By Ed Struzik for The Tyee.

While doing research for a book I was writing on wildfire, I posed two questions to a number of experts: “Do you think there will be another Fort McMurray-like fire in the future? If so, where do you think it will happen?”

Everyone agreed on the first question. Fort McMurray was not an anomaly. It will happen again, sooner rather than later, and likely with deadly consequences.

The responses to the second question varied. University of Alberta wildfire scientist Mike Flannigan had many First Nations communities, Prince George in British Columbia and Timmins in northern Ontario high on his list.

Cliff White, a former Parks Canada scientist and one of the architects of the agency’s wildfire management program, suggested that Sulphur Mountain in Banff could burn, endangering thousands of hikers and tourists.

Wildfire scientists Brian Stocks and Marty Alexander cast a broader net. They suggested that hundreds of communities are at risk.

Glenn McGillivray, the managing director of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, offered the most surprising response. He had Victoria and Vancouver on his list. (If you think McGillvray is exaggerating, consider the fact he predicted in a blog that a fire would threaten Fort McMurray two years before it happened.)

As this year’s fire season in British Columbia has demonstrated, the experts I talked to were right in answering the first question. Time will tell whether they will be right in answering the second. But they will almost certainly be.

The province of B.C. declared a state of emergency on July 7, 2017 due to wildfires. Photo: Province of B.C.

Bigger, Hotter, Faster

The last decade has been the warmest continent-wide. Hotter weather dries the forest and produces more lightning. Lightning is responsible for most of the biggest wildfires that occur in Canada, although people cause more wildland fires than lightning strikes.

More people are living, working and recreating in the forest. There are more mature trees in the forest landscape as a result of decades of aggressive firefighting efforts. Tens of millions of these trees are dead or dying thanks to insects and disease that strike aging trees and the warming that is taking place.

It all adds up to fires burning bigger, hotter, faster and more often.

Everyone agrees that this will result in more evacuations, more homes and businesses being burned, more roads and recreation areas being closed, more smoke imperilling the health of people, especially the young, the elderly and those with respiratory problems. First Nations, which represent only four per cent of the population, will be hit especially hard. They are already affected by a third of the evacuations that take place in a given year.

Water quality will also suffer. The carbon that spills into the river systems can seriously compromise water treatment facilities, especially in places such as Victoria that do not filter water because the high quality water supply does not require them to do so.

Members of the RCMP search the wreckage of the Fort McMurray wildfire in 2016. Photo: RCMP

Fort Mac Sparked Little Change

Fort McMurray should have been the catalyst for changing the way we deal with wildfire. That blaze sent approximately 88,000 people fleeing their homes, offices, hospitals, schools, and seniors’ residences. By the time rains and cooler temperatures helped firefighters contain the fires, 2,800 homes and buildings were destroyed. Nearly 1.5 million acres burned. Insurance losses were expected to amount to $3.77 billion. The total cost of the fire, including financial, physical, and social factors, is likely to be $8.86 billion.

But has anyone in government been listening?

The government of Ontario has embarked on a policy that will allow some fires to burn themselves out so long as they don’t threaten people and commerce. This policy, which preceded Fort McMurray, will go a long way toward making forests there resilient.

But that’s just about it for the bold strategies that outgoing B.C. Premier Christy Clark and her provincial colleagues seemed to call for last year when they supported the idea of a national wildfire strategy. That’s gone nowhere.

The government of Alberta’s response so far to recommendations from an expert review panel that investigated the Fort McMurray fire has been muted at best. More money has been allotted to the FireSmart Program, which helps communities thin urban-edge forests, remove burnable fuel on the ground and around homes, and create defendable boundaries from which fires can be fought.

But it’s not nearly enough. And as Marty Alexander points out, a good chunk of the funding was given to Fort McMurray where the fires of 2016 have already removed most of the dangerous fuels from the ground.

Alberta has strengthened some wildfire protection laws but not those that matter most. The government has been reluctant to enforce existing laws (closing forests in times of extreme drought and heat) that minimize the chance of fires igniting. Alberta has promised to improve fire weather forecasting, but has offered few details.

Image of raging fire 16 kilometres south of Fort McMurray in 2016. Photo: CTV News Youtube screenshot 

Instead of recognizing the dangers that lie ahead, the Alberta government has chosen to treat Fort McMurray as an “extreme event.” It’s not the only government that is guilty of doing this.

Lost in the collective memory of the politicians who rotate in and out of office are the so-called extreme wildfire events of the recent past which are not so rare anymore: Salmon Arm, B.C. and Virginia Hills, Alberta in 1998; the Chisholm and House River fires of 2001 and 2002 in Alberta; West Kelowna, Okanagan Mountain Park, Kootenay, Banff, Jasper, Crowsnest Pass in 2003; the Yukon in 2004; La Tuque in northern Quebec in 2010; Slave Lake and the Richardson fires in 2011; northern Quebec in 2013; the Northwest Territories in 2014; the 2015 fire season, which was the most intense fire season of the century in western North America.

As the current situation in B.C. is demonstrating once again, these extreme events are now the new normal. In Canada, wildfires that burned more than 200,000 hectares of forest happened only four times between 1970 and 1990. Since then they have done so 12 times.

The provinces are not totally at fault. The federal government has done little to support forest science. The Canadian Forest Service used to employ 2,400 people. It now employs about 700. Most of the service’s research money goes to the study of insect infestations that impact the timber industry. The total funding is justified given the nature of the problem and the value of the industry. But less than eight per cent goes to fire research.

“Given the relative importance of fire and insects in Canadian forests, how is this disparity possible?” asks Brian Stocks, who had a long career in the forest service.  

Bigger, Hotter, Faster: Canada’s #Wildfires are Changing and We’re Not Ready https://t.co/cX2EH9KHGO #bcpoli #bcwildfire #climate @kujjua

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) July 17, 2017

People in and out of government kept telling me that the important thing about Fort McMurray was that no one died. They are right to an extent, but they are also wrong because loss of life is not necessarily the best way of measuring success. Fort McMurray was the worst natural disaster in Canadian history. It could have been much worse if so many things — wind, demographics (Fort Mac has relatively few elderly people), safety training (most everyone in the oil sands industry knows what to do in an emergency), quick and creative thinking, heroism and outright luck — hadn’t aligned in the manners they did.

Fort McMurray dodged a lot of bullets, as the town of Slave Lake did in 2011 when everyone had to evacuate at the last minute. Those in the line of fire in the future may not be so fortunate if the provinces and the federal government fail to come to grips with the mounting challenges.

The blueprint for the future was spelled out in 2005 when Brian Stocks and a veritable who’s who of wildfire experts were asked by the Canadian Council of Forest Ministers to come up with a new wildlands fire strategy. Most of those recommendations have been ignored.

Ed Struzik’s book Firestorm, How Wildfire Will Shape Our Future is being published by Island Press in Washington, D.C and distributed in Canada by the University of British Columbia Press in October 2017.

Image: Canadian Armed Forces survey B.C. wildfires from the air. Photo: MCpl Gabrielle DesRochers, Canadian Forces Combat Camera via Flickr

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This is Part 1 of the series "Science on the Chopping Block," an in-depth look at federal cuts to science programs in Canada and what they mean for some of the country's most important researchers.

As cuts to science budgets and programs continue by the federal government, former scientists and academics who’ve lost their funding say the cuts have upended their careers, compromised knowledge about Canada’s environment and undercut development of the next generation of scientists.

Since the cuts began about five years ago, the federal government has either reduced funding or shut down more than 150 science-related programs and research centres and dismissed more than 2,000 scientists.

With the recently announced cuts to Environment Canada, by 2017 the department will be operating with close to 30 per cent fewer dollars than it had in 2012.  

As the impacts of the cuts grow, DeSmog Canada has reached out to former government and university scientists to hear their stories.

Unwatched Parks?

When Dana Haggarty started at Parks Canada in 2007, her job was to take stock of the ecological integrity of Nahanni National Park Reserve in the Northwest Territories. Haggarty saw it as “a dream position” at an organization where she “saw room for growth.” [view:in_this_series=block_1]

It was an exciting time. In 2005, the auditor general had found gaps in the monitoring of parks and Parks Canada was feverishly working to improve its knowledge of regions like Nahanni National Park.

Haggarty, along with other researchers at Parks Canada, was getting ready to announce an expanded boundary for Nahanni in 2009.

Already understaffed and overworked, Haggarty and fellow scientists worked “their butts off” to complete their part of the State of Parks report. The report, produced every five years, provided decision-makers with science-based evidence to help them direct resources.

Haggarty, excited about the future, decided to go on unpaid educational leave to get a PhD in marine biology, focusing on rockfish conservation. She saw it as a career-building move and she wanted to return to Parks Canada and work on restoration efforts along the Pacific coast.

Then major cuts came in 2012. Parks Canada had $29.2-million cut from its budget and 638 jobs were deemed surplus. The cuts drastically affected Parks Canada’s regional service centres, which were consolidated across the country. For her work in the remote area of Nahanni, Haggerty depended heavily on the experienced scientists at the local regional service centre.

She was “just floored” when her mentor Phil Lee’s job was deemed surplus. Lee provided support to scientists in fields in all of the western and northwestern parks, she said.

“There was no way I could do my job without Phil,” Haggarty said. “It said they were absolutely not committed to ecological integrity or basically doing science in parks.”

After the cuts, Haggarty’s position was still available in Nahanni, but there was a lot of confusion around it, she said. On cusp of finishing her PhD, Haggarty saw all of the coastal parks positions she’d hoped to have some day eliminated, so she gave up her job.

“I had such a bad taste in my mouth over what happened to science at Parks Canada. The program that I had worked so hard on and cared so much about was just gutted,” she said.

In response to a previous criticism of its ecological integrity program, Parks Canada said the scientists were hired to develop monitoring programs, but now the agency was moving to another phase of the work.

A 2013 auditor general report stated Parks Canada “has been slow to implement systems for monitoring and reporting on ecological integrity. It has failed to meet many deadlines and targets, and information for decision making is often incomplete or has not been produced.” 

In an e-mail response to questions from DeSmog Canada, Mélissa Larose, a Parks Canada media relations officer, said: “Parks Canada will continue to undertake priority natural resource conservation actions, including species at risk recovery, in national parks and national marine conservation areas that result in tangible and measurable conservation outcomes.”

Haggarty is now considering postdoctoral research, consulting work or moving into the private sector. She would return to Parks Canada if commitments were made to fund the science, she said.

Forgotten Forests?

At one time, Philip Burton managed a multi-disciplinary team of 12 people studying the mountain pine beetle epidemic for the Pacific Forestry Centre.

During the last decade, the beetle — fuelled by climate change — went on an unprecedented tear across British Columbia, infesting and killing large swaths of lodgepole pine trees.

The beetle then expanded beyond its historical range jumping the Rockies into Alberta, the Yukon and the Northwest Territories. Today, as Saskatchewan gears up for its battle with the beetle, scientists fear the problem could jump to the boreal forest, potentially spreading across Canada.

It’s after the beetle tears through an area that the story gets interesting, Burton says. How is the forest going to recover? What needs to be done to make the forest more resilient to future pests, especially in a changing climate?

“Just as we were getting to the more interesting aspects of the problem, the plug was pulled,” Burton said.

Jacinthe Perras, spokesperson for Natural Resources Canada, said in an email response to questions that “research on mountain pine beetle is ongoing, including field study in all affected parts of British Columbia, Alberta and beyond.

Burton agrees other aspects of the beetle’s biology are being studied however “field study in all affected parts” is “physically impossible,” he said. Furthermore, even though studies continue “field-based research has clearly decreased over the last many years, with a growing emphasis on policy support, remote sensing, and simulation modelling instead,” he said.

Burton’s position was eliminated and his office in Prince George, connected to the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC), was consolidated with a Victoria location. He had the opportunity to re-apply as a research scientist in Victoria, but declined.

“All employees at UNBC were offered the opportunity to continue their work at the lab in Victoria,” Perras, from Natural Resources Canada, said.

After the pine beetle epidemic moved through British Columbia, the provincial government closed its forest research division and unsustainably ramped up harvest rates to capture the dying pine trees and bycatch, Burton said.

“We are back into 1890s Gold Rush mentality instead of thoughtful planning for the future,” he said.

Burton stayed in the north in Terrace, B.C., working at a satellite campus of UNBC as the regional chair of ecosystem science and management. He was hired to grow the science program, but is doing limited new science.

“In a 30-year career, this is first time where I have run out of ideas as to where to apply for research funding to support field research for graduate students,” Burton said. “The funding is really poor unless you are going to partner up with industry.”

Image Credit: DeSmog Canada

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