An alarming trend to watch:
Canada’s National Observer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Three whales were reportedly struck by vessels in northern B.C. waters over a 10-day period last month, raising West Coast humpback researchers’ concerns over the risk shipping poses to the marine mammals.
Continue reading Research groups sound alarm after three whales reportedly struck by ships off West Coast
By Matt Simmons, The Narwhal, Local Journalism Initiative reporter
The town of Kitimat, B.C., is folded into a forested valley, tucked back from where the ocean meets the land at the end of a roughly 100-kilometre long inlet. The hub of the community is a jumbled complex of malls with a handful of shops, restaurants and offices serving the population of around 8,000. You can’t see the ocean from here or the sprawling industrial complexes that crowd the waterfront.
Kitimat was settled on Haisla lands in the 1950s, a planned community built on a promise of prosperity from the Aluminum Company of Canada, also known as Alcan. The town was designed to serve the company’s energy-intensive smelter, which would be powered by a dam built on the other side of a range of snow-capped mountains. Now owned by international mining giant Rio Tinto, the smelter’s smokestacks have been puffing ever since.
Continue reading Kitimat: Life in a northern B.C. boomtown
By Matt Simmons, The Narwhal, Local Journalism Initiative reporter
Apart from a little pocket of land on the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, Blueberry River First Nations territory is an industrial wasteland. At a walking pace, it only takes about three minutes to stumble onto some kind of development. It’s a land of pipelines, clearcuts and gas rigs. But things are about to change.
After winning a hard-fought case before the B.C. Supreme Court in 2021, the Treaty 8 nation reached a final agreement with the province on Jan. 18. The agreement charts a path forward from a past where the province excluded the community from resource decisions and infringed on the nation’s constitutionally protected rights. Two days later, B.C. signed agreements with four neighbouring nations: Doig River, Halfway River, Saulteau and Fort Nelson. Collectively, the agreements represent a way out of conflict and a shared goal to heal the land.
Continue reading Blueberry River First Nations beat B.C. in court. Now everything’s changing
By Matt Simmons, The Narwhal, Local Journalism Initiative reporter
For more than a decade, successive B.C. governments have thrown their hats behind an industry hellbent on getting gas out of the ground and across the Pacific to Asian markets.
LNG Canada, a liquefaction and export facility under construction in Kitimat, is poised to be the first project to do so. As the facility inches closer towards a goal of firing up operations in 2025, its partner companies are eyeing investment for an approved expansion, which would double the amount of gas processed at the plant.
Continue reading LNG Canada eyes electrification as planned expansion would send B.C. emissions skyrocketingBy Matt Simmons, The Narwhal, Local Journalism Initiative reporter
B.C. Premier David Eby’s newly appointed cabinet is about to decide the fate of a handful of proposed projects, each of which comes with a slew of implications to biodiversity and climate.
While provincial ministers wrestle with the decisions, delegates from across the country and around the world are gathered at COP15, the United Nations biodiversity conference in Montreal. The aim of the conference is to secure government commitments to slow the global biodiversity crisis underway — the crisis is sometimes referred to as the sixth mass extinction and is the first to be human-caused.
Continue reading B.C. will soon decide the fate of four projects with big climate and biodiversity impacts
