Thank you for the question.
What it boils down to in the province of Alberta is this: We have wildland firefighters who are seasonal. A lot of them are students. If you look back across the news, you can see that Minister Ellis said that we would be ready by March and then that we'd be ready by April. We were still not ready by May.
I'll point out that our wildfire staff make $22 an hour, with no benefits or pre-cancer coverage. Other provinces are offering it. It's similar in Ontario, which is offering a $10,000 signing bonus. If we look at this year alone, we didn't get the people who chose to go to Ontario for a $10,000 bonus and become a wildfire fighter there. We brought 174 people back from Ontario to help fight the fires in Jasper and across the province.
The government can say they are putting in $151 million, which they did, but that's over three years and goes towards tankers we can't use and towards helicopters we can't use when we're flying in smoke. It is not going into the resources on the ground, and that is what is needed. They are undervalued, underpaid and just not coming back.
I believe the government cut 247 positions in 2021, including 57 in wildfire management. This means that in 2023, we started out a serious year with no staff at all.