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00:19:07.440There's only 1,000 people in this town.
00:19:09.460And so this one family who'd been staying in Hinton, which is about 45 minutes east of Jasper, just outside the park gates, they thought, okay, well, we'll drive to Kamloops.
00:19:23.300Well, Kamloops is a four-hour drive from there.
00:19:25.880Then they thought, well, we really should get back to Hinton.
00:19:28.180So they went from Kamloops to Calgary, from Calgary to Edmonton, and from Edmonton back to Hinton.
00:19:34.520It took them 15 hours to do this route that should take 40 minutes.
00:19:41.120But at the end, they were interviewed, and they said, well, you know, at least we survived.
00:19:48.780So, you know, that's the attitude I think an awful lot of people have had about that.
00:19:52.400I remember when Fort McMurray went up in flames, I think one of the things that was credited for the survival of the people was that a lot of people in Fort McMurray work for big oil companies that have a lot of safety drills, and they have fire marshals, and people practice those things as part of the industry.
00:20:09.700So they're used to ideas like muster in a place and evacuate and who's the boss and stay calm.
00:20:17.180And it's almost like if you, and I know you've been on a cruise ship with us before, they have a little drill before the boat goes to sea, just so you're used to it.
00:20:27.060I'm guessing Jasper isn't the same way.
00:20:49.600There was all that dead forest that had been dead for years.
00:20:56.080Years ago, the pine beetle came and killed all the trees, but the trees are still standing up, and they're dry as a bone because they're dead.
00:21:49.840Parks Canada has said over the years that they would do controlled burns around the town site and down south into the valley where the pine beetle devastation was the worst.
00:21:58.900But the conditions are very tricky there.
00:22:01.700You can't do a big controlled burn in the summertime because there are 20,000 tourists there at any given time.
00:22:07.560And so you have to hope that there's not early snow, that there's not late snow, that there isn't a soaking rain because controlled burns won't work in any of this.
00:22:18.560So you only have a few weeks in what are called the shoulder seasons on either side of the summer, in between summer and ski season, where you can do these controlled burns.
00:22:27.940And it never happened, so they just let tens of thousands of hectares of dead trees stand around getting drier and drier and drier.
00:22:36.320And the guy who has been the mayor or the chief executive, chief elected officer of Jasper since 1989, a guy named Richard Ireland, he started in 2017 in a concerted way to try and get Parks Canada to do something about this.
00:22:53.520In 2018, the residents set up a campaign called Save Jasper, which was hoping to get Parks Canada to allow forest companies to come in and log.
00:23:05.740I was told last year by an executive in a forest company that they could help sort out the problems in Jasper in about two seasons if the parks would simply allow them to bring in equipment to take out every other tree.
00:23:21.800Like, they have a plan, they have a formula about how many trees they have to take out and how they can stop the spread of a fire with taking out this tree and that tree and the one over there.
00:23:32.020But nobody at Parks Canada would listen.
00:23:35.640And they stuck with this environmental fantasy they have about how it was going to be naturally reforested.
00:23:45.720I mean, it is fire that is, I mean, and God bless it, normally, I mean, for millennia, that's how forests were rejuvenated, but it doesn't really work if you're in the middle of a tourist town.
00:23:56.940Yeah, also, yeah, and that's the big thing there.
00:23:59.060The big problem is that you have this theory about how the forest is going to naturally revive itself, which involves fire.
00:24:09.780But it's not the natural forest anymore.
00:24:14.200I mean, there isn't any part of Jasper that is as it was before first humans.
00:24:20.120And I don't mean before first European, before first whites.
00:24:25.420There's no part of Jasper that is this idol about, you know, pre-human contact.
00:24:32.780So you have to accept that we are part of the ecosystem now, and particularly around the town site, you have to treat it as though it's a place where human beings live and work and recreate.
00:24:46.900And so it's insane to have allowed these hectares, thousands of hectares of dry trees to just stand there.
00:24:56.600And as soon as there was a lightning strike or whatever we're going to find out caused this fire, there was all these kilometer after kilometer after kilometer of perfect fuel for this fire.
00:25:13.200And it just grew and grew and grew until it finally got into town.
00:25:18.220And thankfully, when it got into town, you know, things are a little bit better managed there.
00:25:22.700And it could only burn so much before it ran out.
00:25:28.480If it's your house that got burnt, if it's your small business that no longer exists, the one you've worked for your entire life, that is devastating.
00:26:21.820So these two fires were coming at Jasper from the north and the south.
00:26:26.340And when it got dark, Parks Canada had to stop.
00:26:30.120And in the morning, they'd pick it up again.
00:26:31.580And then they find, but the fires had moved by the time they could pick them up again.
00:26:35.440And the other thing Smith said is, look, in Alberta, we have the equipment to create giant walls of water in front of these giant walls of fire.
00:29:07.640It justifies everything that Canadians are now getting their backs up against.
00:29:14.120You've probably talked about this already, but last week, the Fraser Institute conducted a study, released a study, where it estimated that the cost of the liberal green mandates, electric vehicles, net zero power grids, and on and on and on, the cost to an average Canadian family by about 2035 is going to be $6,700 a year.
00:29:44.480People are backing away from buying EVs.
00:29:47.460There was an announcement just this morning that an EV battery plant in eastern Ontario, at cost of about $3 billion, is now being put on hold indefinitely, probably forever, because the market's just not there.
00:30:01.800So they have all of these cultish environmental goals that they still support, that they're still obsessed with, and they have to justify it.
00:30:12.120And one of the ways they're going to try and justify all of this is to say, look, look, see how bad Jasper was?
00:30:34.760But it's, again, because of Parks Canada's refusal to thin out the forests, to manage the forests, because it's not, that's not the natural way.
00:30:47.940So that's what I think is largely responsible for the Jasper fire.
00:30:53.840And it's interesting, because there's a deputy minister, a retired deputy minister from Alberta, who's writing in the Edmonton Journal today, who says exactly the same thing.
00:31:02.040He said, we begged them for years to deal with it, because we could see that it was going to start all sorts of major forest fires.
00:31:08.980There was a 2018 study by two longtime forest consultants in B.C., both of whom are quite green in their beliefs.
00:31:19.440But they both said in 2018, you're going to have what they called a mega fire if you don't do something about this.
00:31:26.560And they said it would be a catastrophe.
00:31:32.280I'm not sure how dark their hearts are.
00:31:36.160It wouldn't surprise me if some gurus and strategists in the Liberal Party said, we want a mega fire as the final proof point, as the final talking point.
00:31:47.400I mean, this tweet I read to you by a liberal from Ontario, it feels a little bit like the Westboro Baptist Church.
00:31:53.620I don't know if you remember, about 20 years ago, those guys would send protesters to the funerals of soldiers with signs saying things like, God hates fags.
00:33:26.340And to his great credit, Tristan Hopper at the National Post did a survey of what's called fire history in the Canadian forests last year.
00:33:38.200And found that prior to 1900, forests in Canada burnt at a much higher rate and consumed much more land of, like, forest mass than they do now.
00:33:49.840And that human settlement into the forests has actually made them burn far less.
00:33:58.320But, you know, this I think we're going to find, if we're very honest about it, was human-caused.
00:34:03.560It was caused by the bureaucratic eco-mentality at Parks Canada.
00:34:07.340Right. Well, listen, great to catch up with you on this.
00:34:10.780Thanks for giving us the inside track.
00:34:12.500Again, folks, the column is called Jasper Blaze Exposes Possible Flaws in Parks Canada Wildfire Strategy.
00:34:22.280I don't know if you remember, but a year ago we had a wonderful trip to Israel where we took dozens of our most enthusiastic rebel viewers.
00:34:40.920It was a beautiful utopian time when Israel had a peace agreement with a bunch of Arab countries.
00:34:47.520And we went to Israel for a week, and then we went to the United Arab Emirates.