Canada’s vast landscape, which boasts 20 per cent of the world’s fresh water, a quarter of global wetlands and 28 per cent of its boreal forests, is critical to its economy. Natural resource industries — forests, farms, fisheries, mining and oil and gas — together make up approximately seven per cent of Canada’s gross domestic product. 

Tension exists between expanding these industrialized sectors and protecting the ecosystems on which they depend. In Manitoba, some worry protecting the Seal River Watershed, which spans more than 50,000 square kilometres in the province’s north, will hinder opportunities in mineral resources and hydro; to the east, critical mineral mining ambitions in Ontario’s Ring of Fire clash with the protection of the Hudson and James Bay Lowlands, the second-largest carbon sink on earth; and in B.C., Coastal First Nations have protested that lifting the large tanker ban through their waters will endanger the protected Great Bear Rainforest.

These tensions make it easy to frame nature as the antithesis of economic activity, if it’s always put in opposition to projects that are described as growing Canada’s wealth, sovereignty and security. But a growing chorus of economic and policy leaders, alongside conservation groups, are making the case for nature to be seen as a critical financial asset — not a barrier, but another opportunity for economic growth. 

The federal government’s vision for conservation, laid out in its 2026 nature strategy, is of a nation that “protects, restores, and values nature as a foundation of our economy, sovereignty, and well-being.” 

One of the pillars to achieving that vision is “valuing nature and mobilizing capital,” according to the strategy. It estimated the value of “ecosystem services” — the direct and indirect contributions of nature to well-being and quality of life — to be $3.6 trillion, or “more than double our 2018 GDP.” In other words, the government is looking to spur more private sector investment in conservation by showing businesses how valuable nature is to their bottom lines.

The numbers show conservation is comparable with many of Canada’s major industries. While it may not produce the same scale of economic value as major resource extraction sectors like oil and gas — which does not approach the value of sectors like health care or education — it is a significant contributor to Canada’s economy. And the return on investment is high: a recent analysis by the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS) found every dollar spent on protected areas generated more than $3.50 in visitor spending, helping fuel local economies and generate government revenues. 

Like the oil and gas sector, Canada can choose to invest in the potential of conservation and champion it as a cornerstone of our country’s economic future. And as Canadians grapple with the increasingly severe impacts of the climate crisis, the role of intact ecosystems becomes even more valuable. 

These nine charts capture some of the value of Canada’s natural environments, and the economic potential of conservation.

Economic contributions from protected areas — by province

Gross domestic product (GDP) contributions of selected Canadian industries

How are the industries defined?+

Statistics Canada tracks economic activity indicators for a wide range of sectors using the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), which assigns a code to specific activities and sectors. Industries and government agencies tally these statistics in different ways to determine overall sector impacts. 

This analysis uses Statistics Canada’s data, and defines each industry as follows:

Agriculture: Crop and animal production (farming), related support activities and food manufacturing, including mills, bakeries, meat and dairy production.

Fisheries: Aquaculture, fishing, hunting and trapping and seafood product preparation.

Forestry: Forestry and logging, related support activities, wood and paper product manufacturing. 

Mining: Mineral mining (ore, non-metals, potash) and quarrying activities, including related support. Also includes mineral product manufacturing and metal manufacturing. 

Oil and gas: Oil and gas extraction and related support activities, petroleum and coal product manufacturing, natural gas distribution and pipelines.

Transportation: Air, rail, water, truck and transit and ground transportation (including public transit and taxis). 

Utilities: Electric power generation, transmission and distribution and water and sewage systems.

Jobs and compensation

More than 150,000 people work in protected and conserved areas — not far behind the oil and gas and forestry sectors. As the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society points out, many of these jobs are in Indigenous, rural and remote communities, where unemployment rates are high compared to urban areas. In parts of Canada where other economic opportunities are scarce, protected and conserved areas offer the opportunity to create long-term stable employment. 

Conservation provides value, but how are conservation workers valued? Compensation for the approximately 150,000 Canadians who work in protected areas is low, compared to other sectors; on average, an oil and gas worker makes nearly four times as much annually. 

Tax revenues and subsidies

Governments collected more than $1.4 billion in tax revenues from parks and protected areas in 2024, most of which stemmed from visitor spending, according to the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society’s analysis. That’s comparable to government tax revenues from the forestry industry, at $1.2 billion. Major resource industries like forestry and oil and gas also create government revenue through royalties and other fees. 

But for many of these industries, government revenues can be offset by tax breaks, grants and other subsidies.

Governments invested $2.3 billion in parks and protected spaces in 2024, generating $0.62 in revenue for every dollar invested. By comparison, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) estimates the federal government spent $3.17 billion USD (or $4.34 billion CAD) on fossil fuel subsidies — almost $1 billion USD more than the United States spent on subsidies, despite their industry’s far greater output. That number is likely an underestimate, as a lack of clear data and complex incentive structures make it difficult to track how much governments give out to industry. 

Environmental Defence, which releases an annual report tracking Canadian fossil fuel subsidies, estimates the government doled out more than $30 billion in subsidies and financing to fossil fuel companies in 2024. Most of that funding came in the form of a $20-billion loan for the Trans Mountain Expansion project. 

Carbon storage

The Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society estimated the carbon stocks stored in Canada’s existing protected areas by comparing protected area boundaries to data showing the carbon concentration in soil, vegetated areas and seabed sediments. 

It found a total 51.4 gigatons of carbon stored in the country’s protected forests, peatlands, wetlands, soil and seabeds. 

If this carbon was all emitted as carbon dioxide, the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society estimates, it would equate to 188.4 gigatons of emissions. 

By protecting these regions from industrial disturbances like mining, logging or draining, that carbon stays in the ground. If released, that carbon comes at a cost. 

Canada’s industrial carbon price, which charges businesses for emissions that exceed a predetermined limit, is $110 per tonne as of 2026. A carbon credit — doled out for activities that remove or avoid carbon emissions — is worth the same.

At that price, the carbon stored in Canada’s protected areas is worth $20.7 trillion. 

That’s about 10 times the value of Canada’s global mining assets ($352.6 billion), global energy assets ($827 billion) and domestic farm sector assets ($992.4 billion) combined.

Annual carbon capture

Protected and conserved areas remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, a process known as “carbon capture.” Manitoba’s Riding Mountain National Park, for example, removed an average of 108,328 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year from the atmosphere between 1990 and 2020. This is significantly less than Shell’s Quest carbon capture and storage project, but it’s also just one of hundreds of parks and protected areas across Canada.

Most parks, like the ones included in this chart, are sequestering carbon each year. However, when parks or protected areas are hit by wildfires, they can become carbon emitters.

– With files from Michelle Cyca

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The Ontario government is moving ahead with plans to transfer management of 60 per cent of Wasaga Beach from the province to the town, despite receiving feedback from thousands of Ontarians decrying the proposal as potentially endangering sensitive piping plover habitat and affecting beach access. 

The Doug Ford government received 14,233 comments over a 30-day period last summer, about 98 per cent of which were in opposition to the proposal. Many expressed concerns that erasing provincial protection could mean the loss of sand dunes in favour of hotels, condos and other beachfront development.

“We did not consider any changes to the proposal based on the feedback received, given the Town of Wasaga Beach’s commitments to keeping the beach public, not building on the beach and protecting environmentally sensitive dunes,” the government said in its decision.

Under Ontario’s Environmental Bill of Rights, the government is required to post moves with environmental or energy implications to the publicly accessible Environmental Registry of Ontario to allow for widespread feedback from industry, experts and residents. (The Ford government has, though, exempted several projects and types of notices from the registry, such as the Ontario Place redevelopment and permits to harm at-risk species, under Bill 5.)

Last June, the Ford government posted its decision to amend the Provincial Parks and Conservation Reserves Act, the legislation which created more than 340 parks across Ontario. The amendment would permit the transfer of 60 hectares, or three per cent, of Wasaga Beach Provincial Park, which protects the world’s longest freshwater beach and surrounding natural areas, to the town’s management to help boost tourism and the local economy. 

The transfer includes more than half, or 60 per cent, of the beachfront, which contains all the sand dunes and vegetation that serve as nesting area for the piping plover.

Among the roughly two per cent of respondents that supported the move for the sake of economic development and revitalization, there was also a push for “continued environmental management and continued public access.”

Most of the comments on the registry posting highlighted the consequences of losing this beach environment, or even threatening it with increased development. 

“Once this precedent is set, we risk irreversible environmental degradation, reduced public access and the commercialization of what should remain a protected, public space for generations to come,” one local resident wrote. “Tourism and environmental stewardship are not mutually exclusive, and development must not come at the cost of conservation.” 

“Public land — especially waterfront property as ecologically and recreationally important as Wasaga Beach — should remain in public hands and under provincial protection,” another wrote.  

None of this swayed the province. The amendments to enable the transfer were passed in Ontario’s 2025 budget, released last fall. With the recent decision, the government will now advance the transfer to the town.

This is not the first time the Ford government has disregarded feedback through the Environmental Registry of Ontario. The Auditor General of Ontario has repeatedly called out this government for failing to adhere to its own laws — at times “deliberately” — that require it to meaningfully consult the public through the registry.

In late 2022, for example, the government received more than 30,000 comments about its plans to remove 7,400 acres of land from the protected Greenbelt. In spite of this, “no changes were made to the proposal as a result of public consultation,” the government’s posting on the registry read.

In choosing not to consider any changes based on public feedback, the government’s decision said the lands removed from provincial protection in Wasaga Beach “will continue to be subject to Ontario’s species protection and environmental laws.”

However, shortly before announcing this transfer, the Ford government weakened species protections through its controversial Bill 5, as well as exempting certain postings from the environmental registry. The provincial parks legislation was the last law standing to protect plover habitat in Wasaga Beach.

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Canadian outdoor guides, whose lives are dedicated to getting people out in nature, feel the impacts of climate change acutely. It makes sense: Canada is warming twice as fast as the global average — three times in the North. 

Melting ice, unpredictable weather, wildfires and more make it challenging for guides to keep people safe, whether they’re taking clients rock climbing, skiing, scaling frozen waterfalls or performing search and rescue operations.

The changing environment can also create an emotional tug-of-war for people who have built their lives around the mountains. 

“As guides, it’s an interesting position. We experience the full spectrum of [climate change], from the consequences to the cause, in a really intense way,” mountain guide Dylan Cunningham told The Narwhal. 

“I have almost died from hazards that are largely because of how climate change has affected the mountains. On the other hand, I experience the joy of doing things dramatically bad for our climate on a different level than [most].” 

“People heli-ski for a week, or once in a lifetime. I do it all winter. It’s an amazing job — but there’s an intense conflict with that. Some heli-ski guides are getting to the point where they’re going, ‘This feels hard to justify.’ ”

The Narwhal spoke to mountain, ski and alpine guides in British Columbia and Alberta, like Cunningham, about how climate change has altered their reality. Here’s what they said. 

Mike Adolph, Nordegg, Alta. 

Mike Adolph has been guiding professionally since 1995. He’s a certified mountain guide through the International Federation of Mountain Guides Associations and technical director for the Association of Canadian Mountain Guides, the organization that trains and certifies guides while upholding professional standards. In that time, he’s seen first hand the impacts of climate change. 

“It’s one of those things where it seems to be kind of slapping us in the face. And we adapt, and we’re changing, but what action are we taking? 

I think there’s been more of a conscientious effort amongst guides to look at ways to reduce our footprint. We all look at the mountains and go, ‘Things are changing. We need to do something about this.’ But I think everybody feels like, ‘What can I do about it?’ 

We might not be able to change the course where things are going, but we can slow it down. 

It needs to be part of a bigger movement that everybody’s participating in. We’re not slowing it down to the point where things are ever going to be as they were.

But if everybody does a little bit to reduce our footprint, that’s all steps in the right direction. And I think that’s the best that we can hope for.”

Ian Welsted, Golden, B.C.

Alpine guide Ian Welsted started guiding professionally six years ago after an accomplished career climbing peaks around the world. As an alpine guide, a certification specific to climbing year-round in the mountains, Welsted specializes in trips up prominent peaks, like Mount Robson, the highest mountain in the Canadian Rockies. 

“Climbing had a big impact on my life. I grew up in a conservative farming town in Manitoba, and wasn’t happy there. [When] I discovered climbing, it made me come out of my shell.

That’s partly why I got into guiding. I wanted to show other people how climbing can bring something constructive to your life. 

If people live in the city and have no tie to the natural world, then when they’re sold this weird lie that [climate change doesn’t matter] — if you’ve literally never experienced the natural world, then you probably don’t have any basis to make any kind of value judgment. 

It’s not a magic pill. I’m going to take someone ice climbing and they’re suddenly going to buy an electric car, or lobby against opening the [Arctic] National Wildlife Refuge. But marginally — you never know.”

Jordy Shepherd, Canmore, Alta.

Jordy Shepherd has been guiding and performing search and rescue in Western Canada for more than 25 years. Shepherd became an internationally certified mountain guide in 2000. Among many other hats, Shepherd guides professionally, hosts a podcast about mountain safety and volunteers with Columbia Valley Search and Rescue.  

“These glaciers are our freshwater reserves. We’re using our reserves. You can’t just spend, spend, spend your savings. You’ve got to make back the buffer or you run out.

Time is of the essence, and anyone who has expertise and experience to pass on needs to.

As ice recedes, there are all these unstable boulder fields — dirt and sand that haven’t seen the light of day in 10,000 years. Support is being taken away.

I’m finding I have to be more open to making the obvious decision, which is the tougher decision, to not go certain places. Just carve it off the menu.

I think about [the impact on the next generation of guides] all the time. 

People raring to go, looking to make their mark. With the way things are changing, it’s hard to predict how that is going to go for them when trade routes [commonly guided trips] are not accessible.

There’s certain stuff that you want to have in your repertoire for the ability to take people to. If you can’t take them there, it’s a big loss.”

Christian Schlumpf, Golden, B.C.

Christian Schlumpf began guiding in 2016 and became an internationally certified mountain guide in 2024. Before guiding, Schlumpf pursued engineering physics and worked on solar installations in Switzerland, where he fell in love with the mountains. During the winter, Schlumpf’s work is a mix of backcountry ski guiding, around Golden and internationally, and in the summer he guides rock climbing out of Squamish, B.C.

“For someone who’s a bit younger, like myself, [climate change] has always been a thing. 

I didn’t really think too much about [it]. I just wanted to be in the mountains. I wanted to do this as a profession. 

I don’t feel too nervous about it at this point. It’s just something to manage.

The important part of guiding is how you communicate that. Just getting to a summit is not necessarily the goal of a day in the mountains.  

If anything, I think it’s become more accepted to not put pressure on yourself. 

We’re more accepting of deciding to turn around for whatever reason it may be. Because I think we also realize that things are changing, and things are more unpredictable than they were in the past, and we don’t always have the answers that we think.”

Dylan Cunningham, Golden, B.C.

Dylan Cunningham started guiding in 2015 and became an internationally certified mountain guide in 2022. Cunningham splits his time between heli-ski guiding in B.C., where clients ski from remote locations accessed via helicopter, and guiding internationally and supporting Guardians of the Ice, a non-profit raising awareness of Western Canada’s melting glaciers.    

“[The mountains] hold a very special place to me in the way they add so much value to my and other people’s lives. 

That we’re having a profound impact on that space is moving for me. But it’s pretty hard to detach myself from thoughts of ‘what are the downstream effects of this?’

That cost is going to be disproportionately borne by people who are vulnerable, not by affluent people [with] social and geographic mobility. 

I try to think of it not as how is [climate change] going to impact my career. But how does this impact future generations?

Sometimes that can tap into something a little bit more powerful than, ‘How much convenience and opulence do you want for yourself?’ ”

Kevin Hjertaas, Banff, Alta.

Ski guide Kevin Hjertaas explored the Canadian Rockies on skis his whole life before he began guiding professionally 12 years ago. Formerly a competitive skier and avalanche controller, Hjertaas is based in Banff National Park and cohosts monthly snowpack discussions sharing ski and avalanche conditions across B.C. and Alberta. 

“It’s hard not to get depressed. You’re walking for hours up this glacier with your thoughts for most of the day. Your nearest partner is 15 metres away, there’s no conversation.

It’s really cool to bring your guests [to snow caves that form at the bottom of glaciers], a magical spot where there’s beautiful ice and you’re underneath it. 

You get there and realize that was only two years ago, but now the glacier is a full 60 metres back, and there is no cave. 

But if [they haven’t] been there before, they’re still awed by it. If you’ve seen it before, it’s so diminished. So if I can just drop my expectation, there are still magical places. 

It’s hard. I try to bite my tongue [when] I want to say, ‘It used to be like this,’ but it happens. I try to get off it quickly. You don’t want to diminish that experience. 

I grew up with the expectation glaciers were receding before we recognized global warming had such a human element to it. As a child, we thought it was part of the natural cycle. The fact it’s so accelerated now — I don’t know how you reconcile that.”

Jasmin Caton, Nelson, B.C.

Before becoming a ski, rock and apprentice alpine guide, Jasmin Caton studied hydrogeology and thought she might become an environmental scientist. 

The lead guide and owner of Valhalla Mountain Touring strives to operate her off-grid ski lodge in B.C.’s Selkirk Mountains with as little environmental impact as possible. But climate change may be plotting against her. 

Most remote ski lodges use helicopters to transport guests. To burn less fossil fuel, Caton offers catskiing, transporting guests by tracked land vehicles called snowcats. From wildfires to drought, Caton has experienced the impacts of climate change first hand. 

“I’m a happy, optimistic person. I guard myself against getting dragged down by this stuff. But it’s hard. It’s really sad. 

[When I hear news like] ‘carbon dioxide levels are higher than scientists were predicting,’ this heaviness sets in.

I think about taking my kids to glaciers, because what are glaciers going to look like when they’re my age? So many of the iconic glaciers in this area will not exist in decades. It’s heavy.

I think it’s just good to be able to say it, and also to find joy in life. Because otherwise, what’s the point? 

I’m flying to Greece to go rock climbing with my family. There are all the hypocritical things we do to keep going and find [joy in] life.

It’s the balance I’ve chosen to strike with my career. Owning a business where I take people into the mountains and they can feel more connected to nature, and using my business as a bit of a soapbox, or supporting environmental activities where I feel like I’m doing something meaningful.”

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Standing on the Athabasca Glacier in Jasper National Park, Alta., the wind picks up with an icy bite. 

It will be a lot warmer down there, our guide tells me, pointing to a moulin, a hole in the glacier formed by meltwater.

Trusting my rope, I, like the others, lean back and descend 35 metres down until my spiked feet land inside a sculpture of perfect blue ice. 

Every spring and fall since 2022, photographers Jim Elzinga and Roger Vernon, with mountain guide Dylan Cunningham, venture to the Columbia Icefield. Their mission is to capture the vast glacial expanse straddling the Alberta and British Columbia border before it’s gone.

“This is the beauty,” Elzinga says. “But this is what we’re potentially going to lose.”

Glaciers in Western Canada are melting faster than ever, and the last four years have been particularly devastating. From 2021 to 2024, glaciers receded twice as fast as in the last decade due to low snow, high temperatures and wildfires darkening glacial ice as ash and soot on the surface absorb heat, according to recent research published in Geophysical Research Letters. 

On our current trajectory, Environment and Climate Change Canada predicts glaciers in the Canadian Rockies are likely to all but vanish by 2100, according to a statement emailed to The Narwhal. The consequences are far-reaching, impacting everything from water security to infrastructure to ecosystems and contributing to sea level rise. 

But below the surface of the Athabasca Glacier, encapsulated in its water-sculpted walls, that’s easy to forget. The ethereal blue seems endless, engulfing our senses and filling our peripheral vision.

It’s inescapable — a feeling Elzinga and Vernon strive to replicate with their photography. 

Vernon made sure everyone touched the ice with their bare hands to experience the smooth texture. 

Capturing the beauty of the Columbia Icefield glaciers 

For three decades, Elzinga and Vernon were in the same social circles in the mountain community of Canmore, Alta. But it wasn’t until 2021, when Vernon got a call from Elzinga asking to collaborate on a glacier project, that the pair got to know each other. It was a natural pairing.

“When we came together there was such a common language,” Vernon says. 

Their goal too, was shared. In a world inundated with images, they want to take photos that grab people’s attention at a scale that’s difficult to ignore. 

“We wanted to have our images so big that if you stood back at this distance,” he says, holding his arm out wide, “it still smacked you in your face, commanded your presence.

That shared vision led to Meltdown — a photography project exhibited in large scale at galleries and museums capturing the beauty of the Columbia Icefield glaciers before they are gone. It’s part of a larger initiative by an educational non-profit called Guardians of the Ice which Elzinga cofounded. The group aims to raise awareness of the consequences of losing Western Canada’s glaciers by marrying art and science.

For Vernon, it’s a bit of a shift from his other life behind the camera on the big screen, where he has a long history as a cinematographer, including documentary films and Academy Award–winning movies. 

Elzinga, meanwhile, is an accomplished alpinist who has spent a lifetime guiding and exploring in the mountains at high altitudes. In 1986, he led an expedition when the first North American woman summitted Mount Everest.

While both Elzinga and Vernon have accomplished much in their careers, they brush it off when we talk. The current mission takes centre stage — they are living and breathing glaciers.

Vernon first became aware of the impact of glacier melt when volunteering with a Calgary-based non-profit focused on water security. His work there took him around the world, to Zambia, Ethiopia and Congo. When Elzinga approached him for Guardians of the Ice, Vernon saw an opportunity to have an impact on water security locally.

“Imagine 50 years from now when we don’t have our glaciers. … Those folks aren’t going to have the water,” Vernon says, pointing to downstream Alberta communities. “That’s our food production.”

Water from glaciers in the Columbia Icefield joins rivers, streams and eventually the Pacific, Arctic and Atlantic oceans. As glaciers retreat, declining meltwater supply may impact freshwater availability as early as 2050, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada.

Elzinga, who studied photography in university, dreamt of photographing mountains since the 1980s but had to wait for technology to catch up with his vision. Elzinga and Vernon use a high-resolution camera capable of aerial mapping and space quality imagery to capture the detail and scale of their photography.

The team uses a Phase One camera, a high-resolution camera that allows Elzinga and Vernon to capture the scope of the mountains and glaciers without sacrificing fine details.

Elzinga and Vernon use a technique called photo stacking which combines multiple images to increase the quality of their photos. The technique has been useful for capturing moulins, in particular.

Witnessing glaciers disappear

Before everyone ventures into the moulin, Elzinga and Vernon stand to the side of the opening, looking at their phones. They wait for Cunningham, the mountain guide who supports their work, to text photos to the pair so they can preview the spot and make sure the imagery is what they’re looking for.

Together, Elzinga and Vernon have the mountaineering experience required for the project, but they’re now in their 70s, so they enlisted Cunningham to focus on safety and technical requirements while they focus on the art. 

“We get wrapped up in the minutia of what’s in our eyes,” Elzinga says.

Today we’re also joined by alpine guide and long-time climbing partner of Elzinga’s, Ian Welsted, who volunteered his time to facilitate bringing a reporting team on the shoot. While Elzinga and Vernon take photos, Welsted explores the darker reaches of the moulin.

Behind the camera, Elzinga and Vernon can work together almost wordlessly, an important skill when conditions get rough, they say, like the cold winds and snow when I visit. 

While finding the exact image is a know-it-when-you-see-it scenario, the areas photographed are very intentional. 

A few days after the photoshoot, at Vernon’s home base in Canmore, Alta., he unfolds a map with mountain peaks marked one through 12, the starting point four years ago, when the duo was planning where to photograph. 

The mountains flanking the icefields are known as the “guardians of the ice,” he says, the origin of the non-profit’s name.“Now all that glacier is gone,” Vernon says, pointing to different spots on the map. He points to another area — “gone.” And another, gone.

 Features the photographers planned to capture had vanished or receded remarkably year over year, like the Columbia Glacier, which they estimate to have receded 100 metres from one photograph to the next.

The art of changing people’s minds

While Cunningham has always felt a responsibility toward the environment, working with Elzinga has had a “profound” impact on his outlook, he says. 

When Cunningham gets cynical about climate change, Elzinga’s optimism has the power to pull him back.

“You can’t think that way,” Elzinga will tell him. “We can solve this, we’re making a difference, and we’re going to keep pushing.” 

Giving up isn’t an option for Elzinga.

“It’s really easy to look at this stuff and be overwhelmed by it,” he says. “My attitude is, well, at least you’ve got to try and do something.” 

The non-profit supplies Alberta Tomorrow, a free educational platform, with their materials from the icefields, and plans to expand to the university level as well as experiment with other mediums, like virtual reality. 

Elzinga hopes that awareness will then ripple through every aspect of people’s lives, including the ballot box. “It’s at government levels that you can get policy change,” he says. 

The climate crisis is like a virus, Elzinga says. Even if people are aware of it, they can’t really see it. And as the urgency increases rapidly, maybe art can help show people what’s at stake. 

Among the photographs displayed in the Columbia Icefield Glacier Discovery Centre, where Meltdown is exhibited across from the Athabasca Glacier from May to September until 2027, a wall titled “no action too small” encourages visitors to be mindful of their environmental impact through pledging to take small actions such as eating less meat or divesting from fossil fuel. 

Not everybody who sees the images will make choices for the planet, but some might, and for Vernon and Elzinga, that’s what counts. 

“Sometimes people say, ‘Well, what I do is not going to make a big difference,’ ” Elzinga says. His comeback is to flip the concept of a drop in the bucket on its head. 

“A lot of raindrops go into a rain barrel and then eventually that rain barrel is overflowing.”

As he sees it, if 75,000 people see the images at the gallery, not everybody will make a change — but the percentage of them that do, he says, will “go out and within their circle, they can make a difference.”

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

We all eat and drink. And some time later, the excess must come out the other end. But where do you “go” in Toronto, especially if you’re in the city’s parks? 

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the lack of public washrooms in the city. Cafés and libraries were closed and so were their washrooms. More businesses put up door or window signs stating their washrooms are for customers only. When nature called the options for excreta depended on sex. For women it usually meant holding it. Men had it easier due to their plumbing — with a bush or the side of a building offering enough cover. 

“Clean washrooms make parks accessible and inviting for immigrants,” my colleague at University of Toronto, Ambika Tenneti, said. Her PhD research looked at strategies to engage newcomers in urban forests. In other words: how to increase the connections between people and nature for new Canadians. “In my focus groups the women said we need more washrooms for females. The lines are too long. In multi-generational families, the women often have to take the children or the elders to the washrooms. Men don’t have to do that. There is never a lineup for the men’s toilets. Clean washrooms also make the parks feel safe for immigrants.”

Public washrooms in the city’s parks are maintained by Toronto’s Parks and Recreation division. Some of the washrooms are seasonal, opening from spring to fall each year. Some of the washrooms are more than 50 years old, are not winterized and thus closed to prevent frost damage to pipes and wiring. Where are people supposed to “go” in the winter when the bladder or the belly needs relief?

The lack of public washrooms was emphasized in a report by Toronto Public Space Committee. This volunteer collective of people are “passionate about public space,” including public washrooms. In 2021 the group published “Gotta Go TO: A Public Washroom Strategy for Toronto.” The report called for the city to invest in public washrooms, not just for health and hygiene reasons but as a basic civic service. 

The same year the city launched the Park Washroom Enhancement Program, with the goal of upgrading or rebuilding 125 park washrooms over a decade. This work is now underway, but it can’t come soon enough — or in enough places. The new washrooms will be open year-round. What a relief it will be for park users. “Washrooms are one of the top five priorities when planning a hike,” said Laura Strachan, the board chair of Let’s Hike T.O., a “hiking community in Toronto open to everyone with a focus on people of colour, newcomers and young adults.” 

“We could do longer hikes and have more events in the parks all year if there were open washrooms,” Strachan said. “Now we have to limit our hikes to five kilometres. We could increase it to 12 kilometres or more if there were washrooms. You can tell where the good spots are for washrooms in the parks because you see the used toilet paper or Kleenex there. It’s gross.”

Public washrooms in Toronto have always been a delicate subject. Toronto the Good — an old moniker from when the city was stuffy, monochromatic and presumably godly — didn’t plan for where to expel the excreta. The first public washroom opened in the city in 1896. It was for men only. Women had to fight to get a public washroom. There was a brief interest in building more public washrooms but this ended in the 1920s, thanks to NIMBYism — or “not in my backyard” enthusiasts — from businesses and residents, and lack of interest from politicians. 

Park People, a non-profit agency that advocates for public parks in Canada, noted in its 2023 Canadian City Park Report that public washrooms were the top amenity its survey respondents said they would like to see more of in parks.

In Toronto, Park People partnered with the city to launch the InTO the Ravines program in 2020. This aims to get more under-served communities to know, enjoy and therefore protect the ravines — the wondrous necklace of green river valleys in the city. Whether it’s picnics for a birthday party, barbecues with friends or guided winter walks along the nature trails, it is easier for community groups to like and appreciate the ravines when the public washrooms are open, clean and safe.

“You have to strategize before you even go out to the park. Don’t drink a lot before you go. When organizing events, it becomes even more complex as the group of people literally have nowhere to ‘go,’ ” said Minaz Asani-Kanji, a co-founder of Good Futures Collective, a consulting group that specializes in environmental and community-led research.

In 2012, Canada signed a UN agreement that affirmed access to washrooms was a basic human right. The UN has since clarified that the right applies in public spaces including parks. The City of Toronto is doing a series of public consultations to review its Parkland Strategy — the long-term planning process for the city’s parks. The review includes community engagement sessions to gather feedback from various users of the parks. I went to one held by Black Environmental Initiative, a non-profit agency.

“I am not surprised that toilets came up in the conversations,” Muzamil Gadain, the project leader at Black Environmental Initiative, said. “It’s one of the most pressing issues that people have with the parks and their facilities.”

Washrooms need to be functional, but the design does not have to be Toronto’s usual brand — utilitarian and about as graceful as a pig on ice skates. Thankfully, the city seems to be coming around to this. Toronto Public Space Committee recently picked three top designs in its TO the Loo!: Toronto Toilet Design Challenge. The designs ranged from the elegant to pop-art inspired. Public washrooms in parks can be both useful and beautiful. Most importantly they must be open, year-round.

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Last week, a member of Ontario’s Doug Ford government touted the importance of access to nature to his colleagues. 

Andrew Dowie, MPP for Windsor-Tecumseh, is spearheading Bill 26, new legislation that would amend the provincial parks law to include two new classes of parks: urban and adventure. 

The primary purpose is to facilitate the creation of a new provincial park east of Toronto in Uxbridge by connecting Greenbelt lands with rehabilitated private quarries. The legislation will also aim to create other urban and adventure parks like it. 

The bill is currently being reviewed by a government committee, which heard from members of the public this week. 

Dowie, who serves as the parliamentary assistant to the minister of the environment, conservation and parks, told his colleagues the bill codifies the idea that a growing Ontario needs different kinds of natural spaces. 

“Urban parks make nature accessible where Ontarians now live in growing towns, expanding cities and suburban communities,” he told the committee on Nov. 17. “Urban parks don’t replace traditional provincial parks. They simply acknowledge that in a province of 15 million people, proximity matters.” 

And in truth, natural spaces are getting farther and farther away from urban centres, as those centres sprawl farther and farther out.

Adventure parks, he said, “bring people into nature in different ways,” by encouraging outdoor activities like cycling, paddling, climbing and backcountry trekking, along with newer ventures like pickleball and Pokémon GO. These kinds of parks “give communities new ways to connect people with natural spaces and truly build that appreciation for our biodiversity and for ecological protection,” he said. 

On paper, it makes sense. Over the last few decades, Ontario has rapidly grown, having doubled in population since 1971. That growth has increased the need for and stress on natural spaces, which offer respite for humans and wildlife in so many ways: preserving natural areas lowers stress levels for those who visit them, reduces pollution, protects biodiversity, mitigates flood risk and more. 

But the proposal also comes from a government that continues to expend waterfronts and natural spaces in favour of development and industry. There’s a laundry list of government actions that have put parks and conservation spaces under threat in recent years — everything from the Greenbelt scandal to a bevy of changes to conservation authorities that manage watersheds and public green spaces in Ontario.

The Ford government is removing land from parks to make room for development

Bill 26 is the Ford government’s second amendment to the Provincial Parks and Conservation Reserves Act in several days, picking away at the permanent protection of the lands it governs. In addition to now including two new kinds of parks, the act is also being changed to remove lands from three existing provincial parks to make room for tourism and a highway. 

The government is proposing to remove slivers of land from Grundy Lake and French River provincial parks in northern Ontario to facilitate the widening of Highway 69. It’s also planning to remove land from Wasaga Beach Provincial Park — more than 60 per cent of which is beachfront that also serves as nesting area for endangered piping plovers — and give it to the town to help boost the local economy with tourism-specific development. The bill carrying this change is being put to a final vote this week.

The Ford government insists these changes are specific in their scope and limited in their impact because, as Dowie said, the Progressive Conservatives value nature — at least, sometimes.

Around the same time Bill 26 was tabled, the Ford government also put forward a proposal to amalgamate 36 conservation authorities — agencies unique to Ontario that manage watersheds and reduce the risk of flooding — to seven, leaving unclear the state of the thousands of acres of land these unique agencies manage to minimize flood risk and boost access to nature. Though how this will all play out remains very unclear, there is a strong precedent for Ford meddling with the authorities’ power. In recent years, conservation authorities have been told to audit their lands to find surplus areas for potential development and told the environment minister can overrule their decisions to not allow development permits (or allow them, but that’s not really on brand. Remember minister’s zoning orders or MZOs?).  

Plus, the government has watered down the rules that protect wetlands and waterways in these natural spaces, and has exempted major projects, like the Ontario Place redevelopment on the Toronto waterfront, from environmental assessments.And then there was the Greenbelt scandal, an effort to forego the protection of parcels of farmland and natural spaces for development. 

‘Nature should be part of everyday life’ — but for how long?

Cumulatively, the Ford government’s approach to nature is both confusing and contradictory. It’s valuable, until it’s in the way. And it’s worth protecting as long as people’s place in it is clearly defined. Natural spaces for the sake of nature — not to mention carbon sequestration, flood mitigation and the many other ecosystem services it provides — isn’t a goal for this government. 

The proof is in the literal weeds: in the time that this government has been in office, the auditor general has found there is no clear strategy for expanding the province’s natural areas, not enough staff in place to properly protect them and very little funding allocated to enable either. 

And even when action makes sense, its execution doesn’t. On Friday, the government announced a $4.75-million investment to rebuild and upgrade Samuel de Champlain Provincial Park in Mattawa, Ont., and turn it into a “year-round destination.” The park was devastated by a June storm, trapping campers and clearing swaths of forest. 

“The storm was one of the most severe events Ontario Parks has ever faced,” Environment Minister Todd McCarthy said in his announcement. What he didn’t say was that scientists predict such intense storms will increase in frequency due to global warming fuelled by the burning of fossil fuels. Rebuilding the park is good, but rebuilding it by prioritizing tourism over the climate resilience of such natural areas means they won’t last.

Bill 26 may be designed with good intentions, and Dowie certainly said all the right things at committee. “It will help ensure that access to nature is not to be determined by persons, postal code or income, but by the shared belief that nature should be reachable, welcome and meaningful, in effect democratic,” he told his colleagues. “Nature should be part of everyday life, not an occasional privilege, not one controlled by private landowners all the time, but truly a regular experience.” 

No one would disagree — including beachgoers at what used to be Wasaga Beach Provincial Park. But even if the Ford government facilitates the creation of new urban and adventure parks and fixes up damaged ones, their success depends on the protections that are offered to every park in the province. And when it comes to using the power of the law to ensure nature’s protection, the Ford government has proved more adept at bulldozing through it. 

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On the border between the United States and Mexico, a black bear paces back and forth when confronted with the looming steel beams that form the border wall between the two countries. A pack of javelina wriggles through a tiny opening barely bigger than a piece of printer paper. 

But on the border between Canada and the U.S., the picture is very different.

In many places, moose, bear, wolves and other wildlife can simply walk between the two nations. There are barriers — roads, development and a lack of protected habitat on either side — but for more than a century, relatively relaxed border policy and a shared sense of purpose saw conservationists in both countries working together to overcome them.

Now, U.S. President Donald Trump has ratcheted up the challenges to cross-border conservation. Since his election, he has threatened Canadian sovereignty, sowed economic jeopardy on both sides of the border and cancelled, or proposed cancelling, many U.S. research grants for conservation work.

Many of Trump’s actions have explicit implications for cross-border conservation — in North America and globally. Early on in this term, Trump, along with Elon Musk, then at the helm of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, all but shut down USAID and its international conservation efforts. Canadian conservation organizations have reported losing co-funding as a result of Trump’s cuts to foreign aid. As his administration has stretched staffing thin and proposed deep budget cuts at the U.S. National Park Service, it ended funding many found crucial to habitat conservation work across the border.

Trump has also withdrawn from the Green Climate Fund and the Paris Agreement — both of which support co-operative global action on climate change — and has signalled he wants to cut the Multinational Species Conservation Fund. The Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, which monitors aquatic health on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border and is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has also been gutted.

Other impacts on Canadian conservation are more subtle. As stories of tightening border security spread online, many professionals fear crossing the border for business purposes, no matter how legitimate and lawful they may be. Not to mention the visceral chill in many Canadians’ perception of their closest neighbour.

Despite the challenges, Canadian organizations doing cross-border work are carrying on. “In some ways, nothing has changed for wildlife. Wildlife are still free to cross the boundaries,” said Jodi Hilty, the president and chief scientist of the landscape connectivity initiative Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative (Y2Y), which aims to create an uninterrupted wildlife corridor through that region.  

But Trump has also cast a cloud of uncertainty over efforts to establish connected habitat across the two countries’ national boundaries, and conservation organizations are navigating uncharted waters.

An international science conference in the U.S. highlights declining Canadian participation

Cross-border collaborations rely on relationships. Putting private land into a conservation easement — a legal designation that can prevent development in perpetuity — or securing wildlife movement data comes down to individual relationships between scientists, conservationists and land owners. Yet, many people working in conservation have expressed anxieties that Trump’s attacks on Canadian sovereignty and increased concern about the perceived risks of crossing the border are stymying those critical connections. 

“We saw the biggest impact at our biannual science symposium,” Jessica Lax, the executive director of the Algonquin to Adirondacks Collaborative, said in an interview. The group aims to protect corridors for wildlife movement between the two eastern U.S. and Canadian parks, similar to Yellowstone to Yukon’s efforts to the west. The group hosts a conference every other year, alternating between nations. 

In 2025, the collaborative held its conference in upstate New York. Many Canadians couldn’t or wouldn’t attend — out of the 80 people in attendance, Lax said, only 10 to 15 were Canadian, less than half the expected representation. The event is just as much about sharing research and management strategies across the border as it is about building face-to-face connections with others in this line of work, Lax said.

She worries that because a smaller group of Canadians attended this year, some of those foundational connections were not made. “It’s a subtle thing that now runs through a lot of the work that will make things a little bit harder, because those relationships weren’t strengthened.”

Hilty cites Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta and Glacier National Park in Montana, which together form the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, as an example of the importance of maintaining relationships. There, every year, Canadian and American members of the global organization Rotary International shake hands and recite the “peace pledge.” 

“May the long-standing peace between our nations stimulate other peoples to follow this example.”

Hilty calls this type of effort “positive peace.”

“Positive peace is an active intent to work together,” she explained, one that extends across borders and barriers.

She sees Yellowstone to Yukon’s work in this light. The organization is technically two non-profits, one Canadian and one American, working in concert. That process demands constant interaction and proactive co-operation between two countries — not just internally, among board members and staff, but also with the community groups and landowners in the Yellowstone to Yukon region, Hilty says. 

“I think movements like [Yellowstone to Yukon], and these transboundary efforts are not just hugely important just for nature, but they are also really important for society,” Hilty said. “How do we lean in and maintain and build relationships during this time when governments are having all this tension? How do we keep it at the community level?”

Local governments, international movement

For Yellowstone to Yukon, keeping things at the community level — through connections with tribal governments and private landowners — has made progress despite the political climate. Nowhere has that been more apparent than their work with the Blackfoot Confederacy to bring free-ranging bison back to the West, through a project called the Iinnii Initiative. 

“There’s a lot around this idea of sharing bison and erasing this artificial line and restoring a free-ranging, or a semi-free-ranging, herd,” Hilty said.

Guardians in the Blackfeet Buffalo Program now tend to the small population of iinnii. The larger aim is to link tribal and public lands in a transborder corridor, where the bison can range freely — not as cattle, as most of the bison that do live on the landscape are categorized today — and restore balance to the grassland ecosystem that relies on their presence.

For now, Yellowstone to Yukon is supporting the ambitions of the Blackfoot Confederacy by focusing on granular details, like working on a state level to broaden the legal designation of bison beyond the narrow classification of livestock.

In the east, the Algonquin to Adirondacks Collaborative has also focused on the “nitty gritty,” in Lax’s words. Recently, the group’s focus has turned to the planned expansion of Ontario’s Highway 401, Canada’s busiest highway. They are pushing for the expansion to include the construction of wildlife crossings along the highway.

The Frontenac Arch and Thousand Island region, where the highway expansion falls, has become more and more important as a conservation pathway, Lax explained. As ice in the St. Lawrence River melts, wildlife have been funnelled into a pinch point for passage as they move from north to south. The highway, Lax explained, is a huge source of wildlife mortality in this increasingly delicate region. Though she sees the environmental harm an expansion can have, smart crossings, she suspects, could actually reduce the impact the highway currently has on wildlife trying to migrate across the corridor. Though the highway sits firmly on the Canadian side of the Algonquin to Adirondacks corridor, Lax said she has received an outpouring of interest and help from American partners. “This region influences the ecosystems on the U.S. side pretty significantly,” she said.

Wildlife cover a lot of ground, ‘much bigger geopolitical scale’

Though working on a smaller scale has proven crucial for achieving habitat protection, for widely migrating wildlife to truly benefit, conservationists say, it’s essential to link those efforts together on a broad, transnational scale. Few are more familiar with this than bird biologists. 

“Focusing on one country, one state, one political jurisdiction is clearly not dealing with the biodiversity crisis. We have to be thinking at a much bigger geographic scale, which means you’re looking at a much bigger geopolitical scale,” Jeff Wells, the National Audubon Society’s vice-president of boreal conservation, told The Narwhal.

Take the red knot: a small, tawny shorebird that breeds in the Arctic but spends its summers in South America. Delaware Bay, an estuary between Delaware and New Jersey, is a crucial halfway point on the birds’ journey, where they can stop to fuel up on horseshoe crab eggs. As interest in harvesting the horseshoe crabs for pharmaceutical use and bait has grown, so too has a fervent movement to protect the crabs, beach habitat and birds in Delaware Bay.

But none of that matters, Wells said, if the breeding grounds in Hudson Bay and the wintering grounds in South America are not equally protected. Audubon is now working with nine Ontario First Nations to build out a marine protected area in Hudson Bay.

Navigating the need for data and funding, without certainty of either

Data is key to identifying areas for protection, but cuts to U.S. research funding may have jeopardized its collection, and many government databases have simply been wiped.

Hilty particularly fears the loss of movement data collected by the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee, which includes the National Park Service, U.S. Geological Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service among its members.. For now, it remains accessible on the team’s website.

When it comes to grizzly bears, data that illustrates movement patterns is crucial in helping get the population of Yellowstone grizzlies connected with the genetic diversity of a larger Canadian population, Hilty explained. It allows Yellowstone to Yukon to identify priority habitat and work with ranchers and communities to ensure they are protected from development.

Losing it, she said, would mean losing access to “one of the biggest, longest-term large carnivore data sets in the world,” she said. 

She underscored that her team and other conservationists outside the organization are still unpacking the long-term impacts of not being able to use the full scope of information and data needed for these projects.

To the east, Algonquin to Adirondacks is already feeling the impact of cuts: this spring, Lax says, a National Park Service grant that would have gone towards completing a mapping project was frozen unexpectedly. The organization’s bi-national status allowed it to secure funding from Parks Canada to cover the gaps.

The work of re-orienting to the current political climate and cross-border tensions will take time, conservationists say, but so does the work of true connectivity. The timelines for a landscape and a species extend much further than the flashpoint-anxiety of any one presidential administration. 

“Any opportunities people have for collaboration, they should see it as even more important and meaningful than ever,” Wells said. “The work will go on. It’s essential to human life. So it doesn’t even make sense not to continue.”

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After 24 days of being forbidden from entering the forest, some Nova Scotians are returning to nature. The province lifted its wildfire-related ban in Halifax and counties farther northeast on Aug. 29, with Premier Tim Houston saying in a news release that conditions were “heading in the right direction in certain parts of the province.” 

Every Atlantic province had some form of fire or burning restriction at different points during the dry summer of 2025, but Nova Scotia invited fresh controversy when it banned all access to the woods provincewide on Aug. 5. The province set its fine for violating the woods ban at $25,000, the same amount it fines those that set illegal fires. According to CBC, more than $1 million in fines has been issued for illegal burning in the last two and a half years. 

New Brunswick followed Nova Scotia’s lead and restricted industrial and recreational activities on Crown land, a ban that was mostly lifted on Aug. 26. 

Nova Scotia’s problems aren’t over. Crews are still battling fires in Long Lake, along the province’s north shore in the Annapolis Valley region. Despite the continued risk and considerable damage — over 1,000 residents were evacuated because of the Long Lake fire and 20 homes were lost — not everyone agrees with the restriction on entering the woods, which remains in place in 11 of the province’s 18 counties. In mid-August, Jeff Evely of Westmount, N.S., recorded himself violating the ban.

“I want to challenge this in court,” Evely says to Department of Natural Resources officers in the video. “And the only way for me to do that is to get the fine. So, I’m not trying to make trouble for you guys, okay? I just want a piece of Tim Houston and I want to be as accommodating and as nice as I can be.”

Evely, a veteran who was a People’s Party of Canada candidate for Sydney-Glace Bay in last spring’s federal election, wasn’t alone. The social media response to the woods ban invoked COVID-inspired debates about safety and government overreach. 

Opinions were just as mixed last weekend in Halifax’s Point Pleasant Park and Shubie Park in Dartmouth, as families, dog-walkers and runners headed back into the woods. Some parkgoers said they were glad to follow the rules to help keep the province safe from fire, while others said at least some public spaces should have stayed open. 

Everyone said they were happy to be back.

Interviews have been condensed and edited for clarity.

Point Pleasant Park — Halifax

James Byers, public servant

What he was doing in the park: walking his dog.

“It gets boring walking the same routes and I like feeling grounded, but I think the ban was a good preventative measure and I think that most people respected it. I had coworkers that lost their cottages and had to evacuate last year with the fires out in the Beechville, Hammonds Plains area.

We did our camping and our summer trips earlier in the season, so it didn’t impact our vacation plans. We had family who went camping and couldn’t light a fire but they still had a good time.”

Chris Webster, student, and Lauren Theriault, film and television costumer

What they were doing in the park: walking their dog.

Theriault: “We’ve had a sad dog. It was really hard because it was too hot during the day to walk her on pavement.”

Webster: “It’s been a long month and a half. I think the worst thing was trying to get the unhoused community in Halifax out of the woods. They have nowhere else to go and they’re already kicking them out of encampments. They go to the woods to get away from the city that they’re being kicked out of and then they’re being kicked out of the woods.”

Abdoulaye Barry, founder, Ten Toes Down run club

What he was doing in the park: leading a run.

“I’m the type of guy that loves the outside, and every member here loves Point Pleasant. We tried running at [a local track called] The Oval but a lot of people didn’t like it that much.

Honestly, Point Pleasant, there’s no better place to run. I think a place like this should always be open to the public, because everyone has reasons why they’re here. For the run club, it’s health benefits, right? Social benefit and psychological growth.

I live downtown in an apartment that has a gym and equipment. So, when it came to physical fitness, I had other [options], but I’m sure other people were affected.”

Jay Gaerlan, digital creator

What he was doing in the park: running with Ten Toes Down.

“This community really started in Point Pleasant Park. To have that taken away was really awful. It feels good to be back. A lot of people relieve stress by being in nature. It felt like something was missing.  

We almost had to evacuate when there was a fire in Bayer’s Lake. My house was like a kilometre away.”

Shubie Park — Dartmouth, N.S.

Jared MacPhee, comic artist

What he was doing in the park: walking his dog.

“I have a very high-maintenance dog and the ban prevented me from going to parks in the area, so he was going stir crazy in my house.

I thought it was reasonable. I understand the precautions. Obviously, I don’t want forest fires. Obviously, post-COVID you never like government lockdowns. A bit of a PTSD situation, but I go along with the rules, even if I don’t like them.

There’s a little trail in the woods that we walk every day. It’s just weird, having a little slice of your neighbourhood you’re not allowed to go into anymore.”

Roberto Guebara, chef

What he was doing in the park: showing a friend from Italy “one of the most beautiful parks we have in the city.”

“Feels great, bringing the kids back to breathing fresh air and enjoying the views, seeing this beautiful thing we have here. I’m not really completely in agreement with the ban but we had to follow the rules and respect the fires that were happening.”

Donna King, anesthesia assistant

What she was doing in the park: walking her dog.

“I think it was a little over the top. I wish they’d have kept those city parks open, because it wasn’t deep in the woods. There’s not many places to go in the city. It’s tough not being able to take [my dog] Dino to water.”

Cheryl Cort, retired, and Kimberlee McTaggart, film and television editor

What they were doing in the park: running with the Heart and Sole Running Club.

Cort: “If it had to be, it had to be. We don’t want fires. That’s what they thought was necessary.”

McTaggart: “I’m glad they left the path along Lake Banook open. I really wish they would have opened the waterfront trail, which is a paved path through a tiny bit of woods that people use as commuters.

I like to bikepack and I was hoping to get one more weekend in August. My usual is out to Dollar Lake. That was the only thing that affected me and I wasn’t that upset about it because we needed to do it.

We have a place in Porter’s Lake and there was a fire nearby, mostly in Lake Echo. It didn’t hit us but it hit Mineville Road and it felt like it was on the way.”

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The world’s longest freshwater beach has long been dubbed Ontario’s summer playground, with 70 per cent of the population living within two hours of its shore. But on a Sunday in late August, the largest group along this 14-kilometre stretch of sand isn’t sunbathers and swimmers, it’s protesters. 

They drove in from Toronto and nearby towns to challenge a new provincial land-use decision that they say threatens to irreversibly harm the summer home of one of Wasaga’s regular visitors: piping plovers, the tiny, lively, endangered bird that has visited this beach every summer since 2007. If you’re lucky, you’ll get to see them bouncing like popcorn across the dunes, like I did in 2022.

Over the past two decades, up to five nests (sometimes way more) have been found annually in the northeastern parts of the beach, amid the sand dunes and shrubbery that have been deemed and treated as protected habitat — meaning they can’t be raked. That protection has been possible because this 142-hectare beach is part of a provincial park managed by Ontario’s Ministry of Environment, specifically Ontario Parks, along with almost 1,214 hectares of dunes and natural land connected to it.

Per its management plan, “the Wasaga Beach Provincial Park is unique in Ontario, possibly in Canada.” It is a provincial park located entirely within an urban area and for that reason, often perceived as “an unwanted monster being forced upon the town,” limiting economic growth and tourism in favour of ecological preservation and access. 

The provincial park’s management plan codifies this tension almost constructively, promising to help manifest “a complete, serviced resort community with extensive park facilities by stages to the year 1990.” So the plan says: “As a park within a community, it should also provide some community-oriented recreational opportunities for the residents of the resort town.” 

Thirty-five years later, Wasaga Beach is Ontario’s most popular provincial park, hosting more than a million visitors annually. But it isn’t the promised resort and recreation community. 

This summer, a maze of construction fences and bulldozers block access to the warm, shallow shore at two of eight consecutive beaches that make up the strip. The yellow and orange barriers hide colourful “Wasaga” signs and a shuttered arcade and restaurant, and a handful of food trucks sit idle in large empty parking lots waiting for the final customers of the season. But beyond all this lie the choppy waters of Georgian Bay, under a fluffy blue sky.

There’s no shortage of sand and water to enjoy. But some say that isn’t enough. 

For years, the town has expressed frustration with the Environment Ministry’s management of the park, citing a lack of facilities, infrastructure and cleaning. Repeatedly, the town has asked the provincial government for control over the beach that defines it, most recently in November 2024. And now, there is a provincial government in power that is listening. 

In May, at the start of the summer, Premier Doug Ford was at Wasaga Beach to give the town $38 million to boost tourism, rebuild the beachfront and revitalize Nancy Island — a historical site in the park where the last and most important naval battle in the War of 1812 was fought. 

“This is spectacular now, and it’s going to be even more spectacular,” Ford said in front of the entire town council and reporters at an empty beach. Then Ford announced the province would transfer parts of the provincially owned and protected beach and waterfront to the town as part of this effort to boost tourism and economic growth, promising the beach “will remain public.”

The news took many by surprise. Over the summer, residents and business owners in the town of Wasaga Beach have become concerned about the lack of transparency and details surrounding the plan. Many tell The Narwhal it all seems sudden, poorly thought out and harmful to the environment that defines their town. They also fear it could set a precedent for parts of other provincial parks to be opened for development.

Adding to the concern is the timing. The Ford government passed Bill 5 shortly before the announcement, legislation that centralizes decision-making with the province, reduces environmental oversight and weakens endangered species protections. The provincial parks legislation is the last law standing to protect plover habitat. Without that in effect in Wasaga Beach, some worry these tiny, endangered birds will be without a summer home to raise their young.

The plan and the precedent

In November 1956, the then-Village of Wasaga Beach (dubbed “your children’s safest playground” at the time) wrote to the province of “a serious problem”: the council couldn’t stop drivers from speeding on the beach beyond the high-water mark because it didn’t control the beach; private landowners did. 

“There was a bit of a Wild West nature to Wasaga back then,” Ted Crysler tells The Narwhal. His family has lived here since the 1930s and he ran to represent the local riding for the provincial Liberals in the election this year. As a boy, Crysler remembers seeing cars and biker gangs drive right to the water’s edge and all along the sandy strip. Thrilling as it was to see, it wasn’t safe, and that’s what the town wanted to rectify.

“The entire area is growing rapidly since it is probably one of the finest beaches in the province,” the town wrote in the 1956 letter. It continued that developing and controlling the area was becoming more challenging, “particularly in view of the fact that the lands are not comprised within the boundaries of the incorporated Village of Wasaga Beach.” The then-council posed a solution: consider the beach as an “area from which an Ontario Provincial Park should be formed.” 

The province agreed and, over the 1960s and 1970s, expropriated land from local residents and businesses to form the 1,844-hectare provincial park that exists today. The park enclosed the local population of 25,000 at the shoreline and now covers a quarter of the town’s total area. 

Andrew McNeill’s family, one of the original settler families in the town, lost a thriving cottage business in 1974 when the park was created. In its place, the province built parking lots so “people from Toronto can come up and enjoy the beach,” McNeill tells The Narwhal. 

“It was a very aggressive and contentious expropriation program,” he says. “We’ve been referring to this as the Joni Mitchell approach, where back then, the province literally came in, tore down paradise and put up a parking lot.”

“It was a colossal mistake,” McNeill adds. “In the process of doing that they really undermined the entire economy of Wasaga Beach. Residents and business owners, to this day, are very upset and angry with what happened.” 

Fast forward more than 50 years and McNeill is now the town’s chief administrative officer, and a part of the push to rectify ownership of the beach. In August 2024, the town passed a unanimous motion to ask the province for a little more than two of eight beaches and surrounding lands to be transferred from Ontario Parks to the town, so they could use it to boost their local economy. 

In the proposal published following Doug Ford’s response this May, the province is offering the town double the amount of beach it requested: four out of eight beaches, spanning from the most eastern tip, just past the mouth of the Nottawasaga River, to 16th Street. 

The Ford government is doing this by amending the Provincial Parks and Conservation Reserves Act, the legislation which created more than 340 parks across Ontario. It mandates the need for legislative approval to transfer more than 50 hectares, or one per cent, of permanently protected parkland, subject to environmental assessments and with ecological well-being in mind. 

The amount of provincial land the town is getting back is negligible, McNeill says: 60 hectares, or three per cent of the entire park. And of that three per cent, the town has plans to “reimagine” only half, most of which is currently paved parking lots that could be transformed under the town’s waterfront master plan, which hasn’t been released yet.

“A lot of the town’s economic objectives could be accomplished without making amendments to the [provincial parks] law,” Adam Ballah, with the Simcoe County Greenbelt Coalition, tells The Narwhal. With the town only planning to develop about 30 hectares of the land it’s given, that portion is under the 50-hectare threshold codified in the law. “The province could do that tomorrow without complications.” 

Instead, it is making changes that could affect other provincial parks. While the amendments to the law haven’t been released in detail, there is concern any changes could make it easier to reduce park sizes in favour of unmitigated development — a stepping stone to something more. 

“The Ford government is being tricky in how they’re dealing with this,” Ballah says. “They’re being underhanded or not forthright. Begs the question of why they’re doing this.” No one from the Environment Ministry or Premier’s office responded to questions from The Narwhal by the time of publication. 

McNeill believes the law change is a means to provide a unique solution for a unique park in the town’s backyard. “We believe this makes sense for us, and in my opinion, it’s not precedent-setting,” he says.

He has a litany of explanations for why the land transfer is beneficial to the town, almost all of which are financial. Ontario Parks promised to create a four-season resort destination, but it hasn’t materialized. Other beaches across the province, and even the country, are managed by local governments because “we’re closer to tourists, to issues like garbage collection, traffic, maintenance,” all traditional municipal services. Visitors come to the provincial beach but don’t really spend a lot of money in the community, leaving the town at an economic disadvantage. Plus, the provincial park took away 25 per cent of its property tax base. 

“We are the world’s longest freshwater beach. We need proper investment here to ensure that the product we’re sharing with all our visitors, including you this weekend, is of a quality worthy of being the world’s longest freshwater beach,” he says. “This is not about anti-environment and anti-plovers and anything anti-green. We are very green-minded.” 

Besides, “the actual beach frontage is a very small sliver,” McNeill says. “We’re not going to touch it.” 

The plovers and the park

Whether you look at a map or physically stare down the stretch of sand, the amount of beach going to the town may be a sliver in shape, but a significant one at that. It is 60 per cent of the world’s longest freshwater beach, and it contains all of the piping plover habitat in Wasaga Beach. 

From April to August, piping plovers migrate across the Great Lakes region in search of beaches to nest on. These tiny, fluffy birds, recognizable only by their orange beaks and legs, seek out wide, undisturbed sand and gravel beaches with dunes and vegetation.

As Ontario’s human population rocketed, development increased and beaches became smaller and neater. Plovers all but disappeared from the province in the 1980s. After a 30-year absence, thanks to conservation efforts in the United States, they miraculously returned in 2007, first to Sauble Beach (now Saugeen Beach) on Lake Huron, and then to Wasaga Beach a year later. Since then, according to Birds Canada, the town’s sandy shores have been home to 59 nests and 87 fledglings, the most out of any other beach frequented by plovers.

The plover population that has been born on this beach makes up nearly 50 per cent of fledglings in Ontario. Many of them have gone on to establish their own nests elsewhere in the Great Lakes region. 

“Wasaga Beach is the most important and most productive nesting site for piping plovers in our province,” Sydney Shepherd, the Ontario piping plover coordinator for Birds Canada, tells The Narwhal. “A change in the way their nesting habitat is managed could impact the Ontario piping plover, but really has a potential to impact the population as a whole.”

Inadvertently, plovers have become a part of Wasaga’s identity as much as the beach itself. The tiny birds and beachgoers have coexisted in the provincial park for 18 years, thanks to a significant conservation effort that began soon after their arrival and was formalized in legislation. 

Plovers are endangered under federal law, which instructs that both the bird and its habitat be protected by Ontario’s Endangered Species Act, and in Wasaga’s case, under the provincial parks legislation. The passage of Bill 5 has effectively nullified the former. The Species Conservation Act that is meant to replace the previous law narrows a bird’s habitat to its nest, and removes protections for areas beyond it where that bird might, for example, find food. That means sand dunes that attract plovers to Wasaga Beach may not be protected against raking.

Currently, plover habitat is successfully maintained by Ontario Parks officials in collaboration with Birds Canada and local volunteers, who fence off each nest and closely monitor it to ward off humans and predators. 

This year was the first in two decades where, despite two pairs of plovers creating nests on Wasaga Beach, no fledglings were born. The town noticed and used it to make the case for local management of the beach. 

In a series of posts on X (formerly Twitter), the Town of Wasaga Beach noted how the land transfer was a move away from “a siloed approach” that “hasn’t worked — not for the province, not for the town, and certainly not for the plovers.”

“Fact: Only 2 #plovers attempted to lay eggs on our 14km shoreline this year, and none — 0 — survived natural predators, which include other protected birds (seagulls and falcons),” the town wrote on the social media platform. 

Many have interpreted this messaging as subtle criticism of Ontario Parks. Since the creation of Wasaga Beach Provincial Park, the government agency and the local government have worked together on building sports grounds, creating educational programs and protecting the beach. Most significantly, Ontario Parks has balanced protecting one of the most endangered birds in North America with the local needs of the busiest beach in the province.

But over the last two years, this relationship has frayed over issues like unsanitary or closed facilities, the state of the beach and the enforcement over certain rules like no dogs on the beach (a rule across provincially protected beaches in the province) and leaving the sand dunes (where the plovers live) unraked. 

The criticism may have been fair, but at its core was an underfunded government agency, Crysler says. He worked at Ontario Parks in the 1980s, stewarding the same spaces that are being transferred to the town today.

“Parks are ecologically focused; they’re not commercially focused,” Crysler says. “You have to be careful because you can’t make a park people-only.” 

Ontario Parks’ priority is the proper maintenance of the beach and the dunes, “which are fragile ecosystems … and constantly changing. They’ve done their best,” he says. “But if the park doesn’t get the money from the province, how are they supposed to do it? They can’t do it.” 

Ontario Parks is mainly self-funded, with user fees, including for parking and camping, covering the majority of its budget. There are no financial documents from the government agency publicly available after the 2018-19 fiscal year, when Ford took office. Crysler says the budget has never been enough for the agency to meet the increasing pressure from a growing population on natural habitats, which humans have been accessing drastically more since the COVID-19 pandemic.

In Wasaga Beach, that revenue pool has taken a significant hit.

Last October, the town went to court to ascertain its ownership over Allenwood, the most eastern part of the beach strip in the provincial park, just past the point where the Nottawasaga River meets Georgian Bay. The town’s argument was simple: in 2012 they purchased the beach property for $240,000. That makes them the rightful owners and managers of the beach, not the Ministry of Environment. In February, an Ontario judge agreed. 

For the past several months, Ontario Parks has been working to transfer the management of Allenwood to the town — and the rest of the 60-hectare land transfer will follow. That means handing over a lot of work, including garbage collection services and beach raking, and the ministry foregoing parking fees at the lots included in this section of the beach.

It also means where the beach is transferred from Ontario Parks to the town, there will be virtually no protection in place for the plovers, the dunes in which they nest and the vegetation on which they rely. The federal government could step in with its own protection but that might take time or might not happen at all.

Worst-case scenario: the plover becomes extirpated, meaning it is driven to extinction in Ontario. Because once a plover stops nesting on a beach, it rarely comes back. 

“We would need the town to step in and put in place their own protections, their own legal bylaws,” Shepherd says. “Without them, protecting them would be entirely voluntary.” It would depend on this council and subsequent councils’ willingness to be environmental stewards for the tiny bird. 

Birds Canada initiated a meeting with the town in July with a solution, Shepherd says: the town should create a strong science-based master plan that all subsequent councils would be beholden to that balances recreation, tourism and the natural environment. 

“All of these things can happen, and they have at Wasaga Beach for many years,” she says.

Ballah has another pitch that was actually first suggested by the town’s economic advisory committee: create an arms-length commission that holds every future council accountable to environmental protection of the beach. 

McNeill insists the beach and the dunes where the plover dwells are not the focus of the town’s objectives.

“To be very clear, our goal is to be an environmental leader here. So we are not going to compromise anything,” McNeill says. “We are going to protect the beaches, the dunes. We’re going to work to ensure that endangered species like piping plovers thrive.” 

But residents who dub themselves “plover lovers” have reason to be concerned. There are few dunes left in Allenwood under the town’s management; almost all of the beach has been raked. The biggest problem is that the town has presented no plan to ease fears that this year might have been the plovers’ last stop at Wasaga Beach. 

The path forward

Long before Wasaga Beach Provincial Park was created, there were buildings separating the sand from the town — restaurants, shops, hotels. There are still some there: a smokehouse, a souvenir shop, a motel. A massive fire in 2007 burned down many that still haven’t been rebuilt, including the abandoned arcade that stands in the middle of the construction. But on this late August weekend, these few establishments are quiet; only the waves of Lake Huron roar in their backyard. 

It’s hard to ignore that most of the ground adjacent to the beach is paved for parking lots, priced from $10 to $50 for the day. 

McNeill recalls a past before the car-centric beach with rose-coloured nostalgia. “We’ve been a tourism community for over 100 years,” he says. At its peak, between the 1940s and 1960s, the town hosted more than five million visitors. It’s less than half that today, he says matter-of-factly. 

Something, he strongly suggests, has to be fixed. 

Longtime residents and business owners don’t disagree. A vibrant waterfront would provide benefits to them all, both social and financial. But many do have a significant caveat to the big sell McNeill keeps making, best stated by Rosalyn Campbell, one of the protesters on the beach this past Sunday: “Provincial parks are sacred and should not be transferred or sold unless absolutely necessary,” she says. “And this doesn’t seem necessary.”

“I understand the need for tourism and economy,” says Taylor Nicole, a 28-year-old resident of nearby Collingwood and founder of Eco Guardians of Ontario, a new group created in response to Bill 5. “I grew up going to all the local haunts in the waterfront that are now gone.” 

But the town had years to rebuild, especially after the 2007 fire, she says. The only two things currently under construction are an elevated road along the most popular beach areas and a housing complex with retail space on the ground floor. The latter has raised concerns the beachfront will become a gated community, forever altering the open and accessible nature of the world’s longest freshwater beach. 

“It just feels like [the town is] trying to gaslight us to say, ‘No no, we’ll take care of it … we’re going to take care of everything,’ ” Nicole says. “They keep saying beach access will remain public, but in what way? Will it be an ecological experience or a money grab?”

The town has yet to specify what it wants to build, and that makes people nervous. “I think the current council has a plan, but they haven’t shared it. Maybe they’ve shared it with Doug Ford. Maybe it makes sense to him, but nobody’s ever put dollars and cents to it,” Sylvia Bray, former deputy mayor of the town, says. “For me, my town’s responsibility is the sewers, the roads, the access to my businesses … The council is elected to manage the town’s finances. This whole thing, to me, is outside their scope.”

Bray and her husband, Mark Winegarden, have lived in Wasaga Beach for 20 years, operating Grandma’s Beach Treats, an ice cream parlour. A lot has changed, Winegarden says: the town was “already struggling because there were now other things to do in Ontario rather than come to Wasaga Beach.” Canada’s Wonderland didn’t exist in the heyday McNeill, and the town in its communications, refer to, he says. Development is good, but not at the cost of “the identity of what Wasaga Beach is.” 

“If you take away five feet of it and then 20 feet of it and then 100 feet of it, a lot of that goes away, and with it go a lot of the main reasons that people call this home,” Winegarden says. “If we do that to Wasaga Beach, it opens it up for that to happen everywhere.”

McNeill rebukes all of these concerns as a major misunderstanding of the town’s intentions. “For some reason, some people are under the misimpression that the beach itself is going to be developed. That’s not the case,” he says. “We have no preconceived notion about what’s going there. We’re going to create a plan.” 

Even if there is no plan, some tenants are apparently known. McNeill says he can “pretty much guarantee” the plan will include parks, public parking and some kind of development. Nothing will be known for certain until the town has selected a team of designers, landscape architects, economists, ecologists, shoreline engineers, bird experts and the local conservation authority. 

“We’re at the early stages of actually starting that planning process, but it’s going to be done right,” he says. “We’re not doing anything new here. All we’re trying to do is fix a situation that’s broken.”

In explaining this to me, McNeill often repeats certain words and phrases. The infrastructure is “broken” and “crumbling.” The town’s approach is “green” and adopts an “eco-sustainable model.” The town has to meet its “tourism potential.” The town can do this in a “balanced” way. But it needs to “rebuild its tax base” and “reset a 50-year broken relationship.” 

“This move also puts us back in control of our own destiny, where we’re not beholden to day-trippers and parking lots,” he says. “We can actually build a complete community that is sustainable, and then tourism can be managed as an auxiliary to that. But it is our primary economy that’s our business, and we need to do it well. And these goals are not mutually exclusive, right?”

They’re not. But there is no guarantee that a small beach town can strike this balance, and there’s no legislation in place to require it. 

Come October, when the provincial legislature is sitting again, there may be more clarity about what exactly is happening. But amid the public uncertainty about the plan for Wasaga Beach, and distrust of plans for Ontario towns and cities before this — the forced urban boundary expansions of Bill 23, the opening and then reversal on the Greenbelt, the farmland expropriations for industrial use and more — there is little trust or faith that the world’s longest freshwater beach will remain Ontario’s beloved summer playground for tourists and plover fledglings alike. 

“At the end of the day, the beach is an environment. The beach and the dunes are ecosystems,” Crysler says. “A municipality is a much weaker level of government that has far fewer levers to protect this kind of environment.” 

“Is the town going to have the resources to do it all? I don’t know. I don’t have the answer,” he says. “That’s what I keep coming back to: I just don’t know. And when you don’t know, you just feel unsettled.” 

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Canadians everywhere are planning where to hike, swim or set up a picnic this long weekend — and top of that list, for many British Columbians, will be the turquoise-blue waters and mountainous views of Joffre Lakes Provincial Park. When the portal to reserve a day pass opens at 7:00 a.m. two days in advance, hundreds of hopeful hikers click frantically as they vie for spots that book up within moments.

Joffre Lakes is just one of many places to see glacial lakes and rivers in the Sea-to-Sky area. But it has status. It’s Instagram-famous. It’s undeniably beautiful. And in recent years, it’s become a site of conflict over the competing priorities of Indigenous Rights, conservation and public access.

The area’s original name is Pipi7íyekw in Ucwalmícwts, the language spoken by the Líl̓wat (Lil’wat) and N’Quatqua nations. The nations were under the impression they’d reached an agreement with B.C. to close the park from Aug. 22 to Oct. 23 this year, to mitigate stress on the ecosystem and allow Líl̓wat and N’Quatqua citizens time to harvest and connect with the land that is otherwise challenging to carry out due to the crowds.

On an average summer Saturday, hikers line the trail like students after the bell rings, foot-to-foot, one behind the other. Líl̓wat and N’Quatqua have been working with B.C. since 2018 to co-manage the park and establish regular closures to let the land recover from the constant trampling of feet. A management plan for the park was identified as a joint priority since annual visits to the park spiked, and more than tripled between 2010 and 2019, impacting safety and visitor experience as well as the First Nations’ rights.

But Líl̓wat and N’Quatqua felt the rug pulled from under them on Aug. 19, when B.C. announced to the public that the park would be open over Labour Day weekend, and the closure would be shortened from two months to one month. The nations say B.C. went ahead without informing them in advance, and in full knowledge the nations opposed a shorter closure.

Last Friday, they held a ceremony on Highway 99 to mark the day they intended the park closure to begin. Members and supporters of the two nations blocked traffic in either direction for roughly two hours to raise awareness of how their partnership with the province, to them, had been betrayed. 

In a joint management strategy signed in 2018, BC Parks and both nations committed to “work collaboratively, in good faith, with respect for one another,” Casey Gonzalez, director of land, resources and infrastructure for Líl̓wat, told The Narwhal.

To Gonzalez, BC Parks announcing new closure dates without the nations’ buy-in means “they are not upholding that end of their commitment.” 

“They need to come back, speak with the nations with an open heart and an open mind and be ready to actually collaborate without this back-minded mentality that they are the ultimate decision-makers of our unceded territories,” she said.

The Narwhal requested an interview with the Minister of Environment and Parks or another spokesperson, but the ministry sent an emailed statement instead. “We acknowledge the nations had requested additional closure dates, beyond what we were prepared to agree to,” it said. “We always want to work collaboratively with First Nations partners.”

The ministry said it had several meetings with the nations, but Líl̓wat and N’Quatqua say those meetings reached no collaborative resolution.

In its announcement of the new closure dates, the ministry said it chose a schedule it believes “balances cultural practices, conservation goals and public access to the park.” 

Líl̓wat citizen and former councillor Linda Dan participated in the Friday ceremony. Afterwards, she sat on the side of the road, watching large semi-trailer trucks pass. “We only need this [closure] for a short window, for our gathering of food,” she said, but still, “we are not heard.”

“Education needs to continue on who we really are and what we stand for,” she added. “We don’t mean to hurt anybody. We come in peace. We’re trying to do reconciliation.”

Keeping Joffre Lakes open was a ‘sticking point’ for some constituents, Líl̓wat director said she was told by B.C.

According to Gonzalez, the nations chose the original closure dates and informed park staff in December, but those staff have since been removed and relocated. In May, Minister of Environment and Parks Tamara Davidson visited Pipi7íyekw, and the nations affirmed their expectation the dates would still be met. She said B.C. told the nations in June it wanted the park opened for Labour Day.

Gonzalez said the nations met with Davidson and staff again on Aug. 18, and said they still expected the initial closure dates they discussed in December 2024 to go ahead. “[Davidson] had eight months for their staff to implement this,” Gonzalez said.

Gonzalez said ministry staff told her at that meeting that people wanted access over Labour Day and it was a “sticking point” for constituents. The next day, B.C. announced publicly the park would remain open for the long weekend and the closure would be one month. Gonzalez said B.C. did not tell the nations its intention to go ahead with its own dates. However, in a statement provided to The Narwhal, the ministry wrote “We communicated our final closure schedule—aligned with last year’s agreement—to the Lil’wat Nation and N’Quatqua before it was made public.”

“Throughout negotiations, our position was clear: we intended to stick to a closure schedule that aligned with the balanced approach agreed to last year. We have a responsibility to support public access to parks while also respecting First Nations cultural practices and conservation goals. Although a final agreement for 2025 was not reached, this year’s closure schedule honoured the approach agreed to for the 2024 season,” the ministry wrote. It added that improving advance notice to park visitors is also a priority.

“The final 68 days of closures are consistent with the 60 agreed-to closure dates from last year, rather than the 103 closure dates requested by the nations,” the ministry of environment said in a previous emailed statement.

It pointed out the nations and B.C. collaboratively brought in the day pass, and reduced it from 1,000 people per day to 500 per day in 2024, which has reduced some of its concerns around over-capacity.

The nations and B.C. agreed to close the park for three weeks earlier this year, from Apr. 25 to May 16. They had picked the fall closure dates to align with when berries and medicines are available and traditionally harvested. Outside of those dates, the park is open to the public.

“The community wants to be in Pipi7íyekw to harvest in the fall season, harvest our medicines and our food for the winter,” Gonzalez said.

Dan said the nations’ members have been confined to reserves, a tiny portion of the territories they took care of and lived off of before colonization. None of this land was given up by agreement or treaty, but they were forcibly constrained to small plots of land anyway — and not often where they would have spent most of their time. If the land was desirable, it was more likely to be taken by the Crown.

“Our ancestors were up every one of these mountains,” Dan said. “The government put us in reserves … They put us here, we barely had anything — and we made something of it.” 

Now, countless cars pass through their Mount Currie reserve on the way to Joffre Lakes.

Most interactions with non-nation members are positive, Líl̓wat director said

Some of the online rhetoric in response to the closures has been volatile, denying the nations’ rights to the area and speculating the nations are blocking access for nefarious or selfish reasons. Such posts have said the nation is forcing closures unilaterally, despite its ongoing negotiations and collaboration with B.C. since 2018. Some posts on Reddit had to be removed by moderators for racist language.

“It’s hard to send a message out to deaf ears,” Amanda Ritchie, a Líl̓wat community member, said.

Dan said these kinds of comments have been “very hurtful.” But in many posts, people also have said they supported the closures, saw the environmental benefit and recognized that First Nations have unceded rights to their lands, protected by Canada’s constitution.

Gonzalez said in her experience “90 per cent” of interactions with non-Indigenous folks about the closure are positive — but that last minority is loud.

At the closure, The Narwhal only heard one report of a driver who yelled and swerved past a car blocking the street. Far more people waited or pulled over to see what was going on, and many honked in support once traffic opened up and they passed by the remaining Líl̓wat and N’Quatqua members lining the highway.

Ritchie said oral stories of Pipi7íyekw tell of people going there to gain strength. Despite this latest setback in negotiations with the province, the nations’ members are looking forward to reconnecting with the land as it rests. 

“We would go up there for harvesting and trapping,” she said. “It’s what sustains us and keeps us healthy.”

Kalentitikwa, also from Líl̓wat, said she will hike Joffre Lakes for the first time during the September closure. “I’m excited to take my baby out there. She’s only two and she loves eating berries fresh off of the land,” she said.

“It’s awesome to see that she’s able to do something that I did when I was her age, in our own backyards, and now we can go up to Joffre with our family and our friends and the rest of the nation, and we can just be St’át’imc on St’át’imc land.”

Updated on August 28, 2025 at 12:35 p.m PT: This story has been updated to include additional statements from the Ministry of Environment and Parks, which were provided to The Narwhal after publication time.

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For us humans, there are plenty of benefits to spending time in nature. It can reduce our stress levels and our risk of chronic disease, boost our creativity and our overall happiness.  

There can be benefits for nature too. The more people who care about the health of all the plants and animals we share this planet with, the easier it may be to protect vulnerable ecosystems from harm. But when too many of us descend on popular parks all at once there can be unintended consequences for wildlife. 

As promised, the federal government is making it a little bit easier to access some of the most awe-inspiring landscapes in the country this summer, fulfilling the pledge Prime Minister Mark Carney made during April’s election campaign. From June 20 to September 2, access to national parks and marine conservation areas administered by Parks Canada will be free as part of the Canada Strong Pass announced Monday in Ottawa. The pass, framed as part of the federal response to the ongoing trade war with the United States, aims to make it a bit more affordable for families to “choose Canada” this summer.

“Canada’s natural landscapes are a pillar of our identity and are vital for our well-being,” Nathalie Provost, the secretary of state for nature, said in a statement announcing the initiative. 

The pass — a $70 million initiative — will also cut camping fees in national parks by 50 per cent, give children aged 17 and under free access to national museums and free travel on VIA Rail. A federal spokesperson said the government will cover the lost revenue from park entry and camping fees.

Conservationists say they support the initiative, but want the government to ensure it protects wildlife and their habitats as well.

“When you add more people, it adds more pressure to these special places,” said Nadine Raynolds, the communities and coexistence program director with the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative.

Yellowstone to Yukon calls for investment in park management, new protected areas to balance recreation and conservation

Raynolds, whose organization is working to protect the connected ecosystems of the Rocky Mountains, commended the federal government for taking steps to reduce the costs that can limit access to national parks. “Parks and protected areas really should be for everyone,” she said, adding that spending time in these areas “can foster a love for nature.”

But that must be balanced with care for nature itself. Too many people can force wildlife to abandon their habitats, she said. They sense “it’s not safe to eat there, it’s not safe to mate there, it’s not safe to sleep there because there are just too many people,” she explained.

Balancing human recreation with the needs of nature can be a particular challenge in popular areas like Banff National Park, which sees more than four million visitors each year.

In its latest park management plan, Banff’s high visitor numbers were highlighted as both “a source of pride” and “one of the park’s greatest challenges.” Protecting sensitive species like grizzly bears, mountain goats, wolves and wolverines depends on managing the impacts of human use, the plan says, noting the park will focus on raising public awareness, minimizing human-wildlife conflict and improving habitat quality.

Alongside improving access to national parks, Raynolds said she hopes the federal government will also invest in better monitoring and management of protected areas. At the same time, she wants to see the government fulfill its international commitments to conserve 30 per cent of lands and waters in Canada by 2030. Establishing more parks and protected areas could help keep visitation levels sustainable by giving people more options, Raynolds suggested.

In the meantime, there are simple steps all of us can take to help limit our impact on sensitive species and ecosystems: stay on the trail, pack out your trash, keep your dog on a leash, give wildlife space and stay out of any closed areas.

“I really hope people enjoy their summer out there and stay respectful and responsible to ensure that nature has its safe place as well,” Raynolds said.

‘Almost no limit to the mental and physical health benefits’ of spending time in nature

Dr. Melissa Lem, president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, called the Canada Strong Pass a “great move.”

“There’s almost no limit to the mental and physical health benefits that you can see when you spend time outdoors in nature,” she said.

Research has found spending time in nature can reduce anxiety and depression, improve blood sugar levels, reduce cholesterol and improve heart disease and immune function, she said.

Lem advocates for spending regular time in nearby nature, like your local park. “But every so often, maybe once a month or once a season, going further afield into an even more biodiverse, nature-rich area can provide an even bigger dose of nature,” she said.

The challenge is “sometimes we can love nature to death,” she cautioned.

“I hope that in addition to people just excitedly heading outside, that they take time to learn and think about what it means to caretake these beautiful spaces that we have,” she said. And “hopefully, when people spend the summer connecting to these beautiful outdoor spaces that sustain our health, they will also be inspired to do something to protect the health of the planet.”

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