B.C. cities left in limbo as province quietly abandons Bear Smart oversight

BC abandons Bear Smart

In Whistler, it's used to help promote high-altitude safaris, where tourists catch glimpses of bears foraging in alpine meadows.

In Naramata, the community uses it to advertise the wine region’s “proven record of safe coexistence.”

And in Tofino, it has become the difference between regular calls to the Conservation Officer Service and the necessity of management by bullet.

For 15 years, B.C.’s Bear Smart Community Program has been the province’s blueprint for reducing urban bear deaths. By transforming bears from a liability into a symbol of an authentic, wild B.C., it has also boosted a nearly $5-billion outdoor tourism sector.

The program’s success has attracted worldwide interest, from the Italian Alps to Florida’s wetlands.

But behind the scenes, the program’s oversight mechanisms and capacity to grow have stalled. Internal documents reveal that the very province that invented the Bear Smart model has quietly let it fall into a bureaucratic void, with lead roles unstaffed and applications piling up.

Experts inside and outside the government worry the situation has left B.C.’s premier wildlife safety initiative in a state of limbo—leaving municipalities to navigate a “cycle of killing” alone.

Ellie Lamb, dubbed by some the “Bear Whisperer,” has spent nearly three decades working as a bear-viewing guide while serving on a number of non-profit boards aimed at reducing human-bear conflict in places like Bella Coola, Whistler and Vancouver’s North Shore.

She said failing to staff the Bear Smart program at the provincial level threatens its expansion and weakens the legitimacy of the communities that have already signed up.

“That’s supposed to be our gold standard,” said Lamb. “But if there’s nobody overseeing it… then it would be kind of a farce.”

A proven track record and marketing boon

First rolled out 15 years ago in Kamloops, the Bear Smart program has been approved in a dozen B.C. municipalities.

To get certified, a community must meet six criteria, including a hazard assessment of conflict areas, a community education program, and bylaws that fine residents for leaving attractants unsecured.

The combination has been shown to be extremely effective.

In Naramata, six to eight bears were killed every year before the municipality took action in 2012.

The small Okanagan municipality, which is known for its wineries, provided bear-proof containers, banned residents from putting out their garbage before 5:30 a.m., and changed the day waste was picked up to better align with people’s schedules.

Education programs were introduced at local schools, and garbage audits ensured residents remained compliant with the new measures.

Within a year, the number of calls to the Conservation Officer Service dropped to 12 from 100, and in 2014, the community became the sixth in B.C. to be awarded official Bear Smart status.

A decade later, Port Moody, Tofino and the District of North Vancouver were announced as the latest Bear Smart communities—joining Kamloops and Naramata, as well as Coquitlam, Lions Bay, New Denver, Castlegar, Port Hardy, Port Alberni and Whistler.

Before it was certified, Tofino saw about 10 bears killed every year. In the past two years, that number has dropped to zero, said Tofino Mayor Dan Law.

“We had a problem we wanted to solve. And we did that,” he said. “Without it, wildlife and people suffer.”

The program has also had some obvious benefits for tourism.

“If you’re at a campsite at any town in B.C. and a conservation officer has to shoot a bear in front of 20 kids, that’s not a great marketing ploy,” said Law.

The mayor said many people these days take ethical considerations into account in deciding where they go.

In 2022, tourism added $9.7 billion to B.C.’s GDP. The next year, nearly half of that figure came from outdoor and adventure tourism.

The Bear Smart program plays a part in that growth, and in places like Whistler, it has been extensively used to promote tourism, according to Coun. Arthur De Jong.

He said it’s clear the resort municipality has benefited from tourists who come to see bears—either dangling their feet over the bruins from ski lifts or peeking at them from a distance while on official tours.

“It has a powerful, albeit subjective, presence if you’re trying to build a nature-based program like we are in Whistler-Blackcomb,” said De Jong. “It’s kind of like seeing a lion in Africa.”

Law said Tofino didn’t embark on the Bear Smart program for marketing reasons. But the mayor said getting the designation has had an economic spin-off for Tofino, just as it has in Whistler.

“The best tourism policy is to be authentic, to be caring, to embrace stewarding our region,” he said. “It has been so successful.”

Made-in-B.C. solution goes international

Between 1992 and 1996, B.C. residents reported more than 41,000 cases of human-black bear conflicts. The result: Authorities killed nearly 4,250 bears.

At the time, “problem bears” were managed by shooting them, said Lana Ciarniello, a research scientist and principal at Aklak Wildlife Consulting in Campbell River.

“They were managed by a bullet,” she said. “So the numbers of bears we were killing each year was extremely high.”

In 1997, Ciarniello wrote a landmark study that would change the way governments approached conflict between humans and bears.

A few years later, the B.C. government approached the researcher with a contract to develop a new community program.

She was busy with a PhD, so her colleagues ended up taking the contract, with Ciarniello’s research forming the bedrock of a new approach that attempted to see the world through ursine eyes.

The approach shifted blame away from the bear and focused on how communities failed to manage attractants like garbage or local apple trees — food sources that could put the animals in direct conflict with people.

“It’s from the bear’s perspective. It’s what is the probability that this area will turn a good bear into a problem bear? And how do we manage that?” Ciarniello said.

After Kamloops became the first Bear Smart community in 2011, the idea quickly spread beyond B.C.’s borders. Today, some version of the program can be found in communities in Alberta, Ontario, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Virginia, Washington, North Carolina and Florida.

“All the researchers are looking at it,” Ciarniello said. “It’s becoming huge.”

Outside North America, Italy and Greece have looked to emulate the Bear Smart model after conservation efforts brought back the two countries’ bear population from the brink of extinction.

In 2021, a Marsican brown bear walked into a ski resort town in Italy’s Abruzzo region, entered a bakery and ate a batch of biscuits. The case gained widespread media attention. Two years later, the beloved bear was hit by a car and died.

Ciarniello said a group of Italian researchers recently visited B.C. to learn how to better avoid conflict.

Ciarniello took them to Pemberton Meadows north of Whistler, where she is helping to develop solutions for farmers, including the installation of 30 electric fences around 40 acres of land.

“In some areas, you’re going to build fences. In some areas, you’re going to remove trees, open up lines of sight. It’s a site-specific solution,” said Ciarniello.

Whatever the measures, the desired outcomes remain the same: Reduce conflicts and make people feel more secure and less “bearanoid” as the researcher put it.

Ciarniello said the province’s oversight role in the program is “critical” to ensure cities are properly deploying deterrence and educating residents.

It’s an auditing role that requires staff, something that appears to have been missing for some time now.

Bear Smart program goes dark

In 2023, the head of the B.C. Bear Smart program was reassigned.

The lack of staffing came amid a backlog of scheduled community audits, and immediately raised concerns over who would run the program, according to documents obtained in a freedom of information request by The Furbearers wildlife conservation group and shared with Business in Vancouver.

Provincial staff were temporarily assigned to oversee the program.

After finishing several community audits in 2024, the province notified Kamloops and Port Alberni that they had failed to meet the minimum standards, documents show.

Both cities were given until March 2026 to make changes or face potential ejection from the Bear Smart program.

Long before that could happen, however, the entire B.C. government program appears to have been left in limbo.

Government worker Joe Caravetta was the last to staff the program, internal correspondence suggests. When he left his position around April 2024, he recommended that audits be carried out every year to ensure compliance.

The province did not confirm if Caravetta was the last to oversee the program. But by the winter and spring of 2025, several government staff repeatedly sent emails to one another asking who was in charge.

In a Feb. 25, 2025, email, West Kootenay conservation officer Ben Bettlestone said he had “no idea who is running the Bear Smart portfolio at this time.”

A few months later, a government biologist working in the East Kootenay told colleagues in an email that the province had sold the Bear Smart program to municipalities in the Elk Valley as “a real milestone to strive toward” — going so far as to contract out a bear hazard assessment in Fernie and Elkford.

Provincial large carnivore specialist Garth Mowatt said he started getting calls about the status of the Bear Smart program after other bear biologists left the B.C. government.

“Everybody is phoning me, including MLAs,” he told BIV. “My answer is I don’t know. I don’t even totally know how it works.”

‘Just don’t bother’

In early 2025, Christine Vales began working as a program co-ordinator at WildSafeBC, a Kamloops-based charity partnered with the government to deliver programs to reduce human-wildlife conflict.

When she began, Vales said Bear Smart was not operating at the provincial level, and nobody appeared to know who was at its helm.

At the time, Naramata had been trying to contact the government and renew its status, which had been up for review since June 2024.

Vale told staff at the regional district to stop trying, and passed on the same message to West Kelowna, Kaslo, Elkford and Fernie, all of whom were trying to get into the program.

“A lot of communities were really close to achieving status,” she said. “I’ve been trying to tell people: Just don’t bother.”

Nicole Brown, manager of legislative services at the City of Castlegar, contacted the provincial government in February 2025, asking who she should contact to renew the city’s Bear Smart status, due in May 2026.

“I really didn’t know who to reach out to. Nobody has notified me,” she said in an interview.

Other communities only learned the program was not accepting new applications after they spent significant time and resources trying to get certified.

City of Mission environmental co-ordinator Kyle D’Appolonia said the municipality has worked hard to become a Bear Smart community after its application was rejected in 2024 for failing to provide “any details” in its bear hazard assessment.

About a decade ago, up to seven bears per year were killed in the community. Over the past three years, that number has dropped to zero.​

​In December 2025, Mission resubmitted its application. Not long after, D’Appolonia said he was told the Bear Smart program was “unadministered.”

An emailed statement attributed to two B.C. ministries—Environment and Parks as well as Water, Land and Resource Stewardship—acknowledged the program had helped communities reduce conflicts with bears.

“Unfortunately, the province is not in a position to expand the program at this time, and we have been openly communicating this information,” the statement said.

That admission contradicts staff and elected officials in several B.C. communities, who say they have been left in a state of confusion as the government’s own public website still promotes the program.

The ministries also did not address questions from BIV over how a failure to staff the Bear Smart program could lead to an apparent lack of oversight in communities due for an audit.

Tofino’s mayor warned that if pending audits in communities like Port Alberni and Kamloops aren’t carried out, it could undermine the legitimacy of the entire Bear Smart program.

“When it gets to the point when a community isn’t meeting the standards, it really is an alarm bell that something is wrong,” Law said.

Calls for expanded bear hunt

The province’s move to cease operation of its Bear Smart program comes as it considers opening a summer bear-hunting season in the Lower Mainland after lobbying from berry farmers.

“Fencing of large agricultural fields is very expensive, difficult to maintain and must be electrified to deter bears,” a government spokesperson told BIV last month.

Ciarniello said real-world experiences show large swaths of farmland can “absolutely” be protected by electric fencing. “It should be the cost of doing business,” she said.

If it goes ahead, Ciarniello said the government’s hunting proposal will aggravate a Catch 22 scenario: Shoot a bear and another one will simply take its place because the attractants—in this case, berries—are still there.

“You haven’t addressed the root cause of the problem,” she said. “You’re just in a cycle of killing.”

De Jong worries that communities with few resources will now be left out of the program.

Others who have already spent vast amounts of time and money on becoming Bear Smart communities said that whatever happens, they wouldn’t stop adhering to its standards.

The province’s failure to expand the program is of “no practical concern” for Mission, because the city has already adopted the program’s principles, said D’Appolonia.

“We haven’t done this to be able to pat ourselves on the back,” added Port Moody mayor Meghan Lahti. “We do it because it’s the right thing to do.”

with files from Chelsea Powrie