: Jolene Rudisuela / Capital Daily

Dorward, with Parks Canada, says that many hikers who finish the trail specifically comment on how much the experience of speaking with a guardian meant to them.

“They always talk about that as being the most memorable part of the trip and the most profound, the most impactful,” she said. “It’s that connection that the guardians bring, that experience that they bring in sharing their traditional territory and their cultures with visitors from around the world.”

Peters has seen the trail change over the years as it has become worn down and new structures have been built. He’s become quite handy with a chainsaw too. On the north side, the boardwalks that Peters has built are embellished with carved fish, whales and eagles. The structures he creates are not just utilitarian; he has infused them with part of who he is. 

Images carved into a boardwalk on the West Coast Trail. Photo: Jolene Rudisuela / Capital Daily

Injuries don’t really faze him anymore. The worst injury he has had to deal with was a hiker who broke their arm so badly that the bone was nearly poking through the skin. He was younger then — everything else seems fairly routine after that. 

He has saved hikers from drowning when routine river crossings turn potentially life-threatening after a torrential rain. A few times he has let hikers sleep on the floor of his cabin when ceaseless west coast rains make for a tough trek. He knows where the bears are likely to be at different times of year, which waterways have fish and how long it takes for a river in flood to die down.

For Peters, being out on the trail is about connecting with the land, connecting with people and helping them in his quiet way.

This year, he’s joined on the trail by a new crewmate: his neighbour, Joseph Jules, who he has known for years. Peters has taken to showing his new crewmate the ropes, and throughout the season has been bringing Jules to the hidden places he has found over his two decades working on the West Coast Trail. Some are places that have particular significance to the Huu-ay-aht Nations, others — like a hidden cave only accessible by crawling through a narrow tunnel — are just plain cool. 

Peters knows every kilometre of this third of the trail; it’s one of the places where he feels most at home. And now he has someone new to share it with all over again. 

“Alright, we’re done work,” he’ll say. “Let’s have a quick dinner then go explore some stuff.”

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.

Even when governments have good intentions — like promoting conservation — they don’t necessarily move forward with plans for Indigenous territories in a productive or helpful way, according to Kelly Brown, director of the Haíɫzaqv (Heiltsuk) Integrated Resource Management Department. 

“A lot of work that takes place around management planning with the province or the federal government — they get all the work done, and then they come to us,” Brown told The Narwhal. 

“They don’t realize that, in the community here, we’re already working towards putting our own plans together.”

Brown is a co-author of a recent academic paper that demonstrates how a resurgence in Indigenous governance can lead to more effective conservation.

The paper, “Supporting resurgent Indigenous-led governance: A nascent mechanism for just and effective conservation,” concludes that, worldwide, “increases in conservation in some of the most globally significant areas of conservation interest will increasingly not only be unjust, but also impossible without Indigenous consent and leadership.”

‘Serengeti of the north’: the Kaska Dena’s visionary plan to protect a huge swath of B.C. wilderness

Brown pointed out that conservation techniques are often prescribed from offices in Ottawa, far removed from places where research and direct experience with the landscape are unfolding.

In one instance, Brown said he found inaccurate government data about areas of high and low grizzly bear populations that contradicted the findings of Haíɫzaqv research, which includes detailed bear monitoring. The research gives the Haíɫzaqv valuable insight into local grizzly populations. One study, for example, used grizzly hair samples to find a lower salmon run coincided with higher population levels of cortisol, the chemical associated with stress.

Indigenous people have the right to consultation when it comes to natural resource extraction but also when it comes to natural resource conservation and land use plans, Brown noted. 

It’s time for Indigenous communities to be given the power and authority to lead conservation on their own lands, which they live upon and know well, he said. 

Members of the Coastal Guardian Watchmen inspect their crab traps near Bella Bella, B.C. Photo: Louise Whitehouse / The Narwhal

Indigenous-led conservation a social, ecological and economic win

Empowering Indigenous communities to lead conservation efforts comes with other significant benefits beyond respecting Indigenous rights and confronting the legacy of settler colonialism, found the paper, co-authored by Kyle Artelle, Melanie Zurba, Jonaki Bhattacharyya, Diana E.Chan, Jess Housty and Faisal Moola.

For example, Indigenous Guardians programs on British Columbia’s coast have delivered a social return on investment in ranges between 10:1 and 20:1, according to one study (which measured social, economic, cultural, and economic value). 

The authors cite another study that found biodiversity within Indigenous-managed areas is often higher than, or at least equal to, biodiversity in colonial or state-run parks at the provincial or federal level in Canada. 

Meet the Kaska land guardians

The recent creation of new protected areas within Indigenous territories and alongside Indigenous governments has led to sizeable conservation gains, the authors point out. 

The paper points to the newly created 14,250 square kilometre Edéhzhíe Dehcho Indigenous Protected Area in the Northwest Territories and the 14,000 square kilometre Thaidene Nëné National Park Reserve along the Great Slave Lake, established in partnership by the Łutsël K’e Dene First Nation, the Northwest Territories government, Parks Canada, Northwest Territory Métis Nation and other Indigenous groups.

The paper also notes a recent proposal among the federal government, Nunavut and the Qikiqtani Inuit Association to create Tallurutiup Imanga, which, at 109,000 square kilometres, is set to become the largest protected area in Canada.

Moving beyond ‘fortress conservation’

Lead author Kyle Artelle chuckled when he said the paper’s conclusions will not “blow folks’ minds” who are in Indigenous governance and communities, or even surprise people working in conservation who take part in these kinds of conversations.

“A lot of folks really get this, it seems obvious,” said Artelle, a biologist and adjunct professor with the geography department at the University of Victoria. “But when you leave the bubble, into some mainstream conservation groups, for example, there’s still what they call ‘fortress conservation.’ ”

Artelle said the idea of fortress conservation means aiming to conserve as many hectares as possible — and without any humans

“Some of the original national parks were very colonial. Banff has a horrible history of forcing folks out,” he said. “A lot of the original parks had this mentality that to protect nature you have to get rid of people … in a country where none of these ecosystems have existed since the last ice age without people, or longer.”

Bow River, Banff National Park. Photo: Janusz Sliwinski / Flickr

Conservation failures come with high costs

Other examples, such as weakened salmon populations, show even when governments do implement some restrictions with the goal of conservation, it doesn’t always lead to effective practices.

This year, for example, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) implemented rolling closures of commercial and recreational fisheries. But many First Nations said the closures weren’t enough. 

Some First Nations, including the Haíɫzaqv, decided against fishing, even though recreational fishing was still permitted by DFO.

Many First Nations said the government’s approach to dwindling stocks infringed on their constitutional rights of first access to fish and endangered already vulnerable salmon.

Life after Chinook: a West Coast fishing community looks to reinvent itself

The Haíɫzaqv wanted to take a “strong stance” and shut down certain areas to all types of fishing, including recreational fishing, Brown said. In 2015, the Haíɫzaqv famously occupied a DFO field office and pushed the commercial herring fishery out of their territory following a devastating population collapse. They continue to assert control over herring management, and worked with the DFO to suspend the commercial fishery in 2018.

Going forward, the Haíɫzaqv will enforce their own laws “rather than asking permission,” Brown said, recalling the Haíɫzaqv term Káxḷáya Ǧviḷás: “the ones who uphold the laws of our ancestors.”

While the DFO is relying more on traditional knowledge, change is incremental, Brown noted.

“Both the provincial and the federal government know that we aren’t going to sit back. We say something — we’re actually going to do it,” he said. 

“We don’t like to threaten that way, but sometimes we need to get to that point.”

Using tools ‘our ancestors never would have imagined’

Jess Housty, another Haíɫzaqv co-author, said writing an academic-style paper was a new way to share the ancestral knowledge she’s inherited, even though she’s not an academic.

Jess Housty, acting executive director of Qqs Projects Society on a Guardian Watchmen vessel in Heiltsuk territory. Photo: Louise Whitehouse / The Narwhal

“Transmission of that ancestral knowledge is important work and sometimes we’re called to use tools our ancestors never would have imagined to do it,” she said in an interview.

Housty sees value in putting out these ideas in a new way.

“The crises we collectively face due to colonialism, capitalism, and climate change are too urgent for us to work in silos and I think this paper represents an opportunity to break our silos down.” Artelle hopes that the paper will make its way into the hands of decision-makers who lack information about Indigenous stewardship. Including Indigenous leadership in a national conservation strategy could help the federal government reach its target to protect 17 per cent of terrestrial areas and inland water, and 10 per cent of coastal and marine areas by 2020, he said.

Groups call on B.C. to fund Indigenous monitoring of mines in traditional territories

Indigenous peoples have also recently demonstrated the government will face legal challenges if it makes major land decisions without consent, as illustrated by First Nations opposition to the Trans Mountain pipeline and the Tsilhqot’in Nation stopping Taseko Mines from operating on their territory.

Housty said if the government wants to protect the environment, handing over jurisdiction shouldn’t be complicated.

“When it comes to stewardship and thriving lands and waters, no one can do that work better in Haíɫzaqv territory than the Haíɫzaqv people,” she said. 

“Anyone who purports to share our goal of thriving lands and waters should be asking themselves how they can support us or make space for us to do what we need to do  — not trying to do the work for us.”

Update November 28, 1:15pm pst: This article was updated to clarify the 2015 decline in herring populations led to the Haíɫzaqv occupying a DFO field office. The Haíɫzaqv worked with the DFO to suspend the herring commercial fishery in 2018.

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.

Dinners in Roberta Olson’s restaurant begin with a taste of k’aaw.

The dried herring roe on kelp is a traditional food for the Haida people, an Indigenous nation that has called Canada’s Haida Gwaii (Islands of the People) archipelago home for at least 12,000 years. As the roe crunches between your molars, the flavour and sensations combine in a wholly unfamiliar way; imagine chewing pop rocks that taste like the sea.

The restaurant, known as Keenawaii’s Kitchen (in reference to Olson’s Haida name), is run out of the living room of her home, its furniture rearranged to accommodate groups of 20 or so hungry patrons. Surrounded by traditional Haida art, facing windows that boast nearly 180-degree views of the Hecate Strait from the town of Skidegate, diners feast on a hearty chowder made from halibut, along with bites of fresh and dried salmon, clams, and herring. For dessert, wild berry pie is accompanied by nettle tea.

Once upon a time, any of the dishes on Olson’s menu could have been made using only animals and plants harvested from Haida Gwaii and from the seas surrounding it. Now, the k’aaw she serves to provide patrons a taste of traditional Haida cuisine have to be imported from Bella Bella, a town some 280 kilometres (174 miles) away on the Canadian mainland.

The Haida have a saying: G̱andlaay iinang ad sG̱uuluu G̱ihl — the water is bubbling with herring. But it’s become a linguistic relic from a different time.

The kelp forests that once provided a place for herring to deposit their eggs have all but disappeared.

Roberta Olson serves traditional Haida dishes in her restaurant, Keenawaii’s Kitchen, but increasingly, she and her suppliers are having to venture beyond the bays of Haida Gwaii to source ingredients. Photo: Roberta Olson

Historically, sea urchins coexisted with kelp, which provided shelter and sustenance for the urchins and scores of other creatures. But the local extirpation of sea otters has allowed urchins to become overpopulated, wreaking havoc on the ecosystem. Photo: Ryan Miller

Throughout the archipelago, what was once a lush underwater ecosystem is now an urchin barren: spiky balls as far as the eye can see.

Historically, sea urchins coexisted with the kelp, which provided shelter and sustenance for the urchins and dozens of other creatures, including sea otters, abalone, herring, starfish, rockfish, salmon, and more. Sea lions followed the herring, and orcas followed the salmon.

But the fur trade of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries decimated wild sea otter (Enhydra lutris) populations, and with no otters around to eat them, sea urchin populations exploded. The invertebrates gobbled up everything in sight, clearing the area of the kelp forests on which the entire ecosystem hinged.

Two species of canopy kelp that have especially benefited from urchin removal include bull kelp and giant kelp, and many species of understory (shorter) kelp are benefitting as well. Photo: Ryan Miller

Conventional wisdom holds that sea otter recovery would help to correct the imbalance, allowing the ecosystem to return to its original state — not unlike the stories told about the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone. And that could set the stage for the return of herring, and abalone, and other foods the Haida have relied on for thousands of years.

Thanks to modern protections and conservation efforts, otter populations along the British Columbia mainland and Vancouver Island have begun to recover. While there are no plans to reintroduce otters to the archipelago, with ongoing protection, it seems only a matter of time until they find their way back on their own. Locals say they’ve already seen a few lone individuals floating around the islands.

The prospect of otters returning to Haida Gwaii has some on edge, though. After all, the voracious mammals and fishermen here rely on many of the same food resources, including abalone and the overpopulated urchins.

Urchin barrens like this one, which are devoid of much of the biodiversity for which kelp forests are known, have become commonplace around Haida Gwaii since the local extirpation of sea otters. Photo: Lynn Lee

Sea otters are voracious predators that compete for many of the same food resources that local Haida fishermen target and some people in the local community are anxious about their return. Photo: Matthew Maran

Rather than wait to see what happens when sea otters return, scientists and officials from the Haida Nation, Parks Canada, and Fisheries and Oceans Canada, together with researchers from academic institutions and non-profit organizations as well as representatives from the commercial fishing sector, are now working within the Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve, Marine Conservation Area Reserve, and Haida Heritage Site.

As equal co-managers of Gwaii Haanas (Islands of Beauty), which are part of the larger archipelago, it’s a remarkable example of cooperation, especially considering that the Haida Nation and the Canadian government have never completed a formal treaty.

Together, the researchers are studying the role played by each member of this coastal community — urchins, abalone, kelp, and so on — in order to create a mathematical model for the entire ecosystem. By doing so, they will be better able to anticipate and make policy decisions around what the eventual recovery of otters might mean — for plants, animals, and people alike.

This information will be critical, says Florida State University biologist Dan Okamoto, a scientific collaborator on the study, particularly when the interests of one set of stakeholders, like tour operators who stand to benefit from the eventual return of the charismatic otters, come into conflict with those of another, like commercial urchin fishermen.

Haida culture considers human communities a part of a complete ecosystem, rather than separate from or superimposed onto the natural world. That’s why their traditions are inextricably bound to this place, to the wildlife communities that call it home, and to the rapidly disappearing food resources the ecosystem provides. For the Haida, kelp forest recovery isn’t just about biodiversity conservation. It is also about cultural conservation, about Chiix̱uu Tll iinasdll (nurturing seafood to grow).

Map: James Davidson

If there is to be a future for the Haida Gwaii archipelago, one with a sustainable food harvest as well as a healthy sea otter population, it will require people to be actively involved in the management of the land- and sea-scape, as the Haida have been for thousands of years, says biologist Dan McNeill.

On a cool autumn morning last year, McNeill, scuba tanks on his back and hammer in hand, slipped into the cold water that flows past G̱aysiigas Gwaay (Murchison Island), one of approximately two hundred islands that comprise Haida Gwaii.

McNeill, whose Haida name is Gwiisihlga, is a shellfish specialist for Haida Fisheries and one of several scientists tasked with gathering the data that will feed into the kelp ecosystem model. On this particular day, the task was relatively simple.

Dipping beneath the surface, he swam a couple dozen feet toward the bottom, where multicoloured urchins blanketed the seafloor. Once there, he began harvesting the urchins that seemed likely to contain large enough chii, the edible gonads referred to by the Japanese name uni, to be worth hauling back to shore. The truth is, most of the urchins McNeill saw on that day weren’t worth the trouble.

Ben Penna, a Haida Fisheries Program science diver, cracks an urchin. The Haida Nation, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Parks Canada, commercial urchin fishers and many partners are working to restore kelp forests by removing at least 75 per cent of the sea urchins along three kilometres of the Gaysiigas Gwaay (Murchison Island) shoreline. Photo: Ryan Miller

“When you go down into the barrens,” says marine ecologist Lynn Lee, who is technical lead for the kelp forest restoration study, “only [those] in the first few meters are any good for the market — right against the kelp line in the shallows.” This is because urchins tend to avoid the shallowest areas, where breaking waves would thrash them about, and that leaves only a narrow strip of kelp to grow unencumbered.

After collecting a small haul, McNeill and the rest of the team he supervises began systematically dispatching the unmarketable urchins with a hammer, leaving their shattered corpses behind to serve as food for fish and other invertebrates, their nutrients reclaimed by the ecosystem.

They would go on to kill hundreds of the spiky invertebrates that day. “I think well over a half million urchins have been removed from the research site now,” McNeill says. “And there’s easily another hundred thousand [remaining].”

What might have looked like a malicious act was, in fact, the team’s effort to make up for the absence of otters here, albeit on a relatively small, experimental scale.

“We don’t have sea otters in Gwaii Haanas right now,” says Lee. “[But] what if we could mimic the effects of sea otters eating urchins? If we decrease the urchin population to the same degree that otters would, then we expect that the kelp spores will survive, and a kelp forest will start to grow.”

And that could, in turn, bolster the local population of endangered northern (or pinto) abalone (Haliotis kamtschatkana) and other species that rely on kelp forest habitats to survive. In other words, if McNeill and his team can make an otter-sized dent in the urchin population, the ecosystem could perhaps begin to right itself.

Guuding.ngaay (red urchin roe) is a traditional food of the Haida people. During the urchin-removal project, researchers distributed roe to communities on Haida Gwaii a number of times. Photo: C. Houston

K’aaw (herring roe) is an important food for Haida people and many Indigenous communities along British Columbia’s north and central coast. Photo: Parks Canada

Lee’s idea is based in large part on her previous research. Several years ago, as part of her PhD work at Simon Fraser University, she compared otter-free areas with sites where the predators had been reintroduced. She discovered that otter predation suppressed urchin populations enough to benefit the abalone. Even though some of the mollusks inevitably wound up down otter gullets, the indirect and long-term effects on abalone outweighed the immediate ones, thanks to the critical habitat that the predators helped to restore.

This idea is supported by the team’s recent urchin-smashing experiment.

Six months after it began, Lee, McNeill, and the rest of the team returned to re-survey the treatment area, which spans some 20 hectares along 3 kilometres of Gwaii Haanas coastline. There, they saw bull kelp (Nereocystis luetkeana) — an annual species that can grow up to 10 inches per day — already beginning to recolonize the area, hundreds of individual kelp spikes sprouting from the seafloor.

The control site, which did not get the urchin-cull treatment, was unchanged: a vast urchin barren, nary a kelp to be found.

While Lee isn’t willing to make sweeping conclusions yet — the data has not yet been fully tallied — her hunch is that fish abundance had also increased, as other ocean dwellers began to take advantage of the recovering habitat. “It was pretty amazing to see the change,” she says. “The ecosystem response has been phenomenally quick, faster than I had thought.”

On a calm summer day, three months after that follow-up survey, Okamoto, the Florida State biologist, and his graduate student Nathan Spindel are sorting urchins aboard a floating laboratory in a sheltered bay in the Bischofs, a string of islands about 20 minutes by boat from Murchison Island. Spindel places each animal, collected from the seafloor earlier that day, into its own tank, and after giving the creature time to acclimate to its new surroundings, seals the tank shut.

A boat sits on a quiet bay along the Haida Gwaii coastline. Photo: Jason G. Goldman

Small sensors inside the tanks monitor the amount of dissolved oxygen in the seawater and send the information to a laptop computer nearby. As the urchins breathe, the concentration of oxygen inside the tank drops. By monitoring the rate at which the oxygen level decreases, Spindel can get a rough estimate of the urchin’s metabolic rate, a proxy for its overall wellbeing.

While the findings haven’t been formally published yet, early results are consistent with the researchers’ expectations. Well-fed urchins collected near the kelp line in the control site have higher metabolic rates than those collected from the barrens. It’s an adaptation, Spindel says: By slowing their metabolism, urchins can survive longer in a barren, where food is scarce.

Later, Okamoto uses a special Japanese tool he picked up online designed for cracking urchins apart so that he can have a look at their reproductive organs. Large and butter-coloured, the gonads from these urchins are in prime condition — and they taste delicious. By contrast, the gonads of urchins collected from the barrens are smaller and darker.

“Long ago, our people knew how to harvest and knew how to keep balance so that the ecosystem still had all parts intact.”

— Barbara Wilson, Haida elder

Spindel thinks of urchins in a barren as a zombie army. “They can persist in a barren state for decades,” he says. They may find enough food to scrape by, but without adequate nourishment, their gonads won’t develop enough to be capable of reproduction, let alone to be worth placing atop a ball of rice and dunking into soy sauce. If the ultimate purpose of all biological life is to survive and reproduce, zombie urchins have only succeeded halfway.

Spindel will go on to subject urchins collected from the area where the cull was conducted to the same tests inside the sealed tanks. The shallow-zone urchins, living near the kelp line, were once again perfectly healthy, Lee tells me later. And those collected from deeper areas, where fresh bull kelp had begun to grow, showed signs that their condition was beginning to improve. In other words, the early evidence suggests that the animals are indeed responding to the intervention.

This means, at least in principle, that while the return of otters would likely result in a smaller urchin population, the overall community would have fewer zombies. They would have larger gonads, better for the long-term prospects of the urchin population.

Commercial urchin divers wrap up a day working to restore the kelp forest ecosystem off Haida Gwaii by collecting sea urchins and distributing their roe to local communities. Photo: C. Houston

Marine ecologist Lynn Lee displays a variety of sea urchins that currently overpopulate the seafloor around Haida Gwaii. She and her team are exploring how the return of sea otters might influence this out-of-balance ecosystem. Photo: Jason G. Goldman

Leandre Vigneault attaches a numbered tag to a northern abalone. The tag will enable researchers to identify and assess the wellbeing of this individual in response to changes in the health of the kelp forest ecosystem over time. Photo: Jason G. Goldman

This is potentially good news for creatures like abalone that also depend on intact kelp forests. While Spindel keeps his eyes on the urchin experiment, nearby Leandre Vigneault is focused on several sacks of abalone that divers collected earlier in the day from both the experimental and the control sites. He uses a small electric grinder to harmlessly carve out two spots in the outer layer of each mollusk’s shell, just large enough for a pair of tiny numbered tags. Having done this particular task several summers in a row, his speed and efficiency minimizes the stress to the animals, though “they do seem to have moods,” he says. Some are remarkably tolerant of the vibrations from the tool, while others twist their bodies around in a futile attempt to escape.

As he epoxies the tags onto each shell, the numbers are recorded in a logbook, along with the abalones’ sex, weight, and other data. Later, the mollusks will be returned to the locations where they were collected, and next summer, Okamoto will use their tags to identify the individuals he’s able to re-capture, and assess their wellbeing.

By doing this season after season, he’ll be able to determine whether the abalone in the experimental site, where the urchin population has been artificially reduced, are more likely to survive, how mobile they are, and whether they are more likely to reproduce than abalone in the control site. If so, then the results of this study would bolster Lee’s earlier findings, that by chowing down on urchins, otters can play a positive — if indirect — role in the recovery of northern abalone.

While that would be good news from a research and conservation perspective, convincing fishermen of the benefits of otters is a taller order.

“From our fishery point of view, the biggest threat to the sustainability of red sea urchin [harvest] is sea otters,” says Mike Featherstone, President of the Pacific Urchin Harvesters’ Association, which is also a partner on the kelp forest recovery project. As evidence, he points to areas where otters have begun to recover. Crab traps sit useless on Alaska docks because otters have eaten up all the crabs, he says. If otters return to Haida Gwaii, he fears the same could happen there, for urchins and abalone. “There will be no commercial fishing, and there will be no recreational fishing,” he says.

A red Irish lord hides on the seabed with quillback rockfish and copper rockfish behind in a bull kelp forest. Photo: Alex Mustard

The trouble with that complaint, many experts argue, is that these fisheries have only ever been commercially profitable because of the extirpation of sea otters nearly two centuries ago. In 2003, researchers discovered that large red sea urchins (Mesocentrotus franciscanus) in coastal British Columbia could be more than a hundred years old. This means that the modern commercial urchin fishery relies upon populations that grew as a direct result of the reduction in predation by otters.

“Since the extirpation of the sea otters, the foods that we share with them have become commercialized,” says Haida elder Barbara Wilson, whose recent Master’s thesis at Simon Fraser University focused on employing traditional teachings to develop climate change adaptation strategies on Haida Gwaii.

The fur trade may have turned the kelp forest ecosystem on its side, but the commercial fisheries that grew up in its place have continued to exploit it, taking advantage of its altered, otter-less state. That exploitation may, at one time, have appeared sustainable but what does a sustainable harvest even mean in an already-altered ecosystem?

Gwaii Haanas is place where land, sea and people are intertwined. The area is protected from the bottom of the ocean to the tops of the mountains thanks to its status as a Haida Heritage Site, National Park Reserve and National Marine Conservation Area Reserve. Photo: S. Fung

Fast forward two hundred years and even the 36-year-old McNeill has noticed the decreasing availability of traditional foods since he was a child. “There’s hardly anything left. This is not sustainable as it once was.”

Indeed, while abalone populations initially increased alongside urchin populations when otters were removed, they later crashed as a consequence of habitat loss and overharvest. And the lack of local k’aaw for Roberta Olson’s dinners owes at least as much to the impact of the herring fishery over the last few decades as it does to the much earlier slaughter of otters.

The Haida have another saying: Chiix̱was gen gaguu gataa daanaay guu ga taa iijii — when the tide is out, the table is set. But now, as Roberta Olson and others have learned, the table can no longer be set simply by wading a few meters past the beach.

To achieve biodiversity conservation alongside food cultivation goals, says Wilson, will require merging traditional Haida knowledge with modern scientific evidence. “Long ago, our people knew how to harvest and knew how to keep balance so that the ecosystem still had all parts intact.” Indeed, Haida communities found a way to coexist with otters while still harvesting enough urchins and abalone to feed pre-contact populations, which likely numbered more than 10,000 people.

That balance meant the exclusion of otters from traditional food-gathering areas. The Haida hunted the marine mammals from canoes using bows and arrows or harpoons. By keeping certain areas free of otters, more food resources became available to Haida people.

The Haida people once coexisted with sea otters, but that balance has since been thrown off. The question is whether it can be regained when otters return to Haida Gwaii. Photo: Pascal Kobeh

In Gwaii Haanas urchin barrens, kelp is scarce. As a result, urchins here tend to contain too little roe to be marketable. Photo: Lynn Lee

“There was a management regime up and down the coast by all the nations. They didn’t just get rid of them,” says Wilson referring to the otters. The ancient, pre-fur trade coastline was like a patchwork quilt. In areas kept free of otters through hunting, humans had the chance to partake of the invertebrate bounty. Other areas, further from human communities, would have been available to the otters as a refuge from hunting pressure.

“They realized that balance is important, and that’s the thing that’s missing now,” she says.

As human communities moved around, the otter-exclusion zones would have shifted accordingly, allowing each exploited area the chance to recover. It wasn’t until the Haida began to supply fur traders with otter pelts that the balance Wilson speaks of began to wobble: The hunting pressure on otters intensified, and the decreasing Haida population began shifting from small, temporary villages into larger, permanent communities.

“With the return of sea otters, there’s going to be competition with commercial [fisheries],” says Wilson, as well as with the 2,500 or so Haida still remaining in their ancestral homeland, who continue to turn to the sea for food.

The picturesque Haida Gwaii coastline. Photo: Gregory Gould

If that day comes, perhaps the Haida Nation together with the Canadian government could permit the Haida people to resume their traditional otter hunting practices, in a limited, scientifically-informed manner, as some Native Alaskan communities are now allowed to do, Wilson says. “Let’s look at what our ancestors did and see what we can reinstate so we can live together again,” she says, and ensure that the Haida culture will live on for generations to come.

For his part, McNeill is trying to introduce young people in Haida Gwaii to traditionally important foods. “That’s why we’re bringing urchins into the community, into the schools, going around to the elders, handing them out,” he says. For McNeill, that’s only half the job.

“It’s one thing receiving and eating,” he says. “But it’s another thing being out there on the water, harvesting, paying your respect to the critter. All of that stuff is critically important for our culture to keep going.”

This story originally appeared on bioGraphic, an online magazine about nature and sustainability powered by the California Academy of Sciences.

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From the historic agreement that created the Great Bear Rainforest to B.C.’s Dasiqox Tribal Park to uniquely co-managed forest resources in Labrador, Indigenous-led conservation efforts are transforming the way Canadians understand and practice conservation.

Far from the colonial idea of preserving natural landscapes from human incursion, Indigenous land use plans put sustainable human-nature relationships that seek to revitalize traditional cultural practices at the centre.

It’s a vision of conservation and land use planning that can help Canada deliver on its promise of reconciliation and a renewed nation to nation relationship, according to Valérie Courtois, director of Indigenous Leadership Initiative.

In the recent federal budget, the Trudeau government committed $1.3 billion towards the creation of protected areas in Canada and some of those dollars are specially earmarked to support Indigenous participation.

We asked Courtois to speak with DeSmog Canada about Indigenous-led conservation, why it’s important and how it could transform Canada from the ground up.

This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.

In the federal government’s most recent budget there was a big emphasis on support for Indigenous participation in conservation. Does this represent a changing tide when it comes to the way we view the creation of protected areas in Canada?

Yes.

Certainly the courts have been pretty clear on these things and — to government’s credit — it feels like they’re not just doing the bare minimum of what the courts have asked them to do in this reconciliation process.

This is really about resetting and renewing the relationship between crown governments and Indigenous peoples.

At the same time as that’s happening there’s also a real nationhood movement within Indigenous peoples — we have a population that is more educated, getting more sophisticated in terms of its political strategies and voices and certainly has never had more capacity to manage lands within a modern land management context.

I’m not dismissing exciting governance systems of lands that were there for thousands of years, but this movement towards nationhood and the seriousness of being nations is happening at this same time as this recognition is happening.

We not only have the ability to fill that space but be very creative and provide leaders in that space because of this movement that’s happening in our communities too.

The Lutsel K’e First Nations and Crown governments are co-creating the proposed Thaidene Nene National Park Reserve along the eastern shores of Great Slave Lake. Photo: Pat Kane

Do you see conservation as pathway to nationhood and community revitalization?

For me it’s hard to talk about Indigenous nations outside the context of my own but when we think about nationhood it’s all about who you are where you are — who you are within the land that is your home.

And conservation is one of the tools that allows us to fulfill a responsibility to our land within the reality of it being the central core of who we are as nations.

Much of our nationhood over time has been undermined because of the impacts on that relationship, whether that’s residential schools that took us away from the land or crazy development projects.

So, for example, if you’re a member of West Moberly First Nation in northeastern B.C., it’s very tough to be who you are on that landscape, especially if you consider the community’s historic relationship with caribou.

You can now count the remaining number of caribou there on two hands.

That free-for-all mentality of ‘the land is open,’ has really had a huge impact on the cultural survival on our nations.

So any tool that allows us to protect that land we need to be who we are and to be a part of decision-making on scale, pace and scope of development — especially if that develop is done to our benefit — then that will create some good scenarios.

I’m Innu. We’re caribou people. Our whole lifestyle revolves around following migratory and woodland caribou herds, which means we need a lot of space to be who are as a people.

When we talk about protecting lands in the east we’re not just talking about the forest, we’re talking about huge caribou landscapes.

Our elders say all the time: for us as Innu, if the caribou disappear we won’t be Innu anymore.

It’s a fundamental thing and the caribou situation right across this country is very worrisome.

Most non-indigenous Canadians don’t have a meaningful relationship with caribou. And yet caribou are so significant for conservation in Canada. Someone recently said to me if we lose the caribou we lose all the protections that have come in the fight for their survival. Do you see caribou as a sort of conservation gateway?

Absolutely.

Also a gateway in terms of getting people to see beyond the evident value that touches them.

So, for example, I used to do this all the time, when I would host meetings in the community. When I’d tell people it’s about the forest management plan, we’d get two people.

If we said it was about caribou, the whole community was there. They’re the same issue — it’s all about habitat management and the amount of forest that is available.

But that species and that relationship compels people more and that’s something we use to improve our community based processes as well.

Right now if you’re in central Manitoba and your First Nations I can guarantee you’re worried about moose.

There’s a decline generally with moose there and you’ve got a declining forest industry.

To me that would be a great opportunity to think about, ‘okay shouldn’t we take this opportunity to think about other values forest has to save the moose and perhaps eventually create a context for a more sustainable forestry industry?’

Indigenous Guardians from Lutsel K’e will help manage the proposed Thaidene Nene National Park Reserve, monitoring water quality, wildlife and cultural sites. Photo: Pat Kane

What kinds of conversations are happening in Indigenous conservation circles about the non-Indigenous community and non-Indigenous conservation efforts?

There’s always this effort of finding ways of a parallel recognition of Indigenous science and western science in what we do.

When we were leading the Innu Nation our Elders said, it’s important to know Innu science but your job is to use the best information you have to make decisions — no matter where that comes from.

We hear that more and more with from communities who are looking at science not so much as a barrier anymore but as a body of knowledge in itself that is separate than their own but to be acknowledged and to be valued.

In terms of  the conservation community generally, it has been and can be another form of colonialism, another way for other people to put a value on your land that isn’t your own.

There is a risk for conservation organizations if they push things based on their own values.

A field medic at the standing rock protest of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Photo: Avery White | Oceti Sakowin Camp via Flickr

And that’s why a lot of conservation organizations have had trouble in the past working with First Nations. You see this in the media every once in a while — this idea of conservation being a new colonial frontier.

But there are ways to avoid that and ways for First Nations to make sure they choose the right partners. Some are developing partnership protocols which state what they look for in partners, state what they are looking for in organizations that want to work on their land and what the processes should be.

When those protocols exist relationships tend to be much more fulsome.

There’s a risk in that but there are things organizations can do to create the right space.

The thing I worry about with conservation organizations is this idea that Indigenous people cannot be a means to the conservation organizations’ ends. So if they’re looking at this budget and saying ‘we need to protect areas by 17 per cent’ and they look at a map and say it needs to be areas A, B, and C, then they’re going to say we need to talk to First Nations Area A.

That’s a problem. That is not the right place to start a relationship.

The relationship needs to start with the goal of having Indigenous leadership and nations make decision on their lands. That needs to be the end goal itself as opposed to a means to an end.

On that note there’s an interesting difference in worldviews when it comes to land use planning. From a white, Western perspective we have this idea of creating protected areas that are so-called pristine preservations. What I’ve heard from some Indigenous communities is they want to live on the land, they want their hands in the ground, they want to hunt the animals that live there and gather medicines. They see themselves as part of that landscape. Can you talk about how an emphasis on Indigenous-led conservation is maybe inviting white communities to re-envision what conservation means?

I can’t think of one landscape in Canada that hasn’t been affected in some way by humans.

It’s a false premise to think that landscapes are at their best without us.

It’s not the natural state in much of North America. And we’ve seen that whether it’s the use of fire to create berry areas or to manage large wildlife species.

When I was working on the forestry plan out here in the east and talking with the elders about fires, I was looking on a map where the fires were and elders were saying, ‘yeah, I lit that because I wanted a berry area 10 years later.”

This idea of absence is totally artificial. We’ve been living with that balance or with that relationship as humans in nature for 10,000 plus years — in some places on the coast 13,000 plus years.

Obviously that’s a sustainable model!

To me, this deep ecology where people have to be separate from nature is completely artificial.

If I could use an expression from Trudeau: ‘that’s so 1970.’ We’re so far beyond that.

The other thing is that ecosystems, they’re not just for nature, they’re for us, they are our habitat. As Indigenous peoples we are a part of that biodiversity.

Article 8(j) on the Convention on Biological Diversity actually says that: Indigenous peoples are part of biodiversity of nature.

It’s false to think you can separate those things. Conservation and any management of land is the way we’re going to preserve cultures and have them flourish and really achieve their aspiration as a society.

We have that responsibility as a nation, we’ve affected over 50 different cultures through colonialism. It’s the right thing to do —to encourage that link.

Na-Cho Nyak Dun elder Walter Peters leads the fire ceremony during the Protect the Peel victory celebration at the Kwanlin Dün Cultural Centre, February 2nd, 2018. Photo: Matt Jacques

When it comes to Indigenous rights in Canada, do you see conservation as a way of Indigenous peoples asserting those rights?

Yes, for sure.

I guess the best way for me to answer that question is to speak about an example here in Labrador.

Innus have been in negotiations for a treaty for over 30 years. In that 30 years there’s been one of the world’s largest hydro projects and a second one is in development now.

We’ve seen the world’s largest nickel mine and the expansion of the world’s largest iron facilities. Development has really progressed at quite a pace.

If you’re the Innu Nation and you’re looking at your lands 30 years ago when you started negotiations and looking at them now you have less opportunity as a nation to think about sustainable revenue streams, to think about what you’re going to do on your land base and how you’re going to draw your revenue sources out of your land base.

Those opportunities diminish as things get taken off the land whether that’s trees, minerals or water or whatever.

So conservation in the Innu Nation case as they were negotiating the treaty, they’re said look we’ve got this forestry issue where we can really test out what co-management and our relationship over the long term could look like on these forest resources.

So the Innu Nation and the province signed a unique co-management agreement that doesn’t involve a third party.

Do you see Indigenous land use leadership as a benefit to all Canadians?

This is another interesting thing about Indigenous leadership: it can also help out with non-Indigenous communities.

Here in Goose Bay, when the government first started talking about doing forestry, the community didn’t want anything to do with it. There was a settler group here in town who didn’t trust government at all.

They created a group that was essentially a protest group to the forest process.

When the Innu came on, they cooled their jets. They were like, ‘oh, the Innu Nation cares about the environment. We know because they blocked NATO, blocked Inco, they intervened on these processes that could have been devastating to the environment.’

The fact that we were there brought them enough comfort that they were no longer going to protest the process.

It was fascinating. We could really see it.

I was there for the consultation process and I witnessed that shift from going from ‘we don’t trust anyone in government’ and a very aggressive approach to seeing Innu guys there in their guardian uniforms talking about their values saying ‘we trust this plan.’

Fort McPherson elder, Agnes Neyando, hanging whitefish taken from the Peel River. Agnes and her husband spent their summers living in a wall tent along the river, into their 90s. Photo: Peter Mather

Looking forward, when it comes to Indigenous participation in conservation in Canada, what are you looking forward to? Or even beyond that, what are your hopes for what you’re seeing taking place in Canada right now?

I’m a generally optimistic person, generally hopeful person. I think there’s never been a moment in time like we’re in now for a) the Indigenous empowerment movement to be where it is and b) of our awareness of environmental risk and the importance to conservation.

That’s the key moment in time and it’s important for us who work on these issues to think about that moment in time and advance things as much as possible.

The reconciliation movement in this country will only become truly real when we figure out the land jurisdiction question. When we think about respecting Indigenous peoples on their lands while balancing the reality that we are a federation and the settler population is here.

So what does that look like? What does our shared future look like?

It this that shared future is one where nations are strengthened and jurisdiction is figured out.

When that happens, when Indigenous people have their relationship with land fully restored and cultures are strengthened and that responsibility and sense of stewardship is re-fostered I think we’re going to have the best managed ecosystems in the world, we’re going to be global leaders in that reality.

We’re going to have Indigenous peoples that are coming into who they’re supposed to be, which are strong nations who care for the land.

I feel like it’s essentially the fulfillment of the eighth fire prophecy.

The prophecy tells about how Indigenous people are going to rise up from the ashes of colonialism and this dark period we were in over the last 200 plus years and really rise up to finally become who we are meant to be: these leading land carers that others look to for inspiration and leadership on those issues.

I very much feel like we’re in the moment of that happening.

Valérie Courtois. Supplied

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The Trudeau government committed an unprecedented $1.3 billion in Tuesday’s Budget 2018 to protect land and water in Canada over the next five years. The funds will help Canada meet its target to protect 17 per cent of land and 10 per cent of oceans by 2020 under the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity.

“This is a very good news day for conservation in Canada,” Alison Woodley, national conservation director of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS), told DeSmog Canada.

In addition to significant financial investments, the budget also outlines a new model for collaborative conservation efforts bringing Indigenous, provincial and territorial governments together.

“For the first time the government is not only investing in federal action but also recognizing the importance of partnerships, recognizing Indigenous, provincial and territorial government’s work to protect land and water,” Woodley said.

Over the next five years the federal government will invest $500 million in conservation partnerships and $800 million to support the creation of new protected areas, increased park management, protection of species at risk and to establish a coordinated network of conservation areas with other governmental partners.

“I think the great thing about this is we’re not starting from scratch,” Woodley said. “There are places across this country where Indigenous and other government have proposals underway to protect large landscapes.”

Protecting the celebrated Peel Watershed in the Yukon would be an easy win when it comes to protecting undisturbed wilderness, Woodley said.

Proposals for the South Okanagan Similkameen national park to protect rare and diminishing desert in British Columbia, plans to protect undeveloped land in the Rockies and the Indigenous-led Thaidene Nene conservation project in the traditional territory of the Lutsel K’e Dene First Nation could also represent big conservation wins, she added.

“This is a very good news day for conservation in Canada.” https://t.co/8KMcf1cyeb

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) February 28, 2018

Indigenous-led conservation a priority

“We are particularly pleased to see the budget acknowledge the leadership of Indigenous peoples in protecting Canada’s land and waters,” Éric Hébert-Daly, CPAWS national executive director said in a statement.

“This funding will support Indigenous governments in their conservation efforts, which will make an important contribution to reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Canada.”

Indigenous-led conservation efforts have resulted in some of Canada’s most iconic land use agreements, including the creation of the Great Bear Rainforest and the Gwaii Haanas national park.

And the creation of tribal parks in unceded First Nations traditional territory in British Columbia — like the Dasiquox Tribal Park — has helped redefinine conservation strategies to more thoughtfully prioritize indigenous land use and cultural practices.

Steve Ganey, director of the land and ocean program for the Pew Charitable Trusts, applauded the federal government for its renewed commitment to conservation but said more can and should be done to emphasize reconciliation with Indigenous peoples in all land protection efforts.

“National and provincial governments should work to support new forms of Indigenous-led conservation in their efforts to meet the biological diversity targets,” Ganey wrote in a response to Budget 2018. “This is particularly important in northern Canada, where most of the country’s intact natural areas — and many of its Indigenous communities — are located.”

Ganey added Canada should consider creating protected Indigenous lands that are managed under a self-governance structure that highlights traditional knowledge — similar to Australia.

“This is the best and perhaps only way to rapidly expand conservation efforts while honouring Indigenous rights.”

Woodley said many of Canada’s Indigenous communities are already leading the way when it comes to protecting their lands and cultural practices.

“Indigenous-led conservation initiatives can be a great tool to advance reconciliation,” she said.

Continued investment needed to protect at-risk species

Conservation efforts are key to recovering Canada’s species at risk, such as caribou and orca that have suffered critical habitat loss and degradation over the last several decades.

“The number one reason that species across Canada and globally are in danger is because they’re losing habitat,” Woodley said.

“Protected areas are a key tool, whether on land or in the ocean, for addressing species at risk.”

Canada has been harshly criticized for failing to adequately protect its endangered species, especially through the creation of strict no-go zones that would protect critical habitat from industrial development and human activity.

Aerin Jacob, conservation scientist with the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative (Y2Y), said today’s investment in protected areas signals a change in tide.

“This type of vision shows the government is serious about protecting nature on the scale it needs to thrive,” Jacob said.

“Now the hard work lies ahead since we need different conservation approaches in different parts of Canada. This includes carefully planning where the new protected areas should be, based on intact wilderness, connectivity, species at risk and more.”

Woodley said conservation creates cascading positive effects where protected areas benefit wildlife, nature-based tourism and allow people to enjoy the lifestyles that come with landscapes that aren’t industrialized.

“This funding can deliver a whole suite of benefits to Canadians from nature conservation, economic, social and health perspectives.”

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.