'It's a joint acceptance,' Sarah Harmer says of receiving the 2025 Junos Humanitarian Award

When Sarah Harmer found out she'd be receiving the Humanitarian Award at the 2025 Junos, she said she felt both "very flattered and honoured" — and a bit conflicted.

"It's something I think of [for] Desmond Tutu or something," she said from her home outside Kingston. "It's hard to think of yourself as worthy of that, maybe?" 

But over the past nearly three decades, the Juno-winning singer-songwriter, who started her career leading '90s alt-rock band Weeping Tile, has become as well known for her activism as her incisive, heart-on-sleeve songwriting.  

Roots in the Niagara Escarpment

Harmer grew up around Mount Nemo, which is also the name of the region's conservation area on the Niagara Escarpment in Burlington, Ont. 

"Mount Nemo, it's part of a UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve," Harmer explained. "It's got incredible biodiversity, and it's the top of the headwater. So it's this source water area for so many people downstream."

In 2004, Nelson Aggregate applied to expand its Burlington quarry by 200 acres, which could compromise Harmer's childhood stomping grounds. In response, she co-founded the non-profit Protecting Escarpment Rural Land (PERL) to centralize local response and protest, and wrote Escarpment Blues, with its vivid opening verse:

If they blow a hole in my backyard,
Everyone is gonna run away,
And the creeks won't flow to the great lake below,
Will the water in the wells still be okay?

The song shares a name with a concert film that Harmer released in 2006, which documented her I Love the Escarpment tour to promote PERL and her fight against Nelson Aggregate. It would take six more years for the company's proposal to be denied, and another seven years — taking everyone to 2019 — for the company to put together a different proposal with the same intent: expansion.

Harmer has only put out two albums since 2005's I Am a Mountain, which featured the song Escarpment Blues: 2010's Oh Little Fire and 2020's Are You Gone. While a lot of that in-between time was spent simply living her life, as she said in a 2020 interview with CBC Music, for Harmer that can often mean simultaneously fighting for something.

Between the two years-long fights for the Niagara Escarpment, Harmer has campaigned alongside David Suzuki against the federal government's plan to buy fighter jets; partnered with Suzuki, Stephen Lewis, the late Gordon Lightfoot and more to call for urgent change in how plant and animal species at risk are protected in Ontario; and participated in Students on Ice, a program that leads educational trips to the Arctic and Antarctic for international university and high-school students. ("I benefited so much from that," said Harmer, that she never considered it work.)

Mount Nemo 'is a cathedral'

Right now, though, everything leads back to a quarry that mines for gravel.

"I guess you can kind of get into anything, you know, when you start to [get involved] — like, gravel, wow," Harmer said, laughing. To fight Nelson Aggregate's second proposal, Harmer is now working with Reform Gravel Mining Coalition, an umbrella group that works with PERL and is demanding a moratorium on all new approvals for gravel mining in Ontario.

I feel like it can't be in our generation that this ancient ecosystem gets obliterated any more.- Sarah Harmer

"The work has looked like a lot of Zoom meetings, a lot of finding experts in areas of hydrogeology, blasting, air quality, natural heritage, people who are biologists and do wetland evaluations," she said. "We have been spending years raising money so that we can pay for a legal team, like a lawyer and expert evidence."

Harmer will take a short break from that work to take a train to the Junos in Vancouver to receive her Humanitarian Award — "I've flown a lot in my life and so I feel like my quota … I'm pretty topped up on that" — which will be presented by Suzuki, a "huge honour" for Harmer. 

But she'd also like to share the award: "It's a joint acceptance … I want to just recognize a lot of people that do the same kind of thing [as I do]. And dedicate so much of their time to it. Because it makes a huge difference. It really does."

While that happens, the three-month hearing that began March 4 to determine whether Nelson Aggregate's application will be approved or not will continue. But Harmer is ready for the fight.

"When you're hiking through, say the Mount Nemo Conservation Area, through the forests, it is a cathedral, you know, there is a spiritual reverence there that is hard to miss because it is so ancient," Harmer said. "There are trees clinging to the rock face that are 900,000 years old. It has such richness and history and just defies anything human made. It's just in its own realm. So I feel like it can't be in our generation that this ancient ecosystem gets obliterated any more." 

The 2025 Juno Awards will take place on March 30 at Rogers Arena in Vancouver, and broadcast live on CBC-TV, CBC Gem, CBC Radio One, CBC Music, CBC Listen and globally at CBCMusic.ca/junos.