As climate change and outmoded forestry practices bring Canada its worst wildfire season of the century, exhausted and underpaid firefighters warn they may stand down if their working conditions do not improve.
“We’re sick of this crap, and it’s time to take a stand… let ‘er rip,” one 39-year veteran forest ranger in Ontario said in a public statement. They added they would no longer respond to fires outside their local district nor work over the daily eight-hour schedule, writes The Hotshot Wake Up, a newsletter and podcast on wildfire news and policy.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if folks started not responding,” said one operational crew member. “It’s going to push a lot of people out if we don’t get [low wages] fixed.”
Back in 2021, a group of rangers wrote in a blog post that “Ontario’s wildland firefighters are doing too much, with too little, for too little.” Hotshot Wake Up says multiple provinces have since seen similar issues, including “fire funding cuts, highly effective programs scrapped, and upwards of 40% of their work force left.” The newsletter includes a chart that shows fire rangers earning less today than they did in 2009 after adjusting for inflation.
A similar problem is going on in the United States, with a “mass exodus” over the past three years of firefighters who weren’t satisfied with their pay. Deputy Chief Jaelith Hall-Rivera told Congress the agencies expect 30 to 50% of the work force to leave if the problem isn’t fixed, Hotshot Wake Up writes.
This is happening even as the role of wildland firefighters grows more important than ever before. Wildfires have engulfed 47,000 square kilometres in what is now Canada’s worst fire season of the century, reports the Globe and Mail. Nearly 430 forest fires were burning on Sunday, 210 of them out of control. Widespread evacuations have pushed more than 100,000 people across nine provinces and territories from their homes, and experts are cautioning that dry conditions are likely to persist for the remainder of the season.
Climate Change, Forest Practices Make Matters Worse
Unusually hot and dry conditions have been named as a common denominator across the map for fires in Canada this year. Western Canada had its warmest and driest May on record, while the eastern provinces received 50% less precipitation this spring than usual. Those conditions “left soils and forests as dry as tinder, so when a fire ignites it can grow and spread quickly,” says the journal Nature. Some blazes may have been sparked by human carelessness, but earlier than usual lightning storms also hastened the fire season’s onset.
And while wildfires have always been an important part of forest ecosystems, scientists warn they are growing more frequent and intense due to climate change and land use patterns. In 2020, hundreds of fires burned across the western United States and Canada, other blazes torched Australia during the continent’s “Black Summer”, and Arctic wildfires shattered a record set the previous year. In 2021, a fast-moving wildfire burned the town of Lytton, British Columbia to the ground in less than an hour amid a widespread heat wave. Then in 2022 again, extensive fires burned along North America’s west coast in a longer than usual fire season, and Europe reported its worst forest fire season in history.
Some experts point out that this year’s fires coincide with the start of an El Niño climate pattern, but the two events are unlikely to be connected. Still, extraordinary weather is not unexpected as the planet warms, and “climate change is definitely a factor that is causing these extreme conditions to occur more frequently,” said Piyush Jain, a research scientist at the Canadian Forest Service.
Studies link climate change and the rise of fires generally. The connection to any particular wildfire is less clear, the BBC explains. But an attribution study last month concluded that 88 fossil fuel and cement companies were responsible for 37% of wildfire losses in the western regions of Canada and the United States between 1986 and 2021.
“Climate change just creates these favourable conditions for fires,” James MacCarthy, a research associate with Global Forest Watch at the World Resources Institute, told the Washington Post.
“Decades-long policies of suppressing fires—rather than encouraging healthy burns,” also add to the crisis, writes the Post, citing Stephen Pyne, an emeritus professor at Arizona State University. Pyne previously suggested that human forest management practices are causing a “runaway fire age”, dubbed the “Pyrocene,” by interfering with the landscape’s natural burning cycle.
Ambivalence within the forestry industry and insufficient funding from provincial and federal governments compound the problem. “We just can’t seem to collectively do what’s necessary,” said B.C. fire ecologist Robert Gray. The forestry industry’s preference for certain tree species and logging practices that create homogeneously-aged forests have undermined natural impediments to fires, Gray added. In some cases, those factors coupled with high rates of tree mortality caused by pests leave swaths of forest as tinder.
“There is a feeling right now that we’re in a nation-wide crisis,” Gray told the Guardian. “Smoking out Toronto, Ottawa, Washington, and New York is helping [to prompt action], but I don’t hear anybody speaking about doubling and tripling investment where it’s needed most.”
“We [talk a] big game about climate change and how we need to get out ahead of the natural disasters that are linked to it, but we’re not doing it,” Gray added.
Fires Fuel Division
With Ottawa shrouded in smoke last week from Quebec’s wildfires, and even with Parliament Hill surrounded by haze, lawmakers inside the House of Commons were “largely consumed by metaphorical fires,” wrote CBC Parliamentary reporter Aaron Wherry.
That was after opposition leader Pierre Poilievre vowed to block passage of a federal budget that pivoted heavily to cleantech investment incentives, trying unsuccessfully to keep MPs in Ottawa all summer to rewrite the bill and throw a wrench into the government’s plans. During that debate, Conservative finance critic Jasraj Singh Hallan accused Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland of pouring a “$60-billion jerry can of fuel on the inflationary fire,” while real-life fires raged scarcely 150 kilometres away.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau brought up his promised fight against climate change as part of the plan to fight fires. “Canadians know that fighting climate change is necessary both to create those great jobs and opportunities but also to prevent the catastrophic and expensive losses that Canadians are facing increasingly over the years,” Trudeau said during a presentation reminiscent of his pandemic-era news conferences,.
While the Liberal government scorched opposition Conservatives for fighting carbon taxes and not providing serious policy amid a changing climate, the Bloc Québécois and New Democratic Party accused Trudeau’s government of failing on climate action by pointing to “subsidies for fossil fuel companies and the approvals for controversial resource extraction projects,” the Guardian says.
And as hazardous smoke from Canada permeates North America’s eastern coast—a region usually removed from wildfire impacts—media and political reactions in the U.S. have also been strong, and varied. Several news outlets cautioned people to stay inside or wear a mask outside to protect against smoke, while Democratic lawmakers Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez used social media to issue warnings.
But Republicans and right-wing news outlets took a different approach, downplaying the severity of the fires and climate change’s role in causing them, reports Carbon Brief. In one instance, lobbyist Steve Milloy appeared on Fox News to say that “this doesn’t kill anybody, it doesn’t make anybody cough, this is not a health event…This has got nothing to do with climate. This is wildfire smoke. This is natural.”
Sean Hannity, another popular Fox News host, asked a guest on the show if people complaining about breathing difficulties due to the smoke were merely “snowflakes”.
They evidently missed the front-line account by Dr. Courtney Howard, an emergency room physician in Yellowknife, NWT and past president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment.
“I’ve witnessed the health impacts of wildfires,” Howard said last week. “As smoke fills the skies across Canada, school children are being kept indoors,” and today’s trends mean higher emissions than anyone can adapt to in a healthy way.
“That’s why all our adaptation strategies must be paired with policies to rapidly cut greenhouse gas emissions,” she added. “We need a cap on oil and gas emissions in order to protect all the children who are currently staying inside due to smoke that they did not have a hand in creating.”
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