Prescribed burns – the deliberate setting of fires under controlled circumstances – have resulted in fewer and less intense wildfires in Australia, and it is a strategy Canada should take lead from.HO/The Canadian Press
Canada’s premiers met in Saskatoon in early June to talk infrastructure but were distracted by the small matter of the forest fires raging across the West at the time.
When asked by reporters about it, some of the premiers lamented that there is now a multiyear backlog on orders for new water bombers.
Premier Wab Kinew of Manitoba said his province put an $80-million down payment on three new bombers this year but added they won’t be delivered until 2031 at the earliest. Doug Ford of Ontario said much the same about his province’s order for six more bombers.
Six weeks later, the country is well into one of its worst wildfire seasons ever.
As of Thursday, the number of new fires in Canada (3,235) was higher than at the same point last year (3,145), according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre. More than 5.5 million hectares of forest have burned.
The fires get worse every summer, thanks to the heat and drought caused by climate change – but also because of a bias for suppression over mitigation that has left forest floors littered with flammable material and created a denser canopy at the top where flames can spread, well, like wildfire.
And yet Canada’s premiers still focus on suppression while experts – including some in their own governments – keep telling them to put equal effort and money into ignition prevention and mitigation: in particular, prescribed burns.
“Suppression alone is no longer adequate to address the growing challenges from wildland fire,“ the Canadian Council of Forest Ministers said in a report last year. ”Wildland fire management in Canada needs to be transformed.”
That means creating a national regime of prescribed burns – the deliberate setting of fires under controlled circumstances to reduce the number and intensity of forest fires, and to limit damage to property.
It’s a practice that Indigenous peoples in Canada and elsewhere used for millennia to manage their lands prior to the colonial era. But its use is sharply limited in Canada, mostly because politicians are scared to the point of paralysis by the off-chance that a government-sanctioned burn could get out of control (as has rarely happened).
This reticence is no longer valid in the climate change era. Australia responded to massive wildfires in 2019 by becoming a world leader in the use of prescribed burns, partly by integrating Aboriginal knowledge into its practices.
Tens of millions of hectares of Australian lands are now subject to prescribed burns each year, and the result has been fewer and less intense wildfires, less damage to property, massive savings on expensive suppression efforts and a net drop of carbon emissions.
In Canada, only a few thousand hectares of land are subject to prescribed burns each year, mostly in national parks. The country’s aversion to the practice is being traded off against severe wildfires that this year have forced 30,000 people from their homes, and which pump harmful smoke into the air Canadians breath (an issue we will address in an upcoming editorial).
Canada has to grow up and embrace prescribed burns. To do that, it needs a national firefighting agency that has the command authority to respond to the now perennial forest-fire emergency, and which can also tend to the off-season task of planning and carrying out prescribed fires.
Australia has more than 140,000 trained volunteer forest fire fighters who manage the prescribed burns, and also respond to outbreaks during fire season.
Canada, meanwhile, leaves suppression to the provinces and territories, which rely on seasonal professionals to battle fires. Those firefighters are routinely overwhelmed by the scale of the fires, requiring Canada to call on other countries to send reinforcements, and to back-order more water bombers in desperation.
It’s becoming clear that the country with the world’s largest boreal forest is not up to the task of managing it. This failure is made more damning by the fact that Canada appears poised to increase its fossil fuel production, which could contribute to the climate-change crisis.
It’s going to be awfully hard to build new pipelines across a part of the country that is on fire every summer, and even harder to justify it. Ottawa and the provinces need to show some courage and start fighting bad fire with good fire.