Quebec National Assembly member Sylvie D’Amours bears no ill will toward the person who fired a pellet gun at her constituency office windows in October 2024, peppering them with small dents. She wasn’t there when the incident occurred, and she doesn’t think the person responsible meant to harm anyone. 

“It seemed like it was just an act of mischief — a way of saying, ‘I’m shocked and I’m showing you my anger.’ It wasn’t personal,” the elected official for the riding of Mirabel told The Narwhal in French.

D’Amours suspects the incident had something to do with early versions of the province’s new flood maps, which had just been released by the Communauté métropolitaine de Montréal, a regional planning organization for the Greater Montreal Area. The maps were in a preliminary report that announced 15,508 buildings in Greater Montreal — including nearly 20,000 homes, representing close to $10 billion in property value — would now fall within the province’s newly drawn flood zones. Across the province, The Canadian Press reported, as many as 77,000 homes could be included within the new flood zones.

The weeks following lent themselves to her theory of what prompted the pellets. D’Amours, whose riding encompasses multiple suburbs along Montreal’s North Shore, said she began facing a flurry of hostility over the flood maps: threats on social media, angry phone calls, even a confrontation at the grocery store. Many were angry at how the government was going about modernizing the maps and upset at how the maps might affect their home values. The situation was serious enough that she closed her office out of concern for her safety and that of her employees.

What should have been a technical exercise in Quebec quickly became a political flashpoint, one playing out across the country. 

As provinces and municipalities amend decades-old flood maps and strengthen flood preparedness measures in the face of inclement climate change, a vocal minority of homeowners are pushing back. Some argue governments have failed to properly consult local communities and overlooked personal, on-the-ground mitigation measures. Others say their elected officials are focusing too much on penalizing property owners instead of initiatives that would reduce flood risk. But most express concern about their home values and insurance costs: last year, insurance company Desjardins announced it would no longer offer mortgages in Quebec’s high-risk flood zones.

The result has been a country-wide string of reversals and delays in flood-risk planning. On Nov. 17, 2025, the town of Summerside, P.E.I., rejected a bylaw that would have designated more of the city as a floodplain after residents warned it could hurt property values. Last year, Nova Scotia’s government scrapped robust flooding-related legislation that had already secured all-party support following consultations with concerned homeowners. In Calgary, a neighbourhood association argued in November that government-funded infrastructure upgrades, not development restrictions, should be the city’s first line of protection. And as B.C.’s Fraser Valley coped with another atmospheric river in December, dairy farmers, Indigenous leaders and the Insurance Bureau of Canada all criticized the province’s failure to fulfil flood mitigation promises made after similar catastrophic floods in 2021. 

Kate Sherren, director of Dalhousie University’s School for Resource and Environmental Studies, said the task of updating flood maps is technically complicated, given the uncertainties of climate change, as well as politically fraught.

“I’m not an engineer, but I certainly wouldn’t like to have to come up with a really reliable flood-risk map,” she said. “It’s very difficult, but we kind of have to try, right?”

Canada is ‘20 years behind’ on flood planning

Daniel Henstra, co-lead of the University of Waterloo’s Climate Risk Research Group, said flooding remains the dominant climate risk across Canada.

According to Public Safety Canada, 80 per cent of Canadian cities are located on floodplains — including major cities like Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa and Fredericton. In 2020, the federal agency estimated that 1.5 million households, or 10 per cent of all households in Canada, were highly exposed to flooding.

And yet, Henstra said, “We’re probably 20 years behind other countries on this.”

Canada was the last G7 country to introduce residential insurance coverage for overland flooding because existing flood maps were so outdated. It remains the only G7 country without national, publicly available flood maps — a problem the federal government is trying to fix. A 2020 University of Waterloo survey of 2,500 people in Canada living in designated flood-risk areas found only six per cent knew they were at risk.

That lack of experience with flood maps — combined with the lack of action from governments — contributes to homeowners being upset when maps are updated, Henstra said. 

“[Homeowners] are not used to it, and therefore they don’t necessarily trust the process,” Henstra said. “They already have very low awareness of their own flood risk when new maps suddenly appear and declare that their neighborhood is at high risk. It stands to reason that they would worry about their property value when they go to sell their house.” 

He emphasized that flood maps are important to public safety, but also economic stability: when risk is disclosed upfront, he said research shows property values typically dip by two to six per cent, often temporarily. But after a major flood, values can collapse, insurers pull out and governments face pressure to rebuild homes in the same high-risk locations.

“That doesn’t preserve wealth. It just transfers the cost of inaction onto future homeowners and taxpayers,” Henstra said. By contrast, risk disclosure allows buyers, sellers, lenders, realtors and insurers, “to plan appropriately” and invest in protection and resilience at both the property and community level.

Opposition to new flood maps in Quebec cites lack of government education and care

D’Amours thinks many Montreal residents panicked because they assumed the draft maps the Communauté métropolitaine de Montréal published were final and about to be adopted by the Quebec government. In fact, the maps were only preliminary, with final maps expected to be published progressively as they are approved, starting in March 2026.

But Marie-Claude Nolin understood the maps weren’t final. Yet the recently retired education worker from the Montreal suburb of Vaudreuil-Dorion became a co-founder of the advocacy group Regroupement des citoyens riverains du Québec, or the Quebec Shoreline Residents’ Association. The group launched a petition urging the provincial government to pause the rollout of new flood-risk maps until residents better understand how the changes will affect them and what they perceive to be errors are addressed.

Nolin said too many residents have yet to even see the preliminary maps. She said residents have told her they initially dismissed invitations from the municipalities to attend public consultations: “Several people … thought, ‘I live so far from the water, this must be a mistake.’ ”

Fellow organizer Pier-Luc Cauchon, a construction project manager in Île Bizard — just off the coast of the Island of Montreal — said he doesn’t understand the methodology behind the new zones. At a public meeting in 2024, Cauchon said the Communauté métropolitaine de Montréal’s chief engineer had told him the province had added extra “risk coefficients” on top of the usual international standards for flood recurrence, using the worst-case scenario for projected high-water levels. When Cauchon asked for the calculations, none were provided, he said.

Another of Nolin and Cauchon’s objections is that the current system has no specific point of contact for airing concerns, which makes contesting the maps difficult. Cauchon says he’s heard cases of people being able to get modifications after persistent lobbying but “The average citizen who doesn’t have the time can’t get it changed. There’s injustice in that.”

Nolin and Cauchon eventually received a total of 2,395 signatures on their petition. They say they haven’t heard back from the province. 

Both the Communauté métropolitaine and Quebec’s Environment Ministry defended their consultation process in emails to The Narwhal. 

Jennifer Guthrie, a communications consultant for the Communauté métropolitaine, said the additional “risk coefficients” account for “climate-change uncertainty” across all rivers and waterways, as well as the risk of “compromised management of dams and reservoirs” that help mitigate flooding on rivers such as the Ottawa and St. Lawrence. 

Louis Potvin, a spokesperson for Quebec’s Environment Ministry, said the flood mapping is based on internationally recognized scientific principles developed through consultations with academic, municipal, governmental and private-sector experts. Potvin said the methodology was set out in a new provincial guide published in June 2025, which is nearly a year after the Communauté métropolitaine’s initial consultations.

Potvin did not respond to The Narwhal’s questions about why the province has not formally replied to the petition or whether the government plans to engage directly with its signatories. He acknowledged the preliminary maps have raised concerns and said residents can submit questions through an online form that the ministry responds to systematically. He added that a mechanism to request revisions will be clarified once the final maps are officially released.

In the meantime, Nolin says people they know are already being affected. “We’ve had new homeowners say they’ve seen insurance costs double,” she said in French.

This, too, is a problem Canada could have anticipated. A federal promise to offer insurance support in highest-risk flood areas has been languishing for years.

The problem with exemptions

Nolin insists her group’s goal is not to deny the increased flood risks brought on by climate change, but simply to be better consulted on determining who is at risk. 

Alain Bourque, executive director of Ouranos, a climate-focused research consortium that collaborated with the Quebec government on the new flood maps, doesn’t deny governments can stumble in consultations and fail to show empathy for those affected. 

However, he said, exemptions can help set the stage for costly disasters. He highlights as examples the 2017 and 2019 floods in Montreal. Catastrophe Indices and Quantification, a firm that tracks and tallies insured losses from natural disasters, estimated that the Halloween storm that hit Eastern Canada in 2019 caused $189 million in insured damages in Quebec alone. More recently, the firm estimated Hurricane Debby in 2024 caused close to $2.5 billion in insured flooding-related damages in Quebec.

Bourque said impacts were so severe “because [the government] was too relaxed on regulation — you pile up value here, you develop the economy there and then it gets seriously damaged and wiped out. And everyone expects the government to pay the bill at the end of the day.”

And one homeowner’s actions, including attempts to get exempted, inevitably affects neighbours. Take Cauchon’s argument that Montreal’s maps should take into account individual flood-proofing measures — such as elevated foundations — when assigning a risk level. Sherren, from Dalhousie, said a rush to lift single homes could increase flooding risk for next door neighbours that now live at the bottom of a slope.

That’s why in Truro, N.S., she said, development is still allowed in some high-risk areas, but with a key condition: builders can’t truck in new soil to raise homes and must instead use what’s already on the property. The logic is that any ground they raise is offset by a lower area elsewhere on the lot—leaving floodwaters somewhere to go, rather than pushing the risk onto neighbouring properties. 

Neighbourliness is the same reason why Toronto has stopped allowing most homeowners to pave over their yards for parking: if hard surfaces prevent water from soaking into the ground, it diverts to the gutter and eventually a storm drain, which increases flood risks elsewhere.

A vocal minority can delay or prevent public education about true flood risk

Sherren has studied public attitudes toward flood mapping in Nova Scotia. She has found most respondents favour the idea, viewing flood-risk information as useful whether they’re buying or renting a home. But opinions shifted when people were asked to consider potential impact on property values: a minority of respondents argued flood-risk maps should be private and accessible only to the property owner, not the broader public.

“But even a very small minority of unhappy people — particularly if they have money, if they have power — can come in and cause entire mapping programs to be kind of withdrawn, because the political will isn’t strong enough to hold when these people get angry,” she said.

In February 2024, the Conservative government of Nova Scotia announced it was scrapping the Coastal Protection Act, despite it undergoing three rounds of public consultation and passing in 2019 with all-party support.

Documents obtained by CBC through access-to-information laws show that, in the years when the act had stalled, most public submissions to Environment Minister Tim Halman supported the legislation. Only a small number of property owners and real-estate interests warned of lower land values or limited redevelopment. Yet Halman pointed to those concerns when announcing another round of “targeted” consultations. 

Had it taken effect, the act would have “outlined exactly how and where people can build in a way that protects them from rising seas,” CBC reported. Instead, the government released an online mapping tool that shows the “worst-case scenario for coastal properties in the year 2100 based on current sea-level projections,” letting citizens make an “informed decision” about their property.

But Sherren said the tool’s narrow focus on the coastline doesn’t account for storm surges, coastal topography or even the buffering effects of tidal wetlands. It also omits the potential for rain-driven flooding.

She believes the decision to scrap the act blindsided more than a few municipalities, which might have held off developing their own rules, assuming the province’s framework was imminent. “It put them five or 10 years behind,” Sherren said.

Concerns that Quebec’s new flooding regulations will affect home prices have drawn serious political support: two provincial politicians have publicly endorsed Nolin and Cauchon’s petition. A coalition of 26 Quebec mayors have also released an open letter arguing for the need to accommodate homeowners’ concerns. 

“We believe that the government proposal submitted for consultation can be improved by modifications that will minimize the impact on property values and reduce the uncertainty that citizens have to deal with,” the coalition wrote in French. 

The letter did not specify how the province should achieve that balance. The Canadian Climate Institute said the mayors’ statement amounted to “political pressure” to weaken the proposed framework, arguing that updated and accessible flood-risk maps do not significantly affect access to insurance or mortgages.

Eight months after announcing its first preliminary maps, Quebec officials downgraded the number of homes that would fall in the newly-designated flood zones from 77,000 to 35,000. Officials also emphasized no one would be forced to leave their homes under the new management plan. But the rules would bar new construction in the highest-risk areas and prohibit rebuilding if houses in those zones are destroyed by flooding.

Henstra said flood mapping is more effective when framed as “shared problem solving,” rather than something being done to people. Flood risk in Canada, he adds, is also highly concentrated: roughly 10 per cent of homes account for more than 90 per cent of losses. 

“If we know where those areas are, and that is all transparent,” he said, “we can stop spraying money around the country on disaster mitigation and focus our scarce resources.”

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.

Basia Bulat is running on a busy schedule these days. The Montreal-based singer-songwriter’s back from touring her latest album, Basia’s Palace, which she performed across Canada all spring and summer, but her calendar is still full.

While juggling a successful music career is demanding, it’s a different duty that’s been occupying much of Bulat’s time lately: daycare drop-offs and pick-ups. The multi-Juno-nominated autoharpist and Canadian folk-pop darling says she made her seventh album “in all the small hours of the night, when I was going through this period of time that many call matrescence.”

The mother to two young daughters remembers singing some of the album’s first songs while her youngest was just an infant, rocking her to sleep in her arms. “You’re finding yourself and figuring out who you are, while at the same time letting [yourself] escape into a bit of a fantasy world when the reality is changing nappies and waking up every few hours,” she says. “It’s not very magical or mystical, but at the same time, it is actually quite psychedelic.”

This transformational period prompted Bulat to reflect on her own childhood, which informed the songs on the new record. Now, she’s finding renewed inspiration by playing the music she made so quietly “super loud, on all the big stages.”

Originally from Etobicoke, Ont., but based in Montreal for the last decade, Bulat finds joy in watching her backyard garden grow and her daughters explore the teeming life around them one insect and plant at a time.

Here’s what else she had to share about her relationship with the natural world — including her soft spot for a tiny four-legged crooner — when she took our Moose Questionnaire.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. All opinions are the subject’s own.

What’s the most awe-inspiring natural sight you’ve witnessed between the Pacific, Atlantic, 49th parallel and Hudson Bay, i.e. Canada?

That’s very hard, because I’ve been to almost every province and territory, with the exception of Nunavut. But the most breathtaking has probably been the view of the Klondike, and just getting to the Yukon. It’s somewhere I was obsessed with getting to since I was really young. When I finally made it, I made an entire record up there, inspired by that trip, called Heart Of My Own. A lot of the melodies came up there. The beauty, the quiet, the energy, the air — everything.

But I also have to say Prince Edward Island. I’m so in love with the south shore of P.E.I, when the tide goes out and the red sand goes on forever and ever. [The Yukon and P.E.I.] are almost tied now. They are completely different, but I feel like they’re equal loves.

What’s the most awe-inspiring natural sight you’ve witnessed outside of Canada?

There’s so many. We live on this beautiful jewel of a planet. I was lucky to get to go to Australia on a tour in 2019, two times, and the second time I gave myself quite a bit of time to explore Queensland and go to the Great Barrier Reef. That was probably one of the most breathtaking experiences of my life.

Think of three iconic Canadian animals. Choose one each to kiss, marry and kill

I don’t want to kill anything! But I’ll kiss a moose, because there’s that great Robert Munsch book about the moose kiss. I’ll marry a beaver, because I think they’d be really good at keeping things together and a great partner. And if I had to kill one, just symbolically, let’s say the black fly, because I’ve suffered a lot from them in my medium-long life.

Name a person or group doing something meaningful for the environment that everyone should know about.

This one I really love. It’s just a very special and not super-known cause. It’s a group of people working to protect the western chorus frog. I’m going to give you the name in French: l’équipe de rétablissement de la renaitte faux-grillon du Québec. It’s a very beautiful, super tiny frog, the western chorus frog. It’s got a beautiful song. They’re vulnerable in Quebec right now and there’s so much pressure on their habitat from development, agriculture — from all sides.

It’s easy for people to forget them because they’re really tiny, so not everybody has seen one. They’re our tiniest cohabitants. This group is working hard to educate people and to preserve the habitat we have for them and get out awareness about the chorus frog. They’ve even partnered with the biodome in Montreal, to help move populations that are endangered to a new section. 

I fell in love with the frog myself. I should have said kiss the frog, I guess! 

Outdoor cats: yes or no?

Oh yes. I have an outdoor cat and I found him that way — or he found me. I was staying in a cottage in Saguenay and my cat was a kitten at the time. He found me and basically held on with his tiny claws to the screen door until I took him home. I don’t know if someone left him, but I couldn’t change his nature. He was already quite wild.

Tell us about a time you changed your mind about something, environmental or otherwise.

I change my mind all the time, and I have to, to keep being an artist, so I don’t get stuck in my ways. Every record I’ve ever made has been an exercise in changing my mind.

Tell us about a time you tried to change someone else’s mind about something, environmental or otherwise.

I’ve learned the hard way that nobody wins an argument. This is what’s so hard about climate change, because people in many ways feel their identity is threatened, or they feel judgment. It feels like everybody goes from zero to 100 so quickly.

I usually try to live by “show, not tell,” and try to get a sense of where people are coming from. No one likes to be told. Once you start to see each other and meet people where they’re at, some kind of bridge starts to be built. But it’s challenging, so I just try to lead by example and hope that the people around me follow.

Rocky Mountains or Great Lakes?

Some of these questions are very unfair. But I’m going to say Great Lakes, just because I grew up going to the lakes — Georgian Bay, Lake Superior. I’m a Great Lakes girl.

Researchers at Yale University, the France-based Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society and other institutions have found women tend to be more concerned about climate change than men. Why do you think that is?

It’s heartbreaking that it’s gendered like that. I know the impacts of climate change on women in the Global South are stronger. Maybe I’m being too generalist when I say this — or maybe it’s my perspective as a mother now — but we call her Mother Earth. This is the mother that brought us all life. It could be that connection. I can’t really give an explanation, but it breaks my heart.

If you could dip a toe off Canada’s coastline, which ocean would it be in?

I love the Pacific and I love the Atlantic, but I haven’t been up far enough to dip my toe in the Arctic, so I would dip my toe there — if it would come out still, not in a block of ice.

What’s a beautiful or useful thing you’ve owned for a really long time?

I’m going to say my Martin guitar. Because I’ve written so many songs on it. I think a lot of people would think it’s beautiful, and it just gives me a beautiful feeling.

What’s the farthest north you’ve ever been and what did you do there?

I think the farthest north is Dawson City, or just north of Dawson City. Some friends drove me a little bit farther north, and that’s where I took the album photographs for Heart Of My Own. It was a life-changing trip.

What’s one way you interact with the natural world on a daily basis?

In my garden. I have a little garden, and I try to do something in there every day. Right now, it’s trampled a lot by tiny feet, but we’ve got grapes going, and I have a plum tree. Mostly the garden is feeding the animals, because I can’t get around to harvesting it myself. But the birds and the squirrels are very happy. I’m getting different birds right now, with the grapes I have. I have to figure out what they are — they’re much bigger, and speckled. I haven’t seen them before, in five years of living at this place.

Usually every morning I’m out there, sitting on the back porch with my kiddos and looking for birds. It’s really nice to have even a tiny place. It’s a little bit of heaven.

Who in your life has had the greatest impact on your connection to nature?

Probably my mother and my grandmother. They’re both amazing gardeners. My mom, growing up, really tried to get us up into nature all the time. Camping, going up to an uncle’s cottage whenever she could sneak us in, and just making us go out into the forest. I have so many memories of just wandering around until she would blow this whistle and the dog we had would round up all us kids to come home for supper. 

And my grandmother, I don’t know how she did it, but she had the greenest thumb, so she could just take a branch off of anything and grow it into a tree. There’s a few trees in my mom’s yard now that are maybe 30 feet tall, that started from a stem my grandmother charmed. So I’m hoping some of that passed down to me.

Whose relationship with the natural world would you most like to have an impact on?

My daughters. I’m trying to do that now, all the time. We just spent the summer on Prince Edward Island, and right now we’re really into bugs — understanding that they’re not all scary and that we can learn about them. My daughter is very into snails right now, and hermit crabs and starfish. I’m getting amazing questions from my four-year-old about, like, groundwater, and where the water comes from. And why we don’t just throw things away, and why we have to do all these things like recycling and composting. With all the questions, it’s like, oh yeah, here’s my chance to let it set in early.

Yes, you have to choose: smoked salmon or maple syrup?

That’s easy. Maple syrup — on everything.

Would you rather be invited to Victoria and David Beckham’s Muskoka cottage, or Harry and Meghan Sussex’s B.C. escape?

I want to visit Raffi on Salt Spring Island. He’s always posting his beautiful views and I would love to go visit him in B.C.

Camping: yes or no?

Oh yeah, absolutely. I’m not a great portage-multiday-trekking person, or someone who’s super skilled in terms of survival skills, but I love camping, and hopefully I’ve still got time to work my way up to that level.

Enjoying the Moose Questionnaire? Read more from the series here.

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.

Le biologiste Pierre Dumont a vécu à Montréal et travaillé dans les eaux autour de l’île pour la majeure partie de sa carrière, et pourtant, le fleuve Saint-Laurent reste encore plein de mystères pour lui. Il se spécialise en faune marine des basses terres du Saint-Laurent, ce qui inclut le chevalier cuivré, un poisson en péril qui n’existe qu’au Québec.

Ses frayères sont les eaux au sud du barrage Saint-Ours, qu’il rejoint grâce à une route commençant à l’embouchure du Saint-Laurent, continuant vers le sud pour retrouver la rivière Richelieu, puis empruntant une passe migratoire pour poissons (une structure composée de bassins en escaliers qui permet au poisson de contourner le barrage) construite en 2001.

« On ne sait pas s’il prend cette route à chaque année ou au deux ans. Mais, donc, j’ai 10 ou 12 ans, je descends le fleuve et j’arrive à Sorel. Qu’est-ce qui me dit de faire ça ? Je ne le sais pas. J’aimerais être poisson des fois pour le deviner », a dit Dumont. Alain Branchaud, un autre biologiste, décrit le chevalier cuivré comme un Québécois typique, oscillant entre les fêtes nationales. « Il hésite entre le 24 juin et le 1er juillet pour aller se reproduire … Si c’est un peu plus chaud, il va se reproduire plus à la Saint-Jean. Si l’eau est un peu plus froide, ça va être plus vers la fête du Canada », dit Branchaud, directeur général de SNAP Québec, la section provinciale de la Société pour la Nature et les Parcs du Canada.

Après la frai, les chevaliers cuivrés peuvent rester dans la rivière Richelieu ou retourner vers le Saint-Laurent où les herbiers sont une source d’alimentation. Ce poisson unique est équipé de molaires qui peuvent briser les coquilles des mollusques desquels il s’alimente dans les herbiers sous-marins situés dans les zones avec des courants doux.

Ce garde-manger, et avec lui les habitats d’autres espèces menacées, telles que la rainette faux-grillon de l’Ouest, seraient endommagés par l’expansion proposée du Port de Montréal à Contrecoeur, une ville juste en dessous des 10,000 habitants, environ 40 kilomètres en aval de la métropole. Pendant des années, si ce n’est des décennies, l’Administration portuaire de Montréal a poussé un plan afin d’accroître leur capacité de 60 pourcent. Cette proposition a reçu un grand coup de pouce lorsque le 11 septembre, le premier ministre Mark Carney a annoncé que l’expansion du port pourrait être l’un des cinq projets d’infrastructure dont la mise en place serait accélérée grâce au Bureau des grands projets créée en juin, moment où le gouvernement a passé la Loi visant à bâtir le Canada à travers le projet de loi C-5. Cette recommandation positionnerait le projet comme étant d’intérêt national, promettant ainsi un examen fédéral dans les deux ans et tous les enjeux et conditions environnementales n’entrant en compte qu’après le feu vert.

Les travaux préparatoires dans la nouvelle zone terrestre du port sont censés commencer ce mois-ci, tandis que l’administration portuaire attend le permis de Pêche et Océans Canada pour débuter les travaux en zone aquatique. L’administration a reçu la nouvelle que la demande a été complétée le 28 août et devrait recevoir une réponse d’ici le 28 novembre.

La même journée où Carney dévoilait sa liste de grands projets, le Centre Québécois du Droit de l’Environnement a décidé de poursuivre le gouvernement fédéral en justice afin de remettre en question le bien-fondé de la loi C-5, déclarant que la législation donne au gouvernement des pouvoirs excessifs qui portent atteinte à la démocratie et à la protection de l’environnement. Selon Branchaud, si le permis de Pêche et Océans Canada est donné, SNAP Québec pense également poursuivre en justice le gouvernement fédéral pour avoir enfreint la Loi sur les espèces en péril, puisque le projet empiéterait sur l’habitat essentiel du chevalier cuivré. Le poisson a été inclus dans la Loi sur les espèces menacées du Québec en 1999, et a également été inscrit comme à risque sous la Loi sur les espèces en péril au niveau fédéral en 2007. En 2022, un rapport de Pêche et Océans Canada a montré qu’un rétablissement était possible grâce à un programme de frayage artificiel — bien qu’il soit dépendant du fait d’éviter ou réduire les menaces à ses habitats.

Pour sa part, l’administration portuaire a déclaré que, pour le moment, vu qu’elle est en attente du permis de Pêche et Océans, il n’y a pas d’intention d’utiliser la Loi visant à bâtir le Canada pour contourner la loi environnementale. « Il n’y a pas de plan B, il n’y a qu’un plan A qui est de respecter le processus et la loi», un représentant de l’Administration portuaire de Montréal a dit lors d’une conférence de presse le 1er octobre.

L’expansion de Contrecoeur permettrait l’entrée et sortie additionnelle de ce qui serait plus d’un million de conteneurs maritimes de taille standard, par an. C’est une affaire dont le coût s’estime à $2.3 billions qui proviendront en partie du gouvernement fédéral et provincial, leurs parts respectives étant de $150 millions et $130 millions (le reste du financement n’a pas de source claire attribuée).Cependant, des groupes environnementaux comme SNAP tout comme des experts en affaires questionnent le besoin même de l’expansion, vu que les quais bondés de la fin de la pandémie sont maintenant de l’histoire ancienne et le nombre d’importations continue de baisser. En 2024, 4.8 pourcent de conteneurs en moins que l’année précédente étaient gérés dans le Port de Montréal, le plus grand dans l’est du Canada. Un des arguments de la part du premier ministre québécois François Legault et d’autres défenseurs est que la capacité accrue est nécessaire pour diversifier les marchés parmi les perturbations commerciales avec les États-Unis.

Le chevalier cuivré a vu son habitat être transformé par les humains pendant des siècles et ne tient qu’à un fil

Un scientifique et pêcheur de Montréal fut le premier à mettre l’attention du gouvernement fédéral sur le chevalier cuivré en 1942. Bien avant ça, le poisson était déjà important pour les communautés autochtones de la région. « Depuis les années 1950 la limite de la communauté vis-à-vis des impacts cumulatifs sur les droits de pêche autochtones dans le fleuve Saint-Laurent a été dépassée. Plusieurs de ces impacts et ceux d’autres projets qui seront certainement liés au projet à Contrecoeur iront s’ajouter à l’impact existant sur la qualité de l’eau, les milieux humides, les poissons et leurs habitats », a déclaré le Conseil Mohawk de Kahnawà:ke dans une lettre à propos de la proposition d’expansion du port adressée à l’agence gouvernementale s’occupant des évaluations environnementales en 2019.

La lettre disait que le Kaniatarowanenne, ou le fleuve Saint-Laurent, est important pour les Mohawks depuis la nuit des temps. Le chevalier cuivré n’est qu’un des aliments que la rivière offre, nous dit la lettre, de même que la sauvagine, l’anguille, l’esturgeon, le doré jaune et les moules. Des siècles de dégradation environnementale et de développement ont pollué le Saint-Laurent et ses tributaires, dit-elle encore, rendant la pêche et la récolte dangereuses et enfreignant les droits constitutionnels des Mohawks, résidents de Kahnawà:ke — juste au sud de Montréal — inclus.

Aucune des trois Premières Nations qui furent consultées sur la proposition a accepté d’être interviewée par The Narwhal, mais dans sa lettre, le conseil a souligné que les dégâts de dragage aux herbiers qui servent d’alimentation au chevalier cuivré ne sont qu’une parmi de nombreuses inquiétudes soulevées par Kahnawà:ke à propos du projet. En juin, le grand chef de Kahnawà:ke Cody Diabo est allé à Ottawa pour protester contre la loi C-5, et a dit à l’APTN que Carney a refusé sa demande pour une rencontre.

Les scientifiques expliquent que la baisse du nombre de chevaliers cuivrés est sûrement dû à une confluence de facteurs : l’agriculture qui répand des pesticides et des herbicides dans les eaux, des activités sportives en plus grand nombre dans les espaces de reproduction ainsi que le développement. Les préparatifs de Montréal pour l’exposition universelle Expo 67 ont aussi radicalement modifié le paysage, comprennant des excavations, des remblayages et l’utilisation du DDT, un pesticide qui depuis a été banni au Canada. Des fouilles archéologiques ont découvert des restes de chevalier cuivré dans des sites de préparation alimentaire autochtones et à une auberge du Vieux Montréal, ajoutant la pêche aux possibles facteurs de stress.

Branchaud voit cette liste comme une suite de coups individuels qui ont été reçus : un coup vous mettrait en colère, puis un deuxième vous déstabiliserait et un troisième pourrait vous mettre KO. « Le chevalier cuivré, on est rendu à 123 coups de bâton sur cette population, on ne peut pas se permettre d’en donner un autre », a-t-il dit.

En 2021, Pêche et Océans Canada a donné à l’Administration portuaire de Montréal une liste de 330 conditions pour que l’expansion soit approuvée. Parmi celles-ci, l’administration portuaire doit compenser pour les herbiers détruits par le projet, un superficie que l’administration planifie doubler. Le travail de dragage qui fera des dommages à l’habitat essentiel du chevalier cuivré est censé commencer en 2027, même si l’Administration portuaire affirme que l’établissement fructueux d’herbiers compensatoires à l’Île aux Boeufs, soit 25 kilomètres en amont de la rivière, viendra en priorité.

« On pourra développer, durant un an et demi à deux ans, tous les travaux compensatoires pour rattacher le chevalier cuivré aux nouveaux herbiers. … Il y a deux choses qu’on regarde. C’est sa performance et sa propagation », a dit Paul Bird, le directeur commercial de l’Administration portuaire lors d’une conférence de presse en début octobre.

Dans un rapport d’avis scientifique de 2021, publié par SNAP Québec, quatre scientifiques se sont opposés à l’expansion proposée à Contrecoeur par peur qu’elle mène à l’extinction du chevalier cuivré. Ils disent que les conséquences néfastes du projet sont sous-estimées et les bénéfices tirés des mesures de compensation comme au mieux hypothétiques. La valeur du remplacement des habitats de poisson est questionnée ailleurs au Canada également : en Colombie Britannique, des scientifiques estiment qu’un manque d’entretien fait entrave au succès.

La construction et le dragage du Saint-Laurent feraient aussi une sédimentation et perturberait les contaminants enfouis dans les profondeurs, y compris des composés de butylétain — des perturbateurs endocriniens qui pourraient porter atteinte au cycle reproductif déjà compliqué du poisson. Il n’y a que quelques centaines de spécimens connus de l’espèce de chevalier unique à cette partie très occupée du Saint-Laurent et quelques-uns de ses tributaires, des eaux pour lesquelles Branchaud est en première ligne de défense. En 1998, il a fait partie d’un effort concluant pour changer le nom du poisson de suceur cuivré à chevalier cuivré — une refonte qui a connu son succès grâce à une attention médiatique accrue, ou encore des campagnes de levées de fonds, telles que le lancement d’une bière appelée Rescousse avec le poisson sur son étiquette.

Branchaud croît que l’expansion du port arrive à un moment où le chevalier cuivré est déjà aux soins intensifs. Il voit la proposition de restituer une partie de l’habitat essentiel comme étant tellement grande qu’elle pourrait finir par nuire à d’autres espèces sans réellement apporter une contribution de taille à la protection du poisson menacé.  Lors de la conférence de presse, un représentant de l’Administration portuaire de Montréal a déclaré : « On vise à intervenir sur 0.9 hectares, l’équivalent d’un terrain de soccer d’herbier. L’habitat complet du chevalier cuivré, il fait plusieurs milliers d’hectares ».

Branchaud est en désaccord. « Imagine que l’habitat du chevalier cuivré est une personne. Les différentes parties de l’habitat essentiel seraient le cœur et le cerveau. Est-ce que tu accepterais de te faire enlever un petit bout de cœur ? Et ne sois pas inquiet, nous allons t’en greffer un autre, disons dans le dos », a-t-il dit … « [Le représentant] n’est pas scientifique et ne comprend pas ces concepts ».

Les habitants de Contrecoeur ont d’autres inquiétudes vis-à-vis l’expansion du port, ayant créé le groupe et site web de Vigie Citoyenne Port de Contrecoeur/Montérégie. Leurs soucis par rapport à leur qualité de vie comprennent environ 1,200 camions lourds qui passeraient à travers la ville quotidiennement, ainsi que la perte de 20,000 arbres et 675 mètres de littoral.

Le gouvernement municipal a affirmé sa volonté de voir le projet aboutir, citant le gain économique.  « Cependant, le plus important à cette étape-ci est que le projet se réalise dans les règles, sans compromettre l’environnement naturel et la qualité de vie des Contrecoeurois. Nous prenons au sérieux notre rôle, et tenons à rassurer les citoyens que la Ville veille au grain », a-t-il dit à The Narwhal dans un courriel.

Au-delà de la protection du poisson endémique, auquel il a déjà dédié une partie considérable de sa carrière, une des inquiétudes principales de Branchaud est que l’accélération de ce projet ainsi que d’autres avec la loi C-5 pourraient esquiver les lois environnementales, même si l’administration portuaire dit que ce n’est pas le cas pour l’instant. Pour le biologiste, ceci irait en contre des valeurs concrétisées en loi à travers la Loi sur les espèces menacées en 2002.

« On est entré avec la nouvelle loi, on s’est donné la possibilité de contourner tout le cadre législatif environnemental du pays, bâti sur plus de 150 ans », a dit Branchaud. « La loi visant à bâtir le Canada pourrait éventuellement devenir la loi ayant détruit le Canada, non seulement au sens propre de détruire des éléments de notre patrimoine naturel mais aussi détruire toute cette démocratie-là qu’on a construite ».

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Biologist Pierre Dumont has lived in Montreal and worked in the waters surrounding the island for most of his career, yet much about the St. Lawrence Seaway is still shrouded in mystery for him. He specializes in marine wildlife in the St. Lawrence Lowlands, including the copper redhorse, an endangered fish that lives only in Quebec.Its spawning grounds are the waters south of the Saint-Ours Dam, which it reaches via a route that starts at the mouth of the St. Lawrence, goes south into the Richelieu River and then through a fish ladder — a structure of step-like pools that helps fish bypass dams — built in 2001.“We don’t know if they take this route every year or every two years, but let’s say I’m [a 10 or 12-year-old copper redhorse], I swim down the fleuve and get to Sorel. What makes me do that? I don’t know. I’d like to be a fish sometimes to figure it out,” Dumont said.Another biologist, Alain Branchaud, describes the copper redhorse as a typical Québécois, wavering between national holidays. “It hesitates between June 24 and July 1 to reproduce. … If it’s warmer, it will spawn on Saint-Jean-Baptiste [Day]. If the water is a bit colder, it will wait until closer to Canada Day,” Branchaud, general manager of SNAP Québec, the province’s chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, said.After spawning, the copper redhorse might hang around the Richelieu River or loop back to the St. Lawrence where grass beds act as food sources. The unique fish is equipped with molars that can break the shells of mollusks it feeds on in underwater beds of grass, located in areas with a gentle current.

This pantry, along with the habitats of other at-risk species such as the western chorus frog, would be damaged by the proposed expansion of the Port of Montreal in Contrecoeur, a town of just under 10,000 about 40 kilometres downriver from the city. For years, if not decades, the Montreal Port Authority has been advancing a plan to increase its capacity by 60 per cent. That proposal got a big boost on Sept. 11, when Prime Minister Mark Carney announced the port expansion could be one of five infrastructure projects fast-tracked via a referral to the Major Projects Office created in June, when the government passed the Building Canada Act through Bill C-5. This referral would position the project in the national interest, promising federal review within two years, with any environmental or other conditions coming only after approval. 

Preliminary work on land for the new port is set to begin this month, as the port authority waits for a Fisheries and Oceans Canada permit to carry out work in the water. The authority received notice that its application was complete on Aug. 28, and should have an answer by Nov. 28. 

The same day Carney unveiled his major project list, the Quebec Environmental Law Centre sued the federal government to challenge the validity of Bill C-5, saying the legislation gives the government excessive powers, which jeopardizes democracy and environmental protection. If the Fisheries and Oceans permit goes through, Branchaud said SNAP Québec also plans to sue the federal government, for violating the Species At Risk Act, since the project infringes on the copper redhorse’s critical habitat. The fish has been included in Quebec’s Loi sur les espèces menacées since 1999, and was listed as endangered under the federal Species At Risk Act in 2007. In 2022, a report from Fisheries and Oceans Canada showed that recovery was possible thanks to efforts including an artificial spawning program — though it hinged on avoiding or mitigating threats to its habitats. 

For its part, the port authority said that, for the time being, given that it is expecting to be granted a Fisheries permit, it doesn’t intend to leverage the Building Canada Act to bypass environmental law. “There is no plan B, there is only a plan A, which is respecting process and the law,” a Montreal Port Authority spokesperson said at a press conference on Oct. 1.

The Contrecoeur expansion would allow for the coming and going of the equivalent of more than one million additional standard-sized shipping containers every year. It’s a $2.3-billion effort to which the federal and provincial governments have committed $150 million and $130 million respectively (sources for the remaining funding are unclear). 

But environmental groups like SNAP and some business experts have questioned the need for the expansion altogether, as overflowing docks seen during the later part of the COVID-19 pandemic are a thing of the past and imports are currently dropping. In 2024, 4.8 per cent fewer containers were handled in the Port of Montreal, the largest in Eastern Canada, than in 2023. The argument from Quebec Premier François Legault and other proponents is that increased capacity is needed to diversify markets amid trade upheaval with the United States. 

Copper redhorse has seen its habitat altered by humans for centuries, and it is hanging on by a thread

A Montreal scientist and fisherman first brought the copper redhorse to the federal government’s attention in 1942. But the fish was important to Indigenous people of the region long before that. “Since the 1950s, the community’s threshold for cumulative impacts to aboriginal fishing rights on the St. Lawrence River has been breached. Many of the impacts likely to flow from the Contrecoeur project will add to existing impacts on water quality, wetlands, fish and fish habitats,” the Mohawk Council of Kahnawà:ke stated in a letter about the port expansion proposal to the federal agency in charge of environmental assessments in 2019. 

The letter said that the Kaniatarowanenne, or St. Lawrence River, has been important to Mohawk “since time immemorial.” Copper redhorse is just one of the foods the river used to provide, the letter said, along with waterfowl, eels, sturgeon, walleye and mussels. Centuries of environmental degradation and development have polluted the St. Lawrence and its tributaries, it said, making fishing and harvesting unsafe and infringing on the constitutional rights of Mohawk people including the residents of Kahnawà:ke, just south of Montreal. 

None of the three First Nations consulted on the proposal agreed to be interviewed by The Narwhal, but in its letter, the council noted dredging damage to the grass beds that copper redhorse feed from was just one of many concerns Kahnawà:ke had about the project. In June, Kahnawà:ke Grand Chief Cody Diabo went to Ottawa to protest C-5, telling APTN Carney declined his request for a meeting. 

Scientists say a confluence of factors likely explain the dwindling numbers of copper redhorse: agriculture that leaks herbicides and pesticides into the water, increased recreational sports in breeding grounds and development. Montreal’s preparations for the Expo 67 world fair saw massive alterations to the landscape, including digging, in-filling and the use of DDT, a pesticide that has since been banned in Canada. Archaeological digs have uncovered remains of the copper redhorse at Indigenous food preparation sites and at an Old Montreal inn, adding fishing to possible stressors. 

Branchaud likens this list to being dealt individual blows: one hit might just make you angry, but a second smack might destabilize you and a third could knock you out. “The copper redhorse has received about 123 blows and we can’t afford to give it another,” he said.  

In 2021, Fisheries and Oceans Canada gave the Montreal Port Authority a list of 330 conditions required for the expansion to move forward. One was that the port authority compensate for grass beds lost to the project, which the authority plans to double in size. Dredging work that will damage critical copper redhorse habitat is set to begin in 2027, though the port authority says the successful establishment of compensatory grass beds at l’Île aux Boeufs, about 25 kilometres upriver, will come first. 

“Over a period of a year and a half to two years, we will be able to develop all the compensatory work to link the copper redhorse to the new grass beds. … We will be keeping an eye on two things: performance and propagation [of the grasses],” Paul Bird, the port authority’s chief commercial officer, said at a press conference in early October. 

In a 2021 SNAP Québec report on the impacts of the project on the copper redhorse, four scientists opposing the proposed Contrecoeur expansion said they feared extinction of the fish. They described the project’s negative effects as underestimated and the benefits of compensatory measures as hypothetical at best. The value of replacement fish habitat is questioned elsewhere in Canada, too: in B.C., scientists found a lack of upkeep hinders success.

Construction and dredging of the St. Lawrence would also create sedimentation and disturb contaminants buried deep, including butyltin compounds — endocrine disruptors that could harm the fish’s already difficult reproduction cycle. There are only a few hundred known individuals of the species of redhorse unique to this busy stretch of the St. Lawrence and a few of its tributaries, which Branchaud has been at the forefront of defending. In 1998, he was part of a successful effort to rename the fish from copper sucker to copper redhorse — a rebrand that paid off in increased media attention and fundraising campaigns, like the launch of a beer called Rescousse, or rescue, with the fish on its label. 

Branchaud sees the port expansion arriving at a time when the copper redhorse is already on life support. He thinks the proposition to relocate part of its critical habitat is so large it could harm other species while not doing much to protect the endangered fish. At the press conference, a Montreal Port Authority spokesperson said, “We plan on taking action on 0.9 hectares of grass beds, equivalent to a soccer field. The copper redhorse’s habitat is many thousands of hectares.”

Branchaud doesn’t agree with that sentiment. “Imagine that the copper redhorse is a person, and parts of its essential habitat are the heart and brain. Would you accept having a small piece of your heart removed? But don’t worry, we’re going to graft another piece to your back,” he said. … “[The spokesperson] is not a scientist and does not understand these concepts.” 

Contrecoeur residents have other concerns about the port expansion, creating the Vigie Citoyenne Port de Contrecoeur/Montérégie group and website. Their quality-of-life worries include the estimated 1,200 heavy trucks that would roll through town on a daily basis, as well as the loss of 20,000 trees and 675 metres of shoreline. 

The municipal government has said it wants the project to work out, citing the economic boost. “However, the most important thing at the moment is for the project to be carried out in compliance with rules, without compromising the natural environment and quality of life of Contrecoeur’s residents. We take our role seriously and want to reassure our citizens that the municipality is vigilant,” it told The Narwhal in an email. 

Along with protecting the endemic fish to which he has devoted a considerable part of his career, top of mind for Branchaud is how the fast-tracking of this project and others through Bill C-5 could circumvent environmental law, even if the port authority says that option isn’t currently on the table. For the biologist, that would go against the values concretized into law in 2002 with the Species At Risk Act. 

“We arrived at this new law that gives us the option to bypass the country’s entire environmental legislative framework that was built over 150 years,” Branchaud said. “The law to build Canada could eventually become the law that destroyed Canada, not only in the literal sense of destroying our natural heritage, but also the democracy we built.”

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A small group of men and women clad in brightly coloured coveralls with hoses in tow wind their way through thigh-high foliage and short (by southern Canadian standards) trees on the outskirts of Kuujjuaq, the largest village in Nunavik, the Inuit homelands in Arctic Quebec.

A logo emblazoned on the sleeve of many of the jumpsuits reads, “Kativik Civil Security,” which is effectively the emergency management arm of the Kativik Regional Government that delivers public services in Nunavik.

The group consists mostly of firefighters, volunteer or otherwise, from communities across the region. They’re here as part of a two-day wildfire first responder course being taught by the Société de protection des forêts contre le feu, otherwise known as SOPFEU, the non-profit organization that serves as the province’s wildfire service.

Though geographically below the Arctic Circle, the Nunavik region has a mix of Arctic and subarctic climate and straddles the treeline, where forest fades to tundra. Training to fight wildland fire in an area surrounded by lakes and covered by green vegetation beaded by droplets of rainwater may seem confusing, perhaps even more so given that this area is covered by snow and ice from November until April or May. But for Larry Shea, a firefighter in Kuujjuaq, it makes total sense.

“We would like to be prepared for all eventualities,” Shea says. A structural firefighter for 25 years, Shea has recently found himself face-to-face with wildfires on the outskirts of Kuujjuaq, including one not far from where he now stands in his bright red overalls. That includes a 2023 wildfire that burned across the Koksoak River from Kuujjuaq, clearly visible to the fewer than 3,000 residents who call it home.

Mitch Vail, a civil security coordinator for the regional government, calls the 2023 fire “a wake-up call,” reinforcing that “These types of events can happen even in the north.” The next year, Vail reached out to SOPFEU to request training.

He wasn’t alone. Quebec’s record-breaking 2023 wildfire season saw 4.5 million hectares burn, an all-time record for the province. The following year, the number of training requests exploded. “I think 2023 opened a lot of people’s minds to the threat of wildfire,” SOPFEU liaison agent Frédéric Lalague says. Though he predominantly works with Indigenous communities across the province, he was on the fire lines in 2023.

“I think we all kind of remember where we were,” says Lalague, of the day fires exploded across the province. “We were geared up to maybe fight, you know, 30 to 40 fires at the same time, or one major fire … we had, I think, close to 150 ignitions in one day.”

In wildfire fighting, logistics “is the name of the game,” Lalague says. In Quebec, SOPFEU responds to major wildfires, but in Nunavik, the logistics of using firefighters from outside the region quickly become complicated.

All 14 communities are fly-in only, which means no ability to transport heavy, trailer-based firefighting equipment. It also means increased travel time for southern-based firefighters to get to the North and raises questions about where those firefighters would sleep, what they would eat and what they would drink when they got there.

Of course, the challenges for getting people and equipment into Nunavik communities also extend to getting people out. In Nunavik, it’s not only fires that can prompt emergency evacuations, but also community-wide issues with water supplies or power, which comes from diesel generators.

“If we’re in the south, you get in your vehicle and you drive to the next community,” Vail says. “It’s not an option here.” While the Kativik Regional Government is developing an evacuation model for communities, Vail says it’s also looking at potentially creating designated sites in or near communities that would be safe from wildfires.

Ultimately, the ideal situation is to avoid all of these complicated scenarios. That’s why SOPFEU is here: the plan is to give each community in Nunavik the training and equipment needed to act as wildfire first responders that could contain and extinguish a fire or, at the very minimum, buy some time until southern reinforcements arrive.

Satellite monitoring doesn’t assess wildfire risk as far north as Nunavik

The Kuujjuaq-based course consists of one day in the classroom and one in the field. Last summer, it was offered to communities located in the treeline: the southern edge of the region, where warmer conditions allow for more vegetation, making the threat of wildfire higher. Each community was given hoses and pumps and trained on how to use them. This year, treeline communities that couldn’t attend were invited back, and an invitation was extended to fire departments above the treeline, too.

Firefighting capability farther north is important, because even tundra is vulnerable to wildfire. The treeless tundra, which is largely characterized by ground-hugging vegetation like mosses, lichens and small plants “can be very volatile,” Vail says. “It can still cause significant damage.”

In August 2023, a tundra fire threatened Bathurst Inlet, Nvt., a seasonal community roughly 320 kilometres east of Kugluktuk, prompting a state of emergency and evacuation order. Had nobody been in Bathurst Inlet to report the fire, there’s a chance it would have consumed the site, which includes a lodge, cabins and a former Hudson’s Bay trading post.

Given the remoteness of areas where tundra fires occur, spotting them at all is a challenge and is often only possible via remote sensing. They’re not a regular occurrence in Canada, but researchers now think they happen more than previously believed.

According to satellite data from NASA and the United States Geological Survey, there were roughly 70 recorded tundra fires in Canada between 1986 and 2022. But last year, researchers with Natural Resources Canada’s Northern Forestry Centre published a reanalysis of that data done with new software, identifying an additional 209 fires during that 36-year time span.

It’s information that helps paint a better-defined picture of what “normal” may have looked like — even as climate change makes wildfires generally less predictable, as well as bigger and hotter. According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2024 was the Arctic’s second-warmest year on record, which means more hot days, but also a medley of other noticeable climate-driven changes.

For Shea, this means seeing bugs, birds and animals — like moose — that he never used to. For Vail, it’s the vegetation: longer growing seasons and unfamiliar plants and trees. “If you look around, you’re probably not going to see a 200-year-old tree, but you would in the south,” he says. “The trees are moving farther north … and it’s happening faster than one might think.”

Satellites are also how SOPFEU detects everything from wildfires to lightning strikes across Quebec, including Nunavik. But its monitoring doesn’t provide any data specifically about fire risk above the 55th parallel — making it impossible for Far North communities to have the types of wildfire information and precaution systems common in the south, like a sign on the side of a highway advising passers-by of local risk level.

Given that neither the treeline nor the threat of wildland fire stops at the 55th parallel, Vail is exploring how that data can be obtained, particularly given how fast conditions can change in the north.

“We have a heat warning coming up,” Vail said in early July. “Three days of significant heat can really dry out the topography and really cause a more serious risk.”

Originally, Vail’s plan was to offer the firefighting course for two years, which he thought would be enough time to ensure each community had a chance to receive it. Now, he believes it’s going to be an annual event, both to ensure enough community members are trained and, hopefully, to continually add to the equipment being made available.

“This is a way for us to be proactive in terms of climate change, because it is going to be posing more of a risk,” Vail says.

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Thirty-four years ago, Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel was thrust into the spotlight when she was chosen as the spokesperson for the Kanienʼkehá:ka (Mohawk) communities of Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke, as they resisted the planned expansion of a golf course on into their sacred lands and burial grounds in southern Quebec and police and military attempted to subdue them by force. 

“You do not call it the Oka Crisis,” Gabriel tells me, of the village near the golf course that media and Canadians generally use to refer to the confrontation. “Oka caused the crisis. It was Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke that were under siege, and were attacked because of the municipality of Oka and the private corporations behind the project.”

In the decades since the 78-day standoff ended, Gabriel has remained a steadfast defender of Indigenous homelands and an advocate for Indigenous Rights and sovereignty, particularly the rights of women. She has spoken at the United Nations and addressed Parliament, and served for more than six years as president of the Quebec Native Women’s Association, drawing connections between the protection of Indigenous lands and the rights, dignity and future of Indigenous nations. 

In a new book, When the Pine Needles Fall, Gabriel and settler historian Sean Carleton chart a course from the events of 1990 to the present, while extending into a generous and expansive vision of the future. The book, which they began writing in 2019, evolved during the pandemic, taking shape as a series of conversations that articulate the urgency and necessity of Indigenous resistance. Centring Gabriel’s own words through dialogue, Carleton writes, was a way to “divest my power and authority as an academic to create space for Ellen’s brilliance … to hold space and amplify Ellen’s voice, while also co-creating through conversation.” 

In a conversation with The Narwhal, Gabriel discussed the intentions behind the book, what’s changed (and what hasn’t) since 1990, and her vision for the future.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

In the book, you discuss the biased and incomplete media coverage during the 1990 crisis in Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke. How can media do a better job of covering acts of Indigenous resistance and Indigenous land rights?

Learn about Canada’s real genocidal history. That’s one of the frustrations that I had, and that many of my community members had about the media, is that sometimes they had no clue. You know, there was the assumption that we didn’t exist anymore, that everything was taken care of, everything was settled, right? Media just took that at face value. But armed resistance is not new to Indigenous Peoples on Turtle Island. It was the way of the land when the colonizers came. 

So the approach by journalists was very naive and racist and ignorant, especially the French media. Overall [the media] is just a propaganda machine, as far as I’m concerned, for Canada and the provinces and the corporations. And we’re deemed to be the radical, ridiculous ones for defending our rights. So they didn’t see our rights as human beings, they didn’t see our rights to self-determination. 

All the commissions and reports that had gone out — from the [Truth and Reconciliation Commission] to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples — there are recommendations for everyone at every level to learn the truth about how Canada was formed. But we see today that this is still not the case. They’re still teaching history the way I learned it in the ’70s: that we’re savages, and all these stupid stereotypes. So I think the media has a responsibility to search for the truth, and to dig deeper.

There have been some very significant victories in the recognition of Indigenous Rights and title, like the legislative recognition of Haida title over Haida Gwaii. But we’re still seeing Indigenous land defenders met with militarized violence in nations like Wet’suwet’en, and the same kind of justifications for that state violence provided by the media. Do you think that things have changed, in terms of how Indigenous struggles for recognition of rights are understood by non-Indigenous people? 

I think we’ve come a little further in the public understanding. But in terms of sovereignty and what that means, or land back and what that means, it’s superficial. And government has not changed. They just repackaged colonization. We’re still at the same point in regards to our land rights, our rights to self-determination, as we were in 1990 — and as we were since Canada’s inception. 

I see that there are more opportunities for Indigenous artists, filmmakers, writers — but how do you change the curriculum in the schools that would teach future lawyers, judges, policemen? To be sensitized to the history of colonization that we’re aware of, that we know and feel on a daily basis? If I look at my community, and it’s lawless, there’s nothing that has changed. We’ve lost more land. I don’t see anything as far as where I’m from — I don’t see any improvement whatsoever. In fact, I see us going backward. The community that was directly affected [by the siege] is still reeling from that trauma.

There’s so much more work to be done in regards to education, in regards to respecting our human rights. There’s a lot of rhetoric about inherent rights, but I don’t hear any politician talking about respect, and that’s a vital part of reconciliation. That’s a vital part of reparations. 

If I respect you, I will respect your personal space. I’ll respect your right to have peace, to live in security. I won’t interfere in that right. I’m not going to push you around. That’s not what Canada does. Canada creates a police force that continues to brutalize our people and laws. There is no justice when we go to court. 

If there was respect for our human rights, we would be getting land back without having to pay for it. We would not have the provinces interfering in the education of our children and youth. And we would have the resources needed to restore all of our pre-contact institutions, and to restore the authority of women in our communities. There’s a long way to go. It’s nice to think that everything has changed, but it really hasn’t.

You write about how the understanding of the crisis focused on the Mohawk men who were at the forefront of the standoff, whose photos appeared in media, while women were marginalized — both in the immediate and long-term narrative. Can you talk about the role of women and how decolonization, as you say in the book, requires restoring that balance?

I heard something really interesting, which is that instead of using the word decolonizing, it’s “Indigenizing”. And I think that really goes to the point of what we’re talking about as Indigenous Peoples, in the restoration of those values and institutions that helped our people survive for centuries. 

I can only speak for Haudenosaunee women — I can’t speak for your nation or other nations — but we have title to land. The clans are passed on through women. The women choose the chiefs. The women had an equal role in the Constitution of Kaianere’kó:wa, the Great Law of Peace. 

That summer, the men looked to the women for decisions. And the women would be the ones who were leading, through the words that were being said, and the support given to the men who were defending the people. But you never really saw that in the media; the focus was on the men, not the women who were negotiating and trying to help people not lose their minds. 

You know, people forget it was two communities that were under siege, denied our basic human rights. [In Kanehsatà:ke, closer to the golf course,] we went without food, water, medicine, that kind of stuff. And in Kahnawá:ke, there were 40 women on Highway 207 blocking Canadian Army tanks from coming in to raid the Longhouse. So the women were out there physically as warriors, but we were not recognized as that. 

It was this whole patriarchal perspective, but actually the women were in charge. 

As I was reading, I was thinking about the connections between extractive resource economies and violence against Indigenous women — which is an epidemic everywhere, but is concentrated in these regions where there are resource-based industries. 

Indigenous women who have been working on this issue for a long time — in 2004, my good friend Beverly Jacobs and Amnesty International wrote Stolen Sisters — have talked about the root cause, which is colonization and the dehumanization of Indigenous women. For us, this is not a woman’s problem. This is a man’s problem. The majority of the violence is by men. And the man camps are no different than when the first explorers came to Turtle Island and wanted to have women for sex, right? We’re seen as a commodity. We’re not actually equal to them as human beings. 

I think the rape of the land is personified in the rape of the women, and the murdered and missing Indigenous women, because we are not valued. The Earth is a commodity only — they don’t respect the land. They dig. They create destruction and devastation, and prevent future generations from enjoying those lands. And one of the things that I think is important to connect is that if there is a healthy environment, then there are healthy people.

The babies inside the mother’s womb, the water that keeps them growing and floating, all those aspects for us as Haudenosaunee — all those things that the women are responsible for — have been attacked by colonial laws and policies. [Mohawk scholar] Dawn Martin-Hill [is working on] a map of the majority of missing and murdered Indigenous women, and they are all near man camps. It goes to the respect of women, which is a value that is not taught to the little boys and young men, and that’s where the change needs to come from. Along with Indigenizing Canada’s laws.

I’ve noticed commitments to Indigenous people being framed as “economic reconciliation,” the idea that prosperity and security will come from getting a cut of resource projects. In the book, you say many Indigenous leaders are challenged by the real urgency in many communities to meet basic needs. How do you think Indigenous nations can resist those short-term economic survival prospects in order to protect their homelands?

Well, colonial-rooted poverty will not be solved by more colonial solutions. On our traditional homelands — which extend far beyond the reserves that we’re allowed to live on — the government’s perspective is always “accommodating concerns” of Indigenous people, and talking about consultations rather than free, prior and informed consent. There are many court decisions that talk about the different levels of consultation. But free, prior and informed consent is much stronger, because you cannot be coerced into accepting, like: well, this will create jobs. That’s a form of coercion. What are the consequences of having this in our communities? 

I think often the band councils are making choices as politicians, and not as Indigenous Peoples — as if their role as an Indigenous person is secondary to their role as a leader in their community. So you have these rich corporations coming in and saying: ‘Oh, you’ll benefit from this.’ But what will it mean for picking our medicines — will that area be gone? What about the biodiversity? What about the long-term consequences? 

We are not creating sustainable economies. Service providers are the majority of our employers. I hear, ‘You’re against every kind of development.’ Well, I’m not against sustainable development. But if we’re looking at the climate crisis, the desertification, the floods that are erasing good agricultural soil … there has to be a better way to get out of this colonial root of poverty, where we’re not accepting these destructive forms of extraction. 

For traditional people — I’m not talking about all of the Mohawk Nation, I’m talking about traditional people — we think about the faces not yet born, and how our decisions today will impact the future, as our Elders did when we were those faces not yet born. We need to come up with a better approach if we’re going to be part of that solution for your children, your grandchildren. I think we’ve lost that. We’re just duplicating what Western society wants us to duplicate. 

What’s the way out of that?

Understanding your own culture. Having a strong sense of identity. And having discussions like, how are we going to get out of this? How are we going to survive? How are our teachings, our identities, our languages, our cultures going to survive? 

And we need to start using our minds for better purposes, other than trying to survive and doing whatever is the priority of the Canadian government to issue grants and financial arrangements.

Looking beyond our Indigenous nations, in the book, you and Sean discuss how important allies are for Indigenous resistance. What would you say to non-Indigenous people who want to be allies? 

Educate yourself. Don’t try to speak on our behalf. Support us. But more important, change the laws of Canada. Indigenize the laws to the First People’s values, those original values that helped us survive colonization. 

I have always believed that we should be assimilating the settlers and not the other way around. In small ways, we’re doing that, and getting them to understand who we are and our perspective.

But as human beings we’re flawed. We can be of the same nation but have different approaches, different beliefs. We’re not a monolithic culture, or a static one. And we have to have our rights respected, which includes our right to self-determination on our lands.

There need to be better discussions. There has to be stuff out there that they can use to Indigenize their institutions. Because reconciliation is not our job. Reconciliation is their job. They have to step up to the plate, and not be afraid to say, ‘You know, the Indian Act is pretty racist. Why are we still using it?’

Learning the genocidal history of Canada, but also looking at Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal: all those countries that came and killed our people. Then they’ll understand why we’re so angry sometimes.

One last question: what is your vision and hope for the future?

I go back to the constitution that I’m a part of [Kaianere’kó:wa]. The main mission of it is peace. And what does that mean? For me, I hope that the people on this beautiful little planet will wake up and see what really matters. Not just here on Turtle Island, but everywhere. I hope the Indigenous youth will start learning their languages and cultures. 

And I hope that we have time to heal. Every day, I see that in people who have been traumatized. You know, the six people who were killed in two weeks by the RCMP — some had mental health problems and probably some, if not all, had residual effects from the Indian residential school system. There’s a whole issue of feeling worthy, right? Our people need that, in order to have this future. But we don’t have time. Because what is coming will be worse than what we’ve seen. 

We need to help those who will survive, the faces not yet born. We need to do that today. To make that road a little bit easier for them. To push back against corporations, against corrupt politicians. We need to change our lives, to change how we consume. We need to learn how to love the Earth again. We need to respect her. 

I just hope that there will be peace — peace, love, compassion, respect. Those are some of the elements that our people believe in. I know it sounds like a really lofty dream, but it’s okay to dream.  That’s what people need to know: you don’t have to feel so alone, if you feel like something isn’t right in this big, capitalistic, colonial world we’re living in.

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This is an excerpt from the new book, When the Pine Needles Fall, published September 24, 2024 by Between the Lines.

Sean Carleton: Many people will recognize you as the Kanien’kehá:ka spokesperson from the summer of 1990 during the Mohawk Crisis, the siege of Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke by the Sureté du Quebec (or SQ, the provincial police) and the Canadian Army. The images of you from that summer are iconic, instantly recognizable by many who remember that conflict. But what was your life like before that summer?

In A Short History of the Blockade, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson states that being on her Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg Homelands taught her about life as being “continual, reciprocal, and reflective.” How did you learn about your relationship to the land, as an Indigenous person, as a Kanien’kehá:ka from Kanehsatà:ke, and what made you want to put your body on the land and your life on the line to defend your Homeland?

Ellen Gabriel: Well, that’s an easy answer: the land is everything to me as a Kanien’kehá:ka person, as an Indigenous person. The land is a teacher. Land is life-giving and life-sustaining, and it’s a privilege to be able to use some of my life’s energy to help protect the earth and ensure it can support the next seven generations. That means everything to me, that is an important part of my life’s purpose.

Growing up on a farm I learned how to love the land, Mother Earth, and appreciate all she has to provide us. I was out on the land daily, learning what is safe to touch and what we should stay away from. As children we’re fearless and love to explore. Laughing and playing on the land, I was always outside enjoying nature. My siblings and I worked on the ranch feeding horses, cleaning stalls, bailing hay, and doing other chores outside. There were no video games when I was growing up, and TV was kind of a special treat at that time. My mother Annie was a skilled gardener and could do anything she set her mind to. During summer vacation, she would send us outside to weed and tend to the garden, as she had learned to do growing up with seven siblings. There was a special connection for me right from the beginning. I would say it’s innate, and inherited somewhat from both sides of my family and Kanien’kehá:ka ancestors.

Land is everything for us as Indigenous Peoples. After my mother passed away, my aunties on my mother’s side became like our second mothers and kept us grounded in our identity. In fact in Kanien’kehá:ka culture, aunties are called “Ista” which means mother, followed by their names. So aunties are important in the raising of children and strengthening the family unit. I’m grateful for having them in my life as they also shaped who I am today.

When I learned that Québécois developers were planning to cut down the Pines — a most sacred part of our community and an integral part of our identity here in Kanehsatà:ke — that motivated me to pay greater attention to what was going on around me. I began to realize I had to join the Onkwehón:we (Indigenous) Peoples’ movement to protect the land, to stand up for the land, if I wanted to continue enjoying it and make sure future generations can too.

I started going to the Longhouse where I learned the songs, dances, ceremonies, and participated in the political discussions. Kanonhsésne (or the Longhouse under the Haudenosaunee) is a form of governance that existed before European Contact. In the 1980s, when I was in my twenties, I wanted to learn more about our history and our ways as Kanien’kehá:ka. Being a part of the Longhouse, and connect- ing with traditional people, became something I identified with and could feel an affiliation or belonging to.

The Longhouse was a very educational place for me and others. It was also where I learned more about how to protect our lands and was taught about what had been done for hundreds of years at that point. I learned more about our history, and about the Pines in particular, as a kind of last vestige of our common lands in the community, a symbol of our freedom. So, it was an easy decision to become part of the movement to protect the Pines and our land from more colonial development.

In terms of relationships to land, I can’t speak for anybody else except myself and my perspective, of course. The Pines remain a very magical and spiritual part of the environment that I live in and grew up in. That connection to land is just something that you feel inside. And to know that it’s being threatened because someone just wants to extend a golf course was frustrating—that’s what was proposed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, you know? What was even more insulting is that the developers were going to dig up our family members, our ancestors in our cemetery, to do it! That was just too much. It was an affront to us as Kanien’kehá:ka. Our community of Kanehsatà:ke has been fighting these kinds of incursions on our lands for three hundred years now. That fight for our survival is in our blood. The land is really important. If you don’t have land, you don’t have anything. And that’s something I was taught early on by my parents and other community members.

My parents were both Kanien’kehá:ka and they spoke Kanien’kéha (the Mohawk language) and so it’s my first language. We spoke Kanien’kéha at home and I was surrounded by first language speakers growing up. I also experienced racism at a very young age, which made me fearful because as a child, racism is scary especially if it’s adults who are carrying it out. I became angry when I learned why it was happening and that certainly shaped my view of the wider world.

I understand the determination of Indigenous Peoples to protect all parts of our identity, and why we may be perceived as fierce. That fierceness to protect ourselves and land is misinterpreted, conveniently mind you, by government and society as being violent. It’s become a stereotype used to influence the public to oppose our human rights. But we’re strong and determined, like the many generations before us, and so the will to protect ourselves and our Homelands is something we have inherited. We know who we are and why protecting our land is so important to us, it’s for our survival’s sake.

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In April 2024, at just 35 years old, Sierra Johnson-Caldwell was hospitalized for a heart attack. It’s the most recent health challenge faced by the Mohawk citizen, who grew up in a community contaminated by industrial waste. Since being discharged, she’s relied on a cane to get around, and her steps are still hesitant and unsteady. But she quips that she would have raced to rescue her little sister Marina Johnson-Zafiris, 26, who was among a group of Mohawk community members arrested for allegedly trespassing on Barnhart Island in unceded Akwesasne territory on May 21. She just couldn’t get there in time. 

Akwesasne is part of the Mohawk Nation, one of the six nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Its residents’ ancestral territory, which includes Barnhart Island, extends across the Canada-U.S. border, and includes parts of Ontario, Quebec and New York state. 

Despite the restrictions of colonial borders, the residents of Akwesasne consider the communities of Kawehno:ke in Ontario, Kana:takon and Tsi Snaihne in Quebec, and Saint Regis Mohawk Indian Territory in New York state one community. And they all face the same challenges, including a legacy of devastating industrial contamination that has poisoned their lands and waters. 

But on Barnhart Island, where the sisters stand today, the breeze is sweet and the water is clear. For the land defenders who were arrested, reclaiming Barnhart Island goes hand-in-hand with protecting what’s left of their territory that is still healthy enough for them to gather medicine, hunt, fish, conduct ceremonies and heal. Johnson-Zafiris was planting tobacco seeds as others cleared a stretch of land to build a dwelling when they were all arrested. 

Kneeling on the bank of the St. Lawrence River in a strawberry-print ribbon skirt in late June, Johnson-Zafiris brushes her hand over the grass and reflects on the injustices that spur her to fight for Mohawk Rights to Barnhart Island. 

“We’ve been taken advantage of over and over again since colonization began,” she declares.

Her sister, Johnson-Caldwell, moves slowly towards the edge of the riverbank. Her posture is stooped, and her gestures are accompanied by a slight tremble. But there’s an unwavering look in her eyes as she pulls out her rattle and sings a warrior song, her voice echoing across the water. Like Johnson-Zafiris, she is determined to continue fighting for her homelands.

“The composition of my body is a reflection of what’s happening to this land. Because [poison] went through all my organs, and now my heart,” Johnson-Caldwell says. She believes her afflictions are linked to the toxic industrial waste that was dumped on her reserve and throughout Akwesasne territory for decades. She prays for her song to reach Mohawk allies living farther downstream. 

For more than 40 years, the ownership of the island has been the subject of a legal dispute between the State of New York and the Akwesasne Mohawks, who say they never surrendered it. The land defenders arrested in May are among a group of Mohawks refusing to accept a proposed US$70-million settlement for the island. While the elected tribal government is willing to accept the long-awaited money, which would cede title of the island to the State of New York, those arrested are unwilling to see all Mohawk claims to Barnhart Island extinguished forever.

For decades, the Mohawk Nation and a New York utility company have both claimed ownership of Barnhart Island

According to the New York state police, Barnhart Island is owned by the New York Power Authority. The eight individuals arrested didn’t have the power authority’s permission to be there on May 21. In its statement after the arrests, the police force said the group was trespassing and intentionally damaging the property. Some of the land defenders are registered with the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe, but the elected tribal government distanced itself from the group’s actions.

The elected government issued a joint press release with the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne, whose 12 elected chiefs represent the districts in Canada, and the Mohawk Nation Council of Chiefs, which serves as the historical government of all Mohawk Nation communities on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border, including Akwesasne. Together, the three governments called the efforts of the Barnhart Island land defenders the “actions of a small group of individuals.”

“We understand the feelings of some tribal members that we own Barnhart Island since it is part of our historic homelands. However, we do not feel this action is productive or helpful and can set back our progress in the land claim settlement, which is nearing a positive resolution and could bring over 14,000 acres of Mohawk homelands to the community,” the statement read. 

The Narwhal reached out to the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe, the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne, St. Lawrence County District Attorney’s Office and the State of New York for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.

New York Power Authority responded to an emailed request, stating, “This matter is pending resolution before a federal magistrate. As such, we cannot comment on this pending litigation.” 

Though they differ on what resolution they’re seeking, Akwesasne citizens contest the idea that the state has ever owned Barnhart Island. Their case was bolstered in 2022, when a U.S. federal judge ruled that the State of New York unlawfully obtained Mohawk land in the 1800s.

Abram Benedict was the grand chief of of the 12-chief Mohawk Council of Akwesasne at the time of the arrests, and is now Regional Chief of the Chiefs of Ontario. He said sympathizes with the land defenders who were arrested.  

“The court should acknowledge that these are territorial lands, that these community members are exercising their right to the land,” he said. He notes Akwesasne’s border-straddling position puts the community in a difficult place when it comes to negotiating land settlements. “They are a lot more hardcore in the U.S. than the Canadian side,” Benedict said. 

He believes that refusing a settlement now could mean losing it forever. 

“We are in a tough spot. I guess there are kind of two options: one is to do nothing, right, but you do also have the risk of the court saying, ‘You know what, this is out of here.’ Will they give us another 40 years? Probably not.”

Benedict doesn’t think Barnhart Island would ever be returned to Akwesasne because of the Moses-Sauders power station. Constructed in the mid-20th century, the station required a dam be built in the St. Lawrence River between Cornwall, Ont. and the island. The abundant power it created is what drew polluting industries to Akwesasne.

“The challenge with respect to Barnhart, there’s physical infrastructure on there that the state wants to protect,” Benedict said. However, he added, the settlement includes access for Akwesasne members to practice traditional activities, albeit with permission and under New York Power Authority supervision. 

As for the pollution, he knows the damage to the reserve is done. 

“It will continue to plague our community for a long time. We have rates of cancer in this area that’s very high, the agriculture of the community was decimated, the fish that we relied on.”

The Kanien’kehá:ka, or Mohawk people, who were arrested believe traditional, hereditary government takes precedence over elected governments recognized by colonial powers. (One arrestee, Isaac White, is a reporter with the weekly Akwesasne newspaper Indian Time and was there as a member of the press, not a protestor. He declined to speak to The Narwhal.) In February 2023, the Kanien’kehá:ka, People of the Longhouse Akwesasne, sent a letter to U.S. President Joe Biden collectively declaring that no “organization, government or corporation has the authority to buy, sell, trade, barter or relinquish lands.” 

Johnson-Zafiris and others arrested say the land claim negotiations conducted by the elected band councils and the State of New York were done without transparency.

A legacy of contamination in Akwesasne

The sun dips below the pine and maple trees that shadow the St. Lawrence River, casting a warm glow across the surface of the water as Johnson-Caldwell strolls barefoot along the shore. Barnhart Island is less than a 30-minute drive from her home on the Saint Regis reservation, but it feels like a different world, far away from the industrialization and pollution that has transformed the rest of her people’s territory. 

“When I’m here, I feel okay,” Johnson-Caldwell says.

“My ears don’t burn; my throat feels better. … We’re upwind. Downwind is only a few miles away. And it’s so fucking poisoned.” 

At age two, Johnson-Caldwell was diagnosed with Kawasaki disease, a rare heart condition that causes inflammation of blood vessels. She’s had two heart attacks, two brain tumours, kidney and liver problems, autoimmune dysfunction and hyperthyroidism. Her elder sister, Jamaica, began treatment for kidney disease in her teens; she has since received two kidney transplants and been diagnosed with lupus. “Everyone has something here,” their mother, Wanda Johnson, says. “Chronic illnesses, autoimmune diseases — everyone.” 

Johnson and her daughters hadn’t even been born yet when toxic chemicals began seeping into Akwesasne territory. In the early 1950s, corporations were drawn to the area after the completion of the St. Lawrence Seaway, a monumental feat championed by then-U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Canadian government that made way for large ships and tankers to sail from the Atlantic Ocean to Minnesota via the Great Lakes. 

The seaway coincided with the opening of the Moses-Saunders Power Dam, on the St. Lawrence River, just a few kilometres from the edge of the reserve. The dam brought a new era of hydroelectric power, and now provides electricity to millions of people in New York state and Ontario. Its construction flooded 486 hectares of Akwesasne reservation lands and 6,070 hectares of traditional land in 1958, and citizens were uprooted without consultation or compensation. 

Abundant electricity led companies like General Motors, Reynolds Metals and Alcoa to set up shop on the St. Lawrence River, along the western portion of the Akwesasne reservation. And many of them spent years discharging harmful chemicals into the local waterways. Until the 1980s, they released volatile organic compounds, phenols and other hazardous substances into the environment. 

The Reynolds plant also discharged high levels of fluoride into the air near Akwesasne’s reserve on Cornwall Island, Ont., from 1959 until 1973. The fluoride killed surrounding pine trees and destroyed a profitable cattle and dairy industry in Akwesasne, after the animals suffered and died from fluoride poisoning. (Reynolds was acquired by Alcoa in 2000. An Alcoa spokesperson told The Narwhal, “Alcoa Corp. formed in 2016 when Alcoa Inc. split into two companies, Alcoa Corp. and Arconic Inc. Alcoa Corp. cannot comment on something that would have involved the predecessor company that was Alcoa Inc.”)

Alcoa and Reynolds Metals built power-hungry aluminum smelters; General Motors established an aluminium casting foundry, where it used the metal to fabricate car parts. All three companies used polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, produced by Monsanto as hydraulic fluids. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has since classified PCBs as likely human carcinogens, and linked to reproductive, hormonal, cognitive and immune system issues. The production of polychlorinated biphenyls was banned in Canada in 1977 and in the United States in 1979 due to concerns about their impacts on human health, but not before seeping into Akwesasne territory for decades. (The Environmental Protection Agency did not respond to requests for comment from The Narwhal.)

All three plants have since been designated as Superfund sites by the Environmental Protection Agency, a program for “cleaning up some of the nation’s most contaminated land.” In the 1980s, the Environmental Protection Agency issued 21 violations against General Motors, fining the company US$507,000 for alleged illegal dumping and storage of polychlorinated biphenyl-contaminated waste on-site and in the river. In 1995, General Motors dredged a section of the river near its discharge pipe: while some of the waste was shipped to hazardous holding facilities, some was kept on site after being “capped and armored” to reduce contamination. Though the plant closed in 2009, the company’s on-site disposal areas still contain PCB-contaminated waste, including a nearly five-hectare former landfill just steps from Akwesasne tribal lands. (The land is now owned by RACER Trust, an entity created in 2011 to clean up former General Motors properties. RACER Trust did not respond to a request for comment from The Narwhal.)

In 2013, Reynolds and Alcoa agreed to pay nearly US$20 million to tribal, state and federal authorities to help remediate the damage. The Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe independently pursued settlements from Monsanto and its corporate successors — including Bayer, which bought the company in 2018 — alleging that polychlorinated biphenyls exposure led to increased risks of cancer and other diseases among tribal members.

In response to emailed questions from The Narwhal, a company spokesperson for Monsanto said, “The terms of the settlement agreement are confidential but it fully resolved the claims alleged in the case and contained no admission of liability or wrongdoing by the company.”

Monsanto also wrote that it never manufactured or disposed of PCBs near the reservation. Regarding the designation of the Alcoa, Reynolds and General Motors sites as Superfund sites, the company wrote, “Monsanto was not identified as a responsible party in connection with those Superfund sites.”

David Carpenter, 87, is a physician and director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University at Albany, in New York state. A professor of public health and environmental health sciences, he first began studying the effects of polychlorinated biphenyls on human health in Akwesasne in the 1980s by tracking tribal members’ fish consumption. 

Over the years, Carpenter witnessed an increasingly wide range of serious harms linked to polychlorinated biphenyls — including heart disease, infertility and diabetes. According to the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne, the rate of diabetes in the community is 30 per cent, more than three times the Canadian prevalence of nine per cent. On the American side of the border, the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe and Health Services reports that diabetes affects 16 per cent of Mohawks living in Akwesasne, compared to eight per cent of the state population. 

“Everybody thinks that diabetes is a function of being obese. I don’t think it is. It’s much more related to [polychlorinated biphenyls] and other environmental exposures than it is to obesity,” Carpenter says, pointing out the high rate of diabetes in Akwesasne affects both the young and the old. 

He was called as an expert witness for the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe when it brought a lawsuit against Bayer over alleged effects of the Monsanto products used by companies like Alcoa, Reynolds and General Motors. The tribe reached a settlement in January 2024, before he could testify. The details of the settlement are private, but such settlements typically include clauses that absolve companies from future liability, which Carpenter finds worrisome since he believes long-term health effects are still being discovered.

“The government, Environmental Protection Agency and the companies have been absolving [themselves of] responsibility and saying, ‘Well, you live in a contaminated area, so deal with it,’ ” he says. “Now we’re finding all of these health effects that weren’t understood before. So, having a clause that says you’re not going to be sued again is just outrageous. I think it’s unethical.”

What’s more, no one knows how long polychlorinated biphenyls take to break down as they contaminate the air, water and soil; they’re often referred to as “forever chemicals.” The U.S. federal government also has a three-year statute of limitations on filing a claim related to cleanup or compensation of hazardous waste. “But the health effects don’t have a statute of limitations,” Carpenter points out.

The contested history of Akwesasne

Akwesasne translates to “the land where the partridge drums.” Its cross-border land base sprawls across 10,667 hectares. Around 23,000 people live on its vibrant reservation lands, which extend across the international and provincial borders, in charming homes with neatly manicured lawns, where nearly every corner hosts a tax-free marijuana dispensary or tribal cigarette shop. Three significant rivers — the St. Lawrence, the Raquette and the Saint Regis — flow through Akwesasne, adding to the complexity of the land and water rights in the area.

The history of Akwesasne territory is intertwined with the colonial geopolitics and industrial advancements that shaped North America. Following the American Revolution, the 1783 Treaty of Paris delineated the boundary between British North America and the United States along the 49th parallel, somewhat north of the 45-degree latitude that marks much of the current Canada-U.S. border east of the Prairies. 

The border established by the Treaty of Paris placed Barnhart Island within British territory. Many Akwesasne inhabitants were displaced from their homelands, even though the Mohawks and other nations in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy had largely supported the British during the American Revolution. 

In 1796, a group allegedly representing Akwesasne, called the Seven Nations of Canada, ceded much of its territory except for a small area near the Saint Regis Village, including Barnhart Island. Douglas M. George-Kanentiio, a Mohawk scholar, argues in his book Iroquois on Fire that this treaty was not binding, writing, “That ‘treaty’ merely extinguished the non-existent land claims of the loose alliance of the Catholic Indian communities along the St Lawrence River, which, in fact, transgressed upon the aboriginal land of the Mohawks.”

But subsequent treaties between 1816 and 1845 further eroded Mohawk land claims, leaving them with approximately 5,666 hectares in New York, 2,988 hectares in Quebec and 830 hectares in Ontario, forming the present-day community.

Today, Akwesasne elected governments in two provinces and one state negotiate with two federal, two provincial and one state government over harvesting rights, consultation and, of course, land claims. And in 1958, it was the elected Akwesasne tribal governments that filed a land claim against the State of New York, arguing the signatories to the Treaty of Paris did not represent them and lacked the authority to cede Akwesasne land. 

Marina Johnson-Zafiris grew up away from here, living in Texas with her father after her parents separated. Her sister and mother would go to Barnhart Island and hope for her return.

“Wild strawberries always remind me of Marina, and they grow here,” Johnson-Caldwell says, adding her sister was born on a Strawberry Moon, the full moon in June. 

Three and a half years ago, Johnson-Zafiris returned to Akwesasne to rebuild her relationships with her family and Mohawk traditions. Her connection to her homeland was profound and immediate. 

“It was so organic. That’s so magical and powerful and spiritual and it shows how strong our connections are to our roots, and to our medicines,” Johnson-Caldwell says, clutching her sister’s hand. 

Since returning, Johnson-Zafiris has started a doctoral degree at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., studying information science with a minor in American Indian and Indigenous studies. She’s also reclaiming her Kanien’kehá:ka language and culture and digging into the history of Akwesasne and its ongoing land claims. Much of it she learned from Kanietakeron (Larry) and Kakweraias (Dana Leigh) Thompson, a couple well-versed in sovereignty who were arrested with her in May. The Thompsons are People of the Longhouse, who follow the traditional and ancient form of Mohawk governance.  

The Mohawk longhouse form of governance involves a consensus decision-making process, Johnson-Zafiris says, which wasn’t taken into consideration by the leaders willing to accept a settlement and cede Akwesasne lands. This puts them out of protocol with ancestral governance, she says. Akwesasne is just a small part of the Mohawk homelands, which span millions of acres. “We have the Dish with One Spoon Treaty, which established that we were not going to alienate title,” she adds, referring to an ancient treaty among the Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous nations to steward the land and its resources in common with one another. “When you get into the intricacies of what is in the settlement documents, it’s the tribal government really trying to impose and state that it has full sovereign jurisdiction over this territory. And push aside all the other government entities that exist here.”

Traditionalists want nothing to do with surrendering their lands, not for any price. 

“This is our territorial homeland. And we’ve always firmly believed that it’s never been extinguished, ceded, quit, claimed — ever,” Johnson-Zafiris says. 

Living with the legacy of contamination on Mohawk territory

In the early 1990s, Wanda Johnson was a single mother of four children and pregnant with her fifth. Three times a week, she drove her elder daughter to Plattsburg, N.Y., for dialysis. Her youngest, Caldwell-Johnson, had just received her Kawasaki diagnosis; her sons suffered from severe eczema. 

Johnson embarked on a desperate search for answers. She thought the illnesses might be linked to the factories that surrounded Akwesasne. “I went to every hospital within [a six-hour drive] for a year. I kept asking and asking to the point where they thought I was crazy, asking them to please just do a heavy metals test [on my kids]. They didn’t really know what I was talking about, or they just dismissed it,” Johnson recalls.

The family was under enormous financial and emotional strain. Johnson brought her concerns to the state and local tribal authorities, but felt dismissed. The nearby Raquette Point Road was so contaminated that drinking water was delivered by the New York Department of Environmental Conservation — but Johnson, whose home was just a mile away, was not eligible for water delivery and couldn’t afford bottled water to drink. Finally, in the summer of 1994, Johnson’s home was condemned due to contamination, and the family lived in a shelter and temporary accommodation for half a year until the tribe built her a new home. 

Larry and Dana Leigh Thompson lived on Raquette Point Road, in Larry’s childhood home. As a kid, Larry swam in nearby Turtle Cove and regularly picked through the trash at the General Motors dump site directly across from the family property, looking for aluminum scraps to sell. He didn’t know it was filled with contaminants. 

“There was a dog that went there (to the dump) and messed around in the wrong area,” Larry, 69, remembers.

“His hair started getting patches and sores. It didn’t dawn on us what the hell was going on. We’d drink out of the stream, and figured it was okay. We were only kids. My parents used to plant our garden just there.”

In 1981, scientists began showing up at the Thompsons’ door, asking to test the drinking water and ponds on their property. One of the scientists suggested that Dana Leigh read Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, and she devoured it, reading it four times over. Her eyes were suddenly opened to the contamination around her. 

“The scientists were looking at my beautiful garden, and they looked at me and they said, ‘Well, you know you’re poisoning your people.’ And I’m like, ‘What?’ They said, ‘This is all poison,’ ” she recalls. Dana Leigh was shocked, and pulled up her garden. After the scientists’ tests confirmed their water and land was contaminated, the Thompsons moved across the reserve and began campaigning for the removal of the dump. The toxic waste in the dump is capped and covered by a layer of topsoil, and considered remediated, but the Thompsons believe it is still leaching poison into the environment, a concern echoed by David Carpenter.

“As a mother, grandmother, it’s my responsibility because we’re doing it for the future,” Dana Leigh says. The tribal council members at the time were hesitant to act on her word, she says, and rather followed the orders of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Larry interjects to add tribal leadership drags their feet when it comes to conducting independent rigorous testing for contaminants due to fears of getting its funding cut by the U.S. government’s environmental body. “They don’t want to find what’s really there,” he says, leaning back in his chair. 

In 2011, he decided to take matters into his own hands. 

One morning, he started up his backhoe and drove it into the site, chaining himself to the steering wheel in case police showed up to try to remove him. He began digging into the topsoil of the mound of contamination. 

“General Motors claimed they had fixed the problem, but it was far from it,” he says. 

“So, I went in with my backhoe and I got enough broken up to where I can turn it around and get the big scoop. I went up this ramp where the railroad cars were, and I dumped this poison in there. And, I said, ‘What’s so hard about that? You know? You can do the same. Get this mound outta here!”

Larry was arrested and held in jail for a few days. He pled guilty to a reduced charge of criminal mischief, and says he has no regrets about taking a stand against the system that had poisoned his lands with willful negligence. He bends forward from his chair and recites a philosophy he lives by. 

“There are three kinds of people in the world: those that make things happen, those that watch things happen and those that wonder what happens. We’re the makers and the doers,” he says. 

“We gotta push because we don’t feel the tribal council or Environmental Protection Agency are doing their job.”

“It was an instinct to simply stand our ground.”

On May 21, the day Johnson-Zafiris was arrested, she was delivering food and supplies to a small group of Mohawk men who were working to clear an area on Barnhart Island for the erection of a hunting shelter, one that community members could use while fishing and gathering. The structure was a symbolic refutation of the settlement agreement, a concrete reminder that the Mohawk do not require permission from colonial governments to practice their inherent rights.

Larry Thompson had travelled to Barnhart Island on the morning of May 21 with a clear intention. He knew the land claim settlement between Akwesasne and the State of New York was coming to a close. 

“I knew I got to do something to stop it or disrupt their negotiating with New York. So, I said, ‘To hell with it, I’m going to go in there.’ ”

The former steelworker hauled his trusty backhoe to the Robert Moses State Park on Barnhart Island and worked to clear a spot just off a main road. He called some friends for help and two of them showed up, one bringing along his 14-year-old nephew. After a few hours, he called Dana Leigh to bring the group some refreshments. 

Meanwhile, park rangers arrived and asked what he was doing. 

“I said, ‘I’m making a slab to put a building here,’ ” he recalls. “And they didn’t say ‘You’re trespassing’; they didn’t say nothing.”

Later that afternoon, Dana Leigh arrived with food and water, accompanied by Johnson-Zafiris and Kimberly Terrance, 41. The three women left, returning in the evening with tents, tables and other supplies. As they returned to the island, Johnson-Zafiris noticed the presence of state troopers, Massena police and security guards, watching the group from a distance. As she planted tobacco seeds, the officers — she estimates there were around 35, all armed — suddenly approached, surrounding her and the others. 

“I was standing there, I’ve never been arrested before and I was like, ‘Holy shit. They could shoot, they could shoot at any moment,’ ”  she recalls. “And thankfully nothing physically violent happened, but it was definitely a weaponization of the authority that they know they can exercise.”

She looked to the Elders and other women, as well as a youth among their group, and became worried for their safety. 

“I was concerned that they would escalate it because at the very front of every trooper’s chest plate was an assault rifle, every single one of them.”

One officer announced that they were trespassing and demanded the group leave immediately. But time stood still, says Johnson-Zafiris, and her convictions about her ancestral territories took hold. 

“It was a decision. If we concede and step off those lands, that’s us admitting that we know that it is the State of New York or [New York Public Authority’s] lands and that we are trespassing. And me personally, I refuse that. I don’t believe in that. I don’t understand that. So, it was like a no brainer. It was an instinct to simply stand our ground.”

All eight people present were arrested, even though White identified himself as a member of the press. They were handcuffed and transported to the Massena County jail and held for several hours. When asked their names, Johnson-Zafiris says, some members of the group gave their onkwehonwe (Mohawk) names, which confused the officers during processing. “They told us we could be charged with impersonation,” she says. 

Larry was brought before a judge just after midnight and charged with second-degree criminal mischief for alleged property damage. Given his past criminal record related to self-determination and sovereignty actions, he could do jail time if convicted. The others face misdemeanour charges.

“When they tried to arraign me, I read them international papers that declare I’m a sovereign. I told them I don’t agree, I object,” to the charges, Larry says. 

“It’s ridiculous and should never have happened,” he continues. “They have no legal authority with an Indian. They’re pushing their laws on us and it’s not legal. They don’t own any land. And we were brought up like that, we know our roots. We don’t agree with the other faction [tribal council] that they’re in negotiations to sell their mother, Mother Earth.” 

Dana Leigh said their interests in Barnhart Island are simple.

“The reason why we went there, it’s our land, number one. Number two, it’s above the poison.”

Akwesasne reserve lands are east of the factories and power infrastructure, Johnson-Zafiris explains, and the contamination has flowed downstream with the St. Lawrence River as it runs east toward the Atlantic Ocean. But the western side of Barnhart Island is pristine, upstream from the contamination.

Johnson-Zafiris first appeared in court on June 25, her 26th birthday. She addressed the judge with her Mohawk name, Taiewennahawi, meaning “we hear her voice coming.” She told the judge the court has no jurisdiction over her as a sovereign Kanien’kehá:ka. About two dozen people, including other Akwesasne land defenders, showed up to support Johnson-Zafiris, the Thompsons and the others.

Johnson-Zafiris refused to enter a plea and did not hire legal representation. Doing so would mean participating in and subjecting herself to a foreign government’s legal process, she says. When she returned to court on Aug. 27, she asked the prosecutor if they could provide the deed to Barnhart Island. They could not.

“Well I brought with me a title to Barnhart,” Johnson-Zafiris recited her words from court to The Narwhal. “But I can’t provide you a copy. It’s the eggs in my ovaries. The way I was taught, the land title is held by the faces yet to come, stewarded and protected by the the clan carrying women of the rotinonshonni,” she said, using a word that refers to the Haudenosaunee people of the the longhouse.

She pointed at all the women in the court room who also hold that title.

Johnson-Zafiris and another arrested land defender, Brent Maracle, were offered a deal that would see their charges dismissed after six months if neither was charged with anything new in the meantime. She neither accepted or denied it, and repeated, “The court can do what it wants. We aren’t criminals for being on our land.”

Being arrested has only strengthened Johnson-Zafiris’s resolve. “It didn’t kill my spirit at all. If anything, I hope the arrest and now in the court situation that’s occurring brings more confidence to our people,” she says, “that they can step into that zone of land defence and into that space of knowing and holding a lot of power, fire, to say this is our land and you have no right to exercise your violent colonial authority over me, over us, over this land.”

The day after her arrest, Johnson-Zafiris went back to Barnhart Island with her mother and sister to lay down tobacco in acknowledgement of the land and water. 

“I just laid near the beach. I asked the Creator to put us on the path that we need to go forth with,” Johnson-Zafiris says. She noticed Johnson-Caldwell walking across the grass, experiencing a rare day without pain. 

“These are the moments that we do it for, because at that beach we have clean clay, we have clean land, and that’s what our kids deserve. That’s what Sierra deserves.”

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This story was updated on June 4, 2025

2023 was a record year for Canadian wildfires. At times, it felt like the whole country was burning. 2024 was better, but still devastating and many Canadians face a new reality: the seemingly never-ending possibility of a summer choked with smoke and flames. 

Wildfires consumed record-breaking chunks of the country in 2023, thanks to a dry, hot spring. Choking smoke, increasingly common in Western Canada during fire season, blanketed more populous eastern cities and led to more coverage and concern for what’s happening when it comes to Canada’s wildfires. 

Hot conditions, lightning, human carelessness and forests left cluttered and itching for rebirth have all contributed to the infernos. 

The 2025 wildfire season has already been devastating for many communities, with both Manitoba and Saskatchewan declaring states of emergency in May on account of wildfires. Increased wildfire activity is a pattern the country is likely to see repeated in the coming decades. Temperatures are expected to rise with climate change. Precipitation is expected to be erratic. Disease and pests are killing or weakening trees and forests are continuously managed for industry, homes and infrastructure, a practice that has made forests more flammable.

Here’s a breakdown of how fires start and why they seem to be getting worse. 

What starts wildfires?

Typically, nearly half of all wildfires in Canada are caused by lightning strikes, but that can vary from region to region and from month to month. 

The B.C. government says the majority of wildfires each year are caused by lightning, while in Alberta, the majority are caused by humans — including from off-road vehicles, campfires, fireworks, ammunition, industrial activity, agriculture, power lines and some arson. Some years it’s not even close. In 2020, 88 per cent of wildfires in Alberta were caused by humans. Between 2017 and 2022, on average 68 per cent of wildfires were human caused in Alberta. 

The National Forest Database shows between 1990 and 2020, 33 per cent of fires in Quebec were caused by lightning, while in Ontario the figure was 50 per cent.

But according to the federal government, fires that start from lightning do the most damage, accounting for 67 per cent of land burned. Lightning-caused fires tend to occur in remote areas and several fires can start at once during a storm. 

All of those flash points, like lightning, require a forest dry enough to burn. 

What caused 2023’s fires?

The great fires that swallowed large swaths of Canada early in 2023 started before lightning found its yearly footing and for a while there was an outsized number of mostly accidental, human-caused infernos. 

Ignition was driven by forests left parched by a dry spring and unseasonably hot temperatures across much of the country. Vast areas of Canada were experiencing drought conditions last spring, with some parts of Alberta classified as extreme. 

As wildfires burned across the country, arson was a source of debate, driven by misinformation. In Alberta it took on new meaning when it was amplified by Premier Danielle Smith. Turning to conspiracy in the face of anxiety is not an uncommon reaction when faced with the psychological impact of all-consuming smoke.

But the facts didn’t support the claims.

When The Narwhal asked the RCMP in Alberta about arson last June, a spokesperson said it was investigating 12 suspicious fires at that time, but stressed that didn’t mean those were arson.

In 2024, the drought continued across the Prairies, and that meant another brutal fire season, albeit subdued compared to the previous year. Approximately five million hectares burned across Canada in 2024, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre — less than a third of the previous year’s total. 

So far in 2025, the season is staying close to the 10-year average for the number of fires, although that doesn’t factor in the size and force of an individual fire. In terms of area burned, 2025 is slightly less than the previous year as of the end of May. 

Conditions vary across the country, with B.C. facing less extreme conditions compared to the past two years, but the risks increase east into Saskatchewan. Nearly the entire province faces extreme fire risk this spring, according to Natural Resources Canada. 

What about forest management?

Canada’s forests aren’t what they used to be. 

Decades of forestry and forest management have altered natural cycles and natural growth. An analysis of annual data from the federal government shows more than 930,000 hectares of forest were logged on average in Canada between 1990 and 2020 — that’s just over 1.5 times larger than the Greater Toronto Area. 

Historically, the boreal forest, which stretches across Canada, would burn periodically, with species, including black spruce and lodgepole pine, dependent on fire for regeneration. The commercial value of trees for timber changed priorities.

Although there has been a shift towards recognizing the ecological importance of fire, governments have invested heavily in fighting fires before they can spread, in part to protect valuable trees destined to be logged. 

The federal government says the cost to fight fires over the past decade have ranged between $800 million and $1.5 billion each year.

When fires threaten homes, infrastructure, oil and gas installations and harvest areas for logging companies, firefighters sweep in to do battle — either fully committed to putting out the flames or letting parts of it burn while managing others. 

Across Canada, fire agencies assess fires on a case-by-case basis while recognizing the ecological role of fire and the high costs of fighting them. 

“High-priority areas for protection include residential areas, high-value commercial forests and recreational sites,” according to Natural Resources Canada. “Low-priority sites are generally wilderness parks and remote forests of limited economic value — although protection of rare habitat, culturally significant areas and similar values will influence suppression decisions.”

The consequences can be a buildup of fuel — the accumulation of deadfall, dense brush and more — that allows fires to burn bigger and stronger when lightning (or a careless human) strikes. 

Decades of putting out fires has led to a “fire paradox” and makes fighting fires in the future more difficult, according to a 2019 paper examining Canada’s wildfire management. 

In other words, the more you protect a forest from fire, the more likely it is to eventually burn.

Approximately 60 per cent of Canada’s 3.47 million square kilometres of forests are “covered by a management plan that includes production, conservation or other uses,” according to a 2017 Statistics Canada report. 

Proponents of logging, often clearcut, argue the practice aims to mimic the sweep of a wildfire, clearing the land in order to help it rejuvenate, but those practices don’t necessarily achieve their ends — fire-dependent species like lodgepole pine rely on heat and research suggests logging doesn’t reproduce the “large numbers of small disturbances and the small number of extremely large disturbances created by wildfires.” Research has suggested logged areas of the boreal forest are more susceptible to fires in the decade after harvesting, while areas that were burned are not. 

How bad was the 2023 wildfire season?

In short, it was bad.

There were 7,131 fires according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre. But it’s not just the number of fires, which can range from small outbursts of flame to enormous conflagrations, that matters. 

17,203,625 hectares — an area roughly the size of North Dakota — burned, the largest burned area on record by more than double.

That’s not to say there haven’t been bad years, but 2023 was the worst in recorded history. Since 1990, according to the federal government, fires have burned an average of 2.5 million hectares each year.

In 2023, approximately seven times that average burned. 

It also far exceeded the past record.

The caveat is that location matters. When fires burn in the wilderness, away from infrastructure, homes and industry, they are often left to their own devices. That can impact the number of hectares consumed.

Is climate change to blame?

Weather is a big factor in how many fires are lit and how fast they grow. Hot and dry weather means forests are ready to burn and burn fast. This year’s weather is an example. 

Models show climate change is having an impact. 

Between 1948 and 2022, annual average temperatures have increased 1.9 C, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada.

“Nine of the 10 warmest years have occurred during the last 25 years, with 2010 being the warmest on record (3.0 C above the 1961 to 1990 reference value),” according to the department.

At the same time, annual average precipitation in the form of snow, rain and all the other wet-sky stuff increased between 1948 and 2012 and that trend is expected to continue. Ultimately, the impacts will vary by region, time of year and whether and to what extent carbon pollution is curtailed. 

That might sound good for combatting wildfires, but projections also anticipate a feast-or-famine scenario, with extreme amounts of precipitation in short periods combined with dry spells. That can lead to both flooding and droughts. 

The changes in climate are also putting strain on forests with increased disease and infestation from mountain pine beetles and other pests. According to data from Statistics Canada, in 2020, nearly 18 million hectares of forest was stripped of its greenery or contained dead-standing trees, courtesy of bug infestations. The result is more fuel for fires. The Canadian Wildland Fire Strategy, last updated in 2016, warns things are likely to get worse. 

“Wildland fires caused by lightning and humans are predicted to increase 18 per cent by 2050 and 50 per cent by 2100,” it warns. “The growth of the wildland-urban interface, expanding industrial development and consequential results of climate change are compounding factors of this projection.”

Updated on June 5, 2024, at 10:44 a.m. MT: This story has been updated to include data from the rest of the 2023 wildfire season.

Updated on June 4, 2025, at 2:44 p.m. MT: This story has been updated to include data from the 2024 wildfire season.

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.

Space lasers. That’s the reason some people gave for the catastrophic burning of Lytton, B.C., in 2021 after a historic heat wave set a new temperature record in Canada, exacerbating a wildfire that essentially destroyed the town.

And while the idea seems wild, it wasn’t even the first time the conspiracy theory had been floated. As far back as 2018, space lasers were blamed for causing wildfires in California, some tinged with antisemitic theories the space lasers were owned by Jewish bankers.

So it almost seems quaint that a not-insignificant chorus of Canadians blame the current wildfires sweeping across much of the country on climate activists and laser-less government operatives willing to drive into the woods and strike a match.

Supposedly it’s arson, not natural forces or human carelessness coupled with a hotter and drier climate, that’s the real culprit for the choking smoke that has kept children inside, blocked out the sun and made it nearly impossible to breathe. 

These theories aren’t quaint, and they’re not just being spread in fringe digital corners. 

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith didn’t flinch in early June when asked by talk show host Ryan Jespersen about reconciling her push against federal climate and environmental policies with the intensity of the current wildfire season and its link to climate change. 

“I’m very concerned that there are arsonists,” she said. “There have been stories as well that we’re investigating and we’re bringing in arson investigators from outside the province.” (Arson is not a major factor in wildfire ignition — more on that later.)

It’s not just Smith. Canadian politicians across all levels of government are not aligned on what started the fires and what needs to be done to combat them, a discord that is fuelling a deep misunderstanding of this intense and destructive climate moment. 

There is real fear, in Alberta and beyond, about what these fires represent. They are burning during a critical time for climate policy discussions that will have an enormous impact across Canada, particularly in the oil and gas heartland. 

Hardly anyone in the country is unaffected. There is a direct and visceral threat to home and security for the tens of thousands who have been forced to flee. Then there’s a fear of job loss and security for those who work in sectors including oil and gas. Not to mention the physical and emotional stress on firefighters forced to work without adequate resources or funding. 

Millions more Canadians have been trapped under smoky skies caused by fires thousands of kilometres away. 

Everyone is carrying the anxiety of a changing planet. 

The discussions that need to happen now — that should’ve started long ago — are complex and wide-ranging, and the solutions they result in will require unprecedented co-ordination across ideologies. Along with better approaches to fire prevention and management, governments need to cope with misinformation and social media companies that allow it to spread.

Given all of that, space lasers can seem like an easy out. 

Here’s a rundown of what we know about how the wildfires actually started and the truth behind the most prominent conspiracy theories. It’s also a look at who benefits from spreading untruths and what politicians and social media platforms could be doing to stop the climate disinformation blazing across the country. 

Just how on fire is Canada right now?

Natural disasters at their worst seem cinematic and fictional. And this year, for the first time in our collective memory, the entire country was very much on fire. 

Since March, 11 provinces and territories have been affected by thousands of forest fires, many of them out of control. Canada is on track for its “worst wildfire season” in recorded history, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in early June. You could see the fires from coast to coast. 

British Columbia saw the single-largest wildfire in its history this year in Donnie Creek. Alberta was the most impacted overall in May, forcing the government to declare a provincial state of emergency that lasted a month. Almost 40 per cent of the country’s fires were in Quebec in mid-June, threatening to evacuate more than 15,000 people. Newfoundland and Labrador saw 34 wildfires before May 1, compared to only two fires in the same period last year. Nova Scotia saw its largest recorded forest fire in history; more than 16,000 residents were evacuated from the Halifax area. 

The sheer cumulative effect was, well, apocalyptic. A wall of smoke descended across the U.S.-Canada border. New York City experienced its worst air quality since a dramatic smog event in the 1960s. Skies turned orange, horizons and skylines disappeared. 

North America has never experienced fire like this before. It is scary and visceral. In Ottawa, the smoke became the perfectly haunting metaphor: parliamentarians and policymakers were trapped in the heavy fog, unable to act or see ahead. 

And it’s not over: the large Donnie Creek fire is expected to keep burning for several weeks.

How did the 2023 Canadian wildfires start? 

The majority of new forest fires started in Canada in recent days are from natural causes, like lightning: Mother Nature’s energy weapon that literally sparks flames.

In any given year, almost half of the fires that burn across the country are started by lightning, but those fires account for nearly 67 per cent of the land burned, according to the federal government. There have been 2,715 wildfires across Canada already this year.

But a strike of lightning will not turn into a catastrophic wildfire unless the conditions are ripe for one.

In dry, hot conditions, the flames become raging blazes and if the wind picks up, it carries the thick smoke quickly. Such conditions will become the norm for longer periods of time as Earth’s atmosphere warms rapidly due to carbon pollution created from burning fossil fuels. Wildfire seasons will start earlier, last longer and be more intense. 

As of June 20, almost six million hectares of land in Canada have burned. That’s more than the amount of land that burned in 2016, 2019, 2020 and 2022 combined. 

Lightning strikes have an outsized impact, according to Natural Resources Canada, because they can occur in remote, less populated areas and the fires are often left to burn. Or they can happen in clusters, with multiple fires lit at once, forcing firefighters to decide which ones to tackle with limited resources. 

Humans do cause the majority of wildfires, just over half, but they tend not to be part of a balaclava-clad crowd of ne’er do wells and extremists.

Figures released by the B.C. Wildfire Service show more than a third of this year’s 460 wildfires as of June 20 were caused by lightning. Another 275 were attributed to suspected human activity, not arson but carelessness, like “vehicle and engine use, industrial activity, fireworks, sky-lanterns, outdoor flame lighting and discarding burning items (e.g. cigarettes).” That doesn’t mean there hasn’t been a history of trying to blame everyone from Antifa to environmentalists for the conflagrations.

Alberta’s June 13 update on the wildfire situation showed 368 of 634 — 58 per cent — wildfires this year were human caused, which the province says covers “everything from recreational fires to agricultural incidents to wildfires caused by people on residential land.” It’s part of the reason Alberta implemented bans on outdoor fires and all-terrain vehicle use through much of the spring.

During a news conference on June 12, ​​Melissa Story, an information officer with Alberta Wildfire, said the service is also seeing an “emerging trend with fireworks and exploding targets.”

Lightning, according to the province, was responsible for 129 fires and another 135 are under investigation. 

And yes, sometimes arson is the cause. 

In Alberta, RCMP charged a man in May for a series of arsons, including what they say were intentionally set wildfires, in 2022. The man was also charged with breaching conditions for a previous charge that was supposed to confine him to his property. There was no mention by police of climate motivations for the fires he set, which also included a church, post office and rodeo grounds among targets. That same year, a woman from Kamloops, B.C., was also charged with wildfire arsons. She pled guilty and has yet to be sentenced.

“We see arson wildfires every year, in one form or another. Sometimes they’re under-represented, sometimes they’re over,” Story with Alberta Wildfire told The Toronto Star on June 8. “It’s not an emerging trend that we’re concerned about right now.”

Arson happens, but it is rare.

According to the RCMP, most of the current fires are not suspicious.

“While the vast majority of these fires have been attributed to naturally occurring sources, such as lightning, the RCMP Forestry Crimes Unit is currently investigating 12 suspicious wildfires (January 1, 2023, to June 12, 2023) where human activity is believed to be a factor,” it said in a media release on June 14. “In 2022, 21 suspicious wildfires were investigated. A total of 40 were investigated in 2021.”

So why are arsonist theories so widespread? 

There’s a certain logic to trying to distract from the terror of wildfires and the changing climate that helps set the conditions for them. For many individuals, perhaps the truth is so unimaginable, unsettling and unavoidable, they refuse to accept the complex origins of the new reality. 

Others have more nefarious motivations and use positions of influence to shore up their own interests — from business leaders to politicians to influencers.

Often, misinformation takes a piece of truth and twists it. In early June, the B.C. Wildfire Service released a video explaining how it uses planned ignitions — a fire management tactic that strategically burns areas of the forest a fire hasn’t reached as a way to contain it. But in a doctored version of the video going viral online, footage from the service is edited so all you see is a yellow helicopter flying above a smoke-filled forest in Donnie Creek, in the northeastern part of the province, with a torch suspended from one of the wings shooting flames into the trees. The words “it was a setup” flash on the screen.  

Some of the theories show how new crises are absorbed into existing disinformation spheres. As politicians and health officials advised people to stay indoors or wear masks outside, it activated people who felt COVID-19 lockdowns had curtailed their freedoms — and ignored that N95 masks prevent both the spread of viruses and inhalation of harmful smoke. Then there are those who believe the wildfires were intentionally set to destroy rural life and force everyone into 15-minute cities — an urban planning concept in which daily life exists within walking or biking distance. And there’s the long-running classic, that the wildfires are purposely lit to give the Trudeau government cover to increase the carbon price, which is one of the most effective tools to reduce industrial emissions.

“Climate is just the latest victim in a trend that has already claimed conversations around public health, conversations around migration, conversations around sexual and reproductive health rights, conversations around LGBTQ rights [and] conversations around racial justice,” Jennie King, head of climate research and policy at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told The Narwhal.

“The kind of underlying unifying theme is one of the so-called woke agenda and the cabal of internationalists or globalists who are instigating that supposed agenda,” said King, whose organization is an international think-tank that researches threats to democracy, including disinformation. “That can then be applied to any topic.”

That’s probably why the list of conspiracy theories is endless. There are varying (untrue) explanations of how arsonists operate, from stealing ammonium nitrate from a train to a more elaborate theory about eco-terrorists who co-ordinated the lighting of matches at the same time across the country.

None of these assertions are new this year, or to Canada — similar theories have been floated globally, as fires increase and intensify. But their veracity is deeply concerning, not only because of the growing risk of wildfire, but because of the threat disinformation poses to broader climate action. 

What leads people to believe climate misinformation?

Studies have shown increased anxiety and feeling a loss of control can contribute to belief in conspiracy theories. If anxiety is increased, so too is a disposition to justify theories outside the realm of reality. 

Education or intelligence don’t factor in, at least not in the way many would snidely suggest. One study from Yale Law School in 2017 showed people with higher abilities to interpret quantitative information were better at contorting facts to fit their ideological bias.  

Adrian Bardon, a philosophy professor at Wake Forest University in North Carolina and author of The Truth About Denial, calls this “toxic, system-justifying identity politics.” 

Humans are hardwired for a certain amount of bias and self-justification. Bardon says we often have reactions and then we find reasons to justify those reactions, not the other way around. 

Existential threats — whether it’s the world burning or the loss of your paycheque — are powerful drivers of fear and conspiracy. Powerlessness in the face of global forces is visceral.

But there is also some calculation at play among the top spreaders of climate disinformation, with influencers, grifters and politicians leading the herd away from climate and toward, say, arsonists.

When it comes to climate change, the age of denialism is largely over, according to a report from King’s Institute for Strategic Dialogues. What has taken its place are strategies to muddy the discursive waters, particularly from polluting industries and those with vested interests.

“Whether through conspiracies like ‘climate lockdown,’ or by conflating climate with divisive issues like critical race theory, LGBTQ+ rights and abortion access, the goal of much climate change [misinformation] now is to distract and delay,” reads the report. 

“Yet, with the window to act deemed ‘brief and rapidly closing,’ such an approach may prove fatal.”

So what are Canadian politicians saying about wildfires?

When fire season started this year, Alberta politicians were in the midst of an election campaign devoid of serious climate talk even as the province burned — shrouding cities in smoke and forcing the evacuation of homes and oil facilities. 

It didn’t take long for evidence-free theories to start spreading: the idea that shadowy NDP operatives, perhaps working in concert with Trudeau, intentionally set the fires in order to help defeat the UCP. In reality, the UCP slashed the budgets for wildfire suppression in 2019, leaving a “skeleton crew” to tackle this year’s infernos. 

There’s been a lot of finger pointing and climate denial as this year’s fires reached record levels, across the country and all levels of government. 

Federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault said his ability to act on wildfires was limited by political differences. “What would greatly help our capacity to accelerate our fight against climate change in Canada is if I didn’t have to fight with certain jurisdictions all the time on doing the bare minimum to fight climate change, if I wouldn’t have to fight the Conservative Party of Canada,” he told CTV News in early June. 

Meanwhile at Queen’s Park in the heart of Toronto — which had the second-worst air quality in the world at one point in early June due to fires in northern Ontario, Manitoba and Quebec — Premier Doug Ford refused to link the wildfire smoke to climate change. When asked about it by Ontario NDP leader Marit Stiles, he accused the opposition of “politicizing the fires.” 

Instead, Ford touted the work of Ontario’s firefighters while failing to mention or justify his government’s decision to cut 67 per cent of his province’s emergency forest firefighting funds in the 2019 budget. Ford’s Minister of Natural Resources and Forestry Graydon Smith matter-of-factly said “we’ve got forest fires every year in Ontario” as schools across the Greater Toronto Area cancelled recess due to smoke. 

Then, on the last day of the legislature’s summer session, Ford declared Ontario’s economy “is on fire,” making a badly timed pun as 54 forest fires engulfed the province in smoke.  

Why aren’t social media companies stopping the spread of wildfire conspiracy theories?

Probably because it helps them make money. 

According to a report by the Climate Action Against Disinformation coalition published earlier this year, fossil fuel companies spent around US$4 million on Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram) for paid advertisements that spread false or misleading claims on climate issues. 

The findings show “a stark comeback for climate denial” and “negligence from Big Tech companies who not only continue to monetize and enable, but in some cases actively recommend, such content to users,” the report says. 

Big Tech’s failure to crack down on climate misinformation has been cited as a serious obstacle in reaching global climate goals. In November 2021, more than 400 organizations and individuals wrote an open letter demanding global action to tackle climate misinformation and disinformation. 

There has been some progress. In October 2021, Google announced it would “prohibit ads for, and monetization of, content that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.” In April 2022, Pinterest announced a policy to reduce climate change disinformation in content and ads. And ahead of Earth Day this year, TikTok amended its policies to require the removal of any content that “undermines well-established scientific consensus, such as denying the existence of climate change or the factors that contribute to it.” 

On Earth Day last year, Twitter also announced a new policy to demonetize climate denial in its advertising, although that hasn’t lasted. Since July 2022, when Elon Musk took over the platform, the Climate Action Against Disinformation coalition has observed an increase in climate denial content on Twitter. The group noted a concerning spike for #ClimateScam, a hashtag that “soared back up the top search results” on the site last week, according to King’s early analysis. “That was obviously linked to the stories around the wildfires,” she said.

There’s more work to be done, as the online discourse around this year’s wildfires makes clear. Canada is expected to introduce wide-ranging policy around online harms later this year, after two and a half years of discussion, and King said it can’t come too soon. 

“Canada is probably a little late to the party in recognizing the threat of climate, mis- and disinformation, both at a low local policymaking level, but also, the broader trend of climate being weaponized within kind of identity politics, and dynamics of, of cultural discourse,” she said. There’s finally a recognition that climate disinformation carries “a real vector of harm,” she said, that is creating confusion and perpetuating inaction. 

So why should you care?

There are a lot of climate policies taking shape in Ottawa, from clean electricity regulations, to new clean fuel standards, increased carbon prices and potential caps on emissions from the oil and gas sector. The federal government is ramping up efforts to get to net-zero emissions by 2050 after years of dithering as emissions rose.

It’s essential these policies are discussed and debated on a level playing field, not one distorted by misinformation, so Canadians feel the measures are being passed in their best interests. Especially given the profound impacts of a changing economy, in a world that’s clearly changing despite warnings that were shrugged off.

Wetter wet seasons and drier dry seasons will increase floods and fire. Already, 20,000 Canadians have been displaced by this year’s wildfires. Many more will have to leave their homes behind as shorelines and floodplains shift and forests and grasslands burn. Managed retreat and its incalculable costs will challenge governments across the country. 

It’s a huge problem — the existential challenge of our times. The urge to turn it into a fantastical but simple tale that has a beginning, middle and end, an obvious villain and a clear-cut spark is understandable. But these tales are just a smokescreen, distracting from the growing number of smoke signals from communities across the country desperate for serious climate action.— with files from Denise Balkissoon

Updated June 16, 2023, at 1 p.m. MT: This story was updated to correct a typo in Federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault’s name. It was also updated to clarify that natural causes, such as lightning, were responsible for the majority of new fires instead of all fires currently burning and to add comment from the Alberta RCMP on the number of investigations currently underway.

Updated June 20, 2023, at 3 p.m. MT: This story has been updated to reflect the most recent wildfire statistics.

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In the early morning dark of April 12, 2023, violence erupted along a Nova Scotia riverbank after a man engaged a woman and a youth in a heated argument. Soon after, seven people arrived. One allegedly assaulted the man with a pipe while another stood nearby wielding a knife and a taser. When the RCMP later arrested two members of the group a short distance away, the officers found two shotguns and a taser.

The altercation is just one of a series of violent disputes that broke out along rivers across the province in March and April, with people reporting being threatened at gunpoint or with knives. In one instance, a young person was hit in the head. In another, a man was shot in the leg.

At the center of this fighting is a lucrative bounty: translucent, toothpick-sized young American eels, known as elvers. Elvers currently sell for roughly $5,000 per kilogram, the most valuable commercial fish in Canada by weight. The fishery is worth nearly $50 million, and the pressure to maximize profit during the brief 10-week harvest contributes to tensions among fishers.

Citing threats to public safety and to the eel population, Fisheries and Oceans Canada stepped in on April 15 to close the fishery for 45 days.

Conflict around elvers is not new, nor is it the only fishery in Atlantic Canada that’s seen so much turmoil. In 2021, a group of men armed with a hatchet and piece of rebar threatened and kidnapped two elver fishers in order to steal their catch. In 2020, Fisheries and Oceans Canada also shut the elver fishery down early, after confrontations broke out between Mi’kmaw fishers and federal fisheries officers. Later that same year, non-Indigenous lobster fishers torched a fishing boat, a truck and a building to protest the Sipekne’katik First Nation opening a small lobster fishery. As part of the same dispute, a mob surrounded a lobster holding facility in West Pubnico, N.S., trapping two Mi’kmaw fishers and four non-Indigenous workers inside.

A common point of contention underlies many of these violent conflicts. First Nations spokespeople, commercial fishers and legal experts agree that Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s decades-long refusal to uphold Indigenous peoples’ right to fish for a moderate livelihood has led to altercations in one fishery after another.

“When there isn’t a resolution to rights issues for Indigenous peoples, it doesn’t go away,” says Rosalie Francis, a Mi’kmaw lawyer from Sipekne’katik First Nation. “The issue was never resolved, so now we see it in another resource area.”

Indigenous nations say Treaty Rights mean control over fisheries

In 1760 and 1761, three Indigenous nations — the Mi’kmaq, Wolastoqiyik and Peskotomuhkati — signed treaties with the British Crown. Known as the Peace and Friendship Treaties, the agreements upheld Indigenous peoples’ right to hunt, fish and trade. For centuries, that right was disregarded by colonial governments.

In 1999, however, Canada’s Supreme Court reaffirmed that right in R. v. Marshall. The defendant in the case was Donald Marshall Jr., a Mi’kmaw man from Membertou First Nation in Nova Scotia. Six years earlier, he had been arrested for fishing for adult eels without a license and selling his catch. The high court’s verdict upheld Marshall’s treaty right to fish year round, including outside commercial seasons, and to earn a “moderate livelihood” — enough income to cover basic necessities but not to “accumulate wealth.”

The ruling, known as the Marshall Decision, applied to members of 34 Mi’kmaq, Wolastoqiyik and Peskotomuhkati communities in Quebec, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

Legally, the nations’ Treaty Rights to fish have priority over commercial fishing, though the Supreme Court later clarified that Fisheries and Oceans Canada can curtail First Nations fishing to protect fish populations. What the court did not do, however, was detail how moderate livelihood fishing would work in practice. Instead, it tasked Fisheries and Oceans Canada with developing regulations with the First Nations.

Yet when Indigenous fishers set out to exercise their newly reaffirmed right, Fisheries and Oceans Canada enforcement officers and non-Indigenous commercial harvesters stopped them.

“Once we had got our rights, nobody wanted to share quotas or share the fish,” says Kerry Prosper, an Elder and councillor for Paqtnkek Mi’kmaw Nation in Nova Scotia. “[Fisheries and Oceans Canada] and everybody said [fisheries were] fully subscribed, meaning there’s no room for you.”

The years that followed the Supreme Court ruling earned a heavy moniker: the lobster wars. People rammed each other’s boats, fired guns on the water, cut lobster traps and set vehicles ablaze. The renewed violence decades later suggests that anger has not abated.

In the 24 years since the Marshall Decision, Fisheries and Oceans Canada has tried a handful of approaches to tackle the moderate livelihood question. It spent hundreds of millions on gear and commercial licenses for Mi’kmaw communities. More recently, the department and some First Nations signed controversial Rights Reconciliation Agreements. But those efforts have largely tried to funnel First Nations fishers into existing commercial fisheries. In 2022 and 2023, the federal government took a similar tack: it expropriated 14 per cent of the commercial harvesters’ elver quota and redistributed it to Indigenous communities.

The move angered many.

Unsurprisingly, commercial license holders were not happy with suddenly losing $6 million worth of quota. Michel Samson, a lawyer representing commercial harvesters in a judicial review of the reallocations, says his clients support increasing First Nations access to the fishery. They were prepared to relinquish quota for a fee — the willing buyer–willing seller approach that Fisheries and Oceans Canada has used in multiple fisheries since the Marshall Decision — but their offers were rejected.

“[Fisheries and Oceans Canada] turned around and decided we’ll just take your quota instead,” Samson says. “If you’re going to have a proper reconciliation and new entry into a fishery, you need to compensate those who are in who are prepared to get out.”

But Fisheries and Oceans Canada says that license holders wanted more than market value for the quota. A decision on the judicial review could be issued as soon as this month.

Ken Paul, lead fisheries negotiator and research co-ordinator for the Wolastoqey Nation in New Brunswick, says that from an Indigenous Rights perspective Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s reallocation scheme also doesn’t address the underlying issue: that moderate livelihood fishing is a separate right that has legal priority over the privilege granted to commercial license holders.

“Our position,” says Paul, “is that these fishing licenses are not an accommodation of our rights. These are temporary access.”

Beyond that, Paul notes, the reallocated quota is much less than what a non-Indigenous commercial license holder would have. In 2022, Paul says, the 12,000 members of the Wolastoqey Nation received 200 kilograms of elver quota. “Our members fished that out in five days,” he says.

But if Wolastoqey members choose to fish beyond those 200 kilograms of commercial quota — exercising their treaty right to fish — they encounter other barriers. Because moderate livelihood fisheries are not authorized by Fisheries and Oceans Canada, fisheries officers can fine anyone who buys the catch, including wholesalers and resellers, who can also have their licenses suspended. (The same applies to anyone caught buying from poachers.) The legal risk means that Indigenous fishers often earn a fraction of the high prices that commercial fishers get for elvers and other species.

Ultimately, Paul says, the Wolastoqey Nation wants control over management of fisheries on their territories, including support from Fisheries and Oceans Canada for the nation to conduct scientific work on elvers.

Lack of clarity from Fisheries and Oceans Canada makes confrontation more likely

Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s inconsistent approach to addressing Indigenous treaty rights is not solely a high-level legal dispute. The lack of clarity, says Michael McDonald, a Mi’kmaw lawyer and treaty fisheries manager on contract for Sipekne’katik First Nation, means Indigenous fishers are currently operating in a void that’s made confrontation more likely — including with Fisheries and Oceans Canada officers.

Time and again, says McDonald, Indigenous community members asserting their right to fish have been charged by Fisheries and Oceans Canada enforcement officers. The charges are not for fishing, though. “They get them arguing, and then they charge them with obstruction [of a fisheries officer],” the lawyer says.

Indigenous lobster fishers have had similar run-ins with enforcement. In one 2018 incident, three of McDonald’s clients were fishing lobster for a moderate livelihood when a Fisheries and Oceans Canada officer charged them with fisheries violations and seized their traps. This past January, a Nova Scotia provincial court judge dismissed the charges, saying there was no evidence the fishers had violated Canada’s Fisheries Act.

In a statement, Fisheries and Oceans Canada spokesperson Lauren Sankey says the government is committed to advancing First Nations’ right to fish. But by not clarifying the difference between commercial licenses and Indigenous Rights, Paul says, the government has created a situation where people feel justified opposing Indigenous access. “Our members are afraid to go out there because they’re being persecuted by [Fisheries and Oceans Canada], persecuted by non-native people who feel like First Nations are a threat to their livelihoods.”

Without a plan to implement the Indigenous fishing rights that have been affirmed by Canada’s Supreme Court, we likely haven’t seen the last of this conflict, says Francis. Whether it’s around elvers, lobsters or something else, “this will continue to play out, and play out, and play out, until the government deals with the issues on the table.”

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