Legislation to create Manitoba-Indigenous Crown corporation pending as some First Nations express concerns

Legislation to create a new Crown corporation is hung up, in part, on First Nations’ concerns the entity would override the government’s duty to consult individual nations before launching projects.

“We’re having challenges, I think, creating an endorsement or support for… the draft legislation,” said Grand Chief Jerry Daniels of the Southern Chiefs’ Organization that represents 33 First Nations.

Negotiations are underway on legislation to create the Manitoba Crown-Indigenous Corp., which will work with Ottawa’s Major Projects Office and Arctic Gateway Group on the proposed expansion of the Port of Churchill.

The southern chiefs group is part of a board that meets regularly with the provincial government; Indigenous Futures Minister Ian Bushie deemed the group the interim Manitoba Crown-Indigenous Corp.

Saying ‘no’ to AI data centre a huge win for Manitoba — and Kinew

It’s a tale of two provinces — and two artificial intelligence data centre mega-projects.

Efforts underway to determine ecological, economic benefits of Winnipeg’s trees

How a municipality cares for its trees — especially under increasing climate pressures — is just as critical to forest health as planting.

Limited interest in latest oil and gas lease sale for Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) — Two corporations bid on a handful of leases during the latest oil and gas lease sale in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on Friday, a showing critics described as tepid but one that further opens the door to possible development in the pristine region.

The Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, a state corporation that already has leases in the refuge's coastal plain, had the winning bid on three tracts and Hex Energy LLC on two, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management announced. The tracts cover about 72,000 acres. Nearly 690,000 acres had been offered. Winning bids totaled $3.7 million.

The federal agency's state director, Kevin Pendergast, said a “new era of active leasing and exploration is just beginning to unfold.”

While there is no active drilling underway, the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority’s board last month authorized additional spending for efforts including a seismic survey program aimed at locating oil formations, as well as lease purchases in this latest sale. A message seeking comment from Hex Energy was not immediately returned.

Ottawa pumps the brakes on proposed changes to major project environmental reviews

OTTAWA - The federal government is pumping the brakes on its proposed changes to how major projects are reviewed, and says it won't table legislation on the changes until the fall.

Last month Ottawa released two discussion papers which proposed, among other things, approving major projects before they’re reviewed and exempting certain projects from laws meant to protect species at risk.

It also proposed taking the responsibility for reviewing pipelines, transmission lines and offshore renewable energy projects away from the Impact Assessment Agency and handing it to the Canada Energy Regulator.

The federal government has said it has been told by industry that the level of expertise on energy projects that lived at the Canada Energy Regulator couldn’t be found at the Impact Assessment Agency.

Wilderness committee draws up plan to restore Nopiming after 2025 wildfire

One year ago, wildfires severely damaged cottage communities, backcountry campgrounds and popular canoe routes in Nopiming Provincial Park in eastern Manitoba.

Manitoba Wilderness Committee campaigner Eric Reder says as the park and its boreal ecosystem recover, which will take decades, the province should embrace the opportunity to curtail industrial activity in the park and establish more robust protection for its natural and recreational assets.

“The Nopiming Provincial Park that existed prior to 2025 is gone,” a Wilderness Committee report released Thursday said. “Only an all-of-society recovery solution can bring back what we’ve lost.”

The wilderness committee says that solution involves a moratorium on new industrial activity, a commitment to conserve habitat for caribou herds, increased engagement with First Nations whose land overlaps with the park and investment in recreational infrastructure, including backcountry trails and canoe routes.

Some brands say their jeans are eco-friendly. Here’s how to find a pair that’s actually sustainable

NEW YORK (AP) — Your favorite pair of jeans may have traveled around the world through cotton farms, dye houses, wash facilities and factories before ending up in your closet. The denim may have never been worn but it is stonewashed, sanded, chemically faded or laser-treated to look like it.

Those processes can require significant amounts of water, energy and chemicals — part of the reason denim has become a growing target for sustainability efforts across the fashion industry, which is among the world’s biggest producers of greenhouse gas emissions.

Brands are responding to wider awareness by marketing their jeans as “sustainable,” touting regenerative cotton, recycled fibers and low-water manufacturing techniques. But figuring out if that's true is far more complicated. For one, sustainability is difficult to define — and there isn't a universal set of standards.

Last week, Chinese fast-fashion giant Shein acquired Everlane, a brand known for transparency and sustainability efforts, highlighting broader tensions over scale and affordability. Improvements in sustainable processes typically cost more, making it difficult for companies with fast production cycles and low prices to adopt them widely. Consumers are left to navigate a complicated web of tradeoffs involving farming practices, chemical processes, labor ethics and a wide range of prices.

Reported Germany-Canada LNG deal would bolster investment case for Ksi Lisims: Eby

A deal to supply Canadian liquefied natural gas to Germany would be a key step toward the partners behind the Ksi Lisims project deciding to go ahead with their $10-billion West Coast plant and export terminal, British Columbia Premier David Eby said Tuesday.

Eby made his remarks after multiple outlets reported German firm SEFE is poised to buy gas shipped from Ksi Lisims and a day before federal Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson is scheduled to make an announcement about international energy exports in Vancouver.

The B.C. premier said his government has long been supportive of the project being pursued by the Nisga'a Nation alongside Houston-based Western LNG and Rockies LNG, a group of Canadian natural gas producers. The companies and the First Nation declined to comment on Tuesday.

"We look forward to celebrating the formal announcement of this with the Nisga'a, with the federal government. It's an example of the work we're doing together and we're super proud of it," Eby told reporters after a meeting with western premiers in Kananaskis, Alta.

Brazilian government commits $617.5M to Amazon ecological investment

SAO PAULO (AP) — The Brazilian government said Monday it has committed 3.1 billion reais ($617.5 million) to foster ecological investment in the Amazon region, as part of a plan to expand a federal program known as Eco Invest that was announced during last year’s COP30 — the annual United Nations climate summit it hosted last year.

The resources are expected to go toward businesses that support sustainable tourism, improve infrastructure in the Amazon and expand the “bioeconomy” — the so-called economic activity based on natural resources that preserves the forest.

The model uses a blended finance approach in which the National Treasury lends funds to banks at an annual rate of 1%. In return, banks must mobilize at least four times that amount in private investment, with foreign investors accounting for at least 60%. So far, the program has committed 140 billion reais ($28 billion) in combined public and private resources.

The National Treasury allocated 3.1 billion reais ($617.5 million) Monday and eight banks committed another 10.1 billion reais ($2 billion) in the latest auction of the Eco Invest program, the Ministry of Environment said.

Proponents of solar power push for provincial infrastructure investment to boost grid resilience

In the early 1970s, licence plates were stamped with the slogan “Sunny Manitoba” — a nod to long summer days, crisp blue winter skies and frequent sun dogs reflecting off of blinding white snow. While the slogan later changed, Manitoba’s ranking as Canada’s second-sunniest province has not.

Despite that sunlit reputation, solar power — one of the most-developed renewable energy sources — makes up just a small fraction of the province’s electricity grid.

“It’s extremely marginal, especially when you compare to other jurisdictions like Alberta and Saskatchewan,” said James Wilt, policy development manager at Climate Action Team Manitoba.

Manitoba boasts a predominantly emissions-free grid, with 97 per cent of its power generated by a network of hydroelectric dams. But the provincial utility, Manitoba Hydro, has forecasted that its once-abundant renewable energy source will soon fall short. There is growing demand for power amid the electrification of sectors like transportation and heating, and the rapidly growing interest in developing electricity-hungry data centres. Combined with more unpredictable water levels owing to climate factors like extreme drought, it’s all prompted the utility to warn that capacity could run out as soon as 2030.

Vast marine conservation reserve, bigger than P.E.I., to protect B.C. central coast

An enormous national marine conservation reserve is being established on British Columbia's central coast, spanning an area larger than Prince Edward Island.

The protected area, named Mia-yaltwa Ha’lidzogm hoon, is the result of an agreement between six coastal First Nations and the provincial and federal governments.

An official says the area is around 6700 sq. km and will be operated by Parks Canada along with its Indigenous and federal partners.

The reserve is within the Great Bear Sea, a diverse marine ecosystem that covers more than half of B.C.'s coast and includes glass sponge reefs, salmon, killer whales and migrating humpbacks.

As permafrost thaws, some headwaters in Canada’s North turn orange and toxic: study

Ancient bedrock exposed by disappearing permafrost is releasing toxic metals into Canada's northern rivers, a new study says, with once-pristine subarctic streams now comparable in some cases to highly acidic, contaminated mining sites.

The findings out of Yukon point to an "unfolding environmental disaster," one co-author said, and adds to alarm over the rapid climate-fuelled changes in the North.

"We don't know the end point, but there's nothing about this that gives me any feeling of like, 'oh, we're going to be OK'," said co-author Sean Carey, a professor at McMaster University.

"I'm not even a gloomy person. This looks pretty gloomy."

Hydro advisory circle brings ‘wealth of Indigenous perspectives’

The board of Manitoba Hydro has appointed an Indigenous advisory circle as part of the Crown corporation’s reconciliation efforts.

Former Fox Lake Cree Nation chief and Keeyask Hydropower Limited Partnership board chair Robert Wavey will co-chair the group with Manitoba Hydro board chairman Jamie Wilson. The provincial government ordered the creation of the advisory circle in its 2023 mandate letter to Hydro’s board.

“I think we wanted to get everything right on this one,” Wilson said when asked why it has taken more than two years to appoint Indigenous advisers.

“This is a pretty fantastic group of people from a diverse background, including communities that are directly impacted by Hydro development in the past,” the first Indigenous chairman of the Manitoba Hydro board said in an interview Tuesday.

Alberta’s timing targets for West Coast pipeline ‘best-case scenario’: CIBC analysts

CALGARY - The targeted timeline the Alberta government set out for construction to begin on a potential new West Coast oil pipeline is ambitious, with many obstacles yet to clear, analysts at CIBC World Markets wrote in a recent report.

The province aims to submit a proposal to the federal major projects office by July 1, have it designated a project of national interest by Oct. 1 and get shovels in the ground as early as Sept. 1, 2027. Oil could begin to flow around 2033 or 2034, a provincial official told a media background briefing last week.

"While we are encouraged by the continued sense of urgency, we would characterize these timelines as optimistic and reflective of a best-case scenario," analysts Robert Catellier and Rogan Anantharajah wrote in a Monday industry update.

The Alberta government laid out those targets Friday after it and Ottawa finalized one of the last outstanding elements of the energy accord they signed late last year: an agreement on how the market price on carbon is to gradually increase to $130 a tonne by 2040.

AFN chief warns against changes to major projects development rules, calls for debate

OTTAWA - The national chief of the Assembly of First Nations says proposed changes to major project development rules are "not acceptable" and risk trampling on the rights of First Nations.

The federal government is proposing to grant authority to review interprovincial pipelines and transmission lines, and offshore renewable energy projects, to the Canada Energy Regulator instead of the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada.

The proposal, which will undergo a 30-day consultation process, would undo the move the Liberals made eight years ago to create the Impact Assessment Agency as a one-stop shop for all national project reviews.

National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak told The Canadian Press the proposed changes "demonstrate a pattern of exclusion" and she rejects the compressed timeline to submit feedback.

Economic growth now tops environment as priority in energy policy, poll suggests

OTTAWA - More Canadians now say economic growth should be a bigger priority in Canada's energy policy than protecting the environment, a new Angus Reid Institute report suggests.

The pollster released a report Monday indicating 61 per cent of Canadians now see economic growth as the biggest priority in energy policy. The question offered two options on the top priority shaping federal energy policy: economic growth or environmental protection.

That's a shift in public opinion since seven years ago, when the same question had 55 per cent of Canadians saying the environment should be the top priority in energy policy.

Shachi Kurl, Angus Reid Institute president, said climate change was a top issue for voters in both the 2019 and 2021 elections, but opinion research shows the sense of urgency surrounding it has been declining in recent years.

Nature is a big part of the Canadian economy — but how big? We crunched the numbers.

Canada’s vast landscape, which boasts 20 per cent of the world’s freshwater, a quarter of global wetlands and 28 per cent of its boreal forests, is critical to its economy. Natural resource industries — forests, farms, fisheries, mining and oil and gas — together make up approximately seven per cent of Canada’s gross domestic product.

Tension exists between expanding these industrialized sectors and protecting the ecosystems on which they depend.

In Manitoba, some worry protecting the Seal River Watershed, which spans more than 50,000 square kilometres in the province’s north, will hinder opportunities in mineral resources and hydro; to the east, critical mineral mining ambitions in Ontario’s Ring of Fire clash with the protection of the Hudson and James Bay Lowlands, the second-largest carbon sink on earth; and in B.C., Coastal First Nations have protested that lifting the large tanker ban through their waters will endanger the protected Great Bear Rainforest.

These tensions make it easy to frame nature as the antithesis of economic activity, if it’s always put in opposition to projects that are described as growing Canada’s wealth, sovereignty and security.

Conservation shouldn’t come at the cost of access

The Seal River Watershed in northern Manitoba is one of the last great intact ecosystems in North America.