When Scott Driver began work as fire chief in Cranbrook, B.C., in 2019, his mission was crystal clear: protect his town’s residents and buildings from fire. But it wasn’t until 2022, when a wildfire threatened the mountainside that collects his town’s drinking water, that he realized that in this warming climate, his responsibilities extend far beyond the city limits. 

The BC Wildfire Service was preparing to do everything it could to stop the rapidly growing flames of the Connell Ridge fire. There was just one problem, Driver says. That same slope it was about to raze, burn and dump retardants on was the main source of tap water for Cranbrook, supplying its 20,000 residents with drinking water. 

That’s when a light bulb switched on for him. “Not only do I have to protect the citizens in their houses and our infrastructure, but I have to protect the ability for them to stay in their house and drink water, cause it’s a piece of life,” he recalls thinking. 

He quickly brought his city’s water manager into the fire incident management team and BC Wildfire Service amended its action plan. This isn’t about houses, this is about drinking water, Driver remembers telling them.

The hotter a fire burns, the more the charred soil repels water long after the flames are extinguished. That leads to more sediment washing into streams, more harmful bacteria and warmer water — all of which make it harder and more expensive to treat drinking water. One study from the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found once one-fifth of a watershed’s footprint is burned in severe fire, it will experience increased runoff and water flows, which worsens water quality downstream as the healthy soils and vegetation that absorb and filter water are burned away. 

As climate change combines with decades of rapidly putting out most wildfires — leaving forests packed with dry fuel — the ripple effects are showing up in our tap water. Last summer, discoloured tap water flowing out of faucets in West Kelowna was likely caused by the wildfire that scorched the slopes feeding into the Rose Valley reservoir the previous summer, according to a city statement. 

An analysis by a team of environmental scientists published earlier this year examined 245 burned watersheds across the United States and found organic carbon and phosphorus remained elevated for five years post-fire, while nitrogen and sediment levels remained elevated for up to eight years. The scientists, from the Rocky Mountain Research Station in Colorado, found nitrogen levels in the surface water from watersheds burned in the 2002 Hayman fire, the largest recorded in the state’s history at the time, were still elevated almost 15 years after the fires.In emergency planning, responders plan around safeguarding critical infrastructure assets, but Driver sees a dangerous blind spot in B.C. when it comes to what’s considered critical. “The natural asset of a watershed isn’t currently top of mind for most,” he says. “That’s as important as the schools and the hospital.”

Wildfires are a threat to water security

Fortunately this is still a theoretical concern for Driver, but in many parts of the province, it’s already an issue. Most cities and towns in B.C. depend on reservoirs which collect surface water — the water we can see that comes from rain, melting snow, rivers, lakes and streams. There are more than 466 community watersheds in the province that supply many British Columbians with their water. “You cannot have a community without water,” Robert Gray, a wildland fire ecologist based in Chilliwack, B.C., explains. “The reality is we’re going to be facing more and more of these kinds of crises where we’ve had a significant impact to the watershed.”

In 2023, Canada’s worst wildfire season by a long shot, a record 2.84 million hectares burned in B.C. alone, an area almost as large as all of Vancouver Island. Of that total, 13,970 hectares burned in the Grouse Complex Wildfire that included the McDougall Creek fire in West Kelowna.

Following concerted firefighting efforts, West Kelowna’s brand new $75-million Rose Valley water treatment plant was spared, but the forested watershed which feeds the water plant was not so lucky. About 95 per cent of that watershed burned, a significant change to the landscape which has worsened water quality in the reservoir, increasing turbidity and concentrations of manganese — an unwelcome legacy expected to persist for at least five years after the burn, if not longer.

“We know the land surrounding the Rose Valley reservoir has been damaged because of the wildfire in 2023, and it means the contaminated source of water can be harder to treat because of the sediment, nutrients, metals and organic matter as a result of burned material,” Interior Health medical health officer Dr. Fatemeh Sabet told West Kelowna city council in June this year. 

In 2009, one of the main watersheds that supplied water to Lillooet, B.C., burned extensively in the Mount McLean fire. As a result, its water was contaminated by ash and fire retardant and was unusable altogether. It forced the district to ban water for irrigation in the short term to stretch its reduced water capacity. Since then, the town has developed alternative water sources with the help of $10 million in federal funds. 

“The frequency and intensity of the fire seasons has been overwhelming for a lot of us,” J. Ivor Norlin tells The Narwhal. As head of the drinking water systems program at B.C.’s Interior Health Authority, he’s seen an increase in impacts on water systems due to wildfires. “If it happened once in a while we might be able to focus resources. Now it’s happening every other year, or every three years, and it’s just more and more and more,” he says. In cases like West Kelowna’s McDougall Creek fire, the connection between the fire that burned in August 2023 and the rusty-coloured water with elevated manganese levels that poured out of the tap the following summer was clear. For other water quality impacts, it’s harder to connect the dots. 

Norlin says water managers are seeing the water quality in the entire Okanagan area change in recent years — everything from an increase in water temperatures to spikes in phosphorus and fine sediment have been documented. While the region saw dramatic wildfires in 2017, 2021 and again in 2023, whether these changes in the lake’s water are due entirely to wildfire, or a confluence of extreme weather events, is hard to pin down. “It’s also just part of those broader climate change impacts and just our reality of a shifting environment,” he says. It’s not just B.C. seeing water impacts from wildfires. The fire that struck Fort McMurray, Alta., in 2016 left a huge burn scar on either side of the Athabasca River from which the town’s water is collected. “The water treatment plant there is still dealing with the effects of that fire now,” Juliette O’Keeffe, a senior scientist at the National Collaborating Centre for Environmental Health explains. “Anyone that is operating a water treatment facility has to be aware that there is always a potential for risk of a wildfire.”“It’s not just the land that is burned; you can see downstream impacts as well. Water flows downhill.”

The path to fire-resilient watersheds — and the hurdles in the way

In the cases of West Kelowna and Fort McMurray, their plants have proven robust enough to ensure adequate water treatment despite challenges posed by downstream wildfire impacts, even if they have hiked up water treatment costs. But in Cranbrook, Driver is focused on mitigating the risks upstream, where he wants to make the land more fire-resilient in the first place. 

That way, when it catches fire, it won’t burn so hot and it can bounce back more readily. “We’re not going to stop fire from hitting the landscape,” Driver says. “What we need to do is stop it from wrecking the watershed. … What we want to do is be resilient enough that we can still drink the water after the fire’s been put out.”

He and his department have already begun work to increase the resilience of the city’s water catchment, doing landscape treatments across the parcel of Cranbrook-owned forest adjacent to the town’s water reservoir. They have removed fallen logs, thinned the forest and reduced the amount of fuel available to wildfire and have plans to do more. 

“We’re … planning to do logging and prescribed burning so that if a fire comes roaring down the mountain, it doesn’t come right up to the water’s edge and contaminate the reservoir of water that we use for drinking,” he explains. 

The interior Douglas fir forests surrounding Cranbrook are fire-adapted landscapes, able to recover readily from lower-temperature wildfires. Historic tree-ring analysis shows the forests in the area experienced fire every two to three decades over a period of about 250 years. Burning was a cultural practice of the Ktunaxa, who stewarded these lands for generations, using fire to renew the landscape, improve berry harvests and increase pasture. British Columbia banned cultural burns with the Bush Fire Act of 1874 – the first province in the country to do so. 

In spring 2023, members of ʔaq̓am, a Ktunaxa community, and crews from BC Wildfire Service and Cranbrook’s fire department conducted a 1,200-hectare prescribed burn. A little more than two months later, wildfires whipped through the area. Driver believes the cultural burn reduced fuel loads across the landscape significantly enough to redirect the uncontrolled wildfire away from assets like the airport and neighbouring communities. 

A growing body of scientific evidence shows pre-emptively burning landscapes in low-severity fires lowers their risk of experiencing high-severity fires later, including a recent study out of Stanford University which found prescribed burns lowered the severity of wildfires by 16 per cent and net smoke pollution by an average of 14 per cent. Another analysis found even greater gains of a 72 per cent reduction of severe wildfire risk if forests were thinned to reduce “ladder fuels” (vegetation that can catch fire, drawing flames from the ground up into the tree canopy) and small trees before prescribed burning. 

Driver and his fire department are empowered to reduce the flammability of the parcel of land around the town’s water reservoir because it’s city-owned. But when he looks uphill to the larger watershed that Cranbrook’s citizens rely on, he’s not sure there’s any path he can pursue to make that watershed fire-resistant, because it’s on Crown land. 

“What we need to do in the watersheds are fuel treatments … to mitigate or alleviate fire intensity and severity,” Gray says, adding that means thinning conifer stands, prescribed or cultural burning, converting conifer stands to hardwood or encouraging shrub fields. Most critically, it means asking the B.C. Ministry of Forests to pivot from its status quo model of timber management to more holistic ecosystem management practices that meet multiple objectives.

Currently, as both Gray and Driver note, the province will license a community to collect surface water from a watershed for its water, and with the other hand, permit a private company to harvest timber in that same watershed, with no provisions for the forestry company to log or manage that forest to mitigate its wildfire risk (whether its surface water is licensed to a community or not).

Historically, those two things — timber harvest and surface water collection — could happen in parallel without issue, but now that wildfires are threatening water security, and the best mitigation to safeguard that water source involves altering its management, the two are put in conflict. “Now your focus has to be reducing fire threat to the watershed and not just chasing timber,” says Gray. “The province should have this leadership role where they basically go to the [timber] licensee and say, the objective here in this piece is water quality and water quantity, and reduction of fire risk.” 

It’s possible for a forested watershed to be managed for both fire resilience and profitable harvests, protecting economic interests as well as water supply. In the U.S., Denver Water, the utility that provides the Denver area with clean water, spent tens of millions to repair infrastructure and remove sediment from its reservoirs in the aftermath of the 2002 Hayman Fire. It partnered with federal and state agencies in an initiative called “From Forests to Faucets” to restore fire resilience to the drainage basins that fed its reservoirs. Since 2010, the initiative has conducted treatments across 100,000 acres (roughly 40,000 hectares), ranging from planting within burned priority watersheds to fuel reduction treatments in unburned watersheds to reduce the risk of high-severity fires there.

But such an approach would require a shift in focus and new standards that the province has been unable or unwilling to negotiate for industry. “It takes an adult in the room to say, this is how we’re going to do it,” says Gray. “Right now we don’t have an adult in the room.” 

In an emailed statement, the B.C. Ministry of Forests referred The Narwhal to the newly updated “Silvicultural Systems Handbook for British Columbia” as an example of how the province is “advancing innovative silvicultural practices like selective thinning, fuel management and forest restoration” to advance its understanding “of how changes to forest, water and climate will influence sustainable resource management.” However this handbook provides guidance on best practices for practitioners, rather than enforceable regulations, and provides no specific guidance on how forests that collect surface water for communities downstream should be managed to reduce the risk from severe wildfire. 

The Ministry of Forests also pointed The Narwhal to its Forest Landscape Planning framework (its new forest management regime), which it writes gives “First Nations and non-Indigenous communities greater say in how forest management takes place in their community watersheds.”

And as Canada experiences its second-worst wildfire season on record, communities across B.C. are watching as their own watersheds are threatened and transformed by flames. 

When it comes to watershed management, Gray says, “If you hold to your current static plan, you’re already behind the eight ball.”

Updated Sept. 15, 2025, 11:35 a.m. PT: This article was updated to correct the year of a prescribed burn near Cranbrook, B.C. The burn took place in 2023.

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With municipalities controlling more than half of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions, any success curtailing the nation’s share of planet-warming emissions hinges on urban centres. Vancouver has been on the vanguard of municipal climate policy in North America, with its trailblazing green building code. The city has already shaved 17 per cent off its carbon footprint from 2007 levels and now has one of the lowest per-person carbon footprints of any major Canadian city. But in November, during a heated city council debate about reinstating natural gas heating in new buildings, Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim suggested efforts to curtail emissions were pointless. 

“Whether we like it or not, even if we shut down the city of Vancouver it won’t make a difference in decreasing the rate of change of the global worldwide temperatures,” Sim, whose ABC Vancouver party holds a majority on council, said during the debate. “I’m going to support natural gas. If banning it would have an impact, even a minor impact that was measurable, I would change my mind.” 

Though the motion to restore natural gas heating failed in a close tie vote, the mayor’s do-nothing stance struck many as especially defeatist for a city on the frontlines of steepening climate impacts.

ABC Coun. Mike Klassen expressed disappointment that neither the federal, provincial nor City of Vancouver governments were on track to meet their emission reduction targets. “I ran for office in part to help change that,” he said, before voting to bring back natural gas furnaces and water heaters, a move city staff noted would potentially generate an additional 65,100 tonnes of annual carbon emissions by 2035, compared to a reduction of 15,900 tonnes per year from electrifying heat and hot water. 

Fifty-seven per cent of Vancouver’s greenhouse gas emissions come from burning natural gas in buildings, so Vancouver will be hard-pressed to reach its target of halving emissions by 2030 without decarbonizing heating. While FortisBC is very commendably and voluntarily decarbonizing the natural gas in its lines for all customers by ramping up the percentage of renewable natural gas to 10 per cent by 2030 — a first for North America — the shift is too slow and too expensive to compete with electrification. (Renewable natural gas is essentially a processed biogas, produced by the decomposition of organic matter. It can boast a carbon negative footprint over its life cycle since its combustion as a fuel prevents powerful greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere, but has an acquisition cost roughly 12 times higher than fossil fuel natural gas, according to figures from the British Columbia Utilities Commission.) 

Details of city politics around climate policy may seem trivial, but what unfolded at Vancouver city hall last November indicates how deeply embedded the climate information wars and fear-mongering around electrification have become: rife with double standards and unsupported claims that favour fossil fuel interests. The events confirmed Vancouver — a city long known for conscientious environmentalism, the birthplace of Greenpeace with one of the highest electric vehicle adoption rates in the country — has multiple elected officials for whom climate action isn’t a need, or even a want, but a why-bother. 

ABC Coun. Mike Klassen repeatedly cites misinformation during debate on natural gas heating

A second strange theme also emerged during the gas ban debate: Klassen’s preoccupation with Norway. Klassen cited the Nordic nation twice in the council chambers as a key factor in why he was voting against the electrification of home heating and hot water. 

When it comes to electrification in Norway, there’s a lot to say. The country has the highest heat pump adoption rate in the world. Nine out of 10 vehicles sold in Norway are now electric. And Norway has reduced its national carbon footprint by 13 per cent in the past decade, with two-thirds of those reductions happening in the past five years alone. 

But none of these very helpful and germane facts caught Klassen’s attention.

“When I went to do a little more research about precedence, I saw what I would describe as a bit of a cautionary tale from Norway,” he said in his time slot to ask city staff questions about their gas heating report. “Norway ended gas hookups in 2005 but didn’t have enough energy for electricity and heat, so they built three new gas-fired plants — resulting in increased [greenhouse gas] emissions for the country.” He added, “The cost of heating for space now eats up over 15 per cent of average Norwegian disposable income.” 

Yet data from Statistics Norway shows that in 2022, household spending on electricity averaged 5.7 per cent — nowhere near the 15 per cent figure Klassen cited.

One small but material detail omitted by Klassen is that Norway never had residential gas infrastructure in the first place, so it didn’t have gas hookups to end. (There is one single, almost immaterial exception in the Stavanger region, where an energy company supplies gas to about 2,500 customers through its network — a mere 0.1 per cent of the country’s 2.38 million households.) 

Klassen’s claim that Norway turned to gas power plants to meet residential heating electrical demand also has things backwards. Norway constructed four new natural gas plants between 2007 and 2010, mostly due to what turned out to be overblown concerns about rising electricity prices and power outages from growing electricity demand. In the end, those gas plants could not compete with cheap hydroelectricity. 

Two plants, built at great expense in 2008, were decommissioned without ever being put to use. A third was intermittently used over seven years before being sold for parts in 2014. The fourth operates in the heartland of Norway’s liquefied natural gas (LNG) extraction region and is not connected to any residential electrical grid. After operating at a multimillion-dollar loss for several years, the plant was slated to be mothballed, but got a stay of execution during the 2021 European energy crisis.

When I emailed Klassen to ask about the discrepancy between his claims and Statistics Norway data, in reply he sent a treatise about Norway’s electrification and how it has imperilled both affordability and emissions reductions. Klassen’s emailed statement asserted that recurring equipment maintenance costs can “push heating expenses to 12 to 18 per cent of household disposable income.” Statistics Norway data shows average house maintenance costs in 2022 made up only 0.2 per cent of household expenditures, while spending on the “repair, installation and hire of household appliances” didn’t even register statistically. 

Robbie Andrew, a senior scientist at the CICERO Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo, wrote in an email, “There’s no evidence that those who have installed heat pumps … are surprised by high maintenance costs.” 

Habibollah Sadeghi, an engineer at the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute in Oslo who authored a 2022 peer-reviewed research paper on the performance of Norwegian heat pumps, replied to me by email to say his personal energy bill was “less than [around] three per cent of my annual income (after tax).” He noted he has no other utility bill, like gas, and that his electricity costs include not just the expense of heating his home but also electric car charging, hot water and more. 

In his emailed response, Klassen also contended Norway’s gas ban resulted in households that consume less electricity, often lower income, paying more than four times more per kilowatt-hour of electricity than those with higher electricity consumption, typically wealthier households. “This is simply not correct,” research professor Per Ove Eikeland and senior researcher Tor Håkon Jackson Inderberg, from the independent research foundation Fridtjof Nansen Institute, wrote to me in an email. “Households pay the same price per [kilowatt-hour], irrespective of consumption.” In fact, Norway has some of the lowest energy poverty rates in Europe — 0.8 per cent, compared to the European average of 6.9 per cent. 

By email, Klassen asserted, “Norway’s ban on residential natural gas hasn’t reduced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.” But this, too, appears to be unfounded. “It is wildly untrue to state Norway hasn’t reduced emissions from household heating,” Ketan Joshi, a communications consultant and energy analyst based in Oslo, Norway, emailed in response to my questions. “Since 2010, emissions from burning fossil gas for power and emissions related to household heating have both fallen significantly.” The electrification of heating in Norway has led to an 80 per cent drop in carbon dioxide emissions from heating over the past 30 years.

I responded to Klassen to confirm the source of his long email statement, asking whether the source was a human or artificial intelligence (AI), such as ChatGPT. He replied by email, “I often seek expert help on complex issues like energy.” When I pushed again to confirm the source, asking whether the research used to compile his emailed statement was compiled by a human, I did not receive a reply.

Why Klassen is citing such questionable statements from an unnamed source is a mystery. This is the same councillor who opened his question period to staff about the gas ban by saying, “I think we’re all determined to … having a rigorous fact-based decision here.” 

Admittedly, this is a lot of time spent chasing down claims made by a city councillor during one single climate policy vote. But it is alarming to consider that elected officials are making decisions on behalf of the public based on an unidentified source. It is impossible to know precisely how much of Klassen’s decision to support gas heating in new buildings is attributable to his understanding of Norway’s energy transition. But he returned to the topic and referenced Norway’s ban on fossil fuel for heating and hot water in his statement before the November vote, saying, “In the case of Norway it has led to Norwegians now using up to 15 per cent of their disposable income to heat space and hot water in their homes. This is something I hope we can avoid in our province.” Vancouverites have a right to know if one of their representatives is justifying their decisions using misinformation, whether it’s derived from AI or human sources.

ABC Mayor Ken Sim consistent in his voting record against climate action 

In November 2023, Sim voted against a motion by Green Party Coun. Adriane Carr to start a youth climate corps in Vancouver. “I truly believe that every single person in this chamber believes that the climate’s changing,” he told council at the time. “And I think all of us are responsible as well. For example, my family, we don’t live a carbon neutral lifestyle, we live a carbon negative lifestyle … We buy tons of offset credits to compensate and then some.” 

If Sim were a private citizen instead of an elected representative, and if offsets truly worked (which they only do 12 per cent of the time, according to a research by the Swiss University ETH Zürich and the University of Cambridge), this might pass muster. But Sim leads a city of 730,000 residents who collectively produce about 2.5 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions each year — an environmental responsibility significantly larger than his household footprint. 

Just a year later, the mayor’s tone on climate had swerved to become one of defeatist fatalism. The futility of Vancouver’s emission reduction policies in addressing climate change isn’t worth risking any possible economic downsides, Sim argued in late 2024 — the hottest year on record for global temperatures. 

Evidence gathered by city staff found that electrifying heating has no significant downsides for affordability or the speed of housing construction.

Not persuaded, Sim questioned the veracity of his staff’s findings. “It could be great, it could be flawed, it really doesn’t matter,” Sim said about the staff report, which synthesized the results of 21 meetings and interviews with more than 100 participants, including homebuilders associations, utilities, home and multiplex builders and larger developers. Besides, Sim reasoned, if the staff report’s conclusions were correct, “I truly believe everyone would adopt electrification because it would be at the same price with no delay and it’s actually good for our community.” 

Sim is expecting builders to do what he, as mayor, would not: cut emissions, even though, in the grand scheme of things, no single decision to build with gas heating or heat pumps would have any bearing whatsoever on the temperature of the entire planet. 

The latest projections show the world is on course to reach 3.2 C warming by 2100, in the absence of further emission reduction efforts. The only reason we are no longer on track for the hothouse 5 C temperature hike that was in our future a decade ago is largely because elected leaders implemented greenhouse gas emission reduction policies, in spite of the fact that each policy on its own could never guarantee any change. A multitude of tiny, incremental policy interventions have already drastically improved the outlook. To dismiss the value of municipal efforts, as Sim did, is not just nihilistic — it’s inaccurate.

More than 140 Vancouverites registered to speak to council on this issue, in person or by phone. Those wanting city council to stay the course and ban gas for heating and hot water in new builds (of which I was speaker 29) outnumbered those in favour of reinstating gas heating, seven to one. 

However, a shadowy world of influence and bias may be at play. The mayor’s close friend and top-paid advisor David Grewal (who ran with ABC in the last municipal election) is the director of two natural gas companies. Months prior to ABC Coun. Brian Montague first introducing the motion to re-allow gas for heating back into new buildings in July 2024, Grewal and ABC councillors met with Gurpreet Vinning, a registered lobbyist for gas utility FortisBC: first in December 2023, then again in May and June 2024. 

As to why Sim and the majority of ABC councillors are leaning so hard in favour of gas interests now, ABC councillor Lisa Dominato pointed out, before voting counter to her party’s majority last November: “Only the natural gas sector and their representatives have been advancing this agenda.”

Shortly after ABC’s motion to reverse the gas ban failed in a tie vote, Sim sat down with Business in Vancouver for an interview. 

In it, he was unequivocal about his position, and suggested his council might try a similar motion again, saying, “Personally I was very clear, I support natural gas, I voted for it. We lost the vote. We can’t revisit that for a year.” 

If council revisits the gas ban vote late this year, Vancouverites should be ready to fact-check all claims about gas. They should also be prepared to head to the polls and vote in the city’s by-elections for two vacant councillor positions in April. Should Sim’s ABC party secure more council seats, it could gain the majority needed to reverse course on Vancouver’s gas ban and steadily and impressively shrinking carbon footprint.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.