Six hundred samples. Roughly 180 sites across the Canadian Arctic. And more than 3,000 microbes providing more than four trillion pieces of data on the genetic composition of the Arctic Ocean.

These are the quick numbers behind the work of Srijak Bhatnagar, an assistant professor at the University of Calgary and Athabasca University, who along with his team spent seven years studying and cataloguing environmental DNA from Canada’s most northern waters. 

Environmental DNA is genetic material shed by all organisms, including fish, birds, insects and microbes, into their environment. It includes feces, skin, tissues and mucus, which allows researchers to identify the creature that shed it, providing a picture of the living composition of the ocean and its inhabitants. 

Through samples collected over a six-year period by various researchers aboard the CCGS Amundsen, an icebreaker and Arctic research vessel, Bhatnagar’s team believes they can help identify more than 80 per cent of all environmental DNA found in the Arctic Ocean. 

The significance of this work goes beyond the numbers. According to Bhatnagar, collecting and cataloguing as much environmental DNA as possible is essential to understanding and combatting climate change. The data provides insight into populations and migration patterns for key species in the region, and tracking the impacts of diseases and other marine contaminants on the ecosystem and food security for local communities.

The team plans to make the information accessible to other researchers as well as Inuit and other Indigenous communities in the Canadian Arctic. They are currently building an online environmental DNA database with their ocean samples, which will be added to larger, publicly available databanks created and hosted by the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration, which includes DNA from both terrestrial and marine species in the Arctic. But they also travelled through Nunavut and Nunavik, hosting a series of workshops aimed at making the connection between genomic data and the environmental changes Inuit communities are seeing on the ground.

Bhatnagar’s team is also collaborating with researchers at Carleton University to build a larger, publicly accessible AI-supported system that will be fed by all genomics research taking place in the region, including the ocean environmental DNA his team has studied. The goal, he says, is making “the ChatGPT for genomic information.”

Such a platform, Bhatnagar says, could give communities the tools to answer critical questions: what can the DNA in Arctic waters tell us about mercury contamination in the region? What can local bacteria tell us about the impact of climate change on the population of key wildlife species?

“I cannot emphasize enough how many questions this could answer that I can’t even think of and only the future would reveal,” Bhatnagar says.

A safe, accessible and inexpensive method

Between 2013 and 2019, Bhatnagar’s team processed environmental DNA samples collected from the ocean by various researchers aboard the Amundsen, from across the Canadian Arctic archipelago and as far north as Nares Strait, which lies between Nunavut’s Ellesmere and Greenland. Genome Canada, a federally funded non-profit organization, provided more than $10 million in project funding to Casey Hubert, a professor at the University of Calgary and mentor of Bhatnagar’s. 

Hubert’s research aims to understand what kinds of microbes live in the Arctic Ocean, how abundant they are and how they may offer a nature-based solution in a region that is seeing less sea ice, more shipping and potentially greater chances of oil spills due to increased traffic. 

“Arctic Canada does not have capacity to mount a quick oil cleanup response,” he explains. “So what it comes down to is bacteria that are in the ocean that can actually degrade oil, crude oil or diesel.”

The collected samples have revealed significant quantities of microbes that can degrade various types of oil. They also provide a baseline for these microbes, so any change in the composition of microbes and marine life in the area can be measured after an incident, such as a spill. 

“Pollution incidents could also disturb the environment, disrupt the ecosystem,” Bhatnagar explains. “So how do we know that when the oil cleanup has happened, the environment is back to its old self, or has now moved on to a new self?” 

This method of research and data collection is also less harmful to the ecosystem than other techniques, he adds.

“Using an [environmental DNA] baseline is a lot faster and cheaper and less deadly than trawling [where you] pull up everything, count it and by the time [the marine organisms] come up, they’re already dead,” Bhatnagar says. 

“We use a gram of seafloor or a litre of water and that’s about it. It’s a lot less invasive and faster and cheaper, and it’s replicable,” he says, meaning researchers can compare samples over time. “They can see the changes happening over our lifetime because of climate change.” 

Changing populations, migration patterns and food sovereignty in the Arctic

Alongside making environmental DNA from the ocean samples accessible, Bhatnagar says funding from Genome Canada is also being used to increase the uptake of genomics to inform discussions around food sovereignty for Inuit. This includes discussions about population management and migration patterns, from co-managing herds to monitoring initiatives for local biodiversity. 

In order to do this, Bhatnagar and his team visited communities across Nunavik and Nunavut between January 2024 and March 2025, speaking to Elders, hunters and trappers committees and Inuit government representatives about how environmental DNA-based tools could support their goals. 

Reducing the impacts of research activities on local wildlife and marine life is significant, according to Allen Gordon, an Inuk historian, municipal councillor and wildlife technician in Nunavik who participated in a community workshop held in Kuujjuaq, Que., earlier this year. 

“With new techniques and with new genetics research, you may not need to just always kill — because to sample that beluga, [for example], you’ll have to kill it,” he says. 

“Now you may be able to get a lot of samples just from the water, and the water will tell you who’s been around, who’s left their mark.” 

Gordon adds that larger DNA information can help answer questions Inuit have about wildlife as a source of food that are unique to each community. In Nunavik, Inuit want to know more about belugas, which they have largely been prevented from harvesting in Ungava Bay for decades due to declining local populations. 

“The government came out in the ’80s saying, ‘No more hunting. Your [beluga] population is way too low. No more hunting at all,” Gordon recalls. “But then questions came [from Inuit]: are these whales that we still see and sometimes harvest — are they unique to Ungava Bay or are they the ones that move around to Churchill to join that big population?” 

Gordon adds that it’s an example of how science can help both the Canadian government and Inuit find consensus on their shared goal of maintaining a healthy beluga population: “For us Inuit being a harvesting society — we want to keep eating and killing belugas.”

Shivangi Mishra, a postdoctoral researcher who co-created the community workshops with Bhatnagar, says working with Inuit is essential for ensuring any digital technologies including the database reflect local knowledge that precedes, completes and complements scientific research on Arctic genomics. 

“Science is a very powerful tool, but grounding the science in Indigenous values and traditional values is more important,” she says. 

“Technologies are just a tool. They always complement, but it’s not like they are the only solutions.”

Through the workshops, Gordon says he has been happy to connect with other Inuit working with Bhatnagar’s team who are learning about genomics, making the science accessible to their communities and attempting to apply it to local decision-making. In one meeting, he heard from Emily Angulalik, the executive director for the Pitquhirnikkut Ilihautiniq Kitikmeot Heritage Society in Cambridge Bay, Nvt., who shared that Inuit in the community are seeing more diseases and parasites in muskox. This was surprising for Gordon because over in Nunavik, the local muskox population is healthy and currently growing by nine per cent each year, according to 2024 statistics from the Government of Quebec.

With Angulalik’s participation, Gordon says the conversation around food sovereignty and research in the region was more expansive. The two of them shared with the team the importance of involving communities, valuing their knowledge and ensuring scientific research returns to Inuit.  

“We had a lot of similarities of Inuit knowledge that in the past had not really been taken into account,” Gordon says. 

‘We must use our language to learn our ways’

The AI chatbot will function as a mix between a search engine like Google and an AI-overview system like ChatGPT, Bhatnagar says, that will use the most current and comprehensive genomic research available. 

Bhatnagar says decisionmakers will be able to ask the chatbot questions about local species, the researchers studying them and community involvement in the work.

“The platform will tell me that, for example, polar bears [in that area] are actually thriving. So if we were to hunt polar bears, we go to that side and not to this side, and that information helps [people] with decision-making, from an individual level to territorial and federal government levels.”

While the system will not host the environmental DNA itself, it will draw from all publicly available research and the environmental DNA that Bhatnagar’s team is adding to the larger databanks at the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration. 

Christy Caudill, a systems scientist at Carleton University, is working alongside Bhatnagar to build this platform in partnership with Angulalik and the Pitquhirnikkut Ilihautiniq Kitikmeot Heritage Society. She says the AI tool will function as “a knowledge mobilization system.”

Caudill notes communities like Cambridge Bay have been using both actual genomic science and Inuinnait knowledge around genomics as part of their local monitoring programs for a long time. But there are gaps between Inuit ways of knowing and genomics, particularly when it comes to terminology. 

“We must use our language to learn our ways,” Annie Atighioyak, president of the Kitikmeot Heritage Society, says of this work. “Through spoken Inuinnaqtun, observation, hands-on activities and not just the written form. Let the learners see, hear, feel, practise or taste the language and culture.” 

With Angulalik and Elders at Pitquhirnikkut Ilihautiniq Kitikmeot Heritage Society in Cambridge Bay, the team translated hundreds of terms used in genomic science to Inuinnaqtun. Together, they co-created a definition that incorporates scientific information but is rooted in the culture and Inuinnaqtun dialect. Elder Mary Kaotalok and Angulalik translated ‘genomics’ as: “Aallanngurninga uumajuvaluit ihumaaluktut qanurinninganik, aulavallianinganik, nunaujiurnirmilu naunairutikhangit.”

Alongside these translations, Angulalik and Caudill have also been developing knowledge models that identify the linkages between Inuit and scientific ways of knowing, and ensuring the platform is rooted in both. 

For example, Angulalik and Elder Mabel Etegik described the relationship between their knowledge of muskox and their knowledge of climate change, culture, weather and working together. Their knowledge of this keystone cultural species and its connections and context will be indexed by the AI tool and can be searched and summarized for users.

Caudill adds the process has also led to important discussions about “how [genomics] can be expressed in an everyday context to people” as well. 

“The term ‘genomics’ is inherently difficult to fully understand, unless that is your field of study. It can take years of specialty study to truly understand the concept of wildlife genomics as it relates to larger contexts and informs areas such as conservation,” she says. 

“But, for the first time, it can now be said in only four lines in Inuinnaqtun and understood by those speakers in its holistic context. I think that is a brilliant example of the strength of language itself and the power that it has to relay information.””

Angulalik agrees, adding this work will make genomics research more accessible to Inuinnait moving forward. 

“It’s a slow process but the terms will be used in our future — for our youth and for the generations to come,” she says.

“It’s also so important for our Elders and for Inuinnaqtun speakers [today] to understand the importance of the terms.” 

Meanwhile, Caudill and Angulalik are hoping to present an initial version of the AI platform at the ArcticNet conference in Calgary this December and have it ready for public use by August. It will include more than 100 translations from genomics science co-developed with Inuit partners, some of them in Inuinnaqtun. 

Caudill and Angulalik are now engaging in discussions about data sovereignty and digital ownership with Inuit as well. 

“Consistently, our Inuit partners have said, ‘We welcome science. We welcome Western science. We welcome technologies. We welcome innovations. And also, we’re taking that seat with you at the table,’” Caudill says. 

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After a secret ballot, global trade restrictions will not be placed on the species at the heart of Canada’s most lucrative fishery. But trade of American eels is also driving a massive, illegal economy — and advocates say the vote represents a failure to address this serious threat.

On Nov. 27, countries voted against listing the American eel and other eel species at the 20th meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES, in Uzbekistan. Canada was among the nations who voted against restrictions. At the meeting, the Canadian delegate said populations of American eel have remained stable for the last two decades, and that the proposal did not take into account advances in technology used to distinguish eel species. The vote was followed by an announcement this week that Canada will not list American eel under the Species At Risk Act, following more than a decade of deliberation.

The restrictions would have applied to the trade of 17 eel species, including American eel, which is the basis of a controversial fishery in Atlantic Canada. American eel are harvested as palm-size juveniles from Maritime rivers in the spring, and exported to Asia for rearing in aquaculture facilities. A kilogram of baby eels (called elvers) was fetching nearly $5,000 in 2023.

That price drives not only commercial and Indigenous fisheries, but also a large black-market fishery conducted by organized crime, experts say, making a coordinated response necessary. The Sustainable Eel group, a conservation group based in the U.K., says illegal eel sales are the “world’s greatest wildlife crime.” Despite its vote against the listing, experts say Canada, as a hub for the trade, has a particularly important role to play. 

“Canada could have played a role at this meeting, and actually led support for the proposal,” Katie Schleit, fisheries director at Oceans North says. “They’ve come out in all kinds of different arenas as being a champion to fight illegal, unreported, unregulated fishing, [but] … they aren’t taking responsibility for the role that Canada’s actually playing in the global illegal trade of eels right now.”

Illegal fishing, exports put pressure on American eel

Trade poses a significant threat to biodiversity, according to Sheldon Jordan, a wildlife crime consultant who formerly worked on wildlife enforcement at Environment and Climate Change Canada. “When [people] think of endangered species, they’re thinking of all the things in The Lion King, but the biggest threat is actually [to] the consumables. It’s the fish, it’s the wood, the things that we eat,” he says. With eel, “the demand is outstripping the supply. There is a conservation issue.” 

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, which has been ratified by 185 parties, is meant to address this. Since 1975, the convention has worked to regulate the trade in wild plants and animals, to maximize their chances of survival.

This year, the European Union, with the support of Honduras and Panama, nominated 17 species of eel to be included under an appendix that regulates trade, but doesn’t prevent it. While the proposal noted Japanese and American eel are particularly at risk, the parties nominated over a dozen freshwater species, noting that eels are often impossible to tell apart, making enforcement a challenge.

European eel — which has declined by up to 95 per cent in rivers across Europe — shows why this is important, Jordan says. 

The export of European eels from the European Union has been banned since at least 2011 (with European eel listed under CITES in 2009), but the ban did not stop the export of juvenile eels to Asia. Jordan says his Environment Canada officers in Vancouver and Toronto intercepted containers of frozen eel meat from Asia as late as 2017, almost a decade after the CITES listing. The meat was labelled as American eel, but genetic testing revealed up to 50 per cent was European eel that had been falsely declared to evade controls.

 “In the end, our officers confiscated 186 tonnes of eel meat,” Jordan says. “That was six, seven times more than our previous record when it came to endangered species being seized.” 

Jordan says he warned colleagues at Fisheries and Oceans Canada that given the low supply and high price of European eel, it was only a matter of time before demand exploded for North American exports. “And unfortunately, that has come to pass.”

In Canada, the target is American eel, which is also found throughout the eastern United States, the Caribbean and at the northern edge of South America. American eel have a complex life cycle that starts in an area of the Atlantic Ocean known as the Sargasso Sea. Larvae spend up to a year floating around in the ocean, before transparent juveniles swim up rivers in the spring.

The Canadian commercial quota for those elvers has been set at roughly 10,000 kilograms for decades, and in recent years, the fishery has been the subject of bitter conflict as high prices have increased fishing pressure. Meanwhile, as Jordan predicted, exports of elvers have soared; in 2022, imports of live elvers into East Asia from the Americas jumped to 157 tonnes, up from 53 tonnes in 2021, according to a paper published in Marine Policy.

Over the last five years, Fisheries and Oceans Canada has cancelled the elver season multiple times, citing illegal fishing and violence. Since then, the federal government has imposed new regulations to increase the traceability of the catch, including possession and export licences. 

At this year’s meeting of the endangered species trade convention, Canada’s delegate cited these regulations in its position against listing. The delegate also described recent advances in rapid genetic testing that they said addresses the lookalike problem, though an Environment and Climate Change Canada report from September notes these tests have a 20 per cent false positive rate, and an ideal operating range above 18 C, meaning they can’t be used on frozen meat.

Not everyone agrees on stability of American eel population

Whether harvested as part of the official commercial quota or not, Jordan says elvers are sent to Toronto, where the companies that prepare them to survive export are located. 

Jordan says this makes Toronto the intermediate destination for American eel from not just Canada, but also the Caribbean, including places like Haiti where political instability fuels poaching, and the Dominican Republic, which has been asking for help in controlling illegal trade. “Toronto is basically the hub of the legal and illegal elver trade in the Western Hemisphere, with almost all of the eels going through Canada on their way to Asia,” he says. 

Being a central hub for the eel trade across the Americas, Canada would have been “in a really strong place to play a positive, constructive role in regulating the international trade,” Jordan says. He thinks a stronger stance would have levelled the playing field for Canadian harvesters, who are currently held to a higher standard than in other countries. 

Yet Mitchell Feigenbaum, a commercial licence holder with a fishing business based in New Brunswick and member of an industry group, says while licence holders agree illegal trade is a problem, they were opposed to the listing.

Feigenbaum says initially, he saw a listing as just “more red tape.” But he became concerned when he saw the text of the proposal, which identified American and Japanese eel at serious risk of becoming endangered without regulation. He felt the push for the listing was an attempt by “environmentalists and scientists with a particular predisposition” to call into question the conservation status of eel. “It really just felt like it’s a slap in the face, or … a strategic move by opponents of the fishery to gain a political advantage.”

Feigenbaum suggested American eel are resilient and can recover when their population is depleted, pointing to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s 2015 decision not to list American eel as threatened. In its statement at the convention, the Canadian government referred to a 2025 Fisheries and Oceans scientific report indicating that populations were stable. 

Not everyone sees eel populations that way. 

Kerry Prosper, Mi’kmaw Elder and councillor for Paqtnkek First Nation, has been fishing and working with eels most of his life. In recent years, he’s noticed a significant decline in the population of adult eels that community members once fished for food. “It’s quite a contrast that we’re in, and it’s so sad.” 

Paqtnkek was offered a licence for the elver fishery by Fisheries and Oceans Canada, but turned it down, Prosper says. “We simply don’t have faith in their management plans.”

In 1990, a Supreme Court case known as Sparrow ruled that First Nations had the right to food, social and ceremonial fisheries, putting that right above commercial and recreational fisheries. Prosper says the ruling is being disregarded, and he worries the harvesting of baby eels harms the adult population, putting food security at risk.

Harvesting and exporting eels for commercial profit shouldn’t come “at the cost of the species itself and the Indigenous people who live near where it comes from,” he says. “It’s just total disregard and disrespect to the animal and to the people.”

Schleit, with Oceans North, points out that stability of the American eel population in recent decades comes after a period of steep decline. In its stock assessment, Fisheries and Oceans noted that the species has likely declined by more than 50 per cent since 1980 

Federal government announces American eel will not be added to species at risk

On Tuesday, the federal government announced they would not be listing American eel under Canada’s Species At Risk Act. In a statement, Fisheries and Oceans Canada said it had determined that the Fisheries Act “is most effective for conserving the species while also providing the greatest overall socio-economic benefits to Canadians.”

Not classifying eel as a species at risk could be an acceptable decision from a sustainability perspective, Schleit says, but the government still needs to demonstrate how else they’re effectively managing the species. By not promoting a CITES listing, she says Canada missed a chance to show global leadership.

In a statement, Fisheries and Oceans Canada spokesperson Barre Campbell confirmed that Canada voted against the listing, and said Canada “is committed to the sustainable and orderly management of fisheries for eel and elver.” He also said that the American eel did not meet criteria required for a CITES listing, which requires a 70 percent population decline, and that CITES regulations would create duplication for Canadian harvesters. 

Despite their opposition to the listing, many countries, including Canada, recognized the existence of an issue at CITES, and approved a non-binding resolution to work together to address illegal trade. Schleit says it’s possible to build on that momentum to continue to enact stronger protections for eels. In the meantime, she says, these enigmatic species remain at risk.

“European eel basically got traded to the point where it crashed,” she says. “We see a strong chance that that’s going to happen again with American eel.”

This story was updated on Dec. 5, 2025, at 11:05 ET to correct the units of measurement of Canada’s commercial quota for elvers.

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Just outside the town of Port Hawkesbury, N.S., the shoreline of the Strait of Canso is dotted with industry. “For Nova Scotia, this is one of the last outposts of industrial activity,” Amanda Mombourquette says, steering her SUV. Out one window, towering mounds of coal are piled outside the Point Tupper Generating Station, while tanks and pipelines from a former oil refinery carve up the slope. A short distance down the road, Nova Scotia’s last papermill standing stretches across the hill.

Although the area supports hundreds of jobs, there’s little traffic on a sunny October afternoon. Pulling her car to the side of Industrial Park Road, Mombourquette, who’s the deputy warden for the County of Richmond, and Brenda Chisholm-Beaton, mayor of neighbouring Port Hawkesbury, note that teenagers often use the road to learn how to drive. 

Yet Chisholm-Beaton and Mombourquette have become regular travellers on this road. For the last several years, they’ve been taking people on tours of the area, to pitch its involvement in a new type of industry: offshore wind.

“Our strong feeling is that if there are industries that are going to be located here and we’re going to ask our communities to engage and participate and to support these industries, there should also be a benefit to our communities,” Mombourquette says. 

They’re not alone in spying an opportunity. In Atlantic Canada, many are looking to offshore wind as a transformational force, providing renewable power in a province still heavily dependent on coal for electricity. Offshore wind could also provide a much-needed economic boost for coastal communities and the province. The impact might not stop there: in September, Nova Scotia’s pitch to export 60 gigawatts offshore wind to provide over a quarter of Canada’s electricity, dubbed Wind West Atlantic Energy, was included on a list of projects of potential national interest: it’s not quite developed enough to make the Liberals’ first two rounds of projects considered for fast-tracking, but it’s in their sightlines. 

Yet the rollout of nation-building renewable energy must also strike a delicate balance between the need for power and the effect that gigawatt-scale wind generation will have on an ecosystem that many Nova Scotians already rely on for their livelihoods, particularly fishers.

The industry is moving toward that, with the regulator now conducting the first round of public consultation that could lead to a licence for a project developer, though it’ll be years before the blades start spinning. Either way, few deny that offshore wind, whenever it unfurls, could be transformative — just not in a way that everyone welcomes. 

Optimal conditions for offshore wind offer economic promise for Nova Scotia communities

The phrase “world-class” gets bandied about a lot in Nova Scotia, in relation to everything from golf courses to Halifax’s convention centre, but when it comes to offshore wind, it’s demonstrably true. Far from land, wind speeds here average nine to 11 metres per second. This is comparable to Europe’s North Sea, which already has a thriving offshore wind industry.

Importantly, unlike Canada’s west coast, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland are surrounded by broad continental shelves. The Scotian Shelf provides a wide swath of relatively shallow seabed on which to build turbines, making offshore wind appealing financially — though scientists say that’s also what makes it appealing to marine life, and therefore fishers.

In recent years, legislation has emerged to support the industry. Offshore energy on the east coast is jointly regulated by the federal government and the provinces of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador. Historically this meant petroleum, but in 2024, the Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board’s scope was expanded to include offshore wind (with Newfoundland’s regulator following suit in 2025). 

The province and federal government have also conducted a regional assessment, meant to assess the potential impacts of the industry on the environment, local communities and other ocean users, and to support the identification of potential locations. That assessment was released in January, and in July, Nova Scotia designated four wind energy areas, located at least 20 kilometres off the province’s eastern shore and the northeast edge of Cape Breton.

While offshore wind could have broad economic benefits — with the province eyeing a four per cent royalty from offshore production, as well as jobs for more than 5,000 workers in construction and associated supply chain industries — it has the potential to be particularly impactful for communities close to the sites.

This includes the Port Hawkesbury region, which has a deep, ice-free port that could be used to marshal offshore wind components like blades and turbines. The town also has a community college campus, where the province’s first wind turbine technician program is launching September 2026. 

Green industry is key to the region’s future, Mombourquette says. She also hopes it could bring more affordable electricity to her constituents, who regularly tell her they can’t pay their power bills. It could also ease the transition from the area’s industrial past — nearly 100 people currently work at the Point Tupper’s generating plant, for instance, which will have to stop burning coal by 2030. 

“What’s going to happen to those people and what kind of economic impact will that have on the town, and on the county?” Mombourquette says. “It’s a concern.”

The Municipality of the District of Guysborough, directly to the south of Port Hawkesbury, is also looking to wind for a more sustainable future.

Three of the proposed wind energy areas are off Guysborough County, where existing infrastructure could be used for the industry, including a former plant for offshore gas, where power generated by wind could be transmitted ashore via underwater cables. Paul Long, warden of the municipality hopes this infrastructure could attract development to support the area’s small and spread-out population, which is older and lower-income than the rest of the province. 

“We’re losing a lot of our young people,” he says. “We need development to ensure that our residents get all the services and infrastructure that they deserve like anybody else. If we had to rely on our residential tax rate, it would not be a pretty situation.”

Some people aren’t as convinced. 

Fishers worry about possible impacts to Nova Scotia’s seafood industry

Ninety minutes down the shore from Port Hawkesbury, at the end of a long peninsula jutting into the Atlantic, sits the community of Canso. This has been a settler fishing community since the 1600s and a site of Mi’kmaw fishing long before that, and from a small building on the edge of town, the Guysborough County Inshore Fishermen’s Association continues to support people fishing for lobster, halibut, snowcrab and tuna along the county’s long coastline. 

“We fish whatever we can because if we have a little bit from each, then you’re not putting too much effort on a single stock,” Ginny Boudreau, the association’s executive director and one of its three employees, says.

For the past two years, Boudreau says much the organization’s time, has been taken up with offshore wind, even though “We don’t have a stick in the water yet.”

Two of the designated areas overlap with places where her members fish, Boudreau says. The association has had to respond to new legislation and the regional assessment, as well as develop a system to track vessels through the areas designated for turbines, to get a comprehensive picture of where people are currently fishing.

That location data is important; the Scotian Shelf is heavily fished, with few areas unexploited. Many people have fished the same spots for decades — and as wind turbines move in, fishers fear they’ll be muscled out. 

In Cape Breton, Michael Barron fishes for lobster, crab and halibut in Sydney Bight, where a 1,300-square-kilometre area has been designated for potential offshore wind. Barron, the president of his own local fishing association, worries about people having to move because turbines are in their way or disrupting fish migration patterns. 

Barron points out that Nova Scotia’s seafood is its main export commodity, valued at $2.4 billion annually. The price of getting into the fishery is hefty: a lobster licence can cost upwards a million dollars and a fishing vessel at least half that. 

“Younger captains are taking on a lot of financial debt,” Barron says. “They need good catch rates. They need good weather. They need lots of fishing grounds to be able to explore … to generate the income to pay those debts that they incurred to become part of a historical tradition.”

Despite that, Barron says there’s been “next to no” consultation with his association from the provincial and federal governments. While he says he’s not against green energy, he wants to see more engagement with the people on the water.

Even without turbines, those fishers are already facing uncertainty — catches for snow crab in Cape Breton this year were “catastrophically bad,” Barron says, though he notes that can’t yet be attributed to climate change. 

Boudreau is worried about those shifts too. Her members know better than anyone that climate change is happening: they see it every day on the water. And for environmental reasons as much as economic ones, she thinks offshore wind is inevitable. 

Given that, she wants a clear plan for how wind and fisheries will co-exist — and a written commitment of who will be holding the bag if they can’t. She says the province promised a framework for compensation, though her association is still waiting to see it.

In an emailed response, Nova Scotia Department of Energy spokesperson Adele Poirier said that offshore wind is a “proven technology that’s used successfully in other parts of the world and co-exists with fisheries, among other users of the ocean.” The statement also noted that federal and provincial governments have been consulting on offshore wind for years, and have already addressed some concerns from fishers.

On compensation, the department pointed to a provincial roadmap, which said compensation would be considered if co-existence is not possible. 

Robert Lennox, an associate professor of biology at Dalhousie University, says research could assuage concerns about potential impacts.

Those include turbines’ impacts on winds and currents, which could affect water cycling and the distribution of larval fish and lobsters.

Lennox, who is scientific director of the Ocean Tracking Network, says tracking technology could figure out how animals are moving through wind energy areas and what happens after turbines are installed. 

“We haven’t been prioritizing tracking them at these locations,” he says.

The organization plans to use its own funds to deploy a network of receivers in the Sydney Bight area, to help nudge those questions towards an answer, Lennox says. These receivers pick up the acoustic signal of tagged animals, though only those tagged by other similar groups around the region. 

One scientist says there’s also a wealth of government data that could be used to inform where wind turbines should go.

Kenneth Frank, a former Fisheries and Oceans Canada scientist who retired in 2019, says when he read the report from the regional assessment that informed the selection of areas for turbines, he was shocked by how it characterized the Scotian Shelf. 

The report made the shelf’s outer banks look like “biological deserts,” he says, rather than drawing on “a mountain of data” from existing surveys that show the ecosystem’s productivity. Frank was paid by the Seafood Producers Association of Nova Scotia to submit a comment on the report, though he says he probably would have done it without payment. 

“They’ve chosen the least desirable areas from a conservation perspective. They chose the shallowest areas on the shelf,” he says, speculating that this was for economic reasons. “There are areas that are far less productive but they happen to be in deeper water.”

The Department of Energy said in a statement that all feedback was considered in the designation of the four offshore wind energy areas, including Fisheries and Oceans feedback on biological considerations.

As climate change intensifies in Atlantic Canada, residents prepare for an uncertain future

These developments come amid a grim period for climate impacts in Nova Scotia. Over the summer, the province experienced multiple wildfires and a record-breaking drought.

Meanwhile, in the ocean, scientists reported a warming trend on the Scotian shelf, with a 3 C increase in bottom temperatures over a three decade period. 

It’s a reminder that with or without offshore wind, change is coming to the region. 

Driving along the Strait of Canso, Chisholm-Beaton and Mombourquette point out the ports that could receive components for offshore wind, musing about the other businesses that could benefit, like a local metal fabricator.

Those benefits could help the region chart a new path. For decades, many people in Nova Scotia, including Mombourquette’s husband, have had to leave the province for work. “It has a direct social impact on communities that I’ve been thinking about for a very long time, having gone through the experience of raising two kids with a husband who works out west back and forth.” Building a local wind industry could break that cycle, Mombourquette says. 

From the back seat, Chisholm-Beaton chimes in: “Export wind and not people.”

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The High Seas Treaty reached a major milestone last week after more than 60 countries ratified the agreement, passing a key threshold that sets the stage for new conservation of international waters. But Canada has yet to formally approve the treaty. Until it does, the country with the longest coastline in the world will have limited opportunities to participate in treaty processes, including environmental assessments and efforts to establish marine protected areas in international waters.

The High Seas Treaty is the first international agreement aimed at conserving and ensuring sustainable use of biodiversity in marine areas that fall outside any single country’s jurisdiction — an area covering about two-thirds of the open ocean. After nearly two decades of negotiations, the treaty establishes new tools to create marine protected areas in international waters, a crucial step for meeting the global commitment to conserve 30 per cent of land and waters by 2030. 

It also lays out legally binding rules to strengthen scientific cooperation and ensure the benefits derived from marine biodiversity used for food, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and more are shared fairly.

“It’s a historic milestone to have this kind of law in place,” Stephanie Hewson, a staff lawyer focused on marine conservation with the non-profit West Coast Environmental Law, said in an interview.

While a patchwork of international rules govern specific activities like shipping and fishing, this is the first treaty to look holistically at marine biodiversity in the high seas. Covering almost 70 per cent of the planet, the high seas include biodiversity hot spots like Saya de Malha Bank, an enormous seagrass community found in the Indian Ocean between the Seychelles and Mauritius, and the Costa Rica Thermal Dome, which offers ideal conditions for an immense bloom of microscopic blue-green algae. That algae forms the base of a rich food web that supports blue whales, dolphins, sea turtles, sharks and rays. 

Until it ratifies, Canada won’t be part of environmental assessments, decisions around marine protected areas

Canada signed onto the treaty in March 2024, touting its importance for meeting international conservation targets that 196 countries committed to under the global biodiversity framework, which Canadian officials helped broker in Montreal almost three years ago. “We simply cannot get there without a treaty to protect our high seas beyond national jurisdiction,” Steven Guilbeault, then-minister of Environment and Climate Change Canada, said in a statement at the time.

Canada’s signature signalled its support, but the country won’t be able to fully participate in treaty processes until it ratifies the agreement. In Canada, ratification involves tabling the treaty in the House of Commons for 21 days to give members of Parliament an opportunity to consider the agreement — but the final decision rests with cabinet.

While Hewson said as far as she knows the federal government still intends to ratify the treaty, which she called “great news,” she warned “it’s not ratified, till it’s ratified.”

“Canada has been instrumental in moving this treaty forward,” she said. But, she added, its ability to lead or even participate in the development of treaty processes and institutions moving forward will be limited until it ratifies.

It also means Canada wouldn’t be part of decisions about where and how to establish marine protected areas in the high seas and limited in its participation in environmental impact assessments of planned activities that could harm biodiversity — even if they’re just outside the country’s waters, Hewson warned. While countries that have not ratified the treaty will still be able to provide comments to be considered during environmental impact assessments, parties to the treaty have additional opportunities to participate in the processes. 

Global Affairs Canada and Fisheries and Oceans Canada did not respond to The Narwhal’s request for comment by publication time.

Ratification milestone celebrated, but more work remains before treaty can benefit ailing seas

The timeline for Canada’s ratification remains unclear. Regardless, Hewson said it was an exciting moment when the treaty secured the 60 state ratifications required for it to become international law.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called it “a historic achievement for the ocean and for multilateralism.”

“As we confront the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution, this agreement is a lifeline for the ocean and humanity,” he said in a statement.

The milestone came just days before the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research released its second annual Planetary Health Check report, which warned “the world’s oceans are acidifying to an unsafe degree.”

Oceans are a major carbon sink. By capturing significant amounts of carbon dioxide every year they play a crucial role in moderating climate change driven by humanity’s excessive burning of fossil fuels. But absorbing such large amounts of carbon dioxide has caused the oceans to become more acidic, threatening species and undermining vital marine habitats and food webs.

Rebecca Hubbard, the director of the High Seas Alliance of more than 70 civil society groups advocating for a strong treaty, celebrated passing the ratification threshold, but cautioned it’s “not the finish line.”

“The treaty’s true strength lies in universal participation,” she said in a statement, urging all remaining nations to ratify the agreement. Like Canada, the United States, China, the United Kingdom and Australia have all signed but not yet ratified the agreement. Neither Russia nor Japan have signed.

In the meantime, work is underway to build the institutions and processes for implementing the treaty. Proposals are also being developed for marine protected areas to conserve the biodiversity hot spots, including the Sargasso Sea, an area bounded by four Atlantic Ocean currents known for its floating masses of seaweed that offer rich habitat for a range of species. 

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By 7:30 a.m., the Vancouver Aquarium Marine Mammal Rescue Society is already bustling. The morning sun pours in under the canopy tent as volunteers hose down rows of blue tubs, most holding a rescued harbour seal. As one pup wriggles and rolls in the spray, another attempts to suckle on the side of her tank. Others bark, mew and cry, sounds that in the wild help mothers identify their babies. 

It’s mid-August, nearing the end of pupping season, and the rescue has more than 60 seals in its care. Most wound up here after becoming separated from their moms, unlikely to survive on their own. There’s Proteus, found emaciated at Holland Point Park in Victoria. Newborn Lily, found hidden beneath a dinghy at the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club. And Truffles, who was still wearing his lanugo coat of fine, soft hair when he was found — a sign he was born prematurely. 

The seals are kept in individual tubs for at least two weeks after they first arrive at the rescue, in part as a quarantine measure to make sure they’re not carrying an infection they could pass to other seals. It also makes it easier to hand feed the pups. Most of the rescued seals are under five days old when they’re brought in, Lindsaye Akhurst, the rescue centre’s senior manager explains.  

In the wild, pups will nurse for a month to a month and a half, gaining about 400 grams a day. At the rescue, where seals are tube fed a formula that approximates the fatty, nutritious milk of mother seals, it can take two-to-three times as long to gain that same amount of weight. 

Five times a day, staff and volunteers wearing aprons and long rubber arm protectors lift each seal from its tub and place it on a cart. As a volunteer holds the seal still, a staff member inserts a long tube into the pup’s throat, listening at the other end as they guide it into its stomach. Using a large syringe, another volunteer pushes the formula into the seal’s stomach. 

Tube feeding allows the team to know exactly how much food the seals are getting and it requires less handling, Akhurst says. Plus, “they’re not really good at suckling on bottles,” she adds.

Once the seals are about three or four weeks old, they graduate to fish school. The rescue team slowly weans the pups from the formula and introduces herring into their diet, initially feeding the small, oily fish to the seals by hand until they’re confidently eating on their own. At that point, the seals are moved to a larger communal tank, where they interact with other seals and compete for food. They’re here until they weigh at least 23 kilograms and then if all goes well, they’re released back into the ocean.

Once hunted for their pelts, seal population on B.C. coast has rebounded

While the marine mammal rescue society responds to sea lions, sea otters, small cetaceans like dolphins and even sea turtles in distress, it’s mostly harbour seals that wind up here. There’s a healthy population of harbour seals on the south coast in areas that also have large populations of humans, Akhurst said. That can sometimes lead to conflict between people and seals. But it also means a seal in distress is more likely to get noticed and reported. And, “harbour seals are great candidates for rehabilitation,” Akhurst says.

She noted rescued seals regularly end up at the centre because of human interference. Sometimes moms are scared away from their pups by the big crowds of people at busy beaches other times seals have been brought in with injuries from boats. And, by caring for dozens of seals each year, the rescue centres team of staff and volunteers are also trained to respond to major environmental emergencies that humans sometimes cause — like oil spills.

Harbour seals were hunted extensively for their pelts and bounties from the 1870s onward. By the 1960s the population in B.C. had declined sharply to an estimated 10,000 seals. After hunting was banned, the population recovered to more than 100,000 by the early 2000s. The latest estimates from 2019 peg the population at about 85,000, with the highest concentration of seals found in the Strait of Georgia, according to Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

Harbour seals feed on a variety of fish including pacific hake and herring. But it’s their predation of salmon that’s a source of concern for some, who worry seal populations are a significant hurdle to the recovery of declining salmon stocks. In recent years, Indigenous, sport and commercial fishing groups have urged Fisheries and Oceans Canada to open commercial seal hunting on the west coast to control the population. 

But some experts warn reducing seal populations may not be a panacea for the recovery of salmon, which are also threatened by extensive habitat loss, climate change and water pollution. Speaking to a 2023 parliamentary committee examining seal and sea lion management, Andrew Trites, a professor with the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, said seals are more likely to catch slow or diseased fish, which can make fish populations healthier. Biologist Kilian Stehfest, who worked for the David Suzuki Foundation at the time, told the committee seal predation of pacific hake, which in turn eat herring, could have indirect benefits for salmon, by leaving more herring available for juvenile salmon to eat.

A major decline in seal populations could also have consequences for threatened Bigg’s orcas, also known as transient killer whales. These orcas saw rapid population growth alongside the recovery of seals — their primary prey — between the 1970s and 1990s, according to the latest assessment by the scientific committee that advises the federal government on at-risk species. 

Sea otters and injured seals face barriers to release

Baby seals typically spend about four to six weeks with their mothers before they learn to forage on their own. And even during those early weeks, mother seals will leave their babies for extended periods to find food. It’s this natural life history that makes it comparatively easy to rehabilitate baby seals for release.

Sea otters, by contrast, spend six to eight months with their moms, and for much of those early months, mothers cradle their pups on their bellies, briefly wrapping them in kelp to keep them safe while they dive for food. So when a sea otter pup comes into the rescue, it requires around the clock care: feeding every couple hours and frequent grooming. “You’re constantly handling them,” Akhurst said. But the rescue team can’t teach the young otters the survival skills they would have learned from their mothers in the wild, a major hurdle to their release.

There’s a surrogacy program in California where babies are paired with older otters to hopefully learn some of those skills, which can improve their chance of returning to the wild. “It’s a program we’d love to do at one point, but it’s very expensive,” Akhurst said. The rescue is a registered charity and while the Vancouver Aquarium covers a portion of its budget, it relies heavily on grants and other donations as well as a dedicated team of more than 230 volunteers to operate. 

The rescue has a strong track record of rehabilitating seals, but every now and then a seal comes in with injuries so severe, it’s not possible to release them back into the wild. 

Crinkle was admitted to the rescue on July 21 with severe injuries to her face that left her blind. It’s suspected she was shot with plastic birdshot. “When you’re shooting an animal with birdshot pellets, that’s not to kill, that’s to maim — and it’s cruel,” Akhurst said.

Three weeks after she first arrived, the rescue had to surgically remove one of Crinkle’s damaged eyes: it was bulging so much that she couldn’t close her eyelid around it. 

The procedure went well, and a week after her surgery, Akhurst was feeling cautiously optimistic that Crinkle would survive. 

“She’s got a long road ahead,” Akhurst said. “We’re just hoping that she makes it at this point.”

The rescue centre will work with Fisheries and Oceans Canada on a plan for Crinkle’s future, but it’s unlikely she’ll be released back into the wild. More likely she’ll be placed at the aquarium or another accredited facility.

A spokesperson for the federal agency said it could not comment at this time as Crinkle’s case is still under investigation. But Akhurst is confident that most of the other seals recovering at the rescue centre will be released between late August and the end of November.

“They’ve made it through some big hurdles medically and physically,” Akhurst said, so to see them returned to the wild, “it’s always quite exciting.”

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Two salmon conservation technicians slowly drag a wide net through the north arm of the Fraser River, past the entrance to a marsh that until recently was so densely packed with invasive cattails, even small juvenile salmon may have struggled to navigate it.

As they start to close the net, known as a seine, to temporarily trap any fish they may have caught, biologists Dave Scott and Daniel Stewart wade into the river to help. They use a small netted scoop to pluck out a tiny fish and deposit it into a bucket for a closer look.

The team’s already caught a pile of three-spined stickleback and a small staghorn sculpin today, but it’s the juvenile salmon that elicits a cheer.

While most young coho and sockeye salmon pass through the Fraser River estuary more quickly, for juvenile Chinook salmon these tidal marshes offer a crucial refuge where they can feed and grow for about six weeks before venturing out into the sea. But a lot of these important marshes have been degraded or lost entirely to urban and industrial development, just one of the many challenges declining B.C. salmon populations are struggling to overcome. And the difficulties faced by salmon in this particular marsh reveal that repairing those habitats is no easy solution.

This marsh — known as the Woods Island Marsh — was created in the 1990s as compensation for habitat destroyed by a temporary barge off-loading facility used during construction of a runway at the Vancouver International Airport. In a statement, Alexandra Coutts, a spokesperson for Fisheries and Oceans Canada, said the proponent was released from requirements to monitor and maintain the marsh after it met its targets for effectiveness. 

Today the marsh sits within the Sea Island Conservation Area managed by Environment and Climate Change Canada. But for a long time after it was deemed to be functioning effectively, there was very little management of the marsh itself, says Scott, the Lower Fraser research and restoration director with Raincoast Conservation Foundation. 

“Me and Dan aren’t of the opinion that you can build a human-constructed marsh area and then think that it’s going to turn into a natural ecosystem that needs zero management in the future,” Scott said. “It’s just not very plausible.”

The evolution of Woods Island Marsh supports their hypothesis. Invasive cattails moved in, which “really changes the whole food web dynamic,” Stewart said. Cattail can take longer to break down than some native plants, and ultimately affects the availability of food for growing salmon preparing for their journey into the vast Pacific Ocean. 

Some three decades after it was first constructed, Raincoast has been working to restore the marsh and improve salmon habitat with federal funding. In March, Fisheries and Oceans Canada committed $2.6 million to support Raincoast’s salmon habitat restoration work in the Lower Fraser, including at Woods Island, over three years. The federal and provincial governments also jointly committed $5 million last year for Ducks Unlimited Canada’s habitat restoration efforts, which includes restoration of old offset projects, Coutts said. 

Much of the restoration work at the Woods Island Marsh was done earlier this year. Piles of sediment were dug out to improve water flow and thousands of seedlings, mostly Lyngbye’s sedge, were re-planted after their cattail competitors were cut back. 

At low tide, the tall tufts of grass-like sedge offer splashes of green against the mucky marsh bottom. In just a few years each ebbing tide will reveal a lush meadow of prime rearing habitat.

“Sedge is this highly productive plant that breaks down and is an important part of the detrital food web of this estuary,” Stewart said. The bits of broken-down sedge are food for invertebrates which are in turn eaten by juvenile salmon, like the one swimming in the researchers’ bucket. 

Ongoing maintenance needed to ensure offset projects offer good salmon habitat

The newly restored area will require ongoing monitoring and maintenance in the years ahead. 

So the two biologists and their team will continue to cut back any invasive cattails and check in on how juvenile salmon use the restored area. (Though Stewart did note non-governmental organizations sometimes struggle to get long-term support for monitoring and maintenance from funders who would rather support new restoration efforts.)

It’s this ongoing attention they’d like to see paid to all offset projects in the estuary. For decades, companies have been expected to invest in habitat compensation sites to offset the impacts of industrial projects. More than 100 tidal marshes have been created in the Fraser River estuary since the 1980s, according to a study by Stewart and his co-authors, which was published in the journal Wetlands last year. But they found that sites have a limited chance of success if they are ultimately ignored, even after some initial years of monitoring. 

“We’ve sometimes been a little bit overconfident in how they’re functioning,” Stewart said. “In some cases, it kind of feels like we’re flying in the dark.”

Alongside issues with invasive plants, their review of 78 constructed marshes found half had lost vegetated area since they were first built, leaving mudflat where there was once marsh. While further study is needed to better understand the cause of those losses, the researchers suggest grazing by Canada geese and erosion from boat wakes could be partially responsible. Overall, about nine per cent of the marsh area in their study had died back, undermining the goal that these projects would help offset habitat destruction from industrial projects.

“There is something broken about the way we manage these ecosystems,” Stewart said. “A lot of sites are in disrepair, are completely invaded by invasive species and are really in need of ongoing maintenance.”

Scott said it might be difficult to require project proponents to return to their offset projects every 10 years or so for maintenance — “that just isn’t really going to fly in development,” he warns — but he does see a role for the federal government in long-term management.

While Raincoast and its partners were able to secure federal funding to support restoration of the Woods Island Marsh, there’s still no consistent long-term management plan for legacy offset projects to ensure they continue to meet their goals. 

As it stands, projects authorized under the Fisheries Act are required to monitor offsetting projects for five-to-10 years or more, depending on the results, to ensure they’re functioning as intended, Coutts said. Once they’ve met their effectiveness targets the proponent is released from its responsibilities and the site has the same federal protections as all other fisheries habitats, Coutts explained in the statement.

More industrial pressures in Fraser River add urgency

In the Fraser River estuary, an area that’s already lost the majority of its floodplain habitat and where major new industrial projects are still being built, the lack of long-term management planning is an especially pressing concern. 

It’s one of the reasons Stewart opposed the Roberts Bank Terminal 2 project, which will destroy about 177 hectares of habitat in the Fraser River estuary. The Port of Vancouver says it is creating and restoring 102 hectares of habitat for species like Chinook and Dungeness crab, including tidal marshes. But Stewart isn’t convinced this will adequately offset the harms the project creates in the long-term.

“Based on the mixed outcomes of habitat compensation and offset projects in the estuary to date, including recent projects, I am concerned that the resources required to effectively manage and maintain these projects over the long-term may be underestimated. Also, insufficient accountability may exist to ensure their functioning in the long-term,” he said in an email to The Narwhal.

Going forward, Stewart said he sees a need for a fund that companies contribute to, which could support long-term monitoring and maintenance of offset sites by First Nations or non-governmental organizations. 

As part of his doctoral studies at the University of British Columbia, he’s also comparing the insect and fish populations that use constructed marshes relative to natural marsh areas. This kind of research is important, he said. “The more we can learn about these sites, the more opportunity we have to do things better going forward.”

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Far off Canada’s Pacific coast, and in oceans around the world, mining companies are exploring the bottom of the sea. There, rocky formations contain in-demand minerals like copper, nickel and cobalt. Companies see deepwater dollar signs in a potential new industry: deep-sea mining. 

A Canadian deep-sea mining venture called The Metals Company recently asked the U.S. government to make its dream of an industry a reality. In the wake of the Donald Trump administration declaring deep-sea mining a priority, The Metals Company has applied for U.S. permits to explore and mine Pacific seabed minerals. If it’s successful, it could become the first company to ever commercially mine the deep. It could also undermine global co-operation on managing oceans and their resources.

Here’s what you need to know about deep-sea mining, the environmental risks, The Metals Company and a potential showdown over international ocean agreements.

What is deep-sea mining?

Deep-sea miners plan to use remotely operated robots to remove mineral-rich seabed formations. Though it’s never been done on a commercial scale, companies and governments have explored the prospect for decades, from searching for mineral deposits to running large mining tests. 

These minerals can be used to make steel, batteries, wiring and much more. With such wide-ranging applications, they’re in demand for everything from industrial manufacturing to military technology, as well as emission-free technology such as electric vehicles. The minerals found on the seabed can make powerful long-range batteries, ideal for large trucks and luxury cars. 

Three types of environments could be mined. Polymetallic nodule fields are the most popular option: these deepwater plains are covered with “nodules,” or mineral-rich rocks, which lay on top of the seabed, so they’re easy to remove. Seamounts are another possibility: underwater mountains can develop mineral-rich crusts on their surfaces. Some miners are also interested in inactive hydrothermal vents: spires of minerals that formed around volcanic sea-floor fissures before cooling off. 

Deep-sea nodules and seamount crusts take millions of years to form, as the minerals dissolved in seawater slowly settle into these deposits. Minerals deposits from hydrothermal vents form a bit more quickly (and can be destroyed quickly, by the volcanic activity that creates them). Still, these resources aren’t renewable on human timescales.

Where does Canada stand on deep-sea mining? 

Canada effectively has a moratorium, or temporary ban, on domestic deep-sea mining. A 2023 statement from the ministers of natural resources and fisheries and oceans said, “Canada does not presently have a domestic legal framework that would permit seabed mining and, in the absence of a rigorous regulatory structure, will not authorize seabed mining in areas under its jurisdiction.” 

While that ban could be lifted in the future, Canada also has permanent protections for all of its known hydrothermal vents and over 90 per cent of its known seamounts, so these ecosystems can never be mined. In addition, it supports a moratorium on deep-sea mining in international waters. 

How does deep-sea mining affect the environment?

There are no plants in the deepest parts of the ocean, which sunlight doesn’t reach. However, there are many animals. Seamounts and hydrothermal vents are biodiversity hotspots. Stationary species, such as sponges and tubeworms, attach to them, forming communities that attract swimming species like fish. In the polymetallic nodule fields, the animals tend to be sparser and smaller, but biodiversity is still high.

The nodules offer surfaces for animals like sponges to live on, and scientists have even found octopuses laying eggs on these sponges. Tiny animals, like frilled-looking bristle worms, live in the sediments and inside nodule crevasses. Still, scientists predict the majority of deep sea life still needs to be described — or formally classified — by science: they know there are new species there, but they don’t know exactly how many there are.  

One potential threat is that deep-sea mining removes rocky sea-floor formations that provide habitat for animals like sponges and corals, which need hard surfaces to grow on. 

Mining machines could also bring noise and light to the dark, quiet sea-floor, while ships at the surface would add to the cacophony of industrial ocean activity. Sediment that gets kicked up by mining is another risk as it could interfere with animals’ ability to breathe, communicate with bioluminescence, or get food by filtering tiny edible things from water. After sea-floor minerals are pumped to the surface, any excess sediment that comes with them would be put back into the ocean, creating a second sediment plume. 

In a recent study, U.K.-based scientists returned to a test mining site in the Pacific Ocean 44 years later to see how life there had responded. Certain species had started recolonizing the mining area, but there was lower biodiversity overall. This suggests that some life can persist after deep-sea mining, but ecosystems may not fully return to normal — at least, not on timescales we can easily measure. 

Many questions remain unanswered about how deep-sea mining would impact ecosystems. The deep sea is immense and it’s not easy to sample life there. Scientists know relatively little about sea-floor biodiversity or how the ecosystems are connected. Risks depend on the environment being mined, the type of equipment used and the size of the mining area. 

Despite Canada’s moratorium, some scientists are concerned that impacts from distant mining operations could reach Canadian waters. For example, planned nodule mining tests by a Chinese company near northeast Pacific seamounts could have far-reaching consequences, according to Cherisse Du Preez, a marine biologist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada. 

“Even though they seem like they’re far away from Canada, they lie in one of the convention areas that we manage internationally with other countries,” she says, speaking of the North Pacific Fishery Commission convention area, which sits over the seamounts at the test mining site. The site is located in the vast open Pacific, between Hawaii and China. But because Canada is among the countries that fish there, sediment from mining could harm seafood that Canadians eat. 

Seabed sediment can naturally contain metals like cadmium that become toxic at certain levels. Fish could die once exposed to these metals, or survive with dangerous levels of toxins inside them. Contaminated species may be fished from the convention area, while others could travel back to Canadian waters before being caught: some fish, like salmon, can travel incredibly far on migration routes. “We’re just a couple steps away from the deep sea with everything we do on this planet,” Du Preez says.

She notes that mining near seamounts, even at test scale, magnifies the risks of sediment plumes. These underwater mountains act like ramps, stirring up water that flows up the sides. That means plumes created by mining here can spin sediment into immense eddies that carry across long distances. 

Shipping and processing deep-sea minerals would also have environmental impacts, including greenhouse gas emissions. Some U.S. deep-sea mining advocates hope to process and refine the minerals in “friendly countries,” including Canada. A 2020 assessment of predicted deep-sea mining emissions by a German university named Canada as a potential processing site for Pacific seabed minerals. 

What is The Metals Company?

Headquartered in Vancouver, The Metals Company operates through subsidiaries across the world, including in Singapore, Indonesia, the British Virgin Islands and the United States. The publicly traded company is financed through sales of stocks and stock options, as well as loans. Just last month, it raised US$37 million from investors. More recently, it announced a US$85 million investment from a Korean metal smelting company.

The Metals Company focuses on nodule mining. The company recently poured US$250 million into researching environmental impacts and even conducted a large test mining operation that took more than 3,000 tonnes of nodules from the Pacific sea-floor. However, unless it can get a commercial mining permit, it can’t collect and sell minerals for profit. And even then, profits would be far from guaranteed: deep-sea mining is an untested industry with incredibly high expenses.

In April, the company applied for three U.S. deep sea mining permits. Two are for exploration and one is for commercial recovery — that is, actual mining. Through these permits, The Metals Company aims to explore minerals across nearly 200,000 square kilometres, and mine an area just over 25,000 square kilometres. Its proposed commercial mining site is in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a large patch of the Pacific between Hawaii and Mexico, with lots of nodules and some seamounts. It isn’t in U.S. waters, but rather a shared international zone. 

What is The Metals Company’s mining plan?

The Metals Company’s mining system includes a remotely operated collector vehicle on the seabed, a ship at the surface and a very, very long pipe between the two. 

The collector is like a “big Dyson vacuum cleaner that crawls along the seabed very slowly,” The Metals Company’s environmental manager, Michael Clarke, told The Narwhal. This vehicle uses water jets to lift the nodules off the sea-floor. It sucks them in, spins them to remove debris and sends them up the riser pipe on a four-kilometre journey to the surface vessel. That’s about the height of seven CN Towers stacked on top of each other.

The company states its mining strategy can help reduce environmental risks. Its collector vehicle is designed to be buoyant, so it doesn’t sink deep into the sea-floor, which the company says reduces the level of sediment that gets disturbed. After the minerals are collected, the company intends to put the excess sediment back in the ocean at depths of 2,000 metres, where research indicates life is more sparse than at higher levels. “We’ve put a lot of time and effort into minimizing the amount of sediment that actually goes up the pipe to the surface,” Clarke says. 

Of the species The Metals Company has collected in one of its exploration zones, 80 per cent aren’t yet described by science.

While the sea-floor collector vehicle is fairly quiet, noise from the surface ship could impact the behaviour of marine mammals, like whales, in a radius of nearly four kilometres. “This is really no different from any other vessel that’s out there that’s using dynamic positioning,” Clarke says, referring to the use of thrusters to keep ships in place, which is common in the oil and gas industry.

On the sea-floor, it’s not fully clear which species stand to be impacted. Of the species The Metals Company has collected in one of its exploration zones, 80 per cent aren’t yet described by science. The company states its operations would transform a seabed nodule habitat into a “nodule free habitat,” which would likely change what’s able to live there, since some species appear to depend on the nodules for survival. “We don’t need to know the name of every species that’s out there. We don’t need to know the distribution of every species,” Clarke says. “What we do need to know is the magnitude of the impacts that we’re creating.”

How is the Trump administration pushing deep-sea mining forward?

In 2021, The Metals Company emerged in its present iteration, out of an earlier brand called DeepGreen Metals. Every year since 2021, it has invested in lobbying U.S. government agencies to support deep-sea mining. That investment seems to have finally paid off, as the Trump administration issued a pro-deep-sea mining executive order in April, just before The Metals Company applied for permits. 

U.S. executive orders don’t create laws, but lay out policy intentions — and this one contains a lot of intentions. One highlight is that it calls for fast-tracking the deep-sea mining permitting process. It also orders a report on adding seabed minerals to the U.S. National Defense Stockpile — a strategic inventory of raw materials for wartime use — and calls for revised regulations to support U.S. mineral processing. 

The U.S. government has invited deep-sea miners and supporters to speak to policymakers, including at a recent Committee on Natural Resources hearing, where the possibility of Canadian mineral processing was mentioned. Several deep-sea mining supporters are members of the Trump administration.

What could happen next?

The Metals Company’s plan to get a go-ahead from the U.S. has been criticized by a number of countries and organizations, including the International Seabed Authority. The United Nations-affiliated authority oversees deep-sea mining in international waters. Most countries are International Seabed Authority members, including Canada, but the U.S. is not. The authority has issued many exploration permits, including to The Metals Company subsidiaries. However, it’s never issued a commercial mining permit. Its mining regulations are still under debate. 

Since 1984, the U.S. has also issued and renewed exploration permits for minerals on the international seabed, ignoring international agreements in favour of its own legal framework. But, like the International Seabed Authority, it has never issued a commercial mining permit.

The Metals Company hopes to get U.S. permits and start mining the high seas quickly. But if it bypasses the slow and unwieldy International Seabed Authority, the Canada-headquartered multinational would break the international rules Canada has agreed to. According to international law, resources of the high seas are the “common heritage” of everyone on Earth, which means choosing what to do with them should be a global decision. If they’re claimed by the U.S., that law is upended. Legal disputes could be on the horizon.

These are uncharted waters, so to speak. Experts disagree on whether the U.S. is within its rights. Because the U.S. never joined the authority, some argue it’s not bound by the authority’s rules. The essential question is: if most of the world has agreed to a set of rules, what does that mean for a country that hasn’t?

In March, The Metals Company posted a statement from CEO and chairman Gerard Barron on its site, stating that “After 16 years of engaging with the [International Seabed Authority] in good faith, we are increasingly concerned” its eventual regulations will not allow commercial mining at all. The statement also noted that “more than two dozen nations” do not recognize the authority’s jurisdiction as binding. 

“The freedom to mine the deep seabed, like the freedom of navigation, is a high seas freedom enjoyed by all nations,” Barron’s statement said.

Still, The Metals Company has a long way to go before it can put U.S. regulations to the test. The company will need to scale up its mining equipment for commercial operations. And the U.S. agency in charge of approving or denying the company’s permits has faced significant staff cuts under Trump, which could slow things down.   

At this stage, it’s not clear where The Metals Company’s deep-sea minerals might be processed and refined, or who might buy them. In a 2024 report, the company said it intends to use “processing operations in locations like Japan and Indonesia and refineries in locations like South Korea and Canada.” With its recent pivot, The Metals Company is considering shifting its plans toward the U.S. — but because the U.S. has long outsourced mineral processing, this would require new onshore infrastructure. 

Given the reach of the industry, from sea-floor to surface and from open ocean to global ports, Du Preez believes “deep-sea mining” is a bit of a misnomer. “It’s ocean mining,” she says, “where some of the activity is going to happen on the sea-floor.”

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The federal government has refused to issue an emergency order to protect endangered southern resident orca whales, saying it will instead pursue “incremental measures” to help the ailing population off the south coast of British Columbia. Those could include establishing new limits on pollution from ships and increasing the distance boats must keep from the whales.

It’s the second time in recent years that Ottawa has declined to step in and take emergency action to help the orcas, prompting conservation groups to warn the decision “has put this iconic and critically endangered population at greater risk of extinction.”

The government released its decision on Friday afternoon, five weeks after conservation groups launched legal action against two federal ministers for what they said was an unreasonable delay in recommending an emergency order to cabinet.

Southern resident orcas, also known as killer whales, continue to struggle in the face of noisy, polluted waters, declining food stocks and a shrinking gene pool. As of last July, only 73 whales remained in the southern resident population.

Days before the government’s decision was made public, a pod of the critically endangered orcas was spotted off the southeast coast of Vancouver Island.

Observers with the Center for Whale Research tracked the orcas as they travelled from Oak Bay into Haro Strait, then north to Gibsons, back south to the Gulf Islands, then further south into the waters off Washington state.

Over the course of a few days, the pod travelled at least several hundred kilometres through the Salish Sea, navigating busy shipping corridors frequented by oil tankers and cargo ships — swimming through waters polluted by urban runoff, untreated sewage and industrial wastewater, all the while searching for increasingly elusive salmon.

For years, environmental organizations have pushed the federal government to take urgent action to protect the orcas — asking Ottawa to stop major projects, like the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion and Roberts Bank Terminal 2, that will increase shipping traffic, to require ships and fishing boats to slow down and give the whales more space and to limit fishing for Chinook salmon so more food is available for the orcas.

Ottawa has taken some steps to address known harms to the population. But late last November, federal scientists determined the orca population continues to face imminent threats to its survival and recovery. That determination meant Fisheries and Oceans Canada Minister Diane Lebouthillier and Environment and Climate Change Canada Minister Steven Guilbeault were required under the federal Species At Risk Act to recommend the federal cabinet issue an emergency order.

Emergency orders, a rarely used tool in the act, allow the federal government to take urgent action to protect species facing pressing threats to their survival and recovery. The final decision about whether to issue an emergency order is up to the federal cabinet.

Instead of issuing an emergency order, the government said in its decision document that it will pursue incremental measures under other legislation. It said it had considered “social, economic, policy and other factors, and the broader public interest.”

The government said it will consult on possible additional measures to protect the whales, including increasing the distance boats must keep from the whales from 400 metres to one kilometre, adjusting fishing closures for either or both of 2025 and 2026, establishing underwater noise objectives and establishing new limits on pollution from ships.

Conservation groups met the decision with dismay and disappointment.

“The repeated failure of the federal government to enact an emergency order for southern resident killer whales, Canada’s most endangered whale population, is an abdication of their responsibility to protect species at risk,” Hussein Alidina, lead specialist for marine conservation at World Wildlife Fund Canada, said in a statement issued jointly by several conservation groups.

“While political events and emergencies dominate headlines, the southern resident killer whales are in an urgent fight for survival,” Michael Jasny, director of marine mammal protection at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in the statement. “There are permanent consequences to deferring solutions for endangered species. Delay increases the risk that this population will decline beyond the point of recovery.”

Conservation groups call new measures to protect endangered orcas ‘vague’ and ‘not enough’ 

It’s not the first time the federal government has declined to issue an emergency order to protect the southern resident orca population. Environmental groups also petitioned the government to issue an emergency order in 2018. 

Even though the government found the southern residents were facing imminent threats to their survival in 2018, the federal cabinet also declined to issue an emergency order at that time.

In its most recent decision, the federal government noted it has implemented significant measures since 2018 to mitigate threats to the whales, including annual salmon fishing closures in key foraging areas, voluntary shipping slow downs in portions of their critical habitat and restricting how close boats can get to the whales.

Despite those measures, in its latest imminent threat assessment the federal government noted there have been “no significant changes” to the threats facing southern resident killer whales.

“It may take a long time, even decades, to observe the biological effects of these measures, as southern resident killer whales are long-lived animals that reproduce slowly, and their recovery is expected to take time,” the government said in a written statement.

Alidina said the new, incremental measures won’t be enough to help the orcas. “The new measures the government has proposed are vague, open to dilution and lack any timelines. They are largely a continuation of ‘half measures’ that we know from past experiences are not enough. We are presiding over the extinction of southern resident orcas and future generations will judge us accordingly,” he said.

Beatrice Frank, the executive director of Georgia Strait Alliance, echoed those concerns.

“The federal government has continued to fail to implement robust actions, and instead they are offering proposals for more consultation, leaving orcas struggling unnecessarily,” she warned. 

Despite disappointment in the government’s decision, Frank said Georgia Strait Alliance remains committed to fighting for the southern resident orcas.

“This is a blow to orcas and to the Salish Sea ecosystem and communities, but this is not the end, it is a detour,” she said.

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WSÁNEĆ Hereditary Chiefs and conservation groups have been raising the alarm about herring in the Georgia Strait. Last November, the chiefs called for a moratorium on commercial harvest in the area, reporting community members are not seeing herring spawn as they used to, and they fear the population will collapse. The Georgia Strait is the last commercial herring fishery not under a moratorium in the province.

But Fisheries and Oceans Canada did not implement a moratorium, and instead went ahead in increasing the allowable harvest, from 10 per cent of the estimated total biomass in 2024 to 14 per cent this year. The federal department, also known as DFO, maintained herring in the Strait are healthy in a statement provided to The Narwhal. Commercial fisheries maintain the herring are simply moving, and are not in decline.

The chiefs hosted a herring forum in February on their territory, inviting First Nations, scientists, politicians, government officials and conservationists to share research and brainstorm solutions to the decline they have observed in their waters. Fisheries and Oceans Canada was invited and did not attend.

It may not be surprising that different parties have varying opinions on how an animal should be harvested — but how can First Nations and the feds so drastically disagree on how herring are doing?

Fisheries and Oceans Canada says herring are healthy but moving north

In a statement, Fisheries and Oceans Canada told The Narwhal the biomass of herring has been increasing coastwide since 2010, and the herring in the Strait of Georgia are “in the healthy zone.”

The federal department said “spawn in the Strait of Georgia has shifted northward within recent history,” but stocks have “remained highly productive” and “supported commercial fisheries for a prolonged period.”

When asked what it would take for Fisheries and Oceans Canada to implement a moratorium, it did not answer directly. The department’s statement said it makes its management decisions annually, based on the “best available science” and input from First Nations, commercial harvesters, and other stakeholders.

But First Nations leaders shared they are struggling to have meaningful dialogue with the department. The hereditary chiefs said Fisheries and Oceans Canada has not been returning their calls since they called for the moratorium in November.

At the February forum Kurt Irwin, councillor for Penelakut Tribe, said he called Fisheries and Oceans Canada with concerns about herring and was dismissed.

“I’m a little unclear why DFO is not here today and listening to the concerns of Indigenous people,” he said. “I think that’s part of truth and reconciliation. I thought we were moving on that, but apparently we might not be if they’re not here to even listen to what people are saying.”

The department’s assertion herring are shifting north brings no comfort for Irwin, because of its implications for First Nations who rely on herring and the ecosystem.

“They’re moving, and they’re not coming back. DFO, as far as I’m concerned, should be just as concerned as everybody else.”

“We really need action,” Tseycum Hereditary Chief Vern Jacks, or XÁLÁȾE, told The Narwhal. When asked about the department’s arguments that data shows herring are stable, he responded, “They just sit in their office, they do the computer thing. That’s all they know. But we go out. We know where they are.”

“We used to have herring when I was a young fella,” Jacks added. “Nothing now.”

Scientists say there is evidence fish and animals return home

Some western science aligns with the nations’ ancestral knowledge and lived experience. Marine biologist Doug Swanston told CBC research suggests herring may return to home spawning grounds like salmon do. He identified pollution, development, overfishing and a lack of spawning habitat as factors that need to be further investigated.

Salmon are known for spawning in the rivers where they were born. But Daniel Pauly, professor emeritus from the UBC Institute for Oceans and Fisheries, said research has suggested many fish and animals returning to the place they were born or hatched. It’s a means of optimization, he explained. 

“Their very survival indicates the place they were born worked for them, so they go back there,” he said. “It’s biological logic.” He said genomics studies have demonstrated sharks returning to where they’re born. 

“We have multiple sources of evidence,” he said. “Not only what the Elders know … but also from modern genomics.”

By denying herring return home — meaning they are ‘philopatric’ in science terms — “DFO doesn’t have to bother with allowing them to rebuild,” Pauly argued. Instead, they are banking on one stock that they say is moving northwards.

Across the world, fish seem to be relocating north due to warming sea temperatures. If that happens with herring it’s possible they will be pushed into habitat that does not work for them, Pauly said, such as one that does not have enough kelp.

“They don’t have a choice. They don’t have a choice of saying whether the temperature is not right for them, so they have to leave.” he said.

“All of this is happening, and the DFO pretends that all these people around them — scientists, Elders, other people — that they are just noise.”

Analyst says DFO data doesn’t consider how spawning distribution seems to be getting smaller over space and time — and that could lead to collapse

John Driscoll is a fisheries science and policy analyst with the David Suzuki Foundation and an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia, and he sits on the Fisheries and Oceans Canada Integrated Herring Harvest Planning Committee. 

He said there’s a broad interpretation within the federal department and the commercial industry that the commercial fishery targets one large herring population. But First Nations say there are distinct subpopulations in the Strait’s primary spawning area, something that western scientific methods have been unable to definitively prove nor rule out, and say it’s possible the commercial fishery has been harvesting from these smaller stocks. 

“I have confidence they did exist,” he said. “The question is are they still here?”

He said “tremendous” overfishing in the 1960s could have affected those distinct subpopulations — which would be an “inherent loss” to First Nations.

Driscoll said specific language becomes very important when talking about herring, when so much is still unknown. While some say the herring are shifting northward, he will be careful to say there are herring increases in the north and decreases in the south — because to say there is a shift northwards implies it is one population.

He said Fisheries and Oceans Canada stock assessments consider overall biomass, which appears stable, but do not consider how herring spawns have been contracting, in smaller areas and over shorter intervals. 

They don’t take into account “changes in distribution or drivers of that change,” he said. 

“The danger is we are blind right now to the possible hidden erosion of diversity within both the herring population and the diversity of the habitats,” he said. 

He doesn’t just mean the possibility of genetically distinct subpopulations, but simply diversity in the distribution of spawning in different spaces at different times.

“Thee idea is that the more diversity in the subpopulations you have, the steadier the biomass will be across all your subpopulations,” he said. “Some will go up, some will go down … but overall, just like a diversified portfolio of stocks, the overall effect is that it’s relatively steady.”

If diversity erodes unnoticed, and conditions change, “you open yourself up to unforeseen declines,” he said.

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The Great Bear Rainforest is the largest intact temperate coastal rainforest in the world. It’s been home to First Nations for over 12,000 years. It was an immense achievement in conservation when it became a protected area in 2016. The British Columbia government calls it a “global treasure.” It’s beautiful and rich with life.

All of that is true — but what’s also true is that an abandoned cannery in the Great Bear Rainforest has been leaching pollutants for decades, even after it was protected. Today, some contaminants like mercury are between double and 200 times regulation standards. 

Heiltsuk people have been fighting for the cleanup since the 1980s. The site is home to Namu, an ancient Haíɫzaqv (Heiltsuk) village. The Heiltsuk never ceded their land, but much of it, including Namu, was seized and treated as private property. In 1893 a settler named Robert Draney established a bustling cannery. It was an economic success and the centre of a vibrant community, employing many Heiltsuk people, until it was suddenly shuttered in the 1980s after industry profits dropped. 

Within the imposed colonial system, Namu traded hands without Heiltsuk permission. The most recent corporate owner is now legally dissolved and the Namu lands have reverted to the Crown. 

The Heiltsuk want to protect their land, and to make it habitable again. 

“My kids and I want to go back there and build a house on the land where my parents lived,” Chief Ken Campbell says. Campbell is hereditary chief for Namu and the surrounding area, called Mawas.

His nation needs support to repair the damage caused by outside players — and prevent harm to the surrounding rainforest.

As long as the cannery deteriorates, ‘our work is not done’

The Great Bear Rainforest agreement was finalized in 2016, in collaboration with First Nations and the forestry industry. In total, 85 per cent of the forest was conserved, including 70 per cent of its old-growth trees. 

But the metal and concrete continued to slowly crumble, year after year. About a decade ago, you could still walk around Namu. “You can’t do that anymore,” Chris Tollefson, a lawyer and co-convenor of the Renew Namu working group, says, warning it’s at the point of “becoming a crisis.”

“The condition of the site has deteriorated dramatically. It’s falling into the ocean.”

Heiltsuk Nation has been pushing for cleanup for decades and was drafting a memorandum of understanding with B.C. and Canada to fund and undertake the clean up of Namu that was put on hold due to last fall’s B.C. election. But the nation is making sure the site remains on the recently re-elected NDP’s radar. 

In January, Heiltsuk leaders, allies, B.C. ministers, senior officials and negotiators convened at Simon Fraser University. Tollefson says the meeting was meant to restart discussions about Namu’s future and celebrate the work that has been done so far by the Heiltsuk. Two newly elected B.C. ministers were in attendance: Randene Neill, minister of water, land and resource stewardship, and Tamara Davidson, minister of environment and parks. Davidson, a Haida citizen, is the first Indigenous woman to be elected in North-Coast-Haida Gwaii.

Haíɫzaqv Chief Councillor K̓áwáziɫ (Marilyn Slett) says that Namu made a few people a lot of money — and was left in decay. The nation is working to protect what the world knows as the Great Bear Rainforest, but to the Heiltsuk, it’s home.

“We have a lot to be proud of with the Great Bear Rainforest agreement, land use agreement and moving into marine protected areas and conservancies,” she says. “But when Namu continues to deteriorate and fall into the ocean and get into the earth, we know our work is not done. We need to work together to restore it.”

Contaminant levels for mercury, lead at cannery site ‘off the charts’

Namu is right in the centre of the Great Bear Rainforest, on the central coast of B.C. Heiltsuk Nation contracted an environmental consultant to measure contamination, which found mercury at levels 92.8 times higher than regulation standards for contaminated sites. 

The foreshore, one of the most contaminated areas, was designated a conservancy in 2008, in the run-up to the creation of the Great Bear Rainforest protected area.

Other contaminants were also drastically higher than regulation standards, like tributyltin (toxic to sealife and humans), fluoranthene (which may cause kidney and liver issues), phenanthrene (which can cause reproductive issues in animals) and anthracene (which can cause skin irritation, nausea and inflammation).

“It’s off the charts,” Slett says. 

This is based on a preliminary site assessment, and some areas have not yet been sampled. Tollefson expects further contamination will be identified.

Still, Heiltsuk leaders emphasize that Namu has been inhabited for 10,000 years. While they’ve waited more than 40 years for repair, leadership is determined to secure a prosperous future for Namu for generations to come.

Every Heiltsuk community member has a ‘great story’ about Namu

Hím̓ás Wigvilhba Wakas (Hereditary Chief Harvey Humchitt) was a little boy in Namu. Families would move there in the summer so the adults could work. His dad was a fisherman and his mom worked at the cannery.

“Namu was a thriving village,” he says. “For me, it was a real adventure.”

Harvey worked at the cannery as a teenager — once for 29 hours straight, he says, unloading 250,000 pieces of salmon.

He recalls families walking down the boardwalk like a parade when they left for lunch. His daughter, Megan Humchitt, remembers walking along the boardwalk decades later too.

“Talk to any Heiltsuk community member about Namu, they’re going to have a really great story,” Megan says. “Everybody thinks about Namu with a good heart.” 

“We need to continue to have generations of people — youth, kids, parents, families — come and be able to experience what walking on the boardwalk is like in Namu.”

In 2011, Harvey was central to negotiating the return of Heiltsuk ancestors’ remains from Simon Fraser University, travelling to Vancouver with Hereditary Chief Campbell to bring their ancestors home. 

The work of bringing the remains home also took years, which means Harvey knows such monumental projects can happen. His vision is that B.C., Canada and everyone on the working group work with Heiltsuk to bring Namu back to health.

“It’s in a state where it really needs a lot of attention,” he says. “We need to do something about it.”

One member of the Renew Namu working group, philanthropist Warren Spitz, used to fly north to Namu to work as a teen. At the January meeting, Spitz says he was “terribly embarrassed” that non-Indigenous people descended on an ancient village that had existed for over 12,000 years, “extracted all of the resources from the sea” over less than a century and “made tremendous amounts of money and left.”

“The Heiltsuk, who were the stewards of this land for that millennium, are now simply asking that we help remediate the damage that was done and turn it back to their stewardship for probably another millennium or more of great stewardship,” he says.

Heiltsuk’s vision for the future includes Namu becoming a satellite community, close to the nation’s central community, Bella Bella. Leadership sees potential for a marine transport and safety hub, a cultural centre and ecotourism.

Slett says they just need to keep pushing. She points out that through reconciliation agreements with B.C. and Canada, the nation was able to purchase Shearwater Resort in Bella Bella. In the 75 years it first operated, just one Heiltsuk person worked there, as a cashier, she says. Now, the nation owns it and 54 per cent of its employees are Heiltsuk. She holds that the same can happen for Namu.

“It’s going to take the business community, B.C. and Canada, Heiltsuk and people that care,” she says.

“We’re here to bring everybody together.”

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The Federal Court dismissed a claim that Canada breached the Species At Risk Act when it approved a megaport expansion in Metro Vancouver in early 2023. In the decision, dated Jan. 10, the judge disagreed with a group of environmental organizations that cabinet failed to meet obligations to endangered species law.

The Roberts Bank Terminal 2 expansion is set to grow the Port of Vancouver’s imprint on the Fraser estuary, a biodiversity hotspot in Delta, B.C. The $3.5-billion expansion is expected to impact Chinook salmon and, in turn, negatively impact endangered southern resident killer whales that rely on Chinook. There are only 72 whales left, after two died in November.

“Even since this case was filed and was heard the population has declined further,” Dyna Tuytel, a lawyer with the environmental law charity Ecojustice, said. “This is a really urgent and critical situation.”

In the project’s environmental impact assessment, scientists concluded the expansion will cause environmental impacts that “cannot be mitigated.” Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault agreed with this finding, but said the project was “justified” under the circumstances. He approved it in April 2023 as long as it met 370 conditions — the largest number of legally-binding conditions for a project to date. 

Ecojustice, representing a coalition of environmental groups, argued the federal government breached the Species At Risk Act by allowing destruction of habitat for the endangered orcas, filing for a judicial review  in May 2023 which went to court last year.

With this challenge quashed, the federal government and the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority, a federal agency, will continue the permitting process to get the new berth built. 

Tuytel said that includes securing a permit under the Species At Risk Act, and she argues the project could still be halted in that process.

“It ultimately can’t get those [permits] if the project will jeopardize the southern resident killer whales’ survival and their recovery,” she said. “That means that this project can’t ultimately be built unless the [port authority] can come up with more mitigation.”

Guilbeault’s office did not respond in time for publication.

The port authority said the decision “reaffirms the rigor of the federal environmental assessment process that Roberts Bank Terminal 2 went through.”

“Roberts Bank Terminal 2 is vital to support Canadian trade and our shared prosperity. We are advancing the project in an environmentally responsible way that reflects First Nations’ priorities and supports Canada’s future trade needs,” it told The Narwhal in an email.

The port is in the Fraser estuary, where the river meets the Pacific Ocean. Chinook salmon that are still too young and small to thrive in the open sea use the shallow estuary to feed and grow while adjusting to salt water. The rich soil and water also supports migratory birds like western sandpipers. 

A 2022 study found 102 species in the Fraser estuary are at risk of local extinction between now and 2045. The Fraser River is Canada’s largest producer of Chinook salmon, but it has already lost 85 per cent of its salmon habitat, and the terminal expansion would deplete an additional 177 hectares. The port authority has committed to restoring 86 hectares of salmon habitat in other areas, but critics including Misty MacDuffee, a biologist with Raincoast Conservation Foundation, have argued this doesn’t make up for the negative impact on juvenile salmon.

Federal assessment concludes orcas face ‘imminent threats’ to survival, which could prompt emergency protection

Ecojustice is representing the David Suzuki Foundation, Georgia Strait Alliance, Raincoast Conservation Foundation and the Wilderness Committee in their bid to halt the expansion.

In another effort to stop the project, in June 2024 some of the organizations also requested fisheries minister Diane Lebouthillier and Guilbeault recommend an emergency order to protect southern resident killer whales.

In response to the request, Fisheries and Oceans Canada and Parks Canada did an assessment and, in December 2024, determined southern resident killer whales still face “imminent threats” to recovery and survival. They concluded there have been “no significant changes” in the threats the whales face, despite the implementation of measures in 2018 to improve their conditions. (The assessment added the caveat it may be too early to see effects of those measures, since southern resident killer whales are slow to reproduce and “recovery of the species takes some time.”)

The organizations hope this assessment will drive the ministers to issue an emergency order to protect the whales, which would allow the government to prohibit activities that negatively impact the species and to take actions like increasing the distance vessels must keep from the whales. An emergency order could also temporarily halt the terminal expansion, until it is lifted. But this isn’t a surefire path. In 2018, the fisheries minister and environment minister recommended an emergency order be issued to protect the whales, but the Governor in Council (which means the Governor General acting on the advice of cabinet) declined, saying it was determined existing and planned measures will “contribute to abating” threats to the whales’ survival.

It could be a dead end, but at the moment, it’s the “strongest” legal tool left for the environmental organizations to intervene, MacDuffee said. 

Since the ministers concluded there is an imminent threat, Tuytel said they are legally obligated to recommend that cabinet issue an emergency order, but as far as she knows, they have not done so yet.

Parties disagree how cabinet is bound by the Species At Risk Act

The court disagreed with Ecojustice on how expansive obligations under the Species At Risk Act are, and who is beholden to them. Ecojustice argued cabinet is also under these obligations, but the judge concluded they only apply to Guilbeault. The judge said the organizations failed to prove Guilbeault had not met his legal obligations.

Tuytel said Canada’s position in court was that “the permitting process will ultimately solve these issues.” The permit criteria outlines “the project must not jeopardize the species survival and recovery,” Tuytel said.

But the permitting process is out of the public eye, she explained. While the explanations behind permitting decisions are posted on a public registry, Tuytel said that information is often shared “well after the fact.”

She said Ecojustice and the other applicant organizations will discuss whether to appeal.

The port expansion has been fraught from the start. The cities of Delta, Richmond and White Rock all voiced opposition to the project when it was announced in April 2023. Some First Nations were initially opposed, but the port says it has signed mutual benefit agreements with 27 First Nations.

The authority is consulting with 48 First Nations and pursuing mutual benefits agreements with 28 of them, so it has one more to complete. The port authority said it could not tell The Narwhal which nation the final negotiations are with due to confidentiality.

In an emailed statement, the port authority said “positive discussions are ongoing” regarding the last agreement, “as well as ongoing consultation and engagement.”

Another port project in the estuary seeks approval next to Roberts Bank Terminal 2

The existing tenant at Deltaport, Global Container Terminals, initially applied to operate the new terminal, but says the port wouldn’t accept their application in order to invite more competition. Global Container Terminals began to vocally oppose the port’s Roberts Bank Terminal 2 proposal and its environmental impacts. It argued that other ongoing expansions at Prince Rupert and in Vancouver could meet the coast’s container capacity needs. The company proposed its own smaller, single-berth expansion at Roberts Bank, which it said was an alternative to the Port of Vancouver’s Terminal 2 proposal.

But the environmental impact assessment is being treated as an additional, separate proposal — not an alternative. Now that Roberts Bank Terminal 2 has been approved, Global Container Terminals is still seeking approval, leading to the potential that two separate ports will be added to the estuary. 

The environmental impact assessment does not consider whether a project is needed — it just looks at the impacts.

‘We have no more time. These whales are on an extinction trajectory’

MacDuffee said there has been a lot of talk but little action to protect southern resident killer whales, who are impacted by ocean traffic and noise.

The federal government released a draft ocean noise strategy in August, which MacDuffee called an “absolutely empty initiative.” She says the strategy recognizes the need to consult and develop targets but offers nothing but “platitudes.”

“There’s been a lot of years of talk about action targets and still nothing as a strategy to get us towards those targets,” she said. She pointed to the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion approval in 2019, when the federal cabinet said it would implement 16 recommendations to mitigate impacts of increased oil tankers on endangered orcas before shipping began. In 2024, shipping had begun — but Raincoast discovered ministers had backtracked entirely on some recommendations and had no timeline for implementing others.

She said the 370 conditions the federal government imposed on the port expansion are filled with “soft language,” versus concrete mitigations. For example, the conditions require the port authority to explore the feasibility of breaches under the causeway for salmon to pass through. MacDuffee said it would be easy for the authority to get a quote on the cost and simply conclude breaches aren’t economically feasible, which would meet the condition without offering any ecological benefit. She would want to see a condition that bound the authority to find a way to allow salmon passage. 

The impact assessment agency told The Narwhal in a statement that it is the federal government’s responsibility to ensure potentially adverse effects are mitigated.

“All of the mitigation measures outlined must be technically and economically feasible,” the agency said. 

“The project is now subject to a compliance and enforcement regime. The [impact assessment agency] will verify the proponent’s compliance with the conditions before and during construction, and over the course of all project operations.”

By calling on ministers to issue an emergency order under the Species At Risk Act, the organizations hope to quash the expansion before it completes the permitting process. 

“We have no more time. These whales are on an extinction trajectory,” MacDuffee said.

Updated Jan. 14, 2025, at 10:25 a.m. PT: A previous version of this story listed the groups Ecojustice is representing in petitioning the government for an emergency order to protect killer whales. It has been updated to list the groups Ecojustice is representing in an application for a judicial review of the approval of Roberts Bank Terminal 2.

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