Keeper of the Wild Spaces

There is a call that comes in at 6:47 on a Tuesday morning. A bear has been in the same backyard three nights in a row. The homeowner is frightened. The neighbours are filming. Someone has already posted it online. By the time Murray Smith arrives, there are seventeen people standing on the street with their phones out, and the bear — a two-year-old black bear, healthy, well-fed on unsecured garbage — is sitting in a cedar tree looking down at all of them with what appears to be mild curiosity.

This is Murray Smith's office. Not the government building in Sechelt. Not the desk with the paperwork. The cedar tree, the crowd, the bear, the phones. The moment where science and law and public emotion and animal welfare all arrive at the same intersection at the same time, and someone has to make a decision that will be judged by everyone and understood by almost no one.

Murray Smith has been making those decisions for more than thirty years. He is the Inspector for the BC Conservation Officer Service on the West Coast — a region that runs from the Sunshine Coast through the Lower Mainland, up the Sea to Sky corridor, and across to parts of Vancouver Island. His title is Inspector. His job, in the most honest possible terms, is to stand between the wild world and the human one, and manage the consequences when they collide.

Maple Ridge to Prince George to the Coast

Murray Smith started his career in Maple Ridge in the late 1980s, working as a conservation officer in the Fraser Valley. Five years there, learning the work — the wildlife calls, the poaching investigations, the fisheries enforcement, the slow accumulation of judgment that comes from being in the field when things go wrong and having to figure out what to do next with no one watching and no manual that covers this exact situation.

From Maple Ridge he moved north to Prince George, where he spent twelve years. Prince George is a different world — interior BC, moose country, grizzly territory, a landscape that is vast and indifferent in a way that the Lower Mainland never quite is. The winters are serious. The distances are serious. The wildlife is serious. It was in Prince George that Smith developed the depth of field knowledge that would define his career — not just bear management, but the full spectrum of what a conservation officer does: fisheries violations, illegal hunting, environmental enforcement, public safety operations that involve animals that can kill you.

In 2004, he moved to the Sunshine Coast. He arrived with his wife and two children, and he arrived with a plan. The Sunshine Coast, he told the local paper at the time, had a high population of black bears in urban areas, and he intended to do a lot of work on that problem. He proposed a fruit exchange programme — volunteers picking ripe fruit from residential trees before the bears could get to it, donating the harvest to the local food bank. He wanted community bear-watch groups. He understood, from his first week on the Coast, that the bear problem was not really a bear problem. It was a people problem. The bears were doing exactly what bears do. The people were leaving the food out.

What a Conservation Officer Actually Does

The BC Conservation Officer Service enforces thirty-three federal and provincial statutes. That list includes the Wildlife Act, the Fisheries Act, the Environmental Management Act, the Park Act, the Wildfire Act, and a dozen others that most people have never heard of. Conservation officers hold Special Provincial Constable status under the Police Act. They can arrest people. They carry firearms. They work with the RCMP, with First Nations, with the Ministry of Forests, with Environment Canada, with local governments, and with the public — which is the most unpredictable of all those partners.

On the lower Sunshine Coast, two conservation officers handle between 700 and 1,200 calls for service every year. Approximately 85 per cent of those calls are related to black bears. The remaining 15 per cent covers everything else — illegal hunting, fisheries violations, environmental complaints, cougar sightings, wolf conflicts, injured wildlife, and the occasional situation that does not fit neatly into any category.

As Inspector, Murray Smith does not handle every call personally. He oversees the officers across the West Coast Region, manages the complex cases, acts as the public spokesperson when a situation requires one, and makes the calls that cannot be delegated. When a grizzly bear attacks eleven people including children in Bella Coola, Murray Smith is the one who speaks to the media. When three residents are arrested in Coquitlam for obstructing conservation officers during a bear euthanisation, Murray Smith is the one who explains why. When a Sunshine Coast wildlife rescue organisation is charged with illegally feeding bears, Murray Smith is the one who signs off on the decision.

The Hardest Calls

In July 2019, conservation officers euthanised six black bears in Coquitlam. The bears had been living in a residential area, accessing unsecured food sources, and had reached the point where officers assessed them as a public safety risk. Three residents attempted to intervene. They were arrested for obstructing conservation officers. Their phones were seized as evidence. The story went national.

Murray Smith stood in front of the cameras and said what he believed to be true. "Conservation officers never, ever got into this job to destroy wildlife." He said it plainly, without defensiveness, and it was clearly not a prepared line. It was the thing he had been thinking for thirty years. He also said: "The three people ignored multiple requests from conservation officers to back away from the situation." And: "Having the public interfere with this difficult job exacerbates this difficult situation."

The public reaction was fierce. Animal rights organisations called for body cameras on conservation officers. The Fur-Bearers demanded that non-lethal methods be exhausted before any bear was euthanised. Petitions circulated. The comment sections were brutal. Murray Smith did not retreat from the decision. He explained it, defended it, and moved on to the next call.

That same week, he was also managing a grizzly bear attack on Quadra Island, where a man had been injured and the bear had subsequently stalked conservation officers. The bear was euthanised. There was no national news story about that one. The Coquitlam situation had consumed all the available outrage.

The Paradox at the Centre of the Job

Murray Smith loves wildlife. This is not a guess. It is the only explanation for why a person spends thirty years doing a job that requires them to regularly destroy the animals they are supposed to be protecting, and then stand in front of cameras and explain why it was necessary, and then go home and come back the next morning and do it again.

The paradox at the centre of conservation officer work is that the people who care most about wildlife are often the ones who end up making the hardest decisions about it. A bear that has been conditioned to associate humans with food is not going to unlearn that association. The science is clear on this. The public does not want to hear it, because the bear is beautiful and the outcome is terrible, but the science does not change because the outcome is terrible.

In 2025, conservation officers killed nine black bears on the lower Sunshine Coast. Province-wide, the number was 211 — the lowest since 2011, down 65 per cent from the peak in 2023. Murray Smith's region contributed to that decline. The fruit exchange programme he proposed in 2004 is now a standard part of the Sunshine Coast's bear management approach. The community education work he started has been built upon by the Sunshine Coast Bear Alliance, by WildSafe BC, by local governments. The number of bears killed is going down because the number of bears being attracted into residential areas is going down. That is the work. It is slow, unglamorous, and it requires thirty years of showing up.

The Controversies

In early 2025, the BC Conservation Officer Service charged the operators of Coastal Wildlife Rescue — a Sunshine Coast organisation that describes itself as a first responder for injured, orphaned, and conflicted wildlife — with three counts each of feeding and attracting dangerous wildlife and unlawful possession of dead wildlife. The operators, Tammy Trefry and Jeffrey Martel, denied the charges. Their lawyer, animal law specialist Rebeka Breder, accused the COS of harassment. "What the conservation service is essentially trying to do is to shut them down," Breder told Global News. "It would be an absolute detriment to the wildlife of this province if that were to happen."

The case is scheduled for court in November 2025. Murray Smith is the Inspector who oversees the region where the charges were laid. The tension between the COS and wildlife rescue organisations is not new — it is, in many ways, a structural tension built into the system. Conservation officers operate under the Wildlife Act, which is clear about what is and is not permitted when it comes to feeding and habituating wildlife. Wildlife rescue organisations operate from a place of compassion for individual animals. These two frameworks do not always point in the same direction.

Murray Smith has never, in any public statement, suggested that the people who love wildlife are wrong to love it. He has consistently said that the methods matter — that feeding a bear, however well-intentioned, creates a conditioned animal that will eventually have to be destroyed. The compassion is real. The outcome is the problem.

An Average Day — If There Is Such a Thing

Murray Smith's days do not follow a predictable pattern. The nature of the work is that the pattern is set by the wildlife, the weather, the season, and the public — none of which consult a schedule. In spring, when bears emerge from their dens hungry and the residential areas are full of last year's fruit still on the ground, the calls come in before dawn. In summer, when the salmon are running and the bears are moving between watersheds, the calls come from hikers and campers and people who have encountered something they were not expecting. In winter, the bear calls slow down, and the poaching investigations and fisheries work move to the front.

As Inspector, Smith's days involve a significant amount of administrative and coordination work — managing officers across the region, reviewing cases, liaising with the Ministry, dealing with media inquiries, attending community meetings. But the field work never fully disappears. He is not a desk officer. He is an Inspector who came up through the field, and the field is where his knowledge lives.

On a typical morning on the Sunshine Coast, he might review overnight reports from officers in the region, take a call from a local government about a recurring bear attractant problem, brief a junior officer on a poaching investigation, and then drive out to a property where a bear has been reported entering a structure. By noon, the situation may have resolved itself. Or it may not have. The afternoon might involve a media call about a grizzly incident in a different part of the region, a meeting with First Nations wildlife managers about a shared territory, and a drive back to the office in time to review the day's paperwork before the evening calls start.

Off the Clock

Murray Smith plays squash. This is perhaps the most surprising thing about him, and also the most logical. Squash is a game of controlled aggression — fast, precise, physically demanding, and played in an enclosed space where there is nowhere to hide and no one else to blame for the outcome. It is the opposite of the open, unpredictable, consequence-laden work he does every day. It is a space where the rules are fixed, the boundaries are clear, and the result is immediate. For a man who spends his professional life managing situations where the rules are contested, the boundaries are disputed, and the results are judged for years afterward, the appeal of a squash court is obvious.

He also hunts. This, too, is logical — perhaps even more so. Murray Smith is a man who has spent thirty years enforcing the laws that govern hunting in British Columbia. He understands the Wildlife Act from the inside. He knows what ethical hunting looks like and what it does not look like. He has investigated enough poaching cases to have a very clear view of the difference between someone who hunts with respect for the animal and the ecosystem, and someone who does not. His hunting is, in a sense, the private expression of the same values he enforces publicly — a relationship with wildlife that is honest about what it is, that operates within the rules, and that does not pretend the natural world is a petting zoo.

He has lived on the Sunshine Coast since 2004. His children grew up here. The Coast is home in the way that only a place you chose, rather than inherited, can be home. The forest behind the house, the bears in the neighbourhood, the ferry to the city — it is the life he built, and the work he does is inseparable from the place he does it in.

What He Leaves Behind

The bear numbers on the Sunshine Coast are going down. The community education infrastructure that Murray Smith helped build in 2004 — the fruit exchanges, the bear-aware programmes, the partnerships with local government and the Bear Alliance — is now part of how the Coast manages its relationship with wildlife. The work is not finished. It will never be finished. But the trajectory is better than it was.

The controversies will continue. The calls will keep coming. Someone will always be angry about a decision that had to be made. Murray Smith will stand in front of the cameras and explain it, and some people will understand and some people will not, and the next morning he will come back and do it again.

That is what it means to be the keeper of the wild spaces. Not to protect them from people. Not to protect people from them. To stand in the middle, make the call, and live with it.

"Conservation officers never, ever got into this job to destroy wildlife."