The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Why are Wildfires Getting Worse?

Episode Date: June 18, 2025

Wildfires are increasing in number and intensity around the world. Why is that? And how can Canadians better prepare for wildfire season? We discuss with Anabela Bonada, Managing Director of Climate Science at the University of Waterloo's Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

With wildfires ravaging parts of the country leading to thousands being evacuated from their homes and blanketing cities in smoke, is Canada's wildfire problem continuing to get worse? For more now, we are joined by Annabella Bonada. She is Managing Director of Climate Science at the University of Waterloo's Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation. Annabella, lovely to have you on the program. Thank you for having me. First time, right? Yeah, this is my first time. Excellent, okay. We're gonna start with some pictures here.

This is, Sheldon, you wanna bring these up? This is the fire known as Red Lake 12. This is in Northwestern Ontario. It spans more than, if you can imagine, 175,000 hectares and has forced more than 2,000 people to evacuate from Deer Lake First Nation and Sandy Lake First Nation. And we're going to follow that up with a photo from last week when 19 workers were trapped on a construction site near

Sandy Lake First Nation. To the best of our knowledge, everybody's safe and okay, but this has got to be terrifying. Canadian officials say this wildfire season is about to be the second Canadian officials say this wildfire season is about to be the second worst on record, the worst being 2023. Why is this summer so bad? There are many factors that are contributing to such an intense wildfire season.

So the areas that we're seeing in the country that are having so much wildfire, like in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, they're undergoing drought. They've been undergoing drought for a few months. In the winter months, they didn't have enough snow. So that snowpack was low, and it melted really quickly in the spring. They had a really early spring that was very, very warm.

When that water melts, it doesn't really replenish the ground or the vegetation. In May, parts of Manitoba, of Saskatchewan, we're seeing 30-plus degree Celsius days, something that we didn't have in southern Ontario for example. That hot, dry, windy weather just really helps spread the flames when a wildfire is started. Those early wildfires are usually human caused, so it can be an ATV through an area, a train that goes through an area, or a campfire that starts the wildfire, but the spread is due to all those really dry conditions

and hot conditions that just cause it to grow and grow. I have to learn more about human caused. Human caused as in accidentally, on purpose, or what? Mostly accidentally. So like I mentioned, even a train going through a train track, there's a spark. It can start a wildfire. ATVs out in trails can start a wildfire. Mostly these are accidental as we know and early in

the wildfire season they are caused by humans but as we move in through the season and we get those summer storms, lightning caused most of the wildfires that happen out in remote regions, those big ones that end up spreading, those are caused mostly by lightning. Year-to-year it's about 50 percent human caused, 50 percent lightning caused, but it can vary. I remember when we were kids, obviously, Smokey the Bear was on the commercials saying, make sure you put out your campfires. Is that still a problem today? It is. I'm a big camper and unfortunately, I see people not really listening to these rules that we have, like either don't have a fire, 2023 people could go camping but no fires,

and you would still see some campers having a fire. I think there's just a, like they don't understand the risk that it means to have even that little bit of campfire, but some of us do understand the risk. Okay, let's do some more numbers here. So far this summer, an estimated 220,000 hectares have burned in Ontario, 220,000 hectares have burned in Ontario. 220,000. Compare that to nearly 750,000 hectares in Manitoba and more than a million in British

Columbia. What makes those provinces so far, apparently so much worse than ours? So the conditions of those provinces. So Manitoba's had drought conditions or as I mentioned the spring didn't have that cool like rainy spring that we've been having in Ontario. In Ontario we didn't have the same snow that we've had in the past but we had such cold temperatures that the snow stuck around for a long time and then we've had a spring that, ask any Ontarian, has been cold, rainy, like all the weekends, it always falls on the

weekend but really that's protecting us from those wildfires being more intense in our region this year. I would just caution don't get used to that. Next year drought could hit our region. Drought and precipitation they're locally different so you're not going to get the same thing every year. British Columbia has been undergoing drought since about 2021 so even though they had a better snowpack in some regions of the province, it's too long term. So the ground is not very good at absorbing that moisture when it is there. Obviously we hear the most about fires closer to home, but of course we're not that far removed from Los Angeles and there are stories where this is happening all around the world.

So we are not alone in this, right? This is happening everywhere. It's happening everywhere. When 2023 was the worst wildfire season for us, it was one of the worst for other parts of the world as well. So when we have our summer months, it's the same for Europe. And they were struggling just as much as we were in Portugal and Greece. Their firefighters came here, and then we sent ours out there.

What we saw in LA, that winter wildfire was incredible, just outstanding. That shouldn't have happened to that degree, just things are shifting that much and that quickly that we're starting to see wildfire years instead of wildfire seasons. Obviously, homes can burn, people can be homeless, communities can be destroyed, but go beyond that.

The broader areas where there's nothing but nature, what are the long-term ramifications of having out-of-control wildfires on nature? Unfortunately, it means displacement of wildlife. So they'll move out. They'll try as much as they can. Of course, some animals will die. The biggest issue is that these forest areas might not recover in the way that we would expect because climate change is causing such rapid changes.

So where we had a certain type of forest now that's burning down, we might not have the same one going forward. So we might not have the same ecosystem. Additionally, the emissions from wildfires, they're huge. In 2023, Canadian wildfires emitted the equivalent of the aviation industry globally. So the emissions are enormous when we have wildfires. And they have implications globally. And even if we want to talk about wildfire smoke,

this season already we had wildfire smoke across the country and all the way to the US. So it has a real impact on our health and just kilometers away from where they're occurring. Do you think more people will die of, I don't know, lung-related illnesses because of all the particular matter that has gone further away from where these fires are happening? We have numbers from Public Health Canada

that how acute wildfire smoke can affect people and how chronic wildfire smoke affects people. And it does cause more deaths each year. It's hard to track, and it's hard to have the numbers. And what we've been experiencing over the last few years, I don't think we'll see the real effects until, you know, maybe 10, 15 years from now. There are many people tracking that and doing investigations to see how it's going to affect us.

But I do think we will see an uptick of deaths related or illnesses related to this inhalation of the wildfire smoke. What do you want governments to do to adjust to this new reality? There's so much that governments should be doing. So after 2023, there was a strong federal response saying, we're going to put more funding towards training firefighters, toward the equipment that we need for firefighting and towards FireSmart. So FireSmart is a program that helps homeowners

and communities understand how to reduce risk at their level. However, this isn't going away. So we need to do both things right now. And when I say both, I do mean we need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. If we don't do that, wildfires continue and they will continue to grow and be as intense as they are now.

But we also need to prepare our communities so we do have those programs. We have Fire Smart but how many people are actually fire smarting their homes or their communities? So we need a strong education program so that people understand their risk. Where should they find that education program? So right now Fire Smart has everything online. It's excellent. We have from the Intact Center also just a one sheet infographic that tells you the actions that you can do around your home to reduce your risk right now. But it's alerting people to that. So we are working with different mayors across the country

who are sending these out directly to their constituents. We're working with some banks across the country who are also mailing these out. Some insurance companies are mailing these out. So they're trying to get these out to their customers to really understand their risk and reduce their risk from this. And we're doing as much as we can so even just speaking to the media, going directly and speaking to ministers, provincial and federal and saying hey the education materials here use it, take it, tell people what they can do. I well remember a couple of years ago, the worst year on record, being in northern Ontario and seeing the skies being orange and you couldn't be outdoors because you couldn't

breathe. Do you think that might finally bring it home to people that we are in a situation here? I think it does to many, many people. So when these impacts from climate change start to really impact our life, for example, like our recreation. So the summer months are short in Canada and we like to be outside, but now you're being told you can't go outside because of the smoky air. People feel that impact and they want to see change. They want to know what they can do in the moment, but also in the long run, we're going to continue to have these intense wildfires, we're going to continue to have bad air quality, so there's something that we need to do to

protect our society to continue to have the lifestyle that we enjoy in Canada. Annabella, thank you for this. We are going to take advantage of you schlepping all the way two hours down the 401 to be with us today to put you to work in our next discussion as well about climate change, so stick around and we shall be right back. Thank you for this though. Thank you so much.