Choked Out by Wildfires- Who Lit the Match?

“People have always felt, in Canada, that they are not going to die from a forest fire. But sometimes they are now. This is the canary in the coal mine,” Timothy Lynham said.

Photo by Mike Newbry on Unsplash

This is part one of a two part piece on wildfires in Canada, intended to lay the stage on the problem so that we can understand what’s being done to prevent and help the country with wildfires.

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. For them, there would no longer be a summer season, the season that they believed was, at one point, beautiful. The short poem lamented how hot the summer had become, and how much the smoke had ruined much of the nostalgic attachment they had for the three months a year which were intended for park lounging and camping trips.

The person who wrote the poem is somewhere out there, probably still mourning the loss of their summers; they’re probably reminded of it weekly when we have smoke such as the last week of July 2025, and once again on the first weekend of August.

The internet was aflame with memes and photos, people shouting into their screens that “Montreal has the worst air quality of any major city on earth,” sending each other screenshots of headlines, of AQI ratings in their weather apps.

This isn’t the first time this has happened.

In 2023, Canada had its worst wildfire season on record. In 2025, we’re on track to have the second worst. Even to the naked eye, it’s fairly clear that the summers are hotter, the winters don’t require the long-suffering of yore, and that there’s been a distinct change in the Canadian climate. Even climate change deniers would struggle to argue that nothing has changed.

If we are not prepared as a country for the way it will continue to change, we will see millions affected in the decades to come, and spend vastly more on repairing the damages caused from these fires as well as fighting them than we could if we invested in prevention.

“We’ve always been able to guarantee protection (from forest fires.) Safety. We can’t do that anymore,” Tim Lynham, a fire ecologist and expert on forest fire behaviour said. He graciously spoke to us on the record, despite being retired from his post with the Canadian Forest Service. “The problem is becoming overwhelming.”

Lynham explained that there are fewer fires than there were before, but they are more severe– they burn significantly hotter, and rapidly become out of control. Thus fewer fires, more area burn.

Although there have been disasters recently, destroying populated hubs such as Lytton or Jasper, it is relatively uncommon for fires to be started by humans in Canada, contrary to popular belief.

“You get ignition two ways,” Lynham said. “You get lightning, or you get an accident… or it could be arson, but arson’s not an issue in Canada.”

“Lightning is responsible for about 90 per cent of area burn,” Mike Flannigan, who is the BC Innovation Research Chair in Predictive Services, and whose credentials are too long to list in an article, said. “Area burn has quadrupled since the early 1970s.” Flannigan and his colleagues attribute this to human-caused climate change. Specifically industrial emissions.

“Climate change was caused by industrial emissions,” Lynham said. “Now forest fires are trapped in a cycle.”

Many people claim that Canada is “carbon-neutral” because of the vast forests that spread across the mostly uninhabited land in the north. This has been debunked repeatedly, and the forests are no longer a carbon sink.

The cycle begins because of industrialization, consumerism, and a heating globe. It is then perpetuated by the forest fires, which contribute significantly to climate change, and then the globe heats more. No solution is currently apparent.

“You can’t stop the cycle instantly because you can’t turn back the temperature, we don’t know how to do it,” Lynham said. He then corrected himself. “Well, we know how to do it. We would have to get rid of burning fossil fuels and then do a lot of remediation.” Of course, this isn’t going to happen, as there is no political will in Canada or the globe to change our consumeristic habits.

On the other hand, current carbon capture technology isn’t sophisticated enough to turn down the heat, and is often a misnomer to what the tech is actually doing. What most industrial emitters use is something known as “oil recovery.” It has in fact led to more carbon emissions than before we used these technologies.

Interestingly, there is enough technology globally that we could turn the planet green very quickly and power the globe with a singular source of electricity in the Saharan desert, but that would take an amazing amount of cooperation between countries, and is not realistic to expect considering global geopolitics.

Not only that, but the real-world effects of the smoke goes beyond climate change. It is dangerous and could lead to long term health effects to those who are young, and those who are pre-disposed to respiratory problems.

“Everyone’s lungs are somewhere on a spectrum,” 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. He explained that people are sent on a lifelong trajectory that is positive or negative.

“If you have asthma, your airways are compromised, and smoke will compromise them further… this gets them closer to the crisis point,” he said. Obviously those with pre-existing conditions are in more severe danger than those with healthy lungs, but the danger is there for everyone. Carlsten explained that everyone will degrade as they grow older, but the smoke will speed up the degradation.

So what should we do?

The dangers of the wildfires are ever present in Canada now. The season is now from February to October, and is unprecedented. In the next article, we will address the solutions to the crisis, common discussion points, and discuss what can be done, from a governmental level all the way through to a personal level.