Starting next month, Ontario hunters will have a shot at sandhill cranes — for the first time in a century.

The long-legged, grey birds with a nearly two-metre wingspan are widespread across Ontario from the Great Lakes as far north as southern James Bay — nesting in wetlands and swampy areas after migrating up from the southern United States and Mexico in the spring.

Mark Peck recalls waking up at 4 a.m. to see thousands of sandhill cranes fly over the banks of the Platte River in Nebraska, where 80 per cent of the species migrate to rest and eat before flying back south for the winter. 

Like Peck, many of them travel from Canada, while others make the journey from Alaska and Siberia.

“It was an incredible experience. … There were about 10,000 sandhill cranes, all on the river,” Peck, president of Ontario Field Ornithologists, said. “As the sun was coming up, the birds were slowly leaving, but they were dancing and bugling, and it was just an awesome experience. … I think it would be hard to hunt after witnessing that.”

Sandhill cranes have a distinct, rattling bugle call that can be heard up to four kilometres away. To Peck, it’s akin to the call of a common loon or the howl of a wolf, a “beautiful sound of nature.” Their distinctive mating dance — wings flapping, beak pecking and legs strutting — have been widely captured and shared online.

While birders love them, sandhill cranes have a long and complex history in Ontario. 

In the early 20th century, the species was hunted to near-extirpation in the province, meaning they were almost locally extinct. In the last few decades, thanks to increased protection from unregulated hunting and more sources of food from agriculture, they have surpassed population expectations. To some, this is a huge success.

“It really is a wonderful, good news story,” Peck said. “They’ve made a remarkable comeback. I’m 67. When I was growing up, it was unusual to see a sandhill crane in southern Ontario. Now, they breed across the province.”

Not everyone sees it as good news, though. Farmers in Algoma, Timmins and as far as Thunder Bay have advocated for an open hunting season in northern Ontario. They say sandhill cranes have caused extensive damage to their crops, wreaking havoc in the spring by pulling up freshly planted seedlings, and again in the fall before harvest.

“It is very discouraging to certain farmers that they’re planting their spring crops, and these birds are coming in and just annihilating it,” Bill Groenheide, Northern Ontario director of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture, said. “Farmers are having an increase of up to 30 per cent loss in their crops.”

Birgit Martin, who farms on Manitoulin Island, told Ontario Grain Farmer Magazine she has had to replant 25 per cent of her corn acres due to sandhill crane damage. 

Sandhill cranes are omnivores and eat a wide variety of food including insects, plant roots, small animals like rodents and frogs, berries, seeds and even other small birds. But when they find themselves in agricultural areas during the fall migration, the crops hit the hardest are corn, soybeans and potatoes, Groenheide said — some of the most common, and profitable, crops for Ontario farmers.

“When so many birds come into one area and totally destroy your livelihood, there’s got to be compensation somewhere,” Groenheide said. The province’s wildlife damage compensation program focuses on livestock, and doesn’t cover crop losses to migratory birds. “There’s got to be something done about it.”

Ontario sandhill crane hunt allows for one bird per hunter per day

Ontario farmers have been asking the government to open a hunt for years. Environment and Climate Change Canada assessed the status of sandhill cranes earlier this year and found that a “conservative” hunt would have a “minimal impact” on the population of sandhill cranes — which is currently more than 103,000 strong, and considered to have a large, increasing population size. It proposed a hunt running for 14 days, with a “small bag limit” of one bird per day that will allow the federal government to carefully monitor the harvest in the first four years of implementation.

While Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources determines harvesting regulations for most wildlife in the province, the federal environment department oversees migratory birds, like sandhill cranes.

Environment and Climate Change Canada’s population objective for the cranes sits between 30,000 and 60,000, and explains on its website that a “managed harvest” could slow or stabilize population growth and potentially minimize crop damage.

The federal agency told The Narwhal in an email that the primary goal of this open season is to provide additional hunting opportunity, adding that “while the intent of the season is not to significantly decrease the sandhill crane population in Ontario and Quebec,” the season may also provide “some direct relief of conflicts.” They also said there may be some indirect reduction of conflicts as hunted sandhill cranes may respond better to scare techniques used by farmers to protect their crops, such as propane cannons that make loud noises.

“Obviously that’s great from a recovery perspective … that this population was able to rebound to that extent,” Matthew Robbins, a fish and wildlife biologist at Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters, said. “It also means that, based on the modelling that exists, they can certainly handle some sustainable use.” 

The current hunt will allow Canadian residents to hunt one sandhill crane per person per day in the area around Hudson and James Bay, from Sept. 1 through 14, and on farmland only in other parts of northern and central Ontario including Algoma, Nipissing and Temiskaming, on Sept. 12 through 25. A similarly limited hunt is being opened in Quebec this September as well. 

This new season creates opportunity for hunters and gourmets — sandhill cranes are known to some as “ribeye of the sky” for their rich, red meat — that the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters says is appropriately limited to start.

“The proposal is a very conservative approach,” Robbins said. He doesn’t anticipate a significant hit to the population as a result of the hunt, but says slowing the population growth by some amount may help those farm conflicts.

“It would be worth exploring expanding it in some capacity as long as we can ensure that that’s going to be sustainable,” Robbins said. “From a conservation perspective, it definitely makes sense to start this off from a fairly cautious position, and then go from there.”

Peck is also optimistic about the conservative nature of the hunt’s parameters. But conservation organizations like Ontario Nature have argued reinstating a sandhill crane hunt is a “controversial and concerning proposal.” The birds can live up to 30 years in the wild, meaning they take a long time to mature, while very few of their young survive to adulthood. This makes it more difficult for populations to replenish quickly if adults are killed off.  

The federal government said it received opposing comments from an animal welfare organization, ornithology and naturalist groups, birdwatchers, an unnamed First Nation and individuals during the public comment period last winter.

Environment and Climate Change Canada says on its website that the current strategy accounts for sandhill crane life history and low productivity by allowing only a very limited harvest. It argues the “daily bag limit is intentionally set below” the level the population can sustainably support, and that the population is still expected to grow, though more slowly than if there were no hunt.

At the same time, Groenheide from the Ontario Federation of Agriculture worries the plan for the hunt is not enough to protect farmers, but Environment and Climate Change Canada told The Narwhal it does not anticipate making changes to the proposed harvest framework until the end of the 2029-30 hunting season.

“In Canada, they want to regulate it because they want to drop the amount of birds [killed], and I do understand that,” Groenheide said. “But on the flip side, how do we protect the farmers?”

Farmers organization wants higher sandhill crane harvest and in more areas

In early 2024, the Ontario Federation of Agriculture released a statement recommending Environment and Climate Change Canada alter its plans. The organization wants farmers to be allowed to defend their crops from sandhill cranes at any point during the year, as well as increased hunting limits, more hunting areas and an earlier season. 

While changes have not been reflected in the final regulations, Groenheide said this year’s hunt is a good first step.

“It’s great to see these birds in great numbers. Don’t get me wrong,” Groenheide said. “But there has to be a playing field. Farmers are out there and the value of their crops is in big demand. There’s a lot of money put into this. They’re losing it all. They’re getting nothing for it. So there has to be a trade-off somewhere.”

He said the way this species is managed represents part of a larger picture related to expanding agriculture in northern Ontario, proposed by the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Agribusiness in April 2026.

“We have ministers now wanting to expand the north, wanting the great clay belt to be opened up and all that,” Groenheide said. “I always call it the great frontier of the north.”

“It’s great land,” Groenheide said, but farming new areas comes with new challenges. Wildlife like deer, bear, moose and elk can conflict with agriculture as farming expands northward, he said.

“It’s their territory, so how do we work around it? How do we compensate farmers if we are inviting them out there?” Groenheide said. “There’s got to be a plan.”

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.

Canada’s large oil companies are raking in record profits during an energy crisis.

We’ve been here before — but unlike last time, Ottawa isn’t prodding the industry to use more of the money to clean up its act. In some ways, it’s even volunteering to pick up the tab.

The last time was just four years ago, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine led to Western sanctions on Russian oil and fears about global energy supply. The price of oil shot skyward, and large Canadian oil companies reaped the benefits, taking in billions of dollars in windfall profits.

The oil and gas industry is the largest source of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions, which cause climate change that scientists say has been driving major heat waves and wildfires across the country this summer, destroying communities and upending lives.

Yet instead of using its windfall during the Russian invasion to invest heavily in non-emitting energy sources, or to widely deploy technology to decarbonize its operations, the industry began funnelling a larger proportion of its revenues to shareholders, while a group of oilsands companies went to governments asking them to cover much of the cost of their proposed emissions projects.

The federal environment and climate change minister at the time, Steven Guilbeault, pushed back, suggesting oil companies needed to put their money where their mouth is when it came to their own publicly stated environmental goals.

“As Canadians see those profits, we need to see reinvestment into cleaner energy instead of share buybacks,” Guilbeault said in a video posted online in October 2022.

Share buybacks are when companies use cash to buy their own shares back from investors. It’s a different way of giving money to them than dividends, which distribute earnings to shareholders.

The Iran war, that began this February, is again leading to big profits for Canada’s oil industry, which are again being directed in part to shareholders.

The conversation has reignited calls for a windfall profits tax on the oil and gas industry, something more than 60 unions and civil society organizations have been calling for.

In a survey this May by Liaison Strategies, 66 per cent of a random sample of 1,526 Canadians reached by landline and cell phone also supported a tax on oil and gas excess profits, with the revenues going to help lower energy bills.

Elbows Up For Climate, which represents almost 300 mayors, councillors and local officials from across Canada advocating for national environmental projects, is one of the groups calling for a windfall tax.

Former Toronto mayor David Miller is the co-chair of Elbows Up For Climate alongside former Montreal mayor Valérie Plante. Miller told The Narwhal such a tax makes sense given the global fossil fuel industry spent decades obscuring the truth about climate change and lobbying governments to roll back climate action, and so is “in many ways responsible” for delaying the economy’s transition to clean energy.

“We are in a frightening summer from wildfire smoke. The damage yet again will be in the billions, and the question is, who should pay for that? Should it be the general public?” Miller, now managing director of a global network of mayors called the C40 Centre, said. “Or should it be the people, the entities, that are causing the problem?”

“The entities that are causing the problem — which is climate change, that’s what’s making the wildfires so bad — are the fossil fuel companies, and they should pay for the damage. It’s a user-pay kind of principle, and because of the profits they’re making as a result of the U.S.-Israel attack on Iran, it’s a very appropriate moment.”

Oil companies argue they already pay significant taxes as well as royalties, which are separate payments that companies make to the province that owns the resources. In 2024-25, Alberta took in $17.2 billion in royalties from the oilsands.

But the Vancouver-based Centre for Future Work has argued that royalties collect “only a small fraction” of the increased revenues from higher oil prices. In 2022, they found, oil and gas profits jumped almost three times as much as the increase in royalties.

Applying a new windfall tax on oil profits today could generate between $18 billion and $46 billion over the next year, depending on the tax rate and how much of a company’s profits it applies to, according to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

The Narwhal asked Environment and Climate Change Minister Julie Dabrusin’s office whether she believes, like Guilbeault did, that oil companies should be spending more on emissions reductions, and what she thought of a windfall profits tax.

“Oil and gas companies have an important role to play in driving down Canada’s emissions,” Dabrusin’s director of communications Chris Zhou responded in an emailed statement.

Zhou said the government was focused on “durable, unifying solutions that will deliver sustained emissions reductions over the long term,” including restrictions on methane, a greenhouse gas, in the oil and gas sector, as well as the industrial carbon pricing system.

Oil companies bringing in record-breaking profits amidst Iran war

The Iran war has led to the intermittent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint between the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea that one-fifth of the world’s oil is shipped through.

It created the “largest supply disruption in history,” according to the International Energy Agency, and sent oil prices higher again. The higher price translated to big profits for the world’s largest oil companies, and those in Canada have been no exception.

Earlier this month, Canadian Natural Resources Limited, one of the country’s largest oil and gas companies, reported $4.5 billion in profit in the second quarter, which covers April to June. That result was “the strongest in the history of the company,” Chief Financial Officer Victor Clinton Darel said.

The company returned $2.4 billion to shareholders in the form of dividends and share repurchases. This year, he added, was the 26th consecutive year of dividend increases.

The record results followed a report from Cenovus, one of Canada’s large oilsands companies, of a $2.9-billion profit in the second quarter, its “best quarterly financial result ever,” president and CEO Jon McKenzie said. Cenovus plans to increase shareholder returns, and sent $1.4 billion to them in the second quarter.

“We would never apologize nor take credit for a higher commodity price environment, but the key is to run well while it lasts and capitalize on the opportunity,” McKenzie said.

A third oilsands firm, Suncor, recently posted a $3.7-billion profit, and returned $1.7 billion to shareholders — it too said it plans to spend more money giving cash to investors in return for their shares.

Imperial Oil, a Canadian firm majority-owned by one of the world’s largest oil companies, ExxonMobil, posted a quarterly profit of $2.2 billion. John Whelan, the chairman, president and CEO, said Imperial has grown its annual dividend for 31 years.

In addition to reaping rewards from the higher price of oil, Canadian companies have also been creating more of it. Oil production hit a new record last year in Canada, and crude oil production hit the highest volume this May since comparable records began in 2016, according to Statistics Canada.

This year, Cenovus expects to join the club of companies worldwide that can produce, on their own, the equivalent of a million barrels of oil per day, on average. Only one other Canadian company can do that, Canadian Natural, which also said it had hit a new quarterly production record.

Oil execs praise Alberta deal that taxpayers could be on the hook for

During their earnings calls this summer, executives praised Prime Minister Mark Carney’s deal with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith — in which the federal government has hinted it’s prepared to spend significant public dollars.

Canadian Natural, Cenovus, Suncor and Imperial Oil are four of the five members of the Oil Sands Alliance, formerly known as the Pathways Alliance, which signed a trilateral memorandum of understanding with the federal and Alberta governments that envisions a new oil pipeline to the West Coast, to be filled with increased levels of oil production, as well as a new emissions reduction project in the oilsands called Pathways, which will rely in part on carbon capture technology.

Ottawa says two government-owned corporations will own most of the oil pipeline and one of them will develop and run it. The only private-sector involvement announced so far is a pipeline company signing a non-binding agreement to take a 10 per cent interest during construction, with possibly another 10 per cent interest when the pipeline begins operating.

Pressed by CBC News to reveal how much federal money would be involved in building the new pipeline, Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson said that while he didn’t have “the numbers in front of me right now,” the cost to build an earlier oil pipeline — the Trans Mountain expansion project, which cost between $30 and $40 billion — was a “reasonable thing to look at.”

The government’s deal with Alberta also includes a commitment from Ottawa to “offer financing or support mechanisms” supporting the operating costs of carbon capture and storage projects.

It’s hard to precisely tally up how much this financing and support might cost Canadians, but the government has already committed billions of dollars in the form of carbon capture tax credits, funding for carbon contracts and other related research and development efforts.

At the same time, it’s unclear how much of their own money oil companies are willing to spend on the industry’s infrastructure — whether that’s to move more oil, or to lower their emissions.

Companies tight-lipped about environmental progress, vocal on environmental regulations

Many major oil companies have cited Trudeau-era changes to the federal Competition Act as a reason why they cannot publish information on their environmental performance on their website or in corporate disclosure reports.

The changes introduced an anti-greenwashing requirement for businesses, ensuring they backed up claims about protecting the environment or tackling climate change with evidence. (While the Carney government removed a rule that required this evidence to conform to internationally recognized standards, it left the broader requirement in place.)

Suncor’s 2025 report on sustainability says the company aims to “reduce the greenhouse gas emissions intensity of our base business,” but notes the report intentionally does not contain any “environmental content or data” due to the law. Cenovus says it does not publish any information on its website regarding its environmental performance or targets, for the same reason.

Imperial Oil’s website says it does not publish “an active representation” of its environmental performance although it mentions efforts in “lower-emission fuels,” renewable diesel, lithium and carbon capture technology. Canadian Natural’s website points to reclamation projects, like tree planting, at its oilsands sites.

The four companies, as well as the Oil Sands Alliance, did not respond to requests from The Narwhal for how much money they have spent over the last year on emissions reductions projects, or their opinion of a windfall profits tax.

They have been outspoken, however, about how environmental policy is affecting their bottom lines.

​McKenzie, at Cenovus, said in June that a new oil pipeline to the West Coast could not be ⁠financed by the ​private sector because of Canada’s industrial carbon pricing system. “Industry has been clear that the industrial carbon tax is insidious and it should be revoked,” he said.

On the July earnings call, ​after announcing record profits, McKenzie again described the industrial carbon pricing system as an “uncompetitive carbon tax that uniquely burdens Canadian industry.”

But he praised the Canada-Alberta deal, saying it “creates a framework for governments and industry to work together on production growth, emissions reduction and expanded market access.”

Similarly, Scott Stauth, president of Canadian Natural, said the agreement was a “positive first step” and said it would “benefit all of Canada by providing more jobs, combined with social and economic benefits to our country.”

“It’s a very different mood and tenure today than it has been in the past. We’re encouraged by that,” Suncor president and CEO Rich Kruger said about the Alberta deal, although he also said there was still “a lot of work to do.”

Oil Sands Alliance President Kendall Dilling said in a statement posted July 13 that the trilateral deal was a “framework that is positive for the oilsands industry and provides a step forward to help enable production growth and to advance the Pathways project.”

“It helps meet our shared vision to grow Canadian oil production and benefit Canadians across the country,” he said.

Windfall profits tax could help offset affordability crisis, advocates say

For his part, Carney posted a video online in June suggesting the world needed more of Canada’s fossil fuels, as a result of the Iran War.

“The hard truth is that we don’t control the price of oil, so what we’re doing is helping Canadians through tough times in the short term,” the prime minister explained.

The government suspended the federal gas tax for the summer as an affordability measure, Carney said. But he also argued that addressing global “energy security” means ensuring Canada supplies the world with as much oil and gas “as possible.”

While he acknowledged this “will mean that our emissions will be higher in the next few years than they were projected to be under the previous government’s plan,” he said Canada “can’t afford to restrain the growth of an important part of our energy mix, oil and gas, to meet a short term goal.”

Carney also claimed Canada’s oil would be “produced responsibly and with a clear focus on lowering emissions over time.”

For Elbows Up For Climate, though, the fact remains that carbon pollution from fossil fuels is directly and indirectly the cause of tens of billions of dollars in damages from climate-driven extreme weather, Miller said.

Annual insured losses reached $37 billion between 2016 and 2025, according to the Insurance Bureau of Canada.

“It’s quite remarkable and eye-opening when you look at [insurance] statistics, and those are happening because of the exploitation of fossil fuels,” Miller said.

“Expanding oil and gas production puts more Canadians at risk of extreme weather, extreme heat and other climate-related disasters. We actually can’t afford those disasters.”

Several groups like the Green Budget Coalition, Canadians for Tax Fairness, Seniors For Climate Action Now, For Our Kids and 350.org have also submitted budgetary recommendations to the House of Commons finance committee that endorse a windfall profits tax on oil and gas companies.

Thomas Green, senior manager of climate solutions at the David Suzuki Foundation, part of the Green Budget Coalition, pointed out that the United Kingdom has its own windfall tax.

Between 2022 and 2025, the UK’s Energy Profits Levy raised 9.1 billion pound sterling, or $17 billion at today’s exchange rate.

The coalition wants to see a new levy on oil and gas companies linked to when oil prices exceed certain thresholds — indexed to inflation and periodically reviewed — and for the money to be allocated toward affordability and climate action measures.

“These profits come at the expense of affordability for everyday Canadians,” Green told The Narwhal.

“A windfall profits tax would at least rectify some of the injustice that we see right now.”

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

• Wildfires in northern Ontario are putting many First Nations at risk, and two communities have already burned entirely.
• First Nations leaders are criticizing the provincial government’s response to the emergency. They say the government was too slow to identify the risks facing remote First Nations, and that jurisdictional issues prevent First Nations from accessing resources in an emergency. 
• Several First Nations chiefs are calling for the resignation of senior government officials, as well as a public inquiry into the provincial government’s emergency response.

In the summer of 2021, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Grand Chief Alvin Fiddler of Nishnawbe Aski Nation personally presented Ontario Premier Doug Ford with an 82-page plan to support northern Ontario during emergencies, like wildfires. 

The organization that represents 51 northern Ontario First Nations had developed the plan in response to a series of disasters between 2009 and 2019, both from flooding and wildfires, which are laid out across 27 pages. But those past disasters are nowhere near the scale seen this summer alone, with northern Ontario dealing with what’s now estimated to be the worst wildfire season on record.

The framework identified a series of “deficiencies and gaps” in emergency management for First Nation communities. They include a lack of clear roles for the federal and provincial governments in the event of a disaster; a lack of recognition of the unique challenges facing remote Indigenous communities, many of which are not incorporated like a municipality and are hard to access; a lack of pre-disaster resources and funding for both impacted communities and host communities for evacuees; and no legal framework giving First Nations emergency powers to persuade the province to take action. 

The plan includes 20 recommendations, without which “the need for robust and comprehensive First Nation emergency management will continually increase.”

“That was five years ago,” Fiddler told The Narwhal. “There’s been no response.”

Everything that was highlighted in the report, Fiddler said, is coming to a head today in northern Ontario.

In the span of 11 days, two communities — Collins and Whitewater Lake First Nations — have entirely burned down. By last government count, around 1,800 people have been evacuated, though local emergency officials believe this number may be low as they say there is no coherent government-led system to support or track evacuations in remote Indigenous communities. At least 13 other communities are under evacuation orders, eight of which are First Nations, according to Chiefs of Ontario. As of publication time, there remain more than 170 active wildfires, per Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources, in northern Ontario. 

This season’s 562 fires (versus 371 last year and a 358 10-year average) have already burned down an area almost as large as the entire Greater Toronto Area, which, last week, had some of the worst air quality in the world because of wildfire smoke.

The fires are “behaving differently than what we’re used to,” Sharon Bak, an emergency responder based in Thunder Bay with 30 years of experience, including at the provincial level, told The Narwhal. “There have been more ‘hold my breath’ moments than I’m used to.” 

Weather projections started looking deadly on July 12, with Thunder Bay heading into a week of record heat, hitting — and in some places surpassing — 40 C. Low humidity, combined with bone-dry conditions across northern Ontario’s boreal forest, plus a major lightning event and windy conditions the week before, made for a dangerous combination. 

“The signs were all there,” Bak said. 

“This wasn’t the norm,” she added. “With northern Ontario fires, we’re prepared. We expect them. But this isn’t the norm. We’ve had fires that are close to critical infrastructure and areas where people live. We’ve had fires going one way that changed direction overnight to get closer to communities, and fires joining together.”

“That’s some pretty huge red flags that a lot is going on that needs to be monitored,” she said. “The question is, ‘Who is watching the clock?’ ”

While the ignition points of the 2026 wildfire season are outside government control, the consequences — how fast warnings went out, whether crews were adequately resourced, whether First Nations were supported in evacuation decisions — are the parts local officials and Indigenous leaders say were within the province’s control and completely failed this wildfire season. And while it’s been one for the record books, that may not be the case for long as wildfires get more severe and intense every year due to global warming caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels.

Impacted First Nations communities have reported needing to vacate themselves, not receiving timely and accurate information from government officials and finding spaces to flee to by themselves. 

In the face of this systemic failure, several chiefs are now asking for the resignations of senior government officials — including the Ministry of Natural Resources director of aviation, forest fire and emergency services and the assistant deputy minister overseeing fire operations — and an independent public inquiry into the province’s response writ large.

No one from the office of the premier, the minister of natural resources or the minister of emergency preparedness responded to detailed questions from The Narwhal. In a July 17 press conference, Ford said of First Nations communities, “We’re supplying anything that they need, and they’ll be safe.” 

“The emergency response from both Ontario and Canada have been completely inadequate,” Chief Fiddler said. “I’ve been on Zoom calls with senior government officials asking them basic questions like ‘What is your capacity? How many beds are available? Where are the host sites?’ ”“So far they haven’t given us a response,” he said. “Numbers keep moving, I get it, but you should have a baseline. ‘We don’t have that information’ is not a good baseline when people’s homes and lands are burning down.”

‘It took too long to recognize the danger’: First Nations in northern Ontario describe failed government communication and self-evacuations

At 2:30 p.m. on July 13, Whitesand First Nation’s band manager was informed of a large fire close to their community. A Ministry of Natural Resources official said it would send a helicopter to investigate, and later reported there was no fire despite visible smoke, Chief Lawrence Wanakamik told reporters this week. 

By 4:00 p.m., the nation’s leadership began arranging transportation to Thunder Bay and booking hotels anyway. Some of their members started leaving soon after. 

An hour later, a council member went to a Ministry of Natural Resources meeting, in which they said they were assured their community was safe and there was nothing to worry about. The member “requested the assurances in writing” but never received it, according to Chief Wanakamik. 

At 6:30 p.m., he added, Elders advised the community be evacuated, despite the ministry maintaining that a full evacuation wasn’t needed and that only “vulnerable” people should be moved. (The ministry did not respond to questions about this sequence of events.)

The ministry issued a mandatory evacuation order three hours later. By then, the entire community was already moving away from their homelands. 

“It took too long to recognize the danger, too long to issue a clear direction and too long to order the evacuation,” Chief Wanakamik told reporters on July 21. “Whitesand’s own preparation and decision-making helped prevent an already dangerous situation from becoming worse.” One person, Elder Stella Watson, died in this harrowing experience, he said, adding she was “having a hard time with her breathing from all the smoke.”

Whitesand First Nation wasn’t the only community to experience this provincial emergency response breakdown. Collins, or Namaygoosisagagun, First Nation Chief Helen Paavola said her community, the first to be evacuated, did so without any notice or support. “My community was devastated by a forest fire that overtook the homes with great speed and heat,” she said in the same press conference. “My members barely escaped with the clothes on their backs.”

“This community burned to ash,” she said. “It burnt to the ground because of a failure of the province in their monitoring. And further to that, the emergency management arm of the province also ought to be held accountable for this disaster.”

Her community isn’t formally recognized by the Canadian government, despite predating Canada, which means community members are locked out of disaster-recovery programs now when they need it most, she said. 

Whitewater Lake First Nation Chief Pauline Drake, whose community has also entirely burned down, said they vacated by themselves, with her mother being the last to leave their land. 

“I really wish things were different,” she said. “I wish we could turn back time and go back and be notified. ‘Okay, there’s a fire in your area. Please be ready.’ ”

The three chiefs, along with six others representing communities impacted by wildfires across northern Ontario, all said that no provincial leaders had reached out to them, neither Ford, nor his Indigenous Affairs Minister Greg Rickford or Minister of Natural Resources Mike Harris. And they dispute Ford’s narrative that Ontario is doing a great job fighting these fires. 

“The premier may not yet have a full understanding of the extent of the operational dysfunction and systemic issues within the current wildfire management structure,” Chief Wilfred King of Gull Bay First Nation, which has been given an evacuation order, said in the press conference. “What he is saying is not true. … He’s creating the narrative so that he can basically lie to Canadians and lie to the people of Ontario.”

“What’s required is a complete overhaul of the system,” he said.

‘There’s been limited capacity in the system for a long time’: Ford government hasn’t fully implemented auditor general recommendations

This pattern of failed communications, lacklustre response and poor planning has been a feature of Ontario’s emergency response system for over two decades — and “all the gaps show this time,” Bak said. 

A 2005 internal government review showed the emergency processes and funding were “not currently sufficient to ensure that Ontarians and the resources of the province are adequately protected against emergencies and disasters.” That review itself was cited in a 2017 auditor general report that noted the cabinet committee on emergency management had not met once in five years. In 2022, the auditor general made 30 recommendations to improve the process, noting that it took longer than four hours to dispatch fire crews to 15 per cent of fires from 2017 to 2021.

“Establishing effective emergency management programs can save lives and better protect property and the environment,” the 2022 report said. “More needs to be done to assess the risks of natural hazards so that the province is ready to respond quickly to future environmental events and to make sure we don’t repeat past mistakes.”

As of two years ago, the auditor general found the government has “made little or no progress” on implementing most of their recommendations over the years. 

“There’s been limited capacity in the system for a long time,” Bak said.

Chiefs say that’s left northern Ontario particularly vulnerable as there has been no full-time emergency management coordinator. There are no resources available and ready to mobilize over a much larger geography if needed, they say, adding there is no regional response centre or controlled coordination system. And there is no ready list of resources, including hotels and donated goods and services, for those who have to respond in real-time. 

“The fires this year overwhelmed communities faster,” Bak said. “And there was a delay in acknowledging the problem and delivering the resources we needed.”

Yet, there were recent signs that this trend was shifting. 

Emergency response has generally been undertaken by a stand-alone government agency under the solicitor general, one of the structural issues identified by the auditor general. That changed in March 2025 when the Ford government elevated it into its own ministry, with resources, employees, modernized legislation and a new volunteer organization called Ontario Corps. This new Ministry of Emergency Preparedness and Response works with other ministries depending on the type of emergency; in northern Ontario, that particularly includes the Ministry of Natural Resources, which manages and monitors forests and fires. 

Emergency Preparedness Minister Jill Dunlop told CBC As It Happens that the government’s response is focused on safety. She said the ministry regularly conducts “after-action reviews” following emergencies and that any communication or coordination concerns “will be considered as part of that process.”

But when pressed about why First Nations were left in the dark during the worst of the wildfires, one of her staff pulled her off the air.

Emergency response in First Nations continues to be broken

Ontario’s emergency response also depends on federal funding, an agreement which assumes provinces have a robust system they can use to respond to disaster scenarios. In other words, Ottawa funds emergency response to First Nations, but Ontario controls the decisions about how that response gets executed. 

Fiddler believes part of why the system is broken is because the First Nations are not at the table in making those decisions. As outlined in the Nishnawbe Aski Nation’s report, Ontario’s entire emergency management system is built for municipalities, and First Nations don’t fit that model — legally, financially or structurally.

To start, a First Nation’s declaration of emergency has no impact on the political system; it doesn’t unlock funding or resources, or force higher levels of government into action. 

Financially, there’s not enough money being spent in the right places, the plan notes. Using federal data from 2012 to 2016, it shows Ontario received 31 per cent of all national emergency management funding for First Nations, with the vast majority going to response and recovery, not prevention or mitigation. Meanwhile, the government has consistently underbudgeted for fire response: in the 2025 budget, the Ford government allotted $135 million for its emergency forest firefighting fund, but ended up spending double that: $271 million.

And then there’s the matter of human resources. Citing the 2020 auditor general report, Nishnawbe Aski Nation’s plan notes that in 2021 Ontario had one field officer per 1.8 million residents, versus one for 137,000 residents in B.C. and one for 273,000 in Alberta. These field officers only show up during emergencies, allowing for little trust-building or preparedness before communities. 

And per Ontario’s emergency response rules, municipalities are expected to self-fund emergency management partly through property taxes and can apply for provincial disaster assistance after the fact. But almost no First Nations in Ontario have a property tax regime, so this financing model doesn’t support them.

Compounding all this is the fact that wildfires in northern Ontario often shut down access to remote communities. That means wildfires cut off an entire essential supply chain of food and medicine. For that reason, Neskantaga First Nation declared a state of emergency this week and has begun evacuating its members. 

These issues are all playing out in northern Ontario right now, with local responders and Indigenous members left asking questions about one central theme: “Why have we been left all alone?” 

“Doug Ford talks a lot about our critical minerals and other resources in our territories,” Fiddler said. “He comes this way when it’s for photo opportunities and cutting ribbons and shaking hands with people in these communities. But when it comes to climate change and its impacts, I haven’t heard him make any commitment.” 

Ford has said he will propose a national fire strategy at a meeting of First Ministers and Prime Minister Mark Carney in Charlottetown this week. But for many people The Narwhal spoke with, that’s not the solution; it’s merely passing the buck. Especially as northern Ontario’s calls to declare a provincial state of emergency, which would theoretically unlock resources, go unheeded. 

“Everything starts at the local level, especially responses to emergencies like wildfires,” Bak said. “You think of what happened at Fort McMurray and Jasper, and you thank God it hasn’t happened here. Well, now it’s happened here and it’s clear we didn’t learn anything.”

Updated on July 23, 2026, at 4:47 p.m. ET: This story has been updated to clarify that the current wildfire season in Ontario is estimated to be the worst in terms of the amount of land burnt, but not lives lost.

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Summary

• As wildfire smoke worsens across Canada, volunteers are teaching people to build low-cost DIY air purifiers.
• The fan-and-filter devices can perform as well as commercial HEPA air purifiers while costing around $60 to make.
• Organizers say the workshops provide practical protection from smoke while building community in the face of climate change.

On a sunny Saturday in July, a few dozen people file into a United Church on a quiet, tree-lined street near Victoria. Outside, the sky is clear and cloudless — a far cry from the wildfire smoke blanketing other parts of Canada. Inside, people are taking steps to protect themselves from the toxic smoke that has become a regular feature of Canadian summers.

As climate change makes summers hotter and drier, wildfire season becomes, on average, longer and more severe. More Canadians are experiencing the impacts with every breath they take and three-quarters say they’re concerned about wildfire smoke impacting their air quality. Once smoke rolls in, air purifiers — filtration machines capable of removing toxic chemicals and tiny particulates from the air — can be difficult to find in stores, even for those who can afford them.

But at the church, participants are learning to build simple, effective air purifiers at a workshop organized by Bill Darnell, a local resident who helped found Greenpeace in 1970.

“I’ve been involved in social justice and climate action pretty much all my adult life and it’s kind of discouraging that I’m still having to do it at this point,” Darnell tells The Narwhal.

Darnell was inspired to organize the event after learning about a similar workshop that took place in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. He and other volunteers use information compiled by the BC Lung Foundation and Simon Fraser University to help people build DIY air purifiers, using simple and accessible components like box fans, furnace filters and duct tape.

A 2023 study conducted at the National Collaborating Centre for Environmental Health found these air purifiers can perform as well as commercial air purifiers equipped with high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters. While HEPA-equipped air purifiers often cost hundreds of dollars, the materials for these DIY versions cost less than $60. Since 2023, the BC Lung Association has logged more than 160 community workshops where participants have built more than 3,200 air purifiers.

B.C. has recorded 634 wildfires since April 2026 and 98 are currently burning across the province. The fires have put thousands of British Columbians on evacuation alert, while others have been evacuated — like the community of Boston Bar in the Fraser Valley, where a rapidly spreading wildfire nearby also closed the Trans-Canada Highway for four days in early July. Even so, wildfire smoke has — so far this year — had less of an impact on air quality than in previous years. Most of the province is experiencing low-to-moderate-risk air quality. Meanwhile, intense wildfire activity in Ontario made Toronto’s air quality the worst in the world on July 15.

Darnell describes the DIY air purifier workshop as an opportunity to build community and educate people while also empowering them to take action in the face of a direct threat like climate change.

“It really is important to come together when you’re facing a catastrophe,” he says. “There’s the fast-moving ones like floods and fires, and there’s the slower-moving ones like climate change and smoke. The most important resource is the people around you.”

A fan, a filter, a roll of duct tape: a simple solution for cleaner air

Wildfire smoke is more toxic than everyday air pollution. It can travel thousands of kilometres and linger in the air for weeks. 

The smoke contains gases, such as carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide, and volatile organic compounds, like benzene, toluene and butene. There is also particulate matter, which can include soot, dust, pollen and spores, as well as chemical particles. The particles are classified according to size and fine particulates — the really tiny ones, less than 2.5 microns in diameter and typically referred to as PM2.5 — pose the greatest threats to human health because they can travel deeper into the lungs than larger ones. 

Fine particulates found in smoke and other types of air pollution have been linked to damage in several organ systems, including the heart, brain and reproductive system. 

Certain air filters are capable of removing particulates from the air. The DIY air purifiers use a single MERV 13, commonly used in furnaces and available in Canada for less than $20 per filter, which need to be changed out regularly to maintain performance.

The 20” filters fit perfectly on the back of a 20” box fan, which costs about $35. Duct tape seals the filter to the fan, allowing air to be drawn through the filter and pushed out through the fan. To increase the air purifier’s efficiency, a “shroud” can be placed on the side of the fan opposite the filter. Made of duct tape or cardboard, the shroud blocks off the corners of the fan face, preventing air backflow.

It takes about 25 minutes to assemble one air purifier, which can be used immediately to clean the air in a space of up to 400 square feet. At the Victoria workshop, each table soon sports at least one, some of them decorated with colourful duct tape designs, others sleek and white. 

Community in the face of climate crisis

Among the workshop attendees is Victoria city councillor Dave Thompson, who is considering putting on a workshop in the neighbouring municipality.

“I wanted to see how it got organized,” Thompson says. “We’ve been very active on climate change and this is a piece we haven’t done yet.”

Many participants express a desire to do what they can in the face of the climate emergency.

“I feel like whatever we can do on an individual basis for ourselves and our families is always helpful,” Mary Jean, a nurse, tells fellow participants at her table.

Around the room, several signs feature prompts for conversations about climate change and climate action.

“According to polls, 80 per cent of Canadians are worried about climate, but we often think we’re the only ones,” Darnell says. “So what we’re providing is a place where we can come, do something positive, have fun and know that we’re among people and we can talk about it.”

Climate change is making wildfires more likely and more intense. Between 1948 and 2024, annual average temperatures in Canada increased by an average of 2.8 C, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada.

In B.C., wildfires have burned about 10 million hectares of land, more than in the previous six decades combined, according to the BC Wildfire Service. 

While Darnell feels discouraged about the state of climate action at the provincial and federal level, he sees the importance of people gathering. 

“A lot of the province, particularly to the east of us, is on fire at the moment and certainly in the rest of Canada as well. We are trying to provide practical help for people in the community,” he says. 

“People really need a place to come together and just say, ‘Am I crazy?’ No, you’re not. The behaviors of our economy, of our corporations and our government are crazy at the moment.”

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Summary

• The World Cup prompted Vancouver to clear its False Creek harbour of abandoned boats, a sudden absence that highlights their usual presence in the city’s harbours.
• Abandoned boats are a jurisdictional challenge and environmental hazard across B.C. coastal communities, but in Vancouver they intersect with the city’s housing affordability crisis, as some rely on them for shelter.
• Provincial funding to support the removal of abandoned boats recently ended, but a new federal bill would prohibit the transfer of boats to people who cannot maintain them, offering another way to mitigate the issue.

Stephen Paetkau’s salvage boat, Lucky Dog, was built for the North Sea. When he bought the Norwegian-made vessel in 2021, the advertisement featured three giant moustached Norsemen on the deck, arms crossed and chests puffed out. Today, however, it is moored off Granville Island in Vancouver, on standby to recover abandoned boats in False Creek. It sits beside a black pirate ship that can be rented out for parties, where people don pirate hats and sail out into English Bay to drink and spray water cannons. Both vessels are designed for waters a little bigger than a narrow inlet in the heart of the city.  

Paetkau named it Lucky Dog after the Chinese zodiac year of his birth and because, he says, he’s “the luckiest man alive.” Ironically, much of Paetkau’s work begins when someone else’s luck has run out. 

Paetkau and his brother Jonathan run Skookum Yacht Services. Since 2020 the company has become the one most often called by Transport Canada when an abandoned boat sinks, washes up or breaks to pieces in the waters around Vancouver —  something that happens often enough the locals are used to seeing a boat on the beach or a half-submerged mast in the harbour. Paetkau says that since they began working with Transport Canada in 2020 they have lifted or removed close to 100 boats from the waterways, seabed and beaches of False Creek and English Bay. 

This June, the Paetkaus found themselves busier than usual. Transport Canada established an exclusion zone in False Creek for the duration of the FIFA World Cup — for which Vancouver is one of 16 host cities — forcing several boats normally anchored there to be moved elsewhere. 

Typically, if an abandoned vessel in False Creek — the inlet separating downtown Vancouver from the southern expanse of the city — is deemed hazardous to the public, infrastructure, navigation routes or to the environment, then the Canadian Coast Guard will act swiftly and have it removed. If it is not a hazard but, as Paetkau calls it, merely “offensive junk,” the issue is passed to Transport Canada, who try to find the owner of the vessel. 

In a statement to The Narwhal, Transport Canada stated the exclusion zone was created to “support marine safety and security during FIFA events at the request of RCMP and VPD.” Boats that were anchored in the restricted area were relocated to nearby waters, including off of Kitsilano and Jericho beach, which Paetkau says are difficult places to anchor. 

Though the boats will eventually return to False Creek, their temporary relocation brings attention to an issue coastal community harbours across British Columbia have been facing for years: the risks abandoned boats pose to navigation, public safety and marine ecosystems. But as housing costs continue to rise in Vancouver, some abandoned boats are also becoming makeshift homes, complicating efforts to remove them. 

Abandoned boats have environmental and cultural impacts

When I arrive at his office on Granville Island, Paetkau is on the phone with the Jericho Sailing Centre. After he hangs up, I ask him what has happened to the boats that have been relocated. 

“Well,” he says, gesturing to his phone, “one of them is crashing into the Jericho breakwater.”

Five minutes later, Jonathan walks in with more news.

“Another is on Kits Beach.” 

They don’t sound an alarm bell or take off running to their boat, but instead sigh and shake their heads. A lot more steps and phone calls are required first, a reminder of one of the more persistent issues facing abandoned boats in False Creek: jurisdiction. 

In an emailed statement, Transport Canada told The Narwhal the time required to address a vessel varies, but “in almost all cases, there is a minimum 30-day public notice period” to allow someone to claim ownership. The Vancouver Police Department puts up a notice and assists in monitoring the boat during this time.

If the abandoned boat is not claimed within the time period, a company like Paetkau’s is called in, and the removal is completed on the taxpayer’s dime. The process of moving the boats is slow and the water does not wait. Changing tides, strong winds and storms often blow the boats onto rocks or smash them into thousands of fibreglass fragments before Paetkau’s crew can get to them. 

According to Transport Canada, abandoned vessels start to become environmental hazards as they deteriorate, as they begin to leak oils, fuels and other toxic substances while releasing debris such as fibreglass and microplastics into fragile marine ecosystems.

In certain areas of Canada, these effects have been significant enough to have reached Parliament. In October 2024, John White, director of lands and natural resources for the Snuneymuxw First Nation, appeared before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans alongside Chief Lenora Joe of the shíshálh First Nation, a councillor from the Snaw-naw-as First Nation and an elected chief councillor of the Tseshaht First Nation. Together, they described the environmental and cultural impacts abandoned vessels are having on Indigenous coastal communities. 

Chief Joe told Parliament how abandoned vessels contaminate marine food sources that are central to life for the shíshálh Nation. “Our food is part of our culture,” she said. “The way we collect food, the way we gather it, the way we celebrate — everything that we do depends on the food that we can gather.” 

White pointed to impacts on Pacific salmon in Snuneymuxw territory, describing what he said was a historic decline in salmon on the Fraser River. According to White, sockeye runs that once numbered tens of millions dropped to approximately 500,000 in 2024. 

Two years later, White says the problem persists for the Snuneymuxw Nation, where abandoned boats continue to impact their clam beds and shellfish. “Until we change regulations or change acts and we change regulations on a higher level, we’re still going to fight this problem,” he says.

White also acknowledges opportunities for Indigenous communities to be part of the solution: “How can the First Nations be included in this and develop business around breaking down ships and being part of that process?”

Abandoned boats a symptom of the housing crisis in Vancouver

In False Creek, environmental damage is only part of what Paetkau encounters. When storms drive abandoned boats onto rocks, Paetkau says what he and his crew find inside looks like “desperation.” 

One call in particular has stayed with Paetkau. He boarded a boat that had crashed onto rocks in False Creek, with a hole ripped in the side. His job was to assess the damage and determine a responsible bid for its removal. But, when he climbed inside, he found a woman. 

It was February, and the boat was sitting in an area that would soon fill with seawater when the tide came in. She was wrapped in three flotation jackets and was insisting she could repair the boat that Paetkau knew was beyond saving. She told him she had nowhere else to go. What looked like a wreck had become to her a “paradise,” Paetkau says, even as the boat broke apart around her. 

Housing in Vancouver is among the most expensive in Canada. In a city where the average one-bedroom or studio apartment can cost thousands of dollars a month, even a broken-down boat begins to look like a viable alternative. 

To see how these boats become a symptom of the housing crisis, it helps to first understand how they often become abandoned. 

In B.C., cars must be registered and insured. But according to Paetkau, boats are typically bought and sold privately, often without any formal record of transfer. When a boat reaches the end of its life, both disposal and repairs can cost thousands. At that point, there is a clear incentive to pass it along. 

“I’ve known of boats that we charged the Canadian taxpayer seven or eight thousand dollars to get rid of,” he says, “that probably changed hands over nothing more than a handshake and a six-pack.”

Because of this, Paetkau says, there is little to no paper trail, ownership becomes unclear and the boats tend to drift between hands.

While they can provide shelter, many of the boats stay broken-down in the hands of people who don’t know how to operate or maintain them. As a result, these boats can become harmful for the people on board and for the environment.

Provincial funding ends, but other solutions emerging for abandoned boats

Between April 2025 and May 2026, Transport Canada removed 19 vessels in False Creek. But while Vancouver’s housing crisis may intensify the problem, abandoned boats are not confined to the city’s shoreline. “What I hear from Transport Canada is there are other harbours [in B.C.] where the problem of abandoned boats is worse,” Paetkau says. 

On the west coast of Vancouver Island, in towns such as Tofino and Ucluelet, and the First Nations communities Opitsaht, Tla-o-qui-aht and Ahousaht, the problem is familiar. Until recently, the removal of abandoned boats in their harbours was funded through the provincial Clean Coast, Clean Waters Initiative.

That funding ended this year, as planned, raising concerns in communities where a lack of infrastructure, such as boat lifts, can make vessel removals particularly costly. In an emailed statement, the B.C. Ministry of Environment and Parks told The Narwhal that at this time “there is no funding identified beyond this.” 

There are still signs of efforts to address the problem before the boats become wrecks. Bill C-244, also known as the Clean Coasts Act, was introduced in 2025 and would prohibit owners from transferring vessels to people they know (or ought to know) cannot safely maintain or dispose of them. The bill has passed second reading and is currently under committee review. 

Down the coast, Washington State has taken a similar preventative approach with its Vessel Turn-In Program that allows owners to surrender boats free of charge that are likely to become abandoned before they reach that point, reducing both environmental damage and cleanup costs. 

In Vancouver, preparations for the World Cup pushed many of the boats elsewhere, but it is unclear what changes will outlast the tournament. The version of False Creek projected to the world looked a little different than what locals were used to seeing, and yet the issues beneath the surface remain the same. 

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Summary

• While Black and racialized farm workers make up a large chunk of the country’s agricultural workforce, Black farm owners are still a slim minority in Canada.
• This wasn’t always the case, and historical Black Canadian settlements, like the Black Settlement in Oro Township near Barrie, Ont., provided land and housing for Black farmers in the early 19th century.
• One of the primary barriers to farm access and ownership is the high cost of land; programs like farm rentals and urban farms are trying to bridge the gap.

Along a dusty bike trail of crushed gravel, the blue-grey waters of Kempenfelt Bay shimmer through large trees with leafy branches overhead. On one side stands an Ontario Heritage Trust plaque, recognizing the historic Black community of Oro, Ont. 

On bicycle rides along the Great Lakes Waterfront Trail, I ride for fun and adventure and to find the Black history hidden in the countryside. As a scholar and writer, I research how race intersects with nature. In this case, it is how farming and farmlands — a part of nature we can all connect with — criss-cross with race.

In southwestern Ontario, I’ve taken detours to visit the former Black villages known as the Buxton Settlement and the Puce River Community, near the border with Detroit. In other places I look for Ontario Heritage plaques, old churches and fading headstones in unregistered cemeteries. These are often the only indicators that Black communities once thrived in rural Ontario and that Black farmers owned their farms.

In the 19th century, the area around Lake Simcoe, including Oro (now Oro-Medonte), was filled with Black farmers and their families. There are similar heritage plaques scattered across rural areas and small towns in Ontario such as Fergus, Cainsville, Lucan and Dresden. Once a common sight, today Black farm owners are rare, while Black farm workers are a backbone of agricultural labour in Canada. Each year, some 36,000 Black and brown farm workers come to Canada for the farming season.

The average age of a farmer is 56 years in Canada. They are getting old and tired, greying out of the years of dawn-to-dusk work on the farm. While there has been an increase in the number of female farmers, one statistic has barely changed — the tiny number of Black, Indigenous and racialized farmers. In Ontario, only five per cent of farmers are from diverse ethnocultural groups, which includes racialized groups.

Yet, in Toronto, some 56 per cent of the population is racialized, according to Statistics Canada. This demographic drift is not reflected in farming. So, where will the next generation of young farmers come from in Ontario? Who will grow the food that we all need to eat and live?

Farmland is precious to both farmers and non-farmers, but the competition for farmland is fierce. Data from Ontario Farmland Trust shows Ontario has lost 18 per cent of its farmland in recent decades to urban development and aggregate mining. Each day, Ontario is losing 319 acres, or 129 hectares, of farmland to development. Once the farmland is paved over, it is lost forever.

“The number one issue is access to land for Black farmers,” Claire Perttula, president of the BIPOC caucus of the National Farmers Union, said. “Land is so expensive. To put together a down payment you need millions. Working in agriculture you won’t make that down payment.” 

Created in 2021, the caucus represents racialized farmers, land stewards and farm workers from across the country. It builds community and advocates for their interests.

“Farmland should be treated as a public good and not just as a private one for profit,” Perttula said. “We need a different system of farm ownership and use that would prioritize the people farming the land. This helps them make a go of it and earn a living.”

No Black farmers but lots of Black farm workers

Cycling along the backroads of the Niagara Wine Route in Ontario, I passed scores of Black men tending to grapevines in vineyards, apples in orchards and peas and beans in fields. I stopped to chat with them as they were the only other Black people I had seen so far that summer in the countryside. The men were Jamaican and migrant farm workers. 

Farm workers till the land, plant the seeds and harvest the crops. In Canada, those farm workers are most likely to be Black or brown. The labourers are migrants from the Caribbean, Mexico and Latin America who are hired under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program. Each year, they arrive in Canada in the spring, and must leave in autumn when their contracts end. Nearly half of all agricultural workers in Canada are hired under this program. They labour in every province where there are farms. Some farm workers have been coming to Canada for decades. As temporary foreign workers, they are mostly ineligible for citizenship.

On the other side of the country, Jamaican migrant workers also labour in the wineries and orchards of the Okanagan Valley, B.C. I now expect to see them everywhere in my travels in rural areas or small towns. So why the stark racial divide in farming in Canada, where white farmers reap the profits and Black and brown farm workers sweat under the sun? 

Free farmland for some

In the United States, Black farmers were proverbially promised “40 acres and a mule” — immortalized in the name of Spike Lee’s film production company — a reparation of sorts, at the end of slavery. No such promises were made to formerly enslaved people in Canada, when slavery was abolished here in 1834. 

White homesteaders, however, got their free acres of land under various land grant schemes. In Ontario, for instance, the 1868 Free Grants and Homestead Act gave free land to farmers, who got the title and legal ownership if they cleared the forested land and built a farmhouse within five years. Roads to support colonization were constructed across the province to make it easier for the settlers to arrive and claim their free land. The railways did the same across the country a few decades later. The free farmland was, and still is, all Indigenous land.

The only land scheme in southern Ontario that was specifically for Black people was the Black Settlement in Oro Township, near Barrie, Ont. The free land grants were in part a reward for the Black veterans who fought to protect Canada in the War of 1812 when the United States invaded. However, over time the settlement faded as the land was poor for farming, and it was too far from major roads and thus difficult to reach markets to sell the produce. 

“The problem is not just for Black farmers alone, but it’s worst for them,” Bamidele Adekunle said. He is an adjunct professor at the University of Guelph, and co-editor of the book Eat Local, Taste Global: How Ethnocultural Food Reaches Our Tables.

“It’s the commodification of land,” Adekunle said. “There is a serious competition between real estate and agriculture for land. When land is commodified, its use moves to things that are more profitable. It moves out of the reach of most farmers.”

Access to modern farmland is a massive challenge for any new farmer. Those that don’t inherit the family farm can buy their own, but only if they have the money, and prices are increasing each year. In 2024 the price for a hectare of farmland and buildings in Ontario was $20,782.

Consider an average city block is roughly one hectare in size. The average size of a farm in Ontario is now 249 acres, or 100 hectares. That means an average commercial farm in Ontario costs about $5 million. This means that small family-owned farms are fading into the past along with milk pails, churning butter by hand and Anne of Green Gables. 

Buying traditional farmland is out of reach for many Black farmers, without some form of financial help. The FarmStart program was supposed to kickstart that help. Started in 2005, the program was an incubator for potential farmers, providing them with mentoring, and teaching farming and technical skills. One thing the now-shuttered program struggled to provide was access to land to grow food. 

New solutions for an old farmland problem

“There are some alternative and affordable pathways into farming,” Martin Straathof, the executive director of the Ontario Farmland Trust, said. The non-profit was set up to keep farmers farming by protecting farmland from non-agricultural uses. The trust has advocated for solutions to make farming accessible, such as a conservation easement agreement, which guarantees land will continue to be used for farming.

“The easement creates stability for tenant farmers who can rent the farmland,” Straathof said. “It gives new farmers access to land and the security that they need to keep farming.” 

The farmland is still the private property of the owners under the conservation easement agreement, but it can only be used for farming. Similarly, farmland trusts keep agricultural land protected for that use, even after farming families move on. Some farmers may not have anyone to inherit the family farm or want to leave farmland as their legacy. They can donate the land to a farmland trust, which in turn can lease the land to tenant farmers.

Around the Greater Toronto Area, nature is protected from urban sprawl by the Greenbelt Act. There are calls for similar legislation to shelter prime farmland from development, known as a foodbelt. Bill 21, the Protect Our Food Act, passed first reading in parliament in 2025 and proposes to protect the fertile agricultural lands of southern Ontario from non-agricultural uses. Put forward by Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner and Independent MPP Bobbi Ann Brady, the act could help curve the rapid loss of farmland across southern Ontario.

Additionally, climate change is affecting agriculture in Canada. It is uprooting assumptions about what can and can’t be grown in the land of the “Great White North.” The warming climate impacts crops, farm animals, the soil, insects and diseases. Some traditional crops such as wheat and canola don’t do well when stressed by heat. 

The warmer and longer growing season caused by climate change means that some tropical crops can be farmed in Canada, though. Sweet potatoes are now grown in Ontario as a commercial crop. If the climate change even further, it might be possible to grow other tropical staples such as yam, rice and bananas. However, you need farmers who know how to do so. These are familiar crops for Black and other racialized farmers. They already have the skill and knowledge to grow them. But they can’t use the skills or meet the potential demand for the crops if they have no access to farmland.

“You need a minimum of five acres to be a commercial farmer,” said Jacqueline Dwyer, the farmer and co-founder of Toronto Black Farmers and Food Growers Collective. “The system is against us. The lack of finance. The lack of resources. The lack of land. The system won’t change without pressure.”

Urban farms are another accessible route into farming for Black farmers. There are quite a few Black urban farmers or farm organizations in the Toronto area such as Afri-Can Food Basket, Black Creek Community Farm, Adinkra Farm and Zawadi Farm. Each of these play an important role in reconnecting people to the source of their food and provide culturally appropriate foods for the Black community. These foods include yam, callaloo and okra. However, urban farms have their limits as there is no pathway from there to owning or operating a rural farm for Black farmers. 

“Youth are not getting into agriculture because there is no land,” Dwyer said. “Young people are pushed out of farming. They call themselves landless farmers.”

In many ways, farming is at a crossroads in Ontario. The pipeline into farming is leaking, due to a mismatch between old and new farmers, and it will worsen in the future unless things change. The majority of farmers are old, White and near retirement. They own farmland. The province is multiracial due to demographic shifts and so the next generation of young farmers are most likely to be Black and racialized. They do not own farmland. 

The gap between those who have and do not have farmland must close if we are all going to eat. 

Spring is here and fresh joy fills the air. The birds and butterflies are returning from the tropics. So too are the Black and brown migrant farmer workers. The farmland is awake and it is time to sow. We need Black farmers now, and they too need to reap, if we are all to eat.

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At 7:30 a.m. on June 28, 2021, Ryan Ackerman sat down for a daily meeting. A paramedic and manager with BC Emergency Health Services, Ackerman had attended these meetings nearly every day since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. They had become routine. This one was different.

“A manager in the dispatch centre popped in very briefly and just said, ‘I’m sorry I can’t stay, things really got out of control overnight,’ ” Ackerman says.

Extreme heat was blanketing the province, and the vast majority of B.C.’s population was under public health heat warnings.

Overnight, calls flooded into 911. By morning, dispatchers were already backed up. Ackerman’s colleague told him there were hundreds of genuine emergencies, without enough teams to respond. 

“They need all hands on deck,” he remembers the colleague saying. So Ackerman decided to leave his desk and jump into an ambulance.

“I don’t think the scale of what we were walking into was really clear until we hit the button to go on the air to make ourselves available,” he says. “Immediately, a call came in, I listened to the radio and I heard all of the other units that were also on their way to cardiac arrest calls. It suddenly sank in: this is different, this is reaching natural disaster levels.”

The call Ackerman received was one of 11,970 emergency calls made by people in British Columbia that day, more than double the average number.

Ackerman saw the strain on his colleagues, as he watched them coming and going from the hospital. “They were exhausted, they were hot, they’d been through the heat themselves and they just kept going back out and doing more calls.”

The heat dome lasted eight days and claimed 619 lives in the province. Sarah Henderson, scientific director of Environmental Health Service at the BC Centre for Disease Control, called it “the most deadly weather event in Canadian history.” 

It pushed the ambulance service to the brink, but it also sparked action. In the five years since the heat dome, the province has invested millions to increase the number of paramedics and ambulances. They’ve built new departments and procedures for responding to extreme weather and even increased the scope of medications and treatments that first responders can use to save lives.

According to Ackerman, it’s a reflection of how the heat dome “fundamentally changed how we look at disaster and emergency management.” 

But those changes have yet to be tested by another heat dome of that scale. And as B.C. braces for another summer of extreme temperatures and dry conditions, some are wondering if we’ve gone far enough.

An ‘endless avalanche’ of cardiac arrests

For most paramedics in Vancouver, shift change happens around 6:00 am, as the night crew leaves and the day shift takes over. It’s usually cool, especially in Vancouver, where the ocean breeze helps moderate the temperatures. But on June 28, 2021, it was already 22 C and rising when Jayne Hamilton started her shift.

“I knew it was going to be hot, I knew it was going to be miserable,” she explains. “I didn’t, even with that, have an understanding of how hot it was going to be.”Like Ackerman, Hamilton was immediately dispatched to a cardiac arrest. By the time she cleared from that one, she was sent to another. 

“Somewhere between the second and third one, we started commenting out loud that ‘this is not normal,’ ” she says. “When you’ve made it to three cardiac arrests before 10 o’clock in the morning, it’s odd.” Hamilton is an advanced care paramedic. A specialist dispatched to the most serious emergencies, she has more training than the primary care paramedics who make up the bulk of the ambulance service. But even with that focus, Hamilton says “a heavy week of cardiac arrests” would be three in a four-day work block. But on June 28, she says she responded to 11 of the 27 that came across her dispatch computer. 

“It seemed endless, like just an endless avalanche,” she says.

When bodies heat up, they normally cool down by sweating and dilating the blood vessels near our skin. But extreme heat and exertion can stress these systems. When someone is exposed to these stressors for too long, their body gets overwhelmed. Heat cramps show up, then heat exhaustion, with profuse sweating, nausea and dizziness. Those can be stopped by cooling someone down, but if that doesn’t happen the condition can progress to heat-stroke, a life-threatening problem where organs start to shut down. Heat can also impact how medications work and compound existing health problems, especially related to the heart and kidneys. 

These are all things that paramedics like Hamilton learn in school. But outside of the classroom, heat emergencies are rare. 

“[Extreme heat] wasn’t something that organizations or the paramedics at large were really focused on,” she says, explaining that most heat emergencies happened at worksites or events, like races and summer festivals.

And it wasn’t just paramedics seeing a massive uptick in heat-related illnesses.

“I was working during the heat dome and I saw more cases of heat illness than I ever had in my entire career,” Vancouver-based family physician and president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, Melissa Lem says. 

“It affected so many people … If you didn’t have indoor cooling, you could not escape from the heat; it was everywhere.”

Unhoused and low-income communities impacted more by extreme heat, heat dome

The heat dome was experienced by people throughout B.C., but it didn’t impact everyone equally. In 2022, the BC Coroners Service released a report about this period which found “the elderly, persons with chronic health conditions, persons living alone, those with no access to cooling and those in particular geographic areas were more impacted by the heat.”It was a reality explored by the Union Gospel Mission in their 2024 report Unhoused Under Pressure, looking at how climate change is impacting unhoused people in the Downtown Eastside. It looked at flooding, cold, wildfire smoke and extreme heat, with a focus on how the heat dome hit the community.

“Vancouver’s 2021 heat dome lives vividly in the collective memory of Downtown Eastside residents,” the report explained. While the BC Coroners Service’s report didn’t break down deaths by neighbourhood, it did find that “material deprivation” and “social deprivation” were major contributors to heat-related deaths. So too was the lack of access to air conditioning or indoor cooling spaces, all problems, Wells explains, common in the Downtown Eastside.

“Heat is more harmful and prevalent in the Downtown Eastside because there are fewer plants, less shade and little to no access to air conditioning,” Nick Wells, a spokesperson with Union Gospel Mission, explains.

“The Downtown Eastside can get as hot as 49 degrees Celsius, and that’s incredibly dangerous,” Wells adds. “While you’re dealing with this heat, you’re also dealing with other kinds of comorbidities or issues, such as entrenched homelessness, systemic poverty, mental health issues, substance use and addiction. All these factors play in.”

‘You were in a natural disaster’

First responders train for natural disasters. They call them mass-casualty incidents and have systems to manage staff, triage patients and ensure resources get where they’re needed. But extreme heat doesn’t look like other disasters.

“What we worked through during the heat dome, in the truest sense of the word, was a natural disaster — no different than floods, earthquakes, that kind of thing,” Hamilton says. In addition to her work as a paramedic, Hamilton serves on Canada Task Force 1, a Vancouver-based search-and-rescue team deployed to natural disasters across Canada. “It was that scale of a disaster, [but] at the time, I don’t think, when we were in it, that we recognized it.”

Ackerman remembers “feeling just awful about the way the day had gone.” So much so that he brought it up with his supervisor.  

“He told me, ‘You were in a natural disaster, we just didn’t tell you [that] you were,” Ackerman says.

For some, that feelings of grief, exhaustion and frustration turned into anger when Darlene Mackinnon, then BC Emergency Health Services’ chief operating officer, told Global News that, in her eyes, the service had done “a really good job” responding to the heat dome.

A petition calling for Mackinnon’s firing was initiated, calling out BC Emergency Health Services for failing to prepare for the heat dome by staffing ambulances or dispatch centres appropriately, leaving some patients to wait hours for help. 

“I have never seen paramedics and dispatchers as angry as they are right now,” one paramedic, speaking anonymously to Global News, said in reply. “Everyone is absolutely livid and disgusted with the response.”

The petition calling for Mackinnon’s firing gathered thousands of signatures in a matter of days. The Ambulance Paramedics of British Columbia, the union representing paramedics and emergency dispatchers, later learned that Mackinnon was placed on leave. By December 2021, she moved on to a new role within the provincial health authority.

On July 14, Adrian Dix, then the province’s health minister, held a press conference announcing the hiring of Leanne Heppell to the new post of chief ambulance officer, and pledged millions of dollars to hire 85 new full-time paramedics and 30 full-time dispatchers. There was also money to buy 22 new ambulances and convert 22 rural ambulance stations from part-time, on-call service to full-time.

A year later, in 2022, the province announced $148 million in new funding to expand the ambulance service and hire new paramedics. They budgeted $2.1 billion for climate disaster preparedness, including funding for the Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience team. According to the government, by 2024, the BC Emergency Health Services budget was nearly $1 billion, an increase of more than $475 million since 2017. 

“It’s one of those events where we recognize, as an organization, that it shouldn’t have taken a tragedy like that to lead to improvements,” Ackerman says. But it has led to improvements. After the heat dome, Ackerman became a director of the disaster risk reduction and resilience department, a team he says he oversaw grow from two staff to more than 30.

“The immediate response was [that] we need to have an early warning system, we need to have proper preparation, we need to have a proper response [and] we need to have a proper recovery phase,” he explains. “That was the impetus for five years of iterative improvement to try and make sure that we are prepared well in advance of any event.”

Those preparations include what Ackerman calls an “operational readiness team” of paramedics who monitor forecasts from organizations such as Environment Canada and BC Wildfire Service. Ackerman says they use this data to produce daily risk scores for the service for categories of environmental issues, such as floods, wildfires and extreme temperatures.

These scores trigger a range of responses. It could be increasing staffing levels or moving ambulance crews to high-risk areas. There might be staff-wide warnings about travel conditions or how temperature extremes impact medications. Sometimes it requires out-of-the-box thinking, like when dozens of ambulances were deployed to the Vancouver airport to meet planes evacuating critically ill patients during the 2023 wildfires in the Northwest Territories.

The province also created something called the BC HEAT Committee after the heat dome. A multi-agency coordinating body housed in the BC Centre for Disease Control, Ackerman describes it as a heat alert and response system “that just didn’t exist before the heat dome.” 

“We’re able to respond well in advance and be prepared for these things and not get caught after it’s already escalated,” he says. 

There are also efforts to reduce the strain that heat events put on emergency services. For example, specialized paramedics will respond to non-life-threatening emergencies, helping move people to cooling centres and freeing up ambulances for Code 3 responses.

Climate change is a ‘prominent source of occupational stress’ for paramedics

Getting the ambulance service to understand the connections between climate change and medical emergencies was a focus for David Hollingworth before the heat dome ever hit. A primary care paramedic and the director of the Ambulance Paramedics of BC’s environment and climate change committee, he had spent years trying to make the link. While some supervisors supported him, he says that the higher ranks of the service didn’t seem interested.

“Seeing these [natural disaster] events and not seeing the link to climate change being made was infuriating,” he says.

But something changed after the heat dome. The death toll was one part, but so was the strain of working under extreme temperatures.

“I was making little bags of ice from the ice machine in the hospital,” Hollingworth recalls. “I was putting them in my breast pockets and moving them around to different pockets in my body, just to try to cool down.”

After the heat dome, he had a moment where he felt “a sense of this is what I’ve been talking about.”

“Health-care professionals now recognize that human health is interdependent on planetary health and the environment,” he explains. “By not doing anything about it, we’re just making our work more difficult and more dangerous, so it’s in all of our self-interest to do it.”

It’s an argument that resonates with Shannon Sherk. Now a paramedic, Sherk was a student at the University of Victoria when the heat dome hit. She was broadly interested in the connections between human health, the environment and health-care, but the events of 2021 sharpened that focus onto climate change and paramedics.

“I realized that no one had really looked into the relationship between paramedicine and environmental hazards,” she says. “Which seems a little bit ironic to me, considering it’s the facet of health-care that interacts the most [with people] outside of clinical settings.”

Sherk dug in, surveying over 100 paramedics from across the province about how climate change was impacting their work for a paper that was published in the June 2026 issue of the Journal of Disaster and Emergency Medicine.

“The big overarching conclusion is that paramedics are seeing environmental hazards impact both their patients and themselves,” she explains. “Patient outcomes are worse when you have extreme hazards, transport times or your time to get to patients is longer, and call volumes are higher.”

But while Sherk says that those are all pretty well understood realities, there’s less clarity around how paramedics are affected by events like extreme heat, wildfire smoke and atmospheric rivers — particularly when they’re already at their limit. 

“If you have a workforce that is operating at over 100 per cent capacity on a good day, what plans are there when you do have those additional stressors and there’s not really any extra resources or staff you can pull upon?” she asks. 

Her research found that climate impacts are a “prominent source of occupational stress” among paramedics. 

“The combination of a high call volume, higher acuity calls and an overstretched workforce creates optimal conditions for critical incident stress,” the report explains.

In August 2025, the Ambulance Paramedics of BC published a press release raising the alarm over a simmering mental health crisis within the service. Nine paramedics had already died in seven months prior to the release of the statement.

“While a majority of these deaths were due to health issues or accidents, many of these members died by suicide,” the statement explained. “Deaths that are very likely connected to the immense stressors of their jobs.”It noted 30 per cent of the 6,000-plus paramedics in the province were either off work for mental health reasons or working while dealing with a mental health issue.

When the CBC asked Nicki Ropp, a mental health and wellness coordinator for the union about why they were seeing this spike, she cited multiple factors, including impacts from climate change and extreme weather.“With the ongoing opioid crisis that continues to take up a lot of our call volume, the pandemic, the flooding, the heat dome, our staffing shortages, wildfires, everything. This is all compounding things,” she says.

Sherk worries that these issues are only going to worsen with the climate crisis. 

“You have all of these overlapping factors,” she says. “It’s hard to rally folks around figuring out what you do when there’s another really bad heat event, because we’re so focused on how to deal with how bad things are now.”

It’s a question of when, not if, we’ll experience another heat event. And it might not even take something as extreme as the heat dome. According to research published by Sarah Henderson in June 2025, “the risk of death spikes when people are exposed to both elevated levels of fine particulate matter from wildfire smoke and temperatures above 26 C.” 

That’s something we could easily see this summer. Environment Canada is forecasting a hot, dry summer for British Columbia. In late May, Weather Network meteorologists doubled down on that, predicting that the arrival of an El Niño pattern would lock in warmer summer temperatures for the province and contribute to elevated wildfire risk.That could mean increased strain on health-care and emergency services, because while heat and smoke are both dangerous on their own, they’re even more deadly together. That worries Lem, not only because of the health implications, but because she thinks that both the provincial and federal governments are rolling back climate action and forgetting the lessons of the heat dome. 

“It’s recency bias. … Our brains are wired to focus on what’s in front of us right now,” she says. “This summer is projected to be one of the hottest in history. If we have another deadly heat wave, they’re going to be talking about climate investments again. It’s unfortunately our short-term views that prevent us from acting longer-term.”

Still, Ackerman thinks that the ambulance service is much better prepared to respond to future climate events than it was back in 2021. He points to the increased staffing, better pay, the preparation from his disaster readiness team and even the expanding scope of practice as examples. 

But Sherk isn’t as confident. She’s had conversations with Ackerman’s department and thinks they’re doing “amazing” work in preparing for disaster events. And while she agrees that conditions within the ambulance service have improved through things like better pay and increased staffing levels, many of the external factors driving increased call volumes haven’t.“So much of the workforce is putting out fires and dealing with ongoing crises,” Sherk explains. “You have all of these overlapping factors — like the opioid crisis, the housing crisis, the impact of COVID-19 and terrible responder well-being — that it’s hard to rally folks around figuring out what you do when there’s another really bad heat event. We’re so focused on how we deal with how bad things are now.”For Sherk, it raises questions about whether disaster response plans will work when they depend on having excess resources. Her research suggests that many paramedics are still overworked and burned out, and if they’re already stretched to the limit, she’s worried that even the best- laid plans won’t be enough. 

“If you’re trying to identify what resources you can pull in during a heat event, it’s hard to imagine what that looks like when all available resources are being used all the time.”

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.

Around 13,000 years ago, our blue planet got a lot whiter. 

Temperatures in the northern hemisphere dropped precipitously and in a relatively short time — decades, not centuries — big ice sheets spread down from the mountains, freezing out once-teeming habitats populated densely by flora and fauna. 

Humans, and our non-human relatives, had been flourishing for some 10,000 years in the warm afterglow that followed the previous deep freeze. Abundance had bloomed in the glacial melt and from the sediment left on the land. Life stretched out in the absence of ice. But then the ice came back.

The ensuing thousand-year period is called the Younger Dryas, named for a little Arctic flower called Dryas octopetala. In some places, like Greenland, the freeze took mere months. Other parts of the northern world succumbed more slowly, but the overall process, in geological time, was like the heartbeat of a hummingbird. And then it was quiet.

The onset of the Younger Dryas may have been abrupt, but it wasn’t catastrophic. Humans adapted. Clinging to refugia — pockets of the landscape where conditions were favourable enough to support plants and animals despite the pervasive cold — we endured. Ultimately, we thrived. When the period ended, as abruptly as it had arrived, so began the Holocene.

Like the humans who watched the world change so quickly to white and like their descendants who felt the rapid return of the sun, we are living through a period of dramatic and accelerating changes to our environment. 

But ours is a different time, one characterized not by ice, but by fire.

Last fall, while walking down an alleyway in my northern British Columbia town, I ran into an acquaintance. We traded the usual pleasantries and then talk turned, as it so often does, to the weather. It was hot and dry and the skies were choked with the haze from a spate of wildfires that had flared up after the season appeared to be mostly over.

“This isn’t normal,” my friend insisted. 

Unlike me, he grew up in the area. As an avid outdoors enthusiast and former mountain guide, he was well-positioned to say what’s normal and what’s not. He seemed unsettled, agitated. 

“I have never seen a September like this,” he said.

We are living in the Anthropocene, a term many geologists have adopted to characterize the era where humans are the primary agents of change on the planet. Our actions over the past few centuries have led to the increasingly erratic and unstable climatic systems wreaking havoc across the globe. As we grapple with the impacts of our collective past, we also need to grapple with ourselves as we come to terms with how we process the changes we are experiencing. We are reckoning with a restless world.

Those same wildfires that suffused my little mountain town with the smell of campfire blanketed the city of Vancouver with thick smoke. For a few days, the air quality there plummeted to rank as the worst in the world. It all felt surprising somehow, even as we collectively chided ourselves for being surprised. 

Humans are incredibly adaptable — but we crave certainty. We intuitively cling to patterns we’ve seen before to guide our expectations about what a day, month or year might bring. We plan around those expectations: picnics and road trips, soccer games and barbeques.

As the world around us continues to change, we begrudgingly change with it. We plan now for wildfire season — unheard of in my childhood. We slather our kids in sunblock and pack asthma inhalers. We don’t roast marshmallows on crackling fires anymore when we camp out in the woods in the summer because of months-long fire bans. But change is a painful and iterative process and we keep setting a new normal to anchor ourselves to, again and again and again.

Our preference for certainty can have profound impacts on mental health. Very little quantitative research has been done but there is a growing consensus that climate impacts — including the anticipation of those we have not yet experienced — are leading to a mental health crisis.

“Climate change has been associated with numerous mental health conditions including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, anxiety, grief, substance use disorders and suicidal ideation among many others,” Elizabeth Wiley, a physician, wrote in the BC Medical Journal in 2019.

We do plan further ahead, peeking into possible futures with predictive climate models to design and build infrastructure we hope will protect our communities from fires and floods and more. But our world is changing as fast as that flickering hummingbird heartbeat and we act as if each pulse will last forever. There’s only so far we can see. 

In our temporal myopia, we need to get more comfortable with not knowing — and embrace uncertainty as an essential part of our existence.

Our ancestors found refugia to withstand an icy world that became increasingly hostile to life. Now, as we speed inexorably into a hotter future, we are confronted with a growing list of urgent problems we need to prepare for, and adapt our existence to meet. We need to build our refugia.

David Stainforth, a physicist and climate scientist from Oxford, England, says policy makers and scientists need to pay closer attention to uncertainty — and build for unpredictable outcomes. He told me climate modelling has an important role to play in adaptation, but relying too heavily on a particular set of predictions, however sophisticated the models may be, can inadvertently fall prey to the human tendency to seek certainty. 

“It will kind of spuriously get rid of the uncertainty, meaning you can now build your flood defences — but you’re building the flood defences to protect yourself against the future in the model,” he said on a video call last year. “And the future in reality could be very, very different from that. There’s a danger you might misdirect society.”

In his 2023 book, Predicting Our Climate Future, Stainforth makes a case for embracing the uncertainties in climate models as a guiding principle for building resiliency at a community level. As he wrote in an essay for Aeon, uncertainties compound over decades until “almost everything can influence almost everything else.” 

“Changes in Arctic sea ice could influence the Indian summer monsoon,” he wrote. “Changes in rainfall in the North Atlantic could influence temperature patterns in central Africa.”

In essence, Stainforth argues we risk catastrophe if we are too reliant on the predictions of complex climate models — which can do many things but not all things — for the decisions we make about how to survive the inevitable changes that are coming. But by embracing uncertainty, he says, we can build refugia capable of withstanding impacts we haven’t yet imagined. 

Michele Koppes, a professor in the department of geography at the University of British Columbia, says accepting uncertainty can also provide a path through climate-related grief and anxiety. Koppes studies the effects of climate change on mountains and glaciers and works with communities living with the impacts, which include “dwindling water resources and increases in landslides and natural hazards like outburst floods.” That work began with a focus on the physical changes to the landscape, but has shifted to focus on the human side. 

“Who are the people that are living in the closest proximity to these impacts and what are their stories?” she said. “How are they perceiving this and what do they need in order to be resilient and to feel like they can continue their livelihoods and their lives in the face of all this change?”

She said asking these questions helped her process the loss and helplessness she was feeling as she watched the places she loved melt away. Reframing how we think about climate change asks us to accept uncertainty as a core principle — and while that can be deeply uncomfortable it also offers a truer understanding of the world around us. 

“The notion of certainty is a fallacy,” Koppes said. “Or maybe I’ll be more specific: the notion of control is a fallacy.” 

“The more I spend time on this earth, the more I recognize how we are just one small part of a complex system,” she explained. “And complex systems are the process of emergent phenomena — you never quite know where it’s going to go. The more we think that we understand or we have control, or we’re certain about one aspect, the further we are from truly knowing everything is a web of relations.”

Faced with the onset of the Younger Dryas, our ancestors probably didn’t sit around arguing about how to stop the ice from advancing. It’s far more likely they took stock of their surroundings and found ways to act quickly to protect the things they cared about most. 

“Some people will care about the decreasing glaciers and certain types of wildlife, whether that’s butterflies or polar bears, or whatever,” Stainforth said. “But I don’t think most people do. Their cares are smaller; their cares are more personal. I think the number one thing that we care about with respect to climate change is protecting our societies and our cultures. It’s the world that we have, the world we’ve grown up in, our support structure.”

Stainforth said grounding conversations in how climate change affects what we care about is essential to spurring action — and hope.

“There will be places where the train track needs rebuilding because of landslides, because of flooding or because of drought, or because of changes in the grasses that are growing there,” he said. “These things are going to happen, and they’re going to happen more and more frequently, because that’s what climate change is.” 

Responding to impacts will be a steady drain on government resources, he said, which in turn means “we won’t have resources for other things — and that can be culture, it can be transport, it can be sports facilities or it could be health or education.”

“It’s a threat to everything,” Stainforth said. In response, we have to decide what to save. “It’s about building a future that we want,” he said.

When American author and activist Rebecca Solnit wrote about hope, she emphasized the value of uncertainty.

“Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act,” she wrote in her 2004 book Hope in the Dark. “When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes — you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others.”

If we believe too firmly in a predictable future, Solnit writes, we risk setting ourselves on a path of apathy. Therein lies grief and anxiety and ruin. But if we accept uncertainty as a fundamental part of change, we can act accordingly.

Koppes believes we can see this belief at work in the next generation. Her students have loosened their grip on certainty, she says, but not in an apathetic way.

“There’s no longer any expectation that one can take a snapshot of time or a memory of place and that we can either get back to that time or that place — or that the environment and the climate was ever in a form of stasis,” she said. “They’re grasping at those components of their environments that are still bringing them joy, knowing that they might not exist for their lifetime.”

In other words, her students are accepting and embodying an existential truth: that everything is always in a state of change. And while we can’t be certain about the risks of the future, we also can’t predict how beautiful or resilient it might be. 

One day we might name this period for Chamaenerion angustifolium, the fireweed. Or maybe we’ll go for Delonix regia, sometimes called the Phoenix tree. Like our distant relatives, not just enduring but thriving, we’ll rise from the ashes into a world we co-created that protects all that we hold dear.

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

• The North Bay Parry Sound District Health Unit officially stopped testing water at public beaches.
• In place of testing, the health unit is updating public signage to warn swimmers of risks of heavy rainfall, murky water and large numbers of birds congregating — things that deteriorate water quality.
• Researchers and advocates argue beach water monitoring is important, especially as climate change makes cooling off in the water more necessary — and more hazardous, thanks to algal blooms and pathogens.

Kevin Marois wasn’t aware that the health unit spanning North Bay and Parry Sound, Ont., had stopped testing the water at local swimming spots.“I don’t think it’s a good decision,” Marois told The Narwhal after learning about it on a hot June day at Shabogesic Beach in North Bay. “Not having the information on water quality is the main [concern],” he said as he came out of the water, “And we know that there are problems with water quality during the summer.”

There were six harmful algal bloom events in the health unit’s area in 2025, and more than a dozen in 2024.

After announcing its plans earlier this year, the North Bay Parry Sound District Health Unit has officially stopped testing water at public beaches as of this summer. 

In its place, they’re offering public signage, which the health unit says will warn beachgoers to assess risks from recent heavy rainfall, visibly murky water or large numbers of birds in the water — all things that alter water quality and can make swimming unsafe due to high levels of E. coli or harmful algae.

Despite the updated signage, those who study beach water safety in Canada say ceasing testing could impact people’s ability to make informed decisions about safe swimming this summer. 

Meanwhile, researchers have argued a warming climate in Canada, including more severe summer heat waves, means swimmable water for people to cool off in is more important than ever. 

“We see changing climate patterns, we see urban heat island effects, we see heat domes, we see that there’s a tremendous need for community cooling spaces,” said Gregary Ford, vice-president and Lake Ontario Waterkeeper at Swim Drink Fish, an environmental non-profit that advocates for safe, usable water bodies. Its name comes from signs often posted on shorelines in Canada: no swimming, no fishing and no drinking. 

Ford explained that warmer temperatures and extreme weather events — a part of climate change, which is primarily driven by the burning of fossil fuels — also contribute to more harmful algal blooms and other pathogens that affect the health of the water and people who use it.

Health unit says water testing is resource-intensive and too slow

In March 2026, the North Bay health unit, which also covers Kearney, Nipissing and South River, sent a letter to member municipalities saying sampling the area’s 60 public beaches was too resource-intensive, and lab results took three or four days, limiting their usefulness when water conditions change quickly. The health unit also argued that the risk of illness from water recreation in the region is low. The water was only tested about three times each summer, it said.

Last year, Public Health Sudbury and Districts, a region which includes Manitoulin Island and French River, ended routine water sampling as well — one of many cuts made after the medical officer of health said their funding has not kept pace with inflation.

“Obviously, there are growing pressures on municipalities and public health units … and so we understand that compromises have to be made, but not in something that affects public health,” Ford said. “This is a trend that we see during periods of economic stress and strain … Unfortunately, as these scalebacks start happening, the public is left with less information about their water and, honestly, that becomes the most important part.”

Swim Drink Fish aggregates data from across swimming spots in North America into an app called Swim Guide. But these helpful third-party tools rely on local data collected by public health departments.

“It’s really important that municipalities also provide historical data, even if they’re not sampling today. They should at least publicly make available the data and information that has been collected over the last five years, the last 10 years, so people can still make a somewhat informed decision about where they spend their time,” Ford said. That’s not something made available by the North Bay Parry Sound Health Unit, either.

There are options for protecting beachgoers, but they can’t replace testing: experts

A recent study from Toronto Metropolitan University, which surveyed 4,085 beachgoers at seven beaches in Canada between 2023 and 2025, found that about 2.6 per cent of swimmers reported becoming sick, with children and elderly people facing higher risk of “recreational water illness,” such as stomach issues, ear and eye infections or rashes.

Ian Young, principal investigator on the Canadian Beach Cohort Study, tracking recreational water illness across Canada, said despite that low risk, “having a solid monitoring plan is important to give people confidence in the beach.”

He pointed to other methods being used across the country to help combat the slow, unreliable nature of current testing. For example, at Bluffer’s Park Beach in Scarborough, Ont., the City of Toronto implemented a bird management program, involving removing sources of food and training dogs to spur geese into flight, once they realized a substantial amount of the E. coli in the water at the beach was caused by birds.

Ford, from Swim Drink Fish, has seen other solutions; municipalities like Kingston and Hamilton are trying out new technology that alerts citizens in real-time when sewers and sewer bypasses are overflowing and contaminating beach water. But, he said, this does not replace the need for monitoring.

“It is a far second in terms of a solution. The best solution is to be continuing and continuously monitoring these beaches,” Ford said. “Resources can be stretched thin at times. This is a public health interest, it is a tourism interest and it is an individual health and wellness interest as well. So, this should be a priority for public health units, and it’s disappointing to see some of these decisions that are being made.”

To help mitigate risk, North Bay’s health unit recommends swimmers wash or sanitize hands before eating after swimming, towel off well to help prevent swimmer’s itch, check for hazards before entering the water and avoid getting water in their mouths.

But North Bay resident Ashley Brooker, standing at the shore of Lake Nipissing, said she still doesn’t feel good about the testing changes. “I am a risk-taker, but that doesn’t mean that I want to risk getting sick or catching something,” she said. “Safety is a big thing, and if we’re putting our tax money into something then we should be getting the resources back.”

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Summary

• Canada’s updated national building code puts limits on new buildings’ greenhouse gas emissions, though provinces can choose whether or not to implement them.
• The new rules could reduce the use of natural gas, a fossil fuel, to heat Canadian buildings.
• Documents obtained by The Narwhal reveal an effort by the Canadian Gas Association to lobby against the changes.

Natural gas companies lobbied against federal building guidelines that could help weaken the fossil fuel industry’s iron grip on Canadian communities, according to documents obtained by The Narwhal. 

In December 2025, a federal-provincial body published a new national building code that, for the first time, limits the volume of greenhouse gases that can be emitted by a building, whether from a gas-burning stove, heating system or hot-water tank. As they developed the code, officials held years of consultations with groups including the gas industry, to hear thoughts on changes that could set a precedent that limits natural gas use in new builds.

These limits are called “operational greenhouse gas emissions provisions.” In practice, they mean builders have to consider whether the heating, cooling and cooking systems they outfit a home with will produce emissions that push it beyond that threshold.

Natural gas, a fossil fuel mostly made up of the greenhouse gas methane, represents almost half the energy used in residential buildings in Canada — and almost two-thirds of their carbon pollution. Burning natural gas to heat Canadian homes and water is a big reason why buildings here are the third-largest climate polluter by economic sector, after other fossil fuel-dependent industries like transportation and oil and gas production.

Natural gas also poses threats to public health. While the industry takes steps to limit human exposure, research shows oil and gas fracking can impact birth and respiratory outcomes. When gas is used in the house, it exposes the occupants to air pollutants. When it’s liquefied for export, that’s often done at a facility that flares off excess gas, which also releases pollutants that affect human health. Methane itself, which traps heat in the atmosphere and drives climate change, is on Canada’s toxic substances list.

Coupled with the government’s push to fast-track large-scale housing projects nationwide, the new code could represent a big change in how many Canadians rely on fossil fuels in their homes. That is, if provincial governments play along. The new guidelines aren’t likely to be enforced nationwide anytime soon. It’s up to the provinces to pick and choose what parts to implement, if any; Ontario’s building code, for example, hasn’t been updated in years. 

What’s more, the new limits may not even impact new gas hookups for buildings at all: the code offers a range of standards, and the least restrictive still accommodate “current construction practices using natural gas for space and water heating,” according to the documents, which were obtained through access to information law.

None of that, however, stopped the lobby group Canadian Gas Association from complaining about the new rules.

The industry group has a board of directors made up of executives at companies in the business of distributing gas. During the consultations, it “raised concerns about newly introduced operational greenhouse gas emissions provisions and their potential impacts on housing affordability and energy costs,” according to a January 2026 briefing note for Canada’s deputy minister of housing, infrastructure and communities.

According to the industry group, the rules “could effectively ban natural gas, increase housing and energy costs and favour electrification without considering affordability or infrastructure feasibility,” the briefing note continued. 

The building code development process is governed by a federal-provincial body called the Canadian Board for Harmonized Construction Codes, while the National Research Council provides support once the codes are developed. Both of those organizations were “aware” of the gas lobby group’s concerns and were “working to address them,” the briefing note said.

The Narwhal asked the office of federal Housing and Infrastructure Minister Gregor Robertson how the government planned on addressing the industry’s lobbying. A spokesperson for the ministry responded that it “is one of several government institutions that have been lobbied on the issue of building codes, as per private groups’ and individuals’ right to communicate with elected or appointed government officials,” adding that records of that lobbying are publicly available. The department “will continue to work with its partners at all levels of government and all industries to help ensure that Canadian infrastructure and housing reflect the diverse needs of communities across the country, while continuing to support Canada’s commitments on climate mitigation and resilience.”

The Canadian Gas Association did not respond to a request for comment.

Cities and provinces say natural gas limits will hinder homebuilding

If provinces enforce the highest performance levels in the building code, it’s possible natural gas hookups wouldn’t pass muster, according to Kevin Lockhart, the director of the Pembina Institute’s buildings program.

But it was a “mischaracterization to call it a ban,” he said, since builders have different options in the code to help them meet different aspects and building requirements.

The difficulty of reducing emissions in older buildings is a key reason limiting natural gas in new buildings is important, Betsy Agar, director of buildings policy at Efficiency Canada at Carleton University, said. 

New builds are a tiny portion of Canada’s overall building stock, she said, “less than two per cent of square floor area every year, and 80 per cent of our buildings that exist today will still exist in 2050. Those are the ones that are hard to electrify.”

The enormous task of retrofitting older buildings is one reason it’s difficult to justify rules that would let brand-new construction continue to install natural gas, when other options are available, Agar said. Especially since infrastructure and agreements that allow gas companies to access land and customers are proving hard to dislodge.

B.C. has previously strived for ambitious building code standards. But in Vancouver, where an estimated three-fifths of carbon pollution comes from burning gas for heat, city council voted in May to pause rules that tracked emissions and limited natural gas heating in new homes. 

Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim argued that allowing gas heating in new homes would catalyze new home construction, but critics say the city is rolling back climate action.

In Ontario, the Doug Ford government has also been a strong defender of natural gas as an energy source delivered to both buildings for heating, and to power plants to generate electricity. Early in its tenure, the Progressive Conservatives cancelled hundreds of renewable energy contracts and then awarded new contracts to natural gas plants in 2022.

In late 2023, the province’s energy regulator found gas hookups in new builds may not be the most economical option for the ratepayers that foot the bill for those connections. The regulator ruled developers should pick up that cost, urging them towards cleaner and more cost-effective systems. 

Within days, and after much communication with Enbridge Gas, the Ford government vowed to overturn the ruling, and made good on that promise in August 2024.

Agar said in most cases, industry is “really resistant to strict regulations.” Building codes that drive toward electrification, she said, have particularly been in industry’s crosshairs.

“There’s just been this visceral response to it,” Agar said. But, she added, “the sooner that you adopt these codes, it means that people are living in better, more efficient, more comfortable homes, then all those new builds that we’re building don’t need to be retrofitted years down the line.”

Build Canada Homes will ‘encourage’ energy efficiency — but feds still support natural gas

The January briefing note was prepared for a meeting scheduled between the deputy minister of housing, infrastructure and communities and two members of the Canadian Gas Association, documents show. At that meeting, the deputy minister was expected to ask gas companies about their alternative proposals to the building code rules.

None of the lobby group’s proposals listed in the briefing note were focused on eliminating gas access in new builds. They included “reducing emissions from the gas supply stream,” meaning reducing methane escaping from pipelines that deliver the gas to markets. Another was “hybrid heating,” or pairing an electric heat pump with a natural gas furnace. 

There was also a proposal to blend more “renewable natural gas” — methane captured from food waste and compost, for example — into the system, which may reduce underground extraction of natural gas, but won’t necessarily make a big dent in emissions. And there was mention of blending in hydrogen, which is commonly produced with fossil fuels. There was no comment in the briefing notes about how the government received these proposals.

Build Canada Homes, the federal agency meant to respond to the housing crisis, has said it will “favour projects that demonstrate energy efficiency and climate performance.” The briefing note said Build Canada Homes “will encourage proponents to meet higher energy efficiency tiers” of the building code, but only “where practical and cost-effective.”

Lockhart, at the Pembina Institute, said the federal government could try harder to “drive higher performance in buildings.” That could include making emissions standards in the building code a formal prerequisite for any new homes that receive Build Canada funding.

It’s difficult to predict how Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government will respond to industry’s displeasure with the code. His election platform promised to phase out fossil fuel use in government-owned buildings by 2030, as well as ensure “new federal buildings” would adopt the top performance tiers for energy efficiency and emissions reductions. 

His platform also committed to “reforming and simplifying national building codes,” a promise reiterated in his spring economic update as a way to speed up construction. 

The spring also saw the release of the Carney government’s electricity strategy, which predicts at least a doubling of electricity demand, in part to address the electrification of buildings.

At the same time, the electricity strategy has an entire page devoted to “Natural gas’ strategic role,” where it describes the fossil fuel’s use for electricity generation in glowing terms like “reliable,” “affordable,” “secure,” “flexible” and “abundant.”

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Summary

• The Squamish Nation has regained some its land back after a lengthy court case against the federal government. Sen̓áḵw is the ancestral village name, and name of the development.
• It’s the largest sustainable housing project in First Nations history, and among one of Canada’s largest developments that will operate at net-zero emissions.
• A blessing ceremony for Squamish members and invited guests was hosted at the first completed tower on May 8, the second ceremony of its kind held in the ancestral village in over 100 years.

On an overcast day in May, hundreds of people are gathered in Sen̓áḵw, an ancestral Squamish village, to celebrate the first completed tower among what will be one of the largest housing developments in Kitsilano’s history.

The first tower, called tl’eltl’élnup (real home) is ceremonially brushed with cedar as guests — many of them Squamish Nation members — look on with pride.

With Squamish songs and drummers, eagles flying overhead and people of all ages in attendance – the blessing ceremony carried laughter and emotion throughout. 

“Very historic day for our Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw people, we’re breathing life back into our village here in Sen̓áḵw,” Wilson Williams said.

Williams is the Council Chairperson for the Squamish Nation, and said that after being removed from the ancestral village for more than 100 years, the blessing ceremonies are “the beginning of something beautiful.”

Sen̓áḵw has made headlines across the country as one of the greenest urban developments in Canada, and receiving the largest investment from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation in history. 

In the midst of Canada’s housing crisis, Sen̓áḵw is set to provide 6,000 homes. And in one of the most desirable neighbourhoods in one of North America’s most expensive cities, 1,200 will be delivered under an affordable model.

None of it would have been possible without fighting in court for 25 years. The village site was won back in a 2003 court case — a victory won by Elders from the nation, and renowned leaders such as Chief Joe Mathias. 

“In 1913 our people got put on a barge and pushed into the ocean, our homes were burned as they were going off into the ocean. So it’s been a long battle,” Jacob Lewis said, seated on a cedar bench in the shape of a canoe.

Lewis is Squamish and has been involved with the Sen̓áḵw development since its inception in 2019, when the nation voted in favour to build. He is currently the director of community development with Nch’ḵay̓ Development Corporation, a partner in the project.

“Super excited today, it’s been a long time coming,” he said. “There’s been so much pride, so much honour, so much appreciation and gratitude for our ancestors, for our past leadership and all those people that helped get us here today for the blessing ceremony.”

Beyond making history with the development size and investment, what makes the development special to many is the beauty of the architecture, emphasis on Squamish artwork and environmental considerations taken in the build. 

Three towers come into view from the Burrard Street Bridge, trigon and crescent shapes decorating the buildings.

Coast Salish designs are visible in the concrete, with Sḵwx̱wú7mesh language set to be visible throughout the properties upon completion – there is no mistaking that this is a Squamish village.

The tower is the first of 11 residential towers, with rental priority going to Squamish people, and then Indigenous people, before rentals open to the general public – implemented through an Indigenous participation plan.

The development will be surrounded by a village with amenities including a pool, sauna, cold plunge and more. 

Sen̓áḵw development centres environmental considerations

While the physical construction of Sen̓áḵw is releasing carbon into the environment, the operation of the buildings will emit almost no greenhouse gases from the day residents move in, Jennifer Podmore Russell told the Narwhal. 

“It was really important that we bring every environmental standard that we could into this building, as quickly as we could,” she said. Russell is the Chief Development Officer with Nch’ḵay̓ Development Corporation.

Through an investment from Creative Energy, a Vancouver-based green energy supplier, Sen̓áḵw is one of the only housing developments of its size that will operate at net-zero emissions in the world.

Residential towers are designed to be heated and cooled by converted wasted thermal energy, captured from a Metro Vancouver waste line. 

“With a capacity of approximately 4,000 tons, it’s one of the largest cooling towers in the Lower Mainland, efficiently serving the entire Sen̓áḵw development,” the Creative Energy website reads. 

Just two levels of parking are being offered across each tower, reducing carbon emissions and encouraging less vehicle use. 

A number of different partnerships with transportation providers in the area have been established, including Uber, Evo car share, Mobi rental bikes and False Creek Ferries, so that residents can “be able to navigate their life without the burden of a car,” Russell said.

‘I am excited to live in a brand-new building’

The first residents will move into Sen̓áḵw on June 1st, with the next tower set to open in September. It’s a move that some residents have long awaited, including Cody Bugler.

“I’m moving into a one-bedroom suite, 585 sq. feet, market rate. The size and price is comparable to what I’m paying now in a much older building in the West End, with much less exciting amenities.”

Bugler is Plains Cree from Red Pheasant First Nation in Saskatchewan, and has lived in the area for years. He uses public transportation to access his job at the University of British Columbia as an Indigenous Engagement Leader. 

“I’ve been putting off moving for some time, waiting for these buildings to be complete, so it’s exciting to finally see it all come to fruition,” he said. 

Reflecting on the country’s housing shortage, Lewis said that “it feels amazing” being able to host Indigenous people who find themselves living in Vancouver.

As for building at this scale, Squamish cultural values helped guide the process. Providing high-density housing is solving one of the city’s largest problems, welcomes members of the nation back to the territory, while ensuring that environmental impact is as minimal as possible.

“People were saying ‘shouldn’t they be building something that’s more sustainable?’ Expecting us to build longhouses,” Lewis said, addressing negative feedback from the surrounding neighbourhood.

“We’re doing it the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh way, and that’s what we’re gonna focus on,” he said.

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