Tag: wildfire

This article was written by Wallace Immen and was published in the Globe & Mail on November 4, 2025.

Scant information available on commercial wildfire protection despite rising risks, non-profit says

The Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge only received a 90minute warning that a massive wildfire was racing through its surrounding forest on a summer evening in 2024, according to the hotel’s general manager.

The Fairmont team was able to smoothly evacuate everyone from the property in Jasper, Alta., and launch an emergency plan. “A small group of dedicated staff heroically remained behind, at considerable personal risk, to manually reset the generators and operate the sprinklers,” Garrett Turta recalls.

Those efforts protected most of the property’s buildings, including the main lodge, as fire swept through trees around the golf course, which remained intact.

Despite the Fairmont’s survival, a major gap exists when it comes to efforts to protect businesses from wildfires, says Glenn McGillivray, managing director of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction (ICLR), a Toronto-based non-profit focused on disaster prevention research.

“Most of our guidelines are for homes. There’s very little information out there about what businesses should do to protect themselves against wildfire risks,” he adds, noting a wide range of situations. “Is it a small town with a few stores? Is it a big operation with vats of chemicals and fuel, or pallets of recycled cardboard? Or a lumber yard with wood all over the place?”

RISING WILDFIRE RISKS

After the Jasper wildfires ravaged the town on July 22, 2024, 358 businesses and homes were destroyed.

Insured losses reached $1.3billion, making Jasper the second-costliest wildfire in Canadian history, according to Catastrophe Indices and Quantification Inc. (CatIQ), which tracks insured disaster losses in Canada and is a subsidiary of Zurichbased data provider PERILS AG.

The impacts of Jasper’s blaze were surpassed only by Alberta’s 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, which cost insurers an estimated $3.8-billion, with an additional $6-billion in estimated uninsured losses.

Amid those significant losses, experts say the risks of even more catastrophic fires are rising across Canada and globally.

“We live in a flammable world that’s becoming more flammable as average temperatures rise,” says Mike Flannigan, B.C. innovation research chair for predictive services, emergency management and fire science at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops.

“In Canada, we get about 6,000 wildfires a year, and they’re getting larger and more intense.”

Mr. Flannigan, who’s been studying wildfires since the 1970s, says about four million hectares of forest – an area twice the size of Lake Ontario – burns every year.

“Thousands of communities across Canada surrounded by forests are at risk of seeing their homes as well as commercial buildings burn,” he adds.

HOW WILDFIRES SPREAD

Including the Jasper event, 11 fire-related disasters – causing $30-million-plus in insured losses – have been declared in Canada since 2023, affecting eight provinces, including British Columbia, Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories, according to CatIQ data.

The federal government also now tracks wildfire activity daily.

“It’s often not the fire front that moves into a town but embers that blow far ahead of the fire and ignite things,” Mr. McGillivray says. “And we don’t really have a good understanding of how fire spreads in communities once it gets there.”

For example, the Grouse Complex wildfires, which affected B.C.’s Okanagan region in August, 2023, jumped eight kilometres east as embers blew to areas across Okanagan Lake and started blazes in two other communities.

Mr. McGillivray says more research is needed to determine how wildfires ignite structures and spread. “The models we tend to use are still about vegetation, but building materials are a factor.”

In Jasper, issues arose owing to embers setting fire to untreated cedar roofing on a commercial street.

ADDRESSING CANADIAN WILDFIRE RISK

Increasing wildfire risks have led to more research at universities and funding for management and risk prevention programs, Mr. Flannigan says, which is what resulted in the creation of the new Wildfire Resilience Consortium of Canada, a national organization that held a conference at Thompson Rivers University in early October.

Under the Wildfire Resilient Futures Initiative, Natural Resources Canada is funding the consortium, contributing $11.7million over four years. The financing is part of the government’s $285-million, five-year commitment to reduce wildland fir.

Supported by Natural Resources Canada and the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, a government-owned non-profit, FireSmart Canada, also shares reports and recommendations from provincial and federal agencies on reducing fire risks.

The organization encourages communities and homeowners to pro-actively manage the combustible materials in wildlands, in neighbourhoods and around structures. It also encourages the development of fire-resilient building codes and protective measures such as sprinkler systems in commercial buildings.

While FireSmart has shown to be effective in preventing fire spread in communities, it’s not mandatory, Mr. Flannigan says. “If you’ve got a block of 10 stores and a rain of embers happens, even if nine of them have done everything right, all it takes is for the 10th to catch fire and it spreads structure to structure.”

A FIRE-RESILIENT FUTURE

In Jasper, new constructions follow the federal government’s fire guidelines, which include using fire-resistant building materials and a 1.5-metre, noncombustible zone around structures.

Since much of Jasper was built prior to the release of the guidelines, the part of the town that didn’t burn is still at risk, Mr. Flannigan says.

Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge has created a fire protection team that’s led by the town’s former fire chief. After a 2½-month closing, Mr. Turta says the hotel was able to return to full operations.

“The good news is that we have the knowledge to build and maintain properties – residential and commercial – to withstand attacks from wildfires,” Mr. McGillivray says. “We just need to apply this knowledge on a wider basis.”

We live in a flammable world that’s becoming more flammable as average temperatures rise.

MIKE FLANNIGAN B.C. INNOVATION RESEARCH CHAIR FOR PREDICTIVE SERVICES, EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AND FIRE SCIENCE AT THOMPSON RIVERS UNIVERSITY

This opinion was written by Toby A.A. Heaps, Chief executive officer of sustainable-economy media and research organization Corporate Knights, and was published in the Globe & Mail on October 28, 2025. e Globe and Mail (Ontario Edition)

Imagine if hostile forces launched a relentless assault on Canada – setting forests ablaze and forcing hundreds of thousands of Canadians from their homes. Across the country, millions choke on acrid smoke. In just three years, this enemy has burned an area nearly half the size of Alberta, leaving behind charred landscapes and shattered communities.

That enemy is wildfires. Once part of nature’s regeneration cycle, they are now four times more destructive than they used to be, driven by hotter, drier conditions. Megafires of this scale are the new reality. While wildfires are inevitable, the scale of the damage is not. Canada’s fragmented approach has made the crisis far worse than it needs to be.

If a foreign adversary had caused this scale of disruption, we would respond with full national mobilization. Wildfires demand no less of a response. Yet despite the fact that nearly 8 per cent of Canada’s forests have burned in just three years, progress has been slowed by fragmented jurisdictions, small step increases in funding and piecemeal measures – challenges that governments and agencies have long struggled to overcome.

Meanwhile, Canadians endure record displacement: 352,000 people forced from their homes across 2023, 2024 and 2025. In 2023 alone, 98 per cent of Canadians experienced at least one day of smoke-filled air. South of the border, more than 100 million Americans were placed under air-quality alerts in 2023, and more than 80 million in 2025 – alerts driven primarily by smoke from Canadian fires.

This is not just a domestic emergency. It is a continental one, arriving at a sensitive moment in Canada–U.S. relations. Republican lawmakers and allies of President Donald Trump are already voicing anger over the smoke from Canadian wildfires that has blanketed U.S. cities, and they are unlikely to stay quiet while tens of millions of Americans suffer through air-quality alerts made worse by Canada’s underinvestment in wildfire response.

And make no mistake: This is national defence. Canada has accelerated its NATO spending pledge to 2 per cent of GDP this year, with a new target of 5 per cent by 2035, leaving Ottawa scrambling to identify credible, capital-intensive investments to count toward the goal. Wildfire readiness fits perfectly. Firefighting aircraft, satellite surveillance and early-warning systems are dual-use assets that strengthen both domestic safety and collective defence.

Canada’s fire management agencies work tirelessly under immense pressure, but the scale and intensity of today’s fires routinely push even their best efforts to the breaking point. They need stronger national backing to match the new reality.

Ottawa has already funded programs like FireSmart, the Wildfire Resilient Futures Initiative, and the Wildfire Resilience Consortium of Canada (WRRC). Prevention – including fuel management, prescribed burns and Indigenous-led stewardship – remains essential, but it must be paired with greater suppression capacity when fire seasons escalate beyond prevention’s reach. The reality is that Canada’s current surge capacity is insufficient when fire seasons escalate to “all hands on deck,” as they now do almost every year.

This summer, the national preparedness level was stuck at Level 5 – the highest – for virtually the entire season, with only a few days of relief. That meant every available resource was already committed. When new fires erupted, there was nothing left to send. That gap – between what we have and what we need – is the true measure of our vulnerability.

Canada’s wildfire crisis is not measured only in scorched forests and evacuations. Annual suppression costs now exceed $1-billion, and over the past five years, wildfires have caused more than an estimated $30-billion in economic damages, from destroyed homes and shuttered businesses to health impacts from smoke. A small fraction of fires – about 3 per cent – cause nearly all of the destruction. Research shows that with better surveillance, faster response and targeted prevention, damages could be reduced by as much as 78 per cent.

That is why leading national industry and environmental groups are calling for a federal investment of $4.1-billion over five years – 70 per cent of it capital – to build a dedicated aerial firefighting fleet, expand satellite and drone surveillance, and train thousands of additional firefighters to provide the surge capacity Canada now lacks. Put simply: Investing billions now could prevent tens of billions in losses later, while sparing Canadians the worst human and health impacts.

Despite dedicated efforts, our current system is stretched to its limits year after year. Canada is on fire. We need a firefighting surge capacity – funded, trained and ready to deploy because our current system is being stretched beyond capacity. The question is no longer whether we can afford it. The question is whether we can afford not to. Let’s not wait until we can no longer see the forest because the trees are all gone.

This editorial was written and published by the Globe & Mail on October 22, 2025.

When serious wildfires break out in Canada, a debate invariably ignites between two camps. There are those who argue that the fires are becoming worse and those who say these conflagrations, while terrible, are only blips in an improving trend.

This raking over of the ashes is of more than academic importance.

If the situation is in fact becoming worse, then it behooves Canadians to act. The country must prepare better, invest in more firefighting resources and change, as necessary, how and where we live. But if there is no worsening trend, and the fears are the byproduct of alarmism and ignorance, then there is no urgent need to change course.

A new academic paper shows that there is some truth to both arguments: there are fewer fires but they are getting bigger. However, the paper, published this month in the Canadian Journal of Forest Research, shows that fires are becoming worse in the ways that matter. It also cites research indicating that fires are increasingly likely to burn over the winter, in types of forests not normally conducive to fire and in wetlands that have traditionally acted as protective barriers.

And it warns that Canada’s fire trends are likely to continue for decades due to climate change.

The paper updates existing fire research covering the period from 1959 through 2015 to add nine more years, up to and including 2024. It does show that the total number of fires each year has trended down for decades. So the naysayers are right about that.

But just having fewer fires doesn’t mean things are getting better. When it comes to wildfire, size matters.

The number of large fires – defined as those bigger than 200 hectares – has been increasing by an average of three per year for decades, the paper shows. Most alarming, the very large fires – those that exceed 20,000 hectares – are getting bigger, and accounting for an increasing proportion of the area burned.

What this adds up to is a great deal more damage. And that is the metric that really counts.

For 57 years, from 1959 through 2015, the average area burned in Canada annually amounted to 1.96 million hectares, equal to nearly 20,000 square kilometres. The longterm trend was supercharged in the last decade, which included three of the worst fire years recorded in Canada. From 2016 through 2024, the average area burned annually was 2.84 million hectares, a 45-per-cent jump from the years through 2015.

That increase translated into enormous additional devastation. If the scale of annual conflagration since 2016 had matched the average over the previous 57 years, about 79,000 square kilometres of Canada would not have burned. That’s an area greater than New Brunswick.

So it’s time to retire the debate over whether fires are getting worse. They are. It’s time to shift attention towards reacting accordingly. Fire cannot be eliminated. In fact, it is necessary for the propagation of some types of trees. But there are many things Canadians can do to mitigate their risk.

On an individual level, people can minimize the threat to their own home through the FireSmart approach, which includes measures such as cutting back greenery and blocking embers from getting into roof vents. When large-scale fires do bring palls of smoke, people can reduce the health danger by using air barriers and filters to create a clean room in their home and by scaling back outdoor exercise.

Governments can approve more controlled burns to remove fuel from forests or create fire-breaks around communities or infrastructure. They can also beef up fire-fighting capabilities so that crews can tackle blazes in more places at once, during a season that is now longer than the historical norm. And government can offer better support to people forced to evacuate their communities, as recently called for by Manitoba’s Advocate for Children and Youth.

Wildfires are a terrifying phenomenon with the potential to destroy homes and lives. They may eventually force Canadians to abandon some of the more fire-prone parts of the country. And their power is being amplified by climate change, which is leading to warmer and drier weather.

It can be tempting to hope that the problem will simply go away. But this belief cannot be allowed to hold back action. Assuming that a declining overall number of fires means there is no crisis is to miss the forest for the trees.

This article was written by Steve Lambert and was published in the Toronto Star on October 13, 2025.

Gov­ern­ments and non­profit groups are tak­ing time to review this year’s wild­fire sea­son and the unpre­ced­en­ted chal­lenges posed by evac­u­at­ing tens of thou­sands of people across wide swaths of the coun­try.

The Cana­dian Red Cross registered 52,000 people across the Prair­ies, Ontario and Atlantic Canada, mak­ing it the agency’s largest domestic oper­a­tion in recent memory.

There were sev­eral hun­dred flights to get people out of remote com­munit­ies, some inac­cess­ible by road. Two people died after being trapped by fire near Lac Du Bon­net, Man.

The length of the wild­fire sea­son also stood in sharp con­trast to recent years. In parts of the coun­try, a dry spring meant forest floors didn’t “green up,” so the ground cover provided fuel for fires to grow and spread quickly.

In Man­itoba, where some 32,000 people fled their homes, fires star­ted in the spring and kept pop­ping up through most of the sum­mer. Snow Lake, a town of 1,000, was evac­u­ated twice.

For Flin Flon Mayor George Fon­taine, whose com­munity of 5,000 was evac­u­ated for four weeks start­ing in late May, a key takeaway is that wild­fire crews should be pre­pared to face blazes earlier than nor­mal.

“You no longer can just wait for, for example, until the May long week­end to equip (wild­fire crews),” Fon­taine said in an inter­view.

More fires also require more water bombers, Fon­taine said. When flames erup­ted near Flin Flon, in the province’s north­w­est, water bombers were already tack­ling fires in Whiteshell Pro­vin­cial Park in the south­east.

The Man­itoba gov­ern­ment and the Cana­dian Red Cross both said they will under­take thor­ough reviews of their oper­a­tions dur­ing the wild­fire sea­son.

“This takes time,” the Red Cross said in a pre­pared state­ment.

This article was written by Matthew McClearn and was published in the Globe & Mail on October 11, 2025.

Kim Connors, the former director of the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, says action at the community level is key

As Canada suffered one of the most destructive fire seasons in its history, Eleanor Olszewski, the federal Emergency Management Minister, floated the idea of creating a federal agency to co-ordinate the country’s response to natural disasters, including wildfire. She has committed to revealing further details this fall.

Kim Connors, who retired this year as executive director of the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC), spent more than four decades fighting wildfires, including as director of provincial wildfire programs in New Brunswick and Saskatchewan.

He spoke to The Globe and Mail about why he opposes Ms. Olszewski’s proposal, and why Canadians should start preparing now for next year’s fire season.

What problems did you see with Canada’s existing system in your final years at CIFFC?

The current system was not able to keep up with the demands brought on by climate change and the worsening forest fire situation across Canada.

The wildfire system was based on the sharing of resources across the many agencies. That worked very well when wildfire seasons tended to be regional, at different times of year. So it would start in the east in the spring of the year, into Quebec, slowly into Ontario, then the Prairies and B.C., ending in August and September.

But now the fire season seems to be simultaneous across the country. We’ve seen it in the last five to seven years. It’s becoming worse. The ability to exchange resources between agencies is now stretched beyond capacity.

This year, the fire season was early May all the way into – I mean, there’s still fires on the East Coast. But 2025 could have looked a lot worse. Quebec happened to be quiet. If Quebec had not supported Atlantic Canada, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick would have had a very different outcome.

When did we have the most resources, and how much have resources declined since then?

During the 1990s and the early part of this century, we probably had the most resources. But there were less fires during some of the years since then, for example in the past 10 years in places like Atlantic Canada. And Ontario had a number of years with quieter seasons, and Quebec as well. And so some of those programs downsized. Alberta downsized a bit.

They have been turning around since the early 2020s. But it takes a while to get back up to what’s required. Plus, we need more resources than we ever had before.

To what extent is this merely a problem of insufficient resources, versus other contributing factors?

Clearly, more resources is not the only answer. We have to be focused on communities and society becoming resilient to wildfires. We really need to focus on the mitigation side and building true whole-of-society programs that are strong in practice, not just in rhetoric. And that’s very hard to do.

In what ways are our communities not resilient to fire right now?

At all levels of society, there’s an understanding that it’s somebody else’s responsibility. Or the government will protect us – they’ll come with airplanes and we’ll be fine. But we need to really sit down with community leaders and say, no, we need communities to be in charge of their own destiny. And then give them the tools to be able to do that.

Clearly, more resources is not the only answer. We have to be focused on communities and society becoming resilient to wildfires.

KIM CONNORS FORMER EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, CANADIAN INTERAGENCY FOREST FIRE CENTRE

What are some examples of what communities should be doing?

Number one is to have a plan. There are templates out there that communities can use to build their own wildfire protection plan. They could do assessments to see how vulnerable their community is to a wildfire.

FireSmart Canada teaches things they can do to protect their individual properties and homes. From a community level, there are other things they can do in terms of fire breaks, preparedness to help the initial response, as opposed to waiting for other levels of government. Even in the early days of designing subdivisions and building homes – there’s things that start right at the fundamental start of creating a community.

The past few federal emergency management ministers and public safety ministers have discussed creating a national fire agency. What’s your assessment of that proposal?

I don’t see it as being helpful at all. It’s another layer of federal bureaucracy that’s not required. It’s going to use up a lot of resourcing, mostly in terms of funding, because it’ll be costly to set up and support.

The other problem is that it puts a lot of resourcing at one level of government that is subject to election and budget cycles. It’s sometimes said this federal agency would be “FEMAlike.” But if you look south of the border, FEMA [the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency] is being gutted under the current administration. And so they’re losing resources rapidly, and they’re not going to be as effective as they’ve been over the years.

I think there is a role for our federal government. And I think it needs to be different than what it was in the past, where provinces and territories simply asked for more funding.

The federal government hasn’t said much about what it’s planning to do, but it has suggested creating regional water bomber fleets. What do you think of that?

I think that is a good idea. If the federal government is to invest in those types of expensive resources, then I think they need to be equally available to all provinces and territories and the park system. I don’t think it requires a national FEMA-like agency to administer it.

What else should Ottawa be doing?

They need to look at how they can support resourcing – not just aircraft, but human resources. And there is a sunset on their current investment in mitigation, in FireSmart Canada. They need to establish long-term funding to support FireSmart Canada in reaching all provinces and territories and within the national parks.

The federal government has announced a Canadian Centre for Recovery and Resilience (a partnership with the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction aimed at helping communities rebuild from disasters in ways that improve resilience). How far will that go in achieving what you’re hoping will happen, and where does it fall short?

I’m excited about it. The problem will be if they can’t get the individual players to the table with humility, having the conversations I’ve described, forgetting about the hard white lines. The big risk is that it could end up being just more of the same rhetoric around integrated fire management or whole-of-society management, versus truly creating programs and policies that get us there.

Why are the various provincial and federal agencies and other actors not able to come together in this sort of whole-of-society approach that you’re calling for?

There’s great expertise in this country. It’s second to none and it’s essential. But it’s also the same thing that’s limiting the conversation, and I am frustrated with it. We’re boiled in our bureaucracy, our individual silos of understanding, our authorities, regulations and policies. We need to lay all those off to one side and say: What is the end state we want?

This article was written by Justine Hunter and was published in the Globe & Mail on October 3, 2025.

Nearly 900,000 hectares of forests burned during the peak of British Columbia’s wildfire season this year, making it one of the province’s worst fire years on record.

And with more than 100 blazes still burning across the province, the cost of battling wildfires in 2025 is expected to be close to $500-million.

A new paper published Thursday in the U.S. journal Science argues that B.C. should be spending much more than that to break the current cycle of destructive wildfires.

The preliminary estimates for 2025’s wildfires are well above B.C.’s 10-year average for severity and cost, and the trends are expected to worsen in the coming years.

“B.C. and the Western U.S. states are not alone in this dilemma; the same wicked problem plagues many jurisdictions around the world,” the paper notes.

“Numerous studies have demonstrated the long-term financial benefits of reversing the disaster spending ratio to favour mitigation and prevention spending over response and recovery,” it says.

“Yet to date, nearly all governments have left the crossroads heading in the same wrong direction by continuing to make massive expenditures in response and recovery and only minimal investments in mitigation and prevention.”

The paper focuses on British Columbia as a stand-in for many jurisdictions that are facing similar conditions. But in B.C., the challenge is not just to persuade a debt-laden provincial government to add substantial new spending commitments. The forest industry – currently struggling with punitive U.S. tariffs – also needs to shift to play a greater role in wildfire mitigation.

Treatments, such as thinning and prescribed burning, need to be conducted on a broad scale and will take decades to produce results.

The province’s recent fiscal update forecast this year’s deficit at a record $11.6-billion, and the New Democratic Party government is under pressure to rein in spending.

It [the paper] argues that some of the costs can be recouped through the development of new markets for materials harvested through forest thinning.

Calvin Sandborn, a retired law professor from the University of Victoria and one of the authors of the paper, said in an interview that the province can’t afford not to invest much more in wildfire mitigation.

“The province really has no choice,” he said. “In the long run, it will be far more expensive to suffer through increasingly catastrophic fire seasons far into the future.”

The forest industry already recognizes the need to change practices. A key topic at this year’s convention of the Council of Forest Industries was how to manage forests by reducing fuel loads and creating fire breaks to help prevent the spread of wildfire.

The peer-reviewed paper was also co-written by fire ecologist Robert Gray and Robin Gregory, a research scientist and adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia. It argues that some of the costs can be recouped through the development of new markets for materials harvested through forest thinning.

“Changing industrial activity from exacerbating the problem of damaging fires to helping create solutions requires a substantial shift in management philosophy,” the paper states.

The province can offer incentives such as tax breaks. But “it requires moving from timber harvest and economic profit as the end goal to harvest as a means of achieving multiple goals – including not only economic objectives but also social, cultural, and environmental goals that are met by reducing the incidence of highseverity wildfires on the landscape.”

The public should also be given the true cost of wildfires to understand the need for mitigation investments, the authors wrote. The provincial government does not track indirect costs for individual fires or fire seasons. However, “economists suggest that total fire costs typically range from 1.5 to 20 times the direct cost.”

One of those indirect costs is the impact on human health. In early September, health advisories were posted in communities spanning B.C., Alberta and the Northwest Territories and a portion of northwestern Saskatchewan.

About 3.5 million people in Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley were advised to seek out spaces with air filtration or air conditioning to avoid breathing fine particulate matter.

The paper cites research concluding that from 2007 to 2020, wildfire smoke annually contributed to more than 11,400 non-accidental deaths in the contiguous United States.