THE STANDING SENATE COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE AND FORESTRY
EVIDENCE
OTTAWA, Tuesday, October 28, 2025
The Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry met with videoconference this day at 6:32 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 John M. McNair (Deputy Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Deputy Chair: My name is John McNair and I am the deputy chair of this committee. Welcome to the members of the committee, our witnesses tonight as well as those watching this meeting on the web.
I would like to start by acknowledging that the land on which we gather is on the unceded, traditional territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe Nation.
Before we hear from our witnesses for today, I would like to start by asking the senators around the table to introduce themselves.
Senator Martin: Senator Yonah Martin, British Columbia. Nice to see you.
Senator Robinson: Hello, Mary Robinson, Prince Edward Island.
Senator McBean: Marnie McBean, Ontario.
Senator Muggli: Senator Tracy Muggli, Saskatchewan and Treaty 6 territory. I do that every time.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you. 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 forestry and agriculture industries in our country.
For our first panel, we have the pleasure of welcoming in person, Sarah Butson, Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Lung Association, and by video conference is Dr. Pat Camp, Associate Professor, Department of Physical Therapy at the University of British Columbia.
Thank you to both of you for accepting to appear before our committee. You will have five minutes for your opening remarks. They will be followed by questions from the senators. I will signal that your time is running out by raising one hand when you have one minute left. I will raise both hands when it is a hard stop and your time is up. The floor is yours, Ms. Butson,
Sarah Butson, Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Lung Association: Thank you, and good evening to the committee. We’re really pleased to join this study.
The Canadian Lung Association is one of the oldest health charities advocating, educating and funding research to improve lung health for 125 years. We represent the one in five with lung disease and the five in five who have lungs. Wildfire smoke, of course, is an issue that impacts everyone.
According to polling that we did with Abacus Data in 2023, Canadians not only had high levels of concern, but 64% noticed a bigger impact on their health from worsening air quality due to climate events like wildfires, 73% for those with lung disease. And 84% wanted solutions to be a priority.
There is no safe level of exposure to wildfire smoke. Otherwise healthy adults may experience symptoms like cough, wheeze or difficulty breathing. For those with lung diseases like asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, evidence links exposure to increased symptoms and health care utilization. Depending on what is burning, smoke can also contain harmful pollutants from burned structures, posing additional health harms.
There are steps we can take to protect our lungs; watch the air quality health index and adapt activities, keep indoor air clean by keeping windows shut and using air purifiers, taking protective steps by ensuring medications are current, following action plans and considering the use of N95 masks. Unfortunately, health harms and the ability to take action is not shared equally.
I will now pass the floor to Dr. Camp, a former Canadian Lung Association board member and researcher that we have supported who has worked on several projects looking at the health impacts of wildfire in remote, rural and First Nations communities.
Pat Camp, Associate Professor, University of British Columbia, as an individual: Thank you for the opportunity to speak today. For the past 10 years, I have had the privilege of working with First Nation communities on topics related to lung health, including studies related to wildfire smoke exposure.
As you know, wildfire frequency and intensity have risen sharply in Canada over the last few years, and these fires emit vast amounts of smoke. By July 2025, Canadian wildfires emitted about 180 megatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere. Breathing this smoke exposes the body, especially the lungs and cardiovascular system, to fine particles and gases that cause inflammation and oxidative stress.
I am not involved directly in the research investigating the health impacts of wildfire smoke on our health but many colleagues do that work. I can share with you my experiences and thoughts after working with First Nation communities.
First Nation communities in remote and rural areas are disproportionately affected by wildfires and wildfire smoke. In B.C., over 200,000 Indigenous People live across the province, about 50% residing on reserves, and many of those reserves are in remote and rural areas. These communities have lived through numerous wildfire events, exposures to high levels of wildfire smoke, few options for clean air spaces and repeated evacuation alerts and orders.
In the past, a lot of those communities were really not in the loop with respect to communication and planning, so in response to this, communities are partnering with health societies, universities and other organizations to improve their capacity to reduce the risk of wildfire smoke exposure.
My research team has partnered with Carrier Sekani Family Services and the 11 nations they serve to develop plans related to wildfire smoke exposure. For example, we installed air quality sensors, we provide daily air quality bulletins directly to communities. That helps with their decision making in certain situations such as should we evacuate our Elders if there is a high smoke risk? Can children play outdoors? Prior to this, communities had to rely on sensors that were far away.
We’re also working on different kinds of plans to help in the event of an evacuation. These are some of the examples of how First Nation communities are taking action to improve communication and promote the health of their communities. I would be happy to answer any questions. Thank you.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you for your opening remarks. We will now proceed to questions from senators. Senators, you know that you have five minutes for your questions and that includes the answer.
Senator Muggli: Thank you. Is all wildfire smoke the same? What makes one more dangerous than others regarding exposure?
Ms. Butson: I can answer first and then I will pass to Dr. Camp if she would like to add.
There are a couple of factors. Certainly, there is no safe level of smoke entirely, and the main concern there is PM2.5, which is that super small pollutant that goes deep into our lungs and then has the potential to impact our lung tissue or actually travel into our circulatory system and impact other organs.
But we also know that typically what happens when wildfires are out of control is that they may then expand and burn other substances and that could be plastics, vinyl, other substances, and that the chemical cocktail that may be created in those conditions could then expose Canadians to a number of different carcinogens that could have longer-lasting impacts. Dr. Camp, if there is anything to add?
Ms. Camp: Yes, all smoke isn’t the same. It certainly depends on the type of tree that is burning, the humidity in the air, the heat, the amount of combustion, so the smoke might be different. Then, of course, there are other environmental aspects like humidity, but also the wind, if there is an inversion, or if the smoke is basically hanging in the air. The density of the smoke is another aspect.
It is very difficult to measure a dose and have that dosage measurement be consistent from person to person and from fire to fire.
Senator Muggli: I am imaging this is very deceiving to people who are in the midst of it, not thinking it’s maybe as bad as it actually is?
Ms. Butson: Absolutely. Often when we think about that Air Quality Health Index, or AQHI, and air-quality indicators, you might be looking at five, six, seven on the scale and it may otherwise look okay outside, but you may underestimate the impact of that on your lungs. For people living with lung disease, they often know all too well just how impactful that can be.
Senator Muggli: Do you have publicly available guidelines that associate level of smoke with when to remove yourself? I’m sure that would be different for people who have pre-existing conditions or children or pregnant women, et cetera.
Ms. Butson: That’s right. One of the things that we really encourage people to do is to check the Air Quality Health Index. That’s a scale readily available online that lets people know, based on a range of information, some different behavioural changes they could make based on that and it does that both for the general population, and also for those at higher risk, whether it’s lung disease, being a child, an elderly person or someone who is more vulnerable.
Senator Muggli: Have you ever worked with municipalities to try to get this information into the hands of people who are more at risk, say through utility bills or whatever that might look like?
Ms. Butson: It is a great public education effort that is required. I know there is a lot of work happening at a municipal level. One of the other challenges from a national perspective is that we do have a need for a standardized approach. For instance, the approach that is taken in British Columbia utilizes the AQHI Plus, which does take into account greater amounts of PM2.5, which is helpful during wildfire smoke times, whereas in provinces like Ontario we use the standard AQHI. There is a need for both more public education, better monitoring systems and I think Dr. Camp spoke to that when she was talking about communities where they are just not close enough to the monitors in the first place, that the scale might not really reflect what is happening in their community.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you.
Senator Martin: In your policy work and community outreach, what specific evidence have you gathered to show which interventions are having the biggest measurable impact on reducing the harmful effects of wildfire smoke exposure?
Ms. Butson: Dr. Camp, I will pass to you first and then I can add from our perspective.
Ms. Camp: This is a very intense area of research right now, because there isn’t actually much evidence that is able to point to specific benefits related to some of these interventions. Some of it is related to our understanding about short-term exposure, so things like wear a mask and use an air purifier in your home is related to our common understanding about pollution and exposure. The government just recently funded a team grant for investigators in B.C. to actually do a deeper dive into exposures, interventions and outcomes. But it is still a big gap in our knowledge, for sure.
Senator Martin: Did you want to add to that?
Ms. Butson: I would just add that I think right now our measures are reactive, as Dr. Camp has said. We don’t have a great deal of proactive measures. We really are only able to tell people that when you are in a wildfire, be aware of the level of how poor your air quality and then try to keep safe to the best of your ability by making sure your indoor air quality is clean and that you are taking precautions as needed. It is an area where there is a great need for additional investments in research, and we know that. Like I said in my opening, it is about the one in five with lung disease, but the five in five who breathe. This really is an issue that impacts everyone across Canada.
Senator Martin: Beyond the respiratory dangers, we have heard from other witnesses about the psychological and other effects of having to be displaced, facing these dangers. Considering your statements about mental and emotional impacts of wildfire smoke, what evidence have you found for longer-term health problems and new trends in health care use caused by more frequent and severe wildfire events.
Ms. Butson: I can start and then I will pass to Dr. Camp. For starters, we know that COPD is one of the leading causes of hospitalization, actually next to childbirth, and that’s outside of wildfire smoke season. The hospitalization and the burden related to respiratory disease are quite great, and there are estimates that the use of our services double during those wildfire times. The other piece that we sometimes don’t think about or we take for granted is for individuals with lung disease. The thing that they might be thinking about, particularly if they are in an area that is close to wildfire smoke, is will they continue to have access to their oxygen if they need to be evacuated? Do they have the medications that they need? There is a whole host of other stresses and anxiety for those who are living with lung disease.
Dr. Camp, I’ll pass to you for additional comments.
Ms. Camp: The work that I have been doing involves quite a few communities in the north and North-Central B.C., which have been evacuated, and sometimes they get evacuated multiple times in one season. There are tradeoffs in stress. Of course there is the stress of the wildfire, but leaving your community and going into town has huge stresses as well. Some people have never left their community or they go to a community and they experience gaps in care or racism by the hosts. You’ll start to hear more communities say “We don’t want to evacuate,” because it is a tradeoff. We actually experience worse harms by evacuating than staying put. It is a challenge that they are trying to balance.
Senator Martin: Your work with First Nations in North-Central B.C. to address respiratory health inequities, you have written, “ . . . our methodology ensures that the benefits to the communities are realized during the study period.” You also mentioned that there is action that they themselves are taking in relation to these fire events. So I’m curious, which community-based mitigation tools and health interventions have proven most effective in practice? What policy improvements would you recommend to better protect rural populations in the future?
Ms. Camp: Thank you for the question. I think proof is always challenging when working with communities. I will just pass on their reflections to me. Certainly, the installation of the air-quality monitors have been a big part of communication and planning improvements. They haven’t had those in the past so they were completely out of the loop. Now they are able to make evacuation decisions on their most vulnerable populations. Also, some of our planning around how to ensure consistency of health care services when they are evacuated doesn’t really release the stress of evacuation, but at least when they go to a new evacuation site the services can follow them. The research is often qualitative in nature, but the impacts are expressed in the moment. It is an impact statement instead of proof per se.
Senator McBean: Thank you both.
I was interested in a lot of things, obviously, that you have been saying, but Dr. Camp, when you were mentioning the air quality sensors — and you were just referencing this also — I was wondering how local do these need to be for them to feel relevant to a community.
We all went through the pandemic, and everyone had a lot of fatigue about the information that was coming at them, even for wearing a mask and all the different things we were supposed to do. What do you think is the best way that federal agencies could be collaborating with Indigenous health authorities to design culturally and maybe even community-informed wildfire health responses?
Ms. Camp: I can only speak for the communities that I am working with, but the information is in their hands. The sensors go up — purpleair.com. You can go and have a look. These are publicly available, citizens-science sensors that can go right to the community, literally on their health office and sometimes in a couple of spots in the one community. They have access to that data anytime they want.
We also package it as a bulletin, something that they can put on their Facebook page that they can distribute it in their community as they see fit. Sometimes it becomes something for the whole community to be able to see. Sometimes they keep it more internally and use it for different kinds of decisions. That is their decision of how to use it.
That is new for them. They haven’t had a sensor. Maybe there are three in the North altogether and they haven’t had any in their community. Now they can go and see that the smoke is bad and the sensor indicates it, and let’s start thinking about our Elders, children or making decisions about who will work outside today.
Senator McBean: In your experience, have you found that when these sensors become more local and they are not coming from Edmonton, Winnipeg or — heaven forbid — Toronto — you might get that I’m from Toronto — there is a better response from the community to make the challenging decisions that are uncomfortable for them?
Ms. Camp: I think so, because it is frustrating to get a sensor that says your air quality is great and you look outdoors and it is hazy, and you think, “This isn’t relevant to me.” If you try to put things in place around evacuation, you can get pushback because people are looking at a sensor that is far away and saying, “No, your air quality is fine; I don’t know what you are doing.”
Or even a local industry working in their area that wants to do a burn of their garbage, and they go ahead and do it. I know it is not about wildfires, but just about air quality. First Nation communities have a little bit more of a say about what happens in their community.
Having it local and under their control means that they can make decisions and they are not reliant on a far away government sensor. Even 50 kilometres away can be too far.
Senator McBean: That was it. What are you going to put on the record for me? Dr. Camp or Ms. Butson, do you want to talk about what a potential solution from the federal government for maybe supplying more sensors might be?
Ms. Butson: Dr. Camp, did you want to add to that?
Ms. Camp: The First Nations Health Authority in B.C. does have a program for supplying sensors to communities. I know that’s a unique health authority in Canada. I think working with any sort of environmental agency that has connections with First Nations communities, just having those can be an enormous first step. They are a couple hundred dollars apiece. These are not expensive.
Senator Robinson: Ms. Butson, I was taken with your Abacus Data from 2023. I think you said 64% of people recognized a negative impact from climate change, and 73% of people with lung diseases the same.
My experience, my family have a genetic predisposition to pulmonary fibrosis. My father was on an oxygen concentrator, and when Hurricane Fiona came in, we knew there was going to be a power outage for multiple days. He lived on the fifth floor of a building, so if the power went out, how were we getting him out of the building? Then where do we take him to run his oxygen concentrator?
All of that to say I know we were copied information about a study that had been recently published in the JAMA Network Open. The study focused on California between July and December of 2020, the state’s worst wildfire season on record up to that date. They recorded just under 87,000 emergency room visits and found that exposure to wildfires — specifically PM2.5 levels — were related to significant increase in mental health emergency room visits including for minority groups, ethnic groups and women. I read that and I thought, “Wow, I can identify with that helplessness feeling.”
I have got three questions for you. In Canada, are health care professionals and systems prepared for the possible increase in demand for mental health-related emergency services during wildfire events? How should these professionals and systems in Canada prepare for this possible increase? How should the federal, provincial or territorial governments support them?
Ms. Butson: You are absolutely right. It is a feeling of helplessness, and people with lung disease know all too well how scary it is when they can’t breathe. The challenging thing about wildfires is it is potentially something outside of their control. They can control a lot of the other elements around it.
There is a burden on our health care system. I don’t know that our health care system is fully equipped for respiratory disease as it is, add to it wildfire smoke. When we do think about our most vulnerable populations, in particular young people, it is not even just the health care systems, but even the childcare school settings. What are some of the standardized approaches and guidance that could be keeping our most vulnerable safe? There are gaps even in that area.
Another key gap from a health care perspective is ensuring that our individuals with lung disease are supported to ensure that their respiratory disease is as managed as it can be before wildfires even come. That speaks to systemic issues like access to a doctor in the first place, access to respiratory therapists, access to spirometry to get your diagnosis of respiratory disease in the first place. Then ensuring that they have the ability to follow an action plan and keep their medications up to date. Charities fill a lot of those gaps through support groups and health lines, because we know that many people are falling through the cracks.
Ms. Camp: Yes. Are health care professionals prepared? No, I don’t think the surge in health care utilization is always that apparent. People think that it is just going to happen in the moment, but oftentimes, even after the smoke event has lessened, the health care surge can be a few weeks after that.
Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada working with the health care professional associations to better educate us all about what to expect in terms of health care planning that when an event like this happens, you should expect to see an increase in these many emergency room visits, these many cardiovascular events, this increase in mental health issues; almost like a disaster response going in the short term, but recognizing that we need to think about it even weeks and months after the event has ended.
Senator Robinson: I’ll just put my question on the record.
The Deputy Chair: Do you want to go on second round?
Senator Robinson: Sure.
The Deputy Chair: Colleagues, we’ll now move to second round. Once again, you have five minutes for your question and that includes the answers.
Senator Martin: I want to actually just return to Professor Camp, because I was near the end of my time, and you were just getting to the question of which community-based mitigation tools and health interventions have proven most effective in practice? You mentioned the sensors, the coordinated health support that needs to be there, but I would love to give you more time to give other examples.
Ms. Camp: Other examples are directly supporting communities with their emergency response plans. There’s often a lot of turnover in First Nation community leadership, and some of these communities in B.C. are very small. There might only be a couple of hundred people, and yet the council has maybe five or ten portfolios that they have to handle each.
A lot of them don’t have emergency response plans available to them. If it’s a new person, every year, they do need some direct support to be able to navigate how to have those in place, and how to be able to rely on them in the event of a wildfire.
Organizations like the Carrier Sekani Family Services support the communities that they serve, but many communities don’t have a partner or health care society like that. Those kinds of supports available to communities I think is helpful.
The sensors I’ve mentioned, other kinds of planning, of course, ensuring that they’re a part of all the communication, all of the planning in the region, that they have a seat on any regional district board that is related to any kind of wildfire smoke mitigation or intervention.
Senator Martin: Regarding the First Nations Health Authority, how important is their role? Do these First Nations health authorities exist in every province? I’m from B.C. as well, so I would love to hear about the importance of such an authority.
Ms. Camp: It’s important because they have an established relationship with every individual nation. There’s some kind of link with the First Nation in B.C. and the First Nation Health Authority to a greater or lesser degree. It’s the one organization that can be a conduit, I think, for support and information.
But in the absence of that, it might be working directly with the health authorities in the province or with Indigenous Services Canada. I do think that the First Nations Health Authority in B.C. does allow a fairly streamlined conduit of support.
Senator Martin: Thank you.
Senator Muggli: I wanted to ask a question about care of evacuees, knowing that many would be coming from exposure to smoke. Are there recommendations you have in terms of what it could look like when evacuees arrive at an evacuation centre in terms of lung care or a lung assessment? Who would be the right person to do that kind of assessment? What would typical interventions look like for people who might have an assessed degree of problematic exposure?
Ms. Camp: I can speak about the B.C. experience. If there’s an evacuation order, your community typically works with the provincial government to get everybody on a bus and get to the site where they’re registered. That registration allows a community member to access a number of different services including meal vouchers and things like that.
Sometimes, the evacuated site could have worse air quality than where they came from, but it might be the place with the most accommodation, so these are sometimes challenging, and they can go to a hotel that is not great. The HVAC system might not be great. It’s frustrating for communities when they feel like they’ve gone from a bad situation to a worse situation.
With respect to health care, there isn’t really anything organized. If they’re not feeling well, they would access acute care services in that community. That’s going right to a hospital. Their local doctors would not follow them necessarily.
Senator Muggli: What kind of care provider would be best to do that initial smoke exposure assessment?
Ms. Camp: It’s a good question. Community health services nursing has the capacity to be able to look at the patient holistically and see beyond respiratory, but it’s probably not something that’s on their radar in terms of asking those kinds of questions. When they arrive, they don’t automatically have access to any health services at all. It would be driven by the evacuee to go to emergency, probably.
Senator Muggli: Ms. Butson, recommendations?
Ms. Butson: That’s where it’s interesting to hear what Dr. Camp said. We certainly suggest individuals connect with a respiratory therapist, but we know that this is a gap. It is often hard to actually get in front of a respiratory therapist.
Senator Muggli: We can barely find them for acute care interventions. At least have primary care providers that can do a basic initial assessment, but I’m wondering does there need to be more education of primary health providers around doing this kind of assessment?
Ms. Butson: Again, I think our role as a charity and a patient-focused organization is to help ensure that people have access to their action plan. If they have a health care provider, when we’re getting into wildfire season, reminding people, where possible, to have or start conversations around how they’re doing with their action plan, and what some ideas could be.
If they find themselves in a wildfire situation, to bring that as part of a package with your medications, where possible.
Senator Muggli: Thank you.
Senator McBean: You mentioned in one of your original comments your three recommendations, and one of them was about indoor air quality. Dr. Camp, you also referred to how people sometimes go to hotels and find themselves with poor air conditioners, which is not an air filter.
I’ve experienced being in a poor air quality environment in a heat wave in a community that doesn’t normally have heat waves. There’s no air conditioning. Now you’re in a home or an apartment that is 40 degrees, and you’re trying to keep the windows closed.
What role could federal investment play in cleaner indoor air, like HEPA filtration programs for schools and community centres, places that will be used for respite? What role do you think the federal investment could play in mitigating the health effects of wildfire smoke?
Ms. Butson: Those would be excellent starts. Often when we’re escaping wildfire smoke, we close our windows and seal ourselves indoors, which is certainly a recommendation, but we want to ensure that the air that we’re then breathing inside is as clean as it can be. Unfortunately, we know that for our most vulnerable populations, sometimes they don’t have control over what the air is like inside of that space, whether it is air conditioning or access to an air purifier or an air quality monitor.
It can start with supports for HEPA filtration, access to N95 masks, which can be challenging for people to come across. We know that there are some low-cost, potential options for people that can help them do these things, but, it is an equity issue that could be remedied with some support as well as education.
Senator McBean: Don’t be afraid to put things on the record if you think the federal government should be making respite centres in every community where people can be relocated to. The federal government could be investing in libraries, malls or community centres to make that better.
I’ll let you come back to that in a second, and it might be here. You mentioned that the use of lung association services double during wildfire incidents. What are lung association services during a wildfire incident?
Ms. Butson: The double was health care service utilization in general, connected to asthma and COPD. But charities often do fill the gaps as part of their services. A number of the things that the Canadian Lung Association does, of course, is health education awareness-raising. Actually for the past two years, we’ve teamed up with the American Lung Association to further amplify those efforts. We also offer a lung health line, where individuals can call and speak to someone about their lung health, as well as support groups, and online learning platforms where people can go and learn about indoor and outdoor air quality. We really play that kind of education and disease-management role.
Senator McBean: Could you provide us with some examples of calls that you get to that helpline during wildfire incidents?
Ms. Butson: Some of the main calls that we get are really around what people can do. How can they keep themselves safe inside of home? We often get calls from vulnerable populations where again, the questions are about “How do I convince my landlord or my surroundings to ensure that my indoor air quality is safer?” And then navigation to services, “How do I speak to someone about getting a diagnosis or getting help during a time of wildfire?” Those are some of the types of calls we get.
Senator Robinson: I’m going to build on Senator McBean’s questions. I think Senator McBean, you had mentioned something about hydro bill inserts? Was that you or Senator Muggli? Senator Muggli? Sorry. You had mentioned something about getting information out. This committee had a presentation from some insurance people in regard to wildfires, and they were giving us some of the literature that they get out proactively so people can make their properties more fire smart. I’m suspecting you do something like this, and I just wanted to give you an opportunity to speak about it because as you’ve said, in response to Senator McBean’s question, about hearing from people asking, “How can I keep myself safe?” or “How can I ensure my air quality is safe?” I’m just wondering if you do anything. Senator Muggli was talking about when people show up in duress — maybe having been evacuated — is there a package of information that you put out to people in particular with COPD and asthma and people on your radar as having lung disease? Is there something you give them to kind of say, “These are the things you do in preparation for wildfire season, and these are the things you should have with you”? Is there anything like that that your association puts out now?
Ms. Butson: Right now, because we really focus at that high‑level national perspective, we don’t tend to give it out in the community, although I know that many local, more provincially focused associations may do that, or may support people in finding air-quality monitors, for example.
One of the things that we do as we gear up to wildfire season is things like host webinars, try to do media releases, really raise it to people’s attention. What I will say is that one of the blessings in disguise of 2023 is that we’ve been trying to get people to pay attention to the air quality health index for a very long time. In 2023, it became sort of the marker where there seems to be a receptivity among the general population. Even from the polling, you can see that people are far more aware of this as an issue that’s impacting their lung health than ever before.
So once they learn about these tools, they’re eager to be able to use them.
Senator Robinson: Dr. Camp, did you have anything you wanted to add to that?
Ms. Camp: I think also building off Senator McBean’s questions, a lot of our efforts have been at the level of the individual: for individuals to look at the air quality, and to take steps such as having a home air filter and wearing a mask. I think that there is an enormous opportunity, especially in remote and rural areas, to develop clean air spaces because we’re providing people with these air quality indexes and we’re telling them to find cleaner air. There is no mall, there’s no library, there might be a community hall, but we need to be able to support communities to not just have the education about what to do, but also about the next action. So if the air quality is bad, and you can’t really create a clean air space in your home, then where can you go? That means investing in large air cleaners, not the little ones that could only do a 10-by-10 room, but really thinking about the kind of spaces that are in communities, and how we can make those safe, so at least people can have a few hours, anyway, of cleaner air. Maybe they can’t stay there the whole time, but that’s a community decision. Those kinds of investments like what was suggested, I think, are places that no one has really gone yet. They’ve been more focused on what can the individual do?
Senator Robinson: I’m hearing, I think, an analogy. I’m familiar with warming centres in winter when we lose electricity, so what I’m hearing you suggest are clean air centres that would allow people to go and charge their phone and breathe clean air for a while. I grew up in a community with fewer than 100 people, so I get what it means. That 10-by-10 room might be really useful in a small community, because the populations are so small.
Ms. Camp: Also the cooling centres, so the comment about the extreme heat and the heat dome, sometimes the cooling centre and the clean air centre might be need to be developed in combination because they’re both happening at the same time.
Senator Robinson: One last question if we have time, for both of you, because, as Senator McBean has said, we want to get answers and ideas on the record, because that’s what can inform our report, so I want you to be creative and reach far, because that gives us licence to do the same.
In your opinion, what further resources and funding are needed to help protect Canadians and their families from the harmful impacts of wildfire smoke and particle pollution? Give us your moon shot on that. Within reason.
Ms. Butson: I’ll start with a close moon shot, but I think we’re starting to see investments in research, and Dr. Camp’s work is evidence of the importance of that, so I think investments in research. We’ve talked about that national coordinated system in terms of alerts and monitoring, and that we need better monitoring, better alert systems and supports for people who may not be able to afford the necessary accommodations to protect themselves best. These would be starting places. I’ll pass to Dr. Camp.
Ms. Camp: Invest in research, we’re not keeping up. This is a problem that has escalated in the last five years. It’s gone from 0 to 1,000 in many of these communities. So more knowledge about the long-term impacts is really important.
I think there’s becoming more realization about the need to shelter at home, that evacuations are often too disruptive, so if we can have infrastructure in place so that communities can have safe spaces to go. I’m not talking about wildfire-threatened communities, but just thinking about the smoke. A larger deploy of sensors, and that may mean infrastructure and being able to have internet in remote and rural areas as well, because that’s how those sensors talk to one another. And for those that do have to be evacuated, more coordinated support in the community, recognizing the comments that were made today, these have to be treated almost like Red Cross flooding. People need to have holistic care beyond just getting them into a room, and maybe that’s a team of people that go to the evacuees and are able to assess them across a number of different health outcomes, such as what we talked about today, respiratory, mental health, et cetera, with a special focus on those vulnerable populations.
The Deputy Chair: I would thank both of you for your participation today. Your testimony and insight are very much appreciated. I also want to thank you for all the work you’re doing, Dr. Camp, specifically with the Indigenous communities to help them with the wildfire situations.
On our second panel, we’ll be hearing from Dr. Paul Hessburg. Dr. Hessburg has been a professor at the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences at the University of Washington and a former senior research ecologist with the USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station.
On behalf of the members of the committee, thank you for being here today. We’ll now hear your opening remarks to be followed by the questions from senators. I will signal when your five minutes is up by raising one hand when you have one minute left, and I’ll raise both hands when it’s a hard stop. Dr. Hessburg, the floor is yours, welcome.
Paul Hessburg, Professor, School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, University of Washington, as an individual: Thank you very much. It’s a privilege to be with you this evening. I’ve sent slides along, and I believe the clerk has had the opportunity to distribute them. If the members so choose, during my opening comments, these will be visuals that strongly support the words that I’ll provide. I believe that pictures are worth a thousand words, and these are indeed.
I’ve been studying North American ecosystems for about 50 years, and one of the things that we found as we cross ecosystems is that forest ecosystems today look nothing like those of even 100 years ago. For about 10,000 years, our Indigenous People burned, along with the lightning ignitions, vast territories, and it really changed the complexion of forests.
We trapped beavers out, tens of millions of beavers, that had created wetlands that were breaks on fire flow on the landscape. We favoured conifer forests over broadleaf forests, because conifers were typically the money tree species, and many non‑forest areas — wet and dry meadows, shrublands, open savannahs and prairies — were allowed to regrow into forest, but they were vast across the Canadian landscape once upon a time.
One of the reasons why they did that is closed canopy forests were reduced food and resource productions in forest understories, and in the Prairies that was a cultural burning focus. The trapping out of millions of beavers removed vast networks of wetlands in broad riparian zones, and these areas were really important to stopping the flow of fires over space and time.
If you have those slides handy, look at slide number 4, and you’ll see that fire exclusion over the last 100 years. These are seasonally dry forests; basically forest colonized the drier aspects and the ridges providing for continuous growth of forest instead of very open conditions and closed conditions.
You can see in the fifth slide that these frequent fires kept the forest canopy conditions open in the drier forests, and that was a stabilizing influence.
You can see in the next slide that lacking that influence, trees seeded in, regenerated and completed a carpeted forest and much deadwood. That has allowed flames from the deadwood to reach into the canopies of trees. Historically, fires wouldn’t have occurred in this way.
In the seventh slide, you can see a patchwork of forest conditions. These are in the moist forests that burned every 20 to 50 years. You can see this patchwork is very different than the current condition where you see a dense carpet of trees and bark beetles killing trees in the absence of fire. These are large, lodgepole and Douglas-fir forests.
Finally, in the upper cold forests, where you see lodgepole pine, jack pine, subalpine fir, balsam fir, these kinds of species and montane spruces, these are 120-degree panoramas. There is much-burned area, and the grey tones are the hardwood forests.
In the last slide, I want to summarize. There are key elements in the native landscape that regulated the flow of fire. We have lost many of these elements, and they are critical to restoring resilience. There used to be a lot of non-forest. We have reconstructed many provinces, and what we see was the landscape was 25 to 70% non-forest depending upon the climate, the geography and the fire regimes.
These non-forests were these burned areas, sparsely treed savannahs, wet-and-dry meadows, wetlands, prairies and the like, and all the factors limited the future flow of fire on that landscape.
It makes a lot of sense. It is a simple physics problem. These non-forest elements are low-energy fuel conditions. They break, and they govern the flow of intense fire across the landscape. The non-forest, the hardwood and the wetland elements actually allow the rest of the forest to deforest.
We had this quiescent period in the climate and were able to put most of the fires out. Now that governor is off, the climate is warming, it is hotter, drier and winters are shorter. There is less snowpack and these trends will continue.
The punchline is, with climate change, these conditions will intensify with less snowpack, more fires, bigger fires, hotter fires. The question is: Can we restore resilience? We can. We can bring back these elements and put the governors back into the landscape that historically regulated the flow of fire.
That ends my prepared comments, and I would be happy to entertain questions if that is good timing.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you, Dr. Hessburg, for your opening statements. Colleagues, being aware of the time available to us, I suggest first round is five minutes, including question and answer.
Senator Muggli: Thank you for being with us this evening. We really appreciate it. I’m from Saskatchewan. We have had a lot of wildfires over the last few years, especially in our northern parts with a lot of evacuations.
I’m just curious if you could talk a little bit more about prescribed burns. I know that historically they may have worked well, but do we have a different scenario happening now in our forests where prescribed burns are maybe less effective? I would just like to hear a little bit more about your thoughts on the utility of prescribed burns in the current context of global warming.
Mr. Hessburg: They are incredibly effective, but the conditions under which you conduct those prescribed burns are really important to know as a starting point.
Just for background, I have been working with my Canadian colleagues for decades. Most years, I’m in the Arctic paddling in the northern territories, watching caribou herds and so forth. I’m familiar with the northern territories, from Hudson Bay and all the way to Alaska.
What we are seeing is a tremendous change at double or triple the rate in the northern territories. This climate is big and it’s a different deal that we’re seeing right now. So it is accelerating and causing conditions in the North that are unparalleled in any history that we are aware of.
Further to the south, in the forested countries, basically the sub-boreal forest, we are seeing something that actually can be manipulated with forest management and prescribed burning, but the initial conditions really matter. If you are in the interior Douglas-fir forest, the ponderosa pine forests, the Douglas-fir pine forest, we have tools to be able to deal with those forest conditions. But we have to change the way we think about our forest management to do that. Many conditions, if we prescribe burn without doing an initial forest treatment, we can’t control the prescribed burn. There is an epidemic of trees, and there is too much deadwood on the ground.
In many areas, there are tens to hundreds times more trees there than even 100 years ago. That is an epidemic of trees. When you take fire out of the woods, you literally create uncontrolled regeneration conditions. Trees fall apart, wood is on the ground, so you have got the discontinuity of deadwood all the way into the forest canopy.
The initial conditions matter, but the truth of the matter is prescribed burning is a very effective tool. Considering the comments by the two experts on the previous panel, there is a strong interplay between doing the right work in the woods and managing the smoke down.
Senator Muggli: Do you have a forest fire forecasting system? If you do, what does that look like? If you don’t, what could that look like?
Mr. Hessburg: We do. It is better than an Ouija board. Europe has one as well, and they are getting better every single year. Seventy per cent of the earth is covered in water and the ocean currents, water temperature, sea level, pressure and temperature can change fairly quickly. The predictions are always about 60 to 65% accurate, and we are surprised fairly often.
We do fire weather forecasts. We give an outlook in the United States every year on a monthly basis. This year we nailed it pretty well. But sometimes we’ll see changes in the ocean currents which deliver cooler water or warmer water, and then obviously that affects the climate inland. If your climate is continental and not mostly driven by the sea surface, pressure-driven temperature, then you will have a more reliable forecast. Where you have a strong marine influence, that’s where you start getting into conditions that are sometimes difficult to predict or are changeable.
Senator Muggli: What are the elements of that forecasting system?
Mr. Hessburg: The elements are tracing sea-level temperature and pressure throughout the Atlantic, the Pacific, the North Sea and, the Bering Sea. There are indicators that are being calculated in real time to give the best up-to-date forecast for how we expect these temperature and pressure signals in the ocean and in the atmosphere to influence climate inland. That’s about as good as it gets. What is really changing is the real-time nature. That is improving more all the time.
Senator Robinson: Thank you. Hello, Mr. Hessburg. I represent Prince Edward Island, which is not in the Arctic, but you might know about it. We’re just a little northeast of Maine, and we are Canada’s smallest province. We probably have the smallest inventory of forested land in the country. That’s a pretty safe assumption to make.
When we saw Hurricane Fiona barrel through our region in the fall of 2022, we saw roughly about 10% of our forested area in the province impacted. I’m a woodlot owner and manager, and we lost tens of thousands of trees without even thinking about it. We lost buildings, we lost everything else.
You have talked about deadwood. So I live in fear. This summer, we’re coming off the driest summer on record in our region, as a lot of people are. I looked at the list of 2023, and there were four provinces and one territory that had over a million hectares burned. Then in 2023, the numbers that we saw in Saskatchewan, Manitoba were huge.
When I look at what a wildfire in Prince Edward Island would do, there is a lot of concern there. Because of Hurricane Fiona — I’m getting there — we have a massive amount of deadwood. What would your recommendations be for us to prepare for another dry season next year? How do we best deal with the deadwood issue? It is a tinderbox that is just waiting to go up in smoke. It would be devastating. Do you have any suggestions?
Mr. Hessburg: I love your mighty island, but it is very concerning. Deadwood on the ground cures each year a little bit more, and so the fuels that we’re really concerned about are those that are as big as my wrist and smaller. From some little twigs all the way up to wrist-sized fuels, those are the kindling fuels, just like your fireplace. If you have lots of those fuels and they are available to burn, finger-sized stuff takes an hour to 10 hours to dry. A little bit bigger and it will take 10 to 100 hours to dry. The stuff bigger than my wrist is up to a thousand hours to dry, but we’re getting those drying temperatures.
One of the key things is to be able to start treating those kindling fuels that are absolutely essential to start the large logs. If the kindling fuels are treated, it is very difficult to ignite the large logs. Number one, that’s the benefit of prescribed burning. If you have conditions where managers can prescribe burn the kindling fuels, then do it. This is basically not in the shank of the fire season.
If you can’t prescribe burn because you can’t control them, then it will be incredibly important to get as many of those fuels yarded out of the woods as you possibly can and then do the prescribed burn. Again, the initial conditions really matter for the prescribed burners to be able to do successful work.
The other thing that is nice about that is the more deadwood you get out of the woods, the less smoke emissions you get, so you capture that tradeoff value.
Senator Robinson: Thank you.
Senator Martin: Thank you so much for your research and for your testimony today. As you spoke, I wrote down, “It is simple physics; we can restore resilience.” Just your deck alone has good suggestions of where we need to go with this, but I just wanted to ask you, in addition to what you have said, how do we restore resilience? What are the most critical things we need to do? What should government do? With specific governance or collaboration mechanisms, what is important for Canada to rapidly implement the necessary landscape scale adaptation treatments that your research describes? I hope that governments are reading and looking at the solution to what we’re seeing today with wildfires.
Mr. Hessburg: They are, but they are not focused on the long look, typically, as you well understand. The short-term conditions and investments are often given a lot more advantage financially and otherwise.
We have about 20 to 25 years to get significant work done, and then the fires that have already burned the landscape will be running the table. What I mean by that is once you have burned areas and you get grasses and shrubs and herbs in those very large, severe burn patches, they cure out earlier and stay cured and available to burn longer. If you get ignitions — about 40% of your ignitions in Canada are human-caused and it is much worse in the United States, more than double that — those areas that are next to settlements, roads, trails, those kinds of things are very prone to get re-burned. Then large areas will re-burn, and it is difficult for forests to come back after a re-burn. There are just no trees available to seed those areas in, and many have not kept up on their seed stock and their seedling planting material. It becomes a huge regeneration program.
What it means is fairly significantly investing in a bioeconomy. As the excellent panel before me spoke, we want to have a low-smoke solution on our horizon, and the only way to do that is to decrease the footprint of wildfire smoke. The simple cartoon between a prescribed fire and a wildfire is you have weeks or months of smouldering combustion, and all those big logs smoulder until the season-ending event, and that’s where the worst, most harmful soot comes from.
If you do a prescribed fire, you are burning that kindling and not the big wood, so the many tonnes that might be down there are unavailable to burn; doing things like thinning the forest at a significant scale and creating patterns of open-canopy conditions on the dry slopes and the ridge tops; a more complex forest in the valley bottoms and the north-facing aspects. That interrupts the flow of fire on that landscape, and then there is no one-and-done. You actually have to continue to do that kind of maintenance work.
In a word, everything I learned in forestry school I have had to relearn because the period of time when we had a quiescent climate is over, and that means we have to do the things that actually re-govern the flow of fire, that downplays severe fire behaviour. Does that make sense?
Senator Martin: Yes. What you are saying is we know what we need to do but right now we’re just reacting to the situations and not doing the long-term planning. You said we have 20 to 25 years to get this right?
Mr. Hessburg: We have 20 to 25 years before we start seeing significant burned areas re-burning and making it more difficult for our forests to return. A great number of very large and severe fires have killed trees. In the first 10 to 20 years, those dead trees fall down. Those areas are open, and now you have a lot of deadwood on the ground. If there is a fire during that period, the second fire is typically worse than the first fire.
Dealing with the post-fire environment as well as the green tree environment is really important. In most of our simulation modelling, we’re seeing that treating landscapes at the 35 to 45% level rebuilds the governors back on those landscapes. It allows the rest of the forest to be forest going forward.
These wetland elements, bringing beavers back into the wetlands, restoring broad wetlands, restoring aspen, birch, maple forests that are common throughout the provinces, those were incredibly important, and after a fire, they immediately returned, allowing generations of those trees. That’s a wet blanket on the flow of fire. Those are very moist environments, and so those are obstacles to the future flow of fire.
Literally restoring the non-forest elements is part of the secret sauce of rebuilding resilient forest landscape. That’s what we took out of the woods.
Senator Martin: Your research is very critical at this time, and I hope you will look at that for our report. Thank you so much, professor.
Mr. Hessburg: Absolutely.
Senator Sorensen: Thank you very much, Dr. Hessburg, and much respect for your expertise and the years you have spent in this area. My name is Karen Sorensen. I am a senator for Alberta and a resident of Banff National Park. As a resident of Banff National Park, I have seen firsthand the great value of fire risk management through Parks Canada’s restoration of Indigenous‑led cultural burning practices.
In a recent article where you were quoted, some critics warn that active fire management might actually set the stage for more frequent or severe wildfires, arguing that it is being oversold and has limited effectiveness under current conditions. Having witnessed, of course, the benefits that you are talking about myself, I find this skepticism really concerning.
My question is: How do you respond to critics who question the value of active fire management? We hear them. What impact do these debates have on the broader effects to restore forest health? Secondly, how do you address concerns that active management could become a pretext for so-called salvage logging, which is suggesting a cash grab for industry rather than a genuine ecological strategy?
Mr. Hessburg: Those are great questions, and there are several of them.
The first one is that there is a false narrative out there among conservation groups; and in fact, a number of conservation groups are actually the problem right now. The problem is a false equivalence being shown between the narratives that they are providing and the solid strength of evidence that is in the published science. The Ecological Society of America asked me, my laboratory and several others, to write definitive reviews of all the North American literature on whether or not the tools work, and we published three reviews in high-standing journals at the request of the Ecological Society of America. The short version is that the forests have changed immensely. Some of the conservation organizations are willing to say that’s not true. The definitive evidence says, using a strength of evidence approach, is that they have changed incredibly so. These are the 40 best research laboratories in the field in North America.
Second thing is that treatments work, and we address 10 of the false narratives. I would be happy to share with you all those reviews. The third review basically says that knowing these things together, there is a strong case for intentional management to create the shift that is needed.
The problem is that in the media this false equivalence of the narratives is not being directly addressed. So, increasingly, we’re called on to actually write papers to clear the evidence, and I work with attorneys throughout Western North America to help them clearly understand the lawsuits that impede the ongoing caseload.
We have also researched the post-fire environment, and post‑fire restoration treatments are clearly different than economic salvage logging. Post-fire restoration treatments deal with the trees that accreted during fire exclusion. Salvage logging is just going and getting the most economically available fibre, and there are reasons to do that sometimes. But with post‑fire restoration, that is not the intent, and we have published five papers on this topic from a recent grant.
Senator Sorensen: Thank you very much. It was very difficult to hear the criticism of Parks Canada through the Jasper fire because, again, living where I do, they were very proactive and probably one of the most fire-ready communities in the country, but that fire was that fire.
Mr. Hessburg: As far as I am concerned — I know Rick Kubian really well and Jane Park really well, and they are, internationally, leaders in what they are doing with proactive burning. The answer truly is, in those cold forests, to do the proactive burning, and Mr. Kubian started that 25 years ago, and Ms. Park is continuing that good work in the parks with incredible results.
I think an awful lot of it is this mis-, disinformation campaign that is, essentially, pitted against doing active management. The problem is that they want to stop active management.
Senator Sorensen: I see Ms. Park regularly. I’ll let her know we were chatting.
Mr. Hessburg: Tell her I’m a fan.
Senator Sorensen: Yes, I’m a fan too.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you. Colleagues, before we go to second round, I’m going to exercise my prerogative to ask a question.
Dr. Hessburg, there are two things that you said that stuck with me. One is that everything you learned in forestry school or university you had to relearn. And then you talked about the fact that we have got to change the way we approach forest management with a view to the long term.
I’m curious. When you use the example of beavers. A lot of logging companies would kill a beaver on sight to avoid, in the past, the spread of water areas. You say government doesn’t seem to have the long-term vision yet, but are some of the logging companies starting to get what you are talking about, the need for active management?
Mr. Hessburg: They are. Not all of them. It is a great question, senator. I really appreciate that. I have been working with the chief forester for West Fraser for a number of years, and I have travelled throughout the provinces giving talks with him to other majors within Canada and other multinationals. His name is Jeff Mycock, and he is a senior vice-president for West Fraser across many woodlands. They very much understand that, and he has got a direct conduit to the board that allows him to work on changing those conditions.
There are some majors that are simply not doing the work at all and are not receptive because they learned that if an area can grow forest, it should. There has been a shifting baseline problem among generations. For five generations, six generations, and then over the last 50 years of excluding fire, believed that what is in front of them is natural and that which should be pursued. But the fact of the matter is it is not. I provided those photographs to be able to show just in the wink of an eye how fast these landscapes have changed and how quickly forests regrow. So we literally don’t understand where we come from and then how those pieces fit together to create a resilient landscape, one that will continually need to be provident for us in the long term.
I learned that if there is an area that can grow trees, I should plant them, so I planted trees. I learned that I could put habitats in a paddock and they would stay there, but I did that during a quiescent period of the climate in the 1970s. What I have learned now is that landscape of ideas is no longer intact. These forests are dynamic, and if you put caribou habitat and grizzly bear habitat in a paddock, you do not have a way to deliver on that land management allocation and deliver grizzlies and caribou, for example.
There are management systems for dynamics, and as foresters, we should pursue them. And I am learning them and helping to propagate them throughout forests of Western North America. We need to now manage for dynamics, and that means we have to manage forests with habitats in mind and those elements as well. In the United States, that green revolution happened several decades ago, and I believe it is kick-starting in Canada, but it is quite a bit lagged by comparison.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you for that. The only other quick comment I will make is when you mentioned looking at wrist size and smaller as far as the kindling wood, we’ll all be walking through any woodlots that we’re on, saying, “Oh, gotta remove that one, that one, that one.” Thank you for that.
Mr. Hessburg: Yes. Just the short of it, it’s the fireplace problem, right?
The Deputy Chair: Yes.
Mr. Hessburg: You want to put the Yule log on, but that bad boy is not going to burn unless you roll up newspapers and you have got twigs and sticks and bigger wood elements that are essentially going to create enough heat to kindle that big log. That is the problem with forest fuels. If you take care of the kindling fuels, you can allow the larger logs to actually decay and melt over time, and then come back with, in the right kind of forest types, the prescribed burning that’s helpful.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you, colleagues, for indulging me.
Senator Muggli: With climate change, we’re also seeing extreme winter weather, which we have heard has a significant negative impact on forests causing significant blowdown. Do you have insight into how this blowdown can impact forest fire weather and whether we should be considering blowdown areas in our fire planning and modelling or predictive modelling? My second question will be if you have other methods of thinning forests that you would like to share with us.
Mr. Hessburg: Yes. It is a great question, again, multipart. The blowdown events are really important, because dead and downed trees become fuel and they become cured. When you open up forest canopies, you change the climate of the site. Surface winds can now come in and create more drying. When you have a closed-canopy forest, surface winds stay aloft, above the canopy, so you are going to get different fuel-curing conditions. So in those blowdown events, it makes sense to (a) keep any live trees that remain and stand up, especially those bigger individuals that are more robust, and (b) for the trees that have come down fairly quickly, remove them and remove them as whole trees so that the treetops come out with the tree. For that to be merchantable material, you need to do that in the first year, year and a half. After that, it starts to check and crack, and it is much less valuable to major operators. We have operators in the United States that can live on those trees and not green trees if, in fact, they can get to them fairly quickly, within that first year, year and a half, and then follow up with a burn after that to deal with those kindling fuels.
In forest types where you cannot thin with fire, then that patchwork that I showed you in the photos, that’s what needs to be restored. You have areas where you have shrub and grass and herbaceous fuels separating areas that are young, middle age or older forest conditions. So the same methods don’t apply everywhere.
But the key thing is the trees on the ground, and these wind events are only going to increase in frequency and intensity. As the senator from Prince Edward Island suggested, the hurricanes that are affecting the eastern seaboard are increasing in frequency and intensity as well. So we have to have a big idea about how to get into this mode while we are reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The best years are in the rear-view mirror. I don’t mean that to be alarmist but to say, “Let’s get grounded in what the future actually looks like.”
Senator Muggli: Absolutely. Any other suggestions for thinning?
Mr. Hessburg: For thinning, yes. In the drier forest, in the interior Douglas-fir forest, in the ponderosa pine forest, in the moist, mixed conifer involving large lodgepole pine, Douglas-fir and sometimes montane spruces, you can thin those stands and do the burning.
For a long time, we pulled logs out of the woods. A whole tree yarding that takes the tops with the trees gives this incredible benefit to remove fuels, and those fuels can then be chipped for a bioeconomy, for biochar, for biofuels marine grade, JET A biofuels and those kinds of things, because now they’re concentrated, and they can be moved down the road in a chip van.
Break it out in your mind that in the colder forest, to create that patchwork that I showed you in pictures; in the drier forest, thin and burn. As you move across the provinces, you increasingly have that sub-boreal and boreal zone sweeping down, and so those drier conditions start to be gone, and now we’re talking about patchwork conditions.
Senator Muggli: Thank you.
The Deputy Chair: Dr. Hessburg, I’m going to ask one more.
We heard from previous witnesses on other days about the need for a Canadian version of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. Does FEMA get involved with wildfires in the United States, and what has been your experience with them? What does the process look like, and do you think Canada could benefit from the creation of an emergency management agency similar to FEMA?
Mr. Hessburg: I think the answer is yes. This area isn’t my specialty, but I’ve actually been a resource adviser on FEMA events when we’re going into areas that are now catastrophically ruined or disaster areas to help people get re-grounded, get next to food, water, safe places to rest their heads and those kinds of things, so yes. The problem is going to grow in size and intensity. It’s incredibly helpful in the United States, but there are limits to what FEMA can really do. They can react to a disaster. Yes, it’s one tool in the tool box, and I would say it’s incredibly helpful, and we will continue with FEMA in the United States.
But proactive work, I believe, is the secret sauce to creating resilient landscapes and reducing the problem of smoke and poor public health and increasing the resilience of forest conditions.
What we’re learning in the United States is per million dollars invested, the reactive investments are in declining marginal return on investment. The reason is that the warming, the drying, the warmer winters, the less snow pack, all of that, is feeding into an accelerating condition, and we’re not keeping pace with it in a reactive mode. So proaction, I believe, overall, is the critical missing element in the United States at scale and very likely in Canada.
The Deputy Chair: With the goal to making the forest resilient, as you say?
Mr. Hessburg: Yes.
Senator Martin: I’m just wondering, in terms of best practices and knowledge, is there cooperation between the U.S. and Canada or other jurisdictions, and are there certain measures that we should consider in Canada that you’re doing in the U.S. or that are being done elsewhere?
Mr. Hessburg: I think largely the U.S. and Canadian collaboration is longstanding, and I work with an awful lot of colleagues in practice and in research who are outstanding in Canada and throughout Canada. In each U.S. region, you’ll see that there are U.S. counterparts working with their Canadian colleagues.
The real key right now is that on both sides of the border, it’s very difficult to take that long look and basically say that our forest revenue streams are going to be threatened by expanding burned areas and expanding burned areas severely, so what are the landscape recipes that were created by our Indigenous folks? They know an incredible amount about how to live safely on the landscape.
The more we work with our Indigenous partners, the more we see that combining ancestral knowledge with our western scientific practices creates a much richer intellectual and practice environment. I would say that’s a huge investment in the U.S. and in Canada.
Then for each of the kinds of forest types get together with colleagues in science and in practice to determine what resilient landscapes have looked like, what they will look like in a warming climate and then start recreating those kinds of patterns in order to, essentially, buy down the problem for the future. Lacking that, you’re going to see wildfires run the table.
That’s what the future looks like.
Senator Martin: Learning from the past is absolutely key, isn’t it?
Mr. Hessburg: It is. An awful lot of people will pooh-pooh going back 100 or 200 years to say that’s what we should do, and that’s not the point of understanding the historical ecology.
The point of understanding historical ecology is where did our native forests come from and our primary forest come to. What were the key changes that wrought the current conditions?
Then with the climate, we’re doing climate change modelling in provinces and all over the United States right now, and what we are finding out is that open canopy forests, those drier exposures in the ridge top, more of these wet-and-dry meadows and wetlands are an incredibly important influence to blocking the flow of climate-driven fires in the future. Those ingredients in the historical landscape actually become more important as we look forward.
Our Indigenous counterparts are telling us that that is how they live safely on the landscape. Every Indigenous partner I work with that comes into a U.S. forest that is not resilient will say, “Nobody can live here. We can’t eat here. We can’t find the material resources, and it’s not safe. These are weeds.”
The Deputy Chair: Mr. Hessburg, I want to thank you for taking the time to appear before us today. We really appreciate your input. It’s been quite a learning process for us. This was a very informative session, and, as I said, we appreciate your contribution to our overall study.
I want to thank the committee members for your active participation and thoughtful questions. I would also like to take a moment to thank all the staff that support the work of this committee: The clerk, the Library of Parliament analyst, the interpreters, the Debates Team transcribing this meeting, the committee room attendant, the multimedia services technician, the broadcasting team, the recording centre, ISD and, of course, our page.
(The committee adjourned.)