In New Hazelton, BC, Neighbours Answered the Anti-Energy Development Vandals

Over the weekend someone threw red paint across the front of a small storefront office on Highway 16 in New Hazelton—the shared office of Western LNG, Ksi Lisims LNG and the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission project. Windows, doors and the old wooden porch posts were left streaked in red, a colour chosen to suggest blood.

It was meant to frighten. It didn’t.

Within a day the company said it had been “overwhelmed”. Not by the vandalism, but by the neighbours who came by unprompted, buckets in hand, to help scrub the paint off the glass. Nobody organized them. They simply showed up.

That is the part worth remembering. The vandalism was the work of a few. The clean-up was the character of a town.

None of this is happening in a vacuum. Over four years the Bulkley Valley corridor—Smithers, Houston, Terrace and the Hazeltons, a region of fewer than 30,000 people—has become the country’s outlier for anti-industry sabotage, with no real Canadian parallel. It began with the February 2022 attack on a Coastal GasLink drill site near the Morice River, where roughly 20 masked assailants swung axes at trucks with workers still inside, fired flares and commandeered heavy equipment to do an estimated $20 million in damage. Four years on, no one has been charged.

The campaign never stopped; it moved closer to town. In August 2025, RCMP linked a run of arsons across the corridor—McElhanney vehicles torched in Smithers and Terrace, and four vehicles set alight in a New Hazelton parking lot, an incendiary device placed against the tires while surveillance cameras rolled.

Here is what the vandals rarely admit: the targets are increasingly Indigenous. The vehicles burned in New Hazelton belonged to Gitxsan Development Corporation, the economic arm of the Gitxsan Nation. The office hit with paint serves a pipeline being built to supply Ksi Lisims LNG—a project on Nisga’a treaty land, in which the Nisga’a Nation holds an ownership stake. Sabotage carried out in the name of Indigenous rights is now striking Indigenous-owned business—and the projects Indigenous nations have chosen to build.

Whoever threw the paint wanted New Hazelton to feel afraid and alone. The town did the opposite. When the paint went up, people reached for buckets. That answer says more about this place than any act of vandalism ever will.

Stewart Muir is the President and CEO of Resource Works Society.