Spring is crunch-time when you work at a remote fishing or hunting lodge. Crews are busy updating cabins, repairing generators, getting boats in the water, and preparing to welcome clients. These same activities are unfolding across the Seal River Watershed in northern Manitoba. And this year, they come with an added sense of opportunity.

A new proposal to protect the Seal River Watershed was recently released for public comment on the EngageMB website.

Designed by the Sayisi Dene, Northlands Denesuline, Barren Lands, and O-Pipon-Na-Piwin Cree First Nations, the Manitoba government, and the government of Canada, with input from stakeholders and the public, the plan calls for creating a network of protected areas across 50,000 sq. kilometres of healthy lands and waters.

These new designations — a combination of Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area, provincial parks, and a national park reserve — would honour Dene and Cree cultures and sustain caribou, grizzlies, and polar bears.

On Nov. 9, 2017, I stood in the Manitoba legislature and made a proposal whose time had not yet arrived.

I asked the chamber to protect the entire Seal River Watershed, roughly 50,000 square kilometres of intact boreal forest and tundra in northern Manitoba, a complete hydrological system running unbroken from its headwaters to Hudson Bay. No roads. No mines. No power corridors.

One of the last large watersheds left on Earth is still doing what watersheds are meant to do.

It was not a partisan proposal. It was not, that day, a particularly prominent one. The chamber was nearly empty. The proposal did not pass; it did not fail; it simply sat there. Within weeks, The Northern Miner picked it up and brought the idea to the national mining industry. Almost nobody else did.