A newly released report into last year's devastating Jasper wildfires is making headlines, but not for the reasons you d expect. Instead of holding the federal government accountable for mismanaging a fire that started in a federally controlled national park, the report tries to hang the Alberta government out to dry. Never mind that Parks Canada has long neglected proper forest management in Jasper National Park, and never mind that it was federal jurisdiction from the get-go? Never mind the feds cut the wildfire budget in the park by 23% in the year of the fire, and the feds installed the wrong fire hydrants in the Jasper town site. Just listen to the agenda. Joining me tonight to cut through the smoke and mirrors is Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science. Michelle has been following the eco- politics behind wildfire policy for years, and she s here to expose how ideological, bureaucratic cowardice, and liberal scapegoating are now putting lives, livelihoods, and entire communities at risk.
00:07:20.360The Alberta government paid $79,500 for this study.
00:07:24.980And you can imagine why Alberta wildfire was probably a bit concerned about parks management, because this is what it says in that report,
00:07:36.360that even though the public cited wildfire, as their greatest fear, parks Canada said that, first of all, they're the sole authority for fire smart program, which is how individuals can protect their homes.
00:07:54.520And they said that parks Canada expressed the, that the actual risk of fire is less than the public perception.
00:08:09.140I'm sure that people who are listening to this may not know, but Jasper was sitting in the midst of 150,000 hectares of standing deadwood from the mountain pine beetle.
00:08:20.840And during that wildfire, I think it's 32,000 hectares of that deadwood went up.
00:08:28.800And, you know, we did another video explainer last year where our wildfire forestry consultant, Rob Skagel, provided a lot of technical information.
00:08:38.420But apparently on July 1st, the vapor pressure deficit, it's kind of like a measure of relative humidity, just skyrocketed, skyrocketed.
00:08:52.860And you can see on the wildfire maps at that time on July the 1st, sort of that area of the province looked kind of blue.
00:08:59.160But 12 days later, it was all hot red.
00:09:27.080So I'm sure that Alberta wildfire, you know, could see this extreme rising risk.
00:09:33.180And then we had the big winds come up.
00:09:35.660So, you know, that made it literally impossible to fight the fire.
00:09:39.720Because you can't use water bombers to any significant extent when there's that kind of condition, the wind and everything else.
00:09:54.260So, you know, I think that Alberta had very deep concerns, especially when you read the climate change risk report.
00:10:02.600But it's astonishing that anyone would ever suggest that the wildfire risk in Jasper was lower than the public perception of it.
00:10:14.120Yeah, I mean, I sort of made a list of the things that I thought the feds did wrong.
00:10:20.660And that's not, I guess, I mean, I say I thought, but I watched those Environment Committee hearings.
00:10:26.660And I watched the testimony of Ken Hodges, who said that, and he had been writing letters for the longest time.
00:10:37.900Same with the local MP, Jim Maglinski.
00:10:40.400He had been saying for the longest time, they have failed to mechanically clear parts of the forest that were hit by the pine beetle.
00:10:48.780And one of the reasons Parks Canada said, and this is in documents uncovered by Black Locks, they said, well, you know, it kind of looks ugly.
00:10:56.820And we have a lot of visitors to the parks.
00:11:00.080The Parks Canada also cut the fire budget in 2023-2024 by nearly a quarter, 23%.
00:11:06.500We do know through testimony from private firefighters that they were turned away when they went to the staging area.
00:11:17.020They were hired by one of the resorts there to come in and defend the resort, and they were turned away.
00:11:23.160I think they were turned away because they didn't want any outsiders to show the mismanagement happening in the fire response.
00:11:29.940Because they were also, once they were eventually let in, told, okay, you can go defend the resort that you've been hired to by the insurance company to stage near.
00:11:41.440But you can't get any water from the rivers and the lakes.
00:11:45.380And as it turns out, they couldn't hook to the municipal fire hydrants because Parks Canada had put the wrong fittings or maybe the right fittings, depending on who you ask.
00:11:56.240But it meant that outside municipalities, outside of Hinton, which is just up the road to the east, nobody could really connect to those.
00:12:05.200So you couldn't have this influx of firefighters from across the province converge on Jasper to save this UNESCO World Heritage Site.
00:12:13.720They couldn't do it because their pumper trucks didn't have the right fittings.
00:12:17.360And I think they only have like seven fittings, like adapters to help with the fire response.
00:12:25.860It was just mismanaged for years in advance.
00:12:29.080And then when, you know, push came to shove and an emergency was upon everybody, they couldn't even get the outside help that was ready to show up and help.
00:12:38.820And I know, I know this is a Parks Canada.
00:12:55.540It is a national park, but it happens to be in Alberta.
00:12:58.840And as I mentioned, it's a very important cross point for everything in Alberta, for our economy, for the food security of our people, everything, industry.
00:13:09.720So, you know, that part can't be ignored.
00:13:13.200And when you mentioned Ken Hodges, I was just looking at the standing committee from October 9th, I think it is, of 2024.
00:13:44.080They're not trained, experienced professional foresters.
00:13:48.500So, and when you look at the after effect report, you find that there were seven different emergency management plans
00:13:58.480that they had to navigate in a split second.
00:14:02.020And, of course, you know, initially the fire began quite far away and they thought they'd have like three or four days to deal with evacuation and such like.
00:14:12.120Then the wind came up and very rapidly, you know, it was an extreme emergency situation.
00:14:17.500So, you can imagine if you're trying to navigate all these different emergency plans when you really actually don't have time to read one.
00:14:28.180You know, you just have to, there should have been like one consolidated plan.
00:14:32.940Of course, hindsight's always 50-50 and I wasn't there on site.
00:14:37.720So, some of the things I'm saying may not be fair, but obviously based on the testimony of Ken Hodges, they just, and based on the climate risk report, you know,
00:14:51.440they just did not realize that the actual worst case scenario, God forbid, is that all exits of the town could have been blocked by wildfire.
00:15:03.060There's only one road in and out through the Trans-Canada and then the Highway 93, the Banff-Janspur Highway, you know,
00:15:13.280and the fire jumped to the south of the city or of the town.
00:15:17.900So, that kind of precluded exiting into Alberta and they ended up going to Valemont.
00:15:23.920But what would have happened had it jumped to the other side as well, you know.
00:15:28.080And when you look, if you go on Google Maps and you look at pictures from around the town, you're quite right about the whole idea of not wanting things to be ugly.
00:15:37.240You know, there's lots of still standing deadwood.
00:15:39.580You look at pictures of beautiful, the entryway to Malign Lake.
00:15:43.880That's the opening image on our Jasper wildfire explainer from last year.
00:16:03.460They're firecrackers waiting for somebody to light them up.
00:16:07.420And yes, it would have looked ugly to go in there and mechanically remove them all.
00:16:11.920Probably the tourists wouldn't have liked it.
00:16:13.820But, you know, then perhaps you could do some sort of cosmetic landscaping with some bigger planted trees just to, you know, cover that up and then let the forest renew.
00:16:26.780You know, in fact, it's kind of interesting because Jasper the bear, you know, the iconic emblem of Jasper, survived the fire.
00:16:37.760But when Sean Amato was tweeting about it, he said, this is the biggest fire in the park in 100 years.
00:16:44.680That is precisely the problem, according to our wildfire and forestry consultant, because the trees in the park, they have a lifespan of 40 to 60, maybe 80 years.
00:17:04.160And if you look at the landscape of Jasper National Park, going back to, say, 1900s, you find there's lots of deciduous trees, you know, that they don't have the same resin and chemical content that conifers have.
00:17:22.040They don't have branches way down to the ground.
00:17:24.840So you don't get that crowning fire that you do with conifers, where once the fire is at the top, then it just jumps.
00:17:35.760And if there's a big wind, it goes everywhere.
00:17:39.660So, you know, the fire suppression in the park over the 100 years is a big part of the problem.
00:17:49.200Yeah, when I was watching the committee testimony about this, they actually brought in the Forest Products Association, I believe it was, to offer testimony.
00:18:00.060And they said, we would have come in to the park.
00:18:04.360But there's this perception that you don't want professional private industry loggers inside the park.
00:18:14.580That, you know, it just wouldn't, there would be no public buy-in.
00:18:18.580But now we have 40% of the historic Jasper Town site up in smoke.
00:18:25.540You know, having the forest industry come in and do the job that Parks Canada just wasn't trained to do, or, you know, the town in rubble and desolation.
00:18:37.100Well, and I think also something that people, everyone who lives in Canada should be aware of the FireSmart programs in Canada.
00:18:46.160People who are watching from the States, there's a program called FireWise.
00:18:49.960So if we're going to look at this as lessons learned, then let's learn a lesson.
00:18:53.940Look at the FireSmart materials and see what you can do around your house.
00:18:59.240Because houses don't burn up because of a big wall of flame.
00:19:03.420They burn up because ember storms, firebrands land on, you know, patches of fallen leaves and grass, stuff like that, by the house, on the roof.
00:19:19.540And then that tiny fire takes your house out.
00:19:22.460And if you look at the recommendations for how to FireSmart your house, the exclusion zone, where you want to get all of the flammable materials, shrubs, trees, et cetera, you know, meters from your house.
00:19:39.520And that's in our video that's going up today so that you can see.
00:19:43.220So everyone can look around their house and say, hey, wait a minute, you know, if there is a wildfire season and there's a wildfire in my area, should I really have these materials on my deck?
00:19:56.140You know, because if those things on your deck, if you're storing junk on your deck that's flammable, your deck goes up and so does your house.
00:20:04.460So, and these, most of these are very simple things that people can do that really change the risk ratio for your home.
00:21:39.380Any city, depending on the conditions.
00:21:41.540And, you know, it's interesting that just about the same time as this report came out, Tim Hodgson, the Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, announced that they're putting together this G7 Kananaskis wildfire centre to promote resilience.
00:21:59.420They're going to spend $11.7 million over four years.
00:22:13.320And one of the points that we make in the video that goes up today is provincial and federal governments are spending $476 billion on climate change.
00:22:27.320And they're spending paltry millions on wildfire management.
00:22:31.480And then when there's a crisis situation like what happened in Jasper, they turn around and say, oh, my gosh, that climate change wildfire cost the insurance industry $1.5 billion.
00:22:46.380Let's spend more money on climate change.
00:22:48.960You know, and it's like, no, let's spend more money on practical, real things that we can do right now, today, that you can get everybody participating in.
00:22:58.320But for the benefit of everyone, and let's stop spending these billions of dollars on climate change, which even if Canada met all of its climate commitments, the reduction in global warming would be 0.007 degrees Celsius.
00:23:16.580That's 7,000th of a degree Celsius by 2100, which is ludicrous because every day, China is emitting more.
00:23:29.100Whatever sacrifice we make will not stop furnishing.
00:23:33.060And, you know, frankly, if you read the climate declaration on the CLINTEL website, you'll see that really there's no climate emergency, and Mother Nature is the more stronger force than humans.
00:24:12.340You also have Seth Klein on Early Edition.
00:24:14.380Now, both of them are lamenting the lack of climate action.
00:24:17.860When they mean climate action, they mean taking money from regular people and giving it to climate schemes.
00:24:23.800They don't actually mean making your communities more resilient to, well, acts of nature, which is, I was going to say, extreme weather.
00:24:33.880But, I mean, these are just acts of nature.
00:24:35.460We don't have more extreme weather anymore than we ever have had.
00:24:39.240And, in fact, I think we're better equipped to deal with extreme weather than ever before.
00:24:45.780Fewer people die from extreme weather than ever before.
00:24:48.640And instead of focusing on things, like you say, like fire-smarting your house, we're just supposed to offer up these tithes to David Suzuki's climate gods.
00:25:01.000Anyway, I'm just going on in a crazy rant.
00:25:04.320I'm sorry, you know, this is why, at this point, to everybody who believes that, you know, the systems, the legal, economic, and political systems, they're what have to be changed or altered or refocused.
00:25:21.780Yeah, well, I did a little video about that because, you know, they really disgust me because Seth Klein has this book called A Good War.
00:25:31.080And this works along the same theme as the Climate Emergency Mobilization Unit in the States, which is from Margaret Klein Solomon, who's a clinical psychologist using clinical psychological tactics to scare you into climate compliance.
00:25:47.920And probably her most famous invention is, our house is on fire.
00:25:52.780So you can see that all of the climate activists love to jump on the bandwagon.
00:26:11.100And, of course, the Climate Institute, the Canadian Climate Institute, is funded by the federal government for 79.76% of their budget.
00:26:21.240So while you're at the food bank, can't pay your bills, here's your tax dollars going to these fear mongers who are conflating wildfires and climate change and trying to force you to agree to the idea of building, I don't know, a 66 gigawatt wind farm off the shore of Nova Scotia or building an east-west power grid, which would put us at risk of national blackouts.
00:26:50.340So, you know, these guys are bandwagoning all this stuff.
00:26:55.380In fact, Chris Hatch of the National Observer, which is also government funded, he just wrote kind of an editorial about the wildfires and how he mentioned Catherine Hayhoe and a new report that suggests that, you know, when people face a disaster like the Jasper wildfire,
00:27:20.340they don't automatically connect it to climate change, but if you in the media, you know, connect it to climate change, then they see it, then they understand, oh, yeah, it was climate change that burnt down Jasper.
00:27:33.800So, so that's what they're recommending.
00:27:38.000And you have to realize that there are a number of nudge units that are funded by the federal government here in Canada, also in Britain, I think also in the States.
00:27:46.420But the whole purpose of these nudge units is to try and come up with psychological tactics that will coerce you into compliance on ridiculous things like climate change.
00:27:59.140And they're spending billions of dollars on this.
00:28:01.280So, you know, personally, I wonder if, say, the switch from plastic straws to paper straws was kind of a compliance test.
00:28:10.880You know, I'd love to foip those groups and find out, OK, which campaign was it that you guys used to test people's climate compliance?
00:28:19.680And how much of my tax dollars went to, you know, twist the narrative against me and my freedoms?
00:28:27.480Because basically that's what they're doing.
00:28:29.340You know, with the David Suzuki and Seth Klein, they want to use World War Two measures.
00:28:36.580They want to they want the Wartime Measures Act effectively to force you to ration your consumption, perhaps limitations on your movement.
00:28:46.860This was published also in the journal Metro in September of 2021, actually long before the Freedom Convoy.
00:28:56.480They were already planning how can we use COVID lockdown tactics and apply them to climate change.
00:29:03.300So, you know, I'm really opposed to what Suzuki and Klein are doing because my mother was an ATS driver in World War Two.
00:29:15.880My uncle, one uncle was a Halifax bomber pilot who was lost in a raid over Essen and my other uncle was in the tank brigade.
00:29:26.840So those people fought for our freedoms and Suzuki and Klein are twisting that and twisting the wartime effort to actually try and impose climate tyranny.
00:29:38.420So they really make me sick, actually.
00:29:53.420Well, and, you know, David Suzuki is just so insincere in all of this.
00:30:00.800The man lives like there's no climate emergency.
00:30:04.700He wants me to live like there's a climate emergency, but not him.
00:30:07.760I mean, when he stops buying beachfront property, I might think he's sincere about the oceans rising when he doesn't have to circumnavigate the globe to go to his vacation property.
00:30:21.120In Australia, I might think that he's sincere in his belief about the impact of a climate footprint.
00:30:29.920I wouldn't agree with him, but I might think that he holds a sincere view.
00:30:34.120But, I mean, the man lives larger than almost everybody.
00:30:39.840But, meanwhile, telling the rest of us that humanity is an inherent plague upon the face of the earth.
00:30:47.540What he means is we're the plague, not him.
00:30:51.300Yeah, well, I always remember that famous line that Dr. Willie Soon showed in his presentation to us that David Suzuki said that people are like maggots defecating all over the place.
00:31:47.560Well, Vanuatu put forward a motion to the UN General Assembly about probably two years ago to ask if they would then ask the International Court of Justice for an opinion on climate obligations of countries.
00:32:06.480So, of course, the small island nations make the claim that they're not responsible for climate change.
00:32:13.100It's all the large emitting industrial Western nations who are rich, therefore give us money.
00:32:17.920So, they're claiming, you know, that sea levels are rising.
00:32:23.840And, like, in one of the articles that came out today, they said that sea levels are rising six millimeters a year.
00:32:39.540Anyway, but they're talking about Vanuatu was also sitting on a tectonic plate.
00:32:43.820There was a 7.3 earthquake there, which affected how it sits in the water.
00:32:49.380Dr. John D. Harper, who was one of our consultants, in an interview with him, he said, you know, a lot of these small island nations that are on corals are actually growing.
00:33:00.960But the ones that seem to feel that their island is sinking, typically these places are eroding, you know, and to someone who lives there, it looks like the sea level is rising.
00:33:18.740But, in fact, the land is eroding, and that's simply from the motion of the sea.
00:33:22.840And, in fact, sometimes some of the things they've done to supposedly prevent the erosion has actually, you know, changed the motion of the sea and increased it in some places.
00:33:35.280You know, you have to wonder what's going on there because Vanuatu, while claiming that the West is responsible for this sea level rise, they run a marine registry.
00:33:45.880You know, and marine ships are big polluters and big users of oil and of marine diesel.
00:33:55.920Also, the Marshall Islands, as I think the second or third largest marine registry in the world, same thing.
00:34:02.580And they also, they were the ones who gave Catherine McKenna that little palm frond.
00:34:22.680But the ICJ, the International Court of Justice, is going to be issuing or reviewing the Vanuatu case.
00:34:31.140And interestingly enough, if you look at our report, Manufacturing a Climate Crisis, the West Coast Environmental Law Association, the charity, has been working with Vanuatu.
00:34:46.800So, I suspect that we have the hand of the Tar Sands campaign floating through the background of the Vanuatu case.
00:34:56.360Because, you know, if you're a child on an island, a young person, I think the person who made the application was like 16, I don't think you wake up one morning and go, I know.
00:35:20.940And if people want an example of this, you know, ocean erosion being falsely linked to climate change, we don't have to go to more exotic locales of the world.
00:35:33.680We've got a little island here closer to home.
00:35:42.200And they will tell you that it is linked to your SUV and climate change, which is causing the shoreline of Sable Island to change and erode.
00:35:55.800But in the same article, they always accurately describe Sable Island as not really an island, but a sandbar, which would be eroded by the changing tides of the ocean.
00:36:56.360Yeah, and not purposefully complicated, because I think that's what the other side of this dispute does, is they purposefully complicate ideas so that normal people are like, you know what, I just throw my hands up and assume the other side is smarter than you.
00:37:12.300And really, it's not all that complicated.
00:37:16.760The big burning ball of gas in the sky is more responsible for the changing weather than you are.
00:37:22.380And you can't even accurately measure the average temperature of the surface of the earth, because you can't accurately measure the weather in your own backyard.
00:37:41.900You know, if you just put a whole bunch of thermometers around in your backyard in different locations, you'll find there's like 20 degree difference in temperature from one location to the next sometimes.
00:37:54.600And then they want you to be worried about 1.5 to stay alive.
00:38:21.820Climate change will get us one day, apparently.
00:38:24.240Well, you know, our most recent press release also shows that there are two opinion polls showing that the public are really done with climate change.
00:39:12.340And again, going back to the Jasper wildfire, practical, on-the-ground things, real things that will make a real difference.
00:39:20.000That's what we have to concentrate on.
00:39:21.600You know, that 40% number in the United States seems high to me.
00:39:25.840But if those people had to pay a carbon tax for a couple of years, it would drop down to Canadian levels of not caring about climate change.
00:39:34.120They just haven't had to pay for the effects of the climate ideas yet.