The 2024 Jasper Fire is a grim reminder of the urgency of adopting a Canadian national wildfire strategy

In what is becoming an unfortunately common occurrence, the town of Jasper, Alta. has been ravaged by a wildfire of unprecedented scale. Crews report witnessing “300- to 400-foot flames,” while up to 50 per cent of Jasper’s buildings may be damaged. Luckily, there have been no reported fatalities so far.

If a fire can burn the town of Jasper in a national park that has the resources to deal with fire, what does the future hold for hundreds of small boreal forest towns across the country that do not have the means, know-how or resolve to accept that fire will come someday?

Jasper is the latest in a growing number of communities affected by wildfires. Twenty thousand people living in Yellowknife were evacuated from their homes for more than three weeks in 2023. The B.C. town of Lytton is still rebuilding after it burned in 2021.

Indigenous people, who represent five per cent of the population, are disproportionately affected by wildfires, as First Nations communities comprise 42 per cent of evacuations. Residents of Fort Good Hope, a community that is mainly Indigenous in the Northwest Territories, were recently displaced from their homes for three weeks due to a wildfire.

Jasper reinforces just how much we need a national wildfire strategy to bring together all levels of governance within the business and Indigenous communities to map out a blueprint for how to better predict, prevent, mitigate and manage fires, and how to provide small boreal communities with the resources they need to make them more resilient.

Longtime coming

In the summer of 2010, Parks Canada fire manager Dave Smith conducted aerial and ground surveys of three main valleys in Jasper National Park and found that 400 trees had been attacked by the mountain pine beetle.

Until then, Jasper had been one of the few regions on the east slopes of the Rockies that had not been seriously affected by this slow-moving catastrophe. This beetle species has destroyed pristine views, shuttered lumber mills, increased the threat of forest fires while dead needles are still in the trees and reshaped British Columbia’s economy.

In 2011, I joined Smith on an aerial and ground survey to see how the infestation was progressing. So many trees in Jasper had been reddened by the pine beetle that Smith decided there was no use counting again; he would have to find some other way of monitoring the situation.

Read more:
How to protect your home from wildfires – here’s what fire prevention experts say is most important

Before he retired, Smith told me that, although he loved his job, he had trouble sleeping at night on hot summer days. He worried about a wind-driven wildfire sweeping through the highly combustible needles still clinging to all those dead trees and the living stands of 80-year-old spruce and pine that were at risk of burning. It wasn’t just the aging forest and dead needles that worried him; it was the intense heat, extended droughts and lightning that were intensifying in a rapidly warming world.

Parks Canada fire specialists like Smith have done a lot to prevent fire from coming into Jasper, Banff and other park towns across the country. Forests have been thinned, controlled burns have been ignited to reduce the threat of fire, and business and residential owners have been encouraged to make their properties fire smart.

But even that was not enough to save Jasper from the heartbreak its residents are going through. Jasper’s aggressive response came too late to take the necessary actions to make the national park more resilient to fire. Perhaps, most critically, a century of fire suppression has left behind too many aging trees and not enough space for more resilient stands to be regenerated.

The scenes in Jasper are devastating but also depressingly predictable given the trajectory we’ve been heading towards since 2003 when Parks Canada was overwhelmed by fires burning in Kootenay, Jasper and Banff and other parts of the country — and when more than 45,000 people were evacuated from the Okanagan.

Waterton Lakes Park in Alberta dodged a bullet for nearly a century before the exceptionally intense Kenow fire ripped through it in 2017. Jasper got a scare in 2022 when the Chetamon Fire lit up the night sky. Is Banff next?

As Rob Walker, a former Parks Canada fire and vegetation specialist, noted in a Facebook post on July 25: “Wildfire seasons will continue to worsen, and our political leadership must find a way to stop the madness of our addiction to oil and gas.” It was Walker who told me the 2003 wildfire season was a harbinger of what we could expect in a rapidly warming world.

Read more:
COP28: Why we need to break our addiction to combustion

Lack of foresight

Alberta no longer has a wildfire rappel team that can get to fires that are inaccessible to ground crews. Its fire science co-ordinator has long departed, and its wildfire budget is heavily weighted in favour of suppression over wildfire science. That has been left to the University of Alberta to do, even though its budget has been cut by more than 20 per cent.

In 2024, The Government of Canada invested close to $800 million in initiatives to improve wildfire management, including helping provinces and territories purchase additional firefighting equipment and training 1,000 firefighters across the country.

Its investment in wildfire science pales in comparison.

There was a glimmer of hope in June when the Canadian Council of Forest Ministers met in Cranbrook, B.C. and ended their meeting with a promise to follow through on a national wildfire prevention and mitigation strategy. This time may be different, but we have heard this kind of promise many times before.

More dark days may be coming unless we develop a culture, and political policies, that respect fire, drawing upon the wealth of valuable insights in Indigenous fire stewardship practices.

Read more:
How Indigenous burning practices can help curb the biodiversity crisis

Fire has no ideology or preferences; it will always be quite simply a chemical reaction, a propulsive oxidation of hydrocarbons shaped by terrain, weather, climate and the combustible material around it. We must learn to live with fire, and find ways of containing it for fire will never learn to live with us.