Record start to the wildfire season in Canada
Wildfire season is off to an unprecedented start in Canada, with large fires spiraling out of control in many parts of the country, from British Columbia and Alberta in the west, to the Northwest Territories and Yukon in the far north, to Quebec and Nova Scotia in the east. Fires are also raging in Ontario, the most populous province in the country.
Data from Canada’s Wildland Fire Information System shows that more than 3 million hectares burned across the country during the first week of June, nearly 12 times the 10-year average at this point in the fire season and almost as much as the 2021 fire. Season until October. In recent years, wildfire season in Canada didn’t actually start until July, so this year’s fires are more than a month ahead of the usual forecast. Big fires were already Rabies in Alberta (English article) During the first weeks of May.
There is growing evidence that climate change caused by capitalism is dramatically increasing the severity and extent of wildfires across the country due to higher temperatures, drier conditions and the infestation of Ponderosa pine beetles in western Canada. This phenomenon affects isolated rural communities, including poor First Nations reservations, as well as major urban centers, and extends Canada’s firefighting resources far beyond its borders.
The onset of El Niño weather is expected to bring higher temperatures and drier weather in western Canada through the end of the year, which means conditions will remain favorable for hatching eggs, as well as widespread fires.
As of Sunday, 413 fires were burning across the country and more than 26,000 people were under evacuation orders in Alberta, British Columbia, the Northwest Territories, Nova Scotia, Quebec and Saskatchewan.
Smoke from the fires has significantly worsened air quality across the country, including the capital, Ottawa, where air quality has reached a score of over 10 on Environment Canada’s Air Quality Health Index. This is the highest possible level above which outdoor activities are dangerous. The United States also felt the impact of the fires, as smoke reached the Midwest and New England on Monday and Tuesday.
Hundreds of firefighters from outside the province and internationally have been mobilized to fight the fires, including 443 from the United States, Australia and New Zealand and 200 from South Africa. French Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron has pledged that his government will deploy 100 wildfire specialists to Canada. Water bombers and helicopters from Montana helped put out fires in Nova Scotia on Sunday. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has also deployed 200 members of the Canadian Armed Forces to help fight fires in Quebec, after deploying 300 personnel to Alberta for firefighting missions last month.
“Climate change has been implicated in the exacerbation of wildfires in North America,” Kristina Dahl, senior climatologist for the Climate and Energy Program of the Union of Concerned Scientists, told CTV News. Heat and no precipitation records were broken across the country last month, with communities in Alberta and Nunavut reporting their warmest May on record.
The extension of urban development into formerly rural and forested areas on the outskirts of urban centers is another issue that puts people at risk from wildfires. “We also know that there are far more people living in wildfire-prone areas,” Dahl told CTV. “This means that there are more people who are likely to start fires and more people are affected when fires start.”
In late May, rare fires broke out in Nova Scotia as a result of abnormally hot and dry weather, including the Tantallon Fire, which ripped through Westwood Hills and other newer rural developments in Halifax, destroying 150 homes and 50 other structures. After 16,400 people were evacuated in the province’s largest city, the Tantallon Fire was largely contained by firefighters on June 3.
Wildfires are straining Nova Scotia’s firefighting capabilities like never before. In recent years, municipalities and the regional government have cut off resources for firefighting as part of a harsh austerity policy aimed at protecting the profits of capitalism at the expense of social programmes. Halifax Regional Municipal Council (HRM) has voted to cut fire services by $3.5 million in 2020, using the COVID-19 pandemic as a cover.
The cuts, which shut down a fire station and cut staff in the city’s fire departments, have had a devastating impact on Halifax’s ability to fight and contain wildfires this year.
In September 2021, the Auditor General of the Human Resources Department, Evangeline Coleman-Sade, released a report examining the Halifax Firefighter Inspection Program. Evangeline Coleman-Sade concluded that the Halifax Fire had failed to meet its legal obligations. In particular, it found that Halifax Fire did not complete 40% of its inspections on time. It found that the fire inspection program was generally inadequate and that the Halifax Fire did not have sufficient staff to carry out the inspections.
Halifax firefighters admitted to the Attorney General that many apartment complexes were “built without proper fire safety specifications”. Indigo Shores, Westwood Hills, and White Hills residential areas were determined to have been built without the necessary firefighting infrastructure and destroyed.
Despite the dramatic start to the wildfire season, which has already forced thousands from their homes, Prime Minister Trudeau remained optimistic about Canada’s ability to fight the fires. “Given the outlook, we should have enough resources to complete the summer,” Trudeau told reporters. “Should the situation escalate, we are developing contingency plans and will ensure we are there to ensure all Canadians are protected throughout the summer.”
In the absence of a national fire service, provinces and territories in Canada have generally relied on other provincial and territorial fire services to fight fires as the fire season shifts from west to east. However, as the fires grew in size to encompass the entire country at once, the Canadian government increasingly resorted to deploying the military to fight the fires and calling for international assistance.
“You start to fall into a dilemma: There aren’t enough resources for the amount of fires on the ground, and the larger jurisdictions, which are usually the ones that provide a lot of resources from outside, start pulling away because they are,” Brian Simpson, former chief of the British Columbia Forest Fire Department, told the newspaper. : Globe and Mail.
Mike Flanigan, a professor at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops world The government should consider creating a national force of firefighters and water bombers to put out fires before they become too big.
While every major party has raised the issue of the National Fire Service, none of them will take serious action to address climate change, the root cause of the escalating fire season. Trudeau’s government has promised to cut carbon emissions, including through a “carbon tax,” but has failed even to meet its inadequate targets. Meanwhile, Tory leader Pierre Poiliffry has promised to abolish the carbon tax if he becomes prime minister, allowing oil majors and other companies to pollute almost unlimitedly. As for the New Democrats, despite their claims of tougher action on climate change, they promised in last month’s provincial elections in Alberta that oil and other businesses would continue to benefit from the nation’s highest bottom taxes. They also joined Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and her far-right Conservative party in attacking Ottawa’s plan to reduce net carbon emissions from the oil sector.
There is no solution to climate change and its impacts, including increasingly devastating wildfires, at the national level and within the confines of the nation-state capitalist system. Only an internationally coordinated movement of socialism based on science, led by the working class, will be able to deal with the global catastrophe caused by climate change.
(Article published in English on June 6, 2023)
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