Living Daily with Climate Change on the Lower North Shore Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
Chevery, September 14, 2026 – The impacts of climate change are felt intensely on the Lower North Shore. They affect the way of life, access to essential services, the economy, and the communities’ traditional and current practices.
These upheavals, often perceived as isolated events, had never been brought together in a regional approach, nor related to the climate trends documented at the provincial scale. It therefore became essential for the MRC’s elected officials to equip themselves with such a portrait to better advance regional issues with their various interlocutors.
The MRC is therefore pleased to present the report and narrative map resulting from the research project Living Daily with Climate Change on the Lower North Shore Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, conducted by the Canada Research Chair With Living Environments of the North of the Department of Geography at the Université du Québec à Montréal, in partnership with the MRC and its five municipalities, and with the support of the Innu communities of Pakua Shipi and Unamen Shipu.
This is a study that highlights the scale of the transformations experienced by Lower North Shore communities. Climate change hinders mobility, threatens the survival of social and cultural practices and, above all, undermines access to essential services, particularly health care. It also compounds existing socio-economic and demographic difficulties, thereby deepening the region’s isolation.
The research team gathered the testimony of 217 people, the equivalent of 4.5% of the entire Lower North Shore population. Data collection relied on 42 individual interviews, 17 group participatory mapping workshops, an online survey, and participant observation by the researchers. This testimony was cross-referenced with existing climate data, various government statistics, and regional socio-economic indicators.
In addition to the French and English versions of the report, a bilingual narrative map is available online, in which twenty video capsules give voice directly to residents of the Lower North Shore villages and the Innu communities, filmed in places within their communities that are particularly sensitive to climate change.
Through the quality of the portrait, they draw, the report and narrative map Living Daily with Climate Change on the Lower North Shore Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow give the MRC du Golfe-du-Saint-Laurent valuable tools for raising awareness among its government and private-sector partners of the central issues facing the communities of its territory.
We invite the various political parties in the current election campaign, and above all the next government, to take note of the findings of this research and to consider the challenges associated with the impacts of climate change when developing policies affecting the Lower North Shore. The MRC further reiterates that alternative modes of transportation do not meet the needs of its population, and that the shortcomings of those alternatives are likely to worsen as the climate continues to change. Completing a continuous road between Kegaska and Old Fort remains the only serious option for opening up the entire territory.
The MRC wishes to thank the Société du Plan Nord for its financial contribution to the research, the very many Coasters and Innu residents of the Lower North Shore who took part in the project and agreed to share their testimony, as well as the Canada Research Chair With Living Environments of the North, and more particularly its Chairholder Laurie Guimond and her team, for their openness, their passion, and their professionalism.
“As elected officials, we constantly hear accounts of missed medical appointments, cancelled crossings, and travel that has become impossible. What we lacked was an overall picture connecting these situations to one another. The report gives us that. It will allow us to make the voices of the Lower North Shore better heard by other levels of government,” said Daren Jones, Warden of the MRC.
“The strength of this research lies in the substantial citizen participation in each of the Lower North Shore communities. People were deeply engaged in sharing the realities of the territory they inhabit, the transformations they observe day to day, their concerns, and their visions for the future. Their generous testimony reveals their fine-grained knowledge of the territory, their deep attachment to it, and the extent to which climate change is disrupting every dimension of their lives, particularly the mobility that lies at the heart of their way of life. Every mode of transportation and every piece of transportation infrastructure is affected, which hinders access to essential services, affects safety, accidents and risks, disrupts social and cultural practices, and has an impact on the economy as well as on the distribution and migration patterns of plant, berry, and animal species,” said Laurie Guimond, Chairholder of the Canada Research Chair With Living Milieux of the North, Department of Geography, Université du Québec à Montréal.
Highlights
- 83% of survey respondents consider that climate change affects their daily life “a lot” or “extremely.” (section 6.1, p. 102)
- Climate change affects every mode of transportation and every piece of transportation infrastructure, to varying degrees (snowmobile; Route Blanche; airplane and airport; the Bella Desgagnés; the ice bridge between Harrington Harbour and Chevery; helicopter and heliport; personal boat; the ferry between Chevery and Harrington Harbour; Route 138; the hovercraft between Saint-Augustin and Pakua Shipi; municipal roads; car, ATV, breakwater, and wharf). (p. 59)
- Air transportation is the most criticized mode: between 51% and 53% of users report being dissatisfied with it. (section 4.2, p. 57; figure 16, p. 58)
- Route Blanche saw no days of full opening during the 2022–2023 and 2023–2024 seasons, whereas it remained passable some sixty days per winter in the early 2000s. (figure 27, section 4.3.1.5, pp. 74–75)
- The unpredictability generated by climate change exacerbates geographic isolation and inequalities in access to essential services. (conclusion)
- The individual and community adaptation strategies adopted or proposed reflect a desire to preserve the way of life and to strengthen local and regional solidarity. Structuring institutional and government strategies are still awaited, particularly with respect to improving transportation services and connecting to the road network beyond the region. (conclusion)
- Extending Route 138 is the most widely expressed need and the adaptation measure considered the most structuring. (sections 4.1, p. 56 and 7.2.1, p. 155; also in the summary, p. V)
About the Canada Research Chair with Living Environments of the North
The Canada Research Chair with Living Environments of the North was created in 2024 in the Department of Geography at UQAM. The work carried out by the Chair analyzes the geographical processes of northern living in a context of profound territorial change. It examines the practices, representations, knowledge, and memories rooted in ancestral territories, Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, natural and cultural environments transformed by the extractive industry, and the temporary or so-called disappeared settlements of Northern Quebec. Its research program has three main axes: Inhabited North; Migrations and Mobilities; Intercultural Cohabitation. (Source: website of the Canada Research Chair with Living Environments of the North)
About the MRC du Golfe-du-Saint-Laurent
Established in 2010, the MRC du Golfe-du-Saint-Laurent is the regional governance body for the Lower North Shore. Its council brings together the mayors of its five municipalities — Blanc-Sablon, Bonne-Espérance, Saint-Augustin, Gros-Mécatina, and Côte-Nord-du-Golfe-du-Saint-Laurent — along with a warden elected by universal suffrage. It exercises jurisdiction over land use planning and economic development and administers the unorganized territory of Petit-Mécatina. Its territory of 48,147 km² extends along 375 km of coastline with no continuous road link, and is home to some 3,400 people of English-speaking, Innu, and French-speaking cultures. (Source: MRC du Golfe-du-Saint-Laurent)
