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More Firefighters and Water Bombers Won’t Solve Canada’s Wildfire Crisis

The focus on fighting fires has distracted us from preventing them

This wildfire season isn’t Canada’s largest yet—that honour belongs to 2023—but the season isn’t over. So far, thousands of wildfires have ignited across the country, dozens of which are currently out of control. Over 3 million hectares have burned. Thousands of people have fled communities across the country, including in Northern Ontario, while others face evacuation orders and alerts. Toxic smoke and an orange haze blanketed much of Southern Ontario and parts of Quebec and the United States in mid-July, triggering air quality alerts and a new tariff threat from US president Donald Trump.

Jesse Winter has had a front-row view of wildfires since he began covering them in 2018. In his recent book, Wild Fire: Dispatches from a Country Ablaze, the Vancouver-based photographer and writer describes how following the flames has kindled in him a deeper appreciation of their power. We discussed what he’s learned about wildfires, how political inaction has worsened the issue, and what it would take for things to finally change. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

As a reporter for the Globe and Mail covering the current wildfire season, what are things like for you right now?

At the moment, things are fairly busy, which isn’t really surprising. Especially out West, mid-July through August is kind of the typical height of wildfire season, and what we’ve seen across Canada this year is, for the most part—with a few caveats—fairly “normal.”

What are the caveats—what’s not normal?

One unusual thing about this year, at least in British Columbia, is that the majority of wildfires in the first month of the season were likely human caused, which says that we’re maybe not doing a great job of being safe in the forests. Human-caused fires can often be the ones that lead to really bad outcomes, because they tend to start right next to communities. The trend overall is fewer fire ignitions—we generally are getting good at not starting them ourselves.

I think we’re going to see the proportion of human-caused fires to natural ones change in British Columbia in the coming weeks: we just had huge lightning bolts roll through, which nearly tripled the number of fires in the province, and that’s kind of right on schedule for mid-July.

We’re seeing fires that are much bigger than they used to be and fire behaviour that’s more severe. If you look to Northern Ontario, the fires that exploded in the past week or so are in line with trends that fire scientists are seeing. The measures that we call fire indices—things like the fire weather index, relative humidity, temperature, the state of the forest, and the relative risk of fire—are more frequently off the charts.

I was just talking to a fire scientist the other day who said that experts are starting to recognize that relative humidity as one of the indicators of risk is, in some cases, not the most useful anymore. In some cases, the air and potential fuels are becoming so dry that it’s hard to measure moisture levels accurately. So we’re having to change the way we measure wildfire risk to account for the impacts of climate change.

Most Canadians are lucky enough to not have to evacuate from wildfires, but millions have been feeling the effects of the smoke from great distances away. What would you want people to know about what the fires are actually like up close?

I’ll start by being clear that I don’t have anywhere near the amount of experience up close with fires as firefighters do, so the risks to me are far lower.

There’s a lot of research being done now and a growing awareness of the actual health risks of breathing in wildfire smoke. For a long time, the prevailing sentiment was, It’s just vegetative stuff burning; it’s probably not a big deal. Firefighters are seeing worse outcomes for their health. They’re seeing higher rates of cancer in young firefighters who are, statistically speaking, too young to really be at risk of these things.

In terms of what a wildfire looks like up close, I think people have the expectation that it looks totally overwhelming all the time. And it certainly can. But in Canada, we tend not to want to put fire crews on the ground in front of truly extreme fire behaviour. It’s not worth risking people’s lives in moments when the fire behaviour is as extreme as it was on, say, July 12, 13, and 14 in Northern Ontario.

What about when it’s not an extreme fire?........

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