A small town on northwestern Ontario’s border with the U.S. is quietly preparing for a worst-case scenario. It’s one that could mean a dramatic change for the community’s water supply.

Fort Frances, home to about 7,500 people, sits where Rainy Lake empties into the Rainy River and flows north into Lake of the Woods. Fort Frances’ drinking water comes from Rainy Lake, which is bisected by the Canada-U.S. border — and vulnerable to the whims of either country’s leadership. So is the town’s economy, which relies on fishing and tourism, as well as the rhythms of a border community built around the water.

Now, tensions between the U.S. and Canada threaten those rhythms. This spring, U.S. President Donald Trump took aim at a moratorium on mining in Rainy River’s watershed, and its waters that flow past Fort Frances and numerous First Nations communities around it. Last month, tensions ratcheted up, as Trump signed an order renaming Lake Ontario to “Lake America” amid an escalating trade dispute.

The watershed that surrounds Fort Frances is called Rainy-Lake of the Woods, and it straddles both sides of the border west of Lake Superior. About 450,000 hectares of protected forest, rivers and interconnected lakes on the U.S. side is known as the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, or colloquially, the Boundary Waters. In 2023, the Biden administration protected roughly 91,000 hectares of Superior National Forest just outside the Boundary Waters from mining for 20 years, citing the risk such development posed to the surrounding waters.

Mined copper-sulfide ore is processed to extract metals used in electrical wiring, electronics and rechargeable batteries. But when that ore is exposed to air and water, it can add sulfuric acid and heavy metals into nearby waters. When dissolved in water, that sulfuric acid breaks down into sulfate, which is toxic to wild rice, a plant central to Anishinaabe diet and culture — Minnesota has regulated sulfate in wild rice waters since 1973 for that reason. Sulfate also feeds the bacteria that convert otherwise harmless inorganic mercury into methylmercury, a neurotoxin that accumulates in fish and, through them, the people who eat them. 

But in April 2026, U.S. Congress reversed the protection for the stretch of Superior National Forest outside the Boundary Waters. The Senate voted 50 to 49 to lift the Biden administration’s moratorium that stood in the way of the Twin Metals mine, a project targeting copper, nickel and other metals, majority-owned by the Chilean mining conglomerate Antofagasta. 

President Trump signed the resolution into law in April.

In a statement to other media, Kathy Graul, director of public affairs and communications for Twin Metals Minnesota, said, “Any proposed project in this region, including Twin Metals, must undergo a yearslong, multi-agency regulatory review before earning permits to begin construction of a mine. The [Senate ruling] restores this process, and projects must prove they can meet the stringent environmental standards that have long been in place in Minnesota before moving forward.”

Back over the Canadian border, Fort Frances’ water treatment plant can handle natural fluctuations in the source water — but it wasn’t designed to handle the kind of contamination mining activity could potentially introduce, Travis Rob, the town’s manager of infrastructure and growth, told The Narwhal. Addressing that risk would mean either a costly overhaul of the plant’s treatment processes, or securing an entirely new water source, which would be “neither easy nor cheap,” Rob said. “This is what has me so concerned about the proposed mining activities.” 

He and his team have talked at length about what changes to watch for in the water that feeds the treatment plant and when the town would need to act, he said. But the stakes extend beyond Fort Frances itself. Couchiching First Nation and others also receive drinking water from the town’s treatment plant, Rob said. 

In August, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz issued a reprieve of sorts, signing an executive order directing state agencies to stop issuing leases or permits for copper, nickel and other non-iron ore mines on the U.S. side of the watershed, and to review all existing mineral leases in the area, including Twin Metals’. 

While this might hold up Twin Metals’ plans in part, the order is not immune to legal challenges from mining companies — or future actions of the Trump administration.

A smalltown mayor and First Nation’s chief seek support amid Trump’s mining push

The proposed Twin Metals mine sits at the headwaters of the Rainy-Lake of the Woods watershed.

The project has held leases in the area since the 1960s, under different owners proposing to mine copper, nickel, cobalt and platinum group metals from a deposit up to 1,300 metres below the surface, processing roughly 20,000 tons of ore a day for more than 25 years. 

According to the company, about half the waste rock, or tailings, would be stored underground; the rest would be dried out and kept above ground. Twin Metals says its processing “will remove most of the sulfide minerals,” meaning its tailings won’t result in acid drainage, and that the mine won’t discharge water used for that processing. Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness, an advocacy groups opposed to the project, has argued the risk  of acid drainage from the project’s tailings remains based on other mines, and exploration work in the watershed.

That same watershed carries north past Fort Frances, through Treaty 3 territory, the traditional lands of 28 Anishinaabe First Nations in northwestern Ontario and southeastern Manitoba, and eventually to Hudson Bay.

Gakijiwanong Anishinaabe Nation — formerly Lac La Croix First Nation — condemned the reversal in an April statement, according to NWONewswatch, saying neither it nor affected U.S. tribes were given the chance to testify before Congress voted.

Chief Carrie Atatise-Norwegian of Gakijiwanong Anishinaabe Nation, whose territory borders both the Boundary Waters and Quetico Provincial Park, has framed the stakes even more starkly. “This decision threatens the lives of our people, water resources and our ancestral lands,” she told CBC in April, after the U.S. Congress lifted the moratorium. “As stewards of our lands, [we] will be asserting, exercising and protecting our rights, jurisdiction and sovereignty as a nation.”

By May, Atatise-Norwegian was in Washington, D.C. In Minnesota Senator Tina Smith’s office, she signed a memorandum of understanding with the chairs of three U.S. tribal nations: Red Lake, Grand Portage and Bois Forte. They agreed to present a unified cross-border position on protecting the Boundary Waters and treaty-protected homelands, according to Red Lake Nation News. Atatise-Norwegian did not respond to The Narwhal’s request for an interview. 

The concerns of Gakijiwanong Anishinaabe Nation are shared by many Treaty 3 nations in Ontario. “This is not just a local issue, it is a transboundary concern that directly affects our waters, our environment and our way of life,” Ogichidaa (Grand Chief) Francis Kavanaugh of Grand Council Treaty 3, which represents 28 First Nations across northwestern Ontario and southeastern Manitoba, said in an April statement.

The day after the U.S. Senate voted to lift the moratorium, Fort Frances Mayor Hallikas emailed the office of Marcus Powlowski, the Liberal MP for Thunder Bay-Rainy River, urging him to speak out, and to reach out to Minnesota politicians directly. Hallikas said he also raised the issue with provincial politicians a few weeks later at the Northwestern Ontario Municipal Association’s conference in Thunder Bay, but was told it was a federal issue.

In May, the Rainy River District Municipal Association, of which Fort Frances is a member, wrote to Ontario Premier Doug Ford, aligning itself with Grand Council Treaty 3’s opposition to the mine. The letter states that sulfide-ore copper mining could cause “irreversible harm to water quality, wildlife, public health and a sustainable outdoor recreation-based economy.” It calls on “all levels of Canadian government” to engage with the U.S. and Minnesota on the issue.

“Any decision that could put [these waters] at risk is not solely a Minnesota matter,” Hallikas wrote in an email to The Narwhal. “It is an international and downstream concern that directly affects peoples in northwestern Ontario.”

He drew parallels to Grassy Narrows First Nation, where industrial mercury contamination, which can cause issues like tremors, cognitive effects and neuromuscular disorders, is one of the most consequential environmental health crises in Canadian history. 

“Northwestern Ontario understands the devastating consequences of mercury contamination,” he wrote. “That history demands vigilance, transparency and precaution.”

A binational board with no enforcement power, watching and waiting

In 1909, Canada and the U.S. signed the Boundary Waters Treaty, governing cross-border water disputes and creating the International Joint Commission to oversee exactly this kind of issue.

Merrell-Ann Phare, one of three Canadian commissioners, said the commission has no enforcement authority and no regulatory authority over water quality. Its role is to resolve disputes between nations, not enforce laws.

“We take great care to stay out of the domestic issues that are happening,” Phare said, so the commissions can preserve its neutrality for the moment a request to mediate comes in.

Only governments in Ottawa and Washington can jointly trigger that kind of review, known as a reference, under the treaty. Provinces, states and municipalities have no standing to request one directly, though Indigenous nations can be named partners.

The Ktunaxa Nation is a partner to a case in B.C.’s Elk Valley, where coal-mining pollution flows downstream into Montana and Idaho, causing unnaturally high selenium levels that have led to deformities in fish. It’s a problem the nation had raised for more than a decade before Ottawa and Washington formally asked the commission to step in, in March 2024.

That in itself is a point of concern for Johann Strube, an environmental sociologist who has studied water governance in northwestern Ontario, speaking in a personal capacity rather than as a spokesperson for Grand Council Treaty 3, where he is a natural resources policy analyst. The joint commission, he said, “was founded to advance the settler-colonial interests of Canada and the United States and explicitly excluded Indigenous nations from decision-making.”

The structure of the commission, Strube said, “still doesn’t involve Indigenous nations as nation-to-nation partners.”

Megan Garner is the Canadian co-chair of the International Rainy-Lake of the Woods Watershed Board, the regional organization that operates under the International Joint Commission.

She said the board is “aware of the termination of the mineral leasing moratorium … and is watching this issue closely.” The board is determining next steps, she said, and is committed to “balanced and representative input.” 

Garner later confirmed that, as of Aug. 19, the board “has not been in touch” with the Rainy River District Municipal Association or Gakijiwanong Anishinaabe Nation, and “has not requested input or information from any outside parties” on the mining issue, despite being aware, through its advisory groups, of a range of local perspectives.

A spokesperson for Global Affairs Canada, John Babcock, said, “Canada continues to work closely with the United States through existing bilateral mechanisms, including those established under the Boundary Waters Treaty, in support of our shared stewardship of transboundary waters.” He said they would continue to do this “as we take up the environmental challenges of the 21st century.”

Asked whether Canada had raised any new concerns with the U.S. administration specifically about the 2026 reversal, Babcock said in an emailed statement that the department continues “to monitor the ongoing developments in the region and to advocate that any increased mining activity be properly assessed and managed,” and that “the joint stewardship of the environment is a cornerstone of Canada-U.S. relations.”

Babcock did not respond to a follow-up question on whether or not Canada has requested the International Joint Commission review the issue of mine pollution leaching into the Rainy-Lake of the Woods watershed.

Canada’s caution here, Strube said, may have less to do with the technical question of jurisdiction than with the state of U.S.-Canada relations more broadly. Whether the Trump administration would feel bound by a 116-year-old water treaty, Strube said, is an open question.

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Twilight hangs over the Inlet Raider’s empty deck as it charges up the river. Its voyage has a single, cargo-free purpose: its crew was hired to find out whether the journey up the Taku River from Southeast Alaska past the B.C. border is possible.

If they succeed, this could be one of dozens of trips carrying construction supplies and infrastructure to the proposed New Polaris gold mine along the river, currently under review by the B.C. government and among its list of priority projects for expedited review.

The boat picks up speed, blasting up a passage nicknamed “the narrows” in honour of its thin, flute-shaped banks, which can host fierce, swirling currents. Its other concern lies underneath in braided river channels that can move at least annually to a new configuration, a common trait of glacial-fed rivers like this one. 

As the motor churns, the crew’s stream of banter is replaced by a tense silence punctuated by calls of encouragement as their barge follows a sonar-equipped motorboat guiding its journey up ahead.

“Three hours of boredom punctuated by 30 seconds of sheer terror,” says a joking voice off-screen, in a video posted to the captain’s Facebook page.

A few minutes later, the Inlet Raider makes it through.

New Polaris’s owner, Canagold Resources Ltd., acknowledges the transport challenges ahead. “We never said it’s easy,” Canagold’s chief executive officer, Catalin Kilofliski, tells The Narwhal in an interview. 

“But it’s doable.”

To avoid these precarious barge trips during operations, Canagold plans to transport its gold concentrate on cargo planes. It anticipates up to 15 flights a day, carrying a total of around 27,000 tonnes per year.

The goal is to capitalize on record-breaking gold prices by reopening New Polaris, a long-shuttered mine site on the Tulsequah River.

The project is among a select group featured in a federal prospectus document delivered to attendees of Canada’s recent investment summit in Toronto. This year, New Polaris was included in the federal government’s map of critical minerals projects, thanks to its potential to produce antimony — a heavy metal deemed “critical” by Canada for its use in a variety of applications from bullets to batteries. But Canagold’s feasibility study did not establish New Polaris’s antimony reserves and it does not include antimony in its projected revenues.

Meanwhile, B.C. has included New Polaris among its 35 priority major projects slated for expedited review.

In an emailed statement, the Environmental Assessment Office said New Polaris is on the list because of its “potential to make meaningful contributions to B.C.’s long-term economic growth” along with the other projects chosen.

“No project will be expedited at the expense of protecting the environment and communities or meeting our consultation obligations, which remain at the core of the [Environmental Assessment Office]’s mandate,” it added.

The company intends to create hundreds of direct jobs annually and provide around $500 million in federal and provincial tax revenue during its operations.

But some observers remain concerned that the mine’s potential risks, from water contamination to habitat loss, aren’t worth the financial benefits.

Environmental concerns with New Polaris

The Taku River watershed is one of the largest intact river systems on the Pacific Coast of North America, and one of the few remaining places where Pacific salmon populations are booming, meaning New Polaris’s riverside mine and tailings ponds naturally come with high stakes.

The mine sits around the riverbend from the also-dormant Tulsequah Chief mine site, which was owned by another company, where contamination has been seeping into the watershed for over 50 years.

Canagold has worked to distinguish New Polaris from the tarnished legacy of its next-door neighbour. The company has signed a collaborative engagement consent agreement with the Taku River Tlingit First Nation, whose territory extends across the mine site and surrounding regions on the Canadian side of the border. According to the nation, the agreement means it will have the final say on whether the project goes ahead. The nation did not respond to The Narwhal’s request for comment.

The company has altered its plans in response to concerns raised in its engagement with the public and with the Taku River Tlinigit. It no longer plans to process gold on site using cyanide, which, if spilled, can poison fish and watersheds. It’s also planning to dry out its tailings to reduce the risk of impacts and limit barge trips mostly to the construction phase. The barge trips will only happen in the high-water months, spring and summer, to reduce the risks of running aground — a change that means more flights and higher costs.

With gold prices above US$2,500 per ounce — a price reached for the first time in 2024 — the “projected cash flow and economics are outstanding,” according to a quote from Kilofliski on Canagold’s website.

But the company’s application hints at potential challenges ahead: the historic underground mine is leaching some levels of arsenic and antimony into the surrounding watershed, and rocks in the company’s largest targeted gold deposit appear capable of leaching more of the same. According to a report prepared for the company and included in its application, the mine’s proposed tailings facilities appear to be located within the flood zone of the Tulsequah glacier, which sends a massive deluge of water and sediment into the river below at least yearly. However, Kilofliski said in an email to The Narwhal that its facilities are “in a location that is naturally protected from the floods.”

According to a map in Canagold’s application, it appears New Polaris plans to put an airstrip atop part of a wetland and salmon spawning ground known as Flannigan Slough, although Kilofliski says it is located beside it.

These and many other issues worry Jill Weitz, intergovernmental affairs manager for the Central Council of the Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska.

“It’s this incredible, critical habitat for spawning and rearing of salmon,” she says, adding that the council questions if the mine is feasible given its transport challenges, and worries that, if it goes ahead, the project could “create irreparable damage to the watershed.” 

“We’re just not willing to risk it,” she says. 

Located just 13 kilometres upstream from the U.S. border, New Polaris’s barges will spend most of their travel time in U.S. waters. And any water contamination from the mine could also make its way south, including across the traditional territory of the Douglas Indian Association, which extends across the reaches of the Taku River. In a submission to the environmental assessment process, the association said it “strongly opposes” the mine “due to fears that a mining accident and subsequent mining pollution could devastate our salmon stocks.”

This year, B.C. made a legal amendment functionally removing its requirements to consult U.S. tribes on transboundary projects by stripping their previous status in environmental assessment processes. 

In an email, the Environmental Assessment Office noted that it will still “fulfill its constitutional obligations to consult with U.S. Tribes when there is a credible assertion of Indigenous Rights in Canada, and the potential for these rights to be impacted by a proposed project undergoing assessment.”

It added that the ministry has “considered and incorporated” feedback submitted by some U.S. Tribes to New Polaris’s application process.

Still, for many southeast Alaskans who have submitted letters of opposition to the company’s environmental assessment process, New Polaris presents an untenable threat.

Kilofliski says New Polaris’s environmental assessment application proves otherwise. 

 “The conclusion is that there are no material negative effects on the environment,” he says, adding the company has proven it will not require water treatment post-closure.

These comments seem to be contradicted by some parts of New Polaris’s environmental assessment application, including one section that notes: “The primary negative residual effect of groundwater quality will occur during post-closure.” 

“This is experts talking about scientific stuff,” he says when asked why the application appeared to have included a different analysis than his own. When asked again about incongruities between his comments and the application in a follow-up email, Kilofliski wrote that the application does identify a risk of metal leaching. “If anything I said informally differs from the application, please treat the application as correct.”

The Taku River watershed

From space, the Taku and its tributary, the Tulsequah, look like winding ribbons coloured steely grey and cotton-candy-blue — a product of the steady stream of silt and minerals delivered by the churn of glaciers over the mountaintops above. 

Their combined watershed forms a mecca for Pacific salmon that return to its waters each year. “I don’t know if there’s any place like it in western North America in terms of being a salmon stronghold and being so intact,” Jonathan Moore, an aquatic ecologist and lead at Simon Fraser University’s Salmon Watersheds Lab, says. Though the majority of B.C.’s salmon stocks are declining, the fate of salmon in the Taku watershed is looking up. Moore and his colleagues have mapped out salmon’s likely escape route as watersheds warm down south, and they predict they’ll seek refuge in the Taku’s glacial waters. 

But despite its remoteness, the region is no stranger to industry. First staked in the early 1900s, what’s now the New Polaris site was mined for gold between 1937 and 1951. It shut down after a departing barge sank in the midst of a storm. That year, the Tulsequah Chief mine opened up across the river, building a temporary bridge to carry its ore to New Polaris’s mills. After Tulsequah shut down just six years later, the New Polaris site sat dormant for decades.

Canagold’s predecessor, Canarc Resources Corp., acquired the property in 1988, and the company slowly dabbled in exploration work until 2022. That’s when its former founder and chair was ousted in a a vote led by a Swiss-based investment company, Sun Valley Investments, which is now the company’s largest shareholder. Kilofliski, Canagold’s CEO between 2014 and 2018, was reappointed and soon announced the company’s intentions in a press release.

“The time has come to take New Polaris across the finish line,” he said, adding that with the company’s “refocused ownership,” its board would expedite the project “to reward our company’s shareholders.”

A history of water concerns

Next door to New Polaris, the Tulsequah Chief mine continues to leach orange-crush-tinged effluent into the river downstream. Its decades-long pollution has galvanized a bipartisan uprising of Southeast Alaskans concerned B.C.’s government could allow another Tulsequah Chief to occur. 

In a January interview with the Alaska Beacon, Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski said B.C.’s efforts to clean up pollution at Tulsequah Chief had been “a complete failure.”

“They know that for projects going forward, they’re kind of stained by the operation there,” she added. 

Kilofliski says such conflations are misguided. “They associate our project with the other project, the Tulsequah Chief,” he says. “In our rocks, we do not have the potential for acid drainage like you see on the other side.”

Despite their close proximity, New Polaris and the Tulsequah Chief come from distinct types of ore deposits — Tulsequah Chief’s ocean-formed sulphide rocks are more readily associated with acid mine drainage, whereas New Polaris’s rocks are generally not.

That may have exceptions: a recent report commissioned by the company has noted some rocks contain potentially acid-generating properties, potentially including some of the historic waste carried over from the Tulsequah Chief mine, though some tests are still ongoing.

And even without the ingredients to leach acid, some rocks contain metals that can escape into waterbodies anyway. Heavy metals arsenic and antimony are frequent culprits of this kind of non-acidic leaching, and New Polaris’s targeted rocks have lots of both.

According to a previous report commissioned by the company and cited in its environmental assessment application, 15 samples from the mineral vein New Polaris plans to target had “high potential” to leach metals, particularly arsenic and antimony, due to the types of rocks present.

Non-acidic leaching has caused damage in B.C. before: New Polaris’s deposits are similar to those of the Bralorne gold mine near Lillooet, where seepage from the flooded mine includes levels of arsenic that far exceed Canadian effluent regulations.

In an email to The Narwhal, Kilofliski said: “I do not know the particulars of the Bralorne gold mine seepage issues but it is probable, based on the nature of these kinds of geological deposits, that the concerns would be analogous.” He elaborated, adding New Polaris is “a modern mine” which will leverage new science and technology for water management and ecological health.

“At Canagold we are focused on learning from the lessons of the past and building a modern mining project that provides demonstrable benefits to the Taku River Tlingit First Nation, the region and Canada’s economy,” he added. 

To help avoid the risk of metal leaching, the company plans to export a partially processed product called gold concentrate, which can include impurities like arsenic and antimony that would get smelted out elsewhere. 

“We take the antimony, we take the sulphur, we take the arsenic,” he told The Narwhal. “We recover 90-plus per cent of those metals into the concentrate.”

The remaining ten-or-so per cent of the metals and other materials leftover would be thickened and deposited into a tailings pond with an impermeable covering on top, Kilofliski says, helping to keep it isolated from the environment. During the operational phase, the mine plans to run a water treatment system, but Kilofliski tells The Narwhal he is confident the mine’s concentrate-extraction approach will avoid the need for long-term water treatment.

“We have demonstrated in the environmental assessment that no water treatment is required post-closure,” he says.

In a follow-up email, Kilofliski added the application “assesses a range of scenarios, including conservative cases where water treatment after closure could be needed.” If it is, “Canagold would be responsible for providing it until we are able to demonstrate that passive treatment (that is without active/chemical water treatment technologies) is able to manage the long-term water quality requirements,” he added.

New Polaris’s environmental assessment application suggests metal leaching may not be easily contained: historic contamination has already travelled below the site in a large plume of metals that is projected to grow if New Polaris proceeds. Leaching can also escape from the mine shaft, as it has from the historic mine portal at New Polaris. Groundwater seeping from the existing mine site contains arsenic and antimony above B.C.’s water quality guidelines, and is flowing directly into the salmon-bearing Whitewater Creek, according to the application, which added seepage may grow post-closure. Recent samples from the mine’s targeted deposits and waste rock reflected an extremely high concentration of arsenic and antimony — achieving the highest possible level on a 6-point scale for mineral concentration. 

This leaching risk is cited in parts of New Polaris’s environmental assessment application as a reason that water treatment may be required post-closure. 

In his email to The Narwhal, Kilofliski said “water was tested as part of mine dewatering programs for effects to fish, and the water was not determined to be acutely toxic, despite high levels of arsenic.”

What’s next for New Polaris?

September marks a major milestone in Canagold’s decades-long pursuit to mine New Polaris. By the end of the month, the company will receive its final guidance from the province’s environmental assessment office on how it could strengthen a revised application, which, once submitted, will be final. In meeting notes discussing the company’s application, B.C.’s environmental assessment office noted “significant gaps” in the company’s application, including “a notable lack of groundwater information,” a lack of analysis about the potential impacts of glacial floods and missing information about the site’s potential to leach metals. The Ministry of Environment noted the company’s hydrological information appeared to reflect “draft documents rather than final product.”

The office has informed Canagold that submitting another application “where significant issues remain unresolved” would “lead to a high level of uncertainty on the potential effects of the project.” 

Kilofliski suggests these kinds of issues are standard for projects like this. “They are very normal,” he says, adding that Canagold plans to fill any remaining gaps before it submits its final application, adding in a later email that the company has “continued to collect samples since the submission of the application, and we are updating our water modelling.”

But some uncertainties could remain during the assessment process by design: under B.C.’s mining laws, key aspects of New Polaris’s plans, including how it plans to manage leaching on site, how it will treat water and how it plans to deal with contaminants post-closure, would be determined in the permitting stage after the company receives its environmental assessment. 

Through the assessment and later permitting stages, Kilofliski remains confident that Canagold will establish its case. “We have to demonstrate,” he says, “because our word doesn’t mean anything.” 

“We have to prove, we have to show, and we have to test. … This is how it’s done.”

Updated on Sept. 18, 2026, at 8:52 a.m. PT: This story has been updated with Jill Weitz’s current professional title of intergovernmental affairs manager for the Central Council of the Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, as it has changed since the story was written.

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.

In the 1960s, David Crawford was boating in his backyard on Nipigon Bay when he thought he spotted raw sewage floating in the once-pristine waters of Lake Superior. Years later, he realized the “turds,” as Crawford describes them, were craft paper deposits from the nearby pulp mill in Red Rock, Ont. The mill was also known to billow a harmful smoke into the air and release a hot, foamy plume of effluent into the lake. If the noxious smell wasn’t enough, log drives filled the bay with floating timber and bark, meaning Crawford didn’t often tempt the tumultuous waters of Nipigon Bay.

Along with the pulp mill, raw sewage actually was poisoning the clear bay, coming from two inadequate municipal wastewater treatment plants, but trouble didn’t stop there. The unnatural rise and fall of the water level, due to four hydroelectric dams upstream on the Nipigon River, were causing riverbanks to erode, adding silt to the water, while simultaneously washing out fish spawning habitat.

The reality, Crawford said, was haunting: Nipigon Bay was on the verge of dying.

But in late August, as fishing boats glided across calm, turquoise water behind a podium set up at the Red Rock marina, it was easy to forget about the bay’s past.

A small crowd was gathered as federal Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin visited Red Rock, a town of fewer than 1,000 people, to celebrate those very waters. The air was fresh with the smell of wild mint and Canada geese migrating in undulating waves, stopping to feast in and by the water, honking their approval. Dabrusin spoke into the quiet space left by the calm waters, about “a bay that was heavily polluted and is healthy again. The fish came back, the habitat was rebuilt, and water that people once could not trust, they can trust again.”

Gone are fish with tumours, unnaturally fluctuating water levels, noxious odours, effluent foam barriers, mill plumes and drifting timber. Nipigon Bay is a success story that stretches beyond the Canadian border. It’s one worth noting at a time when the relationship between Canada and the U.S. is strained by President Donald Trump’s trade war and moves to rename another Great Lake — Lake Ontario — to Lake America.

In 1972, Canada and the United States agreed upon their mutual role in polluting a portion of the Great Lakes, which contain 20 per cent of the world’s fresh water. The two countries joined forces to create the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. In 1987, the agreement listed 43 official areas of concern where this industrial pollution was the most deleterious. Twelve of those were in Canada, including Nipigon Bay. 

It was a time when the countries were friendly neighbours, the type that could agree to clean up their backyards and prioritize clean drinking water for millions of people. Remedial action plans were created for the affected areas to create a pathway for healthy environments to thrive.

Which brings us to Nipigon Bay, on Aug. 28, 2026. Four decades after being identified as an area of concern, the federal government announced it was officially delisted at the small celebration beside the still waters of Lake Superior. It was attended by ministers, government officials, local First Nations and Crawford, who chairs a public advisory committee made up of local residents who help to monitor the remediation work.

For Crawford, witnessing the bay heal over his lifetime is a cup of water he’s happy to enjoy. He still worries about the pressures of a rapidly changing world. Currently, there’s a proposal to build a lithium processing plant on the shores of Nipigon Bay in Red Rock, talk of further dams being built upstream on Lake Nipigon and geopolitical tensions straining longstanding bilateral agreements. All the while, climate change has created greater pressure on fresh water and how humans interact with it, from floods to drought and invasive species. 

But for now, Nipigon Bay is one of four areas of concern in Canada that have been delisted. To Crawford, that’s worth celebrating.

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Amid worsening U.S.-Canada relations, Ontario Premier Doug Ford is once again threatening to cut off electricity to 1.5 million homes and businesses across three neighbouring American states: Minnesota, Michigan and New York. 

The move comes as Canada tries to stave off the impact of U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to charge “far WORSE” tariffs after the federal government decided to walk away from trade negotiations on Aug. 21. Prime Minister Mark Carney has announced a “dollar-for-dollar” retaliation beginning September.

But Ford is pitching a more aggressive approach. “Everything’s on the table,” he told reporters on Aug. 24. “I’ll do whatever it takes.” 

On Ford’s table are critical minerals, uranium, potash, oil and, significantly, electricity. 

“We power 1.5 million homes and businesses,” Ford said. “What I find ironic about this is we’re actually giving electricity to companies that make products that compete against us. That needs to stop, and we’re going to address that.” 

Ford emphasized that Ontario isn’t the only province that sends electricity to the U.S. Others include New Brunswick, Quebec and British Columbia. “So we need to get together and decide if we’re going to put surcharges on the electricity,” he said. “How can we let them take really inexpensive electricity to make goods to compete and take jobs from Canadians? You can’t square that circle.” 

Ford’s plan wouldn’t just affect Ontario or its bordering states; it could have repercussions for affordable, reliable electricity across both countries.

Ontario has been trying to stave off these effects by proposing new and massive energy projects across the province — investments that Energy Minister Stephen Lecce deems “tariff-proof, recession-proof.” But these projects are far from being operational.

Here’s everything you need to know about this developing situation.

How did we get here?

For more than a century, America and Canada have bought and sold power between provinces and states. At any given moment, electricity is flowing in either direction across a shared and massive transmission grid, with the goal of keeping electricity affordable and available, especially when it’s most needed. Both countries have helped the other during cold snaps, heat waves, droughts and floods. 

While our shared systems have made us susceptible to each other’s energy failures — 50 million people lost power when overgrown trees in Cleveland caused North America’s largest blackout ever, in 2003 — for the most part, this relationship has been seamless. 

But for the second time in almost two years, all of this is under threat. 

The first major threat to the two countries’ shared electricity grid came in November 2024, when Trump threatened to impose a 25 per cent tariff on all Canadian and Mexican imports — unless the two countries improve security along their borders. 

In response, Ford imposed a 25 per cent tax on electricity exports and threatened to shut down electricity exports entirely should the tariffs remain on the table. The surcharge was in effect for one day last year and made the province $260,000.

Both options — which Ford once described as options of “last resort”— are being pitched once more. 

The federal government has not officially weighed in on Ford’s proposal yet. Neither have other provinces that send electricity south of the border. 

Which Canadian provinces send America electricity?

Canada began sending electricity to the U.S. in 1909, when the first transmission line was built connecting the two countries. Today — 117 years later — every Canadian province along the border is electrically interconnected with at least one U.S. state. There are more than 31 cross-border transmission lines across both countries. 

That means the countries can easily work together to balance out fluctuations in energy needs. For example, during extreme winter weather in the U.S. in 2021, Canadian electricity companies sent increased electricity to those that needed it — an act that wasn’t just friendly, but kept the heat on as temperatures plummeted to less than -20 C in most parts of the central and southern U.S. (That’s less than -4 F for any Americans reading this.)

Ontario is the largest electricity-exporting province, followed by Quebec, while Michigan, New York and Minnesota are the largest electricity importers.

Why has Canada integrated its electricity system with America’s? 

Simply put: we produce too much! And the U.S. population is much, much bigger. 

Ontario’s very large nuclear supply, hydro plants and renewable energy sources collectively produce more electricity than the province of less than 17 million people uses on a regular basis. Nuclear facilities aren’t easily turned on and off, so Ontario sells largely emissions-free electricity to the U.S. overnight for cheap. (The alternative is letting that surplus electricity go to waste.) 

Quebec also produces more hydroelectric power than it uses. That’s why it has long-term export contracts to supply electricity to New York state — home to 20 million people. It’s also a major source of revenue for the provincial government. 

In total, Canada exports enough electricity to power 4.5 million U.S. homes.

Does America sell electricity to Canada? 

Yes, and we might need more of it soon. 

Ontario’s nuclear production has shrunk as aging plants are shut down or refurbished, while drought conditions have made hydroelectricity less reliable in British Columbia and Quebec. Meanwhile, a growing population and energy-hungry technology has put greater demands on Canada’s supply. 

The Independent Electricity System Operator, which manages supply and demand in Ontario, reported in 2024 the province may have to consider increasing the amount of electricity it imports from the U.S., even as it rushes to build new power plants and find new sources of power. 

The balance is already shifting: by fall 2023, monthly average U.S. electricity exports to Canada increased by 70 per cent, and imports decreased by 36 per cent. 

British Columbia has been a net importer of electricity for three years in a row; 25 per cent of the province’s electricity came from America.

In the Prairies, imports and exports are minimal, and the one line connecting Alberta to Montana has been at the centre of a legal battle with Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway.

How has politics affected the Canada-U.S. electricity relationship before? 

On the whole, the shared grid has operated with relatively few discussions of tariffs or trade barriers. The disputes have more frequently been between jurisdictions or electricity producers and utilities. Communities have sometimes opposed electricity projects on the other side of the border when they fear it might affect their local environments. 

Premier Doug Ford has been threatening to cut American states like New York and Michigan off from Ontario’s power. Could he do that?

He could. 

The Ontario government has the power to instruct the Independent Electricity System Operator to limit electricity exports, which would theoretically impact the amount of energy neighbouring American states can access. 

There’s one snag. To both increase the price of electricity exports and shut them down, the government would need to table legislation directing Ontario’s electricity utilities and operators. The government is currently on an extended summer break until Oct. 27. Ford is resisting the Ontario NDP’s call to return sooner to pass emergency relief measures for workers in tariff-exposed sectors and business.

If Ontario reduced or eliminated electricity sales to American states, what would be the impact there and at home?

The electricity grid really is one big machine, so it won’t function nearly as well if we cut it in half. 

Two energy experts previously told The Narwhal the immediate impact would likely be marginal in American states, which could make up for lost Ontario electricity by tapping into local sources of power kept in reserve, mostly fossil fuels. The result would be a grid that was more expensive to operate, much dirtier and less reliable on both sides of the border. Plus, Ontario’s electricity producers would see a financial loss, which might increase costs for domestic users. 

If Ontario was in an emergency situation during a charged political battle, like a winter storm, it wouldn’t be able to rely immediately on U.S. electricity, as it can now. It would have to work more closely with Manitoba and Quebec.

All of this is hypothetical, though. Ford has yet to provide details of his plan.

How will Ontario mitigate the impacts of the trade war on electricity?

By building big, new energy projects — or so they say.

On Aug. 25, Energy Minister Stephen Lecce was in St. Clair Township, at the border between the U.S. and Canada, to announce his government is planning to revive the long-shuttered Lambton coal-generating station into either a new nuclear or gas facility. This proposal joins a long list of massive energy projects — including new generating facilities in Nanticoke and Port Hope — the Ford government believes will make the province and the country energy-independent.

“Energy independence has always been vital,” Lecce said. “Today, it’s more than just keeping the lights on. It is about our national security and sovereignty. It’s about making power and having the power to make our own decisions, build our own industries and fuel our economy right here at home.”

But these projects are far away from being built, let alone being operational. In the short term, a trade war with electricity caught in the centre will have some impact on residents across both countries.

—With files from Drew Anderson

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First Nations fish hatcheries on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border are celebrating 10 years of a collaboration to help salmon blocked from migrating by dams and other threats.

Last month, the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation in Washington transferred more than 6,200 chinook salmon eggs from their Chief Joseph Hatchery to the Okanagan Nation Alliance’s kł cp’elk’ stim’ Hatchery in snpink’tn (Penticton, B.C.), nearly 200 kilometres north.

This year marks one decade since the two tribal hatcheries started working together to restore the fish’s population throughout the Columbia River Basin.

The partnership has seen Colville Tribes send more than 115,000 eyed chinook eggs to the Okanagan Nation Alliance over the past 10 years. One year alone, 2019, saw 40 per cent of those eggs transferred north.

“They don’t have to do that; they don’t have to give us anything,” Tyson Marsel, a biologist at kł cp’elk’ stim’ Hatchery and member of Lower Similkameen Indian Band, said.

“But for them to recognize that this is for the betterment of the environment and conservation, it’s not only helping us, but it’s also helping them.”

As salmon grow in their eggs, the dark spots of their eyes become visible through their shells — a stage early in their development known as the “eyed eggs” period.

Salmon have been a vital source of sustenance for Pacific Northwest Indigenous nations for thousands of years. 

But several salmon species, particularly sockeye and chinook, have seen their runs and populations severely depleted across the Columbia River Basin in the last century. 

As settlers built numerous dams along the waterway, they effectively blocked the fish from migrating up-river and into its tributaries. 

Salmon populations have also been impacted by habitat loss, overfishing and warming water temperatures linked to climate change.

Whether it’s sk’lwist (summer-run chinook) or ntitiyx (spring-run chinook), the fish have for decades become stuck at the Chief Joseph Dam on the Columbia River in Washington, which lacks a fish passage route.

Opened downstream to the dam in 2013, the Chief Joseph Hatchery catches adult fish blocked by the dam to collect their eggs. It’s part of a broodstock, or fish-breeding, program that spawns nearly three million young chinook each year.

“They’ll be collecting millions of chinook eggs in a year,” Marsel said. “Versus us, our best year is 10,000 that we’ve collected from the Okanagan River here.”

The salmon eggs sent from the Colville Tribes’ hatchery roughly doubled the Okanagan Nation Alliance hatchery’s chinook population compared to last year, when it had just 6,500.

kł cp’elk’ stim’ Hatchery stores the transferred roe in an incubator, where water temperatures are gradually increased from 3 C to 10 C over the course of a few weeks, to help support their development.

The fish were expected to hatch around the end of January, and will remain housed at the hatchery until June. Once they weigh between three to five grams, the Okanagan Nation Alliance plans to release them into suwiw̓s (Osoyoos Lake).

The adult fish are expected to return between 2029 and 2031.

Although much of the Okanagan River has been channelized — engineered to straighten the waterway — there’s a more naturally flowing portion north of Osoyoos Lake, in the town of Oliver, B.C.

It’s there that Marsel said the fish like to spawn. 

Even if the fish can make it up-river past Osoyoos Lake, they’ll still reach the Chief Joseph Dam and Colville hatchery downriver.

“Some of our fish that we’ve released from our facility have gone into Chief Joseph Hatchery’s program,” Marsel said.

He added that “every fish counts,” especially when it comes to chinook. The species is a key cultural figure for the syilx Okanagan Nation, being ntytyix (Chief Salmon) of the Four Food Chiefs.

“People don’t realize how rare they are, and a lot of people don’t even know that there’s chinook in the system,” he explained.

While much attention has been paid to sockeye salmon restoration efforts, Marsel said chinook hold a particularly important place in the culture.

“For the syilx Nation and all the people here, it means so much more,” he explained. “Not that sockeye aren’t important, but ntytyix holds a lot more meaning.”

The partnership to help chinook recover by sharing eggs hasn’t just transcended the border, however. It might also be helping transcend some political divisions between First Nations.

In recent years, the newly established Sinixt Confederacy — under the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation — has at times been at odds with Okanagan Nation Alliance over legal and territorial claims related to the historically displaced Sinixt people, and which tribal council represents their descendants. The Okanagan Nation Alliance has asserted that the Sinixt people have always existed as part of the larger syilx Nation rather than as its own entity.

During the hatchery partnership’s decade, the tensions have resulted in chinook egg transfers being withheld, Marsel said — but he firmly believes the two tribal governments realize working together for salmon outweighs their inter-governmental disagreements. 

“We have this same common goal,” he said. “Working together is what’s going to make it better.”

“To have the collaboration is extremely important, not only for the people but definitely the environment, the salmon [and] everything that thrives off the salmon.”

But long before the two modern-day tribal organizations were formed, Marsel said Indigenous communities in the region always supported and traded with one another.

“We have family down in Colville Confederated Tribes,” he said. “There was trading constantly across that imaginary line that’s now put up.”

“It’s not like this is a new thing where we’re working with Colville Confederated Tribes — but it’s exciting that now we’re working together for a common goal, and that’s conservation.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hilty calls this type of effort “positive peace.”

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

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

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

Local governments, international movement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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In the midst of an international inquiry into transboundary water pollution from southeast B.C. coal mines, Elk Valley Resources has submitted a revised proposal for new mining in the region.

Teck Resources, the previous owner of the coal mines, initially proposed the Fording River Extension Project five years ago. In 2023, the provincial government directed the company to submit a revised proposal following a dispute resolution process initiated by the Ktunaxa Nation Council, which opposed the project over the risk of “extraordinarily adverse effects.”

In the intervening years Teck shifted its focus to copper, selling its coal business in a US$9-billion deal to Swiss mining giant Glencore and two other companies. Glencore now holds a majority stake in Elk Valley Resources, which operates the four active coal mines in the area.

The revised project description for the Fording River expansion, which Elk Valley Resources submitted to B.C.’s Environmental Assessment Office last month, proposes a two-phase approach to developing a smaller mine, with a shorter lifespan, with plans to restore mined areas incrementally throughout operations rather than waiting until mine operations have ended. It also limits the risks from waste rock dumps to a creek that has so far been largely unaffected by coal mine pollution and incorporates additional water quality measures.

Simon Wiebe, mining policy and impacts researcher with the Kootenay-based conservation group Wildsight, said the changes to the Fording River extension proposal are largely positive.

“But at the end of the day, the mine hasn’t changed sufficiently for us to not oppose it at all,” he said. “They’re still knocking down an entire mountain.”

Ktunaxa Nation Council and Yaq̓it ʔa·knuqⱡi’it, one of four Ktunaxa First Nations in B.C., were involved in revisions to the mine proposal, Chris Stannell, Elk Valley Resources communication manager, said. 

While Yaq̓it ʔa·knuqⱡi’it Nasuʔkin (Chief) Heidi Gravelle said the best case scenario would be for the mine expansion to be taken off the table, she supports moving the proposal into the next phase of the environmental assessment process.

“What are the other options? To end mining? It’s not going to happen. To make this someone else’s problem in a different area, different mountain?” she said in an interview. 

Yaq̓it ʔa·knuqⱡi’it will continue to be actively involved throughout the environmental assessment process, she said. “These are our lands and we’re here to protect them, we’re here to guide them.”

Gravelle said the nation understands there’s a need for resources, but development doesn’t have to happen the way it has in the past. “Roads are going to be built, schools are going to be built, mining’s going to happen — but does it have to be the way that it has been done historically? Absolutely not,” she said. “There’s a lot that can still be done in the environmental assessment process — there are still a lot of pieces that can be scaled back.”

New mining would destroy high-elevation grasslands, risk added water pollution woes

If approved as currently proposed, the Fording River extension would see new mountaintop-removal coal mining on Castle Mountain, just south of Elk Valley Resources’ existing Fording River Operations. The company says the expansion is necessary to maintain mine operations and sustain more than 1,500 jobs beyond the early 2030s to the early 2060s. 

Under the revised proposal, the extension project would have a total footprint of 4,326 hectares, more than 10 times the size of Vancouver’s Stanley Park. About 2,295 hectares are within already permitted areas and include existing waste rock storage areas, a coal processing plant and a tailings storage facility. The new mining area at Castle Mountain, which is not yet permitted, is just over 2,000 hectares. 

In another shift from the original proposal, Elk Valley Resources is now pitching a staged approach to the project. Phase one would involve construction from 2028 to 2031 with mine operations until 2053. Construction for phase two would begin in 2044, when phase one operations are set to decline, with phase two mining planned for 2046 to 2065.

A spokesperson for the Environmental Assessment Office said the next opportunity for public comment will be after the agency decides whether the project is ready to proceed through the environmental assessment process. Wiebe has urged the government to hold a second public comment period before that decision is made, noting the project has changed since consultations in 2023. 

If the project does proceed, the next phase is process planning, during which the assessment office will engage with First Nations, stakeholders, experts and the public to determine how the assessment will be conducted and how provincial and First Nation processes and decision-making will align.

The Elk Valley has been heavily impacted by historic coal mining dating back 130 years, as well as extensive logging, a highway and rail corridor and the development of several communities. The Fording River extension would add to existing impacts. It would mean losing more high-elevation grasslands in the area, which offer important wintering grounds for bighorn sheep and forage for elk and deer, for instance. “This is irreplaceable habitat,” Wiebe said.

The massive piles of waste rock left over from the mining process, meanwhile, have been a source of water pollution for as long as coal has been mined from the Rocky Mountains of the Elk Valley. When the waste rock is exposed to rain and snow, naturally occurring minerals like calcite and selenium seep into the water, eventually flowing into nearby creeks and rivers. 

While all living things need some amount of selenium, too much of it can be toxic. In fish, for instance, too much selenium can cause deformities and reproductive failure. Calcite, meanwhile, can solidify the loose gravel on the stream bed that fish rely on to create protective nests for their eggs.

Teck has invested more than $1.4 billion in water treatment to reduce water pollution from its mines and Glencore committed to continue ramping up treatment capacity when it took the mines over. Treatment facilities currently have the capacity to treat 77.5 million litres of water per day. According to the company, water treatment facilities are removing between 95 and 99 per cent of selenium from treated water. However, the facilities are not able to treat all contaminated water that flows downstream.

“[Elk Valley Resources] has made significant progress implementing the Elk Valley Water Quality Plan,” Stannell said in an emailed statement. “Selenium concentrations have stabilized and are now reducing downstream of treatment.” 

Three more water treatment projects now under construction are expected to increase water treatment capacity by another 50 million litres per day by 2027, according to the company’s website.  

Selenium levels downstream of the Elk Valley coal mines remain well above B.C.’s guideline of two parts per billion, which is meant to protect aquatic life. But the company is not required to get selenium levels this low in either the Fording or Elk rivers. The B.C. government set selenium targets for the Fording River at 57 parts per billion closer to the mines and 40 parts per billion farther downstream. In the Elk River, the province set a target of 19 parts per billion.

“As a British Columbian, it’s kind of embarrassing, to be honest, that we’re entertaining this discussion,” Wiebe said. “We have an international water pollution issue going on and we’re talking about actively making it worse.”

Gravelle said the risks of added water pollution and the loss of high-elevation grasslands are major concerns for Yaq̓it ʔa·knuqⱡi’it. But she also worries about what happens if the company were to walk away. “Who’s going to pay for that mess that is up there?” she asked. “We see in other areas around the country where there are abandoned mines and things like that — nobody does.”

Late last month, the province released an updated Elk Valley Water Quality Plan, which aims for progressive improvements to water quality downstream of the mines. A spokesperson for the Ministry of Environment and Parks said “the updated plan strengthens B.C.’s regulatory role and provides a clear framework for how decisions are made that affect water quality, ensuring the Ktunaxa First Nations are included.” 

It did not, however, strengthen selenium targets. “But it better prepares us to make these decisions going forward by providing guidance on the process for target review and amendment,” the spokesperson said.

Long-awaited international inquiry into Elk Valley coal mine pollution underway

Water pollution from the mines flows from the Elk River into Lake Koocanusa, a vast reservoir spanning the Canada-U.S. border, before coursing through Montana and Idaho in the Kootenai River. In both states there are long-standing concerns about the impact of the pollution on vulnerable fish species. 

After more than a decade of pressure from the transboundary Ktunaxa Nation, which includes the four First Nations in B.C., the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes in Montana and the Kootenai Tribe of Idaho, the federal governments in the U.S. and Canada agreed to involve the International Joint Commission. The commission was established under the 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty to address intractable disputes over water between the two countries.

The commission convened a body of all affected governments within the region to develop an action plan to reduce the impacts of mine pollution on the watershed, as well as a two-year study board of experts and Indigenous Knowledge Keepers to better understand the pollution and its impact on people and other species. The study board’s interim report is due in September.

Meanwhile in Montana, the state is facing its own struggles over its selenium standard for Lake Koocanusa. 

Between 2015 and 2020, a joint B.C.-Montana working group studied and monitored selenium contamination in the reservoir, with the intention that the two jurisdictions would adopt a single standard for the lake. In 2020, Montana moved forward on its own implementing a more stringent standard of 0.8 parts per billion. Five years later, B.C. is still considering a new standard for Koocanusa — for now it remains at two parts per billion.

But, Lincoln County, the Montana county that surrounds Koocanusa, is once again challenging the state’s standard, outlining concerns that overly restrictive limits could affect local industry, though Montana’s Department of Environmental Quality said back in 2020 that the standard would have no adverse economic impacts in the state.

“It befuddles me, really. I mean there are no sources of selenium in that basin within Montana — it’s coming from Canada and in terms of the benefits that we derive from the Elk Valley operations, it’s slim to nil,” Derf Johnson, deputy director of the Montana Environmental Information Center, an environmental advocacy group, said in an interview.

Johnson warned key Montana industries could be harmed by higher selenium, calling the challenge “a slap in the face to people that rely upon clean water to do their work.”

“We’re talking about outfitters and fishermen, which is really important business in Montana,” he said.

Johnson said he remains hopeful that the International Joint Commission process will be a good step towards addressing the pollution from the Elk Valley coal mines. 

But he said considering new mining at this stage is “just throwing gasoline on the fire.”

“It’s tough to say this right now because of the current state of political affairs in the United States, but it’s about being a good neighbour in terms of making sure that our water quality is protected.”

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Scattered across Great Lakes shores in Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Ontario, Great Lakes piping plovers are nesting and reproducing this year. Since being put on the U.S. Endangered Species Act list in 1984, the plovers are recovering, but only with the protection and assistance of a significant coalition of people and organizations, ranging from universities, volunteer groups, Audubon Great Lakes, zoos and state, federal and provincial governmental agencies.

“This year, we’re doing great. We actually just hit another record pair count. So, we have 85 nesting pairs this year. And that’s four more pairs than we had the last two years,” said Stephanie Schubel at the University of Michigan Biological Station near Pellston. She’s been visiting sites across the region, checking on nesting sites as part of the Great Lakes Piping Plovers conservation effort.

Predators take a toll on piping plovers

People involved in the effort to bring back the Great Lakes piping plover population are pleased with this year’s success, but they’re also concerned about the challenges to the nesting birds.

Chief among those challenges is a small falcon called a merlin. It is a threatened species in Michigan. When more sightings of the bird began a few years ago, people were pleased. Then they found that merlins prey on piping plovers.

“We’ve lost at least eight to ten adults this year to merlins,” Schubel said.

Other predators that kill adult piping plovers, or chicks, or raid the nests for eggs include foxes, owls, racoons, skunks, mink and weasels, among others.

Saving the piping plover chicks

When predators strike, monitors at each nesting site try to recover the eggs to send to the Piping Plover Captive Rearing Center at the University of of Michigan Biological Station.

Francesca Cuthbert, a professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology said originally the Captive Rearing Center was “just a homegrown operation” until the early 1990s. The Detroit Zoological Society got involved in the effort, building a hatchery at the University of of Michigan Biological Station and offering expertise. The Detroit Zoo also involved other zoos in the effort through the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.

Cuthbert, whom everyone calls Francie, has been a leading figure in the Great Lakes piping plover effort. While I interviewed her, a photographer from Michigan, Steve Jessmore, was working on a profile that would be published in the Audubon magazine. (Jessmore has won multiple national awards from Audubon for his bird photography.)

The three of us visited the hatchery. Eggs were being incubated. Newly hatched chicks were already escaping containment in an incubator.

“One of these guys just bailed out,” Cuthbert said to a staff member. “And now he’s just skitting around and probably not very happy with life.”

Apparently, that’s not unusual, because as soon as that chick was put back with the others, another hopped out, and Cuthbert could only laugh. Time to put the newly hatched chicks saved from a beach on North Manitou Island, Mich. into a larger enclosure.

An audio recording of lakeshore waves and piping plover peeps help to create a natural environment. The birds will quickly be moved outdoors to a sandy beach on a lake at the biological station. From there, they’ll be taken back to the original beach where their nest was.

Cuthbert said the chicks go from egg to beach in 30 days.

‘Tremendous’ habitat potential at Lake Superior

One of the nesting sites is at Whitefish Point, Mich. on a section managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Seney National Wildlife Refuge. The site is just 15 miles from where the cargo ship the Edmund Fitzgerald sank with its crew, as made famous by a song by Canadian musician Gordon Lightfoot.

Whitefish Point once stretched its sand and pebble beach much farther out into Lake Superior. A winter storm destroyed two acres of the kind of habitat where piping plovers nest.

Whitefish Point is a popular tourist site because of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum and its iconic lighthouse. That makes it a good opportunity to tell more people about the plight of the piping plover.

There was concern, though, that losing habitat might stop the birds from nesting there. Cuthbert noted even with that loss there’s a “tremendous amount of potential habitat there.”

She’s not alone in that thinking.

“The lakeshore has always been dynamic, right?” said Max Henschell, director of research of Michigan Audubon, which operates a bird observatory in co-operation with the Seney National Wildlife Refuge.

“That point has come and gone throughout the history of the point. So, these birds are used to that dynamic too,” Henschell said.

Too many males, not enough females

This year, there is one nesting pair, four chicks exploring their new world and two extra males. That’s causing a little conflict.

Stephanie Owens has been monitoring the nesting site at Whitefish Point. We watched as the female chased away one of the males.

Like all the piping plover nesting sites, there’s a cordoned off area and then a cage over the nest. The openings in the cage are big enough for the birds to come in and out, but can help keep predators and people away from the nest.

The piping plover’s nest is called a scrape. Basically, the birds use their bodies to make a small depression in the sand and then line them with pebbles.

“So, it’s very, very darling. It’s pebbles and sometimes it’s even shells, like even zebra mussel shells,” explained Stephanie Schubel.

She said the last couple of years there have been extra males on all of the beaches where piping plovers have been nesting.

“We don’t know really where we’re losing the females,” she said.

It could be when they’re young, or at their wintering grounds along the U.S. southern Atlantic coast, the Gulf of Mexico, or the Caribbean and Mexico. Or the females might not survive migration.

“We just know that we have less females, which means not as many pairs as we could have if it was a balanced number,” Schubel said.

People and dogs don’t mix with piping plovers

The decline of the Great Lakes piping plovers is often blamed on market hunting in the 1800s. The birds were killed for their meat and for feathers for women’s hats.

Francie Cuthbert said in the 1950s there was another significant drop in the population because of museums.

“There was a lot of collecting (for specimens) that went on not only of adults, but young, eggs and so on,” Cuthbert said.

She’s looked at the records of museums across the country and there are Great Lakes piping plovers in many of them.

“So, that was a pressure that came down on them.”

Another pressure is people. When beaches were selected for national, state and local parks, they were often the places where piping plovers nested.

“It was before a time when people didn’t even know what the word biodiversity meant. And these were beaches that people thought, ‘well, there’s nothing here; it’s just sand,’ ” Cuthbert said.

“People and plovers don’t mix,” Cuthbert added.

At Whitefish Point, a lot of people were strolling the beaches, many of them unaware of the tiny chicks venturing to the water’s edge in search of food. They eat invertebrates in the wet sand.

Nearby, a woman was throwing a toy into the lake for her dog to fetch.

“Everyone thinks ‘my dog is not going to do anything,’ but they’re still a dog,” Stephanie Schubel said, adding, “They like to run and chase stuff and this can really stress the birds.”

She said keeping your dog on a leash “is super helpful.”

While the record number of nesting pairs is being celebrated, the Great Lakes piping plover population needs to nearly double to be taken off the Endangered Species Act list. Population growth has been uneven.

While some of the challenges have been outlined above, other challenges include weather, climate, development along beaches and potential mishaps such as a Great Lakes oil spill.

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Far off Canada’s Pacific coast, and in oceans around the world, mining companies are exploring the bottom of the sea. There, rocky formations contain in-demand minerals like copper, nickel and cobalt. Companies see deepwater dollar signs in a potential new industry: deep-sea mining. 

A Canadian deep-sea mining venture called The Metals Company recently asked the U.S. government to make its dream of an industry a reality. In the wake of the Donald Trump administration declaring deep-sea mining a priority, The Metals Company has applied for U.S. permits to explore and mine Pacific seabed minerals. If it’s successful, it could become the first company to ever commercially mine the deep. It could also undermine global co-operation on managing oceans and their resources.

Here’s what you need to know about deep-sea mining, the environmental risks, The Metals Company and a potential showdown over international ocean agreements.

What is deep-sea mining?

Deep-sea miners plan to use remotely operated robots to remove mineral-rich seabed formations. Though it’s never been done on a commercial scale, companies and governments have explored the prospect for decades, from searching for mineral deposits to running large mining tests. 

These minerals can be used to make steel, batteries, wiring and much more. With such wide-ranging applications, they’re in demand for everything from industrial manufacturing to military technology, as well as emission-free technology such as electric vehicles. The minerals found on the seabed can make powerful long-range batteries, ideal for large trucks and luxury cars. 

Three types of environments could be mined. Polymetallic nodule fields are the most popular option: these deepwater plains are covered with “nodules,” or mineral-rich rocks, which lay on top of the seabed, so they’re easy to remove. Seamounts are another possibility: underwater mountains can develop mineral-rich crusts on their surfaces. Some miners are also interested in inactive hydrothermal vents: spires of minerals that formed around volcanic sea-floor fissures before cooling off. 

Deep-sea nodules and seamount crusts take millions of years to form, as the minerals dissolved in seawater slowly settle into these deposits. Minerals deposits from hydrothermal vents form a bit more quickly (and can be destroyed quickly, by the volcanic activity that creates them). Still, these resources aren’t renewable on human timescales.

Where does Canada stand on deep-sea mining? 

Canada effectively has a moratorium, or temporary ban, on domestic deep-sea mining. A 2023 statement from the ministers of natural resources and fisheries and oceans said, “Canada does not presently have a domestic legal framework that would permit seabed mining and, in the absence of a rigorous regulatory structure, will not authorize seabed mining in areas under its jurisdiction.” 

While that ban could be lifted in the future, Canada also has permanent protections for all of its known hydrothermal vents and over 90 per cent of its known seamounts, so these ecosystems can never be mined. In addition, it supports a moratorium on deep-sea mining in international waters. 

How does deep-sea mining affect the environment?

There are no plants in the deepest parts of the ocean, which sunlight doesn’t reach. However, there are many animals. Seamounts and hydrothermal vents are biodiversity hotspots. Stationary species, such as sponges and tubeworms, attach to them, forming communities that attract swimming species like fish. In the polymetallic nodule fields, the animals tend to be sparser and smaller, but biodiversity is still high.

The nodules offer surfaces for animals like sponges to live on, and scientists have even found octopuses laying eggs on these sponges. Tiny animals, like frilled-looking bristle worms, live in the sediments and inside nodule crevasses. Still, scientists predict the majority of deep sea life still needs to be described — or formally classified — by science: they know there are new species there, but they don’t know exactly how many there are.  

One potential threat is that deep-sea mining removes rocky sea-floor formations that provide habitat for animals like sponges and corals, which need hard surfaces to grow on. 

Mining machines could also bring noise and light to the dark, quiet sea-floor, while ships at the surface would add to the cacophony of industrial ocean activity. Sediment that gets kicked up by mining is another risk as it could interfere with animals’ ability to breathe, communicate with bioluminescence, or get food by filtering tiny edible things from water. After sea-floor minerals are pumped to the surface, any excess sediment that comes with them would be put back into the ocean, creating a second sediment plume. 

In a recent study, U.K.-based scientists returned to a test mining site in the Pacific Ocean 44 years later to see how life there had responded. Certain species had started recolonizing the mining area, but there was lower biodiversity overall. This suggests that some life can persist after deep-sea mining, but ecosystems may not fully return to normal — at least, not on timescales we can easily measure. 

Many questions remain unanswered about how deep-sea mining would impact ecosystems. The deep sea is immense and it’s not easy to sample life there. Scientists know relatively little about sea-floor biodiversity or how the ecosystems are connected. Risks depend on the environment being mined, the type of equipment used and the size of the mining area. 

Despite Canada’s moratorium, some scientists are concerned that impacts from distant mining operations could reach Canadian waters. For example, planned nodule mining tests by a Chinese company near northeast Pacific seamounts could have far-reaching consequences, according to Cherisse Du Preez, a marine biologist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada. 

“Even though they seem like they’re far away from Canada, they lie in one of the convention areas that we manage internationally with other countries,” she says, speaking of the North Pacific Fishery Commission convention area, which sits over the seamounts at the test mining site. The site is located in the vast open Pacific, between Hawaii and China. But because Canada is among the countries that fish there, sediment from mining could harm seafood that Canadians eat. 

Seabed sediment can naturally contain metals like cadmium that become toxic at certain levels. Fish could die once exposed to these metals, or survive with dangerous levels of toxins inside them. Contaminated species may be fished from the convention area, while others could travel back to Canadian waters before being caught: some fish, like salmon, can travel incredibly far on migration routes. “We’re just a couple steps away from the deep sea with everything we do on this planet,” Du Preez says.

She notes that mining near seamounts, even at test scale, magnifies the risks of sediment plumes. These underwater mountains act like ramps, stirring up water that flows up the sides. That means plumes created by mining here can spin sediment into immense eddies that carry across long distances. 

Shipping and processing deep-sea minerals would also have environmental impacts, including greenhouse gas emissions. Some U.S. deep-sea mining advocates hope to process and refine the minerals in “friendly countries,” including Canada. A 2020 assessment of predicted deep-sea mining emissions by a German university named Canada as a potential processing site for Pacific seabed minerals. 

What is The Metals Company?

Headquartered in Vancouver, The Metals Company operates through subsidiaries across the world, including in Singapore, Indonesia, the British Virgin Islands and the United States. The publicly traded company is financed through sales of stocks and stock options, as well as loans. Just last month, it raised US$37 million from investors. More recently, it announced a US$85 million investment from a Korean metal smelting company.

The Metals Company focuses on nodule mining. The company recently poured US$250 million into researching environmental impacts and even conducted a large test mining operation that took more than 3,000 tonnes of nodules from the Pacific sea-floor. However, unless it can get a commercial mining permit, it can’t collect and sell minerals for profit. And even then, profits would be far from guaranteed: deep-sea mining is an untested industry with incredibly high expenses.

In April, the company applied for three U.S. deep sea mining permits. Two are for exploration and one is for commercial recovery — that is, actual mining. Through these permits, The Metals Company aims to explore minerals across nearly 200,000 square kilometres, and mine an area just over 25,000 square kilometres. Its proposed commercial mining site is in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a large patch of the Pacific between Hawaii and Mexico, with lots of nodules and some seamounts. It isn’t in U.S. waters, but rather a shared international zone. 

What is The Metals Company’s mining plan?

The Metals Company’s mining system includes a remotely operated collector vehicle on the seabed, a ship at the surface and a very, very long pipe between the two. 

The collector is like a “big Dyson vacuum cleaner that crawls along the seabed very slowly,” The Metals Company’s environmental manager, Michael Clarke, told The Narwhal. This vehicle uses water jets to lift the nodules off the sea-floor. It sucks them in, spins them to remove debris and sends them up the riser pipe on a four-kilometre journey to the surface vessel. That’s about the height of seven CN Towers stacked on top of each other.

The company states its mining strategy can help reduce environmental risks. Its collector vehicle is designed to be buoyant, so it doesn’t sink deep into the sea-floor, which the company says reduces the level of sediment that gets disturbed. After the minerals are collected, the company intends to put the excess sediment back in the ocean at depths of 2,000 metres, where research indicates life is more sparse than at higher levels. “We’ve put a lot of time and effort into minimizing the amount of sediment that actually goes up the pipe to the surface,” Clarke says. 

Of the species The Metals Company has collected in one of its exploration zones, 80 per cent aren’t yet described by science.

While the sea-floor collector vehicle is fairly quiet, noise from the surface ship could impact the behaviour of marine mammals, like whales, in a radius of nearly four kilometres. “This is really no different from any other vessel that’s out there that’s using dynamic positioning,” Clarke says, referring to the use of thrusters to keep ships in place, which is common in the oil and gas industry.

On the sea-floor, it’s not fully clear which species stand to be impacted. Of the species The Metals Company has collected in one of its exploration zones, 80 per cent aren’t yet described by science. The company states its operations would transform a seabed nodule habitat into a “nodule free habitat,” which would likely change what’s able to live there, since some species appear to depend on the nodules for survival. “We don’t need to know the name of every species that’s out there. We don’t need to know the distribution of every species,” Clarke says. “What we do need to know is the magnitude of the impacts that we’re creating.”

How is the Trump administration pushing deep-sea mining forward?

In 2021, The Metals Company emerged in its present iteration, out of an earlier brand called DeepGreen Metals. Every year since 2021, it has invested in lobbying U.S. government agencies to support deep-sea mining. That investment seems to have finally paid off, as the Trump administration issued a pro-deep-sea mining executive order in April, just before The Metals Company applied for permits. 

U.S. executive orders don’t create laws, but lay out policy intentions — and this one contains a lot of intentions. One highlight is that it calls for fast-tracking the deep-sea mining permitting process. It also orders a report on adding seabed minerals to the U.S. National Defense Stockpile — a strategic inventory of raw materials for wartime use — and calls for revised regulations to support U.S. mineral processing. 

The U.S. government has invited deep-sea miners and supporters to speak to policymakers, including at a recent Committee on Natural Resources hearing, where the possibility of Canadian mineral processing was mentioned. Several deep-sea mining supporters are members of the Trump administration.

What could happen next?

The Metals Company’s plan to get a go-ahead from the U.S. has been criticized by a number of countries and organizations, including the International Seabed Authority. The United Nations-affiliated authority oversees deep-sea mining in international waters. Most countries are International Seabed Authority members, including Canada, but the U.S. is not. The authority has issued many exploration permits, including to The Metals Company subsidiaries. However, it’s never issued a commercial mining permit. Its mining regulations are still under debate. 

Since 1984, the U.S. has also issued and renewed exploration permits for minerals on the international seabed, ignoring international agreements in favour of its own legal framework. But, like the International Seabed Authority, it has never issued a commercial mining permit.

The Metals Company hopes to get U.S. permits and start mining the high seas quickly. But if it bypasses the slow and unwieldy International Seabed Authority, the Canada-headquartered multinational would break the international rules Canada has agreed to. According to international law, resources of the high seas are the “common heritage” of everyone on Earth, which means choosing what to do with them should be a global decision. If they’re claimed by the U.S., that law is upended. Legal disputes could be on the horizon.

These are uncharted waters, so to speak. Experts disagree on whether the U.S. is within its rights. Because the U.S. never joined the authority, some argue it’s not bound by the authority’s rules. The essential question is: if most of the world has agreed to a set of rules, what does that mean for a country that hasn’t?

In March, The Metals Company posted a statement from CEO and chairman Gerard Barron on its site, stating that “After 16 years of engaging with the [International Seabed Authority] in good faith, we are increasingly concerned” its eventual regulations will not allow commercial mining at all. The statement also noted that “more than two dozen nations” do not recognize the authority’s jurisdiction as binding. 

“The freedom to mine the deep seabed, like the freedom of navigation, is a high seas freedom enjoyed by all nations,” Barron’s statement said.

Still, The Metals Company has a long way to go before it can put U.S. regulations to the test. The company will need to scale up its mining equipment for commercial operations. And the U.S. agency in charge of approving or denying the company’s permits has faced significant staff cuts under Trump, which could slow things down.   

At this stage, it’s not clear where The Metals Company’s deep-sea minerals might be processed and refined, or who might buy them. In a 2024 report, the company said it intends to use “processing operations in locations like Japan and Indonesia and refineries in locations like South Korea and Canada.” With its recent pivot, The Metals Company is considering shifting its plans toward the U.S. — but because the U.S. has long outsourced mineral processing, this would require new onshore infrastructure. 

Given the reach of the industry, from sea-floor to surface and from open ocean to global ports, Du Preez believes “deep-sea mining” is a bit of a misnomer. “It’s ocean mining,” she says, “where some of the activity is going to happen on the sea-floor.”

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For more than 100 years, the United States and Canada have benefitted from a peaceful 5,500-mile (or 8,900-kilometre) border and co-operation on many issues of common concern. Michigan has benefitted from this relationship and without Canada, restoration efforts in the Great Lakes would not have begun in the 1970s to transform the region’s Rust Belt legacy of industrial pollution.

Michigan officials, and those of the seven other Great Lakes states, are fully aware of this history, so it is puzzling that they’ve been silent in the wake of a stream of suggestions by President Donald Trump that Canada should become the 51st state. 

These insulting pronouncements have awakened the anger of Canadians

for understandable reasons. Those who care about the Great Lakes should be similarly concerned. Partnerships like the one between the United States and Canada are uncommon in the rest of the world.

The partnership rests on a respectful coexistence. This has led to joint efforts to restore native species, block invasive species, control nutrient and toxic pollution of the Great Lakes and many other pressing concerns.

Three agreements illustrate the strength of this partnership in the past. The 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty commits the United States and Canada to peacefully resolve their differences over boundary waters concerns. This has led to joint fact-finding, resolution and prevention of water conflicts across our shared border for more than a century.

The 1972 Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement between the U.S. and Canada, which has been renewed several times, is widely credited with helping guide the restoration of the Great Lakes. From one U.S. administration to another over the last 53 years, whether Republican or Democratic, this agreement has held strong and has led to continuous efforts on behalf of these precious waters. They have kept the faith. Canadians have been a partner in all these efforts under the agreement. 

The Great Lakes Compact of 2008 unites the eight U.S. states and two Canadian provinces in banning most water diversions outside the Great Lakes watershed. It is supplemented by a parallel agreement with Ontario and Quebec that fosters improved water conservation and stewardship.

Michigan has a special reason to be a strong partner with Canada in addition to a common boundary on four of the five Great Lakes. The new Gordie Howe bridge spanning the Detroit River has been paid for exclusively by Canadians. It would not have happened without Canadians. Their repayment seems to be a barrage of attacks from the White House.

There is a great deal of unfinished business left in Great Lakes protection. The Lakes face convulsive pressures from climate change, microplastics and other threats. The best way to handle those issues is through a strong and continuing partnership with Canada and Canadians.

Rather than threaten the sovereignty of Canada, our government should be increasing its investment in protecting the Great Lakes. Our state officials, governors and others should be speaking out against the rash rhetoric that Canada should give up its independence to become an appendage of the United States. 

That would be bad for Canada and the U.S., and disastrous for the Great Lakes.

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In his first weeks in office, U.S. President Donald Trump launched rapid attempts to dismantle American institutions and threaten longstanding economic partnerships, compelling Canadians to consider new ways forward. Energy has reasonably taken center stage in discussions about Canada-U.S. economic interdependence, with Trump’s threat of a 10 per cent tariff on Canadian energy, including oil and gas, electricity and critical minerals, still looming. 

While much discussion in Canada has centred on reviving defunct plans for cross-country pipelines, using this moment of opportunity to further expand oil and gas infrastructure would be a mistake. Climate change and its increasingly deadly impacts are a matter of national security too, and it’s untrue that Canadians must sacrifice one priority for the other. A coordinated, national push to expand the production and transmission of renewable energy, including wind and solar, would mitigate against climate change while bolstering the country’s economic independence. To ensure its long-term safety and security, Canada must prioritize decarbonization, now more than ever.

Calls to dramatically increase renewable energy capacity across the country are not new, but the anxiety created by Trump’s erratic decisions could work to nudge decision-makers further away from the idea that clean energy is a partisan issue. Canadians support clean energy — a recent poll from Environmental Defence found more than half of Canadians support the prioritization of renewable energy sources over fossil fuel production. Instead of propping up oil and gas at the expense of communities, we have an opportunity to take bold climate action. A recurring critique of the federal government’s proposed emissions cap for the oil and gas industry is the risk it could restrict cross-border trade — this grows increasingly irrelevant as the Trump administration threatens flows across the border.

The transition is already happening. A recent report from the Canadian Renewable Energy Association shows that wind, solar and energy storage sectors have grown by 46 per cent in the last five years, and are expected to keep growing. Still, solar accounted for just 0.5 per cent, and wind 6.1 per cent, of Canadian electricity generation in 2023, leaving huge potential in the country’s “massive, untapped wind and solar resources,” according to the report.

Trade disruptions pose risks to the growing industry, given the extent of integration across energy systems in Canada and the U.S. In addition to American refineries’ need for heavy Canadian crude oil, materials from Canada are essential to U.S. renewable energy development. That includes imports of steel and aluminium, which Trump slapped with a 25 per cent tariff this week. While tariffs pose a risk to the entire renewable energy industry, experts also point to opportunities for innovation and domestic growth. 

As the Trump administration attempts to hinder wind energy development and freezes hundreds of billions of dollars in congressionally mandated funding aimed at boosting renewable energy, electrification and environmental justice, Canada should double down on efforts to build a reliable and equitable domestic energy system. In addition to more renewable energy supply, we will need to build substantial transmission infrastructure within and between provinces. We’ll need to update grids, provide incentives for domestic manufacturing and revisit approaches to land use conflicts. 

Fossil fuel prices will continue to fluctuate with geopolitics, and their impacts on global climate will create planetary conditions that grow increasingly deadly. The best response is one that builds a national, coordinated effort to support an equitable renewable energy transition.

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