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Fire­fighter `under­fund­ing and under­staff­ing’ leave province scram­bling

This article was written by Marco Chown Oved and was published in the Toronto Star on July 7, 2025.

Halfway through one of the biggest forest fire sea­sons on record, new num­bers show Ontario’s short­age of wild­land fire­fight­ers, equip­ment and staff is worse than pre­vi­ously under­stood.

Thir­teen pilot pos­i­tions and seven air­craft main­ten­ance engin­eer jobs remain unfilled and as a res­ult, accord­ing to OPSEU, the pub­lic sec­tor union that rep­res­ents wild­land fire fight­ers, nearly a third of Ontario’s forest fire avi­ation fleet has been groun­ded.

These short­ages have left the province scram­bling to fight dozens of fires burn­ing sim­ul­tan­eously, includ­ing one that is now the second biggest fire in Ontario’s his­tory, and call­ing on other provinces for help.

“We are in an incred­ible crisis due to cli­mate change, but also due to under­fund­ing and under­staff­ing,” said OPSEU pres­id­ent JP Hor­n­ick.

“We’ve lost fire­fight­ers at the same time that the need for them has increased,” they said. “We have increas­ing num­bers of fires up north. They’re increas­ing in size and intens­ity. But our reac­tion time is slow­ing and the fires are escap­ing con­tain­ment more often.”

Cli­mate change is driv­ing a long term trend toward more and big­ger forest fires and Ontario is cur­rently facing one of its worst fire sea­sons on record. With three months to go, more than 375,000 hec­tares of forest have already burned, the fifth highest total in the past 30 years. In June, three First Nations in the north were evac­u­ated.

Last month, the Star revealed that Ontario is oper­at­ing with more than 100 fewer wild­land fire­fight­ers than it did 10 years ago — field­ing 630 fire rangers, when it used to have 732 — lead­ing to a drop in the num­ber of forest fires brought under con­trol within 24 hours, key to avoid­ing the massive con­flag­ra­tions that con­sume entire com­munit­ies.

New staff­ing num­bers provided by OPSEU show how that 14 per cent reduc­tion in per­son­nel is exacer­bated on the ground, with 27 per cent fewer crews — groups of four or five fire rangers — avail­able to dis­patch to forest fires.

This year, Ontario is short 53 of the 190 crews it used to oper­ate, with only 60 out of 101 crews in the North­w­est Region, west of Mara­thon, and 77 of 89 crews in the North­east­ern Region, stretch­ing from Mara­thon down to the French and Mat­t­awa Rivers.

Short­staff­ing means that wild­fire fight­ers are being worked to the bone, said Noah Freed­man, vice­pres­id­ent of OPSEU Local 703.

Fire Rangers have been work­ing flat out since early May, he said. They’ve just fin­ished their third 19day shift in a row, with only two days off between shifts, and they’re get­ting burned out.

“The young people, the lack of exper­i­ence. As fatigue builds, you have people who already don’t know what they’re doing mak­ing poorer and poorer decisions,” said Freed­man.

Nat­ural Resources Min­is­ter Mike Har­ris Jr. declined an inter­view request and sent a state­ment in response to ques­tions from the Star.

“Ontario works with pro­vin­cial, fed­eral, and inter­na­tional part­ners to ensure the neces­sary resources are deployed to keep com­munit­ies in our province, and across North Amer­ica, safe,” the state­ment read. “These mutual aid part­ner­ship agree­ments enable the shar­ing of addi­tional per­son­nel, equip­ment, and air­craft.”

The province has already received aid from Que­bec and B.C., which have sent two water­bombers and more than 100 fire­fight­ers this sea­son, accord­ing to data from the Cana­dian Inter­agency Forest Fire Centre.

The Min­istry of Nat­ural Resources (MNR) said nine water­bombers are avail­able this sea­son, though it was unclear whether this total includes the water­bombers on loan from Que­bec.

Har­ris Jr.’s office dis­puted the notion that the Avi­ation, Forest Fire and Emer­gency Ser­vices branch (AFFES) is under­staffed, say­ing there isn’t an ideal num­ber of fire rangers but a tar­get “range” for hir­ing.

“We’re com­fort­able with the num­ber of crews we have,” said an offi­cial in the min­is­ter’s office, whom the Star agreed not to name so they could speak on back­ground. “We have a lot of con­fid­ence in our fire rangers.”

“It would be ideal to be fully staffed, but we’re not there,” the offi­cial added. “We’d hire more if there were more applic­a­tions.”

OPSEU says AFFES staff are leav­ing for more luc­rat­ive jobs because Ontario’s water­bomber pilots are the worst paid in the coun­try and the fire rangers are among the worst paid.

Start­ing pay for Ontario wild­land fire­fight­ers is $25.38 an hour.

While Premier Doug Ford has announced the pur­chase of six new water­bombers, the half a bil­lion dol­lars asso­ci­ated with their pur­chase and staff­ing has not been alloc­ated in the budget.

Due to a back­log in orders, the planes would not be delivered for nearly a dec­ade.

But Hor­n­ick said there’s no use in buy­ing new water­bombers if we can’t staff the ones we already have.

Fewer pilots means the ones on staff are being worked to the bone. Work­ing shifts that last 10 days, pilots are get­ting sick and planes are being groun­ded when they’re unavail­able to fly, Hor­n­ick said. This was the case in June when two water­bombers were groun­ded due to pilot ill­ness as blazes grew across the north.

That’s in addi­tion to another water­bomber groun­ded due to lack of crew, bring­ing the total to three water­bombers, three heli­copters, two Turbo Beaver bush­planes and one Twin Otter float plane groun­ded this sea­son, OPSEU num­bers show.

This rep­res­ents nine of the 28 air­craft oper­ated by the Avi­ation, Forest Fire and Emer­gency Ser­vices branch (AFFES) of the Min­istry of Nat­ural Resources.

The loss of exper­i­ence through retire­ment is being felt throughout the AFFES, said Hor­n­ick. The chief heli­copter pilot retired two years ago and hasn’t been replaced, they said. (The MNR says “a tem­por­ary Chief Rotary Wing Pilot is in place.”) Twenty of 46 air­craft mech­an­ics have left in the last five years.

Over­all, there’s a 40 per cent turnover at the AFFES, lead­ing to younger and less exper­i­enced staff being pro­moted into pos­i­tions of respons­ib­il­ity, Hor­n­ick added.

The MNR said it has brought in a num­ber of meas­ures to reduce turnover, includ­ing estab­lish­ing 100 new year­round sup­port jobs, reim­burs­ing train­ing costs and expand­ing standby pay and on­call bene­fits.

At the same time, however, recruit­ment num­bers have plummeted, Hor­n­ick said, mak­ing it harder to train up the next gen­er­a­tion of fire­fight­ers.

“We’re see­ing fewer and fewer applic­a­tions,” they said. “Anec­dot­ally, I’ve heard stor­ies about lit­er­ally try­ing to recruit people off the street to apply.”