Climate change is making life more expensive. Droughts and unpredictable temperatures affect farming and food security, while heat waves drive up utility bills and floods cause insurance to spike. Meanwhile, the gap between Canada’s highest- and lowest-income households hit a record high last year — making these costs harder for some to bear than others. 

The oil and gas industry is Canada’s largest emitter of the heat-trapping greenhouse gases that cause global warming and everything that comes with it. Here’s a look at which Canadian workers profit off activities that cause climate change — and who gets paid to cope with it.

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Summary

• Last spring in Manitoba marked the start of the second-worst wildfire season in Canadian history. Experts warn these types of fires are becoming more common with climate change.
• A Narwhal and Winnipeg Free Press analysis found $500 million in costs directly tied to the Manitoba wildfires, including evacuations, emergency costs, insured losses, healthcare costs and many more.
• The Manitoba government alone spent seven times its projected budget on emergency response — more than the operating budgets of two of its departments combined.

A little more than a year ago, during a time usually marked by lingering snowbanks and the first hints of spring, parts of Manitoba were engulfed in flames.

An early heat wave on the heels of several months of drought combined to produce ideal conditions for spring fires. 

Within days, the province was at the epicentre of what would become the second-worst wildfire season in Canadian history.

Between May and August, fires tore through 2.3 million hectares, decimated provincial parklands and forced more than 33,000 residents out of their homes. Two people died; at least one firefighter was severely injured.

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The scale of the disaster was unprecedented — so were the costs.

An analysis by The Narwhal and the Winnipeg Free Press found at least $500 million in expenses directly attributable to the wildfires — costs tied to emergency response, evacuations, damaged infrastructure, shuttered businesses, lost homes and much more. The true cost will never be known, as the impacts are far-reaching and far less tangible, and likely far, far higher.

But the tangible costs are many: wildfires scorched the provincial economy, burning through hundreds of millions in public funds, searing the bottom lines of several local businesses and taking a heavy toll on thousands of families’ finances. 

In the fiscal year including those wildfires, Manitoba spent $383 million on government emergency expenditures. Nearly all of that, $375 million, was attributed to wildfires, seven times more than what was budgeted.

To put that figure in perspective, the combined operating budgets of the Environment and Climate Change Department ($117 million) and the Department of Natural Resources ($147 million) totalled $264 million, meaning Manitoba spent 42 per cent more on emergency wildfire expenses last year than it did on the operating budgets for those two departments combined.

In a statement in response to a detailed list of questions, the government said a full picture of wildfire costs won’t be available until public accounts are released in September — after the next wildfire season has passed.

The statement described last year’s fires as “generational in nature,” but experts warn many of the same fire-prone conditions are still present. Fire weather is expected to be the norm in the future, as warmer temperatures dry out fuel sources and trigger more lightning storms, among other factors. 

The provincial budget’s risk outlook acknowledges the potential cost of that threat: “If similar conditions persist in 2026 — with climate change contributing to more frequent extreme weather events such as droughts — the province could face continued risks to employment, labour displacement, reductions in tourism and agricultural output and overall economic performance.”

Despite that, Manitoba’s $50-million emergency expenditure budget wasn’t changed for 2026. The government said it is “a sizable emergency expense contingency,” while also noting an increase in funding for wildfire preparedness, prevention and emergency management. 

The government has earmarked more than $4.5 million in new funding for additional seasonal firefighter positions and emergency management staff, upgraded weather and fire-mapping tools and aerial firefighting services.

Another year of devastating wildfires could further strain an economy navigating several stressors at once. Beyond the direct costs linked to firefighters, air tankers and evacuation support, natural disasters have profound indirect — though often unmeasurable — costs that ripple throughout the economy.

table of contents

• Wildfire protection budgets
• Out-of-province firefighters
• Largest evacuation in Manitoba history costs millions
• Damaged property, damaged infrastructure
• Business closures dampen economic activity
• Intangible impacts

Wildfire protection budgets

In 2025, the province spent about $70 million across four departments to manage emergency wildfire response, including fire suppression equipment, provincial firefighters and emergency management teams. 

That’s expected to increase this year as the province aims to hire another 19 emergency firefighters, four conservation workers and 15 emergency management personnel. 

However, the budget for wildfire suppression — just under $14 million — has been relatively unchanged since 2022, even as Canada experienced two of its worst-ever fire seasons in 2023 and 2025. 

Two years earlier, in 2020, the wildfire suppression budget was more than double what it is today, at just under $30 million.

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As for staff, the Manitoba Government and General Employees’ Union, which represents members of the province’s wildfire service, released a report in December that noted 64 fire ranger positions and 25 per cent of wildfire division positions were vacant when the fire season began. 

“Our staffing levels are ’70s, ’80s levels — not current,” one staff member told the union. 

While the union has applauded this year’s five per cent increase to the conservation and wildfire service budget, it noted a full complement of staff with adequate training, equipment and compensation (Manitoba firefighters make the second-lowest hourly wage in the country) could help mitigate the growing risks associated with wildfires. 

“The 2025 fire season was not an outlier, but the new normal as the impacts of climate continue to wreak havoc on communities and natural areas,” the report said.

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Out-of-province firefighters

The severity of the fire season — combined with the depleted complement of firefighters — meant Manitoba needed significant out-of-province support to battle the summer blazes. 

Manitoba brought in more than 250 personnel, both from Parks Canada and provincial fire teams from Alberta, British Columbia, Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. The province also hosted another 250 firefighters from the United States, 200 from Mexico, 40 from France and 65 from New Zealand and Australia. 

The province did not provide a breakdown of its payments to other jurisdictions.

Instead, The Narwhal and Free Press reviewed publicly disclosed provincial government contracts valued over $10,000 and labeled: “Emergency services related to forest fires.” The review found 20 contracts worth a combined $6.5 million inked with other government departments.

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The Société de protection des forêts contre le feu, a non-profit fire protection agency based in Quebec, received about 40 per cent of those funds. The agency sent more than 150 firefighters from Quebec and France, as well as logistics support, through June and July. While Manitoba’s records show contracts totalling $2.8 million, the agency’s annual report indicates it billed Manitoba for more than $5.1 million in 2025. This suggests some out-of-province payments are not yet recorded in Manitoba’s contract records.

The province also paid $2.7 million to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, which “coordinates the sharing of firefighting resources” across Canada, and helped mobilize aircraft and international personnel to fight the Manitoba fires, according to a statement from the centre. Manitoba also recorded eight contracts worth just under $500,000 for “other firefighting equipment.”

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Largest evacuation in Manitoba history costs millions

According to Manitoba’s recently released interim review of the wildfire season, it was “one of the largest evacuation operations in Manitoba’s history.” 

Consider the numbers: 59 communities impacted, more than 33,000 residents evacuated, including 4,100 air evacuations by the Canadian Armed Forces and 2,300 people temporarily relocated outside the province.

Both the Canadian and American Red Cross were called on to support evacuations; many evacuees lived in congregate shelters in Winnipeg, Thompson, Winkler and Portage la Prairie after hotels became overwhelmed. 

These evacuations, some of which lasted several weeks, others months, took an unprecedented toll. Evacuees suffered mental health impacts owing to the fear, uncertainty and stress of being separated from family and their homes, many missed school and work, or were forced to close their businesses. First Nations evacuees, particularly those in remote, northern communities, reported additional strain as they were relocated to urban environments, isolated from familiar foods, community and culture. 

Not all of these impacts can be quantified, but will nonetheless have long-lasting effects on many Manitoba communities.

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The financial responsibility for evacuee support is spread across federal, provincial and local governments, with Indigenous Services Canada responsible for evacuations affecting First Nations, and the federal government providing disaster financial assistance to affected municipalities. According to the interim review, nine disaster financial assistance payments have been made thus far, totalling $3.4 million.

While the province did not specify how much of the $375-million emergency expenditures were earmarked for evacuees, government contracts show Manitoba spent upwards of $60 million on accommodations, food, transportation and other evacuation support. 

Most of that money — $53 million — was paid to the Canadian Red Cross, which helped lead evacuations. These payments do not include the Red Cross’s work with Manitoba First Nations, which is paid for by Indigenous Services Canada. 

Contracts show approximately $4 million in space rental and cleaning fees, including a $1.7 million contract with Canad Inns, and 40 other contracts with hotels, inns and resort centres across Manitoba and western Ontario, where some evacuees were sheltered. 

Catering, groceries and other food bills amounted to $813,000, while the bill for planes, cars, fuel and other transportation was more than $3 million. 

Evacuations are particularly challenging for residents living in hospitals and personal care homes, or receiving regular medical care like dialysis appointments. According to Shared Health, Manitoba’s provincial health authority, the Flin Flon hospital was evacuated in May, as were personal care homes in Flin Flon, Lynn Lake and Thompson.

“The evacuation in the north was the biggest the province has seen,” Shared Health wrote in a May 2025 press release. 

Those patients were transported either by commercial, chartered or, in some cases, individual medivac flights, Jessica Davis, who served as the provincial air ambulance manager for Shared Health through the 2025 wildfire season, said in an interview. 

MedEvac flights cost between $10,000 and $20,000 each direction, she said, while commercial medical flights come with costs between $50,000 and $60,000. 

Shared Health has not yet compiled the final figures, but estimates more than 100 patients were evacuated from hospitals and personal care homes in northern communities. While some of the evacuation costs were shared with the federal government, Kristyn Ball, director of patient flow, noted at least one health-care facility sustained “significant damage,” and many others were costly to shut down and start up again during the evacuations. Davis emphasized the overtime accrued by health-care staff added to the evacuation costs.

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Damaged property, damaged infrastructure

Governments typically absorb the bulk of natural disaster costs, spreading the economic impacts across multi-billion-dollar budgets. For homeowners in the fire’s path, the impacts are acute.

According to the Insurance Bureau of Canada, insurers handled several thousand claims related to the Manitoba wildfires last year, the majority of which came from homeowners. 

In the wake of a natural disaster, Canada’s insurance companies navigate an influx of claims, ranging from “the worst, which is when people have lost everything,” to claims for evacuation-related expenses like hotel rooms and rental cars, Aaron Sutherland, the bureau’s Pacific and Western region vice-president, said in an interview. 

When the sum of insurance claims reaches $30 million, the industry conducts surveys to estimate the total recovery costs. The fires in the Flin Flon and Lac du Bonnet regions both met those thresholds, Sutherland said. 

Estimates compiled in September pegged insured damages from the Flin Flon and Lac du Bonnet fires at $250 million and $60 million respectively. They’re expected to be updated as the one-year mark approaches.

While these estimates help form a picture of the individual costs to rebuild after a fire, they’re only part of the picture. About 90 per cent of Canadians have some form of property insurance; those without may incur steep losses that are neither recoverable or tracked. 

“There’s a real human toll to these events as well,” Sutherland added. “If you’re in the unfortunate situation where you have lost everything, that has a massive impact on your life. Even if you’ve got your insurer there to help you begin to put those pieces back together, you’re looking at belongings, mementos, pictures, things like that, that you may never get back, and it’s absolutely devastating.”

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Even for those whose personal property is unscathed, damage to wider infrastructure can have knock-on effects.

Last year’s fires damaged more than 1,200 Manitoba Hydro poles, interrupting electrical service in several communities. Five generating stations were temporarily shut down or evacuated — the first time the utility has ever evacuated its power infrastructure — leading to about 70 megawatts of lost generating capacity. 

In addition to power interruptions, “telecommunications disruptions affected multiple communities, boil-water advisories were issued and postal and other essential services were suspended in several areas,” the review notes. 

According to a statement from the Crown utility, 1,500 customers were affected by power outages, “including some communities where the outages lasted for weeks or months.”

Manitoba Hydro estimates the wildfires cost the utility approximately $50 million between infrastructure repairs, emergency response crew wages and service interruptions.

It was “without doubt the most impactful wildfire season in Manitoba Hydro’s history, in terms of the number of assets impacted, employees involved in wildfire response, and communities impacted by power outages,” Peter Chura, Hydro’s media relations officer said.

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Meanwhile, the increasing frequency of wildfires, severe floods and other natural disasters is causing concern for the insurance industry. In time, it could lead to increased premiums as insurers look to balance growing recovery costs.

“Insurers, for a long time, have been a bit of a canary in the coal mine,” Sutherland said. 

“We are trending in the wrong direction in terms of the cost of these types of events. It’s a clear indication of the need for us, as a society, to improve our resilience.”

Insured damages from weather-related disasters totalled $14 billion nationwide between 2006 and 2015. In the decade since, that total has more than doubled to $37 billion, according to the Insurance Bureau of Canada. The average number of claims has doubled, too. 

“Insurance price is risk; that risk is growing. If we want to see a more affordable insurance marketplace, we have to take action to begin to reduce the risk facing communities, facing our properties and facing our families,” Sutherland said.

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Business closures dampen economic activity

In 2025, Natural Resources Canada released a research paper outlining a method to estimate the direct and indirect costs of extreme wildfires, acknowledging there are “numerous gaps” in the current understanding of socioeconomic impacts from wildfires.

The study notes it can take several months to fully understand how wildfires have impacted regional economies as business disruptions, lost opportunity costs and the impacts of ecosystem loss ripple through industries. 

Natural resource sectors including mining and forestry, as well as local tourism economies, tend to be most directly impacted by wildfires. For communities in the north, these industries are often the backbone of the local economy.

Last June, Statistics Canada estimated the potential economic disruption from the 2025 wildfires, and found 2.4 per cent of Manitoba’s GDP, including one quarter of the northern region’s economy, was at risk of fire-related disruption — the largest share of any province.

The fires that tore through the eastern portion of the province forced several popular provincial parks to remain closed throughout the busiest season. 

While it’s still too early to pinpoint the exact impact the 2025 wildfires had on visitation and revenue (numbers will be available in August), Travel Manitoba conducted an internal survey of tourism operators last summer to gauge the scope of the impacts, chief operating officer Angela Cassie said in an interview. 

A little more than half of tourism operators — from lodges and outfitters to campgrounds, festivals and outdoor recreation services, to restaurants and transportation — reported cancellations, Cassie said. 

Forty per cent reported lost revenue due to decreased visitation and 18 per cent had to close their businesses entirely for mandatory evacuations, she added.

Impacted businesses reported average revenue losses of about $175,000. 

“The earnings from that summer season often sustains their businesses all year,” Cassie said. “A lot of them are looking at the summer of 2025 as a lost summer.” 

For some businesses, the impacts will extend far beyond one season of depleted revenues. Five per cent reported damaged or lost property as a result of the fires, while others lost habitat, which could impact future bookings. 

One in 10 tourism operators reported mental-health challenges in response to the crisis, Cassie said. 

The high-profile nature of last year’s wildfires had an impact too. As Manitoba declared successive province-wide states of emergency, countries in Europe, for example, warned travellers of the risks of visiting Manitoba. As the province worked to shelter tens of thousands of evacuees, Premier Wab Kinew asked tourists to avoid booking hotel rooms. 

“There’s the physical loss because of cancellations or just people not booking last year but then are you losing people who are maybe now choosing other locations for the summer and not choosing Manitoba?” Cassie said.

Travel Manitoba is on a mission to “earn that business back” with a $1.35-million marketing campaign. The industry group has earmarked an additional $1.35 million for a wildfire assistance program that will cover up to 90 per cent of the cost of fire prevention equipment (such as sprinklers, hoses and water pumps) and training for tourism businesses. 

“This year will be really important for a lot of [businesses]. They’ve come through this winter extremely lean, so this summer is going to be extremely important,” Cassie said. 

The province’s mining industry was impacted, too, with at least four companies reporting shutdowns, evacuations or delays related to the wildfires. 

The Tanco lithium mine in eastern Manitoba, owned by Chinese company Sinomine, was evacuated in early May. Hudbay’s Snow Lake operation was shut down for seven weeks in July and August, incurring more than US$4 million in costs, according to the company’s financial reporting. Grid Metals’ Makwa facility was shuttered for several months, from early May until late July, and was only able to complete one day of field work in the second quarter.

Alamos Gold, near Lynn Lake, was investigated in connection with a major fire in the region, after a burn pile reignited at the MacLellan mine site. 

The company was forced to evacuate, delaying the ramp up of construction on a new mine and contributing to a 48 per cent increase in capital funding for the project, according to the company’s latest quarterly report.

Mining companies also contributed to evacuation and firefighting efforts in the communities where staff live and work, and donated a combined $1.25 million to the Red Cross relief effort.

While impacts to Manitoba’s forestry industry are not yet tabulated, analysis of fire boundaries shows 1.2 million hectares of the province’s logging licence areas burned — about 10 per cent of Manitoba’s regularly harvested forests.

According to the province’s economic development council, “wildfires lead to reduced supply, processing shutdowns and volatile price swings” for the forestry industry. The 2023 wildfires prompted a 20 per cent dip in June and July lumber production compared to the previous five-year average, according to a report from the Canadian Climate Institute.

“Whole regions now have nothing but young trees. There’s nothing to harvest,” B.C.-based wildfire researcher Bob Gray said last October.

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Intangible impacts: health, carbon emissions will add to future costs

The costs compiled here represent only a portion of the long-term economic impacts wildfires will have on Manitoba’s economy. It will take several months for government agencies and private companies to finish taking stock of the damage; some losses will never show up in financial records or industry reports.

For example, communities are left to clean up debris, remediate damaged sites and conduct inspections; these costs can be difficult to tabulate, according to the federal government’s report on the economic impacts of wildfires. 

Other indirect impacts are unlikely to be formally tied to the 2025 fires, making them challenging to capture when calculating the costs of a natural disaster.

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The Manitoba wildfires released a total 44 megatonnes of cumulative carbon emissions by mid-summer — a provincial record — according to data from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, part of the European Union’s environmental monitoring programme. That’s equivalent to two years of Manitoba’s annual, human-caused emissions. 

“As a result, smoke plumes repeatedly blanketed large parts of Canada and North America, and on several occasions travelled across the Atlantic, reaching western, central and eastern Europe,” the Copernicus report notes.

Wildfire smoke increases risk of respiratory and cardiovascular illness, putting long-term strain on health-care systems.

A Health Canada study published in 2024 estimates that between 2013 and 2018, air pollution from wildfire smoke contributed to 240 deaths from short-term exposure and 2,500 from long-term exposure, and generated annual health-care costs between $4.7 and $20 billion.

There were 18 days between May and October last year where Winnipeg’s daily average concentration of fine particulate matter — one way to measure wildfire pollutants — exceeded federal limits of 27 micrograms per cubic metre. The average concentration peaked at 57 micrograms per cubic metre in early June.

Only nine days exceeded federal limits in Winnipeg amid Canada’s worst-ever wildfires in 2023.

The trauma of fires, evacuations and destruction will also have far-reaching mental health impacts for impacted communities and the front-line workers responding to the crisis. 

“The mental-health support part of the [health-care] system is one that’s required long after the fire is out,” Jeff Martin, director of emergency and continuity management for Shared Health, said in an interview. 

With its interim review, Manitoba has started to strengthen its wildfire preparedness and response systems across several government departments. In addition to financial investments to boost emergency staffing and firefighting resources, the province plans to improve evacuee support with more culturally-responsive services, smoother registration systems, more robust financial support and more assistance geared at vulnerable populations. It plans to streamline its overall emergency funding processes, update its wildfire response guidelines and improve coordination and communication between agencies and jurisdictions. 

“We were as prepared as we could possibly have been for a season like we had,” Lisa Naylor, the minister responsible for the Emergency Management Organization, said at a news conference this week for the release of the interim report.

“We hope we won’t see a season like that this year and, at the same time, we’re going to be even more prepared.”

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Julia-Simone Rutgers is a reporter covering environmental issues in Manitoba. Her position is part of a partnership between The Narwhal and the Winnipeg Free Press.

Updated Friday, April 24, 2026, at 9:16 CT: This article has been updated to correct how much more the Manitoba government spent on emergency wildfire expenses compared to the total operating budgets of two of its departments. It was 42 per cent more, not 35, as previously stated.

Updated Friday, April 24, 2026, at 10:50 CT: This article has also been updated to correct an earlier statement from the Insurance Bureau of Canada about the total of insured damages from weather-related disasters in recent decades. The bureau clarified the figures were cumulative, not annual, as they had previously stated.

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.

Summary

• Indigenous women in B.C. are leading projects and organizations committed to mitigating wildfire risk and restoring traditional practices. 
• Cultural burns are making a comeback in the province, thanks to years of advocacy from Indigenous firekeepers.
• First Nations women in the province’s Interior are decolonizing fire management through their work.

In 2017 Jaci Gilbert was 12 years old when she was evacuated from Tsq’escen’ First Nation because of a wildfire. Four years later, more wildfires impacted her community, located in B.C.’s central interior, prompting some Elders to be evacuated to the Lower Mainland.

Gilbert, who is Secwépemc and Tsilhqot’in, volunteered both at the emergency operations centre during the partial evacuation in 2021, and as a fire camp logistics assistant near 100 Mile House during those fires.

“After being involved in the emergency operations centre I caught the bug of wanting to do emergency and wildfire management,” Gilbert told The Narwhal.

Gilbert works for First Nations Emergency Services Society as a cultural and prescribed fire specialist. She is part of a cohort of First Nations women in B.C. who are leading the way in wildfire management in their communities — demonstrating leadership and stewardship as blazes continue each year.

Being a young person, and a woman, Gilbert struggled to get into the field of emergency management, but reaching out to organizations and women in the field is a good place to start, she said.

“Youth have been managing emergencies in their personal lives for a long time, especially Indigenous youth, so using these skills I developed on reserve I’m able to handle [emergencies] well, whereas with a typical office or customer service job I don’t handle [those] very well,” Gilbert said.

“We’re seeing a shift in dynamics. I’m noticing a lot more Indigenous women in fire research and in the fire community.”

Indigenous firefighters bring cultural knowledge to their work

Sheresa Brown, a Nlaka’pamux woman from Lytton First Nation, has been involved with fire since firefighting in high school. Brown works as a field technician and archaeological monitor with Nlaka’pamux Nation Tribal Council, specializing in protecting cultural heritage values.

After her hometown Lytton, B.C., was devastated by fire in 2021, Brown evacuated to Merritt and was looking for a job when she called her former boss from the BC Wildfire Service. 

Back on the frontlines, Brown noticed a crew member cut down a culturally modified tree in Vernon, commonly referred to as a CMT, to clear a pathway for a hose. 

“[First Nations] make that [symbol on the tree] so they can come back to harvest the sap, they can use it to make different types of medicines. And it was a very utilized tree that just got cut down,” Brown told The Narwhal.

She recommended scanning for culturally modified trees before clearing to her crew lead, who received it well. A year later Brown was deployed on another fire near Lytton, teaching BC Wildfire Service crews about the land’s cultural values.

She said she’s willing to take people on the land if they are willing to learn and be respectful, noting that sometimes people do not know they are in a culturally significant area, especially when firefighters are deployed from another province or country. 

“I know if a man can do it, I can do it too, and probably even better,” Brown said, reflecting on her experience being a First Nations woman in the fire industry.

Bringing back cultural burns

Brown and Gilbert are carrying the torch lit by trailblazers in the field like Leona Antoine, who has 30 years of experience. Antoine is a Nlaka’pamux woman who is no stranger to cultural burning or firefighting. 

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She practices traditional burning, is a registered forest technologist, a Type 1 (or first-response) firefighter with the BC Wildfire Service, and is a board director and chair of the Salish Fire Keepers Society. 

When Antoine’s firefighting journey with the BC Wildfire Service began in the early 2000s, she was one of few women on a 20-person unit crew. 

“Because there were no women on the crews before, they didn’t know how to have a woman around,” Antoine told The Narwhal.  

“It took probably about a month for the crew to get used to women being on the crew. You know, putting all the women’s posters and magazines away,” she said. 

Although men on the crew were initially uncomfortable around women, and had to be taught boundaries, “I broke those barriers,” she said. 

Another barrier at the time was getting the province and general public to see the value of cultural burning. B.C. was the first province in Canada to ban the practice in 1874.

After a year of devastating fire in 2017, and following the release of a report Addressing the New Normal: 21st Century Disaster Management in British Columbia in 2018, cultural burns started being taken more seriously by the province, with official amendments to the Wildfire Act in B.C. to support the practice taking effect in 2024.

This is work that the Salish Fire Keepers Society has been advocating for since its inception in 2016. The non-profit is made up of Interior Salish nations who experience some of Canada’s hottest wildfires, and promotes the restoration of cultural burning practices.

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Gilbert contributed to a cultural burning guide, Workbook to Create a Cultural Burn Pathway, made in partnership with the Indigenous Leadership Initiative. 

“As I’ve become more involved with emergency and wildfire management, cultural burning comes up a lot, especially as an Indigenous person that’s interested in Indigenous solutions to modern problems,” she said. 

First Nations Emergency Services Society is an emergency management non-profit organization in B.C. “We were initially created as a result of a lot of Indigenous deaths related to structural fires,” Gilbert said during her presentation at the Salish Fire Keepers Society gathering in Kamloops on Mar. 17. 

The workbook guides readers through different considerations when planning a cultural burn, and was created through a series of community interviews by Amy Cardinal Christianson and Natasha Caverley.

“My role in [its] creation has been trying to make sure that it’s accessible for First Nations. I’m not much on the technical side, I’m … looking at the art and how that can help tell the story for people without strong English backgrounds,” she said.

During the March 2026 gathering, Antoine and the rest of the society’s board gifted each guest speaker with sweetgrass and sage, two traditional medicines among many First Nation cultures across Canada. 

There were many women in attendance, underscoring how things are beginning to shift.

This is an initiative she championed. “We are taught by our Elders when you ask for information or stories, you validate their teachings and what … they have taught. You honour them with medicine,” she said.

Prioritizing traditional protocols, ceremony, and medicine at this year’s fire gathering is an example of how Antoine brings balance to the fire space.

Not only has she broken down barriers for women to come after her, she also creates opportunities for those in the fire industry to connect, heal, and share knowledge – work that can be forgotten for those in the heat of fire. 

Antoine said “we’re in fire dependent ecosystems, the land needs fire.”

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.

Summary

• A recent gathering of the Salish Fire Keepers Society brought together over 100 experts and community members to discuss the role of fire on Indigenous territories in Interior B.C.
• Over a century of fire suppression practices have left Interior B.C. vulnerable to catastrophic wildfires, like the one that destroyed Lytton in 2021.
• Indigenous firekeepers advocate for the use of cultural and prescribed fire to manage risks and restore balance to ecosystems.

In 2022, one year after wildfire tore through the Village of Lytton, a blaze broke out at the nearby Stein Valley Nlaka’pamux Heritage Provincial Park.

The site, co-managed by Lytton First Nation and the B.C. government,  contains pictographs, petroglyphs and culturally modified trees, along with more important cultural sites.

So the BC Wildfire Service called in Sheresa Brown, a 31-year-old Lytton First Nation member who works as a field technician and archaeology monitor with the Nlaka’pamux Nation Tribal Council. When fires happen near registered archaeological sites, Brown works with BC Wildfire Service crews and structural protection specialists to safeguard cultural heritage. 

“I was all for it,” Brown says. “But I wanted to do it in the right way.”

To avoid the pictographs washing away from firefighting efforts, Brown outlined a 75- to 100-metre buffer zone around the cultural site. 

Sprinklers were set up around the buffer zone, and crews watched as the sprinklers stopped the flames from reaching the pictographs.

“That really helped me confirm that this was a good idea,” she said.

In other wildfires, she has helped to determine which registered archaeological sites are within a fire’s boundaries and are along its projected path, directing crews where to work. For example, she will advise where heli-pads can be constructed to avoid cutting down culturally modified trees, and will guide where hoses can be laid to protect artifacts — such as arrowheads — on the ground.

“We make sure that everything is done in a very respectful way,” she said.

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Brown was one of more than a dozen experts and technicians drawn from the realm of Indigenous fire stewardship — from researchers to Indigenous land managers and fire practitioners — who gave panel talks at the Salish Fire Keepers Society “Reigniting The Land” spring assembly on March 17 and 18. Around 100 people attended in-person in Tk’emlúps (also known as Kamloops, B.C.) in Secwepemcúl’ecw, with more tuning in virtually.

Secwepemcúl’ecw

Secwepemcúl’ecw is the traditional territory of the Secwepemc Nation, which stretches across approximately 180,000 square kilometres of Interior B.C. and encompasses 17 Secwepemc communities.

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The panel discussions ranged from protecting cultural heritage sites and values in the event of wildfire, to the experiences of youth engaged in cultural burning and different approaches to land management post-wildfire. 

While honouring the work of their ancestors and the efforts by Indigenous firekeepers in recent decades, the gathering also gave insight into the role that Indigenous youth are having in the future of fire stewardship and emergency response.

Resources around building capacity for community-based fire stewardship and emergency response initiatives were also highlighted, and there was dialogue in bridging opportunity gaps between the BC Wildfire Service and Indigenous communities.

“We need to collaborate with our people. We need to share. We gotta look at those imaginary lines and get rid of those, and work together,” George Campbell, a Nlaka’pamux Nation member from the Boothroyd Indian Band, said. Campbell is a wildfire officer for the Fraser Fire Zone with the BC Wildfire Service.

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Fire Keepers Society brings Indigenous nations together to share knowledge, experiences

Comprised of Elders, youth, Knowledge Holders and firekeepers from Salish communities — including the Nlakaʼpamux, syilx, Secwepemc and Stʼatʼimc Nations — the Fire Keepers Society is a grassroots initiative that started in 2016 as a means to promote awareness around culturally prescribed burns throughout the province.

The society annually hosts a spring and fall gathering, where they aim to build connections between Indigenous nations by sharing knowledge, and promoting and supporting fire stewardship opportunities in different communities.

“We as nations, need to be working together,” Tiffany Traverse, a Secwepemc Nation member who serves as one of the society’s board of directors, said.

“We have shared territories. We have shared family members and family lineages.”

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Fellow board director Darian Edwards, a Stʼatʼimc Nation member from Tsʼkwʼaylaxw First Nation, said that the society is looking to build support and create opportunities for Indigenous youth around fire stewardship initiatives in their respective communities.

“Youth are going to be taking over the work. They are going to be stewarding our lands after us,” Edwards said.

A century of fire suppression

Before settler colonialism outlawed the use of fire on the land through legislation such as the provincial Bush Fire Act of 1874, Interior Salish Nations had been prescribing fire to the land for thousands of years. 

Burn cycles were designed to nurture certain landscapes and ecosystems, often to sustain diversity for hunting areas and to promote the growth of berries and medicinal plants — which all supported various ceremonial purposes.

This work of regular burning ultimately helped to maintain the ecological health of the land by limiting overgrowth and mitigating fuels.

However, settlers and their rapid fire suppression practices effectively removed fire from the ecosystem in the last century. This has resulted in the spread of trees across landscapes that were not historically forested, all of which has led to the accumulation of wildfire fuels and debris across landscapes.

“Those managing forestry are not aware of the historical ecology of our lands and how they were changed through a century of fire suppression and how they were afforested,” Jennifer Grenz, a Lytton First Nation member who is a restoration ecologist and assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, said.

In the past, she noted, “so much of our territories didn’t have trees all over them.”

“They were not meant to be these high-density, single or two-species tree plantations that they were transformed into,” she said.

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Grenz made the comments during her panel presentation on the restoration work she conducted following the 2021 McKay Creek wildfire that broke out near Lilloet in St’at’imc territory.

Last summer, four years after the fire, she and a team of researchers found that burned landscapes are at risk of invasion by fast-growing, fire-prone invasive species of grasses.

However, they also identified historic berry-gathering areas that had once been cultivated and maintained by Indigenous people. 

These sites were sprouting in locations that were impacted by the fire, and did not see any human intervention efforts post-fire.

“Several areas have managed to survive being forested for tree plantations and these mega-fires to remind us of these very large areas that people created — that our people created,” she said.

While many of these areas are recovering on their own post-fire, she noted that “those are the first places that we’re seeing tree planting occurring.”

“The provincial government is going in and planting on top of these areas,” she said.

“This is where I really feel like there’s a really important piece for us to take back greater territorial land management, and find these areas and assert them, as these are our historic berry-gathering areas, food areas. And we don’t want to find trees planted on top of them.”

Grenz said that Indigenous communities know that the mega-fires of today “are not our fires.”

“This is just a totally different level of trying to figure out what to do next,” she said.

‘It’s really important to expose our youth to this work in a good way’

During a panel discussion led by three Indigenous youth, Skuppah Indian Band member Amber Wilber from the Nlaka’pamux Nation said that there’s a lot of trauma in her community around fire, especially among youth.

Skuppah Indian Band is located just two kilometres south of the Village of Lytton, which was the site of a devastating wildfire that swept through the area in 2021 and burned down 90 per cent of the village. Nearly five years after the fire, communities in the area, such as Lytton First Nation, are still in the process of rebuilding their homes and infrastructure.

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“I’d love to see that fear of fire shift to a respect for fire — learning that fire can be a tool that we can use to manage our land, and help bring balance to it, instead of something to be feared,” Wilber, who is in her second year working with BC Wildfire Service, said.

Wilber said growing up, she used to watch from inside her family home as her dad and grandpa burned patches of land outside to support berry harvesting. She would later help her uncle with fuel management work — it was her uncle who taught her that the practice is “an important tool that brings balance to the ecosystem.”

“Not only when it comes to fire prevention and fire management, but also, creating balance in an ecosystem for birds, for elk as well, in our local area. Making way for them to travel through our forests, and giving birds good nesting places,” Wilber explained.

“We also use fuel management and cultural burning in our area as a way to knock down the tick population, because they can be quite pesty in the spring.”

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She described this experience as a young person practising and revitalizing fire stewardship knowledge in her community as “eye-opening.”

“It’s really ignited a connection to the land in a way that I don’t think I ever would’ve gotten anywhere else,” she said. 

“It’s very unique, and it makes me have a lot of appreciation for traditions and cultures. It makes me feel connected to my ancestors in a big way.”

She advised Indigenous youth to get involved in cultural burning “in any way you can” — from listening to family members, to seeking out firekeepers in their communities. 

For the more seasoned firekeepers in the room, she encouraged them to involve their youth in burns, no matter the size of the fire. 

“Bring them out, even if it’s just a small job,” she said. 

“It’s really important to expose our youth to this work in a good way. And let them see your mistakes as well. … Later on, they’ll have that experience, too. They’ll have more grace for you and understanding. It’ll help them feel a little more humanized as well.”

A workbook to educate on cultural burns

Last summer, the First Nations’ Emergency Services Society (FNESS) and the Indigenous Leadership Initiative (ILI) released their “Worksheets To Create A Cultural Burn Pathway” workbook, which is both a physical and digital resource designed to guide Indigenous Nations in creating cultural burn programs within their community.

The workbook is the product of multi-years of community based-research, where more than 50 Elders and Knowledge Keepers were consulted, with additional input coming from gatherings and workshops.

Jaci Gilbert, a prescribed fire specialist with FNESS from the Secwépemc and Tsilhqot’in Nations, contributed to the workbook and gave a presentation about it during the Fire Keepers’ gathering.

“The aim of the workbook is to help nations navigate cultural burning with the impacts of climate change. We are not seeing the indicators that we’re used to, or seeing them at different times that don’t align with our burn windows,” Gilbert said.

“We hope that this workbook will help nations do burning in this new time.”

The workbook is divided into seven worksheets. The ILI, however, recognizes on their website that, “cultural fire is culture and location specific. So instead of a prescriptive approach, each worksheet poses a set of questions and prompts that can be answered collectively.”

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Amy Cardinal Christianson, a Cree-Métis senior fire advisor for the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, helped lead the development of the workbook. 

She appeared virtually at the gathering, and said that the workbook has been used by Indigenous land guardian programs, such as the Kainai Nation’s (Blood Tribe) fire guardian program.

“It’s a really easy resource to use for communities. It also talks a lot about the importance of governance,” Christianson said.

She said that Indigenous fire stewardship is not just limited to culturally prescribed burns.

“Yes, culturally burning — but it can also be firefighting, emergency response, post-fire recovery,” she said.

“It’s any activity where Indigenous people are asserting their jurisdiction and exercising their rights related to fire on the land.”

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When a crisis strikes, rumours and conspiracy theories often spread faster than emergency officials can respond and issue corrections.

In Canada, social media posts have falsely claimed wildfires were intentionally set, that evacuation orders were government overreach or that smoke maps were being manipulated. In several communities, people delayed leaving because they were unsure which information to trust.

This wasn’t just online noise. It directly shaped how Canadians responded to real danger. When misinformation delays evacuations, fragments compliance or undermines confidence in official warnings, it reduces the state’s ability to protect lives and critical infrastructure.

At that point, misinformation is no longer merely a communications problem, but a national security risk. Emergency response systems depend on public trust to function. When that trust erodes, response capacity weakens and preventable harm increases.

Canada is entering an era where climate misinformation is becoming a public safety threat. As wildfires, floods and droughts grow more frequent, emergency systems rely on one fragile assumption: that people believe the information they receive. When that assumption fails, the entire chain of crisis communication begins to break down. We are already seeing early signs of that failure.

This dynamic extends far beyond acute disasters. It also affects long-running climate policy and adaptation efforts. When trust in institutions erodes and misinformation becomes easier to absorb than scientific evidence, public support for proactive climate action collapses.

Recent research by colleagues and me on how people perceive droughts shows that members of the public often rely on lived experiences, memories, identity and social and institutional cues — such as environmental concerns, perceived familiarity and trust — to decide whether they are experiencing a drought, even when official information suggests otherwise.

These complex cognitive dynamics create predictable vulnerabilities. Evidence from Canada and abroad documents how false narratives during climate emergencies reduce protective behaviour, amplify confusion and weaken institutional authority.

Tackling misinformation

Canada has invested billions of dollars in physical resiliency, firefighting capacity, flood resiliency and energy reliability. In addition, the Canadian government also recently joined the Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change to investigate false narratives and strengthen response capacity.

These are much needed steps in the right direction. But Canada still approaches misinformation as secondary rather than a key component of climate-risk management.

That leaves responsibility for effective messaging fragmented across public safety, environment, emergency management and digital policy, with no single entity accountable for monitoring, anticipating or responding to information threats during crises. The cost of this fragmentation is slower response, weaker coordination and greater risk to public safety.

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Canada also continues to rely heavily on outdated communication mediums like radio, TV and static government websites, while climate misinformation is optimized for the social media environment. False content often circulates quickly online digitally, with emotional resonance and repetition giving it an advantage over verified information.

Research on misinformation dynamics shows how platforms systematically amplify sensational claims and how false claims travel farther and faster than verified updates.

Governments typically attempt to correct misinformation during emergencies when emotions are high, timelines are compressed and false narratives are already circulating. By then, correction is reactive and often ineffective.

Trust cannot be built in the middle of a crisis. It is long-term public infrastructure that must be maintained through transparency, consistency and modern communication systems before disasters occur.

Proactive preparedness

Canada needs to shift from reactive correction to proactive preparedness. With wildfire season only months ahead, this is the window when preparation matters most. Waiting for the next crisis to expose the same weaknesses is not resilience, but repetition.

We cannot afford another round of reacting under pressure and then reflecting afterwards on steps that should have been taken earlier. That shift requires systemic planning:

• Proactive public preparedness: Federal and provincial emergency agencies should treat public understanding of alerts, evacuation systems and climate risks as a standing responsibility, not an emergency add-on. This information must be communicated well before disaster strikes, through the platforms people actually use, with clear expectations about where authoritative information will come from.
• Institutional coordination: Responsibility for tackling climate misinformation currently falls between departments. A federal-provincial coordination mechanism, linked to emergency management rather than political communications, would allow early detection of misinformation patterns and faster response, just as meteorological or hydrological risks are monitored today.
• Partnerships with trusted messengers: Community leaders, educators, health professionals and local organizations often have more credibility than institutions during crises. These relationships should be formalized in emergency planning, not improvised under pressure. During recent wildfires, community-run pages and volunteers were among the most effective at countering false claims.

We cannot eliminate every rumour or every bit of misinformation. But without strengthening public trust and information integrity as core components of climate infrastructure, emergencies will become harder to manage and more dangerous.

Climate resilience is not only about physical systems. It is also about whether people believe the warnings meant to protect them. Canada’s long-term security depends on taking that reality seriously.

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Growing up in Nlakaʼpamux and syilx territories in the 1970s, Joe Gilchrist can’t remember a single summer when wildfire smoke ever trapped him indoors. 

The Merritt, B.C., region’s semi-arid landscape still saw scorching summer temperatures back then, the Secwépemc Nation member recalled, but not the record-breaking fire seasons of recent years. 

“That was thanks to our work that the Indigenous ancestors did on the land,” Gilchrist, who now lives on Skeetchestn Indian Band’s reserve with his daughter, said. 

“Then, everything was still fairly spaced out; the fires were easier to handle.”

Although settlers’ wildfire suppression efforts had become the dominant form of land stewardship when he was young, Indigenous communities in the Nicola Valley were still using fire to “cleanse” the land, Gilchrist said.

Cultural burning was a key part of Indigenous land stewardship for thousands of years, he told IndigiNews. “It was all across Canada — it used to be done to the north, the south, the east and west.”

Sharing his knowledge at the UN climate talks in Brazil

Now in his 50s, Gilchrist is playing a leading role in uplifting and advancing his ancestors’ fire-keeping traditions — and sharing that wisdom far beyond his own nation’s territories. 

But he didn’t always conduct burns. For three decades, Gilchrist served as a professional firefighter.

Since retiring from that career, he has assumed the role of a traditional Indigenous firekeeper. 

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That work now takes him around the world to promote the benefits of Indigenous land stewardship — in particular how to cleanse the landscape with cultural burning — in hopes of making it more widespread internationally. 

This month, his mission took him far south to Brazil, where he spoke at the United Nations climate summit, COP30.

At that major international event, he shared his extensive experience as a leader in a growing Indigenous-led fire movement. The summit saw fierce confrontations between security and Indigenous land defenders.

“I got into talking, presenting and just seeing the importance and the need for cultural burning as climate change happened,” he said in an interview before his departure.

“Seeing that the forest was too thick — that it needed to be looked after properly.”

He’s also been to Australia, Fiji, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Colombia and United Nations meetings in Rome to promote cultural burning and land stewardship.

In his travels, he’s met countless fellow Indigenous people who share and advocate for those same values — many of them with ancient cultural burning traditions of their own.

Gilchrist is widely recognized for his leadership in the movement in his homelands, serving as vice-chair of the Thunderbird Collective, an Indigenous organization pushing for more cultural fire practices. He’s also a member of the Salish Fire Keepers Society.

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Through the Thunderbird Collective, he hopes to train and support Indigenous communities in fire stewardship and cultural burning.

Being a cultural firekeeper requires significant responsibility and time. But he realized advocacy work was also needed — something he’s taken upon himself, after recognizing how frequent and devastating wildfires have become in the era of climate change. 

“The loss to fires is getting pretty catastrophic,” he said. “It’s always sad to see the loss.”

“There is a better way of looking after the land, so that it’s not so dangerous to the public. … It is doable.”

‘Our ancestors used to do that all across North America’

Gilchrist began working with fire when he was just 15, to help support his family, after his carpenter stepdad got injured on the job.

He started his 30-year firefighting career with the BC Wildfire Service in 1982, working with the agency until 2012. He retired from fighting fires shortly after.

In 1991, he was a member of the Merritt Firedevils, a type one all-Indigenous emergency unit crew, which is a group of firefighters who are “usually the first to arrive at a fire site to suppress a wildfire,” the BC Wildfire Service states.

One year later, he became the crew’s leader, and travelled all over the country to fight fires, carrying on the prescribed burning traditions of his ancestors. 

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In 1996, he moved to full-time work with the BC Wildfire Service, completing a 16-week government training program, Indigenous Fire Prevention.

That’s where he began to learn more about fire prevention and Indigenous use of fire to steward the land.

He also discovered the practice wasn’t just common in his own territories. 

“It’s amazing that our ancestors used to do that all across North America,” he said. “It goes all the way down to South America, Africa, Australia — the whole thing was all burning.”

‘You can’t do work on the forest just once’

Historically in his region, Gilchrist said Indigenous people conducted low-intensity controlled burns every spring and fall, to support different habitats and maintain varying landscapes — including to deter forest overgrowth.

The ancestral practice — also known as prescribed or cultural burns — helped “cleanse the land” by preventing trees from encroaching on one another. This kept forests healthy by decreasing fuel — such as low-hanging branches, small or dead trees and other vegetation — from accumulating as time passed.

“When you burn it lightly in the springtime, the fire consumes the fuels and turns it into nutrients for the plants,” Gilchrist explained.

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But, he emphasized, that process was never a one-off. Treating forests with light burns needs to happen every seven to 15 years.

“You can’t do work on the forest just once,” he said. “It has to be continuous — it has to be more of a lifestyle change.”

During prescribed burns, trees are pruned by slashing low-hanging branches. This tactic thins forests and creates more space between trees. It also helps prevent fires from climbing to treetops and spreading to other trees.

Slashed branches are piled with the other gathered fuel and sometimes burned at a later date, which was typically sometime in the winter season.

“The longer that you don’t have fire on the ground, the [more] fuel builds up,” Gilchrist said. “But also the forest encroaches on itself — trees become denser and thicker.”

“Then they become diseased, because there’s only so much water for the trees and for the land.”

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Different burn cycles achieved different landscapes, and helped prevent trees from taking over, he said.

“That’s how it was for thousands of years. And if you don’t do that, you get to where we’re at now, where it’s too thick.”

“It happens if you don’t look after the land — if you don’t steward the land with fire.”

Historically, much of the Nicola Valley was grassland, rather than the thick forests found in many areas there today, Gilchrist said.

Since ancient times, the local valley bottoms were host to massive cottonwood trees, growing alongside Indigenous pithouses and other traditional structures.

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Firekeepers maintained those grasslands and meadows by burning the land every two years, he said. Controlled burns destroyed any tree seedlings, needles or pine cones, preventing them from spreading.

But thinning the woodlands also made hunting easier, too.

The practice helped local communities, too, improving hunting areas and encouraging different medicines to grow in the open grasslands left by burning.

“You have to burn every two years — perpetually — for thousands of years, and it’ll stay a healthy grassland,” he said. 

“But once you miss a few burn cycles, the trees become taller than the light burning can kill. Eventually, the trees start to take over.”

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In the fall, at higher elevations, burning every four years allowed huckleberry patches to grow and prosper. These burns also nurtured other medicines, and habitat for both ungulates and wetland species.

Light burns along river banks helped deepen and strengthen the roots of some deciduous trees — such as cottonwood, willow and alder.

Encouraging those trees to flourish helped keep the water cool for fish, as it provided patches of shade over a waterway. It also protected river banks from erosion and flooding.

“There’s a lot of reasons and ways that the fire was used in a good way,” Gilchrist said.

A large Indigenous settlement once stood where the city of Merritt is today, at the junction of the Nicola and Coldwater rivers.

“The area around the community was burned just for protection and safety from fire in the summertime,” he recounted.

“Everything was known, especially by the matriarchs of the land. … The females kept the stories of when it was last burned, where the medicine was picked, where the berries were ready, when it needed to be burned again.”

Settler fire suppression gradually stamped out cultural burning

Settlers built their houses and towns out of wood, often in the middle of heavily forested, fire-prone areas.

“A lot of people want to live in the forest with the trees,” Gilchrist said. “They don’t want to see fire in the trees.”

This practice of low-intensity controlled burns slowly became less common by the end of the 20th century, as settlers’ worldviews about land stewardship and suppressing fire came to dominate.

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“I think it was the fear of fire,” Gilchrist mused. “Seeing people lighting fires must’ve looked dangerous, I guess.”

“You make that illegal — so that people aren’t adding fire to the land — then you just start putting out fires that you see.”

Summertime wildfires, many sparked by lightning, began to threaten colonial settlements — and this is when Gilchrist believes today’s rapid-response fire-suppression model took root. It was a “hit fast, hit hard” approach to wildfires, he said.

In a semi-arid landscape, unless there are smaller, frequent burns to consume fuels that fall to the ground, that natural debris will pile up and dry out even more.

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“They don’t deteriorate,” he said. “They just stay on the ground and wait for fire — it just keeps building up and building up.”

“It just becomes more and more of a danger, the longer that you don’t have a fire on the land. … Now we’re seeing huge megafires because of that kind of land stewardship.” 

Gilchrist sees cultural burning as a type of medicine for the ecosystem. Suppressing that medicine, in favour of reactionary firefighting efforts, has now resulted in the fuel-filled forests that we have today — as he sees it, thick and sick with disease and debris.

“Now, we’re seeing responses becoming ineffective, because the fires are just too intense,” he lamented. “With climate change, the only thing you can really change is the fuel.

“Over thousands of years, it was done. It’s a cleansing. It was made natural by Indigenous people.”

Today, combined with the effects of climate change, hotter, drier and even windier summer conditions have created “the recipe for megafires,” he said.

“The earth can only handle so [many] trees on it, because there’s just not enough rain, not enough moisture, to support the amount of trees that are here,” he said.

As the climate has changed, so has the typical fire season. At one time, Gilchrist recalled, that season would usually be over by early September.

“Now, we’re seeing it move into October, maybe even longer,” he said. “The burn seasons are even getting longer, too, with climate change.”

“That’s just adding more and more of a danger to society.”

Learning to apply fire ‘when we could, as often as possible’

During his decades-long career with BC Wildfire Service, Gilchrist helped conduct hundreds of prescribed burns “for all different reasons.” 

In that time, he and his crews applied fire across thousands of hectares around Merritt and the surrounding Nicola Valley, even going as far as Lytton and Hedley. 

That work often involved partnering with municipalities and First Nations. 

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And, like how his own ancestors conducted that work, different burns were done in the spring and fall seasons.

“We did elk, deer and moose habitat burns, even mountain beaver,” he recalled. “​As we discovered person-caused fires, we would burn those, too.

“We applied fire just when we could, as often as possible.”

His crew favoured a “light hands on the land” approach to their prescribed burn work, avoiding when possible heavy fire-suppression machinery such as bulldozers.

Areas that required prescribed burns were determined by their proximity to a community — such as creating a 2.5-kilometre “buffer” around the city of Merritt, he said.

Previous prescribed burn work he and his crew did ultimately helped mitigate the Lily Lake wildfire outside of Merritt in 1999, which burned approximately 110 hectares.

“We burned it at nighttime to control it,” he recalled. “We did a lot of work around that area.”

Revisiting burns of the past

In July, Gilchrist brought IndigiNews to visit places he’d applied fire to decades ago, such as a forested area around Fox Farm Road. He estimates it’s been at least 20 years since the area was treated.

At the city’s north end, Gilchrist showed IndigiNews another area he once treated with fire, roughly 15 years ago.

He pointed out how signs of his work can still be seen today, for instance how well-spaced the trees are from each other, he noted, and how their lower branches had been pruned to reduce wildfire fuel. 

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But in the years that passed, piles of needle droppings from the tree branches had since accumulated into a thick layer blanketing the ground.

“You can pick it up and hear it crunch,” he said. “It’s not powdery yet, but it’s still able to burn.”

Over the course of 20 years, he also did fire mitigation work on the property around his sister’s home in Nooaitch Indian Band, within Nlaka’pamux Nation. 

That work included cycles of spacing and removing damaged trees, slashing, piling and burning every two to five years.

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The results of his work there, he said, offer proof of the importance of ancient fire practices amidst climate change.

When the catastrophic Lytton fire jumped the Nicola River and swept through the area in 2021, his sister’s home remained unscathed, even though it was made of logs.

But it also underscored how personal the climate crisis has become for many. Just months later, that fall’s catastrophic atmospheric river flooded the region, and washed away his sister’s log house, Gilchrist said.

Cultural burning could help mitigate a smoke-filled future

Nearly 50 years since his youthful days in Merritt, smoky summers — for weeks or even months — are no longer a rarity for communities in the province’s Interior.

Nowadays, such summers have simply become normal and expected, along with the air-quality warnings and extreme health concerns that come with them.

“Our kids are going through that,” Gilchrist lamented.

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In syilx Okanagan homelands, for example, smoky summers have seemingly been normalized in recent years — with local media outlets even using terms like “Smoke-anagan” to describe the distressing climate-fuelled trend.

Since 2021, there have been more than 1,600 wildfires each year in B.C., according to the province. Two years ago, nearly 2,300 fires burned 2.8 million hectares — 300,000 more hectares than the record-breaking 2017 and 2018 wildfire seasons combined.

Niigaan Sinclair, an Indigenous scholar and commentator, told Canada’s National Observer that one in seven First Nations in Canada experienced being evacuated during this year’s wildfire season.

Gilchrist himself said that he’s been evacuated at least five times in the last five years.

He noticed that wildfire seasons were starting to worsen following the 1994 wildfire in snpink’tn (Penticton), also known as the Garnet fire, which saw 5,500 hectares burned. More than 3,500 people were evacuated and 18 homes and structures were lost.

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Amid the climate crisis, Gilchrist said the devastation wrought by worsening wildfires could be likened to a form of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

“There’s kind of like a PTSD that people get when they see fire and things like that,” he said.

“When you wake up in the morning and the valley is filled with smoke — you wonder where the fire is at, whether it’s going to be a danger to yourself.”

Prescribed burns on the rise in B.C. — but more are still needed

Gilchrist said that prescribed burn work in the province is “slowly” going in the right direction, “but it needs to be multiplied hundreds of times.”

Last year, 3,400 hectares of land were treated with 48 cultural and prescribed burns — 23 of them in partnership with First Nations, according to the BC Wildfire Service.

That’s more than double the total number carried out the year before, and up more than a third from 2022. 

The planned burns are skyrocketing year-over-year. This year saw 135 planned, the provincial fire agency said.

But even with the increase in such projects, Gilchrist said even more are needed to keep the land healthy. He believes hundreds of thousands of hectares across the province need to once again be treated with prescribed fire.

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“We’re not burning enough,” he said. “It’s just a mind-boggling amount of work that needs to be done. … We need to speed things up.”

But even as authorities increasingly support the ancient practice, he believes prescribed and cultural burns need even more buy-in from government, academia and media. 

During the Thunderbird Collective’s first formal gathering in snpink’tn (Penticton) in September, the group heard from numerous Indigenous communities about the colonial barriers they said still exist against cultural burning, including regulatory and permitting challenges.

So public education is increasingly essential, Gilchrist said.

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“Start spending more on prevention, wildfire mitigation and Indigenous land stewardship,” he said. 

More planned fires on the landscape bring not just greater ecological health, he emphasized. They also offer financial savings.

“You’ll start spending less money on suppression. People know that there is a better way of managing the forest and the land.”

“My thing now is pushing for Indigenous land stewardship and the Indigenous use of fire on the land. We need to get things going.”

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In early September 2025, as wildfires cast a pall of smoke across parts of B.C., Forests Minister Ravi Parmar was asked about a study from the University of British Columbia which found clear-cut logging can make catastrophic floods larger and much more likely.

“The clear-cut logging that I think people would assume is leading to that is 1950s-style harvesting,” Parmar said. “I don’t think that’s happening in British Columbia anymore. We lead with world-class silviculture practices.”

That statement might come as a surprise to some who have seen recent photos of logged areas of Vancouver Island’s Walbran Valley, which show once-dense forests cut down to nothing. 

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The minister’s comments came as a shock to Younes Alila, a professor at the University of British Columbia’s Department of Forest Resources Management and the lead author of the study Parmar was asked about.

“It sounds like he’s living on another planet, certainly not in British Columbia,” Alila, who has spent 30 years researching the way logging impacts watersheds, told The Narwhal.

The B.C. government’s forestry website defines clear-cutting as a type of logging that involves cutting entire stands of trees. This can happen all at once across an area earmarked for permitted logging — known as a cutblock in the industry — or piece by piece, a process known as strip cutting.

Sometimes, small stands of trees are spared — called clear-cutting with reserves — and B.C. also has rules to protect so-called special trees, the biggest and oldest specimens of certain species, including cedar, maple, fir and spruce.

When The Narwhal asked Parmar to clarify his claim that clear-cutting is an outdated forestry practice, the minister did not clarify. Instead, he said logging practices today involve more care than in the 1950s.

“I’m very comfortable with where we are in British Columbia in terms of the steps that are taken before a permit is submitted,” Parmar said.

B.C.’s current forestry practices balance environmental considerations and the needs of the provincial forestry industry, according to Parmar.

Alila disagrees.

“The clearcutting continues as we speak,” he told The Narwhal.

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‘These are not hypothetical clear-cut logging scenarios’: forestry professor 

Alila isn’t the only one raising eyebrows at Parmar’s statement. Tegan Hansen, senior forests campaigner with Stand.earth, called the minister’s claim “incredibly disappointing.”

“Clear-cutting happens in every part of B.C., from the Skeena to Vancouver Island to the Kootenays,” she told The Narwhal. “I think it’s an incredibly damaging statement.”

When a section of forest is clear-cut, it’s not just the trees that disappear, Hansen said. The understory also dies, including the ferns and shrubs and lichens and mosses that once grew from the forest floor up to the canopy.

“I’ve walked in clearcuts that were logged a few months ago in the summer, and the ground has started to bleach and all of that life is dead, and the logs have been removed, and the earth is churned up from the machinery,” she said.

Stripping trees from the land can have dire consequences. Alila’s research has shown that forest canopies help regulate the water cycle, slowing snow melt in the spring, which can help prevent sudden floods. Tree roots also help stabilize the soil and contribute to moisture retention, reducing the likelihood of drought.

“These are not hypothetical clear-cut logging scenarios,” Alila said of his study subjects. “These are actual cutblocks and actual, real watersheds in actual British Columbia.”

Old clear-cutting practices were ‘pure exploitation’: B.C. government

Mike Morris, a former BC Liberal MLA who represented the forestry-dependent Prince George-Mackenzie riding from 2013 to 2024, is an avid outdoorsman. He’s been hiking, hunting and trapping in northern B.C. forests since the 1960s — before clear-cutting became a widespread practice. Now, he’s regularly reminded of the scale at which local forests are being logged.

“It’s a shocking thing to see when you stand there and you can look around and for miles on either side of you, nothing but clearcuts,” he said, describing a 3,000-hectare clearcut that borders his trapline in northern B.C.

“It’s surrounded by a number of other clearcuts that equate to about 30,000 hectares in size over the last 25 years.”

Forty years ago, clear-cutting was by far the dominant type of logging taking place across B.C., according to data supplied by the Forests Ministry. In 2023, only 17 per cent of the area logged in B.C.’s southern Interior was clear-cut, according to the ministry, while eight per cent of coastal and northern cutblocks were clear-cut.

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Clear-cutting with reserves is now the dominant practice, according to the ministry’s data. Ninety per cent of logged areas in the northern Interior were clear-cut with reserves; 74 per cent in the southern Interior and 47 per cent on the coast.

“Leaving a few trees here and there doesn’t change the practice,” Stand.earth’s Hansen said. “Ecologically, from the perspective of that forest, of all the life that relies on the forest, there’s no difference.”

Clear-cut logging remains “a viable and appropriate approach to sustainable forest management,” according to a statement from the Forests Ministry. While logging in the 1950s focused on getting as much timber out of B.C. forests as possible, a statement from the ministry said modern clear-cut logging accounts for ecological impacts at each specific cutblock.

The B.C. government’s online introduction to forestry practices says the way clear-cutting used to be done — a system known as “clearout” logging — “has given clear-cutting a bad name for some time.”

Unlike the “pure exploitation” of clearout logging, the modern clearcut system “manages a stand for the long term,” the document states.

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Why is B.C. still clear-cut logging?

Morris believes that pressure from the forest industry coupled with B.C.’s increasingly uncomfortable financial situation has left the provincial government with little appetite to reform forestry, despite mounting evidence of the serious impacts of intensive logging.

“I find government maintains the status quo more often than not, just because it’s the easiest path to take,” he said. “But at what cost? At the cost of more lives, at the cost of more infrastructure damage that the taxpayers will have to bear?”

He’s particularly worried about the connection between losing tree canopies and natural disasters. “It’s causing landslides, it’s causing drought and it’s causing increased wildfire risk. To me, that is a clear and present danger that any minister should be aware of.”

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Alila believes B.C.’s lack of action to curb clear-cutting comes down to dollars.

“Clear-cut logging is the cheapest way to cut the wood,” he said. “There are many other logging practices that are more eco-friendly. There are [a] wide variety of silvicultural practices that would have way less effects on hydrology and on wildlife, on biodiversity, but we keep resisting going there, unfortunately, because it’s the cheapest way.”

Even if B.C. were to abandon clear-cutting tomorrow, its effects could linger for a century before forests regain their capacity to moderate the water cycle and stabilize the soil.

“We’re going to be living with the effect of the clear-cut logging all over B.C. for decades to come,” Alila told The Narwhal.

Updated Nov. 20, 2025, at 11:49 a.m. PT: This article was updated to reflect the fact that Mike Morris served as an MLA from 2013 to 2024.

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Sitting among a group of fellow Indigenous fire keepers in syilx homelands, Rachel Cavanagh shared knowledge about cultural burns where she is from in Australia.

“Ceremony,” she said, “has such a huge part to play in implementing fire.”

A Minjungbal woman from the Bundjalung/Yugambeh Nation, Cavanagh journeyed more than 12,000 kilometres to attend the inaugural National Indigenous Fire Gathering in snpink’tn (Penticton). 

The summit brought together more than 100 Indigenous knowledge holders, leaders and experts from Canada, the United States and Australia between Sept. 23 and 25. 

As Cavanagh explained it, the practice of implementing cultural fires year-round is not just about taking care of the landscapes and ecosystems on her nation’s territories — what Indigenous Peoples in her homeland call “Country.”

“It is about our medicines,” she said. “It is about the right type of smoke that is actually really healing for the body.”

“We use it to welcome our babies onto Country. We use it to say goodbye to our Elders as they transition through. We use it for all manner of different things.”

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Having Elders out on Country during cultural burns — whether they’re implementing fire themselves, or telling stories and dancing — is key.

“It’s that intergenerational transfer of knowledge,” she emphasized. “It’s the sharing and storytelling that comes with practicing our culture and doing what we’re doing.”

As a member of the cultural fire movement, she said Indigenous fire practitioners are pushing for Australian governments to recognize them as “traditional custodians” of their territories.

“We still struggle to access our land,” she said.

Her message was far from unique to the Southern Hemisphere. It resonated with — and echoed — the experiences of many other Indigenous fire experts at the gathering. 

A renewed need for cultural burns

September’s gathering in snpink’tn came roughly five years after an earlier meeting of Indigenous representatives from nations across Canada.

At that earlier event, attendees had raised alarms about “how sick the land was,” because its forests were no longer being maintained appropriately, leading to a thick overgrowth of vegetation and woody debris.

They warned this was fuelling the severity of fires, urging Western governments not to ignore the risk any longer.

“It was a really great gathering of like-minded people that are interested in cultural burning — how Indigenous people want to be able to look after the land again,” said Joe Gilchrist, an Indigenous fire keeper from the Skeetchestn Indian Band, a Secwépemc community west of Kamloops.

“Everything was causing pressure for us as Indigenous people to raise our voices and say, ‘We have a way to save communities … with cultural burning and Indigenous land stewardship.’ ”

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Before settler colonialism, Indigenous nations across the continent regularly conducted low-intensity controlled burns, carefully planned to maintain and replenish the health of the land and its ecosystems.

This ancient method of burning forests and grasslands — using what are today known as prescribed, controlled, cultural or traditional burns — encouraged particular plants and medicines to grow, while also preventing forest overgrowth. 

Those practices limited the threat of devastating wildfires blazing out of control.

In the valleys, Secwépemc people conducted early burns in the spring, Gilchrist explained; in the fall, they repeated the practice in the mountains.

“Early spring was for our medicine down below in the grasslands,” he added, “and up high was for our higher elevation medicine areas, food for the animals to eat.”

But while Secwépemc people saw fire as a medicine, settlers gradually removed it from their ecosystems, suppressing it as a problem to be fought. 

Settlers favoured logging over maintaining forest health. As reactionary approaches to fighting wildfires became conventional, they led to more debris accumulating in the country’s forests — ironically, leading to even more devastating wildfires today.

Indigenous fire keepers see directly how bad today’s wildfires have become — “how bad the losses are, evacuations, all that kind of stuff,” said Gilchrist.

But they also see something more positive in their communities.

“How much people just love the land, the animals, the fish, the air we breathe, the water,” he said. “How fire is essential to all of that.”

‘Breaking down those challenges and barriers’

As they gathered in snpink’tn, Indigenous experts from around the world discussed ways they have been using fire to steward their homelands for generations.

They also highlighted bureaucratic barriers impeding their ability to do so.

The similarities between different First Nations’ approaches — and colonial resistance to them — were numerous.

“People are interested in collaborating and networking, to see what other people are doing,” said Charlene John, a member of the Tsal’alh First Nation, a St’at’imc community west of Lillooet. 

John chairs the Thunderbird Collective’s steering committee, which organized the three-day gathering.

One of the meeting’s goals, she said, was for Indigenous communities to share strategies to overcome the various longstanding barriers that exist to cultural burning.

“Then, the Thunderbird Collective can start working toward breaking down those challenges and barriers, by providing resources or tools, or linking people in networks,” she said.

Common issues highlighted by Indigenous participants at the gathering included regulatory and permitting challenges around conducting cultural burns. 

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A growing number of First Nations communities want to be included in improving their landscapes through cultural burning, John said, “and how that creates safer environments from wildfire.”

Cultural burning also requires removing barriers to Indigenous communities participating in responding to wildfires, too. 

To John, that means creating First Nations structures parallel to Western governments’ incident-command wildfire-fighting agencies, “to be able to initiate how the fire should be put out, to be able to have that say,” she added.

“Not only here, but many First Nations people wish to advance and wish to seek the rights and authority to assert themselves in [fire] scenarios.”

Hearing these concerns is crucial, as it helps provide the collective with a framework on “how to solve those issues, eventually, as we develop and regrow,” John noted.

But it’s not just about creating greater access to cultural burning for Indigenous communities — it’s about land stewardship. 

Or, as John puts it, “seeing the resilience brought back.”

To achieve that, she described “four pillars” of the movement: knowledge-sharing, advocacy, land-based cultural practices and sovereignty.

“These types of gatherings are going to help drive us to what we’re doing in our four pillars,” she said.

“As we develop, we can also grow and help fill those gaps that people are still seeing in the different systems.”

Supporting ‘practices that Indigenous people want in the fire world’

Before the Thunderbird Collective arose from a 2024 naming ceremony in Tk’emlúps (Kamloops), the group was called the National Indigenous Wildfire Management Working Group.

Last month’s gathering was the federally funded group’s first formal gathering under its new name.

“Our goal is to grow and develop,” John said, “and move beyond the federal funding.”

The Indigenous-led organization is “restoring the sacred relationship between fire, land and people,” she explained, “cultivating healthy landscapes, resilient communities and multigenerational learning.”

The steering committee consists of nine Indigenous people from different nations across Canada — many of whom are fire keepers and specialists who participate in and promote cultural burning around the world.

“That’s a big part of why they’re here,” John said. “To support cultural burning, to support all the practices that Indigenous people want in the fire world.”

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One of those specialists is Secwépemc fire keeper Gilchrist, who is the steering committee’s vice-chair. Gilchrist started fighting fires when he was just 15. 

He led the Merritt Unit Fire Crew from 1991 to 1996, before finishing his firefighting career with BC Wildfire Service in the early 2010s.

“Now, I travel around and I spread the word about cultural burning and Indigenous land stewardship,” he said. 

That work has taken him to Australia, Fiji, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Colombia and United Nations meetings in Rome to promote cultural burning and land stewardship. In his travels, he’s met many Indigenous Peoples who share and advocate for those same values.

Later this month, he’ll be taking his message to COP30 in Brazil, for the 2025 United Nations climate change conference. 

“Just all over the world they say the exact same thing as we do — about our love for the land, our love for our animals and our water,” he said.

“Fire was used … all around the globe.”

Keeping Indigenous fire traditions alive isn’t just about caring for the land and preventing out-of-control wildfires, however.

Co-ordinating with other communities on the issue is also helping assert Indigenous sovereignty, “upholding our jurisdiction, and practicing our rights,” Justin Kane, chief of Ts’kw’aylaxw First Nation and a member of the Thunderbird Collective’s steering committee, said. 

‘This work is a part of our assertion of sovereignty’

On the gathering’s first day, both regional and international Indigenous communities spoke of the different ways that they use fire to manage their territory — work that correlates to exercising title and sovereignty over their land.

In sməlqmíx (Similkameen)-syilx territory, Lauren Terbasket of the Lower Similkameen Indian Band said managing her people’s territories through fire and water diversion is a way of asserting “title and rights.”

“We believe that this work is a part of our assertion of sovereignty on the land,” she added. 

Continuing to use traditional and ancient management practices, such as cultural burns, is a way to prove her nation’s “ongoing use and occupation,” Terbasket said.

“It’s not just a matter of making partnerships, although that’s what we do — it is our way of asserting our title, our jurisdiction and our rights on our own lands.”

In 2018, the band conducted a prescribed burn in the Crater Creek area with BC Wildfire Service and other government agencies. 

This area is located within the Ashnola Corridor, which was designated as an Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area in 2022. 

When the Crater Creek wildfire swept through the area in 2023, burning more than 40,000 hectares of land, Terbasket said it exhibited “high intensity burning right until it hit the edge of our traditional burned area.”

But many homes located on different reserves throughout the community were not touched by the fire, she recalled.

“We and our Elders believe that it’s because we continue to exercise our responsibility to the land,” she said.

The band is now in the middle of a multi-year prescribed burn project to the akɬʕpas (Place of the Nighthawk) area, with phase one seeing 40 of 370 hectares treated last spring.

“It was really in response to habitat degradation — it was an area that was completely overgrown with sage brush,” Terbasket said. 

“Nothing else was growing there. Our traditional foods were no longer growing.”

Without fires ‘our homes become tinder boxes’

Similarly, Margo Robbins, of the Yurok Tribe in California, said her culture also depends on fire. 

Fire helps them in many ways, she explained — regularly burning the landscape helps foster medicines and traditional food sources, and also encourages the growth of plants used for basket-making.

“Before we started burning, you’d seldom see a deer on the reservation,” said Robbins, co-founder and executive director of the Cultural Fire Management Council.

She described her community’s young men leaving their reservation — sometimes risking heavy fines — to bring deer meat home to feed their families.

“Now,” Robbins said, “they just go to the places where we burn.”

Fire also impacts her community’s water quality, she said.

“When we burn and leave the charcoal on the landscape, it filters the water, making it more pure,” she explained.

“Also, it reduces the amount of vegetation on the land, [creating] more water flow to the creeks, which flows to the rivers.”

Most important, the community’s use of prescribed and cultural burning also helps prevent out-of-control wildfires.

“One of the few things that impacts the spread and intensity of wildfire is where the place has already been burned,” she said. 

“In the absence of fire, our homes become tinder boxes.”

‘Let’s take our place in the ecosystem’

It’s only been 12 years since the Yurok people reclaimed their right to do cultural burns. 

Robbins said her grandchildren have never known a world where their community did not manage fire on their territories.

“It’s really an ambition to be putting fire on the ground,” she explained, “to help create the enabling conditions for not only us to burn, but for others to burn also.”

She is part of several groups who meet together to influence state policy and guide legislation. 

In 2021, California created a prescribed fire liability fund “to support and expand private prescribed fires throughout the state,” budgeting US$20 million (C$28 million) for the initiative.

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She believes it’s “our responsibility as humans” to help take care of the land with fire.

“We can’t just rely on lightning strikes to do it,” she said. “We are part of the ecosystem. We need to step up.”

She hopes more Indigenous Peoples learn to reconnect with traditions that “use fire safely” again. 

“Let’s take our place in the ecosystem to restore it to help.”

One strategy the community undertook was to get everyone involved in encouraging family burns. Robbins explained this approach was the Yurok’s “traditional way of burning” — families “out burning around their homes and gathering places, at the right place at the right time,” she said.

They also offer “aspiring firefighter workshops” for “people that have never worked with fire that want to learn how,” she said.

“It’s my belief that everybody should have the right to use fire. We used to have that right. We used to do that, and our landscapes looked a lot better.”

‘We do it the way we want to do it’

Seven participants represented First Nations in Australia at the gathering, where they offered insight into their people’s relationship with fire and how they use it on their homelands.

“In different places, during certain climates, we’ll burn for plants, for animals,” Deborah Swan, a Ngarrindjeri imimini (woman), said.

“We never use fuel. To us, that’s another contamination to soil and the Earth. We use natural fibers and things like fire sticks.”

Certain fire sticks are used depending on a burn’s objectives — for instance, what kind of plants or other resources a fire keeper is hoping will regenerate afterwards.

She noted her community comes across different government legislation that is “trying to take our knowledge” without actually respecting Indigenous Peoples leading the work.

“Sometimes, we’re being put to the side,” she said. “Or they’re still using fuel, or still telling us when we can burn.”

She believes the fire traditions must be maintained “to keep our women strong, and know that they’re supported to continue their practices.”

Cultural burns, she said, are still “very much a community burn.”

“The children are there,” she explained. “You can walk around barefeet if you want to.”

When it comes to cultural burning on Crown land, Cavanagh said Australian federal and state governments claim they want to include First Nations’ voices in fire legislation and create opportunities for them.

But that inclusion happens on settlers’ terms, “under their prescriptions,” she said — with government telling Indigenous Peoples rules such as, “You must do this training” or “You have to wear a hat, you got to wear shoes, you got to do all these things.”

But cultural fire on Country is easy for her community when it’s on their private lands, she said. 

“We do it the way we want to do it. It is actually us leading and having a say on what that looks like. That’s the important thing.”

Fire as a source of Indigenous healing

Cassandra McKechnie — who is Wiradjuri, Taepadthigi, Kulkagal, Saibailaig and Erubian — said the cultural fire space has become a source of healing for Indigenous Peoples in Australia.

“You see the impact it has on Country and everything that lives within Country, and that extends to us as well,” McKechnie said.

“I started to feel that in myself and in my spirit.”

Rhys Pacey, a Waagay cultural burn practitioner and the chief fire practitioner with Yurruungga Aboriginal Corporation, said the beauty of cultural burning is also in all the relationships it builds — not just with the community and its children, but with the land itself.

That includes interacting with wildlife, trees and other plants, Pacey said.

Once a cultural fire is started, and its smoke begins to appear, “You just see the way everything reacts,” he explained. “Then you stop and you use all your senses. You just immerse yourself. It’s repairing.”

Dean Thomas Kelly, chief executive officer of Yurruungga Aboriginal Corporation, described himself as “a proud Gumbaynggirr custodian.” 

Kelly said gatherings of Indigenous Peoples — like the one in snpink’tn last month — help him realize “we haven’t lost anything when we come together.”

“And I think that is the most beautiful journey I have been on.”

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Wildfire is part of the natural lifecycle of a forest; but as Manitoba continues to battle the embers of its most devastating fire season in more than 30 years, its leaders are starting to consider a more active role in managing this critical resource to stave off the flames.

In early October, as more than 70 wildland fires still smouldered across the province, Premier Wab Kinew and a handful of cabinet ministers released Manitoba’s first all-encompassing plan to slash carbon emissions in the next 25 years. 

Among the promised initiatives was a commitment to “co-develop a wildfire prevention and preparation approach that reflects Indigenous leadership, land-based knowledge and nature-based solutions” — a first hint at how the provincial government plans to respond to the growing threat of wildfire.

“We just came out of the worst wildfire season in living memory,” Environment and Climate Change Minister Mike Moyes said at a press conference for the new strategy this week.

“We recognize that local communities often will have insights in how to respond or how to prevent things. As we review [the wildfire response], we’re going to be looking to make those connections with local leaders and communities so we can get it right, heaven forbid, if that ever happens again.”

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The 2025 wildfire season, which began in early May in the midst of a record-shattering heat wave, has seen 432 fires consume more than 2.1 million hectares of land — a surface area larger than Lake Ontario. Two people died trying to evacuate a blaze near Lac Du Bonnet, the first civilian wildfire deaths in Manitoba’s recent history. The province declared a state of emergency in late May and another in July. The Canadian Red Cross recorded more than 32,000 evacuees, many of whom are still waiting to go home. 

In nearly 100 years of recorded wildfire history in the province, only the 1989 season was more severe. 

There are few details about the direction Manitoba’s fire prevention strategy will take. Provincial officials have deferred questions about the strategy until the final review is completed. 

But in an interview prior to the launch of the emissions-reduction plan, Natural Resources Minister Ian Bushie acknowledged the wildfire risk is changing — and Manitoba’s approach to managing its forest resources will need to change too.

“If this fire season is our new normal,” he says, “then maybe we’ve got to be able to adapt some of our policies to adhere to what that new normal would entail.”

Manitoba’s forestry industry is ‘scared to death’ of increasing wildfire risk

Michael Doig is a long-time Manitoba forester who currently manages a working group in the province’s forestry and peatlands branch. 

Much of his team’s work involves taking detailed inventories, carefully monitoring forest health and conducting complex modelling to draw up decades- or centuries-long plans for harvesting and regenerating the province’s vast forests.

Nearly half of Manitoba’s land area is covered by forest — 26.3 million hectares in all. The majority is made up of dense, boreal wood: a mix of boggy, black spruce lowlands, and uplands dotted with white spruce, poplar and jack pine. There are stands of broadleaf forest dotting the southern prairie grasslands — clusters of aspen, burr oak and other deciduous species.

Some two million hectares are considered provincial forests, which serve as recreation areas, research hubs and timber reserves. Other sections are wrapped within the bounds of provincial parks and protected areas, where they are (for the most part) undisturbed by industrial activities.

And then there are the 11 million hectares of woodlands set aside for commercial logging in two sprawling forest management licence areas — where Doig and his team invest the majority of their resources.

“Our province is huge and our forest industry is somewhat centralized in the northwest and western regions,” Doig says.

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That’s not to say the rest of the province’s forests go without oversight. In eastern and central Manitoba, provincial staff keep track of logging and renewal activities and manage limited, small quota harvests. The province participates in a national forest health survey every year, which requires flying over and monitoring forests in provincial parks and other forested regions.

But the two large swaths of land licensed to forestry companies Canadian Kraft Paper and Louisiana-Pacific come with boots-on-the-ground monitoring, troves of inventory data — and the potential to generate significant provincial revenue.

Logging generated $6.4 million in Crown royalties in 2024, though a significant drop compared to 2022 and 2023, when royalties reached approximately $12 million. 

According to the Forest Industry Association of Manitoba, the industry generates an average of $700 million in revenues annually and contributes more than $330 million to the provincial GDP. 

Fire seasons like this year’s are bad for business. 

More than 1.2 million hectares burned in logging licence areas alone in 2025 — approximately 10 per cent of the province’s regularly harvested forests. It’s the most damage the logging areas have seen in nearly 100 years of recorded fire history.

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It’s still too early to determine the full consequences the fires will have on Manitoba’s logging industry, and Doig says the province will soon review the impacts and could potentially adjust harvest borders to compensate for potential damage in the future. 

But the trends that have emerged across the country in recent years are cause for concern.

“The [forestry] industry is scared to death,” says British Columbia-based Bob Gray, one of Canada’s foremost wildfire researchers.

June and July 2023 saw lumber production in Canada dip 20 per cent below the previous five-year average for the same months, according to a report from the Canadian Climate Institute. The research group’s modelling shows if forests are left to burn as they have, the impacts of climate change — including wildfires — could cost the country thousands of jobs and billions in revenue.

The impacts are already felt in B.C., where lumber mills have closed after fire decimated their source of product. 

“Whole regions now have nothing but young trees. There’s nothing to harvest,” Gray says. 

If nothing changes, “those regions will start to expand. It will get to a point where the industry is done. You’re chasing guts and feathers across the landscape.”

According to the Canadian Climate Institute, the cost of wildfire protection has been climbing by $150 million per decade since the 1970s. Wildfires have cost provincial governments more than $1 billion in six of the last ten years.

Wildfires, to some extent, beget more wildfires. Severe burns can damage soil, making it more challenging for a forest to recover and leaving the forest more vulnerable to future burns. Forests that re-burn multiple times are at risk of transforming to new, less treed ecosystems. 

As fires burn they blanket the skies in heavy smoke and harmful particulate matter (associated with increased risk of health issues impacting the lungs, heart, cardiovascular system and brain). These pollutants contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, and trap heat in the atmosphere, worsening climate impacts like drought — which in turn makes forests more vulnerable to fire.

Proactive forest management can mitigate wildfires — and ensure sustainable harvests

In his 40 years of wildfire research, Gray says he’s starting to see approaches to forest management change — but just not as fast as they need to.

Historically, forest management has focused on economic returns, both in terms of royalties to the Crown and revenues for shareholders. 

“But if forestry is going to survive then we have to tackle the fire-risk problem, and that means doing very specific treatments in very specific places not driven entirely by economics,” Gray says. 

Gray acknowledges that might require compromises like asking companies to harvest less profitable stands for the greater benefit of managing fire risk. But Gray believes there are ways to get the best of both worlds, bringing profit for industry while helping manage the long-term risks.

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Foresters choose stands to harvest based on age, health and vulnerability to natural disturbances such as disease or fire. Manitoba’s forestry department prioritizes harvesting older or damaged stands with “a high fuel load, so lots of standing dead timber or ladder fuel,” Doig says. Ladder fuel refers to dead trees or underbrush that help a fire climb higher up a tree.

“When you take an old, tall forest and make it into a young, short forest, fire behaviour changes dramatically.” 

That’s because older forests often have more timber that’s ready to burn — and more fuel creates more intense fires, Doig explains. 

Doig says forestry teams have recently started to prioritize stands closer to communities — even if they aren’t the most profitable — to help protect homes, buildings and critical infrastructure from fire.

“We’ve always tried to stay away from communities; the thought process is now changing a bit. We need to get closer to communities with our forest management activities to change the forest landscape a little bit,” he explains.

Gray says the forestry industry can also look to diversify stands while regenerating forests. Flammable conifers, which make up the majority of replanted forests, aren’t always good investments.

“The chances that the tree you plant today is going to make it to maturity in 100 years is pretty slim,” he says.

Instead, he recommends planting more hardwood lumber — like aspen — to take advantage of its fire-resilient qualities. A mature aspen stand can be significantly cooler and damper than surrounding areas while serving as a barrier against high winds. 

Doig says Manitoba has considered changing the forest composition, but it can be challenging. Jack pines — a big part of Manitoba’s loggable forests — grow naturally in deep sandy soil; aspen stands may not be sustainable in the same growing conditions.

The province is, however, studying assisted migration, a process of deliberately moving seeds from one area of the forest to another to understand and better predict how forest composition will evolve.

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But the most important role industry can play in fire mitigation, Gray says, is transforming how it deals with slash — a term for the unsaleable trees, branches, deadwood and discarded treetops left behind after the harvest.

One hectare of harvested forest can generate between 50 and 100 tonnes of slash, Gray says, and all that woody detritus on the forest floor fuels hotter and more intense wildfires.

It’s standard practice for foresters to limit slash as much as possible; emerging biomass and engineered wood product markets have created more uses for the leftover lumber and more opportunities to maximize the economic value of forests. Manitoba is already looking for ways to cash in on those markets, Doig says. 

But in cases where that’s not possible — like forests that aren’t easy to access by road or are located far from processing and manufacturing facilities, “you basically need to start to burn the slash,” Gray says. 

“That’s the key strategy: thinning it and then burning it.”

In Manitoba, Doig says, the slash that can’t be brought to market is typically spread out on the landscape to allow nutrients to return to the soil and provide habitat for small animals while avoiding the risks posed by large piles of dead, flammable wood. 

But Gray says even slash that’s been spread out can be “hazardous forever” in a time of extreme fire weather. 

“Timber harvest just rearranges fuels, it doesn’t remove fuels,” Gray says. “All you’ve done is take canopy fuels, aerial fuels, and put them on the ground. You open things up, now things are hotter and drier and there’s no wind friction — so you just sped up fire.”

By contrast, a forest stand that’s deliberately burned after harvest becomes more resilient, he says. 

Grassy, herbaceous vegetation will grow back first, and in the case of a wildfire, will burn with less intensity than denser forest. Once replanted conifer trees are tall enough to close the canopy and shade the grassy material below, the stand is “sort of non-burnable for a while,” Gray says.

“I think prescribed burning is always a tool for consideration, but it’s not part of our plan, not part of our toolbelt at this time,” Doig says of Manitoba’s forest management strategy. Records show 42 such burns in provincial history, all between 1995 and 2015. 

Canadian Kraft Paper and Louisiana-Pacific did not respond to written requests for comment. The Forest Producers Association referred interview requests to members of the Wildfire Consortium of Canada, which was not able to comment on forest industry perspectives by publication time.

Experts recommend strategic forest thinning in Manitoba’s provincial parks

Outside of the logging areas, forest management activities are limited. Manitoba conducts forest health surveys and allows limited harvest, but Gray says provinces should take more active roles in managing its forests in parks and protected areas too. 

While the intent behind leaving swathes of forest undisturbed by industrial activity is laudable, “fire doesn’t recognize lines on a map,” he says. 

Nopiming Provincial Park was all but wiped out by a 359,000-hectare fire that started in early May. After more than 150 days, the sprawling blaze has consumed more than 70 per cent of Nopiming, along the province’s eastern flank, and portions of Atitaki Provincial Park farther north. As of early October, it is still considered an active fire.

All told, more than 260,000 hectares of provincial park lands have been impacted by fire this year — more than double the total area burned between 2020 and 2024.

Forest management in these parks is minimal, Doig says. Logging was banned in all but one provincial park in 2009, so there’s less attention to forest inventory and strategic harvesting, though staff do clear some sections for infrastructure, park expansion and other needs.

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Gray says provincial governments can take cues from Canada’s national parks to better manage those protected forests. 

Industrial logging is generally prohibited in national parklands, but strategic forest thinning is permitted in some parks to reduce fire risk. Jasper National Park, which was scorched by wildfire in 2024, has allowed selective logging and prescribed burns to clear excess vegetation, especially surrounding infrastructure and townsites, since 2003. 

Riding Mountain National Park, in Western Manitoba, conducted 4,000 hectares of prescribed burning in 2024 and a further 1,400 hectares in April this year.

British Columbia has adopted similar practices in its provincial parks, Gray says. 

The key is that provincial governments need to take a more proactive role in protecting these natural resources from fire. 

“We cannot take a static approach in dynamic systems,” Gray says. More time and resources need to be invested in “getting out ahead of as much fire as possible versus reacting to it.”

Manitoba needs diverse viewpoints to shape its wildfire strategies: minister

Manitoba Minister of Natural Resources and Indigenous Relations, Bushie, who oversees both the wildfire service and the forestry department, says the early start to this year’s fires put more of a spotlight on wildfire mitigation. 

“As a good, responsible steward of the land … it’s imperative that we evolve when things change,” he says. “As much as I want to say we have policies in place, absolutely they’re going to evolve as the seasons progress. And if there’s added investments we need … I think we have to maintain that flexibility.”

Fire mitigation strategies were top of mind for Bushie and other Canadian leaders during the annual meeting of the Council of Canadian Forest Ministers in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador in June. 

The council released its Wildland Fire Prevention and Mitigation Strategy in 2024 after more than two years of engagement with political leaders, academics, Indigenous governments and industry. 

“Wildland fire management in Canada needs to be transformed,” the strategy reads. “This transformation can only be achieved by taking a more proactive approach to preventing and mitigating risks before they occur.”

To get there, the report stresses the need for a whole-of-society approach, with leadership from both governments and Indigenous communities often uniquely impacted by wildfire; more than 40 per cent of fire-related evacuations between 1980 and 2021 were in predominantly Indigenous communities. The report recommends increased investment in training, education and prevention programs, as well as financial incentives for industry.

Implementation is currently underway, focused on risk planning and community education before shifting investment to prevention and mitigation programs. 

Whatever tools the province ultimately chooses to advance its wildfire mitigation efforts, Bushie says it will need input from First Nations, rightsholders, industry, community members and other “boots on the ground” Manitobans.

“I don’t think there’s a one-size fits all brush when it comes to forestry management,” Bushie says.

“It would be irresponsible of us not to engage and have every idea on the table.”

Julia-Simone Rutgers is a reporter covering environmental issues in Manitoba. Her position is part of a partnership between The Narwhal and the Winnipeg Free Press.

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This story is part of Habitat, a series from The Narwhal which looks at how communities are working to address the housing and climate change crises simultaneously

Since wildfires tore through his Yunesit’in community in 2017, Russell Myers Ross has been pursuing a dream: building a fire-resistant house that will survive everything climate change can throw at it. 

“I sometimes joke that we could make this good enough to have a grandmother stay in here and live through the apocalypse,” Ross says with a laugh.

His community, one of six in the Tsilhqot’in Nation, was severely damaged in the 2017 wildfire season. Afterward, Ross, who was elected chief at the time, began envisioning a housing solution. The design includes a white, highly reflective metal roof that deflects heat and is fire-resistant, gravel lining the house and sprinklers facing the walls — using easily accessible technologies for a resilient home that makes sense for the dry, hot interior of B.C.

The fire-resistant house is designed to be built with high-quality materials that fend off flame and smoke while incorporating the elements of traditional Yunesit’in pit homes — round and set in the ground. Ross wants more for his community than the houses introduced with the Indian Act, which were often low-quality.

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“We should build houses that are better than the ‘INAC shacks,’ ” Ross says, referring to the nickname for houses provided by the former department of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada (which has since had many similar names and is now two separate federal departments).

In 2016, Ross began talking to professor John Bass from the University of British Columbia’s school of architecture and landscape architecture to realize his vision, and work took off in earnest in 2018 after the destructive wildfires. On Monday they released videos of the prototype that include a three-dimensional walk-through of the design and community members speaking to the importance of getting this house built.

“This work has been done. It’s just about finding a funder to get a prototype,” Bass says.

Outdoor space includes space for a fire and a smokehouse

The 2017 fires burned 2,326 square kilometres around Yunesit’in — a region almost as big as Metro Vancouver. Since then, the Yunesit’in government wrote a report on how to prepare for future wildfires, which included more resilient housing. The Tsilhqot’in National Government has been revitalizing cultural burning, which was outlawed by the province for decades even though it helps clear the forest understory to reduce the chance of highly catastrophic fires.

In a 2019 report by the Tsilhqot’in National Government, community members said their top housing concerns are the need for major repairs, the high cost of energy, overcrowded homes and mold — which, like smoke, is a respiratory health risk. The concerns made it crystal clear to Ross that people need higher quality housing. In a 2019 survey done by Yunesit’in, people also said they wanted storage sheds, renewable energy options, smokehouses, gardens and outdoor space.

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Ross now works in an array of positions, including advancing fire stewardship in the Dasiqox Tribal Park, led by Yunesitʼin and the Xeni Gwetʼin First Nations, and being the online program and operations manager to the Bachelor of Indigenous Land Stewardship at the University of British Columbia, but remains committed to the fire-resistant house. He says Indigenous concepts of homes are expansive, reflecting each nation’s territory, history and values. Building a culturally specific home may mean prioritizing emissions reduction or hiring community members as builders. It can mean ample outdoor or shared community spaces. 

“It’s trying to get a feel of what a liveable space is for people,” Ross says.

For this design, it means extending beyond walls — the outdoor space, which includes plans for a fire pit, space to process meat and a smokehouse, is just as important, he says, as what’s built indoors.

Because so much family time centres around preparing and enjoying food together, the space was designed so that residents can move seamlessly from inside to the fire and food-processing area outside. “That was the most important cultural idea — living happens outside as much as it happens inside,” Bass says. 

They wanted the home to reflect a Tsilhqot’in pit house, and to be simple and durable. Although this design is not round like a pit house, they tried to emulate the feeling by placing a central skylight above a stove marking the centre of the home and columns along the edges.

The design is made to fit Yunesit’in’s needs, but Ross hopes the template can be adapted for other Indigenous cultures — imagining, for example, a design that reflects the long houses of coastal First Nations.

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Clean air, fire-resilient wood and energy efficiency

Reflecting members’ desire for sustainability, the house includes a heat pump for cooling during heat waves, solar panels for energy efficiency, a membrane to prevent mold and high-efficiency air filtration (called HEPA) for smoke. The design meets step 4 of the BC Energy Step Code, which is almost at a passive house level. A passive house is a voluntary standard to make a building highly efficient due to passive elements of its design (like being well-sealed and using high-quality materials and insulation) versus relying on active heating and cooling.

The home is also designed with heat recovery ventilation (HRV) technology, which replaces stale indoor air with fresh outdoor air without compromising the energy-efficient seal of the home.

Some technology, like the HEPA filtration, is simple to install and available in hardware stores but still rarely found on reserve, Bass says. “They’re commonly understood but cost money,” he explains.

In addition to gravel around the house, fire protection includes naturally fire-resistant berry hedges that can capture burning embers from fires. It includes rainwater harvesting for irrigation and fire emergencies, and sprinklers to spray against the walls and moisten them to help prevent them catching fire.

The walls were one area culture and economics came into play — Bass wanted metal walls, but community members wanted wood. The final compromise was to use charred wood, which has a scorched exterior. “It’s harder to ignite — but in an intense fire, it’s going to burn,” Bass says.

Ross says they were considering what resources they have available.

“Part of it, for us, was like, ‘What can we build from our own landscape?’ … We were trying to think long-term in that regard,” Ross says. He was thinking of what resources can be depended on and what jobs can be locally supported and maintained over time. “If we’re going to design something, we’ve got to design it with all of our interests in mind,” he adds.

Bass says that he has learned how important it is to adapt when working with capacity-strapped communities. In this case, he and his students had to focus on designing with Yunesit’in ideas at the centre, even if that meant deadlines extended outside of the academic calendar. “It’s their project,” he emphasizes. The goal is to help a community realize their vision — not “burden” them with imposed timelines.

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The housing problem requires ‘many solutions’ for many First Nations contexts

Like Yunesit’in with the University of British Columbia, other B.C. First Nations are forming partnerships to build housing that reflects their cultures and visions for the future, including the realities of climate change. 

Bass and his students also worked with Haíɫzaqv (Heiltsuk) Nation to build four tiny homes. The community faces a similar housing shortage and is looking for ways to install clean energy infrastructure and build climate-resilient homes to survive heat waves, sea-level rise and wildfires.

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On Vancouver Island, Cowichan Tribes is building River’s Edge, a project of over 200 rental townhomes, with priority given to community members for some of the below-market units. To account for possible flooding of the Cowichan River, the development involves removing sediment from the river to prevent build-up and deepen the river to prevent overflow. That sediment has been used at other construction sites, with royalties going back to the nation.

“We’re obviously experiencing climate chaos,” Renée Olson, interim chief executive officer of Cowichan’s Khowutzun Development Corporation, says. “So to mitigate when floods will happen, we’re very conscientious about sediment removal.”

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Cowichan Tribes developed its project through the BC Builds program, run by the Crown corporation BC Housing. It focuses on rental housing, keeping rental costs down through low-interest financing, finding ways to speed the development process and utilizing public lands.

“One of the reasons housing has become out of reach, especially in dense residential [areas], is shareholders were demanding a rate of return,” Olson says. “This is why this BC Builds program is so important … It’s about creating opportunities for community land.”

Cultural elements of River’s Edge include spacious indoor kitchens, a shared outdoor kitchen, a community garden and native plants.

Cowichan has more than 5,500 citizens, and the plan is for money generated from the development to go back into building homes on reserve — where many more are needed.

“It takes many solutions, different solutions, to tackle this complex problem,” Olson adds.

Construction and housing costs higher than ever

Ross says the main obstacle to getting the first prototype house built is funding — not just enough to get the walls up, but to benefit the community.

Since COVID-19 hit in 2020, construction costs have skyrocketed, Bass explains, all while housing problems also ballooned. It’s now harder than ever to catch up, he says, but they’ll be contacting government, industry, foundations and private donors for potential support. 

For Ross, getting this house built is just one step in a larger vision. He wants to build more high-quality homes, but also a local economy, including training and hiring members to build and maintain the homes — something that would require a locally owned mill. He sees a self-sustaining future.

“The idea was to have a circular economy — so we’re building from our community, but with the hope that we could build enough capacity to help our other surrounding communities,” he says.

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After 24 days of being forbidden from entering the forest, some Nova Scotians are returning to nature. The province lifted its wildfire-related ban in Halifax and counties farther northeast on Aug. 29, with Premier Tim Houston saying in a news release that conditions were “heading in the right direction in certain parts of the province.” 

Every Atlantic province had some form of fire or burning restriction at different points during the dry summer of 2025, but Nova Scotia invited fresh controversy when it banned all access to the woods provincewide on Aug. 5. The province set its fine for violating the woods ban at $25,000, the same amount it fines those that set illegal fires. According to CBC, more than $1 million in fines has been issued for illegal burning in the last two and a half years. 

New Brunswick followed Nova Scotia’s lead and restricted industrial and recreational activities on Crown land, a ban that was mostly lifted on Aug. 26. 

Nova Scotia’s problems aren’t over. Crews are still battling fires in Long Lake, along the province’s north shore in the Annapolis Valley region. Despite the continued risk and considerable damage — over 1,000 residents were evacuated because of the Long Lake fire and 20 homes were lost — not everyone agrees with the restriction on entering the woods, which remains in place in 11 of the province’s 18 counties. In mid-August, Jeff Evely of Westmount, N.S., recorded himself violating the ban.

“I want to challenge this in court,” Evely says to Department of Natural Resources officers in the video. “And the only way for me to do that is to get the fine. So, I’m not trying to make trouble for you guys, okay? I just want a piece of Tim Houston and I want to be as accommodating and as nice as I can be.”

Evely, a veteran who was a People’s Party of Canada candidate for Sydney-Glace Bay in last spring’s federal election, wasn’t alone. The social media response to the woods ban invoked COVID-inspired debates about safety and government overreach. 

Opinions were just as mixed last weekend in Halifax’s Point Pleasant Park and Shubie Park in Dartmouth, as families, dog-walkers and runners headed back into the woods. Some parkgoers said they were glad to follow the rules to help keep the province safe from fire, while others said at least some public spaces should have stayed open. 

Everyone said they were happy to be back.

Interviews have been condensed and edited for clarity.

Point Pleasant Park — Halifax

James Byers, public servant

What he was doing in the park: walking his dog.

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“It gets boring walking the same routes and I like feeling grounded, but I think the ban was a good preventative measure and I think that most people respected it. I had coworkers that lost their cottages and had to evacuate last year with the fires out in the Beechville, Hammonds Plains area.

We did our camping and our summer trips earlier in the season, so it didn’t impact our vacation plans. We had family who went camping and couldn’t light a fire but they still had a good time.”

Chris Webster, student, and Lauren Theriault, film and television costumer

What they were doing in the park: walking their dog.

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Theriault: “We’ve had a sad dog. It was really hard because it was too hot during the day to walk her on pavement.”

Webster: “It’s been a long month and a half. I think the worst thing was trying to get the unhoused community in Halifax out of the woods. They have nowhere else to go and they’re already kicking them out of encampments. They go to the woods to get away from the city that they’re being kicked out of and then they’re being kicked out of the woods.”

Abdoulaye Barry, founder, Ten Toes Down run club

What he was doing in the park: leading a run.

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“I’m the type of guy that loves the outside, and every member here loves Point Pleasant. We tried running at [a local track called] The Oval but a lot of people didn’t like it that much.

Honestly, Point Pleasant, there’s no better place to run. I think a place like this should always be open to the public, because everyone has reasons why they’re here. For the run club, it’s health benefits, right? Social benefit and psychological growth.

I live downtown in an apartment that has a gym and equipment. So, when it came to physical fitness, I had other [options], but I’m sure other people were affected.”

Jay Gaerlan, digital creator

What he was doing in the park: running with Ten Toes Down.

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“This community really started in Point Pleasant Park. To have that taken away was really awful. It feels good to be back. A lot of people relieve stress by being in nature. It felt like something was missing.  

We almost had to evacuate when there was a fire in Bayer’s Lake. My house was like a kilometre away.”

Shubie Park — Dartmouth, N.S.

Jared MacPhee, comic artist

What he was doing in the park: walking his dog.

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“I have a very high-maintenance dog and the ban prevented me from going to parks in the area, so he was going stir crazy in my house.

I thought it was reasonable. I understand the precautions. Obviously, I don’t want forest fires. Obviously, post-COVID you never like government lockdowns. A bit of a PTSD situation, but I go along with the rules, even if I don’t like them.

There’s a little trail in the woods that we walk every day. It’s just weird, having a little slice of your neighbourhood you’re not allowed to go into anymore.”

Roberto Guebara, chef

What he was doing in the park: showing a friend from Italy “one of the most beautiful parks we have in the city.”

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“Feels great, bringing the kids back to breathing fresh air and enjoying the views, seeing this beautiful thing we have here. I’m not really completely in agreement with the ban but we had to follow the rules and respect the fires that were happening.”

Donna King, anesthesia assistant

What she was doing in the park: walking her dog.

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“I think it was a little over the top. I wish they’d have kept those city parks open, because it wasn’t deep in the woods. There’s not many places to go in the city. It’s tough not being able to take [my dog] Dino to water.”

Cheryl Cort, retired, and Kimberlee McTaggart, film and television editor

What they were doing in the park: running with the Heart and Sole Running Club.

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Cort: “If it had to be, it had to be. We don’t want fires. That’s what they thought was necessary.”

McTaggart: “I’m glad they left the path along Lake Banook open. I really wish they would have opened the waterfront trail, which is a paved path through a tiny bit of woods that people use as commuters.

I like to bikepack and I was hoping to get one more weekend in August. My usual is out to Dollar Lake. That was the only thing that affected me and I wasn’t that upset about it because we needed to do it.

We have a place in Porter’s Lake and there was a fire nearby, mostly in Lake Echo. It didn’t hit us but it hit Mineville Road and it felt like it was on the way.”

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