Feds asked to consider national fire service as country grapples with 'new normal' wildfire season

As Canada faces its worst wildfire season in more than 20 years, NDP MP Richard Cannings has joined some academics in calling for the federal government to consider the creation of a national firefighting service to assist provinces with forest fires. “I think the federal and provincial governments are doing all they can, I don’t want to take away from their efforts. But I just think we should be looking at doing things differently in the future,” said Cannings (South Okanagan–West Kootenay, B.C.), who is his party’s emergency preparedness critic. “I think it just makes sense to have a firefighting service—I think a civilian service is what would work best—that is available for deployment on a moment’s notice,” he added. “If, for whatever reason, the fire season in Canada is quiet that year, we could contract it out to other countries that need it, just like we’re getting help from other countries now.” 'This now qualifies unfortunately as Canada’s worst wildfire season of the 21st century,' Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair, pictured, told reporters on June 12. The Hill Times photograph by Andrew Meade So far this year, more than 2,600 fires have burnt through 5.3 million hectares. As of June 15, 458 fires were burning across the country, of which 235 were out of control. “This now qualifies unfortunately as Canada’s worst wildfire season of the 21st century,” Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair (Scarborough Southwest, Ont.) told reporters on June 12. Fisheries Minister Joyce Murray (Vancouver Quadra, B.C.) told reporters on June 15 that 83 fires were active in British Columbia alone. “I do remember how, as environment minister in 2003, the Kelowna fires were unlike anything we had ever experienced, and unfortunately it is feeling increasingly like this is the new normal,” she said. Smoke over Ontario and Quebec on June 3, as captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on NASA’s Aqua satellite. Photograph courtesy of NASA Earth Observatory Ken McMullen, president of the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs (CAFC), used a single word when asked how members of his organization were faring at this point in the season: “Exhausted.” “Canada has never seen this many fires at this intensity spread out this early in a fire season in recent memory,” he told The Hill Times on June 12. “These men and women from all over Canada as well as our neighboring partners that have come in to assist, they're just running on fumes. There are good days, bad days, quieter days, or very active days, but nonetheless, your heart and soul goes into it every single day.” As of last week, approximately 5,000 firefighting personnel were engaged, including firefighters, incident management personnel, overhead specialists, and members of the Canadian Armed Forces. International resources have been deployed from Australia, Chile, Costa Rica, France, New Zealand, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, and the United States. Mike Flannigan, professor of wildfire science and the British Columbia innovation research chair in predictive services, emergency management and fire sciences at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, B.C., said a federal service to combat forest fires would mitigate some of the problems that arise when sharing resources between jurisdictions during emergencies. “In Canada, we share resources, and fire management agencies are really good at response, but there’s room for improvement in prevention, mitigation, and I would say preparedness, too,” he said. “My concerns are that we’re too reactive.” The bulk of wildfire response responsibilities lie with the provinces and territories. If a wildfire situation overwhelms an individual jurisdiction’s resources, the Canadian Interagency Mutual Aid Resources Sharing Agreement ensures that other provincial, territorial, and federal equipment, personnel, and aircraft can be deployed. The Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC) co-ordinates that resource sharing and mutual aid between federal, provincial, and territorial wildland fire management agencies. CIFFC was first created in 1982, but its mandate was expanded to include co-ordination in prevention and mitigation management in 2021. Internationally, Canada and the United States have a reciprocal forest fire fighting arrangement, while CIFFC and member agencies have similar arrangements with counterparts in Australia, Mexico, New Zealand, and South Africa. Flannigan said the requests for help were often only made once fires had already started to spread, in what he described as a worldwide problem with emergency management. “It's a knee-jerk reaction rather than proper planning, and it's not just Canada and the United States that do this,” he said. “These are well-trained professionals, but it's just getting to deal with the predictive services side of things, and many fire management agencies either don't have predictive services or it's lip service in the true sense of the word.” Flannigan said a national firefighting service, which could be activated in advance of expected favourable wildfire conditions, would not leave provinces and territories second-guessing whether fires will spring up in their own area while their firefighters have been sent to other jurisdictions. “When you ship , they're generally on 15-day deployments, and after serving for 15 days, they have to have time off,” he said. “If you had a national fleet, you would avoid some of that game-playing because you wouldn't have to worry about asking, ‘If I ship them away, will I be putting myself at risk?’ because it's all your own territory or land that you're looking after.” In a statement emailed to The Hill Times on June 15, Blair’s office said the federal government stood “ready to assist any province or territory if it is required. We also learn from these events, and continually assess our emergency management approach to ensure we are being responsive to the needs of communities.” “We also recognize that there is a need in all provinces and territories for additional firefighting resources,” the statement said, pointing to a June 1 announcement that the Government of Canada has signed nine agreements as part of the first phase of the Wildfire Training Fund, as well as a pilot project between Natural Resources Canada and the International Association of Fire Fighters to train structural firefighters to respond to the fires in the wildland-urban interface. Australian firefighters deployed to fight the Canadian wildfires inspect a scorched area after a fire passed through the area. Photograph courtesy of Queensland Fire and Emergency Services The Wildfire Training Fund is a $37.5-million program to boost Canada’s wildfire firefighting capacity. The nine agreements will amount to the hiring and training of more than 300 Indigenous firefighters and 125 Indigenous fire guardians this season, Blair’s office said in the statement. The wildfires were the subject of an emergency debate moved by Cannings in the House on June 5. “When I started reading reports and hearing from experts on what we could be doing differently, I thought it was very much time for an emergency debate on this,” he told The Hill Times. “The situation was getting seemingly worse every day, and we went from Alberta to Nova Scotia to Quebec, there was sort of a never-ending news cycle of worsening conditions, and I thought we should be talking about this in the House.” He said an increasing number of forest fires reaching the wildland urban interface (where human settlements meet the natural environment), especially in rural or Indigenous communities, added to the urgency of changed practices. “In 2021, I remember when I was in the federal election campaign, the Okanagan Valley was on fire,” Cannings said. “I was campaigning with all my precious belongings in my car because I didn't know if those two fires behind my house would turn and come at my neighborhood.” “If we have that training and trained personnel, if we have a stockpile of equipment, I think that would go a long way to easing the pressure on small communities and even whole provinces in the future,” he said. Cannings said governments should also be funding and encouraging more firesmart programs outside fire season, such as hardening the exteriors of houses and thinning forests directly surrounding communities. “That takes more money, effort, and planning, it would keep forestry workers employed, it would provide fiber for local mills,” he said. “A more open forest wouldn't sustain a crown fire as easily as some of the thicker younger forests that we have now around cities and towns.” The 2023 season started in April, with record-breaking dry conditions and heat in parts of Alberta, Northwest Territories, and north-east British Columbia. “Unfortunately we had a rash of human-caused fires, and we were off to a very fast start. May is the busiest month for Alberta, but this was an exceptional May,” Flannigan said, noting fires at Slave Lake in 2011, Fort McMurray in 2016, and Chuckegg Creek-High Level in 2019. The fires in British Columbia and Alberta were followed by fires in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. When discussing the issue, Flannigan said it was important to note both the size and the impact on communities. Tens of thousands of people have been evacuated across the country so far this season, while millions in both Canada and the U.S. were affected by poor air quality from the wildfire smoke. “This is a busy fire year. All indications point to more busy fire years in the future—not every year, some years it'll be cooler and wetter—but we're going to see more fire in the future,” Flannigan said. The Chapel Creek wildfire north of Blue River in British Columbia. Photograph courtesy of BC Wildfire Service Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (Papineau, Que.) was asked about measures that the federal government intended to take to improve the speed at which firefighting equipment was built and distributed during a news conference in Saguenay, Que., on June 14. “First, we’re going to focus on getting through this particular season, giving all the resources we can and people need to be able to stay safe and get through this particular fire season,” he said. “But at the same time, we’re going to have lots of conversations about what is needed for the coming years to make sure that we’re able to keep Canadians safe and able to deal with the extreme weather events that are continuing to come.” NDP MP Richard Cannings has called for the government to consider a federal firefighting service to help provinces and territories deal with wildfire emergencies. The Hill Times photograph by Cynthia Münster McMullen said his organization has been lobbying for the creation of a national fire adviser position, similar to the U.S. Fire Administration. The U.S. administration is managed within the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and McMullen said a Canadian equivalent could either work separately or in concert with a national disaster office. “Without knowing the details of what the office of national disaster would look like, or a FEMA-type model, we are sticking with our recommendation that at this point, the government could create a national fire adviser, probably easier and sooner,” he said. Flannigan said that the idea of a federal service was intended to start a conversation, and wouldn’t necessarily solve all problems. “Canada's been either very good or very fortunate that we haven't had large loss of life like we've seen in California and Australia, places where there’s professional modern fire management,” he said. Thirty-one people died in California’s 2020 wildfire season, the state’s worst on record. Thirty-four people died directly during Australia’s “Black Summer” bushfire season in 2019-20, while hundreds more died from smoke inhalation. “Fort McMurray could have really gone sideways , but it didn't,” said Flannigan, referring to the death toll. “But who knows, maybe in the next one we won't be so fortunate.” Countries that have deployed firefighting personnel to Canada so far this year Australia Costa Rica Chile France New Zealand Portugal Spain South Africa United States Facts about wildland fires in Canada Canada has about nine per cent of the world’s forests. Each year over the last 25 years, about 7,300 forest fires have occurred. The total area burned varies widely from year to year, but averages about 2.5 million hectares annually. Only three per cent of all wildland fires that start each year in Canada grow to more than 200 hectares in area. However, these fires account for 97 per cent of the total area burned across the country. Fire suppression costs over the last decade in Canada have ranged from about $800-million to $1.5-billion a year. Source: Natural Resources Canada, June 7, 2023 Expected shifts in wildland fire patterns Climate change during the 21st century is expected to result in more frequent fires in many boreal forests, with severe environmental and economic consequences. From global climate models and scenarios, researchers are interpreting how climate change and climate variability may alter patterns of lightning, fuel moisture, temperature, precipitation and vegetation—all factors that can affect fire occurrence. Fire-prone conditions are predicted to increase across Canada. This could potentially result in a doubling of the amount of area burned by the end of this century, compared with amounts burned in recent decades. Boreal forests, which have been greatly influenced by fire through history, will likely be especially affected by this change. Other climate change impacts that could add damaged or dead wood to the forest fuel load (for example, as a result of insect outbreaks, ice storms or high winds) may increase the risk of fire activity. New research is aimed at refining these climate change estimates of fire activity, and at investigating adaptation strategies and options to deal with future fire occurrence. There is growing consensus that as wildland fire activity increases, fire agency suppression efforts will be increasingly strained. Source: Natural Resources Canada, 2022

Feds asked to consider national fire service as country grapples with ‘new normal’ wildfire season

So far this year, more than 2,600 fires have burnt through 5.3 million hectares. As of June 15, 458 fires were burning across the country, of which 235 were out of control. Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair said this year's fire season is the worst of the 21st century.

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