For more than a year, a major industrial project on B.C.’s south coast has been violating its environmental permit on a near-daily basis. The pollution flowed into a creek that empties into Howe Sound — a fragile recovering ecosystem that UNESCO designated a biosphere region. The provincial body responsible for enforcement, the BC Energy Regulator, knew. It issued a warning letter in December 2024. It assessed no penalty. It ordered no remediation. It did not require work to stop. And the violations continued.

That is the picture painted by a Postmedia investigation published May 5, 2026, in the Vancouver Sun. The reporter analyzed FortisBC’s own publicly posted weekly water-quality reports. The numbers are not in dispute. The regulator’s inaction is not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether this counts as “rigorous oversight,” as the BC Energy Regulator told Postmedia — or whether it counts as a regulator captured by the industry it is supposed to police.

The Numbers

FortisBC Woodfibre Pipeline Violations — By the Postmedia Audit

  • 365 million litres: volume of effluent discharged into East Creek above the permitted limit between January 2025 and March 2026.
  • 1.5 million litres/day: the original permit limit for wastewater discharge.
  • Almost every day: permitted volume exceeded between March 2025 and end of March 2026.
  • 35+ days: volume exceeded by more than double the allowable amount.
  • 10x permitted level: dissolved copper concentration on at least three days — copper is acutely toxic to aquatic life.
  • 16+ weekly tests: dissolved copper above provincial water-quality standards between November 2024 and October 2025.
  • December 2024: BC Energy Regulator issues warning letter. No penalty. No remediation order.
  • February 2026: FortisBC requests an amendment to quadruple its discharge volume and nearly double its allowable copper concentration.

The discharge flows into East Creek, on the eastern shore of Howe Sound — called Átl’ka7tsem in one of the Squamish Nation’s names for the inlet. Howe Sound was designated a UNESCO biosphere region in 2021, the third in Canada. It is home to glass sponges — rare, fragile filter feeders that scientists once believed had gone extinct, and that are highly vulnerable to dissolved metals because they process huge volumes of water.

The Experts Were Warning Years Ago

Tracey Saxby, executive director of the environmental non-profit My Sea To Sky, told the Vancouver Sun her group’s experts had warned before construction began that water inflows into the tunnel were being underestimated.

“Fortis has failed to comply with their permit since as early as September 2024, I believe, by dumping pollution loaded with heavy metals into the Átl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound biosphere, which is a fragile and recovering ecosystem.”

— Tracey Saxby, My Sea To Sky, Vancouver Sun, May 5, 2026

Vicki Marlatt, a professor of toxicology at SFU who provided expert testimony in earlier permit challenges, was blunt: continuous discharge of copper and aluminum above acute B.C. water-quality guidelines “has the potential to cause adverse effects in aquatic life in East Creek and downstream in Howe Sound.” Copper and aluminum, she explained, accumulate in the environment and do not degrade. Marlatt also noted that FortisBC’s “reference samples” for baseline contamination were taken from a brownfield industrial site — potentially already contaminated — not from a true upstream reference site.

The Regulator’s Defence

The BC Energy Regulator told Postmedia that staff have been providing “rigorous oversight and ongoing inspections.” It stated the December 2024 warning letter “established a documented compliance record and provides a clear basis for escalating enforcement should non-compliance persist or increase.”

The non-compliance did persist. By the regulator’s own data, the violations continued through 2025 and into 2026 — including dissolved-copper readings 10x the permitted level. Yet enforcement was not escalated. The regulator told the Sun the excess effluent posed “minimal to negligible risks” to the environment, and that halting construction was not required because the wastewater discharge was needed “to prevent the tunnel from flooding and the destruction of tunnelling equipment.”

Translated: the regulator concluded that protecting the contractor’s tunnelling equipment outweighed enforcing the legal permit limits for over a year, in a UNESCO biosphere region, while warning letters went unanswered.

And Now — A Request to Quadruple the Pollution

In February 2026, FortisBC formally applied to amend its permit. The application would increase the allowable wastewater discharge by 4x — and nearly double the allowable concentration of dissolved copper. The justification offered: the company’s own “reference samples” from the site already contained “elevated concentrations” of the metal. (Reference samples Marlatt called scientifically unreliable because they were taken from contaminated industrial ground.)

The amendment is currently “under review” by the regulator, with First Nations consultations pending. In effect, the proposed solution to a year of violations is to legalize them retroactively.

Why This Is an NDP Story

The BC Energy Regulator (formerly the BC Oil and Gas Commission) is the provincial agency responsible for permitting and enforcing oil and gas project compliance in B.C. Its leadership, board appointments, and policy direction are set by the government of the day — and that government has been the BC NDP since 2017. The Eby government has tied itself rhetorically to climate accountability, environmental stewardship, and Indigenous reconciliation. Howe Sound sits in territory of the Squamish Nation. The biosphere is a UNESCO designation Canada itself sponsored.

And under that government, an LNG-feeder pipeline project has been dumping 365 million litres of excess pollution — loaded with heavy metals — into that biosphere for more than a year, while the provincial regulator issued a warning letter and walked away.

If the regulator’s calculation is that environmental rules are flexible when the cost of enforcement is too high for a major project, then the rules don’t exist. They are decoration. The Vancouver Sun investigation has now made the failure a matter of public record. What the Eby government does next — deny the amendment, order an independent audit, replace the regulator’s leadership, or quietly approve the increase — will tell British Columbians whether the words “environmental protection” in NDP speeches still mean anything at all.