Canada’s capacity to prevent wildfires has been shrinking for decades because of budget cuts, a loss of some of the country’s forest service staff, and onerous rules for fire prevention, turning some of its forests into a tinderbox.
As residents braced for what could be the worst wildfire season on record, and one that is far from over, the air slowly cleared over the Northeastern United States on Friday, but hundreds of wildfires continued to burn across Canada.
Thanks to some rain and cloud cover near wildfire areas, with scattered rains expected in parts of southern Ontario on Sunday, Steven Flisfeder, a warning preparedness meteorologist at Environment and Climate Change Canada, predicted that the weekend could bring better air quality in Toronto, the country’s largest city.
“That’s going to help flush out the contaminants from the air a little bit,” he said.
More than 1,100 firefighters from around the world have been dispatched across Canada to help combat the country’s raging fire season, officials said, including groups from France, Chile, Costa Rica, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.
Wildfire emergency response management is handled by each of the 10 provinces and three territories in Canada, but hundreds of blazes across the country have stretched local resources thin, and renewed calls for a national firefighting service.
At a time when many Canadians are asking if the country has enough wildfire fighting resources, several experts say the government should be focused on doing all it can to prevent wildfires, a focus from which it has strayed since budget cuts imposed in the 1990s that hampered the nation’s forest service.
“We need to do more to get ahead of the problem,” said Mike Flannigan, who studies wildfires at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia, a community in the heart of that province’s wildfire country. “And progress on that has been slow, primarily because we are kind of stuck in this paradigm that fire suppression is the solution.”
People who study Canada’s response say it’s been weakened by a variety of forces, including local and national budget cuts for forests, cumbersome safeguards for fire prevention and a steep reduction in the number of forest service employees.
British Columbia spent 801 million Canadian dollars (about $601 million) on fighting forest fires during the unusually hot year 2021 wildfire season, which saw fire wipe out the town of Lytton. But the province’s current wildfire prevention budget is just 32 million dollars a year.
Similar disparities exist in other provinces, which tend to invest in small, community-based programs that protect villages and towns rather than mitigating the risk of fire throughout forests, increasing the threat of out-of-control wildfires.
The small programs are helpful, involving measures like clearing forest floors on the periphery of towns and creating fire breaks between settlements and forests. But…
2023-06-09 17:58:11
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