Parliamentary Committee Notes: Canadian Wildfires

Issue

To inform on the current wildfire situation in Canada, the 2023 wildfire season, and wildfire resources.

Proposed Response

• Floods and wildfires are the two costliest natural disasters that occur in Canada.
• This has been a historic wildfire season far surpassing any other wildfire season on record in Canada. These wildfires resulted in over 230,000 people evacuating their homes, including the evacuation of Yellowknife. Over 18 million hectares have burned this year which is unprecedented as the ten-year average is under three million hectares.
• This will no doubt be the most expensive wildfire season in Canada’s history. We will be tallying these costs for months to come as the damage continues to be assessed from coast to coast to coast.
• Over 16,000 firefighters helped fight this year’s wildfires and Canada received assistance from over 5,000 international firefighters.
• The Government of Canada is committed to supporting the recovery of impacted communities. We provide financial assistance to PT governments through the Disaster Financial Assistance Arrangements (DFAA), in the event of a large-scale natural disaster where response and recovery costs exceed what individual PTs could reasonably be expected to bear on their own. Administered by Public Safety, the DFAA provides the Government of Canada with a fair and equitable means of assisting provincial and territorial governments and has contributed over $8 billion in post-disaster assistance.

Lessons Learned

• This historic wildfire season highlighted the importance of critical infrastructure (CI) such as roads, telecommunications, and electricity, and their resiliency. We had serious impacts to CI, especially regional fibre optic lines in NWT, but we were lucky not to have any catastrophic impacts; provincial and territorial wildfire resources effectively combatted the fires which had put CI at risk. Vulnerabilities of northern infrastructure such as telecommunications and remains a risk.
  • A number of CI sectors and businesses have proven to be highly responsive in adapting to emergency situations, have invested in resiliency, and are demonstrating their ability to recover as quickly as possible so that Canadians have the services they need.
• Historically, we have focused our firefighting efforts on wildland-urban interface fires to best use our finite resources. This has led some to rethink the typical approach in Canada to combatting fires, when wildfires thousands of kilometers from the nearest town manage to cause significant smoke and long-term health impacts affecting Canada and the United States, in addition to irreparable damage to forests. This season has highlighted the strategic impacts that wildfire smoke can have not only within our own country, but across North America.
  • International support throughout this season was crucial; Canada was fortunate to receive the level of support it did. That said, this assistance may not always be available. This season has renewed calls for a study of Canada’s available firefighting resources.
• Public health messaging was required due to the disruptive smoke in various regions. To this end, there is a need to determine how clinicians and vulnerable populations are supported going forward. Evacuations also have impacts on individuals’ mental health, which needs to be taken into consideration when planning public health responses.
• Events like we experienced this summer demonstrate the importance of increasing our resiliency to natural disasters. For context, prior to 2020, the GOC would coordinate on average 5 to12 RFAs per year. Between January 2020 and August 2023, the GOC has coordinated over 230 of these requests.
• Despite the challenges we faced this wildfire season, we’ve been able to overcome these by working together. We have learned to work with new partners at all levels of government and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) to deal with these events, complex hybrid risk and simultaneous issues, some of which we had not dealt on such a scale like the COVID pandemic. Additionally, the emergency management community has performed superbly over the last few years facing massive challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic up to this wildfire season, but it is only a small part of the overall challenge.
  • We will continue to improve our capacity to respond to emergencies at the federal level without over relying on the Canadian Armed Forces who were heavily tasked this wildfire season. This includes advancing our work through the Humanitarian Workforce Program, and exploring how to further leverage civilian capabilities for future events.
• One of the most frequent and yet always striking aspects of Canada's emergency response is the spirit of cooperation that prevails. No matter the challenges we face, federal, provincial, and territorial governments work together to address the crisis at hand. We have much more work to do

Responsive lines (if prompted)

• Emergencies are managed first at the local level. If municipal and local governments need assistance at the local level, they request it from the province or territory. If the emergency overwhelms PT capacity, the province or territory may seek assistance from the federal government through a Request for Federal Assistance (RFA).
• This fire season saw 18 RFAs put into place over the period of May to September. The Government Operations Centre (GOC), on behalf of the Government of Canada, is the lead for federal response coordination for emergency events and is committed to the prevention of, response to and recovery from wildfire events.
• We maintain continuous communication with our federal and provincial partners, including Indigenous communities, as well as with NGOs, as was the case in the coordination of a donation-matching program with the United Way.

Backgound

The Government Operations Centre (GOC) is mandated, on behalf of the Government of Canada, to lead and support response coordination of events affecting national interest. It is an interdepartmental response-focused asset of the Government of Canada, working in support of deputy heads, departments and agencies at the national (strategic) whole-of-government level.

Each year, in consultation with partners, the GOC completes a comprehensive risk assessment and planning process in advance of flooding and the wildland urban interface seasons. The final outcomes includes contingency plans to outline a coordinated structure for an integrated federal response to flooding or wildfire events, in support of the provinces and territories (PT), for regions of concern.

In the past few years, the Minister of Public Safety, on behalf of the federal government, has accepted increasing numbers of Requests for Assistance (RFAs) for relief efforts from events including the recent impacts from Hurricane Fiona, Atmospheric River events, and BC wildfires.

In addition to the multitude of existing federal investments in wildland fire prevention and response, many new investments are launching including the Firefighting and Managing Wildfires in a Changing Climate program, which is providing $256 million over five years (starting in 2022-2023) to support PTs to strengthen fire management capacities and capabilities across the country by facilitating the purchase of wildland firefighting equipment to increase capacity to respond and prepare for wildland fires. Though this agreement, on 07 Sep, it was announced that more than $65 million in federal funding has been committed for six agreements to 6 PTs (AB, BC, NS, SK, NT, YK).

In addition, the Training Fund portion of the program committed $28 million over 5 years, which has garnered important results such as 160 trained participants at the Type II level and 61 trained firefighters deployed in Indigenous communities in AB, BC, ON, YK, and NT.

Season

The 2023 wildfire season has been the worst in Canadian history in terms of area burned. Nationally, there have been approximately 6,500 fires this season, with an estimated 18.5M hectares burned this year, which is more than double the previous record of 7.5M hectares burned, seen in 1989, and more than seven times the 10-year national average.

This season included the largest wildfires ever recorded in British Columbia and Nova Scotia and also resulted in major smoke impacts across Canada and the United States.

In response to this unprecedented fire season, the Government of Canada has provided assistance to six PTs through 18 RFAs. Humanitarian support by the federal government and NGOs has been provided to 73 First Nations communities.

While actual numbers of firefighters are not readily available due to variances out of our control, i.e. dual reporting in a home PT as well as one to which a responder is deployed or possible unreported information, the following aggregated numbers have been collected from various reporting resources received at the GOC in order to fully highlight the scope of the response effort over the past 4.5 months: 

Total area burned:  approx. 18.5 M Hectares
Total numbers of wildfires  : approx. 6,500
Total number of CAF members deployed: 1,760
Total number of domestic firefighters involved : 10,709
Total number of international firefighters involved: 5,716
Total number of evacuees :  approx. 230,000 evacuees

Ref - Operation LENTUS - Canada.ca

Ref - CIFCC website

Requests for Assistance

The GOC coordinates formal RFAs from the federal government and PTs and liaises with key organizations such as the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) and non-governmental organizations.

When the emergency involves a First Nation (FN) community, FN leadership, depending on relevant emergency management agreements, we will work in collaboration with their PTs and/or ISC or regional officials, to assess the emergency and propose a response. If a resolution is not possible at the regional level, a request for assistance may be sought.

Since May 2023, a total of 18 wildfire-related RFAs were approved and support was provided to AB (2RFAs + 2 extensions); BC (3RFAs + 2 extensions); QC (3RFAs + 2 extensions); NWT (1RFA + 1 extension); NS (1RFA), and ON (1RFA).

• All RFAs from PTs were for a select scope of federal support, chiefly key activities of support included logistics and planning, ICS-trained personnel support, firefighter personnel, and evacuation support.

Date modified:

2024-03-25