The Current - Republicans say Canadian wildfire smoke is ruining summer

Episode Date: July 16, 2025

As the wildfires burn across Canada and the smoke blurs out skylines, a group of Republican members of Congress is complaining that the suffocating air quality from Canadian wildfires is ruining the summer for Americans. Ed Struzik, author of The Future of Fire, explains what we are getting right and wrong when it comes to managing our forests and whether more could be done to prevent wildfires.

There are two kinds of Canadians. Those who feel something when they hear this music. And those who've been missing out so far. I'm Chris Howden. And I'm Nile Coxall. We are the co-hosts of As It Happens. And every day we speak with people at the center of the day's most hard hitting, heartbreaking, and sometimes hilarious news stories.

Also, we have puns. Here Why As It Happens is one of Canada's longest running and most beloved shows. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is the current podcast. The fight against several out of control wildfires continues in Saskatchewan. This is the largest evacuation Manitoba will have seen in most people's living memory. We have evacuated most of our residents from Pelican Arrows.

More than a hundred fires are choking the air, prompting new evacuation orders and alerts. Environment Canada says westerly winds are carrying smoke from active wildfires. It's just absolutely decimated. Hardly a day goes by now that Canadian wildfires aren't in the headlines. Tens of thousands of people have had to flee their homes this summer and smoke is blurring out skylines in several North American cities. That smoke has led a group of Republican members of Congress to send a letter to Canada's ambassador to the U.S. complaining that suffocating air quality from Canadian wildfires

is ruining the summer for Americans. Ed Strusik is a fellow at the Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy at Queen's University. He's written extensively about climate change and wildfires and joins us regularly to talk about this. He's on the line from his home in Edmonton. Good morning, Ed. Good morning, Megan. In that letter, Congress members blame Canada's poor forest management for these wildfires. Are they right? Not really. You know, most of that smoke comes from lightning-triggered fires in areas where, you know, we don't have a lot of firefighting capacity there immediately. And so they're the ones that cause most of the smoke.

And if they're lightning caused, there's nothing we can do about lightning. And the fact is, is that because the climate is warming, we're getting more lightning strikes and more fires starting that way. So it's pretty difficult to control the smoke in from those fires. Now you've been critical about how Canada manages its forests. Are there parts of the country that are doing a better job than others in managing forests? Yeah I think so. I think you know Parks Canada back in 2003 with a couple of prescribed burns that got out of control and the very

close possibility that Banff might have burned came to the realise that they have a problem and they started working on it slowly but surely. They probably could have gone a lot faster. But Parks Canada has the resources. They have a top-notch fire science program in place. They've got a team of wildfire fighters that are permanently employed. It's very unlike any situation around the rest of the country. We also have some communities like Whitehorse that have started to become more resilient with prescribed burns and thinning out the forest around that town. But most of these places just

don't have the resources like Parks Canada has to be able to deal with the emerging fire problem. So resources is part of the problem. I mean, what else is getting in the way of doing a better job across the country to mitigate these fires and the damage that they're causing? I think the big problem is that, you know, we're seeing now in Manitoba and other parts of the country, it's these small boreal forest communities that are constantly getting evacuated and those communities just don't have the tax base or the resources to make themselves more resilient. You need money to be able to do that and that money just isn't there, you know, as it is say in Banff National Park or in Jasper or Riding Mountain National Park. And so those are the communities that are really vulnerable. Now, the letter from Congress also blames arson as a key culprit for some of the big

wildfires. How does arson compare to natural causes of these fires? Well, they should really look at themselves because in the United States arson is much – especially in California, is a much bigger problem than it is here in Canada. I mean, we do have, you know, cases of arson, but the majority of fires are caused by either lightning or humans, you know, working, playing in the forest that are not doing it on purpose. It just comes, you know, with, you know, transmission lines that may falter, work crews that may inadvertently ignite a fire with an all-terrain vehicle, spark coming out, that kind of thing.

So I don't think arson is a really big issue in this country. It certainly is in California. Okay and how much disinformation about wildfires are you seeing spread and also about the role of climate change? You know it's crazy like so many other things in this day and age is that you know some of the things that are coming out you know that the government is actually purposely you know starting these fires. It's a real problem among a whole bunch of different levels. And I think the solution to some extent is that, I think that most of the fire agencies in this country have gone on the defensive and have,

like Parks Canada, have not really touted and told the Canadian public, you know, what they're doing, reassuring them that, yeah, we are doing things, maybe not enough. And I would argue that they're not doing enough. But at the same time, they're allowing, you know, this sort of black hole of information to be taken over by crazies in the social media,

where they've got a lot of good news stories to tell. It's like the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center, which is non-profit, you know, it's a cooperative group between the provinces, the federal government, and the territories, is they've got this fire science site program, pilot program, where they're basically kind of bringing everybody in the fire community together to try to figure out better ways of predicting fires. A lot of good things that are going on and I think also the public needs to be educated and they're not. Right, so better communication from some of those agencies? Yeah and not only the agencies, you know, look at where I live in cities like city of Edmonton,

you know, they really haven't done very much. Ten years after Fort McMurray was evacuated, to tell people who live in the River Valley community is, how can you better protect yourself if a big fire roars through, you know, the biggest urban forest in North America? And I just think that these, you know, these education stories need to be ramped up to kind of under-rock, you know, some of stories need to be ramped up to kind of under-rock, you know, some of the crazy things that are being reported. Yeah, we had a couple of women on a few days ago who were survivors of fires, and one of

them gave some very practical information of things to do. Given that fire behavior itself is changing, what needs to change in the way that we handle wildfires across Canada? Well, we know that they're burning bigger, faster, more often and hotter. We're seeing these pyro-CBs, these fire-driven thunderstorms that can erupt on a blue sky day. We've got to figure out better ways of predicting where and when those are going to happen, so that we can get firefighters out of harm's way, we can get helicopters, planes, air-water bombers out of harm's way.

There's a big challenge ahead and I think it really requires a major investment by the federal government, the provincial governments, the territorial governments really rely on the federal government. But I think it also requires maybe to some extent an audit of just about everything we need to do. Some European Union countries, Italy for example, just did a major peer review audit. People from outside looked at every aspect of their firefighting capacities and what needed to be done. It was a pretty good report. I think that if we did that in Canada,

we could ferret out everything good that we're doing. And there's a lot of good things that are happening, but also pointing out that there's a lot of things that can be done. And, you know, this can be done by experts within the country and say from places like Australia, the United States, Italy and other countries, Greece that are having fires, that they can look and kind of share their information to say, you know, here's how you can improve this situation. Yeah. Now, you mentioned budgets and I know you have spoken out about the need that a lot

of the budgets are suppression of fires over wildfire science and you mentioned this agency as well. We don't have that much time, but can you quickly explain what you mean by that? Sure, you know, we're pretty good at fighting fires. You know, when fires burn, when the season starts ramping up, we've got a lot of people on the ground, a lot of water bombers in the air. You know, we do a pretty good job there. I think what we really need to do is have better capabilities of where do we need to put these people so that they can contain these fires much more quickly than they do now and contain them so that we don't have to evacuate people. That's one example. There's also just investing in fire science that understands what are the landscape changes that are going to take place, how is this going to affect wildlife, tracking smoke, more information that people need about what to do with when there's smoke, big, palt smoke

coming over the city. I'm glad we're done. I mean, we're going to have to leave it there. Thanks so much for speaking with me today. Thanks, Meg. Thanks. Ed Strzysiek is a fellow at the Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy at Queen's University. This has been The Current Podcast. You can hear our show Monday to Friday on CBC Radio 1 at 8.30 a.m. at all time zones. You can also listen online at cbc.ca slash the current or on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts.

My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.