It was 6 a.m. when Qutxulenuhw Tim Kulchyski got the call.

On the phone was Elder Siilh’na’mut Ken Elliott, a fellow member of Cowichan Tribes. Elliott had been working in a place known as Fish Gut Alley, named after the abundant salmon that spawned and then decayed there. It’s a naturalized wetland spread out over nearly four hectares of Duncan, B.C., within Rotary and McAdam Parks, just north of the Cowichan River on Vancouver Island. It was June 2007, and he was restoring the natural habitat around the city’s sewage lagoons — essentially, large pond-like areas that local wastewater flows into.

That morning, Elliott, a Quw’utsun Knowledge Keeper and expert on native plants, had been taking inventory along Fish Gut Alley. As he moved downstream, a strange cacophony grew louder and louder.

“Crows, ravens, kingfishers — just an incredibly large amount of bird activity. Everyone was squawking and making a lot of noise,” he said.

Following the sounds, Elliott came across a scene that was “a blow to the gut,” he said. 

From bank to bank the river was filled with thousands of juvenile coho salmon on their sides, swimming in circles, mouths wide, gasping at the surface. Birds had descended on the area to feast on the dead and dying fish.

Elliott called Kulchyski, a biologist, and told him to get down to the river quickly.

Once he arrived, the two men began looking for the cause of the mass casualty event. “We ran up and down the stream looking for something that may have poisoned them, but we couldn’t find any gasoline or anything like that,” Elliott said.

Before leaving to meet Elliott, Kulchyski had phoned Willi Aquino, a local fishery officer with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, who soon joined them at the river.

“You could see where the fish had died,” recalled Aquino. “It was very close to this storm drain. So, it’s like, ‘OK, something’s coming out of there.’ ”

There had recently been significant rainfall in the area, Elliott recalled. At first, he thought maybe one of the local businesses had dumped something toxic into the storm drain system, which the rain could have washed into the river. Later that day he drove around to ask at dry cleaners, car washes and gas stations, but he found no leads.

Around the same time that Kulchyski, Elliott and Aquino were scratching their heads over the dead coho on Vancouver Island, marine researchers and streamkeepers in Washington state were investigating a similar phenomenon in their own neck of the woods: for decades, they had noticed dramatic die-offs of coho salmon in urban areas, close to roadways, but couldn’t figure out the cause. It wasn’t until 2020 that the Washington researchers hit on a major discovery — one that not only connected the dots for Kulchyski but solved an environmental mystery that had been puzzling scientists for decades.

The culprit: a highly toxic chemical compound called 6PPD-quinone. It comes from the breakdown of a compound called 6PPD, a preservative added to car tires to prevent the rubber from cracking as a result of ozone in the air.

Anti-ozonants like 6PPD came into widespread use in the 1960s so the rubber of car tires wouldn’t crack and wear down so fast. These days, each time a car is driven, its tires shed tiny amounts of 6PPD-infused rubber onto the roads. When it rains, the particles wash into nearby fish habitat, where UV exposure causes it to break down into 6PPD-Q, which can be lethal even in tiny amounts.

Kulchyski had started to hear “murmurs” in the scientific community about a compound that was killing coho salmon just as COVID-19 restrictions began to spread across the world.

Now, after years of research and testing in the area, he has no doubt this was what killed the salmon in Fish Gut Alley. And he’s on a mission to help the world understand the colossal problem 6PPD-Q presents, and how First Nations are on the front lines of dealing with it.

The salmon mystery solved

To understand how 6PPD-Q was discovered, one needs to travel back to the central California coast during the 1990s, when a host of different challenges meant coho salmon were driven nearly to extinction. By 2005, they had been classified as an endangered species in the United States. 

This led to an influx of resources aimed at habitat restoration in urban streams throughout the Pacific Northwest. And more boots on the ground meant more scrutiny, according to aquatic toxicologist Jenifer McIntyre. She’s an associate professor at Washington State University and researches Seattle-area streams in the Puget Sound. 

As researchers tromped around in streams, squinting into turbid waters watching, waiting, McIntyre and others began to notice something odd: large numbers of dead coho piled up along the sides of creeks that were still filled with eggs. This meant they had died before getting a chance to spawn.

“If you’re used to salmon and salmon fisheries, then you’re not surprised by dead fish in the fall, but the fact that they haven’t spawned is like … ‘Oh,’ ” McIntyre said.

Across seven years of field studies, a pattern emerged. The dead salmon were primarily coho, in the most urbanized areas of the Puget Sound. The deaths typically happened during or just after heavy rains, and as they died the fish exhibited a strange, specific behaviour: swimming in circles at the surface of the water, mouths gaping, spiralling and gasping. And the phenomenon was widespread: about 40 per cent of the Puget Sound area was affected and between 40 to 90 per cent of those salmon were dying before they spawned, within hours of being exposed. 

The weight of the evidence at this time suggested their deaths were somehow being caused by stormwater runoff, McIntyre said.

At first, researchers faced a long list of potential causes. Was it pesticides from a nearby golf course, or low oxygen? Could it be parasites? As they dug in and began to eliminate each of these factors, they slowly narrowed in on a possible cause. 

Cars. 

But there were so many chemicals associated with cars. The first year they began running tests on salmon, in 2016, McIntyre figured they only had the capacity to run tests on two things, and decided to look into car tires and exhaust particles. But it eventually proved to be too much to do two things, so they decided to focus on car tires.

When her team passed water through a mulch of worn tire particles to make a solution, it killed all of the coho salmon tested in their lab. That’s when they knew they were onto something, she said, though at first they didn’t know exactly what.

“Something about stormwater — okay. Something about roadway runoff — all right. Something about tires,” McIntyre recalled. “That’s when Ed joined the picture.”

Ed Kolodziej, a water and ecosystem health researcher and professor at the University of Washington, brought in critical chemistry expertise and a dream team of biologists and chemists. Assembled from government departments and universities from across the Pacific Northwest, they set to work trying to figure out what it was in the tires that was killing the fish.

“Out of the hundreds to thousands of chemicals that we were detecting in these samples, there were 57 chemicals that were always present when the coho salmon died, so we started to identify them,” Kolodziej said.

Over time, the list of chemicals got smaller and smaller until they managed to identify the composition of what they thought was the culprit, but there was one problem: it didn’t correspond to any known tire ingredients, McIntyre said.

An environmental chemist on the team named Zhenyu Tian noticed that the carbon and nitrogen in the molecule of their mystery chemical matched some of those on the tire list, though it differed in other ways.

Then Tian had a lightbulb moment: what if they were searching for a chemical that transformed into something else once it entered into the environment and broke down?

In the mountains of research materials, Tian found an old industrial rubber paper from 1983 that talked about a chemical added to tires called 6PPD. When it was ozonated — exposed to air and sunlight — the paper stated that it changed into the exact chemical formula they were searching for: 6PPD-quinone.

To confirm their theory, the scientists bought some 6PPD and tested it on the salmon in their lab. They died, showing the same characteristic twisting and gasping behaviours that had been seen in wild salmon.

The group’s evidence was compiled into a groundbreaking paper published in the journal Science at the end of 2020. It was a sensation in the scientific community, in part because it finally offered an explanation for a phenomenon that wasn’t new, and in part because it sounded an alarm over how toxic and widespread 6PPD-Q is.

One of its most remarkable — and alarming — features is just how little it takes to kill coho salmon. As one researcher put it, the equivalent of a grain of rice in an Olympic-sized swimming pool is enough to make the water lethal.

And it’s not just fish that have been exposed. A recent study out of China shows that 6PPD-Q has been detected in human urine and breast milk, though it’s not yet clear what effect, if any, it has on humans or other mammals. Researchers are also finding it not just in water but in air, dust and snow — basically everywhere there are tires.

“It is among the most toxic chemicals that we know of for aquatic life,” McIntyre said. “We reasoned that you would expect to find this chemical anywhere where tire particles were getting into the water.”

But the researchers still had questions to answer. Why were certain fish species, such as coho and coastal cutthroat trout, so uniquely sensitive to 6PPD-Q? How does it kill them? And, perhaps most important, how can its risks be contained? 

Finding 6PPD-Q hotspots

In February 2026, about 165 people attended the third and final Protecting Salmon From Tire Wear Toxicants workshop in downtown Nanaimo. 

Workshop presentations ranged from practical to dizzyingly technical, and represented an unusual cross-collaboration across disciplines, all focused on solving the same problem.

“If everyone’s a silo, we’re all probably trying to look for the same answers to the same questions, and you’ll get it from many different places, but it’ll happen a lot faster if you’re talking to people,” said Angelina Jaeger, a researcher with Vancouver Island University’s Centre for Health & Environmental Mass Spectrometry (CHEMS), one of the groups that organized the workshop series. “That’s what science should be.”

Like many researchers at the workshop, Jaeger is focused on finding solutions. One problem her team decided to focus on was implementing widespread 6PPD-Q testing in local streams and creeks.

It all started with that seminal 2020 Science paper, said Erik Krogh, a chemistry professor and co-director of Vancouver Island University’s CHEMS lab. Though he read it with a sense of dread, Krogh immediately saw a use for the technology his team had been working on for more than a decade, which would make it “faster, better and cheaper” to test water samples.

Already developed as a way to test for carcinogens in oilsands process water, the test dips a membrane into a water sample and, using a repurposed 3D printer to mix it around, it pulls out the chemical and sends it to be measured. Within a few months, they had repurposed this technology to mass-test for 6PPD-Q. 

Soon, researchers were able to process up to 100 samples a day and get results within minutes.

With hundreds of volunteers taking samples in waterways across Vancouver Island, over the last three years their lab has gathered what Krogh believes is the single largest dataset of 6PPD-Q samples in the world.

When Kulchyski heard about the team’s goal of finding 6PPD-Q “hotspots” on Vancouver Island, he put Fish Gut Alley onto their radar.

Kulchyski and the researchers wanted to understand what was going on in the area, past and present. Since their bleak early-morning discovery in June 2007, Kulchyski, Elliott and Aquino had witnessed other, similar fish kills in the area. At times, researchers say they can recognize urban stormwater that likely contains 6PPD-Q, visible as a cloudy sediment or sometimes an oily sheen. 

“To us it’s like a horror film, because you just see this big dark cloud, and then six or seven or eight thousand fish are dead,” said Kulchyski. 

Initially, everyone involved in the original Fish Gut Alley incident thought low oxygen levels must have been the culprit, and Elliott said he is still convinced that’s the case.

In this case, stormwater sits in a reservoir before being pumped out into the environment and bacteria end up growing in there and consuming the oxygen, and then when it is released it can kill the juvenile salmon, Elliott said.

But Aquino ran on-site tests at the time, and though oxygen levels were low, she said in her estimation they weren’t low enough to kill the fish. She also took a gasping, dying fish out to the Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo to run tests, but nothing came of it.

“We could never really figure it out,” she said. “There was no real smoking gun.”

But in March of 2024, the researchers at Vancouver Island University finally found a clue that connected everything. 

After several days of rain, a stormwater sample taken in the morning at Fish Gut Alley measured levels of 6PPD-Q at hundreds of nanograms per litre, far beyond the concentration that had killed coho in the lab.

“That concentration is certainly higher than most,” Jaeger said. And it’s not the only sample in the area that has tested well above what is safe. As a result, the team designated Fish Gut Alley a priority site and installed an automated collector there last summer to take samples every hour during rain events.

“It’s a great example where we’ve identified a hotspot, and so now we can work to solve it,” Krogh said. Urban streams can have dozens of storm drain outfalls, which means measuring stormwater for 6PPD-Q levels can be a huge task, he said. “Where do you start? Can we fix them all? I mean, that’s overwhelming. Let’s find which ones are problematic, and let’s address them.”

Can it be stopped?

Because 6PPD-Q is hydrophobic, like oil, it tends to stick not only to the test membranes used by the university researchers, but also to soil. And it turns out this is an important part of how the chemical might be mitigated.

Tests being run by researchers at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver show an approximate 90 per cent removal of 6PPD-Q from stormwater when they run it through “rain gardens.” These are green areas near roads that filter runoff through soil and plant roots before re-entering the environment. Krogh is currently working with his research partners on three rain gardens planned for various locations around Vancouver Island, and a fourth is already under construction in Langford, just outside of Victoria.

Promising results have also come from using filters made from coconut husks and biochar — a carbon-rich, charcoal-like substance made from dried plant waste.

At Washington State University, when roadway runoff went through a bioretention system made from 18 inches of sand and compost, it prevented salmon deaths for the entire 13 years the study ran, McIntyre said.

The upside of the whole thing is that researchers already know so much more about the problem now than they did even two or three years ago, Krogh said. For example, their team recently found that even when fresh water is repeatedly run through collected tire sediment samples, it doesn’t seem to dilute the concentration of 6PPD-Q. This means that when tire particles are sitting at the side of a creek, they remain a long-term contamination source despite repeated rains.

“It’s not just one and done. So we really have to deal with the particles and make sure that we handle those carefully, so that we’re not putting them somewhere else in the ecosystem or in the watershed and then they become a source somewhere else.”  

Krogh maintains a cautious sense of optimism that the problem is “solvable.” However, hurdles still exist. Regulating the high volume of 6PPD-Q in the environment is difficult, and finding an alternative chemical with the same properties, but less harmful, is also tricky.

The Canadian government included 6PPD and 6PPD-Q on a priority list for assessment starting in the winter of 2025. This is a step towards the chemical’s possible regulation, under the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act.

However, the Tire and Rubber Association of Canada (TRAC) tried to delay a potential assessment in 2024 to see what regulation happened in the U.S. first, according to documents obtained by The Narwhal through a freedom of information request.   

Governments should not prematurely restrict the use of 6PPD as it could “have enormous public safety and economic consequences,” wrote association president Carol Hochu to then-environment and climate change minister Steven Guilbeault, in an April 1, 2024 letter.

The association believes a deferral of regulation is still the best approach, given the “extensive regulatory activity” underway in the U.S., which includes a search for safe alternatives to 6PPD, communications manager Michal Majernik told The Narwhal by email.

Potential alternatives to 6PPD are being explored by the U.S. Tire Manufacturers Association, which releases a yearly analysis on its findings.

In response to the hurdles, researchers also published a paper in the scientific journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters in the summer of 2025, outlining what an international regulatory framework for 6PPD-Q might look like. It also highlighted some of the broader political issues at play.

For example, vehicle pollution disproportionately impacts “under-resourced and underserved communities, who tend to live closer to traffic.” The paper notes it also affects food sources for Indigenous Peoples, and describes this higher level of tire chemical exposure as an act of “environmental injustice.”

A warning for salmon

Kulchyski caught his first fish at eight years old — a coho salmon, with a spear he made himself. He gave it to his Elders, because that’s what you do when you catch your first fish, he said. It’s a cultural practice and a full-circle philosophy of generational caretaking.

“If you look after your family, when you become an Elder, then your family will look after you,” he said. “If we don’t look after them, it’s a sign that we’re not looking after ourselves. And so if we look after salmon, not only are they healthy and happy, they return and nourish us. It’s a pretty simple system.” 

He caught the coho in Fish Gut Alley, when historical runs of salmon were once so abundant the area was named after the mounds of decaying salmon that died there after spawning. That’s how it was when he was a kid, Kulchyski remembers. But in the decades since, things have changed.

In the broader Cowichan River system, coho numbers have shown a steady decline of more than 90 per cent since the 1970s, though they’ve rebounded somewhat in the last five years. 

“How we’ve treated the landscape, how we’ve treated the land, the dyking and all these other issues, have really pushed almost every pressure that there is that you can exert on fish and fish habitat on this one little stretch,” he said.

A verdant gem hidden in plain sight, Fish Gut Alley is nestled into a suburban neighbourhood in Duncan, and most of the dog walkers and joggers that use its wide gravel trails nearby are likely unaware they’re only steps away from crucial juvenile salmon rearing and spawning habitat.

Though unremarkable to the untrained eye, the area’s shallow protected pools, fallen logs and slow-moving streams are ideal for juvenile coho to hang out in and get strong before heading out to the ocean, Kulchyski said.

It’s hard to get around the negative mindset that things are hopeless, that everything could crash and salmon could just stop existing, Kulchyski said. But for him, giving up is simply not an option.

“That doesn’t exist in our mental scenario of the world. It’s kind of like saying, ‘Hey, you know what? You’re gonna lose one of your children,’ ” he said. “I don’t think so.”

Though 6PPD-Q is not the only problem facing salmon in the area, he views it as something that could  change the way people think about environmental protections, “sort of a stepping stone to introducing us into a new thought process and a new methodology that allows us to do things differently, treat these systems differently, think of fish differently,” he said.

At present, Kulchyski is working with university researchers and the City of Duncan to look at mitigating 6PPD-Q at source, by targeting the stormwater gathered from nearby streets that is held in reservoirs before flowing into salmon habitat.

“We are treating our water so poorly, and not looking after all the issues we bring forward. On all of the bridges and all of the highways, there’s 6PPD-Q coming in everywhere,” he said.

“I certainly don’t know all of the solutions, but I know if we actually start incorporating these concerns and these issues in building new bridges and building new treatment systems, it will immediately make a huge difference.”

On-the-ground reporting for this story was made possible with support from Carleton University’s Leonard Shifrin and Louise Dulude Canadian Social Policy Emerging Reporter Fund. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, no foundation or outside organization has editorial input into our stories.

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

Sherry McIntyre lives an hour’s drive away from the nearest grocery store. Between gas prices, vehicle maintenance and rising grocery costs, the bills add up quickly. 

“Bringing all that food back is also a challenge. You need coolers,” McIntyre told The Narwhal. 

She’s an elected councillor from the Skuppah Indian Band, located two kilometres south of Lytton, B.C.

Forgetting your standard grocery bag will cost you a few dollars, while purchasing a cooler or thermal storage bag to properly store cold foods during long drives will cost you at least $20 during the summer months.

It’s one small way her remote community and others in the southern Interior experience inequities accessing food, while larger disasters have cut the community off from grocery store access completely.

But long before grocery stores existed in B.C., First Nations harvested and preserved salmon during summer fish camps, creating food security throughout the winter months.

Today, accessing wild salmon is more challenging, contributing to food insecurity and an overall disconnect from traditional food. But it’s also more important than ever.

McIntyre grew up fishing the country’s largest salmon run with her father and says that for younger generations today, including her children, “fishing has become so scarce.”

“When your harvest is not as big, you don’t get to fully process all of the salmon that you need. If you only end up with 20 fish a year, you’re just going to freeze it,” she said.

As of August 25th and according to the Pacific Salmon Commission, this year’s sockeye salmon run came in at 2.8 million. The organization estimated 7.7 million last winter.

As salmon are declining across the province, communities are stepping up to keep their access to traditional food strong.

A place to gather, process and store food

In August, Skuppah Indian Band members taught specialized fish preparations, including wind-dried fish, smoked fish and canned fish — all at the community’s food security centre.

The nation decided to build a food security centre back in 2019. Food access and affordability were already challenging at the time. 

During the global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, food became even harder to access amid lockdowns, staffing shortages and supply chain disruptions. Indigenous and remote communities were hit the hardest by food insecurity linked to the pandemic. Then came a year full of climate disasters in British Columbia. 

“In 2021, the Lytton fire took out all of the services in town and cut us off from travelling to get groceries,” McIntyre said. It was only the first record-breaking disaster of the year.

“The atmospheric river came in November and decimated any hope we had of feeding ourselves, because it blocked grocery trucks from coming.”

Those disasters informed the final stages of the Skuppah food security centre including adding private food storage for community members, with a generator installed in the event of a power outage.

“We really honed in on what the needs were for emergency response and climate change, building on the original concept of providing a place for community to gather and prepare food,” McIntyre said.

The space is equipped with a commercial kitchen, high-end pressure canners, freeze dryers to create shelf-stable food that lasts years and more, all designed to make community gatherings and food distributions as easy as possible. 

Since opening in 2022, the food security centre has served as a place for the Skuppah Indian Band to process and store food, including huckleberries and salmon.

The centre has a stockpile of food, a disaster precaution learned in 2021 when roads were flooded out or closed due to fire.

“We’ve had so much positive feedback from our members. Having a space like this does something special when you can come and gather, because it’s a space for loving one another and for supporting one another,” McIntyre said.

At Nlaka’pamux fish camp, traditional fishing techniques are passed on to the next generation

Raymond Phillips, a member of Lytton First Nation, facilitated dip net tying at this year’s community fish camp in Incluckcheen. He says that fish camps are a place for the community to exchange knowledge and create food security within the nation. 

“People leave the fish camp with food. This is survival food, but it’s also really good food. It’s high quality and very nutritious … it has sustained us for thousands of years,” he said. 

Phillips grew up fishing the Fraser and Thompson rivers, learning how to tie dip nets back in the 1980s. Dip nets are a traditional way of harvesting salmon in B.C., only allowed for First Nations in the province.

Tying the dip net and making the hoop and pole requires technique, patience and practice, all of which Phillips has spent decades accumulating.

“There’s a complexity to it,” he said, but once people get the hang of tying a certain knot, it becomes repetitive and easier to teach others.

His station at fish camp had people of all ages in attendance, wanting to learn about traditional fishing tools and harvesting techniques. In the Interior, dip nets are passed down in families for generations, but handmade nets are harder to come by these days.

“It’s becoming a lost art, so many people are buying commercially made aluminum or nylon nets,” he said. 

Traditionally, fir saplings were used to make the pole and hoop, with Spatsin used to make the net. Phillips and other Nlaka’pamux dip net makers hope to pass those skills on by sharing their knowledge at fish camps.  

Phillips is a provincial judge based out of Kamloops. Before that, he worked as a lawyer and represented Indigenous people charged by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

“As a lawyer I ended up helping quite a few people who were being charged with fishing at closed times, so it became a real challenge for the community to feed themselves in times of scarcity. That’s the cycle we’re in now, the salmon resources are becoming scarce,” he said.

When he was younger, salmon were abundant, but as time went on fishery closures became more common.

“The salmon, it’s one of the largest migrations in the world. They go from the Pacific, go into the Fraser and travel all the way to their spawning grounds. Every community along the way waits for that salmon to get there. It’s disheartening to wait and be told you can’t fish. The populations are dwindling, so it is concerning,” Phillips said. 

Despite those challenges, Indigenous communities work together each run to provide Elders, families and those experiencing food insecurity with salmon. 

That holds true for Cheam First Nation, located near Chilliwack, which hosts an annual community canning day.

Cheam community canning day

Every year, Cheam members look forward to gathering at the local gymnasium, ready to gut, fillet and preserve the year’s salmon. It’s a tradition Stó:lō nations in the Fraser Valley have fought to continue for decades. 

“The whole community is coming together on an assembly line to get our fish canned and vacuum packed,” Justin Pike said.

“We get the community together to help try and get fish out to everybody, not everybody knows how to do it, so it really helps,” he said. 

Pike is an elected councillor in Cheam, and one of many who harvested this year’s sockeye salmon haul to distribute among the community.

He was hands-on at the fish gutting station, with youth and community members watching closely, eager to learn and participate. Reflecting on the number of young people engaged, Pike is confident that his nation will continue its tradition of caring for salmon and harvesting and preserving salmon as a food source for the winter.

“We’re always super grateful to get some fish,” said Pike. 

While cultural knowledge remains strong in Cheam, wild salmon is becoming harder to access. Along with the dwindling salmon numbers and costly fishing gear, Cheam also has a history of facing off against the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada for their right to fish. 

“Cheam is known for defending our right to be on that river, our inherent right to these fish,” Wendy Kelly, a salmon processing facilitator, told The Narwhal.

“Years and years ago, they were one of the only bands that battled to go out fishing when the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada said ‘no, you can’t go fishing,’” she said. The nation had numerous stand-offs with the department in the late 1990s and early 2000s over access to salmon in their traditional waters, led by the late Chief Siōliya June Quipp. 

Cheam is located an hour-and-a-half from downtown Vancouver, home to some of the most lucrative seafood ports in the province and country. Communities located closer to the city are heavily monitored on the water, and with fisheries opening for a few days at a time, the struggle to access wild salmon persists. 

It makes Cheam’s annual canning day a powerful assertion of Indigenous Rights, following the footsteps of their ancestors.

Those rights are inherent to Cheam, but also affirmed in Section 35 of the Canadian Constitution, and by the renowned Sparrow and Marshall decisions made in the 1990s, which affirmed the rights of First Nations to fish, hunt and harvest without unjustified government interference. 

“It’s really medicine when you’re handling those fish,” Kelly said. 

In the Pacific Northwest, salmon is a sacred part of the culture, and has been a main food source for millennia. It’s a connection the Vancouver Aboriginal Health Society works to keep strong.

Urban access to culture and salmon

This month, the Vancouver Aboriginal Health Society is hosting salmon processing and jarring workshops, servicing cultural food and knowledge in the heart of the Downtown Eastside.

“This run came from Boston Bar, right from the river to the centre and processed within hours from the time it came out of the water,” Ruby Harry told The Narwhal.

They have access to salmon all year now,” she said, referring to workshop participants, who had the opportunity to clean, process and learn how to can salmon. 

Harry is from Tl’etinqox t’in, located near Williams Lake, but like many Indigenous people, now resides in an urban setting. She grew up eating traditional foods, and after moving to the city, wanted to help create that access for others.

And with Vancouver being one of the most expensive cities in North America, access to nutritious food can be a challenge. Salmon distributions help to fill that gap.

“Vancouver Aboriginal Health Society is one of the only organizations I know that has given the Downtown Eastside this opportunity to process cultural food,” Harry said. 

Harvesting traditional food must be done within your own territory, so for Indigenous people living away from theirs, wild salmon becomes harder to access. 

Salmon workshops create that opportunity for urban Indigenous people, and support food security with rising grocery costs. The workshops hosted by Harry have no cost for participants and create openings for cultural knowledge to be shared.

“Salmon brings lots of good medicine,” said Harry.

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

Summary

• Alberta’s plan to build a pipeline to B.C.’s south coast includes a new terminal capable of servicing supertankers sailing into the Salish Sea.
• If the project goes ahead, very large crude carriers (VLCCs) capable of carrying up to 2.2 million barrels of oil could be loading up at Roberts Bank in the Fraser River estuary.
• A major expansion of the Roberts Bank superport is already in the works with potentially catastrophic impacts on local endangered species.

At the mouth of B.C.’s largest river, industrial development has encroached on important ecosystems for decades. Now, Canada’s plans to boost shipping infrastructure and create a new terminal for oil tankers could increase stress on endangered species and critical habitat.

The Fraser River is truly vast. Its tributaries carry water from nearly one-quarter of B.C., and its delta — the area where the river’s waters mingle with the Salish Sea — stretches from the Vancouver neighbourhood of Point Grey to the American settlement of Point Roberts.

In between, there are mudflats, sandy beaches, eelgrass beds and salt marshes that provide critical habitat for young salmon, migrating birds and countless other species.

“These are really productive environments for fish, for shellfish, for mammals, for birds,” Misty MacDuffee, a salmon biologist and director of Raincoast Conservation Foundation’s wild salmon program, says. 

Freshwater from the Fraser pushes all the way out to the Gulf Islands and the tidal flow from the Salish Sea can make its way all the way to Mission, MacDuffee told The Narwhal. That mingling of freshwater and saltwater creates crucial habitat for young salmon as they make the transition from river living to ocean swimming.“We’ve got all five species of salmon going into the Fraser. It’s Canada’s most productive salmon system — our largest Chinook producer — and it’s really important for the rearing and the migrations of adult and juvenile salmon.”This region has long been subject to development, from canneries and agriculture, to airports and port infrastructure. But now the pressure is ramping up. 

The pipeline pivot to Roberts Bank

On July 2, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced federal support for $10 billion in infrastructure upgrades at the Roberts Bank superport as part of a memorandum of understanding with B.C. 

In the agreement, the federal government also pledged to preserve the ban on oil tankers transiting the waters near B.C.’s North Coast. Keeping the tanker ban in place “without alteration, suspension or narrowing of scope,” as the agreement states, removed the port at Prince Rupert as an option for the terminus of Alberta’s proposed pipeline. Prince Rupert is Canada’s deepest natural harbour, capable of accommodating very large crude carriers (VLCCs), huge tanker ships capable of carrying up to 2.2 million barrels of oil — three times as much as the largest oil tankers currently servicing the Trans Mountain pipeline.

Later the same day, Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announced plans for a new West Coast pipeline (funded primarily by state-owned pipeline company Trans Mountain), which would follow the same route as the current Trans Mountain pipeline with one key difference: it would detour further south to end at Roberts Bank, instead of in Burnaby. 

Alberta’s submission to the federal Major Projects Office includes a two-berth terminal able to serve very large crude carriers. These ships are 330 metres long — that’s more than three World Cup soccer pitches laid end to end — and have a fully loaded draft of 20 metres. To reach water deep enough for these massive vessels to float in, the terminal’s causeway and jetty would extend about five kilometres out into the Strait of Georgia.

If the project goes ahead, it would be the first time that oil tankers of this size have ever docked in B.C. The largest tankers that can fit beneath the Second Narrows bridge to service Westridge Marine Terminal — the current terminus of the Trans Mountain pipeline — are Aframax tankers, which have a maximum capacity of 800,000 barrels of oil. Currently, even those tankers can only be filled to about 80 per cent, so the port authority has applied to dredge Burrard Inlet to make room for larger loads (a plan the Tsleil–Waututh Nation is fighting). 

On land, the proposed oil terminal would take up 260 hectares — nearly two-thirds the size of Stanley Park. About half of that space would be covered with 15 storage tanks capable of holding 6.5 million barrels.Roberts Bank’s location — hemmed by wetlands, Tsawwassen First Nation treaty lands, parcels in the Agricultural Land Reserve and residential neighbourhoods — raises questions about whether there is enough room for Alberta’s proposal. The Major Projects Office did not respond when asked whether any assessments about fitting the proposed tanker terminal in that location have been completed.A question about whether the oil tanker terminal could be built in conjunction with the proposed port expansion or would have to wait until Roberts Bank Terminal 2 is complete also went unanswered.

The Fraser River estuary has lost 85 per cent of its salmon habitat to the effects of development and there are already plans to double the size of the terminal.

MacDuffee described the estuary as an “incredible natural asset” that has economic and environmental value.

“It supports these vibrant ecosystems that people are travelling from all over the world to visit, to see the Salish Sea, to see whales, to see birds, to see these migrations, to see these special places and here we are moving to take this incredible asset and turn it into an industrial sacrifice zone.”

Tanker terminal piles risk on top of risk

Roberts Bank Terminal 2, as the $3.5-billion planned port expansion is known, would increase the port’s container capacity by 50 per cent. The 2020 federal assessment of Roberts Bank Terminal 2 concluded the expansion’s impact on wetland function, Chinook and chum salmon and southern resident killer whales “is high in magnitude, permanent and irreversible.” In 2023, the federal cabinet concluded the public interest in the port expansion superseded those impacts and approved the project, subject to nearly 400 conditions.

In 2025, the Vancouver Port Authority submitted Roberts Bank Terminal 2 to the Major Projects Office, hoping to see it designated a “nation-building project” and fast-tracked for final approvals. That designation would mean streamlined regulatory processes and assessments.

Alberta’s proposal will also be evaluated by the Major Projects Office. The office did not respond to a question about whether the tanker terminal will be assessed to determine the potential cumulative effects of the project on the Fraser River estuary and Salish Sea.

The proposal to add another terminal and introduce oil supertankers to the Fraser estuary is raising concerns amongst B.C. environmentalists.

“This is supercharging the impact in case of an accident,” Anna Barford, Stand.earth’s oceans campaigner, said. “If we have a spill, if there is a critical problem, if one of these ships loses power and runs aground, we’re looking at incredible devastation in an area that is wildly biodiverse … at the mouth of a very important salmon-bearing river.”

The logistics of bringing such large vessels into the crowded waters of the Salish Sea is also a concern, Barford added.For MacDuffee, the tanker terminal proposal flies in the face of the federal government’s acknowledgement of the Fraser estuary’s importance. With more than $2 million in federal funds, Raincoast has been working to restore salmon habitat degraded by marine infrastructure.

“We’re allowing the flow of water — of nutrients, of sediment, of fish, of everything — back onto Sturgeon Bank, trying to restore the function of this estuary and the opportunity for rearing salmon,” MacDuffee told The Narwhal.

Port expansion poses significant risk to endangered species and critical habitat

Even without adding an oil tanker terminal to the mix, Roberts Bank Terminal 2’s impact on endangered species could be catastrophic, Barford said. 

“We’re looking at increased underwater noise, which we know is very difficult for fish and for creatures like southern resident killer whales that use echolocation to find their food.” 

More than 100 species in the Fraser River estuary are at risk of local extinction by 2045, a 2022 study found. At-risk species include the southern resident orca, whose population was just 74 individuals as of last year’s census. 

Many migrating bird species, including the western sandpiper, could also be negatively impacted by the terminal expansion. During their annual migration from Peru to Alaska, western sandpipers stop in the Fraser estuary, where they fuel up on biofilm, communities of microorganisms that flourish on the estuary’s mudflats. Losing access to this crucial food source would be a significant blow to western sandpipers and the many other migratory bird species.

“Roberts Bank is critical habitat,” Barford said. “Just because it looks muddy … doesn’t mean that it isn’t a paradise for endangered and migratory species.”

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Morning light streams into the tiny, five-seat helicopter as it hovers above the Tranquil Creek watershed in Clayoquot Sound, B.C. It turns into what seems like a collision course with a cliff, but a landing pad appears just in time.

After a minute of careful positioning, the chopper touches ground on a bed of freshly cut grass and branches, allowing Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation’s natural resources manager Saya Masso and lead guardian Tattuuskulth (Tatt) Charlie to step outside.

They’ve come to see a mine shaft with an entranceway small enough that Masso ducks down to look inside. It looks like a relic from the gold rush, but there are a few conspicuously new things stashed at the entrance: a shiny white construction hat, plastic bags and a long orange hose coiled in a pile. 

For Masso and Charlie, they’re quiet reminders that what began here more than a century ago has yet to conclude.

In February, Canadian mining company Imperial Metals received a permit to explore for gold at the long-dormant Fandora mine site on Vancouver Island’s west coast. For the next five years, the company is allowed to pick and prod underground in the hopes of accessing the site’s mostly untapped resources. 

Masso is worried about Hiłsyaqƛis, the name for the Tranquil Creek watershed in Nuu-chah-nulth. Problems at this remote site in the middle of rain-drenched temperate forest could easily metastasize. 

“Positive change is gradual,” he says, “but negative change can happen so quick.”

Clayoquot Sound is home to the some of the largest intact old-growth forests on Vancouver Island, and remains a key refuge for massive red cedars, orcas and Pacific salmon. About 20 kilometres from the mine site, these lands and waters now underpin the tourism economy of Tofino, B.C. First Nations including Tla-o-qui-aht have spent decades protecting the region, helping to shape its economic future. According to Tourism Tofino, visitors spent $430 million in the region in 2024. 

Tofino Mayor Dan Law was careful to clarify the municipality has no jurisdiction over a prospective mine outside its boundaries, but says a mine in the sound “seems like a no-go.”

“Clearly, the wealth of Clayoquot Sound is not in resource extraction,” Law says from his office on a tree-lined street in the heart of town.

Masso puts things a little more bluntly. “A gold mine will never open in Clayoquot Sound in this tenure,” he says. The Tla-o-qui-aht have opposed Imperial Metals’ efforts to search for gold on the site for more than a decade.

“It goes against our spiritual plan, our cultural plan, our tourism plan, so we’re asking ministers and leaders in B.C. to help turn this around, to put a pause on it, put an injunction on it,” Masso says.

The Tofino Chamber of Commerce also opposes the plan. 

“This would be extensively damaging to our business community,” Graydon Clerk, executive director of the Tofino Chamber of Commerce, says. The association recently sent a letter to the province outlining its concerns.

Imperial Metals did not respond to The Narwhal’s multiple requests for comment. 

B.C.’s Ministry of Mining and Critical Minerals told The Narwhal the permit doesn’t allow activities beyond the current exploration plan. Anything more would require a new decision under the province’s Mines Act.

“The Ministry remains committed to strong environmental oversight, safe mining practices and ongoing consultation with First Nations and partners,” it added. 

Pressure from the growing price of gold

East of Clayoquot Sound, a broader debate over Canada’s future is unfolding.

“Canada has what the world wants,” Prime Minister Mark Carney told a room of the world’s elite at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, earlier this year, signalling his government’s open-for-business ethos. And the world wants gold.

Gold is among Canada’s largest exports, after oil and gas. Thanks to skyrocketing prices, the precious metal has boosted the profile of Canada’s stock exchange and contributed to the country’s claimed success diversifying its exports away from the U.S. To facilitate a resource-sector renaissance, Canada, B.C. and other provinces have promised to push major projects through — and quickly.

The Tla-o-qui-aht are no strangers to the treasures beneath their territory. Copper and gold from the region have long been used in ceremonies and to adorn regalia. “They had monumental value,” Tla-o-qui-aht Chief Elmer Frank tells The Narwhal in an interview. 

By the late 1800s, word had gotten out, and prospectors flooded the region as the north’s Klondike Gold Rush wound down. The efforts were buoyed by B.C.’s mining laws, which allowed settlers to stake out mineral rights simply by driving posts into the ground.

The Fandora mine site was first staked in the 1930s, but in 1940, the mine had yet to produce the equivalent of a large gold bar. It has sat mostly dormant for half a century. 

Meanwhile, Tofino grew. 

In 2000, Clayoquot Sound was declared a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, marking it as a global priority for conservation. The town’s new boom was in whale-watching, five-star hotels and fancy restaurants. Today, Tofino’s population surges from about 2,500 year-round locals to more than 12,000 during its summer peak.

But in February, as gold prices soared, British Columbia approved a five-year permit for Imperial Metals, under its wholly-owned subsidiary, Selkirk Metals Corp., to see whether Fandora’s reserves are worth the cost of constructing a mine. 

Documents obtained by The Narwhal show the company plans to dig a series of metre-wide trenches, some as long as two football fields, to determine if trace amounts of gold in the soil signal riches below. The company has also mapped out six drill pads, each roughly the size of a small house, some as close as 110 metres from the river. Drilling will likely require thousands of litres of water for each hole. On the company’s proposed exploration map, there are three “helicopter drill pad water sources” listed in Tranquil Creek’s tributaries. According to its permit, “road-access drilling” will not use water from Tranquil Creek or its tributaries. 

In its permit application materials, Imperial Metals noted it will seek to reuse and reduce water as much as possible. The company’s permit also requires it take steps to accommodate traditional harvest and cultural practices during its exploration work, among other requirements.

In the documents, Imperial Metals noted the intensity of this project in its first year will depend on how much funding the company obtains. “We may only drill one or two holes,” it added. Its permit allows it to drill another 15 house-sized drill pads in yet-undisclosed locations across the Tranquil Creek watershed and its adjacent valley.

The documents also suggest gold on the property extends farther than previously understood. “After a long hiatus in exploration, modern soil geochemistry was completed on the property, which successfully extended the anomalous gold horizon along strike of the known veins,” an August 2025 Notice of Work document obtained by The Narwhal states.

Imperial Metals did not respond to The Narwhal’s questions about its plans.

A mine surrounded by tribal parks

As the lead guardian for Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation, Charlie doesn’t miss a beat when asked which of his many tasks he prefers. 

“Hands down, my favourite is trail building,” he says.

Trails extend throughout the nation’s tribal parks, which now encompass Tla-o-qui-aht’s entire territory, more than 1,000 square kilometres. Within tribal parks, industry and economic development aren’t categorically excluded. But their acceptance is contingent on support from the nation and other locals who aim to ensure industry doesn’t come at the expense of what ecosystems and communities need to thrive. 

“It’s a vision that the region can stand behind,” Masso says. 

The province has yet to recognize tribal parks within its own legal system — and where some form of recognition exists, it has been hard-won.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, members of Tla-o-qui-aht and ʕaaḥuusʔatḥ (Ahousaht) First Nations discovered logging giant MacMillan Bloedel had plans to clear-cut almost all of Meares Island, home of ecologically important intact forests. In response, Tla-o-qui-aht declared its first tribal park across Meares in its entirety. The province granted the company’s logging permits anyway.

A blockade led by the Tla-o-qui-aht ensued, sparking the first of a series of blockades in Clayoquot Sound which eventually led to the War in the Woods. In 1985, the B.C. Court of Appeal decided the nations’ yet-to-be-recognized Aboriginal Title should outweigh the company’s right to short-term profit.

According a paper published by lawyer and professor Douglas Harris, the decision helped shape a key turning point. Indigenous Rights claims were no longer a point of curiosity for the courts. Now they had legal weight.

Today, Meares Island remains off-limits to logging, protecting the District of Tofino’s sole source of drinking water. But elsewhere in the territory, including in the Tranquil watershed, areas within tribal parks had no such safeguards.

That is, until recently.

‘Consent of affected First Nations is not a legal requirement,’ B.C. government says

In spring 2024, B.C., Tla-o-qui-aht and neighbouring ʕaaḥuusʔatḥ announced a set of protected areas across Clayoquot Sound and throughout the Tla-o-qui-aht Nation’s tribal parks. “It’s a monumental occasion,” Masso said at the time. 

In theory, the conservancies would recognize some principles of the Tla-o-qui-aht’s tribal parks within B.C.’s laws, and they came with commitments: B.C. promised the areas would have no commercial forestry within their boundaries, nor any mining activity. 

To Masso, it remains a partial victory: The Tranquil Creek conservancy B.C. put forward has a big hole in the middle, shaped seemingly to avoid overlap with Imperial Metals’ mining claims.

Masso says he remembers the province’s reassurances. “They said, ‘This is just the first step,’ ” he says. “‘We’ll make more as we do more work to resolve overlaps or tenures, and we’ll add it.’ ”

But that hasn’t happened. 

Instead, Masso received an email from the province in December 2025, which revealed Imperial Metals was about to return. After a few years of what Chief Frank described as “one-way” consultation, the company was on the precipice of receiving a renewed exploration permit.

Masso was stunned. “We said, ‘Wait a second, they’re considering issuing this,’ ” he says. “We wrote a very stern letter reminding them that they couldn’t.”

Two months later, the province approved Imperial’s permit anyway.

In an emailed statement, B.C.’s Ministry of Mines and Critical Minerals said its decision was based on the exploration activity alone. 

The ministry added “Consent of affected First Nations is not a legal requirement” but that it “seeks to reach consensus in decision making and considers all input from First Nations in that process.”

“Input received informs decision making,” it added. 

ʕaaḥuusʔatḥ, whose territory overlaps with areas within Imperial Metals’ Fandora claim, did not respond to The Narwhal’s interview request. 

Indigenous consent and the country’s relationship to it are an increasingly charged lightning rod in Canadian politics. In 2019, B.C. committed to integrate the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or UNDRIP, into its own laws, including the principle of free, prior and informed consent.

More recently, the B.C. Court of Appeal found the province’s mineral tenure system inconsistent with UNDRIP, as incorporated into provincial law through the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA). The province appealed the ruling, which is now waiting to be heard by the Supreme Court of Canada. In the meantime, Premier David Eby attempted to suspend parts of the Declaration Act, a move that was widely criticized and stopped, in part, by the NDP government’s own members. The government says it will revisit the issue in the fall legislative session.

Sara Ghebremusse, an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia’s Allard School of Law, cautions against efforts to go backwards, particularly given the growing body of international and national law recognizing the weight of Indigenous Rights. 

“This is going to be a long-term issue,” she says.

The cost of gold

At the Fandora site, gold comes wrapped up with sulphides. Under certain conditions, the compound turns water into acid that can leach heavy metals into the watershed.

To curb that risk, mines generally store waste rock underwater and away from oxygen. But in rain-drenched Clayoquot Sound, accumulating pools of tailings could overflow, meaning if built a mine would likely require long-term drainage systems and monitoring. 

“Water is always a problem,” Scott Dunbar, a professor of mining engineering at the University of British Columbia, says. “If an accident occurs, the first question is always ‘Where did the water get out?’ ”

For the time being, Imperial’s exploration permit requires it to mitigate the potential for acid mine drainage through identifying and safely disposing of rocks capable of causing it.

Gold is also famously stubborn for clinging to its host rocks, which means heavy-duty chemicals are used in extraction. Cyanide leaching is the most common method of choice. Companies aim to isolate the obviously noxious chemical and keep it contained, but tailings that are left over are likely contaminated.

Meanwhile, the Tranquil Creek watershed is already on life support. 

After the valley bottom was logged extensively in the 1960s and 1970s, loggers moved into the hills, destroying root systems that held the region’s crumbly till in place. Landslides ensued, helping turn Tranquil Creek, a key spawning ground for Pacific salmon, into a danger zone capable of suffocating salmon eggs beneath gravel or washing them out to sea. By 2017, resident Chinook and chum salmon had almost disappeared.

With the Redd Fish Restoration Society, Tla-o-qui-aht is working to restore the watershed, including installing a series of costly but effective human-made log-jams to slow the water and building terraces in the landslides to choke off the gravel taps. Collectively with other groups, about $6 million has been spent restoring the Tranquil so far. Recent years of boosted salmon returns are providing some hope.

Charlie warns of the risks of backsliding in the Tranquil. “Mining is one thing that will just throw it over the edge,” he says. 

In a recent article in the publication Ha-Shilth-Sa, Imperial Metals CEO Brian Kynoch noted the mine would “most likely” be underground, not in an open pit, and that it would target only “narrow” gold veins. He also said Imperial Metals “remains committed to engaging respectfully with First Nations and local communities as the project moves forward.”

Kynoch has previously described the project as “artisanal.”

But the company has a checkered past: In 2014, the company’s “crown jewel” gold and copper mine, Mount Polley, became the site of the largest mining waste disaster in Canada’s history when its tailings dam breached. More than 25 billion litres of water and mine waste, including lead, cadmium and arsenic, spilled into the surrounding watershed. Later reporting showed the province warned the company about stability concerns in its tailings dam at least five times before the disaster occurred. 

In 2018, the company faced significant financial challenges and there was concern it might file for bankruptcy. But even if a mine is never built, Imperial could profit from the claim. In B.C., mining companies stand to be compensated if they withdraw claims to make way for new protected areas. In 2022, Imperial Metals received $24 million to relinquish its claim area in the Skagit Headwaters. 

“It doesn’t make any sense at all to let them drill it if the only end result is to compensate them to not mine,” Masso says.

Imperial Metals did not reply to The Narwhal’s request for comment.

‘It’s still a beautiful place’

Once we’re back in the helicopter’s bucket seats, the chopper ascends from the cliff face and travels on through the Tranquil watershed. 

Uniform patches of short, stubby trees extend across the valley bottom, but the forests transform as we fly higher, farther from the reach of roads and access points. Soon the chopper tips toward the deep blue bowl of a mountain lake, its water still and inky blue. 

“It’s still a beautiful place,” Masso says. “Even if it’s still in recovery.”

From up above, Tofino’s growth is hard to ignore. Multimillion-dollar vacation homes sprawl across the coastline. Masso peers out the window, thinking about an old photo of Tofino in the 1960s with just a scattering of homes. He knows more change is on the way. 

“Imagine another 80 years from now,” he says. “People are gonna say, ‘Look at what it was like.’ ”

Tourism has its challenges: Tofino is short on water and housing. Charlie and the other Tla-o-qui-aht Guardians sometimes spend days cleaning up after visitors who leave their trash on the beach and backcountry. 

But these are the challenges that Tla-o-qui-aht and the town of Tofino are choosing to grapple with, and there is work underway to smooth out the industry’s edges. Local businesses, for example, are now encouraged to collect a one per cent “responsible visitor fee” from customers to support restoration and protection in Tla-o-qui-aht’s tribal parks program. 

“We live together,” Tofino Mayor Law says. “We see this as a present and future relationship.”

Back on the ground, Masso and Charlie get ready to return to their day’s business. Masso is thinking about the coming heat and wildfires, and asks to see the helicopter company’s firefighting equipment. Moments of pause are few and far between. 

Masso had hoped the nation’s tribal parks would ward off ill-fitting visions of the region’s future. 

“We could spend our time building longhouses and rebuilding rivers, doing positive things for our children,” he says.

“But now I have to spend the next couple of years opposing a gold mine.”

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Wearing regalia bearing the raven crests of his mother’s clan, S’mooygyet (Chief) Algax’m Hax, Murray Smith, of the Gitwilgyoots Tribe, shared where he comes from. Sharing his lineage is a necessary precursor to welcoming visitors to his lands, he explained.

“When I get up here to speak, I have to tell you who I really am,” he told a group gathered in Prince Rupert, B.C., earlier this month. “My grandfather is Haida. My mother’s mother was Ts’msyen from Lax Kw’alaams.”

“There’s a word in my language called sg̱an,” he continued. “Sg̱an is a welcome mat made out of cedar and they place it at the bow of a canoe. When the Chief steps off, he doesn’t step on the ground, he steps on the welcome mat.”

“Chiefs, matriarchs, high-ranking women, young people that are here: the welcome mat is out,” he declared.

Algax’m Hax is a Hereditary Chief of the Gitwilgyoots, one of the Nine Allied Tribes of Lax Kw’alaams. Ten years ago, he and other chiefs signed the landmark Lelu Island Declaration, placing vital salmon habitat in the Skeena River estuary under the protection of Indigenous laws. In solidarity with the Gitwilgyoots Chiefs, leaders of First Nations and elected officials from across the region signed onto the declaration, which extended an invitation to all to join in “defending this unique and precious place and to protect it for all time.”

At the time, the estuary — one of the most productive and ecologically important salmon habitats in B.C. — was threatened by the looming prospect of a major liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal, which was to be built on the island. The following year, Malaysian oil and gas giant Petronas cancelled its plans to build the Pacific Northwest LNG facility. A totem pole was raised on the island, to keep watch and assert stewardship. Two years later, the Prince Rupert Port Authority imposed a development moratorium over the sensitive area.

This spring, as juvenile salmon migrated from the creeks and rivers out to the ocean, Indigenous leaders and allies met to mark the anniversary of the declaration and talk about the future of salmon stewardship in the estuary and watershed. Algax’m Hax spoke to the importance of salmon and expressed solidarity with all who give of themselves to protect the species.

“I see you all here fighting for one thing, and that’s for our salmon,” he said. “So goes the salmon, so do we.”

He looked around the room and said he was called to speak by his fellow chief, Yahaan, who wasn’t able to attend the gathering. He said he phoned Yahaan the night before the event and asked what he should say.

“He said, ‘You’ll find your words,’ ” Algax’m Hax recounted. “It’s easy when I sit amongst people that care, people that dedicate themselves to the wellness of our salmon here on the North Coast, on the coast altogether. I take my hat off to you.”

Salmon connect ‘communities, cultures and generations’

The protection of Lelu Island — and Flora and Agnew Banks, the delicate estuarine habitat around the island — took years of dedication and sacrifice by Indigenous and non-Indigenous leaders and community members. 

Loggers, commercial fishers, scientists, politicians and more agreed building a massive LNG facility in the sensitive estuary would be a catastrophic mistake with far-reaching impacts on the livelihoods and cultures of communities across the region. Weaving Indigenous science and academic research, allyship and land defence, people from across the Skeena watershed and beyond came together to stand up for the salmon, sending ripples far and wide.

“Salmon do something extraordinary,” Julia Hill, executive director of SkeenaWild, said at the two-day event. “They connect ecosystems … communities, cultures and generations. They’re part of the social, cultural and economic fabric of this place.”

In the years since the declaration was signed, Indigenous and non-Indigenous salmon stewardship and science has been ongoing throughout the Skeena watershed. At the gathering, representatives from Fisheries and Oceans Canada presented alongside environmental organizations, academics and First Nations. 

Jonathan Moore, director of the Salmon Watersheds Lab at Simon Fraser University, said the reason the species is able to thrive today is because of this unity and the continuity of stewardship.

“Right now, as we gather, literally hundreds of millions of young salmon are migrating down from throughout the Skeena, potentially hundreds of kilometres away, and they’re all coming down just around the corner and they’re hitting the ocean,” he said, grinning. “It gives me chills, honestly, to think about that phenomenon that unfolds every year because of these intact ecosystems that have been stewarded for millennia.”

But while the protections of Lelu Island remain in place, wild salmon continue to face multiple threats. Many populations across the watershed are struggling. 

“This region is experiencing enormous pressure and rapid change, from climate change and warming waters to industrial expansion and growing global demand for resources,” Hill said. “At the same time, many communities here depend on resource-based economies. So the question isn’t development or no development. The question is how much, where and to whose benefit.”

That tension is rising amid talk about new pipelines from Alberta and the spectre of lifting the oil tanker moratorium on the North Coast. A slew of projects supported by the provincial and federal governments are putting increased pressure on already-impacted salmon habitat throughout the northwest. 

All of this is set against a backdrop of talk by the provincial government about amending or repealing B.C.’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act. It leads some to fear hard-won battles like the protection of Lelu Island could be undermined by an onslaught of new industrial developments that would provide little benefit to the communities who would pay the highest costs.

“We’re witnessing this backlash against Indigenous Rights, against Indigenous stewardship, against title to the land being recognized,” Naxginkw Tara Marsden, Wilp sustainability director with the Gitanyow Hereditary Chiefs, said. “We’re at a critical juncture for salmon stewardship and for the well-being of our communities.”

Marsden emphasized the intersection between rights and responsibilities.

“If we receive a full basket, we have to make sure we pass on a full basket,” she said. “So in my lifetime, if I see the salmon stocks decline to a point of extirpation, then I haven’t done my job for my kids, my grandkids.”

‘This impacts everybody’

For Grace Vickers, daughter of Andrea Vickers and revered carver Roy Henry Vickers, all conversations about stewardship and economy need to start from a shared baseline. Introducing herself as Heiltsuk belonging to the House of Walkus, she spoke about the importance of place-based knowledge.   

“What’s important today is what is sustaining us,” she said, during a youth panel at the gathering. “It’s the air we breathe, it’s the fish we eat and it’s the water we drink.”

Vickers and four other young women — Nasya Moore, Oasis Cleveland, Drew Harris and Kayla Mitchell — shared what it’s like being young at a time when so much is changing. They spoke about cultural disconnection and reconnection and the strength and restorative value of spending time on the land, harvesting and processing fish.

Harris, who is Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan, said she sees how land protections, human rights and stewardship of the likes of salmon can become siloed.

“Like: there’s the fish, there’s the land, there’s the people, there’s the health,” she said. “But it’s all connected. We can’t just silo these things and differentiate them and not talk about it together. Just seeing the different connections and looking from a different perspective can really help you understand the full picture and how to treat that problem.”

She said acknowledging the scale of the problems facing communities can be unifying and called out fossil fuel expansions as a global issue.

“Everywhere we go, we meet the youth and they all have their own projects that they’re fighting,” she said. “It’s sad but it connects us all together.”

“This fight isn’t just for the Indigenous people,” she added. “This impacts everybody.”

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Summary

• Historically, First Nations in B.C. who lived near floodplains respected tides and lived nomadically, until settlers disrupted water flow, creating dikes to pursue agriculture and urban development.
• Xwíʔləm̓nəc, or Addington Point Marsh, has been restored to a wetland after three years of collaboration led by Katzie First Nation.
• Restoring wetlands brings life to countless species and helps restore Indigenous people’s connection to their traditional territories. The marsh is part of Canada’s largest salmon-bearing watershed.

On a late April morning, a group of Katzie First Nation land guardians, conservation workers, government representatives and others trek down to Xwíʔləm̓nəc (Addington Point Marsh).

They gather in the First Nation’s Lower Mainland territory to celebrate the long-awaited completion of a wetland restoration project connecting to the Stó:lō (Fraser River).

Mike Leon leads Katzie’s team of eight guardians, and has been involved with the marsh restoration project from the beginning. After everyone bypasses a locked gate — there to reduce the risk of bear-human encounters — they stop by the water, and he addresses the group.

“I would really like to raise my hands to all of you, to the hard work and willingness to work with us, to be with us, to be with this land,” he said.

The restoration project was funded by the B.C. government and the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans, implemented by Katzie First Nation, Resilient Waters, Ducks Unlimited Canada and the Nature Trust of British Columbia, with many helping hands involved.

For three years the partners worked together to reestablish waterflow in the marsh. The wetlands connection to the Pitt River and South Fraser River system was disconnected when early settlers installed a dike, which has since been removed. 

“I love doing the work. I love being on our territory and helping the environment,” Mackenzie Adams, another Katzie guardian, added. Adams monitored the site throughout the project, and collected water and bird surveys to compare data before and after restoration. 

According to the B.C. Wildlife Federation, wetland monitoring is just as important as the initial restoration during a project. “Monitoring, maintenance, and data collection help us evaluate the effectiveness of restoration techniques and improve the performance and function of future projects,” it reads on their website.

Xwíʔləm̓nəc is now letting nature take its course, and with the area being home to one of the country’s largest salmon runs and smallest sandhill crane populations, monitoring the wetland is critical work for Katzie Guardians. 

“I was there one of the first days … comparing the first day to the last day was pretty eye opening because you can already see the differences from the river water coming in. It will be an awesome habitat for all birds and salmon fry,” Adams said. 

While the exact impact is currently unknown, wetland restoration benefits are well documented. Leon’s team will be on top of that data, working with partners to restore and conserve native plants and animals in the area.

Relationships between Katzie Guardians and partners in the project have flourished. A local property owner who attended the celebration shared their initial concerns after seeing excavation equipment clearing a path to the dike, and their relief after learning more about the endeavour. Beyond its environmental impacts, the project has brought people together from all walks of life who want to see salmon and wildlife in and around the Fraser River thrive.

Restoration project had many partners, but Katzie had final say

Dan Straker, the manager for the Resilient Waters project, was a lead organizer under the direction of Katzie Guardians and leadership. 

“With Katzie First Nation, it was determined early on they would have final decision making and be informing the project along the way. All the partners fell in line with that idea and thinking,” Straker told the Narwhal. 

“What we ended up with was this really nice blended way of doing things, from a more two-eyed seeing approach.” 

Leon added that, throughout the endeavour, Katzie brought in their customs, culture and laws.

“It’s really important and special to us to know our place names in our territory. When we have our guardians come out, we’re honored to be on those place names such as Xwíʔləm̓nəc,” Leon said. 

It’s a sentiment shared by Katzie’s guardian coordinator April Pierre. In a quiet moment of emotion in the circle, she addressed a reality shared by many First Nations people: growing up away from her homelands.

The Xwíʔləm̓nəc restoration project gave Pierre an opportunity to spend time on land she had never been to — the land of her ancestors. It’s one emotional moment of many that were shared during the celebration, as others reflected on the marine and wildlife already making appearances in the marsh.

Dikes were built to create flat land for agriculture in the area since the late 1800s. Restoring the marsh’s connection to the river has immense ecological benefits and cultural benefits for local First Nations.

“Conservation organizations in previous decades had a different approach to conservation land management that I think sometimes excluded other organizations and nations,” Ducks Unlimited senior restoration biologist, Eric Balke, said.

“I think we are learning new and better ways of moving forward, more collaborative ways, and this project is a great example of that.”

Balke has been involved with restoring Xwíʔləm̓nəc since brainstorming and planning days, eventually passing the reins to his colleague Alison Martin.

“What excites me about this project is it’s all about restoring relationships,” he said. “You’re restoring the relationship between the river and these wetlands that were formerly alienated by dikes. You’re restoring the relationship between Xwíʔləm̓nəc and juvenile salmon that previously were prevented from accessing the site … it’s also restoring the relationship between Katzie and their kin.”

Wetland restoration benefits salmon

In the Pacific Northwest, both people and the ecosystem know how important salmon is. Xwíʔləm̓nəc is connected to Canada’s largest salmon-bearing watershed, the Fraser River. 

According to the Pacific Salmon Foundation, “floodplains provide critical, food-rich habitat for juvenile salmon. These low-lying areas adjacent to stream channels allow young salmon to grow healthy and strong before their journey to the ocean.”

But dikes disrupt the river’s connection to the marsh, blocking valuable nutrients and harming the salmon and other species.

“Wetlands, such as tidal marshes, help to collect sediment that build up the marsh platform, helping to protect our communities from flooding,” Balke said.

“This land that settlers found is super valuable for farming and agriculture, it was valuable because of the sediment that was delivered, because of the nutrients that were delivered by the river,” he said.

“When we construct dikes we disconnect the river from its floodplain. The river can no longer deliver those critical ingredients.”

A huge benefit of restoring tidal marshes is that they are one of the most effective ways of capturing and storing carbon, contaminants and pollutants that flow downstream. 

Further, Xwíʔləm̓nəc is home to wapoto and tule, two traditional plants for Katzie First Nation that have been impacted from dikes. Restoring the wetland is giving members of the nation hope that these plants can be harvested for food and mat-making once again.

The marsh is also home to sandhill cranes, whose local population has hovered around 30 to 35 birds for decades, Myles Lamont told the Narwhal. He was brought into the project by Katzie as a sandhill crane consultant.

“The remaining birds seem to nest in golf courses and some very small regional parks … Unfortunately they’ve been getting struck by golf balls. Quite commonly over the last 10 to 15 years, I’ve had to rescue a few birds that have had broken legs or injuries as a result of golf ball strikes, particularly in Richmond,” Lamont said. 

He is hopeful that restoring Xwíʔləm̓nəc to a wetland will bring in enough water to create a nesting habitat for the birds, drawing them away from golf courses. As folks went around the sharing circle, Lamont spotted one overhead, calling out, “Crane!” 

“It’s really cool being a part of it. Just knowing that we’re making a difference, I’m making a difference,” Adams said.“The salmon habitat has a place to go throughout the winter and so do the sandhill cranes and birds. It’s a good feeling … I feel accomplished.”

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As the morning sun beams down upon them, dozens of elementary students eagerly make their way from their bus to a large garden plot of soil by the banks of sq’awsitkʷ (the Okanagan River).

Waiting for the group from Outma Sqilx’w Cultural School are shrubs native to syilx homelands — snowberry, chokecherry, saskatoon berry and wild roses — and trees including willow.

The saplings, still in their infancy, are ready to be planted with the help of the children’s hands and enthusiasm. 

“We’re going to save the world! We’re going to save the world!” one student enthusiastically proclaims as they stride along.

And with the guidance of adults — who had brushed the saplings’ roots with mycorrhizal fungi or bone meal fertilizer to help support their growth — the students get to digging and planting. Just steps away, the river roars past. 

The vegetation will not only grow to provide shade and help keep the water cool for future salmon migrating through the passage site, but it’ll also create habitat for different animals, too — birds, rodents and bugs, to name a few.

Changed landscape, restored ecosystem

The community planting event was a two-day effort that began on Nov. 7. Participants planted roughly 500 native species into the land around the dam’s fish passage channel, which opened in August.

At this point the waterway diverts into two channels — the main vein going straight through the Okanagan Lake Dam in sn’pink’tn (Penticton), and a smaller flow bypassing the dam into kɬúsx̌nítkʷ (Okanagan Lake) through the fish passage.

The Okanagan Nation Alliance and several partners built the fish passage around the dam earlier this year to support returning salmon as they migrate to the upstream side of the dam, hoping to spawn in waterways connected to the lake.

“In 10 years, it’ll be an absolutely changed landscape,” said Lee McFadyen, an environmental advocate who helped organize the event.

“It will have a changed feel to it — it will become an ecosystem unto itself.”

For decades, salmon were blocked from moving upriver into the lake because of the dam and channelization — an engineering process to straighten a winding waterway. For thousands of years before settler colonialism, the fish swam freely into kɬúsx̌nítkʷ and its creeks.

McFadyen said this fall season’s salmon run saw the first sockeye in decades return to the lake. 

“The first time since the 1920s,” she said, proudly.

To build the fish passage channel, some trees had to be removed, disturbing soil in the area. McFadyen said part of Okanagan Nation Alliance’s philosophy is to plant native species when soil is disturbed by a project.

Planting event was a ‘collaborative effort’ with over 200 children and adults participating

The group from Outma Sqilx’w Cultural School were among the 115 other students across four schools in the region who took part in the planting event’s first day. 

Additionally, roughly 100 adults joined the planting, too, as well as community youth groups including Penticton Scouts and Venturers.

“What I really love about it is the collaborative effort — the coming together of communities. That is so important,” said McFadyen.

“If we all don’t work together, we’re not going to make it.”

She said it was wonderful to have syilx kids there, whose ancestral relationship with salmon “has been so much part of their history.”

Being out on the land and learning gives the children “a sense of place, a sense of time, a sense of pride and a sense of belonging,” she added.

“One of the things that they might take away — and I hope that they do — is a pride of place, and a reconnection with their past. But moving forward with it.”

She called the planting event “a historical moment” for everyone involved.

“It is righting a wrong,” she said. “It is food for the future for so many species and communities.”

Land-based learning is integral to syilx education, teacher says

nx̌əx̌sítatkʷ Shayla Allison, a culture and language teacher at Outma Sqilx’w Cultural School, accompanied three of her grade school classes to the planting event.

She said that the land-based learning activities that her classrooms engage in — from planting and harvesting, to visiting hunting camps — are “authentic to who we are as a people.”

“Before there were Western systems, schools and classrooms, our children have always learned … by being, connecting, learning and being intimate with the connections around you, like life and land,” Allison said.

“That’s how we survived and lived. We knew about the science of plants, ecosystems, habitat — everything. The ways that we learned came from those ways of connecting with people and places.”

Every week, she said, they go out on the land and learn.

“Just connecting with the land. Also making sure that we’re respectful to the land, and leaving it better than it was when we got here,” she said.

“The way I always try to look at it, is wanting these kids to not learn from a book. Or learn that science is from a Western construct, or done and taught in Western old school ways of sitting in a class.”

The beauty is seeing young people with learning or social challenges “thrive in that outdoor environment” and become “whole new kids.”

“They get out, they’re the ones that are digging in the land — they’re smiling and they’re helpful. You see a new person,” she said.

“You see the value of taking them out, and seeing them be less censored and scared or afraid of being wrong. There is no wrong.”

Whatever teachings they learn on the land are then brought back to the classroom, where they then “solidify what they learned and how they learned it,” Allison said.

“Everyday, they learn how — one, they’re sacred as being children — but also, they can do good things and be helpful, even with learning. Your energy, your prayers and your thoughts go into everything that you do,” she said.

“They learn, each time, about coming with good intentions and good feelings, being helpful.”

Coming in with good intentions enables them to be mindful of where they are and who they’re with, she said.

“We’re all here to learn. We may make mistakes, but we make sure to come with good intentions and heart,” she said.

“It teaches them to be more observant and seeing — seeing the natural world and the people.”

There’s no better place to educate children “than getting out and doing things” through experiential learning, she concluded — “finding a way to connect everything to what we’ve already always known — to be authentic in sqilx’w and Indigenous teachings wherever you can.”

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Less than two months after receiving approvals from the provincial and federal government, Prime Minister Mark Carney has referred the Ksi Lisims liquefied natural gas (LNG) export facility to the Major Projects Office for review.

“Ksi Lisims will become Canada’s second-largest LNG facility with the capacity to export 12 million tonnes of LNG per year to new markets in Asia,” Carney said on Thursday, adding that the project is expected to yield $4 billion per year in gross domestic product.The North Coast transmission line was also on the latest list of projects picked for the Major Projects Office to review. Carney also announced BC Hydro will get a $139.5-million loan from the Canada Infrastructure Bank to support initial work on the transmission line.

The Major Projects Office was created to oversee the Liberal government’s effort to speed up approvals for major infrastructure projects deemed to be of national interest. In September, Carney’s government referred an initial list of candidate projects — including Phase two of the LNG Canada export terminal and the Red Chris Mine expansion in northern B.C. — to the office for consideration.

Ksi Lisims LNG is a joint venture involving the Nisg̱a’a Lisims Government, U.S.-based LNG project developer Western LNG and Canadian natural gas consortium Rockies LNG.

While the B.C. and Canadian governments have emphasized the Nisg̱a’a Lisims Government’s stake in the Ksi Lisims project, documents filed with the B.C. government show the primary owner and operator of Ksi Lisims is Texas-based Western LNG. Employees of Western LNG, which has offices in Houston, Texas and Vancouver, met with senior provincial government officials 69 times since the beginning of 2024, according to B.C. lobbying records.

Both Ksi Lisims and the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission pipeline — which will supply fracked gas to Ksi Lisims and LNG Canada, a larger export terminal in Kitimat, B.C. — are backed by Blackstone Inc., a U.S. investment company.

In March 2024, the Nisg̱a’a Nation and Western LNG announced a deal to buy TC Energy’s proposed Prince Rupert gas pipeline project. The project has also finalized two agreements to sell its product. The agreements commit Shell Canada and TotalEnergies to buying two million tonnes of LNG per year from the plant — totalling roughly one-third of Ksi Lisims’ expected annual production.

Four of the eleven projects referred to the Major Projects Office are in B.C., a fact Premier David Eby highlighted at his own press conference on Thursday.“British Columbia is going to be the economic engine of this new economy that we’re building going forward, and it is great to see some recognition from Ottawa that this is going to be the case,” he said.

The Nisg̱a’a Nation is backing Ksi Lisims but other First Nations oppose it

Nisg̱a’a Lisims Government president Eva Clayton has described Ksi Lisims as an economic opportunity that will benefit the nation and the world.

“Ksi Lisims LNG represents a transformational opportunity for all participating B.C. nations, and it will be developed in line with our nation’s high environmental standards,” Clayton said in a statement emailed to The Narwhal following the approval of Ksi Lisims.

But other First Nations oppose the project. The Lax Kw’alaams Band, for example, is southwest of the newly approved LNG facility and tankers filled with the liquefied gas will pass by the village’s coast regularly. Lax Kw’alaams says the LNG facility would negatively affect its traditional territory and has expressed concerns about the project’s potential impact on B.C.’s ability to meet its climate targets.

In September, B.C.’s environmental assessment office concluded dispute resolution processes initiated by Lax Kw’alaams and the Metlakatla First Nation as part of Ksi Lisims’ environmental assessment. The resolution failed to address the First Nations’ concerns about the project’s potential impacts on their communities, according to the environmental assessment office.

In October 2024, the Gitanyow Hereditary Chiefs, whose traditional territory includes parts of the Nass and Skeena watersheds, filed an application for judicial review with the provincial court. The Hereditary Chiefs alleged the environmental assessment office failed in its duty to consult and to adequately protect fish species was rejected by the court in early September.Simogyet Watakhayetsxw (Hereditary Chief) Deborah Good said Ksi Lisims could destroy habitat essential to local salmon populations.

“We’ve had to go to court to fight for our way of life and especially the continuing health of our salmon stocks,” Good said in a statement. “We won’t give up because for us, this is a fight for our way of life — for the salmon that have sustained our economy, culture, people and way of life since time immemorial.”In October, Lax Kw’alaams and the Metlakatla First Nation each filed requests for judicial review with the Federal Court, alleging the minister of environment and climate change ignored their concerns about the adverse impacts of the massive LNG project.Eby said he expects the Major Projects Office will help the province work toward resolving the “complexity” created by projects that span multiple First Nations’ territories and often involve issues of federal jurisdiction.“That’s very helpful to us to resolve long-standing issues, to win support for the project or to help do things faster,” he said. 

Ksi Lisims may eventually connect to B.C.’s grid, but first it will run on gas

Ksi Lisims is located near the Nass estuary at the north end of Pearse Island, an area that is home to salmon, oolichan and many other fish, as well as shellfish and mammal species important to local First Nations. The floating facility would be capable of producing up to 12 million tonnes of LNG annually. 

Like the second phase of the LNG Canada facility, which was among the first crop of projects earmarked for potential federal fast-tracking in September, Ksi Lisims has been approved by the provincial and federal governments. But it has yet to receive a final investment decision — the definitive commitment to investing in and proceeding with a project — from its backers.

Carney said the Major Projects Office will offer support on financing and “help coordinate timely approvals” of the main aspects of the Ksi Lisims project. That includes the pipeline to supply Ksi Lisims with fracked gas, a new electricity transmission line and the floating LNG export facility, as well as “related transmission infrastructure” — namely, the North Coast transmission line.Ksi Lisims will be “one of the world’s cleanest LNG operations,” according to Carney, who said the facility has “the potential to reach net zero by 2030.” To achieve that goal, Ksi Lisims will need to access clean electricity via the North Coast transmission line.

But the transmission line — which the government has exempted from environmental assessment and plans to block the B.C. Utilities Commission from reviewing — isn’t expected to be operational until 2032, while Ksi Lisims hopes to begin operations in 2028. That would have left the facility out of compliance with a 2023 provincial regulation requiring all LNG facilities to be net zero by 2030. However, B.C. Energy Minister Adrian Dix issued “a clarification” of the 2023 net-zero policy in March, advising the environmental assessment agency that new LNG facilities need to be ready to become net zero by 2030 but can use natural gas if clean electricity is not available “due to circumstances beyond the control of the proponent.”

The provincial approval allows Ksi Lisims to use natural gas-fired barges to power its operations until access to BC Hydro’s grid is available. A 2024 briefing note prepared for Eby shows Ksi Lisims requested 600 megawatts from BC Hydro, making it one of the most energy-intensive projects the province has ever seen.

With files from Matt Simmons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ongoing maintenance needed to ensure offset projects offer good salmon habitat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More industrial pressures in Fraser River add urgency

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

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

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

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

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

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Environmental groups and U.S. elected officials are raising concerns about a proposed gold mine they say could contaminate the Taku River watershed and threaten wild salmon across the B.C.-Alaska border.

The Canadian-owned mine, called New Polaris, is in the early stages of a B.C. environmental assessment to determine if it can proceed.

Despite its name, New Polaris isn’t new. The northwest B.C. mine, which sits on the banks of the Tulsequah River, roughly halfway between Atlin, B.C., and Juneau, Alaska, operated from 1937 to 1951. It used to be called the Polaris Taku mine. At the time, it was owned by Cominco, a predecessor to Canadian mining giant Teck Resources.

Cominco also owned another mine five kilometres upriver called Tulsequah Chief — which later became infamous for leaching toxic waste into the river for decades. Cleanup and closure of the Tulsequah Chief mine has been underway for several years but is still not completed. 

Since the early 1990s, New Polaris has been owned by Vancouver-based Canagold. In July, as gold prices rose, Canagold submitted a detailed project description to B.C.’s environmental assessment office, kicking off the formal review process. 

Environmental groups advocating for the cleanup of the Tulsequah Chief mine and protection of the Taku River watershed say it’s problematic to revive the New Polaris mine while Tulsequah Chief is still polluting.

“We think it’s unconscionable for B.C. to be giving any consideration to the development of a new lower Taku mine when the nearby Tulsequah Chief mine continues its pollution unabated,” Will Patric, executive director of Alaska-based Rivers Without Borders, told The Narwhal in an email.

He said the group will be sending comments to the B.C. environmental assessment office during a public engagement period that ends on Dec. 12. The engagement period is described by the province as “public feedback on the draft plan” to inform what will be included in the assessment. Patric said the group will submit specific comments about the plans as well as “emphasizing our main point that there should not be consideration of a new lower Taku mine as long as Tulsequah Chief’s toxic discharge into the Taku watershed continues.”

“From a big picture perspective — what makes sense for the public interest, what is respectful of downstream stakeholders and what’s appropriate for an international river system that is the top salmon producer for the entire transboundary region — we believe it’s the message B.C. needs to be getting,” he said.

New Polaris mine would be developed within Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area 

The New Polaris mine is located in what’s described as the largest roadless Pacific watershed in North America. The Tulsequah and Taku rivers are highly productive salmon rivers and the area is home to large populations of wildlife including moose, wolves and bears. 

In early 2023, after decades of pollution from Tulsequah Chief, the Taku River Tlingit First Nation declared the area protected as the T’akú Tlatsini Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area, or T’akú IPCA for short. An IPCA is an area where Indigenous people lead conservation and stewardship efforts in accordance with their own priorities and laws. The Taku River Tlingit protected area doesn’t preclude mining projects, however, with the remaining 40 per cent of the watershed identified as “specially managed landscapes,” according to the declaration. 

“These specially managed areas include zones with high mineral potential, where the T’akú IPCA provides opportunities for respectful, clean mineral extraction and other uses that support a low carbon economy,” a press release at the time noted.

The Taku River Tlingit First Nation was not able to provide comment before publication. Canagold indicated in its government filings it is working with the nation on developing the mine and has signed agreements that uphold the nation’s rights.

U.S. Congresswoman urges greater protections for transboundary mining impacts

On the other side of the border, U.S. groups are pushing for a seat at the table. To build and operate the mine, Canagold would have to cross the international border regularly, shipping construction supplies into the mine site and transporting ore out. 

“Canagold is talking about a huge number of flights in and out of the lower Taku to support its mine, but a lot of barging will also be required,” Patric said. “The Taku is not well suited to barging; previous attempts have been failures and Alaskans are very concerned about the impacts of barging on shallow and very critical salmon habitat.” 

According to the detailed project description the company submitted to the assessment office, the underground mine will produce up to 1,000 tonnes of ore daily for 10 years and employ about 200 people. 

In August, two U.S. senators and a congresswoman, Mary Sattler Peltola, wrote to President Joe Biden, demanding the administration increase pressures on Canada to clean up the Tulsequah Chief mine and to “establish an international framework to prevent and resolve disputes in these transboundary waters.”

“Without unified action from the executive branch, Canadian mining activity in this region will increasingly endanger U.S. communities and resources, such as salmon, without any mechanism for recourse or compensation,” they wrote.

Salmon Beyond Borders director Breanna Walker said Alaskans “have no real voice” in the mine planning process. 

“Anyone familiar with the Taku knows it’s a shallow, dynamic river system that quickly changes and isn’t easy to navigate,” she said in a Dec. 4 press release. “Canagold’s plans are high-risk and an accident would damage some of the best wild salmon spawning habitat in the world.”

Canagold did not respond to The Narwhal’s request for comment before publication but the company has stated it is engaging with Alaska tribes and other potentially affected U.S. groups.

“Although not explicitly mandated by the province of B.C., Canagold is committed to engaging with Indigenous peoples in Alaska,” the company said in its project description.

Updated on Dec. 6, 2024, at 1:00 p.m. PT: This story has been updated to clarify the New Polaris mine would produce up to 1,000 tonnes of ore daily, not of gold, as previously stated. On Dec. 10 at 12:43 p.m. PT, the subbed of this article was also updated to reflect the change.

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This story is a collaboration with the newspaper The Guardian. 

On a clear August morning, Skookum John maneuvers his fishing boat, Sweet Marie, out of the Tofino harbour and into the deep blue waters of Clayoquot Sound on Canada’s west coast. 

On shore, the late summer sun shines on visitors from all over the world who have flocked to Tofino, a bustling fishing town on Vancouver Island, to wander in and out of surf shops, art galleries and restaurants and pile into small boats in the hope of glimpsing orca, humpback and grey whales.

“You’ll never find this anywhere in the world,” John says, gesturing through Sweet Marie’s window at the mosaic of islands and mountains, cloaked in thick green rainforests, that form part of the Clayoquot Sound UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. 

The Sweet Marie motors deeper into Clayoquot Sound, past a web of inviting channels and inlets, and cruises past a raft of sea otters resting in the gentle swells. Once hunted nearly to extinction, sea otters are one of the iconic species found in the biosphere reserve, along with sea lions, seals, wild salmon and bald eagles.

John, a member of Ahousaht First Nation, makes his living on the water, where he helps train Coast Guard members in marine rescue, ferries passengers to islands and hot springs and takes visitors on whale watching tours. Today, John is taking members of Clayoquot Action, a local conservation organization focused on protecting wild salmon, to the site of one of the area’s more controversial industries: open-net pen salmon farms.

Dan Lewis, the co-founder and executive director of Clayoquot Action, is incredulous that industrial salmon farming is allowed to take place in a globally recognized protected area.

“Why are we doing this here?” he wonders, gesturing at the rich waters, home to a colourful array of sea life that includes giant rock scallops, tufted anemones in green, pink and white, dark green kelp forests, red sea urchins and purple-tinged Dungeness crabs.

Clayoquot Sound is also home to some of the last 60 salmon farms left on Canada’s west coast. For decades, as many as 100 farms in Canadian waters have raised mostly non-native Atlantic salmon in pens in the Pacific Ocean. 

But now the salmon farming industry, blamed for contributing to the collapse of wild salmon stocks, faces an uncertain future. In June, the Canadian government announced open-net pen salmon farming will be banned from coastal waters in July 2029, as part of a commitment “to protecting wild salmon and promoting more sustainable aquaculture practices.”

Concerns about the industry’s impact on wild salmon played a major role in the closure of about three dozen farms in the province of British Columbia over the past seven years, after Clayoquot Action and other groups documented sea lice outbreaks and other diseases such as piscine orthoreovirus in farmed fish, including at farms along migration routes for wild salmon. 

Sea lice are parasites that feed on fish, causing stress and damage to their immune systems and making them more vulnerable to disease, while piscine orthoreovirus causes damage to the heart, liver, spleen and other internal organs in salmon.

The decision to ban all remaining British Columbia farms, lauded by conservation groups and wild salmon advocates, has been soundly criticized by Canada’s salmon farming industry, which largely consists of multinational corporations that farm salmon around the world, including in the U.K. The industry says moving salmon farming to closed containment systems on land or in the water, as the government suggests, is not logistically feasible and would be prohibitively expensive. 

For John, who has been campaigning against salmon farms since 2015, the Canadian government’s new 2029 deadline may just be an empty promise, following its earlier, unfulfilled commitment to remove open-net pen salmon farms by 2025.

“I won’t believe anything that the government says until I see it happen,” John says as the Sweet Marie slowly circles a floating salmon farm nestled into a small bay, barely a stone’s throw from the seaweed-strewn shore.

John’s skepticism is shared by Hasheukumiss, a Hereditary Chief of the Ahousaht Nation and president of the Maaqutusiis Hahoulthee Stewardship Society, which manages economic development for the nation. But the two men have very different perspectives on the salmon farming industry, mirroring broader divisions about whether open-net pen farms should be allowed to operate in Canadian waters.

In 2010, the Ahousaht Nation inked an agreement allowing Cermaq Global, a Mitsubishi subsidiary that also farms salmon and trout in Norway, Chile and Scotland, to operate in its territorial waters. The agreement was subsequently renewed with changes, according to Hasheukumiss, also known as Richard George.

“One of the things that I wanted to address was the environmental concerns because we are the true stewards of our backyard,” he says. “It was the sea lice and the pathogens that were the biggest concerns we had.”

According to Hasheukumiss, Cermaq was responsive and worked with the nation to address that concern. 

Hasheukumiss’ assessment of the Canadian government’s handling of fish farms is less rosy. Since he inherited his title in 2020, he says he has discussed the issue with three different fisheries ministers, yet has seen little in the way of consultation with his nation.

A five-year transition away from open-net pen farms is not a realistic timeline for the industry to achieve a paradigm shift, he maintains. “In five years, there is no way this industry — or any industry — can go to fully contained systems.” 

As the Sweet Marie noses slowly towards a rectangle of floating walkways bordered by black net fencing, John stands, slips the engine into neutral and flips back the tarp that tops the modest cabin. He calls out to one of the overall-clad salmon farm workers, jokingly asking why he’s pretending to be busy. It’s his nephew, who recently started working at the Cermaq farm, one of 13 facilities in Clayoquot Sound that employ about 20 Ahousaht members. 

The two banter while Lewis stands at the Sweet Marie’s bow, peering through the nets to get a view of the interior of the pens, as part of the group’s regular monitoring of the industry’s operations. 

At an unstocked salmon farm nearby, the Cermaq’s delousing boat, Aqua Service, towers over the Sweet Marie from its berth. The vessel has a large back deck outfitted with a patented water-based delousing system. The system pulls fish from the pens and uses seawater to flush off the lice. The treatment process takes just 0.2 seconds, aiming to reduce stress and fish death.

In Ahousaht territory, Cermaq has been experimenting with technology to reduce the industry’s impact on wild salmon. A semi-closed containment system — consisting of a semi-permeable bag that stretches 25 metres below the water — is used to raise young salmon smolts while reducing their exposure to sea lice. The bag draws water from deep in the water column where sea lice can’t survive. 

Fewer sea lice on the farmed smolts make it less likely wild salmon swimming past the farms will pick up the parasites. After one year, the young salmon are moved to open-net pens to grow to marketable size.

The semi-closed containment system Cermaq is trialling is expensive — running it costs $20,000 per month in diesel alone. Brian Kingzett, executive director of the BC Salmon Farmers Association, representing Cermaq and other companies, says there is little appetite to make big investments and navigate the time-consuming licensing process for new technology, especially with the future of the industry in limbo.

“There’s lots of reasons why farmers want to go to closed containment for that first year; Cermaq has been trying to do it,” he says. “It took them six years to get a licence. We only have a five-year window.” 

Kingzett says the industry was “completely gobsmacked” by the Canadian government’s decision to remove open-net pen salmon farms by 2029, calling closed containment “an unfeasible option.” 

Setting up enough land-based salmon farming capacity to replace current open-net pen production could cost $1.8 billion, according to a 2022 report commissioned by the British Columbia government. The report’s authors said it was difficult to estimate the costs of setting up medium and large-scale farms because there are no land-based salmon farms in the world that are reliably producing large amounts of fish.

B.C.’s first land-based salmon farm, Kuterra, is now raising steelhead trout, after achieving barely one-third of its production target, according to the B.C. government report. Another land-based venture, West Creek, has stopped farming salmon altogether. And on the other side of the country, near the Atlantic Ocean, the land-based salmon farm Sustainable Blue suffered a mass die-off in November 2023 and is now in receivership. 

But Lewis says closed containment systems on land are the only option if the Canadian government is serious about protecting wild salmon stocks.

“To our understanding, there is nothing that can actually have zero discharge that’s in the water,” Lewis says. “What we want to see in the next five years is all the farms come out of the water. We don’t believe there are any in-water solutions.”

Kingzett says closing down open-net pen salmon farms will harm small coastal communities. Any land-based containment systems will need to be close to plentiful power and water supplies, not to mention customers, he notes.

If B.C.’s salmon farms disappear, Kingzett is confident farmed salmon will still be sold in the country’s supermarkets – but it will come from places like Chile and Norway.

Inside the Sweet Marie’s cabin, John has placed a sticker with the hashtag #FishFarmsOut near the helm. He is eager for the industry to leave Ahousaht territory, even if it means the money fish farming has brought to the community goes with it.

“Wealth isn’t money,” he says. “What we have in our territory, what we have in the ocean, what we have in the air, that’s wealth.”

Updated on Oct. 8, 2024, 4:50 p.m. PT: This story has been updated to clarify that the three cabinet ministers Hasheukumiss met with were fisheries ministers.

Story updated on Oct. 22, 2024, at 10:49 a.m. PT: This story has been updated to remove reference to a medium-sized land-based farm costing $1.8 billion to set up, according to a report commissioned by the B.C. government. In fact, the B.C. government report stated that setting up enough land-based salmon farming capacity to replace current open-net pen production could cost $1.8 billion.

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.