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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What causes ‘spread days’?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are the most urgent takeaways this data is showing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continuing to educate the public is also a path forward. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2023 marked a shift in online wildfire misinformation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who benefits from wildfire misinformation on social media? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wildfires are a threat to water security

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Last week, the eyes of the world were on Jasper, Alta., as a fast-moving wildfire swept through the Rocky Mountain community, razing historic buildings, homes and businesses. 

Firefighters on the ground reported meeting walls of flames 100 metres high. More than one-third of the Jasper townsite was destroyed, while approximately 325 square kilometres of the national park — close to three per cent — have been scorched to date. The townsite is now secure, but the out-of-control Jasper wildfire is still burning through forests in the iconic park.

As the Jasper disaster continues to unfold, many Canadians are pointing fingers, looking to blame a single source for what happened. Some say it was the mountain pine beetle, which killed off significant sections of forest, leaving dry, dead trees. Others say not enough was done to thin the forest and build an effective fire break near town. 

The reality, however, is more complicated.

Decades of highly effective fire suppression in and around national parks have left them more vulnerable to large fires, according to Pierre Martel, the director of national fire management for Parks Canada. 

Forests across Canada, and beyond, have been without fire for too long, setting the stage for uncontrollable mega-fires, with seemingly limitless fuel, in a drier and warmer climate.

And it’s not just parks that are primed to burn. 

In B.C., the town of Lytton burned to the ground in 2021 and has yet to be rebuilt. In 2017, a fire swept through Paradise, Calif., claiming 85 lives. That same year, another Rocky Mountain jewel in Alberta, Waterton Lakes National Park, was hit by a massive blaze. 

Research suggests logging leaves boreal forests more susceptible to fire from both lightning strikes and increased human activity in the woods. 

Without small-scale prescribed burns and brush removal to periodically clean the forest floor of natural detritus, parks and other places can quickly succumb to massive wildfires beyond our control. 

Add in climate change, with its increased heat and chaotic precipitation, as well as dead trees from mountain pine beetles — themselves a byproduct of warmer winters and past forest management — and the conditions are prime for a devastating firestorm.

Reversing decades of fire suppression in Jasper and other parks

Forest ecosystems in parks have unique histories and issues — and also unique opportunities for solutions that can help mitigate wildfires. 

Before colonization, Indigenous Peoples managed fire to clear the forests of fuel, promote the growth of traditional and medicinal plants and restore habitat for large mammals and other wildlife. 

In some ways, Martel and others say we’re playing catchup, trying to reverse the consequences of management practices of the recent past and mitigate climate impacts so as to reduce the risk of wildfires in protected areas and improve wildlife habitat. 

“Historically, and probably still today, there would have been more of a tendency towards overprotection of protected areas,” Wesley Bell, a conservation policy specialist with the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, says in an interview. 

After all, parks are managed places. Fire suppression — which has changed the composition of the forests and altered the natural ebb and flow of wildfires — is one aspect of that management. 

Natural Resources Canada says multiple considerations are taken into account in deciding whether to let a fire burn or to fight it, with a focus on saving “high-value commercial forests,” residential areas and recreation sites. The federal department notes, “Protection of rare habitat, culturally significant areas and similar values will influence suppression decisions.”

But leaving things to nature, or undoing the management errors of the past, isn’t always possible, particularly in an increasingly fragmented landscape across vast areas of Alberta and B.C. Even activities like prescribed burning have to be carefully thought out. 

Bell points to caribou in Alberta, noting there isn’t much undisturbed habitat left and it’s difficult to justify burning it to manage the risk of wildfires because the caribou have nowhere else to go.

“I think one of the difficulties in the current landscape, with the amount of industrial disturbance through forestry and mining and everything, is that you can’t manage a protected area on its own. It needs to be within the broader landscape,” he says. “And that’s particularly challenging with the extent of the disturbance that there is in Canada, but in Alberta especially.”

Parks Canada takes similar factors into account when deciding how to confront a fire, according to Martel. 

“In the areas that are within a certain zone, that is tied to the highest risks to people and infrastructure and communities, … we have to continue the suppression history because we can’t afford to have fires freely burning on those landscapes; it’s just too risky,” he says.

There is also the tension between recreation, tourism and protection that is ubiquitous in popular parks — particularly in Jasper, which saw 2.48 million visitors in 2023 and Banff, which saw 4.28 million. The parks are there to be enjoyed, but that must be balanced with the mandate to prevent ecological harms. 

It’s one reason Bell’s organization advocates for expanding Canada’s network of protected areas — to provide more room for recreation and habitat protection as human populations swell and wild spaces become less wild. 

But it’s challenging to balance all those factors. 

Learning to prevent fires — by setting them

Kira Hoffman, a fire ecologist and researcher with the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions, says restoring balance on the landscape isn’t going to happen overnight. 

“The situations that we’ve seen in British Columbia and Alberta and throughout Canada in the last seven or so years have been the accumulation of many things that have gone wrong,” she says. 

According to BC Parks, 13 provincial parks were closed in early August due to wildfires, with another three partially closed. In Alberta, only one provincial park was closed as of Aug. 1, while 12 have been impacted by fires this year, according to data collected by the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society. They include Jasper and Wood Buffalo National Park in northern Alberta.

Hoffman says many provinces are taking more proactive approaches, including supporting Indigenous-led fire stewardship and cultural burning, but more needs to be done at a larger scale. 

In many ways, Parks Canada is ahead of the curve when it comes to fire management in Canada, she adds.

“Parks Canada probably has the most advanced fire program out of anyone,” she says, including the use of prescribed burns. 

“They get a lot of pushback and I feel for them, because they’ve done so much. And they’ve done it on their own before the provinces really came into the picture.” 

Parks Canada says it initiated eight prescribed burns in six different areas in 2023, burning 5.3 square kilometres across Canada. That’s cumulatively less than one per cent of Jasper alone, by comparison, but the agency notes planning for those fires can take years, with consultations and peer review — and then waiting for the right weather conditions at the right time to move forward with a burn. 

Martel says prescribed burns focus on areas that can’t be allowed to burn out of control, including Jasper. He notes the personnel who light controlled fires are the same called on to fight wildfires.“These fire seasons are getting longer — they start earlier, they end later,” he says. “And so then it doesn’t leave us much for a window to make progress on prescribed fires.”

In the off-season, the agency focuses on building fire breaks and removing vegetation that could pose a greater fire risk. 

BC Parks has a program dedicated to fire management, focusing on wildfire planning, prevention and cultural and prescribed burns. The parks branch also conducts regular assessments of hazard trees and tailors approaches to each individual park, a spokesperson said in an email.  

A spokesperson for the Alberta government did not respond to questions by publication time. On Aug. 1, the government listed two prescribed burn projects on its website. 

Hoffman says, “letting fires burn under more moderate fire conditions” helps clear out fuel on the landscape. The challenge, she says, is that wildfires are happening under extreme conditions. Exacerbated by climate change, they can spread rapidly.

Deeply ingrained public perceptions need to shift, Hoffman says. A greater acceptance of prescribed burns as a tool to prevent fire and more education to overcome concerns about them is necessary, she adds.

Jasper and other areas managed with fire in the past

When settlers drew the lines on the map in 1907 to set Jasper’s park boundaries, they were attempting to box in the area’s iconic mountains, glaciers and forests — and keep out the First Nations and Métis peoples who had lived in the area for millennia. Efforts to preserve the awe-inspiring views didn’t take into account the landscape was always evolving and sometimes burned.

“One of the misconceptions is that those places should be free of fire,” Hoffman says. “The reason we create a lot of parks and protected areas is to save that kind of old-growth structure that we love in those places we like to spend time in. Those places were probably managed with fire in the past — and that’s why they look the way they do.”

In other words, the landscapes settlers fell in love with in Jasper and other parks across the country were shaped by fire, but the park conservation model saw fire as a threat, so blazes were quickly extinguished. 

Hoffman thinks the necessary adaptability goes beyond burning and will require bringing on new partners to thin the trees and starve future fires. 

“This is incredibly controversial: forestry really needs to be part of this conversation,” she says. “We cannot do this without forestry.” 

Forestry companies understand the landscape, she says, and have the equipment and skills to thin forests and support fire prevention. 

Building back from Jasper wildfire, and learning from disaster

When the smoke clears in Jasper and the fires begin to die down across Western Canada as winter approaches, the process of rebuilding and re-evaluating will begin. 

Waterton Lakes National Park, nestled southwest of Calgary along the spine of the Rockies, provides a glimpse into the future for Jasper.

The Kenow fire burned 44 per cent of the vegetated area within Waterton, according to Parks Canada. It destroyed the tree canopy in many areas, leaving ash and mineral soil behind. 

But plants soon started to sprout. Wildlife returned to develop new patterns as Parks Canada stayed on high alert to monitor the landscape and fight invasive species. 

“From an ecological perspective, a landscape can be very sensitive to use after fire,” Bell says. “In terms of soil stability, in terms of introduction of invasive species, a lot of this stuff can happen in a post-fire environment.” 

Martel calls Jasper “one of the leading communities” in preparing for wildfires and trying to mitigate their impacts. Among other initiatives, Jasper implemented fire-smart practices and built a community fuel break to slow any potential fire. 

“There is just so far you can go and then sometimes you have a situation like the one we’ve had this past week, where even with all that preparation work, it only gets you so far, unfortunately,” he says. 

He takes solace in the fact most of the town was saved and it appears much of the critical infrastructure remains in place, making it easier to rebuild. But he acknowledges it’s hard to ignore the question whether more could have been done. 

Martel says reviews will take place and Parks Canada will dive deep into what happened, and why, and try to learn from the fire, but that will come later, not while the fire still burns. 

Bell says it’s critical to listen to all voices that want a say in how Jasper builds back, but agrees it will take time.

“I think it would be unfair to start pointing fingers or to kind of think about any big take-home messages without waiting to see,” he says. “It’s still really fresh.”

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.