Expert warns Canada needs a national wildfire fighting service

Climate change is wreaking havoc all across the world but nowhere have the effects of the warming planet been felt more this summer than in Canada’s thousands of forests. 

The summer of 2023 has proven to be one of the worst years for wildfires in the country and the situation has affected all of North America since the blazes began in late April. 

Over 150,000 were forced to flee their homes by July according to The Washington Post and plumes of toxic smoke from the fires drifted as far as France, Ireland, and Portugal. 

Photo Credit: Wiki Commons

Cities like Detroit, Chicago, Toronto, Minneapolis, and New York were hit hard by smoke and several measured the highest levels of particulate matter in their hair ever recorded. 

The Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre tracks wildfires in Canada and there have been 5875 fires as of this year, a number that’s led to some very significant destruction. 

Roughly 15.4 million hectares or 38.0 million acres have been burned in Canada since the beginning of the year and there are still 1033 active fires burning as of August 24th. 

With all of this in mind, you might be surprised to learn that Canada really has a unified national fire service dedicated to battling wildfires, which begs the question: Why not?

One reason may be because the country’s provincial and territorial governments are in charge of managing public lands and as such hold the responsibility of fighting wildfires. 

This concept was explained by the Director of Natural Resources Canada’s Canadian Forest Centre Michael Norton during a press briefing in Vancouver on August 11th. 

"I don't want to convey that anything is off the table… Any idea might surface as being viable and desirable by the various jurisdictions," Norton said according to CBC News. 

Norton went on to explain that there would be a review of what happened this year and that provinces and territories would learn from what occurred once the fire year ended.

However, this approach might not be enough to help Canada withstand the future that is bearing down on the country as climate change cultivates warmer and dryer summers. 

"The military has been called in a number of times," wildfire expert Mike Flanagan said to CBC News as he championed the concept of a national fire force to combat wildfires. 

Flanagan is British Columbia’s Innovation Research Chair in Predictive Services, Emergency Management, and Fire Sciences and he believes Canada can’t continue to rely on the military to fight its growing wildfire problem. 

“If we had trained national force, we could use them preemptively instead of reactively like we tend to do now,” Flanagan explained. But this isn’t likely to happen anytime soon. 

CBC News noted the Canadian federal government has no plans to institute a federal fire force while the Minister of Emergency Preparedness Harjit Sajjan has said the country already dedicates  "sufficient resources to manage the wildfires."

Unfortunately, Canadians will have to continue to see their governments react to fires in the country rather than try to prevent them, a situation that could prove to be a crucial campaign issue for some in the next federal election.