The big news of last week was the terrible air quality across much of Ontario, Quebec and the northern United States as wildfires raged across Northern Ontario. The big news this week is that the Orange Idiot is moving to impose more tariffs on Canada because we are delinquent in our management of the wildfire process in Canada. 

Details of the tariffs weren’t 100% clear just because they issued a long list which looks very much like their shopping list for the CUSMA negotiations and implementation timelines were 30 days away. The tariff list excludes things for which the United States is particularly hungry – energy, potash, fish and seafood, critical minerals, the previously targeted steel and aluminum, and auto parts. (One wonders what the response would be were we to place an export duty on potash and critical minerals, but since that sounds like Doug Ford’s approach there is almost certainly something wrong with that thought process, so I won’t go there.) 

The Donald placed blame for the wildfires squarely on Canada’s forest management processes. “They are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein”. He was quickly backed up by a number of sycophantic Republican state  and federal senators who said “We are done accepting apologies in place of action” and also “Hey Canada, ‘just let it burn’ is not a solution. Unless you want to become the 51st state, learn to manage your forests.” 

Numerous Canadians have leapt into action on Facebook posting statements like “when you were on fire we sent aid, not threats” and “you have no idea what you’re talking about, because this problem is not solvable in the way you suggest”, and “American climate change inaction is the root cause of this problem.” (In every case, I’m paraphrasing.) My own response was to post that while the problem was smoke, mostly I was smelling horseshit.

But having gotten that little bit of frustration out of my system, I decided to investigate a little further to decide for myself how well we seem to be dealing with the climate change issue. Are the Americans’ complaints really horseshit?

I looked at the whole issue of fire prevention and suppression and concluded that the people who say “you’re asking for the impossible” have it right. The Pew Charitable Trust , a Conservation trust, says Canada has “the world’s largest intact forest ecosystem. It stretches across 1.2 billion acres (485 million hectares) of northern Canada, from the Yukon to Newfoundland and Labrador. It represents 25 percent of the world’s remaining intact forest, even more than the Amazon rain forest.It contains 25 percent of the world’s wetlands.”

The United States has about 50 million hectares. We have about ten times as much forest area to manage, with about one tenth of the population to manage it with. On a per capita basis, we have a hundred times as much forest to control. And that forest is largely wild and inaccessible. Less than 15% of the forest lies within five km of a developed road. More than 65% of the true northern boreal forest sits greater than 100 km away from the nearest permanent firefighting outpost. 

The United States has been accusing us of not working to keep the forests from going on fire by clearing brush etc. In a sense they are right. We spend, ball-park figures, the same amount as the US does on fire prevention on a per capita basis. We’re trying to make a tenth of the money go a whole lot further, and it’s no surprise that the American forested parklands look like parklands not raw forests.

Of course, we spend a lot more on fire suppression than we do on the mammoth task of fire prevention. In terms of the whole picture – pre-fire preventive measures plus hot fire suppression activities, Canada might spend $2.5 Billion in a fairly average year. The United States spends roughly double that amount, about $5B annually. On a per capita basis, we in Canada spend about five times as much on the whole integrated fire problem as American citizens do. 

If we bumped our spending by a factor of a hundred, to something like $250B per year, could we achieve the kind of forest protection and fuel source management that the Americans proclaim? Not a chance. Remember those two statistics I gave at the start about the distances from developed road and established fire control bases? The geography is crushing. Mountains, muskeg, a gazillion small lakes and huge areas of wetlands – how do you get to places where you want to establish a parkland condition called? Impossible. And probably ecologically undesirable. We need to leave Mother Nature alone.

There are no strategy documents or credible scientific pathways that propose Canada could actually reduce modern wildfire severity back to 1990s levels through prevention. The consensus among fire ecologists is definitive: It is an ecological and economic impossibility.

Now let’s look at the next Canadian riposte – “your climate control performance is at the root of the crisis.” Does that seem to be true? Have things fundamentally changed, or are we just doing a lousy job now compared to the smoke-free past in our memories? Well the answer is that things have definitely changed. 

Scientific records show that lightning strikes are occurring with greater frequency. Lightning monitoring was fairly rudimentary prior to 1998 when the Canadian Lightning Detection Network (CLDN) was established. But a review of the older data and the CLDN data together shows that lightning strikes have increased by 20% – 30%. This is consistent with a 12% increase per degree Celsius of ambient warming. It’s hotter now. That causes more lightning strikes. Both outcomes – more lightning strikes because it’s hot, and more fires because of more lightning strikes – are predictable outcomes of global warming.

Furthermore, as the summers get hotter and drier, they are also getting longer. The ignition window in the forests is getting longer because summer is staying hot longer and storms are occurring both earlier and later than in previous decades.

The triple whammy is the state of forest fuel. Because the summers are hotter and drier, the fire risk is sitting at higher levels for extended periods of time. The Canadian Forest Service  tracks the conditions of forest floor fuel through an index called the Forest Fire Weather Index (FWI). It reports that the three defined layers of forest floor fuels are growing drier and staying dry longer. So we’re getting more lightning strikes daily,  over a longer period of time, into increasingly dry forest floor fuel materials. 

The result of all that, unsurprisingly, is that what used to be Summer is now called Fire Season in Canada. (We can replace Spring and Fall with Flood and Hurricane seasons too, if you’d like). In the 1950s, 60s  and 70s, fire damage grew from about 1 million hectares to 1.5 million hectares annually. In the 80’s wildfire damage began to trend sharply upwards. By 2010 we were burning  at least 3 million hectares annually. We set a national record of approximately 7.5 million hectares in 1989, and then eclipsed that in a disastrous 2023 when we had 18.5 million hectares burned. That’s a long, long way from 1 to 1.5 million hectares annually in the period from 1950 to 1980. 

Numerically, about 50% of fires are caused by human activity, but because those fires occur in accessible areas, they are more readily controlled, and cause only about 10 to 20% of forest fire damage. It would be good, of course, to see fewer careless fires, but the good news is that the number of  human-caused fires is declining steadily and is now only about 50% of what they were in the mid-80’s.

There is an important side story to the “climate change is the root cause” argument. As in so many climate-related trends, dangerous trends tend to become self-sustaining, or so called vicious-circle processes. Climate change is accelerating the forest fire issue. Forest fires produce millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases which further exacerbate the climate change problem.

In a “normal” fire year, (if such a thing even still exists), the unmonitored fires produce about 20% as much carbon as is released by the monitored Canadian economy. In 2023, when fires burned for months, it is estimated, fairly conservatively, that carbon release due to wildfires was about 50% greater than the entire monitored carbon releases. When we Canadians beat our chests and proclaim that we’re reducing carbon releases, it’s best to be a little quiet about the fact that wildfire carbon releases are NOT included in our reported totals. By international agreement, carbon releases are reported exclusive of “natural disturbances”. 

Bottom line? Yes, climate change is the big issue behind our perilous forest fire situation.

What about the statement that we come rushing to the American’s aid when they have wildfires and they shouldn’t complain about ours? Well, it’s true that we help them out in time of need. It’s also true that help comes in the other direction too. This is a managed process, driven by the Canada-United States Reciprocal Forest Fire Fighting Arrangement. Historically we get a little bit the better of this bargain – in the disastrous 2023 and 2025 fire seasons we got support from thousands of fire-fighters from south of the border. 

So, in the ongoing debate with the Americans over fire management, we have mostly gotten it right in our indignant responses.Yes, fire seasons are much worse and yes that is demonstrably caused by climate change. The Americans have a point that their fire prevention results are better than ours, but their fire prevention efforts are not better than ours. The simple truth is that our problem is two orders of magnitude bigger than theirs.  

If it’s climate change driven, then, and not susceptible to widespread forest fire prevention programs, are we simply doomed to see more and worse fire situations every year? My answer is yes. This hazard is ours to live with and pass along to the next generations. How should we try to deal with that reality?

As discussed above, the notion that we could prevent wildfires ignited by lightning in our vast wilderness areas is simply preposterous. But we need to be a little more open to the thought that we could do better than we’re currently doing. It’s always easy to demand that governments do more, but I think the argument can be made that we’re simply not spending enough to manage this problem. It is an annual catastrophic phenomenon which destroys communities like Lytton, Jasper, and Fort McMurray. It puts lives at risk every year and it makes the climate issue at the root of the problem ever worse. It needs to become a twelve month long government priority, not a recurring desperate response to support this week’s embattled community.

Our military spending has finally exceeded 2% of GDP and is targeted to achieve 5% GDP by the year 2035. Our emergency fire suppression spend amounts to 0.1% to  0.2% of GDP. So that means we’re spending 10 to 20 times, (aiming for 50 times), as much on national defence as we are on keeping the nation from burning while we guard the borders.

In a bad year, carbon emissions from forest fires can exceed (and actually has exceeded on several occasions) the national carbon emissions from all monitored sources. Our investment in monitored carbon release reduction is about 0.5% of GDP, which dwarfs the amount we spend on fire suppression. And we probably wouldn’t be spending that amount except that it is really aimed at protecting citizens and their housing, not at emissions reduction.

If fires are going to happen randomly because of summertime droughts paired with summertime lightning storms, we can try to reduce smoke generation by becoming better at fighting forest fires. Canada already has the world’s largest fleet of water bombers but a lot of them are aging fast and becoming less reliable and more maintenance intensive. Furthermore, we don’t really have a single fleet. We have numerous provincial water bomber fleets. There is a whole lot of inter-provincial cooperation in trying to suppress fires everywhere, but there isn’t a single coordinated and directed force that can be used strategically for overall control of fires. 

The military budget includes 1.5% of GDP to be aimed at “Dual-Use & Civil Security Infrastructure”. I think a significant portion of that money could and should be spent on water bombers, bulldozers, fire trucks – whatever is needed to significantly elevate our fire suppression capability. In addition to more new “scooper’ water bombers, we could emulate the Americans and modify existing military aircraft to drop large loads of fire retardant chemicals on fire sites.

There are a lot of costs from these fires – emissions, air quality, political enmity, forests lost, wildlife habitat destroyed. But the big impact, the human cost, is the threat to people and their homes. If we can’t stop fires from happening, and we can’t effectively fight them all, what should we be doing to protect people and homes?

There are three fundamental approaches. The first is to protect your home by adopting strategies captured in Canada’s national wildfire management program, FireSmart Canada. That program establishes three zones around your house and lays out how you should plan landscaping, and material choices to limit the ignition probability of your house. It makes suggestions about what you should think of if you’re planning a renovation or a new build. 

The second approach is to protect communities by mandating firebreaks around them. Provincial authorities are beginning to invest in managed firebreaks to start protecting communities in high-risk areas before the fires begin.

And finally, there is a growing trend among vulnerable municipalities and some provincial bodies to mandate the use of fire-resistant materials in their building codes. 

It is tempting, given the scale of the problem that I’ve laid out for you, to respond to Americans saying “manage your forests better,” with a sharp response like “Oh piss off. Get real”. However, the truth is that we are, for the most part, in a very reactive mode with respect to forest fires. Each summer they happen and we do our best to suppress them, and we treat it like it’s a bit of bad luck that the fires came back. The American proposals for resolving our problems are knee-jerk, photo-op, political grandstanding, but the underlying complaint is valid – we go on fire every summer and we don’t appear to be doing anything different to try to change the outcome each summer.

My message here is simple. This problem is NOT going away. It isn’t just bad luck, it’s scientifically predictable. And since it isn’t going away, we need to get proactive. We must stop treating the problem every year as an emergency budget issue. We need to plan for, and invest, in those strategies and programs that help us to live with this problem.