Avi Bryant grew up in a middle-class neighbourhood in Vancouver. By the time he was 30, he was well on his way to becoming a millionaire. 

He calls his path “sheer luck” — but it’s more nuanced than that. Bryant got lucky, sure, meeting the right kinds of friends and acquaintances (executives at Twitter, for example) at the right times. He also made good business and financial choices, including taking stock options in lieu of some of his pay while at Stripe, that eventually propelled him into the so-called one per cent.

Now, instead of kicking back and sipping martinis with the economic elite, he’s joined a growing chorus of wealthy individuals calling for nations to stop catering to the ultra-rich. In fact, he says, Canada needs to tax the rich more — a lot more.

Doing so could change the lives of all Canadians, he says, and help the country accelerate its transition away from fossil fuels. With more tax dollars at its disposal, the federal government would be in a position to make major investments in electrification, solar projects and more. 

Enter the Patriotic Millionaires, a newly registered federal lobbying group that Bryant belongs to, which is advocating for changes to the country’s tax regime. 

From his home on Galiano Island, B.C., Bryant told The Narwhal why he believes Canada needs to target its wealthiest citizens, and some of what it can do with the proceeds.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you tell us about yourself? Did you grow up wealthy?

We were kind of typical middle class. I certainly did not grow up in a wealthy household. At the same time, I grew up in what felt like a very privileged household where there was lots of education, lots of books around, lots of support, a very safe neighbourhood with lots of resources. I didn’t grow up in anything that felt like poverty or lack of privilege, but it certainly was not wealth. 

I ended up doing a computer science degree at [the University of British Columbia] and got into the tech world after graduating, starting a small company in Vancouver. We’re talking early 2000s, kind of post dot-com bust. I made a lot of connections with a lot of people who turned out to be useful people to know. In 2010, we ended up selling the company to Twitter, which was starting out at that time. That considerably changed our financial situation. It also meant that we moved down to San Francisco for a couple of years and made a lot more connections.

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Someone who I had met in Vancouver, in those early startup days, I got to know a lot better when we were in San Francisco: Patrick Collison, who started a company called Stripe. I joined Stripe in early 2013, when that company was still, again, very small. I mean, it was 40 people or something at that point. That company then grew to be thousands of people and worth hundreds of billions of dollars. As an early employee, I had effectively been an early investor and that was just sheer luck. There was no way to predict that my tiny percentage of Stripe was going to end up being worth a large amount of money. 

I left Stripe in 2019, feeling like [my wife and I] had this responsibility to do something with our time and resources that was not just motivated by profit and commerce, that was more about having an impact on the world.

Why do you want to be taxed more?

Society is better off if everyone has their basic needs met and I see that as a function of government. Obviously, Canada has lots of social services … but I believe the government can and should be doing more — and that’s going to require more money. I think the obvious place to get that money is from taxing people who have a lot of it. 

[It’s] about the marginal utility of money: if you’re living on $20,000 a year and you lose 10 per cent of that, you’re losing $2,000 — that’s a big deal. If you’re living on $3 million a year and you lose 10 per cent of that, you’re down $300,000. So what? It’s not going to change your lifestyle. 

We do have progressive taxation. We increase the percentage you’re taxed as you make more, but the top bracket starts at around $260,000. So we don’t distinguish between someone who’s making a quarter-million a year and someone making $2.5 million a year, or $25 million a year. Those situations are very different.

From my point of view, there’s an obvious opportunity to increase taxes on the people who are making millions of dollars a year. There’s also an opportunity to increase taxes on people who hold scarce, valuable resources. Land is the obvious one here. If we’re using land so someone can have a beautiful, 200-acre waterfront estate … I mean, fine, but let’s tax the shit out of it.

I think we have an opportunity to do that without particularly changing people’s lifestyles. It’s not going to make them move out of the country. That’s just not going to happen. They’re here because they want to be here. I’m here because I want to be here. I can afford to pay a lot more in tax than I do without changing my lifestyle and that money can be used to improve the lives of other Canadians.

You touched on the typical argument against this idea: if Canada puts those things into place — vacation home taxes and other types of taxes targeting the wealthy — then those people will just take their money and go elsewhere. What would you say to that?

The only other thing I would say is good riddance. Ultimately, for the handful of people who’d say, “If you raise taxes on the wealthy, I’m going to move to Barbados,” — it’s like, okay, fine. Like: bye Felicia.

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Canada is a wonderful place to live. I could live anywhere I want. This is where my family chooses to live, because we truly believe that this is the best place to be living. And that’s true whatever the tax rate is.

Do you think this proposition, that the government adjust its tax systems, would create benefits for climate and ecosystem health?

One of the functions of government is to do large-scale investment, often infrastructure investment. I think climate is one area we can and should be making large-scale investments. We should be taking a page from China’s book and building very large-scale solar power plants to shift load away from fossil fuel plants. We should be investing in more efficient transportation, like train networks. We should be electrifying as quickly as we can — because we have to.

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The key climate fight here is we know how to transition our electrical production off of fossil fuels. But we also need to shift the demand for things that are currently not electric to electric — and transportation is a big piece of that. Obviously, electric cars have been successful. But trucking, marine, aviation … These are all things that currently depend heavily on fossil fuels. I very much see that as a government function, making investments in shifting those loads from fossil fuel to electricity.

So by taxing the rich, you add more money into the government’s capability to invest in infrastructure — which it can allocate as subsidies and investments to support climate mitigation projects?

Exactly. I think we should be taxing the rich and we should be using that money to invest in, broadly speaking, electrification projects. From a climate point of view, I think that’s the best thing we can be doing — and just doing everything we can to move off of oil. Alberta is going to fight us tooth and nail, but let’s find a way to transition that economy to a renewable economy. If we have to sink a lot of federal money into it, that’s worth doing, because our dependence on fossil fuels is bad for everyone.

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Do you think philanthropy plays a role in solving these bigger existential problems?

I do. With the government, we’re kind of entrusting all of our collective money and the government, as a result, tends to be quite risk-averse. The government doesn’t want to put a lot of capital into something that might fail and they get blamed and they won’t get re-elected or whatever. I think that caution is actually quite appropriate with public money, but at the same time when they do decide it’s worth doing something, they can do it on a very large scale. 

I think philanthropy can be the other side of that coin, which is to say individual philanthropists can take risks with their money and explore ideas that are not as proven. And then, hopefully, having proved some of them right, the government can come in and scale that up. So I think that’s worthwhile. That said, does that philanthropy need to be tax deductible? I don’t really think so.

Who are the Patriotic Millionaires?

Patriotic Millionaires is an organization that began in the U.S. It’s a very focused advocacy organization of people who have wealth who are asking for higher taxes on people who are wealthy. [They] opened a sort of sister organization in the U.K. and last year opened a Patriotic Millionaires in Canada. My wife and I are both members and she is now on the board.

I can see some opposition from powerful minorities, but I think most people can get behind the idea of everyone paying a fair share.

And yet the capital gains exclusion that was on the table for former prime minister Justin Trudeau came off with Prime Minister Mark Carney. Speaking for myself, not the organization, we need to understand why that is. It seems to me the loud minority won that fight. I don’t understand the politics there, but I think that in order to figure out what to do next, we need to understand.

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I was listening to a podcast on fashion, of all things, about tariffs and the economy and this idea that we need to tax the wealthy more. They put it in this framing of “join us.” 

Like, “You guys are off in this little corner and having to hide your money and put it in all these different places and do these different things to avoid being like the rest of us. Come be like the rest of us; join us.” I’m curious for your thoughts on that.

One part of our story is that wealth was a relatively new thing for us and there was a period of a few years where we were really trying to hide from our friends and neighbours how wealthy we were. There’s kind of a social norm there, right? You don’t talk about money. And the dissonance there was so hard.

It feels so much better to be much more open about this with people — and, yeah, to join them. We live on Galiano Island: it’s a small community, it’s a tight community. It’s much better to have those close relationships with people in honesty and solidarity.

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

• With the climate changing and energy demands increasing, many cities set out energy efficiency and other green requirements for new builds.
• Across Ontario, cities have also created grants and other programs to help home and business owners retrofit older buildings with things like heat pumps or insulation.
• The Ford government’s Bill 98 will prevent municipalities from requiring new builds to be green, meaning a whole new generation of buildings could be added to the retrofit backlog.

Over the past decade, Ontario municipalities — and the taxpayers who foot their bills — have spent tens of millions of dollars retrofitting buildings to stave off the worst effects of climate change.

Local governments across southern Ontario have given homeowners grants to transition houses away from natural gas, protect them from extreme temperatures and safeguard their basements from flooding. Businesses have used such funds to cut office energy consumption, reduce the risk of birds crashing into their windows and increase access to nature around their buildings. 

For cities, the idea was simple: fortify structures built before the climate emergency and create rules that ensure new development is prepared for it to worsen. 

At the local level, there’s been broad demand for the initiatives, and positive outcomes as a result. 

In Kingston, Ont., one homeowner lowered the annual emissions of their 1,500-square-foot semi-detached house by 91 per cent by replacing windows, installing a heat pump and insulating the attic, basement and exterior walls. And that translates directly to lower energy bills.

In Toronto, more than 4,000 development projects have met the city’s green standards, which have been in place since 2010. These rules mandate that each building has shared outdoor spaces that aren’t covered by concrete or asphalt, but permeable coverings that absorb stormwater to prevent flooding, among other eco-friendly features. 

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Yet despite the climate imperative and public interest, the ability of cities to incentivize greener builds like these is about to get a lot more complicated — and costly in the long run.

Earlier this month, the Doug Ford government introduced new legislation that would block municipalities from taking action to ensure future development is sustainable. The government’s Bill 98, the Building Homes and Improving Transportation Infrastructure Act, prevents Ontario cities from requiring developers to include electric-vehicle parking spots or bird-friendly windows, among other things. If the majority Progressive Conservative government passes this bill, local governments won’t even be able to require trees on residential properties.

The Narwhal spoke to four officials who serve in the planning or environment departments of Ontario cities, all of whom asked for confidentiality as they weren’t authorized to speak on the issue. All four said their teams are still analyzing the impacts of Bill 98 to properly respond to the government’s proposal, but that ultimately, they expect local budgets to absorb the likely higher — and unavoidable — costs of deep retrofits. 

“Anything that we require as a standard to protect the environment or reduce emissions through the planning process, we could no longer do if this bill passes as is — including requiring developers to make sure there’s a tree in every yard,” one rural Ontario official said in an interview. “That essentially means that we can’t hold developers accountable, and we’ll have to spend money ourselves to fix what they don’t do. So brace for impact, I guess.” 

Municipal green standards developed in place of scant provincial requirements for building efficiency

For more than a decade, green standards were adopted in either mandatory or voluntary forms by Ontario cities including Toronto, Mississauga, Halton Hills, Markham, Vaughan and Richmond Hill. 

Cities across Durham Region, including Whitby, Ajax and Pickering, for example, have standards for private development that promote green roofs, urban forest protection, stormwater management, renewable energy systems and green spaces. These have been implemented as Durham as a whole develops a green development program for new builds, in an effort to have 100 per cent of new housing achieve net-zero emissions by 2030. 

These cities introduced their standards in part because the provincial building code hasn’t been updated since 2017 and makes no mention of eco-friendly features. It came under scrutiny from the provincial auditor general in 2020 for not being strong enough to substantively reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 

Buildings are the source of 24 per cent of Ontario’s emissions, mainly from the use of fossil fuels like natural gas for heating. And these emissions are likely to increase as the province encourages faster construction to support a rapidly growing population, without requiring energy efficiency. 

If Bill 98 passes, developers would only be held to that now decade-old rulebook on building standards. Municipalities would be thwarted in their efforts to keep new building emissions down. The province recognized this in its own analysis of the changes, stating that ending green standards will result in not just “shifting burden from the development sector to municipalities for sustainability measures” but “unintended environmental impacts.”

“Unfortunately, right now, the only way that municipalities can really afford to build those kinds of infrastructure projects is by borrowing money, incurring debt and then paying it over time … or through development charges,” Markham Mayor Frank Scarpitti said last week, explaining why he opposed the bill’s provisions on green standards. 

“We do not have to turn our back on environmental standards,” Scarpitti said. “The environmental standards can actually be set, and then those projects will meet them.” 

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Cities have already been trying to soften the blow of energy efficiency costs on developers. Local green standards are often tied with financial incentives to urge developers to make the shift to greener construction. In 2021, the City of Kingston created a program that offers property tax rebates to builders and private developers who voluntarily construct buildings that strive for net-zero emissions. 

Toronto’s green standards offer a partial refund on development charges for buildings that meet their rules. The more rules a building meets, the higher the refund. Since its inception, this scheme has delivered almost $120 million in refunds to developers.

The success of these programs has inspired other Ontario municipalities to begin working on their own green standards. That includes Hamilton, Ottawa, Waterloo Region, Guelph, Clarington and Oshawa. But their efforts have been paused since Bill 98 was proposed, because it makes building green more complicated.

Ottawa officials, for example, have noted the bill would prevent municipalities from even asking developers to include electric-vehicle spaces in their buildings, even though a process for putting them in place has already been developed.

In an April 8 memorandum, Marcia Wallace, general manager of planning, development and building services for the City of Ottawa, said staff would explore “enabling approaches” like partnerships with the private sector and financial incentives. It did not note whether those incentives could come from taxpayers’ dollars.

Axing green standards means Ontario municipalities have to spend more taxpayer money on building retrofits 

It’s difficult to quantify the cost of building sustainably from the get-go, which depends on size, location and other factors. One study from The Atmospheric Fund in 2012 and another from City of Toronto staff in 2017 suggest the cost of construction would increase by two to four per cent, depending on the building type and community. 

What’s more certain is that retrofitting existing buildings to both lower emissions and withstand some of the symptoms of climate change is a lot more expensive than building green from the start. One Canadian green homebuilder says retrofits can be 50 per cent more expensive. A 2023 study by United Way Greater Toronto estimates a deep energy retrofit of an existing apartment building in Toronto would cost $200,000 per unit.

And all of that is cheaper than leaving homeowners to rebuild after severe flooding. Flood insurance premiums in Ontario have jumped up to 26 per cent in the last two years, according to a new report by a Canadian real estate firm and insurance-rate aggregator.

Many Ontario municipalities are already spending millions to retrofit public buildings and incentivize companies and homeowners to do the same. Now, rather than being able to shrink that budget over time as modern buildings are made more resilient, cities are looking at an exponential growth in cost. 

Guelph and Kingston, for example, have robust home retrofit programs that have been financed to the tune of millions of dollars with support from the federal government. Residents have been eager to take them up on it. 

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In April 2022, Kingston’s local retrofit program had to be paused due to “overwhelming interest” resulting in a lengthy waitlist. As of October 2024, it had supported 250 projects. These programs, and several others aimed at lowering greenhouse gas emissions, fall under the city’s climate leadership division, which in 2025 had a budget of more than $800,000. That works out to $11 on the average tax bill, according to the budget. For a city of 130,000 people, with a limited tax base, that investment is paying off. 

In Guelph, 637 households have registered for this kind of funding and 448 have either completed their retrofits or are currently doing so.  

In Durham Region, more than 1,600 residents have signed up to lower energy consumption and reduce emissions. By 2023, almost 200 retrofits had been completed. In 2024, the region expanded the program to include commercial buildings. 

One Greater Toronto Area official said they expect demand for retrofits to increase if Bill 98 passes: “If there’s no way for us to ensure development is done according to the needs of the climate emergency, I imagine we’ll have more buildings to retrofit than we can handle in the very near future.”

The costs of doing so will ultimately be borne by taxpayers, especially as the province is still in the process of amending its own building code to acknowledge the realities of how climate change will affect buildings across Ontario.

“The building code will be updated. We’re going to go through it section by section,” Ontario Housing Minister Rob Flack told The Narwhal last week. “With respect to green standards, we’ve asked various stakeholders to be part of the process. … They’ll be involved in the process of redefining the building code.”

When pressed on the timeline of this process, Flack said, “ASAP.”

“We’ve started the process of getting people in place,” he said. “It’s going to take a while. It’s a big document.” 

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

• British Columbia is home to the country’s longest-standing Indigenous Guardian program, the Haida Gwaii Watchmen, founded in 1982, and the province leads leads the way for national investment.
• Indigenous Guardian programs support conservation targets, create jobs in rural areas and have a high return on investment. 
• While programs across the country are seeing budgets slashed, Indigenous Guardians received an unexpected $230M investment by the federal government in March — but questions remain.

Ida Peter knew she had to apply to protect mule deer populations in Tsal’alh traditional territory, located in B.C.’s Central Interior, when B.C. first announced $8.9 million for Indigenous Guardians programs in 2023. 

“We have a really big concern about [them] in our territory because traditionally we’re known as the deer people,” Peter said. 

“I would say in the last 50 years the population of deer has declined drastically. Where we used to see hundreds of deer, now we’re lucky to see in those same areas maybe 10 or 20,” she said.

Mule deer are a significant species of concern in the Southern Interior region of the province, which means they are at risk of being endangered because of wildfires, resource extraction and human development.

Peter is an elected councillor in her nation, and manages the culture and heritage department. The Tsal’alh Guardians were born out of Peter’s proposal and are a small but mighty team of three who steward the territory.

It’s one of over 240 Indigenous Guardian initiatives that have been implemented across the country with the support of federal funding: an initial investment of $25 million to pilot Indigenous Guardians programs in 2018-2022 which was bolstered by an additional $100 million announced in 2021. But with both B.C. and federal guardian funding streams set to expire in 2026, Indigenous Guardians across the country were bracing for major cuts. 

That was until an announcement on Mar. 31. 

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To the surprise of many First Nations, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government committed an additional $230 million into Indigenous Guardian programming, including for the creation of a new Arctic Indigenous Guardians Program. 

Though the announcement was welcomed by Indigenous communities, many are still wondering when those funds will begin flowing — and who will benefit from them.

Funding will be administered over the next five years, Emily Jackson from Environment and Climate Change Canada confirmed in an email to the Narwhal.

“Information on Indigenous priorities, including initiatives, eligibility, and timelines, will be shared as it becomes available.”

The Indigenous Guardian movement has deep roots in B.C.

Indigenous Guardians in British Columbia have led the way, implementing the longest-standing program in the country, which has been in operation since 1982: the Haida Gwaii Watchmen, established by volunteers.

Before B.C. or Canada began investing in these programs, Haida people took it upon themselves to steward their homelands. The goal was to preserve Gwaii Haanas village sites, according to the nation’s website. 

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“It was very common for looters to come to these sites and take artifacts that were very important to the living culture of the Haida Nation, the work done by these volunteers was incredibly important in preserving the village sites that are now protected,” it reads.

Now the Watchmen are funded by Parks Canada, one of four programs the department is supporting across Canada, with three of those programs based in B.C. The province is also home to the highest number of guardian programs funded last year.  

According to an economic analysis from Makeway, a national charity that supports conservation, and the CoEvaluation Lab, a Canadian organization that provides reporting and research support, Indigenous Guardian programs put between $1.43 to $5.37 back into the economy for every dollar invested. 

Another analysis by Social Ventures Australia, which examined a different selection of Indigenous Guardian programs in Canada, had similar findings. For every dollar invested, approximately $2.50 was generated for stakeholders. 

Those returns on investment come from employment outcomes, improved health and wellness, increased tax revenues and benefits to the environment.

For Dallas Smith, president of Nanwakolas Council, the thinking behind the programs has evolved.

“First it was about having eyes, ears and boots on the ground out there. But as we’ve started trying to build a conservation economy in the Great Bear Rainforest, we realized that there were other returns to be made, not only in helping us balance our conservation vision, but also [to] build sustainable economic development visions,” he told The Narwhal.

The council supports six member nations on B.C.’s South Coast and Vancouver Island in negotiations with government and industry. 

“Having the guardians in place whether we protect something or develop something has been monumental,” Smith said. 

While the $230 million announcement came as a welcome surprise, with no clear guidelines about where the funding is going, and with B.C.’s funding still set to expire, staff at some programs are concerned.

“Some [guardian programs] have models that have trust funds … where we’re able to back the guardian program up with some foundational funding that we’re able to live off the interest of,” Smith said. 

“For some of the other guardian programs that are in development … I bet there’s definitely some concern out there about where the next set of funding comes from to get through the next season.” 

Meanwhile, the federal government and various provinces, including B.C. and Ontario, passed bills that faced First Nation opposition last year, among them Bills 14 and 15 in B.C., Bill 5 in Ontario and federal Bill C-5, all of which critics have said privilege industry over Indigenous rights and consultation.

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Long term funded is needed to sustain programs

Indigenous Guardians protect the land and natural resources across Canada, maintaining the ecosystem for everyone, while contributing to local economies, businesses and relationships that allow industry into Indigenous territory. 

“The people of this territory would like to see the environment better protected for future generations, so that in generations to come, they’re able to go out and harvest berries and get the meat and fish they need,” Peter said. 

In her nation, interest in becoming a guardian is growing, with renewed funding needed to continue the program. 

“Long-term funding makes it all happen. It takes away the anxiety of chasing grant after grant … being able to secure long term stable funding gives you the ability to plan around it and invest in it,” Smith said. 

Funding gaps, even temporary ones, could undermine the investment and benefits in guardian programs.

And while loss of employment is a huge harm, disruptions in Indigenous Guardian funding can have deadly consequences for the environment.

For example, programs like the Wuikinuxv Guardian Watchmen monitor coastal waters for spills, mitigating risk from industry and acting as a first responder for the environment. 

“Too many people want First Nations to either protect everything or develop everything, they don’t understand the balance we’re trying to reach. The guardians are a living example of creating balance,” said Smith.

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

• Indigenous women in B.C. are leading projects and organizations committed to mitigating wildfire risk and restoring traditional practices. 
• Cultural burns are making a comeback in the province, thanks to years of advocacy from Indigenous firekeepers.
• First Nations women in the province’s Interior are decolonizing fire management through their work.

In 2017 Jaci Gilbert was 12 years old when she was evacuated from Tsq’escen’ First Nation because of a wildfire. Four years later, more wildfires impacted her community, located in B.C.’s central interior, prompting some Elders to be evacuated to the Lower Mainland.

Gilbert, who is Secwépemc and Tsilhqot’in, volunteered both at the emergency operations centre during the partial evacuation in 2021, and as a fire camp logistics assistant near 100 Mile House during those fires.

“After being involved in the emergency operations centre I caught the bug of wanting to do emergency and wildfire management,” Gilbert told The Narwhal.

Gilbert works for First Nations Emergency Services Society as a cultural and prescribed fire specialist. She is part of a cohort of First Nations women in B.C. who are leading the way in wildfire management in their communities — demonstrating leadership and stewardship as blazes continue each year.

Being a young person, and a woman, Gilbert struggled to get into the field of emergency management, but reaching out to organizations and women in the field is a good place to start, she said.

“Youth have been managing emergencies in their personal lives for a long time, especially Indigenous youth, so using these skills I developed on reserve I’m able to handle [emergencies] well, whereas with a typical office or customer service job I don’t handle [those] very well,” Gilbert said.

“We’re seeing a shift in dynamics. I’m noticing a lot more Indigenous women in fire research and in the fire community.”

Indigenous firefighters bring cultural knowledge to their work

Sheresa Brown, a Nlaka’pamux woman from Lytton First Nation, has been involved with fire since firefighting in high school. Brown works as a field technician and archaeological monitor with Nlaka’pamux Nation Tribal Council, specializing in protecting cultural heritage values.

After her hometown Lytton, B.C., was devastated by fire in 2021, Brown evacuated to Merritt and was looking for a job when she called her former boss from the BC Wildfire Service. 

Back on the frontlines, Brown noticed a crew member cut down a culturally modified tree in Vernon, commonly referred to as a CMT, to clear a pathway for a hose. 

“[First Nations] make that [symbol on the tree] so they can come back to harvest the sap, they can use it to make different types of medicines. And it was a very utilized tree that just got cut down,” Brown told The Narwhal.

She recommended scanning for culturally modified trees before clearing to her crew lead, who received it well. A year later Brown was deployed on another fire near Lytton, teaching BC Wildfire Service crews about the land’s cultural values.

She said she’s willing to take people on the land if they are willing to learn and be respectful, noting that sometimes people do not know they are in a culturally significant area, especially when firefighters are deployed from another province or country. 

“I know if a man can do it, I can do it too, and probably even better,” Brown said, reflecting on her experience being a First Nations woman in the fire industry.

Bringing back cultural burns

Brown and Gilbert are carrying the torch lit by trailblazers in the field like Leona Antoine, who has 30 years of experience. Antoine is a Nlaka’pamux woman who is no stranger to cultural burning or firefighting. 

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She practices traditional burning, is a registered forest technologist, a Type 1 (or first-response) firefighter with the BC Wildfire Service, and is a board director and chair of the Salish Fire Keepers Society. 

When Antoine’s firefighting journey with the BC Wildfire Service began in the early 2000s, she was one of few women on a 20-person unit crew. 

“Because there were no women on the crews before, they didn’t know how to have a woman around,” Antoine told The Narwhal.  

“It took probably about a month for the crew to get used to women being on the crew. You know, putting all the women’s posters and magazines away,” she said. 

Although men on the crew were initially uncomfortable around women, and had to be taught boundaries, “I broke those barriers,” she said. 

Another barrier at the time was getting the province and general public to see the value of cultural burning. B.C. was the first province in Canada to ban the practice in 1874.

After a year of devastating fire in 2017, and following the release of a report Addressing the New Normal: 21st Century Disaster Management in British Columbia in 2018, cultural burns started being taken more seriously by the province, with official amendments to the Wildfire Act in B.C. to support the practice taking effect in 2024.

This is work that the Salish Fire Keepers Society has been advocating for since its inception in 2016. The non-profit is made up of Interior Salish nations who experience some of Canada’s hottest wildfires, and promotes the restoration of cultural burning practices.

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Gilbert contributed to a cultural burning guide, Workbook to Create a Cultural Burn Pathway, made in partnership with the Indigenous Leadership Initiative. 

“As I’ve become more involved with emergency and wildfire management, cultural burning comes up a lot, especially as an Indigenous person that’s interested in Indigenous solutions to modern problems,” she said. 

First Nations Emergency Services Society is an emergency management non-profit organization in B.C. “We were initially created as a result of a lot of Indigenous deaths related to structural fires,” Gilbert said during her presentation at the Salish Fire Keepers Society gathering in Kamloops on Mar. 17. 

The workbook guides readers through different considerations when planning a cultural burn, and was created through a series of community interviews by Amy Cardinal Christianson and Natasha Caverley.

“My role in [its] creation has been trying to make sure that it’s accessible for First Nations. I’m not much on the technical side, I’m … looking at the art and how that can help tell the story for people without strong English backgrounds,” she said.

During the March 2026 gathering, Antoine and the rest of the society’s board gifted each guest speaker with sweetgrass and sage, two traditional medicines among many First Nation cultures across Canada. 

There were many women in attendance, underscoring how things are beginning to shift.

This is an initiative she championed. “We are taught by our Elders when you ask for information or stories, you validate their teachings and what … they have taught. You honour them with medicine,” she said.

Prioritizing traditional protocols, ceremony, and medicine at this year’s fire gathering is an example of how Antoine brings balance to the fire space.

Not only has she broken down barriers for women to come after her, she also creates opportunities for those in the fire industry to connect, heal, and share knowledge – work that can be forgotten for those in the heat of fire. 

Antoine said “we’re in fire dependent ecosystems, the land needs fire.”

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.

This story is part of a series called Shockwave: Rising energy demand and the future of the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes region is in the midst of a seismic energy shakeup, from skyrocketing data centre demand and a nuclear energy boom, to expanding renewables and electrification. In 2026, the Great Lakes News Collaborative will explore how shifting supply and demand affect the region and its waters.

The energy system in the Great Lakes region, as in most parts of North America, is wasteful. Stupendously wasteful.

Consider these data points. Two-thirds of the energy generated by the 2,100-megawatt Pickering Nuclear Generating Station, east of Toronto, comes in the form of heat, not electricity. The excess heat is transferred to cooling water that is dumped into Lake Ontario.

For data centres, a booming, voracious energy user, nearly all the electricity that enters a facility to power servers turns into heat. Ejecting that heat so that the servers continue to support Zoom calls and ChatGPT queries can consume gobs of energy and water.

Even underground business and household waste holds wasted energy. Sewage flows in pipes at an average temperature of roughly 15 C, a thermal energy source waiting for an enterprising soul to tap into and extract the heat.

A movement is underway to do just that — mine the region’s power plants, data centres and sewers for heat and use it to develop cleaner, cheaper energy that helps reduce or remove carbon emissions from heating and cooling. The same practices cut the expense of adding new electric generating capacity.

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Such a transformation is certainly possible and has been embraced in northern Europe. But it will not be easy here. Though the physics and equipment for waste-heat recovery are tested and proven, other barriers — financial, organizational and political — are more formidable hurdles for a region and a country in which energy efficiency is less valued than energy expansion.

“It’s not a technology issue,” said Luke Gaalswyk, president and chief executive officer of Ever-Green Energy, a district energy company based in St. Paul, Minnesota, that is eyeing wastewater as a heat source. “The engineering of this is well understood. It’s an awareness issue, it’s a funding issue, it’s a priority issue. We, the United States, don’t have the same policy frameworks or funding mechanisms that Europeans do as it relates to these sorts of projects and incentivizing waste-heat recovery.”

Gaalswyk and others see tantalizing opportunities for waste heat in aiding the region’s electric transition. The benefits include cheaper energy, less exposure to fossil fuel price fluctuations, fewer carbon emissions, less land disruption to build new generating and transmission capacity, and less thermal pollution into waterways. But getting there, they say, requires foundational shifts in understanding, attitudes and public policy. 

A new energy scenario

Electricity demand in the Great Lakes is growing, in some states for the first time in decades. If the projected buildout occurs, data centres will gobble electricity while the climate-friendly push to electrify everything boosts demand for electrons. 

Thermal networks, such as district heating systems that circulate hot water or steam to multiple buildings, garner less attention. Comparable to a home radiator at scale, they have been part of the urban energy landscape for more than a century, predating the invention of the gas-powered automobile. College campuses have them, as do hospital complexes. Cities like St. Paul, Chicago, Rochester and Lansing use district heating or cooling in their downtown cores. Toronto has a district cooling system that uses water drawn from deep in Lake Ontario to cool 80 buildings.

Waste heat — or, heat that is currently regarded as waste — could be a new reservoir of energy for district heating systems.

To find one source, building owners need only look beneath their basements. Promoting sewer thermal energy is a passion project for Paul Kohl, the board chair of the Sewer Thermal Energy Network, a trade association founded in 2023 to advocate for an unsung energy source. “We thought, let’s get people talking about it,” he said.

Kohl’s primary pitch is that sewer thermal energy goes hand-in-hand with reducing greenhouse gas emissions from buildings. Say an office complex wants to stop burning fuel oil for heat and instead wants to install a heat pump. An air-source heat pump, which extracts heat from ambient air, is a common option. But it can be problematic in an era of constrained electricity supply.

“What we’re finding is there are certain entities that are really excited about electrifying their building stock but they’re running into electrical demand problems,” Kohl said. “They can’t get enough electricity from the supplier.”

Enter sewer thermal. The building owner could instead tap into the sewer line running beneath the property and circulate the wastewater through a water-based heat pump that extracts the heat. The sewage is always contained and is not a health risk for those in the building. The water-based heat pump still uses electricity, but because of water’s superior capacity to transfer heat, its electricity demand is about half that of an air-based unit. In short, the well-understood thermal dynamics of water translate into substantial energy savings.

The sewer is a heat resource that constantly renews itself — people take showers, do laundry and wash dishes every day, using hot water in the process. The heat that went into the water could be used again. So why aren’t there more such systems? Kohl cited two major obstacles. One is knee-jerk revulsion, typically from the general public. “The ‘ick’ factor,” he said. 

The second is an unwillingness from utilities to allow other organizations to access their pipe infrastructure when it is not the utility’s mandate to do so. The utilities, he said, are more concerned with regulatory compliance and ensuring the integrity of their pipes.

Asked if his organization operates like a matchmaker, uniting parties that otherwise might not have met, Kohl turned the analogy around. A matchmaker works only if there are willing participants, he said. “A lot of water and wastewater utilities are the consummate bachelors. So they’re like, ‘If I never have to do this, great.’”

What brings utilities into the market? Progressive leadership, Kohl said.

Leaders heating the way

That leadership is on display in pockets around the Great Lakes region, from both the public and private sectors. 

In St. Paul, Ever-Green Energy has drawn up plans to tap the heat in the roughly 650,000,000 litres of wastewater that flows daily out of the Metropolitan Council’s treatment plant and into the Mississippi River. The US $150 million project would use the wastewater heat to replace the natural gas that currently fuels half of the district energy system, which is the largest hot water system in the United States.

Project proponents, including the City of St. Paul and Ever-Green, applied for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s climate pollution reduction grant in 2024 but they were not selected. (Ever-Green’s wastewater heat project in Duluth also was not selected for the grant.) Though Clean Heat St. Paul, as the project is known, is currently unfunded, leaders continue to advocate for it.

“It presents an enormous opportunity for our community, for our state, to build a project that would generate global recognition around what’s possible with linking up wastewater and district heating,” Gaalswyk said.

Across the border, Toronto Western Hospital, part of the city’s leading hospital system, partnered with Noventa, an energy company, to install the world’s largest raw sewage thermal system. Completed in 2025, the project provides about 90 per cent of the hospital’s heating and cooling. 

Also in Toronto, Enwave, a district energy company, operates the Deep Lake Water Cooling system that uses cold water drawn from Lake Ontario to cool 115 buildings before the water is sent to taps as drinking water. Enwave, which operates systems across eastern Canada, is now adapting that system to utilize waste heat from the cooling operations so that heating and cooling work in tandem. At the same time, the company is considering sewer heat recovery from a wastewater treatment plant in Mississauga, Ont.

“The idea is you’re trying to capture waste heat in whatever form you can find it in,” said Carson Gemmill, vice president for solutions and innovations at Enwave.

More trade associations are embracing that logic. The Boltzmann Institute, a group of engineers focused on obstacles to electrification, persuaded the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers to start a campaign in September 2025 to advocate for thermal energy systems. Since the province is considering new nuclear power plants and building small modular reactors, including four 300-megawatt units at Darlington Nuclear Generating Station, the institute would like to see their designs incorporate waste heat reuse.

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“In Ontario, the heat rejected from nuclear power plants is quite a bit greater than the heat required for heating with natural gas in the whole province,” said Michael Wiggin, a Boltzmann Institute director who is also leading the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers’ thermal energy advocacy. “So there’s an enormous possibility to use the heat from these power plants to heat cities.”

Waste heat can flip conventional narratives on their head. Data centres today are maligned for their energy needs. Yet what if their waste heat was put to beneficial use? 

That’s the objective in Lansing, Michigan, where Deep Green, a London-based company, has proposed a 24-megawatt, US $120-million data centre project that would transfer its waste heat into a district heating system run by the Lansing Board of Water and Light, a water and power provider. The Lansing City Council is set to vote on the project on April 6.

“Previously, we didn’t consider heat as an asset because we didn’t need to,” Mark Lee, CEO of Deep Green, wrote in a January 2026 blog post. “There was an abundance of power, cheap energy and less awareness of environmental impact. That’s changing: electricity prices are high, grids are congested and there’s pressure to meet net-zero and [environmental, social and governance] targets.”

Barriers to entry

Even with these first steps, energy experts agree that North America, as a whole, is playing catch-up. Scandinavian countries have been reusing waste heat for decades. Stockholm has a 3,000-kilometre district energy pipe network that serves 800,000 residents and more than 90 per cent of the city’s buildings. More than 30 data centres feed waste heat into the system. In Oslo, sewer thermal provided nearly 7 per cent of the energy for the city’s district heating system in 2025. As a whole, the system provides 30 per cent of Oslo’s heating and hot water demand. China, a more recent entrant in the market, has developed world-champion projects in Qingdao and elsewhere.

Committed cities and governments can reach scale quickly. “The Chinese had nothing hardly in the early ’90s, now they’ve got perhaps the most district heating installed capacity in the world,” Wiggin said.

Rapid growth in waste-heat recovery will not happen in the Great Lakes region on its own. Without policy signals, electric companies, data centre operators and water utilities don’t have the incentives to innovate and co-operate, Kohl said. And for waste heat, collaboration is the key to success.

What are those policy signals? Gaalswyk focused on carrots: tax breaks for companies that install heat recovery systems and a quicker permitting process for those that incorporate efficiency measures.

Wiggin, by contrast, outlined the sticks. A tax on waste heat. State or provincial efficiency standards.

Kohl mentioned both measures. Massachusetts, he noted, set aside state funds for waste-heat recovery feasibility studies. New York, meanwhile, passed a law in 2022 to develop a regulatory framework for thermal energy networks. The law requires the largest investor-owned utilities to submit pilot projects for development.

Those in the district energy industry see waste heat as a massive opportunity, one that begins in the early stages of project development, whether it’s a data centre or a nuclear power station. Incorporating waste-heat recovery into a project’s initial design is easier than retrofitting the facility in the future.

“Our thesis is data centre projects that are bringing additional layers of community benefit to communities will find more success in building trust and gaining the necessary social licence to operate,” Gaalswyk said. “A really important aspect of that is heat recovery, free heat. Again, it’s not a technology issue. We have the heat pumps, we have the industry that can design heat offtake. It’s a matter of figuring out how to get a diverse stakeholder group to work together to realize these benefits in tandem.”

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Summary

• Natural burial can reduce death’s environmental impact and honour humanity’s relationship with the Earth.
• But a range of policy restrictions make it nearly impossible to hold a natural burial in some jurisdictions.
• As interest in green death practices increases, advocates in Ontario are removing the barriers and opening some of the country’s first fully natural cemeteries.

We’re trying out staff-written summaries. Did you find this useful? YesNo

Kyle Moore was “the quintessential tree-hugger,” his father says. He was dedicated to shoreline conservation; he held a belief that people are part of the natural world, not apart from it — even after death. 

When he was diagnosed with a recurrence of brain cancer in 2015, his family was too dedicated to finding the right treatment to save his life to think about where it might end.

“We were really focused on trying to keep his spirits up, and focused on trying to beat it a second time,” Terry Moore, Kyle’s father, says from his home outside Minden, Ont., overlooking a frozen lake. “That delayed any conversation with respect to end-of-life planning.”

When Kyle passed away in 2019, after a four-year battle, his family wanted a way to honour the way he had lived his life.

“We owed it to Kyle to try to create a legacy for him that embodied his view,” Moore, a retired union negotiator and organizer, says. “That’s the origin … of how we came to understand greener natural burial. Up to that point, I hadn’t given two thoughts to that in my entire life.”

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Moore has spent years organizing climate action in his community. He hosts the podcast Planet Haliburton, where he investigates environmental justice issues with experts, and is a vocal member of the group Seniors for Climate Action Now.

He thinks a lot about environmental issues, but the ways they connect to end-of-life choices are seldom discussed by the funeral industry, nor the jurisdictions that govern cemeteries. In many cases, that puts the burden of researching environmental burial options on grieving loved ones and places restrictions on their choices. 

The Moores — Terry, his wife Shirley and their two daughters — discovered they could lay Kyle to rest in biodegradable materials without embalming chemicals. They could restore his grave-site with native grasses, flowers and trees. Such a method uses less energy and water, avoids toxic preservatives and returns a body to the earth more gently than conventional burial, while providing habitat for plants and wildlife.

But as they got up to speed on end-of-life options, the family quickly ran into a barrier shaping burial choices across Ontario: it was February, and all four townships in Haliburton County prohibited winter burials.

“It was just a complete embargo,” Moore says. Burials without cremation require storage over the winter, until the ground thaws. But in order to use the cemetery storage in the county, bodies have to be embalmed with chemicals to delay decomposition, Moore explained.

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“Green burial was an impossible option locally and we then basically decided that, well, that needed to change,” Moore says.

Terry and Shirley Moore launched into years of advocacy, forming the Haliburton Highlands Green Burial Society with other community members, to create a space for green burials to take place year-round. After seven years of speaking with like-minded advocates, giving presentations to local leaders and holding public meetings to help educate their neighbours, they found a path for green burials close to home, and without resorting to cremation as the only alternative.

While cremation conserves land, the process of using heat to turn remains to ash emits carbon and mercury (especially from burning older fillings), as well as other pollutants into the air. One study found that each cremation produces carbon emissions equivalent to driving 1,124 kilometres in a car. That’s still significantly below the emissions of a standard burial, which are equivalent to 4,000 kilometres driven.

Other communities in Ontario are beginning to venture down the path of green burials as more people seek out options that reflect their values, though access remains uneven and strictly regulated, leaving many families without local burial options for loved ones.

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“There’s an inertia that’s built up within municipalities who run cemeteries … the barriers that they themselves put in place, [are] in fact, catering to the trend toward cremation,” Moore says. 

“What we’re asking them to do is embrace a more environmentally sustainable practice, which they’ve never had to advocate for, or they’ve never had to think in those terms before. They just follow demand. They don’t lead it.”

The environmental cost of funerals, and the opportunity to go natural

A major sticking point, Moore says, for green winter burials in Haliburton County, was the local government’s concern over the additional equipment and staff training required to remove snow, manage extreme weather and penetrate frozen ground. To help develop capacity for year-round burials, Moore’s society hosted a winter burials best practice workshop to help introduce county administration and staff to the available options, and brought in private companies for instruction on proper tools and techniques for winter burials. 

The Green Burial Society of Canada, founded in 2013, outlines five principles: no embalming; bodies are buried in biodegradable materials; grave-sites must be naturalized, allowing the area to integrate with surrounding ecosystems; memorialization must be simple, instead of using elaborate tombstones; and land use must be maximized so green burial sites remain as sustainable as possible into the future.

But, the most popular option for Canadians, comprising nearly 77 per cent of deaths as of 2024, is cremation. 

The other typical option in Canada is burial using embalming chemicals and sturdy, often elaborate caskets containing non-biodegradable materials. ​​The maintenance for these burials is also intensive, requiring upkeep with pesticides, synthetic fertilizers and heavy machinery.

Much like Moore, when Susan Greer first heard about natural burials — while listening to the radio in 2018 — she says it was a “lightbulb moment.” Now the executive director of the volunteer-run, province-wide non-profit Natural Burial Association in Ontario, she appreciated that loved ones are involved in natural ceremonies, decorating graves with cedar boughs or flowers and helping lower a loved one into the ground before filling the grave themselves. 

“What might not sound intuitive is that the more that one puts thought into the goodbye, [the more] it actually helps with the grieving process,” Greer says.

But when families and loved ones are in the throes of grief, any barriers to the ceremony can seem insurmountable. It’s why advocates like Moore and Greer want to make natural burials accessible rather than prohibitive.

Greer imagined one call to the planning department in Toronto, where she lives, would get a natural burial ground underway. In reality, it was an eight-year-long process that is still ongoing.

Finally, in 2025, she found an off-market dairy farm to transform into a 38-hectare natural burial ground in Simcoe County, near Oro-Medonte, Ont. She has undertaken myriad municipal approval processes, including hydrogeological and archeological studies and zoning amendments. She has also faced public concern from neighbours that the burial ground would contaminate well water.

“It was just extraordinarily complicated to start a cemetery,” Greer says.

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After years of work, if all goes as planned, more than 24,000 people, Greer says, will be able to be buried at the natural burial ground in Simcoe County among forest and fields, which will become wildflower meadows. Now, she helps advocates around the province, like Moore, by providing the documentation and guidance on the many logistics that come with creating opportunities for natural burials. 

This follows the model of Canada’s first standalone natural burial ground on Salt Spring Island, B.C., surrounded by old-growth forest. More common, though, is a hybrid model, where one section of a traditional cemetery is carved out for natural burials — like the cemetery the Moores established in their town.

The green burial movement is seeing growth worldwide. Data from the U.S.-based National Funeral Directors Association shows 61 per cent of respondents to a 2025 survey were interested in exploring “green” funeral options, up from 55 per cent in 2021, and the U.S. industry is expected to reach $2 billion by the end of 2025.

“There’s also those that would consider it undignified or … aren’t interested in entertaining natural burial,” Greer says, explaining that part of her work is proving demand exists to the funeral industry. “The demand is huge. It’s really, really huge.”

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Along with the environmental benefits, natural burials can be more affordable, advocates say, which may resonate with the 46 per cent of Ontarians worried about affording funeral costs for family members. A 2024 report shows the average cost of a funeral in Canada was more than $7,700, reaching up to $17,000 for burial and $14,000 for cremation. 

Natural burial costs also vary and are changing as the practice develops, but some sources say prices currently range from $3,000 to $8,000, depending on the region and cemetery, due to lower costs for more simplistic caskets and markers. Although green burial plots require less upkeep in terms of fertilizers, pesticides and landscaping, they’re still subject to a maintenance fee of 40 per cent of the price of an in-ground grave, per the Bereavement Authority of Ontario’s regulations, which Greer is hoping will change. 

It’s a fee that the Natural Burial Association calls a “tax on grieving,” when compared to the national average, which the association says is 13 per cent to maintain and preserve the cemetery in perpetuity, including cutting grass and repairing roads and markers.

“The affordability and the cost of end of life is a huge, huge worry for Ontarians, and we have some fees in Ontario that are just insane compared to the rest of Canada and North America,” Greer says. “We’re trying to combat that.”

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As cities in Ontario and around the world warn that land for cemetery space near urban centres is a resource that will soon run out, Greer is also advocating for land ‘renewal.’ This is the idea that a plot of land used to naturally bury someone can be used again for a burial years later. 

That isn’t legal in Ontario yet, but is practised in parts of Europe and Asia.“This is all about reconnecting with nature, so that we can see that we’re all part of the web of life, the greater cycle of life, and giving ourselves back to the earth that sustained us in life,” Greer says.

“You can’t have life without death,” Greer says. “This is a demonstration of that.”

The long history of natural burials

Since Canada’s first urban green-burial site opened in 2008 in Victoria, more than a dozen have followed. In Ontario, spaces for natural burials have opened in Kingston, Guelph and Niagara Falls. But the notion of burials with a low impact on the environment has a long history.

While practices vary, First Nations burial rituals often recognize the connection between the person and the land, using natural, biodegradable materials such as sweetgrass, cedar, sage or tobacco to pay respects. Likewise, some religious traditions provide guidance for today’s secular green burial advocates. 

“Traditionally Jews and Muslims use a very simple plywood casket,” Sabi Ahsan, chair of the Toronto Muslim Cemetery Corporation, says. “People have now also come up with cardboard caskets … so that I think will be even more environmentally friendly.”

In Judaism, the plain pine casket is seen as an equalizer — a reminder that status and wealth don’t come with us to the grave. In Islam, the premise is similar, prioritizing humility and modesty while allowing the body to return to the earth quickly.

“Man was made from earth, according to the Quranic stories, and so he’s returned to it,” Ahsan says.

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In both Islam and Judaism, people must be buried very quickly — ideally within 24 hours of death. As a result, Muslim community advocacy groups in Ontario, including the Northern Muslim Association, have raised concerns about limited access to natural burials, especially in the winter. A representative of the group told the CBC in 2024 that families across Ontario have to ship deceased loved ones to cemeteries in Toronto and Ottawa for a natural burial, costing thousands of dollars and requiring family members to travel hundreds of kilometres to visit the grave-sites. 

Ahsan has seen it at his cemetery in Toronto, with people arriving from northern Ontario for a proper Muslim burial. This has lessened, he added, since the Barrie Mosque purchased plots for Muslim burials at the Innisvale Cemetery in Barrie, Ont., in 2020.

A green resting place, close to home

In late 2024, Shirley was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. As with Kyle, the Moores hoped when the time came to be able to give her a natural burial, close to home. But winter burials were still not permitted at the local cemetery.

When she passed away in March 2025, Moore says, the local council quickly moved on its bylaw to allow winter burials to create the county’s first dedicated green burial site, usable year-round. It passed just a few days after her death, finally bringing the option of a green burial, simple and beautiful, to the community, with Shirley the first person buried there.

“It’s a bit sobering, a bit ironic,” Moore says, “but we managed to pull it off.”

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Operating already, the opening ceremony for the green burial section in St. Stephen’s Cemetery is scheduled to take place in May 2026, Moore says. Neighbouring Highlands East plans to also open a natural burial area later this spring and, in Oro-Medonte in early February 2026 the council approved the zoning amendment to allow Greer’s natural burial ground.

Moore still attends countless meetings to show cemetery and municipal leadership that green burials are something people want and need. He continues to advocate, he says, because individual environmental choices feel increasingly critical.

“Our bodies are important nutrients, not waste to be pumped into [the] atmosphere to help make the climate emergency worse,” Moore says. “We’re hopeful now that this is going to help spur it on in other places.”

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Shirley is buried in a corner of St. Stephen’s Cemetery, next to a timber-framed gazebo and two large stones that will soon be engraved with the names of those buried here. Kyle is buried about ten metres away. 

The cemetery is just off a quiet rural road. In the spring, local volunteer gardeners will continue to plant small native trees and shrubs. Trees line the fence and the cemetery’s edge. Terry Moore is a few minutes away.

“People want to be close when they pass,” he says. “They want to be close to what they love.”

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.

This story is part of Generating Futures, a series from The Narwhal exploring clean energy sovereignty among B.C. First Nations.

Moldy strawberries, wilted lettuce. A forlorn cauliflower pocked with brown. West Moberly First Nations Councillor Clarence Willson jokes that produce available in nearby stores is sometimes “compostable” before it hits the shelves.

That produce arrives by way of a very long supply chain, and their northeastern B.C. territory, a three-and-a-half hour drive northeast of Prince George, is often the end of the line. And thanks to the compounding effects of hydro dams, seismic lines for oil and gas, forestry and coal mines, traditional foods the nation has long harvested or hunted have grown increasingly scarce or unsafe to eat.  

“We have to start looking at how we sustain ourselves,” Chief Roland Willson of West Moberly First Nations says. “Not just West Moberly, but the people in the northeast.”

“The idea of the greenhouse is, to me, where I think we have to go.” 

Growing fresh food year-round in greenhouses could improve food security in the community and across the region, but it would take a lot of energy, too. Fortunately, the First Nation has a serendipitous asset buried deep underground: scalding hot, salty water. 

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Thanks to B.C.’s lively tectonic faults, it has an abundance of this underground water, a key ingredient in what’s known as conventional geothermal energy. Hot water is pumped to the surface, using tools like turbines and heat exchangers to generate renewable electricity or direct heat. Elsewhere, companies are working to design so-called “unconventional” geothermal technologies to extract the earth’s heat from places without such reservoirs, but the drilling required makes it much more costly. B.C.’s geothermal opportunities, in other words, are a relatively low-hanging fruit — one that could literally yield fruit, and other fair-weather crops like tomatoes and peppers, even in winter’s subzero temperatures. 

“British Columbia has a world-class geothermal resource,” says Emily Smejkal, a geologist and policy lead for the Cascade Institute’s geothermal energy office. “We’re just not using it.”

Geothermal energy supplies consistent power, making it similar to the hydro dams and natural gas B.C. currently relies on.   

If the nation’s project succeeds, the West Moberly direct heat geothermal greenhouse project would be the first of its kind in Canada. Such innovation brings risks to its trailblazers, but Clarence, a longtime lead on the geothermal project, says the potential outcomes are worth it.

“When we learned about this geothermal availability, it fit right into our idea of food sovereignty,” he says. 

“We want to be in control of our supply of food, knowing what goes into it and what’s good about it.”

Fragmented food systems have impacted food security, territory

Fresh food used to be abundant in West Moberly’s territory.

“If you needed meat, you’d go to the mountains and get yourself a caribou,” Roland says. Fish came easily, too: rivers were once plentiful enough that you could catch them by hand. The nation’s members travelled throughout their territory with the seasons, maintaining balance and keeping their impacts in check.  

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Over a century ago, Canada signed Treaty 8 which promised signatory First Nations would retain the right to hunt and fish as they always had.

But that’s not what happened. 

To supercharge resource extraction in the north, former premier W.A.C. Bennett dammed the Peace River, bisecting the once-expansive migration of transient caribou that fortified the residential herds. “Caribou that roamed throughout the territory got fragmented down into these small, little pockets,” Roland says, “and then wolves came in.”

Wolves and other predators made use of roads — and seismic and power lines etched across the territory, offering them an easy-access escalator to the caribou’s mountain hideaways. As logging and mining further depleted caribou habitat, the herds plummeted. In 2014, the nation launched a breeding pen program with the Saulteau First Nations, and yet herds remain in critical condition.

Other foods suffered, too: moose and elk populations fell, thanks in part to habitat loss and to new hunting pressure in the caribou’s absence. Berries throughout the territory were sprayed with glyphosate, a chemical now deemed “probably carcinogenic” by the World Health Organization. 

For decades, fish remained relatively plentiful — and critical to diminishing food security. 

Every year in May, Clarence and his family would gather at a special spot along the Crooked River to fish for char, sometimes setting up barbecues to cook by the river as they worked. But worries began to surface, thanks in part to a sign in the Hudson’s Hope post office warning of elevated mercury levels in the Williston Reservoir. The nation knew that fish travelled through the reservoir, and initiated a study in 2015 to determine whether they were safe to eat. 

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“I was in tears when we got the results back, because I knew my family had been eating those fish for years,” Clarence says. 

Ninety-eight percent of the samples had mercury concentrations above B.C.’s health guidelines. Women of childbearing age could safely eat only a Hershey’s Kiss worth of fish every other day.

Before it was flooded, the community learned that BC Hydro’s new dam project, Site C, would bring mercury contamination closer to home. The reservoir is downstream of the Moberly River, which threads through the nation’s territory and flows into Moberly Lake directly facing their community. Just as the Crooked River carried the reservoir’s toxins upstream, the Moberly River is poised to do the same. “A lot of us eat fish directly out of the lake,” Clarence says.

“They went ahead with Site C with the full knowledge that it was going to do the same thing there.”

Clarence added that selenium pollution from nearby coal mines also impacts the region’s watersheds. “All the river networks in our region are affected by something,” he says.

With many traditional food sources depleted or contaminated, West Moberly has taken action over the years to regain access to fresh foods. The nation funded community members to build garden beds, but short growing seasons mean they offer limited respite to a year-round problem. 

A greenhouse could bridge the seasons, but West Moberly First Nations has no natural gas service in its community. And according to Michael Keefer, president of the ecological restoration consultancy Keefer Ecological, the added costs of using electricity to power a greenhouse year-round would make the prospect a non-starter. 

“It’s very energy-intensive to heat a greenhouse,” he says.

That is, unless the nation has another energy source to draw from. 

Energy from an ancient sea-floor

Hundreds of millions of years ago, the earth’s supercontinent broke up along the border of northeastern B.C. and Alberta, turning it — and what would become West Moberly’s traditional territory — into a shallow tropical sea, populated by giant reptilefish.

Eventually, sediment and rock covered it over, leaving little holes underground where that sea-floor had been. 

“If that buried sea-floor doesn’t hold air anymore, it holds salty water or oil or gas,” Smejkal says. Known as “brine,” that water is more plentiful than its fossil fuel cohabitants. “Oil and gas are hard to find,” Smejkal says. “Water is actually pretty easy.”

In addition to that ancient sea-floor, B.C.’s geothermal potential also abounds beneath the chains of volcanoes tracing its coast. There, hot water comes from rain that trickles underground through porous rocks, heated by the volcanoes’ pimple-like proximity to the earth’s molten core.

Some B.C. buildings use a geothermal-lite technique called “geoexchange” to supplement their energy needs by heating water in shallow underground pipes, but to date no projects have successfully tapped the potential of deep-buried water. 

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Glen Clark, chair of the BC Hydro board, told The Narwhal he thinks B.C.’s lacklustre geothermal industry is due in part to an abundance of cheap hydropower and gas. “You’ve got these inexpensive fuel sources that have impaired, in a way, the kind of experimentation you’d have if the price were higher,” he says. But Clark says geothermal is “a really, really important resource,” that could play a key role in B.C.’s energy system in the future. 

Producing electricity from underground water is also finicky: it needs to be super hot, at around 120 C. But industrial sites like greenhouses can easily skip the electricity step, using geothermal heat directly in their operations, creating a less risky project. When West Moberly realized the heat in their geothermal resource was ideal for greenhouse conditions, it seemed like an obvious conclusion, Clarence says. 

“That’s been a topic we’ve discussed for years.” 

Next phase of geothermal project is risky, requires substantial new funding

If all goes as planned, West Moberly’s geothermal greenhouse will bring fresh produce and fish back to the territory. 

Using a system known as aquaponics, the nation plans to raise fish in tanks and use their waste to fertilize vegetables in the greenhouse, cutting down on or eliminating the use of synthetic fertilizers. 

“The waste from the fish is excellent fertilizer for the greenhouse products,” Clarence says. “They work together very well.” 

So far, the nation plans to raise fish like tilapia alongside produce like tomatoes, strawberries, greens and peppers in a 40,000-square-foot greenhouse — enough to provide food for its members and surrounding communities. Keefer is working with the nation to develop a business plan, including reaching out to local grocery stores. He’s confident their products will be in high demand — as long as everything goes according to plan. 

Even though the project is designed to produce a more forgiving form of direct heat, the enterprise still brings risk. “For our project, flow is our big worry,” Ben Lee says. He’s an operations engineer and heat transfer specialist with Calgary-based company Raven Thermal Services, which is helping to design the geothermal project with the nation. If the company doesn’t find enough water in the reservoir it targets, it won’t be able to bring enough heat to the surface, and may need to drill farther into the rock to access it, upping the project’s costs. 

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Lee says they chose to locate the project next to an abandoned oil and gas well near the community, which can serve as a pre-drilled test plot to assess subsurface conditions they might encounter. This is among the many conservative decisions made, Lee says, to reduce risks inherent in the project. “When you’re talking about a community-based project, risk management becomes absolutely critical.”

Having received early feasibility funding from federal and provincial governments, the project now requires substantial new funding to take on the next big step of drilling the hole to determine how much water is there. 

In countries where geothermal energy has boomed, Smejkal says that risk-taking has often been a shared enterprise. For example, in what’s known as the “glass city” — the Westland region of the Netherlands — geothermal-powered greenhouses produce food for distribution across Europe. There, governments agreed to help compensate for the cost difference between geothermal power and natural gas, and offered an insurance program to reduce risks for geothermal projects. By removing the consumer carbon tax and failing to provide consistent support for geothermal energy, Smejkal worries Canada is heading in the opposite direction. 

Clark sees a role for the utility to advance geothermal in the province and help to reduce risks for developers. But, he warns, it faces competing demands for funds and time, including major substation investments to replace aging infrastructure. He says he wasn’t aware of West Moberly’s geothermal greenhouse project, but added that the utility generally enters into equity agreements with First Nations to share ownership of the energy system, like transmission lines, “as opposed to more historic reparations.” He added that he didn’t know enough about the mercury issues related to Site C to comment on them.

Speaking to The Narwhal from his home alongside Moberly Lake, Clarence says those responsible for the community’s collapsing food system are indebted to help. 

 “Some of these people that are poisoning our food supply, they should help us with trying to have good food here,” he says.

Generating Futures is made possible with support from the Real Estate Foundation of BC. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, no foundation or outside organization has editorial input into our stories.

Updated on March 9, 2026, at 6:53 a.m. PT: This article was updated because a previous version incorrectly attributed a quotation to Roland Willson in a caption. The quotation has been deleted from the caption, but remains unchanged in the story’s main text, where it is correctly attributed to Clarence Willson.

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

• Salt applied to roads and parking lots in winter is washing into the Lake Simcoe watershed and others throughout Ontario.
• Increasing salinity in the Lake Simcoe watershed is a threat to biodiversity and drinking water.
• One possible solution to the problem is introducing limited liability for owners of commercial parking lots, so they aren’t tempted to oversalt their properties to protect against “slip and fall” lawsuits.

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In February 2025, a small freshwater stream in Newmarket, Ont., was saltier than the ocean. The source? Winter road salt, washing off local parking lots and highways into the Lake Simcoe watershed.

As a result, concentrations of chloride — one of two minerals that make up table salt — in Western Creek exceeded 26,000 milligrams per litre of water. Meanwhile seawater typically sits at 19,400 milligrams of chloride per litre of water, according to the local conservation authority. 

For Christopher Wellen, an environmental scientist focused on hydrology and associate professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, this finding was not surprising: the Simcoe region, and many others across southern Ontario, have big salt problems. 

“It washes away from the roads, but it doesn’t just disappear,” Wellen said. “It goes where the water goes — that’s our groundwater, it’s our lakes, it’s our rivers — and has effects there.” 

For decades, the concentration of road salt in Lake Simcoe has been on the rise: 120,000 tonnes of it are used by communities in the watershed annually, Lake Simcoe Region Conservation Authority has reported. That amounts to roughly 227 kilograms of salt per person in the region every year.

Heavy salting in winter is not unusual, but Lake Simcoe has been monitored for decades, so it can act as a case study of exactly what happens when this much road salt is being applied. And it illuminates the environmental impact across the province where high-traffic areas, surrounded by cities, towns and a dense network of roadways, are inundated with salt.

Road salt and fresh water

Road salt is primarily made up of sodium chloride and is used to remove ice from roadways in the winter. But oversalting has widespread impacts on ecosystems, harming aquatic life and depleting biodiversity year-round.

“Every organism that lives in streams and rivers and lakes … has tolerances for all sorts of things like temperature fluctuations and salt fluctuations,” Wellen said. “If the water becomes too salty, they can find it really difficult to reproduce and thrive and continue to exist, basically.”

All this chloride does not break down, or simply wash away. It accumulates over time. 

“It’s quite possible that, if things don’t change, the food web could be quite affected,” Wellen added. The problem starts at the bottom of the food chain, he said, and makes its way up.

Since fish are mobile, they can generally avoid areas with high salt concentrations. The pronounced impacts are on the more stationary species, like critters that live in riverbeds. They also make up the base of the food chain, so when they are unable to survive the salty water, organisms higher up lose their food supply.

The Lake Simcoe Region Conservation Authority says on its website that winter salt has become a topic of “great concern” in the watershed, particularly because there isn’t an effective way to remove it. And Lake Simcoe, the largest lake wholly in southern Ontario, supplies drinking water for hundreds of thousands of residents — with hundreds of thousands more relying on groundwater aquifers in the watershed.

How salty is Lake Simcoe?

In Canada, the federal government provides long- and short-term guidelines for exposure to chloride before aquatic life is affected. At a concentration of 640 milligrams of chloride per litre of water for as little as 24 hours, aquatic life could be severely affected. For longer-term exposure, concentrations beyond 120 milligrams of chloride​ per litre of water would see harm to aquatic life such as a fish species declining over time.

David Lembcke, director of watershed science and monitoring at Lake Simcoe Region Conservation Authority, jokingly equates the latter threshold to a pack-a-day cigarette habit: “You’re going to have long-term impacts from that. There are some sensitive biota in the lake that will probably have reproductive, developmental, long-term impacts at those levels.” 

The authority produced a report more than a decade ago that already showed chloride concentrations were impacting these aquatic species in 64 per cent of the Lake Simcoe watershed.

Cut through a wetland: how Ontario’s losing a critical ecosystem

In the lake itself, the concentration in February was around 61 milligrams of chloride​ per litre of water, Lembcke said, which is about half of the long-term exposure guideline set by the province. But that level has been steadily increasing by 0.7 milligrams of chloride per litre of water annually, according to the conservation authority. Elsewhere in the watershed, especially in tributaries in urban areas like Hotchkiss Creek and West Holland River, concentrations regularly exceed both guidelines, Lembcke said, and long after winter ends.

“We have this incredibly persistent, relentless increasing trend in lake [salt] concentrations,” Lembcke said. “Certainly the potential is there: if we don’t curb the amount of salt that we’re using, drinking water could be impacted.”

For drinking water, the Ontario objective is 250 milligrams of chloride​ per litre of water, but this is based on taste, not health considerations. For people who need to limit their sodium intake for things like high blood pressure, or kidney or liver diseases, Health Canada recommends that salt in water shouldn’t exceed 20 milligrams per litre.

In Waterloo, Ont., groundwater and consequently drinking water has already been impacted; given high concentrations in some areas, the city has to mix groundwater from different wells to average out chloride levels across the region. They’ve campaigned hard for curbing road salt use, since current water and wastewater treatment doesn’t remove salt, and the municipality explains on their website that removing it requires expensive, energy-intensive treatment. And that would mean higher water costs for the community.

How do you solve a problem like road salt?

While some communities look to solutions such as replacements for road salt, they also carry their own challenges: alternatives like beet juice or sodium acetate can be prohibitively expensive, and their long-term effects on ecosystems aren’t entirely known. 

Some experts and activists are looking to stop the problem at its source. Commercial parking lots are among the biggest culprits for oversalting, likely since they are liable for any injury that occurs on snow or ice on their properties.

“The problem that we keep seeing is that small businesses or big parking lots are oversalting, and it’s a perverse incentive structure where they feel like they have to do it to protect themselves against the slip and fall [lawsuits],” Jonathan Scott, executive director of the Rescue Lake Simcoe Coalition, said. Scott is chair of the Nottawasaga Valley Conservation Authority and a Bradford West Gwillimbury councillor.

“It’s not any safer. It’s worse for the environment. It’s worse for small businesses in terms of increased costs,” he said.

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Proponents including Scott and Lembcke are arguing to modernize the law by offering limited liability, or a stronger defence against being sued, to those businesses who get an accepted certification such as Smart About Salt, and learn how to implement best salting practices for public safety and the environment alike. 

“If you’re following best practices and if you’re doing the right thing as a winter maintenance operator, that should be a defence for the operator and the property owner against slip and fall claims,” Scott said. “It seems like such a simple pro-business, pro-environment legal reform that wouldn’t cost us anything.” 

Scott points to New Hampshire, a state with comparable winter conditions to Ontario, as an example. The state reduced its salt pollution by 25 to 45 per cent by granting limited liability protection to certified commercial salt applicators. 

Wellen and his team have done modelling studies to see what would happen if a legal reform like this was adopted in the Lake Simcoe area; he said the results are promising, finding it could decrease the concentrations in the lake significantly by the end of the century.

But the province, who would have to make that regulatory change, has yet to sign on.

“It seems to be one of those problems that’s entirely of our own making, in which case it should be something that we can fix,” Lembcke said. “I’m optimistic that it’s something that we can address.”

— With files from Fatima Syed

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.

This story is part of a series called Shockwave: Rising energy demand and the future of the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes region is in the midst of a seismic energy shakeup, from skyrocketing data centre demand and a nuclear energy boom, to expanding renewables and electrification. In 2026, the Great Lakes News Collaborative will explore how shifting supply and demand affect the region and its waters.

In January, Ontario Energy Minister Stephen Lecce told a room full of business and energy officials that communities across the province have been “petitioning us for a small modular reactor.” 

The emerging nuclear technology is exactly what it sounds like: essentially a smaller nuclear reactor, often referred to as an SMR, that can produce enough electricity for up to 300,000 homes. And it’s all anyone in Ontario’s energy space can talk about. It’s poised to be a major facet of the province and country’s plan to become an “energy superpower.” 

There’s a simple case for expanding Ontario’s already robust nuclear fleet. We desperately need more clean, reliable, around-the-clock electricity supply to satisfy our thirst for artificial intelligence, electric cars and all the things we’ll be plugging in over the coming decades. 

The province is betting nuclear energy will satisfy the bulk of our power demand, and so is Canada. The two levels of government have promised billions of dollars toward the country’s (and North America’s) first small modular reactor power plant. The project is under construction at the Darlington Nuclear Generating Station in Bowmanville, Ont., just over an hour’s drive east of Toronto, and led by the Crown corporation Ontario Power Generation. The plan is to build four of these reactors at Darlington over the next decade. 

The catch: we’ve never built a small modular reactor before. 

Both Russia and China have operational small modular reactors, while Argentina has a pilot under construction. But Ontario would be first in the G7 to build one.

That doesn’t seem to have fazed the government — provincial or federal. Prime Minister Mark Carney has referred the Darlington New Nuclear project to his Major Projects Office for consideration to be fast-tracked. That means federal officials could support the financial and licensing needs of all four small modular reactors. 

Here’s everything you need to know about Ontario’s pursuit of small modular reactors, or SMRs. 

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What are small modular reactors, or SMRs? 

They’re like traditional nuclear reactors, but, well, smaller in both the amount of power they produce and their physical size. An SMR and its components can range from the size of a shipping container to a football field. 

But they produce power in the same way, splitting radioactive uranium atoms into smaller elements. This process releases heat that is used to turn water into steam, which drives a turbine, producing electricity.

That similarity is one of the reasons Ontario Power Generation is confident in their plan to build a first-of-its-kind reactor at Darlington, with contractor GE Vernova Hitachi — the small modular reactor is a scaled-down version of an existing nuclear reactor model (the tenth generation of it, in fact), Subo Sinnathamby, Ontario Power Generation’s chief projects officer, told The Narwhal

While the physics are largely the same, small modular reactors are easier to build than a traditional reactor. “They’re almost like Legos: pre-made bits that come out of the factory and are put together on site,” Kirk Atkinson, associate professor and associate industrial research chair in Ontario Tech University’s department of energy and nuclear engineering, said. 

Atkinson, who is also director of the university’s Centre for Small Modular Reactors, says this kind of simplification allows small modular reactors to be produced at reduced costs and much more quickly than full-scale nuclear.

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But while traditional nuclear reactors use uranium, a fuel Canada is the world’s second-largest producer and exporter of, small modular reactors require enriched uranium, which Atkinson likened to concentrated orange juice. Canada doesn’t have any of it in-house, and that’s a hurdle Ontario is trying to get over quickly. More on that below. 

How much power does an SMR produce and for whom? 

A single small modular reactor at Darlington will produce 300 megawatts of electricity, which is enough to power 300,000 homes. 

The lower capacity and size means they make sense in places with smaller populations, everywhere from rural, remote Ontario to Saskatchewan, helping them move away from diesel generators. They can also be used to provide independent or backup power for industrial facilities, mines or data centres, assuming regulation permits this. 

Unlike small modular reactors in remote communities or independent uses, Darlington’s reactors will be tied into Ontario’s power grid.

What is Ontario Power Generation? 

The provincial Crown corporation, often known as OPG, has built and currently operates a significant portion of the nuclear generators in the province. 

Atkinson said it is “the only entity in Canada that is large enough and wealthy enough and skilled enough to take a project like a small modular reactor and be the proving ground of a nation, be a proving ground of the western world.”

For more than a decade, Ontario Power Generation has had an empty site near its Darlington nuclear facility licensed for new nuclear builds. That site is now being used to build the first of four small modular reactors, technically known as the GE Hitachi Boiling Water Reactor X-300 (or the BWRX-300). The full-scale nuclear version of this reactor is in use in the United States.  

“We had a leg up on other nations because we already had a site suitable for this,” Atkinson said. “[Ontario Power Generation] was ahead of the times.”

How much will it cost Ontario taxpayers to build the first SMR? 

Absolute bucketloads. 

Initial forecasts suggest the first small modular reactor may cost $6.1 billion, plus another $1.6 billion for systems around it that will service all four once complete.

In total, Ontario Power Generation anticipates the four reactors at Darlington to cost $20.9 billion.

The federal government’s arm’s-length investment vehicle, the Canada Growth Fund, has given the first leg of the project $2 billion, while the province is putting forward $1 billion through its Building Ontario Fund. 

Both governments say these investments will be worth it because Ontario’s small modular reactors will create 18,000 jobs during construction and 3,700 jobs during operation. They also predict the project will contribute $38.5 billion to Canada’s gross domestic product through its construction and continued operation over 65 years. 

While it looks like the cost of the Darlington project will be borne by taxpayers, the province has noted it is “exploring potential financial instruments that would benefit ratepayers, and in parallel, [Ontario Power Generation] continues to explore other optimal financing arrangements.”

For now, the Crown corporation has asked the Ontario Energy Board to consider permitting it to nearly double the cost of nuclear power for ratepayers to help recoup the very high costs of building the small modular reactors. This follows a rule change made by the Doug Ford government allowing electricity rate increases for generating infrastructure that hasn’t been built yet. We’ll have to wait and see what the independent regulator decides.

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When will the first SMR be operational?

If all goes well, 2030. 

“We have a licence to construct. We don’t have a licence to operate, yet,” Sinnathamby, of Ontario Power Generation, said.  

The power to grant that is in the hands of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, which will greenlight the technology once it’s built, only if it meets all environmental and safety standards. 

It also depends on whether we manage to secure enough enriched uranium to operate them. 

So where is Ontario going to get the enriched uranium needed for small modular reactors? 

Maybe the U.S. Maybe France. 

In its 2024 fall economic statement, the federal government, led by then-prime minister Justin Trudeau, said it intended to backstop up to $500 million in enriched nuclear fuel purchase contracts from allied countries to support small modular reactor operators.

Sinnathamby said Ontario Power Generation has “a very diverse partnership to ensure we have a strong supply of enriched fuel.” Canada has an abundance of uranium, while the United States has facilities to produce the refined form. Sinnathamby noted the American company producing that enriched uranium is a subsidiary of GE Vernova Hitachi, which is building the SMR technology, and so is very invested in the project’s success and that supply chain. 

Nevertheless, in light of the U.S. trade tensions, Sinnathamby said Ontario Power Generation has also signed a deal with French company Orano to garner enriched uranium. 

“We’re quite comfortable and confident around fuel security and supply,” Sinnathamby said. 

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Who wants Ontario’s SMRs?

If you ask Lecce … everyone? 

In 2022, the governments of Ontario, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Alberta agreed to a joint strategic plan to collectively build and deploy small modular reactors. Ontario and Nova Scotia have made a similar agreement. Some of these provinces are “starting from scratch,” George Christidis, president and CEO of the Canadian Nuclear Association, said, which is what makes Ontario’s experience and expertise important. 

In the past year, Lecce has been on a whirlwind of international trips to secure deals both to deploy small modular reactors and support them, everywhere from New York to Poland. 

Ontario Power Generation has also been inundated with requests to visit Darlington to see the SMR site, Sinnathamby said, adding, “I joke that one of my execs is on full-time tour duty because of the number of visitors we have.” That has included representatives from European countries, as well as U.S. government agencies. 

How does Lake Ontario, and water in general, factor into the SMRs at Darlington? 

The three major nuclear sites in Ontario are all close to Great Lakes, which Atkinson said act as “very large bathtubs of water” that can be used to cool the reactors. 

To that end, Sinnathamby said the small modular reactor site in Darlington will include a tunnel into Lake Ontario to bring in water for cooling, “so that wouldn’t be different from any other technology, per se.”

What will differ is the volume of water needed; that depends on the eventual size of the reactor, the number of components and how many are built.

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What will we do with the waste produced by small modular reactors in Ontario?  

We’re not sure, but everyone is confident there will be a plan when they’re operational. 

“Nuclear waste is very securely managed and regulated in Canada,” Christidis said. “There’s a strong and proven safety standard in this industry.” 

This question ultimately depends on the Nuclear Waste Management Organization, a non-profit established by Ontario Power Generation, New Brunswick Power Corporation and Hydro-Québec and empowered by the federal government to create a plan for nuclear waste management.

The organization has long been tasked with finding a site for nuclear waste produced by traditional reactors, and last year chose Ignace, Ont., as the site for a repository. 

But waste produced by small modular reactors isn’t included in the plan for Ignace, and they may produce higher amounts of nuclear waste per unit of energy than traditional reactors. 

Sinnathamby, who sits on the board of the waste management organization, expects robust consultation on what to do with small modular reactor waste before it is operational. “It could potentially go to Ignace,” she said, but either way, the organization is mandated to find a solution for the waste. 

How do SMRs fit into Ontario’s other nuclear plans? 

Ontario is currently in the midst of either refurbishing or expanding all three of its major nuclear plants, which collectively provide more than 50 per cent of the province’s electricity. 

The government has also directed Ontario Power Generation to explore the possibility of building a new nuclear facility in Port Hope, Ont. If built, it would be the second nuclear facility built since 1993 — only after Darlington’s small modular reactors.

If Ontario has never built an SMR before, will it actually be built? 

Many in politics and the industry vigorously believe so. 

But as with all new technology emerging in the energy transition — from carbon capture to hydrogen — a lot remains to be seen. 

“We’re kind of at the beginning stage of this journey,” Atkinson said. “It’s only once we’ve built some and we’ve had the chance to stand back and look at it will we be able to provide better answers.”

Christidis is resolute. “It isn’t just hype. It’s actually very real,” he said. “That’s in the sense of real projects, real jobs, real investments. It’s a success story in the making, here and internationally.” 

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.

Researchers at the University of Manitoba will soon have a new, non-invasive tool to study the province’s vast groundwater resources after inking a partnership with Alberta-based mining company Sio Silica.

“If the technology works … it’s going to provide a mechanism to do real-time monitoring of changes in groundwater,” Ricardo Mantilla, an associate professor in the university’s civil engineering department and lead researcher for the project, said in an interview. 

The emerging technology — called absolute quantum gravimetry — can measure changes in gravity caused by changes in groundwater levels, allowing researchers to better understand the flow and storage of underground water resources without the need for “expensive and disruptive” drilling, he said.

“That obviously has applications for [Sio Silica], but it can have very important implications for how we understand groundwater in aquifers in our province.”

Sio Silica president Carla Devlin said the partnership demonstrates the company’s support for “independent research and transparent monitoring … [that] strengthens accountability and builds trust” as it continues to seek a licence for a controversial sand mine.

Sio Silica is in the process of seeking an environmental licence for a mine that proposes airlifting silica sand from a drinking water aquifer in southeastern Manitoba. It’s the company’s second attempt to secure a licence; Manitoba’s environment minister rejected an initial proposal in early 2024 following a hearing by the province’s Clean Environment Commission.

The company believes the aquifer, located 60 metres below the communities of Vivian, Anola, Springfield and others, contains high-purity silica sand that can be transformed into silicon metal — a critical mineral used for high-tech applications such as computer chips and lithium-ion batteries. Silica sand is also used in manufacturing, solar panel production and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

Residents have pushed back against the mining operation, concerned it could damage a drinking water source that serves more than 120,000 households.

The environment commission described the company’s initial proposal to drill more than 7,000 wells over 25 years and extract more than one million tonnes of sand annually with a technique that has never been used for a large-scale mine as “experimental,” urging caution and additional testing.

In October, Sio Silica submitted a revised application to the environmental assessment branch that proposes fewer wells, smaller sand quantities and a more gradual approach.

Devlin said supporting groundwater monitoring research at Manitoba’s largest university shows the company is “really focused on water safety.”

“The work is designed to safeguard groundwater, and it will confirm that our operations will not put Manitoba’s water at risk. By monitoring and sharing data, we are helping ensure clean, safe water for communities now and into the future,” she added. 

While the technology to monitor changes in the gravitational field caused by water movement is already used in satellites, Mantilla said this new machinery — effectively a “very sophisticated refrigerator” that cools atoms to a temperature where changes in gravity become measurable — can be loaded into a truck and carted around the province, allowing for a much more localized understanding of water systems.

Mantilla said the company’s mine site could become “a good experimental test” of the new technology, but his team has a much broader focus. 

“Groundwater is everything in Manitoba,” he said.

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The province, famed for its 100,000 lakes, its web of rivers and its connection to the Arctic, is a “perfect laboratory” for water research, Mantilla said, adding the research will also have implications for one of the province’s largest industries — agriculture.

“A lot of people in the province rely on groundwater, and we want to make sure that resource is being used in a sustainable way,” Mantilla said. “This technology is well beyond any particular industrial application.” 

Mantilla said his team has been researching this method of groundwater monitoring for over a year, and was seeking out funders to help purchase the specialized machinery, which “runs in the million-dollar type of investment.” 

He connected with Sio Silica when the company visited several research groups in the university’s engineering department and took an interest in his project, later agreeing to sponsor the research.

Hans-Joachim Wieden, the university’s associate vice-president for partnership, knowledge mobilization and innovation, said these kinds of industry partnerships are critical to maximize the impact of the institution’s research. Support from the private sector helps fill gaps in federal research funding, gives students valuable job experience and provides a pathway for research to make a tangible impact in communities.

“We, as the university, are interested in doing industry collaboration … for the benefits it holds for the students, for the researchers and for the communities we are in,” Wieden said.

On top of its financial contribution, Sio Silica plans to share groundwater monitoring data from its mine site with the university to help model and understand the aquifer as a complete system. Devlin noted the company envisions a long-term partnership that could include helping build out the university’s hydrology department.

“The work is not a localized mitigation exercise, it’s a foundational reset in how aquifers are understood,” she said of Mantilla’s research.

Julia-Simone Rutgers is a reporter covering environmental issues in Manitoba. Her position is part of a partnership between The Narwhal and the Winnipeg Free Press.

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In 2006, scientists descended upon a remote open-pit mine in Australia to study air that turns into rock.

Like many mines, after churning through rock to get at a mineral, the Mount Keith nickel mine was left with piles of waste rock, which it held in huge, exposed reservoirs called tailings. This waste rock, however, was reacting with carbon dioxide in the air to form new minerals. It was effectively pulling the carbon out of the air and embedding it within the rocks, a kind of natural version of carbon capture and storage.

The scientists wanted to investigate exactly how much, and how quickly, this natural phenomenon was leading to carbon being captured and mineralized at the mine. Pinpointing this, they figured, would provide insight into how mines with similar tailings could offset their greenhouse gas emissions.

They took more than 800 samples of the mine waste to test and study and discovered something intriguing: the majority of the carbon was being pulled out of the air at Mount Keith by one mineral. Brucite is a waxy, pearly crystal that’s often a dull yellow or blue. It is highly reactive with carbon dioxide, and leveraging that reactivity could boost carbon storage at the mine many times over, the researchers found.

“As we studied the site and became more aware of the presence of brucite, I think then we understood that, ‘Oh yeah, brucite was really doing a lot of the work,’ ” said Ian Power, one of the scientists who travelled to Australia to study the mine, and now the Canada Research Chair in Environmental Geoscience and an assistant professor at Trent University. 

Brucite is now a key part of the carbon storage aspirations of a proposed nickel and cobalt mine near Timmins, Ont. Critical minerals, including copper, nickel and lithium, are essential components in renewable energy systems such as solar panels, wind turbines and batteries. They’re also used in a wide variety of other products, from phones to laptops to weapons.

The proponent of the Timmins mine, Canada Nickel Company Inc., says its Crawford Nickel-Cobalt Sulphide Project will be “Canada’s largest nickel mine.” The project, expected to last 41 years, involves an open pit and stockpile areas, two ore processing plants, a new rail line and relocating a portion of a provincial highway and existing power line.

The project’s greenhouse gas emissions over its lifetime are detailed in a report for the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada. Before enacting any net-zero plans, the mine was expected to emit roughly 15,200 kilotonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, or about as much as 3.5 million gas-powered cars driven over a year, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s calculator (Natural Resources Canada’s calculator was not functioning at the time of publication).

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The company expects to lower those emissions considerably by, for example, electrifying parts of its operation. All told, its net-zero plans could reduce emissions to 154 kilotonnes per year by the year 2030, it said.

But Crawford Nickel will also be capable of storing more than a megatonne of carbon dioxide per year, amounting to 54 megatonnes over the life of the project, the company said — and it will be relying on brucite in its tailings to do the heavy lifting. 

The company expects to start construction on the mine this year after it secures its remaining federal and provincial permits. It says it has moved its carbon storage technology along to the point where it’s filing for patents. 

Beyond its own operations, it plans to source carbon from industrial emitters in the region, although the details of how this will work are still unclear. Questions also remain about whether the technology will work as advertised and the mine’s overall environmental impact.

The little mineral that could

Taking advantage of brucite — as well as other minerals that aren’t quite as efficient — to store carbon is a different technique for “carbon capture and storage” than the one that gets the lion’s share of attention.

The technique the fossil fuel industry has used for years involves taking a stream of carbon dioxide gas and injecting it deep underground into porous rock formations. Traditionally this has been used to loosen up remaining oil reserves and extract more oil, but more recently, and in smaller amounts, it has been used to store that carbon underground.

The problem with mineralization, as Canada Nickel plans to use, has been that the natural process of carbon turning into a solid can take thousands of years under normal conditions. 

Artificially speeding it up has been a scientific pursuit for years at places like the University of British Columbia, where Power worked with other trailblazers in the field. 
A study he authored in 2020, for example, showed how carbon storage could be accelerated at a nickel deposit northwest of Prince George, B.C., by bubbling carbon dioxide and other gases through a powdered mixture containing brucite.

Sourcing the rock from mine tailings is part of the appeal, Power said, because the rock has already been pulverized from ore processing. That exposes much more surface area to carbon dioxide for chemical reactions. Bubbling the gas through brucite also helps the process.

“We were kind of at the forefront of the field, and then [there was] a lot of research, field studies, experiments,” Power said. “And then people at this stage now are thinking, ‘Okay, how can we get to commercialization?’ ”

Canada’s environmental regulations and subsidies for green technology development from government and other private sources could be prodding companies to take carbon storage more seriously, he said.

One of the leaders of the field is Greg Dipple, who worked at the University of British Columbia on carbon mineralization for two decades before retiring and co-founding Vancouver-based company Arca, which calls itself an “industrial mineralization company.” 

Dipple told The Narwhal he was familiar with Canada Nickel but had not had a chance to work with it yet. Arca’s technology involves capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, he said, rather than from direct sources like Canada Nickel is planning.

“To meet the world’s climate targets, no one company or pathway can do it alone,” Dipple said. “We look forward to Canada Nickel’s success in their carbon removal plans.”

How Canada Nickel plans to store carbon at its Crawford mine

The sites studied by Power, Dipple and others involve magnesium-rich rock, often home to nickel and chromium, and where brucite is also often found. The Crawford mine has this type of rock, and is targeting nickel, chromium, cobalt and other mineral deposits for extraction. 

To make use of the carbon-hungry mineral, and expedite its reaction with carbon dioxide, the company plans to run its tailings through a series of tanks as a final step at its ore-processing plant, said Pierre-Philippe Dupont, vice-president of sustainability at Canada Nickel, in an emailed response to questions from The Narwhal.

Inside the tanks, the carbon dioxide will be “bubbled and stirred into the tailings for several hours,” Dupont said. By using “high strength” carbon dioxide streams and controlling for “certain conditions,” he said, the company expects to “fully utilize the brucite in the tailings” to store more carbon.

It will be the first time the technology is being realized at the scale of a full commercial mine.

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In its Impact Assessment Agency submission, the company described its mineralization process as being “at the research stage.” 

Asked by The Narwhal to describe its readiness today, the company pointed to several announcements it has made since 2023 showing the technology advancing through testing and pilot projects, to filing for a patent. 

“While [the technology] has not yet been implemented at full commercial production scale, these disclosures show that the technology has progressed … and is being actively advanced toward commercialization as part of broader carbon management efforts,” Dupont said by email.

Capturing public funds for carbon capture

Both Prime Minister Mark Carney and Ontario Premier Doug Ford have a lot riding on the mine’s success.

It’s the first project in Canada to get named to both the federal Major Projects Office and the provincial “One Project, One Process” list. Both the federal office and the provincial process are meant to make project approvals happen faster and smoother.

In press releases, both governments touted the Crawford Nickel project as “low-carbon” and both linked its production to “batteries and green steel.” Both also cited research showing its projected emissions would be “90 per cent below the global average.” Both governments have also made millions of dollars available for the project to happen. For example, federal dollars have funded its mineralization technology as well as its electrification plans.

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In a January 2026 investor presentation, the company acknowledged it’s drawing on between US$100 and US$300 million of government funding, including support from federal and provincial critical minerals funds. It also has US$500 million in long-term debt financing through the Crown corporation Export Development Canada.

It’s also banking on US$600 million it expects to receive from two Canadian federal tax credits, one for carbon capture and the other for clean technology manufacturing.

“While Crawford could move forward without government support, our project economics includes eligibility for existing federal and provincial programs, including investment tax credits, as well as other forms of government support available to strategically significant critical minerals projects,” Canada Nickel CEO Mark Selby told The Narwhal in an emailed response to questions.

Bringing additional carbon to Crawford Nickel mine could involve a pipeline, or rail

As part of its carbon capture plans, Canada Nickel wants the region around Timmins to become a “low-carbon or potentially zero-carbon industrial cluster.” 

The company has proposed a scheme where the emissions of potential future nickel processing and stainless steel facilities in the region would be transported to the Crawford mine for carbon mineralization. 

Its subsidiary, NetZero Metals, is “advancing plans” for those facilities, Selby told The Narwhal. But he acknowledged there are no detailed plans yet for how it would transport the emissions.

The company has had “discussions” with “potential suppliers” of emissions, which have considered both the idea of constructing a carbon dioxide pipeline in the Timmins region as well as using rail transport, Selby said. 

Whether a pipeline or rail, or another solution is pursued, there would need to be “further engineering work, regulatory frameworks and project approvals” first, Selby said.

Meanwhile, the company’s priority is to reduce its own expected emissions first by electrifying operations and sourcing green energy.

Building a mine creates emissions, through wetland and forest destruction

The mine’s footprint, too, could itself create carbon emissions. Northern Ontario is home to the boreal forest and a vast peatland, which is a net absorber of carbon dioxide and also acts like a filter for clean water, keeping flooding and drought in check and supporting wildlife and biodiversity.

Peatlands are under threat in Canada from industrial uses like forestry, mining and agriculture — all of which can disturb the sequestered carbon, releasing it into the atmosphere. The Wildlife Conservation Society Canada has warned some peatlands overlie major mineral deposits, including Crawford. 

The company’s Impact Assessment Agency of Canada submission calculated the total forgone carbon sequestration over the project’s life was estimated at roughly seven million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.

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At the same time, the proposed mine is situated in an area that’s already partially disturbed and near roads — unlike the proposed mining developments in the so-called Ring of Fire farther north, which would involve pushing deep into undisturbed peatland to build new mining sites, and building new roads to access them. 

“It’s not in the Hudson Bay Lowlands, for example, where there are billions of tons of carbon stored in peatlands,” Adam Kirkwood, a research associate for forests, peatlands and climate change at Wildlife Conservation Society Canada, said in an interview.

“My perspective is, it’s still in the boreal forest, where we do have quite a few peatlands as well.” 

Kirkwood said the area around Timmins is a “mosaic” of forests, lakes and wetlands that may turn into peatlands in the future. He said there was an opportunity for the company to try to minimize its impact so peatland, which takes thousands of years to form, is left undisturbed.

Canada Nickel says the mine’s footprint was assessed federally and, where there are areas that overlap with wetlands and peatland, “these features have been identified and assessed as part of the environmental effects evaluation.”

“Where impacts are unavoidable, we have proposed mitigation, monitoring and compensation measures consistent with regulatory requirements and the commitments made through the Impact Assessment process,” Dupont said.

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