Joe Nemeth: Will we learn from our wildfire history?

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It’s as regular as it depressing.

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Every summer Canada suffers from major wildfires.

Last year the McDougall Creek fire caused the evacuation of 10,000 West Kelowna residents and damaged or destroyed 190 properties, contributing to the “most destructive fire season in B.C.’s recorded history,” according to the government’s fire season summary. It notes that 2,245 fires burned over 28,000 square kilometres of land while taxpayers paid out more than $1 billion in wildfire suppression.

That same year more than 6,100 wildfires occurred in Quebec, destroying 45,000 sq km and sending choking smoke as far as New York.

And this July we all held our breath as an out-of-control wildfire surged into Jasper, Alta., leading to evacuations, property damage, lost homes and businesses. More than 340 sq km were consumed by that fire.

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After a 10-week wildfire season in 2017 displaced 65,000 British Columbians, former Forests minister George Abbott filed a 108-recommendation report outlining steps the province could take to reduce wildfire risk.

Abbott’s work followed a 2003 report from former Manitoba premier Gary Filmon on that year’s wildfire season, which featured more than 2,500 fires and the loss of more than 300 homes and businesses. Filmon made 60 recommendations.

Last September B.C. Premier David Eby appointed a task force to evaluate the wildfire season. It offered 31 recommendations.

No doubt there will be other studies and reports when the 2024 wildfire season is over.

But will anything change?

These reports and others highlight jurisdictional and communication challenges between levels of government (provincial, municipal, regional and First Nations), better training of firefighters, updated technology and equipment — and “fuel management.”

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Canada — and B.C. — are pretty good at fighting wildfires, but we aren’t very good at preventing them or, at least, minimizing their size, spread and duration.

That’s where “fuel management” comes in.

This is simply the practice of removing brush, dead trees and some live hazard trees  — i.e. fuel — from the forests that surround so many B.C. communities. Fires feed on this fuel; eliminate it or reduce it and fires are smaller and more easily contained.

Both Filmon and Abbott cited fuel management as big factors in the fire seasons they studied.

Want an example of how big a difference fuel management (also known as intensive forest management) can make? Look to Finland, a country that in latitude, geography and tree species is comparable with the B.C. Interior.

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The Forests Ministry tells us that B.C. loses some 4,200 sq km to wildfires each year on average.

By comparison, Finland loses about 323 hectares annually — not 323,000 but 323.

The biggest difference is that Finland regularly and predictably thins out its forests, taking down dead trees or spindly trees to sharply reduce the fuel available in its forests. The Finns are also committed to “brushing,” which takes out undergrowth.

Also different to the B.C. practice is the Finnish policy of maintaining logging roads, which serve as firebreaks.

All these steps combine to establish fire breaks around Finnish communities, helping keep fires smaller and less aggressive.

The forest left standing is healthy, growing and green, making it more resistant to fire.

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And guess what, the “fuel” — the brush and hazard trees thinned out through this common sense practice —  is directed to Finnish pulp and paper mills to keep them running and competitive. Much of it is also directed to community energy systems that provide green power and give small communities more direct control over their power supply.

What would make even more common sense is to allow B.C.’s forest industry to access the thousands of fire-damaged stands of trees in every corner of the province.  If crews were able to go into these stands within a year after fire has swept through the areas, there is still value in those burned logs that can be used in a saw mill or pulp mill.

The cleared areas would also be available for replanting to grow a new forest for wildlife and British Columbians to enjoy. And that’s a new, healthy, green forest that is fire-resistant.

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Unfortunately, these practical, proven, common sense ideas aren’t given a chance. The permitting process in B.C. is so broken that a permit to allow that community fire break to be created or to allow a crew to remove standing fire-damaged timber can take two or three years.

If fire-damaged timber isn’t salvaged within 12 months it’s dry and cracked and can no longer be turned into lumber.

Eby’s task force recommended that the province “streamline administrative processes to expedite wildfire risk reduction projects,” but little changed for this wildfire season.

Government spends hundreds of millions (remember, more than $1 billion in 2023) to fight wildfires and repair damage, rather than adopt simple policies to accelerate permits or do what the Finns do and practise basic forest management techniques to help stop fires before they start.

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B.C.’s wildfire season is far from over. It’s likely that we will see more scenes of devastation before cooler and wetter fall weather arrives. That weather will be here in October when we will go to the polls to elect our provincial government.

Our industry will pound on the door of the next minister of forests to ask — insist, really — that he or she take the straightforward steps we have described and that both Filmon and Abbott called for.

As Edward Struzik, a fellow at the Queen’s University Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy, wrote after the Jasper fire: “Fire has no ideology or preferences. We must learn to live with fire, and find ways of containing it, for fire will never learn to live with us.”

Joe Nemeth is the leader of the B.C. Pulp and Paper Coalition.

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