Summary

• A tiny village in Newfoundland and Labrador could become the site of a major floating liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility
• Amid talk about exporting LNG from the east coast, some community members look to Kitimat, B.C., home to Canada’s first major LNG facility 
• Residents of the village of Fermeuse, home to about 300 people, may be tempted by the prospect of jobs but one Kitimat, B.C., resident warns: “The noise, pollution, traffic and burden on the infrastructure is not worth it”

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About an hour’s drive from St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, the little fishing village of Fermeuse sits on the shores of a deep harbour, sheltered from the tempestuous North Atlantic. Atop a hill overlooking the village, eight slow-turning turbines harvest energy from the nearly ever-present wind that flows from the open ocean. Generations of fishers have plied the waters off the coast, harvesting cod, crab and numerous other species.

More than 5,000 kilometres away, on the northwest coast of British Columbia, the town of Kitimat, B.C., is newly home to Canada’s first major liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility. LNG Canada started operations here last year, lighting up the night sky with its noisy and bright flare stack and welcoming a stream of supertankers to the deepwater channel that connects the community with pan-Pacific shipping routes. Years in the making, the LNG export project has undeniably changed life for those who live alongside it.

Fermeuse could be facing similar changes.

When the Atlantic cod fisheries collapsed in the 1990s — putting more than 35,000 people out of work across Newfoundland and Labrador — many left the village in search of good paying jobs, including in the province’s booming oil and gas sector. Now, as nearby offshore oil developments like Bay Du Nord get a boost from the federal government and the province eyes new revenues from the sector, the sleepy village of around 300 residents could become the focal point for an influx of new industry.

Crown LNG Holdings Ltd., under the name of its Newfoundland affiliate, Fermeuse Energy, plans to develop a swath of the harbour to support several projects, possibly including a liquefied natural gas processing and export terminal. The company is approved for a marine base but has not yet submitted an official proposal for an LNG plant. In late January, Fermuese Energy signed an agreement with Hanwha Ocean, a South Korean shipbuilding company and expert in offshore facilities, to “jointly advance the Newfoundland and Labrador LNG development project in Canada.”  

“If the political will and the community support comes along, then we will move ahead with the project by the end of this year or next year,” Swapan Kataria, CEO of Crown LNG, told The Narwhal in an interview.

Valerie Walsh, whose family has lived in Fermeuse for generations, said many in the community are tempted by an idea that “our sons and daughters who moved away for work will maybe move back to Fermeuse” to build the LNG project.

“It’s a sought-after harbour,” she said, explaining it’s protected from the open water and safe for large boats. “It could be really rough in the North Atlantic, but boats can come in here and they’re protected.” 

But Walsh is worried residents will be seduced by industry without knowing what they’re really signing up for.

“I don’t know if it’s because the fishery collapse just took the wind out of everybody’s sails and they’re just waiting for the saviour to come along, which is oil and gas,” she mused. “[The company] can make it seem safe. They can make it seem a lot of things. I think this will be the end of the harbour and any natural thing for us. … There will be no whales coming in anymore, no puffins, no fishery, no boats, no anything.” 

“I don’t know that the community really understands it.”

Details about the potential LNG project are vague, but the company has said plans could include a 380-kilometre pipeline along the ocean floor, trenched for part of that distance to protect it from icebergs, connecting untapped offshore gas reserves to the village. There, a floating liquefaction facility could supercool the gas, reducing its volume for marine transport to overseas destinations. Kataria said the facility, if built, would process and export up to 10 million tonnes of LNG per year. The company acknowledged an LNG project would bring change to the community and said if anything were to move ahead, public consultations and stakeholder engagements would be held.

“We are only approved for a marine base and I think it’s important to qualify that in order to avoid any future confusions,” Kataria said. “We are certainly there to service the offshore growth in the industry.” 

How the LNG project fits into the picture is that those same offshore areas are home to “a lot of gas reserves which nobody is going after,” he said. “We are connected with the industry, and we feel that there is gas which can be monetized.”

‘We don’t know what’s going to happen’: locals question how Fermeuse LNG would impact community

On the north coast of B.C., the massive LNG project was under construction for about five years, employing locals and flooding the community with thousands of out-of-town workers. It now employs around 300 people and will provide the community with $9.7 million in annual taxes for the first five years of operations.

Kitimat residents have experienced months of disruption to their daily lives since LNG Canada started flaring activities in late 2024. Flaring is the burning of excess or waste gas, a normal part of operating a liquefaction facility. In Kitimat, flaring has at times exceeded 90-metre-tall flames, about the height of London’s iconic Big Ben, in part due to an ongoing equipment issue. 

That causes light pollution, noise and emissions, as well as releases air pollution. Flaring at LNG facilities releases carbon monoxide, nitrous oxides, fine particulate matter and sulphur dioxide, all of which can have impacts on human health. For its part, LNG Canada in Kitimat says flaring is “safe, controlled and provincially regulated.” But that hasn’t stopped residents there from being concerned.

Walsh said she’s afraid ceding the harbour shores to an industrial hub for LNG and oil development would be a death knell for the villagers’ way of life.

“My father’s from here, his father and his father before that,” she told The Narwhal on a phone call. “We are literally closing the door on our way of life in this harbour if we let this industrial LNG come in.”

Brenda Aylward lives on the other side of the harbour from Walsh, where she raises sheep and grows vegetables while caring for her aging mother.

“It’s a fifth-generation farm and I’ve been involved pretty much my whole life,” she said. It’s a small farm-to-table operation she’s planning to expand — and she wonders what the impacts of an industrial project in the harbour would have on her livestock.

“I have fields that border the ocean,” she said, explaining the farm is just a few kilometres from the proposed industrial site. “Livestock are quite skittish, to noise and to light. Sheep are the most affected because they are the most skittish livestock.”

She said she has questions about how LNG operations and related marine traffic could alter the flock’s grazing and breeding patterns. Research from animal behaviour expert Temple Grandin has shown stress in livestock can cause agitation, increased thyroid activity and spikes in cortisol.

“[Will] I have my lambs when market time comes?” Aylward wondered. “We don’t know what’s going to happen there.”

Fermeuse Energy did not directly address questions about potential impacts and said there will be an opportunity for community members to get answers.

“We certainly understand that there will be questions from the residents of the area,” Stephen Tessier, a spokesperson with the company, wrote in an emailed statement. “We (Fermeuse Energy) are still in the discovery stage and we need to have a handle on actual product and political will in Newfoundland and Labrador in order to proceed.”

Tessier said before the company submits an application, it will conduct engineering and environmental studies.

“Once that happens, there will be public consultations and stakeholder engagements where the residents can ask questions, clarify their doubts and choose to support the project,” he wrote. “We look forward to working with the towns and residents as this project moves forward.”

One of Aylward’s neighbours, Jenny Wright, has similar questions about potential impacts to the community.

“We live right on the water,” she said. “We bought a traditional old Newfoundland home and my husband is a house builder and he’s renovated every last piece of it.”

She suggested the community should be looking at different options to create jobs beyond oil and gas.

“We are right on the East Coast Trail,” she said, referencing a 336-kilometre network of paths and trails, adding the region would be wise to capitalize on a growing tourism sector. “We can develop an economic plan here that is sustainable, like other towns in Newfoundland and Labrador have done, like Petty Harbour, who own their own fishery, have a co-operative plant and developed and promoted small businesses being around there — and then started a non-profit to educate people on the fishery.”

‘We depend on a clean coastline, clean water and a quiet environment’

Before the cod moratorium — an indefinite closure to the fishery implemented by the federal government in 1992 — came into effect, Fermeuse had a fish plant, too, and the harbour still supports an active fleet.

“Pretty soon — the end of March, early April — is the time for the crab boats going in and out,” Wright said. “Our first signs of spring are the fishery is up and going again. And then, of course, the whales that will come in shortly after that.”

She fears an influx of industry in the harbour would change everything.

“I’m exhausted with hearing everybody when they hear the word LNG go, ‘Oh, this is great, oil and gas is going to save us — it’s going to bring back jobs and all the young people, they’re going to come home and we’re going to flourish again.’ We’ve just done this over and over and over again, and we’re not learning from it.”

Walsh has been trying to get information about what the company wants to do — to little avail, she said — and help her community understand what’s at stake.

“Nobody can visualize it,” she said. “I don’t think they understand what it’s actually going to be like, physically, how the harbour will change. LNG is big money — a company can spin it whatever way they want. They can make it shiny and beautiful and never tell you the downsides.”

Kitimat’s story, some residents say, is a cautionary tale some places like Fermeuse can learn from.

“Expect all the promises they make never to materialize,” a Kitimat community member, who The Narwhal is calling James Smith to protect his family from repercussions, said. “And realize they often spend more effort trying to control the narrative than being transparent. You’re dealing with shiny on the outside, rotten to the core.”

Smith sent The Narwhal images of his property taken at night during recent overnight flaring activity.

“[My] house was lit up like daylight and shaking from the noise,” he wrote in a message accompanying the photos. “On top [of that] there was an ear-piercing whistle.”

Aylward, the sheep farmer, shuddered to think of her community changing so dramatically. 

“It’s devastating to think that something like that will come to this tiny little place,” she said. “We depend on a clean coastline, clean water and a quiet environment, for our food production and our lives. We do not want or need this here in our community.”

‘We already have the buyers’: Crown LNG says Fermeuse is well positioned to get gas to waiting markets 

Kataria agrees building an LNG facility in the harbour would mean significant change for residents of the fishing village.

“It is wrong of me to say that their life’s not going to change,” he said. “If you were looking at a peaceful water view, it is not going to remain the same. People’s expectations that the view is not going to change or the noise levels will not change or the traffic will not change, I think is wrong — because it will change. Industrialization will bring all those things.”

He said while the LNG development is in early stages, bringing industry to Fermeuse means jobs for a community that lost its base economy more than three decades ago.

“If I have the year right, it is 35 years plus [that] there has been no economic upswing in that community,” he said. “Let’s say it was a community of 1,500 people, or 2,000 people, gone down to 300. Do they need jobs? Do they need a change? I don’t know.”

“I think everybody understands that there is a give and take,” he added. 

Kataria said he’s optimistic about Prime Minister Mark Carney’s statements in recent months in support of LNG exports, but he hasn’t seen the political will to support an official proposal yet. 

If things do move forward, he said the main destination for exports from Newfoundland would be Europe, which continues, for now, to import fossil fuels to replace Russian gas since President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, but he also wants to tap into India’s “insatiable demand” for LNG. He noted the company could leverage an international loophole to get the gas there.

“There is a mechanism in place on international trading, where we could actually sell the cargo on the high seas to people taking it to Europe, and people bringing it from the other part of the world into Europe. We can take it from there and just hand it over to India.”

These kinds of high seas cargo swapping, or ship-to-ship transfers, are governed by rules set out by the International Maritime Organization — but the process is also used by the likes of the Russian shadow fleet, a cabal of shady shipping operators making vast sums of money by obscuring the origin of oil that would otherwise be heavily sanctioned.

“We already have a licence for importing 7.2 million tonnes in India,” Kataria said, adding the company is currently working on approvals to build a five-million tonne import facility in Scotland. 

“We are LNG terminal developers,” he explained. “We are not coming to Canada to … build a project and wait for somebody to come and buy the product from us — we already have the buyers. We’re coming there because we need it. It’s the other way around.” 

Lloyd Parrott, Newfoundland and Labrador’s energy and mines minister, told The Narwhal he considers natural gas a “key priority” for the province but he’s waiting on an official proposal for an LNG plant in Fermeuse.

“The department has not received a formal request for support for the Fermeuse energy project,” Parrott wrote in an emailed statement. “Our government will always make time to meet with companies to discuss potential projects that have the potential to provide benefits to Newfoundlanders and Labradorians.”

In Kitimat, Smith warned the promise of benefits may not be enough to offset the impacts of living beside an LNG plant.

“The noise, pollution, traffic and burden on the infrastructure is not worth it,” he said.

For her part, Walsh doesn’t want Fermeuse turned into an industrial hub.

“I just don’t want my community destroyed,” she said. “We’re at a crossroads. We’re caught up in this now. And I just don’t think it’ll be for the betterment of us, the people who live here.”

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Maurice Ruddick waited for nearly nine days near the bottom of a 4,300-metre-deep coal mine before he was rescued. An underground earthquake brought down ceilings and pillars and shifted debris into tunnels, trapping Ruddick and several other miners. Stuck in the darkness, with limited food and water Ruddick lifted his fellow miners’ spirits by leading them in prayers and song. 

In 1958, Nova Scotia’s Springhill mine disaster killed 75 men and trapped dozens in the tunnels. The world kept vigil for survivors as they were slowly rescued. Ruddick, a descendant of enslaved Black people, was among the last miners to be brought back to the surface. A media circus followed and the survivors’ stories were broadcast around the world.

“Maurice’s story is often celebrated for his heroism during the Springhill disaster but less attention is paid to the broader context of racial discrimination he faced,” Aderinola Olamiju told The Narwhal. Olamiju, a graduate student at Memorial University in Newfoundland, is researching the history of Black miners in Nova Scotia.  

“As an example, after the rescue, when he and other survivors were meant to travel to Georgia for vacation, there was still segregation in the United States at that time and he had to be housed separately from the white miners.”  

Ruddick’s story is one of the most well known of a Black miner in Canada. It was made into a Heritage Minute, covered in books and is now a musical play. Olamiju, originally from Nigeria, is looking to explore lesser-known stories. 

As he digs through archives, libraries, union pamphlets and historical newspapers, he hopes to uncover “the hidden stories of Black miners in Nova Scotia’s industrial past, particularly how racial dynamics influenced their experiences with workplace safety and health risks.” 

The Narwhal spoke with Olamiju about his research into what life was like for some of the first Black miners in Canada and the challenges of trying to piece together this history. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What questions do you hope to answer through your research?

As part of the Mining Danger project, which investigates the history of accidents, occupational disease and pollution in Canada’s mines and mining communities, the main focus of my research is looking at the racial dynamics of mining labour, particularly how it connects to health and risk. 

My research will examine several key questions, but the main ones are: how did coal mining companies, labour recruiters and government institutions together create and reinforce racial hierarchies within the industry? And how did Black workers engage with unions and workplace advocacy to improve their working conditions and address workplace accidents and issues relating to occupational health?

What role did Black miners play in Canada’s first mining booms?

Historically, the coal industry in Nova Scotia was intricately linked to the steel industry, as coal was used to burn the furnaces in the steel-making process. So you had two industries heavily dependent on each other. During the industrial expansion of the 1880s and 1890s, there increasingly became labour shortages in the coal industry. Companies like Dominion Coal (Domco, later Disco) and Nova Scotia Steel and Coal Company (Scotia) emerged as major players in the 1890s, and they turned Cape Breton into this industrial hub where you had rival companies running both steel and coal-mining operations. 

To address these labour shortages, some of these companies began to recruit labour from outside the country. Disco was actually a major facilitator of Black migration to Nova Scotia through agreements with the provincial government. The recruitment process sometimes used established networks within the North American steel industry, with company managers recruiting workers from industrial centres in Alabama, Buffalo, Maryland and Pittsburgh. 

Other times, you had labour recruiters going directly to Caribbean countries, and workers who returned home would also recruit their friends or families. As many Caribbean countries were colonized by the British at the time, it was easier to recruit labour from the Caribbean, particularly from Barbados and Jamaica. Nova Scotia’s location and shipping networks made this connection and recruitment easier and labour migration wasn’t only limited to the coal and steel industries. Domestic workers, particularly women, were also recruited from the Caribbean to work in Nova Scotia.

What do we know, so far, about what life was like as a Black miner in the early days of Canada?

We know these new labour recruits faced multiple layers of racial discrimination. Just like in our contemporary society, back then Black labour was devalued as Black workers were often paid much less compared to their white counterparts. Despite having skills, Black workers faced this constant discrimination that kept them in subordinate positions, doing the most physically demanding and lowest-paid jobs. During boom and bust cycles, these workers were often the last to be rehired and the first to be fired. 

Their housing situation was also subpar. For example, for some Disco workers, many lived in company shacks in the Cokeville section of Whitney Pier that lacked basic things like proper heating and running water. There’s this letter from 1908 where a blast furnace superintendent, J. McInnis, wrote to the general manager about how bad the houses were in the “Negro quarter” — they were unboarded and exposed to the harsh realities of winter weather. 

The work itself was extremely dangerous, especially at Disco’s blast furnaces and coke ovens. Black workers were concentrated at these positions because of racial stereotypes about their ability to withstand heat better than white workers. But despite all these negatives associated with labour and immigration, Black workers managed to build strong communities. They set up churches, schools and businesses to help each other cope with the challenges of industrial work and discrimination. 

What has surprised you most in your research so far?

Seeing how racial dynamics developed in Nova Scotia and what forces and factors shaped them. You had these companies actively recruiting Black workers from the Caribbean and the United States to address labor shortages, while at the same time Canada’s immigration policies were trying to restrict Black migration.

Where are you looking for information and what do you hope to find?

Over the summer months, I will be conducting research at various archives and libraries in Nova Scotia, including the Nova Scotia Archives and the university archives at Dalhousie and Cape Breton. Some of the most important sources will be company records, print newspapers and magazines and union documents. Canada’s immigration records are also useful in understanding the policy of immigration discrimination based on race and looking at the scale of migration and countries of origin.

How challenging has it been to find information on the history of Black miners in Nova Scotia? 

Generally, the historical record of such stories is often fragmented. Racial discrimination affected what stories were told and kept in archives. Sometimes the most valuable information can be found in places like immigration paperwork or company letters, rather than the usual mining narratives. Archives also may only keep what society at that time deemed important.

Another factor is scale. Compared to white workers, there weren’t that many Black workers in Nova Scotia’s mining industry. The Afro-Canadian population in Nova Scotia is significant and has a rich history, yes, but when it comes to mining specifically, their numbers were smaller. This was partly because of Canada’s immigration policies — immigration agents were actually given secret instructions to keep Caribbean Black people out, even when they met all the official requirements. They would even work with U.S. officials to restrict African-American migration by getting American railway companies to increase ticket prices for Black passengers from $20 to $200, for example.

Updated on Feb. 28, 2024, at 10:45 a.m. ET: The subtitle on this story was updated to clarify the researcher interviewed for this story is based in the Altantic region, not the Maritimes. He is based in Newfoundland and Labrador.

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After more than 30 years, the federal government has announced it’s lifting the moratorium that shut down commercial cod fishing in Newfoundland and Labrador in the 1990s.

The end of the moratorium includes a 46 per cent increase in total allowable catch from 13,000 tonnes in 2023 to 18,000 tonnes. Just before the collapse in the late 1980s, the total allowable catch was about 240,000 tonnes.

Additionally, international offshore fisheries were allocated a quota of 1,000 tonnes, accounting for about five per cent of the total allowable catch.

Reactions to the announcement have been mixed. Some organizations, like the Association of Seafood Producers, have voiced their support for the moratorium ending. Others are more skeptical. The union representing inshore fish harvesters, for instance, has asked the government to reverse the decision.

Change in how Northern cod abundance calculated allowed for status change

The announcement came after a change was made in Northern cod science in October 2023, when a scientific assessment changed Northern cod stock from being classified as “critical” to “cautious.”

In October 2023, the statistical model used for assessing cod abundance was updated to include inshore and juvenile cod survey data going back to 1954. This information indicated that historical cod population productivity was lower than previously estimated.

This decreased level of productivity means the cod population can be considered recovered at a lower population size than previously estimated. Cod recovery is dependent on the abundance of capelin, the climate and the environment — all factors that change over time and that need to be accounted for when setting targets for Northern cod recovery.

Fisheries and Oceans Canada manages fisheries using a precautionary approach that defines fish populations as either healthy, cautious or critical.

Populations in the critical zone are managed to promote stock growth and keep removals to the lowest possible level. Populations in the cautious zone are managed to promote stock rebuilding to the healthy zone.

At the 2024 stock assessment, the updated model reduced the boundary between the critical and cautious zone. The updated analysis identified that, while the cod population had not grown much in recent years, it had been in the cautious zone since 2016.

It’s important to note that the Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s fisheries stock assessment science is peer-reviewed and based on consensus by Fisheries and Oceans scientists, academic scientists and representatives from the fishing industry and environmental non-governmental organizations. National and international experts participate as external reviewers.

Moratorium has had lasting impacts in Newfoundland and Labrador

Newfoundland and Labrador’s fishing industry has grappled with the economic and social impacts of the moratorium for decades.

Northern cod, one of Canada’s many Atlantic cod populations, was once the backbone of one of the world’s largest fisheries, with hauls in excess of 800,000 tonnes in the late 1960s. This cod population is found on Newfoundland’s northern Grand Banks and off the coast of southern Labrador.

In 1992, commercial fisheries were shut down when the cod population declined by 99 per cent of its historical size, along with other groundfish species.

The moratorium had immediate, long-lasting repercussions for the province. It put more than 30,000 Newfoundlanders and Labradorians out of work and ultimately led to a 10 per cent decline in the province’s population as young residents left to find work elsewhere.

The moratorium didn’t mean Northern cod haven’t been fished since 1992. Inshore, small-vessel (maximum 65 feet, or about 20 metres) fishers have been allowed to catch cod most years since 1998.

Since 2006, Fisheries and Oceans Canada has also allowed a recreational fishery each summer as cod migrate inshore, and a seasonal Indigenous food, social and ceremonial fishery.

After remaining at very low abundance throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Northern cod began showing signs of modest recovery in 2015 and has since stabilized at about 12 per cent of its biomass from the 1960s, or 24 per cent of its biomass from the 1980s. In 2023, there were an estimated 407 million Northern cod, weighing 340,000 tonnes.

The risk of Northern cod cod declining again is high as moratorium lifts

The 2024 quota increase for Northern cod allows about six per cent of cod biomass to be harvested, which is relatively conservative, especially when compared to the fishery before the collapse. In some years, more than 50 per cent of cod biomass was caught.

Still, the risk of stock decline from 2024 to 2027 is high at 62 to 76 per cent, according to a technical report that hasn’t yet been published online. This means that Northern cod could end up back in the critical zone in 2025.

The Newfoundland and Labrador ecosystem is highly dynamic and climate change is affecting marine ecosystems and fisheries globally, compounding the challenges associated with managing Northern cod. After 32 years of a commercial moratorium, the whole world is watching to see what the future holds for Northern cod.

Disclosure statement: Tyler Eddy receives funding from the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Fisheries and Oceans Canada Atlantic Fisheries Fund, the Fisheries and Oceans Canada Sustainable Fisheries Science Fund, the Canadian Association of Prawn Producers, the Canada First Research Excellence Fund and Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada.

Matthew Robertson receives funding from the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Fisheries and Oceans Canada Atlantic Fisheries Fund.

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A massive study of the ocean environment off Torngat Mountains National Park has come to a conclusion: an Inuit-led marine conservation area here should move ahead.

The Torngat Mountains — Torngait in the Inuttitut dialect — span the northern tip of Labrador and eastern Quebec. On the Labrador side, they’re within the Inuit region of Nunatsiavut that stretches to the Quebec border and south to central Labrador. On the Quebec side they’re within Nunavik. Inuit from both regions have used this area for thousands of years.

There are no settlements within the park borders anymore but many people trace their roots back to these lands and waters, and some grew up in camps and communities in and around the Torngats.

The Narwhal visited the area last summer to meet the people who call this place home, and those who have been advocating its protection. 

On March 15, a joint announcement from the Nunatsiavut Government and Parks Canada confirmed the viability of protecting 16,791 square kilometres of the Labrador Sea at the shore of the Torngat Mountains.

Here’s how the Inuit-led protected area has taken shape, and why this recent announcement is significant.

Who is involved in establishing an Inuit protected area in the Torngats?

The Nunatsiavut Government has led the charge to create a marine conservation area, working in conjunction with Parks Canada — which falls under Environment and Climate Change Canada. Currently, in order for Indigenous-led marine conservation projects to be federally recognized, a federal agency has to be a partner, be that Parks Canada or Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

“We do keep referring to it as an Inuit-protected area,” Isabella Pain, the deputy minister of the Nunatsiavut Secretariat with the Nunatsiavut Government, previously told The Narwhal. “We were the ones who developed this plan. As Inuit, we went to the government to say we want to have a protected area.”

Other stakeholders in this agreement include Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Makivvik Corporation, which represents Nunavik Inuit, the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador and various industry groups and other organizations.

Through the feasibility study, which launched in 2019, more information was gleaned about the unique cultural and ecological importance of the region, Rodd Laing, director of environment for the Nunatsiavut Government, said. The proposed boundaries were adjusted as a result. A portion of the border was also carved out due to concerns around impacts on commercial fisheries. (While fishing is generally allowed in national marine conservation areas, bottom trawling — used for scallop and shrimp — is not.)

Why do Inuit want to protect the waters of the Torngat Mountains?

In 2005, the Nunatsiavut Government established the Torngat Mountains National Park Reserve in their land claims agreement, and called it “the Inuit gift to the people of Canada.” But the protected area ends at the low-water mark.

Home to polar bears, ringed seal, beluga and minke whales, narwhal, fish and many, many seabirds, these waters support both wildlife and the people who rely on them. That’s why the Nunatsiavut Government has been advocating to expand protections beyond the shore.

The area is also a shipping corridor, a gateway to the increasingly ice-free Northwest Passage. Despite that, Pain said, there’s no spill response equipment in the region.

Protecting these waters means bringing resources and people here to watch over the environment, to better understand it and how it’s changing, and to respond to what they see. Pain told The Narwhal once the protected area is established, “we want Inuit to be on the land, on the ocean to monitor, to be Guardians.”

Establishing this marine conservation area would also contribute 0.29 per cent to the federal government’s stated goal of protecting 30 per cent of land and water in Canada by 2030. As of January 2023, just under 15 per cent was protected.

What has happened so far?

Since 2016, the Nunatsiavut Government has been working on a marine plan called Imappivut, to determine the use of the waters surrounding Nunatsiavut’s shore. The Torngats marine conservation area falls under this larger project, which expresses the Labrador Inuit jurisdiction over the marine environment.

In 2022, the Nunatsiavut and federal governments signed a memorandum of understanding to consider the feasibility of establishing the marine protected area.

A 15-chapter research document that gathers all western and Inuit Knowledge on the Torngats marine environment was produced as part of this, and the team working on the project travelled up and down the coast, visiting the five communities of Nunatsiavut to gather information and opinions.

“It’s been a true co-developed process,” Laing said, with a great deal of input given by Labrador Inuit, external stakeholders, researchers and beyond. “That’s a really important piece.”

That culminated in last week’s announcement, when Nunatsiavut President Johannes Lampe and federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault declared the protections are feasible, and furthermore, people want to see it happen.

What happens next?

Negotiations can now move ahead to determine what a protected area here might look like: the boundaries, what activities are permitted within them and how the area will be managed and by whom. There are also impact benefit agreements to be sorted out and a formal establishment agreement.

“This announcement today is an important one, not only in the protection of our homeland, but for the preservation of our culture, traditions and Inuit identity,” President Lampe is quoted in the press release saying. “We have worked hard to reach this milestone and will continue to do so as we finalize the memorandum of understanding that will see the establishment of this Inuit protected area. We are glad to see this achievement become a reality today, and proud to take steps forward in ensuring our true Labrador Inuit way of life is maintained for future generations.”

The final step of the process is to secure these protections by designating the site under federal law, such as the Canada National Marine Conservation Area Act, explained Sigrid Kuehnemund, who manages establishment in the Atlantic with Parks Canada. While that designation is underway, work can begin on the ground to develop the site.

Parks Canada has committed to establishing 10 new national marine conservation areas by 2025 — the new Inuit protected area is one of them.

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The worn peaks of the Torngat Mountains slope into rubble before crumbling into the Labrador Sea. They dip into verdant valleys and shallow bowls perched thousands of metres into the sky. The peaks grow taller as you travel north, replaced by straight-blade ridges and jagged tops. Trees peter out of the subarctic landscape long before you reach them, but low brush and willow, fireweed and berries crawl across their shores and climb as far as they can find soil. These stoic tortoises and feisty razorbacks proffer adventure to those who seek it, but perhaps they’re more interested in telling you a story — if you’ll listen.

Torngait, in the Inuttitut dialect, means “place of spirits.” It’s from this word that the Torngat Mountains derive their name and from the Inuit that they derive their protection. In 2005, the Labrador Inuit Association and the governments of Canada and Newfoundland and Labrador signed the Labrador Inuit Land Claim Agreement. It established the Torngat Mountains National Park Reserve — the precursor to the national park that followed in 2008. 

Unlike those before it, Torngat Mountains National Park was co-led by the Indigenous people of these lands, rather than imposed on them. The Labrador Inuit Association’s chief negotiator, Toby Andersen, said at the time that the park reserve was “the Inuit gift to the people of Canada”: a place where cultural heritage and natural beauty can be both protected and appreciated. All 9,700 square kilometres of land, right up to the low-water mark. While several of Canada’s national parks attract millions of visitors annually, just 489 people visited the Torngats this past summer — making it one of the most beautiful places on Earth that few people will see with their own eyes.

Now, almost two decades after the park was established, work is underway to protect the waters that pool at the feet of those mountains and stretch into the Labrador Sea, shuttling icebergs and boats alike. The proposed borders of this first Inuit-led national marine conservation area stretch around these subarctic waters where coral gardens flourish, offshore oil and gas is largely untapped and the dynamic sea ice choreographs a food chain that sustains seabirds, fish, whales and people. 

But to protect these fragile waters, they also need to be understood. A massive initiative is underway to braid together generations of Inuit Knowledge with cutting-edge technology into a comprehensive portrait of what is known and still unknown about these nearly 15,000 square kilometres of marine area off the coast of Torngat Mountains National Park.

Unrestricted by boundaries or a specific moment in time, this is a story about that place and what it means to protect it.

Before reaching the Torngat Mountains, the northern extent of Labrador that thins to an arrowhead pointed at Baffin Island, we first had to get to Nain. The largest and northernmost community in the northern Labrador region of Nunatsiavut, it’s still some 300 kilometres south of the Torngats. I spent a day driving and then flying, first from Toronto to Halifax and then on to Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Labrador. For photojournalist Patrick Kane, who travelled from Yellowknife, it took two days, and twice as many stops. We met around dinnertime in Goose Bay on July 18, in the unexpected 30-C heat, and flew out first thing the next morning to Nain in a tiny Twin Otter plane. 

Founded more than 250 years ago in the cusp of Unity Bay, Nain is home to nearly half of the 2,600 residents of Nunatsiavut, 90 per cent of whom are Inuit. The communities aren’t connected by road, but planes alight tiny airstrips that punctuate the Labrador coast, and a ferry runs from Goose Bay up to Nain, stopping at each community in between. It leaves Goose Bay on Sundays and arrives in Nain on Wednesdays, as long as the water is open. Nunatsiavut, a region roughly the size of Scotland, includes 49,000 square kilometres of coastal waters that remain unprotected — for now. 

Nunatsiavut is one of four regions that comprise Inuit Nunangat, the Inuit homeland in Canada, which also spans the Beaufort Delta in the Northwest Territories, Nunavut and Nunavik in northern Quebec. Together, Inuit Nunangat encompasses 40 per cent of the land and 72 per cent of the coastline in Canada.

Nain’s sandy airstrip hugs the shoreline of Unity Bay and as Kane and I step off the plane, we can see CCGS Amundsen anchored in its waters. The red-and-white ship is nearly 100 metres long — think a track-and-field sprint — and carries a helicopter on board, as well as 12 scientific laboratories and bunks for about 40 researchers and 40 mariners. Named for the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker is fitted with high-tech equipment for marine research in Arctic environments. Every summer it leaves its port in Quebec City to take on various projects along Canada’s northern coastlines, from wildlife studies and oceanographic data collection, to measuring how atmospheric pollution is stored in the marine environment and whether a warming climate risks its release. 

But this current research mission is unique, because for the first time its agenda has been set by an Inuit government. Michelle Saunders, the research manager for the Nunatsiavut Government, spent a leg onboard the Amundsen last year, and wrote the application for ship time this season. “I came back and I said, ‘Psshh, we could do that,’ ” she laughs. 

Today, Saunders is driving around in a forest-green pickup truck, shuttling Nain residents between the town and the barge that will carry them to and from the Amundsen, as part of an inaugural “community science day.”

Saunders engaged the Amundsen to help her government answer some important questions about the waters at their shore. They needed data, Saunders says, “but I think that was going to happen with or without us.” Fisheries and Oceans Canada has their own priorities for study, some that fit with those of the Nunatsiavut Government, and her team would have some say in which projects go ahead. “But I think this is like a different level of decision-making,” she says. Setting the agenda provides more opportunity for the community to be involved and for their concerns and priorities to direct the studies.

In 2016, the Nunatsiavut Government began the work of developing a marine plan, titled Imappivut — “our oceans” in Inuttitut. The plan will guide the use of all of the waters at its shore — including those off the Torngats — for years to come. To begin this work, the government asked a question of community members up and down the Nunatsiavut coast: what does the marine environment mean to you? “The general theme was ‘it’s all connected,’ ” Saunders tells me, summarizing the responses they heard. 

“You can’t talk about the marine environment without talking about the land, right? Or you can’t talk about the marine environment without talking about caribou, which doesn’t seem like an obvious connection, but they use the sea ice as well, and they go down and lick the salt off of the rocks, right? Eat the seaweed, right? So, it’s all a part of each other.”

When Saunders was studying ecology and conservation at Memorial University in St. John’s, the way her professors described the environment didn’t line up with that understanding. And there was no talk of humans and their role in that ecosystem, not even in the context of Newfoundland and Labrador, where Inuit, Innu and Mi’kmaq people have lived for thousands of years. To Saunders, an Inuk who grew up in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, this omission felt wrong. “We are a part of the environment. We are also animals,” she says, laughing at how obvious yet overlooked that sentiment is. “So I found that really confusing, discouraging and I didn’t enjoy my time in undergrad at all. But I think it made me want to do more because I was like, this is not how it should be.”

With her laptop open on the board-room table at the research centre in Nain, Saunders shows us some of the results from one of her current projects, tracking willow ptarmigan — or partridges — in the Torngat Mountains and farther south near the historic town of Hebron. The little brown birds wear tiny backpacks to log their movements — which are wide-ranging for the females, but lesser so for males. The study is meant to learn more about their breeding grounds and how they’re being impacted by climate change. Various birds and their eggs are an important food source along the Nunatsiavut coast.

Earlier this year, the government put out a notice warning of oil contaminants in the water near the community of Postville due to a diesel spill in 2020. That led to limitations on the amount of eggs people consume from three shorebirds: great black-backed gulls, common eider ducks and black guillemots. 

In the Torngats, there’s no spill equipment, despite the recent increase in ship traffic, says Isabella Pain, the deputy minister of the Nunatsiavut Secretariat with the Nunatsiavut Government. Should the area become protected, there could be discussions around dedicated shipping lanes and proper monitoring and spill response. 

Pain was at the table for the negotiations that turned the lands in this region into a national park and set the stage for a marine conservation area. “It was always important to protect our marine environment,” she says. “We depend on the marine environment for food, for travel for cultural reasons, for mental health, physical health: we rely on the ocean.”

Right now, Canada has five national marine conservation areas, as well as other areas listed for some level of federal protection under different departments, such as marine protected areas through Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

The federal government has an oft-repeated goal of protecting 25 per cent of land and water by 2025 and 30 per cent by 2030. As part of that, Parks Canada has committed to establishing 10 new national marine conservation areas by 2025, says Sigrid Kuehnemund, manager of national marine conservation area establishment in the Atlantic with Parks Canada — the Torngats marine area is one of them.

The abundance of life in these waters is one of the reasons the area is seen as an ideal candidate for protection. The Torngats area is a transition zone between Arctic and Atlantic habitats, Kuehnemund explains. “You have, you know, highly scenic fiords and long stretches of coastline and mudflats,” she says. “There’s a variety of marine mammal species that use the area and it’s important for concentrations of breeding and migrating seabirds and waterfowl.”

Ringed seals, narwhals and minke whales also use the area, and Eastern Hudson Bay beluga whales overwinter and migrate through these waters. This subspecies of beluga is listed as threatened by the federal government as a result of commercial overfishing in the 19th century. They’re an important species for harvesting in Nunavik — though only in limited numbers, in order to sustain the population.

The value of these waters doesn’t end with Nunatsiavut.

Not all ships warrant their own line of swag, but a small table is set up at the Unity Bay dock with hats, stickers and magnets bearing the Amundsen’s decals. I take a few stickers and a cap for my ship-loving nephew as a man and woman in blue plastic smocks walk down on their break from the fish plant to pick up keepsakes. Trumpeters welcome the barge in, in an homage to the missionaries that landed here more than 250 years ago, and a crowd of about a dozen people is waiting at the end of the dock to board. When it’s our turn to climb aboard the barge, a woman sitting next to me tells me she’s been on the Amundsen only once before, when it was used as a floating clinic to carry out a health survey in Nunatsiavut. 

Today, everyone from young children to Elders in the community are welcome to meet some of the scientists at work and the crew that keeps the ship running.

As well as giving community members a look at what happens on board, Saunders’ hope for the community science day was for the scientists to meet the people who they’re doing this work for. “Numbers on a page doesn’t do it for me, you know?” she says. “There has to be a reason why you’re doing it. We don’t do research for the sake of research. We do research for the sake of Nunatsiavut, right? For people. Otherwise, what’s the point of it?” 

We disembark from the barge onto a metal staircase lining the hull of the Amundsen, where a lineup of crew members looks down at us and we look down at the waters of Unity Bay. There are massive, precise scientific instruments on board, a million-dollar remotely operated vehicle and more rudimentary tools, like screens for sifting through mud samples, which could have been borrowed from 19th-century gold panners. But all of this will help transcribe the story of the aquatic environment in Nunatsiavut, much of which remains unwritten.

On the Amundsen, Rodd Laing wears a jacket emblazoned with “chief scientist” on the back — a title he shares with David Côté of Fisheries and Oceans Canada. The director of environment for the Nunatsiavut Government, Laing has lived in Nain since 2012, but he boarded the Amundsen in St. John’s a week ago. After hosting the community event — and quickly watering his plants — he’ll travel the length of Nunatsiavut’s coast, past the mouth of Hudson Strait and the entrance to the Northwest Passage, to finally disembark in Iqaluit.

The subject of change is top of mind here, Laing says, a theme that dominates the questions he is receiving from community members lately, “whether it’s climate change, or they’re seeing new species or other things.” That’s partly why it’s so important to gather data now.

Along the coast, data is lacking, save for the understanding of the land and waters among the people who live here. “There is baseline information within Inuit Knowledge because that information is passed on for generations,” he says. “But the scientific baseline is really poor in a lot of areas, and so in order to understand change, you need a combination of this information.”

Volunteers from our tour group take turns emptying out water samples, hold core samples from the seafloor up close and watch in awe as a Greenland shark toys with a baited camera on the screens in the viewing room on the ship’s lower deck. 

The work done on board the Amundsen is helping to fill some of the baseline gaps in scientific information. Even data on the depths of the waters off the northern coast, Saunders tells me, is severely lacking: “Nautical charts? Don’t trust them.” And she spends a lot of time on boats. Using the Amundsen’s multibeam system, she says, they’re starting to better understand what’s down there — like a 60-storey-high wall of corals and sponges in the ocean outside the community of Makkovik, halfway between Goose Bay and Nain.

In 2021, working off a tip from fisherman Joey Angnatok, the Amundsen’s remotely operated vehicle filmed the flourishing wall, called the Makkovik Hanging Gardens, with its pink, polyp-covered trees of paragorgia, known as bubblegum coral, and primnoa, or popcorn coral, extending orangey-beige fingers. 

These corals can live for hundreds of years and form a habitat for deep-sea creatures, Vonda Hayes, a marine biologist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, explains as the science day events wind down at the community hall in the evening. Dried corals are laid out on the table in front of her. This year, they found a second hanging garden near Makkovik. 

Makkovik is far south of the Torngats but, Saunders says, it’s an example of how much is still unknown about Nunatsiavut waters. And it’s a reason why protecting the area, as mysterious as it is, is critical.

Laing and I take a seat at a picnic table outside the community hall. The sun is hesitating to set by 8 p.m. and flies are predating bare skin, which is more abundant than in years past. Average temperatures for late July fall in the mid-teens, but during our visit the temperature hovers between 20 C and 25 C. A lot of people in Nain comment on it. 

As part of their work on Imappivut, the Nunatsiavut Government is carrying out a knowledge study, which involves gathering information from the people who know this land best. 

It will also form a part of a 15-chapter research document Laing, Saunders and about 60 other people are putting together as part of the feasibility study for the Inuit-led national marine conservation area — currently dubbed the Torngats Area of Interest. The purpose is to gather all of the information both from western and Inuit Knowledge systems, and to identify any gaps in that understanding of the marine ecosystem beyond the coast of the Torngat Mountains. The two knowledge systems are considered equal. If, for example, western research shows a certain habitat map for char and the Inuit Knowledge study shows an additional area, the feasibility assessment will include both, Laing explains. And climate change is a consideration in every chapter, he adds: what they know now and what the potential implications of climate change could be. “Which is really important because that allows for some forward thinking and planning on that,” he says.

So far, there hasn’t been a lot of information gathered from people who know the Torngats area, Saunders tells me. “So that’s something that we’re targeting now: people who use this area regularly or used it in the past.”

The area has been used for thousands of years by Inuit who moved between camps with the seasons and animal migrations, rather than staying in a single place. But there is a darker, more recent history of people being relocated from settlements near the Torngats. Between the late 1700s and early 1900s many Inuit settled among eight sites established by Protestant Moravian missionaries along the Labrador coast. Some, like Nain, are still inhabited, while others were forcibly closed by the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador in the 1950s. One of them, Hebron, falls just south of what’s now Torngat Mountains National Park. In 1959, officials with the government attended a church service in Hebron to announce the remote community would be closed. Residents were relocated that week to various communities, with devastating consequences for many Inuit who struggled to adjust to a new place, away from friends, family and familiar terrain. 

It made the Torngats less accessible, Pain of Nunatsiavut Secretariat says. The closest community to the Torngats became Nain. “It was hard to get back up there, but we’re seeing a real resurgence of people being able to use the area, getting access to the area by boat and by going up over the land on Ski-Doo in the wintertime,” she says. 

The process of gathering information from the people who do know this area so well, Saunders says, is really a conversation: where they go, what routes they take and if they have camps or cabins here. It means asking people exactly what they’re seeing.

In the community hall in Nain, tables and posters display some of the work being done on board the Amundsen. There’s dinner and dessert, throat singing and a performance of “Sons of Labrador,” as well as an ode to the Amundsen’s captain. After the event wraps up, Saunders tells me, she texted Laing to say, “That was the best thing we’ve ever done.” 

Because Inuit have co-led the Torngats proposal from the beginning, it has a dual designation as a national marine conservation area and an Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area — and in this way, it’s the first of its kind.

Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas are defined by three essential components: being Indigenous led, having a long-term commitment to conservation and elevating Indigenous Rights and responsibilities. Only three have been recognized as established by the federal government. But outside of federal legislation, several communities have declared protected and conserved areas under their own laws. 

Torngat Mountains National Park predates the Crown government’s recognition of Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas. Its unique partnership between Parks Canada and the Labrador Inuit resulted from their land claims agreement. The agreement also established self-governing powers under the newly formed Nunatsiavut Government, and created a new model for conservation that centres Indigenous use of the land. Developing Imappivut, Nunatsiavut’s marine plan, will see the ocean management chapter of the land claim fully implemented.

The Nunatsiavut Government’s decision to create an Inuit-led national marine conservation area, alongside Parks Canada, wasn’t without thought to forging ahead on their own. But, Pain explains, there is no mechanism under current regulations to create an Indigenous-led marine protected or conserved area that is recognized by the Crown, without partnering with a federal department. “It does have to be tied to some piece of legislation or regulation as it is,” she says.

“So that is sort of why we do keep referring to it as an Inuit-protected area,” Pain says. “We were the ones who developed this plan. As Inuit, we went to the government to say we want to have a protected area.”

The Nunatsiavut Government also recognized the benefits of the Crown’s partnership, particularly in terms of funding arrangements for activities within the area. “We’re not there yet,” Pain says, “but part of our thinking is once we have this protected area, we want Inuit to be on the land, on the ocean to monitor, to be guardians of that land. And so you know, along with a protected area, we hope to and we plan to negotiate funding for some of those things.”

From Parks Canada’s perspective, that ongoing monitoring and sustainable economy built around the conservation area is a part of their vision. “When a site is established, there’s really a long-term commitment by Parks Canada for research and monitoring,” Kuehnemund with Parks Canada says. It’s an opportunity for developing a conservation economy, putting permanent staff and infrastructure at that site and supporting coastal communities in developing ecologically sustainable businesses.

How that plays out, Kuehnemund says, is by allowing for a range of sustainable activities within different zones of that protected area — some that are strictly limited and others that allow for greater use. “Our process is very collaborative, and there’s a lot of engagement and consultation that happens in advance of deciding to establish the national marine conservation area,” she says.

The ability to someday establish a Crown-recognized and Indigenous-led marine conservation area, without it being tied to federal legislation, is an ongoing conversation, Pain says.

For Keith Watt, the Torngat Fish Producers Co-op’s general manager, it’s the partnership with Parks Canada that makes him apprehensive about the plan to protect the Torngat waters. He sees it as a method of hitting conservation targets — something the federal department is unequivocal about, though as a positive rather than a negative.

But for the Nunatsiavut Government’s part and the project in general, he says, “I think it’ll probably be a good thing in the long run, as long as consultation is done properly, as long as there’s not a lot of restriction.”

The co-op operates the Arctic char plant in Nain, which is supplied by 13 fishermen and employs another 30. It’s owned by the Nunatsiavut Government and leased by the co-op, which also operates a plant in Makkovik for crab, turbot and scallop. “There’s nothing wrong with fishing,” Watt tells me, adding that the co-op fishes a lot less than they used to and limits themselves to maintain the stocks. 

Commercial fishing is allowed in national marine conservation areas, but bottom-trawlers, which the co-op uses for scallop and shrimp, are not. “I understand that but don’t support it,” Watts says, adding the proposed conservation area boundary is near what he calls one of the most important shrimp fishing areas, just off Cape Chidley, at the northern tip of the park. 

Harvesting rights for Inuit beneficiaries, however, will not be affected if an Inuit-led marine conservation area is established. That’s a critical point. And the fish co-op is just one of many groups who are being consulted as the marine conservation project takes shape, along with the organization that represents Nunavik Inuit. The feasibility report coming out of all this work should be completed in 2024, Pain says, and then the discussions around finalizing borders, uses and a benefit agreement can take place.

In the future, she says, they will look at where else protected areas could be established in Nunatsiavut waters, through Imappivut. But first, the Torngats. 

Watching the rocky landscape spread out underneath the single-engine prop plane, you can imagine the Laurentide ice sheet that lay here, and then melted away, leaving unevenly depressed ground where water pools. While the kilometres-thick mass of ice started shrinking away some 20,000 years ago, it was relatively late to leave Nunatsiavut — about 9,000 years ago. 

As a result, these lands are still stretching upwards, shrugging off that weight, explains Robert Way, an assistant professor in geography and planning at Queen’s University who is from Labrador and studies the effects of climate change on northern environments. While much of the country and world experiences coastlines sinking into the ocean, these shores are still on the rise. (Though the sea level is expected to catch up at some point, it’s hard to say when exactly; many factors affect sea level rise and these shorelines are poorly mapped — a common theme in northern Labrador, Way adds.) 

We set down in Saglek Fiord on a paved airstrip lined with rundown hangars — a strange sight in such a remote location. Its existence is a relic of the Cold War, built by the U.S. military along with a radar station in the 1950s to watch for a Soviet attack on North America. From here, it’s a few minutes in a helicopter to the Torngat Mountains Base Camp, a collection of about 50 buildings, wall-tents and domes just outside the southern border of Torngat Mountains National Park. 

For the first hour after we arrive, every other person we encounter mentions a “bear situation” to Saunders. A polar bear was found dead on the shore of Kangidluasuk, or St. John’s Bay, just over from base camp, and she needs to take its head off. The Nunatsiavut Government requires samples from polar bears that die of natural causes or are killed in self-defence. Along with its head, Saunders takes fat and muscle samples to study its diet, age and general health indicators. It was a skinny young female, she tells us later. Another polar bear, large and agile, swam handily across the bay below the helicopter as we flew from the airstrip into base camp. It would be the first of more than a dozen polar bears we’d see that week — alive.

After dealing with the polar bear, Saunders started looking for Arctic char. Another one of her current projects is a sampling program to study the health of the char, a source of food and income in Nunatsiavut. She needed 30 fish from base camp and 30 each from two other locations within the park. A group of 18- to 30-year-olds visiting base camp as part of the Nunatsiavut Government’s Youth Leadership Program make quick work of gathering subjects for her, casting line after line into waters flush with fish.

Saunders, with the help of Parks Canada staff, handily prepares char for pitsiq — hashing fillets into small squares and hanging them out to dry — and collects their samples. If they’re interested, Saunders shows youth how she removes the digestive tract, tissue, a fin clip, an eyeball and the otolith – a tiny, solid ear bone, swimming in a sea of brains if the fish was bonked.

As well as being among the most enthusiastic anglers at base camp, the youth group hike, craft and talk. “You talk about all of the hard, difficult things that our relatives had to go through,” Megan Dicker, the program co-ordinator, tells me. “But it’s not only that. We talked about how skilled and how smart Inuit are, and how we were able to live the way we do in the North, so well, because we’re so expert.”

Like eating seal for the nutrients it provides and how it instantly warms you, she says, sliding an image of a seal dissection across the table in the base camp dining room; there are spaces to label the seal’s anatomy in Inuttitut. “And then in turn, we really respect it and use it for as many parts of it as we can,” she says. “Everything is connected in one way or another. And I think that really came through when we were here. Everything is reciprocal.”

Members of her group bustle in and out of the dining room, preparing their lunches before loading onto helicopters to fly out to Nachvak Fiord, about 100 kilometres north. As soon as the helicopter pilot drops Kane and I off in Nachvak, he starts shuttling groups that flew in earlier back to base camp, five people at a time. You would barely know that mountains rise up from the rocky shore or that they’re much, much higher than the ones surrounding base camp, because the clouds are sinking so low.

The youth fish for more char and help Saunders fillet and take samples as the fog settles in.

Only an hour later, as I climb into the helicopter to head back to base camp — the day cut short due to the weather — the pilot pulls out a yellow briefcase. It’s an emergency kit in case the fog is too heavy and he can’t make it back to the fiord for the last group, which includes two Parks Canada staff, Saunders, Kane and a bear guard with a three-barrel shotgun. 

The mosquitoes were relentless, Kane tells me later, and it was hard not to think about the mother polar bear curled up with two cubs we’d flown over on the way in. 

There was a palpable sense of relief, he says, when the pilot appeared through the clouds, singing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” over the radio: “Ground control to Major Tom.” 

That night at base camp, Saunders’ small crew is up processing the pink-fleshed fish well past 10 p.m. as evening anglers continue to pull them in. 

Under a dark, cloudy sky, light and music and the smell of fish fill the research station, down the hall from the dining area and kitchen. While the scent of fresh char doesn’t seem to offend anyone, the cooks are quick to call out when the research station refrigerator is opened, releasing the breathtaking smell of rot from the polar bear head inside.

Andrew Andersen has been working in Torngat Mountains National Park since 2009, just one year after it was established. His father’s family comes from just south of the park.

“Going out on the land, I grew up doing it with my father’s side of the family: fishing and hunting, everything we could,” he says. “Now I do it with my family. We eat mostly wild food in our house: seal, geese, fish, caribou when we can get it.” In his lifetime, he’s seen the environment changing in the mountains and back home in Nain.

He remembers skating before Halloween in the 1990s, lacing up on the freshwater ice around Nain in October, and watching the sea ice forming by November. Since the turn of the century, all bets are off.

“It’s pretty much the talk of the town when we’re waiting for the sea ice to form,” Andersen says. Looking down the road, he says, people are asking the inevitable question: “Is there going to be any ice in 20 to 30 years?”

This year, it wasn’t until mid-January that the sea ice formed. There were some normal cold days and then two weeks above zero where the freshwater brooks burst open and flooded. The snow on the sea ice melted. After a few days back to cold temperatures, he says, the ocean was like a skating rink.

“There was no snow, so it was hard for ringed seals to build a home for their pups,” he says, which alarmed the hunters who rely on the ringed seals to feed the community. The shrinking season for sea ice has other consequences for Inuit, who rely on it to travel around the region, and for wildlife. Around base camp, more than a few people note the lack of sea ice is pushing polar bears closer to camp as they lose their hunting grounds. 

In her role as the community climate change liaison for the Nunatsiavut Government, Chaim Andersen (Andrew’s cousin), ensures Labrador Inuit priorities and values are represented in programming through Environment and Climate Change Canada: both its Climate Change Preparedness in the North program and Indigenous Community-based Climate Monitoring, which gathers data on these changes in the marine environment.

Ice is considered a part of the infrastructure here and the changing nature of it is the biggest priority on her docket.

“It’s so integral to our communities in terms of travel and access to cultural and culturally significant places. I always say that ice is one of my best friends because it’s so important,” she says. “And there’s been a lot of uncertainty and vulnerability increasing in terms of, like, the length of the ice season, the predictability of the ice to whether the ice is safe or not.”

There’s also been significant greening on the land: brush that used to stop closer to the shore now climbs up the hills. Some suspect a literal change is in the air. “People think that the prevailing winds might even be changing, which is significant,” Chaim says. A month earlier, in June, unstable ice remained in the Nain harbour, landlocking the town. She had a conversation with her daughter’s grandfather about it. “He was talking about how we’re getting a lot of southwest winds, which is strange because it’s usually easterly winds,” she says. “It made for the ice to just stay there for a long time as opposed to getting blown out, which is what normally happens in that time of year, which then opens the harbour again.”

Maps of the Torngats, paintings, sketches and cards from previous visitors line the walls of the dining room at base camp. There’s a telescope perched at one of the windows to help sight far-off wildlife or icebergs that tuck into the bay. Sometimes you don’t need it: a minke whale spent an hour one day diving in and out of the waters at the end of the dock, in plain view of anyone here.

One morning after breakfast, Eli Merkuratsuk asks if I’m afraid of polar bears. I’m not, I tell him, as much as I thought I’d be. That’s because he’s a bear guard here, along with a handful of others, who keep their eyes on the margins of base camp. Margins also delineated by a 15,000-watt bear fence. Outside the safety of that electrified fence, the armed bear guards travel everywhere with us. On a short hike from camp, they’re perched at the highest vantage points. On boat and helicopter rides, they’re the first to any site and the last to leave. 

Later that day, bear guards triangulate around a group of us who have travelled by helicopter and boat to Sallikuluk, or Rose Island. We’re an eclectic bunch, including tourists, Inuit drummers flown up from Goose Bay and the youth group.

A mother polar bear and her two cubs swim off the island and mount the shore across from it as we arrive. Soon, one of the drummers points to the ground where a fleck of Ramah chert glints in the sun. The foggy grey stone is found only in Ramah Bay, halfway between Saglek and Nachvak. But tools Inuit carvers made from it, and the flecks they left behind, can be found up and down the Labrador coast and as far south as New England.

We walk around the island, stopping at a row of sod houses and a massive whale bone beside them, and at a mass grave that was built after a palaeontologist in the 1970s stole the remains of 113 Inuit from the island. They were repatriated in 2005 and reburied with their possessions. Standing at the site, a Parks Canada guide tells us through tears that she pictures children playing by the shore here and women sewing. After a moment of silence, the drummers perform a song and people quietly place rocks at the cairn. All the while, the bear guards watch the landscape around us.

We return to base camp by way of a meandering boat ride. Zipping through the arms of Saglek Fiord, between sightings of polar bears and tundra black bears — in one case, within 20 metres of each other — bear guard Joe Atsatata tells me he was up here in March with Merkuratsuk getting caribou. (The park is the only area in Nunatsiavut where caribou hunting is allowed, as the Torngat Mountains herd is in a healthier state than those farther south.) They both have cabins in the area and that’s the best time to come for ice stability. With the ice so hard to predict, they’ll often travel on land instead.

Throughout the Torngat Mountains are hundreds of sites that show where Inuit once lived, harvested and fished, some dating back thousands of years. 

It’s something Lena Onalik, an archaeologist with the Nunatsiavut Government had made clear to me back in Nain, before I arrived in the Torngats. “ What I always like to say is that, anywhere that looks like a nice place to go ashore, somebody already had that thought and there’s probably evidence of their visit,” she says, sitting in her office with heritage program co-ordinator Deirdre Elliott. 

Onalik and Elliott visited an island just south of the Torngats border with a woman who spent her summers there growing up. Sophie Keelan remembered her father catching a beluga whale there, and where its bones lay next to their tent. She set foot on the island for the first time in 60 years and knew exactly where to go: they found a tent ring and beluga skull next to it.

Giving directions like you would to a tourist on a street corner, Keelan tells me over the phone where they harvested mussels and char, and where a shaman’s skull sits near the shore of Nachvak Brook — if it faces the water it will be a good year for fishing; if it faces land, not so much. These places and their importance are still clear in her mind.

“Mammals from the sea, we hunted them for survival and food,” Keelan, who lives in the Nunavik community of Kangiqsualujjuaq, or George River, says. “Even mussels, seaweed and urchins. And ugly fish — you know, you’ve seen ugly fish — the other kind with lots of spikes on the head?” She asks it with a laugh and, in fact, I do know what she means. Sculpin trawl the seafloor. When I first cast off the dock at base camp, Destiny Solomon, the drummer who found Ramah chert on Sallikuluk, sarcastically warned me to reel in quick and not let the hook hit bottom, because she wouldn’t be helping me take sculpin off. 

Archaeology is helping to understand the shift in animal populations that use Torngats waters, Elliott explains. It’s a record of both the people and the environment. Take the bowhead whale bones that have been found on Sallikuluk, in Nachvak Fiord and elsewhere, she says. “When was the last time anyone saw a bowhead whale in the Torngats?” 

Up until the 1700s, the Arctic and subarctic species was hunted along the Nunatsiavut coast, both by Inuit and Basque whalers, but haven’t been spotted in these waters in a century.

Data from pollen studies, ice cores and other sources can show how over extended periods of cooling or warming, people adapted and changed their way of life, Elliott says. “There is one big [period of warming] that happened 800 years ago that essentially resulted in the loss of a culture,” she says. “That’s when the Dorset Paleo-Eskimo just disappeared. The climate warmed and it seemed like they didn’t know how to cope.”

It’s a reminder that creating a conservation area does not freeze a place in time. The effects of climate change, of disasters in far-off but still-connected places will not spare this place because it’s been granted a new title. Forest fires don’t stop at the borders of parks. But that title does grant immunity from some threats: offshore oil and gas and mineral development are not permitted within a national marine conservation area, though there does not appear to be any immediate interest in mining the seafloor here. Perhaps more importantly, the designation represents an intention to focus resources on this place, to learn more about it, what’s here and how it’s changing. 

And to bring more attention to a place that was visited by less than 500 people this year. 

“You see where I grew up?” bear guard Merkuratsuk asks me when I return from Nachvak Fiord. “That’s good.” More people visiting the area is a good thing, he says, it’s more people appreciating what it is: arguably, the most beautiful place in the world.

On our first of three last nights at base camp — as the fog creates a ceiling no helicopter, let alone plane, can pass through, delaying our departure — Saunders hooks her laptop up to a screen. She shares her own story of navigating the bumps of academia to take on her current role, and what some of her research projects entail. A crowd of base camp staff and visitors huddle under knit blankets to listen, the mid-20-temperatures of Nain long behind us.

“We’re always changing and adapting to what people want,” Saunders says of her research priorities. Double-crested cormorants are moving into Nunatsiavut, and that’s happening fast, she says. Another bird they call “lesser geese” started showing up eight or nine years ago, and the research team of the Nunatsiavut Government still isn’t sure what they are. “So far, they’re not cackling geese, and that’s all we know,” she says. 

And people are always interested in char, she says, so they want to know what goes on with their habitat. “For Inuit, it’s a holistic picture of everything,” Saunders says.

Back in the dining room at base camp, chef Trudy Metcalfe-Coe steps out of the kitchen to chat with me about her connection to this place. 

Her father relocated from Hebron when he was 11 years old. He was the first mayor of Nain, a linguist, interpreter and writer. He had his struggles, Metcalfe-Coe says, as did so many people who were forced to leave their home. “But he was always somebody who everybody loved.” In 1988, when she was 22 years old, she moved to Ottawa. She came up to base camp last summer for one week, largely motivated by the chance to stop in Nain on her way up, since she hadn’t visited in more than 25 years. And she wanted to see Hebron, her father’s hometown, now a national historic site, where the Nunatsiavut Government is restoring the old mission buildings. 

Metcalfe-Coe knew she had some family in Nain, but she was floored by how many relatives she found. “It was just crazy. Like I had no idea, there’s so much family up here that I didn’t even know existed,” she says. But they knew about her. Person after person came up to her when she first arrived at base camp, introducing themselves as her relatives — including Merkuratsuk and Atsatata, her cousins. In total, she met 23 relatives that week.

Family ties are also part of what brings the youth group here. “This is an opportunity for youth to come to where their parents or grandparents or great-great-grandparents used to live. So it’s like a return to the homelands, even though we aren’t the ones who grew up here,” youth leader Dicker says. “I think it’s important for people to be reminded or remember who they are and where they come from.” 

On our final morning at base camp, the ceiling of fog finally starts to lift. The gossip around camp is that there’s a polar bear on the backside of an iceberg that drifted into the bay overnight. A few people say they’ve seen it through the telescope, poking its head up occasionally. Others say the bear is just waves crashing up over the smooth curves of the iceberg. As we make our way down to the boat to investigate, a few women from the kitchen, sitting outside for a smoke, warn us it’s out there. We zip across the bay in ten minutes to reach the iceberg — an electric blue and white piece of modern art. But the polar bear, if there ever was one, is gone.

This story is part of Spirits of Place, exploring the many ways Indigenous communities and nations are enacting their responsibilities to their lands, waters and future generations. It was made possible by funding from the Institute for Journalism & Natural Resources, as well as the Metcalf Foundation and MakeWay Foundation. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, the foundations have no editorial input.

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Matt Miller grew up alongside many of the trees on his parents’ woodlots in rural Nova Scotia. But while most of the trees survived “Hurricane Matt” — his rambunctious childhood and some early, clumsy lessons in forestry from his father — many didn’t survive Hurricane Fiona.

“It definitely feels like we lost some friends back there,” he explains, referring to the damage that happened to his family’s two woodlots in September, during the worst storm to ever hit eastern Canada. 

Located in Greenhill and Earlton, the family’s forests are home to a variety of tree species and make up around 500 acres.

“There’s the loss associated with the big trees, those charismatic, solid trees that you can wrap your arms around and stare up into the canopy, but I think some of the hardest losses are those younger trees that I saw grow up before my eyes,” Miller said.

The family harvests sawlogs, which are sold to a local mill, as well as firewood for selling and personal use. But for them, income is secondary to the real value of the trees. Miller’s grandfather’s ashes are buried in the lot they live on and the healthy forest is his legacy.

Hurricane Fiona made landfall as a post-tropical storm near Whitehead, N.S., on Sept. 24. After two days of heavy rain and wind gusts that reached 179 km/h at their peak, as reported by Environment Canada, the aftermath was three deaths in eastern Canada and severe damage to homes and infrastructure across Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador.

Fiona also ripped into the infrastructure of natural habitats, flattening forests, toppling trees and damaging generational woodlots like Miller’s. Wind disturbance is part of nature, but climate change is expected to increase the intensity of storms hitting Atlantic Canada.

Two decades before Fiona came Hurricane Juan in 2003, which reached wind speeds of 160 km/h and damaged over 600,000 hectares of trees. In 2019, Hurricane Dorian hit Sambro Creek with wind speeds of 155 km/h and caused an estimated $105 million in insured damage, according to the Insurance Bureau of Canada.

The increased intensity of these storms is prompting many to wonder what climate resiliency looks like in a region shaped by lumber markets — not ecosystem health — for the past 100 years.

“As climate change intensifies, we’re going to experience these impacts more and more,” said Daimen Hardie, executive director of New Brunswick-based non-profit Community Forests International.

“We’ve really set ourselves up for this risky situation,” he said. “Whenever something like this happens, it’s a reckoning for everybody.”

The Wabanaki-Acadian forest covers much of the Maritimes and parts of the northeastern United States. The border between boreal forest to the north and temperate species to the south, the Wabanaki-Acadian forest is home to a rich mixture of native species that should promote high biodiversity.

But the Maritime forest has changed a great deal since the time that the members of the Wabanaki Confederacy — including the Mi’kmaq, Maliseet, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot and Abenaki — were stewarding it. Old-growth forests have been cleared for agriculture and heavily logged: according to the Nova Scotia Nature Trust, only 0.6 per cent of the province’s forest is over 100 years old. And replanting has usually meant focusing on a less diverse collection of species and ages than was here originally. 

That youth and homogeneity puts the region at greater risk during natural disasters. After Hurricane Juan, University of New Brunswick forest management professor Anthony Taylor led an extensive study looking at how forests are impacted by extreme winds.

Published in 2019, the study used aerial photography and satellites to analyze how wind damage varied based on topography, weather, soil and forest structure. It found that having a greater amount of hardwood species and pine reduced the effect of wind damage to a lot or forest. Tall stands were most vulnerable, especially those dominated by shallow-rooted spruce and balsam fir. 

Unfortunately, the two most vulnerable species are also overrepresented in the region, as a result of their value for softwood lumber and pulp and paper.

“Over the last century, we’ve been carrying out forest management practices that promote more spruce and fir,” said Taylor. “So by default in the forest, it’s already been a bit more vulnerable to blowdown, because we have much more of the spruce and fir.”

Taylor’s study found that while forests dominated by a single species that had been replanted after a clearcut were hurt by wind, so were areas in mixed forests that were more selectively thinned. Both harvesting methods created vulnerabilities.

“I don’t know if anyone has a solution yet, but it’s definitely on a lot of minds. If you believe the science and the projections of climate change, then we’re going to be in for more wind and it’s going to impact our forests,” Taylor said. “If we know that our spruce and fir forests tend to be more susceptible to wind, but we really depend on them for our economy here, then what do we do?”

He also pointed out a caveat from the study — which suggested that regardless of species or topography, 10 minutes of sustained winds of 100 km/h can topple most trees.

“At a certain threshold it doesn’t matter what your forest is made of — likely a lot of it is going to blow down,” he said.

Recovery from Fiona won’t happen quickly. Several woodlot associations have called on provincial governments to help fund recovery operations. Nova Scotia has created a $3.5 million recovery fund for private woodlot owners, while Prince Edward Island announced an Emergency Forestry Task Force on Oct. 28 to assist woodlot owners.

Community Forests International is encouraging land owners to consider making recovery decisions with biodiversity in mind. Hardie said he’s concerned that some woodlot owners will be tempted to clearcut or overharvest sections with heavy losses to avoid losing money on damaged trees.

But even before Fiona, his team was working with a large number of private woodlot owners trying to make forestry more resilient, attempting to balance profits with ecological goals through careful harvesting and planting. The organization works with members to share the latest forest science, providing advice on how to care for trees and replant damaged areas while also coordinating carbon offsets that pay landowners for keeping trees intact.

The storm was hard for those woodlots owners emotionally, as well as financially. 

“There’s a lot of mourning going on right now. It’s people who’ve taken more of a sustainable or ecological approach. They’ve put a lot of care into restoring the forest and then to see that work rolled back is definitely hard for a lot of reasons,” said Hardie. 

Taylor’s findings from 2019 are reflected in Miller’s observation of the forest floor, as he surveyed the damage after Fiona, looking for patterns. 

“I think diversity is important. To my eye those sort of mixed species — mixed multi-age stands — seem to be the ones that have held up the best,” he said.

Miller is a member of the North Nova Forest Owner’s Co-op, so he’s not entirely on his own in dealing with the aftermath of the storm. Staff from the co-op showed up with dedicated contractors to help Miller handle the devastation on one of his family’s 250-acre woodlots.

As he considers the damage, he’s also focused on the future — balancing the need for financial recovery with ensuring that enough light and nutrients are left to allow a diverse forest to regrow. 

“For us as family forest owners wanting to manage for the long term, it becomes a question of salvaging what you can in a way that doesn’t compromise your longer term or ecological goals,” he said.

For woodlot owners choosing to carry on the mission of restoring the biodiversity of the Wabanaki-Acandian forest, that can mean leaving some windblown trees on the forest floor to provide nutrients and habitat.

It will also mean prioritizing a mix of ages and species, putting in white pine and temperate hardwoods like birch and maple that are more likely to survive heavy wind and succeed in a warming climate. As climate change continues, cold-hardy boreal species like spruce and balsam fir — once encouraged for their industrial value — will be less naturally successful.

“Nothing is over for the forest. We tend to feel this loss and like it’s the end of something — I suppose it is the end of something — but at the same time, it’s just the start of something new,” Miller said. 

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Canada’s Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault has approved a major deepwater production project. 

Guilbeault, who has a long history of environmental activism, had twice put off either approving or rejecting the Bay du Nord project off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. In a decision released Wednesday, April 6, he concluded Bay du Nord is “not likely to cause significant adverse environmental effects,” and will, therefore, move ahead.

“The project has undergone a robust federal environmental assessment and scrutiny through every part of Canada’s legislated review process. As the demand for oil and gas falls throughout the coming decades, it will be more important than ever that Canadian projects are running at the best-in-class, low-emissions performance to play a competitive role,” Guilbeault said in a media release on the announcement.

The province describes it as the first deepwater project of its kind in Newfoundland’s offshore.

The Bay du Nord project proposes to extract up to one billion barrels of crude oil from the seabed about 500 kilometres northeast of St. John’s. There, in depths ranging from 300 metres to 1,200 metres, owners Equinor, of Norway, and Husky Energy (now owned by Cenovus), of Canada, hope to operate for up to 30 years.

The federal decision also said that the owners would be expected to comply with 137 conditions during all operations.

Several environmental and Indigenous groups wanted the project rejected. In mid-March, Amy Norman of Labrador Land Protectors told a media briefing hosted by Sierra Club, that approving Bay du Nord would put the country on the wrong trajectory.

“The world is changing and climate change is already here … Already we’re seeing impacts here in Labrador and in Newfoundland: unreliable sea ice, warming temperatures, more frequent storms, unpredictable weather,” Norman said. “It’s already impacting our ways of life and it’s already changing how we live on these lands.”

But industry advocates, along with Newfoundland Premier Andrew Furey, urged the government to give the project the green light, calling it essential to the province’s economy. “​​We remain optimistic that the Government of Canada recognizes the value of the Bay du Nord project. As premier, I have been in contact with the prime minister and he understands the importance of this project to our province,” Furey said in a press release shortly after the latest decision delay.

The attention on Canadian oil and gas has heightened over the last month as Russia’s attack on Ukraine has left much of Europe scrambling for energy sources. Several politicians have used the opportunity to promote homegrown resources as the answer and Bay du Nord, like Alberta’s oilsands projects, has been a focus of the promotion. Furey has, on multiple occasions, stated that the province’s oil supply can play a role in replacing Russian imports.

When asked about Bay du Nord by reporters at a Toronto event in early March, Guilbeault said that, when considering a project, the environmental impact, social implications and economic issues are considered. “What’s happening internationally, we’re not impervious to it, and it would be factored into the analysis,” he said. 

Guilbeault pointed out that even if the project is approved, it won’t produce oil until 2028. “So again, you know, in terms of the short term energy needs of Europe, that’s not a solution.”

When asked how new oil and gas development projects, including Bay du Nord, line up with the government’s emissions reduction plan — which was released in late March, though a cap on oil and gas development is still in the works — Guilbeault responded that it’s not about a blanket yes or no to development.

“I think it’s a mistake to look at one project and use that project to define the entire policy of the government because it doesn’t boil down to one project. Would the project fit under the oil and gas cap? Would it fit under the emissions reduction plan? That’s how I would suggest people look at it.”

Furey sees Bay du Nord as a critical part of the province’s path to net-zero, calling it “the most carbon efficient development of its scale.” Emissions from the project have been estimated by Equinor at eight kilograms per barrel, which is about half of the international average — though neither of those figures factor in emissions from burning that oil, as many critics have pointed out.

Will Bay du Nord cause significant environmental effects?

Late in the day on March 4, Guilbeault extended the deadline for his decision on Bay du Nord by an additional 40 days to determine the potential environmental impacts of the project, according to the extension announcement. At the time, the government also said that the decision would be informed by the Impact Assessment Agency’s environmental assessment report of the project from August 2021. The agency had concluded that, with mitigation measures in place, Bay du Nord is unlikely to cause significant adverse environmental effects.

“The federal government concurs with the recommendation of the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada,” Guilbeault said in the media release announcing his decision. “As a result, the Bay du Nord Development Project may proceed, subject to some of the strongest environmental conditions ever, including the historic requirement for an oil and gas project to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.”

Prior to its approval, Gretchen Fitzgerald, national programs director with Sierra Club Canada, noted that there are a number of red flags she sees with the project. For example, she said that the production estimates have grown from 300,000 barrels to one billion since the project was first pitched and that there are also questions about whether the government’s decision is based on sound scientific advice.

The deep-sea drilling project falls east of Newfoundland and Labrador where four offshore oil and gas projects currently operate. Bay du Nord has been the subject of controversy, as has a 2020 regional assessment on offshore exploration drilling in the area: that led to the exclusion of exploration projects — during which companies drill wells to determine the feasibility and value of long-term projects — in the area from requiring the sort of seal of approval Bay du Nord is waiting on from Guilbeault. 

Both the regional assessment and Bay du Nord have been mired in concerns around whether science — specifically scientific evidence from Fisheries and Oceans Canada — is being outflanked by the province’s push for oil and gas.

In late January, CBC reported on a leaked letter from the union representing Fisheries and Oceans scientists in Newfoundland and Labrador, which outlined its members’ concerns about how politicians and oil and gas industry lobbyists were allegedly interfering with the advice from scientists and scientific practices at the department. It noted several instances of interference, including in a report on mitigating the impacts of oil and gas exploration on corals and sponges. 

Also in January, a critical report from Fisheries and Oceans Canada was released publicly a full two years after it was written. The report is a review of Equinor’s draft environmental impact statement for Bay du Nord, and states that Fisheries Department scientists found several cases where information was mischaracterized and relevant research was left out. Baseline information, it said, was incomplete and outdated for nearly all chapters reviewed.

It continued that this led to an unreliable assessment and “inappropriate conclusions.”

“In its current form, and until the problems identified in this report are addressed, the [environmental impact statement] is not considered a reliable source of information for decision-making processes,” the report stated.

Equinor told The Narwhal in an email that as part of the project’s technical review process, the company had thoroughly responded to questions from federal departments and agencies. It also said that it had revised its environmental impact statement in response to feedback. 

Jaclyn Sauvé, spokesperson for the Impact Assessment Agency, also noted in an email to The Narwhal, prior to the decision, that the Fisheries and Oceans report reflected the findings of department scientists in 2019 and did shape the department’s advice to the agency. While the report itself was not submitted to the agency or Equinor, Sauvé said that the information was shared through workshops, conversations, discussions and in-depth technical reviews. 

Equinor submitted its final environmental impact statement in July 2020. According to the Impact Assessment Agency, the final statement included an additional round of reviews by federal departments, the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board.

The agency also said that the final statement was informed by input from Indigenous groups and the public. But notes from a meeting between the agency and various Indigenous groups in August 2020, after the final statement was submitted, includes a participant question on why Indigenous groups were consulted after Equinor had already received significant input from the government. The questioner stated that this made the assessment process for Bay du Nord different from other similar projects. “This was a missed opportunity especially given the agency’s commitment to early engagement of Indigenous groups,” the question reads.

The agency responded that the technical review of the draft by federal authorities meant that Equinor developed a final statement that was “sufficient for public and Indigenous comment.” It continued that additional requirements could still be given to Equinor following any comments provided by Indigenous groups and the public, with the final statement not yet approved.

At that August meeting, the agency also suggested that a tight timeline was part of the reason the assessment process was different than in the past, telling the questioner that it “committed to a shorter than usual assessment period” of 300 days rather than 365 days, which would kick off once the final environmental impact statement was accepted.

That confirmation that its final statement had been accepted came in late 2020, Equinor spokesperson Alex Collins wrote in an email response to The Narwhal. That was followed by the Impact Assessment Agency’s environmental assessment report for Bay du Nord in August 2021, which laid out the process so far in reviewing the project, including concerns brought up by Indigenous groups, environmental organizations and federal agencies, such as Fisheries and Oceans.

Scientists’ concerns over Bay du Nord remain unaddressed 

The release of the 2019 Fisheries and Oceans report in early 2022, shortly before Guilbeault was due to make a decision, seemingly stirred up tension.

Collins said Equinor was disappointed to see the report published without the full context of the review process, noting that between the time the report was finished and when it was published, Equinor fully responded to all questions and information requests from the government in order to complete its final environmental impact statement.

Soon after the report was released, Fisheries and Oceans Canada regional director for Newfoundland and Labrador, Tony Blanchard wrote to the Impact Assessment Agency to clarify the statements in the report, noting that it was published “after some internal delays.” 

“While the report was published in January 2022, it reflects information available in 2019 and does not provide comments on subsequent information provided during the environmental assessment process,” he wrote on Feb. 2.

He continued that the department’s outstanding concerns have been addressed.

However, the environmental organization Stand.earth commissioned environmental lawyer Shelley Kath to dig into the Fisheries and Oceans report, comparing the recommendations in it to Equinor’s final environmental impact statement. In the vast majority of cases, she found that concerns raised by scientists were not addressed.

An obvious one, she points out, is that the largest oil spill in Newfoundland and Labrador’s history wasn’t mentioned in a discussion of historical spills: a 250,000-litre spill in 2018 from the SeaRose Floating, Production, Storage and Offloading vessel. That’s the same type of vessel proposed for use on Bay du Nord, and it was operated by Husky Energy (now Cenovus) — Equinor’s partner on the Bay du Nord project. Despite this omission being raised by Fisheries scientists, the SeaRose spill is not mentioned in Equinor’s final statement.

“If we’re not even learning from massive mistakes like that, and information of what those impacts were at the time is not incorporated going forward, what does that say?” Fitzgerald, of Sierra Club, said. “It’s actually actively ignored, what does that say?”

The final statement also failed to address a concern brought forward by Fisheries scientists on the lack of modeling around the release of hydrocarbon gas, such as methane, in the case of a spill. 

“This huge lacuna was not rectified in the final [environmental impact statement] and this means that Equinor has ignored a key lesson of Deepwater Horizon,” Kath wrote in her analysis, referring to the 2010 disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The explosion of that BP rig illustrated that, along with oil, underwater blowouts release methane that reduces oxygen levels in the water — exacerbating a process already underway due to climate change.

Kath said that it was hard for her to discern whether the final environmental impact statement was amended to follow advice from the Fisheries report, since the draft statement was never publicly released. She could only compare the Fisheries and Oceans report with Equinor’s final environmental impact statement, and note what was left out.

But from that exercise, she said, “I didn’t notice any places where the recommendations were followed. I did notice, sadly, one instance where a statement actually was changed … but changed for the worse.”

In a section involving ship strikes with marine mammals, the Fisheries report quoted the draft environmental impact statement as suggesting that given the low speed of vessels, “the potential for ship strikes is considered low.” Fisheries scientists responded that it had received several reports of vessels striking whales in transit to or from offshore facilities, as well as reports of a number of dead whales sighted with no evidence of fishing net entanglement, suggesting that being struck was likely also their cause of death. The fisheries report suggested mitigation measures such as onboard observers and communication between vessels about any marine mammal sightings.

Kath found that Equinor’s statement on vessel strikes in the final mostly reads the same, word for word as what Fisheries objected to — up until the end, when it’s amended from the risk being “considered low” to say “the potential for ship strikes is considered very low and not considered an effect.”

“Whether it’s DFO upper management or the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada, someone needs to show their work,” Kath told The Narwhal about Equinor’s impact statement passing an environmental assessment. “They need to show us how these many, many, many issues have been addressed, if they indeed have been addressed.”

When asked for a paper trail or any evidence of how various concerns were addressed, Fisheries and Oceans Canada declined to comment and referred all questions on Bay du Nord to the Impact Assessment Agency. 

For its part, the Impact Assessment Agency covers some technical recommendations under the project conditions it sets out in its environmental assessment, rather than requiring changes to Equinor’s environmental impact statement.

The agency stated in its assessment that Equinor had decided there was no need for dedicated onboard observers, a mitigation measure suggested by Fisheries scientists as well as Miawpukek First Nation in southern Newfoundland. Instead, vessels would use dedicated shipping lanes where available, and slow down if a sea turtle or marine mammal was detected. This was enough mitigation, the agency wrote, to ensure that Bay du Nord was unlikely to cause significant adverse effects to marine mammals or sea turtles. Its proposed conditions mirror the mitigations proposed by Equinor.

A common thread throughout the agency’s report is that, while concerns were raised by various groups, there is limited information available. A lack of baseline information was brought up both by Fisheries and Oceans scientists and Indigenous groups that participated in the project review. 

It’s a major problem for Newfoundland’s offshore industry in general, said Susanna Fuller, vice-president of operations and projects for marine conservation organization Oceans North. She told The Narwhal that a 2016 literature review examining impacts of oil and gas operations on marine environments didn’t even mention the offshore industry in Newfoundland and Labrador or Nova Scotia, simply because there is virtually no peer-reviewed literature available. 

“There are two papers that were done a long time ago by a scientist who now works at (the provincial offshore petroleum board), but there is no ongoing look at actual impacts,” Fuller said.

And even the scarce scientific evidence available isn’t necessarily being listened to, said Fitzgerald, who grew up in Newfoundland and has a background in marine biology. “There has been a long history here of both the community’s concerns being ignored, fishery concerns being ignored and of course, impact on whales and other species being downplayed or ignored,” she said. 

Economic stability and environmental sustainability can exist in tandem, Fuller said, through following good scientific advice rather than prioritizing industry. It’s a lesson she said should have been learned, considering that Newfoundland’s cod industry collapsed as a result of overfishing.

“I keep thinking it’s just the colony of unrequited dreams,” she said. “You see these things happen again every few decades in Newfoundland, where there’s so much fear of losing economic benefit, that they lose the full economic benefits: mining went that way, cod went that way.”

— With files from Emma McIntosh

Updated on Apr. 6 at 7:14 p.m. ET: This story has been updated to clarify that Husky Energy was acquired by Cenovus Energy, meaning Cenovus is now Equinor’s partner in the Bay du Nord project.

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.

For years, Jean-Charles Piétacho has been growing increasingly worried about the state of the planet’s oceans and whether they can continue to sustain traditions that have lasted for generations.

Piétacho is chief of the Conseil des Innu de Ekuanitshit, which lies on the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, just above Anticosti Island, and is also known as Mingan.

The Innu say they have used and occupied the estuary and the gulf as well as its north shore since time immemorial. They say their relationship with Uinipek (the sea), the source of life, is fundamental for their maritime people who continue to exercise their ancestral rights, notably the gathering of marine resources for social, ceremonial purposes and for sustenance.

But Piétacho also believes the ocean represents much more than that for everyone.

“We all need the quality of water that was given by the Creator,” Piétacho told The Narwhal in an interview.

Chief Jean-Charles Piétacho of the Conseil des Innu de Ekuanitshit says new rules permitting exploration in Newfoundland’s offshore could have damaging impacts on his community on the north shore of the St. Lawrence. Photo: Francis Vachon / The Canadian Press

His community of 650 people is worried about the threat posed by oil and gas. The industry is lobbying for more exploration, while a new policy allows certain offshore exploration projects to be approved without adequate federal oversight, nor consultation with affected First Nations.

The Innu and their allies allege that a trove of more than 3,000 pages of recently released federal documents reveal how federal and provincial cabinet ministers rigged a regional study that was supposed to examine the safety of oil and gas exploration in an area off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. They say the documents show that the plan from the outset was to reduce federal oversight and allow more drilling projects to proceed, favouring industry interests over scientific evidence.

In effect, companies can now do seismic testing, install drilling platforms or drill wells into an area of the seafloor of the Atlantic Ocean without getting approval from the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada. It’s a win for industry which, along with the province, had argued federal assessments were an obstacle to development in a sector that’s critical to Newfoundland and Labrador’s economy. 

Piétacho’s community is more than 1,000 kilometres away from this area off the coast of Newfoundland, but a dwindling number of Atlantic salmon swim the route between the two every year.

Atlantic salmon, which the Innu call ushashameku, are listed as endangered around Anticosti Island and of special concern along the North Shore and further down the St. Lawrence River. Salmon enter the river and Bay of Fundy to lay eggs; their young, known as smolt, swim up the river and out of the bay, migrating through the Atlantic and North Atlantic. Fishing ushashameku is particularly important to the Innu and represents a way of life based on spirituality and respect.

Along with valuing the ocean’s cultural significance, Piétacho said, his nation operates a handful of commercial fishing boats, catching Atlantic salmon, crab, lobster and scallops and creating local jobs.

The health of these waters is critical to the people who rely on them.

It’s the reason the Innu of Ekuanitshit intervened in a 2021 court case brought forward by the environmental law charity Ecojustice, representing Sierra Club Canada Foundation, World Wildlife Fund of Canada and Ecology Action Centre. The complainants wanted a judicial review of what they call a “flawed” process that led to this weakened oversight.

In December, Justice Richard Bell denied the judicial review. Ecojustice and the three environmental organizations have appealed this decision. And now, the nearly 3,000 pages of documents released through the court case give a behind-the-scenes look at what happened as the Trudeau government lifted the requirement for federal environmental assessments of oil and gas exploration in a portion of Newfoundland’s offshore — at a time when it told the public it was improving oversight. 

A campaign promise and a new approach to offshore oil and gas exploration east of Newfoundland

Criticizing former prime minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government for watering down the longstanding Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, Justin Trudeau headed into the 2015 election with a campaign promise to improve federal oversight of major projects and restore public trust in federal regulatory reviews.

As prime minister, Trudeau and his Liberal government made good on this promise with the Impact Assessment Act, which came into force in 2019. The Act was meant to strengthen environmental assessments, with a particular emphasis on regional assessments. Studies of existing and anticipated projects are meant to go beyond “project-focused impact assessments to understand the regional context and provide more comprehensive analyses to help inform … future impact assessment decisions,” said Nancy Macdonald, spokesperson for the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada, in an email to The Narwhal.

The act has been challenged in court by industry-friendly politicians who say it infringes on provincial jurisdiction. Environmentalists have said that, while it made some much needed improvements, gaps remain. But, in general, the act is seen as an environmental step forward.

In April 2019, as part of a plan to promote offshore drilling, federal and provincial cabinet ministers announced the creation of the Regional Assessment Committee, saying they had appointed five people to study the regional implications of drilling for new oil deposits east of Newfoundland. At 735,000 square kilometres, the study area is larger than Alberta, stretching from the northern tip of the island of Newfoundland to beyond the southern tip of Nova Scotia — though well off its eastern coastline. There are already four oil-producing projects within the area, with a fifth proposed. Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault is due to make a decision on the controversial Bay du Nord deep-sea drilling project by April 13.

The Regional Assessment Committee was led by co-chairs Garth Bangay, an environmental consultant and previous program manager under Environment Canada, and Wes Foote, an engineer and former deputy minister of Petroleum Development under the Newfoundland government, as well as a board member of the Canada-Newfoundland Offshore Petroleum Board. At the time the committee was established, the government said it would be tasked with writing a report providing advice on how to make the licensing process more efficient for new exploratory drilling projects in the area while also protecting the environment. 

This look at Newfoundland and Labrador’s offshore exploration is the first regional assessment conducted under both the Impact Assessment Act and the previous assessment act. “It is precedent setting,” said Sigrid Kuehnemund, vice-president wildlife and industry with WWF-Canada, adding that’s part of the reason it was so critical it be done properly. Based in St. John’s, Kuehnemund said, “It sets the bar for the conduct of all future regional assessments.”

She was among those in the environmental movement who had hopes that the committee would engage the public, address cumulative impacts of development and identify areas that needed protection within the regional assessment area.

But the documents, released through the court battle, show numerous instances in which some federal officials appear to have influenced the Regional Assessment Committee’s review and recommendations to ensure they favoured the industry’s desire to get faster approvals with less oversight.

One example is a letter signed in December 2019 by Seamus O’Regan, who at the time was the federal minister of natural resources. He sent the letter in response to a request from the committee for more time to complete its work.

In the letter — which he also sent to the federal environment minister, the Newfoundland and Labrador premier and the provincial natural resources minister — O’Regan wrote that in order to ensure Newfoundland and Labrador would support the passing of the Impact Assessment Act, the Trudeau government had made a public promise to “exempt” exploratory drilling from federal review.

The province has its own publicized goal of seeing 100 new wells drilled in Newfoundland’s offshore by 2030 and saw regulatory uncertainty and federal climate change legislation as two major barriers.

O’Regan is Member of Parliament for Newfoundland’s riding of St. John’s South—Mount Pearl, as well as the current minister of labour. In that December 2019 letter, he agreed that the government needed to grant an extension to the Regional Assessment Committee’s deadline — provided it didn’t jeopardize industry plans to spend more than $7 billion on oil and gas exploration in deep water.

With an extension granted, O’Regan said the Regional Assessment Committee would be able to complete consultations, including with Indigenous groups, and prepare its final report. “However, the extension must not put at risk the commitment to have a ministerial regulation in place by the end of April 2020 to exempt exploratory drilling activities under the Impact Assessment Act,” the letter reads. 

O’Regan’s office declined a request for comment from The Narwhal due to the appeal currently before the court. The provincial Department of Industry, Energy and Technology denied a request for an interview for the same reason.

The office of federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault referred questions to the Impact Assessment Agency, as did his department, Environment and Climate Change Canada.

After the federal government agreed to extend the review, the committee submitted its draft report in January 2020, seeking feedback from stakeholders.

The Newfoundland and Labrador Oil and Gas Industries Association was among those providing comments in an April 2020 submission regarding the industry’s exemption from federal assessment when doing explorations. It said it believes “that for the offshore oil and gas industry to continue to be successful it must be globally competitive, and this must include regulatory processes. Environmental reviews can be undertaken in a fashion that protects the environment but allows economic activity to occur in [a] timely manner.”

Macdonald, with the Impact Assessment Agency, told The Narwhal, that recognizing the provincial government’s interest in the exemption, “the Government of Canada was happy to work with them through an agreement on a regional assessment with the regulatory exemption as a potential outcome.”

The potential for other outcomes than a blanket exemption is what Ecojustice lawyer Ian Miron said kept his clients at the table.

The court documents also include government notes from a meeting in May 2019 between the Regional Assessment Committee and fisheries groups and environmental organizations — including the parties to the 2021 lawsuit. The notes show that participants were concerned that the overarching regional assessment would be used to facilitate further drilling by replacing the need for detailed, project-specific assessments.

According to the notes, the Regional Assessment Committee responded in the meeting that the intention was to “increase efficiency” in the environmental assessment process and bring new information to the table to make the best decisions possible. “The purpose was not to facilitate exploratory drilling,” the committee stated.

Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board now primary oversight for new oil and gas projects

Chief Piétacho warns that the reduced oversight may lead to tragedy for local marine life in the event of an accident.

He fears it could be worse than the blowout of an exploratory well in the Deepwater Horizon disaster on the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. Deepwater’s failed well was drilled below 1,500 metres of water in the gulf. While some areas of Newfoundland’s eastern offshore wells are far shallower, others reach comparable deep-sea depths — the Bay du Nord project, for example, is eyeing depths between 1,000 and 1,200 metres. The Bay du Nord project has already completed some exploratory drilling and may soon begin production, if approved by the federal government.

In its review of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, a national commission reporting to the president of the United States noted that “deepwater drilling brings new risks, not yet completely addressed by the reviews of where it is safe to drill, what could go wrong, and how to respond if something does go awry.”Several oil spills in Newfoundland’s offshore in recent years have had experts calling for increased regulatory oversight of the industry. In particular, the worst spill in the province’s history saw the release of 250,000 litres of crude oil from a flowline to Husky Energy’s SeaRose vessel — part of the White Rose project — as it restarted production during a storm.

Although the federal government has removed requirements for federal assessments of offshore exploration in the region, Fisheries and Oceans Canada still has the power to review aspects of new exploration projects that impact fish, fish habitat or species at risk, to ensure mitigations are in place. 

And projects within the regional assessment area will still be submitted to a review by the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board, which is jointly managed by the Canadian and Newfoundland and Labrador governments, and which Regional Assessment Committee co-chair Foote sits on the board of. The offshore petroleum board’s role is to ensure that companies adhere to any conditions set out by the regional assessment. 

Lesley Ridout, a board spokesperson, said that it publicizes all expressions of interest in new exploration licences in Newfoundland’s offshore. “When we do so, Indigenous groups, the public and stakeholders are welcome to submit comments for consideration on any portion of our land tenure process, as stated in each news release, announcing any call for nominations or call for bids,” Ridout said. 

Two industry groups, the Newfoundland Oil and Gas Industries Association and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, emphasized the importance of the regulatory role played by the offshore petroleum board.

“All proposed offshore projects will continue to go through one of the most rigorous review processes in the world,” wrote Paul Barnes, director of Atlantic Canada and Arctic for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, in an emailed statement. “The regional assessment creates a more efficient process and will ensure the federal Impact Assessment is able to focus on the most important project reviews while relying on the world-class expertise of the offshore petroleum board.”

Public servants expressed concerns about the quality of regional assessment and consideration of risks to human health 

While the documents released as part of the Ecojustice case show how senior government officials like O’Regan advocated for reducing federal oversight of offshore oil exploration, they also reveal that some public servants expressed concerns about the quality of the Regional Assessment Committee’s work.

For example, officials at Health Canada with expertise on environmental assessments said the Regional Assessment Committee’s recommendations failed to address the potential dangers of chemical mixtures deployed by industry to disperse spills.

“Therefore, in the event of a spill in which dispersants are used, there would not be a comprehensive understanding of what potential contaminants may be present that could impact the food chain and potentially pose a risk to human health,” wrote a Health Canada environmental assessment specialist in a February 2020 email to a colleague at the Impact Assessment Agency.

The federal health department recommended that companies be required to proactively disclose the chemicals used in dispersants, which are otherwise proprietary, so that scientists can do sampling to review baseline conditions and any changes in the presence of these substances in the ecosystem. Without knowing which contaminants are involved, Health Canada noted their ability to respond to contaminants that have been added is significantly limited.

Despite Health Canada’s recommendations, the Regional Assessment Committee recommended only that baseline conditions and monitoring take place.

The email thread shows that a manager from the Impact Assessment Agency responded that he agreed with Health Canada and had also pointed out the oversight to the committee, “but this is where they landed and what they ended up going with.”

Macdonald, the agency spokesperson, said that Health Canada’s input helped inform the recommendations made by the Regional Assessment Committee. She noted that the potential effects of contaminants, both from planned oil and gas activities and in the case of a spill and cleanup, are considered in several places in the committee’s final report, including risks, mitigation measures and spill response planning.

However, the report does not mention requiring companies to disclose a list of potential contaminants used in dispersants.

In another instance, Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat concluded that some of the Regional Assessment Committee’s initial work was neither reliable, nor credible after scientists at the federal department reviewed sections of a draft report focused on sensitive areas and species in the marine ecosystem, including plankton, invertebrates, finfish, marine mammals and sea turtles.

The federal department also said after concluding its review in the fall of 2019 that it found “multiple mischaracterizations and/or omissions of available research from the referenced literature” and that “reported baseline information was incomplete and outdated” in most of the sections it was allowed to review. 

In an emailed response to questions from The Narwhal, Fisheries and Oceans Canada said, “the committee made substantial additions and revisions to the initial draft” sections that it reviewed, and that its comments and revisions were included in the final report. 

Fisheries and Oceans also said that the federal government had committed to regularly reviewing and updating the regional assessment as new science and data become available, which the department would contribute to. 

However, Fisheries and Oceans has come under fire itself recently for how its scientific advice is being tampered with — including through the regional assessment process. 

In late January, CBC reported on a leaked letter from the union representing Fisheries and Oceans scientists in Newfoundland and Labrador, which outlined its members’ concerns about breaches of the department’s scientific integrity policy due to the influence of industry lobbyists, department leaders and politicians. The letter stated that an investigation by the Office of the Ombuds into a complaint over the regional assessment process “did not follow due process and left members feeling that their complaints were not heard or believed.”

While the Regional Assessment Committee brushed aside some expert advice on its own, the court documents also show at least one instance when a public servant from Natural Resources Canada appears to have pressured the committee to change recommendations that might slow down or prevent oil and gas exploration.

In November 2019, before the committee’s draft recommendations were released to the public, the official emailed a list of concerns to the Impact Assessment Agency.

One of those concerns related to a recommendation that would require a federal review of any proposals in sensitive designated conservation areas, such as the Northeast Newfoundland Slope marine refuge, an area about the size of Nova Scotia that is closed off from commercial fishing due to its abundance of slow-growing cold-water corals and sponges, which provide habitat for numerous species. Protecting the area is a long-standing concern of several of the stakeholder groups, including the environmental organizations represented by Ecojustice.

The Natural Resources official noted that this proposal “could result in few exploratory projects being exempt” from federal oversight, running counter to the Trudeau government’s commitments to the province.

And indeed, the need for a review is not included in the Regional Assessment Committee’s final report, which reads that exploration drilling within marine refuges or certain fisheries “should be contingent on the operator demonstrating that any risks to intended biodiversity/conservation outcomes of that area will be avoided or mitigated.” This runs counter to the federal government’s inclusion of the Northeast Newfoundland Slope in a list of areas relevant towards meeting its goal of 25 per cent protection of Canada’s oceans by 2025 and 30 per cent protection by 2030. At about 55,000 square kilometres, it accounts for about one per cent of the government’s current level of just under 14 per cent protected marine area.

Ecojustice lawyer Miron said the original recommendation was never disclosed to stakeholders and his clients only learned it had been changed after the government disclosed its records through the court case.

Macdonald, from the Impact Assessment Agency, said, “The report and recommendations underwent several iterations,” based on analysis and engagement throughout the drafting process.

Justice Bell sided with the agency in his ruling, noting “There was nothing untoward in the committee consulting [Natural Resources Canada], a party to the agreement.” 

‘The decisions are already made’: Innu chief says regional assessment outcome was decided from the start

Chief Piétacho also said that the federal government failed to meaningfully consult First Nations during the regional assessment process, particularly about the implications of removing substantial federal oversight on new oil and gas projects.

In its 2019 request for an extension, the Regional Assessment Committee said that, while it was making progress, it believed that “building trust with Indigenous groups” was “not a fast-paced process.”

When asked about those comments by the committee, Piétacho told The Narwhal that government officials lost the trust of First Nations years ago based on Canada’s historical and current treatment of Indigenous communities.

“I know from experience, the decisions are already made and after that they come tell us that they are coming to consult us on a project,” he said.

Previously, Piétacho had noted in a February 2020 letter to the Impact Assessment Agency, that members of the Regional Assessment Committee would often provide dates and topics of meetings “at the last minute, giving us little time to prepare to contribute in a significant manner or even just to simply participate.”

Macdonald, with the Impact Assessment Agency, said the agency prioritizes “building long-term partnerships with Indigenous communities and people. Sustaining these relationships over the long term is vital for the success of assessments.”

She added that the agency’s Indigenous Advisory Committee as well as several programs are geared towards building that relationship and fostering trust. That includes the Indigenous Capacity Support Program which works to increase capacity for Indigenous Peoples to meaningfully participate in assessments.

Citing over 100 workshops and technical meetings and $436,000 in participant funding for Indigenous groups and other stakeholders, Macdonald called the regional assessment process fair, open and inclusive.

She listed literature reviews on the potential effects of exploratory drilling and initial drafts of potential recommendations as examples of information provided to Indigenous people in advance. “Some of these documents were provided nearly two months before their draft versions were released for a 30-day public review period,” she wrote in an emailed response.

Piétacho wrote in his February 2020 letter that the committee’s draft report lacked clarity, was rushed and inadequate, and was based on a vision of promoting offshore oil and gas development instead of promoting the protection of the ocean.

“It is concerning that, as the committee notes, too often the scientific expertise of the federal government was not available to support the assessment,” he said, in the letter, dated Feb. 21, 2020.

Just over a week later, the regional assessment report on oil and gas exploration in Newfoundland’s offshore was submitted to then-environment minister Wilkinson.

In their submission letter to Wilkinson, the committee’s co-chairs emphasized how the tight timeline hindered their work. One challenge this presented, they wrote, was limiting “the opportunities for others to contribute. Another was gaining the support of all the parties who should have been available to facilitate our work resulting in significant, additional effort to access important expertise.”

Nonetheless, four days later, on March 4, 2020, the final report was released to the public. On that same day the Impact Assessment Agency put out a discussion paper on the regulation exempting exploration drilling in Newfoundland and Labrador’s offshore from project-specific assessment. 

That April, Piétacho sent another letter to then-environment minister Jonathan Wilkinson, criticizing the proposed regulation. He wrote that it would eliminate the consultation stage with Indigenous people about whether to approve any future exploratory drilling.

The letter also noted that even before the committee’s draft study was released, the government had published a notice predicting that the report would be used to introduce an exemption on federal reviews for exploratory drilling permits.

“Not only is the process hasty and seems to indicate bias for production of hydrocarbons, it fails to really take into account the rights of Indigenous peoples,” Piétacho wrote.

As Piétacho expected, the exemption regulation was enacted on June 4, 2020.

Piétacho told the Narwhal that much is now at stake, for First Nations Rights, but also for everyone else.

“I’m concerned and I’ve taken on this file on behalf of the Innu Nation to defend our principles and dreams,” Piétacho told The Narwhal. “I’m not doing this for myself. I’m doing it for future generations.

With files from Mike De Souza.

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau dropped into Newfoundland and Labrador on Wednesday with a multibillion-dollar bailout package designed to beat down the soaring costs of the contentious Muskrat Falls hydroelectric project and avert a feared bankruptcy.

The agreement-in-principle is not yet official, but ahead of a likely election, Trudeau was clear his government was “prepared to commit” to two separate life-preservers totalling $5.2 billion for the struggling province the Liberals nearly swept in 2019’s election.

The bailout is approaching the total cost of overruns at Muskrat Falls, a megaproject that has faced numerous delays and opposition from local Indigenous peoples and environmental groups. Initially, Crown corporation Nalcor Energy expected the project to cost $7.4 billion all-in, but the price has since swelled to $13.1 billion and counting. It was the subject of a multi-year inquiry that found the megaproject was thoroughly, and perhaps criminally, mismanaged. Former premier Dwight Ball referred the inquiry report to the RCMP last year.

The bailout package, billed as “rate mitigation,” includes a $1-billion loan guarantee and a $1-billion “investment” in the Labrador Island Link (LIL). The LIL is a subsea transmission cable that connects Labrador to Newfoundland to allow electricity to flow from the Muskrat Falls hydro project to the island. The billion-dollar investment sits in a fund that can be emptied at a rate of up to $150 million per year.

The second deal has a projected value of $3.2 billion, and will see Canada making payments to the province equal to what it receives from the Hibernia offshore oil platform. The $3.2-billion estimate rests on Hibernia extracting oil off Newfoundland’s coast until 2047, and the price of oil holding to projections over that time.

“These transfers will ensure Newfoundlanders and Labradorians are the beneficiaries of this project, and the province has what it needs to support the people who live and work here,” Trudeau told reporters in St. John’s.

For years, credit rating agency Moody’s has chalked the province’s dire fiscal situation up to cost overruns at Muskrat Falls, and the province’s reliance on volatile oil revenue that limits its ability to pay down growing debt. The financial crisis was sharply revealed in the early months of 2020 when oil prices collapsed, and Ball was forced to write to Ottawa asking for financial help because the province couldn’t even borrow on its own.

Newfoundland and Labrador’s sole Opposition MP welcomed the news, but noted the bulk of the financial relief was coming from money many in the province have long considered rightfully theirs.

“While we appreciate the Liberal government helping to address the problems with Muskrat Falls with some creative restructuring of the debt and waiving fees on loan guarantees, it’s important to note that the majority of the fiscal support comes from the unintended windfall that Canada received from its Hibernia project share after recouping its investment,” said the NDP’s St. John’s East MP Jack Harris in a statement.

Meanwhile, the Bloc Quebecois is decidedly against the bailout. It sees the money as an unfair advantage to N.L., because Hydro-Quebec and Nalcor are both Crown corporations with significant hydropower competing for New England markets.

“This is no more and no less a frontal assault on our Crown corporation, which, let us remember, has never received a single penny in any subsidy from the federal government,” said Bloc MP and natural resources critic Mario Simard in a statement, adding “the Muskrat Falls circus must stop.”

“In launching this project, the Newfoundland government made no secret of the fact that its objective was to harm Quebec, bypass Quebec territory and compete with Hydro-Quebec on export markets.

“By announcing such funding, the government of Justin Trudeau is directly attacking Hydro-Quebec, which has been trying for several years to increase its electricity sales in the United States, one of the markets targeted by Muskrat Falls,” the statement also reads.

Hydro-Quebec declined comment.

Innu Nation ‘left out of discussions’

Innu Nation Grand Chief Etienne Rich said he was “disappointed” by Wednesday’s news because the nation wasn’t kept in the loop. He said there was a brief “supper time” call with government officials Tuesday, but that the nation learned of the federal funding announcement through the media.

“I told (the premier) very clearly that we need to be part of these discussions, and we need to know in advance because we’re the only Aboriginal group that has an (impacts and benefits agreement) with Nalcor in regards to Muskrat Falls,” he said.

Premier Andrew Furey told reporters Wednesday his government had provided a technical briefing to the Innu Nation on Tuesday evening.

“I have a great relationship and speak with Indigneous leaders every single week … (and) as they’re briefed, and as we all understand the deal better, I’m sure they will be more happy as the details become more available to them,” he said.

Rich says during the Tuesday evening call, he asked if the nation’s impacts and benefits agreement — which spells out financial, environmental, and other commitments — would be affected by the negotiations with Ottawa and didn’t get a clear answer. He says right now, the nation simply doesn’t know how it might be impacted, and that’s exactly the problem with being left out of discussions.

Furey “promised us if there’re any talks about rate mitigation, that he’d let us know in advance, but here it is yesterday, just a day before the announcement, and we didn’t find out through the premier’s office, we found out through the media. So like I say, he’s a very dishonest person.”

Furey’s office did not immediately return a request for comment.

“Even though Canada and the province gave a technical briefing to the press this afternoon, they still haven’t found time to give Innu Nation any details about the backroom deal they have reached,” the Innu Nation said in a statement.

“Innu Nation was only able to obtain a copy of the technical briefing given to the media by barging into a press briefing to which they had not been invited. And Innu Nation also points out that none of the materials made available to the press by Trudeau or Furey governments even mention the Innu,” the statement also reads.

Outside Confederation Building, where the Muskrat Falls bailout package was announced Wednesday, the Social Justice Co-op protested megaprojects for their harm to the environment and nearby communities.

“Over the past year, we have heard more and more government officials propose a hydrodam at Gull Island as a potential next energy project, wrapped up in grandiose plans of an ‘Atlantic Loop’ to power Canada and the U.S.,” said co-chair Kerri Neil.

“We know how harmful the Churchill Falls, and more recently Muskrat Falls, hydrodams have been to the Grand River and the expansive ecosystem that it nurtures. We cannot allow further destruction of the Grand River for resource extraction, and we refuse to let capitalist governments continue to put profit over people.”

Private equity firm Cresta Fund Management recently bought the 135,000 barrel-per-day oil refinery in Come by Chance, N.L., to produce cleaner fuels, but is also eyeing green hydrogen production, expected to use hydropower from Labrador. The provincial government spent millions helping the refinery find a buyer.

How did it get to a multibillion-dollar bailout?

Even though Muskrat Falls is still experiencing delays, an inquiry was launched in 2017 to study what went wrong, because even by then, it was clear the project had come off the rails.

Justice Richard LeBlanc’s report published last year lays the blame on both Nalcor and a series of provincial governments that failed to hold Nalcor accountable. His detailed report said former CEO Ed Martin — who, before taking the reins at Nalcor, managed Petro-Canada’s interests in Newfoundland and Labrador’s offshore oil industry — led a “fiefdom” and intentionally took advantage of politicians who were in over their heads to push forward an unnecessary project.

“There is no doubt that Nalcor, and in particular Edmund Martin, must be faulted for intentionally failing to disclose to (the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, or GNL) relevant information on costs, schedule and risk …If GNL had received full disclosure from Nalcor before sanction, it would have been in a position to properly evaluate the project and provide the public with truthful and accurate information,” LeBlanc wrote.

LeBlanc also found that premiers, starting with Danny Williams, were dead set on a project that could compete with Hydro-Quebec, and “leveraged” tensions between N.L. and Quebec to promote Muskrat Falls. Those frustrations largely relate to the 1969 Churchill Falls contract that gave Quebec outsized benefits for a dam in Labrador.

A number of other setbacks plagued the project, from abandoned plans to build a dome over the site to build through Labrador’s cold winters, to problems with the power grid software.

The province’s negotiating team was led by Brendan Paddick, a telecommunications tycoon who chaired Nalcor’s board of directors, and is also a close associate of Furey’s. Furey, Paddick, and Great Big Sea frontman Alan Doyle founded the Dollar A Day Foundation that funds charities. The federal team was steered by Serge Dupont, a longtime insider who previously was a deputy minister for Natural Resources Canada when N.L. was in the early days of negotiating Muskrat Falls.

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Canada’s foremost fisheries biologists say Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s plan to rebuild Atlantic cod is “riddled with weaknesses from a science and policy perspective” and “it’s unclear whether it will help or hinder a cod recovery.”

The commentary, published last week in Policy Options, is the latest criticism of the federal strategy, which was released in December and is among the first plans the department has produced since 2019 amendments to the Fisheries Act requiring it to protect habitat and rebuild populations of critically depleted fish.

Next year marks 30 years since the 1992 cod moratorium, when the federal government shuttered Newfoundland and Labrador’s cod fishery. Although cod remains under moratoria, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) reopened a small, inshore commercial cod fishery called the “stewardship” fishery 15 years ago. 

Jeffrey Hutchings, a fisheries biologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax and lead author of the commentary, said the plan downplays science showing the greatest threat to cod is overfishing. He said overfishing played a primary role in the 1990s collapse and the failed rebuilding ever since. Part of the problem, he said, is Fisheries and Oceans Canada puts economic and commercial interests ahead of science and conservation efforts. 

“Politicians were ill-equipped to balance interests of the environment, sustainability of coastal communities and the employment they need, with pressures from industry to keep catching more and more cod,” he said of the collapse. “Underlying all of that was advice from scientists in the background.” 

He added that the rebuilding plan changes little by way of fisheries management.

The fishing village of Red Bay in NunatuKavut, on the south coast of Labrador, was one of many communities severely impacted by the 1992 cod moratorium. Photo: John Angelopoulos

According to the plan, “natural causes,” such as the effects of warmer ocean temperatures and starvation due to depleted capelin, cod’s primary fish prey, are preventing a cod comeback more so than fishing. And yet, the plan offers no actions to counteract these threats and doesn’t even mention “climate.”

Meanwhile, the organization representing the Southern Inuit of Labrador said the plan represents a missed opportunity for reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples.

The strategy outlines Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s objectives and management measures for helping northern cod (a population of Atlantic cod) out of the critical zone. But without actions, targets and timelines, it’s unclear how, let alone if, that will happen, Hutchings said. 

This week, Fisheries and Oceans Canada will release its northern cod scientific assessment, which is expected to show the stock is still in the critical zone, where it’s hovered for the better part of the past 50 years.

Fisheries and Oceans Canada has long overlooked the role of overfishing in cod collapse: scientists

Julie Diamond, regional manager of resource management and integrated fisheries for Fisheries and Oceans Canada in Newfoundland and Labrador, said one of the primary goals of the cod rebuilding plan is “to try to strike that balance [between] promoting the growth of the northern cod stocks, but still providing regional fishing opportunities.” 

The plan sets out rules for monitoring the health of the stock and guiding annual fishing limit decisions in the stewardship fishery. Determining fishing limits rarely leads to consensus, Diamond said. As history shows, conservationists err on the side of keeping fishing removals as low as possible, while those with a commercial stake often want more leeway on quota. 

Indeed, when the cod rebuilding plan was announced, ocean conservation charity Oceana Canada argued the federal fisheries department swung too high, saying the plan “fails to include the fundamental elements necessary to rebuild stocks.” 

In contrast, Keith Sullivan, president of the Fish, Food and Allied Workers Union, said the plan swung too low, calling it “a major setback for the development of a sustainable cod fishing sector in rural Newfoundland and Labrador.” 

Kris Vascotto, executive director of the Atlantic Groundfish Council, the non-profit industry association representing year-round groundfish harvesters in Atlantic Canada, landed in the middle, saying the plan strikes the right balance, creating stability around catch, while allowing the cod population room to recover. 

Fishermen filet cod in Newfoundland. In 2006, Fisheries and Oceans Canada reopened a small, inshore commercial cod fishery following the 1992 moratorium. Photo: michael_swan / Flickr

Fisheries biologists, meanwhile, have criticized the federal fisheries department’s actions to increase fishing pressure on critically depleted cod stocks. 

In 2019, George Rose and Carl Walters published a study showing that Fisheries and Oceans Canada had underestimated the role of overfishing and overestimated the role of natural causes in the collapse as well as in more recent recovery efforts. The finding suggests the federal department’s decision to increase the cod fishing quota in the stewardship fishery runs counter to the best scientific advice, Hutchings says. 

Back in 2017, Rose and another colleague, Sherrylynn Rowe, wrote an open letter to Fisheries and Oceans Canada, urging the department to hold off on ramping up the northern cod fishery given stocks were “still well below historical norms.” 

But the department had already more than tripled the northern cod quota from 4,000 metric tonnes in 2015 to 10,000 tonnes in 2016 and 13,000 tonnes in 2017. The allowable catch has remained near 2017 levels ever since, despite the department’s own confirmation of a stalled cod recovery.

The cod rebuilding plan makes no reference to the Rose and Walter study, an omission Hutchings and others have suggested may be intentional given the evidence counters the fisheries department’s practice to increase northern cod catch levels. Diamond was unable to respond to this claim.

Climate change poses one of the biggest threats to cod, yet it’s not mentioned in rebuilding plan

The rebuilding plan acknowledges environmental conditions, especially warming waters, are a contributing factor to cod’s natural mortality, but doesn’t account for this threat. “Climate change should have been at least mentioned in the plan,” said Dave Reddin, a retired fisheries biologist who spent 35 years working for Fisheries and Oceans Canada in St. John’s. 

While science can explain how the ocean is changing due to the global climate crisis, it cannot yet explain how cod will respond, he said, save for the expectation that coldwater marine species will follow cold marine waters, meaning northern cod are likely to swim northward. 

Robert Rangeley, Oceana Canada’s science director, said Fisheries and Oceans Canada could have accounted for climate change by undertaking a climate vulnerability assessment to better understand how northern cod may react and respond to climate-related ocean changes. Such an assessment would identify vulnerabilities (for example, in cod reproduction rates and diet) created by issues like ocean warming and acidification.

Reddin said addressing climate change in the plan would make it clear the federal department is prepared to put conservation ahead of commercial interests. 

If the federal government lists cod as endangered under the Species at Risk Act, it would also have to take decisive action to protect the species, such as restricting fishing, something critics say it might not want to do due to the socioeconomic impacts. Photo: Derek Keats / Flickr

Reddin also pointed to Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s decision to not list cod as endangered under the Species at Risk Act, despite repeated recommendations to do so by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, an independent scientific body.

Hutchings, who chaired the committee from 2006 to 2010, noted that listing a species under the act would compel Fisheries and Oceans Canada to implement protections, such as a halt to all fishing activity.

“Almost any species of commercial value does not get listed,” he said. “A whale, bird or reptile, sure it will get listed. A caribou, maybe. But a marine fish of any commercial value? Not likely.”

Compared with shellfish like crab and shrimp, groundfish such as cod are not high income earners for the province’s commercial fishery, which was valued at $1.4 billion in 2019. But the 14,501 tonnes of cod harvested off of Newfoundland and Labrador in 2019 still garnered $26 million on the export market, according to the Seafood Industry Year in Review 2019.

Critics say rebuilding plan fails to consider capelin, cod’s primary food source

One of the greatest threats to a cod comeback, according to the rebuilding plan, is declining capelin stock. And yet, the plan offers no actions for the commercial capelin fishery. The plan should have explained how cod can recover under current capelin and cod fishing levels, Reddin said. 

While capelin catch limits have generally decreased since 2015, they rose in 2019, during a global capelin shortage due to decreased supply throughout Europe. That year, Newfoundland and Labrador capelin earned $41 million in export value, 65 per cent higher than 2018, while several European countries instituted capelin moratoria to allow the stocks there time to recover. 

Earlier this month, World Wildlife Fund Canada called on Fisheries and Oceans Canada to institute a moratorium for the 2021 Newfoundland and Labrador capelin fishery to allow the stock time to recover as well as to encourage cod stock recovery. More recently, Oceana Canada called on Fisheries Minister Bernadette Jordan to do the same. 

Rangeley said inaction on capelin suggests the fisheries department didn’t consider how species interact within the marine ecosystem. “Part of the problem is we don’t manage our fisheries in an ecosystem context,” he said. “We manage as if they’re out in the water with no other influences, as a single species and a single stock.”

Fishermen catch capelin off Quirpon Island, Newfoundland and Labrador. Capelin is a small fish that feeds a variety of species from Atlantic cod to humpbacks to puffins. Photo: Sean McKinnon

In March, Fran Mowbray, a biologist and the capelin stock assessment lead with Fisheries and Oceans Canada in St. John’s, presented the capelin scientific assessment, which showed the population is a fraction of what it once was with no prospects of recovery under current conditions. The assessment will inform the federal department’s commercial capelin fishery decisions, expected in mid-April along with decisions for the stewardship cod fishery. 

“[Capelin is] what we call a keystone species or linchpin species,” Mowbray said in an interview. “It really has an impact throughout the ecosystem.”

Despite the latest science, some in the commercial industry are urging the federal fisheries department to open this year’s commercial capelin season. But others within industry think it’s time to reexamine the capelin fishery, especially for the sake of cod.

“We need capelin,” said Alberto Wareham, president and CEO of Newfoundland’s Icewater Seafoods, which operates the only plant in North America exclusively dedicated to processing Atlantic cod. “The other things cod are eating are not putting weight on them. DFO needs to invest more in the capelin science.”

The NunatuKavut Community Council, the representative governing body for approximately 6,000 Inuit of south and central Labrador, is recommending the federal government halt the 2021 capelin fishery altogether. 

Fisheries management decisions fail to consider Indigenous Knowledge

When Canada modernized the Fisheries Act in 2019, strengthening the role of Indigenous Peoples in fisheries management decision-making was among the key changes. The cod rebuilding plan targets the largest commercial Atlantic cod fishing zone, half of which is off NunatuKavut’s coastline.

Diamond, of Fisheries and Oceans Canada, said the department hosted more than 20 consultations with stakeholders, including Indigenous stakeholders, since it initiated work toward a cod rebuilding plan.

However, Todd Russell, president of the NunatuKavut Community Council, said the federal plan represents a missed opportunity for reconciliation and he’d like to see Fisheries and Oceans Canada meaningfully involve Indigenous perspectives in decision-making. 

“We’re finding our knowledge has not been fully appreciated for the value it can bring to modern-context fisheries management and there’s been decisions that have continued to keep our communities marginalized,” Russell said.

“DFO, in my view, has not done enough,” he continued. “In fact, they’ve done very little to understand the opportunity that exists for reconciliation in the fishery. Every fisheries minister has been mandated to look, to seek and to pursue reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples through the fishery and how the fishery is managed. And we don’t see that.”

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The ocean swells were reaching more than eight metres high when the SeaRose decided to resume pumping oil in the middle of one of Newfoundland’s worst storms in decades.

That decision in November by the SeaRose, a floating production and storage vessel operated by Husky Energy, led to the largest spill in the region’s history. More than 250,000 litres of crude dumped into the ocean when a subsea flow line disconnected in the heavy seas.

For two Canadian researchers, the incident is just the latest evidence that the offshore oil and gas industry needs the oversight of an independent environmental agency to better protect Newfoundland’s Grand Banks region.

York University’s Gail Fraser and the University of Waterloo’s Angela Carter say it’s critical the offshore energy industry have stricter regulation, at a time when Newfoundland is trying to dramatically expand oil production in the ecologically sensitive region.

“Our concern, in light of that spill, is that the system is obviously not working,” said Carter, a Newfoundland-raised political scientist who focuses on the environmental politics of oil and climate change. “How is it possible that this was a procedure that was deemed acceptable? There’s something really wrong here.”

Fraser and Carter are asking the federal and provincial governments to establish a new, independent environmental authority they say would avoid the economic conflicts of the current regulator, the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board (C-NLOPB).

Newfoundland’s Grand Banks is a diverse ecosystem that’s part of a significant marine environment for seabird colonies, marine mammals and a $1.4 billion fishery. It’s a habitat for millions of migratory birds, endangered leatherback turtles, harbour porpoises, seals and multiple species of whales.

Puffins fly in front of an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland. An oil spill in 2004 is believed to have killed 10,000 seabirds. Photo: Gail Fraser

10,000 seabirds killed in 2004 spill

But more than 350 kilometres off the eastern coast of Newfoundland, it’s also out of sight for most Canadians. A 165,000-litre oil spill in 2004 in the same area is believed to have killed 10,000 seabirds, but because it happened so far from land in heavy seas that dispersed the damage, few people saw any signs of it.

“It’s out of sight. There’s no graphic images of seabirds being killed to grab the public, and promote outrage that this is going on. It’s a hard one to get the public engaged in,” said Fraser, a biologist whose research focuses on the environmental management of offshore oil and gas industry, and avian wildlife.

That 2004 Terra Nova spill, the worst in Atlantic Canada’s history until the SeaRose incident, resulted in $290,000 in fines for operator Petro Canada. Compare that to the $3 million penalty for Syncrude Canada for the deaths of 1,600 ducks at one of its Alberta tailings ponds in 2008.

The oil sector’s track record for protecting this often-unseen environment, and self-reporting the damage it’s doing, is poor, Carter and Fraser argue. And it’s not just spills that cause challenges. Routine waste discharges, marine noise, light pollution that impacts seabirds and flaring are all common problems, they say.

Husky Energy’s decision to resume pumping oil in a major storm followed a near-miss with an iceberg in May 2017, when the SeaRose delayed disconnecting and opted to gamble in favour of continuing oil production.

“These incidents show that the existing regulatory structure allows oil companies to act primarily in accordance with their economic interests to restart production as soon as possible, or continue with risky production, rather than to protect the environment,” reads a letter Fraser and Carter sent to federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna, Natural Resources Minister Amarjeet Sohi and his provincial counterpart Siobhan Coady.

Offshore petroleum board has gaps in oversight

Critics say the offshore petroleum board is more concerned with developing the offshore industry and producing revenue for government coffers than protecting the environment. One obvious problem is that the regulator doesn’t have the power to tell operators when to resume production in severe weather. That leaves the oil companies free to take too many risks, Fraser said.

“They made a revenue decision, rather than thinking, ‘Maybe we shouldn’t be doing this,’ ” she said. “It has identified another gap in overseeing what’s going on.”

Husky Energy, meanwhile, says it has since updated its guidelines for operating in severe weather, put in new protocols to prevent similar spills and is “deeply sorry for the incident and committed to learning from it and putting measures in place to ensure it does not happen again.”

Fraser and Carter want a stronger, more transparent environmental agency that would focus on all stages of offshore activity, from site leasing to decommissioning. That should also include the power to monitor waste treatment, emergency response and evaluate the long-term and cumulative environmental effects of offshore oil and gas extraction, they said.

Newfoundland plans to double oil production by 2030

The calls for more environmental oversight in the Grand Banks come as Newfoundland forges ahead with ambitious expansion plans to add 100 new exploration wells and double production to 650,000 barrels of oil per day by 2030 — all this in a challenging and remote marine environment vulnerable to hurricanes, winter storms, icebergs, fog and rogue waves, obstacles that could delay by weeks the delivery of equipment used to stop major leaks.

But increased scrutiny of the offshore industry isn’t always welcome in an economically challenged province where many see oil as a ticket to prosperity.

“We hope the government will act, but history would tell us they don’t have an appetite for that,” Carter said. “We’ve got a government that is hell-bent on increasing production, and is doing it further out, ever deeper, in more extreme, harsher environments. We’ll have more chances of spills, and no possibility of cleaning them up.”

Both the federal and provincial governments would need to agree to create a new regulatory agency, and neither appears motivated to do so. Environment and Climate Change Canada and Newfoundland’s ministry of natural resources declined to comment for this story.

Natural Resources Canada insists the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board (C-NLOPB) is doing a good job regulating the offshore industry, and ensuring that development is being done in a responsible way. It also points to the Frontier and Offshore Regulatory Renewal Initiative, a federal-provincial partnership that aims to improve standards for safety and environmental protection.

“The Government of Canada has confidence in the C-NLOPB and its ability to ensure safety and environmental protection,” the ministry said in an e-mail. “The board’s mandate is to oversee responsible development in the offshore, and that is exactly what we expect it will continue to do.”

It adds that Bill C-69, legislation that will amend the environmental impact assessment process for resource projects if passed by the senate, would create a new agency that it says would ensure reviews of proposed offshore projects would follow a consistent, neutral process.

The C-NLOPB, meanwhile, defends its record of protecting the environment for over 30 years as a regulator. It says it works closely with Fisheries and Oceans Canada and other agencies from both governments to make sure its decisions are based on the latest science.

“Offshore safety and environmental protection are paramount in all board decisions. The C-NLOPB will not approve any offshore activity until an operator demonstrates that it has met the legislative and regulatory requirements and has reduced risks to as low as reasonably practicable,” Lesley Rideout, spokesperson for the regulator, said in a statement.

‘I wonder how we’ll look back on this in 20 years’

Some in Newfoundland aren’t so sure, and are beginning to sound the alarm about what’s happening in the Grand Banks. Gerry Rogers, leader of the provincial NDP, as well as the island’s fisheries union, have joined the lobbying efforts for an independent offshore regulator.

After the SeaRose spill, Carter and Fraser hope public opinion may slowly be shifting in favour of better protecting the ocean environment off Newfoundland’s shores. But they’re not holding their breath.

“I wonder how we’ll look back on this in 20 years,” Carter said. “We have a government redoubling efforts to increase oil production offshore, at a time when, globally, other countries are banning exploration and extraction of oil… I feel like Newfoundland is completely out of step with the climate crisis.”

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.