Early in the afternoon of Oct. 10, 2015, John Ashley Pryce noticed something strange in his yard. A garbage bag was torn open, and trash was “strewn about the property” in Eastgate, B.C., a small community just east of E.C. Manning Provincial Park.

Pryce took in the scene, his eyes passing over yellowing leaves and dried grass before coming to rest on a massive creature sniffing the detritus. Its fur was mottled with shocks of brown, blonde and black. His eyes traced a prominent hump behind its shoulders and a round, dish-shaped face, both hallmark characteristics of a grizzly bear. 

Pryce grabbed his camera. The shutter snapped as he took a photo. The bear looked up at him for a few seconds before tearing off down the hill and disappearing.

Pryce couldn’t have known it at the time, but this would be the last confirmed grizzly sighting recorded in the North Cascades. A range of mountains, glaciers, rivers and forests stretching from Lytton, B.C., to just east of Seattle, Wash., it is one of the wildest transboundary ecosystems anywhere along the Canada-U.S. border. It is also home to one of the most endangered grizzly bear populations on the continent. 

Scientists estimate that, at most, six grizzly bears still live in the North Cascades. It’s not clear how many bears were once there, but according to Hudson’s Bay Company records, some 3,788 grizzly pelts were shipped from forts in the region between 1827 and 1859. Later records from miners, surveyors and settlers make note of dozens of grizzlies killed throughout the region. 

Today, many experts call the North Cascades grizzly an extirpated species, meaning locally extinct. The International Union for Conservation of Nature has “red-listed” the bears, labelling them “critically endangered.”

Since the bears were listed as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act in 1975, efforts have been made on both sides of the border to recover the population. Most recently, in 2024, the U.S. National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced they would begin reintroducing bears into North Cascades National Park — an effort derailed after Trump’s return to office led to funding and staffing cuts for both agencies. 

But an Indigenous-led project called the Joint Nations Grizzly Bear Initiative has continued to move forward. Led by the Okanagan Nation Alliance, the project is a collaboration with First Nations throughout the region, including the S’ólh Téméxw Stewardship Alliance, the Nlaka’pamux Nation Tribal Council, the Lillooet Tribal Council, the Upper Similkameen Indian Band, Simpcw First Nation and the St’át’imc and Sekw’el’was. Together, they’re hoping to begin reintroducing grizzlies to the North Cascades in 2026. 

Cross-border grizzly efforts hindered by false starts and government cuts

The mountaintops in Manning Park were still dusted with snow when Joe Scott arrived in early June 2024. He had travelled from his home in Washington for the first in-person gathering of the Joint Nations Grizzly Bear Initiative. For Scott, the trip was decades in the making. He started working at Conservation Northwest, a transboundary conservation group based in Washington that was then called the Northwest Ecosystems Alliance, in 1998. At the time, he explains, “It was the only group that was advocating for grizzly bear recovery. Nobody else would touch it.”

When the Joint Nations gathering began, it had been only a few months since U.S. agencies announced their reintroduction plan. Grizzly advocates felt that they were closer than ever to bringing bears back to the North Cascades. But Scott had seen recovery efforts fail before. 

In the 1990s, budget constraints forced then-U.S. grizzly bear recovery coordinator Chris Servheen to choose between recovering bears in Montana or in the North Cascades. In what Servheen called a “command decision” he picked Montana, arguing that the Montana project seemed more likely to succeed.

British Columbia came close a few years later. In 2001, they were on the verge of moving bears from Wells Gray Provincial Park in the B.C. Interior to Manning Park. But when the BC Liberal Party swept to power, it cut wildlife and conservation programs, prematurely ending that effort. Since then, according to Scott, North Cascades grizzly recovery has been a series of “lurching fits and starts.”

At the June 2024 meeting, conversations among the more than 70 Indigenous leaders, community members, researchers and conservationists connected Western and Indigenous science. Participants spoke about preparing for grizzlies’ return to the landscape, discussed challenges in public education and coexistence strategies. They outlined plans to mitigate human-bear conflict and shared ways to manage garbage and other attractants. 

Matt Manuel, natural resource coordinator for the Lillooet Tribal Council, described it as looking for “solutions within a common habitat that needs to be shared between the grizzly bear and those that are occupying or using the land” in a video produced at the gathering.

Much of the conversation at the Manning Park gathering focused on the North Cascades National Park Grizzly Restoration Plan, which would have relocated three or five bears per year on the American side of the border. At that rate, attendees expected it would take decades to establish a healthy population in the park, and even longer for the bears to move into surrounding lands or up into Canada. Still, the gathering closed with palpable excitement. 

But something nagged at Scott. He was “sitting there on pins and needles with full awareness that the [2024 presidential] election is going to make all the difference in whether this gets done.”

When President Donald Trump was re-elected and unleashed Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency on federal agencies, the worst-case scenario followed: more than a thousand national park rangers, scientists and other staff were laid off in February 2025. Facing an uncertain future, many others resigned. According to the National Parks Conservation Association, the Park Service had lost 24 per cent of its permanent workforce by the summer. The impact on grizzly reintroduction was devastating. 

“Park Service loses staff, Fish and Wildlife loses staff,” Scott explains. “They’re already behind the eight ball with a lack of capacity, and then at this point, they just said, ‘We don’t have the people to do this,’ so it just died.”

The collapse of the plan was a blow, but there was still hope. At the Manning Park gathering, the Joint Nations Grizzly Bear Initiative had not only been preparing for the U.S. plan to bring bears back into North Cascades National Park. They were also developing their own plan, a comprehensive strategy that included habitat conservation, community engagement, public education and, eventually, restoring grizzlies on this side of the border.

First Nations-led effort rooted in Indigenous knowledge of the region

Mackenzie Clarke had never seen a grizzly before she packed up her life and moved from Saskatchewan to the Kootenays to work on a grizzly research project with Garth Mowat, the B.C. government’s large carnivore specialist. Soon, she was hooked. 

Eventually, working on grizzlies brought her to the Joint Nations Grizzly Bear Initiative, where she works as the tmixʷ (wildlife) program lead on the project.

Clarke’s role is unique in wildlife conservation. Rather than a nonprofit or government agency, she works for the Okanagan Nation Alliance, a First Nations government. As someone with settler roots, she thinks it’s an important shift in how wildlife conservation happens. “There wasn’t a lot of Indigenous involvement or consultation” in previous North Cascades grizzly recovery efforts, she explains.

Despite this, Indigenous knowledge has long been key to understanding the history of North Cascades grizzlies. After grizzlies were listed as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, researchers began looking for at-risk populations. When researchers began studying North Cascades grizzlies, they struggled to find bears. Researchers found evidence of bears, including tracks, scat, digs and bear dens. They set up fur-snagging traps, lengths of barbed wire hung near scented lures and used the gathered fur samples in genetic testing that confirmed the presence of bears. Despite all the evidence of grizzlies, no live bear has ever been captured or collared in the region. 

In the late 1980s, some scientists and politicians argued that researchers’ struggles to capture a bear were evidence against a historic grizzly presence in the North Cascades. So researchers turned to Indigenous knowledge to prove their case. 

“There’s a lot of historical knowledge from the communities on where the bears used to be,” Clarke says. 

Early efforts relied on anthropological research from the first half of the 20th century, which included accounts from Indigenous people of grizzlies near the Chilliwack and Fraser rivers and among high-elevation berry patches. According to late archaeologist William Duff, the Stó:lō knew grizzlies to be “particular frequenters of the high country.”

But by the late 1990s, First Nations were leading their own studies. In 2001, the Stó:lō published a Traditional Knowledge study as part of the B.C. recovery effort. They interviewed more than a dozen community members, recording decades of grizzly bear sightings throughout their territory. 

Both this study and the anthropological records included stories about the unique nature of grizzly bear harvests before settlers arrived in these lands. Grizzlies were not seen as a major food source. They would be eaten if killed, but the nature of the harvest suggested a deeper connection between people and bears. 

Grizzly bear hunters would track the animals while carrying a sharpened bone about the length of their forearm. When they found the grizzly, the hunter would attempt to jam the bone into the bear’s open mouth with the sharp end pointed up. When the bear slammed its mighty jaws, the bone would strike a killing blow into the grizzly’s brain. The stories noted that many grizzly bear hunters ended up one-handed.

In 2014, the Okanagan Nation Alliance’s Chief Executive Council passed a resolution declaring grizzly bears “at-risk and protected within Syilx Territory.” They directed staff to work with scientists and communities to support “immediate action to assist [grizzlies] from disappearing due to low numbers and habitat isolation.”

By 2018, the resolution was starting to bear fruit. They launched field surveys and began writing their own recovery plan. They also started meeting with other First Nations interested in North Cascades grizzlies.

“The governments of all the nations mobilized,” Scott explains, who at the time helped to funnel conservation funding to the efforts. “The intent was to move the recovery process along by identifying the needs and filling the various gaps.” 

That February, the Okanagan Nation Alliance, alongside the Stó:lō, St’ati’mc, Nlaka’pamux and Secwepemc launched a “multi-nation approach for grizzly bear recovery efforts” that would help launch the Joint Nations Grizzly Bear Initiative in 2021. 

Restoring grizzlies benefits the environment — but also cultures and communities 

Jordan Coble was in university when the first pieces that would become the Joint Nations Grizzly Bear Initiative were being put in place. But now, serving as both a councillor with the Westbank First Nation and as the chair of the Okanagan Nation Alliance’s Natural Resource Committee, he’s grateful for “the courage of those that come forward and say, ‘We should do this, and we must do this, and we must do it together.’ ” 

To Coble, the extirpation of grizzly bears from the landscape echoes what happened to Indigenous Peoples. 

“Where we’re at today is rebuilding from 150 years of colonization, of separation and forced removal and isolation from our land itself,” he says. In this context, he sees restoring grizzly bears as a way to restore not just a creature but also landscapes, communities and relationships. 

“Guiding the path forward has been interesting because colonization was quite effective in separating our communities from one another [and] separating our communities from the land itself,” he explains. “Now that we’re turning back to those practices where we’re reminding ourselves that we have interconnections beyond our communities, beyond our nations.”  

This relational approach extends to the natural world as well. For Coble, North Cascades grizzly bear recovery is just one piece of a bigger project. 

“The nation started returning salmon back to the Okanagan, and then saw the success from that built out into forestry and other aspects,” he says. “That interconnection of all those living species, right from salmon to the tops of the mountains where the grizzly bears live, is really important. It’s kind of nice to think about it that way, that we kind of worked our way up into the mountains.”

North Cascades region can sustain grizzlies, expert says

In late July 2025, a little more than a year after the gathering in Manning Park, Michelle McLellan was back in the North Cascades. McLellan, an expert in the relationship between grizzlies and the landscapes where they live, had been at the 2024 meeting. She had also been hired by the Joint Nations team to evaluate North Cascades habitats for potential reintroduction.

Using studies from the Coast Range, which extends from Yukon to the Fraser River, and other regions where researchers had tracked grizzlies with radio collars, she correlated bear movements with habitat factors such as landscape, climate and plant cover, and used the data to build a model of the potential grizzly bear habitat in the North Cascades.

It was a good start, but McLellan “felt it was important to go to the landscape and see what that looks like.” She and a group of researchers, park rangers and conservationists spent the better part of a week ground-truthing the maps. They bushwhacked through overgrown forests, taking note of the horsetail ferns and sedges that bears like to eat in the spring. They climbed into the alpine, looking for whitebark pines with cones that make a calorie-dense grizzly snack. They counted blueberry and huckleberry bushes, snacking on sweet purple huckleberries as they moved through the landscape, considering the locations of roads, campgrounds and other human pressures that could impact bears or bring them into conflict with people. 

“There’s definitely sufficient food to sustain a population there,” McLellan says, though not as high-quality as the grizzly habitat of the Coast Range or the Rocky Mountains. “In general, we did find some good patches that were far from people … the kind of remote valleys you couldn’t just walk into.”

The habitat evaluation was a big step, but it is only one piece of a complex puzzle that reflects the long history of challenges with recovering bears in the North Cascades. 

One of the more notable chapters in that history was the story of a grizzly bear named Winston. In 1992, Winston was captured near Pemberton, B.C. He had already been relocated once but had returned and was getting into trouble with local farmers. 

Winston was released in eastern Manning Park later that year. He travelled south, crossing into the Pasayten Wilderness, Wash., on the eastern edge of the North Cascades. From there, he headed northwest, through Manning Park and into the Chilliwack River Valley, where hunters picked up his trail and chased him north. 

On Dec. 30, 1992, his radio collar pinged near Bridal Falls, B.C., a small community just east of Chilliwack. Researchers lost track of Winston through the winter, but in April they picked up his trail again and headed north along the banks of Harrison Lake. Whether he had swum across the Fraser River or used a bridge is anyone’s guess. 

By that June, he was back in the Lillooet River Valley close to Pemberton. His radio collar fell off sometime that summer, and for a few years, no one knew what happened to Winston. Then, in 1999 bear with similar markings to Winston was captured again in the Pemberton Valley. This time, the bear had been going after chickens on a local farm. It was relocated to the Anderson River Valley near the town of Boston Bar, where it destroyed its radio collar and was never seen again.

It’s still a topic of some debate whether that last bear was truly Winston. And while North Cascades grizzly researchers like to tell this story, they use it mainly to point out the myriad ways bear relocation has improved since then. For one, male grizzlies, which require massive habitat ranges and have strong homing instincts, aren’t typically used for relocation programs meant to recover grizzly populations. Successful programs in other regions have taught scientists that sub-adult females have the highest success rate. They have also learned to source bears from ecosystems with food profiles similar to those of the recovery area and have developed rigorous evaluation criteria to identify the best candidates for relocation. 

It’s also why grizzly bear augmentation is a slow and meticulous process, expected to take decades to restore populations to a level where they might begin to interact with people. 

For McLellan, success might look like moving 20 bears in the next 10 years. 

Coble takes an even longer view of it.

“I feel like we’re not going to know until 20 to 50 years down the road if there’s grizzly bears back in the North Cascades in a sustainable manner,” he says. 

Opposition and concern over grizzly reintroduction lingers, but support is widespread.

Still, when McLellan talks about the project in public, she hears a lot of people worried that “all of a sudden, there’ll be grizzly bears all over the landscape.” 

This isn’t a new concern. Scott describes North Cascades grizzly recovery as “a relatively simple body of work that has been made really complex by people who don’t want to see it happen.” 

Opposition to grizzly bear reintroduction has been loudest on the eastern side of the North Cascades, where livestock operations raised concerns about depredation. In 1993, government representatives at a public meeting about reintroduction held in Okanogan, Wash., faced death threats. In 2001, B.C.’s reintroduction efforts faced opposition from cattle ranchers in the Nicola Valley, including one who told the Vancouver Sun he was “hoping this whole friggin’ program will go away.”

Over the years, many of the concerns of those opposed to reintroduction have been addressed by government agencies and conservation groups. Today, opposition to reintroduction is a small minority. According to polling released by the National Parks Conservation Association in 2023, 85 per cent of Washington residents support the reintroduction of grizzly bears in the North Cascades. There isn’t specific polling on the North Cascades in B.C., but a majority of the public regularly supports efforts to protect grizzly bears across the province. 

Still, the Joint Nations project isn’t taking any chances. When reintroduction seemed imminent in 2024, they began ramping up public education, stakeholder engagement and community efforts. 

“We’ve been trying to make sure that nobody’s going to be surprised that bears are going to be coming back to the landscape,” Clarke says. 

She sees education, habitat restoration and conflict management as critical to the long-term viability of the North Cascades grizzly recovery. Building up support for grizzly recovery in communities is also essential.

“It’s okay to take this community by community, but also, step by step,” Coble explains. “Building that awareness, building the understanding that, more than anything, it’s important that the grizzly bears are here.” 

For Clarke, this community work also means increasing the sense of agency that people throughout the region feel about coexisting with bears. She points out that some of this work is already underway in communities where black bears live. But she also points to a range of other ways for communities to get involved, such as conducting community bear-hazard assessments, developing attractant management plans and engaging Indigenous Guardian programs in bear management.

They’re also working to spread the word in non-Indigenous communities. Groups like Conservation Northwest and Coast to Cascades, an organization that aims to restore connectivity among bears in the Cascade and Coast mountain ranges, have long been partners. In B.C., the Joint Nations Grizzly Bear Initiative is increasingly working with the Hope Mountain Center for Outdoor Learning, an outdoor education non-profit based in Hope, B.C. that runs a phone line for reporting North Cascades grizzly sightings. 

Clarke admits it’s an ambitious project with many moving parts. But she is also optimistic about recovering bears and about being ready to support both bears and communities once that happens. 

“There’s not really that many bears,” she says, “so you can set things out properly before, and hopefully, have all the resources in place.” 

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.

Summary

• Indigenous women in B.C. are leading projects and organizations committed to mitigating wildfire risk and restoring traditional practices. 
• Cultural burns are making a comeback in the province, thanks to years of advocacy from Indigenous firekeepers.
• First Nations women in the province’s Interior are decolonizing fire management through their work.

In 2017 Jaci Gilbert was 12 years old when she was evacuated from Tsq’escen’ First Nation because of a wildfire. Four years later, more wildfires impacted her community, located in B.C.’s central interior, prompting some Elders to be evacuated to the Lower Mainland.

Gilbert, who is Secwépemc and Tsilhqot’in, volunteered both at the emergency operations centre during the partial evacuation in 2021, and as a fire camp logistics assistant near 100 Mile House during those fires.

“After being involved in the emergency operations centre I caught the bug of wanting to do emergency and wildfire management,” Gilbert told The Narwhal.

Gilbert works for First Nations Emergency Services Society as a cultural and prescribed fire specialist. She is part of a cohort of First Nations women in B.C. who are leading the way in wildfire management in their communities — demonstrating leadership and stewardship as blazes continue each year.

Being a young person, and a woman, Gilbert struggled to get into the field of emergency management, but reaching out to organizations and women in the field is a good place to start, she said.

“Youth have been managing emergencies in their personal lives for a long time, especially Indigenous youth, so using these skills I developed on reserve I’m able to handle [emergencies] well, whereas with a typical office or customer service job I don’t handle [those] very well,” Gilbert said.

“We’re seeing a shift in dynamics. I’m noticing a lot more Indigenous women in fire research and in the fire community.”

Indigenous firefighters bring cultural knowledge to their work

Sheresa Brown, a Nlaka’pamux woman from Lytton First Nation, has been involved with fire since firefighting in high school. Brown works as a field technician and archaeological monitor with Nlaka’pamux Nation Tribal Council, specializing in protecting cultural heritage values.

After her hometown Lytton, B.C., was devastated by fire in 2021, Brown evacuated to Merritt and was looking for a job when she called her former boss from the BC Wildfire Service. 

Back on the frontlines, Brown noticed a crew member cut down a culturally modified tree in Vernon, commonly referred to as a CMT, to clear a pathway for a hose. 

“[First Nations] make that [symbol on the tree] so they can come back to harvest the sap, they can use it to make different types of medicines. And it was a very utilized tree that just got cut down,” Brown told The Narwhal.

She recommended scanning for culturally modified trees before clearing to her crew lead, who received it well. A year later Brown was deployed on another fire near Lytton, teaching BC Wildfire Service crews about the land’s cultural values.

She said she’s willing to take people on the land if they are willing to learn and be respectful, noting that sometimes people do not know they are in a culturally significant area, especially when firefighters are deployed from another province or country. 

“I know if a man can do it, I can do it too, and probably even better,” Brown said, reflecting on her experience being a First Nations woman in the fire industry.

Bringing back cultural burns

Brown and Gilbert are carrying the torch lit by trailblazers in the field like Leona Antoine, who has 30 years of experience. Antoine is a Nlaka’pamux woman who is no stranger to cultural burning or firefighting. 

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She practices traditional burning, is a registered forest technologist, a Type 1 (or first-response) firefighter with the BC Wildfire Service, and is a board director and chair of the Salish Fire Keepers Society. 

When Antoine’s firefighting journey with the BC Wildfire Service began in the early 2000s, she was one of few women on a 20-person unit crew. 

“Because there were no women on the crews before, they didn’t know how to have a woman around,” Antoine told The Narwhal.  

“It took probably about a month for the crew to get used to women being on the crew. You know, putting all the women’s posters and magazines away,” she said. 

Although men on the crew were initially uncomfortable around women, and had to be taught boundaries, “I broke those barriers,” she said. 

Another barrier at the time was getting the province and general public to see the value of cultural burning. B.C. was the first province in Canada to ban the practice in 1874.

After a year of devastating fire in 2017, and following the release of a report Addressing the New Normal: 21st Century Disaster Management in British Columbia in 2018, cultural burns started being taken more seriously by the province, with official amendments to the Wildfire Act in B.C. to support the practice taking effect in 2024.

This is work that the Salish Fire Keepers Society has been advocating for since its inception in 2016. The non-profit is made up of Interior Salish nations who experience some of Canada’s hottest wildfires, and promotes the restoration of cultural burning practices.

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Gilbert contributed to a cultural burning guide, Workbook to Create a Cultural Burn Pathway, made in partnership with the Indigenous Leadership Initiative. 

“As I’ve become more involved with emergency and wildfire management, cultural burning comes up a lot, especially as an Indigenous person that’s interested in Indigenous solutions to modern problems,” she said. 

First Nations Emergency Services Society is an emergency management non-profit organization in B.C. “We were initially created as a result of a lot of Indigenous deaths related to structural fires,” Gilbert said during her presentation at the Salish Fire Keepers Society gathering in Kamloops on Mar. 17. 

The workbook guides readers through different considerations when planning a cultural burn, and was created through a series of community interviews by Amy Cardinal Christianson and Natasha Caverley.

“My role in [its] creation has been trying to make sure that it’s accessible for First Nations. I’m not much on the technical side, I’m … looking at the art and how that can help tell the story for people without strong English backgrounds,” she said.

During the March 2026 gathering, Antoine and the rest of the society’s board gifted each guest speaker with sweetgrass and sage, two traditional medicines among many First Nation cultures across Canada. 

There were many women in attendance, underscoring how things are beginning to shift.

This is an initiative she championed. “We are taught by our Elders when you ask for information or stories, you validate their teachings and what … they have taught. You honour them with medicine,” she said.

Prioritizing traditional protocols, ceremony, and medicine at this year’s fire gathering is an example of how Antoine brings balance to the fire space.

Not only has she broken down barriers for women to come after her, she also creates opportunities for those in the fire industry to connect, heal, and share knowledge – work that can be forgotten for those in the heat of fire. 

Antoine said “we’re in fire dependent ecosystems, the land needs fire.”

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.

Summary

• B.C.’s throne speech was not delivered in 2026 due to the tragic shooting in Tumbler Ridge.
• The Narwhal obtained a copy of the speech via freedom of information request.
• The unshared speech gives an insight into B.C.’s priorities which include mining and liquefied natural gas (LNG).

In a typical year, the spring sitting of the B.C. legislature starts with a throne speech.

The speech from the throne — as the document is formally known — is delivered by the lieutenant-governor on behalf of the provincial government. It is a snapshot of the political moment, a mixture of policies and milestones the government of the day considers accomplishments, as well as hints about legislative priorities for the coming months.

For journalists who cover the legislature, the throne speech is an opportunity to peer at the political tea leaves and guess at what lies ahead.

But in 2026, the government’s planned throne speech was never presented in the legislature. Two days before its scheduled delivery, a horrific event occurred in the small town of Tumbler Ridge, B.C.: a mass shooting that resulted in the deaths of nine people, many of them students and staff at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School.

In the wake of the tragedy, the date set for the throne speech was postponed and the province observed a day of mourning. A few days later, Lieutenant-Governor Wendy Cocchia delivered a short and somber speech dedicated to the community of Tumbler Ridge.

But what was in the speech the government was poised to deliver? The Narwhal filed a freedom of information request for a copy of the speech with Premier David Eby’s office. And we received a mostly un-redacted copy.

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Over the year ahead, the B.C. government plans to continue championing liquefied natural gas (LNG) and mining development, which — along with forestry — form the province’s economic foundation, according to the speech.

“This natural inheritance remains central to our future prosperity,” the speech says.

British Columbians should look forward to “a more sustainable forestry sector,” even as tariffs imposed by the United States continue to bite, the speech says. The government will also continue to work toward “delivering B.C. energy to growing markets” — supporting companies producing LNG to ship to markets on the other side of the Pacific — and “driving momentum on critical minerals,” it says.

A section of the speech is dedicated to the North Coast transmission line, which the government says will deliver “clean, reliable electricity needed to unlock tens of billions of dollars worth of private sector projects across” northwest B.C. The transmission line may almost exclusively serve large industrial customers, such as the Ksi Lisims LNG facility and multiple proposed mines. But its cost, which was most recently estimated at $6 billion for a little more than half the line’s length, will be shared between all BC Hydro ratepayers. 

The North Coast transmission line will be built “in true partnership with First Nations,” the throne speech says before it segues into a section titled “Reconciliation and Partnerships with Indigenous Peoples.”

‘Reconciliation is the responsibility of elected governments,’ throne speech says

For its next 431 words, the throne speech highlights the importance of reconciliation with First Nations and the work the province has done since the unanimous passage of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act in November 2019. It affirms the existence of Aboriginal Title, recognized by Canadian courts and in the Canadian Constitution.

“Reconciliation is the responsibility of elected governments,” according to the throne speech. 

“Repealing the Declaration Act, or walking away from negotiations with First Nations, would not change that reality,” the throne speech says. “It would create chaos, delays, lost jobs, and endless lawsuits.”

On page 13, the tone of the speech shifts as it mentions “recent court decisions [that] have raised questions about what reconciliation means in practice.” While those decisions aren’t named in the speech, the province is seeking to appeal a December 2025 decision by the B.C. Court of Appeal, which agreed with an argument from the Gitxaała and Ehattesaht First Nations that the government’s obligations under the Declaration Act — to align provincial laws with the principles of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples — are legally enforceable.

Since December, Eby has been touting plans to amend the Declaration Act to “address some serious legal liabilities that were created … through the court decision.” This angered First Nations leaders across B.C., who told Eby in a meeting last week that his plans to amend the law were “totally unacceptable.” So, on April 2, he made an abrupt announcement saying he would suspend parts of the Declaration Act and the Interpretation Act in the coming weeks instead.

However, suspension still requires legislative amendments, which will be voted on in the legislature by May 28. 

Eby said he is willing to risk the future of his government to get it done.

“This will be a confidence vote,” Eby told reporters on April 2. That means if the majority of MLAs vote against the legislation, the NDP government will have lost the confidence of the house, likely triggering a snap election.

These plans to change the landmark Indigenous Rights law over the objections of many First Nations leaders seem contradictory to the throne speech promise that the B.C. government “will not abandon responsibility for reconciliation.”

You can read the entire 25 pages of the throne speech here, except for a few lines redacted by the premier’s office under section 12 of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, which covers matters discussed in cabinet. 

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.

Summary

• A recent gathering of the Salish Fire Keepers Society brought together over 100 experts and community members to discuss the role of fire on Indigenous territories in Interior B.C.
• Over a century of fire suppression practices have left Interior B.C. vulnerable to catastrophic wildfires, like the one that destroyed Lytton in 2021.
• Indigenous firekeepers advocate for the use of cultural and prescribed fire to manage risks and restore balance to ecosystems.

In 2022, one year after wildfire tore through the Village of Lytton, a blaze broke out at the nearby Stein Valley Nlaka’pamux Heritage Provincial Park.

The site, co-managed by Lytton First Nation and the B.C. government,  contains pictographs, petroglyphs and culturally modified trees, along with more important cultural sites.

So the BC Wildfire Service called in Sheresa Brown, a 31-year-old Lytton First Nation member who works as a field technician and archaeology monitor with the Nlaka’pamux Nation Tribal Council. When fires happen near registered archaeological sites, Brown works with BC Wildfire Service crews and structural protection specialists to safeguard cultural heritage. 

“I was all for it,” Brown says. “But I wanted to do it in the right way.”

To avoid the pictographs washing away from firefighting efforts, Brown outlined a 75- to 100-metre buffer zone around the cultural site. 

Sprinklers were set up around the buffer zone, and crews watched as the sprinklers stopped the flames from reaching the pictographs.

“That really helped me confirm that this was a good idea,” she said.

In other wildfires, she has helped to determine which registered archaeological sites are within a fire’s boundaries and are along its projected path, directing crews where to work. For example, she will advise where heli-pads can be constructed to avoid cutting down culturally modified trees, and will guide where hoses can be laid to protect artifacts — such as arrowheads — on the ground.

“We make sure that everything is done in a very respectful way,” she said.

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Brown was one of more than a dozen experts and technicians drawn from the realm of Indigenous fire stewardship — from researchers to Indigenous land managers and fire practitioners — who gave panel talks at the Salish Fire Keepers Society “Reigniting The Land” spring assembly on March 17 and 18. Around 100 people attended in-person in Tk’emlúps (also known as Kamloops, B.C.) in Secwepemcúl’ecw, with more tuning in virtually.

Secwepemcúl’ecw

Secwepemcúl’ecw is the traditional territory of the Secwepemc Nation, which stretches across approximately 180,000 square kilometres of Interior B.C. and encompasses 17 Secwepemc communities.

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The panel discussions ranged from protecting cultural heritage sites and values in the event of wildfire, to the experiences of youth engaged in cultural burning and different approaches to land management post-wildfire. 

While honouring the work of their ancestors and the efforts by Indigenous firekeepers in recent decades, the gathering also gave insight into the role that Indigenous youth are having in the future of fire stewardship and emergency response.

Resources around building capacity for community-based fire stewardship and emergency response initiatives were also highlighted, and there was dialogue in bridging opportunity gaps between the BC Wildfire Service and Indigenous communities.

“We need to collaborate with our people. We need to share. We gotta look at those imaginary lines and get rid of those, and work together,” George Campbell, a Nlaka’pamux Nation member from the Boothroyd Indian Band, said. Campbell is a wildfire officer for the Fraser Fire Zone with the BC Wildfire Service.

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Fire Keepers Society brings Indigenous nations together to share knowledge, experiences

Comprised of Elders, youth, Knowledge Holders and firekeepers from Salish communities — including the Nlakaʼpamux, syilx, Secwepemc and Stʼatʼimc Nations — the Fire Keepers Society is a grassroots initiative that started in 2016 as a means to promote awareness around culturally prescribed burns throughout the province.

The society annually hosts a spring and fall gathering, where they aim to build connections between Indigenous nations by sharing knowledge, and promoting and supporting fire stewardship opportunities in different communities.

“We as nations, need to be working together,” Tiffany Traverse, a Secwepemc Nation member who serves as one of the society’s board of directors, said.

“We have shared territories. We have shared family members and family lineages.”

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Fellow board director Darian Edwards, a Stʼatʼimc Nation member from Tsʼkwʼaylaxw First Nation, said that the society is looking to build support and create opportunities for Indigenous youth around fire stewardship initiatives in their respective communities.

“Youth are going to be taking over the work. They are going to be stewarding our lands after us,” Edwards said.

A century of fire suppression

Before settler colonialism outlawed the use of fire on the land through legislation such as the provincial Bush Fire Act of 1874, Interior Salish Nations had been prescribing fire to the land for thousands of years. 

Burn cycles were designed to nurture certain landscapes and ecosystems, often to sustain diversity for hunting areas and to promote the growth of berries and medicinal plants — which all supported various ceremonial purposes.

This work of regular burning ultimately helped to maintain the ecological health of the land by limiting overgrowth and mitigating fuels.

However, settlers and their rapid fire suppression practices effectively removed fire from the ecosystem in the last century. This has resulted in the spread of trees across landscapes that were not historically forested, all of which has led to the accumulation of wildfire fuels and debris across landscapes.

“Those managing forestry are not aware of the historical ecology of our lands and how they were changed through a century of fire suppression and how they were afforested,” Jennifer Grenz, a Lytton First Nation member who is a restoration ecologist and assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, said.

In the past, she noted, “so much of our territories didn’t have trees all over them.”

“They were not meant to be these high-density, single or two-species tree plantations that they were transformed into,” she said.

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Grenz made the comments during her panel presentation on the restoration work she conducted following the 2021 McKay Creek wildfire that broke out near Lilloet in St’at’imc territory.

Last summer, four years after the fire, she and a team of researchers found that burned landscapes are at risk of invasion by fast-growing, fire-prone invasive species of grasses.

However, they also identified historic berry-gathering areas that had once been cultivated and maintained by Indigenous people. 

These sites were sprouting in locations that were impacted by the fire, and did not see any human intervention efforts post-fire.

“Several areas have managed to survive being forested for tree plantations and these mega-fires to remind us of these very large areas that people created — that our people created,” she said.

While many of these areas are recovering on their own post-fire, she noted that “those are the first places that we’re seeing tree planting occurring.”

“The provincial government is going in and planting on top of these areas,” she said.

“This is where I really feel like there’s a really important piece for us to take back greater territorial land management, and find these areas and assert them, as these are our historic berry-gathering areas, food areas. And we don’t want to find trees planted on top of them.”

Grenz said that Indigenous communities know that the mega-fires of today “are not our fires.”

“This is just a totally different level of trying to figure out what to do next,” she said.

‘It’s really important to expose our youth to this work in a good way’

During a panel discussion led by three Indigenous youth, Skuppah Indian Band member Amber Wilber from the Nlaka’pamux Nation said that there’s a lot of trauma in her community around fire, especially among youth.

Skuppah Indian Band is located just two kilometres south of the Village of Lytton, which was the site of a devastating wildfire that swept through the area in 2021 and burned down 90 per cent of the village. Nearly five years after the fire, communities in the area, such as Lytton First Nation, are still in the process of rebuilding their homes and infrastructure.

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“I’d love to see that fear of fire shift to a respect for fire — learning that fire can be a tool that we can use to manage our land, and help bring balance to it, instead of something to be feared,” Wilber, who is in her second year working with BC Wildfire Service, said.

Wilber said growing up, she used to watch from inside her family home as her dad and grandpa burned patches of land outside to support berry harvesting. She would later help her uncle with fuel management work — it was her uncle who taught her that the practice is “an important tool that brings balance to the ecosystem.”

“Not only when it comes to fire prevention and fire management, but also, creating balance in an ecosystem for birds, for elk as well, in our local area. Making way for them to travel through our forests, and giving birds good nesting places,” Wilber explained.

“We also use fuel management and cultural burning in our area as a way to knock down the tick population, because they can be quite pesty in the spring.”

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She described this experience as a young person practising and revitalizing fire stewardship knowledge in her community as “eye-opening.”

“It’s really ignited a connection to the land in a way that I don’t think I ever would’ve gotten anywhere else,” she said. 

“It’s very unique, and it makes me have a lot of appreciation for traditions and cultures. It makes me feel connected to my ancestors in a big way.”

She advised Indigenous youth to get involved in cultural burning “in any way you can” — from listening to family members, to seeking out firekeepers in their communities. 

For the more seasoned firekeepers in the room, she encouraged them to involve their youth in burns, no matter the size of the fire. 

“Bring them out, even if it’s just a small job,” she said. 

“It’s really important to expose our youth to this work in a good way. And let them see your mistakes as well. … Later on, they’ll have that experience, too. They’ll have more grace for you and understanding. It’ll help them feel a little more humanized as well.”

A workbook to educate on cultural burns

Last summer, the First Nations’ Emergency Services Society (FNESS) and the Indigenous Leadership Initiative (ILI) released their “Worksheets To Create A Cultural Burn Pathway” workbook, which is both a physical and digital resource designed to guide Indigenous Nations in creating cultural burn programs within their community.

The workbook is the product of multi-years of community based-research, where more than 50 Elders and Knowledge Keepers were consulted, with additional input coming from gatherings and workshops.

Jaci Gilbert, a prescribed fire specialist with FNESS from the Secwépemc and Tsilhqot’in Nations, contributed to the workbook and gave a presentation about it during the Fire Keepers’ gathering.

“The aim of the workbook is to help nations navigate cultural burning with the impacts of climate change. We are not seeing the indicators that we’re used to, or seeing them at different times that don’t align with our burn windows,” Gilbert said.

“We hope that this workbook will help nations do burning in this new time.”

The workbook is divided into seven worksheets. The ILI, however, recognizes on their website that, “cultural fire is culture and location specific. So instead of a prescriptive approach, each worksheet poses a set of questions and prompts that can be answered collectively.”

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Amy Cardinal Christianson, a Cree-Métis senior fire advisor for the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, helped lead the development of the workbook. 

She appeared virtually at the gathering, and said that the workbook has been used by Indigenous land guardian programs, such as the Kainai Nation’s (Blood Tribe) fire guardian program.

“It’s a really easy resource to use for communities. It also talks a lot about the importance of governance,” Christianson said.

She said that Indigenous fire stewardship is not just limited to culturally prescribed burns.

“Yes, culturally burning — but it can also be firefighting, emergency response, post-fire recovery,” she said.

“It’s any activity where Indigenous people are asserting their jurisdiction and exercising their rights related to fire on the land.”

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.

Summary

• B.C. Premier David Eby has backed off on permanent changes to the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, following backlash from First Nations leaders. 
• Instead, he’s proposing to suspend parts of the Declaration Act for up to three years while the province appeals a court decision.
• The government says the recent court ruling makes changes to the Act urgent, but critics warn they could weaken legal accountability.

After a virtual meeting with First Nations leaders, B.C. Premier David Eby says his government is abandoning its plan to permanently change parts of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act — at least for now.

“We heard loud and clear that this approach was totally unacceptable to First Nations leaders, that it reflected government unilaterally drafting changes to a law that we had worked on together to write, and they felt the process was rushed and that the entirety of that approach was wrong,” Eby told reporters at the legislature on April 2.

In lieu of the amendments he’s been vowing to make for months, the premier is now proposing to suspend parts of the Declaration Act for up to three years while the province appeals a December 2025 decision by the B.C. Court of Appeal.

In its December ruling, the court agreed with the Gitxaała and the Ehattesaht First Nations, which argued the government’s obligations under the Declaration Act — to align provincial laws with the principles of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples — are legally enforceable.

Eby’s proposal would block further court challenges of provincial laws on the grounds that they do not align with the Declaration Act — a move the premier said is critical.

“We have seen court filings now and court decisions that rely on that Court of Appeal decision and the volume of litigation that we face is not sustainable,” he told reporters. “We have to fix it. It is non-negotiable. We have to fix it.”

The premier positioned his new proposal as less definitive and less permanent than the prior amendments, but admitted his latest pitch is not particularly palatable to the First Nations leaders he met with.

“I recognize that Indigenous leadership wants no pause on these sections,” Eby said. “They want no amendments, [but] we have to do something. A pause is, in my opinion, hopefully the least invasive way of addressing government’s concern.”

First Nations leaders will have an opportunity to provide the government with feedback on the new proposal — feedback Eby promised “will be taken seriously” — but the Declaration Act will be modified in some way before the legislature rises for its summer break at the end of May.

Eby confirmed his government intends to draft legislation to suspend parts of the Declaration Act and the Interpretation Act in the coming weeks, introduce it in the legislature and pass it by May 28. And he’s willing to put the future of his government in the balance to get it done.

“This will be a confidence vote,” Eby said. If the majority of MLAs vote against the legislation, the NDP government will have lost the confidence of the house, likely triggering a snap election and possibly Eby’s resignation. Former BC Liberal premier Christy Clark lost a confidence vote in June 2017, resulting in the NDP and Green Party forming government.

Eby believes he will not meet the same fate.

“We have a strong and united caucus. All of our MLAs understand the seriousness and importance of our work and partnership with Indigenous people and our commitment to all British Columbians to grow the economy and ensure prosperity for British Columbians.”

Eby’s new proposal would not affect the Declaration Act action plan — a road map for the work the province has committed to undertake with First Nations through 2027 — or the sections of the law that allow joint decision-making agreements with First Nations, according to a spokesperson from the premier’s office.

‘It got inconvenient’ 

The Declaration Act changes have drawn a lot of interest at a time when high-profile court decisions have thrust Indigenous Rights and Aboriginal Title into the public spotlight. 

Prior to Eby’s announcement on April 2, The Narwhal spoke to Adam Olsen, former MLA and lead negotiator for Tsartlip First Nation, lawyer Cynthia Callison and Jessica Clogg, executive director of West Coast Environmental Law and a member of the Gitxaała Nation’s legal team.

In November 2019, Olsen was one of 87 elected officials to vote in favour of passing the Declaration Act. The law’s unanimous passage was hailed as a major accomplishment.

At the time, the government described the act as “a path forward” for relations between First Nations and the province, and a way to avoid long and costly court battles. Now, the province is readying amendments to the Declaration Act, aimed at barring courts from interpreting or applying the law. 

“It kind of breaks my heart that in 2019 we get unanimous support in the legislature to move this forward,” Olsen, a former member of the BC Green Party, said in an interview. A member of Tsartlip First Nation, Olsen represented Saanich North and the Islands from 2017 until 2024 before exiting provincial politics. “Now, the same government a couple of years later is going to use the slimmest of majorities — if they can even muster it — to basically amend [the law] because it got inconvenient.” 

The legislation that was once celebrated as a major step toward working with First Nations in a better, more equal way has been recast as a destabilizing or even destructive force. Repeal or revise — those seem to be the only two options B.C.’s elected leaders can envision for the Declaration Act. 

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“It’s frustrating, sad and angering that our government would set up a binary like that,” Olsen said.

Olsen, who did not seek re-election in the October 2024 provincial election, is now the lead negotiator for Tsartlip First Nation. As a participant in the confidential consultations, he could not discuss any details about the ongoing process but did reflect on the political climate in which the Declaration Act amendments have been proposed.

“This past year for Indigenous relations has been awful. It’s been awful on social media. It’s been awful to hear how the official opposition has handled this,” said Olsen, referring to the BC Conservative Party’s vocal desire to repeal the law altogether.

There were no BC Conservative MLAs in the legislature when the Declaration Act passed in 2019, though MLAs who now represent the party did vote in favour of the law at the time. Former BC Conservative leader John Rustad — who once served as B.C.’s Minister of Aboriginal Affairs — began calling for the Declaration Act’s repeal during his 2024 election campaign. Rustad was ousted as party leader in December and the BC Conservatives are now in the midst of a leadership race to replace him.

The BC Conservatives still support repealing the Declaration Act, interim party leader Trevor Halford told reporters at the legislature on April 1. The legislation, he added, has failed to deliver the stability and reconciliation progress it was intended to deliver.

“As difficult a conversation as that is, I think it’s worth having,” Halford said. “I think that a full repeal actually gives certainty. I do believe that.”

Olsen feels the conversation about Indigenous Rights has shifted so far from where it was in 2019 — when all MLAs voted in support of the Declaration Act.

Public support for the application of the Declaration Act has dropped in recent months, according to a new poll released by Angus Reid. In August, 44 per cent of British Columbians polled felt B.C.’s effort to align its laws with the United Nations declaration had gone “too far in limiting provincial authority over land and resources.” As of this month, 53 per cent of respondents said they think the province’s approach on reconciliation and Indigenous Rights has gone too far.

Clogg believes Eby’s comments about the need to change the Declaration Act have contributed to the decline in public support for reconciliation.

“We need leadership from the highest levels and from all sectors of society to face down racist, populist sentiment and chart a course towards true reconciliation,” she said.

Declaration Act amendments happening quickly

The fact that the government is prioritizing making these changes quickly — by legislative standards — is a further complication. The Declaration Act essentially enshrines the federal United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, or UNDRIP, in B.C. law. That includes Article 19, which states Indigenous Peoples have the right to be consulted and to give free, prior and informed consent on legislation that impacts them.

One thing the ongoing consultations have made clear, Olsen said, is that many First Nations do not want the act changed.

“The ones that have spoken publicly have said that they oppose amendments to the act,” he said.

The government’s proposed changes to the Declaration Act will “prevent significant litigation risk for the province of British Columbia,” Eby said in the legislature on March 30. Some First Nations leaders and Indigenous law experts disagree, warning that the tight timeline the government is pursuing to change the act could actually spark more lawsuits.

“I hope that B.C. appreciates that the highly abridged timelines and their intransigence in the face of opposition from civil society groups and First Nations makes them vulnerable to legal challenge should they proceed on the originally proposed timeline,” Clogg said.

Eby admitted that consultations with First Nations are being “rushed,” but maintained the province has no other option.

“We are having to move quickly to make amendments in order to address some serious legal liabilities that were created … through the court decision,” he told reporters. “Nobody is excited about this process. Certainly I’m not, and First Nations leadership are not.” 

The condensed consultation timeline and vocal opposition from First Nations should give lawmakers “extreme caution” about the quality of the process for changing the law — or risk ending up right back in court, Olsen argued.

“If they’re going to table a bill, they need to be very comfortable that their consultation record is impeccable,” he said.

Proposed amendments would block First Nations from defending their rights in court, legal expert says

Non-disclosure agreements notwithstanding, the Canadian Press reported on some of the government’s proposed changes to the Declaration Act last week. 

According to the Canadian Press, leaked documents included a change in the wording of the Declaration Act, narrowing the government’s commitment to take “all measures” to ensure provincial laws align with the United Nations declaration. The amended law would task the government only with aligning laws deemed to be a priority, the Canadian Press reported.

For Cynthia Callison, a partner with Callison & Hanna Law who has advocated for First Nations in B.C. for 29 years, the proposed changes reported last week do not seem to materially change the province’s approach to implementing the Declaration Act to date.

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“They have not been working on aligning all laws, they have been working on priorities,” Callison, who was appointed King’s Counsel by the province in January, told The Narwhal in an interview. King’s Counsel designations recognize lawyers for their expertise and significant contributions to the judicial system.

Those priorities outlined in the action plan include self-government and anti-racism initiatives, changes to family services and emergency management programs and pathways for joint decision-making on resource management.

The proposed amendments leaked to the Canadian Press indicate to Clogg that the government is moving toward doing exactly what Eby said it would do in December: block the courts from being able to hold the government to account when First Nations take issue with its progress on reconciliation.

“The amendments that are proposed are designed to deny First Nations access to the courts to defend their Indigenous human rights,” she said, adding these amendments are “essentially an effort to avoid that accountability.”

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The recent court cases that the premier has taken issue with — specifically the Cowichan Tribes ruling and the Gitxaała decision — were “never a priority for the province and are not part of their action plan,” Callison added. 

Canadian Press also reported the government is planning to add language to the Declaration Act to allow the province to make changes to the action plan, potentially without the support of First Nations. That could make the action plan more vulnerable to political whims, Callison said.

B.C. government is once again pushing legislation over the objections of First Nations

This isn’t the first time Eby’s government has side-stepped its consultation obligations to First Nations.

In May 2025, Bill 15, which granted cabinet broad powers to fast-track infrastructure projects, prompted vocal opposition from many, including Don Tom, Chief of the Tsartlip First Nation and vice-president of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs. Eby has acknowledged his government failed to meet the consultation standard set in the Declaration Act at times but insisted his government was not backsliding on its commitments to reconciliation and Indigenous Rights.

Now, the province is once again pushing legislation that has drawn strong criticism from First Nations leaders. 

“This is two spring sessions in a row where First Nations leaders are in the spotlight, not for any of their own doings, but because of what the provincial government is up to,” Olsen said. “When Premier Eby says, ‘We are really keen on reconciliation and it’s still a top priority’ — well, the behavior seems to be quite confrontational with First Nations, rather than relational.”

Clogg was more blunt.

“There is nothing about the way B.C. is approaching this that remotely could be called cooperation or co-development,” she said. “It’s an entirely unilaterally driven, expedited process.”

Despite the mounting objections from First Nations leaders, Eby confirmed on April 1, the amendments will be introduced in the coming weeks.

“The amendments will be introduced with lots of time for debate and discussion in the legislature,” he said.

Olsen warned the premier’s plan to push ahead with the controversial amendments to the Declaration Act could land his government in a quagmire.

“The premier has backed himself into a corner. Now he’s making quicksand.”

Updated April. 13, 2026, at 11:07 a.m. PT: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated former BC Liberal premier Christy Clark lost a confidence vote in June 2017, resulting in the election that brought the NDP to power. In fact, there was no second election. Clark tried unsuccessfully to convince the lieutenant governor to allow one, but former NDP leader John Horgan secured a confidence-and-supply agreement with the Green Party and formed government.

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

In January, Todd Stone, the president and chief executive officer of the Association for Mineral Exploration British Columbia, told the crowd assembled for the association’s conference about a lobby meeting he had with Premier David Eby. Stone joked that he opened by congratulating the premier on his “success on 30-by-30.” 

The crowd began to chuckle as he continued his story about provincial and national targets for protecting 30 per cent of land and water by 2030.

“You’ve actually accomplished 47 by 2025,” he recalled telling the premier. He then recounted asking: “Can we start having a conversation about pulling some land back?”

That figure comes from a policy paper published in December 2025 by the association, arguing “up to 46.99 per cent” of British Columbia was protected land. That’s far more than the federal government’s figure of 19.9 per cent, and would surpass the province’s 30-by-30 pledge. 

According to Stone, a former minister under the B.C. Liberals, the comments led to the premier directing “the staff at the [Water, Lands and Resource Stewardship Ministry] to go back and look at all their numbers and sit down with us.”

According to public records, the association lobbied at least a dozen members of B.C.’s NDP government in late 2025 to press their argument. Those include the speaker, the minister of forests, the minister of labour, the minister of energy and climate solutions, the minister of mining and critical minerals and Randene Neill, the minister of water, lands and resource stewardship.

On Dec. 2, 2025, Minister Neill poured cold water on the lobbying effort.

“It is inaccurate to suggest these areas are currently fully protected when they are not,” she said. A section of the statement attributed to the ministry went on to add that many of the so-called protected areas cited in the association’s policy paper “do not restrict all resource activities that can negatively affect biodiversity.”

Torrance Coste, associate director at the Wilderness Committee, remembers seeing Minister Neill’s statement shared on an email list used by the province’s conservation groups. He described it as “encouraging” at the time. But Stone’s comments, and more recent statements by the ministry, have him worried.

According to a statement emailed to The Narwhal, the Ministry of Water, Lands, and Resource Stewardship said it is “developing an updated approach” to tracking the province’s progress towards the 30-by-30 conservation goal and appreciated the association’s “feedback as we proceed through this work.”

“This work includes a review of all existing areas within B.C. that have conservation measures in place or have restrictions on resource activity,” the ministry explained. 

To complete that review, they added they are working with “other resource sector ministries, including Forests, Mining and Critical Minerals, and Energy and Climate Solutions” as well as “industry and environmental non-governmental organizations.”

Coste thinks this could be a sign that the ministry is considering adopting some of the Association for Mineral Exploration’s definitions for protected lands. Something he describes “a naked attempt to lobby against the expansion of protected areas committed to by the governments of B.C. and Canada through the 30-by-30 commitment.”

“The Association for Mineral Exploration’s proposal has absolutely nothing to do with conservation,” he said. “The fact [that] the BC NDP government is even looking at the association’s nonsense is a huge scandal”. 

The Narwhal reached out to the Association for Mineral Exploration British Columbia regarding the meeting Stone described between himself and Eby, but did not receive a response by publication time. The premier’s office directed questions about the comments to the Ministry of Lands, Water, and Resource Stewardship, which sent the statement cited above. 

Conservation groups say the math doesn’t add up 

Despite the ministry’s statement that both “industry and environmental non-governmental organizations” are involved in the process of reviewing conservation measures and goals, Coste says the ministry has not contacted the Wilderness Committee.

The Narwhal did learn that the British Columbia office of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society had been engaged in conversations about how the province calculates protected lands. But those conversations began prior to the Association for Mineral Exploration’s recent lobbying, according to Coste and others The Narwhal interviewed for this story.

Coste says that if the province reaches out to him, his first move would be sharing “photos from this year of massive clear cuts in critical caribou habitat.”

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These photos, he explains, are from areas designated as ungulate winter range. A land designation under the Forest and Range Practices Act, it’s meant to protect critical winter habitat for species such as mountain goats, elk, bighorn sheep, deer, moose and caribou. It also accounts for 17.7 per cent of the province’s land mass — land the Association for Mineral Exploration says is closed to mining. 

Back in December 2025, the Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship disagreed with that assessment. In the same statement where Minister Neill rebuffed the Association for Mineral Exploration, the ministry argued ungulate winter range didn’t meet the 30-by-30 conservation criteria.

“There are two types of ungulate winter ranges: no harvest and conditional harvest,” the statement read. The former “are subject to restrictions on forestry activities, but do not restrict mineral development and exploration activities.” A conditional harvest zone, meanwhile, may not have stringent enough restrictions on forestry to satisfy international conservation requirements, according to the statement.

In other words, ungulate winter range isn’t fully closed to development. It’s a conclusion the Association for Mineral Exploration shared in a 2016 report, describing it as land “where new mineral claims may be acquired and access for mineral exploration and development may be permitted.”

Coste points to other land designations that the Association for Mineral Exploration calls protected that don’t fit the 30-by-30 criteria. Among them are special management zones and wildlife management areas. Both restrict some, but not all, mining and logging. Like ungulate winter range, the Association for Mineral Exploration’s 2016 report said these areas could be open to mining. 

In special management zones, the report stated that “resource development and extraction opportunities exist.” While in wildlife management zones, “resource extraction like mining may be allowed.”

To Adrienne Berchtold, the director of mining reform and habitat protection at SkeenaWild Conservation Trust, it’s more evidence that the Association for Mineral Exploration’s policy paper is using faulty figures.

“We’ve done some early fact-checking and found that around 27 per cent of operating mines, proposed mines and exploration projects in the province are located in areas [the Association for Mineral Exploration] is telling the government should count as protected areas,” she says. “These numbers show that not only is mining activity possible in these areas, it is actively occurring in significant quantities.”

The problem with ‘other effective conservation measures’

For Coste, one of the most egregious land designations included in the Association for Mineral Exploration’s policy proposal are old growth management areas. According to a 2024 report from the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society B.C., less than one-third of old growth management areas are protected old-growth forests. Most of them, the report found, were young forests, and at least 27,300 hectares were active cutblocks. 

“They’re not protected areas,” Coste says. 

But the provincial government includes old growth management areas in the province’s 30-by-30 calculations.

Of the 20 per cent of land and water the province has logged in the Canadian Protected and Conserved Areas Database, 15.9 per cent is parks and protected areas. The other 4.1 per cent are listed under the heading of “other effective area-based conservation measures.”

A vague designation, other effective area-based conservation measures are not parks, conservation lands or other clearly defined, government-recognized protected areas. Their inclusion in 30-by-30 stems from the definition of protected areas developed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, an organization headquartered in Switzerland, which counts Canadian government and non-government entities among its members.

It defines a protected area as “a clearly defined geographical space, recognized, dedicated and managed, through legal or other effective means, to achieve the long-term conservation of nature with associated ecosystem services and cultural values.”

The “legal” side of this is straightforward: think provincial and federal conservation areas, ecological reserves and parks. “Other effective means” is where things get complicated. 

The province considers old growth management areas protected enough to include in their 30-by-30 calculations. The Association for Mineral Exploration agrees, adding ungulate winter range, special management zones, wildlife management areas and a few other designations they believe should also be included. 

But Coste disagrees, arguing that these designations “clearly don’t meet the International Union for the Conservation of Nature guidelines.” 

He describes the push to include them as government and extractive industries seeking “loopholes” to avoid real conservation. And yet, Coste said there are other means to meeting the 30-by-30 targets.

He points to Indigenous-led conservation areas as an example. These areas can fall into a legal grey zone, declared by nations but not recognized by the provincial or federal government. 

“If it’s Indigenous-declared, they’re probably going to need resources to do management plans and to get Guardians on the ground,” Coste says. “If it’s not a recognized protected area, that funding is not going to flow.”

He says that recognizing these areas as other effective area-based conservation measures could change that. It’s what happened, for example, in the Northwest Territories with Thaidene Nëné. 

An Indigenous protected area located on the northeastern arm of Great Slave Lake, it was designated by the Łutsël K’é Dene First Nation in 2019. Parts of the area were recognized by the territorial government as a territorial protected area and a wildlife conservation area. The rest was recognized by the federal government in 2025, forming the 26,000-square-kilometre Thaidene Nëné National Park Reserve. Earlier this year, the project received a major funding boost when the territorial government dispersed $21.6 million to support Indigenous-led conservation. 

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Without these other pathways to establish protected areas, Matthew Mitchell, a professor and researcher at the University of British Columbia’s faculties of land and food systems and forestry and environmental stewardship, isn’t sure that B.C. or Canada can meet the 30-by-30 targets. 

“We can’t always do conservation the way we traditionally think about it,” he says.

In 2021, Mitchell served on an expert panel convened by Environment and Climate Change Canada to explore pathways to meet Canada’s conservation goals. Along with other researchers, he concluded meeting the 30-by-30 target would require innovative solutions. 

He advocates for approaches such as Indigenous protected areas, urban parks and biosphere reserves that include working landscapes.

“There are lots of good examples of working landscape conservation, agricultural areas where we’re adding in buffer strips and hedgerows,” he says. “Things that can actually have big benefits to a variety of wildlife and agricultural production.”

These are the kinds of other effective area-based conservation measures that he thinks are useful. But he also acknowledges there are pitfalls, and that opening the door to interpretations like the Association for Mineral Exploration’s isn’t helpful. 

“How you define these things and how effective they are actually really matters,” he says. “Putting them all into one bin and saying that we’ve hit our 30 per cent target is not a good way to go.”

A proposed Indigenous protected area in the crosshairs 

At roughly 40,000 square kilometres, the Dene Kʼéh Kusān Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area would be among the largest tracts of protected land in British Columbia. Located at the heart of the Kaska Dena nation’s traditional territory, it’s four times the size of Tweedsmuir Provincial Park, the largest park in the province.

“As Kaska, we’ve been stewards of our territory, so in our mind, it’s about thoughtful land use planning that will protect one of the most intact ecosystems in North America,” Michelle Miller, director of culture and land stewardship at the Dena Kayeh Institute, says.

When it’s recognized, she adds, the Kaska will be able to promote sustainable economic growth and protect land, water and critical habitat. It would also contribute to the province’s conservation goals. 

“Dene Kʼéh Kusān is four per cent of the province,” Miller explains. “Protecting it would go a long way to helping B.C. achieve its 30-by-30 goals.”

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That has led projects like Dene Kʼéh Kusān to land in the Association for Mineral Exploration’s crosshairs. In their December 2025 policy proposal, the association called for a stop to “Northwest Land Use Plans, which are expected to add … significant new conservation areas to the province.” Conservation areas like Dene Kʼéh Kusān.

But Miller questions the association’s framing. 

“The idea of pitting conservation against economy, and against job creation, I think it’s an outdated argument,” she says. Dene Kʼéh Kusān is “not about opposing mining, it’s about where that can occur in other areas throughout the territory.” 

For Miller, that balance is at the heart of a “modern conservation economy” where “Indigenous stewardship, healthy ecosystems and economic opportunity can all move forward together.”

It’s a view she hopes won’t be lost if the government works with mining interests to change how they approach conservation and the 30-by-30 target. 

“The whole conversation around how you get to 30-by-30, I think we can recognize there’s some creative math going on there,” she says. “But we’re not here to debate that. We’re just here to say that Dene Kʼéh Kusān is worth protecting.”

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Nova Scotia’s Kejimkujik National Park and Historic Site is home to old-growth forests, white sand beaches, diverse wildlife and abundant natural beauty. But long before it was established as a national park in 1969, it was the site of Mi’kmaw fishing villages, hunting territories and burial grounds for thousands of years. Now, the Mi’kmaq will once again play a central role in deciding how that land, which is the keeper of their stories and memories, is cared for.

A new agreement between the Mi’kmaq and Parks Canada will allow both parties to govern almost all of Nova Scotia’s parks and historic lands together. Announced in December 2025, the Toqi’maliaptmu’k Arrangement, which means “we will look after it together,” reflects a relationship based in mutual respect and allyship — one that has taken decades to nurture and create.

Roughly 30 years ago, that relationship was essentially non-existent, Eric Zscheile says. He has been a legal advisor to the Mi’kmaq, who operate as one nation, since 1992 and negotiates on their behalf with the federal and provincial governments. 

Nova Scotia’s national parks (excluding Sable Island), as well as many more throughout Canada, were created from land that was directly taken from First Nations, often through “dubious land surrenders,” Zscheile says. For generations, the Mi’kmaq had no say in how unceded land was protected, used or accessed, and there was a deep sense of distrust toward the federal agency as a result. 

 “Most Mi’kmaq refused to even go into a national park because of the past,” Zscheile says. “There was a feeling that it was government appropriation.”

Then came the Marshall Case, a 1999 landmark decision in favour of Mi’kmaw fisherman Donald Marshall that affirmed First Nations’ Treaty Right to fish, hunt and gather for their livelihood. After that, Zscheile says, things slowly began to shift.

“ People within Parks [Canada] started looking at what was happening legally when it came to the rights of Indigenous Peoples and their relationship with Indigenous Peoples, not just in Nova Scotia but across the country,” he says. “There started to be a concerted effort to say, ‘I think we have to do things differently.’ ”

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In the years since, progress has been gradual. Mi’kmaw leaders have worked with Parks Canada on a number of projects to help repair the community’s relationship with both the agency and the land they’d historically been excluded from. In 2012, they formed an arrangement to allow Mi’kmaq to enter national parks for free.

They’ve also worked to incorporate Mi’kmaw place names into official signage and interpretive displays, create visitor programs highlighting Mi’kmaw history and culture and organize harvesting, protection and restoration projects. One such project focused on white birch conservation and gave the Mi’kmaq access to white birch for traditional crafts, including building canoes.

Today, Parks Canada is lovingly seen by the community as the “least offensive federal agency,” Zscheile says. That’s thanks to years of collaboration and a willingness to listen and work together as equal partners. 

That status as equal partners is now official, according to the Toqi’maliaptmu’k Arrangement, which took nearly a decade of negotiations to bring to fruition.

The arrangement is unprecedented and monumental in its scope. While similar agreements exist in Gwaii Haanas in B.C., Newfoundland’s Torngat Mountains and Saoyú-ʔehdacho in the Northwest Territories, those partnerships apply only to individual parks. This agreement’s underlying principle is to recognize and implement Aboriginal and Treaty Rights within lands that have traditionally been governed, managed and utilized by the Mi’kmaq. 

Because of that wide scope, it’s the first agreement to apply province-wide and covers all Parks Canada-administered national parks and national historic sites in Nova Scotia.

The only exception is Sable Island Reserve, which was left out because it remains unclear if Mi’kmaq traditionally frequented and used Sable Island, Jonathan Sheppard, says. Sheppard is superintendent of Kejimkujik National Park and National Historic Site, one of the locations covered by the arrangement. Discussions about the governance and management of Sable Island are ongoing between Parks Canada and the Mi’kmaq.

The choice to create a province-wide agreement, rather than one focused on individual lands, was largely based on the Mi’kmaw preference for a collective approach because the Mi’kmaw communities in Nova Scotia operate as one unified political group, Sheppard says.

“[It was] really important for the ideas associated with self-governance and self-determination that this is a pan-Nova Scotia initiative, because it is ultimately about a nation-to-nation relationship and the nation-to-nation decision-making governance structure,” he says.

A shared vision 

Fundamentally, the arrangement is a framework to formalize the modern-day relationship while recognizing and implementing the Peace and Friendship Treaties, signed in the 1700s between the Crown and east-coast Indigenous communities.

 “This was not about negotiating rights and it was not about creating rights or extinguishing rights,” Sheppard says. “It was really about implementing rights originating from those original Peace and Friendship Treaties.”

In practice, the framework will be guided by a co-management board that will be made up of an equal number of Parks Canada and Mi’kmaw representatives. There will also be technical committees made up of Knowledge Holders, Elders and harvesters focused on specific topics, including language, culture and heritage; archeology; natural resource stewardship and harvesting; and economic opportunities.

While exact details will be developed over the coming months, the arrangement will include opportunities for practices on the land, including in protected heritage places. This will allow for practices such as ceremonies, Indigenous-led conservation activities and place-based learning and knowledge sharing.

The 10-year agreement has an option to extend or renew, although the Mi’kmaq are free to opt out at any point if they are dissatisfied. 

“ It was really clear to Parks Canada that there was a lot of overlap in vision about land stewardship, and that formed the basis for the agreement,” Sheppard says.

The Mi’kmaw concept of Netukulimk teaches about the respectful use of resources and only taking what you need from the land. It’s one of the principles Sheppard says aligns with Parks Canada’s vision for ecological integrity and preservation. Another is Msit No’kmaq, which suggests that all living beings are sacred and interconnected.

Etuaptmumk, or two-eyed seeing, is the concept at the very core of this new partnership, according to Lindsay Marshall, the Mi’kmaq relations advisor for the Cape Breton Field Unit for Parks Canada and a former chief of Potlotek First Nation.

Coined by Mi’kmaw Elder Albert Marshall, it means “looking at something with your western eye, and also with your Indigenous eye to come up with something truly beautiful and unique, and to understand it more,” he says. It is about combining both wisdoms to create a more holistic, in-depth approach. 

While the timeline to establish this arrangement was long, Marshall says it was the Mi’kmaq who set the pace, not the government. This required patience from Parks Canada at times, patience that helped demonstrate respect. So far, Sheppard says, the public response has been positive.

“ I’m really proud of the way the approach has been at the speed of the communities and not rushing, not being forceful in any way,” Marshall says. “That shows understanding and appreciation for culture.”

For First Nations in other provinces who may want to develop their own arrangements, Marshall suggests a similar strategy: go slow and build a real relationship before rushing into anything. 

And to federal agencies that may want to build partnerships with Indigenous communities, Marshall stresses the importance of doing the homework first. 

“Before you even set foot in the community, you should learn about the community,” he says. “You go at [their] speed and you approach with respect.”

Heal the people, heal the land 

For Clifford Paul, the moose management co-ordinator for the Unama’ki Institute of Natural Resources, this new arrangement is an opportunity for true healing among the Mi’kmaq.

“The Mi’kmaq language hasn’t been spoken in these areas in a long time,” Paul says. “The language belongs there. Our people belong there.”

It is also a chance to draw on Indigenous wisdom to help heal the land at a time when the environment is in dire need of protection. The Mi’kmaq have a proven track record of helping to improve the ecosystems in Nova Scotia’s parks, Paul says. In recent years, for example, they reintroduced pine martens into the boreal forest and helped to rectify an overabundant moose population through harvesting.

While the latter project was highly controversial — both with people who oppose hunting and non-Indigenous hunters who opposed being excluded — Paul says the Mi’kmaq successfully demonstrated their ability to get the job done safely while providing positive social impacts to their communities.

Restoring the spiritual connection between the Mi’kmaq people and the land is another crucial part of this deal, Paul says. Although the arrangement is about resource management and economic opportunities, it is also about harvesting knowledge from these sacred lands after hundreds of years of severed access.

“ When we go to these places and do our storytelling, it widens the breadth and scope of our Traditional Knowledge,” he says. “ You heal the people by taking them back to the land.” 

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Summary

• A working group of First Nations and the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada released an interim report on the cumulative impacts of development in the Ring of Fire.
• Among the participants and collaborators in that report, the Government of Ontario was glaringly absent. The report says the province hasn’t shared valuable data on caribou, polar bears and other regional species that are needed to complete the assessment.
• Ontario NDP MPP Sol Mamakwa said, “By not providing any information or any data to the process, they are essentially muzzling the process itself.”

We’re trying out staff-written summaries. Did you find this useful? YesNo

Ontario has not been involved in the federal government’s regional assessment of the Ring of Fire, withholding scientific data and funding needed to understand the impact of mining development, even as the province ushers it through. 

The province is absent in the regional assessment working group’s interim report, released Feb. 23. In multiple instances, the group, made up of representatives from 15 First Nations and the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada, makes clear Ontario has yet to sign on. 

There is still an “opportunity for collaboration with the province of Ontario in the regional assessment,” the group wrote in the report. The group said it’s preparing what “specific information” it will need to request from the province.

Ontario’s absence is notable as the Doug Ford government continues to push through development in the Ring of Fire, an environmentally sensitive area of boreal forest and peatlands in the James Bay Lowlands, known as Bakitanaamowin Aki, which means “the Breathing Lands,” and Mammamattawa, or “many rivers coming together,” by the First Nations that call it home.

“If they really, really cared about [the assessment], they would work with the federal government,” Ontario NDP MPP Sol Mamakwa, who represents the Ring of Fire region, told The Narwhal. “By not providing any information or any data to the process, they are essentially muzzling the process itself.”

A spokesperson for the federal Impact Assessment Agency confirmed to The Narwhal that the working group understands “several areas it must assess are within provincial expertise.” It will “request information from Ontario as needed” in addition to consulting publicly available data, the spokesperson added.

The Ontario government is hoping the region will be the centre of new mining activity. During a press conference with Prime Minister Mark Carney in December, Premier Ford said Ontario is on track to get “shovels in the ground this June” to build a road to the remote region.

But the regional assessment has also been in the works for at least seven years. Aroland First Nation and environmental groups asked for a federal regional assessment in 2019.

The Ontario government has signed deals with three First Nations along the proposed roads to the Ring of Fire, even as other local communities urge the government to pause and properly address environmental protections and long-standing issues on the ground, such as boil-water advisories, health care and housing.

The interim regional assessment report reiterates some of these concerns, recommending the existing conditions for First Nations in northern Ontario be “thoroughly examined” and for “immediate interventions” to be made, even as mining and development are greenlit. 

“There are a lot of things happening in these First Nations and their territories that both Canada and Ontario need to address,” Mamakwa said. 

“Before the conversation turns to mining, conditions need to be properly assessed and improved.” 

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The working group’s plan, updated in November, shows it has already built an information sharing platform, held technical sessions, developed community-led studies and begun to evaluate cumulative impacts of development in the Ring of Fire.

It’s now seeing through evaluations and studies and continuing to engage with communities to eventually compile a final report, which the group expects to land around June 2027. 

Whether or not Ontario will come to the table for the next phase is not yet clear.

“I think [the Ford government] is not happy with the federal assessment,” Mamakwa said. “The process itself, I think, they don’t want to be part of. And they just want to do their own thing.”

Ontario’s participation was ‘TBD’ — now it’s non-existent

Last January, when the working group finalized its terms of reference, it described an “outer ring” of contributors, such as experts and industry representatives and listed Ontario as one of these — but with “TBD,” or to be determined, attached to its name. 

The latest report suggests Ontario is not participating despite having a trove of scientific information readily available about the region. 

While 22 federal departments and agencies show up on a list of respondents to the working group’s public call for information and data, no provincial ministries are listed.

Even Wyloo Metals, the company behind the Eagle’s Nest mine, currently in the exploration phase in the Ring of Fire, contributed to technical sessions of the regional assessment, according to the report.

All of this is raising questions about whether the Ford government is preventing Ontario public servants from participating in the regional assessment. 

Without Ontario at the table for the regional assessment, “staff obviously won’t be given the mandate to participate,” Kerrie Blaise, the founder of the non-profit Legal Advocates for Nature’s Defence, told The Narwhal. 

“One hundred per cent, there would be staffers who would have knowledge and things to contribute. Without the direction to do so, they’re barred from doing so.”

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In an interview at Queen’s Park on March 23, The Narwhal asked Ontario Environment Minister Todd McCarthy about the province’s lack of involvement in the regional assessment. He said he’d look into the matter.

McCarthy also told The Narwhal the province is “co-operating” with the federal government, citing a Dec. 18 agreement between the two levels to streamline the environmental assessment process. 

In that agreement, Ontario promised to lead any assessments for projects that are subject to both federal and provincial jurisdiction. But this deal covers single projects, whereas the Ring of Fire regional assessment isn’t examining a project, instead looking at cumulative effects of development in the region.

McCarthy said Ontario’s absence from the interim regional assessment report was “an exception.” 

“I suspect that Ontario is part of that conversation, and will be part of the conversation and will continue to co-operate and lead in terms of sharing data … to get all of it done,” he said.

“If the sense is that we’re not there at the moment, as I speak to you, we’re going to be there as we are all the time in terms of co-operating and leading.” 

The Narwhal sent specific questions to Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources, as well as the premier’s office, the Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks and the Ministry of Indigenous Affairs and First Nations Economic Reconciliation, about the government’s direction to public servants and financial willingness to support First Nation participation in the federal assessment. None responded to those emails by publication time.

Ontario is withholding scientific data on the Ring of Fire from the regional assessment

Within its interim report, the assessment group wrote that “several priorities for the regional assessment would benefit from provincial expertise.”

There are hints of what kind of expertise the group is hoping to get, in a submission by Environment and Climate Change Canada filed in January in response to one of the group’s requests for information.

In a question about Indigenous consent for non-Indigenous uses of land, the Environment Department pointed out that most traditional territories in Ontario are on non-federal lands, and the province is responsible for hunting and fishing regulations there.

The department also pointed out how the province has been monitoring boreal caribou and undertaking research to fill gaps in knowledge about the animal, and that the province holds valuable data such as aerial surveys on polar bears in the southern Hudson Bay subpopulation. 

Ontario also hosts the Natural Heritage Information Centre, which has historical data and continues to track biodiversity in the Ring of Fire region, the federal Environment Department noted, and directed questions about the centre to the provincial government.

“There are certain things the federal government cannot touch,” Blaise said. “So even if there’s a comment deadline, and people bring up concerns, if it’s not all within federal jurisdiction, you’re not going to have those players at the table to actually respond to those information gaps and requests.”

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Without Ontario’s participation, the working group will be forced to go to the province to request information. That could result in more delays and extra costs, Blaise said.

When the Government of Alberta successfully challenged the constitutionality of the Impact Assessment Act at the Supreme Court of Canada, the judges emphasized in the 2023 ruling that “respect for the division of powers” between the federal and provincial governments helps put in place strong environmental protection laws and “facilitates co-operation between the two levels of government.”

Here, “we’re not getting that co-operation,” Blaise said. “So it means you’re inherently getting a narrower process, a process that doesn’t actually have all the requisite knowledge and expertise and government officials at the table.” 

Blaise also said Ontario’s lack of participation could translate to a lack of provincial support for whatever the working group ends up recommending.

First Nations need more funding to participate in the regional assessment from ‘other parties.’ Ontario did not respond to the call

The interim report highlights how many First Nations in the Ring of Fire area lack basic necessities, like clean water, health care, housing, education and electricity. First Nations can’t be “true partners in equitable decision-making processes” like the regional assessment, the group wrote, without these “necessities of life.” 

The report recommended that the existing conditions of First Nations in northern Ontario be “thoroughly examined” and that “immediate interventions” be made.

Community members also have to “constantly balance their roles,” the report stated, with responding to emergencies, dealing with other federal and provincial negotiations, staying involved in legal actions, responding to regulatory processes like permit applications and answering outside requests from industry.

All of this points to a need for more funding to help “address the participation gaps within the regional assessment process,” the group wrote.

While First Nations have worked with the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada on a funding strategy, and receive “base funding” to support their participation, the group said the amounts involved are “often largely insufficient.”

The Impact Assessment Agency of Canada’s departmental plan for 2026-27 shows it’s planning for $34,206,000 in cumulative spending cuts through 2029, but it’s unclear whether or how those cuts will impact its work on the Ring of Fire regional assessment.

The working group noted the effort involved in trying to apply to other federal funding programs, or nailing down private funds, is “prohibitive.” The group recommended that the federal government “and other parties” help the First Nations get enough funding so that they’re not burdened with trying to find the money themselves. 

“The provincial government cannot claim to move the Ring of Fire forward ethically or equitably while withholding information or funding for this process,” Mamakwa said.

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This story is part of Generating Futures, a series from The Narwhal exploring clean energy sovereignty among B.C. First Nations.

When most people think of an energy conference in Canada, they probably imagine people dressed in suits, seated in rows of chairs under fluorescent lighting, looking at a PowerPoint presentation. 

Well, not this gathering. 

Indigenous Clean Energy’s directional gatherings are a special place in the energy industry. They prioritize wellness, time on the land with local Indigenous Elders and connecting with one another outside of panels or breakout sessions.

“For me it’s super important to make sure that we bring [wellness] forward, and make it normal for people when they are attending gatherings,” organizer Danika Crow told The Narwhal.

“With wellness you gotta make sure people are healthy, right? To focus on and build clean energy projects, [wellness] is one of our goals out of these gatherings,” she said.

Crow, who is from Big Grassy River First Nation in northwestern Ontario, is the wellness and gatherings manager for Indigenous Clean Energy, a non-profit organization that delivers capacity-building programs for Indigenous people and communities across Canada who are looking to develop energy projects.

“Past cohorts wanted more connection to the land, and more culture, so I think that’s what we brought them with the directional gatherings. Taking the whole day to … build connections with each other on the land, and to learn about the different territories we’re on and their culture,” Crow said.

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Indigenous Clean Energy has hosted gatherings in five directions: Iqaluit, representing the north, Fredericton, representing the east, Manitoulin Island, Ont., representing the south, Nanaimo, B.C., representing the west, and Whitecap Dakota First Nation in Saskatchewan representing central Canada.

The gatherings reflect the growing visibility of Indigenous people in Canada’s energy transition. More than 90 per cent of privately owned clean energy projects in B.C., known as independent power producer projects, have Indigenous participation, either through full ownership, as equity partners or through royalty agreements.

And B.C. is not alone.

On its website, the federal government says “renewable energy projects on traditional Indigenous territory or reserve lands increased steadily since the 1970s, and more than quadrupled from 2009 to 2020.” 

Indigenous values a core part of directional gatherings, programming

At the Nanaimo gathering in late February, the days began with a smudging ceremony, a common practice for First Nations people, where traditional medicines are burned to create smoke that cleanses the energy of anything it touches. 

Crow says when Indigenous Clean Energy began looking for venues to host directional gatherings, it focused on Indigenous-owned spaces to ensure smudging could be part of programming, as many businesses do not permit smoke inside of their buildings.

Another unique cultural consideration was spending the entire first day of the gathering on the land with local Elder Dave Bodaly.

Bodaly, a member of Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island, took participants to old village sites while sharing teachings about the land, traditional medicines and local animals.

“For our participants from the West Coast, [we wanted to] remind them of all the tools they have in their own region,” Crow said, noting that spending time on the land and in community can offer something not found in books. 

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That sentiment holds true for Dakota Marsden, a participant at the Nanaimo directional gathering who has attended numerous Indigenous Clean Energy events in the past.

“I saw this program with Indigenous Clean Energy and I didn’t have any idea what to expect. It was called Generation Power. … I was part of the first cohort and started learning about what clean energy could be,” Marsden told The Narwhal. The Generation Power program employs Indigenous youth from across Canada in the energy sector, lasting from three to nine months, and paired with mentors in the field. 

She says what keeps her coming back to these events are the networking opportunities and the heavy emphasis on mentorship. Marsden travels to gatherings with her son Hawk, who turns two years old this month. 

“I find that Indigenous organizations are more open to little ones coming, right? I did start taking Hawk quite young into these spaces: he was two months old.”

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“In the beginning I didn’t see any other babies, it was just Hawk. … At this gathering I saw a lot more babies and children. It was very nice to see that they’re being included in these gatherings and capacity-building programs,” she said. 

Participants find community at directional gatherings

Five years after the initial launch of the Generation Power program, Marsden still attends events all over the country with Indigenous Clean Energy, strengthening relationships and creating new ones. At the Nanaimo gathering, her only criticism was that she wanted more dedicated time to hear about everyone’s energy projects.

Marsden is employed as the lands manager in her nation, Pinaymootang First Nation in Manitoba, so she is used to energy projects coming across her desk. 

So far, her nation has installed level three electric-vehicle chargers — the fastest available — and solar panels at the local conference centre. The nation has also submitted a proposal to Manitoba Hydro to answer a call for 600 megawatts of wind-generated power. 

Marsden was initially not sure about clean energy, but the guidance and mentorship provided through Indigenous Clean Energy programming has been crucial in her journey.

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She is one example of many who return to and find community at these events, as confirmed by the organization’s director of energy and climate Freddie Campbell, who is Michif from Ktunaxa Kinbasket territory in B.C., with her Métis family name coming from Lac La Biche, Alta. 

“We wanted to offer another opportunity to gather and really open that space for folks to have these conversations about what people are experiencing in their regions in terms of energy needs, gaps and future dreams,” Campbell told The Narwhal, emphasizing the importance of land-based programming. 

“It can be easy to get caught up or distracted in the colonial system that we are existing in, so I think that taking that time on the land really allows us to get back to that space of connection, to come together and dream about systems that are our own,” she said. 

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Though she grew up in Saskatchewan, Santana Dreaver stood out when The Narwhal began looking for a B.C.-based Indigenous Journalism Fellow. For one thing, Santana had spent time at CBC learning the fundamentals of journalism through its Indigenous Pathways program, accruing bylines and skills. But she also had a passion for journalism and a clear vision of the kinds of stories she wanted to tell: centring youth, grappling with ecological disasters and industry impacts, and rooted in sovereignty and traditional practices.

Here at The Narwhal, Santana will be spending 2026 learning about in-depth feature writing and reporting, and telling stories from across the province. You’ll see her byline on IndigiNews as well, which is a partner in this fellowship, and she’ll be receiving training and mentorship from the Indigenous Journalists Association. Santana has already racked up a few bylines at The Narwhal — covering B.C.’s critical minerals push and the women leading natural disaster response across Canada — but we’re thrilled to formally introduce her to you. You’ll be seeing a lot of her in the year ahead!

What inspired you to go into journalism? 

There were a few moments growing up that inspired me to be a journalist. I must have been five or six when my photograph and interview made the local newspaper — a group of us from the Kinistin Saulteaux Nation went to the Tisdale, Sask., airport to go on mini-airplane rides. My grandma was the school receptionist and had the newspaper clipping hung up in the staff room. I remember feeling pride seeing it there. 

When I was eleven, I competed in the Saskatchewan First Nation winter games, hosted in Saskatoon that year. I won two gold medals in badminton, in under-12 singles and doubles — my first big competition in the sport. Between matches a news crew came to the courts and my coach told me to go and interview. Being on TV for playing a sport I loved made an impact on me. 

Lastly, I grew up around storytelling my entire childhood. Stories are how culture is passed down from generation to generation. As a Gen Z Saulteaux and Plains Cree person, journalism always felt like a modern way for me to tell stories and practise that aspect of my culture.

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You grew up in northern Saskatchewan on Kinistin Saulteaux Nation, and you’re a member of Mistawasis Nêhiyawak. Now that you’re in B.C., what’s something you miss about the Prairies? 

Without stating the obvious that I miss my family, what I often find myself missing is open and quiet spaces. The Lower Mainland can sometimes feel congested for someone who grew up in rural and northern Saskatchewan. 

I miss my connection with the sky — thunderstorms, the bright sunlight nearly everyday, star constellations, moon cycles and the Northern Lights are harder to see with the light and air pollution here. 

Something I never expected to miss is being around bison. My community has had bison since I was a child, housed in the fields behind our house, and my appreciation for these relatives only grew the more I learned about salmon in Coast Salish lands, reflecting on my own values and culture throughout the years. 

You served on former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s youth council — what was that experience like? 

Advising the former prime minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet for 2.5 years was a rewarding and challenging experience. In my personal life, I was branded as a Liberal when the position was non-partisan, and on the council I can say confidently I was one of the most vocal members to speak about issues affecting Indigenous people in Canada and overseas.

I felt immense pressure to use my access in government to push forward Indigenous Rights, and found myself wanting to quit from time to time. All of that said, I learned how to say the hard things when it mattered and my confidence grew realizing how much knowledge I carried forward to roundtables and consultations. 

Two highlights were attending an online safety symposium, surrounded by journalists and hosted by the Right Honourable Mary Simon, Canada’s first Indigenous Governor General, at Rideau Hall in Ottawa, where I ended up at dinner with people from TikTok Canada. The second was being invited to the Prime Minister’s Office for an invitation-only meeting following ongoing efforts to advocate for Palestine with fellow council member Ganiyat Sadiq.

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You have a lot of experience in emergency preparedness work, including as an advisor to the Ministry of Emergency Management and Climate Readiness, and a board member for Preparing Our Home, which is focused on emergency readiness for Indigenous youth. What drew you to that work? 

Just before the pandemic I attended Preparing Our Home in Osoyoos, B.C., as a youth participant. I was supposed to fly to New York City after the gathering to attend a conference at the United Nations when the city declared a state of emergency, cancelling what would have been my first time at the U.N. 

While the cancellation was disappointing, I felt grateful to be in Canada during the outbreak of COVID, and it made everything I learned at Preparing Our Home stick with me as one participant spoke about pandemic protocols in her Northern Ontario community.

After moving to B.C. by myself in 2021, disaster after disaster happened in the province. I lived on my own and had no emergency contact at the time, so educating myself about the lands I had moved to and how to prepare for its potential dangers became critical when I realized no one else was going to do it for me. 

What are your favourite stories to report?

My favourite stories to report on are emergency management stories, anything related to the land and Indigenous Rights, governance and policy. As for my favourite story thus far, it changes often, but one that stays top of mind is an Okanagan salmon restoration story that I wrote for CBC. 

I could feel how happy everyone involved was, and it stayed the top story on the CBC B.C. website for a few days. I don’t want to associate ratings with a personal favourite story, but that shows it was a special moment in the province for a lot of people, including myself. 

You spent a year at CBC in the Indigenous Pathways program, but before that, you worked for Sacred Earth, an Indigenous women-led organization focused on climate justice and energy transitions. What did you learn in that role about the challenges of tackling fossil fuel dependency?

Working for Sacred Earth, I learned that governments in Canada subsidize oil and gas companies, not leaving much incentive for corporations to transition to cleaner energy methods. General misinformation about clean energy, and oil and gas being the status quo for a century in the country is also a barrier in tackling fossil fuel dependency. The start-up and maintenance costs of transitioning is also a barrier, especially in rural and remote communities. 

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You’re spending all of 2026 at The Narwhal. What’s one story you hope to tell before you leave? 

During my time with The Narwhal I hope to tell stories that matter to B.C. First Nations people. I am always thinking about the land I reside on, how British Columbia obtained it and how I, as a guest, can be back in a way that feels good to me, which I hope to do with my reporting. Early on after moving here I learned about the concept of witnessing in Salish culture, and I hope as a journalist I can be a witness to what local nations are doing and comfortable sharing.

The Narwhal’s 2026 Indigenous Journalism Fellowship is possible with support from the Sitka Foundation. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, no foundation or outside organization has editorial input into our stories.

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

Summary

• The first round of investments from a $375-million fund for Indigenous-led conservation in the territory is being distributed to 21 Indigenous partner governments.
• The funds will support activities on three Tłı̨chǫ protected areas, which cover roughly half of Tłı̨chǫ territory and represent a region three times larger than Banff National Park.
• Funds will also support new and existing Guardians programs, which will generate steady jobs and preserve cultural knowledge that would otherwise be lost.

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A landmark initiative in the Northwest Territories is disbursing $21.6 million to Indigenous governments to support protected areas and Guardian programs.

The funds represent the first round of investments from the Our Land for the Future Trust. The trust came out of an agreement signed in 2024 by the federal government, territorial government, 21 Indigenous governments and private donors that invested $375 million into Indigenous-led conservation in the territory.

$375M Indigenous-led conservation deal just signed in the Northwest Territories

The investments were announced Feb. 26 at a meeting in Yellowknife, where the agreement’s partners gathered to review progress.

“It’s an exciting announcement,” Dahti Tsetso, the trust’s chief executive officer, told The Narwhal. With the agreement finalized and funds transferred to the trust’s account, money is now flowing to Indigenous governments to support conservation work at the community level: protecting diverse ecosystems, culturally and spiritually important areas and wildlife habitats.

That, she says, “was always the vision.”

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In this first round of funding, Tsetso says each of the 21 Indigenous partner governments is getting resources to work toward area-based conservation goals as well as Guardian and stewardship goals.

In some cases, this will mean managing existing protected areas, such as Edéhzhíe in the Dehcho region or Thaidene Nëné near Łutsël K’é. In other cases, funds will support communities looking to explore or advance protected areas. Both Ka’a’gee Tu and Sambaa K’e First Nations, for example, have been working to establish protected areas that would conserve culturally and ecologically significant zones, home to wildlife such as moose, fish, waterfowl and caribou.

“There’s a number of initiatives that have been ongoing for quite some time,” Tsetso says. “Now the trust can help support their efforts.”

She adds that all of the Indigenous partners have ambitions to either initiate or expand their Guardian work. For instance, the K’ahsho Got’ine Guardians in Fort Good Hope are looking to expand, while the Gwich’in are developing a regional Guardian program.

The frontline of conservation: how Indigenous guardians are reinforcing sovereignty and science on their lands

Protecting roughly half of Tłı̨chǫ lands

The Our Land for the Future agreement covers existing protected areas in the territory, but it’s also expected to support 200,000 square kilometers of new protected and conserved areas, contributing to the federal government’s commitment to protect 30 per cent of Canada’s land and water by 2030. 

Last week’s announcement recognized a big step toward that goal. In November 2025, three protected areas on Tłı̨chǫ lands were officially recognized as Indigenous protected areas by the federal government and added to a national database. The online database is currently being updated to reflect more lands and waters protected as of the end of 2025, according to a spokesperson from Environment and Climate Change Canada.

Will Canada meet its goal to protect 30% of land and waters by 2030?

The three protected areas are known as Tłı̨chǫ Nàowoò K’è Dèt’àhot’ı̨ı̨, Gowhaèhdǫǫ̀ Yek’e Aet’ı̨̀ı̨ K’è and Tıts’aàdı̀ı Nàdèe K’è Wexoedıı.

Altogether, they span 22,565 square kilometers— equivalent to about three times the size of Banff National Park, and encompassing about half of Tłı̨chǫ lands.

“It is a great piece of work,” Tłı̨chǫ Grand Chief Jackson Lafferty says.

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He adds that there are also large areas where development is being promoted to support economic self-sufficiency. “It’s a balancing act,” he says. “We’re doing what we can to conserve and also develop.”

 Tłı̨chǫ Nàowoò K’è Dèt’àhot’ı̨ı̨ is aimed at preserving Chief Monfwi’s trails: traditional winter and summer travel routes that connect the four Tłıc̨hǫ communities as well as important cultural and harvesting areas, Brett Wheler, senior policy advisor on sustainability and resource management with the Tłı̨chǫ Government, says.

Similarly, Gowhaèhdǫǫ̀ Yek’e Aet’ı̨̀ı̨ K’è prioritizes the preservation of the ancestral Įdaà Trail, which connects Great Bear Lake to Great Slave Lake. There are important waterways and watersheds situated roughly halfway along the route.

Finally, Tıts’aàdı̀ı Nàdèe K’è Wexoedıı extends along the shoreline of the north arm of Great Slave Lake, and will protect habitat for birds and other wildlife such as caribou.

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“These areas have been important for Tłıc̨hǫ people for a long time, basically forever,” Wheler says. Although Tłıc̨hǫ people have protected the areas since time immemorial, a lack of resources to get people on the land had kept them from fully realizing their vision of stewardship.  

The funds from the trust will support the “people component” of the protected areas, Wheler says, including Guardian work, environmental monitoring and cultural programming. One intention is to hire people full time — though the Tłıc̨hǫ Government already has several monitoring programs, patchy funding has meant most employees work on a part-time or casual basis.

The trust served as a catalyst for having the areas officially designated and recognized by the federal government, Wheler explains. In anticipation of funds flowing from the Our Land for the Future, Tłı̨chǫ law governing land protection was updated in 2023. In 2025, the federal government deemed the three areas equivalent to other protected areas, such as national or territorial parks, for achieving conservation goals. As a self-governing nation, the Tłı̨chǫ Government is the sole decision-making authority on its 39,000 square kilometres of land. A land claims and self-government agreement signed in 2003 gave the Tłı̨chǫ Government ownership of surface and subsurface rights on these lands.  

Stephanie Behrens, the Tłıc̨hǫ Government’s manager of lands protection and renewable resources, echoes Wheler.

“Our Elders have always said that the wildlife and the land need us to be out there,” she says. “Having this pot of money really ensures that we’re able to do that.”

Guardians funding will bring jobs, protect culture 

Behrens says the intent is to hire two full-time Guardians in each of the four Tłıc̨hǫ communities, along with a Guardian manager.

Employing Guardians full-time will also provide jobs in an economically challenging time for the region, Behrens says. The territory’s three diamond mines have long been major employers, but are all expected to close by the end of the decade. One is shutting down this month, and the two others are struggling financially.

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Tłıc̨hǫ Guardians will help implement work set out for the protected areas, including stewardship, monitoring and harvesting. The work will support the Tłıc̨hǫ Government’s language and cultural programs, but also provide opportunities for individuals to exercise their culture, Wheler says. Elders will provide Guardians with guidance on how to re-establish and maintain cultural trails, along with a network of camps and cabins. 

A lot of that cultural knowledge might otherwise be lost.

“There are only a handful of people that actually know these historic trails,” Behrens says, adding much of her work is guided by her late grandfather’s vision. As an Elder, he was involved in negotiating the Tłıc̨hǫ self-government agreement.“To be able to utilize these trails once again in the way that our Elders and ancestors used to do, I think he would be extremely proud,” she says.

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.