THE STANDING SENATE COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE AND FORESTRY
EVIDENCE
OTTAWA, Tuesday, October 7, 2025
The Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry met this day at 7:30 p.m. [ET] to examine and report on the growing issue of wildfires in Canada and the consequential effects that wildfires have on forestry and agriculture industries, as well as rural and Indigenous communities, throughout the country.
Senator Robert Black (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: I will call to order the meeting of the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry. Good evening, everyone. Thanks for coming this evening. I would like to begin by welcoming the members of the committee, my colleagues, our witnesses — two of them this evening — as well as those watching on the worldwide web. My name is Rob Black, senator from Ontario, and I chair this committee.
I want to start by acknowledging that the land on which we gather this evening is on the unceded traditional territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe Nation. Before we hear from our witnesses today, I would like to start by asking the senators around the room to introduce themselves, starting with our deputy chair.
Senator McNair: John McNair from the province of New Brunswick. Thank you for being here.
Senator Martin: Yes, good evening. Yonah Martin from British Columbia.
Senator Varone: Toni Varone, Ontario.
Senator Sorensen: Karen Sorensen, Alberta, Banff National Park, Treaty 7 territory.
Senator McBean: Marnie McBean — not as beautiful as that — Toronto —
Senator Sorensen: Downtown Toronto.
Senator McBean: — pretty proud of it, though — Toronto, Ontario.
[Translation]
Senator Miville-Dechêne: Julie Miville-Dechêne from Quebec.
[English]
The Chair: Today the committee continues to study the topic of the growing issue of the wildfires in Canada and the consequential effects that wildfires have on the forestry and agricultural sector and industries.
We have the pleasure this evening of welcoming Robert Gray, wildland fire ecologist, and Dr. John Pomeroy, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Geography & Planning at the University of Saskatchewan. Thank you, gentlemen, for being here. You will each have five minutes for your opening remarks, and they will be followed by questions from my colleagues. Questions and answers are five minutes, and then we’ll move on. When my hand goes up, it means you have a minute left, and two hands means it’s time to wrap up. We will do multiple question sessions.
On behalf of the committee members today, I want to thank you for being here. And with that, Mr. Gray, the floor is yours.
Robert W. Gray, Wildland Fire Ecologist, R.W. Gray Consulting Ltd.: I would like to thank the committee for the opportunity to provide input to their study. I would also like to thank the committee for accepting our recently published paper on the wildfire crisis. I apologize that I didn’t have time to get it translated into French. It was just published last Thursday. We got it out as quick as we could.
My brief focuses on B.C., where I live, but many of the issues plaguing B.C. are common to all of Canada.
Canadians have experienced numerous highly damaging fire seasons in the past decade. Unfortunately, climate change modelling suggests things will likely be worse in the future. Higher temperatures, longer fire seasons, stronger winds, more lightning and drier fuels will all contribute to increases in area burned at high severity.
The total cost of fire is also expected to increase. This includes the direct cost of suppression plus the many indirect costs of wildfire such as physical and emotional health of civilians and firefighters, property and infrastructure damage, business loss, evacuation costs, resource losses, et cetera.
Suppression costs are tracked by provincial and territorial agencies, but indirect costs aren’t. Economists estimate that indirect costs can range from 1.5 to 20 times the direct costs for any one particular fire. This cost to society is substantial. For example, the estimated annual economic burden from wildfire in the U.S. ranges from $394 to $894 billion per year.
As fire seasons get worse, and increasingly overlap, governments are having to set aside more money into contingency funds in anticipation of bad fire years. This is money that is no longer available for health, education, housing, et cetera.
In B.C., wildfires in the past eight years have severely impacted a significant proportion of the timber harvesting land base. Coupled with millions of hectares of insect damage and past harvest, at some point in the not-too-distant future, the industry will cease to be economically viable and sustainable.
The impact on rural, single-industry communities and the province will be catastrophic economically and socially. A healthy and diverse forest industry is needed to help us solve the wildfire crisis, but forest practices and economics need to change in order to make it an effective tool.
B.C.’s annual harvest footprint is approximately 130,000 hectares, but very few of those hectares are fuel treatments. Slash is not treated, and conifer plantations are planted through the slash. Ironically, the harvest areas that do survive current wildfires are those 1980s and 1990s cutblocks that were slash burned and then planted.
The scale of the fuels problem is immense and daunting, but we don’t need to treat everywhere. To be truly effective, harvest needs to take place in specific places on the landscape and for specific reasons. In other words, the primary objective can’t be economics — highest volume at lowest cost — it needs to be wildfire mitigation.
We have the tools to help predict where fire is most likely to flow on a landscape, how severe it will likely be and how to interrupt flow and change severity. We also have research supporting how much needs to be treated: unconstrained, approximately 40% of a landscape consisting of vegetation structure and composition that slows and stops fires and alters severity rarely exhibits large fires. This is the landscape that we inherited from Indigenous fire stewardship. This means more hardwood forest, grasslands, shrublands, woodlands, thinned and burned stands, re-burned stands and more robust riparian areas. It also means strategically not replanting large areas post-fire.
To fund this necessary work, we need to couple the forestry and energy sectors. Our forests contain dimension lumber and pulp but also stored energy, and either we control how that energy is released or Mother Nature does.
Harmonizing and hybridizing the forest and energy sectors means we look at landscape forest management through a forest product and energy sector lens from the outset, not as two separate actions.
To carry out this work — thinning, prescribed and cultural fire, tree planting, post-fire restoration, et cetera — we need stable, regional workforces. This means a workforce that trains and plans over the winter, conducts fuel treatments in the spring and fall and is available for firefighting in the summer. This shifts the emphasis from wildfire suppression to wildland fire mitigation, and will enable us to get ahead of the crisis and reduce the hazardous conditions facing our wildland firefighters.
Stable, adequate funding is also necessary to build wildland fire management capacity and carry out the work. Programs such as the Weston Family Foundation-funded Canadian Prescribed Fire Training Program, recently established at the University of British Columbia Okanagan campus, are a critical first step, but without stable funding we’ll never be able to tackle the crisis at the appropriate pace and scale. Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you.
Dr. Pomeroy, it is now your turn.
John Pomeroy, Distinguished Professor of Geography, Director of the Centre for Hydrology, University of Saskatchewan, as an individual: Thank you very much. I am honoured to be speaking to the committee and to be representing over 200 professors from 23 universities and 1,800 students and technicians who contributed to the Global Water Futures program since it began in 2016, and we carry on with the observing program.
In Canada we have dwindling snowpacks and more erratic rainfalls, and these are the primary source waters for our increasingly threatened water supplies. In 2023 and 2025, in the West and much of the North, we had snow droughts that led to extensive wildfires, record-low river flows, early ice breakup, dropping reservoirs, drying wetlands and lakes and record glacier melt. The UNESCO Chair in Mountain Water Sustainability that I contribute to and the UN’s Decade of Action on Cryospheric Sciences dealing with snow and ice, which I chair, are working to address the knowledge and capacities of these issues, which need integrated observing and prediction systems, facilitating the transformation of communities to increase their resilience and develop local adaptations to wildfire.
Wildfires, droughts and floods go hand in hand with climate change. Our warming planet is warming faster in Canada than anywhere else, and the further north you go or the higher the elevation you go. Warmer winters mean shallower snowpacks, earlier springs and more intense early summer wildfires. Hotter summers mean drought, low soil moisture, more extreme and erratic rainstorms and more wildfires. The wildfires themselves are accelerating the deglaciation of the Canadian Rockies and have increased an outrageous 10% due to soot that darkens the ice and increases the melt rate.
The recently burned areas in Canada since 2001 is about 11% of our forested area. It is equivalent to the area of Newfoundland and Labrador. The implications for flooding are dire. There is a 25% or more increase in peak stream flows possible after a mountain basin burns.
About half of Canada’s land area is covered in shrubs and forest, and they govern the water supply and store carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Those northern forests are losing their resilience with increasing trends for extended severity of wildfire, thawing permafrost, forest collapse, pest infestations and disease. It’s the most rapid land cover change since the agricultural settlement of Canada. It has massive implications on freshwater and it’s happening right now.
The main disturbance in boreal forests is wildfire. Many species are well adapted to this, such as the black spruce; but changes in the fire regime are increasing the size, frequency and severity of wildfire, degrading the abilities of these forests to regenerate. Forty percent of black spruce woodlands were not found to be resilient to long-term drought from climate change by my colleague Jennifer Baltzer of Wilfrid Laurier University. Up to 30% of these woodlands showed regeneration failure of any tree species. They are not coming back as forests.
Across North America, we have seen a transition from conifers — from needle leaves — to deciduous species — birch, aspen and others — or even unforested land covers. We have zombie fires now, and they are really short interval burnings that are just wiping these out.
This is affecting a wide range of ecosystem services, including hydrology.
The years 2023 and 2024 were the hottest years on the planet in 120,000 years, by many estimates. This warmed our snow, melted it early, thawed our permafrost, burned our forest, and intensified rainfall and drought outside of conditions to which nature and our population has evolved. It is hurtling us into a dangerous and unfamiliar world where our experience in traditional approaches to forest and water management no longer provide adequate guidance for preserving our environment, building our prosperity, looking after each other, and living in safe, healthy communities.
Canada has undergone an unprecedented number of water-related natural disasters since the year 2000 that have exceeded $40 billion in damage. This is making wildfire, drought and flood insurance unviable for many countries with parts of Canada becoming uninsurable.
The increased risk of wildfire due to drier conditions requires land management policies to incorporate fuel management strategies to reduce intensity and spread of wildfire. Public awareness campaigns on prevention are increasingly important. Fire management agencies need to prepare for longer, more intense wildfire seasons. They need to provide resources for early detection rapid response. A national water prediction strategy could be harnessed to predict the likelihood of wildfires with the same models used for drought and flood forecasting. Prescribed burning, resource deployment and evacuation planning would benefit from these predictions.
Integrated water observations and water predictions could add crucial water and wildfire intelligence to our emergency preparedness and climate change adaptation. Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you very much.
Colleagues, the first round will be five minutes each, including question and answer, and if time permits and there is a need, we’ll move on to a second round.
Senator McNair: Thank you both, gentlemen, for being here tonight. Mr. Gray my question is to you. In the article you provided us “Wildfire management at a crossroads,” you talk about what is essentially a whole-of-society shift that needs to happen in order to mitigate the effects of wildfires to the point that we see a noticeable change.
Can you go into a little detail of what that shift should look like from your perspective and how we get there? I take it it’s on the increased investment and mitigation option you talk about in your article.
Mr. Gray: Yes, that’s a loaded question. In 2023 we started talking about getting on a war footing, not just fire but climate change too, and it is similar to how we approached tackling fascism in the 1940s. It requires looking at things through a different sort of economic lens.
We say forestry can’t be just simply an economic exercise; it has to be a tool to meet a greater objective, and there is a whole trickle down when it comes to looking at it that way. We have to direct practices to very specific parts of the landscape, whatever the cost is, and so it may mean retooling forestry and looking for other ways to combine other sectors, like energy, to help defray those costs. Society as a whole will likely have to look at making certain sacrifices in order to get this thing done at the pace and scale necessary.
When we look at doing things in a very intentional way across the landscape, it means not just forestry has to change but also the constraints we place on the landscape. Fire is going to go where fire is going to go, and that means if we have static reserves on the landscape then we can’t protect them. We have to look at a very fluid situation on the landscape, and we will have to make significant tradeoffs.
Senator McNair: Talking about 2025 and the fire and fuel management practices you discussed, were they previously applied in Manitoba and Saskatchewan? Or how could they have been applied that would have made a difference for this year?
Mr. Gray: There hasn’t been a great deal of prescribed burning in Canada for quite some time. In 2023 about 7,000 hectares were applied in Canada and about 8 million hectares in the United States.
So without that necessary thinning and prescribed burning, we really can’t interrupt fire flow very well. The prescribed burning robs the fire of fuel, and it’s been well established and plenty of research papers show that thinning followed by prescribed fire or prescribed fire alone really does the trick. Thinning alone doesn’t quite do it. But scale is really critical. Postage stamps, the fires we’re seeing, they don’t even cause a hiccup, so it has to be at a large enough scale.
A good example we have in our paper is in 2023 we did a 1,300-hectare prescribed burn on the Aqam community just north of Cranbrook, and that was to save the airport and the community. There was a July wildfire that took out seven homes, 10% of the homes on the reserve, unfortunately, but it made a run at the airport, which is the tanker base and the fuelling site for helicopters. That treatment stopped the fire. It saved 100 homes plus the airport. But it ran north and took out another 5,000 hectares, so 1,300 hectares wasn’t enough. The scale of treatment has to match the scale of the disturbance.
Senator Sorensen: Mr. Pomeroy, you stated that wildfire smoke is causing glaciers to melt faster in the Canadian Rockies, and you have estimated the Athabasca Glacier will be gone by the end of the century and Peyto Glacier could disappear in a decade, both areas that are very near and dear to my heart. Can you explain how wildfire smoke impacts glaciers but also how researchers measure that particular impact on the glaciers? There is lots of rationale for the Athabasca Glacier to be receding, but this particularly, how do you measure that?
Mr. Pomeroy: Thank you for the question. We have taken detailed measurements on the Peyto and Athabasca glaciers for a number of years. These are meteorological stations, weather stations on the ice which include something called radiometers that measure solar radiation, sunshine essentially, and the energy from it coming in from the sky and also reflected off the ice. We’ve been able to measure the reflectance of the glaciers over time. If you go back 30, 40 years ago, they would have been reflecting about 30% of the solar radiation hitting them. Now they are as dark as a prairie field. They are reflecting about 15% of that solar radiation. They are absorbing much more energy from the sun and melting faster.
The other thing we found interesting is that the smoky days block some of that solar radiation from hitting the glacier ice, so that slows down the melt a little bit. Those tend to be cooler days, so that was interesting.
The big melt events occur the year after the smoky years. The glacier accelerates when we get back to those clear skies. We found that algae were growing on the glaciers and holding the soot in place. Filamentous algae feed off it and are keeping the glaciers dark for years after a wildfire event. One wildfire can do this for multiple years, and the overall increase is about 10% of the melt rate which, given they are already record high, is disastrous.
Senator Sorensen: I worked at the Athabasca Glacier probably 45 years ago, and so you had that measurement happening at that time.
Mr. Pomeroy: We did not, but we have had measurements at Peyto Glacier going back to 1965. It was part of Canada’s contribution to the International Hydrological Decade.
Senator Sorensen: I have a question for Mr. Gray. As mentioned, I live in Banff National Park. Prescribed burning with Parks Canada is part of my life, as it is in Jasper, which, again, we could talk about how 70% of that town was saved. It is interesting to me to know that there is so little prescribed burning across the rest of Canada. Is that a credit to Parks Canada that they are proactive with that activity?
Mr. Gray: Very much so. They have been the leaders in this for such a long time.
Senator Sorensen: So noted, because they took a lot of criticism. That does surprise me that the rest of Canada and other levels of government are not doing prescribed burning.
Mr. Gray: Well, in British Columbia, there were about 150,000 hectares burned per year up until the early 1990s. But there were too many escapes, smoking out population centres and burning where it wasn’t appropriate ecologically, and it lost favour, and it couldn’t defend itself.
Senator Sorensen: Which is interesting, because, of course, we are tourism destinations, and when you decide to do a prescribed burn, and the smoke comes in, it is not popular among tourists. But I’ll tell you, those communities, who cares? Get rid of that. Build a barrier.
Thank you.
Senator McBean: I’m going to quickly go back to something that Senator Sorensen just picked up on there. You said 7,000 hectares in Canada and 8 million hectares in the United States. How are they getting away with it, and what are we doing wrong that have put so many brakes on it?
Mr. Gray: A large majority of the burning in the States is in the southeast, and they never stopped. Cowboy burning happened down there for decades.
Even after 1910 and the change in, sort of, fire approach to more suppression, they kept burning, and they developed a culture. It’s slowly spread across the country. There are about 150,000 prescribed burns per year in the United States, and they have built up a system that has a 99.2% success rate.
Senator McBean: Is that why right now Canada is shouldering the — everyone in the school ground is pointing at Canada for burning so much, and the United States is just pointing up at us, too. Are they burning the same?
Sometimes I find that I watch the news, and I think Canada is burning like crazy. Then you put on the international news, and, actually, France and Spain and everything is burning everywhere.
Are the States not burning right now because of these prescribed burns?
Mr. Gray: No, they had a pretty significant fire season this year as well. Their smoke comes north. Our smoke goes south.
In B.C., we are actually trading fires back and forth across the border. We just need to build the capacity to increase the pace and scale of prescribed burning, and the program that I mentioned in the brief is a start, for sure.
Senator McBean: Thank you. I’m going to come back on the second round.
Dr. Pomeroy, based on your modelling work, what are the long-term projections for wildfire risk under the different climate scenarios, and how should this inform Canada’s adaptation planning?
Mr. Pomeroy: We’ve run detailed climate models forward to the end of the century under business as usual and some greenhouse gas reduction scenarios, but when we couple them to best-guess ecological changes due to wildfire, it is quite distressing. We see a massive retreat of the boreal forest but not an expansion into the tundra as quickly as one might hope for. We see shrub tundra expansion but boreal forest loss due to disease, wildfire, lack of regeneration for a variety of reasons and permafrost collapse, which destabilizes black spruce forests in the North.
I expect an acceleration of deforestation with wildfire as one of the primary causes, but there are other causes associated with this as well. After permafrost collapse, forests lose their base, their roots. They fall over, and then they are susceptible to burn, as an example.
Senator McBean: Thank you for such an uplifting — I know. It is jaw-dropping, sorry. Thank you.
Mr. Pomeroy: Yes, we are losing the boreal forest.
Senator Varone: My question is for you, Mr. Gray. I read the report with intent, and I’m a newbie on this committee, so I’m learning as we speak. But you make four recommendations at the end of the report. The first three I get, and just for efficacy, you say:
. . . begin a proactive policy shift that sets a clear vision for wildfire resilience . . . .
I get that. The second one was:
. . . public understanding and acceptance of the wildfire crisis . . . recognizing that the goal of reducing wildfire risks to zero is illusory.
I found that very powerful as a comment.
The third was:
. . . governments have to take a proactive, “hands on” approach and coordinate with industry, the scientific community . . . .
Those are all very clear and concise.
The fourth, though, is what got me incredibly confused, because you stated:
. . . increased media coverage and recognition of the human and financial costs . . . have created sufficient frustration (on the part of affected publics) . . . to encourage new choices by regional and national governments.
You state that clearly, but elsewhere you suggest that the top-down solutions are:
. . . encountering increased resistance, instead of embracing local knowledge and community governance . . . .
When you talk about the funding, I’m curious about what you would call a utopian governance model that will allow for a funding formula and for that governance model to execute on your recommendations. Because on one side you’re saying, “top down,” and on the other side, you’re saying, “bottom up.”
So if the money is coming from the top level of government, how does that all work?
Mr. Gray: I have no idea. That was the sociologist member of our co-authors. I’m the technical expert on fire science, and that was a recommendation from one of my co-authors. I’m not quite sure how we do that.
Senator Varone: I understand that that is a mystery still?
Mr. Gray: Yes. I’m sorry. I can’t answer that.
Senator Varone: This would be, I guess, a policy analyst’s nightmare:
. . . economists suggest that total fire costs typically range from 1.5 to 20 times the direct cost.
That’s not a small bandwidth. That is an incredibly wide berth.
Then you go on to say that:
. . . direct and indirect expenditures, range from $394 billion to $893 billion . . . .
How do you expect governments to factor that in on an annual basis when that bandwidth is so wide? You’ll give fits to anybody trying to balance a budget.
Mr. Gray: That is a really good question.
The reality is it’s just a trend line. There is a lot of variability year to year, but the trend is still doing this.
If you look at the five-year running average mean, then it’s basically just going up and up and up. There is a lot of variability year to year, but it’s not trending down; it’s trending up.
We don’t know what it’s going take to bend the curve on this. We don’t know how long it’s going to take. We have models that could probably help inform on that, but the general trend is just going up and up.
What we’re seeing — at least in B.C. with the contingency fund — is that they are setting aside more and more, and it’s eating up other parts of the budget, realistically. It’s not the same year to year, but over a couple of years’ trend, it is eating up all the rest of the programs the government wants to fund.
Senator Martin: Thank you both for your expertise.
I’m very new to this as well, but there are some key things that, based on the readings and whatnot, I wanted to ask.
First I’ll ask Mr. Gray. You talked about how the cost of wildfires is quite substantial — I’m from B.C. as well — just across our country. In B.C. alone, I think more than 7 million hectares burned in the past decade at a direct cost, which exceeds $4.8 billion, and, as you say, more and more money is having to be set aside for dealing with the wildfires.
In your article you note that:
Once a sufficiently large area has been treated, the costs of suppression and recovery should start to first flatten and then decrease . . . .
And that:
Gains can and will be made . . . if the right suite of treatments is implemented in the right places . . . .
That is where I want to ask my first question: What is the right suite of treatments, in what places and is it something provincial? Can it be national? Would you expand a bit more on that?
Mr. Gray: The analysis we’ve done is at the scale of 70,000-to-100,000-hectare landscapes, oftentimes watersheds. When we model out optimization, where to put these treatments relative to where fire wants to flow, first we model fire-flow patterns based on weather, topography and fuels, and then we run optimization models and we place treatments. Those treatments are anything from thinning and prescribed burning, to just prescribed burning to changing from conifers to hardwoods, anything that changes the behaviour of the fire. We run those optimizations. We see that at about 40% of the landscape treated, the incidence of large fires decreases quite dramatically.
Now, every landscape is a little bit different. There is going to be a little bit of wiggle room about that. Our colleagues have run different model scenarios, and about 40% seems to be that critical threshold.
Unfortunately, wildfire is going to do a lot of the heavy lifting for us. We cannot get out in front of this fast enough. We will be responding to wildfires still for quite some time in the future. But we can build off of those treated areas, because wildfire is a treatment. It’s not always the best one. We can build off of that to try to get to that point where we are starting to see a major decrease in fire size and severity.
Senator Martin: Do you work with the B.C. government? Are you on an advisory committee or in other capacities?
Mr. Gray: I work collaboratively with them. We have a pilot project in southeastern B.C. that was approved by the minister in a meeting a couple of months ago, and we are working with the Ktunaxa Nation and the two communities of Kimberley and Cranbrook on 3.8 million hectares of Ktunaxa traditional territory. We are doing that analysis at that scale. We have been actively doing prescribed burning with BC Wildfire Service for the last couple of years and did about 12 burns in the last three weeks in southeastern B.C.
Senator Martin: You are here in Ottawa and this is at the national level, but are these best practices effectively shared among provinces? Is there a national conversation that is happening?
Mr. Gray: Not that I’m aware of, no. I think B.C. right now is a little bit out ahead of a lot of other provinces on this. The idea behind this national prescribed fire training academy is that it is national. We will be developing it at UBC Okanagan, but the idea is that it will be a resource across the country to get everyone basically lifted to the same level.
Senator Martin: That is important I think because every terrain, every area is different, and yet there is so much we can learn from each other. It is great for the Senate to be able to bring together all these different key individuals and players. But how that is coordinated is a separate discussion.
[Translation]
Senator Miville-Dechêne: Good evening, gentlemen.
[English]
I’m not asking my question in English because it is a bit specialized, and it’s late.
[Translation]
As some of my colleagues have said, I’m not an expert on these issues.
In the provinces most affected by forest fires, what percentage of forests have seen a 40% effort to change things? Is it quite small? Are there pilot projects only in specific locations, or have certain parts of Manitoba, Saskatchewan or British Columbia begun in earnest to establish 40% areas and to carry out all the work needed to lower the number of forest fires? I’m trying to figure out where things stand with our efforts. Are we getting nowhere, or have we made progress in some areas? Also, are we talking about Crown land or private land? It’s much more difficult to take action on private land and in private forests.
[English]
Mr. Gray: Thank you. That is a great question. We are at very early stages. The modelling I speak of was work that I did with the U.S. Forest Service and the University of Washington in the U.S. It has been introduced in B.C. It is getting a lot of traction. There is a lot of interest in it now, especially this 40% critical threshold number.
I am not aware of any other province that is looking at it this way: significant changes to forest practices so that forestries become a more effective tool in fire mitigation.
Hopefully, what we learn in B.C. we can communicate out across the country through conferences, webinars, meetings, published papers, whatever. Right now, B.C. is leading the way on this.
[Translation]
Senator Miville-Dechêne: Why isn’t this happening in other places? Does it stem from the fact that this method is costly or unfamiliar? What could be the reason? Is it because other places use prescribed burning and consider it the only way to respond?
[English]
Mr. Gray: To be honest — and this is my own personal opinion — I think that for the last couple of years people were looking at fire seasons as anomalies and not the trend. Even in B.C. through 2017-18 when about 2 million hectares burned, I was still hearing that these were one-offs and these were anomalies. I think 2023 did it, at least in B.C. and in parts of the West where they now realize that this is the reality, this is the trend and now we need to do something. That was only a year and a half ago.
Those of us who deal with landscape fire ecology have known where this is headed. I was part of the Filmon report in 2003 when we told them this is what was coming. Now it’s: What do we do about it? Right now, there are a lot of agencies and provinces who are like: What do we do?
[Translation]
Senator Miville-Dechêne: If we compare the cost of creating these 40% areas with the costs incurred by a forest fire, which is cheaper? What are the proportional costs? Is it cheaper to let the forest fires burn or to try to prevent them?
[English]
Mr. Gray: There has been a fair bit of published work on the ratios of response and recovery versus mitigation and prevention, and most of time it is 6 to 1, 12 to 1. I have seen papers where it was 60 to 1. Just letting the fires burn is the most costly option.
Senator Miville-Dechêne: Thank you very much.
Senator McBean: I keep coming up with so many questions now.
Dr. Pomeroy, I was in the previous session. I was listening to the discussion regarding Bill C-241. You were talking about creating a national freshwater management group.
What role can improved water and land management play in reducing wildfire risk? Obviously, creating a national freshwater management group, but what federal actions would you recommend to better align the systems? I hear water, wildfire and I want to put you two at a table with a couple of beers, if that is your choice, and hear how you guys talk about it to each other. I am hearing two chicken and eggs here, in a good way.
I interrupted my own question. I will say it again: What role can improved water and land management play in reducing wildfire risk? What federal actions would you recommend to better align these systems?
Mr. Pomeroy: I will start off. The one thing is forests are nature’s natural water manager. When we have forests and watersheds, we have moderation of droughts in many cases. We also have, to some degree, moderation of floods and extreme events, depending upon the causes behind them. It is often associated with the forest soils.
In one simulation we did, I was curious about what the Calgary flood would have looked like if the Bow River Basin had burned just before that happened. The flood peak would have been twice as high if the soils had been disturbed in that wildfire. A tremendous role there in magnifying extreme events if we allow severe and extensive wildfires. At the time around the simulation, I thought we would never get wildfires that large. I don’t believe that anymore.
Also, the lack of water due to extreme drought, which is associated with climate change, is putting forests at risk. It is causing disease. It is giving them everything except the spark. Sometimes the extreme storms are providing the spark as well from lightning effects, particularly in the North. We are seeing a situation where we have an extra month of summer in many parts of Canada without the extra water to get those forests through that in a well-watered nature. They are very vulnerable to burning at some point in that longer, hotter summer.
Our tree species in the boreal forests are used to fire. They have evolved with it. They have had a high return frequency of fire over the years, and as they are seeing such severe fires and rapid returns, it is causing a shift in the species composition, and that is a movement towards deciduous species. That is changing water. These species store snow and liquid water differently. They don’t always come back as proper forests — they can be scrubland or shrubs — and that changes the hydrology again as well.
The whole system is changing, and I have to admit with a large degree of uncertainty as to where it’s headed because they co-evolve. We are running a broad-scale experiment in the country that is unprecedented in human history. The likelihood is ecosystem collapse in some areas and some parts of the country associated with this. That would result in loss of water management services that we get for free from these forests at the same time.
Senator McBean: How could monitoring water help? Is this something we’re just watching? It struck me, Mr. Gray, when you said we will be responding to wildfires for some time into the future. In creating national freshwater management and observing it, is there some way we can help prevent or predict?
Mr. Pomeroy: I will go quickly on that. We had a number of stations up in the northern part of Saskatchewan and the N.W.T. this summer. We were measuring record-low soil moisture conditions. Jasper recorded a record-low soil moisture condition the day before the massive fires hit the town. They are quite predictable. Our stations burned down, by the way, shortly after that record-low measurement.
The thing is, we can measure that and that means we can get resources in place before the fires hit. We can have people on the ground, in place, and the bombers, resources and finances lined up. That is what we’re not doing in this country right now.
Senator Sorensen: Thank you. I will start with you, Mr. Gray. I will ask you about a co-authored piece, so I hope that I have the part that you were participating in. Was it you who stated about the fire guardians that could help bring down total fire costs? Does that make sense to you? Reducing both suppression and mitigation budgets, it stated:
Existing guardian programs — over 200 First Nations guardian programs already operate in Canada — have been shown to generate $2.50 in social, economic and environmental returns for every $1 invested.
Can you talk about those programs? Are they in place across Canada?
Mr. Gray: They are not in place across Canada. Some places are further ahead than others. Certainly in the West, there are many guardian programs. Those individuals are trained to do anything from firefighting to wildlife habitat work. On the wildfire side, they are taught both the suppression side as well as cultural burning. They are heavily involved in the reapplication of fire from a cultural sense.
Senator Sorensen: Thank you. That is interesting.
Dr. Pomeroy, can you talk more about the algae forming on the glaciers? What is the impact of that? How much does it contribute to the glaciers melting?
Mr. Pomeroy: Yes, the algae was an interesting discovery. We took samples of what’s called cryoconite, which is a mixture of algae, fungi, bacteria, viruses and other things that you find as black growths on the glacier. I took it back to the lab, looked at it with a scanning electron microscope and looked at its DNA. It’s strange.
These algae have evolved on ice. They are all part of the system there waiting for the soot. They are filamentous, so they hold the soot in place with filaments on the ice crystals for years at a time. As I mentioned, there are also viruses, bacteria and other things in this. They have spread. We’re getting literally algae blooms on the Columbia Icefield in the Canadian Rockies. It means our water prediction models fail and we have to use satellite measurements of how dark the ice is to feed into the models to get the right results now, which we figured out how to do.
It’s not just us. Greenland is suffering from this as well. The black carbon increased glacier ice melt 30% in the Himalayas, causing healthy glaciers to shift into declining glaciers in that region. They are seeing this in the Andes Mountains as well. It’s a global phenomenon. It’s a bit of a surprise. I think if we had said we would have algae blooms on glaciers 20 years ago, it wouldn’t have been on the list, but it is now.
Senator Sorensen: Thank you. That’s fascinating.
Senator Martin: This question could be to both of you, but I will start with Mr. Pomeroy.
This is related to human-caused fires that are largely preventable and still make up a big share of starts — 40% in B.C. and approximately 50% nationally. In 2024, roughly half of Canadian wildfires were human caused.
I am curious whether our study should give some weight to preventing these ignitions. Do you have any comments based on your research? Is fire just fire? Do human-caused fires affect agriculture and lands differently? I’m looking at these numbers and thinking these are a lot of human-caused fires.
Mr. Pomeroy: We classify them as human-caused fires, but remember, you can flick a match into the woods, and if it’s wet, nothing happens. There has to be a drought already. You have to have tinder-dry woods for this to happen. A spark off of a muffler from an ATV, a careless cigarette or intentional fires are easier to spread. First, we have to have the condition that makes the probability of wildfire expansion important. Otherwise, humans can’t really cause fires very easily.
The other, though, is it was rather interesting to watch Nova Scotia ban people from going into the woods. It was, I think, unprecedented in Nova Scotia’s history and not completely popular but rather sensible because they had never had such extreme conditions where then you have to work very hard and be rather strict to control those human-caused sparks.
I will go further back. You mentioned agriculture. Of course, before the agricultural settlement of the Prairies, there were prairie wildfires that spread into what is now the boreal forest. The boreal forest stayed further north because it couldn’t extend into the southern areas because of regular fires. Of course, Indigenous people set them deliberately to manage the grasslands and to manage the forest fringe. That was part of land management that had been going on for millennia in the Prairies. With the settlement of homesteaders, it stopped, and that caused the southern encroachment of trees into Saskatchewan and a change and ultimately a risk of greater fires because of smaller plains fires moving in there.
Senator Martin: That’s a complete answer. Do other jurisdictions have such high numbers of human-caused fires? Yes? Okay. It just seems high. Can we do something in Canada to improve this?
Mr. Gray: Throughout the States, human-caused fires are the majority. There has also been the Smokey Bear ad campaign since the 1940s. We look at the proportion of human-caused fires since the 1940s, and it hasn’t changed. That is considered the most successful ad campaign in history.
Education only goes so far. We have to prepare as if it is going to happen. We can’t hope that it is never going to happen. We have to prepare as if we’re going to get human-caused fires and naturally caused fires. It is all about the fuels.
Senator Varone: Mr. Gray, you mentioned in your report the largeness of the Canadian forest industry. It is substantially large in the landscape of industry itself. The most prevalent product is softwood, and softwood burns a lot faster than hardwood, but you also talk about replenishing the burned areas with more of a concentration of hardwoods.
What does the government need to do to shift that paradigm for industry to look at shifting what they are planting, what they are putting into the ground, as an adjunct to wildfire prevention? I think they work hand-in-hand. The last time I checked, a board foot of oak is worth ten times that of a board foot of spruce.
Mr. Gray: That is a great question. It is going to depend on where you are in the country and how much leverage the federal government has over the provinces.
In B.C., there is a new interest in aspen, for example. We are doing some research with the BC Wildfire Service and the B.C. government, and we have modelled and shown that aspen of a certain age, structure and size has a significant impact on fire spread. Aspen, you can produce pulp, OSB, or any number of products out of it.
It is convincing the industry that there is a product and market there. It has been so conifer focused for so long. If there’s something the feds can do to stimulate that, great. The fire science behind it says to do it, make the shift to hardwoods, but the industry is addicted to conifers, and getting them to move off of that has been difficult.
Senator Varone: You can blame the homebuilders for that.
Mr. Gray: Yes.
Senator McNair: Dr. Pomeroy, I was listening to the testimony and the questions. You get this drought information, this data. You know you are in an extreme drought situation. What do you do with that?
I think you answered that in part with Senator McBean, that you get the teams ready to be able to respond.
I take it the other thing is governments make decisions based on the drought situation to close the woods to the public and industry. You mentioned Nova Scotia.
It was actually Parks Canada, Senator Sorensen, that closed their parks before the province did, the rest of the woods. What Nova Scotia also did was increase the fines significantly, but there were still people who were not believers, who thought they had a right to be in the woods and were intentionally going out there to be arrested, which seems incomprehensible in those situations. New Brunswick closed the woods also.
Is there anything else that we can be doing with the drought information or data you are collecting?
Mr. Pomeroy: We need to take the drought information into wildfire probability indices and continue to improve these, make them more dynamic, and make them available daily for rapid response through often rapidly changing situations.
We also need to force these calculations with seasonal forecasts from Environment Canada and other weather agencies so that we can have a three-month, one-month outlook into this to prepare resources and mobilize for what is happening.
Some of the wildfire seasons are quite predictable. When you see a snowpack less than half of normal or melting off two months early in the year, you know that you are in for a very tough spring wildfire season in most cases. What depends next is what happens with the rainfall from that.
There is a certain persistence to droughts. Droughts are getting more severe, longer, and they are ending more sharply into wet periods as well.
That is the other danger. These wildfire seasons often end with a flood in the same season, spectacularly so in British Columbia in 2021 in the Lower Fraser Valley but elsewhere as well.
I think a national prediction system could help. We could do a better job with that and tie it into flood and drought prediction, which is essentially the same computer models and software. You go for the duff layer and moisture indices for the forest fire.
Senator McBean: Following on what Senator Varone was talking about, the business of it. Mr. Gray, you said that in B.C., 130,000 hectares is a normal harvest, but none of it was used for remediation and treatment. Do you think that there is a way this could be driven to the harvesters? Could it be in keeping with the companies who are cutting it? Should we be trying to take that 130,000 and steering it into clearing land?
Mr. Gray: If we can direct that 130,000-hectare footprint to being very specific, very intentional on the landscape, it will pay huge benefits when it comes to fire size and severity, especially if we can accompany it with other treatment options like prescribed burning and species conversion.
Senator McBean: Would it work, though? Is that something that businesses would want? Are you looking at areas here that are easy to harvest, as it were?
Mr. Gray: The catch is going to be when we start talking about being very specific with the treatment, with the harvest. It may not be where you have the highest volume at the cheapest cost. It may require a subsidy.
We talk about if we can hybridize forestry with energy. If we can salt that treatment to not just taking out dimension lumber but an energy product like biomass or something for bioenergy, then it makes it economical. We will have to look seriously at what we can do economically and how we can change product streams to make it more effective.
Senator McBean: Thank you.
The Chair: Gentlemen, thank you for taking the time to appear before us today. This was truly an informative session.
I also wish to thank my colleagues on the committee for your active participation and thoughtful questions.
As I always do, I also want to thank the folks behind us: the interpreters, the translators, the folks who manage the television and things like that. Obviously, we wish to thank our page, Ms. Angélique Pinto. Thank you. Your help is certainly vital to the work that we do.
(The committee adjourned.)