Juno News - October 10, 2024


Shocking new Jasper wildfire revelations put blame on Parks Canada

Topics
Parks Canada wildfire obstruction Parks Canada wildfire negligence
Hosted by
Harrison Faulkner
Mentioned
Steven Guilbeault Justin Trudeau Peter Schultz Ken Hodges Greenpeace Jasper Bush
Trump Derangement Syndrome RESURGENCE as Harris falters Trudeau appeased Hamas supporters

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

157.04

Word count

1,534

Sentence count

82


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

A third of Jasper National Park has now been destroyed by the devastating wildfire that ripped through the town of Jasper, Alberta, Canada in July of 2014. Who is responsible for the negligence that allowed this massive fire to burn for so long?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Throughout the Jasper fire, we encountered numerous examples of Parks Canada fire management
00:00:08.940 actively obstructing our activities and not providing us with relevant information on fire.
00:00:13.360 What was done was insignificant and poorly thought out.
00:00:16.980 It did nothing to protect the town from the Jasper fire complex.
00:00:21.260 We're doing nothing to protect you against forest fires.
00:00:30.000 Well, we are learning some truly insane things about the federal government's response to the Jasper wildfire this past summer.
00:00:37.440 For one, we now know that private fire crews were ordered to stand down and not assist in the fighting of the Jasper wildfire by different federal agencies
00:00:46.580 while the wildfire was ripping through Jasper National Park.
00:00:50.400 This latest revelation, layered on top of what we already know to be truly insane levels of incompetence when it comes to fire prevention by Parks Canada,
00:00:58.260 is beginning to paint a very dark picture as to what exactly happened in Jasper over the summer.
00:01:05.020 It's beginning to look as though the wildfire was entirely preventable.
00:01:09.660 The Trudeau government has blamed every wildfire in this country over the past few years exclusively on climate change,
00:01:16.500 refusing to acknowledge or take any responsibility for their inaction.
00:01:20.360 Now, we don't want to ascribe intentional malice to anyone at Parks Canada for the Jasper wildfire.
00:01:26.080 But with the information that we are starting to learn now from committee meetings,
00:01:29.800 can you really blame Canadians for thinking that way?
00:01:32.620 Now, before we get into the show, be sure to drop a like on this video, help us out by subscribing to the Trude North YouTube channel,
00:01:37.700 and the comment question for the episode is this.
00:01:41.040 Who should be held responsible for the negligence in battling the Jasper wildfire?
00:01:46.280 Let me know your answer in the comments below, and let's get into it.
00:01:49.100 Well, thanks to an ongoing parliamentary committee looking into the handling of the Jasper wildfire last summer,
00:01:55.700 we now know that while Jasper was burning, while a third of Jasper had been burned
00:02:01.700 and close to a billion dollars of damages had occurred from the devastating wildfire,
00:02:06.100 Parks Canada turned away the services of a private firefighting group.
00:02:11.320 Now, this is not just a ragtag group of men pretending to be firefighters without proper authorization.
00:02:19.820 This group, Arctic Fire Services Limited, had been contracted out by the Alberta government to protect the town of Jasper.
00:02:28.480 So while the fire was taking place, Parks Canada turned them around.
00:02:33.240 Take a listen to this shocking committee testimony.
00:02:35.320 Throughout the Jasper fire, we encountered numerous examples of Parks Canada fire management
00:02:39.060 actively obstructing our activities and not providing us with relevant information on fire.
00:02:44.300 We were provided rules of engagement, which we had to accept or be escorted out by the wardens.
00:02:50.680 They reiterated twice by Parks Canada Operations Section Chief,
00:02:53.900 second in charge to the incident commander, that we were not legally allowed to be there.
00:02:57.100 In a letter sent by Arctic Fire Safety Services to parliamentarians,
00:03:02.020 it states clearly that throughout the Jasper fire, we, Arctic Fire Safety Services,
00:03:08.340 encountered numerous examples of Parks Canada fire management actively obstructing our activities
00:03:13.200 and not providing us with relevant information on the fire.
00:03:16.580 It goes on to state that these firefighters were informed that they were non-essential.
00:03:23.560 And when the fire risk rose again during August the 2nd to the 4th,
00:03:27.120 with increasing fire behavior anticipated, they were lawfully ordered by Parks Canada to leave the park.
00:03:33.240 This organization was not allowed to be part of the incident management organization.
00:03:39.240 However, wildfire defense systems from Montana, so a foreign wildfire organization,
00:03:46.320 was allowed to be part of the incident management organization.
00:03:50.580 So 50 firefighters and 20 fire trucks were turned away by Parks Canada from battling this wildfire.
00:03:57.120 We now know from other testimony, this time from Ken Hodges, a forestry expert,
00:04:02.720 that Parks Canada did nothing to address the situation building up on the ground
00:04:06.560 with the invasive pine beetle that created fuel for the Jasper wildfire.
00:04:11.860 Nothing was done to address the landscape of the beetle-killed timber
00:04:15.960 to prevent the mega fire of July 22nd, 2024.
00:04:19.120 What was done was insignificant and poorly thought out.
00:04:23.660 It did nothing to protect the town from the Jasper fire complex.
00:04:27.980 So what are Parks Canada even doing at this point?
00:04:30.720 What are they doing to prevent another major devastating wildfire
00:04:35.060 that could ruin another piece of Canada's natural landscape?
00:04:40.380 Jasper National Park is one of the most naturally beautiful places on Earth,
00:04:44.480 and a third of it has now been burned to the ground and ruined
00:04:47.780 due to what is clearly, clearly negligence and incompetence.
00:04:51.700 No one at this point is seriously blaming the Jasper wildfire on climate change.
00:04:58.020 Except, of course, Stephen Gilbeau, Justin Trudeau's Minister of the Environment.
00:05:04.580 We're doing nothing to protect you against forest fires.
00:05:07.300 Forestry experts are now all saying the same thing,
00:05:10.000 that Parks Canada did not do enough to prevent this wildfire from happening.
00:05:14.280 Furthermore, I spoke to Peter Schultz, a former Jasper National Park senior planner
00:05:19.840 who worked at the park in 2008, and he claimed that as far back as even then,
00:05:26.500 Parks Canada was not doing anything to clear the dead wood, to clear the fuel in the forest.
00:05:32.180 They basically allowed the perfect situation, they allowed a tinderbox to build up inside Jasper National Park.
00:05:40.020 And, of course, the park caught on fire.
00:05:42.080 There's confidence in stopping the small fires, but I know that the fire team was telling upper management repeatedly,
00:05:49.340 at least back in 2008 and since forward, there's a certain point we can't fight it anymore.
00:05:55.660 There's too much fuel. It'll catch too fast.
00:05:58.640 We need to clear out. We need to prescribe burns during wet weather.
00:06:03.220 We need to get machines in there. We need to log.
00:06:07.000 We need to do things to remove the amount of fuel.
00:06:10.580 We're very good at this, but there's a certain limit.
00:06:13.900 And we have reached that limit. And that limit was reached 17 years ago.
00:06:17.180 So Parks Canada allowed bureaucratic red tape to prevent fire crews from putting out this fire earlier.
00:06:24.060 They also, through multiple testimony, as well as an interview with a former employee of Parks Canada at Jasper National Park,
00:06:31.440 did nothing for over 10 years to prevent the buildup of fuel and dead wood in Jasper National Park to stop a forest fire from happening.
00:06:41.080 But, of course, it's a whole lot easier to blame this devastating wildfire simply on climate change.
00:06:47.060 To say that there's nothing anyone could do to prevent this from happening because climate change is simply unstoppable
00:06:53.840 without, of course, the following measures that need to be implemented,
00:06:57.700 such as a carbon tax, such as banning the sale of gas vehicles,
00:07:03.040 such as shutting down Canada's natural resources industry.
00:07:07.880 Isn't it convenient that all of the solutions to solving climate change advance the federal government's liberal agenda?
00:07:14.980 And isn't it convenient, as well, that all of these wildfires are being blamed exclusively on climate change,
00:07:21.420 despite the overwhelming evidence that the Jasper wildfire had nothing to do with climate change?
00:07:27.040 We're looking at a situation in which Canadians are starting to ask whether or not criminal negligence took place in this instance,
00:07:34.200 whether or not a crime might have actually been committed here.
00:07:37.400 And it's not like Stephen Gilboa isn't used to committing crimes to advance his political agenda.
00:07:42.360 Actually, it's something he's pretty good at doing.
00:07:44.980 Greenpeace is climbing the world's tallest building today to tell the world not to be fooled by the liberal government.
00:07:50.460 As the talk on climate change starts, we want to tell the world that the Bush and Canadian administration are out to kill the Kyoto Protocol.
00:07:58.000 And you know what is horribly ironic?
00:08:00.480 The carbon emissions from Canada's 2023 wildfire season.
00:08:04.920 Just the wildfires alone.
00:08:07.000 Nothing else.
00:08:08.080 The wildfires produced more carbon emissions than all but three nations in 2023.
00:08:18.340 The Canadian wildfires produced more carbon dioxide than every other country in the world,
00:08:25.020 except for the United States, China, and India.
00:08:27.200 So good luck trying to lower Canada's carbon emissions with your outrageous political policies like carbon taxes
00:08:33.920 and with the constant political attacks on Canada's natural gas and oil industries,
00:08:39.300 when you are doing nothing at all to prevent the spread of wildfires in our country,
00:08:43.980 which produce more carbon dioxide than anything else in this country combined,
00:08:50.260 which produce more carbon dioxide than all but three countries in the entire world.
00:08:54.340 You don't get to blame wildfires on climate change when this level of negligence is taking place inside Canada's national parks.
00:09:03.200 You can't just use climate change to absolve negligence from federal government agencies like Parks Canada
00:09:09.540 and hope that everybody just moves along with their lives and forgets about it.
00:09:13.480 This is disgraceful.
00:09:14.900 Canadians should be outraged over this.
00:09:16.860 And someone needs to be held accountable.
00:09:19.460 And I think it'll likely be Stephen Guilbeau.
00:09:22.240 All right, everyone, that's going to do it for us today on the show.
00:09:24.540 Thank you so much for tuning in.
00:09:25.700 My name is Harrison Faulkner, and this is Ratio.
00:09:28.320 We'll see you next time.
00:09:45.120 We'll see you next time.