THE STANDING SENATE COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE AND FORESTRY
EVIDENCE
OTTAWA, Thursday, October 23, 2025
The Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry met with videoconference this day at 8 a.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’ll call to order this meeting of the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry. My name is Rob Black, and I chair this committee. I want to welcome the members of the committee this morning, our witnesses, as well as those watching the meeting on the web.
I want to start by acknowledging that the land on which we are gathered is on the unceded traditional territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe Nation.
Before we ask our witnesses to speak, I’d like to ask senators to introduce themselves, starting with the deputy chair.
Senator McNair: Thank you for being here today. I’m John McNair from the province of New Brunswick.
Senator Varone: Toni Varone, Ontario.
Senator McBean: Marnie McBean, Ontario.
Senator Muggli: Tracy Muggli, Treaty 6 territory, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
The Chair: Today the committee is continuing its study on the topic of the growing issue of wildfires in Canada and the consequential effects that wildfires have on the forestry and agriculture industries.
For our first panel, we have the pleasure of welcoming Liam McGuinty, Vice-President, Federal Affairs at the Insurance Bureau of Canada. He is accompanied by his colleague, Margot Whittington, Manager, Climate Policy. Welcome.
From the National Research Council Canada, or NRC, we welcome Dr. Jean-François Houle, Vice-President, Engineering, and Dr. Noureddine Bénichou, Research Officer, Fire Resistant Construction. Welcome, folks. It is great to have you here.
Thanks for accepting our request to appear before the committee. You’ll each have five minutes to speak for your opening remarks. That will be followed by questions from my colleagues around the table.
I’ll signal when your time is running out. At four minutes my hand will go up, and at five minutes, when two hands are up, it’s about time to wrap it up, if you don’t mind.
With that, the floor is yours, Mr. McGuinty.
Liam McGuinty, Vice-President, Federal Affairs, Insurance Bureau of Canada: Thank you very much. Good morning, everyone. I am pleased to be here today on behalf of the Insurance Bureau of Canada, or IBC. We are the national industry association that represents the insurance companies that write home, car and business insurance.
Canada is experiencing a higher frequency and severity of natural disasters. We’re becoming a riskier place to live, work and insure. The average annual insured losses from wildfire have increased from $70 million to $740 million over the last two decades. That’s a 1,037% increase. For reference, inflation over that same period is closer to 50%.
Last year was our worst year ever, with insured damage caused by severe weather events surpassing $9 billion. That tally shattered the previous record of $6 billion, which was set in 2016. You may recall that was the year of the Fort McMurray wildfires. Last year, extreme weather events resulted in approximately 228,000 claims in the span of one month. For context, in the year previous, we received 160,000 claims for the whole year.
In addition to the financial impacts on insurers and their clients, severe weather events take a toll on people’s physical and mental health. It’s not uncommon every year for thousands of Canadians to be forced to evacuate their homes due to out-of-control wildfires. Evacuations, disruptions to people’s lives and, in some cases, deaths are real consequences of severe weather events.
To accelerate resilience in Canada, IBC cofounded Climate Proof Canada, a national coalition that played an important advisory role in helping to establish Canada’s first National Adaptation Strategy. For the last several years, organizations like IBC and Climate Proof Canada have been warning governments about the need to be better prepared for severe weather. Unfortunately, much work remains to be done to protect Canadians, their families and their properties as severe weather worsens.
Just a few weeks ago, IBC issued a three-point resilience plan. It’s a roadmap for governments to build resilience. There are solutions in there that stakeholders have been calling for for years, and at the heart of the plan is an ambitious goal, which is to make Canada the best in the world when it comes to preparing for, responding to and recovering from natural disasters, including wildfires. I will provide a brief overview of the plan.
There are three points. First, we have to improve how and where we build. That means modernizing our building codes and land use planning rules so that new homes we are scheduled to build are not doomed to fail. As this committee has previously heard, over the next five years, Canada will be building 220,000 homes in high-risk wildfire areas. In keeping with the federal Liberal platform commitment, the government must ensure that any funds for housing are conditional on housing being built in the right places.
Secondly, we need to invest in resilience and help communities mitigate their risks. Canada suffers from a staggering $270 billion infrastructure deficit. That’s the gap between the current state of infrastructure and the investment required to maintain, repair, upgrade or expand to meet current and future demands. Municipalities own and maintain most of the country’s infrastructure, and they’re increasingly challenged to keep up with rapid growth and urbanization, with limited funding tools at their disposal.
The federal government should immediately boost the Disaster Mitigation and Adaptation Fund, or DMAF, which is a fund designed to support public infrastructure projects in communities across Canada to become more resilient to climate-related disasters.
Finally, we need to empower Canadians to protect themselves and recover from disaster more quickly. Natural disasters, unfortunately, are going to continue to occur. Canadians can better protect themselves by understanding the risks that they face. To that end, the federal government should release the flood map portal immediately and expand it to include high-risk wildfire and hill zones. That portal is ready to go; it just needs to be launched.
We also need to better equip ourselves to respond to and recover from disasters, which is why we’ve been calling for a national emergency management agency that will strengthen Canada’s capacity to coordinate and deploy resources during emergencies and help expedite recovery.
Thank you for the invitation to speak with you today. I look forward to your questions.
The Chair: Thank you very much for your opening statement.
Dr. Houle, the floor is yours for your opening remarks.
Jean-François Houle, Vice-President, Engineering, National Research Council Canada: Thank you, Mr. Chair, for the invitation to speak with you today on behalf of the National Research Council Canada, as part of this committee’s study on the growing issue of wildfires in Canada and the consequential effects that wildfires have on the forestry and agriculture industries.
As mentioned before, my name is Jean-François Houle, and I am the Vice-President of Engineering at the NRC. I am joined today by Dr. Noureddine Bénichou, who is Principal Research Officer with the Fire Safety Group within the NRC Construction Research Centre.
I would like to begin by acknowledging that the NRC’s work takes place across the unceded, shared, current and traditional territories of First Nations, Inuit and Métis Peoples. We recognize our privilege to conduct research on these lands and pay respect to the peoples who have cared for them.
[Translation]
As Canada’s largest federal research organization, the NRC advances scientific and technical knowledge, supports business innovation and industrial development, and conducts research and innovation activities that support national priorities. With facilities and collaborations across the country, the NRC brings together scientists, industry and academic stakeholders, and partners from around the world.
For over 75 years, the NRC has been supporting innovative small and medium-sized enterprises in Canada through its industrial research assistance program, NRC-IRAP. This program helps SMEs grow, innovate and strengthen the Canadian economy.
In the context of climate change, forest fires pose an urgent threat to communities, forests and agriculture across Canada. The NRC supports national resilience by conducting research on wildfire risks, improving preparedness and creating tools to help communities be safer and more resilient.
[English]
Over the past decade, Canada has averaged over 5,000 wildfires annually, burning roughly 2.9 million hectares each year.
From 1981 to 2018, more than 300,000 wildfires prompted over 400,000 evacuations, including the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, which displaced nearly 90,000 people and caused approximately $9.5 billion in losses.
The NRC’s Construction Research Centre has been actively involved in research to help communities prepare for and respond to wildfires, particularly in areas where urban development meets forests, known as the Wildland-Urban Interface, or WUI.
Under the NRC’s Climate Resilient Built Environment Initiative, the NRC has produced a number of guidance documents and tools to help Canadians take steps to address the effects of wildfires. These include developing the National Guide for Wildland-Urban Interface Fires, which is Canada’s first guide with advice on reducing wildfire risks in areas where communities border forests. This guide, which was created with Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada, was used to guide rebuilding in Lytton, B.C., and provided recommendations to the town of Jasper following the 2024 forest fire.
We developed the Resilience and Adaptation to Climatic Extreme Wildfires program to help communities prepare for wildfires, assess risks, plan evacuations and support vulnerable populations. We developed practical guidance and tools on protecting homes from wildland fires to reduce wildfire risks through building safety testing, hazard mapping and evacuation planning.
With the support of Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada, we help Canada’s buildings and public infrastructure withstand climate-related risks by developing tools, technologies and strategies to improve safety and support stronger, more resilient communities.
[Translation]
Through these efforts, the NRC is committed to providing evidence-based solutions to help communities mitigate wildfire risks and build resilience.
Mr. Chair, please allow me once again to thank you for inviting me to testify today. I will be happy to answer any questions you may have.
[English]
The Chair: Thank you very much.
Colleagues, we’ll now move to questions. As we have in the past, you will have five minutes for your questions and answers, and then we’ll move to subsequent rounds as we may need to.
With that in mind, our deputy chair will go first.
Senator McNair: Thank you again for being here today. My question is directed to the NRC.
You talked about the guides and the tools that you’ve prepared to assist, especially in the rebuilding in these critical areas. We heard from the Canadian Climate Institute and the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation, or Intact Centre, that one of the key obstacles to the adoption of climate-adaptation measures for building and infrastructure are the high upfront costs of such measures. They indicated that, in Fort McMurray, for example, they essentially “built back wrong” and didn’t significantly add the adaptation measures. Is that your experience? I heard you talk about Lytton and Jasper. Maybe you can talk about the take-up of the tools you provided.
Mr. Houle: I can answer that question. The tool was published in 2021. We did an impact assessment on how to implement the tool first. In areas where the hazard is very high, if you invest $1, you can get a return of $14. That’s an important outcome. That impact analysis was done by a third party. We just gave them the guide, tried to use it across Canada and then saw how much of a return we could have on investment.
Depending upon the area, that return on investment can be even higher. This is for new construction; for existing construction, if you were to rebuild with resilience, then you might have to tear down the material that you have on top. In that case, the return would be lower, but you can still get a big return on a dollar invested. At the national level, it’s fourfold, so if you invest $1, you get a return of $4.
That’s the impact analysis that we support our work on. In terms of rebuilding, Lytton has rebuilt at least one house using some of the measures that we have in the guide. There is definitely a return on investment when you want to rebuild with resilience using the guide.
Senator McNair: Did you say they rebuilt one house?
Noureddine Bénichou, Research Officer, Fire Resistant Construction, National Research Council Canada: Yes. Lytton is still in the rebuilding phase, because it takes time. And yes, there is at least one house; there could be more. I know that the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction is engaged with them. Basically, they expose the measure inside the guide and then they try to work with them in terms of rebuilding.
Actually, in 2023, I believe, they had a bylaw to rebuild using the guide. That bylaw was voted by the council at the time, but another council came and made it voluntary.
There is uptake, but it takes time with these things. We just have to basically provide the message that if you invest, you can get a better resilience over time.
As far as Jasper, I was there as a witness to the devastation and so on. Again, we provided the measures that are in the guide. They took some of that information to rebuild. I think it will take time for them to rebuild, but that’s what the uptake is.
Fort McMurray is too far in the past for us. Any community can hopefully use the measures and see how they can provide resilience for their communities.
Senator McNair: I’ll go on second round.
Senator Muggli: Thank you so much for being here. It’s really appreciated.
My question is for Mr. McGuinty. In terms of the insurance industry, I’m wondering about impacts for mental health claims where people have health insurance. Do you have any information about changes in that related to exposure to wildfires?
Mr. McGuinty: Thank you very much for the question. That’s a question better suited to the life and health insurers, represented by an organization called the Canadian Life and Health Insurance Association, or CLHIA. I spoke high level to what we’re seeing in terms of the day to day, but that’s not our line of business. I am able to speak to the impacts on property insurance and how that impacts agriculture, but I defer to CLHIA otherwise.
Senator Muggli: Thanks for that clarification. Maybe we can follow up with that organization.
You also talked about flood map portals. Who created it, and how comprehensive is it? What’s the connection to wildfires?
Mr. McGuinty: Thank you for the question.
We have been calling for a publicly available portal that can be accessed by citizens and municipalities, developers, et cetera. The federal government, led by Public Safety Canada, developed just such a portal using private-sector data from vendors that offer that kind of data. Our understanding is that the portal has been completed and ready to go, but I think there might be some last-minute socialization efforts behind the scenes at Public Safety Canada to get that flood portal released.
Now, in terms of its application to wildfires, you could extend that map to cover other perils, such as hail or wildfires, once it’s been released. Again, you can lean upon private-sector data sources to populate it. The value of that kind of tool is in helping individuals make informed decisions, for instance, about where they choose to live or, if they’ve already purchased a property, they can make insurance decisions. If you live in a high-risk flood zone, there are mitigating steps you can take, and that’s a way to help.
It’s also a helpful tool for municipalities in terms of land-use planning, and I think that might be where it will have the most impacts.
Senator Muggli: You mentioned it’s all vendor/private-sector data. Do you see a role or a space where public- or government-provided data should be integrated into that?
Mr. McGuinty: It might have some public data sources in that, as well; I think it’s an aggregation of various data sources. That might be a better question for Public Safety, but as we understand it, it is a pretty robust data set that will be a helpful resource.
Senator Muggli: Thanks.
I have a question for NRC. I’ll be introducing one of your colleagues from Saskatoon today in the Senate, actually. He told me a story once about the potential for blueberries to perhaps act as firebreaks, so that’s pretty interesting.
My question was around whether you’re doing research now around forecasting fires.
Mr. Bénichou: We have a project where we basically take the data for existing fires, and then we try to project what’s going to happen in 50 to 100 years.
That kind of work is done based on the increase of temperature, drought and so on. We take all the information from past events and try to project them. That work is ongoing. Additionally, we’re trying to provide each community with the potential hazards that they can face, be it now or in the future as well.
Senator Muggli: Okay. I’m looking forward to the work and the outputs to help us all. Thank you.
Senator Varone: My question is for you, Mr. McGuinty. It’s a take on where Senator Muggli was going with respect to the mapping.
In a previous life, I was a builder/developer and mapping was probably the most important tool that was offered to us through the municipality, whether it be geodetic mapping, in terms of how you set your house on your lot, flood-zone mapping that was readily available. Even zone mapping was all important. You can’t truly build a house or build toward climate resilience without understanding that data.
Case in point, I moved into High Park and I’m in a flood zone. I saw it on the map. The first thing I did is install a flood ejector pump in the basement, where there wasn’t one. I have this huge tree canopy that if anybody ever sparked a fire in High Park, my house would burn, but I put slate shingles just as a preventive measure. Everything works interplay with the National Building Code. I’m absolutely confused as to why the building blocks are not there and why aren’t people crying out for appropriate mapping, whether it be flood mapping, zone mapping, geodetic mapping and in this case, wildfire-pattern mapping. When you play that into a National Building Code, you automatically build resilience. I don’t hear anybody screaming about that.
As insurers, you’re the ones who have to pay out in terms of building back stupid.
Mr. McGuinty: I think it’s an excellent comment and maybe a few points to make. I think you’re going to hear a growing number of organizations — I reference Climate Proof Canada, certainly IBC, calling for more publicly available data sources to inform not only consumer decision making, but also development and building. The flood map portal is one such way to do that.
I also think you’re going to hear us calling for more assertive or more aggressive timelines in terms of how quickly we bring in National Building Code models at the provincial, and even at the municipal level, which I think is a critical part of this. Provinces sometimes take five years after the National Building Code has been introduced to implement their own.
In addition, I don’t think we’re doing a good enough job in Canada in accounting for specific perils that our cities or provinces may be facing. You referenced the fact that you’re in High Park and flood is a real risk there. There can be and probably should be municipal building codes, which means you need the permission of the province to do that, that address perils. We’re talking about hail in parts of Calgary, earthquake risk in parts of B.C. flood risk in many parts of Canada and in a whole bunch of regions now, more and more every year, wildfire risk is coming into play.
I think data is important, building codes are important, land-use planning is incredibly important. We’ve called that a whole-of-society approach to resilience. I fully agree with you that we need more voices to call for those kinds of measures.
Senator Varone: What kind of governance model do you envision to bring this all together, from a municipal, provincial and federal level? Is there that kind of think tank being developed between all levels of government? What you don’t want to see is when one municipality institutes something and in the next election, another round of municipal governance throws it out. How do you prevent that?
Mr. McGuinty: I’m not sure there’s a way we’ll ever get around local political decision making. You heard some examples or references made earlier to that.
We do have a number of third parties. The Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction was mentioned as well as the Intact Centre, which I think appeared before the committee last week. I think you do need a strong federal government role to make sure that the lessons we’re learning from rebuilds and climate disasters are being brought across Canada. That’s where I think the emergency management agency that’s currently being considered by the federal government could play an important role.
Senator Varone: Thank you.
Senator Robinson: My question is for the NRC. You had mentioned that you work with SMEs and scientists and that you need to support research. During the stages of development what we see is that when something is trying to come into being and actually be used on the land, on the ground, that there is a disconnect between the people developing it and the people implementing it.
I am wondering about the relationship between scientists and researchers and the people who are actually implementing is. What are they finding, and could this be improved? Do you have any thoughts on that?
Mr. Houle: Our experience at the NRC is that we’ve managed to foster good collaboration with small- and medium-sized enterprises. For instance, we’ve worked with companies that have developed novel doors to create some level of protection against flooding risk, et cetera. Through the Industrial Research Assistinace Program, or IRAP, and through the connection with the NRC, we can bring these organizations through the NRC to do the final round of testing, certification and validation that they require in order to prove that their product would be useful in certain situations.
At this point in time, innovators are always looking for opportunities in our installation facilities that we have at the NRC, the fire lab that we have with the fire safety group, the large basins we have to investigate, flooding risk. We actually built a full-scale house inside a flood basin to look at the impact of flooding and water movement along a house in the current standards for building. We do feel that there’s an innovative view and there is support for these organizations.
In terms of adoption, it’s the typical things that small- and medium-sized enterprises encounter in terms of adoption: trying to get the end users to use it and to see the value in it. Fundamentally, that’s where that stands.
Senator Robinson: Can you speak specifically about what you undertake to bridge that gap between development and adoption? Are there any efforts specifically where you offer opportunities for those two entities, those two bodies, to come together, collaborate and facilitate adoption?
Mr. Houle: There are a number of ways. We do this either through work workshops or consortiums that we build. Often the consortiums bring not only the SMEs, but also the end users and the federal authorities that are responsible, to make them aware of what’s available out there. We support the development of national model codes and Codes Canada. Through these meetings, we usually talk about the research and the innovative solution that is we see come to our door, and that’s how we try to disseminate that information throughout the ecosystem.
Senator Robinson: Do you think there’s room for improvement in that effort?
Mr. Houle: A small- or medium-sized enterprise would always tell you they would like to see their technologies adopted more quickly. There’s definitely always room for improvement. There are a number of pathways that exist in order for innovative solutions to be accepted. We run the Canadian Construction Materials Centre that helps novel innovation get certified as being up to code expectations. We provide user guides as well. We try to set them up for success.
Senator Robinson: I was thinking of the one house built in Lytton and was wondering why it was only one house.
Mr. Bénichou: People may be looking at the upfront cost more than the investment and the return on that investment. In Lytton, many people didn’t have any insurance. It becomes a very hard decision. Do you build with resilience or not? Do you absorb that upfront cost? I think we can make an effort to make sure that people understand that in the long term, resilience is much better for them. Lytton was hit, again. Fortunately, there was nothing, but the fire was very close. These are the things I think we have to communicate.
As far as relationships, I do a lot of presentations with builders or local authorities — many and them. We do workshops, and in that case, we present, let’s say, the guide and say these are the measures. This is how we should build. That’s the interaction that we have all the time with them. In that case, they can take that information and try to say, how can they adjust now and how can we rebuild it? That’s where we can make that difference as well.
Senator McBean: My mind is full of different directions or questions. It’s not the first time we have heard about the importance of releasing a hazard map. We’ve heard it over and over again.
I am pulling different worlds together, sore of. In another committee that Senator Varone and I sit on, we’re looking at housing strategies and affordability, and a witness recently talked about the regulatory burden, which, Mr. Bénichou, you’re talking about how the pendulum is swinging back and forth. It seems like the pressure to build is weighing up against this pressure to build properly.
I’m wondering what incentives or regulatory tools there are that the federal government could consider to encourage homeowners and municipalities to adopt wildfire resilience with building materials and land use practices and keep them. I hear you saying $1 now is $4 later, but it is hard for people to say, “I’m actually collecting on that $4 if I never collect on the $4.” It is not actually money back as an investment.
How can we make it more attractive to make the building, regulatory burdens and bylaws stick together?
Mr. Bénichou: That is a very good question. First of all, this is a common goal for many. Insurance companies have to get in here as well.
From our side, I think the long-term vision is how we can get this into the National Building Code so that building with resilience becomes the norm. That’s where the longer vision is going to be.
How I see it is that right now we are standardizing the guide, so we are moving it to a standard. That is going to be available in 2027, and then there are policy discussions about the National Building Code and how we can put measures for resilience inside the National Building Code.
If we can bridge that gap, ultimately, this is — it’s like an earthquake. If you build in an area where you have earthquake potential, then you build with certain measures. Those measures may cost, but they still protect in the long term.
If we can find ways of getting to that level and know which locations are going to be hit, eventually, and the measures they should be built with, that will be the ultimate vision for us in Canada. Then in that case, it becomes the natural thing to do.
That’s how we should be looking at it in the long term.
Senator McBean: I want to pivot over to the Insurance Bureau of Canada, because I would imagine that one of the problems with coming out with a hazard map is that then you are instantly making some homes uninsurable. Because we know that if you are living in a floodplain, it has become increasingly difficult, expensive or impossible to get insurance.
How would the IBC see that releasing accurate data can protect homeowners? Also, down the road, does the Insurance Bureau of Canada foresee that including fire mapping would then make homes uninsurable? How does this increased risk affect premiums and policies for Canadians?
Mr. McGuinty: Thank you for the good questions.
On the flood data, insurers have their own proprietary data sets and make their own decisions already based on your flood risk. I don’t know if there would be substantive changes in terms of the insurability of a home, because insurers already make those assessments with their own data.
I would say as well that we do have a portion of Canadians who can’t access overland flood insurance. That number is now shrinking. The gap of households that can’t access overland has gone from, probably, 10% to something more like 5 or 6%. The private market is responding. There is still a coverage gap, and we think a national flood insurance program would help solve that.
Wildfires, similarly, there is not one place in Canada where you cannot get wildfire insurance. It is included in your basic home insurance policy. However, over time, if we don’t take the kinds of steps that we need, including the release of data and the kind of resilience measures that we have heard about like stronger building codes that account for resilience, we are going to get into a situation where you are going to not necessarily have an availability challenge but a significant affordability challenge. This could be seen by some as a proxy, essentially, for an availability challenge.
Senator McBean: Can you tell me a little more about what you would want from a federal flood insurance program?
Mr. McGuinty: We have been discussing it for seven or eight years now.
The right kind of program should be a few things. It should be complementary to a well-functioning private sector market, it should be lean and it should be scoped to the highest-risk households. You don’t want it to act as a subsidy for those who can access private coverage, but you want it to fill that coverage gap that does persist in Canada.
I would be happy to speak more about it.
The Chair: Thank you.
Before we move to Round 2, I have a question for the National Research Council Canada.
We heard earlier in the week from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre that they face difficulties in accessing reliable and accurate data on internal displacements leading to underestimates with respect to their research. Are there other areas where accurate and reliable data is missing within wildfire research? Do you have any thoughts, gentlemen?
Mr. Bénichou: Data is a big, big thing that we have to collect. I know that we’ve been talking to Natural Resources Canada, because they also collect data. We are trying to engage with them to share that data and then make use of it.
Data is always going to be difficult to get, and also the accuracy of that data, sometimes is not there. We go into the field, and we try to collect as much as possible. Then we can rely, maybe, on stories that have been in the news about what has happened in the area and so on, but that accuracy is always going to be in question. We have to make a better effort on collecting more accurate data for that.
The Chair: That relates to data gaps. Are there other gaps in research that you have noticed require more focus?
Mr. Bénichou: Yes, regarding wildfire, I think we have to maybe put effort into early detection. Early detection can save a lot of land as well as communities.
If we can find ways of engaging in research that is going to provide early detection, then we can have a better response, and then we can prepare the communities.
Sometimes communities are just taken by surprise, and they don’t have enough time. That is something that we should be looking at. Then, obviously, we should apply the measures and find ways to apply the measures so that we can make communities safer and ready for anything that could happen.
The Chair: Mr. McGuinty, I’ve heard you talk a lot about federal, provincial and territorial municipalities having to work together better. What recommendation can we put in our report that would encourage, mandate or demand that this happens so that increased collaboration happens, which would then support the work that you’re doing?
Mr. McGuinty: Thank you for the question. I think, certainly, the most obvious way to do that is to create an emergency management agency and give it two particular pieces to its mandate.
Number one, it should play a role in coordination of resources in terms of response. I think we do a pretty good job of that in Canada. We also have international agreements that are helpful, but I think there is more we can do.
We’re going to get to a point in Canada where we’re going to have major natural catastrophes occurring at the same time. It is an inevitability when you look at the data from the last few decades, so I think having the ability to coordinate more effectively will be helpful.
Secondly, I would ensure that the agency has a mandate for expedited recovery. We have talked about Lytton, Fort McMurray and Jasper today. There are lessons that we can learn from the rebuilds there. I would suggest that if this agency can house some institutional memory where we can learn the lessons from rebuilds, that would be filling a gap that exists if Canada right now.
More broadly, beyond the agency, housing is where we should be applying our efforts. I have talked about conditionality for federal funds; I think that’s critical. We are set to build hundreds of thousands of homes in high-risk wildfire areas. The federal government has a critical role in ensuring that any funds it provides to municipalities through the provinces should be conditional. Then, of course, there is the conversation about the National Building Code, as well. I really think provinces have a critical role in making sure they are building to codes that are built for the perils their provinces face.
The Chair: We will move on to a second round.
Senator McNair: My question is for Mr. McGuinty. It might seem a bit unusual, but I noticed on your website that when a disaster happens that requires an entire community to evacuate, you have a virtual Community Assistance Mobile Pavilion that can be employed to provide insurance information to affected residents.
Can you provide more details on that? I would expect there is a huge demand for that type of service.
Mr. McGuinty: Thank you, yes. We call it CAMP, it’s exactly as you described: It is a resource that we launch post-disaster, whether that’s a natural disaster or otherwise, and we provide impartial resources to insurance policyholders.
I actually went to Hinton, Alberta, last year for 10 days, which is outside of Jasper, and we set up camp in Jasper the day of the reopening of the town. We had a dozen or so insurance companies join us for that.
It is a resource we provide on behalf of our members for free.
We also have a complementary resource, which is a consumer information centre, staffed by a dozen or so mostly retired insurance professionals who answer questions and offer resources to anyone who calls. We take about 20,000 calls or emails a year. Again, it is a service we provide on behalf of our members.
From a very internal perspective, one of the things we are thinking about is that we are going to have multiple natural catastrophes occur at the same time, and we want to ensure we can continue to provide CAMP and other similar resources when we have events happening across the country. We absolutely continue to believe that it provides a helpful resource to policyholders.
Senator McNair: I commend you on getting information into the hands of the people who need it very urgently at those times.
Mr. McGuinty: Thank you.
Senator Varone: The comment that you made, Mr. Bénichou, with respect to the gap from when the National Building Code of Canada actually gets amended and you get your say to include stuff in it to the time it gets adopted. Is there room — and, through you, to Mr. McGuinty — it’s already being done today, where insurance companies reduce their premiums based on the built product. So if I build for resilience, flooding or other items, I get a deduction on premiums.
Is there an ability to extend that further, whether it be through the mortgage companies that are placing mortgages such that if you have a climate-resilience certification, you get a reduction on your mortgage rate? Even in the alternative to the province, in Ontario, you have the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation, creating a line item that has a different mill rate for houses that are compliant to climate resilience, and you’re taxed less based upon that.
Has any thought gone into bringing everybody onto the same page the way the insurance companies already do it today but extend it further and close that gap?
Mr. Bénichou: Our mandate is not in that space. We provide tools and then, hopefully, the others can also join.
Mr. Houle: The one observation I will make is that we are aware of the Climate Smart Buildings Alliance, which is an alliance of banks, developers, et cetera, that are looking at some of these issues and at ways, and suggesting policy approaches to help support buildings that are climate smart for the mitigation of emissions and for resilience in the long term. That is one organization that is looking at that particular issue.
Mr. McGuinty: Similarly, I would say that the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction is partnering with builders to consider the insurance and building implications, and how we can work more closely together.
It is a great question around mortgages and property taxes. I personally haven’t heard the discussion around property taxes, but I will say that insurers offer a number of incentives and disincentives that would encourage the right kinds of actions by homeowners in terms of the steps they can take to mitigate risks to their homes. It is not just at the building phase. If you are already in a home and you take proper steps — you had mentioned the installation of a sump pump — that is the kind of thing that, if you do that, you should be notifying your insurer. There may be a discount there and more favourable coverage terms that go in your favour.
When it comes to wildfires, there is a whole series of steps that you can take. We haven’t talked about FireSmart, but I know the committee has heard of it. That is a helpful mechanism, and there is at least one insurance company that will offer some form of discount for your home insurance product on the wildfire component of the product in recognition of the FireSmart measures you have taken.
I will also mention that in B.C. and Alberta, there’s something called Wildfire Defense Systems, Inc., or WDS, that insurers are offering gratis to their customers. Wildfire Defense Systems comes in and takes a number of risk-mitigation steps with our home when a wildfire is imminent to minimize the damage.
Mr. Bénichou: FireSmart uses the measures that are in the guide, so there is that link. FireSmart can show that people are building with resilience, and maybe that is where the insurance companies can come into a play.
The Chair: The point is that you need to convince the public, and the only people convincing the public right now are the insurers with real deductions. If everyone is serious, they have to come to the table in a serious way.
Margot Whittington, Manager, Climate Policy, Insurance Bureau of Canada: A program that the federal government got rid of last month — the Canada Greener Homes Initiative — was focused on energy efficiency, but we could have something similar for resilience. That would help incentivize people to build their homes to be more resilient or retrofit them to make them more resilient in the future.
Senator Muggli: I think my question is for Mr. McGuinty, but NRC might want to pipe in. It is about rebuilding. You might be familiar with the community in Saskatchewan that lost half of its community this summer — about 200 homes. Referencing the Jasper experience, a big delay was caused by soil remediation. That got me curious, because my son is an environmental engineer who is doing a lot of soil testing. It is very monotonous and detailed, and takes a long time.
In your opinion, what might speed up soil-remediation processes? What is the cost? Also, what might speed up other regulatory necessities in the rebuilding process?
Mr. McGuinty: That is a good question. I didn’t think we’d be talking about the soil-remediation process in Jasper, but you’re bang on. It’s been one of the reasons the rebuild has been taking much longer than the town insurance companies and all stakeholders involved would have liked. As of the one-year mark, we were still in the low double digits in terms of rebuilding when it comes to homes. In fact, I think we’re still at the demolition phase.
I’m not an expert on soil remediation; I don’t know everything that goes into it. I will say that Jasper was complicated by the fact that you had a town within a province within a national park. There were multiple levels of government involved there, which can create some duplication or, more specifically, some delays. The lesson we need to take out of Jasper — and again, I think the agency can play a role here — is that we’ve got to focus on expedited recovery, and we’ve got to have the kinds of processes in place where you have a clear accountability lead in terms of government that is focused on getting people back to their homes as quickly as possible.
We have some room to grow, based upon the Jasper experience.
Senator Muggli: Thank you.
NRC?
Mr. Bénichou: We don’t do a lot on soil remediation, but it’s a very important thing to consider. I believe that, maybe, there is a need to create a step-by-step recovery process where the first step is ensuring people are safe, and then it’s taking the debris out and look at the soil. That kind of process would be very important. Then, maybe link it to insurance companies.
That kind of process may be very useful. For each step, we can develop the tools to ensure people can return safely to their homes.
Senator Robinson: My questions are about adaptation and this disproportionate investment we see into mitigation versus adaptation. We heard testimony earlier this month from a representative from the Intact Centre, at the University of Waterloo, that 24-1 are the dollars we spend on adaptation and mitigation. In his opinion, he thought it should be more 50-50, that adaptation really should be bumped up in what it does get.
I was thinking about the soil remediation, I looked at that and thought, I wonder what lessons we’ve learned there to prevent soil degradation in future fires and how that is being built into any of the codes.
But I wanted to speak about this funding imbalance. I’m wondering if Mr. McGuinty and Ms. Whittington might be able to offer comment on what the federal government should be doing to allocate more funding to adaptation in regard to climate change and disasters?
Mr. McGuinty: Over the last 10 years, $42 billion has been spent on emission-reduction measures and $4 billion on adaptation measures. We think, and Dr. Blair Feltmate as well, who I believe shared those numbers with the committee, that this is not the right balance between the two.
I’ll let Margot speak to what it is we think the federal government and perhaps others should be doing in terms of resilience.
Ms. Whittington: We work closely with Dr. Blair Feltmate through Climate Proof Canada. We, at Climate Proof Canada, helped get the federal government to bring forward the National Adaptation Strategy, and that strategy has timelines and targets that the federal government should be aiming to meet. In terms of adaptation, there are a number of things in there that I think have maybe fallen to the side in the last year or so.
I think we really should focus on the National Adaptation Strategy and meeting the measures in there and trying meet to timelines and targets that are set by the federal government on adaptation.
I also mention the rebate program, which is another idea that is in the strategy as well. That’s another piece of helping educate homeowners and business owners about how they can retrofit their homes and businesses to make them more resilient going forward.
Senator Robinson: Another question. You mentioned stats about how the claims have gone up disproportionately — was it like 60,000 to 228,000?
Mr. McGuinty: It was 228,000 in the span of a month last year, versus 160,000 the entirety of the year previous.
Senator Robinson: I was wondering if you wanted to expand on that a little bit?
Mr. McGuinty: Sure, You’re seeing — generally speaking — an increase in the number of claims, but it’s not an increase that is proportionate with population growth. It is an increase that is tied to the frequency and severity of natural disasters that we are seeing in this country. The bulk of those claims, or the bulk of the growth, is on home insurance. You do get natural disaster claims on auto, especially in hail claims, but it has been home insurance that is bearing the brunt of it. What you’ve seen is insurance companies — and this may be too inside baseball — but insurance companies have really had to staff up their claims and get more sophisticated in terms of their claims departments as well. Ultimately, claims are a proxy for risk and premium follows risk. In those parts of the country where you’re seeing more natural catastrophes, Western Canada especially, you’re seeing real coverage changes. You’re seeing more claims, in some cases higher premiums, peril-specific deductibles, higher deductibles, and insurers are starting to evaluate their concentration in those areas.
Not to be alarmist, but taken to the worst possible scenario, we don’t want to end up in a situation like California. And there were three conditions in place in California that led to the crisis they’re experiencing: they suppressed insurance rates; they did not take the proper steps to mitigate risks; and they were building in the wildland-urban interface, not building in fire breaks, and the building codes were insufficient. We have got to learn those lessons from California.
Senator McBean: I’m really happy actually you ended with learning lessons from California. Unfortunately, we all know now there is wildfire season and it becomes either water cooler chat or my daughter plays soccer so there are parents standing around for a good hour talking about the things we see on TV.
One of the things that we sometimes see when there’s been a wildfire, or in L.A. we often saw an evacuation, and there is a private organization — otherwise known as “guy with hose” standing near a property — who stays behind, flouts the evacuation orders but successfully saves a home, if not a small community.
I had a parent telling me about how they have colleagues in L.A. who are using private firefighting services — often, “guy with hose” — to put out these fires.
I’m not at all advocating for this, but are insurance companies increasingly looking at private wildfire protection?
Mr. McGuinty: Thank you for the question and I hadn’t heard it referred to as “guy with hose,” but I think it’s —
Senator McBean: I’ll coin it now.
Mr. McGuinty: There are a number of insurance companies, not all, who are working with a company called Wildfire Defense Systems. My understanding is that it’s only available in B.C. and Alberta at the moment, but that is a private company that will take risk mitigation steps, remove things from close to your property line, debris items that could be flammable. They will do that in the event that a wildfire is imminent. That was a free service that didn’t exist a few years ago and now it’s much more commonplace across the insurance industry.
You can look at that one of two ways: One of which is it is a benefit, it is a competitive advantage, but it is also in the interest of insurance companies. They’ve made the business decision that this is worth the investment in order to mitigate their losses. I do expect you’re going to see more of that. Maybe at some point that will be expanded to the rest of Canada as well.
Senator McBean: You’re saying that is a free service.
Mr. McGuinty: It is included as part of your policy.
Senator McBean: So you check and get the service and a premium on that.
Mr. McGuinty: It may be embedded within the cost of your coverage. I haven’t heard that there is an additional cost that is made on top of this. It is embedded. If any cost is incurred, it is embedded within your product.
The Chair: Senator Robinson, could you ask your question and maybe they would respond in writing to our clerk?
Senator Robinson: We have heard concerns about properties becoming uninsurable as we get more data out there and people are in areas that are just too high risk. I’m wondering if you can talk about the positives of what it means for the rest of the insurance pool if we actually drive development away from these areas so that we can kind of turn that frown upside down a little bit.
The Chair: We will send you that question and if you can respond that is great. Thank you for your testimony today, it has been insightful.
For our second panel, we will be hearing from Alex Deslauriers, Chief Executive Officer of FireSwarm Solutions, Inc.; and Domenico Iannidinardo, Chief Executive Officer of Strategic Natural Resource Group. On behalf of the members today, thank you for being here.
We’ll hear your opening remarks, which will be followed by questions from the senators. I’ll signal when your time is up. With that, Mr. Deslauriers, the floor is yours.
Alex Deslauriers, Chief Executive Officer, FireSwarm Solutions Inc.: Good morning, chair and members of the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to share our perspective on Canada’s wildfire crisis and the role of emerging wildfire technology.
I’m an aeronautics engineer with over 25 years of experience in integrating complex systems for commercial and military aircraft. I’m also a commercial pilot and a search and rescue volunteer. Most important, I’m a Canadian who watched helplessly in the summer of 2023 as our family’s multigenerational home burned to the ground, along with 56 of our neighbour’s properties.
On August 18, as flames consumed our community, we saw firsthand the gaps in wildfire response. Aircraft were grounded at night and in low-visibility for safety reasons. As the rest of the province burned that summer, we lived the nightmare of stretched resources and delayed response. One thing became painfully clear: The tools we rely upon today to suppress wildfires are not sufficient to meet the needs of wildfire challenges now and in the decades to come.
That realization sparked the creation of FireSwarm Solutions. We are a B.C.-based company with a national mission: to expand Canada’s firefighting capacity using ultra heavy-lift drones with advanced flight technology to operate systems designed to integrate into existing wildfire agencies. Our drones can carry up to 300 kilograms of water and rapidly deploy in those first critical 12 hours.
Our goal is to give firefighters a new aerial tool that can fly when others can’t, continually working 24/7 through smoke and in conditions where crewed aircraft are grounded.
The path forward isn’t guesswork; it’s a matter of engineering, policy and government support.
Over the past two years, FireSwarm has researched, developed and tested solutions. I will talk about some of the things we’ve learned. A “crawl, walk, fly” approach is necessary. Technology can do more than the current rules allow. We’re starting with automation, where drones follow set routes and tasks. Over time, as rules change, we’ll move toward true autonomy, where drones can make smart decisions while a pilot watches and steps in, if needed. This is a safe and measured approach to integrating drones into wildfire airspace.
Second, field-deployable systems are a requirement. Transport Canada and NAV CANADA require drones to operate in restricted airspace only. Our system is truck-transportable and can be pre-positioned in high-risk zones to provide a rapid force multiplier.
Third, ultra heavy-lift drones are ready. The technology is now mature enough for wildfire response, emergency management and supporting Canadian sovereignty. We’ve partnered with top manufacturers to meet the necessary lift and endurance requirements.
Finally, power and performance matter. Electric vertical-lift systems can’t deliver the right combination of payload and endurance. Drones powered by jet engines are necessary to drop meaningful volumes of water on fires and transport equipment to the line where it’s needed most.
Our findings lead to one conclusion: The technology is ready, and so are the Canadian regulations.
Here’s what we know: Wildfire organizations, Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, and agencies are prepared to integrate ultra heavy-lift drones into test environments; firefighters and helicopter operators are eager for this capability, not to replace existing aircraft but to enhance pilot safety and work 24/7; and FireSwarm is in lockstep with our regulator, Transport Canada, which is aligned with our “crawl, walk, fly” approach.
Here are our recommendations. To start, we must move at the speed of this crisis. By fast-tracking regulatory collaboration, give Transport Canada and NAV CANADA the resources to safely integrate automated wildfire drone operations into Canadian airspace so companies, like Strategic Natural Resource Group, can reaffirm investment decisions in this technology.
Support partnerships with Indigenous and remote communities in high wildfire risk zones where the rapid response capacity of these drones would be a game changer. Direct national procurement agencies to invest in Canadian wildfire-fighting technology. Leverage dual-use funding; bolster federal innovation and defence programs, like the Strategic Innovation Fund, to support R&D and scale manufacturing here in Canada.
FireSwarm is exportable, creates highly-skilled jobs, supports First Nation capacity building and strengthens infrastructure.
The 2023 wildfire season was the worst in our nation’s history, but 2025 now ranks as the second worst. Together, we can build a stronger, safer and more prepared Canada. Thank you.
[Translation]
If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them in the language of your choice.
[English]
The Chair: Thank you very much.
The floor is yours, Mr. Iannidinardo.
Domenico Iannidinardo, Chief Executive Officer, Strategic Natural Resource Group: Good morning, chair and committee members.
Strategic Natural Resource Group is a consulting and management company that is both employee- and majority-Indigenous-owned, based out of British Columbia. I’m a registered professional forester, biologist and engineer with 25 years of experience in natural resource management. Additionally, I had the privilege of being the founding chair of the Canadian Forest Owners association.
I extend greetings today on behalf of our company’s chair, Chief of the Ehattesaht First Nation, Simon John. It is an honour to be here to address you on Algonquin Anishinaabe territory today, following my colleague Alex Deslauriers.
Let’s pick up on the urgency and opportunity that Mr. Deslauriers laid out for us today. As you just heard, the next level of technology to combat wildfires exists. The pressing challenge is to deploy these tools swiftly and safely where they are needed most in our communities, the forests and the frontline of response. At Strategic Natural Resource Group, this urgency is not just theoretical, it is our lived experience almost every summer where we work closely with Indigenous communities and corporate forest operators in managing the infrastructure, standing shoulder to shoulder with affected communities during wildfire events.
When fires threaten homes or timberlands, our crews are often alongside other first responders, assisting with wildfire fighting efforts, logistics and evacuation planning.
We have witnessed firsthand how a small, manageable fire can rapidly escalate into a landscape-level disaster overnight simply because we lacked the right tools when they were most needed most.
This is precisely why we have collaborated with FireSwarm Solutions to transition innovation into effective operational readiness. Together, we are integrating FireSwarm Solutions ultra-heavy lift, AI-enabled drone technology with our decades of operational expertise in emergency response and wildfire resilience planning.
Our vision is straightforward: to make automated aerial wildfire suppression a reality in Canada, supported by trained operators and Indigenous communities.
We are focused on effective distribution, deployment and operator training, ensuring that these innovative technologies become integral to daily wildfire defence rather than remaining locked away in testing facilities.
This is because when communities like Ulkatcho First Nation have a late-season wildfire that forces hundreds to evacuate, causes millions in timber damage and leaves long-term economic scars, it underscores that every hour counts.
The Strategic Natural Resource Group’s pre-planning helped Ulkatcho avoid tragedy, but if ultra-heavy lift uncrewed aircraft had been pre-positioned in the region, that fire could have been contained more effectively.
At night, our crews already use drones to map heat zones on fires, but imagine if those same drones could deliver water at night when it’s cool, calm, and every drop is ten times more effective than in the daytime heat. This is not a distant possibility. It’s achievable today with the proper regulatory support and federal leadership.
Wildfire is a matter of national security. We must recognize that a wildfire threatening a family’s home is not just a local concern; it’s a security threat to that family and a matter of national urgency. Wildfires pose risks not only to infrastructure and forests but also destabilize communities, erode cultural continuity and threaten food and water security.
Strategic Natural Resource Group fully supports these recommendations and has two additional, actionable priorities derived from our field experiences.
First, interprovincial crew mobility. This past summer, our wildfire crews in British Columbia were ready to deploy eastward to help in Manitoba. Despite the urgent need, we were blocked by inconsistent provincial administrative processes.
These are highly trained professionals, and soon, they’ll be the operators managing ultra-heavy lift drones like FireSwarm’s. We urgently need a system that allows wildfire personnel to move seamlessly across provincial borders.
This coordination could be guided through policy from the Canadian Council of Forest Ministers, which B.C. currently chairs, and it would instantly expand Canada’s operational capacity.
Second, we need a national model for standby cost and training reimbursement for private and Indigenous wildfire crews. Canada’s public firefighting agencies do heroic work, but they’re increasingly stretched too thin. Private and Indigenous crews are a partially untapped force that could be mobilized much more quickly and safely if there were an established baseline support for them. This is the perfect public-private partnership opportunity: the private sector can scale rapidly and stand ready, so the government can focus on its core resources and enable such additional resources that we know can be put to good use.
For Indigenous and rural communities, wildfire resilience isn’t just about suppressing flames; it’s about protecting identity, continuity and sovereignty.
It’s not just an environmental issue. I’ll repeat, it’s a national imperative. While technology like FireSwarm’s gives us new tools, immediate action and courage are needed more than ever.
Let’s keep focusing on fostering innovation as the key driver of our progress, with regulation that promotes this. Let’s make sure Canadian communities — Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike — have the resources, training and technology to defend what matters most.
It simply needs to be done. Thank you for your time here today. Thank you for what you are doing to protect Canada’s people, lands and the future.
The Chair: Thank you very much for your opening statements. We’ll now proceed to questions.
My question is first. It is very simple. Do the drones only carry water? Earlier in our testimony we heard of other materials. Could they carry other materials?
Mr. Deslauriers: That’s a good question. There have been a number of questions coming to us in terms of carrying surfactant, suppressants or pre-ignition bulbs that can be dropped to start a fire in terms of a prescribed burn. There are a number of assets that can be carried underneath these machines. We are working with the Department of National Defence, through the IDEaS program and through NATO’s Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic, or DIANA, for protection of troops and also for logistics transport in military zones.
The Chair: Thank you.
Senator McNair: Thank you to both of you for being here today. My question is to Mr. Deslauriers of FireSwarm Solutions. We noted that you partnered with the Kelowna Fire Department in 2025 to deploy wildfire suppression. Can you provide any further information on the data on how the drones did in performing those tasks? You touched quickly on some of the clear advantages of using the drones: 24/7, flying at night and more precision.
The other thing that I was curious about is this: You mentioned NAV CANADA. Do they get the sense of urgency? Are they on board?
Mr. Deslauriers: Thank you for your questions. I can start with Kelowna and get into NAV CANADA.
The Kelowna exercise that was executed in May was partially in support through NRC and Innovate BC, which actually allowed us to have the funding available to deploy smaller-scale machines in the Kelowna Fire Department area. The exercise in Kelowna was to show how the agencies locally on the ground could work with swarms of drones that would actually be transporting water from A to B.
We, as FireSwarm, came into the exercise thinking that these firefighters will want to see water being put on flames. However, through the planning of the exercise, that was actually not really our initial use case. They said, “We want you to carry water from a lake for an advanced pumping tank where the water can then be used at the forward operating base.”
That’s why these exercises with the end users are so critical, because our assumption as an innovator was actually incorrect. They said, “No, we want you initially to carry water to an uphill station where we already have firefighters.”
To answer your question, we don’t have metrics specifically today for the efficacy of water on fires. We just competed in the semifinals the XPRIZE Wildfire competition in Sweden where we had the ultra-heavy lift drones putting water on fires 300 kilograms at a time, and the fire was extinguished within five minutes. That’s not the specific data set you’re looking for. We are working on those data sets.
Speaking to NAV CANADA, they are a very constrained group.
Senator McNair: That’s very diplomatic.
Mr. Deslauriers: Thank you. They’re certainly challenging in terms of managing airspace and the number of aircraft flying in and around controlled airspace. Imagine, as a drone operator, saying, “Actually, we’d like to fly drones in Class G uncontrolled airspace and we would ask you, NAV CANADA, to provide separation between aircraft.” That is just not going to work.
That is why Transport Canada and NAV CANADA are supporting the concept of deploying these machines in the controlled bubble of a wildfire, which is 3,000 feet AGL, five nautical miles perimeter around a wildfire, meaning that this is where the operators can come in with these machines and operate within, essentially, deconflicted airspace, especially at night.
Senator McNair: It’s essentially a no-fly zone except for the ones that are rightly there.
Mr. Deslauriers: Exactly. In Transport Canada’s words, it is called a Class F restricted or advisory airspace, meaning that no aircraft are allowed to be in that area unless they have the handshake from incident command. This is where our operators are considering operating.
Senator McNair: Mr. Iannidinardo from the Strategic Natural Resource Group, you set out the two critical policy areas. Can you expand a little bit more? It’s not the first time we’ve heard about private Indigenous crews representing a largely untapped resource that could be mobilized to more effectively deal with wildfire challenges. We heard testimony from people who were not allowed to go in during daylight hours and were going in after hours to save their community.
Mr. Iannidinardo: Certainly, when it comes to the crew mobility matter, that was an interprovincial crew mobility matter that I highlighted. The resource of part-time or seasonal wildfire fighting from the private sector, Indigenous and commercial — it is often interchangeable these days — needs to be coordinated to optimize. It’s a straightforward function of energy, of young Indigenous and non-Indigenous people who are sometimes doing the tree planting and if an emergency happens, they’re willing to do the firefighting. We train them up as an industry. We find them meaningful work when there’s no emergency, in ordinary times. That costs money, and it costs investment calculations. We would appreciate and we expect an investment coming from governments would be returned multiple times over, like you heard from the Insurance Bureau, by having that force fully ready and able to move around wherever the fires went.
Senator Muggli: I have a quick question about clarity. Could you have water-bomber planes and drones operating at the same time?
Mr. Deslauriers: Certainly, it is not a Transport Canada issue. The conversations we’ve had with Transport Canada have told us they do not see a problem cornering off a specific area of the fire and allowing crewed assets to essentially work a different latitude, longitude area.
Especially at night, water bombers do not fly. There are a few helicopters nationwide that do fly at night, but they’re extremely expensive to operate, usually with two crews, three crews sometimes, and night-vision goggles, and it is extremely risky, which is the concept here of bringing these ultra-heavy lift drones to wildfires in nighttime where we see a deconflicted airspace.
To answer the question, it is not only possible, it is highly probable that that will be, in the future, what will happen in terms of our technology and crewed aircraft. Initially, in terms of entry to the market, we really do see a perfect opening for nighttime early suppression with the work that Strategic Natural Resource Group is already doing.
Senator Muggli: Who else is doing this in the world, if anyone? Are there any limitations in terms of having to have a certain body of water to be able to grab your water from? How deep can you get into the active fire, et cetera?
Mr. Deslauriers: In terms of who is doing this in the world right now, this is innovation that is truly on the bleeding edge. The XPRIZE Foundation in California, there were 400 teams that applied for early detection and early suppression. The exercise was really meant to be 30 kilometres by 30 kilometres. How quickly can you detect a fire and put it out within 10 minutes? That is the challenge that we have for the competition. Four hundred teams applied. We, as a Canadian company, are the only Canadian company, and there are 15 of us remaining, 15 worldwide companies. We are the only company that brings jet engine powered drones that carry a significant amount of water to a fire that will actually affect change.
There are other companies. One of them just raised $60 million two days ago. Good for them. They are little electric drones that spray liquid from the front, and anyone that knows anything about wildfire is not overly optimistic, let’s just say.
Senator Muggli: In terms of the bodies of water, any limitations in that regard or how deep they can get into a fire zone?
Mr. Iannidinardo: In terms of the implementation and the visual that you’re familiar with of a bucket under a helicopter, it’s the same parameters. You need four metres of water if it’s a water body, and you can set up the relay tank situation that Mr. Deslauriers mentioned earlier.
Safety is the limit when it comes to what you can do and, certainly, water availability that matches it.
Senator Muggli: Any thoughts on the impact on the insurance industry long term in terms of premium costs, et cetera?
Mr. Deslauriers: Certainly, we refer to some things as the big audacious goal to have these machines pre-positioned, ready to respond, fully autonomous, pre-positioned. Essentially, the concept of a drone in a box, but we’re talking about a sizable machine here ready to respond as needed, daytime or nighttime.
Insurance companies are looking at us. They’re very keen on what’s coming around here, and they see power plants that are at risk, stranded assets that require protection.
If you couple our technology with early detection such as SenseNet sensors that can detect fires at the moment of that incipient stage, coupled with our early suppression technology, you can see a world not very far away where these machines will be receiving signals for early suppression as soon as a fire is detected. These machines will be auto dispatched with somebody in downtown Calgary or Toronto being able to say, “Yes, approve the mission.”
Senator Muggli: Thank you.
Senator Robinson: I’ve been thinking about your strategic burns and about avalanching and how we pre-blast to avoid avalanches. I thought it was kind of similar.
I’m curious about the cost of drones. I hear the term “jet engine,” which doesn’t sound like a Honda Civic engine, and it may be a little expensive. What is the cost of a drone? Who are you suggesting is buying these drones and how many drones? What kind of density do you need in an area to be able to respond in a timely fashion? You’re saying someone in Calgary can hit the button. Have you numbers like those to give us an idea of what level of investment is being considered at this point?
Mr. Deslauriers: There’s the short-term goal and then the long-term pre-positioning goal. Maybe we can speak to the short-term goal first.
Mr. Iannidinardo: I’ve mentioned publicly before that these are seven-figure cost machines right now. They’re currently hand-built in Scandinavia, the machines we’re working with. They are being serialized now and that manufacturing facility is being developed so we can start making them faster, and they will get cheaper.
The pre-positioning concept is one of simple time and space. The closer they are and the more autonomous they are, the faster they can get to a fire and put it out before it’s a bit deal, because that is the number one way to stop a big fire, to stop it when it’s small.
We see a world where we can be producing these in Canada in the not too distant future, so that they do become much more part of the everyday and something that requires less training than helicopter pilots. They’re cheaper than helicopters. They are much more efficient per litre of water delivered, the cost, than current aerial delivery mechanisms, but they are not intended to displace the current resources we have for aerial delivery. They are meant to complement and be in places that larger machines can’t be and with crews that otherwise wouldn’t be able to deliver that water when it’s needed.
Mr. Deslauriers: The longer-term goal, the critical factor to keep in mind is the metric is the dollars per kilogram, or how much it will cost to actually carry a kilogram of water in the case of a wildfire. Even when not at scale, that ratio is still in the parameters of a crewed helicopter. You can imagine at scale, once we start building hundreds and thousands of these machines, that number will go down. Already today, the operating cost of a drone that’s not meant to carry humans is much lower, a fraction of that of a crewed helicopter. Crewed helicopters are meant to carry humans, and we’ve just been using these crewed helicopters to carry buckets of water. If you think about it, it doesn’t make sense, but it’s all we had. Now we have a paradigm shift that we can just engage.
Senator Robinson: What do we need to do to accelerate our ability to produce them within Canada?
Mr. Deslauriers: From an innovation point of view, we simply need purchase orders from operators, and those purchase orders are then passed to ACC Innovation, the Swedish manufacturer of the drone. There is already a handshake agreement that says, “If you get us enough purchase orders, we will open a plant in Canada for these machines.”
Mr. Iannidinardo: We need a horizon, a government contract and private contract horizon, to start with one machine, five machines, to get the swarm and fire swarm activated and for people to really get good at deploying those swarms and feeling confident about what they can do. Once we get one machine here, we’ll get five machines here and we’ll be able to demonstrate it. There will be a confidence on the horizon for contracts with the government and commercial sector operators. We’ll really see a positive expansion of trust and affirmation of the technology.
Senator Robinson: Who owns the drones then?
Mr. Iannidinardo: These drones will be owned by individual companies, consortiums of First Nations, forest owners and local communities. Kelowna in particular has been a driver of interest and expression of commitment toward having this resource.
Mr. Deslauriers: We were speaking to Minister Fuhr at the Abbotsford Airshow and his first comment was “This is great, we need this technology, every reserve unit in Canada could have one of these machines.” So there is also a national play here when it comes to ownership of machines through DND.
The Chair: Did you notice how Senator Robinson slid that last question in without checking if you had much more time? It’s all right.
Senator Varone: I have a variety questions and the first one is about range. When you talk about range and deployment and you said you can bring these drones by truck to individual sites and have them ready, but range is the first question, type of fuel. Are you bringing the fuel as well? Jet propulsion fuel is not cheap, and it is not available at your local gas station. So how do you envision the logistics of deployment?
Mr. Deslauriers: I can speak to the range and endurance of the actual machines and maybe you can speak to the logistics.
Mr. Iannidinardo: Sure.
Mr. Deslauriers: The first drone that we have found on planet Earth that can deliver 300 kilograms of water on a jet engine is built in Sweden. This is ACC Innovation’s Thunder Wasp. We, as a Canadian innovator, install our fire emission kit and then we have our software algorithm control these machines in, currently, autonomous fashion and, in time, fully autonomous fashion.
When it comes to range and endurance, when we talk about aviation, it is always a contrast between payload versus endurance and fuel. What we are saying is that 300 kilograms of payload, we can expect 1.5 hours of endurance with this machine.
The machine flies at nominal airspeed with a bucket at around 70 kilometres per hour.
The mission profile is really to stay within the confines of this class F restricted or advisory airspace, which is by definition 20 kilometres wide and 3,000 feet high. There is no need to fly higher than we need to, essentially we need to skim the trees.
In terms of range, if you’re considering other use cases outside of wildfire, we could look at that in terms of DND applications and we are starting to do that.
Senator Varone: I was thinking of civil defence. These remote communities, if you have ever been to Whistler and you get a fire at a house in Whistler, the last thing they are going to get is a fire pump truck coming up the road to put out the fire. Is there an ability to adapt to that?
Mr. Deslauriers: Yes, 100%. What we’ve been finding with the Kelowna Fire Department, their biggest problem is when there is a fire within the area of the city, but it is just up that hill, it will take four hours for firefighters to get there or 15 minutes for drones to bring water directly on that fire.
Senator Varone: Interesting. This is for Mr. Iannidinardo. On your point No. 1, interprovincial crew mobility. Has Bill C-5 and the passage of C-5 eliminated that comment, or are you still finding interprovincial restrictions and mobility restrictions because C-5 should have dealt with it. This is dated October 21.
Mr. Iannidinardo: Bill C-5 will help. I haven’t seen how it has all the precise mechanisms to get through the matters, which take time, of provinces having slightly different training standards for components of a wildfire firefighter certification. So those can now start to be standardized. They can refer to C-5 as the catalyst for it, but with the Canadian Institute, the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre and the Wildfire Resilience Consortium of Canada, combining with the Canadian Council of Forest Ministers, I feel that the national defence imperative, plus the wildfire and ecological imperative, can really drive the simplification and standardization of the standards.
They’re all very similar across provinces. Currently provinces have different priorities in terms of their own categories of crews. There can be four different categories of wildfire crews, and different provinces categorize those differently.
It’s a mathematical, methodical approach to make those standard and therefore ensure that wildfire crews are put where wildfires are as quickly as possible. I’m confident that it’s coming and I’m seeing agencies and centres form around it.
Senator McBean: Unbelievable. We’re clearly all going in the same lane, which is fun and frustrating when you’re the last on the list to ask the question.
Mr. Iannidinardo, when you were talking about groups having difficulty going interprovincially, maybe I can drill down because we have some committee meetings where people say it’s working and it’s getting better and there is not a problem and other committees where they say it isn’t, particularly with providing interprovincial help and aid.
Who exactly is telling who exactly that they can’t move from one provincial area to another?
Mr. Iannidinardo: There are two big categories of wildfire fighting ground crews. There are government firefighting ground crews and there are commercial, which include Indigenous, wildfire fighting ground crews that are available based on provincial government contracts. These ground crews don’t have federal government contracts, they have provincial government contracts.
Those provincial governments have different ways of prioritizing the release of crews to go out of the province. If one province is sending out its type 1 crews to go to another province, it deliberately can, and sometimes does, retain their commercial crew capacity for their province even if their province is quiet. They like to keep that buffer. That buffer that a province is building and relying on, in recent times, is no longer supported by standby rates or training-cost reimbursements for the commercial operators to absorb that capacity and keep them busy doing other things, being ready for a potential phone call from the province to deploy and support local needs.
Whatever dimension you measure it by, the commercial operators are taking large risks and are at the frontline of coordinating, willing energy of youth. The same youth from the generation that is very good at making a decision about where to put a yogurt container in recycling bins to reduce carbon emissions, but know if they get a day on a fire, they can reduce a hundred tons of carbon emission and make a real difference that way.
I want to enable that resource to get to where it wants to be and make the most impact positively for the country.
Senator McBean: I’m wondering if there is a command-centre-to-command-centre approach kind of thing.
Mr. Iannidinardo: There is the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, the Council of Forest Ministers, where all the senior civil servants related to forest wildfire services in each province do communicate. There is that communication. There are protocols for aerial coordination. That protocol seamlessness needs to be extended further into the ground crews. I believe you will find that the capacity of this country will be instantly expanded because the energy, interest and ability are there.
Now, you put on ultra heavy-lift drones and you bring more people willing to volunteer to be part-time in the wildfire resiliency and wildfire mitigation suppression space, then we are winning and getting fires when they are small instead of waiting until they are large.
Senator McBean: Thank you, and thank you for saying ultra heavy-lift drones. Everyone wants to work that into their question because it’s kind of awesome.
Mr. Deslauriers, we haven’t said sorry for the loss of your home that you mentioned right off the top. My only thing beyond that comment is to thank you for turning it into something positive and trying to figure out how there can be a positive result for future families so that we save more and more homes.
What I heard you say was the Swedish-made Thunder Wasp becomes a Fire Wasp but you need five to have a swarm, is that right? How many of these are in Canada right now?
Mr. Deslauriers: We have one on order from Sweden. Going back to the Kelowna exercise, we were using smaller drones the size of a picnic table. Those were electrically powered and could only carry small buckets of water, but it was to test out the concept. The Thunder Wasp from ACC Innovation, we apply the fire-emission kit and it becomes a Fire Wasp. That is the Fire Wasp that is then purchased by companies that will have contracts with the fire agencies to suppress fires using these machines.
If we do a comparison in terms of water capacity, three machines are equal to one small-scale helicopter. That is where we do the comparison, but there is no maximum or minimum in terms of the pre-positioning of these machines.
The Chair: We’ll move to the second round. I just have a question. Does the Strategic National Resource Group support the integration of Indigenous knowledge into your emergency response efforts and services?
Mr. Iannidinardo: Absolutely, and I’m here on behalf of our chair and chief of the Ehattesaht First Nation, Simon John.
The Strategic National Resource Group has been around for about 25 years, but for the last three, we have been majority Indigenous owned. Indigenous knowledge is combined with scientific knowledge each day in all of the resource-management planning that we do, and that includes wildfires. It includes cultural burning prescriptions as part of the wildfire-resiliency plans that we do for local governments around Western Canada. Our professionals are proud of that connectivity we have now as an Indigenous majority-owned company. The employees that come from various First Nations also fill in our ranks as a company.
Senator McNair: Back to some of the operations, we’ve talked about range, speed and fuel. I’m just curious. When you’re loading the 300 kilograms in, does it have to move? We all see the pictures of the water tanker skimming the lake. Are you hovering over the lake at that point or are you moving along?
Mr. Deslauriers: We had a great conversation with Conair, one of the world leaders in aerial suppression using their tankers. When we described the concept of hovering on a body of water with a Bambi Bucket or another type of bucket to pick up water, they said right away, “You guys are on the right track.” Because every time a water skimmer approaches for a landing on water, it is a controlled crash. With enough training you obviously do not crash the aircraft, but it is a very risky operation to hold a hover at a certain height above water, wait until the bucket is full and for our system to register torque and temperature on the machine to make sure it’s safe to continue flight. If it’s not, we release the water and pick somewhere else.
That is the concept of operation. It is extremely safe compared to skimming —
Senator McNair: It is more precise.
Mr. Deslauriers: It is extremely precise. As you can tell, in time, we are going toward having an AI on the drone be able to learn from water drops that have been done in previous minutes by other drones that are ahead of it or in tow to precisely put water where it needs to be based on wind conditions, topography, quality of the fuel and so on.
Senator McNair: How much in volume is a kilogram of water?
Mr. Deslauriers: Luckily, the metric scale is a beautiful thing, so 300 kilograms is exactly 300 litres.
Senator McBean: One litre is like a Gatorade bottle.
Mr. Deslauriers: The same technology is currently used by helicopters, so when people ask if 300 kilograms of water will do anything, we say you can ask the bucket manufacturer. They’re selling it to current helicopter operators.
Senator McNair: The other thing with the skimming process is when you talk about controlled airspace, you’re also dealing with a controlled water space at that point. The coast guard in New Brunswick this summer had to ensure boats weren’t in the area where the skimmer was approaching.
Mr. Deslauriers: And there is zero-nighttime operation for skimming water.
Senator Muggli: Thank you. Mr. Deslauriers, spot fires are a big challenge, as is being able to identify and address them in a timely manner. I’m curious if the deployment of the drones can help monitor spots or address them.
Mr. Deslauriers: I’ll bring it over to Mr. Iannidinardo here. The concept of the ultra heavy-lift drones being deployed is just one more tool in the tool box. There are already companies deploying drones to do hot-spot detection in mapping. Our software takes that data into target coordinates. Then from there, we have the operators of the machines use our software that integrates early detection and early suppression.
Mr. Iannidinardo: For over 10 years now, our company has been providing hot-spot mapping, the heat-scanning service, to make sure that the morning crew has the best information possible. As I was saying in my opening remarks, we now have the potential to do some active suppression while we are scanning for hot spots, scanning for embers, but that ember front on a fire is generally how fires spread.
Having this complementarity of these ultra heavy-lift drones to work at night putting out hot spots is another real important use case for this technology that doesn’t exist today. Ground crews can’t do much of that at night at all safely.
Like Mr. Deslauriers mentioned, there aren’t many helicopters that do it, and it is very complex for the big aircraft to be worrying about embers in spots. This is to stop the bigger problem from starting.
Senator Varone: I have two very simple and connected questions. Fresh water sea water, are they both applicable?
Mr. Iannidinardo: Gatorade as well.
Mr. Deslauriers: Although it has sugar.
Senator Varone: The more important question about the Strategic Natural Resource Group. Are you a not-for-profit or are you a for-profit corporation?
Mr. Iannidinardo: Strategic Natural Resource Group is for profit. We are a 25-year-old company based in British Columbia. We have offices around British Columbia, both interior and coastal, and we have served the west of Canada for all that time.
We do make these decisions, and we need to make these decisions from a standard investment perspective. Our shareholders are our employees and First Nations who look at this type of risk as worthwhile in and of itself. It’s important to the culture and the environment to minimize fires and have fires operate and behave in controlled ways. But it also needs to pay for itself and justify the financial risks.
Senator McBean: This is for Strategic Natural Resource Group and is a little off the drone topic, but what role does private forest owners and resource companies play in wildfire mitigation, and how could federal incentives strengthen those efforts?
Mr. Iannidinardo: My pitch was to focus on the reimbursement. When companies, either the forest owners that manage their own land or forest owners and tenure holders that rely upon companies like mine to manage those lands for them, demonstrate the commitment by investing in the training, paying for the standby costs associated with those hardworking and intent professionals, so they can do more of it. Therefore, we can have bigger standby crews organized and faster deployment pathways for the ground crews with their drones that they have today for heat scanning, but, in the future, we need to make sure we can get those vehicles to the properly classified airspaces and get those drones up without flying over towns or needing NAV CANADA approval; we can just get there on the ground and make it happen.
Senator McBean: Are there current resources like reimbursements or incentives for companies to be using?
Mr. Iannidinardo: These have fluctuated over the years. That is part of the issue. Some years, we have had reimbursement as part of our contracts with provincial governments. Currently, we don’t. That does complicate and change our investment decisions when we’re deciding how many people we plan to train in a particular fire season before we know what the fire season is going to be like. We believe it’s fair to share that risk with public budgets.
The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Deslauriers and Mr. Iannidinardo, for your time today. It was a very informative session, as you can tell by the questions, and we do appreciate your contributions to our study, which is coming to a close soon. We will make sure you are informed when the report is ready so you can get copies.
I want to thank my colleagues around the table for your active participation and thoughtful questions, and for even sharing questions among each other. Thanks to the staff that we have working for us in our offices, the folks who are behind us — the interpreters, the Debates team transcribing and editing the meeting, the committee room attendant, the multimedia services technicians, the Broadcasting team, the Recording Centre, ISD and the page who had to step out. We appreciate their support, as well.
(The committee adjourned.)