On Aug. 6, with much of southern B.C. blanketed in wildfire smoke, Minister of Energy and Climate Solutions Adrian Dix kicked off a Campbell River press conference by thanking wildfire fighters and the BC Hydro employees working to address infrastructure damaged by the flames.

“The impact of climate change and the impact of wildfires presents challenges to BC Hydro,” Dix acknowledged, adding wildfires had knocked out power for about 24,000 B.C. homes over the previous week.

A few days prior to the minister’s announcement, wildfires near the central B.C. communities of Clinton and Vernon had destroyed hundreds of homes and prompted evacuation orders affecting about 8,000 people.

But Dix wasn’t on Vancouver Island to talk about the wildfires. He was there to announce the purchase of Island Generation, a 275-megawatt natural gas-fired power plant, by BC Hydro. Despite a mandate that all electricity generated in B.C. come from renewable sources by 2030, BC Hydro now says it needs to continue getting electricity from gas to meet an anticipated surge in power demand over the next few years: a 20 per cent increase by 2030 and a 50 per cent increase by 2050.

That surge in demand is driven largely by mining and liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects, as well as increasing numbers of electric vehicles and heat pumps in B.C. homes.

Keeping gas in BC Hydro’s generation mix will allow the provincial power utility to focus on developing more renewable energy sources, Dix argued.

“It’s better to continue to build out clean electricity and to ensure that resources like Island Generation stay in B.C. and support the system,” he said, calling climate action “essential” to B.C.’s environmental, economic, social and cultural well-being.“Surely things like our own wildfires, and then witnessing what’s happened, for example, in France, in Spain, in other parts of the world, demonstrate this,” he said.

The day after the Campbell River announcement, the Bald Ridge fire ignited near Summerland in southern B.C., leading to the evacuation of more than 20,000 people. On Aug. 8, Premier David Eby declared a provincial state of emergency due to the wildfires. B.C. is now in its third state of emergency in five years, including those prompted by the November 2021 atmospheric river and the extreme wildfires of 2023.

“Climate scientists have connected the dots to all three of those emergencies and been able to identify that climate change made them both more likely and more extreme,” Dan Woynillowicz, a climate policy expert and principal with Polaris Strategy + Insight, said after watching Eby declare a state of emergency. “And neither the premier nor either of his ministers made even passing reference to climate change in that whole press conference.”

Some might say that connecting the “explosive and extremely dangerous” conditions driving this year’s wildfires to climate change is in poor taste while people are being displaced and losing their homes, but Woynillowicz takes a different view. 

“I think British Columbians are sophisticated enough to be able to hear those different messages,” he said. “What we need to continue to do to better prepare and adapt to a world in which we are going to be experiencing this with greater frequency and greater extremity, but also what we need to do to prevent even worse impacts in the future by reducing our combustion of fossil fuels that are that are creating the problem and making it worse.”

Failure to plan for future electricity demand makes Island Generation purchase an ‘unfortunate necessity’

Gas isn’t a big part of BC Hydro’s electricity generation, about 2.5 per cent. The emissions reduction from BC Hydro ditching gas would not be huge, and there are arguments for keeping facilities like Island Generation online as energy demands grow across B.C.Island Generation is what’s known as a peaker plant, mostly called on to generate power at times of peak demand like hot summer days and cold winter nights. Over the past five years, it’s been running for about five days per year and BC Hydro expects that will continue. 

The plant can create enough electricity to power about 125,000 homes — about one-quarter of all the electricity that can be produced on Vancouver Island, making it an important local asset.Evan Pivnick, associate director of public affairs for Clean Energy Canada, called the Island Generation purchase an unfortunate necessity — one that shows BC Hydro’s planning has not kept pace with the growing electricity demand it faces.

“This needs to be an opportunity to learn from those mistakes, so that we truly look at natural gas as an option of last resort, not as something that plays a growing role in our electricity systems,” he said. 

B.C. is set to achieve just half of its legislated target of reducing emissions by 40 per cent below 2007 levels by 2030, according to the most recent climate accountability report. 

“Rather than closing the gap to the 2030 target year after year, we’ve been getting further away from it,” Kathryn Harrison, a political science professor at the University of British Columbia who studies climate and energy policy, told The Narwhal.

“Since that report was published [in 2025], the B.C. government has weakened some climate policies and, as far as I can tell, abandoned others,” she added, citing B.C.’s discarded pledges to develop an oil and gas emissions cap and reduce medium- and heavy- truck emissions, as well as the elimination of the consumer carbon tax.

Electrification — replacing fossil fuel power sources with electricity — is central to almost all of B.C.’s emissions reduction goals. But as B.C. fast-tracks energy-intensive resource projects, BC Hydro has yet to figure out how and when it would have those resources ready to supply them with power. 

“There was no accompanying electricity strategy,” Pivnick said. “There was a disconnect where the ambitions around electrifying industry, electrifying households, never translated into what does this mean for our electricity system and how do we think about the buildout of the supply that’s required?”

Even the 50 per cent increase in electricity demand by 2030 that BC Hydro is currently working to meet is likely a conservative estimate. Woynillowicz noted the federal government’s electricity strategy projects a doubling in electricity demand across Canada by 2030.

“BC Hydro has continued planning for, relatively speaking, a lower-growth future, and I think that is now coming back to bite,” Woynillowicz said.He wondered whether a more proactive planning approach could have allowed BC Hydro to develop renewable resources and avoid continuing to rely on Island Generation. Despite launching the CleanBC program in 2018 and investing $3.5 billion in its efforts to cut greenhouse gases, B.C. has not been successful at reducing emissions in the province and has admitted the program’s goals are no longer “accurate or workable.”   

“Hindsight is 20/20, but I think it raises questions,” he said. “Between BC Hydro and the government, was planning happening in the way that it needed to be? I would say that no, it wasn’t. That there was fundamentally a disconnect between CleanBC and the future that BC Hydro was planning for.”

LNG ambitions could lead to electricity crunch and higher gas prices

The pressing need for power that B.C. faces is relatively new. Before the NDP government committed to completing the Site C dam, some experts estimated the province would not need the 1,100 megawatts the dam can produce for a decade or more after it began operating. There were also those who argued renewable power sources would be a better bang for the B.C. government’s buck.

But just electrifying all proposed LNG terminals in B.C. — something the government has made a condition for those projects to proceed — and some of the gas infrastructure to supply them would take 40,000 gigawatts per year. That’s 7.5 times the capacity of Site C, as noted in the CleanBC review co-authored by Woynillowicz and fellow climate expert Merran Smith.

Electrification is key to the main marketing slogan for B.C.’s LNG, as Premier Eby emphasized during a recent press conference.

“Our LNG is the lowest carbon in the world because it is electrified as much as possible throughout the chain [and] because we have high standards around methane leakage and emissions,” he said. 

“We take climate change very seriously, but we also recognize that B.C. can play a role in driving down carbon pollution around the world.”

But the massive electricity demand for LNG could put B.C.’s electrification and emission reduction goals in peril.

“If we don’t have enough electricity to power LNG and potentially also electric vehicles and home electrification and other industries, we will end up either not pursuing those projects or increasing our emissions,” Harrison said. 

She also pointed out that B.C.’s most recent emission projections don’t include some of the LNG projects the provincial government has been pushing hard to see built: LNG Canada Phase 2 and Ksi Lisims. If those facilities fire up, it will add “many millions of tonnes difference” to how realistic the province’s emissions reduction goals are.

The economic opportunities offered by becoming a global LNG supplier are real, Pivnick said, but they may not outweigh the downsides.

“The world would be very happy to see Canada and B.C. invest in more and more fossil fuel projects that ensure there’s a secure supplier available to purchase from as they go through their own transitions, but that’s Canada and B.C. choosing to invest as essentially a shock absorber for a world that’s trying to move away from our goods,” he said.

A robust LNG industry will also mean much higher demand for natural gas in B.C. The province’s 2026 budget banks on a doubling of natural gas prices. That could be bad news for affordability in B.C. down the road, given natural gas accounts for about 31 per cent of all energy used in the province, while electricity accounts for about 18 per cent.

“Whether we’re talking about burning natural gas in our homes or burning natural gas for electricity, continuing to have that reliance at the same time that we’re actively trying to secure higher prices, [that is] good for the oil and gas sector, good for the province in terms of royalties, but it’s actually pretty lousy for British Columbians from an affordability perspective,” Woynillowicz said.

Back in April, Dix told the legislature Island Generation had been having trouble with its gas supply, an issue he attributed to demand from the Woodfibre LNG project in Squamish. In July, The Narwhal’s questions to the Energy Ministry, Island Generation and Woodfibre LNG about the supposed supply issue mostly went unanswered.

At the Aug. 6 announcement, Dix said he is confident Island Generation will be able to get the gas it needs, but offered no further information.

Concern for climate change has spiked as wildfire smoke spreads, creating an opportunity for conversation

A very dim silver lining to the summer’s wildfires is that they seem to have put climate change back on many Canadians’ radar. A recent Angus Reid poll found 21 per cent of Canadians put climate change as their top concern, up from 14 per cent in March. In B.C., 25 per cent of respondents said climate change was their top concern, putting the issue in third place behind cost of living and healthcare.

That’s a notable shift from the past few years, when climate change has consistently polled low as a priority for many Canadians. But just because people aren’t telling pollsters climate change is a top concern doesn’t mean they aren’t worried about the impacts of a warming world, Harrison argued.

“I don’t think it is the case that that means people are willing to sacrifice their safety from wildfires, their children’s health from breathing smoke, their elderly parents’ safety in extreme heat in exchange for a lower cost of living today,” she said. “They’re just not connecting those dots.”

That lack of connection isn’t helped, she said, by politicians who claim they take climate change seriously while continuing to support fossil fuel development and failing to address emissions effectively.

“Politicians are reassuring people, ‘Don’t worry, we’ve got the whole climate change thing in hand,’ and people at the same time are worried about the economy,” she said.

Instead of offering reassurances that things will be okay, Woynillowicz wishes politicians would communicate what they are doing to directly and effectively address climate change.

“One of the messages we’re hearing from government is that they’ve got our backs,” he said. 

“I would feel more comfortable that they’ve got my back and my kids’ backs if I knew that … they are actually being proactive, both in terms of helping make us more resilient to future impacts that we know are coming — but also what they’re doing to prevent even worse impacts in the future by doing more to reduce the pollution that’s causing the problem.”

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The wildfire that tipped B.C. into a state of emergency this August was described as “a bomb going off” to Premier David Eby by a fire official. Flames from Bald Range, in the interior of the province, grew to heights of 90 metres as the fire spread rapidly after igniting on Aug. 7. More than 20,000 people in the region were evacuated. At least one person died while trying to flee. And all of that is due to just one of more than 100 fires burning across the province.

Experts around the world have called extreme fire weather our “new normal” and Eby even used the term at a press conference earlier this week. But as fire scientist Mike Flannigan looks at B.C.’s wildfires of the past, he rejects the term. “We’re moving into uncharted territory. This is our new reality. Some people might say ‘normal,’ but to me, normal sounds like a plateau. We’re on a trajectory, and it’s downward.” 

Flannigan is a professor of wildland fire at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops whose expertise has earned him the BC Innovation Research Chair in predictive services, emergency management and fire Science. He’s been studying fire for decades. He recently spoke to The Narwhal from Kamloops and shared some data that showed a dramatic increase in area burned across the province in the last 10 years compared to the previous six decades. We asked him to break down what this all means for the future of wildfires in B.C. and the country.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

What are the conditions in Kamloops right now? How’s the air quality there?

We got a bit of relief today. It’s better. I went out without a mask today because it was good enough. But the last week has been horrific. Just awful, awful air quality. I’m sick and tired of this smoke. You want to enjoy summer, and it’s hard to enjoy it when you’re either trapped indoors or choking on smoke.

We’re in mid-August and there are currently more than 100 wildfires burning across the province and thousands of people have been evacuated. What are you thinking as you look at Canada and B.C. right now?

We’ve had three bad fire seasons in Canada immediately prior to 2026. About eight per cent of our forests burned 2023 to 2025, and there’s no modern analog for this. We’ve never had three fire seasons like we’ve just seen. 

And my narrative up to now has always been: yes, there’ll be bad fire seasons, but there’ll be cooler, wetter years, and the fire season will be quiet. I still believe that regionally. Like, Ontario’s had a bad fire season this year. Next year may be really quiet. 

But nationally, we’re such a big country that every year, somewhere we’re going to see this combination or episodes of dry fuels, ignitions and hot, dry, windy weather. You get all three, you have fire. 

In Canada, about three per cent of fires are responsible for 97 per cent of our area burned. Much of this happens on a relatively small number of days of hot, dry, windy conditions. We call them ‘spread days,’ and that’s when you see explosive fire growth, like we saw in the Bald Range fire. 

It’s really important people report fires right away if they see a wildfire, because all fires start small and that’s our window. If you don’t get on top of it within 30 minutes, the horse has left the barn.

What causes ‘spread days’?

What we’re seeing is a lot more extreme fire weather in large measure due to climate change. And I’ll be even more specific: human-caused climate change. A warmer world for Canada means more fire. 

The warmer we get, the longer the fire seasons are and we’re seeing that across Canada. 

Second, the warmer we get, the more lightning we expect. Now, in Canada, just over half of our fires are started by lightning, but they’re responsible for about 92 per cent of our area burned.

The third reason is probably the most important. As the atmosphere warms, the ability to suck moisture out of dead forest floor fuels increases rapidly. The forecast for the future is we’re not going to see enough rain. Bottom line? It means more of that fuel on the forest floor has dried out and is available to burn, which leads to these higher intensity fires that are difficult or impossible to extinguish. 

I would argue that B.C. is the pointy end of the climate change spear in terms of fire in Canada. We have seen an abrupt increase. 

To me the big driver is extreme fire weather and ignitions. I have lots of colleagues who want to blame what we see on land management, forest management, fuel build-up. They are playing a role, but they’re really minor. It is extreme fire weather conditions. 

Recent studies suggest more than 1.5 million people prematurely die every year globally due to wildland fire smoke, and that number is only going to increase as we see more larger populations impacted by smoke.

You recently looked at how much area has burned in B.C. going back to the 1950s. What did you notice?  

There were big years in the past. 1958 was an active year. 2003 was an active year. The Barriere fire in 2003 devastated part of the town. Kelowna had a number of homes lost. But more area has burned this year than in 2003. That was really a big fire year in those years. Now it’s considered not that much. 

In 2017 it’s like somebody flipped the switch. It was record-breaking. Followed by 2018, which was record-breaking. Then came along 2023, which said, ‘Oh, I’m going to almost double you’ and broke a record. 2023 the whole province was on fire. 2024 and 2025 were active in the northeast, not so much down south. 

2026 is mostly the Cariboo and southern regions that are seeing the fire. If you look at a drought map, you’ll see that’s where the drought is. Drought doesn’t guarantee fire, but sets the stage for an active fire season.

Is there a way to contextualize how much area in B.C. burned in 1950 to 2016 compared to 2017 to 2026? 

A fair bit more area burned between 2017 and 2026 than the previous 67 years, 1950 to 2016.

2026 is still burning as we speak. To put the numbers in context, the area burned in the first 67 years — 1950 to 2016 — is just over twice the size of Vancouver Island. Whereas the last decade is trying to approach three times the size of Vancouver Island in 10 years versus 67 years.

What are the most urgent takeaways this data is showing?

It is showing that the impacts of climate change on fire activity are here and are worsening. There’s a couple ways they’re worsening. 

Historically, nighttime temperatures went down, relative humidity went up, the wind generally went down. The fire would go quiet, firefighters could catch their breath and prepare for the next day. Now we’re seeing fires burning into and through the night. Fire management, to their credit, has responded by fighting fire at night. They have night vision helicopters in places like B.C., Alberta, California. But that’s one challenge. 

An even bigger challenge is we’re seeing the intensity of these fires increase. There are recent studies showing globally where the increases are occurring, and western North America and the boreal forests are playing a major role. 

Many of these are what we call pyrocumulonimbus, fire-generated thunderstorms. These are monsters. Fire management cannot fight these. The only strategy is to get out of the way.  

How can looking at the past six decades help us today?

I would say we need to look even farther back in time. We’re in uncharted territory. There is no historical analog for this kind of rapid increase in fire activity. 

There’s a recent paper by Chelene Hanes and others that looks at changes in the fire regime from 1959 to 2024. We’re seeing larger fires and we had been seeing lightning fires increase, but human-caused fires were going down. We were all patting ourselves on the back, saying, “Hey, you know education’s working. Fire bans are working.” 

But this most recent study is now detecting an upswing in human-caused fires. Are people becoming more careless? I don’t think so. It’s because the fuels are drier that it’s more receptive whether it’s lightning strikes or human activities. Most fires are accidental. Arson does play a role, unfortunately, but typically a fairly small number of fires are started by arson. There’s other things that start fires like our infrastructure, power lines, railways, burning trash, agricultural burning, four-wheel vehicles and quads.

Another tool is forest closures. In some years, you may never have to close the forest, but when it’s extreme, you should close the forest. Unpopular, of course, with industry and people who want to do recreation, but it’s a very effective tool, and allows fire management.

What questions should emergency management and researchers be asking when looking at these numbers?

How can we be better prepared for the future? Every community should have an emergency management plan for fire and floods, but include climate change. Metro Vancouver has a really good emergency management plan. Not only does it deal with fire, but also talks about climate change and the expected increase in fire activity. 

We should be looking at FireSmart, making it mandatory in high-risk locations to protect homes and buildings. We should be providing funding or incentives to make that happen. It’s kind of happening through insurance already. 

I’ll give you another positive example. Jasper is rebuilding and they’re making two FireSmart principles mandatory: using non-flammable building materials and making a 1.5 metre buffer zone around your home non-flammable. Fire typically enters a community through a rain of embers — burning bits of twig, bark, sometimes even pine cones — and it’s probing. It’s opportunistic. It’s looking for something to burn. It lands on mulch or a conifer shrub right beside your home. Your home catches fire and then your neighbour’s home catches fire. Domino, just the whole block goes. 

Continuing to educate the public is also a path forward. 

I also advocate for a national firefighting force. In the last three years, about two-thirds of the days in 2023 to 2025, we did not have enough resources in Canada, so we called on the United States. This year, the United States is having a very active fire season having nothing to spare. Right now, we have firefighters from Mexico, New Zealand and Australia. There’s talk about the Canadian Armed Forces. We should have a FEMA-type agency, a Federal Emergency Management Agency, to deal with fire, floods, earthquakes and hurricanes. We’re the only G7 country without one. 

We have an early warning system for hurricanes. Why can’t we do that for fire? I am doing fire weather outlook right now as a first step in our early warning system. It’s a research project that is publicly available. We have models to predict fire occurrence, lightning, and human caused. So, if we know where the extreme fire will be, and if we know where the new fire starts will be, we should be moving resources proactively ahead of time to those locations. It will cost money, absolutely. But if it saves one Jasper, one Fort McMurray, one Summerland, it kind of pays for itself.

Looking at this data, it can feel pretty bleak. Are you feeling any hope?

I used to be more optimistic than I am. Our track record with dealing with greenhouse gases is abysmal. Building another pipeline is like adding a nail in our coffin. We really have to get off fossil fuels. I don’t know what else I can say. I just see, “drill, baby, drill” and “build, baby, build” and rather than a serious thoughtful conversation of, ‘How can we build a better Earth for the next generation?’ ’’

We need to do something as a global society, and not just for fire. I would like to leave the place better than we found it, and we’re not doing that. We’re making it much worse than what we found it. People can change behaviour. We can change.

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Beena Ruparelia does not need to check a thermometer to know when heat has settled into her northwest Toronto home.

She can see it on her skin.

“You see me sweating,” she says while waving a handheld fan and placing a standing fan right beside her. The temperature inside the rental home she shares with her husband, Peter, near Martin Grove and Albion roads, reaches as high as 40 C during heat waves, including this past July.

The couple does not have central air conditioning. Beena says their home traps heat throughout the day.

“So even having a shower, coming out, you’re literally sweating,” she says. “It’s unbearable.”

At night, the heat rises to the second floor, making it difficult to sleep. Peter, who recently turned 65, says there’s no escape.

“The way the sun is directed in, the morning sun comes right into our bedroom,” he says.

The couple use portable air conditioners overnight, but the units cool only part of the home and increase their electricity bill by about $20 to $30 a month during the summer, Beena says.

When the heat becomes stifling, they retreat to the semi-finished basement.

“We go right down,” Beena says. “That’s the only other place to go.”

The temperature also dictates what they eat. Turning on the stove would add even more heat, so Beena says she relies on sandwiches, microwaveable food and other meals that require little cooking.

The Ruparelias’ experience sits at the centre of a growing gap between provincial and municipal housing rules and the changing climate.

The Ruparelias’ home was built in the 1960s. Like much of Toronto’s rental housing, it was built for surviving winter, when keeping heat in was a greater concern than keeping it out. But as the city gets hotter, low-income renters are among those most vulnerable to extreme heat. 

Renters also have no legal right to a maximum indoor temperature. The City of Toronto will likely take at least another year to institute a maximum indoor temperature by-law, while the Ontario government hasn’t committed to introducing one at all. 

As Toronto experiences longer and more frequent periods of extreme heat, the debate is shifting from whether cooling in rental units is necessary to who should be responsible for providing it — and who should bear the cost.

“Is it on working-class people or is it, in this case, on landlords?” Bruno Dobrusin, co-chair of the Toronto Tenant Union, asks. He has become all too familiar with renters’ stories of frustration and, in some cases, desperation.

“I feel like the main change in the last few years has been mostly the scale: how many more people are going through this and how much more often we hear of tenants just fighting to have some form of cooling in their apartments,” Dobrusin says.

Unlike Mississauga to the west, Toronto does not have a maximum indoor temperature by-law for rental units. Dobrusin says tenants have reported being denied permission to install an air conditioner or being told they must pay an additional $50 to $80 a month to operate one, he says, mostly due to the increased electricity needed to run them.

“Another $50 a month is quite a bit on your budget,” he says.

He says residents often go to Tim Hortons or TTC stations as cooling spaces because they are widely available, require little or no spending, stay open late and allow people to remain for long periods without being disturbed. But they can’t sleep there. 

The lack of cooling cannot be separated from Toronto’s broader housing and affordability crises, he says.

As rents rise, more people are sharing homes. During extreme heat, multigenerational and crowded households can face an additional burden as several people share a space designed for just a few occupants.

Dobrusin says working-class tenants may also spend their days in poorly ventilated or inadequately cooled workplaces before returning to apartments that offer no relief.

“What people are going through are multiple crises that are exacerbated by the climate crisis,” he says.

Toronto was built for a different climate

The city projects the number of days each year with temperatures above 30 C could rise from an average of 10 days between 1971 and 2000 to between 36 and 44 days by the 2050s. By the 2080s, Toronto could experience between 46 and 78 days above 30 C annually, depending on future greenhouse gas emissions.

Climate change is accelerated by greenhouse gases concentrating in the atmosphere from many sources, but primarily from the burning of fossil fuels like oil and gas.

Health Canada data shows 66.3 per cent of the heat-related deaths recorded in Canada since 1981 occurred after 2016. More than one-third occurred in 2021, the year of the Western Canada heat dome.

Extreme heat can cause dehydration, fainting, heat rash and heat stroke. It can also worsen pre-existing health conditions of the heart and kidneys, as well as respiratory diseases. 

Children, seniors and people with existing health conditions can be more vulnerable to extreme temperatures.

And outdoor temperature alone does not determine who is most at risk.

Pavement, concrete and buildings absorb and radiate heat, while neighbourhoods with fewer trees and less vegetation lack natural sources of shade and cooling. This creates what is known as the urban heat island effect.

Karen Smith, an associate professor at the University of Toronto’s department of physical and environmental sciences, helped develop what’s known as a heat vulnerability index for Toronto.

Smith says heat vulnerability considers residents’ sensitivity to high temperatures and their capacity to adapt. That includes whether someone can afford an air conditioner or travel to a cooling space. A resident’s age, health, income and housing conditions can also determine whether a hot day becomes dangerous. 

What the index shows is that the areas with the highest heat vulnerability are also among the city’s lowest-income neighbourhoods, and have high concentrations of immigrants.

Overall, she says, city blocks highly concentrated with apartment towers are more vulnerable to heat than the rest of the city. And while a public cooling space may offer temporary relief, it does not necessarily help a tenant who returns to a hot apartment at night.

Toronto Public Health wrote in an email to The Narwhal that it is continuing to work with the University of Toronto to update the heat vulnerability index with additional indicators and more recent data, but otherwise referred questions to the City of Toronto. 

Why Rexdale faces overlapping risks

The Toronto and Region Conservation Authority has identified Rexdale, the area where Beena and Peter Ruparelia live, as a community facing overlapping environmental and socio-economic vulnerabilities.

A 2023 resilience strategy found apartments account for about 61 per cent of the neighbourhood’s housing and most of its housing stock was built before 1980. Jennifer Taves, senior manager of sustainable communities with the conservation authority, says the community also has older single-family homes that have not been retrofitted for central air conditioning. 

The strategy flagged heat stress, limited tree canopy in some areas, food insecurity, transportation barriers and flood risk as additional concerns. It also found that Rexdale has a higher proportion of children aged 14 and younger than Toronto as a whole.

Because of these risks, the conservation authority decided to prioritize Rexdale for climate adaptation strategies, creating a Sustainable Neighbourhood Action Program with help from community stakeholders.

In 2024, residents in three towers received 47 climate-resiliency kits containing things like instant cold packs and temporary window shades, as well as portable air purifiers and purifying plants for days the sky is filled with wildfire smoke. Taves says there are no current plans to expand that program, but some bigger projects involve gardening, tree planting and engagement efforts. 

“We know that heavily shaded neighbourhoods are much cooler than neighbourhoods that don’t have that shade canopy. So investing in that natural infrastructure or [shade] infrastructure is a very important part of preparing for these effects,” Taves says. The official term is shelterbelt infrastructure, which is when a line of trees and shrubs are planted in one or more rows to help lower surface temperatures like at Rowntree Mills Park and areas along Kipling Avenue.

What is the province doing about heat vulnerability

This past July, a three-year-old amendment to Ontario’s Residential Tenancies Act finally kicked in: now, tenants have the explicit right to install and use a window or portable air conditioner when the landlord does not provide cooling.

The change addresses one problem Beena and Peter say they faced for years: being told they were not supposed to use portable units.

The tenant must notify the landlord in writing. The air conditioner must be installed safely and must not damage the property. If electricity is included in the rent, the landlord can raise it to cover higher bills — but rent hikes can’t exceed the actual electricity cost or stay in place when the tenant removes the unit or stops using it for the season.

But even when a charge accurately reflects electricity use, it may remain unaffordable for a senior or another tenant living on a fixed income, according to Dania Majid, a staff lawyer and director of the tenant duty counsel program at the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario. 

Majid says her organization has heard concerns about lump-sum charges, administrative fees and installation requirements associated with air conditioners. Because the provincial provisions are new, many disputes have not yet been considered by the Landlord and Tenant Board.

She’s one of many tenant advocates that want Toronto to pass a legal maximum indoor temperature of 26 C that applies to all rental units, similar to the legislated minimum during colder months.

“We wouldn’t do that to them in the winter,” Majid says. “So why are we doing this to them in the summer?”

But the Federation of Rental-housing Providers of Ontario says a legislated maximum indoor temperature would raise significant logistical and financial questions.

The federation agrees tenants need protection from extreme heat, Marielle Hossack, the federation’s director of policy and regulatory affairs, says. That’s why it supported the  air-conditioner changes to the Residential Tenants Act, giving tenants the flexibility to buy their own. Even so, some older buildings may not have the electrical capacity to power an air conditioner in every apartment at the same time. 

Honouring a maximum temperature could require electrical upgrades, new mechanical systems and other major retrofits, she says. And that work would require time, planning, skilled labour and significant investment.

“Requiring landlords or housing providers to absorb the electricity cost is not a sustainable solution where electricity is included in rent,” she says.

Governments should instead provide targeted energy or income assistance to low-income or medically vulnerable tenants, Hossack says.

The Ontario Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing did not respond to questions by publication time.

The long, long road to a maximum temperature for Toronto renters 

Toronto does not currently have a maximum temperature that applies to all rental units.

When a landlord already provides air conditioning, it must be operated from June 1 to Sept. 30 and keep the unit at no more than 26 C. But if no air conditioner is installed when the tenant moves in, no maximum temperature applies.

As of June 1, apartment buildings that don’t offer in-unit cooling must keep at least one existing indoor amenity space at or below 26 C during the summer. This only applies to buildings that are three or more storeys and 10 or more units and does not apply if construction is needed to meet the requirement.

Toronto city council seems to be moving toward a broader maximum indoor temperature by-law, but slowly. In June, the city manager was instructed by council to report back by June 2027 on findings and key considerations for a by-law and implementation plan.

The city has also asked Ontario to establish a province-wide maximum temperature of 26 C and to prevent landlords from increasing the rent above the normal annual limit if the city does pass a by-law. Right now, landlords can hike rent if it’s meant to comply with municipal by-laws.

In an email to The Narwhal, a City of Toronto spokesperson wrote equity is central to the city’s Heat Relief Strategy.

“We continue to explore new ways to strengthen the strategy and help residents stay safe during periods of extreme heat,” it says. 

The city offers cooling spaces at libraries, community centres and civic centres, along with more than 700 park drinking fountains and mobile water trailers. Residents also have access to pools, splash pads, wading pools and supervised beaches, with some pools extending hours during heat warnings.

Toronto is also expanding programs intended to provide and install up to 2,400 air conditioners for low-income and vulnerable residents.

For Beena and Peter, organizing with other tenants has become part of that solution.

After years of feeling that she and her husband were dealing with the conditions in their home alone, they joined the Toronto Tenant Union. She says she wants governments to hear directly from the people living through extreme indoor heat.

“The first thing is that they need to come and speak to the landlords,” she says. “They need to fight on our behalf.”

Rajpreet Sahota is a community and policy reporting fellow. Her position is generously funded in part by the Canadian Race Relations Foundation. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, the foundation has no editorial input.

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When temperatures drop, people who rent their homes in B.C. have a right to stay warm. Heating is considered an essential service under the province’s Residential Tenancy Act, something landlords must supply.

But when extreme heat hits, it’s a different story. As temperatures soared last month, smashing record highs across B.C., landlords in most parts of the province held on to the power to prohibit their tenants from installing and using air conditioners.

“It’s in my lease agreement,” Nadine Nakagawa, a city councillor in New Westminster, says. 

Summary

• B.C. doesn’t have a provincial law addressing maximum temperatures in rental units.
• In recent years, a number of B.C. municipalities have voted to change their bylaws to protect tenants from extreme heat.
• Local politicians and advocates say better rebates and other support for renters’ ‘right to cool’ must come from the provincial government.

Safety concerns are often used to justify air conditioning bans in rental units, especially in older buildings where electrical systems might struggle in high-demand situations. But that’s not always the case; the building Nakagawa lives in was built in 2019.

Nakagawa knows some of her neighbours flout the air conditioner prohibition, running the risk of eviction when temperatures rise. It’s a risk she argues they shouldn’t have to take.

“Individual tenants being brave really can’t be the answer in a housing market that does make people extremely precarious.”

Cooling devices — air conditioners or, increasingly, heat pumps — aren’t just a matter of comfort. As climate change increases the likelihood of heat waves and hotter summers, access to cool spaces is becoming a matter of life and death. Only 45 per cent of B.C. households report having an air conditioner — well below the national rate of 68 per cent, according to Statistics Canada. And while more than three-quarters of homeowners have access to an air conditioner, just over half of tenants said the same. 

In late June 2021, the Pacific Northwest heat dome made the lack of cooling devices a deadly reality for many British Columbians for the first time. Over one sweltering week, temperatures in many parts of the province approached 40 C. The heat caused the deaths of 619 people, 98 per cent of whom died indoors. Many of them were seniors without access to adequate cooling in their homes, according to B.C.’s chief coroner. 

Many also lived in low-income neighbourhoods where apartment buildings tend to be older. This often means rent is more affordable, but comes with leaky windows, poor ventilation, dated electrical systems and an absence of cooling devices — characteristics that leave their residents vulnerable to extreme weather.

In the years since the heat dome, the B.C. government has taken some steps to protect people from extreme heat, including funding for air conditioning and ventilation in seniors’ homes and long-term care facilities and access to free air conditioners for a small number of vulnerable people. A 2024 update to the BC Building Code requires every unit in new residential buildings to have one room where the temperature does not exceed 26 C, even during summer heat. 

But most B.C. tenants don’t live in new buildings and the province has yet to address their “right to cool,” as policies focused on protecting people from extreme heat are sometimes called. The lack of provincial action has pushed some councillors, including Nakagawa, to tackle the issue at the municipal level. 

“We have known for a number of years that we are going to be having hotter and hotter summers,” she says. “In the next heat dome, we cannot say that we did not know and didn’t expect it. That’s why we have to take action right now.”

Who pays to keep B.C. renters cool?

So far, six B.C. municipalities, including New Westminster, have voted to change their bylaws to bar landlords from banning the use of cooling devices in rented homes. As of this month, that list includes Victoria. Emily Rogers, director of operations with the Together Against Poverty Society, calls the decision “a move in the right direction.”

“It is long overdue and necessary to prevent heat-related injury and death,” she says. “I’ve had this public conversation every year since 2021.”

The society helps renters living in poverty navigate B.C.’s Residential Tenancy Act. When it comes to making the right to cool official, Rogers argues that even though the act currently lacks specific temperature requirements around extreme heat, it already implies rental homes should not get dangerously hot.

“It’s already the landlord’s responsibility to provide safe housing conditions and in this new era of climate change, that includes the right to cooling,” Rogers says.

Many landlords in B.C. are well aware “that cooling is a huge issue,” David Hutniak, CEO of LandlordBC, says.

Our concern is that some of the solutions suggested in these bylaws are ignoring the complexity of the problem,” he told The Narwhal. The organization is working with its members to ensure they understand the new bylaws popping up in municipalities.

“Right now, there’s a fair bit of confusion and uncertainty on the part of owners,” he says.

Hutniak points out that some buildings will require significant electrical upgrades to handle the power demand. Those may be difficult to do quickly and require large investments by building owners, he adds. That’s where planning becomes key. LandlordBC runs the Rental Apartment Retrofit Accelerator, a program that helps landlords plan for energy-efficiency upgrades and access rebates and other financial support from governments.

“We’re chipping away at it here as best we can,” Hutniak says. “It’s a complex issue, but I think over time here we can have some reasonable solutions that will make sense for everybody.”

Provincial support is limited. Free portable air conditioners are only available to people enrolled in home care or mental health and substance use programs, and even then require a recommendation letter from the local health authority. 

In 2025, B.C. broadened its heat pump rebates to include renters and people living in strata buildings. But installing a heat pump as a tenant is complicated and costly, which can be a deterrent. 

Interested renters have to get permission from their landlord. Even landlords that agree might not be willing to pay costs not covered by the rebate — and B.C. allows landlords to pass along the costs of significant upgrades and repairs to their tenants via rent increases. Yet, according to B.C.’s energy ministry, “Since the heat pump is a permanent fixture installed in the building, it becomes part of the property and stays with the unit even if the tenant moves out.” 

Victoria city councillor Susan Kim lives in a rental apartment that will have to lift its ban on cooling devices after the city amended its bylaws. But after reviewing the heat pump rebate program, she decided it wasn’t worth approaching her landlord about it. “You’re subsidizing the landlord by building their equity as well as putting your own sweat equity and labour into it,” Kim says.

Landlords who opt to invest in heat pumps or air conditioners can apply to the Residential Tenancy Branch to raise rents beyond the annual allowable increase. In recent decisions, the branch has allowed the full costs to be recouped. For one multi-unit building, the $145,000 cost of heat pumps led to an additional $41 in monthly rent per unit. In that case, the landlord said the “heat-related death of an elderly resident during a heat wave” spurred the installation.

In another case, the $5,775 cost of an air conditioner for a single unit led to an extra $62 per month.

Rogers points out that income assistance in B.C. is just $1,060 per month to cover all living costs. Even purchasing a $200 air conditioner isn’t feasible for these tenants, she says. 

“Most folks that I speak with are telling their kids that they had enough to eat through the day because they don’t want their kid to feel bad about them not eating dinner with the family, so that the kids can have enough to eat that night.”

Not every method of addressing extreme heat in rental buildings is expensive 

New Westminster adopted a bylaw prohibiting bans on cooling devices in 2025. This spring, the city pushed its right to cool practices further. Now all landlords — not just those with new buildings — must meet the BC Building Code standard that one room in every unit stay below 26 C overnight.

The bylaw sprang from a motion Nakagawa co-sponsored with the aim of putting the onus for maintaining safe temperatures “on the building owner, on the landlord … rather than the tenant.”

The new rule doesn’t dictate how landlords address the issue. Shades and awnings, window glazing, ventilation improvements or even painting the roof white could help bring a building into compliance. So-called passive cooling measures can help reduce or slow indoor temperature gains and have the added benefit of requiring little to no electricity, cutting costs for tenants and working even during power outages.

Those kinds of upgrades, Nakagawa says, could yield benefits year-round. 

“If you have better insulation, it might help it be warmer in the winter as well.”

So far, the new bylaw hasn’t resulted in much conflict with landlords, New Westminster Mayor Patrick Johnstone says. 

“I actually expected there would be more pushback; I’ve been quite surprised.”

It’s up to tenants to alert the city about non-compliance, Johnstone says, and the city’s focus is on working with landlords to make sure their rental units meet the new temperature standard, rather than handing out fines.

“I think by being proactive and being a partner with landlords, we can actually bring people into compliance,” he says.

Nagakawa worries the new bylaw won’t address the problem of pricey appliances or retrofit costs being passed on to tenants. She thinks the province should get rid of that option, at least for upgrades aimed at preventing dangerous indoor temperatures.

“At the end of the day, I also have to live with the idea that I don’t want more tenants in my municipality to die in the next heat dome.”

The right to cool needs to be addressed at the provincial level in B.C. 

Everyone The Narwhal spoke with agreed the issue needs to be dealt with by the B.C. government. Provincial legislation could protect tenants from rent increases related to costs landlords incur to keep buildings cool, while providing support for landlords that need it. 

“If the province is using its own powers to put this in place, they can also use their own powers to intervene and make it doable,” Kim says. 

One approach could be to alter the Residential Tenancy Act to make adequate cooling an essential service, just like heating. The Ministry of Housing and Municipal Affairs did not answer when asked whether it is considering altering the act to protect tenants from extreme heat. A question about whether the ministry is considering preventing landlords from passing along the installation costs also went unanswered.

In lieu of answering The Narwhal’s specific questions, the ministry sent a statement, saying it is in the process of developing additional building code requirements “to address climate change adaptation and mitigation in existing buildings and result in new standards by 2030.”

Hutniak is hopeful that the issue is getting needed attention, but sees downsides to the “piecemeal approach” currently happening. “Because of the scale and scope of the challenge, it will require senior levels of government to be more involved, strategically and in terms of some financial support,” he says. “This is just not something that can get solved through municipalities passing bylaws.”

Until other levels of government are ready to take action, Nakagawa says municipalities can be proactive about understanding tenant needs and local vulnerabilities. “There’s a whole bunch of steps they could take, if they’re not feeling quite ready to bring in the same bylaw that we’ve brought,” she says. For example, the Victoria capital regional district has created a map to help residents understand where heat risks are highest. 

New Westminster has been collecting data on heat vulnerability among renters, part of a move to beef up its tenant protections in recent years, including creating an anti-eviction bylaw. It’s been using annual fire inspections as a chance to gather data about which buildings have “heat challenges,” Johnstone says, after which emergency services and community organizations then helped “identify vulnerable people who were in those buildings.”

But the mayor agrees that the issue is bigger than New Westminster. “We can’t have, across the province, 160 municipalities all with different rules making it up as they go along,” Johnstone says. 

“Ultimately, this is a healthcare concern. Ultimately, this is a housing concern and ultimately, this should be regulated at the provincial level.”

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While health officials urge people to stay indoors due to the smoke draping the Midwest, experts say we should remember the same polluted air affecting humans is also threatening animals. 

On July 16, Detroit ranked as the worst air quality in the world with a 724 index — climbing past the 300-point threshold on the Air Quality Index, where air quality is considered hazardous. In second place sat Toronto, then Minneapolis, Minnesota and in fourth place was Chicago.

According to Dr. Jack Harkema, a veterinary pathologist at Michigan State University, the effects of wildfire smoke on animals aren’t just a single symptom. 

“It doesn’t affect just the lungs, but also the cardiovascular system and the metabolic system,” Harkema said. “We’ve actually even looked at the effects on the brain, and there’s increased inflammation in the brain as well.”

Wildfire smoke may be even more harmful to animals than the everyday air pollution found in cities, he said. 

“Wildfire smoke is probably even more toxic than our regular urban particulate matter. These particles create a lot of oxidants, they damage tissue and they cause inflammation locally in the lung, but then that inflammation can spread to other organs.”

Wildfire smoke contains a mixture of pollutants, including fine particles known as PM2.5. Those microparticles are small enough to go deep into the lungs and, sometimes, enter the bloodstream.

“PM2.5 particles are inhalable,” Mayra Oyola, an assistant professor in the department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Wisconsin Madison, said. “They can get into the lungs and, just like in humans, they stay there. They can damage respiratory and cardiovascular tissue in anything that breathes. So it’s not just us.”

The fires that are impacting the Midwest are mainly contained toward the lower part of Ontario. But the smoke from these fires has migrated from wind paths to reach the Midwest.

“Animals close to the fires, that’s the biggest concern, because they will be displaced,” Oyola said. “More often than not, they move into human-populated areas. That creates risk for both humans and the animals.”

Birds are especially vulnerable to wildfire smoke because their respiratory system is more efficient than other mammals, according to research scientist at Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology Olivia Sanderfoot. While that helps them get more oxygen, it also means they breathe in more harmful particles from polluted air.

“Birds are able to take up twice as much oxygen with each breath compared to mammals, which also means they’re getting an extra-heavy dose of anything toxic in the air,” Sanderfoot said.

“We’ve known for a long time that birds are more vulnerable,” she said. “So I’m especially worried about them in this smoke.”

Other outdoor animals can also suffer. Because of respiratory diseases like heaves, livestock that spend their time outdoors are exposed for days or weeks to smoky conditions, which heightens risks, Harkema said.

“If this continues, you’re going to see more illness in humans and animals.”

For pet owners, Dr. Jennifer Henderson, a veterinarian at Vetco Total Care in Chicago, said taking the same precautions you would take for yourself is ideal. 

“The same concerns apply to our pets that apply to humans,” Henderson said. “You just want to keep them inside or limit their activity outside so it doesn’t cause any flare-up.”

Owners should also watch closely for signs that smoke may be affecting their animals.

“I think respiratory symptoms, with the coughing and the lethargy, are the main things to watch for,” Henderson said. 

She also recommends monitoring for bloodshot eyes, squinting or other signs of eye irritation. The guidance is ultimately simple, Henderson said: if the air isn’t healthy for people, it probably isn’t healthy for pets either.

“Similar to how they’re dealing with it for themselves, [they should] apply the same concerns and strategies to their pets,” she said. “You can’t put a mask on a dog, so it’s really just keeping them out of the environment or limiting their time.”

Harkema recommends limiting walks to brief bathroom breaks and avoiding strenuous exercise.

“You don’t want to exercise them because more of these particulate matter and other air toxicants can get into the lung and cause inflammation,” Harkema said.

Sanderfoot said keeping pets in cool, air-conditioned spaces with clean, filtered air whenever possible is best. 

As wildfire seasons grow longer and more intense, Sanderfoot says she expects poor air-quality events to become a more frequent occurrence across North America.

“The issue is that climate change is supercharging these fires and lengthening our fire season,” Sanderfoot said. “The bigger the fire, the more smoke.”

According to Oyola, research shows wildfire smoke will become a persistent problem.

“It’s very clear that climate change is real and that it’s not slowing down,” she said. “With drier conditions and warmer conditions, we should expect more events like this.”

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The Bradley Creek wildfire ignited on reserve lands at nk̓maplqs (the head of Okanagan Lake) on Friday, July 31. More than 30 band members have lost their homes, while around 200 homes and structures belonging to non-band members are also gone. kelsie, who was evacuated and has not yet returned home, shared her reflections in the midst of the evacuation. This story was co-published with IndigiNews.

Saturday, Aug. 1, started like any other day.

I woke up early with my partner. We sat on the front deck, coffee in hand, watching the morning unfold. We talked about the day ahead, my son Skookamina’s graduation party and my grandmother’s 83rd birthday. There was meat to smoke, cakes to bake, tables to set. The day felt like a blessing because we had so much to celebrate.

I checked my phone. A small fire had started the night before, nothing unusual for this time of year. Our Okanagan Indian Band fire department is amazing. I figured it’d be out by noon, so I kept moving.

I seasoned the meat, I lit the smoker, and I sang while I cooked, the way I always do in my kitchen.

But I kept checking my phone, as we had family that was traveling in for the event.

Mid-morning, we decided as a family to move the party from the beach in town to my uncle’s house in the community. Some of our family had community obligations they’d need to tend to if the fire got out of control. We wanted to be close.

Everyone was there. My grandmother sat in her chair, full of joy as each person arrived. Skookamina was surrounded by his cousins, and the sound of our family filled the air, aunties laughing loud, making outlandish jokes, the familiar banter of people who know each other’s rhythms.

For one hour, we were just a family celebrating, living our lives the way we always do.

Then, one by one, family members started picking up their phones.

Some stood up. They’d been put on evacuation alert. They had to go home, pack, and wait. I watched them go, first one, then another, then a handful until the room thinned. The laughter quieted and my grandmother sat in her chair, watching her grandchildren leave, one by one. She didn’t say much, she didn’t need to, she knew this dance, she’d done it before.

Eventually, I had to leave too.

We packed the rest of the food. We hugged. We said “see you soon,” and we meant it. Then everyone went home. My father had to evacuate with only minutes to spare. I raced to my dad’s house and we helped him pack what we could as the fire grew at an alarming speed toward him. He was evacuated two minutes from my house, so I knew I was next.

By the time I got home, our family friends were already there, packing for me. They’d already been evacuated without time to take anything with them. Now they were saving us while their own home burned behind them.

One minute I was laughing with my son. The next minute I was grabbing what I could carry. I was not thinking about taking what was valuable, I only grabbed what was irreplaceable. Old ceremony blankets, medicine necklace materials, baskets, photographs, my computers with language recordings and the eagle feather my son gave me. Everything else I left.

On my way out, I looked back, and the smoke was climbing toward us. Flames moved over the ridge toward my house, and the sky was turning black. I felt an overwhelming need to just get out, this fire had taken on a life of its own. I could tell this fire doesn’t know our names the way our cultural burns do. It was consuming everything equally, the sacred and the ordinary, the medicine plants and the invasive brush. 

But, even as I watched the fire consume everything in its path, I realized this is exactly what my people prepared me for. This is why they taught me about grief.

They taught me that grief is not a destination, it’s like a creek — you don’t stop it. You discipline yourself to sit beside it, make kin with it, let it flow, and let it carry away what it needs to carry.

They taught me that grief has a shape. They taught me that grief is so special to us that it has its own ceremony, its own songs, its own prayers for specific losses. I was always told, “Name your grief, give it boundaries. Tell it, I see you. You are welcome here. But you will not take me with you.”

They taught me that the deeper you love, the deeper you grieve. That grief and joy are not enemies. That you can weep and laugh in the same breath. That you can feed people even when you can’t eat yourself.

My people taught me that a community that grieves together stays together. To suppress grief is to go against our own syilx intellect, against the very way we are made to commune with the world. Feeling is not weakness, we are to honour that it is our Way of Knowing. It is the thread that connects us to what we love, to cut it is to sever ourselves from the land, from each other, from the truth of what we carry.

My people taught me that grief is not something to outrun. It is something to sit beside, to name, to sing, to let drip into each other’s minds, drop by drop, until a shared truth emerges. The image of that process is enowkinwixw, the syilx word for a gentle way of coming to understanding together. The word itself conjures liquid being absorbed drop by drop through the mind, filling in gaps, softening resistance, building a common picture. The process is about finding clarity, where each person is offering what they know, no matter how small, until the whole circle sees more clearly. That is how we hold the loss in the centre of the circle and face it together.

So now I think about that morning. Coffee on the deck, with my partner beside me. The sun rising over the valley. I didn’t know it would be the last ordinary morning for a while. I didn’t know I would spend the next few days learning what my people have always known, that you can lose everything and still have everything that matters.

Okanagan Indian Band Chief naspəpʕásəs Dan Wilson confirmed as of Aug. 5, more than 30 band members have lost their homes to the fire, and numerous other structures are also gone. Some families have been contacted directly, and others are still waiting, still hoping, still not knowing if their homes are standing. 

He told IndigiNews, “Our loss is measured in the family histories that have been lost — especially the Elders who have lost their homes. The old pictures, the memorabilia; the Salish baskets.”

As I write this, it’s Aug. 6. I wash dishes in someone else’s sink. I cook without my grandmother’s tools. Today, I am learning to grieve the way my people taught me, by sitting with it, and letting it flow like the little creek that runs beside my house.

Tomorrow I will wake up and make coffee. I will stand on whatever deck I am given and be grateful for it. I will look out at whatever sky is above me and I will remember that I am grateful to be sqilx’w in these times, I am blessed to be syilx, and I am proud to be from the Okanagan Indian Band, proud to have called it home my entire life. Now, I have both the responsibility and the profound honour to continue dreaming, as we have been directed by our Creator to do, and that does not end when the smoke clears.

 If you are a member of the Okanagan Indian Band and are struggling, help is available through the OKIB Mental Health and Wellness team at 250-540-7416. Resources are also available from First Nations Health Authority and Interior Health.

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Summary

• Indigenous culture camps are happening across Canada this summer. Revitalizing cultural practices, spending time on the land, and participating in ceremonies is the focus of most camps. 
• Despite dozens of wildfires across B.C., organizers are fulfilling their commitments, highlighting the importance of hosting communities and organizations.
• Some culture camps have been happening for decades, while other communities hosted their first camp this year.

For 10 days in July, Qaqaqam Chris Wells spent time on the land camping with Líl̓wat youth, teaching Lil̓wat7úl cultural protocols, songs and stories. The Kwáozán̓tsut cultural summer camps have been “a long time coming,” he said. 

“Bringing our children back onto the land is teaching them land based healing and learning,” Wells told the Narwhal. “It was really awesome to bring back our culture.”

Hosted at Klháka7min, previously known as the Coast Mountain Outdoor School, two separate age groups camped for five days each between July 6th and July 17th. 

Though the youth were a bit shy at first, Wells and fellow camp leaders Ánwasúlmec Brett Wallace and Sík Sík Joshua Anderson say that by the end of each cohort, seeing how the participants had come out of their shells was a highlight.

“It was extra special for me: I had two of my daughters there, one in each age group,” Anderson said. “It was an opportunity to spend more time with them during the busy summer.”

During this year’s culture camp, a wildfire prompted evacuations in Pemberton, located approximately 25 kilometres down the road. Despite the nearby fire, the culture camps were a success — connecting youth with tradition, the land and culture. 

“We were pretty safe from all the fires happening around us,” Wells said. He’s stewarded the territory since he was a youth.

Land-based learning, education and connection

Between the two age groups — 9 to 12-year-olds, and teens — 30 youth attended the camps. 

Líl̓wat Elders took youth out onto the land, teaching them about edible berries and teas that grow in the area during that time of year.

“Every evening we had singing and drumming, and talked about cultural protocols. We talked about the origin of the songs. We talked about our ceremonies,” Wells said. 

Archery, axe throwing and rifle shooting with the older age group all took place with laughter and storytelling throughout. 

Youth had the opportunity to make traditional rattles and smudge bowls, ceremonial items that can be hard to access for a young person. Anderson said numerous parents reached out to him after the camp, sharing how their child went home wanting to practice their culture more through smudging. 

The youth even made a swimming hole to jump into cold glacier water, adding some casual fun into the mix, and relief from the hot summer days. 

“You can’t forget the fun part of it. We had the opportunity to play bone game in the evening time,” Anderson said, which showed the youth “how disputes were settled in a traditional manner.” 

The bone game is a traditional game used historically as an alternative to war by nations along the Salish Sea, and has other names such as “stick game” or “hand game” in other regions of Western Canada.

Youth were also split into three groups and tasked with helping in the kitchen. Local Lil̓wat7úl chef Casey Gabriel taught them how to cook for the group and clean up afterwards. 

The Kwáozán̓tsut Cultural Summer Camps were championed by the organizing trio of Anderson, Wells and Wallace, who are no strangers to hosting culture camps. But despite hosting camps in St’át’imc Nation communities for years, it took some time to prepare and build the trust required to host youth camps in their own nation. 

Now the Líl̓wat Nation wants to host another culture camp this fall. Wells, Wallace and Anderson are all looking forward to sharing their knowledge and helping out.

Now in its 15th year, Nlha’7kapmx annual culture camp is a ‘safe haven’

Excitement for future camps is a sentiment shared by Michelle Isaac, who always lends a helping hand at an annual Nlaka’pamux culture camp hosted at Pasulko Lake, located in B.C.’s Southern Interior.

“My stepmom at the time, Amy Chapman, brought me up to what used to be called the healing gathering. All I remember from there was how much of a difference it made in my life,” Isaac told the Narwhal. 

She attended the healing gathering after surviving a severe car accident, but over the years, the annual gathering lost volunteers and resources. 

Having experienced the healing energy of gathering herself, and meeting with the service agency about how to support community members, Isaac and a group of ladies working for Nlha’7kapmx Child and Family Services decided to spearhead a community based culture camp.

Now in its 15th year, people in the area look forward to gathering at Pasulko Lake each summer, practicing culture and being together on the land. 

This year, a mix of cultural activities, including drum making, cedar weaving and language friendship bracelet making took place, along with activities such as a tug-of-war game between youth and the local firefighting group, the Lytton Rattlers, and a performance by local band Ritchie and the Fenderman.

Isaac attends camp each year with her children, who are part of the Lower Nicola Indian Band community. While Isaac is not Indigenous herself, she still attends with an open heart and mind, supporting in any way she can. When wildfires are burning, she sees the camps as an especially important place for youth. 

“They’re able to come up there and do the activities, do the crafts, I find it takes a lot of stress and fear from the fire away from them,” Isaac said. This year, it’s also been an important refuge for her as well, after she was evacuated in July due to the nearby Brunswick Creek wildfire.

“Fire-wise, for me it was a safe haven. My one daughter came up as well, who was also evacuated, and hung out all week there. It gave me a safe place,” she said.

Across B.C. and Canada, wildfires disproportionately impact First Nations communities. Though they represent only five per cent of the population, it’s estimated that First Nations make up 42 per cent of all wildfire evacuations. 

As wildfires blaze all around the Interior, the camp offered a break from smoke for those in attendance. On event posters this year, air quality warnings were addressed, with evacuation routes marked along the way to camp as a precaution.

People who attended camp were asked to register at the sign in desk daily, to track who was there, and were informed about a muster point in the event of evacuation. 

The decision to continue on with both culture camps was deliberated by organizers carefully, with designated people monitoring surrounding wildfires.

Renegerating the land through fire

B.C. was the first province or territory in Canada to ban cultural burning in 1874, prohibiting generations of Indigenous people from stewarding their territories with fire. In 2024, 150 years later, the province officially amended wildfire regulations to support cultural burns. Today, many nations are in the process of reclaiming this practice, including Líl̓wat. 

“We can’t look at fire as dangerous all of the time. We gotta look at it as an element that helps us regenerate, and help us repurpose the land,” Wallace added.

An example of fire regenerating the land was visible to those at Líl̓wat’s culture camps through an abundance of berries, following a cultural burn several years before.

“That specific area was culturally burnt seven or eight years ago and now finally it’s starting to reproduce huckleberries,” Wallace said. “It’s not just a small piece of land, it’s a really big area, and the whole area was covered in huckleberries and raspberries because of these cultural burns that happened.”

Youth were able to harvest these berries, and surrounding wildlife have a tasty treat. 

And in the era of technology, culture camps give youth the opportunity to disconnect from the internet, and to connect with the natural world. 

“Back in our time, we didn’t have technology to hold us back from being out on the land,” Wells said. “It’s important to return to land-based healing … to be St’át’imc, and to do St’át’imc things.”

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.

“What are you going to do about wildland firefighter mental health?”

The question came to Jim Johansson — a former wildland firefighter and assistant professor in the faculty of nursing at the University of Alberta — from a student in December 2023. Canada had just experienced its deadliest wildfire season on record.

Eight wildland firefighting personnel died in 2023 in Western Canada and the Northwest Territories, prompting scrutiny of the profession’s hidden costs: chronic fatigue, physical and mental burnout and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Now, the 2026 fire season has made one thing unmistakingly clear: the psychological toll of wildland firefighting in North America has reached new levels. In June, two wildland firefighters and a bush pilot died in a plane crash near Fort Simpson, N.W.T. Several days later, three firefighters were fatally burnt while working on a wildfire along the Utah-Colorado border, while a fourth died on July 24 from injuries he sustained. 

Kylie Foisy, the nursing student who sent the email about mental health to Johansson back in 2023, had just wrapped up her rookie season as an initial attack crew member in northwestern Alberta. Initial attack crews are the first on the scene of new blazes, tasked with quickly extinguishing them. On her second day on the job in May 2023, Foisy’s crew was dispatched to a 5,000-hectare wildfire. “It was so crazy,” she says. “But so fun.”

She loved the intensity of the work and the strong bonds she developed with her crew, but the summer unfolded with more sobering events, including a fatal helicopter crash in her district. For Foisy’s crew it was “business as usual” the next day, she says. For the duration of the season she felt the impacts wearing on her mental well-being, and could see others were also struggling.

For Johansson, Foisy’s email was a call to action. And it was the very start of what is now Canada’s first wildland firefighter peer-support network. Johansson has assembled a team of veteran wildland firefighters, occupational health therapists, psychologists and climate specialists to co-create and launch a new peer-support network in Alberta “by wildland firefighters, for wildland firefighters” — the first of its kind in Canada.

Johansson hopes to apply what he’s learned over the past decade as a mental health nurse to bolster support for those on the frontlines of wildfire. A year after Foisy’s email landed in his inbox, he hired her as a research assistant. Together, they’re undertaking a qualitative research project to examine the mental health challenges related to wildland firefighting and climate change in Alberta.Already, they’ve heard stories from those who have experienced or witnessed crew members escape near-death scenarios, including close calls with fallen trees or vehicle collisions. Others were impacted by fatal tragedies, like in August 2024, when 24-year-old firefighter Morgan Kitchen was killed by a fallen tree while working on the Jasper wildfire. Last week, as the two-year anniversary of Kitchen’s death approached, six workplace safety charges were laid against Alberta’s Ministry of Forestry and Parks in relation to it, for failing to take measures to assess and control hazards related to dangerous trees — along with failing to adequately train firefighters to identify hazardous trees. The first court appearance is scheduled for this September, in Jasper.

Wildfire fighters lack the supports of municipal firefighters

Despite working on the frontlines of some of Canada’s most intense climate-related disasters, most wildland firefighters are classified as forestry workers — not first responders — under Canada’s national occupational classification system. They also often lack the wages, pensions and benefits afforded to municipal firefighters. 

Johansson was all too familiar with the working conditions on the frontlines of wildfires. He had worked as an initial attack firefighter in Alberta from 2001 to 2009, then taught up-and-coming crew members and leaders at the Hinton Training Centre until 2013. Johansson led an initial attack crew from 2005 to 2009, working 12- to 16-hour days over three-week shifts, hauling hose through muskeg and pumping water from swamps to extinguish wildfires.

Despite the low pay, the camaraderie and joy of spending days in the bush “got into his blood,” Johansson says. “There’s a culture of wildland firefighting that I felt so happy in, and that didn’t really exist anywhere else,” he says.

Yet, there were psychological hazards, too. In 2007, a helicopter carrying an initial attack crew crashed near Fort McMurray, killing 22-year-old Patrick Dominic Watters-Michaud. After the news arrived, Johansson had to “jump in a helicopter and go day-base that day,” he says. Day-basing involves relocating crews to high-risk wildfire areas to increase their chances of extinguishing the fires when they’re still small. The next day, wildland firefighters informally banded together, lowering the flags at bases across the province, “mourning the loss of one of our people,” Johansson recalls.

Alberta Wildfire managers raised the flags, citing that the firefighter did not meet the criteria of their flag-lowering policy. The policy changed in 2008 after crew leaders filed formal complaints. Alberta Wildfire did not respond to questions from The Narwhal about this incident or any other questions.

The incident opened Johansson’s eyes to the “legitimate danger” of wildland firefighting, and he became increasingly anxious to fly on helicopter patrols — a routine part of firefighting work where crew members survey the landscape for new ignitions. But it also shone a light on what he says is the government’s ongoing failure to provide safe, culturally relevant mental health support to wildland firefighters.

Johansson became increasingly vocal as a leader, advocating for the safety and well-being of his crew. He would eventually be “DNRed” by the Edson district — a term referring to Alberta Wildfire’s “Do Not Rehire” policy. Alberta Wildfire does not grant seasonal firefighters automatic recall rights from one season to the next, unlike other Canadian provinces like B.C. Alberta Wildfire did not respond to questions about whether this policy exists or how it’s applied.

After leaving wildfire, it felt like Johansson was “starting all over again,” he says. He decided to pursue higher education in nursing, specializing in mental health. 

Johansson doesn’t want his research limited to publishing papers.

“When I put my nursing lens on firefighting, I’m always looking for strengths and how we can mobilize those to help people. In wildfire, that strength is the people,” Johansson says. “That’s what keeps firefighters coming back every season.”

Climate change and gaps in mental health support put Alberta’s wildland firefighters at risk

For his research, Johansson interviewed 17 former and current wildland firefighters in Alberta. He shared preliminary results with The Narwhal.

Early data from Johansson’s qualitative research has raised some red flags. The majority of wildland firefighters Johansson spoke to agreed the 2023 fire season was a “turning point” in their careers. Crews spent a higher number of days actively fighting fires in increasingly risky and volatile environments. It’s “non-stop all season long,” and there’s fatigue and additional safety issues that come with that, researchers found.

Initial attack and unit crew leaders also spoke to Johansson about mental health challenges related to high turnover of crew members. “In the past, most crews would only have a small number of rookies each year,” Johansson says. An Alberta Wildfire document, leaked to The Narwhal, analyzes the results of a wildfire crew exit survey in 2023, and indicates that “60 per cent of all firefighters were either brand new, or entering their second year.” 

Alberta Wildfire did not respond to any questions about the findings of Johannson’s research.

Johansson’s research found leaders were worried about dividing their attention between managing large-scale wildfires, and simultaneously supervising a higher number of rookies less familiar with volatile fire behaviour and danger trees, whose unstable roots and surrounding soil could result in suddenly toppling over. In addition, some reported that third-year firefighters were being pushed prematurely into leadership roles, he says.

There are broader labour issues in Alberta too, including that wildland firefighters lack paid sick days and health benefits. There are some limited mental health services available — including a counselling hotline — but interviewees expressed hesitation, or lack of trust about confidentiality when using the services for fear they might not be hired back the following spring, Johansson says.

Wildland firefighters are left to fend for themselves in the off-season — when they often need supports the most

Johansson often compares the dynamics of wildland firefighting to that of soldiers returning from combat. “[Wildland firefighters] exist in these really high-intensity situations. They have a tight-knit peer support network that keeps them safe mentally,” he says.

But when the wildfire season ends in the fall and seasonal firefighters’ contracts are terminated, they suddenly lose that support network.

For Jessica Broder, a former wildland firefighter with the BC Wildfire Service, when she left her crew to spend the winters in other communities she lost her “sounding board for processing.” She also points to the reality of wildland firefighters relying on substances to cope through the off-season. A study of U.S. wildland firefighters found that nearly four in five respondents reported binge drinking before and after the fire season.

Broder worked on a unit crew in Revelstoke, B.C., in 2023, the summer her colleague Devyn Gale was killed by a fallen tree. The accident felt all too relatable, Broder says. She herself had narrowly avoided falling trees and knew others had experienced similar close calls. 

After Gale’s accident, she and her crew participated in critical incident stress management debriefs, and had access to a clinical counsellor with a history in wildland firefighting.

Broder and her crew accrued approximately 100 fireline days in the 2023 season (a unit crew would be happy if they got 60 days, according to Broder). While initial attack crews respond to wildfires with the goal of quickly extinguishing them, unit crews are 20-person crews that specialize in “sustained action,” or longer-term firefighting efforts on mega-fires. In September, her crew was deployed to northern B.C. to work on the Big Creek fire, which she described as her “breaking point.” The Big Creek fire grew to more than 175,000 hectares in 2023 and triggered evacuation orders in the Takla Lake First Nation. Broder led a night shift, working from 5 p.m. until 9 a.m. the next morning, and had to evacuate camp when the wildfire threatened to burn it.

Broder worries that increasingly destructive wildfire seasons are exposing firefighters to greater psychological strain. While BC Wildfire Service has some mental health training, including a course offered through the Canadian Mental Health Association, adapted specifically for wildfire, called Resilient Minds, Broder would like to see more preparatory training for all wildland firefighters.

“We’re not giving people the tools to tell someone at 4 a.m. that their house is not ‘an achievable objective,’ or to go into a rural or Indigenous community [to engage with community members],” she points out, referring to how wildland firefighters have to knock on doors and tell community members to leave their homes — and sometimes warn them they are unlikely to have a home to return to.

Recently, Johansson recruited Broder — today a student at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, B.C. — onto his team to research existing mental health support programs for wildland firefighters in North America. “It’s something that really lacks across Canada,” she says. “I think [a peer-support network] could be transformational.”

‘It’s not a hopeless endeavour’: veteran wildland firefighter

Over a 30-year career, Michelle Wigmore fought wildfires across Canada and North America, led a 20-person unit crew and developed national training courses. Today, she’s teaming up with Johansson to help launch the peer-support network.

Over the years, Wigmore has seen wildland firefighters struggle with mental health, but says “it’s often not in the way people think.” Busy seasons and long hours can be challenging, but they’re also “why people join fire and stay in it,” she says. “It’s the excitement, adrenaline, you’re working as a team — it’s the greatest thing ever.” But it comes with immense pressure.

Wigmore has lost colleagues to helicopter accidents, health conditions and suicide. One year, a crew member died by suicide on his day off. 

A recent survey in the U.S. found 22 per cent of wildland firefighters have attempted suicide, while 37 per cent reported suicidal ideation. 

Rainy seasons can be just as psychologically hazardous, Wigmore says. When wildfire activity is low, crews may spend extended periods away from home without the opportunity to earn overtime. “That’s when I’ve seen the most issues come up,” she says.

The solutions don’t always need to be complicated, Wigmore says, and they’re most effective when they come from the ground up. Crew morale is at the heart of it, she says. “It’s not a hopeless endeavour.”

What helped her crew the most when they lost a colleague to suicide, was the show of solidarity from other wildland firefighters on base. They collectively decided to construct a bench in honour of their colleague and flew it to a nearby mountaintop.

In 2023, Wigmore wasn’t hired back on — she was “DNRed.” The “do not rehire” policy in Alberta is “barbaric,” Wigmore says. Wildland firefighters deserve job security and automatic recall rights, so they’re not afraid of advocating for their well-being, or safety, says the veteran firefighter

But she’s quick to credit recent progress. The Alberta government and union signed a new agreement in 2025 that will increase wages for crew members with the most years of service by more than 19 per cent by 2027. Wages for longest-serving crew leaders and supervisors will rise by more than 27 per cent and 31 per cent, respectively. 

“This is career-changing for people,” Wigmore says. “[Firefighters] that were planning their exit strategy … are now planning to stay.” Other major wildfire agencies in Canada, including B.C. and Ontario should take note, Wigmore says.

BC Wildfire leads cultural shift in mental health awareness

The devastating losses of six firefighters in B.C.’s wildland firefighting community in 2023 “struck a chord” for the BC Wildfire Service, Olivia Goldney, a safety specialist with the organization, says. “We need to have a strengthened culture of care for our staff and develop trauma-informed systems that can allow our staff to do this job long-term,” she adds.

Aside from chronic fatigue and burnout, wildland firefighters are grappling with a profound sense of “ecological grief,” as their communities and landscapes are burnt over by wildfires. Goldney experienced post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from her experiences as an initial attack crew leader in 2021, witnessing the devastating events of the Lytton fire, which tore through the community in 15 minutes, destroying homes and businesses, and killing two people.

Today, she’s leading the development of a new psychological health and safety strategy within the BC Wildfire Service. “We want to align psychological injuries closer to how we approach physical injuries,” Goldney says.

All wildland firefighters in B.C. have automatic recall rights and benefits, including sick days and partially paid short-term disability leave, according to Goldney. Once they have worked over a certain number of hours, they also receive a $1,000 annual health and wellness allowance that can be used for services such as massage therapy and counselling. A counselling hotline is available to all firefighters, while First Nations firefighters can also access a crisis line to access culturally informed support. A 2021 survey found more than 50 per cent of Indigenous wildland firefighters in Canada had experienced additional risks related to cultural discrimination on the frontlines.

After the 2023 season, BC Wildfire Service also launched a recovery program, a four-day intensive retreat that provides firefighters with therapeutic tools for their long-term recovery from work-related traumatic stress.  

While wildland firefighting has long been dominated by a culture of stoicism — “a kind of buck up and do the job,” Goldney says — she’s seeing a cultural shift within BC Wildfire Service’s leadership to acknowledge and address the psychological toll of the work.

“From the bottom to the top, there’s this ‘shake’ that’s happening culturally,” Goldney says. “People are understanding the work we do has profound impacts on a person.”

She points to systemic changes that are underway in B.C.: wildland firefighters are becoming increasingly recognized by their first responder peers in the province. Recently, BC Wildfire Service was invited to join the BC First Responders Mental Health committee, Goldney says. In addition, B.C. wildland firefighters will soon have the most comprehensive cancer coverage in all of Canada. She’s hopeful that federal legislation will change to recognize wildland firefighters as first responders.

“I think only good things are to come,” Goldney says.

Wildland firefighting peer-support network sets sights on launching in early 2027

If you had asked Johansson at 25 whether he was struggling with his mental health, he would have shrugged and replied, “Job’s fine. I’m fine.” Twenty years later, he’s no longer sure that was really the case.

That realization is part of why Johansson sees value in long-term support. His team plans to build a year-round support network for both active and retired wildland firefighters, offering a space where those still processing their experiences can find an informed, listening ear.

“You could be two, three, five, 10 years out and still access [support],” he says. 

Come September, after the fire season, Johansson’s team will brainstorm what the network could look like. There are already ideas of starting an online platform, a peer-support counselling line, group fitness challenges or even integrating supports into video games. 

They plan to launch the pilot peer-support network in Alberta in the spring of 2027 with the broader goal of eventually expanding across Canada. 

Already he’s receiving overwhelmingly enthusiastic reception and support for the project, he says. “[People] are like, ‘Thank you for doing this’, or ‘How can I help?’ It’s obviously filling a need.”

It’s been a full-circle moment for the former wildland firefighter, although Johansson admits that, emotionally, a part of him has never really left. 

Gardening in his backyard in Calgary often evokes the memory of “digging in the dirt, looking for hot spots,” he says. Even the faintest trace of wildfire smoke has a way of transporting him back to the frontlines. “It’s total nostalgia,” Johansson says.

“For a minute, I’m back in it.”

Updated on Aug. 7, 12:52 pm PST: A number of photographs in this story have been changed. The images originally used did not show a wildfire, but an Indigenous cultural burn, and misidentified attendees at the burn as employees of BC Wildfire.

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Summary

• The 2026 wildfire season in Canada, which has been particularly severe in Ontario, has prompted significant interest on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok.
• Many of these posts contain misinformation, including AI-generated maps with incorrect details on the locations or severity of fires across Canada, or conspiracy theories linking wildfires to lasers, 15-minute city initiatives or eco-terrorism.
• Many posts focus on mismanagement and place blame on Canadian governments, which complicates valid critiques of wildfire response and funding with destabilizing misinformation.

Ontario is grappling with one of the worst wildfire seasons in recorded history, which has put thousands of people, especially those in the province’s north, at risk. Last month, two Indigenous communities — Namaygoosisagagun First Nation and Whitewater Lake First Nation — were burned to the ground. The scale of the crisis has made headlines around the world, and prompted a blaze of posts on social media.

But many of those posts contain misinformation, both AI-generated and hand-crafted: maps that purport to show Ontario wildfires labelled with communities that don’t exist; false information about air quality and evacuation alerts; captions with conspiracy theories about 15-minute cities and arson. 

Look closely and you might see clues about what’s real and what isn’t. One viral AI-generated graphic purports to show the location of Ontario wildfires, but directs people to a non-existent Ontario government website. Another, claiming 10,000 people in Alberta were under evacuation orders as of July 16 (not true), includes a map where Jasper National Park appears to cover most of the province. One map puts Ontario on the West Coast, Quebec over the southern United States and Alberta up around Alaska — and includes a province called “Onjebio,” where the wildfire situation looks pretty bad. 

But just as often, it’s hard to tell fact from fiction. And it’s getting harder: in May, Statistics Canada reported 43 per cent of Canadians find it more difficult to distinguish between facts and misinformation online, compared to three years ago. Those with less trust in news media reported even more difficulty. 

Each year, it seems, the onset of wildfire season in Canada is accompanied by the onset of wildfire misinformation season on social media. As AI-generated content becomes more ubiquitous — and often tougher to spot — across social media, it presents new challenges to Canadians looking for trustworthy information about unfolding crises across the country. Wildfires are getting worse because of climate change. But what’s driving the escalation of misinformation?

2023 marked a shift in online wildfire misinformation

Gwen Roley, a digital verification journalist covering Canada for the international outlet Agence France-Presse, recently reported on some of the AI-generated maps spreading across social media platforms. “The labels on it were really wonky, and the symbols for the wildfires didn’t make sense,” she says. Roley has covered wildfire misinformation extensively, and there are certain trends that pop each year — “eco-terrorists, directed energy weapons,” also known as lasers — but this year’s maps struck her as a new trend. 

Roley has been debunking wildfire misinformation since 2023 — a “really superlative year, as we all remember,” she says. In addition to being the worst year for wildfires in Canada so far, there were also devastating fires in Hawaii. “These were almost like never-before-seen events, very scary events, where people are looking for explanations,” she says. In some parts of Canada, wildfires are familiar, even if the scale of recent years is not. But when wildfires rage in New Brunswick or the Northwest Territories or Hawaii, they may prompt more fear — and more speculation — than usual. When something that feels extraordinary happens, people are inclined to look for extraordinary explanations: even back in 1954, residents of Bellingham, Wash., became convinced hydrogen bomb tests or space rays were responsible for a sudden rash of damage to car windshields. 

Climate change denial, likewise, is not a new phenomenon. Chris Russill is an associate professor in the school of journalism and communication at Carleton University, where he’s also an academic director of Re.Climate, a centre focused on public engagement and climate communication. He says denial or skepticism of climate science dates back decades. 

But he agrees 2023 was an inflection point for wildfire misinformation online. Some of that was because of what was happening in the real world, such as the impact of Canadian fires on American air quality. 

But many were linked to shifts happening on major social media platforms: “Elon Musk had just bought Twitter,” he recalls. The Canadian government had passed the Online News Act, an attempt to make foreign social platforms pay to share news. Instead, Russill remembers, “Meta was refusing to negotiate with journalists around the News Act and stripped out Canadian journalism [from its platforms Facebook and Instagram].” It was also the first wildfire season since the widespread adoption of generative artificial intelligence; within two months of its release in November 2022, ChatGPT had more than 100 million monthly active users.

That chain of events is definitely still reverberating today: though Canadian news has been banned by Meta since 2023, a majority of Canadian users still don’t know that, according to a June 2026 report by the Media Ecosystem Observatory at McGill University. Of 1,518 Canadians surveyed for the report, only one in four Instagram users knew that news outlets in Canada could not publish on Meta platforms. Many people believe they’re seeing news on Facebook and Instagram when what they’re seeing is misinformation and conspiracy theories. And users searching Google for wildfire updates are shown AI-generated summaries, which launched in Canada in October 2024, and may contain inaccuracies. (Over the August long weekend, a Narwhal editor looking for air quality information at a lake in the B.C. Interior was shown a summary that incorrectly stated the lake was closed — information pulled from social media posts about two different places that were closed.)

Russill also attributes the 2023 sea change to the post-pandemic atmosphere of suspicion. “There was a more adversarial, conspiratorial way that climate was being dragged into other culture-war type issues that were becoming more and more salient through the [COVID-19] period,” he says.

This year, once again, Canadian wildfire smoke is impacting the United States, triggering posts from President Donald Trump on his Truth Social platform and AI-generated graphics that distort the impact of smoke on Americans.

Who benefits from wildfire misinformation on social media? 

As much as they complain about it, Russill says American politicians are also finding an opportunity in the effects of wildfire smoke on air quality. 

“The U.S. politicians, MAGA politicians, definitely have an interest in leveraging narratives — misinformation, conspiracies, false and misleading content — around wildfires to pursue a narrative they have about Canada as a bad neighbour, and leveraging that for trade and security,” he says. In a post on July 17, Trump threatened that the “cost of this pollution must of necessity be added to the TARIFFS Canada is currently paying.”

Researchers call this “participatory disinformation,” in which political leaders and influencers seed disinformation across platforms, and it’s then amplified and reproduced by ordinary users, in this case shaping online narratives about extreme weather events. (Disinformation is distinguished from misinformation by the intentions of the person sharing it. While people may unintentionally share misinformation, disinformation is false information shared on purpose.)

The McGill report on Canadian news notes, “When journalism loses visibility on social media, it is not replaced by nothing — it is replaced by content that serves a different function.” Conspiracy theories and images that distort the reality of wildfires get engagement, and a real crisis presents a fertile opportunity for content generation. 

Ad revenue from Google and other ad exchanges is another motivating factor, the Media Ecosystem Observatory also reported in June: the push behind a coordinated, international network of Facebook accounts pushing “news slop” — AI-fabricated stories — onto Canadian users. 

It’s easy for everyday users to get caught up in spreading untruths, too. Across social media, engagement is currency, which may provide an incentive to use the most dramatic or striking images without checking — or caring — about accuracy. “You can find a real map that you can very easily take a screenshot of that is using real data,” Roley says. But the real maps aren’t as dramatic as the AI-generated ones, “where it looks like all of Ontario has been burnt to a crisp, or one of the videos I saw where it looks like the wildfires are visible from space.” And lingering on those images — even if we’re skeptical of them — rewards the algorithm. 

As Russill points out, it’s “faster, easier and cheaper than ever before to generate fake and misleading content with AI.” It’s also easy to see what does well with your audience, and react accordingly, he says. “Like, let’s make the smoke bigger. Let’s put a fleeing polar bear in there. Who knows, right?” Some people may be diehard believers in climate conspiracies, and others might be deliberately seeding disinformation, but some are almost certainly agnostic to the culture wars; they just want the engagement. 

Whether users want to gain followers or further a political agenda, Russill says, they have “almost nothing to lose.” While AI posts may be flagged and removed on some platforms, it’s easy to replace them. “In these moments like wildfire evacuations and emergencies, this surges forward because it’s a real high engagement opportunity,” he says. 

This happened in 2025, he adds, prompting the BC Wildfire Service to warn of AI-generated images circulating on social media. And it’s happening this year, too.

From climate change denial to ‘mismanagement’: the narrative online has shifted

Misinformation typically downplays or denies the role of climate change in worsening wildfires, and displaces it onto other, implausible explanations. A few years ago, it was space lasers and 15-minute cities.

But no part of the world’s media ecosystem is free of Trump’s influence, including reporting on wildfires. After the 2025 wildfires in Los Angeles, which killed 31 people, the president blamed mismanagement of California forests. (Experts attributed the disaster to climate change, prolonged drought and southern California’s high winds, which spread the fire rapidly.)

“So the impacts people were seeing were a result of government mismanagement, not climate, not other types of things,” Russill says. The same argument is now being directed at Canada; in July, a Michigan senator posted on X, “Unless you want to become the 51st state, learn to manage your forests.” Such a task would be impossible in Canada, which has 369 million hectares of forest — covering more than a third of its landmass — 260 million of which is boreal forest in the sparsely populated north. Much of these forests have never been “managed,” but are experiencing more severe and frequent wildfires because the planet is getting hotter, a crisis that cannot be solved with rakes.

In part, this is a problem of our own making. In 2023, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith dodged a question about climate change and wildfire by pivoting to arsonists. And she’s not the only Canadian leader minimizing the severity of the climate crisis, while pushing more fossil fuel investments. “As politicians everywhere have gotten more quiet about climate, it becomes more difficult for people to understand why these [wildfire] situations are becoming much more unmanageable,” Russill says. 

The question of government responsibility is legitimate, he adds. There are valid criticisms of the Ontario government’s response to recent wildfires, or its habitual underfunding of emergency wildfire response. But in a news ecosystem rife with disinformation, it can be hard to balance valid criticism with simply undermining Canadian authorities. “It’s being leveraged as a frame in which to challenge and create distrust of authorities during these moments of crises in a more substantive way,” he says. 

Wildfire misinformation can bring real-world risk to Canadian firefighters — and everyone else

AI-generated images are annoying and possibly being weaponized to destabilize democracy. What researchers don’t know yet is if they are also putting individual lives at risk. 

“One of the things I would be curious to know is how it’s impacting people’s understanding of wildfires,” Roley says. “Like, is someone fleeing from their home because they saw this AI-generated map? I have no idea.” 

Wildfire agencies are now also spending precious time and resources combatting misinformation or pushing back on AI-generated images — especially when it targets them. Russill says that degrades trust that is already wearing thin. “In B.C., you know, BC Wildfire is not trusted by every rural community that experiences wildfire, so they already have that issue to deal with.” The effect of untruths and conspiracy theories on public trust is just one of the mental health stresses faced by frontline firefighters. 

Russill adds people might also be overly reliant on AI overviews to check for news on evacuation orders, park access or campfire guidelines. “But I think more likely it’s inducing a sort of widespread cynicism or distrust or confidence in people.” 

Online misinformation is a problem without a simple solution. Providing facts is important, but there is a depressingly robust body of research suggesting they’re not enough to change peoples’ minds or strongly-held beliefs.

“Certainly around moments of crisis like this, [providing fact checks] can introduce friction into the ways people are engaging with content,” Russill says. “Maybe they share a little less. Maybe they reset and ground-truth on something that’s happening, as opposed to letting their feelings start to overwhelm them.” 

Wildfires are still at their worst during hot, dry seasons; misinformation can burn all year long. At least for now, you can still limit your exposure to one of those risks by closing an app.

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.

As you bite into a juicy peach this summer, thank Niagara. The southern Ontario region grows more than half of Canada’s tender fruits: more than 70 per cent of our peaches, plus many fragrant baskets of nectarines, plums, pears, cherries, grapes and apricots. 

Despite the bounty, climate change is taking a toll. Sour cherries took the hit this year, the industry group Ontario Tender Fruit says, with the crop all but wiped out by a cold winter and late frost. A summer of extreme heat and smoky skies have made farm work difficult, even dangerous. As weather becomes more intense and erratic, harvests across the country become unpredictable, too. 

Jay Subramanian’s job is to tackle that uncertainty. The University of Guelph professor works at the Vineland Research & Innovation Centre in Niagara, combining modern genetics and age-old techniques to develop futuristic tender fruit. Right now, he’s trying to breed peaches that last longer, both before and after being picked. In the orchard, growers could spare workers a day of harvest during extreme heat. At home, we’d have an extra day to enjoy them, reducing food waste. 

The process for breeding flowering plants is centuries old. First, you identify varieties with different desirable qualities. Then, you take pollen from “variety X,” as Subramanian puts it, and paste it onto the stigma — the sticky tip of the flower — of “variety Y.” Then, you see what grows. If the fruits of his labour bear the desired qualities, he consults a panel to make sure the new variety also has the right “colour, shape, taste, everything that is appealing.” 

Bringing a new variety to the public takes years. 

The market value of Ontario’s tender fruit was more than $94 million in 2025, and that figure doesn’t account for the wider industry around it. Yet Subramanian says finding money to protect it isn’t easy. The only recent government funding for developing climate-resilient tender fruit varieties in the province — from data collection and research to education and breeding — was slightly more than $1 million from the federal government. And that was two years ago. 

This lack of support, he says, is one reason the country’s crop of fruit breeders is shrinking.

“We used to have like 10 people or 12 people in Canada when I joined,” Subramanian, who was born in India, says. “Now it has gone down to four. And if any of us retire, the writing is on the wall. That has to change. That has to come not from us, not from the university. It has to come from somewhere above.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

How are Ontario’s peach crops being affected by climate change? 

Jay Subramanian: I joined this job not too long ago — 24 years, but it’s not a very long period in crop evolution and things like that. Then, the first peaches here were harvested in the last week of July. [This year], we are already starting to see peaches ripen on July 10 — almost a three-week advancement within three decades.

That tells you how alarming the situation is in terms of climate change. Neither the breeder nor the marketing people nor the consumer can put something on the calendar like our parents or grandparents used to do — ‘Okay, this week I am going to get peaches from the farmers’ market and then do canning in my home.’ That’s all out of whack. 

[This July] we had temperatures crossing almost 33 C, 34 C, and that’s also not good. When you go and look at the fruits, they are all burnt, as if they were just taken out of a barbecue on the top. It is that bad.

When I say the effects of climate change, I mean unpredictable and extreme weather, such as early or late frost, extreme heat, drought or too much rain. Today in mid-July in Toronto, it’s incredibly smoky because of fires up north. Is there anything I’m missing?

Another thing is our winters are not predictable anymore. Sometimes we have enough snow on the ground so that the groundwater is all filled up and the plants kind of muscle up during the winter. Sometimes we don’t get that. We just get a smattering of snow here and there and then we don’t have enough groundwater. That is also causing decline and unpredictability to the tender fruit crops.

What does this mean for you, as a breeder and a scientist? What is your day-to-day when you’re trying to make these fruits as climate-resilient as you can?

Just to back up, tender fruit breeding is a very long process. The varieties that we release now were bred 25 years ago. So I have to have a vision or a crystal ball to know what is going to happen — 25 years from now, what is going to happen? That is just not possible. 

Looking at what is going to happen, how we are going to breed, that is going to be challenging. But we are also contributing to global warming and climate change. When you have produce like tender fruits going to a landfill, they emanate quite a bit of methane and nitrous oxide when they are rotting. Nitrous oxide takes six times longer than a carbon molecule to get settled down back in the earth, so it is going to be up there in the atmosphere for much longer.  

We are trying to breed varieties that would stay better so that it doesn’t go to the landfill, varieties of tender fruits that will remain on the shelf and in the consumer’s house for two or three days extra. Twenty to 30 per cent of produce is wasted by the consumer. That is the part that I can control within my career, within my lifetime. 

On the front end, an early peach that is ripening now, or a late peach that’s going to ripen in September, they all flower at the same time. They all flower within that two-week window in May. But then, from flowering to fruit maturity, that time for some is short. For some, it is long. 

So we are trying to work on that one: if it flowers on day X, it is going to ripen 70 days after flowering. This part as a geneticist, as a breeder, we can control. It’s a long process, but that is doable by using modern genetics. It is a slow and patient study, but I’d be more than happy to take the initiative on that because I’m the only one left in Canada.

You’re the only what left in Canada?

Only tender fruit breeder, only peach breeder left in Canada. If I retire, R.I.P. for this position.

How did that happen?

That’s a good question. Almost all through the world, for any publicly funded research program, they are looking at the industry to support this breeding. If you take a place like California, yes, their industry is huge — by even getting something like five cents from an agricultural check-off fund, they can support like five scientists. Certain crops, like corn, soybean, canola, wheat, these are huge industries. It’s easy. It’s possible. 

But our industry here is just very, very tiny. It is a very vital industry because we supply more than 50 per cent of tender fruits for Canada from this tiny little bowl in the south corner of Ontario. So that value is something people in power have to recognize.

In terms of the science, can you say a bit more? You want more control over the ripening process?

Well, ripening is a very long scientific process. Over the past 75 years, there’s quite a bit of study that has gone into the ripening process, how it is managed, what are all the genes involved and all those things. Using genetics, we can either accelerate it or we can delay it. That part we can do by breeding.

We know the genetics, we know what variety X can do, what variety Y can do, what we expect when we hybridize X and Y, things like that. If we take varieties that are ripening early, and if we put that pollen on the flowers that are ripening late, can we get something in-between? 

Along with ripening, I assume you’re also working, for example, on trees that are more resilient if there’s too much rain, or not enough rain.

To some extent, we can control that part by genetics. Another thing that we are working on is to make sure the varieties that we develop are resistant to some of the diseases. We are in Niagara, and the place is normally rainy and humid, and this is a heaven for pathogens like fungus and bacteria to grow. Especially when they see the fruits — fruit is full of sugar — and then they just go kaboom after that. 

By breeding varieties that are naturally resistant, we are also reducing the number of sprays that a farmer has to do. In that way, you can also help reduce climate change effects, because the operation of the machine, the pesticides themselves, all those things contribute to climate change. 

Is there a success that you’ve had in your career worth highlighting?

It’s a little bit early, but I think I have enough conviction to say that we are now developing a new series of peaches that can stay a little longer on the tree, on the shelf, as well as on the consumer table. Significantly longer, and they still taste very much like the normal peach. In fact, some of them are much sweeter. 

Probably in the next five, six years, we will be releasing varieties belonging to that particular group. Some of the press people call them the ‘neat peach.’

I personally really love a messy peach, though. I feel like that’s part of the peach experience. 

That is because we are here [in southern Ontario]. We are spoiled with the good stuff.

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Summary

• As climate change causes the Arctic to warm, the region’s permafrost — a layer of soil that stays frozen throughout the year — is beginning to thaw.
• In the Inuit community of Nain in Labrador, residents are witnessing the impacts of permafrost thaw. Ground that used to be solid is becoming unsteady, putting buildings at risk.
• Permafrost thaw also threatens to accelerate climate change, because permafrost releases carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere as it melts.

In central Nain, the largest community in northern Labrador, Joey Angnatok used shipping containers to build his warehouse.

He placed the two sea cans on hefty steel H-beams, leaving some room beneath them, should he need to jack up one end or the other against the sloping, ever-changing ground.

The land under them, he says, is “alive, like it’s always moving.” 

Some of the Nunatsiavut region, the Labrador Inuit Land Claims Agreement area in northern Labrador where Nain is located, is underlaid with permafrost. It’s a layer of soil and sediment, rock and ice — sometimes all of them together — that remains frozen for more than two years. Permafrost is ubiquitous across the Arctic and much of the subarctic, with some of the oldest layers believed to have remained frozen for hundreds of thousands of years.

But despite its longevity in some places, as the climate warms, permafrost thaw is becoming an increasingly inescapable problem.

“I hate it because I own a few properties around town, and unfortunately the melting of the permafrost is playing havoc with the foundations and movements of the buildings and all that kind of stuff,” Angnatok says. 

That’s why he built his warehouse to mitigate the undulating effects of permafrost thaw. “Because the land was so bad there, I figured we’d try something different instead of your normal ‘pour the concrete down and then build your wood structure on that,’ ” he explains. 

Three years after building, he says he’s still holding his breath. 

Nain is a community at the forefront of change. What’s happening here is being seen elsewhere in the North, and will continue to as the climate warms, thawing and reshaping the foundations on which communities are built.

As Canada eyes expansion and development in the Arctic, thawing permafrost could have a big impact. So what is it — and how fast is it changing?

Climate change and human activity are driving permafrost thaw

In another part of the community, there used to be a convenience store called Puffin Snacks, where everything — including the building — was tilted to one side. “If you walked into the building, you just started running in because it was just so sloped,” Michelle Saunders, a Nain resident and research manager for the Nunatsiavut Government, recalls. 

Puffin Snacks, too, was built on permafrost — a study on permafrost in Nain, published in 2021, shows that much of the infrastructure across the community has been impacted in some way as the ground shifts and sinks beneath it.

As the climate changes — far faster in the Arctic than elsewhere around the world — permafrost is thawing as temperatures rise. 

Robert Way, an associate professor at Queen’s University in the Department of Geography and Planning, is from Labrador and is one of the authors of the study on permafrost in Nain. Spending three to four months each year in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Labrador, and the rest of his time in Kingston, Ont., he studies the impacts of climate change in the subarctic region. 

In addition to climate change, Way says human activities such as construction of buildings and roads can also impact permafrost. “Building a house over top of permafrost, especially in areas where the permafrost is relatively warmer, often will contribute more heat into the system and will result in permafrost starting to thaw,” he says. Building roads also leads to stripping vegetation and piling up snow, which he says can also impact the permafrost underneath. 

These changes are on the minds of Saunders and her colleagues, as they manage and facilitate research programs in and with Nunatsiavut communities. And it affects their personal lives too.

Saunders, who moved to Nain five years ago, is thinking of building a cabin. Permafrost thaw, she says, is a risk she considers with possible locations. “Is this actually a good spot? Will this cause my cabin to shift over time? And I am not totally sure how to figure that out.” Because permafrost thaw is a recent phenomenon, she cannot use knowledge from Elders or other knowledge holders to help figure out where to build on lands with no permafrost.

For her and other residents of Nain, the ground shifting under their feet is a reality that can’t be ignored. “I think it’s something you have to think about now, for sure,” she says.

Permafrost thaw can damage not only infrastructure but also vegetation and wildlife found on top of it.

Across the North, Way says, the permafrost layer can range from a single metre to thousands of metres thick. 

If the average year-round temperature in a region is zero degrees or below, Way says, you generally start to encounter permafrost. “You really start to have a lot of permafrost once you get in the vicinity of Nain, and moving north from there,” Way says.

Way says that with permafrost thaw, change is gradual at first — and then sudden. “It actually takes a lot of energy to melt that ground ice,” he says, adding, “What you’ll see happen is it’ll take sort of a while before it thaws, maybe numbers of years. But, then once it starts to thaw, you start to see the surface usually sinking down.”

Permafrost thaw impacts everything in the natural environment

Nain sits at the edge of the Labrador Sea, at 57 degrees north — roughly on parallel with Fort McMurray, Alta.

It’s surrounded by rocky mountains covered in lichen, capped in snow well into May.

The gravel airstrip hugs the community’s shore, suitable only for a twin otter plane or smaller, with the smell of sea salt wafting up from the Labrador Sea. 

The houses are colourful, standing out against the red, green and white of shrubs and trees, some standing unevenly on sloping ground.

As well as being the largest, Nain is the northernmost community in Nunatsiavut, a 72,520-square-kilometre, Inuit-governed area that includes five communities in total. The permafrost found here is discontinuous, which means it’s interspersed with patches of unfrozen ground, Way says.

Permafrost is also found in the southern regions of Labrador, in high mountains and hills that have blowing wind patterns in winter, and along the south coast in peatland areas. Way says that in Labrador, snow thickness is one of the most important controls on the distribution of permafrost. He says thicker snow insulates the ground, leading to more peatland permafrost in the most wind-exposed sites where snow is less likely to accumulate.

And it can be found beneath the ocean in shallow waters in the High Arctic, Way says. There’s a rare patch of more southerly subsea permafrost in Webb Bay, north of Nain.

As permafrost thaws, it releases carbon dioxide and methane, which both contribute to global warming. Around the world, permafrost stores as much as 1.7 gigatons of carbon dioxide — about three times more than what’s currently found in the atmosphere. And while permafrost has historically acted as a “carbon sink” — storing massive amounts of carbon from dead plants and decaying organic matter underground — that thaw may turn it into a carbon emitter.

Subsea permafrost thaw beneath coastal waters also releases greenhouse gases, and the warming Arctic Ocean could release up to 250 gigatons of carbon dioxide by the year 2100, according to 2021 estimates from the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative. Another estimate, from the European Space Agency Climate Office, predicts that by the end of this century, thawing permafrost will emit more greenhouse gases each year than all of the European Union countries combined, amplifying climate change more than what it is now.

Beyond greenhouse gases, permafrost thawing contains other risks — including the carcinogen radon, and the remains of humans and animals, which may contain still-active pathogens. The Canadian Wildlife Association says infectious diseases such as smallpox, anthrax and the 1918 influenza are among the potential risks, as well as unknown pathogens from generations ago. 

Thawing permafrost has impacts on daily life in Nain

Angnatok is a fisherman in Nain, and turns his fishing boat into a research vessel at the end of the fishing season. He has been a part of various research teams, including one studying permafrost thaw around Nain, and he’s seen how it plays into everyday life in Labrador — for the better and the worse.

He recalls collecting Arctic char from fishermen along the north coast of Labrador, where they would use snow to keep the fish frozen and then when the snow melted, “they would start digging away the ground,” he says, to reach the permafrost. “They would start chopping that ice down and using that to keep their char cold.” 

He’s also seen it shift, like near Nain’s airport building. “If you dig down, even just three or four inches, you’ll hit solid permafrost.” The airstrip is one of many sites around town listed in the 2021 report as having permafrost underneath. That report recommends long-term temperature monitoring at depth to study permafrost, and cautions that future community expansion and site-selection initiatives need to factor in permafrost. 

As well as climate change thawing permafrost, it can also thaw due to human activities, such as building roads or houses, which makes the ground underneath warmer and changes the way the environment is managed. 

In much of the Arctic, homes and other buildings are constructed on stilts and piles to keep them from warming the permafrost below. 

Chaim Andersen is the infrastructure planning coordinator for the Nunatsiavut Government, and sees the impacts of permafrost thaw in the community. “It’s a huge problem, especially for housing, because obviously we get really cold winters.” If the ground thaws and shifts, it can damage the housing above it. “Then there’s opportunities for cracks to be in the wall and for drafts to come through during the winter, which makes it really difficult to heat the home,” Andersen says, adding that the costs of heating are already high in the region. 

Andersen’s role includes planning and implementing infrastructure projects, navigating what housing needs in the community exist and also what infrastructure needs there are. She says in the remote community, accessing materials for repairs can be challenging.

“If there are any kind of identified areas in community that have permafrost, there’s kind of two things that happen. One is either it makes the land difficult to develop on, or you can’t develop it all because the buildings need to be up to standard and having that foundational instability makes it really difficult,” Andersen says. 

Permafrost, land and water: it’s all connected

Yifeng Wang, a research scientist for the federal government on permafrost research, says that permafrost can impact other parts of the ecosystem, and vice versa. 

“If you have shrubs, they tend to trap the snow in the winter, and that creates a thick, insulating blanket almost over the ground.” This can cause permafrost to thaw. 

Vegetation found on mounds of permafrost in northern Labrador includes lichen, and berries such as bakeapples, redberries or blueberries, Wang says. Animals like caribou rely on these plants as a food source, and are impacted by permafrost thaw.  

Angnatok wonders if the Arctic char habitat around Nain is being affected by subsea permafrost thawing, “because the permafrost below the ocean appears to be melting also, so therefore the waters are warming during the summer season in the areas. What effects is that having on, like, say char or anything else in that area?” Species that were never found near Nain, like salmon, are now being observed in the surrounding rivers; he and other community members wonder if this shift is linked to the permafrost thaw. 

Permafrost thaw in the Arctic and subarctic is impacting everything in the ecosystem, including the people who have built their lives on top of it. As shifting ground becomes more common beneath northern communities, damaging infrastructure and altering the landscape, the growing challenge of thawing permafrost is a reality that can’t be ignored.

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