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Photo: Ramona Leitao / The Narwhal
Summary
- While Black and racialized farm workers make up a large chunk of the country’s agricultural workforce, Black farm owners are still a slim minority in Canada.
- This wasn’t always the case, and historical Black Canadian settlements, like the Black Settlement in Oro Township near Barrie, Ont., provided land and housing for Black farmers in the early 19th century.
- One of the primary barriers to farm access and ownership is the high cost of land; programs like farm rentals and urban farms are trying to bridge the gap.
Along a dusty bike trail of crushed gravel, the blue-grey waters of Kempenfelt Bay shimmer through large trees with leafy branches overhead. On one side stands an Ontario Heritage Trust plaque, recognizing the historic Black community of Oro, Ont.
On bicycle rides along the Great Lakes Waterfront Trail, I ride for fun and adventure and to find the Black history hidden in the countryside. As a scholar and writer, I research how race intersects with nature. In this case, it is how farming and farmlands — a part of nature we can all connect with — criss-cross with race.
In southwestern Ontario, I’ve taken detours to visit the former Black villages known as the Buxton Settlement and the Puce River Community, near the border with Detroit. In other places I look for Ontario Heritage plaques, old churches and fading headstones in unregistered cemeteries. These are often the only indicators that Black communities once thrived in rural Ontario and that Black farmers owned their farms.
In the 19th century, the area around Lake Simcoe, including Oro (now Oro-Medonte), was filled with Black farmers and their families. There are similar heritage plaques scattered across rural areas and small towns in Ontario such as Fergus, Cainsville, Lucan and Dresden. Once a common sight, today Black farm owners are rare, while Black farm workers are a backbone of agricultural labour in Canada. Each year, some 36,000 Black and brown farm workers come to Canada for the farming season.
The average age of a farmer is 56 years in Canada. They are getting old and tired, greying out of the years of dawn-to-dusk work on the farm. While there has been an increase in the number of female farmers, one statistic has barely changed — the tiny number of Black, Indigenous and racialized farmers. In Ontario, only five per cent of farmers are from diverse ethnocultural groups, which includes racialized groups.
Aliyah Fraser started Lucky Bug Farm on rented land in 2020, thanks to help from a mentorship program through Sundance Harvest. Photographed here in June 2021, she smooths the soil and evens up the spacing for tomatoes. Photo: Ramona Leitao / The Narwhal
Yet, in Toronto, some 56 per cent of the population is racialized, according to Statistics Canada. This demographic drift is not reflected in farming. So, where will the next generation of young farmers come from in Ontario? Who will grow the food that we all need to eat and live?
Farmland is precious to both farmers and non-farmers, but the competition for farmland is fierce. Data from Ontario Farmland Trust shows Ontario has lost 18 per cent of its farmland in recent decades to urban development and aggregate mining. Each day, Ontario is losing 319 acres, or 129 hectares, of farmland to development. Once the farmland is paved over, it is lost forever.
“The number one issue is access to land for Black farmers,” Claire Perttula, president of the BIPOC caucus of the National Farmers Union, said. “Land is so expensive. To put together a down payment you need millions. Working in agriculture you won’t make that down payment.”
Created in 2021, the caucus represents racialized farmers, land stewards and farm workers from across the country. It builds community and advocates for their interests.
“Farmland should be treated as a public good and not just as a private one for profit,” Perttula said. “We need a different system of farm ownership and use that would prioritize the people farming the land. This helps them make a go of it and earn a living.”
No Black farmers but lots of Black farm workers
Cycling along the backroads of the Niagara Wine Route in Ontario, I passed scores of Black men tending to grapevines in vineyards, apples in orchards and peas and beans in fields. I stopped to chat with them as they were the only other Black people I had seen so far that summer in the countryside. The men were Jamaican and migrant farm workers.
While the number of female farmers in Canada has increased in recent years, the number of Black, Indigenous or otherwise racialized farmers has not, and still hovers around five per cent. Photo: Chris Katsarov Luna / The Narwhal
Farm workers till the land, plant the seeds and harvest the crops. In Canada, those farm workers are most likely to be Black or brown. The labourers are migrants from the Caribbean, Mexico and Latin America who are hired under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program. Each year, they arrive in Canada in the spring, and must leave in autumn when their contracts end. Nearly half of all agricultural workers in Canada are hired under this program. They labour in every province where there are farms. Some farm workers have been coming to Canada for decades. As temporary foreign workers, they are mostly ineligible for citizenship.
On the other side of the country, Jamaican migrant workers also labour in the wineries and orchards of the Okanagan Valley, B.C. I now expect to see them everywhere in my travels in rural areas or small towns. So why the stark racial divide in farming in Canada, where white farmers reap the profits and Black and brown farm workers sweat under the sun?
Free farmland for some
In the United States, Black farmers were proverbially promised “40 acres and a mule” — immortalized in the name of Spike Lee’s film production company — a reparation of sorts, at the end of slavery. No such promises were made to formerly enslaved people in Canada, when slavery was abolished here in 1834.
White homesteaders, however, got their free acres of land under various land grant schemes. In Ontario, for instance, the 1868 Free Grants and Homestead Act gave free land to farmers, who got the title and legal ownership if they cleared the forested land and built a farmhouse within five years. Roads to support colonization were constructed across the province to make it easier for the settlers to arrive and claim their free land. The railways did the same across the country a few decades later. The free farmland was, and still is, all Indigenous land.
The only land scheme in southern Ontario that was specifically for Black people was the Black Settlement in Oro Township, near Barrie, Ont. The free land grants were in part a reward for the Black veterans who fought to protect Canada in the War of 1812 when the United States invaded. However, over time the settlement faded as the land was poor for farming, and it was too far from major roads and thus difficult to reach markets to sell the produce.
The Black Settlement in Oro Township, near Barrie, Ont., was the only dedicated land scheme in southern Ontario specifically for Black people. The land ended up being poor for farming and the settlement eventually dissolved. Photo: Simcoe County Archives – Eileen Murdoch collection
“The problem is not just for Black farmers alone, but it’s worst for them,” Bamidele Adekunle said. He is an adjunct professor at the University of Guelph, and co-editor of the book Eat Local, Taste Global: How Ethnocultural Food Reaches Our Tables.
“It’s the commodification of land,” Adekunle said. “There is a serious competition between real estate and agriculture for land. When land is commodified, its use moves to things that are more profitable. It moves out of the reach of most farmers.”
Access to modern farmland is a massive challenge for any new farmer. Those that don’t inherit the family farm can buy their own, but only if they have the money, and prices are increasing each year. In 2024 the price for a hectare of farmland and buildings in Ontario was $20,782. Consider an average city block is roughly one hectare in size. The average size of a farm in Ontario is now 249 acres, or 100 hectares. That means an average commercial farm in Ontario costs about $5 million.
Additionally, the average size of a farm in Ontario is now 249 acres, or 100 hectares. Consider an average city block is roughly one hectare in size. This means that small family-owned farms are fading into the past along with milk pails, churning
This means that small family-owned farms are fading into the past along with milk pails, churning butter by hand and Anne of Green Gables.
Buying traditional farmland is out of reach for many Black farmers, without some form of financial help. The FarmStart program was supposed to kickstart that help. Started in 2005, the program was an incubator for potential farmers, providing them with mentoring, and teaching farming and technical skills. One thing the now-shuttered program struggled to provide was access to land to grow food.
New solutions for an old farmland problem
“There are some alternative and affordable pathways into farming,” Martin Straathof, the executive director of the Ontario Farmland Trust, said. The non-profit was set up to keep farmers farming by protecting farmland from non-agricultural uses. The trust has advocated for solutions to make farming accessible, such as a conservation easement agreement, which guarantees land will continue to be used for farming.
“The easement creates stability for tenant farmers who can rent the farmland,” Straathof said. “It gives new farmers access to land and the security that they need to keep farming.”
Urban farms offer a more accessible route into farming for some Black farmers, given the high cost of traditional agricultural land. While they don’t provide a pathway to rural farm ownership, they offer opportunities to experiment with traditional crops like yam, callaloo and okra. Photo: Ramona Leitao / The Narwhal
The farmland is still the private property of the owners under the conservation easement agreement, but it can only be used for farming. Similarly, farmland trusts keep agricultural land protected for that use, even after farming families move on. Some farmers may not have anyone to inherit the family farm or want to leave farmland as their legacy. They can donate the land to a farmland trust, which in turn can lease the land to tenant farmers.
Around the Greater Toronto Area, nature is protected from urban sprawl by the Greenbelt Act. There are calls for similar legislation to shelter prime farmland from development, known as a foodbelt. Bill 21, the Protect Our Food Act, passed first reading in parliament in 2025 and proposes to protect the fertile agricultural lands of southern Ontario from non-agricultural uses. Put forward by Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner and Independent MPP Bobbi Ann Brady, the act could help curve the rapid loss of farmland across southern Ontario.
Additionally, climate change is affecting agriculture in Canada. It is uprooting assumptions about what can and can’t be grown in the land of the “Great White North.” The warming climate impacts crops, farm animals, the soil, insects and diseases. Some traditional crops such as wheat and canola don’t do well when stressed by heat.
The warmer and longer growing season caused by climate change means that some tropical crops can be farmed in Canada, though. Sweet potatoes are now grown in Ontario as a commercial crop. If the climate change even further, it might be possible to grow other tropical staples such as yam, rice and bananas. However, you need farmers who know how to do so. These are familiar crops for Black and other racialized farmers. They already have the skill and knowledge to grow them. But they can’t use the skills or meet the potential demand for the crops if they have no access to farmland.
“You need a minimum of five acres to be a commercial farmer,” said Jacqueline Dwyer, the farmer and co-founder of Toronto Black Farmers and Food Growers Collective. “The system is against us. The lack of finance. The lack of resources. The lack of land. The system won’t change without pressure.”
Urban farms are another accessible route into farming for Black farmers. There are quite a few Black urban farmers or farm organizations in the Toronto area such as Afri-Can Food Basket, Black Creek Community Farm, Adinkra Farm and Zawadi Farm. Each of these play an important role in reconnecting people to the source of their food and provide culturally appropriate foods for the Black community. These foods include yam, callaloo and okra. However, urban farms have their limits as there is no pathway from there to owning or operating a rural farm for Black farmers.
Jacqueline Dwyer and her partner Noel Livingston sell their produce and handmade African baskets at the Afro-Caribbean Farmers’ Market in Toronto’s Little Jamaica neighbourhood in 2021. Photo: Ramona Leitao / The Narwhal
“Youth are not getting into agriculture because there is no land,” Dwyer said. “Young people are pushed out of farming. They call themselves landless farmers.”
In many ways, farming is at a crossroads in Ontario. The pipeline into farming is leaking, due to a mismatch between old and new farmers, and it will worsen in the future unless things change. The majority of farmers are old, White and near retirement. They own farmland. The province is multiracial due to demographic shifts and so the next generation of young farmers are most likely to be Black and racialized. They do not own farmland.
The gap between those who have and do not have farmland must close if we are all going to eat.
Spring is here and fresh joy fills the air. The birds and butterflies are returning from the tropics. So too are the Black and brown migrant farmer workers. The farmland is awake and it is time to sow. We need Black farmers now, and they too need to reap, if we are all to eat.
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.
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Matthew Green, Judy Rebick, and Martin Lukacs join Desmond Cole to discuss the future of the NDP
The post Can democratic socialism chart a new path for Canada? appeared first on The Breach.
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Ask a climate therapist: Why should I plan for my future when I feel we don’t have one?
(thenarwhal.ca)
Photo: Carlos Osorio / The Narwhal
Dear Leslie,
I’m a young adult trying to figure out what I’m doing with my life. It feels really hard to plan for my future given the uncertainty climate change produces, and sometimes I feel like my degree, which I’m passionate about, will be useless “when the apocalypse comes.” How can I plan well for my future when I don’t know what the world will look like in 10 years, let alone 50?
— Scared Student
Dear Scared Student,
You’re asking one of the most significant questions of your generation, and it’s one that I’m hearing more and more from young people who are tuned into the rapid shifts occurring on our planet. Anyone who claims to know exactly what our changing world will look like in 50 years is deceiving themselves. It takes courage to sit with that uncertainty rather than push it away, so let’s start there: give yourself credit for remaining aware of both the realities and the unknowns.
That said, the word “apocalypse” doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for possibility. It’s hard to believe that anything matters if the end of times is a foregone conclusion. I think it’s worth breaking that down into two inquiries: what might actually happen, and how the uncertainty is affecting your ability to move forward.
Serious disruptions are taking place already and are essentially a guarantee — including in whatever field you’re training for. I don’t want to minimize the real fear underlying your question. Planning for a future that feels unstable is a genuine challenge. Let yourself feel the weight of that before reaching for solutions. Whatever our future does hold, we can be certain it will look different from the world we know today — perhaps in some wonderful ways, and likely in some bad. Feeling the loss is part of staying whole — neither turning away from what worries you, nor losing sight of what you can still shape.
But collapsing all of our possible futures into a single worst-case scenario tends to make us freeze, and freezing helps neither us nor the communities and ecosystems depending on our action.
Unfreezing, then, is not about pretending that everything will be fine: it’s about developing a skillful agility that allows you to shift as circumstances change.
The skills, relationships, ways of thinking and capacity for meaning-making that you cultivate when pursuing work you’re passionate about can translate into a wide range of scenarios. They’re not locked inside a single job title. The question isn’t whether your degree will survive in the future; it’s how you can show up with depth and flexibility and continue to seek out the next useful contribution, both personally and professionally.
It can help to shift from long-range certainty-seeking to values-based navigation. Instead of asking, “Will this matter in 50 years?” try asking, “What matters to me now, and how can I build a life that honours that?” This is a core insight from acceptance-based approaches to anxiety. When we loosen our grip on specific outcomes and orient ourselves toward what we value, we can become more resilient and sustain our motivation. Values travel with us, and they’re what allow us to keep pivoting as circumstances change.
No one can plan for a fixed future. Such a thing doesn’t exist. You’re developing yourself and your work in a very dynamic world that will challenge you to use your creative power as you pursue your goals. Your passion isn’t a liability. Today and in the future, whatever transpires, the paramount need is for people who care deeply.
With you in this,Leslie
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.
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Despite the manufactured controversy, the 12-metre exhibit is the first time the story of Palestinian dispossession is being told in a national institution
The post The Nakba exhibit is a breakthrough for a long-silenced Palestinian narrative appeared first on The Breach.
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Summary
- In Simpcw First Nation, women are continuing traditions practiced by generations of women before them, including animal-hide tanning.
- Tiffany Bowser and Roberta Haller are Secwe̓pemc women who grew up immersed in their culture and now teach others who want to learn through community workshops.
- While women have always tanned deer hide in B.C.’s interior, a smaller number practice the skill today, making the workshops hosted by Bowser and Haller a powerful assertion of Indigenous Rights.
Working with animal hides can be a messy process — and children in Tiffany Bowser’s community of Simpcw First Nation “absolutely love it.”
“They love scraping the hide. They love stretching it,” she shares.
“I don’t know why, but brain water is one of their favourite things,” she adds, laughing. “I’m like okay, just don’t get it in your mouth.”
Bowser hosts hide-tanning workshops in her First Nation, come-and-go style, so people with different needs can attend. Her workshops are also hosted during the school day, so children and youth from the Secwe̓pemc community — located north of Kamloops — are able to participate.
A deer hide in the process of being tanned. Depending on the size of the animal, and who is tanning, the process can take weeks or months to complete. Photo: Submitted by Tiffany Bowser
From hunting the animal, to skinning and tanning the hide, it is a lengthy, expensive and labour-intensive process that many people struggle to make time for. And finding people who carry the knowledge about how to properly tan an animal hide is becoming rare.
Despite those challenges, the tradition lives on in the Simpcw First Nation. In Secwe̓pemc culture, women are typically tasked with preparing animal hides — a responsibility that Bowser takes seriously.
“There’s not too many people on the reserve who know how to tan a hide,” Roberta Haller, who also teaches hide tanning in the community, says. “I feel very proud that I’m one of them.”
“I’ve been hunting since I was about three years old,” Bowser told The Narwhal.
Bowser and her mother Tina Donald hunt big game in Secwe̓pemc territory. Bowser uses the hides to host community workshops, revitalizing the skill of tanning animal hide and hunting on the land the way her ancestors always have. Photo: Submitted by Tiffany Bowser
“Some of my earliest memories are sitting on my dad’s shoulders, packing a handful of gophers around and fishing. It’s just something I grew up doing.”
This year, she hosted a 10-day workshop, calling her mentor Haller over the phone for advice each day. Haller was mentored by the late Virginia Donald, her aunt, who was known in the area for her tanned deer hides.
“I’m probably pretty biased, but she was one of the best hide tanners out there. Her deer hides came out white and perfect,” Bowser says.
Following the tradition of women who came before and taught them, Bowser and Haller support one another, teaching the next generation of hide tanners in their community how it’s done.
Hide tanning process and usage
While methods to prepare animal hides vary from person to person and community to community, Bowser and Haller follow the methods passed down to them from generations of Secwe̓pemc women.
After harvesting and skinning the animal, Haller explains, the hide gets soaked in water. After it’s soaked, the hair is cut and scraped off the hide before it’s carefully placed on a frame.
Tiffany Bowser and Angie Rainer hold and stretch an animal hide as part of the tanning process. The practice is labour intensive and takes many helping hands. Photo: Submitted by Tiffany Bowser
This part can be tricky: experienced tanners know where to cut holes to properly stretch the hide on the frame, without ruining it by piercing in the wrong places.
Once on the frame, the hide is pounded and stretched, over a gentle heat source. “Not too hot, so it doesn’t try out too fast,” she says.
After that, the hide is taken off of the rack and smoked, which adds colour, prevents stiffness and makes the fabric not water-resistant, but washable.
The next step is the brain water.
“We take the brains from the deer and then we dissolve it in warm water so it becomes a milky liquid, in there we soak the hide again. As we’re soaking, we’re stretching it out again … then you put it back on the frame, pound it out again and start the whole process over again,” Haller says. All of this takes days, weeks or months, depending on the animal size, and what outcome the tanner is going for.
A tipi made out of an animal hide that Bowser worked on during a community workshop. The finished hide can be used to make clothing, regalia and more. Photo: Submitted by Tiffany Bowser
But if the steps aren’t completed properly, the whole process must be started over. Smaller game animals can take weeks to complete, while larger animals like moose can take up to a year.
It takes time, commitment, muscles and know-how to make it all happen.
Passing the tradition through generations
Haller started working with animal hide in her 30s, wanting to pass the tradition onto her children. And since tanning was so intensive, she wanted to help her mentor Virginia continue the practice as she aged, while learning the practice from her.
“Auntie Virginia didn’t like to take any shortcuts,” Haller tells The Narwhal. That meant skipping modern tools including pressure washers and trimmers to remove animal hair during the tanning process, which weren’t available back in her day.
“She just liked to do it the way she was taught, she didn’t try any other way. She knew one way would work, and that’s how she taught me, and that’s what we still do.”
Since learning from her auntie, Haller has mentored Bowser and anyone else who wants to learn at the community workshops in Simpcw First Nation. Though they focus on involving youth, anyone from the general community is also welcome to attend, as long as they are respectful of the animal hide.
One of those community participants is Fred Fortier, a Simpcw member who has attended many hide-tanning workshops hosted by Bowser and Haller.
Angie Rainer is a language and cultural teacher in Simpcw First Nation. She supports the animal hide workshops hosted by Bowser, often attending them with her father Fred Fortier. Photo: Submitted by Tiffany Bowser
Fortier grew up connected to the land. After recovering from cancer five years ago, animal hide workshops have become a more accessible way for him to practice culture, although he still goes hunting sometimes.
Visiting, speaking Secwepemctsín, sharing meals, telling hunting stories and laughing together at the workshops are “just a lot of fun,” Fortier says.
Watching his grandchildren participate in the workshops is exciting. “I think that’s a really important component, our kids wanting to learn and not feeling ashamed to learn our cultural ways … for them to keep their head up and be proud,” he says.
He encourages hunters in the nation to keep the hide, bones and brains in mind when harvesting deer to be in alignment with Secwe̓pemc culture.
“We have a lot of women in our community who have stepped forward to teach people our cultural ways,” he says.
“For those people like Tiffany and Roberta, and all of the women who have stepped forward … I think they are the backbone of our community.”
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.
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Illustration: Supplied by Deep Sky
Summary
- The Montreal-based tech firm Deep Sky is proposing to build a direct air carbon capture facility in southern Manitoba, and documents obtained by The Narwhal show the company has garnered support from First Nations, rural municipalities and at least one bank.
- Direct air carbon capture involves sucking carbon out of the atmosphere and then burying it deep underground. Deep Sky says its technology is “viable,” but critics have expressed skepticism.
- If built, the facility will require 15 megawatts of electricity to run — which is about enough to power 10,000 homes. Deep Sky hopes to connect to Manitoba’s electrical grid to obtain that energy.
A direct air carbon capture facility proposed for southwestern Manitoba has been shoring up allies in local and Indigenous governments and large corporations, as Montreal-based Deep Sky aims to convince the provincial government its project is ready to launch.
The venture-capital-backed tech firm sent the province a package of support letters late last year encouraging the government to provide the regulatory support and electric power supply needed for Deep Sky’s Manitoba facility to move forward, according to documents obtained by the Free Press and The Narwhal.
“Deep Sky Manitoba is not a speculative concept,” the company wrote in a December letter.
“It is a commercially viable infrastructure project that is backed by real market demand and presents an economic opportunity for Manitoba on a global scale.”
Deep Sky is proposing a 145-acre facility in the agriculture and oil-dominant southwestern region that will scrub 30,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere each year and inject it into porous rock formations 1,000 metres below ground. The company says it will use technology first tested at its existing accelerator in Innisfail, Alta., and will finance the $200-million Manitoba project by selling carbon credits.
Deep Sky will need up to 15 megawatts of power — roughly the power draw of 10,000 homes — for the first stage of the project, CEO Alex Petre told The Narwhal and Free Press in December.
The package included term sheets and letters of intent from five customers and investors, as well as support from local communities.
While some of the documents are redacted under a section of the freedom of information act that protects corporate privacy, The Narwhal and the Free Press obtained copies of letters from the Dakota Grand Council, the rural municipalities of Pipestone and Two Borders, Frontier and the Bank of Montreal.
“These documents illustrate that this project is ready to break ground,” the company wrote.
“We have the customers and the support to bring this investment to the province. We are simply waiting for the final regulatory framework and the confirmation of power supply to unlock this investment.”
Direct air carbon capture: big promises, yet to be proven
Deep Sky’s proposal has been met with skepticism from area residents and climate action groups, who have posed questions about the safety, affordability and long-term impacts of direct air carbon capture.
While oil and gas companies and some climate experts view the technology as a useful tool to help achieve global net-zero targets, critics say it is prohibitively expensive and not guaranteed to work.
Despite energy agencies, including the Canada Energy Regulator and Manitoba Hydro, predicting direct air capture will sequester millions of tonnes of emissions annually by 2050, facilities aren’t yet keeping pace. The two dozen facilities currently operating worldwide capture less than 10,000 tonnes per year.
But Deep Sky maintains its project will be able to succeed given Manitoba’s “natural advantages,” including suitable geologic conditions, a low-cost hydroelectric grid and a local workforce familiar with oil and gas operations.
The company recently sold North America’s first verified carbon removal credits after successfully storing carbon at its Innisfail facility, according to a press release Monday.
According to the December letter, it has now also secured “strong local buy-in” after hosting information sessions through the fall and winter.
“Over the past year, we’ve engaged with Indigenous communities, municipalities, provincial partners and regional stakeholders across Manitoba to better understand local priorities and explore how this industry can create lasting economic opportunities for Manitoba,” Jason Vanderheyden, Deep Sky’s vice-president of government affairs and public policy said in an emailed statement.
“All of these conversations continue to inform our approach as the project advances.”
Deep Sky points to First Nations support for proposed facility
Vanderheyden noted the company’s partnership with the Dakota Grand Council, a collaborative organization representing Manitoba’s Dakota nations.
In a letter to the province dated Dec. 5, 2025, Dakota Chiefs Dennis Pashe and Raymond Brown expressed “strong support for the Deep Sky Manitoba project,” noting it presents an opportunity to reverse “decades of economic exclusion in the region.”
The project is anticipated to create between 750 and 1,000 jobs during construction, with around 100 permanent positions during operation. The Dakota council said it is working with Deep Sky to ensure its members are prioritized for these roles, and will explore equity opportunities through the relationship agreement.
“Deep Sky’s Manitoba executive team engaged with us early, right from the start of the project and we found them to be extremely transparent,” Pashe said in an emailed statement.
“They were also very informative when explaining the project and carbon removal technology, which is important when communities consider something new.”
The company will still need to complete impact and benefit agreements to receive consent from the Dakota Nation, he added.
Local rural governments come out in support of Deep Sky project
The package also included resolutions passed by the rural municipalities of Pipestone and Two Borders in early 2025 declaring support for carbon capture and storage projects, including the Deep Sky initiative, and urging Manitoba to amend its carbon storage rules in collaboration with the company.
Manitoba passed the Captured Carbon Storage Act in May 2024, outlining the legal framework for such projects. The accompanying regulations, which will outline the finer details of a company’s responsibilities when storing captured carbon, were initially expected this spring, according to a December interview with Manitoba’s Business, Mining, Trade and Economic Development Minister Jamie Moses.
It’s not yet clear when the regulations will be finalized.
Deep Sky already has a carbon capture test facility operating in Innisfail, Alta., seen here. Now, the company has garnered support from First Nations and rural municipalities in Manitoba to build a larger facility in southwestern Manitoba. Photo: Supplied by Deep Sky
In response to detailed questions from The Narwhal and the Free Press regarding the province’s support for Deep Sky’s proposal, progress on carbon storage regulations and the company’s power supply request, Moses’ office said in a three-sentence reply, “any decisions regarding that project will be communicated in the coming months” and consultation will continue to take place with affected communities.
Deep Sky looks for connection to provincial grid and hydroelectric power
Alongside local support, Deep Sky has the backing of several large corporations in the technology and finance sectors.
Frontier is an advanced market commitment group representing some of the world’s largest tech and financial companies — including Stripe, Google, Shopify and Anthropic — in an effort to stimulate the carbon storage industry.
The company is “actively evaluating Deep Sky for future offtake agreements and are encouraged by the pace of their technical progress,” according to a letter included in the Deep Sky package.
“However, to unlock this global market demand for Manitoba,” the company states, “two critical enablers are required: the allocation of hydroelectric power and a finalized regulatory framework.”
The Deep Sky project is expected to require 15 megawatts of electricity. The company hopes to secure that electricity by hooking up to Manitoba’s energy grid, which is made up almost entirely of hydroelectric power. Photo: Tim Smith / The Narwhal
Bank of Montreal executive Grégoire Baillargeon, who serves as a board member for Carbon Removal Canada, wrote a similar letter of support urging the province to “grant the project a high-priority hydro allocation so that construction can begin and Manitoba can secure a leadership position in this emerging market.”
Neither company responded to follow-up questions.
Any facility needing to draw more than five megawatts must submit a large power supply application, according to Manitoba Hydro (Deep Sky will need up to 15 megawatts of power in its first phase). In an email, media relations officer Peter Chura explained Hydro reviews applications thoroughly to determine feasibility, then forwards requests to the province for review and prioritization.
Chura said Hydro could not confirm whether it had received a request for power from Deep Sky, as the Crown utility does not publicly discuss customers, applications or proposed developments. He confirmed Hydro has not received any directives from the Manitoba government regarding the Deep Sky proposal.
Julia-Simone Rutgers is a reporter covering environmental issues in Manitoba. Her position is part of a partnership between The Narwhal and the Winnipeg Free Press.
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Photo: Jimmy Jeong / The Narwhal
I was arrested while reporting on Wet’suwet’en opposition to the Coastal GasLink pipeline in November, 2021.
And this year, I’ve spent weeks in court as The Narwhal and I pursue our press freedom lawsuit against the RCMP. I’ve had good reason to reflect on the fundamental rights we are fighting for.
It started with a simple pitch — I had asked co-founders Emma Gilchrist and Carol Linnitt: “Any interest in partnering to do some reporting out there?” I’d been documenting the RCMP sending officers to enforce Coastal GasLink’s injunction for years, once even for The New York Times.
I sent that pitch because I knew The Narwhal would be the publication to really get it. They agreed to fund my trip, and I was grateful. I had no idea how lucky I was to be working with a team who would go on to support me through some of the worst moments of my life.
That support hasn’t faded — and neither has my faith in The Narwhal. We can only keep telling critical stories about resource extraction in Canada because **more than 7,400 members regularly pitch in to support this work. Today, I hope you will join them.**I knew that trip would be difficult. I had no idea it would end with me staring down the barrel of a police gun, let alone being arrested and kept in custody for four days, or to become a headline myself. I could not have known we would still be wrestling with the effects nearly five years later.
Police filmed my arrest as they took my cameras, then my notebook, my audio recorder and my credentials. With my hands tied, I could not do my work. I felt helpless and unheard.
But Narwhals (both staff and readers like you) leapt into action. Carol and Emma jumped to get me and my urgent reporting out of jail. Reporter Matt Simmons drove to the RCMP station to advocate for me — and also made the long trip to Prince George to pick me up and dust me off, days later.
I was shaken. At the same time, I was buoyed by the response from so many Narwhal readers. We needed that community of support then — and we need it now, too. Will you help The Narwhal keep sending journalists to cover the most important stories affecting the natural world in Canada?
A militarized police officer aims his gun into a tiny house full of unarmed individuals on Friday, Nov. 19, 2021. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal
Wet’suwet’en opposition was not the first clash between industrial aspirations and Indigenous relationship to land — and it won’t be the last. Today, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government is clearing the way for more major infrastructure in the name of sovereignty, including a potential new pipeline across British Columbia.
These issues, and the urgent need to be able to report completely on them, could not be more timely.
The Narwhal is invested in following stories from the halls of power in Ottawa and across the nation to the forests, mountain ranges and coastlines where communities feel the impacts.
Photojournalism requires physical presence. As the eyes and ears for the public, my job is to help you better understand what it’s like to be there — accurately, before it can become anyone’s spin. To get the time I needed to do this work, I’ve had to be scrappy. The Narwhal, as a non-profit, is scrappy too.
And, as one of our newest members put it: “I think reporters deserve to work without being arrested for doing their jobs.”
As a longtime freelancer I’ve gotten a peek into many different newsrooms, and felt the pinch of seemingly ever-shrinking budgets. The Narwhal is a rare and special breed, for its willingness to pursue gritty journalism — and genuinely support the journalists who do the work.
Today, I’m asking you to become a member so we can keep fighting for a free press, and keep publishing on-the-ground stories just like this. From experience, I know just how much your support matters — and it matters now, more than ever.
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This doctor’s resignation from Hamilton’s police board exposes the failures of police oversight
(breachmedia.ca)
Physician Anjali Menezes just resigned from the Hamilton police board—and she’s calling for it to be dismantled entirely
The post This doctor’s resignation from Hamilton’s police board exposes the failures of police oversight appeared first on The Breach.
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North Bay’s PFAS problem: 5 things to know about a ‘forever chemicals’ hotspot in Ontario
(thenarwhal.ca)
Summary
- The Department of National Defence and City of North Bay have been working to clean up decades-old per- and polyfluoroalkyl, or PFAS, contamination, first announced to the public in 2017.
- Residents have proposed a class-action lawsuit over the contamination and consequent loss of property value — though environmental and health hazards of the contamination aren’t a part of the case.
- An international company called Industrial Plastics Canada is among the 10 major importers of a Teflon-like subgroup of PFAS to Canada, and they opened a factory in North Bay in 2023.
Gathered in an arena in North Bay, Ont., in summer 2024, federal officials told hundreds of concerned citizens how they planned to remediate longstanding contamination of the city’s waterways left behind by the Department of National Defence. A few months later, officials gave a similar presentation to a packed hotel conference room.
For nearly a decade now, residents have known about the contamination. Some have been told not to drink the water from their own wells, and everyone in the city has been warned not to drink water or eat fish from a creek outside town.
The creek is part of a system of waterways where carcinogenic “forever chemicals” run downstream from a military base, emptying into Trout Lake, the source of the city’s drinking water. It sits at nearly double Health Canada’s guideline for PFAS in drinking water, measured in nanograms per litre.
Health Canada published an “objective” level of 30 nanograms per litre in August 2024 for 25 chemicals in the PFAS family. That’s less than half of what Ontario currently recommends: 70 nanograms per litre, pertaining to just 11 PFAS chemicals. And that’s just a suggestion, not a binding regulation.
The city did not reply to The Narwhal’s detailed questions regarding the current state of the drinking water supply, but CBC reported in February 2026 that Trout Lake contained around 58 nanograms of PFAS per litre of water.
Thousands of substances classified as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as PFAS, are used to make everything from medical equipment to waterproof clothing. They can generate hazardous waste which, if not disposed of carefully, contaminates air, water and soil — where it can remain for 1,000 years, hence their other nickname, “forever chemicals.”
Statistics Canada reports almost all Canadians already have PFAS in their bodies, including in remote regions such as the Arctic and subarctic.
In North Bay, the issue is top of mind, with a class-action lawsuit, a lengthy and expensive remediation plan and a new factory importing chemicals from the Teflon-like subgroup of PFAS, called PTFE. And the company behind that factory, Industrial Plastics Canada, is one of the 10 major importers of PTFE in Canada.
While PFAS have been making global headlines for years as an emerging threat to the environment and our bodies, North Bay knows the issue intimately; citizens fear for their water as politicians try to clean up the mess.
Here’s everything you need to know about PFAS in North Bay.
- North Bay’s PFAS contamination comes from firefighting foam
From the early 1970s to the mid-1990s, the Department of National Defence used a fire suppression foam containing PFAS to train firefighters across Canada, including near the North Bay Jack Garland Airport. In 2016, after the North Bay Parry Sound District Health Unit learned PFAS had been identified by the Department of National Defence in waterways around the city, it commissioned consulting firm Stantec to assess the impacts on soil and groundwater.
It’s the invisible nature of these chemicals that are part of what makes them so insidious; you can’t see them or smell them, so you don’t know they’re there without testing.
“When you look at a mine, for example, you can see it and say, ‘That’s obviously disruptive to our ecosystem.’” North Bay-based environmental anthropologist Carly Dokis previously told The Narwhal. “But these things are invisible pollutants, which then tend to attract less public awareness.”
Stantec found PFAS from the foam had contaminated soil, bedrock, groundwater, private wells and several waterways in the region including Trout Lake, Lake Nipissing and Lees, Dorlan, Chippewa and La Vase creeks and surrounding areas.
Long-lasting “forever chemicals” known as PFAS have contaminated surface water, soil, bedrock and groundwater near the Jack Garland Airport, including the municipal drinking water system, private wells and waterways around Nipissing District. Map: Shawn Parkinson / The Narwhal
In 2025, reporting by the Investigative Journalism Bureau surfaced a report by the Royal Military College showing the Department of National Defence found elevated PFAS levels around the base as far back as 2012. That means the department knew about the contamination for five years before revealing it to the City of North Bay in 2016, and the public in 2017.
2. PFAS impacts health, environment and property values. Residents are seeking recompense
In late 2025, North Bay citizens filed a proposed class-action lawsuit asking for remediation, safe drinking water and $105 million in damages for residents living within a three-kilometre radius of the 22 Wing Canadian Forces Base and Jack Garland Airport. Some of the people who live closest to the contamination have been receiving bottled water from the government for years, but have had no other opportunity for recourse.
The proposed lawsuit, if certified by the court, would be against the City of North Bay and the Attorney General of Canada, on behalf of the Department of National Defence, focusing on the loss of property value and remediation costs. The case is also seeking punitive damages, contending that National Defence was aware of the contamination long before warning residents.
Not mentioned in the suit is the long list of health concerns associated with “forever chemicals.”
The United States Environmental Protection Agency lists potential health risks of exposure to PFAS, including reproductive problems like infertility, developmental effects in children, increased risk of certain cancers and weakening of the body’s immune system, including reduced vaccine response. The Canadian government says PFAS can be transferred through the placenta during pregnancy, and infants can be exposed through human milk.
Ecosystems are affected, too. Studies have shown exposure to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances can stunt plant growth and cause reduced seed germination and ability to photosynthesize. The chemicals can build up in the organs of living creatures throughout the food chain. In the district of Nipissing, that poses a risk to people who hunt, fish and harvest from the land.
“These industrial areas are often surrounded by lower-income buildings and peoples and communities,” Curtis Avery, environment department manager with Nipissing First Nation, told The Narwhal in summer 2023. “We’re the most vulnerable group of people that utilize our lands — the lands are our grocery stores. … If these are being impacted, we need to know.”
- Cost of North Bay clean-up grew five-fold, to more than $100 million
In 2021, the City of North Bay announced plans to begin remediation under a “shared responsibility” agreement between the Department of National Defence and the city. The federal department would cover 97 per cent of the costs, or $19.4 million, and the city would cover the remaining three per cent, at $600,000. But costs have ballooned since then; in December 2025, National Defence announced it would contribute another nearly $100 million to the remediation, with the city’s share rising to more than $3.6 million. The total for the cleanup project has risen to more than $122 million.
The remediation, which began on the ground in 2024, includes excavating and disposing of about 26,000 tonnes of PFAS-impacted soil; injecting activated carbon material into particularly dense patches of PFAS to stop the underground plume from spreading; and installing a filtration system to treat water leaving the site.
“We remain committed to addressing and managing the operational legacy of the Canadian Armed Forces responsibly,” Minister of National Defence David J. McGuinty said in a news release.
Contamination on federal sites is an issue across Canada. There are thousands listed on the federal contaminated sites inventory, and PFAS are found on more than 100 of them. These include at least 26 National Defence sites including bases in Trenton, Ont., Gagetown, N.B., and Moose Jaw, Sask. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal
As part of the process, a notice went up on the federal Impact Assessment Agency registry on April 28, inviting the public to comment up until June 5 on a proposal to install a 250-metre permeable barrier in the ground to help filter impacted groundwater. A spokesperson for the agency said its role in the project is to offer advice on determining its environmental effects, as well as providing the opportunity to post the project on the registry.
Local organizations, including the environmental group Northwatch, said in a press release that they were concerned about “very limited public engagement over the last ten years since the public disclosure of the contamination,” counting only the two forums in 2024 and 2025, where there was “limited opportunities for the public to ask questions.”
Northwatch’s project coordinator Brennain Lloyd told The Narwhal about the public notice period, which she said her organization only learned of in a daily bulletin from the Impact Assessment Agency listing multiple assessment notices from across the country.
“To the best of our knowledge there were no local announcements or invitations to comment issued to the many residents and organizations who have identified their interest in this program,” a release from Northwatch reads.
The Department of National Defence did not respond to questions from The Narwhal.
- North Bay’s not alone: contaminated military bases affect communities across Canada
Contamination on federal sites is an issue across Canada. There are thousands of contaminated sites listed on the federal contaminated sites inventory, and PFAS are found on more than 100 of them. These include at least 26 National Defence sites including bases in Trenton, Ont., Gagetown, N.B., and Moose Jaw, Sask.
And contaminants don’t stop at the fenceline. Health Canada says some contaminants can travel long distances through soil, water and air: “PFAS can be found in fresh water and drinking water in areas that are far away from where they entered the environment,” according to the department’s website.
- Industry is still importing PFAS-class chemicals into North Bay
While the Canadian government no longer uses firefighting foam that contains PFAS, industry continues to bring these substances into the country. In 2023, The Narwhal reported on an international plastics conglomerate that opened its first Canadian location, Industrial Plastics Canada, in North Bay. The company has a presence across Europe as well as in India and China, billing itself as one of the “largest worldwide manufacturers of PTFE products.”
Industrial Plastics Canada in North Bay, Ont., is on the list of Canada’s 10 major importers of PTFE, or polytetrafluoroethylene, a Teflon-like product in a subgroup of PFAS. Photo: Vanessa Tignanelli /The Narwhal
PTFE, or polytetrafluoroethylene, is a Teflon-like product in a subgroup of PFAS known as fluoropolymers, or fluoroplastics. A company spokesperson previously told The Narwhal the use of PTFE at the factory will not produce waste and poses “no risk.” The company also says fluoropolymers aren’t as dangerous as other PFAS and are “considered safe, non-bioaccumulative and non-toxic.”
But fluoropolymers have been found to be dangerous to human health, according to research published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science & Technology and others.
In 2023, Health Canada released a draft assessment of the state of PFAS in Canada to help decide how to regulate the class of chemicals. In it, the agency cited an industry-funded study that said fluoropolymers should be considered separately from other PFAS as “polymers of low concern.” A Health Canada spokesperson said the agency, along with Environment and Climate Change Canada, “examined information from a wide range of sources,” including scientific journals and reports while preparing the state of PFAS report.
The substances were ultimately excluded from the final report, released in March 2025, in which Health Canada proposed classifying the remaining PFAS chemicals as toxic substances under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act.
The Health Canada spokesperson said in an email that fluoropolymers “have specific properties that differentiates them from other PFAS,” which led to their exclusion from the final report. They added that the exclusion “should not be interpreted as meaning they are or are not of concern,” and that a separate fluoropolymer assessment is currently underway.
The exclusion of PTFE from that classification was a major priority for industry, Rémy Alexandre, toxics project lead at environmental law non-profit EcoJustice, told The Narwhal.
According to data collected by Alexandre, who studied Industrial Plastics Canada’s imports to North Bay, the company brought in almost 207,000 kilograms of PTFE from India and China from July 2025 to May 2026.
This puts the facility on the list of the 10 major importers of PTFE in Canada, alongside U.S.-based chemicals company Chemours, a spinoff of Dupont that has been arguing that the European Union should exempt fluoropolymers from their regulations, too.
“The decision to site this plant in a community that is an existing hotspot for PFAS raises concerns,” Alexandre told The Narwhal. “And so does the selection of a jurisdiction that isn’t regulating fluoropolymers.”
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Illustration: Melanie Garcia / The Narwhal. Photo: Mike Graeme / The Narwhal
Around 13,000 years ago, our blue planet got a lot whiter.
Temperatures in the northern hemisphere dropped precipitously and in a relatively short time — decades, not centuries — big ice sheets spread down from the mountains, freezing out once-teeming habitats populated densely by flora and fauna.
Humans, and our non-human relatives, had been flourishing for some 10,000 years in the warm afterglow that followed the previous deep freeze. Abundance had bloomed in the glacial melt and from the sediment left on the land. Life stretched out in the absence of ice. But then the ice came back.
The ensuing thousand-year period is called the Younger Dryas, named for a little Arctic flower called Dryas octopetala. In some places, like Greenland, the freeze took mere months. Other parts of the northern world succumbed more slowly, but the overall process, in geological time, was like the heartbeat of a hummingbird. And then it was quiet.
Dryas octopetala, an Arctic wildflower also known as mountain avens, gave the Younger Dryas its name. Photo: Steinsplitter / Wikimedia Commons
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The onset of the Younger Dryas may have been abrupt, but it wasn’t catastrophic. Humans adapted. Clinging to refugia — pockets of the landscape where conditions were favourable enough to support plants and animals despite the pervasive cold — we endured. Ultimately, we thrived. When the period ended, as abruptly as it had arrived, so began the Holocene.
Like the humans who watched the world change so quickly to white and like their descendants who felt the rapid return of the sun, we are living through a period of dramatic and accelerating changes to our environment.
But ours is a different time, one characterized not by ice, but by fire.
Last fall, while walking down an alleyway in my northern British Columbia town, I ran into an acquaintance. We traded the usual pleasantries and then talk turned, as it so often does, to the weather. It was hot and dry and the skies were choked with the haze from a spate of wildfires that had flared up after the season appeared to be mostly over.
“This isn’t normal,” my friend insisted.
Unlike me, he grew up in the area. As an avid outdoors enthusiast and former mountain guide, he was well-positioned to say what’s normal and what’s not. He seemed unsettled, agitated.
“I have never seen a September like this,” he said.
We are living in the Anthropocene, a term many geologists have adopted to characterize the era where humans are the primary agents of change on the planet. Our actions over the past few centuries have led to the increasingly erratic and unstable climatic systems wreaking havoc across the globe. As we grapple with the impacts of our collective past, we also need to grapple with ourselves as we come to terms with how we process the changes we are experiencing. We are reckoning with a restless world.
Those same wildfires that suffused my little mountain town with the smell of campfire blanketed the city of Vancouver with thick smoke. For a few days, the air quality there plummeted to rank as the worst in the world. It all felt surprising somehow, even as we collectively chided ourselves for being surprised.
Humans are incredibly adaptable — but we crave certainty. We intuitively cling to patterns we’ve seen before to guide our expectations about what a day, month or year might bring. We plan around those expectations: picnics and road trips, soccer games and barbeques.
As the world around us continues to change, we begrudgingly change with it. We plan now for wildfire season — unheard of in my childhood. We slather our kids in sunblock and pack asthma inhalers. We don’t roast marshmallows on crackling fires anymore when we camp out in the woods in the summer because of months-long fire bans. But change is a painful and iterative process and we keep setting a new normal to anchor ourselves to, again and again and again.
Wildfires increasingly shape the structure of our lives, from how and when we interact with the natural world to choices we make about exposing ourselves and our families to smoke. Photo: Mike Graeme / The Narwhal
Our preference for certainty can have profound impacts on mental health. Very little quantitative research has been done but there is a growing consensus that climate impacts — including the anticipation of those we have not yet experienced — are leading to a mental health crisis.
“Climate change has been associated with numerous mental health conditions including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, anxiety, grief, substance use disorders and suicidal ideation among many others,” Elizabeth Wiley, a physician, wrote in the BC Medical Journal in 2019.
We do plan further ahead, peeking into possible futures with predictive climate models to design and build infrastructure we hope will protect our communities from fires and floods and more. But our world is changing as fast as that flickering hummingbird heartbeat and we act as if each pulse will last forever. There’s only so far we can see.
In our temporal myopia, we need to get more comfortable with not knowing — and embrace uncertainty as an essential part of our existence.
Our ancestors found refugia to withstand an icy world that became increasingly hostile to life. Now, as we speed inexorably into a hotter future, we are confronted with a growing list of urgent problems we need to prepare for, and adapt our existence to meet. We need to build our refugia.
David Stainforth, a physicist and climate scientist from Oxford, England, says policy makers and scientists need to pay closer attention to uncertainty — and build for unpredictable outcomes. He told me climate modelling has an important role to play in adaptation, but relying too heavily on a particular set of predictions, however sophisticated the models may be, can inadvertently fall prey to the human tendency to seek certainty.
“It will kind of spuriously get rid of the uncertainty, meaning you can now build your flood defences — but you’re building the flood defences to protect yourself against the future in the model,” he said on a video call last year. “And the future in reality could be very, very different from that. There’s a danger you might misdirect society.”
In his 2023 book, Predicting Our Climate Future, Stainforth makes a case for embracing the uncertainties in climate models as a guiding principle for building resiliency at a community level. As he wrote in an essay for Aeon, uncertainties compound over decades until “almost everything can influence almost everything else.”
“Changes in Arctic sea ice could influence the Indian summer monsoon,” he wrote. “Changes in rainfall in the North Atlantic could influence temperature patterns in central Africa.”
In essence, Stainforth argues we risk catastrophe if we are too reliant on the predictions of complex climate models — which can do many things but not all things — for the decisions we make about how to survive the inevitable changes that are coming. But by embracing uncertainty, he says, we can build refugia capable of withstanding impacts we haven’t yet imagined.
Michele Koppes, a professor in the department of geography at the University of British Columbia, says accepting uncertainty can also provide a path through climate-related grief and anxiety. Koppes studies the effects of climate change on mountains and glaciers and works with communities living with the impacts, which include “dwindling water resources and increases in landslides and natural hazards like outburst floods.” That work began with a focus on the physical changes to the landscape, but has shifted to focus on the human side.
“Who are the people that are living in the closest proximity to these impacts and what are their stories?” she said. “How are they perceiving this and what do they need in order to be resilient and to feel like they can continue their livelihoods and their lives in the face of all this change?”
Illustration: Melanie Garcia / The Narwhal. Photo: Matt Simmons / The Narwhal
She said asking these questions helped her process the loss and helplessness she was feeling as she watched the places she loved melt away. Reframing how we think about climate change asks us to accept uncertainty as a core principle — and while that can be deeply uncomfortable it also offers a truer understanding of the world around us.
“The notion of certainty is a fallacy,” Koppes said. “Or maybe I’ll be more specific: the notion of control is a fallacy.”
“The more I spend time on this earth, the more I recognize how we are just one small part of a complex system,” she explained. “And complex systems are the process of emergent phenomena — you never quite know where it’s going to go. The more we think that we understand or we have control, or we’re certain about one aspect, the further we are from truly knowing everything is a web of relations.”
Faced with the onset of the Younger Dryas, our ancestors probably didn’t sit around arguing about how to stop the ice from advancing. It’s far more likely they took stock of their surroundings and found ways to act quickly to protect the things they cared about most.
“Some people will care about the decreasing glaciers and certain types of wildlife, whether that’s butterflies or polar bears, or whatever,” Stainforth said. “But I don’t think most people do. Their cares are smaller; their cares are more personal. I think the number one thing that we care about with respect to climate change is protecting our societies and our cultures. It’s the world that we have, the world we’ve grown up in, our support structure.”
Stainforth said grounding conversations in how climate change affects what we care about is essential to spurring action — and hope.
“There will be places where the train track needs rebuilding because of landslides, because of flooding or because of drought, or because of changes in the grasses that are growing there,” he said. “These things are going to happen, and they’re going to happen more and more frequently, because that’s what climate change is.”
Responding to impacts will be a steady drain on government resources, he said, which in turn means “we won’t have resources for other things — and that can be culture, it can be transport, it can be sports facilities or it could be health or education.”
“It’s a threat to everything,” Stainforth said. In response, we have to decide what to save. “It’s about building a future that we want,” he said.
Faced with the existential threat posed by the rapidly changing climate, we have to decide what we want to save, climate scientist David Stainforth says. Photo: Matt Simmons / The Narwhal
When American author and activist Rebecca Solnit wrote about hope, she emphasized the value of uncertainty.
“Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act,” she wrote in her 2004 book Hope in the Dark. “When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes — you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others.”
If we believe too firmly in a predictable future, Solnit writes, we risk setting ourselves on a path of apathy. Therein lies grief and anxiety and ruin. But if we accept uncertainty as a fundamental part of change, we can act accordingly.
Koppes believes we can see this belief at work in the next generation. Her students have loosened their grip on certainty, she says, but not in an apathetic way.
“There’s no longer any expectation that one can take a snapshot of time or a memory of place and that we can either get back to that time or that place — or that the environment and the climate was ever in a form of stasis,” she said. “They’re grasping at those components of their environments that are still bringing them joy, knowing that they might not exist for their lifetime.”
In other words, her students are accepting and embodying an existential truth: that everything is always in a state of change. And while we can’t be certain about the risks of the future, we also can’t predict how beautiful or resilient it might be.
One day we might name this period for *Chamaenerion angustifolium,*the fireweed. Or maybe we’ll go for Delonix regia, sometimes called the Phoenix tree. Like our distant relatives, not just enduring but thriving, we’ll rise from the ashes into a world we co-created that protects all that we hold dear.
The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.
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Liberals champion the causes of Canada’s progressive majority to get power, then screw them over to serve their corporate allies
The post Run left, rule right: how Liberals con progressive voters appeared first on The Breach.
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Lake Muskoka gets its first MZO, meaning Ontario can push a new resort past local planning rules
(thenarwhal.ca)
Photo: Fred Lum / The Canadian Press
Summary
- A proposal by developer Cliff Bay Muskoka Corp. includes new condominium and hotel units, restaurants, a spa, an event centre and a marina in the small town of Gravenhurst, Ont., along with particularly controversial water villas over Lake Muskoka.
- The proposal relies on obtaining a Minister’s Zoning Order, or MZO, to bypass local municipal planning rules.
- The MZO was a condition of the purchase when the developers bought it from the province, which one legal expert told The Narwhal could pose a conflict of interest.
Ontario cottage country — famous for its hundreds of clear lakes nestled in the Canadian Shield — is experiencing a first.
The Cliff Bay resort project, proposed for the south end of Lake Muskoka, is planning for a Minister’s Zoning Order, a provincial decree that limits local government oversight in order to move development ahead. It’s known across the province as an MZO although, until now, Muskoka doesn’t appear to have experienced one.
Now that it is, locals and cottagers have a lot to say. Throughout the town of Gravenhurst, Ont., lawn signs urge passersby to “Protect Muskoka Bay.” An attempt at an online public meeting initiated by the developers failed in May 2025, after its capacity of 100 attendees was quickly reached, with many more stuck in the waiting room eager to voice their concerns.
The proposal by developer Cliff Bay Muskoka Corp., part of the KS Group of Companies, shows new condominium and hotel units, two restaurants, a spa, an event centre for weddings and a marina with space for 80 boats. While the developers originally proposed 1,400 units split between hotel and residential space, they told The Narwhal in an email that number has been “significantly reduced,” but didn’t say by how much.
All of this will spread across 33 hectares, or about the size of just under 50 soccer pitches.
A particularly controversial aspect of the Cliff Bay resort plan are additional water villas proposed to be built directly over the lake. Their construction would impact Crown lake-bed, which supports invertebrates and insects that are the backbone of the lake ecosystem.
“The building over water is what gets me the most,” Bruce Parlette, who spends half his time at his cottage on Lake Muskoka, told The Narwhal. Parlette began an online petition opposing the project that has accumulated more than 5,300 signatures over the last year.
By current municipal rules, buildings on the bay typically have to be at least 20 metres, in some cases 30, from the shoreline. “But they’re looking to build all these villas on the water … so the whole shoreline protection, that buffer zone, would be gone,” Parlette said.
The proposal by developer Cliff Bay Muskoka Corp. includes new condominium and hotel units, two restaurants, a spa, an event centre for weddings and a marina — along with villas built over the lake. Illustration: Cliff Bay Muskoka All Season Resort and Residences
So far, Gravenhurst’s leadership has been quiet on the project within its borders. A spokesperson told The Narwhal in an email that the town has not taken a position or issued any news releases or statements as “there hasn’t really been anything to share,” adding that they are awaiting the final proposal for “some form of statement or release.”
When asked about public concerns over the impact of the project, the spokesperson said “the town does not own the property, process or decision here,” adding that council “certainly heard the concerns” at the developer’s public information session and might be able to take an eventual position when the process is further along.
The spokesperson did express council’s desire to see the property, a mix of undeveloped Crown land and a former sanatorium, put to productive use for the community.
Meanwhile, Parlette and advocates at the Muskoka Lakes Association are selling the lawn signs, emailing officials and participating in public meetings about what the association calls the “deeply troubling details of a massive development proposal.”
“Nobody wants to see it done with an MZO, because then it’s going to override any local planning, zoning and decision-making,” Parlette said.
The developer website reads that, “in partnership with the Province of Ontario, we’re redeveloping this iconic site into a vibrant, mixed-use tourist complex,” in a project that reflects their “commitment to thoughtful growth, economic development and preserving the natural beauty of Muskoka for generations to come.”
The Narwhal also sent questions to Infrastructure Ontario, which sold the land to Cliff Bay, and the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing. Neither of the provincial agencies involved responded to detailed questions about the sale of the land, the Minister’s Zoning Order and public concerns about the impact of the project.
Muskoka’s first MZO and the Doug Ford government’s track record using them
A Minister’s Zoning Order is a powerful control tool. It lets the provincial Housing Minister unilaterally decide how land is used and developed by bypassing local municipal planning and public consultation processes that would otherwise be required under the Planning Act.
After searching publicly available government records, The Narwhal was unable to find evidence of any other MZOs being issued in the Muskoka area, including in the three major towns of Gravenhurst, Bracebridge, Huntsville and smaller hubs like Bala and Port Carling.
Phil Pothen, legal counsel and program manager of land use and Ontario environment at advocacy organization Environmental Defence, told The Narwhal the Muskoka proposal raises concerns because the developers stated publicly that obtaining a Minister’s Zoning Order was a condition of the purchase and sale agreement between Infrastructure Ontario and the developers.
“It would actually place the province in something of a conflict of interest,” Pothen said, “in the sense that [the province] is both the landowner who stands to gain more if the land is more highly valued and the regulator who’s actually making the decision.”
Discussion of the MZO came at a public information meeting held over Zoom in July 2025, a redo after the over-capacity attempt that May. There, Kirill Soloviev, head of strategic planning for Cliff Bay, told hundreds of attendees that, as part of the deal for the developer to buy the property from the province, a “Ministerial Zoning Order was included, and now it’s a formal part of the transaction.” Bob List, a land use and environmental planner acting as a consultant for the project, echoed the statement.
The Cliff Bay project’s developer wrote in an email to The Narwhal that a Minister’s Zoning Order was a “necessity” because mixed land use — mostly recreational and commercial — is currently not recognized in existing zoning for the property. Ensuring a Minister’s Zoning Order would come through was essential to the decision to purchase the land, as without it, the decision to rezone the property for the purposes of the resort would have been left with the township, and not guaranteed.
In 2024, the Office of the Auditor General of Ontario conducted an audit of Minister’s Zoning Orders in the province and found that between 2017 and 2023, 114 were issued. With the Doug Ford government first elected in 2018, that average of 23 per year represents a 17-fold increase from the prior two decades. The audit concluded that these orders “have been used to override municipal planning.”
The audit also found that most information packages prepared for the office of the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing as it evaluated each order “did not contain the kind of detailed risk information normally factored into municipal zoning decisions.” That included key information about the capacity of local roads, sewers and other infrastructure; the risks posed by natural hazards and the environment; and likely financial burdens to regions, municipalities and taxpayers.
These orders cannot be appealed at the Ontario Land Tribunal. Of the 25 Minister’s Zoning Orders the auditor general scrutinized for the report, they found that half showed “no evidence the ministry engaged with any affected Indigenous communities” prior to issuing the order.
“This is a threat, frankly, to the rule of law in Ontario,” Pothen said. “It’s a process that is much more susceptible to impropriety than a conventional planning process where multiple individuals all need to be lined up in support of a proposal.”
What’s next for Cliff Bay resort in Ontario cottage country?
Right now, the area surrounding the site boasts a tree-lined shore spotted with cottages, ranging from quaint to luxurious. Docks surround the large, clear blue bay, with Muskoka chairs set up with views across the lake. Not far from the water on the site, the eerie, now-closed hospital building sits abandoned and overgrown.
Maintaining shorelines is critical to ecosystems and the wildlife they support; it’s where fish spawn, turtles lay eggs and birds nest. Healthy shoreline vegetation also filters rainwater and can even limit flooding, a risk that is increasing in the face of climate change.
In a response to questions from The Narwhal, the Cliff Bay developers said that upcoming changes to their plans will add more features for public use, like the beaches and public trails Soloviev mentioned during the public meetings, and address public comments they’ve received from people reaching out to them.
Phil Pothen, legal counsel and program manager of land use and Ontario environment at Environmental Defence, says MZOs allow development projects to “leapfrog and circumvent” the established planning laws of a municipality. Photo: Ramona Leitao / The Narwhal
In an email, they said no “significant or unusual environmental impacts are anticipated,” as sewage will be processed at an existing local treatment facility and because “there are no significant natural heritage features on the site.” The developers said they anticipate an updated draft of the Minister’s Zoning Order will be “available for further public review, Indigenous consultation and government processing in several months.”
Despite these efforts, Minister’s Zoning Orders do not come with any legally binding requirement to consult the public — a point project planner List repeated several times at the July 2025 Zoom meeting.
Pothen said the zoning orders provide a direct route for the minister to “leapfrog and circumvent the established planning laws of a municipality” and to approve a development even if it doesn’t conform with the official plan or with the government’s own provincial planning statement.
The Minister’s Zoning Order process does involve collecting comment from municipal governments. But, according to the auditor general’s report, there is no legislated requirement for the ministry to satisfy any municipal requests for specific conditions prior to the orders being issued.
The Cliff Bay development will have to go through several environmental checks before being built — including a posting on the environmental registry of Ontario for public comment if the proposal goes through.
There are cases where Minister’s Zoning Orders have been useful, Pothen told The Narwhal, such as during COVID-19 lockdowns, when they allowed for quick creation of emergency shelters.
“They are meant to be used, in our view, for very extreme and emergency circumstances,” Pothen said. “What’s being posed here, it’s really just a way to circumvent the rule, which raises the problem.”
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