00:00:00.000And so although those of us who experience Jasper as visitors can't imagine what it feels like to be a Jasperite right now, we share this sense of loss with all of those who live in the town, who care for it, and who have helped build it.
00:00:25.000Jasper, we will continue to stand by you as everyone works to get their feet back under them and as we look forward to recovering.
00:00:42.000Well, we start today with the devastating scenes coming out of Jasper National Park in Alberta yesterday.
00:00:47.000One of the most beautiful and pristine parks in the world is on fire and residents of the town of Jasper have been ordered to evacuate.
00:00:55.000Historic buildings and landmarks in the town of Jasper were engulfed in flames last night as firefighters rushed in to say whatever they could of these critical pieces of Canadian history.
00:01:06.000We pray for their safety and we wish them all the very best in their efforts.
00:01:11.000Now, just like last summer, Canadians and particularly Albertans have been caught in the middle of an ongoing debate around what causes these wildfires and how to respond.
00:01:20.000This is, of course, a political debate.
00:01:23.000If you are a liberal, you would no doubt look at these scenes and conclude that this is the fault of climate change, of a warming planet caused by the carelessness and inaction of humans.
00:01:33.000And if you're a conservative, you likely conclude that such scenes must be the result of bureaucratic and government failure to enact proper forest management policies.
00:01:42.000But there's an easy way for us to see if this is one way or the other.
00:01:45.000We can look at the United States and elsewhere in the world to see if the situation is happening there.
00:01:50.000We can look at different policies implemented by different governments around the world to prevent wildfires.
00:01:56.000And we can also analyze historic data.
00:01:58.000So we're going to do that today on the show to try and get to the bottom of what's really going on here.
00:02:03.000Before we do that, however, be sure to drop a like on this video.
00:02:06.000Help us out by subscribing to the True North YouTube channel.
00:02:08.000And the comment question for the episode is this.
00:02:11.000What do you think caused the wildfires in Jasper National Park?
00:02:15.000Let me know your answer in the comments section below and let's get into it.
00:02:19.000Well, let's start with an update on what the situation is looking like in Jasper right now.
00:02:23.000This is a video that has been uploaded to social media showing the scenes in Jasper from this morning.
00:02:33.000And thanks to an update from Justin Trudeau.
00:02:35.000We also know that the federal government has deployed the Canadian military to help assist Alberta in battling these wildfires.
00:02:42.000We also know that by 8.30 local time yesterday night, thanks to a Parks Canada update that the air quality situation had become so bad that even wildland firefighters without oxygen masks had to be evacuated from the situation.
00:02:57.000Now, it is inevitable that at some point, Justin Trudeau, as well as his ministers, will take to a podium and attribute what we're seeing to climate change.
00:03:07.000Year after year, with climate change, we're seeing more and more intense wildfires.
00:03:13.000And with the accelerating impact of climate change, we very much will continue to do so moving forward.
00:03:20.000Part of this is because of climate change and that we collectively, certainly in Canada and around the world, need to do more and accelerate the fight against climate change.
00:03:31.000It's clear that the government has not taken the climate crisis seriously.
00:03:37.000Our country is literally on fire and this liberal government thinks that business as usual is fine.
00:03:42.000Because that's not only what they did last year during the wildfire season, but it's also what they do whenever there is any extreme weather event.
00:03:50.000Like the recent flash flooding in Toronto.
00:03:53.000Justin Trudeau, of course, had to blame that on climate change.
00:03:56.000And not, of course, the obvious, which is poor and outdated city infrastructure.
00:04:01.000One of the most obvious ways of preventing wildfires is by clearing out fuel that would usually trigger major wildfires using prescribed burns.
00:04:10.000So you're basically fighting fire with fire.
00:04:12.000Everybody knows this is a well-known and established method of preventing wildfires.
00:04:17.000But what is interesting is that prescribed burns are not that common in Canada.
00:04:23.000Yes, they happen, but they don't happen at nearly the same rate as would be required to battle this situation.
00:04:30.000For example, in 2015, Parks Canada set its own record for the number of prescribed burns in a year.
00:04:38.000That was the most that Parks Canada had ever conducted.
00:04:42.000Now, strangely, in 2023, Parks Canada only conducted eight prescribed burns.
00:04:47.000So in 2015, they conducted more than three times the number of prescribed burns.
00:04:52.000Now, this piece of information comes directly from the International Association of Wildland Fire.
00:04:57.000According to Kira Hoffman and colleagues in a 2022 paper, Western Canada's new wildfire reality needs a new approach to fire management.
00:05:04.000The use of prescribed fire has decreased over the 25 years in British Columbia due to increased regulation, smoke concerns, fear of escapes and a lack of qualified and experienced practitioners.
00:05:15.000There is no prescribed fire certification framework in Canada.
00:05:19.000Parks Canada is an outlier among Canadian provinces when it comes to the use of prescribed burning.
00:05:24.000They embrace prescribed burning, but they just don't do it very often, according to the International Association of Wildland Fire.
00:05:32.000Despite actively using and supporting prescribed fire, there are still relatively small numbers of prescribed fires in area burned per year compared to wildfires.
00:05:40.000Parks Canada statistics on prescribed fire and wildfires show that since 1981, the annual number of prescribed fires has been highly outpaced by wildfires.
00:05:49.000It's also important to highlight that the number of wildfires in Canada have been steadily decreasing since 1990, making the climate change argument harder to justify.
00:05:58.000But something strange happened in 2023.
00:06:00.000Despite having the same number of wildfires, 2023 saw a completely disproportionate spike in area burned in this country due to wildfires.
00:06:11.000In fact, according to the Canadian National Fire Database, 15 million hectares of land were burned due to wildfires while there were 7,000 wildfires across the country.
00:06:23.000So if the number of wildfires occurring across Canada isn't changing that much from 1970 to 2023, but the amount of land burned has spiked disproportionately, something is going on there.
00:06:36.000Something needs to be looked at and analyzed as to what exactly is going on, because it's not as if this graph follows any trajectory which would point to a warming planet.
00:06:46.0002022 had a smaller area burned than 2018, and it appears that 1989 was the year that had the previous record for area burned before 2023.
00:06:57.000And now according to the Fraser Institute, none of this has anything to do with climate change, and it is in fact a failure of forest policy management.
00:07:05.000As the Fraser Institute writes in a 2023 article,
00:07:08.000Timestra's study also finds that wildfire management policy in Canada comes up short.
00:07:13.000A major barrier in Canada is the inadequate funding to support the vision of an innovative and integrated approach to wildfire management.
00:07:20.000Mitigation funding has allowed wildfire disasters, but not at the same level to mitigate flood and earthquake disasters.
00:07:26.000Despite the increasing occurrence of wildfire disasters in Canada, funding to support wildfire prevention, mitigation and preparedness have not kept pace with the increasing need to mitigate the impacts from wildfires and be better prepared when they do arrive.
00:07:39.000Furthermore, according to a Royal Society study out of the UK in 2016, they found that global area burned due to wildfires had been decreasing over previous decades.
00:07:51.000As the 2016 research report states, global area burned appears to have overall declined over past decades,
00:07:58.000and there is increasing evidence that there is less fire in the global landscape today than centuries ago.
00:08:04.000Now, this piece of criticism on the Canadian government was also picked up on in a 2021 Globe and Mail article with the headline,
00:08:12.000Canada's massive wildfires are the result of decades of bad decisions, time to make better decisions.
00:08:19.000And in this editorial, they highlight different policies implemented in the United States by the Biden administration and by Gavin Newsom in California
00:08:27.000to try to prevent these fires from happening in the first place, focusing specifically on forest management.
00:08:33.000As the Globe and Mail wrote in 2021, the idea of cleaning up the forests has come to the fore.
00:08:38.000In May, the Biden administration announced a plan to at least double the annual work to treat forests.
00:08:43.000In 2020, the U.S. Department of Agriculture worked on 10,700 square kilometers of forests.
00:08:49.000To put that into perspective, a record 40,000 square kilometers burned in 2020, including about 16,000 in California.
00:08:57.000Beyond cleaning out deadfall, the USDA said prescribed burns, planned small-scale fires are also part of its plans.
00:09:05.000So it appears that failing to implement enough prescribed burns in Jasper National Park likely played a very significant role in doing this.
00:09:13.000I also now want to point you to an interesting Facebook post made yesterday by a company called Freya Logging.