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Ontario fires A car drives down a side street, as smoke from wild fires fills the night air in Thunder Bay, Ont., Friday, July 17, 2026. <\/p>\nWINNIPEG \u2013 \u201cIt was literally red, like, red, really dark.\u201d<\/p>\n
That is how Victoria Lafreniere described the situation she was in earlier last week, as wildfires burned near her business, about 220 kilometres northeast of Thunder Bay, Ont. <\/p>\n
Lafreniere owns Pasha Lake Cabins, a fishing lodge in northwestern Ontario. She\u2019s lived her whole life in the north and has never experienced anything this severe before.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had a fire four kilometres away (and) we were using flashlights to get everything ready to be able to up and leave,\u201d she said. \u201cThere were embers flying everywhere; it was crazy.\u201d <\/p>\n
Lafreniere says they are still on standby to leave but says the conditions have since improved over the last couple of days. <\/p>\n
She says the situation was worrying. <\/p>\n
\u201cI built this place for my children and myself and we\u2019re only five years in. I was terrified just knowing how much you put your everything into this, and you could just lose it within seconds,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Ontario fires A car drives down a side street, as smoke from wild fires fills the night air in Thunder Bay, Ont., Friday, July 17, 2026. <\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve seen on the news that there\u2019s places that are fairly close to us, like Armstrong, and they\u2019ve lost communities. There\u2019s two other resorts that were lost, like near Thunder Bay, and I can\u2019t even imagine everything you worked so hard for, just being blown up, literally.\u201d <\/p>\n
Lafreniere says the current situation in northwestern Ontario is severely impacting her business. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe actually have seen a very significant loss of revenue,\u201d she said. \u201cWe were having a really good year, and I had a full week this week. We had full cabins, everything, and now we\u2019re only down to a little bit less than half of what I was going to have this coming week, so it\u2019s really put a damper on our season so far.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve had a lot of people cancel the rest of the season as well, just because of the worry of the air quality and not knowing what could happen going forward, because we do have multiple fires that are still around us,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n
Over 950 wildfires continue to burn right across Canada, with nearly 200 of them in Ontario. The fires are producing thick, blanket-like smoke, which has prompted Environment and Climate Change Canada to issue air quality warnings.<\/p>\n
Flooding impacting Manitoba campgrounds <\/p>\n
Meanwhile, many campgrounds in western Manitoba have been closed due to flooding. <\/p>\n
CTV News recently spoke to a campground owner along the Shell River, north of Russell, Man., which is about 350 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg. <\/p>\n
Karen Goraluk owns and operates Asessippi Beach and Campground. She says she lost 14 of her 22 campsites after the campground was hit by two major floods in three weeks.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe land fell into the river,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s very sandy, and it just started to eat away \u2014 the first flood, and the second flood took a whole bunch more, so that area, it\u2019s half gone.\u201d<\/p>\n
With just eight campsites left, Goraluk told CTV News the campground is unable to generate enough revenue to keep operations open. <\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think we\u2019ll open this summer, just with everything that\u2019s happened,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n
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Alicia Mitchell Winnipegger Alicia Mitchell says she and her family were unable to secure any camping sites within Manitoba for the whole summer. Campers face limited availability<\/p>\n
Despite the unpredictable weather impacting many campgrounds, demand for campsites still appears to remain high.<\/p>\n
Winnipegger Alicia Mitchell says she and her family were unable to secure any camping sites within Manitoba for the whole summer and were forced to go out of province to camp.<\/p>\n
She says they are constantly checking to see if there are any cancellations within the province, but so far, no luck. <\/p>\n
\u201cYou can sign up for a notification if you go on after the bookings open and you are trying to make a booking, and it says there\u2019s nothing available; there\u2019s a place on the site that you can hit and get notifications and you will be notified about that specific booking,\u201d she said. \u201cIf you put in the date, the details of the site, you\u2019ll be notified, if something comes up.\u201d <\/p>\n
Mitchell says she is hopeful something will come up this summer but says she will be more proactive next year to secure a site. <\/p>\n
\u201cYou have to kind of be prepared, know what site you want, do some research, plan ahead, mark out your first site second say third, fourth choices, and be on top of the game when it comes to logging on in the morning, having all your passwords in place and being prepared that way,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n
-With files from CTV\u2019s Milan Lukes <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WINNIPEG \u2013 \u201cIt was literally red, like, red, really dark.\u201d That is how Victoria Lafreniere described the situation…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":812850,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[712,49,48,44],"class_list":["post-812849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-canada","tag-apple-news","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=812849"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812849\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/812850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=812849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=812849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=812849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}