Canada’s ability to prevent wildfires falls short of need
Canada’s ability to prevent wildfires has been declining for decades due to budget cuts, the loss of some of the country’s forest management workforce and strict fire prevention regulations turning some forests into a tinderbox.
As residents braced for what could be the worst wildfire season on record, and a season that is far from over, the skies slowly cleared over the northeastern United States on Friday, but hundreds of wildfires continued to burn across Canada.
Thanks to some rain and cloud cover near wildfire areas, with scattered rains expected in parts of southern Ontario on Sunday, Steven Flisfeder, an alert preparedness meteorologist at Environment and Climate Change Canada, predicted the weekend could bring better weather. air quality in Toronto, the country’s largest city.
“That will help flush the contaminants out of the air a little bit,” he said.
More than 1,100 firefighters from around the world have been dispatched across Canada to help fight the country’s raging fire season, officials said, including groups from France, Chile, Costa Rica, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.
Wildfire emergency management is handled by each of Canada’s 10 provinces and three territories, but hundreds of fires across the country have stretched and renewed local resources calls for a national fire service.
At a time when many Canadians are questioning whether the country has sufficient resources for wildfire fighting, several experts say the government should do everything it can to prevent wildfires, a focus from which it has drifted since the 1990s budget cuts that forest service of the country.
“We need to do more to tackle the problem,” said Mike Flannigan, who studies wildfires at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia, a community in the heart of that province’s wildfire country. “And progress on that front has been slow, mainly because we’re stuck in the paradigm that firefighting is the solution.”
People studying Canada’s response say it has been weakened by several forces, including local and national forest cuts, cumbersome fire prevention safeguards and a sharp reduction in the number of forest rangers.
British Columbia spent 801 million Canadian dollars (about $601 million) fighting wildfires during the unusually hot year 2021, in which the wildfires fire devastates the town of Lytton. But the county’s current wildfire prevention budget is only $32 million a year.
Similar disparities exist in other counties, which tend to invest in small, community-based programs that protect towns and cities rather than reduce wildfire risk, increasing the threat of out-of-control wildfires.
The small programs are useful, taking measures such as clearing forest floors on the outskirts of towns and creating firebreaks between settlements and forests. But to reduce runaway wildfires, broader measures are needed, experts said.
One of the fire prevention practices Canada should expand on, experts said, is burn prescription, a practice that comes with it set fire to a specific area under controlled conditions to burn trees, dead branches, undergrowth and other material that could otherwise fuel wildfires.
It also stimulates ecological restoration by clearing the canopy to allow sunlight to reach the forest floor and promote new growth, as well as opening the cones of some tree species to release seeds.
“It’s a great technique, but we haven’t used it that much in Canada,” said Daniel Perrakis, a fire scientist with the Canadian Forest Service. “With climate change, we are clearly seeing different fire behavior.”
Some communities of indigenous peoples – who wildfires have a disproportionate impact because they often live in fire-prone areas – they have adhered to the practice of controlled burning.
Two years ago, as a record-breaking heat wave exacerbated wildfires in British Columbia, some flames flared near the West Bank First Nation, an indigenous community in the Okanagan Valley. But years of thinning the forest and using their land cultural burning practices prevent the fire from wreaking havoc on the community.
Across Canada, there are a handful of controlled burns each year, according to partial numbers compiled by the National Forestry Database. Foresters who want to implement them must go through a lengthy process to get approval from a county.
The burns are generally unpopular in places like public parks, and even more so when they go wrong. 1995, more than 1,000 people were evacuated after a prescribed burn spiraled out of control and threatened the town of Dubreuilville, Ontario.
In some fire seasons, the duration of the approval process exceeds the narrow window when weather conditions are favorable for controlled burns.
The rules minimize the risk of an out-of-control prescribed burn, but they increase the risk of a wildfire out of control.
“Essentially you handcuffed people — forest rangers and foresters — so they couldn’t successfully get off prescription burns because we made the rules so tough and so restrictive,” allowing more fuel for wildfires left on the forest floor, said Sarah Bros, a forest ranger and co-owner at Merin Forest Management based in North Bay, Ontario, who conducted the prescribed burn. “Harvesting doesn’t do what Mother Nature does.”
Budget cuts in the late 1990s, called for by then Prime Minister Paul Martin – known as ashortage killer— left few government agencies untouched, shrinking the Canadian Forest Service size of staff from 2,200 to the 700 people it now employs.
“There was an incredible brain drain,” said Edward Struzik, a fellow at the Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy at Queen’s University in Ontario and author of the book “Dark Days at Noon: The Future of Fire.”
“People were mortified, and continue to be mortified, by the fact that we have this situation unfolding, this new fire paradigm, and the Forestry Service is just getting big changes to deal with it,” he said.
Dan Bilefsky contributed reporting from Montreal. Remy Tumin contributed reporting from New York.