Adapt or Choke: The Urgent Need for a National Strategy on Wildfires

“Anyone who tells you that this can be solved even in a matter of years lives in lala land. Especially politicians.”

Photo by Malachi Brooks on Unsplash

If you haven’t read yesterday’s piece on the wildfires, it can be found here. This piece is strongly enhanced as the second part of the investigation.

Recently, an American politician wrote a letter to the Manitoban government that said "we would like to know how your government plans on mitigating wildfire and the smoke that makes its way south."

They complained that their "constituents have been limited in their ability to go outside and safely breathe due to the dangerous air quality the wildfire smoke has created.

It is unclear what their goal in sending this letter was, and it proved to exacerbate tensions that are already at a breaking point between the two countries. Online, it led many people to ask why Canada does not use controlled burns to stop wildfires, an indigenous practice that is well reputed. But asking why Canada doesn’t use these controlled burns is missing the forest for the trees.

There are approximately 400 million hectares of forest in Canada. Most of it is uninhabited. Much of it is inaccessible.

“I believe it was a leader in the United States who said we should rake the forest to get rid of the woody material,” Timothy Lynham, a fire ecologist and expert on forest fire behaviour said. “You want us to rake 400 million hectares of Canadian forest?”

“It’s just laughable to suggest we have any control over that,” David Lapp, an engineer specializing in climate change, said. “It’s so arrogant. When I saw that I laughed out loud, it’s quite humorous really– it’s all I could do to just laugh at it.”

“Three per cent of our fires burn 97 per cent of the area burned,” Mike Flannigan, who is the BC Innovation Research Chair in Predictive Services, and whose credentials are too long to list in an article, said. Although predictive equations by experts are impressive, predicting those 3 percent of fires that will cause so much damage is near impossible. Without their predictive algorithms, Canada would be in far worse shape.

Many solutions are being thrown around in colloquial settings, and there’s enough of a political pressure that the Prime Minister is discussing ideas that Canada could use. Mark Carney used carbon capture technology as the capstone of his environmental proposals during the election in 2025. His faith in the tech may not be warranted.

“I don’t think he appreciates the limited impact or the massive cost.” David Lapp said. In his view, Carney is overestimating the potential of this technology. Implementing it is not commercially viable and would quickly cost in the hundreds of millions, if not more. “There’s no magic bullet. Anyone who tells you that this can be solved even in a matter of years lives in lala land. Especially politicians.”

Lapp explained that carbon capture technology captures the carbon from the air, separates it, and then stores it underground; but it isn’t yet viable as a solution to our woes. “The scale at which you’d have to capture carbon to have any effect is prohibitive,” he said. Not only that, but “if you were able to stop every single greenhouse gas emission right now you’d still see an increase in temperature.”

Currently, if all greenhouse gas emissions immediately stopped, the temperature would rise further, and it would take “hundreds of years to return to normal.” Lapp explained that the only option is to adapt and play the long game by fighting climate change in a sustained and coordinated effort.

Lapp stressed that it is necessary to educate people on forest fires and wildfire preparedness, and then to build appropriate infrastructure that protects populated areas from the worst scenarios. With out-of-control wildfires now being a part of Canadian life, it’s important that people understand how fires start, how smoke affects health, and to pay attention to scientists and researchers, keeping up to date with current conditions when you go camping, hiking, or live in a more fire-susceptible area.

Infrastructure, especially in BC or northern parts of provinces, need to have large barriers of space between housing and forests in order to hopefully prevent wildfires from spreading to the city, but also to enable evacuations. People living in rural areas or smaller cities should have go-bags ready, with all the necessary supplies ready to be thrown in the car in case of an evacuation order.

Resources are a large problem with the fires, Timothy Lynham said. “Normally we have problems in one part of the country at one time. It’s easier to share resources,” he said. Now there are fires everywhere, and resources are spread thin. Canada has even helped the United States with their forest fires many times over, despite them not reciprocating.

Mike Flannigan, well known across the country, has been pushing for new innovations.

“I’ve been calling for a national emergency management agency and a national firefighting force to deal with this,” he said. “Every year we’re calling on the military, calling on firefighters from all over the world.” In his view, money spent preventing these national disasters would save money long term.

He’s had consistent pushback on this, with people 'informing him' that land management is exclusively a provincial responsibility. Flannigan pushes back every time, saying that the health and safety of Canadians is also a federal responsibility.

Factually speaking, it isn’t quite true to say that only the provinces deal with wildfires, considering that the feds consistently wire the provinces cash whenever there’s an emergency.

People also complain to Flannigan that it would cost money. “Yeah, absolutely it’s going to cost money,” he said. But considering that there’s already a Canadian disaster fund, and 30 per cent of it is due to wildfires, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of a cure. You spend money in advance and prevent serious disasters such as Lytton.

“The bottom line is that prevention and mitigation saves money,” he said.

One of the major resources every province shares and uses are water bombers. Again, there is a great misunderstanding at how water bombers work. They do not put out fires. They buy a short window to decrease energy output of a fire that has reached upwards of 1200 degrees Celsius.

Although there are less wildfires in Canada than there used to be, the wildfires are more severe. They burn hotter, and are harder to contend with– this is what makes them out of control. When the water bomber drops its load on an out of control fire, it allows on the ground teams to get to work creating barriers that lead to the fire to die off.

The more rapidly these resources can be deployed, the better off everyone in the country will be— but in the end, no matter what we do, Canadians are going to have to live with wildfires for the long term– so how do we protect ourselves from the smoke?

“Masks are very effective,” Dr. Christopher Carlsten, director of the Centre for Lung Health, a professor and head of the Respiratory Medicine Division at the University of British Columbia (UBC) said. Younger people are in more danger because they have to live with more particulate matter that affects air quality. Smoke, particularly in smokers, causes inflammation in the lungs which increases the likelihood of lung cancer, heart cancer and respiratory problems. Smokers are able to recover because the inflammation goes down after they stop smoking.

“That inflammation, just like if your arm was inflamed from a sunburn or something like that, that’ll eventually go down when you remove the insult,” Carlsten said. In order for people to protect themselves, HEPA filters need to be invested in, windows need to be tightly shut, and N95 masks should be worn outside. Everything possible to prevent breathing in the particulate matter caused from wildfire smoke.

The new reality that Canadians find themselves in means adaptation while pushing for more innovative solutions on climate change, and better coordination between government agencies.

On a light pole facing north on Berri street in 2024 there was a poem that was called “La Belle Saison,” (The Beautiful Season.) A stranger had stuck a sticker where they wrote a short poem about the loss of their childhood.

On Berri street in the summer of 2024, despite there being fewer fires, someone lamented the loss of their summers. That poem is gone now, painted over by Montreal, and forgotten about forever into the vapid memories of another piece of graffiti that was placed somewhere in a city with so much other, more interesting art.

Nonetheless, the poem recognized something that the people in power have yet to– summers in Canada will never be the same. Now we must ask what we are going to do in response.