Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Minister, and thank you, officials, for joining us today.
I mean more than just thank you for joining us today; thank you for your work over the course of this very, very challenging wildfire season in Alberta and right across Canada.
Unlike the Conservatives, I want to commend you for your work and for the preparation you undertook. That work saved lives. I want to be very clear: The work undertaken by non-partisan officials, Parks Canada staff, firefighters, forestry workers and everybody who goes into those places to do that work saved lives, whether it was putting out a fire, creating an evacuation plan, talking to families or printing the literature and going door to door to make sure that families knew what the plan was.
I've found the over-politicization of this natural disaster over the last couple of meetings to be disgusting. It's a natural disaster impacted by human events like climate change. In this case, it wasn't impacted by arson. I believe we've heard that the wildfires were started by lightning, not by a campfire or a cigarette butt or something.
I've read what Mayor Ireland said. Mayor Ireland said they're devastated. He lost his childhood home, as you mentioned, Minister, the home of his whole life—but they can rebuild. They'll recover. Jasper will economically recover, because it's a place where everybody wants to go. It's beautiful.
We can't rebuild human lives. The work that was undertaken by your colleagues, by the staffs, by Parks Canada, by the Minister of Emergency Preparedness and everybody who focused on this problem, going years back, saved lives, so thank you.
A couple of years ago, we saw the same thing happen. We've been seeing the proliferation of wildfires, the lengthening of the seasons and the severity of the fires increasing because of climate change, because of drier forests, because of infestations and because of a lot of other factors, but we've also seen an over-politicization of these fires.
A couple of years ago, we saw Donald Trump blaming Governor Newsom for not clearing dead wood from the forest bed. I've spent time in forests before. I know what a 30,000-hectare forest looks like. It's an enormous undertaking to suggest that any large group of individuals would go out into the forest and clear all that dead wood. Forest management is important, but blaming forest management for wildfires and for natural disasters in the face of a climate crisis is absurd.
What's more absurd than that is when recently a Conservative member included the name of a non-partisan official, somebody who works in this field professionally, in a tweet. What happened subsequently was that this professional Canadian, dedicating their time and their career to keeping Canadians safe, received death threats as a result of that tweet from a Conservative member. I'm not going to bring names into this—they're not important—but that's what we get when we overly politicize natural disasters, when we take things out of context and when we try to score points off of people's lives, livelihoods and homes that have been lost. I want to call that out as being inappropriate, unacceptable and disgusting.
Minister, I find the over-politicization of this natural disaster to be troubling, and I commend you on your cross-partisan work with Minister Ellis in Alberta. I was actually in Algonquin Park thinking about how beautiful it was when I heard on the radio that you were in Edmonton working with Minister Ellis. Thank you very much for that. On behalf of Canadians who love the outdoors and on behalf of Jasperites, thank you for the work you did that saved lives.
Minister, there is always more work to be done, as you said. What more can we do to prevent the over-proliferation of wildfires with that severity? What forest management techniques could be considered while we also undertake Canada's responsibility to mitigate climate change? We have such a responsibility to do so.
