The Decibel - How wildfires are changing the way we think of summer

Episode Date: June 19, 2025

This year is off to a bad start for wildfires. To date, more than 40,000 people have had to evacuate their homes, and both Manitoba and Saskatchewan declared provincial states of emergency. Even people in communities thousands of miles from the fires have faced hazardous smoke.Temur Durrani has been covering this year’s wildfires for The Globe. He joins us to talk about how wildfires in the summer have become the new normal and why fire chiefs are pushing for a more centralized approach to handling them.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Summer officially starts this week. And for more and more Canadians, that means dealing with wildfires. We've seen a lot of hot spots on the side of the road. The bush was on fire in certain areas. The wind was blowing, it was pretty smoky. The Manitoba government has declared a province-wide state of emergency due to the wildfire situation. Today we're declaring a provincial wildfire state of emergency. The wildfire season began early this year.

Tens of thousands of people have already had to leave their homes. Today we're just going to try and deal with what's happening today and get on with our days today and hopefully on with our days today and hopefully we go home soon. Some are still displaced. Others are now returning to their communities. But even if you've been far away from the actual fires, you've probably felt the effects of the smoke. You might have had to cancel that day at the beach

or keep your kid home from a soccer game. The effects are so widespread that wildfires are changing the way we now experience summer in Canada. So today, The Globe's Timur Durrani is on the show. He's based in Winnipeg and has been covering the wildfires. Tamur will talk about what we've seen so far this year and if a Canada-wide approach is needed for wildfire season. I'm Maynika Ramen-Welms and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Tamur, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me again.

So I know that you are in Winnipeg, which actually is in fairly close proximity to a lot of the fires that we've seen this year. What's it been like in the city? You know, I think here we've had a lot of wildfires closer to Winnipeg than there's ever been before in a very recent time, you know? So every day, I think a lot of people wake up and they start thinking about whether they need to wear a mask outside or they should be spending little time outside because the wildfire smoke has been so bad.

Even earlier in May, before even any of this in the real big sense of the province-wide state of emergency started in Manitoba, there was an early start to the wildfire season even within the province, just not too far outside of Winnipeg near Lactobani by the water side there. And there, of course, two people unfortunately died because of being stuck in their home during a wildfire. But one of the things that really stuck out for me was as I was reporting on that story

and I was near Lactobani, an area that, of course, was safe for me to be in. But the wildfire smoke still got so stuck in my throat that for days I also spent having this weird ticklish feeling, almost like a flu-like sort of tendency. I had runny eyes, runny nose. It was a whole thing. I had to get used to that idea that this

is how it's going to be reporting on wildfires as well. We have been hearing about the wildfires, obviously obviously in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, in other provinces as well tomorrow. Can you just kind of give us a sense like just how bad has it been so far this year? Yeah so maybe let's kind of start with where we're at today. As of today, as we're talking today on Wednesday afternoon, it is 239 active wildfires across the country. 90 of those are considered out of control, which means they're really hard for firefighters to really manage. They are usually encroaching communities, something like

that. Can you put that into context for us? Like is that a lot? I don't really know. Yeah, this is a lot to date because it keeps adding up to new fires. I mean today there are 13 new fires since yesterday. But this is a good day actually that we're talking on because over the last bit we've had quite a bit of rain that's been helpful to hold back some of these really big fires across a lot of the provinces. So now I guess we can answer your question

of how bad it's been so far to date. West of Ontario and really now starting to include northwestern Ontario itself, there have been a very sizable portion of wildfires across the country. We're talking Manitoba is in a state of emergency and then Saskatchewan also in a state of emergency alongside that and then Alberta has had dozens of fires itself. BC has had quite a bit of sizable fires as well, lots of localized states of emergencies in those two provinces but not province-wide yet. You know, so, so far according to Environment

and Climate Change Canada, we are triple the 10-year average for this point of the year when Environment Canada gave us this figure that was until the end of May. So even we hadn't even touched the other fires that have happened in June so far at that point when they were calculating that. This is by every measure one of the worst years to date that Canada has seen, particularly because of the sheer volume and size of these fires. Do we know why it's been so bad this year, Tamora? Like, are there certain factors that I guess are playing into this? Well, climate change, you know? The world is changing. We are not in the same place we used to be before. Our summers start earlier.

Our wildfire seasons themselves also start earlier. In fact, they've been starting early and ending later than they were used to. So now they go on longer. They start around May when they used to maybe start around June. There's very specific factors that contribute to wildfires themselves,

then also exacerbating the wildfires. I mean, this is a natural phenomenon. It does happen. It's happened for eons, but it has become exacerbated because of prolonged heat waves, because of lower precipitation levels, just dryness and heat. Those are the two big things that have helped.

And then of course, wind. There's been unpredictable sort of winds that either help you in some cases to manage the wildfire by moving it away from communities where people live, or in the case of this year, they move it towards that community, right? And so what that does is it creates these necessities

for evacuations because this is where people live. These aren't just forests we're talking about. These are towns and municipalities and cities in some cases as well. Yeah. So tell me about the effort then to counter these wildfires. Do the crews that are actually battling these fires have enough resources?

How are they holding up? Multiple provinces have sought or are actively seeking some version of help from the Canadian Armed Forces. That's how bad it's been. That's the amount of resources they've had to get. So hundreds of firefighters at a time. Of course, they're exhausted already, right? Like you asked this question to the provincial authorities over and over again and they keep telling you this

is something that they are being exhausted by. I mean, Wab Kanu, when we asked him this question about how the firefighters are dealing with this, what it's looking like, to give us a sense of the scale, and he described quite literally a person dedicated to the mental health of firefighters themselves. Where we're at with the fight against the fires is that we have conservation officers who are deployed just to provide mental health supports to wild firefighters right now. It is at times unbearable long days where you have to be waiting for rain for you to be able to go in front and fight the fires only that day when the rain comes. It's days when you have to spend basically away from those areas that you wanna be fighting those fires

because even your units get affected by it. You are burnt by those fires. You're hurt by those fires. So it is quite a difficult task. We heard from some evacuees off the top of this episode. Do we know, I guess broadly across the country, how many people have had to be evacuated and what have you been hearing from them

about how this is affecting their lives? Yeah, numbers wise, we're looking at, you know, in Manitoba alone, 21,500 people at least. Then we're talking in Saskatchewan, they've given the figure of up to 15,000 people. And then we're talking in Ontario, around 3,000 people. Alberta has had those levels of thousands, not that many yet.

BC has also had evacuations. Around the figure, if we add them up, it's more than at least 40,000, 42,000. Around that figure is what we're talking about so far. Again, so many of them have been allowed to go back home. But, you know, of course, it's been a long process. People have had to fly in from 2,000 kilometers away from northern Manitoba to Niagara Falls, Ontario, you know, which is the closest place they could find

a hotel for them to stay in for a longer extended period of time. That's what we're talking about. This is thousands of kilometers away. People have never even flown away in some cases from these First Nations communities, and now they've had to be evacuated in that way. from these First Nations communities, and now they've had to be evacuated in that way. One of the things that comes across each time I talk to an evacuee is there's a lot of similarities, because as humans, we tend to sort of describe these things in a very similar way, it seems like to me.

Over and over again, the metaphor that comes around when you ask them to describe what it felt like when they were being told to leave their homes and pack up and quickly, you know, maybe get a few cherished mementos, maybe get something, but then the essentials, whatever you grab, they sort of tend to describe it as a movie.

Almost always they go to that. It feels like I'm living in a movie, partly because it feels like they have no control over the situation. It's like someone else's movie of their own life, and they just don't have any sense of being able to really dictate anything that happens. And that comes across over and and over again that it feels like I was in an apocalyptic movie. It sounds like a cliche but it's because it tries for us to maybe understand beyond logic,

beyond anything that this is something that is really happening. It is happening in real life but it doesn't feel like real life, right? It sounds like it's hard to comprehend, yeah. It's hard to comprehend and there's a real fear there. Again, just the volume to put it in context. Two of these fires are so big in Manitoba. One of them became seven times the size of Winnipeg and one became five times the size of Winnipeg alone. It's so hard to show people what these fires look like, you know, and even describing them is it's unfathomable. Tamar, is there anyone in particular that you talk to whose story stands out to you? I guess I'm wondering, because I know that you have had these interactions, if there's

any stories that really come to mind. Yeah, I've had quite a few. I've thought about this one woman I spoke with who in the early days of Saskatchewan's sort of wildfire evacuations, she'd spoken to me as she just driven at that point, hundreds of kilometers to get away from La Ronche, Saskatchewan. And the way she described it was that it felt, again, like a movie to drive in the middle of the night trying to get away all the way to Saskatoon to a friend's place

because she wasn't sure where else she could go to find safety. That's a story that keeps coming back to me over and over again. There's been a few others also, you know, and I think about this one story in northwestern Ontario, Sandy, near Sandy Lake First Nation, where over there they've had construction workers that were stuck quite literally in shipping containers because they a fire jumped at them so quickly, a fire that they were trying to help beyond their job to actually help the community with fire breaks, you know. And then suddenly it jumped at them so much that these 19 construction members were stuck in these shipping containers trying to get to board safety.

Eventually, helicopters tried to rescue them, but then helicopters couldn't even land because the fire was so bad and the smoke was so bad, it was making it so difficult for them to land there. I mean, the trauma of that is, again, just so unfathomable for people. You mentioned, of course, that some people are now able to actually return to their communities. Do we have a sense of what that looks like for them to actually try to go back to those lives? Yeah. Scott Moe, Saskatchewan's premier, did a good job, I think, of sort of explaining to us that it's going to take a while to build back your home.

In some cases, people's family homes of decades have been destroyed. In some cases, the schools that their kids would go to, literally little basic things like grocery stores need to be restocked. But then, of course, there's going to be power outages as they try to put these things back together again. In LaRange, which was about half of Saskatchewan's evacuees

are now being allowed to go back there. So about 7,000 people are slowly gonna be able to go back there. They're being transported there. Actively many of them are there trying to rebuild their lives. There, there have been businesses lit up completely in flames.

We're talking this beloved sort of artifacts place of, you know, Robertson Trading Process, it's called indigenous artifacts, thousands and thousands of years old have been entirely destroyed, hundreds of them, right? It's a lot to rebuild a home. It's gonna be very difficult from the way, again, the Premier Scott Moe sort of described, it's gonna be very difficult for people to get used to what their lives are gonna look like now.

But one thing that's been interesting for me to note has been that, you know, they're trying their best, each of these provinces so far, when I attend all of these briefings, one thing keeps coming across is they're allowing people back in, is that they wanna send people back only when they might not be having to re-evacuate it again.

But they are preparing them for that possibility as well. We'll be back after this message. So, Tamora, we just talked about some of the evacuees who are very directly affected by these wildfires, but earlier on we also touched on the fact that because these fires are so massive the smoke really travels quite far and affects a lot more people. And we're all kind of familiar with this now in Canada, but let's get into this a little bit more. How have these wildfires and the smoke affected other parts of the country? So one thing to understand is, of course, wildfires don't think of our arbitrary borders. So the wildfire smoke from

Canada has traveled all the way to Europe, as far east toward Greece, according to their environment agencies there. That's astonishing. That's really far. It's astonishing, right? And you know, there's been advisories all over the US from New York to Minnesota to, you know, Florida all the way.

So just to think about the fact that the smoke that is coming, the thick fumes from them, from Manitoba and Saskatchewan all the way there, makes you realize that no matter whether you're in a wildfire zone or not, whether you're actively in a community that is being encroached by these flames or not, you are still going to feel the effects of it in a way that changes the way you think about, you know, your days, the way you think about how you plan for your summer, your holidays, you know, your kids planning for whether they

can go out for a soccer game or not, things like that. You think about those things in a very different way now because of the way the smoke has been affecting it. And it is a real effect. I mean, doctors tell us for years they've been saying the same thing, but this year, of course, we've asked them that question again. How does it affect you? And they've been warning us of those effects for a while now. Let's get into this though, because I think we all know that breathing in this wildfire smoke is not good for us. But what exactly is it that is so bad for our health? breathing in this wildfire smoke is not good for us, but what exactly is it that is so bad for our health? Pollution particles when they get into our bodies, they're not great for our hearts, they're not great for our brains, they obviously cause some very obvious symptoms.

There's been things like I'll have runny noses and itchy throat, basic things like that for a few days. It feels like a weird version of a flu, kind of like COVID almost, for a few days. It's just this cough that you might have as things like that. But then of course, there's long-term effects that doctors have noted. So, you know, your cognitive function could be affected by it. Your heart rates could be affected by it.

Your childhood development could be affected by it. There's all these sort of risks there. And there's all sorts of ways to make sure that you are preparing for that. So for example, I mean, I live in an apartment here in Winnipeg, right? And so I've had to think about, you know, the kind of, and these are things that are warnings

that the governments have been putting out saying, don't open your windows. Cause if you get the wildfire smoke coming in, it's gonna get trapped in there and it's gonna keep circulating and it makes it not as safe for you anymore to be in that space for longer extended periods of time. Okay, so we've talked about the effects of wildfires,

both the health effects, also kind of the social stuff about not being able to go outside as much, closing your windows. I wanna talk more directly now to more about how we respond to these wildfires. If we look at the situation now, how are firefighting efforts usually coordinated in Canada? Has this been effective the way we do it now?

Yeah, so Canada remains one of the few G7 countries, certainly one of the few leading countries in the world that doesn't have a national strategy or national agency responding, like an official agency from the federal government responding to wildfires. And that has gotten in the way at times of having a coordinated response. So for years we've had the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs saying this over and over again, advocating for a national fire administration for a decade, really, right? And they've been saying this every time wildfire season comes around, that it would help for that. It would help us with, you know, coordinating our resources.

So, for example, again, we have provinces right now that are requesting help from the military, but the military doesn't have this infinite amount of resources. So if you have a national strategy, you could then decide, for example, when to send the resources where, how to plan for the next time another province requests it or another jurisdiction, you could think of that in a different way.

So it sounds like this national strategy would be kind of like a central coordination then. Is that the idea behind it? Exactly, a unified approach that would allow for us to think about these wildfires in a way, again, that maybe doesn't take into account in the same way that a border to border sort of a thing would, right? Like there were one country that's dealing with these wildfires. How do we figure out where to send the resources when we have these vast networks that provinces

have had to come up with themselves in order to function when these wildfires do happen there, right? So Manitoba will call upon Columbia even, or other places internationally, in order to get firefighters. But maybe it would be helpful if we had a unified approach that would help with that, right? Like that could also coordinate with that. And also think about the other provinces that might, again, neighboring Saskatchewan, for example,

is also dealing with a province-wide state of emergency. So they could plan around that. One thing is that it is important to note here, though, is that it would have to be very careful not to infringe on provincial and territorial rights, right? So you know, you can't tell a First Nation how to respond to that if it is their authority or stewardship over that land. You can't tell the province exactly what to do by this agency, but it would help even

all of those different jurisdictional sort of powers to come together and think about this as a unified approach. Do we know why Canada doesn't have a centralized system like this? different jurisdictional sort of powers to come together and think about this as a unified approach. Do we know why Canada doesn't have a centralized system like this? Because you mentioned, you know, we're the only G7 country without it. So I guess I wonder why haven't we got this up and running yet? I don't think we have a clear answer to that. I think the political sort of like, I mean, you know, governments change. We've had governments come and go who've promised these things. The reality is wildfires have gotten worse, right? Like? And so as the years go by, maybe the intensity and the need for that is becoming more obvious to us now.

But the reality is we haven't had this kind of approach before. I mean, governments have not necessarily thought that this was the most important thing to do or whatever has happened there. Maybe there's a bureaucratic hurdle there, but we don't have a clear answer of why we don't have that yet.

Of course, it could be also, again, this point of like the provinces provinces want to assert their authority, the territories want to assert their authority. So that could also be part of the reason why we haven't had a federal government, you know, really getting there, trying to be like, I'm going to tell you what to do. But that's not exactly what these advocates

have been talking about ever. Like, that's not what they want to do. They just would like a more unified approach for us to think about these wildfires in a national way so that we can coordinate those resources. We can think about them preemptively. We can put our research together to plan around them, to put action, really actionable things

before these wildfires happen. Of course, we saw the G7 summit wrap up in Alberta earlier this week, and the G7 leaders actually released a wildfire charter at the end of the summit. Of course, this is a pretty high-level document. It's what you would expect from something like this. But I wonder, Tamar, did anything from this wildfire charter stand out to you? Yeah. I mean, what stood out to me is that this is the most

detail we've ever gotten from G7 leaders in a communique of this sort or any sort of like document like this after a G7 summit. You know, in 2023, there was no wildfires mentioned in any of their communiques. You know, at last year's summit, the leaders agreed on a one sentence commitment to prevent and manage the negative impacts of wildfires. But this year, there's quite a bit of detail. There's quite a bit of sort of, you know, we're taking these steps to adopt a whole of society approach implementing mitigation actions. They usually don't attach dollar figures to those things in these communiqués, and they didn't this time either. But what they are saying is we're

committed to something like this as all of our countries, many of them now, are dealing with this problem, with wildfires. So, Tamora, I'm going to let you go in a second here, but we're just at the start of summer, still very early in wildfire season, and yet we've seen it be so bad so far. What does the forecast look like for wildfires for the coming months? Unfortunately, it's very bleak according to Environment and Climate

Change Canada. It is still looking like the conditions are quite ripe. You know, the Western provinces are still going to be more so affected. Any levels of precipitation that they've gathered, you know, there is going to be very little rainfall. There's going to be prolonged heat waves, Alberta seems to be right on that edge of seeing more of that coming for later in the summer. So far Alberta and BC have not been as affected as Manitoba and Saskatchewan, but from by every measure what we're seeing later in the summer, we are unfortunately probably going to see more wildfires this year again. We're just, this is just the way we think about

the way when we think about our summers now. We have to plan around this smoke, even whether we live close to that wildfire or not. It's quietly sort of affecting us in these little ways and reminding us that we kind of can't run away from this problem. Unfortunately, it is, I'm, you know, I'm actually even quoting almost as I'm saying this out loud, the words of Environment and Climate Change Canada themselves, their meteorologists, when they say it's quite literally at our doorsteps. They'll affect you whether you like it or not. You'll see the sun and it'll look different. It'll be orangish. You'll see these hazy skies.

And you'll be reminded that, yeah, you might not have the fires coming to your community by any measure. You're thousands of kilometers away. And yet you are still quite literally being affected by that in some capacity. Tamur, always good to talk to you. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

That was Tamur Durrani, The Globe's Winnipeg reporter. That's it for today. I'm Maynika Ramad Wilms. This episode was produced by Kevin Sexton. Our producers are Madeleine White, Michal Stein, and Ali Graham. David Crosby edits the show, Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor.

Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.