Investigations

Sun Life and Manulife have made net-zero promises but continue investing billions of dollars in fossil fuels, new data obtained by Canada's National Observer reveals.

New research connects disease to the fish farms and the threat to wild salmon. Who wins this epic fight? Fisheries and Oceans managers working with the fish farm industry? Or First Nations and a tenacious whale scientist?

The Fisheries and Oceans minister, following a recommendation from the Cohen Commission, orders fish farms in the Discovery Islands to close. By 2023, they will be gone. The industry — Mowi and Cermaq go to court to challenge the decision. The court rules in their favour. But it isn’t a done deal — it just means the minister has to make some changes before making the order. Meanwhile, First Nations are also moving to get rid of fish farms on their territories.

The Sea Shepherd research vessel got a rude welcome when it arrived in Victoria, B.C., for its third year of working with Alex Morton. What had been a quick, routine customs event took a menacing turn.

Nova Scotia's Donkin coal mine reopened this week. But it won't be required to follow federal cap-and-trade rules, meaning greenhouse gas emissions from the site will continue unchecked.

More than a dozen roof cave-ins, 152 warnings, 119 compliance orders, 37 administrative penalties and a series of provincial stop-work orders. Nova Scotia's Donkin coal mine reopened this week, begging the question: what has changed?

Alex and Hereditary Chief George Quocksister Jr. used GoPro cameras and divers to record what was happening underneath the fish farms. When the footage was shown to First Nations communities, there was shock and sadness, then anger.

Newfoundland and Labrador is betting its financial future on the hundreds of millions of barrels of oil buried off its coast. Here's what that looks like.

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society offers to send a research ship to B.C. to help Alex Morton with her studies. At first, she rejects the offer as too provocative. Sea Shepherd is a contentious environmental organization. But Alex needs to get close to the salmon farms, so she changes her mind.

As her day to testify at the Cohen Commission arrived, Alex Morton was full of adrenaline. She could tell people what she had been seeing with the salmon for the past two decades. And she would reveal what she had found in the 500,000 pages of government documents submitted to the inquiry.

The salmon had been returning to the Fraser River for hundreds of years. In 2009, they didn’t. Or barely did. Nine million sockeye salmon were missing. Stephen Harper, prime minister at the time, was not a man known for promoting science, but the catastrophic loss forced him to call an inquiry. For the first time, there would be money, time and people testifying under oath about events leading to the disappearance of the wild salmon.

A federal financial intervention program created new water and housing hardships for at least 65 First Nations while it was in place, a Canada's National Observer investigation finds.

When Alex left the orcas behind to study sea lice, she knew she couldn’t be everywhere, so she started to gather an army of sea lice helpers — citizen scientists from all over northern Vancouver Island willing to collect smolts and count sea lice for her research. Jody Erickson and Farlyn Campbell started as teenagers and were devastated to see baby fish with dozens of sea lice eating through their bodies.

Canada says it can repurpose LNG infrastructure for hydrogen exports. "It's so factually incorrect that it kind of drives you crazy to hear people say it," says hydrogen expert Paul Martin.

If you take a boat along the coast of northern British Columbia, you’ll see towering deciduous trees and snow-capped peaks, small islands, big islands and scattered throughout it all … fish farms. Dozens of them. Alexandra Morton remembers their arrival — remembers the Gold Rush when anyone who wanted a fish farm license got one. And she remembers how the government tricked coastal people into pointing out the best wild salmon habitat.