Quebec man pleads guilty to what he accused the government of: causing forest fires
A Quebec resident who shared conspiracy theories online last summer suggesting the Canadian government deliberately set wildfires to convince people climate change was happening has now pleaded guilty to setting more than a dozen fires.
Brian Paré, 38, pleaded guilty to setting 14 fires in the Chibougamau area of Quebec between May and September 2023. Last year was Canada's worst wildfire season on record, with a total of 45 million hectares burned. On many days, smoke from the fires spread across North America and the rest of the world, worsening air quality and disrupting the daily lives of millions of people.
Two of the fires set by Mr. Paré forced people to evacuate about 500 homes in the town of Chapais in late May, according to a statement by the prosecutor, Marie-Philippe Charron, in court and reported by the Canadian Press. One of these, the Lake Cavan fire, burned more than 2,000 hectares of forest and was the largest of the fires that Mr Paré admitted to setting. The court hearing took place on Monday; The ruling is expected in April.
Rising global temperatures are contributing to longer fire seasons and more lightning strikes, which were responsible for sparking the most damaging Canadian fires last year.
Mr. Paré had shared posts on Facebook last summer claiming that the government was purposefully failing to control the forest fires and even deliberately fanning them. Some of Mr Paré's posts also deny the existence of climate change and link the forest fires to conspiracy theories suggesting that governments are making up phenomena such as climate change and Covid-19 to justify new restrictions and regulations.
Mr Paré's posts were part of a larger wave of misinformation in the wake of the fires and fit a pattern that followed other extreme weather events such as floods, heat waves and droughts.
“All of these things created a lot of buzz and, accordingly, different forms of misinformation,” said Chris Wells, an associate professor of media studies at Boston University who studies climate misinformation. “When an event like this happens, the obvious question today is: 'To what extent is that related to climate change?'”
The specific type of conspiracy theory that Mr. Paré shared – linking climate change and climate-related policies to governments' ulterior motives – is also common, Dr. Wells out. “It's part of a broader domain of conspiratorial thinking.”
In reality, climate change is contributing to worse wildfires in a number of ways, says Mike Flannigan, a professor of wildfire at Thompson Rivers University in Canada. In addition to longer fire seasons and more lightning strikes, warmer air also sucks moisture from vegetation, creating more dry fuel for fires.
While the size of 2023 fires was “off the charts” and may not repeat itself anytime soon, “we will see more active fire years in the future than in the past,” said Dr. Flannigan.