EZRA LEVANT | The best of our coverage of the Jasper wildfires
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Summary
Rebel News' Court reporter Robert Kraychuk catches up with us to update us on the latest on the wildfires that have ravaged the town of Jasper, Alberta, over the past week. In this episode, we talk with reporter Sheila Gunn-Reed and reporter Sidney Fusard about their reporting on the fires.
Transcript
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Tonight, happy holiday when we have a show for you.
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It's the best of our coverage of the Jasper wildfires.
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I want you to see with your eyes just how horrific it was.
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So please make sure you have a subscription to what we call Rebel News Plus.
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Not only do you get all the video content, but you support Rebel News because, you know, we don't take a dime from Trudeau, and it shows.
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It's about time that we have a catch-up with Robert Kraychuk.
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He is our court reporter who's been in Lethbridge, Alberta, for the trial of the Coutts III and the Coutts IV.
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Well, they are charged with various crimes emanating from the border blockade during the trucker convoy of 2022.
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But first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
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And not only do you get the videos, you get the satisfaction of helping Rebel News.
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As you know, we were one of the only people standing up for the truckers, and we actually crowdfunded a lot of their legal defenses, including for the Coutts III.
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All right, without any further ado, let me invite you to subscribe to the video version of Rebel News Plus.
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Tonight, an update on our reporting from the Jasper wildfires with Sheila Gunn-Reed and Sidney Fusard.
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It's August 5th, and this is E.S. from LeVant Show.
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I remember how terrified I was back when the Fort McMurray wildfire seemed to come out of nowhere and consume most of the town.
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I was absolutely terrified by the images of the arches, the arcs of fire that were on either side of the road, walls of fire, hundreds of feet high, absolutely terrifying.
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And that was one of our first large charitable crowdfunders that we did with Rebel News.
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We raised six figures for wildfire relief, and I felt very proud to have done so as an expat Albertan living in Ontario.
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Well, another forest fire, as you know, has hit Alberta, and it's hit the town of Jasper particularly hard.
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Now, we cover wildfires from time to time when there's a political angle.
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We cover things where there's a bit of a current events, political, ideological question.
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It's one of the reasons we went to Maui, the town of Lahaina.
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When wildfire scorched that place, there were a lot of political questions.
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Why didn't the government ring the alarm bells?
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What's happening with the rebuilding of the house?
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Well, it behooves us to do the same in our own country in the city of Jasper.
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Well, Sheila Gunn-Reed went out there with Aki and Simone to see what's going on because there is a political angle there, too.
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There is a loosey-goosey, one-world green party idea never to chop down a tree.
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Well, that's how it was, I suppose, for hundreds of millions of years in the past.
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So nature would chop down the trees with forest fires started by lightning.
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Massive forest fires would burn millions of acres, and that's how nature was.
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Trouble is, that's not exactly conducive to human life or, for that matter, animal life.
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And so modern towns and cities have fire breaks, or they cull that fuel.
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Alas, Stephen Gilboa refused to do that because he wants the au naturel.
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Sheila Gunn-Reed for Rebel News, and I'm here just west of Hinton, Alberta.
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What you see behind me is a police checkpoint preventing people from going into Jasper National Park because the national park has out-of-control wildfires burning within it.
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The town site of Jasper, a UNESCO World Heritage site, has been lost to wildfire.
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30% of the town has burned, mostly the residential area.
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Now, I'm here to do this journalism on the cheap.
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We took my Jeep, my travel trailer, and we're staying in a campsite up the road.
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If you want to support our independent journalism for this trip, but to also keep Rebel News journalists out on the street,
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please consider making a donation at rebelfieldreports.com.
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But if you're like me and you feel compelled to help the people and the businesses of Jasper, Alberta,
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please consider making a donation at helpjasper.ca.
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That's our crowdfund where 100% of the proceeds will go to an on-the-ground charity working with the evacuees and businesses of Jasper.
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That's what you're going to see from us for the next couple of days.
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On the ground here in Hinton, Alberta, I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed.
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My videographer and I, Key and Simone, are on the ground just west of Hinton, Alberta,
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to report on the devastating wildfires that swept through Jasper National Park and claimed a portion of the town.
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But if you want to help, please consider making a donation to helpjasper.ca.
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That's our crowdfund where 100% of the proceeds go to a charity working on the ground with Jasper evacuees.
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My colleagues, Sheila Gunn-Reed and Key and Simone are doing incredible boots on the ground journalism in the area surrounding Jasper,
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following the heartbreaking wildfire that did so much damage to that beautiful community.
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And while they are doing that journalism, I'm actually here in Calgary,
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and I had the opportunity to sit down with Premier Danielle Smith and ask her some questions about the management of forests
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and the federal response and the circumstances that led up to the destruction of a great part of Jasper.
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Folks, I just want to encourage you, if you want to help the people who are struggling as a consequence of those fires,
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You know, despite Minister Gilbo's insistence that forest management was well done,
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can you comment on the fact that the Federal Environment Ministry did not act on its own Jasper Park Management plan
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to mitigate the fuel load issues in Jasper National Park?
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Well, look, I've been reading the same articles that you've been reading and hearing what scientists have said,
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scientists who worked for Parks Canada and have been raising this issue for many years.
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So I think we've got to take that seriously and we've got to take a look at,
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is there a way that we can remove some of that fuel load?
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I've talked to my own forestry and parks minister, Todd Lowen,
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and asked him if we could do a review so that we could see what the age of the forests are from top to bottom.
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Because, quite frankly, our forests are the type that were forged by fire.
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And so when they get to be 80 to 100 years old, they die.
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And when that happens, there's only three things that are going to occur.
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Either you have to do prescribed burns to get rid of that fuel,
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you have to do mechanical removal, or nature will take its course.
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And if we can do a better job of removing that fuel so that we can protect more communities, we should do that.
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We'll do a review of the forests that are in our forest protection area and our provincial parks,
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and then we'll bring some of that learning to the federal government and ask them to do the same for federal parks.
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what is being done as far as provincial efforts to mitigate the pine beetle fuel load as well in that provincial context?
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Well, I can tell you that last year, because we had 2 million hectares burned,
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Todd Lowen took a dramatically different approach for how we first fight fires.
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So one of the things that he realized is that we needed to have a very large fire guard.
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And when we do forest firefighting, when fire does hit and we need to protect a community,
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we bring the dozers in right away so that we're able to clear out a fire break area.
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When you get that huge fuel load coming, you need to have a break.
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Sometimes you do backburns, so you create a wall of fire that burns back.
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But you have to be careful with that because sometimes the wind can get in the way.
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But when you have the kind of flames that we saw in Jasper,
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by that point, there's no firefighting team that can stop it.
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The work that you have to do has to come beforehand.
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Now, in an effort to tackle sort of some of the misinformation, disinformation that is out there,
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But people have been very eager to perpetuate this myth
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that Premier Daniel Smith cut the wildfire budget, the firefighting budget.
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You've indicated that that's not true already, if you can comment on that.
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So your government over the last few years has made various cuts
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Well, I can tell you what we observed last year,
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is that we had a $100 million forest fire budget,
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and Todd Lowen said, well, what's our typical fire year?
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And so he got a 50% increase in budget this year, up to $155 million.
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and we were ready to go by May 15th before the bulk of the fires came in.
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We have contracts with Indigenous forest firefighters,
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and we also have contracts with private sector operators.
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So at this precise moment, our Alberta force is 1,800 people strong.
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And that is, so I feel like that is the kind of force
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that we need to be prepared to put forward each year.
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And then, of course, we use the Canadian Forest Fire Interagency Centre
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and to put our resources towards them when things change.
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I think what happened was a number of years ago,
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and then they repel into an area so that they can fight fires.
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And what we discovered is they were barely being deployed,
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only in 2% of the cases, for a number of reasons.
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there's only certain types of landscapes that they can be on.
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And so what we realized is that we have to fight fires differently.
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we do nighttime firefighting so that we can precision drop teams
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once we know where the fires are so that they can fight at night.
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Now, finally, obviously, places like Jasper are national parks.
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But as we're seeing, it's Albertans who are suffering.
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Do you feel that there's a need for increased provincial involvement?
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Or is it important to leave that jurisdiction federal?
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Yes, there absolutely is a need for provincial involvement.
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We have been an advising agency through the forest fires.
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I was on the phone immediately asking our team to do whatever we could.
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And so they already proactively positioned a bunch of equipment
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so that if the call came in, they were ready for it.
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The call did come in, and we were ready to put all of our resources.
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we have to remember that Parks Canada, I don't believe,
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has the expertise to manage a rebuild of this nature.
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I mean, Parks Canada does a lot of forest firefighting and forest management.
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This is really the kind of work that municipal governments do.
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This is the kind of thing that provincial governments should step into
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I'm happy to be used in any role that they would like.
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But we also have our own recovery that we need to do.
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So we've got to make sure that we're taking care of those folks.
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We're working on trying to find a way to get temporary housing
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So there is a role for us to play in being able to accelerate this.
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What we don't want is to look back three years from now
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I think it's been mentioned to me, and I tend to agree,
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that the permitting process in national parks has sometimes been very slow,
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These are folks who need to get their lives back to normal.
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When we were asking to be part of Unified Command for the incident,
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we also asked for that to persist through recovery
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actually between Hinton and Jasper National Park.
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We're here reporting on the devastating wildfires,
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many of which that are still burning out of control
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Now, if you want to help in our charitable relief efforts
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or have lost homes and businesses inside of Jasper National Park,
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please consider making a donation at helpjasper.ca.
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Now, we're on the ground to tell you exactly what's happening here in Hinton.
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but also many of the police and firefighting resources are stationed here.
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And it is almost impossible to go through the town
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or anywhere near Jasper without encountering a police checkpoint,
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It's really impossible to bring you any original imagery
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because we're not a member of the mainstream media cabal,
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so we don't get special treatment from the federal government
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We have to sue them to get access to politicians.
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They're certainly not going to give us access to the National Park
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where we are going to ask them some serious questions
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and the pine beetle fuel load left inside of it.
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in an effort to go around the independent media blackout
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on what's happening inside of Jasper National Park,
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on the mountains and all the trees are dead and
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they're leaving these dead trees there, which is
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I mean, they used to do cleanup in around town.
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And I mean, if there's a fire in the back country,
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But we're talking, this is like a fire that came
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Like, they should have cleared some land, put a firewall
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We've had five or six major municipalities in the last 15
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We've had, last year it was all around Grand Prairie.
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And we've got municipalities that are still unprepared.
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I mean, yeah, like when we talk about Jasper or Banff,
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there's the national, there's the big part, the
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And I think in this case, it's the town that was really
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On the environmental aspect, a lot of people are seeing
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this wildfire and they're blaming environmentalism for
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Whereas if you're actively preventing wildfires, I
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imagine no doubt there's going to be a buildup of, as you
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mentioned, the tools needed for wildfires to naturally
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Do you think that the environmentalists should perhaps
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sustainability as opposed to just blaming it for the
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I mean, you know, the environmentalists in some
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Like an example that I hear all the time is people talking
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about, oh, we need to protect old growth forests.
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And people don't actually know what an old growth forest is.
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And, you know, people imagine that an old growth forest is
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something in British Columbia with these big sequoias or
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But an old growth forest simply means trees that have
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Well, so the language penetrated the environmental movement and
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everybody's like, let's protect the old growth forest, which
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Well, no, we can't do that because a forest has a life cycle and
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So either they die naturally and burn or we go and help with the
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So, yeah, I think the environmental movement has hurt itself in some
00:43:00.300
And now in hindsight or after all these disasters, it's easy to blame
00:43:08.020
No environmentalist is going to take blame for this.
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We're going to blame it on climate change, which is easy.
00:43:14.240
It was a lightning strike, so it just would have happened.
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But from what we've heard, there's like the trees in Jasper are
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So like when the lightning strike happened, it just like went up in
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But people have been saying for months that Jasper was going to burn.
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I think the most surprising thing is just how quickly it happens.
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Like we left about 48 hours ago and now there's nothing left.
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You think you have more time for that kind of thing, but just like
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What should be done or needs to be done now for you guys for the
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Currently, there's been a really good response, especially here from
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like the evacuation centers in the city and information has been
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really good in terms of being passed out from like the municipality
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Currently, we're being put into hotels indefinitely.
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Whilst we sort of figure out what the next move is for it.
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I suppose I know there's only so much they can know and it's a developing
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situation, but it would be good to have some kind of roadmap that just outlines
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what's going to happen, what we're going to get in terms of reparations and what the
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next few weeks or few months is going to look like.
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I just hope that everybody gets out safe and for the people that like have been living
00:44:41.820
Like, I just hope that they're going to be okay and get some sort of compensation or
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something because we know people who have lived there forever and now their homes are
00:44:51.900
And I just really hope that everything will be okay for them.
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What do you think needs to be done for the people that we're seeing behind us for the
00:45:13.920
I mean, as much as the parks are there as parks, they are also there for tourism.
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So hopefully we rebuild it quickly, but we got to rebuild it and learn from this.
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I mean, after the fires in Fort McMurray, we should have put a one-mile radius around
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I don't know why we're pretending that this is a new phenomenon.
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We live in the middle of, we live in Alberta where there are huge forests.
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Like, when I was a kid, this didn't happen every year.
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So let's remind ourselves of where we live, and let's be realistic and pragmatic, and
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let's forget some of these crazy ideologies, and let's focus on what's important, which
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is, you know, the fact that we live in the wilderness, and we need to be prepared for
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We're part of nature, and we're smarter than nature.
00:46:14.200
We should be able to live in nature and not, you know, lose our homes every 10 years.
00:46:24.080
If you would like to support our independent journalism, please consider donating to our
00:46:32.520
Remember, since the program we watched as well, you should be canigmy these best things in the
00:46:38.980
We will цвет it, and you willheavalenti imagine what thekal endeavor looks like.
00:46:40.980
If you would like to prevent them from 252, please notice they will organize our homes every
00:46:50.480
If anything, you're going to survive while convincing them.